CHAPTER VII
“The same: three days later.” So, in theatrical parlance, we lift the curtain on a scene the replica of that introduced in the second chapter of this Comedy of Errors. It was all as before, even to the parted figures—only with this difference: somewhat equidistant between the two sat Mrs. Davis.
That, though an addition seeming insignificant, had all the latent force in it of a barrel of gunpowder with an unlighted fuse attached. The moment might come when, the match being applied, the whole of that artificial stuff of obmutescence would be blown in a flash to the winds.
Mrs. Moll was perhaps herself a little conscious of the volcano on which she was perched. Yet it would be doing her an injustice to hint that she either felt or showed any perturbation. While fully realizing that her position was in the last degree precarious, the thrill of the thing, the exercise of the mental agility needed to prevent, or at least postpone, that final catastrophe, was compensation enough, while it lasted, to reconcile her to her utmost danger. And in the meanwhile she was having, in the slang of to-day, the time of her life. Lapt in a perfumed luxury, which was as foreign as it was agreeable to her nature, and enjoying it none the less because it was stolen fruit, soon to be consumed; like a born actress living in her part, but like an astute woman keeping an unsleeping eye to the business side of her engagement, she gave herself wholly to the situation, and endeavoured to extract from it the best that mischief and ingenuity could devise. Morally, she was in her own eyes merely the naughty little tertium quid needed in a drama of love and jealousy to effect a certain purpose of separation.
And, incidentally, she regarded the feelings of no one. The play was the thing, and nothing outside it mattered. She was not, personally, taken with his lordship, while, professionally, she coquetted with, and, as she supposed, captivated him. If, in the course of those antics, he should be so obsessed as to propose to make her his mistress in actual fact, she might possibly, for reasons of self-interest, be induced to accept. But she was quite contented without. The entertainment to her lay in the successful management of the double deception which was to end by procuring Hamilton the fruit of his elaborate intrigue. She was not jealous of him, though he was the man, handsome and daring, for her fancy. They were small souls akin, and she would like to please him, if only to hear his praise.
My lord read, my lady worked, and Mrs. Davis sat with her hands on her lap and yawned. When she addressed either, it had to be with a careful view to maintaining with each the fiction that she was the other’s friend—a task not to be under-estimated for its difficulty, and, indeed, only rendered possible by the stubborn avoidance by the two, in replying to her, of any reference to her position in the house as the guest of one of them. But their mutual pride was in that her safety. For any self-betrayal they invited, designedly or undesignedly, she might actually have been their known and accepted visitor. They spoke not so much to her as through her—shafts designed by each to gall the other. It was for her usefulness in that respect that my lady had condescended to condone her presence, and even to the extent of some verbal interchanges. As a medium, transmitting the bitter intercourse of soul with soul, she had her negative virtues.
It was evening, and the girandoles were all a sparkling haze of light. There was no company but these three; for his lordship had of late shown a peevish avoidance of his friends, and his implied intimation of a desire for solitude had been generally respected—infinitely to the disgust of his young Countess, who, never wedded to domestic dullness, found in this infliction of it, under the circumstances, an intolerably aggravated grievance. She sat like a figure of fate, distilling frost.
Moll, leaning back in her chair, linked her hands behind her head, stretched deliciously, gave a prodigious yawn, and rattling her little heels on the floor, came erect again, and looked in a collapsed way at her ladyship.
“Sure, you’d find stitching easier, wouldn’t you,” she said, “if you took off that black sling of a thing.” (The injured wife still advertised her hurt on occasion.)
“No,” answered the lady shortly, pursing her lips. “I shouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t you, now?” said the slut, and settled herself down for a tease. She was a born chatterer, as glib at retort as she was garrulous, and the bump of reverence had been wholly denied her. She looked very pretty, nevertheless, in her evening frock of flowered lutestring, with her bright hair tumbling over her bright cheeks, and dressed at each temple with a knot of pink ribbon. “Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. If I’d hurt my arm, I should either forget the bruise or forget my work. They don’t pull together.”
