Anthony Wilding

by Rafael Sabatini

“You are very good, madam,” said Mr Wilding, and he bowed to the withers of his roan. Ruth said nothing; expressed neither approval nor disapproval of Diana’s withdrawal, and the latter, with a word of greeting to Wilding, went ahead followed by Jerry, who had regained control by now of the beast he bestrode. Wilding watched them until they turned the corner, then he walked his mare slowly forward until he was alongside Ruth.

  “Before I go,” said he, “there is something I should like to say.” His dark eyes were sombre, his manner betrayed some hesitation.

  The diffidence of his tone proved startling to her by virtue of its unusualness. What might it portend, she wondered, and sought with grave eyes to read his baffling countenance; and then a wild alarm swept into her and shook her spirit in its grip; there was something of which until this moment she had not thought – something connected with the fateful matter of that letter. It had stood as a barrier between them, her buckler, her sole defence against him. It had been to her what its sting is to the bee – a thing which if once used in self-defence is self-destruction. Not, indeed, that she had used it as her sting; it had been forced from her by the machinations of Trenchard; but used it had been, and was done with; she had it no longer that with it she might hold him in defiance, and it did not occur to her that he was no longer in case to invoke the law.

  Her face grew stony, a dry glitter came to her blue eyes; she cast a glance over her shoulder at Diana and her servant. Wilding observed it and read what was passing in her mind; indeed, it was not to be mistaken, no more than what is passing in the mind of the recruit who looks behind him in the act of charging. His lips half smiled.

  “Of what are you afraid?” he asked her.

  “I am not afraid,” she answered in husky accents that belied her.

  Perhaps to reassure her, perhaps, because he thought of his companions lurking in the thicket and cared not to have them for his audience, he suggested they should go a little way in the direction her cousin had taken. She wheeled her horse, and, side by side, they ambled up the dusty road.

  “The thing I have to tell you,” said he presently, “concerns myself.”

  “Does it concern me?” she asked him coldly, and her coolness was urged partly by her newborn fears, partly to counterbalance such impression as her ill-judged show of gladness at his safety might have made upon his mind. He flashed her a sidelong glance, the long white fingers of his right hand toying thoughtfully with a ringlet of the dark brown hair that fell upon the shoulders of his scarlet coat.

  “Surely, madam,” he answered dryly, “what concerns a man may well concern his wife.”

  She bowed her head, her eyes upon the road before her. “True,” said she, her voice expressionless. “I had forgot.”

  He reined in and turned to look at her; her horse moved on a pace or two, then came to a halt, apparently of its own accord.

  “I do protest,” said he, “you treat me less kindly than I deserve.” He urged his mare forward until he had come up with her again, and then drew rein once more. “I think that I may lay some claim to – at least – your gratitude for what I did today.”

  “It is my inclination to be grateful,” said she. She was very wary of him. “Forgive me, if I am still mistrustful.”

  “But of what?” he cried, a thought impatiently.

  “Of you. What ends did you seek to serve? Was it to save Richard that you came?”

  “Unless you think that it was to save Blake,” he said ironically. “What other ends do you conceive I could have served?” She made him no answer, and so he resumed after a pause. “I rode to Taunton to serve you for two reasons; because you asked me, and because I would have no innocent men suffer in my stead – not even though, as these men, they were but caught in their own toils, hoist with the petard they had charged for me. Beyond these two motives, I had no other thought in ruining myself.”

  “Ruining yourself?” she cried. Yes, it was true; but she had not thought of it until this moment; there had been so much to think of.

  “Is it not ruin to be outlawed, to have a price set upon your head, as will no doubt a price be set on mine when Albemarle’s messenger shall have reached Whitehall? Is it not ruin to have my lands and all I own made forfeit to the State, to find myself a beggar hunted and proscribed? Forgive me that I harass you with this catalogue of my misfortunes. You’ll say, no doubt, that I have brought them upon myself by compelling you against your will to marry me.”

  “I’ll not deny that it is in my mind,” said she, and of set purpose stifled pity.

