MOLL DAVIS

Somewhere about the western angle now formed by the junction of Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road, there stood in the year 1661 “The Mischief” Inn. It was a substantial building, consisting of two gabled sections, divided by a third and wider having a pent-roof, and forming with the others a deep recess, in whose ground quarters was plentiful accommodation for the stabling of horses. At the level of the first story ran a railed wooden balcony, common to all the bedrooms behind; and in the yard below were rough benches and trestle-tables disposed about, where customers might forgather to discuss, over their pipes and purl, such topics as went seasonably with them—it might be his popular Majesty’s latest roguery, or “Old Mob’s,” almost as great a thief and favourite.

“The Mischief,” standing as it did on the great highway running east and west, formed a convenient terminus for travellers journeying from the contiguous wilds of Berkshire and Wiltshire, the majority of whom, for reasons of economy, came by “waggon.” This was a vast road craft, with a tilt, and tyres to its wheels a foot wide, whose consistent record of progress never exceeded three miles to the hour. It was drawn commonly by six sturdy roadsters in double harness, and bearing yokes with swinging bells at the hames of their collars; and time was never of the essence of its contract. But it was safe, if slow, being well prepared and armed against surprises, which were by no means of infrequent occurrence by the days-long way, especially as London was approached.

Oxford Street itself, indeed, bore a villainous reputation. It stretched somewhat on the borders of the town, with wild and wooded country going northwards from it, and was handy therefore to the gentry whose profession it was to cut purses from the skirts of civilization. Latterly, its heterogeneous domiciles had shown a tendency to increase and multiply, and, by adding to their number on either side the way, to extend the boundaries of the comparative security which obtained about the central regions of Westminster and Whitehall. But it was still a perilous district, the very expression and moral of which appeared epitomized in the sign which swung on a high gallows, beside a wooden water-trough, before the front of our inn, and which depicted a poor unhappy citizen bearing upon his suffering shoulders a drunken scold. In the neighbourhood of the building clustered, like disreputable relations, a knot of tenements, which included a pawnbroker’s and a gin-shop; and southwards from it zigzagged a muddy bridle-way—known appropriately as Hog Lane—which, traversing a motley course, half town, half rookery, debouched finally upon the village of Charing, where in an open place stood the monument with its gilt cross.

So, approximately, appeared this particle of our London in the year following that of the King’s Grace’s restoration, A.D. 1661. It is easier to explain a frog of to-day out of a Pliocene leviathan than it is to trace the growth of a huge metropolis from such paltry beginnings. The tendency of Nature is to reduce from the unwieldy to the workable, while that of man is to magnify his productions out of all proportion with the simple necessities they are wanted to supply. That is why towns increase while animals grow smaller.

The yard of “The Mischief” Inn was fairly crowded on that particular June morning which witnessed the encounter between its landlord and Mrs. Moll Davis. This young lady had come to town out of Wiltshire, by waggon, some fortnight or more earlier, and, putting up at the inn, had succeeded already in outstaying a welcome which was wont to be continued to such angels only as came franked with a sufficiency of their golden namesakes. In short, Mrs. Davis could not, or would not, pay her score; and, since she failed to quit the landlord, and he declined to release her without settlement, a state of deadlock had arisen between them, which seemed to promise no conclusion but through the better ability of one or the other to “throw” its adversary in a wrestle of wit—a contest in which the lady, at least, need expect no “law.” And it was at this juncture that Mr. George Hamilton appeared upon the scene.

He was a very agreeable young gentleman, of cavalier rank, debonair and smart to foppery, which as yet, however, stopped short of the extravagance which later came to characterize it. He wore his own long chestnut hair, and a lingering tone of sobriety marked his dress. The times, in fact, had not quite pulled free their damasked wings from the Puritan case which had enclosed them, though certain foreshadowed iridescences gave promise of the splendour to come; and, moreover, the gentleman had ridden in that morning from the country, and had been in no mind to stake his sweetest trappings against the habitual quagmires of Oxford Street. He dismounted at “The Mischief” for his morning draught, and, giving his horse to hold to his servant, sat down at a table in the yard, and hammered for the drawer.

