Arabella Read online

  ‘Good God, why did he not?’

  He coughed in an embarrassed way. ‘Might have been a little bit on the go,’ he said diffidently. ‘Scared of being pounded by the tipstaffs, too. Come to think of it, might easily be if he stayed with me. Dashed tradesmen know he’s a friend of mine! At all events, he ain’t with me – didn’t send me word where he was till this morning – feeling too blue-devilled, I daresay. Don’t blame him: would myself!’

  ‘Oh, poor Bertram, poor Bertram!’ she cried, wringing her hands. ‘I do not care where he is, see him I must, if I have to go to this Willow Walk alone!’

  ‘Good God, ma’am, mustn’t do that!’ he exclaimed, appalled. ‘Very rough set of coves in Willow Walk! Besides –’ He paused, looking acutely uncomfortable. ‘Not quite himself!’

  ‘Oh, he must be ill with worry, and despair! Nothing would keep me from him at a such a time! I will fetch my bonnet, and we may be off directly!’

  ‘Ma’am, he won’t like it!’ Mr Scunthorpe said desperately. ‘Very likely be ready to murder me only for telling you! You can’t see him!’

  ‘Why can I not?’

  ‘He’s been in the sun a trifle! You see – very understandable thing to do! – shot the cat!’

  ‘Shot the cat?’

  ‘Can’t blame him!’ Mr Scunthorpe pleaded. ‘Wouldn’t have told you, if you hadn’t been so set on seeing him! Felt desperate – shot the cat – felt better – kept on swallowing balls of fire – result, looking as queer as Dick’s hatband, when I saw him!’

  ‘Do you mean that he has been drinking?’ demanded Arabella. ‘What, in heaven’s name, is a ball of fire?’

  ‘Brandy,’ said Mr Scunthorpe. ‘Devilish bad brandy too. Told him to make Blue Ruin the preferred suit. Safer.’

  ‘Every word you say makes me the more determined to go to him!’ declared Arabella.

  ‘Assure you much better to send him some blunt, ma’am!’

  ‘I will take him all I have, but oh, it is so little! I cannot think yet what is to be done!’

  Mr Scunthorpe pointed significantly to the ceiling. ‘You don’t think the old lady – ?’ he suggested delicately.

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, no, no! Impossible!’

  Mr Scunthorpe looked a little thoughtful. ‘In that case, ma’am, better take you to him. Talking very wildly this morning. No saying what he might do.’

  She almost ran to the door. ‘We have not a moment to waste, then!’

  ‘No, no!’ he assured her. ‘No need to be on the fret! Won’t cut his throat today! Told the girl to hide his razor.’

  ‘What girl?’

  He became very much confused, blushed, and uttered: ‘Girl he sent to my lodging with a message. Been looking after him.’

  ‘Oh, God bless her!’ Arabella cried fervently. ‘What is her name? How much I must owe her!’

  As the lady in question had introduced herself to Mr Scunthorpe as Leaky Peg, he was obliged to take refuge in prevarication, and to hope devoutly that they would not encounter her in Willow Walk. He said that he had not caught her name. Arabella seemed a little disappointed, but since this was no time for wasting over trifles she said no more, but ran out of the room to fetch her bonnet and shawl.

  It was impossible for her to leave the house without the butler’s being aware of it, but although he looked surprised, he made no comment, and in a few minutes’ time she and Mr Scunthorpe were seated in a ramshackle hackney coach, which seemed as though, many years before, it had formed part of a nobleman’s equipage, but which had fallen into sad decay. The coverings to the seats and the squabs were tattered and dirty, and the vehicle smelled strongly of beer and old leather. These evils Arabella scarcely noticed, in such a turmoil was her mind. It was a struggle to support her spirits at all; she felt ready to sink; and was unable, while in such a state of agitation, to form any plan for Bertram’s relief. The only solution which had so far presented itself to her mind was an instinctive impulse, no sooner thought of than recoiled from, to send off an express to Heythram. Mr Scunthorpe’s suggestion of applying to Lady Bridlington she well knew to be useless, nor would her pride tolerate the putting of herself under such added obligation to her godmother. Wild notions of selling Mama’s diamonds, and the pearl necklet that had belong to Grandmama Tallant, could not, she knew, be entertained, for these trinkets were not hers to dispose of at will.

