Parson Kelly/Chapter 21

HE devil in all this affair, it was that Wogan could not be in two, or even three, places at once. While Kelly was shut in with Lady Oxford earlier, Mr. Wogan, as he has said, was on the wrong side of the door. There he was again, after the rout, while he conversed with Colonel Montague in the street. Again, while Wogan was busy with Mr. Scrope in St. James's Park, Kelly and the Colonel were exchanging their unknown explanations, of a kind not admired by Mr. Wogan, which ended in their walking, like a pair of brothers, towards George's rooms. In all these conjunctures Mr. Wogan's advice, could he have been present, might have been serviceable, or at least his curiosity must have been assuaged.

What did pass between Kelly and Lady Oxford when the rout was over, and what were the considerations which induced George and the Colonel to resist their natural and mutual desire for an honourable satisfaction?

These questions (that perplexed Wogan when he awoke, about noon, from the fatigue of the previous day) were answered later by Kelly, and the answer must be given before the later adventures and sorrows of George can be clearly narrated. Sure, no trifle could have turned sword and gown into friends that night.

When Lady Oxford and Kelly were left alone in the empty rooms, among the waning candles and scattered cards, Lady Oxford marched, like indignant royalty, to the end of the inner withdrawing-room, where they could not be heard or interrupted without warning.

Mr. Kelly followed with a mind made up. It was, after all, Lady Oxford that had betrayed him, but he had, by an accident of forgetfulness, kept her letters, and they now gave him the advantage. If those letters could be saved, the Chevalier's papers could and should be saved too, and himself rescued from peril and Rose from much unhappiness. Rose was at the bottom of his thoughts that night; her face was mirrored there bright, it seemed, with divinity. The Chevalier was there too, no doubt, but Rose peeped over his shoulder. Mr. Kelly, then, hardened his heart, and, for love and loyalty, meant to push his advantage over Lady Oxford to its limits. He approached her as she stood retired.

'Wretch,' cried Lady Oxford, 'you promised to burn my letters. Of all traitors you are the most abandoned and perfidious.'

The Parson thought that memory supplied him with a parallel, but he replied:

'It is a promise all men make and all men break.'

Lady Oxford struck her hand upon a table.

'You swore you had burned them.'

This time George was less ready with his answer, but her ladyship stood awaiting it.

'My passion must be my excuse, madam; I could not bear to part with these elegant testimonies of your esteem. It is as I have the honour to tell your ladyship; the brocades are in my strong box in my lodgings. To-morrow they shall be restored to your hands.'

'To-morrow!' she said, in a voice of despair. 'To-morrow! I am undone!'

'It is not so long to wait for the finery, and I do not think the streets are so purely unsafe as you suppose.'

'I am undone!' she repeated. 'The public will ring of my name. I shall become a byword, a thing of scorn for every scribbler to aim his wit at.'

She gnawed her fingers in an agony of fear and perplexity. Mr. Kelly had learned enough. There was plainly no chance within the lady's knowledge, as he had hoped, of saving her letters. Neither, then, could the King's papers be saved. He bowed, and took a step towards the door.

'Stop!'

Mr. Kelly turned with alacrity at the eager cry, but Lady Oxford had no words of hope for him.

'You must not leave this house to-night, or must leave it secretly by the garden.'

Kelly smiled grimly. Her ladyship was suddenly grown most tender of her reputation now that it was in peril.

'Your ladyship's care for me, and your hospitality overcome me, but I have, as you perhaps remarked, an assignation of honour with Colonel Montague which nothing must prevent me from keeping. He is longing for an instant revenge—at the Hazard Table. A while ago, you may pardon me for observing, your ladyship was remote from feeling this sudden and violent anxiety on my hand.'

Mr. Kelly's irony was poured out to deaf ears. Lady Oxford paced to and fro about the room, wringing her hands in her extremity. Then she stopped suddenly.

'I might drive to the Minister's.' She reached out a hand towards the bell. Kelly shook his head.

