Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

FORTUNE’S FOOL

FORTUNE’S FOOL

BY

RAFAEL SABATINI

Author of “Scaramouche,” “Captain Blood,” “The Snare,”
“The Sea-Hawk,” etc.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1922 AND 1923, BY THE McCALL COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY RAFAEL SABATINI

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1923
FOURTH IMPRESSION, OCTOBER, 1923

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE: MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

FORTUNE’S FOOL

FORTUNE’S FOOL

CHAPTER I THE HOSTESS OF THE PAUL’S HEAD

The times were full of trouble; but Martha Quinn was unperturbed. Hers was a mind that confined itself to the essentials of life: its sustenance and reproduction. Not for her to plague herself with the complexities of existence, with considerations of the Hereafter or disputations upon the various creeds by which its happiness may be ensured—a matter upon which men have always been ready to send one another upon exploring voyages thither—or yet with the political opinions by which a nation is fiercely divided. Not even the preparations for war with Holland, which were agitating men so violently, or the plague-scare based upon reports of several cases in the outskirts of the City, could disturb the serenity of her direct existence. The vices of the Court, which afforded such delectable scandal for the Town, touched her more nearly, as did the circumstance that yellow bird’s-eye hoods were now all the rage with ladies of fashion, and the fact that London was lost in worship of the beauty and talent of Sylvia Farquharson, who was appearing with Mr. Betterton at the Duke’s House in the part of Katherine in Lord Orrery’s “Henry the Fifth.”

Even so, to Martha Quinn, who very competently kept the Paul’s Head, in Paul’s Yard, these things were but the unimportant trifles that garnish the dish of life. It was upon life’s main concerns that she concentrated her attention. In all that regarded meat and drink her learning—as became the hostess of so prosperous a house—was probably unrivalled. It was not merely that she understood the mysteries of bringing to a proper succulence a goose, a turkey, or a pheasant; but a chine of beef roasted in her oven was like no chine of beef at any other ordinary; she could perform miracles with marrow-bones; and she could so dissemble the umbles of venison in a pasty as to render it a dish fit for a prince’s table. Upon these talents was her solid prosperity erected. She possessed, further—as became the mother of six sturdy children of assorted paternity—a discerning eye for a fine figure of a man. I am prepared to believe that in this matter her judgment was no whit inferior to that which enabled her, as she boasted, to determine at a glance the weight and age of a capon.

It was to this fact—although he was very far from suspecting it—that Colonel Holles owed the good fortune of having lodged in luxury for the past month without ever a reckoning asked or so much as a question on the subject of his means. The circumstance may have exercised him. I do not know. But I know that it should have done so. For his exterior—his fine figure apart—was not of the kind that commands credit.

Mrs. Quinn had assigned to his exclusive use a cosy little parlour behind the common room. On the window-seat of this little parlour he now lounged, whilst Mrs. Quinn herself—and the day was long past in which it had been her need or habit with her own plump hands to perform so menial an office—removed from the table the remains of his very solid breakfast.

The lattice, of round, leaded panes of greenish, wrinkled glass, stood open to the sunlit garden and the glory of cherry trees that were belatedly in blossom. From one of these a thrush was pouring forth a Magnificat to the spring. The thrush, like Mrs. Quinn, concentrated his attention upon life’s essentials, and was glad to live. Not so Colonel Holles. He was a man caught and held fast in the web of life’s complexities. It was to be seen in his listless attitude; in the upright deep line of care that graved itself between his brows, in the dreamy wistfulness of his grey eyes, as he lounged there, shabbily clad, one leg along the leather-cushioned window-seat, pulling vacantly at his long clay pipe.

Observing him furtively, with a furtiveness, indeed, that was almost habitual to her, Mrs. Quinn pursued her task, moving between table and sideboard, and hesitated to break in upon his abstraction. She was a woman on the short side of middle height, well hipped and deep of bosom, but not excessively. The phrase “plump as a partridge” might have been invented to describe her. In age she cannot have been much short of forty, and whilst not without a certain homely comeliness, in no judgment but her own could she have been accounted beautiful. Very blue of eye and very ruddy of cheek, she looked the embodiment of health; and this rendered her not unpleasing. But the discerning would have perceived greed in the full mouth with its long upper lip, and sly cunning—Nature’s compensation to low intelligences—in her vivid eyes.

It remains, however, that she was endowed with charms enough of person and of fortune to attract Coleman, the bookseller from the corner of Paul’s Yard, and Appleby, the mercer from Paternoster Row. She might marry either of them when she pleased. But she did not please. Her regard for essentials rendered the knock-knees of Appleby as repulsive to her as the bow-legs of Coleman. Moreover, certain adventitious associations with the great world—to which her assorted offspring bore witness—had begotten in her a fastidiousness of taste that was not to be defiled by the touch of mercers and booksellers. Of late, it is true, the thought of marriage had been engaging her. She realized that the age of adventure touched its end for her, and that the time had come to take a life companion and settle soberly. Yet not on that account would Martha Quinn accept the first comer. She was in a position to choose. Fifteen years of good management, prosperity, and thrift at the Paul’s Head had made her wealthy. When she pleased she could leave Paul’s Yard, acquire a modest demesne in the country, and become one of the ladies of the land, a position for which she felt herself eminently qualified. That which her birth might lack, that in which her birth might have done poor justice to her nature, a husband could supply. Often of late had her cunning blue eyes been narrowed in mental review of this situation. What she required for her purposes was a gentleman born and bred whom fortune had reduced in circumstances and who would, therefore, be modest in the matter of matrimonial ambitions. He must also be a proper man.

Such a man she had found at last in Colonel Holles. From the moment when a month ago he strode into her inn followed by an urchin shouldering his valise and packages, and delivered himself upon his immediate needs, she had recognized him for the husband she sought, and marked him for her own. At a glance she had appraised him; the tall, soldierly figure, broad to the waist, thence spare to the ground; the handsome face, shaven like a Puritan’s, yet set between clusters of gold-brown hair thick as a cavalier’s periwig, the long pear-shaped ruby—a relic, no doubt, of more prosperous days—dangling from his right ear; the long sword upon whose pummel his left hand rested with the easy grace of long habit; the assured poise, the air of command, the pleasant yet authoritative voice. All this she observed with those vivid, narrowing eyes of hers. And she observed, too, the gentleman’s discreditable shabbiness: the frayed condition of his long boots, the drooping, faded feather in his Flemish beaver, the well-rubbed leather jerkin, worn, no doubt, to conceal the threadbare state of the doublet underneath. These very signs which might have prompted another hostess to give our gentleman a guarded welcome urged Mrs. Quinn at once to throw wide her arms to him, metaphorically at present that she might do so literally anon.

At a glance she knew him, then, for the man of her dreams, guided to her door by that Providence to whose beneficence she already owed so much.

He had business in town, he announced—at Court, he added. It might detain him there some little while. He required lodgings perhaps for a week, perhaps for longer. Could she provide them?

She could, indeed, for a week, and at need for longer. Mentally she registered the resolve that it should be for longer; that, if she knew her man and herself at all, it should be for life.

And so at this handsome, down-at-heel gentleman’s disposal she had placed not only the best bedroom abovestairs, but also the little parlour hung in grey linsey-woolsey and gilded leather, which overlooked the garden and which normally she reserved for her own private use; and the Paul’s Head had awakened to such activity at his coming as might have honoured the advent of a peer of the realm. Hostess and drawer and chambermaid had bestirred themselves to anticipate his every wish. The cook had been flung into the street for overgrilling the luscious marrow-bones that had provided his first breakfast, and the chambermaid’s ears had been soundly boxed for omission to pass the warming-pan through the Colonel’s bed to ensure of its being aired. And although it was now a full month since his arrival, and in all that time our gentleman had been lavishly entertained upon the best meat and drink the Paul’s Head could offer, yet in all that time there had been—I repeat—neither mention of a reckoning, nor question of his means to satisfy it.

At first he had protested against the extravagance of the entertainment. But his protests had been laughed aside with good-humoured scorn. His hostess knew a gentleman when she saw one, he was assured, and knew how a gentleman should be entertained. Unsuspicious of the designs upon him, he never dreamed that the heavy debt he was incurring was one of the coils employed by this cunning huntress in which to bind him.

Her housewifely operations being ended at last—after a prolongation which could be carried to no further lengths—she overcame her hesitation to break in upon his thoughts, which must be gloomy, indeed, if his countenance were a proper index. Nothing could have been more tactful than her method, based upon experience of the Colonel’s phenomenal thirst, which, at all times unquenchable, must this morning have been further sharpened by the grilled herrings which had formed a part of his breakfast.

As she addressed him now, she held in her hand the long pewter vessel from which he had taken his morning draught.

“Is there aught ye lack for your comfort, Colonel?”

He stirred, turned his head, to face her, and took the pipestem from between his lips.

“Nothing, I thank you,” he answered, with a gravity that had been growing upon him in the last fortnight, to overcloud the earlier good-humour of his bearing.

“What—nothing?” The buxom siren’s ruddy face was creased in an alluring smile. Aloft now she held the tankard, tilting her still golden head. “Not another draught of October before you go forth?” she coaxed him.

As he looked at her now, he smiled. And it has been left on record by one who knew him well that his smile was irresistible, a smile that could always win him the man or woman upon whom he bestowed it. It had a trick of breaking suddenly upon a face that in repose was wistful, like sunshine breaking suddenly from a grey sky.

“I vow you spoil me,” said he.

She beamed upon him. “Isn’t that the duty of a proper hostess?”

She set the tankard on the laden tray and bore it out with her. When she brought it back replenished, and placed it on a coffin-stool beside him, he had changed his attitude, but not his mood of thoughtfulness. He roused himself to thank her.

She hovered near until he had taken a pull of the brown October.

“Do you go forth this morning?”

“Aye,” he answered, but wearily, as if reduced to hopelessness. “They told me I should find his grace returned to-day. But they have told me the same so often already, that....” He sighed, and broke off, leaving his doubts implied. “I sometimes wonder if they but make game of me.”

“Make game of you!” Horror stressed her voice. “When the Duke is your friend!”

“Ah! But that was long ago. And men change ... amazingly sometimes.” Then he cast off the oppression of his pessimism. “But if there’s to be war, surely there will be commands in which to employ a practised soldier—especially one who has experience of the enemy, experience gained in the enemy’s own service.” It was as if he uttered aloud his thoughts.

She frowned at this. Little by little in the past month she had drawn from him some essential part of his story, and although he had been far from full in his confidences, yet she had gleaned enough to persuade herself that a reason existed why he should never reach this duke upon whom he depended for military employment. And in that she had taken comfort; for, as you surmise, it was no part of her intention that he should go forth to the wars again, and so be lost to her.

“I marvel now,” said she, “that you will be vexing yourself with such matters.”

He looked at her. “A man must live,” he explained.

“But that’s no reason why he should go to the wars and likely die. Hasn’t there been enough o’ that in your life already? At your age a man’s mind should be on other things.”

“At my age?” He laughed a little. “I am but thirty-five.”

She betrayed her surprise. “You look more.”

“Perhaps I have lived more. I have been very busy.”

“Trying to get yourself killed. Don’t it occur to you that the time has come to be thinking o’ something else?”

He gave her a mildly puzzled glance, frowning a little.

“You mean?”

“That it’s time ye thought o’ settling, taking a wife and making a home and a family.”

The tone she adopted was one of commonplace, good-humoured kindliness. But her breathing had quickened a little, and her face had lost some of its high colour in the excitement of thus abruptly coming to grips with her subject.

He stared a moment blankly, then shrugged and laughed.

“Excellent advice,” said he, still laughing on a note of derision that obviously was aimed at himself. “Find me a lady who is well endowed and yet so little fastidious in her tastes that she could make shift with such a husband as I should afford her, and the thing is done.”

“Now there I vow you do yourself injustice.”

“Faith, it’s a trick I’ve learnt from others.”

“You are, when all is said, a very proper man.”

“Aye! But proper for what?”

She pursued her theme without pausing to answer his frivolous question. “And there’s many a woman of substance who needs a man to care for her and guard her—such a man as yourself, Colonel; one who knows his world and commands a worthy place in it.”

“I command that, do I? On my soul you give me news of myself.”

“If ye don’t command it, it is that ye lack the means, perhaps. But the place is yours by right.”

“By what right, good hostess?”

“By the right of your birth and breeding and military rank, which is plain upon you. Sir, why will you be undervaluing yourself? The means that would enable you to take your proper place would be provided by the wife who would be glad to share it with you.”

He shook his head, and laughed again.

“Do you know of such a lady?”

She paused before replying, pursing her full lips, pretending to consider, that thus she might dissemble her hesitation.

There was more in that hesitation than either of them could have come near imagining. Indeed, his whole destiny was in it. Upon such light things do human fates depend that had she now taken the plunge, and offered herself as she intended—instead of some ten days later, as eventually happened—although his answer would have varied nothing from what it ultimately was, yet the whole stream of his life would have been diverted into other channels, and his story might never have been worth telling.

Because her courage failed her at this moment, Destiny pursued the forging of that curious chain of circumstance which it is my task to reveal to you link by link.

“I think,” she said slowly at last, “that I should not be sorely put to it to find her. I ... I should not have far to seek.”

“It is a flattering conviction. Alas, ma’am, I do not share it.” He was sardonic. He made it clear that he refused to take the matter seriously, that with him it never could be more than a peg for jests. He rose, smiling a little crookedly. “Therefore I’ll still pin my hopes to his grace of Albemarle. They may be desperate; but, faith, they’re none so desperate as hopes of wedlock.” He took up his sword as he spoke, passing the baldric over his head and settling it on his shoulder. Then he reached for his hat, Mrs. Quinn regarding him the while in mingling wistfulness and hesitation.

At last she roused herself, and sighed.

“We shall see; we shall see. Maybe we’ll talk of it again.”

“Not if you love me, delectable matchmaker,” he protested, turning to depart.

Solicitude for his immediate comfort conquered all other considerations in her.

“You’ll not go forth without another draught to ... to fortify you.”

She had possessed herself again of the empty tankard. He paused and smiled. “I may need fortifying,” he confessed, thinking of all the disappointment that had waited upon his every previous attempt to see the Duke. “You think of everything,” he praised her. “You are not Mrs. Quinn of the Paul’s Head, you are benign Fortune pouring gifts from an inexhaustible cornucopia.”

“La, sir!” she laughed, as she bustled out. It would be wrong to say that she did not understand him; for she perfectly understood that he paid her some high and flowery compliment, which was what she most desired of him as an earnest of better things to follow.

CHAPTER II ALBEMARLE’S ANTECHAMBER

Through the noisy bustle of Paul’s Yard the Colonel took his way, his ears deafened by the “What d’ye lack?” of the bawling prentices standing before The Flower of Luce, The White Greyhound, The Green Dragon, The Crown, The Red Bull, and all the other signs that distinguished the shops in that long array, among which the booksellers were predominant. He moved with a certain arrogant, swaggering assurance, despite his shabby finery. His Flemish beaver worn at a damn-me cock, his long sword thrust up behind by the hand that rested upon the pummel, his useless spurs—which a pot-boy at the Paul’s Head had scoured to a silvery brightness—providing martial music to his progress. A certain grimness that invested him made the wayfarers careful not to jostle him. In that throng of busy, peaceful citizens he was like a wolf loping across a field of sheep; and those whom he met made haste to give him the wall, though it should entail thrusting themselves or their fellows into the filth of the kennel.

Below Ludgate, in that evil valley watered by the Fleet Ditch, there were hackney-coaches in plenty, and, considering the distance which he must go and the desirability of coming to his destination cleanly shod, Colonel Holles was momentarily tempted. He resisted, however; and this was an achievement in one who had never sufficiently studied that most essential of the arts of living. He bethought him—and sighed wearily over the reflection—of the alarming lightness of his purse and the alarming heaviness of his score at the Paul’s Head, where he had so culpably lacked the strength of mind to deny himself any of those luxuries with which in the past month he had been lavished, and for which, should Albemarle fail him in the end, he knew not how to pay. This reflection contained an exaggeration of his penury. There was that ruby in his ear, a jewel that being converted into gold should keep a man in ease for the best part of a twelvemonth. For fifteen years and through many a stress of fortune it had hung and glowed there amid his clustering gold-brown hair. Often had hunger itself urged him to sell the thing that he might fill his belly. Yet ever had reluctance conquered him. He attached to that bright gem a sentimental value that had become a superstition. There had grown up in his mind the absolute conviction that this jewel, the gift of an unknown whose life he had arrested on the black threshold of eternity, was a talisman and something more—that, as it had played a part in the fortunes of another, so should it yet play a part in the fortunes of himself and of that other jointly. There abode with him the unconquerable feeling that this ruby was a bond between himself and that unknown, a lodestone that should draw each to the other ultimately across a whole world of obstacles and that the meeting should be mutually fateful.

There were times when, reviewing the thing more soberly, he laughed at his crazy belief. Yet, oddly enough, those were never the times in which dire necessity drove him to contemplate its sale. So surely as he came to consider that, so surely did the old superstition, begotten of and steadily nourished by his fancy, seize upon him to bid him hold his hand and suffer all but death before thus purchasing redemption.

Therefore was it that, as he took his way now up Fleet Hill, he left that jewel out of his calculations in his assessment of his utterly inadequate means.

Westward through the mire of the Strand he moved, with his swinging soldierly stride, and so, by Charing Cross, at last into Whitehall itself. Down this he passed towards the chequered embattled Cockpit Gate that linked one side of the palace with the other.

It was close upon noon, and that curial thoroughfare was more than ordinarily thronged, the war with Holland—now an accomplished fact—being responsible for the anxious, feverish bustle hereabouts. Adown its middle moved a succession of coaches to join the cluster gathered about the Palace Gate and almost blocking the street from one row of bourne posts to the other.

Opposite the Horse Guards the Colonel came to a momentary halt on the skirts of a knot of idlers, standing at gaze to observe the workmen on the palace roof who were engaged in erecting there a weather-vane. A gentleman whom he questioned informed him that this was for the convenience of the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, so that his grace might observe from his windows how the wind served the plaguey Dutch fleet which was expected now to leave the Texel at any hour. The Lord Admiral, it was clear, desired to waste no unnecessary time upon the quarter-deck.

Colonel Holles moved on, glancing across at the windows of the banqueting-house, whence, as a lad of twenty, a cornet of horse, some sixteen years ago, he had seen the late King step forth into the sunlight of a crisp January morning to suffer the loss of his head. And perhaps he remembered that his own father, long since dead—and so beyond the reach of any Stuart vengeance—had been one of the signatories of the warrant under which that deed was done.

He passed on, from the sunlight into the shadow of Holbein’s noble gateway, and then, emerging beyond, he turned to his right, past the Duke of Monmouth’s lodging into the courtyard of the Cockpit, where the Duke of Albemarle had his residence. Here his lingering doubt on the score of whether his grace were yet returned to Town was set at rest by the bustle in which he found himself. But there remained another doubt; which was whether his grace, being now returned, would condescend to receive him. Six times in the course of the past four weeks had he vainly sought admission. On three of those occasions he had been shortly answered that his grace was out of Town; on one of them—the last—more circumstantially that his grace was at Portsmouth about the business of the fleet. Twice it was admitted—and he had abundant evidences, as now—that the Duke was at home and receiving; but the Colonel’s shabbiness had aroused the mistrust of the ushers, and they had barred his way to ask him superciliously was he commanded by the Duke. Upon his confession that he was not, they informed him that the Duke was over-busy to receive any but those whom he had commanded, and they bade him come again some other day. He had not imagined that George Monk would be so difficult of access, remembering his homely republican disregard of forms in other days. But being twice repulsed from his threshold in this fashion, he had taken the precaution of writing before presenting himself now, begging his grace to give orders that he should be admitted, unless he no longer held a place in his grace’s memory.

The present visit, therefore, was fateful. A refusal now he must regard as final, in which case he would be left to curse the impulse that had brought him back to England, where it was very likely he would starve.

A doorkeeper with a halbert barred his progress on the threshold. “Your business, sir?”

“Is with His Grace of Albemarle.” The Colonel’s tone was sharp and confident. Thanks to this the next question was less challengingly delivered.

“You are commanded, sir?”

“I have reason to believe I am awaited. His grace is apprised of my coming.”

The doorkeeper looked him over again, and then made way.

He was past the outer guard, and his hopes rose. But at the end of a long gallery a wooden-faced usher confronted him, and the questions recommenced. When Holles announced that he had written to beg an audience—

“Your name, sir?” the usher asked.

“Randal Holles.” He spoke it softly with a certain inward dread, suddenly aware that such a name could be no password in Whitehall, for it had been his father’s name before him—the name of a regicide, and something more.

