Gallantry Part 12

MISS ALLONBY, a young lady of wit and fortune.

ATTENDANTS to Lord Humphrey, Etc.

SCENE

Tunbridge Wells, first in and about Lord Humphrey's lodgings, then shifting to a drawing-room in Lady Allonby's villa.

THE RHYME TO PORRINGER

PROEM:--_Merely to Serve as Intermezzo_

Next morning Captain Audaine was closeted with Mr. Vanringham in the latter's apartments at the _Three Gudgeons_. I abridge the Captain's relation of their interview, and merely tell you that it ended in the actor's looking up, with a puzzled face, from a certain doc.u.ment.

"You might have let me have a whiff of this," Mr. Vanringham began. "You might have breathed, say, a syllable or two last night--"

"I had my instructions, sir, but yesterday," replied the Captain; "and surely, Mr. Vanringham, to have presumed last night upon my possession of this paper, so far as to have demanded any favor of you, were unreasonable, even had it not savored of cowardice. For, as it has been very finely observed, it is the nicest part of commerce in the world, that of doing and receiving benefits. O Lord, sir! there are so many thousand circ.u.mstances, with respect to time, person, and place, which either heighten or allay the value of the obligation--"

"I take your point," said the other, with some haste, "and concede that you are, beyond any reasonable doubt, in the right. Within the hour I am off."

"Then all is well," said Captain Audaine.

But he was wrong in this opinion, so wrong that I confute him by subjoining his own account of what befell, somewhat later in the day.

I

'Twas hard upon ten in the evening (the Captain estimates) when I left Lady Culcheth's, [Footnote: Sir Henry Muskerry's daughter, of whom I have already spoken, and by common consent an estimable lady and a person of fine wit; but my infatuation for Lady Betty had by this time, after three nights with her, been puffed out; and this fortunate extinction, through the affair of the broken snuffbox, had left me now entirely indifferent to all her raptures, panegyrics, and premeditated artlessnesses.--F. A.] and I protest that at the time there was not a happier man in all Tunbridge than Francis Audaine.

"You haven't the king?" Miss Allonby was saying, as I made my adieus to the company. "Then I play queen, knave, and ace, which gives me the game, Lord Humphrey."

And afterward she shuffled the cards and flashed across the room a glance whose brilliance shamed the tawdry candles about her, and, as you can readily conceive, roused a prodigious trepidation in my adoring breast.

"Dorothy!--O Dorothy!" I said over and over again when I had reached the street; and so went homeward with constant repet.i.tions of her dear name.

I suppose it was an idiotic piece of business; but you are to remember that I loved her with an entire heart, and that, as yet, I could scarcely believe the confession of a reciprocal attachment, which I had wrung from her overnight, to the accompaniment of Gerald's snoring, had been other than an unusually delectable and audacious dream upon the part of Frank Audaine.

I found it, then, as I went homeward, a heady joy to ponder on her loveliness. Oh, the wonder of her voice, that is a love-song! cried my heart. Oh, the candid eyes of her, more beautiful than the June heavens, more blue than the very bluest speedwell-flower! Oh, the tilt of her tiny chin, and the incredible gold of her hair, and the quite unbelievable pink-and-white of her little flower-soft face! And, oh, the sc.r.a.p of crimson that is her mouth.

In a word, my pulses throbbed with a sort of divine insanity, and Frank Audaine was as much out of his senses as any madman now in Bedlam, and as deliriously perturbed as any lover is by ordinary when he meditates upon the object of his affections.

But there was other work than sonneting afoot that night, and shortly I set about it. Yet such was my felicity that I went to my nocturnal labors singing. Yes, it rang in my ears, somehow, that silly old Scotch song, and under my breath I hummed odd s.n.a.t.c.hes of it as I went about the night's business.

Sang I:

"Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?

Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?

King James the Seventh had ae daughter, And he gave her to an Oranger.

"Ken ye how he requited him?

Ken ye how he requited him?

The dog has into England come, And ta'en the crown in spite of him!

"The rogue he salna keep it lang, To budge we'll make him fain again; We'll hang him high upon a tree, And King James shall hae his ain again!"

II

Well! matters went smoothly enough at the start. With a diamond Vanringham dexterously cut out a pane of gla.s.s, so that we had little difficulty in opening the window; and I climbed into a room black as a pocket, leaving him without to act as a sentinel, since, so far as I could detect, the house was now untenanted.