  Beside her, Mr Scunthorpe, feeling vaguely that her spirits required support, tried to entertain her by pointing out, conscientiously, the various places of interest the hackney drove past. She scarcely heeded him, but when they reached Westminster, began to look about her a little, insensibly cheered by the respectability of the neighbourhood. But the hackney lumbered on, and in a surprisingly short space of time it was hard to realise that she must be within a stone’s throw of the Abbey, so squalid were her surroundings. An unlucky attempt made by Mr Scunthorpe to divert her, by pointing out an ugly brick structure which he said was the Tothill Fields Bridewell, made her shudder so alarmingly that he hastily informed her that it was so crammed to overflowing with felons that there was no room for another soul behind its walls. A row of squat, almshouses was the next object of interest to be seen. This was followed by a charity school, but the district seemed to Arabella to be largely composed of wretched hovels, ancient mansions, fallen into depressing decay, and a superfluity of taverns. Frowsy looking women stood in the doorways of some of the hovels; half-naked urchins turned cartwheels on the dirty cobbles, in the hope of gaining largesse from persons well-breeched enough to travel in hackney coaches; at one corner, a fat woman, seated behind an iron cauldron appeared to be dispensing tea to a curiously ill-assorted crowd of persons, ranging from bricklayers to bedizened young women; various street-cries echoed in the narrow streets, from offers of coal to entreaties for old iron; and the male population seemed to consist entirely of scavengers, sweeps, and unidentifiable persons with blue jowls, and mufflers round their necks in place of collars.

  After passing the entrances to several noisome alleys, the hackney turned into Willow Walk, and proceeded down it for some way before drawing up outside a dingy house, whose windows showed, besides fluttering oddments of washing hung out to dry, several broken panes of glass. In the open doorway, an old woman sat in a rocking-chair, puffing at a clay pipe, and engaged in conversation with a younger female, who held a squalling infant on one arm, which she from time to time shook, or refreshed from a black bottle, from which she herself took frequent pulls. Arabella had no positive knowledge of what was in that black bottle, but that it must contain strong liquor she felt convinced. The thought of Bertram was momentarily banished from her head; as Mr Scunthorpe handed her down from the hackney, and punctiliously brushed off the straws that clung to the flounce of her simple cambric dress, she opened her reticule, hunted in it for a shilling, and astonished the mother of the infant by pressing it into her hand, and saying earnestly: ‘Pray buy the baby some milk! Oh, pray do not give it that horrid stuff!’

  Both women stared at her with fallen jaws. The old Irishwoman, the first to regain command over her faculties, burst into a cackle of mirth, and informed her that she was talking to no less a personage than Quartern Sue. This conveyed little to Arabella, but while she was still puzzling over the appellation, Quartern Sue, recovering from her stupefaction, had launched forth into a catalogue of her embarrassments, and was holding her hand cupped suggestively. Mr Scunthorpe, beads of sweat standing upon his brow, took it upon himself to hustle his charge into the house, whispering to her that she must not get into talk with such ill-famed women. Quartern Sue, never one to let slip an opportunity, followed them, her beggar’s whine rising to a crescendo, but was repulsed at the foot of a rickety, uncarpeted stairway by a strapping young woman, with a tousle of greasy yellow hair, a countenance which not all the ravages of gin had entirely deprived of comeliness, and a tawdry dress, stained in various pl
aces, and with the bodice cut so low as to reveal glimpses of dirty shift. This lady, having driven Quartern Sue forth by a series of remarks, not one of which was intelligible to Arabella, turned and confronted the genteel visitors with a belligerent look on her face, and her arms set widely akimbo. She demanded of Mr Scunthorpe, with whom she appeared to be acquainted, what he meant by brining a flash mort to the ken. Mr Scunthorpe uttered the one word, Sister! in strangled accents, upon which the blonde beauty turned a pair of fierce, bloodshot eyes upon Arabella, and ejaculated: ‘Ho! Sister, is it?’

  ‘Girl who brought me the message!’ explained Mr Scunthorpe in a blushful aside to Arabella.

  The blonde beauty needed no other passport to Arabella’s favour. If she was conscious – as she could hardly have failed to have been – of the strong aroma of daffy which hung about the person of Leaky Peg, she gave no sign of it, but started forward, with her hands held out, and impulsive words on her lips. ‘Oh, are you the girl who has been kind to my brother? You must let me thank you! I can never, never repay you! Mr Scunthorpe here has been telling me that it was you who took care of him when he – when he came to this place!’

