Shrewsbury Part 16

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps, Mr. Square-Toes? You know it is the case!" was the vivid answer. "For otherwise, as I like the woman, and now, at all events, she is married--what is against her?"

"I do not trust her," was the measured answer. "And, madam, in these days people are more strait-laced than they were; it is not fitting."

"That for people!" my lady cried with a reckless good humour that would have been striking in one half her age. "People! Odds my life, when did I care for people? But come, I will make a bargain with you.

t.i.t for tat. A Roland for your Oliver! If you will give me your Anne I will give you my Monterey."

"My Anne?" he exclaimed, in a tone of complete bewilderment.

"Yes, your Anne! Come, my Monterey for your Anne!"

There was silence for a moment, and then "I do not at all understand you," he said.

"Don't you? I think you do," she answered lightly. "Look you,

'When William king is William king no more.'

Now, you understand?"

"I understand, my lady, that you are saying things which are not fitting for me to hear," the man answered, in a tone of cold displeasure. "The King, thank G.o.d, is well. When he ails, it will be time to talk of his succession."

"It will be a little late then," she retorted. "In the meantime, and to please me----"

He raised his hand in protest. "Anything else," he said.

"You have not yet heard what I propose," she cried, her voice shrill with anger. "It is a trifle, and to please me you might well do it.

Set your hand to a note which I will see delivered in the proper quarter; promising nothing in the Prince's life-time--there! but only that in the event of his death you will support a Restoration."

"I cannot do it," he answered.

"Cannot do it?" she rejoined with heat. "Why not? You have done as much before."

"It maybe: and been forgiven for it by the best master man ever had!"

"Who feels nothing, forgives easily," she sneered.

"But not twice," he said gravely. "The King----"

"Which King?"

"The only King I acknowledge," he answered, unmoved. "Who knows, believe me, so much more than you give him credit for, that it were well if your friends bethought them of that before it be too late. He has winked at much and forgiven more--no one knows it better than I--but he is not blinded; and there is a point, madam, beyond which he can be as steadfast to punish as your King. If Sir John Fenwick, therefore, who I know well, is in England----"

But at that she cut him short, carried away by a pa.s.sion, which she had curbed as long as it was in her impetuous nature to curb anything.

"Odds my life!" she cried, and at the sound of her voice uplifted in a shriek of anger, the woman listening beside me raised her face to mine, and smiled cruelly--"Odds my life, your King and my King! Kings indeed! Why, mannikin, how many Kings do you think there are! By G--d, Master Charles, you will learn one of these days that there is but one King, sent by G.o.d, one King and no more, and that his yea and nay are life and death! You fool, you! I tell you, you are trembling on the edge, you are tottering! A day, a week, a month, at most, and you fall--unless you clutch at the chance of safety I offer you! Sign the note! Sign the note, man! No one but the King and Middleton shall know of it; and when the day comes, as come it will, it shall avail you."

"Never, madam," was the cold and unmoved answer.

So much I heard and my lady's oath and volley of abuse; but in the midst of this, and while she still raged, my companion, satisfied I suppose with what she had learned, and a.s.sured that her lady would not get her way, twitched my sleeve, and softly taking up the lamp, signed to me to go before her. I obeyed nothing loth, and regaining the small ante-room by which I had entered, found the man Smith awaiting us.

When they had whispered together, "I'll see you home, Mr. Taylor,"

said he, somewhat grimly. "And to-morrow I will call and talk business. What we want you to do is a very simple matter."

"It is simply that my lady's son is a fool!" the woman cried, snappishly.

"Well," he said, smiling, "I should hardly call my Lord Shrewsbury that!"

The woman screamed and clapped her hand to his mouth. "You babbling idiot!" she cried, in a pa.s.sion. "You have let it out."

He stood gaping. "Good lord!" he said.

"You have let it out with a vengeance now!" she repeated, furiously.

He looked foolish; and at last, "He did not hear," he said.

"Hear? He heard, unless he is deaf!" she retorted. "You may lay your account with that. For me, I'll leave you. You have done the mischief and may mend it."

