‘Whenever you wish,’ Nell replied. ‘Now, if you desire me to.’
‘Oh, no, there is no occasion for you to do so now! He is gone to visit his uncle, you know, and he did not expect to be in London again until tomorrow evening. I was thinking, love, that if we were to go to Almack’s on Friday I daresay we should meet him there, and then, don’t you think? we could discover when it would be convenient for him to come to us.’
It was evident, from this speech, that an assignation at Almack’s had already been made. Nell did not feel equal to giving a promise that she would attend the Assembly, but she said that she would do so if she felt well enough, and with this Letty, after a little more coaxing, was obliged to be content. In the state of wretchedness she was in Nell could not think of taking part in such a frivolous entertainment without a shudder, but she did manage to extract a grain of comfort from the reflection that the first fury of Letty’s passionate despair had worn itself out, and she was not contemplating any immediate act of imprudence.
The more compliant mood lasted. Letty was able to see Cardross again without ripping up; and although her spirits were languid, and her manner lacked its usual liveliness, there could be no doubt that she was making a serious endeavour to mend her temper.
The hope that Dysart would come to her kept Nell at home on the following day. Cardross was to have escorted both his ladies to a Review in Hyde Park, but in the end only Letty went with him. She had said at first that she was in no humour for it, but upon Nell’s appealing to her to bear Cardross company so that she herself might nurse a headache at home she at once agreed to go. She was too much absorbed in her own troubles to perceive that her sister-in-law was looking far from well until her attention was directed to this circumstance, but when Sutton told her that she was quite in a worry over her mistress, she was instantly ready not only to do what was asked of her, but a great deal that was not asked, such as placing cushions behind Nell’s head, a stool under her feet, and a shawl across her knees, bathing her brow with vinegar, offering her all manner of remedies from hartshorn to camphor, and enquiring every few minutes if she felt a degree better. Nell endured these ministrations patiently, but Cardross, coming to see how she did, exclaimed: ‘Good God, Letty, don’t fidget her so! Enough to drive her into a fever!’
Letty was inclined to take affront at this, but he pushed her out of the room without compunction, telling her to go and put her hat on, since his curricle would be at the door in five minutes. ‘And if you want me to let you handle the ribbons, take that pout from your face!’ he recommended. He turned, and went back to Nell’s chair, and held her wrist in his hand for a moment. Under his fingers her pulse was flurried enough to make him say: ‘If you are not better by the time we return I’ll send for Baillie.’
‘Oh, no, pray do not! Indeed I am not ill! Only I still have the headache, and it seems foolish to go out in this hot sun,’ she replied quickly. ‘I shall be perfectly well presently.’
‘I hope you may be,’ he said, laying her hand down again. He glanced at Sutton. ‘Take care of her ladyship!’
An extremely dignified curtsey was all the answer vouchsafed to his behest. From the dresser’s downcast eyes and lifted brows he might have inferred that she was deeply offended, but he did not look at her again. His gaze had returned to his wife’s face; his expression seemed to her to soften; and after hesitating for a moment he bent over her, and lightly kissed her cheek. ‘Poor Nell!’ he said.
He was gone before she could say a word, leaving her with an almost overpowering inclination to cry her heart out. She managed to overcome it, and to assure Sutton, with very tolerable composure, that she was already better, and needed nothing to restore her to her usual health but to be left to rest quietly for an hour or so. She believed that she might fall asleep if no one came to disturb her.
It would have been well for her had she done so, but sleep had never been farther from her. She tried to interest herself in a new novel, and discovered that she had read three pages without taking in the sense of one word; every vehicle heard approaching in the square below brought her to her feet and hurrying to the window; and when she took up her embroidery, determined to employ herself rather than to pace about the room, a prey to most harrowing reflections, she found that her hands were so unsteady as to make it impossible for her to set a stitch.
Dysart did not come, and so severe was her disappointment that it took all the resolution of which she was capable to enable her to meet Cardross upon his return with a calm countenance. Her training stood her in good stead: no one could have supposed from her demeanour that her brain was in a turmoil; and when it was suggested to her that she might prefer not to go to the Italian Opera that evening she laughed away this solicitude, telling her husband and sister-in-law that they must not try to wrap her in cotton.
