Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “I spoke to you as I should speak to my sister,” Sir Hervey said, with something akin to apology in his tone.

  “Say, rather, as you would speak to your daughter!” she replied, quick as lightning; and, trembling with rage, she drove home the shaft with a low curtsey. “To be sure, sir, now I think of it, the distance between us justifies you in giving me what advice you please.”

  He winced at last, and was even a trifle out of countenance. But he did not answer, and she, furiously angry, turned her back on him, and looked the other way. Young as she was, all the woman in her rose in revolt against the humiliation of being advised in such a matter by a man. She could have struck him. She hated him. And they were all in the same story. They were all against her and her dear Irishman, who alone understood her. Tears rose in Sophia’s eyes as she pictured her present loneliness and her happiness in the past; as she recalled the old home looking down the long avenue of chestnut trees, the dogs, the horses, the boisterous twin brother, and the father who by turns had coarsely chidden and fondly indulged her. In her loss of all this, in a change of life as complete as it was sudden, she had found one only to comfort her, one only who had not thought the whirl of strange pleasures a sufficient compensation for a home and a father. One only who had read her silence, and pitied her inexperience. And him they would snatch from her! Him they would ——

  But at this point her thoughts were interrupted by a general movement towards the door. Bent on an evening’s frolic the party issued into Arlington Street with loud laughter and louder voices, and in a moment were gaily descending St. James’s Street. One or two of the elder ladies took chairs, but the greater part walked, the gentlemen with hats under their arms and canes dangling from their wrists, the more foppish with muffs. Passing down St. James’s, where Betty, the fruit woman, with a couple of baskets of fruit, was added to the company, they crossed the end of Pall Mall, now inviting a recruit, after the easy fashion of the day, and now hailing a friend on the farther side of the street. Thence, by the Mall and the Horse Guards, and so to the Whitehall Stairs, where boats were waiting for them on the grey evening surface of the broad river.

  Sophia found herself compelled to go in the same boat with Sir Hervey, but she took good heed to ensconce herself at a distance from him; and, successful in this, sat at her end, moody, and careless of appearances. There was singing and a little romping in the stern of the boat, where the ladies principally sat, and where their hoops called for some arrangement. Presently a pert girl, Lady Betty Cochrane, out at sixteen, and bent on a husband before she was seventeen, marked Sophia’s silence, nudged those about her, and took on herself to rally the girl.

  “La, miss, you must have been at a Quakers’ meeting!” she cried, simpering. “It is easy to see where your thoughts are.”

  “Where?” Sophia murmured, abashed by this public notice.

  “I believe there is very good acting in — Doblin!” the provoking creature answered, with her head on one side, and a sentimental air; and the ladies tittered and the gentlemen smiled. “Have you ever been to — Doblin, miss?” she continued, with a look that winged the innuendo.

  Sophia, her face on fire, did not answer.

  “Oh, la, miss, you are not offended, I hope!” the tormentor cried politely. “Sure, I thought the gentleman had spoken, and all was arranged. To be sure —

  “O’Rourke’s noble fare

  Will ne’er be forgot

  By those who were there,

  And those who were not!

  And those who were not!” she hummed again, with a wink that drove the ladies to hide their mirth in their handkerchiefs. “A fine man, O’Rourke, and I have heard that he was an actor in — Doblin!” the little tease continued.

  Sophia, choking with rage, and no match for her town-bred antagonist, could find not a word to answer; and worse still, she knew not where to look. Another moment and she might even have burst into tears, a mishap which would have disgraced her for ever in that company. But at the critical instant a quiet voice at the stern was heard, quoting —

  “Whom Simplicetta loves the town would know,

  Mark well her knots, and name the happy beau!”

  On which it was seen that it is one thing to tease and another to be teased. Lady Betty swung round in a rage, and without a word attacked Sir Hervey with her fan with a violence that came very near to upsetting the boat. “How dare you, you horrid man?” she cried, when she thought she had beaten him enough. “I wish there were no men in the world, I declare I do! It’s a great story, you ugly thing! If Mr. Hesketh says I gave him a knot, he is just a — —”

  A shout of laughter cut her short. Too late she saw that she had betrayed herself, and she stamped furiously on the bottom of the boat. “He cut it off!” she shrieked, raising her voice above the laughter. “He cut it off! He would cut it off! ’Tis a shame you will not believe me. I say — —”

  A fresh peal of laughter drowned her voice, and brought the boat to the landing-place.

