Parson Kelly/Chapter 28

T seemed to Wogan that this particular story of the Parson's fortunes, which began in Paris so long ago, had now ended in Paris. But he was wrong, and it was not till ten years after Mr. Kelly's escape from the Tower that Wogan witnessed the last circumstance in England, and himself spoke the closing word.

Retiring soon from Paris, which ill suited a slender purse, Mr. Kelly lived, with his fair wife, at Avignon, where he played secretary to the Duke of Ormond. The Parson was a gêne on the amours of the aged Duke, who posted him off, in the year Forty-Five, to, escort the Prince of Wales to the Scottish islands. Wogan himself, earlier in the same year of grace, lost an arm at the battle of Fontenoy, but got a leaf of the laurels, being dubbed Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis.

His arm amputated and the wound healed, Wogan must needs join the Prince of Wales, then residing in his palace of Holyrood, near Edinburgh. Wogan came too late for that pretty onfall at Prestonpans, but he marched south with the Prince's forces, riding again the old roads from Carlisle to Lancaster and Preston. The buxom maids of the inns were broad-blown landladies now; some of them remembered Wogan; and the ale was as good as ever.

It chanced that at Preston, where he tarried for a couple of days, Mr. Wogan was billeted on a cobbler, a worthy man, but besotted with a new religion, which then caused many popular tumults. To England it had been brought over from America by two brothers of Wogan's old friend, Sam Wesley, the usher at Westminster School, and familiar of Bishop Atterbury.

Wogan's host could talk of nothing but this creed, whose devotees cried out (it seemed), laughed, fell down in fits, barked, and made confession in public.

'Ah, sir,' he said to Wogan, 'if you could but hear the Brothers Wesley, Charles and John, in the pulpit or singing hymns! Charles sings like an angel, and to hear John exhort the unaroused might waken those who have lain for a score of years in the arms of the Devil.'

'John Wesley, little Jack Wesley?' cried Wogan. 'Why, I have saved him from many a beating at Westminster School!'

'Do you know that saint, sir? 'asked the cobbler, in an enthusiasm.

'Know him, I know nobody else, if he is the brother of honest Sam Wesley, that once let me into the Deanery on a night in May. Assuredly I knew little Jack.'

The cobbler came near kneeling to Wogan. 'Here, indeed, is the finger of Providence,' he exclaimed. 'Dear sir, you may yet cast off the swathings of the Scarlet Woman.'

'Easy, be easy, Mr. Crispin!' quoth Wogan. 'But tell me, is Jack to preach and is Charles to sing in this town of yours to-night?'

'Unhappily no, but we are promised the joy of hearing that famed disciple, Mr. Bunton, discourse, and the Elect Lady, as the Brethren style her, will also speak.'

'Do the women preach in your new Church?'

'No, but they are permitted to tell the story of their call, and to-night we shall hear the Elect Lady—'

'Confess before the congregation? 'Faith, the discourse may be improving. Is the Elect Lady handsome?'

'She hath been one of the most renowned beauties of her age, and there are some who say that she is little altered by time. Ah, sir, she will make you embrace the truth.'

'My embraces were ever at the mercy of feminine persuasion,' said Wogan. 'Is this Elect Lady of these parts?'

'No, sir, she comes from the South, travelling with holy Mr. Bunton. You will oblige me infinitely, sir, if you will take pity on your own poor soul and join our love-feast. We meet in the warehouse of Mr. Brown, our most eminent grocer, in Scotch Lane, behind the "Jackdaw and Bagpipes."'

'I thank you for your solicitude,' Wogan said; 'and as to the love-feast, I'll think of it.'

Consequently he thought no more of it till the bottle had gone round half-a-dozen times at the Prince's mess in the 'Bull Tavern.' Lord Elcho, who had certainly drunk his dose, began telling, as a good thing, of his conversation with a bourgeois of Preston.

'"What is your Prince's religion?" asked the bourgeois.

'"That is still to seek, my good man, still to seek," I answered him,' cried Elcho, laughing.

The Prince laughed also; the free-thinking philosophers had been at him already, first in Rome, then in Paris.

'Good for you, Elcho,' he cried; then, musing, '’Tis a very awkward business, this of religion. We have given three crowns for a mass, and there's the difficulty, there it is, as black as ever. I wish some one would invent a new creed, and the rest agree about it, dn them, and then what is still to seek, my religion, would be found.'

A thought came into Wogan's head; the bottle had made rounds enough, and more; next morning they were to march early.

