Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman
Page 338
He did not answer her, and she turned from him, fearing he might try to detain her. But she had not taken three steps before she paused in agitation, uncertain in the darkness which way she had come. A giggling, squealing girl ran by her into the grove, followed by a man; at the same moment a distant fanfare of French horns, with the confused noise of a multitude of feet trampling the earth at once, announced that the entertainment was over, and that the assembly was beginning to leave the gardens.
Sophia’s heart stood still. What if she were missed? Worse still, what if she were left behind? “Oh,” she cried, turning again to him, her hands outstretched, “which is the way? Mr. Hawkesworth, please, please show me the way! Please take me to them!”
But the Irishman did not move.
CHAPTER III
THE CLOCK-MAKER
It even seemed to Sophia that his face, as he stood watching her, took on a smirk of satisfaction, faint, but odious; and in that moment, and for the moment, she came near to hating him. She knew that in the set in which she moved much might be overlooked, and daily and hourly was overlooked, in the right people. But to be lost at Vauxhall at midnight, in the company of an unauthorised lover — this had a horribly clandestine sound; this should be sufficient to blacken the fame of a poor maid — or her country education was at fault. And knowing this, and hearing the confused sounds of departure rise each moment louder and more importunate, the girl grew frantic with impatience.
“Which way? Which way?” she cried. “Do you hear me? Which way are the boxes, Mr. Hawkesworth? You know which way I came. Am I to think you a dolt, sir, or — or what?”
“Or what?” he repeated, grinning feebly. To be candid, the occasion had not been foreseen, and the Irishman, though of readiest wit, could not on the instant make up his mind how he would act.
“Or a villain?” she cried, with a furious glance. And in the effort to control herself, the ivory fan-sticks snapped in her small fingers as if they had been of glass. “Take me back this instant, sir,” she continued, her head high, “or never presume to speak to me again!”
What he would have said to this is uncertain, for the good reason that before he answered, two men appeared at the end of the alley. Catching the sheen of Sophia’s hoop skirt, where it glimmered light against the dark of the trees, they espied the pair, took them for a pair of lovers, and with a whoop of drunken laughter came towards them. One was Lord P —— , no soberer than before; the other a brother buck flushed with wine to the same pitch of insolence, and ready for any folly or mischief. Crying “So ho! A petticoat! A petticoat!” the two Mohocks joined hands, and with a tipsy view-halloa! swept down the green walk, expecting to carry all before them.
But it was in such an emergency as this that the Irishman was at his best. Throwing himself between the shrinking, frightened girl and the onset of the drunken rakes, he raised his cane with an air so determined that the assailants thought better of their plan, and, pausing with a volley of drunken threats, parted hands and changed their scheme of attack. While one prepared to rush in and overturn the man, the other made a feint aside, and, thrusting himself through the shrubs, sprang on the girl. Sophia screamed, and tried to free herself; but scream and effort were alike premature. With a rapid twirl Hawkesworth avoided my lord’s rush, caught him by the waist as he blundered by, and, swinging him off his legs, flung him crashing among the undergrowth. Then, whipping out his sword, he pricked the other who had seized Sophia, in the fleshy part of the shoulder, and forced him to release her; after which, plying his point before the bully’s eyes, he drove him slowly back and back. Now the man shrieked and flinched as the glittering steel menaced his face; now he poured forth a volley of threats and curses, as it was for a moment withdrawn. But Hawkesworth was unmoved by either, and at length the fellow, seeing that he was not to be intimidated either by his lordship’s name or his own menaces, thought better of it — as these gentlemen commonly did when they were resisted; and springing back with a parting oath, he took to his heels, and saved himself down a bypath.
The Irishman, a little breathed by his victory, wasted no time in vaunting it. The girl had witnessed it with worshipping eyes; he could trust her to make the most of it. “Quick,” he cried, “or we shall be in trouble!” And sheathing his sword, he caught the trembling Sophia by the hand, and ran with her down the path. They turned a corner; a little way before her she saw lights, and the open space near the booths which she had seen her brother cross. But now Hawkesworth halted; his purpose was still fluid and uncertain. But the next moment a shrill childish voice cried “Here she is; I’ve found her!” and Lady Betty Cochrane flew towards them. A little behind her, approaching at a more leisurely pace, was Sir Hervey Coke.