  “All the same, Lady Betty,” the nearest girl said as they prepared to step out, “you’d better not let your mother hear, or you’ll go milk cows, my dear, in the country! Lord, you little fool, the boy’s not worth a groat, and should be at school by rights!”

  Miss Betty did not answer, but cocking her chin with disdain, which made her look prettier than ever, stepped out, sulking. Sophia followed, her cheeks a trifle cooler than they had been; and the party, once more united, proceeded on foot from the river to the much-praised groves of Pleasure; where ten thousand lamps twinkled and glanced among the trees, or outlined the narrowing avenue that led to the glittering pavilion. In the wide and open space before this Palace of Aladdin a hundred gay and lively groups were moving to and fro to the strains of the band, or were standing to gaze at the occupants of the boxes; who, sheltered from the elements, and divided from the humbler visitors by little gardens, supped al fresco, their ears charmed by music, and their eyes entertained by the ever-changing crowd that moved below them.

  Two of the best boxes had been retained for Mrs. Northey’s party, but before they proceeded to them her company chose to stroll up and down a time or two, diverting themselves with the humours of the place and the evening. More than once Sophia’s heart stood still as they walked. She fancied that she saw Hawkesworth approaching, that she distinguished his form, his height, his face amid the crowd; and conscious of the observant eyes around her, as well as of her sister’s displeasure, she knew not where to look for embarrassment. On each occasion it turned out that she was mistaken, and to delicious tremors succeeded the chill of a disappointment almost worse to bear. After all, she reflected, if she must dismiss him, here were a hundred opportunities of doing so in greater freedom than she could command elsewhere. The turmoil of the press through which they moved, now in light and now in shadow, now on the skirts of the romantic, twilit grove, and now under the blaze of the pavilion lamps, favoured the stolen word, the kind glance, the quick-breathed sigh. But though he knew that she was to be there, though of late he had seldom failed her in such public resorts as this, he did not appear; and by-and-by her company left the parade, and, entering the boxes, fell to mincing chickens in china bowls, and cooking them with butter and water over a lamp, all with much romping and scolding, and some kissing and snatching of white fingers, and such a fire of jests and laughter as soon drew a crowd to the front of the box, and filled the little gardens on either side of them with staring groups.

  Gayest, pertest, most reckless of all, Lady Betty was in her glory. Never was such a rattle as she showed herself. Her childish treble and shrill laugh, her pretty flushed face and tumbled hair were everywhere. Apparently bent on punishing Coke for his interference she never let him rest, with the result that Sophia, whose resentment still smouldered, was free to withdraw to the back of the box, and witness rather than share the sport that went forward. To this a new zest was given when Lord P —— , who had been dining at a tavern on the river, arrived v
ery drunk, and proceeded to harangue the crowd from the front of the box.

  Sophia’s seat at the back was beside the head of the half-dozen stairs that descended to the gardens. The door at her elbow was open. On a sudden, while the hubbub was at its height, and a good half of the party were on their feet before her — some encouraging his lordship to fresh vagaries, and others striving to soothe him — she heard a stealthy hist! hist! in the doorway beside her, as if some one sought to gain her attention. With Hawkesworth in her mind she peered that way in trembling apprehension; immediately a little white note dropped lightly at her feet, and she had a glimpse of a head and shoulders, withdrawn as soon as seen.

  With a tumultuous feeling between shame and joy, Sophia, who, up to this moment, had had nothing clandestine on her conscience, slipped her foot over the note? and glanced round to see if any one had seen her. That moment an eager childish voice cried in her ear, “Give me that! Give it me!” And then, more urgently, “Do you hear? It is mine! Please give it me!”

