DRAMATIS PERSONAE
DUKE OF ORMSKIKK.
EARL OF BRUDENEL, father to Lady Marian Heleigh, who has retired sometime into the country.
LORD HUMPHREY DEGGE, a gamester, and Ormskirk's hireling.
MR. LANGTON, secretary to Ormskirk.
LADY MARIAN HELEIGH, betrothed to Ormskirk, a young, beautiful girl of a mild and tender disposition.
SCENE
The east terrace of Halvergate House.
APRIL'S MESSAGE
It occurs to me that we here assume intimacy with a man of unusual achievement, and therefore tread upon quaggy premises. Yet I do but avail myself of to-day's privilege…. It is an odd thing that people will facilely assent to Don Adriano's protestation against a certain travestying of Hector,—'Sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the dead, for when he breathed he was a man,'—even while through the instant the tide of romance will be setting quite otherwhither, with their condonation. For in all the best approved romances the more sumptuous persons of antiquity are very guilty of twaddle on at least one printed page in ten, and nobody remonstrates; and here is John Bulmer, too, lugged from the grave for your delectation.
I presume, however, to palliate the offence. The curious may find the gist of what I narrate concerning Ormskirk in Heinrich Loewe's biography of the man, and will there discover that with established facts I have not made bold to juggle. Only when knowledge failed have I bridged the void with speculation. Perhaps I have guessed wrongly: the feat is not unhuman, and in provision against detection therein I can only protest that this lack of omniscience was never due to malice; faithfully I have endeavored to deduce from the known the probable, and in nothing to misrepresent to you this big man of a little age, this trout among a school of minnows.
Trout, mark you; I claim for Ormskirk no leviathan-ship. Rather I would remind you of a passage from somewhat anterior memoirs: 'The Emperor of Lilliput is taller, by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into his beholders.'
This, however, is not the place to expatiate on Ormskirk's extraordinary career; his rise from penury and obscurity, tempered indeed by gentle birth, to the priviest secrets of his Majesty's council,—climbing the peerage step by step, as though that institution had been a garden-ladder,—may be read of in the history books.
'I collect titles as an entomologist does butterflies,' he is recorded to have said: 'and I find the gaudier ones the cheapest. My barony I got for a very heinous piece of perjury, my earldom for not running away until the latter end of a certain battle, my marquisate for hoodwinking a half-senile Frenchman, and my dukedom for fetching in a quack doctor when he was sore needed by a lady whom the King at that time delighted to honor.'
It was, you observe, a day of candors.
I
The Duke of Ormskirk, then (one gleans from Loewe's pages), dismissed from mind the Audaine conspiracy. It was a pity to miss the salutary effect of a few political executions just then, but after all there was nothing to be done about it. So the Duke turned to the one consolation offered by the affair, and set out for Halvergate House, the home of Marian Heleigh's father. There one finds him, six days later, deep in a consultation with his secretary, which in consideration of the unseasonable warmth was held upon the east terrace.
'Yes, I think we had better have the fellow hanged on the thirteenth,' said Ormskirk, as he leisurely affixed his signature. 'The date seems eminently appropriate. Now the papers concerning the French treaty, if you please, Mr. Langton.'
The impassive-faced young man who sat opposite placed a despatch-box between them. 'These were sent down from London only last night, sir. Mr. Morfit [Footnote: Perhaps the most adroit of all the many spies in Ormskirk's employment. It was this same Morfit who in 1756 accompanied Damiens into France as far as Calais; and see page 16.] has been somewhat dilatory.'
'Eh, it scarcely matters. I looked them over in bed this morning and found them quite correct, Mr. Langton, quite—Why, heyday!' the Duke demanded, 'what's this? You have brought me the despatch-box from my dresser— not, as I distinctly told you, from the table by my bed. Nay, I have had quite enough of mistakes concerning despatch-boxes, Mr. Langton.'
Mr. Langton stammered that the error was natural. Two despatch-boxes were in appearances so similar—
'Never make excuses, Mr. Langton. '
Left alone, the Duke of Ormskirk sat for a while, tapping his fingers irresolutely against the open despatch- box. He frowned a little, for, with fair reason to believe Tom Langton his son, he found the boy too stolid, too unimaginative, to go far. It seemed to Ormskirk that none of his illegitimate children displayed any particular promise, and he sighed. Then he took a paper from the despatch-box, and began to read.
He sat, as one had said, upon the east terrace of Halvergate House. Behind him a tall yew-hedge shut off the sunlight from the table where he and Tom Langton had earlier completed divers businesses; in front of him a balustrade, ivy-covered, and set with flower-pots of stone, empty as yet, half screened the terraced gardens that sank to the artificial lake below.
The Duke could see only a vast expanse of sky and a stray bit of Halvergate printing the horizon with turrets, all sober gray save where the two big copper cupolas of the south facade burned in the April sun; but by bending forward you glimpsed close-shaven lawns dotted with clipped trees and statues,—as though, he reflected, Glumdalclitch had left her toys scattered haphazard about a green blanket—and the white of the broad marble stairway descending to the sunlit lake, and, at times, the flash of a swan's deliberate passage across the lake's surface. All white and green and blue the vista was, and of a monastic tranquillity, save for the plashing of a fountain behind the yew-hedge and the grumblings of an occasional bee that lurched complainingly on some by- errand of the hive.
Presently his Grace of Ormskirk replaced the papers in the despatch-box, and, leaning forward, sighed. '
Then he lifted his head at the sound of a girl's voice. Somewhere rearward to the hedge the girl idly sang— an old song of Thomas Heywood's,—in a serene contralto, low-pitched and effortless, but very sweet. Smilingly the Duke beat time.
Sang the girl:
