CHAPTER XL
When I recovered my senses I was on my back in one of eighteen beds, in a long white-walled room, having barred windows, and a vaulted ceiling. A woman, garbed strangely in black, and with a queer white cap drawn tight round her face, leaned over me, and with her finger laid to her lips, enjoined silence. Here and there along the wall were pictures of saints; and at the end two candles burned before a kind of altar. I had an idea that I had been partly conscious, and had lain tossing giddily with a burning head, and a dreadful thirst through days and nights of fever. Now, though I could scarcely raise my head, and my brain reeled if I stirred, I was clear-minded, and knew that the bone of my leg was broken, and that for that reason I had a bed to myself where most lay double. For the rest I was so weak I could only cry in pure gratitude when the nun came to me in my turn, and fed me, and plain, stout, and gentle-eyed, laid her fingers on her lip, or smiling, said in her odd English “Quee-at, quee-at, monsieur!”
In face of the blessings which the Protestant Succession, as settled in our present House of Hanover, has secured to these islands, it would little become me to find a virtue in papistry; and my late lord, who early saw and abjured the errors of that faith, would have been the last to support or encourage such a thesis. Notwithstanding which, I venture to say that the devotion of these women to their calling is a thing not to be decried, merely because we have no counterpart of it, nor the charity of that hospital, simply because the burning of candles and worshipping of saints alternate with the tendance of the wretched. On the contrary, it seems to me that were such a profession, the idolatrous vows excepted, grafted on our Church, it might redound alike to the credit of religion — which of late the writings of Lord Bolingbroke have somewhat belittled — and to the good of mankind.
So much with submission; nor will the most rigid of our divines blame me, when they learn that I lay ten weeks in the Maison de Dieu at Dunquerque, dependent for everything on the kind offices of those good women; and nursed during that long period with a solicitude and patience not to be exceeded by that of wife or mother. When I had so far recovered as to be able to leave my bed, and move a few yards on crutches, I was assisted to a shady courtyard, nestled snugly between the hospital and the old town wall. Here, under a gnarled mulberry tree which had sheltered the troops of Parma, I spent my time in a dream of peace, through which nuns, apple-faced and kind-eyed, flitted laden with tisanes, or bearing bottles that called for the immediate attention of M. le Medecin’s long nose and silver-rimmed spectacles. Occasionally their Director would seat himself beside me, and silently run through his office: or instruct me in the French tongue, and the evils of Jansenism — mainly by means of the snuff-box which rarely left his fine white hands. More often the meagre apothecary, young, yellow, dry, ambitious, with a hungry light in his eyes, would take an English lesson, until the coming of his superior routed him, and sent him to his gallipots and compounding with a flea in his ear.
Such were the scenes and companions that attended my return to health; nor, my spirits being attuned to these, should I have come to seek or desire others, though enhanced by my native air — a species of inertia, more easily excused by those who have viewed French life near at hand, than by such as have never travelled — but for an encounter as important in its consequences as it was unexpected, which broke the even current of my days.
It was no uncommon thing for the nuns to bring one of my own countrymen to me, in the fond hope that I might find a friend. But as these persons, from the nature of the case, were invariably Jacobites, and either knowing something of my story, thought me well served, or coming to examine me, shied at the names of Mr. Brome and Lord Shrewsbury, such efforts had but one end. When I heard, therefore, for the fourth or fifth time that a compatriot of mine, amiable, and of a vivacity tout-â-fait marveilleuse was coming to see me, I was as far from supposing that I should find an acquaintance, as I was from anticipating the interview with pleasure. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Sœur Marie called me into the garden at the appointed time; and, her simple face shining with delight, led me to the old mulberry tree, where, who should be sitting but Mary Ferguson!
