CHAPTER XX
MR. SCROPE BATHES BY MOONLIGHT AND IN HIS PERUKE
WOGAN had heard two doors shut that evening, and with very different feelings. One had been latched gently, and the sound had filled him with apprehensions; one had been flung to with an angry violence, and the sound soothed him like the crooning of music. For Kelly, it seemed, after all held the trumps in his hand; he had but to play them aright and the game was his.
'The longer he takes to play them the better,' murmured Wogan, as he stood on the steps of Lady Oxford's house and looked briskly about him. For to his left, standing openly in the moonlight, he saw a tall martial figure wrapped in a cloak, and the end of a scabbard shining beneath the cloak, while across the road his eyes made out a hunched form blotted against the wall. The figure in the cloak was Colonel Montague; the skulker would no less certainly be Mr. Scrope. If the Parson would only take time enough to deploy his arguments like a careful general! Mr. Wogan would have liked to have run back and assured Kelly that there was no need whatever for hurry, since he himself had enough amusements on his hands to make the time pass pleasantly.
He advanced to the Colonel first.
'Sir, it is now to-morrow, the date at which you kindly promised me a few moments of your leisure. You may hear the chimes of the Abbey strike the half hour after one.'
'Mr. Wogan,' replied the Colonel, 'I reckon this yesterday—till after breakfast. At present I have an engagement with another person.'
'Colonel Montague, your reckoning of time is contrary to the almanac, and to a sound metaphysic, of which I am the ardent advocate. You will understand, sir, that such a difference of opinion between gentlemen admits of only one conclusion.'
Colonel Montague smiled, and to Wogan's chagrin and astonishment replied:
'You have grown a foot, or thereby, Mr. Wogan, since last we met, on an occasion which you will permit me to say that I can never forget. All our differences are sunk for ever in that one consideration. I implore you to leave me to the settlement of my pressing business.'
So the Colonel knew of that unfortunate rescue at Preston. Wogan, however, was not so easily put off.
'Grown a foot, sir!' he cried. 'I am not the same man! You speak of a boy, who died long ago; if he made a mistake in saving your life, overlook a pure accident, and oblige me.'
'The accident does not remove my obligation.'
'If you knew the truth, you would be sensible that there was no obligation in the matter. Come, take a stroll in the Park, and I'll tell the truth of the whole matter to whichever of us is alive to hear it.'
'I had the whole truth already, to-night, from the young lady.'
'The young lady?' Wogan had told Rose Townley of how he saved the life of a Colonel Montague, and to-night he had informed her that this Colonel was the man. She had been standing by his elbow when he had picked his quarrel with Montague. Sure she had overheard and had interfered to prevent it. 'The young lady!' he cried. 'All women are spoil-sports. But, Colonel, you must not believe her. I made a great deal of that story when I told it to Miss Townley. But you would find it a very simple affair if you had it from an eye-witness.'
The Colonel shook his head.
'Yet the story was very circumstantial, how you leaped from the barricades—'
'That were but two feet high.'
'And, through a cross fire of bullets, crossed the square to where I lay—'
'The fire was a half charge of duckshot that an old fellow let off by mismanagement from a rusty pistol. Both sides stopped firing the moment I jumped over—the politest thing. I might have been tripping down the Mall with a lady on my arm, for all the danger I ran.'
'But your wounds?'
'I slipped and cut my shin on the sharp cobbles, that's true.'
'Mr. Wogan, it will not do! Had I known your name this evening when Lady Mary made us acquainted, certain expressions properly distasteful to you would not have escaped my lips. But now I can make amends for them to the gallant gentleman who brought a wounded enemy out of a cross-fire. I apologise to you, but I cannot oblige you to the extent you wish, however you may attempt to make light of your courage, and of the obligation on my side.'
'Sure, Colonel, to be done with adornment of the real truth, I only saved such a fine man to have the pleasure of killing him myself.'
Here the Colonel broke into a laugh.
'Mr. Wogan, if I drew my sword and stood up before you without making a parry or a lunge, would you kill me?'
'No, indeed, there would be little diversion in that game,' said Wogan, who was now grown quite melancholic.
'Well, that is the utmost you will get from me, I am much pressed for time, and look to find another.'
'Another!' Wogan's failing hopes revived. 'Praise be to the Saints! I see your mistake, and you shall understand it in a twinkling. The other and myself are just one man for these purposes. George is my alter ego. We are the greatest friends, and have been taken for each other when we are talking. I'll talk all the time we fight, and you can fancy it is George whose ribs you are trying to tickle.'