'Sir,' he said, 'there is a new religion, and a handsome lady to preach it.' Then he repeated what his host, the cobbler, had chanted to him, 'The meeting is at night in the warehouse of Mr. Brown, the eminent grocer.'

'A handsome woman!—a new belief! By St. Andrew, I'll go,' cried Charles. 'You'll come, Nick, you and—' he looked at the faces looming through the tobacco smoke round the wine-stained table. The blue reek of pipes clouded and clung to men's faces; to the red rough beard of Lochgarry, the smart, clean-shaven Ker of Graden and Maxwell of Kirkconnell, the hardy gaze of brave Balmerino, the fated Duke of Perth. Wogan thought of the Highland belief in the shroud of mist that is seen swathing men doomed soon to die, as were so many of them. The Prince stood and stared, his pipe in his hand. 'Nick, you will come, you and Ker of Graden; he's sober! Allons!'

'Sir,' whispered Mr. Murray of Broughton, 'think of the danger! The Elector has his assassins everywhere; they are taken; your Royal Highness laughs and lets them go, and the troops murmur.'

'Danger! Will they look for me at a tub-thumping match?'

The Prince picked up a cork from the floor; he set it to the flame of a candle; he touched with it his eyebrows and upper lip; he tucked his brown hair under his wig, standing before the mirror on the chimneypiece. Then he flung a horseman's cloak over his shoulders, stooped, and limped a little in his walk.

'A miracle,' everyone called out, for scarce a man of them could have known him.

He tossed his hand in the air; Allons, en avant! he cried, with a laugh; and Wogan, with Ker of Graden, did what all might have better done at Derby—followed their leader.

The night was wintry, and a cold north wind blew about the rare flickering oil lamps in the street. All three men buttoned themselves up in their cloaks. The Prince, still stooping and limping, took an arm of each of his aides-de-camp; indeed, he somewhat needed their support.

'I am like that Sultan in Monsieur Galland's Eastern tales,' he said, 'visiting my subjects incognito. Nick, you are Mesrour, the Chief of the—no, you're Giaffar. Graden is—I forget the Eastern minister's name. I am the Caliph. But what are the rabble about?'

The three pilgrims had entered the lane that led to the warehouse of the devout grocer. There was a mob around the door waving torches and shouting insults at a few decent tradesmen and their wives who were bent on the same pious errand as Wogan and his friends.

'Away, swaddlers!' 'Down with the Methodists!' they cried; and a burly fellow brushed against Wogan's shoulder in the least gentlemanly style. He reeled off and fell flat in the lane, while the other ragamuffins laughed at him.

The three devotees stepped briskly through the grinning crowd that cried to Graden, 'Come to buy brimstone, Scotch Sandy?'

'Come to escape it, my dear friend,' quoth Wogan's host, the cobbler, who stood at the door, and kept it, too, against the mob with a great show of spirit.

'You have thought of us, sir?' asked the cobbler.

'Ay, and brought two other inquiring spirits,' said Wogan.

They were conducted into a long half-empty warehouse, smelling of cheese and festooned with cobwebs. A light or two burned dimly in horn lanterns; a low platform of new planks had been set up at the top of the room; a table with seven candles made an illumination there; a big black Bible, and a jug of water with a glass flanked the Bible. The preacher sat on a chair (most of the congregation stood, or reposed on barrels and benches), and on another chair, beside the preacher, was a lady, veiled, her fine figure obscured by widow's weeds.

'Is that your beauty?' whispered the Prince.

'The Elect Lady, sir,' murmured the cobbler devoutly.

'Mon Dieu! she has a very pretty foot!'

And Wogan, too, noticed the blaze of a diamond buckle that nearly covered the little arched instep. Tap, tap! went the Elect Lady's foot, thrust out in front of her heavy petticoat of crape.

'The lady is travelling everywhere, for the good of souls, gentlemen, with Mr. Wesley's friend and choice disciple, the preacher, Mr. Bunton.'

'L'heureux Monsieur Bunton! Quelle chance!' quoth his Highness.

Mr. Bunton, the preacher, was indeed a fine, handsome young fellow as any widow could wish to look upon. He wore lay dress, not being a priest ordained of the Church of England. As for the congregation, they were small trading people, not rabble; indeed, the mob outside broke most of the windows during the sermon, that was interrupted, not only by the pebbles of the ragamuffins, but by the antics of the congregation.

