Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 296
In the small room the candles burnt motionless, and with long flames, above the tablecloth. The noises from without increased, so that there appeared to be an army of cooks ready to do their duties. Major Penruddock gazed over his shoulder as if with an angry hint to Mr. Harcourt; and Mr. Harcourt, his face very pale, avoided the Major’s eye.
And suddenly Mr. Jack Williamson burst out with a horse-laugh —
“I will get me a suit of canary yellow. I am of the same complexion as Mr. Harcourt, and this colour, as I saw this morning, admirably becomes him.”
At this reference to the encounter of the morning Mr. Bettesworth scowled upon his retainer. It appeared to him that this must cause at least an instant challenge between all the four gentlemen. And suddenly the Major, tired of frowning and blinking at his ally, said roundly —
“Mr. Harcourt, I think you have a message to communicate to Mr. Bettesworth.”
“But, surely,” Mr. Bettesworth said, almost cordially, for he felt at peace with his kind, “business will wait till after supper?”
“We shall eat,” Major Penruddock said grimly, “with the better appetite if this is first dispatched.” Mr. Bettesworth replied that he was at Mr. Harcourt’s service.
He walked stiffly to the door, Mr. Harcourt waiting upon him with a mien in which pallor and effrontery were equally mingled.
Major Penruddock opened the door very smartly, and smartly closed it behind them. For the moment there was a dead silence. The Major stood with his back to the door, his arms crossed akimbo. And suddenly there went up a huge outcry. It was compounded of cries, oaths, shuffling of footsteps, and the shrieks of women. It shook the candles in their sockets; it reverberated through the whole small room; it swelled to enormous proportions; it took the aspect of multivoiced cheers in the hundred echoes of the stone-flagged hall. And then, slowly, it died down; it receded; it became a sustained buzz, rising now and again, and again falling to a level.
“Gentlemen,” Major Penruddock said to his guests, “God be thanked, the country is saved, and the town of Ashford may sleep in its beds to-night. The Jacobite Duke of Berwick is taken!”
CHAPTER II.
WHEN the door closed behind him, the first thing that assailed Mr. Bettesworth was, in an almost impenetrable darkness, the stench of humanity. And then hands that seemed to be all thumbs, and to be of enormous weight, were laid upon him. This outrage affected him as if it were something incredible. An enormous and bewildering noise went up; there was hardly any light in a passage packed with human beings like cattle in a stack-yard, and all crying out. His hands were pinned to his side by the bodies of other men, his questions were inaudible in their outcry. It was all so utterly beyond belief, and beyond imagination, that his senses seemed to refuse their functions. Accustomed to command, he was in the grip of a force whose very nature was unknown to him. Accustomed to think at his leisure, he had suddenly nothing to think of. He was used to being solitary in large rooms, to thinking himself godlike and set apart from the common herd; he found himself suddenly in the dark, pressed up against the vilest creatures, who offended his every sense. His stomach turned within him. He saw, as if in silhouettes, the cock of hats, the gleam of pikes, and the faces of men inspired by panic and by
execration. He was jammed against a wall so that his spine seemed to be compressed; a hard object smote him upon the mouth, and his lips and chin suddenly grew wet; the ribbon being torn from his queue, locks of hair fell across his face. He became blind; his wrists were pinioned by hands behind his back; he was pushed forward, hurtling against other men’s bodies; and the intolerable babel of voices swelled and swelled.
He had, at last, a sensation of standing solitary. Gyves, he realized, were clapped upon his wrists. Then his wig was pulled back from over his eyes. He was breathless, he was enraged beyond measure; an enormous ball seemed to gather in his throat, so that he choked.
