Part 4

I heard a shuffling on the stairs as I re-entered by the window, and in a moment, tripping lightly, came upon Father Pope descending. He had his great book under his arm, and he tiptoed with a sort of scared effort to hush the creaking of his tell-tale shoes. He gave a guilty start on seeing me standing smiling before him, and stumbled and caught himself erect by the banisters, frowning at me.

I did not speak. I stood dumbly to let him canvass the transformation; but the creature had no nerve of sentiment in all his dull anatomy.

“What do you want?” he said; “who are you?”

I could see he only fenced with the truth to recover himself. I dropped him a pretty little curtsey.

“Diana, please,” I said.

I was in trepidation that he would deny me, as I was convinced he had designed to give me the slip; and, though for policy’s sake I must propitiate him, I hated the creature for his treachery. But, despite his being a Jesuit, he was too crude a wit for the double part.

“Humph!” he growled. “I was wondering what had become of you,”--which, no doubt, was true enough.

He glowered at me dislikingly; then bidding me wait for him, stalked off into the gloom of passages, from which he presently re-emerged with a bagful of bread and biscuit ends which he had collected.

“I have no money,” he said. “You must manage with your share of these or nothing. If you look for better, it must be out of my company.”

“What does for you, will do for me, Father,” I said meekly; but nothing would disarm his churlishness.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said he. “I could do very well without you, to begin with.”

I dropped my eyes.

“Now, then, bestir yourself,” he bullied. “If you’re to come at all, come before the world’s awake.”

He strode off, and I followed, through shuttered glooms, and along silent corridors to a distant part of the building, emerging from a door in which we found ourselves in a close shrubbery-walk going up towards woods. Very soon the comforting screen of trees was about us, and the peril of watchful enemies surpassed. We pushed on without rest or pause. My spirit and my feet danced together. It was all so free and fragrant, and the rapture of my new emancipation was like a second sight. Fays and sweet things seemed to melt before me round green corners, or overhead among the branches, leaving a scent of the unknown world in their footsteps. I sang low, I laughed to the birds, I seemed incapable of weariness. And, indeed, my late training served me in good stead, for this clerical Caliban had no mercy on my tender limbs. He desired only the least excuse to shake me off, and I would not gratify him with one.

All day he led me south by wood and common, avoiding the living places where men were like to be alert on the new Crusade. We hardly exchanged a word, as he swung on with the gait of a camel; but in the end it was he who succumbed first. The weight of his great folio crushed him--that is the truth. He called a halt in an unfrequented copse, and flung himself exhausted on the grass.

“Go, find yourself a lodging,” he said. “I will sleep here.”

I did not dare cross him. I crept away; but only so far as a low thorn tree, mounting into which I could easily hold him in view. But I need not have feared. The poor wretch was sunk in fatigue, and incapable of further effort. He had an odious night, I am sure, while I, from my late habits, slept as securely as in an arm-chair.

Early next morning we were afoot again. My companion, mouldy-cheeked and limping, greeted me with a scowl.

“What have I not suffered of humiliation as a priest,” he said, “to have thee breathing in the same wood!”

The world must have been an insufficient dormitory to this misogynist.

At noon, having wandered for hours through forest so green, so profound, that its deer-haunted vistas seemed the very byways to the infinite, we came out suddenly, when half faint with toil and hunger, upon the foot of a low hill, on whose summit was a queer octagonal stone tower, crowned with a dome like a pepper-box. My companion sputtered anathema upon seeing it, and stood stock still.

“What is it, Father?” I whispered, creeping up to him.

“We’ve overshot the mark, that’s all,” he growled, conceding a point to civility. “Here’s Shole beyond; and I aimed at no farther than Wellcot-Herring. Well, we must go over as the shortest way,” and he began to mount the slope.

I followed him, emboldened to ask, “What’s this we’re coming to?”

“Rupert’s Folly,” he answered viciously. “Old Lousy’s spy-house.”

“What’s he?” I asked.

He gave a rude laugh.

“He’s an itch on the skin of my lord that he can’t scratch away;” and, with these coarse, enigmatic words, he motioned me to fall behind.