George was a bold youth of his inches—which were sufficient—but quite immoral and unscrupulous. He fitted amiably into his age, which expected nothing better of a man than good company. That he supplied, and could have supplied in purer brand if good-fellowship had been its inevitable corollary. But there he lacked. Generally he wished no man good but where he saw his own profit of the sentiment; and he could be an inhuman friend. He had regular, rather full features, and a rolling brown eye which took in much that had been kindlier left unobserved; and, like most of his order, he was infernally pugnacious. While his ale was bringing, he sat, one arm akimbo, the other crossed on his knee, conning, as if they were cattle, the group about him, and humming an abstracted tune. There was no one who interested him much, or who touched a note of originality in all the commonplace crowd which surrounded him. Grooms, carters, local traders; a seedy rakehell or two; a lowering Anabaptist, sipping his ale with a toast in it, and furtively conscious the while of the scrutiny of a yellow trained-band Captain lolling by the tap door; a prowling pitcher-bawd, lean, red-eyed, and hugging his famine as he ogled about for custom—one and all they conformed to type, and presented nothing beyond it worth considering. George felt quarrelsome over the matter, as if he had been defrauded of a legitimate expectation. True, mankind in its ordinary habits and conversation could hardly be looked to at the best for more than diluted epigram; yet there should be a limit to the insipidity of things, and he felt it almost his duty to insist upon the fact. Possibly his brain was a little fevered from last night’s debauch.

The seedy Mohawks were his nearest neighbours. Said one to his fellow, in the words of Banquo’s murderer: “It will be rain to-night.”

Hamilton turned on him.

“Who says so, clout?”

“Sir!” exclaimed the young man, startled aback.

“I say, who says so?”

“I say so.”

“Then a pox on your profanity! Are you to arrogate to yourself the Almighty’s prerogatives? It shall rain or not as the Lord decrees.”

“Hallelujah, young sir!” boomed the Anabaptist.

“Do you say it will not rain?” demanded George, addressing him.

“Nay,” answered the Fifth-Monarchist; “but I trust it will not.”

“Then you are as bad as the other,” said George, “since you are as ready to lament the Almighty’s dispensations.” He snapped again on the luckless first speaker. “I am a man of submission, for my part, and content to accept whatever comes—even if it be a fool to spit himself on my rapier-point. I’ll take you on that question of your damned divinity.”

The landlord came up at the moment, bringing his drink, and simultaneously there appeared, on the balcony above, the figure of a young girl. A certain hush had fallen on the crowd, expectant of a fracas.

“Zoons!” said Boniface sourly; “we’ll have no talk of swords, by your leave. No swords, my lord, none. This is no hedge-tavern; we want no fire-eaters here! We’ve a reputation to maintain.”

He was a gross, club-fisted man, with a sooty underlip. It needed such to keep a grip on the sort of company he dealt with.

“A reputation for mischief, by the token,” said Hamilton derisively, “or you fly false colours.”

The landlord grumbled violently. “No steel, by God! I say. I’m master here.” He was already out of temper, and, glancing up, found a timely butt for his wrath in the figure on the balcony. With an exclamation of fury, he heaved his shoulders through the mob until he came under.

“Here, you!” he roared. “Who let your ladyship out of duress?”

She nodded and smiled down.

“A hairpin,” she said. “I managed to pick the lock with it.”

She was young—almost a child, with blue eyes laughing in a saucy face. From under a black whimple, set coquettishly on her head and garnished with a sprig of rosemary, filched from the kitchen, hung thick brown curls over dolly-pink cheeks. A deep-falling collar, quite plain, was set about her slender throat, and loosely knotted into it was a tasselled cord. An underskirt of stone blue, and an upper one of brown, bunched at the tail into a little pannier, completed a very attractive picture. Hamilton, his attention drawn to it, sat up, interested and mollified at once.

“Then,” cried the landlord, with an oath or two, “you’ll e’en return whence you came, or I’ll bring the law on you for house-breaking! Bing-awast! Back you go to your chamber, bobtail!”

