Chapter I: Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Lionel Ratcliffe closed behind him the gate of the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he had his lodging. He crossed the road, then paused to survey the desolate scene.

The day was drawing to a close, but sullen fires of sunset were still burning low under a leaden, cloudy sky. Beneath his feet the grass was parched, the ground everywhere leprous grey. Though it was only early July, the foliage of the trees hung limp and sick-hued; there was not a flicker of life among the branches—indeed, hardly a stir anywhere in the languid atmosphere. Sky seemed to brood over earth, earth to lie paralysed, awaiting some moment of catastrophe, and heavy vapours to be fusing them together. The heat was a palpable presence. An anguished expectation caught the throat as with an actual pressure. The plague held all London in its grip.

Men can walk with fortitude under the wings of the Angel of Destruction, when the death he brings is a clean one, honourable, seemly; but this horrible Demon of Corruption that now spread its shadow over the world made its victims loathsome in each other’s eyes and infected them with coward selfishness and panic fears.

The Court had gone at last, though Charles was no poltroon. Half the population was in flight along country roads; blind terror was upon most of those whom circumstances retained within the doomed circle. Among the well-to-do only three classes still lingered in the town: those whom a sense of duty kept at their post; those again who, with a strange but not unknown faculty of self-deception, chose to ignore the visitation rather than to face the appalling presence; and lastly, those few strong natures who, for purposes of their own, found it worth while to set danger at defiance.

To these last belonged Lionel Ratcliffe. Fully aware of the peril, he challenged it deliberately. He knew that those yellow vapours were the very breath of the pestilence; that the smell everywhere meeting his nostrils was that of death; that among yonder prostrate figures reclining beneath the trees many were doubtless stricken, dying, or dead. He kept on, nevertheless, calm if wary, at a masterful gait, across the fields.

In his hand he swung a loaded cane of such proportions as almost to rival a watchman’s staff—one which could keep at a distance or at one stroke lay low the sturdiest onslaught. For it was well known that many of the pest-stricken in their delirium rushed into the street to die; that the passer-by might at any moment be confronted by some miserable wretch who, seized with madness, would rise and clasp him in an embrace of hideous contagion.

As for the mumpers and rufflers, who were wont to emerge at the darkening hours in the Fields—like night-moths, no one knew where from—one glance of this gentleman’s eye, not to speak of the knowing gesture of the staff hand, would have sufficed to bid even the stoutest of them pause and be wiser than to meddle.

And so Lionel Ratcliffe passed on, without undue haste, leaving the closed theatre on his left, making westward toward Arch Row. And presently, as he emerged from the shadow of the trees, he sighted the mansion that was his goal, Chillingburgh House, with its sharp roof, its coping balustrade and urns rising in relief, black against the lurid orange of the sky.

As he approached the gateway a sedan chair, escorted by a couple of armed footmen, was just depositing a lady voluminously wrapped in a silk cloak before the double flight of steps. He halted for a second to watch her begin the ascent on the right. She went slowly, as one fatigued; he swiftly entered the flagged courtyard, took the opposite side of the stairs, and reached the landing just before her.

“Madame de Mantes! … your servant—! Punctual to the moment!” cried he, bowed and clapped the feathered hat against his breast.

She halted on the last step and raised her handsome head slowly toward him, ignoring his hand. The light was growing dim, and the rosy folds of her hood looked grey; but even under its shadows and in spite of the rouge on her cheek he had an uncomfortable impression of her pallor.

“_Oui_,” she said tonelessly, “_me voici_.” Then, with sudden petulance, “Ouf! but one suffocates in this air!”

She caught at the strings of her cloak and tore them apart; the light silken thing slipped from her shoulders, but she hurried into the house as one unseeing. Ratcliffe picked up the garment alertly, and followed, just in time to offer his hand again at the foot of the great staircase. The touch of her fingers struck chill. His first misgivings deepened; but he quickly dismissed the rising thoughts. Bah! a woman in love (what was there about this Rockhurst, curse him! that all the fair should thus run mad upon him?)—a woman hopelessly in love, and a Frenchwoman at that! There would sure be scenes with the faithless lover, and she was even now rehearsing them in her agitated imagination. Well might her hands be cold.

“Are you ill at ease?” he whispered, with a perfunctory show of solicitude as they passed a couple of anxious-looking servants and drew closer together on the stairs.

“_Mon Dieu!_ but not at all!” she mocked him irritably. “Neither ill in my ease, nor my heart, nor—oh, tranquillise yourself—nor in my head! Besides, who could be but well and happy in this merry London of yours?”

