INTRODUCTORY (continued 5)

She obeyed, heedful, in her panic, to the last details. Luckily, my lord, being gone abroad to his lawyers, there were no prying eyes to criticise her. No sooner was she driven off than—having collected into a stocking all our jewels, and whatever money I could lay hands on, which I hung from my waist out of sight—I stole forth by the back way into the stables, and thence to the street, where I found a hackney coach, and drove after my friend.

I found her, as I had hoped, with Mr. Roper. He looked mighty serious over our escapade, but informed me that he had loyally attended to my instructions, and procured us a lodging, as for two country ladies who had come up to view the sights, in as distant a part of the town as he could compass on short notice. We went out immediately by a side door, and, having all got into a coach that was in waiting, were driven to Holborn, where we alighted, and thence, for precaution, walked to a quiet house in Great Coram Street, near the Foundlings, where our handsome escort left us, promising to call, at discretion, in a few days, and recommending us in the meanwhile to lie as close as rabbits in a furrow.

He was as good as his word, coming in a week later, after dark, with a face as long as a lawyer’s writ.

“Well, madam,” he said, “you have cut the ground from under your own feet with a vengeance.”

I laughed.

“You have been reading ‘Angélique’s’ Last Testament?”

“Pray the Fates it may not be so indeed,” he said gravely; and, pulling a paper out of his pocket, began to refer to it.

“Why, do you not know,” said he, “that others besides our Volpone are reported interested in that strange disappearance of a one-time heir-presumptive to Volpone’s own title?”

“Perfectly.”

“And yet you go and put your head into the lion’s mouth?”

“I would do more to expose a villain. I would go all lengths to right an injured man. He is no more mad than I am.”

“That seems probable.”

He unfolded a second paper from the other, and pointing silently to a paragraph, handed it to me.

“The king” (I read from the Gazette) “has bestowed the vacant garter upon the newly created Marquis of Synge;” and a little lower down: “It is stated that the Earl of Herring has been relieved, at his own request, of all offices which he held under the Crown. His lordship is understood to have long contemplated a complete retirement from public life.”

I shrieked with laughter. I danced about the room, waving the paper over my head. The noise I made brought up one of two gentlemen who lived below. He put his head in at the door, with a leer and a grin: “O, a thousand pardons!” said he; “I thought you was alone, and that something had happened”—and he vanished.

“He thought something had happened!” groaned Bob dismally; and, taking the paper from me, he read out elsewhere: “His Majesty’s final decision is supposed not unconnected with the esclandres of a certain notorious lady, which have exercised the public curiosity for some time past, and which culminated on Saturday sennight in an attack too obvious in its direction to be overlooked.”

I heard, glistening.

“Well, I told him I recognised my debt, and should pay him,” I said.

Bob folded the papers, and returned them to his pocket. His mouth and eyes were set in a kind of suffering smile.

“You may know best how to play your hand for yourself,” he said. “God preserve your partner, that’s all.”

“What have you to fear?”

“Your prudence, first of all—not a very trustworthy asset, if one may judge by your apparent confidence in your fellow-lodgers.”

“O! him that looked in!” I said. “I will answer there with my life.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Yes, that is the point,” said he. “Do you quite realise what you have done, Diana?”

“O, quite!”

“Well, that is a comfort. It gives me a sort of confidence in my future. So long as I can be played as live-bait for your capture, I shall be spared, no doubt.”

He came up to me, and spoke very earnestly—

“Do you understand? He will try to trace you through me. If he succeeds”—

“There is an end of both of us,” I said cheerfully.

“Well,” he answered, with admiration, “you are a game little partlet. But remember, at least, that revenge which evokes retribution misses the best half of itself. For that reason, if for no other, I must keep away from you. This visit to-night, even—I only dared it after infinite precautions. If you want me, write: I will risk some means to see you. For the rest, live close as death, till some of this, at least, is blown over. Your friend, the pretty simpleton, where is she?”

“In bed and asleep.”

“Keep her there. Make a dormouse of her. My Lady Sophia is nosing for her tracks, as my lord her brother for yours. Did you suppose she would acquiesce quietly in the abduction of her handmaid? I tell you, she has got wind of the truth; and there has been tempest in the house of Herring. Keep her close. Above everything, cut all further communication with the World—as you love yourself, and me a little, perhaps, Diana.”

“As I love the truth,” I said; and went up and kissed him.

“Ah!” he sighed, “that is very pretty. But, believe me, the truth, as represented by His Majesty, wishes your love at the devil before it meddled in his family affairs.”

XXIV. I FIND A FRIEND IN NEED

You know the truth, mon ami—that the face which looked in at my door was the face of my father. O, heavens, the reunion, so wonderful, so pathetic! and the sequel, so interesting! Truly, through our living fidelities do the gods chastise our worldliness.

We had not been a day in the house when I ran across him in a passage. He was, it appeared, one of two gentlemen who lodged below. He was plainly, almost shabbily dressed; bloated a little; prematurely aged: but I knew him instantly. Though eleven years had gone since my childish eyes had last acknowledged and adored him, the instinct of nature was too sure to be deceived. I gasped, I trembled, as he stood ogling me; finally I threw myself into his arms.

“Papa!” I cried; “papa!”

“Hey!” he responded; “is that all?”

“Do you not remember your little Diana?” I implored, in an ecstasy of emotion.

“Wait,” he said, and put a hand to his forehead. “It may be on my notes. I’ve a damned bad memory.”

The door of a room hard by stood open. He led me in, closed it, and seated himself officially at a table.

“Now,” he said, “what mother?”

The shock, my friend! I had remembered him so strong and gallant—wicked, if you will; but then I had always pictured myself the cherished pledge of his wickedness. And now, it appeared, I was only one of a large family. Without a word, I turned my back upon him.

“Don’t go,” he said, disturbed at that. “What name did you say?”

I confronted him once more, sorrow and disdain battling in my face.

“I said Diana.”

“Of course,” he answered, beating his forehead; “the child of”—

After all, it was a long lapse of time. I told him my mother’s name.

“She was my one real love,” he said, shedding tears. “I recall her among the peats of Killarney as if it were to-day. When she died (she is dead, isn’t she?) I buried my heart in her grave. I have never known a moment’s happiness since. Speak to me of her, Dinorah.”

He followed me up a little later, when Patty was sitting with me, and peeped round the door.

“May I—daughter Di?” he said. I believe he had really in the interval been looking among his notes, or letters, and with such benefit to his memory that he felt secure, at least, in that monosyllabic compromise. Blame my fond heart, thou fripon. I was softened even in my desperate disillusionment by this half recognition. With a father, fashionable and well-connected, possibly rich, to safeguard my interests, I need no longer fear the light.

Receiving no answer, he sidled himself into the room, and to a sofa, on which he sat down. Patty, dropping her work, looked at him with all her might of astonishment.

“And is this dear child your sister?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered; “from the very first.”

“Twins?” he exclaimed. “I am very sure there is no such entry.”

He sat frowning at the carpet for a little. Then, “Wait,” he said. “It is my misfortune to serve small beer.” And with these enigmatic words laid himself down and fell asleep.

With his first snore, Patty flew over to me.

“Who is it?” she whispered, frantic.

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

“Father?” she said.

“Hush!” I answered; “yes.” And would say no more till he woke.

He came to himself presently, in a properer sense of the word. During the interval I had been curiously observing his condition. It was very different in seeming from that of the spark of eleven years since. It showed an assumption of finery, it is true; but the trappings were tawdry and soiled, and the materials cheap.

He sat up with a prodigious yawn, his face, in the midst, lapsing into a watery, paternal smile. But it was evident at once that something of the thread of memory was restored in him; and he began questioning me much more shrewdly and to the point.

“Why, ecod,” said he presently, “was it a fact that the sweep had stole you? If I’d only learnt the truth before Charlie Buckster put a bullet in himself. I’d a double pony on it with the man.”

Then we got on famously. He cried much over his poor lost love, and was so tender with me that he completely won me from my reserve, and I ended by recounting to him the whole tale of my fortunes, even up to the present moment.

“That Herring!” he said: “a fine guardian to my girl! I knew the stoat well in my time. Let him beware, now that she has found her natural protector.”

He swelled with indignation, as I with pleasure.

“You have gifts, presents from him, no doubt,” he said fiercely. “What do you say to my taking them all back, and throwing them in his face?”

“I say, certainly not,” I answered.

“Ah well!” he said, “you have got them, anyhow; and the thought will wring his covetous soul.”

At this moment a great voice roared, “Johnson, you devil!” down below somewhere.

My father got quickly to his feet.

“Ay,” he answered, to my look; “’tis me, Di—the pseudonym I go by. Fact is, child, I’m temporarily under a financial cloud, and forced to eke out a living, while awaiting the moment of my complete restoration to fortune, by service—that is to say, by taking it, hem!”

“By taking service?”

“Exactly. A sort of elegant cicerone and social introducer to a damned old parvenu curmudgeon, who wants to learn at what lowest outlay to himself he can pose as a gentleman. ’Tis tiresome, though in its way amusing; but I really think I shall have to cut the old rascal on his taste in liquor. For a palate like mine, you know—small beer and blue ruin, faugh! You haven’t change for a guinea, my angelic?”

“Johnson!” roared the voice again.

“Coming, sir, coming!” cried my papa; and, seeing me unresponsive, skipped out of the room.

