'Oh,' wailed Smilinda, and her arms went round Strephon's neck. 'Heureuse en jeu, malheureuse en amour. O fatal cards, would that I had lost this dross!' cries she, with her eyes on the glittering heap of guineas and doubloons strewed about the table. 'Oh, Strephon, thou wilt forget me in another's arms. I dread the French syrens.'
And then Mr. Kelly to the same tune:
'Never will I forget Smilinda. If I come back with the King, and he makes me a Bishop, with a pastoral crook, thy Strephon will still be true.'
Whereat the lady laughed, though Kelly was jesting with a heavy heart, and vowed that Lady Mary would write a ballad on 'Strephon, or the Faithful Bishop.' Then she fell into a story of lovely Mrs. Tusher, the Bishop of Ealing's wife, who was certainly more fair than faithful. Next she wept again, and so yawned, and gave him her portrait in miniature.
'You will not part with it--never--never,' she implored.
The portrait was beautifully set with diamonds.
'It shall be buried with me,' said Kelly, and so Lady Oxford let him go, but called him back again when he was through the door to make him promise again that he would not part with her portrait. Mr. Kelly wondered a little at her insistence, but set it down to the strength of her affection. So he departed from the cave of the enchantress with many vows of mutual constancy and went to Rome, and from Rome he came back to Genoa, where he fell in with Nicholas Wogan.
Mr. Wogan remembers very well one night on which the pair of them, after cracking a bottle in Grimble's tavern, came down to the water-gate and were rowed on board of Wogan's ketch. This was in the spring of the year 1721, some four or five months since the Parson had left England, and Wogan thought it altogether a very suitable occasion for what he had to say. He took the Parson down into his cabin, and there, while the lamp flecked the mahogany panels with light and shade, and the water tinkled against the ship's planks as it swung with the tide, he told him all that he had surmised of Lady Oxford's character, and how Lady Mary had corroborated his surmises. At the first Mr. Kelly would hear nothing of his arguments.
'It is pure treason,' said he. 'From any other man but you, Nick, I would not have listened to more than a word, and that word I would have made him eat. But I take it ill even from you. Why do you tell me this now? Why did you not tell it me in London, when I could have given her ladyship a chance of answering the slander?'
'Why,' replied Wogan, 'because I know very well the answer she would have made to you--a few words of no account whatever, and her soft arms about your neck, and you'd have been convinced. But now, when you have not seen her for so long, there's a chance you may come to your senses. Did you never wonder what brought Scrope to Brampton Bryan?'