Moll Davis: a comedy

by Bernard Capes

He bent over the table, pulled her to him, and set his lips under the dangling curls. Then, being released, she ran with a face of fire to the steps, and, ascending them, to the accompaniment of an irrepressible guffaw or so from the spectators, paused a moment on the balcony above, hearing a jackass bray in the stables.

“What an echo there is in this place,” says she to the heads below, “when you gentlemen all laugh together!” and whisked into her room.

Hamilton, in the meantime, going to arrange terms with the landlord, grinned agreeably to his own thoughts. The chit had neither imposed on him nor, comely limb though she was, disorganized his emotions. Indeed, being deeply engaged at the moment to an intrigue which absorbed his most passionate energies, he had no appetite for supplementary complications. Still, beauty was beauty, and to invest in it, with whatever view to ultimate profit of one sort or the other, was never a bad principle. He had no conception at present of any use to which to put these covetable goods which good fortune had committed to his hands; but that he could find a use for them, and one that should be personally gainful, he never had a doubt. The only necessity was promptitude. He had seen enough to know that his hold on the skit was to be measured by just the length and elasticity of the tether by which he might strive to keep her under his nominal control. And that tether must be provided shortly, or she would scamper free of her own accord. But he was a man of distinguished resourcefulness in such matters, and he never questioned his own ability to convert this capture somehow to a profitable end. And in the meanwhile the girl was well disposed where no prowling town-bull might come by her to steal a march on him. Indeed, to make assurance double sure, he hinted to the landlord of a favour contingent on his holding himself responsible, as heretofore, for the safe custody of his guest, with a suggestion that locks which yielded themselves to the insidious manipulations of hairpins were better supplemented by stouter defences. And, having satisfied himself as to that, he departed.

CHAPTER II

In a fine panelled room which gave, through two large windows, upon the privy gardens of Whitehall Palace, a lady and a gentleman were seated as far apart as the limits of the chamber would permit. She, in her place, worked at a sampler, or affected to work; and he, in his, read in a book, or affected to read.

The room was such as, with the best will in the world, we cannot, lacking its appropriate human furniture, preserve, or reproduce, in these days without vital loss to its character. We may possess the sombre panels, the rich-hued pictures with their gilded frames sufficiently illuminating the austerity, the Venetian glass girandoles, reflecting in the polished floor below, as in water, their starry opalescences; we may have, or acquire, the brass-studded, or the stamped leather, or the screw-railed chairs, the elaborately carved or the gate-legged tables, the priceless Persian rugs—which, by the by, are but an early fashion resumed—the gilt caskets and the silvered mirrors: we can not, unless to bring great ridicule upon ourselves, wear the long lovelocks down our cheeks, or the silk favours at our shoulders, or the jewelled cravats and beribboned hose and breeches, without which all the rest must figure but as an anachronism, a discordance, an Elgin marble ravished from its Parthenon, and lined up for show in a glass-roofed museum. That we do try to reconcile the irreconcilable in these matters, using Early English cradles as receptacles for our faggots, and hanging up our silk hats in antique ambries, is due to the fact that we have lost the art, or the instinct, for decorative appropriateness. In those remote but less “original” days the same mind that conceived the idol adorned its shrine.

But if fashions in dress change and change, there was never in all history but one fashion in human moods and tempers. Those, whether figured in love, hate, desire, or jealousy, have been worn since the Fall to the single unchangeable pattern which wrought and accompanied it. One could not, in fact, from the fashion of their minds, have distinguished these two seated apart from any ill-assorted married couple of to-day.

And yet they had been wedded Earl and Countess not so many months but that their differences might have less divorced them. That those amounted to what they did was entirely the fault of the husband, who had chosen deliberately to provoke an estrangement in perverse spite of a certain felt premonition that his villainy was about to recoil on his own head. He really was a villain, this Lord Chesterfield; if only in one essential a greater than most of the young fire-eating profligates of his time. That he had fought several duels, and killed his man in one at least of them, was nothing out of the common; that he had formed a number of loose attachments with petticoats of sorts was only to be expected of a gentleman of his rank and fortune; but that he had wedded with his young Countess on such terms of opportunism and self-interest as were a disgrace to himself and an outrage to her—there was the unpardonable sin. He had wantonly insulted her jealousy; to be rent and mangled by the yellow demon in his turn would serve him excellently right.

The long and the short of the situation is explained in a few words. A certain Mrs. Palmer, who had secured the King’s favour to that extent that letters patent to the Earldom of Castlemaine were already in process of being prepared for her husband, had not failed to qualify herself before her exaltation, it was said, for the sort of business which had procured it; and prominent among her admirers had been named his lordship of Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope. This mature young gentleman—some twenty-eight years of age at the time of which we write—had in consequence found himself a person somewhat “suspect” and ill-considered in the royal regard, and being very willing, in his own interests, to propitiate his master by disavowing the least thought of rivalry with him in the matter of the lady’s favour, had, as the surest proof of his sincerity, paid forthwith his ardent devoirs to a daughter of the Duke of Ormonde, a young lady, conventually bred, of the sweetest looks and innocence. In brief, his suit had sped so well with this darling that their union had not been long in following the days of fervid courtship; when, having secured his object, the perfidious creature dropped his mask, and gave his young wife indirectly but very plainly to understand that his passion for her had been a pretence, that a former idol was by no means dethroned in his heart, and that he had no longer personal use for the affection which he had been at the pains to excite for no other purpose than to throw dust in the eyes of a certain distinguished individual. He had not, of course, said this in so many words; but he had let his manner, his neglect, his indifference imply what amounted to a confession of it in a fashion which was unmistakable, and which no woman, however unsophisticated, could misread, and not one in ten thousand fail to resent.

The young Countess resented it, naturally. She resented it, I am not going so far as to say, as one in her situation might resent it at this day; but she resented it conformably to the different standard of morals which prevailed in her own, and which did not leave even a delicately bred ingénue in complete illusionment as to the conduct of men in general and husbands in particular. She had lived for a year, moreover, within echo of the scandals at Whitehall—where her father, as Lord High Steward, held a prominent position—and enough may have filtered through to her ears therefrom to correct any extravagant notions she might once have formed as to the ideality of the married state. Still, and when all is said, the fine depths of her nature found themselves grievously outraged in this application of a common rule to her particular case; while, being a girl of spirit as well as sense, the desire to retaliate in form on such perfidy awoke in her bosom a passion dangerous to its young security. It was not enough, she felt, to retort on coldness with coldness; she must teach this scorner of her affections the estimate placed by others on a possession of which he did not appear to realize the value, and by opening his eyes through a sense of loss, make him suffer, helplessly and in excess, those very pangs of jealousy with which he had wantonly inflicted her.