Lady Betty stared at Hawkesworth with all her eyes, and giggled. “Oh, lord, a man!” she cried, and veiled her face, pretending to be overcome.
“I saw my brother,” Sophia faltered, covered with confusion, “and ran down — ran down to — to meet him.”
“Just so! But see here, brother!” Lady Betty answered with a wink. “Go’s the word, now, if you are not a fool.”
Hawkesworth hesitated an instant, looking from Sophia to Sir Hervey Coke; but he saw that nothing more could be done on the occasion, and muttering “Another time,” he turned away, and in a moment was lost in the grove.
“She was with her brother,” Lady Betty cried, turning, and breathlessly explaining the matter to Coke, who had seen all. “Think of that! She saw him, and followed him. That’s all. Lord, I wonder,” she continued, with a loud giggle, “if they would make such a fuss if I were missing. I declare to goodness I’ll try.” And, leaving Sophia to follow with Sir Hervey, she danced on in front until they met Mrs. Northey, who, with her husband and several of her party, was following in search of the culprit. Seeing she was found, the gentlemen winked at one another behind backs, while the ladies drew down the corners of their mouths. One of the latter laughed, maliciously expecting the scene that would follow.
But Lady Betty had the first word, and kept it. “Lord, ma’am, what ninnies we are!” she cried. “She was with her brother. That’s all!”
“Hee, hee!” the lady tittered who had laughed before. “That’s good! Her brother!”
“Yes, she was!” Betty cried, turning on her, a very spitfire. “I suppose seeing’s believing, ma’am, though one is only fifteen, and not forty. She saw her brother going by the — the corner there, and ran after him while we were watching — watching the —— But oh, I beg your pardon, ma’am, you were otherwise engaged, I think!” with a derisive curtsey.
Unfortunately the lady who had laughed had a weakness for one of the gentlemen in company; which was so notorious that on this even her friends sniggered. With Mrs. Northey, however, Lady Betty’s advocacy was less effective. That pattern sister, from the moment she discovered Sophia’s absence, and divined the cause of it, had been fit to burst with spleen. Fortunately, the coarse rating which she had prepared, and from which neither policy nor mercy could have persuaded her to refrain, died on her shrewish lips at the word “brother.”
“Her brother?” she repeated mechanically, as she glowered at Lady Betty. “Her brother here? What do you mean?”
“To be sure, ma’am, what I say. She saw him.”
“But how did she know — that he was in London?” Mrs. Northey stammered, forgetting herself for the moment.
“She didn’t know! That’s the strange part of it!” Lady Betty replied volubly. “She saw him, ma’am, and ran after him.”
“Well, anyway, you have given us enough trouble!” Mrs. Northey retorted, addressing her sister; who stood before them trembling with excitement, and overcome by the varied emotions of the scene through which she had passed in the alley. “Thank you for nothing, and Master Tom, too! Perhaps if you have quite done you’ll come home. Sir Hervey, I’ll trust her to you, if you’ll be troubled with her. Now, if your ladyship will lead the way? I declare it’s wondrous dark of a sudden.”
It was his misfortune — and hers — that he chose his seasons ill. At that moment her heart was filled to overflowing with her lover, and her danger; his prowess, and his brave defence of her. Her eyes were hot with joyful, happy tears hardly pent back. Her limbs trembled with a delicious agitation; all within her was a tumult of warm feelings, of throbbing sensibilities.
For Sir Hervey to oppose himself to her in that mood was to court defeat; it was to associate himself with the worldliness that to her in her rapture was the most hateful thing on earth; and he had his reward. “Throw away my life,” she cried, curtly and contemptuously, “’tis just that, sir, I am determined not to do!”
“You are going the way to do it,” he retorted.
