The sight gave me pause: and for a moment I stood reconnoitring the men. To advance or not was the question, and I was still debating it, and striving to deduce something from the men's appearance, when something, I never knew what-perhaps some noise ill-apprehended-led me to turn aside my head. Whatever the cause of the movement, it apprised me of something little suspected. Not fifty paces behind me I saw the figure of a giant horseman looming out of the mist. He was advancing along the summit of the sea-wall below which I stood; hence I saw him before he made me out: and this gave me the start and the advantage. I had time to take in the thing, and seize my horse by the head, and move eight or ten paces towards the boat before he took the cue. Then on neither side was there any concealment. With a cry, a yell rather, the mere sound of which flung me into a panic, the man urged his horse down the bank shouting fiercely to me to stand; I in utter terror spurred mine across the beach towards the men I had seen.
I have said that I had some sixty yards of start, and two hundred or so to cross, to reach the boat; but the horses were scarcely able to trot; a yard was a furlong; and the sand swallowing up the sound of hoofs, it was a veritable race of ghosts, of phantoms, labouring through the mist across the flat, with the oily Stygian sea lapping the shore beside us. He cried out in the most violent fashion, now bidding me stay and now bidding the men stop me. And for all I know they might be in his pay, or at best be some of the reckless desperadoes who on that coast live by owling and worse practices. But they were my only hope and I too cried to them; and with joy I saw them put in again-they had before got afloat. Believing Smith to be gaining, I cried pitifully to them to save me, and then my horse stumbling, I flung myself from the saddle, and plunged through the sand towards them. At that, two sprang out to meet me and caught me under my arms; and in a moment, amid a jargon of cries in a foreign tongue whipped me over the side into the boat. Then they pushed it off and leaped in themselves, wet to the thighs; and as my pursuer came lurching down the beach, a pistol drawn in his hand, a couple of powerful strokes drove the boat through the light surf. Waving frantically he yelled to the men to wait, and rode to his boot-soles into the water; but with a jeering laugh and a volley of foreign words the sailors pulled the faster and the faster, and the mist lying thick on the water, and the boat sitting low, in half a minute we lost the last glimpse of him and his passion, and rode outward on a grey boundless sea.
CHAPTER XXXIX
I should have been less than a man had I not thanked God for my escape. But it is in the sap of a tree to run upward in the spring, and in the blood of a man to live in the present and future, the past going for little; and I had not crouched two minutes on the thwart before the steady lurch of the boat outwards and seawards fixed my attention. From this to asking myself by what chance I had been saved, and who were the men who sat round me-and evinced no more curiosity about me than if they had been sent to the spot purely and simply to rescue me-was but a step.
I took it, scanned them stealthily, and was far from reassured; the sea-garb was then new to me, and these wearers of it were the wildest of their class. The fog which enfolded us magnified their clumsy shoulders and great knitted night-caps and the tarry ringlets that hung in festoons about their scarred and tanned faces. The huge gnarled hands that swung to and fro with the oars were no more like human flesh than the sea-boots which the men wore, drawn high on their thighs. They had rings in their ears, and from all came a reek of tobacco, and salt-fish, and strange oaths; nor did it need the addition of the hanger and pistol which each wore in his belt to inform me that I had fallen once again among fierce and desperate men.
Dismayed by all I saw, it yet surprised me that no one questioned me. He who sat in the stern of the boat, and seemed to be in command, had a whistle continually at his lips, and his eyes on the curtain of haze before us; but if the tiller and navigation of the boat took up his thoughts, there were others. These, however, were content to pull on in silence, eyeing me with dull brutish stares, until the fog lifting disclosed on a sudden the hull of a tall ship looming high beside us. A shrill piping came from it-a sound I had heard before, but taken to be the scream of a sea-bird; and this, as we drew up, was followed by a hail. The man by my side let his whistle fall that he might answer-which he did, in French. A moment later our boat grated against the heaving timbers, and I, looking up through the raw morning air, saw a man in a boat-cloak spring on the bulwarks and wave his hat.
"Welcome!" he cried, lustily. "And God save the King! A near thing they tell me, sir. But come on board, come on board, and we shall see Dunquerque the sooner. Up with you, Sir John, if you please, and let us be gone with the fog, and no heel-taps!"
