A DOUBLE PRETENDER
I
"FULWOOD'S RENTS" was, in 1750, a quite self-important little Court, and notable above the most of those which neighboured on the fashionable seclusion of Gray's Inn Gardens. It possessed two very opposite claims to distinction—conviviality and exclusiveness. The first illustrated itself in a number of reputable houses of entertainment, which included, among others, the Castle and Golden Griffin Taverns, John's and Squire's Coffee-houses, and the punch-shop once kept by Ned Ward of the "Spy," who had figured in the "Dunciad." The second was vested primarily in Miss Arabella Pitcher's Finishing School for young ladies.
How this last establishment had ever come to leaven the sociality of Fulwood's was an unrelated chapter in the story of the Court. A strange lock of secrecy seemed to hold its walls curiously rigid and its wire-blinded windows curiously vacant. Its conventual mystery was even supposed a veil to something unconformable and subversive, though nobody knew exactly of what. Certainly the vision of its half-score little Misses issuing for their daily promenade in the gardens (to which an upper passage gave them access, without need to traverse the Court), and pairing away demurely under the shepherding of Miss Nancy Bell, painted with no colours but of eyebrights and rose-buds the supposed dark enigma. But, then, have flowers no other significance than as the frank emblems of innocence? Mr. Turpin, accepting a nosegay of pinks at St. Sepulchre's on his way to Tyburn, suggests quite another character for them.
Well, there is no smoke without fire; and let it be conceded at once that the burning heart of Miss Pitcher was really responsible for the haze which enveloped her dwelling. That stood, strait-laced and aloof, on the upper east side of the Court, in "a handsome open place, with a freestone pavement," and, as a matter of fact, was a gift to her from a deceased lawyer uncle, who had retired thither from the Inn hard by, when his association with the defence of Kilmarnock, and the other rebel lords of '47, had brought his legal career, and finally his life, to an apoplectic end. But very loyally his niece had shared, and succeeded to, his political views; whence the ardent heart, and the mystery-exhaling atmosphere thereof.
Miss Pitcher, in short, was a fanatical Tory, a white rose of the whitest; and her house was an asylum, rather than a school, for the daughters of a few of those aristocratic exiles, from the Cause, who could afford remittances sufficient for the meet education of their abandoned olive-branches. She was own foster-mother to Jacobitism, and suckled her charges, so to speak, bn the rose-white milk of it. She enjoyed all the delights of conspiracy by proxy, and loved to think herself an object of secret uneasiness to the Government, while she shut her eyes resolutely to the growing indifference, on the part of the public, to the so-called "Pretence." All the little by-plays and innuendoes of Jacobitism were religiously practised in her house. They drank (in orgeat, which was a syrup of almonds and sugar) the King across the water-bottle; they besprigged themselves fitly on Oak-apple Day; they mourned, in white favours, on Execution. It would have been all very harmless and amusing had not the desperation of the cause at that time attached a contributory value even to such frothy ebullitions; and so far, at least, Miss Pitcher's neighbours were justified in their suspicion of her Finishing School.
Now there was, I regret to say, one traitor in the Pitcher camp, and that was Miss Nancy Bell. Nancy and her brother had been orphan wards of the late Sergeant Pitcher, and whether it was due to his ruinous conduct of their small estate, or to resentment of his overbearing personality, or to principle, or to all together, the two detested both Pretenders, old and young. Mr. Thomas Bell, indeed, having completed his Chancery term as law student, and been promoted to the Inns of Court, could afford a political self-indulgence which was denied to his sister, who was utterly dependent on Miss Arabella, and treated, moreover, with a contempt and arrogance not infrequently shown to the victims of injustice by their wrongers. She was expected to respond, in short, body and soul, to the charity which fed her with the crumbs from her own dissipated estate. Her employer never even thought to question her loyalty to herself, or to picture her as a possible viper on her Jacobitish hearth. But there she went astray. The young lady was possessed of a tooth quite virulently venomous, although, like a viper's, it was laid back, until wanted, against the little pink roof of her mouth. She held it so, pending the arrival of that retributive day when all the wrong of which her fiery little brain and bursting heart was conscious should find its opportunity to retaliate upon her hard task-mistress. And in the meanwhile she "under-nursed" the boarders (she was scarcely older than the eldest of them), and took their aristocratic scorns and condescensions in silence.
