Arabella

by Джорджетт Хейер

  After passing the entrances to several noisome alleys, the hackney turned into Willow Walk, and proceeded down it for some way before drawing up outside a dingy house, whose windows showed, besides fluttering oddments of washing hung out to dry, several broken panes of glass. In the open doorway, an old woman sat in a rocking-chair, puffing at a clay pipe, and engaged in conversation with a younger female, who held a squalling infant on one arm, which she from time to time shook, or refreshed from a black bottle, from which she herself took frequent pulls. Arabella had no positive knowledge of what was in that black bottle, but that it must contain strong liquor she felt convinced. The thought of Bertram was momentarily banished from her head; as Mr. Scunthorpe handed her down from the hackney, and punctilliously brushed off the straws that clung to the flounce of her simple cambric dress, she opened her reticule, hunted in it for a shilling, and astonished the mother of the infant by pressing it into her hand, and saying earnestly: “Pray buy the baby some milk! Oh, pray do not give it that horrid stuff!”

  Both women stared at her with fallen jaws. The old Irishwoman, the first to regain command over her faculties, burst into a cackle of mirth, and informed her that she was talking to no less a personage than Quartern Sue. This conveyed little to Arabella, but while she was still puzzling over the appellation, Quartern Sue, recovering from her stupefaction, had launched forth into a catalogue of her embarrassments, and was holding her hand cupped suggestively. Mr. Scunthorpe, beads of sweat standing upon his brow, took it upon himself to hustle his charge into the house, whispering to her that she must not get into talk with such ill-famed women. Quartern Sue, never one to let slip an opportunity, followed them, her beggar’s whine rising to a crescendo, but was repulsed at the foot of a rickety, uncarpeted stairway by a strapping young woman, with a tousle of greasy yellow hair, a countenance which not all the ravages of gin had entirely deprived of comeliness, and a tawdry dress, stained in various places, and with the bodice cut so low as to reveal glimpses of a dirty shift. This lady, having driven Quartern Sue forth by a series of remarks, not one of which was intelligible to Arabella, turned and confronted the genteel visitors with a belligerent look on her face, and her arms set widely akimbo. She demanded of Mr. Scunthorpe, with whom she appeared to be acquainted, what he meant by bringing a flash mort to the ken. Mr. Scunthorpe uttered the one word, Sister! in strangled accents, upon which the blonde beauty turned a pair of fierce, bloodshot eyes upon Arabella, and ejaculated: “Ho! Sister, is it?”

  “Girl who brought me the message!” explained Mr. Scunthorpe in a blushful aside to Arabella.

  The blonde beauty needed no other passport to Arabella’s favour. If she was conscious—as she could hardly have-failed to have been—of the strong aroma of daffy which hung about the person of Leaky Peg, she gave no sign of it, but started forward, with her hands held out, and impulsive words on her lips. “Oh, are you the girl who has been kind to my brother? You must let me thank you! I can never, never repay you! Mr. Scunthorpe here has been telling me that it was you who took care of him when he—when he came to this place!”

  Leaky Peg stared very hard at her for a moment, and then said pugnaciously: “I found the covey on the mop, blue as megrim, see? and him no more than a mouth! Half flash and half foolish, that’s him. Strike me, I don’t know what I see in the hick!”

  “Miss Tallant, better come upstairs!” said the anguished Mr. Scunthorpe, to whom Leaky Peg’s vocabulary was rather more intelligible than to Arabella.

  “You dub your mummer, you death’s head on a mop-stick!” Leaky Peg advised him. “Leave me and the swell mort be!” She turned back to Arabella, and said roughly: “Lurched, ain’t he? He tells me there’s a fastener out after him. He hadn’t so much as a meg in his truss when I come up with him in the boozing-ken. I took him along with me—strike me if I know why!” She jerked her thumb towards the stairs. “You want to take him away: this ain’t his lay, nor it ain’t mine neither! Spouting a kid’s mish all to buy him mutton and smash, which he don’t eat! Me! You take him off; you’re welcome!”

  Gathering from these words that Leaky Peg had been keeping Bertram supplied with food, Arabella, tears standing in her eyes, seized one of her hands, and pressed it fervently between both her own, saying: “How good you are! Indeed, I thank you! He is only a boy, you know, and what must have become of him without you I dare not think!”

