"Yes," replied she, but in a voice almost inarticulate from shame and terror.

"Now, Sir Stafford, I 'm at your orders," said the Viscount, gayly, as he left the room, followed by the old man, whose crimson cheek and flashing eye bespoke the pa.s.sion which was struggling within him.

Of the two who now entered Sir Stafford's library, it must be owned that Lord Norwood was, by many degrees, the more calm and collected. No one, to have looked at him, could possibly have supposed that any question of interest, not to say of deep moment, awaited him; and as he carried his eyes over the well-filled shelves and the hand some fittings of the chamber, nothing could be more naturally spoken than the few complimentary expressions on Sir Stafford's good taste and judgment.

"I shall not ask you to be seated, my Lord," said the old Baronet, whose tremulous lip and shaking cheek showed how deep-felt was his agitation.

"The few moments of interview I have requested will be, I have no doubt, too painful to either of us, nor could we desire to prolong them. To me, I own, they are very, very painful."

These hurried, broken, and unconnected sentences fell from him as he searched for a letter among a number of others that littered the table.

Lord Norwood bowed coldly, and, without making any reply, turned his back to the fire, and waited in patience.

"I have, I fear, mislaid the letter," said Sir Stafford, whose nervous anxiety had now so completely mastered him that he threw the letters and papers on every side without perceiving it.

The Viscount made no sign, but suffered the search to proceed without remark.

"It was a letter from Lord Effingdale," continued the Baronet, still busied in the pursuit, "a letter written after the Newmarket settling, my Lord; and if I should be unfortunate enough not to find it, I must only trust to my memory for its contents."

Lord Norwood gave another bow, slighter and colder than the former, as though to say that he acquiesced perfectly, without knowing in what.

"Ah! here it is! here it is!" cried Sir Stafford, at last detecting the missing doc.u.ment, which he hastily opened and ran his eyes over. "This letter, my Lord," continued he, "announces that, in consequence of certain defalcations on your part, the members of the 'Whip Club'

have erased your Lordship's name from their list, and declared you incapacitated from either entering a horse, or naming a winner for the stakes in future. There, there, my Lord, is the paragraph, coupled with what you will doubtless feel to be a very severe but just comment on the transaction."

Norwood took the letter and read it leisurely, as leisurely and calmly as though the contents never concerned him, and then, folding it up, laid it on the chimney-piece beside him.

"Poor Effingdale!" said he, smiling; "he ought to spell better, considering that his mother was a governess. He writes 'naming' with an 'e.' Didn't you remark that?"

But as Sir Stafford paid no attention to the criticism, he went on:

"As to the 'Whip,' I may as well tell you, that I scratched my own name myself. They are a set of low 'Legs,' and, except poor Effy, and two or three others of the same brilliant stamp, not a gentleman amongst them."

"The defalcation is, however, true?" asked Sir Stafford.

"If you mean to ask whether a man always wins at Doncaster or Newmarket, the question is of the easiest to answer."

"I certainly presume that he always pays what he loses, my Lord,"

replied Sir Stafford, coloring at the evasive impertinence of the other.

"Of course he does, when he has it, Sir Stafford; but that is a most essential condition, for the 'Turf' is not precisely like a mercantile pursuit."

Sir Stafford winced under the flippant insolence with which this was spoken.

"There is not exactly a fair way to calculate profit, nor any a.s.surance against accidental loss. A horse, Sir Stafford, is not an Indiaman; a betting man is, therefore, in a position quite exceptional."

"If a man risks what he cannot pay, he is dishonorable," said Sir Stafford, in a short, abrupt tone.

"I see that you cannot enter into a theme so very different from all your habits and pursuits. You think there is a kind of bankruptcy when a man gets a little behind with his bets. You don't see that all these transactions are on 'honor,' and that if one does 'bolt,' he means to 'book up' another time. There was George, your own son--"

"What of him? what of George?" cried Sir Stafford, with a convulsive grasp of the chair, while the color fled from his cheek, and he seemed ready to faint with emotion.

"Oh, nothing in the world to cause you uneasiness. A more honorable fellow never breathed than George."

"Then, what of him? How comes his name to your lips at such a discussion as this? Tell me, this instant, my Lord. I command I entreat you!"

And the old man shook like one in an ague; but Norwood saw his vantage-ground, and determined to use it unsparingly. He therefore merely smiled, and said, "Pray be calm, Sir Stafford. I repeat that there is nothing worthy of a moment's chagrin. I was only about to observe that if I had the same taste for scandal-writing as poor Effy, I might have circulated a similar story about your son George. He left England, owing me a good round sum, for which, by the way, I was terribly 'hard up;' and although the money was paid eventually, what would you have thought of me what would the world have thought of him if I had written such an epistle as this?"

And as he spoke, his voice and manner warmed into a degree of indignant anger, in which, as if carried away, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter from the chimney-piece and threw it into the fire. The act was unseen by Sir Stafford, who sat with his head deeply buried between his hands, a low faint groan alone bespeaking the secret agony of his heart.

"My son has, then, paid you? He owes nothing, my Lord?" said he, at last, looking up, with a countenance furrowed by agitation.

"Like a trump!" said Norwood, a.s.suming the most easy and self-satisfied manner. "My life upon George Onslow! Back him to any amount, and against the field anywhere! A true John Bull! no humbug, no nonsense about him!

straightforward and honorable, always!"

"Your position is, then, this, my Lord," said Sir Stafford, whose impatience would not permit him to listen longer, "you have quitted England, leaving for future settlement a number of debts, for which you have not the remotest prospect of liquidation."

"Too fast, you go too fast!" said the Viscount, laughing.

"Lord Effingdale writes the amount at thirty thousand pounds, and adds that, as a defaulter--"

"There's the whole of it," broke in Norwood. "You ring the changes about that one confounded word, and there is no use in attempting a vindication. 'Give a dog a bad name,' as the adage says. Now, I took the trouble this very morning to go over the whole of this tiresome business with George. I explained to him fully, and, I hope, to his entire satisfaction, that I was simply unfortunate in it, nothing more. A man cannot always 'ride the winner; 'I 'm sure I wish _I_ could. Of course, I don't mean to say that it 's not a confounded 'bore' to come out here and live in such a place as this, and just at the opening of the season, too, when town is beginning to fill; but 'needs must,' we are told, 'when a certain gent sits on the coach-box.'"

Sir Stafford stood, during the whole of this speech, with his arms folded and his eyes fixed upon the floor. He never heard one word of it, but was deeply intent upon his own thoughts. At length he spoke in a full, collected, and firm voice: "Lord Norwood I am, as you have told me, perfectly unfitted to p.r.o.nounce upon transactions so very unlike every pursuit in which my life has been pa.s.sed. I am alike ignorant of the feelings of those who engage in them, and of the rules of honor by which they are guided; but this I know, that the man whom his equals decline to a.s.sociate with at home is not recognizable abroad; and that he who leaves his country with shame, cannot reside away from it with credit."

"This would be a very rude speech, Sir Stafford Onslow, even with the palliative preface of your ignorance, if our relative ages admitted any equality between us. I am the least bellicose of men, I believe I can say I may afford to be so. So long, therefore, as you confine such sentiments to yourself, I will never complain of them; but if the time comes that you conceive they should be issued for general circulation--"

"Well, my Lord, what then?"

"Your son must answer for it, that's all!" said Norwood; and he drew himself up, and fixed his eye steadily on the distant wall of the room, with a look and gesture that made the old man sick at heart. Norwood saw how "his shot told," and, turning hastily round, said: "This interview, I conclude, has lasted quite long enough for either of us. If you have any further explanations to seek for, let them come through a younger man, and in a more regular form. Good-morning."

Sir Stafford bowed, without speaking, as the other pa.s.sed out.

To have seen them both at that moment, few would have guessed aright on which side lay all the disgrace, and where the spirit of rect.i.tude and honor.

Sir Stafford, indeed, was most miserable. If the Viscount's mock explanations did not satisfy a single scruple of his mind, was it not possible they might have sufficed with others more conversant with such matters? Perhaps he is not worse than others of his own cla.s.s. What would be his feelings if he were to involve George in a quarrel for such a cause? This was a consideration that pressed itself in twenty different forms, each of them enough to appall him. "But the man is a defaulter; he has fled from England with 'shame,'" was the stubborn conviction which no efforts of his casuistry could banish; and the more he reflected on this, the less possible seemed anything like evasion or compromise.

CHAPTER XXVI. THE END OF THE FIRST ACT

THE point discussed in our last chapter, if not a momentous one in itself, was destined to exercise a very important influence upon the fortunes of the Onslow family. The interview between Sir Stafford and the Viscount scarcely occupied five minutes; after which the Baronet wrote a note of some length to her Ladyship, to which she as promptly replied; a second, and even a third interchange of correspondence followed. The dinner-party appointed for that day was put off; a certain ominous kind of silence pervaded the house. The few privileged visitors were denied admission. Mr. Proctor, Sir Stafford's man, wore a look of more than common seriousness. Mademoiselle Celestine's glances revealed a haughty sense of triumph. Even the humbler menials appeared to feel that something had occurred, and betrayed in their anxious faces some resemblance to that vague sense of half-curiosity, half-terror, the pa.s.sengers of a steamboat experience when an accident, of whose nature they know nothing, has occurred to the machinery.

Their doubts and suspicions a.s.sumed more shape when the order came that Sir Stafford would dine in the library, and her Ladyship in her own room, George Onslow alone appearing in the dining-room. There was an air of melancholy over everything, the silence deepening as night came on.

Servants went noiselessly to and fro, drew the curtains, and closed the doors with a half-stealthy gesture, and seemed as though fearful of awakening some slumbering outbreak of pa.s.sion.

We neither have, nor desire to have, secrets from our readers. We will therefore proceed to Sir Stafford's dressing-room, where the old Baronet sat moodily over the fire, his anxious features and sorrow-struck expression showing the ravages even a few hours of suffering had inflicted. His table was littered with papers, parchments, and other formidable-looking doc.u.ments. Some letters lay sealed here, others were half-written there; everything about him showed the conflict of doubt and indecision that was going on within his mind; and truly a most painful struggle was maintained there.

For some time back he had seen with displeasure the course of extravagance and waste of all his household. He had observed the habits of reckless expense with which his establishment was maintained; but, possessing a very ample fortune, and feeling that probably some change would be made with the coming summer, he had forborne to advert to it, and endured with what patience he could a mode of life whose very display was distasteful to him. Now, however, a more serious cause for anxiety presented itself, in the cla.s.s of intimates admitted by Lady Hester to her society. Of the foreigners he knew comparatively little; but that little was not to their advantage. Some were wealthy voluptuaries, glad to propagate their own habits of extravagance among those they suspected of fortunes smaller than their own. Others were penniless adventurers, speculating upon everything that might turn to their profit. All were men of pleasure, and of that indolent, lounging, purposeless character so peculiarly unpleasing to those who have led active lives, and been always immersed in the cares and interests of business.