April Lady (15 page)

Nell waited in vain for Dysart to put in an appearance that afternoon. Her footman brought back no answer to her note, his lordship having gone out. No, his lordship's man had not been able to say when he expected him to return.

His lordship did not return to his rooms, in fact, until an advanced hour of the day; and since he was engaged to dine at Watier's, with a select company of his intimates, and afterwards to try his luck at that most exclusive of gaming-clubs, it was rather too much to expect him to keep the best dinner in town waiting while he danced attendance in Grosvenor Square. A fortunate bet had (as he phrased it) brought the dibs into tune again, and encouraged him to think that a long run of bad luck had come to an end. With a little ready to sport on the table there was no saying but what he might by the end of the evening be in a position to settle any number of damned dressmakers' bills, and through no more exertion than was required to cast, instead of the worst chances in the game, a few winning nicks. Inured by custom to all the stratagems known to creditors, he considered that Madame Lavalle's story of being about to put herself out of the way of collecting the monies due to her was a piece of gammon. In his experience, no creditor ever put himself out of the way of collecting money. Having pursued a precarious course for some years, he was not at all alarmed by duns, and thought that Nell was being more than commonly gooseish. However, he was fond of her, and if she was as sick with apprehension as her letter seemed to indicate he would not, on the following morning, grudge an hour spent in soothing her alarms. Moreover, the morning might find him out of ebb-water, and hosed and shod again, for it was nothing for a man enjoying a run of luck to win three or four thousand pounds in one night's sitting at the Great Go.

It might have been thought that a club where the minimum stake was double the sum fixed at any other gaming establishment, and the play was known to be tremendous, was scarcely the place for a young blood, living on an inadequate allowance and a grossly encumbered expectation. The Viscount's well-wishers shook their heads over it, but they could scarcely blame him for playing there, since he had become a member of the club under the auspices of his own father. In general an indifferent parent, Lord Pevensey every now and then awoke to a sense of his responsibilities. Finding that his heir, after an adventurous period at Oxford, had established himself in London and was about to make his debut in fashionable circles, he had felt that it behoved him to do what lay within his power to launch him into society. He introduced him to White's and to Watier's; franked him into the subscription-room at Tattersall's; pointed out to him certain individuals whose business in life it was to diddle the dupes; recommended him to let none but Weston make his coats; advised him to purchase his hats at Baxter's, and to have his boots made by Hoby; and warned him of the dangers of offering a carte blanche to too highflying an Incognita. He was obliging enough to instruct his son in some of the signs by which he might recognize, amongst the muslin company, those prime articles who might be depended on to ease a protector of all his available blunt; and to counsel him strongly not to visit any but the highest class Academies. After that, and feeling that he had left nothing undone to ensure for the Viscount a prosperous career, he cast off his parental responsibilities, which had by that time begun to bore him very much, and left his son to his own devices.

Watier's, which was situated on the corner of Bolton Street and Piccadilly, in an unpretentious house which had once been a gaming establishment of quite a different order, was generally supposed to owe its existence to the Prince Regent. Watier had been one of his cooks, but the Prince, upon learning from some of his friends that a good dinner was not to be had at any of the London clubs, had conceived the benevolent notion of providing gentlemen of high ton with a dining-club not just in the common style, and had suggested to Watier that he was the very man to carry out this pleasing design. The idea took; in partnership with two other of the royal servants Mr. Watier embarked on the venture, and prospered so well that within a very few years he was able to retire from active participation in the business of running the club. By that time what had begun as a dining-club, with excellent cooking, carefully chosen wines, and harmonic assemblies as its attractions, had blossomed into the most exclusive as well as the most ruinous of all London's gaming clubs. The dinners, under the surveillance of Mr. Augustus Labourie, continued to be the best that could be had in town; it had a bank of ten thousand pounds; Mr. Brummell was its perpetual president; and to be admitted to membership was the object of every aspirant to fashion. Play began at nine o'clock, and continued all night, the principal games being hazard, and macao: a form of vingt-un introduced into England by the émigrés from France, and still enjoying a considerable vogue.

