I think that I had spent a week, or it might be more, in this situation of mingled ease and torment, when on coming down one morning after a hag-ridden night I heard a stir in the hall; and, going that way to learn what it meant, met the servants returning in a crowd from the front, and talking low about something. Martin, who was foremost, cried, "Ha, you are too late!" And then drawing me aside, into a little den he had beside the passage, "They have taken him to the office," he said. "But, lord's sakes, Mr. Price," he continued, lifting his eyebrows and pursing up his lips to express his astonishment, "who would have thought it? Her ladyship will be in a taking! I hope that there may be no more in it than appears!"

"In what?" said I.

"In this arrest," he answered, eyeing me with meaning, and then softly closing the door on us. "I hope it may end there. That is all I say! Between ourselves."

"You forget," I cried with irritation, "that I know nothing about it! What arrest? And who is arrested?"

"Mr. Bridges's man of business."

"What Mr. Bridges?" I cried.

"Lord, Mr. Price, have you no wits?" he answered, staring at me. "My lord's mother's husband. The Countess's, to be sure! You must know Mr. Smith."

It needed no more than that; although, without the name, we might have gone on at cross purposes for an hour. But the name--the world held only one Smith for me, and he it seemed was arrested.

He was arrested! It was with the greatest difficulty that I could control my joy. Fortunately the little cub, where we stood, was ill-lighted, and Martin, a man too much taken up with his own consequence to be over-observant of his companions. Still, for a moment, I was perfectly overcome, the effervescence of my spirits such that I could do nothing but lean against the wall of the room, my heart bounding with joy and my head singing a pÆan of jubilation. Smith was taken! Smith was in the hands of justice! Smith was arrested and I was free.

The first rapture past, however, I began to doubt; partly because the news seemed to be too good to be true, and partly because, though Martin had continued to babble, I had heard not a word. Wild, therefore, to have the thing confirmed, I cut him short; and crying, "But what Smith is it, do you say? Who is he?" I brought him back to the point at which he had left me.

"Why, Mr. Price," he answered, "I thought everyone knew Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, Mr. Bridges's factotum, land-steward, what you will! He married the Countess's fine madam--madame they call her in the household, though she is no French thing but Hertfordshire born, as I knew by her speech when my lord first took up with her. But not everyone knows that."

"When my lord took up with her?" I said, groping among half-recognised objects, and beginning--so much light may come through the least chink--to see day.

Mr. Martin nodded confidentially. "That is how she came to be with my lady," he said. "And Mr. Smith, too! My lord met her somewhere when he was young and gay and took up with her, and to please her got the place for Mr. Smith, who had been her flame before. However, my lord soon tired of her, for though she was a beauty she had common ways and was bold as brass; so when he parted from her she went back to her old love, who had first made her the mode, and married him. I have heard that my lord was in a pretty taking when he found her planted at the Countess's. But I have nothing to say against her."

"Does my lord--see her now?" I said with an effort.

"When he does he looks pretty black at her. And I fancy that there is no love lost on her side."

"What did you say that--they called her?" I asked.

"Madame--Madame Monterey."

I remembered where I had heard the name before and who had borne it; and saw so much light that I was dazzled. "And my lord's mother--who married Mr. Bridges. She is a Papist?"

"Hush!" he said. "The less said about such things the better, Mr. Price."

But I persisted. "It was she who ran off with my Lord Buckingham in King Charles's time," I cried, "and held his horse while he killed her husband? And who had Mr. Killigrew stabbed in the street; and----"

In a panic he clapped his hand on my mouth. "God, man!" he cried, "do you know where you are, or is your head turned? Do you think that this house is a fit place to give tongue to such things? Lord, you will be but a short time here, and to the pillory when you go, if you throw your tongue that way! I have not blabbed as much in twenty years, and would not for a kingdom! Who are you to talk of such as my lady?"

He was so righteously indignant at the presumption of which I had been guilty in attacking the family that, though it was his own indiscretion that had led me to the point, I made haste to mutter an apology, and doing this with the better grace for the remembrance that Smith was now powerless and his wicked plans abortive, I contrived presently to appease him. But the ferment which the discovery I had made wrought in my spirits moved me to escape as quickly as possible to my room, there to consider at leisure the miserable position in which, but for Smith's timely capture, I must have found myself.

