CHAPTER IX
THE END OF THE FIRST ACT
"The question now is," said Lewis Granger to Beau Bufton that night, "what is to be done? How are you, and I, which latter is perhaps of more considerable importance, to continue to exist? I have had no money for a long time, and in a short time you also will have none. What do you intend to do?"
As he spoke, he cast his eyes upon the man who now sat the picture of despair in his rooms in the Haymarket, and was, in truth, in about as miserable a frame of mind as it was possible for any person to be. Miserable and broken down in more ways than one; through lack of money as well as a lack of knowledge of where any was to come from; miserable also through the certainty that by to-morrow all London would ring with the manner in which he had been tricked and deceived. While, which was perhaps the worst of all disasters, his long-meditated plan of espousing some heiress or another was now and for ever impossible. Who would marry him, a man who might or might not be the husband of the singing, dancing girl of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Marylebone Gardens; what heiress, even though he could get free of Anne Pottle, would not know him in his true colours: those of a fortune-hunter?
There was no gibe nor jeer left in him now, not even of that lower-form schoolboy order, which Granger had so often derided with savage contempt. How could he ever jeer and jest at others henceforth? He, who had stood so pitiful and exposed a fool before others that morning. In the future, whatever became of him, he could sneer or scoff no more, for fear that in his teeth should be thrown his own idiocy.
But, in place of the little quips and contemptuous insolence he had been wont to pride himself upon, there had come now into his heart a passion, black and venomous, that had taken the place of those other qualities which once he had considered all-sufficient-a passion that was a thirst, a determination for revenge. Yet, against whom it was to be exercised he scarcely knew, even now. His wife, if she were his wife, perhaps; and then-afterwards-against all who had aided and abetted her, all who, knowing what was to be done, had stood by and had not interfered in the doing thereof. Undoubtedly there were two such persons, if no more. Surely the real Ariadne Thorne had known; surely, too, the man who had proclaimed himself as her future husband. The man who, on the two occasions when they had come together, had treated him with icy contempt and scorn; who had driven him from the avenue with ignominy; and had spoken to him as though he were dirt beneath his feet. Who had spoken thus to him! – to him! – whose whole system had been to treat others so.
"You do not answer me," said Lewis Granger, filling his glass as he spoke. "I have asked you what is to be done. How are you and I to live? You owe me five thousand pounds, which, as you have not married the lady who possesses twenty times that amount, I presume it is little use dunning you for. But the wherewithal to live, that is the question of the moment."
"I am ruined," Bufton said. "The Fleet Prison will ere long be my home-"
"Tush! tush!" exclaimed Granger. "Never. What! A bold cock of the walk like Algernon Bufton languish in the Fleet? Never, I say. Are there not the clubs, the gaming-houses, the credit given by dupes? You are skilful at-well-sleight of hand-"
"Clubs! gaming-houses! credit!" exclaimed Bufton. "Who will give me credit now; who play with me? Man, I am ruined. Lost. Sunk. I have but thirty gold pieces in the world."
"You will have but thirty in an hour or so, when you have shared what you possess with me; but at present you have sixty, or had when you went to your wedding to-day, and you have spent nothing since then."
"Curse you!" cried Bufton angrily. "Before God, I think you are my evil genius."
"As I was when you were at Cambridge, eh? In the Glastonbury affair?"
"No! no! I meant not that. But-but-Lewis, what is to become of me?"
"Make money. If you cannot enter clubs here, or gamble, you can do so elsewhere. There is Bath-Tunbridge I do not suggest, for reasons-painful reasons-but there is Bath. Your cleverness with your-well! – fingers and hands-should stand you in good stead."
"It will be known at Bath as well as in London. I can show my face nowhere."
"What then to do? What are you thinking of? You are burdened with me, you see; you have to keep me for ever-until, at least, the Glastonbury affair is wiped away. You do it devilish ill; I live in a garret, you in sumptuous rooms; yet it is something. Am I to keep myself henceforth? Wherefore again I say, what are you thinking of doing?"
