“He’s still warm, Nick,” said he of the pipe.
“He’ll be cold enough ‘or ever we come to Aldgate,” answered the other; and the next moment their hooks were in such garments as they had left him, and they had added him to the ghastly load that already half-filled the cart.
They trundled on, going eastward, pausing ever and anon as they went, either at the call of a watchman or at what they found for themselves, and ever and anon adding to the grim load which they bore away to peremptory burial in the plague pit.
They had all but reached Aldgate, when the colonel was aroused, his wits quickened by Nature to rescue him from suffocation. He awakened, thrusting fiercely for air at a heavy mass that lay across his face. At first his efforts were the feeble ones to be expected of his condition, so that he gained but short respites, in each of which, like a drowning man who keeps coming to the surface, he gasped a breath of the contamination about him. But finding each effort succeeded by a suffocation that became more painful, a sort of terror gained upon him and pulled his senses out of their drunken torpor. He heaved more strenuously, and at last won clear, so far as his head was concerned. He saw the paling stars above, and was able to breathe freely, but the burden he had thrust from his head now lay across his breast, and the weight of it was troublesome. He put forth a hand, and realising that what he grasped was a human arm, he shook it vigorously.
“Afoo’ there, ye drunken lob!” he growled in a thick voice. “Afoo’, I say! D’ye take me forrer couch, to pu’ yourself to bed across me? O’s my life,” he continued more angrily, getting no response “Gerrup! Gerrup! Or I’ll—”
He stopped, blinking up at the glare of light that suddenly struck across his eyes, and beheld the two horrible figures of the carters, who had mounted the wheels of the vehicle, summoned by the sound of his voice. There was something so foul and infernal in their faces as seen in the ruddy glare of the torch that he made an effort more completely to arouse his senses. He struggled up into a sitting posture and looked about him, endeavouring to conjecture where he was.
“I told ye he was warm, Nick,” said the voice of one of those ghouls.
“Ay, ye did so,” was the answer. “An’ what’s to be done with him now? Best take him along. If he’s not dead already he soon will be.”
“And what of the examiner, fool? Turn him out. He’s but a drunken cove that was sleeping off his wine. Lend a hand.”
But there was not the need. Whether it was their words, or what he saw about him, that helped him to realise his situation, the colonel had struggled first to a sitting posture and then to his knees. Loathing and horror completely sobered him. He gripped the sides of the cart, flung a leg over, and leapt down, stumbling as he reached ground and falling his full length.
By the time he had gathered himself up the cart was moving on again, and the peals of hoarse laughter of the carters seemed to fill the silent street. Holles fled from the sound, back the way he had come, but not knowing where he was, and feeling, moreover, utterly bereft of strength, he sank presently into the shelter of the doorway of a deserted house, and there fell asleep.
When next he awakened it was to find himself in the full glare of a hot sun already high in the heavens. In mid-street stood a man dressed in black, leaning upon a red wand, and regarding him attentively.
“What ails you?” the man asked him, seeing him awake.
“The sight of you,” growled the colonel, rising.
Yet on the movement a giddiness assailed him; he reeled and sank back to the step that had been his couch. Acting on a sudden thought, he tore open his shirt. On his breast the flower of the plague had blossomed while he slept.
“I lied,” he said. “Look!”
And he laughed as he displayed almost with pride those dark red blotches to the man in black. And that was the last thing that he remembered.
There ensued for him a period of fevered activity, of dread encounters, and terrible combats, of continual strife with an opponent dressed in white satin, who wore the countenance of his Grace of Buckingham, and who was ever on the point of slaying him, yet, being unmerciful, never slayed. He lived in a world of delirium, whence at last he awakened one day to sanity — awakened to die, as he thought, when he had taken stock of his surroundings and realised them by the aid of his last waking memory.
He lay on a pallet near a window, through which he caught a glimpse of foliage and a strip of indigo sky. Overhead were the bare rafters of a roof that knew no ceiling; down the long room on his left were stretched a dozen such pallets as his own, and upon each a sufferer like himself, some lying still as if in death, others moaning and struggling with their keepers. He turned from them to contemplate that strip of sky, and from his heart he thanked God that at last the sands of his miserable life were running swiftly out, that peace awaited him. In that peace at last would be blotted out the shame that haunted him even now in these first moments of returning consciousness, the spectre of the contempt and loathing which he must have inspired in her against whom he had so grossly sinned. Yet it would have been sweet before he passed out into the cold shadows to tell her all that had gone to making such an utter villain of him. It might perhaps have mitigated that contempt of hers did she know how Fate had placed him between the hammer and the anvil. Tears gathered in his eyes and rolled down his wasted cheeks.
Steps approached his bedside. Someone was leaning over him. He looked up, and a great fear possessed him, so that his heart seemed to contract. Then, aloud, he explained to himself that apparition.
“I am at my dreams again,” he complained softly.
“Nay, Ned; you are awake at last,” said Nancy.
And now he saw that she, too, was weeping.
“Where am I, then?” he asked.
“In the pest-house in Bunhill Fields,” she told him.
“And how come you here?”
