THE CASTLE INN

CHAPTER I

A KNIGHT-ERRANT

About a hundred and thirty years ago, when the third George, whom our grandfathers knew in his blind dotage, was a young and sturdy bridegroom; when old Q., whom 1810 found peering from his balcony in Piccadilly, deaf, toothless, and a skeleton, was that gay and lively spark, the Earl of March; when bore and boreish were words of haut ton, unknown to the vulgar, and the price of a borough was 5,000l.; when gibbets still served for sign-posts, and railways were not and highwaymen were--to be more exact, in the early spring of the year 1767, a travelling chariot-and-four drew up about five in the evening before the inn at Wheatley Bridge, a short stage from Oxford on the Oxford road. A gig and a couple of post-chaises, attended by the customary group of stablemen, topers, and gossips already stood before the house, but these were quickly deserted in favour of the more important equipage. The drawers in their aprons trooped out, but the landlord, foreseeing a rich harvest, was first at the door of the carriage, and opened it with a bow such as is rarely seen in these days.

'Will your lordship please to alight?' he said.

'No, rascal!' cried one of those within. 'Shut the door!'

'You wish fresh horses, my lord?' the obsequious host replied. 'Of course. They shall be--'

'We wish nothing,' was the brisk answer. 'D'ye hear? Shut the door, and go to the devil!'

Puzzled, but obedient, the landlord fell back on the servants, who had descended from their seat in front and were beating their hands one on another, for the March evening was chill. 'What is up, gentlemen?' he said.

'Nothing. But we will put something down, by your leave,' they answered.

'Won't they do the same?' He cocked his thumb in the direction of the carriage.

'No. You have such an infernal bad road, the dice roll,' was the answer. 'They will finish their game in quiet. That is all. Lord, how your folks stare! Have they never seen a lord before?'

'Who is it?' the landlord asked eagerly. 'I thought I knew his Grace's face.'

Before the servant could answer or satisfy his inquisitiveness, the door of the carriage was opened in haste, and the landlord sprang to offer his shoulder. A tall young man whose shaped riding-coat failed to hide that which his jewelled hands and small French hat would alone have betrayed--that he was dressed in the height of fashion--stepped down. A room and a bottle of your best claret,' he said. 'And bring me ink and a pen.'

'Immediately, my lord. This way, my lord. Your lordship will perhaps honour me by dining here?'

'Lord, no! Do you think I want to be poisoned?' was the frank answer. And looking about him with languid curiosity, the young peer, followed by a companion, lounged into the house.

The third traveller--for three there were--by a gesture directed the servant to close the carriage door, and, keeping his seat, gazed sleepily through the window. The loitering crowd, standing at a respectful distance, returned his glances with interest, until an empty post-chaise, approaching from the direction of Oxford, rattled up noisily and split the group asunder. As the steaming horses stopped within a few paces of the chariot, the gentleman seated in the latter saw one of the ostlers go up to the post-chaise and heard him say, 'Soon back, Jimmie?'

'Ay, and I ha' been stopped too,' the postboy answered as he dropped his reins.

'No!' in a tone of surprise. 'Was it Black Jack?'

'Not he. 'Twas a woman!'

A murmur of astonishment greeted the answer. The postboy grinned, and sitting easily in his pad prepared to enjoy the situation. 'Ay, a woman!' he said. 'And a rare pair of eyes to that. What do you think she wanted, lads?'

'The stuff, of course.'

'Not she. Wanted one of them I took'--and he jerked his elbow contemptuously in the direction whence he had come--'to fight a duel for her. One of they! Said, was he Mr. Berkeley, and would he risk his life for a woman.'

The head ostler stared. 'Lord! and who was it he was to fight?' he asked at last.

'She did not say. Her spark maybe, that has jilted her.'

'And would they, Jimmie?'

'They? Shoo! They were Methodists,' the postboy answered contemptuously, 'Scratch wigs and snuff-colour. If she had not been next door to a Bess of Bedlam and in a main tantrum, she would have seen that. But "Are you Mr. Berkeley?" she says, all on fire like. And "Will you fight for a woman?" And when they shrieked out, banged the door on them. But I tell you she was a pretty piece as you'd wish to see. If she had asked me, I would not have said no to her.' And he grinned.

The gentleman in the chariot opened a window. 'Where did she stop you, my man?' he asked idly.

'Half a mile this side of Oxford, your worship,' the postboy answered, knuckling his forehead. 'Seemed to me, sir, she was a play actress. She had that sort of way with her.'

The gentleman nodded and closed the window. The night had so far set in that they had brought out lights; as he sat back, one of these, hung in the carriage, shone on his features and betrayed that he was smiling. In this mood his face lost the air of affected refinement--which was then the mode, and went perfectly with a wig and ruffles--and appeared in its true cast, plain and strong, yet not uncomely. His features lacked the insipid regularity which, where all shaved, passed for masculine beauty; the nose ended largely, the cheek-bones were high, and the chin projected. But from the risk and even the edge of ugliness it was saved by a pair of grey eyes, keen, humorous, and kindly, and a smile that showed the eyes at their best. Of late those eyes had been known to express weariness and satiety; the man was tiring of the round of costly follies and aimless amusements in which he passed his life. But at twenty-six pepper is still hot in the mouth, and Sir George Soane continued to drink, game, and fribble, though the first pungent flavour of those delights had vanished, and the things themselves began to pall upon him.

When he had sat thus ten minutes, smiling at intervals, a stir about the door announced that his companions were returning. The landlord preceded them, and was rewarded for his pains with half a guinea; the crowd with a shower of small silver. The postillions cracked their whips, the horses started forward, and amid a shrill hurrah my lord's carriage rolled away from the door.

'Now, who casts?' the peer cried briskly, arranging himself in his seat. 'George, I'll set you. The old stakes?'

'No, I am done for to-night,' Sir George answered yawning without disguise.

'What! crabbed, dear lad?'

'Ay, set Berkeley, my lord. He's a better match for you.'

'And be robbed by the first highwayman we meet? No, no! I told you, if I was to go down to this damp hole of mine--fancy living a hundred miles from White's! I should die if I could not game every day--you were to play with me, and Berkeley was to ensure my purse.'

'He would as soon take it,' Sir George answered languidly, gazing through the glass.

'Sooner, by--!' cried the third traveller, a saturnine, dark-faced man of thirty-four or more, who sat with his back to the horses, and toyed with a pistol that lay on the seat beside him. 'I'm content if your lordship is.'

'Then have at you! Call the main, Colonel. You may be the devil among the highwaymen--that was Selwyn's joke, was it not?--but I'll see the colour of your money.'

'Beware of him. He doved March,' Sir George said indifferently.

'He won't strip me,' cried the young lord. 'Five is the main. Five to four he throws crabs! Will you take, George?'

Soane did not answer, and the two, absorbed in the rattle of the dice and the turns of their beloved hazard, presently forgot him; his lordship being the deepest player in London and as fit a successor to the luckless Lord Mountford as one drop of water to another. Thus left to himself, and as effectually screened from remark as if he sat alone, Sir George devoted himself to an eager scrutiny of the night, looking first through one window and then through the other; in which he persevered though darkness had fallen so completely that only the hedges showed in the lamplight, gliding giddily by in endless walls of white. On a sudden he dropped the glass with an exclamation, and thrust out his head.

'Pull up!' he cried. 'I want to descend.'

The young lord uttered a peevish exclamation. 'What is to do?' he continued, glancing round; then, instantly returning to the dice, 'if it is my purse they want, say Berkeley is here. That will scare them. What are you doing, George?'

'Wait a minute,' was the answer; and in a twinkling Soane was out, and was ordering the servant, who had climbed down, to close the door. This effected, he strode back along the road to a spot where a figure, cloaked, and hooded, was just visible, lurking on the fringe of the lamplight. As he approached it, he raised his hat with an exaggeration of politeness.

'Madam,' he said, 'you asked for me, I believe?'

The woman--for a woman it was, though he could see no more of her than a pale face, staring set and Gorgon-like from under the hood--did not answer at once. Then, 'Who are you?' she said.

'Colonel Berkeley,' he answered with assurance, and again saluted her.

'Who killed the highwayman at Hounslow last Christmas?' she cried.

'The same, madam.'

'And shot Farnham Joe at Roehampton?'

'Yes, madam. And much at your service.'

'We shall see,' she answered, her voice savagely dubious. 'At least you are a gentleman and can use a pistol? But are you willing to risk something for justice' sake?'

'And the sake of your beaux yeux, madam?' he answered, a laugh in his voice. 'Yes.'

'You mean it?'

'Prove me,' he answered.

His tone was light; but the woman, who seemed to labour under strong emotion, either failed to notice this or was content to put up with it. 'Then send on your carriage,' she said.

His jaw fell at that, and had there been light by which to see him he would have looked foolish. At last, 'Are we to walk?' he said.

'Those are the lights of Oxford,' she answered. 'We shall be there in ten minutes.'

'Oh, very well,' he said, 'A moment, if you please.'

She waited while he went to the carriage and told the astonished servants to leave his baggage at the Mitre; this understood, he put in his head and announced to his host that he would come on next day. 'Your lordship must excuse me to-night,' he said.

'What is up?' my lord asked, without raising his eyes or turning his head. He had taken the box and thrown nicks three times running, at five guineas the cast; and was in the seventh heaven. 'Ha! five is the main. Now you are in it, Colonel. What did you say, George? Not coming! What is it?'

'An adventure.'

'What! a petticoat?'

'Yes,' Sir George answered, smirking.

'Well, you find 'em in odd places. Take care of yourself. But shut the door, that is a good fellow. There is a d----d draught.'

Sir George complied, and, nodding to the servants, walked back to the woman. As he reached her the carriage with its lights whirled away, and left them in darkness.

Soane wondered if he were not a fool for his pains, and advanced a step nearer to conviction when the woman with an impatient 'Come!' started along the road; moving at a smart pace in the direction which the chariot had taken, and betraying so little shyness or timidity as to seem unconscious of his company. The neighbourhood of Oxford is low and flat, and except where a few lights marked the outskirts of the city a wall of darkness shut them in, permitting nothing to be seen that lay more than a few paces away. A grey drift of clouds, luminous in comparison with the gloom about them, moved slowly overhead, and out of the night the raving of a farm-dog or the creaking of a dry bough came to the ear with melancholy effect.

The fine gentleman of that day had no taste for the wild, the rugged, or the lonely. He lived too near the times when those words spelled danger. He found at Almack's his most romantic scene, at Ranelagh his terra incognita, in the gardens of Versailles his ideal of the charming and picturesque. Sir George, no exception to the rule, shivered as he looked round. He began to experience a revulsion of spirits; and to consider that, for a gentleman who owned Lord Chatham for a patron, and was even now on his roundabout way to join that minister--for a gentleman whose fortune, though crippled and impaired, was still tolerable, and who, where it had suffered, might look with confidence to see it made good at the public expense--or to what end patrons or ministers?--he began to reflect, I say, that for such an one to exchange a peer's coach and good company for a night trudge at a woman's heels was a folly, better befitting a boy at school than a man of his years. Not that he had ever been so wild as to contemplate anything serious; or from the first had entertained the most remote intention of brawling in an unknown cause. That was an extravagance beyond him; and he doubted if the girl really had it in her mind. The only adventure he had proposed, when he left the carriage, was one of gallantry; it was the only adventure then in vogue. And for that, now the time was come, and the incognita and he were as much alone as the most ardent lover could wish, he felt singularly disinclined.

True, the outline of her cloak, and the indications of a slender, well-formed shape which it permitted to escape, satisfied him that the postboy had not deceived him; but that his companion was both young and handsome. And with this and his bargain it was to be supposed he would be content. But the pure matter-of-factness of the girl's manner, her silence, and her uncompromising attitude, as she walked by his side, cooled whatever ardour her beauty and the reflection that he had jockeyed Berkeley were calculated to arouse; and it was with an effort that he presently lessened the distance between them.

'Et vera incessu patuit dea!' he said, speaking in the tone between jest and earnest which he had used before. '"And all the goddess in her step appears." Which means that you have the prettiest walk in the world, my dear--but whither are you taking me?'

She went steadily on, not deigning an answer.

'But--my charmer, let us parley,' he remonstrated, striving to maintain a light tone. 'In a minute we shall be in the town and--'

'I thought that we understood one another,' she answered curtly, still continuing to walk, and to look straight before her; in which position her hood, hid her face. 'I am taking you where I want you.'

'Oh, very well,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. But under his breath he muttered, 'By heaven, I believe that the pretty fool really thinks--that I am going to fight for her!'

To a man who had supped at White's the night before, and knew his age to be the âge des philosophes, it seemed the wildest fancy in the world. And his distaste grew. But to break off and leave her--at any rate until he had put it beyond question that she had no underthought--to break off and leave her after placing himself in a situation so humiliating, was too much for the pride of a Macaroni. The lines of her head and figure too, half guessed and half revealed, and wholly light and graceful, had caught his fancy and created a desire to subjugate her. Reluctantly, therefore, he continued to walk beside her, over Magdalen Bridge, and thence by a path which, skirting the city, ran across the low wooded meadows at the back of Merton.

A little to the right the squat tower of the college loomed against the lighter rack of clouds, and rising amid the dark lines of trees that beautify that part of the outskirts, formed a coup d'oeil sufficiently impressive. Here and there, in such of the chamber windows as looked over the meadows, lights twinkled cheerfully; emboldened by which, yet avoiding their scope, pairs of lovers of the commoner class sneaked to and fro under the trees. Whether the presence of these recalled early memories which Sir George's fastidiousness found unpalatable, or he felt his fashion, smirched by the vulgarity of this Venus-walk, his impatience grew; and was not far from bursting forth when his guide turned sharply into an alley behind the cathedral, and, after threading a lane of mean houses, entered a small court.

The place, though poor and narrow, was not squalid. Sir George could see so much by the light which shone from a window and fell on a group of five or six persons, who stood about the nearest door and talked in low, excited voices. He had a good view of one man's face, and read in it gloom and anger. Then the group made way for the girl, eyeing her, as he thought, with pity and a sort of deference; and cursing the folly that had brought him into such a place and situation, wondering what on earth it all meant or in what it would end, he followed her into the house.

She opened a door on the right-hand side of the narrow passage, and led the way into a long, low room. For a moment he saw no more than two lights on a distant table, and kneeling at a chair beside them a woman with grey dishevelled hair, who seemed to be praying, her face hidden. Then his gaze, sinking instinctively, fell on a low bed between him and the woman; and there rested on a white sheet, and on the solemn outlines--so certain in their rigidity, so unmistakable by human eyes--of a body laid out for burial.

CHAPTER II

A MISADVENTURE

To be brought up short in an amorous quest by such a sight as that was a shock alike to Soane's better nature and his worse dignity. The former moved him to stand silent and abashed, the latter to ask with an indignant curse why he had been brought to that place. And the latter lower instinct prevailed. But when he raised his head to put the question with the necessary spirt of temper, he found that the girl had left his side and passed to the other hand of the dead; where, the hood thrown back from her face, she stood looking at him with such a gloomy fire in her eyes as it needed but a word, a touch, a glance to kindle into a blaze.

At the moment, however, he thought less of this than of the beauty of the face which he saw for the first time. It was a southern face, finely moulded, dark and passionate, full-lipped, yet wide of brow, with a generous breadth between the eyes. Seldom had he seen a woman more beautiful; and he stood silent, the words he had been about to speak dying stillborn on his lips.

Yet she seemed to understand them; she answered them. 'Why have I brought you here?' she cried, her voice trembling; and she pointed to the bed. 'Because he is--he was my father. And he lies there. And because the man who killed him goes free. And I would--I would kill him! Do you hear me? I would kill him!'

Sir George tried to free his mind from the influence of her passion and her eyes, from the nightmare of the room and the body, and to see things in a sane light. 'But--my good girl,' he said, slowly and not unkindly, 'I know nothing about it. Nothing. I am a stranger here.'

'For that reason I brought you here,' she retorted.

'But--I cannot interfere,' he answered, shaking his head. 'There is the law. You must apply to it. The law will punish the man if he has done wrong.'

'But the law will not punish him!' she cried with scorn. 'The law? The law is your law, the law of the rich. And he'--she pointed to the bed--'was poor and a servant. And the man who killed him was his master. So he goes free--of the law!'

'But if he killed him?' Sir George muttered lamely.

'He did!' she cried between her teeth. 'And I would have you kill him!'

He shook his head. 'My good girl,' he said kindly, 'you are distraught. You are not yourself. Or you would know a gentleman does not do these things.'

'A gentleman!' she retorted, her smouldering rage flaming up at last. 'No; but I will tell you what he does. He kills a man to save his purse! Or his honour! Or for a mis-word at cards! Or the lie given in drink! He will run a man through in a dark room, with no one to see fair play! But for drawing his sword to help a woman, or avenge a wrong, a gentleman--a gentleman does not do these things. It is true! And may--'

'Oh, have done, have done, my dear!' cried a wailing, tearful voice; and Sir George, almost cowed by the girl's fierce words and the fiercer execration that was on her lips, hailed the intervention with relief. The woman whom he had seen on her knees had risen and now approached the girl, showing a face wrinkled, worn, and plain, but not ignoble; and for the time lifted above the commonplace by the tears that rained down it. 'Oh, my lovey, have done,' she cried. 'And let the gentleman go. To kill another will not help him that is dead. Nor us that are left alone!'

'It will not help him!' the girl answered, shrilly and wildly; and her eyes, leaving Soane, strayed round the room as if she were that moment awakened and missed some one. 'No! But is he to be murdered, and no one suffer? Is he to die and no one pay? He who had a smile for us, go in or out, and never a harsh word or thought; who never did any man wrong or wished any man ill? Yet he lies there! Oh, mother, mother,' she continued, her voice broken on a sudden by a tremor of pain, 'we are alone! We are alone! We shall never see him come in at that door again!'

The old woman sobbed helplessly and made no answer; on which the girl, with a gesture as simple as it was beautiful, drew the grey head to her shoulder. Then she looked at Sir George. 'Go,' she said; but he saw that the tears were welling up in her eyes, and that her frame was beginning to tremble. 'Go! I was not myself--a while ago--when I fetched you. Go, sir, and leave us.'

Moved by the abrupt change, as well as by her beauty, Sir George lingered; muttering that perhaps he could help her in another way. But she shook her head, once and again; and, instinctively respecting the grief which had found at length its proper vent, he turned and, softly lifting the latch, went out into the court.

The night air cooled his brow, and recalled him to sober earnest and the eighteenth century. In the room which he had left, he had marked nothing out of the common except the girl. The mother, the furniture, the very bed on which the dead man lay, all were appropriate, and such as he would expect to find in the house of his under-steward. But the girl? The girl was gloriously handsome; and as eccentric as she was beautiful. Sir George's head turned and his eyes glowed as he thought of her. He considered what a story he could make of it at White's; and he put up his spying-glass, and looked through it to see if the towers of the cathedral still overhung the court. 'Gad, sir!' he said aloud, rehearsing the story, as much to get rid of an unfashionable sensation he had in his throat as in pure whimsy, 'I was surprised to find that it was Oxford. It should have been Granada, or Bagdad, or Florence! I give you my word, the houris that the Montagu saw in the Hammam at Stamboul were nothing to her!'

The persons through whom he had passed on his way to the door were still standing before the house. Glancing back when he had reached the mouth of the court, he saw that they were watching him; and, obeying a sudden impulse of curiosity, he turned on his heel and signed to the nearest to come to him. 'Here, my man,' he said, 'a word with you.'

The fellow moved towards him reluctantly, and with suspicion. 'Who is it lies dead there?' Sir George asked.

'Your honour knows,' the man answered cautiously.

'No, I don't.'

'Then you will be the only one in Oxford that does not,' the fellow replied, eyeing him oddly.

'Maybe,' Soane answered with impatience. 'Take it so, and answer the question,'

'It is Masterson, that was the porter at Pembroke.'

'Ah! And how did he die?'

'That is asking,' the man answered, looking shiftily about. 'And it is an ill business, and I want no trouble. Oh, well'--he continued, as Sir George put something in his hand--'thank your honour, I'll drink your health. Yes, it is Masterson, poor man, sure enough; and two days ago he was as well as you or I--saving your presence. He was on the gate that evening, and there was a supper on one of the staircases: all the bloods of the College, your honour will understand. About an hour before midnight the Master sent him to tell the gentlemen he could not sleep for the noise. After that it is not known just what happened, but the party had him in and gave him wine; and whether he went then and returned again when the company were gone is a question. Any way, he was found in the morning, cold and dead at the foot of the stairs, and his neck broken. It is said by some a trap was laid for him on the staircase. And if it was,' the man continued, after a pause, his true feeling finding sudden vent, 'it is a black shame that the law does not punish it! But the coroner brought it in an accident.'

Sir George shrugged his shoulders. Then, moved by curiosity and a desire to learn something about the girl, 'His daughter takes it hardly,' he said.

The man grunted. 'Ah,' he said, 'maybe she has need to. Your honour does not come from him?'

'From Whom? I come from no one.'

'To be sure, sir, I was forgetting. But, seeing you with her--but there, you are a stranger.'

Soane would have liked to ask him his meaning, but felt that he had condescended enough. He bade the man a curt good-night, therefore, and turning away passed quickly into St. Aldate's Street. Thence it was but a step to the Mitre, where he found his baggage and servant awaiting him.

In those days distinctions of dress were still clear and unmistakable. Between the peruke--often forty guineas' worth--the tie-wig, the scratch, and the man who went content with a little powder, the intervals were measurable. Ruffles cost five pounds a pair; and velvets and silks, cut probably in Paris, were morning wear. Moreover, the dress of the man who lost or won his thousand in a night at Almack's, and was equally well known at Madame du Deffand's in Paris and at Holland House, differed as much from the dress of the ordinary well-to-do gentleman as that again differed from the lawyer's or the doctor's. The Mitre, therefore, saw in Sir George a very fine gentleman indeed, set him down to an excellent supper in its best room, and promised a post-chaise-and-four for the following morning--all with much bowing and scraping, and much mention of my lord to whose house he would post. For in those days, if a fine gentleman was a very fine gentleman, a peer was also a peer. Quite recently they had ventured to hang one; but with apologies, a landau-and-six, and a silken halter.

Sir George would not have had the least pretension to be the glass of fashion and the mould of form, which St. James's Street considered him, if he had failed to give a large share of his thoughts while he supped to the beautiful woman he had quitted. He knew very well what steps Lord March or Tom Hervey would take, were either in his place; and though he had no greater taste for an irregular life than became a man in his station who was neither a Methodist nor Lord Dartmouth, he allowed his thoughts to dwell, perhaps longer than was prudent, on the girl's perfections, and on what might have been were his heart a little harder, or the not over-rigid rule which he observed a trifle less stringent. The father was dead. The girl was poor: probably her ideal of a gallant was a College beau, in second-hand lace and stained linen, drunk on ale in the forenoon. Was it likely that the fortress would hold out long, or that the maiden's heart would prove to be more obdurate than Danäe's?

Soane, considering these things and his self-denial, grew irritable over his Chambertin. He pictured Lord March's friend, the Rena, and found this girl immeasurably before her. He painted the sensation she would make and the fashion he could give her, and vowed that she was a Gunning with sense and wit added; to sum up all, he blamed himself for a saint and a Scipio. Then, late as it was, he sent for the landlord, and to get rid of his thoughts, or in pursuance of them, inquired of that worthy if Mr. Thomasson was in residence at Pembroke.

'Yes, Sir George, he is,' the landlord answered; and asked if he should send for his reverence.

'No,' Soane commanded. 'If there is a chair to be had, I will go to him.'

'There is one below, at your honour's service. And the men are waiting.'

So Sir George, with the landlord, lighting him and his man attending with his cloak, descended the stairs in state, entered the sedan, and was carried off to Pembroke.

CHAPTER III

TUTOR AND PUPILS--OLD STYLE

Doctor Samuel Johnson, of Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, had at this time some name in the world; but not to the pitch that persons entering Pembroke College hastened to pay reverence to the second floor over the gateway, which he had vacated thirty years earlier--as persons do now. Their gaze, as a rule, rose no higher than the first-floor oriel, where the shapely white shoulder of a Parian statue, enhanced by a background of dark-blue silken hanging, caught the wandering eye. What this lacked of luxury and mystery was made up--almost to the Medmenham point in the eyes of the city--by the gleam of girandoles, and the glow, rather felt than seen, of Titian-copies in Florence frames. Sir George, borne along in his chair, peered up at this well-known window--well-known, since in the Oxford of 1767 a man's rooms were furnished if he had tables and chairs, store of beef and October, an apple-pie and Common Room port--and seeing the casement brilliantly lighted, smiled a trifle contemptuously.

'The Reverend Frederick is not much changed,' he muttered. 'Lord, what a beast it was! And how we hazed him! Ah! At home, is he?'--this to the servant, as the man lifted the head of the chair. 'Yes, I will go up.'