“I haven’t hurt my arm.”
“Not?”
“It was bitten by a dog.”
“Sakes, now! What made him do it?”
“What makes any dog bite? An evil disposition, I suppose.”
“You weren’t taking his bone away from him, by chance?”
“Not I. He’s welcome to a whole skeleton of bones for me.”
“All except the spare-rib, maybe.”
His lordship, from his place apart, went “Ha-ha!”—and immediately looked furiously solemn. My lady, beyond a slight flushing of the cheek, showed no consciousness of the interruption. Moll turned in her chair, leaning her arms on the back and her chin on her crossed hands.
“That’s you,” she said. “Is your book so funny?”
“Killing,” answered Chesterfield. “’Tis—’tis a tract on drainage.”
“Lord, now—how humoursome! No wonder it makes you roar. But, sure, there’s no laughter in your face. You look as cross as a Good Friday bun.”
“Zounds! I’m amused, I tell you,” he said; “as amused as a dog when a cat arches her back at him.”
“I’ve seen more amused things than that. Come, prithee, leave your book and let us talk. What do you want to read for when a guest is by?”
“O! just to occupy my mind.”
“Put something into nothing, do you mean? Well, ’tis better empty than filled with drainage.”
He laughed, without hilarity, but laid aside his reading.
“Well,” said he; “I am at your service.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And so we’ll make a merry company, we three—the best in the middle and the bread on each side, like a duck sandwich.”
“Little merriment in a sandwich, to my thinking.”
“Why, so there isn’t. ’Tis a poor substitute for the stomach.”
“A very poor substitute. A man might better own a bread-basket.”
But that was too much for Mrs. Davis. She bridled, instantly offended.
“You vulgar beast! I’ll have you know I’m not to be spoken to like that, curse you!”
There is nothing more incommensurable, to be sure, than the particular standards of decorum which obtain with people of Mrs. Moll’s station—now as then.
Chesterfield’s eyebrows went up; he shook with a little inward laughter.
“Why,” says he, “I’m all amazement! ’Twas but a façon de parler; or, as we call it, a figure of speech.”
“Well, you can keep that part of speech’s figure to yourself.”
“I will; though I’ve got enough of my own. Come—forgive my offence. What were we discussing? Sandwiches?”
“Well, I say they’re a poor manner of food. The man that invented them meant well, but he went the wrong way about with it. They should be a slice of bread between two slices of meat, to my taste. He must ha’ been like Kit’s friend, who always did the right thing and did it wrong.”
She was constantly referring to this “Kit.” Neither of her hearers had a notion as to who was the individual alluded to, though each supposed it to be some one familiar to the other’s knowledge. The lady, of course, thought it a woman, the gentleman a man. The name, you see, as applicable to a member of either sex, was one very well chosen for abstract purposes. It enabled her to keep up an assumption of understood references, while avoiding the danger of specific instances. “Kit” was made the mouthpiece of quite a number of imaginary characters. He—or she—might or might not have had some existence in fact—even to a certain association with that mythical personage her husband (in whom, by the by, Hamilton had scant belief); but for oracular purposes it mattered nothing whether “Kit” were a derivation or a creation. The enigma, however, had this whimsical effect—both husband and wife became presently consumed with such an insatiable curiosity to penetrate the secret of “Kit’s” identity, that they felt like to burst under the weight of silence which the irony of circumstance had imposed on them.
“What friend of Kit’s was that?” inquired his lordship.
“He was a plumber,” answered Moll—and turned on her hostess. “Have you ever had a friend a plumber?”
It was as though she had suddenly shot a jet of iced water over the daughter of the Duke of Ormonde. Kate started, quivered, and sat rigid.
“Never!” she gasped out.
“Well,” said Moll, “I don’t blame you. They’ve a smell about them of putty and warm tallow that isn’t appetizing. But this friend of Kit’s was worse than most. He never mended a broken pipe but what he shut up some of his tools in it first, or stopped one leak without opening two. Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Never mind my feelings,”—the response came Arctic. “I’m not accustomed to having them considered”—“by the friends of plumbers,” was implied.
