And then Fenton stopped abruptly.
Someone in the room, unquestionably Meg, was softly playing a tenor viol. Meg’s fine contralto voice, though low-pitched, rang out with a triumph of joy and pride.
“Here’s a cry to all ye goodmen,
Shout it joyous through the town—
Three swordsmen and three woodmen
Did bring the tyrant down!”
Fenton held hard to the stair rail, now half-sick at the stomach. Of all the things he did not want to hear, these were the worst. Each tawdry word somehow concerned Lydia, and brought Lydia into his mind. He stumbled down the passage while Meg still proudly sang of that cheap brash affair. …
“If all held firm and stood, men,
No Shaftesb’ry rules the Crown!
Three swordsmen and three woodmen
Shall bring THIS tyrant down!”
Fenton, his spurs rattling, threw open the door. The bow of the tenor viol slipped away from the strings. He and Meg looked at each other.
“You have been a mighty long time,” said Meg, tossing her head with a careless air, “in coming to wait upon me.” Then her tone changed. “Nick! What’s the matter?”
At the front of the room there were two windows, with a fireplace between them. At each window faced out into the room a huge carved chair, covered with coloured swan’s-down pillows. A single candle burned in a golden holder in the middle of the mantelpiece, above a light log fire in the chimney. Meg, fully dressed in a purple velvet gown with a heavy fall of Venice point lace round the low corsage, sat in the big carven chair to the right of the fireplace.
The tenor viol had fallen from her hand. That dim light shone on her dark hair.
Since Fenton knew her tastes, he was not surprised to find the small square room as richly furnished as any at Whitehall. There were padded chairs, and an ottoman. But most of all, because of the tapestries and the amorous pictures, it reminded him of George’s description. …
Meg sprang to her feet, letting fall the viol bow.
“Wait!” he said.
His face was as white as tallow, his legs unsteady. His right arm so ached with bruises that he could not have made a quick sword-draw to save his life. But he groped up for his hat, and found it gone. It must have blown off somewhere.
“First of all,” Fenton said hoarsely, in the speech of 1925, “let’s get rid, as we did once, of all this nonsense of word and pronunciation out of our own century. Let’s speak as we were taught to speak!”
The dim candlelight, the struggling fire, made a shadow-play across Meg’s white shoulders. But her eyes, lids drooping, began to gleam with understanding.
“Very well, if you wish. —Professor Fenton, why are you really here?”
“Because I’m beaten,” he answered flatly. “I can’t see what to do. I came here for … for …”
“For sympathy?” asked Meg, with poisoned sweetness. She crept a little way out, her breast rising and falling. Jealousy, hatred leaped at him. “You’ve had a tiff, I suppose, with that … that … the Lydia woman?”
“In a sense, yes.”
“And now you come crawling to me for sympathy? Well, you won’t get it!” Meg straightened up. “And you!”
Fenton contemplated the bright carpet.
“Probably you’re right,” he admitted.
“You!” Meg said bitterly. “Oh, I know Mr. Reeve too! Who doesn’t? And I have a copy of his verses! They call you the hero of the ‘battle’ of Pall Mall. I was proud of that. Yes! And, in our other lives, do you remember how you planned General, now Field Marshal, Fatwaller’s campaign that nearly broke the whole German defences? Yes! And led the opening attack yourself, with the First Battalion of Westshires?”
“Strangely enough, I dreamed of that the other night.”
“And now you come for sympathy to me. I can’t endure a man who crawls. Get out of here! Go!” she screamed at him. “Take your silly troubles and get out!”
“Good night, then; and good-by.”
He had not seen, even before he turned towards the door, how Meg’s expression suddenly altered. It altered even as she screamed at him. There was a heavy rustling of silks as she raced past him towards the door, closed it, and set her back to it.
“Nick! No! Wait!”
“Get out of my way, please,” he said dully. “What’s the use?”
“Oh, why must I always do this?” cried Meg, her grey-black eyes roving round the room as though she might find some answer there. “Almost every time we meet, I turn spiteful; I grow vixenish; I say things I don’t mean. And I didn’t mean what I said just now; I didn’t!”
To his dulled astonishment, real tears gleamed on her long black eyelashes as she looked at him. Meg clasped her hands together. More than her physical appeal, more than contrition, she seemed to exude a power of sympathy which almost burned.
“Don’t go,” she whispered. “Nick …”
Once-more he kissed her, and once more he lost his head.
“Now tell me!” said Meg, looking at him with her head held back. “What hath this woman done to you? Hath she cuckolded you?”
“Damn it, Mary, have you forgotten the speech of your own century?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! But did she—deceive you with another man?”
“No.”
“Then wherefore did you quarrel?”
Fenton was silent. He could not speak.
“Well, it makes no matter,” Meg said presently. “I do not care. Come here, Nick.”
A little way out from the closed door was a large padded chair, which faced towards the fireplace with its window on either side. A red glare sprang up behind the right-hand window; but he remembered, as it dimmed to pink and died, it was only the soap boileries down the Thames.
“It makes no matter!” Meg repeated in a shaky voice, though both knew she lied. Again she indicated the padded chair facing the windows. “Sit down, my dear. And must you wear a clumsy sword, a buckled cape, even here with me?”
