The Fortunes of Lal Faversham Page 9

  “In that case, madame,” quoth Sir Charles, with a sneer, “your whims dumfound me.”

  “But at least they in no way concern this boy whom you wish to kill; whom you, Charles, my Charles”—and her voice sank to a murmur that was wondrous soft—”are seeking to murder.”

  “Can you explain why you left me at Newark?” he asked, and ’tis no miracle that his voice grew gentler.

  She gave me a glance which clearly bade me withdraw, and I obeyed, albeit reluctantly.

  “What farce is being played yonder?” quoth Killigrew as I came up.

  “I make no doubt that we shall soon learn,” I answered.

  A little while we waited, watching those two as they stood apart in earnest conversation. Now she caught his hand; now she set hers upon his shoulder, and thus they stood a while; then he took that hand in his, and, stooping, raised it to his lips. ’Twas clear she had conquered.

  They came back together, and Sedley forthwith addressed the company.

  “Gentlemen,” said he, “you have heard from Lady Chesterton that Edward Kynaston is under arrest, and thus prevented from keeping his appointment. This lady, gentlemen, hath been gracious enough to explain certain matters, and I am satisfied that false rumors have maligned to me the conduct of him who was to have been my opponent here. At the instances of Lady Chesterton, I renounce all quarrel with Edward Kynaston, and do solemnly pledge my word to do him no hurt whatever.”

  His oath was followed by the silence of intense surprise, broken at length by a loud, long peal of mocking laughter from Caroline. It was a laugh that seemed to strike some chord of memory within me, and suddenly there surged before my mind a scene in the first act of Macbeth, and the figure of Kynaston—that inimitable player of female parts—in the character of Lady Macbeth.

  I glanced at Caroline’s face, and that intangible, familiar likeness that had struck me when first I had seen her at her house in Pall Mall, and which I had attributed to dim memories of the child I had known, did now assume a definite shape.

  Like a torrent realization broke upon my mind, and I smote my forehead with my hand, dubbing myself a fool for not having understood before. And yet what manner of dupe had not Sedley been—Sedley, who had spent hours of sweet dalliance, and ended by eloping with him.

  As I looked, the feathered hat and gorgeous wig of glossy black were whisked away, revealing the actor’s fair hair beneath. Casting aside the long woman’s cloak in which he had come arrayed, Kynaston himself stood before the gasping company.

  Those present stood thunderstruck, and for some moments silent. Then a great burst of laughter went up, at which Sedley was so maddened that with a roar he sprang at Kynaston.

  But half a dozen rushed in between. “Remember, Charles, you have pledged your honor to do him no hurt,” cried Falmouth, and Sedley groaned.

  Kynaston, however, professed himself ready to cross swords if Sedley wished it, but those about would not permit it. The game had gone against Sir Charles, and he was dishonored if he went back upon his word and his solemn oath.

  Dick Talbot and I carried Kynaston home to breakfast with me. In my coach, he entertained us on the way with a recitation of the discourse that had passed ’twixt him and Sedley on the occasion of their elopement. He added, too, the information that he was himself the writer of the letter that I’d received from Lord Chesterton, who had—so far as he knew—no notion of taking a second wife.

  “And should this matter come to his ears, I shall look to you to make my peace with him, Sir Lionel,” he added. “For the rest, the house in Pall Mall and the suppers I have given have cost a handsome sum, but my revenge on Sedley hath been no whit less handsome.”

  IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR

  Fortune was come at last! There are men who say of Charles that he had a longer memory for enemies than for friends, and that although he sought out and compassed the destruction of all who had been concerned either in his august father’s death or in his own exile, yet many of those who had been stripped of everything by their loyalty to the Stuart cause were left to perish of want in the denuded state to which the Commonwealth had reduced them.

  Haply, they have good cause for their complaint. But in me at least it were unfitting so to speak, for albeit tardily, yet my own restoration was come, and my broad Kentish acres were mine again by an act of kingly justice.

  Truly, then, have I written: Fortune was come at last! But Fortune, with that blighting irony wherewith she is wont to sour the feasts she spreads, was come too late.