Mr. Justice Stareleigh and Mr. Justice Wyndham Bestwell stood with their heads together in the extreme inner corner of the Ordinary Room. Mr. Bestwell was so tiny and so jaundiced in the face that he resembled a yellow dwarf. Mr. Stareleigh, who kept harriers, had a face the colour of his copper horn; his wig was knotted and tasselled like a coachman’s, his stomach resembled a bag-pudding, and his legs were so bandy that a full foot and a half of wainscoting showed between his knees. Mr. Bestwell kept the gilt knob of his cane perpetually beside his mouth. He talked incessantly in a high, outraged voice, leaning his mouth to Mr. Stareleigh’s ear and gesticulating with his left hand, so that he resembled a soldier in the smoke of battle. Mr. Bettesworth was stood in the centre of the long room, between four fat and agitated men holding enormous pikes and unlit horn-lanterns. His hands were manacled behind his back, his blue coat was torn from neck to knee, his gold lace hung in shreds all over the garment; his sword was gone, his scabbard broken, his wig lay at his feet; and from his broken lip there ran down a stream of black blood that dripped upon his neck-ruffles and his waistcoat. And upon him all the faces in the room were turned with looks of panic, of execration, of savage joy, and of leering cruelty. The crowd at the bottom of the room was kept in place by one of the Ordinary tables. There were men of all shapes and sizes — smugglers lacking eyes, farmers with wigs of horsehair, drawers in their shirt-sleeves, an apothecary with a black patch over his eye, a farrier who had brought his sledgehammer with which to protect himself; and shaking Ben, a palsied wretch dressed in fragments of fishing-net knotted together with string, one of the shoulders entirely bare and begrimed with cow-dung, his face expressing a leering joy, his right hand brandishing a marrow-bone which, in the confusion, he had stolen from the kitchen.
All these faces expressed a panic-stricken joy at the arrest of a public enemy, and a malignant regret that he had been taken out of their hands, so that they could not tear him limb from limb.
And so stunned was Mr. Bettesworth by the blows that he had received, and so unthinkable to him was his position, that he found no word at all to say. It was as if, for the moment, he had been visited by a stroke of apoplexy. He did not even understand that he had been arrested on a warrant from the two Justices. It would have been impossible for him to imagine that he could be arrested; rather his mind ran dimly on riots and seditious tumults. He imagined himself in the hands of bandits, — possibly of a band of smugglers who would hold him for ransom, — and he tried to look round to see how Mr. Harcourt had fared. But at his first inclination to make a movement his guards seized his shoulders with airs of extraordinary emotion, and shouted in his ears ferocious threats. He remembered, indeed, Lydia Chuckel’s warnings of the night before; he remembered, too, Mr. Chuckel’s perturbation of the morning; and at that moment Mr. Chuckel himself, pushing out from the crowd of wretches at the bottom of the room, crossed his line of vision, and, hatless and perspiring, ran to the top of the room and began to whisper to the ill-assorted pair who were continuing their excited but smothered colloquy. Mr. Bettesworth imagined that these two must be the head of the gang of smugglers, and that Mr. Harcourt must have heard them; but almost immediately afterwards — his clothes a little ruffled by the pressure of the crowd, but grinning obliquely — Mr. Harcourt passed him also, and when he was level with Mr. Bettesworth he held his handkerchief to his face to hide a spasm of laughter. Then slowly something of a revelation came to Mr. Bettesworth’s mind, and having now an object upon which it could fittingly vent itself, rage arose in Mr. Bettesworth’s heart. He remembered that the night before Mr. Harcourt and the Major, to his own knowledge, had been in secret conclave with Chuckel upon the terrace.
Mr. Harcourt, too, with his constrained manner, had accompanied him out of the room, and had done it at the bidding of Major Penruddock. It appeared to him absolutely plain that these two, in conjunction with the defaulting steward, had taken advantage of the lawlessness and inaccessibility of that place to call upon the smugglers and desperadoes to remove him, at any rate for a time. The like had been done even in his own Wiltshire, and in the town of Wilton, not so many years ago, and Kent was renowned for its lawlessness. It had its colonies of Jesuits; it had many refugees from the wrath of the law in other countries; its smugglers were notorious, its highwaymen the most formidable that England produced; it was infested with French and Jacobite spies. Thus it appeared to him to be certain that he had been captured by one or the other kind of outlaw.
A measure of silence fell upon the room when it was observed that Mr. Justice Bestwell was leaving the little group of four to approach the prisoner. He walked in a singular and prancing manner, kicking up his lean knees and swaying his cane for all the world like a drum-major. His coat-skirts and his hat were alike of enormous dimensions, so that he had the air of being pressed down into the floor. He pressed the porcelain apple that formed the head of his cane to the side of his jaw, and asked, in an extraordinary, perturbed manner, if Mr. Bettesworth had anything to say.