The tower sprouted clean from the grass. Reaching and skirting it, I had occasion barely to notice a figure seated under a low door against its farther angle, before the liveliest prospect below engaged all my attention. The hill went down on this side into a wide valley, in the midst of whose trees and pastures, dominating a tiny village with forge and tavern, stood a great old house of grey stone. On the green before, as we could see, was a merry-making: sports, and dancing, and long tables spread, and a vast broaching of casks. And the villagers in their ribbons were all there, so that my eyes and my heart danced to see them.

But my companion stood looking down with a most venomous expression.

“Fah! A nest of heretics!” he muttered. “What golden calf are they met to worship?”

“The red herring’s spawn, good sir,” said the voice of the creature behind us. I turned and stared at him for the first time. He sat sucking at a long pipe at the open door of the tower--the filthiest little scrub you could imagine. His face was like old crumpled parchment, his crafty eyes floated in rheum, and he scratched a dusty tag of beard down upon his breast as he leered at us.

“What! Lousy John,” said the priest. “Is it our heir of all the Herrings come of age?”

“Ay,” said the old wretch. “Nephew Salted. You know him? Ay, ay. You should be the man Pope, of course, by your rudeness? Go down to your whore of Babylon, sir. She mingles with yonder company.”

“You’d have me into the range of your burning-glass, hey?” said the priest, with a snort between laughter and contempt.

The other smoked on unperturbed.

“All in good time, priest,” he said. “I’m not for anticipatin’ the devil. Is that his scriptures you’re a-carryin’ to propagate?”

My companion uttered a furious exclamation, and, hugging his book, shuffled out of range. Most like a woman, he could not bear to have his spiteful humour returned upon him.

I understood nothing of all this, of course, and was standing bewildered, when the old obscenity beckoned me.

“See,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and pointing with the scarlet tongue of it: “a beautiful landscape, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” I faltered.

“Ah!” said he. “I’ll tell you--just you, mind. I don’t take a-many into my confidence. It’s the beauty of pain, child; a local inflammation in the system.”

I murmured something, and he chuckled.

“They call this tower ‘Rupert’s Folly,’” he said privately; “and I laugh, settin’ up here in my shell. D’ye think they’d laugh too, if they guessed where the smut came from that blasted of their crops?”

“From you?” I whispered.

He bent over, and pointed upwards. For the first time I noticed that the muzzle of a telescope projected from the little dome on the roof. While I was gazing, I suddenly felt my wrist in the clutch of his apish claw.

“Hush!” he said. “It’s there I gathers my star-powder, and discharges it where I will. I’m Briareus, the last of the Uranids, left behind to rack the world to all eternity for its presumption.”

He let me go, squinting and nodding at me. I backed from him in horror. Nothing was plain to me but that here was one of those astrologic demons who delight to bring heaven close that they may measure our remoteness from it, and to cast away poor souls amidst the eternal silences. That he seemed to rave was nothing. Such inhumanity is in itself a madness.

“Ay,” he chuckled, hugging himself in a secret way, “you didn’t expect that, did you? You must be a god to lust in pain. Why, lord, child! the earth would be drab all over but for its galls and breakings. See where I’ve set a withered crop among the green; see where I’ve teased the soil to scarlet--a blazing core of fever. I know the World, the wanton. So long as she can cover her cancer with a ribbon, she’ll smile. By and by I shall set a spark to the west, and burn up the day’s rubbish. Look when the sun drops, and you’ll see it a little point of white, and afterwards a bonfire.”

I backed still farther.

“Lord!” he cried, doubling with laughter, “what headaches I’ve projected into their beer-barrels down there! What poison laid on the lasses’ lips! I shall have some fine incense of sufferin’ risin’ to me to-morrow! What, you’re goin’, are you? Down into the fire, hey? A pretty little faggot to mend its blazin’!” And he kneaded his hands rapturously between his knees.

I saw the priest had disappeared over the crest, and, half crying, pursued him. He turned on me angrily as I came up.

“Now,” said he, adjusting his spectacles to glare through them, “if that old carrion speaks truth, I come to an end with you.” He gripped my shoulder. “Hold your tongue, d’you hear? Not a word of us till we find out how the land lies.”

