‘And,’ pursued the Duke, opening the door, and casting a mischievous look at his cringing servitor, ‘I shall not engage a new valet!’
‘Now, your Grace!’ said Nettlebed, in quite a different voice.
But the Duke had gone.
He rode out towards Willsbridge beside his bailiff in a mood of gay good-humour, which much rejoiced that worthy man’s heart. By his request, they gave Cheyney a wide berth, the Duke having no desire to encounter his uncle while going upon an errand of which Lord Lionel would violently disapprove, and Moffat understanding this without the Duke’s having the least need to explain it to him. They reached Furze Farm without meeting anyone with whom the Duke was acquainted, and, tethering the horses to the gate-posts, walked across the yard to the open kitchen-door. A girl in a cotton apron and a mob-cap, who had stepped out to empty a pail of water, dropped a curtsy to Moffat, and informed him that Missus was in the kitchen, rolling out the pastry. Her voice brought a spare, middle-aged woman to the door. She had a worn, kindly face, and after casting the Duke a doubtful look, smiled at Moffat, and said: ‘Come you in, Mr Moffat! Now, if I’d but known you would be passing this way to-day – !’
‘Mrs Mudgley, ma’am, I’ve brought his Grace to see your Jasper,’ said Moffat, indicating his companion.
She gave a gasp, and made haste to curtsy and to wipe the flour from her hands at the same time. ‘Your Grace! Oh, Mr Moffat! And me all unprepared, and Jasper out in the fields, and you bringing his Grace to the kitchen, instead of round the front, as is fitting! I do not know what to say, your Grace, but I’m sure I beg your pardon! If you would please to step into the parlour, I will send directly to fetch my son!’
‘Will you let me rather come into your kitchen, and talk to you, Mrs Mudgley?’ he said, with his shy smile.
She looked rather wildly at Moffat, faltering that it was not fit. The bailiff said in a heartening tone: ‘Take his Grace in, ma’am: I’ll warrant he will like it very well!’
She dropped another curtsy, and the Duke stepped over the threshold, and laid his hat and gloves down on a chair, saying, as he looked round the room: ‘Yes, indeed I do. How comfortable it is! Am I disturbing you?’
‘Oh, no, indeed, your Grace!’ she assured him. She saw how young he was, and suddenly felt less nervous. She set a chair for him, whisked her pastry up into a damp cloth, and said diffidently: ‘If your Grace would partake of a little refreshment after the ride? Just a sup of my cowslip wine, belike?’
‘Thank you: you are very good!’ he said, hoping that it would not disagree with him as much as he feared it would. ‘Moffat, while I am talking to Mrs Mudgley, will you be so good as to find her son for me?’
Mrs Mudgley looked a little scared at being left without support, but by the time she had poured out a glass of her wine for the guest, and he had tasted it, and said how good it was, and had asked her how it was made, she began to forget his exalted status, and even allowed herself to be persuaded to sit down in a chair opposite to him.
He said: ‘Moffat has been telling me about the Five-acre field. I am sorry my agent would not let your son buy it, but, you see, he has had to be so very careful while I was a minor.’
She murmured something about her son’s being able to give a fair price for it.
‘Well, I think I shall not sell it to him,’ said the Duke. ‘I should like to give it to his bride, for her dowry.’
She looked at him in a puzzled way. ‘Your Grace is very good, but –’
‘Mrs Mudgley, I didn’t come for that reason, but to ask you if you recall a girl named Belinda?’
She jumped. ‘Belinda!’ she exclaimed. ‘Yes, and indeed I do, your Grace! Jasper was that taken with her he’ll not look at another wench! Poor thing, it wasn’t what I wished for him, sir, but seeing him so set on her, and him no more changeable than his father was before him, I would have let him wed her, and said naught, for she was so pretty you couldn’t but compassion her, and good-natured besides, even if she hadn’t much sense in her head, which dear knows she hadn’t! But she ran off from the woman she was apprenticed to, and try as he would my boy could never discover what had become of her. Why, sir, it couldn’t be that you know where she is?’
