Her shrieks rose above the rumble of the wheels and the steady trampling of the horses; she added to the noise by kicking and beating on the door with the fury of a mad woman. Mr. Thoma.s.son had had enough of violence for that day; and shrank from anything that might bring on him the fresh wrath of his captors. But a moment's reflection showed him that if he allowed himself to be carried on he would, sooner or later, find himself face to face with Mr. Dunborough; and, in any case, that it was now his interest to stand by his companion; and presently he too fell to shouting and drumming on the panels. There was a quaver, indeed, in his 'Help! Help!' that a little betrayed the man; but in the determined clamour which she raised and continued to maintain, it pa.s.sed well enough.

'If we meet any one--they must hear us!' she gasped, presently, pausing a moment to take breath. 'Which way are we going?'

'Towards Calne, I think,' he answered, continuing to drum on the door in the intervals of speech. 'In the street we must be heard.'

'Help! Help!' she screamed, still more recklessly. She was growing hoa.r.s.e, and the prospect terrified her. 'Do you hear? Stop, villains!

Help! Help! Help!'

'Murder!' Mr. Thoma.s.son shouted, seconding her with voice and fist.

'Murder! Murder!'

But in the last word, despite his valiant determination to throw in his lot with her, was a sudden, most audible, quaver. The carriage was beginning to draw up; and that which he had imperiously demanded a moment before, he now as urgently dreaded. Not so Julia; her natural courage had returned, and the moment the vehicle came to a standstill and the door was opened, she flung herself towards it. The next instant she was pushed forcibly back by the muzzle of a huge horse-pistol which a man outside clapped to her breast; while the glare of the bull's-eye lanthorn which he thrust in her face blinded her.

The man uttered the most horrid imprecations. 'You noisy s.l.u.t,' he growled, shoving his face, hideous in its c.r.a.pe mask, into the coach, and speaking in a voice husky with liquor, 'will you stop your whining?

Or must I blow you to pieces with my Toby? For you, you white-livered sneak,' he continued, addressing the tutor, 'give me any more of your piping and I'll cut out your tongue! Who is hurting you, I'd like to know! As for you, my fine lady, have a care of your skin, for if I pull you out into the road it will be the worse for you! D'ye hear me? he continued, with a volley of savage oaths. 'A little more of your music, and I'll have you out and strip the clothes off your back! You don't hang me for nothing. D--n you, we are three miles from anywhere, and I have a mind to gag you, whether or no! And I will too, if you so much as open your squeaker again!'

'Let me go,' she cried faintly. 'Let me go.'

'Oh, you will be let go fast enough--the other side of the water,' he answered, with a villainous laugh. 'I'm bail to that. In the meantime keep a still tongue, or it will be the worse for you! Once out of Bristol, and you may pipe as you like!'

The girl fell back in her corner with a low wail of despair. The man seeing the effect he had wrought, laughed his triumph, and in sheer brutality pa.s.sed his light once or twice across her face. Then he closed the door with a crash and mounted; the carriage bounded forward again, and in a trice was travelling onward as rapidly as before.

Night had set in, and darkness, a darkness that could almost be felt, reigned in the interior of the chaise. Neither of the travellers could now see the other, though they sat within arm's length. The tutor, as soon as they were well started, and his nerves, shaken by the man's threats, permitted him to think of anything save his own safety, began to wonder that his companion, who had been so forward before, did not now speak; to look for her to speak, and to find the darkness and this silence, which left him to feed on his fears, strangely uncomfortable.

He could almost believe that she was no longer there. At length, unable to bear it longer, he spoke.

'I suppose you know,' he said--he was growing vexed with the girl who had brought him into this peril--'who is at the bottom of this?'

She did not answer, or rather she answered only by a sudden burst of weeping; not the light, facile weeping of a woman crossed or over-fretted, or frightened; but the convulsive heart-rending sobbing of utter grief and abandonment.