To tell the truth, the Reverend Frederick Thomasson had so keen a scent for Gold Tufts or aught akin to them, that it would have been strange if the instinct had not kept him at home; as a magnet, though unseen, attracts the needle. The same prepossession brought him, as soon as he heard of his visitor's approach, hurrying to the head of the stairs; where, if he had had his way, he would have clasped the baronet in his arms, slobbered over him, after the mode of Paris--for that was a trick of his--and perhaps even wept on his shoulder. But Soane, who knew his ways, coolly defeated the manoeuvre by fending him off with his cane; and the Reverend Frederick was reduced to raising his eyes and hands to heaven in token of the joy which filled him at the sight of his old pupil.

'Lord! Sir George, I am inexpressibly happy!' he cried. 'My dear sir, my very dear sir, welcome to my poor rooms! This is joy indeed! Gaudeamus! Gaudeamus! To see you once more, fresh from the groves of Arthur's and the scenes of your triumphs! Pardon me, my dear sir, I must and will shake you by the hand again!' And succeeding at last in seizing Sir George's hand, he fondled and patted it in both of his--which were fat and white--the while with every mark of emotion he led him into the room.

'Gad!' said Sir George, standing and looking round. 'And where is she, Tommy?'

'That old name! What a pleasure it is to hear it!' cried the tutor, affecting to touch his eyes with the corner of a dainty handkerchief; as if the gratification he mentioned were too much for his feelings.

'But, seriously, Tommy, where is she?' Soane persisted, still looking round with a grin.

'My dear Sir George! My honoured friend! But you would always have your joke.'

'And, plainly, Tommy, is all this frippery yours?'

'Tut, tut!' Mr. Thomasson remonstrated. 'And no man with a finer taste. I have heard Mr. Walpole say that with a little training no man would excel Sir George Soane as a connoisseur. An exquisite eye! A nice discrimination! A--'

'Now, Tommy, to how many people have you said that?' Sir George retorted, dropping into a chair, and coolly staring about him. 'But, there, have done, and tell me about yourself. Who is the last sprig of nobility you have been training in the way it should grow?'

'The last pupil who honoured me,' the Reverend Frederick answered, 'as you are so kind as to ask after my poor concerns, Sir George, was my Lord E----'s son. We went to Paris, Marseilles, Genoa, Florence; visited the mighty monuments of Rome, and came home by way of Venice, Milan, and Turin. I treasure the copy of Tintoretto which you see there, and these bronzes, as memorials of my lord's munificence. I brought them back with me.'

'And what did my lord's son bring back?' Sir George asked, cruelly. 'A Midianitish woman?'

'My honoured friend!' Mr. Thomasson remonstrated. 'But your wit was always mordant--mordant! Too keen for us poor folk!'

'D'ye remember the inn at Cologne, Tommy?' Sir George continued, mischievously reminiscent. 'And Lord Tony arriving with his charmer? And you giving up your room to her? And the trick we played you at Calais, where we passed the little French dancer on you for Madame la Marquise de Personne?'

Mr. Thomasson winced, and a tinge of colour rose in his fat pale face. 'Boys, boys!' he said, with an airy gesture. 'You had an uncommon fancy even then, Sir George, though you were but a year from school! Ah, those were charming days! Great days!'

'And nights!' said Sir George, lying back in his chair and looking at the other with eyes half shut, and insolence half veiled. 'Do you remember the faro bank at Florence, Tommy, and the three hundred livres you lost to that old harridan, Lady Harrington? Pearls cast before swine you styled them, I remember.'

'Lord, Sir George!' Mr. Thomasson cried, vastly horrified. 'How can you say such a thing? Your excellent memory plays you false.'

'It does,' Soane answered, smiling sardonically. 'I remember. It was seed sown for the harvest, you called it--in your liquor. And that touches me. Do you mind the night Fitzhugh made you so prodigiously drunk at Bonn, Tommy? And we put you in the kneading-trough, and the servants found you and shifted you to the horse-trough? Gad! you would have died of laughter if you could have seen yourself when we rescued you, lank and dripping, with your wig like a sponge!'

'It must have been--uncommonly diverting!' the Reverend Frederick stammered; and he smiled widely, but with a lack of heart. This time there could be no doubt of the pinkness that overspread his face.

'Diverting? I tell you it would have made old Dartmouth laugh!' Sir George said, bluntly.

'Ha, ha! Perhaps it would. Perhaps it would. Not that I have the honour of his lordship's acquaintance.'

'No? Well, he would not suit you, Tommy. I would not seek it.'

The Reverend Frederick looked doubtful, as weighing the possibility of anything that bore the name of lord being alien from him. From this reflection, however, he was roused by a new sally on Soane's part. 'But, crib me! you are very fine to-night, Mr. Thomasson,' he said, staring about him afresh. 'Ten o'clock, and you are lighted as for a drum! What is afoot?'

The tutor smirked and rubbed his hands. 'Well, I--I was expecting a visitor, Sir George.'

'Ah, you dog! She is not here, but you are expecting her.'

Mr. Thomasson grinned; the jest flattered him. Nevertheless he hastened to exonerate himself. 'It is not Venus I am expecting, but Mars,' he said with a simper. 'The Honourable Mr. Dunborough, son to my Lord Dunborough, and the same whose meritorious services at the Havanna you, my dear friend, doubtless remember. He is now cultivating in peace the gifts which in war--'

'Sufficed to keep him out of danger!' Sir George said bluntly. 'So he is your last sprig, is he? He should be well seasoned.'

'He is four-and-twenty,' Mr. Thomasson answered, pluming himself and speaking in his softest tones. 'And the most charming, I assure you, the most debonair of men. But do I hear a noise?'

'Yes,' said Sir George, listening. 'I hear something.'

Mr. Thomasson rose. 'What--what is it, I wonder?' he said, a trifle nervously. A dull sound, as of a hive of bees stirred to anger, was becoming audible.

'Devil if I know!' Sir George answered. 'Open the window.'

But the Reverend Frederick, after approaching the window with the intention of doing so, seemed disinclined to go nearer, and hovered about it. 'Really,' he said, no longer hiding his discomposure. 'I fear that it is something--something in the nature of a riot. I fear that that which I anticipated has happened. If my honourable friend had only taken my advice and remained here!' And he wrung his hands without disguise.

'Why, what has he to do with it?' Soane asked, curiously.

'He--he had an accident the other night,' Mr. Thomasson answered. 'A monstrous nuisance for him. He and his noble friend, Lord Almeric Doyley, played a little trick on a--on one of the College servants. The clumsy fellow--it is marvellous how awkward that class of persons is--fell down the stairs and hurt himself.'

'Seriously?'

'Somewhat. Indeed--in fact he is dead. And now there is a kind of feeling about it in the town. I persuaded Mr. Dunborough to take up his quarters here for the night, but he is so spirited he would dine abroad. Now I fear, I really fear, he may be in trouble!'

'If it is he they are hooting in St. Aldate's,' Sir George answered drily, 'I should say he was in trouble! But in my time the gownsmen would have sallied out and brought him off before this. And given those yelpers a cracked crown or two!'

The roar of voices in the narrow streets was growing clearer and more threatening. 'Ye-es?' said the Reverend Frederick, moving about the room, distracted between his anxiety and his respect for his companion. 'Perhaps so. But there is a monstrous low, vulgar set in College nowadays; a man of spirit has no chance with them. Yesterday they had the insolence to break into my noble friend's rooms and throw his furniture out of window! And, I vow, would have gone on to--but Lord! this is frightful! What a shocking howling! My dear sir, my very dear Sir George,' Mr. Thomasson continued, his voice tremulous and his fat cheeks grown on a sudden loose and flabby, 'do you think that there is any danger?'

'Danger?' Sir George answered, with cruel relish--he had gone to the window, and was looking out. 'Well, I should say that Madam Venus there would certainly have to stand shot. If you are wise you will put out some of those candles. They are entering the lane now. Gad, Tommy, if they think your lad of spirit is here, I would not give much for your window-glass!'

Mr. Thomasson, who had hastened to take the advice, and had extinguished all the candles but one, thus reducing the room to partial darkness, wrung his hands and moaned for answer. 'Where are the proctors?' he said. 'Where are the constables? Where are the--Oh, dear, dear, this is dreadful!'

And certainly, even in a man of firmer courage a little trepidation might have been pardoned. As the unseen crowd, struggling and jostling, poured from the roadway of St. Aldate's into the narrow confines of Pembroke Lane, the sound of its hooting gathered sudden volume, and from an intermittent murmur, as of a remote sea, swelled in a moment into a roar of menace. And as a mob is capable of deeds from which the members who compose it would severally shrink, as nothing is so pitiless, nothing so unreasoning, so in the sound of its voice is a note that appals all but the hardiest. Soane was no coward. A year before he had been present at the siege of Bedford House by the Spitalfields weavers, where swords were drawn and much blood was spilled, while the gentlemen of the clubs and coffee-houses looked on as at a play; but even he felt a slackening of the pulse as he listened. And with the Reverend Frederick it was different. He was not framed for danger. When the smoking glare of the links which the ringleaders carried began to dance and flicker on the opposite houses, he looked about him with a wild eye, and had already taken two steps towards the door, when it opened.

It admitted two men about Sir George's age, or a little younger. One, after glancing round, passed hurriedly to the window and looked out; the other sank into the nearest chair, and, fanning himself with his hat, muttered a querulous oath.

'My dear lord!' cried the Reverend Frederick, hastening to his side--and it is noteworthy that he forgot even his panic in the old habit of reverence--'What an escape! To think that a life so valuable as your lordship's should lie at the mercy of those wretches! I shudder at the thought of what might have happened.'

'Fan me, Tommy' was the answer. And Lord Almeric, an excessively pale, excessively thin young man, handed his hat with a gesture of exhaustion to the obsequious tutor. 'Fan me; that is a good soul. Positively I am suffocated with the smell of those creatures! Worse than horses, I assure you. There, again! What a pother about a common fellow! 'Pon honour, I don't know what the world is coming to!'

'Nor I,' Mr. Thomasson answered, hanging over him with assiduity and concern on his countenance. 'It is not to be comprehended.'

'No, 'pon honour it is not!' my lord agreed. And then, feeling a little recovered, 'Dunborough,' he asked, 'what are they doing?'

'Hanging you, my dear fellow!' the other answered from the window, where he had taken his place within a pace of Soane, but without discovering him. He spoke in the full boisterous tone of one in perfect health and spirits, perfectly satisfied with himself, and perfectly heedless of others.

'Oh, I say, you are joking?' my lord answered. 'Hanging me? Oh, ah! I see. In effigy!'

'And your humble servant,' said Mr. Dunborough. 'I tell you, Tommy, we had a near run for it. Curse their impudence, they made us sweat. For a very little I would give the rascals something to howl for.'

Perhaps he meant no more than to put a bold face on it before his creatures. But unluckily the rabble, which had come provided with a cart and gallows, a hangman, and a paunchy, red-faced fellow in canonicals, and which hitherto had busied itself with the mock execution, found leisure at this moment to look up at the window. Catching sight of the object of their anger, they vented their rage in a roar of execration, so much louder than all that had gone before that it brought the sentence which Mr. Thomasson was uttering to a quavering end. But the demonstration, far from intimidating Mr. Dunborough, provoked him to fury. Turning from the sea of brandished hands and upturned faces, he strode to a table, and in a moment returned. The window was open, he flung it wider, and stood erect, in full view of the mob.

The sight produced a momentary silence, of which he took advantage. 'Now, you tailors, begone!' he cried harshly. 'To your hovels, and leave gentlemen to their wine, or it will be the worse for you. Come, march! We have had enough of your fooling, and are tired of it.'

The answer was a shout of 'Cain!' and 'Murderer!' One voice cried 'Ferrers!' and this caught the fancy of the crowd. In a moment a hundred were crying, 'Ay, Ferrers! Come down, and we'll Ferrers you!'

He stood a moment irresolute, glaring at them; then something struck and shattered a pane of the window beside him, and the fetid smell of a bad egg filled the room. At the sound Mr. Thomasson uttered a cry and shrank farther into the darkness, while Lord Almeric rose hastily and looked about for a refuge. But Mr. Dunborough did not flinch.

'D----n you, you rascals, you will have it, will you?' he cried; and in the darkness a sharp click was heard. He raised his hand. A shriek in the street below answered the movement; some who stood nearest saw that he held a pistol and gave the information to others, and there was a wild rush to escape. But before the hammer dropped, a hand closed on his, and Soane, crying, 'Are you mad, sir?' dragged him back.

Dunborough had not entertained the least idea that any one stood near him, and the surprise was as complete as the check. After an instinctive attempt to wrench away his hand, he stood glaring at the person who held him. 'Curse you!' he said. 'Who are you? And what do you mean?'

'Not to sit by and see murder done,' Sir George answered firmly. 'To-morrow you will thank me.'

'For the present I'll thank you to release my hand,' the other retorted in a freezing tone. Nevertheless, Sir George thought that the delay had sobered him, and complied. 'Much obliged to you,' Dunborough continued. 'Now perhaps you will walk into the next room, where there is a light, and we can be free from that scum.'

Mr. Thomasson had already set the example of a prudent retreat thither; and Lord Almeric, with a feeble, 'Lord, this is very surprising! But I think that the gentleman is right, Dunny,' was hovering in the doorway. Sir George signed to Mr. Dunborough to go first, but he would not, and Soane, shrugging his shoulders, preceded him.

The room into which they all crowded was no more than a closet, containing a dusty bureau propped on three legs, a few books, and Mr. Thomasson's robes, boots, and wig-stand. It was so small that when they were all in it, they stood perforce close together, and had the air of persons sheltering from a storm. This nearness, the glare of the lamp on their faces, and the mean surroundings gave a kind of added force to Mr. Dunborough's rage. For a moment after entering he could not speak; he had dined largely, and sat long after dinner; and his face was suffused with blood. But then, 'Tommy, who is--this--fellow?' he cried, blurting out the words as if each must be the last.

'Good heavens!' cried the tutor, shocked at the low appellation.' Mr. Dunborough! Mr. Dunborough! You mistake. My dear sir, my dear friend, you do not understand. This is Sir George Soane, whose name must be known to you. Permit me to introduce him.'

'Then take that for a meddler and a coxcomb, Sir George Soane!' cried the angry man; and quick as thought he struck Sir George, who was at elbows with him, lightly in the face.

Sir George stepped back, his face crimson. 'You are not sober, sir!' he said.

'Is not that enough?' cried the other, drowning both Mr. Thomasson's exclamation of horror and Lord Almeric's protest of, 'Oh, but I say, you know--' under the volume of his voice. 'You have a sword, sir, and I presume you know how to use it. If there is not space here, there is a room below, and I am at your service. You will not wipe that off by rubbing it,' he added coarsely.

Sir George dropped his hand from his face as if it stung him. 'Mr. Dunborough,' he said trembling--but it was with passion, 'if I thought you were sober and would not repent to-morrow what you have done to-night--'

'You would do fine things,' Dunborough retorted. 'Come, sir, a truce to your impertinence! You have meddled with me, and you must maintain it. Must I strike you again?'

'I will not meet you to-night,' Sir George answered firmly. 'I will be neither Lord Byron nor his victim. These gentlemen will bear me out so far. For the rest, if you are of the same mind to-morrow, it will be for me and not for you to ask a meeting.'

'At your service, sir,' Mr. Dunborough said, with a sarcastic bow. 'But suppose, to save trouble in the morning, we fix time and place now.'

'Eight--in Magdalen Fields,' Soane answered curtly. 'If I do not hear from you, I am staying at the Mitre Inn. Mr. Thomasson, I bid you good-night. My lord, your servant.'

And with that, and though Mr. Thomasson, wringing his hands over what had occurred and the injury to himself that might come of it, attempted some feeble remonstrances, Sir George bowed sternly, took his hat and went down. He found his chair at the foot of the stairs, but in consideration of the crowd he would not use it. The college porters, indeed, pressed him to wait, and demurred to opening even the wicket. But he had carried forbearance to the verge, and dreaded the least appearance of timidity; and, insisting, got his way. The rabble admired so fine a gentleman, and so resolute a bearing, gave place to him with a jest, and let him pass unmolested down the lane.

It was well that they did, for he had come to the end of his patience. One man steps out of a carriage, picks up a handkerchief, and lives to wear a Crown. Another takes the same step; it lands him in a low squabble from which he may extricate himself with safety, but scarcely with an accession of credit. Sir George belonged to the inner circle of fashion, to which neither rank nor wealth, nor parts, nor power, of necessity admitted. In the sphere in which he moved, men seldom quarrelled and as seldom fought. Of easiest habit among themselves, they left bad manners and the duello to political adventurers and cubbish peers, or to the gentlemen of the quarter sessions and the local ordinary. It was with a mighty disgust, therefore, that Sir George considered alike the predicament into which a caprice had hurried him, and the insufferable young Hector whom fate had made his antagonist. They would laugh at White's. They would make a jest of it over the cakes and fruit at Betty's. Selwyn would turn a quip. And yet the thing was beyond a joke. He must be a target first and a butt afterwards--if any afterwards there were.

As he entered the Mitre, sick with chagrin, and telling himself he might have known that something of this kind would come of stooping to vulgar company, he bethought him--for the first time in an hour--of the girl. 'Lord!' he said, thinking of her request, her passion, and her splendid eyes; and he stood. For the âge des philosophes, destiny seemed to be taking too large a part in the play. This must be the very man with whom she had striven to embroil him!

His servant's voice broke in on his thoughts. 'At what hour will your honour please to be called?' he asked, as he carried off the laced coat and wig.

Soane stifled a groan. 'Called?' he said. 'At half-past six. Don't stare, booby! Half-past six, I said. And do you go now, I'll shift for myself. But first put out my despatch-case, and see there is pen and ink. It's done? Then be off, and when you come in the morning bring the landlord and another with you.'

The man lingered. 'Will your honour want horses?' he said.

'I don't know. Yes! No! Well, not until noon. And where is my sword?'

'I was taking it down to clean it, sir.'

'Then don't take it; I will look to it myself. And mind you, call me at the time I said.'

CHAPTER IV

PEEPING TOM OF WALLINGFORD

To be an attorney-at-law, avid of practice and getting none; to be called Peeping Tom of Wallingford, in the place where you would fain trot about busy and respected; to be the sole support of an old mother, and to be come almost to the toe of the stocking--these circumstances might seem to indicate an existence and prospects bare, not to say arid. Eventually they presented themselves in that light to the person most nearly concerned--by name Mr. Peter Fishwick; and moving him to grasp at the forlorn hope presented by a vacant stewardship at one of the colleges, brought him by coach to Oxford. There he spent three days and his penultimate guineas in canvassing, begging, bowing, and smirking; and on the fourth, which happened to be the very day of Sir George's arrival in the city, was duly and handsomely defeated without the honour of a vote.

Mr. Fishwick had expected no other result; and so far all was well. But he had a mother, and that mother entertained a fond belief that local jealousy and nothing else kept down her son in the place of his birth. She had built high hopes on this expedition; she had thought that the Oxford gentlemen would be prompt to recognise his merit; and for her sake the sharp-featured lawyer went back to the Mitre a rueful man. He had taken a lodging there with intent to dazzle the town, and not because his means were equal to it; and already the bill weighed upon him. By nature as cheerful a gossip as ever wore a scratch wig and lived to be inquisitive, he sat mum through the evening, and barely listened while the landlord talked big of his guest upstairs, his curricle and fashion, the sums he lost at White's, and the plate in his dressing-case.

Nevertheless the lawyer would not have been Peter Fishwick if he had not presently felt the stirrings of curiosity, or, thus incited, failed to be on the move between the stairs and the landing when Sir George came in and passed up. The attorney's ears were as sharp as a ferret's nose, and he was notably long in lighting his humble dip at a candle which by chance stood outside Sir George's door. Hence it happened that Soane--who after dismissing his servant had gone for a moment into the adjacent chamber--heard a slight noise in the room he had left; and, returning quickly to learn what it was, found no one, but observed the outer door shake as if some one tried it. His suspicions aroused, he was still staring at the door when it moved again, opened a very little way, and before his astonished eyes admitted a small man in a faded black suit, who, as soon as he had squeezed himself in, stood bowing with a kind of desperate audacity.

'Hallo!' said Sir George, staring anew. 'What do you want, my man?'

The intruder advanced a pace or two, and nervously crumpled his hat in his hands. 'If your honour pleases,' he said, a smile feebly propitiative appearing in his face, 'I shall be glad to be of service to you.'

'Of service?' said Sir George, staring in perplexity. 'To me?'

'In the way of my profession,' the little man answered, fixing Sir George with two eyes as bright as birds'; which eyes somewhat redeemed his small keen features. 'Your honour was about to make your will.' 'My will?' Sir George cried, amazed; 'I was about to--' and then in an outburst of rage, 'and if I was--what the devil business is it of yours?' he cried. 'And who are you, sir?'

The little man spread out his hands in deprecation. 'I?' he said. 'I am an attorney, sir, and everybody's business is my business.'

Sir George gasped. 'You are an attorney!' he cried. 'And--and everybody's business is your business! By God, this is too much!' And seizing the bell-rope he was about to overwhelm the man of law with a torrent of abuse, before he had him put out, when the absurdity of the appeal and perhaps a happy touch in Peter's last answer struck him; he held his hand, and hesitated. Then, 'What is your name, sir?' he said sternly.

'Peter Fishwick,' the attorney answered humbly.

'And how the devil did you know--that I wanted to make a will?'

'I was going upstairs,' the lawyer explained. 'And the door was ajar.'

'And you listened?'

'I wanted to hear,' said Peter with simplicity.

'But what did you hear, sir?' Soane retorted, scarcely able to repress a smile.

'I heard your honour tell your servant to lay out pen and paper, and to bring the landlord and another upstairs when he called you in the morning. And I heard you bid him leave your sword. And putting two and two together, respected sir, 'Peter continued manfully,' and knowing that it is only of a will you need three witnesses, I said to myself, being an attorney--'

'And everybody's business being your business,' Sir George muttered irritably.

'To be sure, sir--it is a will, I said, he is for making. And with your honour's leave,' Peter concluded with spirit, I'll make it.'

'Confound your impudence,' Sir George answered, and stared at him, marvelling at the little man's shrewdness.

Peter smiled in a sickly fashion. 'If your honour would but allow me?' he said. He saw a great chance slipping from him, and his voice was plaintive.

It moved Sir George to compassion. 'Where is your practice?' he asked ungraciously.

The attorney felt a surprising inclination to candour. 'At Wallingford,' he said, 'it should be. But--' and there he stopped, shrugging his shoulders, and leaving the rest unsaid.

'Can you make a will?' Sir George retorted.

'No man better,' said Peter with confidence; and on the instant he drew a chair to the table, seized the pen, and bent the nib on his thumbnail; then he said briskly, 'I wait your commands, sir.'

Sir George stared in some embarrassment--he had not expected to be taken so literally; but, after a moment's hesitation, reflecting that to write down his wishes with his own hand would give him more trouble, and that he might as well trust this stranger as that, he accepted the situation. 'Take down what I wish, then,' he said. 'Put it into form afterwards, and bring it to me when I rise. Can you be secret?'

'Try me,' Peter answered with enthusiasm. 'For a good client I would bite off my tongue.'

'Very well, then, listen!' Sir George said. And presently, after some humming and thinking, 'I wish to leave all my real property to the eldest son of my uncle, Anthony Soane,' he continued.

'Right, sir. Child already in existence, I presume? Not that it is absolutely necessary,' the attorney continued glibly. 'But--'

'I do not know,' said Sir George.

'Ah!' said the lawyer, raising his pen and knitting his brows while he looked very learnedly into vacancy. 'The child is expected, but you have not yet heard, sir, that--'

'I know nothing about the child, nor whether there is a child,' Sir George answered testily. 'My uncle may be dead, unmarried, or alive and married--what difference does it make?'

'Certainty is very necessary in these things,' Peter replied severely. The pen in his hand, he became a different man. 'Your uncle, Mr. Anthony Soane, as I understand, is alive?'

'He disappeared in the Scotch troubles in '45,' Sir George reluctantly explained, 'was disinherited in favour of my father, sir, and has not since been heard from.'

The attorney grew rigid with alertness; he was like nothing so much as a dog, expectant at a rat-hole. 'Attainted?' he said.

'No!' said Sir George.

'Outlawed?'

'No.'

The attorney collapsed: no rat in the hole. 'Dear me, dear me, what a sad story!' he said; and then remembering that his client had profited, 'but out of evil--ahem! As I understand, sir, you wish all your real property, including the capital mansion house and demesne, to go to the eldest son of your uncle Mr. Anthony Soane in tail, remainder to the second son in tail, and, failing sons, to daughters--the usual settlement, in a word, sir.'

'Yes.'

'No exceptions, sir.'

'None.'

'Very good,' the attorney answered with the air of a man satisfied so far. 'And failing issue of your uncle? To whom then, Sir George?'

'To the Earl of Chatham.'

Mr. Fishwick jumped in his seat; then bowed profoundly.

'Indeed! Indeed! How very interesting!' he murmured under his breath. 'Very remarkable! Very remarkable, and flattering.'

Sir George stooped to explain. 'I have no near relations,' he said shortly. 'Lord Chatham--he was then Mr. Pitt--was the executor of my grandfather's will, is connected with me by marriage, and at one time acted as my guardian.'

Mr. Fishwick licked his lips as if he tasted something very good. This was business indeed! These were names with a vengeance! His face shone with satisfaction; he acquired a sudden stiffness of the spine. 'Very good, sir,' he said. 'Ve--ry good,' he said. 'In fee simple, I understand?'

