CHAPTER XXIII

BULLY POMEROY

The man held a candle in a hand that wavered and strewed tallow broadcast; the light from this for a moment dazzled the visitors. Then the draught of air extinguished it, and looking over the servant's shoulder--he was short and squat--Mr. Thoma.s.son's anxious eyes had a glimpse of a s.p.a.cious old-fashioned hall, panelled and furnished in oak, with here a blazon, and there antlers or a stuffed head. At the farther end of the hall a wide easy staircase rose, to branch at the first landing into two flights, that returning formed a gallery round the apartment. Between the door and the foot of the staircase, in the warm glow of an unseen fire, stood a small heavily-carved oak table, with Jacobean legs, like stuffed trunk-hose. This was strewn with cards, liquors, gla.s.ses, and a china punch-bowl; but especially with cards, which lay everywhere, not only on the table, but in heaps and batches beneath and around it, where the careless hands of the players had flung them.

Yet, for all these cards, the players were only two. One, a man something under forty, in a peach coat and black satin breeches, sat on the edge of the table, his eyes on the door and his chair lying at his feet. It was his voice that had shouted for Jarvey and that now saluted the arrivals with a boisterous 'Two to one in guineas, it's a catchpoll!

D'ye take me, my lord?'--the while he drummed merrily with his heels on a leg of the table. His companion, an exhausted young man, thin and pale, remained in his chair, which he had tilted on its hinder feet; and contented himself with staring at the doorway.

The latter was our old friend, Lord Almeric Doyley; but neither he nor Mr. Thoma.s.son knew one another, until the tutor had advanced some paces into the room. Then, as the gentleman in the peach coat cried, 'Curse me, if it isn't a parson! The bet's off! Off!' Lord Almeric dropped his hand of cards on the table, and opening his mouth gasped in a paroxysm of dismay.

'Oh, Lord,' he exclaimed, at last. 'Hold me, some one! If it isn't Tommy! Oh, I say,' he continued, rising and speaking in a tone of querulous remonstrance, 'you have not come to tell me the old man's gone! And I'd pitted him against Bedford to live to--to--but it's like him! It is like him, and monstrous unfeeling. I vow and protest it is!

Eh! oh, it is not that! Hal--loa!'

He paused there, his astonishment greater even than that which he had felt on recognising the tutor. His eye had lighted on Julia, whose figure was now visible on the threshold.

His companion did not notice this. He was busy identifying the tutor.

'Gad! it is old Thoma.s.son!' he cried, for he too had been at Pembroke.

'_And_ a petticoat! _And_ a petticoat!' he repeated. 'Well, I am spun!'

The tutor raised his hands in astonishment. 'Lord!' he said, with a fair show of enthusiasm, 'do I really see my old friend and pupil, Mr.

Pomeroy of Bastwick?'

'Who put the cat in your valise? When you got to London--kittens? You do, Tommy.'

'I thought so!' Mr. Thoma.s.son answered effusively. 'I was sure of it! I never forget a face when my--my heart has once gone out to it! And you, my dear, my very dear Lord Almeric, there is no danger I shall ever--'

'But, crib me, Tommy,' Lord Almeric shrieked, cutting him short without ceremony, so great was his astonishment, 'it's the Little Masterson!'

'You old fox!' Mr. Pomeroy chimed in, shaking his finger at the tutor with leering solemnity; he, belonging to an older generation at the College, did not know her. Then, 'The Little Masterson, is it?' he continued, advancing to the girl, and saluting her with mock ceremony.

'Among friends, I suppose? Well, my dear, for the future be pleased to count me among them. Welcome to my poor house! And here's to bettering your taste--for, fie, my love, old men are naughty. Have naught to do with them!' And he laughed wickedly. He was a tall, heavy man, with a hard, bullying, sneering face; a Dunborough grown older.

'Hush! my good sir. Hush!' Mr. Thoma.s.son cried anxiously, after making more than one futile effort to stop him. Between his respect for his companion, and the deference in which he held a lord, the tutor was in agony. 'My good sir, my dear Lord Almeric, you are in error,' he continued strenuously. 'You mistake, I a.s.sure you, you mistake--'

'Do we, by Gad!' Mr. Pomeroy cried, winking at Julia.' Well, you and I, my dear, don't, do we? We understand one another very well.'

The girl only answered by a fierce look of contempt. But Mr. Thoma.s.son was in despair. 'You do not, indeed!' he cried, almost wringing his hands. 'This lady has lately come into a--a fortune, and to-night was carried off by some villains from the Castle Inn at Marlborough in a--in a post-chaise. I was fortunately on the spot to give her such protection as I could, but the villains overpowered me, and to prevent my giving the alarm, as I take it, bundled me into the chaise with her.'

'Oh, come,' said Mr. Pomeroy, grinning. 'You don't expect us to swallow that?'

'It is true, as I live,' the tutor protested. 'Every word of it.'

'Then how come you here?'

'Not far from your gate, for no reason that I can understand, they turned us out, and made off.'

'Honest Abraham?' Lord Almeric asked; he had listened open-mouthed.