‘Yes, I do know,’ he replied. ‘She fell into the hands of a plausible rogue, who wished to use her for his own ends, and I think she has been very unhappy since she ran away from Bath. But although she has been drifting about the country, and is a very silly girl, I am quite sure she is still quite an innocent girl.’ He paused. ‘I think I ought to tell you all I know of her,’ he said, meeting her startled blue eyes candidly. ‘You won’t judge her harshly, I believe, and – and it would not be right not to tell you!’
She looked anxiously at him, but said nothing. But as he gently unfolded Belinda’s story to her the anxiety faded. She shook her head over it often, and clicked her tongue in censure, but at the end sighed, and said: ‘It all comes of her being a foundling, your Grace, and no one to bring her up right. Not that they don’t do their best at the Foundling Hospital, I’m sure, but it’s not the same, and never could be. It’s like as if the poor children don’t have the feelings they would with homes of their own, and folks to care for them. It always seemed to me that Belinda was just like that leaf that’s just blown in through the door, sir, cast about she didn’t know where, and nothing to hold to, if your Grace takes my meaning.’ He nodded. ‘I never thought she was a bad girl, for all the silly notions she had in her head.’
‘No, that I know she is not,’ he replied. ‘But she has the most dreadful way of going off with anyone who offers to give her silk dresses, or trinkets, I can’t deny!’
‘Ah, but they did say at the Foundling Hospital, where my boy went to ask if they had no news of her, that her father was Quality, which would account for it, sir, the Quality being very easy in their ways,’ explained Mrs Mudgley simply. ‘A love-child, she was. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I was to tell your Grace I’m wishful my son should wed with her, but see him in the dumps, like he’s been ever since he lost her, I can’t. She won’t go trapesing off once she’s got a home of her own, and babies, and I daresay I shall be able to show her the way she should go on, for she was mightily taken with the farm, and they did teach her to bake and make at the Foundling Hospital, that I will say!’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking round. ‘She would be happy here. She is not happy in Laura Place, I think. It’s strange to her, and she is a little afraid of Lady Ampleforth. And she thinks a great deal of your son, and of you.’ He smiled. ‘You were very kind to her: she told me, finding it strange that any woman should show her kindness.’
Her heart was touched; she said: ‘Poor little dear! Do you bring her to me, sir, and don’t let her fear to be scolded, for it’s no manner of use scolding a pretty, silly creature like her!’
A shadow darkened the doorway; the Duke looked up, and saw a sturdy young man confronting him, in breeches, and leggings, and with his shirt-sleeves rolled half-way up his tanned arms. He had a stolid, open countenance, in which a pair of widely set grey eyes squarely met the Duke’s. His mother jumped up, and went to him, chiding him for not having put on his coat and washed his hands before coming into the house, but he put her gently aside, saying, with his eyes still fixed on the Duke: ‘Mr Moffat told me his Grace of Sale had news of Belinda, Mother.’
‘Yes, yes, but make your bow, Jasper, do!’ she adjured him. ‘His Grace has been so kind, you would not believe!’
‘Has he?’ said Mr Mudgley heavily.
‘Jasper, will you mind your manners? I don’t know what his Grace must be thinking of you, standing there like a gowk! And him giving the Five-acre to Belinda, as he will!’
The lines about Mr Mudgley’s jaw seemed to harden. ‘I don’t care for that,’ he said. ‘Nor I don’t rightly know why he should do any such thing, Mother.’
/> The Duke rose. ‘Not for any such reason as you have in your head,’ he said. ‘Walk out with me: we shall do better to talk this over alone.’
‘I’m agreeable,’ said Mr Mudgley, in a level tone, and stood aside for him to pass out of the kitchen.
‘Oh, deary me!’ said Mrs Mudgley to Moffat, who had slipped quietly into the house behind his young friend. ‘I do hope my Jasper won’t offend his Grace! You know what he is, Mr Moffat! As stiff-necked as his father, and move him you can’t, once he’s taken a notion into his head! Whatever will become of us if he should say something which his Grace might take amiss?’
‘His Grace won’t take offence,’ Moffat said. ‘He’s not like his uncle, high in the instep, as the saying is. I’ve known him since he was a sickly boy, hardly out of short-coats, ay, and helped him out of trees when he got stuck, and taught him to handle a gun, and there never was a lad with a sweeter nature, that I’ll swear to! What’s more, ma’am, he’s got a way with him, for all he’s not much to look at, and if he don’t have your Jasper out of his high ropes I shall be fair astonished!’