He was with us continually during the fortnight after our arrival; and I had no least idea of the consequences awaiting me, when one afternoon a hastily scribbled note, dated “en route for the Continent,” was delivered at the house door by a porter, and sent up to me. I read it, shrieked, and sank half fainting into a chair.

“I have taken, dear daughter,” it said, “the entire responsibility for our monetary affairs upon my own shoulders. To live on one’s capital is, like the self-eating pelican, to devour the substance of the unborn generations. Seeing how you appeared quite unaccountably callous to the natural claims of your prospective family (for, with your attractions, you cannot hope to escape one), I, as its prospective grandfather, have asserted my prerogative by appropriating our principal to its properest uses of investment. The stocking you will find still reposing in its secret cache behind the hangings of your dressing-table; but you will find it empty. Do not blame me, but console yourself with the conviction that in a few weeks I shall be in a position to return you your principal at least trebled. In the meanwhile, accept the assurances of my love and protection.”

Half dazed with the shock, I tottered, with Patty’s assistance, into our bedroom. It was too true. The desperate wretch, seizing his opportunity by night while we slept, had robbed us of everything. He had left us not a sixpence. We were ruined.

I tore my hair. I uttered cries and imprecations. I cursed Heaven, my own fond gullibility, the cruelty of the fate that would not let me live and be honest. Patty, poor fool, tried to calm me. I drove her away with blows, and, in a reaction to fury, rushed downstairs and into the room of the remaining lodger.

“Where is my money, where are my jewels?” I shrieked. “You are his accomplice. I will swear an information against you unless you tell.”

He was a gross, coarse man, of a violent complexion.

“Ho-ho!” he bellowed; “blackmail is it? Wait, while I call a witness.”

He pulled the bell down, summoning our landlady. When she came, there was an outrageous scene. Quite cowed in the end, I retreated to our apartments, where, however, I was not to be left in peace. Within an hour the harridan appeared with her bill, an extravagant one, which of course I was unable to settle. The next morning, driven forth with contumely, we were arrested at her suit, and carried to a sponging-house. Thence, quite self-collected now in my desperation, I despatched a note to Mr. Roper, who, without delay, good creature, waited upon us. I told him the whole unreserved truth.

“Very well,” he said, “I will quit you of this, child; and, for the rest, find accommodation for you in humbler quarters till you can help yourself. With your genius, that should not be long. You know my circumstances, and that I cannot afford luxuries.”

“I will work my fingers to the bone,” I said, with tears in my eyes.

“Not quite so bad as that,” he answered. “Bones ain’t negotiable assets. Have you ever thought on the stage, now, for a living?”

“I believe, without much study, I could make an actress,” I said.

“With none at all,” said he confidently. “I have a friend in Westley of Drury Lane, and will see if he can put you in the way to a part. I should fear the publicity, i’ faith, but that my lord has taken his grievances to the Continent for an airing, and in the interval we are safe to act.”

Good loyal friend! He found us pretty snug quarters over a little shop in Long Acre, where, keeping to our pseudonym of the Misses Rush, we bided while he negotiated terms for me. He was successful, when once I had been interviewed by the management; and, to cut short this melancholy story, I made my first appearance on the boards as the fairy Primrose in the Christmas masque of the Dragon of Wantley. I had a little song to sing about a butterfly, which never failed to bring down the house; and altogether, I was growing not unhappy in the novelty of the venture, when that, with almost my life, was ended at a blow.

But first I must relate of the most surprising contretemps that ever I was to experience, and which had the strangest and most immediate bearing on my destinies.

I had noticed frequently that the hind legs of the dragon would linger unaccountably, when the absurd monster, on his way off the stage, happened to pass me standing in the wings. This would lead to much muffled recrimination from the forequarters, which, exhausted by their antics, aimed only at getting to their beer; the consequence being that one eventful night, what between the haulings and contortions, the back seam of the creature split, and out there rolled before my eyes—Gogo.

He picked himself up immediately, and stood regarding me silently, with a most doleful visage. My dear, I cannot describe what emotions swept my soul in a little storm of laughter—the astonishment, the pity, the bewilderment! In the midst, too confounded to arrange my thoughts, I turned away, affecting not to recognise him; seeing which, he uttered one enormous sigh, and stumped off to face the battery of the stage-manager’s indignation.

I must have put a world of feeling that night into my little song about the poor butterfly, that was stripped of its wings by a cruel boy, and so prevented from keeping its assignation with the rose, insomuch that it moved a very beautiful lady, who was present in a private box, to send for me that she might thank me in person.

We had all of us, of course, heard of, and some of us remembered, perhaps, chucking under the chin, the ravishing Mrs. Hart, who, from pulling mugs of beer to the pinks of Drury Lane, had risen to be chère amie to his excellency the British Ambassador at Naples, and, quite recently, his lady. She had lately come to London, à travers tous les obstacles, to be made an honest woman of, and it was she who craved the introduction, to which you may be sure I responded with as much alacrity as curiosity. I could have no doubt of her the moment I entered the box, and made, with becoming naïveté, my little curtsey. She was certainly very handsome, in spite of her twenty-seven years and her large feet, though, I thought, lacking in grace. But her face was beautifully formed, with a complexion of apple-blossoms, and red lips a little swollen with kissing, and, to crown everything, a great glory of chestnut hair. There were tears in her fine eyes as she turned impulsively to address me—

“La, you little darling, you’ve made me cry with your butterflies and things. Come here while I buss you.”

There was a gentleman sitting by her, foremost of two or three that were in the box, and he made room for me with an indulgent smile. He was a genial, precise-looking person, with a star on his right breast, and the queue of his wig reaching down his back in long curls that were gathered into a ribbon. I took him, rightly, to be Sir William, the husband, and made him my demure bow as I passed. His lady gave me a great kiss, in full view of the house, and taking a little jewel from her bosom, pinned it into mine.

“There,” she said, “wear this for Lady Hamilton, in token of the only reel feeling she has come across in your beastly city.”

Sir William put his hand on her arm.

“My dear,” he said.

She fanned herself boisterously. She had been disappointed, everyone knew, in her designs to be received at court, and was to leave England in a few days missing the coveted honour. Somehow she reminded me of the “bouncing chit” that our gentlemen call a champagne bottle—she so gushed and sparkled, and was a little large and loud.

I made my acknowledgments quite prettily, and left the box; and, once got outside, leaned for a moment against the wall, with a feeling of mortal sickness come over me. For, as I retreated, I had come face to face with those seated at the back—and one of them was the Earl of Herring.

Had he recognised me? He had not appeared to lift his eyes, even, as he sat at discussion with his neighbour. And that might be the most deadly sign of all.

I don’t know how I got through the rest of my part. But that night I clung to Patty as if she were my only support in a failing world.

Morning brought some reassurance; and so, for a further evening or two, finding myself still unmolested, I struggled to convince myself that he had not seen, or that I was forgotten, and my fault passed over. But all the time the terror lay at my heart.

On the third evening, as I was entering the theatre, I encountered a poor creature standing by the stage door. I went to him; I almost fell upon his breast in my agitation.

“Gogo!” I said, “Gogo!” and stood dumb and shame-stricken before him.

He threw up his hands with that odd familiar gesture, with that tempestuous sigh which found such an immediate response in my soul.

“Are you not coming in?” I faltered.

He shook his head.

“You are dismissed?”

“I spoiled their dragon for them.”

I burst into tears.

“It was for me, dear. Do you see to what I have come? Forgive me, Gogo.”

“I can’t help myself,” he groaned. “You are my destiny.”

“Gogo, I am frightened; I am in danger. Help me, Gogo.”

The poor fellow smiled.

“In everything but running away, Diana.”

“And that is just where I want your help. Come to me: come and see me to-morrow, Gogo, will you? O, Gogo, will you?”

“Don’t be foolish, Diana. At what time?”

“You know my address?”

“Of course I do.”

“As early as early, then; the moment I am out of bed.”

Strangely comforted, and looking to see if we were alone, I dropped a tiny kiss on his rough cheek, and ran in gaily, wiping my eyes as I went.

That night I sang my little song with renewed feeling, and ended to a burst of applause. As I was standing at the wings, flushed and radiant, a note was put into my hand. I opened it, and read: “You are in danger. Don’t go home.”

I never learned who had sent it; some one, probably, from amongst the few friends I could still number in that wicked household. It had been handed in at the stage door by a messenger, and that was all I could discover. The lights of my triumph were darkened. I knew myself at last hunted—and alone. Why had I not bid my monster wait for me? But it were idle now to moan. Despair gave me readiness. I finished my part quite brilliantly, without a stumble, and chatted gaily, while disrobing, with the poor pretty little coryphée who was my chief friend in the dressing-rooms. By one pretext or another I detained her until we were alone. Then, “Fanny,” I said, “keep mum; but I think it unlikely I shall come here again.”

She looked at me with her large grey eyes. We were much of a figure, and not unlike in features.

“O, Miss Rush!” she whispered. “And I’d ’oped always to ’ave you for a friend.”

“So you shall, Fanny,” I said: “but there are contingencies—you understand?”

Her lip was trembling. I think she wanted to tell me to keep good.

“And so,” I said hastily, “as I have liked you so, I want to exchange little presents with you, as a remembrance, if you will.”

The poor child had often cast admiring eyes on a calash which it was my habit to wear to the theatre, and which was indeed a very becoming thing of crimson velvet and cherry-coloured lining, with a frame of costly fur to the face. It had been given me by Bob, and certainly nothing short of my present desperation would have brought me to part with it; but it was, more than anything I wore of late, associated with me; and necessity has no conscience.

