Chapter II: I Am Abducted

My mamma questioned me again in the morning about my adventures. She was very hollow-eyed and nervous, which offended me; for for her to appear ill in body or ill at ease in mind seemed to make my own young sanity something that it was wrong or selfish in me to enjoy. I was inconsiderate, no doubt; yet tell me, my Alcide, is it, on the other hand, considerate of dyspepsia to be always wet-blanketing health and contentment? Is not the human the only animal permitted of right to inflict his sickness on his fellows, while in every other community the invalid is “out of the law” of nature? It is thus, undoubtedly, that deterioration is provided against. To be attracted to the sweet and wholesome, and repelled by distemper, is _that_ selfishness? If it is not, then am I content to be misunderstood by all others, so long as Heaven will recognise the real love of humankind which inspires my wish to secure its untainted image in myself. There must be a divine virtue in health, seeing how disease is the heir of sin. Is not to sympathise, then, with depression, to condone evil?

I leave the answer to profounder moralists than I, content, in default, to admit that the misery which now befell me was the direct consequence of my wickedness.

“Papa,” said I, tossing my head, “gave me to the beautiful duke, and he took me in pledge of the love papa bears him. Will he come and fetch me, do you think, mamma? I shall be glad to belong to one who does not have headaches whenever the sun shines.”

She went quite white, and broke into a torrent of French invective.

“I do not understand these hard words,” I said. “Is it so they pray in les Madelonnettes?”

My sauciness took her completely aback. She stared at me for some moments in silence, and then cried out suddenly, “God forgive you, Diane, and the vile creature who has instructed you to this, and your father, who I am going at once to ask that she may be removed!”

And she went out, unconsciously consigning me to my fate; and I never saw her again, may Heaven pardon her!

I was a little frightened, though still defiant; and I loitered about the house, singing in my small voice, which, though never an “organ,” has always been attractive, so people say.

Presently I remembered my duck-stone, and thought I would seek a case for it. I was alone in the house, for our one maid was gone marketing, and the governess not yet arrived. I went upstairs, and rummaged in my mother’s bureaux, and by and by found a tiny silver vinaigrette into which the stone fitted beautifully. Then I went and sat in our little front garden which overlooked the road running to the downs, and there rocked and mused amongst the flowers in a recovered temper. I hoped my father would fetch me again; I expected he would; and so, smiling and dreaming, put up the vinaigrette half-consciously, and sniffed at it. In a moment all sense of my surroundings went from me, and sky and flowers and the grey downs were blended in a rapture of unreality.

I came to myself amidst an impression of jolting. I thought it was night, and that I was suffocating in my bedclothes. I threw something from my face, saw daylight, and cried out incoherently.

Immediately the jerky motion ceased, and a horrible mask looked over and down at me. It was fat and sooty, with a handkerchief, startlingly white by contrast, going obliquely across its forehead.

“Stow that, my pigeon!” it said hoarsely and shortly. But at the first sound of its voice, black inspiration had come upon me in a flood. It was the sweep of my last night’s adventure, and he was bearing me away captive in the very little cart he had lost to my father. Whether he had driven that up, sportingly, to time, or was merely escaping in it, I never learned. Anyhow, temptation had come to him recognising me lying there, senseless and unprotected, in the garden, and moved, perhaps, by some sentiment between cupidity and revenge, he had seized the opportunity to kidnap me.

He swung his fat legs over the sitting board, and lifted me up from the midst of the empty bags where he had concealed me. We were in the thick of a little wood, and the pony was quietly cropping at the trackside grass. The sense of loss and isolation, the filth of my condition, the terror of this startled awakening from happy dreams, wrought a desperation in me that was near madness. I screamed and reviled and fought. The man opposed to my struggles just his two hands; but their large persuasive strength, unctuous as they were with soot, was more deadly than any violence. Alas! how the star that lit last night’s heaven may be found fallen in the mud to-day, my Alcide!

When I was quiet, he put me up between his knees, and smacked my face twice, deliberately, on either side--not hard, but in a lustful, proprietary way.

“Blow for blow,” says he, and lifted the bandage a little from his eye. It was horribly swollen and discoloured.

“Knew how to handle his morleys,” he said. “D’ee see’t? Now it be my turn.”

“What are you going to do with me?” I sobbed.

“Make ’ee my climbing boy,” he answered promptly, and with a hideous grin. “You’re my luck. D’ee see? Say you’re a gurl, and I’ll”-- He hissed in his breath, and looked at me like a beast of prey.

“There,” he ended; “get under, and so much’s sniff at your peril!”

Some distant sound, perhaps, startled him. He stuffed me into my former position, and, covering me again with the bags, turned and clicked up his pony. I lay in a half faint, scarce daring to breathe, so utterly had this monster succeeded in subduing me. I cried, incessantly but quietly, hearing hour by hour the wheels grind under my ear, till the sound and physical exhaustion induced in me a sort of delirium. All this time, the hope of pursuit and rescue never occurred to me, I believe. Did they occur to Proserpine having once felt the inhumanity of her sooty abductor?

But now all of a sudden the anguish grew unendurable. I must move or die. And at the moment I became conscious of the vinaigrette still clutched convulsively in my little fist.

Sure never death offered a sweeter release. Very softly I raised it, and found oblivion. I might have sought to use it on my enemy, and escape; but, alas! the unsophisticated mind of the child could compass no such artifice.

