"I do not require to be schooled in my duties either to Lady Judith or any one else," replied Topsparkle, livid with rage under his artificial carnation, which had been laid on by a less cunning hand than that of Fetis, and which made hectic spots upon that death-like countenance.

Lavendale sauntered to the door, taking leave of his host with a low bow; the Swiss started from his slumbers and flung open the double-doors, and the link-boys ran forward to light the last departing guest to his chair; and then the heavy doors closed with a clang; and the great house in Soho Square sank into silence for the rest of the night.

CHAPTER IX.

"THE DEVIL'S DEAD, THE FURIES NOW MAY LAUGH."

Among the habitations of eighteenth-century London, it would have been difficult to find a more dismal den than that house of entertainment which Mr. Marjory and his family kept for insolvent debtors, and which, with two other houses of the same stamp, formed a kind of antechamber to the Fleet Prison, where Governor Bambridge at this period reigned supreme. Hovels there were more squalid, rottener roofs, and darker garrets than those of Marjory, within sound of Bow bells; abodes where crime was rifer, and where midnight orgies and midnight quarrels were of a more brutal character than such as resounded under Mr. Marjory's roof-tree. But for sheer gloom, and for dulness and despair, the Marjory establishment was scarcely to be matched. There needed no inscription above the greasy portal to tell that he who entered there left hope behind him. There was an atmosphere of hopelessness in that establishment which needed no translation in words.

And yet there were rioters who drank and gamed and put on a show of joviality within those abhorred precincts; but these were only the hardened few--reprobates so steeped in vice and ignominy, that they would have made merry in Newgate on the eve of an execution.

Louis Fetis had been a dweller in that sinister abode for more than a week. At the commencement of his captivity he had carried himself haughtily enough; had bl.u.s.tered and swaggered, and told his gaolers that the debt for which he was arrested was but a bagatelle, which he should be able to settle off-hand directly he had communicated with his friends. He had sent a ticket-porter to Soho Square and Poland Street, with messages to his wife and to Mr. Topsparkle. There had been some difficulty about finding letter-paper, or he would have written; but he was too impatient to wait while Marjory's down-at-heel daughter hunted for a couple of sheets of paper and a pen. The reply in both cases had been in the negative. His wife could not help him; his master would not.

"You have been drawing upon me very heavily of late, my good Fetis, and I have your notes of hand to the amount of some thousands," wrote Topsparkle. "You cannot, therefore, expect that I shall hasten to your rescue, when a less forbearing creditor claps you in prison. Your house and furniture must be worth something; so, no doubt, Mrs. Fetis will be able to raise money enough to extricate you. For my own part, I am your milch cow no longer."

Mrs. Fetis informed her dearest husband, upon paper blotted with her tears, that she had not a guinea in her possession. She would have flown to him to comfort and weep with him, but the shock of his arrest had made her so ill that she was unable to leave her bed.

Fetis burst into a torrent of Gallic oaths after reading this affectionate scrawl. She was a traitress, a hypocrite, the falsest of women. She was glad to be free of him, to coquette with the fine gentlemen who frequented his house, to flaunt in brocade and powder, and gamble and drink ratafia with those middle-aged bucks who had admired her on the stage, who had watched her dancing and simpering behind the oil-lamps in a ballet divertiss.e.m.e.nt.

"She is a whited sepulchre," said Fetis; and then he sat down in a dusty corner of the shabby sitting-room at Marjory's, and sobbed aloud. He felt himself abandoned by all the world, alone in his misery like a poisoned rat in a hole.

"It is not the wine-merchant," he said to himself; "'tis these two--traitor and traitress--false master, false wife. These two have plotted together to shut me up in gaol. He fears me and the secrets I can tell, and he thinks that here the scorpion cannot sting."

He asked for pens, ink, and paper, intending to pen a denunciation of his late master for one of the newspapers; and again there was a difficulty. Miss Marjory could not find a sheet of letter-paper anywhere. It was odd; but there had been such a call for it yesterday, there was not a sheet left, and it was too late to get any out of doors.