Fanny’s eyes sparkled against her will, as I held the thing out to her.

“O no, miss!” she entreated; “it’s too good for me, and I can’t give you nothing the same in exchange.”

“You shall give me your neckerchief,” I said; and, cutting the discussion short, drove her away at length, with her pretty face in the hood, and tears in her eyes.

I gave her five minutes’ start, then followed her out, with a brain as hot as my heart was shivering. “They must discover their mistake very soon,” I thought, “and will be returning on their tracks.”

However, I reached home, running by byways, in safety; and there, quite unnerved now the terror was passed, threw myself into Patty’s arms and told her everything. She was the sweet, simple counsel and consoler she always was to grief, and distressed me only by some concern she could not help showing for the fate of Fanny.

“You try to make me out a devil,” I cried passionately. “They will let her alone, of course, when they find she isn’t who they want.”

We slept in one another’s arms that night, fearful of every sound in the street. But morning brought the sun and Gogo—though the latter inexcusably late to his appointment—and both were a heavenly joy to me.

I saw at once by his expression that he carried news; but he did not speak.

“Gogo!” I whispered.

He uttered a strange sound, like a wounded beast, and turned his face from me.

“Did you exchange head-dresses with her last night?” he muttered.

“What do you mean?”

My heart seemed to stop.

“They said it was your hood. She was jostled by ruffians in the street, it seems, and thrown under the traffic, and killed.”

I fell on my knees before him, shuddering and hiding my face.

“You didn’t mean that, Diana?”

“Before God, no. I thought they would leave her when they found out.”

He gave a heart-breaking sigh, and looked at me for the first time.

“I wouldn’t go near the theatre again, if I was you. They’ll not judge you as—as favourably as I, perhaps.”

“I’ve done with the theatre. Fate is very cruel. No one understands me or believes in me. At least, don’t tell Patty anything of this. I think you will break my heart among you. How did you even know I was threatened?”

“Didn’t you tell me you were in danger?”

I cried out to him in a sudden agony—

“I am in danger. O, Gogo! for God’s sake tell me what I am to do!”

Then the great human love of the creature went down before me. He fondled me, with tears and broken exclamations; he swore himself once more, through all eternity, through sin and sorrow, my bondman.

Presently, without extenuation, I had confessed all to him; and he had forgiven me; had admitted, even, that I had had the reason of a better regard on my side. But as to what had happened to himself during the long interval, he would tell me nothing as yet.

“I am the ex-hind legs of a dragon,” he said, “that was conquered by the Chevalière Primrose, and turned into two-thirds of a prince. I date myself from the translation. The curtain’s down on all that was before.”

Now, when we came to discussing the ways and means for my escape from a desperate situation, my dear resourceful monster was ready with a suggestion at once.

“The Hamilton,” said he, “sails from England in a day or two. She is disposed, by the tokens, to make a pet of you. Why not go to her; relate everything; throw yourself upon her charity, and ask to be conveyed abroad in her suite?”

“Gogo! When?” I cried. It was an inspiration.

“No moment like the present.”

“I will go. But you must come too, to protect me.”

“Of course.”

“And Patty?”

“All three of us together. Pack your box, pay your bill, and be ready while I wait. At the worst, ’tis something gained to shift your quarters and cover your trail.”

I demurred only at the bill; for, indeed, we needed every penny of our ready money. But he settled the matter by paying it himself.

“I have become of a saving disposition,” he said; “and whatever trifle there be, you are its heir. This is only drawing on your reversion”—and, indeed, he valued money at nothing at all. If he could have picked a living from the earth, he would never have been to the trouble of putting a penny in his pocket.

In a little, all being prepared, we took a coach and drove to the Ambassador’s hotel. My lady was fortunately at her toilette, and sent down a surprised message, that, whatever the deuce I wanted, I was to be shown up. I found her, tumbled a little abroad, in the hands of her perruquier, whom she dismissed while she talked to me.

“Why, child,” she said, “what a face! ’Tis as white, I vow, as the wings of your butterfly. Out with your trouble now.”

I threw myself at her feet. I made a clean breast of my story—of the inhuman cruelty of which I was the destined victim; and I ended by imploring her to let me and my friends enjoy the bounty of her protection. She fired magnificently, as I had hoped she would, over the recital. She embraced my cause impulsively and without a thought for possible consequences to herself.

“The infamous old fox!” she cried of my lord; “I was flattered by his attentions, hang him! until I found they was of the worst consequence to me as a lady of position. To think of the old beast wanting to murder you because of a lampoon—pasquinades we call ’em in Italy! La, child! if I answered so to every dig that’s made at me, I’d better turn public executioner at once. Let’s keep our own characters clean against the light being turned on ’em, say I; and, if we don’t, there’s only ourselves to thank. It’s too late to talk of bein’ a lady when the crowner comes to sit on our dirty stockin’s.”

She made me repeat my little song to her, and cried over it again.

“Trot up your friends,” she said, wiping her eyes. “There’s room for you all here till we start for France—or Naples, if you will. Let me see the old devil dare to follow you into this sancshery! We’ll be even with him, gnashin’ his yellow teeth left behind. Go and fetch ’em. I want to see what they’re like.”

And she gave me a tempest of a kiss, and pushed me out at the door.

It is here we encounter that considerable lacuna in the Reminiscences to which reference was made in the “Introductory.” An examination of the MS. shows that the large section—of more than a hundred pages—which related to Mrs. Please’s experiences during the terrific period of the Revolution, and afterwards so far as the year ’98, when the narrative is resumed, was at some time bodily removed, whether with a view to separate publication (of which, however, no proof can be found), or through one of those intermittent panics of conscience to which the lady was subject, there is no evidence to show. While this breach is to be regretted—from her editor’s point of view, at least—it must be said that innumerable contemporary references to Madame “Se-Plaire” enable us in some measure not only to follow the career of that redoubtable adventuress (pace M. le Comte de C——), but to supply to ourselves at least one presumptive reason for her shyness, on reflection, of perpetuating certain of its incidents. However, not to confuse matters, we will take our stepping-stones in the order of their placing.

It appears, then, that Mrs. Please and her friends were conveyed safely in the Ambassador’s entourage, to Paris, where Madame the Ambassador’s wife received, during the few days of her stay in the French capital on her way to Italy, some salve to her hurt vanity in the reception accorded her at the Tuileries by the queen, who took the opportunity to intrust her with a letter to her sister of Naples. Whether elated, indirectly, by the royal condescension, or electrified by the state of the national atmosphere, or for whatever reason, Diana, it appears, decided to remain where she was. She even, there is some reason for believing, sought, in the character of a very loyal little moucharde, to ingratiate herself with the queen, going so far as to imply that Lady Hamilton had taken this delicate means of placing in Her Majesty’s hands a counter-buff to Mr. Pitt, whom Miss Diana had often seen in my lord of Herring’s house in Berkeley Square, and whose sinister designs against France she was quite ready to quote—or invent.

However this may be, it seems certain that Her Majesty was inexplicably so far from being prepossessed by her fair visitor’s fair protégée, that (assuming even that she gave her her countenance at the first) she did not hesitate long in turning upon her the coldest of cold shoulders. We know at least that within a month of her arrival in Paris, Diana (which always equals, be it understood, Diana plus her two inseparables) had established herself, far from the precincts of the court, in very good rooms in a house in the Rue St. Jacques; where with characteristic suddenness and thoroughness she announced her complete conversion to the principles of ultra-republicanism. It must have been about this time, moreover, that she found interest to return to the stage; for in addition to the inclusion of her name in the bill of that stirring melodrama, Les Victimes Cloîtrées, which set all fermenting Paris overflowing, there exists that reference to her in the rather spiteful Reminiscences of Adrienne Lavasse, which, I think, is worth transcribing. “Mademoiselle Please,” says the actress, “was for a little our ingénue at the Français. She was imported from England; but, it must be confessed, had a pretty gift [une belle facilité] for our tongue. One night, after a mêlée in the green-room, she lifts her voice in a furious outcry about her having been ravished of a neckerchief which had been given her by a fellow-comédienne in London, and which, she declares, she would not have parted with for a louis-d’or. But I never observed” (adds the little spitfire) “that she took the trouble to replace it with another; from which it is evident that it was not her modesty that she valued at so high a figure.”

How long Mrs. Please continued on the stage at this time (she returned to it again later) is not certain. Probably her engagement was terminated by that famous split in the company, when democratic Talma and Vestris migrated to the Rue de Richelieu, bequeathing the remnant honours of the old house in the Faubourg St. Germain to the royalist Fleury, Dazincourt, and Company. What we do know is that about this critical period a lucky coup in a State lottery established our heroine on her feet, and that thenceforth she flourished. She kept a little salon in those same historic rooms, through which a regular progression of nationalists passed and vanished. There, in their time, were to be seen Brissot, Guadet, Gensonné, the Roman Roland, the handsome Barbaroux, Pétion, Vergniaud, the sweet and indolent, in his ragged coat, Desmoulins, Barrére, Billaud-Varennes, Barras. The order is significant of our lady’s political, or politic, evolution. The life of the State, she came to think, was only to be saved by ruthless amputation; and, unfortunately, the disease was in the head. As the atmosphere thickens, our glimpses of her become rarer and more lurid. She appears once as the proprietress of a sort of Mont de piété, very private and exclusive, in which she amassed good quantity of property, pledged by the proscribed, who never returned to redeem it. Among these, curiously, seems to have been her father, whom, as characteristically as possible, she forgave and attempted to shelter, though without avail, for he was guillotined. It was probably to propitiate the Government for this filial dereliction that she reappeared on the boards, in ’93, in that grotesque monument to the dulness of the Sovereign People, The Last Judgment of Kings; and there, so far as we can trace, ended her connection with the stage.

