SCENE XX

The side-rays of the chaise-lamps played on the widow's soft, saucy face, threw beguiling shadows under her eyes, and fleeting dimples round those lips that seemed perpetually to invite kisses.

Cosily nestling in the corner of the carriage, her head in its black silk hood tilted back against the cushions, in the flickering uncertain gleam, there was something almost babyish in her whole appearance; something babyish, too, in her attitude of perfect confidence and enjoyment.

Denis O'Hara, with one arm extended above her head, his hand resting open on the panel, the other hand still clasping the handle of the door, gazed upon the woman who had placed herself so completely in his power, and felt smitten to the heart of him with a tenderness that was well-nigh pain. Hitherto his glib tongue had never faltered with a woman that his lips were not ready to fill the pause with a suitable caress. But not so to-day.

"What's come to me at all?" said he to himself, as, frightened by the very strength of his own passion, he could find no word at once ardent and respectful enough in which to speak it. And, indeed, "What had come to him?" was what Mistress Kitty was thinking about the same time. "And what may his arm be doing over my head?" she wondered.

"How beautiful you are!" babbled the Irishman at last.

Mistress Bellairs sat up with an angry start. It was as if she had been stung.

"Heavens!" cried she, thrusting her little forefingers into her ears. "Mr. O'Hara, if you say that again, I shall jump out of the chay."

Her eyes flashed; she looked capable of fulfilling her threat upon the spot.

"Me darling heart," said he, and had perforce to lay his hands upon her to keep her still. "Sure what else can I say to you, with my eyes upon your angel face?"

Apparently the lady's ears were not so completely stopped but that such words could penetrate.

"'Tis monstrous," said she in hot indignation, "that I should go to all this trouble to escape from the bleating of that everlasting refrain, and have it buzzed at me," she waxed incoherent under the sense of her injuries, "thus at the very outset!"

"My dear love," said he, humbly, capturing the angry, gesticulating hand, "sure me heart's so full that it's just choking me."

She felt him tremble beside her as he spoke.

Now the trembling lover was not of those that entered into Mistress Kitty's scheme of existence. She had, perhaps, reckoned, when planning her escapade, upon being made to tremble a little herself. She had certainly reckoned upon a journey this evening that should be among the most memorable in the annals of her impressions. O'Hara bashful! O'Hara tongue-tied! O'Hara with cold fingers that hardly dared to touch hers! O'Hara, the gay rattler, with constrained lips!

This was an O'Hara whose existence she had not dreamed of, and for whose acquaintance, to say the truth, she had small relish.

"What has come to you?" she cried aloud, with another burst of petulance.

"Faith," said he, "and I hardly know myself, Kitty darling. Oh, Kitty," said he, "'tis vastly well to laugh at love, and play at love; but when love comes in earnest it takes a man as it were by the throat, and it's no joke then."

"So I see," said she, with some dryness.

O'Hara clenched his hand and drew a laboured breath.

*****

Straining, slipping now and again, breaking into spurts of trot, to fall into enforced walking pace once more, the gallant team had dragged the chaise to the summit of the great rise at a speed quite unprecedented, yet comparatively slow.

Now the way lay down-hill. The coachman waved his whip. Bounding along the fair road the wheels hummed; the night-wind blowing in through the half-opened window, set Mistress Kitty's laces flapping on her bosom, and a stray curl of Mr. O'Hara's dancing on his pale forehead.

The exhilaration of the rapid flight, the crack of the whip, the mad rhythm of the hoofs, the witchery of the night hour, the risks of the situation, the very madness of the whole enterprise, all combined to set the widow's gay blood delightfully astir, mounting to her light brain like sparkling wine.

What! were all the accessories of the play to be so perfect, and was the chief character to prove such a lamentable failure in his part? What! was she, Kitty Bellairs, to be carried off by the most notorious rake in Bath, only to find him as awkward, as dumb, as embarrassed with the incomparable situation as the veriest greenhorn? "It shall not, and it cannot be," said she to herself. And thereupon she changed her tactics.

"Why," said she aloud, with the cooing note of her most melting mood, "I protest one would think, sir, that you were afraid of me."

"Aye, Kitty," said he, simply; "and so I am."

"Oh, fie!" she laughed. "And how have I alarmed you? Think of me," said she, and leaned her face towards him with a smile of archest wit, "not as a stranger, but as a sisther, as a dear, dear cousin."

His eye flamed back at her. Her merry mood was as incongruous to his sudden, storm-serious growth of passion as the gay lilt of a tambourine might be to a solemn chant.

"I think of you," he said, and there was a deep thrill in his voice, "as my wife that is to be."

And so saying he fell upon his knees in the narrow space, and tenderly kissed a fold of her lace, as one, from the knowledge of his own fire, afraid of a nearer touch.

The word "wife" had never a pleasing sound in the lovely widow's ears. From neither the past nor the future did it evoke for her an attractive picture.

Coming from those lips, by which it was the very last name she desired to hear herself called, it aroused in her as pretty a fit of fury as ever she had indulged in.

