Part 10

Dr. Peel knew well the impotence of virtue to conquer. He saw it of such poor force in the world as to figure of no moment at all in a contest with vice. He did not fear God, but he feared that the devil was God, and vindictive where the harming of his protégées--of whom he had no thought but that I must be one--was concerned. He had been eye-witness of the, to him unaccountable, foiling of his project; and it struck him as if he had fallen upon an ambush in one of those dark corners. He shrunk back terrified, and thenceforth exchanged his noisome attentions to me for an attitude of propitiation which was as unwelcome, and even more stultifying, in seeming, to my hopes, inasmuch as it included an increased jealous concern for my safeguarding. But there, in the end, his service of his dark master was made to recoil upon his own head, through his very scepticism of the more divinely cunning power which works for good. He would lock me, as I said, into my room at night, thereby securing me not only from prowling evils, but an asylum in which I might ponder undisturbed what plans I could of escape. And it was that security from interruption which enabled me presently to realise on an opportunity of which I was quite unexpectedly made the mistress.

It fell early very cold and wintry that November, but the chill in my heart was colder than any hailstones. Presently such an apathy of despair found me that I would hardly leave my room all day, but would sit in a sullen misery gazing, gazing from my unbarred open window upon the fraction of stiffening world it commanded. It was at a front angle of the house, pretty high above the ground; and under it the stony drive went round an elbow of lofty trees to the fatal unseen gates of the entrance beyond.

One morning, after breakfast, I was seated there, when a chaise rolled up to the steps of the door below, and a moment later Dr. Peel entered and was driven rapidly away, on some fresh marauding devilry, I conjectured. The vehicle, sped by a heart-whole curse from my lips, had disappeared scarce a minute, when round the bend of the shrubs it had taken came striding the oddest figure--an interloper by way of the open portals, it seemed. Such an event had never, in my knowledge, happened before. I stared, and roused myself, elate even over this momentary grotesque vision from the world beyond. It was just a stilt-walker, a monstrous pierrot, with floured absurd face and conical cap, his legs, cased in linen trousers, rising an immense height from the ground. As he came on, ridiculously gyrating, he blew a pipe, and rattled at a little tabor that hung from his neck. In the same moment he saw me where I stood, and danced up, rolling and wallowing--for he was an incomprehensibly great creature for such a trade--and broke into a mad, jerky little chaunt, half French, half English, as he approached--

“_O-ha, mamselle! Je vous trouve, je vous salue! A la fin çà, çà, çà!_

“‘Be’old the mountaineer, He sik for edelweiss, I have found my dear Very high and very nice--_çà, çà, çà!_’”

He flicked off his cap--with a grin that showed, though against the flour, a set of perfect teeth--and in three strides was at the window, his eyes and huge white face above the level of the sill. Even in the instant, as if the former were a cypher momentarily isolated for my reading, I understood, and was stricken to stone.

“The graveyard!” whispered the pierrot in that instant: “be at the wall over against it at ten o’clock to-night”--and reeled away, to a pantomime of grins and pirouettes, as the lodge-keeper came raging round the corner in pursuit.

“_O que nenni dà!_” cried the intruder, twisting and turning and affecting to bend with laughter. “O, madame! O, fie! I am very honourable z’jentlemans. Wat, I say! I make you good proposals to marry. I display my parts, _v’là_!”

He contorted himself, with absurd coquetry. “Wat!” he protested, pausing; “madame declines of the ravishment? She does not move herself to fly with me? Vair well”-- He pretended of a sudden to espy his pursuer, and pressing his cap to his breast, waltzed up to him.

“Hey, my little fellow,” he cried (the lodge-keeper was at least as big as Daniel Lambert), “it is for you, then. You know the best wat is good. I will not abduct madame: I will not marry at all. It is vair much satisfaction. You see me dance, _hein_? Come on, jolly _garçon_!--

“‘Love miscarries--heh? When a man marries--heh?’

When a man’s single he live at his is--you spik French, but yes?”

The lodge-keeper hawked up a glair of oaths, and discharged them. He swore by all his gods that he would cut off the intruder by the legs, unless he went out, and double quick, the way he had come. Then ensued a comical scene. The pierrot, affecting to retreat after a brief altercation, swerved suddenly and seated himself on the branch of a tree--

“O-ho!” he said, as the other came lumbering up, “it is vair well, but I make up my mind. I refuse madame, it is true. You know to marry, what it is? Listen, then--

“‘At the end of one year one baby: That is jolly-fun!’”

