THE EXTRAORDINARY
CONFESSIONS OF
DIANA PLEASE

“I am convinced she rivalled, at fifty, the exquisite Diane de Poitiers herself, in the brightness of her wit and the perfection of her form, and might have passed as triumphantly a like test of the marble.”

The Marquis de C—— in his “Foreword.”

If the public seeks any apology for this introduction to it, at a late date, of the extraordinary woman whose self-dictated Memoirs form the staple of the following pages, it must look for it in the references of her contemporaries; it will be far from gathering it from her own autobiography.

Diane Rosemonde de St. Croix (to give her her proper mother-title) considered that she owed to Romance, in a glowing age, what, in a practical one, is conceded by a thousand dull and petty vanities to a vulgar curiosity—her personal reminiscences. She had at least the justification of her qualities, and the good fortune to find, in her latter-day friend, the Marquis de C——, an enthusiastic historian of them. In the question of their appeal, one way or the other, to the English reader, the present transcriber (from the original French notes) must hold himself responsible both for choice and style.

Madame de St. Croix was a “passionist,” as the French called Casanova; and, indeed, she had many points in common with that redoubtable adventurer: an unappeasable vagabondism; a love of letters; an ardent imagination; an incorruptible self-love; and, lastly, what we may term an exotic orthodoxy. If, subscribing to the universal creed which makes man’s soul his fetish, she worshipped an exacting god, she was at least always ready to sacrifice the world to gratify it, and now, no doubt, very logically sings among the angels.

In the matter of her more notorious characteristics, M. de C——, lest her part on earth should suffer misconstruction by the censorious, is so good as to speak with some show of finality. “I deny,” he says, “the title adventuress to my charming and accomplished friend. It is nothing if not misleading. Every day we venture something, for love, for hunger, for ambition. He who deviates from rice and barley-water, venturing on spiced dishes, makes every time an assault on his epigastrium. He who is not content with an ignoble mediocrity, though he do no more than take pains with a letter, is a candidate for fame. And as for love, it does not exist on the highway. Why should it imply distinction to call a man an adventurer, and be invidious to style a woman adventuress? Ulysses dallying in Ææa is surely no more honourable a sight than Godiva traversing Coventry in an adorable deshabille. To have the wide outlook, the catholic sympathy—is that to merit defamation? No, it is to be heroically human. Better sin like an angel, I say, than be a sick devil and virtuous.”

It remains only to mention that the present transcript conducts no further than to the finish of a dramatic period of Madame de St. Croix’s story; and to that, even, at the expense of a considerable lacuna (referred to in its place), which no research has hitherto been successful in filling. It is hoped, however, that, in what is given, enough will be found to interest.

B. C.

[Note.—An ingenious etymologist supplies a likely derivation for the “duck-stone,” so often mentioned in the text, from the Slavic dook or duk, signifying to spirit away. Accepting this genesis, the duck-stone, given to Mrs. Please by the gypsy, becomes the dook, or bewitching-stone, and is imbued with whatever virtues our faith or our credulity may suggest.]

THE EXTRAORDINARY
CONFESSIONS OF DIANA PLEASE[1]

I.
I MAKE MY DÉBUT

At my friend M. de C——’s instigation I sit down in the noon of my life to talk of its morning.

I look first to your gallantry, my dear Alcide, to see that this statement is not misconstrued. That I have a past argues nothing of my remoteness from it. In comparison with the immortality which is surely to be mine, everything on this side is youth. I am seventeen, or thirty-seven, or whatever I choose; and I intend that Heaven, whenever it calls me, shall find me irresistible. Possessing all the ages, it cannot grudge me my arbitrary disposition of my own little term.

Now, tell your friends, my dear Alcide, that to succeed in life one must never ask a woman her age or a man his intentions; and so we shall all be comfortable.

I owe my mother the most whimsical of grudges, my existence. I will nickname her the Comtesse de l’Ombre, and so shall abuse no confidences in relating of my debt to her, and to “Lovelace,” her collaborator in the romance of which I am the heroine. She was very beautiful; and he, an English cadet of distinction, was an aristocratic paragon.

At the age of sixteen, convinced of the hollowness of life, she had taken the veil, and become the Sister Agnès of the Communauté de Madelonnettes, Notre Dame de la Charité, in Paris, whence a year later she was transferred to an English branch of the house. Hence and from her duty my father, whom she had approached upon a begging mission, succeeded unhappily in inveigling her.

To the day of her death my mother bore the disfiguring sign of a little cross on her breast. It has succeeded to me, but in a faint reflection, a grain de beauté, only. I will tell you, in a word, the story of my inheritance.

The ladies of les Madelonnettes had, in inviting all the feminine vices to their inauguration ceremony, with the object to pension them off handsomely, overlooked the bad fairy Jealousy. Thou knowest, Alcide, the meanness of this witch. To revenge herself, she cast Lovelace into their midst, as Eris cast the apple of discord upon the nuptial board of Thetis; and poor de l’Ombre was made the consequent scapegoat. Driven forth in ignominy from the fold, she could not suffer so much but that one, over zealous or jealous, must strike her an envious blow across the bosom, on which she always wore a little crucifix, the gift of her father. The ebony cut in and left an indelible scar, to which I was to succeed in pathetic earnest of my origin. It has never ceased to be a symbol to me of the vanity of self-renunciation. How can we deny ourselves, and not deny One after whose image we are made?

I was born in a lodging at Brighthelmston, whither my father had conveyed my mother. The town, which has always possessed an attraction for me, was at that time a very paltry affair of scattered houses, to which the mumpish or melancholic came periodically to salt their spleens against a fresh course of dissipations. Locality has never, however, influenced my temper. The perfume of contentment breathes from within, and is not to be affected by soil or surroundings. Let us who have good constitutions continue, as the way is, to accept them for virtues, and to abhor the dyspeptic as unclean. Let us have the discretion to ask no questions of our neighbours about what we don’t understand in this entertaining comedy of life. So shall we justify ourselves to ourselves, and avoid being made uncomfortable. Is it not so, my friend?

