CHAPTER X
It may appear to some people that Hamilton was taking a prodigious amount of trouble to reach by a roundabout way a conclusion at least as presumptively attainable by direct means as by sinuous; and, in this connection, Montrose’s quatrain may possibly occur to them—
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
Without, however, stopping to defend or disallow the moral applicability of these lines to our case in point, it may be offered to such objectors that, generally speaking, the rewards most hardly won are the rewards most highly prized by men, that five-sixths of the satisfaction of success lie in the difficulties surmounted to achieve it (the thing may be be-adaged to infinity), and that if there was a scamp in this world alive to that truism, it was your Restoration scamp, with his plethora of experience in the ways of facile conquest. Who, indeed, could for ever take joy or credit of shooting the sitting pheasant, of hunting the fox or the hare if his quarry, the moment it were pursued, squatted down to be trodden on? Rather, would it be his object to scare away, with a view to stalking and circumventing, the affrighted game, than, by coming to straight conclusions with it, to miss all the excitement of the chase.
Now, I do not say that, in this particular scoundrelism he was bent on, Hamilton went deliberately about it to complicate an issue he ardently desired; only, intrigue in such matters being the recognized process, it never occurred to him, perhaps, that satisfactory conclusions could be reached without. It was a superstition of his time that beef to be tender must be first baited; and certainly the sport added a zest of its own to the subsequent feast. Moreover, the relish in the sport itself owed much of its savour, as always with sport, to the fact that the winner’s gains involved the loser’s losses. To the account of his triumph, if triumph it should be, must be put, not only the corruption of the wife but the fooling of the husband. The humour of that result were enough to vindicate in itself the most tortuous of courses; and the fact that the husband happened to be his connection and confidential friend only added in his eyes a touch of exquisite drollery to the situation. In the process of engineering that situation he tasted all the thrilling delectation of the spy, who, conscious of his sole possession of momentous secrets, plays the apparent tool to this side and the other, himself the master of both and the real arbiter of their destinies.
He was walking one afternoon near the Ring in Hyde Park, watching the solemn circumambulation of the coaches about that damned and dusty arena, when a voice hailed him, and he saw Chesterfield’s glum visage protruded from the window of a chariot which had drawn up hard by.
“Prithee come in, coz,” said the Earl, “and help a poor foundered wretch to forget himself in livelier company than that of his own thoughts.”
Hamilton, with a laugh, acceded, and the two rolled on together.
“Is your mood so lugubrious?” asked the rogue. “Why, what a weathercock it is, now pointing hot, now chill, without a devil of a reason that I can see in this temperate climate! But the last time I met you you were all for sultry, and now, to mark your face! I’ve seen a gargoyle, with an icicle hung to its nose, look less dismally frosty.”
“Pish!” exclaimed the other testily. “If ’tis to the Corisande you allude, my fire that night was but a flash-in-the-pan.”
“A touch of the real sulphur in it, nevertheless, I believe.”
“A touch-and-go it was, then. The skit can dance and sing to make a man’s pulses leap—I admit it; but herself soon serves to kill that transitory glamour. She’s her own corrective.”
“Well, I say the more the pity.”
“Why do you say it? I don’t understand.”
He glanced at his companion, a sudden wrath of suspicion in his eyes.
“What don’t you understand?” asked Hamilton, bridling, though with an appearance of extreme urbanity, to the other’s tone.
“That you should deplore my not burning my fingers in the fire I play with. Did you design that I should when you recommended that hussy to me?”
“H’m! In a measure—yes,” drawled Hamilton.
“For what reason? Curse it, I say, for what reason?”
“For what reason?”
“Do you repeat me to gain time, groping for an excuse? Do you, I say?”
“You are full of questions. Will you have me answer them in one, or one by one? Zounds, man, behave less like a pea dancing on a drum.”
“Now, by God, George——!” He set his teeth, hissed in his breath, shook his fists at nothing at all, and fell suddenly calm. “I’ll be reasonable,” he said, apostrophizing space—“quite temperate and reasonable. Is it reasonable to suppose that one, a family connection and my friend, in my close confidence, could make such an admission without some motive designed to serve me—unless, indeed, it pointed to a treachery on his part so black as to constitute a devilry unthinkable?”
Hamilton’s brow corrugated. By a curious psychological perversity he felt as much incensed over the insinuation as if there had actually been no warrant for it. Such is often the case with your wrongdoer; he will justify himself to himself, while remaining perfectly firm on the question of abstract morality.
