the town after you.’
‘I have been to the lake.’
‘Queer fish there!’ Sir Meeson dropped a glance on the capture.
Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer’s arm. ‘Do you eat with us?’ he asked the baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they strode to the dining-room.
‘Do you wash, sir, before eating?’ Sir Meeson said to Woodseer, caressing his hands when they had seated themselves at table. ‘Appliances are to be found in this hotel.’
‘Soap?’ said Lord Fleetwood.
‘Soap—at least, in my chamber.’
‘Fetch it, please.’
Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that. He requested the waiter to show the gentleman to a room.
Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel. ‘We’re off directly and must eat at once,’ he said.
‘Soap—soap! my dear Fleetwood,’ Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing of those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.
‘Let the waiter fetch it.’
‘The soap is in my portmanteau.’
‘You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me. Bring it.’
Woodseer had risen. Lord Fleetwood motioned him down. He kept an eye dead—as marble on Corby, who muttered: ‘You can’t mean that you ask me … ?’ But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a power of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of gaze forcefuller than repetitions of the word. He knew Lord Fleetwood. Men privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot: they were sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him. He had hastily to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the whole torture of banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else the mad behest must be obeyed. He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and sprang up, remarking, that he went with all the willingness imaginable. It could not have been the first occasion.
He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing his metal soap-case. The performance was checked by another look solid as shot, and as quick. Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson Corby or Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the service, but so intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him uncomfortable in his own sense of independence. The humblest citizen of a free nation has that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in a neighbouring State: it acts like a concussion of the air.
Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an observer. He listened to Sir Meeson’s entreaties that he should start at once for Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by his office to hang about him in terror of his liege lady’s displeasure. Presently, near the close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger, he handed it to the baronet, and said, ‘Give her that. She knows I shall follow that.’ He added to himself:—I shall have ill-luck till I have it back! and he asked Woodseer whether he put faith in the virtue of talismans.
‘I have never possessed one,’ said Woodseer, with his natural frankness. ‘It would have gone long before this for a night’s lodging.’
Sir Meeson heard him, and instantly urged Lord Fleetwood not to think of dismissing his man Francis. ‘I beg it, Fleetwood! I beg you to take the man. Her ladyship will receive me badly, ring or no ring, if she hears of your being left alone. I really can’t present myself. I shall not go, not go. I say no.’
‘Stay, then,’ said Fleetwood.
He turned to Woodseer with an air of deference, and requested the privilege of glancing at his notebook again, and scanned it closely at one of the pages. ‘I believe it true,’ he cried; ‘I had a half recollection of it—I have had some such thought, but never could put it in words. You have thought deeply.’
‘That is only a surface thought, or common reflection,’ said Woodseer.
Sir Meeson stared at them in turn. Judging by their talk and the effect produced on the earl, he took Woodseer for a sort of conjuror.
It was his duty to utter a warning.
He drew Fleetwood aside. A word was whispered, and they broke asunder with a snap. Francis was called. His master gave him his keys, and despatched him into the town to purchase a knapsack or bag for the outfit of a jolly beggar. The prospect delighted Lord Fleetwood. He sang notes from the deep chest, flaunting like an opera brigand, and contemplating his wretched satellite’s indecision with brimming amusement.
‘Remember, we fight for our money. I carry mine,’ he said to Woodseer.
‘Wouldn’t it be expedient, Fleetwood …’ Sir Meeson suggested a treasurer in the person of himself.
‘Not a florin, Corby! I should find it all gambled away at Baden.’
‘But I am not Abrane, I’m not Abrane! I never play, I have no mania, none. It would be prudent, Fleetwood.’
‘The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another fling. I ‘d rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed that dragon’s jaw. A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him with some satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I ‘ve tried these tables, and couldn’t stir a pulse. Have you?’
It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables. ‘Not I,’ said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.
Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and discarding a suspicion of the young philosopher’s possible weakness under temptation.
Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together. He could not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands. He said it:—he could not have done the thing. So the best he could do was to let them go. Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter, that he caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway. Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a beggar for his friend! He would have given something to have an English ear near him as he watched them rounding under the mountain they were about to climb.
CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER, TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES
In those early days of Fortune’s pregnant alternations of colour between the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly,
