Well, she did. Mr. Kelly had come to his meaning in a roundabout fashion enough, as he acknowledged that same day to Nicholas Wogan.
‘Upon my conscience, but I made a blundering ass of myself,’ said he.
‘You would,’ said Wogan. ‘My dear man, why didn’t you tell me of your intention and I would have written you out a fine sort of speech that you could have got by heart?’
‘Sure I should have stammered over the first sentence and forgot the rest,’ said Kelly with a shake of the head. ‘To tell the truth, the little girl has sunk me to such a depth of humility and diffidence that I find it wonderful I said anything at all.’ Then he grew silent for a minute or so. ‘Nick,’ said he secretly, drawing his chair a trifle closer. ‘There’s a question troubles me. D’ye think I should tell her of My Lady Oxford?’
‘It would be entirely superfluous,’ replied Wogan with decision, ‘since the thing’s done with.’
‘But is it?’ asked Kelly. ‘Is it, Nick? Look you here. We thought it was done with a year ago, and up springs Mr. Scrope at Avignon. Mr. Scrope does his work and there’s not the end of it. For I am carried here and so my very betrothal is another consequence. It is as though her ladyship had presented me to Rose. Well, how are we to know it’s done with now? If it ends here it is very well. But, d’ye see, Nick, it was after all not the most honourable business in the world, and am I to make this great profit out of it? Well, perhaps my fears confuse my judgment. I am all fears to-day, Nick,’ and he stopped for a moment and clapped his hand into his pocket.
‘I’ll confess to you a very childish thing,’ said he. ‘Look!’ and out of his pocket he drew a pistol.
‘What’s that for?’ asked Nick.
‘It’s loaded,’ replied Kelly. ‘I went up to my room, after the little girl had taken me, and loaded it and slipped it into my pocket,’ and he began to laugh, perhaps something awkwardly. ‘For, you see, since she prizes me, why I am grown altogether valuable.’ He put back the pistol in his pocket. ‘But don’t misunderstand me, Nick. The new fears are quite overbalanced by a new confidence. Sure, it’s not the future I am afraid of.’
‘I understand,’ said Wogan gravely. ‘It’s what’s to come.’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Kelly.
Being afraid, and being a man of honour, Kelly did nothing, said nothing on the head of his old love affair, and trembled with apprehension of he knew not very well what. A path of flowers stretched before him, but a shadow walked on it, a tall, handsome shadow, yet unfriendly. It is Mr. Wogan’s firm belief, based on experience, that a woman always finds everything out. The only questions are, when, and how will she take it? Sometimes it is a letter in the pocket of an old coat which the dear charitable creature is giving to a poor devil of a chairman. Sometimes it is a glance at a rout, which she shoots flying. Now it is a trinket, or a dead flower in a book, or a line marked in a poem, but there is always a trail of the past, and woman never misses it.
George’s wooing seemed as flowery as the meadows about Avignon, white with fragrant narcissus, or as the gardens purple with Judas trees in spring. Rose was all parfait amour, and, in her eyes, Mr. Kelly was a hero, a clerical Montrose, or a Dundee of singular piety. Wogan has known women more zealous for the Cause, such as her Grace of Buckingham, or Madame de Mézières, who had ever a private plot of her own running through the legs of our schemes, like a little dog at a rout, and tripping us up. To Miss Townley George was the Cause, and the Cause was George, so that, in truth, she was less of a Jacobite than a Georgite.
There never had been such a George as hers for dragons. Why did he fight Mr. Scrope? She was certain it was all for the Cause! Indeed, that casus belli, as the lawyers say, proved a puzzle. Why, in fact, did the Parson come to be lying on the flags, in receipt of a sword-thrust of the first quality? George was the last man to brag of his services, but he was merely obliged to put the sword-thrust down to his credit with the Cause. His enemy had been a Whig, a dangerous spy, which was true, but not exactly all the truth, about as much of it as a man finds good for a woman.
Rose clasped her hands, raised her eyes to Heaven, and wondered that it did not better protect the Right. What other deeds of arms had her warrior done? She hung on George imploring him to speak of deadly ‘scapes, and of everything that it terrified her to hear. Mr. Kelly, in fact, had never drawn sword in anger before; he was, by profession, a man of peace and of the pen. If ever he indulged a personal ambition, it would have been for a snug Irish deanery, and he communicated to Miss Townley a part of his favourite scheme, for leisure, a rose-hung parsonage, and Tully, his Roman friend.