There was an abundance of foolish, sensational, and mythical stories which the popular imagination had woven about the execution of King Charles I. The execution of a king was a portent, and there never yet was a portent that did not gather other portents to be its satellites. Of these was the groundless story that the official headsman was missing on the day of the execution because he dared not strike off the head of God’s anointed, and that the headsman’s mask had covered the face of one who at the last moment had offered himself to act as his deputy. The identity of this deputy had been fastened upon many more or less well-known men, but most persistently upon Randal Holles, for no better reason than because his stern and outspoken republicanism had been loosely interpreted by the populace as personal rancour towards King Charles. Therefore, and upon no better ground than that of this idle story, the name of Randal Holles bore, in those days of monarchy restored, the brand of a certain infamous notoriety.

It produced, however, no fearful effect upon the usher. Calmly, mechanically repeating it, the fellow consulted a sheet of paper. Then, at last, his manner changed. It became invested by a certain obsequiousness. Clearly he had found the name upon his list. He opened the studded door of which he was the guardian.

“If you will be pleased to enter, sir....” he murmured.

Colonel Holles swaggered in, the usher following.

“If you will be pleased to wait, sir....” The usher left him, and crossed the room, presumably to communicate his name to yet another usher, a clerkly fellow with a wand, who kept another farther door.

The Colonel disposed himself to wait, sufficiently uplifted to practise great lengths of patience. He found himself in a lofty, sparsely furnished antechamber, one of a dozen or more clients, all of them men of consequence if their dress and carriage were to be taken at surface value.

Some turned to look askance at this down-at-heel intruder; but not for long. There was that in the grey eyes of Colonel Holles when returning such looks as these which could put down the haughtiest stare. He knew his world and its inhabitants too well to be moved by them either to respect or fear. Those were the only two emotions none had the power to arouse in him.

Having met their insolence by looking at them as they might look at pot-boys, he strode across to an empty bench that was ranged against the carved wainscoting, and sat himself down with a clatter.

The noise he made drew the attention of two gentlemen who stood near the bench in conversation. One of these, whose back was towards Holles, glanced round upon him. He was tall, and elderly, with a genial, ruddy countenance. The other, a man of about Holles’s own age, was short and sturdily built with a swarthy face set in a heavy black periwig, dressed with a certain foppish care, and of a manner that blended amiability with a degree of self sufficiency. He flashed upon Holles a pair of bright blue eyes that were, however, without hostility or disdain, and, although unknown to the Colonel, he slightly inclined his head to him in formal, dignified salutation, almost as if asking leave to resume his voluble conversation within this newcomer’s hearing.

Scraps of that conversation floated presently to the Colonel’s ears.

“ ... and I tell you, Sir George, that his grace is mightily off the hooks at all this delay. That is why he hurried away to Portsmouth, that by his own presence he might order things....” The pleasant voice grew inaudible to rise again presently. “The need is all for officers, men trained in war....”

The Colonel pricked up his ears at that. But the voice had dropped again, and he could not listen without making it obvious that he did so, until the speaker’s tones soared once more.

“These ardent young gentlemen are well enough, and do themselves great credit by their eagerness, but in war....”

Discreetly, to the Colonel’s vexation, the gentleman again lowered his voice. He was inaudibly answered by his companion, and it was some time before Holles heard another word of what passed between them. By then the conversation had veered a point.

“ ...and there the talk was all of the Dutch ... that the fleet is out.” The sturdy, swarthy gentleman was speaking. “That and these rumours of the plague growing upon us in the Town—from which may God preserve us!—are now almost the only topics.”

“Almost. But not quite,” the elder man broke in, laughing. “There’s something else I’d not have expected you to forget; this Farquharson girl at the Duke’s House.”

“Sir George, I confess the need for your correction. I should not have forgotten. That she shares the public tongue with such topics as the war and the plague best shows the deep impression she has made.”

“Deservedly?” Sir George asked the question as of one who was an authority in such matters.

“Oh, most deservedly, be assured. I was at the Duke’s House two days since, and saw her play Katherine. And mightily pleased I was. I cannot call to mind having seen her equal in the part, or indeed upon the stage at all. And so thinks the Town. For though I came there by two o’clock, yet there was no room in the pit, and I was forced to pay four shillings to go into one of the upper boxes. The whole house was mightily pleased with her, too, and in particular His Grace of Buckingham. He spoke his praises from his box so that all might hear him, and vowed he would not rest until he had writ a play for her, himself.”

“If to write a play for her be the only earnest his grace will afford her of his admiration, then is Miss Farquharson fortunate.”

“Or else unfortunate,” said the sturdy gentleman with a roguish look. “’Tis all a question of how the lady views these matters. But let us hope she is virtuous.”

“I never knew you unfriendly to his grace before,” replied Sir George, whereupon both laughed. And then the other, sinking his voice once more to an inaudible pitch, added matter at which Sir George’s laughter grew until it shook him.

They were still laughing, when the door of Albemarle’s room opened to give exit to a slight gentleman with flushed cheeks. Folding a parchment as he went, the gentleman crossed the antechamber, stepping quickly and bestowing nods in his passage, and was gone. As he vanished at one door, the usher with the wand made his appearance at the other.

“His grace will be pleased to receive Mr. Pepys.”

The swarthy, sturdy gentleman cast off the remains of his laughter, and put on a countenance of gravity.

“I come,” he said. “Sir George, you’ll bear me company.” His tone blended invitation and assertion. His tall companion bowed, and together they went off, and passed into the Duke’s room.

Colonel Holles leaned back against the wainscoting, marvelling that with war upon them—to say nothing of the menace of the plague—the Town should be concerned with the affairs of a playhouse wanton; and that here, in the very temple of Bellona, Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office should submerge in such bawdy matters the grave question of the lack of officers and the general unpreparedness to combat either the Dutch or the pestilence.

He was still pondering that curious manifestation of the phenomenon of the human mind, and the odd methods of government which the restored Stuarts had brought back to England, when Mr. Pepys and his companion came forth again, and he heard the voice of the usher calling his own name.

“Mr. Holles!”

Partly because of his abstraction, partly because of the omission of his military title, it was not until the call had been repeated that the Colonel realized that it was addressed to himself and started up.

Those who had stared askance at him on his first coming, stared again now in resentment to see themselves passed over for this out-at-elbow ruffler. There were some sneering laughs and nudges, and one or two angry exclamations. But Holles paid no heed. Fortune at last had opened a door to him. Of this the hope that he had nourished was swollen to a certainty by one of the things he had overheard from the voluble Mr. Pepys. Officers were needed; men of experience in the trade of arms were scarce. Men of his own experience were rare, and Albemarle, who had the dispensing of these gifts, was well acquainted with his worth. That was the reason why he was being given precedence of all these fine gentlemen left in the antechamber to cool their heels a while longer.

Eagerly he went forward.

CHAPTER III HIS GRACE OF ALBEMARLE

At a vast writing-table placed in the middle of a lofty, sunny room, whose windows overlooked St. James’s Park, sat George Monk, K.G., Baron Monk of Potheridge, Beauchamp, and Tees, Earl of Torrington and Duke of Albemarle, Master of the Horse, Commander-in-Chief, a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

It was a great deal for a man to be, and yet George Monk—called a trimmer by his enemies and “honest George” by the majority of Englishmen—might conceivably have been more. Had he so willed it, he might have been King of England, whereby it is impossible that he could have served his country worse than by the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, which he preferred to effect.

He was a man of middle height, powerfully built, but inclining now, in his fifty-seventh year, to portliness. He was of a dark complexion, not unhandsome, the strength of his mouth tempered by the gentleness of his short-sighted eyes. His great head, covered by a heavy black periwig, reared itself upon too short a neck from his massive shoulders.

As Holles entered, he looked up, threw down his pen, and rose, but slowly, as if weighted by hesitation or surprise. Surprise was certainly the expression on his face as he stood there observing the other’s swift, eager advance. No word was uttered until no more than the table stood between them, and then it was to the usher that Albemarle addressed himself, shortly, in dismissal.

He followed the man’s withdrawal with his eyes, nor shifted them again to his visitor until the door had closed. Then abruptly concern came to blend with the surprise still abiding in his face, and he held out a hand to the Colonel whom this reception had a little bewildered. Holles bethought him that circumspection had ever been George Monk’s dominant characteristic.

“God save us, Randal! Is it really you?”

“Have ten years wrought such changes that you need to ask?”

“Ten years!” said the Duke slowly, a man bemused. “Ten years!” he said again, and his gentle almost sorrowing eyes scanned his visitor from foot to crown. His grip of the Colonel’s hand tightened a moment. Then abruptly, as if at a loss, or perhaps to dissemble the extent to which he was affected by this meeting, “But sit, man, sit,” he urged, waving him to the armchair set at the table so as to face the Duke’s own.

Holles sat down, hitching his sword-hilt forward, and placing his hat upon the floor. The Duke resumed his seat with the same slowness with which he had lately risen from it, his eyes the while upon his visitor.

“How like your father you are grown!” he said at last.

“That will be something gained, where all else is but a tale of loss.”

“Aye! You bear it writ plain upon you,” the Duke sadly agreed, and again there broke from him that plaintive, “God save us!”

Randal Holles the elder had been Monk’s dearest friend. Both natives of Potheridge in Devon, they had grown to manhood together. And though political opinions then divided them—for Monk was a King’s man in those far-off days, whilst the older Holles had gone to Parliament a republican—yet their friendship had remained undiminished. When Monk at last in ’46 accepted a command from Cromwell in the Irish service, it was the influence of Holles which had procured both the offer and its acceptance. Later, when Holles the younger decided for the trade of arms, it was under the ægis of Monk that he had taken service, and it was due as much to Monk’s friendship as to his own abilities that he had found himself a Captain after Dunbar and a Colonel after Worcester. Had he but chosen to continue under the guidance of his father’s friend, he might to-day have found himself in very different case.

The thought was so uppermost now in the Duke’s mind that he could not repress its utterance.

Holles sighed. “Do I not know it? But....” He broke off. “The answer makes a weary story and a long one. By your leave, let us neglect it. Your grace has had my letter. That is plain, since I am here. Therefore you are acquainted with my situation.”

“It grieved me, Randal, more deeply, I think, than anything I can remember. But why did you not write sooner? Why did you come vainly knocking at my door to be turned away by lackeys?”

“I had not realized how inaccessible you are grown.”

The Duke’s glance sharpened. “Do you say that bitterly?”

Holles almost bounded from his seat. “Nay—on my soul! I vow I am incapable of that, however low I may have come. What you have, you have earned. I rejoice in your greatness as must every man who loves you.” With mock cynicism as if to cover up any excessive emotion he might have used, he added: “I must, since it is now my only hope. Shorn of it I might as well cast myself from London Bridge.”

The Duke considered him in silence for a moment.

“We must talk,” he said presently. “There is much to say.” And, in his abrupt fashion, he added the question: “You’ll stay to dine?”

“That is an invitation I’d not refuse even from an enemy.”

His grace tinkled a little silver bell. The usher appeared.

“Who waits in the anteroom?”

Came from the usher a string of names and titles, all of them distinguished, some imposing.

“Say to them with my regrets that I can receive none before I dine. Bid those whose business presses to seek me again this afternoon.”

As the usher removed himself, Holles lay back in his chair and laughed. The Duke frowned inquiry, almost anxiously.

“I am thinking of how they stared upon me, and how they’ll stare next time we meet. Forgive me that I laugh at trifles. It is almost the only luxury I am still able to afford.”

Albemarle nodded gloomily. If he possessed a sense of humour, he very rarely betrayed the fact, which is possibly why Mr. Pepys, who loved a laugh, has written him down a heavy man.

“Tell me now,” he invited, “what is the reason of your coming home?”

“The war. Could I continue in Dutch service, even if the Dutch had made it possible, which they did not? For the last three months it has been impossible for an Englishman to show his face in the streets of The Hague without being subjected to insult. If he were so rash as to resent and punish it, he placed himself at the mercy of the authorities, which were never reluctant to make an example of him. That is one reason. The other is that England is in danger, that she needs the sword of her every son, and in such a pass should be ready to afford me employment. You need officers, I learn—experienced officers....”

“That’s true enough, God knows!” Albemarle interrupted him, on a note of bitterness. “My anteroom is thronged with young men of birth who come to me commended by the Duke of This and the Earl of That, and sometimes by His Majesty himself, for whom I am desired to provide commissions that will enable these graceful bawcocks to command their betters....” He broke off, perceiving, perhaps, that his feelings were sweeping him beyond the bounds of his usual circumspection. “But, as you say,” he ended presently, “of experienced officers there is a sorry lack. Yet that is not a circumstance upon which you are warranted to build, my friend.”

Holles stared blankly. “How ...?” he was beginning, when Albemarle resumed, at once explaining his own words and answering the unspoken question.

“If you think that even in this hour of need there is no employment for such men as you in England’s service,” he said gravely, in his slow, deep voice, “you can have no knowledge of what has been happening here whilst you have been abroad. In these past ten years, Randal, I have often thought you might be dead. And I ask myself, all things being as they are, whether as your friend I have cause, real cause, to rejoice at seeing you alive. For life to be worth living must be lived worthily, by which I mean it must signify the performance of the best that is in a man. And how shall you perform your best here in this England?”

“How?” Holles was aghast. “Afford me but the occasion, and I will show you. I have it in me still. I swear it. Test me, and you shall not be disappointed. I’ll do you no discredit.” He had risen in his excitement. He had even paled a little, and he stood now before the Duke, tense, challenging, a faint quiver in the sensitive nostrils of his fine nose.

Albemarle’s phlegm was undisturbed by the vehemence. With a sallow fleshly hand, he waved the Colonel back to his chair.

“I nothing doubt it. I ask no questions of how you have spent the years. I can see for myself that they have been ill-spent, even without the hints of your letter. That does not weigh with me. I know your nature, and it is a nature I would trust. I know your talents, partly from the early promise that you showed, partly from the opinion held of you at one time in Holland. That surprises you, eh? Oh, but I keep myself informed of what is happening in the world. It was Opdam, I think, who reported you ‘vir magna belli peritia.’” He paused, and sighed. “God knows I need such men as you, need them urgently; and I would use you thankfully. But....”

“But what, sir? In God’s name!”

The heavy, pursed lips parted again, the raised black eyebrows resumed their level. “I cannot do so without exposing you to the very worst of dangers.”

“Dangers?” Holles laughed.

“I see that you do not understand. You do not realize that you bear a name inscribed on a certain roll of vengeance.”

“You mean my father’s?” The Colonel was incredulous.

“Your father’s—aye. It is misfortunate he should have named you after him. But there it is,” the deliberate, ponderous voice continued. “The name of Randal Holles is on the warrant for the execution of the late King. It would have provided a warrant for your father’s own death had he lived long enough. Yourself you have borne arms for the Parliament against our present sovereign. In England it is only by living in the completest obscurity that you’ll be allowed to live at all. And you ask me to give you a command, to expose you prominently to the public gaze—to the royal eye and the royal memory, which in these matters is unfading.”

“But the act of indemnity?” cried Holles, aghast, seeing his high hopes crumbling into ashes.

“Pshaw!” Albemarle’s lip curled a little. “Where have you lived at all that you do not know what has befallen those whom it covered?” He smiled grimly, shaking his great black head. “Never compel from a man a promise he is loath to give. Such promises are never kept, however fast you may bind them in legal bonds. I wrung the promise of that bill from His Majesty whilst he was still a throneless wanderer. Whilst he was at Breda I concerted with him and with Clarendon that there should be four exceptions only from that bill. Yet when, after His Majesty’s restoration, it was prepared, it left to Parliament such exceptions as Parliament should deem proper. I saw the intention. I pleaded; I argued; I urged the royal promise. Finally it was agreed that the exceptions should be increased to seven. Reluctantly I yielded, having no longer the power effectively to oppose a king de facto. Yet when the bill came before the Commons—subservient to the royal promptings—they named twenty exceptions, and the Lords went further by increasing the exceptions to include all who had been concerned in the late king’s trial and sundry others who had not. And that was a bill of indemnity! It was followed by the King’s proclamation demanding the surrender within fourteen days of all those who had been concerned in his father’s death. The matter was represented as a mere formality. Most were wise enough to mistrust it, and leave the country. But a score obeyed, conceiving that they would escape with some light punishment.”

He paused a moment, sinking back into his chair. A little smile twisted the lips of this man who had no sense of humour.

“It was announced that those who had not surrendered were excluded from the Bill of Indemnity, whilst, as for those who having surrendered were to be supposed included in it, a loyal jury found a true bill against them. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Major-General Harrison was the first of them to suffer. He was disembowelled over yonder at Charing Cross. Others followed, until the people, nauseated by the spectacle provided daily, began to murmur. Then a halt was called. There was a pause, at the end of which the executioners began again. Nor were those sentenced in that year the only ones. Others were indicted subsequently. Lambert and Vane were not brought to trial until ’62. Nor were they the last. And it may be that we have not reached the end even yet.”

Again he paused, and again his tone changed, shedding its faint note of bitterness.

“I do not say these things—which I say for your ears alone here in private—to censure, or even criticize, the actions of His Majesty. It is not for a subject to question too narrowly the doings of his King, particularly when that King is a son concerned to avenge what he considers, rightly or wrongly, the murder of his father. I tell you all this solely that you may understand how, despite my ardent wish to help you, I dare not for your own sake help you in the way you desire, lest, by bringing you, directly or indirectly, under His Majesty’s notice, I should expose you to that vengeance which is not allowed to slumber. Your name is Randal Holles, and....”

“I could change my name,” the Colonel cried, on a sudden inspiration, and waited breathlessly, whilst Albemarle considered.

“There might still be some who knew you in the old days, who would be but too ready to expose the deception.”

“I’ll take the risk of that.” Holles laughed in his eagerness, in his reaction from the hopelessness that had been settling upon him during Albemarle’s lengthy exposition. “I’ve lived on risks.”

The Duke eyed him gravely. “And I?” he asked.

“You?”

“I should be a party to that deception....”

“So much need not transpire. You can trust me not to allow it.”

“But I should be a party none the less.” Albemarle was graver than ever, his accents more deliberate.

Slowly the lines of Holles’s face returned to their habitual grim wistfulness.

“You see?” said the Duke sadly.

But Holles did not wish to see. He shifted restlessly in his chair, swinging at last to lean across the table towards the Duke.

“But surely ... at such a time ... in the hour of England’s need ... with war impending, and experienced officers to seek ... surely, there would be some justification for....”

Again Albemarle shook his head, his face grave and sad.

“There can never be justification for deceit—for falsehood.”

For a long moment they faced each other thus, Holles striving the while to keep the despair from his face. Then slowly the Colonel sank back into his chair. A moment he brooded, his eyes upon the polished floor, then, with a little sigh, a little shrug, a little upward throw of the hands, he reached for the hat that lay on the floor beside him.

“In that case....” He paused to swallow something that threatened to mar the steadiness of his voice, “ ... it but remains for me to take my leave....”

“No, no.” The Duke leaned across and set a restraining hand upon his visitor’s arm. “We part not thus, Randal.”

Holles looked at him, still inwardly struggling to keep his self-control. He smiled a little, that sad irresistible smile of his. “You, sir, are a man overweighted with affairs; the burden of a state at war is on your shoulders, I....”

“None the less you shall stay to dine.”

“To dine?” said Holles, wondering where and when he should dine next, for a disclosure of the state of his affairs must follow upon this failure to improve them, and the luxury of the Paul’s Head could be his no longer.

“To dine, as you were bidden, and to renew acquaintance with her grace.” Albemarle pushed back his chair, and rose. “She will be glad to see you, I know. Come, then. The dinner hour is overpast already.”

Slowly, still hesitating, Holles rose. His main desire was to be out of this, away from Whitehall, alone with his misery. Yet in the end he yielded, nor had occasion thereafter to regret it. Indeed, at the outset her grace’s welcome of him warmed him.

The massive, gaudy, untidy woman stared at him as he was led by Albemarle into her presence. Then, slapping her thighs to mark her amazement, up she bounced, and came rolling towards him.

“As God’s my life, it’s Randal Holles!” she exclaimed. And hoisting herself on tiptoe by a grip of his shoulders she resoundingly kissed his cheek before he guessed her purpose. “It’s lucky for George he’s brought you to excuse his lateness,” she added grimly. “Dinner’s been standing this ten minutes, and cooling do spoil good meat. Come on. You shall tell me at table what good fortune brings you.”