"'Twill do to-morrow," answered Fetis moodily; "what I have to write cannot be written in an hour."

He sat by the smoky fire, brooding over a letter to the _Flying Post_--a letter in which, without betraying himself, he should blast Mr.

Topsparkle's reputation. He could not afford to speak plainly, but he could insinuate evil; he could deal in such slander as the town loved, and do infinite harm without risking his own neck.

The idea of this mischief comforted him a little; but when the next day came, he was too ill to rise from the pallet which he occupied in a draughty apartment on the first floor, where there were three other beds. It was a back room, looking into a yard, and affording a prospect of dead wall and water-b.u.t.t. He was not alone in his indisposition.

There was an invalid in the next bed, hidden from him by a faded old green baize curtain--a man who had been delirious in the night, but who lay for the greater part of the day in a kind of stupor. Fetis took both these conditions to be the consequences of a heavy drinking bout.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances Mr. Fetis would perhaps have hardly been ill enough to keep his bed all that November day; but he lay there in an apathy of despair, waiting for his fate; wondering helplessly whether Topsparkle would relent, and hasten to liberate him, and whether that false wife of his would think better of her treachery, and come to his relief. He had a racking headache, and he dozed a good deal. And so the day pa.s.sed.

He got up next morning, in spite of heavy head and aching limbs, and went down to the sitting-room, where he breakfasted in his solitary corner, shunning all companionship with his fellow-captives--an elderly parson, a scribbler of the Philter type, and a decayed tradesman--all equally hopeless and dismal.

"We are kept here to swell Bambridge's profits," protested the parson.

"Charges are being run up against us all for our commons in this wretched hole, and still worse extortions of a so-called legal nature; and I am told there is a fever of some kind in the house, and that we may all sicken of it before we are transferred to the Fleet."

Fetis heard almost indifferently. He had entered that accursed house in a state of low fever, disturbed mentally and bodily. It seemed to him he could scarcely become worse than he was. He sat in his corner by the fireplace, sipping brandy all through the dreary winter day; would fain have attempted that letter to the newspaper, but there was again a difficulty about writing materials, and he had not strength to be persistent, and insist that he should be accommodated in that way. A lethargy was creeping over him; he sat staring at the dull fire, sometimes shivering, sometimes oppressed by heat. Next morning he awoke in a much worse condition, and could not lift his head from his pillow; next night he was delirious, and for more than a week he languished in a state betwixt apathy and raving madness; then came a lull in the fever, and one afternoon, in a lucid interval, he heard the word smallpox p.r.o.nounced by an ancient beldame who had been the only attendant upon him and his neighbour; and then gradually--for there was a dulness in his mind which made him slow to apprehend anything--he began to understand what had happened to him.

He had been put into a room with a smallpox patient, and he was smitten by that fell disease. The house was infected; he had been sent there to his doom. It was Topsparkle's scheme for getting rid of a dangerous tool. The arrest had been prompted by Topsparkle; the whole business planned by Topsparkle.

He asked to see Mr. Marjory, and after much expostulation and heart-sickening delay the proprietor of the den appeared.

Fetis accused him of murder, of having entrapped an unconscious victim into his poisonous den, with deliberate purpose to compa.s.s his death.

"You have been bribed to get me out of the way," he said. "This house of yours is a _guetapens_;" and then he entreated that he might be removed to the Fleet prison till his debts were paid.

"You'll have first to settle with me," answered Marjory, "and the tipstaff, and the warders;" and thereupon he produced a bill of nearly thirty pounds.

Fetis had entered the house with less than thirty shillings on his person, and the greater part of those shillings had dribbled away in payment for drams. He had less than a crown left.

"Send for my wife," he screamed, "send for that cold-blooded hussy! I have a house full of furniture, I have powerful friends. Send for the Duke of Wharton."