“What a shame, now! If ’tis your arm that’s hurting you, don’t stand on ceremony, but get to bed. We can manage alone somehow.”
The Earl raised his eyebrows, positively petrified. How dared the baggage mock the other thus, however much her friend? It could be nothing but her obsession about himself and his fatal attraction which emboldened her so to range herself, as it were, under the protection of his guns.
Lady Chesterfield, her cheek aglow, rose to her feet.
“This is becoming insufferable,” she began; and stopped, biting her lip.
“You’ve forgotten your sling,” said Moll.
“You’ve forgotten yourself,” said Kate disdainfully; and, with a shrug, resumed her seat. “But perhaps that is an advantage.”
Mrs. Davis jumped up, with a ringing laugh.
“What a company of crosspatches!” she cried. “The sandwich doesn’t seem to be a success. You come in the middle, Phil, and be the duck.”
He grinned, but in a half-scared way. She had never yet ventured so far as to call him by his Christian name. He was feeling suddenly rather helpless—taken off his feet by the excess of the storm he had himself invited. When she ran to him and pulled at his coat, he resisted feebly.
“Come and be the duck.” She chirped with laughter. “What a face to grin through a horse collar! O! look intelligent!” She shook him. “What shall we do—play games? Hot cockles, say, or——” she released him, and stood with deliberating finger on lip. “No, that would never do. Dumb-crambo—what do you say to that?” She glanced with comical plaintiveness from one mute figure to the other. “But you don’t look very playful, either of you. I wish Kit was here. You’d never be able to resist Kit, whatever you do me.”
Chesterfield cleared his throat, fingering the cravat at it.
“Is Kit such a wag?” said he.
“Just,” was the answer.
“And good at games?”
“There was never such a one for make-believe.”
“A happy disposition. But then, as to happiness—Kit isn’t married, of course.”
Her ladyship, in an uncontrollable spasm, whisked about.
“Kit, Mrs. Davis, has never suffered that most cruel of disillusionments.”
And then they went at it alternately, each pointedly addressing not the other, and tossing the hypothetical Kit between them, as if that epicene individual were the most familiar of shuttlecocks.
“Kit is to be congratulated, Mrs. Davis,” said his lordship.
“Kit has chosen the better course, Mrs. Davis,” said her ladyship.
“Matrimony is the shadow of felicity, Mrs. Davis, for which men, like the dog in the fable, drop the substance.”
“Men, you see, are beasts, Mrs. Davis; and not only beasts, but silly beasts.”
“They don’t know when they are well off, Mrs. Davis.”
“But women do, Mrs. Davis, when men insist on remaining single.”
“A pity for them, then, Mrs. Davis, that they don’t insist on remaining single too.”
“A great pity, Mrs. Davis; but women are in everything self-sacrificing.”
“They know how to take consolation for their injuries, Mrs. Davis.”
“The one lesson for which they are thankfully indebted to men, Mrs. Davis.”
“Take care what you’re confessing to, Mrs. Davis!”
“Or what calumnies you are making poor Kit responsible for, Mrs. Davis,” said her ladyship, with a little contemptuous laugh.
“O, Kit is the devil!” shouted the Earl, his wrath, till then steadily crescendo, exploding in a clap.
Moll, with a shriek of laughter, put her little hands to her ears.
“Lud!” she cried. “I’ve never confessed to so much before without knowing it! And to think Kit is come to be the devil after all!”
She lowered her hands to clap them; and at that moment the doors were flung open and Mr. Hamilton was announced. He came in from attending the Court, a brilliant figure all silk and velvet, with bows to his shoes a foot wide, and deep ruffles of lace falling from his knees over his calves. His teeth showed in a little tentative smile, their whiteness emphasized by the thread of moustache, no thicker than an eyebrow, which adorned his upper lip; while his glance, swift and comprehensive, took in the essentials of the situation on which he had alighted. His young kinswoman sprang to greet him with a cry of gladness.
