CHAPTER IV
At that I remember that I cried out in overwhelming excitement and amazement; cried out that I knew the man and his story, and the place whence she had been taken; that I had heard the tale from my father years before. "It was Colonel Porter who picked you up-Colonel Porter, and he saved his life by it!" I cried, quite beside myself at the wonderful discovery I had made. "It was Colonel Porter, in the great riot at Norwich."
"Ah?" she said, slowly; looking away from me, and speaking so coolly and strangely as both to surprise and damp me.
Yet I persisted. "Yes," I said, "the story is well known; at least that part of it. But-" and there and at that word I stopped, dumbfounded and gaping.
"But what?" she asked sharply, and looked at me again; the colour risen in her face.
"But-you are only eighteen," I hazarded timidly, "and the Norwich riot was in the War time. I dare say, thirty years ago."
She turned on me in a sort of passion.
"Well, sir, and what of that?" she cried. "Do you think me thirty?"
"No, indeed," I answered. And at the most she was nineteen.
"Then don't you believe me?"
I cried out too at that; but, boy-like, I was so proud of my knowledge and acuteness that I could not let the point lie. "All I mean," I explained, "is that to have been alive then, and at Norwich, you must be thirty now. And-"
"And was it I?" she answered, flying out at me in a fine fury. "Who said anything about Norwich? Or your dirty riots? Or your Porter, whose name I never heard before! Go away! I hate you! I hate you!" she continued, passionately, waving me off. "You make up things and then put them on me! I never said a word about Norwich."
"I know you did not," I protested.
"Then why did you say I did?" she wailed. "Why did you say I did? You are a wretch! I hate you!"
And with that, dissolving in tears and sobs she at one and the same time showed me another side of love, and reduced me to the utmost depths of despair; whence I was not permitted to emerge, nor reinstated in the least degree of favour until I had a hundred times abased myself before her, and was ready to curse the day when I first heard the name of Porter. Still peace was at last, and with infinite difficulty restored; and so complete was our redintegratio amoris that we presently ventured to recur to her tale and to the strange coincidence that had divided us; which did not seem so very remarkable, on second thought, seeing that she could not now remember that she had said a word about booths or stalls, but would have it I had inserted those particulars; the man in her case having taken refuge-she fancied, but could not at this distance of time remember very clearly-among the seats of a kind of bull-ring or circus erected in the marketplace. Which of course made a good deal of difference.
Notwithstanding this discrepancy, however, and though, taught by experience, I hastened to agree with her that the secret of her birth was not likely to be discovered in a moment, nor by so simple a process as the journey to Norwich, which I had been going to suggest, it was natural that we should often revert to the subject, and to her pretensions, and the hardship of her lot: and my curiosity and questions giving a fillip to her memory, scarcely a day passed but she recovered some new detail from the past; as at one time a service of gold-plate which she perfectly remembered she had seen on her father's sideboard; and at another time an accident that had befell her in her childhood, through her father's coach and six horses being overturned in a slough. Such particulars (and many others as pertinent and romantic, on which I will not linger) gave us a certainty of her past consequence and her future fortune were her parents once known; and while they served to augment the respect in which my love held her, gradually and almost imperceptibly led her to take a higher tone with me, and even on occasions to carry herself towards me with an air of mystery, as if there were still some things which she had not confided to me.
This attitude on her part-which in itself pained me extremely-and still more the fear naturally arising from it, that if she came by her own I should immediately lose her, forced me to make the acquaintance of yet another side of love; by throwing me, I mean, into such a fever of suspicion and jealousy as made me for a period the most unhappy of men. From this plight my mistress, exercising the privilege of her sex, made no haste to relieve me. On the contrary, by affecting an increased reserve and asserting that her movements were watched, she prolonged my doubts; nor when this treatment had wrought the desired end of reducing me to the lowest depths, and she at length consented to meet me, did she entirely relent or abandon her reserve; or if she did so, on rare occasions, it was only to set me some task as the price of her complaisance, or expose me to some trial by which she might prove my devotion.
In a word, while I became hopelessly enslaved, even to the flogging a boy at her word, or procuring a dress far above my station-merely that she might see me by stealth in it, and judge of my air! – which were two of her caprices, she appeared to be farther removed from me every day, and at each meeting granted me fewer privileges. Whether this treatment had its origin in the natural instinct of a woman, or was deliberately chosen as better calculated to increase my subservience, it had the latter effect; and to such an extent that when, after a long absence, she condescended to meet me, and broached a plan that earlier would have raised my hair, I asked no better than to do her bidding, and, instead of pointing out the folly of her proposal, fell in with it with scarcely a murmur.
Her plan, when she communicated it to me, which she did with an air of mystery and the same assumption of a secret withheld that had tormented me before, amounted to nothing less than an evening sally into the town on the occasion of the approaching visit of the Duke of York, who was to lie one night at the Rose at Ware on his way to Newmarket. Mr. D- had issued the strictest orders that all should keep the house during this visit; not so much out of a proper care for the boys' morality (though the gay crowd that followed the Court served for a pretext) as because, in his character of fanatic and Exclusionist, he held His Highness's religion and person in equal abhorrence. Such a restriction weighed little in the scale against love; but, infatuated as I was, I found something that sensibly shocked me in the proposal coming from Dorinda's lips; nor could I fail to foresee many dangers to which a young girl must expose herself on such an expedition in the town, and at night. But as to a youth in love nothing that his mistress chooses to do seems long amiss, so this proposal scared me for a moment only; after which it cost my mistress no more than a little rallying on my crop-eared manners, and some scolding, to make me see it in its true aspect of an innocent frolic, fraught with as much pleasure to the cavalier as novelty to the escorted.
"You will don your new suit," she said, merrily, "and I shall meet you in the garden at half past nine."
"And if the boys may miss me?" I protested feebly.
"The boys have missed you before!" she answered, mocking my tone. "Were you not here last night? And for a whole hour, sir?"
I confessed with hot cheeks that I had been there; humbly and tamely awaiting her pleasure.
"And did they tell then?" she asked scornfully. "Or are they less afraid of the birch now? But of course-if you don't care to come with me-or are afraid, sir-?"
"I am neither," I said warmly. "Only I do not quite understand, sweet, what you wish."
"They lie at the Rose," she said. "And amongst them, I am told, are the prettiest men and the most lovely women in the world. And jewels, and laces, and such dresses! Oh, I am mad to see them! And music and gaming and dancing! And dishes and plates of gold! And a Popish priest, which is a thing I have never seen, though I have heard of it. And-"
"And do you expect to see all these things through the windows?" I cried in my superior knowledge.
She did not answer at once, but with her hands on my shoulders, swayed to and fro sideways as if she already heard the music; while her gipsy face looked archly into mine,