She linked an arm through one of his, and led him away to their frugal board, which Mr. Pepys—who loved the good things of this world—has denounced as laden with dirty dishes and bad meat. It was certainly not ducal, either in appurtenances or service. But then neither was its hostess, nor could any human power have made her so. To the end she was Nan Clarges, the farrier’s daughter and the farrier’s widow, the sempstress who had been Monk’s mistress when he was a prisoner in the Tower some twenty years ago, and whom—in an evil hour, as was generally believed—he had subsequently married, to legitimize their children. She counted few friends in the great world in which her husband had his being, whilst those she may have counted in her former station had long since passed beyond her ken. Therefore did she treasure the more dearly the few—the very few—whom she had honoured with that name. And of these was Randal Holles. Because of his deep regard for Monk, and because of the easy good-nature that was his own, he had in the early days of Monk’s marriage shown a proper regard for Monk’s wife, treating with the deference due to her married station an unfortunate woman who was smarting under the undisguised contempt of the majority of her husband’s friends and associates. She had cherished that deference and courtesy of Holles’s as only a woman in her situation could, and the memory of it was ineffaceably impressed upon her mind.

Clarendon, who detested her as did so many, has damned her in a phrase: “Nihil muliebris præter corpus gerens.” Clarendon did not credit her with a heart, under her gross, untidy female form, a woman’s heart as quick to respond to hate as to affection. Holles could have enlightened him. But, then, they never knew each other.

The trivial, unconsidered good that we may do on our way through life is often a seed from which we may reap richly anon in the hour of our own need.

This Holles was now discovering. She plied him with questions all through her noisy feeding, until she had drawn from him, not only the condition of his fortunes, but the reason of his return to England, the hopes he had nourished, and her own husband’s wrecking of those hopes. It put her in a rage.

“God’s life!” she roared at her ducal lord and master. “You would ha’ turned him like a beggar from the door? Him—Randal!”

His grace, the dauntless, honest George Monk, who all his life had trodden so firmly the path of rectitude, who feared no man, not even excepting the King whom he had made, lowered his proud, grave eyes before this termagant’s angry glance. He was a great soldier, as you know. Single-handed once he had faced a mutinous regiment in Whitehall, and quelled its insubordination by the fearless dominance of his personality. But he went in a dread of his boisterous vulgar duchess that was possibly greater than the dread in which any man had ever gone of him.

“You see, my love, according to my lights....” he was beginning uneasily.

“Your lights quotha!” she shrilled in scorn. “Mighty dim lights they be, George, if you can’t see to help a friend by them.”

“I might help him to the gallows,” he expostulated. “Have patience now, and let me explain.”

“I’ll need patience. God knows I shall! Well, man?”

He smiled, gently, as if to show that he used gentleness from disinclination to assert his mastery. As best he could, seeing that he was subjected the while to a running fire of scornful interruptions, he made clear the situation as already he had made it clear to Holles.

“Lord, George!” she said, when he had finished, and her great red face was blank. “You are growing old. You are not the man you was. You, a kingmaker! La!” She withered him with her scorn. “Where are the wits that helped King Charles Stuart back to his own? You wasn’t put off by the first obstacle in they days. What would ye be without me, I ask myself. It needs me to help ye see how ye can help a friend without bringing him under notice of them as might do him a hurt.”

“If you can do that, my dear....”

“If I can? I’d ha’ my brains fried for supper if I couldn’t. I would so—damme! For ’tis all they’d be good for. Is there no commands in your bestowing but commands here at home?”

His eyebrows flickered up, as if something in his mind responded to her suggestion.

“Are there no colonies to this realm of England? What of the Indies—East and West? There’s a mort o’ them Indies, I know, whither officers are forever being dispatched. Who’d trouble about Randal’s name or story in one o’ they?”

“Egad! ’Tis an idea!” The Duke looked at Holles, his glance brightening. “What should you say to it, Randal?”

“Is there a post for me out there?” quoth the Colonel eagerly.

“At this very moment, no. But vacancies occur. Men die in those outlandish parts, or weary of the life, or find the climate intolerable and return. There are risks, of course, and....”

Holles cut in briskly. “I have said that I have lived on risks. And they’ll be less than those you represent as lying in wait for me here at home. Oh, I’ll take the risks. Right gladly I’ll take the risks. And I’ve little cause to be so wedded to the old world that I’d not exchange it for the new.”

“Why, then, we’ll see. A little patience, and it may be mine to offer you some place abroad.”

“Patience!” said Holles, his jaw fallen again.

“Why, to be sure. After all, such posts do not grow like apples. Keep me informed of where you are lodged, and I will send you word when the occasion offers.”

“And if he doesn’t send word soon do you come and see me again, Randal,” said her grace; “we’ll quicken him. He’s well enough; but he’s growing old, and his wits is sluggish.”

And the great man, whose eye had daunted armies, smiled benignly upon his termagant.

CHAPTER IV CHERRY BLOSSOMS

Colonel Holles knelt on the window-seat at the open casement of his parlour at the Paul’s Head. Leaning on the sill, he seemed to contemplate the little sunlit garden with its two cherry trees on which some of those belated blossoms lingered still. Cherry blossoms he was contemplating, but not those before him. The two trees of this little oasis in the City of London had multiplied themselves into a cherry orchard set in Devon and in the years that were gone beyond reclaiming.

The phenomenon was not new to him. Cherry blossoms had ever possessed the power to move him thus. The contemplation of them never failed to bring him the vision that was now spread before his wistful eyes. Mrs. Quinn’s few perches of garden had dissolved into an acre of sunlit flowering orchard. Above the trees in the background to the right a spire thrust up into the blue, surmounted by a weather-vane in the shape of a fish—which he vaguely knew to be an emblem of Christianity. Through a gap on the left he beheld a wall, ivy-clad, crumbling at its summit. Over this a lad was climbing stealthily—a long-limbed, graceful, fair-haired stripling, whose features were recognizable for his own if from the latter you removed the haggard lines that the years and hard living had imprinted. Softly and nimbly as a cat he dropped to earth on the wall’s hither side, and stood there half crouching, a smile on his young lips and laughter in his grey eyes. He was watching a girl who—utterly unconscious of his presence—swept to and fro through the air on a swing that was formed of a single rope passed from one tree to another.

She was a child, no more; yet of a well-grown, lissom grace that deceived folk into giving her more than the bare fifteen years she counted to her age. Hers was no rose-and-lily complexion. She displayed the healthy tan that comes of a life lived in the open far away from cities. Yet one glance into the long-shaped, deeply blue eyes that were the glory of her lovely little face sufficed to warn you that though rustic she was not simple. Here was one who possessed a full share of that feminine guile which is the heritage from Mother Eve to her favoured daughters. If you were a man and wise, you would be most wary when she was most demure.

Swinging now, her loosened brown hair streamed behind her as she flew forward, and tossed itself into a cloud about her face as she went back. And she sang as nearly as possible in rhythm with her swinging:

“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!

Where do you tarry?

Whiles here I stay for you

Waiting to marry.

Hey, young love! Ho, young....”

The song ended in a scream. Unheard, unsuspected, the stripling had crept forward through the trees. At the top of her backward swing he had caught her about the waist in his strong young arms. There was a momentary flutter of two black legs amid an agitated cloud of petticoat, then the rope swung forward, and the nymph was left in the arms of her young satyr. But only for a moment. Out of that grip she broke in a fury—real or pretended—and came to earth breathless, with flushed cheeks and flashing eye.

“You give yourself strange liberties, young Randal,” said she, and boxed his ears. “Who bade you here?”

“I ... I thought you called me,” said he, grinning, no whit abashed by either blow or look. “Come, now, Nan. Confess it!”

“I called you? I?” She laughed indignantly. “’Tis very likely! Oh, very likely!”

“You’ll deny it, of course, being a woman in the making. But I heard you.” And he quoted for her, singing:

“Hey, young love! Ho, young love!

Where do you tarry?”

“I was hiding on the other side of the wall. I came at once. And all I get for my pains and the risk to a fairly new pair of breeches is a blow and a denial.”

“You may get more if you remain.”

“I hope so. I had not come else.”

“But it’ll be as little to your liking.”

“That’s as may be. Meanwhile there’s this matter of a blow. Now a blow is a thing I take from nobody. For a man there is my sword....”

“Your sword!” She abandoned herself to laughter. “And you don’t even own a penknife.”

“Oh, yes I do. I own a sword. It was a gift from my father to-day—a birthday gift. I am nineteen to-day, Nan.”

“How fast you grow! You’ll be a man soon. And so your father has given you a sword?” She leaned against the bole of a tree, and surveyed him archly. “That was very rash of your father. You’ll be cutting yourself, I know.”

He smiled, but with a little less of his earlier assurance. But he made a fair recovery.

“You are straying from the point.”

“The point of your sword, sweet sir?”

“The point of my discourse. It was concerning this matter of a blow. If you were a man I am afraid I should have to kill you. My honour would demand no less.”

“With your sword?” she asked him innocently.

“With my sword, of course.”

“Ugh. Jack the Giant-Killer in a cherry orchard! You must see you are out of place here. Get you gone, boy. I don’t think I ever liked you, Randal. Now I’m sure of it. You’re a bloody-minded fellow for all your tender years. What you’ll be when you’re a man ... I daren’t think.”

He swallowed the taunt.

“And what you’ll be when you’re a woman is the thing I delight in thinking. We’ll return to that. Meanwhile, this blow....”

“Oh, you’re tiresome.”

“You delay me. That is why. What I would do to a man who struck me I have told you.”

“But you can’t think I believe you.”

This time he was not to be turned aside.

“The real question is what to do to a woman.” He approached her. “When I look at you, one punishment only seems possible.”

He took her by the shoulders in a grip of a surprising firmness. There was sudden alarm in those eyes of hers that hitherto had been so mocking.

“Randal!” she cried out, guessing his purpose.

Undeterred he accomplished it. Having kissed her, he loosed his hold, and stood back for the explosion which from his knowledge of her he was led to expect. But no explosion came. She stood limply before him, all the raillery gone out of her, whilst slowly the colour faded from her cheeks. Then it came flowing back in an all-suffusing flood, and there was a pathetic quiver at the corners of her mouth, a suspicious brightness in her drooping eyes.

“Why, Nan!” he cried, alarmed by phenomena so unexpected and unusual.

“Oh, why did you do that?” she cried on a sob.

Here was meekness! Had she boxed his ears again, it would have surprised him not at all. Indeed, it is what he had looked for. But that she should be stricken so spiritless, that she should have no reproof for him beyond that plaintive question, left him agape with amazement. It occurred to him that perhaps he had found the way to tame her; and he regretted on every count that he should not have had recourse before to a method so entirely satisfactory to himself. Meanwhile her question craved an answer.

“I’ve been wanting to do it this twelvemonth,” said he simply. “And I shall want to do it again. Nan, dear, don’t you know how much I love you? Don’t you know without my telling you? Don’t you?”

The fervent question chased away her trouble and summoned surprise to fill its place. A moment she stared at him, and her glance hardened. She began to show signs of recovery.

“The declaration should have preceded the ... the ... affront.”

“Affront!” he cried, in protest.

“What else? Isn’t it an affront to kiss a maid without a by-your-leave? If you were a man, I shouldn’t forgive you. I couldn’t. But as you’re just a boy”—her tone soared to disdainful heights—“you shall be forgiven on a promise that the offence is not to be repeated.”

“But I love you, Nan! I’ve said so,” he expostulated.

“You’re too precocious, young Randal. It comes, I suppose, of being given a sword to play with. I shall have to speak to your father about it. You need manners more than a sword at present.”

The minx was skilled in the art of punishing. But the lad refused to be put out of countenance.

“Nan, dear, I am asking you to marry me.”

She jumped at that. Her eyes dilated. “Lord!” she said. “What condescension! But d’you think I want a child tied to my apron-strings?”

“Won’t you be serious, Nan?” he pleaded. “I am very serious.”

“You must be, to be thinking of marriage.”

“I am going away, Nan—to-morrow, very early. I came to say good-bye.”

Her eyelids flickered, and in that moment a discerning glance would have detected a gleam of alarm from her blue eyes. But there was no hint of it in her voice.

“I thought you said it was to marry me you came.”

“Why will you be teasing me? It means so much to me, Nan. I want you to say that you’ll wait for me; that you’ll marry me some day.”

He was very close to her. She looked up at him a little breathlessly. Her feminine intuitions warned her that he was about to take a liberty; feminine perversity prompted her to frustrate the intention, although it was one that in her heart she knew would gladden her.

“Some day?” she mocked him. “When you’re grown up, I suppose? Why, I’ll be an old maid by then; and I don’t think I want to be an old maid.”

“Answer me, Nan. Don’t rally me. Say that you’ll wait.”

He would have caught her by the shoulders again. But she eluded those eager hands of his.

“You haven’t told me yet where you are going.”

Gravely he flung the bombshell of his news, confident that it must lend him a new importance in her eyes, and thus, perhaps, bring her into something approaching subjection.

“I am going to London, to the army. My father has procured me a cornetcy of horse, and I am to serve under General Monk, who is his friend.”

It made an impression, though she did not give him the satisfaction of seeing how great that impression was. To do her justice, the army meant no more to her just at that moment than champing horses, blaring trumpets, and waving banners. Of its grimmer side she took as yet no thought: else she might have given his news a graver greeting. As it was, the surprise of it left her silent, staring at him in a new wonder. He took advantage of it to approach her again. He committed the mistake of attempting to force the pace. He caught her to him, taking her unawares this time and seizing her suddenly, before she could elude him.

“Nan, my dear!”

She struggled in his arms. But he held her firmly. She struggled the harder, and, finding her struggles ineffective, her temper rose. Her hands against his breast she thrust him back.

“Release me at once! Release me, or I’ll scream!”

At that and the anger in her voice, he let her go, and stood sheepishly, abashed, whilst she retreated a few paces from him, breathing quickly, her eyes aflash.

“My faith! You’ll be a great success in London! They’ll like your oafish ways up yonder. I think you had better go.”

“Forgive me, Nan!” He was in a passion of penitence, fearing that this time he had gone too far and angered her in earnest. “Ah, don’t be cruel. It is our last day together for Heaven knows how long.”

“Well, that’s a mercy.”

“Ye don’t mean that, Nan? Ye can’t mean that ye care nothing about me. That you are glad I’m going.”

“You should mend your manners,” she reproved him by way of compromise.

“Why, so I will. It’s only that I want you so; that I’m going away—far away; that after to-day I won’t see you again maybe for years. If ye say that ye don’t care for me at all, why, then I don’t think that I’ll come back to Potheridge ever. But if ye care—be it never so little, Nan—if you’ll wait for me, it’ll send me away with a good heart, it’ll give me strength to become great. I’ll conquer the world for you, my dear,” he ended grandiloquently, as is the way of youth in its unbounded confidence. “I’ll bring it back to toss it in your lap.”

Her eyes were shining. His devotion and enthusiasm touched her. But her mischievous perversity must be dissembling it. She laughed on a rising inflection that was faintly mocking.

“I shouldn’t know what to do with it,” said she.

That and her laughter angered him. He had opened his heart. He had been boastful in his enthusiasm, he had magnified himself and felt himself shrinking again under the acid of her derision. He put on a sudden frosty dignity.

“You may laugh, but there’ll come a day maybe when you won’t laugh. You may be sorry when I come back.”

“Bringing the world with you,” she mocked him.

He looked at her almost savagely, white-faced. Then in silence he swung on his heel and went off through the trees. Six paces he had taken when he came face to face with an elderly, grave-faced gentleman in the clerkly attire of a churchman, who was pacing slowly reading in a book. The parson raised his eyes. They were long-shaped blue eyes like Nancy’s, but kindlier in their glance.

“Why, Randal!” he hailed the boy who was almost hurtling into him, being half-blinded by his unshed tears.

The youth commanded himself.

“Give you good-morning, Mr. Sylvester. I ... I but came to say good-bye....”

“Why, yes, my boy. Your father told me....”

Through the trees came the girl’s teasing voice.

“You are detaining the gentleman, father, and he is in haste. He is off to conquer the world.”

Mr. Sylvester raised his heavy grey eyebrows a little; the shadow of a smile hovered about the corners of his kindly mouth, his eyes looked a question, humorously.

Randal shrugged. “Nancy is gay at my departure, sir.”

“Nay, nay.”

“It affords her amusement, as you perceive, sir. She is pleased to laugh.”

“Tush, tush!” The parson turned, took his arm affectionately, and moved along with him towards the house. “A mask on her concern,” he murmured. “Women are like that. It takes a deal of learning to understand a woman; and I doubt, in the end, if the time is well spent. But I’ll answer for it that she’ll have a warm welcome for you on your return, whether you’ve conquered the world or not. So shall we all, my boy. You go to serve in a great cause. God bring you safely home again.”

But Randal took no comfort, and parted from Mr. Sylvester vowing in his heart that he would return no more betide what might.

Yet before he quitted Potheridge he had proof that Mr. Sylvester was right. It was in vain that day that Nancy awaited his return. And that night there were tears on her pillow, some of vexation, but some of real grief at the going of Randal.

Very early next morning, before the village was astir, Randal rode forth upon the conquest of the world, fortified by a tolerably heavy purse, and that brand-new sword—the gifts which had accompanied his father’s blessing. As he rode along by the wall above which the cherry blossoms flaunted, towards the grey rectory that fronted immediately upon the road, a lattice was pushed open overhead, and the head and shoulders of Nancy were protruded.

“Randal!” she softly called him, as he came abreast.

He reined in his horse and looked up. His rancour melted instantly. He was conscious of the quickening of his pulses.

“Nan!” His whole soul was in his utterance of the name.

“I ... I am sorry I laughed, Randal, dear. I wasn’t really gay. I have cried since. I have stayed awake all night not to miss you now.” This was hardly true, but it is very likely she believed it. “I wanted to say good-bye and God keep you, Randal, dear, and ... and ... come back to me soon again.”

“Nan!” he cried again. It was all that he could say; but he said it with singular eloquence.

Something slapped softly down upon the withers of his horse. His hand shot out to clutch it ere it fell thence, and he found himself holding a little tasselled glove.

There was a little scream from above. “My glove!” she cried. “I’ve dropped it. Randal, please!” She was leaning far out, reaching down a beseeching hand. But she was still too far above him to render possible the glove’s return. Besides, this time she did not deceive him with her comedy. He took off his hat, and passed the glove through the band.

“I’ll wear it as a favour till I come to claim the hand it has covered,” he told her in a sort of exaltation. He kissed the glove, bowed low, covered himself with a flourish, and touched the horse with his spurs.

As he rode away her voice floated after him, faintly mocking, yet with a choking quaver that betrayed her secret tears.

“Don’t forget to bring the world back with you.”

And that was the last of her voice that he had ever heard.

Five years passed before the day when next he came to Potheridge. Again the cherry trees were in blossom; again he saw them, tossed by the breeze, above the grey wall of the rectory orchard, as he rode forward with high-beating heart, a lackey trotting at his heels.

The elder Holles, who had removed himself permanently to London shortly after his son’s going to Monk, had been dead these two years. If Randal had not accomplished his proud boast of conquering the world, at least he had won himself an important place in it, a fine position in the army, that should be a stepping-stone to greater things. He was the youngest colonel in the service, thanks to his own talents as well as to Monk’s favour—for Monk could never so have favoured him had he not been worthy and so proved himself—a man of mark, of whom a deal was expected by all who knew him. All this he now bore written plainly upon him: his air of authority; his rich dress; the handsome furniture of his splendid horse; the servant following; all advertised the man of consequence. And he was proud of it all for the sake of her who had been his inspiration. From his heart he thanked God for these things, since he might offer them to her.

What would she look like, he wondered, as he rode amain, his face alight and eager. It was three years since last he had heard from her; but that was natural enough, for the constant movements demanded by his soldier’s life made it impossible that letters should reach him often. To her he had written frequently. But one letter only had he received in all those years, and that was long ago, written to him after Dunbar in answer to his announcement that he had won himself a captaincy and so advanced a stage in his conquest of the world.

How would she greet him now? How would she look at him? What would be her first word? He thought that it would be his name. He hoped it might be; for in her utterance of it he would read all he sought to know.

They came to a clattering halt at the rectory door. He flung down from the saddle without waiting for his groom’s assistance, and creaked and clanked across the cobbles to rattle on the oak with the butt of his riding-whip.

The door swung inwards. Before him, startled of glance, stood a lean old crone who in nothing resembled the corpulent Mathilda who had kept the rector’s house of old. He stared at her, some of the glad eagerness perishing in his face.

“The ... the rector?” quoth he, faltering. “Is he at home?”

“Aye, he be in,” she mumbled, mistrustfully eyeing his imposing figure. “Do ee bide a moment, whiles I calls him.” She vanished into the gloom of the hall, whence her voice reached him, calling: “Master! Master! Here be stranger!”

A stranger! O God! Here all was not as it should be.

Came a quick, youthful step, and a moment later a young man advanced from the gloom. He was tall, comely, and golden-haired; he wore clerkly black and the Geneva bands of a cleric.

“You desired to see me, sir?” he inquired.

Randal Holles stood looking at him, speechless for a long moment, dumbfounded. He moistened his lips at last, and spoke.

