Volume 3 — CHAPTER XIV. ARTHUR FINDS HIMSELF DONE.

The letter produced, after five minutes’ delay, by the faithful Lydia, ran as follows:

“My dear Vavasour,—You will be surprised to find that I have absquattulated. Beggars mustn’t be choosers, and I should have been only too glad if circumstances had allowed of my remaining in England; but the fact is, I made a bad business of my book—hedged, and that kind of thing; so, having no chance left but to sell Rough Diamond, I did it on the nail. My beastly creditors have made London too hot to hold me, and as debts are transferable in these days, and be hanged to them! I must keep dark for the present, or they’ll have me in quod in some confounded foreign place or other. Of course you are an exception; and when I am settled anywhere you shall hear from me. The missus desires to be kindly remembered. Nothing new about Honor—the man is a brute. Ta-ta, old fellow, and believe me yours truly,

“F. Norcott.”

Arthur, after making himself master of the contents of this flippant epistle, stood for a moment like one turned, after the manner of Lot’s wife of old, into a statue.

“When did they go?” he said at last. “I came by appointment; this must have been quite a sudden start. G—! I can’t understand it! Gone, do you say? Impossible!”

Miss Lydia sniggered conceitedly at this assertion.

“The Colonel never came back at all,” she said; “he sent for Mrs. Norcott—or else they’d settled it between them afore, which missus she thinks they did. Any way, Mrs. Norcott she packed up, and paid all that was owing the first thing this morning, and by two o’clock she was off, and missus, she had the bill put up at onst.”

To this short but lucid explanation Arthur listened as one who heareth not. The melancholy truth that he had—in vulgar parlance—been done was beginning to dawn upon his mind. That Fred Norcott—base and unprincipled as he suspected him to be—could have the unparalleled audacity to deny and ignore the fact of his (Arthur’s) ownership of the Derby winner was, however, almost too wonderful to be true. His estimate of Honor Beacham’s father, though about as low a one as it is possible for one person to entertain about another, did nevertheless fall short of believing this man capable of actual felony. That he had trusted him so completely—had confided so entirely in the honour of his associate, was alone a sufficient proof that he did not consider Fred Norcott to be capable of an act of fraud. The transfer of Rough Diamond from Arthur’s ownership to the nominal possession of the quondam cavalry officer had been made in a decidedly loose and unbusiness-like manner—the very nature of the transaction necessitating to a certain extent this unsatisfactory mode of proceeding. There was a secret to be kept—a secret which was of vital importance to the well-being of one of the contracting parties—and therefore it followed that “all things” were not, on this occasion, “done decently and in order.”

The suspicion, that was destined gradually to become a settled belief in Arthur’s mind, that the man in whose power he knew himself to be was a villain of the least creditable die, was anything but agreeable. Pondering on this certainty, he, as he sauntered with lingering steps towards the splendid home which, in right of his wife, he called his own, felt about as unhappy a young aristocrat as ever trod the broad flagstones of the Tyburnian pavement. His furious indignation against the rascal by whom he had been deceived passes the bounds of description. Had Fred Norcott chanced at that moment to present himself within his reach, there is no saying to what lengths the passion of the younger man might have led him. But happily the Colonel—his faithful wife by his side, his ill-gotten gains in his pocket, and his unrepented sins upon his head—was far away by that time—far away to the land where roguery is at a premium, and cheating is dignified by the agreeable name of “smartness”—to the land where to be a villain is no disgrace, and where every sin save that of failure is condoned and pardoned.

“Now, Atty, let me look at you again—I am sure that something is the matter—quite sure. Daddy dear, doesn’t Arthur look worried? And he will go out so early. I thought you would stay just a tiny half-hour till I have had my arrowroot, but—”

“Stay, dear—of course I will, if you wish it,” Arthur replied in answer to his wife’s appeal, spoken in the low and feeble voice which made her faintest wish a law.

“I was going out on business, but I can put it off till the afternoon,” and he tried to speak as if the sacrifice were no sacrifice, and as if acting the part of deputy sick-nurse was quite in the usual course of events for a young man about town, who had but lately completed his twenty-second year.