The Colonel, however, was obdurate, and before Wogan could hit upon a likelier argument both gentlemen heard a cough.
Someone was standing on Lady Oxford's doorstep looking towards them.
The Colonel coughed in reply, and the figure—it was Mr. Kelly's—waved his hand, and marched, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, toward St. James's Park.
The Colonel followed, like Hamlet, and Mr. Wogan followed the Colonel. Would there be a fourth to follow Wogan? The three men marched in the moonlight, their footsteps rang boldly on the road. Was there a fourth behind them stealthily creeping in the shadow of the wall? As they turned a corner out of the square Wogan fell a little further to the rear. He kept his head screwed upon his shoulders, and he saw a shadow slink round the corner. He listened, and heard the stealthy steps. He stopped; the steps ceased. Wogan went on again. He knew that Scrope was dogging them.
The figure in front moved silently on till he reached a sweet spot for an occasion, a little clairière among the trees, the smoothest sward, moonlight on the grass, dark shadow all around. There he stopped, turned, and dropped his cloak. The moon shone silvery on the silver shoulder-knots of Mr. Kelly. The other two gentlemen advanced.
'Nick,' exclaimed Kelly, 'you should be on your road to the coast.'
'At last!' cried Colonel Montague, dropping his cloak.
'A moment, sir,' said Kelly; 'I must dismiss my friend.'
'And would you be so mad? Are you to have nobody to see fair and run for the surgeon while the other gentleman makes his escape? George, I never knew you were so selfish.'
Kelly drew his friend a little way aside.
'Nick, I have that to do which cannot be done before a witness.'
Mr. Wogan merely gaped at this extraordinary speech. He noticed that Kelly looked white and haggard even for a man in the full moonlight.
'When I tell you that my honour hangs on it, that a witness is mere ruin, when I pray you by our old friendship? Nick, you must go out of eye-shot and ear-shot.'
'I think you are crazed,' said Wogan.
'I have obeyed you all night. Things have taken the turn that you must obey me. There is no time for an explanation, the hour presses, and, Nick, my honour hangs on it. You must retire to where you can neither see nor hear us, or I am shamed—lost with the Cause.'
Mr. Kelly had been whispering, his voice trembled as the Cause was named. Wogan had only once seen him thus moved. Had he played his trumps amiss after all? It seemed he had not won the game.
'Very well,' said Wogan. 'Good-night. I will take care you are not troubled with witnesses.'
'No,' said Kelly suddenly, and then 'yes; goodnight.'
He stood looking at Wogan a moment and then hurried off to the Colonel, who seemed, to Wogan's judgment, a man apt to give the Parson his bellyful. Wogan twitched his cloak about him, and took his road down a path, bordered by bushes. It was the path by which they had come into the Park. Wogan was determined that the Parson should not be troubled by witnesses.
From his boyhood Mr. Wogan has had a singular passion for bird's-nesting. He idly scanned the bushes as he marched, for he had heard a twig snap, and in a thick bush he saw what at a first glance certainly resembled a very large brown bird's-nest. Looking more narrowly at this curiosity there were shining eyes under the nest, a circumstance rarely found in animated nature.
Mr. Wogan paused and contemplated this novelty. The bush was deep; the novelty was of difficult access because of the tangled boughs. Wogan reckoned it good to show a puzzled and bemused demeanour, as of one who has moored himself by the punch-bowl.
'It's a very fine bird,' he said aloud. 'I wonder what is the exact species this fine fowl may belong to?'
Then he wagged his head in a tipsy manner, and so lurched down the path singing:
'I heard a bird
Sing in a bush,
And on his head
Was a bowl of punch,
La-la-loodie!'
But Wogan's eye was cocked back over his shoulder, for he hoped that the fowl, thinking the hunter gone, would save him trouble by breaking cover. The bush did not stir, however; all was deadly still.
Wogan lurched back to the bush, still singing, parted the branches, and peered in. His mind, in fact, was quite fixed as to the nature and name of this nocturnal fowl.
He spied into the bush. 'I have heard, in France, of a bird called "the cuckoo Kelly,"' he said, 'I wonder if this can be le cocu Scrope?'
Something glittered in the heart of the bush. Mr. Wogan leaped aside, his hat spun round on his head, he was near blinded by the flame and smoke of a pistol discharged almost à bout portant. A figure had scrambled out of the bush on the further side, and was running at a great pace towards St. James's.
Mr. Wogan gave a view halloo, and set off at the top of his own pace in pursuit. He was swift of foot when young, sound of wind, and long of stride.