“It was Mr. Sylvester whom I desired to see, sir,” he answered. “Tell me”—and in his eagerness he was so unmannerly as to clutch the unknown parson’s arm—“where is he? Is he no longer here?”

“No,” was the gentle answer. “I have succeeded him.” The young cleric paused. “Mr. Sylvester has been with God these three years.”

Holles commanded himself. “This is bad news to me, sir. He was an old friend. And his daughter ... Miss Nancy? Where is she?”

“I cannot tell you, sir. She had departed from Potheridge before I came.”

“But whither did she go? Whither?” In a sudden frenzy he shook the other’s arm.

The cleric suffered it in silence, realizing the man’s sudden distraction.

“That, sir, I do not know. I never heard. You see, sir, I had not the acquaintance of Miss Sylvester. Perhaps the squire....”

“Aye, aye! The squire!”

To the squire’s he went, and burst in upon him at table in the hall. Squire Haynes, corpulent and elderly, heaved himself up at the intrusion of this splendid stranger.

“God in Heaven!” he cried in amazement. “It’s young Randal Holles! Alive!”

It transpired that the report had run through Potheridge that Randal had been killed at Worcester. That would be at about the time Mr. Sylvester died, and his daughter had left the village shortly thereafter. At another season and in other circumstances Holles might have smiled at the vanity which had led him to suppose his name famous throughout the land. Here to his native Potheridge no echo of that fame had penetrated. He had been reported dead and no subsequent deed of his had come to deny that rumour in this village that was the one spot in all England where men should take an interest in his doings.

Later, indeed, he may have pondered it, and derived from it a salutary lesson in the bridling of conceit. But at the moment his only thought was of Nancy. Was it known whither she had gone?

The squire had heard tell at the time; but he had since forgotten; a parson’s daughter was no great matter. In vain he made an effort of memory for Randal’s sake and upon Randal’s urging. Then he bethought him that perhaps his housekeeper could say. Women retained these trivial matters in their memories. Summoned, the woman was found to remember perfectly. Nancy had gone to Charmouth to the care of a married aunt, a sister of her father’s, her only remaining relative. The aunt’s name was Tenfil, an odd name.

To his dying day Randal would remember that instant ride to Charmouth, his mental anxiety numbing all sense of fatigue, followed by a lackey who at intervals dozed in his saddle, then woke to grumble and complain.

In the end half dead with weariness, yet quickened ever by suspense, they came to Charmouth, and they found the house of Tenfil, and the aunt; but they found no Nancy.

Mrs. Tenfil, an elderly, hard-faced, hard-hearted woman, all piety and no charity, one of those creatures who make of religion a vice for their own assured damnation, unbent a little from her natural sourness before the handsome, elegant young stranger. She was still a woman under the ashes of her years and of her bigotry. But at the mention of her niece’s name the sourness and the hardness came back to her face with interest.

“A creature without godliness. My brother was ever a weak man, and he ruined her with kindness. It was a mercy he died before he came to know the impiety of his offspring—a wilful, headstrong, worldly minx.”

“Madam, it is not her character I seek of you; but her whereabouts,” said the exasperated Randal.

She considered him in a new light. In the elegance and good looks, which had at first commended him, she now beheld the devil’s seal of worldliness. Such a man would seek her niece for no good purpose; yet he was just such a man as her niece, to her undoing, would make welcome. Her lips tightened with saintly, uncharitable purpose. She would make of herself a buckler between this malignant one and her niece. By great good fortune—by a heavenly Providence, in her eyes—her niece was absent at the time. And so in the cause of holiness she lied to him—although of this the poor fellow had no suspicion.

“In that case, young sir, you seek something I cannot give you.”

She would have left it vaguely there, between truth and untruth. But he demanded more.

“You mean, you do not know ... that ... that she has left you?”

She braced herself to the righteous falsehood.

“That is what I mean.”

Still he would not rest content. Haggard-faced he drove her into the last ditch of untruth.

“When did she leave you? Tell me that, at least.”

“Two years ago. After she had been with me a year.”

“And whither did she go? You must know that!”

“I do not. All that I know is that she went. Belike she is in London. That, at least, I know is where she would wish to be, being all worldliness and ungodliness.”

He stared at her, a physical sickness oppressing him. His little Nan in London, alone and friendless, without means. What might not have happened to her in two years?

“Madam,” he said in a voice that passion and sorrow made unsteady, “if you drove her hence, as your manner seems to tell me, be sure that God will punish you.”

And he reeled out without waiting for her answer.

Inquiries in the village might have altered the whole course of his life. But, as if the unutterable gods of Mrs. Tenfil’s devotions removed all chances of the frustration of her ends, Randal rode out of Charmouth without having spoken to another soul. To what end should he have done so, considering her tale? What reason could he have to disbelieve?

For six months after that he sought Nancy in all places likely and unlikely. And all that while in Charmouth Nancy patiently and trustfully awaited his coming, which should deliver her from the dreadful thraldom of Aunt Tenfil’s godliness. Some day, she was persuaded, must happen that which she did not know had already happened; that he must seek her in Potheridge, learn whither she was gone, and follow. For she did not share Potheridge’s belief that he was dead, though for a time she had mourned him grievously when first the rumour ran through her native village. Subsequently, however, soon after her migration to Charmouth, a letter from him had reached her there, written some months after Worcester fight, in which he announced himself not only safe and sound, but thriving, conquering the world apace, and counting upon returning laden with it soon, to claim her.

And meanwhile despair was settling upon young Randal. To have lived and striven with but one inspiration and one aim, and to find in the hour of triumph that the aim has been rendered unattainable, is to know one’s self for Fortune’s fool. To a loyal soul such as his the blow was crushing. It made life purposeless, robbed him of ambition and warped his whole nature. His steadfastness was transmuted into recklessness and restlessness. He required distraction from his brooding; the career of arms at home, in time of peace, could offer him none of this. He quitted the service of the Parliament, and went abroad—to Holland, that happy hunting-ground of all homeless adventurers. He entered Dutch service, and for a season prospered in it. But there was a difference, deplorable and grim. He was no longer concerned to build himself a position in the State. Such a thing was impossible in a foreign land, where he was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, a man who made of arms a trade soulless and uninspired. With the mantle of the mercenary he put on a mercenary’s habits. His easily earned gold he spent riotously, prodigally, as was ever the mercenary’s way. He gamed and drank and squandered it on worthless women.

He grew notorious; a man of reckless courage, holding his life cheap, an able leader of men, but a dissolute, hard-drinking, quarrelsome Englander whom it was not safe to trust too far.

The reaction set in at last; but not until five years of this life had corroded his soul. It came to him one day when he realized that he was over thirty, that he had dissipated his youth, and that the path he trod must lead him ultimately to a contemptible old age. Some of the good that slumbered in the depths of his soul welled up to cry a halt. He would go back. Physically and morally he would retrace his steps. He would seize this life that was slipping from him, and remould it to the original intention. For that he would return to England.

He wrote to Monk, who then was the powerfullest man in the realm. But—Fortune’s fool again—he wrote just too late. The restoration was accomplished. It was a few weeks old, no more. For one who had been a prominent Parliament man in the old days, and the son of a Parliament man still more prominent, there was no place by then in English service. Had he but made the application some months sooner, whilst the restoration was still in the balance, and had he then taken sides with Monk in bringing it about, he might by that very act have redeemed the past in Stuart eyes, setting up a credit to cancel the old debt.

The rest you guess. He sank thereafter deeper into his old habits, rendering himself ever more unfit for any great position, and so continued for five horrid years that seemed to him in retrospect an age. Then came the war, and England’s unspoken summons to every son of hers who trailed a sword abroad. Dutch service could no longer hold him. This was his opportunity. At last he would shake off the filth of a mercenary’s life, and go boldly home to find worthy employment for his sword.

Yet, but for the scheming credit accorded him by a tavern-keeper and the interest of a vulgar old woman who had cause to hold him in kindly memory, he might by now have been sent back, to tread once more the path to hell.

CHAPTER V THE MERCENARY

Colonel Holles took the air in Paul’s Yard, drawn forth partly by the voice of a preacher on the steps of Paul’s, who was attracting a crowd about him, partly by his own restlessness. It was now three days since his visit to the Cockpit, and although he could not reasonably have expected news from Albemarle within so short a time, yet the lack of it was fretting him.

He was moving along the skirts of the crowd that had collected before the preacher, with no intention of pausing, when suddenly a phrase arrested him.

“Repent, I say, while it is time! For behold the wrath of the Lord is upon you. The scourge of pestilence is raised to smite you down.”

Holles looked over the heads of the assembled citizens, and beheld a black crow of a man, cadaverous of face, with sunken eyes that glowed uncannily from the depths of their sockets.

“Repent!” the voice croaked. “Awaken! Behold your peril, and by prayer and reparation set yourselves to avert it whiles yet it may be time. Within the Parish of St. Giles this week lie thirty dead of this dread pestilence, ten in St. Clement’s, and as many in St. Andrew’s, Holborn. These are but warnings. Slowly but surely the plague is creeping upon the city. As Sodom of old was destroyed, so shall this modern Sodom perish, unless you rouse yourselves, and cast out the evil that is amongst you.”

The crowd was in the main irreverently disposed. There was some laughter, and one shrill, persistent voice that derided him. The preacher paused. He seemed to lengthen before them, as he raised his arms to Heaven.

“They laugh! Deriders, scoffers, will you not be warned? Oh, the great, the dreadful God! His vengeance is upon you, and you laugh. Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic. Therefore I will bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, and I will burn thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.”

Holles moved on. He had heard odd allusions to this pestilence which was said to be making victims in the outskirts and which it was alleged by some fools was a weapon of warfare wielded by the Dutch—at least, that it was the Dutch who had let it loose in England. But he had paid little heed to the matter, knowing that scaremongers are never lacking. Apparently the citizens of London were of his own way of thinking, if he might judge by the indifferent success attending the hoarse rantings of that preacher of doom.

As he moved on, a man of handsome presence and soldierly bearing, with the dress and air of a gentleman, considered him intently with eyes of startled wonder. As Holles came abreast of him, he suddenly stepped forward, detaching from the crowd, and caught the Colonel by the arm. Holles checked, and turned to find himself gravely regarded by this stranger.

“Either you are Randal Holles, or else the devil in his shape.”

Then Holles knew him—a ghost out of his past, as he was, himself, a ghost out of the past of this other; an old friend, a brother-in-arms of the days of Worcester and Dunbar.

“Tucker!” he cried, “Ned Tucker!” And impulsively, his face alight, he held out his hand.

The other gripped it firmly.

“I must have known you anywhere, Randal, despite the change that time has wrought.”

“It has wrought changes in yourself as well. But you would seem to have prospered!” The Colonel’s face was rejuvenated by a look of almost boyish pleasure.

“Oh, I am well enough,” said Tucker. “And you?”

“As you see.”

The other’s grave dark eyes considered him. There fell a silence, an awkward pause between those two, each of whom desired to ask a hundred questions. At last:

“I last heard of you in Holland,” said Tucker.

“I am but newly home.”

The other’s eyebrows went up, a manifestation of surprise.

“Whatever can have brought you?”

“The war, and the desire to find employment in which I may serve my country.”

“And you’ve found it?” The smile on the dark face suggested a scornful doubt which almost made an answer unnecessary.

“Not yet.”

“It would have moved my wonder if you had. It was a rashness to have returned at all.” He lowered his voice, lest he should be overheard. “The climate of England isn’t healthy at all to old soldiers of the Parliament.”

“Yet you are here, Ned.”

“I?” Again that slow, half-scornful smile lighted the grave, handsome face. He shrugged. He leaned towards Holles, and dropped his voice still further. “My father was not a regicide,” he said quietly. “Therefore, I am comparatively obscure.”

Holles looked at him, the eager pleasure which the meeting had brought him withering in his face. Would men ever keep green the memory of this thing and of the silly tie with which they had garnished it? Must it ever prove an insuperable obstacle to him in Stuart England?

“Nay, nay, never look so glum, man,” Tucker laughed, and he took the Colonel by the arm. “Let us go somewhere where we can talk. We should have a deal to tell each other.”

Holles swung him round.

“Come to the Paul’s Head,” he bade him. “I am lodged there.”

But the other hung back, hesitating a moment. “My own lodging is near at hand in Cheapside,” he said, and they turned about again.

In silence they moved off together. At the corner of Paul’s Yard, Tucker paused, and turned to look across at the doorway of Paul’s and the fanatical preacher who stood there shrilling. His voice floated across to them.

“Oh, the great and the dreadful God!”

Tucker’s face set into grimly sardonic lines. “An eloquent fellow, that,” he said. “He should rouse these silly sheep from their apathy.”

The Colonel stared at him, puzzled. There seemed to be an ulterior meaning to his words. But Tucker, without adding anything further, drew him away and on.

In a handsome room on the first floor of one of the most imposing houses in Cheapside, Tucker waved his guest to the best chair.

“An old friend, just met by chance,” he explained to his housekeeper, who came to wait upon him. “So it will be a bottle of sack ... of the best!”

When, having brought the wine, the woman had taken herself off and the two sat within closed doors, the Colonel gave his friend the account of himself which the latter craved.

Gravely Tucker heard him through, and grave his face remained when the tale was done. He sighed, and considered the Colonel a moment in silence with sombre eyes.

“So George Monk’s your only hope?” he said, slowly, at last. Then he uttered a short, sharp laugh of infinite scorn. “In your case I think I’d hang myself and have done. It’s less tormenting.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think that Monk will really help you? That he intends to help?”

“Assuredly. He has promised it, and he was my friend—and my father’s friend.”

“Friend!” said the other bitterly. “I never knew a trimmer to be any man’s friend but his own. And if ever a trimmer lived, his name is George Monk—the very prince of trimmers, as his whole life shows. First a King’s man; then something betwixt and between King and Parliament; then a Parliament man, selling his friends of the King’s side. And lastly a King’s man again, in opposition to his late trusting friends of the Parliament. Always choosing the side that is uppermost or that can outbid the other for his services. And look where he stands; Baron of this, Earl of that, Duke of Albemarle, Commander-in-Chief, Master of the Horse, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and God knows what else. Oh, he has grown fat on trimming.”

“You do him wrong, Ned.” Holles was mildly indignant.

“That is impossible.”

“But you do. You forget that a man may change sides from conviction.”

“Especially when it is to his own profit,” sneered Tucker.

“That is ungenerous, and it is untrue, of course.” The Colonel showed signs of loyal heat. “You are wrong also in your other assumption. He would have given me all the help I needed, but that....”

“But that he counted the slight risk—nay; what am I saying?—the slight inconvenience to himself should any questions afterwards be asked. He could have averted in such a case all awkwardness by pleading ignorance to your past....”

“He is too honest to do that.”

“Honest! Aye—‘honest George Monk’! Usually misfortune schools a man in worldly wisdom. But you....” Tucker smiled between contempt and sadness, leaving the phrase unfinished.

“I have told you that he will help me; that he has promised.”

“And you build upon his promises? Promises! They cost nothing. They are the bribes with which a trimmer puts off the importunate. Monk saw your need, as I see it. You carry the marks of it plainly upon you, in every seam of your threadbare coat. Forgive the allusion, Randal!” He set a conciliatory hand upon his friend’s arm, for the Colonel had reddened resentfully at the words. “I make it to justify myself of what I say.” And he resumed: “Monk’s revenues amount to thirty thousand pounds a year—such are the vails of trimmers. He was your friend, you say; he was your father’s friend, and owed much to your father, as all know. Did he offer you his purse to tide you over present stress, until opportunity permits him to fulfil his promise? Did he?”

“I could not have taken advantage of it if he had.”

“That is not what I ask you. Did he offer it? Of course he did not. Not he. Yet would not a friend have helped you at once and where he could?”

“He did not think of it.”

“A friend would have thought of it. But Monk is no man’s friend.”

“I say again, you are unjust to him. You forget that, after all, he was under no necessity to promise anything.”

“Oh, yes, he was. There was his Duchess, as you’ve told me. Dirty Bess can be importunate, and she commands him. He goes notoriously in terror of her. Yielding to her importunities he promised that which he will avoid fulfilling. I know George Monk, and all his leprous kind, of which this England is full to-day, battening upon her carcase with the foul greed of vultures. I....”

He grew conscious that Colonel Holles was staring at him, amazed by his sudden vehemence. He checked abruptly, and laughed.

“I grow hot for nothing at all. Nay, not for nothing—for you, old friend, and against those who put this deception upon you. You should not have come back to England, Randal. But since you’re here, at least do not woo disappointment by nourishing your hopes on empty promises.” He raised his glass to the light, and looked at the Colonel solemnly across the top of it. “I drink to your better fortune, Randal.”

Mechanically, without answering a word, the Colonel drank with him. His heart was turned to lead. The portrait Tucker had so swiftly painted of Monk’s soul was painted obviously with a hostile, bitter brush. Yet the facts of Monk’s life made it plausible. The likeness was undeniable, if distorted. And Holles—rendered pessimistic and despondent by his very condition—saw the likeness and not the distortion.

“If you are right,” he said slowly, his eyes upon the table, “I may as well take your advice, and hang myself.”

“Almost the only thing left for a self-respecting man in England,” said Tucker.

“Or anywhere else, for that matter. But why so bitter about England in particular?”

Tucker shrugged. “You know my sentiments, what they always were. I am no trimmer. I sail a steady course.”

Holles regarded him searchingly. He could not misunderstand the man’s words, still less his tone.

“Is that not.... Is it not a dangerous course?” he asked.

Tucker looked at him with wistful amusement.

“There are considerations an honest man should set above danger.”

“Oh, agreed.”

“There is no honesty save in steadfastness, Randal, and I am, I hope, an honest man.”

“By which you mean that I am not,” said Holles slowly.

Tucker did not contradict him by more than a shrug and a deprecatory smile that was of mere politeness. The Colonel rose, stirred to vehemence by his friend’s manifest opinion of him.

“I am a beggar, Ned; and beggars may not choose. Besides, for ten years now I have been a mercenary, neither more nor less. My sword is for hire. That is the trade by which I live. I do not make governments; I do not plague myself with questions of their worth; I serve them, for gold.”

But Tucker, smiling sadly, slowly shook his head.

“If that were true, you would not be in England now. You came, as you have said, because of the war. Your sword may be for hire; but you still have a country, and the first offer goes to her. Should she refuse it, the next will not go to an enemy of England’s. So why belittle yourself thus? You still have a country, and you love it. There are many here who are ready to love you, though they may not be among those who govern England. You have come back to serve her. Serve her, then. But first ask yourself how best she may be served.”

“What’s that?”

“Sit down, man. Sit, and listen.”

And now, having first sworn the Colonel to secrecy in the name of their old friendship—to which and to the Colonel’s desperate condition, the other trusted in opening his heart—Tucker delivered himself of what was no less than treason.

He began by inviting the Colonel to consider the state to which misgovernment by a spendthrift, lecherous, vindictive, dishonest king had reduced the country. Beginning with the Bill of Indemnity and its dishonourable evasion, he reviewed act by act the growing tyranny of the last five years since the restoration of King Charles, presenting each in the focus of his own vision, which, if bitterly hostile, was yet accurate enough. He came in the end to deal with the war to which the country was committed; he showed how it had been provoked by recklessness, and how it had been rendered possible by the gross, the criminal neglect of the affairs of that navy which Cromwell had left so formidable. And he dwelt upon the appalling license of the Court with all the fury of the Puritan he was at heart.

“We touch the end at last,” he concluded with fierce conviction. “Whitehall shall be swept clean of this Charles Stuart and his trulls and pimps and minions. They shall be flung on the foul dunghill where they belong, and a commonwealth shall be restored to rule this England in a sane and cleanly fashion, so that honest men may be proud to serve her once again.”

“My God, Ned, you’re surely mad!” Holles was aghast as much at the confidence itself as at the manner of it.

“To risk myself, you mean?” Tucker smiled grimly. “These vampires have torn the bowels out of better men in the same cause, and if we fail, they may have mine and welcome. But we do not fail. Our plans are shrewdly laid and already well advanced. There is one in Holland who directs them—a name I dare not mention to you yet, but a name that is dear to all honest men. Almost it is the hour. Our agents are everywhere abroad, moulding the people’s mind, directing it into a sane channel. Heaven itself has come to our help by sending us this pestilence to strike terror into men’s hearts and make them ask themselves how much the vices by which the rulers defile this land may not have provoked this visitation. That preacher you heard upon the steps of Paul’s is one of our agents, doing the good work, casting the seed in fertile places. And very soon now will come the harvest—such a harvest!”

He paused, and considered his stricken friend with an eye in which glowed something of the light of fanaticism.

