Let not those who would judge her harshly forget that Julia, to an impulsive and passionate nature, added a special and notable disadvantage. She had been educated in a sphere alien from that in which she now moved. A girl, brought up as Sir George's cousin and among her equals, would have known him to be incapable of treachery as black as this. Such a girl, certified of his love, not only by his words and looks but by her own self-respect and pride, would have shut her eyes to the most pregnant facts and the most cogent inferences; and scorned all her senses, one by one, rather than believe him guilty. She would have felt, rightly or wrongly, that the thing was impossible; and would have believed everything in the world, yes, everything, possible or impossible--yet never that he had lied when he told her that he loved her.
But Julia had been bred in a lower condition, not far removed from that of the Pamela to whose good fortune she had humbly likened her own; among people who regarded a Macaroni or a man of fashion as a wolf ever seeking to devour. To distrust a gentleman and repel his advances had been one of the first lessons instilled into her opening mind; nor had she more than emerged from childhood before she knew that a laced coat forewent destruction, and held the wearer of it a cozener, who in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred kept no faith with a woman beneath him, but lived only to break hearts and bring grey hairs to the grave.
Out of this fixed belief she had been jolted by the upheaval that placed her on a level with Sir George. Persuaded that the convention no longer applied to herself, she had given the rein to her fancy and her girlish romance, no less than to her generosity; she had indulged in delicious visions, and seen them grow real; nor probably in all St. James's was there a happier woman than Julia when she found herself possessed of this lover of the prohibited class; who to the charms and attractions, the nice-ness and refinement, which she had been bred to consider beyond her reach, added a devotion, the more delightful--since he believed her to be only what she seemed--as it lay in her power to reward it amply. Some women would have swooned with joy over such a conquest effected in such circumstances. What wonder that Julia was deaf to the warnings and surmises of Mr. Fishwick, whom delay and the magnitude of the stakes rendered suspicious, as well as to the misgivings of old Mrs. Masterson, slow to grasp a new order of things? It would have been strange had she listened to either, when youth, and wealth, and love all beckoned one way.
But now, now in the horror and darkness of the post-chaise, the lawyer's warnings and the old woman's misgivings returned on her with crushing weight; and more and heavier than these, her old belief in the heartlessness, the perfidy of the man of rank. At the statement that a man of the class with whom she had commonly mixed could so smile, while he played the villain, as to deceive not only her eyes but her heart--she would have laughed. But on the mind that lay behind the smooth and elegant mask of agentleman'sface she had no lights; or only the old lights which showed it desperately wicked. Applying these to the circumstances, what a lurid glare they shed on his behaviour! How quickly, how suspiciously quickly, had he succumbed to her charms! How abruptly had his insouciance changed to devotion, his impertinence to respect! How obtuse, how strangely dull had he been in the matter of her claims and her identity! Finally, with what a smiling visage had he lured her to her doom, showed her to his tools, settled to a nicety the least detail of the crime!
More weighty than any one fact, the thing he had said to her on the staircase at Oxford came back to her mind. 'If you were a lady,' he had lisped in smiling insolence, 'I would kiss you and make you my wife.' In face of those words, she had been rash enough to think that she could bend him, ignorant that she was more than she seemed, to her purpose. She had quoted those very words to him when she had had it in her mind to surrender--the sweetest surrender in the world. And all the time he had been fooling her to the top of her bent. All the time he had known who she was and been plotting against her devilishly--appointing hour and place and--and it was all over.
It was all over. The sunny visions of love and joy were done! It was all over. When the sharp, fierce pain of the knife had done its worst, the consciousness of that remained a dead weight on her brain. When the paroxysm of weeping had worn itself out, yet brought no relief to her passionate nature, a kind of apathy succeeded. She cared nothing where she was or what became of her; the worst had happened, the worst been suffered. To be betrayed, cruelly, heartlessly, without scruple or care by those we love--is there a sharper pain than this? She had suffered that, she was suffering it still. What did the rest matter?
Mr. Thomasson might have undeceived her, but the sudden stoppage of the chaise had left no place in the tutor's mind for aught but terror. At any moment, now the chaise was at a stand, the door might open and he be hauled out to meet the fury of his pupil's eye, and feel the smart of his brutal whip. It needed no more to sharpen Mr. Thomasson's long ears--his eyes were useless; but for a time crouching in his corner and scarce daring to breathe, he heard only the confused muttering of several men talking at a distance. Presently the speakers came nearer, he caught the click of flint on steel, and a bright gleam of light entered the chaise through a crack in one of the shutters. The men had lighted a lamp.
It was only a slender shaft that entered, but it fell athwart the girl's face and showed him her closed eyes. She lay back in her corner, her cheeks colourless, an expression of dull, hopeless suffering stamped on her features. She did not move or open her eyes, and the tutor dared not speak lest his words should be heard outside. But he looked, having nothing to check him, and looked; and in spite of his fears and his preoccupation, the longer he looked the deeper was the impression which her beauty made on his senses.
