The Amazing Marriage, v1

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You chorus the last two lines.

That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in
singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved. He
believed in her virtue to the very last.

'The ravished wife of my bosom,' he calls her all through the latter half
of the play. It is a real tragedy. The songs of that day have lost
their effect now, I suppose. They will ever remain pathetic to me; and
to hear the poor coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear
stolen wife Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song
of Saturday, was a most moving thing. You saw nothing but handkerchiefs
out all over the theatre. What it is that has gone from our drama, I
cannot tell: I am never affected now as I was then; and people in a low
station of life could affect me then, without being flung at me, for I
dislike an entire dish of them, I own. We were simpler in our habits and
ways of thinking. Elizabeth Martin, according to report, was a woman to
make better men than Ralph Thorkill act evilly--as to good looks, I mean.
She was not entirely guiltless, I am afraid; though in the last scene,
Mrs. Kempson, who played the part (as, alas, she could do to the very
life!), so threw herself into the pathos of it that there were few to
hold out against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had been misled. So
much for morality in those days!

And now for the elopement.

CHAPTER II

MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF THE ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF CRESSETT WITH
THE OLD BUCCANEER, AND OF CHARLES DUMP THE POSTILLION CONDUCTING THEM,
AND OF A GREAT COUNTY FAMILY

The twenty-first of June was the day appointed by Captain Kirby to carry
off Countess Fanny, and the time midnight: and ten minutes to the stroke
of twelve, Countess Fanny, as if she scorned to conceal that she was in a
conspiracy with her grey-haired lover, notwithstanding that she was
watched and guarded, left the Marchioness of Arpington's ball-room and
was escorted downstairs by her brother Lord Levellier, sworn to baffle
Kirby. Present with him in the street and witness to the shutting of the
carriage-door on Countess Fanny, were brother officers of his, General
Abrane, Colonel Jack Potts, and Sir Upton Tomber.

The door fast shut, Countess Fanny kissed her hand to them and drew up
the window, seeming merry, and as they had expected indignation and
perhaps resistance, for she could be a spitfire in a temper and had no
fear whatever of firearms, they were glad to have her safe on such good
terms; and so General Abrane jumped up on the box beside the coachman,
Jack Potts jumped up between the footmen, and Sir Upton Tomber and the
one-armed lord, as soon as the carriage was disengaged from the ruck two
deep, walked on each side of it in the road all the way to Lord
Cressett's town house. No one thought of asking where that silly young
man was--probably under some table.

Their numbers were swelled by quite a host going along, for heavy bets
were on the affair, dozens having backed Kirby; and it must have appeared
serious to them, with the lady in custody, and constables on the look-
out, and Kirby and his men nowhere in sight. They expected an onslaught
at some point of the procession, and it may be believed they wished it,
if only that they might see something for their money. A beautiful
bright moonlight night it happened to be. Arm in arm among them were
Lord Pitscrew and Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, a great friend of Kirby's;
for it was a device of the Old Buccaneer's that helped the earl to win
the great Welsh heiress who made him, even before he took to hoarding and
buying,--one of the wealthiest noblemen in England; but she was crazed by
her marriage or the wild scenes leading to it; she never presented
herself in society. She would sit on the top of Estlemont towers--as
they formerly spelt it--all day and half the night in midwinter, often,
looking for the mountains down in her native West country, covered with
an old white flannel cloak, and on her head a tall hat of her Welsh
women-folk; and she died of it, leaving a son in her likeness, of whom
you will hear. Lord Fleetwood had lost none of his faith in Kirby, and
went on booking bets giving him huge odds, thousands!

He accepted fifty to one when the carriage came to a stop at the steps of
Lord Cressett's mansion; but he was anxious, and well he might be, seeing
Countess Fanny alight and pass up between two lines of gentlemen all
bowing low before her: not a sign of the Old Buccaneer anywhere to right
or left! Heads were on the look out, and vows offered up for his
appearance.

She was at the door and about to enter the house. Then it was; that with
a shout of the name of some dreadful heathen god, Colonel Jack Potts
roared out, 'She's half a foot short o' the mark!'

