Moll Davis: a comedy

by Bernard Capes

CHAPTER II

In a fine panelled room which gave, through two large windows, upon the privy gardens of Whitehall Palace, a lady and a gentleman were seated as far apart as the limits of the chamber would permit. She, in her place, worked at a sampler, or affected to work; and he, in his, read in a book, or affected to read.

The room was such as, with the best will in the world, we cannot, lacking its appropriate human furniture, preserve, or reproduce, in these days without vital loss to its character. We may possess the sombre panels, the rich-hued pictures with their gilded frames sufficiently illuminating the austerity, the Venetian glass girandoles, reflecting in the polished floor below, as in water, their starry opalescences; we may have, or acquire, the brass-studded, or the stamped leather, or the screw-railed chairs, the elaborately carved or the gate-legged tables, the priceless Persian rugs—which, by the by, are but an early fashion resumed—the gilt caskets and the silvered mirrors: we can not, unless to bring great ridicule upon ourselves, wear the long lovelocks down our cheeks, or the silk favours at our shoulders, or the jewelled cravats and beribboned hose and breeches, without which all the rest must figure but as an anachronism, a discordance, an Elgin marble ravished from its Parthenon, and lined up for show in a glass-roofed museum. That we do try to reconcile the irreconcilable in these matters, using Early English cradles as receptacles for our faggots, and hanging up our silk hats in antique ambries, is due to the fact that we have lost the art, or the instinct, for decorative appropriateness. In those remote but less “original” days the same mind that conceived the idol adorned its shrine.

But if fashions in dress change and change, there was never in all history but one fashion in human moods and tempers. Those, whether figured in love, hate, desire, or jealousy, have been worn since the Fall to the single unchangeable pattern which wrought and accompanied it. One could not, in fact, from the fashion of their minds, have distinguished these two seated apart from any ill-assorted married couple of to-day.

And yet they had been wedded Earl and Countess not so many months but that their differences might have less divorced them. That those amounted to what they did was entirely the fault of the husband, who had chosen deliberately to provoke an estrangement in perverse spite of a certain felt premonition that his villainy was about to recoil on his own head. He really was a villain, this Lord Chesterfield; if only in one essential a greater than most of the young fire-eating profligates of his time. That he had fought several duels, and killed his man in one at least of them, was nothing out of the common; that he had formed a number of loose attachments with petticoats of sorts was only to be expected of a gentleman of his rank and fortune; but that he had wedded with his young Countess on such terms of opportunism and self-interest as were a disgrace to himself and an outrage to her—there was the unpardonable sin. He had wantonly insulted her jealousy; to be rent and mangled by the yellow demon in his turn would serve him excellently right.

The long and the short of the situation is explained in a few words. A certain Mrs. Palmer, who had secured the King’s favour to that extent that letters patent to the Earldom of Castlemaine were already in process of being prepared for her husband, had not failed to qualify herself before her exaltation, it was said, for the sort of business which had procured it; and prominent among her admirers had been named his lordship of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope. This mature young gentleman—some twenty-eight years of age at the time of which we write—had in consequence found himself a person somewhat “suspect” and ill-considered in the royal regard, and being very willing, in his own interests, to propitiate his master by disavowing the least thought of rivalry with him in the matter of the lady’s favour, had, as the surest proof of his sincerity, paid forthwith his ardent devoirs to a daughter of the Duke of Ormonde, a young lady, conventually bred, of the sweetest looks and innocence. In brief, his suit had sped so well with this darling that their union had not been long in following the days of fervid courtship; when, having secured his object, the perfidious creature dropped his mask, and gave his young wife indirectly but very plainly to understand that his passion for her had been a pretence, that a former idol was by no means dethroned in his heart, and that he had no longer personal use for the affection which he had been at the pains to excite for no other purpose than to throw dust in the eyes of a certain distinguished individual. He had not, of course, said this in so many words; but he had let his manner, his neglect, his indifference imply what amounted to a confession of it in a fashion which was unmistakable, and which no woman, however unsophisticated, could misread, and not one in ten thousand fail to resent.

