scribendi cacoethes

MIND'S EYE

for CS and TS

The pup he strained upon his leash,
Whiskers stiff, eyes fixed, ready to leap.
Sunflowers dropped petals, stirred by the breeze
That ruffled cypress, bent corn, lofted crows,
Rising, rising, to set some stars a-spinning.

She watched them, pain receding,
As the breeze dropped, stars paused,
Corn, crows, cypresses and sunflowers stopped
Pretending to be real;
While the pup -
Went back to being stuffed.

~ E.M.R.H.                              8 February 2010


BOOKWORM

THE GATES OF DOOM

by Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 18

IN CHECK

As my Lord Pauncefort calculated so did things fall out. No sooner had she seen his carriage roll away in a cloud of dust towards London than Evelyn went in quest of Damaris.
She found her seated by the window of her room - she would sit there by the hour now in apparent idleness - and in her hand Damaris held Captain Gaynor's letter, which already she had read so often that its every character was seared indelibly upon her memory. She thrust the epistle into the bosom of her corsage when Evelyn entered, still pale and breathless now from the haste she had made, and she listened quite calmly to the tale that Evelyn brought.
At the mention of Sir John's danger her gentle face had hardened and she had frowned. Her quick mind perceived it instantly. Whatever else might be false in the message of which her cousin was the bearer, there could be no question as to the truth of that part of it. Yet she remained singularly quiet.
"I see," she said, when Evelyn had done. "And of course Lord Pauncefort bade you tell me this." The faint sneer gave the words their intended meaning, and Evelyn grasped it instantly.
"Not so," she cried, her cheeks flushing with indignation for one whom she felt it her duty - since he had so openly and honestly confided in her - to champion. "Not so - though he feared that you would think so."
"Then, of course, he did intend that you should tell me."
"He did not!" Evelyn stamped her foot. She was angry now.
"Why all this heat, my dear?"
"Because you are so unjust, so meanly suspicious. And you go too fast in your suspicions. It was just because he feared that you might impute unworthy motives to him that he begged me as he was setting out to forget all that he had said and to mention it to no one."
"Being quite confident, of course, that you could not keep it to yourself," said Damaris. "Nay, Evelyn, be not angry with me. My scorn is not for you, child."
"I am as old as you are," flashed Evelyn back, with something of her mothers irrelevance.
"But you have been saved some of the bitter experience which has been mine," added Damaris, with a pale smile, "else my Lord Pauncefort would not so easily have made a tool of you."
"A tool of me? Lord Pauncefort?" Her indignation was out of all proportion to the charge. For she magnified it into an insult - a slight upon her shrewdness.
"Do you not see, Evelyn dear, that if he had no ends to serve by telling you this, he would not needlessly have harassed you by showing you your father’s peril? It is precisely because he sought to strike a bargain with Sir John, and because Sir John failed him entirely, that he sent me this message by you."
"He sent no message," Evelyn insisted. "'Tis hateful to be so suspicious. He told me not to mention what he had said, just because he feared you would so construe his ends."
"That fear, at least, was shrewd in him."
"I see that it is idle to make you understand." And on that, with flaming cheeks, Eveyln swung on her heel and left her cousin.
To have been told that Lord Pauncefort had made a tool of her, as though she had no wit of her own! It was monstrous, and it sent her very angry to her chamber. Had she known in what frame of mind she left poor Damaris, perhaps her own had been less bitter.
To the burden, already almost overwhelming, of her grief was added this fresh horror - the knowledge that over her only remaining friend hung this terrible peril in which his very life might be involved, and the further torturing, agonising knowledge that it lay within her power, by self-immolation, to rescue him.
She rose, and remained standing for some time by the window, her hands pressed against her brow, as if seeking to stimulate the numbed brain within. Did it greatly matter what befell her now? Did it greatly matter that she should deliver herself to Pauncefort as a ransom for Sir John? Was it not, perhaps, the best use to which she could now devote her otherwise wasted and useless life?"
Heavy-footed she went below in quest of her guardian. She found him still seated at the table in the library, bowed down in expectation of the descent of that impending sword. He looked up as she entered, and the sight of that grey face, and the dumb pain investing those eyes that were wont to gleam so clear and jovially, strengthened her in her purpose by showing her the great good to be achieved.
She came to him, and set an arm about his shoulder, her smooth warm cheek against his own.
"Father dear," she murmured - and since it was not her custom to address him by that name, her present use of it lent her a greater tenderness. "Father dear, you are troubled, and I have come to help you if you will let me."
"Trou - troubled!" he faltered, with a poor attempt to bluster. "Nay, now, what should be troubling me?"
"This thing that my Lord Pauncefort came to tell you. You see that I know all."
He attempted to swing round in her embrace that he might face her.
"Who told you?" he growled. "Did you see Pauncefort? Did he make you this infamous proposal?"
"No," she answered. "He saw Evelyn."
"And he told her to the end that she might tell you!" His voice was shaking now with indignation.
"Be not angry with her, father dear." Her cheek pressed his own yet more closely. "Evelyn is but a child. She never realised that my Lord Pauncefort used her to this end. I do not think that she fully realises your danger even now."
"Indeed," he answered bitterly, "it is well written that the father of a fool hath no joy." For in his mind at that moment was the fact that his child, informed of this horror that menaced him, had never given a thought to the condition in which it must have left him, had never attempted to seek him out, to bring him at least the comfort of her affection and sympathy. It had been left for Damaris to discharge a consoler's duty, and more, to seek him with the offer to immolate herself that she might rescue him - for already he guessed, with heavy foreboding, the nature of the help which she announced.
It must be as Damaris said. It must be that this frivolous, irresponsible child he had brought into the world had not the wit to understand his position. He sighed heavily as he reflected that she was, after all, his offspring - his and his foolish wife’s - and that he had not the right to complain.
"Do not grieve, my sweet Damaris," he said presently. "Your sympathy has consoled and cheered me. It makes me realise that perhaps all may not yet be lost."
"Nothing is lost," she answered him, "since we have it in our power to - to ransom you."
"Not that!" he cried, in a voice of thunder. "I forbid it. Do you hear me, child?" He disengaged himself from her arms, and threw back his great head that he might regard her fully. Then in a milder, tender voice, he pursued: "Ah, it is sweet in you to offer it; it is noble in you, and I am proud and happy in this earnest of your love, my dear. But it may not - it shall not be."
"I am but a husk," she said slowly, her voice a little wistful, her eyes resolute. "All that was Damaris Hollinstone perished at Tyburn a week ago - all save this little of me that I have kept for you. What, then, can it signify? Let my lord have this husk. It is all that he seeks of me - more than he seeks, since my fortune is his real desire. And how better could that fortune be applied than to ransoming the man whom today I honour most in all the world. Ah, father dear, you'll not deny me. Did you know how gladly I will- "
"No!" he roared again, and his great hand crashed heavily upon the table. "It shall not be. I would not permit it were it to save me from being quartered alive. What manner of knave should I be, Damaris? What respect for me could linger with you or with any honest soul did I become a party to so infamous a bargain?" He waved a hand of peremptory dismissal. "Let come what will. I am am old man, and in any event I should not have many more years of life before me. The Government will get but little, when all is said, and for such a little the ransom you propose were altogether absurd and disproportionate. "
"Can it be that you think only of yourself?" she asked him.
He stared. "My dear, I hope I think of you as well."
"There are those who have a prior claim to mine upon your thoughts."
She saw the sudden spasm of pain that crossed his face; noted the little pause before he spoke again. But when he did speak his tone and manner were unshaken.
"And am I so base that I will purchase their welfare at the price of your prostitution?" he asked her.
But she did not flinch. "I have told you that I am but a husk," she said. "Do you not believe me?"
"O my God!" he groaned, and for a moment he was limp and helpless. But in the next he had mastered himself. "Not another word of this, my child," he said, and his voice was now one of utter finality. "As you love me do not attempt to pursue this subject further. I will not listen. Ah, don't think me harsh, don't think me slow to perceive your nobility, your greatness, my sweet Damaris." He rose, took her in his arms, and kissed her very tenderly. "For that I thank you from my soul. You have brought such comfort and gladness to my grey hairs this day as I have never known. To the end I shall thank God for the treasure of your affection."
"Ah, but, father dear!" Her face was upturned to his, and he saw the tears brimming her eyes.
"No more," he said gently. "No more of this. You cannot constrain me, for even if you consented of your own accord to the sacrifice, even did you in your foolish nobility seek that hound Pauncefort and announce your readiness to pay the price, yet should I withold my consent to the union, and exercise my rights under your father’s will. I must, as I believe in God and in honour."
She perceived then how irrefragable was his resolve, perceived with her true-sightedness that did she urge him further he might perhaps make an end by impaling himself upon the sword that threatened him. So she went her way, praying heaven to afford her the means of saving him yet, despite himself. Indeed, so engrossed was she in the thought that she realised but indifferently its meaning to herself, had little leisure in which to dwell upon the horror of the price that she must pay.
One day, a week later, she thought that her chance had come, when Evelyn brought her word that my Lord Pauncefort was again closeted with Sir John in the library.
Again as on the occasion of my lord's previous visit, Sir John's first impulse had been to deny himself. But he reflected that it were best to receive his lordship and learn - as he supposed he would - the precise present degree of the danger threatened. Yet his reception of Pauncefort was again as uncompromising as before.
"You are not welcome, my lord," he said, rising to receive his visitor, and keeping him standing throughout the interview, "and if your visit has the same object as your last you had been better advised to have spared yourself the trouble."
"I deplore, Sir John," returned the viscount, with his almost miraculous equanimity, "to find you still in the same obdurate humour. But I think I shall have the felicity of mending it." He advanced slowly, gracefully into the room, whilst Sir John took his habitual stand with his shoulders to the carved overmantel. "Had I not conceived," he continued, "means of removing your unworthy suspicions, of proving to you how disinterested is my action, how dictated purely by my profound affection for your ward I should not again have intruded where - as you do not omit to tell me - I am unwelcome. "
He had waited from hour to hour in London, confident that there would come to him a letter from Damaris. Unable, however, longer to endure the suspense; knowing, too, that he could not much longer delay action in the matter of advising Sir John's arrest, lest it should occur independently to Lord Carteret to order it (from which will be gathered the falsehood in which his lordship had been dealing), he had returned to the attack, armed now with a fresh weapon.
"I am listening, my lord," was the baronet's cold answer. "But I warn you that the matter will need a deal of proof, and I conceive that your invention is more like to be strained than my credulity. But proceed, my lord."
"You have said, sir, that to the end you would withhold your sanction to my marriage with your niece?" His lordship's statement was interrogative rather than affirmative.
"I have said so," answered Sir John.
"And I hope," said his lordship, "that you adhere to that resolve."
"You are justified of that hope, at least," was the dry answer.
The door opened gently and, unobserved by either of the men, Damaris appeared under the lintel.
"I rejoice in that," answered his lordship, his face lightening suddenly, "since thus I can prove to yourself and to Damaris my penitence of my past attitude and the sincerity of my feelings. I am willing, Sir John, willing and eager to marry your niece, as you once invited me, without your sanction. And so, the devil take her fortune!"
"And the devil take your offer!" was the imperturbable reply.
"No, no, Sir John!" It was Damaris who spoke. She advanced quietly into the room.
"Damaris!" cried Sir John, and his brows grew dark. His lordship, a fine figure in bronze-green satin, bowed until the curls of his periwig almost met across his face.
"Since his lordship offers this proof of his sincerity -" she began, and Lord Pauncefort's eyes were aglow with triumph. But this triumph was not yet complete.
"His sincerity!" the baronet interrupted. "Are you deceived by these smooth words?"
"Sir John, you go too far," my lord reproved him, very haughty now. "Consider, pray, that I do no more than take you at your word, as I should have taken you when it was uttered but that I was a fool. Thus, at least, I had saved Damaris and myself much fruitless pain. I am here, sir, to repair a fault for which I have never ceased to feel the most profound contrition, and if there is deception in my words I challenge you, sir, to unmask it."
He flicked a handkerchief as he finished, applied it to his lips, and with head thrown back, gallant defiance in every line of him, he waited for Sir John’s answer. It came hard and swift.
"Why, what a foolish rogue is this! It passes belief! That he should think, Damaris, to cozen us with transparent falsehoods that would not deceive a child! And you would listen to him. Be it so; but at least let me help you to understand him. He will take you without my sanction, he says; by which he means that he will take you without your fortune, and that in withholding my sanction I am to dispose of your inheritance as your father’s will directs. But am I? Shall I be allowed to do so? If they arrest me and make an outlaw of me, what power have I to execute any such deed? And that, Damaris, is what my lord is counting on. Oh, he is subtle but not subtle enough to match his villainy."
Lord Pauncefort’s face was black with anger. "Your injustice, sir, is the only thing that passes belief." He swung to Damaris. "I am employing every effort of which I am capable to restrain the Secretary of State from issuing a warrant against your uncle as I have told him; and all that he can find for me on his side is insult. I think I had much better wash my hands of the affair, and leave him to his fate."
"No, no!" she cried. "Wait, my lord. Do you undertake that Sir John shall have complete immunity from any proceedings?"
"From any proceedings resulting from his having harboured Captain Gaynor," said his lordship. "That is what I have promised. I do not wish this to be a bargain between us, Damaris. In no sense do I make it a bargain. But loving you as I do," he continued, affecting not to observe how she winced under those words, "loving you as I do, how can I refrain from pointing out that, were I Sir John’s relative by marriage, my Lord Carteret, out of his affection for me, would be more easily induced to refrain from proceedings against him? This I can promise."
"Ay, and prove as false to your promise as you have proven false to all else," stormed Sir John. "Oh, do not heed him, Damaris."
"Nay, you must heed me, mistress," said his lordship. "You were right to - to have despised me once for an altogether unworthy hesitation. That hesitation I am now amending, and I implore you not to make me suffer more for it than I have done. I am ready and eager, as I have said, to waive Sir John’s sanction, and thus consent that your fortune be bestowed elsewhere. What greater proof can I afford of the sincerity of my intentions?"
"He waives my sanction," said Sir John, "knowing full well that once I am laid by the heels he can dispense with it at law to appropriate your inheritance. Do you not see, Damaris, that, far from helping me, as you suppose, by such a sacrifice, you will but imperil me, you will make my doom doubly assured?"
This was checkmate indeed; and his lordship saw it - saw it reflected on her face. Her shrewd wit had straightly followed Sir John’s shrewd indication.
"Then you must give your sanction, Sir John," she cried. "You must!"
"Never!" he answered, and his lips closed firmly, his face became a stone.
Lord Pauncefort perceived the doom of his hope as far as the present line of attack was concerned. But from her attitude he perceived where and how a flanking movement might be made that should carry him to easy victory. At once he flung off his hypocritical mask of resignation, and showed now a countenance that was evil and menacing.
He bowed. "There is no more to be said at present," he murmured. "You are too old a man to call to account for your words. It but remains for me to withdraw from further insult."
As on the former occasion Sir John pulled the bell-rope. "I am glad, sir, that you perceive it," was his scornful answer.
Deliberately his lordship turned his shoulders upon him, and with bowed head he stood respectfully before Damaris.
"I will beg you to judge more mercifully than does your uncle. Believe me," and his voice vibrated with an apparent sincerity that almost deceived her, "I have not deserved so much opprobrium, and I am honest in my love of you."
He swept her a profound bow, and was gone.
She ran to Sir John, and put her arms about his neck. "Why did you refuse?" she wailed. "You have doomed yourself."
"Not more than I was doomed before," he answered gloomily. He stroked the dark head, and looked wistfully into her brown eyes, that were now so troubled for his sake. "Indeed, my only chance is to stand firm," he said, to comfort her. "If I give way I am destroyed. But as long as I refuse him, I may hold him off; he may hope and, hoping, may not denounce me - for it is upon his denunciation that my arrest depends. The rest is all a fable of his own. He has convinced me of that today."
"Oh no, no; never that!" she cried.
"I know my Lord Carteret. We have been almost friends. And I know that he is not the man to stand like a lackey at that fellow's beck. Pish! It is as I say. He pretends to stand between me and arrest. He does - by not denouncing me. He denounced all the others. He denounced Harry Gaynor."
She cried out at that. It was a shrewd thrust, well calculated to pierce her armour of self-sacrifice, as Sir John intended.
"Ay, it is true enough, as God hears me," he insisted. "And that is the man you would have married! You see how impossible 'twould be? You had not quite understood this until now, eh? But do not fret, dear child. By opposing him we may still weather this."
She was deceived. "You believe that?"
"I do," he answered, lying bravely And so, somewhat comforted by his assurance, she departed.
But when alone he went again to sit at that table, as he had sat before after the last interview with Lord Pauncefort. And if on that occasion he had accounted himself in grave danger, today he accounted himself irrevocably doomed. The end would not be long in coming, and he wondered again what would betide his helpless child, and still more helpless wife, when the blow fell. From his heart he sent up a silent prayer to God to guard them.
Still sitting there, quite idly, a lackey found him half an hour later when he entered with a letter for Sir John, which a messenger had just brought from London.

For anyone interested in Rafael Sabatini here is a link to a book to be released in May 2010:

http://www.oakknoll.com/detail.php?d_booknr=102816

scribendi cacoethes

EGO COMPLAINS!

How needful to hope that I will be read

Long after this feeble body is dead.

To dream that the words which danced in my mind

Another, a stranger, will pleasing find;

One whom I never can speak to or meet

Will be my friend - that thought is sweet!

The truth, alack, is a tale oft told:

My books will never be bought or sold,

But remain unfinished, incomplete, unread,

For I'm remaindered before I'm well dead!

~ E.M.R.H.                 6 February 2010


BOOKWORM

THE GATES OF DOOM

by Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 16
RESURRECTION

For almost all the matter contained in this chapter I acknowledge an indebtedness that will presently be apparent to that memoir of Dr Blizzard which I have mentioned, and upon which already I have drawn for those dream-sensations experienced by Captain Gaynor when he was turned off and left swinging after the cart had drawn away from under him.
I closely followed that portion of the memoir up to the point at which the Captain lost consciousness, or - to adhere strictly to his own impressions - at which he sank to sleep, his head pillowed upon the bosom of Damaris.
When next he awakened it was in surroundings vastly different from those under which he had sunk to slumber, as he believed. Here was no sunlit garden, but a square, whitewashed chamber, lighted not only by a window in one of its walls, but also from another - and a very large one this - in the ceiling immediately above him.
Someone was bending over him, and a face was peering into his. But it was not the lovely, beloved face of Damaris. Instead, it was a keen, lean, almost wolfish face, with leathern cheeks and very piercing little eyes that were considering him through horn-rimmed spectacles.
He lay quite still and only half conscious as yet, looking up into that face, and neither wondering nor caring to whom it might belong. Then, as his awakening proceeded, he was conscious that his body was cold and stiff and that there was a strong taste of brandy in his mouth. His left wrist, he discovered, was in the grip of this wizened-faced man; but it was a very gentle grip, with a finger pressing lightly upon his pulse.
Then, quite suddenly, memory like a flood poured in upon his consciousness, and his awakening was complete.
He attempted to rise from his recumbent position, and the effort set a thousand hammers swinging in his brain. His head, he found, was just an ache, a globe of pain, no more. The window above him appeared to slide to and fro, the couch upon which he lay heaved under him, and the wizened face of his companion dilated and contracted horribly as he watched it. He groaned and closed his eyes. The pain spread downwards through his body, which lay stark there upon a table - for such was the nature of his couch. Then, at last, the tide of torment slowly ebbed again, leaving him bedewed from head to foot with sweat.
He opened his eyes once more. He attempted to speak, and this fresh effort centralised the pain in his throat and tongue. They seemed swollen to elephantine proportions.
The leathern mask of a face above him appeared suddenly to crack across. A very wide and quite lipless mouth had opened, and from it issued a queer, clucking sound.
"Tut, tut! Tut tut! Better keep still! Better keep still!"
The hand had already left his wrist, and now the figure turned and moved away a little to another table under the window in the wall. Captain Gaynor was able to follow it with his eyes without moving his head. He observed the man to be of middle height and very thin. He wore black velvet breeches, black silk stockings and shoes with steel buckles. He was without a coat, and the sleeves of his waistcoat and shirt were rolled up to the elbows of two long, thin, sinewy arms. His waistcoat itself was concealed by a coarse, yellowish apron in which there were several dull, brown patches. This apron covered him in front from chin to waist; the remainder of it had been rolled into a rope and was twisted round his middle. The table to which he had moved was of a good size and of plain deal. Part of it was encumbered by phials of all forms and sizes; but in a clear space in the middle, upon a spread cloth, was an array of very bright instruments of queer shapes, whose purpose the Captain could not have guessed had his mind been in a condition to attempt the task.
Dr Emanuel Blizzard - for this was the identity of the man - took up a short-stemmed lily-shaped glass, and held it up in one of his enormous, bony hands. From one of the phials he poured into it a ruby-coloured liquid; from another he added something else that was quite colourless, and he did this with great care, pausing, adding another drop or two, pausing again, and yet again adding a drop. Then he set the phial down, and carrying the glass he once more approached the table where the Captain lay.
He thrust his left hand under his patient’s head, and raised it very slowly and gently. But for all his gentleness those great hammers were set to swing again, and they crashed forward and backward in Harry Gaynor's brain. The rim of the glass was brought to his lips.
"Drink this," said the gruff voice, and obediently, without any will of his own, the Captain painfully swallowed the fluid. He was not conscious of any flavour in it at the time. But afterwards, when his head had been lowered once more, and the room had ceased to swing about him like the cabin of a ship, he became aware of a fresh pungency in his mouth, soothing and cooling and seeming to reduce its inflammation.
In the moment that his head had been raised, he had perceived in a subconscious way that he was quite naked, that there was blood on his left leg, that a ribbon of this blood ran to the little puddle reaching to the table’s edge. Now, as he lay back once more, he noticed a faint dripping sound, recurring at very brief and very regular intervals. Dimly, and without much interest, he connected this sound with the puddle he had observed.
The events of the morning were coming back to him now in detail. He remembered the cart, the crowd, his pinioned wrists, the parson who had ridden with him, the glimpse he had of the gallows when he had turned his head as they were going down the hill. What happened afterwards, he could not remember until he came to that point where he had found himself in the open country, still in the cart at first, and later crossing a bridge over a great expanse of glaring water to find Damaris awaiting him.
He could not distinguish between the real and the imagined. That all this had happened to him he never doubted; but he could not explain it, any more than he could explain how he came to be lying stark naked upon a deal table with blood flowing from his leg and dripping into some vessel on the floor whilst a stranger tended him.
It would seem as if he had not been hanged after all, and he wondered why was this. But he did not wonder with any great activity; there was no vigorous mental effort to resolve this mystery. His brain was too tired and indolent for the exertion. The indolence gained upon him; it became a torpor, and very gently he sank once more into oblivion.

