CHAPTER VI.

FROM SCYLLA TO CHARYBDIS.

“It is an ill wind which blows nobody good,” Lady Bell thought, rising with the alacrity of her years to join the pleasure-seekers.

She ransacked her trunks, and went into high dress—the extremely high dress of Lady Lucie’s order and era. Once more Lady Bell put on a peach-blossom coloured paduasoy, a muslin neckerchief drawn through the straps of her white silk stays, and a Rubens hat above her powdered curls, and started abroad to flutter like her companion butterflies in the sunshine and splendour of high life and its holiday.

Mrs. Die, sitting opposite Lady Bell in the family coach, so seldom in use, was not so inappropriate in costume as in physiognomy. The fabric of ladies’ gowns possessed in those days the advantage of lasting for generations; country fashions were not expected to change above once or twice in a lifetime. Mrs. Die’s dead-leaf coloured cut velvet, her lace, and the few jewels which, as heirlooms of the Godwins, had not been confiscated, were not amiss for an unhappy, haunted lady of quality.

Mrs. Kitty in her mode cloak and bonnet, and black satin muff, formed a creditable waiting gentlewoman.

But the group, however stared at and commented upon, remained isolated and apart after they had entered the great gateway, and joined the rest of the Warwickshire world, high and low.

The guests were meant to mix in the sports, and to promenade among the refreshment tents, and about the spaces allotted for games and dancing, and to sit on a green terrace listening to a band of music, and witnessing a little wedding-drama, “writ” for the occasion, in which the real bride and bridegroom, with a master of the ceremonies, and several nymphs to serve as the indispensable chorus, were the actors.

But Lady Bell wearied of the spectacle, and began to fret secretly at her strict spectatorship of the play, though the May weather was fine, and the scene in the gay young green of the season, and the lively colours of the holiday company, was very effective.

After Lady Bell had decided hastily that the bride—a great fortune—however languishing and abounding in airs, and however bejewelled, was far behind the court ladies whom Lady Bell had seen; that the bridegroom looked not quite sober at that moment; that the company were in keeping with the king and queen of the feast, she ceased to mind them exclusively.

She admired idly the red cloaks of the country girls, seen among the shrubbery like poppies in corn. She turned to watch a fleet of swans on an artificial lake beyond the turf stage on which the chief show had been held.

At last, neglected as Lady Bell was by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty, who snarled and made their own observations, and forgotten by Mr. Greenwood, who was with the Squire betting in the centre of a shooting-match, Lady Bell rashly ventured to stroll away from the others, trusting to find them where she had left them. She fancied she would like to inspect the swans more narrowly, to see if there were any of the silver pheasants of which she had heard, in the bushes, to look at, and smell at her leisure the fragrant flowering lilacs and thorns.

Lady Bell was punished for her enterprise. There was a mixed company at Brooklands that day, as there was wont to be at similar entertainments. Such gatherings were more dangerous even than public assemblies like ridottos or Ranelagh, because, in the latter case, the rules of admission placed a check on the guests. There a disguised highwayman, flush of money, might, if he were inclined for mild amusement, impose upon a master of the assembly, and dance cotillons and drink negus with honest folk; but he must be in disguise, and act up to his character. Here a desperate penniless vagabond could intrude with the wild hope of mending his broken fortunes. Not only were simple boors from far and near, in their clean smocks and knots of ribbons, collected and regaled free from charge at Brooklands, but with them came disreputable hangers-on at the country houses and the wayside inns, servants out of place, discharged soldiers, scamps of every description, attracted by a day’s rough junketing, and possible profit.

Lady Bell learnt, in her painful experience, that a handsome young lady of fifteen years of age, richly dressed, and separated from her party, was in perilous circumstances in such a scene.

She had discerned that she had gone farther than she had intended in an unfrequented direction, and had turned to retrace her steps along a path between high hazel bushes, when a man, in a horseman’s cloak, still worn off the stage, rounded a corner, and intercepted her by stopping short and standing directly in her way.