The lodge-keeper, cursing, made a snatch at the man’s stilts; but, incredibly strong, he whipped them up out of reach, and held them so horizontal.

“‘At the end of two year two baby-- How it is a little serious!’”

he sang.

The lodge-keeper swore and jumped, till he was running wet for all the cold; but he was too fat a fox for these grapes.

“‘At the end of three year three baby-- But that is the very devil,’”

bawled the pierrot ferociously, and clashed the stilts like great castanets.

Then he settled himself firmly.

“‘One asks for bread,’” bellowed he; and suddenly flourishing his right stilt, caught the lodge-keeper a stinging smack across the head with it--

“‘Another for soup,’” he yelled, and gave such a counter blow with his left, that the lodge-keeper fairly reeled and went rolling over--

“‘_L’aut’ qui demande à téter,_ _Et les seins sont tarie,_’”

shouted the pierrot, and was up and out of sight in a moment, striding like Talus. The infuriate lodge-keeper rose, when he had recovered himself, to pursue; but he was too late. The pierrot had got clean away.

Not till all had been vanished many minutes did I awake from the stunned trance into which I had been thrown by those few whispered words. Then, still by the window, I sank upon the floor, and, simultaneously, into a very reel and passion of ecstasy.

How had he traced me? Whence devised this strange method of procuring speech? Ah! as to that, there were no doubt experiences in his past life still unrelated; and, after all, did he not always in a measure--strictly in a measure--walk on stilts? This was only to extend his wooden legs indefinitely. But after what secret practices, and suspicions averted? For I held him still the creature of his despicable master. My Gogo--for it was he! My Gogo, the great resourceful, affectionate, crippled giant! It was inexpressibly touching to me to know myself, the poor persecuted, wistful dupe of Fate, still the cynosure of this burning soul--not forgotten, schemed for, held the sacred object of its desire. All the time I had thought myself abandoned, he had been weaving a ladder for my despair. Good Gogo! Dear, kind, honest Caliban! He would save me yet--he would save me; and the tears flowed from my eyes. How was he such an actor? It was true I had known hitherto only one side of him--the saturnine--the shadow of the great fallen rock. Ah, he could show a lighter for my sake--little roguish sparklets twinkling in the sun of his hot yearning. I loved him at that moment, and my tears fell for him and myself.

But, stay! What had he whispered? I must remember. At ten o’clock--the wall over against the graveyard? Why had he so chosen--so nicely specified? Did he know nothing of the patrol? Yes, likely; but it was a desperate expedient, calculated upon a possible superstition, upon a presumptive avoidance of so haunted a spot. I pressed my hands to my wet forehead and tangled hair. He had dared and done all he could: the rest was for me, whom he knew and could trust. I would not be unworthy. I would answer to him wit for wit.

Half an hour later, serene and wicked as he could have wished, I took my way, singing, into the grounds, and, unaccosted, sought that remote quarter where the graveyard was situated. Still softly singing, I pushed between the trees, and came out into the waste interval against the boundary wall which was devoted to the watch. Stooping here to pick some chance berries, I had not to wait a minute before the local sentinel, as I had calculated, was upon me. I dropped my spray, with an aspect of alarm that struggled into piteousness.

“O, I am so sorry!” I said.

The man--he was personable enough to make my task the less nauseous--eyed me, insolent and masterful.

“All right,” he said. “Blow me if you ain’t done it now. Why, don’t you know as this here’s Prisoner’s Base, and you’re out of bounds?”

I went up to him fearlessly, and taking his hands, muffled in great hairy gloves, looked up into his face. I saw a spot of deeper colour come into his cheeks, and he breathed fast.

“Shall I confess,” I said, low and urgent, and glancing quickly about me, “that I wanted to be caught?”

“Ah!” he said, and showed his teeth in a twitching grin.

“Hush!” I whispered. “I am in great despair. You know perfectly well I am sane; I shall die if I am detained here longer.”

“O! will you?” he responded.