  Of what avail these rich estates when she—the only one with whom I might have shared them—had lain these past three months in some remote Scotch grave? In the same pocket that held the deed of restitution lay cheek by jowl, as though in mockery of it, the letter that from her deathbed my gentle Margaret had penned me; while on my finger I wore the ring that once had been mine, then hers, now mine again. Nine years of loyalty; nine years of waiting; nine years of exile—for such an end as this.

  I moved idly about Whitehall, rather with the air of a man beset by some dire calamity than of one so suddenly enriched.

  Being one afternoon at the Mitre, in Wood Street, I came suddenly face to face with a tall, superbly-dressed man of my own age or thereabout, in whose handsome, florid countenance there lay a something that was familiar to me. He eyed me for a moment, then approached the table at which I sat alone, and calmly seated himself before me.

  “Have I not the honor,” quoth he, in a low voice, leaning, as he spoke, across the board, “of addressing Sir Lionel Faversham, gentleman-in-waiting to his Majesty?”

  Time had given portliness to his form, and a masking grossness to his face, but the voice it had left unchanged. I started at the sound of it, for it was as a voice out of the past; a voice belonging to that time, nine years ago, when first I had met and wooed sweet Margaret Fitzmorris; a voice that last I had heard in the castle of Bailienochy, some months before Worcester was fought.

  I sat and stared at him, unable to do more than gasp this name:

  “Carleston!”

  He laughed his easy, debonair laugh of old.

  “I am right, it seems,” said he. “You are paler and thinner than of old, and in your hair a thread or two of gray begins to set the seal of age, but otherwise you are much as you were on the day you held a pistol to my head at Bailienochy. That was our last meeting.” And again he laughed, as though the memory afforded him amusement. “We parted enemies, but we were good friends before that, and so, Lal, for old time’s sake, and to drown that enmity that may have stood betwixt us, let us crack a bottle.”

  “Your pardon, Lord Carleston,” I answered stiffly, and pushing back my chair I rose. “I have kept odd company in my time, for fortunes such as mine have can bring one strange bedfellows. But never yet have I sat at table with a traitor, to my knowledge, nor will I do so now.”

  “Gadswounds!” he muttered, looking sharply round to see if any had overheard me. “If to change one’s cause because, having perceived the errors of the one he follows, a man doth wish to mend his ways, is to become a traitor, why, then, I take the title.”

  “I am a man of no great wit, my lord,” I answered, “more used to blows than arguments—haply to this I owe it that I cannot see your actions in the light you seek to cast upon them. But this I know, Lord Carleston,” I added sternly, “that you must perforce be a bold man to show your face in London at such a time.”

  “Have done, man,” he cried with some show of anger. “It is well known that I fought and bled for good King Charles—”

  “And,” I added, in a whisper, “it is also well known to some that, because a royalist lady would have none of you, you turned traitor and took service with the solemn League and Covenant. Get you back to Scotland, my lord; back to the hills, and there lie hidden until his Majesty shall have wearied of revenge.”

  “There is,” said he, “but one man in London who can accuse me of this treason, as you call it, and he will not.”
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  “How know you that?”

  “How? Why, crush me, because, firstly, Lal Faversham is neither spy nor tipstaff, and, secondly, because when I shall have told him that ’tis for his sake that I am come to London—into the lion’s maw—methinks his heart will dictate gratitude and friendship.”

  “For my sake!”

  “Ay, for your sake, and a pretty greeting have I had. To tell you,” he went on slowly, doling out each word as a miser might dole out gold, “to tell you that Margaret Fitzmorris lives, and sits in Perth pining to death because the lover to whom she plighted her troth nine years ago returns not.”

  Had a blow been dealt me across the head methinks it would have stunned me less.

  “You lie, Carleston!” I gasped, at length.

  He shrugged his shoulders, and turning, called for wine.

  “There, drink, man,” he bade me, when it was brought, “and I will tell you more.”

  Tacitly I took the bumper in my trembling hands, and gulped the contents at a draft.

