SCENE XXIII

"'Tis an orgy!" exclaimed Lady Maria.

"Oh, Jasper!" sobbed Lady Standish.

"'Twould be interesting to know," further trumpeted Lady Maria, "which of these gentlemen is supposed to have run away with the widow Bellairs?"

"Oh, Kitty!" sobbed Lady Standish.

"My God!" said Sir Jasper, laying down his reeking glass and hardly believing his eyes.

Mistress Kitty (seated between O'Hara and Stafford at the end of the table, while Lord Verney and Sir Jasper faced each other), continued, unmoved, to sip her fragrant brew and cocked her wicked eye at the newcomers, enjoying the situation prodigiously. She laid an arresting hand upon the cuffs of her neighbours, who, all polite amazement, were about to spring to their feet. "Keep still," said she, "keep still and let Sir Jasper and his lady first have their little explanation undisturbed. Never intermeddle between husband and wife," she added demurely: "it has always been one of my guiding axioms!"

"Well, Sir Jasper Standish, these are pretty goings on!" cried Lady Maria, "for a three months' husband.... (Hold up, my poor dear Julia!) Profligate!" snorted the old lady, boring the baronet through with one gimlet eye. "Dissolute wretch! highwayman!"

"I demand," fluted Lady Standish's plaintive treble (in her gentle obstinate heart she had come to the fixed resolution of never allowing Sir Jasper out of her sight again), "I demand to be taken back to my mother, and to have an immediate separation."

"Running away with women out of the streets of Bath!—A lady," (sniff) "supposed to be engaged to my nevvy! Poor deluded boy——"

"And my dearest friend!—oh, Jasper! How could you?"

Sir Jasper broke in upon his wife's treble with the anguished roar of the goaded: "The devil take me," cried he, "if I don't think the whole world's going mad! I elope with the widow Bellairs, Lady Maria, ma'am? I treacherous, my Lady? Ha!" He positively capered with fury and wounded feeling and general distraction, as he drew the incriminating documents from his breast, and flourished them, one in each hand, under the very nose of his accusers. "What of Red Curl, madam? What of the man who kissed the dimple, madam? What of your lover, madam!"

In his confusion he hurled the last two demands straight in Lady Maria's face, who, with all the indignation of outraged virtue, exclaimed in her deepest note:

"Vile slanderer, I deny it!"

Here Mistress Bellairs deemed the moment ripe for her delicate interference.

"My lovely Standish," she cried, "you look sadly. Indeed I fear you will swoon if you do not sit. Pray Mr. Stafford, conduct my Lady Standish to the arm-chair and make her sip a glass of cordial from the bowl yonder."

"Oh, Kitty!" cried Lady Standish, and devoured the widow's face with eager eyes to see whether friend or enemy was heralded there.

"My dear," whispered Kitty, "nothing could be going better. Sit down, I tell you, and I promise you that in ten minutes you will have Sir Jasper on his knees."

Then running up to Sir Jasper and speaking with the most childlike and deliberate candour:

"Pray, Sir Jasper," said she, "and what might you be prating of letters and red curls? Strange now," she looked round the company with dewy, guileless eyes, "I lost a letter only a day or two ago at your house—a," she dropped her lids with a most entrancing little simper, "a rather private letter. I believe I must have lost it in dear Julia's parlour, near the sofa, for I remember I pulled out my handkerchief——"

"Good God!" said Sir Jasper, hoarsely, and glared at her, all doubt, and crushed the letters in his hand.

"Could you—could you have found it, Sir Jasper, I wonder? Mercy on me! And then this morning ... 'tis the strangest thing ... I get another letter, another rather private letter, and after despatching a few notes to my friends, for the life of me, I could not find the letter any more! And I vow I wanted it, for I had scarce glanced at it."

"Oh, Mistress Bellairs!" cried Sir Jasper. "Tell me," cried he panting, "what did these letters contain?"

"La!" said she, "what a question to put to a lady!"

"For God's sake, madam!" said he, and in truth he looked piteous.

"Then, step apart," said she, "and for dear Julia's sake I will confide in you, as a gentleman."

She led him to the moonlit window, while all followed them with curious eyes—except Verney, who surreptitiously drank his punch, and slid away from the table, with the fear of his aunt in his heart. And now Mistress Kitty hung her head, looked exceedingly bashful and exceedingly coy. She took up a corner of her dainty flowered gown and plaited it in her fingers.

"Was there," she asked, "was there anything of the description of a—of a trifling lock of hair, in the first letter—'twas somewhat of an auburn hue?"

"Confusion!" exclaimed the baronet, thrust the fateful letters into her hand, and turning on his heel, stamped his foot, muttering furiously: "Curse the fool that wrote them, and the feather-head that dropped them!"

"And what of the fool that picked them up and read them?" whispered Mistress Kitty's voice in his ears, sharp as a slender stiletto.

She looked him up and down with a fine disdainful mockery.