Mr. Bettesworth had some difficulty in speaking, for his lip was very much contused, and his breath came with such rage through his nostrils that he was in danger of bursting a blood-vessel. It was the sight of Mr. Harcourt’s laughter that had so unnerved him. And that he might not render himself ridiculous by imprecations and by threats that, for the moment, he had no power to put into execution, he remained stark silent and reflected. This silence threw the little Justice into an intolerable panic.
“If you will not speak,” he said, “we must put you to the torture.” He turned his head over his shoulder and squeaked —
“He! brother Stareleigh, must he not be put to the torture?”
Mr. Stareleigh’s bandy knees trembled so much that he, too, had a difficulty in finding utterance.
Mr. Harcourt said, with his humorous, persuasive manner —
“Oh, come! This is no trial. This is only a capture. You have no right to make him plead if he will not. Let him be taken away and clapped up, and there an end of it.”
Having counted forty, Mr. Bettesworth spoke —
“Sir,” he said to Mr. Bestwell, who quivered at the sound of his voice, “upon this outrage against my person I have no comments to make, but when I am rescued Mr. Harcourt will know what he has to await. As for yourself, I will say this: that I will use every penny that I possess to get you hanged. And if the Government cannot come at you, I will raise men to do it, even though it should be five troops of horse.”
These words, which were plainly audible throughout the room, raised anew a tremendous clamour; so that every fist and every weapon in the room were brandished towards Mr. Bettesworth. For every man there imagined that Mr. Bettesworth was the Duke of Berwick, and that he had near by, in the marshes, a huge troop of Jacobite soldiers who were marching upon the town to set flames to it, to murder all the townsmen, and to establish there the headquarters of King James. And in the midst of this tumult Mr. Bettesworth was dragged away by his guards, pushed through a door into the inn-garden, and so dragged up the street; whilst a crowd, pouring out of the other entrance, fell over each other’s legs in a desperate rush towards the Round House, where Mr. Bettesworth was to be interned. The two Justices of the Peace remained with Mr. Chuckel and Mr. Harcourt, solitary in the large room.
“Sirs,” Mr. Harcourt said, with his simper, “by this night’s work you shall have made yourselves the most famous men in England. King George, himself, will shower blessings upon you; and no doubt you shall be made Knights of the Shire, or Peers of the Realm, and have all the honours that you can stomach.”
“But,” said Mr. Bestwell, “what if the Duke be indeed rescued and we all hanged? It will be many hours before the military arm can come down from Canterbury to strike at the rebels in the marshes. Nay, who knows even where these rebels are? For some say that they are here and some say they are there.”
“Sir,” Mr. Harcourt said, “I think you may very quietly rest in your beds. For upon the news that this Duke of Berwick is taken all his forces will vanish in the thin air as if they had never been.”
“Nevertheless,” said Mr. Justice Stareleigh, “would it not be a very wise precaution if we should guard well the spot where we lie, and call all the ablebodied men that we may to surround our house?”
“Sir,” Mr. Harcourt said, with polite inattention, “it would be excellent! Excellent!”
He had perceived that Mr. Roland Bettesworth and Mr. Williamson had entered the far end of the room. He looked with apprehension at Mr. Chuckel, at the Justices, and at the open door that led into the dark garden. But immediately behind the two gentlemen came Major Penruddock. Mr. Williamson was laughing consumedly, so that he rolled in his stride.
“So,” he said, “you have taken Old Ramrod for the Duke of Berwick! Egad, here’s a pretty, humorous, drunken pickle!”
Mr. Roland, however, was more serious, inasmuch as he expected that when he again found his brother, Mr. Bettesworth would be overcome by a cold and impetuous rage which might well be visited upon all around him.
“Sirs,” he said to the magistrates, “I do not know what you have done to Mr. Bettesworth, but you have been right royally fooled, and it is like to cost you a pretty penny.”
Mr. Bestwell and Mr. Stareleigh both attempted to speak at once; the one in high tones, the other in very low. They fell silent; and then Mr. Chuckel, his hard blue eyes seeming to shower contempt and triumph upon Mr. Roland’s face, said unctuously —
“Sir, since this gentleman, Mr. Harcourt, of His Majesty’s Private Council, has sworn that this traitor is the Duke of Berwick, and since we have her ladyship’s letter to prove it—”
“Gadzooks!” Mr. Roland exclaimed. “Her ladyship’s letter!”