“You are a master of reason, Phil, we know,” said he, with a sneer; “the which, if I doubted, would not your proviso convince me? So, I have openly confessed my hand—to beguile you to an infatuation that should leave the coast clear for me—me—to play the villain?”
“I never said so.”
“O! did you not?”
“I said specifically the thing was unthinkable.”
“Showing you had thought of it.”
“George, don’t torture me. You said, you know, it was a pity I was not more really touched.”
“I say it again.”
“Why, in God’s name?”
“So your attitude would be more convincing. As it is, the hollow pretence of it would not deceive a child.”
“Is that all you meant? Forgive my words to you—I am so torn and harassed—and you are my only friend, I think. I’ll try to be more natural with the wretch; more—more convincing, damn her! Yet I drove it home with Kate the other night; you saw how she left the room?”
“There you are! because for the moment you were really what you had pretended to be—under the spell. Could you ask a better proof?”
“No, that’s true. But it’s hard to feign the fire you do not feel.”
Hamilton laughed indulgently.
“You take things too seriously. Convince yourself you do not care whatever happens, and Fortune will be kind to you. It is the jade’s way, being a woman. Indifference to her is the only thing she cannot resist. And it isn’t as if the fruit you were asked to handle were rotten medlers. Here’s a sweet country nectarine for which a very epicure might envy you.”
“A country crab, I think, as biting as she’s little. Well?”
“Well, is this to forget yourself in livelier company? Marry, Phil, if you can laugh at nothing else, laugh at yourself—always the best fool in a man’s household. But, come, I’ll give you distraction. Here’s a story just on the town of two rogue apothecaries, partners, which might point the moral of an Æsop’s fable. Have you heard it?”
Chesterfield, his eyes perfectly lacklustre, muttered some incoherent response. The other proceeded, undaunted—
“Nixon and Carter were they called, and both attended, among others, on a certain ailing miserly old widow, waiving their fees in hope of some rich bequest half promised to them for their devotion. The day before she died she sent them two old shabby worn-out cloaks, one cloth, one velvet, in reward of their long services to her, and of these garments, Nixon, as the elder, was to choose which he would, the other going to his partner. They were well mad, I can promise you, but, making the best of it, Nixon chose the cloth, as being the more serviceable, and after, in derision, offered to part with it to Carter for a shilling. Which, promptly agreeing to, and securing his bargain, Carter, the more astute knave, discovered each of its twelve buttons to be a gold Carolus hidden under cloth. And so they were at it, Nixon demanding back his goods and Carter resisting, till from quarrelling they came to blows and Nixon killed Carter, for which Nixon is to be hanged. And now comes in the lovely moral; for it seems they were both Fifth Monarchist men, owing their lives to the Act of Indemnity, yet who would have cut off their right hands rather than help the King to a tester of his own coin. And the end is these twelve gold pounds are forfeit to the Crown. What think you of that for a rare combination of law and justice?”
Receiving no answer, he looked at his companion, and perceived him patently oblivious to every word he was saying. He exclaimed, and laid his hand on the door.
“What now?” said Chesterfield, waking up.
The other cursed him fairly. “A pox on your insensibility! Here have I been pouring my precious wine of eloquence into thy cracked measure of a head that hath retained not one drop. I’ll up and begone.”
“No, don’t. Have you been talking in truth?”
“O, listen to him! Have I been talking! No, sir; I’ve been thinking aloud; and if my thoughts ran on jackasses in their relation to the creature called a mute, you have only to speak without braying to prove yourself not half the donkey you seem.”
“Don’t be offensive, George. Why do you apply such a word to me?”
“Are you not a donkey, to go brooding on thistles when I offer you grapes?”
“I cannot help but brood. Have patience with me, coz. There’s a thought in my mind I cannot rid it of.”
“A thought? What thought?”
“This cursed Kit.”
“Kit?”
“The Kit her friend is for ever alluding to.”
“O! that.”
“There’s some purposed innuendo, I’m convinced, in the hussy’s mockery—perhaps to some former flame of my wife’s known to both. I believe, before God, it is that. You should have heard my lady before you came that night. On my soul, she had almost confessed bare-faced that she used this Kit to console herself for my neglect.”
“The devil she did!”
