'Oh, la!' said Lady Dunborough, spitting on the floor--for there were ladies who did such things in those days--'I think they are all in it together. And the fair cousin too! Cousin be hanged!' she added with a shrill ill-natured laugh; 'I have heard that before.'
But Sir George took no notice of her words. 'Come, if you choose,' he cried, addressing the lawyer. 'But I do not wait for you. And now, madam, if your interference is at an end--'
'And what if it is not?' she cried, insolently grimacing in his face. She had gained half an hour, and it might save her son. To persist farther might betray him, yet she was loth to give way. 'What if it is not?' she repeated.
'I go out by the other door,' Sir George answered promptly, and, suiting the action to the word, he turned on his heel, strode through the crowd, which subserviently made way for him, and in a twinkling he had passed through the garden door, with Mr. Fishwick, hat in hand, hurrying at his heels.
The moment they were gone, the babel, suppressed while the altercation lasted, rose again, loud as before. It is not every day that the busiest inn or the most experienced traveller has to do with an elopement, to say nothing of an abduction. While a large section of the ladies, seated together in a corner, tee-hee'd and tossed their heads, sneered at Miss and her screams, and warranted she knew all about it, and had her jacket and night-rail in her pocket, another party laid all to Sir George, swore by the viscountess, and quoted the masked uncle who made away with his nephew to get his estate. One or two indeed--and, if the chronicler is to be candid, one or two only, out of as many scores--proved that they possessed both imagination and charity. These sat apart, scared and affrighted by their thoughts; or stared with set eyes and flushed faces on the picture they would fain have avoided. But they were young and had seen little of the world.
On their part the men talked fast and loud, at one time laughed, and at another dropped a curse--their form of pity; quoted the route and the inns, and weighed the chances of Devizes or Bath, Bristol or Salisbury; vaguely suggested highwaymen, an old lover, Mrs. Cornelys' ballet; and finally trooped out to stand in the road and listen, question the passers-by, and hear what the parish constable had to say of it. All except one very old man, who kept his seat and from time to time muttered, 'Lord, what a shape she had! What a shape she had!' until he dissolved in maudlin tears.
Meanwhile a woman lay upstairs, tossing in passionate grief and tended by servants; who, more pitiful than their mistresses, stole to her to comfort her. And three men rode steadily along the western road.