The young Countess resented it, naturally. She resented it, I am not going so far as to say, as one in her situation might resent it at this day; but she resented it conformably to the different standard of morals which prevailed in her own, and which did not leave even a delicately bred ingénue in complete illusionment as to the conduct of men in general and husbands in particular. She had lived for a year, moreover, within echo of the scandals at Whitehall—where her father, as Lord High Steward, held a prominent position—and enough may have filtered through to her ears therefrom to correct any extravagant notions she might once have formed as to the ideality of the married state. Still, and when all is said, the fine depths of her nature found themselves grievously outraged in this application of a common rule to her particular case; while, being a girl of spirit as well as sense, the desire to retaliate in form on such perfidy awoke in her bosom a passion dangerous to its young security. It was not enough, she felt, to retort on coldness with coldness; she must teach this scorner of her affections the estimate placed by others on a possession of which he did not appear to realize the value, and by opening his eyes through a sense of loss, make him suffer, helplessly and in excess, those very pangs of jealousy with which he had wantonly inflicted her.

A perilous policy; but one actuated, at least in its inception, by the most righteous of motives. The bee that stings deep, however, too often destroys itself in the loss of its own weapon; and so it may be with offended chastity. This young Countess, seeking about for an instrument with which to achieve her purpose, came near to her downfall in the choice which opportunity, not to speak of kinship, imposed on her. Mr. George Hamilton, her cousin-german, was its name.

Now see her as she sits affecting to work, with an occasional glance askance, half derisive, half wistful, at her husband’s pretended preoccupation, and admit that she is proposing to herself a very risky course in thus feigning to lease her charms to a tenant so unscrupulous as Master George. The young wit of her, the natural delicacy warring with passion, the emotions engendered of such a combat; and all housed in a form as pretty as that of a Dresden shepherdess, as pink and white, as endearing in its childish bloom—what could these all be but so many provocations to a man of Hamilton’s antecedents to play, by diverting to his own advantage the sensibilities so fondly entrusted to his sympathy, the part of Machiavellian seducer? He never hesitated, as a fact, but started at once to sort the hand which Fortune had so gratuitously thrust upon him. It was his good luck at the outset that his cousinship, aided and abetted by his close intimacy with the Earl, gave him the entrée at all times into those quarters at Whitehall which Chesterfield enjoyed in right of his position as Groom of the Stole to her Majesty; but, like the practised intrigant that he was, he used his privilege with discretion. He was really, to do him justice, very enamoured of the lady; and, according to his code, free of all moral responsibility in seeking to make a cuckold of a man who, though he was his personal friend and confidant, had chosen deliberately to invite such reprisals on the part of a faith he had grossly abused. At the same time, he did not under-estimate the delicacy of his task, or the strength of the instinctive prejudices he had to overcome; though sure enough such obstacles but added a zest to the pursuit. What as yet he did not guess was that his own eyes were not alone, nor even the most compelling, in having discovered and marked down for capture a tender prey which circumstances seemed to have made quite peculiarly attainable. In short, his Majesty’s brother, the Duke of York, was already suspected of a leaning in the same direction.

Poor little, abused Countess! But perhaps it would be better not to pity her prematurely.

She threw down her work, on a sudden uncontrollable impulse, and rising to her feet, looked across at the insensible bear opposite. Some emotion of love and forbearance was working, it seemed, in her; she hesitated an instant, gazing with full eyes, the knuckles of her little right hand held to her lips, then hurried across the room, and addressed her husband.

“Cannot we be friends, Philip, before it is—too late?”

He did not even stir, but just raised his lids indolently and offensively. He was, to do him justice, a personable man as to his upper half, with a fine head of mouse-coloured hair and a ready brain under it; but irresolution spoke in his legs, which were weedy, and so, inasmuch as the strength of a rope is its weakest part, affected the stability of the entire structure, physical and moral. He was, in fact, a waverer and unreliable, overbearing to others because uncertain of himself, much subject to moods and passions, and always, as is the case with those whose vanity is up in arms at the least suspicion of criticism, more disposed to force his way by rudeness than to win it by consideration. But he was skilled with his sword, and that, in a quarrelsome age, procured him a better title to respect than a hundred courtesies would have done.

