he was absorbed in his book; for another, the carpet was thick and the lady's step of the lightest. She went first to the bookcase, then she crossed the room and shuffled some papers on a table, then she knocked against a chair, the chair knocked against the table, and at the noise Kelly looked up. He rose to his feet. Lady Oxford turned round, started, and uttered a sharp little cry.
'My lady,' began Mr. Kelly.
'Oh, it is you, Mr. Johnson,' she broke in with a hand to her heart, and dropped into the chair. 'I believe,' she said with a broken laugh, 'I was foolish enough to be frightened. I fancied you had gone with your friend to the stables,' which was as much as to say that she knew he had not. Kelly commenced an apology for so disordering her, but she would not listen to it.
'No,' she said, 'it is I that am to be blamed. Indeed, such stupid fears need chiding. But in a house so lonely and silent they grow on one insensibly. Indeed, I have known the mere creak of the stairs keep me awake in terror half the night.'
She spoke with the air of one gently railing at her own distress, but shivered a little to prove the distress genuine, and Kelly, as he looked at her, felt a sudden pang of pity.
'Your place, my lady, is not here,' he cried, 'but in the Mall, at the Spring Gardens, in the lighted theatres, when even your ladyship's own sex would pay you homage for outrivalling them.'
'Nay,' she replied, with the sweetest smile of reproof, 'you go too fast, Mr. Johnson. My place is here, for here my duty lies.' She looked up to the ceiling with a meek acceptance of the burden laid upon her fair shoulders. 'But I am not come to disturb you,' she continued briskly; 'I came to fetch a book to read aloud to my lord.' At that a sigh half broke from her and was caught back as it were upon her lips. 'Perhaps, Mr. Johnson,' she said in a well-acted flurry, 'you will help me in the selection?'
'With all the heart in the world,' said he, laying down his volume. The choice took perhaps longer than need have been, for over each book there was some discussion. This one was too trivial to satisfy my Lord Oxford's weighty mind; that other was too profound to suit his health. 'And nothing too contentious, I implore you, lest it throw him into a heat,' she prayed, 'for my lord has a great gift of logic, and will argue with you by the hour over the merest trifle.' This with another half-uttered sigh, and so the martyr sought her lord's bedside. It appeared, however, that Lord Oxford was sleepy that night, or had no mind for the music of his lady's voice, for in a very little while she returned to the library and Mr. Kelly, where Wogan presently found them discussing in a great animation the prospects of Mr. Law's ventures.
'You are in for a great stake?' she asked.
'For all I have,' replied Kelly, 'and a little more. It is not a great sum.'
'But may become one,' said she, 'and will if a friend's good wishes can at all avail.' And so she wished her guests good night.
The next morning Lord Oxford sent a message that he was so far recovered as would enable him to receive his visitors that afternoon. Meanwhile Lady Oxford, after breakfast carried off the two gentlemen to visit a new orchard she was having planted. The orchard was open to the south-west, and Kelly took objection to its site, quoting Virgil in favour of a westerly outlook.
'Ah, but the west wind,' she said, 'comes to us across the Welsh mountains, which even in the late spring are at times covered deep in snow. However, I should be pleased to hear the advice of Virgil,' and the Parson goes off to the library and fetches out a copy.
It was a warm day in April, with the sky blue overhead and the buds putting out on the trees, and for the most part of that morning Mr. Kelly translated the Georgics to her ladyship, on a seat under a great yew-tree, in a little square of grass fenced off with a hedge. She listened with an extraordinary complaisance, and now and then a compliment upon the Parson's fluency; so that Mr. Wogan lost all his apprehensions as to her meddling in the King's affairs. For, to his thinking, than listening to Virgil, there was no greater proof of friendship.
Nor was it only upon this occasion that she gave the proof. Lord Oxford was a difficult man from his very timidity, and the Parson's visit was consequently protracted. His lordship needed endless assurances as to the prospects of a rising on behalf of King James, before he would hazard a joint of his little finger to support it. Who would take the place of the Royal Swede? Could the French Regent be persuaded to lend any troops or arms or money, or even to wink? Had the Czar been approached? Indeed he had, by Wogan's brother Charles. And what office would my Lord Oxford hold when James III. was crowned? Each day saw these questions reiterated and no conclusion come to. Lady Oxford was never present at these discussions; the face of her conduct was a sedulous discretion. It is true that after a little she dropped the pretence of laces, and, when the servants were not present, styled the Parson 'Mr. Kelly.' But that was all. 'These are not women's matters,' she would say with a pretty humility, and then rise like a queen and sail out of the room. Mr. Wogan might have noticed upon such occasions that the Parson hesitated for a little after she had gone, and spoke at random, as though she had carried off some part of his mind from affairs with the waft of her hoop. But he waited on the lady's dispositions and set down what he saw of his friend's conduct at the time as merely the consequence of an endeavour to enlist her secrecy and good-will.
These councils with Lord Oxford took place, as a rule, in the afternoon, his lordship being a late riser, and even when risen capable only of sitting in a chair, with a leg swathed in a mountain of flannel. So that, altogether, Mr. Kelly had a deal of time upon his hands, and doubtless would have found it hang as heavy as Nick Wogan did, but for the sudden interest he took in Lady Oxford's new orchard. He would spend hours over the 'Observations on Modern Gardening,' and then,
'Nick,' he would cry,' there's no life but a country life. One wakes in the morning, and the eye travels with delight over the green expanse of fields. One makes friends with the inanimate things of nature. Nick, here one might re-create the Golden Age.'
'To my mind,' says Nick, 'but for the dogs and horses it would be purely insupportable. With all the goodwill in the world I cannot make friends with a gatepost, and I'm not denying I shall be mightily glad when the wambling old sufferer upstairs brings his mind at last to an anchor.'
But the Parson was already lost in speculation, and would presently wake to ask Wogan's opinion as to whether a Huff-cap pear was preferable to a Bar-land. To which he got no answer, and so, snatching up his Virgil, would go in search of Lady Oxford. He acquired, indeed, a most intimate knowledge of apples and pears, and would discourse with her ladyship upon the methods of planting and grafting as though he had been Adam, and she Flora, or, rather, our mother Eve, before the apple was shared between them. For apples the store, the hayloe-crab, the brandy-apple, the red-streak, the moyle, the foxwhelp, the dymock-red; for pears the squash pear, the Oldfield, the sack-pear, never a meal passed but one of these names cropped up at the table and was bandied about between Kelly and her ladyship like a tennis-ball. Now all this, though dull, was none the less reassuring to Wogan, who saw very clearly that Lady Oxford was altogether devoted to country pursuits, and wisely inferred that while there might result confusion in the quality of the pears, there would be the less disorder in the affairs of the Chevalier.
Moreover, her ladyship's inclination towards Mr. Kelly plainly increased. He translated the whole of the second book of the Georgics to her, five hundred and forty-two mortal lines of immortal poetry, and she never winced. Nor did she cry halt at the end of them, but, thereafter, listened to the Eclogues; and, all at once, their conversation was sprinkled with Melibœus and Mœris, and Lycidas and Mopsus, and Heaven knows what other names. Mr. Wogan remembers very well coming upon them one wet afternoon in the hall when it was growing dark. The lamps had not been lit, and Kelly had just finished reading one of the pastorals by the firelight. Lady Oxford sat with her hands clasped upon her knees, and, as he closed the book,
'Oh