His next awakening was very different. It took place some twelve hours later, early in the morning of the following day. He was abed now in a solid furnished room that was full of sunlight, and for some moments he lay still, staring up at the white, flat canopy overhead. Then quite suddenly he sat up. Pain shot through his head once more, to bring back a dim memory of his last awakening. But it was endurable now, though still acute.
His sudden movement had been answered by another. From a chintz-covered settle ranged against the wall on his right sprang now the slender figure of the doctor. An arm went round the Captain to support him in his sitting posture; the little piercing eyes considered him again through those spectacles with their great horn rims, and Gaynor observed that, for all its wolfishness, the face was genial and kindly.
The wide lipless mouth opened, and as before it emitted that clucking sound; but the leathery, close-shaven countenance was wrinkled in a smile.
"Eh, and how do we feel now, eh? Better?" And as he spoke, the professor stamped his foot three times upon the floor - an obvious signal to someone below.
"Who are you?" the bewildered patient asked him.
"Eh? My name is Blizzard - Doctor Emanuel Blizzard, professor of anatomy, eh. And you're safe and snug in my house."
"In your house, Doctor -"
"Blizzard, sir - Emanuel Blizzard."
"And how came I here?" the Captain asked, his wonder and bewilderment increasing. His voice was so husky that he could not speak above a whisper, and he was conscious still of a numbness of tongue and throat.
The professor clucked again. "Tut-tut! 'Tis a long story that, and a strange. You shall hear it when you are more recovered. Ye're weak, eh? Ye will be. I bled you very thoroughly. But we'll soon renew what's lost."
A knock fell on the door. The anatomist set the pillows behind his patient so that they supported him in an upright position. Then he sped to the door, opened it, and returned with a tray on which was a bowl, a flagon of red wine and a glass. This tray he placed upon a table by the head of the bed. He took up the bowl, which was filled with steaming broth.
"Ye'll be hungry, eh?" he said, his head on one side. The Captain nodded weakly. "Aha! 'Tis very well."
He approached the patient, and with a horn spoon proceeded himself to feed him. Then he carefully measured him a half-glass of Burgundy, and he held it to his lips, what time the Captain slowly drained it.
"Another?" he asked. "Tut, tut! Better not. Better not, eh? We must go slowly. Piano si va sano, as the Italians say. For the present - ne quid nimis, eh?"
Gently as a woman might have done, he replaced the pillows, and induced his patient once more to lie down. Captain Gaynor obeyed him, too feeble, too utterly bewildered to resist. Something had happened to him; something altogether inordinate; but what that something might be he had no faintest conception, and least of all could he conceive how he came into the house of a professor of anatomy who treated him with such tenderness and solicitude. There was one point, however, that so plagued him that he must have enlightenment upon it. He looked up into that wolfish yet kindly countenance.
"Then - I was not hanged?" he inquired feebly.
"Hanged!" cried the other. "Tut, tut! Go to sleep. You'll be stronger when next you wake. Go to sleep now."
The prediction proved true enough. The broth and the wine spreading warmth through that debilitated frame bore a torpor with them, to which the Captain very shortly succumbed, notwithstanding the question with which he still plagued himself.
When next he opened his eyes upon that room, the sunshine had left it. By the mellow light and the tepid air that came through the open casement he knew it to be eventide. A stout, middle-aged woman with red polished cheeks, that gave her face the appearance of a giant apple, occupied a chair near the bed. She smiled reassuringly when she encountered his questioning gaze, and she rose at once.
"Better now?" she greeted him.
Captain Gaynor was better indeed, and he was conscious of an appetite that was keen as a razor's edge. He said so, and found his voice much stronger, whilst there was hardly any of the sensation of pain in tongue and throat. His head, too, was clearer, and it no longer ached when he moved it, as he did by way of testing its condition.
"I'll go call the doctor," she said. "He's resting below."
In a very few minutes the anatomist was at his patient's bedside. In another few minutes there was more broth and Burgundy for the Captain, and even a few slices of capon's breast and a little wheaten bread.
"And now," said Captain Gaynor, reclining comfortably among his heaped-up pillows when he had consumed a meal which he found all too spare, "will you tell me how I come here, and how it befell that I was not hanged? What happened to me?"
The professor looked at him, meditatively stroking his smooth chin.
"It did not befall that you were not hanged," he said slowly. "Ye were hanged - two days since."
"Hanged?" The Captain started up. Horror and incredulity were blent in his countenance.
"Tut, tut, now^l" clucked Dr Blizzard. "Let us be calm, eh! Theres not the need to start and cry out. It’s over, and it’s not to do again. Nemo bis punitur pro eodem delicto, remember. That is the law, eh?"
But the impossibility of punishing a man twice for the same offence was the last thing that exercised the Captain's thoughts just then.
"But if I was hanged," said he, his face an utter blank, "how - how come I to be alive, for I am alive, am I not? I am not dead and dreaming, perchance?"
"Eh! Why, to be sure you're alive, and in a week or so I make no doubt but ye'll be about again as sound as ever you were."
"But how - how, if I was hanged?"
"Because if a man won't drown who’s born to hang, neither will a man hang who’s born to drown, eh? 'Tis the best reason I can think of, faith! And, faith! it's reason enough."
Still understanding little or nothing, the Captain stared at the doctor.
"I - I don't understand even now," he said weakly. "How came I here?"
"Eh? Ah, that is another matter, and well may it exercise you. It was this wise." The doctor took snuff in prodigious quantities, then snapped and pocketed his box, and sat upon the edge of the bed facing his patient. "It was this wise. When you had hanged for the term of twenty minutes - as by law prescribed - you were cut down by a couple of rascals who know where to obtain a guinea or two for the fruit of the leafless tree, as they humorously term it. And here let me say that ye were mighty fortunate in that ye gave no thought to your own burial and that no friends of yours saw to the reparation of that omission. He, he!" he laughed on a thin high note. "But for that - faith! - ye'ld not be sitting there drinking Burgundy Ye'ld have been snug under a tombstone by now, eh!
"Well, then," he pursued, "these rascals brought you hither in a cart, and never was there living man who looked more dead. Ye deceived even myself, when I had you lying stark upon my table, for you'll understand that I had bought you to dissect you, and I never so much as suspected how I'd been swindled - that ye were not a corpse at all - until I had run my scalpel across your breast; you'll feel the sting of the scratch belike. It was not a cut; 'twas no more than skin-deep, to mark the line I was to follow. But behold! this line I had drawn turned suddenly bright crimson. If I say that I was amazed, I say nothing. I ran my finger along it and withdrew it moist with blood.
"There could be no doubt then that ye were not dead, eh? But whether you had travelled too far into the dark valley ever to be dragged back again to the world of the living was what I could not say I held a mirror to your lips, and found it filmed with moisture after a moment. I set my finger to your pulse, but could discover no movement in it. So I opened a vein in your leg to stimulate the heart by setting the blood a-flowing; and within ten minutes you had opened your eyes and were endeavouring to sit up.
"Since then I've done little more than leave you to the vis medicatrix naturae. For Nature, sir, has endowed you very richly; so richly that I could almost regret the loss of the two guineas I gave those rascals for your anatomy - for ye've defrauded me, sir, in a most heartless fashion, eh!"
The Captain smiled feebly at the jest. But it was something that he was able to smile at all, now that he had the full account of this most extraordinary adventure.
"But you repay me richly in another way," the anatomist pursued.
"I can assure you, sir, you shall not be out of pocket in any way," said the Captain.
"Pish! Tut, tut!" The professor waved one of his great bony hands contemptuously.
"Tell me," said the Captain presently, "is it not a very extraordinary thing to have happened?"
"Extraordinary? Godso! Ye're not supposing that it happens every week, eh?"
"Have you ever known such another case?"
"As to that, why yes - though never in my own experience. Did ye never hear of John Smith the housebreaker - a few years ago - who was reprieved after he had been turned off and hanged for a quarter of an hour? When the reprieve arrived it scarce seemed worth while to make haste to cut him down, he looked so dead. Yet to all the world's amazement the rogue revived to return to his house-breaking trade. Then there was the case of Anne Green at Oxford, over fifty years ago. She was hanged for over half an hour, and like yourself fell into the hands of an anatomist - a Dr Petty - who revived her. And there have been others. Still, the event is rare enough - so rare that a man should be thankful when it serves him, eh!"
The Captain lay back among his pillows and abandoned himself freely to his amazement, and to the thoughts and speculations born of his astounding situation.
As the doctor had said, "Nemo bis punitur pro eodem delicto"; and so from the law of England he had nothing more to fear, even should his identity be discovered. But he did not think that it need be.
Very soon his thoughts turned to Damaris, and it was with a sudden fearful doubt that he asked himself what result his revival would have there. How had she received his letter? There was, he thought, but one way in which she could receive it. Yet his being alive again, or alive still, must alter everything and might modify her feelings if they were - as he thought they must be - of forgiveness. The doubt was most cruelly tormenting. He turned suddenly to the doctor.
"How soon," he inquired, "shall I be in case to depart?"
"Tut!" clucked the professor. "Here’s a great haste, now! Why, if you are quiet and obedient to me, perhaps in a week or a little longer you will sufficiently have regained your strength. You're healthy, amazing healthy. But I've half drained your veins, ye'll remember, and ye'll need wait until they are replenished, eh."
"A week!" he groaned.
"Tut! 'Tis but a little while. Be thankful ye're not dead and buried. And if ye've any friends with whom you'ld wish me to communicate -”
"No," said the Captain. "My friends can wait. It will be better." Then, shifting the subject: "Sir," he said, "there is a debt between us that it would tax my wit and my resources to liquidate."
"It need not. Tut! No. What else could I have done? Carved you up, as it was? Faith! every doctor is not a murderer, whatever the vulgar may say Besides, ye're a more interesting experiment alive. Tell me now, d'ye not actually remember hanging?"
"I do not," said the Captain.
The anatomist nodded. "Ay, ay; 'twas just so with John Smith when he revived. Tell me what you remember."
Readily the Captain complied, relating those dream sensations that had been his, and suppressing no more than the name of the lady who had awaited him in the garden and in whose embrace he had seemed to choke.
"A warning that," snapped Dr Blizzard, "a warning of the perils that may lie in a woman’s arms. Still, men will run the risk. Tut! the pity of it!"
But the anatomist treasured those details of the Captain's perilous passage through the gates of doom, and he incorporated them in that memoir he prepared of the curious resurrection of Captain Jenkyn, a memoir which - as I have said - has supplied me with most of these particulars.


Chapter 17
PAUNCEFORT THE SOWER

On the Monday of the following week - four days after the execution of Captain Gaynor - came my Lord Pauncefort to Priory Close for the first time since that encounter in the garden in which his lordship had all but lost his life.
Of that encounter, too, Sir John was informed by now, and of the intervention of the gardeners, which had saved Lord Pauncefort - an intervention which Sir John deplored as profoundly as any of the events of the past week. Indeed, but for that intervention Harry Gaynor might still have been among the living, and the world would have been the sweeter for being purged of a villain.
It was again in the library that the interview took place between Sir John and his unwelcome visitor. The baronet’s first impulse had been to deny himself to his lordship. But he had thought better of it, and had repaired to that lofty, book-lined chamber where his visitor awaited him. Yet his greeting had been sufficiently uncompromising.
"Do you not think, sir," he said, "that you have wrought evil enough here already and that so you might have spared us this intrusion upon the grief you have occasioned?"
His lordship, hat under arm, and leaning lightly upon his amethyst-headed cane, had looked the very picture of injured innocence.
"Sir John," he protested quietly, "assuredly you speak under a grievous misapprehension."
"Is it a misapprehension that you delivered Captain Gaynor to his death?"
"A gross one," cried his lordship instantly "Though I can see upon what grounds you base it. I am the more glad I came since I may now dispel your error. You have supposed, I see, that Harry Gaynor's arrest was the result of his unfortunate quarrel with me here. That is not so, sir. The warrant had been out some days already, and he must have been taken when he was. And the real fact is I came to warn him."
"To warn him that you had betrayed him?" Sir John’s blue eyes were hard and cold as they played over his lordship's handsome, swarthy face, which flushed now under that regard.
"You use harsh words, sir, and untrue."
"In that you lie, my lord," answered the baronet. "Do you hear me - you lie!"
His lordship stiffened. He drew himself up very rigid, and Sir John watched him with eyes that gleamed almost wickedly
"Were you twenty years younger, Sir John, I should ask you to prove your words upon my body. But you are an old man," he added, in tones that became a very insult of tolerance, his tall figure relaxing its menacing rigidity, "and so I must even bear with you and attempt to prove to you in more peaceful ways the ineffable injustice of your words."
"Spare me more of this," flashed Sir John impatiently. "You may disregard my insult on the score of my years, and I may lack the means to force you to regard it - for you would swallow a blow even as you swallow all else -”
"Sir John!" the other cried, suddenly roused. "Do not urge me too far or I may forget the years that lie between us."
"There is not the need. There are younger swords in plenty to call a reckoning with you. What of O'Neill and Leigh, your sometime friend, Harewood, Clinton, Brownrigg, and Mr Dyke, who is said to play the deadliest sword in England? Have you bethought you what will happen when presently these and the others you have betrayed into gaol are restored to liberty? - as restored they must be for lack of satisfactory grounds upon which to impeach them. Do you think they will be slow to avenge upon you the base treachery you performed in selling them? Or do you perhaps consider them in ignorance or doubt of their betrayer?"
Ever since his encounter with Gaynor, Pauncefort had been plagued by the thought of this; for Gaynor had made it more than plain that his lordship's treachery was revealed, and it was odds that what Gaynor knew was known to all the plotters. And yet it was possible that it might not be; and, Gaynor being dead, his lordship had clung to that possibility. As for Sir John, he was aware of the source of the baronet's suspicions; he knew that they sprang from the veiled threat he had uttered at their last meeting.
Slowly now he shook his head under its heavy black periwig. His large eyes looked almost sorrowful.
"How sadly are you mistaken," said he. "As for those you name, I cannot think they would so misjudge me. But if any should, he will find me ready for him - ready to satisfy him in any manner he desires. Meanwhile, however, Sir John, there is the business upon which I am come."
"Ah, true!" snapped the baronet. "I detain you, no doubt. Pray state this business. Thus shall I be the sooner rid of you."
"I bring you a warning," said his lordship.
"Such a warning, I make no doubt, as that which you bore Harry Gaynor," was the stinging answer.
Lord Pauncefort considered him with those sorrowful eyes of his. "Even so," he said quite simply. Then he sighed. "Indeed, I think that I had better go my ways, leaving you to the fate that hangs over you, since you have naught but insults for me. And yet, sir, I will beg you to consider - since there is no other way of convincing you of my good faith - that I can stand to gain little or nothing by my warning to you, and," he added with slow emphasis, "that I might gain a deal by your impeachment."
"You mistake," said Sir John, "I am in no danger of being impeached.”
"It is you who mistake, Sir John; for you are in danger, in grave danger, not only of impeachment but of conviction. Against those others whom you have named I gladly admit that the Government can take no proceedings and will be forced to let them go for lack of evidence, and also because such is the Government’s policy. But you, sir, are in far different case."
"I am," Sir John agreed, "because against me there is not even the shadow of an accusation to be produced."
"Ah! You build on that" said his lordship sadly, and again he shook his handsome head and sighed. "There is something you've forgot. You have forgot that you harboured here one Harry Gaynor, the notorious Jacobite agent and spy - I use the Government’s terms - who has been convicted and hanged."
It was quite true. If Sir John had not overlooked the fact itself, at least he had overlooked the consequences it must have for himself did the Government elect to move against him. It was a matter to which he had never given thought, and finding it thrust upon his notice thus abruptly by Lord Pauncefort, he perceived his danger as clearly as one may perceive a chasm that has opened in one’s path.
He stood with hands clasped behind him, his tall, portly figure somewhat bowed and his face suddenly troubled, all the fine arrogance gone out of him. For there were not only the consequences to himself to consider, there were the consequences to his wife and child - the consideration of which had made him cautious to the point of lukewarmness in his support of that Cause in which at heart he believed. Were he convicted of treason - as it was very clear now he might be - part of his punishment would be a fine that must leave Lady Kynaston and Evelyn all but destitute.
A deep silence ensued. Sir John stood pondering with bowed head. When at last he raised it, and his troubled glance once more rested upon his visitor, Lord Pauncefort observed that his countenance was ashen. But if there was no longer any arrogance in his bearing, it was still in his tone and his uncompromising words.
"And it is of this that you are come to warn me?" he asked.
"Indeed, I would that were all," replied his lordship. "I am come to tell you that my Lord Carteret has at present under consideration the issuing of a warrant for your arrest upon that charge."
Sir John smiled bitterly "Your information would serve, at least, to resolve any doubt that might linger in my mind concerning your own connection with the Government."
A shadow crossed his lordship’s face, but he remained quite unmoved.
"You persist in your opinion of me. It is so deepseated that all things must serve to confirm it. But you are mistook, Sir John. My information springs from my personal relations with the Secretary of State, relations which have permitted me aforetime to serve my friends, and which have permitted those - such as you, sir - who are not my friends, to misconstrue my aims. I will add, sir, that in your own case this warrant would already have been issued but for the exertions which I have used with his lordship. I have played upon his friendship for me by drawing his notice to the fact that I must, myself, suffer by your arrest since I am hoping for the honour of becoming related to you by marriage before long."
"Ah!" said Sir John dryly. "I thought we should come to that in the end!"
Pauncefort frowned. "The disinterestedness of my motives must be so apparent, even to a mind prejudiced against me, that I marvel you still remain in doubt, sir. You conceive, I fear, that I am come to bargain with you. You expect me to say: 'Sanction my wedding with your ward and niece, and my influence with my Lord Carteret shall be employed, to obtain the suppression of this warrant.' That is what you expect of me, is it not?"
"Some such proposal, I admit," answered the baronet, "though I am sure you will cloak it in more specious terms."
His lordship stroked his cleft chin thoughtfully, and his eyes narrowed as they surveyed Sir John.
"Let me," he said very gently, "let me beg you to observe, Sir John, that to serve such aims as you impute to me, I need in this matter but to stand aside and suffer the warrant to be executed. Nay, more: Were I first and last the self-seeker you account me and do not scruple to pronounce me, I should be employing such influence as I have with the Secretary of State to urge the warrant’s instant execution. For reflect, I beg, that upon your inevitable conviction of treason must follow your outlawry. The powers conferred upon you by the will of the late Mr Hollinstone will be determined; you will no longer have any voice at law in any matter whatsoever, and for sanction to my union with your ward may be dispensed with, for it is a thing you will have power neither to confer nor to withhold. That, Sir John, is a reflection which may lead you to judge me in a spirit of some justice."
But Sir John did not seem at all disposed to do so, notwithstanding that he perceived the irrefragable fact to which his lordship drew his attention.
"I see," he said slowly. "I see! What you have to propose then is that subject to my giving my sanction you will so exercise your influence with my Lord Carteret as to achieve the suppression of the warrant, eh? And thus -”
"Not so," Pauncefort interrupted, loud and imperiously. "I make no bargain. I have nothing to propose. I merely desire to indicate that by serving me you will best serve yourself. In any event my efforts can never be addressed to any end but that of saving you from your impending fate - and this, notwithstanding the insults you have heaped upon me now. But those efforts, which would be almost certain of success if exerted by one who is become your relative, are almost equally certain of failure coming from one who is no more than your friend."
The impudence of it struck Sir John speechless for a moment. He found in it matter for laughter almost, despite the overwhelming peril at which his heart was sickening.
"My friend?" he said, and his lip curled ominously. "Too great an honour." And he bowed ironically. "And there is one trifle that has escaped your attention, too, in this. You have forgot to consider Miss Hollinstone herself and her inclinations."
His lordship was on the point of answering that those inclinations might easily be swayed when she knew of Sir John’s peril. But from that false step he saved himself betimes. He was none of your clumsy, superficial intriguers, but one who went to work skilfully in the depths. He contained himself and bowed, his face wearing an expression of concern and sorrow.
"It is true," he said. "I have not sufficiently considered how those inclinations will have been swayed against me in a household so permeated by a spirit hostile to myself - in a household where, despite all that I can protest and all that I can do, I am looked upon as a man who has not kept faith. It is monstrously unjust; but it seems there is naught I can do to combat it."
Suspicious of this half-resignation, Sir John eyed his visitor shrewdly.
"You betrayed yourself to her, my lord, in this very room," he answered slowly. "You betrayed the true fortune-hunting motives by which you were animated. Can you wonder that she looks upon you now with - with the contempt you merit?"
His lordship sighed. He dabbed his red lips with a flimsy kerchief ere he answered. Then he shrugged despondently.
"I was mad that day," he said. "That infamous money-lender, Israel Suarez, had been almost violent, and I was driven to the verge of despair. But, Sir John, if I showed myself eager for control of your ward's fortune, it was not thence to be construed that I was not eager for herself, that I did not love her for herself." He turned his large, handsome eyes upon the baronet. They were heavy with sorrow." I would give my life to efface that hour," he said.
"Do so, then," said Sir John, "and perhaps you will efface it. If not, being dead, it will signify less to you. You will cease to suffer."
"You rally me, sir!" was the indignant cry
"Neither yourself nor the Government," said Sir John, "can deprive me of the right to laugh. Soon it may be the only right remaining me."
His lordship took up his hat from the table, tucked it under his arm, and drew on his heavy riding-gloves. His face was set, his lips tight-pressed. But all this was purest comedy. He realised that he had said all that need be said. He had sowed his seeds, and it were well now to depart without further disturbing the soil, leaving those same seeds to sink in. He was fairly sanguine that they would put forth roots ere long. And, meanwhile, as some recompense for his services and some compensation for the injustice done him in the case of Harry Gaynor, Lord Carteret was willing to delay Sir John’s arrest until Pauncefort should give the word. So that there was no desperate haste.
"In spite of all, Sir John," he said, "I cannot forget that for a season we were good friends."
"My memory is not so good as yours," quoth the downright, uncompromising baronet.
"So I perceive," said the viscount, smiling bitterly. "Mine is not only long, but grateful. And so, despite the unworthy manner in which you have used me today, I shall continue to strain every effort with my Lord Carteret to procure your immunity from the consequences of your meddling with treason."
Sir John strode to the bell-rope, and tugged it with a violent hand.
"I should loathe to be beholden to you," he said. "Pray leave my affairs to care for themselves."
"I understand, Sir John," replied the other, with a resumption of his air of resignation. "Oh, I understand." Then he bowed stiffly. "I have the honour to give you good day."
Sir John waved a hand in almost contemptuous dismissal. A footman, summoned by the bell, stood in the doorway. "Reconduct his lordship," said the baronet shortly.
But once alone, his manner changed as abruptly as if he had thrown off a cloak in which he had been wrapped. He walked heavily to the writing-table, sank into the chair, leaned his head upon his hand and stared dully into vacancy Then something that was almost a sob shook his massive, vigorous frame.
"My poor Maria!" he groaned aloud. "My poor Evelyn! God help you both!"
But he had been wiser if, instead of groaning impotently there, he had retained awhile his cloak of defiant self-possession, and himself escorted my Lord Pauncefort to the chaise which awaited him in the avenue. Thus might he have averted the ill-chance which came to serve his lordship. For as Pauncefort was descending the steps, he encountered Miss Kynaston herself.
He paused a moment to give her greeting. His air was gloomy and preoccupied. But what engaged him now was a new thought that had flashed into his opportunist mind. True, he had accounted ample the seed he had sown; and yet he knew that Sir John could be very obstinate, that he might immolate himself out of that obstinacy upon the altar of what he accounted a sacred trust from the dead. There could be no harm his lordship opined, in sowing a little more seed in this very pretty and fertile soil so opportunely thrust before him.
"Alas, Miss Kynaston, I fear that I have been the bearer of but indifferent tidings to your father," he said, and the gloom of his face was most tragically deepened.
It alarmed her, as that subtle gentleman intended that it should. He noted the flutter of colour in her cheeks, the startled look in her eyes.
"What is it?" she asked him a little breathlessly
He glanced aside at the footman who stood by the door. She read the look, and understood his meaning when he invited her to walk the length of the avenue with him.
"Drive on," he bade his coachman. "Stay for me at the gates."
Down the avenue of elms, in the dappled shade, stepped dainty Evelyn beside his handsome lordship.
"It is well, perhaps, that I should tell you," he was saying musingly, "most opportune, indeed, that I should have met you. You may be able to accomplish something in which I greatly fear me that I have failed, and in which my failure involved your father in grave peril"
Piqued, alarmed, flattered by the suggestion that she might achieve something in which he had failed, Evelyn's sweetly timid eyes fluttered him an upward glance of inquiry.
"Your father, madam, has involved himself very seriously by having harboured here one who has been convicted and hanged as a traitor and spy: Such an action subjects a man to penalties scarcely less grave than those imposed upon the actual traitor, because in itself such an action implies an almost equal degree of guilt."
"What do you tell me?" she cried, now all alarm.
"The brutal truth, ma'am. But there is not yet the need for alarm. What friend can do I am doing to obtain the suppression of the warrant which the Secretary of State has already signed for your father’s arrest."
"For his arrest!" She stood still, one hand clutching his lordship's sleeve, and her lovely empty face was blenched.
"Nay, now, nay!" he soothed her. "I entreat ye, ma'am, do not give way: I am hopeful that I may prevail. I have much influence with my Lord Carteret; he listens to me, and you may be sure that all such influence shall be employed to serve you."
"What - what could they do to him if he were arrested?" she asked.
"Ah!" he said, and rubbed his chin. "They would hardly hang him, I think. No, no, there is no danger of that. But they will mulct him very heavily - so heavily that it may almost amount to a complete confiscation of his estates and possessions."
A vista of poverty, of destitution, was instantly opened out before the eyes of her imagination. It terrified her, for all that the picture was far from lifelike. She had looked upon so few of the realities of life that she was incapable of adequately conceiving this one. But she conceived enough of it to undergo almost an increase of terror.
"Oh!" she moaned, and again: "Oh!"
"But you are not to be alarmed," he repeated. "Oddslife, now, did I not say that I would exert my influence, and that my influence is great? Bear that in mind to set against your fears." He spoke cheerfully and confidently, and, reflective as she always was, she felt herself cheered and her confidence returning. Then his face clouded. "If," he ran on, "your father had but chosen the way I showed him, I could make his immunity a certainty. Unfortunately -"
"What way was that?" she questioned eagerly.
He looked down at this frail slip of womanhood, observed the elegantly coiffed golden head that scarce reached the level of his shoulder, and he sighed.
"As you know," he said, "I am betrothed to Damaris."
"Yes, yes," said she, for even now she had not learnt of the grounds upon which that betrothal had been dissolved. The readiness of the "yes, yes" informed him of this fact, and made things easier for him. His eyes glowed a moment with satisfaction.
"You may not know that your father is opposed to the marriage; that he will not allow it to take place until Damaris is of full age."
"But why?" she cried.
"Some trifling scruple of adherence to her father's wishes," he answered lightly. "This scruple I have begged him to put aside. I have assured him that were I his relative, instead of his friend, it would strengthen my hands to serve him, it would render Lord Carteret's suppression of the warrant certain. For, you see, madam, he loves me too well to wish to hurt any who might stand in a degree of relationship, however slender, towards myself."
"Then - then it is easy. He is safe, and there is not any cause for fear," she exclaimed, and her face was upturned to his.
He gloomed down at her sorrowfully, and shook his head.
"Unfortunately, your father will not waive his idle scruples," he said. Then he brightened again. "But do not let it concern you. After all, I do not doubt but that I shall be able to prevail even as it is. Still, the other way would be safer. But I dare not press your father on the point; nor yet dare I press Damaris, because - This is a confidence that you'll respect, Miss Kynaston?"
"Yes, yes," she assured him eagerly.
"Because," he resumed, "Damaris once did me the injustice to think that I wooed her out of mercenary motives, and I could not for all the world give her cause to think so again."
"How could she in this?" cried simple Evelyn.
He smiled the bitter, knowing smile of the man of the world, of the man who has looked into the human heart and studied its proneness to unworthy suspicions.
"It might be construed that I sought to make a bargain, and I could not suffer that. Therefore, I may not insist. Perhaps, indeed, I have failed to represent to your father the full extent of your peril. If I tell it you, it is because, thinking highly as I do of - of your wit, you may perhaps consider well to give a hint in the proper quarter. But do not on any account say that I urged it, and - and perhaps you had best say naught to your father."
It was as plain an invitation to tell Damaris as he could well have uttered; yet she did not perceive his subtleties.
"I understand," she cried. "Oh yes, I will do what I can."
"I am sure of it, and thus you will bring me the happiness of having served not only your father, but yourself - for it involves your own future as well!" Doffing his three-cornered hat, he bowed low over her hand. He kissed it in farewell, and also, as it were, to seal a bond between them.
They had reached the chaise by now. He entered it, whilst she stood by the gate-post watching him, somewhat bemused by all that he had said. The coachman gathered up his reins, when suddenly his lordship checked him. He thrust his head from the carriage window.
"Upon second thoughts, Miss Kynaston, perhaps it were best if you said naught to anyone. Leave the matter in my hands to deal with as best I can. I" - he faltered, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "I so dread the danger of unworthy motives being imputed to me. So best forget what I have said."
Again he gravely saluted her, and without waiting for an answer he sank back into his chaise. But as the carriage rolled away he smiled, well satisfied to reflect that his meeting her had been a most fortunate chance, and that he had sowed more than he had looked to do when he came, and some of it on very fertile soil.