“I should be going the way — were I to entertain the suit of a spy!” she cried, her voice trembling as she hurled the insult at him. “Were I to become the wife of a man who, even before he has a claim on me, dogs my footsteps, watches my actions, defames my friends! Believe me, sir, I thank you for nothing so much as for opening my eyes to your merits.”
“Oh, Lord!” he exclaimed in despair almost comic.
“Thank you,” she said. “I see your conduct is of a piece, sir. From the first you treated me as a child; a chattel to be conveyed to you by my friends, with the least trouble to yourself. You scarcely stooped to speak to me until you found another in the field, and then ’twas only to backbite a gentleman whom you dared not accuse to his face?”
As she grew hotter he grew cool. “Well, well,” he said, tapping his snuff-box, “be easy; I sha’n’t carry you off against your will.”
“No, you will not!” she cried. “You will not! Don’t think, if you please, that I am afraid of you. I am afraid of no one!”
And in the fervour of her love she felt that she spoke the truth. At that moment she was afraid of no one.
“’Tis a happy state; I hope it may continue,” Coke answered placidly. “You never had cause to fear me. After this you shall have no cause to reproach me. I ask only one thing in return.”
“You will have nothing,” she said rudely.
“You will grant me this, whether you will or no!”
“Never!”
“Yes,” he said, “for it is but this, and you cannot help yourself. When you have been married to that man a month think of this moment and of me, and remember that I warned you.”
He spoke soberly, but he might have spoken to the winds for all the good he did. She was in air, picturing her lover’s strength and prowess, his devotion, his gallantry. Once again she saw the drunken lord lifted and flung among the shrubs, and Hawkesworth’s figure as he stood like Hector above his fallen foe. Again she saw the other bully flinching before his steel, cursing, reviling and hiccoughing by turns, and Hawkesworth silent, inexorable, pressing on him. She forgot the preceding moment of dismay when she had turned to her lover for help, and read something less than respect in his eyes; that short moment during which he had hung in the wind uncertain what course he would take with her. She forgot this, for she was only eighteen, and the scene in which he had championed her had cast its glamour over her, distorting all that had gone before. He had defended her; he was her hero, she was his chosen. What girl of sensibility could doubt it?
Coke, who left them at the door of the house in Arlington Street, finished the evening at White’s, where, playing deep for him, he won three hundred at hazard without speaking three unnecessary words. Returning home with the milk in the morning, he rubbed his eyes, surprised to find himself following Hawkesworth along Piccadilly. The Irishman had a companion, a young lad who reeled and hiccoughed in the cool morning air; who sung snatches of tipsy songs, and at the corner of Berkeley Street would have fought with a night chairman if the elder man had not dragged him on by force. The two turned up Dover Street and Sir Hervey, after following them with his eyes, lost sight of them, and went on, wondering why a drunken boy’s voice, heard at haphazard in the street, reminded him of Sophia.
He would have wondered less and known more had he followed them farther. At the bottom of Hay Hill the lad freed himself from his companion’s arm, propped his shoulders against the wall of Berkeley Gardens, and with drunken solemnity proceeded to argue a point. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I speak to S’phia, if I please. Eh? S’phia’s devilish good girl, why do you go and drag her off? That’s what I want to know.”
“My dear lad,” Hawkesworth answered with patience, “if she saw you she’d blow the whole thing.”
“Not she!” the lad hiccoughed obstinately. “She’s a good little girl. She’s my twin, I tell you.”
“But the others were with her.”
“What others?”
“Northey.”
“I shall kick Northey, when I am married,” the lad proclaimed with drunken solemnity. “That’s all.”
“Well, you’ll be married to-morrow.”
“Why not to-day? That’s what I want to know. Eh? Why not to-day?”
“Because the fair Oriana is at Ipswich, and you are here,” the Irishman answered with a trace of impatience in his tone. Then under his breath he added, “D — n the jade! This is one of her tricks. She’s never where she is wanted.”
In the meantime the lad had been set in motion again, and the two had reached the end of Davies Street at the north-west corner of the square. Here, perceiving the other mutter, Tom — for Sophia’s brother, Tom, it was — stopped anew. “Eh? What’s that?” he said. “What’s that you are saying, old tulip?”
