Zounds! had a girl like Lady Bell been exposed in a place like Peasmarsh at a time like this, all night? She must have been decoyed, made away with. He would give Trevor Court—his life—to see her in honour and safety again. He would cause this woman, who had suffered Lady Bell to be lost, to pay for it with her miserable means, her vile body. He should have her before a magistrate, lay her in prison, and leave her to rot there among the demireps, and felons, who were fit company for her.
“Oh, gracious sir! have mercy on me!” implored the woman, “listen to reason! I never knowed there was any harm in my lady going abroad, when she had been flourishing up and down, here and there, and everywhere, for the last ten days, by your own orders, Squire. I’ll take my Bible oath on that; and you too up to the ears with the ’lection to bear her company. How could I know that she were to go wrong all at oncet, and be lost, and bring this trouble on my poor innocent head?”
An unexpected arrival came to the landlady’s aid. Mrs. Walsh, the Squire’s cousin, entered, walked up to the Squire, and spoke to the point of his misery and his conscience.
“I have ridden over, cousin, because I have heard word that, in your arrogance and lust to win this canvass, you have been exposing Lady Bell, like a bird with its wings unclipped, to the snare of the fowler. Now, by the first word I hear from you, the bird has flown, or been stricken down, and its blood be on your head.”
The difficulty of the situation in which Squire Trevor was placed, could not have been surpassed; even if Lady Bell had deliberately selected the occasion of her quitting him for the purpose of baffling and discomfiting him, she could not have succeeded better. He could not throw up the chances of his election, and abandon his party and his supporters in order to seek her. Political feeling ran too high then, to admit of such a course, even in a more devoted husband than Mr. Trevor. His very vanity and obstinacy which, without knowing that she had divulged his secret and provided for the safety of his enemy, were enlisted in recovering his marital rights, and humbling and punishing Lady Bell, were equally enlisted in his standing to his colours, not showing the white feather, and going through with, and, if possible, winning the election.
It became a matter of peevish policy even, and of rage repressed, that it might be more scathing in the end, to be gloomily silent on the domestic misfortune which had befallen him. He was constrained to seek in the dark in order to discover what could have become of Lady Bell. He had to let rumour give out that she was gone, while the person most concerned concealed the inexplicable nature of her absence.
Thus it happened, that Lady Bell Trevor’s disappearance was whispered as a mystery in Peasmarsh, and that all sorts of astounding and contradictory accounts prevailed.
It was said that Lady Bell had gone up secretly to London, to see about getting a King’s patent for conferring a peerage on Squire Trevor, because she, a peer’s daughter, could not brook the descent involved in her being married to a simple commoner.
On the other hand, it was whispered that Squire Trevor was so displeased with his wife, because she had lost him Goodman Rickards’s vote, which Madam Sundon had beguiled from Rickards, by presenting all the women of the Rickardses with feather tippets, while Lady Bell had only gone the length of bestowing cloth spencers; that Squire Trevor had determined, without delay, on parting from Lady Bell. As she had no private fortune, or even pin-money, he had whipped her off to France, with the view of confining her in a convent for the rest of her life.
There were other individuals besides Mr. Trevor in Peasmarsh, who were behind the curtain; but who, however anxious and full of pity, were reduced to listening to these absurd stories, and to doing nothing beyond contributing one or two opposite and enigmatical advertisements which were inserted, at this date, in the Peasmarsh Chronicle.