Dysart walked in on her, unannounced, just before noon on the following morning. She was sitting with Letty in the drawing-room, endeavouring to soothe feelings very much ruffled by a visit from Miss Berry. The good lady had called a little earlier to enquire after her state of health, but upon Letty’s coming into the room had speedily infuriated that injured damsel by entering with great earnestness into a discussion of her affairs. What she said held excellent common sense, and did honour to her heart as much as to her judgement, but her manner was unfortunate. A trick she had of repeating over and over again some catch-phrase could only irritate; she had a way of talking in a hurried, over-emphatic style; and the caresses and exaggerated terms of affection she employed in trying to win more confidence than was voluntarily reposed in her served only to set up Letty’s back. She had not long left the house when Dysart entered it; and when he walked into the drawing-room the angry flush had not faded from Letty’s cheeks.
‘Dysart!’ Nell cried, springing up from her chair.
‘Hallo, Nell!’ he responded, with cheerful nonchalance. ‘I hoped I should find you at home.’ He looked critically at Letty, and enquired in a brotherly fashion: ‘What’s put you in a miff?’
‘If nothing else had you would!’ retorted Letty, with spirit, but a distressing want of civility. ‘No doubt, dearest Nell, you would like to be private with your detestable brother! I would as lief converse with the muffin-man, so I will go and sit in the library until he has gone away again!’
‘Well, if ever I saw such a spitfire!’ remarked the Viscount, mildly surprised. ‘What have I done to set you up on the high ropes?’
Deigning no other answer than a withering look of scorn, Letty swept out of the room with her head in the air. He shut the door behind her, saying: ‘Too hot at hand by half!’
‘Oh, Dy, thank God you are here at last!’ Nell uttered, with suppressed agitation. ‘I have been in such distress – such agony of mind!’
‘Lord, you’re as bad as that silly chit!’ said Dysart, diving a hand into his pocket, and bringing forth a roll of bank-notes. ‘There you are, you goose! Didn’t I promise you I wouldn’t make a mull of it this time?’
She would not take the roll, almost recoiling from it, and crying with bitter reproach: ‘How could you? Oh, Dy, Dy, what have you done? You cannot have supposed that I would accept money obtained in such a way!’
‘I might have known it!’ ejaculated Dysart disgustedly. ‘In fact, I did know it, and I took dashed good care not to tell you what I meant to do! When it comes to flying into distempered freaks, damme if there’s a penny to choose between you and Mama!’
‘Distempered freaks!’ she repeated, gazing at him in dismay. ‘You call it that? Oh, Dysart!’
‘Yes, I dashed well do call it that!’ replied his lordship, his eye kindling. ‘And let me tell you, my girl, that these Methody airs don’t become you! Besides, it’s all slum! I may have to listen to that sort of flummery from Mama, but I’ll be damned if I will from you! What’s more, it’s coming it a trifle too strong! Let me tell you, my pio
us little sister, that if Felix Hethersett hadn’t thrown a rub in your way you’d have borrowed the blunt from that Old Pope in Clarges Street!’
‘But, Dy – !’ she stammered. ‘The cases are not comparable! Perhaps it was wrong of me – indeed, I know it was wrong! – but it was not – it was not wicked!’
‘Oh, stop acting the dunce!’ he said, exasperated. ‘Of all the fustian nonsense I ever heard in my life – ! What the devil’s come over you, Nell? You were never used to raise such a breeze for nothing at all!’
‘I can’t think it nothing! Surely you do not?’ she said imploringly. ‘I had rather have done anything than lead you into this! I never dreamed – Oh, if I had but told Cardross the truth!’
‘Well, if you meant to kick up such a dust as this I’m dashed sorry you didn’t tell him!’ said Dysart. ‘I always knew you had more hair than wit, but it seems to me it’s worse than that! Queer in your attic, that’s what you are, Nell! First you plague the life out of me to raise the recruits for you – and where you thought I could lay my hand on three centuries the lord knows! Then, when I hit on a way of doing the thing neatly you’ve no more sense in your cock-loft than to cry rope on me; and now, when I hand you a roll of soft you ain’t even grateful, but start reading me a damned sermon! And when I think that I came posting back to town the instant the thing came off right because I knew you’d fall into a fit of the dismals, or go off on some totty-headed start, if I didn’t, I have a dashed good mind to let you get yourself out of your fix as best you can!’
