“Very true, my dear, but you will never prevail with him,” said his aunt gloomily. “It would make a great difference too.”
“And instead of this,” pursued Mr Grantham, with a strong sense of injury, “I find that this house has become little more than a gaming-hell! Nothing could be more unfortunate! I think you should have been more careful, ma’am!”
Lady Bellingham was quite crushed by this severity, but could not feel that Kit had entirely grasped the exigencies of her situation. She tried, in a half-hearted way, to make him understand how difficult it was for a widow with expensive tastes and a nephew and a niece dependent upon her to live a restricted income, but as his mind seemed to be all wholly taken up with his own problems, it was doubtful if attended to much that she said. At the first pause in her rambling explanation, he favoured her with a description of Arabella’s manifold charms, and expressed his conviction that if anything were to stand between him and marriage to his lady, he should find himself unable to support life, and might just as well blow his brains out and be done with it.
Lady Bellingham was horrified to hear such sentiments on his lips, and begged him to consider her nerves. His sister, when the conversation was reported to her, merely replied that she had listened to much the same stuff from Lord Mablethorpe, who was now falling in love with Phoebe as fast as he could.
“But Kit is so impulsive!” sighed Lady Bellingham. “I must say, it would be a splendid thing if he were to marry an heiress, my love, and I am very sorry if anything I have done should put a spoke in his wheel.”
“How dare Kit say such a thing to you?” exclaimed Deborah. “I never heard of anything so ungrateful in my life! If he talks in that vein to me, he shall soon hear what I think of his folly! As for his marrying an heiress, pooh! It will come to nothing, ma’am, for he has been in love a dozen times before, and will doubtless be in love a dozen times again. Who is the girl?”
“Oh, I don’t know! He did not tell me, and I was too distracted to ask! My dearest love, he is not at all pleased with us for keeping a gaming-house, and what he will say if he hears of the mortgage, and that horrid man’s foreclosing on me, I shudder to think!”
“You have nothing to worry about on that score, aunt: there will be no foreclosure.”
Miss Grantham spoke with a note of certainty in her voice, for she had received a note, brought round by hand from Mr Kennet’s lodging, reminding her to prepare her cellar for a guest. She had implicit faith in Kennet, and felt perfectly sure that he would contrive to deliver the arch-enemy into her hands by nightfall. Lady Bellingham was expecting a fairly numerous gathering of people in her saloons that evening, and the only question now troubling Miss Grantham was how Kennet and Silas would manage to carry their prisoner into the cellar unobserved. As she could think of no way by which she might assist them, and supposed they must have taken this problem into account, she very sensibly put it out of her head, and went upstairs to change her green saque for an evening gown of dull yellow brocade.
Lady Bellingham had meanwhile presented her nephew to Miss Laxton, first impressing on him that he must not divulge her presence in the house to a living soul. His sister had already explained to him the circumstances leading up to Phoebe’s arrival in St James’s Square, and although he was inclined to think it was excessively imprudent of her to have interfered with what was no concern of hers, he was not proof against the al peal of Phoebe’s soft brown eyes, and air of fragility, and so began to think Deborah had acted in a very proper manner.
He had very little opportunity to converse privately wit Deborah before she went up to change her dress, but he did catch her alone for a few minutes on her way down again to the dining-room, and begged her to tell him whether it was true that she had refused a very advantageous offer of marriage. She replied truthfully that she had not done so, but when she saw how his face brightened she added that she had no real intention of marrying Mablethorpe, although she did not at preset wish this known.
“You are the strangest girl!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t you mean to marry him? I am sure you cannot hope for a better offer! They say he will come into a very pretty fortune, and aunt tells me he is perfectly amiable. I do not know what can ail you!”
“I am not in love with him,” replied Deborah, adding with rather a saucy smile: “You will understand that, I am persuaded!”
He sighed. “Yes, indeed I do, but the cases are not the same. You do not love anyone else, do you?”
“Certainly not, but I am not too old yet to fall in love, I hope
He looked at her rather anxiously. “My aunt mentioned Lord Ormskirk, Deb. I could not well make out what she meant: you know how she will run on! But it did not sound to me—In short, you are not contemplating anything of clandestine nature, are you?”
