“I love thee, I doat on thy features so fine,
I must and will have thee, and force makes thee mine.”
MRS. JENNER quite forgot her dignity, and actually ran up the stairs after the gentleman who was scaling them.
Had careless Kitty Bell actually locked the door? Was any one in the nursery except the darling who was bawling? What would that incensed gentleman do when he got in? Would he murder the child outright, or carry it off, swinging by the feet, as the man in the “Promessi Sposi” did the live turkeys?
A thousand dreadful conjectures whirled in the eddy of that moment through her biain, and she shrieked as she ran up —
“Kitty, lock the door; Kitty, lock the door!”
And the baby wailed; and, to her comfort, the women’s voices also were heard from within.
The captain’s hand was on the handle of the door, which he twisted about with a few violent jerks.
It was a clumsy oak door, with a keyhole almost as big as a modem hall-door; and Mrs. Jenner almost fainted with sudden relief when she saw that it resisted.
“Open the door,” said Captain Torquil.
“Oh! no, no, no, no,” cried Mrs. Jenner.
The women’s voices were hushed, and in a tone of undisguised fury Captain Torquil cried again —
“Open the door!”
And Mrs. Jenner’s distracted accompaniment of “No, no, oh! no, no, no, no-o-o!” resounded and quivered through staircase, hall, and passage.
The captain struck the door a furious blow with his foot; but it was none of those flimsy defences which fall down before a pop-gun; but mingled with the ba-a-a-ing of the child came now the frightened whimper of women from within. Captain Torquil recoiled three or four steps, and, with a rush, sprang with his shoulder and side against the door, and — heaven and earth! What is this?
Admirable door this is: heart of oak; solid as the wooden walls of England! Here is a lock and key strong and clumsy as Vulcan himself.
If people hold that locks and keys are necessary to their doors — and what more effectual security against the miscreant on the lobby?-it is worth seeing that the mechanism is in working order. Here the door was right, the key was right, the lock, properly so called, was right; but, alas! the iron socket that receives the bolt, which in rude fashion was there screwed to the doorpost, stripped by the worthy vicar, in an emergency when screws were wanted and not elsewhere at hand, of all its screws but one, yielded to the weight of the captain’s charge, and flew in with ominous clatter among the garrison, and with a tremulous swing, door, key, and lock revolved, and the beseiger, white with rage, strode in through the breach.
Mrs. Jenner, rushing forward with her new-found motherly instincts all alive, screamed wildly; Mrs. Jolliffe, with her palms raised and fingers extended, screamed also. Kitty Bell bawled “By Jen! The deaul clake thee,” and dealt the ogre a lusty thump over the head with her shut fist, which made the captain’s small ears sing under the close curls of his black perfumed hair.
Captain Torquil was not accustomed to such handling, and he loosed the hold which Kitty had laid upon his collar with so little ceremony that the heroic girl spun half-way round, and sat involuntarily, with the whole force of her plump person, upon the nurse’s chair of state, from which, for a moment, she gazed bewildered; while Captain Torquil, stooping at the child’s bedside, before any one of the women had recovered the power of action, dived his hands under the infant.
So all seemed over-conclamatum est. In two seconds more the captain would have been running down the vicar’s stairs with his short, vile laugh and the prize in his arms, to spring with it into the chaise, and drive from Golden Friars as fast as the whip of a bribed post-boy could speed him.
But it was not to be this time. A powerful chuck at the nape of his neck whisked the captain at this critical moment backward, staggering with a good apparent likelihood of tumbling on the floor.
“Here’s douce wark, clamperin’ through the vicar’s house!” said the stentorian bass of Tom Shackles.
If the captain had thought upon the question of odds at that moment, he would have seen at a glance that Tom was altogether too huge and sinewy to leave him a chance against that modem athlete. But Captain Torquil was for the moment beside himself with anger, and rallying, he struck with all his force at Tom’s face.
The women screamed appeals to heaven at this renewal of the battle, and Tom caught the blow on his open hand; and having a vague idea that the captain was a relation of the family, and therefore to be treated with tenderness, he returned it, not with his formidable knuckles, but with the same open hand he dealt him a slap on the cheek and ear such as is happily seldom heard in a nursery; and the captain staggered against the wall, where he looked for a moment as if he was going to sleep.
“By my sang, my lad, I’ve a mind to gie thee a gud bevellin’,” said Tom; and to the women he said, pointing to the door that opened into an inner room, “take the bam in there, and shut the door, and don’t stand gapin’ here; ‘t may be killed else.”
“Give up that child!” cried Captain Torquil, again staggering forward — a manifestation which although Tom Shackles placed himself between, hurried the movements of the women, who, with the child in a hasty roll of blankets, scurried into the inner room, through the door and shut it.
At the same moment, grinning happily from ear to ear, the bluff face of Dick Wykes, who had come clanking up in shoes of four pound weight apiece to have his share of the mill, entered the nursery.
“Is thee him?” Dick inquired. “Hoot, man! Lap up! I thout there wor fower o’ ye. Why, I’d thraa thee out o’ t’ window wi’ yan hand!” said this smiling intruder, of whose speech Captain Torquil understood nothing but the good-humoured contempt expressed in his face and demeanour.
He eyed the two Herculean fellows over. Even in his then State of mind he saw the folly of any attempt to cope with their united strength.
Mrs. Jenner stood staring wildly from the lobby on the strange scene which had for a minute or so profaned the homely roof of the vicarage. The captain looked from one Titan to the other, and collected enough sense not to make a fool of himself by fighting. He was quivering with passion nevertheless.
“You have taken the child; you’ve assaulted me, you-hoo-oo scoundrel! As I hope for heaven, I’ll make every one of you suffer! I’ll have the police here in half an hour.”
He ran down-stairs; he roared a curse or two at the post-boy, and jumped into the chaise, and sat for a few seconds bewildered, looking first out at one window and then out at the other; and then, seeing that some idlers had collected about the vicar’s door, perceiving that something odd was occurring within, he lowered the front window, and bawled to the driver —
“You go-you drive-ha, ha!-drive towards the place you came from.”
And he pulled up the window, and leaned back, and stared wickedly in the faces of the people who were looking there. And Captain Torquil sped away, leaving wild and sinister impressions of himself, and no material memento of his visit except a piece of wrenched iron and his hat on the nursery floor.
Captain Torquil drove away at a great pace-it was to be supposed, in hot haste to accomplish some scheme. Of course, a man with his ear tingling from a blow, and with such a case as regarded the child, and in the state of intense exasperation in which he was, and with his hat impounded in the vicar’s nursery, could hardly have gone away with threats so fierce against all parties without very resolute intentions.
But when the vicar returned after sunset to his hysterical household, the captain had not reappeared.
The vicar, like a wise governor, took prompt measures in this state of affairs. He sealed up Captain Torquil’s hat in a band-box, lest there should be litigation with respect to that property. He caused Tom Shackles to make a note of the captain’s sayings and doings. He locked up the twisted iron which attested his violence, and he retained Tom as a garrison, keeping up through the night a sharp look-out in the moonlight, lest the enemy should return and attempt a surprise.
But that night passed over quietly. And the next day came and went without tidings of or from the captain, and a week or more, without even a letter from a London attorney.