Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (341 page)

CHAPTER VIII
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LYDIA increased her pace so as to reach the kiosk a full twenty yards in front of Mr. Williamson. She should, indeed, have made the distance greater, since the lock was rusted and the key turned with difficulty. But in delaying, in order to attract the attentions of Major Penruddock and Mr. Harcourt, she had lost more space than had entered into her precise calculations. The garment in which Celia had sat hung over an easel, and she had it over her head and the stuff was obscuring her view when already Mr. Williamson stumbled over the threshold. Thus he had her in his arms before her face actually emerged from the rather dusty material. She drew her head back, and then, bringing it swiftly forward, her forehead smote hard and like a battering-ram upon the poor gentleman’s jaw. He staggered back from her, holding his hand to his lip and protesting, since most of the impetus had been taken out of him by his long run, that this was monstrous ill-usage. He had, indeed, in his muzzy brain the idea that so considerable an exertion had entitled him in all morality to some sort of reward. But Lydia’s head emerged from above the pink-and-white, and her first words were—”Beast, I am meat for your masters!”

She was very angry, but more angry at her own slight miscalculation than at Mr. Williamson’s desires, which, in a sense, did him credit and were only her due.

“Obscene hog!” she continued. “You are like a new puncheon when it sweats. You are like a brandy anker that has been started on the beach.”

She was thrusting her arms into her sleeves, and with sinuous motions of her body was jerking her dress into its places. And Mr. Williamson, recognising a master mind, became at once once more a servant. He was looking at her with his mouth still open, awaiting instructions and advice as to how they stood one to another, when Mr. Harcourt and Major Penruddock wedged themselves in the doorway. And the only actual satisfaction came to him when, seeing Major Penruddock re-enter with his sword drawn, he himself felt at liberty to draw his own rather rusty and rather notched blade. It had seen so much service against night-watchmen, tailors’ apprentices, and belated citizens in the night streets of London, that he felt it to be a trusted companion, a comforting factor in a too bewildering situation.

“Sir,” Major Penruddock said, “we claim the person of this lady, and since you are outnumbered, we being two to one,” — and he looked out into the sunlight, where Mr. Harcourt, at the sight of swords, appeared rather wavering and indefinite,—”since we are two to one, you may very honourably surrender.”

Mr. Williamson looked appealingly at Lydia Chuckel. She was still pulling tight the laces at her back; behind her head, on one corner of a square easel, hung the broad straw hat of Celia, the pink ribbons depending almost to the floor; at the other corner was the strawberry frail, also with its pink ribbons. Her dark hair, which had come unsnooded, dropped on to one side down her cheek and fell on to her shoulder. She gave, however, no sign to Mr. Williamson, and, awaiting it, he stood irresolute, his sword drooping. He mumbled as if he were addressing himself, or as if he expected to find Major Penruddock a fair-minded interlocutor, that it seemed to him that he had been the first to find the girl, and that she was, in consequence, his property.

“Sir,” Major Penruddock said, “the matter is very simple, since, unless instanter you surrender this lady into my charge, I will slit your throat from ear to ear under the jaw-bone.”

“Oh, if it is a matter of slitting ears—” Mr.

Williamsom mumbled.

The threat brought illumination to his thoughts, and he looked first at Major Penruddock’s blade and then at his own, which was much heavier. “I shall split your sword into shilders at the first blow,” he mused.

“I shall withdraw it and run it through your windpipe,” Major Penruddock answered. “Besides,” — and he beckoned with his hand behind his back to Mr. Harcourt,—”Mr. Harcourt, if he be not man enough to meet you face to face, will woundily pink your back whilst I engage you before.”

“That will be met by setting my back against the wall,” Mr. Williamson said.

In a gingerly fashion Mr. Harcourt had followed his leader’s command, and had crept in at the door.

“Besides—” Mr. Williamson said, and with a sudden motion he seized a large sackcloth of gamboge from the painter’s table in his left hand, with a dexterity that, learnt as it was in tavern brawls, was unexpected by the Major, whose education was solely of the camps. With an outward swing of his hand Mr. Williamson discharged the bag with a forcible exactness upon Mr. Harcourt’s protuberant waistcoat, and the air was filled with yellow fumes, in the midst of which Mr. Harcourt lay doubled up and groaning in the corner. And quite quickly, in the midst of an enormous crash of palettes, of palette-knives, of colour bladders that hopped and rolled about the Major’s feet, Mr. Williamson had overset the painter’s table and stood behind it in between the four legs. His hat and wig had fallen off, and a great deal of the yellow dust decorated his right shoulder. “Besides,” he continued, panting, but with some composure, “your reinforcements are disabled and I am entrenched. You cannot strike my throat, for the table will protect me; whilst with my broadsword, by God! I will split you to the chin if you come within reach! The lady is mine!”

“In any case,” Major Penruddock grumbled between his teeth, “you shall not, nor she neither, have any exit from this door, and I have won my bet from Mr. Harcourt.”

Mr. Harcourt had arisen in his corner. He was powdered yellow from head to foot, but he gasped gallantly —

“No, by God! that point must be brought before a tribunal of the club.”

“Why, by God!” the Major growled, “unless you concede it now you die upon the spot.”

“Then,” Mr. Williamson commented, from his entrenchment behind the table, above which only his blotched face and bleared eyes gazed with a ferocious happiness, “whilst your sword is engaged with your ally’s guts, mine will be upon your buttocks.”

There was, at that moment, as if from behind Mr. Williamson’s back, the report as if of a demi-culverin. Mr. Harcourt leapt into the air; from the doorway there came the voice of Mr. Roland Bettesworth.

“How!” he said with a clear and composed amazement; and then, as his eye took in the disorderly contents of the room, “Will you assassinate our dear bully, Jack?”

