Читать книгу The Billow and the Rock - Harriet Martineau - Страница 6

Lady Carse and her maid Bessie—an elderly woman who had served her from her youth up, bearing with her temper for the sake of that family attachment which exists so strongly in Scotland—were busy packing trunks this afternoon, when they were told that a gentleman must speak with Lady Carse below stairs.

“There will be no peace till we are off,” observed the lady to her maid. In answer to which Bessie only sighed deeply.

“I want you to attend me downstairs,” observed the lady. “But this provoking nonsense of yours, this crying about going a journey, has made you not fit to be seen. If any friend of my lord’s saw your red eyes, he would go and say that my own maid was on my lord’s side. I must go down alone.”

“Pray, madam, let me attend you. The gentleman will not think of looking at me: and I will stand with my back to the light, and the room is dark.”

“No; your very voice is full of tears. Stay where you are.”

Lady Carse sailed into the room very grandly, not knowing whom she was to see. Nor was she any wiser when she did see him. He was muffled up, and wore a shawl tied over his mouth, and kept his hat on; so that little space was left between hat, periwig, and comforter. He apologised for wearing his hat, and for keeping the lady standing—his business was short:—in the first place to show her Lord Carse’s ring, which she would immediately recognise.

She glanced at the ring, and knew it at once.

“On the warrant of this ring,” continued the gentleman, “I come from your husband to require from you what you cannot refuse—either as a wife, or consistent with your safety. You hold a document—a letter from your husband, written to you in conjugal confidence five years ago, from London—a letter—”

“You need not describe it further,” said the lady. “It is my chief treasure, and not likely to escape my recollection. It is a letter from Lord Carse, containing treasonable expressions relating to the royal family.”

“About the treason we might differ, madam; but my business is, not to argue that, but to require of you to deliver up that paper to me, on this warrant,” again producing the ring.

The lady laughed, and asked whether the gentleman was a fool or took her to be one, that he asked her to give up what she had just told him was the greatest treasure she had in the world—her sure means of revenge upon her enemies.

“You will not?” asked the gentleman.

“I will not.”

“Then hear what you have to expect, madam. Hear it, and then take time to consider once more.”

“I have no time to spare,” she replied. “I start for London early in the morning; and my preparations are not complete.”

“You must hear me, however,” said the gentleman. “If you do not yield your husband will immediately and irrevocably put you to open shame.”

“He cannot,” she replied. “I have no shame. I have the advantage of him there.”

“You have, however, personal liberty at present. You have that to lose—and life, madam. You have that to lose.”

Lady Carse caught at the table, and leaned on it to support herself. It was not from fear about her liberty or life; but because there was a cruel tone in the utterance of the last words, which told her that it was Lord Lovat who was threatening her; and she was afraid of him.

“I have shaken you now,” said he. “Come: give me the letter.”

“It is not fear that shakes me,” she replied. “It is disgust. The disgust that some feel at reptiles I feel at you, my Lord Lovat.”

She quickly turned and left the room. When he followed she had her foot on the stairs. He said aloud, “You will repent, madam. You will repent.”

“That is my own affair.”

“True, madam, most true. I charge you to remember that you have yourself said that it is your own affair if you find you have cause to repent.”

Lady Carse stood on the stairs till her visitor had closed the house door behind him, struggled up to her chamber, and fainted on the threshold.

“This journey will never do, madam,” said Bessie, as her mistress revived.

“It is the very thing for me,” protested the lady. “In twelve hours more we shall have left this town and my enemies behind us; and then I shall be happy.”

Bessie sighed. Her mistress often talked of being happy; but nobody had ever yet seen her so.

“This fainting is nothing,” said Lady Carse, rising from the bed. “It is only that my soul sickens when Lord Lovat comes near; and the visitor below was Lord Lovat.”

“Mercy on us!” exclaimed Bessie. “What next?”

“Why, that we must get this lock turned,” said her lady, kneeling on the lid of a trunk. “Now, try again. There it is! Give me the key. Get me a cup of tea, and then to bed with you! I have a letter to write. Call me at four, to a minute. Have you ordered two chairs, to save all risk?”

“Yes, madam; and the landlord will see your things to the coach office to-night.”

Lady Carse had sealed her letter, and was winding up her watch with her eyes fixed on the decaying fire, when she was startled by a knock at the house door. Everybody else was in bed. In a vague fear she hastened to her chamber, and held the door in her hand and listened while the landlord went down. There were two voices besides his; and there was a noise as of something heavy brought into the hall. When this was done, and the bolts and bars were again fastened, she went to the stair-head and saw the landlord coming up with a letter in his hand. The letter was for her. It was heavy. Her trunks had come back from the coach office. The London coach was gone.

The letter contained the money paid for the fare of Lady Carse and her maid to London, and explained that a person of importance having occasion to go to London with attendants, and it being necessary to use haste, the coach was compelled to start six hours earlier than usual; and Lady Carse would have the first choice of places next time;—that is in a fortnight.