“Your sword is idle and you seek employment for it, Randal. Here is a service you may take with honour. It is the service of the old Commonwealth to which in the old days you were stanch, a service aiming at these enemies who would still deny such men as you a place in England. You strike not only for yourself, but for some thousands in like case. And your country will not forget. We need such swords as yours. I offer you at once a cause and a career. Albemarle puts you off with promises of appointments in which the preference over worth is daily granted to the pimpish friends of the loathly creatures about Charles Stuart’s leprous Court. I have opened my heart to you freely and frankly, even at some risk. What have you to say to me?”

Holles rose, his decision taken, his face set. “What I said at first. I am a mercenary. I do not make governments. I serve them. There is no human cause in all the world to-day could move me to enthusiasm.”

“Yet you came home that you might serve England in her need.”

“Because I did not know where else to go.”

“Very well. I accept you at your own valuation, Randal—not that I believe you; but not to confuse the argument. Being here, you find the doors by which you counted upon entering all closed against you, and locked. What are you going to do? You say you are a mercenary; that your concern is but to give a soulless service to the hand that hires you. I present you to a liberal taskmaster; one who will richly reward your service. Since to you all service is alike, let the mercenary answer me.”

He, too, had risen, and held out a hand in appeal. The Colonel looked at him seriously awhile; then he smiled.

“What an advocate was lost in you, Ned!” said he. “You keep to the point—aye; but also you conveniently miss it. A mercenary serves governments in esse; the service of governments in posse is for enthusiasts; and I have had no enthusiasms these ten years and more. Establish your government, and my sword is for your hire, and gladly. But do not ask me to set my head upon the board in this gamble to establish it; for my head is my only remaining possession.”

“If you will not strike a blow for love, will you not strike one for hate: against the Stuart, whose vindictiveness will not allow you to earn your bread?”

“You overstate the case. Though much that you have said of him may be true, I will not yet despair of the help of Albemarle.”

“Why, you blind madman, I tell you—I swear to you—that in a very little while Albemarle will be beyond helping any man, beyond helping even himself.”

Holles was about to speak, when Tucker threw up a hand to arrest him.

“Do not answer me now. Let what I have said sink home into your wits. Give it thought. We are not pressed for a few days. Ponder my words, and if as the days pass and no further news comes to you from Whitehall—no fulfilment of this airy promise—perhaps you will regard things differently, and come to see where your interest really lies. Remember, then, that we need skilled soldiers as leaders for our movement, and that an assured welcome awaits you. Remember, too—this for the mercenary you represent yourself—that the leaders now will be the leaders still when the task is accomplished, and that theirs will be the abiding rewards. Meanwhile, Randal, the bottle’s not half done. So sit you down again, and let us talk of other matters.”

Going home towards dusk, the thing that most intrigued the Colonel was the dangerous frankness that Tucker had used with him, trusting a man in his desperate case with a secret so weighty upon no more than his pledged word and what Tucker remembered of him in the creditable state from which he had long since fallen. Reflection, however, diminished his wonder. Tucker had divulged no facts whose betrayal could seriously impair the plotters. He had mentioned no names; he had no more than vaguely alluded to a directing mind in Holland, which the Colonel guessed to be Algernon Sidney’s, who was beyond the reach of the Stuart arm. For the rest, what had he told him? That there was a serious movement afoot to overthrow the Stuart dynasty, and restore the Commonwealth. Let Holles carry that tale to the authorities, and what would happen? He could impeach by name no man but Tucker; and all he could say of Tucker was that Tucker had told him these things. Tucker’s word would be as good as Holles’s before a justice. On the score of credit, Holles’s antecedents would be the subject of inquiry, and the revelation of them would result in danger to himself alone.

Tucker had not been as ingenuous and confiding as he had at first supposed. He laughed a little to himself at his own simplicity. Then laughed again as he reviewed the proposal Tucker had made him. He might be desperate, but not desperate enough for that—not yet. He caressed his neck affectionately. He had no mind to feel a rope tightening about it. Nor would he yet despair because of what Tucker, largely for the purposes of his own advocacy, had said of Albemarle. The more he considered it, away from Tucker now, the more persuaded was he of Albemarle’s sincerity and good intentions.

CHAPTER VI MR. ETHEREDGE PRESCRIBES

On his return to the Paul’s Head from that treasonable talk with Tucker, the Colonel found a considerable excitement presiding over that usually peaceful and well-conducted hostelry. The common room was thronged, which was not in itself odd, considering the time of day; what was odd was the noisy, vehement babble of the normally quiet, soberly spoken merchants who for the main part composed its custom. Mrs. Quinn was there listening to the unusually shrill voice of her bookseller-suitor Coleman, and her round red face, which the Colonel had never seen other than creased and puckered in smiles of false joviality, was solemn for once and had lost some of its normally high colour. Near at hand hovered the drawer, scraping imaginary crumbs from the table with his wooden knife, as a pretext for remaining to listen. And so engrossed was his mistress that she left his eavesdropping unreproved.

Yet, for all her agitation, she had a coy glance for the Colonel as he stalked through, with that lofty detachment and arrogant unconcern of his surroundings which she found so entirely admirable in him. It was not long before she followed him into the little parlour at the back, where she found him stretched at his ease on his favourite seat under the window, having cast aside sword and hat. He was in the act of loading a pipe from a leaden tobacco-jar.

“Lord, Colonel! Here be dreadful news,” she told him.

He looked up, cocking an eyebrow.

“You’ll have heard?” she added. “It is the talk of the Town.”

He shook his head. “Nay, I heard nothing dreadful. I met a friend, an old friend, over there by the Flower of Luce, and I’ve been with him these three hours. I talked to no one else. What is this news?”

But she was frowning as she looked at him scrutinizingly with her round blue eyes. Her mind was shifted by his light words to her own more immediate concerns. He had met a friend—an old friend. Not much in that to arouse anxiety, perhaps. But Mrs. Quinn moved now in constant dread of influences that might set the Colonel on a sound worldly footing likely to emancipate him from his dependence upon herself. She had skilfully drawn from him enough of the details of his interview with Albemarle to realize that the help upon which he counted from that quarter had not been forthcoming. He had been put off with vague promises, and Mrs. Quinn knew enough of her world not to be greatly perturbed by that. None the less she would have set all doubts at rest by leading the Colonel into the relationship in which she desired to hold him, but that as yet the Colonel manifested no clear disposition to be led. And she was too crafty a huntress to scare her quarry by premature and too direct an onslaught. The only anxiety, yielding to which she might have committed that imprudence, was on the score of the unexpected. She knew that the unexpected will sometimes happen, and this mention of a friend—an old friend, with whom he had spent some hours in intimate talk—was disquieting. She would have liked to question him on the subject of that friend, and might have done so but for his insistent repetition of the question:

“What is this news?”

Recalled to it thus, the gravity of the news itself thrust out the other matter from her mind.

“That the plague has broken out in the City itself—in a house in Bearbinder Lane. It was brought by a Frenchman from Long Acre, where he lived, and which he left upon finding the pestilence to be growing in his neighbourhood. Yet it seems he was already taken with the disease, which now the wretch has brought to our threshold, as it were, without benefit to himself.”

The Colonel thought of Tucker and his scaremongering emissaries.

“Perhaps it is not true,” said he.

“Aye, but it is. Beyond a doubt. It was put about by a preacher rogue from the steps of Paul’s to-day. At first folk did not believe him. But they went to Bearbinder Lane, and there found the house shut up, and guarded by command of my Lord Mayor. And they do say that Sir John Lawrence is gone to Whitehall to take order about this, to concert measures for staying the spread of the pestilence; they are to close playhouses and all other places where people come together, which will likely mean that they will be closing taverns and eating-houses. And what should I do in that case?”

“Nay, nay,” Holles comforted her. “It will hardly come to that. Men must eat and drink or they starve, and that’s as bad as the pestilence.”

“To be sure it is. But they’ll never think of that in their zeal and their sudden godliness—for they’ll be in a muck-sweat o’ godliness now that they see what a visitation has been brought upon us by the vices of the Court. And this to happen at such a time, with the Dutch fleet, as they say, about to attack the coast!”

She railed on. Disturbed out of her self-centred existence into a consideration of the world’s ills now that she found herself menaced by them, she displayed a prodigious volubility upon topics that hitherto she had completely ignored.

And the substance of her news was true enough. The Lord Mayor was at that very moment at Whitehall urging immediate and drastic measures for combating the spread of the pestilence, and one of these measures was the instant closing of the playhouses. But since he did not at the same time urge the closing of the churches, in which the congregating of people was at least as dangerous as in the theatres, it was assumed at Court that Sir John was the cat’s-paw of the Puritans who sought to make capital out of the pestilence. Besides, the visitation was one that confined itself to the poorer quarters and the lower orders. Heaven would never be so undiscriminating as to permit this horrible disease to beset persons of quality. And then, too, Whitehall’s mind at the moment was over-full of other matters: there were these rumours that the Dutch fleet was out, and that was quite sufficient to engage such time and attention as could be spared from pleasure by the nation’s elect, following in the footsteps of their pleasure-loving King. Also a good many of the nation’s elect were exercised at the time by personal grievances in connection with the fleet and the war. Of these perhaps the most disgruntled—as he was certainly the most eminent—was His Grace of Buckingham, who found the nation sadly negligent of the fact that he had come all the way from York, and his lord-lieutenancy there, to offer her his valuable services in her hour of need.

He had requested the command of a ship, a position to which his rank and his talents fully entitled him, in his own view. That such a request would be refused had never entered his calculations. But refused it was. There were two factors working against him. The first was that the Duke of York cordially disliked him and neglected no chance of mortifying him; the second was that the Duke of York, being Lord Admiral of the Fleet, desired to take no risks. There were many good positions from which capable naval men could be excluded to make way for sprigs of the nobility. But the command of a man-of-war was not one of these. Buckingham was offered a gun-brig. Considering that the offer came from the King’s brother, he could not resent it in the terms his hot blood prompted. But what he could do to mark his scorn, he did. He refused the gun-brig, and enlisted as a volunteer aboard a flag-ship. But here at once a fresh complication arose. As a Privy Councillor he claimed the right of seat and voice in all councils of war, in which capacity it is probable he might have done even more damage than in command of one of the great ships. Again the Duke of York’s opposition foiled him, whereupon in a rage he posted from Portsmouth to Whitehall to lay his plaint before his crony the King. The Merry Monarch may have wavered; it may have vexed him not to be able to satisfy the handsome rake who understood so well the arts of loosening laughter; but between his own brother and Buckingham there can have been no choice. And so Charles could not help him.

Buckingham had remained, therefore, at Court, to nurse his chagrin, and to find his way circuitously into the strange history of Colonel Randal Holles. His grace possessed, as you know, a mercurial temperament which had not yet—although he was now approaching forty—lost any of its liveliness. Such natures are readily consoled, because they readily find distractions. It was not long before he had forgotten, in new and less creditable pursuits, not only the humbling of his dignity, but even the circumstance that his country was at war. Dryden has summed him up in a single line: He “was everything by starts, and nothing long.” The phrase applies as much to Buckingham’s moods as to his talents; it epitomizes the man’s whole character.

His friend George Etheredge, that other gifted rake who had leapt into sudden fame a year ago with his comedy “The Comic Revenge,” had been deafening his ears with praises of the beauty and talent of that widely admired and comparatively newly discovered actress Sylvia Farquharson. At first Buckingham had scoffed at his friend’s enthusiasm.

“Such heat of rhetoric to describe a playhouse baggage!” he had yawned. “For a man of your parts, George, I protest you’re nauseatingly callow.”

“You flatter me in seeking to reprove,” Etheredge laughed. “To be callow despite the years is to bear the mark of greatness. Whom the gods love are callow always; for whom the gods love die young, whatever be their age.”

“You aim at paradox, I suppose. God help me!”

“No paradox at all. Whom the gods love never grow old,” Etheredge explained himself. “They never come to suffer as do you from jaded appetites.”

“You may be right,” his grace admitted gloomily. “Prescribe me a tonic.”

“That is what I was doing: Sylvia Farquharson, at the Duke’s House.”

“Bah! A play actress! A painted doll on wires! Twenty years ago your prescription might have served.”

“You admit that you grow old. Superfluous admission! But this, let me perish, is no painted doll. This is an incarnation of beauty and talent.”

“So I’ve heard of others that had neither.”

“And let me add that she is virtuous.”

Buckingham stared at him, opening his lazy eyes. “What may that be?” he asked.

“The chief drug in my prescription.”

“But does it exist, or is your callowness deeper than I thought?” quoth Buckingham.

“Come and see,” Mr. Etheredge invited him.

“Virtue,” Buckingham objected, “is not visible.”

“Like beauty, it dwells in the beholder’s eye. That’s why you’ve never seen it, Bucks.”

To the Duke’s playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields his disgruntled grace suffered himself, in the end, to be conducted. He went to scoff. He remained to worship. You already know—having overheard the garrulous Mr. Pepys—how from his box, addressing his companion in particular and the whole house in general, the ducal author loudly announced that he would give his muse no rest until he should have produced a play with a part worthy of the superb talents of Miss Farquharson.

His words were reported to her. They bore with them a certain flattery to which it was impossible that she should be impervious. She had not yet settled herself completely into this robe of fame that had been thrust upon her. She continued unspoiled, and she did not yet condescendingly accept such utterances from the great as no more than the proper tribute to her gifts. Such praise from one so exalted, himself a distinguished author and a boon companion of the King’s, set a climax upon the triumphs that lately she had been garnering.

It prepared her for the ducal visit to the green room, which followed presently. She was presented by Mr. Etheredge with whom she was already acquainted, and she stood shyly before the tall, supremely elegant duke, under the gaze of his bold eyes.

In his golden periwig he looked at this date not a year more than thirty, despite the hard life he had lived from boyhood. As yet he had come to none of that grossness to be observed in the portrait which Sir Peter Lely painted some years later. He was still the handsomest man at Charles’s Court, with his long-shaped, dark blue eyes under very level brows, his fine nose and chin, and his humorous, sensitive, sensual mouth. In shape and carriage he was of an extraordinary grace that drew all eyes upon him. Yet at sight, instinctively, Miss Farquharson disliked him. She apprehended under all that beauty of person something sinister. She shrank inwardly and coloured a little under the appraising glance of those bold, handsome eyes, which seemed to penetrate too far. Reason and ambition argued her out of that instinctive shrinking. Here was one whose approval carried weight and would set the seal upon her fame, one whose good graces could maintain her firmly on the eminence to which she had so laboriously climbed. He was a man whom, in spite of all instinctive warnings, she must use with consideration and a reasonable submission.

On his side, the Duke, already captivated by her grace and beauty upon the stage, found himself lost in admiration now that at close quarters he beheld her slim loveliness. For lovely she was, and the blush which his scrutiny had drawn to her cheeks, heightening that loveliness, almost disposed him to believe Etheredge’s incredible assertion of her virtue. Shyness may be counterfeited and the simpers of unsophistication are easily assumed; but a genuine blush is not to be commanded.

His grace bowed, low, the curls of his wig swinging forward like the ears of a water-spaniel.

“Madam,” he said, “I would congratulate you were I not more concerned to congratulate myself for having witnessed your performance, and still more Lord Orrery, your present author. Him I not only congratulate but envy—a hideous, cankering emotion, which I shall not conquer until I have written you a part at least as great as his Katherine. You smile?”

“It is for gratification at your grace’s promise.”

“I wonder now,” said he, his eyes narrowing, his lips smiling a little. “I wonder is that the truth, or is it that you think I boasted? that such an achievement is not within my compass? I’ll confess frankly that until I saw you it was not. But you have made it so, my dear.”

“If I have done that, I shall, indeed, have deserved well of my audience,” she answered, but lightly, laughing a little, as if to discount the high-flown compliment.

“As well, I trust, as I shall have deserved of you,” said he.

“The author must always deserve the best of his puppets.”

“Deserve, aye. But how rarely does he get his deserts!”

“Surely you, Bucks, have little reason to complain,” gibed Etheredge. “In my case, now, it is entirely different.”

“It is, George—entirely,” his grace agreed, resenting the interruption. “You are the rarity. You have always found better than you deserved. I have never found it until this moment.” And his eyes upon Miss Farquharson gave point to his meaning.

When at length they left her, her sense of exaltation was all gone. She could not have told you why, but the Duke of Buckingham’s approval uplifted her no longer. Almost did she wish that she might have gone without it. And when Betterton came smiling good-naturedly, to offer her his congratulations upon this conquest, he found her bemused and troubled.

Bemused, too, did Etheredge find the Duke as they drove back together to Wallingford House.

“Almost, I think,” said he, smiling, “that already you find my despised prescription to your taste. Persevered with it may even restore you your lost youth.”

“What I ask myself,” said Buckingham, “is why you should have prescribed her for me instead of for yourself.”

“I am like that,” said Etheredge,—“the embodiment of self-sacrifice. Besides, she will have none of me—though I am ten years younger than you are, fully as handsome and almost as unscrupulous. The girl’s a prude, and I never learnt the way to handle prudes. Faith, it’s an education in itself.”

“Is it?” said Buckingham. “I must undertake it, then.”

And undertake it he did with all the zest of one who loved learning and the study of unusual subjects.

Daily now he was to be seen in a box at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and daily he sent her, in token of his respectful homage, gifts of flowers and comfits. He would have added jewels, but that the wiser Etheredge restrained him.

“Ne brusquez pas l’affaire,” was the younger man’s advice. “You’ll scare her by precipitancy, and so spoil all. Such a conquest as this requires infinite patience.”

His grace suffered himself to be advised, and set a restraint upon his ardour, using the greatest circumspection in the visits which he paid her almost daily after the performance. He confined the expressions of admiration to her histrionic art, and, if he touched upon her personal beauty and grace, it was ever in association with her playing, so that its consideration seemed justified by the part that he told her he was conceiving for her.

Thus subtly did he seek to lull her caution and intoxicate her senses with the sweet poison of flattery, whilst discussing with her the play he was to write—which, in his own phrase, was to immortalize himself and her, thereby eternally uniting them. There was in this more than a suggestion of a spiritual bond, a marriage of their respective arts to give life to his dramatic conception, so aloof from material and personal considerations that she was deceived into swallowing at least half the bait. Nor was it vague. His grace did not neglect to furnish it with a certain form. His theme, he told her, was the immortal story of Laura and her Petrarch set in the warm glitter of an old Italian frame. Nor was that all he told her. He whipped his wits to some purpose, and sketched for her the outline of a first act of tenderness and power.

At the end of a week he announced to her that this first act was already written.

“I have laboured day and night,” he told her; “driven relentlessly by the inspiration you have furnished me. So great is this that I must regard the thing as more yours than mine, or I shall do it when you have set upon it the seal of your approval.” Abruptly he asked her, as if it were a condition predetermined: “When will you hear me read it?”

“Were it not better that your grace should first complete the work?” she asked him.

He was taken aback, almost horror-stricken, to judge by his expression.

“Complete it!” he cried; “without knowing whether it takes the shape that you desire?”

“But it is not what I desire, your grace....”

“What else, then? Is it not something that I am doing specially for you, moved to it by yourself? And shall I complete it tormented the while by doubts as to whether you will consider it worthy of your talents when it is done? Would you let a dressmaker complete your gown without ever a fitting to see how it becomes you? And is a play, then, less important than a garment? Is not a part, indeed, a sort of garment for the soul? Nay, now, if I am to continue I must have your assistance as I say. I must know how this first act appears to you, how far my Laura does justice to your powers; and I must discuss with you the lines which the remainder of the play shall follow. Therefore again I ask you—and in the sacred cause of art I defy you to deny me—when will you hear what I have written?”

“Why, since your grace does me so much honour, when you will.”

It was intoxicating, this homage to her talent from one of his gifts and station, the intimate of princes, the close associate of kings, and it stifled, temporarily at least, the last qualm of her intuitions which had warned her against this radiant gentleman. They had become so friendly and intimate in this week, and yet his conduct had been so respectful and circumspect throughout, that clearly her instincts had misled her at that first meeting.

“When I will,” said he. “That is to honour me, indeed. Shall it be to-morrow, then?”

“If your grace pleases, and you will bring the act....”

“Bring it?” He raised his eyebrows. His lip curled a little as he looked round the dingy green room. “You do not propose, child, that I should read it here?” He laughed in dismissal of the notion.

“But where else, then?” she asked, a little bewildered.

“Where else but in my own house? What other place were proper?”

“Oh!” She was dismayed a little. An uneasiness, entirely instinctive, beset her once again. It urged her to draw back, to excuse herself. Yet reason combated instinct. It were a folly to offend him by a refusal? Such a thing would be affronting by its implication of mistrust; and she was very far from wishing to affront him.

He observed the trouble in her blue eyes as she now regarded him, but affected not to observe it, and waited for her to express herself. She did so after a moment’s pause, faltering a little.

“But ... at your house.... Why, what would be said of me, your grace? To come there alone....”

