Part 13

“I was going to,” I answered; “but the moment I bent, your chairs moved, and I was frightened, and ran away.”

“That sounds frank,” said he. He sat musing a little. “You’re a child, ’tis true, mutable and thoughtless; but where could be the harm? If the secret were mine only-- Well, study for my confidence, and some day, perhaps”--

He broke off with a smile, which I had a difficulty to return. So there _was_ a mystery in reality. There and then I vowed a Delilah oath to myself to get the better of it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said; “I had no thought to surprise any secrets. Is that the way through, indeed?”

“Yes,” he said; “fairly, it is. ’Tis pierced under the big copper in the kitchen, which has a detachable grate to be pulled all out in one piece. God knows the original use of this contrivance--this space in the wall--unless ’twere always for the purpose that we”--(he checked himself again). “Anyhow, ’tis utterly inaccessible else, save by way of the skylight which your ladyship knows; and now you’re acquainted with your prison, ask me further what you will.”

“_Ranger_ Portlock, did you say?”

“Ay, ranger; once my brother’s keeper (not like Cain, unhappily), and since promoted.”

“You seem to love your brother.”

“I have reason.”

“And this Portlock is still in his service?”

“Yes.”

“And in _your_ confidence?”

“Ay, is he not! I must tell you I am a proper sportsman, madam, and always more popular with Hardrough’s people than the noble verderer himself. Well, I have taught them something here and there, and put money in their pockets, maybe. Have no fear. Not Portlock nor any other will betray us. I have my merry men of Down, who sink or swim with me. And now I have my Maid Marian. What more? You shall see this Portlock. Bear in mind he was once a thread-paper of a man. I have known him since I was a boy. What else?”

“Can you ask me?” I said low, hanging my head. “The reason--what you hinted up there--why you are ruined and in hiding?”

He ventured to put an arm about me. How could I refuse him, who was my Bayard? Yet, when he told me, it was not all. He never to the end acquainted me of what social dereliction of his had originally delivered him into the earl his brother’s power, and placed him and his remnant fortunes under the hand of that remorseless nobleman to use and crush at his will. He never even admitted but indirectly that stain on his birth, in which a high person was whispered to be implicated, and which was at the root, perhaps, of all the trouble.

“He always hated me,” he said of the Lord Herring; “and never more than when he foresaw my succession in the death of his promising limb, my nephew.”

“What, is he dead?” I asked, astonished.

“No,” he said, “but only rotten. He will never come into the title, believe me.”

“And you,” I said, curiously interested. “How will he keep you out, if the worst should happen to him?”

“Why,” he said, “he would threaten an inquiry, an exposure; and there are those who, rather than suffer it, would countenance his quiet disposal of me--have done so, perhaps, already. And there you come in.”

“Me!” I cried.

“Child,” he responded, “how can I speak it without offence? You have long been marked down by this man, my brother, for his prey. I have known it, trust me, and writhed under the knowledge. But you were in proper hands, and he must bide his opportunity. Believe me, he was no privy to Sophia’s schemes of husbandry. Had he guessed, he would have anticipated the end, so far as you was concerned, by carrying you away by force. When he learned the truth at last, he was mad. But he recovered his sanity on reflection. It was no bad thing to let you ripen in that hell for his purposes--to subdue you by that torture to his will. Then, when reduced, he would exchange your sweet person with Dr. Peel for mine, would sell me to your place in the madhouse, so killing his two birds with one wicked stone. But his plan miscarried. I had a friend in the household--someone, a poor dancer, whom he had used for a day and thrown aside. She revealed all to me, and I fled, leaving him only my bitter curse for legacy. And I came here, into hiding, to mature my plans for revenge--came back to Nature, renouncing my kindred and all the vile social policies of a world I had got to loathe. He had beggared me, and I would fleece the plunderer. He had thought to debauch my love, and I would disappoint him of even that moiety of his bargain. Have I done so? Judge, if he loved me before, how he would spare me now, who have baffled his schemes and stolen his dear! A knowledge of but half the truth has already, in these few weeks, set him turning every stone to discover where I lie; but I am well served by my friends. He would burn the forest if he guessed the whole. As you regard me, as you value yourself, child, concede nothing to chance--not so much as a peep over the roof. Ay, I know your activity. But you must lie close as a hare if you would be safe--through these first days of peril, at least. Later, when the chase less presses, you may venture out, perhaps, by the ladder; but always with infinite caution, as you love me. Little sister, do you agree?”