  The voice was Lady Betty’s; and her flushed pleading face backed the appeal. At which, and all it meant, it is not to be denied that a little malice stirred in Sophia’s breast. The chit had so tormented her an hour earlier, had so held her up to ridicule, so shamed her. It was no wonder she was inclined to punish her now. “Yours, child,” she said, looking coldly at her. “Impossible.”

  “Yes, miss. Please — please give it me — at once, please, before it is too late.”

  “I do not know that I shall,” Sophia answered virtuously, from the height of her eighteen years. “Children have no right to receive notes. I ought to give it to your mother.” Then, with an unexpected movement, she stooped and possessed herself of the folded scrap of paper. “I am not sure that I shall not,” she continued.

  Lady Betty’s face was piteous. “If you do, I — I shall be sent into the country,” she panted. “I — I don’t know what they’ll do to me. Oh, please, please, will you give it me!”

  Sophia had a kindly nature, and the girl’s distress appealed to her. But it appealed in two ways.

  “No, I shall not give it you,” she answered firmly. “But I shall not tell your mother, either. I shall tear it up. You are too young, you little baby, to do this!” And suiting the action to the word, she tore the note into a dozen pieces and dropped them.

  Lady Betty glared at her between relief and rage. At last “Cat! Cat!” she whispered with childish spite. “Thank you for nothing, ma’am. I’ll pay you by-and-by, see if I don’t!” And with a spring, she was back at the front of the box, her laugh the loudest, her voice the freshest, her wit the boldest and most impertinent of all. Sophia, who fancied that she had made an enemy, did not notice that more than once this madcap looked her way; nor that in the midst of the wildest outbursts she had an eye for what happened in her direction.

  Sophia, indeed, had food for thought more important than Lady Betty, for the girl had scarcely left her side when Mrs. Northey came to her, shook her roughly by the shoulder — they had direct ways in those days — and asked her in a fierce whisper if she were going to sulk there all the evening. Thus adjured, Sophia moved reluctantly to a front seat at the right-hand corner of the box. Lord P —— had been suppressed, but broken knots of people still lingered before the garden of the box expecting a new escapade. To the right, in the open, fireworks were being let off, and the grounds in that direction were as light as in the day. Suddenly, Sophia’s eyes, roving moodily hither and thither, became fixed. She rose to her feet with a cry of surprise, which must have been heard by her companions had they not been taken up at that moment with the arrest of a cutpurse by two thief-takers, a drama which was going forward on the left.

  “There’s — there’s Tom!” she cried, her astonishment extreme, since Tom should have been at Cambridge. And raising her voice she shouted “Tom! Tom!”

  Her brother did not hear. He was moving across the open lighted space, some fifteen paces from the box; a handsome boy, foppishly dressed, moving with the affected indifference of a very young dandy. Sophia glanced round in an agony of impatience, and found that no one was paying any attention to her; there was no one she could send to call him. She saw that in a twinkling he would be lost in the crowd, and, acting on the impulse of the moment, she darted to the stairs, which were only two paces from her, and flew down them to overtake him. Unfortunately, she tripped at the bottom and almost fell, lost a precious instant, and lost Tom. When she reached the spot where she had last seen him, and looked round, her brother was not to be seen.

  Or yes, there he was, in the act of vanishing down one of the dim alleys that led into the grove. Half laughing, half crying, innocently anticipating his surprise when he should see her, Sophia sped after him. He turned a corner — the place was a maze and dimly lighted — she followed him; she thought he met some one, she hurried on, and the next moment was all but in the arms of Hawkesworth.

  “Sophia!” the Irishman cried, pressing his hat to his heart as he bowed before her. “Oh, my angel, that I should be so blest! This is indeed a happy meeting.”

  But she was far at the moment from thinking of him. Her brother occupied her whole mind. “Where is he,” she cried, looking every way. “Where is Tom? Mr. Hawkesworth, you must have seen him. He must have passed you.”

  “Seen whom, ma’am?” her admirer asked with eager devotion. He was tall, with a certain florid grace of carriage; and ready, for his hand was on his heart, and his eyes expressed the joy he felt, almost before she knew who stood before her. “If it is any one I know, make me happy by commanding me. If he be at the ends of the earth, I will bring him back.”