But some twenty minutes later, when I had finally succeeded in forcing the escritoire I found in the back room upon the second story, I heard the street door unclose. And I had my candle extinguished in that self same instant. You can conceive that 'twas with no pleasurable antic.i.p.ation I peered into the hall, for I was fairly trapped. I saw some five or six men of an ugly aspect, who carried among them a burden, the nature of which I could not determine in the uncertain light. But I heaved a sigh of relief as they bore their cargo past me, to the front room, (which opened on the one I occupied), without apparent recognition of my presence.

"Now," thinks I, "is the time for my departure." And having already selected the papers I had need of from the rifled desk, I was about to run for it, when I heard a well-known voice.

"Rat the parson!" it cried; "he should have been here an hour ago. Here's the door left open for him, endangering the whole venture, and whey-face han't plucked up heart to come! Do some of you rogues fetch him without delay; and do all of you meet me to-morrow at the _Mitre_, to be paid in full for this business, before reporting to his Grace."

"Here," thinks I, "is beyond doubt a romance." And as the men tumbled down-stairs and into the street, I resolved to see the adventure through, by the light of those candles which were now burning in the next room.

I waited for perhaps ten minutes, during which period I was aware of divers movements near at hand; and, judging that in any case there was but one man's anger to be apprehended, I crept toward the intervening door and found it luckily ajar.

So I peered through the crack into the adjoining room, and there, as I had antic.i.p.ated, discovered Lord Humphrey Degge, whom I had last seen at Lady Culcheth's wrangling over a game of _ecarte_ with the fairest antagonist the universe could afford.

Just now my Lord was in a state of high emotion, and the cause of it was evident when I perceived his ruffians had borne into the house a swooning lady, whom merciful unconsciousness had rendered oblivious to her present surroundings, and whose wrists his Lordship was vigorously slapping in the intervals between his frequent applications to her nostrils of a flask, which, as I more lately learned, contained sal volatile.

Here was an unlucky turn, since I had no desire to announce my whereabouts, my business in the house being of a sort that necessitated secrecy; whereas, upon the other hand, I could not but mis...o...b.. my Lord's intention toward the unknown fair was of discreditable kinship, and such as a gentleman might not countenance with self-esteem.

Accordingly I devoted the moments during which the lady was recovering from her swoon, to serious reflection concerning the course that I should preferably adopt. But now, Miss came to, and, as is the custom of all females similarly situated, rubbed her eyes and said, "Where am I?"

And when she rose from the divan I saw that 'twas my adored Dorothy.

"In the presence of your infatuated slave," says my Lord. "Ah, divine Miss Allonby--!"

But being now aware of her deplorable circ.u.mstances, she began to weep, and, in spite of the amorous rhetoric with which his Lordship was prompt to comfort her, rebuked him for unmanly conduct, with sublimity and fire, and depicted the horrors of her present predicament in terms that were both just and elegant.

From their disjointed talk I soon determined that, Lord Humphrey's suit being rejected by my angel, he had laid a trap for her (by bribing her coachman, as I subsequently learned), and had so far succeeded in his nefarious scheme that she, on leaving Lady Culcheth's, had been driven to this house, in the conviction she rode homeward; and this course my Lord endeavored to justify, with a certain eloquence, and attributed the irregularity of his behavior solely to the colossal vehemence of his affection.

His oratory, however, was of little avail, for Dorothy told him plainly that she had rather hear the protestations of a toad than listen to his far more nauseous flattery; and bade him at once restore her to her natural guardians.

"_Ma charmante_," said he, "to-morrow your good step-mother may, if you will, share with your husband the privilege of saluting Lady Humphrey Degge; but as for Miss Allonby, I question if in the future her dearest friends are likely to see much of her."

"What do you mean?" cries she.

"That the parson will be here directly," said he.

"Infamous!" she observes; "and is the world run mad, that these extempore weddings should be foisted upon every woman in the Allonby connection!"

"Ah, but, my dear," he answered airily, "'twas those two fiascos which begot my notion, and yet hearten me. For in every approved romance the third adventurer gets the victory; so that I am, I take it, predestinate to win where Vanringham and Rokesle failed."