'That visit would be remarked upon unfavourably by the friends of my Lord Oxford, who are not in the Minister's interest. Mr. Walpole has no party to-night, and must have gone to bed—'tis verging on two o'clock—or else he is in his cups. Moreover, the Dolliad, the ballad on his sister, was credited to your pen. You know that Mr. Walpole loves a broad jest, and loves revenge. He will not protect you nor miss so fair an opportunity. Nay, I think I read in to-morrow's Flying Post, "In the papers of the prisoner Kelly, among other treasonable matter reserved for a later occasion, were found the following letters of a high curiosity, which we are graciously permitted to publish; one begins—Oh, my Delicious Strephon."

Lady Oxford snapped her fan between her fingers and dashed the fragments in Kelly's face. He owns that he cannot well complain she served him ill, but he wanted to repay her in some sort for her innuendo about his fate at the hangman's hands, and similar favours. Beholding her passion, which was not unjust, he felt bitterly ashamed of his words.

'You coward!' she said. Her dark eyes glared at him from a face white as the ivory of her broken fan, and then, quite suddenly, she burst into a storm of tears. Kelly's shame was increased a thousandfold.

'I humbly crave your ladyship's pardon,' he said. 'I have spoken in terms unworthy of a chairman. But some remarks of your ladyship's on a future event, to me of painful interest, had left an unhappy impression.'

But Lady Oxford paid no heed to the stammered apology. As Mr. Kelly moved to her she waived him aside with her hands, and, dropping on to a sofa, pressed her weeping face into the cushions. Sobs shook her; she lay abandoned to distress.

Mr. Kelly stood apart and listened to the dolorous sound of her weeping. That was true which she had said; he had promised to burn those letters; he had sworn that he had burned them. His fine plan of using them as a weapon against her began to take quite another complexion. There were, no doubt, all manner of pious and respectable arguments to be discovered in favour of the plan, if only he pried about for them. But a saying of Mr. Scrope's was suddenly scrawled out in his recollections: 'Æneas was an army chaplain who invoked his religion when he was tired of the lady, and so sailed away with a clear conscience.' Kelly murmured 'Rose' to himself, and, again, 'Rose,' seeking to fortify himself with the mention of her name. But it had the contrary effect. Even as he heard his lips murmuring it, the struggle was over.

George had a number of pretty finical scruples, of which his conduct at this crisis of his fortunes was a particular example. He relates how it seemed to him that at the mention of her name Rose threw out a hand to him and drew him up out of a slough; how he understood that his fine plan was unworthy of any man, and entirely despicable in the man whom she, out of her great condescension, had stooped to love; how he became aware that he owed it to her, since she was a woman, that no woman's fame, whether a Smilinda's or no, should be smirched by any omission of his; how he suddenly felt in his very marrow that it would dishonour Rose to save her even from great misery by a lâcheté towards another of her sex. His duty was revealed to him in that moment, as clear as it was unexpected. He sets his revulsion of feeling wholly to Rose's account, as a man in love should, but very likely her ladyship's fan had something to do with it.

He spoke again to Lady Oxford, and very gently.

'Madam, it is true. I promised to burn your letters. I swore that I had burned them. My honour, I perceive, can only be saved by saving yours.'

Lady Oxford raised her head from the cushions and stared at him with wondering eyes.

'Let us play this game cartes sur table,' continued Kelly.

Her ladyship rose from her sofa and sat herself in a chair at a table, still wondering, still suspicious. George took the chair on the other side of the table, and spoke while Lady Oxford dried the tears upon her face. To help her at all he must know all that she knew. His first business was to remove her ladyship's suspicions.

'I understand that your ladyship, by some means of which I am as yet ignorant, has become aware of a certain Plot, and has carried the knowledge to Mr. Walpole.'

Lady Oxford neither agreed nor denied. She admitted the truth of Mr. Kelly's statement in her own way.

'You bragged and blabbed to my worst enemy, to Lady Mary, with her poisonous pen,' and her fine features writhed with hatred as she spoke Lady Mary's name.

'There your ladyship was misled,' returned Kelly. 'My lips have been sealed, as I already had the honour to inform you. My Lady Mary may not love you, but she is innocent of this offence. If she wrote those rhymes, she was, indeed, more my enemy than yours; and my enemy, as your ladyship is aware, she is not.'

