Chapter XVI: Cadbury's Plan or Plot

And now to relate what more came to pass at Chilcote, and where Alison had vanished to.

The morning came to her after a sleepless night, and she was incapable of giving the answer to which Sir Ranald had hopefully looked forward. She was in a species of mental fever. So passed the day--the day she knew that she could not meet Bevil--and the short winter evening was passing into another night, when the ringing of the door bell gave her a kind of electric shock, so thoroughly was her whole nervous system shaken.

The hour was a dark and gloomy one; snow flakes were falling athwart the dreary landscape of leafless trees, and the north wind moaned sadly round old Chilcote and its giant beeches, with a wail that seemed consonant with disasters impending there, when Lord Cadbury arrived, by chance as it seemed, but in reality to see the effect of the bomb he had fired from the office of Mr. Solomon Slagg, in St. Clement's Lane.

The curtains had been drawn over the windows by the tiny little hands of Daisy Prune; a coal fire blazed pleasantly in the grate, and threw a ruddy glow over all the panelled room and the family portraits, particularly on those of the two Cavalier brothers, looking so proud and defiant in their gorgeous costume, that ere long would be finding their way to the brokers in Wardour Street or elsewhere.

Sir Ranald and Alison sat alone--alone in their misery--when the peer came jauntily in, and took in the whole situation at a glance--the poor girl, with all her rare beauty, looking utterly disconsolate; the bankrupt father, with all his pride, looking utterly desperate!

Alison was seated, or rather crouching, on a black bearskin rug by Sir Ranald's side--one arm caressingly thrown over his knees, and she was in the act of touching his wrinkled hand with hers with a fondness pretty to see, and then he stooped to take her face between them both and looked into her blue-grey eyes wistfully.

They formed a lovely picture, but it touched not the heart of my Lord Cadbury of Cadbury Court.

The bezique cards lay on the table close by, where old Archie had placed them as usual; but they were unnoticed now. Father and daughter were quite past playing their quiet game together.

Alison, as if the visitor's presence was to her insupportable, arose, and muttering some excuse, she knew not what, withdrew to her own room.

In Sir Ranald's eyes there was a passionate and despairing expression of pain that wrung the very soul of Alison; but still, she thought, why should the love of her youth, and why should _her_ whole future life be sacrificed for one who had enjoyed his long life to the full, and all because her grandfather had been, like her father, a spendthrift!

Cadbury took in the whole situation; all that he anticipated had come to pass; the result was exactly what he had foreseen, and he now hoped that he would be able to triumph over Alison, whose repugnance for him piqued his pride and excited his revenge.

'What is the matter, Cheyne--you look seriously unwell?' said he, with well-feigned interest.

'You find me a sorely broken man,' replied Sir Ranald, in a hollow voice, as he took the hand of his visitor and begged him to be seated. 'Ruin has overtaken me at last, Cadbury.'

'I think I can guess,' said the latter, tugging at his long white moustaches; 'but tell me in what form.'

In a few words, but with intense shame and mortification of spirit, Sir Ranald told of Slagg's threatening letter, and of all that his listener had been aware of days before.

'And these acceptances must be met?'

'But how, Cadbury--how? I might as well attempt to make a river run up a hill.'

'What is before you?' asked the peer, a cunning smile twinkling in his eyes, unseen by his visitor.

'Death or disgrace!'

'Disgrace in what fashion?'

'Arrest or flight.'

Cadbury continued to pull each of his moustaches in a kind of nervous way, and after a minute's silence he said, with a kind of laugh,

'I think I can help you.'

'I am not a man who has been used to seek help from others,' said Sir Ranald, with a little of his old pride of bearing.

Lord Cadbury coughed and smiled as he thought of more than one cheque given to the speaker, and by the latter apparently forgotten.

'Under this terrible pressure, have you spoken of my proposal to--to Miss Cheyne?' he asked, bluntly.

'Yes.'

'And with what result--for she knows what I can do, if I choose?'

'None--none!'

