Contraband Part 26

But here a difficulty presented itself: Johnnie had a slight cold; the evening was clouding over, and threatened rain. It was only after long and earnest pleading that Mrs. Mole gave her consent for "one little turn" as far as the river and back, while she busied herself about some household matters that were more easily set to rights in the absence of her charge.

With a beating heart, Miss Ross led him down the pathway towards the river, the boy kicking out his feet and taking huge steps with his short legs in a state of high triumph and glee.

Presently, at the water's edge, he looked wistfully up in his companion's face and asked:

"Ain't we going back? Never going back--never--no more?"

"Would you _like_ never to go back, darling?" said Jin, stooping to fold him in her arms.

"I want to go back to Moley!" answered Johnnie, now panic-stricken, and making up his face for a cry.

Heavy drops of rain began to fall, and at the same moment a boat, shooting suddenly round a bend in the river, grated its keel on the shallows under the bank.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"STRANGERS YET."

The rower of this boat, whose back was necessarily turned to the sh.o.r.e, wore a pea-jacket, with its collar turned up to the brim of a black hat, such as is not usually affected by watermen, either professional or amateur. Through Jin's beating heart shot a sickening throb of misgiving and alarm. She turned cold and faint, catching up her boy and hugging him instinctively to her breast.

As the rower, obviously unused to an oarsman's exercise, rose, straightened himself, and turned round, he started with a violence that shot the boat back into deep water, her chain running out with a clang over her bows. Stupefied as it seemed by this apparition of the man whom she had watched from Mrs. Mole's door three hours ago, Jin's eyes dilated, her jaw dropped, while she gazed in Picard's face as if she had been turned to stone.

He was the first to recover himself, and burst into a laugh, not entirely forced.

"Who would ever have thought it?" said he, shoving the boat close in sh.o.r.e. "Of all reunions this is the most extraordinary, the most unlooked for. Jump in, Madame, there is no time to lose: in ten minutes it will rain like a water-spout. Great heavens, you are unaltered after all these years, and you have not a grey hair in your head!"

She obeyed mechanically in silence, folding Gustave beneath her shawl, who protested with energy against the embarkation, expressing a strong desire to return to "Old Moley" forthwith.

Once more in mid-stream, Picard laid on his oars as if doubtful whether to proceed. "What are you doing with that boy?" he asked.

She had recovered her presence of mind, though still confused and bewildered, as after some stunning blow.

"You _know_ me, Achille," said she, bending on him the defiant, impracticable gaze he remembered so well. "Whatever happens, wherever we are bound, the child goes with me! Where are you taking us? What is the meaning of it all?"

Picard's face was not improved by the diabolical expression that swept over it. "The meaning is this," he answered in a hoa.r.s.e whisper: "I am helping Captain Vanguard to run away with my own--bah!" he broke off abruptly, "there will be time enough for explanations between here and Windsor bridge: the question is now about the child. He must not go a yard farther--he'll be wet to the skin as it is. There are few things I wouldn't part with to--to--undo the wrongs between you and me; but I cannot, and will not, give up the boy!"

She would have been fiercer in all probability, but that Picard, accepting the heavy down-pour, which now commenced, in his thin summer waistcoat and s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, had stripped off his pea-coat, and was wrapping the boy carefully in its folds, without however removing him from his mother's embrace. The little fellow smiled, and tugged playfully at this rugged nurse's whiskers, obviously welcoming the face of a friend, but repeated his request to return to "Old Moley" as speedily as possible.

"I mean to have no discussions," said Jin, in tight, concentrated accents that denoted suppressed rage and inflexible resolution. "I never wished to see your face again, and I shall insist presently on knowing why you are here now; but in the mean time I desire to know what right you have to the child."

"I like that!" exclaimed Picard with a bitter laugh. "Rather, what right have you? I saved his life!"

"I gave him birth!" answered Jin collectedly. "This is the infant you deserted so gallantly and so generously when you left his mother.

Enough! He has no claim on you, my precious; you belong solely and exclusively to me!"

Picard heeded not. Bending over that little bundle, folded so carefully in his pea-jacket, on its mother's knee, he kissed the soft brow tenderly, gently, almost reverently, while a tear hanging in the man's s.h.a.ggy whiskers, dropped on the pure delicate cheek of the child.

"No wonder I loved you," he muttered. "I wish I had been a better man, for your sake."

Miss Ross was touched. "_Allons!_" said she; "you and I may come to an understanding, after all. Speak the truth and so will I. How did you find the boy, and where?"

Ashamed of his feelings, as such men usually are ashamed of any one redeeming point in a character saturated with evil, he had recovered his emotion, and was pulling leisurely down stream with the utmost composure.

"How and where?" he repeated. "Well, the story is simple enough, and there would be nothing extraordinary in it, but for what I have this moment learned, I give you my honour, for the first time. I happened to be at Lyons in one of the worst floods they had there for twenty years.

The river rose incredibly during the night, and I was out at daybreak to--to see the fun, you know, and render any a.s.sistance I could afford.

