to marry Pen.”
“Well, of all things!” gasped Cedric. “And here was I thinking you a hopeless case!”
“I am going to bed,” stated Pen.
Sir Richard moved across the door to open it for her. “Yes my child: go to bed. But pray do not let Cedric’s artless chatter prejudice you! For addle-pated folly I have never met his equal.” He possessed himself of her hand, as he spoke, and lifted it to his lips. “Pleasant dreams, brat,” he said softly.
She felt a lump rise in her throat, achieved a tremulous smile, and fled, but not before she had heard Cedric exclaim in tones of the liveliest surprise: “Ricky, you ain’t really in love with that chit, are you?”
“I think,” said Sir Richard, closing the door, “that we shall be more usefully employed in discussing the circumstances which brought you here, Cedric.”
“Oh, by all means!” Cedric said hastily. “Beg pardon! No intention of prying into your affairs, dear boy; not the least in the world! Now, don’t get into a miff! You know how it is with me! Never could keep a discreet tongue in my head!”
“That is what I am afraid of,” Sir Richard said dryly.
“Mum as an oyster!” Cedric assured him. “But that you of all men, Ricky—! That’s what beats me! However, no concern of mine! What’s all this you were telling me about Bev?”
“He’s dead. That seems to be the most important thing.”
“Well, it’s no good expecting me to pull a long face over it. He was a bad man, take my word for it! What was he doing in this spinney you talk of?”
“As a matter of fact, he went there to meet me,” said Sir Richard.
Cedric frowned at him. “More in this than meets the eye. Why, Ricky?”
“To be plain with you, he had hit upon the notion of extorting money from me by threatening to make known the fact that my supposed cousin was a girl in disguise.”
“Yes, that’s Bev all over,” nodded Cedric, quite unsurprised. “Offered to pay his debts, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I had offered that earlier in the day! Unfortunately Captain Trimble learned of my appointment with Beverley in the spinney, and went there before me. I fancy he had nothing more than robbery in mind. There was a witness to the meeting, who described how a quarrel sprang up, and how Trimble struck Beverley down, searched his pockets, and made off. Possibly he thought he had merely stunned him. When I found him his neck was broken.”
“Jupiter!” said Cedric, giving a whistle of consternation. “It’s worse than I thought, then! The devil! There will be no hushing this up. They don’t suspect you of having a hand in it, do they, Ricky?”
“I am fast acquiring a most unsavoury reputation in this neighbourhood, but so far I have not been arrested for murder. What precise object had you in coming here?”
“Why, to choke the truth out of Bev, of course! Couldn’t get it out of my head he was at the bottom of that robbery. He was badly dipped, y’know. M’ father wants my bloodhound called off, too, but I’m damned if I can come up with any trace of him. If you met the fellow on the Bristol road, that would account for my missing him. I went to Bath. Last I heard of Bev was that he was there, with Freddie Fotheringham. Freddie told me Bev had gone off to stay with some people called Luttrell, living at a place near here. So I saw m’ mother, got the full story of the robbery out of her, and came on here.
“You had better make the acquaintance of the local magistrate. A man who might well be Trimble was taken up in Bath to-day, but whether the necklace was on him I know not.”
“Must lay my hands on that plaguey necklace!” frowned Cedric. “Won’t do if the truth about that were to come out. But what are you going to do, Ricky? It seems to me you’re in the deuce of a coil too.”
“I shall no doubt be able to answer that question when I have talked the matter over with Pen to-morrow,” Sir Richard replied.