At every step he gained on the flying figure, which, he happily remembered, might be armed with another pistol. These commodities usually go in pairs. Reflecting on this, and reckoning his distance to a mathematical nicety, Mr. Wogan applied his toe to that part of the flying gentleman's figure which he judged most accessible and most appropriate to his purpose. The flying gentleman soared softly into a parabola, coming down with a crash, while a pistol fell from his hand. As the priming was spilled, Mr. Wogan let the weapon lie, and courteously assisted the prostrate person to rise.
'I fear I stumbled over you, sir,' he said. 'I hope I was not so unfortunate as to hurt you. Why, 'tis Mr. Scrope, the celebrated critic and amateur of Virgil. Mr. Scrope, the writer of ballads.'
'You are a brutal Irish bully,' said Scrope, whose hands and face were bleeding, for he had the mischance to slip on a gravel path covered with sharp little flints at the top of the Canal.
'Nay, when last we met it was my poetry that you criticised, and now 'tis my manners that do not please you! How could I guess that it was Mr. Scrope who lay in a bush to watch an explanation between gentlemen? This time, sir, of your flight, you have not two horses to carry you off, and I am not barefoot. Suppose we take up our conversation where we left it when last you ran away? You have a sword I see.'
Scrope's sword was already out, and he made a desperate pass at Wogan, who broke ground and drew his own weapon. Scrope was no match for his reach and skill in fence.
'Why, sir, our positions are altered,' said Wogan. 'Now it is you who make errors, and I who play critic and instructor.'
Wogan made a parade in contre de carte.
'Look, sir, your blade was beaten a good half foot out of line. Had I chosen to riposte, my sword-hilt would have rung on your breast-bone. Ah, that was rather better,' he said, stepping a pace back, and offering his breast full like a fencing master with his pupil. 'But you did not really extend yourself. Now, sir, un, deux, doublez, dégagez, vite!' and Mr. Wogan passed his sword through the lappet of Scrope's coat, coming back on guard. 'That is how you ought to lunge. There is another thing that I would have you notice. Coming on rashly as you do, I could stop you at any moment with a time thrust. I have only to extend my long arm, and where are you?'
Scrope broke ground, sweating, and drew breath:
'You cowardly maître d'armes!' he exclaimed between two pants.
'Cowardly, sir? Am I a spy? Or a nameless, obscene rhymer? Do I carry pistols and try to use them? Fie, Mr. Scrope, you must see that a coward who meant to kill you would have done so long ago, and left you here—with an insult, and without a surgeon. You remember the little square at Avignon. You want another lesson.'
Wogan parried, riposted, and just grazed his opponent on the fore-arm.
'Touché!' he said. 'Now you see I do not mean to kill you: at least, not with the sword. To do so would be to oblige a lady whom I have no desire to please. Would you prefer to lay down your weapon and come frankly to my embrace? You remember our fond hugs at Brampton Bryan? By the way, Mr. Scrope,' asked Wogan, as an idea occurred to him, 'the night is warm and you seem heated, do you swim? The place is convenient for a bathe, and sheltered from coarse observation.'
With this remark Wogan switched Scrope's sword out of his hand by a turn of the wrist in flanconade. The blade flew up and fell flashing in the water of the Canal.
'Now, sir, your life is at my mercy. You have betrayed my Cause; you have nearly murdered my friend; you have insulted two ladies of my acquaintance; you have censured my poetry; and you have spoiled my hat with your pistol bullet. I repeat, do you swim? There are two places here mighty convenient for a ducking.'
Here Mr. Wogan caught his enemy by the collar.
'The Canal is shallow; Rosamond's Pool is deep. You have your choice; safety and prose, or poetry and peril?'
Scrope was squirming in Wogan's grip like a serpent. When Mr. Wogan had calmed him he carried Mr. Scrope like a babe to the edge of the Canal.
'One, two, three!' he said, heaving Mr. Scrope backward and forward, like children setting a swing in motion. 'And away!'
A heavy body flew through the air, flashed into the Canal, and did not at first arise to the surface.
'I hope he has not hit his head or broken his neck,' said Wogan with anxiety. 'It would be very disagreeable to have to wade for him.'
His fears were soon set at rest. Scrope scrambled to his feet, the water reaching nearly to his middle. In his dripping perruque he cut a figure odd enough, and sufficiently pitiable.
'A water god! A Triton!' cried Wogan. 'Have you a Virgil in your pocket? You might study the marine deities whom you resemble. You are sure you have again forgotten to bring the Virgil you desired for Mr. Kelly's use at Avignon.'
'Dn you, I shall see your bowels burned before your eyes for this, you Popish traitor,' cried Scrope, shaking his fist.
