Faro's Daughter (29 page)

‘I think it would be less disagreeable for Phoebe,’ he said. ‘I might talk my mother over, but I dread the thought of what Phoebe might be made to undergo at Lady Laxton’s hands if I did not. I mean to offer for her with all the propriety in the world, but if I am refused permission to address her I shall marry her out of hand, even if it means running all the way to Gretna Green to do it!’

She smiled. ‘Bravo! Meanwhile, what is to be done? Am I to keep her with me, or do we send her to stay with her aunt?’

He stopped short in his tracks, an arrested expression in his face. ‘I had forgot her aunt! Deb, I believe I should journey into Wales to see her, and to beg for her support! What do you think?’

‘It seems to me an excellent plan. She may well be able to assist you. In the meantime, I will keep Phoebe here, where she will be quite safe, depend upon it! You will not mention the matter to your mother, or to your cousin, until things are in a way to be settled.’

He grasped her hands gratefully. ‘You are the best of creatures, Deb! I do not know where we should be without you! I will come round tomorrow to talk the thing over with Phoebe, and to learn her aunt’s direction.’

She agreed to this, and he then took his leave of her, going home with his head in the clouds, so divorced from earthly considerations that he quite forgot to think out a convincing reason to account for his absence all day to his anxious parent. The result of this oversight was that he blurted out the truth when she questioned him, and then felt very guilty, because Lady Mablethorpe at once expressed her intention of calling in Grosvenor Square the very next morning to favour Mr Ravenscar with her opinion of his wicked callousness in exposing her only son to all the risks of curricle-racing.

On the following day, Miss Laxton stationed herself soon after breakfast at the window in the Yellow Saloon, to watch for Lord Mablethorpe’s arrival, while Miss Grantham went to her aunt’s dressing-room to see how that afflicted lady did.

Lady Bellingham’s spirits had undergone a further buffet by the arrival of a bill from her milliner. She had just thrust this iniquitous document into Deborah’s hands when her black page scratched on the door, and, upon being told to come in, handed a packet to Miss Grantham on a silver tray.

She picked it up, recognizing Mr Ravenscar’s bold fist, and observing that it had been brought round by hand, asked the boy if art answer was expected. No, he said: the messenger had not waited for any answer.

She dismissed him, and broke the seal, spreading open the stiff sheet of paper. A slim sheaf of bills was disclosed and, attached to them, one of Mr Ravenscar’s visiting-cards, with a curt message written across the top of it.

‘With my compliments,’ she read, and sat staring at the card in stunned silence.

Lady Bellingham eyed her with misgiving. ‘What is it, my love?’ she asked uneasily. ‘Who is it from?’

Miss Grantham said, in a voice which did not seem to belong to her: ‘It is from Mr Ravenscar.’

Lady Bellingham gave a moan, and reached for her smelling salts. ‘I knew it! Tell me the worst at once! He is going to have us all arrested!’

‘No,’ said Miss Grantham. ‘No.’ She handed the packet to her aunt, feeling quite unable to say anything more.

Lady Bellingham took the packet in a gingerly fashion, but when she saw what it contained, she dropped her smelling salts, and ejaculated: ‘Deb! Deb, he has sent them!’

‘I know,’ said Miss Grantham.

‘They are all here!’ declared her ladyship, sorting them with trembling fingers. ‘Even the mortgage, my love! Oh, was there ever anything so providential? But—but why has he done it? Don’t tell me you have been teaching him anything dreadful’

Miss Grantham shook her head. ‘I can’t think why he has done it, aunt.’

‘Did you tell him you would not marry Mablethorpe, and don’t care to own it to me? That is it!’

‘It is not, ma’am. I told him I would marry Mablethorpe. I said I would ruin him, too.’

‘Then I don’t understand it at all,’ said Lady Bellingham, laying the packet down on her dressing-table. ‘You don’t suppose, do you, my love, that he can have misunderstood you?’

‘I am very sure he did not. But what is to be done?’

‘Done, my dear?’ repeated her ladyship. ‘Well, I think you should write him a pretty letter, thanking him for his goodness in restoring my bills. I must say it is most obliging of him! I never supposed that he would do so, for they say he is abominably close! But I shall tell anyone who says that to me again that it is not so at all!’