He could hear no more of the men's talk than muttered grumblings plentifully bestrewn with curses; and wonder what was forward and why they remained inactive grew more and more upon him. At length he rose and applied his eyes to the crack that admitted the light; but he could distinguish nothing outside, the lamp, which was close to the window, blinding him. At times he caught the clink of a bottle, and fancied that the men were supping; but he knew nothing for certain, and by-and-by the light was put out. A brief--and agonising--period of silence followed, during which he thought that he caught the distant tramp of horses; but he had heard the same sound before, it might be the beating of his heart, and before he could decide, oaths and exclamations broke the silence, and there was a sudden bustle. In less than a minute the chaise lurched forward, a whip cracked, and they took the road again.
The tutor breathed more freely, and, rid of the fear of being overheard, regained a little of his unctuousness. 'My dear good lady,' he said, moving a trifle nearer to Julia, and even making a timid plunge for her hand, 'you must not give way. I protest you must not give way. Depend on me! Depend on me, and all will be well. I--oh dear, what a bump! I'--this as he retreated precipitately to his corner--'I fear we are stopping!'
They were, but only for an instant, that the lamps might be lighted. Then the chaise rolled on again, but from the way in which it jolted and bounded, shaking its passengers this way and that, it was evident that it no longer kept the main road. The moment this became clear to Mr. Thomasson his courage vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
'Where are they taking us?' he cried, rising and sitting down again; and peering first this way and then the other. 'My G--d, we are undone! We shall be murdered--I know we shall! Oh dear! what a jolt! They are taking us to some cut-throat place! There again! Didn't you feel it? Don't you understand, woman? Oh, Lord,' he continued, piteously wringing his hands, 'why did I mix myself up with this trouble?'
She did not answer, and enraged by her silence and insensibility, the cowardly tutor could have found it in his heart to strike her. Fortunately the ray of light which now penetrated the carriage suggested an idea which he hastened to carry out. He had no paper, and, given paper, he had no ink; but falling back on what he had, he lugged out his snuff-box and pen-knife, and holding the box in the ray of light, and himself as still as the road permitted, he set to work, laboriously and with set teeth, to scrawl on the bottom of the box the message of which we know. To address it to Mr. Fishwick and sign it Julia were natural precautions, since he knew that the girl, and not he, would be the object of pursuit. When he had finished his task, which was no light one--the road growing worse and the carriage shaking more and more--he went to thrust the box under the door, which fitted ill at the bottom. But stooping to remove the straw, he reflected that probably the road they were in was a country lane, where the box would be difficult to find; and in a voice trembling with fear and impatience, he called to the girl to give him her black kerchief.
She did not ask him why or for what, but complied without opening her eyes. No words could have described her state more eloquently.
He wrapped the thing loosely in the kerchief--which he calculated would catch the passing eye more easily than the box--and knotted the ends together. But when he went to push the package under the door, it proved too bulky; and, with an exclamation of rage, he untied it, and made it up anew and more tightly. At last he thought that he had got it right, and he stooped to feel for the crack; but the carriage, which had been travelling more and more heavily and slowly, came to a sudden standstill, and in a panic he sat up, dropping the box and thrusting the straw over it with his foot.
He had scarcely done this when the door was opened, and the masked man, who had threatened them before, thrust in his head. 'Come out!' he said curtly, addressing the tutor, who was the nearer. 'And be sharp about it!'
But Mr. Thomasson's eyes, peering through the doorway, sought in vain the least sign of house or village. Beyond the yellow glare cast by the lamp on the wet road, he saw nothing but darkness, night, and the gloomy shapes of trees; and he hung back. 'No,' he said, his voice quavering with fear. 'I--my good man, if you will promise--'
The man swore a frightful oath. 'None of your tongue!' he cried, 'but out with you unless you want your throat cut. You cursed, whining, psalm-singing sniveller, you don't know when you are well off'! Out with you!'
Mr. Thomasson waited for no more, but stumbled out, shaking with fright.
'And you!' the ruffian continued, addressing the girl, 'unless you want to be thrown out the same way you were thrown in! The sooner I see your back, my sulky Madam, the better I shall be pleased. No more meddling with petticoats for me! This comes of working with fine gentlemen, say I!'
Julia was but half roused. 'Am. I--to get out?' she said dully.
'Ay you are! By G--d, you are a cool one!' the man continued, watching her in a kind of admiration, as she rose and stepped by him like one in a dream. 'And a pretty one for all your temper! The master is not here, but the man is; and if--'
'Stow it, you fool!' cried a voice from the darkness, 'and get aboard!'
'Who said anything else?' the ruffian retorted, but with a look that, had Julia been more sensible of it, must have chilled her blood. 'Who said anything else? So there you are, both of you, and none the worse, I'll take my davy! Lash away, Tim! Make the beggars fly!'
As he uttered the last words he sprang on the wheel, and before the tutor could believe his good fortune, or feel assured that there was not some cruel deceit playing on him, the carriage splashed up the mud, and rattled away. In a trice the lights grew small and were gone, and the two were left standing side by side in the darkness. On one hand a mass of trees rose high above them, blotting out the grey sky; on the other the faint outline of a low wall appeared to divide the lane in which they stood--the mud rising rapidly about their shoes--from a flat aguish expanse over which the night hung low.
It was a strange position, but neither of the two felt this to the fall; Mr. Thomasson in his thankfulness that at any cost he had eluded Mr. Dunborough's vengeance, Julia because at the moment she cared not what became of her. Naturally, however, Mr. Thomasson, whose satisfaction knew no drawback save that of their present condition, and who had to congratulate himself on a risk safely run, and a good friend gained, was the first to speak.