Then, without another word, I knew what had happened; I knew why the boat which had picked me up, had been waiting on the beach at that hour; and as I rose to my feet on the seat, and clutched the rope ladder which the sailors threw down to me, my knees knocked together; for I foresaw what I had to expect. But the deck was surer ground for debate or explanation than the cockle-shell wherein I sat, and which tossed and ducked under me, threatening every moment to upset my stomach; and I went up giddily, grasped the bulwark, and, aided by half-a-dozen grinning seamen, night-capped and ringletted, I sprang down on the deck.
The man in the boat-cloak received me with a clumsy bow, and shook my hand. "Give you joy, Sir John!" he said. "Glad to see you, sir. I began to fear that you were taken! A little more, and I must have left you. But all's well that ends well, and-your pardon one moment."
With that he broke off, and shouted half-a-dozen orders in French and English and French to the sailors; and in a moment the capstan, as I afterwards heard it called, was creaking round, and there was a hurry of feet, first to one side and then to the other, and a great shouting and a hauling at ropes. The ship heeled over so suddenly that if I had not caught at the rail I must have lost my footing, and for an instant the green seas seemed to swell up on a level with the slanting deck as if they would swallow us bodily. Instead, the sloop, still heeling over, began to gather way, and presently was hissing through the water, piling the white surf before it, only to pour it foaming to either side. The haze, like a moving curtain, began to glide by us; and looking straight ahead I saw a yellow glare that told of the sun rising over the French dunes.
The man who had received me, and who seemed to be the master, returned to my side. "We are under way, sir," he said, "and I am glad of it. But you will like to see Mr. Birkenhead? He would have met you, but the sea-colic took him as he lay on the swell outside Dunquerque whistling for a wind. He gets it badly one time, and one time he is as hearty as you are. He is better this morning, but he is ill enough."
I muttered that I would see him by-and-by, when he was better. That I would lie down a little, and-
"Oh! I have got a bunk for you in his cabin," the master answered briskly. "I thought you would want to talk State secrets. Follow me, if you please, and look to your sea-legs, sir."
He led the way to a hatch or trap-door, and raising it began to descend. Not daring to refuse I followed him, down a steep ladder into the dark bowels of the ship, the reek of tar and bilge-water, cheese and old rum, growing stronger with every foot we descended. At the bottom of the ladder he pushed aside a sliding panel, and signed me to pass through the opening. I obeyed, and found myself in a sort of dog-hole-as it seemed to me who knew nothing of ships' cabins-lighted only by a span-wide round window, so dark, therefore, that I stood a moment groping, and so close and foul-smelling that my gorge rose.
Out of the gloom came a groan as of a sick sheep. "Here is Sir John, safe and sound!" cried the master in his sea tones. "There is good medicine for you, Mr. Birkenhead." And he peered into the darkness.
The only answer was a second groan. "Do you hear, sir?" the captain repeated. "Sir John is here."
A voice feebly yet unmistakably d-d Sir John and the captain.
The master chuckled hoarsely. "Set a frigate behind us with a noose flying at the yard-arm, and there is no man like him!" he said. "None, Sir John; and I have carried him across seventy times and over, sick and well, he should know the road from the Marsh to Southwark if any man does. But let him be for the present, and do you lie down in the bunk above him, and I will bring you some Nantz and a crust. When he is better, he will be as glad to see you as if you were his brother."
I obeyed, and fortified by the strong waters he brought me, was glad to lie down, and under cover of darkness consider my position and what chance I had of extricating myself from it. For the time, and probably until we reached Dunquerque, I was safe; but what would happen when Birkenhead-the man whom the Jacobites called the Royal Post, and who doubtless knew Sir John Fenwick by sight-what would happen, I say, when he roused himself, and found that he had not only taken off the wrong man but left Sir John to his fate? Would he not be certain to visit the mischance on my head? Or if I escaped his hands, what must I expect, a stranger, ashore in a foreign land with little money, and no language at my command? I shuddered at the prospect; yet shuddered more at the thought of Birkenhead's anger; so that presently all my fore-looking resolved itself into a strenuous effort to put off the evil day, and prolong by lying still and quiet the sleep into which he appeared to have fallen.