But the girl put this down to his inveterate modesty, remarked by all Europe in his countrymen.
‘Nay, I know you have done more,’ she said one day alone with him in a bower of the garden. ‘You have done something very brave and very great, beyond others. You helped to free the Queen from the Emperor’s prison at Innspruck!’
‘I!’ exclaimed Mr. Kelly in amazement. ‘What put that notion into the prettiest head in the world? Why, it was Nicholas’s brother Charles, with other Irish gentlemen, Gaydon, Misset, and O’Toole, who did that feat; the world rings of it. I was in Paris at that time.’
‘Then you did something greater and braver yet, that is a secret for State reasons, or else, why does the King give you such rich presents?’
Mr. Kelly blushed as red as the flower after which his lady was named.
‘Now,’ he thought, ‘how, in the name of the devil, did she hear of the box the King gave me, and I gave to Lady Oxford?’
That trinket was lying on Lady Oxford’s table, but the face behind the mirror was now that of a handsomer man than either his Majesty, or Mr. Kelly, or Colonel Montague. Kelly knew nothing about that, but he blushed beautifully when Miss Townley spoke of a rich royal present.
‘You blush,’ cried the girl, before he could find an answer. ‘I know you are hiding something, now.’ (And here she added to his pleasure without taking anything from his confusion), ‘Tell me why you blush to find it fame?’
‘Troth, isn’t my face a mirror, and reflects your rosy one, my Rose?’ answered Mr. Kelly, putting on a great deal of the brogue, to make her laugh. For, if a woman laughs, she is apt to lose sight of her idea.
‘I must be told; I cannot trust you to show me how brave you are.’
Mr. Kelly was upon dangerous ground. If he was expected to talk about the box given by the King, and if Rose wished to see, or to know what had become of it, Kelly had not a fable ready, and the truth he could not tell. He made a lame explanation:
‘Well, then, I blushed, if I did, for shame that the King has to borrow money to help better men than me.’
‘I don’t care if he borrowed the money or not, for he could not have borrowed for a better purpose than to give you — what I have seen.’
Mr. Kelly was pale enough now. What in the wide world had she seen? Certainly not the snuffbox.
‘Seen in a dream, my dear; sure the King never gave me anything but my little pension.’
‘Then you know other kings, for who else give diamonds? Ah, you are caught! You have the Queen’s portrait set with diamonds.’
‘The Queen’s portrait?’ cried Kelly in perplexity. He was comforted as well as perplexed. ’Twas plain that Rose knew nothing of the royal snuffbox, now the spoil of Lady Oxford’s spear and bow.
‘Yes,’ cried Rose. ‘Whose portrait but the Queen’s should it be that lies on your table? So beautiful a lady and such diamonds!’
Mr. Kelly groaned in spirit. The snuff-box was not near so dangerous as this new trail that Rose had hit. She had seen, in his possession, the miniature of Smilinda, and had guessed that it was a royal gift; the likeness of the Princess Clementina Sobieska, who had but lately married the King.
‘I saw it lying on your table the day we brought you home from the seat on the boulevard, when we thought’(here Miss Rose hid her face on her lover’s shoulder, and her voice broke) ‘that
— you — would — die.’
Now was this rose wet with a shower, and when Kelly, like the glorious sun in heaven, had dried these pretty petals, what (Mr. Wogan puts it to the casuists) was the dear man to say? What he thought was to curse Nick for holding his hand when he was about throwing Smilinda’s picture into the sea.
What he said was that, under Heaven, but without great personal danger, he had been the blessed means of detecting and defeating a wicked Hanoverian plot to kidnap and carry off from Rome the dear little Prince of Wales, and Mrs. Hughes, his Welsh nurse. This prodigious fable George based on one of the many flying stories of the time. It satisfied Miss Townley’s curiosity (as, indeed, it was very apt to do) and George gave her the strictest orders never to breathe a word of the circumstance, which must be reckoned a sacred mystery of the royal family. He also remarked that the portrait flattered her Majesty (as painters will do), and that, though extremely pretty and gay, she had not that air of dignity and command, nor was so dark a beauty. ‘In fact, my dear,’ said George, ‘you might wear that portrait at the Elector’s Birth Night rout (if you could fall so low) and few people would be much the wiser. These Roman painters are satisfied with making a sitter pretty enough to please her, or him.’
