第59章

The arrest of Disney struck a chill into Wilding. From his lodging at Covent Garden he had communicated cautiously with Sunderland a few days after his arrival, building upon certain information he had received from the Duke at parting as to Sunderland's attachment to the Cause. He had carefully chosen his moment for making this communication, having a certain innate mistrust of a man who so obviously as Sunderland was running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He had sent a letter to the Secretary of State when London was agog with the Axminster affair, and the tale - of which Sir Edward Phelips wrote to Colonel Berkeley as "the shamefullest story that you ever heard" - of how Albemarle's forces and the Somerset militia had run before Monmouth in spite of their own overwhelming numbers. This promised ill for James, particularly when it was perceived as perceived it was - that this running away was not all cowardice, not all "the shamefullest story"that Phelips accounted it. It was an expression of good-will towards Monmouth on the part of the militia of the West, and it was confidendy expected that the next news would be that these men who had decamped before him would presently be found to have ranged themselves under his banner.

Sunderland had given no sign that he had received Wilding's communication. And Wilding drew his own contemptuous conclusions of the Secretary of State's cautious policy. It was a fortnight later - when London was settling down again from the diversion of excitement created by the news of Argyle's defeat in Scotland - before Mr. Wilding attempted to approach Sunderland again. He awaited a favourable opportunity, and this he had when London was thrown into consternation by the alarming news of the Duke of Somerset's urgent demand for reinforcements. Unless he had them, he declared, the whole country was lost, as he could not get the militia to stand, whilst Lord Stawell's regiment were all fled and mostly gone over to the rebels at Bridgwater.

This was grave news, but it was followed in a few days by graver. The affair at Philips Norton was exaggerated by report into a wholesale defeat of the loyal army, and it was reported - on, apparently, such good authority that it received credence in quarters that might have waited for official news - that the Duke of Albemarle had been slain by the militia which had mutinied and deserted to Monmouth.

It was while this news was going round that Sunderland - in a moment of panic - at last vouchsafed an answer to Mr. Wilding's letters, and he vouchsafed it in person, just as Wilding - particularly since Disney's arrest - was beginning to lose all hope. He came one evening to Mr.

Wilding's lodgings in Covent Garden, unattended and closely muffled, and he remained closeted with the Duke's ambassador for nigh upon an hour, at the end of which he entrusted Mr. Wilding with a letter for the Duke, very brief but entirely to the point, which expressed him Monmouth's most devoted servant.

"You may well judge, sir," he had said at parting, "that this is not such a letter as I should entrust to any man."Mr. Wilding had bowed gravely, and gravely he had expressed himself sensible of the exceptional honour his lordship did him by such a trust.

"And I depend upon you, sir, as you are a man of honour, to take such measures as will ensure against its falling into any but the hands for which it is intended.""As I am a man of honour, you may depend upon me, Mr. Wilding solemnly promised. "Will your lordship give me three lines above your signature that will save me from molestation; thus you will facilitate the preservation of this letter.""I had already thought of that," was Sunderland's answer, and he placed before Mr. Wilding three lines of writing signed and sealed which enjoined all, straitly, in the King's name to suffer the bearer to pass and repass and to offer him no hindrance.

On that they shook hands and parted, Sunderland to return to Whitehall and his obedience to the King James whom he was ready to betray as soon as he saw profit for himself in the act, Mr. Wilding to return to Somerset to the King James in whom his faith was scant, indeed, but with whom his fortunes were irrevocably bound up.

Meanwhile, Monmouth was back in Bridgwater, his second occupation of which town was not being looked upon with unmixed favour. The inhabitants had suffered enough already from his first visit; his return there, after the Philips Norton affair - of.which such grossly exaggerated reports had reached London, and which, in point of fact, had been little better than a drawn battle - had been looked upon with dread by some, with disfavour by others, and with dismay by not a few who viewed in this an augury of failure.

Now Sir Rowland Blake, who since his pursuit of Mr. Wilding and Trenchard on the occasion of their flight from Taunton had - in spite of his failure on that occasion - been more or less in the service of Albemarle and the loyal army, saw in this indisposition towards Monmouth of so many of Bridgwater's inhabitants great possibilities of profit to himself.

He was at Lupton House, the guest of his friend Richard Westmacott, and the open suitor of Ruth, entirely ignoring the circumstance that she was nominally the wife of Mr. Wilding - this to the infinite chagrin of Miss Horton, who saw all her scheming likely to go for nothing.