He lay so close to me, divided only by the one board on which I reclined, that all the noises of the ship-the creaking of the timbers, the wash of the seas as they foamed along the quarter, and the banging of blocks and ropes-noises that never ceased, failed to cover the sound of his breathing. And this nearness to me, taken with the fact that I could not see him, so tormented me with doubt whether he was awake or asleep, was recovering or growing worse, that more than once I raised my head and listened until my neck ached. In the twilight of the cabin I could see his cloak swaying lazily on a hook; on another hung a belt with pistols, that slid this way and that with the swing of the vessel. And presently watching these and listening to the regularity of his breathing, I laid my head down and did the last thing I proposed to do or should have thought possible; for I fell asleep.
I awoke with a man's hand on my shoulder; and sat up with a start of alarm, a man's voice in my ear. The floor of the cabin slanted no longer, the cloak and swordbelt hang motionless on the wall; and in place of the sullen plash of the waves and the ceaseless creaking of joists and knees, that had before filled the inwards of the ship, a medley of shouts and cries, as shrill as they were unintelligible, filled the pauses of the windlass. These things were, and I took them in and drew the inference, that we were in harbour; but mechanically, for it seemed, at the moment, that such wits as terror left me were in the grasp of the man who shook me and swore at me by turns; and whose short hair-for he was wigless-fairly bristled with rage and perplexity.
"You! Who the devil are you?" he cried, frantically. "What witchcraft is this? Here, Gill! Gill! Do you hear, you tarry pudding-head? Who is this you have put in my cabin? And where is Fenwick? Where-"
"Where is Sir John?" cried a voice somewhat distant, as if the speaker stooped to the hatchway. "He is there, Mr. Birkenhead. I set him there myself. And between gentlemen, such words as those, Mr. Birkenhead-"
"As what?" cried the man who held me.
"As tarry. But never mind; between friends-"
"Friends be hanged!" cried my assailant with violence. "Who is this fool? That is what I asked. And you, have you no tongue?" he continued, glaring at me. "Who are you, and where is Sir John Fenwick?"
Before I could answer, the master, who had descended, crowded himself into the doorway. "That is Sir John," he said, sulkily. "I thought that you-"
"This, Sir John?" the other exclaimed.
"Ay, to be sure."
"As much Sir John as you are the warming-pan!" Birkenhead retorted; and released me with so much violence that my head rapped against the panels. "This, Sir John Fenwick?" And then, "Oh, man, man, you have destroyed me," he cried. "Where is my reputation now? You have left the real Simon Pure to be taken, and brought off this-this-you booby, you grinning ape, who are you?"
Trembling, I told him my name.
"And Sir John?" he said. "Where is he?"
"I left him at Ashford," I muttered.
"It is a lie!" he cried in a voice that thrilled me to the marrow. "You did not leave him at Ashford! He was with you on the beach-he was with you and you deserted him! You left him to be taken, and saved yourself. You wretch! You Judas!"
God knows by what intuition he spoke. For me, I swear that it was not until that moment, not until he had put the possibility into words that I knew-ay, knew, for that was the only word, so certain was I after the event-that the man who had ridden down the beach and called vainly on the sailors to wait, the man from whom we had rowed away laughing, taking with us his last hope of life, was not Matthew Smith, but Sir John Fenwick! Now, things which should have opened my eyes then, and had not, came back to me. I recalled how tall and gaunt the rider had looked through the haze, and a something novel in his voice, and plaintive in his tone. True, I had heard the click-clack of Smith's horse's shoes as clearly as I ever heard anything in my life; but if Sir John, alarmed by the sound of my hasty departure, and fearing treachery, had sallied out, and leaping on the first horse he found, had ridden after me, then all was clear.
I saw that, and cowered before the men's accusing eyes: so that they had been more than Solomons had they taken my sudden disorder for aught but guilt-guilt brought home. For Birkenhead, his rage was terrible. He seized me by the throat, and disregarding my pitiful pleas that I had not known, I had not known, he dragged me from the berth, and made as if he would choke me there and then with his naked hands. Instead, however, he suddenly loosed me. "Faugh," he cried; "I will not dirty my hands with you! That such as you-you should be a man's death! You! But you shall not escape. Gill, up with him! Up with him and to the yard-arm. String him up! He shall swing before he is an hour older!"
"In Dunquerque harbour?" said the other.
"Why not?"