“I was here before you. Being desolate, I offered myself as nurse-keeper, and the authorities sent me hither to tend the victims of the plague.”
“And you tended me — you?”
“Did not you tend me?” she asked him. “Did you not stay to do so, and risk infection, when you might have fled and so been safe? Dr. Dymock told me of it all.”
He made a gesture with one of his hands, grown so white and thin.
“Pish! That was the meanest measure of reparation, as I told you!” He sighed. “God is very good to me, a sinner. As I lie here now, all that I craved was that you might know the full truth of my villainy, of my temptation, and my fall; and no sooner do I wish it than you are come — that by confession I may die the easier.”
“Why talk of death?” she asked him.
“Because it comes, and I shall make it welcome. To die of the plague is what I most deserve. I sought it, and it fled before me, yet in the end I stumbled upon it by chance. It was ever thus with me. In all things have I been the sport of Chance, even in my dying, as it seems. But I have a deal to tell you, and I am weak. If I delay perhaps I shall go before the tale is told. Listen, then!”
And, lying there while she continued to bend over him, he told her all. The evil choice that Buckingham had offered him, his desperate condition, and the utter hopelessness that had led to his succumbing.
“I am dying,” he ended, “and I would not seek your forgiveness by a falsehood. I desire not to make the thing I did appear less vile. But I swear by my last feeble hope of heaven, if a heaven indeed there be, that I knew not that it was you I was to carry off, else I had gone to the hangman ‘fore ever I had lent myself to the duke’s business.”
“You told me that before,” she said; “and, indeed, I never doubted it. How could I?”
“How could you? Easily, all things considered,” he answered grimly. Then he looked at her with piteous eyes. “I scarce dare hope that you’ll forgive me all.”
“But I do, Ned. I have forgiven you all long since, even without knowing what you have now told me. I forgave you when I learnt what you
had done, how you risked your life for me.”
“Say it again,” he implored her.
She said it, weeping.
“Then I am happy. What matter all my unrealised dreams of crowned knight-errantry, what matter all my high-flown ambitions! To this must I have come in the end. I was a fool not to have taken the good to which I was born. Then might we have been happy, Nan, and neither of us would have sought the empty triumphs of the world.”
“You shall get well again,” she assured him through her tears.
“That surely were a crowning folly when I may die so happily,” he answered.
But he did not die. What he had done for her, she had now done for him. By unremitting care of him in the endless hours of his delirium she had brought him safely through the Valley of the Shadow, and already, even as he spoke of dying, deluded by his weakness into believing that he stood upon the threshold, his recovery was assured.
Within a few days he was afoot again, and pronounced clear of the infection. Yet, before they would suffer him to depart, he must undergo the prescribed period of sequestration. He went to take his leave of Nancy under the elms of the garden of the farm that had been converted into a pest-house.
Slimly graceful stood she before him, and regarded him with white-faced, wide-eyed dismay.
“Can you then think of leaving me again?” she asked him, driven herself to woo this man who would not woo her.
He turned pale as herself, and trembled where he stood, growing conscious too that he made but an ungainly figure in the garments with which the public charity had supplied him.
“What else is there?” he asked her hoarsely.
“That is a question you had best answer for yourself.”
He looked at her, and then away. He moistened his lips and stifled a curse.
“I see, I see!” he said. “You would gather up the shreds of this shattered life of mine with the hands of pity?”
“If that were my pleasure, should it not be your law?” she asked him.
“Your pleasure? Ha! Your pity, I said.”
“Why, then you said wrong. Must I ask you to marry me, Ned, before you will catch my meaning? Or do you think that, having been a play-actress once, I am so fallen that—”
“Stop!” he bade her almost angrily. Then, looking at her. “Why do you try me, Nan?” he said. “You cannot need me. What have I to offer?”
“Do women love men for what they bring?” she asked him. “Is that the lesson your mercenary life has taught you? Oh, Ned, you spoke of Chance, and how it had directed all your life, and yet it seems you have not learnt to read its signs. A world lay between us, in which we were lost to each other, yet Chance brought us together again, and if the way of it was evil, yet it was the way of Chance. Again we strayed apart, and as irrevocably again we have come together. Will you weary Chance by demanding that it should perform this miracle for the third time?”
He looked at her steadily, a man redeemed, driven back into the paths of honour by the scourge of all that had befallen him. Then he took her hand, and, bending low over it, he bore it to his lips.
“If I have been Chance’s victim all my life, that is no reason why I should help you to be no better. For you there is the great world, there is your art, there is life and joy, when this pestilence shall have spent itself. I have naught to offer you in exchange for all that. And so, God keep you ever, Nan.”
And upon that, abruptly, he left her, nor heeded the little fluttering cry of “Ned! Ned!” that followed after him.
But Chance had not done with him yet. When a month later, without seeing her again — since that, of course, would have been denied him, as it would have nullified his sequestration from infected persons and surroundings — he went forth free to go where he pleased, he remembered the debt that still lay unsettled between Buckingham and himself.
