He could see the closed houses — and there were six of them within his view on the opposite side of the street — each with its red cross, and an armed watchman day and night before its padlocked door.
Victuals and what else was needed from outside reached them through the watchman. To him Holles would lower money in a basket. (He was well supplied with money still, the remains of the funds he had received from Buckingham.) And by the same means would the watchman send up what was required. Nightly was he distributed soon after dark, and again just before peep of day, by the hideous clang of a bell — hideous because association of ideas had so made it to him — and the creak of wheels and a raucous voice that awoke the stillness with its dreadful summons:
“Bring out your dead!”
Peering down, he would see the dark outline of the ghastly dead-cart loom into view as it came slowly down the street. Invariably it paused before his own door, arrested by the cross upon it, and the bell would clang and the summons rise:
“Bring out your dead!”
Then, at a word from the watchman on guard below, the grim vehicle would move slowly on, and Holles, with a shudder, would fling a glance at the sufferer where she lay, wondering fearfully whether he would be ready to answer that summons when next it came.
On the morning of the sixth day the doctor found the fever much abated, and the patient in an unusually easy tranquil slumber, from which she awakened to full consciousness at the touch of his hand upon her wrist.
She was helped to a realisation of her surroundings by the words the doctor was uttering:
“The danger is overpast. She will recover, thanks to your tireless care of her, and it is yourself gives me more thought now than does she. Leave her now to the care of Mrs. Bates, and do you go rest yourself, man, or I’ll not answer for your life. See, she is waking.”
Her eyes sought Holles, where he stood at the foot of the carved bed, and she beheld a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghost with pallid, sunken cheeks frammed in a coarse stubble of unshaven beard. Meeting her conscious gaze, he moved aside and staggered to a chair.
“Naught ails me, doctor,” he answered; but already his voice came thick, and his words were almost indistinct. “I would sooner—”
He was suddenly fast asleep. It was as if the assurance that she was out of danger had snapped the reins of will by which he had held his lassitude in subjection. Instantly nature had claimed from him the dues he had long withheld.
She looked at the doctor.
“I have the plague, have I not?” she asked him.
“Say, rather, that you had it, madam,” he answered her; “and give thanks to God and your husband that you are recovered.”
“My husband?” she inquired.
“Indeed, yes — and a husband in a thousand. I have seen many husbands of late, and speak with knowledge. I have seen terror of the pestilence blot out all else in them. But Colonel Holles is not of these.”
“He is not my husband, sir.”
“Not your husband? Gadso! Perhaps that explains it. What is he, then, who has all but given his life for you?”
She hesitated a moment how to define him.
“Once he was my friend,” she said.
“Once?” quoth the physician, raising his brows. “And when, pray, did he cease to be your friend — this man who stayed with you in this infected house when he might have fled, who has denied himself sleep or rest of any kind in all these days that he might be ever at hand against your need of him, who has risked taking the pestilence a thousand times for your sake?”
“Did he do all this?” she asked.
The doctor explained precisely the extent of the colonel’s self-sacrifice.
“He may once have been your friend, as you say,” he concluded, smiling, “but I cannot think that he was ever more your friend than now.”
She lay very thoughtful and silent for a time, staring at the ceiling, her face an expressionless mask in which the inquisitive little doctor sought in vain for a clue to the riddle of the relations of these two. Had he obeyed this inquisitiveness he would have questioned her, but professional instincts restrained him. Nourishment and rest were to be prescribed, and he saw to the former before he departed, out of sheer charitableness, not only to her but to Holles, whose sleep he could not bring himself to disturb.
When he returned that evening he was again accompanied by a public examiner, who came to assure himself that the danger of infection being now overpast, the re-opening of the house could be permitted after the prescribed lapse of thirty days.
Holles, who had slept uninterruptedly until their advent, awakened, and stood dully at hand whilst the examiner assured himself that all was as the doctor stated. When they left the room he went with them, and he remained below after they had gone, and so continued, grim and lonely, until three days later, when the nurse came to tell him that Miss Farquahrson was risen, and desired to speak with him.
He turned pale and trembled at the summons. Then he braced himself and went.
He found her seated by the open window, where he himself had sat throughout the greater part of those five days and nights when he had watched over her and fought back hungry death from her pillow. She was very pale and weak, yet her loveliness seemed to draw added charms from her condition.
She had been dressed with care in a gown of grey and purple — the same that she had worn on the night when he had carried her off — and her chestnut hair was intertwined with a thread of pearls. Her eyes seemed of a darker, deeper blue than usual, perhaps because of the deep brown stains her illness had left about them. She seemed oddly changed, too, so spiritualised that she appeared to have recovered something of her early youth, so that she looked less like Sylvia Farquahrson, the idolised player, and more like the Nancy Sylvester that Holles had known in the old days.
He stood mutely before her, like a lackey awaiting his orders, whereupon a tinge of colour crept into her cheeks.
“I have sent for you, sir, that I might thank you for your care of me, for your disregard of your own peril in tending me; in short, sir, for my life, which had been lost without you.”
He avoided the gaze of her eyes, that were like wet sapphires.