Bessie had never seen her mistress in such a rage as now: and poor Bessie was never to see it again. At the first news, she was off her guard, and thanked Heaven that this dangerous journey was put off for a fortnight; and much might happen in that time. Her mistress turned round upon her, said it was not put off—she would go on horseback alone—she would go on foot—she would crawl on her knees, sooner than give up. Bessie was silent, well knowing that none of these ways would or could be tried, and thankful that there was only this one coach to England. Enraged at her silence, her mistress declared that no one who was afraid to go to London was a proper servant for her, and turned her off upon the spot. She paid her wages to the weeping Bessie, and with the first light of morning, sent her from the house, herself closing the door behind her. She then went to bed, drawing the curtains close round it, remaining there all the next day, and refusing food.

In the evening, she wearily rose, and slowly dressed herself—for the first time in her life without help. She was fretted and humbled at the little difficulties of her toilet, and secretly wished, many times, that Bessie would come back and offer her services, though she was resolved to appear not to accept them without a very humble apology from Bessie for her fears about London. At last, she was ready to go down to tea, dressed in a wrapping-gown and slippers. When halfway down, she heard a step behind her, and looked round. A Highlander was just two stairs above her: another appeared at the foot of the flight; and more were in the hall. She knew the livery. It was Lovat’s tartan. They dragged her downstairs, and into her parlour, where she struggled so violently that she fell against the heavy table, and knocked out two teeth. They fastened down her arms by swathing her with a plaid, tied a cloth over her mouth, threw another over her head, and carried her to the door. In the street was a sedan chair; and in the chair was a man who took her upon his knees, and held her fast. Still she struggled so desperately, that the chair rocked from side to side, and would have been thrown over; but that there were plenty of attendants running along by the side of it, who kept it upright.

This did not last very long. When they had got out of the streets, the chair stopped. The cloth was removed from her head; and she saw that they were on the Linlithgow road, that some horsemen were waiting, one of whom was on a very stout horse, which bore a pillion behind the saddle. To this person she was formally introduced, and told that he was Mr. Forster of Corsebonny. She knew Mr. Forster to be a gentleman of character; and that therefore her personal safety was secure in his hands. But her good opinion of him determined her to complain and appeal to him in a way which she believed no gentleman could resist. She did not think of making any outcry. The party was large; the road was unfrequented at night; and she dreaded being gagged. She therefore only spoke—and that as calmly as she could.

“What does this mean, Mr. Forster? Where are you carrying me?”

“I know little of Lord Carse’s purposes, madam; and less of the meaning of them probably than yourself.”

“My Lord Carse! Then I shall soon be among the dead. He will go through life with murder on his soul.”

“You wrong him, madam. Your life is very safe.”

“No; I will not live to be the sport of my husband’s mercy. I tell you, sir, I will not live.”

“Let me advise you to be silent, madam. Whatever we have to say will be better said at the end of our stage, where I hope you will enjoy good rest, under my word that you shall not be molested.”

But the lady would not be silent. She declared very peremptorily her determination to destroy herself on the first opportunity; and no one who knew her temper could dispute the probability of her doing that, or any other act of passion. From bewailing herself, she went on to say things of her husband and Lord Lovat, and of her purposes in regard to them, which Mr. Forster felt that he and others ought not, for her own sake, to hear. He quickened his pace, but she complained of cramp in her side. He then halted, whispered to two men who watched for his orders, and had the poor lady again silenced by the cloth being tied over her mouth. She tried to drop off, but that only caused the strap which bound her to the rider to be buckled tighter. She found herself treated like a wayward child. When she could no longer make opposition, the pace of the party was quickened, and it was not more than two hours past midnight when they reached a country house, which she knew to belong to an Edinburgh lawyer, a friend of her husband’s.

Servants were up—fires were burning—supper was on the table. The lady was shown to a comfortable bedroom.

From thence she refused to come down. Mr. Forster and another gentleman of the party therefore visited her to explain as much as they thought proper of Lord Carse’s plans, and of their own method of proceeding.

They told her that Lord Carse found himself compelled, for family reasons, to sequestrate her. For her life and safety there was no fear; but she was to live where she could have that personal liberty of which no one wished to deprive her, without opportunity of intercourse with her family.

“And where can that be?” she asked. “Who will undertake to say that I shall live, in the first place, and that my children shall not hear from me, in the next?”

“Where your abode is to be, we do not know,” replied Mr. Forster. “Perhaps it is not yet settled. As for your life, madam, I have engaged to transfer you alive and safe, as far as lies in human power.”

“Transfer me! To whom?”

“To another friend of your husband’s, who will take equal care of you. I am sorry for your threats of violence on yourself. They compel me to do what I should not otherwise have thought of—to forbid your being alone, even in this your own room.”

“You do not mean—”

“I mean that you are not to be left unwatched for a single instant. There is a woman in the house—the housekeeper. She and her husband will enter this room when I leave it; and I advise you to say nothing to them against this arrangement.”

“They shall have no peace with me.”

“I am sorry for it. It will be a bad preparation for your further journey. You would do better to lie down and rest—for which ample time shall be allowed.”

The people in charge of the house were summoned, and ordered, in the lady’s hearing, to watch her rest, and on no account to leave the room till desired to do so. A table was set out in one corner, with meat and bread, wine and ale. But the unhappy lady would not attempt either to eat or sleep. She sat by the fire, faint, weary and gloomy. She listened to the sounds from below till the whole party had supped, and lain down for the night. Then she watched her guards—the woman knitting, and the man reading his Bible. At last, she could hold up no longer. Her head sank on her breast, and she was scarcely conscious of being gently lifted, laid upon the bed, and covered up warm with cloak and plaid.