‘It is all my fault!’ she said mournfully, wringing her hands. ‘I was in such desperate straits, and begged you so foolishly to help me –’
‘Now, don’t put yourself in a taking over that!’ he interrupted. ‘I don’t say I was best pleased at the time – and now that all’s right I don’t mind owning to you that there was a moment when I thought I was at a stand – but I’m not complaining. There’s no saying but what if you hadn’t kept on teasing me to dub up the possibles I mightn’t be standing here today pretty well able to buy an abbey!’
‘Dysart, no!’
‘Well, no, it ain’t as much as that,’ he acknowledged. ‘As a matter of fact I had thought it would be more. Still, it’s enough to keep me living as high as a coach-horse for a while, and that will be a pleasant change, I can tell you! Lord, Nell, I was so monstrously in the wind that I’d not much more than white wool left to play with! Six thousand and seven hundred pounds is what I’ve made out of it! And that’s not counting my debt to you, and the monkey I owed Corny!’
She grasped the back of a chair for support, for her knees were shaking under her. From out a white face her eyes stared up at her beloved brother in horror; she felt as though she were suffocating, and could only just manage to say: ‘Don’t! Dy – oh, Dy, you could not! Not money gained in such a way!’
The thought of his sudden affluence had banished the frown from his brow, but at this it descended again. ‘Oh?’ he said ominously. ‘And why could I not?’
‘Dysart, you must know why you cannot!’ she cried hotly.
‘That’s where you’re out, my girl, because I don’t know! And there’s something else I don’t know!’ he said grimly. ‘Perhaps you’ll be so obliging, my lady, as to tell me what you did with the blunt you won at Doncaster last year! Very pretty talking this is from a chit who backed three winners in a row! You weren’t blue-devilled then, were you? Oh, no! you were in high croak!’ He shot out an accusing finger at her. ‘And don’t you try to tell me you didn’t go to Doncaster, because I was there myself! Cardross took you to stay at Castle Howard, with the Morpeths, and you drove over there with a whole party of people! It’s no use denying it: why, I remember how you told me that the only thing you didn’t like at Castle Howard was the old Earl, because there was so much starch in him that he frightened you to death! Now, then! How do you mean to answer that, pray?’
Utterly bewildered, she stammered: ‘But – but – I don’t understand! What has that to say to anything? I remember perfectly! But –’ she broke off suddenly, and gave a gasp. ‘Oh, can it be possible that – ? Oh, Dy, dearest, dearest Dy – did you win that money?’
‘Well, of course I did!’ he replied, in the liveliest astonishment. ‘How the devil else was I to do the trick?’
She sank down on the sofa, wavering between tears and laughter. ‘Oh, how stupid I have been! I thought – Oh, never mind that! Dy, has the luck changed at last? Tell me how it was! Where have you been? How – Oh, tell me everything!’
‘Chester, for the King’s Plate,’ he replied, eyeing her uneasily. She seemed to him to be in queer stirrups, and he was just about to ask her if she felt quite the thing when a happy explanation occurred to him. ‘I say, Nell, you haven’t sprained your ankle, have you?’ he demanded, grinning at her.
‘Sprained my ankle? No!’ she answered, a good deal surprised.
‘What I mean is – in the family way?’
She shook her head, colouring. ‘No,’ she said sadly.
‘Oh! Thought that must be it.’ He saw that her face was downcast, and said bracingly: ‘No need to be moped! Plenty of time yet before you need think of setting up your nursery. I shouldn’t wonder at it if you were like Mama.’
‘Yes, that is what she thinks, but – Oh, never mind that! Tell me how this all came about!’