It must be admitted, in some defence of Miss Pitcher's treatment of her, that Miss Nancy was quite reprehensibly pretty—pretty in a way which, to a certain acid order of intelligence, is a necessary moral disqualification. For it is a feminine instinct to associate ugliness with respectability, and to be suspicious of "looks," which are never other than "mere" in Mrs. Grundy's category of the graces. Hence, with women, the grotesque fashions most prevail, while the becoming are soon discarded. Nancy, in consequence, being possessed of a loveliness which was quite independent of adornments, was a perpetual provocation to the "dressings" of righteousness. But her bloom survived, despite Miss Pitcher's efforts to depreciate it; it survived—in china complexion, seal-like eyes, and gold-umber tresses, of which no spite could discrown her—by reason, perhaps, of a spirit which was as much its inspiration as its defence. Nancy, in short, was as fearless as she was pretty, and as wideawake as she was patient.
It was this young lady's duty to chaperon the boarders (implying thereby her "plain" fitness for the task) in their daily ordered perambulations about the Gardens; but when the weather was cold or ungenial she was permitted to take her constitutional alone. Perhaps—who knows?—Miss Pitcher secretly looked to scandalous circumstance to rid her of a conscience-chafing incubus on some such occasion. I would not wrong her; but certainly the Gardens—what with pick-pockets, ring-droppers, and other expert folk of a shady caste—were become of late years no safe place of resort for unprotected young women. Nancy, however, by reason of her strong will of innocence, moved as safe among the beasts as Bonny Kilmeny; and mostly her hours of freedom were spent with her brother the law-student, who had modest chambers in the Inn, and whose sympathy and encouragement were a never-failing tonic to her depression, while his optimism built such real-looking castles in the air that the moment of their possession by him and her, grown independent and prosperous, seemed never far distant. And, in the meanwhile, discussion of impossible methods for "rounding on" Miss Pitcher were a perpetual comfort to the two, until—lo and behold! on one desperate day the opportunity, which they had so long and so wrongly prefigured, showed itself to them in fearsome guise, and—they closed with it.
It was a chill dingy noon in September of the year 1750, and Miss Nancy was out in the Gardens by herself, hurrying for Mr. Thomas's chambers. There were a good many people about, including rather a superfluity of the sinister-respectable; and whether it were that lawlessness felt in its veins some rumour of political infection, or because the little beauty unusually charmed the bilious atmosphere, she found herself seriously molested for the first time in her experience. It happened in a moment, inexplicably and confusingly. Without a note of warning, there she was the centre and cynosure of a malapert, derisory group, being complimented and hustled. In the midst, she felt her purse go (a poor little starved account of steel beads and threepenny pieces), and a scream, half terror, half fury, burst from her lips. It had the instant effect to bring an outer circle of spectators about the inner, hemming the wheel within the wheel.
"My purse has been stole from me!" wailed Miss Nancy.
"Has it, though, has it?" said a tall fair-headed young gentleman, pushing his way through the crowd. He had a rather large pleasant face, big-nosed and under-jawed—not a bit, in its suggestion of massive humour, of the femininely romantic order. He wore the uniform, only lately established, of a naval officer—blue coat with white facings, hat turned up with a gold cockade, and the sword, of course. Miss Nancy received him breathless. If this was to be a cutting-out expedition, how was to end the moral for her? But somehow his appearance gave her confidence.
He shook his finger at the crowd, in shrewd good-humour.
"A purse has changed hands," he said. "'Tisn't in nature, is it, to expect anyone to confess to the when and how? But I know some things out of nature. I've travelled the seas, as you'll observe, and I've kept my eyes open. In the West Indies they practise bugaboo. I learned a little there—for instance, how to detect a thief by it. 'Tis very simple, when he happens to be present. I merely raise my hand, like this; I cry 'Mumbo-jumbo!' loud, as I cry it now, and, within a few seconds, as you'll notice, his nose will begin to swell up like a blood-blister."
He had scarcely uttered the word when a fellow in the crowd clapped his hand to his snout, recognised on the instant his mistake, threw down the purse, burst through the intervening press, and bolted for his life. The rest, to a storm of laughter, gave chase, and Nancy and her deliverer were left alone.