They had reached the gallery. She snapped her hand from his and dropped him a courtesy. He wondered to have thought her pale; now she seemed to him unwontedly flushed. Her heavy eyes shot fire. Appraising her critically, he approved. There were jewels at her ears and throat; her gown had the impress of French taste, and became her every beauty.

The grey-haired butler who flung open the doors of the drawing-room at her approach looked after the swaying, shimmering figure with melancholy approval.

“’Tis almost like old times, Master Lionel,” he whispered, as Ratcliffe passed in, “to see a Court lady about the place again.”

“Aye, from Court she is,” said Lady Chillingburgh’s grandson, halting on the threshold to let his gaze roam thankfully over the great white-and-gold room, which had a sense of coolness and repose about it, even on such a night. “But she had her reasons for not hasting off with the rest of them this morning.”

“Eh—but they must be weighty reasons!” murmured the old servant, with a sigh.

“No doubt the lady thinks them so,” said Lionel Ratcliffe, with his detached laugh.—“We are full early here, ’twould seem,” he added in louder tones, advancing toward the card-table in the window before which the Frenchwoman had already taken seat.

But she disdained to cast toward him even the flutter of an eyelid. Her fingers were moving restlessly among the cards and dice.

“_Zero … zero! Hein? Non-zero. Ah … mal-chance!_”

The man stood over her a second or two in silence. Then sat down in his turn and faced her. His voice rang out with a kind of empty cheeriness:—

“What! to the dice already?—Nay,” here he leaned across the narrow space and whispered, “Remember, it was to play another game that I brought you here.”

She turned petulantly from him; then her eye became fixed, staring out through the unshuttered window.

“What a strange red moon is rising!” she cried. “Would to God, Monsieur Ratcliffe, you had never come to me this morning, tempting, tempting.… My boxes were packed: I should be now far from this pit of pestil—”

“Hush! hush!” he warned, finger on lip. “Not here! Do not forget my instructions.” Then, in his low, mock-gallant accents: “How now? Is the game, then, no longer worth the hazard?”

She caught up the dice-box again, feverishly:—

“Yes—yes. But I have no luck to-night!”

She muttered and cast. “Naught again!”

“Expect you luck at the game of chance,” quoth he, catching the dice-box from her hand, “when you are so lucky at the game of love?”

“I? I, lucky?”

“Yes,” proceeded he; “and have you not had Cupid’s best cards in your hand, since the very hour of your landing with Madame de France? First the King—King of Trumps himself, and eke the Queen.—Gad, she’d have loved you, were it but to spite the Castlemaine.—Then—”

“Tush!” she interrupted angrily. “Cards?—’Tis not all to hold the cards—one must play them. I held them all, in truth—” she put her hand to her throat with a little choking sob. “But—”

“You threw them all down!” he laughed.

“Ah, _ciel_!—When the heart begins to take a part in this game of love, then all goes astray.”

“Aye,” repeated the man, steadily, his hard eyes upon her, “you threw your cards away—and all for love of this Rockhurst, the greatest knave in the pack.”

She turned with sudden anger:—

“Knave, sir? Sho!… King of you all!” Then, with equally sudden change of mood, “Oh, he _is_ a villain!” she moaned, and her lip trembled upon tears.

“And so you have not seen him,” said he, altering his tone to one of elaborate sympathy, “since he returned to town, escorting to his house my fair cousin, Diana Harcourt? What—not once, after all you have given up for him?—Faith, ’tis ungallant of him!”

Her elbows on the table, her chin sunk in her hands, she was now staring fiercely into his eyes.

“Your promise, sir, that I meet him here to-night?…”

“Nay, I can only tell you, my fair Jeanne, that he journeys hither from the Tower or Whitehall twice a day—when ’tis not thrice.”

“_Mon Dieu!_ …” she breathed between her clenched teeth.

Satisfied with the temper he had aroused in her, the man withdrew his eyes, turned sideways on his chair, and crossed his legs.

“I fear you’ve been too cool with him,” he remarked airily. “Our ‘merry Rockhurst,’ as his Majesty calls him, is used to a vast deal of warmth.”

“I—too cool!” She laughed hysterically. “Oh, yes, it was that, of course, with this heart and brain of mine on fire!”

“Then I fear,” said Ratcliffe, on the edge of a yawn, “you’ve been too hot. The Lord Constable of his Majesty’s Tower is a man of niceties.”