"Now, indeed, is the murder out!" she cried. "Oh, you men are all alike. As lovers—all fire, capsicums Indian suns! Bottles of Sillery always bursting! Torrents not to be stemmed.... But, lo you! let the lover once fancy himself the husband, let the vision of the coveted mistress but merge into the prospect of the secured wife.... Merciful heavens, what a change! For fire we have ice; for the red, biting capsicum, the green, cool cucumber; for joyous, foaming Sillery, the smallest ale; small ale—nay, toast and water!" cried Mistress Kitty, lashing herself to finer frenzy. "And if the mere sense of your security thus transforms the lover in you, what a pleasing prospect, indeed, lies before the wedded wife! No, thank you, sir," said the lady, and pushed the petrified O'Hara with an angry foot, "I have had one wintry, toast-and-water husband, and that shall be enough for my lifetime. Thank God, it is not too late yet!" she fumed. "I am not yet, sir, Mistress O'Hara."

And in the very midst of her indignation: "This will," she thought, "simplify the parting at Devizes." But no whit was her wrath thereby abated, that the fool should have spoiled her pretty ride.

For a moment, after the angry music of her voice had ceased to ring, there was a breathless silence, broken only by the straining progress of horses and chaise up the sides of another hill. Then O'Hara broke forth into a sort of roar of wounded tenderness, passion, and ire. Flinging himself back upon the seat, he seized her wrist in a grip, fierce, yet still gentle under its fierceness.

"How dare ye!" cried the man, "how dare ye doubt my love! Sure the flames of hell are cold compared to me this minute. May my tongue wither in my mouth, may it be cut out of my jaws and never speak a word of sense again, may I be struck dead at your feet, Kitty, for the rest of my life, if it's not gospel truth! Listen to my heart," he cried, with yet greater vehemence, pressing her captive hand against his breast, "isn't it Kitty, Kitty, Kitty ... that it's saying? Sure it's nothing but a bell, and your name is the clapper in it! ... And you to be railing at me because it's so much I have to say that never a word can I bring out! Oh," pursued Mr. O'Hara, waxing louder and more voluble still, "sure what could I say, with my heart in my mouth stopping the way? Look at it, you cruel woman; isn't it all yours, and aren't you sticking pins into it for sheer devilment, this minute? God forgive me, that I should say such a thing of an angel! Look at it, now, Kitty! Is that the heart of a cucumber? ... If you had said a love-apple itself.... Och, indeed, it's the real cool cucumber I am, and it's toast and water that's running through my veins like fire! ... Laugh, madam, laugh, it's a grand joke entirely! Make a pin-cushion of the cucumber! See, now, is that small ale that bursts from the wounds? Upon my soul," he cried, arrived at the height of his tempest, "I have a mind to show you the colour of it!"

He reached violently towards the back seat for his sword as he spoke, and Mistress Bellairs, suddenly arrested in her delighted paroxysm, was sufficiently convinced of the strength of his feelings to stop him with clinging hands and clamouring little notes of terror:

"O'Hara! madman!—for God's sake, Denis!"

"Ah!" cried he. "It's not hot enough I was for ye. It's the cold husband you're afraid of. Ah, Kitty, you've stirred the sleeping dog, you mustn't complain now if you can't put out the fire!"

So saying, he turned and clasped her in an embrace that left her scarcely breath to scream, had she so wished, and had indeed the kisses which he rained upon her lips allowed her space in which to place a protest.

Her light soul, her easy shallow nature, was carried as it were off its feet in the whirlwind of a passion the mere existence of which, with all her experience, she had never even guessed. To say the truth, so much as she had deemed him vastly too cold, so now she found him vastly too hot. She was a woman of niceties, an epicure in life and love, and nothing met with her favour but the delicate happy mean. This was a revelation, with a warning.

"Mr. O'Hara," she gasped, at length released, fluttering like a ruffled dove, all in anger and fear, "such treatment! For a gentleman, sir, you strangely forget yourself." She laid her hand on the window strap. "Not a word, sir, or I will instantly give the order to turn back."

"Oh," cried the unhappy lover, and tore at his hair with desperate fingers, filling the ambient air with flakes of powder which shone silvery in the moonlight. "You drove me to it. Ah, don't be frightened of me, my darling; that hurts me the worst of all! I'm quiet now, Kitty."

His labouring breath hissed between his words, and his satin coat creaked under each quivering muscle.

"I'm as quiet as a lamb," said he; "sure a baby might put its head in my jaws—the devil's gone out of me, Kitty."

"I'm glad to hear it, sir," said she, unappeased. She sat, swelling with ruffled plumes, looking out of the window and biting her lips.

"A moon, too," she thought, and the tears almost started to her eyes, for the vexation of the wasted opportunity and the complete failure of a scene so excellently staged. "How wise, oh, how wise I was, to have secured my exit at Devizes!"

"I frightened her," thought O'Hara; and in the manly heart of him he lamented his innate masculine brutality and formed the most delicate chivalrous plans for the right cherishing in the future of the dear lady who had confided herself to him.