BOOKWORM

THE GATES OF DOOM

by Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 14
THE ROAD TO TYBURN

That afternoon Captain Gaynor, once more completely master of himself, and showing no least outward sign of the storm through which his spirit had so lately passed, of the rage that for a while had so entirely governed him, took his leave of Lady Kynaston, informing her that business of some urgency compelled him to depart at once without awaiting Sir John's return.
Her ladyship made no allusion to the fracas in the rose-garden, of which her servants had brought her word; but she did not doubt that his departure was concerned with it, and that this urgent business which he pleaded was the continuation of that quarrel. Upon what grounds it had arisen she had formed the obvious opinion, but dared not ask its confirmation. The Captain's manner was respectfully forbidding. She did not go so far as to connect with it the fact that both her daughter and her niece had kept their respective chambers since the event.
Unquestioned, then, he was permitted to go his ways. He did not see Damaris again, which caused him no surprise. To the circumstance that he did not see Evelyn again he gave no thought, perturbed as he was.
He put up at an obscure inn in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, and there he dismissed Fisher. That done he cast about him for a friend who would wait upon Lord Pauncefort on his behalf, and he bethought him of Sir Richard Templeton, whose residence in St James's Street was within a stone's throw of Pauncefort House. It was possible that the baronet had already departed for Devonshire. But he would ascertain.
He went, then, to make the discovery that in St James's Street he was already expected - not, indeed, by Sir Richard, who had, in fact, departed already, but by the tip staves set to watch for him by Lord Pauncefort, who counted upon a visit to himself. As the Captain was turning out of Pall Mall he was suddenly confronted by a couple of burly, coarsely garbed fellows, the foremost of whom desired a word with him.
"With me?" he said, stiffening haughtily, yet more than guessing their business.
"I have a warrant for you here," said the taller of the twain - the very man who had been the leader of that raid at "The World's End." He produced his parchment, and thrust it under the Captain's very nose.
"I think ye'll be the person mentioned there – Captain Jenkyn."
What, Captain Gaynor asked himself, could it avail him to deny? They held him, and they would not be like to let him go upon a denial, however emphatic. Moreover, it came to him suddenly that he did not want to go. The cause he served was ruined for the time being, set back for many a year, perhaps, if not for ever. The woman he had come to love - he, who hitherto had held himself aloof from all women, being wholly wedded to his master's service - deemed him base and unworthy, and must so deem him. What, then, remained in life? - the avenging of their betrayal upon that traitor Pauncefort; and that, he knew, another hand than his would execute ere long.
This arrest seemed to him in that despondent hour to resolve his difficulties, to remove from him a heavy burden. He had sickened at the very thought of returning to Rome with the dismal report of his failure; he had sickened further at the thought of living on, a dastard in the eyes of the only woman whose esteem he courted.
He considered his captors, and his glance was almost friendly. Were they not good friends of his, the best he had ever known, friends who came to him in the hour of his most urgent need?
"'Tis so," he said quite simply. "I am the man you seek. I am Captain Jenkyn."
The trial of Captain Jenkyn - which, under instructions from the Secretary of State was hurried forward, so that it took place within three days of his arrest - attracted little notice at the time.
As in the case of all matters relating to Jacobite plottings, it was the desire of the Government that it should be disposed of as quietly and speedily as possible. Therefore the news of his capture was not allowed to transpire until his trial was over, and he himself under sentence of death.
The prisoner's admission that he was Captain Jenkyn had saved the court both time and trouble, for all that it was exercised not a little by this sudden supineness in one whom they had every reason to believe bold and resolute. They accounted for it upon the assumption that, being caught, his resourcefulness and courage had deserted him, and that perhaps he had hoped by pleading guilty to the charges preferred to earn the clemency of his judges. Lord Carteret was relieved to learn that the fellow had, himself, admitted his identity, since that disposed of the necessity of unmasking so very valuable a Government spy as Pauncefort. Under the circumstances sufficient evidence was afforded by the three tipstaves who had arrested him, and Sir Henry Tresh's lady, who came forward to identify him with the man who had invaded her chamber at "The World's End" on that evening when the plotters were taken there.
The affair was a very brief one, summarily dealt with, as you may see by consulting the "State Trials," where you will find all the details of it if you have a mind for them. The prisoner himself seemed intent upon assisting the court at every turn, readily admitting, one after another, the charges brought against him - whether concerned with previous visits to England or with the present one - charges which had long been drawn up in preparation for and awaiting such a day as this - a preparation which explains the Government's ability to expedite the affair.
On one point only was the prisoner stubborn. Whilst ready to admit that he was Captain Jenkyn, he would not admit that his real name was Captain Gaynor. He did not deny it; but he refused to admit it. They had arrested him, he said, as Captain Jenkyn, and as Captain Jenkyn he was indicted. Let that suffice them.
This apparently curious attitude was based upon the reflection that to admit his real identity might be to assist the Government in proceedings against many of those who were known to have been the associates of Captain Gaynor and against whom there was no independent evidence of Jacobitism. He did not know to what extent the absence of positive knowledge would hamper the Government; but, in any event, he was resolved to make no admissions that might assist it.
The court did not press, obedient always to its instructions. It could have done so, obviously. It could easily have produced witnesses to swear that he was Captain Gaynor; it could have fetched Sir John Kynaston and his family from Chertsey; it might even have thrust the discomfited Second Secretary Templeton into the humiliating position of saying by what name he had known this man who had so imposed upon him. But the Government desired, above all, that the matter should be swiftly and quietly determined, with as few witnesses and as little stir as might be necessary to procure the conviction and sentence of so very desperate and dangerous a rebel.
So the court waived this minor point, and as Captain Jenkyn our Jacobite was duly sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn like any common cutpurse.
There was calculation even in this, and wise calculation. He was to die obscurely, at the hands of the common hangman; this, too, it was deemed must prove a deterrent - that is to say, not merely the death, but the inglorious manner of it.
There were few people in court when the sentence was passed, and no single face did Captain Gaynor see with which he was acquainted. Pauncefort, he imagined, might have looked in to gloat over his plight. But Pauncefort wisely had kept away. Templeton, he had fancied, might have desired to come there and satisfy himself of a thing that to him must seem incredible. He marvelled at the Second Secretary's absence; but then he did not know that the Second Secretary found the ridicule which he had sought to heap upon Lord Carteret concerning Captain Gaynor all recoiling upon himself; that he had taken to his bed, announcing himself assailed by gout. (When Templeton came to hear that sentence had been passed upon the prisoner, he immediately resigned his office as the only possible step remaining to his tattered dignity.)
Sir John Kynaston, the Captain had thought, would surely have come. For he did not know that Sir John, like all the rest of the world, was in ignorance of the fact that the trial was taking place, conceiving that a trial upon charges so complex and difficult to establish must be long in preparing.
Captain Gaynor heard his sentence entirely unmoved. He had expected nothing else. He was no trivial foolish plotter, but an accredited agent, the disturber - as the indictment had it - of the peace of the realm, a man who aimed at the overthrow of the dynasty and, if necessary, at the death of the reigning sovereign, a man who was looked upon as a spy of the Pretender's, and for whom there could be no fate but the spy's.
Nor was his immobility merely external, or born of pride as it is with so many who show themselves outwardly undaunted at the prospect of an early death. His pulses remained calm, his heart tranquil. It was no more than he desired. Standing in the face of death he was enabled to do a thing he could not have done with life before him - a thing to be done at all costs, even at the cost of life itself, as he was doing it.
His trial took place on a Monday - the last Monday in June - and he was informed that same evening that he was accorded three days in which to set his affairs in order and make his soul. On the following Thursday he was to hang.
The time was more than he desired; certainly more than he required for what remained him to do. Relatives who mattered, he had none. With his friends he did not dare to communicate for fear of implicating them. To his master in Rome it would have pleasured him to send a dying message of devotion. But he knew that no such message would be allowed to reach its destination. There remained, then, but the letter to Damaris to indite. When that was done, he would be done with all matters of this world, and that was the thing which the near approach of death enabled him to do, the thing he could not have done had the way of life been open still before him.
But it was not until the evening of Wednesday that he asked for pen, ink and paper. He desired to make that communion with her almost the very latest act of his swiftly ebbing life, setting at last to paper the thoughts that since his trial had almost entirely occupied his mind.
He headed his epistle: "From my cell in Newgate, on the even of my death."
That done he was fretted awhile, as he sat pen in.hand, to know how to address her. He solved the riddle, at last, by confining himself simply to her name.

Damaris [he wrote], when you read these lines I shall have gone where neither execration nor compassion can pursue me, and for that reason if for no other I have the consolation in these my last hours of hoping that you will read what assuredly you would not read were I still living and at large. For that reason alone I think that I am glad to die, since death gives me certain privileges and rights that are denied the living. Further still, since I stand upon the dread threshold, since the gates of doom are opening to admit me, and I am on the eve of facing my Eternal Judge, I have a claim to be believed when I write of things that might seem to you incredible did I still walk the great highway of life. For it is not to be thought that I should in such an hour and for no possible temporal profit sully myself with falsehood in matters whereupon I might without temporal loss continue silent to the end. When you consider, then, how little falsehood can avail me now, when you consider how repellent it is even to the most abandoned to deal in falsehood with the cold eye of death upon him, the icy scythe severing him already from all earthly hopes, desires and aspirations, I die content in the knowledge that what I am writing here you must believe, and believing will come to give me dead that treasure of your loving thought which living I could never have claimed again.

All that my Lord Pauncefort told you was true, yet no less true was my assurance, when you asked me to deny his story - that only were I the dastard he represented me could I have saved myself by the falsehood of such denial. You did not understand. You do not yet. For in these words, until all is known, must seem to dwell nothing but confusion. Yet in them dwells the whole and absolute truth. For never, O Damaris, was truth more untruly told than by Lord Pauncefort on that evil day.

It is true, then, that I played with him that ill-considered game. It was on a night when he had lost to me some eight thousand guineas, and he was bewailing that he stood upon the brink of utter ruin and in peril of a debtor's gaol. In that ill-omened hour, I bethought me that he had something yet to stake - his right to wed you - for I believed him still betrothed to you - and it is true that when I made him that proposal I had no thought of winning your own self, and that your fortune was the real stake I saw upon the board. But it is not true that by this - assuming that I succeeded with you did I win that game with him - I was an adventurer seeking your fortune for myself. My only thought was to devote that fortune to the service of my master, who is in such dire straits for means to his high ends. It was for him that I played that game, as my Lord Pauncefort well knows. That I should sacrifice you to a cause to which already I had sacrificed myself, in which I was imperilling the life that at last I am about to lose, did not then - nor does it yet - seem so heinous and unforgivable a thing.

His lordship won the cut. I paid him his guineas, and there the matter ended, or would have ended but for the deception which for reasons that I cannot fathom you thought it well, with your cousin, to play upon me. For here we touch upon a truth which should efface all other things in this mistaken enterprise, a truth which already I have uttered. I did not know, nor ever dreamt, that you were other than you represented yourself to be. I did not know, nor ever dreamt, that you were Damaris Hollinstone until you told me so in the garden a moment before his lordship came upon us. I looked upon your cousin as the heiress - as, I suppose, you intended that I should - and from the hour in which I met you I was glad that it was not you - you, Damaris - whom I was pledged by the fortune of the cards to abstain from wooing. I was glad in that hour to think that I had not won a game, whose stakes my honour must have compelled me to take up - for my honour is so bound up with the service of my king and master that I must account dishonourable all measures that do not aim at its advancement.

There, my beloved, you have all the truth, and it is my hope as I write - nay, it is my certainty - that the knowledge will help to comfort you. You need not take shame in any thought that you were the mere prey of an unscrupulous fortune-hunter, that you gave the pure and holy treasure of your love to an adventurer, a mercenary and a scoundrel.

The thought that you will come to know and to understand enheartens me and irradiates a season that must otherwise be very dark indeed. It warms and gladdens me in this hour, and I shall go blithely to my end, knowing that it is the modest price I pay for the sublime good of sending you this undoubtable assurance.

Tomorrow, for as long as thought can hold a place in this poor head, that thought will be of you. What is to follow after I do not know, nor do I fear. But if memory of life is still to be retained in the great beyond, one memory will linger to make my heaven - the memory of you, the consciousness that, knowing all, you will hold the memory of me in tenderness until we meet again, if there be meetings yonder.

And so, my sweet lady, my dearest love, goodnight!