'Yes.'

'Precisely. Precisely; no uses or trusts? No. Unnecessary of course. Then as to personalty, Sir George?'

'A legacy of five hundred guineas to George Augustus Selwyn, Esquire, of Matson, Gloucestershire. One of the same amount to Sir Charles Bunbury, Baronet. Five hundred guineas to each of my executors; and to each of these four a mourning ring.'

'Certainly, sir. All very noble gifts!' And Mr. Fishwick smacked his lips.

For a moment Sir George looked his offence; then seeing that the attorney's ecstasy was real and unaffected, he smiled. 'To my land-steward two hundred guineas,' he said; 'to my house-steward one hundred guineas, to the housekeeper at Estcombe an annuity of twenty guineas. Ten guineas and a suit of mourning to each of my upper servants not already mentioned, and the rest of my personalty--'

'After payment of debts and funeral and testamentary expenses,' the lawyer murmured, writing busily.

Sir George started at the words, and stared thoughtfully before him: he was silent so long that the lawyer recalled his attention by gently repeating, 'And the residue, honoured sir?'

'To the Thatched House Society for the relief of small debtors,' Sir George answered, between a sigh and a smile. And added, 'They will not gain much by it, poor devils!'

Mr. Fishwick with a rather downcast air noted the bequest. 'And that is all, sir, I think?' he said with his head on one side. 'Except the appointment of executors.'

'No,' Sir George answered curtly. 'It is not all. Take this down and be careful. As to the trust fund of fifty thousand pounds'--the attorney gasped, and his eyes shone as he seized the pen anew. 'Take this down carefully, man, I say,' Sir George continued. 'As to the trust fund left by my grandfather's will to my uncle Anthony Soane or his heirs conditionally on his or their returning to their allegiance and claiming it within the space of twenty-one years from the date of his will, the interest in the meantime to be paid to me for my benefit, and the principal sum, failing such return, to become mine as fully as if it had vested in me from the beginning--'

'Ah!' said the attorney, scribbling fast, and with distended cheeks.

'I leave the said fund to go with the land.'

'To go with the land,' the lawyer repeated as he wrote the words. 'Fifty thousand pounds! Prodigious! Prodigious! Might I ask, sir, the date of your respected grandfather's will?'

'December, 1746,' Sir George answered.

'The term has then nine months to run?'

'Yes.'

'With submission, then it comes to this,' the lawyer answered thoughtfully, marking off the points with his pen in the air. 'In the event of--of this will operating--all, or nearly all of your property, Sir George, goes to your uncle's heirs in tail--if to be found--and failing issue of his body to my Lord Chatham?'

'Those are my intentions.'

'Precisely, sir,' the lawyer answered, glancing at the clock. 'And they shall be carried out. But--ahem! Do I understand, sir, that in the event of a claimant making good his claim before the expiration of the nine months, you stand to lose this stupendous, this magnificent sum--even in your lifetime?'

'I do,' Sir George answered grimly. 'But there will be enough left to pay your bill.'

Peter stretched out his hands in protest, then, feeling that this was unprofessional, he seized the pen. 'Will you please to honour me with the names of the executors, sir?' he said.

'Dr. Addington, of Harley Street.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And Mr. Dagge, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, attorney-at-law.'

'It is an honour to be in any way associated with him,' the lawyer muttered, as he wrote the name with a flourish. 'His lordship's man of business, I believe. And now you may have your mind at ease, sir,' he continued. 'I will put this into form before I sleep, and will wait on you for your signature--shall I say at--'

'At a quarter before eight,' said Soane. 'You will be private?'

'Of course, sir. It is my business to be private. I wish you a very good night.'

The attorney longed to refer to the coming meeting, and to his sincere hope that his new patron would leave the ground unscathed. But a duel was so alien from the lawyer's walk in life, that he knew nothing of the punctilios, and he felt a delicacy. Tamely to wish a man a safe issue seemed to be a common compliment incommensurate with the occasion; and a bathos. So, after a moment of hesitation, he gathered up his papers, and tip-toed out of the room with an absurd exaggeration of respect, and a heart bounding jubilant under his flapped waistcoat.

Left to himself, Sir George heaved a sigh, and, resting his head on his hand, stared long and gloomily at the candles. 'Well, better be run through by this clown,' he muttered after a while, 'than live to put a pistol to my own head like Mountford and Bland. Or Scarborough, or poor Bolton. It is not likely, and I wish that little pettifogger had not put it into my head; but if a cousin were to appear now, or before the time is up, I should be in Queer Street. Estcombe is dipped: and of the money I raised, there is no more at the agent's than I have lost in a night at Quinze! D----n White's and that is all about it. And d----n it, I shall, and finely, if old Anthony's lad turn up and sweep off the three thousand a year that is left. Umph, if I am to have a steady hand to-morrow I must get to bed. What unholy chance brought me into this scrape?'

CHAPTER V

THE MEETING

Sir George awoke next morning, and, after a few lazy moments of semi-consciousness, remembered what was before him, it is not to be denied that he felt a chill. He lay awhile, thinking of the past and the future--or the no future--in a way he seldom thought, and with a seriousness for which the life he had hitherto led had left him little time and less inclination.

But he was young; he had a digestion as yet unimpaired, and nerves still strong; and when he emerged an hour later and, more soberly dressed than was his wont, proceeded down the High Street towards the Cherwell Bridge, his spirits were at their normal level. The spring sunshine which gilded the pinnacles of Magdalen tower, and shone cool and pleasant on a score of hoary fronts, wrought gaily on him also. The milksellers and such early folk were abroad, and filled the street with their cries; he sniffed the fresh air, and smiled at the good humour and morning faces that everywhere greeted him; and d----d White's anew, and vowed to live cleanly henceforth, and forswear Pam. In a word, the man was of such a courage that in his good resolutions he forgot his errand, and whence they arose; and it was with a start that, as he approached the gate leading to the college meadows, he marked a chair in waiting, and beside it Mr. Peter Fishwick, from whom he had parted at the Mitre ten minutes before.

Soane did not know whether the attorney had preceded him or followed him: the intrusion was the same, and flushed with annoyance, he strode to him to mark his sense of it. But Peter, being addressed, wore his sharpest business air, and was entirely unconscious of offence. 'I have merely purveyed a surgeon,' he said, indicating a young man who stood beside him. 'I could not learn that you had provided one, sir.'

'Oh!' Sir George answered, somewhat taken aback, 'this is the gentleman.'

'Yes, sir.'

Soane was in the act of saluting the stranger, when a party of two or three persons came up behind, and had much ado not to jostle them in the gateway. It consisted of Mr. Dunborough, Lord Almeric, and two other gentlemen; one of these, an elderly man, who wore black and hair-powder, and carried a gold-topped cane, had a smug and well-pleased expression, that indicated his stake in the meeting to be purely altruistic. The two companies exchanged salutes.

On this followed a little struggle to give precedence at the gate, but eventually all went through. 'If we turn to the right,' some one observed, 'there is a convenient place. No, this way, my lord.'

'Oh Lord, I have such a head this morning!' his lordship answered; and he looked by no means happy. 'I am all of a twitter! It is so confounded early, too. See here: cannot this be--?'

The gentleman who had spoken before drowned his voice. 'Will this do, sir?' he said, raising his hat, and addressing Sir George. The party had reached a smooth glade or lawn encompassed by thick shrubs, and to all appearance a hundred miles from a street. A fairy-ring of verdure, glittering with sunlight and dewdrops, and tuneful with the songs of birds, it seemed a morsel of paradise dropped from the cool blue of heaven. Sir George felt a momentary tightening of the throat as he surveyed its pure brilliance, and then a sudden growing anger against the fool who had brought him thither.

'You have no second?' said the stranger.

'No,' he answered curtly; 'I think we have witnesses enough.'

'Still--if the matter can be accommodated?'

'It can,' Soane answered, standing stiffly before them. 'But only by an unreserved apology on Mr. Dunborough's part. He struck me. I have no more to say.'

'I do not offer the apology,' Mr. Dunborough rejoined, with a horse-laugh. 'So we may as well go on, Jerry. I did not come here to talk.'

'I have brought pistols,' his second said, disregarding the sneer. 'But my principal, though the challenged party, is willing to waive the choice of weapons.'

'Pistols will do for me,' Sir George answered.

'One shot, at a word. If ineffective, you will take to your swords,' the second continued; and he pushed back his wig and wiped his forehead, as if his employment were not altogether to his taste. A duel was a fine thing--at a distance. He wished, however, that he had some one with whom to share the responsibility, now it was come to the point; and he cast a peevish look at Lord Almeric. But his lordship was, as he had candidly said, 'all of a twitter,' and offered no help.

'I suppose that I am to load,' the unlucky second continued. 'That being so, you, Sir George, must have the choice of pistols.'

Sir George bowed assent, and, going a little aside, removed his hat, wig, and cravat; and was about to button his coat to his throat, when he observed that Mr. Dunborough was stripping to his shirt. Too proud not to follow the example, though prudence suggested that the white linen made him a fair mark, he stripped also, and in a trice the two, kicking off their shoes, moved to the positions assigned to them; and in their breeches and laced lawn shirts, their throats bare, confronted one another.

'Sir George, have you no one to represent you?' cried the second again, grown querulous under the burden. His name, it seemed, was Morris. He was a major in the Oxfordshire Militia.

Soane answered with impatience. 'I have no second,' he said, 'but my surgeon will be a competent witness.'

'Ah! to be sure!' Major Morris answered, with a sigh of relief. 'That is so. Then, gentlemen, I shall give the signal by saying One, two, three! Be good enough to fire together at the word Three! Do you understand?'

'Yes,' said Mr. Dunborough. And 'Yes,' Sir George said more slowly.

'Then, now, be ready! Prepare to fire! One! two! th--'

'Stay!' flashed Mr. Dunborough, while the word still hung in the air. 'You have not given us our pistols,' he continued, with an oath.

'What?' cried the second, staring.

'Man, you have not given us our pistols.'

The major was covered with confusion. 'God bless my soul! I have not!' he cried; while Lord Almeric giggled hysterically. 'Dear me! dear me! it is very trying to be alone!' He threw his hat and wig on the grass, and again wiped his brow, and took up the pistols. 'Sir George? Thank you. Mr. Dunborough, here is yours.' Then: 'Now, are you ready? Thank you.'

He retreated to his place again. 'Are you ready, gentlemen? Are you quite ready?' he repeated anxiously, amid a breathless silence. 'One! two! three!'

Sir George's pistol exploded at the word; the hammer of the other clicked futile in the pan. The spectators, staring, and expecting to see one fall, saw Mr. Dunborough start and make a half turn. Before they had time to draw any conclusion he flung his pistol a dozen paces away, and cursed his second. 'D----n you, Morris!' he cried shrilly; 'you put no powder in the pan, you hound! But come on, sir,' he continued, addressing Sir George, 'I have this left.' And rapidly changing his sword from his left hand, in which he had hitherto held it, to his right, he rushed upon his opponent with the utmost fury, as if he would bear him down by main force.

'Stay!' Sir George cried; and, instead of meeting him, avoided his first rush by stepping aside two paces. 'Stay, sir,' he repeated; 'I owe you a shot! Prime afresh. Reload, sir, and--'

But Dunborough, blind and deaf with passion, broke in on him unheeding, and as if he carried no weapon; and crying furiously, 'Guard yourself!' plunged his half-shortened sword at the lower part of Sir George's body. The spectators held their breath and winced; the assault was so sudden, so determined, that it seemed that nothing could save Sir George from a thrust thus delivered. He did escape, however, by a bound, quick as a cat's; but the point of Dunborough's weapon ripped up his breeches on the hip, the hilt rapped against the bone, and the two men came together bodily. For a moment they wrestled, and seemed to be going to fight like beasts.

Then Sir George, his left forearm under the other's chin, flung him three paces away; and shifting his sword into his right hand--hitherto he had been unable to change it--he stopped Dunborough's savage rush with the point, and beat him off and kept him off--parrying his lunges, and doing his utmost the while to avoid dealing him a fatal wound. Soane was so much the better swordsman--as was immediately apparent to all the onlookers--that he no longer feared for himself; all his fears were for his opponent, the fire and fury of whose attacks he could not explain to himself, until he found them flagging; and flagging so fast that he sought a reason. Then Dunborough's point beginning to waver, and his feet to slip, Sir George's eyes were opened; he discerned a crimson patch spread and spread on the other's side--where unnoticed Dunborough had kept his hand--and with a cry for help he sprang forward in time to catch the falling man in his arms.

As the others ran in, the surgeons quickly and silently, Lord Almeric more slowly, and with exclamations, Sir George lowered his burden gently to the ground. The instant it was done, Morris touched his arm and signed to him to stand back. 'You can do no good, Sir George,' he urged. 'He is in skilful hands. He would have it; it was his own fault. I can bear witness that you did your best not to touch him.'

'I did not touch him,' Soane muttered.

The second looked his astonishment. 'How?' he said. 'You don't mean to say that he is not wounded? See there!' And he pointed to the blood which dyed the shirt. They were cutting the linen away.

'It was the pistol,' Sir George answered.

Major Morris's face fell, and he groaned. 'Good G--d!' he said, staring before him. 'What a position I am in! I suppose--I suppose, sir, his pistol was not primed?'

'I am afraid not,' Soane answered.

He was still in his shirt, and bareheaded; but as he spoke one of several onlookers, whom the clatter of steel had drawn to the spot, brought his coat and waistcoat, and held them while he put them on. Another handed his hat and wig, a third brought his shoes and knelt and buckled them; a fourth his kerchief. All these services he accepted freely, and was unconscious of them--as unconscious as he was of the eager deference, the morbid interest, with which they waited on him, eyed him, and stared at him. His own thoughts, eyes, attention, were fixed on the group about the fallen man; and when the elder surgeon glanced over his shoulder, as wanting help, he strode to them.

'If we had a chair here, and could move him at once,' the smug gentleman whispered, 'I think we might do.'

'I have a chair. It is at the gate,' his colleague answered.

'Have you? A good thought of yours!'

'The credit should lie--with my employer,' the younger man answered in a low voice. 'It was his thought; here it comes. Sir George, will you be good enough--' But then, seeing the baronet's look of mute anxiety, he broke off. 'It is dangerous, but there is hope--fair hope,' he answered. 'Do you, my dear sir, go to your inn, and I will send thither when he is safely housed. You can do no good here, and your presence may excite him when he recovers from the swoon.'

Sir George, seeing the wisdom of the advice, nodded assent; and remarking for the first time the sensation of which he was the centre, was glad to make the best of his way towards the gates. He had barely reached them--without shaking off a knot of the more curious, who still hung on his footsteps--when Lord Almeric, breathless and agitated, came up with him.

'You are for France, I suppose?' his lordship panted. And then, without waiting for an answer: 'What would you advise me to do?' he babbled. 'Eh? What do you think? It will be the devil and all for me, you know.'

Sir George looked askance at him, contempt in his eye. 'I cannot advise you,' he said. 'For my part, my lord, I remain here.'

His lordship was quite taken aback. 'No, you don't?' he said. 'Remain here!--You don't mean it,'

'I usually mean--what I say,' Soane answered in a tone that he thought must close the conversation.

But Lord Almeric kept up with him. 'Ay, but will you?' he babbled in vacuous admiration. 'Will you really stay here? Now that is uncommon bold of you! I should not have thought of that--of staying here, I mean. I should go to France till the thing blew over. I don't know that I shall not do so now. Don't you think I should be wise, Sir George? My position, you know. It is uncommon low, is a trial, and--'

Sir George halted so abruptly that will-he, nill-he, the other went on a few paces. 'My lord, you should know your own affairs best,' he said in a freezing tone. 'And, as I desire to be alone, I wish your lordship a very good day.'

My lord had never been so much astonished in his life. 'Oh, good morning,' he said, staring vacantly, 'good morning!' but by the time he had framed the words, Sir George was a dozen paces away.

It was an age when great ladies wept out of wounded vanity or for a loss at cards--yet made a show of their children lying in state; when men entertained the wits and made their wills in company, before they bowed a graceful exit from the room and life. Doubtless people felt, feared, hoped, and perspired as they do now, and had their ambitions apart from Pam and the loo table. Nay, Rousseau was printing. But the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' though it was beginning to be read, had not yet set the mode of sensibility, or sent those to rave of nature who all their lives had known nothing but art. The suppression of feeling, or rather the cultivation of no feeling, was still the mark of a gentleman; his maxim; honoured alike at Medmenham and Marly, to enjoy--to enjoy, be the cost to others what it might.

Bred in such a school, Sir George should have viewed what had happened with polite indifference, and put himself out no further than was courteous, or might serve to set him right with a jury, if the worst came to the worst. But, whether because he was of a kindlier stuff than the common sort of fashionables, or was too young to be quite spoiled, he took the thing that had occurred with unexpected heaviness; and, reaching his inn, hastened to his room to escape alike the curiosity that dogged him and the sympathy that, for a fine gentleman, is never far to seek. To do him justice, his anxiety was not for himself, or the consequences to himself, which at the worst were not likely to exceed a nominal verdict of manslaughter, and at the best would be an acquittal; the former had been Lord Byron's lot, the latter Mr. Brown's, and each had killed his man. Sir George had more savoir faire than to trouble himself about this; but about his opponent and his fate he felt a haunting--and, as Lord Almeric would have said, a low--concern that would let him neither rest nor sit. In particular, when he remembered the trifle from which all had arisen, he felt remorse and sorrow; which grew to the point of horror when he recalled the last look which Dunborough, swooning and helpless, had cast in his face.

In one of these paroxysms he was walking the room when the elder surgeon, who had attended his opponent to the field, was announced. Soane still retained so much of his life habit as to show an unmoved front; the man of the scalpel thought him hard and felt himself repelled; and though he had come from the sick-room hot-foot and laden with good news, descended to a profound apology for the intrusion.

'But I thought that you might like to hear, sir,' he continued, nursing his hat, and speaking as if the matter were of little moment, 'that Mr. Dunborough is as--as well as can be expected. A serious case--I might call it a most serious case,' he continued, puffing out his cheeks. 'But with care--with care I think we may restore him. I cannot say more than that.'

'Has the ball been extracted?'

'It has, and so far well. And the chair being on the spot, Sir George, so that he was moved without a moment's delay--for which I believe we have to thank Mr.--Mr.--'

'Fishwick,' Soane suggested.

'To be sure--that is so much gained. Which reminds me,' the smug gentleman continued, 'that Mr. Attorney begged me to convey his duty and inform you that he had made the needful arrangements and provided bail, so that you are at liberty to leave, Sir George, at any hour.'

'Ah!' Soane said, marvelling somewhat. 'I shall stay here, nevertheless, until I hear that Mr. Dunborough is out of danger.'

'An impulse that does you credit, sir,' the surgeon said impressively. 'These affairs, alas! are very greatly to be de--'

'They are d--d inconvenient,' Sir George drawled. 'He is not out of danger yet, I suppose?'

The surgeon stared and puffed anew. 'Certainly not, sir,' he said.

'Ah! And where have you placed him?'

'The Honourable Mr.--, the sufferer?'

'To be sure! Who else, man?' Soane asked impatiently.

'In some rooms at Magdalen,' the doctor answered, breathing hard. And then, 'Is it your wish that I should report to you to-morrow, sir?'

'You will oblige me. Thank you. Good-day.'

CHAPTER VI

A FISH OUT OF WATER

Sir George spent a long day in his own company, and heedless that on the surgeon's authority he passed abroad for a hard man and a dashed unfeeling fellow, dined on Lord Lyttelton's 'Life of King Henry the Second,' which was a new book in those days, and the fashion; and supped on gloom and good resolutions. He proposed to call and inquire after his antagonist at a decent hour in the morning, and if the report proved favourable, to go on to Lord ----'s in the afternoon.

But his suspense was curtailed, and his inquiries were converted into a matter of courtesy, by a visit which he received after breakfast from Mr. Thomasson. A glance at the tutor's smiling, unctuous face was enough. Mr. Thomasson also had had his dark hour--since to be mixed up with, a fashionable fracas was one thing, and to lose a valuable and influential pupil, the apple of his mother's eye, was another; but it was past, and he gushed over with gratulations.

'My dear Sir George,' he cried, running forward and extending his hands, 'how can I express my thankfulness for your escape? I am told that the poor dear fellow fought with a fury perfectly superhuman, and had you given ground must have ran you through a dozen times. Let us be thankful that the result was otherwise.' And he cast up his eyes.

'I am,' Sir George said, regarding him rather grimly. 'I do not know that Mr. Dunborough shares the feeling.'

'The dear man!' the tutor answered, not a whit abashed. 'But he is better. The surgeon has extracted the ball and pronounces him out of danger.'

'I am glad to hear it,' Soane answered heartily. 'Then, now I can get away.'

'À volonté!' cried Mr. Thomasson in his happiest vein. And then with a roguish air, which some very young men found captivating, but which his present companion stomached with difficulty, 'I will not say that you have come off the better, after all, Sir George,' he continued.

'Ah!'

'No,' said the tutor roguishly. 'Tut-tut. These young men! They will at a woman by hook or crook.'

'So?' Sir George said coldly. 'And the latest instance?'

'His Chloe--and a very obdurate, disdainful Chloe at that--has come to nurse him,' the tutor answered, grinning. 'The prettiest high-stepping piece you ever saw, Sir George--that I will swear!--and would do you no discredit in London. It would make your mouth water to see her. But he could never move her; never was such a prude. Two days ago he thought he had lost her for good and all--there was that accident, you understand. And now a little blood lost--and she is at his pillow!'

Sir George reddened at a sudden thought he had. 'And her father unburied!' he cried, rising to his feet. This Macaroni was human, after all.

Mr. Thomasson stared in astonishment. 'You know?' he said. 'Oh fie, Sir George, have you been hunting already? Fie! Fie! And all London to choose from!'

But Sir George simply repeated, 'And her father not buried, man?'

'Yes,' Mr. Thomasson answered with simplicity. 'He was buried this morning. Oh, that is all right.'

'This morning? And the girl went from that--to Dunborough's bedside?' Sir George exclaimed in indignation.

'It was a piece of the oddest luck,' Mr. Thomasson answered, smirking, and not in the least comprehending the other's feeling. 'He was lodged in Magdalen yesterday; this morning a messenger was despatched to Pembroke for clothes and such-like for him. The girl's mother has always nursed in Pembroke, and they sent for her to help. But she was that minute home from the burial, and would not go. Then up steps the girl and "I'll go," says she--heaven knows why or what took her, except the contrariness of woman. However, there she is! D'ye see?' And Mr. Thomasson winked.

'Tommy,' said Sir George, staring at him, 'I see that you're a d--d rascal!'

The tutor, easy and smiling, protested. 'Fie, Sir George,' he said. 'What harm is in it? To tend the sick, my dear sir, is a holy office. And if in this case harm come of it--' and he spread out his hands and paused.

'As you know it will,' Sir George cried impulsively.

But Mr. Thomasson shrugged his shoulders. 'On the contrary, I know nothing,' he answered. 'But--if it does, Mr. Dunborough's position is such that--hem! Well, we are men of the world, Sir George, and the girl might do worse.'

Sir George had heard the sentiment before, and without debate or protest. Now it disgusted him. 'Faugh, man!' he said, rising. 'Have done! You sicken me. Go and bore Lord Almeric--if he has not gone to Paris to save his ridiculous skin!'

But Mr. Thomasson, who had borne abuse of himself with Christian meekness, could not hear that unmoved. 'My dear Sir George, my dear friend,' he urged very seriously, and with a shocked face, 'you should not say things like that of his lordship. You really should not! My lord is a most excellent and--'

'Pure ass!' said Soane with irritation. 'And I wish you would go and divert him instead of boring me.'

'Dear, dear, Sir George!' Mr. Thomasson wailed. 'But you do not mean it? And I brought you such good news, as I thought. One might--one really might suppose that you wished our poor friend the worst.'

'I wish him no worse a friend!' Sir George responded sharply; and then, heedless of his visitor's protestations and excuses and offers of assistance, would see him to the door.

It was more easy, however, to be rid of him--the fine gentleman of the time standing on scant ceremony with his inferiors--than of the annoyance, the smart, the vexation, his news left behind him. Sir George was not in love. He would have laughed at the notion. The girl was absolutely and immeasurably below him; a girl of the people. He had seen her once only. In reason, therefore--and polite good breeding enforced the demand--he should have viewed Mr. Dunborough's conquest with easy indifference, and complimented him with a jest founded on the prowess of Mars and the smiles of Venus.

But the girl's rare beauty had caught Sir George's fancy; the scene in which he had taken part with her had captivated an imagination not easily inveigled. On the top of these impressions had come a period of good resolutions prescribed by imminent danger; and on the top of that twenty-four hours of solitude--a thing rare in the life he led. Result, that Sir George, picturing the girl's fate, her proud, passionate face, and her future, felt a sting at once selfish and unselfish, a pang at once generous and vicious. Perhaps at the bottom of his irritation lay the feeling that if she was to be any man's prey she might be his. But on the whole his feelings were surprisingly honest; they had their root in a better nature, that, deep sunk under the surface of breeding and habit, had been wholesomely stirred by the events of the last few days.

