Fortune's My Foe. John Bloundelle-Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ make him-well! perhaps even make him the more sought after. Therefore he went on, wishing, however, that his Ariadne had not selected a part of the avenue so distant from the main road-and so near to her house; and then-then-he knew she was there and had kept the appointed meeting.

      A girl came towards him from beneath the trees, shyly, almost hesitatingly; while over her fair hair she had drawn a riding-hood. And a moment later Beau Bufton had taken her hand and was impressing kisses on it, and muttering phrases such as were in use in the highest London circles, and, consequently, must be irresistible to this provincial heiress.

      "I am enraptured," he murmured now, "that one so fair should deign to receive her admirer. Ah, madam, if you but knew how my thoughts have dwelt on you since you let me claim you at the Wells-"

      "And stole my fan, bad man. Ah, sir, you should not have trifled thus-"

      "Love, madam, knows no law. But-but-fair Ariadne-almost had I said fair and chaste Diana-may I not gaze once more in rapture on those lovely orbs, those features ever present in my memory? Will you not remove your hood?"

      With no more than a brief assumption of coyness, the fair one did as her gallant desired, showing a mass of light hair beneath the hood, and, beneath that, a pair of bright eyes which glistened in the evening dusk. She had too a fresh red-and-white complexion, the whole being a very satisfactory proof of the benefits of country air and living, as opposed to the effects of what an earlier poet had rapturously spoken of as "the stench of the London flambeaux."

      "Ah! I protest," Beau Bufton exclaimed now as the maiden yielded to his request, and displayed her loveliness, "once more I tremble at the sight of those charms which won my heart at Tunbridge. Ariadne, you know by my letters all that I desire-all I wish. To call you mine. To be your husband. You cannot doubt my love."

      "So soon?" she said. "Oh, fie! Not yet-not for years, I vow. I am too young."

      "Young! Is the heart ever too young for love? And, Ariadne, dearest one, now is the time. I protest I cannot wait."

      "But there are my guardians, the lawyers. What will they say?"

      "What can they say? I am of ancient family, sweet one, and allied to some of the most distinguished houses in the land. They can make no dissent."

      "If 'tis to be done," the girl said, "it must not be here. Oh! I could not. Instead, in London. We go to London two weeks hence. Yet-yet-I fear," and she gazed up into his face with a look of alarm that fascinated him. For now he knew that the hundred thousand guineas were almost in his grasp.

      Yet as those clear eyes met his, they also disturbed him.

      "Where," he muttered, "where, dearest, have I seen such orbs as yours before? Or was't in my dreams of them? Those lovely orbs."

      "I do not know," she answered. "How can I say? I have wandered little away from this old country home of mine; and at Tunbridge was the first time I have ever been in the gay world. Ah, Algernon, you will be good to me?"

      "Your life shall ever be my choicest care. My most precious treasure. Dearest, may I not put up the banns to-morrow, when I return to London?"

      "You will love me always?"

      "Always and ever."

      Then she slid her hand coyly into his, and told him it should be as he desired.

      "Now," she whispered, "you must away. Sunday sen'-night we leave for Cowley Street in Lambeth. You will not, Algernon, desire a great wedding? Let it be private; with none there but Mrs. Pottle, my faithful nurse. Say that it shall be so, my own."

      "It shall be ever as you wish, sweet one," Beau Bufton answered, while as he did so he laughed in his sleeve. Mrs. Pottle, her faithful nurse! The woman who had done more to bring this about in accord with his jackal's, with Lewis Granger's machinations, than any one else; the woman who was to have five hundred guineas for so bringing it about (unless he could in any way manage to avoid the payment of the money); the woman, who, that very night, had had ten guineas from him.

      "Yes, yes," he whispered, "Mrs. Pottle, your faithful nurse, on your side; Lewis Granger, my hireling, on mine." While as he mentioned the latter's name he reflected that here was another who would have to be hoodwinked out of the guerdon he had stipulated for-hoodwinked out of five thousand guineas. Verily! a vast number of those guineas would drunken, ruined Lewis Granger get, when once Ariadne's fortune was in his hands. A vast number!

      "Farewell, then," the girl said now. "Farewell, my beloved. Oh! do not deceive me, do not take advantage of my innocence and inexperience. Say you will not."

      "Dear heart," he murmured, "who could deceive thee?" "A girl," he added to himself, "who has a hundred thousand guineas and a Hampshire manor. Who could do so?"

      They parted now, she clinging to him tenderly before going away, and whispering in his ear that 99, Cowley Street, Lambeth, was where she would be a week from Sunday next, and that then she would be all his, and, meanwhile, would write often. They parted, she going up the avenue towards where the house stood, and he standing looking after her, feeling his chin and, with a contemptuous smile, drawing down the corners of his mouth.

      CHAPTER III

      "A COUNTRY CLOD."

      It was now almost dark-yet not quite so, it being the period when the days are longest-and for some little time the Beau stood gazing after the retreating figure of his captured heiress. Then he turned slowly and began to retrace his steps to the Hautbois, where he intended to snatch a few hours' rest ere the up coach, which left the "Globe" at Portsmouth at five o'clock in the morning, should pass.

      Perhaps never had Algernon Bufton been in a more agreeable frame of mind than he was at this present time. Everything was, he told himself, very well with him. A ruined spendthrift; a man who, seven years ago, had inherited a substantial fortune and, in the passage of those seven years, had managed to squander it; the chance had come to him of winning this girl, whom, in his mind, he considered to be little better than a fool.

      He had thought so at first when he made her acquaintance at a public ball at Tunbridge, he having gone there heiress hunting and with a list in his pocket of all the young ladies who were known to be either the possessors of large fortunes or the future inheritors thereof; and he still thought her a fool after this evening's interview. That she should have fallen violently in love with him did not of course stamp her as one, since, in spite of his unfortunate chin, he deemed himself not only attractive, but irresistible. Yet a fool she undoubtedly was to throw herself away on a man about whom she had made no inquiries (as he knew she could not have made), and to be willing to marry him in the surreptitious, or, as he termed it, "hole in the corner," manner that she was about to do.

      "If I were a scoundrel," he mused to himself with extreme complacency, "who was pursuing the girl with some other object than that of obtaining possession of her fortune, how I might hoodwink her! Granger, if kept sober till midday, could play the parson sufficiently well to throw dust in her eyes. But not in such a case as this should it be done. No. No! my beauteous Ariadne. Not in such a case as this. You shall be tied up devilish tight, so tight that never shall you escape your bonds with Algernon Bufton; so fast that my demise alone shall cancel them. You are not one of the pretty helpless fools whom villains deceive.

      "A fine property, too," he mused, casting a dark eye around, "a fine property. The trees alone would sell for much if cut down. Yet-yet-we must not come to that. An avenue gives ever an imposing- Hist! What is this? Some country clown, by the way he sings to himself. Perhaps a rival."

      Whereon, true to himself, Beau Bufton assumed a СКАЧАТЬ