countenance, and said indulgently: “Now, what’s happened to put you into one of your tantrums, Miss Deb?”
“I am not in a tantrum!” replied Deborah furiously. “And if Lord Mablethorpe should call, I will see him!”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” said Wantage. “For he’s been here once already, and means to come again. I never saw anything like it, not in all my puff!”
“I wish you will not talk in that odiously vulgar way!” said Deborah.
“Not in a tantrum: oh, no!” said Mr Wantage, shaking his head. “And me that’s known you from your cradle! Your aunt says as how Master Kit’s a coming home on leave. What do you say to that?”
Miss Grantham, however, had nothing to say to it. She was an extremely fond sister, but for the moment the iniquities of Mr Ravenscar possessed her mind to the exclusion of all other interests. She ran upstairs to the little back-parlour on the half-landing, which was used as a morning-room. Lady Bellingham was writing letters there, at a spindle-legged table in the window. She looked up as her niece entered the room, and cried: “Well, my love, so you are back already! Tell me at once, did—” She broke off, as her eyes met Miss Grantham’s stormy ones. “Oh dear!” she said, in a dismayed voice. “What has happened?”
Miss Grantham untied her bonnet-strings with a savage jerk, and cast the bonnet on to a chair. “He is the vilest, rudest, stupidest, horridest man alive! Oh, but I will serve him out for this! I will make him sorry he ever dared—I’ll have no mercy on him! He shall grovel to me! Oh, I am in such a rage.”
“Yes, my love, I can see you are,” said her aunt faintly. “Did he—did he make love to you?”
“Love!” exclaimed Miss Grantham. “No, indeed! My thoughts did not lie in that direction! I am a harpy, if you please, Aunt Lizzie! Women like me should be whipped at the cart’s tail!”
“Good heavens, Deb, is the man out of his senses?” demanded Lady Bellingham.
“By no means! He is merely stupid, and rude, and altogether abominable! I hate him! I wish I might never set eyes on him again!”
“But what did he do?” asked Lady Bellingham bewildered.
Miss Grantham ground her white teeth. “He came to rescue his precious cousin from my toils! That was why he invited me to drive out with him. To insult me!”
“Oh dear, you thought it might be that!” said her aunt sadly.
Miss Grantham paid no heed to this interruption. “A Grantham is not a fit bride for Lord Mablethorpe! To marry me would be to ruin himself! Oh, I could scream with vexation!”
Lady Bellingham regarded her doubtfully. “But you said much yourself, my dear. I remember distinctly—”
“It doesn’t signify in the least,” said Miss Grantham. “He hi no right to say it”
Lady Bellingham agreed to this wholeheartedly, after watching her niece pace round the room for several minutes, ventured to inquire what had happened during the course of the drive. Miss Grantham stopped dead her tracks, and replied in a shaking voice: “He tried to bribe me!”
“Tried to bribe you not to marry Adrian, Deb?” asked her aunt. “But how very odd of him, when you had never the lea intention of doing so! What can have put such a notion in his head?”
“I am sure I don’t know, and certainly I don’t care a fig replied Deborah untruthfully. “He had the insolence to offer me five thousand pounds if I would relinquish my pretensions—my pretensions!—to Adrian’s hand and heart!”
Lady Bellingham, over whose plump countenance a hopeful expression had begun to creep, looked disappointed, she said: “Five thousand! I must say, Deb, I think that is shabby!”
“I said that I feared he was trying to trifle with me,” recounted Miss Grantham with relish.
“Well, and I am sure you could not have said anything better, my love! I declare, I did not think so meanly of him!”
“Then,” continued Miss Grantham, “he said he would double that figure.”
Lady Bellingham dropped her reticule. “Ten thousand!” she exclaimed faintly. “No, never mind my reticule, Deb, it don’t signify! What did you say to that?”
“I said, Paltry!” answered Miss Grantham.
Her aunt blinked at her. “Paltry ... Would you—would you call it paltry, my love?”
