Fortune's Fool/Chapter 17

chair swung past the grotesque wooden structure of Temple Bar and along Fleet Street in the deepening dusk of that summer evening, and this being the normal way it should have taken there was so far nothing to alarm its occupant. But as its bearers were about to turn to the right, to plunge into the narrow alley leading down to Salisbury Court, a man suddenly emerged from that black gulf to check their progress. The man was Holles, who had gained the place ahead of them.

"Back!" he called to them, as he advanced. "You cannot pass. There is a riot down there about a plague-stricken house which has been broken open, and the pestilence is being scattered to the four winds. You cannot go this way."

The bearers halted. "What way, then?" the foremost inquired.

"To Salisbury Court."

"Why, that is my way. You must go round by the Fleet Ditch, as I must. Come, follow me." And he went ahead briskly down Fleet Street.

The chair resumed its way in the altered direction. Miss Farquharson had leaned forward when it halted to hear what was said. She had observed no closed house in the alley upon coming that way some hours ago in daylight. But she saw no reason to doubt the warning on that account. Infected houses were, after all, growing common enough by now in London streets, and she was relieved that the closing of the theatre was to permit her own withdrawal into the country, away from that pestilential atmosphere.

She sat back again with a little sigh of weariness, and in silence suffered herself to be borne along.

But when they came to the Fleet Ditch, instead of turning to the right her bearers kept straight on, following ever in the wake of that tall cloaked man who had offered to conduct them. They were halfway over the bridge before Miss Farquharson became aware of what was happening. She leaned forward and called to them that they were mistaking the way. They took no more heed of her than if they had been stone-deaf, and trudged stolidly onward. She cried out to them more loudly and insistently. Still they took no notice. They were across the bridge, and swinging away now to the right towards the river. Miss Farquharson came to the conclusion that there must be some way back of which she was not aware, and that some good reason inspired their guide. So, for all that she still accounted it strange that the chairmen should have been so deaf to her commands, she allowed them now to proceed without further interference. But when far from finding any way to recross the ditch, the chair suddenly turned to the left in the direction of Baynard's Castle, her bewilderment suddenly redoubled

"Stop!" she called to them. "You are going the wrong way. Set down the chair at once. Set down, I say!"

They heeded her as little as before. Not only did they press steadily onward, but they even quickened their pace, stumbling over the rough cobbles of the street in the darkness that pervaded it. Alarm awoke in her.

"Nathaniel," she called shrilly, leaning forward, and vainly seeking to grasp the shoulder just beyond her reach. "Nathaniel!"

Her alarm increased. Was this really Nathaniel or was it some one else? There was something sinisterly purposeful in the stolid manner in which the fellow plodded on unheeding. The tall man ahead who led them, little more than a dark outline now, had slackened his step, so that the chair was rapidly overtaking him.

She attempted to rise, to force up the roof of the chair, to thrust open the apron in front of her. But neither yielded to her exertions. And in the end she realized that both had been fastened. That made an end of any doubt with which she may still have been deluding herself. She yielded to terror and her screams for help awoke the silent echoes of the street. The tall man halted, turned, rapped out an oath, and authoritatively commanded the men to set down. But even as he issued the order the flare of a link suddenly made its appearance at the corner of Paul's Chains, and in the ring of yellow light it cast they could discern the black outlines of three or four moving figures. Light and figures paused a moment there, checked by the girl's cries. Then abruptly they flung forward at clattering speed.

"On! On!" Holles bade the chairmen curtly, and himself went forward again, the chair now following with Miss Farquharson steadily shrieking for help and beating frenziedly upon roof and apron.

She, too, had seen those Heaven-sent rescuers rushing swiftly to meet them, and she may have caught in the torchlight the livid gleam of swords drawn for her deliverance.

They were a party of three gentlemen lighted by a link-boy, on their homeward way. They were young and adventurous, as it chanced, and very ready to bare their blades in defence of a lady in distress.

But it happened that this was a contingency for which Holles was fully prepared, one, indeed, which he could not have left out of his calculations.

The foremost of those hastening gallants was suddenly upon him, his point at the level of the Colonel's breast, and bawling dramatically:

"Stand, villain!"

"Stand yourself, fool," Holles answered him in tones of impatient scorn, making no shift to draw in self-defence. "Back—all of you—on your lives! We are conveying this poor lady home. She has the plague."

That checked their swift advance. It even flung them back a little, treading on one another's toes in their sudden intimidation. Brave enough against ordinary men and ordinary lethal weapons, they were stricken with instant panic before the horrible, impalpable foe whose presence was thus announced to them.

Miss Farquharson, who had overheard the Colonel's warning and perceived its paralyzing effect upon those rescuers whom she had been regarding as Heaven-sent, leaned forward, in frenzied fear that the trap was about to close upon her.

"He lies! He lies!" she shrieked in her terror. "It is false! I have not the plague! I have not the plague! I swear it! Do not heed him, sirs! Do not heed him! Deliver me from these villains. Oh, of your charity, sirs in God's name  do not abandon me, or I am a lost woman else!"

They stood at gaze, moved by her piteous cries, yet hesitating what to believe. Holles addressed them, speaking sadly:

"She is distraught, poor soul. Demented. I am her husband, sirs, and she fancies me an enemy. I am told it is a common enough state in those upon whom this terrible disease has fastened." It was a truth of which all London was aware by now that the onslaught of the plague was commonly attended by derangement of the mind and odd delusions. "And for your governance, sirs, I should tell you that I greatly fear I am, myself, already infected. I beg you, then, not to detain me, but to stand aside so that we may regain our home before my strength is spent."

Behind him Miss Farquharson continued to scream her furious denials and her piteous entreaties that they should deliver her.