'Every word of it,' the tutor answered.

'Then, my dear, if you have a fortune, sit down,' cried Mr. Pomeroy; and seizing a chair he handed it with exaggerated gallantry to Julia, who still remained near the door, frowning darkly at the trio; neither ashamed nor abashed, but proudly and coldly contemptuous. 'Make yourself at home, my pretty,' he continued familiarly, 'for if you have a fortune it is the only one in this house, and a monstrous uncommon thing. Is it not, my lord?'

'Lord! I vow it is!' the other drawled; and then, taking advantage of the moment when Julia's attention was engaged elsewhere--she dumbly refused to sit, 'Where is Dunborough?' my lord muttered.

'Heaven knows,' Mr. Thoma.s.son whispered, with a wink that postponed inquiry. 'What is more to the purpose,' he continued aloud, 'if I may venture to make the suggestion to your lordship and Mr. Pomeroy, Miss Masterson has been much distressed and fatigued this evening. If there is a respectable elderly woman in the house, therefore, to whose care you could entrust her for the night, it were well.'

'There is old Mother Olney,' Mr. Pomeroy answered, a.s.senting with a readier grace than the tutor expected, 'who locked herself up an hour ago for fear of us young bloods. She should be old and ugly enough! Here you, Jarvey, go and kick in her outworks, and bid her come down.'

'Better still, if I may suggest it,' said the tutor, who was above all things anxious to be rid of the girl before too much was said--'Might not your servant take Miss above stairs to this good woman--who will doubtless see to her comfort? Miss Masterson has gone through some surprising adventures this evening, and I think it were better if you allowed her to withdraw at once, Mr. Pomeroy.'

'Jarvey, take the lady,' Mr. Pomeroy cried. 'A sweet pretty toad she is.

Here's to your eyes and fortune, child!' he continued with an impudent grin; and filling his gla.s.s he pledged her as she pa.s.sed.

After that he stood watching while Mr. Thoma.s.son opened the door and bowed her out; and this done and the door closed after her, 'Lord, what ceremony!' he said, with an ugly sneer. 'Is't real, man, or are you bubbling her? And what is this c.o.c.k-lane story of a chaise and the rest?

Out with it, unless you want to be tossed in a blanket.'

'True, upon my honour!' Mr. Thoma.s.son a.s.severated.

'Oh, but Tommy, the fortune?' Lord Almeric protested seriously. 'I vow you are sharping us.'

'True too, my lord, as I hope to be saved!'

'True? Oh, but it is too monstrous absurd,' my lord wailed. 'The Little Masterson? As pretty a little t.i.t as was to be found in all Oxford. The Little Masterson a fortune?'

'She has eyes and a shape,' Mr. Pomeroy admitted generously. 'For the rest, what is the figure, Mr. Thoma.s.son?' he continued. 'There are fortunes and fortunes.'

Mr. Thoma.s.son looked at the gallery above, and thence, and slyly, to his companions and back again to the gallery; and swallowed something that rose in his throat. At length he seemed to make up his mind to speak the truth, though when he did so it was in a voice little above a whisper. 'Fifty thousand,' he said, and looked guiltily round him.

Lord Almeric rose from his chair as if on springs. 'Oh, I protest!' he said. 'You are roasting us. Fifty thousand! It's a bite?'

But Mr. Thoma.s.son nodded. 'Fifty thousand,' he repeated softly. 'Fifty thousand.'

'Pounds?' gasped my lord. 'The Little Masterson?'

The tutor nodded again; and without asking leave, with a dogged air unlike his ordinary bearing when he was in the company of those above him, he drew a decanter towards him, and filling a gla.s.s with a shaking hand raised it to his lips and emptied it. The three were on their feet round the table, on which several candles, luridly lighting up their faces, still burned; while others had flickered down, and smoked in the guttering sockets, among the empty bottles and the litter of cards. In one corner of the table the lees of wine had run upon the oak, and dripped to the floor, and formed a pool, in which a broken gla.s.s lay in fragments beside the overturned chair. An observant eye might have found on the panels below the gallery the vacant nails and dusty lines whence Lelys and Knellers, Cuyps and Hondekoeters had looked down on two generations of Pomeroys. But in the main the disorder of the scene centred in the small table and the three men standing round it; a lighted group, islanded in the shadows of the hall.

Mr. Pomeroy waited with impatience until Mr. Thoma.s.son lowered his gla.s.s. Then, 'Let us have the story,' he said. 'A guinea to a China orange the fool is tricking us.'

The tutor shook his head, and turned to Lord Almeric. 'You know Sir George Soane,' he said. 'Well, my lord, she is his cousin.'

'Oh, tally, tally!' my lord cried. 'You--you are romancing, Tommy!'

'And under the will of Sir George's grandfather she takes fifty thousand pounds, if she make good her claim within a certain time from to-day.'

'Oh, I say, you are romancing!' my lord repeated, more feebly. 'You know, you really should not! It is too uncommon absurd, Tommy.'

'It's true!' said Mr. Thoma.s.son.