My mother had never, I do believe, had a doll till I came. She was very young, even then, and could not tire of playing with me in our pretty cottage near the Steine. And I responded in all endearing gaiety and innocence, with the very trustfulness of which she must, I fear, have come to reproach her apostasy.

Maybe she did, for, as time went on, I can recall a cloud settling upon her brow—the shadow, perhaps, of the yoke under which she was passing from girlhood to womanhood. I was already four when she came of age. O, mon chéri! think of the tragedy of those italics! And think of me, a child of a precocious observation, and little ears as pinkly susceptible to murmurs as the inside of a shell, doomed to wake—wake to some misty understanding of the unusual in our relations!

By and by I even confided my suspicions to my father, whom I adored, and who visited us occasionally, coming down from town very elegant and mondain and in great company. He laughed, and then frowned over at mamma, who returned his look steadily.

“Dear sir,” she said only, “the child is growing very critical. Do not encourage her, and make this cross harder than I can bear.”

“But I too have a cross,” I said; “only it is little and faint, and not blushing like maman’s.”

My papa laughed again, and again frowned, saying, “It is a fact, and hard on the infant, who has done nothing to deserve it.”

Then he pushed me from him, and rose, and, going to the door, turned at it with a peevish face.

“I weary of these heroics,” said he. “If you persist in them, remember that you are qualified, more than ever, for les Madelonnettes.”

He went; and she cried out, as if over some dreadful awakening. But thenceforth, for some reason, our confidences grew estranged. I loved my poor mamma so well, that I think she should not have responded by striving to make heir to her melancholy the innocent cause of it. At the root of all our moral revolt is a sense of the injustice of original sin. I, at least, had done nothing to make me unhappy.

Presently I was given a governess, my dear careless father’s nominee. She was French, a ci-devant maîtresse de pension, very lazy and self-indulgent, and, if not sleeping, she was always ogling for unattached beaux. Vicious and insolent, she delighted in prompting me to reflections on my mother’s self-reserve, and “honour” was as much in her mouth as false teeth. I learned nothing from her but indecorum and innuendo.

One day—for the moral to her teaching (it was when I was ten years old)—I was playing truant on the downs, when I saw a small smutty baby crawl from under a bush into the road at the very moment that a carriage, wildly driven, was approaching. I had just time to notice the gilded splendour of the equipage, and, perhaps,—let us be frank, my friend,—to be inspired to heroism by the sight, before I leapt and snatched up the child from under the very feet of the galloping horses. As the chariot thundered by, an elegantly groomed head thrust itself from the window, and a ruffled hand, waving to me standing there unhurt but bewildered, flung back a gold coin into the dust. I turned my back immediately, disillusioned, by the insolence of the acknowledgment, as to the disinterested quality of my deed, and the more so as the baby was, parler franchement, decidedly unpleasant. I put the imp down, and began to re-order my little ruffled plumes. Wouldst thou hear what they were, my Alcide? I can recall them at this hour: A dainty gipsy hat knotted to a blue ribbon; a stomacher laced over with silver twist, and a skirt to the ankles, both of flowered lustring; three pair of ruffles at my bare elbows; a black solitaire at my neck, and black shoes with red heels and the prettiest of paste buckles.

Alas! how better than our sins of yesterday do we remember the stockings we wore to sin in! Let me, for penance, concede to history these my failings. I was, in fact, colourless in complexion, like tinted porcelain, with what my detractors used to call spun-glass hair, and the eyes of a Dresden shepherdess. And I was not at that time light on my feet, with which my volatile spirits were always at odds.

Now, as I smoothed my skirt, I was aware of a mad gipsy woman hurrying from the bank towards me, and crying and gesticulating as she came. She caught up the infant, and, finding it unharmed, put it down again, and fawned upon me inarticulate. Then she broke off to curse the distant carriage up hill and down, and finally went to pick up the coin from the very spot where she had not failed to mark its fall.

“It is yours,” she said, striding back to me. “Take it!”

“You can keep it,” I answered, with my little nose in the air. “A lady does not want for money.”

She slipped it into her pocket, and fell on her knees before me.

“Nor beauty, nor love, nor silken raiment,” she cried; “and yet they are not all. Think, my darling! There be no need so wild but the poor grateful gipsy may show a way to gratify it.”

I laughed, half annoyed and half frightened; and then, suddenly and oddly, there came into my head the thought of the stocking needle the gouvernante was wont to stick into my bosom at meals, to prevent me stooping and rounding my back. Must I confess, my Alcide, that there was ever a time when thy Diane was a little less or more than a sylph?

“Make me light,” I said, “so that I can dance without feeling the ground.”

She looked at me strangely a moment, then all about her in a stealthy way, while she slipped her hand into her pocket.

“Hush!” she said. “For none other but you. Only tell not of it.” And she brought up a little greasy packet, of parchment writ round with characters, like a Hebrew phylactery.

“Have you ever heard tell of the duck-stone?” she whispered.

I shook my head, full of curiosity.

“No,” she said, “nor any of thine. It fell from the sky, from another world, deary, that’s strange to ours, and the gipsies found it in the wild places of the woods. There was a smell came from it like the sugar of all flowers, and it was as light as foam and as hard as the beaten rocks.”

She undid the packet while she spoke, and I saw a number of tiny grey cubes, like frothy pumice-stone, one of which she detached, and gave to me.

“It wrought upon them even to madness,” she said, “so that they took and broke it with their mattocks. And, lo! the nameless thing was found in its scattered parts a virtue, even like the poisons which, taken in little, heal. Smell to it when the world is dark, and your brain shall flash into light, like an inn to the tired traveller. Smell to it when your feet go sick and heavy, and you shall feel them like the birds’ whose bones are full of wind. But tell not of the gift or giver, lest I die!”