  “It is my brother!”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes — but you would not know him,” she cried, stamping her foot with impatience. “How annoying!”

  “Not know him?” he answered gallantly. “Oh, ma’am, how little you know me!” And Hawkesworth extended his arm with a gesture half despairing, half reproachful. “How little you enter into my feelings if you think that I should not know your brother! My tongue I know is clumsy, and says little, but my eyes” — and certainly they dwelt boldly enough on her blushing face, “my eyes must inform you more correctly of my feelings.”

  “Please, please do not talk like that!” she cried in a low voice, and she wrung her hands in distress. “I saw my brother, and I came down to overtake him, and — and somehow I have missed him.”

  “But I thought that he was at Cambridge?” he said.

  “He should be,” she replied. “But it was he. It was he indeed. I ran to catch him, and I have missed him, and I must go back at once. If you please, I must go back at once.”

  “In one moment you shall!” he cried, barring the road, but with so eloquent a look and a tone so full of admiration that she could not resent the movement. “In one moment you shall. But, my angel, heaven has sent you to my side, heaven has taken pity on my passion, and given me this moment of delight — will you be more cruel and snatch it from me? Nay, but, sweet,” he continued with ardour, making as if he would kneel, and take possession of her hand, “sweetest one, say that you, too, are glad! Say — —”

  “Mr. Hawkesworth, I am glad,” she murmured, trembling; while her face burned with blushes. “For it gives me an opportunity I might otherwise have lacked of — of — oh, I don’t know how I can say it!”

  “Say what, madam?”

  “How I can take — take leave of you,” she murmured, turning away her head.

  “Take leave of me?” he cried. “Take leave of me?”

  “Yes, oh, yes! Believe me, Mr. Hawkesworth,” Sophia continued, beginning to stammer in her confusion, “I am not ungrateful for your attentions, I am not, indeed, ungrateful, but we — we must part.”

  “Never!” he cried, rising and looking down at her. “Never! It is not your heart that speaks now, or it speaks but a lesson it has learned.”

  Sophia was silent.

  “It is your friends who wo
uld part us,” he continued, with stern and bitter emphasis. “It is your cold-blooded, politic brother-in-law; it is your proud sister — —”

  “Stay, sir,” Sophia said unsteadily. “She is my sister.”

  “She is; but she would part us!” he retorted. “Do you think that I do not understand that? Do you think that I do not know why, too? They see in me only a poor gentleman. I cannot go to them, and tell them what I have told you! I cannot,” he continued, with a gesture that in the daylight might have seemed a little theatrical, but in the dusk of the alley and to a girl’s romantic perceptions commended itself gallantly enough, “put my life in their hands as I have put it in yours! I cannot tell them that the day will come when Plomer Hawkesworth will stand on the steps of a throne and enjoy all that a king’s gratitude can confer. When he who now runs daily, nightly, hourly the risk of Layer’s fate, whose head may any morning rot on Temple Bar and his limbs on York Gates — —”

  Sophia interrupted him; she could bear no more. “Oh, no, no!” she cried, shuddering and covering her eyes. “God forbid! God forbid, sir! Rather — —”

  “Rather what, sweet?” he cried, and he caught her hand in rapture.

  “Rather give up this — this dangerous life,” she sobbed, overcome by the horror of the things his words had conjured up. “Let others tread such dangerous ways and run such risks. Give up the Jacobite cause, Mr. Hawkesworth, if you love me as you say you do, and I — —”

  “Yes? Yes?” he cried; and across his handsome face, momentarily turned from her as if he would resist her pleading, there crept a look half of derision, half of triumph. “What of you, sweet?”

  But her reply was never spoken, for as he uttered the word the fireworks died down with startling abruptness, plunging the alley in which they stood into gloom. The change recalled the girl to a full and sudden sense of her position; to its risks and to its consequences, should her absence, even for a moment, be discovered. Wringing her hands in distress, in place of the words that had been on her lips, “Oh, I must go!” she cried. “I must get back at once!” And she looked for help to her lover.