It was a new and surprising suggestion for Hamilton himself. It seemed to open out a wholly unexpected vista of mortifying possibilities. Could there be anything in it? Little signs—an odd look, a queer inflection of the voice, unsuspected of any significance at the time—occurred to him now in the connection of his cousin’s confidences. Was she really playing a double game with all of them, this little artless-seeming Thais? No! she was altogether too unsophisticated; he could not believe it. Besides, of course, he was actually forgetting that she and Mrs. Moll were but recent acquaintances. They could not have a knowledge of that name in common, unless——
“Did she specifically say ‘him’?” he asked Chesterfield.
“What do you mean?” demanded the Earl.
“You know Mrs. Davis would not admit Kit’s sex when I rallied her.”
Chesterfield shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“Pooh! The merest subterfuge, to mislead and torment me. The dog’s a male dog; there’s no question whatever about it.”
Hamilton sat frowning a while. It was true that that fact of the women’s unacquaintance counted for little. Moll, the prying and mischievous, might easily have made a discovery; or, again, granted the alternative of Kate’s double-dealing, the two might be in a naughty confederacy to punish the master of the house. Truly, if it were no worse than that, he could forgive them, though their understanding meant a certain treachery to himself. But at least it would ease his mind of a qualm which had suddenly overtaken it.
He meditated, on the whole ill at ease. He must find some opportunity, of that he was decided, to question Mrs. Moll more particularly about this Kit, and, though he foresaw well enough an evasive response, he believed he would be able to extract from her some indication of the truth sufficiently illuminating to guide him in his further actions. He turned to his companion with the suggestion—
“Leave the matter to me, Phil, for the moment. I’ll question the slut, and, like the persuasive, artful dog I am, worm the truth out of her.”
“Will you, George? Zounds, if my suspicions should be verified, and there’s secret meetings between them! Though he be a Kit of nine lives, I’ll skewer them every one on my rapier like slivers of dog’s meat. When will you come?”
“When is it safe?”
“My lady rides abroad each day at noon.”
“To-morrow, then.” He put an impressive warning hand on the other’s sleeve. “This must not affect your behaviour to the visitor. Never, whatever you do, relax your attentions there, but rather emphasize them.”
“O! why?”
“Why—why?” He spoke with some impatient irritability. “Are you really so dense? Why, because—if you must be instructed—any slackness on your part might rouse your wife’s suspicions. We want, if it’s to be a question of taking her off her guard, to lull her into a sense of false security; and the more infatuated you appear, the more careless of precaution will she become. Strange that I should have to teach you sexual strategy.”
He would not dismiss the whole suggestion at once, you see, as incredible and preposterous; he was too well versed in the thousand duplicities of which woman is capable ever to accept her innocence at more than its face value. Nor is mere youth a guarantee with her of harmlessness. The little two-inch viper can bite to poisonous effect the moment it is hatched from the egg. No, it was judicious, for the sake of all concerned, to attempt to establish the identity of this hermaphroditic individual. And he thought he could do it.
He went to essay the experiment the next day. A little to his confusion he learned that his cousin, whom he had calculated upon finding out, was not yet departed, but was strolling, pending her horse’s arrival, in the garden. After a moment’s hesitation, he went to seek her there, and encountered her loitering about the paths which led down, among ordered parterres and hedged alleys, to the river-side. She looked very pretty in her scarlet riding habit à la mode, with the long-skirted coat, fashioned after a man’s, which was just then come into vogue, and the little plumed hat tilted over one ear; and the picture she made went straight down through his eyes to his heart. Her eyes opened a shade as she turned to recognize him.
“Are you coming to offer to ride with me?” she said. “Because, if you are——”
“Yes?” he asked.
She tossed her head suddenly, with a little shrug.
“O! no matter. What the world can see the world will not suspect. Come, if you wish it.”
“Meaning by the world, I suppose, your husband. Then you have thought better of my suggestion?”
“What suggestion?”
“That you should use me to stimulate his jealousy.”
“I have thought of you as my kinsman and his friend.”
“Is that a reproof, Kate Chesterfield?”
She ruffled a box border with her little pointed toe, looking down the while.
“Why should you think it so, cousin? You are a man of honour, are you not? And I have your own word for it your offer was a quite disinterested one.”
“That may be; but to turn it to no better account than riding innocently in company is not the way to make it effective.”
She did not reply for a moment, then looked him straight in the eyes.
“What would you have us do?”
“I could answer for one thing,” he said. His gaze was on a knot of rosebuds fastened in her bosom. “These walls are argus-eyed. Grant me a token from that sweet nest.”