He sat down beside her. ‘Lord, it was the oddest thing! A fifteen to one chance, Nell! And I’d no more notion of laying my blunt on it than the man in the moon! Well, I didn’t know the horse existed, and as for backing it – ! Anyone would have laid you odds there was only one horse entered that could beat Firebrand, and that was Milksop. But what do you think happened to me?’ She shook her head wonderingly, and he gave a chuckle. ‘Sort of thing that only comes to a man once in a lifetime. It was on Saturday night that it started. I thought I might take a look-in at the – well, it don’t signify telling you the name of the place: you wouldn’t know it! It’s a club I go to now and again. Anyway, I called for a tankard there, drank it off, and damme if there wasn’t a great cockroach in the pot!’
‘Ugh!’ exclaimed Nell, shuddering.
‘Yes, I didn’t like it above half myself,’ agreed the Viscount. ‘But the queer thing about it was that it wasn’t dead! Seemed a bit lushy when I tipped it out on to the table, but, dash it, what could you expect? It got quite lively after a while, and so we matched it against a spider that – a friend of mine – picked off its web.’
‘Cockroaches and spiders?’ interrupted Nell, aghast.
‘Oh, lord, yes: dozens of ’em! The place is full of them!’
‘But, Dysart, how very shocking! It must be a sadly dirty house!’
‘Yes, I expect it is,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, I know it is, but that don’t signify! The thing is, most of the company fancied the spider. Well, I did myself, to tell you the truth, for it was a stout-looking runner, with a set of capital legs to it. I didn’t back it, of course, because the cockroach was my entry, but I never thought to see the cockroach win.’
‘And it did?’ Nell asked anxiously.
‘Won by half the length of the course!’ said the Viscount. ‘That was the table. We had ’em lined up, and I must say I thought my entry was still a trifle bosky, and I daresay he was, but no sooner did I give him the office – with a fork – than off he went, in a fine burst, straight down the course for the winning-post! Mind you, the spider had it in him to beat him: devilish good mover, I give you my word! The trouble with him was that he was a refuser. If he didn’t fold his legs up under him, he went dashing off in circles. Now, young Johnny Cockroach jibbed a trifle, but every time I used my persuader on him, off he went again at a slapping pace, and always straight ahead! You wouldn’t have thought, to look at him, that he was such a good mover. A daisy-cutter, is what I thought, and so he was, but a regular Trojan, for all that!’
>
‘Oh, Dy, how absurd you are!’ Nell exclaimed, laughing. ‘And you won all that money on the creature?’
‘No, no, of course I didn’t! That was only funning! I didn’t win much more than a pony on him.’
‘What happened to him?’ Nell could not help asking.
‘How should I know? Went back to his stable, I daresay: I wasn’t paying much heed to him. Or to any of it, if it comes to that. Well, what I mean is, never thought another thing about it, once the race was won. There wasn’t any reason why I should. But, Nell, when I went to bed on Sunday night, I pulled back the clothes, and damme if there wasn’t a cockroach right in the middle of the bed! How I came to be such a gudgeon as not to see then what it meant still has me in a puzzle. I didn’t. It wasn’t till Monday that it fairly burst on me. I went just to see how they were betting their money at Tatt’s, and who should be there but old Jerry Stowe? No, you don’t know him – not the kind of fellow you would know, but he’s a mighty safe man at the Corner, I can tell you. Did him a trifling service once: no great matter, but to hear him you’d think I’d saved his life! Well, the long and short of it was that he told me in my ear to put all my blunt on Cockroach for the King’s Plate at Chester! That fairly sent me to grass, I can tell you! I hadn’t even heard of the tit: didn’t mean to bet on the race at all, because I’ve no fancy for an odds-on chance, and to my mind there wasn’t a horse entered, barring Milksop, that could beat Firebrand. But, of course, as soon as Jerry tipped me the office that settled it: taking one thing with another, I could see Cockroach was a certainty. The only trouble was, how the deuce was I to raise enough mint-sauce to make the thing worth while?’ He paused, frowning. The amusement was quenched in Nell’s eyes, which were fixed on his face in painful enquiry. ‘Did something I’ve never done before, and never thought I should do,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Too damned ramshackle by half! Mind, if I hadn’t known the horse couldn’t lose I wouldn’t have done it!’