CHAPTER XIX

THE PURSUERS

For promptitude, the lady, the gentleman, and the coachman were in such

unison as to make it a reasonable deduction that the flight had been

concerted.

Never did any departure from the Roebuck leave so wide-mouthed a body of

spectators. Mrs. Pagnell's shrieks of 'Stop, oh! stop!' to the backs of

the coachman and Aminta were continued until they were far down the

street. She called to the innkeeper, called to the landlady and to

invisible constables for help. But her pangs were childish compared with

Morsfield's, who, with the rage of a conceited schemer tricked and the

fury of a lover beholding the rape of his beautiful, bellowed impotently

at Weyburn and the coachman out of hearing, 'Stop! you!' He was in the

state of men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations, and he

shot loud oaths after them, shook his fist, cursed his friend Cumnock,

whose name he vociferated as a summons to him,--generally the baffled

plotter misconducted himself to an extreme degree, that might have

apprised Mrs. Pagnell of a more than legitimate disappointment on his

part.

Pursuit was one of the immediate ideas which rush forward to look back

woefully on impediments and fret to fever over the tardiness of

operations. A glance at the thing of wrinkles receiving orders to buckle

at his horses and pursue convinced them of the hopelessness; and

Morsfield was pricked to intensest hatred of the woman by hearing the

dire exclamation, 'One night, and her character's gone!'

'Be quiet, ma'am, if you please, or nothing can be done,' he cried.

'I tell you, Mr. Morsfield--don't you see?--he has thrown them together.

It is Lord Ormont's wicked conspiracy to rid himself of her. A secretary!

He'll beat any one alive in plots. She can't show her face in London

after this, if you don't overtake her. And she might have seen Lord

Ormont's plot to ruin her. He tired of her, and was ashamed of her

inferior birth to his own, after the first year, except on the Continent,

where she had her rights. Me he never forgave for helping make him the

happy man he might have been in spite of his age. For she is lovely! But

it's worse for a lovely woman with a damaged reputation. And that 's his

cunning. How she could be so silly as to play into it! She can't have

demeaned herself to look on that secretary! I said from the first he

seemed as if thrown into her way for a purpose. But she has pride: my

niece Aminta has pride. She might well have listened to flatterers--she

had every temptation--if it hadn't been for her pride. It may save her

yet. However good-looking, she will remember her dignity--unless he's a

villain. Runnings away! drivings together! inns oh! the story over

London! I do believe she has a true friend in you, Mr. Morsfield; and I

say, as I have said before, the sight of a devoted admirer would have

brought any husband of more than sixty to his senses, if he hadn't hoped

a catastrophe and determined on it. Catch them we can't, unless she

repents and relents; and prayers for that are our only resource. Now,

start, man, do!'

The postillion had his foot in position to spring. Morsfield bawled

Cumnock's name, and bestrode his horse. Captain Cumnock emerged from the

inn-yard with a dubitative step, pressing a handkerchief to his nose,

blinking, and scrutinizing the persistent fresh stains on it.

Stable-boys were at the rear. These, ducking and springing, surcharged

and copious exponents of the play they had seen, related, for the benefit

of the town, how that the two gentlemen had exchanged words in the yard,

which were about beastly pistols, which the slim gentleman would have

none of; and then the big one trips up, like dancing, to the other one

and flicks him a soft clap on the check--quite friendly, you may say; and

before he can square to it, the slim one he steps his hind leg half a

foot back, and he drives a straight left like lightning off the shoulder

slick on to t' other one's nob, and over he rolls, like a cart with the

shafts up down a bank; and he' a been washing his 'chops' and threatening

bullets ever since.

The exact account of the captain's framework in the process of the fall

was graphically portrayed in our blunt and racy vernacular, which a

society nourished upon Norman-English and English-Latin banishes from

print, largely to its impoverishment, some think.

By the time the primary narrative of the encounter in the inn yard had

given ground for fancy and ornament to present it in yet more luscious

dress, Lord Ormont's phaeton was a good mile on the road. Morsfield and

Captain Cumnock--the latter inquisitive of the handkerchief pressed

occasionally at his nose--trotted on tired steeds along dusty

wheel-tracks. Mrs. Pagnell was the solitary of the chariot, having a

horrid couple of loaded pistols to intimidate her for her protection, and

the provoking back view of a regularly jogging mannikin under a big white

hat with blue riband, who played the part of Time in dragging her along,

with worse than no countenance for her anxieties.

News of the fugitives was obtained at the rampant Red Lion in Dudsworth,

nine miles on along the London road, to the extent that the Earl of

Ormont's phaeton, containing a lady and a gentleman, had stopped there a

minute to send back word to Steignton of their comfortable progress, and

expectations of crossing the borders into Hampshire before sunset.

Morsfield and Cumnock shrugged at the bumpkin artifice. They left their

line of route to be communicated to the chariot, and chose, with

practised acumen, that very course, which was the main road, and rewarded

them at the end of half an hour with sight of the Steignton phaeton.

