“Mr. Bulstrode meant to make me happy,� she said bitterly, after a while; “but I doubt if he has. I even doubt, if that money comes to us, whether it may not do us more harm than good.�
“I understand quite well what you mean,� cried Blair, blazing up. “You think I will go back to horse racing, and gambling, and a few other vices. That is the confidence you have in my word. I tell you, Elizabeth, a man can’t have any confidence in himself unless somebody else has some confidence in him; and a man’s wife can make a scoundrel of him easier than anybody in the world.�
“I did not suspect that I was calculated to make a scoundrel of a man,� answered Elizabeth; and Blair taking out his watch ostentatiously and picking up his cigar again, she rose to go. Their voices had not risen beyond the most ordinary pitch, yet the first serious quarrel of their married life had come about. Blair relighted her candle for her, and held the door wide open until she had reached the top of the stair. He was very polite to her, but he was more angry with her than he supposed he ever could be. He was angry with her for the little she said, but more angry with her for the great deal she implied; and he meant to have some money on his expectations, if it were in the power of mortal man.
CHAPTER XVI.
Blair was as good as his word, and sent immediately to England for a copy of Mrs. Skelton’s will. But in those days it was a matter of three months or more to get a thing of that kind attended to, and meanwhile affairs with him improved greatly. Old Tom Shapleigh, urged thereto by Sylvia, and also by Mrs. Shapleigh, who declared she never could tolerate a new neighbour at Newington, went quietly to work and bought up all of the most pressing claims against Blair. He knew that he could get as good interest on his money invested in Newington, under Blair’s admirable management, as anywhere else; and, besides, he was fond of the Blairs, and anxious to do them a good turn for the very bad one of selling Alabaster to Blair. So Blair suddenly found himself very much better placed than he expected, and with an excellent chance, if he lived ten years, of paying off his debts. He also had a strange sense of relief when his race horses were sold, at the feeling that it was now out of his power to be a turfite any longer. It had always been a nightmare as well as a vampire to him, and fortunately it was one of those passions which have a body to them, and can therefore be destroyed, at least temporarily. His horses brought uncommonly good prices, which enabled him to pay some of the small debts that harassed him most. He began to think, with a sort of savage satisfaction, that what Skelton designed for his destruction might in the end be his salvation. Hilary, too, began to improve rapidly, and was in six weeks’ time perfectly recovered. Mrs. Blair was amazed at the turn affairs took; but there was yet an unspoken, still antagonism between Blair and herself in regard to his course about the Skelton money. They had been so happy together for so many years that the mere habit of love was strong. The children saw no shadow between their father and mother, but nevertheless it was there, and it pursued them; it sat down by them, and walked with them, and never left them. Elizabeth, seeing how happy they might have been without this, conceived a tender, womanish superstition against the money that might be theirs. She had a faint, quivering doubt that much money might be Blair’s destruction; and, anyhow, the mere hint of it had brought silent dissension between them, when nothing else ever had. Mrs. Blair, in the depths of her soul, heartily wished Bulstrode had never told her what he did, or that she had never told Blair. She had been able to hold up her head proudly before Richard Skelton in all the rivalry between him and her husband; but now, this unseemly looking after what might never be theirs and was never intended to be theirs, this hankering after dead men’s shoes, made her ashamed.
What Skelton thought or felt nobody knew. He expressed, however, to Sylvia, great solicitude in speaking of Hilary Blair’s recovery, and sent Bob Skinny formally, once or twice, to ask how the boy was. Sylvia was making herself felt on Skelton’s heart and mind; but, like a man, he put off entertaining the great guest as long as he could. And there was his engagement to the world to do something extraordinary. In the long summer days he was haunted by that unfulfilled promise. He was so tormented and driven by it, and by his inability to settle down steadily to his book, that he looked about him for some distraction. He found it only too often, he began to think, in Sylvia Shapleigh’s soft eyes and charming talk.
Skelton was not averse to occasional hospitalities on a grand scale, and one day it occurred to him that he would give a great ball as a return for the invitations he had received.
On mentioning this embryonic scheme to Sylvia, that young woman received it with enthusiasm, and even slyly put Lewis Pryor up to reminding Skelton of it. Lewis, too, was immensely taken with the notion, and when Skelton found himself the victim of two such conspirators, he yielded gracefully enough. He declared that he would send for a man from Baltimore who knew all about balls, that he might not be bothered with it, and Sylvia forcibly encouraged him in everything calculated to make the ball a success. The man was sent for and plans were made, upon which Sylvia’s opinion was asked—to Mrs. Shapleigh’s delight and consternation and to old Tom’s secret amusement.
“Mr. Shapleigh, the county will say at once that Sylvia is engaged to Richard Skelton, and then what shall we do?�
“Do, ma’am? Do as the French do in a gale of wind.