“Monsieur Ratcliffe,” cried Jeanne de Mantes, beating the table with her palm and darting her head toward him like a pretty serpent, “you are the Devil!”

“And your very good friend, madam.” He smiled with a charming bow. “Come, come! Smooth that fair brow. Do you doubt but you can hold your own against a mere country widow?”

She fixed him with suspicious eyes.

“Aye, and now it comes to me,” she cried resentfully. “What is your motive in all this, Monsieur Ratcliffe? Not simply sympathy for me?”

“Come, come! Be calm.” There was authority under his blandness. “Be calm,” he repeated, “and let me whisper in your ear.—I will even trust you with my innermost thought. Diana Harcourt shall not be for my Lord Rockhurst, but for your humble servant.”

“Aye,” she commented, a twist of scorn upon her lips; “the lady, I was told, is passing rich.”

“Even so,” returned he, unmoved. “’Twould indeed be impossible to conceal aught from your perspicacity!—Now Mistress Harcourt, by an odd trick of fate, has become affianced to Harry Rockhurst, the virtuous, innocent country son of this most reprobate nobleman. The which, however, would be but a small matter (for she loves not the green lad, mark you, nor ever will), were it not the spur to other feelings.”

“I fail to follow you, sir,” she said wearily.

“Nay, a moment’s patience, pretty huntress, then you will come full on the scent. My Lord Rockhurst has had the singular maggot of playing a game of parental virtue with his heir.—But you are not listening.”

She was pressing her temples with the tip of her fingers, as one who fights a stabbing pain. At his words, she looked up again and nodded; and he went on:—

“He has pledged himself to guard the goddess for his lad in the maze of the town. Mistress Diana has seen naught of my Lord Constable but the high-souled knight, the King Arthur of romance, and so he would fain remain in her eyes even as in those of his son; and thus he, whom the town has dubbed Rakehell Rockhurst, caught in his own springe, must go on playing the pattern of chivalry, the virtuous gentleman, the devoted father—play his part out, in fact, or else be dubbed now prince of hypocrites! Aye, and the cream of the jest is that they have fallen both so mad in love with each other, aha! that each can scarce breathe in the other’s presence for the weight of the secret!”

He laughed, but she brooded darkly, nibbling at her little finger.

“And so,” she said after a pause, “you count upon me to lure back my lord?”

“Aye,” retorted he, with a great show of ease. “That—or else to pluck the mask of grave virtue from his face … in Mistress Harcourt’s presence. Was it not agreed? Either course, I take it, will serve your purpose as well as mine. Why—I deemed you subtler, madam! Upon my Lord Constable’s discomfiture; upon the opening of my fair prude’s eyes, strikes my hour, I say. And, zounds, I take it!—Strikes your moment, too, so you know how to clutch it! Do you not see that?”

She made no answer. A meaningless laugh was on her lips; it died in a sigh. A strange feeling as of soaring and undulation had come upon her, and a splitting of her thoughts as though she were in two places at once. Her mind was wandering oddly, beyond her control, to the cool meadows of her childhood’s home, to the days when she plucked daisies with her baby brother in the dew-wet grass. Lionel Ratcliffe was still speaking; she caught a word here and there. One phrase at last fixed her attention.

“’Twill go hard,” he was saying, “if Lionel Ratcliffe comes not to his own to-night!”

“And Jeanne de Mantes to hers!” she cried then, in a kind of high-strained voice, rousing herself. And, falling back into her abstraction: “What a wicked mist there rises from the garden,” she went on, complaining. “Aye, would I were far from here!”

“And let pious Mistress Harcourt convert my Lord Constable?”

“A plague on you!” she shrieked in a sudden frenzy.

“Hush, hush! That word—have you forgot?”

A shadow fell on them as they leaned together. She looked up in terror. It was only the old butler, with a whispered message from Lady Chillingburgh to her grandson.

Lionel frowned: the interruption was unwelcome. He glanced at the clock, it was the hour of the reception; the guests would presently arrive, and he mistrusted the Frenchwoman’s tact, above all to-night, in this unwonted vapourish mood. He rose with ill humour.

“Some whimsy of my grandam about the tables, no doubt,” he muttered, as he sauntered from the room, pausing at the door to cast a last look of warning. And, truly,—for Fate plays such tricks upon those who would guide her,—scarce had his footsteps died away, when Lord Rockhurst himself entered unannounced upon the solitary guest, as enters the familiar of the house.