Chapter XIX: The Meeting on the Mall

By nine o’clock next morning a young naval officer was pacing the Mall of St. James’s under the interlaced boughs of the still leafless trees. He formed a conspicuous figure among the porters, tradesmen’s boys, shopwomen, and message girls—all who were then to be seen on the old promenade, which had still its fashionable frequenters at stated hours later in the day.

But conspicuous or unconspicuous, there was no one whose observation was likely to signify to the gentleman, or to the lady who, taking an early walk, attended by her maid, might encounter him, and consent to his attendance for the rest of the way.

The weather, which had been boasting that spring was come a fortnight before, had reversed its sentence—now that March was not only coursing in the blood and in the sap of the trees, but recorded in the calendar—and insisted that the season was no other than midwinter. A raw, surly east wind was blowing; a grey sky was overhead; the turf of the park looked pinched; the leaflets of the trees stood arrested—their green turned to sickly yellow. The little birds retained their songs in their breasts, and only chirped disconsolately in a croaking fashion down in their throats, as they hopped from bough to bough to keep themselves warm.

Captain Fane, with his cocked hat pulled down to his eyebrows, looked grave and almost grim and hard-favoured as he paced the Mall.

Captain Fane’s patience was not tried on the occasion. He had not half crossed the park when a little figure, guarded from the chill morning air and from prying eyes by a furred mantle and a capuchin, came towards him.

The figure was followed by a faithful maid in her white cap and pattens, walking discreetly behind.

The lady advanced, woman fashion, as if she did not see the gentleman, but had been enticed out by the fineness of the disagreeable morning, and by the company on the deserted Mall. She looked over her shoulder to speak to her maid. She tacked, as she picked her steps from side to side of the Mall, like one of the ships in Harry Fane’s squadron when the wind was chopping afresh every minute. The figure, with its halting, wavering, but unmistakable progress in his direction, quickened the gentleman’s steps in accordance with his bounding pulses, and sent him straight as a launch to meet it.

Captain Fane was deeply sensible of the boon granted to him; but even as he held Lady Bell’s hand in his own, his face continued grave and contracted with trouble and pain. The first words which he said as he turned and walked by her side, giving, not offering his arm, were words of warning in breaking bad news.

“It is well that you have been as good as your word, dearest, well for your own tender heart as for my comfort in remembrance, since our first meeting is likely to be our last. Orders from the Admiralty were waiting my return last night. I did not know, but it was just possible that the _Thunderbomb_ might be put in dock to lie high and dry for months. I had even entertained the thought—but that was before I saw you and lost my head with my heart—ah! sweet Bell, I’ll go bail you have much to account for—of seeking to get an appointment to another ship, lest I should be kept hanging about long on shore. Long! The time has passed like a summer day which is all but ended. The _Thunderbomb_ is to hold itself in readiness to weigh anchor on or about the 15th, to sail with a detachment of troops for Boston.”

Lady Bell had heard him without interruption till this. “Going away—away from me, Harry?” she cried, struck heavily by the blow, “to join the ranks of war, and dare the stormy seas while these words we have spoken are yet on our lips! No, no, it cannot be.”

“My love, I would I could say no and comfort you. Guess, then, what it must be for me to leave you,” he appealed to her.

“Then, don’t leave me,” said Lady Bell desperately. “Oh, Harry Fane, I have been so lonely all my life, an orphan, a loveless wife—I could not help it; I could not love poor Mr. Trevor after he had forced me, a persecuted child, to marry him—till I found Sunny. You need not look disappointed. She has been the dearest, best of friends and sisters to me; but I am frighted I have misled her. I know I would leave her for my lover, my true husband. Will you leave me after this alone again? Cruel Harry! Lady Sundon was right. You are a hard, stubborn man.”

“Alas! dear, how can I help it?—I, who would give my best chance of promotion—well-nigh my life, if—not the Admiralty, but the Powers above, would suffer me to remain with you only three months,” he protested passionately. “It may not be, Lady Bell—I cannot even pray for it.”

“And yet you only half approve of this American war,” she reminded him pertinaciously.