“Child! Child!” he interrupted her, his tone laden with gentle reproach. “Can you think that I should so lightly expose you to the lewd tongues of the Town? Alone? Give your mind peace. I shall have some friends to keep you in countenance and to join you as audience to hear what I have written. There shall be one or two ladies from the King’s House; perhaps Miss Seymour from the Duke’s here will join us; there is a small part for her in the play; and there shall be some friends of my own; maybe even His Majesty will honour us. We shall make a merry party at supper, and after supper you shall pronounce upon my Laura whom you are to incarnate. Is your hesitancy conquered?”

It was, indeed. Her mind was in a whirl. A supper party at Wallingford House, at which in a sense she was to be the guest of honour, and which the King himself would attend! She would have been mad to hesitate. It was to enter the great world at a stride. Other actresses had done it—Moll Davis and little Nelly from the King’s House; but they had done it upon passports other than those of histrionic talent. She would have preferred that Miss Seymour should not have been included. She had no great opinion of Miss Seymour’s conduct. But there was a small part for her, and that was perhaps a sufficient justification.

And so she cast aside her hesitation, and gladdened his grace by consenting to be present.

CHAPTER VII THE PRUDE

On the evening of the day that had seen the meeting between Holles and Tucker, at about the same hour that Sir John Lawrence was vainly representing at Whitehall the expediency of closing the theatres and other places of congregation in view of the outbreak of plague within the City itself, His Grace of Buckingham was sitting down to supper with a merry company in the great dining-room of Wallingford House.

Eleven sat down to a table that was laid for twelve. The chair on the Duke’s right stood empty. The guest of honour, Miss Farquharson, had not yet arrived. At the last moment she had sent a message that she was unavoidably detained for some little time at home, and that, if on this account it should happen that she must deny herself the honour of sitting down to supper at his grace’s table, at least she would reach Wallingford House in time for the reading with which his grace was to delight the company.

It was in part a fiction. There was nothing to detain Miss Farquharson beyond a revival of her uneasy intuitions, which warned her against the increase of intimacy that would attend her inclusion in the Duke’s supper-party. The play, however, was another affair. Therefore she would so time her arrival that she would find supper at an end and the reading about to begin. To be entirely on the safe side, she would present herself at Wallingford House two hours after the time for which she had been bidden.

His grace found her message vexatious, and he would have postponed supper until her arrival but that his guests did not permit him to have his own way in the matter. As the truth was that there was no first act in existence, for the Duke had not yet written a line of it and probably never would, and that supper was to provide the whole entertainment, it follows that this would be protracted, and that however late she came she was likely still to find the party at table. Therefore her late arrival could be no grave matter in the end. Meanwhile, the empty chair on the Duke’s right awaited her.

They were a very merry company, and as time passed they grew merrier. There was Etheredge, of course, the real promoter of the whole affair, and this elegant, talented libertine who was ultimately—and at a still early age—to kill himself with drinking was doing the fullest justice to the reputation which the winecup had already earned him. There was Sedley, that other gifted profligate, whose slim, graceful person and almost feminine beauty gave little indication of the roistering soul within. Young Rochester should have been of the party, but he was at that moment in the Tower, whither he had been sent as a consequence of his utterly foolish and unnecessary attempt to abduct Miss Mallet two nights ago. But Sir Harry Stanhope filled his vacant place—or, at least, half-filled it, for whilst Rochester was both wit and libertine, young Stanhope was a libertine only. And of course there was Sir Thomas Ogle, that boon companion of Sedley’s, and two other gentlemen whose names have not survived. The ladies were of less distinguished lineage. There was the ravishingly fair little Anne Seymour from the Duke’s House, her white shoulders displayed in a décolletage that outraged even the daring fashion of the day. Seated between Stanhope and Ogle, she was likely to become a bone of contention between them in a measure as they drowned restraint in wine. There was Moll Davis from the King’s House seated on the Duke’s left, with Etheredge immediately below her and entirely engrossing her, and there was that dark, statuesque, insolent-eyed Jane Howden, languidly spreading her nets for Sir Charles Sedley, who showed himself willing and eager to be taken in them. A fourth lady on Ogle’s left was making desperate but futile attempts to draw Sir Thomas’s attention from Miss Seymour.

The feast was worthy of the exalted host, worthy of that noble chamber with its richly carved wainscoting, its lofty ceiling carried on graceful fluted pillars, lighted by a hundred candles in colossal gilded girandoles. The wine flowed freely, and the wit, flavoured with a salt that was not entirely Attic, flowed with it. Laughter swelled increasing ever in a measure as the wit diminished. Supper was done, and still they kept the table, over their wine, waiting for that belated guest whose seat continued vacant.

Above that empty place sat the Duke—a dazzling figure in a suit of shimmering white satin with diamond buttons that looked like drops of water. Enthroned in his great gilded chair, he seemed to sit apart, absorbed, aloof, fretted by the absence of the lady in whose honour he had spread this feast, and annoyed with himself for being so fretted, as if he were some callow schoolboy at his first assignation.

Alone of all that company he did not abuse the wine. Again and again he waved away the velvet-footed lackeys that approached to pour for him. Rarely he smiled as some lively phrase leapt forth to excite the ready laughter of his guests. His eyes observed them, noting the flushed faces and abandoned attitudes as the orgy mounted to its climax. He would have restrained them, but that for a host to do so were in his view an offence against good manners. Gloomily, abstractedly, his eyes wandered from the disorder of the table, laden with costly plate of silver and of gold, with sparkling crystal, with pyramids of fragrant fruits and splendours of flowers that already were being used as missiles by his hilarious guests.

From the chilly heights of his own unusual sobriety he found them gross and tiresome; their laughter jarred on him. He shifted his weary glance to the curtains masking the long windows. They draped the window-spaces almost from floor to ceiling, wedges of brilliant colour—between blue and green, upon which golden peacocks strutted—standing out sharply from the sombre richness of the dark wainscot. He strained his ears to catch some rumble of wheels in the courtyard under those windows, and he frowned as a fresh and prolonged burst of laughter from his guests beat upon his ears to shut out all other sounds.

Then Sedley in a maudlin voice began to sing a very questionable song of his own writing, whilst Miss Howden made a comedy of pretending to silence him. He was still singing it, when Stanhope sprang up and mounted his chair, holding aloft a dainty shoe of which he had stripped Miss Seymour, and calling loudly for wine. Pretty little Anne would have snatched back her footgear but that she was restrained by Ogle, who not only held her firmly, but had pulled her into his lap, where she writhed and screamed and giggled all in one.

Solemnly, as if it were the most ordinary and natural of things, a lackey poured wine into the shoe, as Stanhope bade him. And Stanhope, standing above them, gay and flushed, proposed a toast the terms of which I have no intention of repeating.

He was midway through when the twin doors behind the Duke were thrown open by a chamberlain, whose voice rang solemnly above the general din.

“Miss Sylvia Farquharson, may it please your grace.”

There was a momentary pause as of surprise; then louder than ever rose their voices in hilarious acclamation of the announcement.

Buckingham sprang up and round, and several others rose with him to give a proper welcome to the belated guest. Stanhope, one foot on his chair, the other on the table, bowed to her with a flourish of the slipper from which he had just drunk.

She stood at gaze, breathless and suddenly pale, on the summit of the three steps that led down to the level of the chamber, her startled, dilating eyes pondering fearfully that scene of abandonment. She saw little Anne Seymour, whom she knew, struggling and laughing in the arms of Sir Thomas Ogle. She saw Etheredge, whom she also knew, sitting with flushed face and leering eyes, an arm about the statuesque bare neck of Miss Howden, her lovely dark head upon his shoulder; she saw Stanhope on high, capering absurdly, his wig awry, his speech halting and indecorous; and she saw some others in attitudes that even more boldly proclaimed the licence presiding over this orgy to which she had been bidden.

Lastly she saw the tall white figure of the Duke advancing towards her, his eyes narrowed, a half-smile on his full lips, both hands outheld in welcome. He moved correctly, with that almost excessive grace that was his own, and he at least showed no sign of the intoxication that marked the guests at this Circean feast. But that afforded her no reassurance. From pale that they had been, her cheeks—her whole body, it seemed to her—had flamed a vivid scarlet. Now it was paling again, paling this time in terror and disgust.

Fascinatedly she watched his grace’s advance for a moment. Then incontinently she turned, and fled, with the feelings of one who had looked down for a moment into the pit of hell and drawn back in shuddering horror before being engulfed.

Behind her fell a dead silence of astonishment. It endured whilst you might have counted six. Then a great peal of demoniac laughter came like an explosion to drive her fearfully onward.

Down the long panelled gallery she ran as we run in a nightmare, making for all her efforts but indifferent speed upon the polished, slippery floor, gasping for breath in her terror of a pursuit of which she fancied that already she heard the steps behind her. She reached the hall, darted across this, and across the vestibule, her light silk mantle streaming behind her, and so gained at last the open door, stared at by lackeys, who wondered, but made no attempt to stay her.

Too late came the shout from the pursuing Duke ordering them to bar her way. By then she was already in the courtyard, and running like a hare for the gateway that opened upon Whitehall. Out of this the hackney-coach that had brought her was at that moment slowly rumbling. Panting she overtook it, just as the driver brought it to a halt in obedience to her cry.

“To Salisbury Court,” she gasped. “Drive quickly!”

She was in, and she had slammed the door as the Duke’s lackeys—three of them—ran alongside the vehicle, bawling their commands to stop. She flung half her body through the window on the other side to countermand the order.

“Drive on! Drive quickly, in God’s name!”

Had they still been in the courtyard, it is odds that the driver would not have dared proceed. But they were already through the gateway in Whitehall itself, and the coach swung round to the left in the direction of Charing Cross. Here in the open street the driver could defy the Duke’s lackeys, and the latter dared not make any determined attempt to hinder him.

The coach rolled on, and Miss Farquharson sank back to breathe at last, to recover from her nameless terror and to regain her calm.

The Duke went back with dragging feet and scowling brow to be greeted by a storm of derision upon which in more sober mood his guests would hardly have ventured. He attempted to laugh with them, to dissemble the extent to which he had been galled. But he hardly made a success of it, and there was distinct ill-temper in the manner in which he flung himself down into his great chair. Mr. Etheredge, leaning across Miss Howden, laid a white jewelled hand on his friend’s arm.

He alone of all the company, although he had probably drunk more deeply than any, showed no sign of intoxication beyond the faint flush about his eyes.

“I warned you,” he said, “that the little prude is virtuous, and that she will require much patience. This is your chance to exercise it.”

CHAPTER VIII MR. ETHEREDGE ADVISES

Towards midnight, when all the guests but Etheredge had departed, and the candles lighting the disordered room were guttering in their sconces, the Duke sat alone in council with the younger libertine. He had dismissed his servants; the doors were closed, and they were entirely private.

The Duke unburdened himself, bitterly and passionately. The patience which Etheredge counselled was altogether beyond him, he confessed. More than ever now, when, by the exercise of it, by moving circuitously to his ends, he had so scared the little prude that he was worse off than at the outset.

Etheredge smiled.

“You’re a prodigiously ungrateful fellow. You go clumsily to work and then you blame me for the failure of your endeavours. Had you asked me, I could have told you what must happen with a parcel of fools and sluts who haven’t learnt the art of carrying their wine in decent fashion. Had she arrived at the appointed time, whilst they were still sober, all might have been well. She might have come to share, in part, at least, their intoxication, and so she would have viewed their antics through eyes that wine had rendered tolerant and kindly. As it is, you merely offended her by a disgusting spectacle; and that is very far from anything that I advised.”

“Be that as it may,” said the ill-humoured Duke, “there is a laugh against me that is to be redeemed. I am for directer measures now.”

“Directer measures?” Etheredge’s brows went up. He uttered a musical, scornful little laugh. “Is this your patience?”

“A pox on patience....”

“Then she is not for you. Wait a moment, my sweet Bucks. I have no illusions as to what you mean by direct measures. You are probably more sober than I am; but then I am more intelligent than you. Out of my intelligence let me inform your sobriety.”

“Oh, come to the point.”

“I am coming to it. If you mean to carry the girl off, I’ll be reminding you that at law it’s a hanging matter.”

The Duke stared at him in disdainful amazement. Then he uttered a sharp laugh of derision.

“At law? Pray, my good George, what have I to do with the law?”

“By which you mean that you are above it.”

“That is where usually I have found myself.”

“Usually. The times are not usual. The times are monstrous unusual. Rochester, no doubt, thought as you do when he carried off Miss Mallet on Friday night. Yet Rochester is in the Tower in consequence.”

“And you think they’ll hang him?” Buckingham sneered.

“No. They won’t hang him, because the abduction was an unnecessary piece of buffoonery—because he is ready to mend Miss Mallet’s honour by marrying her.”

“Let me perish, George, but you’re more drunk than I thought. Miss Mallet is a person of importance in the world with powerful friends....”

“Miss Farquharson, too, has friends. Betterton is her friend, and he wields a deal of influence. You don’t lack for enemies to stir things up against you....”

“Oh, but a baggage of the theatre!” Buckingham was incredulously scornful.

“These baggages of the theatre are beloved of the people, and the mood of the people of London at present is not one I should care to ruffle were I Duke of Buckingham. There is a war to excite them, and the menace of the plague to scare them into making examinations of conscience. There are preachers, too, going up and down the Town, proclaiming that this is a visitation of God upon the new Sodom. The people are listening. They are beginning to point to Whitehall as the source of all the offences that have provoked the wrath of Heaven. And they don’t love you, Bucks, any more than they love me. They don’t understand us, and—to be plain—our names, yours and mine and several others, are beginning to stink in their nostrils. Give them such an argument as this against you, and they’ll see the law fulfilled. Never doubt that. The English are an easy-going people on the surface, which has led some fools to their undoing by abusing them. The spot where His Majesty’s father lost his head is within easy view of these windows.

“And so I tell you that the thing which you intend to do, which would be fraught with risks at any time, is certain destruction to you at this present. The very eminence upon which you count for safety would prove your undoing. The fierce light that beats upon a throne beats upon those who are about it. A more obscure man might do this thing with less risk to himself than you would run.”

His grace discarded at last his incredulous scorn, and gave himself up to gloomy thought. Etheredge, leaning back in his chair, watched him, faintly, cynically amused. At length the Duke stirred and raised his handsome eyes to his friend’s face.

“Don’t sit there grinning—damn you!—advise me.”

“To what end, since you won’t follow my advice?”

“Still, let me hear it. What is it?”

“Forget the girl, and look for easier game. You are hardly young enough for such an arduous and tiring hunt as this.”

His grace damned him roundly for a scoffer, and swore that he would not abandon the affair; that, at whatever cost, he would pursue it.

“Why, then, you must begin by effacing the bad impression you have made to-night. That will not be easy; indeed, it is the most difficult step of all. But there are certain things in your favour. For one, you were not, for a wonder, drunk, yourself, when you rose to welcome her. Let us hope that she observed it. Pay her a visit on Monday at the theatre to tender your most humble apologies for the disgraceful conduct of your guests. Had you known them capable of such abandoned behaviour, you would never have bidden her make one of such a company. You will profess yourself glad that she departed instantly; that is what you would, yourself, have advised.”

“But I pursued her. My lackeys sought to stay her coach.”

“Naturally—so that you might make her your apologies, and approve a departure which in the circumstances you must have urged. Damme, Bucks! You have no invention, and you desire to deem yourself a dramatist.”

“You think she will believe me?” His grace was dubious.

“That will depend upon your acting, and you are reputed something of an actor. God knows you played the mountebank once to some purpose. Have you forgotten?”

“No, no. But will it serve, do you think?”

“As a beginning. But you must follow it up. You must reveal yourself in a new character. Hitherto she has known you, first by repute and to-night by experience, a rake. That in itself makes her wary of you. Let her behold you as a hero; say, as a rescuer of beauty in distress—herself in the distressful part. Deliver her from some deadly peril, and thereby earn her gratitude and her wonder at your prowess. Women love a hero. So be heroical, and who knows what good fortune may attend your heroism.”

“And the deadly peril?” quoth the Duke gloomily, almost suspecting that his friend was rallying him. “Where shall I find that?”

“If you wait to find it, you may have long to wait. You must, yourself, provide it. A little contriving, a little invention, will soon supply what you lack.”

“Can you propose anything? Can you be more than superiorly vague?”

“I hope so. With a little thought....”

“Then, in God’s name, think.”

Etheredge laughed at his host’s vehemence. He brimmed himself a cup of wine, surveyed the rich glow of it in the candlelight and drank it off.

“Inspiration flows. Invention stirs within me. Now listen.” And sitting forward he propounded a plan of campaign with that rascally readiness of wit that was at once his glory and his ruin.

CHAPTER IX ALBEMARLE PROPOSES

Ned Tucker did not long leave his proposal to Holles unconfirmed. He sought him in the matter again at the Paul’s Head three days later, on the Sunday, and sat long in talk with him in the little parlour, to the profound disquieting of Mrs. Quinn, who had observed from the gentleman’s bearing and apparel that he was a person of consequence.

He found the Colonel a little more malleable to-day, a little less insistent upon serving only governments in esse. The fact was that, as day followed day without word from Albemarle, Holles approached the conclusion that things were indeed as Tucker had represented them. His hopes sank, and his dread of that score of his which was daily mounting at the Paul’s Head added to his despair.

Still, he did not altogether yield to Tucker’s persuasions; but neither did he discourage him when the latter promised to visit him again on the morrow, bringing another old friend of their Parliament days. And on the Monday, true to his promise, Tucker came again, accompanied this time by a gentleman some years his senior, named Rathbone, with whom Colonel Holles recalled some slight acquaintance. This time they came with a very definite proposal, empowered, so they told him, by one whose name they would not yet utter, but which, if uttered, must remove his every doubt.

“For that, Randal, you will accept our word, I know,” said the grave Tucker.

Holles nodded his agreement, and the proposal was disclosed. It offered him a position which in an established government would have been dazzling. It was dazzling even as things were, to one in his desperate case, driven to the need of making a gambler’s throw. If on the one side he probably set his head, at least the stake they offered could hardly have been greater.

And they tempted him further by revelations of how far their preparations were advanced, and how thorough these were.

“Heaven,” said Rathbone, “is on our side. It has sent this plague to stir men to bethink themselves of the rulers they have chosen. Our agents have discovered four cases in the City to-day: one in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street, and two in Crooked Lane. The authorities hoped to keep it from the knowledge of the people. But we are seeing to that. At this moment our preachers are proclaiming it, spreading terror that men may be driven by it to the paths of righteousness.”

“When the devil was sick the devil a monk would be,” said Holles. “I understand.”

“Then you should see that all is ready, the mine is laid,” Tucker admonished him. “This is your opportunity, Randal. If you delay now....”

A tap at the door interrupted him. Tucker bounded up, propelled by his uneasy conspirator’s conscience. Rathbone, too, glanced round uneasily.

“Why, what’s to startle you?” said the Colonel quietly, smiling to behold their fears. “It is but my good hostess.”

She came in from the common room bearing a letter that had just been brought for Colonel Holles.

He took it, wondering; then, observing the great seal, a little colour crept into his cheeks. He spread the sheet, and read, under the observing eyes of his friends and his hostess, and they were all alike uneasy.

Twice he read that letter before he spoke. The unexpected had happened, and it had happened at the eleventh hour, barely in time to arrest him on the brink of what might well prove a precipice. Thus he saw it now, his vision altering with his fortunes.

“Luck has stood your friend sooner than we could have hoped,” wrote Albemarle. “A military post in the Indies has, as I learn from letters just received, fallen vacant. It is an important command full worthy of your abilities, and there, overseas, you will be safe from all inquisitions. If you will wait upon me here at the Cockpit this afternoon, you shall be further informed.”

He begged his friends to excuse him a moment, took pen, ink, and paper from the sideboard and quickly wrote a few lines in answer.

When Mrs. Quinn had departed to convey that note to the messenger, and the door had closed again, the two uneasy conspirators started up. Questions broke simultaneously from both of them. For answer Holles placed Albemarle’s letter on the table. Tucker snatched it up, and conned it, whilst over his shoulder Rathbone read it, too.

At last Tucker lowered the sheet, and his grave eyes fell again upon Holles.

“And you have answered—what?” he demanded.

“That I will wait upon his grace this afternoon as he requires of me.”

“But to what end?” asked Rathbone. “You can’t mean that you will accept employment from a government that is doomed.”

The Colonel shrugged. “As I have told Tucker from the first, I serve governments; I do not make them.”

“But just now....” Tucker was beginning.

“I wavered. It is true. But something else has been flung into the scales.” And he held up Albemarle’s letter.

They argued with him after that; but they argued vainly.

“If I am of value to your government when you shall have established it, you will know where to find me; and you will know from what has happened now that I am trustworthy.”

“But your value to us is now, in the struggle that is coming. And it is for this that we are prepared to reward you richly.”