It was late when the letter was concluded. He folded the sheets, tied them together, sealed them and placed them in his breast-pocket. Then he lay down, and soon was very peacefully asleep.
Before the hangman's minions came to seek him in the morning, he had given the letter into the hands of a friendly gaoler, together with his purse, containing some twenty guineas in recompense for the service the fellow had promised to do him.
Soon after eight the ordinary was introduced. He was a short, stoutish man with mild eyes but a heavy jowl, and the stubble of beard - a weeks growth at least - that blackened his face lent him an almost ferocious aspect. He wore a soiled surplice; there was a peck of snuff hanging about his bands and in the stubble of his upper lip.
Captain Gaynor gave him a very courteous if somewhat distant welcome, presuming upon which the parson straightway fell to talking of the Captain's soul. In this the Captain cut him short.
"By your leave, good sir," said he, "I am of opinion, look you, that I know more of my own soul than any man can tell me. So leave me, I entreat you, to search it for myself. Meanwhile I can minister to your body. You'll find some passable Hollands in that jar, and there is a bottle of Burgundy which the gaoler has just procured me. Pray honour me." And the Captain waved him to the rude table where stood the vessels and a couple of drinking cans.
Thereafter he was but little troubled as he paced to and fro in his cell, awaiting with some impatience the coming of those who should take him for his last ride. They arrived at last, at a little before eleven. They conducted him to the courtyard, where the cart was waiting, a company of redcoats drawn up about it, and every window of the gaol packed with villainous faces, their eyes greedy of as much of the coming spectacle as it might be theirs to witness.
He leapt lightly into the cart, and the ordinary, somewhat flushed with Burgundy, clambered after him. Gladly would he have dispensed with the fellow's company; but the rules did not permit it. The parson must be with him to the end - must, indeed, intone the psalm that would be sung at the turning-off. So perforce he submitted with the best grace possible.
The driver stood up and turned to the prisoner. He held a length of whipcord in his hand, and with this he pinioned the doomed man's wrists behind his back. Then he took up a length of hempen rope with a running noose in it, and deftly flicked this noose over the Captain's head, leaving the end of the rope to hang behind him. That done - and with the utmost nonchalance, the ruffian puffing, meantime, a short and very foul pipe - the gates were opened. The Sheriff's Deputy, a splendid figure in a gold-laced, scarlet coat, gave the word of command, and the procession formed up and started.
Ahead went the military in their red coats and mitre-shaped hats, opening a way with their musket-butts through the mob that had collected about the prison gates. Out into that seething, human ocean rolled the cart. With dispassionate, almost pitiful eyes the Captain looked upon that surface of upturned faces. One bestial fellow was singing an obscene song allusive to the Captain's grim condition. The Captain's eyes fell upon him in a look so profoundly compassionate that the rascal broke off short in the middle of his ditty, and after a moment's silence loosed a volley of lewd oaths at him.
Looking, the Captain had wondered in what circumstances death would come to find such a man, and he had seen - with that extraordinary vision which is vouchsafed to men who stand upon the Threshold - an image dreadful beyond words, an image that had informed that profound compassion of his glance.
They pushed on. Crowds everywhere along the cart's way; every window held a little mob, assembled there to see a man pass to his death. To Harry Gaynor though ever dispassionate now and beyond resentment of such trifles, there seemed something foul and obscene in this curiosity
He turned his gaze from it at last and met the mild eyes of the ordinary They were full of tears. This he deemed very odd. He was almost touched by it, forgetting entirely the amount of Burgundy which the chaplain had consumed and in which his heart had been softened so that the death of a stray dog would have rendered him maudlin.
"Sir," he said very gently, "I beg that ye'll not weep for me who do not weep for myself."
"That is the very reason of my weeping," the parson answered him, and a tear detached itself at last, ran down his ample cheek and joined the snuff on his neckband, all of which the Captain observed with extraordinary interest.
"This is very odd," he said. "Do you, then, not believe in what you teach? Do you not believe in a joyous and glorious hereafter?"
The ordinary stared at him, and in his surprise forgot his weeping. "Or is it that in your own experience this world has proved it so extraordinarily delectable a place that you will not barter it for any other?"
"Nay, nay, sir. But you, so young -" the fellow mumbled inconclusively
"Am I not fortunate therein, since I shall be spared the infirmities of age?"
"But to be cut off in mid-life, thus! It is so monstrous pitiful. Oh, sir," he implored, "turn your thoughts, I beg, to other things."
"They are so turned," the Captain answered quietly" 'Tis yours, sir, that seem to be earth-bound, else why this grief in which I cannot share? Sir, I do think you lay too much store by this little moment we call life." And lo! it was the doomed man who set himself to offer spiritual comfort to the parson.
"Since go we must in the end, what shall it signify that we go today or tarry until tomorrow? Shall we bewail a day? Let me tell you a story I heard once in the East."
"God forbid!" ejaculated the ordinary "In such an hour!" he cried, all scandalised. "Would you still dwell upon your past when your thoughts should be all of the future?"
The Captain smiled a little, and said no more. Still overlooking the Burgundy, he accounted this fellow unfit for the ordeal of bearing solace to the doomed. The task, it was evident, confused him. There fell a silence between them. The cart, at a snail's pace, was crawling up Holborn Hill, and everywhere surged the same brutal, unfeeling crowd, staring, shouting, jesting, jeering.
Do not suppose that in this was any political rancour. Few, indeed, had any notion of the offence for which the Captain was to suffer. He was just a man going to be hanged, and a man going to be hanged was ever an interesting and often a somewhat amusing spectacle, always sufficient to justify a holiday
The ordinary, watching his face, saw its almost contemptuous wonder, and misinterpreted it.
"I marvel vastly, sir," he said, "that you did not get leave to come in a coach."
"Could I have done so?" asked the Captain, with but indifferent interest.
"At your own expense," the parson assured him.
"Ah, well, 'tis little matter."
But now another thought occurred to the ordinary. He had just observed that the cart contained no coffin.
"Have you no friends?" he asked abruptly He was obliged to shout almost that he might be heard above the din.
"Friends? I hope so."
"Where are they, then?"
The Captain's brows were knit in an instant. "Would you have them here to swell this dreadful throng?" he asked.
"Nay, nay; but what provision have they made?"
"Provision, sir?"
"Ay, for your burial. Have they obtained leave to bury you?"
The Captain looked at him, and smiled. "The thought has never engaged me. I had imagined, if I imagined anything, that all this was the concern of those that hang me."
"Then ye were mistaken, sir."
"Does it signify so much?" he asked. And before the extraordinary calm of the soldier's eyes, the ordinary became suddenly aware that he was very far astray from the path of his duty, that his thoughts were all for this wretched, perishable body instead of for the imperishable soul.
He uttered some commonplaces of religion, some of the minor currency that it was his trade to circulate. The soldier sat silent, his thoughts far away, thankful for this respite from the man's more trivial chatter of trivial things. He turned his head to look forward, and he heard the ordinary's sudden, alarmed "Don't look!"
But it did not deter him. They were trundling downhill now, the mob growing more and more dense, the houses thinning. Below there, at the hill's foot, the ground was black with swarming humanity, and from the midst of it, a dark triangular object reared itself - the sinister triple beam.
Captain Gaynor eyed it steadily, then turned him to the ordinary once more.
"We approach the journey's end," he said, and smiled. "It is very well, for the journey itself is none so pleasant."


Chapter 15
EXECUTION

Often has it been written that death is life's greatest adventure. A paradox lurks subtly in the statement, which may be the reason why the phrase has been esteemed of so many writers. But of the death Captain Gaynor was to die that day at Tyburn, the statement can be made in its literal meaning, and without paradox, that it was the greatest adventure of his life.
I am tempted at this stage of my history to interpolate here a memoir from the pen of the somewhat famous Dr Emanuel Blizzard. And if upon due consideration I have resolved not to quote this document verbatim, it is because, despite its wealth of detail, this record is, after all, an incomplete one; for there was, of course, much concerning Captain Gaynor's history with which the famous professor was never made acquainted.
I write, however, with the doctor's memoir before me - indeed, in its absence, it would be impossible for me to fill in the details of this most extraordinary part of the history I am relating. Much of that memoir - and my reader will be quick to discern the passages - I transcribe almost literally, save that here and there I have been able to elaborate from other records at my disposal certain points which to the doctor remained perforce obscure. Moreover, it will better contribute to the lucidity of my own narrative if I marshal the events in the order of their happening - an order by no means observed by the professor.

As the cart bearing Captain Gaynor came under the fatal beam, the vociferations of the crowd abated. They sank to a mere murmur, to a subdued hissing whisper, as of a breeze stirring through a forest, and lastly into an absolute and deathly silence - the impressive expectant hush of nature when a storm impends.
The ordinary was reading aloud the Office for the Dead. Jack Ketch, the ruffianly driver of the cart, was on his feet. He took the end of the rope that hung from the noose round Captain Gaynor's neck, swung it a moment to gather the required momentum, then threw it over the beam and deftly caught it again as it came round and down. In an instant he had knotted it. In another he had resumed his seat, taken up his whip, and with a stinging cut sent his horse at a half-gallop down the lane which the military had opened out for him in the mob.

Captain Gaynor found himself alone now in the cart. The parson had vanished, though he could not remember at what precise stage of the journey the fellow had left him. All round the vehicle seethed the crowd, yelling, shouting, cursing, laughing once more, but they seemed no longer to heed him.
Onward the cart rolled, with a thundering rumble now, which increased in volume as they went, and the Captain observed with faint curiosity that those who were not quick to avoid it went down under its wheels. Theirs were the curses and foul oaths with which his ears were being deafened.
Soon, however, these and all other sounds began to fade. They had left the crowd behind, about that triangular structure which he knew stood some way in the rear. They were coming into the open country. The wheels of the cart still rumbled, but less noisily now, and as they rolled presently over a soft spread of emerald turf this sound faded almost entirely.
The Captain discovered that his hands were no longer pinioned, and this was as mystifying as that sudden disappearance of the parson, for he could not recall at what particular stage of his progress the bonds had been removed.
He turned, and saw before him, sitting upright upon his plank, the immobile figure of the driver in his ragged three-cornered hat and coat of rusty black. The fellow still puffed his short clay pipe, for the smoke of it hung in wreaths about his head. He marvelled at his unconcern and apparent disregard of his prisoner.
They were ambling gently now down a lane between hedgerows that were aflame with extraordinarily rich blossoms. The sunlight was dazzling. It shone upon the waters of a pond, which he perceived through a gap in the hedge, so brilliantly that his eyes were hurt and dazzled.
It occurred to him then that since Jack Ketch was so unobservant and unconcerned, and since there was none other by to hinder him, he need not continue in the cart. He threw a leg over the rail at the back, and leapt lightly to the ground.
The vehicle rolled on. He stood watching it as with incredible swiftness it diminished in size down that interminable avenue. When it was no more than a speck in the far distance, he turned and went through the gap in the hedge with that unbearable reflection of sunlight on water beating upon his eyes; and turn which way he would he could not avoid it. There was water all about him now, and it all shone fiercely, like a mirror in the very eye of the sun. At last he perceived a bridge. He advanced towards it, and crossed it, shutting his eyes to exclude that fierce g are, yet still conscious of it even through closed lids. He opened them again to make the discovery that this bridge which he had crossed was the rustic structure leading into the garden of Priory Close. Strange, he thought, that he should never before have observed what a deal of water flowed down the little ravine it spanned. And then he ceased to wonder about anything, for before him stood a radiant Damaris with arms held out in welcome.
He plunged forward with a cry, and sank into her embrace.
"My dear," she said, "why have you left me so long to my bitter thoughts of you?"
He sought to answer her, but could not; her arms were laced so tightly about his neck that he could not speak. She was strangling him. Had he been able to speak he would have told her so. But he could not. Yet although the choking was hurting him, he did not attempt to struggle. It was so good to lie there. He was very, very weary. He nestled his head more closely upon her breast. A great drowsiness overcame him, and he fell asleep.

Between two of the three uprights of that triangular structure, the body of Captain Gaynor swung gently to and fro, as if the warm summer breeze made sport with it.
About the foot of the gibbet there was an open square, maintained by a hedge of men in scarlet coats and mitre-shaped hats. The drums had long since ceased to beat.
Came a sharp word of command, and a line of muskets flashed up and rattled to rest, each upon the shoulder of its owner; another word of command, and the redcoats manoeuvred into marching order, four abreast. Then the drums rolled out again, and the scarlet phalanx swung briskly away through the tumultuous crowd.
The show was at an end.
Into the open square which the military had maintained at the gallows' foot sprang now some half-dozen resolute and bustling ruffians. The crowd surged after them, like waters suddenly released, and a cart pressed forward with the foremost.
The tallest of these ruffians, with a knife between his teeth, shinned up one of the vertical timbers and threw a leg over the cross-beam from which the Captain's body was swinging. With his knife he slashed through the rope, and the body tumbled into the arms of his companions below. Two of them bore it away. The others plied elbows and tongues to force a passage through the rabble with their prize. They gained the cart, flung in their limp burden, and as one of them vaulted after it, the driver cracked his whip and cursed the people volubly and obscenely. A way was reluctantly opened, and into this the little cart pressed, driven forward like a wedge. Slowly it won through.
Some little distance from the gallows a chaise had been drawn up. In this sat an elderly gentleman, who, with a grey face and dull, pain-laden eyes, had watched the execution. His aspect was so profoundly grief-stricken that the crowd about his carriage had felt the influence of it, and had preserved an almost utter silence. They resented being constrained to this despite themselves, for they felt that their enjoyment of the show had been marred; but for all their resentment they had not been able to shake off the spell of that anguished old countenance.
Suddenly, as the body was being borne away, Sir John Kynaston - for he it was - seemed to rouse himself from his trance. He uttered a cry and carried a trembling hand to the carriage door. He fumbled at it for some moments, opened it at last, and sprang down, shouting. But his voice was lost in the terrific uproar. He attempted to struggle through the crowd. But, spent as was his strength by grief, he was unequal to the effort, and after a quarter of an hour's striving he had got no farther than the foot of the gallows, whilst the cart was vanishing into the Edgware Road.
He implored those about him to pass the word along that he would pay the snatchers handsomely for their booty. An attempt was made to do his will, and the message travelled some little way, but it was scattered and lost at last.
In the end he was forced to give up the attempt. Blaming himself for not having thought of the matter sooner, he made his way with feeble, unsteady steps - his vigour all sapped - back to his carriage. The crowd was growing thinner now He regained his chaise, and so returned in sorrow to Chertsey, deriving, if possible, an added grief from the reflection that he had neglected to perform the last rites by the body of his old friend's boy.
Priory Lodge in those days was haunted by an atmosphere of gloom. Evelyn and Damaris remained both invisible even to Sir John, both pleading indisposition.
Evelyn was overcome with terror at the ruin she had wrought, for she accounted that Captain Gaynor's arrest and execution had all resulted from the disclosure of his identity when Lord Pauncefort spied upon the lovers in the garden. She it was who had fetched his lordship to Chertsey by her letter, and she, herself, had conducted him to the garden that he might surprise his betrothed in the arms of another.
It had been with her no more than an act of petty vengeance, she could scarce have said for what. But she had intended that it should remain petty; she had never dreamt of such tragic consequences as these. She was prostrated by them and by her consciousness of guilt; and it went as near to making a woman of her and arousing her dormant intelligence as anything could do. She had not seen Damaris since the happening - now some ten days old - in that garden. She had been afraid to face her, and now her fear had increased to terror since Sir John had brought word three days ago of the sentence of death that had been passed upon their whilom guest. That had been terrible enough. But now came the still more terrible news - again brought by Sir John - that Captain Gaynor had been hanged.
In her anguish, in her overwhelming panic, Evelyn wanted to die. She could never again meet the eyes of Damaris. She was - she told herself that night, as she lay wide-eyed upon her bed - a murderess. Once, in the grey hour of dawn she rose from her bed, fell on her knees beside it, and prayed - not to heaven, but to the spirit of Captain Gaynor - for forgiveness. Conceiving that this spirit being disembodied must be now all knowing, she cried out to it that she had not meant to work this havoc, that her deed had been light and heedless, that never would she have performed it could she have dreamed of such consequences to himself as these.
Some comfort she took in the reflection that he must know, and that knowing all he must forgive, as all must who know all.
It was on the morrow that Sir John brought himself to question his wife on the subject of the Captain's sojourn at Priory Close. His wife, with habitual irrelevance and her passion for the unimportant, related to him the deception that had been practised by the girls. He gathered from this and from what else she added that Harry Gaynor had wooed Damaris under the impression that he was wooing Evelyn; he learnt that Pauncefort had been at Priory Close on the very morning of the day upon which the Captain had been arrested; and he was able for himself to piece together the event, save that he knew nothing of the revelations that had driven Damaris away in a loathing of Harry Gaynor as great almost as had been that which earlier had turned her from Pauncefort.
He sat in the library pondering it all, and thinking of the elder Gaynor who had been his friend, his more than brother, and thanking God that he had not lived to see this day of sorrow. He pondered the hope he had nourished of wedding his only child to Harry. That hope must, he saw, in any case have been frustrated. It mattered little now. For Evelyn, indeed, it was better as it was; better that she had not loved him. And then he sat up sharply with a sudden, a terrible thought. It moved him to rise and go in quest of his wife again.
"What ails Evelyn?" he inquired.
"I do not know, my dear. The child is very odd always, and very headstrong." Lady Kynaston sighed. "I never had her confidence."
"How long has she been ailing? How long has she kept her chamber?"
Her ladyship considered a moment. "Why, ever since Captain Gaynor left us," said she.
He was answered, he thought. His daughter, too, was stricken by the same blow. She had conceived for the Captain an unrequited passion. His heart bled for her, and in his compassion he went at once to seek her.
He found her sitting listlessly by the window of her room, her hands idle in her lap. The roses had all fled from her cheeks; she looked haggard, so haggard and woebegone that even her air of intense femininity had departed from her. She raised heavy eyes to her father's face, and he observed the dark lines under them that told the tale of sleepless nights.
"My dear!" he said. "My poor child!" He held out his arms to her, and there were tears in his old eyes.
His pity stabbed her. She did not understand it, but she understood that it was sprung from some misapprehension.
"Ah, don't touch me, father!" she cried. "You don't know, you don't know!"
"I think I do," he answered very gently.
"You do?" He saw horror in the eyes so suddenly lifted to stare fit him. At once she realised that he had no knowledge of the truth, that something very different was in his mind. He came upon her very ripe for confession, at a point where, did she not share her burden with another, she must sink under it and die, she thought. She rose, flung herself upon his breast, and there, through a storm of sudden weeping, in a voice broken by sobs, she poured out her miserable story.
He listened, frowning awhile. But when the end was reached he did not put her from him in aversion, as she had feared. Gently he stroked her golden head.
"For the unworthy thing you did, Evelyn, you have been punished enough," he said. "Do not torment yourself with the supposition of a greater sin. It was not you who gave Captain Gaynor to the hangman, nor did Lord Pauncefort do it in consequence of what he witnessed here, nor yet did he, as you suppose, discover Captain Gaynor's identity as a result of what you enabled him to overhear. He knew it already. He was himself a Jacobite who had betrayed his fellow-plotters. So comfort you at least with the knowledge of that."
She comforted herself very speedily and completely, as such natures can. She slept soundly that night, and on the morrow when she made her appearance at the breakfast-table she had resumed much of her habitual air.
Nor was she any longer oppressed by the fear of meeting Damaris, since in no degree now did she account herself guilty towards her cousin. It was true that she had done a meanness in writing to Lord Pauncefort and bringing him to spy upon the lovers, but for the rest she had her father's word for it that her action had nowise altered the inevitable course to which the events of these last days had been fore-ordained. But if she no longer feared to meet Damaris, yet she could not go the length herself of seeking Damaris, nor for that matter could Sir John, despite the urgings of his deeply sympathetic nature.
There was not, however, the need. Damaris, of her own accord, came forth on the following evening from her retirement, and sought her uncle.
He was in the library, writing to his brother, when suddenly she stood before him, almost ghostly in her intense pallor as she paused among the shadows by the door for his leave to intrude a moment. He sprang up at sight of her and went to meet her, and even as he was shocked by the change that grief had wrought in her, so was she shocked by the greyness of his face, the haggard air where joviality had ever sat and the dullness of those blue eyes that usually were so bright and smiling.
He held out his hands and she took them, her fingers tightening upon them. But for this man who had been more than father to her, her loneliness must be utter now.
"How cold you are, my child," he murmured. Then his voice broke. "Oh, my poor Damaris!" His voice told her that - no matter how - he was informed of all, or, at least, of all that mattered.
"I came to talk to you of him," she said quietly, her voice, as controlled as her face, like her face showing, despite her, the suffering through which she was passing.
He led her forward to a chair, and when she was seated he went to stand by the overmantel. So had he stood, she remembered, on that day when at Pauncefort's side by the window there, she had looked upon him as her enemy, and defied him. How bitterly, now, she repented her that momentary defection! How profoundly she loved him, since today, in his affection for Harry Gaynor, she discovered a fresh and very solemn bond between them.
"He desired me to give you certain messages when he was on the point of setting out," she said, and neither of them deemed it strange that she should find no need to mention any name. "They do not amount to very much, but he dared not write them, he said, lest his letter should miscarry. As it is, you no doubt will have guessed what he would wish to say." And she repeated with a rare fidelity the words he had entrusted to her.
"Yes," he said heavily, when she had done. "All that I understood."
"I - I have since had a letter from him," she said.
"He wrote to me from Newgate, on the eve of - on Thursday last. You - you were with him - at the end?" she asked.
"I was there," replied Sir John. "But he did not see me."
She swayed on her chair. She passed a hand over her brow, her face strained with the effort of self-control. "How - how did he die?" she asked at last.
"Happily, I think," Sir John replied. "He was smiling at the end, when - when he stood up. What had he to fear?" cried the baronet, a sudden vigour returning to his voice, a defiance almost. "What had he to fear? He was as brave and gallant a gentleman as ever drew the breath of life, a man whom all honoured and loved, and he died a martyr to truth and right. What then, had he to fear in death?" The tears ran down the old man's cheeks, and his voice sank again, as he concluded: "Had the poor lad been my own son I should have been as proud of him as I was of the affection with which his father honoured me."
She rose and came to him. She reached up to put her arms about his neck, drew down his head, and very gently kissed him. And so, quietly, her sorrow ever silent and contained, she left him.

scribendi cacoethes

CHARITY

Lazarus lay at the rich man's gate
And dogs did him surround,
From whom more kindness he did get
Than in his kinsman found.

