Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (346 page)

“Why, you will be unconscionable braggarts to the last, you Bettesworths!” Major Penruddock said. “You make a man’s gall rise into his throat. Nevertheless, it shall not be said that Major Penruddock was wanting in magnanimity to a fallen foe. I have served enough in the wars for that, and can disregard the puling of the defeated; so I will bid you stop here a moment or so, that I may bring you the keys of the town jail. And you will have observed that I have done my best to rid this house of able-bodied men, so that you may easily release your brother from his incarceration, for to no other end did I suggest that Mr. Bestwell should draw off his forces. And this, I maintain, is the action of a man of magnanimous integrity.”

Major Penruddock swung through the door, the skirts of his scarlet coat flouncing out behind him. Mr. Roland and Mr. Williamson remained for a moment in silence, and then suddenly, as if the effort of imagination needed no word, they drew their swords and placed themselves behind the door, Mr. Williamson peeping through the crack to observe the Major’s return along the passage. It was their intention upon his re-entering the room with the keys of the jail to slam the door and pin him with their points at his throat. Extended upon the table, Mr. Stareleigh slumbered peacefully, his snore coming in a gentle cadence. From a distance they could hear the shouts of Mr. Justice Bestwell and the hum of voices of his men. The sounds diminished, drew off, and disappeared; and Mr. Williamson’s breathing, in his excitement, grew as stertorous, if more suppressed, than those of the slumberer, for Mr. Williamson considered that he had a crow to pluck with the Major, and was eager to be at his throat.

“Will he have failed of getting the keys?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. And then he swore violently and sprang into the air. The glass of the window crashed violently inwards. It splintered all through the room. Four candles fell upon the tablecloth, and a bottle half full of wine crashed suddenly into nothing, the liquid splattering in one gout upon the sanded floor.

“Gentlemen,” the voice of Major Penruddock called through the window, “I have made too many campaigns to be so taken in ambush. I laugh, you perceive, the last.”

They heard the clatter of his horse loud upon the cobbles, and diminishing, disappearing. Upon the table lay two immense keys, united by a string that threaded a bullet of lead.

“By God!” Mr. Williamson exclaimed, “who laughs last?”

“Oh, we, we!” Mr. Roland answered him; “since this Lydia Chuckel is by no manner of means the original of ‘Celia in her Arbour.’”

Mr. Williamson exclaimed, “The devil!”

PART IV
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CHAPTER I
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MR. ROLAND BETTESWORTH was swayed by no great feelings of brotherly love. Nevertheless, upon his way to the Round House compassion moved him, and still more the family feeling. It seemed to him disagreeable in the extreme that one of them should have been laid open to the possibility of being twitted, or at the least tittered at, upon his entry into an assembly. And compassion came into play with a warm emotion of disgust at the thought of his brother’s being mishandled by a pack of dirty rustic scum. If, in fact, he desired to humiliate his brother as far as he himself was concerned — if he didn’t exactly stomach his brother’s princely airs towards himself — it disgusted him that, if only for a space of three or four hours or so, his brother had not been able to act princely towards all the rest of the world.

Mr. Williamson having been rendered valiant and uproarious by the contents of a half bottle of Schiedam that he had ravished from the host’s parlour of the inn, now entirely denuded of men-folk by the necessities of bloody war — Mr. Williamson was now vocal and martial in the extreme. The houses

of the broad market-place slumbered, shut down and lifeless as if in extreme terror; and with his immense sword drawn and whiffling in the air, Mr. Williamson pursued an uneven course over the cobbles, surrounded by a ring of the town dogs, who neglected his more tranquil companion. This appeared to Mr. Williamson to be a matter of such grave inhospitality that, with imprecations of the most sanguinary, and with a voice of hoarse, but direful, distinctness, he invited the inhabitants to issue forth and have their throats cut. To Mr. Roland the adventure seemed one calling for secrecy and stealth. Nevertheless, to the accompaniment of outrageous and grotesque noise, they passed the pound, the stocks, and the ducking-pond, and came eventually to the Round House itself. There was a sufficient glimmer from a concealed moon to let them find the dark opening into the round stone building; and by feeling upon the iron-ribbed surface of the, door they came upon the keyhole; and finally, to the sound of rusty janglings and bumps of the leaden bullets upon the surface of the door, the feeble light from a lantern issued forth, together with such a stench that Mr. Roland fell backwards against Mr. Williamson, who had just succeeded in catching upon the flank, with the point of his sword, the most vociferous of the dogs. Mr. Bettesworth came out, an unseeing silhouette against the light, and Mr. Williamson cheered. But at sight of the Methodist’s black hat, which, crowlike, appeared round the corner of the archway, Mr. Williamson was seized with a new access of martial ardour, so that he transfixed the hat with his blade. He waved it over his head; he cheered, and his cheering once again aroused the innumerable dogs. Mr. Bettesworth’s spirit revived at the contact of the fresh air, and at the sight of the blade held by a man to him indistinguishable amidst the gloom.

