They were patched and powdered as if prepared for a ball rather than for the dust of the road. Dowagers, frigid and stately as marble, murmured racy gossip to each other behind their fans. Famous beauties flitted hither and thither, beckoning languid fops with their alluring eyes. Wits and beaux sauntered about elegantly even as at White’s. ’Twas plain that this was a party en route for one of the great county houses near.
Aileen stared with wide-open eyes and parted lips at these great dames from the fashionable world about which she knew nothing. They were prominent members of the leading school for backbiting in England, and in ten minutes they had talked more scandal than the Highland lass had heard before in a lifetime. But the worst of the situation was that there was not one of them but would cry “Montagu!” when they clapped eyes on me. Here were Lord March, George Selwyn, Sir James Craven, Topham Beauclerc, and young Winton Westerleigh; Lady Di Davenport and the Countess Dowager of Rocksboro; the Hon. Isabel Stanford, Mistress Antoinette Westerleigh, and others as well known to me. They had taken us at unawares, and as Creagh would have put it in an Irish bull the only retreat possible for us was an advance through the enemy. At present they paid no more attention to us than they would to the wooden negro in front of a tobacco shop, but at any moment detection might confront me. Faith, here was a predicament! Conceive me, with a hundred guineas set upon my head, thrust into the very company in all England I would most have avoided.
And of all the people in the world they chanced on me as a topic of conversation. George Selwyn, strolling up and down the room, for want of something better to do, stopped in front of that confounded placard and began reading it aloud. Now I don’t mind being described as “Tall, strong, well-built, and extremely good-looking; brown eyes and waving hair like ilk; carries himself with distinction;” but I grue at being set down as a common cutpurse, especially when I had taken the trouble to send back Sir Robert’s jewelry at some risk to myself.
“Wonder what Montagu has done with himself,” queried Beauclerc after Selwyn had finished.
“Or what Volney has done with him,” muttered March behind his hand. “I’ll lay two to one in ponies he never lives to cross another man.”
“You’re wrong, March, if you think Volney finished him. He’s alive all right. I heard it from Denman that he got safe across to France. Pity Volney didn’t pink the fellow through the heart for his d——d impudence in interfering; not that I can stand Volney either, curse the popinjay!” snarled Craven sourly.
“If Montagu reaches the continent, ’twill be a passover the Jews who hold his notes will not relish,” suggested Selwyn in his sleepy way.
A pink-and-white-faced youth shimmering in cream satin was the animated heart of another group. His love for scandal and his facility for acquiring the latest tidbit made him the delight of many an old tabby cat. Now his eyes shone with the joy of imparting a delicious morsel.
“Egad, then, you’re all wrong,” he was saying in a shrill falsetto. “Stap me, the way of it was this! I have it on the best of authority and it comes direct, rot me if it doesn’t! Sir Robert’s man, Watkins, told Madame Bellevue’s maid, from whom it came straight to Lord Pam’s fellow and through him to old Methuselah, who mentioned it to——”
“You needn’t finish tracing the lineage of the misinformation. We’ll assume it began with Adam and ended with a dam—with a descendant of his,” interrupted Craven with his usual insolence. “Now out with the lie!”