She had as little expected to meet me as I to meet her, but coming on me thus suddenly, and seeing me lame, and in a sense a cripple, reduced, moreover, by the long illness through which I had passed, she let her feelings have way. Such tenderness as she had entertained for me before welled up now with irresistible force, and giving the lie to a certain hoydenish hardness, inherent in a disposition which was never one of the most common, in a moment she was in my arms. If she did not weep herself, she pardoned, and possibly viewed with pleasure, those tears on my part, which weakness and surprise drew from me, while a hundred broken words and exclamations bore witness to the gratitude she felt on the score of her escape.
Thus brought together, in a strange country, and agitated by a hundred memories, nothing was at first made clear, except that we belonged to one another, and Sœr Marie had long fled to carry the tale with mingled glee and horror into the house, before we grew sufficiently calm to answer the numberless questions which it occurred to each to ask.
At length Mary, pressed to tell me how she had fared since her escape, made one of the odd faces I could so well remember. And “Not as I would, but as I could,” she said, dryly. “By crossing with letters.”
“Crossing?” I exclaimed.
“To be sure,” she answered. “I go to and from London with letters.”
“But should you be taken?” I cried, with a vivid remembrance of the terror into which the prospect of punishment had thrown her.
She shrugged her shoulders; yet suppressed, or I was mistaken, a shudder. Then “What will you?” she said, spreading out her little hands French fashion, and making again that odd grimace. “It is the old story. I must live, Dick. And what can a woman do? Will Lady Middleton take me for her children’s governante? Or Lady Melfort find me a place in her household? I am Ferguson’s niece, a backstairs wench of whom no one knows anything. If I were handsome now, bien! As I am not — to live I must risk my living.”
“You are handsome enough for me!” I cried.
She raised her eyebrows, with a look in her eyes that, I remember, puzzled me. “Well, may be,” she said a trifle tartly. “And the other is neither here nor there. For the rest, Dick, I live at Captain Gill’s, and his wife claws me Monday and kisses me Tuesday.”
“And you have taken letters to London?” I said, wondering at her courage.
“Three times,” she answered, nodding soberly. “And to Tunbridge once. A woman passes. A man would be taken. So Mr. Birkenhead says. But — —” and with the word she broke off abruptly, and stared at me; and continued to stare at me, her face which was rounder and more womanly than in the old days, falling strangely.
SHE LISTENED IN SILENCE, STANDING OVER ME WITH SOMETHING OF THE SEVERITY OF A JUDGE
It wore such a look indeed, that I glanced over my shoulder thinking that she saw something. Finding nothing, “Mary!” I cried. “What is it? What is the matter?”
“Are you the man who came with Sir John Fenwick to the shore?” she cried, stepping back a pace — she had already risen, “And betrayed him? Dick! Dick, don’t say it!” she continued hurriedly, holding out her hands as if she would ward off my words. “Don’t say that you are that man! I had forgotten until this moment whom I came to see; who, they said, was here.”
Her words stung me, even as her face frightened me. But while I winced a kind of courage, born of indignation and of a sense of injustice long endured, came to me; and I answered her with spirit. “No,” I said, “I am not that man.”
“No?” she cried.
“No!” I said defiantly. “If you mean the man that betrayed Sir John Fenwick. But I will tell you what man I am — if you will listen to me.”
“What are yon going to tell me?” she answered, the troubled look returning. And then, “Dick, don’t lie to me!” she cried quickly.
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bsp; “I have no need,” I said. And with that, beginning at the beginning, I told her all the story which is written here, so far as it was not already known to her. She listened in silence, standing over me with something of the severity of a judge, until I came to the start from London with Matthew Smith.
There she interrupted me. “One moment,” she said in a hard voice; and she fixed me with keen, unfriendly eyes. “You know that Sir John Fenwick was taken two days later, and is in the Tower?”
“I know nothing,” I said, holding out my hands and trembling with the excitement of my story, and the thought of my sufferings.
“Not even that?”
“No, nothing; not even that,” I said.
“Nor that within a month, in all probability, he will be tried and executed!”
“No.”
“Nor that your master is in peril? You have not heard that Sir John has turned on him and denounced him before the Council of the King?”