George was driven to this flagrant incorrectness because, though Miss Townley had not yet seen the Queen’s portrait (her father having changed sides) she might see one any day, and find Mr. Kelly out.
The girl was satisfied, and the thing went by, for the time. But, on later occasions, his conscience gnawing him, the good George very unwisely dropped out general hints of the unworthiness of his sex, and of himself in particular, as many an honest fellow has done. In Mr. Wogan’s opinion, bygones ought to be bygones, but it takes two to that bargain. Meanwhile Miss Rose might make as much or as little of her lover’s penitences as she chose, and, indeed, being a lass of gold, with a sense of honour not universal in her sex, and perfectly sure of him, she made nothing whatever, nor thought at all of the matter.
But there was another dragon in the course that never yet ran smooth. The excellent surgeon, who had not recovered the fright of Preston, was obdurate. He had no dislike for Mr. Kelly, but a very great distaste for Mr. Kelly’s Cause. Rose might coax, the Parson might argue, Wogan might use all his blandishments — the good man was iron. In brief, Kelly must cease to serve the King, or cease to hope for Rose. This was a hard choice, for indeed Mr. Kelly could not in honour leave hold of the threads of the plot which were then in his hands.
So much Dr. Townley was at last brought to acknowledge, and thereupon a compromise was come to. Mr. Kelly was to go over to England once again, on the last chance. The blow was to be struck in this spring of the year 1722. If it failed, or could not be struck, Mr. Kelly was to withdraw from the King’s affairs and earn his living by writing for the booksellers, and instructing youth.
The Parson was the more ready to agree to this delay, because of a circumstance with which he was now acquainted. The Doctor and his daughter were themselves on the point of returning to England. Mr. Kelly and Rose had no great difficulty in persuading the surgeon that he would find it more convenient to live in London than in the country, of the miseries of which they drew a very pathetic and convincing picture; and so, being assured that the delay would not mean a complete separation, they accepted the plan and fell to mapping out their lives.
They chose the sort of house they would live in and where, whether in Paris or in England: they furnished it from roof to cellar.
‘There must be a room for Nick,’ said the Parson, ‘so that he can come in and out as if to his own house.’
Mr. Wogan had borne his part in persuading Dr. Townley, without a thought of the great change which the Parson’s marriage meant for him. But these words, and the girl’s assent, and above all a certain unconscious patronage in their voices, struck the truth into him with something of a shock.
Mr. Wogan escaped from the room, and walked about in the garden. These two men, you are to understand, had been boys together, George being by some years the older, and had quarrelled and fought and made friends again twenty times in a day. Mr. Kelly bore, and would bear till his dying day, a little scar on his cheek close to his ear, where he was hit by a mallet which Wogan heaved at him one day that he was vexed. Wogan never noticed that scar but a certain pleasurable tenderness came over him. His friendship with the Parson had been, as it were, the heart of his boyhood. And in after years it had waxed rather than diminished. The pair of them could sit one on each side of a fire in perfect silence for an hour together, and yet converse intelligibly to each other all the while. Well, here was Mr. Wogan alone in the darkness of the little garden at Avignon now. The Rhone looked very cold beneath the stars, and the fields entirely desolate and cheerless. Yet he gazed that way persistently, for if he turned his head toward the house he saw a bright window across which the curtains were not drawn, and a girl’s fair hair shining gold against a man’s black periwig. Mr. Wogan had enough sense to strangle his jealousy that night, and was heartily ashamed of it the next morning when he bade the couple good-bye and set out for Paris.
Mr. Kelly took his leave a few days later, being now sufficiently recovered to travel. The precise date was the eighth of April. To part from Rose you may well believe was a totally different matter from his adieus to Smilinda. Nothing would serve the poor girl, who had no miniature and diamonds to give, but to sacrifice what she prized most in the world after her father and her lover.
‘You cannot take me,’ she said with a tearful little laugh, ‘but you shall take Harlequin, who made us acquainted. That way you will not be altogether alone.’
Harlequin wagged his tail, and sat up on his hind legs as though he thoroughly approved of the proposal, and Mr. Kelly, to whom the poodle could not but be an inconvenience, had not the heart to refuse the gift.
George had to give as well as to take, and felt even less blessed in giving than in receiving. For Miss Rose must have a souvenir of him, too, and what should it be but that inestimable testimony to her lover’s loyalty and courage, the Portrait of the Queen! There was no way of escape, and thus, as a memorial of Mr. Kelly’s singular attachment to the best of Causes and of Queens, Miss Townley was treasuring the likeness of the incomparable Smilinda. The ladies, in the nature of things, could never meet, George reckoned, for the daughter of the exiled country physician would not appear among the London fashionables.