But it was returning. A nearer view showed it empty of the couple.

Morsfield bade the coachman pull up, and he was readily obeyed. Answers

came briskly.

Although provincial acting is not of the high class which conceals the

art, this man's look beside him and behind him at vacant seats had

incontestable evidence in support of his declaration, that the lady and

gentleman had gone on by themselves: the phaeton was a box of flown

birds.

'Where did you say they got out, you dog?' said Cumnock.

The coachman stood up to spy a point below. 'Down there at the bottom of

the road, to the right, where there's a stile across the meadows, making

a short cut by way of a bridge over the river to Busley and North

Tothill, on the high-road to Hocklebourne. The lady and gentleman thought

they 'd walk for a bit of exercise the remains of the journey.'

'Can't prove the rascal's a liar,' Cumnock said to Morsfield, who rallied

him savagely on his lucky escape from another knock-down blow, and tossed

silver on the seat, and said--

'We 'll see if there is a stile.'

'You'll see the stile, sir,' rejoined the man, and winked at their backs.

Both cavaliers, being famished besides baffled, were in sour tempers,

expecting to see just the dead wooden stile, and see it as a grin at

them. Cumnock called on Jove to witness that they had been donkeys enough

to forget to ask the driver how far round on the road it was to the other

end of the cross-cut.

Morsfield, entirely objecting to asinine harness with him, mocked at his

invocation and intonation of the name of Jove.

Cumnock was thereupon stung to a keen recollection of the allusion to his

knock-down blow, and he retorted that there were some men whose wit was

the parrot's.

Morsfield complimented him over the exhibition of a vastly superior and

more serviceable wit, in losing sight of his antagonist after one trial

of him.

Cumnock protested that the loss of time was caused by his friend's

dalliance with the Venus in the chariot.

Morsfield's gall seethed at a flying picture of Mrs. Pagnell, coupled

with the retarding reddened handkerchief business, and he recommended

Cumnock to pay court to the old woman, as the only chance he would have

of acquaintanceship with the mother of Love.

Upon that Cumnock confessed in humility to his not being wealthy.

Morsfield looked a willingness to do the deed he might have to pay for in

tenderer places than the pocket, and named the head as a seat of poverty

with him.

Cumnock then yawned a town fop's advice to a hustling street passenger to

apologize for his rudeness before it was too late. Whereat Morsfield,

certain that his parasitic thrasyleon apeing coxcomb would avoid

extremities, mimicked him execrably.

Now this was a second breach of the implied convention existing among the

exquisitely fine-bred silken-slender on the summits of our mundane

sphere, which demands of them all, that they respect one another's

affectations. It is commonly done, and so the costly people of a single

pattern contrive to push forth, flatteringly to themselves, luxuriant

shoots of individuality in their orchidean glass-house. A violation of

the rule is a really deadly personal attack. Captain Cumnock was

particularly sensitive regarding it, inasmuch as he knew himself not the

natural performer he strove to be, and a mimicry affected him as a

haunting check.

He burst out: 'Damned if I don't understand why you're hated by men and

women both!'

Morsfield took a shock. 'Infernal hornet!' he muttered; for his conquests

had their secret history.

'May and his wife have a balance to pay will trip you yet, you 'll find.'

'Reserve your wrath, sir, for the man who stretched you on your back.'

The batteries of the two continued exchangeing redhot shots, with the

effect, that they had to call to mind they were looking at the stile. A

path across a buttercup meadow was beyond it. They were damped to some

coolness by the sight.

'Upon my word, the trick seems neat!' said Cumnock staring at the

pastoral curtain.

'Whose trick?' he was asked sternly.

'Here or there 's not much matter; they 're off, unless they 're under a

hedge laughing.'

An ache of jealousy and spite was driven through the lover, who groaned,

and presently said--

'I ride on. That old woman can follow. I don't want to hear her

gibberish. We've lost the game--there 's no reckoning the luck. If

there's a chance, it's this way. It smells a trick. He and she--by all

the devils! It has been done in my family--might have been done again.

Tell the men on the plain they can drive home. There's a hundred-pound

weight on your tongue for silence.'

Cumnock cried: 'But we needn't be parting, Dolf! Stick together. Bad

luck's not repeated every day. Keep heart for the good.'

'My heart's shattered, Cumnock. I say it's impossible she can love a

husband twice her age, who treats her--you 've seen. Contempt of that

lady!

By heaven! once in my power, I swear she would have been sacred to me.

But she would have been compelled to face the public and take my hand. I

swear she would have been congratulated on the end of her sufferings.

Worship!--that's what I feel. No woman ever alive had eyes in her head

like that lady's. I repeat her name ten times every night before I go to

sleep. If I had her hand, no, not one kiss would I press on it without

her sanction. I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near

me. I 've lost her--by the Lord, I 've lost her!'

'Pro tem.,' said the captain. 'A plate of red beef and a glass of port

wine alters the view. Too much in the breast, too little in the belly,

capsizes lovers. Old story. Horses that ought to be having a mash between

their ribs make riders despond. Say, shall we back to the town behind us,

or on? Back's the safest, if the chase is up.'