Involuntarily, as she spoke, I had raised the stone to my nostrils. A faint scent as of menthene intoxicated my brain. The downs and the sky swam before me in one luminous mist. Lightness and delight took all my soul and body with rapture....

A shout brought me to myself. I was sitting on the grass, with the duck-stone still tight in my clutch. The gipsy was gone, how long I could not tell, and up the road was coming a second cortège, more brilliant than the former. A dozen young fellows, all volunteer runners and dressed in white, preceded a coach in which sat a rich-apparelled lady, very bold and handsome, and escorted by a splendid cavalcade of gentlemen. It was the Duchess of Cumberland, who followed her husband to the seaside, as I was to learn by and by; for while I was collecting my drowsy young wits to look, a wonderful thing happened. A horseman drew up with a cry, dismounted, seized and bore me to his saddle, and rode away with me after the carriage. It was my father, flushed and jovial, the pink and Corinthian of his company, as he always was.

He showed no curiosity over the encounter, nor scruple in taking me with him. He was in wild spirits, laughing and teasing, and sometimes he reeled in his saddle in a way to endanger my balance. But the rush of air restored me to myself, and I had the wit, for all my excitement, to slip my charm, which I still held, into a pocket.

So we raced for the town, and presently drew up at the Castle Tavern, where His Royal Highness and his wife, the late Mrs. Horton, were quartering themselves.

The time which followed is confused in my remembrance. I was put in charge of a chambermaid, given a dish of tea and cake, and presently fell fast asleep, to awake smiling and rosy to the summons of my pleasant Clarinda. A lackey in a magnificent scarlet livery awaited me at the door, received me into his arms, and carried me downstairs to a long room blazing with waxlights, where, at a white table spilt all over with a profusion of fruit and crystal, sat a gorgeous company of gentlemen and ladies. Such silks and laces, such feathers and diamonds, I had never in my young day encountered. It was like the most beautiful fair I had ever seen, and the red faces of the company were the coloured bladders bobbing in the stalls. Still, I had not lost my self-possession, when my father reeled round in his chair, and catching me away from the servant, set me on my feet on the table itself.

I was a little confused by the tumult which greeted my exaltation.

“Diane,” whispered my father in my ear, “go and tell the duke in a pretty speech that I send my love to him.”

I flicked up my skirts, and went off immediately among the fruit and decanters. My progress was a triumph. The women clapped in artificial enthusiasm, and the men stopped me to kiss my little shoes. And presently down that long lane I saw the duke’s smiling face awaiting me. It was not a temperate face, it is true; its thirty-four years were traced upon it in very crooked hieroglyphics. But then—c’est la dernière touche qu’informe—the royal star of the garter glittering on the apricot coat beneath made everything handsome. By his side sat the lady his duchess, née Luttrell, as brand-new as I to her exaltation. But it was the difference between Hebe and Thais. For all my innocence I felt that, and did not fear her rivalry. I dropped a little curtsey amongst the grapes and melons.

“Monsieur,” I said, “my papa wishes to make you a pretty gift, and sends you his love.”

He applauded, laughing, as did all the table, and lifted me down to his lap.

“What price for the love?” he cried. “See, I return him a dozen kisses.”

He kept me, however, plying me with bonbons, while madam tittered and fanned herself vexedly.

“You will make the little ape sick, Enrico,” she said. “Put her down; for shame!”

“I know where to stop,” I retorted; and “By God, you do!” said the duke, with a great laugh, and held me tight.

I had a thimbleful of liqueur from his hand by and by, which made me think of the duck-stone. I was the little queen of the evening, and a delight to my father and all.

“Faith!” said a merry Irish rapparee, a bit of a courtier captain, “man has been vainly trying to fit woman into the moral scheme ever since she made herself out of his ninth rib, and the fashions out of a fig-leaf; and here, in the eighteenth century Anno Domini, is the result.”

I was carried on to the Steine presently by my father, my little brain whirling. The whole of the Castle Tavern, and every house and shop adjacent, were illuminated; and the lights and crowds of people quite intoxicated me. There were sports enacting on all sides, and I screamed with laughter to see a jingling match, played for a laced coat and hat, in which the jingler, hung with bells, dodged and eluded and dropped between the legs of the blindfolded who sought to capture him. Then there was a foot-race, run by young women for a Holland smock; and I jeered at their self-conscious antics with all my little might, as they went giggling into place, coy and hobbledehoy, and pushed and quarrelled secretly, and stopped the starter to do up their greasy tresses, and then, all but the winner, snivelled over the result, pronouncing it unfair.

Presently I was taken to see an ox roasted whole; and it was here, while we were looking on at the lurid tumult, occurred a rencontre which was to alter the whole current of my life. A fat, drunken sweep in his war-paint jostled my father, who, himself in the fury of wine, turned and felled the beast to the ground. We were isolated from our friends at the moment, and a ring was immediately formed, and the sweep called upon to stand up and pay his interest like a man. He rose, nothing loth, it seemed, and faced my father, who was forced to engage.

“My little ’orse and cart to a red-un that I whop ye!” cried the sweep.

“Done!” answered my father, and they fell to.

I was sure of the result, and stood by quite self-possessed and eager while they fought. A round or two settled it, and there sat the sweep, unable to rise again, with a white tooth dropped on his coat-front.

When my father came away, I clung to him and kissed him in ecstasy. He was quite cool, and only a little breathed; and when, for the honour of sport, he had settled for the sweep’s trap to be driven round to his door in the morning, intending to put it up to auction, he shouldered me laughing, and carried me away amidst cheers.