“Too late for what?” he drawled languidly.

She made a little gesture of helplessness, then rallied to her task.

“Is this,” she said, “the natural fruit of the love you expressed for me, before—before I became your wife?”

“When you talk of Nature, madam,” he answered, stirring and yawning, then relapsing into his apathetic attitude, “you forget that with her a single season covers the whole contract of matrimony.”

“Then is our season ended?”

“You are Lady Chesterfield,” he said. “Is not that sufficient answer?”

“I want no wifehood without love, Philip. Has so little of me proved so much?”

He shrugged in a way which might have meant anything or nothing. She went on—

“Or did you woo me under false pretences from the first, making me, as I more than suspect, merely your unconscious stalking-horse to the King’s favour?”

He laughed, but a little uneasily.

“You get these fancies into your head,” he said.

“I do,” she answered; “but they come, I think, to stay. They are not like your fancies—for this woman or the other—that can be put off or on to suit your worldly convenience. The King has claimed one of your fancies, has he not, my lord—a wedded woman, too, Barbara Palmer by name? That was a shameful thing for both of you; but most shameful for the man who could deceive an innocent maid to curry favour with his sovereign. Did you not marry me to show him your heart was wholly divorced from that earlier idol?”

He drew in his breath, with an oath.

“By God, madam, this is too much!”

“It is too much, indeed,” she said. And then suddenly she held out entreating hands, her eyes brimming.

“Philip, I could forgive you that—even that—it was before you knew me—if only you would be to me again what you seemed. Will you, Philip? If any suspicion of my learning and resenting the truth has caused this coldness in you, keeping you aloof in your pride, O, forget it! I am not exacting; I know what men must be. Say only that you hold me in your true heart above that—that woman, and I will pardon you everything. Philip, before it is too late!”

He started furiously to his feet, flinging the book in his hand away from him.

“Pardon! Too late! That threat again! Zounds, madam, you presume. I neither guess nor heed your meaning. I cherish an image, do I? Very well, I cherish it. As to yourself, you are distasteful to me. For what reason? Simply because you are you—no other in the world, I assure you. And, if that is not enough——”

He stopped, checked in the midst of his wrath by the look in the eyes before him. It was not submission or fright; it was the spark of a new amazed dawn. That he had said the thing he could never recall occurred to him suddenly with an odd sick qualm. He tried to recover the thread of his discourse, but only to have it tail off into inarticulate stammerings.

“Enough?” she said in a low voice. “O, truly—and to spare. Distasteful! Am I that to you? Why, so are all sweets to the carrion-loving dog. Well, I am well content to have your loathing, sir. Will you please be gone: there is nothing noisome here to tempt your palate. Distasteful!” She took a step forward, a single one, and his eyes flickered. He thought, perhaps, she was going to strike him. “Now, listen to this,” she said. “I will never, before God, utter word to you again till you have gone down on your knees to me and asked my pardon for that insult.”

She turned her shoulder on him and walked apart. He watched her, lowering, and forced a laugh he meant for one of mockery.

“Silence between us!” he said. “Be assured I make a second, madam, in that welcome compact.”

He sat down again, and, picking up his book, affected to become absorbed in it. But all the time his pulses were thumping and his eyes furtively conning the rebel over the leaf edges. A spot of bright colour was on her cheek; she trilled a little air, as she seated herself in her former position, as naturally and light-heartedly as if she had never a trouble in the world. “Damn her!” he thought. “To take the upper hand of me like that!” His fury heaved and fermented in him like yeast in a dough-pan. He sneered at her pretence of cheerful abstraction. “She is thinking of me,” he reflected, “as I am of her.”