“No,” I said. “How should I?”
“What?” she cried incredulously. “You do not know that with which all England is ringing — though it touches you of all men?”
“How should I?” I said feebly. “Who would tell me here? And for weeks I have been ill.”
She nodded. “Go on,” she said.
I obeyed. I took up the thread again, told her how we reached Ashford, how I saw Sir John, how I fled, and how I was pursued; finally how I was received on board the boat, and never, until the following day, when Birkenhead flung it in my teeth, guessed that I had forestalled Sir John, and robbed him of his one chance of escape. “For if I had known,” I continued warmly, “why should I fly from him? What had I to fear from him? Or what to gain, if Smith with a pistol were not at my heels, by leaving England? Gain?” I continued bitterly, seeing that I had convinced her. “What did I gain? This! This!” And I touched my crippled leg.
“Thank God!” she said, with emotion. “Thank God, Dick. But — —”
“But what!” I retorted sharply; for in the telling of the story I had come to see more clearly than before how cruelly I had been treated. “But what?”
“Well, just this,” she said gently. “Have you not brought it on yourself in a measure? If you had been more — that is, I mean, if you had not been so — —”
“So what?” I cried querulously, seeing her hesitate.
“Well, so quick to think that it was Matthew Smith — and a pistol,” she answered, smiling rather heartlessly. “That is all.”
“There was a mist,” I said.
She laughed in her odd way. “Of course, Dick, there was a mist,” she agreed. “And you cannot make bricks without straw. And after all you did make bricks in St. James’s Square, and it is not for me to find fault. But there is a thing to be done, and it must be done.” And her lips closed firmly, after a fashion I remembered, and still remember, having seen it a hundred times since that day, and learned to humour it. “One that must be done!” she continued. “Dick, you will not leave the Duke to be ruined by Matthew Smith? You will not lie here and let those rogues work their will on him? Sir John has denounced him.”
“And may denounce me!” I said, aghast at the notion. “May denounce me,” I continued with agitation. “Will denounce me. If it was not the Duke who was at Ashford, it was I!”
“And who are you?” she retorted, with a look that withered me. “Who will care whether you met Sir John at Ashford or not? King William — call him Dutchman, boor, drunkard, as it’s the fashion this side, call him I say what you will — at least he flies at high game, and does not hawk at mice!”
“Mice?”
“Ay, mice!” she answered with a snap of her teeth — and she looked all over the little vixen she could be. “For what are we? What are we now? Still more, what are we if we leave the Duke to his enemies, leave him to be ruined and disgraced, leave him to pay the penalty, while you, the cause of all this, lie here — lie safe and snug? For shame, Dick! For shame!” she continued with such a thrill in her voice that the pigeons feeding behind her fluttered up in alarm, and two or three nuns looked out inquisitively.
I had my own thoughts and my own feelings about my lord, as he well knew in after years. I challenge any to say that I lacked either respect or affection for him. But a man’s wits move more slowly than a woman’s, and the news came on me suddenly. It was no great wonder if I could not in a moment stomach the prospect of returning to risk and jeopardy, to the turmoil from which I had been so long freed, and the hazards of a life and death struggle. In the political life of twenty years ago men carried their necks to market. Knowing that I might save the Duke and suffer in his place — the fate of many a poor dependant; or might be confronted with Smith; or brought face to face with Ferguson; or perish before I reached London in the net in which my lord’s own feet were caught, I foresaw not one but a hundred dangers; and those such as no prudent man could be expected to regard with equanimity, or any but a harebrained girl would encounter with a light heart.
Still I desired to stand well with her; and that being so I confess that it was with relief I remembered my lameness; and named it to her. Passing over the harshness of her last words, “You are right,” I said. “Something should be done. But for me it is impossible at present. I am lame, as you see.”
“Lame?” she cried.
“More than lame,” I answered — but there was that in her tone which bade me avoid her eyes. “A cripple, Mary.”
“No, not a cripple,” she answered.