“Sir,” Mr. Chuckel said, “her ladyship’s letter said that this man was her cousin, and sure all the world knows that her ladyship is a cousin to the Duke of Berwick—”
“Sir,” Mr. Justice Bestwell shrieked suddenly, “I do not know who you may be, or by what authority you question us, but look upon the inside of this wig.”
Mr. Bestwell had, indeed, rescued Mr. Bettesworth’s wig from the floor; for being an economical man, and having, moveover, a taste for very large garments, this covering, whose locks would have fallen almost to his buttocks, appeared to him of supreme desirability. He held out the red satin lining towards Mr. Roland. Upon this, that it might be more easily identified when taken to the barber’s, there had been embroidered a capital letter “B” in gleaming gold, and above it Mr. Bettesworth’s: crest, which was a wild-cat rampant.
“Sir,” Mr. Bestwell said, “what should this letter and this device mean but that its owner is the Duke of Berwick? For Berwick is in Scotland, and the Duke claims to be a royal Duke of Scotland; and this lion rampant, what is it but the Arms of Scotland, as all may see it upon the Arms of our beloved Lord the King ever since the blessed day of union between the kingdoms?”
“Sir,” Mr. Roland said, “the beast is a wild-cat.”
“And what,” Mr. Bestwell asked triumphantly, “is a lion but a wild-cat?”
“And remember,’’ Mr. Chuckel continued,” again, the phrasing of her ladyship’s letter where her ladyship commends me upon my head to look after the comfort of this man as if he were the King or his brother. What is this but to say that this is a Royal personage, come to prepare the way for the king from over the water?”
“And,” Mr. Bestwell said, “he did utter the most horrible threats of having me hanged; of raising troops of horse; of devastating the country. Who could do such things but a usurper?”
“Why,” Mr. Roland said, “this is a very good hearing, for since this gentleman is so near akin to me, I, also, must be demonstrably a royal Duke, for you have proved it very satisfactorily upon my brother.”
Mr. Justice Stareleigh’s mind moved with some slowness if with considerable ferocity. He had by now arrived at the comprehension of the fact that these were strangers.
“Who be you to question the Justices?” he rumbled, with a deep fury, from his stomach. “Kiss my wig! I will show you what Justices be in Kent. I will commit you. I will commit you all. I am in a very committing frame of mind, and will have Habeas-corpus burnt by the town-crier;” and his voice died away into a rumble of obscene ejaculations.
“Brother Stareleigh,” Mr. Justice Bestwell exclaimed, “I think that is a very fine idea. I think you have the right of it. How can we tell that these are not officers of the Duke’s force now in the marshes?”
Mr. Chuckel commented suddenly —
“Your Worships, that I would have had all along. For these gentlemen came also with the Duke from I know not where, descending, as it appeared, from heaven, but coming, of a truth, from the King of France’s dominions.”
“Ha!” Mr. Justice Bestwell exclaimed, “let us arrest them at once. Let us send for paper and pens and sign the warrants.”
“My friends,” Mr. Roland exclaimed, “we are but two to five, but I think we can let a little blood before you make much pen play.”
Mr. Chuckel slipped slowly behind the fat Justice. Mr. Harcourt, anew, cast glances towards the garden door. Mr. Justice Stareleigh had not yet perceived the tenor of Mr. Roland’s remarks, but with a scream of incredulous rage Mr. Bestwell suddenly drew his sword, which was a great deal too large for him.
“Ho!” he exclaimed, “shall we be threatened? Ho! we are swordsmen, too! Ho! I am a match for six Papists and French frogs!” And at each ejaculation he leapt into the air, feinted towards Mr. Roland’s face, and uttered a shrill and ape-like cry of rage.
“Gentlemen! gentlemen,” Major Penruddock exclaimed. “I beg your Worships to listen to me.” He stepped with a business-like calm between Mr. Roland and the little Justice, whose sword he brushed aside with his hand. “This is a sad misunderstanding,” he said. “It is lamentable to see gentlemen fall out about follies.” He looked gravely upon Mr. Bestwell and gravely upon Mr. Roland. He took a pinch of snuff whilst he marshalled his words, and reflected upon his course of action. To the one he said —
