Long he laughed and merrily.

"Eloped for Gretna Green with Tony Creagh last night, and I, poor forsaken swain, faith! I do not pursue."

You may be sure that dashed me. I felt as a trapped fox with the dogs closing in. The future loomed up clear before me, Aileen hand in hand with Volney scattering flowers on my grave in sentimental mood. The futility of my obstinacy made me bitter.

"Come, Montagu! Listen to reason," urged the tempter. "You get in my way, but I don't want to let you be sponged out. The devil of it is that if I get you a pardon--and I'm not sure that I can get it--you'll marry the girl. I might have you shipped to the Barbadoes as a slave with some of the others, but to be frank I had rather see you hanged than give you so scurvy an end. Forswear what is already lost and make an end of it."

I turned away blackly. "You have my answer. Sir Robert, you have played your last card. Now let me die in peace."

He shrugged impatiently and left me. "A fool's answer, yet a brave man's too," he muttered.

Aileen, heart-broken with the failure of her mission, reached town on Thursday and came at once to the prison. Her face was as the face of troubled waters. I had no need to ask the question on my lips. With a sobbing cry she threw herself on my breast. My heart was woe for her.

Utter weariness was in her manner. All through the long days and nights she had agonized, and now at last despaired. There seemed no tears left to shed.

Long I held her tight, teeth set, as one who would keep his own perforce from that grim fate which would s.n.a.t.c.h his love from him. She shivered to me half-swooning, pale and of wondrous beauty, nesting in my arms as a weary homing-bird. A poignant grief o'erflowed in me.

"Oh, Aileen! At least we have love left," I cried, breaking the long silence.

"Always! Always!" her white lips answered.

"Then let us regret nothing. They can do with me what they will. What are life and death when in the balance dwells love?" I cried, rapt in unearthly worship of her.

Her eyes found mine. "Oh, Kenneth, I cannot--I cannot--let you go."

Sweet and lovely she was beyond the dream of poet. I trembled in an ecstasy of pain. From the next cell there came to us softly the voice of a poor condemned Appin Stewart. He was crooning that most tender and heart-breaking of all strains. Like the pibroch's mournful sough he wailed it out, the song that cuts deep to a Scotchman's heart in time of exile.

"Lochabar no more, Lochabar no more.

We'll maybe return to Lochabar no more."

I looked at Aileen, my face working. A long breath came whistling through her lips. Her dear face was all broken with emotion. I turned my eyes aside, not daring to trust myself. Through misty lashes again I looked.

Her breast lifted and fell in shaking sobs, the fount of tears touched at last. Together we wept, without shame I admit it, while the Stewart's harrowing strain ebbed to a close. To us it seemed almost as the keening of the coronach.

So in the quiet that comes after storm, her dear supple figure still in my arms, Sir Robert Volney came in unexpectedly and found us. He stopped at the door, startled at her presence, and methought a shadow fell on his face. Near to death as I was, the quality of his courage was so fine and the strength of the pa.s.sion in him so great that he would have changed places with me even then.

Aileen went up to him at once and gave him her hand. She was very simple, her appeal like a child's for directness.

"Sir Robert, you have already done much for me. I will be so bold as to ask you to do more. Here iss my lover's life in danger. I ask you to save it."

"That he may marry you?"

"If G.o.d wills."

Volney looked at her out of a haggard face, all broken by the emotions which stirred him.

A minute pa.s.sed, two minutes. He fought out his fight and won.

"Aileen," he said at last, "before heaven I fear it is too late, but what man can do, that will I do."

He came in and shook hands with me. "I'll say good-bye, Montagu. 'Tis possible I'll see you but once more in this world. Yet I will do my best.

Don't hope too much, but don't despair."

There was unconscious prophecy in his words. I was to see him but the once more, and then the proud, gallant gentleman, now so full of energy, was lying on his deathbed struck out of life by a foul blow.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SHADOW FALLS

It would appear that Sir Robert went direct from the prison to the club room at White's. He was observed to be gloomy, preoccupied, his manner not a little perturbed. The usual light smile was completely clouded under a gravity foreign to his nature. One may guess that he was in no humour to carry coals. In a distant corner of the room he seated himself and fell to frowning at the table on which his elbow rested. At no time was he a man upon whom one would be likely to foist his company undesired, for he had at command on occasion a hauteur and an aloofness that challenged respect even from the most inconsiderate.