In Paris, on his road to London, Mr. Kelly visited the Duke of Mar, who most unfortunately took notice of the dog, and asked him what he purposed to do with it.
‘My Lord,’ replied Kelly, ‘when I am on my jaunts Harlequin will find a home with the Bishop of Rochester, whose wife has a great liking for dogs. The poor lady is ill, and, alas, near to her death; the Bishop is fretting under the gout, and his wife’s sickness, and the jealousies among the King’s friends. Moreover, he is much occupied with building his tomb in the Abbey, so that, altogether, their house is of the gloomiest, and Harlequin may do something to lighten it.’
For the poodle had more accomplishments than any dog that ever the Parson had met with, and this he demonstrated to the Duke of Mar by putting him through his tricks. The Duke laughed heartily, and commended the Parson’s kindliness towards his patron. But in truth the Parson never did a worse day’s work in the whole of his life.
CHAPTER XIV
OF THE GREAT CONFUSION PRODUCED BY A BALLAD AND A DRUNKEN CROW
FROM THIS TIME until Saturday, May 19, the world seemed to go very well for those concerned in the Bishop of Rochester’s plot, which was a waiting plot; and in the other scheme, the scheme for an immediate rising, which was a hurrying scheme, and not at all known to the good Bishop. There was a comforting air of discontent abroad; the losses from the South Sea made minds heavy and purses light. Mr. Walpole had smoked nothing of what was forward, so far as a man could see; and within a month the country was to rise. Mr. Wogan from Paris travelled to Havre-de-Grace, whence James Ro
che, an Irishman, settled in that port, and a noted smuggler upon the English coast, set him across the Channel, and put him ashore at the Three Sheds and Torbay near Elephant Stairs in Rotherhithe. Mr. Wogan took his old name of Hilton, and went about his business, paying a visit now and again to the Cocoa Tree, where amongst other gossip he heard that Lady Oxford was still on the worst of friendly terms with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the best of loving terms with Colonel Montague. There was more than one jest aimed at Mr. Kelly on this last account, since a man who has been fooled by a woman is ever a fair mark for ridicule; and when James Talbot began to talk of the Parson with a mock pity, Wogan could no longer endure it.
‘Sure your compassion is all pure waste, Crow,’ said he. ‘I could tell you a very pretty tale about the Parson were I so minded.’
Of course he was minded, and he told the story of the Parson’s betrothal with a good many embellishments. He drew so tender a picture of Rose, that he became near to weeping over it himself; he clothed her in high qualities as in a shining garment, and you may be sure he did not spare Lady Oxford in the comparison. On the contrary, he came very near to hinting that it was the Parson jilted Lady Oxford, who therefore fell back upon Colonel Montague to cover her discomfiture. At all events that was the story which soon got about, and Mr. Wogan never said a word to correct it, and in due time, of course, and in a way not very agreeable, it came to her Ladyship’s ears.
The Parson arrived in London on a Wednesday, the 13th of April. The weather had been terrible on the sea, and the unhappy dog Harlequin had contrived to slip his leg by a fall on deck. However, he soon recovered of his injury, thanks to the care of Mrs. Barnes, and Mr. Kelly carried him to the Bishop’s house at Bromley, where his lady lay a-dying. There, too, as he had good cause afterwards to remember, he wrote certain letters for the Bishop, to the King, the Duke of Mar, and General Dillon, and put them in the common post. They did but carry common news, and excuses for delay. The Bishop’s lady died on the 26th of April, and on that very day Harlequin’s hurt broke out again, and the poor creature went whining lugubriously about the gloomy house, as though it was mourning for its mistress. This fact should be mentioned, because the Duke of Mar had made an inquiry in a letter as to how Harlequin fared, and whether Mr. Illington, as the Bishop was called, had as yet received the dog. Kelly replied that ‘Illington is in great tribulation for poor Harlequin, who is in a bad way, having slipped his leg again,’ which was true, for since the dog by his tricks greatly lightened his lady’s sickness, the Bishop grew very fond of him, though at the Bishop’s trial, when these things were brought up to prove that Illington and he were the same man, it was said ‘he never loved a dog.’ So much for Mr. Kelly.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 275