It was near midnight by then, and, happening upon a royal servant, he gave me into the man’s charge, and, in spite of my remonstrances, bade him convey me home. I sulked all the way, and was in no mood, after my excitement, to sympathise with my mother’s agitated reception of her truant. She had been near distracted all these hours, thinking me drowned or kidnapped, and could not control a gust of temper upon hearing how I had been employed.

“O, my maman,” I said saucily, “you must understand I have never been in a convent, and so know how to take care of myself.”

It was wicked; but it was my governess speaking, not I.

II.
I AM ABDUCTED

My mamma questioned me again in the morning about my adventures. She was very hollow-eyed and nervous, which offended me; for for her to appear ill in body or ill at ease in mind seemed to make my own young sanity something that it was wrong or selfish in me to enjoy. I was inconsiderate, no doubt; yet tell me, my Alcide, is it, on the other hand, considerate of dyspepsia to be always wet-blanketing health and contentment? Is not the human the only animal permitted of right to inflict his sickness on his fellows, while in every other community the invalid is “out of the law” of nature? It is thus, undoubtedly, that deterioration is provided against. To be attracted to the sweet and wholesome, and repelled by distemper, is that selfishness? If it is not, then am I content to be misunderstood by all others, so long as Heaven will recognise the real love of humankind which inspires my wish to secure its untainted image in myself. There must be a divine virtue in health, seeing how disease is the heir of sin. Is not to sympathise, then, with depression, to condone evil?

I leave the answer to profounder moralists than I, content, in default, to admit that the misery which now befell me was the direct consequence of my wickedness.

“Papa,” said I, tossing my head, “gave me to the beautiful duke, and he took me in pledge of the love papa bears him. Will he come and fetch me, do you think, mamma? I shall be glad to belong to one who does not have headaches whenever the sun shines.”

She went quite white, and broke into a torrent of French invective.

“I do not understand these hard words,” I said. “Is it so they pray in les Madelonnettes?”

My sauciness took her completely aback. She stared at me for some moments in silence, and then cried out suddenly, “God forgive you, Diane, and the vile creature who has instructed you to this, and your father, who I am going at once to ask that she may be removed!”

And she went out, unconsciously consigning me to my fate; and I never saw her again, may Heaven pardon her!

I was a little frightened, though still defiant; and I loitered about the house, singing in my small voice, which, though never an “organ,” has always been attractive, so people say.

Presently I remembered my duck-stone, and thought I would seek a case for it. I was alone in the house, for our one maid was gone marketing, and the governess not yet arrived. I went upstairs, and rummaged in my mother’s bureaux, and by and by found a tiny silver vinaigrette into which the stone fitted beautifully. Then I went and sat in our little front garden which overlooked the road running to the downs, and there rocked and mused amongst the flowers in a recovered temper. I hoped my father would fetch me again; I expected he would; and so, smiling and dreaming, put up the vinaigrette half-consciously, and sniffed at it. In a moment all sense of my surroundings went from me, and sky and flowers and the grey downs were blended in a rapture of unreality.

I came to myself amidst an impression of jolting. I thought it was night, and that I was suffocating in my bedclothes. I threw something from my face, saw daylight, and cried out incoherently.

Immediately the jerky motion ceased, and a horrible mask looked over and down at me. It was fat and sooty, with a handkerchief, startlingly white by contrast, going obliquely across its forehead.

“Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it, I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved, perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized the opportunity to kidnap me.

He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams, wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide!

When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face twice, deliberately, on either side—not hard, but in a lustful, proprietary way.

“Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured.

“Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my turn.”

“What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.

“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”— He hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey.

“There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!”

Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe, so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried, incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the inhumanity of her sooty abductor?

But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still clutched convulsively in my little fist.

Sure never death offered a sweeter release. Very softly I raised it, and found oblivion. I might have sought to use it on my enemy, and escape; but, alas! the unsophisticated mind of the child could compass no such artifice.

We went on all day, as I realised during the intervals of my waking, by the unfrequented roads, jolting, loitering, sometimes in lonely places halting to rest the pony. The moral force my master (as I must now call him) put upon himself to avoid the wayside taverns, is the most convincing proof of his tenacity.

At last, a thicker darkness descended upon me, lying there in hopeless apathy, and night and sleep stretched their shroud over my miseries.

I awoke to rough movement and the sound of voices. My master was carrying me into a little ill-lighted cottage, which stood solitary upon the edge of a common. Sharp and brilliant, at no great distance, in a soughing night, sparkled the first lamps of a town.

I was borne into a tiny room, where something, covered with a cloth, lay stretched upon a rickety table. My master put me to the ground, and stood back to regard me. Another man, an expressionless sweep like himself, but gaunt and bent-shouldered, joined silent issue in this scrutiny.

“Well,” said the latter at length, “they’ll fit right enow; but damn the exchange!”

He stopped to cough rendingly; then went on—

“If you mean a deal, I’m game for half a bull, and there’s my word on it. But burn them duds, Johnny! I won’t take the risk on ’em.”

My master considered.

“Mayhap you’re right,” said he. “Call it done.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the other had jerked the cloth from the table. And there underneath lay the dead stiff body of a little sooty boy. His hands were griped at his chest, as if in agony of its œdematous swelling, and his bared eyeballs and teeth were as white as porcelain.

I could not cry out, or do anything but stare in horror, while the gaunt man, with some show of persuasion, began to strip the little body of its coat and vest and trousers—all its poor harness. Then, in a sickness beyond words, I comprehended. I was to be made exchange, for these foul vestments, my own pretty silken toilet.

“Come along, Georgy,” wheedled his late master. “You wouldn’t be so unhandsome as to deny a lady, and she doing you honour to accept of them.”

He rolled the body gently from side to side, so coaxingly forceful and intent, that someone, bursting in upon him at the moment, took him completely by surprise.

It was a wretchedly clad woman, with resinous blots of eyes in a hungry face, and a little black moustache over a toothless mouth—strange contrast!—that was never more still than a crab’s.