“No, no!” she assured him. “You need have no fears!”
“I was sure you could not be! But everything seems to me topsy-turvy here now—But I can trust you!”
“I hope so indeed. But can I trust you, Kit? This is very: shocking news, that you are meaning to be married!”
He laughed, and squeezed her arm. “You will always funning! Wait until you see her! You will understand then. She is the tiniest, daintiest little darling you can imagine, at with such countenance, such pretty, taking ways! Only ten one they will not let her marry me, more particularly since her aunt has allowed her house to become a haunt of gamesters. I was never so vexed!”
“If you do not like it, let me advise you to be less expensive said Deborah roundly. “It is not for you to reproach Aunt Lizzie, after all! You cannot suppose that she keeps a gaminghouse from her own choice.”
He looked a good deal mortified, and muttered something about having had no idea that things had come to this pass. “I suppose it was Lucius who put the idea into my aunt’s head. I wonder that he should have encouraged you to lend yourself to it!”
“My dear Kit, Lucius has no such nice notions! I could not leave my aunt to struggle alone. You must understand too that I am considered an attraction in the saloons!”
“How can you talk so! I declare, it makes me inclined to sell out. I do not like to have my sister playing hostess to a set of gamesters! Where is Lucius? Shall I see him tonight?”
“Undoubtedly,” replied Deborah, thinking that Lucius Kennet ought by now to be on his way to the house, and hoping very much that he had not failed to accomplish his task.
Chapter 11
Mr Ravenscar came to the rendezvous in the Park alone, and on foot, as Kennet had hoped he would, when he appointed a meeting-place at no great distance from his house, and in one of the walks a little way away from the carriage-road. He knew that unless he drove himself Ravenscar either walked, or took a hackney, and it was not likely that he would have his curricle out so late in the day. He had himself hired a closed vehicle whose owner, a villainous-looking individual with a cauliflower ear, was vouched for by Silas. For five guineas, he was ready, he said jovially, to assist in a murder, and if it were a mere matter of abduction he counted it a very slight piece of work, and was happy to be of service. He bit the gold pieces that were given him, and said that he liked to have to do with honest culls. He engaged to hold his carriage in readiness in the Park, and to be deaf and blind to his employers’ activities.
Mr Ravenscar saw the carriage as he crossed the road towards the path where he expected to meet Miss Grantham, and he supposed it to be hers. It was already dusk, and the Park was almost deserted. What reason Deborah could have for appointing a meeting-place in such secrecy, and at such an hour, he could not imagine. He would not have been surprised to find that there was some trick brewing, and was prepared to encounter all the feminine weapons of tears, cajolery, pleadings and vapours. That she hoped to induce him to relent he was sure; he suspected, with a cynical twist to his mouth, that she was regretting her rejection of his fantastic offer of twenty thousand pounds, and determined that no arts of hers should prevail upon him to repeat the off
er, or even the half of it. She might think herself fortunate to get the mortgage and the bill into her hands.
The path down which he was wending his way lay between beds of autumn flowers and was screened from the road by a belt of trees, which made it so dark, in the failing light, that he could not see many yards ahead. A rustic seat, where Miss Grantham should have met him, loomed vaguely ahead, beside a clump of flowering shrubs. No one was in sight. Ravenscar paused, frowning, and suddenly suspicious. It was no longer fashionable to wear a sword, and he carried nothing but his walking-cane in his hand. Some instinct of danger made him tighten his grip on this, but before he had well grasped that Miss Grantham had not kept her appointment with him, Silas Wantage had sprung out from behind the bush with a club it his hand, and came at him in a rush.
Ravenscar escaped the blow aimed at his head only by the swiftness with which he ducked. The blow missed him, and he sprang back, holding his cane like a rapier. It was too late to enable him to recognize Wantage; his first thought was that he had been set upon by a footpad. When Wantage came or again, the cane caught him so shrewdly across the elbow-join that his club-hand dropped and he let out a grunt of pain. In that moment Ravenscar saw his chance, dropped his cane, and went in with a left and a right to the jaw. Silas’s head went back but he had not spent ten years in the Ring for nothing, and he recovered quickly, abandoning his club, and covering up in this manner of an experienced bruiser. “Come on, then!” hi growled, pleased that it should have come to a turn-up after all.
