To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
And heap the shrine of luxury and pride
With incense kindled at the Muses' flame.
The scene was completed by a blue and yellow macaw at one window chained to his perch, and a green monkey tethered in like manner at the other.
Of course Elizabeth Delavie did not perceive all these details at once. Her first sensation was the shock to the decorum of a modest English lady at intruding into a bed-room; but her foreign recollections coming to her aid, she accepted the fashion with one momentary feminine review of her own appearance, and relief that she had changed her travelling gear for her Sunday silks, and made her father put on his full uniform. All this passed while Sir Amyas was leading her into the room, steering her carefully out of the monkey's reach. Then he went a step or two forward and bent before his mother, almost touching the ground with one knee, as he kissed her hand, and rising, acknowledged the lady with a circular sweep of his hat, and his Colonel with a military salute, all rapidly, but with perfect ease and gracefulness. "Ah! my truant, my runaway invalid!" said Lady Belamour, "you are come to surrender."
"I am come," he said gravely, holding out his stronger hand to his little brother and sister, who sprang to him, "to bring my father- and sister-in-law, Major and Miss Delavie."
"Ah! my good cousin, my excellent Mrs. Betty, excuse me that my tyrant friseur prevents my rising to welcome you. It is so good and friendly in you to come in this informal way to cheer me under this terrible anxiety. Let me present you to my kind friend, the Countess of Aresfield, who has been so good as to come in to-day to sustain my spirits. Colonel Mar you know already. Pray be seated. Amyas-Archer-chairs. Let Syphax give you a cup of chocolate."
"Madam," said the Major, disregarding all this and standing as if on parade, "can I see you alone? My business is urgent."
"No evil news, I trust! I have undergone such frightful shocks of late, my constitution is well nigh ruined."
"It is I that have to ask news of you madam."
She saw that, if she trifled with him, something would break out that she would not wish to have said publicly. "My time is so little my own," she said, "I am under command to be at the Palace by two o'clock, but in a few minutes I shall be able to dismiss my tormentor, and then, till my woman comes to dress me, I shall be at your service. Sit down, I entreat, and take some chocolate. I know Mrs. Betty is an excellent housekeeper, and I want her opinion. My dear Lady Aresfield, suffer me to introduce my estimable cousin, Mrs. Betty Delavie."
The Countess looking in her feathers and powder like a beetroot in white sauce, favoured Betty with a broad stare. Vulgarity was very vulgar in those days, especially when it had purchased rank, and thought manners might be dispensed with. Betty sat down, and Amoret climbed on her lap, while a diversion was made by Archer's imperious entreaty that his mamma would purchase a mandarin who not only nodded, but waved his hands and protruded his tongue.
Then ensued what seemed, to the sickening suspense of the two Delavies, a senseless Babel of tongues on all sides; but it ended in the friseur putting up his implements, the trades-folk leaving the selected goods unpaid for, and the poor poet bowing himself within reach of the monkey, who made a clutch at his MS., chattered over it, and tore it into fragments. There was a peal of mirth-loudest from Lady Aresfield- but Sir Amyas sprang forward with gentlemanly regrets, apologies, and excuses, finally opening the door and following the poor man out of the room to administer the guinea from his own pocket, while Colonel Mar exclaimed, "Here, Archer, boy, run after him with this. The poor devil has won it by producing a smile from those divine lips-such as his jungle might never have done-"
"Fie! fie! Mar," said the Lady, shaking her fan at him, "the child will repeat it to him."
"The better sport if he do," said Colonel Mar, carelessly; "he may term himself a very Orpheus charming the beasts, so that they snatch his poems from him!"
Then, as Sir Amyas returned, Lady Belamour entreated her dear Countess to allow him to conduct her to the withdrawing room, and there endeavour to entertain her. The Colonel could not but follow, and the Major and Betty found themselves at length alone with her Ladyship.
"I trust you have come to relieve my mind as to our poor runaway," she began.
"Would to Heaven I could!" said the Major.
"Good Heavens! Then she has never reached you!"
"Certainly not.
"Nor her sister? Oh, surely she is with her sister!"
"No, madam, her sisters knows nothing of her. Cousin, you have children of your own! I entreat of you to tell me what you have done with her."
"How should I have done anything with her? I who have been feeding all this time on the assurance that she had returned to you."
"How could a child like her do so?"
"We know she had money," said Lady Belamour.
"And we know," said Betty, fixing her eyes on the lady, "that though she escaped, on the first alarm, as far as Sedhurst, and was there seen, she had decided on returning to Bowstead and giving herself up to you Ladyship."
"Indeed? At what time was that?" exclaimed my Lady.
"Some time in the afternoon of Sunday!"
"Ah! then I must have left Bowstead. I was pledged to her Majesty's card-table, and royal commands cannot be disregarded, so I had to go away in grievous anxiety for my poor boy. She meant to return to Bowstead, did she? Ah. Does not an idea strike you that old Amyas Belamour may know more than he confesses! He has been playing a double game throughout."
"He is as anxious to find the dear girl as we are madam."
"So he may seem to you and to my poor infatuated boy, but you see those crazed persons are full of strange devices and secrets, as indeed we have already experienced. I see what you would say; he may appear sane and plausible enough to a stranger, but to those who have known him ever since his misfortunes, the truth is but too plain. He was harmless enough as long as he was content to remain secluded in his dark chamber, but now that I hear he has broken loose, Heaven knows what mischief he may do. My dear cousin Delavie, you are the prop left to me in these troubles, with my poor good man in the hands of those cruel pirates, who may be making him work in chains for all I know," and the tears came into her beautiful eyes.
"They will not do that," said Major Delavie, eager to reassure her; "I have heard enough of their tricks to know that they keep such game as he most carefully till they can get a ransom."
"Your are sure of that!"
"Perfectly. I met an Italian fellow at Vienna who told me how it was all managed by the Genoese bankers."
"Ah! I was just thinking that you would be the only person who could be of use-you who know foreign languages and all their ways. If you could go abroad, and arrange it for me!"
"If my daughter were restored-" began the Major.
"I see what you would say, and I am convinced that the first step towards the discovery would be to put Mr. Belamour under restraint, and separate his black from him. Then one or other of them would speak, and we might know how she has been played upon."
"What does your Ladyship suppose then?" asked the Major.
"This is what I imagine. The poor silly maid repents herself and comes back in search of me. Would that she had found me, her best friend! But instead of that, she falls in with old Belamour, and he, having by this time perceived the danger of the perilous masquerade in which he had involved my unlucky boy, a minor, has mewed her up somewhere, till the cry should be over."
"That would be the part of a villain, but scarcely of a madman," said Betty dryly.
"My dear cousin Betty, there are lunatics endowed with a marvellous shrewdness to commit senseless villanies, and to put on a specious seeming. Depend upon it, my unfortunate brother-in-law's wanderings at night were not solely spent in communings with the trees and brooks. Who knows what might be discovered if he were under proper restraint? And it is to you, the only relation I have, that I must turn for assistance in my most unhappy circumstances," she added, wit a glance so full of sweet helplessness that no man could withstand it. "I am so glad you are here. You will be acting for me as well as for yourself in endeavouring to find your poor lovely child, and the first thing I would have done would be to separate Belamour and his black, put them under restraint, and interrogate them separately. You could easily get an order from a magistrate. But ah, here comes my woman. No more now. You will come to me this evening, and we can talk further on this matter. I shall have some company, and it will not be a regular rout, only a few card-tables, and a little dancing for the young people."