The lady nodded again, pursing cherry lips; and prompt the answer came from them—

“I’ll see you damned first!”

The crowd bawled with laughter; but the landlord, purple in the face, turned to storm the heights by way of a flight of steps which gave access to the balcony from the yard corner. Before he had well started, however, Hamilton’s voice stayed him—

“Hold, vintner! Steel or no steel, I take up this quarrel!”

He had risen, and now advanced to the scene of action, the press giving way to him. His air, his obvious rank, no less than his hint of a dangerous temper, were his sufficient passports, not only with the company but to the landlord’s better consideration. The man scowled and muttered; but he stood halted. Hamilton blew a kiss to the rosy nymph before he turned on her persecutor.

“Duress! House-breaking!” quoth he. “What terms are these to hold an angel fast? Tell us her crime, bluffer!”

“Angel!” responded the landlord deeply. “Aye, a pretty angel, to cully a poor innkeeper out of his dues! Look you here, master—you that are so righteous—will you pay your angel her shot?”

“She owes you board and lodging?”

“Aye, she does; seven days and more.”

George looked up at the balcony.

“Is that true, child?”

The girl had already produced a little handkerchief, which she now dabbed to her eyes, her breath catching very touchingly.

“Sure I would find the money if I could,” she said. “He might give me credit for my good intentions.”

“I’ll give you credit for nothing!” roared the landlord. “God A’mighty! She’ll be asking for a cash advance on her good intentions next!”

George hushed him down.

“Whence do you hail, child,” he said, “and whither make?”

She whimpered. “I’m but a poor maid, out of Wiltshire, kind sir, and ’tis a husband I seek.”

“A husband!” quoth he. “Alack that I’m none myself, to accommodate your need. But if a bachelor might serve——”

The crowd hooted again.

“Pay her shot, Captain, and hold her hostage for it.”

“Shall I?” said Hamilton. He addressed the childish countenance above, observing for the first time the tiniest of patches placed under the corner of its baby mouth. That gave him some sniggering thought. It seemed to suggest the footlight Chloe rather than the genuine article. Moreover the baggage appeared, for all her seeming innocence, quite self-possessed. He wondered. “What do you say, child?” he demanded.

She had fallen back a little, using her handkerchief. Now she started, as if conscious of some question, and leaned forward again.

“Was it the gentleman with the plum-pudding eye that spoke?” she said.

A clap of new laughter greeted the seeming artless sally. George cachinnated with the rest, but in a mortified fashion.

“Yes,” says he; “and a very sweet simile, my dear.” He turned to the landlord. “What is she, vintner?”

“God knows,” answered the man morosely. “A strolling play-actress, like as not. She’s no good, whatever she is.”

“No good is a better woman than you, you radish!” cried the girl.

“That’s certain,” said Hamilton. “You are answered, bluffer.”

“Answered?” said the man. “Aye, I know her. Trust her young tongue to answer, though you provoked it in the middle of a song.”

“Song? Does she sing?”

“Does she not—like the wicked young syrup she is. Sings like a kettle.”

The lady laughed.

“And best when in hot water. Shall I sing to you now?”

“Sing for your supper, like Master Tom Tucker,” said the Cavalier. “Yes, sing, by all means; only come down to do it. I’ll go bail for her,” he assured the landlord.

The man grumbled, but submitted, and George beckoned the nymph.

“Descend,” said he, “and give us of your quality. You shall not lose by it.”

She nodded, disappeared for a moment, and returning with a lute, ran to the stairs, descended to the yard, and stood among the company, confident and unabashed. And straight and readily she touched the strings, with slender fingers seeming oddly native to that tuneful contact, and sang the little song which afterwards came to be the most associated with her naughty name.

My lodging is on the cold ground,

And hard, very hard, is my fare,

But that which grieves me more

Is the coldness of my dear.

Oh, turn, love, I prythee, love, turn

to me,

For thou art the only one, love,

that art ador’d by me.

