Shrewsbury Part 35

Mr. Martin nodded confidentially. "That is how she came to be with my lady," he said. "And Mr. Smith, too! My lord met her somewhere when he was young and gay and took up with her, and to please her got the place for Mr. Smith, who had been her flame before. However, my lord soon tired of her, for though she was a beauty she had common ways and was bold as bra.s.s; so when he parted from her she went back to her old love, who had first made her the mode, and married him. I have heard that my lord was in a pretty taking when he found her planted at the Countess's. But I have nothing to say against her."

"Does my lord--see her now?" I said with an effort.

"When he does he looks pretty black at her. And I fancy that there is no love lost on her side."

"What did you say that--they called her?" I asked.

"Madame--Madame Monterey."

I remembered where I had heard the name before and who had borne it; and saw so much light that I was dazzled. "And my lord's mother--who married Mr. Bridges. She is a Papist?"

"Hus.h.!.+" he said. "The less said about such things the better, Mr.

Price."

But I persisted. "It was she who ran off with my Lord Buckingham in King Charles's time," I cried, "and held his horse while he killed her husband? And who had Mr. Killigrew stabbed in the street; and----"

In a panic he clapped his hand on my mouth. "G.o.d, man!" he cried, "do you know where you are, or is your head turned? Do you think that this house is a fit place to give tongue to such things? Lord, you will be but a short time here, and to the pillory when you go, if you throw your tongue that way! I have not blabbed as much in twenty years, and would not for a kingdom! Who are you to talk of such as my lady?"

He was so righteously indignant at the presumption of which I had been guilty in attacking the family that, though it was his own indiscretion that had led me to the point, I made haste to mutter an apology, and doing this with the better grace for the remembrance that Smith was now powerless and his wicked plans abortive, I contrived presently to appease him. But the ferment which the discovery I had made wrought in my spirits moved me to escape as quickly as possible to my room, there to consider at leisure the miserable position in which, but for Smith's timely capture, I must have found myself.

A suspicion of the truth I had entertained before; but this certainty that the man I was to be trepanned into personating was my benefactor, and that in the plot his own mother was engaged, filled me with as much horror, when I considered the necessity of complying under which I might have lain, as thankfulness when I reflected on the escape I had had. Nor did these two considerations, overwhelming as they may well appear, account for all the agitation I was experiencing. Mr.

Martin, in speaking of Madame Monterey's origin, had mentioned Hertfords.h.i.+re; and the name, bringing together two sets of facts. .h.i.therto so distant in my mind that I had never undertaken to connect them, had in a flash presented Smith and madame in their true colours.

Why I had not before a.s.sociated the Smith I now knew with that Templar Smith whom I darkly remembered as Jennie's accomplice in my early trouble; why I had not recognised in the woman's coa.r.s.ely handsome features the charms that thirteen years before had fired my boy's blood and brought me to the foot of the gallows, is not more difficult to explain than why this one mention of Hertfords.h.i.+re sufficed to raise the curtain; ay, and not only to raise it, but to set the whole drama so plainly before me that I could be no wiser had I followed every scene in madame's life, and, a witness of her shameful _debut_ under Smith's protection, her seduction of my lord and her period of splendour, had attended her in her final declension when, a discarded mistress, she saw no better alternative than a marriage with her former protector.

How greatly this identification of the two conspirators increased, as well as the loathing in which I held their schemes, as my relief upon the reflection that those schemes were now futile, I will not say.

Suffice it that the knowledge that, but for Smith's arrest, I must have chosen between playing the basest part in the world and running a risk whereat I shuddered, filled me with thankfulness immeasurable, a thankfulness which I did not fail to pour out on my knees, and which was in no degree lessened by a shuddering consciousness that in that dilemma, had Providence not averted it, I might have--ay, should have--played the baser part!