He tried to escape her image, to get genuinely interested in his book; but his indignation—and something else, that qualmish something—would always come between. To be faced and flouted by this bantling, adjudged and sentenced of her furious young disdain! It was intolerable—not to be endured. A dozen times he twitched, on the verge of an explosion, and a dozen times, with an ever-diminishing heat, restrained himself. It was true enough, he thought, as his fume evaporated, that he had not condescended to tact in his repulse of her. Diplomatically, at least, he should have been more tender of her feelings, have attained his end more surely without brutality. She had some reason for her resentment; and he must admit she had looked well in expressing it. A clear conscience burned with a clear fire, and there was something cleanly piquant in the warmth it emitted. It gave his arid veins a new sensation. Comparing those immature lines with the fuller which had hitherto besotted his fancy, he found a curious interest in studying them. It was like extracting a fresh, slender, white kernel from its grosser husk—a sweet and rather tasty discovery. Had his eyes been at fault, and his palate? Infatuation, perhaps, had blinded the one and cloyed the other. Well, he might come yet to humour this situation—even to atone in some measure for the unkindness of which he had been guilty. But not at once! She must be taught her little lesson before he could afford to unbend. She was really a pretty child, when all was said and done—a brunette, with large blue eyes appealing and alluring, and a complexion like china roses. The rest, did he choose to will it, should come to ripen in the sun of love, like a peach hung on a wall. There was a thrill in the sense of that power possessed and withheld. With a sigh that was half a new rapture, he turned resolutely to his reading.

And at that moment Mr. George Hamilton was announced. He entered gaily, looking the pink of health and comeliness, and, nodding a cheery greeting to my lord his friend, went to the lady, like one full confident of his privileged position.

“Good-morrow, cousin,” quoth he.

She dropped her hands, with her work, into her lap, and, leaning forward, looked up into his face with a smile.

“You are welcome, cousin,” she answered. “I was bored, i’ faith.”

He just glanced at the husband, and laughed.

“In such company, Kate?”

She raised innocent brows. “What company? My own, do you mean? There is none other here but sticks and stocks.”

“Well, say I meant your own. Can that bore you?”

“O, faith, it can!”

“O, faith, then, you’re hard to please!”

“’Tis proof I’m not, for your saying so pleases me. Lord, what a novelty to hear a compliment!”

He conned her with a puzzled air, then took the piece of work from her hands and stood quizzing it.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A sampler,” she answered. “Have you never seen one before?”

“Not in your hands.”

“It has been in my hands, nevertheless, for—O God, I don’t know! Fifty years, belike. I began it when I was a little girl, and time goes slowly in these days.” She jumped to her feet, and stood at his shoulder, pointing out the figures of the design. “Do you see? Here’s what I noted most, put down as in a commonplace book—people and texts, and even animals, including a number of my friends. Am I not a Lely in portraiture, cousin? Here’s my dear nurse, and here my governess to the life.”

“To the knife, she looks rather. Who’s this—your father?”

“Of course, stupid.”

“Do you put in none but those you favour?”

“O no! Here and there is one distasteful.”

“Was this a favourite cat?”

She pouted.

“No, sir, a dog.”

“And here’s your husband?”

“No, another dog.”

“H’m! You can get a likeness, indeed.”

My lord, slamming down his book somewhat violently, got to his feet with a haste which seemed to belie the leisureliness of the stretch and yawn which followed.

“Am I not to have my place among the favoured?” says Hamilton.

“Would you like it?” questioned the artful rogue. “I should be hard put to’t to portray so perfect a gentleman. They have not come my way of late. What hath happened to your brooch, cousin? Stay while I refasten it for you.”

He lifted his chin obediently, while she manipulated, with deft, slender fingers, the jewel at his cravat. My lord, with a quick, loud clearing of his throat, started and came across the room.

“What, George!” said he. “I vow I was so lost in what I read I hardly noted you. What’s wrong with your cravat?”

Hamilton, his head still tilted, responded brusquely but nosily—“It’s chokid be, that’s all.”

Her little ladyship laughed.

“I’ll be done in a moment, poor man.”

“Zounds!” blustered her husband. “Here, let me fasten it!”

She ignored him altogether.

“How sweet you smell, cousin!” she said. “Is it kissing-comfits?”

“That’s for sweet lips to answer,” gurgled Hamilton.

My lord, in a vicious spasm, gripped the little wrist and wrenched it from its task. Hamilton cried “Damnation!” and my lady, putting the wounded limb to her mouth, looked up at him with wide appealing eyes.

“Some beast has hurt me,” she said. “Take care of yourself, cousin, while I go and bathe it.”