“Listen,” I said, flushing and hanging my head. “I offer you no money, which I have not got. But there are things--other things--sold here, which”--

I tore my hands away, and, putting them to my face, fell back from him.

“Hey!” he said, in a thick whisper, and pursued me. “Why do you pick _me_ out for your favours, you little beauty?”

I did not answer.

“Why?” he insisted.

“If it has to be,” I muttered from my refuge, “you--O, don’t ask me!”

“Why?” he said.

“Well, of twenty evils, choose the best-looking.”

He gave a low chuckle.

“Come along, where we can be private,” said he, and put a hand on me; but I started back, affecting an agony of shame.

“O! what have I said--what promised? Let me go. Don’t think any more of it.”

“Won’t I?” he said; and added threateningly: “You’ve given your promise, remember.”

I looked about me, and again upon my twined fingers.

“To-night, then, at--at ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“In the workshop.”

“You can get out?”

“Yes; I have a way.”

“That you have,” he said, coveting me with his eyes; “and a pretty one, my darling.”

I entreated him once more, in a passion of emotion--

“If--if I consent, you’ll hold to your part of the bargain?”

“Eh?” he questioned.

“Help me to escape?”

“No fear o’ my forgetting,” he answered. “You may lay to that.”

I knew he meant to betray me in the double sense, and would have given more than I feigned to barter at that moment for the leave to beguile him to me, and slip a knife into his lying throat. But I tasted part of my revenge in the thought of his freezing alone there by and by, in the rendezvous to which my wits had decoyed him, while I went to my other undisturbed.

He was jealous of me, and suspicious still of so light a surrender. But the prize was worth the risking; and in the end he let me go, gloating over my stealthy retreat, as a cruel schoolmaster might watch the slinking away of a delinquent whom he had ordered up for punishment later.

That night fell a harder frost, with glittering stars but no moon. Early secured in my sanctum, I awaited the great moment in such an indescribable agony of mind as I have never felt before or since. Every step near my door was a tread upon a nerve. The stable clock, when it rang out, clear and sonorous, the last quarter after nine, seemed to brain me with its every stroke. I stole to the open window, took intent stock of the quiet, seated myself, poised to spring, on the sill, and passed my duck-stone at a little distance under my nostrils. The next instant I had alighted safely on my feet, and reeling against the wall beneath, stood a minute to recover. The next, I was round the angle of the house, and sped into the dark shrubberies, where were safety and concealment.

Going very softly in my stockinged feet, and careful of my knowledge not to penetrate the thicket until close upon the appointed place, I reached my goal upon the stroke of the hour.

“Well!” whispered a voice from the starlight. “I could trust you.”

He had been stretched recumbent on the wall top, and now rose cautiously to my view, no longer the whitened fool, but the true Gogo of my affections. I looked up at him as from a well; and he swung his long stilts over, as he sat, so that they rested on the ground beneath.

“Quick!” he muttered; “without a moment lost--swarm! I can’t bend.”

Heaven knows how I did it--with no better show of grace than Lady Sophia, I fear. But somehow I scrambled up, until he could reach my hands, and haul me with a mighty power beside him. Then, once more, swing went his legs, and there was the ladder for my descent on the other side.

I clung to him convulsively; I kissed his hands; I could not refrain from sobbing.

“O, Gogo!” I said; “what you have saved me from--O, Gogo, what!”

His breath caught like a wounded lion’s.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “There is far to go first!”

“Put me down, then,” I answered, alert in the stress of things.

“No,” he said. “On my back--quick!”

“You are going to carry me?”

“There are bloodhounds,” he replied. “There must be no tracks but the stilts’--no scent for them to follow.”

Then I understood the fulness of his plan; but still I lingered, amazed.

“I am not a child. What strength, though yours, could bear me so?”

He showed me a long staff that leaned to him against the outer wall.

“There is my third prop,” he said. “When I am driven, I can still seat you upon a branch, and save the scent. The ground is iron, and”--he struck his chest--“these ribs. Come, and let me wear my heart upon my sleeve.”