'My dear young lady,' he said, in an insinuating tone very different from that in which he had called for her kerchief, 'I vow I am more thankful than I can say, that I was able to come to your assistance! I shudder to think what those ruffians might not have done had you been alone, and--and unprotected! Now I trust all danger is over. We have only to find a house in which we can pass the night, and to-morrow we may laugh at our troubles!'
She turned her head towards him, 'Laugh?' she said, and a sob took her in the throat.
He felt himself set back; then remembered the delusion under which she lay, and went to dispel it--pompously. But his evil angel was at his shoulder; again at the last moment he hesitated. Something in the despondency of the girl's figure, in the hopelessness of her tone, in the intensity of the grief that choked her utterance, wrought with the remembrance of her beauty and her disorder in the coach, to set his crafty mind working in a new direction. He saw that she was for the time utterly hopeless; utterly heedless what became of herself. That would not last; but his cunning told him that with returning sensibility would come pique, resentment, the desire to be avenged. In such a case one man was sometimes as good as another. It was impossible to say what she might not do or be induced to do, if full advantage were taken of a moment so exceptional. Fifty thousand pounds! And her fresh young beauty! What an opening it was! The way lay far from clear, the means were to find; but faint heart never won fair lady, and Mr. Thomasson had known strange things come to pass.
He was quick to choose his part. 'Come, child,' he said, assuming a kind of paternal authority. 'At least we must find a roof. We cannot spend the night here.'
'No,' she said dully, 'I suppose not.'
'So--shall we go this way?'
'As you please,' she answered.
They started, but had not moved far along the miry road before she spoke again. 'Do you know,' she asked drearily, 'why they set us down?'
He was puzzled himself as to that, but, 'They may have thought that the pursuit was gaining on them,' he answered, 'and become alarmed.' Which was in part the truth; though Mr. Dunborough's failure to appear at the rendezvous had been the main factor in determining the men.
'Pursuit?' she said. 'Who would pursue us?'
'Mr. Fishwick,' he suggested.
'Ah!' she answered bitterly; 'he might. If I had listened to him! If I had--but it is over now.'
'I wish we could see a light,' Mr. Thomasson said, anxiously looking into the darkness, 'or a house of any kind. I wonder where we are.' She did not speak.
'I do not know--even what time it is,' he continued pettishly; and he shivered. 'Take care!' She had stumbled and nearly fallen. 'Will you be pleased to take my arm, and we shall be able to proceed more quickly. I am afraid that your feet are wet.'
Absorbed in her thoughts she did not answer.
'However the ground is rising,' he said. 'By-and-by it will be drier under foot.'
They were an odd couple to be trudging a strange road, in an unknown country, at the dark hour of the night. The stars must have twinkled to see them. Mr. Thomasson began to own the influence of solitude, and longed to pat the hand she had passed through his arm--it was the sort of caress that came natural to him; but for the time discretion withheld him. He had another temptation: to refer to the past, to the old past at the College, to the part he had taken at the inn, to make some sort of apology; but again discretion intervened, and he went on in silence.
As he had said, the ground was rising; but the outlook was cheerless enough, until the moon on a sudden emerged from a bank of cloud and disclosed the landscape. Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry of relief. Fifty paces before them the low wall on the right of the lane was broken by a pillared gateway, whence the dark thread of an avenue trending across the moonlit flat seemed to point the way to a house.
The tutor pushed the gate open. 'Diana favours you, child,' he said, with a smirk which was lost on Julia. 'It was well she emerged when she did, for now in a few minutes we shall be safe under a roof. 'Tis a gentleman's house too, unless I mistake.'
A more timid or a more suspicious woman might have refused to leave the road, or to tempt the chances of the dark avenue, in his company. But Julia, whose thoughts were bitterly employed, complied without thought or hesitation, perhaps unconsciously. The gate swung to behind them, and they plodded a hundred yards between the trees arm in arm; then one and then a second light twinkled out in front. These as they approached were found to proceed from two windows in the ground floor of a large house. The travellers had not advanced many paces towards them before the peaks of three gables rose above them, vandyking the sky and docking the last sparse branches of the elms.
Mr. Thomasson's exclamation of relief, as he surveyed the building, was cut short by the harsh rattle of a chain, followed by the roar of a watch-dog, as it bounded from the kennel; in a second a horrid raving and baying, as of a score of hounds, awoke the night. The startled tutor came near to dropping his companion's hand, but fortunately the threshold, dimly pillared and doubtfully Palladian, was near, and resisting the impulse to put himself back to back with the girl--for the protection of his calves rather than her skirts--the reverend gentleman hurried to occupy it. Once in that coign of refuge, he hammered on the door with the energy of a frightened man.
When his anxiety permitted him to pause, a voice made itself heard within, cursing the dogs and roaring for Jarvey. A line of a hunting song, bawled at the top of a musical voice and ending in a shrill 'View Halloa!' followed; then 'To them, beauties; to them!' and the crash of an overturned chair. Again the house echoed with 'Jarvey, Jarvey!' on top of which the door opened and an elderly man-servant, with his wig set on askew, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his mouth twisted into a tipsy smile, confronted the wanderers.