“So he’s dead, you dog!” she cried, seeming to feed on the words; “and you druv him to his death; and may God wither you!”

The bent man jumped, like a vulture, from the body, and hopped and dodged, keeping it between him and the woman.

“You took the odds!” he cried, coughing, and kneading his cracking knuckles together, “you took the odds, and you mustn’t cry out like a woman if they gone agen ye. I did no more’n my duty, as the Lord hears me!”

“Both on us,” said the woman. “Well, speak out!”

“He stuck,” said the sweep. “He stuck beyond reason. It were a good ten-inch square, for all it were a draw-in bend. I were forced to smoke him; but his lungs were that crowded, there was no loosening the pore critter till they bust and let him down. He were a good boy, and worth a deal to me.”

“That’s true,” put in my master. “A man, though he be a flue-faker, don’t cut off his nose to spite his face, missus.”

She made no answer, staring fixedly at the corpse.

“He were my seventh,” she said. “He made no cry when you come and took him away from me—a yellow-haired devil. Did he cry for his mammy, chokin’ up in the dark there?”

“No,” said the man—“an unnat’ral son!”

She threw up her hands with a frightful gesture.

“I could have borne it if he had—I could have borne it, and cut my throat. What were you doing with him?”

The sweep hesitated; but my master took the word from him.

“It’s a question of his slops, missus.” (He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at me, where I stood in the background paralysed with terror.) “Half a bull or nothing, and you and him to share.”

The woman put her arms akimbo.

“Ho, indeed!” she said. “And where does he come in?”

“It’s my own smalls,” swore the man, excited and truculent at once. “I won’t bate an inch of ’em, if I’m to die for it.”

They were facing each other across the body like tom cats, when my master pulled his friend aside, and whispered in his ear.

“Amongst ladies and gentlemen,” said he, and waited, smiling and oily, while the other fetched a black bottle from a cupboard. The woman visibly relaxed at the sight of this. Its owner uncorked it, and putting it to his mouth, gurgled, and smacked his black lips.

“The deal passes!” cried my master; and he snatched the bottle, and handed it to the woman with an ingratiatory smile.

It was the psychologic moment, which loosened and harmonised their tongues. They waxed confiding and genial. Presently the woman, commissioned politely to effect my transformation, swaggered across to me with devil-daring eyes, and began roughly to pull off my clothes.

“Damn you!” she said, with such a heat and violence of hate that my very sobs were withered in my throat. “Come up, you young limb! What the deuce! We’ll cry quits for my Georgy when the black smoke finishes your ladyship.”

She never had had a doubt of the meaning of my presence in that vile den, but my beauty and refinement and helplessness were only so many goads to her implacability. Her fingers were like rakes in my tender flesh. She would have torn me with her teeth, I believe, if any had been left to her. And I could only shrink and shiver under her hands, terrified if they wrung so much as a gasp from me.

When I was stripped, she seized a blunt dinner knife, and sawed off all my golden hair close to my head, a horrible experience. The tears gushed silent down my cheeks. They might have moved the heart of a wolf.

“There!” she said, when finished; “chuck us the duds!” and as she received them, scrubbed my face with the filthy tatters before she vested me in them.

I had hoped, perhaps, until thus hopelessly transformed; and then, at once, I hoped no more. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate—I was behind the bars; I wore the devil’s livery. O, my Alcide! Pity this poor little Proserpine so ravished from her Plains of Enna.

III.
I ESCAPE

Hast thou the nerve to follow me, my friend? My martyrdom was severe, but, after all, brief. Comfort thyself with the thought of the brilliant moth which is to emerge from this sad chrysalis.

My master was an itinerant sweep. He jogged from town to village and from village to town in his little cart, an untaxed Bohemian, and carried me always with him. I had wild weepings at first, and frantic schemes of escape, and fits of sullen rebellion; but they were all persuaded out of me presently by his thick black hand. Then, as the past grew obscured behind me in ever-densifying clouds of soot, I came by degrees provisionally reconciled to my destiny, and even—canst thou believe it?—to some enjoyment of its compensations.

These were its changefulness, its irresponsibility, its little adventures, that always had our bodily solace for their end. We pilfered orchards, snatched an occasional fat duckling from a pond, smoked hives at night and carried away the dripping comb to eat under warm ricks in the moonlight. And I had little to complain of ill-treatment, except when engaged professionally. My master’s ample receptivities laughed and grew fat on self-indulgence. Liquor made him, to my good fortune, beatifically helpless; rich meats, paternally benevolent, and even poetical. It was only in business that he chastised, with a large and incorruptible immorality.

I learned the jargon more readily than I did the practice of my abominable trade. My first ascent of a chimney was a hideous experience—an ascent into hell, reversing all geographical orthodoxy. But my particular devil was a Moloch, who would either be served by exaltation or vindicate his majesty in smoke and fire. He was diplomatic to put me through my first paces, so to speak, in a dismantled vicarage that was in preparation for a new tenant. He simply thrust an iron scraper into my hand, and, with the briefest directions, drove me up. I was refractory, of course; and at that, without wordy persuasion, he lit a brand of tow and applied it to my bare ankles. The pain made me scream and writhe, as he had philosophically counted upon its doing. Involuntarily I found myself ascending the flue, as an awn of barley travels up inside one’s sleeve. The very ease of it made me rebel, and I stopped. Immediately the brand below, flaring at the end of a stick, was lifted to spur me. Frenzied and sobbing, I felt its hot rowel, and struggled on. The soot, with which the chimney was choked, began to fall upon me, half stifling, and filling my pockets. Then self-preservation, the great mother, recalled to me my directions. I looked up, and saw a far eye of light denoting freedom, and I began desperately to scrape clear my passage towards it, letting always the black raff descend between my knees before I rose to take its place. The eye enlarged, and with it grew the dawn of a strange new enthusiasm. I rose to it, like a fish to the angle, as my master had calculated I should. These fiends bait their hooks with heaven.