He was not destined to suffer astonishment. After walking up and down the lane for long enough to make Mrs Mudgley feel very uneasy, the two men came in, apparently on the best of terms. Mrs Mudgley saw that the set look he had worn for so long had vanished from her son’s face, and shed tears, which she dried hastily, however, explaining that she didn’t know whether she stood on her head or her heels. None of the three men found this very comprehensible, but they were relieved to see that she had stopped crying, and encouraged her in their several ways, her son patting her on the shoulder, Moffat saying There, there! in a helpless way, and the Duke announcing that it had been decided that he and Lady Harriet would bring Belinda out to Furze Farm as soon as was possible.
Mrs Mudgley then poured out cowslip wine all round, and after he had heroically swallowed his portion, the Duke took his leave of his hosts, and rode back to Bath, feeling that a weight had dropped from his shoulders.
He had been invited to dine in Laura Place, before attending the Dowager and Lady Harriet to the Assembly Rooms, and when he reached the Christopher he found that his cousin had driven out to Cheyney some time earlier. He walked upstairs, to be met by Nettlebed, who took his hat and gloves from him, expressing the hope that he would rest before he changed his dress.
‘Yes, perhaps I will,’ he said, yawning. ‘What’s this?’ He picked up a letter from the table as he spoke, and saw that it was addressed to him in Lord Gaywood’s dashing handwriting.
‘My Lord Gaywood’s man left it here for your Grace, not half an hour ago,’ responded Nettlebed disparagingly. ‘He said there was no answer expected. And a fly-by-night fellow he is! I wonder his lordship would have such about him.’
The Duke broke the wafer, and spread open the letter. It was quite brief.
‘Dear Sale,’ it ran. ‘Don’t put yourself to any more trouble over your fair Cyprian, for I’m taking her off your hands. It would be a curst sin to tie such an out-and-outer up to some Somerset bumpkin. You may fob Harriet off with what tale you please, and, believe me, Your devilish obliged servant, Gaywood.’
Twenty-five
For a full minute after he had read this missive the Duke knew an impulse to wash his hands of the whole affair. Then a cold, unaccustomed rage took possession of him, and, as he raised his eyes from the letter in his hand, his valet was startled to see in them an expression so reminiscent of the late Duke in one of his rare fits of anger that he could almost have supposed that the Duke’s father and not himself stood before him.
The Duke crushed the letter into a ball, his mouth tightening. He glanced at Nettlebed, and spoke. ‘My chaise, and four good horses,’ he said curtly.
Nettlebed knew that voice, though he had never heard it issuing from this Duke’s lips. He was frightened, but he felt himself bound by his love and his duty to protest. ‘Now, your Grace!’ he began, in a scolding tone.
A sudden flash of anger in the Duke’s frowning eyes silenced him. ‘You heard what I said!’
‘Yes, your Grace,’ said Nettlebed miserably.
‘Do as I bid you, then! It is to be ready for me within twenty minutes. I am going round to Laura Place now. Call me a hackney!’
Devoutly trusting that Lady Harriet would be better able than himself to dissuade his master from undertaking whatever grim project he had in mind, Nettlebed said: ‘Yes, your Grace!’ again, and hurried out of the room.
The Duke bade the hackney-coachman wait for him outside Lady Ampleforth’s house, and ran up the steps to the door. It was opened to him by the porter, who at once ushered him upstairs to the drawing-room, where he found the Dowager seated beside the fire, with her gloved hands clasped on the head of her ebony cane, and a bonnet overpoweringly bedecked with curled ostrich plumes, tied over her improbable ringlets. At the writing-table in the window, Lady Harriet, also in walking-dress, sat agitatedly scribbling on a sheet of hot-pressed note-paper. When the Duke was announced, she turned quickly, half-rising from her chair, and exclaiming in a faint voice: ‘Oh, Gilly!’
‘For heaven’s sake, girl!’ snapped the Dowager. ‘Let us have no die-away airs, I beg of you! One would suppose the end of the world to be upon us! Well, Sale, you are come in a good hour! That fancy-piece of yours has found another fool to run mad over her blue eyes.’