The man held a candle in a hand that wavered and strewed tallow broadcast; the light from this for a moment dazzled the visitors. Then the draught of air extinguished it, and looking over the servant's shoulder--he was short and squat--Mr. Thomasson's anxious eyes had a glimpse of a spacious old-fashioned hall, panelled and furnished in oak, with here a blazon, and there antlers or a stuffed head. At the farther end of the hall a wide easy staircase rose, to branch at the first landing into two flights, that returning formed a gallery round the apartment. Between the door and the foot of the staircase, in the warm glow of an unseen fire, stood a small heavily-carved oak table, with Jacobean legs, like stuffed trunk-hose. This was strewn with cards, liquors, glasses, and a china punch-bowl; but especially with cards, which lay everywhere, not only on the table, but in heaps and batches beneath and around it, where the careless hands of the players had flung them.
Yet, for all these cards, the players were only two. One, a man something under forty, in a peach coat and black satin breeches, sat on the edge of the table, his eyes on the door and his chair lying at his feet. It was his voice that had shouted for Jarvey and that now saluted the arrivals with a boisterous 'Two to one in guineas, it's a catchpoll! D'ye take me, my lord?'--the while he drummed merrily with his heels on a leg of the table. His companion, an exhausted young man, thin and pale, remained in his chair, which he had tilted on its hinder feet; and contented himself with staring at the doorway.
The latter was our old friend, Lord Almeric Doyley; but neither he nor Mr. Thomasson knew one another, until the tutor had advanced some paces into the room. Then, as the gentleman in the peach coat cried, 'Curse me, if it isn't a parson! The bet's off! Off!' Lord Almeric dropped his hand of cards on the table, and opening his mouth gasped in a paroxysm of dismay.
'Oh, Lord,' he exclaimed, at last. 'Hold me, some one! If it isn't Tommy! Oh, I say,' he continued, rising and speaking in a tone of querulous remonstrance, 'you have not come to tell me the old man's gone! And I'd pitted him against Bedford to live to--to--but it's like him! It is like him, and monstrous unfeeling. I vow and protest it is! Eh! oh, it is not that! Hal--loa!'
He paused there, his astonishment greater even than that which he had felt on recognising the tutor. His eye had lighted on Julia, whose figure was now visible on the threshold.
His companion did not notice this. He was busy identifying the tutor. 'Gad! it is old Thomasson!' he cried, for he too had been at Pembroke. 'Anda petticoat!Anda petticoat!' he repeated. 'Well, I am spun!'
The tutor raised his hands in astonishment. 'Lord!' he said, with a fair show of enthusiasm, 'do I really see my old friend and pupil, Mr. Pomeroy of Bastwick?'
'Who put the cat in your valise? When you got to London--kittens? You do, Tommy.'
'I thought so!' Mr. Thomasson answered effusively. 'I was sure of it! I never forget a face when my--my heart has once gone out to it! And you, my dear, my very dear Lord Almeric, there is no danger I shall ever--'
'But, crib me, Tommy,' Lord Almeric shrieked, cutting him short without ceremony, so great was his astonishment, 'it's the Little Masterson!'
'You old fox!' Mr. Pomeroy chimed in, shaking his finger at the tutor with leering solemnity; he, belonging to an older generation at the College, did not know her. Then, 'The Little Masterson, is it?' he continued, advancing to the girl, and saluting her with mock ceremony. 'Among friends, I suppose? Well, my dear, for the future be pleased to count me among them. Welcome to my poor house! And here's to bettering your taste--for, fie, my love, old men are naughty. Have naught to do with them!' And he laughed wickedly. He was a tall, heavy man, with a hard, bullying, sneering face; a Dunborough grown older.
'Hush! my good sir. Hush!' Mr. Thomasson cried anxiously, after making more than one futile effort to stop him. Between his respect for his companion, and the deference in which he held a lord, the tutor was in agony. 'My good sir, my dear Lord Almeric, you are in error,' he continued strenuously. 'You mistake, I assure you, you mistake--'
'Do we, by Gad!' Mr. Pomeroy cried, winking at Julia.' Well, you and I, my dear, don't, do we? We understand one another very well.'
The girl only answered by a fierce look of contempt. But Mr. Thomasson was in despair. 'You do not, indeed!' he cried, almost wringing his hands. 'This lady has lately come into a--a fortune, and to-night was carried off by some villains from the Castle Inn at Marlborough in a--in a post-chaise. I was fortunately on the spot to give her such protection as I could, but the villains overpowered me, and to prevent my giving the alarm, as I take it, bundled me into the chaise with her.'
'Oh, come,' said Mr. Pomeroy, grinning. 'You don't expect us to swallow that?'
'It is true, as I live,' the tutor protested. 'Every word of it.'
'Then how come you here?'
'Not far from your gate, for no reason that I can understand, they turned us out, and made off.'
'Honest Abraham?' Lord Almeric asked; he had listened open-mouthed.
'Every word of it,' the tutor answered.
'Then, my dear, if you have a fortune, sit down,' cried Mr. Pomeroy; and seizing a chair he handed it with exaggerated gallantry to Julia, who still remained near the door, frowning darkly at the trio; neither ashamed nor abashed, but proudly and coldly contemptuous. 'Make yourself at home, my pretty,' he continued familiarly, 'for if you have a fortune it is the only one in this house, and a monstrous uncommon thing. Is it not, my lord?'