'Even to save you, she will not marry me?'

'No.'

'No!'

'At least, I have totally failed to extract an answer from her.'

Lord Cadbury's ferret-like eyes flashed; he actually ground his teeth and clenched his coarse, vulgar hands.

'Look here, Cheyne--if I take up your paper and pay Slagg, could you not force her--I say, force----'

'Hush--she might fall ill and die, as her mother died, of a decline,' groaned Sir Ranald.

'Oh! not a bit, not a bit,' said Cadbury; 'but change of air will do her good. Let us get her out of this place, anyway.'

'The fact is, she has a fancy for that infantry fellow, Bevil Goring, at Aldershot,' said Sir Ranald, who carefully omitted to state that Alison had admitted her engagement.

'The devil--but I don't need to be told that,' exclaimed Cadbury, angrily; 'yet we must eradicate that fancy, and sharply too.'

'But how?'

'Take her over to the Continent. Let us get her on board my yacht, with you as her protector, and all will come right in the end, and I'll leave _you_ ashore somewhere when you least suspect it,' was Cadbury's concluding thought.

'But these bills that Slagg holds----'

'Are not in his possession now.'

'In whose, then?' asked Sir Ranald, with fresh alarm.

'In mine.'

'Yours?'

'Yes--look here.'

Cadbury opened his pocket-book and laid before the startled eyes of Sir Ranald eight or nine bills and promissory notes, all of which he knew but too well.

'How comes this pass?' he asked, with a bewildered air, as he passed a hand across his forehead.

'I know Solomon Slagg. I knew him to my cost ere I came to the title. You mentioned that he had acceptances of yours. I got them all up, and trust that in quietude Alison will end this nonsense and become Lady Cadbury.'

Sir Ranald shook his head and sank back in his chair.

'If I put these papers in the fire, will you stick to my plan of getting her on board my yacht, and leaving the rest to time and to me?' asked Cadbury, in a voice that intensity rendered husky.

'Yes,' replied Sir Ranald, in a faint voice, while eyeing the fatal documents as if they had serpent-like fascination for him.

'Your hand upon it.'

Sir Ranald put his cold, thin hand in the peer's rough and pudgy one, and in another moment the documents were vanishing in the fire.

Sir Ranald seemed as one in a dream; he could scarcely believe his senses, and that he was thus freed from those encumbrances, the sudden destruction of which had not been a part of Cadbury's plan on the day he visited Slagg, but was an afterthought to produce a species of dramatic situation, and win, perhaps, through fear or gratitude, what Alison would never accord him from love.

He had now, he thought--for he well knew his man--secured the livelong gratitude and trust of her father; and through her filial love of the latter, and the peril which she would still be led to suppose was menacing him, he would attain the means of getting her away and controlling her movements.

It is an old aphorism which says with truth that a man is usually more inclined to feel kindly towards one on whom he has conferred favours than to one from whom he has received them; thus, barely had Sir Ranald seen the last of his blue paper shrivel up in the flames, and thus felt a load lifted off his mind, when his natural sense of gratitude jarred with his equally natural constitutional pride, which revolted at the idea of being favoured or protected by any man.

However, they mutually resolved, after Sir Ranald had poured forth his expressions of gratitude, with promises to refund whenever it was in his power to do so, that Alison should be kept in ignorance of what had been done with the bills till they had her on board the yacht, when they both hoped to count upon her gratitude; and now, when the pressure of the present danger had passed away, Sir Ranald felt more than ever annoyance, even rage, at his daughter's folly and obstinacy--folly in permitting herself to be swayed by a regard for Goring, and obstinacy in declining the proposal of Cadbury.

'And now that is arranged,' said the latter, 'I'll telegraph to Tom Llanyard to get the _Firefly_ into Southampton Water. We can take the train at Basingstoke and be off to-morrow, bag and baggage. Pension off or pay off that old Scotch fellow, Auchindoir--he is not worth his salt, and would only be in the way on board the _Firefly_; ditto with old Prune your housekeeper. We'll take Daisy with us, however, as Alison must have a maid; and, until we are at sea, watch well that she has no means of posting letters.'