Mr. Ravenscar did come on, but Lucius Kennet, anxious to finish the business, and fearing that they might at any moment be surprised by a Park keeper, or some late wayfarer, ran out from his hiding-place behind Ravenscar and clubbed him be fore he realized that he had two opponents instead of only one.
Mr Ravenscar dropped where he stood. Silas Wantage said angrily: “You hadn’t ought to have done that! Hitting of him from behind, and spoiling the prettiest set-to I’ve had in years! That was a foul blow, Mr Kennet, sir, and I don’t hold with such!”
“Don’t stand there chattering, you fool!” said Kennet, kneeling down beside Ravenscar’s inert body. “He’ll come to himself in a minute! Help me to tie him up!”
Silas somewhat sulkily produced two lengths of whipcord, and began to bind one about Ravenscar’s ankles, while Kennet lashed his wrists behind his back, and gagged him with a handkerchief, and a scarf.
“I said he’d peel to advantage, and so he would,” said Silas. “Did you see the right he landed to my jaw? Ah, he knows his way about, he does! Fair rattled my bone-box, I can tell you. And then you goes and lays him out before I’ve had time to do so much as draw his cork!”
“I’m thinking it was your own cork would have been drawn,” retorted Kennet, making his knots fast. “Take you his legs, man, and I’ll take his head. We’ll have him safe hidden in the carriage before he comes round.”
“I don’t deny he’s fast,” admitted Silas, helping to raise Mr Ravenscar from the ground. “But it goes against the grain with me to see as likely a bruiser knocked out by a foul, Mr Kennet, and that’s the truth!”
By the time they had borne Mr Ravenscar’s body to the waiting carriage, both men were somewhat out of breath, and extremely glad to be able to dump their burden on the back seat. Mr Ravenscar was no lightweight.
The carriage had left the Park, and was rumbling over the cobbled streets when Ravenscar stirred, and opened his eyes. He was conscious first of a swimming head that ached and throbbed, and next of his bonds. He made one convulsive attempt to free his hands.
“Ah, now, be easy!” said Kennet in his ear. “There’s no harm will come to you at all if you’re sensible, Mr Ravenscar.”
Mr Ravenscar was dizzy, and bewildered, but he knew that voice. He became still, rigid with anger: anger at Miss Grantham’s perfidy, anger at his own folly in allowing himself to be led into such a trap.
Another and deeper voice spoke in the darkness of the carriage. “You went down to a foul,” it said apologetically. “That weren’t none of my doing, for milling a cove down from behind is what I don’t hold with, and never did, “specially a cove as stands up as well as you do, sir, and shows such a handy bunch of fives. But you hadn’t ought to have gone a-persecuting of Miss Deb, when all’s said.”
Mr Ravenscar did not recognize this voice, but the language informed him that he was in the company of a bruiser. Hi closed his eyes, trying to overcome his dizziness, and to collect his wits.
By the time the carriage drew up outside Lady Bellingham’s house, it was dark enough to enable the conspirators to smuggle their prisoner down the area steps without being ob served either by a man who was walking away in the direction of Pall Mall, or by two chairmen waiting outside a house farther down the square.
The basement of Lady Bellingham’s house was very large very ill-lit, and rambling enough to resemble a labyrinth more nearly than the kitchen-quarters of a well-appointed mansion The cellar destined for Mr Ravenscar’s temporary occupation was reached at the end of a stone-paved corridor, and contained, besides a quantity of store-cupboards, most of Lady Bellingham’s trunks and cloak-bags; a collection of empty band-boxes, stacked up against one wall; and a Windsor chair thoughtfully placed there by Miss Grantham.
Mr Ravenscar was set down on the chair by his panting bearers. Silas Wantage, who had provided himself with the lantern that stood on a table just inside the area-door, critically surveyed him, and gave it as his opinion that he would do. Mr Kennet shook out his ruffles, and smiled upon the victim in a way that made Mr Ravenscar long to have his hands free for only two minutes.