He dropped his hold, on a sudden thought, to my elbow, and, with a muttered menace, marched me down the hill.

At the bottom, in a little lane, with hedges to screen it from the view beyond, we came unexpectedly upon a lady gathering wild flowers. She started violently upon observing my companion, and dropped her nosegay. He accosted her, with a manner of gruff civility, and here it was somehow that, as they broke into talk of an urgent nature, we got separated.

VI. I AM “PINNED OUT”

The festivities were to celebrate the majority of the Viscount Salted, only son to Hardrough, fourth Earl of Herring, Baron Rowe of Shole and Wellcot-Herring, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and official Verderer of the Forest of Down. The Lady Sophia Rowe, aunt to the young gentleman, had driven over from Wellcot--her estate in tail female, and distant from Shole by road seven miles--to lend her saintly countenance to the gathering, and it was she whom Father Pope, steering his course erroneously for Shole instead of Wellcot-Herring, had fortuitously encountered culling wild flowers in her brother’s lordlier demesne.

The Lady Sophia was, unlike her orthodox kinsman, a convert to the Catholic from the Established Church, and within her limits, and because of them, a zealous fanatic. In her one saw acutely demonstrated the denaturalising power of creed. Gentle as a dove by temperament, there was no crime but self-destruction which she would not have gloried in to justify hers. She would have thought the world well lost to save her own soul, colourless as that dear little article was. Though she was modesty incarnate, her self-importance in this respect was amazing. She schemed through all the virtues for the apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman, only, being a woman, _à contre-cœur_, and not a saint, for me it must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds.

When we alighted on her, she was by great good chance withdrawn from her company, and communing with Nature for relaxation. Flowers, to her, were sanctified of the altar, so bringing her faith and her inclinations into line. She was terribly agitated over her encounter with Father Pope, whom she knew, and over his peril, which she exaggerated. The shock of intolerance was hardly extended to Shole; but she had heard, by private despatch, of her Dulwich kinsfolk’s flight, and of the chaplain’s eccentric desertion, and all the day had tormented herself with fears of the fate which he had invited to befall him. Now, while they were engaged in earnest discussion, eschewing for the moment all thought of me, I was driven by curiosity to steal down the lane, till, through a gap in the hedge, I was able to observe at close hand the lively scene that was enacting on the green below.

It had certainly looked prettier from the hill. I saw links of red-faced oafs sway roaring across the turf, and whip themselves in mere drunken impulse about any mock-bashful hoyden who stood, feigning unconsciousness, in their path. I saw blowzed, over-fed women, dragging squalling babies, struggle vainly to be included in the amorous capture, and when they failed or were ignored, vindicate their outraged respectability in coarse recriminations. I saw farmers, seated under trees, weep fuddled tears because they could hold no more, and stuffed children, crying for nothing so much as breath. I had been drawn, as was natural to me, by the bait of gaiety and life, and this was my reward. The ground between the booths was strewed with trampled fragments of bread and meat, and sodden with rejected ale. It was a fair, with all the licence of a day gathered into an hour.

I don’t know how long I had been standing, absorbed in contemplation of this Gehenna, and of the stately mansion across the green, on whose terraces a gay company, gathered to see the beasts feed, was clearly distinguishable, when a sound of hoofs coming up the lane behind me brought me to myself; and almost immediately three horsemen, with very flushed faces, rode into view, and, perceiving me, halted. One was a fox-featured gentleman, in fulvous cloth; one, good-humoured and quiet, wore a grey coat; and the third was resplendent all over, and as drunk as Chloe. He, at the first sight of me, tumbled rather than dismounted from his horse, and, forsaking the reins, which the grey gentleman caught, came staggering upon me.

“Hey, my vitals!” he lisped, “whom the devil have we here?”

He was quite young, and like a pretty toy, with a spangled coat in the Maccaroni Club style, a great bow at his neck, and ribbons to his knees. But he frightened me with the stare in his glazed eyes; and as he advanced, I backed into the hedge.

“I was only looking,” I fluttered. “I didn’t mean any harm. Please let me go.”

“Harm!” he exclaimed, with a tipsy crow. “O, but you’re trespassing, missy, and must give an hic-count of yourself. Come ’long, now, before my lord.”