'That is as may be. You have done what you can to that end already. You have told all you know; as regards myself it is not very much, and I am not in Newgate yet. Moreover, I know a way out. But stop, I cannot possibly permit you to land, for Scrope was wading to the bank. 'Stay where you are and admire the moonshine! If you set foot on shore I will merely throw you in again! You might be hurt.
Scrope turned and was beginning to wade to the other side of the Canal.
'It really is not safe in the middle if you do not swim,' cried Wogan. 'Moreover, I can easily be at the further bank before you.' Mr. Wogan suited the action to the word. He ran round the bank as Scrope waded across. He met his bedraggled victim at the water's edge. Mr. Wogan uttered a joyful whoop; there was a great splash and again Scrope sank beneath the surface. He regained his feet and rose spluttering. 'I do trust, Mr. Scrope, that you are not hectic, or subject to rheumatism,' said Wogan with sympathy.
Wogan walked to the centre of the path across the top of the Canal. He spread his cloak upon the grass and sat down, contemplating the moonlight on Buckingham House. There was a sweet odour of the budding may in the air.
'A more peaceful scene, Mr. Scrope,' he cried, 'I have rarely witnessed. All the poet whom you tried to crush wakes in my bosom. I shall recite Mr. Pope's celebrated Night piece for your benefit.'
Mr. Wogan then arose from his seat on the grass, and, raising his hand towards the Moon, delivered Mr. Pope's lines in his best manner.
1As when the Moon, refulgent lamp of Night,
O'er Heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light.
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'erspreads the solemn scene.'
'You are not listening, Mr. Scrope!'
Scrope was listening, but not to Wogan. Wogan ceased from reciting and listened also. He heard steps and voices of men approaching. Presently, to his great amazement, he recognised the tones of Kelly and Montague, whose mere existence had been banished from his mind. He was yet more surprised when they both came in view, walking very friendly together.
Wogan rose as they drew near him.
'What, both of you?' he exclaimed.
'You do not seem to be glad to see us again, sir?' said Colonel Montague.
'And devil a scratch between the pair of you!' cried Mr. Wogan. 'George, what does this mean? Am I to hear,' he asked with honest indignation, 'that one of you has debased himself to an apology?'
He looked from one to the other much perplexed in mind.
'It is too long a tale for the opportunity, Mr. Wogan,' said the Colonel laughing. 'But what does that mean?'
He pointed to the Water God in the perruque, whose shadow was reflected in the calm bosom of the lake.
'Colonel Montague,' cried Scrope, 'I appeal to you as a Protestant and an officer of his Majesty's for your protection against an Irish, Popish, Jacobite conspirator.'
'That gentleman,' said Wogan, 'whom I have been entertaining with Mr. Pope's poem, is an English Protestant, Whig, spy, and murderer, and even, I suspect, a writer in the newspapers. He persists in staying out in the water there, where I cannot get at him. He is one of the Maritime Powers. Egad! George, you know Mr. Scrope of Northumberland and Grub Street?'
George bowed to Mr. Scrope.
'The fourth time you see, sir, has been lucky, contrary to the proverb,' he said politely.
'The poor devil's teeth are chattering audibly,' said Colonel Montague. 'May I ask you to explain his situation, Mr. Wogan?'
'Faith, sir, the story, as you say, is too long for the occasion. And I want an explanation myself. After a gentleman has trod on another gentleman's foot, here you both are, well and smiling. I am betrayed,' cried Mr. Wogan, 'in the character of a friend. I could not have thought it of George.'
'What was the pistol shot we heard, Nick?' asked Mr. Kelly.
'That was Mr. Scrope firing at me.'
'And the view halloo that might have wakened the dead?'
'That was me remonstrating with Mr. Scrope. But I crave your pardon for my thoughtlessness. No doubt the noise brought up some ungentlemanly person who interrupted you in your explanation. You will begin it again? Mr. Scrope and I will be delighted to see fair play, but you will see it from the water, Mr. Scrope. You don't come out yet.'
'Our honours, about which you are so kindly concerned, Mr. Wogan, are as intact as our persons,' said the Colonel.
'Then you have been finding out that George saved your life, or you saved George's, some time in the dark ages, all to prevent you killing each other in a friendly way?'
'You are in an ingenious error, Mr. Wogan; but Mr. Johnson and I have important business together in the town, and we must bid you farewell. Pray allow that dripping gentleman to land and go to bed.'
