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.
The path down which he was wending his way lay between beds of autumn flowers and was screened from the road by a belt of trees, which made it so dark, in the failing light, that he could not see many yards ahead. A rustic seat, where Miss Grantham should have met him, loomed vaguely ahead, beside a clump of flowering shrubs. No one was in sight. Ravenscar paused, frowning, and suddenly suspicious. It was no longer fashionable to wear a sword, and he carried nothing but his walking-cane in his hand. Some instinct of danger made him tighten his grip on this, but before he had well grasped that Miss Grantham had not kept her appointment with him, Silas Wantage had sprung out from behind the bush with a club it his hand, and came at him in a rush.
Ravenscar escaped the blow aimed at his head only by the swiftness with which he ducked. The blow missed him, and he sprang back, holding his cane like a rapier. It was too late to enable him to recognize Wantage; his first thought was that he had been set upon by a footpad. When Wantage came or again, the cane caught him so shrewdly across the elbow-join that his club-hand dropped and he let out a grunt of pain. In that moment Ravenscar saw his chance, dropped his cane, and went in with a left and a right to the jaw. Silas’s head went back but he had not spent ten years in the Ring for nothing, and he recovered quickly, abandoning his club, and covering up in this manner of an experienced bruiser. “Come on, then!” hi growled, pleased that it should have come to a turn-up after all.
Mr. Ravenscar did come on, but Lucius Kennet, anxious to finish the business, and fearing that they might at any moment be surprised by a Park keeper, or some late wayfarer, ran out from his hiding-place behind Ravenscar and clubbed him be fore he realized that he had two opponents instead of only one.