~ E.M.R.H.                  31 January 2010

BOOKWORM

THE GATES OF DOOM

by Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 12
NATURE TRIUMPHANT

On the morrow Captain Gaynor made his preparations for leaving England.
He had learnt upon returning to Priory Close of the messenger who had sought him there, and thus realised how narrow had been his escape. For the present, however, he had obtained - thanks to Mr Templeton and his own wit - a temporary respite, and that respite he proposed to employ in giving my Lord Pauncefort his quietus. He looked upon this as a sacred duty, and he could not account himself at liberty to depart out of England until he had discharged it. His intention, therefore, was to return to London, and that very day seek out his lordship and, wherever he found him, force upon him a quarrel demanding immediate adjustment. He reflected that the affair would serve him well, and would leave Mr Templeton with an obvious explanation of his subsequent flight from England. He should be glad of that, for he had no reason to embroil the Second Secretary, who had been so very good a friend to him.
He began that morning by desiring his valet, Fisher, to pack his few belongings, and by informing Fisher that once London were reached he would be obliged by circumstances to dispense with a body servant. The valet, who in the week during which he had served the Captain had found him not only a kind and considerate master, but further had been drawn to him by that magnetism which the Captain's strong personality irradiated, was so distressed as to seek the reason of this.
"I am very sorry, sir," he said. "I hope your Honour has no cause to be displeased with me. I have done my best, but there has been little opportunity -"
"It isn't that," said the Captain. He laid a hand upon the little man's shoulder, and looked kindly into his sharp face. "You have done very well, and I am sorry to part with you. But - to take you into my confidence, which you'll respect, I know - I have an affair on my hands."
"Oh, sir!" the fellow cried, with quick understanding, and Gaynor was moved by the look of concern that leapt into those keen eyes.
"If it end one way, Fisher," the Captain continued, "I shall require no more servants. If it end the other - as I am trustful it will - I shall be put to it to fly the country, and I cannot take you with me."
"But why not, sir?" cried the valet. "I've travelled aforetime. I was in France and Italy with his Grace of Wharton when I had the honour to serve him. I know foreign ways. I -"
"I do not doubt it at all, my friend," the Captain interrupted him. "But there are reasons why I cannot take you, reasons for which you must not press."
"I shouldn't dream of such a liberty, sir."
"Then we must leave it there. I am sorry, Fisher, sorry to part with you."
"And I am sorry, sir," said the little man with profound sincerity
"Thank you, Fisher."
"Thank you, sir."
Then the Captain went downstairs. He was touched a little by the valet's manner. It seemed to increase the burden that was upon him. He was almost obsessed by a sense of imminent evil, born, no doubt, of the impending farewell that he must make to one with whom he must leave, it seemed, a part of himself - and that the better part - when he rode away that day.
He was exercised, too, by the continued absence of Sir John Kynaston. There was news that, Sir John's brother being now out of all danger, the baronet would be returning on the morrow or the day after. But Captain Gaynor dared not wait and the abruptness of his departure demanded an explanation; more, the events which had transpired in these last few days made it necessary to convey a warning to the baronet. Yet how was he to accomplish it? Write, he dared not; for letters are ever dangerous and liable to miscarriage, and the things he had to say might, if written, come to prove a deadly witness against Sir John. Thus he was driven to the decision that he must entrust his messages by word of mouth to Evelyn - by whom, of course, he meant Damaris.
He reflected that Sir John might prefer her to remain - like the rest of the household - in ignorance of her father's slight association with the Jacobite Cause; but he had no alternative. It was a choosing of the lesser of two evils; and, after all, he had perceived in this sweet lady such admirable qualities of head and heart that he was comparatively easy in his mind at the thought of confiding in her. Moreover, he would so put it as not to betray Sir John even to her in any unnecessary degree. With this intent he sought her now.
He was informed by a servant that Miss Kynaston was with her ladyship in the latter's withdrawing-room. Thither he went, to find, of course, Lady Kynaston and Evelyn. They accorded him a pleasant, friendly welcome. He hesitated to ask for the lady whom he sought, and he was spared the need, for through the window he espied her walking in the garden.
Yet for all his haste to join her there, he must linger awhile in a properly deliberate exchange of courtesies with his hostess. She had been perusing The Daily Courant of yesterday when he entered, and, presumably for lack of other matter, she alluded to something she had read.
"Did you hear aught in town, sir, of these knavish Jacobites who are again attempting to undermine the peace of the realm?" she asked him, and in the main, she was quoting words that she had read.
"I heard something, madam," he answered lightly.
"Ah!" said she. "You do not treat the matter with a proper seriousness."
"Is it very serious, ma'am?" he asked her.
"Serious? Why, the notorious Captain Jenkyn is in England again."
"Pooh! A rumour, no doubt."
"Nay, sir, no rumour - a report."
"'Tis all one, mother dear," said Evelyn from the window, where she was standing. "I hope they will not take him," she added, and paid that gallant unknown the tribute of a sigh.
"You hope they will not take him, Evelyn!" Her ladyship was outraged by such a sentiment. "The man is a dangerous and pernicious rebel. And they'll take him, never fear."
"I wonder!" said Captain Gaynor.
"Look at this," she bade him, and held out The Courant.
He took the news-sheet, and followed the indication of her finger. But there was not the need of it. The bold announcement at the foot of the second column challenged every eye:

ADVERTISEMENT

WHEREAS it is reported to his Majesty's Government that the notorious rebel and Jacobite spy and agent who is known as Captain Jenkyn is at this present time in England, his Majesty's Secretary of State hereby gives notice that any who shall bring such information as will lead to the arrest and conviction of the said rebel shall receive from his Majesty's Treasury the sum of TWELVE HUNDRED GUINEAS in REWARD.

"His value is increasing, it seems," said the Captain, returning the sheet to her ladyship. "Poor devil!" he added, and soon afterwards found an excuse upon which he might withdraw and go to join Damaris in the garden.
"Madam," he said, bowing formally before her, "I am come - alas! - to take my leave of you. But ere I go there is something I desire to say for your private ear, if you will so honour me."
He saw the quick blood leap to her cheeks and ebb thence again, leaving her very white; he saw that droop of the brown eyes, the sudden agitation of her breast, the little quiver of her hand upon the briar from which she had been about to break a rose.
He knew then how she misunderstood his aims; knew that she cared; and the knowledge was as a sword in his flesh.
"Yes," she answered faintly. "I am listening, Captain Gaynor."
He hesitated yet a moment. Then: "Will you walk, madam?" he invited her, his voice oddly subdued, faltering a little even.
She turned at his bidding, and together they took their way at a gentle pace towards the plantation; they crossed the bridge, and followed the main valley of the glorious garden; and all this with no word spoken between them, yet such a communion of soul and soul as gladdened her and left him sick with fierce despair.
She imagined that she understood why he led her to the garden. She remembered how he had spoken of it as enchanted, a place wherein a man might be content to lay down ambition and have done with strife. It was here, too, that they had first talked to any purpose. It was almost as if they had met there, under the apple-blossom, for until that talk they had been as utter strangers. There it was that he had first revealed himself with all that stark honesty which she found so admirable in him, that it more than made amends for his avowed lack of great ideals. She was touched by his desire that they should talk now in such a place; that he should have chosen this garden of enchantment, in which he had erst revealed himself, to reveal himself yet more fully unto her alone.
Rejoicing, she went with him thither, as she would have gone with him wheresoe'er he bade her. Was she not his to claim? And in that hour she was glad indeed of the deception that had been practised, glad that he had not known her for the heiress, Damaris Hollinstone. For thus was she brought to the sweet and tranquil conviction that here was one who desired her for her own self and not for aught that she might have to give. She was glad, too, that she was Damaris Hollinstone and rich, and glad that he was poor. Thus should be increased the joy and blessing that would be hers in giving - for she was of those selfless ones who, where they love, desire to give and give. She knew that she was good to look upon; and in this too she took joy that morning, since this too had she to give.
She was dreaming as she stepped along beside him, a happy dream whose fulfilment she deemed impending. Why did he not speak? she wondered. Did he hesitate, poor lover? Did he doubt her? God wot, there was but little need for that. Furtively, shyly she glanced aside at him, to observe at last his haggard look and wrinkled brow.
Dear heart! How needlessly was he torturing himself! How fondly she longed for the uttered word that should give her the right to drive forth his fears, to transfigure his face and smooth away those lines. Yet she loved him the more for this most sweet timidity towards her in one whom she judged of a nature that normally was bold and fearless.
And then, at last, he spoke, his voice singularly small and quiet; and his first words shattered that dream-paradise of hers so abruptly that for an instant she was stunned and numb.
"It is of Sir John that I desire to speak to you, madam," he said. "I have a message for him of gravest import - so grave that I dare not write it, lest an ill-chance should put it into hands that might use it against him."
Mechanically she walked on. She was choking. Her face was deathly pale; her eyes seemed suddenly enlarged in it and very dark; her mouth was trembling. But he observed naught of this. He did not observe her at all. He was looking away through the sundrenched orchard on their right.
Followed a little spell of silence, in which they came to the first of those courts enclosed in their tall, boxwood settings. He stood aside to let her pass first through the narrow archway in that massive hedge. He followed, and they stood in the rose-garden, which was now all fire and snow with petals red and white.
"You will tell him, madam, that I am grieved beyond all mention that I may not stay another day for his return, to take my leave of him in person; that I dare not; that with every hour I tarry now in England the shadow of the gallows falls more heavily across my path."
She came out of her stupor, awakened by the sinister image he had employed.
"The gallows?" she cried, horror in every line of her lovely face. "You are in danger!"
Deliberately had he spoken so, hoping that his words would convey not only the intended message to Sir John, but a message to her too that should explain his need to preserve silence upon the subject on which she looked to hear from him. Yet now that he saw and interpreted her alarm, his soul was torn with sobs unuttered. His eyelids flickered. But beyond that he gave no sign of the terrible ordeal he was sustaining, must sustain for honour's sake. His every nerve and fibre shrieked imperatively that he should take her in his arms, and claim her - who stood so ready for surrender - for his own. But the calm, cold voice of Honour warned him not to heed those treacherous behests of heedless Nature - of Nature, who knows naught of honour and such human shibboleths.
What manner of knave would he be, Honour demanded, to return the good that Sir John had ever done him by the evil of such a deed? To repay the baronet's trust and affection by stealing away his only child and bearing her with him upon his hapless wanderings?
Were Sir John here, things might be different. Captain Gaynor could have gone to him and loyally spoken what was in his heart, loyally abided by the baronet's decision. But without the baronet's consent - a consent which Gaynor deemed extremely unlikely - he must not speak to her of this thing with which his heart was bursting. And linger until Sir John's return, he dared not; not merely for the danger that he ran - that danger he would have faced most gladly - but because his presence in England might place in jeopardy those arrested Jacobites, against whom little could be enacted if he remained undiscovered, he must depart at once. The voice of Honour was very clear, and not to be misunderstood. It bade him be silent, and so depart.
So in that swift flicker of his eyelids he determined. He brushed aside with a disdainful gesture the suggestion that the danger he ran was one to occasion concern.
"The danger is naught," he said, "or will be naught so that I depart at once. And I mean not only danger to myself but danger to others who would be implicated were I taken. Please remember this that you may tell him. And that the principal ones of my master's friends have been prematurely arrested; that no great harm threatens them, but that for the present I have been obliged to abandon my mission; that I shall not go to Rochester, nor indeed take any further steps, but shall return immediately to Rome.
"That, I think, is all that I need say. The rest he will infer. But add that there is a warrant out for my arrest - though not in my own name, as the Government is not yet assured that my identity and that of the person sought are one and the same. And before the Government has such assurance - if indeed it ever has it - I hope to be very far away. Bid him spare himself anxieties on my account. My plans are soundly laid, and I have a friend at Court upon whose offices I am depending.
"Tell him just that, madam," he concluded, his eyes ever avoiding hers, "just that and my deep devotion. He will understand why I was forced to this precipitate flight, and he will know how to guard himself from any consequences of having sheltered me in the event of my being ultimately identified with - with the man for whom the warrant has been issued."
"I will remember all," she said - indeed, every word of it was seared upon her memory - "and I will tell him. But you, sir" - her voice dropped a little, and her tone by its gentleness seemed to belie the words she uttered - "you have deceived me."
He looked up sharply. "Deceived you – I?"
"You represented yourself to me as an adventurer, a follower of Fortune's banner, a mercenary who sold his sword to the highest bidder."
"All this I have been - all this I am," he answered. "I practised no deceit."
"You practise it still," she said, her pride in him increased a thousandfold by her discovery. "You spoke but now of a mission and of your master in Rome. You are a Jacobite, that much you have made plain - one who in the pursuit of an ideal imperils his life and moves, in your own words, under the shadow of the gallows. Yet," she reproached him almost fondly, so caressingly protesting was her tone, "you represented yourself to me as a hireling; you provoked and submitted to my scorn."
He trembled, looked at her, then looked away across the flaming roses. His first impulse was to say that in this too he was a mercenary; that what he did, he did for gold. First the falsehood stayed him; then the reflection that even that falsehood could not serve him now. He had won her love; her every word and look assured him of it. Should he then be so ungenerous as to maintain this hateful pretence that she was nothing to him? Could that serve any but a hurtful purpose? Was it not better that he, too, should let her see how it was with him? Was it not better that she should know that where unwittingly he had conquered he had been conquered also? That she should hold this knowledge would, he felt, comfort him; and her too it might comfort. Some day - who knew?
But there he went too fast. He would convey it, but not utter it. To utter it were to break down the barriers which Honour had raised up.
"You are right," he said gently. "I crave your pardon."
"My pardon?" she echoed. "My pardon - for being noble where I deemed you base!"
"Nay, for the deceit I put unworthily upon you."
"Why did you?" she asked him, the intimacy between them growing now with an odd and alarming swiftness.
"To be consistent in the part I played. Had any known my secret, all must know it. Yet there was no untruth in my deceit. I was a mercenary in all other services but this. And of this I dared not speak - at least not then."
"And now?" she asked him without shyness.
"Now?" He looked at her, full into her steadfast eyes that were drawing his very soul from him. "Now to make amends I will place my life in your gentle hands. God knows it is all I have to give." He laughed a little ruefully. She was trembling. "I am he whom the Government knows by the name of Captain Jenkyn."
She fell back with a little cry. She needed no explanation. She, too, had seen The Daily Courant that morning and the Secretary of State's announcement. She turned white to the lips, realising at last to the full the overwhelming peril in which he stood. She clasped her hands.
"Oh, God of pity!" was her moan. And then, in an agony: "Why - oh, why did you tell me this?"
The appeal was more than he could endure. Impulse shattered Honour's barriers at a blow, and struck Honour herself silent, whilst Nature swept on triumphant and irresistible.
He strode to her, caught her in his arms and crushed her to him. His voice shook with mingled pain and exultation.
"Because I love you, oh, my lady!" he cried. "Because all that I have, all that I am I would place in your sweet hands in pledge of it."
"I asked not any pledge," she sobbed in a gladness that mounted and overrode her terror. His head drooped to her upturned face, and they kissed. "Dear love," she murmured, as she lay there happily upon his breast, "I, too, must make confession."
"Confess, dear sinner," he replied, "and be very sure of shrift."
"I am glad that you deceived me, for I too have practised a deceit on you."
"Deceit - thou?" his voice was scornful.
"I am not Evelyn," she confessed, watching his face, observing the cloud that gathered on his brow. "I am Damaris Hollinstone."
The cloud grew darker, then suddenly it vanished utterly and he laughed.
"Faith, then, I'm glad," said he, "for Damaris is a sweeter and more fitting name."
"And for no other reason?" she inquired.
"What other could there be? You are you under whatever name you please."
And so they hung there, the world and all its perils sunk many a fathom deep into oblivion, conscious of naught but each other - just man and woman in a garden.
From behind the boxwood hedge stepped, soft-footed, a hidden watcher. Another - a golden-headed, fragile slip of womanhood, fled, shuddering and weeping softly in an agony of remorse at the catastrophe she had invoked, a catastrophe that overleapt her every expectation and spread grim tragedy where she had thought to set a comedy with a spice of malice.
Through the archway into that Eden stepped the inevitable Satan, wearing the handsome outward seeming of my Lord Pauncefort. He paused an instant, himself unobserved, to consider the idyll that he came to shatter with a bloody hand. And what time he paused, he set upon his seething rage the mask of a sardonic humour.
"Soho!" he announced himself. "Here is not merely a rebel, but a rebel in arms, it seems."