The next moment we were off. The great creature swayed beneath me like a tree; but he never staggered or faltered, save periodically to rest himself and me. The sweet night wind blew upon my face, cold and colder. I snuggled from it into the vast nape of his neck, which was like a mat for warmth. I had no idea or care whither he was taking me, and the knowledge only that it was by roads deserted at this silent hour. Still he held on, and, when frost and weariness threatened to numb my brain, could spare a strong hand to imprison both mine lest I fell. And still the flight endured, and I asked, could ask, no question, not even when I grew penetrated by a dull consciousness of ascent--of my comrade straining and toiling beneath me like a stricken Sisyphus--of the groaning of the giant spirit in him who would not be subdued. Then, at last, came a pause, and darkness and release; and I felt myself swung gently down to rest upon a mat of scented leaves, whose warmth and fragrance wooed me to such a sleep as I had never known before.

XV. I BECOME AN INMATE OF “RUPERT’S FOLLY”

I awoke, flushed and happy as a dormouse from its winter bed of leaves. The world was good again, with all its potentialities of love and freedom; the sun was somewhere seeking me; there was no ache, but the sweet ache of memory, in my whole heart and body. Locality, I have said before, has never influenced my temper. I make the only reservation now of liberty to change it at my will.

I remained some time, with my hands beneath my head, taking stock motionlessly of my new surroundings. They were odd enough. I lay near the wall, it seemed, of a sort of circular ground chamber or cellar, roofed in at an inexplicable height above me. Twice, at intervals between, projecting corbels appeared to show the one-time existence of upper floors, which, having either rotted away or been removed, had left the chamber of a height quite disproportionate with its ground dimensions. In lieu of stairs, a make-shift ladder went up into the roof at a crazy angle, and disappeared through a trap; but it started from the ground so close to a rude fireplace in the wall, that its butt was scorched, and more than one of the lower rungs snapped in its socket.

Over the floor itself were scattered tokens of some late or present occupation--a common table, a rush chair or two, battered saucepans, a greasy gridiron, and, hanging on the walls, a frowzy account of clothes. A line, stretched across a segment of the room, had once held suspended a litter of foul-washed clouts; but the string had broken, and its filthy load been kicked aside or trodden into the floor, half brick half muck, which paved the apartment.

There were no windows, but, at irregular intervals, narrow loops such as one sees in old castles; and the single ground opening was a doorway, which let in just such a smear of daylight as served to emphasise the uncleanness.

Recognising in all this the reverse of familiar, I let my wondering eyes travel round to the parts more contiguous to my bed, and so gave a little pleased start and smile. There, like guardian posts to my slumber, were the long stilts leaned against the wall, their straps hanging loose; and pendent from a nail close by was the very clown’s dress of my memory. I could have drawn it to me and kissed it; but, contenting myself with conceding to it a sigh of affection, I sank back and closed my eyes. Lying thus deliciously, half-submerged in a very nest of dry fern, and with a heavy cloak for blanket over me, I would delay luxuriously the moment of revelation; but it was very evident, I thought, that Gogo had brought me to some wrecked and deserted mill.

Suddenly, unable to rest longer, I peeped. He was going softly about the hearth, preparing something at a little fire, whose every thicker waft of smoke he would jealously dissipate with his hands. He still feared observation, then! Watching him silently, my heart welled up with a gush of love for the dear, patient, faithful monster. “Gogo!” I said softly.

He started, looked across, and came to me at once, stumping over the floor in a rapture of response. He took a stool, and, sitting on it by me, gazed eagerly into my face, his own--animal, sinful, and divine--looking from a very burning bush of stubble.

Smiling, in a drowsy warmth, I put out a hand, and let him imprison it in his own. Ah, foolish little bird, so to commit thyself to the snare of the fowler! I thought he would have killed it, and tore it back fluttering and wounded.

“O, how could you?” I cried. “I was so happy; and you have hurt me!”

He leaned in a hoarse agony to me; his breath groaned in his chest.

“O, come to me!” he implored, “while I make one mouthful of you!”

Then, all in an instant, he was sobbing, and tearing at his short hair, and crying incoherently--

“What have I done?--to wound my dear! Ride me, flog me, use me, but trust me no more. Bitter, bitter are the gods, who make a man stiff-kneed for their sport! Not love or penance for me, never, never. Never to kneel--to lie prone only for a show! O, child! it seems a little thing not to kneel, but--ah, to see others pray and love, yourself forbidden--what pity, what pity! I am the Olympian fool; I am the ass and clown. Behold my livery!”

