Arabella

“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!”

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!”