Miss Grantham pressed her hands to her cheeks. ‘My dear ma’am, you cannot think that I would accept this generosity! It is impossible! What am I to do?’

Lady Bellingham’s eyes started with horror. She caught up the packet and clasped it to her bosom. ‘Not accept it?’ she gasped. ‘After all the trouble you have been to get these horrid things away from him? Oh, I shall go mad!’

‘But that was different,’ Miss Grantham said impatiently. ‘I never thought he would give them to me merely for the asking!’

‘But, my love; you were trying to take them from him by force!’ wailed her ladyship.

‘Yes, and so I would have,’ agreed Miss Grantham. ‘But to be beholden to him in this manner is intolerable!’

‘Deb, they are my bills, and I don’t find it intolerable!’ said her ladyship in imploring tones.

‘It puts me in the most odious position! I can never lift my head again! Besides, he does not even like me! You must see, ma’am, that I cannot endure this! It is not as though I had behaved nicely to him: I have done everything I could to make him hate and despise me!’

‘Yes, my love, indeed you have, and that is what makes it so particularly obliging of him! I daresay he must think you are mad, and that is why he has done it, because, he is sorry for you.’

This suggestion found no favour at all with Miss Grantham. She fired up at once, saying: ‘He must know very well that I am nothing of the kind! I don’t want him to be sorry for me. There is no reason why he should be!’

‘Well, my love, perhaps he is sorry for me, and I am sure there is plenty of reason for that!’

Miss Grantham got up, kneading her hands together. ‘It must be paid!’ she said.

‘Paid?’ gasped her aunt. ‘I can never pay the half of such sum.’

‘Yes, yes, we always meant to pay the mortgage, my dear ma’am! It must be done!’

‘I call it flying in the face of providence!’ said Lady Bellingham, with strong feeling. ‘With all these other horrid bills of wine, and carriages, and green peas, and candles! I declare Deb, you are enough to try the patience of a saint!’

‘Dear Aunt Lizzie, a run of luck, a little economy, and the thing is done!’

‘You know we decided that it was impossible to live much cheaply than we do now, my love! Besides, there is Kit exchange to be thought of! Do but consider! If you do not like to write to Ravenscar I am very willing to do it for you.

‘Certainly not! I will write to him myself. I will ask him to come to see me, and I will—yes, I will thank him, of course but I will make it plain to him that he shall be paid back every penny.’

‘Next you will be wanting to pay him the interest!’ said her ladyship.

‘The interest! I had forgotten that! Oh, ought we to pay that too?’ said Miss Grantham, appalled.

Lady Bellingham flung up her hands. ‘Deb, you are mad! I do not know what has come over you! It was bad enough when you wantonly threw away twenty thousand pounds—and I can scarcely bear to think of that, when I remember all the shocking bills!—but when it comes to refusing to accept the dreadful mortgage, which you have spent a week trying to get from Ravenscar, it goes beyond all bounds! Anyone would have supposed that you would be thankful to get the wretched thing so easily! But not at all! I do believe you would have preferred to have wrested it from Ravenscar by main force.

‘Yes, I would,’ replied Miss Grantham earnestly. ‘Much rather! That would have been my wits against his! This—oh, I wonder you cannot see how impossible it is!’

‘I cannot, and I never shall,’ said her aunt. ‘At least, I hope I shall not, but sometimes I feel as though I were going mad too. I wish you will let me call in the doctor to you! I am sure you have caught a touch of the sun, or contracted some horrid disease which is sending you out of your mind!’

Before Miss Grantham could repudiate this suggestion there was a hurried tap on the door, followed immediately by the entrance of Miss Laxton into the room, looking as white as her tucker.

‘Good God, child, what is the matter with you?’ exclaimed Lady Bellingham.

Miss Laxton took a wavering step towards Deborah. ‘Sir James!’ she managed to utter, and crumpled up where she stood, in a dead faint.

‘Oh, heavens, if it is not one thing it is another!’ wailed her ladyship, looking round wildly for the vinaigrette. ‘Untie her laces! Where are those salts? Why is nothing ever where it is wanted? Ring the bell! Oh no, the hartshorn is in that cupboard! I shall go distracted! You ought to burn some feathers under her nose, but there are only the new ostrich plumes in my best hat, and really—However, take them if you like! I am sure I do not grudge them!’