If they still doubted, yet they dared not put their doubts to the test. Moreover, her very accents by now in their frenzy seemed to confirm this man's assertion that she was mad. A moment yet those rescuers hung there, hesitating. Then suddenly one of them surrendered to his mounting fear and horror.

"Away! Away!" he cried, and, swinging round, dashed off down the street. His panic communicated itself instantly to his fellows, and they went clattering after him, the link-boy bringing up the rear, his streaming torch held high.

Aghast, spent by her effort, Miss Farquharson sank back with a moan, feeling herself exhausted and abandoned. But when one of the chairmen, in obedience to an order from the Colonel, pulled the apron open, she at once leapt up and out, and would have gone speeding thence but that the other bearer caught her about her slender body, and held her firmly whilst his fellow wound now about her head a long scarf which Holles had tossed him for the purpose. That done, they made fast her hands behind her with a handkerchief, thrust her back into the chair, and shut her in.

She sat now helpless, half-choked by the scarf, which not only served to muffle her cries, but also blindfolded her, so that she no longer knew whither she was being conveyed. All that she knew was that the chair was moving.

On it went, then away to the left, and up the steep gradient of Paul's Chains, and lastly to the right into Knight Ryder Street. Before a substantial house on the north side of this, between Paul's Chains and Sermon Lane, the chair came to a final standstill and was set down. The roof was raised and the apron pulled open, and hands seized upon her to draw her forth. She hung back, a dead weight, in a last futile attempt at resistance. Then she felt herself bodily lifted in strong arms, and swung to a man's shoulder.

Thus Holles bore her into the house, wherein the chair, the poles having been removed, was also presently bestowed. The Colonel turned to the right of the roomy hall in which two silent figures stood at attention—Buckingham's other two French lackeys—and entered a moderate-sized square chamber, sombrely furnished and sombrely wainscoted from bare floor to whitened ceiling. In the middle of the room a table with massive corkscrew legs was laid for supper, and on its polished surface gleamed crystal and silver in the light from the great candle-branch that occupied its middle. The long window overlooking the street was close-shuttered, the shutters barred. Under this stood a daybed of cane and carved oak, furnished with velvet cushions of a dull wine colour. To this daybed Holles conveyed his burden. Having set her down, he stooped to remove the handkerchief that bound her wrists.

It was a compassionate act, for he knew that the pinioning must be causing pain by now to her arms. Under the broad brim of his hat, his face, moist from his exertions, gleamed white, his lips were tightly compressed. Hitherto intent upon the accomplishment of the business as he had planned it, he had given little thought to its ugly nature. Now suddenly as he bent over this figure, at once so graceful, so delicate and frail, as a faint sweet perfume that she used assailed his nostrils conveying to his senses a suggestion of her daintiness and femininity, disgust of the thing he did overwhelmed him, like physical nausea.

He turned away, to close the door, tossing aside his hat and cloak, and mopping his brow as he went, for the sweat was running down him like basting on a capon. Whilst he was crossing the room she struggled to her feet, and her hands being now at liberty she tugged and tore at the scarf until she loosed it so that it slipped down from her face and hung in folds about her neck and shoulders above the line of her low-cut, modish bodice.

Erect there, breathing hard, her eyes flaming, she flung her words angrily at the tall loose-limbed figure of her captor.

"Sir," she said, "you will let me depart at once, or you shall pay dearly for this villainy."

He closed the door and turned again, to face her. He attempted to smother in a smile the hangdog expression of his countenance.

"Unless you suffer me to depart at once, you shall "

There she paused. Abruptly she broke off, to lean forward a little, staring at him, her parted lips and dilating eyes bearing witness to an amazement so overwhelming that it overrode both her anger and her fear. Hoarse and tense came her voice at last:

"Who are you? What what is your name?"

He stared in his turn, checking in the very act of mopping his brow, wondering what it was she saw in him to be moving her so oddly. Where she stood, her face was more than half in shadow, whilst the light of that cluster of candles on the table was beating fully upon his own. He was still considering how he should answer her, what name assume, when she startled him by sparing his invention further trouble in the matter.

"You are Randal Holles!" she cried on a wild, strained note.

He advanced a step in a sort of consternation, breathless, some sudden ghastly emotion tearing at his heart, eyeing her wildly, his jaw fallen, his whole face livid as a dead man's.

"Randal Holles!" she repeated in that curiously tortured voice. "You! You of all men—and to do this thing!"

Where there had been only wild amazement in her eyes, he beheld now a growing horror, until mercifully she covered her face with her hands.

For a moment he copied her action. He, too, acting spasmodically, covered his face. The years rolled back; the room with its table laid for that infamous supper melted away to be replaced in his vision by a cherry orchard in bloom, and in that orchard a girl on a swing, teasing yet adorable, singing a song that brought him, young and clean and honourable, hastening to her side. He saw himself a lad of twenty going out into the world with a lady's glove in his hat—a glove that to this day he cherished—bent upon knight-errantry for that sweet lady's sake, to conquer the world, no less, that he might cast it in her lap. And he saw her—this Sylvia Farquharson of the Duke's Theatre—as she had been in those long-dead days when her name was Nancy Sylvester.

The years had wrought in her appearance a change that utterly disguised her. Where in this resplendently beautiful woman could he discover the little child he had loved so desperately? How could he have dreamt of his little Nancy Sylvester transformed into the magnificent Sylvia Farquharson, whose name he had heard used as a byword for gallantry, lavishness, and prodigality, whose fame was as widespread and questionably lustrous as that of Moll Davies or Eleanor Gwynn?

He reeled back until his shoulders came to rest against the closed door, and stared and stared in dazed amazement, his soul revolted by the horror of the situation in which they found themselves.

"God!" he groaned aloud. "My Nan! My little Nan!"