“That is true,” he owned; “and more than I are in the same, or a worse predicament. Lord Effingham has followed the example of Viscount Pitt, in requesting leave to retire from the service; and Captain Wilson, an Irishman, who obtained his commission by raising a hundred and thirty men off his own estate, and who has served with the greatest credit for sixteen years, has also laid down his sword.”

“Then why cannot you do the same?” she implored him.

“Because I do not see it to be my duty,” he said firmly. “I don’t approve of every tittle of the laws and their execution. For instance, a miserable lad of fifteen was hanged t’other day for some petty theft—it may have been no more than the filching of a sixpence, for which they tell me another wretched fellow swung at Tyburn; but that is not to say that I am not to maintain the laws which are just and good in the main. This is no time to pick holes in the services, but to build them up with our bodies and blood, and let reformation follow in due time. For anything else—even to be with you, it would be rank selfishness.”

“You are too strong and wise for me,” she complained a little bitterly, averting her head.

“You would not have me sacrifice honour and duty,” he pressed her in his turn, “what every true man is bound to maintain in the name of God and his fellows, whatever else he give up? Remember the line of the song you sang the last time I stood by the harpsichord in Cleveland Court:—

‘I could not love thee, dear, so well,
Loved I not honour more.’

Sailors, like soldiers, belong specially to their king and country. Would you wish your sailor to stain his blue jacket?”

“No, no, I would have you my best of men,” yielded Lady Bell, with a great sob; “but I doubt my heart is broke, for I cannot follow you into danger, and if—if——”

She failed in framing the conclusion, that the man she loved, and who had just told her his love, standing there in his flower of youth, health, and strength, might ere long fall on the deck, slippery with blood, never to rise again, or sink in the trough of an engulphing wave, and be washed far beyond the ken of friend or foe.

Lady Bell broke into piteous tears. She had been, as she said, so lonely a young creature, constrained, in the measure, to be self-sufficing, till she had found a friend, and then a love.

He had taught her in the shortest space to be prouder of his love than of all else belonging to her. She had been right willing to lay down for him her pride of birth and beauty and a belle’s worldly expectations. She had consented gladly to resign that belleship, to affront the great world, and, as an anti-climax after her triumphs, to make a poor love marriage.

But it was all in vain. No such voluntary offering was required of her. Her new-found love was snatched from her. Her life was emptied of its fulness at the fullest, just when she had begun to know how rich and rapturous life might be. “Would it have been a relief to you,” asked Captain Fane slowly, “though I would never have consented to your facing hardship (‘fore George, to think of my Lady Bell being exposed for me!)—if all this had occurred months earlier, and in the interval we had braved the cold displeasure, or the hot wrath, of friends, and were wed, man and wife, whom no man, nothing save death, could put asunder? Would it have made a difference if you could have gone out with me, as some of the civil authorities, Mr. Eden and others—ay, some of the officers too, have carried out their wives?”

“Oh, Harry, it would have been heaven compared to this!” Lady Bell assured him fervently.

“What!” he cried, half with tender wonder, half covetous to have the fond assurance repeated, “you would cross the seas, and rough it among rough sailors on board ship, and you so young and dainty. You would dwell among strangers, many of them hostile—some say with a good cause, but it is too late to do aught but fight its righteousness or unrighteousness now—and we sailors might be called on to help to take stores up the country, while we were dependent on the fidelity of our barbarous allies, the Indians. You were never in a foreign country. You never even tried living on board ship.”

“Never, never,” corroborated Lady Bell, so heartily, that there was something like cheerfulness in her tone. “But I should be with you, and what would I mind besides? Do you think I am a coward, sir, or a peevish woman, fit for nothing but to miss my comforts, and make a moan? Don’t call the sailors rough, when you are a sailor.”

“Then I am delivered from a very great temptation,” admitted Harry Fane honestly.

“Don’t return thanks for it,” she forbade him quickly, “when it is my loss. Oh, Harry! I am yours—yours in our hearts; but I would I were yours so that no man could contradict it, anyhow or anywhere,” sighed Lady Bell, clinging to him with a creeping quailing foretaste of all the evils which might be wrought by distance, time, the remonstrances of friends, the misrepresentations of enemies.