Though to Lady Bell horsemen’s cloaks were not uncommon accoutrements for travellers, and men whose changes of suit were not numerous, yet this great, hideous, hide-all of a cloak—exactly such a cloak as may be worn by the Stranger in Kotzebue’s drama, to this day—was attended with the result of investing its wearer with mystery. The air of that cloak alone sent a thrill through poor Lady Bell, while she had an instinctive consciousness that the riding-boots seen beneath the cloak were filthy and tattered. Above it, set in the unshorn Ishmaelite face over which the three-cornered hat was cocked, and which she had never seen before, were two bloodshot eyes, that, in their tendency to leer, inspected her sharply.

Lady Bell tried to pass without speaking, and when that was in vain, she assumed her grandest air, and said, with the tremor in her voice running through its imperativeness—

“Pray, sir, let me pass.”

“Not so fast, young lady,” replied the man, in a thick harsh voice, but with the accent of a man of education; “I want speech with one of your sort—perhaps with you in particular. Ain’t you young Lady Bell Etheredge?”

“And what if I be?” demanded Lady Bell, in doubt and dismay for the consequences of the admission, yet not seeing how she could avoid it, while she rued her folly bitterly.

“A vast deal in my favour, if you be, my young lady,” replied her challenger, with a mock wave of his hand, and a flourish of his hat revealing the absence of a wig, “scratch” or “bag,” to hide the thin and almost white hair of a head which had been blanched betimes in the ways of vice. “I wish you to tell me if Mrs. Die Godwin has come here. I have the strongest and tenderest reasons for the inquiry,” he protested, with a loud laugh.

Then this was her aunt Die’s terrible suitor, whom her Uncle Godwin had destroyed? This was that Cholmondely who would not leave off seeking revenge, after the cruel kindness of the Godwins had changed to hardly more cruel hatred, by flaunting his degradation in Mrs. Die’s face, and persecuting her with her old letters and love-tokens, and wringing money from the woman who detested and spurned him?

Lady Bell had heard that he had threatened to blow out either his own or his mistress’s brains—it was a toss up which; but as she would be only too glad to get rid of him, he rather thought the lady’s brains would have the preference. Perhaps he had a pistol beneath his cloak at this moment, and might begin by practising his aim on Lady Bell. She gave a gasp before she delivered her answer—“When I quitted Mrs. Die she was sitting on the terrace with the main part of the company.”

“By heavens, that will not serve my purpose!” swore the man; then he added, either by way of intimidation, or because he was three-fourths desperate and dangerous, “I wonder how it would do to take you in her stead,” and caught Lady Bell by the wrist.

“Unhand me, unhand me, sir!” cried Lady Bell, striving to free her hand, and when she did not succeed, uttering a shrill scream before the man could clap his hand on her mouth.

To Lady Bell’s unbounded relief the scream brought a champion to her aid without a moment’s delay.

A gentleman, who must have been walking behind her, ran forward, shouting, “Leave alone the lady!” then, as a recognition ensued, he vociferated, “Be off with you, Will Cholmondely; I have screened you as a fallen gentleman in distress, before now, but if it has come to this, that you are to fright and prey on ladies in public places, I’ll have nothing more to say to you. I’ll have you up to justice myself.”

Cholmondely growled something, half inaudibly, of not designing the young lady any harm, of having as good a right to be there as any Bully Trevor, of Trevor Court, among them. He slunk away, nevertheless, and left Lady Bell to her deliverer.

This gentleman, so well met, ought to have been long of wind as of leg, befitting the young prince come to the rescue of the young princess. On the contrary, however, he was finding as much difficulty, though the impeding cause was different, in recovering his breath, as Lady Bell was finding in recovering hers.

He was a stout florid man of sixty, bull-necked, short if firm on the legs, and wearing the brown coat and scarlet vest, which in one style of man preceded the blue coat and yellow vest identified with American republicanism and Charles James Fox. He was not an altogether uncomely, elderly gentleman, but he was narrow-browed and heavy-jowled, and showed himself at once extremely choleric. Even while complying with the form of standing with his hat in his hand he was rating Lady Bell soundly for getting him out of breath and into collision with a scamp.

“What were you doing at an affair of this sort all alone, ma’am? Han’t you been told of the villain Hackman shooting Miss Rae at the door of Covent Garden Theatre?”

