Shrewsbury Part 14

"I know this!" Ferguson retorted, dropping his voice on a sudden to a baleful whisper, "Who is here, and where he lies, Mr. Smith. And----"

"So do Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry," the other answered, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously; and then to me, "Mr. Taylor," he continued with politeness, "I think we will be going. Light the door, my dear.

That is it. I have a coach below, and--good-night, Mr. Ferguson, good-night to you. I'll tell Sir George I have seen you. And do you think over my advice."

At that my master broke out afresh, cursing the other's impudence, and frantically swearing to be even with him; but I lost what he said, in a sudden consternation that seized me, as I crossed the threshold; a kind of shiver, which came over me at the prospect of the night, and the dark coach ride, and the uncertainty of this new adventure. The lights in the room, and Mr. Smith's politeness, had given me a courage which the dark staircase dissipated; and but for the hold which my new employer, perhaps unconsciously, laid on my arm, I think I should have stood back and refused to go. Under his gentle compulsion, however, I went down and took my seat in the coach that awaited us; and my companion following me and closing the door, someone unseen raised the steps, and in a moment we were jolting out of Bride Lane, and turned in the direction of the Strand.

More than this I could not distinguish with all my curiosity, and look out as I might; for Mr. Smith muttering something I did not catch, drew the curtain over the window on my side, and, for the other, interposed himself so continually and skilfully between it and my eyes, that the coach turning two or three corners, in a few minutes I was quite ignorant where we were, or whether we still held a westward direction. A hundred notions of footpads, abductions, Mr. Thynne, and the like pa.s.sed through my mind while the coach rumbled on, and rumbled on, and rumbled on endlessly; nor was the fact that we appeared to avoid the business parts of the town, and chose unlighted ways, calculated to steady my nerves. At length, and while I still debated whether I wished this suspense at an end, or feared more what was to follow, the coach stopped with a jerk, which almost threw me out of my seat.

"We are there," said my companion, who had been some time silent. "I must trouble you to descend, Mr. Taylor. And have no fears. The matter in hand is very simple. Only be good enough to follow me closely, and quickly."

And without releasing my arm he hurried me out of the coach, and through a door in a wall. This admitted us only to a garden; and that so dark, and so completely obscured by high walls and the branches of trees, which showed faintly overhead, feathering against the sky, that but for the guidance of his hand, I must have stood, unable to proceed. Such an overture was far from abating my fears; nor had I expected this sudden plunge into a solitude, which seemed the more chilling, as we stood in London, and had a little while before pa.s.sed from the hum of the Strand. I tried to consider where we could be, and the possibilities of retreat; but my conductor left me little room for indecision. Still holding my arm, he led me down a walk, and to a door, which opened as we approached. A flood of light poured out and fell on the pale green of the surrounding trees; the next moment I stood in a small, bare lobby or ante-room, and heard the door chained behind me.

My eyes dazzled by a lamp, I saw no more at first than that the person who held it, and had admitted us, was a woman. But on her setting down the lamp, and proceeding to look me up and down deliberately, the while Mr. Smith stood by, as if he had brought me for this and no other, I took uneasy note of her. She appeared to be verging on forty but was still handsome after a coa.r.s.e and full-blown fashion, with lips over-full and cheeks too red; her dark hair still kept its colour, and the remains of a great vivacity still lurked in her gloomy eyes. Her dress, of an untidy richness worn and tarnished, and ill-fastened at the neck, was no mean match for her face; and led me to think her--and therein I was right--the waiting-woman of some great lady. Perhaps I should, if let alone, have come something nearer the truth than this, and quite home; but Mr. Smith cut short my observations by falling upon her in a tone of anger, "Hang it, madam, if you are not satisfied," he cried, "I can only tell you----"

"Who said I was not satisfied?" she answered, still surveying me with the utmost coolness. "But----"

"But what?"

"I cannot help thinking---- What is your name, sir, if you please?"

This to me.

"Taylor," I said.