It was not mere revenge that drove him. It was the hideous thought that what his Grace had attempted once he might attempt again, and perhaps with better fortune. The colonel looked upon him as a peril to be removed from Nancy’s path. With this intent he took his way to Whitehall on that day of September.
There he was informed that his Grace had left town some weeks ago, having gone to join the Court at Salisbury, and that in all probability he would now be found at Oxford, whither the King’s Majesty had transferred himself. He was turning away, determining that he must find the means to get him to Oxford, when, as he came down the steps of the palace, he was brought face to face with a huge, dark man who had just alighted from a coach.
The man checked and stared at sight of him, and the colonel put off his plain, unfeathered hat in greeting to his sometime friend the Duke of Albemarle.
“Why, Ned Holles, as I live!” cried his Grace. “Where the plague have you been?”
“With the plague mostly,” answered Holles.
His Grace stared.
“You’re certified in health, I hope?” said he, on a note of anxiety.
“I am. I carry no infection.”
“Then you never had my letter?” said the duke. “Or are you come in answer to it now?”
“What letter?” quoth the colonel.
“Come in, man.” The duke linked his arm through the colonel’s and led him within again. “I wrote to tell you that Stanhope had taken the plague and died. You’ll remember ’twas Stanhope had the office that you sought. So the office was yours again for the asking. That was a month ago, I waited a week, and hearing nothing from you, I appointed another gentleman of promise. He was to have sailed for Bombay yesterday. But he, too, took the plague, and died three days ago. So the office is vacant again, and if you still have a mind for the Indies, you may go fill it. I begin to think it fortunate that ye’ve had the plague, and so cannot die of it, as all seemed doomed upon whom I bestowed the appointment. Will you go?”
Holles could scarcely command his eagerness to answer becomingly.
“Good!” said the duke. “The office is a good one, my friend, and may carry you high if you use your opportunities. How soon can you sail?”
“In a month’s time,” said Holles promptly.
“A month!” cried Albemarle. “Nay, you’ll need to sail sooner. Time enough has been wasted already.”
“Yet a month it must be. I may have a companion who cannot be ready before then, and I am resolved that, sooner than go alone, I’ll stay where I am.”
He explained himself, and won the duke’s sympathy in the end. With this, and the parchment bearing the signature of the Secretary of State conferring upon him that distant post, and a heavy purse advanced him by the Treasury for his outfit, the colonel took coach at once and went straight back to Bunhill Fields and the pest-house.
On the way thither a great fear took him lest he should no longer find her there. But this fear was instantly set at rest by the elderly matron who received him.
Miss Sylvester, she informed him — for Nancy had resumed her old name when she offered herself to tend the victims of the plague — was taking her noontide hour of rest. She led him to the garden where he had parted from Nancy a month ago, and pointed her out to him where she sat under the elms, then left him to go forward alone.
The turf deadened his steps, she was unconscious of his approach until he stood over her where she sat, all lost in thought. She looked up as his shadow fell beside her, and at sight of him uttered a little cry, and grew very white.
“Chance,” he said, “has performed her third and greatest miracle — the one you said was not to be looked for. At last I have something to offer you, Nan, in exchange for all that you will resign in taking me. It is not much, but such as it is I offer it.”
And he tossed his parchment into her lap.
She looked at the white cylinder, and then at him, and a little smile crept about the corners of her mouth and trembled there. Into her mind there came a memory of the big boast of conquest for her sake with which he had set out in the long ago.
“Is this the world
you promised me, Ned?” she asked him
“As much of it as I can contrive to get,” he answered.
“Then it will be enough for me,” she said; and rising, held out the parchment, still unfolded.
“But you haven’t looked,” he protested.
“What need is there? Since it is your kingdom, I will share it whatever else it may be.”
He met the glance of her eyes that were now aglow.
“It is situate in the Indies — in Bombay,” said he with indifference.
She considered.
“I ever had a thirst for travel,” she said deliberately, “but its whereabouts matters very little.”
He felt that it was due to her that he should explain how he came by it, and to that explanation he proceeded. Before he had quite done, she was suddenly in tears.
“Why? Why? What now?” he cried in dismay. “Does your heart misgive you.”
“Oh, Ned,” she cried, “I weep for gladness that what I had ceased to hope for has come to pass. Do you not see that I need comforting for the month of hopeless anguish I have spent?”
“My dear!” he cried; and gave her forthwith the comfort she invited.
THE SIEGE OF SAVIGNY
Chambers’ Journal, November 1903
Heigh-ho! A man of twenty in love is a sad fool. Yet who would not be a sad fool that he might be twenty and in love?
I sat idling in the guard-room of the Castle of Nogent one July morning, my twenty-year-old mind running upon a lady who dwelt at Juvisy, whose very name was unknown to me, but whose eyes — the bluest that I ever looked into — had nathless made a fool of me. That pair of eyes had drawn me oft of late to ride across the league and a half that lay ‘twixt Nogent and Juvisy, so that I might pass beneath her window, and earn for all reward perchance a glance, perchance not that. So, thinking of her, as had become my constant wont, sat I that July morning when one of M. de Crecqui’s men came to bid me wait upon the Governor.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 515