He was not, however, to be moved. The letter from Albemarle had reached him an hour too soon.

At parting he assured them that their secret was safe with him, and that he would forget all that they had said. Since, still, they had disclosed no vital facts whose betrayal could frustrate their purpose, it was an almost unnecessary assurance.

They stalked out resentfully. But Tucker returned alone a moment later.

“Randal,” he said, “it may be that upon reflection you will come to see the error of linking yourself to a government that cannot endure, to the service of a king against whom the hand of Heaven is already raised. You may come to prefer the greatness that we offer you in the future to this crust that Albemarle throws you at the moment. If you are wise, you will. If so, you know where to find me. Seek me there, and be sure of my welcome as of my friendship.”

They shook hands and parted, and with a sigh and a smile Holles turned to load himself a pipe. He was not, he thought, likely to see Tucker again.

That afternoon he waited upon Albemarle, who gave him particulars of the appointment he had to offer. It was an office of importance, the pay was good, and so that Holles discharged his duties well, which the Duke had no occasion to doubt, there would be even better things in store for him before very long.

“The one thing to efface the past is a term of service now, wheresoever it may be. Hereafter when I commend you for some other place, here at home, perhaps, and I am asked what are your antecedents, I need but point to the stout service you will have done us in the Indies, and men will inquire no further. It is a temporary exile, but you may trust me to see that it endures no longer than is necessary.”

No such advocacy was needed to induce Holles to accept an office that, after all, was of an importance far beyond anything for which he could reasonably have hoped. He said so frankly by way of expressing his deep gratitude.

“In that case, you will seek me again here to-morrow morning. Your commission shall be meanwhile made out.”

The Colonel departed jubilant. At last—at long last—after infinite frowns, Fortune accorded him a smile. And she accorded it in the very nick of time, just as he was touching the very depths of his despair and ready to throw in his lot with a parcel of crazy fanatics who dreamed of another revolution.

So back to the Paul’s Head he came with his soaring spirits, and called for a bottle of the best Canary. Mrs. Quinn read the omens shrewdly.

“Your affairs at Whitehall have prospered, then?” said she between question and assertion.

Holles reclined in an armchair, his legs, from which he had removed his boots, stretched luxuriously upon a stool, his head thrown back, a pipe between his lips.

“Aye. They’ve prospered. Beyond my deserts,” said he, smiling at the ceiling.

“Never that, Colonel. For that’s not possible.” She beamed upon him, proffering the full stoup.

He sat up to take it, and looked at her, smiling.

“No doubt you’re right. But I’ve gone without my deserts so long that I have lost all sense of them.”

“There’s others who haven’t,” said she; and timidly added a question upon the nature of his prosperity.

He paused to drink a quarter of the wine. Then, as he set down the vessel on the table at his elbow, he told her.

Her countenance grew overcast. He was touched to note it, inferring from this manifest regret at his departure that he had made a friend in Mrs. Quinn.

“And when do you go?” she asked him, oddly breathless.

“In a week’s time.”

She considered him, mournfully he thought; and he also thought that she lost some of her bright colour.

“And to the Indies!” she ejaculated slowly. “Lord! Among savages and heathen blacks! Why, you must be crazed to think of it.”

“Beggars may not choose, ma’am. I go where I can find employment. Besides, it is not as bad as you imagine.”

“But where’s the need to go at all, when, as I’ve told you already, such a man as yourself should be thinking of settling down at home and taking a wife?”

She realized that the time had come to deliver battle. It was now or never. And thus she sent out a preliminary skirmishing party.

“Why, look at yourself,” she ran on, before he could answer. “Look at the condition of you.” And she pointed a denunciatory finger at the great hole in the heel of his right stocking. “You should be seeking a woman to take care of you, instead of letting your mind run on soldiering in foreign parts.”

“Excellent advice,” he laughed. “There is one difficulty only. Who takes a wife must keep a wife, and, if I stay in England, I shan’t have enough to keep myself. So I think it’ll be the Indies, after all.”

She came to the table, and leaned upon it, facing him.

“You’re forgetting something. There’s many a woman well endowed, and there’s many a man has taken a wife with a jointure who couldn’t ha’ taken a wife without.”

“You said something of the kind before.” Again he laughed. “You think I should be hunting an heiress. You think I have the figure for the part.”

“I do,” said she, to his astonishment. “You’re a proper man, and you’ve a name and a position to offer. There’s many a wealthy woman of modest birth would be glad of you, as you should be glad of her, since each would bring what the other lacks.”

“Faith! You think of everything. Carry your good offices further than mere advice, Mrs. Quinn. Find me this wealthy and accommodating lady, and I’ll consider the rejection of this Indian office. But you’ll need to make haste, for there’s only a week left.”

It was a laughing challenge, made on the assumption that it would not be taken up, and, as she looked away uncomfortably under his glance, his laughter increased.

“That’s not quite so easy as advising, is it?” he rallied her.

She commanded herself, and looked him squarely in the eyes.

“Oh, yes, it is,” she assured him. “If you was serious I could soon produce the lady—a comely enough woman of about your own age, mistress of thirty thousand pounds and some property, besides.”

That sobered him. He stared at her a moment; the pipe between his fingers.

“And she would marry a vagabond? Odds, my life! What ails her?”

“Naught ails her. If you was serious I’d present her.”

“’Sblood! you make me serious. Thirty thousand pounds! Faith, that is serious enough. I could set up as a country squire on that.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Really, she was bewildering, he thought, with her calm assumptions that it was for him to say the word.

“Because there’s no such woman.”

“And if there was?”

“But there isn’t.”

“I tell you there is.”

“Where is she, then?”

Mrs. Quinn moved away from the table, and round to his side of it.

“She is ... here.”

“Here?” he echoed.

She drew a step or two nearer, so that she was almost beside him.

“Here in this room,” she insisted, softly.

He looked up at her, still uncomprehending. Then, as he observed the shy smile with which she sought to dissemble her agitation, the truth broke upon him at last.

The clay stem of his pipe snapped between his fingers, and he dived after the pieces, glad of any pretext to remove his eyes from her face and give him a moment in which to consider how he should conduct himself in this novel and surprising situation.

When he came up again, his face was flushed, which may have been from the lowering of his head. He wanted to laugh; but he realized that this would be utterly unpardonable. He rose, and set the pieces of the broken pipe on the table. Standing thus, his shoulder to her, he spoke gently, horribly embarrassed.

“I ... I had no notion of ... of your meaning....” And there he broke down.

But his embarrassment encouraged her. Again she came close.

“And now that you know it, Colonel?” she whispered.

“I ... I don’t know what to say.”

His mind was beginning to recover its functions. He understood at last why a person of his shabby exterior and obvious neediness should have been given unlimited credit in this house.

“Then say nothing at all, Colonel dear,” she was purring. “Save that you’ll put from you all notion of sailing to the Indies.”

“But ... but my word is pledged already.” It was a straw at which he clutched, desperately. And it was not a very fortunate one, for it suggested that his pledged word was the only obstacle.

The effect was to bring her closer still. She was almost touching him, as he stood there, still half averted, and she actually leaned against him, and set a hand upon his shoulder as she spoke, coaxingly, persuasively.

“But it was pledged before ... before you knew of this. His grace will understand. He’ll never hold you to it. You’ve but to explain.”

“I ... I couldn’t. I couldn’t,” he cried weakly.

“Then I can.”

“You?” He looked at her.

She was pale, but resolute. “Yes, me,” she answered him. “If your pledge is all that holds you, I’ll take coach at once and go to Whitehall. George Monk’ll see me, or if he won’t his Duchess will. I knew her well in the old days, when I was a young girl, and she was a sempstress glad to earn a groat where she could. Nan Clarges’ll never deny herself to an old friend. So if you but say the word, I’ll soon deliver you from this pledge of yours.”

His face lengthened. He looked away again.

“That is not all, Mrs. Quinn,” he said, very gently. “The truth is ... I am not of a ... a nature to make a woman happy.”

This she deemed mere coyness, and swept it briskly aside. “I’d take the risk of that.”

“But ... but ... you see I’ve lived this roving life of mine so long, that I do not think I could ever settle. Besides, ma’am, what have I to offer?”

“If I am satisfied with my bargain, why take thought for that?”

“I must. The fact is, I am touched, deeply touched. I did not think I had it in me to arouse the affection, or even the regard, of any woman. Even so, ma’am, whilst it moves me, it does not change my purpose. I am not a marrying man.”

“But....”

He raised a hand, dominantly, to check her. He had found the correct formula at last, and he meant to keep to it.

“Useless to argue, ma’am. I know my mind. My reasons are as I have said, and so is the fact. I am touched; I am prodigiously touched, and grateful. But there it is.”

His firmness turned her white with mortification. To have offered herself, and to have been refused! To have this beggar turn his shoulder upon her, finding her so little to his taste that not even her thirty thousand pounds could gild her into attractiveness! It was a bitter draught, and it called up bitterness from the depths of her soul. As she considered him now with her vivid blue eyes, her face grew mottled. She was moved to sudden hatred of him. Nothing short of killing him could, she felt, extinguish that tormenting hate.

She felt impelled to break into violent recriminations, yet could find nothing upon which to recriminate. If only she could have thrown it in his face that he had afforded her encouragement, trifled with her affections, lured her on, to put this terrible affront upon her, she might have eased herself of some of the gall within her. But she could charge him with nothing that would bear the form of words.

And so she considered him in silence, her abundant bosom heaving, her eyes growing almost baleful in their glance, whilst he stood awkwardly before her, his gaze averted, staring through the open window, and making no attempt to add anything to what already he had said.

At last on a long indrawn breath she moved.

“I see,” she said quietly. “I am sorry to have....”

“Please!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hand again to arrest her, an infinite pity stirring in him.

She walked to the door, moving a little heavily. She opened it, and then paused under the lintel. Over her shoulder she spoke to him again.

“Seeing that things is like this, perhaps you’ll make it convenient to find another lodging not later than to-morrow.”

He inclined his head a little in agreement.

“Naturally....” he was beginning, when the door closed after her with a bang and he was left alone.

“Phew!” he breathed, as he sank limply into his chair again. He passed a hand wearily across his brow, and found it moist.

CHAPTER X BUCKINGHAM DISPOSES

Colonel Holles hummed softly to himself as he dressed with care to keep his momentous appointment at the Cockpit, and when his toilet was completed you would scarcely have known him for the down-at-heel adventurer of yesterday, so fine did he appear.

Early that morning he had emptied the contents of his purse upon the bed, and counted up his fortune. It amounted to thirty-five pounds and some shillings. And Albemarle had promised him that, together with his commission, he should that morning receive an order on the Treasury for thirty pounds to meet his disbursements on equipment and the rest. He must, he considered, do credit to his patron. He argued that it was a duty. To present himself again at Whitehall in his rags were to disgrace the Duke of Albemarle; there might be introductions, and he would not have his grace blush for the man he was protecting.

Therefore, immediately after an early breakfast—at which, for once, he had been waited upon, not by Mrs. Quinn, but by Tim the drawer—he had sallied forth and made his way to Paternoster Row. There, yielding to the love of fine raiment inseparable from the adventurous temperament and to the improvident disposition that accompanies it, and also having regard to the officially military character he was about to assume, he purchased a fine coat of red camlet laced with gold, and small-clothes, stockings, and cravat in keeping. By the time he added a pair of boots of fine Spanish leather, a black silk sash, a new, gold-broidered baldric, and a black beaver with a trailing red plume, he found that fully three quarters of his slender fortune was dissipated, and there remained in his purse not above eight pounds. But that should not trouble a man who within a couple of hours would have pocketed an order upon the Treasury. He had merely anticipated the natural course of events, and counted himself fortunate to be, despite his reduced circumstances, still able to do so.

He had returned then with his bundle to the Paul’s Head, and, as he surveyed himself now in his mirror, freshly shaven, his long thick gold-brown hair elegantly curled, and a clump of its curls caught in a ribbon on his left, the long pear-shaped ruby glowing in his ear, his throat encased in a creaming froth of lace, and the fine red coat that sat so admirably upon his shoulders, he smiled at the memory of the scarecrow he had been as lately as yesterday, and assured himself that he did not look a day over thirty.

He created something of a sensation when he appeared below in all this finery, and, since it was unthinkable that he should tread the filth of the streets with his new Spanish boots, Tim was dispatched for a hackney-coach to convey the Colonel to Whitehall.

It still wanted an hour to noon, and this the Colonel considered the earliest at which he could decently present himself. But early as it was there was another who had been abroad and at the Cockpit even earlier. This was His Grace of Buckingham, who, accompanied by his friend Sir Harry Stanhope, had sought the Duke of Albemarle a full hour before Colonel Holles had been ready to leave his lodging.

A gentleman of the Duke’s eminence was not to be kept waiting. He had been instantly admitted to that pleasant wainscoted room overlooking the Park in which His Grace of Albemarle transacted business. Wide as the poles as were the two dukes asunder, the exquisite libertine and the dour soldier, yet cordial relations prevailed between them. Whilst correct and circumspect in his own ways of life, Monk was utterly without bigotry and as utterly without prejudices on the score of morals. Under his dour taciturnity, and for all that upon occasion he could be as brave as a lion, yet normally he was of the meekness of a lamb, combined with a courteous aloofness, which, if it earned him few devoted friends, earned him still fewer enemies. As a man gives, so he receives; and Monk, being very sparing both of his love and his hate, rarely excited either passion in others. He was careful not to make enemies, but never at pains to make friends.

“I desire your leave to present to your grace my very good friend Sir Harry Stanhope, a deserving young soldier for whom I solicit your grace’s good offices.”

Albemarle had heard of Sir Harry as one of the most dissolute young profligates about the Court, and, observing him now, his grace concluded that the gentleman’s appearance did justice to his reputation. It was the first time that he had heard him described as a soldier, and the description awakened his surprise. But of this he betrayed nothing. Coldly he inclined his head in response to the diving bow with which Sir Harry honoured him.

“There is no need to solicit my good offices for any friend of your grace’s,” he answered, coldly courteous. “A chair, your grace. Sir Harry!” He waved the fop to the second and lesser of the two chairs that faced his writing-table, and when they were seated he resumed his own place, leaning forward and placing his elbows on the table. “Will your grace acquaint me how I may have the honour of being of service?”

“Sir Harry,” said Buckingham, leaning back in his armchair, and throwing one faultlessly stockinged leg over the other, “desires, for certain reasons of his own, to see the world.”

Albemarle had no illusions as to what those reasons were. It was notorious that Harry Stanhope had not only gamed away the inheritance upon which he had entered three years ago, but that he was colossally in debt, and that, unless some one came to his rescue soon, his creditors might render life exceedingly unpleasant for him. He would not be the first gay butterfly of the Court to make the acquaintance of a sponging house. But of that thought, as it flashed through the mind of the Commander-in-Chief, no indication showed on his swart, set face and expressionless dark eyes.

“But Sir Harry,” Buckingham was resuming after the slightest of pauses, “is commendably moved by the wish to render his absence from England of profit to His Majesty.”

“In short,” said Albemarle, translating brusquely, for he could not repress a certain disdain, “Sir Harry desires an appointment overseas.”

Buckingham dabbed his lips with a lace handkerchief. “That, in short,” he admitted, “is the situation. Sir Harry will, I trust, deserve well in your grace’s eyes.”

His grace looked at Sir Harry, and found that he did nothing of the kind. From his soul, unprejudiced as he was, Albemarle despised the mincing fop whom he was desired to help to cheat his creditors.

“And the character of this appointment?” he inquired tonelessly.

“A military character would be best suited to Sir Harry’s tastes and qualities. He has the advantage of some military experience. He held for a time a commission in the Guards.”

“In the Guards!” thought Albemarle. “My God! What a recommendation!” But his expression said nothing. His owlish eyes were levelled calmly upon the young rake, who smiled ingratiatingly, and thereby, did he but know it, provoked Albemarle’s disgust. Aloud, at length, he made answer: “Very well. I will bear in mind your grace’s application on Sir Harry’s behalf, and when a suitable position offers....”

“But it offers now,” Buckingham interjected languidly.

“Indeed?” The black brows went up, wrinkling the heavy forehead. “I am not aware of it.”

“There is this command in Bombay, which has fallen vacant through the death of poor Macartney. I heard of it last night at Court. You are forgetting that, I think. It is an office eminently suitable to Sir Harry here.”

Albemarle was frowning. He pondered a moment; but only because it was ever his way to move slowly. Then he gently shook his head and pursed his heavy lips.

“I have also to consider, your grace, whether Sir Harry is eminently suitable to the office, and, to be quite frank, and with all submission, I must say that I cannot think so.”

Buckingham was taken aback. He stared haughtily at Albemarle. “I don’t think I understand,” he said.

Albemarle fetched a sigh, and proceeded to explain himself.

“For this office—one of considerable responsibility—we require a soldier of tried experience and character. Sir Harry is no doubt endowed with many commendable qualities, but at his age it is impossible that he should have gained the experience without which he could not possibly discharge to advantage the onerous duties which would await him. Nor is that the only obstacle, your grace. I have not only chosen my man—and such a man as I have described—but I have already offered, and he has already accepted, the commission. So that the post can no longer be considered vacant.”

“But the commission was signed only last night by His Majesty—signed in blank, as I have reason to know.”

“True. But I am none the less pledged. I am expecting at any moment now, the gentleman upon whom the appointment is already conferred.”

Buckingham did not dissemble his annoyance. “May one inquire his name?” he asked, and the question was a demand.

Albemarle hesitated. He realized the danger to Holles in naming him at this unfortunate juncture. Buckingham might go to any lengths to have him removed, and there was that in Holles’s past, in his very name, which would supply abundant grounds. “His name would not be known to your grace. He is a comparatively obscure soldier, whose merits, however, are fully known to me, and I am persuaded that a fitter man for the office could not be found. But something else will, no doubt, offer within a few days, and then....”

Buckingham interrupted him arrogantly.

“It is not a question of something else, your grace, but of this. I have already obtained His Majesty’s sanction. It is at his suggestion that I am here. It is fortunate that the person you had designated for the command is obscure. He will have to give way, and you may console him with the next vacant post. If your grace requires more explicit instruction I shall be happy to obtain you His Majesty’s commands in writing.”

Albemarle was checkmated. He sat there grim and impassive as if he were carved of stone. But his mind was a seething cauldron of anger. It was always thus. The places of trust, the positions demanding experienced heads and able hands that England might be served to the best advantage by her most meritorious sons, were constantly being flung away upon the worthless parasites that flocked about Charles’s lecherous Court. And he was the more angered here, because his hands were tied against resistance by the very identity of the man he was appointing. Had it been a question of any other man of Holles’s soldierly merit, but of such antecedents as would permit the disclosure of his name, he would clap on his hat and step across to the palace to argue the matter with the King. And he would know how to conduct the argument so as to prevail against the place-seeking insolence of Buckingham. But, as it was, he was forced to realize that he could do none of this without perhaps dooming Holles and bringing heavy censure fruitlessly upon himself. “Oddsfish!” the King would cry. “Do you tell me to my face that you prefer the son of a regicide to the friend of my friend?” And what should he answer then?

He lowered his eyes. The commission which was the subject of this discussion lay there on the table before him, the space which the name of Randal Holles was intended to occupy still standing blank. He was defeated, and he had best, for the sake of Holles as much as for his own, accept the situation without further argument.

He took up a pen, dipped it, and drew the document to him.

“Since you have His Majesty’s authority, there can be, of course, no further question.”

Rapidly, his quill scratching and spluttering across the sheet, he filled in the name of Sir Harry Stanhope, bitterly considering that he might as profitably have filled in Nell Gwynn’s. He dusted the thick writing with pounce, and proffered it without another word. But his looks were heavy.

Buckingham rose, smiling, and Sir Harry bounced up with him, smiling also. For the first and last time in the course of that short interview Sir Harry spoke.

“Your grace’s devoted servant,” he professed himself, bowing and smirking. “I shall study to discharge my office creditably, and to allay any qualms my youth may leave in your grace’s mind.”

“And youth,” said Buckingham, smiling, to reassure Albemarle, “is a fault that time invariably corrects.”

Albemarle rose slowly to his feet, and the others bowed themselves out of his presence.

Then he sat down again heavily, took his head in his hands, and softly loosed an oath.

Holles came an hour later, radiant with expectation, a gay, youthful-looking, commanding figure in his splendid red coat, to be crushed by the news that proved him Fortune’s fool again, as ever.

But he bore it well on the face of him, however deeply the iron was thrust into his soul. It was Albemarle who for once showed excitement, Albemarle who inveighed in most unmeasured terms against the corrupt influence of the Court and the havoc it was working.

“It needed a man for this office and they have constrained me to give it to a fribble, a dolly in breeches, a painted dawcock.”