'Lord! I vow it is!' the other drawled; and then, taking advantage of the moment when Julia's attention was engaged elsewhere--she dumbly refused to sit, 'Where is Dunborough?' my lord muttered.
'Heaven knows,' Mr. Thomasson whispered, with a wink that postponed inquiry. 'What is more to the purpose,' he continued aloud, 'if I may venture to make the suggestion to your lordship and Mr. Pomeroy, Miss Masterson has been much distressed and fatigued this evening. If there is a respectable elderly woman in the house, therefore, to whose care you could entrust her for the night, it were well.'
'There is old Mother Olney,' Mr. Pomeroy answered, assenting with a readier grace than the tutor expected, 'who locked herself up an hour ago for fear of us young bloods. She should be old and ugly enough! Here you, Jarvey, go and kick in her outworks, and bid her come down.'
'Better still, if I may suggest it,' said the tutor, who was above all things anxious to be rid of the girl before too much was said--'Might not your servant take Miss above stairs to this good woman--who will doubtless see to her comfort? Miss Masterson has gone through some surprising adventures this evening, and I think it were better if you allowed her to withdraw at once, Mr. Pomeroy.'
'Jarvey, take the lady,' Mr. Pomeroy cried. 'A sweet pretty toad she is. Here's to your eyes and fortune, child!' he continued with an impudent grin; and filling his glass he pledged her as she passed.
After that he stood watching while Mr. Thomasson opened the door and bowed her out; and this done and the door closed after her, 'Lord, what ceremony!' he said, with an ugly sneer. 'Is't real, man, or are you bubbling her? And what is this Cock-lane story of a chaise and the rest? Out with it, unless you want to be tossed in a blanket.'
'True, upon my honour!' Mr. Thomasson asseverated.
'Oh, but Tommy, the fortune?' Lord Almeric protested seriously. 'I vow you are sharping us.'
'True too, my lord, as I hope to be saved!'
'True? Oh, but it is too monstrous absurd,' my lord wailed. 'The Little Masterson? As pretty a little tit as was to be found in all Oxford. The Little Masterson a fortune?'
'She has eyes and a shape,' Mr. Pomeroy admitted generously. 'For the rest, what is the figure, Mr. Thomasson?' he continued. 'There are fortunes and fortunes.'
Mr. Thomasson looked at the gallery above, and thence, and slyly, to his companions and back again to the gallery; and swallowed something that rose in his throat. At length he seemed to make up his mind to speak the truth, though when he did so it was in a voice little above a whisper. 'Fifty thousand,' he said, and looked guiltily round him.
Lord Almeric rose from his chair as if on springs. 'Oh, I protest!' he said. 'You are roasting us. Fifty thousand! It's a bite?'
But Mr. Thomasson nodded. 'Fifty thousand,' he repeated softly. 'Fifty thousand.'
'Pounds?' gasped my lord. 'The Little Masterson?'
The tutor nodded again; and without asking leave, with a dogged air unlike his ordinary bearing when he was in the company of those above him, he drew a decanter towards him, and filling a glass with a shaking hand raised it to his lips and emptied it. The three were on their feet round the table, on which several candles, luridly lighting up their faces, still burned; while others had flickered down, and smoked in the guttering sockets, among the empty bottles and the litter of cards. In one corner of the table the lees of wine had run upon the oak, and dripped to the floor, and formed a pool, in which a broken glass lay in fragments beside the overturned chair. An observant eye might have found on the panels below the gallery the vacant nails and dusty lines whence Lelys and Knellers, Cuyps and Hondekoeters had looked down on two generations of Pomeroys. But in the main the disorder of the scene centred in the small table and the three men standing round it; a lighted group, islanded in the shadows of the hall.
Mr. Pomeroy waited with impatience until Mr. Thomasson lowered his glass. Then, 'Let us have the story,' he said. 'A guinea to a China orange the fool is tricking us.'
The tutor shook his head, and turned to Lord Almeric. 'You know Sir George Soane,' he said. 'Well, my lord, she is his cousin.'
'Oh, tally, tally!' my lord cried. 'You--you are romancing, Tommy!'
'And under the will of Sir George's grandfather she takes fifty thousand pounds, if she make good her claim within a certain time from to-day.'
'Oh, I say, you are romancing!' my lord repeated, more feebly. 'You know, you really should not! It is too uncommon absurd, Tommy.'
'It's true!' said Mr. Thomasson.
'What? That this porter's wench at Pembroke has fifty thousand pounds?' cried Mr. Pomeroy. 'She is the porter's wench, isn't she?' he continued. Something had sobered him. His eyes shone, and the veins stood out on his forehead. But his manner was concise and harsh, and to the point.
Mr. Thomasson. glanced at him stealthily, as one gamester scrutinises another over the cards. 'She is Masterson, the porter's, foster-child,' he said.
'But is it certain that she has the money?' the other cried rudely. 'Is it true, man? How do you know? Is it public property?'
'No,' Mr. Thomasson answered, 'it is not public property. But it is certain and it is true!' Then, after a moment's hesitation, 'I saw some papers--by accident,' he said, his eyes on the gallery.