During all this period, it is only fair to her to say, she seems to have played the inflexible duenna to her little friend and adoratrice, Miss Patty Grant, protecting the child from outside evil and her own kind pliability, and, when she was called away from her side, committing her to the care of that faithful and incorruptible monster, the cripple.

Towards the end of ’93 she appears to have been so far in favour with the powers that she was despatched on a secret propagandist mission to the Neapolitan States—a portentous departure. She was not back in Paris again until the spring of ’95, when she returned to find the Terror overthrown, its “tail” in process of being docked by Sanson, and the jeunesse dorée patrolling the streets.

Not much record of this journey remains, beyond the single weighty fact that it brought her acquainted with the young revolutionary enthusiast, Nicola Pissani, who accompanied her home by way of Tuscany and Piedmont, propagating their gospel of Liberty on the road.

We may perhaps be pardoned for thinking it probable that Mrs. Please, on her return to Paris, would have recanted her extremist views, had it not been for this romantic exalté, to whom, no doubt, she at the time was sincerely attached. It is possible, indeed, that she did persuade him of the necessity of an open recantation, in order that she might consort with him the more safely in those measures which he, and for his sake she, had at heart—the violent establishment of a republic at Naples, to wit. For, for the moment, sanscullotism was out of fashion, and propagandists at a discount. It made no difference to her, apparently, that her former patroness and saviour was heart and soul with the court of Ferdinand. She was of the Roman mettle, and would have sacrificed her own child to Liberty—with Pissani. I swear my heart bleeds for her; for (the truth has to be uttered) that passionate young zealot was no sooner made free of the house in the Rue St. Jacques, than he fell hopelessly entangled in the unconscious meshes of poor blameless, lovable little Patty Grant. And, worse: Miss Grant, without a thought of disloyalty to her friend and sister—who, indeed, persistently, and perhaps justifiably, posed for no more than the Neapolitan’s pious fellow-missionary—yielded her whole sweet soul to him!

Nothing was declared, or came of this at the time. Pissani went back to Naples; the two—he and Diana: not he and another, you may be sure, unless by stealth—corresponded regularly; the march of events proceeded; our heroine managed, no doubt, to console herself, provisionally, for the separation. Perhaps she may have been conscious of an alteration in her friend; a hint of some sad preoccupation; the bright eyes dulling, the white face growing ever a little more white and drawn. If she did, she chose, while biding her time of enlightenment, to attach any but the right reason to the change. She seems to confess, indeed, that she had the suspicion. Like enough, in that case, she indulged it for a perpetual stimulant to her romance, which might have withered without. She was not one to bear tamely her supplanting by another—least of all by the little humble slave of her passions and caprices, of her kisses and disdains. And, in the meantime, the years went over them, while she was studying to ingratiate herself with the Directory, so that presently her house knew again its succession of ministers and deputies—men who came to lighten their leisure with a little interlude of love or wit. And so we reach the crisis.

Naples, about the middle of ’98, was in a last state of ferment. Jacobinism threatened it within and without, the former but awaiting the advance of the French under Championnet to arise and hand over the city to its sympathisers. In September Nelson came sweeping to its sea-gates in his Vanguard; in October General Mack posted from Vienna to take command of its rabble army of resistance; in November its king led another army to Rome, nominally to restore the Pope his kingdom, and, having done some ineffective mischief, returned ingloriously, to find his capital in a state of anarchy. Finally, in December, the whole royal family sneaked on board the Vanguard, and transferred itself pro tempore to Palermo, where it remained until the danger was laid, when it returned to exact a bloody vengeance.

Therewithin lies the whole tragedy of Pissani and a little English maid. Early in the February of that year the man had written, hurried and agitated, to Mrs. Please, to announce that the moment was ripe, the tree of despotism tottering to its fall, to be replaced by the more fruitful one of Liberty; and to urge her to come at once, if she would see consummated the glorious work for which they had both laboured so long and so self-sacrificially. No doubt that he believed in her single-heartedness, as she, in another way, in his. He assured her that she might be, if she would, a second Pucelle. He fired her vanity: he rekindled her passion. With characteristic impetuosity, she broke up her household, and (here figures either her blindness or her imperious self-confidence) prepared to transport it, stock and block, to the scene of her anticipated triumphs. She had no difficulty in procuring passports. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that she was intrusted with despatches for General Berthier, then occupying Rome. At any rate she, in company with Mademoiselle Grant and her inseparable Gogo, embarked at Marseilles for Civita Vecchia; were in the Eternal City before the end of the month; and had thence, travelling again by sea, reached Naples without accident by the middle of March. Here, by preconcerted arrangement (as regarded only herself and the Neapolitan, however) they were met by Pissani, who conducted them in the first instance to a little cabaret in the dark quarters near the Arsenal. And here, from the glooms of that dingy rendezvous, Mrs. Please is pleased to enter again upon her own story.

B. C.

[Note.—To the curious in matters of personal appearance, the following extract from the Roper Correspondence (Hicks & Beach, London, 1832) may be of interest. The passage occurs in a letter—dated Paris, January 1798—from the Hon. Robert Roper to his cousin Lord Carillon, and runs as follows:—

“I have renewed my acquaintance with the Please, who is twenty-seven, and nothing if not the ripe fruit of her promise. Dost remember, Dick, how she was your ‘Long-legged Hebe’? I tell you, sir, she is by Jove out of Leda, a very Helen. She moults her years, like the swan her father its feathers, and is always ready with a virgin bosom of down for the next quilt. The same sprightly insolence; the same perfect irregularity of feature—and conduct; the same zeal in making the interests of others her own—and the profits thereof. Her face retains its pretty moue; her hair has only ripened a little, like corn. She is still slender, as we remember her—in everything now but the essentials; still as pale, with the flawless eyebrows and bob-cherry lips. I would be sentimental; but, alack! she tells me our past is put away in a little bag like lavender. ‘Would you wish the gift of it, sir,’ she says, ‘to lay among your bed-linen? ’Tis grown too scentless for my use. Il n’y a si bonne compagnie qu’on ne quitte.’ O, Dick, to be rebuked for one’s years, and by an immortal! O, Dick, for the time ‘when wheat is green and hawthorn buds appear’! Why may not our feet continue to dance with our hearts? I have a débutante always within my breast, and because I am forty, she must be a wallflower forsooth!

“She has realised at last la grande passion, she tells me. She is perfectly frank. He is gone elsewhere, and she only waits for his whistle to follow. This to me! She has her little salon, as pretty as a bonbon box, and a dozen of powdered ministers at her feet. The morning after our meeting I breakfasted with her and her friend. You recall the little soft brunette, with the motherly eyes and the caressing bashfulness? She is still with her, the foil, as of old, to her ladyship, and virgin soil to this day, I believe.... Madam took her tea laced with a little eau de vie. There was a curious legless monster in waiting: something between a dumb-waiter and a Covent Garden porter. She defers to him in everything; and he growls.”]

XXV. I DECLARE FOR THE KING

We were landed upon the Mole, not far from the Castel Nuovo, a vast, sullen pile like the Bastille, on whose ruins I had danced. It was a dark and rainy night. Pissani, who had been squatted amongst some boats down by the water, rose, came forward in two or three swift strides, and exclaimed, in an eager, agitated undertone, “Mother of God! You are accompanied?”

I could not see his face, but my heart responded unerringly to the dear remembered tones. I went quickly to him, and put up my hands to his breast.

“Nicola mio—my brother, my comrade!” I whispered, “by all that, next to you, I hold most dear.”

“What? Whom?” he asked, in a low voice of amazement. “Not—?”

“Yes,” I said, “by my servant and my sister. You called and I came, Nicola, ‘bringing my sheaves with me.’”

He was breathing fast, but he did not answer.

“Are you not pleased,” I said, “that I give up everything for you and to you; that I devote my best to the cause—our cause, Nicola; that at the bidding of my brother I have moved my tent into the wilderness? Are you not pleased with me?”

“There is danger in the wilderness,” he muttered. “No, I am not pleased.”

I fell back with a little shiver. “No more for her than for me,” I answered.

“It is not the same,” he said; “it is not the same thing at all.” In an instant he had gripped my wrist. “Send her back into safety. She shall not risk her life here—by God, she shall not!”

And then I think I understood. I was calm as death, and as cold. It had needed but these few words to turn me into stone. My God! all my fervour and self-sacrifice—and this for their reward! I laughed out quite gaily—

“O, mon chéri! in the rain and the dark? Are you mad? Please to convey us to some shelter.”

He hesitated a moment; then beckoned to Patty, who came running like a dog to the whistle. Pissani turned his back as she approached.

“Tell your servant to await your orders here,” he muttered; “and, for you, follow me.”

Patty stole by my side, dumb over her reception. The fool! the little adorable traitress! How would she have chattered, teeth and heart, had she seen my nails, hid under my cloak, dug into the soft palms they were clinched on. Yet I had an admiration for her, even while I crouched to spring. That she, self-obliterating, undemonstrative with men, could all the time have been softly insinuating herself between me and my love! I had not credited her with so much cleverness.