CHAPTER XVIII

But as the spoken word has sometimes the permanence which proverbs attach to the _Littera scripta_, and is only confirmed by bungling essays to erase it, so it was in this case; Mr. Smith's endeavours to explain away the fact which he had carelessly blabbed only serving to impress it the more deeply on my memory. It would seem that he was partly aware of this; for not only did his attempts lack the dexterity which I should have expected from one whose features augured much experience of the world, but he quickly gave up the attempt as labour in vain, and gruffly bidding me go before to the coach, followed me and took his seat beside me. We rumbled away. The night was overcast, the neighbourhood seemed to be rural; and, starting from an unknown point, I had less chance than before of tracing the devious lanes and streets through which we drove; so that when the coach presently stopped in a part of the town more frequented, I had not the least idea where we were, or where we had been.

"You can get home from here," said he, still ruffled, and scarce able to speak to me civilly.

Then I saw, as I went to descend, that we were near the end of Holborn, in the Tyburn Road, where it grows to country. "I will see you to-morrow," he cried. "And, mind you, in the meantime, the less you say to Ferguson the better, my man!" With which the coach drove away towards Kensington, leaving me standing against the wall of St.

Giles's Pound.

Thus released, alone, and free to consider what had happened to me, I found a difficulty in tracing where I had been, but none in following the drift of the strange scene and stranger conversation at which I had been present. Even the plans of those who had conveyed me to that place were transparent. It needed no Solomon to discern that in the man Smith and the woman Monterey the young lord had two foes in his mother's household, as dangerous as foes could be; the woman moved, as I conjectured, by that _spretae injuria formae_, of which the great Roman poet speaks, and the man by I know not what old wrong or jealousy. It was plain that these two, to obtain their ends, were urging on the mother a most perilous policy: that, I mean, of committing the son to the Jacobite Court, that so he might be cut off from St. James's; moreover, that, as he could not be induced, in _propria persona_, to such a treasonable step as would serve their ends, advantage was to be taken of some likeness that I bore to him (which Smith had observed the previous evening in Covent Garden) to personate him in a place or company where his presence would be conclusive both for and against him.

I could believe that the mother contemplated but vaguely the power over him which the incident would give her; and dreamed of using it only in the last resort; rather amusing herself in the present with the thought that short of this, and without bringing the deception to his notice, the effect she desired would be produced--since he would be held at St. Germain's to be well affected, and at St. James's the matter would not be known. So, in his own despite, and without his knowledge, he could be reconciled to the one court, while remaining faithful to the other!

But, as in the ma.s.s of conspiracies--and this was especially true of the conspiracies of that age--the acute eye can detect the existence of an inner and outer ring of conspirators, whereof the latter are commonly the dupes of the former, so I took it that here Smith and the woman meditated other and more serious results than those which my lady foresaw; and, thinking less of my lord's safety in the event of a Restoration than of punishing him or obtaining a hold upon him--and more of private revenge than of the Good Cause--had madam for their princ.i.p.al tool. Such a consideration, while it increased my reluctance to be mixed up with a matter so two-faced, left me to think whether I should not seek out the victim, and by an early information, gain his favour and protection.

I stood in the darkness of the street doubtful, and weighing the matter. Clearly, if I had to do the thing, now was the time, before I saw Smith, or exposed myself to an urgency which in spite of his politeness might, I fancied, be of a kind difficult to resist. If by going straight to Lord Shrewsbury I could kill two birds with one stone--could at once free myself from the gang of plotters under whom I suffered, and secure for the future a valuable patron--here was a chance in a hundred, and I should be foolish to hesitate.

Nor did I do so long. True, it stuck me a little that I knew nothing of my Lord Shrewsbury's whereabouts in London; nor whether he lived in town, or in the great house among the lanes and gardens which I had visited, but of the road whereto I had no more knowledge than a blind man. This, however, I could learn at the nearest coffee-house: and impulse rather than calculation directing my steps, I hurried hot-foot towards Covent Garden, which lay conveniently to my hand.

It was not until I was in the Square and close to the Piazza that I bethought me how imprudent I was to re-visit the scene of last night's adventure; a place where it was common knowledge that the Jacobites held their a.s.signations; and where I might be recognised. To reinforce this late-found discretion, and blow up the spark of alarm already kindled, I had not stood hesitating while a man could count ten, before my eye fell on the very same soldierly gentleman, with the handkerchief hanging out of his pocket, to whom I had been sent the evening before. He was alone, walking under the dimly-lighted Piazza, as he had walked then; but as I caught sight of him two others came up and joined him: and in terror lest these should be the two I had met before, I retreated hastily into the shadow of St. Paul's Church, and so back the way I had come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I HEARD A LIGHT FOOT FOLLOWING ME]