He recovered the purse and presented it to her, encountering her for the first time face to face. The spirit of humour left his own. He suddenly winced in his breath, as if shot; and indeed a little gilded bolt had struck him under the fifth rib.
Now, this is not a love-story, or I could fashion a very pretty idyll out of the meetings of the next three days. Fewer, in the times of the Fleet and Gretna Green, had often sufficed for a whole fairy-tale of courtship and matrimony.
"Madam," says the stranger, quite gravely, by and by, "the debt is flagrantly mine. 'Twere ecstasy if the devotion of a lifetime might be held to liquidate it in part."
That was to begin, one might say, almost at the end; and Nancy, no doubt, felt the peril of such foreclosings. She was deeply engaged to her hero; but, just as yet, knowledge had not come to leaven her suspicion of his unromantic cast of countenance.
"If they capture the pickpocket," he said, "you will have to appear against him, and likely be put to some distress and impertinence. I think you would be wise to let me escort you from the scene. 'Possession is eleven points in the law.'"
She thanked him very sincerely; and suggested that her brother's chambers were hard by.
"And I'm sure, sir," said she, "that his gratitude, joined to mine, will leave you in no doubt as to which way the obligation lies."
He protested rapturously; but honest Tom, when they had sought and found him, completely justified her insistence.
The next three days were all a lyric, of love crescendo, to Nancy and her knight. The weather, being bad, contributed to the Lydian measure. She learned of him that his name was Charles Edward Prince: that he was a sea-officer to His Majesty, but at present uncommissioned; that he loved her, in and out of reason. He learned of her that she was a pensioner on someone's bounty; that she was poor and unhappy; that she was a determined Whig (at which he laughed); that—conditionally, and in reason only—she returned his regard. That was enough. They would not ruin their idyll by offensive details.
Only once he frightened her; and that was by proposing a Fleet marriage. When he saw her distress, he explained—thus far:
"The back-door to happiness is the one for poor dependents, like you and me. If we sought the front, it would be shut in our faces."
She rejoiced to learn, by that, that he was in something her own case of servitude. But she would have none of his way to emancipation.
"I am a free-born Briton," she said. "If I am to marry you at all, it shall be in a church."
That morning, on a backstair in the Inn, he won his first kiss of her. Tom was very busy above, singing and shuffling papers.
Nancy returned to Fulwood's Rents in a dream. She was awakened from it, all in a moment, to a sense of startling realities.
Miss Pitcher was the cause. She rose in her place, after the midday meal, to make a hushed and rapturous announcement.
"Ladies," she said, "a transcendent experience is to be ours. It has been conveyed to my knowledge that a certain August Personage, not unconnected in the first instance with the events of '45, is at the moment risking his illustrious life in a visit to the first Capital of his inheritance; and, desiring to assure us in person, and as the representative of his saintly parent, of his sense of our loyal attachment to his House, is deigning to contemplate a call upon us to-morrow at midday, when he will distribute among us some treasurable mementoes of his condescension. Ladies, let us respond, with a full heart of gratitude, and a full sense of the responsibility which the occasion imposes on us, to this sweetest of affabilities on the part of our adored young Prince."
Nancy listened in dumbfoundered silence. But she had the hypocrisy presently to smile and applaud. Afterwards she set to thinking.
The fruits of her thought appeared in a hurried visit to her brother early on the following morning. She risked some Pitcherian indignation and rebuke to obtain it. But the risk was worth.
The two put their thrilling, tingling heads together. The sum of their hurried discussion amounted to this: An information to be laid by Mr. Thomas, instantly and privately, before the proper authorities; an organised descent of the law at the psychologic moment on Fulwood's Rents; arrest of the young Pretender; consequent claiming of the reward (it might amount to anything up to forty thousand pounds); and, result—triumph, retaliation, independence, and a bridal dowry.
Miss Nancy went home, hugging, in prospect, her thirty pieces of silver. She was a traitor; but injured women, especially if in love, are subject to no laws of honour.
II
Two very opposite sentiments awaited, in Fulwood's Rents, the approach of the stupendous hour. On the one side was a sort of congregated intoxication of eleven enraptured brains—stored and smouldering censers awaiting their divinity; on the other, in splendid isolation, the single arch-traitor.