“You owe me no thanks,” he said, and his voice was almost gruff. “I but sought to undo the evil I had done.”
“Nay, now, the plague — it was no fault of yours that I took it. I had it when you brought me hither.”
“No matter for that,” he said. “Reparation was due. I owed it to myself.”
“You did not owe it to yourself to risk your life for me.”
“I think I did, but the matter is not worth contending.”
He did not help her. Yet she persisted.
“At least the reparation was a very full one,” she said quietly.
“It would comfort me to hear you say it, could I believe you,” he answered grimly. “If you have commands for me, madam, I shall be below until the house is re-opened, and we can go our ways.”
And upon this he bowed and left her.
He was in a mood from which there was no issue. Shame hemmed his soul about like prison walls, and he saw no way out save through the door that death might open; yet death obdurately refused. And so the weeks passed, and from Mrs. Bates he heard of the progress of Miss Farquahrson, and of how she was daily gathering strength. Yet never once did he go to visit her, and not again did she summon him to her presence. He kept to his quarters below-stairs, smoking continually, and drinking deeply, too, until he had consumed the little store of wine the house contained.
Thus August found them, and from the watchman he heard incredible stories of the city’s plight, and from the window he nightly beheld the comet in the heavens, the flaming sword of wrath — as the watchman termed it — that was hung above the accursed city, from Whitehall to the Tower.
They were within three days of the re-opening of the house, when one evening Mrs. Bates brought him word that Miss Farquahrson desired to see him in the
morning. He received the message, and dismissed the woman with an incoherent sound that conveyed neither assent nor dissent; then he sat down to smoke and think. And the more he thought the more his terror of that interview increased. It was himself he feared, himself he mistrusted. Where once the boy had worshipped, the man now loved with a love that was consuming him, a love that heaped up and fed the fires of shame within his soul.
In her eyes he could never be but the vilest of men, for he had done by her the vilest thing a man may do. And yet there was her cursed gratitude for the life which he had saved. And that very gratitude was based upon a misapprehension which made a cheat of him. She could not know that it was his desire to take the infection and perish that had made him so assiduous, so seemingly reckless of consequences to himself. She deemed his behaviour a noble reparation, and so, should he speak of his love, should he fling himself at her feet and pour out the tale of his longings, out of her sense of debt she might take him — this broken derelict of humanity, and so doom herself to be dragged down with him into the kennels that awaited him. And, because he could not trust himself to come again into her presence preserving the silence that his honour demanded, he suffered torture now at the thought that to-morrow, willy-nilly, he must behold her, since such was her desire.
One way out there was, a desperate one. Yet, since no alternative offered, he resolved that he must take it, and take it he did. Towards midnight he gently opened the window and peered down. The night watchman, who had come on duty two hours ago, had propped himself in a corner of the doorway, and the sound of his snores informed the colonel that he slept, no doubt assured that no evasion was to be feared from a house that in three days more would be thrown open.
Holles fetched hat and cloak, then straddled the window-sill, and let himself gently down until he hung full length, his feet but a yard or so above the street. He dropped almost without a sound, and set off at once in the direction of Paul’s Chains.
The watchman, momentarily aroused, heard his retreating footsteps, but never conceiving them to concern him, settled himself more comfortably in his restful angle, and slept soundly until, towards dawn, the rumble of the dead-cart and the clang of the bell awoke him.
Meanwhile, Colonel Holles, with no other aim than to place as wide a distance as possible between himself and the house in Knight Ryder Street that sheltered Miss Farquahrson, came by way of Carter Lane into Paul’s Yard. He hesitated here a moment, then struck eastward down Watling Street, plunged into a labyrinth of narrow alleys to the north of it, and might have walked all night, but that, lost in the heart of this dædalus, he was drawn by sounds of revelry to a narrow door. From under this door a blade of light was stretched across the cobbles of the street. He stood hesitating on the threshold, peering up at the sign, which he could faintly make out to be a flagon, so that he conjectured the place to be a tavern. In the end he might have passed on, but that, whilst he hesitated, the door opened suddenly, and a couple of drunken roysterers lurching out, discovered him, and dragged him into the glare within with loud cries of insensate hilarity.
Holles suffered them to do their will with him, whilst the taverner made haste to close the door, and shut out of sight and sound the fact that he was breaking the rigorous laws lately enacted against such assemblies.
The colonel looked about the unclean den into which he had strayed, and found himself in a motley gathering of debauchees. They were men whom circumstances, and the fact that no further certificates of health were issued, confined to the plague-ridden City, and they took this means of drowning the terror in which they lived and moved in this stronghold of death. Holles joined them. He had a few guineas in his pocket, and he spent one of these on burnt sack before that wild company broke up, and its members crept to their homes, like rats to their holes, in the pale light of dawn.
Thereafter he hired a bed from the vintner, and slept until close upon noon, when he rose, broke his fast on a dish of salt herrings, and went forth again on his aimless way. He won through a succession of narrow alleys into the eastern end of Cheapside, and stood there aghast to survey the change that a month had wrought. That thoroughfare, usually the busiest in London, was now almost deserted.
