“Is it all over, Arabella?”
“All over! What questions you do ask, mamma! No. It is not all over. I’ll stick to him like a leech. He proposed to me as plainly as any man ever did to any woman. I don’t care what people may say or think. He hasn’t heard the last of me; and so he’ll find.” And thus in her passion she made up her mind that she would not yet abandon the hunt.
“What will you do, my dear?”
“What will I do? How am I to say what I will do? If I were standing near him with a knife in my hand I would stick it into his heart. I would! Mistaken him! Liar! They talk of girls lying; but what girl would lie like that?”
“But something must be done.”
“If papa were not such a fool as he is, he could manage it all for me,” said Arabella dutifully. “I must see my father and I must dictate a letter for him. Where is papa?”
“In London, I suppose.”
“You must come up to London with me tomorrow. We shall have to go to his club and get him out. It must be done immediately; and then I must see Lord Mistletoe, and I will write to the Duke.”
“Would it not be better to write to your papa?” said Lady Augustus, not liking the idea of being dragged away so quickly from comfortable quarters.
“No; it wouldn’t. If you won’t go I shall, and you must give me some money. I shall write to Lord Rufford too.”
And so it was at last decided, the wretched old woman being dragged away up to London on some excuse which the Connop Greens were not sorry to accept. But on that same afternoon Arabella wrote to Lord Rufford.
Your letter has amazed me. I cannot understand it. It seems to be almost impossible that it should really have come from you. How can you say that I have mistaken you? There has been no mistake. Surely that letter cannot have been written by you.
Of course I have been obliged to tell my father everything.
On the following day at about four in the afternoon the mother and daughter drove up to the door of Graham’s Club in Bond Street, and there they found Lord Augustus. With considerable difficulty he was induced to come down from the whist room, and was forced into the brougham. He was a handsome fat man, with a long grey beard, who passed his whole life in eating, drinking, and playing whist, and was troubled by no scruples and no principles. He would not cheat at cards because it was dangerous and ungentlemanlike, and if discovered would lead to his social annihilation; but as to paying money that he owed to tradesmen, it never occurred to him as being a desirable thing as long as he could get what he wanted without doing so. He had expended his own patrimony and his wife’s fortune, and now lived on an allowance made to him by his brother. Whatever funds his wife might have not a shilling of them ever came from him. When he began to understand something of the nature of the business on hand, he suggested that his brother, the Duke, could do what was desirable infinitely better than he could. “He won’t think anything of me,” said Lord Augustus.
“We’ll make him think something,” said Arabella sternly. “You must do it, papa. They’d turn you out of the club if they knew that you had refused.” Then he looked up in the brougham and snarled at her. “Papa, you must copy the letter and sign it.”
“How am I to know the truth of it all?” he asked.
“It is quite true,” said Lady Augustus. There was very much more of it, but at last he was carried away bodily, and in his daughter’s presence he did write and sign the following letter;—
My Lord,
I have heard from my daughter a story which has surprised me very much. It appears that she has been staying with you at Rufford Hall, and again at Mistletoe, and that while at the latter place you proposed marriage to her. She tells me with heartbreaking concern that you have now repudiated your own proposition—not only once made but repeated. Her condition is most distressing. She is in all respects your Lordship’s equal. As her father I am driven to ask you what excuse you have to make, or whether she has interpreted you aright.
L
“In These Days One Can’t Make a Man Marry”
This was going on while Lord Rufford was shooting in the neighbourhood of Dillsborough; and when the letter was being put into its envelope at the lodgings in Orchard Street, his Lordship was just sitting down to dinner with his guests at the Bush. At the same time John Morton was lying ill at Bragton;—a fact of which Arabella was not aware.
The letter from Lord Augustus was put into the post on Saturday evening; but when that line of action was decided upon by Arabella she was aware that she must not trust solely to her father. Various plans were fermenting in her brain; all, or any of which, if carried out at all, must be carried out at the same time and at once. There must be no delay, or that final chance of Patagonia would be gone. The leader of a forlorn hope, though he be ever so resolved to die in the breach, still makes some preparation for his escape. Among her plans the first in order was a resolution to see Lord Mistletoe whom she knew to be in town. Parliament was to meet in the course of the next week and he was to move the address. There had been much said about all this at Mistletoe from which she knew that he was in