He was on the pavement, and it seems he measured her as she slipped by
him, and one thing and another caused him to smell a cheat; and General
Abrane, standing beside her near the door, cried: 'Where art flying now,
Jack?' But Jack Potts grew more positive and bellowed, 'Peel her wig!
we're done!'

And she did not speak a word, but stood huddled-up and hooded; and Lord
Levellier caught her up by the arm as she was trying a dash into the
hall, and Sir Upton Tomber plucked at her veil and raised it, and
whistled:

'Phew!'--which struck the rabble below with awe of the cunning of the Old
Buccaneer; and there was no need for them to hear General Abrane say:
'Right! Jack, we've a dead one in hand,' or Jack Potts reply:

'It's ten thousand pounds clean winged away from my pocket, like a string
of wild geese!'

The excitement of the varletry in the square, they say, was fearful to
hear. So the principal noblemen and gentlemen concerned thought it
prudent to hurry the young woman into the house and bar the door; and
there she was very soon stripped of veil and blonde false wig with long
curls, the whole framing of her artificial resemblance to Countess Fanny,
and she proved to be a good-looking foreign maid, a dark one, powdered,
trembling very much, but not so frightened upon hearing that her penalty
for the share she had taken in the horrid imposture practised upon them
was to receive and return a salute from each of the gentlemen in
rotation; which the hussy did with proper submission; and Jack Potts
remarked, that 'it was an honest buss, but dear at ten thousand!'

When you have been the victim of a deceit, the explanation of the
simplicity of the trick turns all the wonder upon yourself, you know, and
the backers of the Old Buccaneer and the wagerers against him crowed and
groaned in chorus at the maid's narrative of how the moment Countess
Fanny had thrown up the window of her carriage, she sprang out to a
carriage on the off side, containing Kirby, and how she, this little
French jade, sprang in to take her place. One snap of the fingers and
the transformation was accomplished. So for another kiss all round they
let her go free, and she sat at the supper-table prepared for Countess
Fanny and the party by order of Lord Levellier, and amused the gentlemen
with stories of the ladies she had served, English and foreign. And that
is how men are taught to think they know our sex and may despise it! I
could preach them a lesson. Those men might as well not believe in the
steadfastness of the very stars because one or two are reported lost out
of the firmament, and now and then we behold a whole shower of fragments
descending. The truth is, they have taken a stain from the life they
lead, and are troubled puddles, incapable of clear reflection. To listen
to the tattle of a chatting little slut, and condemn the whole sex upon
her testimony, is a nice idea of justice. Many of the gentlemen present
became notorious as woman-scorners, whether owing to Countess Fanny or
other things. Lord Levellier was, and Lord Fleetwood, the wicked man!
And certainly the hearing of naughty stories of us by the light of a
grievous and vexatious instance of our misconduct must produce an
impression. Countess Fanny's desperate passion for a man of the age of
Kirby struck them as out of nature. They talked of it as if they could
have pardoned her a younger lover.

All that Lord Cressett said, on the announcement of the flight of his
wife, was: 'Ah! Fan! she never would run in my ribbons.'

He positively declined to persue. Lord Levellier would not attempt to
follow her up without him, as it would have cost money, and he wanted all
that he could spare for his telescopes and experiments. Who, then, was
the gentleman who stopped the chariot, with his three mounted attendants,
on the road to the sea, on the heath by the great Punch-Bowl?

That has been the question for now longer than half a century, in fact
approaching seventy mortal years. No one has ever been able to say for
certain.

It occurred at six o'clock on the summer morning. Countess Fanny must
have known him,--and not once did she open her mouth to breathe his name.
Yet she had no objection to talk of the adventure and how Simon Fettle,
Captain Kirby's old ship's steward in South America, seeing horsemen
stationed on the ascent of the high road bordering the Bowl, which is
miles round and deep, made the postillion cease jogging, and sang out to
his master for orders, and Kirby sang back to him to look to his priming,
and then the postillion was bidden proceed, and he did not like it, but
he had to deal with pistols behind, where men feel weak, and he went
bobbing on the saddle in dejection, as if upon his very heart he jogged;
and soon the fray commenced. There was very little parleying between
determined men.

