A Plucky Girl

by L. T. Meade

He folded his arms across his chest and looked full at me. He was in such great and desperate earnest that he was not quite so repellant as usual. I could not but respect him, and I found it no longer difficult to speak freely to him.

"I come as a woman to appeal to a man," I said. "You are a man and I am a woman, we stand on equal ground. You would not like your sister, had you a sister, to do what you want me to do. I appeal to you on behalf of that sister who does not exist."

He tried to give a laugh, but it would not rise to his lips.

"As you justly remarked," he said, "I have not got a sister."

"But you know, you must know, Mr. Fanning, what you would feel if you had a sister, and she allowed a man who was no relation, no relation whatever, to take her debts and pay them. What would you think of your sister?"

"I'd say the sooner she and that chap married the better," was Mr. Fanning's blunt response; "they'd be relations then fast enough, eh, eh? I think I have about answered you, Miss Wickham."

"But suppose she did not want to marry that man; suppose she had told him that she never would marry him; suppose he knew perfectly well in his heart that she could not marry him, because she had not a spark of love to give him?"

"But I don't suppose anything of the sort," said Mr. Fanning, and now his face grew white, uncomfortably white, and I saw his lips trembling.

"There now," he said, "you have had your say, and it is my turn. I see perfectly well what you are driving at. You think I have taken an unfair advantage of you, but this was the position. I knew all about it, I had seen it coming for some time. Jane Mullins had dropped hints to mother, and mother had dropped hints to me, and, good gracious! I could tell for myself. I am a man of business; I knew exactly what each of the boarders paid. I knew exactly or nearly to a nicety, and if I didn't my mother did, what the dinners cost which we ate night after night in your dining-room, and what the furniture must have cost, and what the breakfast cost, and the hundred and one things which were necessary to keep up an establishment of that kind, and I said to the mater, 'Look you here, mater, the incomings are so and so, and the outgoings are so and so, and a smash is inevitable. It will come sooner or later, and it is my opinion it will come sooner, not later.' The mater agreed with me, for she is shrewd enough, and we both thought a great deal of you, and a great deal of your mother. We knew that although you were dainty in your ways, and belonged to a higher social class than we did (we are never going, either of us, to deny that), we knew that you were ignorant of these things, and had not our wisdom, and we thought Jane Mullins was a bit of a goose to have launched in such a hopeless undertaking. But, of course, as the mater said, she said it many, many times, 'There may be money at the back of this thing, Albert, and if there is they may pull through.' But when Mr. Randolph went off in that fine hurry last winter, we found out all too quickly that there was no money at the back, and then, of course, the result was inevitable.

"I expected Pattens to send a man in, for I had met him once or twice, and he told me that his bill was not paid, and that he did not mean to supply any more meat, and what Pattens said the baker and greengrocer said too, and so did Allthorp the grocer, and so did the fishmonger, Merriman, and so did all the other tradespeople, and if one spoke to me, so did they all. I have paid Pattens, but that is not enough. Pattens won't trouble you any more, his man has gone, but there is Merriman's man to come on, and there is Allthorp's man, and there are all the others, and then, above and beyond all, there's the landlord, Mr. Hardcastle. Why, the March quarter's rent has not been paid yet, and that is a pretty big sum. So, my dear young lady, things cannot go on, and what is to be done? Now there's the question—what is to be done?"