"No, your Grace!"
"I shall
not
be knocked up," said the Duke, walking over to the door.
"No, your Grace!"
"I shall dance into the small hours."
"Yes, your Grace!"
"And," pursued the Duke, opening the door, and casting a mischievous look at his cringing servitor, "I shall
not
engage a new valet!"
"Now, your Grace!" said Nettlebed, in quite a different voice.
But the Duke had gone.
He rode out towards Willsbridge beside his bailiff in a mood of gay good-humour, which much rejoiced that worthy man's heart. By his request, they gave Cheyney a wide berth, the Duke having no desire to encounter his uncle while going upon an errand of which Lord Lionel would violently disapprove, and Moffat understanding this without the Duke's having the least need to explain it to him. They reached Furze Farm without meeting anyone with whom the Duke was acquainted, and, tethering the horses to the gateposts, walked across the yard to the open kitchen door. A girl in a cotton apron and a mob-cap, who had stepped out to empty a pail of water, dropped a curtsy to Moffat, and informed him that Missus was in the kitchen, rolling out the pastry. Her voice brought a spare, middle-aged woman to the door. She had a worn, kindly face, and after casting the Duke a doubtful look, smiled at Moffat, and said: "Come you in, Mr. Moffat! Now, if I'd but known you would be passing this way today—!"
"Mrs. Mudgley, ma'am, I've brought his Grace to see your Jasper," said Moffat, indicating his companion.
She gave a gasp, and made haste to curtsy and to wipe the flour from her hands at the same time. "Your Grace! Oh, Mr. Moffat! And me all unprepared, and Jasper out in the fields, and you bringing his Grace to the kitchen, instead of round the front, as it fitting! I do not know what to say, your Grace, but I'm sure I beg your pardon! If you would please to step into the parlour, I will send directly to fetch my son!"
"Will you let me rather come into your kitchen, and talk to you, Mrs. Mudgley?" he said, with his shy smile.
She looked rather wildly at Moffat, faltering that it was not fit. The bailiff said in a heartening tone: "Take his Grace in, ma'am: I'll warrant he will like it very well!"
She dropped another curtsy, and the Duke stepped over the threshold, and laid his hat and gloves down on a chair, saying, as he looked round the room: "Yes, indeed I do. How comfortable it is! Am I disturbing you?"
"Oh, no, indeed, your Grace!" she assured him. She saw how young he was, and suddenly felt less nervous. She set a chair for him, whisked her pastry up into a damp cloth, and said diffidently: "If your Grace would partake of a little refreshment after the ride? Just a cup of my cowslip wine, belike?"
"Thank you: you are very good!" he said, hoping that it would not disagree with him as much as he feared it would. "Moffat, while I am talking to Mrs. Mudgley, will you be so good as to find her son for me?"
Mrs. Mudgley looked a little scared at being left without support, but by the time she had poured out a glass of her wine for the guest, and he had tasted it, and said how good it was, and had asked her how it was made, she began to forget his exalted status, and even allowed herself to be persuaded to sit down in a chair opposite him.
He said: "Moffat has been telling me about the Five-acre field, I am sorry my agent would not let your son buy it, but, you see, he has had to be so very careful while I was a minor."
She murmured something about her son's being able to give a fair price for it.
"Well, I think I shall not sell it to him," said the Duke. "I should like to give it to his bride for her dowry."
"She looked at him in a puzzled way. "Your Grace is very good but—"
"Mrs. Mudgley, I didn't come for that reason, but to ask you if you recall a girl named Belinda?"
She jumped. "Belinda!" she exclaimed. "Yes, and indeed I do, your Grace! Jasper was that taken with her he'll not look at another wench! Poor thing, it wasn't what I wished for him, sir, but seeing him so set on her, and him no more changeable than his father was before him, I would have let him wed her, and said naught, for she was so pretty you couldn't but compassion her, and good-natured besides, even if she hadn't much sense in her head, which dear knows she hadn't! But she ran off from the woman she was apprenticed to, and try as he would my boy could never discover what had become of her. Why, sir, it couldn't be that you know where she is?"
"Yes, I do know," he replied. "She fell into the hands of a plausible rogue, who wished to use her for his own ends, and I think she has been very unhappy since she ran away from Bath. But although she has been drifting about the country, and is a very silly girl, I am quite sure she is still quite an innocent girl." He paused. "I think I ought to tell you all I know of her," he said, meeting her startled blue eyes candidly. "You won't judge her harshly. I believe, and—and it would not be right not to tell you!"
She looked anxiously at him, but said nothing. But as he gently unfolded Belinda's story to her the anxiety faded. She shook her head over it often, and clicked her tongue in censure, but at the end sighed, and said: "It all comes of her being a foundling, your Grace, and no one to bring her up right. Not that they don't do their best at the Foundling Hospital, I'm sure, but it's not the same, and never could be. It's like as if the poor children don't have the feelings they would with homes of their own, and folks to care for them. It always seemed to me that Belinda was just like that leaf that's just blown in through the door, sir, cast about she didn't know where, and nothing to hold to, if your Grace takes my meaning." He nodded. "I never thought she was a bad girl, for all the silly notions she had in her head."
"No, that I know she is not," he replied. "But she has the most dreadful way of going off with anyone who offers to give her silk dresses, or trinkets, I can't deny!"
"Ah, but they did say at the Foundling Hospital, where my father went to ask if they had no news of her, that her father was Quality, which would account for it, sir, the Quality being very easy in their ways," explained Mrs. Mudgley simply. "A love-child, she was. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I was to tell your Grace I'm wishful my son should wed with her, but see him in the dumps like he's been ever since he lost her, I can't. She won't go trapesing off once she's got a home of her own, and babies, and I daresay I shall be able to show her the way she should go on, for she was mightily taken with the farm, and they did teach her to bake and make at the Foundling Hospital, that I will say!"