He pointed to the dress on the wall, and hung his head and arms in a very grief of despondency. But by now my hurt and little fright were gone, and my heart touched again to softness.

“Gogo,” I said, “give it me down, please.” And he looked up wondering, and stirred and obeyed.

“This, and this, and this,” I said, “in pledge of our one-day contract before Jove, or Jehovah, when the maimed shall be made whole.”

My tears dropped on it, as I kissed it three times and gave it back to him. He received it wonderingly first, then sadly, and held it drooping over his knees.

“Whole!” he muttered. “Ay, I don’t question I shall find my legs in Avalon; but can even Jove restore the rifled flower its honey?”

Suddenly he cast himself down beside me, groaning like a bull.

“O, little maid, little maid! I am a beggar, I am a beggar; but I want no reversion of a used estate. Though my own goes lame, I am proud. Give me new-minted money, that no man has worn in his pocket, or none at all.”

For a moment the great human urgency of the creature made me falter. I owed him so much! could the devotion of my life more than repay him? But, alas! it needed but a little reflection to see the fond ridiculous picture the caricature it was. Had I the right even to risk a new generation of Gogos? I saw myself in imagination walking abroad, the proud convoyer of an uncountable number of little shock-headed Dutch tumblers. Perhaps if our Sovereign King had received that Carpenters’ Petition, and brought wooden legs into fashion, I might have been tempted; but it was still the vogue to walk on one’s own feet.

I sat up, my lips twitching perilously near laughter.

“Dear Gogo,” I said, “I am so thankful to you, and so sorry; and I would not have said or done what I did, if I had known it would disturb you so. Won’t you let me get up?”

He scrambled to his feet--ah, fie upon the unmeant cruelty of the word!--and stood knotting his great hands, while his breast heaved stormily.

“Well, I think I was mad,” he roared suddenly. “Strike me! Stamp on me! Bind me to a pillar, and let the eternal remorse batten on my vitals! Whatever the spark at my tail, it started me up like a rocket: and behold me at the end, a blackened and empty case!”

He entreated me with his hands--

“Ah, the pagan sight of you! Ah, your wild hair, growing from the fern or melting into it! Ah, your face, the very flowering of a hamadryad! It wrought a frenzy in my brain. Forgive me, forgive me! And I will serve you seven times seven years, for the promise only to be godfather to your last--your Benjamin!”

He sank down on the stool, and, burying his face in his hands, was silent.

I thought a practical rescue of the situation best, and rising from my bed, went to bestir myself over the fire, which was burning redly. Moreover, a delectable odour had already reached my nostrils from the little caldron he had hung there, and whose contents were beginning to inspire me with a very lively curiosity.

I turned to the poor sufferer.

“Gogo, please, it is very sad; but if I am to go on being a hamadryad I must be fed. Gogo, what is in the pot?”

He lifted his head, with a sigh.

“Snipe,” he said, most tragically.

“Ah! What else?”

“A hare, a partridge, teal.”

“O!”

“Onions, potatoes, carrots.”

“O--o!”

“Larks, chestnuts”--

“Be quiet, lest I cry. You are the best of creatures, and I am the hungriest.”

“Eat what you will. It is my _pot au feu_--nothing finished before the next is added.”

“I can wait no longer. You are the hermit of hermits. Who is your commissariat-general?”

“Who but the child your little friend.”

“My”--

“Miss Grant.”

“Patty!”

He had arisen, and come across to me.

“She lays it in a hollow tree, twice a week, and twice a week I go down by night and fetch it.”

I stood gaping, staring at him.

“Gogo! Where are we?”

“In ‘Rupert’s Folly.’”

“In--!”

I gave a little cry. He seized me by the wrist, and dragged me towards the opened door.

“O, Gogo!” I choked, struggling and resisting, “we shall be seen.”

“What does it matter if we are,” he said fiercely, “since you loathe me?”

I wept and fondled him, in an agony of fear.

“I don’t loathe you. You are my one stay and comfort. Gogo! Will you give me back to that terror?”

He fell squatting at my feet--it was his substitute for kneeling--and clasped his arms about my skirt.

“Beast!” he groaned; “I neither meant nor could help it. To play upon your fears!--To taste love by deputy!--O, forgive me, forgive me!”