I’ll twine thee a garland of straw, love,

I’ll marry thee with a rush ring,

My frozen hopes will thaw, love,

And merrily we will sing.

Then turn to me, my own love;

I prythee, love, turn to me,

For thou art the only one, love,

that art ador’d by me.

There was silence as she ended, for indeed the child’s voice was of the sweetest, as full and natural as a bird’s; and then came a round of applause. Hamilton hushed it, rather angrily. “Would ye slam down the lid of the virginal while the last notes still ring in it?” he said. “Unfeeling dolts!”

Sweet music touched him; perhaps it was the only gentleness that could. It wrought a glamour which willy-nilly fooled his better reason. It did so now, conscious as he was of his own enthralment. Here was no longer a child adventuress, but a plaintive innocent, melodiously sorrowing in Nature’s very voice. He was never a giver in the disinterested sense; now the song decided a point on which he had hitherto wavered. He turned impulsively to the landlord.

“What is her debt?” said he. “I discharge it.”

“Thirty shillings and a groat,” answered the other promptly.

“Knock off the groat,” said Hamilton, “for your contribution. What, man, who calls the tune must pay the piper.”

He would hear no remonstrances, but waved the innkeeper away. “Come aside with me,” he said to the girl; and, very willingly it seemed, she obeyed. He led her to a table apart, where he sat her down, himself facing her, and there was none of the company rash enough to question by so much as a snigger that implied claim to privacy in a public place. Most dispersed about their business, while the few who remained gave the couple a respectfully wide berth.

“Now,” said Hamilton, “who are you, pretty one?”

“A poor deserted wife, kind sir,” she answered, “as ever wedded a villain.”

“A wife—you baby!”

“Please, I was married in long clothes,” said she.

“And who taught you that song?”

“Grief,” she said—“and Mr. Bedding.”

“Your husband?”

“O, no!” says she. “There was no bedding with him.”

He conned her shrewdly. He was already beginning to recover himself, and to suspect a hussy under this rose.

“Why not?” he said.

“He was that jealous,” she answered, “if the moon looked in at the window, he would accuse me of making eyes at the man in her.”

“That was in Wiltshire?”

“Where our home was, sure.”

“And so you left him?”

“Mr. Bedding came by, and took me to sing for him. But a strolling company was never to my taste.”

“So you left it and came to town?”

“I went home again.”

“To your husband?”

“No, he was gone.”

“Gone?”

“He had taken umbrage, as they call it—he was always one to mind a little thing—and off’d with it to Jericho, leaving me nothing but his curse—not so much as a sixpence beside.”

“And so you followed him—to Jericho?”

“Not I. I followed my own inclinations, and they brought me here.”

“Well, inclinations spend more than they hoard, as a rule. Haven’t you found it so?”

“Sure, I’ve no need to hoard, when kind gentlemen pay my bills for me.”

“That’s as it may be, Mrs. —— By the by, what is your name?”

“Mary Davis, by your leave, kind sir; but my intimates call me Moll. Please, what is yours?”

“George Hamilton, Moll.”

“That’s a good name, George. Are you of the King’s Court?”

“I’ve been there.”

“I do so long to see the King—a dear, kind gentleman. They call him in our parts the father of his people. Is he?”

“Well,—of quite a number of them. Why do you want to see the King?”

“Only—O, just to see him!”

George wagged a finger at the artless young baggage.

“O-ho! Mrs. Mollinda,” says he. “Does the wind lie that way? You have begun early, true enough; and you’ll not fail for lack of confidence in your pretty wits. But it’s a long climb from the cradle to the four-poster.” He laughed. “Upon my word—the baby’s assurance! and by way of such obstacles!”

She turned pained, troubled eyes on the scoffer, making as if to rise.

“What have I said in my innocence?”

“Nothing at all,” says he. “Your innocence never spoke a word. But, by God! your looks are voluble. I’ faith, you’re the sweetest darling, Mrs. Moll, and for that I’ll be your friend, if you will, as a decent young gentleman should. What would you have me do? Find your husband for you?”

