“We have no right to ask such a pledge from you, Mr. Durant. Yes, you have always been very kind, very kind. Forgive me,” she said, softening, “if I am too unhappy to say what I ought. I thought something might have been done. But to think that we must stand by calmly and see him accomplish his own destruction! Oh, think again!” she cried, with sudden tears, “can we do nothing, nothing more, to save my boy from this miserable fate?”
Durant put down his hat. He did not go till late, nearly midnight. They sat and talked of Arthur, nothing but Arthur, the whole evening through.
CHAPTER X.
THAT which Lady Curtis had reproached Durant for not doing was done by the lawyers so successfully that Arthur Curtis was driven almost frantic, and swore wild oaths of vengeance upon his family. Sir John’s ambassador was not held back by any delicacy. He offered a sum which made Mrs. Bates tremble, and moved her husband to declare, with emphasis, that they had never thought of going against Sir John—that, of course, they wouldn’t go against Sir John. Mr. Bates had a reverence for the upper classes which was almost sublime. He made no radical revolutionary demand of excellence from them—he did not even require that they should benefit, or be especially civil to himself. Anyhow, and under any circumstances, he was willing to give himself up to be trodden under the feet of any Sir John, if need was; and that he should oppose one, after his will was fully known, seemed impossible. Especially a Sir John with a bag of money in his hand.
“Let him marry our Nancy after Sir John Curtis, his excellent father, has spoke against it! You couldn’t do such a thing, Sarah,” he said, “and when there is a nice bit of money coming in for doing what is only our dooty—”
“Our duty is first to Nancy,” said Mrs. Bates doubtfully, “and if we were to say it shouldn’t be, who can tell if she’d obey us? Nancy has a spirit of her own.”
That this was true they both had good occasion to know. But it was a great temptation. The lawyer gave them to understand that if Nancy could be withdrawn from the field, and Arthur allowed to go free—(this was how they all put it, making believe that Arthur was a kind of caged bird, to be let loose, or kept in a cage at will)—a thousand pounds might be forthcoming. A thousand pounds! never before in all their lives had such a sum been dangled before the eyes of this pair. There seemed so many things that they could do with it. It would portion off, they thought, all the children. With two hundred a piece, Matilda and Sarah Jane would be heiresses, and Charley might have a little more to start him in business; and a sum left in the bank for a rainy day. What a heavenly prospect it was! “Was there any sweetheart in the world,” the tax-collector asked, “that was worth it?” and Mrs. Bates shook her head emphatically and said, “No—certainly not!” But then would Nancy see that? Girls had their own ways of thinking; and on the other side was her sweetheart, and the marriage that was all settled, that everybody knew of—Mrs. Bates felt that even to herself this would be a bitter pill—to countermand all the preparations for the wedding, and give all the neighbours a right to say that the Bates’ had overreached themselves, and pride was having a fall. This, no doubt, would be a tremendous price to pay; but, a thousand pounds! They talked it over until it seemed to them both that not to have this thousand pounds would be at once a deception and a wrong. The Lord knew it was not for themselves they wanted it. But Mr. Bates was more and more strongly of opinion that to prefer a sweetheart to this sum of money, that would be the making of the family, was something beyond mortal perversity. He was for sending her away at once to a brother of his who lived in Wapping, without leaving her time to communicate with Arthur.
“But you must lock her up when she gets to Wapping,” said Mrs. Bates regretfully, “or she’d write to him straight off to let him know where she was—and where would be the gain?”
“Well, Sally, we’d have had nothing to do with it, you know,” said Mr. Bates, not liking to put the suggestion into words—but yet feeling that if the thousand pounds was paid, and circumstances happened after, over which they had no control—why, they could have no control over circumstances—and nobody would ask them to give back the money. Mr. Bates’ wits had been sharpened by his tax-collecting, but his wife was not so clever.
“If we take the money, we’ll have to do the work,” she said, “and it’s all very well to talk, but who’ll manage Nancy? That girl do scare me.”