After he was a little mollified by the evident inexperience of the culprit, by the dewy freshness of the weeping eyes and the child-like pout of the quivering lips, he still scolded, though he extended his scolding, causing it to fall less heavily on the individual head.

“Bless my soul, you’re a very young lady; somebody ought to be taking charge of you. Whom do you belong to?”

Lady Bell was affronted in the middle of her gratitude, for she was Lady Bell Etheredge—she was not likely to forget that, though she had suffered humiliation; in fact, the more she was humbled the more she clung to the remembrance of how, until she had come to St. Bevis’s, she had been treated with the respect due to her rank.

But she bethought herself that doubtless this imperious old gentleman had daughters of her age whom he was in the habit of hectoring over, that thus it was by a not unfriendly, fatherly forgetfulness he took her to task; so, in place of letting herself grow indignant, she looked up in his face with a disarming confidingness in her dark eyes, and spoke out her thoughts frankly: “I dare say, sir, if I had been a daughter of yours, I should not have been suffered to expose myself. But I am Lady Bell Etheredge, and as my father and mother and Lady Lucie Penruddock are all dead, I am staying with Squire Godwin.”

She stopped there, as if that were sufficient explanation of her loneliness.

The listener replied in a tone of curious mortification and irritation, as of a vain man petted to the sensitiveness of a girl on the oddest points.

“A daughter of mine! madam—my lady, I crave leave to tell you that I have not the honour to have a daughter, nor a son neither, for that matter, whether bantling or young lady or gentleman.” He paused, with a shade of shame at the ridiculousness of his annoyance. “No matter, you are Lady Bell Etheredge, and you are staying with Squire Godwin,” he repeated, settling and shaking his double chin dogmatically in his cravat; “that is queer enough, since he is an old political ally of mine. It is business with him which brings me now to this part of the country, and I thought I should like to look in on Lord Thorold’s party in the by-going—the better for you, Lady Bell—the better for you, and we’ll hope not the worse for me in the long-run,” he told her emphatically.

He went on again, as if pondering over and digesting her statement, not without an accent of satisfaction. “Your father the Earl, and your mother the Countess, are dead a number of years ago, I knew that, of course, and Lady Lucie Penruddock—I think I have heard of her as a lady of repute and discretion. And so you have taken up your quarters—cold quarters, eh?—at St. Bevis’s.”

Lady Bell would have been not merely affronted, but mortally offended, by the freedom of the last words, had they not been spoken abstractedly, like the words of a man accustomed to lead an autocratic, solitary life, and to speak to himself for lack of a qualified audience.

He wound up by stretching out his hand to take that of Lady Bell and by making the proposal—“Come, Lady Bell, I shall lead you back to your guardians, and renew my acquaintance with Squire Godwin.”

Lady Bell submitted, and when she reached the spot where she had left her aunt, she found Mrs. Die with Mrs. Kitty in high dudgeon, declining so much as to give an account of their stewardship to Mr. Greenwood, who was looking about in consternation for Lady Bell.

As for Squire Godwin, he was lolling against a tree a little apart, his arms folded, his chin in the air, his eyes half closed; if he had not been standing he might have been fast asleep.

Lady Bell’s companion, Mr. Trevor, of Trevor Court, stepped up to Mr. Godwin, and saluted him pointedly, “Your servant, sir. I hope you’ve not forgotten me, since I have come to the neighbourhood on purpose to transact a piece of business with you, and I have brought back your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, who has strayed and nearly come to grief in this crowd.”

“I am obliged to you, Mr. Trevor; I remember you perfectly.” Mr. Godwin acknowledged both the man and the favour with the utmost suavity and the least interest.

“It is about the purchase of that little corner of your Staffordshire property which is next to mine,” explained Squire Trevor brusquely. “As for the service to Lady Bell,” he added in an undertone, looking after the girl while she withdrew to the other side of Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty, “I make bold to hope I may establish a right to serve her before we have done with our business, Squire Godwin.”

“With all my heart,” responded Squire Godwin, with a bow of imperturbable acquiescence.