“Alack! Is that to be my friend?”

“The best, maybe—but by and by. Who knows? He may come to serve us with royalty yet. Do you trust me, Moll?”

“Sure a poor girl like me must live on trust.”

“So she must, and live very well too. Did that rogue of a landlord really keep you fast?”

“On my honour he did.”

“Don’t swear by false idols.”

“What have I said now?”

“That he put you on your honour.”

“No, that he did not. My honour’s not for such as him.”

“No, indeed. It flies at higher game. Well, he must keep you still, for a while.”

“Not he!”

“He must, I say. You must bide here till I can arrange of your fortunes. I’m but by the road, and will come again anon. Never fear; I’ll see you well provided. But you must lie close for the moment, if you would have my help.”

“In what?”

“To see the King, of course.”

She clapped her little hands in artless glee.

“Shall I see the King?”

“See him and sing to him, perhaps. In the meantime you’re mine to dispose of. Is it a bargain?” He rose, and she with him, her expression downcast and demure. “That’s well,” said he. “Give me a buss, Mrs. Moll, in token of our understanding.”

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.

A perilous policy; but one actuated, at least in its inception, by the most righteous of motives. The bee that stings deep, however, too often destroys itself in the loss of its own weapon; and so it may be with offended chastity. This young Countess, seeking about for an instrument with which to achieve her purpose, came near to her downfall in the choice which opportunity, not to speak of kinship, imposed on her. Mr. George Hamilton, her cousin-german, was its name.

Now see her as she sits affecting to work, with an occasional glance askance, half derisive, half wistful, at her husband’s pretended preoccupation, and admit that she is proposing to herself a very risky course in thus feigning to lease her charms to a tenant so unscrupulous as Master George. The young wit of her, the natural delicacy warring with passion, the emotions engendered of such a combat; and all housed in a form as pretty as that of a Dresden shepherdess, as pink and white, as endearing in its childish bloom—what could these all be but so many provocations to a man of Hamilton’s antecedents to play, by diverting to his own advantage the sensibilities so fondly entrusted to his sympathy, the part of Machiavellian seducer? He never hesitated, as a fact, but started at once to sort the hand which Fortune had so gratuitously thrust upon him. It was his good luck at the outset that his cousinship, aided and abetted by his close intimacy with the Earl, gave him the entrée at all times into those quarters at Whitehall which Chesterfield enjoyed in right of his position as Groom of the Stole to her Majesty; but, like the practised intrigant that he was, he used his privilege with discretion. He was really, to do him justice, very enamoured of the lady; and, according to his code, free of all moral responsibility in seeking to make a cuckold of a man who, though he was his personal friend and confidant, had chosen deliberately to invite such reprisals on the part of a faith he had grossly abused. At the same time, he did not under-estimate the delicacy of his task, or the strength of the instinctive prejudices he had to overcome; though sure enough such obstacles but added a zest to the pursuit. What as yet he did not guess was that his own eyes were not alone, nor even the most compelling, in having discovered and marked down for capture a tender prey which circumstances seemed to have made quite peculiarly attainable. In short, his Majesty’s brother, the Duke of York, was already suspected of a leaning in the same direction.

Poor little, abused Countess! But perhaps it would be better not to pity her prematurely.

She threw down her work, on a sudden uncontrollable impulse, and rising to her feet, looked across at the insensible bear opposite. Some emotion of love and forbearance was working, it seemed, in her; she hesitated an instant, gazing with full eyes, the knuckles of her little right hand held to her lips, then hurried across the room, and addressed her husband.

“Cannot we be friends, Philip, before it is—too late?”

He did not even stir, but just raised his lids indolently and offensively. He was, to do him justice, a personable man as to his upper half, with a fine head of mouse-coloured hair and a ready brain under it; but irresolution spoke in his legs, which were weedy, and so, inasmuch as the strength of a rope is its weakest part, affected the stability of the entire structure, physical and moral. He was, in fact, a waverer and unreliable, overbearing to others because uncertain of himself, much subject to moods and passions, and always, as is the case with those whose vanity is up in arms at the least suspicion of criticism, more disposed to force his way by rudeness than to win it by consideration. But he was skilled with his sword, and that, in a quarrelsome age, procured him a better title to respect than a hundred courtesies would have done.