I buried my face in my hands. My whole heart cried out on the cruel tyranny of a code that could let such monsters as this wreak their passions on the pure and innocent, and yet find absolution. O, that I could find a way, in the lawful junction of our fortunes, to vindicate this dear oppressed creature, and establish him in his rights before the world! I leaned to him, with wet eyes.

“If you love _me_ so, brother,” I murmured, “what made you behave so cruel to me?”

He gave a happy, low laugh, and tightened his hold.

“Why, dear,” he said, “are not a woman’s extremes of love all for the man who will beat her, or the man she can cherish and protect? I vow I chose only my natural part.”

“Well,” said I, “I’m glad you stopped short of the beating. It would only have stiffened me, like cream.”

“Whipt cream is very good with cherries,” said he, and bent to my lips.

But I started from him gaily, and leapt to my feet.

“Come,” I said; “I’m waiting to be introduced to Mr. Portlock.”

He laughed, and stretched himself, and, rising, stooped to the hole in the wall and scratched with his finger, like a rat gnawing, on the iron stop therein. In a little something was withdrawn, and a weak wash of light flowed through.

“Now,” said he, “I will go first, and do you follow, little mouse.”

He dropped on his hands and knees, and crawled in, and disappeared. It was an attitude that lacked romance, and I was glad there was none behind to witness my passing. But the journey was so short that I was hardly in before my head was free on the farther side; and in a moment George had helped me to my feet, and I saw our host.

I saw nothing else, indeed. There were, I believe, the open range, and herb-hung rafters, and settle and dresser of the ordinary cottager’s kitchen. The huge creature before me absorbed three-fourths of the field of my vision. I understood at once why Mahomet must come to the mountain.

He had an enormous tallowy face, had this person, with an expression so excessively melting that it might have been said to be no expression at all. He could have had no more intimacy with his own skeleton than a hippopotamus. Ages ago he must have left it buried within himself as useless, and turned his wits to balancing on the twin globes of fat that were his legs. His eyes were slits, his nose a wart, his mouth the mere orifice of a blow-pipe. If his neck by any possibility had been broken, one might have stretched it till his head touched the ceiling.

I was conscious of George standing by watching me, and instinctively I dropped a curtsey. Immediately the mountain rumbled, and dusted a chair for my reception. It swung in his vast hand like a signboard from an inn. Relatively, I had some fear of sitting on it; it looked for a moment so like a doll’s.

“Mr. Portlock,” I murmured, casting down my eyes, “I--I am your humble servant, sir.”

He bowed--bagged, would be the better expression. The whole weight of his chin was against his recovery; but he managed it, with an effort.

“You--you are very good to give me shelter,” said I. “I’m afraid we--we shall crowd you dreadfully, sir.”

A low gale vibrated in him somewhere. I seemed to be able to detach certain indistinct utterances from it, of which “welcome: what can do: Maid Marian” were the clearest.

I made an effort to respond fitly--struggled, and was dumb. Then, in a moment--I saw George with his hand to his mouth--the demon exploded in me.

“Were you--were you always like that?” I shrieked, and fell across my chair-back, half hysteric.

The poor fellow may have laughed himself--there was no guessing what emotions that curtain of flesh concealed--but he looked, if anything, more abashed than offended.

“Hush!” said George, recovering himself, “or I must drag you back, miss.”

We shook, facing one another with gleaming eyes and teeth.

“Didn’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that he was a thread-paper of a man once?”

He went and clapped a hand on the mountain’s shoulder.

“Come, Johnny, no offence,” said he. “None knows better than her ladyship that your heart’s in the right place.”