“Oh, bien rencontré, mon beau cousin! You are welcome as health after sickness!”
She positively seemed to fawn on him, while Chesterfield, black and splenetic, scowled from his place across the room.
Hamilton was hugely gratified; but prudence necessitated his discounting this demonstration in the kindest way possible. He laughed, and very gently putting aside the caressing hands, answered, sufficiently audibly—
“Troth, Kate, if this is your malady, it appears in a more attractive form than most.” And then, lowering his voice, he spoke her aside: “Who is this stranger?”
“You should know,” she replied, hardly deigning to respond in kind. “Was it not you that warned me of her coming?”
“Ah!” he said, seeming enlightened, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders. “Is that so? Well, make us known to one another, child; for there’s no situation possible here without.”
“You said you had seen her.”
“Never to be remembered by her. I prithee, Kate.”
She could not; it stuck in her throat; but she conceded this much—she waved him with her hand towards the other two, where they stood together. Hamilton made the best of it.
“Will you, Phil?” says he, skipping up before, with a killing smile for the lady.
Chesterfield had no choice but to respond.
“Mrs. Davis,” he said, in a voice that seemed to carry an oath behind it; “this is my friend, Mr. George Hamilton.”
Moll curtsied, “a wicked little winkle” in her eye; and the gentleman, left hand on chest, right extended, and right toe advanced and pointed, swept a bow the very exaggeration of courtly.
“Charmed,” said he.
“Sure,” said Moll.
“You were speaking,” said he, “when it was my misfortune to interrupt you.”
“Was I?” said she. “Now I remember—it was about Kit.”
“Was it, faith? And who’s Kit?”
“Kit’s the devil.”
“The devil he is!”
“I never said he, now.”
“She, then.”
“Nor she. Kit’s Kit.”
“Zounds! Neither man nor woman?”
“Zounds! Why not? Doesn’t something come between man and woman?”
“What comes?”
“Why, the devil, sure.”
“Ah! Then Kit is the devil.”
“Indeed, Kit is not. Kit is what the devil comes between.”
“Wait, now. I scent a quibble. Kit stands for Christopher, and Kit stands for Katherine—both man and woman. They go arm in arm.”
“Not they. Why, Chris could never look at a woman without blushing.”
“And how about Kate?”
“O, she! She’d go arm in arm with a pair of breeches.”
My lord laughed, half vexedly: “She never could, you know.”
Moll turned on him.
“’Twas you, not me, called Kit the devil. Why don’t you answer for your own?” and, with a manner of playful fretfulness, she began to tease and rally him sotto voce.
Hamilton looked, with a grin, at his cousin, then moved to rejoin her. She stood with set lips and a disdainful frown on her brow.
“How can you encourage such intolerable stuff?” she said, in an undertone, as he approached.
“Come with me into the window,” he answered low; and, rebelling a moment, she succumbed. It was a large room, and the movement secured them a relative privacy.
“Stuff it may be,” said he; “but ’tis the sort of ready flippancy which leads your Philip Stanhopes by the nose. Is there any truth in this Kit?”
“How should I know or care? Some former flame of his, belike, with whom they play to perplex and insult me. It is no concern of mine. I am done with him.”
“Is that true, cousin?” He looked at her very earnestly. “Nay, I can see you are not speaking the truth.”
“Can you see? What true masculine eyes! I tell you that, having formed my resolve, I am quite unconcerned and happy!”
“Ah! Women think themselves what they want to be. That is why they never understand when they are accused of being what they are.”
“Indeed! And pray what am I that I do not think myself?”
“Jealous.”
“Never!”
“Jealous, I say—or you were not still so obsessed that you could fail to play the game I set you.”
“What game?”
“O! ‘What game?’ says she. Why, his game—or fatuity. Make him jealous; hoist him with his own petard, and see this common jade deposed.”