"Why not?" said the master. "Because, Mr. Birkenhead, I serve a King de jure and not de facto. That is why not. And if you want another reason-"
"Well?"
"I am not aware that His Majesty has raised you to the Bench," the master answered sturdily.
"Oh, you have turned sea-lawyer, have you?"
"Law is law," said the shipmaster. "England, or France, or the high seas."
"And owling is owling!" the other retorted with passion. "And smuggling, smuggling! You are a fine man to talk! If you will not hang him-as they will hang Fenwick, so help me, never doubt it! – what will you do with him?"
"Give my men a bag of sand apiece, and let him run the gauntlet," the captain answered, with a phlegm that froze me. "Trust me, sir, they will not leave much of a balance owing."
It was terrible to see how Birkenhead, vain, choleric and maddened by disappointment, jumped at the cruel suggestion. For me, I shrank into the bunk into the farthest corner, and cried for mercy; I might as well have cried to the winds. I was hauled out, the word passed up, and despite my desperate struggles, prayers and threats-the latter not unmingled with the name of Shrewsbury, which did but harden them-I was dragged to the foot of the ladder. Thence I was carried on deck, where, half-dead with fear and powerless in the hands of three stout seamen, I met none but grinning faces and looks of cruel anticipation. Few need to be told with what zest the common herd flock to a scene of cruel sport, how hard are their bosoms, how fiendish the pleasure which all but the most humane and thoughtful take in helpless suffering. Small was the chance that my pleas of innocence and appeals for a hearing would gain attention. All was ready, the men bared their arms and licked their lips, and in a moment I must have been set for the baiting.
But in certain circumstances the extremity of fear is another name for the extremity of daring; and the master, at this last moment going to range the crew in two lines, and one of the sailors who had me in charge releasing me for an instant, that he might arm himself with a sand-bag, I saw my opportunity. With a desperate swing I wrenched myself from the grasp of the other men. That done, a single bound carried me to the plank which joined the deck to the shore. I flew across it, swift as the wind; and as the whole crew seeing what had happened broke from their stations and with yells and whoops of glee took up the chase, I sprang on shore. Bursting recklessly through the fringe of idlers whom the arrival of the ship had brought to the water's edge, I sped across the open wharf, threaded a labyrinth of bales and casks, and darted up the first lane to which I came.
Fear gave me wings, and I left the wharf a score of yards ahead of my pursuers. But the seamen, who had taken up the chase with the gusto of boys let loose from school, made up for the lack of speed by whooping like demons; and the English among them halloing "Stop Thief!" and the others some French words alike in import, the alarm went abreast of me. Fortunately the lane was almost deserted, and I easily evaded the halfhearted efforts to stop me, which one or two made. It seemed that I should for the present get away. But at the last moment, at the head of the lane fate waited for me: an old woman standing in a doorway-and who made, as I came up, as if she was afraid of me-flung a bucket after me. It fell in front of me, I trod on the edge and fell with a shriek of pain.
Before I could rise or speak, the foremost of the sailors came up and struck me on the head with a sand-bag; and the others as they arrived rained blows on me without mercy. I managed to utter a cry, then instinctively covered my head with my arms. They belaboured me until they were tired and I almost senseless; when, thinking me dead, they went off whistling, and I crawled into the nearest doorway and fainted away.
CHAPTER XL
When I recovered my senses I was on my back in one of eighteen beds, in a long white-walled room, having barred windows, and a vaulted ceiling. A woman, garbed strangely in black, and with a queer white cap drawn tight round her face, leaned over me, and with her finger laid to her lips, enjoined silence. Here and there along the wall were pictures of saints; and at the end two candles burned before a kind of altar. I had an idea that I had been partly conscious, and had lain tossing giddily with a burning head, and a dreadful thirst through days and nights of fever. Now, though I could scarcely raise my head, and my brain reeled if I stirred, I was clear-minded, and knew that the bone of my leg was broken, and that for that reason I had a bed to myself where most lay double. For the rest I was so weak I could only cry in pure gratitude when the nun came to me in my turn, and fed me, and plain, stout, and gentle-eyed, laid her fingers on her lip, or smiling, said in her odd English "Quee-at, quee-at, monsieur!"
