Idonia: A Romance of Old London

by Arthur Frederick Wallis

"Oh, Denis, Denis, do not let me go, nor never leave you," she said, and I (witless braggart) swore that nought upon earth should sever us.

I led her up the turf path, sheltering her from the rain that had already begun to fall thickly. My thoughts were all astray and I had no plan of any sort, but still to have my arm about her, and feel her yielding to my touch, as spent with love and weary with the pride of so much given.

A man must feel humbled by the magnitude of that he asks of a maid, but all I could say was, brokenly: "I will try to be worthy, sweetheart." Poor words, but she thanked me for them joyfully. She besought me to let her rest soon, and we sat down by a weather-twisted pile at the water's edge, for I could not run into the jeopardy that might lurk amid the inhospitable dark houses of this place, where everything oppressed with a sense of evil. My cloak kept off the worst of the rain, but, as the rising wind swept across the river, Idonia shivered with the cold. Nevertheless she lost not a whit of her gaiety, which indeed seemed to increase with her distress, and she would laugh more loudly than I thought was altogether safe at some odd construction put upon my remonstrance in her wayward speech. I could not long disguise from myself her condition of fever, which at the same time I knew not how to alleviate; but more than once I caught myself wishing I had left her that night at the Inn, where, for all her fears, she had not been any way molested, nor, I now thought, would likely have been, her guardian having returned, and Malpas beyond the power to annoy her further.

A little later, and quite suddenly, she relaxed her extravagant hilarity, and fell into a moodiness equally to be pitied. She wept a deal then, and seemed to have got a strange perception of the malignant influences that surrounded us. The sound of the wind terrified her, and she would shrink down whispering that something tugged at her cloak. I did what I could to soothe and comfort her, but she only shook her head, or pressed my fingers with her hot hand.

But the worst was when, by some trick of the brain, she thought herself back in the Inn-room again, when Cleeve had entered in his horrid uncouth dress, and with his yellow face and hands.

"He said he was my guardian," she ran on, in a dull low voice, "but I knew he was no one of this world. He said it was a foreign habit he had filched from a dead man he had been enforced to kill, and that he used it to escape detection of the watch. Ah! it is all escaping with us—escaping and killing! I knew he had some secret lurking-place near the river; he has often said so, and that he went disguised when any great danger threatened. The watch ... and yet he used to laugh at it; but lately he has come to fear arrest: why is it? and so he killed an innocent man and took his coat to save himself.... His eyes, when he told me he had been waylaid at last, and almost at the Inn door! but he killed that man too, he said: he hindering him. Christ! how his eyes do sift you....

"These jewels in the jar, now, I know they have all been worn by men he has killed. I remember them perfectly well. There is the great cross the Spaniard wore; and these rings. I wonder when it was you murdered him. He was a fair-spoken gentleman, and I thought you were friends...

"I forgot. This is you, Denis, not he I call my guardian. I do not think he altogether trusts me any longer, although he gave me the jar to keep ... and I have left it behind in the Inn. It was worth a king's ransom, he said, and ordered me to keep it by me until he should have finished a certain work he had below, that would not take him long. I have left it, and he will be angry ... I fear him, Denis. He is calm as death when he is angry....

"And yet he can laugh too. He laughed when he told me of the Chinese he killed, and how he dared his fellow to betray him. Oh, he made a merry tale of it, and of his forcing the poor wretch to simulate a desire to take vengeance upon a man that had fled—when it was he, the murderer himself, remained behind! Yes, and he laughed at you, Denis, until my blood burnt me ... I shall never forget his wrinkled heathen face as he laughed."

It may appear an incredible motion of my mind, but I could have cried out for joy at a diversion which, then befalling, served to turn Idonia from these crazed memories; albeit the cause was one properly, and at another time wholly, to be feared. For chancing to lift my eyes to one of the houses that be here builded by the water's edge, and serve doubtless for the storage of marine stores and tackle, I saw a man, and after, another, and then a whole posse of men armed with cuirass and halberd, that advanced directly towards us. Idonia saw them almost at the same moment, and seeming to recover her wits in the suddenness of the danger, she broke off, and turned to me with a swift glance of inquiry.