Our sombre patriot led us to a little osteria in a sewer hard by, where the rain beat on a lurid scrap of window, and a mutter of voices from within seemed to mingle in a throaty discussion with a gurgling water-pipe at our feet. There were two or three wine-drinkers revealed as he pushed open the door—strangely respectable folk in these incongruous surroundings. They but glanced up as we entered and passed on by a stone passage to a little remote room, where were a bare table and a single taper glimmering sickly on the wall.

Pissani shut the door and faced us. He was very pale and grim; grown sterner than my memory of him, but still the melancholy, romantic brigand of my heart. For a moment he seemed unable to speak; and in that moment I could see my little sister’s hand shake on the table on which she had leaned it for support. The truth was confessed amongst us all in that silence. And I—I knew it suddenly, instantly, for what I had long suspected but struggled to conceal from myself; knew it for the real solution of this my conscious unconscious caprice in bringing Patty with me. It had been to force it, to satisfy myself of the best or the worst, that I had acted as I had done. That I recognised now. And, after all, I was the first to speak.

“Well, M. Pissani,” I said, “it seems that one of us at least is de trop.”

His mouth twitched with nervousness.

“She cannot help the cause,” he said. “She will only be in the way. What is her use in this pass?”

“Patty,” I said, turning on the child, “M. Pissani does not want you. You can go back.”

She looked at me, the helpless fool. Her lip trembled, and her eyes filled with tears. But Pissani by that was smiling.

“I do not want you, child, I?” he said, in a sick voice, and held out his hands fondly to her across the table. “Ah, but we know better the truth of our hearts! When the battle is won, then, O gentle my love, that betakest thyself to love as the lark to heaven, come to me, as you promised! But not now—not now, when the storm is in the air, and this so dear shrine of my hopes might be struck and violated. You have not changed, you could not change: it is enough, I have seen you. Come now with me, Pattia, and I will take you back to the boat, to my friends, that they may see you secured in Rome until I can send to you and say, ‘It is time, most dear wife, it is time. Return to me, and give thyself to be the mother of patriots!’”

She moved, and gave a little sob. Her response was not to him but to me—to the stunned questioning of my eyes. She had no wit but to utter her whole self-condemnation in it.

“Diana! I did not know! I have not been untrue to you.”

I struck her on the mouth, and she staggered back, with that red lie printed on it for the delectation of her paramour. She clutched at the table, reeled, and sank down beside it moaning. It was too much. My fury had flashed to an explosion in that wicked falsehood.

Pissani, with a sudden and terrible cry at the sight of his mistress’s disgrace, drew a knife from his hip, and leapt like a goat across the table. Stumbling as he alighted, she caught him frantic round the knees, and held him raging and snarling while he stabbed at the air in his frenzy. I stood fallen back a little, white and scornful, but with not a thrill of fear at my heart; and, so standing, saw how, in the thick blindness of his rage, he was yet tender of her in his struggles to free himself. And then in a moment he had fallen upon his knees, the blade yet in his hand, and was kissing and caressing her, moaning inarticulate love into her ear. She tried feebly to repulse him; to drag herself away and towards me. I had always known that she was of the fools who caress the hands that scourge them. But I sprang back, loathing her neighbourhood.

“Don’t come near me,” I cried.

He had kissed the blood from her mouth to his own. He struck the spot there with a furious hand, as he turned on me.

“By this,” he said, “your death or mine!”

I laughed scornfully.

“So brutes revenge themselves on the innocence they have despoiled!”

“It is a lie!” he raged; and, on the word, put a fierce arm about his wife. “Believe it is a lie, thou!”

But she was still struggling to reach me.

“Diana! Not this end to all our love! Not this end to the high hopes with which we came. It is not ourselves, but Liberty, sister. See, he will be good; he will not hurt you” (she was groping eagerly for the knife, which he ended by letting her secure). “I did not know,” she cried, “I did not guess—until this moment I did not. I will never see him again, if you wish. I will be no man’s wife to your hurt. Diana! It is the truth!”

I let her rave. I never took my eyes from his devil’s face.

“So,” I said, deeper now, and with my hands upon my storming bosom, “you would make your sacrifice to Reason, monsieur, in me—me! My mission was to be the Pucelle’s, and her glorious fate, with which, I suppose, you were to assure your little after-paradise of loves. O, a grateful use for this poor heart, to be a stepping-stone to the respectable amours of Monsieur and Madame Pissani! Only I renounce the honour, as I renounce the cause of the paragon of taste who could prefer that for this.”

I tore at my dress.

“You have made your choice,” I cried; “it is all said. Only think, monsieur, think sometimes of what you have lost, before you talk of the battle being won!”

I hurried from the room, even as my false friend called to me again in agony, “Diana! Believe me! Listen to me! O, what shall I do?” But, even in my frenzy, I had the wit to pause the other side of the door, listening for his response.

“Thou shalt go back to Rome, my dearest, my heart,” he said. “Hearken to me, my Pattia.”

But she only sobbed dreadfully, “Not like this—not in this disgrace. I must follow her, even if she kills me.”

“By my soul, no,” he said; “for your life is mine.”

I could hear them wrestling together; till, in a moment, he prevailed, even before I had guessed he would.

“Hush, my bird,” he panted softly; “there is one other way—if it must be so indeed.”

There followed a pause. I could have laughed in the mad joy of my revenge. He was an upstart, this patriot; a son of the people. He would commit her to his own—wive her, I most fervently prayed—and deposit his jewel, this little pet of luxury, in the squalid cabin at Camaldoli where he was born. He had often told me of it; of his early experiences of the joys of life in a place where the peasant could not fasten his coat against cold, or take refuge from the sun under a tree, or borrow a stone from the hill for his paths, or renew his starved patch with manure of leaves, or set a water-butt to catch the showers, or be buried decently when he dropped at the plough-tail and died, because buttons, and the shade of trees, and stones, and dead leaves, and rain-water, and a dead peasant were all taxed alike—items in a hundred other feudal impositions which left existence hardly its own shadow to prevail by. And now these joys would be hers; for I knew that she had not the strength to oppose him, though enough to damn her own fool fortune by insisting on the Church’s sanction to her possession of an estate of mud and wattles. I listened eagerly for the next.

“If thou wilt be my mother’s daughter?” he said.

I could have clapped my hands. I hurried down the passage and out into the night, fierce, burning, but with an exultation in my rage. The sight of men risen, scared and listening, as I passed through the wineshop, served to recall me to myself and to my danger. I was outcast from these conspirators—if only they had known!

With an effort I composed myself, and turned to them with a smile—

“Messieurs, but the door is between me and the street!”

One of them at that stepped forward, opened it, and gravely bowed me forth. As gravely I stepped into the rain, and made without hurry for the beach.

So this was the end to all my exaltation, to my dreams of love and sacrifice! I stamped in the puddles. “Vive la tyrannie! vive les Bourbons!” I cried to myself as I sped on. So shamed, so wronged, so spurned! was not the worst justified to me? I saw the shadow of my loved monster standing solemn sentinel over the single trunk we had brought with us. Our heavy baggage we had left in Rome. O, mon fidèle! how at that moment I could have stormed my wounded heart out on thy breast!

“Canst thou lift it and follow me?” I said only.

He answered, the dear Caliban, by obeying.

“Whither?” he growled.

I looked desperately about me. Near at hand it was all a tangle of spars and sheds, and the rain driving between. But inland, the night went up in glistening terraces, scattered constellations all shaken in the thunder of a great city. Far south, what looked like the red light of a forge alternately glared, and faded, and grew again, battling, it seemed, with drowning flaws of tempest. It was the glimmering bonfires of Vesuvius, those hot ashes of a consumed empire, from which, according to Pissani, the phœnix Liberty was to arise. I laughed: “Not yet, my poet, my friend; since thou choosest another than Pucelle to breed thee thy patriots!”

I turned to the north. There, upon a huddle of tall buildings, looming near and enormous in the dark, the stars of the hills seemed to have drifted down, clinging thickly over all, like primroses under a bank.

“It is the royal palace,” said Gogo.

“It is our way, then,” I panted, on fire. “Follow me, and quickly; we are not safe here.”

Along wharfs and causeways, plashing over the filthy stones, by squalid alley and reeking wall, I fled and he pursued. I had no lodestar save my hate; but it served. The growing scream and thunder of the town drove towards us as we advanced; but few people in that bitter night; until, skirting the massed buildings of the arsenal and palace, we emerged suddenly through a little lane into the Strada di St. Lucia, and paused a moment undecided and amazed.

It was as if the devil had taken his glowing pencil and ruled off this quarter of the city for his own. A noisome ravine of houses it was, with life like a fiery torrent brawling along its bed. Song and tumult and mad licence; fingers quick to stab, or to snap like castanets to a dancing child; doorways that were the mouths of tributary sewers vomiting filth and tatters into the main; fishermen, at their flaring stalls, bawling crabs and oysters, frutti di mare—my God! what fruit, and from what a sea that drained a shambles; women out in the rain and the open, making their shameless toilettes, and screaming the while such damnation by the calendar on their sister doxies for a word, a retort, a mere flea-bite (the commonest experience, after all) as to leave themselves, one would have thought, no vocabulary for the more strenuous encounters of fists and claws; children swarming everywhere in the double sense, and scattering shrill oaths like vermin; rags and nakedness and insolence—a loafing melodrama—an epitome of the worst squalor and viciousness in all Naples—such was the district upon which we had alighted, the mid-ward of the Lazzaroni.

