“Very true, my dear, but you will never prevail with him,” said his aunt gloomily. “It would make a great difference too.”
“And instead of this,” pursued Mr Grantham, with a strong sense of injury, “I find that this house has become little more than a gaming-hell! Nothing could be more unfortunate! I think you should have been more careful, ma’am!”
Lady Bellingham was quite crushed by this severity, but could not feel that Kit had entirely grasped the exigencies of her situation. She tried, in a half-hearted way, to make him understand how difficult it was for a widow with expensive tastes and a nephew and a niece dependent upon her to live a restricted income, but as his mind seemed to be all wholly taken up with his own problems, it was doubtful if attended to much that she said. At the first pause in her rambling explanation, he favoured her with a description of Arabella’s manifold charms, and expressed his conviction that if anything were to stand between him and marriage to his lady, he should find himself unable to support life, and might just as well blow his brains out and be done with it.
Lady Bellingham was horrified to hear such sentiments on his lips, and begged him to consider her nerves. His sister, when the conversation was reported to her, merely replied that she had listened to much the same stuff from Lord Mablethorpe, who was now falling in love with Phoebe as fast as he could.
“But Kit is so impulsive!” sighed Lady Bellingham. “I must say, it would be a splendid thing if he were to marry an heiress, my love, and I am very sorry if anything I have done should put a spoke in his wheel.”
“How dare Kit say such a thing to you?” exclaimed Deborah. “I never heard of anything so ungrateful in my life! If he talks in that vein to me, he shall soon hear what I think of his folly! As for his marrying an heiress, pooh! It will come to nothing, ma’am, for he has been in love a dozen times before, and will doubtless be in love a dozen times again. Who is the girl?”
“Oh, I don’t know! He did not tell me, and I was too distracted to ask! My dearest love, he is not at all pleased with us for keeping a gaming-house, and what he will say if he hears of the mortgage, and that horrid man’s foreclosing on me, I shudder to think!”
“You have nothing to worry about on that score, aunt: there will be no foreclosure.”
Miss Grantham spoke with a note of certainty in her voice, for she had received a note, brought round by hand from Mr Kennet’s lodging, reminding her to prepare her cellar for a guest. She had implicit faith in Kennet, and felt perfectly sure that he would contrive to deliver the arch-enemy into her hands by nightfall. Lady Bellingham was expecting a fairly numerous gathering of people in her saloons that evening, and the only question now troubling Miss Grantham was how Kennet and Silas would manage to carry their prisoner into the cellar unobserved. As she could think of no way by which she might assist them, and supposed they must have taken this problem into account, she very sensibly put it out of her head, and went upstairs to change her green saque for an evening gown of dull yellow brocade.
Lady Bellingham had meanwhile presented her nephew to Miss Laxton, first impressing on him that he must not divulge her presence in the house to a living soul. His sister had already explained to him the circumstances leading up to Phoebe’s arrival in St James’s Square, and although he was inclined to think it was excessively imprudent of her to have interfered with what was no concern of hers, he was not proof against the al peal of Phoebe’s soft brown eyes, and air of fragility, and so began to think Deborah had acted in a very proper manner.
He had very little opportunity to converse privately wit Deborah before she went up to change her dress, but he did catch her alone for a few minutes on her way down again to the dining-room, and begged her to tell him whether it was true that she had refused a very advantageous offer of marriage. She replied truthfully that she had not done so, but when she saw how his face brightened she added that she had no real intention of marrying Mablethorpe, although she did not at preset wish this known.
“You are the strangest girl!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you mean to marry him? I am sure you cannot hope for a better offer! They say he will come into a very pretty fortune, and aunt tells me he is perfectly amiable. I do not know what can ail you!”
“I am not in love with him,” replied Deborah, adding with rather a saucy smile: “You will understand that, I am persuaded!”
He sighed. “Yes, indeed I do, but the cases are not the same. You do not love anyone else, do you?”
“Certainly not, but I am not too old yet to fall in love, I hope
He looked at her rather anxiously. “My aunt mentioned Lord Ormskirk, Deb. I could not well make out what she meant: you know how she will run on! But it did not sound to me—In short, you are not contemplating anything of clandestine nature, are you?”
“No, no!” she assured him. “You need have no fears!”
“I was sure you could not be! But everything seems to me topsy-turvy here now—But I can trust you!”
“I hope so indeed. But can I trust you, Kit? This is very: shocking news, that you are meaning to be married!”
He laughed, and squeezed her arm. “You will always funning! Wait until you see her! You will understand then. She is the tiniest, daintiest little darling you can imagine, at with such countenance, such pretty, taking ways! Only ten one they will not let her marry me, more particularly since her aunt has allowed her house to become a haunt of gamesters. I was never so vexed!”
“If you do not like it, let me advise you to be less expensive said Deborah roundly. “It is not for you to reproach Aunt Lizzie, after all! You cannot suppose that she keeps a gaminghouse from her own choice.”
He looked a good deal mortified, and muttered something about having had no idea that things had come to this pass. “I suppose it was Lucius who put the idea into my aunt’s head. I wonder that he should have encouraged you to lend yourself to it!”
“My dear Kit, Lucius has no such nice notions! I could not leave my aunt to struggle alone. You must understand too that I am considered an attraction in the saloons!”
“How can you talk so! I declare, it makes me inclined to sell out. I do not like to have my sister playing hostess to a set of gamesters! Where is Lucius? Shall I see him tonight?”
“Undoubtedly,” replied Deborah, thinking that Lucius Kennet ought by now to be on his way to the house, and hoping very much that he had not failed to accomplish his task.
Chapter 11
Mr Ravenscar came to the rendezvous in the Park alone, and on foot, as Kennet had hoped he would, when he appointed a meeting-place at no great distance from his house, and in one of the walks a little way away from the carriage-road. He knew that unless he drove himself Ravenscar either walked, or took a hackney, and it was not likely that he would have his curricle out so late in the day. He had himself hired a closed vehicle whose owner, a villainous-looking individual with a cauliflower ear, was vouched for by Silas. For five guineas, he was ready, he said jovially, to assist in a murder, and if it were a mere matter of abduction he counted it a very slight piece of work, and was happy to be of service. He bit the gold pieces that were given him, and said that he liked to have to do with honest culls. He engaged to hold his carriage in readiness in the Park, and to be deaf and blind to his employers’ activities.
Mr Ravenscar saw the carriage as he crossed the road towards the path where he expected to meet Miss Grantham, and he supposed it to be hers. It was already dusk, and the Park was almost deserted. What reason Deborah could have for appointing a meeting-place in such secrecy, and at such an hour, he could not imagine. He would not have been surprised to find that there was some trick brewing, and was prepared to encounter all the feminine weapons of tears, cajolery, pleadings and vapours. That she hoped to induce him to relent he was sure; he suspected, with a cynical twist to his mouth, that she was regretting her rejection of his fantastic offer of twenty thousand pounds, and determined that no arts of hers should prevail upon him to repeat the offer, or even the half of it. She might think herself fortunate to get the mortgage and the bill into her hands.