  “Well, it’s little enough I got from it!” remarked Leaky Peg caustically. “You and him with your breakteeth words! You get up them dancers, you and that moulder alongside you that looks like a toothdrawer! First door on the right: stale-drunk, he is, but he ain’t backt yet!”

  With these heartening words she turned on her heel, and strode out of the house, driving before her Quartern Sue, who had had the temerity to venture on to the threshold again. Mr. Scunthorpe made haste to usher Arabella up the stairs, saying reproachfully: “Shouldn’t talk to her, ma’am! Not at all the thing! Assure you!”

  “The thing!” she exclaimed scornfully. “She has a kind heart, sir!”

  Abashed, Mr. Scunthorpe begged pardon, and tapped at a door at the head of the stairs.

  Bertram’s voice sounded from within the room, and without waiting for her escort to usher her in Arabella lifted the latch and quickly entered.

  The apartment, which looked out on to a filthy yard, where lean cats prowled amongst garbage-heaps, was small, rather dark, and furnished with a sagging bed pushed up against one wall, a deal table, two wooden chairs, and a strip of threadbare carpet. The remains of a loaf of bread, a heel of cheese, together with a glass, a jug, and an empty bottle stood on the table; and on the mantelshelf, presumably placed there by Leaky Peg, was a cracked mug containing a wilting bunch of flowers. Bertram, who was stretched on the bed, raised himself on his elbow as the door opened, an apprehensive look in his face. He was fully dressed, but was wearing a handkerchief knotted round his neck, and looked both ill and unkempt. When he saw Arabella, he uttered something like a sob, and struggled up, and to his feet. “Bella!”

  She was in his arms on the word, unable to prevent herself from bursting into tears, but passionately clasping him to her. His breath reeked of spirits, but although this shocked her, she did not recoil from him, but hugged him more tightly still.

  “You should not have come!” he said unsteadily, “Felix, how could you have brought her here?”

  “Warned her she wouldn’t like it,” Mr. Scunthorpe excused himself. “Very set on seeing you!”

  Bertram gave a groan. “I did not mean you to know!”

  She disengaged herself, wiped her tears away, and sat down on one of the chairs. “Bertram, you know that is nonsense!” she said. “Whom should you turn to if not to me? I’ am so sorry! What you must have suffered in this dreadful house!”

  “Pretty, ain’t it?” he said jeeringly. “I don’t know how I came here: Leaky Peg brought me. You may as well know, Bella, I was so foxed I don’t remember anything that happened after I bolted from the Red Lion!”

  “No, I quite see,” she said. “But, Bertram, pray do not go on drinking! It is all so bad, and that makes it worse! You look sadly out of sorts, and no wonder! Have you a sore throat, dearest?”

  He flushed, his hand going instinctively to the handkerchief round his neck. “This! Oh, no! Gammoning the draper, my dear!” He saw her look of bewilderment, and added, with a short laugh: “You would be surprised at the cant I have learnt from my hosts here! I’ve become a spouter—at least Peg manages the business for me! Pawned, Bella, pawned! Shan’t have a rag to my back soon—not that that will signify!”

  Mr. Scunthorpe, seated on the edge of the bed, exchanged a meaning look with Arabella. She said briskly: “It would signify very much! We must think what is to be done. Only tell me what you owe!”

  He was reluctant to divulge the sum, but she insisted, and after a little while he blurted out: “It comes to more than seven hundred pounds! There is no possibility of my being able to get clear!�
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  She was aghast, for she had not supposed that he could owe nearly so much. The sum seemed vast beyond belief, so that she could not be surprised when Bertram, casting himself into the other chair, began to talk in a wild way of putting a period to his existence. She let him run on, guessing that his despair needed the relief of just such mad outpourings, and having no very real fear that he would put his violent threats into execution. While he talked she cudgelled her brains for a solution to his difficulties, only lending half an ear to him, but patting his hand soothingly from time to time. Mr. Scunthorpe intervened at last, saying with great commonsense: “Don’t think you ought to jump into the river, dear old boy. Sister wouldn’t like it. Bound to leak out. Your governor might not like it either: never can tell!”