“I do not know,” he said, “what inhuman scoundrels you may be, but within here is a woman dying or dead.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland said, “whether the woman be dying or dead let us hasten from here.”

For, though he was not very well sure of his ground, he had already imagined for himself that if the magistrates should return and find the nest cracked they might well be arrested all over again.

“Brother,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “if that is you, there are some things to be seen to that I will not hurry away from.”

Mr. Roland desired to send Mr. Williamson with all haste to the Manor-house to arouse Mr. Bettesworth’s men, to get out the horses, and to be upon the road. “Brother,” he said, “are you wounded? Are you sick? Can you walk? Could you ride?”

“Why, I do not know,” Mr. Bettesworth answered. “But I am not minded to be gone.”

“Oh, come away!” Mr. Roland said. “Do you not understand what has been done in your absence?”

“I neither know nor care,” Mr. Bettesworth said coldly; “but here there have been enacted three of the grossest cases of miscarriage of justice, and I will burn the nests about these rotten magistrates before I leave this place.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland said, “the place to light the slow-match is in London, not here, where they will have you by the heels again. And for the woman, if she be dead she is dead; if she is dying she is past help. And at the best of it, the Major and Mr. Harcourt have taken Lydia Chuckel and are posting along the London road with her.”

In the darkness, which was now grown thinner to their accustomed eyes, Mr. Bettesworth could be seen to strike his brow. There arose in him a fierce struggle. He desired to overtake and recapture his prize from those who had ravished her from him. The knowledge did not come to him as so very considerable a disturbance, since during his conversation with Mr. Williams, the Methodist, he had been able to accredit his rivals with the conception and achievement of some such scheme. But he had hardly given them credit for the power to get so speedily into action; so that hitherto he had set foremost his desire to avenge himself, and to perform a public office in righting the wrongs done to the Methodist and to the stick-gatherer, and the inhumanity towards the dead prostitute. Mr. Roland had begun again to speak, intending to console his brother with the news that Lydia Chuckel was not the model for Celia; but when he opened his lips, Mr. Bettesworth exclaimed “Silence!” in a voice so masculine and terrible that Mr. Roland was at once assured of his brother’s bodily welfare, and piqued into a condition the reverse of compassionate.

“Why, if the Emperor will be Emperor,” he said, “let him sit on his own throne.” And seeing that Mr. Bettesworth was determined to count forty, he, none the less determined to be gone from that place, pushed, kicked, and jostled Mr. Williamson to the other side of the stocks, and, by shaking him, reduced him to a condition of some attention.

His directions were that Mr. Williamson should fetch their three horses from the inn, and, tethering two of them at the park gates, he should gallop with all speed to the Manor-house and waken Mr. Bettesworth’s servants, bidding them get on foot and to horse with all the speed they could. For Mr. Roland was determined that at all costs, and under whatever pretext, they should be gone from the town before it awoke from sleep to fury. Mr. Williamson was drunk, but he was so used to action in such a state that, save that he might beat an ostler, if any ostlers were to be found at the inn, he might be trusted to carry out the bringing out of three horses and the awakening of a whole army of men; whereas, Mr. Bettesworth had but five servants with him. He returned to the jail mouth in time to hear Mr. Bettesworth deliver a formal oration, in the course of which he himself chafed consumedly.

“I have,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “arrived at the following determinations. I have before me the problem of this jail and the problem of Lydia Chuckel.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland interrupted, “you have before you the fact that for the moment you are the most ridiculous figure in England, except for the Justices here, who, being of no mortal account, will escape with the laughter of the common sort alone.”

Mr. Bettesworth chose to take no heed of his brother’s speech, and this only the more irritated Mr. Roland.

“In this jail,” Mr. Bettesworth continued, “there were four persons, of whom three were unjustly condemned, and the fourth barbarously done to death. I myself, since I am of the most account, was the most unfairly handled; for the heavy avenging of that I can wait my leisure. But here is an old woman, having, by the laws of England and the tenure of her hut, the right to pick dry sticks from hedgerows in the parish of Goldwell. She has been cast into jail at the instance of the lord of the Manor of Goldwell for exercising a right that is as indubitably hers as is mine to drive a coach and four up the steps of St. Paul’s. For the maintaining of the rights of this old woman, I would, if it were necessary, spend the entire contents of my purse against this lord of the Manor and these Justices, who are in league to grind the faces of the poor.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland said, “have you not heard that the water-bailiff of Berwick St. James, of which place you are lord of the Manor, hamstrung the donkey of Simon Tapper because it stood in one of the pools of the Winterbourne, though Simon Tapper had his common rights and water-ingress for his beasts?”