  Leaky Peg stared very hard at her for a moment, and then pugnaciously: ‘I found the covey on the mop, blue as megrim, see? And him no more than a mouth! Half flash and half foolish, that’s him. Strike me, I don’t know what I see in the hick!’

  ‘Miss Tallant, better come upstairs!’ said the anguished Mr Scunthorpe, to whom Leaky Peg’s vocabulary was rather more intelligible than to Arabella.

  ‘You dub your mummer, you death’s head on a mopstick!’ Leaky Peg advised him. ‘Leave me and the swell mort be!’ She turned back to Arabella, and said roughly: ‘Lurched, ain’t he? He tells me there’s a fastener out after him. He hadn’t so much as a meg in his truss when I come up with him in the boozing-ken. I took him along with me – strike me if I know why!’ She jerked her thumb towards the stairs. ‘You want to take him away: this ain’t his lay, nor it ain’t mine neither! Spouting a kid’s mish all to buy him mutton and smash, which he don’t eat! Me! You take him off; you’re welcome!’

  Gathering from these words that Leaky Peg had been keeping Bertram supplied with food, Arabella, tears standing in her eyes, seized one of her hands, and pressed it fervently between both her own, saying: ‘How good you are! Indeed, I thank you! He is only a boy, you know, and what must have become of him without you I dare not think!’

  ‘Well, it’s little enough I got from it!’ remarked Leaky Peg caustically. ‘You and him with your breakteeth words! You get up them dancers, you and that moulder alongside you that looks like a toothdrawer! First door on the right: stale-drunk, he is, but he ain’t backt yet!’

  With these heartening words she turned on her heel, and strode out of the house, driving before her Quartern Sue, who had had the temerity to venture on to the threshold again. Mr Scunthorpe made haste to usher Arabella up the stairs, saying reproachfully: ‘Shouldn’t talk to her, ma’am! Not at all the thing! Assure you!’

  ‘The thing!’ she exclaimed scornfully. ‘She has a kind heart, sir!’

  Abashed, Mr Scunthorpe begged pardon, and tapped at a door at the head of the stairs.

  Bertram’s voice sounded from within the room, and without waiting for her escort to usher her in Arabella lifted the latch and quickly entered.

  The apartment, which looked out on to a filthy yard, where lean cats prowled amongst garbage-heaps, was small, rather dark, and furnished with a sagging bed pushed up against one wall, a deal table, two wooden chairs, and a strip of threadbare carpet. The remains of a loaf of bread, a heel of cheese, together with a glass, a jug, and an empty bottle stood on the table; and on the mantelshelf, presumably placed there by Leaky Peg, was a cracked mug containing a wilting bunch of flowers. Bertram, who was stretched on the bed, raised himself on his elbow as the door opened, an apprehensive look in his face. He was fully dressed, but was wearing a handkerchief knotted round his neck, and looked both ill and unkempt. When he saw Arabella, he uttered something like a sob, and struggled up, and to his feet. ‘Bella!’

  She was in his arms on the word, unable to prevent herself from bursting into tears, but passionately clasping him to her. His breath reeked of spirits, but although this shocked her, she did not recoil from him, but hugged him more tightly still. ‘You should not have come!’ he said unsteadily. ‘Felix, how could you have brought her here?’

  ‘Warned her she wouldn’t like it,’ Mr Scunthorpe excused himself. ‘Very set on seeing you!’

  Bertram gave a groan. ‘I did not mean you to know!’

  She disengaged herself, wiped her tears away, and sat down on one of the chairs. ‘Bertram, you know that is nonsense!’ she said. ‘Whom should you turn to if not to me? I am so sorry! What you must have suffered in this dreadful house!’

  ‘Pretty, ain’t it?’ he said jeeringly. ‘I don’t know how I came here: Leaky Peg brought me. You may as well know, Bella, I was so foxed I don’t remember anything that happened after I bolted from the Red Lion!’

  ‘No, I quite see,’ she said. ‘But, Bertram, pray do not go on drinking! It is all so bad, and that makes it worse! You look sadly out of sorts, and no wonder! Have you a sore throat, dearest?’