Mr. Bunton, after a hymn had been sung without any music, began his preaching. He assured the audience that none of them could be a gayer dog than he had been, that was now a shining light. He obliged the congregation with a history of his early life and adventures, which Wogan now tells in few words, that people may know what manner of men were certain of these saints, or had been. Mr. Bunton was reared in sin, he said, as a land-surveyor. A broth of a boy he was, and nine times his parents sent him from Reading to London to bind him to a trade. Nine times his masters returned him on their hands.

Here the audience groaned aloud, and one went off in a fit. Mr. Bunton then told how he was awakened to sin as he walked in Cheapside. At this many, and the cobbler among them, cried 'Hallelujah!' but some went off into uncontrollable fits of laughter, which did not disturb the gravity of the rest of the assembly.

The preacher's confession was, indeed, of such a nature that Wogan let a laugh out of himself, while Graden and the Prince rolled in extreme convulsions.

'Go on, gentlemen; you are in the right path,' said the cobbler. 'Our converts are generally taken in this way first. It is reckoned a very favourable sign of grace. Some laugh for a week without stopping to sleep, eat, or drink.'

'I'll try to stop to drink,' hooted his Highness, his face as red as a lobster; and then off he went again, the bench shaking beneath him, while Wogan and Graden laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks in their dark corner. The sympathetic cobbler murmured texts of an appropriate character. Indeed, now he thinks of it all, and sees Mr. Bunton sawing the air while he tells the story of his early wicked days, Mr. Wogan laughs as he writes. The man was greasy and radiant with satisfied vanity. His narrative of what he did and thought after he awoke to sin in Cheapside was a marvel.

'I felt that beef and mutton were sinful things.'

Here came a groan from an inquiring butcher.

'I wished to put away all that was of the flesh fleshy. My desire was to dwell alone, in a cave, far from the sight of woman.'

The Elect Lady groaned, and all the wenches in the congregation followed suit.

'Abstaining from feasts of fat things, my mind was set on a simple diet of acorns, grass, and crabs.'

'Les glands, les écrevisses, et l'herbe des champs!' hooted the Prince. 'Mon Dieu, quel souper, et quelle digestion il doit avoir, cet homme-là!'

'But, sisters and brethren,' Mr. Bunton went on, 'did I yield to these popish temptations? Did I live, like one of their self-righteous so-called saints, on crabs, acorns, and grass? Did I retire to a cave? No, dear sisters and brethren. My motive for abstaining was bad; it was a suggestion of the Old Man—'

'Qui donc est-il, ce vieillard bien pensant?' whispered the Prince.

'The devil, sir,' answered Graden, who knew the doctrine of the Scotch ministers.

'My motive for not living on crabs in a cave was bad, I confess, but it was over-ruled for the best. Dear friends, I kept myself far from these temptations, because, indeed, I was afraid of ghosts that haunt caves and such places.'

'Il ne mangeait pas les écrevisses, parce qu'il avait peur des revenants! O c'est trop!' said the Prince, in a voice choked with emotion, while more advanced disciples cried 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!'

'But next,' the preacher went on, much gratified and encouraged by these demonstrations, 'I was happily brought acquainted with that precious sister, that incomparable disciple of Mr. Wesley, whom we call the Elect Lady. Then I awoke to light, and saw that it was laid upon me to preach, continually and unceasingly, making in every town confession of my offences. That dear lady, friends, promises for this once (she is as modest as she is generous and good) to tell us the moving story of her own early dangers, while she was a dweller in the tents of—of Shem, I think.'

The congregation cheered and stamped with their feet, all but a few who were rolling on the floor in fits and foaming at the mouth. Mr. Bunton sat down very warm, and applied himself to the mug of water.

The Elect Lady rose up to her full height, and tossed back her veil over her shoulders.

'Ah, nous sommes trompés,' said the Prince. 'C'est une femme de quarante ans, bien sonnés!'

But Wogan, between the shoulders of the congregation, stared from his dim corner as he had never stared at mortal woman before. The delicate features were thickened, alas, the lips had fallen in, the gold threads had been unwoven out of the dark brown hair. There were two dabs of red on a powdered face, where in time past the natural roses and lilies had bloomed; but the voice and the little Andalusian foot that beat the time with the Elect Lady's periods were the voice and the foot of the once incomparable Smilinda! Nay, when she turned and looked at the converted land-surveyor beside her, Mr. Wogan knew in her gaze the ghost of the glance that had bewitched Scrope, and Kelly, and Colonel Montague, and Lord Sidney Beauclerk, and who knows how many other gallants? In that odd place Wogan felt a black fit of the spleen. A woman's loss of beauty,—Wogan can never think of it unmoved. What tragedy that we men endure or enact is like this?