“And earn,” she said, “a credit I do not deserve. Why should I go out of my way so to damn myself?”
“He’ll hear of it.”
“The only one of all that would not care.” A sudden flush came to her face. She leaned forward a little, and spoke three words: “Who is Kit?”
It fairly took him aback. He was so startled that for a moment he could not answer.
“Kit!” he stammered then.
“You are my husband’s friend,” she said—“in his confidence; you know and have shared, no doubt, the secrets of his past. Was it not enough to force upon me the daily insult of this Davis creature’s presence, but he must make a jest through her lips of other infamies in which it seems they were both implicated? Who is this Kit, I say?”
Now, one thing, in his astonishment, was made clear to Hamilton. Kate was as innocent of Kit as Kit of Kate. That reassurance was consoling, though it left him more confounded than ever as to the identity of the strange being.
“On my honour, cousin,” he said, “I have no idea.”
“You have not?”
“Not a shadow of one. But, whoever she is, if she she is, what reason have you to connect Phil with her?”
She made a sound of scorn.
“What reason? Am I deaf and blind to all hints and innuendoes—to their conspiracy to mock me with veiled references to the part she has played in his life? O, reason, indeed!”
“I think, on my soul, you are letting your imagination master you. Has he ever really confessed to this Kit?”
“You did not hear him? No, it was before you came. He did as much, referring to her as the substance of happiness for which he had exchanged its shadow—the shadow—the wife—O, I am in truth a shadow of a wife!”
“Then, I say, if that be so, he deserves no mercy.”
“I intend to show him none.”
“Give me the rose, then.”
“Why do you want it? In reward of your disinterestedness?”
“Just that.”
She gazed at him a moment—a fathomless look; then—O, woman, microcosm of all incomprehensibilities!—detached a bud from the group and held it out to him. He received it in rapture, and dared to put it to his lips. But at that she flushed pink, and turned from him.
“I will ride alone,” she murmured. “Nay, do not press me further.”
He forbore to. It suited his plans to remain behind, and he let her go without protest. And the moment he was sure of her departure he went to seek Mrs. Davis. His veins were hot; there was a glaze over his eyes. “She hath put foot within the magic circle,” he thought, “and I have her.”
He went to find a servant, and to dispatch him in quest of Mrs. Moll. The baggage came down to him presently into the great room, and, when they were left alone together, danced gleefully up to him and dropped a curtsey.
“Is not that to the manner?” she said. “Or is it the bong tong to offer you my cheek?”
“Come,” he said, with a shadow of impatience. “I want to have a serious talk with you.”
“Lud! What mischief have I been up to?”
“Not mischief enough—that is my complaint.”
“Well, that’s easy remedied.”
“Is it? I’m beginning to doubt.”
“Ah! You don’t know me.”
“You are enjoying yourself here, are you not?”
“Passably. ’Tis dull sometimes—too much confinement, and not enough fresh air.”
“You’d like to be released, perhaps, from your duties?”
“Should I? What makes you think so?”
“It has occurred to me. Supposing I were to tell you you might go?”
“Supposing? Well, I shouldn’t go, that’s all.”
“You wouldn’t? Do you mean to say you’d defy me?”
“Yes, I do mean to say it.” She came close before him, put her little fists behind her back, and tilted her chin at him. “What’s all this about? Aren’t I wanted any more, or have you changed your mind? That ’ud be a pity, because I’m not the sort, you know, to be taken or left just as it suits a man’s convenience.” She laughed—not pleasantly. “Has it never occurred to you, George, that you happen to be just a little bit in my power?”
“The devil I am!”
“So am I—on occasion. You might find that out if you provoked me.”
“Why, what could you do?”
“I could blab, couldn’t I—make havoc of your little plot?”
He was a trifle staggered. Here was something overlooked in his calculations. He had only designed, in fact, to stimulate her efforts; this threatened rebellion revealed some mistake in his methods.
“And lose for ever your chance of promotion,” said he. “Well, if you wish to make me your enemy——”
She nodded her head once or twice.
“I don’t. But I’d lose twenty kings sooner than sit quiet under a dirty trick like that.”
“Do you propose staying on, then, till this imposture is discovered, as every day makes more probable? As well betray me at once.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. But I like the fun and I like the life, and I see no more risk of discovery now than when I came. Why do you want me to go?”
“I never said I did. I don’t, as a matter of fact, if you will only not like these things so well as half to forget your purpose in them.”