I subdued myself by a vast effort, and rose, and went to conciliate the poor creature.

“Haven’t I reason to?” I said. “And--and I put my faith in you, sir; and--and faith moves mountains”--and I was near off again.

He shifted, and flushed faintly, and delivered himself once more.

“’Tis the wittles--have done it.”

“He means,” said George, “that he’s made up for lost time and opportunities, since his promotion.”

“Ay, ’twas the nerves,” went on the oracle--“kep’ me down--once. Shook, I did--hear thunder. Walk a mile round--avoid row. When the crows holloa’d--see funeral pass--turned blood water. ’Twas lack ballast--that was it.”

“Of course,” said George, “that was it. What a coward you was, Johnny, in your thin time. D’you remember the day we shot the home covers, with a great person for company, and the sky came raining cobwebs, so that we were near stifled with ’em; and you stuck your head in a bush, till we gave you with our ramrods something better than cobwebs to roar about?”

“Ay, I do,” said the mountain, and rumbled again. “Not much cobweb--’bout me now.”

Well, I told him that one couldn’t have too much of a good thing; and very soon we were fast friends. But that morning George haled me back into shelter before much was said; and afterwards our acquaintance ripened by fits and starts. The very immobility of the creature was our and his salvation. There was no conscious expression to betray itself on that vast desert of a countenance. Periodically, he was visited by the steward; fitfully, by units of the hunt which his lordship sought to lay on his vanished brother’s trail. He was never, so far as I knew, suspected; and with the deepening of winter the chase slackened.

And, in the meantime, what was I doing there, buried alive like a recreant novice in the wall? Wilt thou believe, Alcide, that I, with all my free aspirations, could have remained at peace in the little prison for a day? Well, with rare excursions beyond, and those not till I had been long immured, I lived there for more than a year, and was near all the time as happy as a swallow under the eaves. It is love makes the dimensions of our estate.

XX. I PUT AN END TO FOLLY NUMBER TWO

It was not till early in the second spring of my idyll that the clouds began to darken, and my conscience to stir uneasily in those gloomy last hours before the final waking. Many things had contributed to this state, some cardinal, but most, no doubt, indifferent--mere little tributary streams which had come to swell the volume of my disenchantment. Misunderstanding, alas! does not walk to challenge us on the highway. It spies from behind hedges, and listens at keyholes; and when at length its tally of grievances is made, we wonder at the weight of the evidence it has accumulated.

Late in the previous year I had been very ill. During the worst of my disorder an unconscionable old hag, some withered afreet of the forest, who was in the secret of our retreat, had been brought in to attend me. She disappeared soon, thank God, in a whisk of sulphur; and thereafter George nursed me devotedly. But, strangely enough, as I grew convalescent I developed an odd impatience of him, which rose by degrees to a real intolerance and dislike. That feeling abated as I grew strong, but never to such degree as to make us again quite the friends we had been. He made some study to propitiate me, even to the extent of renouncing those ridiculous principles of “Nature,” which he had affected to exchange for the whole sum of social accommodations. It was a relief, though an aggravation, to have him refine himself again out of a savage, since I no longer could find the entertainment I once had in the dear _poseur_. Orson, in truth, was never so little attractive as when, for the sake of tired love’s favour, he confessed his ruggedness a humbug. His recantation, though welcome enough in one way, only disillusioned me in another. So long as he had been consistent, he was absolute; now his weakness had made me so. I remembered the times when I had pleaded with him, and had found him only more covetable in his inaccessibility to my arguments.

“We can’t return to Nature, in the sense of rudeness,” I had often said to him, “any more than we can recover our childhood. We have grown out of it, and there’s an end. A man playing the child is only sorry make-believe; or, if it isn’t, the man’s an idiot. Nature herself, you see, isn’t stationary: she’s always refining on her first conceptions.”

“What!” he would protest, grumbling; “is all that hypocrisy of ‘breeding,’ that high _goût_, which is so fastidious in its appetite for crawling meats, and rotten policies, and bruised virtues, Nature?”