Simon Fettle was a plain kindly creature without a thought of malice,
who kept his master's accounts. He fired the first shot at the foremost
man, as he related in after days, 'to reduce the odds.' Kirby said to
Countess Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she would
be afraid, 'The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to mangle,' for
they had been arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on the Continent,
and Simon Fettle to do the washing. She could not help laughing
outright. But when the Old Buccaneer was down striding in the battle,
she took a pistol and descended likewise; and she used it, too, and
loaded again.

She had not to use it a second time. Kirby pulled the gentleman off his
horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess Fanny to
crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor gentleman in the
breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and Simon and he disarmed
the servant who had fired. One was insensible, one flying, and those two
on the ground. All in broad daylight; but so lonely is that spot,
nothing might have been heard of it, if at the end of the week the
postillion who had been bribed and threatened with terrible threats to
keep his tongue from wagging, had not begun to talk. So the scene of the
encounter was examined, and on one spot, carefully earthed over, blood-
marks were discovered in the green sand. People in the huts on the hill-
top, a quarter of a mile distant, spoke of having heard sounds of firing
while they were at breakfast, and a little boy named Tommy Wedger said he
saw a dead body go by in an open coach that morning; all bloody and
mournful. He had to appear before the magistrates, crying terribly, but
did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed. Time came when
the boy learned to swear, and he did, and that he had seen a beautiful
lady firing and killing men like pigeons and partridges; but that was
after Charles Dump, the postillion, had been telling the story.

Those who credited Charles Dump's veracity speculated on dozens of great
noblemen--and gentlemen known to be dying in love with Countess Fanny.
And this brings us to another family.

I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we
have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of
trying to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she
had bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.

About eleven miles distant, as the crow flies and a bold huntsman will
ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the mounds
and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who intermarried
with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the wealthiest of the
old county families until Curtis Fakenham entered upon his inheritance.
Money with him was like the farm-wife's dish of grain she tosses in
showers to her fowls. He was more than what you call a lady-killer, he
was a woman-eater. His pride was in it as well as his taste, and when
men are like that, indeed they are devourers!

Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose
offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain Kirby's
children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear. And these two brothers
were sons of Geoffrey Fakenham, celebrated for his devotion to the French
Countess Jules d'Andreuze, or some such name, a courtly gentleman, who
turned Papist on his death-bed in France, in Brittany somewhere, not to
be separated from her in the next world, as he solemnly left word;
wickedly, many think.

To show the oddness of things and how opposite to one another brothers
may be, his elder, the uncle of Curtis, and Baldwin, was the renowned old
Admiral Fakenham, better known along our sea-coasts and ports among
sailors as 'Old Showery,' because of a remark he once made to his flag-
captain, when cannon-balls were coming thick on them in a hard-fought
action. 'Hot work, sir,' his captain said. 'Showery,' replied the
admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of a cannon-ball.
He lost both legs before the war was over, and said merrily, 'Stumps for
life'' while they were carrying him below to the cockpit. In my girlhood
the boys were always bringing home anecdotes of old Admiral Showery: not
all of them true ones, perhaps, but they fitted him. He was a rough
seaman, fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl, and utterly
despising his brother Geoffrey for the airs he gave himself, and crawling
on his knees to a female Parleyvoo; and when Geoffrey died, the admiral
drank to his rest in the grave: 'There's to my brother Jeff,' he said,
and flinging away the dregs of his glass: 'There 's to the Frog!' and
flinging away the glass to shivers: 'There's to the Turncoat!'

He salted his language in a manner I cannot repeat; no epithet ever stood
by itself. When I was young the boys relished these dreadful words
because they seemed to smell of tar and battle-smoke, when every English
boy was for being a sailor and daring the Black Gentleman below. In all
truth, the bad words came from him; though an excellent scholar has
assured me they should be taken for aspirates, and mean no harm; and so
it may be, but heartily do I rejoice that aspirates, have been dropped by
people of birth; for you might once hear titled ladies guilty of them in
polite society, I do assure you.