"At present I think but of one thing. Revenge! A terrible revenge!"
"On whom?"
"On him. That man, Barry. The man who is to marry the true Ariadne Thorne; the man who, since he appeared at the church, knew very well what was taking place and let me fall into the snare like a rat into a trap."
"It will be hard to do. He is a sea-captain, a brave, stalwart-looking fellow, and-he has beaten you once. He may do so again. Moreover, I do not think he would meet you if you challenged him."
"There are other ways. Men can be hired even nowadays to do the work. A month ago Lord D'Amboise's nose was slit to the bone-perhaps his Ariadne would not like Sir Geoffrey so much if he were equally disfigured! There are many ways if one will pay-"
"But you cannot pay," said Granger, with a swift glance at him, which the other saw well enough; "that is, unless you have a secret store. You would be like enough to have one, and keep the knowledge from me."
"I have nothing; nothing but what you know of."
"Humph! perhaps. 'But what I know of!' Well, at least I know of your sixty guineas which you had when you went to your marriage this morning-your wedding with the heiress," Granger said emphatically, observing how the other winced at the word "marriage"; "I know of that. Well! come, let us decide. You say you can support me no longer, therefore I must now support myself. We must part, grievous as so doing will be to me."
"Part! You and I! When we have been so much to each other. Part! Oh, no! I-I might find a little more money somehow yet-if-if-a letter were sent to my mother saying that I was dying-now-she might consent. She-"
"I do not doubt you will find more money somewhere," Granger replied, with a very profound look of disgust for the knave on his face, "no more than I doubt that, in some way, you will wheedle the wherewithal to live out of your mother. But-you must do it by yourself. We part now. I can earn my living in a fashion. Come, divide."
"Not now; you will not take all at once-the full half? Think of my debts."
"Damn your debts! Though I have confidence in your powers, Bufton; you will by some means discover how to avoid their payment. Divide, I say."
By strong persuasion, by the force of some hold which Granger had over the Beau, the latter was at last induced to draw forth his purse, and to divide into two heaps the sum of sixty guineas which it contained, though not without much protest on his side, nor without, indeed, almost a whimper at parting with both his money and his friend. But the latter was inexorable, and he took the thirty guineas.
"And we shall meet no more?" Bufton said, "after so long a friendship. Oh! it is hard. And how-how are you going to make a living? Can you not put me in the way of doing so too?"
As he asked the question, the other started. Put him in the way of making a living! In the way of making a living! Rather, he thought suddenly to himself, put him in the way of going to a more utter ruin than that which had yet fallen on him. He must think of this. His whole life for two years had been devoted towards ruining, crushing this man who had ruined his own career at the outset of it; and, although by tricking him into the marriage made that day he had gone far towards fulfilling his purpose, he was not yet content. Anne Pottle had spoken truthfully when she told Ariadne that he had not finished his business with Bufton yet.
"It might be," he said more gently now, and speaking in a friendlier tone, "that I could put you in such a way-later. Perhaps! It may be so. We will see. You must, in truth, disappear from the Beau Monde for a time; where, therefore, can news be found of you?"
"Are we not to meet again?" Bufton asked, his face haggard from all he had gone through that day; and, perhaps-since, although half-knave and half-fool, he was still human-feeling doubly wretched at this withdrawal of his principal ally and bottle-comrade.
"Not yet. I, too, leave this part of the town now. The other, the east of the city, will be my portion for some time to come."
"What is it?" almost whispered Bufton, "what? What have you found?"
"A commercial pursuit," the other answered; "one connected with the sea and the colonies of America. Enough! No more as yet. Say, where shall I write you if aught arises that may be of benefit?"
"Send word to the 'Rummer'-no! no! they know me there. Instead, give me a house to which I may send to you. I pray you do so."
For a moment Granger paused, meditating; turning over in his mind more matters than one. Then he said, "Write to the 'Czar of Muscovy' on Tower Hill. It will find me. And," he added to himself, "it is not too near." Then, aloud, he exclaimed finally, "Now, farewell!"
