"You wretch! you villain! you perjured, scheming, designing, lying, paltry, stupid, insignificant, outrageous----"

Whether it was that her ladyship wanted words to supply a climax, or that hysterics are usually attended with such results, we cannot pretend to say, but certain it is that at this precise point the languishing, fashionable, die-away Lady Stukely actually spat in the young baronet's face.

Ashwoode changed colour, as he promptly discharged the ridiculous but very necessary task of wiping his face. With difficulty he restrained himself under this provocation, but he did command himself so far as to say nothing. He turned on his heel and walked downstairs, muttering as he went,--

"An old painted devil!"

The cool air, as he pa.s.sed out, speedily dissipated the confusion and excitement of the scene that had just pa.s.sed, and all the consequences of his rupture with Lady Stukely rushed upon his mind with overwhelming and maddening force.

"You were right, perfectly right--he _is_ a cheat--a trickster--a villain!" exclaimed Lady Stukely. "Only to think of him! Oh, heaven and earth!" And again she was seized with violent hysterics, in which state she was conducted up to her bedroom by Emily Copland, who had enjoyed the catastrophe with an intensity of relish which none but a female, and a mischievous one to boot, can know.

Loud and repeated were Lady Stukely's thanksgivings for having escaped the snares of the designing young baronet, and warm and multiplied and grateful her acknowledgments to Emily Copland--to whom, however, from that time forth she cherished an intense dislike.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

OF JEWELS, PLATE, HORSES, DOGS, AND FAMILY PICTURES--AND CONCERNING THE APPOINTED HOUR.

In a state little, if at all, short of distraction, Sir Henry Ashwoode threw himself from his horse at Morley Court. That resource which he had calculated upon with absolute certainty had totally failed him; his last stake had been played and lost, and ruin in its most hideous aspect stared him in the face.

Spattered from heel to head with mud--for he had ridden at a reckless speed--with a face pale as that of a corpse, and his dress all disordered, he entered the great old parlour, and scarcely knowing what he did, dashed the door to with violence and bolted it. His brain swam so that the floor seemed to heave and rock like a sea; he cast his laced hat and his splendid peruke (the envy and admiration of half the _pet.i.t maitres_ in Dublin) upon the ground, and stood in the centre of the room, with his hands clutched upon the temples of his bare, shorn head, and his teeth set, the breathing image of despair. From this state he was roused by some one endeavouring to open the door.

"Who's there?" he shouted, springing backward and drawing his sword, as if he expected a troop of constables to burst in.

Whoever the party may have been, the attempt was not repeated.

"What's the matter with me--am I mad?" said Ashwoode, after a terrible pause, and hurling his sword to the far end of the room. "Lie there.

I've let the moment pa.s.s--I might have done it--cut the Gordian knot, and there an end of all. What brought me here?"

He stared about the room, for the first time conscious where he stood.

"d.a.m.n these pictures," he muttered; "they're all alive--everything moves towards me." He flung himself into a chair and clasped his fingers over his eyes. "I can't breathe--the place is suffocating. Oh, G.o.d! I shall go mad!" He threw open one of the windows and stood gasping at it as if he stood at the mouth of a furnace.

"Everything is hot and strange and maddening--I can't endure this--brain and heart are bursting--it is h.e.l.l."

In a state of excitement which nearly amounted to downright insanity, he stood at the open window. It was long before this extravagant agitation subsided so as to allow room for thought or remembrance. At length he closed the window, and began to pace the room from end to end with long and heavy steps. He stopped by a pier-table, on which stood a china bowl full of flowers, and plunging his hands into it, dashed the water over his head and face.

"Let me think--let me think," said he. "I was not wont to be thus overcome by reverse. Surely I can master as much as will pay that thrice-accursed bond, if I could but collect my thoughts--there must yet be the means of meeting it. Let _that_ be but paid, and then, welcome ruin in any other shape. Let me see. Ay, the furniture; then the pictures--some of them valuable--_very_ valuable; then the horses and the dogs; and then--ay, the plate. Why, to be sure--what have I been dreaming of?--the plate will go half-way to satisfy it; and then--what else? Let me see. The whole thing is six thousand four hundred and fifty pounds--what more? Is there _nothing_ more to meet it? The plate--the furniture--the pictures--ay, idiot that I am, why did I not think of them an hour since?--my sister's jewels--why, it's all settled--how the devil came it that I never thought of them before?

It's very well, however, as it is--for if I had, they would have gone long ago. Come, come, I breathe again--I have gotten my neck out of the hemp, at all events. I'll send in for Craven this moment. He likes a bargain, and he shall have one--before to-morrow's sun goes down, that d----d bond shall be ashes. Mary's jewels are valued at two thousand pounds. Well, let him take them at one thousand five hundred; and the pictures, plate, furniture, dogs, and horses for the rest--and he has a bargain. These jewels have saved me--bribed the hangman. What care I how or when I die, if I but avert that. Ten to one I blow my brains out before another month. A short life and a merry one was ever the motto of the Ashwoodes; and as the mirth is pretty well over with me, I begin to think it time to retire. _Satis edisti, satis bipisti, satis lusisti, tempus est tibi abire_--what am I raving about? There's business to be done now--to it, then--to it like a man--while we _are_ alive let us _be_ alive."