Suddenly, the last feet were conquered, and I emerged, and saw below me a beautiful village prospect of trees and homesteads.

Did I then sit there and weep? On the contrary, I was radiant. Account for it, thou fripon, as thou wilt. Thou knowest, Better the devil to applaud us than none at all. I swear to thee that, for the moment, I coveted nothing but my master’s admiring praise. Breathless as I was, I bent and uttered down the chimney the shrill cry “All up!” as he had bidden me. A little strained laugh came back, and, with an oath of distant approval, a command to descend. But at that, oddly enough, the horror came. I could not stomach the evil pit, with its reeling return into a night from which I had mounted to heaven. My knees trembled beneath me. I sat crying and shivering, while my master stormed thin gusty blasphemy up the flue. At length I remembered my duck-stone. It was in my trousers pocket, safe in its silver case, which, having dropped in the cart, I had found again to my delight lying undiscovered amongst the soot bags. I took it out, let myself down gingerly to the arm-pits, clutched it tightly in my hand, and sniffed, but not vigorously. I awoke to find myself sitting on the hearth, and smiling foolishly into the frightened face of my master. He recovered himself at the moment I did, and was the implacable martinet again and at once.

“Why, you cust little back-slummer!” he said, “to let loose and think to take a chalk of me like that! I’ll larn your nerves!”

And he pulled me to my feet, with his hand raised, but thought better of it, and gave me another chance. Chimney after chimney I must mount, till, fagged and heart-broken, I stood rebellious against his extremest persuasion, and he was obliged, with at least a few healing words of commendation, to postpone the finish of his job.

So began this terror of my new life, and so fortunately ended within a period that was not stretched beyond my endurance.

In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable, and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor. I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering, and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up, “Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once. Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates. But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of self-identity.

So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day, some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London, reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen, had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies, grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark, tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London was in the hands of a No-Popery mob.

Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it gratitude.

We were rolling one afternoon along a certain Knight’s Hill or road which skirted a stretch of common, when we came upon a great inn, called The Horns, where was a considerable concourse of people assembled, all in blue cockades, and buzzing like a hive about to swarm. The word most in the mouths of this draff was Pope, which at first we took to mean the Vicar of Rome, but soon understood for the name of a young Jesuit who was lately come as chaplain to a Catholic family of the neighbourhood. Now, such insolent defiance of the penal laws was not to be tolerated, and so the loyal Protestant burghers of Dulwich were going, with no disrespect to the family, to cast down its graven images, and hang up its chaplain for a scarecrow to all propagandists who should venture out of the Holy See into our tight little island. And here they were gathered to organise themselves, the process taking good account of malt liquors; and hence, when they moved off, we, to cut the story short, accompanied them walking, foreseeing some prospect of “swag” in the crusade.

Going in a pretty compact body, with a great deal of howling and hymning, such as that with which all conscripts, either of the cross or guillotine, are accustomed to stimulate one another’s courage and vanity, we crossed a Croksted Lane, and again a sweep of wild heath, that spread towards the dense forests called Northwood, which fill all that shallow valley from Sydenham Wells on the north to Penge Common on the south. And presently coming to the trees, and entering a wide, elegant clearing amidst them, where the woods were banked behind, and the ground dropped towards us in terraces, on the highest we saw the house standing, a great sunny block of brick and stone, but shuttered now, and apparently lifeless.

The mob at first knocked on the door with a diffidence inspired of its varnished and portly exclusiveness; but, provoking no response, presently grew bolder and more clamorous. Still, I believe, its fervour would ultimately have wasted itself on this inflexible barrier, had not my master, with some disgusted expressions of contempt, come to the front and taunted it on to a violence the more vicious because it was shamefaced. Under his stimulus, then, the panels were beginning to crack, when in a moment the bolts flew, and there stood in the opening a little sinister fellow in grey, who asked us, curt and ironic, our business.

All but my master fell back before him, though there were some broken cries touching the Scarlet Woman, which the sweep took up.

The little man wrinkled his little acrid nose. He was nobody, it turned out, but the Scotch steward, holding staunch to his post; but he was cut and coloured like steel.

“D’ye ask here for your doxy?” he said. “Go back, man, and look where you left her in the tavern.”

The sweep, only half understanding, spat out a mouthful of oaths.

“We want that there Pope!” he roared. “Bring us to the black devil, you.”

“After you, sir,” answered the other politely.

My master, looking horribly ugly, repeated his demand.

“Well,” said the steward, “this is fair humours, Newcastle asking for coals!”

The words were hardly out of him, when my master smote him down, and pushed into the house. He gave a little quiver, like unstrung wire, and lay senseless, the red running from his nostrils.

Mon chéri, hast thou ever seen a pack of mongrels snarl aloof, fearful and agitated, about a dog-fight, and in a moment break in with coward teeth upon the conquered? So over the body of the steward trampled this rabble, blooded now at another’s expense, and reckless in its consciousness of self-irresponsibility. They had found a champion to take the onus of this, and all worse that might happen, off their shoulders.

But they were destined to discover no further chestnuts for their catspaw. The Jesuit had fled, it appeared, with the rest of the family; and so they must content themselves with wrecking the private chapel, where the household was wont to practise its treasonable rites.

Now, my master, who was eager after spoil, sweating and toiling in the thick of the press, left me unguardedly to my own devices; and suddenly I found myself quite alone in a closet hung with vestments, where there was a fireplace with an open bricked hearth, having no signs of usage, which immediately, from habit, caught my attention. And straight, at last, God, pitiful to His poor little derelict, touched the cross on my breast, and quickened inspiration in that where I had supposed all was dead. I slid into the chimney, and went up, up, like an eel in a well rising for air. The sounds of destruction grew attenuated beneath me; I smelt life and freedom, and swarmed faster in my agony to attain them. The chimney, clean as at its building, let down no token of my passage by it, and in a few moments I emerged from the summit, and, tumbling into the cleft of a long double roof—found myself face to face with a man who was there before me.

