“How can you think so?” Arabella cried hotly. “Grieved he must be—oh, I dare not even think of it!—but you must know that never, never would he do such an unchristian thing as to cast you off! Oh, do not write to him yet! Only give me tune to think what I can do! If Papa knew that you owed all that money, I am very sure he would pay every penny of it, though it ruined him!”
“How can you suppose I would be such a gudgeon as to tell him that? No! I shall tell him that my whole mind is set on the army, and I had as lief start in the ranks as not!”
This speech struck far more dismay into Arabella’s heart than his previous talk of committing suicide, for to take the King’s shilling seemed to her a likely thing for him to do. She uttered, hardly above a whisper: “No, no!”
“It must be, Bella,” he said, “I’m sure the army is all I’m fit for, and I cannot show my face again with a load of debt hanging over me. Particularly a debt of honour! O God, I think I must have been mad!” His voice broke, and he could not speak for a moment. In the end he contrived to summon up the travesty of a smile, and to say: “Pretty pair, ain’t we? Not that you did anything as wrong as I have.”
“Oh, I have behaved so dreadfully!” she exclaimed. “It is even my fault that you are reduced to these straits! Had I never presented you to Lord Wivenhoe—”
“That’s fudge!” he said quickly. “I had been to gaminghouses before I met him. He was not to know I wasn’t as well-blunted as that set of his! I ought not to have gone with him to the Nonesuch. Only I had lost money on a race, and I thought—I hoped Oh, talking pays no toll! But to say it was your fault is all gammon!”
“Bertram, who won your money at the Nonesuch?” she asked.
“The bank. It was faro.”
“Yes, but someone holds the bank!”
“The Nonpareil.”