Affecting, while he spoke, the simplest conversational manner, he had an acute eye all the time for the two across the room. He observed the little attention the Earl was paying to the wiles besieging him, his disturbed glances his way, the morose suspicion of his expression; and he knew that the man was still too corroded with jealousy to play adequately the part assigned him. And in so far the decoy had failed, it seemed, to justify her uses. It was evident that, as Chesterfield had stated, she had begun to weary him—a perilous situation, which must be stopped from developing itself at whatever cost. But this mischief had reserves of fascination not yet brought into action. Kate’s own guitar—the famous instrument—lay on a table hard by. The sight of it brought one of these reserves most opportunely into his mind. If he dared—but he must dare.
Kate looked at her beguiler queerly. “I had forgotten,” she said. “Thank you, cousin. Is your advice very disinterested?”
“To that extreme,” said he, “that I offer myself, if you will, the fond instrument to this provocation. Purely to serve you, believe me. Why, watch him now, and judge if, for all his misbehaviour, he would relish that sort of retort on his infidelity.”
“I will not watch him,” she said, “or even look at him. You are very kind to me, cousin. I will think on what you say.”
He was so elated that he decided on the venture. Lifting the guitar, he ran his fingers over the strings.
“This, Mrs. Davis,” said he, advancing a few steps, “is thought, as no doubt you have been informed, the finest instrument of its kind in London. Do you play?”
The girl’s eyes sparkled. If she had a soul, it was to be evoked, small and indefinite, through music. Hamilton had calculated on that effect.
“I play,” she said. “Give it me.”
Her ladyship exclaimed angrily—
“No! Put it away, cousin. I will not have it so misused.”
He laughed.
“O, Kate! Never so churlish. Those fingers, I’ll go bail, were not made for hurt or discord. I prithee, sweet Kate.”
“Give it me,” said Moll entreatingly. “I’ll use it so I’ll make you all love me.”
Too indignant and too proud to protest further, the young Countess contented herself by flinging into a chair, where she sat with her back turned obstinately on the performer.
And Moll played, her fingers fluttering over the strings like butterflies, and drawing honey wheresoever they alighted. It was not great music, accomplished, soul-stirring; but it was very natural and very moving, quite true, quite simple, welling from the little spring that was her one pure sincerity. And presently—just as, sympathetically, when notes and chords are struck you may see a caged bird’s throat swell and throb, until the responsive rapture comes irresistibly bubbling forth and overflowing—her voice melted into, or took up, the melodious refrain her hands were shaping; and in a moment she was singing a little song, as sweet as a thrush upon a tree—
When my love comes, O, I will not upbraid him!
He meant but for kindness the gift that he gave.
Is he to blame for the Heaven that made him
A heart full of tenderness meet to enslave?
When my love comes I will promise him roses,
Gift for the gift that he laid in my breast.
O, for that promise his kindness discloses,
Will he not kiss me and make me his blest?
There’s a cry in the air of the cuckoo, sweet comer;
The daffodils blow and there’s green on the tree;
There’s a nest in the roof that is empty since summer—
When my love comes will he warm it for me?
It took her hearers by surprise, Hamilton not least. He was so moved, indeed, for the moment, that he failed to observe its effect on Chesterfield. They all dwelt silent for a little, while the girl, conscious of the impression she had made, looked down, still softly touching the strings. And then in a twinkle her mood changed. She shook her curls, laughed, touched out a lively air, and began to dance.
Her dancing was like her playing, her singing—native, unaffected, captivating, a rhythm of lightness, seeming to mock gravitation. It was to help to make her famous by and by—in days when the susceptible Mr. Pepys was to go into raptures over seeing “little Miss Davis” jigging at the play-end; and, indeed, it was very pretty, so elf-like, so unforced. It roused the enthusiasm of at least two of her company. When, laughing and rosy, she ceased, Chesterfield came to her all in a glow.
“It was prettier than the frisking of your own lambs,” said he. “Did you learn it of a shepherd’s piping, and your song of the nightingale? I vow I envy the country its possession of such a Corisande.”
My lady rose from her chair, and, without turning her head, walked erect from the room. Hamilton, watching the Earl with a furtive smile, heard her go, and breathed a silent benediction on his own success.