We have greatly improved in that respect. They say the admiral's
reputation as a British sailor of the old school made him, rather his
name, a great favourite at Court; but to Court he could not be got to go,
and if the tale be true, their Majesties paid him a visit on board his
ship, in harbour one day, and sailors tell you that Old Showery gave
his liege lord and lady a common dish of boiled beef with carrots and
turnips, and a plain dumpling, for their dinner, with ale and port wine,
the merit of which he swore to; and he became so elate, that after the
cloth was removed, he danced them a hornpipe on his pair of wooden legs,
whistling his tune, and holding his full tumbler of hot grog in his hand
all the while, without so much as the spilling of a drop!--so earnest was
he in everything he did. They say his limit was two bottles of port wine
at a sitting, with his glass of hot grog to follow, and not a soul could
induce him to go beyond that. In addition to being a great seaman, he
was a very religious man and a stout churchman.

Well, now, the Curtis Fakenham of Captain Kirby's day had a good deal of
his uncle as well as his father in him, the spirit of one and the
outside, of the other; and, favoured or not, he had been distinguished
among Countess Fanny's adorers: she certainly chose to be silent about
the name of the assailant. And it has been attested on oath that two
days and a night subsequent to the date furnished by Charles Dump, Curtis
Fakenham was brought to his house, Hollis Grange, lame of a leg, with a
shot in his breast, that he carried to the family vault; and his head
gamekeeper, John Wiltshire, a resolute fellow, was missing from that
hour. Some said they had a quarrel, and Curtis was wounded and John
Wiltshire killed. Curtis was known to have been extremely attached to
the man. Yet when Wiltshire was inquired for, he let fall a word of
'having more of Wiltshire than was agreeable to Hampshire'--his county.
People asked what that meant. Yet, according to the tale, it was the
surviving servant, by whom he, or whoever it may have been, was
accidentally shot.

We are in a perfect tangle. On the other hand, it was never denied that
Curtis and John Wiltshire were in London together at the time of Countess
Fanny's flight: and Curtis Fakenham was one of the procession of armed
gentleman conducting her in her carriage, as they supposed; and he was
known to have started off, on the discovery of the cheat, with horrible
imprecations against Frenchwomen. It became known, too; that horses of
his were standing saddled in his innyard at midnight. And more, Charles
Dump the postillion was taken secretly to set eyes on him as they wheeled
him in his garden-walk, and he vowed it was the identical gentleman. But
this coming by and by to the ear of Curtis, he had Charles Dump fetched
over to confront him; and then the man made oath that he had never seen
Mr. Curtis Fakenham anywhere but there, in his own house at Hollis! One
does not really know what, to think of it.

This postillion made a small fortune. He was everywhere in request.
People were never tired of asking him how he behaved while the fight was
going on, and he always answered that he sat as close to his horse as he
could, and did not dream of dismounting; for, he said, 'he was a figure
on a horse, and naught when off it.' His repetition of the story, with
some adornments, and that same remark, made him the popular man of the
county; people said he might enter Parliament, and I think at one time it
was possible. But a great success is full of temptations. After being
hired at inns to fill them with his account of the battle, and tipped by
travellers from London to show the spot, he set up for himself as
innkeeper, and would have flourished, only he had contracted habits on
his rounds, and he fell to contradicting himself, so that he came to be
called Lying Charley; and the people of the country said it was 'he who
drained the Punch-Bowl, for though he helped to put the capital into it,
he took all the interest out of it.'

Yet we have the doctor of the village of Ipley, Dr. Cawthorne, a noted
botanist, assuring us of the absolute credibility of Charles Dump, whom
he attended in the poor creature's last illness, when Charles Dump
confessed he had lived in mortal terror of Squire Curtis, and had got
the trick of lying, through fear of telling the truth. Hence his ruin.

So he died delirious and contrite. Cawthorne, the great Turf man,
inherited a portrait of him from his father the doctor. It was often
the occasion of the story being told over again, and used to hang in
the patients' reception room, next to an oil-painting of the Punch-Bowl,
an admired landscape picture by a local artist, highly-toned and true
to every particular of the scene, with the bright yellow road winding
uphill, and the banks of brilliant purple heath, and a white thorn in
bloom quite beautiful, and the green fir trees, and the big Bowl black as
a cauldron,--indeed a perfect feast of harmonious contrasts in colours.

And now you know how it is that the names of Captain Kirby and Curtis
Fakenham are alive to the present moment in the district.