“Yes, to be sure,” I would answer: “’tis _human_ nature--the fruits of her desire to hasten her social apotheosis by a union with the sons of God.”

“Ay,” would growl my Timon--“the fruits of incontinence.”

“I don’t see it,” I would cry. “I can’t see but that a knife and fork are in the right succession to a beak. We may use our fingers, you will say. Would you wish me, sir, to fondle my love with the same hands I tear my meat withal? No, you wouldn’t--except for the sake of argument,--and therefore I protest I am the truer child of that little liaison. _Vive la Nature!_ say I; the Nature who is my mother, and the God who is my father. They have taught me between them to study, in studying myself, to make the gift of prettiness to my neighbours.”

“And I swear you are a dutiful child,” he would answer, with the readiness that made me love him.

“O, believe me, sir!” I would cry; “there is nothing artificial about the civilisation you have professed to renounce--as if that were responsible for your downfall. On its main lines it always makes for beauty”--

“Which is truth, I suppose,” he would interrupt with a sneer.

“Which is truth, as much as anything is,” I would reply. “Truth is only a cant word for what we don’t understand; and, if we could get to, there would be an end of all fun in the world.”

“O, upon my word, you are a very learned minx!” he would crow; but I would continue, not minding him--

“If we had to start again from the beginning, don’t tell me but that we should develop the very same conventions as now, or at least near ’em. Why, sir, not to lean our elbows on the table, for instance, while we sup our tea, isn’t a tyrannous edict of society. ’Tis a natural recognition of the unhandsome; a natural effort to qualify ourselves for the better company we all look to some day. Don’t we all feel that we are only rehearsing here for a greater piece? Well, for my part, I don’t want to be damned in it. But you--you cry, like a poor actor, ‘Leave me alone to my pipe and beer. I shall be all right on the night itself!’”

Then he would laugh bravo; and, pulling out his tobacco, silence me with a kiss.

But now--well, he had abdicated, and I ruled, that was the difference.

There had been a time when I would have consolidated the understanding between us by taking, on the first dawn of liberty, our friendship to church. In those days, indeed, I even hinted as much to him, touching upon the duty he owed me so to establish my innocence with the world. Then he would fall back upon his cant of Nature; of vows dishonoured in her sight; of laws that crossed the plainest mandate that ever she had given to earth. And I must be content at the time, because we were helpless outcasts together, because he was kind to me, because he flattered me with a thousand attentions which made me forget the equivocalness of my position.

But now, at the last, it was he must sue and I be cold. For, under our altered relations, I had come to recognise, though late, how wrong was this continued communion, however platonic, between us. It was not that I loved my brother less, but that I respected myself more. I had been blinded by all the novelty and glamour. He was pagan at heart, I saw, and I was at heart religious. My thoughts turned with affection to the quiet nunnery at Wellcot. I longed to see my kind again, to recover something of the world I had lost. I had no real faith in his protestations, no real belief that, should it ever chance to him to recover his rights--which, in truth, seemed impossible--he would claim me to my legitimate share in them. And I found no room in my world for a paradise of sinful loves.

He sighed much, and was very pathetic, poor fellow, over my changed attitude, and wearied me to death. Then he took to verse, and depressed me more. He had a strange faculty for a sort of big-sounding line, which he would invent and declaim in his odd moments while engaged over mending his snares or sewing buttons on his gaiters. It was quite impressive in its place, but was not exhilarating when applied to _les amours_.

“This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres, Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies, And are consumed in fire, to manure And quicken old fields of heaven with new love. O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile, So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”--

A romantic use to put your poor little Diana to, eh, my friend? But, indeed, I would have none of it. I hate that fashion of decrying the flesh, because your poet has a stomachache. My body is the only certain God I know in the midst of these shadows. I cling to it, worshipping it with all the pretty gifts I can think. When it goes, where shall I be? Seeking and crying for it again through space. I will not have it abused to such uses, my sweet body that I love so.

Well, it had all vastly interested me once: the fond, comical incongruity; the unexpected soul of my Nimrod revealing itself through suffering. He did not, dear simpleton, in the least understand his own inconsistency: how, loving all birds and beasts, as he professed to do, and so claiming affinity with Nature, he could use and approve the latest engines of civilisation for their slaughter. He called the red deer “the spirit of the antlered tree,” and went to shoot it with a gun. He made me a pretty waistcoat of squirrel skins (I went sweetly befurred, indeed, throughout the cold winters), and dwelt lovingly on the primeval romance of woodlands, meaning, in fact, that rapture of flight and pursuit of visible things which alone appeals to the unredeemed barbarian. In the end, to speak truth, his mad rhapsodies came to remind me, only too uncomfortably, of the dead astrologer; and I looked askance on what seemed a common derivation from a crazy stock.

But now, lest it appear that I attach too much importance to these minor discords, let me relate of the much darker and more formidable shadow which had arisen between us, and which, as the months but added to its density, grew at last to be the insuperable barrier to our reconciliation.

It was the _secret_ dividing us--the secret which I had once half surprised, and to the existence of which he had virtually confessed, only, it seemed, to torture me by withholding it. This much alone I knew: that he went somehow practising, in his banishment, to be revenged on the society which he held responsible for it. Often, at first, I tried to coax the truth from him. He was not, for all his love, to be beguiled. There were others concerned, he said, who by no means shared his faith in my discretion; with whom, in fact, he had come to open dispute on the subject of my continued sojourn in the cottage, and whom, in the end, he had had to propitiate--seeing his safety lay in their hands--by a vow to reveal nothing to me.

I had no doubt, in my heart, but that these unknown were the “merry men” of his boasting--woodmen, verderers, perhaps, who--treacherous to the earl their master--were aiding and abetting the exile in those very malpractices he concealed from me. I was right as to that, it appeared; but what I could never understand was the nature of my reputation with them: how they had so learned to misapprehend my character for faith and loyalty. However, mistaken as they were, they had nothing to complain of their leader’s constancy to his oath--a constancy, alas! which I can only not commend because of its miserable sequel. If he had only had the strength to trust me, neither would he have lost his liberty, nor I been condemned to the torments of a quite unmerited remorse. At this date of time, I can insist, with a clear but sorrowful conscience, that the poor infatuated fool brought what happened upon his own head.

When I recognised at last that he was adamant to my pleadings, I waived the subject, but not by any means my private concern in it. The secret, I was naturally enough convinced, lay to be revealed behind the locked door of that Bluebeard Chamber; and one night--after my friend had gone out--I took a taper and my courage in hand, and descended softly through the trap to investigate.

After he had gone out, I say; and therein lay the key to my growing apprehensions. For not many days had I been in hiding before I discovered that my comrade was a night-walker. He would wait, soft-shut into his room, until he fancied I was drowned in sleep, then list-footed creep out and by the screen--which he had put up to protect me--and either descend by way of the trap, or, less often, mounting the ladder which communicated with the hidden gully, disappear, and pull his means of exit after him. Then I would wait, shivering and wondering through the whole gamut of formless fears, till stupor overtook me, or perhaps by and by, after long hours, a terrified half-consciousness of his stealthy return.

Where did he thus nightly go? To what dark business or witches’ frolic? I tormented my brain for the solution, and of my love and loyalty could find none. But the poison of a yet-unrealised fear was working in me early.

Now, on this night, waking out of tormented dreams, I was on the instant desperate to solve the mystery. But hardly had I crossed the little cellar when a warning rumble from Portlock, seated in the room beyond, told me that I was discovered. So this vast creature was in the conspiracy! Quite panic-struck, I fled, and, mounting to my room--found George there. He had returned, descending by the ladder, during the minute of my absence.

He made no allusion whatever to my escapade; but just laughed softly, and took my cold hand in his, as I stood trembling and aghast before him.

“Poor little maid,” he said; “she has been dreaming”--and he led me to my bed, and tucked me in warm, and left me with a kiss.

I never thought it necessary to confess; but always after that, as I came to learn, he descended by the trap and _bolted it behind him_.