Craven liked his bargain, and engaged that the money should be duly handed at noon next day to Sir Henry Ashwoode, who forthwith bade the worthy attorney good-night, and wrote the following brief note to Gordon Chancey, Esq.:--

"SIR,

"I shall call upon you to-morrow at one of the clock, if the hour suit you, upon particular business, and shall be much obliged by your having a _certain security_ by you, which I shall then be prepared to redeem.

"I remain, sir, your very obedient servant,

"HENRY ASHWOODE."

"So," said Sir Henry, with a half shudder, as he folded and sealed this missive, "I shall, at all events, escape the halter. To-morrow night, spite of wreck and ruin, I shall sleep soundly. G.o.d knows, I want rest.

Since I wrote that name, and gave that accursed bond out of my hands, my whole existence, waking and sleeping, has been but one abhorred and ghastly nightmare. I would gladly give a limb to have that d----d sc.r.a.p of parchment in my hand this moment; but patience, patience--one night more--one night only--of fevered agony and hideous dreams--one last night--and then--once more I am my own master--my character and safety are again in my own hands--and may I die the death, if ever I risk them again as I have done--one night more--would--_would_ to G.o.d it were morning!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

THE RECKONING--CHANCEY'S LARGE CAT--AND THE COACH.

The morning arrived, and at the appointed hour Sir Henry Ashwoode dismounted in Whitefriar Street, and gave the bridle of his horse to the groom who accompanied him.

"Well," thought he, as he entered the dingy, dilapidated square in which Chancey's lodgings were situated, "this matter, at all events, is arranged--I sha'n't hang, though I'm half inclined to allow I deserve to do so for my infernal folly in trying the thing at all; but no matter, it has given me a lesson I sha'n't soon forget. As to the rest, what care I now? Let ruin pounce upon me in any shape but that--luckily I have still enough to keep body and soul together left."

He paused to indulge in ruminations of no very pleasant kind, and then half muttered,--

"I have been a fool--I have walked in a dream. Only to think of a man like me, who has seen something of the world, allowing that d----d hag to play him such a trick. Well, I believe it _is_ true, after all, that we cannot have wisdom without paying for it. If my acquisitions bear any proportion to my outlay, I ought to be a Solomon by this time."

The door was opened to his summons by Gordon Chancey himself. When Ashwoode entered, Chancey carefully locked the door on the inside and placed the key in his pocket.

"It's as well, Sir Henry, to be on the safe side," observed Chancey, shuffling towards the table. "Dear me, dear me, there's no such thing as being too careful--is there, Sir Henry?"

"Well, well, well, let's to business," said young Ashwoode, hurriedly, seating himself at the end of a heavy deal table, at which was a chair, and taking from his pocket a large leathern pocket-book. "You have the--the security here?"

"Of course--oh, dear, of course," replied the barrister; "the bond and warrant of attorney--that d----d forgery--it is in the next room, very safe--oh, dear me, yes indeed."

It struck Ashwoode that there was something, he could not exactly say what, unusual and sinister in the manner of Mr. Chancey, as well as in his emphasis and language, and he fixed his eye upon him for a moment with a searching glance. The barrister, however, busied himself with tumbling over some papers in a drawer.

"Well, why don't you get it?" asked Ashwoode, impatiently.

"Never mind, never mind," replied Chancey; "do _you_ reckon your money over, and be very sure the bond will come time enough. I don't wonder, though, you're eager to have it fast in your own hands again--but it will come--it will come."

Ashwoode proceeded to open the pocket-book and to turn over the notes.

"They're all right," said he, "they're all right. But, hush!" he added, slightly changing colour--"I hear something stirring in the next room."

"Oh, dear, dear, it's nothing but the cat," rejoined Chancey, with an ugly laugh.

"Your cat treads very heavily," said Ashwoode, suspiciously.

"So it does," rejoined Chancey, "it does tread heavy; it's a very large cat, so it is; it has wonderful great claws; it can see in the dark; it's a great cat; it never missed a rat yet; and I've seen it lure the bird off a branch with the mere power of its eye; it's a great cat--but reckon your money, and I'll go in for the bond."

This strange speech was uttered in a manner at least as strange, and Chancey, without waiting for commentary or interruption, pa.s.sed into the next room. The step crossed the adjoining chamber, and Ashwoode heard the rustling of papers; it then returned, the door opened, and _not_ Gordon Chancey, but Nicholas Blarden entered the room and confronted Sir Henry Ashwoode. Personal fear in bodily conflict was a thing unknown to the young baronet, but now all courage, all strength forsook him, and he stood gazing in vacant horror upon that, to him, most tremendous apparition, with a face white as ashes, and covered with the starting dews of terror.