No wonder that a hundred harrowing recollections crowded on my mind, or that under the pressure of these the tumult of my spirits became so powerful that I presently seized my hat, and hastily escaping from the house, sought in rapid movement some relief from the unpleasant retrospect. Crossing the Green Park, I chose a field path that led by the Pimlico marshes to Fulham; and gradually the songs of the larks and the spring suns.h.i.+ne--for the day was calm and serene--leading my mind into a more cheerful groove, I began to dwell rather on the fact of my escape than on the crime from which I had escaped, and contemplating the secure career that now lay in view before me, I was not long in seeing that thankfulness should be my strongest feeling.

Turning my back on Smith and his like, I began to build my house again; saw a smiling wife and babes, and days spent between my home and my lord's papers; and then a green old age and slippered feet tottering through the quiet shades of a library. Before I turned I had roofed the house with an honourable headstone, and felt the tears rise in generous sympathy with the village a.s.sembled to do the old man honour.

In a word, tasting the full relief of emanc.i.p.ation, I became so gay and lightsome that even the smoke and din of London, when I re-entered it, failed to subdue the unusual humour. I could have sung, I could have laughed aloud. Let the dead past bury its dead! For Ferguson, Smith, the Monterey--a fig! Who had come off best after all? And of their fine plottings and contrivings what had been the upshot? They had failed and I had triumphed; they were prisoners, I was free and safe.

Near the garden-wall of Buckingham House there was a bear dancing, and a press of people round it. I stayed to watch, and in my mood, found the fun so much to my taste that I threw the man a penny and went on laughing. A little further, by the edge of the lake, was a man with a barrow and dice--then a novelty, though now so prevalent that at the last sessions, I am told, the thing was presented for a nuisance. I stood here and saw a man lose, and in the exaltation of my spirits, pushed him aside and laid down a s.h.i.+lling, and won, and won again--and again; whether the cog failed or the truckster who owned the barrow thought me a good bait. Either way I took up my winnings with an air and hectored away as good a bully as another; placed for the moment so far above myself and common modesty, that I wondered whether I should ever sink back into the timid citizen, or feel my eyes drop before a bravo's.

Alas, in a moment, _quantum mutatus ab illo!_ At the corner of the c.o.c.kpit, towards Sion House, I met Matthew Smith.

I had no doubt. I knew all in an instant, and turned sick. He was free, alone, walking with his head high and an easy gait. Worse, he saw me; saw how I cowered and shrank into myself, and became another man at sight of him!

Slackening his pace as he came up, he halted before me, with that quiet devil's grin on his face. "Well," he said, "how are you, Mr.

Price? I was looking for you."

"For me?" I muttered. "I thought--I heard--that you were arrested."

"A mistake!" he answered, continuing to smile. "A mistake! Some other Smith."

"And you were not arrested?" I whispered.

"Oh, I was arrested!" he answered jauntily. "And taken to the Secretary. And of course released. There! you have it all."

I uttered an exclamation; two words wrung from me by despair.

Thereat, and pretending to misunderstand me. "You thank G.o.d? Very kind of you, Mr. Price," said he grinning. "Like master, like man, I see.

The Duke was kindness itself. But I must be going." And then, arresting himself in the act of leaving me, "You have heard," he continued, "that the poor devil Charnock stands his trial to-morrow?

Porter is an evidence, and by Monday the parson will swing. It should be a warning to us," he continued, shaking his head with a smile that chilled the marrow in my bones, "what company we keep. A rascal like Porter might see you or me in the street--and swear to us. Ha! Ha! It sounds monstrous odd, but so it might be. But by-by, Mr. Price. I must not keep you."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

The state in which I crawled back to the house after this encounter maybe conceived but not described. From an exaltation of mind to which the epithet delirious might be applied with propriety, I fell in an instant to a depth of abjectness as monstrous as my late felicity, but more real and reasonable. All the things, on my escape from which I had been congratulating myself, now lay before me, and formed a vista as gloomy as the point to which it tended was dreadful. To be a slave to the woman and man who had ruined my youth; to live outwardly at ease, while inwardly devoured by daily and hourly terror; to hang between the choice of danger or baseness, comfort or treachery; to discern in my own destruction or my patron's the inevitable ending; beyond all, to foresee that I should choose the evil and eschew the good, and to wish it otherwise and be powerless to change it--these things, and particularly the last, filled me with antic.i.p.ations of misery so great that I rolled on my bed, and cursed Providence and my fate; and next day went down so pale, and ill, and woe-begone that the servants took note of it.