As we stood, a ruffian, swaggering past, swerved, and approached a handsome, impudent face. Gogo, without a word, heaved his shoulder between. But I had no fear. These Lazzari were the king’s friends—and mine. I pushed aside my henchman.

“Pour le roi!” I cried, and pointed towards the palace.

He understood, and whipped off his greasy hat.

“Viva il re!” he answered enthusiastically, showing his white teeth, and motioned us to a street going eastwards up the hill. I saw and recognised the same fellow once or twice afterwards. He was a Michele di Laudo—Mad Michael, they called him—who, as chief of his vagabonds, was to take a prominent part in the defence of the suburbs against the French.

We crossed the street under his protection, and on its farther side, before waving us on, he bent and snatched a kiss. The rank sweet touch of his lips was like a visé on my passport into hell. It seemed to bring the blaze, the colour, the stench of the reeling streets clashing to a focus in my brain, and it sent me speeding on half drunk and half sick, loathing and hugging myself. I was an angel in Sodom, running blindly for the refuge of God’s wing in a dazzle of roaring lights, and confused by the glare, knowing not whether I turned to the self I had left or to the self that was awaiting me. Gogo, straining in my wake, panted as I hurried before him—

“For every dog but the watch-dog, a bone.”

I turned on him, with a stamp.

“A bone! I am meat for your masters, I tell you.”

“I serve no Pissani,” he said sullenly.

I shook him in my anger.

“Never breathe his name to me again, or we part.”

“Very well,” he said. “I thought as much. He has got his deserts.”

“Has he?”

I glared at him one moment, then turned and sped on—up the street of the Giant, passing the north flank of the palace, where sentries stood on guard, and so into an open piazza, the Largho S. Ferdinando, into which the palace itself stuck a shoulder, and where were churches and the flaring portico of a theatre, and other buildings strangely fine in their contiguity to the slums we had left.

And here, amidst the wild drift and gabble of a throng less foul but as aimless, we plunged and were absorbed, and stood together again to breathe.

All Naples, it seemed, was bent on shouting down its brother.

“What next?” bawled Gogo in my ear.

A handsome inn, the “Orient,” stood comparatively quiet and isolated in an odd corner of the Place.

“Rooms—there!” I answered.

“Its exclusiveness makes it prominent,” boomed Gogo, with as much dryness as he could put into a roar.

I beckoned him on imperiously.

On n’a jamais bon marché de mauvaise marchandise.

In a little we were installed in comfortable rooms.

“Now order wine,” I said, “and we will drink.”

I sipped, while he sat on a stool at my feet, soothing the weariness from them with a touch that was only my monster’s. The Chianti and the sorcery of his hand began to drug me.

“Drink you too,” I murmured.

He reached for his glass.

“To whom?” he said. “What are we now? It makes no difference; only I must know.”

“Death to all republics,” I cried, “and long life to the King of Naples!”

“Ah!” he said, between a groan and a sigh. “Well—the poor child—you have cast her off, I suppose,” and he drained his glass.

I stared at him a moment, then fell sobbing upon his shoulder.

“You pity everyone but me,” I cried, “and my heart is broken.”

“What, in the old place?” said he.

But I was too miserable to retort; and half the night afterwards he held me, fallen fast asleep, in his arms.

XXVI. I RENEW AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

For three days I remained shut into my rooms at the “Orient,” not daring to go out, a prey to the utmost nervousness and agitation. Do not suppose that on that account I was the less determined in my plans for vengeance. But revenge that lays itself open to retribution misses the better half of itself. I remembered my old friend Mr. Roper’s dictum, and beat my brains only for the means to strike with impunity. I was not from the first without a design. The difficulty was to give it practical effect; because for the moment I could not use Gogo. For myself, under my assumed name, I might lie secure in this hiding. To make him my carrier to the English Embassy would be to mark a sure track to my retreat with every punch of his wooden legs. I dared not let him out; I dared not even temporarily part with him in my peril; I dared not come to a decision, while knowing that my life depended on a wise one. For I was a renegade revolutionary—I could not blink the fact. Though I had never hitherto actually set foot in Naples itself, there must be many to know me by report for that apostle of the new creed of equality who, but a few years before, had stumped their country, winning converts. And now! the safety of many men—and women too—was in my hands; and not Pissani, nor those others when they came to learn, would have forgotten the nature of my secession, or the significance of the threats which had accompanied it. If passion had given me away, caution must redeem me. I had no faith in Patty’s power to protect me. The occasion was too desperate; the interests involved were too many. Pissani was a reformer before he was a lover. I must be sacrificed, if possible, to the cause I had the means to betray.

All day, peeping from behind the curtains of our windows, we saw the piazza below like a seething cauldron of unrest. As significant of that as anything were the out-at-elbows letter-writers under the arcades of the old theatre of San Carlo, who, at a time when every man feared to commit his simplest thoughts to paper, did less than enough business to keep themselves in macaroni. They served to exhibit the popular bankruptcy as well as the briefless advocates, who, from thriving on the countless abuses of the law, found themselves abandoned to the lawlessness they had created; as well as the journalists, who, having been brought under a strict moral censorship, starved as vampires might on a diet of milk; as well as the professors and savants, who were hampered, it must be confessed, by a thousand childish restrictions in their efforts to make life beautiful by turning it inside out, and to teach men to follow in themselves, while eating an omelet, the whole process of absorption and digestion; as well as the bolder demagogues, who, mounted on steps or tubs, screamed denunciations of their misgoverning sovereigns, under the transparent veil of Claudius and Messalina, and called upon their hearers, by many classical examples, to strike for liberty and political cleanliness. At which the Lazzari laughed, understanding just so much that, if they were to be no longer flea-bitten, they would be deprived of the traditional luxury of scratching; and shaking their heads over that new idea of equality, which was in fact so old an idea as to be embodied in a popular proverb: “Tu rubbi a me, io rubbo a te,” which one might expound: “‘If Taffy robs me, I rob Taffy’—so what the devil’s all this fuss about?” Naples was rich in charitable institutions for the encouragement of indolent beggary; and what sort of a reform was it that sought to deprive an honest loafer of his soup? And so to a man they held out for dirt, moral and material, and for the king who assured them a continuance in both—a condition of things which made revolution a very different affair from what it had been in starving Paris.

Since the date of my first visit in ’94 this ferment had been rising, in spite of all efforts of the authorities to check it. As well try to stop the decomposition of a dead body—for such was the national credit. The foolish, vile queen, panic-sick that she was destined to the fate of her better-meaning but as foolish sister in Paris, persuaded her weak, common husband into a counter-blast to the Terror—with as much effect as King James the First’s against smoking. It is bad policy to try to suppress an evil by advertising it. Self-martyrdom is the most popular of all notorieties. They inaugurated a system of espionage, which in itself was an education to conspirators; they read Jacobinism across the forehead of all learning, and so alienated the intelligence which might have saved the land; they crammed the filthy prisons with suspects, and broke the hearts and fortunes of those who were the best leaven to corruption; they made it criminal to wear scarlet waistcoats and long trousers; finally, for some such dereliction, or one less momentous, they hung up two or three respectable boys in a public square, varying the entertainment by shooting down some scores of spectators who had fallen into a panic at the noise of a distant musket-shot. And then, having thrown their sacrifice on the flames of discontent, and so lowered them, they settled down with an affectation of the strong arm, and a blindness to the embers smouldering underneath.

These had not ceased to smoulder, nevertheless, feeding on their new fuel; and by and by the blaze was to come.

Eh bien! la voix du peuple est la voix de Dieu! So they say; only, unfortunately, here the Lazzari were the crack in it. It was a pretty Naples I had come to.

One afternoon, while looking out of the window, I saw a magnificent equipage cross the square, and, turning the corner towards the palace, disappear. I had been waiting during these long days for some such vision, the nature of which now, if, indeed, the plaudits of the loafers had not confirmed it in my mind, was established in the glimpse of a bold, beautiful face which I obtained in its passing. On the instant my resolution was made, and I ran to the table and hastily scribbled off a note:—

“One whom you formerly befriended seeks your help and protection. She is in possession of important secrets, which you cannot afford to discard. Ask for her, under the name of Madame Lavasse, at the ‘Orient.’”

I called Gogo, and hurriedly instructed him—

“Lady Hamilton has just passed, driving to the palace. Her coach is gilt, with four dapple-greys. Go secretly out by the back; make your way there circumspectly, wait for her reappearance, and throw this in at the window of her carriage. Then return here, but by a roundabout way, and not till after dark. Be swift and sure. Everything—our safety, our lives—depends on this opportunity.”

He groaned out a little sigh: “And our honour, Diana? Think of the time when we shall be damned together, before you betray the child.”

I walked up and down in terrible agitation when he was gone. Betray! Who had been the traitor, of us two? Not a drop of water for her, though I were to lie in Abraham’s bosom!

Night came, but no Gogo. Tortured with doubts and apprehensions, I could neither eat nor rest. Had he too repented at last of his loyalty, and abandoned me in my need? They all fell from me, those I had succoured and most trusted. Sometimes, in my agony of mind, I upbraided his selfishness, cursed my own irreclaimable fondness in putting faith in man. I believed he had sold himself—whether to cupidity or an emotion, what did it matter. At length, quite exhausted by my passions, I fell asleep on my bed, dressed as I was.