I saw the eldest of the three regarding us from his saddle with a sort of mordant humour, and the sudden recognition of his state made my heart leap. Red, and lank-jawed, and vicious, he sat watching us as a fox might watch his cub negotiating the helpless struggles of a lamb. He always had a fine appetite for such occasions, and could sin very sweetly by proxy, could Hardrough.

“Wounds, my lord!” cried the boy, “is this a larsh surprise for me you’ve ’ranged? Besh preshent of all the day. Come cock-horse, child, and we’ll kiss a-riding.”

He put an arm about me. For all my distress, the musky contact of him, so precious after my long degradation, seemed half to drug me from resistance. I struggled feebly to push him away.

“Get on with your gallophic,” said he, addressing his companions knowingly. “I’ll follerer by-m-by.”

“Come, Salted,” cried the grey gentleman suddenly, in a laughing, half-vexed way. “Remember what’s due to your guests, child, now and to be. Come along and ride yourself sober, as you engaged.”

“Shober, nunky! shober, you cake!” sputtered the fool. “Shober ’nough yourself to wa’t me go on and break my neck--hey, my lord?”

He leered tipsily to the earl his father, who grinned, and blinked his red eyes.

“Let him be, George,” said the nobleman. “Damme, the boy’s not fit to ride a broomstick. You’re precious anxious for the gipsy, brother. I’d as lief you was concerned for your nephew.”

“And so I am,” says the other hotly. “’Tis foul so to take advantage of a stranger and a child. Call your cub off, sir,” says he, “if I’m not to take a whip to him.”

He gathered his reins in, and twitched his heels. He was bronzed and comely, a man of thirty or so, younger by ten years than the earl. He, the latter, had turned quite white. A frost seemed to have pinched his cheeks. In another moment, I believe, he would have drawn his riding-switch across the handsome face, but in that moment I was aware of a lady hurrying up, and I broke from my captor, and fled to meet her.

“Help me!” I cried. “Don’t let him hurt me!”

She received me very kindly. She was a tall and colourless figure, gentle in mien but with a bad complexion--the lady, in short, in whose company I had left Father Pope.

“Hardwick! George!” she whispered, in an outraged voice.

The earl pushed up to her, with a snigger.

“There, Sophy,” said he. “What are you doin’ here? But I’m glad you’ve come. Is this here your protégée? Well, take the little baggage away, that was near bringing us to words about her.”

“Words!” she said. “This child!”

“O,” he exclaimed, “that’s all one! Come, boy!”

She detained him some minutes, murmuring to him as he bent down. At the end he rose, grinning at me.

“What!” says he--“the sly old crow! Be sure the little sweep wasn’t fathered by a black cassock before you adopt her.”

She started back, flushing scarlet.

“Hardrough!” she said; “I ask you to go on.”

“Well, I will,” said he, with a little breathless laugh, “and carry your secret, sister, safe in my keepin’.”

He half wheeled, and in an ironic voice summoned the young viscount. The boy got to his horse as sulky as sin. In another minute the three gentlemen were ridden out of sight.

The moment they had disappeared the lady turned to me.

“Why didn’t you keep by your friend?” she asked, rather sharply. “From what he tells me, you are in need of one.”

I hung my head and broke into sobs. She was softened immediately.

“There,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be harsh; but discretion was so necessary. Will you come with me--I am the Lady Sophia Rowe--and we can discuss your case in safety at home? But every instant means peril, and we must hasten.”

I suffered her to hurry me up the lane. Her gait took no grace from urgency, being awkward as with most over-tall women, and the worse to view because she was reckless how she raised her skirts. In a little we came round a curve that swept beyond the limits of the green; and here, under some trees, we found her coach, which had been ordered round earlier, with the priest and his great folio ensconced glowering in it. In a moment we were in, and rolling along quiet country roads. The noise of the fairing died behind us. The world of new peace and beatitude lay before. For seven miles we sped soberly on, deeper and deeper into the pleasant hush, that was broken only by the incessant confidential murmuring of my companions.