  “I say it is a lie, Carleston,” I repeated. “I have in my pocket a letter written me in her hour. I have the ring which she returned to me.”

  “You have been the victim of a foul plot of Sir John Gillespie’s hatching,” he announced. “You remember him?”

  “Remember the man who sought to sell the King to Cromwell? Ay, I remember him,” I answered grimly, “no less than he remembers me.”

  “He doth indeed remember you, and his hatred is as green as ever. The letter you have received was forged by him; the ring he stole from Mistress Margaret. ’Tis true enough, Lal. I had it from him one night, a month ago, when he was deep in his cups, as also I had it that he had sent a letter to Mistress Margaret which purported to come from you. Close upon the heels of that missive came the news of your betrothal to Mistress Hyde to confirm its contents to poor Margaret.”

  “Blood and wounds, man, is this the truth—or—or—”

  “It is the truth, as it is the truth that Margaret lives.”

  “Why did Gillespie do so foul a thing?” I asked suspiciously.

  “For hate of you, and love of her.”

  “And you,” I exclaimed suddenly, “you who were Gillespie’s friend and associate, why do you come to tell me of it? You loved her once yourself, Carleston. ’Twas that and her indifference made a traitor of you.”

  “I love her still, Faversham,” he answered, with a sigh. “It is because of this love I bear her, and since it is not mine to win her for myself, that I can not endure to look upon her affliction at your supposed faithlessness. This it is that hath brought me to London to seek you out and bid you to Scotland. Now, you may deliver me to the King’s justice if you have a mind to; my task is accomplished, I—”

  I held out my hand.

  “Carleston,” I said, in a voice that was sorely shaken, “I have wronged you, and I crave your forgiveness. The debt in which to-day you have set me is too deep ever to be repaid. But for the sake of the old days you spoke of, Carleston, for the sake of the old friendship that linked us, let us crack the bottle that a while ago I churlishly refused.”

  The wine was brought. We sat down and filled our glasses.

  “’Twas for her that we became enemies,” said he, very sadly, “for her, and in her name let our peace be made. I drink to your speedy union.” And we drained our glasses.

  Then, as I set my bumper down, the full realization of the happiness, so little looked for, that was to be mine, burst fully upon me, and unnerved me. A mad laugh broke from my lips to startle those who may have heard it; then folding my arms upon the table I buried my face in them, and there, in the common room of the Mitre inn— strong man though I count myself—I fell a-sobbing as I had not sobbed for thirty years. I set out that very night for Perth, none knowing save Carleston the true errand that took me north. Him I left in London, it being his purpose to find a vessel that would bear him to France, in which country he deemed his head would rest more securely upon his shoulders than in England.

  I traveled night and day in a fever of impatience that made me rail at the trifling halts necessary for the change of horses, and by prodigality of threats and lavishness of gold, I did so contrive that betwixt the Tuesday night on which I had set out and the following Friday afternoon I had reached Berwick. Within a mile of the town the axle of my carriage broke, and I was compelled to set out afoot and walk the distance. I repaired to the Crown inn, and weary though I was, my first thought was for another coach. But in this endeavor I failed, despite the vast sums of money that I wildly offered, and at my failure I cursed and raved, little thinking how before to-morrow dawned I should have cause to thank God upon my knees for the mishap that had befallen me.

  At last, and for a monstrous price, a horse was found me; and on this, despite my scant knowledge of the country and my spent condition, I determined to push on that very night to Edinburgh.

  I left Berwick at sunset, and rode along for mayhap ten or twelve miles, when a fresh mischance overtook me, and the nag I bestrode cast a shoe. Perforce, I must get down, and taking the bridle on my arm, trudge along through the night that was fast closing in upon me. For some two hours I plodded on—scarce knowing whither—leading that lame brute and cursing the fates that did thus make a mock of me. To add to my discomfort, a fine rain was beginning to fall, when, at length, I espied the lights of the hamlet of Lenmuir.