Nancy did not once repent her part during that long agitated morning. She was one of those exquisitely human natures, whose moral cuticles are as abnormally sensitive to wrong as the skins of some people are to physical pain. Her hatred of tyranny in any form took no especial count of the fact that it was of her own oppression that she had been an enforced and helpless spectator. She would have conspired quite as heartily in any impersonal case to counterplot coercion. Her hot young soul struck for the true principle of liberty, which is the recognition of one's right to live one's own life unvexed of privilege under whatever guise or disguise, and to subscribe to no laws which are not designed to secure that end. Her motto was simply the vive ut vivas. She would have abhorred the democracy and socialism of our own day, as she would have detested its Conservatism.
She regarded with a secret sardonic amusement the pious preparations for the great event—the daïs improvised out of boards supported on footstools, and covered with a piece of spare carpet, the selvage outward; the theatrical gilded chair, hired of a costumier in Covent Garden; the bouquet of yellow (they called it yaller, then) golden-rod. What a cataclysm, she thought, was threatening all this shoddy play-acting! and hers was to be the hand to launch the flood! The Pitcher and the Bell, the brass and the earthenware vessels, were to come to conclusions at last!
As the clock neared the fatal hour, the stress of expectancy waxed acute. One or two of the boarders giggled along the road to hysterics. Miss Pitcher herself grew tremulous and flabby, and uncertain in her grasp of the situation. Only the nerves of the hardened conspirator kept their tension—nay, tightened it by a turn or two of the screws. Such is the perversity of wickedness. The innocent trembles to a false charge: the guilty stiffens to a true one.
Midday struck—no Prince. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed, and the suspense grew intolerable. Then did Miss Pitcher, verging on tears, admit how she had always had her doubts of the reliability of Doctor King, in whose house, in Red Lyon Square hard by, the exalted visitor, as she now confessed, was sojourning. Miss Nancy, making a furious mental note of the fact, wondered only if she had somehow been betrayed to this man. If so
A loud rap-rap at the door!
••••••
He was ushered in, quite alone and unattended—a tall, fair-haired gentleman-citizen in garb and appearance; but his features! how familiar to the devoted conners of their royal profile engraved on lockets and watchcases! He looked, for his part, a little warm and shamefaced, and even received with obvious embarrassment the genuflections of the company, as it fell on its knees to him in rustling adoration.
"We are to apologise" (O, the rapture of that "we") "for this unpunctuality," he said; "it was unavoidable."
And then his eye glanced to a solitary figure in the background, which alone of them all remained erect—and he saw before him, white, rigid and stricken, the face of her to whom he had pledged his eternal faith only yesterday in the Gardens.
The shock was an astounding one; but he mastered it. He even managed to play his part admirably. Majesty is wont to such contretemps, and trained to carry the worst situations with a smile. His condescension was intoxicating. He made a pretty little speech to the children; he accepted the bouquet with a kiss to its blushing bearer; he produced and distributed among the boarders a number of little tawdry trinkets, rings and seals and so forth, just to keep his memory green with them, he said.
Miss Pitcher corrected him daringly. "White, your royal Highness," she whispered—"the hue of your angel race."
One little miss craved his signature for her album. He hesitated a moment at that, but consented in the end. While he was writing it, a young lady advanced suddenly from the back and overlooked him (Charles Edward P., she saw him trace), and was smartly rebuked by the mistress for her impertinence. She neither heard nor was interested to hear. Her mind, her soul were all one swirl of agony. That she had unwittingly betrayed her love; that her love was revealed this man, a love impossible to her; that she could do nothing at last to stay, to warn him from, the consequences of her own treason!—the madness sickened her brain. Bitterly, bitterly had her bolt recoiled upon her own head. In the midst of her stunned despair, she was conscious of a second knocking at the door. "Judas! Judas! Judas!" she cried aloud, and struck herself insanely on the breast. A score of eyes, wild and startled, were turned upon her. She flung herself into a chair and hid her face.
Thus lying, she was aware of hurried footsteps, of agitated shrieks, of a babble of voices, of oaths and a dreadful silence. Wrought beyond endurance, she pushed the hair from her eyes and looked up.