  “No, indeed!” Arabella said. “You must not talk of it any more, Bertram. You know how wicked it would be!”

  “Well, I suppose I shan’t kill myself,” Bertram said, a shade sulkily. “Only, I can tell you this: I’ll never face my father with this!”

  “No, no!” she agreed. “Seven hundred pounds! Bertram, how has it been possible?”

  “I lost six hundred at faro,” he said, dropping his head in his hands. “The rest—Well, there was the tailor, and the horse I hired, and what I owe at Tatt’s, and my shot at the inn—oh, a dozen things! Bella, what am I to do?”

  He sounded much more like the younger brother she knew when he spoke like that, a scared look in his face, and in his voice an unreasoning dependence on her ability to help him out of a scrape.

  “Bills don’t signify,” pronounced Mr. Scunthorpe. “Leave town: won’t be followed. Not been living under your own name. Gaining debts another matter. Got to raise the wind for that. Debt of honour.”

  “I know it, curse you!”

  “But all debts are debts of honour!” Arabella said. “Indeed, you should pay your bills first of all!”

  A glance passed between the two gentleman, indicative of their mutual agreement not to waste breath in arguing with a female on a subject she would clearly never understand. Bertram passed his hand over his brow, heaving a short sigh, and saying: “There’s only one thing to be done. I have thought it all over, Bella, and I mean to enlist, under a false name. If they won’t have me as a trooper, I’ll join a line regiment. I should have done it yesterday, when I first thought of it, only that there’s something I must do first. Affair of honour. I shall write to my father, of course, and I daresay he will utterly cast me off, but that can’t be helped!”

  “How can you think so?” Arabella cried hotly. “Grieved he must be—oh, I dare not even think of it!—but you must know that never, never would he do such an unchristian thing as to cast you off! Oh, do not write to him yet! Only give me tune to think what I can do! If Papa knew that you owed all that money, I am very sure he would pay every penny of it, though it ruined him!”

  “How can you suppose I would be such a gudgeon as to tell him that? No! I shall tell him that my whole mind is set on the army, and I had as lief start in the ranks as not!”

  This speech struck far more dismay into Arabella’s heart than his previous talk of committing suicide, for to take the King’s shilling seemed to her a likely thing for him to do. She uttered, hardly above a whisper: “No, no!”

  “It must be, Bella,” he said, “I’m sure the army is all I’m fit for, and I cannot show my face again with a load of debt hanging over me. Particularly a debt of honour! O God, I think I must have been mad!” His voice broke, and he could not speak for a moment. In the end he contrived to summon up the travesty of a smile, and to say: “Pretty pair, ain’t we? Not that you did anything as wrong as I have.”

  “Oh, I have behaved so dreadfully!” she exclaimed. “It is even my fault that you are reduced to these straits! Had I never presented you to Lord Wivenhoe—”

  “That’s fudge!” he said quickly. “I had been to gaminghouses before I met him. He was not to know I wasn’t as well-blunted as that set of his! I ought not to have gone with him to the Nonesuch. Only I had lost money on a race, and I thought—I hoped Oh, talking pays no toll! But to say it was your fault is all gammon!”

  “Bertram, who won your money at the Nonesuch?” she asked.

  “The bank. It was faro.”

  “Yes, but someone holds the bank!”

  “The Nonpareil.”

  She stared at him. “Mr. Beaumaris?” she gasped. He nodded. “Oh, no, do not say so! How could he have let you—No, no, Bertram!”

  She sounded so much distressed that he was puzzled. “Why the devil shouldn’t he?”

  “You are only a boy! He must have known! And to accept notes of hand from you! Surely he might have refused to do so much at least!”

  “You don’t understand!” he said impatiently. “I went there with Chuffy, so why should he refuse to let me play?”

  Mr. Scunthorpe nodded. “Very awkward situation, ma’am. Devilish insulting to refuse a man’s vowels.”

  She could not appreciate the niceties of the code evidently shared by both gentlemen, but she could accept that they must obtain in male circles. “I must think it wrong of him,” she said. “But never mind! The thing is that he is—that I am particularly acquainted with him! Don’t be in despair, Bertram! I am persuaded that if I were to go to him, explain that you are not of age, and not a rich man’s son, he will forgive the debt!”