Holles remembered Tucker’s denunciations of the present government and began to realize at last how right he was and how justified he and his associates might be of their conviction that the people were ready to rise and sweep this Augean stable clean.

Albemarle was seeking to comfort him with fresh hope. No doubt something else would offer soon.

“To be snatched up again by some debt-ridden pimp who wants to escape his creditors,” said Holles, his tone betraying at last some of the bitterness fermenting in his soul.

Albemarle stood sorrowfully regarding him. “This hits you hard, Randal, I know.”

The Colonel recovered and forced a laugh.

“Pooh! Hard hits have mostly been my portion.”

“I know.” Albemarle paced to the window and back, his head sunk between his shoulders. Then he came to a halt before the Colonel. “Keep me informed of where you are lodged, and look to hear from me again as soon as may be. Be sure that I will do my best.”

The Colonel’s glance kindled again. It was a flicker of the expiring flame of hope.

“You really think that something else will offer?”

His grace paused before answering, and, in the pause, the sorrowful gravity of his face increased.

“To be frank with you, Randal, I hardly dare to think it. Chances for such as you are, as you understand, not ... frequent. But the unexpected may happen sooner than we dare to hope. If it does, be sure I’ll not forget you. Be sure of that.”

Holles thanked him steadily, and rose to depart, his radiance quenched, despondency in every line of him.

Albemarle watched from under furrowed brows. As he reached the door the Duke detained him.

“Randal! A moment.”

The Colonel turned and waited whilst slowly Albemarle approached him. His grace was deep in thought, and he hesitated before speaking.

“You ... you are not urgently in need of money, I trust?” he said at last.

The Colonel’s gesture and laugh conveyed a shamefaced admission that he was.

Albemarle’s eyes considered him a moment still. Then, slowly, he drew a purse from his pocket. It was apparently a light purse. He unfastened it.

“If a loan will help you until....”

“No, no!” cried Holles, his pride aroused against accepting what amounted almost to alms.

Even so the repudiation was no more than half-hearted. But there was no attempt from Albemarle to combat it. He did not press the offer. He drew the purse-strings tight again, and his expression was almost one of relief.

CHAPTER XI A WOMAN SCORNED

Colonel Holles retraced his steps to the City on foot. A hackney-coach, such as that in which he had driven almost in triumph to the Cockpit, was no longer for him; nor yet could he submit to the expense of going by water now that the unexpected was all that stood between himself and destitution.

And yet the unexpected was not quite all. An alternative existed, though a very desperate one. There was the rebellion in which Tucker had sought fruitlessly hitherto to engage him. The thought of it began to stir in his dejected mind, as leaden-footed he dragged himself towards Temple Bar through the almost stifling heat which was making itself felt in London at the end of that month of May. Temptation urged him now, nourished not only by the circumstance that in rebellion lay his last hope of escaping starvation, but also by hot resentment against an inclement and unjust government that drove able soldiers such as himself into the kennels, whilst befriending the worthless minions who pandered to the profligacy of a worthless prince. Vice, he told himself, was the only passport to service in this England of the restored Stuarts. Tucker and Rathbone were right. At least what they did was justified and hallowed by the country’s need of salvation from the moral leprosy that was fastening upon it, a disease more devastating and deadly than this plague upon which the republicans counted to arouse the nation to a sense of its position.

He counted the cost of failure; but he counted it derisively. His life would be claimed. That was the stake he set upon the board. But, considering that it was the only stake remaining him, why hesitate? What, after all, was this life of his worth that he should be tender of setting it upon a last throw with Fortune? Fortune favours boldness. Perhaps in the past he had not been bold enough.

Deep in his musings he had reached St. Clement Danes, when he was abruptly aroused by a voice, harsh and warningly commanding.

“Keep your distance, sir!”

Checking, he looked round to the right, whence the order came.

He beheld a man with a pike, who stood before a padlocked door that was smeared with a red cross a foot in length, above which also in red was heavily daubed the legend: LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US.

Taken thus by surprise, the Colonel shuddered as at the contact of something unclean and horrible. Hastily he stepped out into the middle of the unpaved street, and, pausing there a moment, glanced up at the closed shutters of the infected house. It was the first that he had seen; for although he had come this way a week ago, when the plague was already active in the neighbourhood, yet it was then confined to Butcher’s Row on the north side of the church and to the mean streets that issued thence. To find it thus upon the main road between the City and Whitehall was to be rendered unpleasantly conscious of its spread. And, as he now pursued his way with instinctively quickened steps, he found his thoughts thrust more closely than ever upon the uses which the revolutionaries could make of this dread pestilence. Much brooding in his disturbed state of mind distorted his mental vision, so that he came presently to adopt the view that this plague was a visitation from Heaven upon a city abandoned to ungodliness. Heaven, it followed, must be on the side of those who laboured to effect a purifying change.

The end of it was that, as he toiled up Ludgate Hill towards Paul’s, his resolve was taken. That evening he would seek Tucker and throw in his lot with the republicans.

Coming into Paul’s Yard, he found a considerable crowd assembled before the western door of the Cathedral. It was composed of people of all degrees: merchants, shopkeepers, prentices, horseboys, scavengers, rogues from the alleys that lay behind the Old ’Change, idlers and sharpers from Paul’s Walk, with a sprinkling of women, of town-gallants, and of soldiers. And there, upon the steps of the portico, stood the magnet that had drawn them in the shape of that black crow of a Jack Presbyter preaching the City’s doom. And his text—recurring like the refrain of a song—was ever the same:

“Ye have defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your iniquities, by the iniquity of your traffic.”

And yet, from between the Corinthian pillars which served him for his background, had been swept away the milliners’ shops that had stood there during the Commonwealth.

Whether some thought of this in the minds of his audience rendered his words humorously inapt, or whether it was merely that a spirit of irresponsible ribaldry was infused into the crowd by a crowd of young apprentices, loud derision greeted the preacher’s utterance. Unshaken by the laughter and mocking cries, the prophet of doom presented a fearless and angry front.

“Repent, ye scoffers!” His voice shrilled to dominate their mirthful turbulence. “Bethink you of where ye stand! Yet forty days and London shall be destroyed! The pestilence lays siege unto this city of the ungodly! Like a raging lion doth it stalk round, seeking where it may leap upon you. Yet forty days, and....”

An egg flung by the hand of a butcher’s boy smashed full in his face to crop his period short. He staggered and gasped as the glutinous mass of yolk and white crept sluggishly down his beard and dripped thence to spread upon the rusty black of his coat.

“Deriders! Scoffers!” he screamed, and with arms that thrashed the air in imprecation, he looked like a wind-tossed scarecrow. “Your doom is at hand. Your....”

A roar of laughter provoked by the spectacle he presented drowned his frenzied voice, and a shower of offensive missiles pelted him from every quarter. The last of these was a living cat, which clawed itself against his breast spitting furiously in its terror.

Overwhelmed, the prophet turned, and fled between the pillars into the shelter of Paul’s itself, pursued by laughter and insult. But scarcely had he disappeared than with uncanny suddenness that laughter sank from a roar to a splutter. To this succeeded a moment of deadly silence. Then the crowd broke, and parted, its members departing at speed in every direction with cries in which horror had taken now the place that was so lately held by mirth.

Colonel Holles, finding himself suddenly alone, and as yet very far from understanding what had taken place to scatter those men and women in such panic, advanced a step or two into the suddenly emptied space before the cathedral steps. There on the roughly cobbled ground he beheld a writhing man, a well-made, vigorous fellow in the very prime of life, whose dress was that of a tradesman of some prosperity. His round hat lay beside him where he had fallen, and he rolled his head from side to side spasmodically, moaning faintly the while. Of his eyes nothing was visible but the whites, showing under the line of his half-closed lids.

As Holles, perceiving here no more than a sick man, continued his advance, a voice from the retreating crowd shouted a warning to him.

“Have a care, sir! Have a care! He may be stricken with the plague.”

The Colonel checked, involuntarily arrested by the horror that the very word inspired. And then he beheld a stoutish, elderly man in a heavy wig, plainly but scrupulously dressed in black, whose round countenance gathered a singularly owlish expression from a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, walk calmly forward to the stricken citizen. A moment he stood beside him looking down; then he turned to beckon a couple of burly fellows who had the appearance and carried the staves of billmen. From his pocket the sturdy gentleman in black produced a kerchief upon which he sprinkled something from a phial. Holding the former to his nostrils with his left hand, he knelt down beside the sufferer, and quietly set himself to unfasten the man’s doublet.

Observing him, the Colonel admired his quiet courage, and thence took shame at his own fear for his utterly worthless life. Resolutely putting it from him, he went forward to join that little group.

The doctor looked round and up at his approach. But Holles had no eyes at the moment for any but the patient, whose breast the physician had laid bare. One of the billmen was pointing out to the other a purplish tumid patch at the base of the sufferer’s throat. His eyes were round, his face grave, and his voice came hushed and startled.

“See! The tokens!” he said to his companion.

And now the doctor spoke, addressing Holles.

“You would do well not to approach more closely, sir.”

“Is it ... the plague?” quoth Holles in a quiet voice.

The doctor nodded, pointing to the purple patch. “The tokens are very plain to see,” he said. “I beg, sir, that you will go.” And on that he once more held the handkerchief to his mouth and nostrils, and turned his shoulder upon the Colonel.

Holles withdrew as he was bidden, moving slowly and thoughtfully, stricken by the first sight of the plague at work upon a fellow-creature. As he approached the edges of the crowd, which, keeping its distance, yet stood at gaze as crowds will, he observed that men shrank back from him as if he were himself already tainted.

A single thing beheld impresses us more deeply than twenty such things described to us by others. Hitherto these London citizens had treated lightly this matter of the plague. Not ten minutes ago they had been deriding and pelting one who had preached repentance and warned them of the anger of Heaven launched upon them. And then suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, had come the stroke that laid one of them low, to freeze their derision and fill their hearts with terror by giving them a sight of this thing which hitherto they had but heard reported.

The Colonel stalked on, reflecting that this event in Paul’s Yard had done more proselytizing for the cause of the Commonwealth than a score of advocates could have accomplished. It was very well, he thought. It was a sign. And if anything had been wanting to clinch his decision to throw in his lot with Tucker, this supplied it.

But first to quench the prodigious thirst engendered by his long walk through that sweltering heat, and then on to Cheapside and Tucker to offer his sword to the revolutionaries. Thus he would assure himself of the wherewithal to liquidate his score at the Paul’s Head and take his leave of the amorous Mrs. Quinn, with whom he could not in any case have afforded now to continue to lodge.

As he entered the common room, she turned from a group of citizens with whom she was standing to talk to follow him with her eyes, her lips compressed, as he passed on into his own little parlour, at the back. A moment later she went after him.

He was flinging off his hat, and loosening his doublet to cool himself, and he gave her good-morning airily as if yesterday there had not been an almost tragic scene between them. She found his light-hearted and really tactful manner highly offensive, and she bridled under it.

“What may be your pleasure, Colonel?” she demanded forbiddingly.

“A draught of ale if I deserve your charity,” quoth he. “I am parched as an African desert. Phew! The heat!” And he flung himself down on the window-seat to get what air he could.

She went off in silence, and returned with a tankard, which she placed upon the table before him. Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.

Silently she watched him, frowning. As he paused at last in the enjoyment of his draught, she spoke.

“Ye’ll have made your plans to leave my house to-day as we settled it last night?” said she between question and assertion.

He nodded, pursing his lips a little. “I’ll remove myself to the Bird in Hand across the Yard this afternoon,” said he.

“The Bird in Hand!” A slight upward inflection of her voice marked her disdain of that hostelry, which, indeed, was but a poor sort of tavern. “Faith, it will go well with your brave coat. Ah, but that’s no affair of mine. So that ye go, I am content.”

There was something portentous in her utterance. She came forward to the table, and leaned heavily forward upon it. Her expression and attitude were calculated to leave him in no doubt that this woman, who had been so tender to him hitherto, was now his declared enemy. “My house,” she said, “is a reputable house, and I mean to keep it so. I want no traitors here, no gallows’ birds and the like.”

He had been on the point of drinking again. But her words arrested him, the tankard midway to his lips.

“Traitor? Gallows’ bird!” he ejaculated slowly. “I don’t think I take your meaning, mistress. D’ye apply these terms to me? To me?”

“To you, sir.” Her lips came firmly together.

He stared, frowning, a long moment. Then he shrugged and laughed.

“Ye’re mad,” he said with conviction, and finished his ale at a draught.

“No, I’m not mad, nor a fool neither, master rebel. A man’s to be known by the company he keeps. Birds of a feather flock together, as the saying goes. And how should you be other than a traitor that was friends with traitors, that was close with traitors, here in this house of mine, as I have seen and can swear to at need, and would if I wanted to do you a mischief. I’ll spare you that. But you leave my house to-day, or maybe I’ll change my mind about it.”

He crashed the tankard down upon the board, and came to his feet.

“’Sdeath, woman! Will you tell me what you mean?” he roared, his anger fanned by uneasiness. “What traitors have I been close with?”

“What traitors, do you say?” She sneered a little. “What of your friend Danvers, that’s being sought at this moment by the men from Bow Street?”

He was instantly relieved. “Danvers?” he echoed. “My friend Danvers? Why, I have no such friend. I never even heard his name before.”

“Indeed!” She was terribly derisive now. “And maybe you’ve never heard the names of his lieutenants neither—of Tucker and of Rathbone, that was in here with you no later than yesterday as I can swear. And what was they doing with you? What had you to do with them? That’s what you can perhaps explain to the satisfaction of the Justices. They’ll want to know how you came to be so close with they two traitors that was arrested this morning, along of a dozen others, for conspiring to bring back the Commonwealth. Oh, a scoundrelly plot—to murder the King, seize the Tower, and burn the City, no less.”

It was like a blow between the eyes. “Arrested!” he gasped, his jaw fallen, his eyes startled. “Tucker and Rathbone arrested, do you say? Woman, you rave!” But in his heart already he knew that she did not. For unless her tale were true how could she have come by her knowledge of their conspiring.

“Do I?” She laughed again, evilly mocking. “Step out into Paul’s Yard, and ask the first man you meet of the arrest made in Cheapside just afore noon, and of the hunt that is going on this minute for Danvers, their leader, and for others who was mixed up in this wicked plot. And I don’t want them to come a-hunting here. I don’t want my house named for a meeting-place of traitors, as you’ve made it, taking advantage of me that haven’t a man to protect me, and all the while deceiving me with your smooth pleasantness. If it wasn’t for that, I’d inform the Justices myself at once. You may be thankful that I want to keep the good name of my house, if I can. And that’s the only reason for my silence. But you’ll go to-day or maybe I’ll think better of it yet.”

She picked up the empty tankard, and reached the door before he could find words in his numbed brain to answer her. On the threshold she paused.

“I’ll bring you your score presently,” she said. “When you’ve settled that, you may pack and quit.” She went out, slamming the door.

The score! It was a small thing compared with that terrible menace of gaol and gallows. It mattered little that—save in intent—he was still completely innocent of any complicity in the rash republican plot which had been discovered. Let him be denounced for association with Tucker and Rathbone, and there would be no mercy for the son of Randal Holles the Regicide. His parentage and antecedents would supply the crowning evidence against him. That was plain to him. And yet the score, whilst a comparatively negligible evil, was the more immediate, and therefore gave him at the moment the greater preoccupation.

He knew that it would be heavy, and he knew that the balance of his resources was utterly inadequate to meet it. Yet unless it were met he could be assured that Mrs. Quinn would show him no mercy; and this fresh trick of Fate’s, in bringing him into association with Tucker on the very eve of that conspirator’s arrest, placed him in the power of Mrs. Quinn to an extent that did not bear considering.

It was, of course, he reflected bitterly, the sort of thing that must be for ever happening to him. And then he addressed his exasperated mind to the discovery of means to pay his debt. Like many another in his case, it but remained for him to realize such effects as he possessed. Cursing his confident extravagance of the morning, he set about it.

And so you behold him presently, arrayed once more in the shabby garments that he had thought to have discarded for ever, emerging from the Paul’s Head carrying a bundle that contained his finery, and making his way back to those shops in Paternoster Row where it had been so lately and so jubilantly acquired.

Here he discovered that there is a world of difference between the treatment offered to a seller and to a buyer. He further discovered that the main value of a suit of clothes would appear to be the mere bloom upon it. Once this has been a little rubbed, the garments become, apparently, next-door to worthless. The fact is that he was a soldier who understood soldiering, and they were traders who understood trade. And the whole art of successful trading, in whatsoever degree, lies in a quick perception of the necessities of others and a bowelless readiness to take advantage of them.

Ten pounds was all that he could raise on gear for which a few hours ago he had paid close upon thirty. Perforce, however ill-humoured, he must sell. He was abusive over the negotiations; at one moment he was almost threatening. But the merchant with whom he made his traffic was not at all disturbed. Insults were nothing to him, so that he made his profit.

Back to the Paul’s Head went Colonel Holles to find his hostess awaiting him with the score. And the sight of the latter turned him almost sick. It was the culminating blow of a day of evil fortune. He studied the items carefully, endeavouring to keep the dismay from his countenance, for Mrs. Quinn was observing him with those hard blue eyes, her lips compressed into a tight, ominous line.

He marvelled at the prodigious amount of Canary and ale that he had consumed during those weeks. Irrelevantly he fell to considering that this very costly thirst of his was the result of a long sojourn in the Netherlands, where the habit of copious drinking is a commonplace. Then he came back to the main consideration, which was that the total exceeded twenty pounds. It was a prodigious sum. He had expected a heavy score; but hardly so heavy a score as this. He conceived that perhaps Mrs. Quinn had included in it the wound to her tender susceptibilities, and he almost wondered whether marriage with her, after all, were not the only remaining refuge, assuming that she would still consider marriage. Short of that, he did not see how he was to pay.

He raised eyes that, despite him, were haggard and betraying from those terrifying figures, and met that baleful glance of the lady who, because she could not be his wife, was now his relentless enemy. Her glance scared him more than her total. He lowered his eyes again to the lesser evil and cleared his throat.

“This is a very heavy bill,” he said.

“It is,” she agreed. “You have drunk heavily and otherwise received good entertainment. I hope you’ll fare as well at the Bird in Hand.”

“Mrs. Quinn, I will be frank. My affairs have gone awry through no fault of my own. His Grace of Albemarle, upon whom I had every reason to depend, has failed me. At the moment I am a man ... hard-pressed. I am almost without resources.”

“That nowise troubled you whiles you ate and drank of the best my house could offer. Yours is a tale that has been told afore by many a pitiful rogue....”

“Mrs. Quinn!” he thundered.

But she went on, undaunted, joying to deal a wound to the pride of this man who had lacerated her own pride so terribly.

“ ... and there’s a way to deal wi’ rogues. You think that, perhaps because I am a woman, I am soft and tender; and so perhaps I am with them as deserves it. But I think I know your sort, Colonel Holles—if so be that you be a colonel. You’re not new to a house like mine; but I’ve never yet been bested by any out-at-elbow ruffler, and I’ll see to it as how you don’t best me now. I’ll say no more, though I could. I could say a deal. But I’ll say only this: if you gives me trouble I’ll ha’ the constable to you, and maybe there’ll be more than a matter of this score to settle then. You know what I mean, my man. You know what I could say an’ I would. So my advice to you is that you pay your bill without whimperings that won’t move me no more than they’ll move that wooden table.”

Scorched with shame, he stood before her, curbing himself with difficulty, for he could be very violent when provoked, though thanks to an indolent disposition he did not permit himself to be provoked very easily. He suppressed his fury now, realizing that to loose it would be to have it recoil upon him and precipitate his ruin.

“Mrs. Quinn,” he answered as steadily as he could, “I have sold my gear that I might pay my debt to you. Yet even so this debt exceeds the amount of my resources.”

“Sold your gear, have you?” She uttered a laugh that was like a cough. “Sold the fine clothes you’d bought to impose upon them at Whitehall, you mean. But you’ve not sold everything. There’s that jewel a-flaunting in your ear that alone would pay my score twice over.”

He started, and put a hand to the ear-ring—that ruby given to him as a keepsake by the lovely, unknown royalist boy whose life he had saved on the night after Worcester fight some fifteen years ago. The old superstitions that his fancy had woven about it had placed it outside his realizable assets. Even now, in this desperate pass, when reminded of its value, the notion of selling it was repugnant to him. And yet perhaps it was against this very dreadful need, perhaps it was that he might save his neck—for she made it clear to him that nothing less was now at stake—that in all these years he had hugged that jewel against every blow of fortune.

His head drooped. “I had forgot,” he said.

“Forgot?” she echoed in tones that plainly called him a liar and a cheat. “Ah, well, ye’re reminded of it now.”

“I thank you for the reminder. It ... it shall be sold at once. Your score shall be paid to-day. I ... I am sorry that, that.... Oh, no matter.”