"What, all the way to Spain? I doubt Wharton is almost as hard up as your honour, and could scarcely help you if he had a mind to it," jeered Marjory.

"Send for the Duke of Bolton."

"How many more Dukes would your worship summon? There is my little account, Mr. Fetis, and till that is squared you'll not budge. Smallpox be d--d! There's no such thing; 'tis a slander upon a respectable house to say so. Why there are but two or three pimples on your face, doubtless the result of a surfeit. Your neighbour has been down with an attack of jaundice from over-free living, but he's on the mending hand, and will be about in a few days. As for you, sir, I take it you have one of those timid const.i.tutions that can put themselves into an ague at the slightest hint of danger."

"Send me a doctor, if you won't release me from this devilish man-trap, and send for my wife instantly," cried Fetis, in an agony of indignant feeling, fear, wrath, vengeance.

Marjory left him to rave as he pleased. He was powerless to help himself in any way, and seemed as if he had scarce strength to move. He lay there impotent and raging, like a poisoned rat in a hole, as he said to himself again; there was no other similitude that fitted him so well.

And so the short winter day waned till it was growing towards dusk. His neighbour in the bed behind the baize curtain was sleeping heavily. His stertorous breathing was the only sound in the room, intolerable in its monotony. His unseen presence was the sole company that Fetis had enjoyed for the last two hours.

Suddenly it seemed to Fetis that he might see for himself what ailed the man. If his disease were jaundice, he would be as yellow as a new guinea; if it were that hideous malady which had been spoken of, the signs would be but too obvious.

Fetis gathered himself together with an effort, got out of bed, and plucked back the baize curtain.

There was a gleam of wintry sunset shining in at the window. It fell upon the sick man's face. G.o.d! what a face, seamed, scarred, ravaged by that foul disease! G.o.d's image for ever marred, humanity almost obliterated, by that dread visitation. He stood beside the bed staring at that disfigured sleeper, as if that sickening aspect had turned him into stone. Then he recoiled shuddering from that loathsome bed, the curtain dropped from his trembling hand, and he fell back upon his pallet in a mute agony of despair.

There was no longer room for doubt. He had been put into this contagious den with a deliberate purpose. This was Topsparkle's ghastly answer to his incautious menaces. He had aroused his master's suspicions, awakened his fears; and _this_ was how Vyvyan Topsparkle defended himself.

He lay shivering under the dingy coverlet, his limbs like ice, his head on fire, meditating his revenge. He was not going to lie there like an unreasoning animal till death released him from suffering. He would be even with Vyvyan Topsparkle before he died, brief as his time might be.

The beldame came in presently, before he had had time to shape his thoughts. She brought two basins of gruel, and a rushlight in a great iron cage, which she set upon the empty hearth, where it looked like a lighthouse shedding long slanting lines of light over a dark sea.

"You'll not want anything more to-night, will you, good gentleman?" she asked. "I'm going home to my family, and there's no one else in the house that cares to come into this room; so I hope you'll spend a comfortable night, and to-morrow morning old Biddy Flanagan will come and look after ye again. Lord! how sweet he sleeps!" looking down at the slumberer behind the curtain. "Sure, there never was such a cure; but I'm afraid his beauty is a thrifle damaged, poor dear sowl."

"What's the hour, woman?" asked Fetis.

"Sure, darlint, 'tis just on the stroke of six."

"And quite dark outside?"

"As black as your hat, surr. G.o.d bless your honour, and give yez a good night's rest!"

She was gone, in haste to return to her brood, and to feed them with broken victuals secreted about her person at odd intervals during her daily duties. 'Twas almost as tender a thing, though not altogether so honest, as the maternal ministrations of the pelican.

Fetis dozed for a little, wandered in his mind for a little, then woke with a start, perfectly lucid, and heard the clock of St. Bride's strike ten.

No, he would not lie there like a dog. He would find a way of escape somehow.