  When I was within half a mile of the place a horseman passed me at a perilous gallop, and with ne’er a glance in my direction. A man afoot, leading a horse, he may in the dark have held to be some peasant homeward bent. I shouted to him, for I would have bought that mettlesome horse of his for any price that he might set upon it. But either he heard me not or left my cry unheeded, and in this again Providence befriended me, for ’tis odds that had he turned, my sands had been run within the hour.

  By the door of an inn too mean to own an ostler I came some ten minutes later upon his tethered nag. The place was little better than a hovel, yet the light that streamed from door and window was inviting. Through that window I shot a passing glance, then stood as if frozen there, and stared with eyes wide open, and whose sight I dared not credit, at a tall, swart man who formed the center of a group strangely ill attuned to that foul chamber.

  That man—at a glance I knew him— was Sir John Gillespie, Argyle’s kinsman, the man who, ten years ago, had sought to sell the King to Cromwell; the covenanting dog who was Carleston’s friend, and whom Carleston accused of having tricked both me and Margaret; the man than whom in my thirty-seven years of life I had had no bitterer enemy.

  Little did I dream as in my astonishment I gazed upon that stately figure—which time appeared to have left untouched—that I—drawn thither by God’s almighty providence—did myself supply the motive for that gathering and the subject of their talk that very moment. Gillespie’s voice it was, harsh and loud as of old, that discovered to me what was afoot. He addressed himself to a knave who, cloaked and booted, stood hat in hand before him, in a respectful attitude, and whom I guessed to be the man that had ridden past me on the road.

  “At Berwick you say he has been compelled to lie?”

  “Yes, Sir John. His coach lay with a snapped axle a mile or so beyond the town as I rode by. In the yard of the Crown I came upon him raving at the landlord; but no fresh carriage can he have until to-morrow, and, perforce, he must remain there to-night.”

  “It seems, then, gentlemen, that the Kirk must wait another day,” said Gillespie. Then turning to the messenger again—“How left you my Lord Carleston?”

  “In excellent health, as his letter will doubtless tell you.”

  A letter from Carleston! I set my teeth hard and clenched my hands, for in that hour I knew upon what errand I had been sent to Scotland. Once a traitor, ever a traitor—I should have known it. Vainly did I search in my mind a purpose for this betrayal, and next a chill dread beset me as I asked myself how far he had lied. Was it a lie that Margaret lived?�
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  “Gentlemen,” came Sir John’s voice, “you may depart since he comes not to-night. I shall await you here by eight o’clock to-morrow morning. Good night to you.”

  I had sense enough to slink away and crouch ’neath the shelter of a hedge to await their departure. Since Sir John bade them good night he remained. I thanked God for that.

  A few minutes went by, then from the rear of the building, they came riding out—four of them in all—and took their way along the road by which I had arrived. Presently the messenger came out, and mounted. With a “Good night, Sir John,” he rode away in the wake of the others.

  Some moments yet I tarried ’neath that hedge, then, coming forth, I crept cautiously toward the casement, and peered in. By the dirty table of coarse deal stood Sir John perusing a paper which he held to the trembling light of a greasy candle. Doubtless this was Carleston’s letter, and the one purpose predominating in my mind was to become possessed of it. A moment I lingered by the window, watching him and wondering how I might compass my design; next, with no plan formed beyond the fixed resolve to get that paper at any cost, I softly drew my sword, and crept round to the door.

  On tiptoe I stole across the threshold, then paused to observe him. A little while—while a man might tell a dozen—I stood there motionless, with not six paces separating us, and watched him, and although his back was toward me, methought the throbbing of my pulses loud enough to betray my presence. But intent upon that precious letter he made no stir until the end was reached; then with a chuckle he folded it and was thrusting it into his pocket as he turned and came of a sudden face to face with me.

  Like some apparition must I have seemed to him, as I stood there, grim and silent, my naked sword in my hand. For a second he stared with wrinkled brows and open jaw; then his sudden gasp told me that he recognized me.

  “Sir John,” said I politely, “I must trouble you for that letter.”

  His answer was a bellowed oath, and before I could move to prevent it, his sword was out.