Deborah, who had dropped on to her knees beside Miss Laxton’s inanimate form, raised her head to say: ‘My dear ma’am, it is quite unnecessary! Have the goodness to bring me a little water, and I will engage for it that she will soon come round! Poor child, what can have happened, I wonder? Did she say Sir James was here?’

‘She said Sir James, but I heard nothing more. If this is his doing, I will step downstairs immediately, and give him a piece of my mind. This may be a gaming-house, but if he thinks to come to it simply to terrify stupid girls he is very much mistaken, and so he will find before he is a day older!’

Deborah took the glass of water from her, and sprinkled a little on Miss Laxton’s face. ‘Hush, ma’am! She is coming to herself! There, my dear! You are better now, are you not?’

Phoebe’s eyes opened, and stared blankly up into Miss Grantham’s face for a bewildered moment. Then, as realization came, she shuddered convulsively, and clutched at Miss Grantham’s arm. ‘Oh, don’t let him come in!’

‘No one shall come in whom you don’t wish to see, my dear,’ replied Miss Grantham calmly. ‘Do not agitate yours so! You are quite safe! Come, I want you to drink this hartshorn-and-water, and then you will be better!’

Miss Laxton swallowed the mixture obediently, and burst into tears. Lady Bellingham said: ‘For heaven’s sake, child don’t start crying! If Sir James is downstairs, I will very so send him about his business! His mother was a very vulgar low kind of a woman, so that I am sure one cannot be surprised at anything!’

Miss Grantham helped Phoebe to rise from the floor, a put her into a large armchair. ‘Is he downstairs, Phoebe?’

‘No! Oh, no, I think not! He walked away. He will have gone to my father. I am utterly undone! What shall I do? Where can I go? I dare not stay here another minute!’

Lady Bellingham sighed, and shook her head. ‘I declare cannot make head or tail of what she means! I dare say shi going mad too, if we only knew, and who shall wonder at.’

Phoebe clasped Miss Grantham’s hand feebly, and said t: indeed she was not mad. ‘It was my fault. It was all my fault I never thought—I went into the front saloon, to watch Adrian, and I didn’t think that anyone would see me. I pulled back the blinds, to see better, and he was there!’

‘Who was there? Who was where?’ demanded Ls Bellingham.

‘Sir James, in the Square, walking by the house in the direction of St James’s Street!’

‘I daresay he was on his way to White’s,’ said her ladyship.

‘But he saw me! I know he saw me, and knew me too! I not immediately perceive him, and when I did look toward him he was standing quite still, staring up at me! I thought I should have died of fright! I ran away from the window came directly in search of you, Deb! Oh, what is to be doing. I won’t go back, I won’t, but I know Papa will come to fetch me, and Mama too, very likely!’

‘Well, if Augusta Laxton comes into this house I shall know what to do!’ said Lady Bellingham, with unwonted pugnaciously. ‘I do not wish to speak ill of your Mama, Phoebe, but she is odious, mercenary, cheating wretch! She used to play faro at my parties, when we lived in the smaller house, and at times did I catch her cocking her card! Let her attempt to find her way in here, that is all I have to say!’

Miss Laxton, however, refused to be comforted. She quite sure that she would be wrested from her friends’ protection, and compelled to marry Sir James Filey. No representations which Miss Grantham could make of the impossibility of her being compelled to marry anyone bore any weight with her; she seemed to be determined to give herself up for lost. It was with considerable relief that Miss Grantham learned, a few minutes later, that Lord Mablethorpe was belowstairs.

‘Desire him to come up!’ she said. ‘You will not object to his coming into your dressing-room, aunt?’

‘Oh no, let him come!’ said her ladyship, quite exhausted by her efforts to reassure Phoebe. ‘I do not care who comes, if only they can put some sense into this stupid girl’s head! I will say this for you, Deb: you may lock people up in the cellar, and fling thousands of pounds in their faces as though it was mud, but you don’t cry! Nothing could be more tiresome, when all is said and done! If that is you at the door, Mablethorpe, come in this instant, and do something!’