Still, the good and the evil in the man were so far in conflict that, had he been asked as he walked to Magdalen what he proposed to do should he get speech with the girl, it is probable he would not have known what to answer. Courtesy, nay, decency required that he should, inquire after his antagonist. If he saw the girl--and he had a sneaking desire to see her--well. If he did not see her--still well; there was an end of a foolish imbroglio, which had occupied him too long already. In an hour he could be in his post-chaise, and a mile out of town.

As it chanced, the surgeons in attendance on Dunborough had enjoined quiet, and forbidden visitors. The staircase on which the rooms lay--a bare, dusty, unfurnished place--was deserted; and the girl herself opened the door to him, her finger on her lips. He looked for a blush and a glance of meaning, a little play of conscious eyes and hands, a something of remembrance and coquetry; and had his hat ready in his hand and a smile on his lips. But she had neither smile nor blush for him; on the contrary, when the dim light that entered the dingy staircase disclosed who awaited her, she drew back a pace with a look of dislike and embarrassment.

'My good girl,' he said, speaking on the spur of the moment--for the reception took him aback--'what is it? What is the matter?'

She did not answer, but looked at him with solemn eyes, condemning him.

Even so Sir George was not blind to the whiteness of her throat, to the heavy coils of her dark hair, and the smooth beauty of her brow. And suddenly he thought he understood; and a chill ran through him. 'My G--d!' he said, startled; 'he is not dead?'

She closed the door behind her, and stood, her hand on the latch. 'No, he is not dead,' she said stiffly, voice and look alike repellent. 'But he has not you to thank for that.'

'Eh?'

'How can you come here with that face,' she continued with sudden passion--and he began to find her eyes intolerable--'and ask for him? You who--fie, sir! Go home! Go home and thank God that you have not his blood upon your hands--you--who might to-day be Cain!'

He gasped. 'Good Lord!' he said unaffectedly. And then, 'Why, you are the girl who yesterday would have me kill him!' he cried with indignation; 'who came out of town to meet me, brought me in, and would have matched me with him as coolly as ever sportsman set cock in pit! Ay, you! And now you blame me! My girl, blame yourself! Call yourself Cain, if you please!'

'I do,' she said unblenching. 'But I have my excuse. God forgive me none the less!' Her eyes filled as she said it. 'I had and have my excuse. But you--a gentleman! What part had you in this? Who were you to kill your fellow-creature--at the word of a distraught girl?'

Sir George saw his opening and jumped for it viciously. 'I fear you honour me too much,' he said, in the tone of elaborate politeness, which was most likely to embarrass a woman in her position. 'Most certainly you do, if you are really under the impression that I fought Mr. Dunborough on your account, my girl!'

'Did you not?' she stammered; and the new-born doubt in her eyes betrayed her trouble.

'Mr. Dunborough struck me, because I would not let him fire on the crowd,' Sir George explained, blandly raising his quizzing glass, but not using it. 'That was why I fought him. And that is my excuse. You see, my dear,' he continued familiarly, 'we have each an excuse. But I am not a hypocrite.'

'Why do you call me that?' she exclaimed; distress and shame at the mistake she had made contending with her anger.

'Because, my pretty Methodist,' he answered coolly, 'your hate and your love are too near neighbours. Cursing and nursing, killing and billing, come not so nigh one another in my vocabulary. But with women--some women--it is different.'

Her cheeks burned with shame, but her eyes flashed passion. 'If I were a lady,' she cried, her voice low but intense, 'you would not dare to insult me.'

'If you were a lady,' he retorted with easy insolence, 'I would kiss you and make you my wife, my dear. In the meantime, and as you are not--give up nursing young sparks and go home to your mother. Don't roam the roads at night, and avoid travelling-chariots as you would the devil. Or the next knight-errant you light upon may prove something ruder than--Captain Berkeley!'

'You are not Captain Berkeley?'

'No.'

She stared at him, breathing hard. Then, 'I was a fool, and I pay for it in insult,' she said.

'Be a fool no longer then,' he retorted, his good-humour restored by the success of his badinage; 'and no man will have the right to insult you, ma belle.'

'I will never give you the right!' she cried with intention.

'It is rather a question of Mr. Dunborough,' he answered, smiling superior, and flirting his spy-glass to and fro with his fingers. 'Say the same to him, and--but are you going, my queen? What, without ceremony?'

'I am not a lady, and noblesse oblige does not apply to me,' she cried. And she closed the door in his face--sharply, yet without noise.

He went down the stairs a step at a time--thinking. 'Now, I wonder where she got that!' he muttered. 'Noblesse oblige! And well applied too!' Again, 'Lord, what beasts we men are!' he thought. 'Insult? I suppose I did insult her; but I had to do that or kiss her. And she earned it, the little firebrand!' Then standing and looking along the High--he had reached the College gates--'D--n Dunborough! She is too good for him! For a very little--it would be mean, it would be low, it would be cursed low--but for two pence I would speak to her mother and cheat him. She is too good to be ruined by that coarse-tongued boaster! Though I suppose she fancies him. I suppose he is an Adonis to her! Faugh! Tommy, my lord, and Dunborough! What a crew!'

The good and evil, spleen and patience, which he had displayed in his interview with the girl rode him still; for at the door of the Mitre he paused, went in, came out, and paused again. He seemed to be unable to decide what he would do; but in the end he pursued his way along the street with a clouded brow, and in five minutes found himself at the door of the mean house in the court, whence the porter of Pembroke had gone out night and morning. Here he knocked, and stood. In a moment the door was opened, but to his astonishment by Mr. Fishwick.

Either the attorney shared his surprise, or had another and more serious cause for emotion; for his perky face turned red, and his manner as he stood holding the door half-open, and gaping at the visitor, was that of a man taken in the act, and thoroughly ashamed of himself. Sir George might have wondered what was afoot, if he had not espied over the lawyer's shoulder a round wooden table littered with papers, and guessed that Mr. Fishwick was doing the widow's business--a theory which Mr. Fishwick's first words, on recovering himself, bore out.

'I am here--on business,' he said, cringing and rubbing his hands. 'I don't--I don't think that you can object, Sir George.'

'I?' said Soane, staring at him in astonishment and some contempt. 'My good man, what has it to do with me? You got my letter?'

'And the draft, Sir George!' Mr. Fishwick bowed low. 'Certainly, certainly, sir. Too much honoured. Which, as I understood, put an end to any--I mean it not offensively, honoured sir--to any connection between us?'

Sir George nodded. 'I have my own lawyers in London,' he said stiffly. 'I thought I made it clear that I did not need your services further.'

Mr. Fishwick rubbed his hands. 'I have that from your own lips, Sir George,' he said. 'Mrs. Masterson, my good woman, you heard that?'

Sir George glowered at him. 'Lord, man?' he said. 'Why so much about nothing? What on earth has this woman to do with it?'

Mr. Fishwick trembled with excitement. 'Mrs. Masterson, you will not answer,' he stammered.

Sir George first stared, then cursed his impudence; then, remembering that after all this was not his business, or that on which he had come, and being one of those obstinates whom opposition but precipitates to their ends, 'Hark ye, man, stand aside,' he said. 'I did not come here to talk to you. And do you, my good woman, attend to me a moment. I have a word to say about your daughter.'

'Not a word! Mrs. Masterson,' the attorney cried his eyes almost bursting from his head with excitement.

Sir George was thunderstruck. "Is the man an idiot?" he exclaimed, staring at him. And then, "I'll tell you what it is, Mr. Fishwick, or whatever your name is--a little more of this, and I shall lay my cane across your back."

"I am in my duty," the attorney answered, dancing on his feet.

"Then you will suffer in it!" Sir George retorted. "With better men. So do not try me too far. I am here to say a word to this woman which I would rather say alone."

"Never," said the attorney, bubbling, "with my good will!"

Soane lost patience at that. "D--n you!" he cried. "Will you be quiet?" And made a cut at him with his cane. Fortunately the lawyer evaded it with nimbleness; and having escaped to a safe distance hastened to cry, "No malice! I bear you no malice, sir!" with so little breath and so much good-nature that Sir George recovered his balance. "Confound you, man!" he continued. "Why am I not to speak? I came here to tell this good woman that if she has a care for this girl the sooner she takes her from where she is the better! And you cannot let me put a word in."

"You came for that, sir?"

"For what else, fool?"

"I was wrong," said the attorney humbly. "I did not understand. Allow me to say, sir, that I am entirely of your opinion. The young lady--I mean she shall be removed to-morrow. It--the whole arrangement is improper--highly improper."

"Why, you go as fast now as you went slowly before," Sir George said, observing him curiously.

Mr. Fishwick smiled after a sickly fashion. "I did not understand, sir," he said. "But it is most unsuitable, most unsuitable. She shall return to-morrow at the latest."

Sir George, who had said what he had to say, nodded, grunted, and went away; feeling that he had performed an unpleasant--and somewhat doubtful--duty under most adverse circumstances. He could not in the least comprehend the attorney's strange behaviour; but after some contemptuous reflection, of which nothing came, he dismissed it as one of the low things to which he had exposed himself by venturing out of the charmed circle in which he lived. He hoped that the painful series was now at an end, stepped into his post-chaise, amid the reverent salaams of the Mitre, the landlord holding the door; and in a few minutes had rattled over Folly Bridge, and left Oxford behind him.

CHAPTER VII

ACHILLES AND BRISEIS

The honourable Mr. Dunborough's collapse arising rather from loss of blood than from an injury to a vital part, he was sufficiently recovered even on the day after the meeting to appreciate his nurse's presence. Twice he was heard to chuckle without apparent cause; once he strove, but failed, to detain her hand; while the feeble winks which from time to time he bestowed on Mr. Thomasson when her back was towards him were attributed by that gentleman, who should have known the patient, to reflections closely connected with her charms.

His rage was great, therefore, when three days after the duel, he awoke, missed her, and found in her place the senior bedmaker of Magdalen--a worthy woman, learned in simples and with hands of horn, but far from beautiful. This good person he saluted with a vigour which proved him already far on the road to recovery; and when he was tired of swearing, he wept and threw his nightcap at her. Finally, between one and the other, and neither availing to bring back his Briseis, he fell into a fever; which, as he was kept happed up in a box-bed, in a close room, with every window shut and every draught kept off by stuffy curtains--such was the fate of sick men then--bade fair to postpone his recovery to a very distant date.

In this plight he sent one day for Mr. Thomasson, who had the nominal care of the young gentleman; and the tutor being brought from the club tavern in the Corn Market which he occasionally condescended to frequent, the invalid broke to him his resolution.

'See here, Tommy,' he said in a voice weak but vicious. 'You have got to get her back. I will not be poisoned by this musty old witch any longer.'

'But if she will not come?' said Mr. Thomasson sadly.

'The little fool threw up the sponge when she came before,' the patient answered, tossing restlessly. 'And she will come again, with a little pressure. Lord, I know the women! So should you.'

'She came before because--well, I do not quite know why she came,' Mr. Thomasson confessed.

'Any way, you have got to get her back.'

The tutor remonstrated, 'My dear good man,' he said unctuously, 'you don't think of my position. I am a man of the world, I know--'

'All of it, my Macaroni!'

'But I cannot be--be mixed up in such a matter as this, my dear sir.'

'All the same, you have got to get her,' was the stubborn answer. 'Or I write to my lady and tell her you kept mum about my wound. And you will not like that, my tulip.'

On that point he was right; for if there was a person in the world of whom Mr. Thomasson stood in especial awe, it was of Lady Dunborough. My lord, the author of 'Pomaria Britannica' and 'The Elegant Art of Pomiculture as applied to Landscape Gardening,' was a quantity he could safely neglect. Beyond his yew-walks and his orchards his lordship was a cipher. He had proved too respectable even for the peerage; and of late had cheerfully resigned all his affairs into the hands of his wife, formerly the Lady Michal M'Intosh, a penniless beauty, with the pride of a Scotchwoman and the temper of a Hervey. Her enemies said that my lady had tripped in the merry days of George the Second, and now made up for past easiness by present hardness. Her friends--but it must be confessed her ladyship had no friends.

Be that as it might, Mr. Thomasson had refrained from summoning her to her son's bedside; partly because the surgeons had quickly pronounced the wound a trifle, much more because the little he had seen of her ladyship had left him no taste to see more. He knew, however, that the omission would weigh heavily against him were it known; and as he had hopes from my lady's aristocratic connections, and need in certain difficulties of all the aid he could muster, he found the threat not one to be sneezed at. His laugh betrayed this.

However, he tried to put the best face on the matter. 'You won't do that,' he said. 'She would spoil sport, my friend. Her ladyship is no fool, and would not suffer your little amusements.'

'She is no fool,' Mr. Dunborough replied with emphasis. 'As you will find, Tommy, if she comes to Oxford, and learns certain things. It will be farewell to your chance of having that milksop of a Marquis for a pupil!'

Now, it was one of Mr. Thomasson's highest ambitions at this time to have the young Marquis of Carmarthen entrusted to him; and Lady Dunborough was connected with the family, and, it was said, had interest there. He was silent.

'You see,' Mr. Dunborough continued, marking with a chuckle the effect his words had produced, 'you have got to get her.'

Mr. Thomasson did not admit that that was so, but he writhed in his chair; and presently he took his leave and went away, his plump pale face gloomy and the crow's feet showing plain at the corners of his eyes. He had given no promise; but that evening a messenger from the college requested Mrs. Masterson to attend at his rooms on the following morning.

She did not go. At the appointed hour, however, there came a knock on the tutor's door, and that gentleman, who had sent his servant out of the way, found Mr. Fishwick on the landing. 'Tut-tut!' said the don with some brusqueness, his hand still on the door; 'do you want me?' He had seen the attorney after the duel, and in the confusion attendant on the injured man's removal; and knew him by sight, but no farther.

'I--hem--I think you wished to see Mrs. Masterson?' was Mr. Fishwick's answer, and the lawyer, but with all humility, made as if he would enter.

The tutor, however, barred the way. 'I wished to see Mrs. Masterson,' he said drily, and with his coldest air of authority. 'But who are you?'

'I am here on her behalf,' Mr. Fishwick answered, meekly pressing his hat in his hands.

'On her behalf?' said Mr. Thomasson stiffly. 'Is she ill?'

'No, sir, I do not know that she is ill.'

'Then I do not understand,' Mr. Thomasson answered in his most dignified tone. 'Are you aware that the woman is in the position of a college servant, inhabiting a cottage the property of the college? And liable to be turned out at the college will?'

'It may be so,' said the attorney.

'Then, if you please, what is the meaning of her absence when requested by one of the Fellows of the college to attend?'

'I am here to represent her,' said Mr. Fishwick.

'Represent her! Represent a college laundress! Pooh! I never heard of such a thing.'

'But, sir, I am her legal adviser, and--'

'Legal adviser!' Mr. Thomasson retorted, turning purple--he was really puzzled. 'A bedmaker with a legal adviser! It's the height of impudence! Begone, sir, and take it from me, that the best advice you can give her is to attend me within the hour.'

Mr. Fishwick looked rather blue. 'If it has nothing to do with her property,' he said reluctantly, and as if he had gone too far.

'Property!' said Mr. Thomasson, gasping.

'Or her affairs.'

'Affairs!' the tutor cried. 'I never heard of a bedmaker having affairs.'

'Well,' said the lawyer doggedly, and with the air of a man goaded into telling what he wished to conceal, 'she is leaving Oxford. That is the fact.'

'Oh!' said Mr. Thomasson, falling on a sudden into the minor key. 'And her daughter?'

'And her daughter.'

'That is unfortunate,' the tutor answered, thoughtfully rubbing his hands. 'The truth is--the girl proved so good a nurse in the case of my noble friend who was injured the other day--my lord Viscount Dunborough's son, a most valuable life--that since she absented herself, he has not made the same progress. And as I am responsible for him--'

'She should never have attended him!' the attorney answered with unexpected sharpness.

'Indeed! And why not, may I ask?' the tutor inquired.

Mr. Fishwick did not answer the question. Instead, 'She would not have gone to him in the first instance,' he said, 'but that she was under a misapprehension.'

'A misapprehension?'

'She thought that the duel lay at her door,' the attorney answered; 'and in that belief was impelled to do what she could to undo the consequences. Romantic, but a most improper step!'

'Improper!' said the tutor, much ruffled. 'And why, sir?'

'Most improper,' the attorney repeated in a dry, business-like tone. 'I am instructed that the gentleman had for weeks past paid her attentions which, his station considered, could scarcely be honourable, and of which she had more than once expressed her dislike. Under those circumstances, to expose her to his suit--but no more need be said,' the attorney added, breaking off and taking a pinch of snuff with great enjoyment, 'as she is leaving the city.'

Mr. Thomasson had much ado to mask his chagrin under a show of contemptuous incredulity. 'The wench has too fine a conceit of herself!' he blurted out. 'Hark you, sir--this is a fable! I wonder you dare to put it about. A gentleman of the station of my lord Dunborough's son does not condescend to the gutter!'

'I will convey the remark to my client,' said the attorney, bristling all over.

'Client!' Mr. Thomasson retorted, trembling with rage--for he saw the advantage he had given the enemy. 'Since when had laundry maids lawyers? Client! Pho! Begone, sir! You are abusive. I'll have you looked up on the rolls. I'll have your name taken!'

'I would not talk of names if I were you,' cried Mr. Fishwick, reddening in his turn with rage. 'Men give a name to what you are doing this morning, and it is not a pleasant one. It is to be hoped, sir, that Mr. Dunborough pays you well for your services!'

'You--insolent rascal!' the tutor stammered, losing in a moment all his dignity and becoming a pale flabby man, with the spite and the terror of crime in his face. 'You--begone! Begone, sir.'

'Willingly,' said the attorney, swelling with defiance. 'You may tell your principal that when he means marriage, he may come to us. Not before. I take my leave, sir. Good morning.' And with that he strutted out and marched slowly and majestically down the stairs.

He bore off the honours of war. Mr. Thomasson, left among his Titian copies, his gleaming Venuses, and velvet curtains, was a sorry thing. The man who preserves a cloak of outward decency has always this vulnerable spot; strip him, and he sees himself as others see or may see him, and views his ugliness with griping qualms. Mr. Thomasson bore the exposure awhile, sitting white and shaking in a chair, seeing himself and seeing the end, and, like the devils, believing and trembling. Then he rose and staggered to a little cupboard, the door of which was adorned with a pretty Greek motto, and a hovering Cupid painted in a blue sky; whence he filled himself a glass of cordial. A second glass followed; this restored the colour to his cheeks and the brightness to his eyes. He shivered; then smacked his lips and began to reflect what face he should put upon it when he went to report to his pupil.

In deciding that point he made a mistake. Unluckily for himself and others, in the version which he chose he was careful to include all matters likely to arouse Dunborough's resentment; in particular he laid malicious stress upon the attorney's scornful words about a marriage. This, however--and perhaps the care he took to repeat it--had an unlooked-for result. Mr. Dunborough began by cursing the rogue's impudence, and did it with all the heat his best friend could desire. But, being confined to his room, haunted by the vision of his flame, yet debarred from any attempt to see her, his mood presently changed; his heart became as water, and he fell into a maudlin state about her. Dwelling constantly on memories of his Briseis--whose name, by the way, was Julia--having her shape and complexion, her gentle touch and her smile, always in his mind, while he was unable in the body to see so much as the hem of her gown, Achilles grew weaker in will as he grew stronger in body. Headstrong and reckless by nature, unaccustomed to thwart a desire or deny himself a gratification, Mr. Dunborough began to contemplate paying even the last price for her; and one day, about three weeks after the duel, dropped a word which frightened Mr. Thomasson.

He was well enough by this time to be up, and was looking through one window while the tutor lounged in the seat of another. On a sudden 'Lord!' said he, with a laugh that broke off short in the middle. 'What was the queer catch that fellow sang last night? About a bailiff's daughter. Well, why not a porter's daughter?'

'Because you are neither young enough, nor old enough, nor mad enough!' said Mr. Thomasson cynically, supposing the other meant nothing.

'It is she that would be mad,' the young gentleman answered, with a grim chuckle. 'I should take it out of her sooner or later. And, after all, she is as good as Lady Macclesfield or Lady Falmouth! As good? She is better, the saucy baggage! By the Lord, I have a good mind to do it!'

Mr. Thomasson sat dumbfounded. At length, 'You are jesting! You cannot mean it,' he said.

'If it is marriage or nothing--and, hang her, she is as cold as a church pillar--I do mean it,' the gentleman answered viciously; 'and so would you if you were not an old insensible sinner! Think of her ankle, man! Think of her waist! I never saw a waist to compare with it! Even in the Havanna! She is a pearl! She is a jewel! She is incomparable!'

'And a porter's daughter!'

'Faugh, I don't believe it.' And he took his oath on the point.

'You make me sick!' Mr. Thomasson said; and meant it. Then, 'My dear friend, I see how it is,' he continued. 'You have the fever on you still, or you would not dream of such things.'

'But I do dream of her--every night, confound her!' Mr. Dunborough said; and he groaned like a love-sick boy. 'Oh, hang it, Tommy,' he continued plaintively, 'she has a kind of look in her eyes when she is pleased--that makes you think of dewy mornings when you were a boy and went fishing.'

'It is the fever!' Mr. Thomasson said, with conviction. 'It is heavy on him still.' Then, more seriously, 'My very dear sir,' he continued, 'do you know that if you had your will you would be miserable within the week. Remember--

''Tis tumult, disorder, 'tis loathing and hate;
Caprice gives it birth, and contempt is its fate!'

'Gad, Tommy!' said Mr. Dunborough, aghast with admiration at the aptness of the lines. 'That is uncommon clever of you! But I shall do it all the same,' he continued, in a tone of melancholy foresight. 'I know I shall. I am a fool, a particular fool. But I shall do it. Marry in haste and repent at leisure!'

'A porter's daughter become Lady Dunborough!' cried Mr. Thomasson with scathing sarcasm.

'Oh yes, my tulip,' Mr. Dunborough answered with gloomy meaning. 'But there have been worse. I know what I know. See Collins's Peerage, volume 4, page 242: "Married firstly Sarah, widow of Colonel John Clark, of Exeter, in the county of Devon"--all a hum, Tommy! If they had said spinster, of Bridewell, in the county of Middlesex, 'twould have been as true! I know what I know.'

After that Mr. Thomasson went out of Magdalen, feeling that the world was turning round with him. If Dunborough were capable of such a step as this--Dunborough, who had seen life and service, and of whose past he knew a good deal--where was he to place dependence? How was he to trust even the worst of his acquaintances? The matter shook the pillars of the tutor's house, and filled him with honest disgust.

Moreover, it frightened him. In certain circumstances he might have found his advantage in fostering such a mésalliance. But here, not only had he reason to think himself distasteful to the young lady whose elevation was in prospect, but he retained too vivid a recollection of Lady Dunborough to hope that that lady would forget or forgive him! Moreover, at the present moment he was much straitened for money; difficulties of long standing were coming to a climax. Venuses and Titian copies have to be paid for. The tutor, scared by the prospect, to which he had lately opened his eyes, saw in early preferment or a wealthy pupil his only way of escape. And in Lady Dunborough lay his main hope, which a catastrophe of this nature would inevitably shatter. That evening he sent his servant to learn what he could of the Mastersons' movements.

The man brought word that they had left the town that morning; that the cottage was closed, and the key had been deposited at the college gates.

'Did you learn their destination?' the tutor asked, trimming his fingernails with an appearance of indifference.

The servant said he had not; and after adding the common gossip of the court, that Masterson had left money, and the widow had gone to her own people, concluded, 'But they were very close after Masterson's death, and the neighbours saw little of them. There was a lawyer in and out, a stranger; and it is thought he was to marry the girl, and that that had set them a bit above their position, sir.'

'That will do,' said the tutor. 'I want to hear no gossip,' And, hiding his joy, he went off hot-foot to communicate the news to his pupil.

But Mr. Dunborough laughed in his face. 'Pooh!' he said. 'I know where they are.'

'You know? Then where are they?' Thomasson asked.

'Ah, my good Tommy, that is telling.'

'Well,' Mr. Thomasson answered, with an assumption of dignity. 'At any rate they are gone. And you must allow me to say that I am glad of it--for your sake!'

'That is as may be,' Mr. Dunborough answered. And he took his first airing in a sedan next day. After that he grew so reticent about his affairs, and so truculent when the tutor tried to sound him, that Mr. Thomasson was at his wits' end to discern what was afoot. For some time, however, he got no clue. Then, going to Dunborough's rooms one day, he found them empty, and, bribing the servant, learned that his master had gone to Wallingford. And the man told him his suspicions. Mr. Thomasson was aghast; and by that day's post--after much searching of heart and long pondering into which scale he should throw his weight--he despatched the following letter to Lady Dunborough:

'HONOURED MADAM,--The peculiar care I have of that distinguished and excellent gentleman, your son, no less than the profound duty I owe to my lord and your ladyship, induces me to a step which I cannot regard without misgiving; since, once known, it must deprive me of the influence with Mr. Dunborough which I have now the felicity to enjoy, and which, heightened by the affection he is so good as to bestow on me, renders his society the most agreeable in the world. Nevertheless, and though considerations of this sort cannot but have weight with me, I am not able to be silent, nor allow your honoured repose among the storied oaks of Papworth to be roughly shattered by a blow that may still be averted by skill and conduct.

