Yet the man's fear was so great that he might even by now have been denounced by Sir Charles Ames to the officer of the guard at Kensington Palace, that more than once he rose from the box and, on hearing any slight noise in the square, ran to the window and peered out of it and down into the road, and then came back to his task of packing up his valuables. And all the while as he did so he muttered to himself continually:
"The notary must see to all--I will write to him from France. He had best sell all and remit the money. England is done with! Neither Hanoverian nor Jacobite now. Curse them both and all." Then he laughed, a little sniggering, feeble laugh--it was wondrous that, in the state his mind was and with the ruin which was upon him, he could have been moved by such a trifle!--and chuckled to himself and said:
"If Luke comes back now he will find the door barred forever. A faithful servant! A faithful servant! Well, his home is gone. Let him go drown himself."
He fetched next all the silver which he could find about the house, and which had been brought forth on his return from the coffers where it had lain since his father's flight into France years ago--candelabras, old dishes and baskets and a coffee pot, with a tankard or so--and hurled them into the strong box and locked it securely.
Then, after once more peering into the square and seeing that all was clear, he descended to the hall, opened the door an inch or two and again glanced his eye round, and, a moment later, drew the door to and went forth into the night.
[CHAPTER XV.]
UNITED.
All through Picardy, from Artois to the Ile de France, from Normandy to Champagne, the wheat was a-ripening early that year, the trees in the orchards and gardens of the rich, fruitful province had their boughs bent to the earth with their loads, and, so great was the summer heat, the cattle stood in the rivers and pools for coolness, or sought shelter under the elms and poplars dotted about by the river's banks.
Yet, heat notwithstanding, the great bare road that runs from Calais through Boulogne, Abbeville, and Amiens, as well as through Clermont and Chantilly and St. Denis to Paris, had still its continuous traffic to which neither summer nor winter made much difference, except when the snows of the latter belated many diligences and waggons--for it was the high road between the coast and the capital. And thus it was now, in this hot, broiling June of 1746. Along that road, passing each other sometimes, sometimes breaking down, sometimes, by the carelessness of drunken drivers or postillions, getting their wheels into ditches and sticking there for hours, went almost every vehicle that was known in the France of those days. Monseigneur's carriage, drawn by four or six stout travelling roadsters--wrenched for the occasion from the service of Monseigneur's starving tenants--and with Monseigneur within it looking ineffably bored at the heat and the dust and the inferior canaille who obtruded themselves on his vision--would lumber by the diligence, or Royal Post, farmed from Louis the well-beloved--so, loved, perhaps, because he despised his people and said France would last his time, which was long enough!--or be passed by a desobligéant, or chaise for one person, or by a fat priest on a post-horse, or by a travelling carriage full of provincials en route for Paris. Also, to add to the continuous traffic on this road in that period, were berlins à quatre chevaux, carriers' waggons loaded with merchandise either from or to England, countless horsemen civil and military, and innumerable pedestrians, since the accomplishment of long journeys on foot, with a wallet slung on the back, was then one of the most ordinary methods of travelling amongst the humbler classes.
Seated in the banquette, or hooded seat, attached to the back of the diligence from Calais to Amiens, on one of these broiling days in June of 1746, were Kate Fane--as now she alone would describe herself or allow herself to be styled--and her father. They had crossed from England in the ordinary packet-boat a day or two before, and were at this moment between Abbeville and Amiens, at which latter place they proposed to remain for the present at least. To look at her none would have supposed that, not more than a week or two before, this golden-haired girl, now dressed in a plain-checked chintz, with, to protect her head from the heat, a large flapping straw hat, had been discarded by the man whom she had imagined to be her husband; had been told that she was, possibly, no lawful wife. For she looked happier, brighter at this time than she had ever done since she went through a form of marriage with the Viscount Fordingbridge, because--though not in the way that he had falsely insinuated--she was free of him.