‘Gilly, I have been quite unworthy of your trust in me!’ Harriet said, in a conscience-stricken tone. ‘I am so mortified, and I fear you will think I have been dreadfully to blame!’
He trod over to her swiftly, and raised her hands to his lips, and kissed them both. ‘No, no, I could never think that!’ he said. ‘I should not have saddled you with such a tiresome burden!’
‘Very true!’ said the Dowager.
‘Do you know, then, Gilly?’ Harriet asked, her eyes searching his face.
‘Yes, I know. Belinda has run away again.’
‘I was just writing a note to tell you of it. I have been driving out with Grandmama, and when we returned, I discovered – Gilly, is it – is it Charlie?’
‘Yes.’
She saw the same tightening of the mouth which had alarmed Nettlebed, and timidly laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘You are very angry! Pray do not be! – I think Charlie did not exactly understand the nature of the affair!’
The irrepressible old lady by the fire gave a croak of sardonic mirth. ‘Small blame to him! I have no patience with these missish tricks, girl! One would say a young man had never before mounted a mistress!’
‘Oh, Grandmama, hush! Of course I know – But I promised Gilly I would let no harm befall Belinda!’
‘Harm, indeed! The minx does very well for herself, I vow! I see no occasion for these tragedy airs!’
Harriet clasped her hands together. ‘I had not thought that he had been alone with her, Gilly, but I have been questioning the servants, and it seems that when he would not go to Lady Ombersley’s party with us, saying that he was engaged with some friends of his own, he spent the evening here, with Belinda. But I do not believe the mischief was concerted between them then! Belinda was very unhappy, you know, when you told us how you had been unable to find Mr Mudgley –’
‘I have found him,’ he interrupted.
‘Oh, Gilly, no! When she may have gone off with Charlie! It makes it worse! What shall we do?’
‘I am going after them. I came only to discover if you knew more than I do, and to inform you that I have received a communication from your brother, apprising me of the event. Obliging of him!’
She winced at this, but the Dowager thumped her cane on the floor, and ejaculated: ‘Are you crazy, Sale? Let me tell you that you are well-rid of the girl! My grandson will know better how to deal with her! I wonder you will concern yourself in this ridiculous fashion over such Haymarket-ware! I knew her for what she
was the instant I clapped eyes on her!’
‘Grandmama, it is only since she had the misfortune to break your Sèvres bowl that you have thought so!’ said Harriet pleadingly.
‘You are wrong, ma’am,’ said the Duke. ‘She is not yet Hay-market-ware, and I do not mean her to become so.’
This put the old lady out of all patience, and she delivered herself of a scathing denunciation of the namby-pamby behaviour of the present generation. Since her tongue was always salted, and never more so than when she lost her temper, she brought hot blushes to her granddaughter’s cheeks. The Duke, however, heard her out with chill civility, bowing slightly when she stopped for want of breath, and turning to address his betrothed. ‘You do not know when Belinda left this house, my love?’
‘No, for no one saw her, but I think it cannot have been very long since. It was the unluckiest thing that I was obliged to go with Grandmama to Monkton Combe, for we have been away from the house since noon. Whimple has told us that Gaywood was here shortly after we drove away, and I fear that it must have been then that he – that the mischief was planned. You know how it is when Belinda is not quite happy, Gilly! She cries, and she looks so very lovely – not in the least like other people! – and poor Charlie must have been led astray, and have offered to take care of her, without, perhaps, thinking –’
‘Nonsense, Harriet!’ the Duke said. ‘It was not Gaywood that was led astray!’
She hung her head. ‘It is very bad of him, I know,’ she faltered. ‘Indeed, I am very sorry!’
He dropped a hand on her shoulder. ‘You have nothing to be sorry for!’
‘She might be sorry to be such a fool, and you too, Sale!’ interpolated the Dowager.
He paid no heed to this, but said: ‘I am going after them, of course. I imagine Gaywood will have taken her to London, for he will scarcely have the effrontery to be seen with her in Bath, under our noses! I beg your pardon, Harriet, and yours, ma’am: I shall be unable to escort you to the Assembly Rooms tonight. I hope you will forgive me.’