Chapter 19 The Gates of Doom by Rafael Sabatini
THE CAPTAIN GOES INTO ACTION
Sir John broke the seal, and spread a sheet of yellowish paper on which a crabbed and spidery hand had written:
HONOURED SIR,—I have a communication to make that I think you will consider of importance, concerning your friend Captain Harry Gaynor, and as I am in some haste to deliver it, which you will consider quite natural when you shall have received it, I hope that you will find it possible to do me the honour of visiting me here at once. The bearer of these present has my order to reconduct you hither should you desire to give my request the immediate compliance which I solicit. Should this not be possible or convenient, he is to bring me word on what day and at what hour I may look for the honour of your visit. My house is situate in the Gray's Inn Road, three doors from 'The Weeping Woman,' as you go from Holborn. I am, honoured sir, your obedient, respectful servant, EMANUEL BLIZZARD.
Sir John read the letter twice with knitted brows. A communication concerning Harry Gaynor! And the writer did not so much as say "the late Harry Gaynor." It flashed through his mind at the first reading that here might lurk some trap for him. But that omission of "the late"—with its inevitable suggestion that the writer was in ignorance of the Captain's death—was in itself almost sufficient to dispel any such fear. Assuredly, anyone preparing a snare for him would not have fallen into such an omission as that. A doubt still lingered. But he crushed it aside. What need was there to lay traps for him? If his conviction was desired, the grounds already afforded were ample.
He rose abruptly, his decision taken. He could form no conception of the nature of this promised communication, seek as he might; but it could not be his to be slow to inform himself. He looked at the respectfully waiting servant.
"What like is the messenger who brought this?" he inquired.
"Just a plain youth, Sir John," the man replied. "He came on horseback."
"Tell him I will accompany him. Bid them saddle Jessie for me, and send Bird to help me on with my boots."
He said nothing to Damaris, and to his wife no more than that he was summoned to London upon a matter of some urgency and that he would return that night.
A couple of hours later he was standing in a dark room on the ground floor of the doctor's dingy house in the Gray's Inn Road. Into this room came the slim little professor, moving swiftly and jerkily, as was his habit, and clucking as he came.
"Tut, tut! This is kind in you, Sir John. I should be distressed to think I had caused you inconvenience, eh? I trust I have not." He washed his great bony hands in the air, his gimlet eyes gleaming through his spectacles.
"I should not consider any inconvenience of account to receive a communication touching one who was almost as a son to me, Mr Blizzard."
"Doctor—Doctor Blizzard," the professor amended. "Your obedient servant. But, will you not sit, eh?"
Sir John took the arm-chair to which the doctor waved him, and set his hat and whip on the table at his side. The professor leaned against the table, clucking for a moment. He thrust his spectacles up on to his forehead until they almost joined the rim of his grizzled bob-wig, and he peered at his visitor with short-sighted eyes that had lost all apparent powers of penetration.
"The communication I have for you, sir, is very extraordinary—ve-ry extraordinary, eh; in fact, startling."
"Yes, yes," said the baronet. "I will beg you not to prolong my suspense."
"Tut! I should not dream of it. But it may be necessary to prepare you somewhat, eh?"
"To prepare me?"
"Godso! yes. Have I not said that my communication is of a startling character, eh? It amounts, sir, to this: that the gallows at Tyburn proved to your friend the gate of life in a sense other than that intended by the prophet, psalmist or theologian, or whoever it was, who made the phrase—mors janua vitae, ye know."
Sir John stared at him blankly. Had he to do with a madman? "Will ye tell me Dr Blizzard, in plain terms, what ye mean?"
"In plain terms? Ah! In plain terms, then ... But wait! I am a doctor, as I have told you, sir. I am a professor of anatomy, and therefore a student of anatomy. By great good fortune, sir, your friend's friends neglected to provide a funeral for him, and I bought the alleged corpse from the snatchers for a couple o' guineas, and—well, then, to put it in plain terms, as ye desire, I found that he wasn't dead at all."
Sir John sat very still. Slowly the colour faded from his face. His lips parted, but he made no sound. Then he began to tremble from head to foot.
"There, there! Tut, tut!" cried the doctor, slipping his spectacles once more on to his nose, and observing his visitor. "I told you 'twould startle you. Ye would have it in plain terms."
"I..." The baronet gulped. "I am quite myself, sir," he said, striving valiantly to master his agitation. He drew out a handkerchief, and mopped his clammy brow. "But I confess you startled me. In fact, I hardly understand you even now. Do you mean that Harry Gaynor is—is alive?"
"Not only alive, but almost well. Mending rapidly. In a day or two he will be in case to go his ways again."
There followed a silence which the professor did not attempt to interrupt. He understood that such news as this must be given time for assimilation by any ordinary brain.
"But this is a miracle!" cried Sir John presently, yet he spoke without heartiness. Obviously he was still incredulous; obviously he still but half understood the thing he had been told.