'For particulars, Madam, the young gentleman--I say it with regret--has of late been drawn into a connection with a girl of low origin and suitable behaviour, Not that your ladyship is to think me so wanting in savoir-faire as to trouble your ears with this, were it all; but the person concerned--who (I need scarcely tell one so familiar with Mr. Dunborough's amiable disposition) is solely to blame--has the wit to affect virtue, and by means of this pretence, often resorted to by creatures of that class, has led my generous but misguided pupil to the point of matrimony. Your ladyship shudders? Alas! it is so. I have learned within the hour that he has followed her to Wallingford, whither she has withdrawn herself, doubtless to augment his passion; I am forced to conclude that nothing short of your ladyship's presence and advice can now stay his purpose. In that belief, and with the most profound regret, I pen these lines; and respectfully awaiting the favour of your ladyship's commands, which shall ever evoke my instant compliance,

'I have the honour to be while I live, Madam,
Your ladyship's most humble obedient servant,
'FREDERICK THOMASSON.

'Nota bene.--I do not commend the advantage of silence in regard to this communication, this being patent to your ladyship's sagacity.'

CHAPTER VIII

THE OLD BATH ROAD

In the year 1757--to go back ten years from the spring with which we are dealing--the ordinary Englishman was a Balbus despairing of the State. No phrase was then more common on English lips, or in English ears, than the statement that the days of England's greatness were numbered, and were fast running out. Unwitting the wider sphere about to open before them, men dwelt fondly on the glories of the past. The old babbled of Marlborough's wars, of the entrance of Prince Eugene into London, of choirs draped in flags, and steeples reeling giddily for Ramillies and Blenheim. The young listened, and sighed to think that the day had been, and was not, when England gave the law to Europe, and John Churchill's warder set troops moving from Hamburg to the Alps.

On the top of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things higher than ribbon or place or pension, seemed to be dead among public men. The Tories, long deprived of power, and discredited by the taint or suspicion of Jacobitism, counted for nothing. The Whigs, agreed on all points of principle, and split into sections, the Ins and Outs, solely by the fact that all could not enjoy places and pensions at once, the supply being unequal to the demand--had come to regard politics as purely a game; a kind of licensed hazard played for titles, orders, and emoluments, by certain families who had the entrée to the public table by virtue of the part they had played in settling the succession.

Into the midst of this state of things, this world of despondency, mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years' War--and particularly the loss of Minorca--seemed to confirm the gloomiest prognostications of the most hopeless pessimists, came William Pitt; and in eighteen months changed the face of the world, not for his generation only, but for ours. Indifferent as an administrator, mediocre as a financier, passionate, haughty, headstrong, with many of the worst faults of an orator, he was still a man with ideals--a patriot among placemen, pure where all were corrupt. And the effect of his touch was magical. By infusing his own spirit, his own patriotism, his own belief in his country, and his own belief in himself, into those who worked with him--ay, and into the better half of England--he wrought a seeming miracle.

See, for instance, what Mr. Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann in September, 1757. 'For how many years,' he says, 'have I been telling you that your country was mad, that your country was undone! It does not grow wiser, it does not grow more prosperous! ... How do you behave on these lamentable occasions? Oh, believe me, it is comfortable to have an island to hide one's head in! ...' Again he writes in the same month,' 'It is time for England to slip her own cables, and float away into some unknown ocean.'

With these compare a letter dated November, 1759. 'Indeed,' he says to the same correspondent, 'one is forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one.' And he wrote with reason. India, Canada, Belleisle, the Mississippi, the Philippines, the Havanna, Martinique, Guadaloupe--there was no end to our conquests. Wolfe fell in the arms of victory, Clive came home the satrap of sovereigns; but day by day ships sailed in and couriers spurred abroad with the news that a new world and a nascent empire were ours. Until men's heads reeled and maps failed them, as they asked each morning 'What new land, to-day?' Until those who had despaired of England awoke and rubbed their eyes--awoke to find three nations at her feet, and the dawn of a new and wider day breaking in the sky.

And what of the minister? They called him the Great Commoner, the heaven-born statesman; they showered gold boxes upon him; they bore him through the city, the centre of frantic thousands, to the effacement even of the sovereign. Where he went all heads were bared; while he walked the rooms at Bath and drank the water, all stood; his very sedan, built with a boot to accommodate his gouty foot, was a show followed and watched wherever it moved. A man he had never seen left him a house and three thousand pounds a year; this one, that one, the other one, legacies. In a word, for a year or two he was the idol of the nation--the first great People's Minister.

Then, the crisis over, the old system lifted its head again; the mediocrities returned; and, thwarted by envious rivals and a jealous king, Pitt placed the crown alike on his services and his popularity by resigning power when he could no longer dictate the policy which he knew to be right. Nor were events slow to prove his wisdom. The war with Spain which he would have declared, Spain declared. The treasure fleet which he would have seized, escaped us. Finally, the peace when it came redounded to his credit, for in the main it secured his conquests--to the disgrace of his enemies, since more might have been obtained.

Such was the man who, restored to office and lately created an earl by the title of Chatham, lay ill at Bath in the spring of '67. The passage of time, the course of events, the ravages of gout, in a degree the acceptance of a title, had robbed his popularity of its first gloss. But his name was still a name to conjure with in England. He was still the idol of the City. Crowds still ran to see him where he passed. His gaunt figure racked with gout, his eagle nose, his piercing eyes, were still England's picture of a minister. His curricle, his troop of servants, the very state he kept, the ceremony with which he travelled, all pleased the popular fancy. When it was known that he was well enough to leave Bath, and would lie a night at the Castle Inn at Marlborough, his suite requiring twenty rooms, even that great hostelry, then reputed one of the best, as it was certainly the most splendid in England, and capable, it was said, of serving a dinner of twenty-four covers on silver, was in an uproar. The landlord, who knew the tastes of half the peerage, and which bin Lord Sandwich preferred, and which Mr. Rigby, in which rooms the Duchess or Lady Betty liked to lie, what Mr. Walpole took with his supper, and which shades the Princess Amelia preferred for her card-table--even he, who had taken his glass of wine with a score of dukes, from Cumberland the Great to Bedford the Little, was put to it; the notice being short, and the house somewhat full.

Fortunately the Castle Inn, on the road between London and the west, was a place of call, not of residence. Formerly a favourite residence of the Seymour family, and built, if tradition does not lie, by a pupil of Inigo Jones, it stood--and for the house, still stands--in a snug fold of the downs, at the end of the long High Street of Marlborough; at the precise point where the route to Salisbury debouches from the Old Bath Road. A long-fronted, stately mansion of brick, bosomed in trees, and jealous of its historic past--it had sheltered William of Orange--it presented to the north and the road, from which it was distant some hundred yards, a grand pillared portico flanked by projecting wings. At that portico, and before those long rows of shapely windows, forty coaches, we are told, changed horses every day. Beside the western wing of the house a green sugarloaf mound, reputed to be of Druidical origin, rose above the trees; it was accessible by a steep winding path, and crowned at the date of this story by a curious summer-house. Travellers from the west who merely passed on the coach, caught, if they looked back as they entered the town, a glimpse of groves and lawns laid out by the best taste of the day, between the southern front and the river. To these a doorway and a flight of stone steps, corresponding in position with the portico in the middle of the north front, conducted the visitor, who, if a man of feeling, was equally surprised and charmed to find in these shady retreats, stretching to the banks of the Kennet, a silence and beauty excelled in few noblemen's gardens. In a word, while the north front of the house hummed with the revolving wheels, and echoed the chatter of half the fashionable world bound for the Bath or the great western port of Bristol, the south front reflected the taste of that Lady Hertford who had made these glades and trim walks her principal hobby.

With all its charms, however, the traveller, as we have said, stayed there but a night or so. Those in the house, therefore, would move on, and so room could be made. And so room was made; and two days later, a little after sunset, amid a spasm of final preparation, and with a great parade of arrival, the earl's procession, curricle, chariot, coaches, chaises, and footmen, rolled in from the west. In a trice lights flashed everywhere, in the road, at the windows, on the mound, among the trees; the crowd thickened--every place seemed peopled with the Pitt liveries. Women, vowing that they were cramped to death, called languidly for chaise-doors to be opened; and men who had already descended, and were stretching their limbs in the road, ran to open them. This was in the rear of the procession; in front, where the throng of townsfolk closed most thickly round the earl's travelling chariot, was a sudden baring of heads, as the door of the coach was opened. The landlord, bowing lower than he had ever bowed to the proud Duke of Somerset, offered his shoulder. And then men waited and bent nearer; and nothing happening, looked at one another in surprise. Still no one issued; instead, something which the nearest could not catch was said, and a tall lady, closely hooded, stepped stiffly out and pointed to the house. On which the landlord and two or three servants hurried in; and all was expectation.

The men were out again in a moment, bearing a great chair, which they set with nicety at the door of the carriage. This done, the gapers saw what they had come to see. For an instant, the face that all England knew and all Europe feared--but blanched, strained, and drawn with pain--showed in the opening. For a second the crowd was gratified with a glimpse of a gaunt form, a star and ribbon; then, with a groan heard far through the awestruck silence, the invalid sank heavily into the chair, and was borne swiftly and silently into the house.

Men looked at one another; but the fact was better than their fears. My lord, after leaving Bath, had had a fresh attack of the gout; and when he would be able to proceed on his journey only Dr. Addington, his physician, whose gold-headed cane, great wig, and starched aspect did not foster curiosity, could pretend to say. Perhaps Mr. Smith, the landlord, was as much concerned as any; when he learned the state of the case, he fell to mental arithmetic with the assistance of his fingers, and at times looked blank. Counting up the earl and his gentleman, and his gentleman's gentleman, and his secretary, and his private secretary, and his physician, and his three friends and their gentlemen, and my lady and her woman, and the children and nurses, and a crowd of others, he could not see where to-morrow's travellers were to lie, supposing the minister remained. However, in the end, he set that aside as a question for to-morrow; and having seen Mr. Rigby's favourite bin opened (for Dr. Addington was a connoisseur), and reviewed the cooks dishing up the belated dinner--which an endless chain of servants carried to the different apartments--he followed to the principal dining-room, where the minister's company were assembled; and between the intervals of carving and seeing that his guests ate to their liking, enjoyed the conversation, and, when invited, joined in it with tact and self-respect. As became a host of the old school.

By this time lights blazed in every window of the great mansion; the open doors emitted a fragrant glow of warmth and welcome; the rattle of plates and hum of voices could be heard in the road a hundred paces away. But outside and about the stables the hubbub had somewhat subsided, the road had grown quiet, and the last townsfolk had withdrawn, when a little after seven the lamps of a carriage appeared in the High Street, approaching from the town. It swept round the church, turned the flank of the house, and in a twinkling drew up before the pillars.

'Hilloa! House!' cried the postillion. 'House!' And, cracking his whip on his boot, he looked up at the rows of lighted windows.

A man and a maid who travelled outside climbed down. As the man opened the carriage door, a servant bustled out of the house. 'Do you want fresh horses?' said he, in a kind of aside to the footman.

'No--rooms!' the man answered bluntly.

Before the other could reply, 'What is this?' cried a shrewish voice from the interior of the carriage. 'Hoity toity! This is a nice way of receiving company! You, fellow, go to your master and say that I am here.'

'Say that the Lady Dunborough is here,' an unctuous voice repeated, 'and requires rooms, dinners, fire, and the best he has. And do you be quick, fellow!'

The speaker was Mr. Thomasson, or rather Mr. Thomasson plus the importance which comes of travelling with a viscountess. This, and perhaps the cramped state of his limbs, made him a little long in descending. 'Will your ladyship wait? or will you allow me to have the honour of assisting you to descend?' he continued, shivering slightly from the cold. To tell the truth, he was not enjoying his honour on cheap terms. Save the last hour, her ladyship's tongue had gone without ceasing, and Mr. Thomasson was sorely in need of refreshment.

'Descend? No!' was the tart answer. 'Let the man come! Sho! Times are changed since I was here last. I had not to wait then, or break my shins in the dark! Has the impudent fellow gone in?'

He had, but at this came out again, bearing lights before his master. The host, with the civility which marked landlords in those days--the halcyon days of inns--hurried down the steps to the carriage. 'Dear me! Dear me! I am most unhappy!' he exclaimed. 'Had I known your ladyship was travelling, some arrangement should have been made. I declare, my lady, I would not have had this happen for twenty pounds! But--'

'But what, man! What is the man mouthing about?' she cried impatiently.

'I am full,' he said, extending his palms to express his despair.' The Earl of Chatham and his lordship's company travelling from Bath occupy all the west wing and the greater part of the house; and I have positively no rooms fit for your ladyship's use. I am grieved, desolated, to have to say this to a person in your ladyship's position,' he continued glibly, 'and an esteemed customer, but--' and again he extended his hands.

'A fig for your desolation!' her ladyship cried rudely. 'It don't help me, Smith.'

'But your ladyship sees how it is.'

'I am hanged if I do!' she retorted, and used an expression too coarse for modern print. 'But I suppose that there is another house, man.'

'Certainly, my lady--several,' the landlord answered, with a gesture of deprecation. 'But all full. And the accommodation not of a kind to suit your ladyship's tastes.'

'Then--what are we to do?' she asked with angry shrillness.

'We have fresh horses,' he ventured to suggest. 'The road is good, and in four hours, or four and a half at the most, your ladyship might be in Bath, where there is an abundance of good lodgings.'

'Bless the man!' cried the angry peeress. 'Does he think I have a skin of leather to stand this jolting and shaking? Four hours more! I'll lie in my carriage first!'

A small rain was beginning to fall, and the night promised to be wet as well as cold. Mr. Thomasson, who had spent the last hour, while his companion slept, in visions of the sumptuous dinner, neat wines, and good beds that awaited him at the Castle Inn, cast a despairing glance at the doorway, whence issued a fragrance that made his mouth water. 'Oh, positively,' he cried, addressing the landlord, 'something must be done, my good man. For myself, I can sleep in a chair if her ladyship can anyway be accommodated.'

'Well,' said the landlord dubiously, 'if her ladyship could allow her woman to lie with her?'

'Bless the man! Why did you not say that at once?' cried my lady. 'Oh, she may come!' This last in a voice that promised little comfort for the maid.

'And if the reverend gentleman--would put up with a couch below stairs?'

'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Thomasson; but faintly, now it came to the point.

'Then I think I can manage--if your ladyship will not object to sup with some guests who have just arrived, and are now sitting down? Friends of Sir George Soane,' the landlord hastened to add, 'whom your ladyship probably knows.'

'Drat the man!--too well!' Lady Dunborough answered, making a wry face. For by this time she had heard all about the duel. 'He has nearly cost me dear! But, there--if we must, we must. Let me get my tooth in the dinner, and I won't stand on my company.' And she proceeded to descend, and, the landlord going before her, entered the house.

In those days people were not so punctilious in certain directions as they now are. My lady put off her French hood and travelling cloak in the lobby of the east wing, gave her piled-up hair a twitch this way and that, unfastened her fan from her waist, and sailed in to supper, her maid carrying her gloves and scent-bottle behind her. The tutor, who wore no gloves, was a little longer. But having washed his hands at a pump in the scullery, and dried them on a roller-towel--with no sense that the apparatus was deficient--he tucked his hat under his arm and, handling his snuff-box, tripped after her as hastily as vanity and an elegant demeanour permitted.

He found her in the act of joining, with an air of vast condescension, a party of three; two of whom her stately salute had already frozen in their places. These two, a slight perky man of middle age, and a frightened rustic-looking woman in homely black--who, by the way, sat with her mouth, open and her knife and fork resting points upward on the table--could do nothing but stare. The third, a handsome girl, very simply dressed, returned her ladyship's gaze with mingled interest and timidity.

My lady noticed this, and the girl's elegant air and shape, and set down the other two for her duenna and her guardian's man of business. Aware that Sir George Soane had no sister, she scented scandal, and lost not a moment in opening the trenches.

'And how far have you come to-day, child?' she asked with condescension, as soon as she had taken her seat.

'From Reading, madam,' the girl answered in a voice low and restrained. Her manner was somewhat awkward, and she had a shy air, as if her surroundings were new to her, But Lady Dunborough was more and more impressed with her beauty, and a natural air of refinement that was not to be mistaken.

'The roads are insufferably crowded,' said the peeress. 'They are intolerable!'

'I am afraid you suffered some inconvenience,' the girl answered timidly.

At that moment Mr. Thomasson entered. He treated the strangers to a distant bow, and, without looking at them, took his seat with a nonchalant ease, becoming a man who travelled with viscountesses, and was at home in the best company. The table had his first hungry glance. He espied roast and cold, a pair of smoking ducklings just set on, a dish of trout, a round of beef, a pigeon-pie, and hot rolls. Relieved, he heaved a sigh of satisfaction.

''Pon honour this is not so bad!' he said. 'It is not what your ladyship is accustomed to, but at a pinch it will do. It will do!'

He was not unwilling that the strangers should know his companion's rank, and he stole a glance at them, as he spoke, to see what impression it made. Alas! the deeper impression was made on himself. For a moment he stared; the next he sprang to his feet with an oath plain and strong.

'Drat the man!' cried my lady in wrath. He had come near to oversetting her plate. 'What flea has bitten you now?'

'Do you know--who these people are?' Mr. Thomasson stammered, trembling with rage; and, resting both hands on the back of his chair, he glared now at them and now at Lady Dunborough. He could be truculent where he had nothing to fear; and he was truculent now.

'These people?' my lady drawled in surprise; and she inspected them through her quizzing-glass as coolly as if they were specimens of a rare order submitted to her notice. 'Not in the least, my good man. Who are they? Should I know them?'

'They are--'

But the little man, whose seat happened to be opposite the tutor's, had risen to his feet by this time; and at that word cut him short. 'Sir!' he cried in a flutter of agitation. 'Have a care! Have a care what you say! I am a lawyer, and I warn you that anything defamatory will--will be--'

'Pooh!' said Mr. Thomasson. 'Don't try to browbeat me, sir. These persons are impostors, Lady Dunborough! Impostors!' he continued. 'In this house, at any rate. They have no right to be here!'

'You shall pay for this!' shrieked Mr. Fishwick. For he it was.

'I will ring the bell,' the tutor continued in a high tone, 'and have them removed. They have no more to do with Sir George Soane, whose name they appear to have taken, than your ladyship has.'

'Have a care! Have a care, sir,' cried the lawyer, trembling.

'Or than I have!' persisted Mr. Thomasson hardily, and with his head in the air; 'and no right or title to be anywhere but in the servants' room. That is their proper place. Lady Dunborough,' he continued, his eyes darting severity at the three culprits, 'are you aware that this young person whom you have been so kind as to notice is--is--'

'Oh, Gadzooks, man, come to the point!' cried her ladyship, with one eye on the victuals.

'No, I will not shame her publicly,' said Mr. Thomasson, swelling with virtuous self-restraint. 'But if your ladyship would honour me with two words apart?'

Lady Dunborough rose, muttering impatiently; and Mr. Thomasson, with the air of a just man in a parable, led her a little aside; but so that the three who remained at the table might still feel that his eye and his reprehension rested on them. He spoke a few words to her ladyship; whereon she uttered a faint cry, and stiffened. A moment and she turned and came back to the table, her face crimson, her headdress nodding. She looked at the girl, who had just risen to her feet.

'You baggage!' she hissed, 'begone! Out of this house! How dare you sit in my presence?' And she pointed to the door.

CHAPTER IX

ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON

The scene presented by the room at this moment was sufficiently singular. The waiters, drawn to the spot by the fury of my lady's tone, peered in at the half-opened door, and asking one another what the fracas was about, thought so; and softly called to others to witness it. On one side of the table rose Lady Dunborough, grim and venomous; on the other the girl stood virtually alone--for the elder woman had fallen to weeping helplessly, and the attorney seemed to be unequal to this new combatant. Even so, and though her face betrayed trouble and some irresolution, she did not blench, but faced her accuser with a slowly rising passion that overcame her shyness.

'Madam,' she said, 'I did not clearly catch your name. Am I right in supposing that you are Lady Dunborough?'

The peeress swallowed her rage with difficulty. 'Go!' she cried, and pointed afresh to the door. 'How dare you bandy words with me? Do you hear me? Go!'

'I am not going at your bidding,' the girl answered slowly. 'Why do you speak to me like that?' And then, 'You have no right to speak to me in that way!' she continued, in a flush of indignation.

'You impudent creature!' Lady Dunborough cried. 'You shameless, abandoned baggage! Who brought you in out of the streets? You, a kitchen-wench, to be sitting at this table smiling at your betters! I'll--Ring the bell! Ring the bell, fool!' she continued impetuously, and scathed Mr. Thomasson with a look. 'Fetch the landlord, and let me see this impudent hussy thrown out! Ay, madam, I suppose you are here waiting for my son; but you have caught me instead, and I'll be bound. I'll--'

'You'll disgrace yourself,' the girl retorted with quiet pride. But she was very white. 'I know nothing of your son.'

'A fig for the lie, mistress!' cried the old harridan; and added, as was too much the fashion in those days, a word we cannot print. The Duchess of Northumberland had the greater name for coarseness; but Lady Dunborough's tongue was known in town. 'Ay, that smartens you, does it? 'she continued with cruel delight; for the girl had winced as from a blow. 'But here comes the landlord, and now out you go. Ay, into the streets, mistress! Hoity-toity, that dirt like you should sit at tables! Go wash the dishes, slut!'

There was not a waiter who saw the younger woman's shame who did not long to choke the viscountess. As for the attorney, though he had vague fears of privilege before his eyes, and was clogged by the sex of the assailant, he could remain silent no longer.

'My lady,' he cried, in a tone of trembling desperation, 'you will--you will repent this! You don't know what you are doing. I tell you that to-morrow--'

'What is this?' said a quiet voice. It was the landlord's; he spoke as he pushed his way through the group at the door. 'Has your ladyship some complaint to make?' he continued civilly, his eye taking in the scene--even to the elder woman, who through her tears kept muttering, 'Deary, we ought not to have come here! I told him we ought not to come here!' And then, before her ladyship could reply, 'Is this the party--that have Sir George Soane's rooms?' he continued, turning to the nearest servant.

Lady Dunborough answered for the man. 'Ay!' she said, pitiless in her triumph. 'They are! And know no more of Soane than the hair of my head! They are a party of fly-by-nights; and for this fine madam, she is a kitchen dish-washer at Oxford! And the commonest, lowest slut that--'

'Your ladyship has said enough,' the landlord interposed, moved by pity or the girl's beauty. 'I know already that there has been some mistake here, and that these persons have no right to the rooms they occupy. Sir George Soane has alighted within the last few minutes--'

'And knows nothing of them!' my lady cried, clapping her hands in triumph.

'That is so,' the landlord answered ominously. Then, turning to the bewildered attorney, 'For you, sir,' he continued, 'if you have anything to say, be good enough to speak. On the face of it, this is a dirty trick you have played me.'

'Trick?' cried the attorney.

'Ay, trick, man. But before I send for the constable--'

'The constable?' shrieked Mr. Fishwick. Truth to tell, it had been his own idea to storm the splendours of the Castle Inn; and for certain reasons he had carried it in the teeth of his companions' remonstrances. Now between the suddenness of the onslaught made on them, the strangeness of the surroundings, Sir George's inopportune arrival, and the scornful grins of the servants who thronged the doorway, he was cowed. For a moment his wonted sharpness deserted him; he faltered and changed colour. 'I don't know what you mean,' he said. 'I gave--I gave the name of Soane; and you--you assigned me the rooms. I thought it particularly civil, sir, and was even troubled about the expense--'

'Is your name Soane?' Mr. Smith asked with blunt-ness; he grew more suspicious as the other's embarrassment increased.

'No,' Mr. Fishwick admitted reluctantly. 'But this young lady's name--'

'Is Soane?'

'Yes.'

Mr. Thomasson stepped forward, grim as fate. 'That is not true,' he said coldly. 'I am a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, at present in attendance on her ladyship; and I identify this person'--he pointed to the girl--'as the daughter of a late servant of the College, and this woman as her mother. I have no doubt that the last thing they expected to find in this place was one who knew them.'

The landlord nodded. 'Joe,' he said, turning to a servant, 'fetch the constable. You will find him at the Falcon.'

'That is talking!' cried my lady, clapping her hands gleefully. 'That is talking!' And then addressing the girl, 'Now, madam,' she said, 'I'll have your pride pulled down! If I don't have you in the stocks for this, tease my back!'

There was a snigger at that, in the background, by the door; and a crush to get in and see how the rogues took their exposure; for my lady's shrill voice could be heard in the hall, and half the inn was running to listen. Mrs. Masterson, who had collapsed at the mention of the constable, and could now do nothing but moan and weep, and the attorney, who spluttered vain threats in a voice quavering between fear and passion evoked little sympathy. But the girl, who through all remained silent, white, and defiant, who faced all, the fingers of one hand drumming on the table before her, and her fine eyes brooding scornfully on the crowd, drew from more than one the compliment of a quicker breath and a choking throat. She was the handsomest piece they had seen, they muttered, for many a day--as alien, from the other two as light from darkness; and it is not in man's nature to see beauty humiliated, and feel no unpleasant emotion. If there was to be a scene, and she did not go quietly--in that case more than one in the front rank, who read the pride in her eyes, wished he were elsewhere.