“I did call it paltry. I said I would not let Adrian slip through my fingers for a mere ten thousand. I enjoyed saying that, Aunt Lizzie!”
“Yes, my dear, but—but was it wise, do you think?”
“Pooh, what can he do, pray?” said Miss Grantham scornfully. “To be sure, he flew into as black a temper as my own, and took no pains to conceal it from me. I was excessively glad to see him so angry! He said—about Ormskirk—Oh, if I were a man, to be able to call him out, and run him through, and through, and through!”
Lady Bellingham, who appeared quite shattered, said feebly that you could not run a man through three times. “At least, I don’t think so,” she added. “Of course, I never was present at a duel, but there are always seconds, you know, and they would be bound to stop you.”
“Nobody would stop me!” declared Miss Grantham bloodthirstily. “I would like to carve him into mincemeat!”
“Oh dear, I can’t think where you get such unladylike notions!” sighed her aunt. “I do trust that you did not say it?”
“No, I said that I thought I should make Adrian a famous wife. That made him angrier than ever. I thought he might very likely strangle me. However, he did not. He asked me what figure I set upon myself.”
Lady Bellingham showed a flicker of hope. “And what answer did you make to that, Deb?”
“I said I should be very green to accept less than twenty thousand!”
“Less than—My love, where are my smelling-salts? I do not feel at all the thing! Twenty thousand! It is a fortune! He must have thought you had taken leave of your senses!”
“Very likely, but he said he would pay me twenty thousand if I would release Adrian.”
Lady Bellingham sank back in her chair, holding the vinaigrette to her nose.
“So then,” concluded Miss Grantham, with reminiscent pleasure, “I said that after all I preferred to marry Adrian.”
A moan from her aunt brought her eyes round to that afflicted lady. “Mablethorpe instead of twenty thousand pounds?” demanded her ladyship, in quavering accents. “But you told me positively you would not have him!”
“Of course I shall not!” said Miss Grantham impatiently. “At least, not unless I marry him in a fit of temper,” she added, with an irrepressible twinkle.
“Deb, either you are mad, or I am!” announced Lady Bellingham, lowering the vinaigrette. “Oh, it does not beat thinking of! We might have been free of all our difficulties! Ring the bell; I must have the hartshorn!”
Deborah looked at her in incredulous astonishment. “Aunt Eliza! You did not suppose—you could not suppose that I would allow that odious man to buy me off?” she gasped.
“Kit might have bought his exchange! Not to mention the mortgage!” mourned her ladyship.
“Kit buy his exchange out of—out of blood-money? He would prefer to sell out!”
“Well, but, my love, there is no need to call it by such an ugly name, I am sure! You do not want young Mablethorpe, after all I...”
“Aunt, you would not have had me accept a bribe!”
“Not an ordinary bribe, dear Deb! Certainly not! But twenty thousand—Oh, I can’t say it!”
“It was the horridest insult I have ever received!” said Deborah hotly.
“You can’t call a sum like that an insult!” protested her ladyship. “If only you would not be so impulsive! Think of poor dear Kit! He is coming home on leave too, and he says he has fallen in love. Was ever anything so unfortunate? It is all very well to talk of insults, but one must be practical, Deb! Seventy pounds for green peas, and here you are throwing twenty thousand to the winds! And the end of it will be that you will fall into Ormskirk’s hands! I can see it all! The only comfort I have is that I shall very likely die before it happens, because I can feel my spasms coming on already.”
She closed her eyes as she spoke, apparently resigning herself to her approaching end. Miss Grantham said defiantly: “I am not in the least sorry. I will make him sorry he ever dared to think I was the kind of creature who would entrap a silly boy into marrying me!”
This announcement roused Lady Bellingham to open her eyes again, and to say in a bewildered way: “But you told me you said you would marry him!”
“I said so to Ravenscar. That is nothing!”
“But I don’t see how he can help thinking it if you told him So!”