  He sighed and looked at her again, but she would not meet his eye, else its whimsical expression might have intrigued her. “Can you deny my magnanimity, I wonder?” said he, and spoke almost as one amused. “All I had I sacrificed to do your will, to save your brother from the snare of his own contriving against me. I wonder do you yet realise how much I sacrificed today at Taunton! I wonder!” And he paused, looking at her and waiting for some word from her; but she had none for him.

  “Clearly you do not, else I think you would show me if only a pretence of kindness.” She was looking at him at last, her eyes less hard. They seemed to ask him to explain. “When you came this morning with the tale of how the tables had been turned upon your brother, of how he was caught in his own springe, and the letter found in his keeping was before the King’s folk at Taunton with every appearance of having been addressed to him, and not a tittle of evidence to show that it had been meant for me, do you know what news it was you brought me?” He paused a second, looking at her from narrowing eyes. Then he answered his own question. “You brought me the news that you were mine to take whenso’er I pleased. Whilst that letter was in your hands it gave you the power to make me your obedient slave. You might blow upon me as you listed whilst you held it, and I was a vane that must turn to your blowing for my honour’s sake and for the sake of the cause in which I worked. Through no rashness of mine must that letter come into the hands of the King’s friends, else was I dishonoured. It was an effective barrier between us. So long as you possessed that letter you might pipe as you pleased, and I must dance to the tune you set. And then this morning what you came to tell me was that things were changed; that it was mine to call the tune. Had I had the strength to be villain, you had been mine now, and your brother and Sir Rowland might have hanged on the rope of their own weaving.”

  She looked at him in a startled, almost shamefaced manner. This was an aspect of the case she had not considered.

  “You realise it, I see,” he said, and smiled wistfully. “Then perhaps you realise why you found me so unwilling to do the thing you craved. Having treated me ungenerously, you came to cast yourself upon my generosity, asking me – though I scarcely think you understood – to beggar myself of life itself with all it held for me. God knows I make no pretence to virtue, and yet I think I had been something more than human had I not refused you and the bargain you offered – a bargain that you would never be called upon to fulfil if I did the thing you asked.”

  At last she interrupted him; she could bear it no longer.

  “I had not thought of it!” she cried. It was a piteous wail that broke from her. “I swear I had not thought of that. I was all distraught for poor Richard’s sake. Oh, Mr Wilding,” she turned to him, holding out a hand; her eyes shone, filmed with moisture, “I shall have a kindness for you…all my days for your…generosity today.” It was lamentably weak, far from the hot expressions which she forced it to replace.

  “Yes, I was generous,” he admitted. “We will move on as far as the crossroads.” Again they ambled gently forward. Up the slope from the ford Diana and Jerry were slowly climbing; not another human being was in sight ahead or behind them. “After you left me,” he continued, “your memory and your entreaties lingered with me. I gave the matter of our position thought, and it seemed to me that all was monstrously ill-done. I loved you, Ruth, I needed you, and you disdained me. My love was master of me. But ’neath your disdain it was transmute
d oddly.” He checked the passion that was vibrating in his voice and resumed after a pause, in the calm, slow tones, soft and musical, that were his own. “There is scarce the need for so much recapitulation. When the power was mine I bent you unfairly to my will; you did as much by me when the power suddenly became yours. It was a strange war between us, and I accepted its conditions. Today, when the power was mine again, mine to bring you at last to subjection, behold, I have capitulated at your bidding, and all that I held – including your own self – have I relinquished. It is perhaps fitting. Haply I am punished for having wed you before I had wooed you.” Again his tone changed, it grew more cold, more matter-of-fact. “I rode this way a little while ago a hunted man, my only hope to reach home and collect what moneys and valuables I could carry, and make for the coast to find a vessel bound for Holland. I have been engaged, as you know, in stirring up rebellion to check the iniquities and persecutions that are toward in a land I love. I’ll not weary you with details. Time was needed for this as for all things, and by next spring, perhaps, had matters gone well, this vineyard that so carefully and secretly I have been tending would have been, maybe, in condition to bear fruit. Even now, in the hour of my flight, I learn that others have come to force this delicate growth into sudden maturity. There! Soon ripe, soon rotten. The Duke of Monmouth has landed at Lyme this morning. I am riding to him.”

  “To what end?” she cried, and he saw in her face a dismay that amounted almost to fear, and he wondered was it for him.

