The last words were almost inarticulate: her voice failed her from strong emotion; and she wept audibly.
Sir Charles was moved and softened: the spectacle of a woman's tears--of a woman so young, beautiful, and evidently unhappy,--her supplicating countenance and attitude, and the pleading tones of her low soft voice ("an excellent thing in woman!"), were more than his gallantry could support. To such a pleader he had not the heart to say that she must plead in vain: he put his hand to his forehead; considered for a moment or two; and then said----
"My dear Miss Walladmor, I fear I am doing very wrong: what may be quite right for you--may be wrong indeed in me: yet I cannot resist a request of yours urged so persuasively; and I will go to the utmost lengths I can in meeting your wishes; to go further might expose them to the risk of discovery. Use any influence you please with the soldier on guard: I will place only one at the prisoner's door, and will endeavour to select such a one as may be most readily induced to----forget his duty. The centinel at the gate will not challenge any person leaving the castle: he is placed there only to prevent the intrusion of suspicious persons from without. In short proceed as you will; and depend upon my looking away from what passes--which is the best kind of assistance that I can give to your intentions in this case, without running the risk of defeating them."
Miss Walladmor smiled through her tears, and thanked him fervently: Sir Charles bowed and departed.
Sir Charles Davenant was a man of ancient family and of great expectations, but of very small patrimonial fortune: he had been a ward of Sir Morgan Walladmor's; between whom and the Davenants there was some distant relationship: and it was to the Walladmor interest, supported by the Walladmor purse, that Sir Charles was originally indebted for his commission upon entering the army and his subsequent promotion. These were circumstances which could not be unknown to Miss Walladmor: but she had been too delicate and too just to use them as any arguments with Sir Charles upon the present occasion. So much the more however was Sir Charles disposed to recollect them: and he now exerted himself without delay to make such inquiries and arrangements as might put things in train for accomplishing Miss Walladmor's design; conscious as he was that every post might bring down orders from government which would make any such design impracticable.
Miss Walladmor, on her part, found that it would be impossible to pursue this design without the co-operation of her own maid; and for that purpose it was necessary to admit this young person in some degree to her confidence. To any woman of delicate and deep feelings this must naturally have been under ordinary circumstances a painful necessity; but the time was now past for scruples of that sort: and difficulties, which would have appeared insuperable in a situation of free choice, melted away before the extremities of the present case. Moreover, apart from the pain of making such disclosures at all, there was no person to whom Miss Walladmor would more willingly have made them than to her own attendant; for Grace Evans was an amiable girl: had been bred up in superstitious reverence for the whole house of Walladmor; and with regard to Miss Walladmor in particular, who had been the benefactress of her own family in all its members, her attachment was so unlimited that she would have regarded nothing as wrong which her young mistress thought right--nor have suffered any obstacles whatsoever to deter her in the execution of that thing which she had once understood to be her mistress's pleasure. In the present case however there was nothing that could press heavily on her sense of duty; nor any need to appeal to her affections against her natural sense of propriety. On the contrary both were in perfect harmony. She had long known, in common with all the country, the circumstances of Miss Walladmor's early meetings with Edward Nicholas--and the attachment which had grown out of them. And it is observable that to all women endowed with much depth and purity of feeling, more particularly to women in humble life who inherit a sort of superstition on that subject (and are besides less liable to have it shaken by the vulgar ridicule of the world, and the half-sneering tone with which all deep feelings are treated in the more refined classes of society)--love, but especially unfortunate love, is regarded with a sanctity of interest and pity such as they give to religion or to the memory of the dead. In this point women of the lowest rank (as a body) are much more worthy of respect and admiration than those above them, in proportion to the rarity of the temptations which beset them for diverting the natural course of their own affections--and to the less worldly tone of the society[[1]] in which they move. Women however of all classes manifest a purity and elevation of sentiment on this subject to which the coarseness of the other sex rarely ascends.
Hence it was that Miss Walladmor found in her humble attendant a sympathy more profound than she might possibly have met with in many of her own rank. The tender hearted girl had long been deeply affected in secret by the spectacle of early grief and unmerited calamity which had clouded the youthful prospects of her mistress; she was delighted with the honor of the confidence reposed in her: and she immediately set her little head to work, which (to do her justice) was a very woman's head for its fertility in plots and wiles, to consider of the best means for accomplishing the deliverance of the prisoner. Political offences are naturally no offences at all in the eyes of women: and independently of the deeper interest which she took in the present case, she would at any time with hearty good will have given her gratuitous assistance to effect a general gaol delivery of all prisoners whatsoever whose crimes, had relation chiefly to the Secretaries of State for the time being.
A tap at the door, which came at this moment, served to abridge and to guide her scheming. It was a servant with a note from Sir Charles Davenant to the following effect:
"My dear Madam,
"I may possibly be under the necessity of leaving the castle this evening for a few days on some business connected with my military duties: and for that reason, as well as because it is on all accounts adviseable that any attempt which is contemplated should be made without much delay, I take the earliest opportunity of informing you that Thomas Godber, a late servant on the Walladmor establishment, will relieve guard at eight o'clock this night. He was, I believe, recently a groom or helper in the castle stables: and he enlisted into one of the two troops now quartered in the castle with the knowledge and approbation of Sir Morgan. I know nothing of him more than this, and that he bears the character amongst his fellow troopers of a goodnatured young man. But I presume that, as a former servant of the family, he shares in the general attachment which all about her manifest for Miss Walladmor. On this account I have placed him on guard in the only station which is of any importance. It will be necessary, I must add, that he should go out of the way for a time after the escape of the prisoner.