And so these two men parted for the time.
That night, as Granger sat alone in his garret, while he occupied himself with flinging hastily into a valise a second suit of clothes which he possessed, some odd linen, and other necessaries, he muttered more than once to himself:
"The first act is played out, and so far it is successful. He is married to that girl, and much I doubt if he will ever free himself from the yoke. Yet it is not enough. Enough-my God! What can ever be enough? What can repay me for my own wasted life; my mother's death; the loss of the woman who loved me; and-Heaven help us both! – believed in me? Enough! What can be enough?" While, even as he mused thus, he went to a cupboard and took from out of it a bottle. "Still half full," he whispered, "still half full. Ah, well! it will be empty ere day breaks."
He sat down after he had brought forth a glass also, into which he poured a dram of spirit, and, supping it, continued his meditations, though still they were on the same subject, and still, therefore, full of bitterness.
"Some men," he whispered to himself, "would stop here-would be content. Yet I will not stop-will never stop so long as Sophy's face rises before me every night-aye, and rises more plainly as I drink more; so long as there rises, too, the dank, reeking churchyard into which I stole at night-the night after my mother's burial. I will never stop," he continued, as he poured more spirits into the glass; "never. Only-what to do? how to go on? None would believe me now-none. None believed then that I was an innocent man and he the guilty one. None! My mother died with her heart broken, Sophy married the man whom she thought I had tried to rob. Curse him! I will never stop."
Again he emptied the glass of spirits down his throat; yet, fiery as the drams were, they did not make him drunk. Instead, only the more resolute, the more hard, if the set look upon his face was any index to his mind.
"He is ruined," he said to himself now. "Ruined. Still-that is not enough. Yet, how to do more? How! how! Short of murder I cannot slay him. There is no way. And I have sworn to slay him-his soul, if not his body. I have sworn to slay him, and there are no means. None. I shall never stamp on those grinning features; I can do nothing now."
Sitting there, with on one side of him the glass-again empty, and soon again to be refilled-and on the other a guttering rushlight which imparted to his face a sickly, cadaverous appearance, he continued racking his brain as to how more calamity might be made to fall upon Beau Bufton, the man who, if his meditations might be taken as a clue to the past, had once brought terrible ruin to him. He wondered if this man Barry (who was, beyond all doubt, the future husband of the woman, the heiress, whom he and Anne Pottle had contrived to make their tool believe he was himself about to marry) could in any way be used as a means to the end; he pondered this, and then discarded that idea as worthless. "Sir Geoffrey Barry is a gentleman, an officer," he said. "Bufton is now an outcast. It is impossible. Impossible. Barry would not condescend to kick him."
Again he drank-the bottle being almost empty by this time-and still his mind did not become clouded; still he was able to think and plot and scheme. And once he muttered, "He wishes to participate in my new method of earning a living, not even knowing what that method is. Ah!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet and knocking over the miserable rushlight as he did so, whereby he was now in the dark, "he wishes that. He wishes that! Oh, my God!" he cried, gesticulating in that darkness, "he wishes that to be. And so it shall! So it shall! He shall participate. Somehow, I will do it. He shall participate, even as the sheep-which his accursed, gibbering face is something like-participates with the butcher in the shambles to which it is led. He shall indeed participate."
Then, in the darkness, and half-frenzied both with the drink he had already partaken of-which was not the first that day-as well as with the thoughts of a new scheme which had suddenly dawned in his mind, he put out his hand and, groping for the bottle, found it, and drained the last remnants of its contents.
After which he stumbled towards where his bed was and sought oblivion in sleep-an oblivion that, however, was not altogether complete-that was disturbed by dreams and visions of a girl's face, a girl's form shaken with piteous sobs; and, also, of a newly made grave in a country churchyard, on which the rain poured without cessation through the night.
CHAPTER X
"THE MIGNONNE."