'Oh, d--n your accident!' Mr. Pomeroy cried brutally. 'You are very fine to-night. You were not used to be a Methodist! Hang it, man, we know you,' he continued violently, 'and this is not all! This does not bring you and the girl tramping the country, knocking at doors at midnight with Cock-lane stories of chaises and abductions. Come to it, man, or--'
'Oh, I say,' Lord Almeric protested weakly. 'Tommy is an honest man in his way, and you are too stiff with him.'
'D--n him! my lord; let him come to the point then,' Mr. Pomeroy retorted savagely. 'Is she in the way to get the money?'
'She is,' said the tutor sullenly.
'Then what brings her here--with you, of all people?'
'I will tell you if you will give me time, Mr. Pomeroy,' the tutor said plaintively. And he proceeded to describe in some detail all that had happened, from thefons et origo mali--Mr. Dunborough's passion for the girl--to the stay at the Castle Inn, the abduction at Manton Corner, the strange night journey in the chaise, and the stranger release.
When he had done, 'Sir George was the girl's fancy-man, then?' Pomeroy said, in the harsh overbearing tone he had suddenly adopted.
The tutor nodded.
'And she thinks he has tricked her?'
'But for that and the humour she is in,' Mr. Thomasson answered, with a subtle glance at the other's face, 'you and I might talk here till Doomsday, and be none the better, Mr. Pomeroy.'
His frankness provoked Mr. Pomeroy to greater frankness. 'Consume your impertinence!' he cried. 'Speak for yourself.'
'She is not that kind of woman,' said Mr. Thomasson firmly.
'Kind of woman?' cried Mr. Pomeroy furiously. 'I am this kind of man. Oh, d--n you! If you want plain speaking you shall have it! She has fifty thousand, and she is in my house; well, I am this kind of man! I'll not let that money go out of the house without having a fling at it! It is the devil's luck has sent her here, and it will be my folly will send her away--if she goes. Which she does not if I am the kind of man I think I am. So there for you! There's plain speaking.'
'You don't know her,' Mr. Thomasson answered doggedly. 'Mr. Dunborough is a gentleman of mettle, and he could not bend her.'
'She was not in his house!' the other retorted, with a grim laugh. Then, in a lower, if not more amicable tone, 'Look here, man,' he continued, 'd'ye mean to say that you had not something of this kind in your mind when you knocked at this door?'
'I!' Mr. Thomasson cried, virtuously indignant.
'Ay, you! Do you mean to say you did not see that here was a chance in a hundred? In a thousand? Ay, in a million? Fifty thousand pounds is not found in the road any day?'
Mr. Thomasson grinned in a sickly fashion. 'I know that,' he said.
'Well, what is your idea? What do you want?'
The tutor did not answer on the instant, but after stealing one or two furtive glances at Lord Almeric, looked down at the table, a nervous smile distorting his mouth. At length, 'I want--her,' he said; and passed his tongue furtively over his lips.
'The girl?'
'Yes.'
'Oh Lord!' said Mr. Pomeroy, in a voice of disgust.
But the ice broken, Mr. Thomasson had more to say. 'Why not?' he said plaintively. 'I brought her here--with all submission. I know her, and--and am a friend of hers. If she is fair game for any one, she is fair game for me. I have run a risk for her,' he continued pathetically, and touched his brow, where the slight cut he had received in the struggle with Dunborough's men showed below the border of his wig, 'and--and for that matter, Mr. Pomeroy is not the only man who has bailiffs to avoid.'
'Stuff me, Tommy, if I am not of your opinion!' cried Lord Almeric. And he struck the table with unusual energy.
Pomeroy turned on him in surprise as great as his disgust. 'What?' he cried. 'You would give the girl and her money--fifty thousand--to this old hunks!'
'I? Not I! I would have her myself!' his lordship answered stoutly. 'Come, Pomeroy, you have won three hundred of me, and if I am not to take a hand at this, I shall think it low! Monstrous low I shall think it!' he repeated in the tone of an injured person. 'You know. Pom, I want money as well as another--want it devilish bad--'
'You have not been a Sabbatarian, as I was for two months last year,' Mr. Pomeroy retorted, somewhat cooled by this wholesale rising among his allies, 'and walked out Sundays only for fear of the catchpolls.'
'No, but--'
'But I am not now, either. Is that it? Why, d'ye think, because I pouched six hundred of Flitney's, and three of yours, and set the mare going again, it will last for ever?'
'No, but fair's fair, and if I am not in this, it is low. It is low, Pom,' Lord Almeric continued, sticking to his point with abnormal spirit. 'And here is Tommy will tell you the same. You have had three hundred of me--'
'At cards, dear lad; at cards,' Mr. Pomeroy answered easily. 'But this is not cards. Besides,' he continued, shrugging his shoulders and pouncing on the argument, 'we cannot all marry the girl!'
'I don't know,' my lord answered, passing his fingers tenderly through his wig. 'I--I don't commit myself to that.'
'Well, at any rate, we cannot all have the money!' Pomeroy replied, with sufficient impatience.
'But we can all try! Can't we, Tommy?'