But Sir Richard was not destined to have the opportunity of talking over any matter with Miss Creed upon the morrow. Miss Creed, going dejectedly up to bed, sat for a long time at the open window of her room, and gazed blindly out upon the moonlit scene. She had spent, she decided, quite the most miserable day of her life, and the sudden incursion of Cedric Brandon had done nothing to alleviate her heaviness of heart. It was apparent that Cedric considered her adventure only one degree less fantastic than the notion that she was to marry Sir Richard. According to his own words, he had known Sir Richard from the cradle, so that it was fair to assume that he was very well acquainted with him. He gave it as his opinion that she must marry Sir Richard, which was tantamount to saying, she reflected, that she had put Sir Richard into the uncomfortable position of being obliged to offer for her. It was most unjust, Pen thought, for Sir Richard had not been sober when he had insisted on accompanying her into Somerset, and he had, moreover, done it out of sheer solicitude for her safety. It had not occurred to her that a gentleman so many years her senior could be supposed to compromise her, or to engage his own honour so disastrously. She had liked him from the moment of setting eyes on him; she had plunged into terms of intimacy with him in the shortest possible time; and had, indeed, felt as though she had known him all her life. She thought herself more stupid even than Lydia Daubenay not to have realized before ever they had reached Queen Charlton, that she had tumbled headlong in love with him. She had refused to look beyond her meeting with Piers, yet she could not but admit to herself now that she had been by no means anxious to summon Piers to her side when she had arrived at the George. By the time she did come face to face with him, he would have had to have been a paragon indeed to have won her from Sir Richard.
His conduct had been anything rather than that of a paragon. He had spoiled everything, Pen thought. He had accused her of impropriety, and had forced Sir Richard into making a declaration he had surely not wanted to make.
“Because I don’t suppose he loves me at all,” Pen argued to herself. “He never said so until Piers was so odious: in fact, he treated me just as if he really was a trustee, or an uncle, or somebody years and years older than I am, which I dare say was what made it all seem quite proper to me, and not in the least scandalous. Only then we fell into so many adventures, and he was obliged to fob off Aunt Almeria, and then the stammering-man guessed I was a girl, and Piers was disagreeable, and I got into a scrape through Lydia’s folly, and the Major came, and now this other Mr Brandon knows about me, and the end of it is I have placed poor Richard in the horridest situation imaginable! There is only one thing for it: I shall have to run away.”
This decision, however, made her feel so melancholy that several large tears brimmed over her eyelids and rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them away, telling herself it was stupid to cry. “Because if he doesn’t want to marry me, I don’t want to marry him—much; and if he does, I dare say he will come to visit me at Aunt’s house. No, he won’t. He’ll forget all about me, or very likely be glad that he is rid of a badly behaved, tiresome ch-charge! Oh dear!”
So sunk in these dismal reflections did she become that it was a long time before she could rouse herself sufficiently to prepare for bed. She even forgot the elopement she had helped to arrange, and heard the church- clock strike midnight without so much as recalling that Lydia should now be stepping up into the hired post-chaise, with or without a cage of love-birds.
She spent a miserable night, disturbed by unquiet dreams, and tossing from side to side in a way that soon untucked all the sheets and blankets, and made the bed so uncomfortable that by six in the morning, when she finally awoke to find the room full of sunlight, she was very glad to leave it.
A considerable portion of her waking hours had been spent in considering how she could run away without Sir Richard’s knowing anything about it. A carrier was used to go into Bristol on certain days, she remembered, and she made up her mind either to buy a seat on his wagon, or, if it was not one of his days, to walk to Bristol, and there book a seat on the London stage-coach. Bristol was not more than six or seven miles distant from Queen Charlton, and there was, moreover, a reasonable hope of being offered a lift in some conveyance bound for the town.
She dressed herself, and very nearly started to cry again when she struggled with the folds of the starched muslin, cravat, because it was one of Sir Richard’s. Once dressed, she packed her few belongings in the cloak-bag he had lent her, and tiptoed downstairs to the parlour.
The servants, though she could hear them moving about in the coffee-room and the kitchen, had not yet come into the parlour to draw back the blinds, and to set the room to rights. In its untidy, overnight state it looked dispiriting. Pen pulled the blinds apart, and sat down at the writing-table to compose a letter of farewell to Sir Richard.
It was a very difficult letter to write, and seemed to entail much nose-blowing, and many watery sniffs. When she had at last finished it, Pen read it through rather dubiously, and tried to erase a blot. It was not a satisfactory