Sophy was, as I have said, the least selfish of human beings—she would at all times have been ready to make any sacrifice for those she loved; but a young heiress smiling over her first-born babe may be pardoned if for once in her life she failed to see that her exacting wishes militated against those of her husband, and if, while she rejoiced over the happy consciousness of his devotion, she forgot that he might have other duties to perform and other interests at stake than the one to which her entreaty had devoted him.

It was late in the afternoon before Arthur Vavasour, seizing the opportunity of a sound sleep into which the invalid had fallen, stole from the pretty morning-room adjoining that where his wife lay, stepping softly; for old Duberly—who dearly loved, after the fashion of the aged, to talk—might, had he heard his step upon the stairs, have intercepted his departure, and, slipping his bald head out of the half-opened study-door, have chained him—an unwilling listener—for an hour at least, in the close and stuffy atmosphere of his private sanctum.

At that moment, with his brain positively whirling with suppressed excitement, and with the fever caused by anxiety and suspense boiling in his veins, Arthur felt that, had he been stopped by his respected father on his outward way, he would have been capable of laying violent hands upon that well-meaning but officious personage. To rush into the fresh air—to throw himself into a passing hansom—to be carried as fast as wheels could bear him to the first emporium of sporting news where he was likely to obtain authentic intelligence regarding the respective fates of Rough Diamond and the Colonel—were the ends that Arthur Vavasour had in view while stepping on tiptoe down the broad stone staircase, with a flushed face, and a heart that beat fast with long-controlled emotion. The heaviness that had endured through the night (for, for the first time in his life, Arthur had been kept awake by care) was not succeeded by the joy which “cometh in the morning,” and—during the weary hours that he had passed, book in hand, on the luxurious sofa, among the pretty and expensive nicknacks which adorned his wife’s boudoir—the heir to countless thousands had given himself up to the most disastrous convictions regarding his future fate. To his then thinking—and he too soon discovered that his forebodings had not overstepped the truth—it seemed the most probable of misfortunes that Frederick Norcott, taking advantage of the carelessly-effected contract regarding the Derby colt, had shamelessly appropriated to his own use the proceeds of the sale of that invaluable animal. That the man who had sunk so deep in the mire of infamy would hesitate a moment to make merchandise of the secret which he was well aware his dupe and victim was keenly desirous to preserve, Arthur could neither hope nor believe. He was in the power—poor young fellow!—(and miserably did he shudder under the disgraceful yoke)—of one of the most unprincipled genteel villains that ever walked about in well-made boots and broadcloth, and—a grievance for the moment still more keenly felt—his debts of honour—those debts which he had hoped and intended by the sale of the Derby winner to discharge—would still remain unpaid, whilst he, under the cloud which his own folly had gathered above his head, must endure, with such patience as he could muster, the consequences of a bad man’s guilt.

It took but little time, and a very few inquiries, to make sure of the fact that Colonel Norcott, with whom no respectable sporting man (a degradation of which Arthur was ignorant, so blind had his passion for Honor made him) would bet—it took but little time, I say, to make sure of the, at first, only floating news, to wit, that the nominal owner of Rough Diamond, after securing the amount paid by Lord Penshanger for that illustrious animal, had left England for foreign parts. Where he had gone, no one appeared able to divulge; nor did the ascertaining of the chosen spot to which he had betaken himself appear a matter of importance to the greatest sufferer by Colonel Norcott’s disappearance. Arthur knew enough of law to be convinced that, even were it possible for him to brave the consequences of irritating Fred’s not-over-placable disposition, the law could in this case do little or nothing towards the recovery of the stolen cash. It was horribly provoking—annoying to a scarcely endurable extent, and the more unendurable from the circumstance that to no human being could he venture to pour forth the history of his wrongs; but there was, alas, no help for it. If it should ever chance that his lucky stars might place him within arm’s-reach of the “swindler,” whose real character was now laid bare before him, why, then—and Arthur (who was the man to keep such an oath both to the letter and in the spirit) swore a vow between his clenched teeth, that if Frederick Norcott left his hands alive, it was about as much as that ignoble personage could reasonably expect.