"Pheugh, Mr. Price," said Martin, "you might be Charnock himself, or Keyes, poor devil! You could not look more like hanging! What is it?"

I muttered that I was not well.

"It is Keyes I am sorry for," continued the steward, who was taking his morning draught, "if so be they go to the end with him. I have heard of a master given up by his servant, but never before of a servant hung on his master's evidence--and his master the one that drew him into it! Hang Captain Porter, say I! A fine Captain!"

"Oh, they will let the poor devil live," said another.

"Keyes?"

"Ay."

"Not they!" said Mr. Martin with great appearance of wisdom. "He was in the Blues, do you see, my man, and if it spread there? No, he will swing. He will swing for the example. Don't you think so, Mr. Price?

You are in there with my lord, and should know."

But I muttered something and escaped, finding solitude and my own reflections as tolerable as their gossip. A little later, my lord, sending for me, kept me close at work until evening; which was so far fortunate, as the employment, by diverting my thoughts, helped to lift me out of the panic into which I had fallen. True, the news that the three conspirators were found guilty and were to die the following Monday, exactly as Smith had foretold, threw me again into the cold fit, and heralded another night of misery. But as it is not possible for mortals to lie long under the same peril without the sense of danger losing its edge, in three days I began to find life bearable.

The stateliness of the household, the silence and books that surrounded me, the regular hours and steady employment soothed my nerves; and Smith making no sign, and nothing occurring to indicate that he meant to keep his word or summon me to fulfil mine, I lulled myself into the belief that all was a dream.

Yet I was very far from being happy: to be that, with such apprehensions as never quite left me, was beyond my philosophy. And I had rude awakenings. One day it was the execution of Charnock, King, and Keyes at Tyburn, followed by the hawking of their last dying speeches and confessions in the streets, that jogged me out of my fancied security, and sent me sick and white-faced from the windows.

Another it was the sentence on Sir John Friend and Sir William Perkins, the two elderly citizens whom I had twice seen among the plotters, and never without wondering how they came to be of the gang.

A little later, three more suffered, and again the Square rang with the shrill cries of the chapmen who peddled their last speeches from door to door. Against all these Captain Porter and a man commonly called "Sc.u.m Goodman," both _participes criminis_, and persons of the most infamous character, bore witness; their evidence being corroborated by that of a man of higher standing, Mr. Prendergast.

Whether they could not prove against Ca.s.sel and Ferguson, or reasons of State intervened, these, with several of their fellows, lay in prison untried; a course which, in other circ.u.mstances, might have involved the Government in obloquy. But so keen at this time was the general feeling against the plotters, and so high the King's popularity that he might have shed more blood had he chosen. Here, however, the executions stopped; and his Majesty showing mercy if not indulgence, the hue and cry, despite the popular indignation, gradually slackened until it was restricted to Sir John Fenwick, who was believed to be still in hiding in the country, and on whose punishment the King was reported to be firmly set.

How deeply these events and rumours, which formed the staple of conversation during the summer of '96, troubled my existence, I leave to the imagination; provising only that in proportion to the outward quiet of my life was the power to agitate which they exerted.

Moreover, there were times when a terror more substantial trespa.s.sed on my peace. One day going hastily into the hall I found the servants all peeping, Mr. Martin holding open the door, a dozen faces staring curiously in from the suns.h.i.+ne of the Square, and my lord standing, very stiff, on the threshold of his room, while in the middle of the floor stood a scowling man, flas.h.i.+ly dressed.

The Duke was speaking when I appeared. "At the office, sir," I heard him say. "You misunderstood me. I can see you there only."

"Your Grace is hard on me," the man muttered with a glance that would be rebellious, and was hang-dog. "I have done the King good service, and this is the way I am requited. It is enough----"

"It is more than enough. Captain Porter," my lord said, quietly taking him up. "At the office, if you please. This house is for my friends."

"And the King's friends? They may s.h.i.+ft for themselves?" the wretch--who even then wore finery bought with blood--cried bitterly.