A suspicion of the truth I had entertained before; but this certainty that the man I was to be trepanned into personating was my benefactor, and that in the plot his own mother was engaged, filled me with as much horror, when I considered the necessity of complying under which I might have lain, as thankfulness when I reflected on the escape I had had. Nor did these two considerations, overwhelming as they may well appear, account for all the agitation I was experiencing. Mr. Martin, in speaking of Madame Monterey's origin, had mentioned Hertfordshire; and the name, bringing together two sets of facts hitherto so distant in my mind that I had never undertaken to connect them, had in a flash presented Smith and madame in their true colours. Why I had not before associated the Smith I now knew with that Templar Smith whom I darkly remembered as Jennie's accomplice in my early trouble; why I had not recognised in the woman's coarsely handsome features the charms that thirteen years before had fired my boy's blood and brought me to the foot of the gallows, is not more difficult to explain than why this one mention of Hertfordshire sufficed to raise the curtain; ay, and not only to raise it, but to set the whole drama so plainly before me that I could be no wiser had I followed every scene in madame's life, and, a witness of her shameful dÉbÛt under Smith's protection, her seduction of my lord and her period of splendour, had attended her in her final declension when, a discarded mistress, she saw no better alternative than a marriage with her former protector.

How greatly this identification of the two conspirators increased, as well as the loathing in which I held their schemes, as my relief upon the reflection that those schemes were now futile, I will not say. Suffice it that the knowledge that, but for Smith's arrest, I must have chosen between playing the basest part in the world and running a risk whereat I shuddered, filled me with thankfulness immeasurable, a thankfulness which I did not fail to pour out on my knees, and which was in no degree lessened by a shuddering consciousness that in that dilemma, had Providence not averted it, I might have--ay, should have--played the baser part!

No wonder that a hundred harrowing recollections crowded on my mind, or that under the pressure of these the tumult of my spirits became so powerful that I presently seized my hat, and hastily escaping from the house, sought in rapid movement some relief from the unpleasant retrospect. Crossing the Green Park, I chose a field path that led by the Pimlico marshes to Fulham; and gradually the songs of the larks and the spring sunshine--for the day was calm and serene--leading my mind into a more cheerful groove, I began to dwell rather on the fact of my escape than on the crime from which I had escaped, and contemplating the secure career that now lay in view before me, I was not long in seeing that thankfulness should be my strongest feeling. Turning my back on Smith and his like, I began to build my house again; saw a smiling wife and babes, and days spent between my home and my lord's papers; and then a green old age and slippered feet tottering through the quiet shades of a library. Before I turned I had roofed the house with an honourable headstone, and felt the tears rise in generous sympathy with the village assembled to do the old man honour.

In a word, tasting the full relief of emancipation, I became so gay and lightsome that even the smoke and din of London, when I re-entered it, failed to subdue the unusual humour. I could have sung, I could have laughed aloud. Let the dead past bury its dead! For Ferguson, Smith, the Monterey--a fig! Who had come off best after all? And of their fine plottings and contrivings what had been the upshot? They had failed and I had triumphed; they were prisoners, I was free and safe.

Near the garden-wall of Buckingham House there was a bear dancing, and a press of people round it. I stayed to watch, and in my mood, found the fun so much to my taste that I threw the man a penny and went on laughing. A little further, by the edge of the lake, was a man with a barrow and dice--then a novelty, though now so prevalent that at the last sessions, I am told, the thing was presented for a nuisance. I stood here and saw a man lose, and in the exaltation of my spirits, pushed him aside and laid down a shilling, and won, and won again--and again; whether the cog failed or the truckster who owned the barrow thought me a good bait. Either way I took up my winnings with an air and hectored away as good a bully as another; placed for the moment so far above myself and common modesty, that I wondered whether I should ever sink back into the timid citizen, or feel my eyes drop before a bravo's.

Alas, in a moment, quantum mutatus ab illo! At the corner of the Cockpit, towards Sion House, I met Matthew Smith.

I had no doubt. I knew all in an instant, and turned sick. He was free, alone, walking with his head high and an easy gait. Worse, he saw me; saw how I cowered and shrank into myself, and became another man at sight of him!

Slackening his pace as he came up, he halted before me, with that quiet devil's grin on his face. "Well," he said, "how are you, Mr. Price? I was looking for you."

"For me?" I muttered. "I thought--I heard--that you were arrested."

"A mistake!" he answered, continuing to smile. "A mistake! Some other Smith."

"And you were not arrested?" I whispered.

"Oh, I was arrested!" he answered jauntily. "And taken to the Secretary. And of course released. There! you have it all."

I uttered an exclamation; two words wrung from me by despair.

Thereat, and pretending to misunderstand me. "You thank God? Very kind of you, Mr. Price," said he grinning. "Like master, like man, I see. The Duke was kindness itself. But I must be going." And then, arresting himself in the act of leaving me, "You have heard," he continued, "that the poor devil Charnock stands his trial to-morrow? Porter is an evidence, and by Monday the parson will swing. It should be a warning to us," he continued, shaking his head with a smile that chilled the marrow in my bones, "what company we keep. A rascal like Porter might see you or me in the street--and swear to us. Ha! Ha! It sounds monstrous odd, but so it might be. But by-by, Mr. Price. I must not keep you."