Mr. Thomasson's face, when the question was put to him in that form, was a curious study. Mr. Pomeroy had spoken aright when he called it a chance in a hundred, in a thousand, in a million. It was a chance, at any rate, that was not likely to come in Mr. Thomasson's way again. True, he appreciated more correctly than the others the obstacles in the way of success--the girl's strong will and wayward temper; but he knew also the humour which had now taken hold of her, and how likely it was that it might lead her to strange lengths if the right man spoke at the right moment.
The very fact that Mr. Pomeroy had seen the chance and gauged the possibilities, gave them a more solid aspect and a greater reality in the tutor's mind. Each moment that passed left him less willing to resign pretensions which were no longer the shadowy creatures of the brain, but had acquired the aspect of solid claims--claims made his by skill and exertion.
But if he defied Mr. Pomeroy, how would he stand? The girl's position in this solitary house, apart from her friends, was half the battle; in a sneaking way, though he shrank from facing the fact, he knew that she was at their mercy; as much at their mercy as if they had planned the abduction from the first. Without Mr. Pomeroy, therefore, the master of the house and the strongest spirit of the three--
He got no farther, for at this point Lord Almeric repeated his question; and the tutor, meeting Pomeroy's bullying eye, found it necessary to say something. 'Certainly,' he stammered at a venture, 'we can all try, my lord. Why not?'
'Ay, why not?' said Lord Almeric. 'Why not try?'
'Try? But how are you going to try?' Mr. Pomeroy responded with a jeering laugh. 'I tell you, we cannot all marry the girl.'
Lord Almeric burst in a sudden fit of chuckling. 'I vow and protest I have it!' he cried. 'We'll play for her! Don't you see, Pom? We'll cut for her! Ha! Ha! That is surprising clever of me; don't you think? We'll play for her!'
It was a suggestion so purely in the spirit of a day when men betted on every contingency, public or private, decorous or the reverse, from the fecundity of a sister to the longevity of a sire, that it sounded less indecent in the cars of Lord Almeric's companions than it does in ours. Mr. Thomasson indeed, who was only so far a gamester as every man who had pretensions to be a gentleman was one at that time, and who had seldom, since the days of Lady Harrington's faro bank, staked more than he could afford, hesitated and looked dubious. But Mr. Pomeroy, a reckless and hardened gambler, gave a boisterous assent, and in the face of that the tutor's objections went for nothing. In a trice, all the cards and half the glasses were swept pell mell to the floor, a new pack was torn open, the candles were snuffed, and Mr. Pomeroy, smacking him on the back, was bidding him draw up.
'Sit down, man! Sit down!' cried that gentleman, who had regained his jovial humour as quickly as he had lost it, and whom the prospect of the stake appeared to intoxicate. 'May I burn if I ever played for a girl before! Hang it! man, look cheerful, We'll toast her first--and a daintier bit never swam in a bowl--and play for her afterwards! Come, no heel-taps, my lord. Drink her! Drink her! Here's to the Mistress of Bastwick!'
'Lady Almeric Doyley!' my lord cried, rising, and bowing with his hand to his heart, while he ogled the door through which she had disappeared. 'I drink you! Here's to your pretty face, my dear!'
'Mrs. Thomasson!' cried the tutor, 'I drink to you. But--'
'But what shall it be, you mean?' Pomeroy cried briskly. 'Loo, Quinze, Faro, Lansquenet? Or cribbage, all-fours, put, Mr. Parson, if you like! It's all one to me. Name your game and I am your man!'
'Then let us shuffle and cut, and the highest takes,' said the tutor.
'Sho! man, where is the sport in that?' Pomeroy cried, receiving the suggestion with disgust.
'It is what Lord Almeric proposed,' Mr. Thomasson answered. The two glasses of wine he had taken had given him courage. 'I am no player, and at games of skill I am no match for you.'
A shadow crossed Mr. Pomeroy's face; but he recovered himself immediately. 'As you please,' he said, shrugging his shoulders with a show of carelessness. 'I'll match any man at anything. Let's to it!'
But the tutor kept his hands on the cards, which lay in a heap face downwards on the table. 'There is a thing to be settled,' he said, hesitating somewhat, 'before we draw. If she will not take the winner--what then?'
'What then?'
'Yes, what then?'
Mr. Pomeroy grinned. 'Why, then number two will try his luck with her, and if he fail, number three! There, my bully boy, that is settled. It seems simple enough, don't it?'
'But how long is each to have?' the tutor asked in a low voice. The three were bending over the cards, their faces near one another. Lord Almeric's eyes turned from one to the other of the speakers.
'How long?' Mr. Pomeroy answered, raising his eyebrows. 'Ah. Well, let's say--what do you think? Two days?'
'And if the first fail, two days for the second?'
'There will be no second if I am first,' Pomeroy answered grimly.
'But otherwise,' the tutor persisted; 'two days for the second?'
Bully Pomeroy nodded.
'But then, the question is, can we keep her here?'
'Four days?'
'Yes.'
Mr. Pomeroy laughed harshly. 'Ay,' he said, 'or six if needs be and I lose. You may leave that to me. We'll shift her to the nursery to-morrow.'
'The nursery?' my lord said, and stared.
'The windows are barred. Now do you understand?'
The tutor turned a shade paler, and his eyes sank slyly to the table. 'There'll--there'll be no violence, of course,' he said, his voice a trifle unsteady.