  “To place my sword at his service. Were I not encompassed by this ruin, I should not have stirred a foot in that direction – so rash, so foredoomed to failure is this invasion. As it is” – he shrugged and laughed – “it is the only hope – all forlorn though it may be – for me.”

  The trammels she had imposed upon her soul fell away at that like bonds of cobweb. She laid her hand upon his wrist, tears stood in her eyes; her lips quivered.

  “Anthony, forgive me,” she besought him. He trembled under her touch, under the caress of her voice, and at the sound of his name for the first time upon her lips.

  “What have I to forgive?” he asked.

  “The thing that I did in the matter of that letter.”

  “You poor child,” said he, smiling gently upon her, “you did it in self-defence.”

  “Yet say that you forgive me – say it before you go!” she begged him.

  He considered her gravely a moment. “To what end,” he asked, “do you imagine that I have talked so much? To the end that I might show you that however I may have wronged you I have at the last made some amends; and that for the sake of this, the truest proof of penitence, I may have your forgiveness ere I go.”

  She was weeping softly. “It was an ill day on which we met,” she sighed.

  “For you – ay.”

  “Nay – for you.”

  “We’ll say for both of us, then,” he compromised. “See, Ruth, your cousin grows weary, and I have a couple of comrades who are no doubt impatient to be gone. It may not be good for us to tarry in these parts. Some amends I have made; but there is one crowning wrong which I have done you for which there is but one amend to make.” He paused. He steadied himself before continuing. In his attempt to render his voice cold and commonplace he went near to achieving harshness. “It may be that this crack-brained rebellion of which the torch is already alight will, if it does no other good in England, at least make a widow of you. When that has come to pass, when I have thus repaired the wrong I did you, I hope you’ll bear me as kindly as may be in your thought. Goodbye, my Ruth! I would you might have loved me. I sought to force it.” He smiled ever so wanly. “Perhaps that was my mistake. It is an ill thing to eat one’s hay while it is grass.” He raised to his lips the little, gloved hand that still rested on his wrist. “God keep you, Ruth!” he murmured.

  She sought to answer him, but something choked her; a sob was all she achieved. Had he caught her to him in that moment there is little doubt but that she had yielded. Perhaps he knew it; and knowing it kept the tighter rein upon desire. She was as metal molten in the crucible, to be moulded by his craftsman’s hands into any pattern that he chose. But the crucible was the crucible of pity, not of love; that too he knew, and knowing it, forbore.

  He dropped her hand, doffed his hat, and, wheeling his horse about, touched it with the spur and rode back towards the thicket where his friends awaited him. As he left her, she too wheeled about, as if to follow him. She strove to command her voice that she might recall him; but at that same moment Trenchard, hearing his returning hoofs, thrust out into the road with Vallancey following at his heels. The old player’s harsh voice reached her where she stood, and it was querulous with impatience.

  “What a plague do you mean, dallying here at such a time, Anthony?” he cried, to which Vallancey added: “In God’s name, let us push on.” At that she checked her impulse – it may even be that she mistrusted it. She paused, lingering undecided for an instant; then, turning her horse once more, she ambled up the slope to rejoin Diana.

  Chapter 13

  “PRO RELIGIONE ET LIBERTATE”

  The evening was far advanced when Mr Wilding and his two companions descended to Uplyme Common from the heights whence as they rode they had commanded a clear view of the fair valley of the Axe, lying now under a thin opalescent veil of evening mist.

  They had paused at Ilminster for fresh horses, and there Wilding had paid a visit to one of his agents, from whom he had procured a hundred guineas. Thence they had come south at a sharp pace, and with little said. Wilding was moody and thoughtful, filled with chagrin at this unconscionable rashness of the man upon whom all his hopes were centred. As they cantered briskly across Uplyme Common in the twilight they passed several bodies of countrymen, all heading for the town, and one group sent up a shout of “God save the Protestant Duke!” as they rode past him.

  “Amen to that,” muttered Mr Wilding grimly, “for I am afraid that no man can.”