At last, taking a road high above a little village bowered in trees, we turned between beautiful scrolled gates into a drive that seemed to me to pierce gardens as enchanting as the hanging ones of Babylon. There were soft lawns and placid groves of timber, with lofty rookeries. There were vivid parterres, and terraces stooping to blue depths, wheredown a little silver brook bubbled through mists of foliage. There were rose bowers, and great jars, like Plenty’s horn, brimming petunias. There was a mossy fountain, with lilies and goldfish, and a baby Triton in the midst spurting a jet to heaven. There were grassy walks, and beyond their vistas the eternal solace of distance. And, dominating all, there was the house.

At least it seemed less to command than to partake of the serenity of which it was the habitable nucleus--the human nest in the garden. It stood before us, not suddenly, but in quiet revelation, a simple old structure of red brick, unlaboured with ornament, unweighted of stone, a pleasant home for happiness set on a wide level platform of grass and gravel. My eyes had hardly accepted it before my heart.

We alighted into a fragrant hall, and madam led me at once into a large low room with windows bent upon a heavenly prospect of woods and meadows; and there, bidding me await her until she could come and talk with me, shut me in, and withdrew.

I had not stood many minutes, in a silent dream of wonder and expectation, when the door opened softly again, and a little girl stole in. She was about my own age, or somewhat older, and very dark and pretty, but with foolish large eyes like a dog’s. For some moments she stared at me, wondering, without a smile, then came and touched my hand.

“Madam sent me,” she said. “I live here. I am her adoption child. Are you come to stay?”

I shook my head, bewildered.

“O,” she whispered, “I hope so. I have no little friend at all, and you are so pretty.”

“I have golden hair,” I said. “We can’t all be the same. But yours at least is very curly. What is your name?”

“Patience Grant,” she said. “My mother died in the convent, and I have no father. I am not allowed to play with the village children. What is _your_ name?”

I told her “Diana Please.”

“It is a nice name,” she said. “Did _your_ mother too die in the convent? I am very happy here, but I shall be happier if you come.”

Lady Sophia had entered softly while she spoke.

“Hush, Patty!” said she, with a smile. “And run away now.”

The child went, looking wistfully back. _Ah, mignonnette, ma petite à jamais mémorable, toi que j’aime sans discontinuer!_ How wert thou to me from the first the most attached of little dogs!

Madam drew me into a window, and looked earnestly into my eyes. As she held me, Father Pope entered and stood near, my morose and baleful inquisitor.

“Do you like my home?” she said, in her level, toneless voice. The labour of lifting it seemed always constitutionally beyond her.

I clasped my hands. “O, madam,” I said, “I could be a very good Catholic here!”

She smiled, in a surprised way, then looked grave. I waited in a fever of expectation for her to speak again. I had already decided that I would wish to be adopted like Patience, in whom I seemed to foresee a little adoring vassal, so welcome after my own long slavery, and that I must be adroit to gain my point. Brighthelmston, with its questionable potentialities, had darkened in contrast with this paradise. I felt even that it would not be good for me to return there; that I was destined for a virtuous, if not a devout life. It is no contradiction that I had not thought so an hour before. Our moral development is intermittent. Its phases of growth are inspirations of adaptation to circumstance. A fever made of Francis of Assisi a saint out of a profligate. These high lawns had revealed to me the pit from which I had escaped.

Lady Sophia looked very sweet and grave.

“Or anywhere, I hope,” she said. “Faith is not a question of surroundings.”

I was not so sure of that; but I held my tongue, hanging my head.

“Let me see your face,” she insisted, and put her thin hand under my chin.

“It is a pretty and an innocent one,” she declared. “How came you, child, in the position in which Father Pope found you?”

I told her how I had been stolen by the sweep, and had escaped from him rather than seem to concur in the violence offered to my religion.

“It was an ingenious and a courageous act,” she said, gently kindling; “was it not, Father?”

The bear snorted, dissent or commendation--it was all one.

“Ask her about her mother,” he growled.

“True,” said the lady, with a gesture of involuntary repulsion, for which she the moment after atoned with a caress.

“She had been a Sister in the Hospital of St. Magdalen, Father Pope tells me,” she said very low. “She had returned there to expiate her--her”--