Because Mr. Roland Bettesworth had been given the task of visiting outlying physicians, and farriers who resided in lonely farms, he had, as a precaution, already got himself a pair of pistols whose muzzles were of formidable dimensions, and with one of these, with great deliberation, he covered the waistcoat of Major Penruddock.

“Major,” he said, “I shall be pleased to oblige you later in any convenient spot, but this place is too confined; and, for the moment, I am your master, so that unless you lower your point, call a truce, and explain this mêleé, I swear by the body of Christ there shall not be an inch of the wall behind you left undecorated by your vitals!”

The Major had learned already, by frequent experience, how to surrender with the honours of war gracefully before overwhelming force. He inserted the point of his sword in between two boards of the floor, as if he had been putting it into a cork, to show that he disarmed himself.

“Why,” he said, and he moved his hand towards the interior of the room, “since I have found this lady—”

“But I call you to witness,” Mr. Harcourt explained, “that the Major was not the first to find her—”

“No, by God!” Mr. Williamson grunted, “I found her, and I have protected her from these bloody ravishers like a true mohock.”

He stood up, whereas before he had been crouching, and leant with his arms crossed as if over a garden wall.

“They was two to one, but I ha’ cullied’em. I ha’ coloured’em, too; and if there be a reward, it shall be mine who found Celia.”

“But this lady,” Major Penruddock began stoutly, “should be given the option of with whom she will go, for this is a Christian land, and we are no Papishers to whom the ravishing of virgins is a daily occupation. God save the King and the Protestant succession!”

“Your loyalty,” Mr. Roland said in his clear tones, “shall no doubt be of service to you; but even where and what is this lady?”

Mr. Williamson sprang round on his heels. He poured forth oaths as a volcano pours forth lava. Mr. Harcourt brushed the ochre from his eyes. Major Penruddock’s jaw fell.

“Upon my soul!” Mr. Roland said, “my brother’s wine is more potent than who would have thought.

For here upon the morrow morning you have seen, tousled, and fought for a Celia who is no more than a vision of the grape.”

He looked at them with his cool and ironic grin, and waved his hand round the circular studio. There were in it three easels of different shapes; against the wall a brown chest of oak, such as those within which carpenters keep their tools; the inverted table with the muddle of rags, paint-bladders, and knives; and the bare walls. Mr. Williamson kicked violently on the inner side of this piece of furniture. It toppled slowly over, and the four legs pointed mournfully to the skylight. “By God!” he said mournfully, “she was a vision, and she has flown up to heaven!”

Their lethal weapons seemed to have been rendered so innocuous by this shock that Mr. Roland ventured himself in amongst them.

“Surely,” he said, “she must have slipped out through the door, yet I never saw her and I was on the outside.”

Mr. Harcourt gesticulated helplessly towards the inner apex of the circular room.

“Down there!” he said. “Down there! Did you not hear the trap-door slam?”

“I thought it was a culverin,” Mr. Roland said. He strode, grinning and unconcerned, across the floor. He had no cause for vexation. “Why, here is a ring!” He bent, jerked, and there came up a square piece of the flooring.

“You damned oaf!” Major Penruddock said to Mr. Harcourt. “Could you not have called out?” Mr. Harcourt muttered, “No, nor could you neither if you had such a meal as I,” and he spat yellow drops upon the floor.

Mr. Roland handed his pistol to Jack Williamson. “Keep you the opening,” he said. “I will descend.” There went down a comfortable flight of stone steps into a long stone passage, through which there fell from above, about half-way, a beam of broad light barred by a grating. Mr. Roland Bettesworth skimmed lightly along. He was laughing consumedly to himself, for here was the underground passage by which Sir Anthony Eshetsford of the Revolution had been accustomed to visit his concubines whilst he was supposed to be in the act of prayer. Stone steps went up at the end, and a door led him into a white-washed closet full of crocks upon shelves, and decorated as to the ceiling with hams and festoons of black puddings. He pushed the door ajar and stood in the presence of Mrs. Hitchcock, who was pouring green gooseberries from an apron into a stoneware crock, and with her two daughters who were sewing at their embroidery tambours.

He pulled off his hat, and flourishing it, asked —

“Madam, has Mistress Celia passed this way?” Mrs. Hitchcock grinned all over her enormous brown face. “Ye’ll be coming down the chimney like the boo-boys next,” she said. “Such a coil about a Celia! Young gentleman, who are you?”

“Madam,” Mr. Roland said, “I am Mr. Bettesworth’s brother. I pray your pardon for alarming you.”

“Alarming!” Mrs. Hitchcock laughed. “Says Lydia to me: ‘They will be a-following and a-hitching and a-fitching after me, but do ye, Mrs. Hitchcock, not tell’em nowt save it be Mr. Bettesworth’s man;’ and hot-foot she is run to Mr. Bettesworth, so’ee may spare your capers and eat a brandied cherry.”

Mr. Roland reflected that, if Lydia Chuckel were indeed running to his brother, the longer the Major and Mr. Harcourt were entertained by Mr. Williamson at the pistol’s mouth the safer would be her transit. He sat down, therefore, upon one of the four dark chairs that slid upon the polished floor, and, depositing his hat on the ground by his side, took the spare end of the elder daughter’s silk from the table.

“Young lady,” he said, “let us play at cat’s-cradle for kisses, for this town could afford no felicity greater than the touching of your swansdown fingers.”

The two large girls giggled, and nudged each other.

Major Penruddock and Mr. Harcourt waited an interminable age before the muzzle of Mr. Williamson’s pistol. They discoursed upon their plight, and cursed each other with freedom; but at last, subterraneous and awfully booming, there welled into the small place from the passage the words —