Eight months had passed; March of the year 1759 had come, and a bitterly cold east wind blew up Bugsby's Reach, causing the pennons on countless barges and frigates and brigs, to say nothing of great ships of war lying in that classic piece of water, to stream out like pointing fingers towards where, above all else, there glistened in the wintry afternoon sunlight the cross surmounting St. Paul's. It whistled, too, through the shrouds of a French-built frigate, one that in earlier days would have been spoken of as "a tall, rakehelly bark," a fabric that was beautiful in all her lines, in her yacht-like bows and rounded stern, in her lofty masts, stayed with supreme precision; in her shining afterdeck brasswork, her wheel carved and decorated as though the hands of dead-and-gone Grinling Gibbons might have been at work at it; upon, too, her brass capstan and binnacle. A French frigate pierced also with gun ports below, and bearing for her figurehead the face and bust of a smiling, blue-eyed child, which figurehead represented the name she bore upon her bows, Mignonne.
Yet French as she was, and as any Jack Tar would have informed you in a moment had you not known-after he had run a fierce eye along her shape and marked other things about her as well-there flew above her no flag proclaiming that she was owned by Louis le Bien-aimé (Bien-aimé by countless women, perhaps, but never, surely, by the subjects whom he taxed and ground to the soil they sweated over). For instead, streaming out from her mainmast there flew, because it was war-time and she lay in the King's chief river, the Royal Standard of England; from her foremast, the Anchor of Hope, the flag of the Lord High Admiral; and from her mizzen, the white flag, with the red St. George's cross; also she flew the same flag from her jack-staff.
French though she may have been, none who saw those noble ensigns could doubt what she was now.
In fact, she was a capture, taken by an English ship, which in her turn had once been French-Le Duc d'Acquitaine-and she lay, on this wild, tempestuous March day, off Blackwall and the historic Bugsby's Hole, under the temporary command of Captain Sir Geoffrey Barry. There are ironies in the life of other things besides human beings-in ships, perhaps, more especially than amongst other inanimate creatures-and the Mignonne was an example that such was the case. In her thirty years of existence she had been fighting fiercely on behalf of France against her hereditary foe-England; now she lay in the Thames, serving as a vessel into which were brought scores of impressed men, as well as scores of others who were burning to fight as willing sailors against her former owners.
For at this time there was a hot press wherever men could be found; all along and around the coast of England it was going on; every vessel of war was being stuffed full of Englishmen who, willingly or unwillingly, had to take part in the deeds that were doing and that still had to be done.
Were not privateers and merchantmen being taken daily? Was not Boscawen raging the seas like a devouring lion; Sir Edward Hawke hurling insults at the French fleet in an attempt to bring them to action; Rodney bombarding their coast? Were not those French also swearing that, ere long, their invasion of England should take place, and should be final, decisive, and triumphant?
No wonder, therefore, that sailors were wanted-and found! No wonder that husbands were torn from their wives, and fathers from their children; that men disappeared from their homes and were never more heard of, since, often not more than a month later, they were lying at the bottom of the sea, after having been sunk with their ships in some great naval fight, or, having been slain on board those ships, had next been flung over their sides-legless, armless, headless.
Geoffrey Barry was not alone in the Mignonne. With him, as sharer of that old after-cabin, with its deep stern walk, whereon she sat sometimes for hours regarding all the traffic of the great and busy river, was his wife, sweet Ariadne, who (until the Mignonne's anchor should have been catted and fished, and her canvas sheeted home as she set out on her voyage round England, to distribute the men she had gathered to the various great ships of war in need of them) would remain ever by his side. For she could not tear herself away from him to whom she was but newly wedded; she could not look with aught but tearful apprehension to the moment, the hour that must inevitably come, when, for the last time, she would feel his arms about her and his lips pressed to hers. The hour when he would go forth to distribute those men, and would then, after putting his own ship into fighting trim, join either Rodney, Boscawen, or Hawke, as their Lordships might see fit to direct.