Lady Oxford understood the strength of the argument.

'Ah, yes,' she said thoughtfully. 'The apothecary's daughter!'

The contemptuous phrase slipped from Lady Oxford by mistake, and was not at all uttered in a contemptuous voice. But she had no doubt fallen into a habit of so terming the girl in her thoughts. None the less, however, it stung Mr. Kelly, who was at some trouble to keep his voice gentle. He knew how much Smilinda owed at this moment to the apothecary's daughter.

'The young lady to whom I conceive you refer, Miss Townley, is of a family as ancient, loyal, and honourable as your ladyship's own, and you may have seen on what terms both ladies were this evening. Moreover, Lady Mary was purely ignorant of Miss Townley's very existence when that pasquinade was written.'

'Then who wrote it?'

'Mr. Scrope, as I have the honour to repeat.'

'Scrope?' she answered in a quick question, as though for the first time she understood that George might well be right. He gave the reasons for his belief as he had given them at the Deanery to Nicholas Wogan. They were to the last degree convincing. Lady Oxford was persuaded long before Mr. Kelly had come to an end. A look came into her face which Kelly could not understand, a look of bitter humiliation. 'Scrope,' she muttered, as her fingers played with the cards upon the table. She overturned a card which lay face downwards on the table, and it chanced to be the knave of hearts.

'Your ladyship now sees that you fell into a natural error,' continued Kelly, who was anxious to smooth Lady Oxford's path, 'in consequence of which you took a natural revenge. May I ask how you secured the means of revenge? How, in a word, you came to know of the hidden Plot within the Plot?'

Her ladyship's answer fairly startled Mr. Kelly. It was not given at once. She still played with the cards, and overturned another. It was the knave of clubs.

'The cards tell you,' she said with a bitter smile.

Mr. Kelly leaned back in his chair open-mouthed. 'Scrope?' he asked.

'Scrope,' replied her ladyship. 'I received a humble letter from him praying that I would forgive his odious ingratitude, and, by way of peace-offering, bidding me tell my Lord Oxford—'

'Who had already withdrawn,' said George. 'I think I understand,' Lady Oxford's look of humiliation had enlightened him, 'and I think your ladyship understands with me. Mr. Scrope is a sort of a gentleman, and would prefer to do his dirty work without appearing as a spy. He has made use of your ladyship. He sends you the Plot and spurs you to disclose it with his ballad. He would have disclosed it himself, I doubt not, had not your ladyship served his turn. But Mr. Scrope has his refinements, and, besides that he spares himself, would take a particular pleasure in compassing my ruin at the same time that he outwitted you.'

Little wonder that Lady Oxford broke in upon Mr. Kelly's reasonings. It must have been sufficiently galling for her to reflect that in exacting her revenge she had been the mere instrument of a man she had tossed aside.

'It is both of us that he has ruined, not you alone,' she cried.

Certainly, Mr. Scrope was a person to reckon with, and had killed quite a covey of birds with one stone.

'Are you sure?' asked Kelly. 'Are you sure of that?'

She bent across the table eagerly, but she did not reply to the question.

'Will you kill Scrope,' she flashed out, 'and you and I part friends?'

Kelly, even in the midst of this tangle of misfortunes, could not but smile.

'I fear that I may have been anticipated. Mr. Scrope has been watching your ladyship's house to-night—and Mr. Wogan observed him, and, I conceive, has undertaken for him.'

Lady Oxford at that smiled too. 'Then he is a dead man,' she said, slowly savouring her words like wine.

'But his death, madam, will not save your letters,' said Kelly; and the fire died out of her face.

'He has betrayed us both,' she moaned. It seemed she had already forgotten how she herself had seized at the occasion of betraying Mr. Kelly. Kelly was in no mood to debate these subtleties.