'But I cannot take him with me, and it is purely inconvenient to let him follow me, for the precise reason that he would not follow me at all, but my friend Mr. Johnson. I am like my countryman who caught a Tartar in the Muscovite wars. To be sure, I might tie him to a tree with his garters. Come out, Mr. Scrope, and be tied to a tree!'
'No, no,' said the Colonel; 'your friend will die of a cold.'
'Then what am I to be doing?' asked Wogan. 'He is a very curious gentleman.'
'I must leave that for you and your friend to determine,' said Colonel Montague. He turned to Kelly. 'In ten minutes,' said he, moving off.
'In ten minutes, Corydon,' said Kelly, and Wogan thought he heard the Colonel mutter, 'Oh, damnation!'
It was all Greek to Wogan, and Kelly seemed in no mind to translate the Greek for his baser comprehension.
'Be off, Nick,' said he. 'I have ten minutes to wait here, and for ten minutes Mr. Scrope shall stand in the pond. You have that much law. It is time enough for your long legs.'
'And do you think I am leaving Mr. Scrope to follow you while I go quietly to bed?' asked Wogan, who was in truth hurt by the proposal. 'No. I shall take him with me. It is the best plan after all.'
'It will not matter, I think, whether he follows me or no; and, Nick, as to going to bed, I hope it will not be on this side of the Channel. Truth, I should be blaming you as it is for your delay, but I have no heart to it.' He had dropped into the Irish accent, a thing very rare with him. 'For the world topples about me to-night, and the sight of a friend is very pleasant to me. There! It is all I had to say to you. Good-night. Good-bye.'
He clapped his hand on Wogan's shoulder and then sat himself down on the grass. If Mr. Scrope had had his wits about him, he might have chosen this occasion to creep out of the water, for Wogan was paying little heed to him.
'George,' said he, 'it seems the game has gone against you. But I have the simplest plan imaginable to put matters straight. What if you give me the key to that pretty despatch-box? You see if I go to your lodging and am taken—'
'No!' cried Kelly.
'But yes,' said Wogan, seating himself on the grass beside Kelly. 'If I am taken, why, it's just Nick Wogan that's taken, and no one but Nick Wogan is a penny the worse. But if you go and are taken—well, there's the Doctor's daughter.'
Kelly would not listen to reason. It was not, he said, a mere matter of slipping into the house and burning the cyphers. But a man must pay for his own shortcomings, and the whole aspect of affairs had changed. And then he fell to thanking Wogan, which thanks Wogan cut short; and so they sat in the moonlight like a couple of owls, only they did not talk.
'You are very thoughtful,' said Kelly, with a tired sort of laugh, 'and you have thought most of your ten minutes away.'
'I was thinking,' said Wogan, 'of a word you used to say about a little parsonage in Ireland and your Latin books, and an acre or two of land, and how, like a fool, I laughed at you for speaking so.'
Kelly rose very quickly to his feet.
'Come, Nick,' said he almost sharply. 'My ten minutes are almost up. I cannot watch Scrope after that, and you may just as well save your life as lose it.'
'I mean to take him with me,' said Wogan. 'Come out, my friend. I'll give him the slip, never fear, when I want to.'
'And then you will start for France?'
Mr. Wogan did not mention a couple of obstacles which would at all events delay his departure. In the first place he had a little matter of business with Lord Sidney Beauclerk, and in the second it would be no more than politeness to inquire after Kelly's health before he went abroad. He kept silent upon this subject, and again summoned Scrope, who waded with his teeth chattering from the water. He drove Scrope before him along a bypath, leaving the Parson standing alone in the moonlight. Mr. Wogan had no expectation that he would ever see his friend's face again, and therefore he swore most heartily at Scrope.
'Come, my man,' said he, 'I am to see that you do not catch cold,' and he marched Scrope at a round pace eastwards as far as Temple Bar, and thence northwards to Soho, and from Soho westwards.
Scrope had been enjoined strictly not to open his lips; but, on the other hand, he heard a great deal about his own character, his merits as a poet, and the morals of his family, which was no doubt new to him. Some three hours later, when the moon had long since set, the pair came to the fields behind Holland House, and there Wogan took his leave of Scrope. The man could do no more harm for that night, and he had for the moment lost his taste for spying.
'You will stay here for five minutes,' said Wogan, who in five seconds was lost in the darkness. He knew a shy place in Westminster where he could pass the night undisturbed. As he laid his head on the pillow it seemed to him to be a good year since he had driven off from Sir Harry Goring's house in the morning. And what of the Parson, whom he had last seen, a sombre figure in the moonlight by the water of St. James's Park? Well, the night had only then begun for Kelly, who, to be sure, had lain abed all the day before.