Egerton wrung his friend's hand; and the nobleman had already reached the door of the room, when he turned back as if a sudden recollection had struck him, and said, "By the way, my dear boy, have you any cash in the house? I must make a certain payment in the neighbourhood before I go; and my agent in the country has been infernally slow lately in sending up the rents of my estate."
Lord Dunstable's estate was one of those pleasing fictions which exhibit the imaginative faculties of so many members of the aristocracy and gentry residing at the West End of London.
"Oh! certainly," was Egerton's prompt answer to the question put to him. "I have some four or five hundred pounds in my pocket-book. How much do you require?"
"Four hundred pounds will just make up the amount I have to pay," said Dunstable; and having received that sum in Bank-notes, he took his departure, humming an opera air.
It is not necessary to detail the particulars of the young nobleman's visit to Ravensworth Hall: suffice it to say that he was completely successful in his proposed arrangements with the gardener, and that he communicated this result to his friend Egerton at Long's Hotel in the evening. Chichester, Cholmondeley, and Harborough were let into the secret; and they insisted upon joining the party.
Accordingly, on the following day Egerton sent a favourable reply to his aunt's letter; but his conscience reproached him—deeply reproached him, for the cheat which he was about to practise upon his confiding and affectionate relative.
For, in spite of the dissipated courses which he was pursuing,—in spite of the gratification which his pride received from the companionship of his aristocratic acquaintances,—in spite of the lavish extravagance that marked his expenditure, this young man's good feelings were not altogether perverted; and it required but the timely interposition of some friendly hand to reclaim him from the ways that were hurrying him on to ruin!
The Monday fixed upon for the excursion arrived; and at eleven o'clock in the forenoon a huge yellow barouche, commonly called "a glass-coach," rattled up to the door of Mr. Egerton's lodgings in Stratton Street. The driver of this vehicle had put on his best clothes, which were, however, of a seedy nature, and gave him the air of an insolvent coachman; and the pair of horses which it was his duty to drive seemed as if they had been purchased at least six months previously by a knacker who had, nevertheless, mercifully granted them a respite during pleasure.
Egerton's countenance became as red as scarlet when this crazy equipage stopped at his door: but his four friends, who were all posted at the windows of his drawing-room, affected to consider the whole affair as "a very decent turn-out;" and thus the young man's mind was somewhat calmed.
By the side of the seedy coachman upon the box sate a tall, thin, red-haired young man, dressed in deep black, and with his shirt-collar turned down, over a neckerchief loosely tied, after the fashion of Lord Byron. The moment the glass-coach stopped in Stratton Street, down leapt the aforesaid seedy coachman on one side, and the thin young man on the other; and while the seedy coachman played a nondescript kind of tune upon the knocker of the house, the young gentleman proceeded to hand out first Mrs. Bustard, and then her five daughters one after the other.