The Viscount, after an evening devoted to faro, had not found that this alteration in his habits answered as well as he had hoped it might; and when he rose from a very convivial dinner he resisted all attempts to lure him into the macao-room. He would give the bones another chance, he said, for he had a strong presentiment that fortune was at last about to favour him. So, indeed, it seemed. Being set twenty pounds, and naming seven as the main, he threw eleven, nicking it, which promised well for the night's session. Even Mr. Fancot, who had been trying to lose money to him for months and had begun to despair of achieving his ambition, felt hopeful.

From the circumstance of the Prince Regent's holding one of his bachelor parties at Carlton House that evening, the club was rather thin of company. Mr. Hethersett, strolling in at midnight, found the macao-room deserted by all but a collection of persons who figured in his estimation either as prosy old stagers or tippies on the strut. He took a look-in at those intent on hazard, but here again the company failed to attract him, and he was just about to leave the premises when he was suddenly smitten by an idea. It was not a very welcome idea, nor did he look forward with the least degree of pleasure to the putting of it into action, but it was the best that had occurred to him during the course of a day largely devoted to wrestling with the problem of Lady Cardross's financial difficulties.

The more he considered this matter the greater had grown his uneasiness, for the mild
tendre
he felt for Nell did not lead him to place any very firm trust in her promise to keep away from usurers. A just man, he was obliged to own that if she dared not confess her debts to Cardross no other solution than to borrow upon interest suggested itself. In his opinion, she was magnifying Cardross's wrath rather absurdly. It was unlikely that he would hear the confession with complaisance, but he was not only a man very much in love; he was also a man of generous temper, and a good deal more than common sense. No one would be quicker to make allowance for youth and inexperience; and although there could be little doubt that he had forbidden Nell to keep her brother in funds Mr. Hethersett had still less doubt that he would understand, and even sympathize with, the very natural feelings which had led her to disobey him. He would know how to put a stop to such practices, too; and that was something that ought to be done immediately, if Nell was not to founder at the last in a morass of debt and deception. Cardross would pardon her now with no loss of tenderness, but if he discovered in the future that she had been playing an undergame with him, perhaps for years, the very openness of his disposition would cause him to regard her with revulsion.

Mr. Hethersett, gloomily pondering, had reached the conclusion that although it would be of some advantage if his cousin were to be put in possession of the facts by almost any agency, the only happy outcome to the affair would be for Nell herself to make the disclosure. But when he had urged her to do so she had recoiled from the suggestion, and had begged him in considerable agitation not to betray her to Cardross. The suspicion had crossed his mind that all might not be so well with that marriage as appeared on the surface. Thinking it over, it occurred to him that the couple were not as often in company together as might have been expected. It was not, of course, in good
ton
for a man to live in his wife's pocket; but the cynicism which had prompted the higher ranks of the previous generation to regard marriage as a means of advancement or convenience was going out of fashion. Amongst his father's contemporaries, Mr. Hethersett knew of more than one man who could never be sure how many of his lady's offspring had been fathered by himself; while the number of middle-aged couples of the first stare who never willingly spent as much as half an hour together was past counting. But that sort of thing was going out of fashion. Love-matches were being indulged in by persons of consequence; and public signs of affection, instead of being thought intolerably bourgeois, were even smiled on. Mr. Hethersett, whose fastidiousness had lately been offended by the sight of a newly-married pair seated side by side on a small sofa with their heads together at an evening party, was inclined to think that the pendulum was swinging too far, and he certainly did not expect Cardross to behave with such a want of breeding. At the same time, he did sometimes wonder that Nell, married to a man who had not only chosen her, for love, from amongst a dozen more eligible ladies, but was also possessed of a charm which made him generally fascinating to females, should so frequently appear in public either unescorted, or with some quite inferior gallant at her side. There was nothing to take exception to in that, of course; and never anything in her manner towards her admirers to encourage the most inveterate seekers after crim. cons to suspect her of having formed a guilty attachment. Mr. Hethersett was pretty well persuaded that she had no eyes for any man but Cardross: he had seen them light up when his cousin had unexpectedly entered a room where she was sitting. No: he did not think that if anything had gone amiss with the marriage it arose from any lack of affection. He recollected having heard it said that in love-matches even more than marriages of convenience the first year was often one of tiffs and misunderstandings, and decided that so much profound cogitation was leading him to refine too much upon the couple's public conduct. But if there had been disagreements, Mr. Hethersett, knowing just how formidable his cousin could be when he was angered, could readily understand the reluctance of his very young bride to confide her sins to him. It would be useless to press her to do so, he thought; but having reached this conclusion he found himself at a stand, for there was no one other than herself who could tell Cardross of the fix she was in without setting up his back.