Half crying, she turned away and ran from the room. The moment she was gone the two men bristled upon one another, my lord opening with a snarl—

“There are limits, sir, to my forbearance.”

“The first I’ve known of them,” was the sharp response.

“What’s that?”

“Why, what I say.”

“My wife——”

“Is she your wife? One would never guess it from the way you treat her.”

“My wife, I say——”

“We’ll take her word for’t—not yours.”

“Do you quarrel with me, George?”

“I’ faith, I’m her kinsman, Phil.”

“You take the privileges of one.”

“Better I than another, for your sins.”

My lord gulped, as if he were taking a pill; then forced a propitiatory smile.

“Why, I confess I have sinned, George; and you mean me well, no doubt. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be lessoned, even by a cousin.”

“Then learn from a less scrupulous quarter. There’ll be plenty to gather the fruit you let hang over the wall.”

He was going, but the other stopped him; hurriedly.

“What’s that? No, tarry awhile, George. Zounds, man, can’t you see my state?”

He was so suddenly solicitous, so eager in his entreaty, that Hamilton paused in wonder, and turned to face him.

“Why,” said he, “let me look at you. I believe—anno mirabile!—I do believe you’re jealous. Philip Stanhope jealous, and of his wife!”

Chesterfield chuckled foolishly.

“What are the symptoms?”

“Yellow, sir, yellow—a very jaundice of the eye. Why, what hath happened between yesterday and to-day?”

“Nothing, I tell you—or perhaps everything. Is she so much admired?”

“Is Kate? Can you ask, who have eyes and senses?”

“I think I’ve been at fault.”

“Tell her so, then.”

“Why, that’s the devil o’t. We’re not on speaking terms.”

Hamilton sneered.

“So, it’s come to a head with her? And who but a blind dullard would ever have failed to foresee that end? Yet, with one so gracious, it must have needed a foul provocation to drive her to such extremes. What, may I ask, was the deciding insult?”

“I’ll be frank. I told her she was distasteful to me.”

Hamilton threw up his hands.

“Ye gods! And he can talk of speaking terms! Be thankful if she ever looks at you again.”

His lordship winced.

“Not? She hath sweet eyes, too. I own I spoke in temper, and said a silly thing.”

“Silly! Have you never heard of a woman scorned? You’ve lost her before you’ve found her.”

“No, no. I trust you, George: damn it, man, I trust you! I know you are my friend. Tell me—what shall I do?”

“To reconcile you?”

“Aye.”

“Too sudden an exodus this! Turn tail, I advise, and get back to your flesh-pots.”

“Carrion, she called it, and me a dog. The savour sticks somehow; I can’t go back to carrion. Let the King enjoy his own for me: I’m content with mine.”

“She your own? Any man’s, rather, after that.”

“Don’t say so! George——” He put a twitching hand on Hamilton’s sleeve. He seemed quite transformed in these few minutes; smitten out of the blue, and, under that rankling wound, lusting for what he had despised. There are those who, tyrannous to love’s submission, fall slaves to love’s disdain. Here was one who, expelled from Paradise, found himself, as it were, naked and ashamed. “I’d concede something,” he said, “to be on terms with her again—not all her condition, curse it, but something substantial.”

“What was her condition?”

“She swore she’d never speak word to me again till I’d gone on my knees to her to ask her pardon.”

“That was before you’d hurt her, physically. She’ll want more now.”

“What more?”

“Likely a separation.”

“I’ll not grant it.”

“She’ll take it her own way, never fear.”

“What way?”

“Why, the way of all provoked wives. You should know.”

Chesterfield broke from him, and, taking half a dozen agitated steps, wheeled and returned to the charge.

“Let her, then, and be damned to her! And yet, that ‘carrion’! George, there’s something in purity.”

“How do you know?”

“I wouldn’t be the cause of her committing herself. That would be a foul return for her trust.”

“You’re very virtuous and considerate of a sudden.”

“I must go some lengths to save her.”

“Go on your knees, do you mean?”

“Would she forgive me, if I did?”

“She might pretend to—just to quiet your suspicions.”

“Curse you for a comfortless friend!” He went off again, and again wheeled and flung back. “Zounds, man, can’t you see what is the case with me?”