In the top room of a cottage, completely undermined and tottering, I saw a woman making signals of distress. Between us lay what looked like a ca.n.a.l: it may have been a street once for all I know, but a few defaced walls, five or six feet above the water-level, were alone left.

Excepting the half-fallen cottage from which this woman waved her arms, not a tenement was standing for some score of yards on each side. I was already immersed to my waist, but I had to swim for it before I could reach the poor creature, who seemed out of her wits with terror.

Treading water a few feet below, I implored her to plunge in at once, and trust to me. I thought she was coming, when '_Tiens!_' she screamed out--I can hear her now--and threw, as I imagined, a linen bundle at my head. It fell beyond me, and sank immediately. I dived for it, and quickly too; but while I was under water the walls fell with a crash, and the whirl carried me several paces from where I had gone down, not, however, before I had succeeded in grasping the bundle, which I brought with me to the surface. As the rush subsided I found the stream enc.u.mbered with dust, beams, household furniture, but of the woman I could see nothing. Doubtless at the instant, perhaps from the very effort she made to consign me her burthen, its foundations gave way, and she fell among the ruins of her house, to be drowned without a chance of escape.

"The bundle contained a boy--living, unhurt, and very wet. I have taken care of him ever since. There he is. Do you think anything would tempt me to part from him now?"

The tears rose to Jin's eyes. "G.o.d bless you!" said she. "You saved my child!"

"I saved _our_ child," he answered; "and I am not going to give him up."

"Why are you here to-day?" she asked. "And where do you mean to put me ash.o.r.e?"

She was meditating, even then, how she might escape him; if to reach Frank Vanguard, well and good; but, at any rate, to attain some refuge where she could be alone with her child.

He laughed, to cover a strong sense of embarra.s.sment, even of shame.

"This is a strange _rencontre_," he said. "It must be Fate. You and I have never once met among all the amus.e.m.e.nts of a London season; and we meet now in the rain, on the lonely river, at a time when we ought most to forget and ignore each other's existence. Of all people in the world, I must be the last you would have wished to come across to-night."

"En effet," she muttered, "c'est un rencontre a.s.sez mal-a-propos."

Her coolness seemed contagious. He proceeded with a _sang-froid_ too complete to be perfectly natural:

"I came here to oblige my dearest friend, a man for whom I would make almost any sacrifice. That foreign prince at Windsor has taken a sudden fancy to inspect a regiment of Household Cavalry in their barracks. He is there at this moment, attended by every officer available for duty.

My friend Captain Vanguard came to me in the greatest agitation. He had a rendezvous, he said, for this evening with a lady. It could not be put off. It was of the gravest importance. If he failed to appear, she was lost. He reposed entire confidence in my honour. He asked my advice.

What was to be done? I considered. I remembered my obligations to him. I put myself in his place. In short, here I am, _in_ his place, pledged to conduct you safely to the Castle Hotel, there to wait till he is at leisure to join you, after which I am free to take whatever course I think due to my own character in this most awkward complication. I need not say that it never entered my head the Miss Ross I had heard of in society, or the lady whose _enlevement_ I was to conduct for my friend, could be--well--could be _you_! Madame, we have met in a manner that is creditable to neither of us--that is utterly ruinous to one. Can we not ignore this clumsy _contretemps_? Can we not agree to conceal it, and never meet again?"

Jin felt much rea.s.sured by this climax, though ready to sink with shame and vexation at the whole business.

"You know I am going to--to _marry_ Captain Vanguard," she said, looking him straight in the face, though she hesitated a little in her sentence. "Will you promise to throw no impediment in my way--to keep your own counsel? In short, to let bygones be bygones, if, on my part, I consent to leave the past unscrutinised and unavenged?"

"It's a fair offer," he replied; "but I cannot give you up the boy."

"Then war to the knife!" she burst out recklessly. "I will lose husband, lover, home, character, everything--life itself--rather than part with Gustave for a day!"

Perhaps he knew what a desperate woman was. Perhaps--for, in his own way, he too loved little Gustave very dearly--he reflected that a child might safely be committed to a mother's tenderness, even were that mother the wildest and most wilful of her s.e.x. In a couple of minutes his busy brain formed a thousand schemes, took in a thousand contingencies. Frank Vanguard was about to marry the woman who had once held a wife's place at his hearth. Well, to that he had no objection. He would at least be freed from an awkward claim, which might interfere with certain vague schemes of his own that had only recently begun to take a shape. In those schemes Frank's a.s.sistance, as a friend of Sir Henry Hallaton's, might be valuable. An intimacy with Vanguard, and the latter's good word, would vouch at least for his position and standing in society. Helen could no longer consider him a mere unknown adventurer. Some influence he might obtain over Frank through his wife, if, indeed, this wild, untoward marriage were to come off. His chief difficulty lay in that wife's inflexible and impracticable character; but surely he could bend her to his will through her affection for the boy.

"You cannot take him with you now," observed Picard, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone. "Think of the travelling, and the weather, and the ridicule attached to the whole proceeding. You are not going to join your future husband, surely, with a ready-made child?"

"I _am_!" she exclaimed, in high indignation. "Frank knows all about it, and takes us as we are!"