'Are you sure?' he contented himself with asking for a second time. 'There is one thing Mr. Scrope has not done. He has taken no measures purposely to insure that your letters will be discovered, since he does not know of them; else, no doubt, he would have done his worst. We two are still engaged in a common cause—your ladyship's. Your intentions in my regard I were much less than a man if I did not forgive, granting (what I now know) your ladyship's erroneous interpretation of my ground of offence, the babbling to Lady Mary. Does your ladyship permit me, then, at the eleventh hour, to save you, if I can find a way, from the odious consequences of Mr. Scrope's unparalleled behaviour?'

'You?'

Lady Oxford's brows were drawn together in perplexity. The notion that Mr. Kelly was prepared to do this thing was still new and strange to her.

'You?' Her eyes searched his for the truth of his purpose, and found it. 'You?' she said again, but in a voice of gratitude and comprehension. And then, with a gesture of despair, she thrust her chair back and stood up. 'You cannot save yourself. I cannot save you.'

'No,' replied George, 'myself I cannot save; but it may not be too late to save my honour, which is now wrapped up in that of your ladyship's. My case is desperate; what can be done for yours? Be plain with me. How much does your ladyship know?'

Lady Oxford turned away from the table. In the face of Kelly's generosity no doubt she hesitated to disclose the whole truth of her treachery.

'I know no more than that you are in peril of arrest,' she said.

'Madam, surely you know more than that. You spoke earlier this evening of my arrest, and you spoke with the assurance of a more particular knowledge.'

Lady Oxford took a turn across the room.

'Oh, my God, what can I do?' she cried, lifting her hands to her head. 'I hear Lady Mary's laughter and the horrid things they will say!'

The whimsical inconsequence of Smilinda's appeal to her Maker did not fail to strike Kelly as ludicrous, but, as his own case was hopeless and abandoned, any thought of revenge or mockery had ceased to agitate him. His honour now stood in saving all that was left of hers from open and intolerable shame, and Rose beckoned him to the task.

'Surely you know more,' he persisted quietly.

Lady Oxford gave in and came back to the table.

'The Messengers should be waiting for you in Ryder Street.'

At last Kelly knew the worst. He would be taken before he reached his doorstep. There would be no chance of saving the cyphers in his strong box. Could he save Smilinda's letters?

He bent his forehead upon his hands, thinking. Smilinda watched him; her lips moved as though she was praying.

'I might be carried to your lodgings and claim what is mine,' she suggested.

'You would be carried to a trap—a souricière. Ten to one you would be arrested by the Messengers. At all events your visit would be remarked upon, and you would not obtain the letters.'

Lady Oxford had no other proposal at hand, and there was silence in the room. Mr. Kelly remained with his face buried in his hands; he took the air in long deep breaths. No other sound was audible except the faint ticking of the clock in the outer withdrawing-room. For Smilinda was holding her breath lest she should disturb the man whom she had betrayed, and who was now wholly occupied with the attempt to save her. Then she remarked that the sound of his breathing ceased. She bent forwards; he raised his face to hers. He did not seem to see her; his eyes kindled with hope.

'You have found a way?' she whispered; and he whispered back:

'A desperate chance, but it may serve.' He started to his feet. 'It must serve.'

A smile brightened over his face.

'It will serve.'

Sure he showed as much pleasure as if he had discovered an issue for himself.

'Quick!' said Smilinda, with a smile to answer his. 'Tell me!'

'Colonel Montague—'

'What of him? Why speak to me now of him?'

Lady Oxford's face had clouded at the name.

'He is your only salvation.'

'What can he do?'

'Everything we need. His loyalty to the present occupant of the Throne is entirely beyond a suspicion. He can act as he will without peril to his reputation. He can even rescue your papers, which are not in the same strong box as my own. The Colonel, if any man, can assist you if he will.'

'But he will not,' said her ladyship sullenly.

'He will,' answered Kelly confidently, 'if properly approached. He is a man of honour, I take it? You will pardon me for saying that your ladyship's flattering behaviour towards me, in his presence (for the nature of which you had, doubtless, your own particular reasons) can have left him in no doubt on certain heads; while it is equally plain that your ladyship hath no longer any very tender interest in keeping his esteem and regard. Nevertheless, being a gentleman, he will not abandon your ladyship's cause.'