“My purpose? That’s to make the lord creature in love with me. Well, haven’t I?”
“I miss the conclusive evidence—the proof of the pudding that’s in the eating.”
“That wasn’t in the bargain. Be fair, George. I’m doing all that was asked of me, and doing it faithful.”
She was, in fact; yet he had actually hoped for more. She was so excessively alluring that he could not believe Chesterfield capable, in spite of his apparent insensibility, of ultimately resisting her charms, were she fully resolved he should not.
“And is that,” he said, “suggesting the little piece too much? You’ve grown very fastidious of a sudden. I told you I was beginning to doubt.”
She looked at him queerly a moment.
“Isn’t it going as well with you as you expected?” she asked.
“Your finishing him could do my cause no harm, at least,” said he, and bit his lip.
“Well, I vow I’m sometimes a’most sorry for her,” she said. “She’s but my own age, and—and the man’s in love with her all the time, and at a word she’d be with him. Don’t I know that? What a brace of blackguards we are, George!”
“Speak for yourself, Mrs. Moll,” said Hamilton, a little hotly. “Love absolves all sinners. It knows no villainy but incompetence.”
“Sure, you must be a saint, then. But betwixt this and that, and your doubt’s despite, it wasn’t in the bargain and I won’t do it.”
“Then that settles it, and we must manage without.”
“As you like.” She brought her hands to the front, and, linking them in the most decorous of love-knots, stiffened her neck and tossed her head backwards and a little askew. “Besides,” she said, “you seem to forget that I’ve got a husband myself.”
He burst into a laugh, vexed but uncontrollable, and immediately checked himself.
“I had forgot—I confess it,” he said. “Kit, is it not?”
“Kit!” she ejaculated, in deep scorn. And then she, too, laughed derisively.
“Not Kit?” said he.
“If you knew Kit you wouldn’t ask such a silly question,” she answered.
“Well, why shouldn’t I know Kit? He seems an attractive person.”
“O! Kit’s attractive.”
“I see, I see. Pardon my stupidity.”
“What do you see?”
“Kit’s a—hem!—friend of yours.”
“Indeed, Kit is—the best, a’hem, friend of mine that ever hemmed a hem.”
“What! a woman?”
“Either that or a tailor.”
“Damn it! Not a tailor?”
“Damn it, why not? Though it takes nine tailors to make a man, one woman can make a tailor.”
“Come, Moll, thou art goosing me.”
“A tailor’s goose, maybe.”
“Tell me, who is this friend of yours?”
“I wonder.”
“Frankly, is it man or woman?”
“Frankly, I’ve never asked.”
“Ah! you won’t tell me. Are we not good comrades now, and as such should have no secrets from one another?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What is Kit?”
“Sometimes this, sometimes that. We all have our moods.”
“I believe he has no existence but in your imagination. Who is he? Tell me.”
“Will you kiss me, George, if I tell?”
“That I will.”
He suited the action to the word, putting his lips to hers, while she submitted quietly.
“Now,” said he.
“But I haven’t told,” she protested.
He could have boxed her pink ear; and he did fling from her with some roughness.
“P’sha!” he said. “I am wasting time.”
“And that is not all,” said she.
He saw a warning flush in her cheek, and forced his vexation under.
“Well,” he said, with a propitiatory laugh, “if you tell me nothing, I’ve got the kiss for nothing; and so mine is the best of the bargain. But I count you a little unkind, Mollinda.”
“I don’t mean to be that, George,” she answered, somewhat penitent. “But I shouldn’t tell secrets not my own; now should I?”
That only served to restimulate his doubts and perplexity; but he said no more on the subject, feeling it wiser to desist.
“Never mind,” he said. “You have your own good reasons for silence, of course, and it’s no business of mine to press them. What is more to the point is this question of your scruples regarding his lordship. So you won’t go to extremes? Then, what is to be the course? With all deference, Mrs. Moll, you can’t surely be planning to stay on here indefinitely.”
“Well, I’ll work up to any conclusion you like, short of that.”
“You will?”
“Sure.”
“Even if it were to an appearance—of that?”
“Why not? ’Twould be enough for me to know my own innocence, since I’m the only one that ever believes in it.”
He pondered, musing on her. “I’ll think it out, faith. We’ll arrange some trick between us—some coup de grâce for her ladyship. Shall we?”
“O, go to grass yourself!” she said. “Speak English.”