Chapter 13
IN THE ROSE-GARDEN

Alarmed, confused, the lovers sprang apart; yet not so far apart that the Captain's arm continued to encircle - protectingly now - the waist of Damaris.
There followed a spell of silence during which the two men measured each other with their eyes, like swordsmen about to engage. And there was something more in the Captain's glance; there was satisfaction to see before him the man who was become his quarry. No need now to go afield in search of him. With a smouldering eye, with something that was almost a smile on his lips did Gaynor ponder now his enemy.
But it was Damaris, standing tense and white, who was the first to break the silence.
"By what right, sir, do you thus insolently thrust yourself in here?" she challenged the intruder.
"Do you, madam, question my right?" quoth he, eyebrows raised. It was Captain Gaynor who supplied the answer to her question.
"By the right of his nature, Damaris. He can no more help being a spy than the fox can help its smell."
His lordship's eyes swung back to the Captain's face, and betrayed by their startled look how shrewdly this blow had caught him. But he made a swift recovery, throwing back his handsome black head in arrogance.
"What shall that mean, sir?"
"Mean, you base Judas!" The Captains passion was overmastering him at the sight of this man whose falseness had wrought such fearful havoc, had ruined for a season his beloved master's every hope. Thus that fierce burst of rage escaped him. But he controlled himself almost at once.
"Let me present to you, Damaris," said he, in a cold, sneering voice, "the most infamous spy in England, who in the discharge of that office has thrust himself here upon us. You may have conceived that in my Lord Pauncefort you beheld a nobleman, a gentleman, a man of honour. So have others thought to their undoing. Instead, you behold there a broken gamester who for a handful of gold has betrayed the men who trusted him and counted him their friend, has sold the Cause in which he himself believed, has bartered his honour and brought everlasting shame upon the name he bears."
"Be silent!" thundered Pauncefort, advancing a step and checking there, his countenance writhing. "It is false, I say!"
"You perjured hound! False, is it? Ay, the deed was false and foul as hell, in which it shall be expiated."
"Was it he betrayed you?" quoth Damaris, her voice most singularly calm and quiet.
"Ay was it. Look on him, Damaris." He flung out an accusing arm. "Look on him, for you may never again see such another - a man who was born a gentleman and is reduced to infamy, a man who has pawned his soul to keep his body in luxury."
Pauncefort was livid, stricken by the unexpectedness of this attack, for he had been very far from dreaming that his treachery was detected.
"And now, sir," said Damaris, "now that you have received what was here your due, perhaps you will depart again?"
Her contempt struck him more keenly than the Captain's bitter denunciation. It stirred him, awakened him from his stupor. Swiftly he mastered himself to play his part in this game; and he was suddenly heartened by the knowledge that he had a card in his pack should trump this whirling Captain's trick.
He turned upon Gaynor very haughtily, every inch of him the great gentleman.
"Sir," he said, "base as you are and as I know you to be, you have said that to me here which is not to be borne by any man, however high-placed, from another, however low. Elsewhere we will continue this discussion."
"We shall, by God!" said Gaynor. "I so intend it."
"And," his lordship added, "you shall eat the lies you have uttered." Upon that his gesture signified that he had done with him. "But you, Damaris - oh, that you should have lent an ear to this infamous defamer! that you should have believed these things against me, myself unheard! This is what stings and cuts me to the very soul!"
She surveyed him with an eye that pierced this miserable artifice. She disdained him any answer other than: "Will you go now, sir?"
He stared at her as if this fresh dismissal were beyond belief. He played his part with vigour and intensity.
But it was quite futile. Yet in the face of his indifferent audience he maintained it, enheartened by the confidence that his finest line was yet to utter; saving this skilfully for his climax, a climax that should overwhelm and conquer her for all her present scorn of him.
"No," he answered, "I will not go. My place is here beside my affianced wife."
"Your - ?" She checked, her cheeks aflame. "You do well, I think, to remind me of my shame. But that is past. I am your affianced wife no longer."
"Ah?" he said. He was quite himself by now, betraying no least sign of heat. "Since when this change?"
He got his answer pat. "Since you, yourself, failed in wit to conceal from me that it was my fortune, not myself, you wooed."
He considered her, and his eyes were melancholy. He sighed. "I feared you had thus misunderstood me!"
"Oh, I did not misunderstand you," she answered. "I understood you for the first time. And that is how it happens that Captain Gaynor's further revelation of your ways does not surprise me."
This was a blow between the eyes. But his lordship did not stagger under it. He preserved a calm front. "For that, too," said he "you shall contritely and of your own free will yet seek my pardon."
"I?" Her contempt withered him. "Oh, will you go!"
And seeing him still making no shift to depart: "I think," said the Captain, "this lady bids you go. Must I compel you to obey her?"
"Very well," he said to Damaris, entirely ignoring the Captain. "Very well." He bowed to her. "Another season will perhaps serve me better. I should indeed prefer to clear myself in your eyes when there are no witnesses at hand. Yet ere I go, I will ask you to remember that however you may have misunderstood my motives, you are pledged to me, and I have not redeemed you from that pledge."
"Myself have cancelled it," she answered him. "I will not wed a thief."
"Ha!" cried the Captain. "'Tis the very word - the very word I sought. A thief! Ha!"
The swarthy face flushed heavily, the eyes were venomous in the glance they flashed upon the Captain. My lord drew a deep breath with a little hissing sound, thereby acknowledging the hit.
"How wanton can a woman be when her mood is cruel!" he exclaimed. "How wanton is her injustice! This injustice; madam," he continued sadly, his head bowed, "yourself shall come to acknowledge. As I know you to be a true and generous woman where you are not misled, so do I know that you will sue for pardon to me. You think to fling me aside because you imagine - oh, so mistakenly, dear God! - that I was a fortune hunter, that (in your own cruel words) I wooed your fortune and not yourself. And yet - and yet, such is a woman's blindness - you replace me by one who is an avowed adventurer, a self-confessed fortune-hunter, a mercenary in all things; one who openly and without disguise or shame sought to win you for what you're like to bring him in worldly estate. "
He had begun at last to play his trumps, and Captain Gaynor stiffened as he listened, stiffened in sudden horror of a picture that leapt before the eyes of his memory.
"Have you quite done?" was all Damaris' acknowledgment of his lordship's scathing words.
"Quite, if you do not believe me," he answered with grim confidence.
Had she but preserved silence, had she but maintained her haughty indifference, all might yet have been well. There would have been no more to say, and, his rebuff complete, he must have taken his departure. But, woman-like, she must have the last word in this; she must come down a little from those frosty heights to utter it, and in uttering it must open the door to more.
"I do not believe you," she said, to which he returned the obvious answer:
"And if I could prove it to you?"
"Prove it?" she cried, and now her pride and confidence in her lover were as much to blame as any other sentiments. "Prove it? You poor deceiver! Why, I can prove the very contrary. Until this hour, until he knew that he had won me - for I am his, my lord - he did not know my name; he deemed me Evelyn Kynaston, as a result of a poor deceit we put upon him; and for that I thank heaven, since it gives me this easy means of showing how fully I account you what Captain Gaynor says you are."
But his lordship brushed the insult aside. It was insignificant, then; a mere piece of detail. The fact to which it was attached arrested him. For a second it checkmated him. And then he saw how it might be turned to account.
"He thought you Miss Kynaston?" he cried. "He has succeeded in making you credit even that? Now what a most complete and finished liar have we here!" Then, in a voice of thunder, a voice whose very weight and volume seemed to increase the burden of his overpowering words, he let her have it.
"Why, this man" - and he shook a quivering finger at the Captain - "this dastard came here of set intent to woo you, ere ever he had seen you. In his own words, ma'am, he knew not whether you were tall or short, dark or fair, plump or lean, neither did he care; he knew you for the wealthiest heiress in all England, and in no other way did he desire to know you." He swung upon the Captain, smiling grimly. "You see that I have treasured the remembrance of your every word, sir."
"You hound! You jackal!" said the Captain through his teeth.
But my lord ran on: "And because he knew me betrothed to you; because he knew me in straits for money, in the clutches of a merciless usurer, a debtor's goal awaiting me, he availed himself of my despair to propose to me that I should play him for the right to wed you, which was mine. To my undying shame, I confess that I succumbed. He set you against ten thousand guineas, and he lost. Yet in spite of that, so false a dastard is he, he cannot abide by that issue of the cards, but comes here to steal a thing which is doubly lost to him in honour. And yet you call me a thief, and fling yourself into the arms of such a thief as that!"
He paused, and still she answered nothing. Her calm was impregnable. She just looked at him with eyes of coldest scorn, eyes that seemed to say she but suffered him to talk that he might be done the sooner, that she but waited to be rid of his unwelcome presence. Yet he had not quite done. The card was played; but its force and value were not yet realised.
"I have been in a very hell of shame since I lent myself - induced in my despair - to such a thing. But however shameful you may deem me, I am not shameful as is he. I at least desired you because first and last I loved you. It was not your fortune that I staked upon the board when I gambled for my right to wed you - not your fortune, but my very life, my every hope. But he - Well! I have told you what words he uttered. He will not deny them if you ask him. He cannot, bold liar though he is."
He had finished. If he had ruined himself, at least he had ruined the Captain. And yet for himself he had a glimmer of hope. If on the recoil from himself she had tumbled into the Captain's mercenary arms, might he not win her yet upon this second recoil that must inevitably follow now? It was just possible, and he had the means, he thought, to compel Sir John's assistance. He could not think that he had talked in vain. He preened himself upon his knowledge of the ways of women, and here he was confident of having taken a course that no woman could disregard. Yet, it seems, there was one woman whom he had not gauged. For all that Damaris answered him even now was: "Will you go at last, sir; or can you think of aught else to say - though I warn you 'twill be so much wasted breath."
He gasped and blenched. His eyes bulged as he stared at her.
"You - you do not believe me?" he cried, as he had cried before, but without the confidence that had informed the earlier question.
"Believe you?" she said, and smiled. "I see that you have thought me mad."
"Ask him!" he barked, and flung out a hand again towards Gaynor.
"There is not the need," she said, with quiet confidence.
For a moment he continued to stare at her - her loyalty - her foolish, headstrong loyalty had defeated him, he thought. How she must love this fellow Gaynor that no doubt of him could find admittance to her mind however spurred.
"You are right," he said at last. "There is not the need to ask." And he, too, was smiling, never so wickedly. "You have but to look. Look!" he commanded. "Look in his face and see for yourself what is written there; see for yourself whether I have lied. Oh, indeed, there is no need to ask."
She looked as he bade her. Captain Gaynor's continued silence under that long and formidable accusation occurred to her, perhaps, to cause her at last to do his lordship's bidding and turn her head to look upon her lover's face.
What she saw there struck all her proud confidence to earth, left her frozen and panic-stricken. His face was as the face of a dead man; the very eyes were gone lustreless, and they could not meet her own.
"Harry," she said, and the steadiness of her voice surprised her. She considered that steadiness almost critically, just as she considered the circumstance that this was the first occasion on which she used his name; and to think that she must use it to ask him - to ask him! - to refute a grotesque and foolish accusation. Yet ask him she must, which meant that the accusation had ceased of a sudden to seem to her grotesque and foolish. She was as one who looked on at herself and at her fellow-actors in this scene. It was as if her spirit were disembodied, to become a cold and critical spectator.
"Harry, you will tell me that he lies. That is all that you need tell me."
"Were I the man to have done what he says I have done, then I should be a liar, too, and I should not scruple to answer you as you desire," he said. His voice was husky and unsteady.
She did not understand. There was a confusing paradox in his words. She weighed them in her mind, repeated them to herself, and found them meaningless. She said so.
"But you mean that it is untrue?" she pleaded.
"Untrue, as there is a God above me," he answered, "yet every word of it is true."
She drew away from him. In the half-benumbed condition of her mind she could set but one interpretation upon his stricken condition, his husky, vibrant voice; she saw nothing but subterfuge and quibble in his words.
"True?" she echoed. "You gamed for me?"
He did not answer. He stood rigid, with hands clenched at his sides. The temptation to explain assailed him for a moment; but he allowed it to pass on unheeded and despised, as she must despise it did he attempt to offer it. It were, he realised, but to make himself seem viler and more pitiful. It could not be believed, could carry no conviction; rather must every word of such explanation as he had to offer seem the obvious pretence put forward by a rogue and liar; every word and act that had passed between them since his coming must add confirmation to the thing that Pauncefort told her, since fundamentally that thing was true - the blackest, foulest, untruest truth that was ever uttered.
She waited, then, in vain, waited until his silence bore the only answer.
"O God, pity me!" she wailed. She stumbled, and put a hand to her brow. He flung out a hand to save her, and that act revived her; with fresh panic she shrank from the touch of it as though it had been redhot iron, and in shrinking she stiffened and regained a wonderful composure.
Torn, lacerated, anguished, she stood before these beasts who had fought for her and mangled her very soul in the strife, and she determined in her pride to let them see nothing of her hurt.
She turned very quietly, and with figure erect, though her head drooped a little, she passed down the narrow alley of that court.
"Damaris!" cried Pauncefort as she approached him, his flaming eyes devouring her. But before her glance he quailed and fell back. There was something awful and forbidding there that he dared not brave.
She continued on her way unhindered further. But as she was passing underneath the archway in the hedge she heard her name again.
"Damaris! Damaris!"
It was the cry of one in mortal agony. It was a voice that had grown more dear to her than any human voice, than the sum of all other human voices. She might account him vile and faithless; but his call could still, it seemed, compel her. For she paused and turned her head - turned to him that lovely, stricken face, those deep brown eyes in which so lately he had seen his own reflection, those pale trembling lips that so lately he had kissed. Thus, her head turned, she waited, hoping madly even now against all reasonable hope.
"One thing, at least, believe, O Damaris!" he cried. "One thing I swear - and it is a thing that should efface all else. Until this hour I did not know that you were Damaris Hollinstone. That much I do swear by the God above us, Who is my witness."
If that were so, then indeed did it efface all else, as he had said. If that were so, then all else could matter nothing. She tried to think, to weigh his words. And then, to help to falsify her scales, came a little wicked, scornful laugh from my Lord Pauncefort.
"Of course," scoffed his lordship, "the gentleman must be believed. Has he not deserved to be? Is he not the very soul of honour?"
That gave her the right perspective, she opined; and listlessly she continued on her way, and so out of their sight.
Like a sleep-walker she made her way to the house and ascended the broad steps. Straight and evenly she held upon her course, up the great staircase, to her own chamber. By the narrow white bed she sank down upon her knees. Then pent-up nature had its way at last and, kneeling there, she swooned away. And thus, perhaps, she saved her reason.
Outside, in the rose-garden, my Lord Pauncefort and Captain Gaynor eyed each other in silence for a moment after Damaris had vanished. The Captain listened to her footsteps intently until they had faded in the distance. Then, as if some arresting influence were removed, as if a spell were shattered, he shook himself and his sword flashed lividly from its scabbard.
"Now, you - you lackey!" he snarled. "It is my turn." And on the words he sprang, trampling a bed of roses in his haste to come upon his enemy.
Pauncefort would have avoided this. He was no coward, but to fight a man in the Captain's white-heat of rage were utter suicide. He saw his death in the blazing eyes that looked out of that livid, distorted countenance.
He flung up a hand to arrest the other's attention. "This is neither time nor place," he cried, "and the man that prevails will be indicted for murder."
The Captain laughed.
"Send your friends to wait upon me," his lordship insisted, "and you shall have what satisfaction you desire."
But as well might he, like Canute, have attempted to arrest the tide.
"Draw, damn you," was his answer. "Draw, or I spit you as you stand."
As my lord still hesitated, that long, thin blade flashed up and its point came level with his heart. The sweat broke out cold upon his brow. He drew perforce, and threw himself on guard.
The Captain pressed him wildly, a maniac, panting, sobbing, jeering as he fought. He was terrific, and terror of him went deep into his lordship's soul. He was vengeance incarnate, a bloodhound upon its prey; and in imagination already my lord felt that bright, cruel steel tearing at his throat.
"What place or season could be better?" the Captain mocked him, as he drove his lordship back into a rose bed, across it, and plump into another, that dancing point hovering ever with its deadly menace along the line of his lordship's Adam's apple. "You are fastidious indeed, if my lady's rose-garden will not suit you for a death-bed; a dunghill would better meet your merits."
His lordship crashed backwards through a rose-bush, stumbled, recovered and fought on in desperate defence. He had caught a sound of running feet to hearten him. The Captain heard them too, a moment later.
"You hear them running," he mocked the other. "So run your sands. Your wages are due, my lord, and shall be paid you - thus!" He beat aside the other's impotent blade, and his own point leapt out to end the matter. But as it leapt, his lordship leapt too, back and aside, and then fled in utter panic.
"O coward!" roared the Captain. "Coward that cannot even face his death. Take it, then, from behind." And he sprang to follow. His foot caught and tangled in the root of a brier. He plunged forward, and fell upon his face. As he struggled to rise a hand came to help him, a hand which retained its hold upon his arm after assisting him to his feet.
As through a mist he saw the weather-beaten face of one of the gardeners; another stood on his other side. He strove to throw off the grip that held him. But the second man came to the assistance of the first. Between them they overpowered him and deprived him of his sword, muttering apologies the while for the force they were employing.
My Lord Pauncefort, limp and breathless, leaned against a hedge, and looked on, until one of the gardeners respectfully advised him to be gone. Acting upon that excellent advice, he sheathed his sword and withdrew, mopping his livid brow.
"You may go now," Gaynor called after him, "but do not think to escape. It is but a postponement."
Lord Pauncefort, something recovered by now, turned to his antagonist.
"In a regular manner I will meet you when you will," he panted. "I shall expect you." And upon that he took his departure.

ATTIC TROVE

Some light on SAINTE by Stéphane Mallarmé 

A word for word literal translation into English of this small miracle of a poem would produce gibberish.

One way to appreciate it is first to acquaint oneself with what is known and what is surmised about the poet's intentions when he wrote it – or them, for there are two versions, the following being the earlier one:

Sainte Cécile jouant sur l'aile d'un chérubin
(chanson et image ancienne)
A la fenêtre recélant

Le santal vieux qui se dédore

De la Viole étincelant

Jadis parmi flûte ou mandore,

Est une Sainte recélant

Le livre vieux qui se déplie

Du Magnificat ruisselant

Jadis à véprée et complie,

Saint à vitrage d'ostensoir

Pour clore la harpe par l'ange

Offerte avec son vol du soir

A la délicate phalange

Du doigt, que, sans le vieux santal

Ni le vieux livre, elle balance

Sur le plumage instrumental

Musicienne du silence.

What do we know about version 1?
In December 1865, Mallarmé wrote to a friend to say that he sent him a small musical poem requested by Mme. Brunet. To another he wrote the next day charging him to pass on a letter to (Monsieur?) Brunet and to read to Mme. Brunet "a Sainte Cecilia which I promised her". Mme Brunet's given name was Cécile, and she was godmother to the poet's daughter, Geneviève.

It is worth noting that M. Jean Brunet was a master glass-maker.

Mallarmé seems then to have laid the poem aside until 1883, when he showed his revised version to his fellow poet, Paul Verlaine:

Sainte

À la fenêtre recelant

Le santal vieux qui se dédore

De sa viole étincelant

Jadis avec flûte ou mandore,

Est la Sainte pâle, étalant

Le livre vieux qui se déplie

Du Magnificat ruisselant

Jadis selon vêpre et complie:

À ce vitrage d’ostensoir

Que frôle une harpe par l’Ange

Formée avec son vol du soir

Pour la délicate phalange

Du doigt que, sans le vieux santal

Ni le vieux livre, elle balance

Sur le plumage instrumental,

Musicienne du silence.

What do we know or guess about the picture in the poet's mind?
It appears that the poet intended at once to evoke a dream of time long past (jadis), and to blur it, mixing up the images evoked as dreams do, so that a simple cut-and-dried explanation is not possible. But we can glean first an outline: we are looking at a window (fenêtre . . . ce vitrage) which for the nonce functions as a monstrance (ostensoir) – that which reveals something holy. In the window is a saint who we know (from version 1) is definitely Saint Cecilia. The window also shows an angel, an old (vieux) missal or book of hours, and some old musical instruments of gilded sandalwood (santal). Also, it is evening, and this is undoubtedly a church because once (jadis) evening prayer would have been sung here.

Add the details and this is the picture that suggests itself:

At evening (du soir) in a church where once were sung Vespers (vêpre) – including the Magnificat – followed by Compline (complie), is Saint Cecilia in a stained-glass window. She is pale, her colour drained perhaps by the failing sunlight which has also first flaked the gilt (dédore) from the formerly (jadis) sparkling (étincelant) viol, flute and mandora, all now concealed (recelant) as the light fails to come through them. In one hand the saint displays (étalant) an old book, unfolding (se déplie) at the Magnificat – possibly shown with its musical notation as in this similar image:

The Magnificat once 'streamed' (ruisselant) during evening prayer but there is a sense that the rippling pages of the unfolding volume are also now concealed by darkness, hence the repetition of jadis.
The saint's other hand has a delicate finger (la délicate phalange/ Du doigt) extended in a pose not uncommon in medieval art, pointing – but not intentionally – in the direction of an angel – almost always shown along with Saint Cecilia – who has at least one wing outspread as if in flight (vol) – again a not uncommon pose – and this wing has the shape of a harp (une harpe par l’Ange/ Formée avec son vol du soir). The saint's extended finger barely brushes (frôle) the wing whose ranked feathers might suggest the strings of a harp (plumage instrumental).
And now comes the magical part. One might suppose that a trick of the withdrawing rays of sunlight lights up the harp-like wing and the saint's finger in such a way that – presently deprived of her musical instruments and her hymn (book) – she makes music on this imagined harp. Only, the music must also be imagined, for naturally it will be silent music, yet the music was silenced anyway when services in the church ceased. And this circumstance is perhaps symbolised by the 'concealment' of the viol, flute and mandora, as well as the Magnificat-bearing page. But, after all, the poem itself is now the music. . . .

*****

To have this exquisite poem explained in such a fashion is rather like having Hercule Poirot explain the Mona Lisa. Leave explanations here and simply read the poem aloud, listening to it. (Maurice Ravel set it to music as a song.)
There are many other aspects to, and details about, this poem which need not concern the lay reader. It is only necessary to enjoy it, seeing it as a picture brought to life by the slanting rays of a setting sun first piercing a stained glass window and later causing apparent movement in that window; then smelling its fragrance as of aged sandalwood mingled with ancient dust; but most of all hearing its music – an old, gentle music.

*****

"Sainte" was first drawn to one's attention by Dr Jaysinh Birjepatil, then (1970-71) Reader in (or Professor of) English at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. In acknowledging a debt to him it seems appropriate, too, to acknowledge others – Head of Department Professor V. Y. Kantak, Mr R. N. Mehta, Rev. Fr I. Echaniz S.J. and Sr Mary Rafaella F.M.M. All of them, each in a different way, opened doors and windows in the mind, not only imparting knowledge but making one aware of the possibility of joy: joy in knowledge, certainly, but beyond that the joy of self-expression and self-fulfilment. As one grows old and the end of one's days draws closer, one turns to look back down the long road one has trod, at its turning points and the people who stand there smiling encouragingly. They are too far away to hear, but one may at least wave a hand in salutation and in thanks for kindness shown.

Message
A year that went awry from the beginning and got progressively worse with relentless ferocity had some moments of respite: activity on the Rafael Sabatini front, and private satisfactions at Christmas, namely Midnight Mass, the Christmas Crib, and the new-made ornaments hung in the living-room window.
Midnight Mass was in the lovely chapel of St. Joseph's Boys' High School where, in spite of ragged singing by the choir, and concessions made to an increasing trivialisation of all-important things which is characteristic of modern life (PowerPoint presentation to keep hoi polloi amused during the Vigil before Mass, decorations more suited to a home than to a chapel), it was possible to participate fully in the celebration of a holy Mass, to hear exhortations that went home, and - most blissful of all - to join in singing loved Christmas carols after twenty years!
The current year is unlikely to be different from the last in one key respect, but it will be possible at least to refresh the spirit with the memory of a Crib which turned out well in spite of all the imperfections of construction such as would never have passed muster in yesteryears. One grows old, clumsy, tired, and must accept the consequent deficiencies in one's work. But the mind urges endeavour where the body resists, and here is the result - first a panorama, then details, and finally another panorama:
(22 of the first 23 photographs are by Berenice da Gama-Rose)









"He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit" ~ (the Apostles' Creed)






"there was no room for them at
the inn" ~ (Lk. 2:7)



"The keeper of the gate . . . said, respectfully, "Rabbi, . . . if you care to go with me, I will show you that there is not a lodging-place left in the house; neither in the chambers, nor in the lewens, nor in the court - not even on the roof."

























"Then he took the leading-strap from Joseph,
and said to Mary, "Peace to you, O daughter of David!"
Then to the others, "Peace to you all!" Then to Joseph, "Rabbi, follow me."
"The cave to which we are going," he said to her, "must have been a resort of your ancestor David." ~ from Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace




"She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger" ~ (Lk. 2:7)



"About midnight some one on the roof cried out, "What is that light in the sky? Awake, brethren, awake and see!" ~ Ben-Hur



"there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God" ~ (Lk. 2:13)

"And they came with haste, and they found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger." ~ (Lk. 2:16)


"and falling to their knees they did him homage" ~ (Matt. 2:11)
"ever 'gainst the season comes/ Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated/ This bird of dawning singeth all night long"
~ Hamlet (I:1)


"So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt" ~ (Matt. 2:14)





(see the Christmas legend of the spider below)












Refreshing, too, will be the memory of celebrating the Creator in the spirit of the jongleur of Notre-Dame, by the sub-creation of ornaments to hang up, six of them new this Christmas:
(photograph by Sonali Bhatia)












His Light











His bounty (new)







Music (new)
















Mirth (new)




And the Logos who gives the mind word and thought entwined to bring forth artefacts that are symbolic in a kind of poetry:






Christ our Light (new)














Mary, the new Ark who bore Christ
(new)




the Paradise Tree (new), reminder of Paradise lost and Paradise to be regained, the unalterable promise of which was made at the Nativity.








This is the story of the spider at Christmas, which a mother used to tell her small daughter while they decorated the Christmas Tree.
There was an old lady who lived all alone but for a cat and a dog. On Christmas Eve she would lock them out until she had cleaned the parlour from rafters to floor, and set up the Christmas Tree with the Crib arranged below it.