Suddenly the crowd about the door heaved. It opened slowly, and a voice, airy and indifferent, was heard remarking, 'Ah! These are the people, are they? Poor devils! 'Then a pause; and then, in a tone of unmistakable surprise, 'Hallo!' the newcomer cried as he emerged and stared at the scene before him. 'What is this?'

The attorney almost fell on his knees. 'Sir George!' he screamed. 'My dear Sir George! Honoured sir, believe me I am innocent of any ill-meaning.'

'Tut-tut!' said Sir George, who might have just stepped out of his dressing-closet instead of his carriage, so perfect was his array, from the ruffles that fell gracefully over his wrists to the cravat that supported his chin. 'Tut-tut! Lord, man, what is the meaning of this?'

'We are going to see,' the landlord answered drily, forestalling the lawyer's reply. 'I have sent for the constable, Sir George.'

'But, Sir George, you'll speak for us?' Mr. Fishwick cried piteously, cutting the other short in his turn. 'You will speak for us? You know me. You know that I am a respectable man. Oh, dear me, if this were told in Wallingford!' he continued; 'and I have a mother aged seventy! It is a mistake--a pure mistake, as I am prepared to prove. I appeal to you, sir. Both I and my friends--'

He was stopped on that word; and very strangely. The girl turned on him, her cheeks scarlet. 'For shame!' she cried with indignation that seemed to her hearers inexplicable. 'Be silent, will you?'

Sir George stared with the others. 'Oh!' said Lady Dunborough, 'so you have found your voice, have you, miss--now that there is a gentleman here?'

'But--what is it all about?' Sir George asked.

'They took your rooms, sir,' the landlord explained respectfully.

'Pooh! is that all?' Soane answered contemptuously. What moved him he could not tell; but in his mind he had chosen his side. He did not like Lady Dunborough.

'But they are not,' the landlord objected, 'they are not the persons they say they are, Sir George.'

'Chut!' said Soane carelessly. 'I know this person, at any rate. He is respectable enough. I don't understand it at all. Oh, is that you, Thomasson?'

Mr. Thomasson had fallen back a pace on Sir George's entrance; but being recognised he came forward. 'I think that you will acknowledge, my dear sir,' he said persuasively--and his tone was very different from that which he had taken ten minutes earlier--'that at any rate--they are not proper persons to sit down with her ladyship.'

'But why should they sit down with her?' said Sir George the fashionable, slightly raising his eyebrows.

'Hem--Sir George, this is Lady Dunborough,' replied Mr. Thomasson, not a little embarrassed.

Soane's eyes twinkled as he returned the viscountess's glance. But he bowed profoundly, and with a sweep of his hat that made the rustics stare. 'Your ladyship's most humble servant,' he said. 'Allow me to hope that Mr. Dunborough is perfectly recovered. Believe me, I greatly regretted his mischance.'

But Lady Dunborough was not so foolish as to receive his overtures according to the letter. She saw plainly that he had chosen his side--the impertinent fop, with his airs and graces!--and she was not to be propitiated. 'Pray leave my son's name apart,' she answered, tossing her head contemptuously. 'After what has happened, sir, I prefer not to discuss him with you.'

Sir George raised his eyebrows, and bowed as profoundly as before. 'That is entirely as your ladyship pleases,' he said. Nevertheless he was not accustomed to be snubbed, and he set a trifle to her account.

'But for that creature,' she continued, trembling with passion, 'I will not sleep under the same roof with her.'

Sir George simpered. 'I am sorry for that,' he said. 'For I am afraid that the Falcon in the town is not the stamp of house to suit your ladyship.'

The viscountess gasped. 'I should like to know why you champion her,' she cried violently. 'I suppose you came here to meet her.'

'Alas, madam, I am not so happy,' he answered--with such blandness that a servant by the door choked, and had to be hustled out in disgrace. 'But since Miss--er--Masterson is here, I shall be glad to place my rooms at her--mother's disposal.'

'There are no rooms,' said the landlord. Between the two he was growing bewildered.

'There are mine,' said Sir George drily.

'But for yourself, Sir George?'

'Oh, never mind me, my good man. I am here to meet Lord Chatham, and some of his people will accommodate me.'

'Well, of course,' Mr. Smith answered, rubbing his hands dubiously--for he had sent for the constable--'of course, Sir George--if you wish it. I did not understand for whom the rooms were ordered, or--or this unpleasantness would not have arisen.'

'To be sure,' Sir George drawled good-naturedly. 'Give the constable half-a-crown, Smith, and charge it to me.' And he turned on his heel.

But at this appearance of a happy issue, Lady Dunborough's rage and chagrin, which had been rising higher and higher with each word of the dialogue, could no longer be restrained. In an awful voice, and with a port of such majesty that an ordinary man must have shaken in his shoes before her towering headdress, 'Am I to understand,' she cried, 'that, after all that has been said about these persons, you propose to harbour them?'

The landlord looked particularly miserable; luckily he was saved from the necessity of replying by an unexpected intervention.

'We are much obliged to your ladyship,' the girl behind the table said, speaking rapidly, but in a voice rather sarcastic than vehement. 'There were reasons why I thought it impossible that we should accept this gentleman's offer. But the words you have applied to me, and the spirit in which your ladyship has dealt with me, make it impossible for us to withdraw and lie under the--the vile imputations, you have chosen to cast upon me. For that reason,' she continued with spirit, her face instinct with indignation, 'I do accept from this gentleman--and with gratitude--what I would fain refuse. And if it be any matter to your ladyship, you have only your unmannerly words to thank for it.'

'Ho! ho!' the viscountess cried in affected contempt. 'Are we to be called in question by creatures like these? You vixen! I spit upon you!'

Mr. Thomasson smiled in a sickly fashion. For one thing, he began to feel hungry; he had not supped. For another, he wished that he had kept his mouth shut, or had never left Oxford. With a downcast air, 'I think it might be better,' he said, 'if your ladyship were to withdraw from this company.'

But her ladyship was at that moment as dangerous as a tigress. 'You think?' she cried. 'You think? I think you are a fool!'

A snigger from the doorway gave point to the words; on which Lady Dunborough turned wrathfully in that direction. But the prudent landlord had slipped away, Sir George also had retired, and the servants and others, concluding the sport was at an end, were fast dispersing. She saw that redress was not to be had, but that in a moment she would be left alone with her foes; and though she was bursting with spite, the prospect had no charms for her. For the time she had failed; nothing she could say would now alter that. Moreover her ladyship was vaguely conscious that in the girl, who still stood pitilessly behind the table, as expecting her to withdraw, she had met her match. The beautiful face and proud eyes that regarded her so steadfastly had a certain terror for the battered great lady, who had all to lose in a conflict, and saw dimly that coarse words had no power to hurt her adversary.

So Lady Dunborough, after a moment's hesitation, determined to yield the field. Gathering her skirts about her with a last gesture of contempt, she sailed towards the door, resolved not to demean herself by a single word. But halfway across the room her resolution, which had nearly cost her a fit, gave way. She turned, and withering the three travellers with a glance, 'You--you abandoned creature!' she cried. 'I'll see you in the stocks yet!' And she swept from the room.

Alas! the girl laughed: and my lady heard her!

Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the fact that she had not dined, and was leaving her supper behind her; perhaps it was only a general exasperation rendered her ladyship deaf. From one cause or another she lost something which her woman said to her--with no small appearance of excitement--as they crossed the hall. The maid said it again, but with no better success; and pressing nearer to say it a third time, when they were halfway up the stairs, she had the misfortune to step on her mistress's train. The viscountess turned in a fury, and slapped her cheek.

'You clumsy slut!' she cried. 'Will that teach you to be more careful?'

The woman shrank away, one side of her face deep red, her eyes glittering. Doubtless the pain was sharp; and though the thing had happened before, it had never happened in public. But she suppressed her feelings, and answered whimpering, 'If your ladyship pleases, I wished to tell you that Mr. Dunborough is here.'

'Mr. Dunborough? Here?' the viscountess stammered.

'Yes, my lady, I saw him alighting as we passed the door.'

CHAPTER X

MOTHER AND SON

Lady Dunborough stood, as if turned to stone by the news. In the great hall below, a throng of servants, the Pitt livery prominent among them, were hurrying to and fro, with a clatter of dishes and plates, a ceaseless calling of orders, a buzz of talk, and now and then a wrangle. But the lobby and staircase of the west wing, on the first floor of which she stood--and where the great man lay, at the end of a softly lighted passage, his door guarded by a man and a woman seated motionless in chairs beside it--were silent by comparison; the bulk of the guests were still at supper or busy in the east or inferior wing; and my lady had a moment to think, to trace the consequences of this inopportune arrival, and to curse, now more bitterly than before, the failure of her attempt to eject the girl from the house.

However, she was not a woman to lie down to her antagonists, and in the depth of her stupor she had a thought. Her brow relaxed; she clutched the maid's arm. 'Quick,' she whispered, 'go and fetch Mr. Thomasson--he is somewhere below. Bring him here, but do not let Mr. Dunborough see you as you pass! Quick, woman--run!'

The maid flew on her errand, leaving her mistress to listen and fret on the stairs, in a state of suspense almost unbearable. She caught her son's voice in the entrance hall, from which stately arched doorways led to the side lobbies; but happily he was still at the door, engaged in railing at a servant; and so far all was well. At any moment, however, he might stride into the middle of the busy group in the hall; and then if he saw Thomasson before the tutor had had his lesson, the trick, if not the game, was lost. Her ladyship, scarcely breathing, hung over the balustrade, and at length had the satisfaction of seeing Thomasson and the woman enter the lobby at the foot of the stairs. In a trice the tutor, looking scared, and a trifle sulky--for he had been taken from his meat--stood at her side.

Lady Dunborough drew a breath of relief, and by a sign bade the maid begone. 'You know who is below?' she whispered.

Mr. Thomasson nodded. 'I thought it was what you wished,' he said, with something in his tone as near mutiny as he dared venture. 'I understood that your ladyship desired to overtake him and reason with him.'

'But with the girl here?' she muttered. And yet it was true. Before she had seen this girl, she had fancied the task of turning her son to be well within her powers. Now she gravely doubted the issue; nay, was inclined to think all lost if the pair met. She told the tutor this, in curt phrase; and continued: 'So, do you go down, man, at once, and meet him at the door; and tell him that I am here--he will discover that for himself--but that the hussy is not here. Say she is at Bath or--or anywhere you please.'

Mr. Thomasson hesitated. 'He will see her,' he said.

'Why should he see her?' my lady retorted. 'The house is full. He must presently go elsewhere. Put him on a false scent, and he will go after her hot-foot, and not find her. And in a week he will be wiser.'

'It is dangerous,' Mr. Thomasson faltered, his eyes wandering uneasily.

'So am I,' the viscountess answered in a passion. 'And mind you, Thomasson,' she continued fiercely, 'you have got to side with me now! Cross me, and you shall have neither the living nor my good word; and without my word you may whistle for your sucking lord! But do my bidding, help me to checkmate this baggage, and I'll see you have both. Why, man, rather than let him marry her, I'd pay you to marry her! I'd rather pay down a couple of thousand pounds, and the living too. D'ye hear me? But it won't come to that if you do my bidding.'

Still Mr. Thomasson hesitated, shrinking from the task proposed, not because he must lie to execute it, but because he must lie to Dunborough, and would suffer for it, were he found out. On the other hand, the bribe was large; the red gabled house, set in its little park, and as good as a squire's, the hundred-acre glebe, the fat tithes and Easter dues--to say nothing of the promised pupil and freedom from his money troubles--tempted him sorely. He paused; and while he hesitated he was lost. For Mr. Dunborough, with the landlord beside him, entered the side-hall, booted, spurred, and in his horseman's coat; and looked up and saw the pair at the head of the staircase. His face, gloomy and discontented before, grew darker. He slapped his muddy boot with his whip, and, quitting the landlord without ceremony, in three strides was up the stairs. He did not condescend to Mr. Thomasson, but turned to the viscountess.

'Well, madam,' he said with a sneer.' Your humble servant. This is an unforeseen honour! I did not expect to meet you here.'

'I expected to meet you,' my lady answered with meaning.

'Glad to give you the pleasure,' he said, sneering again. He was evidently in the worst of tempers.' May I ask what has set you travelling?' he continued.

'Why, naught but your folly!' the viscountess cried.

'Thank you for nothing, my lady,' he said. 'I suppose your spy there'--and he scowled at the tutor, whose knees shook under him--'has set you on this. Well, there is time. I'll settle accounts with him by-and-by.'

'Lord, my dear sir,' Mr. Thomasson cried faintly, 'you don't know your friends!'

'Don't I? I think I am beginning to find them out,' Mr. Dunborough answered, slapping his boot ominously, 'and my enemies!' At which the tutor trembled afresh.

'Never mind him,' quoth my lady. 'Attend to me, Dunborough. Is it a lie, or is it not, that you are going to disgrace yourself the way I have heard?'

'Disgrace myself?' cried Mr. Dunborough hotly.

'Ay, disgrace yourself.'

'I'll flay the man that says it!'

'You can't flay me,' her ladyship retorted with corresponding spirit.' You impudent, good-for-nothing fellow! D'you hear me? You are an impudent, good-for-nothing fellow, Dunborough, for all your airs and graces! Come, you don't swagger over me, my lad! And as sure as you do this that I hear of, you'll smart for it. There are Lorton and Swanton--my lord can do as he pleases with them, and they'll go from you; and your cousin Meg, ugly and long in the tooth as she is, shall have them! You may put this beggar's wench in my chair, but you shall smart for it as long as you live!'

'I'll marry whom I like!' he said.

'Then you'll buy her dear,' cried my lady, ashake with rage.

'Dear or cheap, I'll have her!' he answered, inflamed by opposition and the discovery that the tutor had betrayed him. 'I shall go to her now! She is here.'

'That is a lie!' cried Lady Dunborough. 'Lie number one.'

'She is in the house at this moment!' he cried obstinately. 'And I shall go to her.'

'She is at Bath,' said my lady, unmoved. 'Ask Thomasson, if you do not believe me.'

'She is not here,' said the tutor with an effort.

'Dunborough, you'll outface the devil when you meet him!' my lady added--for a closing shot. She knew how to carry the war into the enemy's country.

He glared at her, uncertain what to believe. 'I'll see for myself,' he said at last; but sullenly, and as if he foresaw a check.

He was in the act of turning to carry out his intention, when Lady Dunborough, with great presence of mind, called to a servant who was passing the foot of the stairs. The man came. 'Go and fetch this gentleman the book,' she said imperiously, 'with the people's names. Bring it here. I want to see it.'

The man went, and in a moment returned with it. She signed to him to give it to Mr. Dunborough. 'See for yourself,' she said contemptuously.

She calculated, and very shrewdly, that as the lawyer and his companions had given the name of Soane and taken possession of Sir George's rooms, only the name of Soane would appear in the book. And so it turned out. Mr. Dunborough sought in vain for the name of Masterson or for a party of three, resembling the one he pursued; he found only the name of Sir George Soane entered when the rooms were ordered.

'Oh!' he said with an execration. 'He is here, is he? Wish you joy of him, my lady! Very well, I go on. Good night, madam!' The viscountess knew that opposition would stiffen him. 'Stop!' she cried.

But he was already in the hall, ordering fresh saddle-horses for himself and his man. My lady heard the order, and stood listening. Mr. Thomasson heard it, and stood quaking. At any moment the door of the room in which the girl was supping might open--it was adjacent to the hall--and she come out, and the two would meet. Nor did the suspense last a moment or two only. Fresh horses could not be ready in a minute, even in those times, when day and night post-horses stood harnessed in the stalls. Even Mr. Dunborough could not be served in a moment. So he roared for a pint of claret and a crust, sent one servant flying this way, and another that, hectored up and down the entrance, to the admiration of the peeping chambermaids; and for a while added much to the bustle. Once in those minutes the fateful door did open, but it emitted only a waiter. And in the end, Mr. Dunborough's horses being announced, he strode out, his spurs ringing on the steps, and the viscountess heard him clatter away into the night, and drew a deep breath of relief. For a day or two, at any rate, she was saved. For the time, the machinations of the creature below stairs were baffled.

CHAPTER XI

DR. ADDINGTON

It did not occur to Lady Dunborough to ask herself seriously how a girl in the Mastersons' position came to be in such quarters as the Castle Inn, and to have a middle-aged and apparently respectable attorney for a travelling companion. Or, if her ladyship did ask herself those questions, she was content with the solution, which the tutor out of his knowledge of human nature had suggested; namely, that the girl, wily as she was beautiful, knew that a retreat in good order, flanked after the fashion of her betters by duenna and man of business, doubled her virtue; and by so much improved her value, and her chance of catching Mr. Dunborough and a coronet.

There was one in the house, however, who did set himself these riddles, and was at a loss for an answer. Sir George Soane, supping with Dr. Addington, the earl's physician, found his attention wander from the conversation, and more than once came near to stating the problem which troubled him. The cosy room, in which the two sat, lay at the bottom of a snug passage leading off the principal corridor of the west wing; and was as remote from the stir and bustle of the more public part of the house as the silent movements of Sir George's servant were from the clumsy haste of the helpers whom the pressure of the moment had compelled the landlord to call in.

The physician had taken his supper earlier, but was gourmet enough to follow, now with an approving word, and now with a sigh, the different stages of Sir George's meal. In public, a starched, dry man, the ideal of a fashionable London doctor of the severer type, he was in private a benevolent and easy friend; a judge of port, and one who commended it to others; and a man of some weight in the political world. In his early days he had been a mad doctor; and at Batson's he could still disconcert the impertinent by a shrewd glance, learned and practised among those unfortunates.

With such qualifications, Dr. Addington was not slow to perceive Sir George's absence of mind; and presuming on old friendship--he had attended the younger man from boyhood--he began to probe for the cause. Raising his half-filled glass to the light, and rolling the last mouthful on his tongue, 'I am afraid,' he said, 'that what I heard in town was true?'

'What was it?' Soane asked, rousing himself.

'I heard, Sir George, that my Lady Hazard had proved an inconstant mistress of late?'

'Yes. Hang the jade! And yet--we could not live without her!'

'They are saying that you lost three thousand to my Lord March, the night before you left town?'

'Halve it.'

'Indeed? Still--an expensive mistress?'

'Can you direct me to a cheap one?' Sir George said rather crustily.

'No. But doesn't it occur to you a wife with money--might be cheaper?' the doctor asked with a twinkle in his eye.

Sir George shrugged his shoulders for answer, and turning from the table--the servant had withdrawn--brushed the crumbs from his breeches, and sat staring at the lire, his glass in his hand. 'I suppose--it will come to that presently,' he said, sipping his wine.

'Very soon,' the doctor answered, drily, 'unless I am in error.'

Sir George looked at him. 'Come, doctor!' he said. 'You know something! What is it?'

'I know that it is town talk that you lost seven thousand last season; and God knows how many thousands in the three seasons before it!'

'Well, one must live,' Sir George answered lightly.

'But not at that rate.'

'In that state of life, doctor, into which God has been pleased--you know the rest.'

'In that state of life into which the devil!' retorted the doctor with heat.' If I thought that my boy would ever grow up to do nothing better than--than--but there, forgive me. I grow warm when I think of the old trees, and the old pictures, and the old Halls that you fine gentlemen at White's squander in a night! Why, I know of a little place in Oxfordshire, which, were it mine by inheritance--as it is my brother's--I would not stake against a Canons or a Petworth!'

'And Stavordale would stake it against a bootjack--rather than not play at all!' Sir George answered complacently.

'The more fool he!' snapped the doctor.

'So I think.'

'Eh?'

'So I think,' Sir George answered coolly. 'But one must be in the fashion, doctor.'

'One must be in the Fleet!' the doctor retorted. 'To be in the fashion you'll ruin yourself! If you have not done it already,' he continued with something like a groan. 'There, pass the bottle. I have not patience with you. One of these fine days you will awake to find yourself in the Rules.'

'Doctor,' Soane answered, returning to his point, 'you know something.'

'Well--'

'You know why my lord sent for me.'

'And what if I do?' Dr. Addington answered, looking thoughtfully through his wine. 'To tell the truth, I do, Sir George, I do, and I wish I did not; for the news I have is not of the best. There is a claimant to that money come forward. I do not know his name or anything about him; but his lordship thinks seriously of the matter. I am not sure,' the doctor continued, with his professional air, and as if his patient in the other room were alone in his mind, 'that the vexation attending it has not precipitated this attack. I'm not--at all--sure of it. And Lady Chatham certainly thinks so.'

Sir George was some time silent. Then, with a fair show of indifference, 'And who is the claimant?' he asked.

'That I don't know,' Dr. Addington answered. 'He purports, I suppose, to be your uncle's heir. But I do know that his attorney has forwarded copies of documents to his lordship, and that Lord Chatham thinks the matter of serious import.'

'The worse for me,' said Sir George, forcing a yawn. 'As you say, doctor, your news is not of the best.'

'Nor, I hope, of the worst,' the physician answered with feeling. 'The estate is entailed?'

Sir George shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'It is mortgaged. But that is not the same thing.'

The doctor's face showed genuine distress. 'Ah, my friend, you should not have done that,' he said reproachfully. 'A property that has been in the family--why, since--'

'My great-grandfather the stay-maker's time,' Sir George answered flippantly, as he emptied his glass. 'You know Selwyn's last upon that? It came by bones, and it is going by bones.'

'God forbid!' said the physician, rubbing his gold-rimmed glasses with an air of kindly vexation, not unmixed with perplexity. 'If I thought that my boy would ever come to--to--'

'Buzz the gold-headed cane?' Sir George said gravely. 'Yes, doctor, what would you do?'

But the physician, instead of answering, looked fixedly at him, nodded, and turned away. 'You would deceive some, Sir George,' he said quietly, 'but you do not deceive me. When a man who is not jocular by nature makes two jokes in as many minutes, he is hard hit.'

'Insight?' drawled Sir George lazily. 'Or instinct.'

'Experience among madmen--some would call it,' the doctor retorted with warmth. 'But it is not. It is what you fine gentlemen at White's have no part in! Good feeling.'

'Ah!' said Soane; and then a different look came into his face. He stooped and poked the fire. 'Pardon me, doctor,' he said soberly. 'You are a good fellow. It is--well, of course, it's a blow. If your news be true, I stand to lose fifty thousand; and shall be worth about as much as a Nabob spends yearly on his liveries.'

Dr. Addington, in evident distress, thrust back his wig. 'Is it as bad as that?' he said. 'Dear, dear, I did not dream of this.'

'Nor I,' Sir George said drily. 'Or I should not have betted with March.'

'And the old house!' the doctor continued, more and more moved. 'I don't know one more comfortable.'

'You must buy it,' said Soane. 'I have spared the timber, and there is a little of the old wine left.'

'Dear, dear!' the doctor answered; and his sigh said more than the words. Apparently it was also more effectual in moving Sir George. He rose and began to pace the room, choosing a part where his face evaded the light of the candles that stood in heavy silver sconces on the dark mahogany. Presently he laughed, but the laugh was mirthless.

'It is quite the Rake's Progress,' he said, pausing before one of Hogarth's prints which hung on the wall. 'Perhaps I have been a little less of a fool and a little more of a rogue than my prototype; but the end is the same. D----n me, I am sorry for the servants, doctor--though I dare swear that they have robbed me right and left. It is a pity that clumsy fool, Dunborough, did not get home when he had the chance the other day.'

The doctor took snuff, put up his box, filled his glass and emptied it before he spoke. Then, 'No, no, Sir George, it has not come to that yet,' he said heartily. 'There is only one thing for it now. They must do something for you.' And he also rose to his feet, and stood with his back to the fire, looking at his companion.

'Who?' Soane asked, though he knew very well what the other meant.

'The Government,' said the doctor. 'The mission to Turin is likely to be vacant by-and-by. Or, if that be too much to ask, a consulship, say at Genoa or Leghorn, might be found, and serve for a stepping-stone to Florence. Sir Horace has done well there, and you--'

'Might toady a Grand-duke and bear-lead sucking peers--as well as another!' Soane answered with a gesture of disgust. 'Ugh, one might as well be Thomasson and ruin boys. No, doctor, that will not do. I had sooner hang myself at once, as poor Fanny Braddock did at Bath, or put a pistol to my head like Bland!'

'God forbid!' said the doctor solemnly.

Sir George shrugged his shoulders, but little by little his face lost its hardness. 'Yes, God forbid,' he said gently. 'But it is odd. There is poor Tavistock with a pretty wife and two children, and another coming; and Woburn and thirty thousand a year to inherit, broke his neck last week with the hounds; and I, who have nothing to inherit, why nothing hurts me!'

Dr. Addington disregarded his words.

'They must do something for you at home then,' he said, firmly set on his benevolent designs. 'In the Mint or the Customs. There should not be the least difficulty about it. You must speak to his lordship, and it is not to be supposed that he will refuse.'