"Oh, Geoff! oh, Geoff!" she cried, as now on this afternoon she sat by his side, their dinner and their dish of tea both over, "oh, Geoff! who that did not love him fondly, madly, would be a sailor's wife? But three months married are we, and the time has come, is close at hand, for us to part. What will become of me?"
"Heart up, sweet one," her husband said in answer, even as, while he spoke, he glanced through the quaint square ports, across which were pulled back the prettily flowered dimity curtains that had adorned the windows of the Mignonne when a French captain had sat in the selfsame cabin, with, perhaps, his own wife by his side. "Heart up, mine own. 'Tis glory, my flag, I go to win. Glory for thee and me. What! shall my Lady Barry give precedence to any in our old Hampshire, where for many a long day the Barrys have ruled the roast. You must be an admiral's wife, sweet; an admiral's wife."
"Alas! 'tis you I want, not rank nor precedence. My poor father died a sailor, and-and-it broke my mother's heart later, I think. So, too, will mine break if now husband follows father."
"Tush, dearest, tush! Your father was a gallant seaman, your mother should have lived long to love his memory. A sailor's wife must be brave. Why! look, now, at Mrs. Pottle. She, too, lost her husband, yet she hath not succumbed. And," discontinuing his bluff heartiness-assumed only to solace his girl-wife, and not truly felt-"I will not be slain. Fortune is not my foe-I know it, feel it-I shall not follow Henry Thorne nor Ezra Pottle. Be cheered, my dear."
But still Ariadne could not be cheered, knowing that he was going from her side, though she made strenuous efforts and smiled wanly through her tears; while she said she would behave as became a seaman's wife. Yet, all the same, she could not refrain from asking him timorously, though hoping all the time that his answer would be in the negative, whether he had yet found all the seamen necessary for the ships he was told off to provision with them.
"Why, see now, Ariadne!" he exclaimed, as he took from an inner cabin his boat-cloak, holding it over his arm as he talked, "they do not come in fast. In honest truth, I do think I have drained all this fair neighbourhood of its men. Down there," and he nodded his head forward, towards the forecastle, "I have a hundred and a half of old sea-dogs who will fight till the flesh is hacked from off their bones."
Here Ariadne shuddered, while he continued, "God knows, in many cases they have not much left to hack, most of 'em having fought a hundred fights under Lestock, Martin and Knowles, and two even under Vernon. But for others I know not what to do. Drunken swabs are brought to me by the crimps; young boys from citizens' offices offer themselves-ofttimes they have robbed their masters and hope thus to evade the gallows; husbands who are sick of their wives; or, better still, men who would make houses for the women they love. But all of the right sort do not come my way as fast as the King and I would wish."
"Thereby," said Ariadne, "you cannot yet sail. Not yet. Ah!" And beneath her breath she said, "Thank God."
"Thereby," he replied with a smile, understanding well enough her mind, "I cannot yet sail. But, dear heart, it must be soon, whether I have gotten all I want or not. At least, I have some. Yes, it must be, for De la Clue is about, and Conflans broods ever on a descent. We must check them. We must. We must!"
"What do you go to seek now?" Ariadne asked, as, approaching the cabin stairs he summoned his coxswain and bade him call the gig away. "What? More citizens' boys, or-or-" and she laughed a little at the words and blushed, "drunken swabs, as you term them?"
"Not," he answered, "if I can get others, though even those can use a match-tub if their hands shake not too much, and can put their puny weight on to a halyard. But there are others. There is a fellow hard by, ashore, in Jamaica Court, who, I do hear, can find what is wanted. Likewise-and this is better if it can but be accomplished-lying further down the river is a schooner a-filling up with indented servants for our American colonies. There should be pickings there, and they will cost the King nothing. Not a groat."
"Why?" asked Ariadne, open-eyed, "why? Can the King get men without paying the two pounds press-money that you say he gives?"