When all was ready, she let in her pets and they went about inspecting everything, wagging a tail or purring as was appropriate to each. Then all three went off to early supper and bed, for the next morning it would be Christmas Day.

Once it happened that a single little spider escaped the old lady's broom and hid in the rafters. From there she could see very little, but she knew that something very fine had been arranged below for cat, dog and old lady all seemed so pleased. So after they had all left she climbed down and began to inspect the Tree from top to bottom, for she was a tiny thing and could not take it all in at a glance.
When she reached the manger below she looked up and saw a dreadful thing. The beautiful Christmas Tree hung with shiny ornaments was covered now in cobwebs and looked so very shabby. The little spider began to cry.
But it was midnight now and the Baby in the manger wasn't going to let the spider be unhappy on his Birthday. He smiled, and as he smiled a bright light spread out and up - up - up to the top of the Tree. And lo, the filaments of spider webbing had turned to finest threads of silver and gold! The Christmas Tree was far more beautiful now than it had ever been before.












And that is why we wreathe our Christmas trees with tinsel threads.....

BOOKWORM

THE GATES OF DOOM
by Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 9
THE ALIBI
Twice before had Maclean attempted to repair to the conspirators, but each time prudence had compelled him to abandon the attempt. On the first occasion he was crossing the outer room when he heard the door open softly behind him, and, looking over his shoulder, found himself observed by the spy.
He betrayed no uneasiness, but affecting to continue on his way, reached the overmantel and took thence a couple of candle branches, with which he returned.
The face of the Bow Street messenger betrayed the extent to which he was intrigued. He had been on the watch, and observing Maclean's cautious approach he had inferred from it that at last he was to be put upon the trail of his quarry. Instead he found the landlord seeking a pair of candle branches in an empty room. The spy felt naturally aggrieved.
"D'ye lack aught, sir?" Maclean had asked him, between landlordly solicitude and challenge.
"I do," replied the spy, practically at bay. "I am seeking some friends o' mine who are expecting me here. One is Sir Thomas Leigh; belike you'll be acquainted with him?"
Maclean's expression was that of one who innocently searches in his memory. He shook his head. "Not by name," said he slowly. "Have ye looked in the room yonder?" And he indicated the room across the passage to which he had earlier directed the spy.
"I have. And he's not there."
"Perhaps he'll be below stairs, then."
"Neither is he below stairs." The messenger's tone was grim; his eyes intently watched the landlord's baffling face.
"Then, sir, I'm afraid he'll not be here."
"Ah!" said the spy. "Very odd! Ve-ry odd!"
But the face of the dour Scot remained politely blank. Clearly, the spy considered, there was naught to be made of this fellow, and to push insistence further just then might be to give an alarm that must result in the flight of his game.
"I'll wait," he added shortly, and, turning, made his way back to the room which he had lately quitted. But he did not enter it. Maclean had bowed and passed on down the stairs. The spy stood watching him with a certain hope. This, however, was frustrated. He was completely baffled by the circumstance that never once did Maclean so much as turn his head. Such indifference argued a quiet conscience. Was it possible, he wondered, that Maclean might be in ignorance of the meeting that was taking placed under his roof? The fellow's obvious unconcern scarcely admitted of any other conclusion.
He wandered down the passage, listening outside doors as he went, but gaining no useful information until he came to the end, where he found a door ajar. He gently pushed it, and made the discovery that it opened upon a narrow staircase. He peered down and ascertained that this led to the kitchen and to the garden at the back of the inn. He realised to his dismay that this back staircase formed an emergency exit of whose existence he had been in ignorance. Was it possible that while he had been wasting his time in that room on the right, the landlord, smoking his business, had got the plotters away?
He turned and came thoughtfully back. And now he perceived the host coming upstairs again. Straight towards him came Maclean.
"Is your friend a tall, elderly gentleman with a red face?" he asked.
"Ay," said the spy. "He answers that description."
"Then he is in the taproom below there."
The spy thanked him, and descended, leaving the host upon the landing. But it is not to be supposed that the fellow was imposed upon. He simply availed himself of this petard of Maclean's to hoist Maclean himself. He turned into the taproom. But the next instant he had thrust out his head to see what course Maclean was taking, and he was just in time to see the landlord again vanish into that room on the left where earlier he had surprised him.
The messenger flung out of the house at once to his men who sat sipping their ale at one of the trestle tables. He was a shrewd, calculating fellow, and he made not the slightest doubt about what must follow. He took his six bullies round to the pleasant garden at the back, and bestowed them and himself very carefully behind a hedge of laurel, the gathering dusk assisting his manoeuvre.
Meanwhile Maclean had, at last, penetrated to the inner chamber where the conspirators were gathered, and had announced to them that beyond all doubt the Bow Street messenger was seeking themselves, having gone the length of asking for Sir Thomas Leigh by name.
"There's a pack of ruffianly fellows outside, and it's not a doubt but they will be his followers. Ye must take t'other way - by the back; and now is your opportunity, whilst the spy is gone on a fool's errand for me."
They were on their feet at once, ready and anxious to be gone.
"Your horses are ready for you in the stables, and my lad awaits you there. Come, sirs."
They moved at once, but Captain Gaynor detained them yet a moment.
"We part here," he said. "I will wait until you are safely away. If I succeed afterwards in making my own escape, I shall be found at 'White's' at noon tomorrow."
"Will you not go first, Captain?" suggested Mr Partridge.
"No, no," he answered. "I have something yet to do ere I can run the risk of capture. Away with you, then, and good luck go with you."
When they had departed, Captain Gaynor took a taper from the overmantel, lighted it and reduced to ashes certain papers which he carried between the leathers of his sword-belt. He sighed over the act, for it marked the end of the business upon which he was come. Since that was discovered there was an end for the present to the need of such papers, and since his own arrest perhaps impended, their destruction was imperative.
Leaving a little heap of ashes in the grate, he quitted the chamber in his turn, went swiftly across the outer room, and, having assured himself with due precaution that the coast was clear, he stepped out into the corridor, and made his way to the door at the head of the back staircase.
He reached it without encountering anyone, and having pushed it open he was on the point of descending when a sudden uproar below brought him sharply to a halt. Above the din of voices rang the call: "In the King's name! Surrender! In the King's name!" Lastly came a cry of: "Hold there, or I fire!"
Gaynor rapped out an oath. His friends, it was plain, had walked into a trap. The house, he concluded, was surrounded, or, at least, both back and front were being watched. He was thankful for the others' sake as much as for his own that he had not accompanied them. He caught the sound of a scuffle; a pistol-shot cracked suddenly and was followed by a cry: Then the din gradually receded.
But there was now commotion within doors, for the inmates of the house had been disturbed by these sounds of battle. He heard steps and voices in the corridor behind him, and he was grateful to the gloom that gave him cover. He must not be found there; that was of the first importance now, and it would be more than probable that there were other tipstaves in the approaching company
There was a door on the captain's right. Unhesitatingly he turned the handle. It yielded. He slipped in, closed the door softly and turned the key, which he was thankful to find on the inside. Then he faced about to make the discovery that he was in a bedroom. It was untenanted at the moment but there was no lack of evidence that it possessed a tenant.
A cloak was thrown over the back of a chair, and under it stood a pair of feminine shoes with high French heels. On the bed lay a petticoat and a wrap. A valise gaped on the floor, its contents bulging, and among these the Captain noted a prodigious display of laces and ribbons.
Through the window, facing eastwards towards London, he had a glimpse of trees and fields and hedgerows, backed by the fine grey pile of Beaufort House, all very soft and mellow in the evening light.
And then, from a curtained alcove hitherto unperceived by him, came a clear, young voice to freeze him where he stood by its unexpectedness.
"Is that you at last, Henry?"
His recovery was instantaneous. Reflecting that Henry was indeed his name, he had no hesitation in answering the question with the shortest affirmative in the language.
"Yes."
"Where have you tarried so long?" came the voice again, and it contained a note of petulance. "You knew that I stayed for you. And I am hungry, and -"
Quite suddenly she appeared between the parted curtains, her speech cropped short at sight of him. It had been his dread lest she should be in an incomplete condition of toilet, in which case he thought that outraged modesty combined with alarm would most surely set her screaming. To his relief, however, she appeared before him fully dressed, save for a slight and very charming disorder of her hair and the absence of tucker from her alabaster neck.
She was a handsome, regal woman, and she made a very engaging picture standing there between the parted curtains of red velvet. But it was a picture which, however delightful in itself, delighted Captain Gaynor not at all. Before she could give expression to the alarm that stared in her eyes and blenching face, the Captain bowed low and most reassuringly.
"Most profoundly do I crave your indulgence for my error, ma'am," said he.
His voice was so serene and courteous, his air and manner so much that of the fine gentleman that her fears sank down a little; but not quite.
"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice vibrating. "What do you here?"
"I am just a blunderer who has strayed into the wrong room," he explained.
"You have locked the door," she accused him, and her alarm appeared to rise once more.
"'Twas that I desired to be alone," he answered.
"You" - her voice was growing shrill - "you answered to the name of Henry," she remembered.
"My name is Henry, ma'am," he assured her.
There fell a pause. She stood with knitted brows and quickened bosom, waiting. At last - "Why do you stay, then?" she challenged him, and as she spoke she came forward towards where the bell-rope hung.
"I but await your leave to go," he answered her.
"My leave?" said she, pausing in her amazement. "Depart at once, sir."
"At once, ma'am," said he submissively. But on the words, greatly to her alarm, he advanced resolutely into the room. "By your leave," said he quite coolly, "I should prefer to go by the window."
"By the window?" she echoed, and began to wonder was he mad. Along the passage outside the door sped hurrying feet; a murmur of voices reached them through the panels.
"You hear, madam," he said, waving a hand in that direction. "I hope I am not so utterly lost to consideration for the fair name of a lady as to permit myself to he seen issuing from her chamber. You will agree, I am sure, that the window is most opportune."
She eyed him narrowly, barring now his way. And he admired her spirit as much as the ripe beauty of her.
"Do you know who I am, sir?" she asked. "I am Lady Tresh. My husband is Sir Henry Tresh, one of the Middlesex justices."
"Sir Henry is a man to be envied, ma'am," said he, no whit abashed. Indeed, the situation was becoming humorous. He made her a leg, his hat upon his heart. "I should have preferred, ma'am, that we had met under circumstances more auspicious to myself. But even so, I am honoured - profoundly honoured." And he bowed again. He was in no haste to depart either by door or window. Indeed, the longer he delayed, the better would it suit him. Already, he observed, the sounds in the corridor were receding.
"Unlock that door, sir," she commanded, standing before him like a queen of tragedy, with one arm out-flung to emphasise her stem command.
"It were so unwise," he deprecated. "And the window is so very opportune. It cannot be more than a dozen feet above the ground."
Her queenly bosom heaved in agitation. "Will you tell me who you are?" she demanded once more.
He shrugged, his eyes smiling ruefully. He was on the point of answering truthfully, accounting that perhaps the best course might be to cast himself upon her mercy, when suddenly he saw a fresh alarm leap into her eyes and one hand fly to her bosom.
Down the corridor came a heavy, lumbering step - a step to which she was listening and which was known to her. It paused at the door, and the handle turned with a rattle. Then a double knock rapped on the panel and a gruff voice called: "Kate!"
"My husband!" She no more than breathed the words.
The Captain spread his hands, and his face showed concern for her. "You see," he whispered back, "that the window becomes more opportune than ever."
She wrung her hands. Her eyes were upon him in a look that was between distress and anger.
"I am undone!" she moaned.
"Nay, nay!" He tiptoed past her to the window, and flung it open.
Raps more numerous, louder and more insistent came again upon the panel. Again the handle of the door was rattled. "Kate!" that gruff voice was yelling now.
"It is you, Henry?" she called back. The intruder was already astride of the sill.
"Whom else were you expecting?" growled the voice. "Damme! Why must women for ever be locking themselves in?"
She crossed the room leisurely, and fumbled an instant at the key. Captain Gaynor had vanished.
He dropped from the window - a good fourteen feet to the ground - and landed somewhat shaken. But he did not stay to consider it. He found himself in the stable-yard, and he sped across it like a hare, to find cover in the stable itself. He gained it before Sir Henry had crossed the threshold of the room above. He found there young Maclean in a state of considerable perturbation.
The young Scot muttered a short thanksgiving at sight of the Captain.
"Your horse is ready," was his greeting. "Come, sir."
From him now Captain Gaynor learnt that his five friends had all been taken. They were gone in hackney carriages to London with the tipstaves. Sir Thomas Leigh had drawn his sword, and had been shot through the arm in consequence. Mr Dyke, too, had attempted to resist the messengers, and had received a broken crown. Maclean the elder, his son assured the fugitive, need occasion the Captain no concern; he would know how to answer any awkward questions he might he asked.
Having heard all that the young man could tell him, the Captain took his decision. He would leave his horse where it was until he called for it again. In its place he desired to be supplied with a post-horse.
The bitterness which had assailed Captain Gaynor when first he had learnt of the shrewd blow with which the Government had demolished for the present any Jacobite development was now dispelled. It would return, no doubt, anon, and be the sharper perhaps for this respite. But for the moment he rode in a spirit of elation born of the adventure upon which he was now set.
He reached Charing Cross some time after nightfall, and having surrendered his horse at the post-house, he disappeared to execute the project in his mind.
A half-hour later he was leaning in the shadow of a tree near Whitehall steps, observing with interest a watchman who, with lanthorn and staff, was pacing the river-front not far from his hutch. Captain Gaynor produced from his breast-pocket a flask containing close upon half-a-pint of brandy, which he had procured at parting from young Maclean. He drank rather less than half, poured the remainder into his waistcoat, and flung the flask into the river. Then he reeled forth until he was level with the watchman's box. Into this he hurtled, sat down and - apparently fell fast asleep. At least he was discovered to be breathing stertorously a minute later.
The watchman swore at him, prodded him with his staff, shook him and bellowed in his ear, to all of which the Captain remained as insensible as a stone image.
From these signs and from the overpowering fumes of brandy which the fellow exhaled, the watchman came to the conclusion that he was very drunk. Now there was an Act promulgated under the late queen which accounted all drunkards to be disturbers of the peace, and enjoined upon watchmen their apprehension and consignment to gaol. If you were not drunk beyond all speech, you might for a shilling or two obtain instead that the watchman should abandon his post to escort you to your residence. But in such a case as the Captain's there was but one course to pursue, and that course this member of the law pursued.
He very carefully picked the Captain's pockets as a preliminary, a proceeding which yielded him a profit so disproportionate with the Captain's dress and appearance - the Captain having previously bestowed his valuables beyond the reach of prying fingers - that the old rascal was forced to conclude that those pockets had been picked already. Then he whirled his rattle and brought up the constable and a posse of other watchmen, besides a small crowd of watermen from the riverside and several loiterers. Into the hands of his brethren he delivered the inanimate body of the Captain, informing the constable in a whisper of the state of the gentleman's pockets, so as to save the constable the trouble of going through them on his own account.
Thus Captain Gaynor was carried off to the Gatehouse at Westminster, which was the nearest prison. There he was flung into a dank, noisome chamber, tenanted already by some dozen of the very foulest scourings of the streets. These would have gone over the Captain's person for the sake of any pickings that the constable and watchman might have left, but that the Captain, growing partly sobered as the first filthy fingers touched him, roused himself sufficiently to crash his fist into the face of their owner. The fellow sank down with a howl that turned into an agonising cough. His few remaining teeth had been loosened by the blow.
Thereafter the Captain was left in peace. For a man who could smite such blows when too drunk to stand must be terrible indeed when sober, and they might so have to reckon with him did they abuse his present condition.
He reclined, then, against the wall with his legs stretched straight before him; and thus he spent one of the most horrible nights of his existence. But to comfort him he had the knowledge that all had fallen out precisely as he had planned, and that there remained but little doubt that its sequel in the morning would fully compensate him for his present discomforts.

Chapter 10
TWO LETTERS

Mr Second Secretary Templeton sat at breakfast in the dining-room of his stately mansion in Old Palace Yard. It was a spacious, sunny chamber, panelled in white with an abundance of gilding, and its long French windows stood open to the terrace, over whose grey stone balustrade surged a riot of roses and geraniums.
The statesman was at his ease in a bed-gown of blue brocade, his cropped head swathed in a silk kerchief, whose rich colouring exaggerated the sallowness of his long, aristocratic face. Facing him across the round table sat Mrs Templeton, short, long-waisted and inclining to stoutness. Like her husband, she was dark-complexioned, and age had rendered masterful and rather too aquiline a face that in youth had been accounted beautiful. Between them sat the Second Secretary's cousin, Sir Richard Tollemache Templeton, returned but yesterday from his foreign travels.
Although the baronet was quite ten years the statesman's junior - Sir Richard cannot have been more than thirty at the time - Mr Templeton, whose manner was patronising with all the world, treated him with the deference due to the head of a family into which he accounted it his greatest honour to have been born. Family was a religion with Mr Templeton, and before the head of his own he unbent to a most extraordinary degree; upon occasion he went even the length of courting his approval and sympathy. He was courting them this morning. He made philosophy for the purpose.
"In this world, my dear Tollemache," he was saying - he considered "Richard" a form of address much too familiar to be used towards one who occupied his cousin's exalted position - "in this world the truly great but too seldom receive the recognition that is their due. The vulgar - ah - undiscerning crowd will ever believe what it is told. It has no judgment, no - ah - percipience of its own. It considers great those who proclaim themselves great, without reflecting that to true greatness such - ah - such a proclamation must be in the last degree repugnant - in the last degree repugnant."
"It is a repugnance undiscernible in your own case, Edward," said his lady, with a gleam almost of malice in her pale eyes.
"My dear - my love!" His mellow, sonorous voice quivered with emphatic protest at such an implication. "Here in the - ah - sacrosanct intimacy of my own domestic hearth, it may be permitted me to - ah - denude myself."
"It will nevertheless be more becoming in you to retain your gown," she snapped, in reproof of his too florid rhetoric, and Sir Richard could not repress a smile.
"I do not speak of the body, madam, but of the soul - the mind," her husband boomed. "Surely, I say, at his own table, to his own wife and to the head of his own family, in the presence of his Lares and Penates, a man may speak with complete freedom, and without the - ah - encumbrance of excessive modesty. Modesty is a garment that every decent man must wear in public. But the public, knowing naught of decency, account him truly great who goes without it."
Thus he swung back to the subject from which his wife's interruption had all but diverted him. "Now here is my Lord Carteret, and here, Tollemache, am I. To Lord Carteret the rich emoluments, the fawning sycophancy, the smile of majesty, the great honours of his office as Secretary of State: to me - in comparative obscurity - the labour that preserves him a fame which he himself does naught to merit - naught to merit." And angrily he fell to stirring his chocolate.
"But your own turn will come, Ned," said the amiable Sir Richard. Mr Templeton paused in the stirring that he might level a denunciatory spoon at his cousin. "And who will warrant me that?" quoth he. He laughed almost angrily. "You do not apprehend, I see, with what buttresses my lord props up his greatness. Let me explain, Tollemache, let me explain.
"In affairs of State my Lord Carteret stands in the same relation to me as the - ah - figure at the prow of a ship stands to the - ah -navigator. No, no!" he reproved himself. "My metaphor is too broad. Were it so, indeed, all would be well - all would be well. But I have drawn you a false image."
"You would be more intelligible," said his wife, "if you dispensed with images. What you mean is that it is you who steer the ship of State, whilst my Lord Carteret takes the credit."
He nodded thoughtfully. He was impervious to the veiled sneer in her words.
"You put it - ah - crudely, but truthfully - truthfully. But it should be made clear to Tollemache that his lordship takes the credit when there is credit to take. One of these fine days - mark me! - one of these fine days, as a result of his unceasing interferences with the - ah - navigator, the ship of State will run aground. Do you think his lordship will take the blame of that as he takes the credit of all smooth sailing? Do you think so?"
His eye roamed from Tollemache to his wife, and told them plainly the opinion he should hold of their wit if they did think so.
"No!" he boomed, having reached his climax.
"You are spilling your chocolate," said his wife.
"No!" he repeated, ignoring the frivolous interruption. "On that day, at last, my lord will point out that he has a helmsman to steer for him; he will protest that the shoal upon which we founder was one of whose presence his helmsman should have been aware. Will any blame him? Will majesty cease to smile upon him or sycophants to fawn? No! The obloquy will fall where never fell the credit – where never fell the credit. In short, upon myself" He sat back in his chair, and stroked his massive chin. "That, Tollemache, is the way reputations are made and reputations blasted."
He was almost in a towering passion.
"But," said Sir Richard soothingly, "so long as you are at the helm, you can guard against any such disaster."
"Ah! There's the rub, Tollemache - there's the rub. I could, were I left - ah - untrammelled; were I left to follow my own judgment; did his lordship not perpetually interfere with me, and suggest courses that are undesirable and sometimes perilous. Now take this Jacobite business. You are a man of the world, Tollemache - head of a great family, a soldier and a scholar." (Sir Richard dropped his eyes before Mrs Templeton's stony stare.) "I ask you, Tollemache, were you Secretary of State, would you, could you commit a blunder so - ah - ineffable?"
"I think," said Sir Richard, not without some hesitation, "that I can perceive the drift of Lord Carteret's policy."
Mr Templeton frowned; then his features relaxed into a smile. "Drift!" he cried, and again, "drift! My dear Tollemache, I thank you for teaching me that word. It is most excellent, most apposite. It precisely describes his lordship's policy. It suggests that - ah - driving before the gale of circumstance that is so characteristic of his statesmanship. 'Drift' expresses it completely - completely."
"Fiddlesticks!" said his wife. "Y'are a clever man, no doubt, Edward, but you fall into the grave error of considering all other men fools."
The statesman spread his hands. He apologised for her to his cousin.
"Woman's logic, Tollemache!" quoth he, and cast an upward glance at the ceiling. Then, to his wife: "My dear," he said, "do you not perceive that the two propositions may not be reconciled. If I am a clever man such an error is not possible to me."
"Then perhaps you are not a clever man," said she.
"That, my dear, represents a retraction inadmissible in intelligent argument. You - ah - you merely interrupt, my love." He was unusually bold.
"But is it not possible," suggested Sir Richard, his frank young eyes upon his cousin, "that in stifling these Jacobite smoulderings, in stamping them out before they can show a flame, his lordship is discharging an easier task than that of quenching a later possible conflagration?"
"You think so?" Mr Templeton was as sardonic as he dare be with so august a person as the head of his family.
"I merely ask," said the baronet. "I am not a statesman."
"A loss to England, my dear Tollemache - a loss to England. But you ask, and you shall be answered." He cleared his throat that he might deliver himself without physical hindrance. "The contention you make is his lordship's own. It is - ah - specious, but delusive. If - if what you suggest were possible, the course would be an excellent one; but it is not possible. The thing has no legal sanction - it is almost illegal, for it is premature. And this is shown by the consequences. We arrest these men, but do we put them upon their trial? Aha! We dare not. We have not the means. The - ah - accusation emanates generally from a single informer. We keep our captives in prison for a week or so, and then his lordship has them severally brought before him, reads them a homily upon the heinousness of disloyalty, the folly of Jacobitism, dwells upon the narrowness of their escape, which he attributes to his Majesty's clemency instead of to his own lack of elements for preparing an impeachment. Is that a dignified course for a government to pursue? I ask you, Tollemache."
"Perhaps not," ventured Tollemache. "But it serves its purpose. It instils fear into these plotters, and turns them from their plotting. Thus, as I perceive it, the peace of the realm is preserved."
Mr Templeton sipped his chocolate, swallowing with it some of his rising indignation and chagrin at the obtuseness of the head of the family.
"You are not a statesman, my dear Tollemache, and there are, therefore, excuses for your short-sightedness which cannot possibly be urged for my Lord Carteret," he said presently. "So long as fortune favours these - ah - operations; so long as - to use your own most excellent image - we drift before a favourable breeze of chance, all goes well. But one of these fine days, my lord will put his hand upon an innocent man, and there will then be a blazing scandal, indemnities will be claimed, heaven alone knows what may follow; but I know that, whatever it is, 'twill be upon my own head. Now, take this case of your friend Captain Gaynor -"
"That, of course, was a most foolish misapprehension," Tollemache admitted.
"You see - you see!" cried the Second Secretary, rubbing his long hands. "Yet had it not been for me - had I not bethought me of your own introduction, of your knowledge of this man's life; had I not seen the - ah - preposterousness of such a charge; had I not been in possession of his unimpeachable credentials and had I not exercised the prudence of seeking their confirmation at two of the embassies (ab uno disce omnes) Captain Gaynor had been under arrest by now as a Jacobite agent."
"Preposterous!" said Sir Richard. "The man is a soldier of fortune, first and last. I have it on his own word that he had thought of taking service with the Pretender, but that the service could not yield him enough to live upon, whilst as for future guerdon he had no faith in the ultimate success of the Pretender's cause."
"And yet," cried Templeton, "in spite of all that I could say, his lordship persists in his assurance that the information he has received is not to be doubted, and that Captain Gaynor and the agent Captain Jenkyn are one and the same man. It is only as a consequence of my insistence and as a result of the information obtained from the Austrian and Turkish embassies that his lordship consents that the warrant shall be made out for Captain Jenkyn only, confident that he would be taken last night at 'The Worlds End' with the other plotters, and that when taken he would be discovered to be Captain Gaynor."
A footman entered and came to proffer Mr Templeton a letter bearing an official seal. He took it abstractedly.
"An extraordinary error," said Sir Richard, smiling. "I would we knew the source of it. I vow that Harry Gaynor will be vastly diverted when I tell him - yes, and grateful to you, Ned, for a judgment and perspicacity which have saved him this annoyance."
"Oh, but for obstinacy, commend me to his lordship - commend me to him!" cried Mr Templeton. "When he learns that no Captain Gaynor - no Captain Jenkyn in any form - was taken with the plotters - if, indeed, they are plotters, which is yet to prove, does he admit, think you, that there has been an error? Not he. 'The Captain must have escaped,' he says. 'These rogues have done their work badly.' There is no arguing with such a man."
He had broken the seal of the letter whilst speaking. He scanned now its contents, and as he did so his face was seen to empurple. He struck the table with his clenched hand.
"Now sink me into - ahem! There is no answer, Jones. Say that I will answer it myself, in person, later." The servant vanished.
"What is it, Edward?" asked Mrs Templeton, who had observed the alteration in her husband's countenance.
"What is it?" he echoed. "It is - But listen for yourselves? Egad! If I had required a proof of what I was saying this could not have come more opportunely to my hands. Listen." And he began to read:

DEAR MR TEMPLETON, - Acting upon the opinions which you know me to entertain, I despatched last night a messenger to Sir John Kynaston's place in Surrey to ascertain whether Captain Gaynor continued there. This messenger has just brought me the information that Captain Gaynor left Chertsey in the afternoon of yesterday and has not yet returned. I shall be obliged if you will take such measures as may be necessary to ascertain not only Captain Gaynor's present whereabouts, but also the particular business which brought him yesterday from Chertsey. It is greatly my fear that as a result of my having lent an ear to your assurance that this person is not the Jacobite agent I am informed, he may slip through our hands and escape the country. I shall be surprised, indeed, if he is not on his way to the coast or even at sea by this time. Believe me to be your obedient servant,

CARTERET

He flung the missive down with an oath. "Blister me!" he bellowed, and he was by no means a man addicted to such expletives. "He blames me already, you see. I have enabled a Jacobite agent to win clear, and this is coldly stated with no more proof that Captain Gaynor is a Jacobite spy than that I am. The man may not leave Chertsey but it is a proof to his lordship that he's a Jacobite and on his way to the coast if not at sea already. Here, my dear Tollemache, you may observe for yourself the mind of one of the world's great men - ah - dissected, as it were, for your inspection. What do you think of it?"
Sir Richard was frowning. "I am certainly of opinion that my lord Carteret is a man of very rash and hasty conclusions."
"How long, I ask you, Tollemache, how long do you suppose that such men could keep their positions were it not for such as I who do their work like moles underground where none perceives them? Pah!" He flung himself back in profoundest disgust.
"Is it impossible that his lordship should be right for once?" quoth Mrs Templeton.
The question was as a cold douche to her husband. He cringed under it.
"Right?" he gurgled. He tossed his arms to heaven. "Is he ever right?"
"He is certainly wrong in this case, I'll stake my life on't," said Sir Richard, carrying conviction to Mrs Templeton and extinguishing her nascent doubts.
"Ay, and in every other case," pronounced the fuming Second Secretary. "You may stake your life on that too - with confidence. I told him yesterday that if he was entirely - ah - positive, he might issue the warrant himself and take the consequences. Did he? Bah! He answered me that that was my function. My function - to run all risks and stand between ridicule and this man who takes all the glory that is shed."
Sir Richard rose from the table. "The situation may be awkward for my friend Gaynor," he said.
"You have to find him," Mrs Templeton reminded them.
The door opened, and again the footman appeared. Again he was the bearer of a letter, and Mr Templeton frowned prodigiously upon perceiving it.
"What now?" quoth he.
"A messenger, sir, from the Gatehouse, Westminster. He stays for a reply."
"From the Gatehouse? What a plague have I to do with the Gatehouse? Am I at the beck of every magistrate's clerk?" He snatched up the letter peevishly, and cut the thread that bound it. It bore no seal.
He spread the sheet, read, frowned, then dropped it from hands that were suddenly limp. He bore those hands to his sides. He seemed to breathe stertorously for a moment, then he exploded; and never in the experience of living man had the solemn, decorous Second Secretary been heard to laugh as he laughed then. Peal upon peal of it reverberated to the ceiling. Gradually, at last, it weakened to a splutter. Mrs Templeton, Sir Richard and the very footman regarded him with eyes of increasing alarm. At last the power of speech was restored to him.
"He – he's found!" he cackled weakly "Oh - oh! He's found! He's not at sea - not even on his way to the coast. He's – he's - Oh, sink me! Where do you think he is? Where do you think he has been all night?"
"Where?" quoth Sir Richard, staring; but having no doubt concerning the person to whom Mr Templeton was referring.
"Listen!" The statesman took up the letter. "It is from the magistrate, Sir Henry Tresh." And once more he read to them:

HONOURED SIR, - There is brought before me this morning a gentleman who has spent the night in the Gatehouse, having been found early last evening by the watch dead-drunk in the neighbourhood of Whitehall Steps. He gives the name of Captain Harry Gaynor, claims the honour of your acquaintance, and presumes to say that you will speak for him. I venture to send you a note which he himself has penned to you, to inform you of his circumstances, and I shall be honoured by a word to guide me in dealing with him.

He paused to wipe his eyes, still faintly tittering at the thought of Lord Carteret's discomfiture. Sir Richard, too, was smiling, as was even Mrs Templeton.
"But listen further to what the rascal writes, himself. The rare impudence of this rogue to desire a Secretary of State to go bail for him! Listen:

DEAR MR TEMPLETON, - Such muddled memories as I retain of what befell me yester evening at 'The Cock' in Fleet Street are at your disposal when I have the honour of meeting you, for I judge that you may require to know more of how I am come to such a pass as this. What concerns me chiefly at present is the circumstance that whilst I was in an unconscious condition some rogues cleaned out my pockets of such monies as I had, my watch and seals, the silver lace on my coat, and everything else of value. But for this I should make shift not to disturb you upon so trifling a matter. I shall be vastly your debtor if you will send a line to Sir Henry Tresh, as warranty that I shall pay the fine imposed so soon as my liberty is restored me. Your most obedient –

"And that," cried the jubilant Second Secretary, "is the Jacobite plotter, the agent who yester evening was conspiring in a tavern, the desperate Captain Jenkyn!" His laughter swelled again, and it was joined now by his cousin's.
"That should answer my Lord Carteret, egad!" cried Richard.
"It should. It shall - ecod! it shall. I'll send him these letters forthwith, and then straight to the Gatehouse to release this rogue of a plotter."
He pushed back his chair, and rose. He turned to the waiting servant.
"Say to the messenger that I shall follow him in person to wait upon Sir Henry so soon as I am dressed."
"By your leave, I'll go with you, Ned," said Sir Richard.
"So you shall." He strode briskly to the door in the wake of the departing lackey. "Oh, 'slife!" he cried over his shoulder. He was most flippantly profane that morning. ''I'ld give a deal to see his lordship's countenance when he receives this testimony of an alibi - and such an alibi!"
He went out laughing, overjoyed at the discomfiture in store for his superior, and loving Harry Gaynor as a son for having provided him with so very apt and crushing an answer to that haughtily couched imputation.

Chapter 11
PAUNCEFORT'S MOVE
Captain Gaynor, duly enlarged from durance by the good offices of Mr Templeton, and looking somewhat jaded and hollow-eyed as a result of his unpleasant night in the Gatehouse - an appearance which lent colour to the debauch of which he claimed to be victim - was an object of mirth and the butt of a deal of spurious wit on the part of the very jubilant Second Secretary.
When this had somewhat spent itself, the Captain explained the object of his visit to town.
"I was on my way to wait upon you, sir, when this befell me," he announced unblushingly. "I am hoping that by now you may have found some commission for me."
The statesman's face lengthened. In Lord Carteret's present mood it would be worse than futile to approach him on such a subject. But he refrained from saying so. He contented himself with deploring that so far naught of a quality worthy of the Captain's high attainments had offered itself; but he protested that it was a matter he must not be thought to be neglecting, and soon he hoped to have the good fortune of offering Captain Gaynor something that he would consider acceptable. The Captain expressed his profound indebtedness.
"Meanwhile," said he, "I am for Scotland. I have friends there whom I desire to visit, whom I have not seen for years."
His destination, as a matter of fact, was Rome and his master's Court, to report his failure. But to announce that he was returning abroad at such a moment must call for explanation, might even savour of flight, and were therefore imprudent in the extreme.
"You will keep me advised of your whereabouts?" said Mr Templeton.
"I shall be roaming," was the answer. "So perhaps 'twill be best, should you have letters for me, that you address to me at Childe's - my bankers here, with whom I shall be in communication. I shall report myself to you immediately on my return to town."
On that, with the compliments which the occasion called for, they parted.
Mr Templeton hired a chair, and went to wait upon Lord Carteret, whilst Gaynor and his friend Sir Richard sauntered off together.
Upon the pretence of repairing the loss he had suffered by the picking of his pockets yesternight, Captain Gaynor paid a visit to Childe's, upon whom he had a letter of credit. He drew there a sum sufficient for the journey that lay before him. Next, towards noon, they looked in at "White's"; and for an hour or so they lounged there in amiable talk of the pleasant season they had spent in Italy in each other's company, and of other matters.
At the end of that hour they parted, the Captain to return to Chertsey and Sir Richard announcing that upon the morrow he was for his seat in Devonshire, where he hoped that Harry would visit him ere he left England for the post in the colonies that was to be obtained him.
Captain Gaynor detested the deception he was practising upon his friend, detested having used him in his need. He would have liked at parting to tell him the truth of matters, but he dared not for his very life's sake.
He walked from "White's" to the post-house at Charing Cross and thence rode post to "The World's End" at Chelsea, where he but stayed for a word with Maclean and to recover his own horse.
Heavy-hearted, now that the adventure was at an end, with all the burden of a sense of failure upon him, he rode on to Chertsey; and heaviest of all was the knowledge that tomorrow he must look his last upon that sweet lady he had met in the enchanted garden. Never again, it seemed to him would he ride fancy-free, never again find the cup of adventure all satisfying, never again be content to wander and take pleasure in the wandering. All was changed. All was very dark ahead in a world that but a little week ago had been so full of sunshine.
Meanwhile Mr Templeton had gone to lay before Lord Carteret the desired evidence of Captain Gaynor's whereabouts, together with conclusive proofs of the error under which the Secretary of State had laboured.
This he performed with an abundance of smirks, an occasional chuckle and many a "Did I not tell your lordship how it was?" Finally he withdrew in magnificent, dignified triumph, his knowledge and perspicacity entirely vindicated, leaving his superior not only discomfited but extremely raw at his discomfiture. For to be guffawed over in such a manner by your underling, and to be forced almost to admit that you have sneered at warnings which an intelligent man would have heeded, is not to be endured complacently by any. Least of all is it to be endured by a Secretary of State when the chastening falls from such soft, pompous hands as those of a Mr Templeton.
Lord Carteret, as is the wont of men in high office, looked about for someone upon whom he might visit his ill-humour and to whom he might impart some of his own rawness. To him in this questing mood comes that morning my Lord Pauncefort, very resplendent in black periwig and saffron-coloured coat.
"Good morning, my lord!" the statesman greeted him, in a tone that implied that he wished the viscount anything but a good morning. "I was about to send for you." Lord Carteret - a man of a comfortable habit of body, with a hooked nose, a crafty mouth, and small round eyes that were singularly penetrating and level - scowled upon his visitor. "What cock-and-bull tale was this ye brought me concerning one Captain Gaynor?"
"Cock-and-bull tale" echoed Pauncefort, taken aback by the question and still more by the tone of it. He drew himself up to the full of his magnificent height, and stared down haughtily upon the Secretary of State. He was not accustomed to being addressed in the manner that Lord Carteret employed this morning.
But he did not long maintain his stare or his haughty poise. The thin lips of the minister wore a sneer and the round little eyes flashed a contempt before which Lord Pauncefort was forced to lower his own. A slight flush crept into his swarthy cheeks.
Men such as Lord Carteret may use men such as Lord Pauncefort; but from the moment they so use them equality ceases between them and is never again to be resumed. To Lord Carteret, the viscount was just a vulgar spy, to be used with contempt, paid his dirty wages and scorned as was his proper due. All this he showed in that faintly sneering mouth and disdainful eyes.
"Those were my words," he said steadily, and he repeated them. "Cock-and-bull tale. This Captain Gaynor was not at Chelsea last evening, and it has been made plain to me that it is impossible he should be Captain Jenkyn, as you have said. It was made plain to me yesterday; but I persisted under your assurances, and as a consequence I have enabled that coxcomb Templeton to laugh at me this morning. Now his Majesty's Government, my lord," he continued mercilessly, "is not paying you for fictions, but for exact - for scrupulously exact - information."
"And you have had it," answered Pauncefort in a dull voice.
The statesman rapped the table impatiently with his knuckles. "In this case we have not."
"In this case more than in any other," Pauncefort insisted. "What should it profit me to accuse an innocent man who can prove his innocence as soon as he speaks?"
"Yet that precisely appears to be Captain Gaynor's case."
"Appears to be - ay. The fellow is slippery as Satan himself."
Lord Carteret pooh-poohed the statement. He proceeded to relate where and how Captain Gaynor had spent the night. Pauncefort listened attentively.
"At what hour did the watch discover him?" he inquired.
"At nightfall, I am informed."
"That would be at about half-past nine. And at what time were the arrests effected at Chelsea?"
"At something before nine. He can hardly have been in both places within the time and drunk himself into a stupor in between. Besides, why should he?"
"To set up an alibi, in case it should be necessary. Was he drunk at all?"
Lord Carteret shrugged impatiently. "The watch affirm it: they should know, and Templeton swears he still stinks of brandy."
"And yet, that he is Captain Jenkyn I know; and that he was at Chelsea last night I'll make oath."
"Had he been taken with the others, the fact that he is an agent of the Pretender would have been established, and we could have dealt with him. As it is - why, as it is, I must believe that Templeton is right and that he is -"
"He is Captain Jenkyn, my lord," Pauncefort insisted still.
"You are becoming plaguily monotonous, sir," snapped Carteret. "If you would prove a little more and affirm a little less I should be better pleased with you. Ye see, we can't hang the fellow on your bare word. Indeed anybody's word would be almost better in the ears of a court than that of an informer. You understand?"
That he understood his countenance showed. "My lord," he burst out angrily, "you are putting an affront upon me!"
The minister surveyed him coolly. "I am calling things by the names that belong to them," he answered icily. And my lord was compelled to swallow that added insult - his very proper and inevitable wage.
''I'll wish your lordship a good morning" he said stiffly. He bowed curtly and gained the door. There, a thought striking him, he turned. "You said, I think, that Sir Henry Tresh was the justice before whom Captain Gaynor was brought at Westminster?"
"That is so," said his lordship. "Come to me again when your information stands upon better foundations."
The viscount went out raging, and kicked a flunkey out of his way to vent a little of the fumes with which he was swollen to bursting-point.
He straightway sought the magistrate upon a pretence of being a friend of Captain Gaynor's who had just received news of his arrest. Sir Henry informed him that the Captain was already at large, whereafter his lordship lingered in talk concerning the erstwhile prisoner, and in the course of their entertainment Chance favoured Pauncefort in a manner entirely unexpected. He learnt that Sir Henry had been at "The World's End" at Chelsea last night when the arrest of the plotters was being effected, and he learnt something further, something which was imparted that evening to Sir Richard Tollemache Templeton by his cousin.
"What, think you, is my Lord Carteret's present view of your friend Gaynor?" inquired the Second Secretary.
"Does he hang there still?" quoth Sir Richard in surprise.
"'Tis an obsession with him - an obsession! Oh, 'tis incredible that fatuity should go to such lengths - incredible! And the story itself would be incredible to any but a man who is - ah - lost to all sense of the ridiculous. Why, listen to't. It transpires that by an odd chance Sir Henry Tresh was at 'The World's End' last night when the arrests were made. He was sitting over his wine with a friend when the stir took place. Having witnessed it he goes to his wife's room, finds the door locked, and believes that he hears voices within the room. He knocks; there is a delay, and finally the cuckold is admitted. He demands an explanation of those sounds, of the delay and of the extraordinary agitation in which he finds her. Whereupon she tells him that a gentleman unknown to her entered her room and locked the door, leaving thereafter by the window.
"Sir Henry - a most obliging husband, this - believes her implicitly, assumes that like enough the fellow would be one of the Jacobites who escaped the general arrest. Today my Lord Carteret hears the story, and concludes - can you credit it? - that here, at last, is the explanation of why Captain Jenkyn was not taken with the others. If he were to pause there, I could credit him still with an - ah - with a remnant of sanity. But straightway Captain Jenkyn becomes Captain Gaynor again, in spite of the alibi, the credentials and all else. What, I ask you, Tollemache, can you say to such a man?"
"God help England, I think," answered Sir Richard.
And the worst of it all is that he threatens to execute the warrant for Captain Jenkyn upon Captain Gaynor."
"Is he quite mad?" asked Tollemache.
"Quite - oh, quite!" And Mr Templeton shook his great head. "He'll be in Bedlam before the year is out. But I've washed my hands of the affair. I have told him so. I have warned him. Let the consequences of it - if indeed he goes so far - recoil upon his own head. I shall take measures to protect mine. I shall publish it broadcast that in this blunder at least I am not concerned, that indeed I have done all in my power to avert it. Then, when his lordship rightly becomes the - ah -laughing-stock of the country for an alarmist who sees Jacobite agents in every shadow, then we shall see - we shall see." And Mr Templeton washed his hands in the air, his eyes glowing upon a vision of power that should be transferred to his own more capable hands as a proper and fitting result of his chief's disgrace and downfall.

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