  In the narrow lane by Hay Farm a horseman, going in the opposite direction, passed them at the gallop; but they had met several such since leaving Ilminster, for indeed the news was spreading fast, and the whole countryside was alive with messengers, some on foot and some on horseback, but all hurrying as if their lives depended on their haste.

  They made their way to the Market Place where Monmouth’s declaration – that remarkable manifesto from the pen of Ferguson – had been read some hours before. Thence, having ascertained where His Grace was lodged, they made their way to the George Inn.

  In Coombe Street they found the crowd so dense that they could but with difficulty open out a way for their horses through the human press. Not a window but was open, and thronged with sightseers – mostly women, indeed, for the men were in the press below. On every hand resounded the cries of “A Monmouth! A Monmouth! The Protestant Religion! Religion and Liberty,” which latter were the words inscribed on the standard Monmouth had set up that evening on the Church Cliffs.

  In truth, Wilding was amazed at what he saw, and said as much to Trenchard. So pessimistic had been his outlook that he had almost expected to find the rebellion snuffed out by the time they reached Lyme-of-the-King. What had the authorities been about that they had permitted Monmouth to come ashore, or had Vallancey’s information been wrong in the matter of the numbers that accompanied the Protestant Champion? Wilding’s red coat attracted some attention. In the dusk its colour was almost all that could be discerned of it.

  “Here’s a militia captain for the Duke!” cried one, and others took up the cry, and if it did nothing else it opened a way for them through that solid human mass and permitted them to win through to the yard of the George Inn. They found the spacious quadrangle thronged with men, armed and unarmed, and on the steps stood a tall, well-knit, soldierly man, his hat rakishly cocked, about whom a crowd of townsmen and country fellows were pressing with insistence. At a glance Mr Wilding recognised Captain Venner – raised to the rank of colonel
by Monmouth on the way from Holland.

  Trenchard dismounted, and taking a distracted stable-boy by the arm, bade him see to their horses. The fellow endeavoured to swing himself free of the other’s tenacious grasp.

  “Let me go,” he cried. “I am for the Duke!”

  “And so are we, my fine rebel,” answered Trenchard, holding fast.

  “Let me go,” the lout insisted. “I am going to enlist.”

  “And so you shall when you have stabled our nags. See to him, Vallancey; he is brainsick with the fumes of war.”

  The fellow protested, but Trenchard’s way was brisk and short; and so, protesting still, he led away their cattle in the end, Vallancey going with him to see that he performed this last duty as a stable-boy ere he too became a champion militant of the Protestant Cause. Trenchard sped after Wilding, who was elbowing his way through the yokels about the steps. The glare of a newly-lighted lamp from the doorway fell full upon his long white face as he advanced, and Venner espied and recognised him.

  “Mr Wilding!” he cried, and there was a glad ring in his voice, for though cobblers, tailors, deserters from the militia, pot-boys, stable-boys, and shuffling yokels had been coming in in numbers during the past few hours since the Declaration had been read, this was the first gentleman that arrived to welcome Monmouth. The soldier stretched out a hand to grasp the newcomer’s. “His Grace will see you this instant, not a doubt of it.” He turned and called down the passage. “Cragg!” A young man in a buff coat came forward, and to him Venner delivered Wilding and Trenchard that he might announce them to His Grace.

  In the room that had been set apart for him above stairs, Monmouth still sat at table. He had just supped, with but an indifferent appetite, so fevered was he by the events of his landing. He was excited with hope – inspired by the readiness with which the men of Lyme and its neighbourhood had flocked to his banner – and fretted by anxiety that none of the gentry of the vicinity should yet have followed the example of the meaner folk, in answer to the messages dispatched at dawn from Seaton. The board at which he sat was still cumbered with some glasses and platters and vestiges of his repast. Below him on his right sat Ferguson – that prince of plotters – very busy with pen and ink, his keen face almost hidden by his great periwig; opposite were Lord Grey of Werke, and Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, whilst, standing at the foot of the table barely within the circle of candlelight from the branch on the polished oak, was Nathaniel Wade, the lawyer, who had fled to Holland on account of his alleged complicity in the Rye House plot and was now returned a major in the Duke’s service. Erect and soldierly of figure, girt with a great sword and with the butt of a pistol protruding from his belt, he had little the air of a man whose methods of contention were forensic.