The tutor heard, and was at first astonished, then alarmed. 'My dear, good girl, don't cry like that,' he said awkwardly. 'Don't! I--I don't understand it. You--you frighten me. You--you really should not. I only asked you if you knew whose work this was.'

'I know! I know only too well!' she cried pa.s.sionately. 'G.o.d help me!

G.o.d help all women!'

Mr. Thoma.s.son wondered whether she referred to the future and her own fate. In that case, her complete surrender to despair seemed strange, seemed even inexplicable, in one who a few minutes before had shown a spirit above a woman's. Or did she know something that he did not know?

Something that caused this sudden collapse. The thought increased his uneasiness; the coward dreads everything, and his nerves were shaken.

'Pish! pish!' he said pettishly. 'You should not give way like that! You should not, you must not give way!'

'And why not?' she cried, arresting her sobs. There was a ring of expectation in her voice, a hoping against hope. He fancied that she had lowered her hands and was peering at him.

'Because we--we may yet contrive something' he answered lamely. 'We--we may be rescued. Indeed--I am sure we shall be rescued,' he continued, fighting his fears as well as hers.

'And what if we are?' she cried with a pa.s.sion that took him aback.

'What if we are? What better am I if we are rescued? Oh, I would have done anything for him! I would have died for him!' she continued wildly.

'And he has done this for me. I would have given him all, all freely, for no return if he would have it so; and this is his requital! This is the way he has gone to get it. Oh, vile! vile!'

Mr. Thoma.s.son started. Metaphorically, he was no longer in the dark. She fancied that Sir George, Sir George whom she loved, was the contriver of this villainy. She thought that Sir George--Sir George, her cousin--was the abductor; that she was being carried off, not for her own sake, but as an obstacle to be removed from his path. The conception took the tutor's breath away; he was even staggered for the moment, it agreed as well with one part of the facts. And when an instant later his own certain information came to his aid and showed him its unreality, and he would have blurted out the truth--he hesitated. The words were on the tip of his tongue, the sentence was arranged, but he hesitated.

Why? Simply because he was Mr. Thoma.s.son, and it was not in his nature to do the thing that lay before him until he had considered whether it might not profit him to do something else. In this case the bare statement that Mr. Dunborough, and not Sir George, was the author of the outrage, would go for little with her. If he proceeded to his reasons he might convince her; but he would also fix himself with a fore-knowledge of the danger--a fore-knowledge which he had not imparted to her, and which must sensibly detract from the merit of the service he had already and undoubtedly performed.

This was a risk; and there was a farther consideration. Why give Mr.

Dunborough new ground for complaint by discovering him? True, at Bristol she would learn the truth. But if she did not reach Bristol? If they were overtaken midway? In that case the tutor saw possibilities, if he kept his mouth shut--possibilities of profit at Mr. Dunborough's hands.

In intervals between fits of alarm--when the carriage seemed to be about to halt--he turned these things over. He could hear the girl weeping in her corner, quietly, but in a heart-broken manner; and continually, while he thought and she wept, and an impenetrable curtain of darkness hid the one from the other, the chaise held on its course up-hill and down-hill, now b.u.mping and rattling behind flying horses, and now rumbling and straining up Yatesbury Downs.

At last he broke the silence. 'What makes you think,' he said, 'that it is Sir George has done this?'

She did not answer or stop weeping for a while. Then, 'He was to meet me at sunset, at the Corner,' she said. 'Who else knew that I should be there? Tell me that.'

'But if he is at the bottom of this, where is he?' he hazarded. 'If he would play the villain with you--'

'He would play the thief,' she cried pa.s.sionately, 'as he has played the hypocrite. Oh, it is vile! vile!'

'But--I don't understand,' Mr. Thoma.s.son stammered; he was willing to hear all he could.

'His fortune, his lands, all he has in the world are mine!' she cried.

'Mine! And he goes this way to recover them! But I could forgive him that, ah, I could forgive him that, but I cannot forgive him--'

'What?' he said.