Sir George grunted, and might have expressed his doubts, but at that moment the sound of voices raised in altercation penetrated the room from the passage. A second later, while the two stood listening, arrested by the noise, the door was thrown open with such violence that the candles flickered in the draught. Two persons appeared on the threshold, the one striving to make his way in, the other to resist the invasion.

The former was our friend Mr. Fishwick, who having succeeded in pushing past his antagonist, stared round the room with a mixture of astonishment and chagrin. 'But--this is not his lordship's room!' he cried. 'I tell you, I will see his lordship!' he continued. 'I have business with him, and--' here his gaze alighted on Sir George, and he stood confounded.

Dr. Addington took advantage of the pause. 'Watkins,' he said in an awful voice, 'what is the meaning of this unmannerly intrusion? And who is this person?'

'He persisted that he must see his lordship,' the servant, a sleek, respectable man in black, answered. 'And rather than have words about it at his lordship's door--which I would not for twice the likes of him!' he added with a malevolent glance at the attorney--'I brought him here. I believe he is mad. I told him it was out of the question, if he was the king of England or my lord duke. But he would have it that he had an appointment.'

'So I have!' cried Mr. Fishwick with heat and an excited gesture. 'I have an appointment with Lord Chatham. I should have been with his lordship at nine o'clock.'

'An appointment? At this time of night?' Dr. Addington returned with a freezing mien. 'With Lord Chatham? And who may you please to be, sir, who claim this privilege?'

'My name is Fishwick, sir, and I am an attorney,' our friend replied.

'A mad attorney?' Dr. Addington answered, affecting to hear him amiss.

'No more mad, sir, than you are!' Mr. Fishwick retorted, kindling at the insinuation. 'Do you comprehend me, sir? I come by appointment. My lord has been so good as to send for me, and I defy any one to close his door on me!'

'Are you aware, sir,' said the doctor, frowning under his wig with the port of an indignant Jupiter, 'what hour it is? It is ten o'clock.'

'It may be ten o'clock or it may be eleven o'clock,' the attorney answered doggedly. 'But his lordship has honoured me with a summons, and see him I must. I insist on seeing him.'

'You may insist or not as you please,' said Dr. Addington contemptuously. 'You will not see him. Watkins,' he continued, 'what is this cock-and-bull story of a summons? Has his lordship sent for any one?'

'About nine o'clock he said that he would see Sir George Soane if he was in the house,' Watkins answered. 'I did not know that Sir George was here, and I sent the message to his apartments by one of the men.'

'Well,' said Dr. Addington in his coldest manner, 'what has that to do with this gentleman?'

'I think I can tell you,' Sir George said, intervening with a smile. 'His party have the rooms that were reserved for me. And doubtless by an error the message which was intended for me was delivered to him.'

'Ah!' said Dr. Addington gruffly. 'I understand.'

Alas! poor Mr. Fishwick understood too; and his face, as the truth dawned on him, was one of the most comical sights ever seen. A nervous, sanguine man, the attorney had been immensely elated by the honour paid to him; he had thought his cause won and his fortune made. The downfall was proportionate: in a second his pomp and importance were gone, and he stood before them timidly rubbing one hand on another. Yet even in the ridiculous position in which the mistake placed him--in the wrong and with all his heroics wasted--he retained a sort of manliness. 'Dear me, dear me,' he said, his jaw fallen, 'I--Your most humble servant, sir! I offer a thousand apologies for the intrusion! But having business with his lordship, and receiving the message,' he continued in a tone of pathetic regret, 'it was natural I should think it was intended for me. I can say no more than that I humbly crave pardon for intruding on you, honourable gentlemen, over your wine.'

Dr. Addington bowed stiffly; he was not the man to forgive a liberty. But Sir George had a kindly impulse. In spite of himself, he could not refrain from liking the little man who so strangely haunted his steps. There was a spare glass on the table. He pushed it and the bottle towards Mr. Fishwick.

'There is no harm done,' he said kindly. 'A glass of wine with you, sir.'

Mr. Fishwick in his surprise and nervousness, dropped his hat, picked it up, and dropped it again; finally he let it lie while he filled his glass. His hand shook; he was unaccountably agitated. But he managed to acquit himself fairly, and with a 'Greatly honoured, Sir George. Good-night, gentlemen,' he disappeared.

'What is his business with Lord Chatham?' Dr. Addington asked rather coldly. It was plain that he did not approve of Sir George's condescension.

'I have no notion,' Soane answered, yawning. 'But he has got a very pretty girl with him. Whether she is laying traps for Dunborough--'

'The viscountess's son?'

'Just so--I cannot say. But that is the old harridan's account of it.'

'Is she here too?'

'Lord, yes; and they had no end of a quarrel downstairs. There is a story about the girl and Dunborough. I'll tell it you some time.'

'I began to think--he was here on your business,' said the doctor.

'He? Oh, no,' Sir George answered without suspicion, and turned to look for his candlestick. 'I suppose that he is in the case I am in--wants something and comes to the fountain of honour to get it.'

And bidding the other good-night, he went to bed; not to sleep, but to lie awake and reckon and calculate, and add a charge here to interest there, and set both against income, and find nothing remain.

He had sneered at the old home because it had been in his family only so many generations. But there is this of evil in an old house--it is bad to live in, but worse to part from. Sir George, straining his eyes in the darkness, saw the long avenue of elms and the rooks' nests, and the startled birds circling overhead; and at the end of the vista the wide doorway, aed. temp. Jac. 1--saw it all more lucidly than he had seen it since the September morning when he traversed it, a boy of fourteen, with his first gun on his arm. Well, it was gone; but he was Sir George, macaroni and fashionable, arbiter of elections at White's, and great at Almack's, more powerful in his sphere than a belted earl! But, then, that was gone too, with the money--and--and what was left? Sir George groaned and turned on his pillow and thought of Bland and Fanny Braddock. He wondered if any one had ever left the Castle by the suicide door, and, to escape his thoughts, lit a candle and read 'La Belle Héloïse,' which he had in his mail.

CHAPTER XII

JULIA

It is certain that if Sir George Soane had borne any other name, the girl, after the conversation which had taken place between them on the dingy staircase at Oxford, must have hated him. There is a kind of condescension from man to woman, in which the man says, 'My good girl, not for me--but do take care of yourself,' which a woman of the least pride finds to be of all modes of treatment the most shameful and the most humiliating. The masterful overtures of such a lover as Dunborough, who would take all by storm, are still natural, though they lack respect; a woman would be courted, and sometimes would be courted in the old rough fashion. But, for the other mode of treatment, she may be a Grizel, or as patient--a short course of that will sharpen not only her tongue, but her fingernails.

Yet this, or something like it, Julia, who was far from being the most patient woman in the world, had suffered at Sir George's hands; believing at the time that he was some one else, or, rather, being ignorant then and for just an hour afterwards that such a person as Sir George Soane existed. Enlightened on this point and on some others connected with it (which a sagacious reader may divine for himself) the girl's first feeling in face of the astonishing future opening before her had been one of spiteful exultation. She hated him, and he would suffer. She hated him with all her heart and strength, and he would suffer. There were balm and sweet satisfaction in the thought.

But presently, dwelling on the matter, she began to relent. The very completeness of the revenge which she had in prospect robbed her of her satisfaction. The man was so dependent on her, so deeply indebted to her, must suffer so much by reason of her, that the maternal instinct, which is said to be developed even in half-grown girls, took him under its protection; and when that scene occurred in the public room of the Castle Inn and he stood forward to shield her (albeit in an arrogant, careless, half-insolent way that must have wounded her in other circumstances), she was not content to forgive him only--with a smile; but long after her companion had fallen asleep, Julia sat brooding over the fire, her arms clasped about her knees; now reading the embers with parted lips and shining eyes, and now sighing gently--for 'la femme propose, mais Dieu dispose.' And nothing is certain.

After this, it may not have been pure accident that cast her in Sir George's way when he strolled out of the house next morning. A coach had come in, and was changing horses before the porch. The passengers were moving to and fro before the house, grooms and horse-boys were shouting and hissing, the guard was throwing out parcels. Soane passed through the bustle, and, strolling to the end of the High Street, saw the girl seated on a low parapet of the bridge that, near the end of the inn gardens, carries the Salisbury road over the Kennet. She wore a plain riding-coat, such as ladies then affected when they travelled and would avoid their hoops and patches. A little hood covered her hair, which, undressed and unpowdered, hung in a club behind; and she held up a plain fan between her complexion and the sun.

Her seat, though quiet and remote from the bustle--for the Salisbury road is the less frequented of the two roads--was in view of the gates leading to the Inn; and her extreme beauty, which was that of expression as well as feature, made her a mark for a dozen furtive eyes, of which she affected to be unconscious. But as soon as Sir George's gaze fell on her, her look met his frankly and she smiled; and then again her eyes dropped and studied the road before her, and she blushed in a way Soane found enchanting. He had been going into the town, but he turned and went to her and sat down on the bridge beside her, almost with the air of an old acquaintance. He opened the conversation by saying that it was a prodigious fine day; she agreed. That the Downs were uncommonly healthy; she said the same. And then there was silence.

'Well?' he said after a while; and he looked at her.

'Well?' she answered in the same tone. And she looked at him over the edge of her fan, her eyes laughing.

'How did you sleep, child?' he asked; while he thought, 'Lord! How handsome she is!'

'Perfectly, sir,' she answered, 'thanks to your excellency's kindness.'

Her voice as well as her eyes laughed. He stared at her, wondering at the change in her. 'You are lively this morning,' he said.

'I cannot say the same of you, Sir George,' she answered. 'When you came out, and before you saw me, your face was as long as a coach-horse's.'

Sir George winced. He knew where his thoughts had been. 'That was before I saw you, child,' he said. 'In your company--'

'You are scarcely more lively,' she answered saucily. 'Do you flatter yourself that you are?'

Sir George was astonished. He was aware that the girl lacked neither wit nor quickness; but hitherto he had found her passionate at one time, difficult and farouche at another, at no time playful or coquettish. Here, and this morning, she did not seem to be the same woman. She spoke with ease, laughed with the heart as well as the lips, met his eyes with freedom and without embarrassment, countered his sallies with sportiveness--in a word, carried herself towards him as though she were an equal; precisely as Lady Betty and the Honourable Fanny carried themselves. He stared at her.

And she, seeing the look, laughed in pure happiness, knowing what was in his mind, and knowing her own mind very well. 'I puzzle you?' she said.

'You do,' he answered. 'What are you doing here? And why have you taken up with that lawyer? And why are you dressed, child--'

'Like this?' she said, rising, and sitting down again. 'You think it is above my station?'

He shrugged his shoulders, declining to put his views into words; instead, 'What does it all mean?' he said.

'What do you suppose?' she asked, averting her eyes for the first time.

'Well, of course--you may be here to meet Dunborough,' he answered bluntly. 'His mother seems to think that he is going to marry you.'

'And what do you think, sir?'

'I?' said Sir George, reverting to the easy, half-insolent tone she hated. And he tapped his Paris snuff-box and spoke with tantalising slowness. 'Well, if that be the case, I should advise you to see that Mr. Dunborough's surplice--covers a parson.'

She sat still and silent for a full half-minute after he had spoken. Then she rose without a word, and without looking at him; and, walking away to the farther end of the bridge, sat down there with her shoulder turned to him.

Soane felt himself rebuffed, and for a moment let his anger get the better of him. 'D--n the girl, I only spoke for her own good!' he muttered; then reflecting that if he followed her she might remove again and make him ridiculous, he rose to go into the house. But apparently that was not what she wished. He was scarcely on his legs before she turned her head, saw that he was going, and imperiously beckoned to him.

He went to her, wondering as much at her audacity as her pettishness. When he reached her, 'Sir George,' she said, retaining her seat and looking gravely at him, while he stood before her like a boy undergoing correction, 'you have twice insulted me--once in Oxford when, believing Mr. Dunborough's hurt lay at my door, I was doing what I could to repair it; and again to-day. If you wish to see more of me, you must refrain from doing so a third time. You know, a third time--you know what a third time does. And more--one moment, if you please. I must ask you to treat me differently. I make no claim to be a gentlewoman, but my condition is altered. A relation has left me a--a fortune, and when I met you here last night I was on my way to Bath to claim it.'

Sir George passed from the surprise into which the first part of this speech had thrown him, to surprise still greater. At last, 'I am vastly glad to hear it,' he said. 'For most of us it is easier to drop a fortune than to find one.'

'Is it?' she said, and laughed musically, Then, moving her skirt to show him that he might sit down, 'Well, I suppose it is. You have no experience of that, I hope, sir?'

He nodded.

'The gaming-table?' she said.

'Not this time,' he answered, wondering why he told her. 'I had a grandfather, who made a will. He had a fancy to wrap up a bombshell in the will. Now--the shell has burst.'

'I am sorry,' she said; and was silent a moment. At length, 'Does it make--any great difference to you?' she asked naïvely.

Sir George looked at her as if he were studying her appearance. Then, 'Yes, child, it does,' he said.

She hesitated, but seemed to make up her mind. 'I have never asked you where you live,' she said softly; 'have you no house in the country?'

He suppressed something between an oath and a groan. 'Yes,' he said, 'I have a house.'

'What do you call it?'

'Estcombe Hall. It is in Wiltshire, not far from here.'

She looked at her fan, and idly flapped it open, and again closed it in the air. 'Is it a fine place?' she said carelessly.

'I suppose so,' he answered, wincing.

'With trees, and gardens, and woods?'

'Yes.'

'And water?'

'Yes. There is a river.'

'You used to fish in it as a boy?'

'Yes.'

'Estcombe! it is a pretty name. And shall you lose it?'

But that was too much for Soane's equanimity. 'Oh, d--n the girl!' he cried, rising abruptly, but sitting down again. Then, as she recoiled, in anger real or affected, 'I beg your pardon,' he said formally. 'But--it is not the custom to ask so many questions upon private matters.'

'Really, Sir George?' she said, receiving the information gravely, and raising her eyebrows. 'Then Estcombe is your Mr. Dunborough, is it?'

'If you will,' he said, almost sullenly.

'But you love it,' she answered, studying her fan, 'and I do not love--Mr. Dunborough!'

Marvelling at her coolness and the nimbleness of her wit, he turned so that he looked her full in the face. 'Miss Masterson,' he said, 'you are too clever for me. Will you tell me where you learned so much? 'Fore Gad, you might have been at Mrs. Chapone's, the way you talk.'

'Mrs. Chapone's?' she said.

'A learned lady,' he explained.

'I was at a school,' she answered simply, 'until I was fifteen. A godfather, whom I never knew, left money to my father to be spent on my schooling.'

'Lord!' he said. 'And where were you at school?'

'At Worcester.'

'And what have you done since?--if I may ask.'

'I have been at home. I should have taught children, or gone into service as a waiting-woman; but my father would keep me with him. Now I am glad of it, as this money has come to me.'

'Lord! it is a perfect romance!' he exclaimed. And on the instant he fancied that he had the key to the mystery, and her beauty. She was illegitimate--a rich man's child! 'Gad, Mr. Richardson should hear of it,' he continued with more than his usual energy. 'Pamela--why you might be Pamela!'

'That if you please,' she said quickly, 'for certainly I shall never be Clarissa.'

Sir George laughed. 'With such charms it is better not to be too sure!' he answered. And he looked at her furtively and looked away again. A coach bound eastwards came out of the gates; but it had little of his attention, though he seemed to be watching the bustle. He was thinking that if he sat much longer with this strange girl, he was a lost man. And then again he thought--what did it matter? If the best he had to expect was exile on a pittance, a consulship at Genoa, a governorship at Guadeloupe, where would he find a more beautiful, a wittier, a gayer companion? And for her birth--a fico! His great-grandfather had made money in stays; and the money was gone! No doubt there would be gibing at White's, and shrugging at Almack's; but a fico, too, for that--it would not hurt him at Guadeloupe, and little at Genoa. And then on a sudden the fortune of which she had talked came into his head, and he smiled. It might be a thousand; or two, three, four, at most five thousand. A fortune! He smiled and looked at her.

He found her gazing steadily at him, her chin on her hand. Being caught, she reddened and looked, away. He took the man's privilege, and continued to gaze, and she to flush; and presently, 'What are you looking at?' she said, moving uneasily.

'A most beautiful face,' he answered, with the note of sincerity in his voice which a woman's ear never fails to appreciate.

She rose and curtsied low, perhaps to hide the tell-tale pleasure in her eyes. 'Thank you, sir,' she said. And she drew back as if she intended to leave him.

'But you are not--you are not offended, Julia?'

'Julia?' she answered, smiling. 'No, but I think it is time I relieved your Highness from attendance. For one thing, I am not quite sure whether that pretty flattery was addressed to Clarissa--or to Pamela. And for another,' she continued more coldly, seeing Sir George wince under this first stroke--he was far from having his mind made up--'I see Lady Dunborough watching us from the windows at the corner of the house. And I would not for worlds relieve her ladyship's anxiety by seeming unfaithful to her son.'

'You can be spiteful, then?' Soane said, laughing.

'I can--and grateful,' she answered. 'In proof of which I am going to make a strange request, Sir George. Do not misunderstand it. And yet--it is only that before you leave here--whatever be the circumstances under which you leave--you will see me for five minutes.'

Sir George stared, bowed, and muttered 'Too happy.' Then observing, or fancying he observed, that she was anxious to be rid of him, he took his leave and went into the house.

For a man who had descended the stairs an hour before, hipped to the last degree, with his mind on a pistol, it must be confessed that he went up with a light step; albeit, in a mighty obfuscation, as Dr. Johnson might have put it. A kinder smile, more honest eyes he swore he had never seen, even in a plain face. Her very blushes, of which the memory set his blasé blood dancing to a faster time, were a character in themselves. But--he wondered. She had made such advances, been so friendly, dropped such hints--he wondered. He was fresh from the masquerades, from Mrs. Cornely's assemblies, Lord March's converse, the Chudleigh's fantasies; the girl had made an appointment--he wondered.

For all that, one thing was unmistakable. Life, as he went up the stairs, had taken on another and a brighter colour; was fuller, brisker, more generous. From a spare garret with one poor casement it had grown in an hour into a palace, vague indeed, but full of rich vistas and rosy distances and quivering delights. The corridor upstairs, which at his going out had filled him with distaste--there were boots in it, and water-cans--was now the Passage Beautiful; for he might meet her there. The day which, when he rose, had lain before him dull and monotonous--since Lord Chatham was too ill to see him, and he had no one with whom to game--was now full-furnished with interest, and hung with recollections--recollections of conscious eyes and the sweetest lips in the world. In a word, Julia had succeeded in that which she had set herself to do. Sir George might wonder. He was none the less in love.

CHAPTER XIII

A SPOILED CHILD

Julia was right in fancying that she saw Lady Dunborough's face at one of the windows in the south-east corner of the house. Those windows commanded both the Marlborough High Street and the Salisbury road, welcomed alike the London and the Salisbury coach, overlooked the loungers at the entrance to the town, and supervised most details of the incoming and outgoing worlds. Lady Dunborough had not been up and about half-an-hour before she remarked these advantages. In an hour her ladyship was installed in that suite, which, though in the east wing, was commonly reckoned to be one of the best in the house. Heaven knows how she did it. There is a pertinacity, shameless and violent, which gains its ends, be the crowd between never so dense. It is possible that Mr. Smith would have ousted her had he dared. It is possible he had to pay forfeit to the rightful tenants, and in private cursed her for an old jade and a brimstone. But when a viscountess sits herself down in the middle of a room and declines to budge, she cannot with decency be taken up like a sack of hops and dumped in the passage.

Her ladyship, therefore, won, and had the pleasure of viewing from the coveted window the scene between Julia and Sir George; a scene which gave her the profoundest satisfaction. What she could not see--her eyes were no longer all that they had been--she imagined. In five minutes she had torn up the last rag of the girl's character, and proved her as bad as the worst woman that ever rode down Cheapside in a cart. Lady Dunborough was not mealy-mouthed, nor one of those who mince matters.

'What did I tell you?' she cried. 'She will be on with that stuck-up before night, and be gone with morning. If Dunborough comes back he may whistle for her!'

Mr. Thomasson did not doubt that her ladyship was right. But he spoke with indifferent spirit. He had had a bad night, had lain anywhere, and dressed nowhere, and was chilly and unkempt. Apart from the awe in which he stood of her ladyship, he would have returned to Oxford by the first coach that morning.

'Dear me!' Lady Dunborough announced presently. 'I declare he is leaving her! Lord, how the slut ogles him! She is a shameless baggage if ever there was one; and ruddled to the eyes, as I can see from here. I hope the white may kill her! Well, I'll be bound it won't be long before he is to her again! My fine gentleman is like the rest of them--a damned impudent fellow!'

Mr. Thomasson turned up his eyes. 'There was something a little odd--does not your lady think so?'--he ventured to say, 'in her taking possession of Sir George's rooms as she did.'

'Did I not say so? Did I not say that very thing?'

'It seems to prove an understanding between them before they met here last night.'

'I'll take my oath on it!' her ladyship cried with energy. Then in a tone of exultation she continued, 'Ah! here he is again, as I thought! And come round by the street to mask the matter! He has down beside her again. Oh, he is limed, he is limed!' my lady continued, as she searched for her spying-glass, that she might miss no wit of the love-making.

The tutor was all complacence. 'It proves that your ladyship's stratagem,' he said, 'was to the point last night.'

'Oh, Dunborough will live to thank me for that!' she answered. 'Gadzooks, he will! It is first come first served with these madams. This will open his eyes if anything will.'

'Still--it is to be hoped she will leave before he returns,' Mr. Thomasson said, with a slight shiver of anticipation. He knew Mr. Dunborough's temper.

'Maybe,' my lady answered. 'But even if she does not--' There she broke of, and stood peering through the window. And suddenly, 'Lord's sake!' she shrieked, 'what is this?'

The fury of her tone, no less than the expletive--which we have ventured to soften--startled Mr. Thomasson to his feet. Approaching the window in trepidation--for her ladyship's wrath was impartial, and as often alighted on the wrong head as the right--the tutor saw that she had dropped her quizzing-glass, and was striving with shaking hands--but without averting her eyes from the scene outside--to recover and readjust it. Curious as well as alarmed, he drew up to her, and, looking over her shoulder, discerned the seat and Julia; and, alas! seated on the bench beside Julia, not Sir George Soane, as my lady's indifferent sight, prompted by her wishes, had persuaded her, but Mr. Dunborough!

The tutor gasped. 'Oh, dear!' he said, looking round, as if for a way of retreat. 'This is--this is most unfortunate.'

My lady in her wrath did not heed him. Shaking her fist at her unconscious son, 'You rascal!' she cried. 'You paltry, impudent fellow! You would do it before my eyes, would you? Oh, I would like to have the brooming of you! And that minx! Go down you,' she continued, turning fiercely on the trembling, wretched Thomasson--'go down this instant, sir, and--and interrupt them! Don't stand gaping there, but down to them, booby, without the loss of a moment! And bring him up before the word is said. Bring him up, do you hear?'

'Bring him up?' said Mr. Thomasson, his breath coming quickly. 'I?'

'Yes, you! Who else?'

'I--I--but, my dear lady, he is--he can be very violent,' the unhappy tutor faltered, his teeth chattering, and his cheek flabby with fright. 'I have known him--and perhaps it would be better, considering my sacred office, to--to--'

'To what, craven?' her ladyship cried furiously.

'To leave him awhile--I mean to leave him and presently--'

Lady Dunborough's comment was a swinging blow, which the tutor hardly avoided by springing back. Unfortunately this placed her ladyship between him and the door; and it is not likely that he would have escaped her cane a second time, if his wits, and a slice of good fortune, had not come to his assistance. In the midst of his palpitating 'There, there, my lady! My dear good lady!' his tune changed on a sudden to 'See; they are parting! They are parting already. And--and I think--I really think--indeed, my lady, I am sure that she has refused him! She has not accepted him?'

'Refused him!' Lady Dunborough ejaculated in scorn. Nevertheless she lowered the cane and, raising her glass, addressed herself to the window. 'Not accepted him? Bosh, man!'

'But if Sir George had proposed to her before?' the tutor suggested. 'There--oh, he is coming in! He has--he has seen us.'

It was too true. Mr. Dunborough, approaching the door with a lowering face, had looked up as if to see what witnesses there were to his discomfiture. His eyes met his mother's. She shook her fist at him. 'Ay, he has,' she said, her tone more moderate. 'And, Lord, it must be as you say! He is in a fine temper, if I am any judge.'

'I think,' said Mr. Thomasson, looking round, 'I had better--better leave--your ladyship to see him alone.'

'No,' said my lady firmly.

'But--but Mr. Dunborough,' the tutor pleaded, 'may like to see you alone. Yes, I am sure I had better go.'

'No,' said my lady more decisively; and she laid her hand on the hapless tutor's arm.

'But--but if your ladyship is afraid of--of his violence,' Mr. Thomasson stuttered, 'it will be better, surely, for me to call some--some of the servants.'

'Afraid?' Lady Dunborough cried, supremely contemptuous. 'Do you think I am afraid of my own son? And such a son! A poor puppet,' she continued, purposely raising her voice as a step sounded outside, and Mr. Dunborough, flinging open the door, appeared like an angry Jove on the threshold, 'who is fooled by every ruddled woman he meets! Ay, sir, I mean you! You! Oh, I am not to be browbeaten, Dunborough!' she went on; 'and I will trouble you not to kick my furniture, you unmannerly puppy. And out or in's no matter, but shut the door after you.'