Fenton loosed the sword and the cape, and threw them over on the ottoman. Then he sat down.
“I should ask you to remove that periwig too,” said Meg. “Yet (foh!) all men have their hair cropped beneath, or near-cropped, so that there may be no lice.”
Fenton did not know why he laughed.
“You need not fear the cropped skull or the lice either. I have let my hair grow,” he said. Taking off the periwig, he flung it over to the ottoman with a single bruise-twinge in his right arm.
His heavy black hair, parted on one side, had been pressed down by the periwig. As he threw the wig away, it was as though he came step by step closer, through the mists of the past, towards the future. But Meg, who had sat down sideways on his lap so that she might look at him and bend over him, for a moment would not allow him to think of this.
“Nay,” she whispered close to his cheek, “you must never think of me as Mary Grenville; only as Meg York. My true self is Meg York. This was so even when truly I was Mary Grenville, though I must needs conceal it because you all thought of me as a small girl.”
She bent over him. His intense mingling of desire, comfort, and sympathy again kept him silent. Meg persistently used the old speech; he knew he must do so too.
“Much of your perplexity,” Meg said, “I caused by things I should have told you long ago, but durst not. Will you hear me now?”
“I hear you.”
“Do you recollect that night—in your withdrawing room, two hundred and fifty years from now—when you told me you had sold your soul to the devil?”
Fenton felt a small, inexplicable chill. But he nodded.
“I recollect it well,” he replied.
“And you discovered me not … surprised?”
“True! I felt so. Yet I can’t tell why.”
/> “It was of the heart, dearest, not the mind. You sought and found it ere you knew.”
“Yet …”
“Stay; hear me! I had heard no word of these people, or this matter of poisoning, though you had studied it for years. Still do you recollect?”
“Yes?”
“I was in a rage; I was sore jealous; I could have bit the blood from my arm.” Now Meg’s low voice hissed at him. “Yet I must not tarry. I loved you. I must learn, in haste and from a certain source, who these people might be. ‘Three beautiful women,’” Meg quoted, with hatred; “that was what you said. Well! As one of these women, I must travel into the past with you.”
“Travel into the …” Fenton stopped.
“Playing Meg York, but with my own self in her place, could I not indeed demonstrate I was no little girl?” Round Meg’s lips curled the elusive smile with which he was so familiar. “Faith, Nick, did you not mark it the first night you met me?”
The glow of the soap vats, rising up red behind the right-hand window and touching the left-hand window as well, showed Meg’s wicked little smile more clearly.
“By God’s body!” Fenton swore, and gripped her arms so that the smile became more provocative. “Did you, Mary Grenville, make any pact to sell your soul to … our friend?”
Meg’s voice was enigmatic.
“Of that,” she said, “we must discourse presently. In Spring Gardens, not long ago, you asked me why I did not tell you I was Mary Grenville when first we were met. I replied: that I was unsure of myself, unsure even of my speech.”
Abruptly Meg, despite her body heat, shivered. He put his arms round her and gripped her hard, feeling the pressure of her arms in return and her cheek against his. Both of them stammered in their speech.
“Y-yet,” said Meg, “’twas not all the truth. I must make you sure I could not be Mary Grenville. I must put by and delay. I must cause you to love me, or at least desire me, as Meg York.”
“Tell me! Have you made any pact with …”
“I’ll not say yes or no. Yet I travelled back in time in my own semblance, though I chose to be Meg York. Your lady mistress.”
“A pity,” said Fenton, “I have never been in a position to exercise my rights!”
“Why, as to that! ’Tis easily remedied. —Stay; touch me no more for the moment! I would have time to …”
“Unnecessary! Pray why defer?”
After a certain struggle, Meg rose to her feet. She settled her purple velvet gown, with the heavy fall of lace at the corsage. Hurrying to the mantelpiece, she picked up the single taper holder to light her way into another room. As she turned from the mantelpiece and went back towards the door, she held up the taper flame when she passed Fenton, who was on his feet now.
“I shall return very quickly,” she murmured. “Do you much wish for my return?”
“Much!”
She glided past his hand, looking at him over her shoulder with her eyelids lowered. The door opened, and closed after her.
Fenton, his nerves twitching, sat down again.
Now the only light in the little room, with its tapestries and pictures, came from a fire which would not burn properly. Its small logs were burnt fiery red underneath, but with only a flick of flame over them.
Once this whole area (so the thoughts mumbled in Fenton’s head) had been swept by a Great Fire which began in a bakery in Pudding Lane. But surely there was something peculiar about the little log fire here in the grate now? Or else the direction of the wind had changed. This fire seemed to let smoke into the room, curling upwards in odd style. Then a deep glow from the soap boileries beyond the right-hand window, with its great chair facing outwards, rose up to show him the truth. There was no smoke from the chimney. There was no smoke at all. He had mistaken it for what seemed a vague, shifting outline of someone sitting in the great chair.
A suave, familiar voice spoke across at him.