"Tut!" clucked the professor. "There are no miracles in nature. A miracle is a thing out of nature; and the thing I tell you is a thing in nature. Sufficiently rare to look like a miracle; but no miracle at all.
"Where is he?" was Sir John's next question, his voice trembling.
"Above stairs, awaiting you," was the answer, and it was an answer that seemed to dispel at last the mists that were obfuscating the baronet's understanding.
Harry Gaynor was alive, above-stairs, and awaiting him. Those facts he grasped clearly, and for the moment nothing more. He came instantly to his feet.
"Why was I not told of this before? Why did your letter convey no hint of it?"
"You must ask the Captain," said the professor, smiling. "I would have communicated with his friends at once. But he would not have it. A very cautious fellow for all his recklessness. But I detain you, eh? This way, sir."
He led Sir John from the room and up a steep, dark staircase. He paused on the narrow landing above, and after a preliminary tap he threw open a door. The baronet entered and then halted abruptly, as if in spite of what he had been told he still could not believe his eyes which showed him Captain Gaynor in a quilted bed-gown standing smiling to receive him.
Behind him the doctor had closed the door on the outside, leaving the two friends alone.
"Harry!" cried Sir John, his voice husky.
"My dear Sir John!" said the Captain, and he held out a hand in welcome. But the baronet, under the impulse of his overmastering feelings, thrust aside the hand, and, opening wide his arms, clasped the young man to his heart.
"My boy, my boy!" he mumbled brokenly, and the tears stood in his eyes. "We have wept you dead, and you are restored to us alive."
Presently, when the Captain had soothed Sir John's emotion and brought him by slow degrees to the full acceptance of this amazing state of things, they sat and talked at length, and Gaynor expounded his plans, which were concerned with little more than his immediate departure from England.
"The law may run that a man shall not suffer twice for the same offence," he said, "but I am by no means sure that an exception might not be made in the case of a dangerous Jacobite agent, that the Government might not find ways of disposing of me did it leak out that I have escaped my doom."
"Yes, yes," the baronet agreed. "You are wise in that. You will need money, perhaps?"
"I have," was the answer, "a letter of credit upon Childes, under which I can draw something a little short of two thousand guineas. But I think it would be wiser not to use it. For all that the identification of Captain Jenkyn with Captain Gaynor might not have been complete, yet it is generally understood, no doubt that they are one and the same, and Childes might account it their duty to advise the Government."
"You are right," said Sir John. "You must use my purse to any extent you need."
"Thank you, sir," the Captain replied, without hesitation. "A hundred guineas will suffice to get me to Rome."
"I will bring you the sum tomorrow."
"Then, I think, if Dr Blizzard will permit it, I will set out on the following day. And now of yourself, Sir John?"
Sir John looked at him, and marvelled that there had been so far no word of Damaris; yet he thought he understood the Captain's hesitation. "Damaris," he said slowly, "will be as one born again when I bear her these glad tidings."
He saw the clear-cut young face grow white, and he observed the falter in the voice that asked him: "She—she has grieved?"
"Grieved, lad? She has been almost as lifeless as we deemed yourself. Oh, but this will be great medicine. It will bring back the roses to her cheeks, and the sparkle to her eyes. And"—he stopped short, smitten of a sudden by a great thought—"it will make an end of all danger of any such sacrifice as she has been contemplating."
"Sacrifice? What sacrifice?"
Too late Sir John perceived that his words had exceeded prudence. He could not now withdraw, and so he was forced to confide in Captain Gaynor, to lay his own troubles before him. Nor was he reluctant so to do; for upon the young man's resourcefulness he founded a faint hope that some way might yet be perceived, not apparent to Sir John himself, out of the danger that hung over him.
Captain Gaynor listened inscrutably to the tale that Sir John unfolded; the only outward sign he made was to nod shortly when the baronet pointed out the quality of the mesh in which Pauncefort was enfolding him. When Sir John had done the young man rose, and with hands clasped behind him, head bent in thought, he slowly paced the length of the chamber from door to window and back again. He was profoundly touched by the nobility of Damaris in her proposed sacrifice and the nobility of Sir John in his determination to frustrate her.
"For the present," Sir John had said, in conclusion, "I have succeeded in persuading her that, far from removing the peril, she will but increase it by consenting to marry that villain. If to this were added the knowledge that you have been so incredibly, so miraculously, spared, I think our work would be complete; for I am convinced there would be an end to the despair upon which her courage of self-sacrifice is founded."
"It—it amounts to that?" cried the Captain incredulously.
"My dear Harry, had you heard her say to me, 'I am but a husk—all that was myself perished at Tyburn,' you had so gauged the depth of that despair that you had been moved to tears."
He was not far from moved to them by the repetition of those words. He paced on, resolving all that Sir John had told him, seeking a way through this baffling tangle. At last, as he approached the window for the second time, he paused and his face lighted.