We went on all day, as I realised during the intervals of my waking, by the unfrequented roads, jolting, loitering, sometimes in lonely places halting to rest the pony. The moral force my master (as I must now call him) put upon himself to avoid the wayside taverns, is the most convincing proof of his tenacity.

At last, a thicker darkness descended upon me, lying there in hopeless apathy, and night and sleep stretched their shroud over my miseries.

I awoke to rough movement and the sound of voices. My master was carrying me into a little ill-lighted cottage, which stood solitary upon the edge of a common. Sharp and brilliant, at no great distance, in a soughing night, sparkled the first lamps of a town.

I was borne into a tiny room, where something, covered with a cloth, lay stretched upon a rickety table. My master put me to the ground, and stood back to regard me. Another man, an expressionless sweep like himself, but gaunt and bent-shouldered, joined silent issue in this scrutiny.

“Well,” said the latter at length, “they’ll fit right enow; but damn the exchange!”

He stopped to cough rendingly; then went on--

“If you mean a deal, I’m game for half a bull, and there’s my word on it. But burn them duds, Johnny! I won’t take the risk on ’em.”

My master considered.

“Mayhap you’re right,” said he. “Call it done.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the other had jerked the cloth from the table. And there underneath lay the dead stiff body of a little sooty boy. His hands were griped at his chest, as if in agony of its œdematous swelling, and his bared eyeballs and teeth were as white as porcelain.

I could not cry out, or do anything but stare in horror, while the gaunt man, with some show of persuasion, began to strip the little body of its coat and vest and trousers--all its poor harness. Then, in a sickness beyond words, I comprehended. I was to be made exchange, for these foul vestments, my own pretty silken toilet.

“Come along, Georgy,” wheedled his late master. “You wouldn’t be so unhandsome as to deny a lady, and she doing you honour to accept of them.”

He rolled the body gently from side to side, so coaxingly forceful and intent, that someone, bursting in upon him at the moment, took him completely by surprise.

It was a wretchedly clad woman, with resinous blots of eyes in a hungry face, and a little black moustache over a toothless mouth--strange contrast!--that was never more still than a crab’s.

“So he’s dead, you dog!” she cried, seeming to feed on the words; “and you druv him to his death; and may God wither you!”

The bent man jumped, like a vulture, from the body, and hopped and dodged, keeping it between him and the woman.

“You took the odds!” he cried, coughing, and kneading his cracking knuckles together, “you took the odds, and you mustn’t cry out like a woman if they gone agen ye. I did no more’n my duty, as the Lord hears me!”

“Both on us,” said the woman. “Well, speak out!”

“He stuck,” said the sweep. “He stuck beyond reason. It were a good ten-inch square, for all it were a draw-in bend. I were forced to smoke him; but his lungs were that crowded, there was no loosening the pore critter till they bust and let him down. He were a good boy, and worth a deal to me.”

“That’s true,” put in my master. “A man, though he _be_ a flue-faker, don’t cut off his nose to spite his face, missus.”

She made no answer, staring fixedly at the corpse.

“He were my seventh,” she said. “He made no cry when you come and took him away from me--a yellow-haired devil. Did he cry for his mammy, chokin’ up in the dark there?”

“No,” said the man--“an unnat’ral son!”

She threw up her hands with a frightful gesture.

“I could have borne it if he had--I could have borne it, and cut my throat. What were you doing with him?”

The sweep hesitated; but my master took the word from him.

“It’s a question of his slops, missus.” (He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at me, where I stood in the background paralysed with terror.) “Half a bull or nothing, and you and him to share.”

The woman put her arms akimbo.

“Ho, indeed!” she said. “And where does _he_ come in?”

“It’s my own smalls,” swore the man, excited and truculent at once. “I won’t bate an inch of ’em, if I’m to die for it.”

They were facing each other across the body like tom cats, when my master pulled his friend aside, and whispered in his ear.

“Amongst ladies and gentlemen,” said he, and waited, smiling and oily, while the other fetched a black bottle from a cupboard. The woman visibly relaxed at the sight of this. Its owner uncorked it, and putting it to his mouth, gurgled, and smacked his black lips.

“The deal passes!” cried my master; and he snatched the bottle, and handed it to the woman with an ingratiatory smile.

It was the psychologic moment, which loosened and harmonised their tongues. They waxed confiding and genial. Presently the woman, commissioned politely to effect my transformation, swaggered across to me with devil-daring eyes, and began roughly to pull off my clothes.

“Damn you!” she said, with such a heat and violence of hate that my very sobs were withered in my throat. “Come up, you young limb! What the deuce! We’ll cry quits for my Georgy when the black smoke finishes your ladyship.”

She never had had a doubt of the meaning of my presence in that vile den, but my beauty and refinement and helplessness were only so many goads to her implacability. Her fingers were like rakes in my tender flesh. She would have torn me with her teeth, I believe, if any had been left to her. And I could only shrink and shiver under her hands, terrified if they wrung so much as a gasp from me.

When I was stripped, she seized a blunt dinner knife, and sawed off all my golden hair close to my head, a horrible experience. The tears gushed silent down my cheeks. They might have moved the heart of a wolf.

“There!” she said, when finished; “chuck us the duds!” and as she received them, scrubbed my face with the filthy tatters before she vested me in them.

I had hoped, perhaps, until thus hopelessly transformed; and then, at once, I hoped no more. _Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate_--I was behind the bars; I wore the devil’s livery. O, my Alcide! Pity this poor little Proserpine so ravished from her Plains of Enna.