  He flushed, his hand going instinctively to the handkerchief round his neck. ‘This! Oh, no! Gammoning the draper, my dear!’ He saw her look of bewilderment, and added, with a short laugh: ‘You would be surprised at the cant I have learnt from my hosts here! I’ve become a spouter – at least Peg manages the business for me! Pawned, Bella, pawned! Shan’t have a rag to my back soon – not that that will signify!’

  Mr Scunthorpe, seated on the edge of the bed, exchanged a meaning look with Arabella. She said briskly: ‘It would signify very much! We must think what is to be done. Only tell me what you owe!’

  He was reluctant to divulge the sum, but she insisted, and after a little while he blurted out: ‘It comes to more than seven hundred pounds! There is no possibility of my being able to get clear!’

  She was aghast for she had not supposed that he could owe nearly so much. The sum seemed vast beyond belief, so that she could not be surprised when Bertram, casting himself into the other chair, began to talk in a wild way of putting a period to his existence. She let him run on, guessing that his despair needed the relief of just such mad outpourings, and having no very real fear that he would put his violent threats into execution. While he talked she cudgelled her brains for a solution to his difficulties, only lending half an ear to him, but patting his hand soothingly from time to time. Mr Scunthorpe intervened at last, saying with great commonsense: ‘Don’t think you ought to jump into the river, dear old boy. Sister wouldn’t like it. Bound to leak out. Your governor might not like it either: never can tell!’

  ‘No, indeed!’ Arabella said. ‘You must not talk of it any more, Bertram. You know how wicked it would be!’

  ‘Well, I suppose I shan’t kill myself,’ Bertram said, a shade sulkily. ‘Only, I can tell you this: I’ll never face my father with this!’

  ‘No, no!’ she agreed. ‘Seven hundred pounds! Bertram how has it been possible?’

  ‘I lost six hundred at faro,’ he said, dropping his head in his hands. ‘The rest – Well, there was the tailor, and the horse I hired, and what I owe at Tatt’s, and my shot at the inn – oh, a dozen things! Bella, what am I to do?’

  He sounded much more like the younger brother she knew when he spoke like that, a scared look in his face, and in his voice an unreasoning dependence on her ability to help him out of a scrape.

  ‘Bills don’t signify,’ pronounced Mr Scunthorpe. ‘Leave town: won’t be followed. Not been living under your own name. Gaming debts another matter. Got to raise the wind for that. Debt of honour.’

  ‘I know it, curse you!’

  ‘But all debts are debts of honour!’ Arabella said. ‘Indeed, you should pay your
bills first of all!’

  A glance passed between the two gentlemen, indicative of their mutual agreement not to waste breath in arguing with a female on a subject she would clearly never understand. Bertram passed his hand over his brow, heaving a short sigh, and saying: ‘There’s only one thing to be done. I have thought it all over, Bella, and I mean to enlist, under a false name. If they won’t have me as a trooper, I’ll join a line regiment. I should have done it yesterday, when I first thought of it, only that there’s something I must do first. Affair of honour. I shall write to my father, of course, and I daresay he will utterly cast me off, but that can’t be helped!’

  ‘How can you think so?’ Arabella cried hotly. ‘Grieved he must be – oh, I dare not even think of it! – but you must know that never, never would he do such an unchristian thing as to cast you off! Oh, do not write to him yet! Only give me time to think what I can do! If Papa knew that you owed all that money, I am very sure he would pay every penny of it, though it ruined him!’

  ‘How can you suppose I would be such a gudgeon as to tell him that? No! I shall tell him that my whole mind is set on the army, and I had as lief start in the ranks as not!’

  This speech struck far more dismay into Arabella’s heart than his previous talk of committing suicide, for to take the King’s shilling seemed to her a likely thing for him to do. She uttered, hardly above a whisper: ‘No, no!’

  ‘It must be, Bella,’ he said. ‘I’m sure the army is all I’m fit for, and I cannot show my face again with a load of debt hanging over me. Particularly a debt of honour! O God, I think I must have been mad!’ His voice broke, and he could not speak for a moment. In the end he contrived to summon up the travesty of a smile, and to say: ‘Pretty pair, ain’t we? Not that you did anything as wrong as I have.’

  ‘Oh, I have behaved so dreadfully!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is even my fault that you are reduced to these straits! Had I never presented you to Lord Wivenhoe –’