But her ladyship spoke, and she spoke very well. The congregation, all of them that were not in fits or in laughing hysterics, listened as if to an angel. Heavens! what a story she told of her youth! What dangers encountered! What plots prepared against her virtue, ay, by splendid soldiers, beautiful young lords, and even clergymen; above all, by one monster whom she had discovered to be, not only a monster, but a traitor to the King, and an agent of the Pretender. She was a young thing then, married to an old lord, all unprotected, on every side beset by flattery.

The congregation groaned and swayed at the picture of man's depravity, but Wogan, his spleen quite forgotten, was chuckling with delight.

Yet, all unawakened as she was, said this penitent, an unknown influence had ever shielded her. She remembered how one of these evil ones, the clergyman, after kneeling vainly at her feet, had cried, 'Sure, some invisible power protects your ladyship.'

Here the groans gave place to cries of praise, arms were lifted, the simple, good people wept. Wogan listened with a less devotional air, bending forward on his bench, and rubbing his hands for joy. In truth it had just come upon him that it was his duty to stand up when the Elect Lady sat down, and bear his witness to the truth of her narrative.

'Not to her be the triumph,' she went on, 'all unawakened as she then was, and remained, till she heard Mr. Wesley preach,' and thereafter went through the world with Brother Bunton, converting land-surveyors, colliers, and others.

Wogan does not care to remember or quote any more of this lady's pieties. They had a kind of warmth and ease of familiarity which, in sacred things, are not to his liking. However, when she ceased, Mr. Wogan stood up, a tall figure of a French officer with an empty sleeve in his dim corner.

'Good people,' he said; 'in my heedless youth I had the honour to be of the acquaintance of this lady who has just spoken to you.'

The Elect Lady glanced at Wogan; she gave a strange, short cry, and the black veil swept over her face again.

'I was,' Wogan went on, 'the eye-witness of these trials to which her Ladyship's virtue was exposed by the wicked ones of whose company I was a careless partaker. I have heard that wicked minister say that some invisible power protected her Ladyship. If any testimony to the truth of her ladyship's moving tale were needed I could bear that evidence, as could my friend the Rev. Mr. Kelly, now in France with despatches, and also General Montague, at present serving with Field-Marshal Wade, in the neighbourhood of Newcastle.'

Wogan sat down.

'That was providential indeed,' said the cobbler; and all the congregation bawled 'Miracle.' But the Elect Lady sat still, her face in her hands, like a Niobe in black bombazine.

In the confusion, the three inquirers from the Prince's army slipped modestly out. A heavy shower of snow had swept the rabble out of the lane. All was dark and cold, after the reek of the crowded warehouse.

'Nick,' said the Prince, 'was that story all true? Was the Elect Lady a prude?'

'It is Mr. Kelly's story, sir,' said Wogan. Your Royal Highness can ask him.'

'George was her adorer? Then George shall tell me the tale over a bottle. How the cold strikes! Hey, for a bowl of punch!' cried the Prince.

'I am at your commands, sir, but may I say that it is one of the morning, and the pipes play the reveillé at four?'

'To quarters, then! What is the word, damme? What is the word?'

'Slaint an Righ, sir.'

'Slaint an Righ? I never can get my tongue about it. Oh, if our subjects had but one language and one religion! But it shall not be the religion of Mr. Bunton. Bon soir!'

'You have taken every trick, Wogan!' said Graden, as the Prince entered his inn. 'A sober night, for once, before a long day's march.'

Next morning the army went south, to Derby, and then (by no fault of the Irish officers or of their Prince) came back again. Wogan was at Falkirk, Culloden, and Ruthven, woe worth the day! How he reached France when all was over, is between him and a very beautiful young lady of Badenoch; she said she bore a king's name—Miss Helen Macwilliam. Of King Macwilliam Wogan hath never heard, but the young lady (whose brothers had taken to the heather) protected Wogan in his distress, tended his wound, hid him from the red-coat soldiers, and at last secured for him a passage in a vessel from Montrose.

And for all souvenir, she kept the kerchief with which she had first bound up the bayonet-stab that Wogan came by, when he, with the Stewarts, broke through Barrel's regiment at Culloden. He writes this at Avignon, where George and his wife also dwell, in the old house with the garden, the roses, and the noisy, pretty children that haunted Mr. Kelly's dreams when he was young.