Morsfield declared himself incapable of turning and meeting that chariot.

He sighed heavily. Cumnock offered to cheer him with a song of Captain

Chanter's famous collection, if he liked; but Morsfield gesticulated

abhorrence, and set out at a trot. Song in defeat was a hiss of derision

to him.

He had failed. Having failed, he for the first time perceived the

wildness of a plot that had previously appeared to him as one of the

Yorkshire Morsfields' moves to win an object. Traditionally they stopped

at nothing. There would have been a sunburst of notoriety in the capture

and carrying off of the beautiful Countess of Ormont.

She had eluded him during the downward journey to Steignton. He came on

her track at the village at the junction of the roads above Ashead, and

thence, confiding in the half-connivance or utter stupidity of the fair

one's duenna, despatched a mounted man-servant to his coachman and

footmen, stationed ten miles behind, with orders that they should drive

forthwith to the great plain, and be ready at a point there for two

succeeding days. That was the plot, promptly devised upon receipt of Mrs.

Pagnell's communication; for the wealthy man of pleasure was a strategist

fit to be a soldier, in dexterity not far from rivalling the man by whom

he had been outdone.

An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard

drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns

in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be

likely to supply the port wine for floating him through garlanding dreams

of possession most tastily to blest oblivion.

He was a lover, nevertheless, honest in his fashion, and meant not worse

than to pull his lady through a mire, and wash her with Morsfield soap,

and crown her, and worship. She was in his blood, about him, above him;

he had plunged into her image, as into deeps that broke away in

phosphorescent waves on all sides, reflecting every remembered, every

imagined, aspect of the adored beautiful woman piercing him to extinction

with that last look of her at the moment of flight.

Had he been just a trifle more sincere in the respect he professed for

his lady's duenna, he would have turned on the road to Dornton and a

better fortune. Mrs. Pagnell had now become the ridiculous Paggy of Mrs.

Lawrence Finchley and her circle for the hypocritical gentleman; and he

remarked to Captain Cumnock, when their mutual trot was established:

'Paggy enough for me for a month--good Lord! I can't stand another dose

of her by herself.'

'It's a bird that won't roast or boil or stew,' said the captain.

They were observed trotting along below by Lord Ormont's groom of the

stables on promotion, as he surveyed the country from the chalk-hill rise

and brought the phaeton to a stand, Jonathan Boon, a sharp lad, whose

comprehension was a little muddled by 'the rights of it' in this

adventure. He knew, however, that he did well to follow the directions of

one who was in his lordship's pay, and stretched out the fee with the air

of a shake of the hand, and had a look of the winning side, moreover. A

born countryman could see that.

Boon watched the pair of horsemen trotting to confusion, and clicked in

his cheek. The provincial of the period when coaches were beginning to be

threatened by talk of new-fangled rails was proud to boast of his

outwitting Londoners on material points; and Boon had numerous tales of

how it had been done, to have the laugh of fellows thinking themselves

such razors. They compensated him for the slavish abasement of his whole

neighbourhood under the hectoring of the grand new manufacture of wit in

London:--the inimitable Metropolitan PUN, which came down to the country

by four-in-hand, and stopped all other conversation wherever it was

reported, and would have the roar--there was no resisting it. Indeed, to

be able to see the thing smartly was an entry into community with the

elect of the district; and when the roaring ceased and the thing was

examined, astonishment at the cleverness of it, and the wonderful

shallowness of the seeming deep hole, and the unexhausted bang it had to

go off like a patent cracker, fetched it out for telling over again; and

up went the roar, and up it went at home and in stable-yards, and at the

net puffing of churchwardens on a summer's bench, or in a cricket-booth

after a feast, or round the old inn's taproom fine. The pun, the

wonderful bo-peep of double meanings darting out to surprise and smack

one another from behind words of the same sound, sometimes the same

spelling, overwhelmed the provincial mind with awe of London's occult and

prolific genius.

Yet down yonder you may behold a pair of London gentlemen trotting along

on as fine a fool's errand as ever was undertaken by nincompoops bearing

a scaled letter, marked urgent, to a castle, and the request in it that

the steward would immediately upon perusal down with their you-know-what

and hoist them and birch them a jolly two dozen without parley.

Boon smacked his leg, and then drove ahead merrily.

For this had happened to his knowledge: the gentleman accompanying the

lady had refused to make anything of a halt at the Red Lion, and had said

he was sure there would be a small public-house at the outskirts of the

town, for there always was one; and he proved right, and the lady and he

had descended at the sign of the Jolly Cricketers, and Boon had driven on

for half an hour by order.

This, too, had happened, external to Boon's knowledge: the lady and the

gentleman had witnessed, through the small diamond window-panes of the

Jolly Cricketers' parlour, the passing-by of the two horsemen in pursuit

of them; and the gentleman had stopped the chariot coming on some fifteen

minutes later, but he did not do it at the instigation of the lady.