Mistress Wilding

by Rafael Sabatini

On the morrow of Sedgemoor, the town of Bridgwater became invested—infested were no whit too strong a word—by the King's forces under Feversham and the odious Kirke, and there began a reign of terror for the town. The prisons were choked with attainted and suspected rebels. From Bridgwater to Weston Zoyland the road was become an avenue of gallows, each bearing its repulsive grimace-laden burden; for the King's commands were unequivocal, and hanging was the order of the day.

It is not my desire at this stage to surfeit you with the horrors that were perpetrated during that hideous week of July, when no man's life was safe from the royal butchers. The awful campaign of Jeffries and his four associates was yet to follow, but it is doubtful if it could compare in ruthlessness with that of Feversham and Kirke. At least, when Jeffries came, men were given a trial—or what looked like it—and there remained them a chance, however slender, of acquittal, as many lived to prove thereafter. With Feversham there was no such chance. And it was of this circumstance that Sir Rowland Blake took the fullest and the cowardliest advantage.

There can be no doubt that Sir Rowland was a villain. It might be urged for him that he was a creature of circumstance, and that had circumstances been other it is possible he had been a credit to his name. But he was weak in character, and out of that weakness he had developed a Herculean strength in villainy. Failure had dogged him in everything he undertook. Broken at the gaming-tables, hounded out of town by creditors, he was in desperate straits to repair his fortunes and, as we have seen, he was not nice in his endeavours to achieve that end.

Ruth Westmacott's fair inheritance had seemed an easy thing to conquer, and to its conquest he had applied himself to suffer defeat as he had suffered it in all things else. But Sir Rowland did not yet acknowledge himself beaten, and the Bridgwater reign of terror dealt him a fresh hand—a hand of trumps. With this he came boldly to renew the game.

He was as smooth as oil at first, a very penitent, confessing himself mad in what he had done on that Sunday night—mad with despair and rage at having been defeated in the noble task to which he had turned his hands. His penitence might have had little effect upon the Westmacotts had he not known how to insinuate that it might be best for them to lend an ear to it—and a forgiving one.

“You will tell Mr. Westmacott, Jasper,” he had said, when Jasper told him that they could not receive him, “that he would be unwise not to see me, and the same to Mistress Wilding.”

And old Jasper had carried his message, and had told Richard of the wicked smile that had been on Sir Rowland's lips when he had uttered it.

Now Richard was in many ways a changed man since that night at Weston Zoyland. A transformation seemed to have been wrought in him as odd as it was sudden, and it dated from the moment when with tears in his eyes he had wrung Wilding's hand in farewell. Where precept had failed, Richard found himself converted by example. He contrasted himself in that stressful hour with great-souled Anthony Wilding, and saw himself as he was, a weakling, strong only in vicious ways. Repentance claimed him; repentance and a fine ambition to be worthier, to resemble as nearly as his nature would allow him this Anthony Wilding whom he took for pattern. He changed his ways, abandoned drink and gaming, and gained thereby a healthier countenance. Then in his zeal he overshot his mark. He developed a taste for Scripture-reading, bethought him of prayers, and even took to saying grace to his meat. Indeed—for conversion, when it comes, is a furious thing—the swing of his soul's pendulum threatened now to carry him to extremes of virtue and piety. “O Lord!” he would cry a score of times a day, “Thou hast brought up my soul from the grave; Thou hast kept me alive that I should not go down to the pit!”

But underlying all this remained unfortunately the inherent weakness of his nature—indeed, it was that very weakness and malleability made this sudden and wholesale conversion possible.

Upon hearing Sir Rowland's message his heart fainted, despite his good intentions, and he urged that perhaps they had better hear what the baronet might have to say.