'Violence? Oh, no, there will be no violence,' Mr. Pomeroy answered with an unpleasant sneer. And they all laughed; Mr. Thomasson tremulously, Lord Almeric as if he scarcely entered into the other's meaning and laughed that he might not seem outside it. Then, 'There is another thing that must not be,' Pomeroy continued, tapping softly on the table with his forefinger, as much to command attention as to emphasise his words, 'and that is peaching! Peaching! We'll have no Jeremy Twitcher here, if you please.'
'No, no!' Mr. Thomasson stammered. 'Of course not.'
'No, damme!' said my lord grandly. 'No peaching!'
'No,' Mr. Pomeroy said, glancing keenly from one to the other, 'and by token I have a thought that will cure it. D'ye see here, my lord! What do you say to the losers taking five thousand each out of Madam's money? That should bind all together if anything will--though I say it that will have to pay it,' he continued boastfully.
My lord was full of admiration. 'Uncommon handsome!' he said. 'Pom, that does you credit. You have a head! I always said you had a head!'
'You are agreeable to that, my lord?'
'Burn me, if I am not.'
'Then shake hands upon it. And what say you, Parson?'
Mr. Thomasson proffered an assent fully as enthusiastic as Lord Almeric's, but for a different reason. The tutor's nerves, never strong, were none the better for the rough treatment he had undergone, his long drive, and his longer fast. He had taken enough wine to obscure remoter terrors, but not the image of Mr. Dunborough--impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer--Dunborough doubly and trebly offended! That image recurred when the glass was not at his lips; and behind it, sometimes the angry spectre of Sir George, sometimes the face of the girl, blazing with rage, slaying him with the lightning of her contempt.
He thought that it would not suit him ill, therefore, though it was a sacrifice, if Mr. Pomeroy took the fortune, the wife, and the risk--and five thousand only fell to him. True, the risk, apart from that of Mr. Dunborough's vengeance, might be small; no one of the three had had act or part in the abduction of the girl. True, too, in the atmosphere of this unfamiliar house--into which he had been transported as suddenly as Bedreddin Hassan to the palace in the fairy tale--with the fumes of wine and the glamour of beauty in his head, he was in a mood to minimise even that risk. But under the jovial good-fellowship which Mr. Pomeroy affected, and strove to instil into the party, he discerned at odd moments a something sinister that turned his craven heart to water and loosened the joints of his knees.
The lights and cards and jests, the toasts and laughter were a mask that sometimes slipped and let him see the death's head that grinned behind it. They were three men, alone with the girl in a country house, of which the reputation, Mr. Thomasson had a shrewd idea, was no better than its master's. No one outside knew that she was there; as far as her friends were concerned, she had vanished from the earth. She was a woman, and she was in their power. What was to prevent them bending her to their purpose?
It is probable that had she been of their rank from the beginning, bred and trained, as well as born, a Soane, it would not have occurred even to a broken and desperate man to frame so audacious a plan. But scruples grew weak, and virtue--the virtue of Vauxhall and the masquerades--languished where it was a question of a woman who a month before had been fair game for undergraduate gallantry, and who now carried fifty thousand pounds in her hand.
Mr. Pomeroy's next words showed that this aspect of the case was in his mind. 'Damme, she ought to be glad to marry any one of us!' he said, as he packed the cards and handed them to the others that each might shuffle them. 'If she is not, the worse for her! We'll put her on bread and water until she sees reason!'
'D'you think Dunborough knew, Tommy?' said Lord Almeric, grinning at the thought of his friend's disappointment. 'That she had the money?'
Dunborough's name turned the tutor grave. He shook his head.
'He'll be monstrous mad! Monstrous!' Lord Almeric said with a chuckle; the wine he had drunk was beginning to affect him. 'He has paid the postboys and we ride. Well, are you ready? Ready all? Hallo! Who is to draw first?'
'Let's draw for first,' said Mr. Pomeroy. 'All together!'
'All together!'
'For it's hey, derry down, and it's over the lea.And it's out with the fox in the dawning!'
sang my lord in an uncertain voice. And then, 'Lord! I've a d----d deuce! Tommy has it! Tommy's Pam has it! No, by Gad! Pomeroy, you have won it! Your Queen takes!'
'And I shall take the Queen!' quoth Mr. Pomeroy. Then ceremoniously, 'My first draw, I think?'
'Yes,' said Mr. Thomasson nervously.
'Yes,' said Lord Almeric, gloating with flushed face on the blind backs of the cards as they lay in a long row before him. 'Draw away!'
'Then here's for a wife and five thousand a year!' cried Pomeroy. 'One, two, three--oh, hang and sink the cards!' he continued with a violent execration, as he flung down the card he had drawn. 'Seven's the main! I have no luck! Now, Mr. Parson, get on! Can you do better?'
Mr. Thomasson, a damp flush on his brow, chose his card gingerly, and turned it with trembling fingers. Mr. Pomeroy greeted it with a savage oath, Lord Almeric with a yell of tipsy laughter. It was an eight.
'It is bad to be crabbed, but to be crabbed by a smug like you!' Mr. Pomeroy cried churlishly. Then, 'Go on, man!' he said to his lordship. 'Don't keep us all night.'