Where all had been life and bustle, a hurrying of busy men, and a continual stream of chairs and coaches, all was now silent and empty of life. Not a single chair or carriage was to be seen abroad, and but an odd straggler on foot tenanted the length of that empty street. And these few whom he met wore, he noticed, a furtive, watchful air, and kept to the middle of the street as they walked, drawing off still further when they passed him or another. But few of the shops remained open, whilst almost every other house was close shuttered, its door padlocked, marked with the red cross, and guarded by its armed watchman. Last of all, he noticed that blades of grass were sprouting between the kidney stones with which the street was paved, so that, but for the houses, looking so grim and silent on either side, he must have supposed himself in some suburban lane.
He turned up towards St. Paul’s, his steps echoing in the empty street as if he had been some reveller who took his midnight way towards home. He turned into Paternoster Row, as silent and deserted as Cheapside, and made his way towards his old lodging at the sign of the Bird in Hand, which at least he found still clear of the infection.
Although the house’s trade was all but completely paralysed, yet he was given but an indifferent and suspicious welcome to his old quarters, where for the present he determined to abide. What the future would bring he could not surmise. He would have left the City, but that his going was impossible now that certificates of health were being withheld. Moreover, he could not in the circumstances have submitted himself to questions as to his antecedents without finding himself sequestered and flung into gaol for having committed what then was accounted the most serious offence against the law, in escaping from an infected house before the authorities had reopened it.
And, meanwhile, in that house in Knight Ryder Street, his evasion had been discovered and published abroad. When word of it was borne to Miss Farquahrson, she received it without spoken comment. But her white face announced how it affected her; she sat a while, as Mrs. Bates afterwards related, as if she had been stunned, and thereafter moved like a woman in a dream until, two days later, when she was presented with a certificate of health by the examiner, and informed that she was at liberty to depart.
A chair was fetched for her, and she was carried home, there to make the discovery that her servants had fled after plundering her handsome house.
She sat amid the dust and disorder of her once elegant boudoir, and her sense of desolation reached its climax.
Chapter VI.
Had you asked Colonel Holles in after life how he had spent the week that followed his escape from the house in Knight Ryder Street there was little he could have told you, for the ugly truth of the matter is that in those days he was never sober. His memories were all obscured and befogged. Odd events that he could recall he recalled but dimly, like objects seen through a mist. Of these was the faint recollection of an excursion in quest of his Grace of Buckingham, to vent a sense of wrong that came to the surface of his sodden wits like oil to the surface of water. He remembered vaguely setting out with intent to cut his Grace’s windpipe into pieces — to use his actual expression; but of how the excursion ended he had no recollection whatever beyond a sense of disappointment.
He slumbered throughout most of those days, and waking towards evening, with a mind which sleep had partly sobered, he would roll out, and be seen no more until the following dawn. Those nights were invariably spent at the sign of the Flagon in that dismal alley off Watling Street whither chance had led him in the first instance. What attraction the place held for him he could scarcely have defined, but there is no doubt that he was drawn by the company of men in similar case to himself — men who sought the nepenthes of the wine-cup, forgetfulness of their misery and desolation in riotous debauch. Low though he might previously hav
e come, neither was it the resort nor were its patrons the associates that he would ordinarily have chosen. Fortune, whose sport he had ever been, had flung him thither; and thither he continued, since he could find there the only thing he sought until death should bring him final peace.
The end came abruptly. One night — the seventh that he spent in this fashion — he drank more deeply even than his deep habit, so that when, at the host’s command, he lurched out into the dark alley, the last of the roysterers to depart, his wits were drugged to the point of utter unconsciousness. His limbs moved mechanically, staggering under him, and bore his swaying body in long lurches down the lane, until he must have looked like some flimsy simulacrum of a man with which the wind made sport. Knowing nothing of whither he went, he came into Watling Street, crossed it, plunged into a narrow alley on the southern side, and reeled on until his feet struck an obstacle in their unconscious path. He fell forward on his face, and, lacking the energy to rise, lay there, and so sank into a lethargic sleep.
Came a bell tinkling in the distance. Its sound grew nearer and louder, and was accompanied by the fall of hoofs and the groan of wheels. Presently was heard the cry on the silent night:
“Bring out your dead!”
The vehicle halted at the mouth of the alley where the colonel lay. A man stood there, holding a flaming link above his head, casting its ruddy glare hither and thither, searching the dark corners of that by-way. He beheld two bodies stretched upon the ground — the colonel’s and the one over which he had tripped. He called to a companion, and the cart was brought nearer by one who walked at the horse’s head, pulling at a short clay pipe.
Whilst the first of these ghoulish fellows held the light, the other rolled the body over, then stepped on, and did the same by Colonel Holles. The colonel’s countenance was as livid as that of the corpse that had tripped him, and he scarcely seemed to breathe. They bestowed no more than a glance upon him, then turned to the other. The man with the link thrust this into a holder attached to the front of the dead-cart, then the two of them took down their hooks, seized the body, and swung it up into the vehicle. Coming next to Holles, they pulled off his boots and his doublet, then took his hat and cloak, made a bundle of the lot, and dropped them into a basket attached behind the cart.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 514