IV.
I FALL INTO THE HANDS OF A COLLECTOR

At least I call him a man; but O, my Alcide, he was a marionnette! His joints creaked. All the bran in his body seemed to have been shaken down into his calves. His hat supported itself on his ears and the top of his coat collar. His sleeves were sacks. His nose was nothing but a wen, and being no better adapted to the burden of some enormous spectacles he wore, had led his fingers to an incessant trick of adjusting those in their place. He carried under his arm an immense folio, with which, as I appeared, he aimed an agitated blow at me, only to miss and fall forward on his face on the roof.

I instantly dodged past him, and stood panting while he collected himself. His glasses, without which he was helpless, had flown off, and I saw his eyes, which before had seemed to fill the whole field of the great lenses, mere swollen slits, like a pig’s. He groped about in the utmost consternation as he knelt, pawing the tiles for his lost property.

“Who are you? Wait! I’ll be with you,” he ejaculated excitedly, as his bony hands swept the roof.

I backed out of their reach without replying.

At last he found what he sought, and fitting the rims to his nose, rose to his feet and stared at me.

“Hey, what!” he said—“a sweep! Well!”—and blew out a rumbling grunt, which he checked suddenly, as if he had turned a cock on it.

A moment after, he put his hand into his pocket, and fetching out a dirty fragment of biscuit, held it to me persuasively, as one might lure a colt. Seeing, however, that I still held away from him, he threw the biscuit down in a pet, and stood to canvass me in a baleful manner.

“What do you want?” he snapped out suddenly. “How did you find your way here?”

Still with my eyes on him, I answered, in a husky whisper—

“Don’t you know? Up the closet chimney.”

“Ay,” he said, dropping his own voice in tacit response to the warning in mine, “but not to sweep it?”

“No,” I said; “to escape by it.”

His hand went up to his glasses. He glared at me through their restored focus.

Watchful of him, lest, before I could explain, he should silence me provisionally with some stunning blow, I ventured to approach him a little nearer.

“There’s killing,” I whispered, “going on down there—a poor old man in a grey coat.”

He started violently, and pulling his jaw down, uttered a sort of mechanical crow, and let it go again.

“Grey!” he muttered. “It’s the steward, then. He didn’t give me away, did he?”

I shook my head dumbly. He was readjusting his glasses to meet the answer.

“Ay,” he gulped, swallowing with relief, “poor Mackenzie! And to think that for all his loyalty he must burn!”

I whispered, “Why must he?”

“Because,” he said, “he wasn’t of the faith.”

This uncouth creature was getting horrible to me. I suppose he read my repulsion in my face, for his own suddenly grew agitated and menacing.

“Are you thinking of betraying me?” he said.

I retreated before him, working my foolish young arms.

“Keep away!” I cried; “I don’t even know who you are.”

“O!” he said, and stopped, and was at his spectacles again. Then suddenly he held up his hand.

“Hark!” he said.

I listened. Far and faint below, through the hubbub of destruction came wafted at intervals the name of the chaplain—Pope—the cynosure of all this iconoclastic zeal.

“Yes, it’s you they want,” I said.

“And you,” he retorted fiercely, “are pointing the way, you little”—

“It’s a lie!” I cried vehemently. “I came up here to escape from them, like you.”

He looked at me doubtfully.

“You said you didn’t know who I was.”

“No more I did,” I protested, “till you told me.”

“I told you!” he cried. “Humph!” And he glared at me sourly. “Sit down, then,” he said, “and hold your tongue till I speak to you again.”

It was the wise policy, certainly. He squatted himself between me and the chimney, and we dwelt in silence, while the mob wreaked its blind vengeance below. I was in a dreadful fright all the time. Every moment I expected to hear my master’s voice boom up the flue by way of which I had climbed; and, desperate as I was, I devised the naughty expedient to curry favour, if necessary, by claiming the credit of having run this fugitive to bay. It was a base thought, perhaps, though natural under the stress of the occasion. Chiefly, however, I regret it because it was uncalled for, and it is aggravating to burden one’s conscience with unprofitable frailties. The monster I had run from was never, in point of fact, to cross my path again. Probably, thinking I had fled from the house, he went hunting counter, and so put ever a wider interval between us.

It was not, after all, so very long before the racket of despoliation down below died away, and we heard the mob clatter from the house, and go streaming and singing across the common in its retreat. I believe that, either realising how in my master it had evoked a demon to its own legal discomfiture, or perhaps frightened by the bugbear of some reported troop of militia assembling in the neighbourhood, it was suddenly decided to temper Protestantism with prudence, and so dissipating itself with great speed and piety, left the building to a solitude more dense by contrast than before.

It was not, however, until every whisper and echo had long ceased that I durst let myself be persuaded of the reality of my reprieve; and when at last I did, the joy that grew minutely in my heart came near to upsetting my reason.

My excitement hungered for something on which to flesh itself. I rose and went up and down, quickly and softly, in the space left me, seeking the means to some larger action. Then I saw the great folio lying discarded on the roof where the chaplain had dropped it, and all of a sudden felt itching to know what it could contain to tempt this man to burden himself with its care in so anxious a situation.

He sat with his face in his hands—or cuffs, rather. He appeared to be in a sort of uncouth trance. I stole very noiseless by him, and, unobserved as I supposed, had actually lifted the book, when he started awake in a moment.

“Hey!” he cried. “That’s mine!”

“I was going to bring it to you,” I said.

He scuttled towards me on his hands and toes, and snatching the book from me, squatted down, hugging it, and glaring at me in a sort of dumb malevolence.