“Good evening, my friend,” said the devil.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FATHER OF EVIL
THE RED GLARE FADED to pink dimness and died away. There remained only the unstable, varying outline in the chair by a dull fire. The devil, as usual, spoke modern English with a slightly archaic flavour.
Over Fenton’s mind again stole the sense he had known on the first night he had met the devil: a dreamlike quality, wherein voices were soundless and emotions felt only as impalpable waves; yet, at the same time, all seemed as natural and commonplace as two men talking in the smoking room of a club.
But this was not all. The devil’s appearance could not prevent Fenton from jumping to this feet, stifling back a fine old oath, before the dream world closed over him. He settled back again, with a suavity to match the devil’s own.
“Good evening, my dear sir,” Fenton answered coldly.
There was a pause. The devil seemed distressed.
“Professor Fenton,” he said, “have I in any way offended you? Is my presence unwelcome?”
“You are always welcome,” conceded Fenton, “if only for your verbal rapier play. Yet you choose a most da—a most unfortunately ill-timed moment for your visit.”
“Ah!” said the devil, enlightened. “You refer to the—er—young lady?”
“Who will return very shortly.”
The devil was deeply shocked.
“My dear fellow!” he protested. “Do you imagine for one moment that I, of all people, would interfere with this laudable little affair of yours? No, no, no! You horrify me. Such affairs, in nine cases out of ten, are most useful to me. —Ah, I see! You consider my presence, at such a time, embarrassing and tactless?”
“I do not say tactless. I merely point out that you are here.”
“Come now!” chuckled the devil. “I had not thought to find you so conventional. In that case, you can postpone your trifling for some other occasion.”
“In all your own vast experience, sir, have you ever found that argument quite convincing at the time?”
The devil’s tone altered slightly.
“Does it not occur to you, Professor Fenton, that you are treating rather lightly some matters which concern your own soul?”
And now Fenton heard or, to be exact, sensed in the wave of emotion which flowed from that great chair the first hint of malice, like that of the cruel small boy. Yet here was the Father of Evil, who could upset real mountains and crush armies as the small boy might upset a toy mountain or scatter lead soldiers.
Nor was this all. The devil, metaphorically, had waxed and grown huge. Despite his casual behaviour, like a man in a club, the glimmer of his power blazed through. To put the matter in ordinary terms, he was like a man who holds a handful of trumps, and begins to let it be seen. Of course he had known all the time that Meg was there.
For a moment, as at their one previous meeting, his presence turned Fenton’s insides into a cold hollow of fear. Fenton walked amid tall dangers, and he knew it. But, crudely to turn back the metaphor, the devil did not hold the ace of trumps. Fenton’s play against him must now never falter.
“You are right,” Fenton admitted, with a shade of humility in his voice. “I have treated these matters—perhaps too lightly. I ask your pardon.”
“Granted, granted!” said the devil suavely, as though he might have waved his hand. “I wished only to remind you of your position. After all, we did sign a certain … a certain agreement some time ago.”
“We did.”
“Ah! Have I fulfilled my conditions of the bargain?”
“In candour, sir, you have led me one devil of a dance.”
“But you wished to be Sir Nick Fenton; behold, you are. Still! I must remind you that some of your ‘conditions,’” said the devil, “were beyond even my power to grant. Being absent-minded, I failed to remind you at the time.”
“Oh?�
�� Again terror swept through Fenton. “You ‘forgot’ to remind me?”
“Alas, yes,” sighed the devil. “Yet you should have seen it. When you said, ‘You will make me do thus,’ or ‘You will not allow that,’ you should have realized it was beyond my power if it contradicted history. But, my dear sir!” The devil sounded hurt. “I quite fairly warned you that no one can change history.”
“No one?”
And now the devil was complacent.
“Not myself, or my … my Opponent.” Briefly he seemed to glance upwards. “Long ago, at a time (forgive me) beyond your comprehension, my Opponent and I planned the history of this very small planet. We warred, of course. Here He gained a victory; there I won instead. But it cannot be altered. I have almost forgotten it. It is no more than a dusty plan, rolled up like an architect’s, and put away in some obscure pigeonhole of time.”
Soothing, drowsy, almost hypnotic was the voice. Abruptly the devil chuckled, altering his mood.
“Come now, Professor Fenton!” he said amiably. “If I have made you Sir Nick Fenton, what have you to fear? Nothing. Not even when I … call for you at the time of your death. Let us speak of more pleasant matters! For instance, this young lady—”
The door opened, and Meg stood on the threshold.
In her left hand she held up a lighted candle in a brass holder. Her dark-gleaming hair was loosed round her shoulders. With her right hand she held loosely about her body the yellow bedgown she had worn when Fenton first saw her as Meg York.
Even with the candlelight, she could not ordinarily have seen that immense, shifting vagueness against the window. And yet, Fenton realized as he turned round, Meg knew.
Immediately the taper flame, perhaps in a draught, dwindled to a blue spark and vanished. Just before it disappeared, there seemed to be strange lines and alterations in Meg’s face; but they changed back into her normal beauty before the room went dark, except for the fire.
Meg stood terrified, as though her knees would not move.
“Ah, my dear,” said the visitor. “You need not be formal. You may join us, if you like.”
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