"You certainly have a knack, Miss Grey, of making the most unpalatable a.s.sertions."

"I will make another more unpalatable. Solitude I could bear,--and death,--but not such a marriage. You force me to tell you the whole truth because half a truth will not suffice."

"I have endeavored to be at any rate civil to you," he said.

"And I have endeavored to save you what trouble I could by being straightforward." Still he paused, sitting in his chair uneasily, but looking as though he had no intention of going. "If you will only take me at my word and have done with it!" Still he did not move. "I suppose there are young ladies who like this kind of thing, but I have become old enough to hate it. I have had very little experience of it, but it is odious to me. I can conceive nothing more disagreeable than to have to sit still and hear a gentleman declare that he wants to make me his wife, when I am quite sure that I do not intend to make him my husband."

"Then, Miss Grey," he said, rising from his chair suddenly, "I shall bid you adieu."

"Good-bye, Mr. Barry."

"Good-bye, Miss Grey. Farewell!" And so he went.

"Oh, papa, we have had such a scene!" she said, the moment she felt herself alone with her father.

"You have not accepted him?"

"Accepted him! Oh dear no! I am sure at this moment he is only thinking how he would cut my throat if he could get hold of me."

"You must have offended him then very greatly."

"Oh, mortally! I said everything I possibly could to offend him. But then he would have been here still had I not done so. There was no other way to get rid of him,--or indeed to make him believe that I was in earnest."

"I am sorry that you should have been so ungracious."

"Of course I am ungracious. But how can you stand bandying compliments with a man when it is your object to make him know the very truth that is in you? It was your fault, papa. You ought to have understood how very impossible it is that I should marry Mr. Barry."

CHAPTER LIII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST PLOT.

When Mr. Scarborough had written the check and sent it to Mr. Grey, he did not utter another word on the subject of gambling. "Let us make another beginning," he said, as he told his son to make out another check for sixty pounds as his first instalment of the allowance.

"I do not like to take it," said the son.

"I don't think you need be scrupulous now with me." That was early in the morning, at their first interview, about ten o'clock. Later on in the day Mr. Scarborough saw his son again, and on this occasion kept him in the room some time. "I don't suppose I shall last much longer now,"

he said.

"Your voice is as strong as I ever heard it."

"But unfortunately my body does not keep pace with my voice. From what Merton says, I don't suppose there is above a month left."

"I don't see why Merton is to know."

"Merton is a good fellow; and if you can do anything for him, do it for my sake."

"I will." Then he added, after a pause, "If things go as we expect, Augustus can do more for him than I. Why don't you leave him a sum of money?"

Then Miss Scarborough came into the room, and hovered about her brother, and fed him, and entreated him to be silent; but when she had gone he went back to the subject. "I will tell you why, Mountjoy. I have not wished to load my will with other considerations,--so that it might be seen that solicitude for you has been in my last moments my only thought. Of course I have done you a deep injury."

"I think you have."

"And because you tell me so I like you all the better. As for Augustus--But I will not burden my spirit now, at the last, with uttering curses against my own son."

"He is not worth it."

"No, he is not worth it. What a fool he has been not to have understood me better! Now, you are not half as clever a fellow as he is."

"I dare say not."

"You never read a book, I suppose?"

"I don't pretend to read them, which he does."

"I don't know anything about that;--but he has been utterly unable to read me. I have poured out my money with open hands for both of you."

"That is true, sir, certainly, as regards me."

"And have thought nothing of it. Till it was quite hopeless with you I went on, and would have gone on. As things were then, I was bound to do something to save the property."

"These poor devils have put themselves out of the running now," said Mountjoy.

"Yes; Augustus with his suspicions has enabled us to do that. After all, he was quite right with his suspicions."

"What do you mean by that, sir?"

"Well, it was natural enough that he should not trust me. I think, too, that perhaps he saw a screw loose where old Grey did not; but he was such an a.s.s that he could not bring himself to keep on good terms with me for the few months that were left. And then he brought that brute Jones down here, without saying a word to me as to asking my leave. And here he used to remain, hardly ever coming to see me, but waiting for my death from day to day. He is a cold-blooded, selfish brute. He certainly takes after neither his father nor his mother. But he will find yet, perhaps, that I am even with him before all is over."

"I shall try it on with him, sir. I have told you so from the beginning; and now if I have this money it will give me the means of doing so. You ought to know for what purpose I shall use it."

"That is all settled," said the father. "The doc.u.ment, properly completed, has gone back with the clerk. Were I to die this minute you would find that everything inside the house is your own,--and everything outside except the bare acres. There is a lot of plate with the banker which I have not wanted of late years. And there are a lot of trinkets too,--things which I used to fancy, though I have not cared so much about them lately. And there are a few pictures which are worth money. But the books are the most valuable; only you do not care for them."

"I shall not have a house to put them in."

"There is no saying. What an idiot, what a fool, what a blind, unthinking a.s.s Augustus has been!"

"Do you regret it, sir,--that he should not have them and the house too?"

"I regret that my son should have been such a fool! I did not expect that he should love me. I did not even want him to be kind to me. Had he remained away and been silent, that would have been sufficient. But he came here to enjoy himself, as he looked about the park which he thought to be his own, and insulted me because I would not die at once and leave him in possession. And then he was fool enough to make way for you again, and did not perceive that by getting rid of your creditors he once again put you into a position to be his rival. I don't know whether I hate him most for the hardness of his heart, or despise him for the slowness of his intellect."

During the time that these words had been spoken Miss Scarborough had once or twice come into the room, and besought her brother to take some refreshment which she offered him, and then give himself up to rest. But he had refused to be guided by her till he had come to a point in the conversation at which he had found himself thoroughly exhausted. Now she came for the third time, and that period had arrived, so that Mountjoy was told to go about his business, and shoot birds or hunt foxes, in accordance with his natural proclivities. It was then three o'clock on a gloomy December afternoon, and was too late for the shooting of birds; and as for the hunting of foxes, the hounds were not in the neighborhood. So he resolved to go through the house, and look at all those properties which were so soon to become his own. And he at once strolled into the library. This was a long, gloomy room, which contained perhaps ten thousand volumes, the greater number of which had, in the days of Mountjoy's early youth, been brought together by his own father; and they had been bound in the bindings of modern times, so that the shelves were bright, although the room itself was gloomy. He took out book after book, and told himself, with something of sadness in his heart, that they were all "caviare" to him. Then he reminded himself that he was not yet thirty years of age, and that there was surely time enough left for him to make them his companions.

He took one at random, and found it to be a volume of Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." He pitched upon a sentence in which he counted that there were sixteen lines, and when he began to read it, it became to him utterly confused and unintelligible. So he put it back, and went to another portion of the room and took down Wittier's "Hallelujah;" and of this he could make neither head nor tail. He was informed, by a heading in the book itself, that a piece of poetry was to be sung "as the ten commandments." He could not do that, and put the book back again, and declared to himself that farther search would be useless. He looked round the room and tried to price the books, and told himself that three or four days at the club might see an end of it all.

Then he wandered on into the state drawing-room,--an apartment which he had not entered for years,--and found that all the furniture was carefully covered. Of what use could it all be to him,--unless that it, too, might be sent to the melting-pot and brought into some short-lived use at the club?