We lived a happy domestic life in those old coaching days, when county
affairs and county people were the topics of firesides, and the country
enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance. My opinion is,
that men and women grow to their dimensions only where such is the case.
We had our alarms from the outside now and again, but we soon relapsed
to dwell upon our private business and our pleasant little hopes and
excitements; the courtships and the crosses and the scandals, the tea-
parties and the dances, and how the morning looked after the stormy night
had passed, and the coach coming down the hill with a box of news and
perhaps a curious passenger to drop at the inn. I do believe we had a
liking for the very highwaymen, if they had any reputation for civility.
What I call human events, things concerning you and me, instead of the
deafening catastrophes now afflicting and taking all conversation out of
us, had their natural interest then. We studied the face of each morning
as it came, and speculated upon the secret of the thing it might have in
store for us or our heroes and heroines; we thought of them more than of
ourselves. Long after the adventures of the Punch-Bowl, our county was
anxious about Countess Fanny and the Old Buccaneer, wondering where they
were and whether they were prospering, whether they were just as much in
love as ever, and which of them would bury the other, and what the
foreign people abroad thought of that strange pair.

CHAPTER III

CONTINUATION OF THE INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME GOSSIP, TOGETHER
WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION

I have still time before me, according to the terms of my agreement with
the person to whom I have, I fear foolishly, entrusted the letters and
documents of a story surpassing ancient as well as modern in the
wonderment it causes, that would make the Law courts bless their hearts,
judges no less than the barristers, to have it running through them day
by day, with every particular to wrangle over, and many to serve as a
text for the pulpit. So to proceed.

It should be mentioned that the postillion Charles Dump is not
represented, and I have no conception of the reason why not, sitting
on horseback, in the portrait in the possession of the Cawthorne family.
I have not seen it, I am bound to admit. We had offended Dr. Cawthorne,
by once in an urgent case calling in another doctor, who, he would have
it, was a quack, that ought to have killed us, and we ceased to visit;
but a gentleman who was an established patient of Dr. Cawthorne's and
had frequent opportunities of judging the portrait, in the course of a
chronic malady, describes Charles Dump on his legs as a small man looking
diminished from a very much longer one by shrinkage in thickish wrinkles
from the shoulders to the shanks. His hat is enormous and very gay.
He is rather of sad countenance. An elevation of his collar behind the
ears, and pointed at the neck, gives you notions of his having dropped
from some hook. He stands with his forefinger extended, like a disused
semaphore-post, that seems tumbling and desponding on the hill by the
highroad, in his attitude while telling the tale; if standing it may be
called, where the whole figure appears imploring for a seat. That was
his natural position, as one would suppose any artist must have thought,
and a horse beneath him. But it has been suggested that the artist in
question was no painter of animals. Then why did he not get a painter of
animals to put in the horse? It is vain to ask, though it is notorious
that artists combine without bickering to do these things; and one puts
his name on the animal, the other on the human being or landscape.

My informant adds, that the prominent feature, telling a melancholy tale
of its own, is of sanguine colour, and while plainly in the act of
speaking, Charles Dump might be fancied about to drop off to sleep. He
was impressed by the dreaminess of the face; and I must say I regard him
as an interesting character. During my girlhood Napoleon Bonaparte alone
would have been his rival for filling an inn along our roads. I have
known our boys go to bed obediently and get up at night to run three
miles to THE WHEATSHEAF, only to stand on the bench or traveller's-rest
outside the window and look in at Charles Dump reciting, with just room
enough in the crowd to point his finger, as his way was.

He left a child, Mary Dump, who grew up to become lady's maid to Livia
Fakenham, daughter of Curtis, the beauty of Hampshire, equalled by no one
save her cousin Henrietta Fakenham, the daughter of Commodore Baldwin;
and they were two different kinds of beauties, not to be compared, and
different were their fortunes; for this lady was likened to the sun going
down on a cloudy noon, and that lady to the moon riding through a stormy
night. Livia was the young widow of Lord Duffield when she accepted the
Earl of Fleetwood, and was his third countess, and again a widow at
eight-and-twenty, and stepmother to young Croesus, the Earl of Fleetwood
of my story. Mary Dump testifies to her kindness of heart to her
dependents. If we are to speak of goodness, I am afraid there are other
witnesses.

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