Mr. Dunborough was understood to curse everybody; after which he fell into the chair that stood next the door, and, sticking his hands into his breeches-pockets, glared at my lady, his face flushed and sombre.

'Hoity-toity! are these manners?' said she. 'Do you see this reverend gentleman?'

'Ay, and G--d--him!' cried Mr. Dunborough, with a very strong expletive; 'but I'll make him smart for it by-and-by. You have ruined me among you.'

'Saved you, you mean,' said Lady Dunborough with complacency, 'if you are worth saving--which, mind you, I very much doubt, Dunborough.'

'If I had seen her last night,' he answered, drawing a long breath, 'it would have been different. For that I have to thank you two. You sent me to lie at Bath and thought you had got rid of me. But I am back, and I'll remember it, my lady! I'll remember you too, you lying sneak!'

'You common, low fellow!' said my lady.

'Ay, talk away!' said he; and then no more, but stared at the floor before him, his jaw set, and his brow as black as a thunder-cloud. He was a powerful man, and, with that face, a dangerous man. For he was honestly in love; the love was coarse, brutal, headlong, a passion to curse the woman who accepted it; but it was not the less love for that. On the contrary, it was such a fever as fills the veins with fire and drives a man to desperate things; as was proved by his next words.

'You have ruined me among you,' he said, his tone dull and thick, like that of a man in drink. 'If I had seen her last night, there is no knowing but what she would have had me. She would have jumped at it. You tell me why not! But she is different this morning. There is a change in her. Gad, my lady,' with a bitter laugh, 'she is as good a lady as you, and better! And I'd have used her gently. Now I shall carry her off. And if she crosses me I will wring her handsome neck!'

It is noticeable that he did not adduce any reason why the night had changed her. Only he had got it firmly into his head that, but for the delay they had caused, all would be well. Nothing could move him from this.

'Now I shall run away with her,' he repeated.

'She won't go with you,' my lady cried with scorn.

'I sha'n't ask her,' he answered. 'When there is no choice she will come to it. I tell you I shall carry her off. And if I am taken and hanged for it, I'll be hanged at Papworth--before your window.'

'You poor simpleton!' she said. 'Go home to your father.'

'All right, my lady,' he answered, without lifting his eyes from the carpet. 'Now you know. It will be your doing. I shall force her off, and if I am taken and hanged I will be hanged at Papworth. You took fine pains last night, but I'll take pains to-day. If I don't have her I shall never have a wife. But I will have her.'

'Fools cry for the moon,' said my lady. 'Any way, get out of my room. You are a fine talker, but I warrant you will take care of your neck.'

'I shall carry her off and marry her,' he repeated, his chin sunk on his breast, his hand rattling the money in his pocket.

'It is a distance to Gretna,' she answered. 'You'll be nearer it outside my door, my lad. So be stepping, will you? And if you take my advice, you will go to my lord.'

'All right; you know,' he said sullenly. 'For that sneak there, if he comes in my way, I'll break every bone in his body. Good-day, my lady. When I see you again I will have Miss with me.'

'Like enough; but not Madam,' she retorted. 'You are not such a fool as that comes to. And there is the Act besides!'

That was her parting shot; for all the feeling she had shown, from the opening to the close of the interview, she might have been his worst enemy. Yet after a fashion, and as a part of herself, she did love him; which was proved by her first words after the door had closed upon him.

'Lord!' she said uneasily. 'I hope he will play no Ferrers tricks, and disgrace us all. He is a black desperate fellow, is Dunborough, when he is roused.'

The crestfallen tutor could not in a moment recover himself; but he managed to say that he did not think Mr. Dunborough suspected Sir George; and that even if he did, the men had fought once, in which case there was less risk of a second encounter.

'You don't know him,' my lady answered, 'if you say that. But it is not that I mean. He'll do some wild thing about carrying her off. From a boy he would have his toy. I've whipped him till the blood ran, and he's gone to it.'

'But without her consent,' said Mr. Thomasson, 'it would not be possible.'

'I mistrust him,' the viscountess answered. 'So do you go and find this baggage, and drop a word to her--to go in company you understand. Lord! he might marry her that way yet. For once away she would have to marry him--ay, and he to marry her to save his neck. And fine fools we should look.'

'It's--it's a most surprising, wonderful thing she did not take him,' said the tutor thoughtfully.

'It's God's mercy and her madness,' quoth the viscountess piously. 'She may yet. And I would rather give you a bit of a living to marry her--ay, I would, Thomasson--than be saddled with such a besom!'

Mr. Thomasson cast a sickly glance at her ladyship. The evening before, when the danger seemed imminent, she had named two thousand pounds and a living. Tonight, the living. To-morrow--what? For the living had been promised all along and in any case. Whereas now, a remote and impossible contingency was attached to it. Alas! the tutor saw very clearly that my lady's promises were pie-crust, made to be broken.

She caught the look, but attributed it to another cause. 'What do you fear, man?' she said. 'Sho! he is out of the house by this time.'

Mr. Thomasson would not have ventured far on that assurance, but he had himself seen Mr. Dunborough leave the house and pass to the stables; and anxious to escape for a time from his terrible patroness, he professed himself ready. Knowing where the rooms, which the girl's party occupied, lay, in the west wing, he did not call a servant, but went through the house to them and knocked at the door.

He got no answer, so gently opened the door and peeped in. He discovered a pleasant airy apartment, looking by two windows over a little grass plot that flanked the house on that side, and lay under the shadow of the great Druid mound. The room showed signs of occupancy--a lady's cloak cast over a chair, a great litter of papers on the table. But for the moment it was empty.

He was drawing back, satisfied with his survey, when he caught the sound of a heavy tread in the corridor behind him. He turned; to his horror he discerned Mr. Dunborough striding towards him, a whip in one hand, and in the other a note; probably the note was for this very room. At the same moment Mr. Dunborough caught sight of the tutor, and bore down on him with a view halloa. Mr. Thomasson's hair rose, his knees shook under him, he all but sank down where he was. Fortunately at the last moment his better angel came to his assistance. His hand was still on the latch of the door; to open it, to dart inside, and to shoot the bolt were the work of a second. Trembling he heard Mr. Dunborough come up and slash the door with his whip, and then, contented with this demonstration, pass on, after shouting through the panels that the tutor need not flatter himself--he would catch him by-and-by.

Mr. Thomasson devoutly hoped he would not; and, sweating at every pore, sat down to recover himself. Though all was quiet, he suspected the enemy of lying in wait; and rather than run into his arms was prepared to stay where he was, at any risk of discovery by the occupants. Or there might be another exit. Going to one of the windows to ascertain this, he found that there was; an outside staircase of stone affording egress to the grass plot. He might go that way; but no!--at the base of the Druid mound he perceived a group of townsfolk and rustics staring at the flank of the building--staring apparently at him. He recoiled; then he remembered that Lord Chatham's rooms lay in that wing, and also looked over the gardens. Doubtless the countryfolk were watching in the hope that the great man would show himself at a window, or that, at the worst, they might see the crumbs shaken from a tablecloth he had used.

This alone would have deterred the tutor from a retreat so public: besides, he saw something which placed him at his ease. Beyond the group of watchers he espied three people strolling at their leisure, their backs towards him. His sight was better than Lady Dunborough's; and he had no difficulty in making out the three to be Julia, her mother, and the attorney. They were moving towards the Bath road. Freed from the fear of interruption, he heaved a sigh of relief, and, choosing the most comfortable chair, sat down on it.

It chanced to stand by the table, and on the table, as has been said, lay a vast litter of papers. Mr. Thomasson's elbow rested on one. He went to move it; in the act he read the heading: 'This is the last will and testament of me Sir Anthony Cornelius Soane, baronet, of Estcombe Hall, in the county of Wilts.'

'Tut-tut!' said the tutor. 'That is not Soane's will, that is his grandfather's.' And between idleness and curiosity, not unmingled with surprise, he read the will to the end. Beside it lay three or four narrow slips; he examined these, and found them to be extracts from a register. Apparently some one was trying to claim under the will; but Mr. Thomasson did not follow the steps or analyse the pedigree--his mind was engrossed by perplexity on another point. His thoughts might have been summed up in the lines--

'Not that the things themselves are rich or rare,
The wonder's how the devil they got there'--

in a word, how came the papers to be in that room? 'These must be Soane's rooms,' he muttered at last, looking about him. 'And yet--that's a woman's cloak. And that old cowskin bag is not Sir George's. It is odd. Ah! What is this?'

This was a paper, written and folded brief-wise, and indorsed: 'Statement of the Claimant's case for the worshipful consideration of the Eight Honourable the Earl of Chatham and others the trustees of the Estcombe Hall Estate. Without Prejudice.'

'So!' said the tutor. 'This may be intelligible.' And having assured himself by a furtive glance through the window that the owners of the room were not returning, he settled himself to peruse it. When he again looked up, which was at a point about one-third of the way through the document, his face wore a look of rapt, incredulous, fatuous astonishment.

CHAPTER XIV

A GOOD MAN'S DILEMMA

Ten minutes later Mr. Thomasson slid back the bolt, and opening the door, glanced furtively up and down the passage. Seeing no one, he came out, closed the door behind him, and humming an air from the 'Buona Figlinola,' which was then the fashion, returned slowly, and with apparent deliberation, to the east wing. There he hastened to hide himself in a small closet of a chamber, which he had that morning secured on the second floor, and having bolted the door behind him, he plumped down on the scanty bed, and stared at the wall, he was the prey of a vast amazement.

'Jupiter!' he muttered at last, 'what a--a Pactolus I have missed! Three months ago, two months ago, she would have gone on her knees to marry me! And with all that money--Lord! I would have died Bishop of Oxford. It is monstrous! Positively, I am fit to kill myself when I think of it!'

He paused awhile to roll the morsel on the palate of his imagination, and found that the pathos of it almost moved him to tears. But before long he fell from the clouds to more practical matters. The secret was his, but what was he going to do with it? Where make his market of it? One by one he considered all the persons concerned. To begin with, there was her ladyship. But the knowledge did not greatly affect the viscountess, and he did not trust her. He dismissed the thought of applying to her. It was the same with Dunborough; money or no money was all one to him, he would take the girl if he could get her. He was dismissed as equally hopeless. Soane came next; but Sir George either knew the secret, or must know it soon; and though his was a case the tutor pondered long, he discerned no profit he could claim from him. Moreover, he had not much stomach for driving a bargain with the baronet; so in the end Sir George too was set aside.

There remained only the Buona Figliuola--the girl herself. 'I might pay my court to her,' the tutor thought, 'but she would have a spite against me for last night's work, and I doubt I could not do much. To be sure, I might put her on her guard against Dunborough, and trust to her gratitude; but it is ten to one she would not believe me. Or I could let him play his trick--if he is fool enough to put his neck in a noose--and step in and save her at the last moment. Ah!' Mr. Thomasson continued, looking up to the ceiling in a flabby ecstasy of appreciation, 'If I had the courage! That were a game to play indeed, Frederick Thomasson!'

It was, but it was hazardous; and the schemer rose and walked the floor, striving to discover a safer mode of founding his claim. He found none, however; and presently, with a wry face, he took out a letter which he had received on the eve of his departure from Oxford--a letter from a dun, threatening process and arrest. The sum was one which a year's stipend of a fat living would discharge; and until the receipt of the letter the tutor, long familiar with embarrassment, had taken the matter lightly. But the letter was to the point, and meant business--a spunging house and the Fleet; and with the cold shade of the Rules in immediate prospect, Mr. Thomasson saw himself at his wits' end. He thought and thought, and presently despair bred in him a bastard courage.

Buoyed up by this he tried to picture the scene; the lonely road, the carriage, the shrieking girl, the ruffians looking fearfully up and down as they strove to silence her; and himself running to the rescue; as Mr. Burchell ran with the big stick, in Mr. Goldsmith's novel, which he had read a few months before. Then the struggle. He saw himself knocked--well, pushed down; after all, with care, he might play a fine part without much risk. The men might fly either at sight of him, or when he drew nearer and added his shouts to the girl's cries; or--or some one else might come up, by chance or summoned by the uproar! In a minute it would be over; in a minute--and what a rich reward he might reap.

Nevertheless he did not feel sure he would be able to do it. His heart thumped, and his smile grew sickly, and he passed his tongue again and again over his dry lips, as he thought of the venture. But do it or not when the time came, he would at least give himself the chance. He would attend the girl wherever she went, dog her, watch her, hang on her skirts; so, if the thing happened, he would be at hand, and if he had the courage, would save her.

'It should--it should stand me in a thousand!' he muttered, wiping his damp brow, 'and that would put me on my legs.'

He put her gratitude at that; and it was a great sum, a rich bribe. He thought of the money lovingly, and of the feat with trembling, and took his hat and unlocked his door and went downstairs. He spied about him cautiously until he learned that Mr. Dunborough had departed; then he went boldly to the stables, and inquired and found that the gentleman had started for Bristol in a post-chaise. 'In a middling black temper,' the ostler added, 'saving your reverence's presence.'

That ascertained, the tutor needed no more. He knew that Dunborough, on his way to foreign service, had lain ten days in Bristol, whistling for a wind; that he had landed there also on his return, and made--on his own authority--some queer friends there. Bristol, too, was the port for the plantations; a slave-mart under the rose, with the roughest of all the English seatown populations. There were houses at Bristol where crimping was the least of the crimes committed; in the docks, where the great ships, laden with sugar and tobacco, sailed in and out in their seasons, lay sloops and skippers, ready to carry all comers, criminal and victim alike, beyond the reach of the law. The very name gave Mr. Thomasson pause; he could have done with Gretna--which Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act had lately raised to importance--or Berwick, or Harwich, or Dover. But Bristol had a grisly sound. From Marlborough it lay no more than forty miles away by the Chippenham and Marshfield road; a post-chaise and four stout horses might cover the distance in four hours.

He felt, as he sneaked into the house, that the die was cast. The other intended to do it then. And that meant--'Oh, Lord,' he muttered, wiping his brow, 'I shall never dare! If he is there himself, I shall never dare!' As he crawled upstairs he went hot one moment and shivered the next; and did not know whether he was glad or sorry that the chance would be his to take.

Fortunately, on reaching the first floor he remembered that Lady Dunborough had requested him to convey her compliments to Dr. Addington, with an inquiry how Lord Chatham did. The tutor felt that a commonplace interview of this kind would settle his nerves; and having learned the position of Dr. Addington's apartments, he found his way down the snug passage of which we know and knocked at the door. A voice, disagreeably raised, was speaking on the other side of the door, but paused at the sound of his knock. Some one said 'Come in,' and he entered.

He found Dr. Addington standing on the hearth, stiff as a poker, and swelling with dignity. Facing him stood Mr. Fishwick. The attorney, flustered and excited, cast a look at Mr. Thomasson as if his entrance were an added grievance; but that done, went on with his complaint.

'I tell you, sir,' he said, 'I do not understand this. His lordship was able to travel yesterday, and last evening he was well enough to see Sir George Soane.'

'He did not see him,' the physician answered stiffly. There is no class which extends less indulgence to another than the higher grade of professional men to the lower grade. While to Sir George Mr. Fishwick was an odd little man, comic, and not altogether inestimable, to Dr. Addington he was an anathema.

'I said only, sir, that he was well enough to see him,' the lawyer retorted querulously. 'Be that as it may, his lordship was not seriously ill yesterday. To-day I have business of the utmost importance with him, and am willing to wait upon him at any hour. Nevertheless you tell me that I cannot see him to-day, nor to-morrow--'

'Nor in all probability the next day,' the doctor answered grimly.

Mr. Fishwick's voice rose almost to a shriek. 'Nor the next day?' he cried.

'No, nor the next day, so far as I can judge.'

'But I must see him! I tell you, sir, I must see him,' the lawyer ejaculated. 'I have the most important business with him!'

'The most important?'

'The most important!'

'My dear sir,' Dr. Addington said, raising his hand and clearly near the end of his patience, 'my answer is that you shall see him--when he is well enough to be seen, and chooses to see you, and not before! For myself, whether you see him now or never see him, is no business of mine. But it is my business to be sure that his lordship does not risk a life which is of inestimable value to his country.'

'But--but yesterday he was well enough to travel!' murmured the lawyer, somewhat awed. 'I--I do not like this!'

The doctor looked at the door.

'I--I believe I am being kept from his lordship!' Mr. Fishwick persisted, stuttering nervously. 'And there are people whose interest it is to keep me from his lordship. I warn you, sir, that if anything happens in the meantime--'

The doctor rang the bell.

'I shall hold you responsible!' Mr. Fishwick cried passionately. 'I consider this a most mysterious illness. I repeat, I--'

But apparently that was the last straw. 'Mysterious?' the doctor cried, his face purple with indignation. 'Leave the room, sir! You are not sane, sir! By God, you ought to be shut up, sir! You ought not to be allowed to go about. Do you think that you are the only person who wants to see His Majesty's Minister? Here is a courier come to-day from His Grace the Duke of Grafton, and to-morrow there will be a score, and a king's messenger from His Majesty among them--and all this trouble is given by a miserable, little, paltry, petti--Begone, sir, before I say too much!' he continued trembling with anger. And then to the servant, 'John, the door! the door! And see that this person does not trouble me again. Be good enough to communicate in writing, sir, if you have anything to say.'

With which poor Mr. Fishwick was hustled out, protesting but not convinced. It is seldom the better side of human nature that lawyers see; nor is an attorney's office, or a barrister's chamber, the soil in which a luxuriant crop of confidence is grown. In common with many persons of warm feelings, but narrow education, Mr. Fishwick was ready to believe on the smallest evidence--or on no evidence at all--that the rich and powerful were leagued against his client; that justice, if he were not very sharp, would be denied him; that the heavy purse had a knack of outweighing the righteous cause, even in England and in the eighteenth century. And the fact that all his hopes were staked on this case, that all his resources were embarked in it, that it had fallen, as it were, from heaven into his hands--wherefore the greater the pity if things went amiss--rendered him peculiarly captious and impracticable. After this every day, nay, every hour, that passed without bringing him to Lord Chatham's presence augmented his suspense and doubled his anxiety. To be put off, not one day, but two days, three days--what might not happen in three days!--was a thing intolerable, insufferable; a thing to bring the heavens down in pity on his head! What wonder if he rebelled hourly; and being routed, as we have seen him routed, muttered dark hints in Julia's ear, and, snubbed in that quarter also, had no resource but to shut himself up in his sleeping-place, and there brood miserably over his suspicions and surmises?

Even when the lapse of twenty-four hours brought the swarm of couriers, messengers, and expresses which Dr. Addington had foretold; when the High Street of Marlborough--a name henceforth written on the page of history--became but a slowly moving line of coaches and chariots bearing the select of the county to wait on the great Minister; when the little town itself began to throb with unusual life, and to take on airs of fashion, by reason of the crowd that lay in it; when the Duke of Grafton himself was reported to be but a stage distant, and there detained by the Earl's express refusal to see him; when the very KING, it was rumoured, was coming on the same business; when, in a word, it became evident that the eyes of half England were turned to the Castle Inn at Marlborough, where England's great statesman lay helpless, and gave no sign, though the wheels of state creaked and all but stood still--even then Mr. Fishwick refused to be satisfied, declined to be comforted. In place of viewing this stir and bustle, this coming and going as a perfect confirmation of Dr. Addington's statement, and a proof of his integrity, he looked askance at it. He saw in it a demonstration of the powers ranked against him and the principalities he had to combat; he felt, in face of it, how weak, how poor, how insignificant he was; and at one time despaired, and at another was in a frenzy, at one time wearied Julia with prophecies of treachery, at another poured his forebodings into the more sympathetic bosom of the elder woman. The reader may laugh; but if he has ever staked his all on a cast, if he has taken up a hand of twelve trumps, only to hear the ominous word 'misdeal!' he will find something in Mr. Fishwick's attitude neither unnatural nor blameworthy.

CHAPTER XV

AMORIS INTEGRATIO

During the early days of the Minister's illness, when, as we have seen, all the political world of England were turning their coaches and six towards the Castle Inn, it came to be the custom for Julia to go every morning to the little bridge over the Kennet, thence to watch the panorama of departures and arrivals; and for Sir George to join her there without excuse or explanation, and as if, indeed, nothing in the world were more natural. As the Earl's illness continued to detain all who desired to see him--from the Duke of Grafton's parliamentary secretary to the humblest aspirant to a tide-waitership--Soane was not the only one who had time on his hands and sought to while it away in the company of the fair. The shades of Preshute churchyard, which lies in the bosom of the trees, not three bowshots from the Castle Inn and hard by the Kennet, formed the chosen haunt of one couple. A second pair favoured a seat situate on the west side of the Castle Mound, and well protected by shrubs from the gaze of the vulgar. And there were others.

These Corydons, however, were at ease; they basked free from care in the smiles of their Celias. But Soane, in his philandering, had to do with black care that would be ever at his elbow; black care, that always when he was not with Julia, and sometimes while he talked to her, would jog his thoughts, and draw a veil before the future. The prospect of losing Estcombe, of seeing the family Lares broken and cast out, and the family stem, tender and young, yet not ungracious, snapped off short, wrung a heart that belied his cold exterior. Moreover, when all these had been sacrificed, he was his own judge how far he could without means pursue the life which he was living. Suspense, anxiety, sordid calculation were ever twitching his sleeve, and would have his attention. Was the claim a valid claim, and must it prevail? If it prevailed, how was he to live; and where, and on what? Would the Minister grant his suit for a place or a pension? Should he prefer that suit, or might he still by one deep night and one great hand at hazard win back the thirty thousand guineas he had lost in five years?

Such questions, troubling him whether he would or no, and forcing themselves on his attention when they were least welcome, ruffled at last the outward composure on which as a man of fashion he plumed himself. He would fall silent in Julia's company, and turning his eyes from her, in unworthy forgetfulness, would trace patterns in the dust with his cane, or stare by the minute together at the quiet stream that moved sluggishly beneath them.

On these occasions she made no attempt to rouse him. But when he again awoke to the world, to the coach passing in its cloud of dust, or the gaping urchin, or the clang of the distant dinner-bell, he would find her considering him with an enigmatical smile, that lay in the region between amusement and pity; her shapely chin resting on her hand, and the lace falling from the whitest wrist in the world. One day the smile lasted so long, was so strange and dubious, and so full of a weird intelligence, that it chilled him; it crept to his bones, disconcerted him, and set him wondering. The uneasy questions that had haunted him at the first, recurred. Why was this girl so facile, who had seemed so proud, and whose full lips curved so naturally? Was she really won, or was she with some hidden motive only playing with him? The notion was not flattering to a fine gentleman's vanity; and in any other case he would have given himself credit for conquest. But he had discovered that this girl was not as other girls; and then there was that puzzling smile. He had surprised it half a dozen times before.

'What is it?' he said abruptly, holding her eyes with his. This time he was determined to clear up the matter.

'What?' she asked in apparent innocence. But she coloured, and he saw that she understood.

'What does your smile mean, Pulcherrima?'

'Only--that I was reading your thoughts, Sir George,' she answered. 'And they were not of me.'

'Impossible!' he said. I vow, Julia--'

'Don't vow,' she answered quickly, 'or when you vow--some other time--I may not be able to believe you! You were not thinking of me, Sir George, but of your home, and the avenue of which you told me, and the elms in which the rooks lived, and the river in which you used to fish. You were wondering to whom they would go, and who would possess them, and who would be born in the room in which you were born, and who would die in the room in which your father died.'

'You are a witch!' he said, a spasm of pain crossing his face.

'Thank you,' she answered, looking at him over her fan. 'Last time you said, "D--n the girl!" It is clear I am improving your manners, Sir George. You are now so polite, that presently you will consult me.'

So she could read his very thoughts! Could set him on the rack! Could perceive when pain and not irritation underlay the oath or the compliment. He was always discovering something new in her; something that piqued his curiosity, and kept him amused. 'Suppose I consult you now?' he said.

THE CASTLE INN

BY

STANLEY J. WEYMAN

Author of

"A Gentleman of France," "Under the Red Robe,""The House of the Wolf," etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY

WALTER APPLETON CLARK

1898

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE CASTLE INN

CHAPTER I

A KNIGHT-ERRANT

CHAPTER II

A MISADVENTURE

CHAPTER III

TUTOR AND PUPILS--OLD STYLE

CHAPTER IV

PEEPING TOM OF WALLINGFORD

CHAPTER V

THE MEETING

CHAPTER VI

A FISH OUT OF WATER

CHAPTER VII

ACHILLES AND BRISEIS

CHAPTER VIII

THE OLD BATH ROAD

CHAPTER IX

ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON

CHAPTER X

MOTHER AND SON

CHAPTER XI

DR. ADDINGTON

CHAPTER XII

JULIA

CHAPTER XIII

A SPOILED CHILD

CHAPTER XIV

A GOOD MAN'S DILEMMA

CHAPTER XV

AMORIS INTEGRATIO

"A Gentleman of France," "Under the Red Robe,"
"The House of the Wolf," etc.