"Yes" he said, looking round. "She would be happy here. She is not happy in Laura Place, I think. It's strange to her, and she is a little afraid of Lady Ampleforth. And she thinks a great deal of your son, and of you." He smiled. "You were very kind to her, she told me, finding it strange that any woman should show her kindness."
Her heart was touched; she said: "Poor little dear! Do you bring her to me, sir, and don't let her fear to be scolded, for it's no manner of use scolding a pretty silly creature like her!"
A shadow darkened the doorway; the Duke looked up, and saw a sturdy young man confronting him, in breeches, and leggings, and with his shirt-sleeves rolled half-way up his tanned arms. He had a stolid, open countenance, in which a pair of widely set grey eyes squarely met the Duke's. His mother jumped up, and went to him, chiding him for not having put on his coat and washed his hands before coming into the house, but he put her gently aside, saying, with his eyes still fixed on the Duke: "Mr. Moffat told me his Grace of Sale had news of Belinda, Mother."
"Yes, yes, but make your bow, Jasper, do!" she adjured him. "His Grace has been so kind, you would not believe!"
"Has he?" said Mr. Mudgley heavily.
"Jasper, will you mind your manners? I don't know what his Grace must be thinking of you, standing there like a gowk! And him giving the Five-acre to Belinda, as he will!"
The lines about Mr. Mudgley's jaw seemed to harden. "I don't care for that," he said. "Nor I don't rightly know why he should do any such thing, Mother."
The Duke rose. "Not for any such reason as you have in your head," he said. "Walk out with me: we shall do better to talk this over alone."
"I'm agreeable," said Mr. Mudgley, in a level tone, and stood aside for him to pass out of the kitchen.
"Oh, deary me!" said Mrs. Mudgley to Moffat, who had slipped quietly into the house behind his young friend. "I do hope my Jasper won't offend his Grace! You know what he is, Mr. Moffat! As stiff-necked as his father, and move him you can't, once he's taken a notion into his head! Whatever will become of us if he should say something which his Grace might take amiss?"
"His Grace won't take offence," Moffat said. "He's not like his uncle, high in the instep, as the saying is. I've known him since he was a sickly boy, hardly out of short-coats, ay, helped him out of trees when he got stuck, and taught him to handle a gun, and there never was a lad with a sweeter nature, that I'll swear to! What's more, ma'am, he's got a way with him, for all he's not to much to look at, and if he don't have your Jasper out of his high ropes I shall be fair astonished!"
He was not destined to suffer astonishment. After walking up and down the lane for long enough to make Mrs. Mudgley feel very uneasy, the two men came in, apparently on the best of terms. Mrs. Mudgley saw that the set look he had worn for so long had vanished from her son's face, and shed tears, which she dried hastily, however, explaining that she didn't know whether she stood on her head or her heels. None of the three men found this very comprehensible, but they were relieved to see that she had stopped crying, and encouraged her in their several ways, her son patting her on the shoulder, Moffat saying There, there! in a helpless way, and the Duke announcing that it had been decided that he and Lady Harriet would bring Belinda out to Furze Farm as soon as was possible.
Mrs. Mudgley then poured out cowslip wine all round, and after he had heroically swallowed his portion, the Duke took his leave of his hosts and rode back to Bath, feeling that a weight had dropped from his shoulders.
He had been invited to dine in Laura Place, before attending the Dowager and Lady Harriet to the Assembly Rooms, and when he reached the Christopher he found that his cousin had driven out to Cheyney some time earlier. He walked upstairs, to be met by Nettlebed, who took his hat and gloves from him, expressing the hope that he would rest before he changed his dress.
"Yes, perhaps I will," he said yawning. "What's this?" He picked up a letter from the table as he spoke, and saw that it was addressed to him in Lord Gaywood's dashing handwriting.
"My Lord Gaywood's man left it here for your Grace, not half an hour ago," responded Nettlebed disparagingly. "He said there was no answer expected. And a fly-by-night fellow he is! I wonder his lordship would have such about him."
The Duke broke the wafer, and spread open the letter. It was quite brief.
"Dear Sale,"
it ran.
"Don't put yourself to any more trouble over your fair Cyprian, for I'm taking her off your hands. It would be a curst sin to tie such an out-and-outer up to some Somerset bumpkin.
You
may fob Harriet off with what tale you please, and believe me, Your devilish obliged servant, Gaywood."
Chapter 25
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For a full minute after he had read this missive the Duke knew an impulse to wash his hands of the whole affair. Then a cold, unaccustomed rage took possession of him, and, as he raised his eyes from the letter in his hand, his valet was startled to see in them an expression so reminiscent of the late Duke in one of his rare fits of anger that he could almost have supposed that the Duke's father and not himself stood before him.
The Duke crushed the letter into a ball, his mouth tightening. He glanced at Nettlebed, and spoke. "My chaise, and four good horses," he said curtly.
Nettlebed knew that voice, though he had never heard it issuing from this Duke's lips. He was frightened, but he felt himself bound by his love and duty to protest. "Now, your Grace," he began, in a scolding tone.
A sudden flash of anger in the Duke's frowning eyes silenced him. "You heard what I said!"
"Yes, your Grace," said Nettlebed miserably.
"Do as I bid you, then! It is to be ready for me within twenty minutes. I am going round to Laura Place now. Call me a hackney!"