But just as he was about to leave the hazard-room, Dysart, who had been too deeply concerned with the fall of the dice to notice his entrance, happened to look up, and to see him. He called a careless greeting, and on the instant Mr. Hethersett was smitten by his idea.

If he could be persuaded to do it, Dysart was the one person who could tell Cardross, unexceptionably, even, perhaps, with advantage, the truth. Mr. Hethersett had no doubt at all that Nell's debts had been incurred on his behalf, and very little that a frank confession made by him of the whole would win plenary absolution for Nell, and in all probability pecuniary assistance for himself. It would be an easy matter for him to convince Cardross that Nell had yielded only to his urgent entreaties; and Cardross would be swift to recognize and to appreciate the courage that enabled him to perform so unpleasant a duty. Only, did he possess that courage? Mr. Hethersett, joining the scattering of lookers-on gathered round the table, glanced speculatively at him, considering the matter. Physical courage he certainly possessed to a pronounced degree; but in spite of taking a perverse pride in being thought a Care-for-Nobody he had not as yet given anyone reason to suppose that he had any strength of moral character. Mr. Hethersett, several years his senior and a man of a different kidney, was not one of his friends, and even less one of his admirers, but he did him the justice to acknowledge that although he was a resty young blade, decidedly loose in the haft, incorrigibly spendthrift, and ready at any moment to plunge into whatever extravagant folly was suggested to him by his impish fancy, he had never been known, even in his most reckless mood, to step over the line that lay between the venial peccadilloes of a wild youth and such questionable exploits as must bring his name into dishonour. He was both generous and goodnatured, and Mr. Hethersett rather thought that he held his sister in considerable affection. He knew, too, that Cardross, better acquainted with him, and increasingly exasperated by his starts, by no means despaired of him. Without going to the length of forecasting for him a future distinguished by sobriety or solvency, he said that if a cornetcy could but be provided for him he would find an outlet for his restless energy, and might do tolerably well.

"He may be a scamp," said Cardross, "but there's no sham in him—nothing of the dry-boots! It would give me great pleasure to go sharply to work with him—but he's pluck to the backbone, and I own I like that."

Mr. Hethersett had a great respect for his cousin's judgment, and, remembering these words, he made up his mind to have at least a touch at Dysart. Since the task was not one he looked forward to with relish, he thought that the sooner it was accomplished the better it would be, and decided that unless Dysart arose from the table a loser he would broach the matter that very day. From the flush in the Viscount's cheeks, and the over-brightness of his eyes, he had at first glance supposed him to be a trifle foxed; but he soon realized that for once he had wronged him. The Viscount, whose exuberance could lead him to become top-heavy at almost any hour of the day, was by far too keen a gamester to join a gaming-table when in his altitudes. There was certainly a glass at his elbow, but the brandy it held sank hardly at all during the time Mr. Hethersett stood watching the play, and from time to time making his bet on the odds monotonously declared by the groom-porter.