"Taylor? Taylor?" She repeated the name as if uncertain. "I remember no Taylor; and yet----"

"You remember? You remember? You know very well whom you remember!"

Mr. Smith cried, impatiently. "It is the likeness you are thinking of!

Why, it is as plain, woman, as the nose on his face. It is so plain that if I had brought him in by the front door----"

"And kept his mouth shut!" She interposed.

"No one would have been the wiser."

"Well," she said, grudgingly, and eyeing me with her head aside, "it is near enough."

"It is the thing!" he cried, with an oath.

"As a Chelsea orange is a China orange!" she answered, contemptuously.

At that he looked at her in a sort of dark fury, precisely, so it seemed to me, as Ferguson had looked at him an hour before. "By heaven, you vixen," he cried in the end, surprise and rage contending in his tone, "I believe you love him still!"

Her back being towards me I did not see her face, but the venom in her tone when she answered, made my blood creep. "Well," she said, slowly, "and if I do? Much good may it do him!"

Ambiguous as were the words--but not the tone--the man shrugged his shoulders. "Then what are we waiting for?" he asked, irritably.

"Madam's pleasure," she answered. And I could see that she loved to baulk him. However, her pleasure was, this time, short-lived, for at that moment a little bell tinkled in a distant room, and she took up the lamp. "Come," she said. "And do you, sir," she continued, turning to me and speaking sharply, "hold up your head and look as if you could cut your own food. You are going to see an old woman. Do you think that she will eat you?"

I let the gibe pa.s.s, and wondering of whom and what it was she reminded me, whenever she spoke, I followed her up a short dark flight of stairs to a second ante-room, or closet, situate, as far as I could judge, over the other. It was hung with dull, faded tapestry and smelled close, as if seldom used and more seldom aired. Setting down the lamp on a little side-table whereon a crumpled domino, a couple of masks, and an empty perfume bottle already lay, she bade us in a low voice wait for her and be silent; and enforcing the last order by placing her finger on her lip, she glided quietly out through a door so skilfully masked by the tapestry as to seem one of the walls.

Left alone with Mr. Smith, who seated himself on the table, I had leisure to take note of the closet. Remarking that the wall at one end was partly hidden by a couple of curtains, between which a bare bracket stood out from the wall, I concluded that the place had been a secret oratory and had witnessed many a clandestine ma.s.s. I might have carried my observations farther; but they were cut short at this point by the return of the woman, who nodding, in silence, held the door open for us to pa.s.s.

CHAPTER XVI

The first to enter, and prepared for many things--among which the gloomy surroundings of an ascetic, devoted to the dark usages of the old faith, held the first place in probability--I halted in surprise on the threshold of a lofty and splendid room suffused with rose-tinted light, and furnished with a luxury to which I had been hitherto a stranger. The walls, hung with gorgeous French tapestry, presented a succession of palaces and hunting scenes, interspersed with birds of strange and tropical plumage; between which and the eyes were scattered a profusion of j.a.panese screens, cabinets, and tables, with some of those quaint Dutch idols, brought from the East, which, new to me, were beginning at this time to take the public taste.

Embracing the upper half of the room, and also a _ruelle_, in which stood a stately bed with pillars of silver, a circle of stronger light, dispersed by lamps cunningly hidden in the ceiling, fell on a suite of furniture of rose brocade and silver; in the great chair of which, with her feet on a foot-stool set upon the open hearth, sat an elderly lady, leaning on an ebony stick. A monkey mowed and gibbered on the back of her chair; and a parrot, vieing in brilliance with the broidered birds on the wall, hung by its claws from a ring above her head.

Nor was the lady herself unworthy of the splendour of her surroundings. It is true, her face and piled-up hair, painted and dyed into an extravagant caricature of youth, aped the graces of sixteen, and at the first glance touched the note of the grotesque rather than the beautiful; but it needed only a second look to convince me that with all that she on whom I looked was a great lady of the world, so still she sat, and so proud and dark was the gaze she bent on me over her clasped hands.

