My Lady Peggy Goes to Town

by Frances Aymar Mathews

This was Lady Peggy, at a loss to know the meaning of the shouts, not having been near enough to the scene of the encounter to learn its purport, and only now realizing that ’twas herself was sought and meant by the concerted cry that rent the air. Scenting a new if unknown danger, she followed her woman’s instinct, and, in the waiting pause that succeeded the tumultuous call, Peggy fled to the landing, pressed a handful of shillings, almost her last, into the palm of the only boatman there, jumped into the wherry and bade him get her as swiftly as he could to Queenhithe Stairs; for determined was she, now more than ever, to leave no traces in her wake, and to return, at all risks, to Mr. Brummell’s house for her bundle of woman’s clothes.

For a long way down the Thames the renewed cry of the Vauxhall crush rang in her distracted ears:

“Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin McTart! Sir Robin! Sir Robin! Where are you? Come forth! Show yourself!”

But none other came forth, and the Baronet, taking such courage as he might through his astonishment at Sir Percy’s being alive,—and not forgetting, even at this point, to reckon how much the lying assassins had mulcted him of, now, in the second breathless halt of the calling his own name, waved his weapon and answered it, saying again:

“I am Sir Robin McTart!”

“Prove it,” shouted Chalmers, with a derisive shrug.

“Faith! and so he can by me!” exclaimed the panting Vicar, as, borne rather by the surging of the people than by his slender legs, the tenant of the cloth was pitched somewhat unceremoniously head-first into his pupil’s middle. Sputtering, but yet winning the attention which truth and the clergy usually and righteously obtain, the Vicar raised his right hand, and, laying his left on the Baronet’s shoulder, he spoke:

“This is Sir Robin McTart of Robinswold, Kent. I have known him from his birth; his father before him; he has been my pupil. Who dares use his name than himself is an impostor and a thief!”

“What!” and now comes forward Mr. Brummell with open hand. “And my old friend,” says he, “’sdeath, Mr. What’s-your-name, you were a curate when we met last, twenty years ago, but I remember you, Sir, at Robinswold. So this,” surveying the Baronet, “is my old friend’s son and heir? Of a truth he favors his sire more than the pretty young rapscallion that’s been a-fooling us all for now these four weeks past; for gentlemen,” adds the Beau, turning to Sir Percy, “’tis as well we confess ourselves to have been duped. Gad, Sir,” this sotto voce to Percy alone, “I always wondered where Sir Hector found that handsome lad, for he was as ugly a gentleman as ever was wedded to wife.”

After the storm there came that calm which is the inevitable successor, save that, in this case, while the noise subsided, the wonder grew. Every one of Mr. Brummell’s company and all of the rest of the world beside, was rehearsing his and her own surmise as to the identity of the young gentleman who had, for above a month, been the town toast, and who had now disappeared as suddenly as he came. Some believed him to be Tom Kidde himself; some, a Lord out of France; some, a Prince of the blood; some, the Devil; some, an astrologer; there was no lack of inventions as to Her Ladyship’s identity by the time the ten minutes of Sir Percy’s setting had come to an end.