I slept far into the morning, and awoke to a consciousness of a presence in the next room. Was it he, returned at last? Dazed, and sick with excitement, I rose and ran to meet him. A lady only was there, cloaked and mysterious. She lifted her veil, and showed me the face I had desired.

It had not, indeed, so much altered in these years as her person’s amplitude. Conceive, my dear friend, the head of a Circe on the body of a hippopotamus! Now I perceived Nature’s forethought in the gift of those immense feet. They were disproportionate no longer. She had grown colossal. The mountain had come to Mahomet. It was wonderful how, in spite of all, she could have retained the general fine contour of her features. One would have thought she could hardly have kept her countenance, seeing the changes below. I certainly found it difficult to keep mine, as I fell on my knees before her, and, catching at her hands, hung my head.

She stepped back from me, shaking the room. I understood then in a moment that the old glamour was only to be recovered, if at all, with discretion.

“Now, madam,” she said, “being come at your request, I must ask you for your reason, and as short as you’ll please to make it.”

“My messenger”—I began.

“Your messenger,” she interrupted me promptly, “is put under lock and key till we know more about him and you. He got a cut on the cheek before he was took by the guards; but that wasn’t my fault.”

I buried my face in my hands.

“I thank you, madam,” I said, with emotion. “He lies at least in better security than I.”

“Well, I won’t answer for that,” she replied, “till I come to hear what you’re after.”

I looked up.

“O, madam, my benefactress!” I cried. “It is much to expect, perhaps; but do you not know me?”

“O, perfectly, madam!” she said, with a curtsey that made her balloon. “We make it our pains to know all about our visitors. Believe me, you was under surveillance from the moment you stepped ashore at the Mole. It was not very likely, was it, that we should overlook the arrival of her as seemed wishin’ to reap the discord she had sowed among us a while back? Be sure we know you, madam, well enough, and the reputation you built for yourself in Paris too!”

Startled as I was, I had a difficulty to refrain from retorting that my reputation would bear comparison with hers. But I bit my lip on the temptation, and for the moment took refuge from everything in tears, to which, however, she listened silent.

“I did not refer to that,” I cried, looking up with clasped hands and swimming eyes, “but to the goodness of a great and beautiful lady, who once succoured a poor girl in distress.”

“And I include that too in my knowledge,” said she; “and much gratitude you’ve shown to the class as befriended you.”

“Gratitude!” I cried. “O, believe me, that, until I reached here, I never even guessed that, in conspiring against royalty, I was conspiring against you, my saviour.”

She sat down on a chair, near breaking it.

“Didn’t you?” she said, gathering the folds of her cloak about her. “Well, supposing you didn’t, what then? You ain’t goin’ to forego your principles for a sentiment like that—don’t tell me.”

“If you won’t believe me”—I murmured despairingly.

“Why look here, Madame Lavasse, or Please, or whatever your damned name is,” she said, shaking a hectoring finger at me, “one may help a girl, but a woman helps herself, which I make no bones of guessing you’ve managed to do pretty free. The question with you is whether Jacobinism or royalty is going to pay best; and if you’re proposin’ to change about and turn informer, no better moral than profit is at the bottom of your little game, I’ll vow. Well, I don’t say but in that case we’re open to treat; only I’ll ask you to drop the artless girl, which don’t sit well on you at your age, and talk with me like one woman of the world to another.”

I rose to my feet with a burning face.

“Go!” I said, with an imperious gesture; “insult me no more. Have I not suffered wrong and outrage enough, but my heart must be made the sport of every common”—

“Highty-tighty, miss!”

She rose in astonishment. For a moment she stood conning me, my quivering lips and heaving bosom. Then of a sudden she smiled.

“Well, perhaps”—she said. “There, I’ve a way of letting my tongue run away with me; but it’s no example for you to follow. I should have remembered the glass houses in the sayin’ before I twitted you with your past. Only for sure, Diana Please, it can never be said against me that I betrayed my love that betrayed me.”

My rage was all gone. I dropped my head, with a sad little cry. The sound of it brought her to my side.

“Was he not your love,” she whispered—“him that came with you?”

And I answered, “He was my love.”

“Was—was,” she repeated. “Well—I see. They take other fancies.”

“You was sold yourself—is it not true?” I muttered.

“Ay,” she answered, and sighed. “But it was for gold.”

“You can forgive, then, and forget,” I said; “but not I—no, never.”

“You would ruin him?”

“Yes, and her.”

“Bring him to the gallows?”

“That is why I sent for you. You can trust me.”

“And in the meantime you fear for yourself?”

“I struck her. He tried to stab me. I cried, Vive le Roi! You know what that means.”

“Cry Vive la Reine for the future. ’Tis the sweet saint who suffers most. Well, it seems the truth at last; and you have your provocation—by God, you have! Only for me, having one different, to help myself by you?—it goes against my stomach somehow. I wish it was your principles instead of your jealousy.”

“Help me in nothing but to some place of safety, where I can inform and direct the court. It will not be troubled with your ladyship’s scruples.”

“How do you know? ’Tis so you have been taught to regard my sweet queen, I suppose?”

“O, madam!” I cried, “you know what made me an ardent pupil.”

She stood musing upon me long and earnestly.

“Yes, perhaps,” she said at length, and sighed; “what a fool preacher is Love, not to be able to keep his own faith! To drive woman for refuge on woman—’tis like banishing your physician to the enemy’s camp. Well”—she took my hands; I thought she was going to kiss me, but she made no offer—“for myself, I don’t want to hear none of your inculpations; but I’ll put you in train to satisfy your passions on others that may. Will that suit you?”

She turned before I could answer, and was going.

“It must be soon,” I urged hoarsely, following her; “O, madam! don’t you understand that it must be soon?”

“Within an hour or two,” she said, over her shoulder. “Have no fear. You are already protected—and watched.”

I set myself, with what self-control I could, to await her return; for, after our emotional confidences, I expected nothing less than that she would come for me presently in person. But in that I was mistaken, as was made evident in the ushering up to me by and by of a very courtly young gentleman, of a shrewd, sallow visage, who informed me, with a bow, that he was Love’s emissary.

“His Majesty, sir,” I said, with a faint smile, and some intentional ambiguity, “is well represented. Do we go to the palace?”

“We go,” he said, “to the palace. Will madam be pleased to accept my escort?”

I took the arm he offered me. In view of some such contingency, I had spent the interval in making my toilette agreeably to it.

He conducted me out by the back way to the stables, where, in a little court, we found an ordinary post-chaise, with two horses, awaiting us.

“Faire comme on le juge à propos,” murmured my companion; and, seeing my trunk (pregnant with damning evidence) well secured in front, he handed me in, followed himself, pulled down the blinds, and gave the word. In an instant we were rolling over the stones.

It was a very roundabout way, it seemed to me, that we took to the palace; yet for long—so potent was my trust in myself as an emissary of vengeance, and so engaging the chatter of my comrade—I suspected no treachery. But at length, losing conscious sense, through the thunder of the wheels, of a roar and racket which had once accompanied it, I started as it were awake, and, in an immediate panic, peeped from behind the blind nearest me. And then I saw that we had already left the town, and were tearing along country roads.

I half rose, with a cry: “The palace! This is not the way to it!”

My companion seized my wrist in a grip of steel, forcing me to reseat myself.

“The very nearest, I can assure you, madam.”

“You are taking me to prison?”

“My faith! a prison that some would like,” he said, showing his teeth.

I struggled with him. “Let me out! I will raise the country else!”

He released me at once.

“As madam wills. Madam will claim protection of her friends the Jacobins? For me, I consult only her safety.”

“What!” I panted at him, sinking back. “Tell me who are you?”

“Luigi de’ Medici, at madam’s service,” he said, with a bow; “a name, at least, that should be a guarantee of some worth.”

“No doubt, sir; but, as a stranger, at your mercy”—

“I have the honour to be, madam, the chief of the police.”

The word awoke new frenzy in me.

“My God! I am betrayed. For pity’s sake, sir, tell me where we go.”

“I answered, madam, to the palace. I am a man of my word.”

“What palace?”

“Ah! At length madam talks reason. To the Palace of Caserta, ten leagues away.”

I stared at him aghast.

“To be immured there?”

“Truly,” he said, “to be immured in a paradise, amongst fountains and flowers! It is not like the inside of a wall.”

“You are pleased to mock me, sir. But why am I brought so far?”

“Madam shall ask of her mirror,” he said, with a charming grin. “Shall I so abuse my office as to admit that His Majesty is susceptible; and that Madame the English Ambassadress—who, nevertheless, is of a perfect honour—is jealous for her friend the queen, and, perhaps, for her own pre-eminence in beauty? Certainly not. It is quite enough to say that Madame Lavasse, being in some danger of assassination in Naples, is removed to a distance for her own security; to a place, in short, whence she can direct the lightning, without exciting suspicion of collusion with Jupiter.”

He bent and looked into my face.

“I vow, madam,” he said, “that the last frost of discretion must melt in the fire of such beauty. Take my word for it, that the Queen of Olympus never of her will would have admitted Venus to be of her court.”

This was very disarming, to be sure; and already, before we reached Caserta, Signor de’ Medici was in possession of some preliminary information that proved useful to him.

XXVII. I KNOW HOW TO WAIT

Caserta Palace was a sort of Versailles to the Palazzo Reale. It was a fine, long, rectangular building, lofty and imposing in the eighteenth century style of grand architecture, with marble colonnades and innumerable windows. The town it dominated, being a royal town par excellence, was comparatively clean and reposeful; and the palace gardens were as extensive and as beautiful as any in the world.