A course which he had earlier considered but which he had discarded as too desperate where it was only calculated to serve himself, recurred to him now. It was a reckless, adventurous audacious course, which yet might succeed by virtue of its very audacity. He threw back his head and laughed his full-throated, musical laugh. Sir John looked up, almost startled by the sound.
"I think," said the young man, "that it was high time that Captain Gaynor should come to life again."
Sir John, completely bewildered, continued to stare at him, whereupon that keen face became once more inscrutable.
"Look you, Sir John," he cried, "this danger of yours has been exaggerated to you. Let us say that they arrest you. To convict you they must still prove that Captain Gaynor and Captain Jenkyn were one and the same man, and that fact has not yet been entirely established."
"Pish!" said the baronet. "From the moment that it becomes necessary to advance proof of that, the Government can have no difficulty in doing so."
"Let us say that it can; let us say that witnesses could be found—though, I confess, I know not whence. The Government must still prove that you knew of my connection with the Jacobite movement, that you knew me for an agent of the King over the Water, and that I did not impose upon you as I imposed upon so many others—including Mr Second Secretary Templeton."
"Oh, Harry, Harry! These are but straws that will never float me through those waters, and you know it."
"I do not know it," said Harry, and he was smiling now. "But, even so, I have a sort of raft in the background that may serve you better."
"What is it?"
The Captain reflected a moment. Then—"I have yet a little work to do upon it to render it seaworthy," he said thoughtfully "But I hope to have all in readiness by tomorrow, when you come again. I will tell you then."
And, despite Sir John's entreaties, not another word would the soldier add until the morrow, when Sir John not only promised to return but to bring Damaris with him, a promise which kept the Captain awake for most of the night in mingling joy and fear at the coming meeting.
But on the morrow, which was Tuesday, there was no sign of Sir John. The Captain had made the best of himself with the black suit in which he had been taken and hanged—the only suit he had. He had procured flowers—baskets of roses and tall virginal lilies—to deck his chamber for so wondrous an occasion. The morning went in preparation; the afternoon in expectation; the evening in sick disappointment and vain clingings to hope even after the candles had been lighted. Eventually he went to bed, still buoyed by the conviction that they must come tomorrow.
But the morrow again went by in the same manner, and still there was neither sight nor sign of Sir John.
On the Thursday morning, worn out by this suspense, utterly unable to bear more of it, the Captain borrowed the anatomist's apprentice, who, on that former occasion, had carried a message to Priory Close, and despatched him this time with a request by word of mouth for news.
The youngster returned with a tale of a desolated house and the information that Sir John had been arrested on returning home on the Monday night.
The Captain drew a deep breath at the news; not a breath of dismay, but of resolve, almost of relief. He thanked the messenger, and when the lad had gone he turned to the anatomist, who sat with him.
"Decidedly," he said grimly, "it is time I came to life again. What's o'clock?"
"Eh?" said the professor. "O'clock? Why, 'twill be nearly two."
"Then it is time I took my leave of you."
"Tut!" clucked the professor, rising. "D'ye mean ye're going, eh? Where are ye going?"
"Back to life," said Harry Gaynor.
"But in your condition?" cried the dismayed anatomist, who was reluctant to part with so amiable a guest. "Y'amaze me!"
"What ails my condition?" Gaynor asked him. "Look at me," he commanded.
Down came the spectacles from the professor's forehead to his nose.
"Ye've a somewhat feverish air," said he.
"That is anticipation," said the patient. He took the doctor's hand. "There is a debt between us, my friend, that it would tax me to discharge."
"Tut—tut!"
"Ye've been more than friend to me. And I hope that friends we may remain, and that if at any time Harry Gaynor has it in his power to serve you ye'll not forget to make him happy by acquainting him with the circumstance."
"My dear sir, my dear lad! Tut—tut! Tut—tut!"
"I leave your hospitable and kindly roof, sir, with profound regret. But this is not a parting. We remain friends, and"—he hesitated an instant—"there is the matter of the charges to which you have been put—"
"Sir!" the doctor exploded in the simulation of a towering rage. "Am I a vintner? Do I keep a tavern?"
The Captain pressed his hands. "Forgive me," he said. "My inability to repay the real debt rendered me the more eager in the matter of this other trivial one."
"Not another word or ye'll affront me, eh!"
They parted the best of friends in the world, and, after the Captain had gone, that lonely anatomist realised for the first time in all his absorbed and studious years that his house in the Gray's Inn Road was dingy, dull and dismal.
The Captain in his black suit and a hat that had been procured for him by the professor's apprentice, with a couple of guineas in his pocket borrowed from Dr Blizzard at parting, walked briskly down the road across Holborn and on until he came into the slush and filth of Temple Bar.
Here he hired him a chair, and was carried to that inn in Chandos Street where he had alighted a fortnight ago, and where his baggage would still be lying.