“A case of love at first sight, it seems to me.”

“I believe, on my honour, you’re right.”

“You do? So you’ve never looked at your wife till now?”

“Not with these eyes.”

“Well, on my word, I’m sorry for you.”

“Why? Why are you sorry?”

“Late comers to the feast, you know, must be content with bones.”

He laughed provokingly. My lord’s jaw seemed to drop.

“You’ve no reason to suspect her?” he demanded.

“None whatever.”

“Then, why——?”

“Hark ye, Phil; I know my young cousin—and I know women. She’s bound, in self-respect, to refute your outrageous calumny by offering herself to be tasted elsewhere.”

“A pox on my peevish tongue! Don’t say I’ve gone too far for hope, George.”

“We’ll say, at least, for simple remedies.”

“What desperate ones, then, in God’s name?”

Hamilton considered, frowning heavily, while the other hung feverishly on his verdict. The young man was, in truth, in a quandary. Everything hitherto had been favouring his purposed intrigue—the husband’s indifference, the wife’s grievance, and her natural affection for him, her cousin. That, under the circumstances, had been easily manœuvred into a warmer feeling. He had his sympathy with her neglected state for a leading asset; he had calculated upon Chesterfield’s consistent callousness and blindness. Now, this sudden and unexpected revulsion of feeling on the nobleman’s part had upset all his designs. A reconciliation between the couple was the last thing in the world he desired to bring about; his interests lay, rather, in widening the breach. To effect the latter while appearing to assist the former must be from this time his insidious policy. He cudgelled his brains for inspiration, and suddenly he looked up.

“There’s only one remedy I can think of,” he said. “No other amends you could make would be adequate to the offence. You might go down on your knees to her, and she would forgive and despise you; you might kiss and be friends, and she would smile, and turn away to wipe her lips. No self-abasement could atone for such an insult; but it would rather wake in her disgust for one so poor in spirit that he dared not back his own slander. Yet what she would never yield, despite pretence, to recantation and apology, she might to jealousy.”

“Jealousy?”

“Distasteful, Phil—think of that!—you called her distasteful! And so to see you dally with some fruit more to your liking! What a madness, then, would be hers, to oust the interloper, to seize her place, to convince you of the lovelier flavour of that you had insulted and rejected. Be bold and dare it. Force her into taking the initiative in this game of passion, and you’ll win her yet, whole and unsullied.”

So spake the wily serpent, his eyes furtive, looking to confirm the breach while feigning a way to close it. My lord stared before him, glum and unconvinced.

“’Tis a cursed risk,” he said. “What if it should fail?”

“Then everything would fail. The gods themselves are subject to Fate; and Fate is jealousy. If jealousy cannot work the oracle, then nothing can.”

“It would be simpler to enforce her.”

“Much; and to drive her straightway upon other consolation. But do as you will. It is your concern, and if we differ as to the means——”

“No, no. Keep your temper, George! Damn it, man, keep your temper! I believe you may be right, after all.” He stood glowering, and biting his nails. “What fruit to dally with? What pretty gull?” he said. “You don’t say, and it would have to be before her face, I presume?”

A laugh, timely converted into a cough, gurgled in Hamilton’s throat. Here was the way opened to the working of a certain dare-devil scheme, which had already flashed upon him in outline while he meditated. With hardly a thought he jumped to it.

“As to that,” he said soberly, “by the happiest of chances the means are offered you, and immediately, by Kate herself. She has a young friend about to visit her, as she tells me—a Mrs. Moll Davis—some pretty tomrig from the country; and what could better serve your purpose than she? Kate’s own friend—why, ’tis a very providence!”

Chesterfield grinned sourly.

“I must see her first.”

A lackey entered at the moment, bringing a summons from the Queen. My lord was wanted by her Majesty, and he might curse and “pish,” but he had to obey. He sniggered round, as he made for the door.

“More of this anon. Don’t go till I return. Jealousy it is, George.”

“Jealousy, Phil.”

Hamilton waved his hand, and turned, as the door shut on the departing figure. Then, with his fingers at his chin and a grin on his face, he stood to consider the game to which he had committed himself.