"He can get these," Geoffrey replied, with a laugh, "if I take them. I, or any other of his officers. Because, you see, these are hocus-pocussed men; fellows who have been made, or found, drunk by the crimps, and sold on board to the master. He has paid for them, and 'tis illegal. Wherefore the King-represented in my person-will set 'em free to serve him. God bless him! His service is better than that in the plantations."
"Is it honest to do this, Geoff?" Ariadne asked, a look of doubt on her young face.
"Honest, my dear! Why, child, there is no spot of honesty in't at all. Honest, i'faith! Is it honest to buy men's bodies as one buys dogs and cattle? honest to drench and drug men with gin, and then fling them aboard as one would fling a side of beef aboard? Nay, 'tis honest to rescue such, to give them a chance of serving King and country; to have a mort of food and rum into them two and three times a day, as much 'baccy as they can smoke, and many a guinea to spend on Sal and Sukie when they get ashore. That's honest, my dear, and what the sky-pilots call 'Christian.'"
"If they ever do get ashore to see Sal and Sukie; if the French do not kill them," said Ariadne.
"Well! come what may, I must get ashore," said Geoffrey, as now he saw his gig tossing on the turbulent waves of the windswept river; "so fare ye well, sweetheart, until to-night. You have that new-fangled novel thing to read, and Anne and her mother are with you, wherefore you will not be dull till bedtime."
Then, changing his blustering, good-natured tone for one more serious as he stooped and kissed her; while noticing again, as he held her in his arms, as he had often noticed before, how slight and delicate a thing his child-wife was, he whispered:
"Oh! my love, my love, how I do worship thee. Sweetheart, will the hours be long till I come back?"
"As ever and always they are," she whispered too, her arms around his neck and her cheek against his. "As ever and always they are."
"You do not regard me as only a rude, rough sailor," he asked now; "one ruthless in his duty? Nor cruel?"
"Nay, nay, never; but as the man of my heart-my only love, my husband."
"So! that is well. Again, farewell till to-night. Farewell, dear one," and, reaching the deck, he grasped the manropes when, entering his gig, he was rowed ashore.
Arrived at Brunswick Stairs, he sent back his boat, giving orders for the coxswain to return in two hours, "For," said he, "I need no accompaniment to-day. What I have to do I can do very well by myself." After which he set out from the river inland towards Stepney, threading, as he did so, some quaint old streets and lanes in which each floor of the houses overlapped the one below it, so that, at last, the top floors almost touched each other. As he progressed he noticed, as often enough he had observed before, with what disfavour he was regarded by all the idlers in the place, including slatternly-looking women leaning against doorposts; rough-looking men who shrunk away, however, directly his eye lighted on them (they, perhaps, thinking that he was appraising their value as "food for the Frenchmen"); and miserable, cadaverous-looking young fellows, some of whom had no hesitation in instantly disappearing into the passages of houses, they being generally those in which they did not happen to live.
For all knew that this stalwart young captain, who wore the undress of the new uniform of the Royal Navy (new now for some ten years); whose sword-handle had a gold knot to it, and whose three-cornered hat had in it a gold cockade, was he who, aided by his myrmidons, tore them away from their wives and mothers to roam the seas as well as to fight, and, probably, be killed by some of Conflans' Frenchmen. They knew him well enough for the captain of the "Migniong," as they called his craft, and they hated and feared him in consequence.
"May he be blasted!" said one hideous, blear-eyed old woman as he passed by, she taking no trouble to lower her voice; "he's got my Jenny's man in his cussed fock'sle even now. And she married to George but two months! He've got a young wife of his own-I seen her ashore with him but yesterday-a sweet young thing too. How'd she like it if som-un ravished 'im away from her!"
"Curse him!" said a man, who regarded Geoffrey from behind a blind, he being afraid to show himself, knowing well enough that the captain of the Mignonne would be as like as not to make a mental note of the house if he saw him. "Curse him and his King, too, and all the Lords and Commons. Why should we fight and die for them? They wouldn't do it for us."
And he heard much of their mutterings, knew how he was regarded, and regretted that such should be so. But, he told himself, it was duty. It must be done.