In face of the blessings which the Protestant Succession, as settled in our present House of Hanover, has secured to these islands, it would little become me to find a virtue in papistry; and my late lord, who early saw and abjured the errors of that faith, would have been the last to support or encourage such a thesis. Notwithstanding which, I venture to say that the devotion of these women to their calling is a thing not to be decried, merely because we have no counterpart of it, nor the charity of that hospital, simply because the burning of candles and worshipping of saints alternate with the tendance of the wretched. On the contrary, it seems to me that were such a profession, the idolatrous vows excepted, grafted on our Church, it might redound alike to the credit of religion-which of late the writings of Lord Bolingbroke have somewhat belittled-and to the good of mankind.
So much with submission; nor will the most rigid of our divines blame me, when they learn that I lay ten weeks in the Maison de Dieu at Dunquerque, dependent for everything on the kind offices of those good women; and nursed during that long period with a solicitude and patience not to be exceeded by that of wife or mother. When I had so far recovered as to be able to leave my bed, and move a few yards on crutches, I was assisted to a shady courtyard, nestled snugly between the hospital and the old town wall. Here, under a gnarled mulberry tree which had sheltered the troops of Parma, I spent my time in a dream of peace, through which nuns, apple-faced and kind-eyed, flitted laden with tisanes, or bearing bottles that called for the immediate attention of M. le Medecin's long nose and silver-rimmed spectacles. Occasionally their Director would seat himself beside me, and silently run through his office: or instruct me in the French tongue, and the evils of Jansenism-mainly by means of the snuff-box which rarely left his fine white hands. More often the meagre apothecary, young, yellow, dry, ambitious, with a hungry light in his eyes, would take an English lesson, until the coming of his superior routed him, and sent him to his gallipots and compounding with a flea in his ear.
Such were the scenes and companions that attended my return to health; nor, my spirits being attuned to these, should I have come to seek or desire others, though enhanced by my native air-a species of inertia, more easily excused by those who have viewed French life near at hand, than by such as have never travelled-but for an encounter as important in its consequences as it was unexpected, which broke the even current of my days.
It was no uncommon thing for the nuns to bring one of my own countrymen to me, in the fond hope that I might find a friend. But as these persons, from the nature of the case, were invariably Jacobites, and either knowing something of my story, thought me well served, or coming to examine me, shied at the names of Mr. Brome and Lord Shrewsbury, such efforts had but one end. When I heard, therefore, for the fourth or fifth time that a compatriot of mine, amiable, and of a vivacity tout-â-fait marveilleuse was coming to see me, I was as far from supposing that I should find an acquaintance, as I was from anticipating the interview with pleasure. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Sœur Marie called me into the garden at the appointed time; and, her simple face shining with delight, led me to the old mulberry tree, where, who should be sitting but Mary Ferguson!
She had as little expected to meet me as I to meet her, but coming on me thus suddenly, and seeing me lame, and in a sense a cripple, reduced, moreover, by the long illness through which I had passed, she let her feelings have way. Such tenderness as she had entertained for me before welled up now with irresistible force, and giving the lie to a certain hoydenish hardness, inherent in a disposition which was never one of the most common, in a moment she was in my arms. If she did not weep herself, she pardoned, and possibly viewed with pleasure, those tears on my part, which weakness and surprise drew from me, while a hundred broken words and exclamations bore witness to the gratitude she felt on the score of her escape.
Thus brought together, in a strange country, and agitated by a hundred memories, nothing was at first made clear, except that we belonged to one another, and Sœr Marie had long fled to carry the tale with mingled glee and horror into the house, before we grew sufficiently calm to answer the numberless questions which it occurred to each to ask.
At length Mary, pressed to tell me how she had fared since her escape, made one of the odd faces I could so well remember. And "Not as I would, but as I could," she said, dryly. "By crossing with letters."
"Crossing?" I exclaimed.
"To be sure," she answered. "I go to and from London with letters."
"But should you be taken?" I cried, with a vivid remembrance of the terror into which the prospect of punishment had thrown her.
She shrugged her shoulders; yet suppressed, or I was mistaken, a shudder. Then "What will you?" she said, spreading out her little hands French fashion, and making again that odd grimace. "It is the old story. I must live, Dick. And what can a woman do? Will Lady Middleton take me for her children's governante? Or Lady Melfort find me a place in her household? I am Ferguson's niece, a backstairs wench of whom no one knows anything. If I were handsome now, bien! As I am not-to live I must risk my living."
