“Well, I hope you may be right,” said Miss Grantham. “My only fear is that she may have hired the Bow Street Runners to find Phoebe.”
This suggestion was so appalling that Lady Bellingham sank plump into a chair. “My love, don’t say such a thing! Oh dear, what have you done? Only think of the scandal if the law officers were to come to this house! We shall all be prosecuted!”
“My dear ma’am, there is not the least likelihood of such a thing happening. No one knows of any circumstance connecting me with Phoebe, and Adrian must be quite above suspicion.”
But the idea, once instilled into Lady Bellingham’s brain, took such strong possession of it that it might well have brought on her dreaded spasms had it riot been ousted by a far more pressing threat.
The following morning’s post brought Miss Grantham a curt communication from Mr Ravenscar.
It was handed to her as she sat at breakfast with her aunt and her protégée. She did not recognize the handwriting, which was very black and firm, and the crest on the seal was equally strange to her. She turned it over idly, broke open the seal, and spread out the single, crackling sheet of paper.
She was eating a slice of bread-and-butter as she ran her eye down the missive, and startled her aunt by choking suddenly. She let a hasty exclamation escape her, swallowed a stray crumb, which found its way into her windpipe, and fell into helpless coughing. By the time she had been restored by having her back briskly slapped by her aunt, all the impropriety of disclosing the contents of her letter in Miss Laxton’s presence had been recollected, and she sat with it in her lap throughout the rest of the meal. Lady Bellingham noticed that she was unusually silent, and saw that her eyes were smouldering and her cheeks unduly flushed. Her heart sank, for she knew these signs. “My love, I do trust you have not received some bad news?” she said nervously.
“Bad news, ma’am?” said Miss Grantham, sitting ver5 straight in her chair. “Oh, dear me, no! Nothing of that nature!”
Lady Bellingham’s alarms were not in the least allayed by this assurance, and she sat fidgeting until Phoebe presently left the table. When the door had shut behind her, her ladyship fixed her eyes on Deborah’s martial countenance, and demanded: “What is it? If I am not to be laid upon my bed with the vapours, tell me the worst at once! The Laxtons have discovered that child’s whereabouts?”
“This obliging letter,” said Deborah, looking at it with loathing, “does not come from the Laxtons. It comes from Mr Ravenscar.”
“Never say so, my love!” cried her ladyship, reviving fast. “Well, now, this time, don’t you think, dearest Deb that you should compound with him? What does he offer you?”
“You are mistaken, ma’am; he does not offer me anything He threatens me instead!”
“Threatens you?” exclaimed her aunt. “For heaven’s sake, child, what with?”
“Mr Ravenscar,” said Deborah, through her teeth, “beg: leave to inform me that he has acquired—acquired!—certain bills of exchange drawn by you, and a mortgage on this house.”
“What?” almost screamed Lady Bellingham. “He can’t have acquired them! Ormskirk holds them! You know he does! Ii must be a trick to frighten you!”
“No, it isn’t, and I am not in the least frightened!” said Miss Grantham indignantly. “He has got them from Ormskirk, that much is plain.”
“I can’t believe such a thing! Ormskirk would never give them up, I am persuaded!”
“You said he was badly dipped, Aunt Lizzie,” Deborah reminded her. “If Ravenscar offered to buy them from him, I daresay he may have been glad to agree to sell them.”
“I never heard of such treachery in my life!” declared her ladyship. “It passes everything! Besides, if he does not hold the bills any longer, what hope can Ormskirk have of persuading you, my love?”
Miss Grantham thought this over, wrinkling her brow over the problem. “I daresay he might think he had no hope of me,” she said at last. “If he believes I am about to marry Adrian, that would be it, no doubt.”
“I shall go distracted!” said Lady Bellingham, clasping her head in her hands, and sadly disarranging her cap. “Nothing could be worse! You have now lost them both through your tricks! I do not know how you can be so improvident, Deb, indeed I don’t! You must marry Adrian at once!”
“Nonsense! He is not of age, ma’am. Besides, I do not mean to marry him at all.”
“No! You mean to fob him off with this Laxton child, which is so downright wasteful of you I cannot bear to think of it! But if Ravenscar holds those dreadful bills, there is nothing to be done (unless you choose to give Adrian up altogether) but to marry him secretly at once! I know you will say these Gretna marriages are not at all the thing, but it can’t be helped now! Matters are desperate!”
“I must get them into my hands,” said Deborah, who had not been paying much heed to this speech.
“Get what into your hands?” demanded her ladyship.
“The bills, and the mortgage, ma’am; what else?”
“Do you mean you will agree to give Adrian up?” asked Lady Bellingham. “I own, it may come to that, but I do think it would be better if you married him.”
“Ravenscar and Lady Mablethorpe would have the marriage annulled if I did anything so foolish. Oh, he thinks he has me in a pretty corner, but I shall show him!”
“No, no, don’t show him anything more, Deb, I implore you!” begged her aunt, agitated. “You see what has come of showing him things! If only you would be a little conciliating!”
“Conciliating! I mean to fight him to the last ditch!” said Miss Grantham. “The first thing is to get those bills away from him!”
“You can’t get them away from him,” said Lady Bellingham despairingly. “What does he say in his letter?”
“Why, that he will be happy to restore them to me in return for his cousin’s freedom! How dare he insult me so? Oh, I will never forgive him!”
“Says he will restore them? Well, I must say, my dear, that is very handsome of him! To be sure, it is not as good as twenty thousand pounds, but it would be a great relief to be rid of some of our debts!”
“And if I don’t send Adrian about his business, he will foreclose on you,” added Miss Grantham.
Lady Bellingham gave a moan. “The brute! I cannot possibly pay him! I suppose he wants me to go upon my knees to him, but I won’t do it! I won’t!”
“Go on your knees to him?” cried Miss Grantham. “No indeed! I would never speak to you again if you did.”
“Very likely no one will ever speak to me again—no one I care to speak to, at all events—for I shall be in a debtors’ prison, and shall end my days there. Oh, Deb, how can you be so heartless?”
Miss Grantham put her arms round the afflicted matron. “I’m not heartless, dearest, indeed I’m not, and you shan’t be put into any prison! It is not you that hateful man wishes to punish, but me! He thinks to frighten me, but I have still a trick or two up my sleeve, and so he shall find! I’ll get those bills back, and won’t give Adrian up—at least, I will really, but Ravenscar shall not know of it until he owns himself beaten—and—”
“Don’t!” begged her aunt. “I cannot bear it! Nothing will do for you but to ruin us all, and that is the matter in a nutshell! And I do think Ravenscar must be the most disagreeable man in the world, besides the oddest-behaved! If he means to foreclose, why doesn’t he tell me so? I am sure it is not your business!”
“Oh, he wrote to me because I made him so angry that he wants to punish me! I am sure he has no quarrel at all with you, aunt, so pray do not put yourself in a taking! This is all wicked spite! But I will teach him a lesson!”
Since no arguments of hers seemed likely to prevail against this determination, Lady Bellingham gave up any attempt to induce her niece to see reason, and tottered away to spend a melancholy morning trying to discover an error in her dressmaker’s bill, and to convince Mortimer that the stubs of the candles used in the saloons could quite well be lit again for kitchen purposes. As she succeeded in neither of these objects, her spirits underwent no change for the better, and might indeed have borne her down utterly had she been privileged to know what her niece was planning to do. This knowledge, however, was prudently kept from her, so that she was able to go out for her usual drive in the Park in ignorance of the events which were brewing above her unfortunate head.