Lady Oxford was in no way comforted.

'It may well be as you say,' she returned with a look at Mr. Kelly. She had already one example of how much a gentleman could forgive a woman when she stood in need of his help. 'But, Mr. Kelly, you cannot come at Colonel Montague.'

'Why not?'

'You know very well that he lodges in the same house as yourself. I sent a lackey with a note to you, yesterday. And your reply was dated from 13 Ryder Street.'

Mr. Kelly stepped back, he could hardly believe his ears.

'Colonel Montague—lodges—in the same house as myself?' he asked.

'Yes,' Lady Oxford replied in a dispirited fashion. She had lost heart altogether. Mr. Kelly, on the other hand, was quite lifted up by the unexpected news.

'This is a mere miracle in nature,' he cried. 'I only went into my present lodgings two days ago. I have been abroad for the greater part of the time, and asleep the rest, and have had no knowledge of the other tenants, even of their names. 'Faith, madam, your letters are as safe as though the ashes were now cold in your grate.'

'But the Colonel will have gone home, and you are to be taken in Ryder Street. You will not get speech with him.'

'Nay, madam, he has not gone home. He is waiting for me now.' Lady Oxford started. 'Ah, your ladyship remembers. He is waiting for me. Ten yards from your doorstep—ten yards at the farthest,' and Kelly actually chuckled. Carried away by his plan, he began to pace the room as he unfolded it. 'I shall see the Colonel, and if I can by any means do so, I will acquaint him, as far as is necessary, with the embarrassing posture of your affairs. I shall give him the key of the box containing the—brocades, and, if the Messengers be not already in possession of them, the rest must be entrusted to his honour as a gentleman and a soldier. The unexpected accident of our being fellow-lodgers gives him, to this end, a great advantage, and can scarce have occurred without the providence of—some invisible power or another which watches over your ladyship.'

Kelly thought that Lady Oxford this night had enjoyed what is called the Devil's own luck.

'Have I your ladyship's leave to try my powers of persuasion with Colonel Montague?'

Very much to Kelly's surprise she moved towards him, like one walking in her sleep.

'You are bleeding,' she said, and stanched with her handkerchief some drops from his brow, where it had been cut by the broken edges of the ivory fan. Then she went again into a bitter fit of weeping, which Kelly could never bear to see in a woman. She may have remembered the snow upon the lawn, years ago, and a moment's vision of white honour. Then she stinted in her crying as suddenly as she had begun; in a time incredibly short you could not tell that she had wept.

'You must carry a token. I must write. Oh my shame!' she said, and sitting down to a scrutoire, wrote rapidly and briefly, sanded the paper, and offered it open to Kelly.

'I cannot see it; your ladyship must seal it,' he said, which she did with a head of Cicero.

George took the note, and said: 'Now time presses, madam. I must be gone. I trust that, if not now, at least later, you may forgive me.'

Her lips moved, but no words came forth. Kelly made his bow, and so took leave of Smilinda, she gnawing her lips, as she watched him with her inscrutable eyes, moodily pushing to and fro with her foot the broken pieces of the fan on the polished floor.

There came into Kelly's fancy his parting view of Rose at Avignon, her face framed among the vine leaves, in the open window; she leaning forth, with a forced smile on her dear lips and waving her kerchief in farewell. A light wind was stirring her soft hair at that time, and she crying '''Au revoir! Au revoir!''' There was a scent of lilacs from the garden in the air of April, George remembered, and now the candles were dying in the sconces with a stench.

With these contrasted pictures of two women and two farewells in his fancy, Kelly was descending the wide empty staircase, not knowing too well where he went. Something seemed to stir, he lifted his eyes and before him he saw again the appearance of his King: the King, young and happy, and as beautiful as the dawn that was stealing into the room and dimming the lustres on the stairs.

Then the appearance moved aside, and Kelly found himself gazing into a great empty mirror that hung on the wall, facing the gallery above.

Lord Sidney Beauclerk, in fact, had not left the house with the other guests, and Kelly, remembering, laughed aloud as he reached the fresh air without.