“I’m thinking the second round goes to Deb, Mr Ravenscar. Don’t you be worrying your head, however, for it’s not for long she means to keep you here! We’ll be leaving you now for a while. You will be wanting to think over your situation, I dare swear.”
“Ay, we’d best tell Miss Deb we have him safe,” agreed Silas
Both men then left the cellar, taking the lantern with them and locking the heavy door behind them. Mr Ravenscar was left to darkness and reflection.
Abovestairs, dinner was over, but none of the expectant visitors to the saloons had yet arrived. Mr Kennet strolled into the little back-parlour on the half-landing, where the three ladies were sitting with Kit Grantham, and directed the ghost of a wink at Deborah before going up to shake hands with her brother. It was a little while before any opportunity for exchanging a private word with him occurred, but when he had greeted Kit, and each had asked the other a number of jovial questions, Lady Bellingham recollected that on the previous evening the E.O. table had not seemed to her to be running true, and desired Kennet to inspect it. As he followed her out of the room, he passed Miss Grantham’s chair, smiled down at her, and dropped a large iron key in her lap. She covered it at once with her handkerchief, torn between guilt and triumph, and in a few minutes murmured an excuse, and left the room.
She found Silas Wantage in the front-hall, ready to open the door to the evening’s guests. “Silas! Did you—did you have any trouble?”
“No,” said Wantage. “Not to say trouble. But he displays to remarkable advantage, I will say, nor I don’t hold with hitting him over the head with a cudgel from behind, which was what Kennet done.”
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Miss Grantham, turning pale. “Has he hurt him?”
“Not to signify, he hasn’t. But I would have milled him down, for all he planted me a wisty castor right in the bonebox. What’s to be done now, missie?”
“I must see him,” said Miss Grantham resolutely.
“I’d best come with you, then, and fetch a lantern.”
“I will take a branch of candles down. The servants might notice it if you took the lantern away. But please come with me, Silas!”
“I’ll come right enough, but you’ve no call to be scared, Miss Deb: he’s tied up as neat as a spring chicken.”
“I am not scared,” said Miss Grantham coldly.
&n
bsp; She fetched one of the branches of candles from the supper room, and Silas, having instructed one of the waiters to mount guard over the door, led the way down the precipitous stairs to the cellars. He took the big key from her, and flung open the door of Mr Ravenscar’s prison. Mr Ravenscar, looking under frowning brows, was gratified by the vision of a tall goddess in a golden dress, holding up a branch of candles whose flaming tongues of light touched her hair with fire. Not being in a mood to appreciate beauty, he regarded this agreeable picture without any change in his expression.
Miss Grantham said indignantly: “There was no need to leave him with that horrid thing tied round his mouth! No one would hear him in this place, if he shouted for help! Untie ii this instant, Silas!”
Mr Wantage grinned, and went to remove the scarf and the gag. Miss Grantham saw that her prisoner was rather pale, and a good deal dishevelled, and said, in a voice of some concern, “I am afraid they handled you roughly! Silas, please to fetch, glass of wine for Mr Ravenscar!”
“You are too good, ma’am!” said Mr Ravenscar, with bitter emphasis.
“Well, I am sorry if you were hurt, but it was quite your own fault,” said Miss Grantham defensively. “If you had not done such a shabby thing to me I would not have had you kidnapped. You have behaved in the most odious fashion, and you deserve it all!” A rankling score came into her mind. She added: “You did me the honour once, Mr Ravenscar, of telling me that I should be whipped at the cart’s tail!”
“Do you expect me to beg your pardon?” he demanded. “You will be disappointed, my fair Cyprian!”
Miss Grantham flushed rosily, and her eyes darted fire. “I you dare to call me by that name I will hit you!” she said between her teeth.
“You may do what you please—strumpet!” replied Mr Ravenscar.
She took one hasty step towards him, and then checked saying in a mortified tone: “You are not above taking an unfair advantage of me. You know very well I can’t hit you when you have your hands tied.”
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