Fleetwood lay that night beneath the roof of the Royal Sovereign.  Sleep is life’s legitimate mate.  It will treat us at times as the faithless wife, who becomes a harrying beast, behaves to her lord.  He had no sleep.  Having put out his candle, an idea took hold of him, and he jumped up to light it again and verify the idea that this room . . .  He left the bed and strode round it, going in the guise of an urgent somnambulist, or ghost bearing burden of an imperfectly remembered mission.  This was the room.

Reason and cold together overcame his illogical scruples to lie down on that bed soliciting the sleep desired.  He lay and groaned, lay and rolled.  All night the Naval Monarch with the loose cheeks and jelly smile of the swinging sign-board creaked.  Flaws of the North-easter swung and banged him.  He creaked high, in complaint,—­low, in some partial contentment.  There was piping of his boatswain, shrill piping—­shrieks of the whistle.  How many nights had that most ill-fated of brides lain listening to the idiotic uproar!  It excused a touch of craziness.  But how many?  Not one, not two, ten, twenty:—­count, count to the exact number of nights the unhappy girl must have heard those mad colloquies of the hurricane boatswain and the chirpy king.  By heaven!  Whitechapel, after one night of it, beckons as a haven of grace.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

A DIP INTO THE SPRING’S WATERS

The night Lord Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman.  Seated on his coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under his eye.  She had never been courted:  she deserved a siege.  She was a daughter of the racy highlands.  And she, who could say to her husband, ’I guard my rooms,’ without sign of the stage-face of scorn or defiance or flinging of the glove, she would have to be captured by siege, it was clear.  She wore an aspect of the confident fortress, which neither challenges nor cries to treat, but commands respect.  How did she accomplish this miracle of commanding respect after such a string of somersaults before the London world?

He had to drive North-westward:  his word was pledged to one of his donkey Ixionides—­Abrane, he recollected—­to be a witness at some contemptible exhibition of the fellow’s muscular skill:  a match to punt against a Thames waterman:  this time.  Odd how it should come about that the giving of his word forced him now to drive away from the woman once causing him to curse his luck as the prisoner of his word!  However, there was to be an end of it soon—­a change; change as remarkable as Harry Monmouth’s at the touching of his crown.  Though in these days, in our jog-trot Old England, half a step on the road to greatness is the utmost