“I was saying you were a monstrous clever fellow to win her — to-day or to-morrow,” Hawkesworth answered coolly. “And I am hanged if I know how you did it. I can tell you a hundred gay fellows in the town are dying to marry her. And no flinchers, either.”
“‘Pon honour?”
“Ay, and a hundred more would give their ears for a kiss. But lord, out of all she must needs choose you! I vow, lad,” Hawkesworth continued with enthusiasm, “it is the most extraordinary thing that ever was. The finest shape this side of Paris, eyes that would melt a stone, ankles like a gossamer, a toast wherever she goes, and the prettiest wit in the world; sink me, lad, she might have had the richest buck in town, and she chooses you.”
“Might she really? Honest now, might she?”
“That she might!”
Tom was so moved by this picture of his mistress’s devotion and his own bliss that he found it necessary to weep a little, supporting himself by the huge link-extinguisher at the corner of Davies Street. His wig awry, and his hat clapped on the back of it, he looked as abandoned a young rake as the five o’clock sun ever shone upon; and yet under his maudlin tears lay a real if passing passion. “She’s an angel!” he sobbed presently. “I shall never forget it! Never! And to think that but for you, if your chaise had not broken down at my elbow, just when you had picked her up after the accident at Trumpington, I should never have known her! And — and I might have been smugging at Cambridge now, instead of waiting to be made the happiest of men. Oriana,” he continued, clinging to the railings in a tipsy rhapsody, “most beautiful of your sex, I vow — —”
A couple of chairmen and a milk-girl were looking on grinning. “There, bed’s the word now!” Hawkesworth cried, seizing him and dragging him on. “Bed’s the word! I said we would make a night of it, and we have. What’s more, my lad,” he continued in a tone too low for Tom’s ear, “if you’re not so cut to-morrow, you’re glad to keep
the house — I’m a Dutchman!”
This time his efforts were successful. His lodging, taken a week before in the name of Plomer, was only a few doors distant. In two minutes he had got Tom thither; in three, the lad, divested of his coat, boots and neckcloth, was snoring heavily on the bed; while the Irishman, from an armchair on the hearth, kept dark watch over him. At length he too fell asleep, and slumbered as soundly as an innocent child, until a muffled hammering in the parlour roused him, and he stood up yawning and looked about him. The room, stiflingly close, lay in semi-darkness; on the bed sprawled the young runagate, dead asleep, his arms tossed wide. Hawkesworth stared awhile, still half asleep; at last, thirsting for small beer, he opened the door and went into the parlour. Here the windows were open: it was high noon. The noise the Irishman had heard was made by a man whose head and, shoulders were plunged in a tall clock that stood in one corner. The man was kneeling at his task mending something in the works of the clock. The Irishman touched him roughly with his foot.
“Sink that coffin-making!” he cried coarsely. “Do you hear? Get up!”
The clock-maker withdrew his head, looked up meekly to see who disturbed him, and — and swore. Simultaneously Hawkesworth drew back with a cry, and the two glared at one another. Then the man on the floor — he wore a paper cap, and below it his fat elderly face shone with sweat — rose quickly to his feet. “You villain!” he cried, in a voice tremulous and scarcely articulate, so great was his passion. “I have found you at last, have I? Where’s my daughter?” and he stretched out his open hands, crook-fingered, and shook them in the younger man’s face. “Where is my daughter?”
“Lord, man, how do I know?” Hawkesworth answered. He tried to speak lightly, but with all his impudence he was taken aback, and showed it.
“How do you know?” the clock-maker retorted, again shaking his hands in his face. “If you don’t know, who should? Who should? By heaven, if you don’t tell me, and truly, I’ll rouse the house on you. Do you hear! I’ll make you known here, you scoundrel, for what you are. This is a respectable house, and they’ll have none of you. I’ll so cry you, you shall trick no man of his daughter again. No, for I’ll set the crowd on you, and mark you.”