"You are handsome enough for me!" I cried.
She raised her eyebrows, with a look in her eyes that, I remember, puzzled me. "Well, may be," she said a trifle tartly. "And the other is neither here nor there. For the rest, Dick, I live at Captain Gill's, and his wife claws me Monday and kisses me Tuesday."
"And you have taken letters to London?" I said, wondering at her courage.
"Three times," she answered, nodding soberly. "And to Tunbridge once. A woman passes. A man would be taken. So Mr. Birkenhead says. But-" and with the word she broke off abruptly, and stared at me; and continued to stare at me, her face which was rounder and more womanly than in the old days, falling strangely.
It wore such a look indeed, that I glanced over my shoulder thinking that she saw something. Finding nothing, "Mary!" I cried. "What is it? What is the matter?"
"Are you the man who came with Sir John Fenwick to the shore?" she cried, stepping back a pace-she had already risen, "And betrayed him? Dick! Dick, don't say it!" she continued hurriedly, holding out her hands as if she would ward off my words. "Don't say that you are that man! I had forgotten until this moment whom I came to see; who, they said, was here."
Her words stung me, even as her face frightened me. But while I winced a kind of courage, born of indignation and of a sense of injustice long endured, came to me; and I answered her with spirit. "No," I said, "I am not that man."
"No?" she cried.
"No!" I said defiantly. "If you mean the man that betrayed Sir John Fenwick. But I will tell you what man I am-if you will listen to me."
"What are yon going to tell me?" she answered, the troubled look returning. And then, "Dick, don't lie to me!" she cried quickly.
"I have no need," I said. And with that, beginning at the beginning, I told her all the story which is written here, so far as it was not already known to her. She listened in silence, standing over me with something of the severity of a judge, until I came to the start from London with Matthew Smith.
There she interrupted me. "One moment," she said in a hard voice; and she fixed me with keen, unfriendly eyes. "You know that Sir John Fenwick was taken two days later, and is in the Tower?"
"I know nothing," I said, holding out my hands and trembling with the excitement of my story, and the thought of my sufferings.
"Not even that?"
"No, nothing; not even that," I said.
"Nor that within a month, in all probability, he will be tried and executed!"
"No."
"Nor that your master is in peril? You have not heard that Sir John has turned on him and denounced him before the Council of the King?"
"No," I said. "How should I?"
"What?" she cried incredulously. "You do not know that with which all England is ringing-though it touches you of all men?"
"How should I?" I said feebly. "Who would tell me here? And for weeks I have been ill."
She nodded. "Go on," she said.
I obeyed. I took up the thread again, told her how we reached Ashford, how I saw Sir John, how I fled, and how I was pursued; finally how I was received on board the boat, and never, until the following day, when Birkenhead flung it in my teeth, guessed that I had forestalled Sir John, and robbed him of his one chance of escape. "For if I had known," I continued warmly, "why should I fly from him? What had I to fear from him? Or what to gain, if Smith with a pistol were not at my heels, by leaving England? Gain?" I continued bitterly, seeing that I had convinced her. "What did I gain? This! This!" And I touched my crippled leg.
"Thank God!" she said, with emotion. "Thank God, Dick. But-"
"But what!" I retorted sharply; for in the telling of the story I had come to see more clearly than before how cruelly I had been treated. "But what?"
"Well, just this," she said gently. "Have you not brought it on yourself in a measure? If you had been more-that is, I mean, if you had not been so-"
"So what?" I cried querulously, seeing her hesitate.
"Well, so quick to think that it was Matthew Smith-and a pistol," she answered, smiling rather heartlessly. "That is all."
"There was a mist," I said.
She laughed in her odd way. "Of course, Dick, there was a mist," she agreed. "And you cannot make bricks without straw. And after all you did make bricks in St. James's Square, and it is not for me to find fault. But there is a thing to be done, and it must be done." And her lips closed firmly, after a fashion I remembered, and still remember, having seen it a hundred times since that day, and learned to humour it. "One that must be done!" she continued. "Dick, you will not leave the Duke to be ruined by Matthew Smith? You will not lie here and let those rogues work their will on him? Sir John has denounced him."