Again Mr. Bettesworth ignored his brother’s interruption. A slight and drizzling rain began to fall, and, as the fog rolled inwards over the marshes to the high ground, the moon was almost obscured.

“But,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “the case of this old woman also may stand over till I have leisure. There remains that of Mr. Williams, who is a preacher of the sectarian — or possibly it is not a sectarian — order of Methodists. For until this matter can be brought before the Synod of Canterbury — this association being, as I am assured, but three years old, and its head having left but this month for the Virginias, so that its orthodoxy or non-orthodoxy cannot be settled this three years — until the matter is finally adjudicated upon, it cannot be settled whether this Mr. Williams, who is a student of Oxford and in Holy Orders, being the son of decent parents of this neighbourhood, conforms, or is more justly a Nonconformist. But let us put it that he is a Nonconformist: none the less the Act against sectarians is annually suspended by Parliament Therefore his committal at the instance of the parson here is an infringement of the liberty of the subject which I am not minded to pass over.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland said, “if you are minded to redress all the wrongs of the town of Ashford, we shall be here till it snows.”

“The case of Mr. Williams,” Mr. Bettesworth continued, “will, I doubt not, prove the longest of any, and therefore I must have the more leisure to consider of it For there enters into it not only the common law, but the canon law, and the point is a very nice one. For if, upon the one hand, he be proved to be Nonconformist, he has committed no crime; but if he be proved to be orthodox, then, being in Holy Orders, he has infringed against the Church law by preaching without licence in the parish of a clergyman of the Established Church.”

Mr. Roland said, “O God, O God!”

The fog grew thicker. The houses of the marketplace disappeared altogether. The stocks and the looming form of the pillory were blotted out. They were invisible one to another; only a watery ray from the lantern within the jail silhouetted Mr. Bettesworth’s legs and cast their shadow upon the mist. And suddenly the voice of the old woman within made itself heard, whimpering for two pennies to lay upon the eyelids of the corpse.

Mr. Williams said, “Glory to God, who has raised up a strong pillar for us! I have never heard our case put more concisely.”

“It appears, therefore, to me,” Mr. Bettesworth continued, ignoring alike the old woman and the preacher, “that I may best meet this case by taking Mr. Williams as my chaplain, since for the time being his occupation is gone and his money has been stolen from him by the jailer. And the more so, for my most immediate purpose, since, being by birth of this neighbourhood, he has a private and special knowledge of its quaggy and impenetrable roads.”

“Brother,” Mr. Roland said, and by this time he was worked into an ironic fury, “you stand here a laughing-stock. You are the most ridiculous and befooled creature in the country. You talk of what you will do, and for what reason you will do it, for all the world as if you were a popinjay prince. But I tell you,” — and Mr. Roland’s voice grew harsher and harsher,—”if you don’t take the road at once you will never hold up your head again. But you will be known as the Duke of Berwick, and be listened to by no Councillor and no Council in the kingdom, and be the paltriest creature that—”

Mr. Bettesworth had been, by means of his formal speeches, at once proving to himself and them that he could contain his passions, and striving to justify his desire to himself, but his voice shook in his throat, his hands clenched and unclenched, his face was covered with cold sweat; and at his brother’s words there issued from his throat a harsh sound like the bark of a Barbary ape. All the hatred that he felt for the two men who had fooled him, an immense rage that seemed to tie his entrails into knots, cast him as if from a sling upon the blotted shape of his brother. He caught Roland by the throat, he showered down blows upon his face, his eyes felt as if they were bursting from his head, his chest was inflated beyond bearing; it seemed that in striking Roland he was buffeting the world that would sneer at him. Roland tore himself away with a sudden feint of the shoulders, and when he was a yard or two off he said, with a cool harshness—”If you approach a step, I will spit you like a dog.” And, automatically, his hands began to rearrange in the darkness the ruffles at his neck.

“Hark ye,” he said coolly, “you may gallop to hell with the preacher at your back, but you shall have no more use of me — no, not till you beg my pardon upon your knees. You will grow into a rustic oaf, a toss-pot, a beaten dog with its tail between its legs. Go home and rot, for you will never dare show your face in London Town again.” He disappeared into the fog, and then from a distance his voice called, “You will find your horses at the park gates.”