We must suppose that he was moved out of his usual indifference, that some long-dormant spring of n.o.bility was quickened to a renewed life, that a girl's truth and purity, refining his selfish pa.s.sion, had bitten deep into the man's callous worldliness. For long he sat in a sombre silence with his head leaning on his hand, his keen mind busy with the problem--so I shall always believe--as to how he might even yet save me from the gallows.

By some strange hap it chanced that Sir James Craven, excited with drink, the bile of his saturnine temper stirred to malignity by heavy losses at cards, alighted from his four in hand at White's shortly after Volney.

Craven's affairs had gone from bad to worse very rapidly of late. He had been playing the races heavily and ruin stared the man in the face. More than suspected of dubious play at cards, it had been scarce a week since the stewards of a leading racetrack had expelled him for running crosses.

Any day a debtor's prison might close on him. Within the hour, as was afterward learned, his former companion Frederick Prince of Wales had given him the cut direct on the Mall. Plainly his star was on the decline, and he raged in a futile pa.s.sion of hatred against the world. Need it be said that of all men he most hated his supplanter in the Prince of Wales'

good-will, Sir Robert Volney.

To Volney then, sitting gloomily in his distant solitude, came Craven with murder in his heart and a bitter jest on his lips. At the other side of the table he found a seat and glared across at his rival out of a pa.s.sion-contorted face. Sir Robert looked past him coldly, negligently, as if he had not been there, and rising from his seat moved to the other side of the room. In the manner of his doing it there was something indescribably insulting; so it seemed to Topham Beauclerc, who retailed to me the story later.

Craven's evil glance followed Volney, rage in his bloodshot eyes. If a look could kill, the elegant macaroni had been a dead man then. It is to be guessed that Craven struggled with his temper and found himself not strong enough to put a curb upon it; that his heady stress of pa.s.sion swept away his fear of Volney's sword. At all events there he sat glowering blackly on the man at whose charge he chose to lay all his misfortunes, what time he gulped down like water gla.s.s after gla.s.s of brandy. Presently he got to his feet and followed Sir Robert, still dallying no doubt with the fascinating temptation of fixing a quarrel upon his rival and killing him. To do him justice Volney endeavoured to avoid an open rupture with the man. He appeared buried in the paper he was reading.

"What news?" asked Craven abruptly.

For answer the other laid down the paper, so that Sir James could pick it up if he chose.

"I see your old rival Montagu is to dance on air to-morrow. 'Gad, you'll have it all your own way with the wench then," continued Craven boisterously, the liquor fast mounting to his head.

Volney's eyes grew steelly. He would have left, but the burly purple-faced baronet cut off his retreat.

"Damme, will you drink with me, or will you play with me, Volney?"

"Thanks, but I never drink nor play at this time of day, Sir James. If it will not inconvenience you to let me pa.s.s----"

With a foolish laugh, beside himself with rage and drink, Craven flung him back into his chair. "'Sdeath, don't be in such a hurry! I want to talk to you about-- Devil take it, what is it I want to talk about?-- Oh, yes! That pink and white baggage of yours. Stap me, the one look ravished me! Pity you let a slip of a lad like Montagu oust you."

"That subject is one which we will not discuss, Sir James," said Volney quietly. "It is not to be mentioned in my presence."

"The devil it isn't. I'm not in the habit of asking what I may talk about.

As for this mistress of yours----"

Sir Robert rose and stood very straight. "I have the honour to inform you that you are talking of a lady who is as pure as the driven snow."

Buck Craven stared. "After Sir Robert Volney has pursued her a year?" he asked with venomous spleen, his noisy laugh echoing through the room.

I can imagine how the fellow said it, with what a devilish concentration of malice. He had the most irritating manner of any man in England; I never heard him speak without wanting to dash my fist in his sneering face.