"Why will you men write?" said she meaningly. "Letters are dangerous things!"

He stood convicted, without a word.

"La! what a face!" she cried aloud now. "I protest you quite frighten me. And how is it you are not overjoyed, Sir Jasper? Here is your Julia proved whiter than the driven snow and more injured than Griselidis, and you not at her feet!"

"Where is she?" said Sir Jasper, half strangled by contending emotions.

"Why, there, in that arm-chair in the inglenook."

Mistress Kitty smoothed her restored treasures quite tenderly, folded them neatly and slipped them into the little brocade bag that hung at her waist.

*****

"Indeed, Lady Standish," said Mr. Stafford, "a glass of punch will do you no harm."

"Punch?" echoed Lady Maria—then turning fiercely on her nephew: "What, my Lord!" said she, "would your mother say? Why you are positively reeking with the dissolute fumes!"

"My dear Lady Maria," interposed the urbane Stafford, "a mere cordial, a grateful fragrance to heighten the heart after fatigue and emotions, a sovereign thing, madam, against the night air—the warmest antidote! A sip of it, I assure you, would vastly restore you."

"I," she said, "I, drink with the profligate and the wanton! The deceiving husband and the treacherous friend!" She gave the fiercer refusal for that she felt so strongly in her old bones the charm of his description.

"Pooh, pooh! my dear ladies, if that is all," said Mr. Stafford, "then, by Heaven, let the glass circulate at once! Indeed, your La'ship," turning to Lady Standish, "so far from our good Jasper having anything to say to Mistress Bellairs's presence here to-night, let me assure you that he and I set out alone at an early hour this evening, with no other object but to be of service to your ladyship—whom your anxious husband had been led to believe was likely to come this way ... somewhat—ah—unsuitably protected, as he thought."

Then he bent down and whispered into Lady Standish's pretty ear (which she willingly enough lent to such consoling assurances): "As for your friend," he went on, "our delightful if volatile Bellairs—she came here with a vastly different person to Sir Jasper: poor O'Hara yonder—who's drinking all the punch! She will tell you herself how it happened.... But, gracious stars, my dear Lady Maria, have you not yet been given a glass of the—of Mr. O'Hara's restorative!"

"Allow me," cried Kitty, who, having just settled Sir Jasper's business for him, had now freedom to place her energies elsewhere. "Dearest Lady Maria—how sweet of you to join us in our little reconciliation feast!" She took a brimming glass from O'Hara's hands and held it, with a winning smile, for Lady Maria's acceptance.

"Madam," responded the matron, scowled, drew her voluminous skirts together and became impenetrably deaf.

"Ah," cried the widow in her topmost notes, "Madam, how I should have revered such a relative as yourself! Next to the joy of calling my Lord Verney's mother, my mother, would have been that of calling his aunt, my aunt! But the dream is over. Lord Verney and I can never be more to each other than we are now."

"Eh?" and the Dowager recovered her hearing. "What's that, what's that, nevvy?"

"'Tis, alas, true," said Lord Verney, with great demureness. "Mistress Bellairs has given me back my word."

"Forgive me, dear Lady Maria," trilled the widow.

"Mercy on us!" ejaculated the old lady; then, as if unconsciously, groped for the glass in Mistress Kitty's hand.

"Sit down, sit down all!" cried Mistress Bellairs. Stafford echoed with a jovial shout. There was a call for a fresh bowl. O'Hara's eyes began to dance, his tongue to resume its glibness. And Lady Maria was surprised to find how long her tumbler took to empty, but, curiously, never failed to be looking the other way when Mistress Bellairs with tenderest solicitude plied the silver ladle in her direction.

"I hope," said the ancient lady, now wreathed in smiles, "I hope that Mr. O'Hara's cordial is not really stronger than Madeira wine—which my physician, that charming Sir George, says is all I ought to drink."

"Madeira?" cried Mr. O'Hara, "Madeira wine is a very fair drink ... it is a fine stirring dhrink. But 'tis apt, I'm afraid, to heat the blood overmuch. Now Claret," he went on, pursuing the thesis, "Claret's the wine for gentlemen—only for the divil of a way it has of lying cold upon the stomach ... after four or five bottles.... Do I hear you say: 'Port,' over there, Tom, me boy? I'll not deny but that Port has qualities. It's strong, it's mellow—but it's heavy. It sends a fellow to sleep, and that's a tirrible bad mark against it; for 'tis near as bad for a man to sleep when he has a bottle going, as when he has a lady coming. Then there's Champagne for you: there's exhilaration in Champagne, 'tis the real tipple for a gentleman when he's alone—in a tête-à-tête—but 'tis not the wine for great company. Now, my dear friends," said O'Hara, stirring his new brew with the touch of a past master, "if you want to know a wine that combines the fire of the Madeira with the elegance of the Claret, the power and mellowness of the Port with the exhilaration of the Champagne—there's nothing in the world can compare to a fine screeching bowl of Brandy Punch!"