It was not, however, to a corner of this stately pile that I found myself committed, but to rooms in the Casino of St. Lucius, which stood in the park some two miles north of the main building, and commanded a noble view, not only of the surrounding country, but of the dark pruned alleys beset with white statues, and the terraces and fountains and cascades of the gardens themselves—a lovely spot. And here, for the moment secure and at peace, I resolved upon a life of placid enchantment, treated like a queen’s hostage, and biding the development of events.

I had my little sleepy, soft-footed household—an old groom, a pretty maid or two, and a quite delectable cook. No restrictions were placed upon me; I was free to wander as I listed, and, indeed, had no inducement to venture without the cordon of sentries who were my best protection. The month was April, the most lovely in all Naples; and, save when Capri, showing near and blue, gave indications of the scirocco, I spent all my days out of doors. So tranquil was it, so remote from the centres of ferment, I could have thought myself in Avalon, though all the while and around the clouds of a coming tempest were gathering to burst. As I loitered by those empty corridors of green, smiling back the smiles of the unruffled statues, listening to the drowsy thunder of the waters, seeing only for all tokens of human life the little marionnettes of place swarming, quite distant and minute, about the steps of the palace, France was preparing to launch her legions on Naples both by land and sea; scared refugee cardinals were trotting by the dozen into the city; Nelson, off Toulon, was shaping his course, by way of Aboukir, to the arms of Mrs. Hart; Ferdinand was tremblingly fastening his warlike greaves on his fat shins; and, finally, Maria Carolina was making her bloody tally for the hangman. And only of the last was I actively cognisant, seeing that it was there alone lay my concern with the outer world.

From time to time M. de’ Medici would visit me in this connection, coming ingratiatory and quite lover-like to refresh his portfolio with new names from my list, or to examine my correspondence, which was entirely at his service. I had taken no half-measures. The spared assassin comes to strike again, was my motto.

“Have I not proved myself a sincere convert?” I said to him once.

“Assuredly, most beautiful,” he answered; and fell to counting on his fingers. “You have given us already certain proof of the guilty complicity of—One: Signor Domenico Cirillo, professor of botany, arborist, edenist, pupil of Jean Jacques, too delicate a flower for this climate; two: Francesco Conforti, court theologian, a priest and ambitious—nothing singular, but he will be beaten in the race for power by a neck; three: Carlo Muscari; four: his excellency the Marquis of Polvica, a lamentable case; five: Pasquale Baffi, professor of dead languages, for which he will soon be literally qualified; six: Gennaro Serra di Cassano, a very pretty young gentleman, late released from confinement—but it is sometimes policy to spare the cub, if one would learn the way to the dam; seven:—but, ’tis enough, madam: those six will vindicate you.”

“You are welcome to them, monsieur,” I said, “if only you would exchange against them all my dear, indispensable Gogo.”

At which, as usual, he shook his head, tightening his lips.

“A bond of sentiment. You are better apart.”

“At least you might acquaint me where he is?”

“As to that, he is very safe and well cared for.”

“In prison?”

“Nominally—nominally, ma belle. But, observe—so are you, you know. What then? There are prisons and prisons.”

“Well, if he is as well off as I?” I sighed. And, indeed, the assurance was a wonderful comfort to me.

As a matter of course he kept me constantly informed—though I never questioned him—as to the career of the Pissanis, the head and front of all offending.

“Signor Nicola is our bell-wether,” he would say. “We have hung a little invisible cymbal about his neck, which has the strange quality of sounding only to us. O, we police are the latter-day fairies, believe me! All unconsciously to himself, he calls the flock about him; and we—we have nothing to do but keep count of them, till the season of the butcher arrives. Then we shall see. I shall want, perhaps, all the fingers of my own hands, and of yours too—my God, a dainty tally! And madam, you ask—though your lips do not move? It is very laughable, take my word. At once, since her marriage, the dear little frog emulates the bull. O, fie, fie! Madam misreads me. Such a scandal! I would say only that it has inoculated her with her husband’s ambition; that she is become an enthusiast in the cause, attending meetings, distributing tracts, haranguing multitudes in her sweet round voice, that is like pelting giants with sugar-plums. Yes, as madam implies, it is marvellous. What will not love do? But for me, I am susceptible: I adore all beauty. I could wish the poor child another embrace than the hangman’s.”

“Well, sir,” I answered, “you will have occasion, perhaps, to offer her the alternative.”

“O, fie!” he said. “Is not my heart engaged immutably? Otherwise—who knows? It is a sad world.”

It was a very dark and bitter one to me from the moment of his revelations. So, she could be independent of me, and happy in her independence! What a world of hypocrisy and double-dealing was exposed in this her easy repudiation of my claims upon her! During all these years that I had counted her my slave, she had been nursing her schemes of treachery—been manœuvring, probably, to make me the instrument of her conveyance to her lover’s arms. And now, no doubt, they were laughing over their outwitting of me. Well, who laughs last laughs best.

One day I had a notable visit. Two ladies, walking through the grounds, came upon me where I was seated in a grove of myrtle. One was Lady Hamilton, very great and gorgeous in a shell-shaped hat de sparterie, trimmed with butterflies and a violet ribbon knotted under one ear; while the other, whom I did not know, a dowdy, ignoble old figure with watery eyes, wore a plain fichu-chemise, and an immense bonnet with a veil thrown back over it. They both stopped upon seeing me, and Lady Hamilton beckoned. I rose, advanced, and curtsied.

“Here, your Majesty,” said my friend, “is the very person herself.”

Her Majesty! I paled and trembled; then ventured a glance from under my lashes. Sure I was not to blame for my remissness. I vow I could have thought my lady had brought her monthly nurse with her for an airing in the country. The poor woman looked steeped in caudle, flocky with child-beds, and no wonder. In some two dozen years out of her forty-five or so she had borne near as many children. She had prayed for an heir, and Heaven had sent her a tempest. The eternal lyings-in had soured her temper, which was not further improved by neuralgia and opium. Nursing, as she did, outside her litter, a perpetual ambition to wear the breeches of government, it had been characteristically mean of her husband to adopt this method to correct it. Yet, in spite of all she had borne both from and to her lord, her vigour remained unquenchable. Indeed, in a kingdom which annually abandoned some twenty-five thousand babies to the foundlings, a child was the cheapest present one could make to one’s favourite of the moment. Yet, as I saw her now, she was the farthest from imposing or attractive. Her legs were short, and her upper lip so long that her nose stood nearer her forehead than her chin, on the former of which she wore a single fat curl like a clock-spring. She put a hand to it two or three times, before she addressed me, very quick and hoarse, in French.

“Maria! Mais elle fait une bonne mine à mauvais jeu! Come hither, child. So this is our redoubtable little moucharde? We have need of her in these days of the devil’s advocacy.”

Her eyes looked injected; her flabby face puckered at the temples like yellow milk skin. As I approached, she turned away in evident pain. Lady Hamilton was all effusive attentions at once. She waved me to stop, and supported her friend to the seat I had just occupied, commiserating, explaining, and fondling in one.

“O, my darling queen! It is the neuralgia that worries my sweet like a dog. Lean on your Emma. Have you nothing, child—no salts, no drops?”

I fetched a certain vinaigrette from my pocket, and bending before the royal knees, snapped the stopper once or twice under the royal nose. The effect was instantaneous. An expression of maudlin relief succeeded to the strain. She lay breathing peacefully, with a smile on her lips, until, after some minutes, she aroused herself with a sigh.

“What was it, then? It is a Circe, with her witch’s face and her potions!”

But this was to trespass on the other’s domain.

“Give it to me, if you please,” said Mrs. Hart coldly. “Her Majesty would prefer to take it from my hand.”

I returned it quietly to my pocket.

“Nay, madam,” I said; “it is a remedy that must not be repeated.”

She looked at me astounded; then broke into a forced laugh. “Hey-day! We are pretty absolute, are we not?” But the queen, grown suddenly very affable and communicative, put her aside with a hand which she laid upon my arm—

“We will not quarrel with our physician. She knows what she knows. Moreover, for all her long exile and the little errors which she has redeemed, she is of the great nation which we love. Is it not so, child? and hast thou heard what are the best and latest news? None other than that thy glorious captain, the supreme Nelson, has within the last few days annihilated the French fleet at Aboukir! Ah! that rose is from thy heart. It speaks the proud blood, the red rose of England, mantling above all foolish sophistries. Thou canst not but rejoice with us in the destruction of the enemies of thy race—of all the world!”

And then she and the other began a little litany of excommunication:—

“Dogs and assassins!”

“Despoilers of churches and women!”

“Hordes of anti-Christ vomited from hell!”

“Scum and rabble of an infamous democracy!”

“Monsters of sacrilege!”

“Cowards curst of God!”

“Whom to slay is righteousness!”

“To whom to give quarter is deadly sin!”

“Subverters of all order and decency!”

“The devil hang the lot!” said Lady Hamilton.

The queen rose, quite refreshed and reinvigorated. Suddenly she was holding me with a piercing look. Craft and villainy peeped out of her little inflamed eyes.

“I come to put a question to you, madam,” she said. “There is a lady of our retinue—the Signora de Fonseca Pimentel. Your correspondence contains no proof of her disloyalty to us?”

“No, madam, or I should have informed M. de’ Medici,” I answered, in a faint terror; but rallied immediately. “I know only that she is in communication with the Signor Carafa since his escape.”