“Yes,” I said.
“No, Dick,” she answered in a voice low, but so grave and firm that I winced. “Let us be frank for once. Not a cripple, but a coward.”
“I never said I was a soldier,” I answered.
“Nor I,” she replied, wilfully misunderstanding me. “I said, a coward! And a coward I will not marry!”
With that we looked at one another: and I saw that her face was white. “Was it a coward saved your life — in the Square?” I muttered at last.
“No,” she answered. “But it was a coward played the sneak for Ferguson. And a coward played the rogue for Smith! It was a coward lost Fenwick — because he dare not look behind! And a coward who will now sacrifice his benefactor, to save his own skin. And you only know in how many other things you have played the craven. But the rather for that, up, now, and play the man! You have a chance now! Do this one brave thing and all will be forgiven. Oh, Dick, Dick!” she continued — and with a sudden blaze in her face she stooped and threw her arms round me, “if you love me, do it! Do it for us both! Do it — or if you cannot, God knows it were better we were hung, than married!”
I cannot hope to describe the fervour, which she threw into these last words, or the effect which they wrought on me, weakened as I was by long illness. In a voice broken by tears I conjured her to give me time — to give me time; a few days in which to consider what I would do.
“Not a day!” she answered, springing from me in fresh excitement, and as if my touch burned her. “I will give you no time. You have had a lifetime, and to what purpose? I will give you no time. Do you give me your word.”
“To go to England?”
“Yes.”
I was ashake from head to foot; and groaned aloud. In truth if I had known the gallows to be the certain and inevitable end of the road, on which I was asked to enter, I could not have been more sorely beset; between rage and fear, and shame of her and desire for her. But while I hung in that misery, she continuing to stand over me, I looked, as it happened, in her face; and I saw that it was no longer hot with anger, but sad and drawn as by a sharp pain. And I gave her my word, trembling and shaking.
“Now,” said she, “are you a brave man; and perhaps the bravest.”
CHAPTER XLI
That the arrest of Sir John Fenwick, reported in London on the 13th of June, was regarded by all parties as an event of the first magnitude, scarce exceeded in importance by a victory in Flanders or a defeat in the Mediterranean, is a t
hing not to be denied at this time of day; when men, still in their prime, can recall the commotion occasioned by it. The private animosity, which was believed to exist between Sir John and the King, and which dated, if the gossip of Will’s and Garraway’s went for anything, not from the slight which he had put upon the late Queen, but from a much earlier period, when he had served under William in Flanders, aroused men’s curiosity, and in a sense their pity; as if they were to see here the end of a Greek drama.
Nor, apart from the public and general interest, which Sir John’s birth and family connections, no less than his share in the plot, considerably augmented, was there any faction which could view his arrest with indifference. He had been so deep in the confidence of St. Germain’s that were he to make a discovery, not Tories and Jacobites only lay at his mercy, but all that large class among the Whigs who had stooped to palter with James. These, as they were the more culpable had also more to fear. Trembling at the prospect of a disclosure which must convict them of practices at variance with their most solemn professions, they were supported by none of those sentiments of loyalty, honourable if mistaken, which excused the others; while as each fondly thought his perfidy unknown to his neighbour, and dreaded nothing so much as detection by the rank and file of the party, he found the burden of apprehension weigh the more heavily, because he had none to share it with him.
The absence of the King, who was campaigning in Flanders, aggravated the suspense; which prevailed so widely for the reasons above, and others, that it is not too much to say that barely four politicians could be found of the first or second rank who were not nearly concerned in the question of Sir John Fenwick’s silence. Of these, however, I make bold to say that my lord was one; and though the news that Sir John, who lay in the Tower, had sent for the Duke of Devonshire may have excited a passing feeling of jealousy in his mind — since he and not the other Duke was the person to whom Sir John might more fitly unbosom himself — I am confident, and, indeed, had it from his own lips, that at this time he had no notion of any danger threatening himself.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 288