Now that the keen and aching sense of immediate danger had passed away, or been replaced by gratitude and thankfulness, Sir Ranald's spirit, in addition to his annoyance with Alison, writhed under the part he found himself compelled to act, in silently permitting Lord Cadbury to direct his daughter's movements and to arrange their household matters.

But now the packing and preparations for departure began that very night, and were resumed with fresh energy on the following day, Alison toiling with a will in the selection of her father's wardrobe and her own. Alas! there was but little in either to make the selection difficult, sorrow for the sudden separation from Goring on one hand being tempered on the other by a belief that immediate departure alone could save Sir Ranald from the peril that menaced him but yesterday; and so closely was she watched, and so much were her movements hampered, that she was totally without an opportunity for writing or dispatching even the smallest note to Aldershot.

'And sae you're gaun awa', and without me?' said Archie, rather reproachfully, to Sir Ranald.

'Yes; from here, certainly.'

'Where to?'

'God knows where to,' was the absent response.

'Back to Essilmont, maybe?'

'In time, perhaps, Archie; in time, but not now,' said Sir Ranald, with a bitter sigh.

'Tak' tent, Sir Ranald; for gudesake gang hooly. Dinna wade if ye canna see the bottom,' resumed Archie, in a low and confidential voice; 'and beware ye o' that Lord Cadbury. I ken a spune frae a stot's horn as weel as maist men, and I distrust him sairly.'

'That I do not. He has just been a good friend to me, Archie; and now a word in your ear--when I want advice from you concerning my friends or my affairs, I shall condescend to ask it.'

The old servitor looked abashed and crushed. He bowed very low, and withdrew in silence.

At last the hour of departure came, and Lord Cadbury's carriage and a light luggage-van were at the door; and, ere Alison was assisted into the former, she shook old Archie's hand, and then with a sudden impulse kissed his cheek, for she had known Archie from her infancy. Thus he seemed to her as a part and parcel of Essilmont; and, when the carriage rolled away with her in it, the old man lifted up his hands and voice and wept as only the aged and the hopeless weep.

'Poor girl!' thought Cadbury, with a grimace, when after a time there came a distant view of Aldershot, with its camp of huts, its church spire, and Twesildown Hill, 'she'll hold, I suppose, for a time, to her little rag of fidelity--her promise to that fellow Goring in the infantry lines; but, _faute de mieux_, we shall cure her of that. We shall see what we shall see, when an hour on board the _Firefly_.'

Well did Alison know where Aldershot lay, but, conscious that her tormentor's keen eyes were upon her, she turned hers away and gazed steadily in the opposite direction.

'I thought I had bidden good-bye to the world, Cadbury,' said Sir Ranald, with the nearest approach to a smile Alison had seen on his thin, worn face for some time past; 'and here I am about to see it again in your yacht. Alison will require some additions to her wardrobe, I fear, but we have no time for that; and though she has Daisy for her attendant, I should like her also to have the society of some lady friend--do you know of one?'

Cadbury looked perplexed.

'What need of a lady friend or chaperon when you, her own father, are with her? Besides, we are close run for time, and Llanyard awaits us at Southampton,' he replied, almost with irritation.

'I have been engaged in many little affairs,' he grumbled in thought, as he recalled the burned bills and the enormous cost, 'but never in a "love chase" so expensive as this! I am in for it now, however, and may as well go through with it; and what will the clubs say when they hear that I am off to see the Continent with old Cheyne's pretty daughter?'

The veteran lover chuckled in his vanity at this, and, ideas of marriage apart, he actually began to scheme how he might 'drop' Sir Ranald somewhere on the Continent, compromise the girl in some way, and thus revenge himself on her and Goring too.

He had scarcely made up his mind yet in what direction to sail at that inclement season, but, wherever it was, another route would be announced in the papers, to throw adventurous lovers off the scent.