Read Ebook: The extraordinary confessions of Diana Please by Capes Bernard

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Ebook has 2100 lines and 90946 words, and 42 pages

"After you, sir," answered the other politely.

My master, looking horribly ugly, repeated his demand.

"Well," said the steward, "this is fair humours, Newcastle asking for coals!"

The words were hardly out of him, when my master smote him down, and pushed into the house. He gave a little quiver, like unstrung wire, and lay senseless, the red running from his nostrils.

But they were destined to discover no further chestnuts for their catspaw. The Jesuit had fled, it appeared, with the rest of the family; and so they must content themselves with wrecking the private chapel, where the household was wont to practise its treasonable rites.

Now, my master, who was eager after spoil, sweating and toiling in the thick of the press, left me unguardedly to my own devices; and suddenly I found myself quite alone in a closet hung with vestments, where there was a fireplace with an open bricked hearth, having no signs of usage, which immediately, from habit, caught my attention. And straight, at last, God, pitiful to His poor little derelict, touched the cross on my breast, and quickened inspiration in that where I had supposed all was dead. I slid into the chimney, and went up, up, like an eel in a well rising for air. The sounds of destruction grew attenuated beneath me; I smelt life and freedom, and swarmed faster in my agony to attain them. The chimney, clean as at its building, let down no token of my passage by it, and in a few moments I emerged from the summit, and, tumbling into the cleft of a long double roof--found myself face to face with a man who was there before me.

At least I call him a man; but O, my Alcide, he was a marionnette! His joints creaked. All the bran in his body seemed to have been shaken down into his calves. His hat supported itself on his ears and the top of his coat collar. His sleeves were sacks. His nose was nothing but a wen, and being no better adapted to the burden of some enormous spectacles he wore, had led his fingers to an incessant trick of adjusting those in their place. He carried under his arm an immense folio, with which, as I appeared, he aimed an agitated blow at me, only to miss and fall forward on his face on the roof.

I instantly dodged past him, and stood panting while he collected himself. His glasses, without which he was helpless, had flown off, and I saw his eyes, which before had seemed to fill the whole field of the great lenses, mere swollen slits, like a pig's. He groped about in the utmost consternation as he knelt, pawing the tiles for his lost property.

"Who are you? Wait! I'll be with you," he ejaculated excitedly, as his bony hands swept the roof.

I backed out of their reach without replying.

At last he found what he sought, and fitting the rims to his nose, rose to his feet and stared at me.

"Hey, what!" he said--"a sweep! Well!"--and blew out a rumbling grunt, which he checked suddenly, as if he had turned a cock on it.

A moment after, he put his hand into his pocket, and fetching out a dirty fragment of biscuit, held it to me persuasively, as one might lure a colt. Seeing, however, that I still held away from him, he threw the biscuit down in a pet, and stood to canvass me in a baleful manner.

"What do you want?" he snapped out suddenly. "How did you find your way here?"

Still with my eyes on him, I answered, in a husky whisper--

"Don't you know? Up the closet chimney."

"Ay," he said, dropping his own voice in tacit response to the warning in mine, "but not to sweep it?"

"No," I said; "to escape by it."

His hand went up to his glasses. He glared at me through their restored focus.

Watchful of him, lest, before I could explain, he should silence me provisionally with some stunning blow, I ventured to approach him a little nearer.

"There's killing," I whispered, "going on down there--a poor old man in a grey coat."

He started violently, and pulling his jaw down, uttered a sort of mechanical crow, and let it go again.

I shook my head dumbly. He was readjusting his glasses to meet the answer.

"Ay," he gulped, swallowing with relief, "poor Mackenzie! And to think that for all his loyalty he must burn!"

I whispered, "Why must he?"

"Because," he said, "he wasn't of the faith."

This uncouth creature was getting horrible to me. I suppose he read my repulsion in my face, for his own suddenly grew agitated and menacing.

"Are you thinking of betraying me?" he said.

I retreated before him, working my foolish young arms.

"Keep away!" I cried; "I don't even know who you are."

"O!" he said, and stopped, and was at his spectacles again. Then suddenly he held up his hand.

"Hark!" he said.

I listened. Far and faint below, through the hubbub of destruction came wafted at intervals the name of the chaplain--Pope--the cynosure of all this iconoclastic zeal.

"Yes, it's you they want," I said.

"And you," he retorted fiercely, "are pointing the way, you little"--

"It's a lie!" I cried vehemently. "I came up here to escape from them, like you."

He looked at me doubtfully.

"You said you didn't know who I was."

"No more I did," I protested, "till you told me."

It was the wise policy, certainly. He squatted himself between me and the chimney, and we dwelt in silence, while the mob wreaked its blind vengeance below. I was in a dreadful fright all the time. Every moment I expected to hear my master's voice boom up the flue by way of which I had climbed; and, desperate as I was, I devised the naughty expedient to curry favour, if necessary, by claiming the credit of having run this fugitive to bay. It was a base thought, perhaps, though natural under the stress of the occasion. Chiefly, however, I regret it because it was uncalled for, and it is aggravating to burden one's conscience with unprofitable frailties. The monster I had run from was never, in point of fact, to cross my path again. Probably, thinking I had fled from the house, he went hunting counter, and so put ever a wider interval between us.

It was not, after all, so very long before the racket of despoliation down below died away, and we heard the mob clatter from the house, and go streaming and singing across the common in its retreat. I believe that, either realising how in my master it had evoked a demon to its own legal discomfiture, or perhaps frightened by the bugbear of some reported troop of militia assembling in the neighbourhood, it was suddenly decided to temper Protestantism with prudence, and so dissipating itself with great speed and piety, left the building to a solitude more dense by contrast than before.

It was not, however, until every whisper and echo had long ceased that I durst let myself be persuaded of the reality of my reprieve; and when at last I did, the joy that grew minutely in my heart came near to upsetting my reason.

My excitement hungered for something on which to flesh itself. I rose and went up and down, quickly and softly, in the space left me, seeking the means to some larger action. Then I saw the great folio lying discarded on the roof where the chaplain had dropped it, and all of a sudden felt itching to know what it could contain to tempt this man to burden himself with its care in so anxious a situation.

He sat with his face in his hands--or cuffs, rather. He appeared to be in a sort of uncouth trance. I stole very noiseless by him, and, unobserved as I supposed, had actually lifted the book, when he started awake in a moment.

"Hey!" he cried. "That's mine!"

"I was going to bring it to you," I said.

He scuttled towards me on his hands and toes, and snatching the book from me, squatted down, hugging it, and glaring at me in a sort of dumb malevolence.

I had no retort for such rudeness. I stood crimsoning under my black a moment, then, in default of a better answer, began to cry.

He was not the least moved, the ill-conditioned boor, but he was disturbed by the noise.

"Ur-rh!" he bullied. "That'll do. Do you hear?"

Indignation gave me decision. I turned my back on him.

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