'His love!' she cried fiercely. 'That I will never forgive him! Never!'

He knew that she spoke, as she had wept, more freely for the darkness.

He fancied that she was writhing on her seat, that she was tearing her handkerchief with her hands. 'But--it may not be he,' he said after a silence broken only by the rumble of wheels and the steady trampling of the horses.

'It is!' she cried. 'It is!'

'It may not--'

'I say it is!' she repeated in a kind of fury of rage, shame, and impatience. 'Do you think that I who loved him, I whom he fooled to the top of my pride, judge him too harshly? I tell you if an angel from heaven had witnessed against him I would have laughed the tale to scorn.

But I have seen--I have seen with my own eyes. The man who came to the door and threatened us had lost a joint of the forefinger. Yesterday I saw that man with _him_; I saw the hand that held the pistol to-day give _him_ a note yesterday. I saw _him_ read the note, and I saw him point me out to the man who bore it--that he might know to-day whom he was to seize! Oh shame! Shame on him!' And she burst into fresh weeping.

At that moment the chaise, which had been proceeding for some time at a more sober pace, swerved sharply to one side; it appeared to sweep round a corner, jolted over a rough patch of ground, and came to a stand.

CHAPTER XXII

FACILIS DESCENSUS

Let not those who would judge her harshly forget that Julia, to an impulsive and pa.s.sionate nature, added a special and notable disadvantage. She had been educated in a sphere alien from that in which she now moved. A girl, brought up as Sir George's cousin and among her equals, would have known him to be incapable of treachery as black as this. Such a girl, certified of his love, not only by his words and looks but by her own self-respect and pride, would have shut her eyes to the most pregnant facts and the most cogent inferences; and scorned all her senses, one by one, rather than believe him guilty. She would have felt, rightly or wrongly, that the thing was impossible; and would have believed everything in the world, yes, everything, possible or impossible--yet never that he had lied when he told her that he loved her.

But Julia had been bred in a lower condition, not far removed from that of the Pamela to whose good fortune she had humbly likened her own; among people who regarded a Macaroni or a man of fashion as a wolf ever seeking to devour. To distrust a gentleman and repel his advances had been one of the first lessons instilled into her opening mind; nor had she more than emerged from childhood before she knew that a laced coat forewent destruction, and held the wearer of it a cozener, who in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred kept no faith with a woman beneath him, but lived only to break hearts and bring grey hairs to the grave.

Out of this fixed belief she had been jolted by the upheaval that placed her on a level with Sir George. Persuaded that the convention no longer applied to herself, she had given the rein to her fancy and her girlish romance, no less than to her generosity; she had indulged in delicious visions, and seen them grow real; nor probably in all St. James's was there a happier woman than Julia when she found herself possessed of this lover of the prohibited cla.s.s; who to the charms and attractions, the nice-ness and refinement, which she had been bred to consider beyond her reach, added a devotion, the more delightful--since he believed her to be only what she seemed--as it lay in her power to reward it amply.

Some women would have swooned with joy over such a conquest effected in such circ.u.mstances. What wonder that Julia was deaf to the warnings and surmises of Mr. Fishwick, whom delay and the magnitude of the stakes rendered suspicious, as well as to the misgivings of old Mrs. Masterson, slow to grasp a new order of things? It would have been strange had she listened to either, when youth, and wealth, and love all beckoned one way.

But now, now in the horror and darkness of the post-chaise, the lawyer's warnings and the old woman's misgivings returned on her with crushing weight; and more and heavier than these, her old belief in the heartlessness, the perfidy of the man of rank. At the statement that a man of the cla.s.s with whom she had commonly mixed could so smile, while he played the villain, as to deceive not only her eyes but her heart--she would have laughed. But on the mind that lay behind the smooth and elegant mask of a _gentleman's_ face she had no lights; or only the old lights which showed it desperately wicked. Applying these to the circ.u.mstances, what a lurid glare they shed on his behaviour!