Huddled, gasping and hysterical, to one side of the room were Miss Pitcher and the boarders: standing facing them on the other were her brother, a gross peppery old gentleman in a great peruke, and a couple of stolid Bow Street runners; and between, quite passive and with folded arms, was the subject of all the hubbub.
The Magistrate—for such was the old fellow—had been speaking; and he spoke again.
"As to you, ma'am, I congratulate ye on your entertainment of an impostor, since it's saved ye consequences. But I'd make sure another time, if I was you, to have me rook identified before I gave him the name of treason."
Miss Pitcher could only gasp: "You say it is not the Prince?"
"I say it, ma'am," said the Magistrate coolly. Then he roared: "What! ye fond old Tory! Wasn't I familiar with his face and person as the palm of me hand ('twas in Paris in '48, when our fine new friend the King o' France was plotting to rid himself of Charlie)—and then to see pointed out for'm this long-nosed skittle-sharper, whom I'm not sure yet but it isn't me duty to lay by the heels in His Majesty's pound. Take'm for Charlie, indeed!"
Miss Pitcher screeched, with a little rally to fury.
"Not?" she cried. "Then what!"
Reference to the trinkets, to the signature, was on her lips; but discretion choked it back timely. She was enmeshed indeed—held by every limb, and stifled from utterance. She could only look and claw in venomous silence at the discredited royalty.
Nancy, white as paper, had risen to her feet; the stranger laughed.
"Well, I confess I'm not the Prince," he said.
Again Miss Pitcher screamed; but this time not half so loud as Miss Nancy.
"O, thank God, thank God!" cried the latter, and ran and threw herself into the young gentleman's arms.
A l'oeuvre on connaît l'ouvrier. Miss Pitcher, scandalised, outraged, infuriated, yet, oddly, a little relieved, had an instant vision of the truth. A short terrible scene followed—its main points impossible of elucidation in the presence of the law—and Nancy was ordered to leave the house instanter with her—but we will not sully the record, even if a vixen thought fit to. The Magistrate let them go, with only a dry comment on the situation: "Jusq'au revoir!" Then he turned to Mr. Thomas. "I'd go back to me occupation of sitting on wind-eggs, if I was you, sir," says he. "You may hatch out another rook or so, and more profitable to ye, if ye're lucky."
Nancy and her lover walked across the Gardens, together but apart. Crestfallen, Tom slunk in their rear, his tail between his legs. They all made, as if by instinct, for the law-student's rooms. Not a single word was spoken amongst them until they were closeted together. Then the "sea-officer" placed Miss Nancy in one chair, invited her brother to another by her side, and so, standing and facing the two, delivered himself.
"You have heard me denounced for an impostor: I am one—in a sense. My name is truly, nevertheless, Charles Edward Prince. If I abbreviate it to Charles Edward P., I am guilty of a vulgarism, perhaps, but no fraud. My father is General Prince, who fought at Culloden, and after found asylum in France. I serve King George; but my sympathies are—well, with a frolic at all times. The old gentleman advised me, being on furlough, that a certain visitor might be expected at the house of our kinsman Dr. King, and implored me, by my filial duty, to help to see him through. I scented an adventure, and agreed. It is perfectly true (I confide it to your honour) that the Prince is at this moment ensconced in the house of my kinsman in Red Lyon Square.
"Miss Pitcher (you never revealed the name of your employer to me, Nancy, you know) was a Jacobite to be shown consideration. A visit to her house was on the programme. We set out this morning to accomplish it. Our way lay through Fulwood's Rents, a very congeries of Taverns. Perhaps you know, or perhaps you don't know, the young gentleman's weakness. He insisted anyhow on a temporary adjournment, became enamoured of a particular bin, and was soon helpless. We were at our wits' end. Miss Pitcher was not to be denied. At length it was decided that I, carrying the tokens, and bearing some loose likeness to the exalted principal, should go on and personate him, while my companion remained behind to accommodate matters as he could. You know the rest—all but the name of the traitor."
"Nancy Bell," cried the young lady; and rose and threw herself at his feet, sobbing.
He stared; then burst into a great laugh.
"Why, I had that notion," he said. "But, if Mr. Thomas will lend his countenance, we'll even now make a shift to round off this conspiracy in the Fleet, and afterwards Mrs. Prince shall tell us her story."