At first, it seemed to me, she gazed like one who, feeling a great surprise, has learned to hide that and all other emotions. But presently, "Come in, b.o.o.by," she cried, in a voice petulant and cracking with age. "Does a woman frighten you? Come nearer, I say. Ay, I have seen your double. But the lamp has gone out."

The woman who had admitted me rustled forward. "It has sunk a little perhaps, madam," she said in a smooth voice. "But I----"

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE GREAT CHAIR SAT AN ELDERLY LADY LEANING ON AN EBONY STICK]

"But you are a fool," the lady cried. "I meant the lamp in the man, silly. Do you think that anyone who has ever seen him would take that block of wood for my son? Give him a brain, and light a fire in him, and spark up those oyster eyes, and----turn him round, turn him round, woman!"

"Turn," Smith muttered, in a fierce whisper.

"Ay," the lady cried, as I went to obey, "see his back, and he is like enough!"

"And perhaps, madam, strangers----"

"Strangers? They'd be strange, indeed, man, to be taken in by him! But walk him, walk him. Do you hear, fellow," she continued, nodding peevishly at me, "hold up your head, and cross the room like a man if you are one. Do you think the small-pox is in the air that you fear it! Ha! That is better. And what is your name, I wonder, that you have that nose and mouth, and that turn of the chin?"

"Charles Taylor," I made bold to answer, though her eyes went through me, and killed the courage in me.

"Ay, Charles, that is like enough," she replied. "And Taylor, that was your mother's. It is a waiting-woman's name. But who was your father, my man?"

"Charles Taylor too," I stammered, falling deeper and deeper into the lie.

"Odds my eyes, no!" she retorted with an ugly grin, and shook her piled-up head at me, "and you know it! Come nearer!" and then when I obeyed, "take that for your lie!" she cried; and, leaning forward with an activity I did not suspect, she aimed a blow at me with her ebony cane, and, catching me smartly across the shins, made me jump again.

"That is for lying, my man," she continued with satisfaction, as I stooped ruefully to rub myself. "Before now I have had a man stopped and killed in the street for less. Ay, that have I! and a prettier man than you, and a gentleman! And now walk! walk!" she repeated, tapping the floor imperiously, "and fancy that you have money in your purse."

I obeyed. But naturally the smart of the cane did not tend to set me at my ease, or abate my awe of the old witch; and left to myself I should have made a poor show. Both the man and the woman, however, prompted and drilled me with stealthy eagerness, and whispering me continually to do this and that, to hold up my chin, to lay back my shoulders, to shake out my handkerchief, to point my toes, I suppose I came off better in this strange exhibition than might have been expected. For by-and-by, the lady, who never ceased to watch me with sharp eyes, grunted and bade me stand. "He might pa.s.s," she said, "among fools, and with his mouth shut! But odds my life," she continued, irritably, "G.o.d have mercy on us that there should be need of all this! Is there no royalty left in the world, that my son, of all people, should turn traitor to his lawful King, and spit on his father's faith? Sometimes I could curse him. And you, woman," she cried with sudden fierceness, "you cajoled him once. Can you do nothing now, you Jezebel?"

But the woman she addressed stood stiffly upright, looking before her, and answered nothing; and the mistress, with a smothered curse, turned to the man. "Well," she said, "have you nothing to say?"

"Only, madam, what I said before," he answered smoothly and gravely; "my lord's secession is no longer in issue. The question is how he may be brought back into the path of loyalty. To be frank, he is not of the stuff of those, whom your ladyship knows, who will readily lick both sides of the trencher. And so, without some little pressure, he will not be brought back. But were he once committed to the good cause, either by an indiscretion on his own part, if he could be induced to that----"

"Which he cannot, man, he cannot," she struck in impatiently. "He made one slip, and he will make no second."

"True, madam," the man answered. "Then there remains only the way which does not depend on him; and which I before indicated; some ruse which may lead both the friends and enemies of the good cause to think him committed to it. Afterwards, this opinion being brought to his notice, and with it, the possibility of clearing himself to the satisfaction both of St. Germain's and St. James's, he would, I think, come over."