“Too late for what?” he drawled languidly.

She made a little gesture of helplessness, then rallied to her task.

“Is this,” she said, “the natural fruit of the love you expressed for me, before—before I became your wife?”

“When you talk of Nature, madam,” he answered, stirring and yawning, then relapsing into his apathetic attitude, “you forget that with her a single season covers the whole contract of matrimony.”

“Then is our season ended?”

“You are Lady Chesterfield,” he said. “Is not that sufficient answer?”

“I want no wifehood without love, Philip. Has so little of me proved so much?”

He shrugged in a way which might have meant anything or nothing. She went on—

“Or did you woo me under false pretences from the first, making me, as I more than suspect, merely your unconscious stalking-horse to the King’s favour?”

He laughed, but a little uneasily.

“You get these fancies into your head,” he said.

“I do,” she answered; “but they come, I think, to stay. They are not like your fancies—for this woman or the other—that can be put off or on to suit your worldly convenience. The King has claimed one of your fancies, has he not, my lord—a wedded woman, too, Barbara Palmer by name? That was a shameful thing for both of you; but most shameful for the man who could deceive an innocent maid to curry favour with his sovereign. Did you not marry me to show him your heart was wholly divorced from that earlier idol?”

He drew in his breath, with an oath.

“By God, madam, this is too much!”

“It is too much, indeed,” she said. And then suddenly she held out entreating hands, her eyes brimming.

“Philip, I could forgive you that—even that—it was before you knew me—if only you would be to me again what you seemed. Will you, Philip? If any suspicion of my learning and resenting the truth has caused this coldness in you, keeping you aloof in your pride, O, forget it! I am not exacting; I know what men must be. Say only that you hold me in your true heart above that—that woman, and I will pardon you everything. Philip, before it is too late!”

He started furiously to his feet, flinging the book in his hand away from him.

“Pardon! Too late! That threat again! Zounds, madam, you presume. I neither guess nor heed your meaning. I cherish an image, do I? Very well, I cherish it. As to yourself, you are distasteful to me. For what reason? Simply because you are you—no other in the world, I assure you. And, if that is not enough——”

He stopped, checked in the midst of his wrath by the look in the eyes before him. It was not submission or fright; it was the spark of a new amazed dawn. That he had said the thing he could never recall occurred to him suddenly with an odd sick qualm. He tried to recover the thread of his discourse, but only to have it tail off into inarticulate stammerings.

“Enough?” she said in a low voice. “O, truly—and to spare. Distasteful! Am I that to you? Why, so are all sweets to the carrion-loving dog. Well, I am well content to have your loathing, sir. Will you please be gone: there is nothing noisome here to tempt your palate. Distasteful!” She took a step forward, a single one, and his eyes flickered. He thought, perhaps, she was going to strike him. “Now, listen to this,” she said. “I will never, before God, utter word to you again till you have gone down on your knees to me and asked my pardon for that insult.”

She turned her shoulder on him and walked apart. He watched her, lowering, and forced a laugh he meant for one of mockery.

“Silence between us!” he said. “Be assured I make a second, madam, in that welcome compact.”

He sat down again, and, picking up his book, affected to become absorbed in it. But all the time his pulses were thumping and his eyes furtively conning the rebel over the leaf edges. A spot of bright colour was on her cheek; she trilled a little air, as she seated herself in her former position, as naturally and light-heartedly as if she had never a trouble in the world. “Damn her!” he thought. “To take the upper hand of me like that!” His fury heaved and fermented in him like yeast in a dough-pan. He sneered at her pretence of cheerful abstraction. “She is thinking of me,” he reflected, “as I am of her.”

