The gale, in sheer wantonness, caught the midnight
prowler’s hat and with a wild sound as of the
detonation of a hundred guns, tossed it to the waves
below. The snow in a few moments had thrown a
white pall over the watcher’s head.
He could see quite clearly the tall boulder untouched
by the tide, on which he had placed the black silk
shade that night, also the broad-brimmed hat, so that
these things should be found high and dry and be easily
recognizable.
Some twenty feet further on was the smooth stretch
of sand where had lain the smith, after he had been
dressed up in the fantastic clothes of the mysterious
French prince.
Marmaduke de Chavasse gazed upon that spot. The
breakers licked it now and again, leaving behind them
as they retreated a track of slimy foam, which showed
white in this strange gray gloom, rendered alive and
moving by the falling snow.
The surf covered that stretch of sand more and more
frequently now, and retreated less and less far:
the slimy foam floated now over an inky pool; soon
that too disappeared. The breakers sought other
boulders round which to play their titanic hide-and-seek.
The tide had completely hidden the place where Adam
Lambert had lain.
Then the watcher walked on—one step and
then another—and then the one beyond the
edge as he stepped down, down into the abyss ninety
feet below.
The chronicles of the time tell us that the mysterious
disappearance of Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse was but
a nine days’ wonder in that great world which
lies beyond the boundaries of sea-girt Thanet.
What Thanet thought of it all, the little island kept
secret, hiding its surmises in the thicket of her
own archaic forests.
Squire Boatfield did his best to wrap the disappearance
of his whilom friend in impenetrable veils of mystery.
He was a humane and a kindly man and feeling that
the guilty had been amply punished, he set to work
to cheer and to rehabilitate the innocent.
All of us who have read the memoirs of Editha de Chavasse,
written when she was a woman of nearly sixty, remember
that she, too, has drawn a thick curtain over the
latter days of her brother-in-law’s life.
It is to her pen that we owe the record of what happened
subsequently.
She tells us, for instance, how Master Skyffington,
after sundry interviews with my Lord Northallerton,
had the honor of bringing to his lordship’s
notice the young student—so long known as
Richard Lambert—who, of a truth, was sole
heir to the earldom and to its magnificent possessions
and dependencies.
From the memoirs of Editha de Chavasse we also know
that Lady Sue Aldmarshe, girl-wife and widow, did,
after a period of mourning, marry Michael Richard
de Chavasse, sole surviving nephew and heir presumptive
of his lordship the Earl of Northallerton.
But it is to the brush of Sir Peter Lely that we owe
that exquisite portrait of Sue, when she was Countess
of Northallerton, the friend of Queen Catherine, the
acknowledged beauty at the Court of the Restoration.