I had no retort for such rudeness. I stood crimsoning under my black a moment, then, in default of a better answer, began to cry.

He was not the least moved, the ill-conditioned boor, but he was disturbed by the noise.

“Ur-rh!” he bullied. “That’ll do. Do you hear?”

Indignation gave me decision. I turned my back on him.

“Where are you going?” he cried.

I stalked on without a word.

“No, you don’t!” he said, scrambling up; and he followed and caught hold of my jacket.

“Let me go!” I cried, struggling. “My master will be looking for me.”

“O!” he said, quite suddenly agitated. “Come here and I’ll show you a picture.”

I let myself be drawn reluctant.

“Is it of the Scarlet Woman?” I said.

He started, and roared, “The Scarlet—!” then, conscious of his mistake, dropped his voice to a panic whisper.

“There’s no such moth,” said he. “If you mean heraclia dominula, the scarlet tiger, come and I’ll show you one.”

He persuaded me to sit by him on the roof slope, and gingerly opened the book away from me.

“Don’t touch,” he said. “It’s called Fasti Sanctorum Naturæ Cultoribus Proprii.”

“Is that Latin?” I asked.

“Yes,” he growled; but he looked at me rather curiously. “It means The Naturalist’s Calendar of the Saints. How did you know?”

“O, I know,” I said.

He turned some leaves, while scanning me covertly and sourly; and I exclaimed becomingly over their contents. On each was a picture of a saint, hastily illuminated, and of many insects most beautifully coloured after nature. The saints, it is true, were pigmies, and the moths life size; but it was through the former that this uncivilised Churchman justified himself in a secular hobby. He was, as I came to learn presently, a crazy collector of the small game of fields and hedges, and had only drifted into the Church after a particularly fine specimen of the Painted Lady, or some such immoral creature.

I tried to appreciate in order to conciliate him; but I could see that my flattery was not expert, or perhaps fulsome enough for his taste. Presently, on the score that my mere neighbourhood threatened the lustre of his illuminations, he shut the book, and placed it discontentedly by his side.

“Did you do it all by yourself?” I asked.

“Ay,” he grunted.

“And why did you bring it up here, when”—

He smacked his great hand on his knee, interrupting me—

“If you haven’t the intelligence to see—sooner part with my blood to those Vandals! There; let the book alone, and tell me what brought you here.”

“I’ve said already—I was escaping from my master.”

“A master sweep?”

“Yes.”

“Now,” he said, “how did you know this was Latin?”

I hung my head.

“Come,” he threatened, “you’d best tell me.”

I was considering what I should do. I reddened excited under my mask, and rose to my feet again. After all these months of obliteration, a wonderful thought was beginning to dawn in me—the thought of my sex as a possible factor in my redemption. For how long, my dear friend, had I not lost the art to play it for the value of so much as a sugar-plum? And what was there now to prevent me from reassuming that charming confidence in men which so disarms them? Alas! it was a vain recovery here—a waste of art on a material no more responsive to it than a pulpit hassock.

“How did you know?” he repeated angrily.

“Because,” I whispered, blushing, and lingering over the sensation I felt I was about to produce—“because—Father—I am a little daughter of the Church.”

He had been gnawing his knuckles, as he bent his morose brows on me; and at my words stopped suddenly, his great teeth bared, like a dog looking up from a bone.

“I am the child of a great gentleman. I was stolen from my parents,” I said, and clasped my hands to him. “I am not a boy at all, but a girl.”

He leapt up as if I had struck him.

“How dare you!” he shouted; then, choking, in another hoarse reaction to panic, “How dare you try to impose upon me!”

“I’m not!” I cried, in a childish fury of chagrin over his insensibility. “It’s true, every word. My mother was a Sister of les Madelonnettes, and I was stolen from her, and I want to be sent back.”

I did not in truth, save in so far as that way only lay my chance of restoration to my darling father. But the point was inessential.

The priest’s eyes, dilated monstrosities, devoured me through their lenses.

“Les Madelonnettes—the Magdalens!” he muttered, amazed and frowning. His hand, caressing his chin, grated on the stubble of it. “Come,” he said brutally, “I’m an old bird to be caught by chaff. Confess to me, if you’re a Catholic, you wretched little sinner.”

I wanted nothing better. This sacrament of penance must convince and win him. In a moment my young elastic soul had leapt the dark interlude which divided me from my past, and my little feet were tripping once more in fancy down the royal prince’s table. I fell on my knees.

“Say your Confiteor,” he commanded harshly.

I repeated it without a mistake.

“Humph!” said he. “What are you waiting for?”

I told him my whole story. He listened to it, after the first, abstractedly, with one eye caressing his abominable book. At the end he gave me absolution, canvassing me distastefully as he pondered the penance. Presently he spoke.

“I order you,” he said, “twenty Ave Marias, and to return to your master.”

I jumped to my feet.

“My master—the sweep!” I cried.

“Certainly,” he replied stubbornly. “You were obviously the foundling of Providence, which has elected this honest tradesman to be your foster-father.”

“But, my mother?” I choked.

“It is her judgment,” he said, “to remain and mingle her weeping with the ashes of this sacrifice, in the hospital of which her crimes have made her an inmate.”

He had listened with his elbows, as I supposed. I recognised the hopelessness of my task.

“Very well,” I said. “I daresay he has finished with the steward by now. I will go and tell him what you say”—and I made for the chimney.

He was after me in a moment, at a gallop.

“Stop!” he cried. “What do you mean? That your master was one of this rabble?”

“One? The worst of them all,” I answered. “It was he knocked down the poor grey gentleman; and the last I heard of him was crying for you.”

THE EXTRAORDINARYCONFESSIONS OFDIANA PLEASE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

THE EXTRAORDINARYCONFESSIONS OF DIANA PLEASE[1]

I.I MAKE MY DÉBUT

II.I AM ABDUCTED