He tried to escape her image, to get genuinely interested in his book; but his indignation—and something else, that qualmish something—would always come between. To be faced and flouted by this bantling, adjudged and sentenced of her furious young disdain! It was intolerable—not to be endured. A dozen times he twitched, on the verge of an explosion, and a dozen times, with an ever-diminishing heat, restrained himself. It was true enough, he thought, as his fume evaporated, that he had not condescended to tact in his repulse of her. Diplomatically, at least, he should have been more tender of her feelings, have attained his end more surely without brutality. She had some reason for her resentment; and he must admit she had looked well in expressing it. A clear conscience burned with a clear fire, and there was something cleanly piquant in the warmth it emitted. It gave his arid veins a new sensation. Comparing those immature lines with the fuller which had hitherto besotted his fancy, he found a curious interest in studying them. It was like extracting a fresh, slender, white kernel from its grosser husk—a sweet and rather tasty discovery. Had his eyes been at fault, and his palate? Infatuation, perhaps, had blinded the one and cloyed the other. Well, he might come yet to humour this situation—even to atone in some measure for the unkindness of which he had been guilty. But not at once! She must be taught her little lesson before he could afford to unbend. She was really a pretty child, when all was said and done—a brunette, with large blue eyes appealing and alluring, and a complexion like china roses. The rest, did he choose to will it, should come to ripen in the sun of love, like a peach hung on a wall. There was a thrill in the sense of that power possessed and withheld. With a sigh that was half a new rapture, he turned resolutely to his reading.

And at that moment Mr. George Hamilton was announced. He entered gaily, looking the pink of health and comeliness, and, nodding a cheery greeting to my lord his friend, went to the lady, like one full confident of his privileged position.

“Good-morrow, cousin,” quoth he.

She dropped her hands, with her work, into her lap, and, leaning forward, looked up into his face with a smile.

“You are welcome, cousin,” she answered. “I was bored, i’ faith.”

He just glanced at the husband, and laughed.

“In such company, Kate?”

She raised innocent brows. “What company? My own, do you mean? There is none other here but sticks and stocks.”

“Well, say I meant your own. Can that bore you?”

“O, faith, it can!”

“O, faith, then, you’re hard to please!”

“’Tis proof I’m not, for your saying so pleases me. Lord, what a novelty to hear a compliment!”

He conned her with a puzzled air, then took the piece of work from her hands and stood quizzing it.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A sampler,” she answered. “Have you never seen one before?”

“Not in your hands.”

“It has been in my hands, nevertheless, for—O God, I don’t know! Fifty years, belike. I began it when I was a little girl, and time goes slowly in these days.” She jumped to her feet, and stood at his shoulder, pointing out the figures of the design. “Do you see? Here’s what I noted most, put down as in a commonplace book—people and texts, and even animals, including a number of my friends. Am I not a Lely in portraiture, cousin? Here’s my dear nurse, and here my governess to the life.”

“To the knife, she looks rather. Who’s this—your father?”

“Of course, stupid.”

“Do you put in none but those you favour?”

“O no! Here and there is one distasteful.”

“Was this a favourite cat?”

She pouted.

“No, sir, a dog.”

“And here’s your husband?”

“No, another dog.”

“H’m! You can get a likeness, indeed.”

My lord, slamming down his book somewhat violently, got to his feet with a haste which seemed to belie the leisureliness of the stretch and yawn which followed.

“Am I not to have my place among the favoured?” says Hamilton.

“Would you like it?” questioned the artful rogue. “I should be hard put to’t to portray so perfect a gentleman. They have not come my way of late. What hath happened to your brooch, cousin? Stay while I refasten it for you.”

He lifted his chin obediently, while she manipulated, with deft, slender fingers, the jewel at his cravat. My lord, with a quick, loud clearing of his throat, started and came across the room.

“What, George!” said he. “I vow I was so lost in what I read I hardly noted you. What’s wrong with your cravat?”

Hamilton, his head still tilted, responded brusquely but nosily—“It’s chokid be, that’s all.”

Her little ladyship laughed.

“I’ll be done in a moment, poor man.”

“Zounds!” blustered her husband. “Here, let me fasten it!”