  She broke off, for there was no mistaking the expressions of shocked disapprobation in both Bertram’s and Mr. Scunthorpe’s faces.

  “Good God, Bella, what will you say next!”

  “But, Bertram, indeed he is not proud and disagreeable, as so many people think him! I—I have found him particularly kind, and obliging!”

  “Bella, this is a debt of honour! If it takes me my life long to do it, I must pay it, and so I shall tell him!”

  Mr. Scunthorpe nodded judicial approval of this decision.

  “Spend your life paying six hundred pounds to a man who is so wealthy that I daresay he regards it no more than you would a shilling?” cried Arabella. “Why, it is absurd!”

  Bertram looked despairingly at his friend. Mr. Scunthorpe said painstakingly: “Nothing to do with it, ma’am. Debt of honour is a debt of honour. No getting away from that.”

  “I cannot agree! I own, I do not like to do it, but I could do it, and I know he would never refuse me!”

  Bertram grasped her wrist. “Listen, Bella! I daresay you don’t understand—in fact, I can see that you don’t!—but if you dared to do such a thing I swear you’d never see my face again! Besides, even if he did tear up my vowels I should still think myself under an obligation to redeem them! Next you will be suggesting that you should ask him to pay those damned tradesmen’s bills for me!”

  She coloured guiltily, for some such idea had just crossed her mind. Suddenly, Mr. Scunthorpe, whose face a moment before had assumed a cataleptic expression, uttered three pregnant words. “Got a notion!”

  The Tallants looked anxiously at him, Bertram with hope, his sister more than a little doubtfully.

  “Know what they say?” Mr. Scunthorpe demanded. “Bank always wins!”

  “I know that,” said Bertram bitterly. “If that’s all you have to say—”

  “Wait!” said Mr. Scunthorpe. “Start one!” He saw blank bewilderment in the two faces confronting him, and added, with a touch of impatience: “Faro!”

  “Start a faro-bank?” said Bertram incredulously. “You must be mad! Why, even if it were not the craziest thing I ever heard of, you can’t run a faro-bank without capital!”

  “Thought of that,” said Mr. Scunthorpe, not without pride. “Go to my trustees. Go at once. Not a moment to be lost.”

  “Good God, you don’t suppose they would let you touch your capital for such a cause as that?”

  “Don’t see why not!” argued Mr. Scunthorpe. “Always trying to add to it. Preaching at me for ever about improving the estate! Very good way of doing it: wonder they haven’t thought of i
t for themselves. Better go and see my uncle at once.”

  “Felix, you’re a gudgeon!” said Bertram irritably. “No trustee would let you do such a thing! And even if they would, good God, we neither of us want to spend our lives running a faro-bank!”

  “Shouldn’t have to,” said Mr. Scunthorpe, sticking obstinately by his guns. “Only want to clear you of debt! One good night’s run would do it Close the bank then.”

  He was so much enamoured of this scheme that it was some time before he could be dissuaded from trying to promote it. Arabella, paying very little heed to the argument, sat wrapped in her own thoughts. That these were by no means pleasant would have been apparent, even to Mr. Scunthorpe, had he been less engrossed in the championing of his own plans, for not only did her hands clench and unclench in her lap, but her face, always very expressive, betrayed her. But by the time Bertram had convinced Mr. Scunthorpe that a faro-bank would not answer, she was sufficiently mistress of herself again to excite no suspicion in either gentleman’s breast.

  She turned her eyes towards Bertram, who had sunk back, after his animated argument, into a state of hopeless gloom. I shall think of something,” she said. “I know I shall contrive to help you! Only please, please do not enlist, Bertram! Not yet! Only if I should fail!”

  “What do you mean to do?” he demanded. “I shan’t enlist until I have seen Mr. Beaumaris, and—and explained to him how it is! That I must do. I—I told him I had no funds in London, and should be obliged to send into Yorkshire for them, so he asked me to call at his house on Thursday. It is of no use to look at me like that, Bella! I couldn’t tell him. I was done-up, and had no means of paying him, with them all there, listening to what we were saying! I would have died rather! Bella, have you any money? Could you spare me enough to get my shirt back? I can’t go to see the Nonpareil like this!”