'Nay, madam,' cried Kelly, instantly softened by the lonely picture which her words called up in his mind. She was transfigured all at once into Una, Andromeda, Ariadne, or any other young woman of great beauty and virtue who has ever been left desolate to face a wintry world. 'Believe me, you have one friend whose only aspiration is to serve you with his life-blood. 'Faith, madam, had you but shown me your face when first I came to the door of your carriage, I would never have let M. de Strasbourg run away until I had offered you his smoking heart on the point of my sword.'
Her ladyship gave the Parson to understand that she had gone to the ball on the King's service. Had his brain been of its customary sobriety the adventure would doubtless have surprised him more than it did. He might have questioned the nature of the service which took her ladyship to the masquerade. But she had sufficient art to tell him nothing and persuade him that she told all. Moreover, he had other matters to engage him.
There is no need to extend more particularly the old story of a young man's folly with a woman of Lady Oxford's kind. She had sought to hide who she was, she said, because she dared not trust herself; and the fact that she was not living in her own house, which was being repaired, but in one that she had borrowed, with the servants, from a friend who had gone to the Bath, seemed to make her intention possible. But Heaven had been against her. Mr. Kelly was readily beguiled into the sincere opinion that she had fought against her passion, but that her weakness and his transcendent bravery, of which she would by no means allow him to make light, had proved her ruin. It was all in a word set down to gratitude, which was a great virtue, she suggested. Love, indeed, was just the charge of powder which would have never flashed--no never--had not gratitude served as a flint and thrown off the spark.
Well, Mr. Kelly walked home in the dawning of a new day and painted his thoughts with the colours of the sky. For weeks thereafter he seemed in his folly to tread on air; and no doubt he had more than ordinary warrant for his folly. He had a fortune safely lodged with Mr. Child, the goldsmith; his mistress was no less fair than she showed fond; and so fond she was that she could not bring herself to chide the coachman who was discovered the next morning drunk with drugged wine at a tavern near the Haymarket, whither one of Scrope's hirelings had lured him. Mr. Kelly was prosperous in the three great games of life, love, and politics. For he was wholly trusted by the Bishop, by Lord Oxford and the rest; he took his place in the world and went and came from France with hanging matter in his valise. The valise weighed all the lighter for the thought that he was now serving Lady Oxford as well as the King. She was at this time always in his dreams. His passion indeed was in these days extreme, a devouring fire in brain and marrow. He believed her a most loyal conspirator, and, of course, all that he knew came to her ladyship's ears. But his bliss in the affection of Lady Oxford quite blinded him to danger, and he seemed to himself to walk invisible, as though he had the secret of fernseed.
For a season, then, Mr. Kelly was the happy fool, and if the season was short--why, is it ever long? Mr. Wogan is not indeed sure that the Parson has got altogether out of her ladyship's debt, in spite of what happened afterwards. For when the real morning broke and the true love came to him, troubles followed apace upon its coming. It is something to have been a happy fool, if only for a season and though the happiness ended with the folly.
CHAPTER X
[WHAT CAME OF MR. KELLY'S WINNINGS FROM THE SOUTH SEA]
Luck is a chameleon, and in November of that same year 1720, thought fit to change its complexion. The date, to be precise, was the 17th of the month. Mr. Wogan can determine on the particular day, for the reason that Mrs. Barnes carried out her threat, and sent him a laborious long letter concerning the Parson's moral iniquities. The letter reached Mr. Wogan in October, who was then cleaning his ship at Morlaix in Brittany, and what with his fifteen months of purposeless cruises, felt himself as encrusted with idleness as his ship's bottom with barnacles. It was just this eternal inactivity which no doubt induced him to take the serious view of Mrs. Barnes's epistle. 'It is a most cruel affair,' said he to Mr. Talbot, who was with him, 'and of the last importance that I should hurry to London and set it straight.'
'But you are fixed here,' said the Crow, for so Talbot was commonly called from the blackness of his complexion. 'Can I undertake the business for you?'
'No,' says Nick, shaking his head very solemn; though maybe his eye twinkled. Mr. Wogan forgets what point the plot was at then, for since the black year, 1688, there had been but one plot, though it had changed and shifted shape like the faces you see in the dark before you sleep. But he could not hear that anything immediate was intended; and it would be, therefore, the most convenient occasion to refit his ketch Fortune. He gave orders to that effect, travelled to Paris, obtained from General Dillon a month's leave to dispose of his own affairs, and went whistling to London like a schoolboy off on his holidays. For, to tell the truth, he was not greatly concerned at George Kelly's backslidings, but on the contrary was inclined to chuckle over them, and trusted completely to his friend's discretion.