She ignored him altogether.

“How sweet you smell, cousin!” she said. “Is it kissing-comfits?”

“That’s for sweet lips to answer,” gurgled Hamilton.

My lord, in a vicious spasm, gripped the little wrist and wrenched it from its task. Hamilton cried “Damnation!” and my lady, putting the wounded limb to her mouth, looked up at him with wide appealing eyes.

“Some beast has hurt me,” she said. “Take care of yourself, cousin, while I go and bathe it.”

Half crying, she turned away and ran from the room. The moment she was gone the two men bristled upon one another, my lord opening with a snarl—

“There are limits, sir, to my forbearance.”

“The first I’ve known of them,” was the sharp response.

“What’s that?”

“Why, what I say.”

“My wife——”

“Is she your wife? One would never guess it from the way you treat her.”

“My wife, I say——”

“We’ll take her word for’t—not yours.”

“Do you quarrel with me, George?”

“I’ faith, I’m her kinsman, Phil.”

“You take the privileges of one.”

“Better I than another, for your sins.”

My lord gulped, as if he were taking a pill; then forced a propitiatory smile.

“Why, I confess I have sinned, George; and you mean me well, no doubt. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be lessoned, even by a cousin.”

“Then learn from a less scrupulous quarter. There’ll be plenty to gather the fruit you let hang over the wall.”

He was going, but the other stopped him; hurriedly.

“What’s that? No, tarry awhile, George. Zounds, man, can’t you see my state?”

He was so suddenly solicitous, so eager in his entreaty, that Hamilton paused in wonder, and turned to face him.

“Why,” said he, “let me look at you. I believe—anno mirabile!—I do believe you’re jealous. Philip Stanhope jealous, and of his wife!”

Chesterfield chuckled foolishly.

“What are the symptoms?”

“Yellow, sir, yellow—a very jaundice of the eye. Why, what hath happened between yesterday and to-day?”

“Nothing, I tell you—or perhaps everything. Is she so much admired?”

“Is Kate? Can you ask, who have eyes and senses?”

“I think I’ve been at fault.”

“Tell her so, then.”

“Why, that’s the devil o’t. We’re not on speaking terms.”

Hamilton sneered.

“So, it’s come to a head with her? And who but a blind dullard would ever have failed to foresee that end? Yet, with one so gracious, it must have needed a foul provocation to drive her to such extremes. What, may I ask, was the deciding insult?”

“I’ll be frank. I told her she was distasteful to me.”

Hamilton threw up his hands.

“Ye gods! And he can talk of speaking terms! Be thankful if she ever looks at you again.”

His lordship winced.

“Not? She hath sweet eyes, too. I own I spoke in temper, and said a silly thing.”

“Silly! Have you never heard of a woman scorned? You’ve lost her before you’ve found her.”

“No, no. I trust you, George: damn it, man, I trust you! I know you are my friend. Tell me—what shall I do?”

“To reconcile you?”

“Aye.”

“Too sudden an exodus this! Turn tail, I advise, and get back to your flesh-pots.”

“Carrion, she called it, and me a dog. The savour sticks somehow; I can’t go back to carrion. Let the King enjoy his own for me: I’m content with mine.”

“She your own? Any man’s, rather, after that.”

“Don’t say so! George——” He put a twitching hand on Hamilton’s sleeve. He seemed quite transformed in these few minutes; smitten out of the blue, and, under that rankling wound, lusting for what he had despised. There are those who, tyrannous to love’s submission, fall slaves to love’s disdain. Here was one who, expelled from Paradise, found himself, as it were, naked and ashamed. “I’d concede something,” he said, “to be on terms with her again—not all her condition, curse it, but something substantial.”

“What was her condition?”

“She swore she’d never speak word to me again till I’d gone on my knees to her to ask her pardon.”

“That was before you’d hurt her, physically. She’ll want more now.”

“What more?”

“Likely a separation.”

“I’ll not grant it.”

“She’ll take it her own way, never fear.”

MOLL DAVIS

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CONTENTS

MOLL DAVIS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II