Free Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini Page B

you'll join us at supper."
    "I'll be damned," roared Blake, "if ever I sit at table of yours, sir."
    "Ah!" said Mr. Wilding regretfully. "Now you become offensive."
    "I mean to be," said Blake.
    "You astonish me!"
    "You lie! I don't," Sir Rowland answered him in triumph. He had got it out at last.
    Mr. Wilding sat back in his chair, and looked at him, his face inexpressibly shocked.
    "Will you of your own accord deprive us of your company, Sir Rowland," he wondered, "or shall Mr. Trenchard throw you after your hat?"
    "Do you mean . . ." gasped the other, "that you'll ask no satisfaction of me?"
    "Not so. Mr. Trenchard shall wait upon your friends tomorrow, and I hope you'll afford us then as felicitous entertainment as you do now."
    Sir Rowland snorted, and, turning on his heel, made for the door.
    "Give you a good night, Sir Rowland," Mr. Wilding called after him. "Walters, you rascal, light Sir Rowland to the door."
    Poor Blake went home deeply vexed; but it was no more than the beginning of his humiliation at Mr. Wilding's hands — for what can be more humiliating to a quarrel-seeking man than to have
his enemy refuse to treat him seriously? He and Mr. Wilding met next morning, and before noon the tale of it had run through Bridgwater that Wild Wilding was at his tricks again. It made a pretty
story how twice he had disarmed and each time spared the London beau, who still insisted — each time more furiously —upon renewing the encounter, till Mr. Wilding had been forced to run
him through the sword-arm and thus put him out of all case of continuing. It was a story that heaped ridicule upon Sir Rowland and did credit to Mr. Wilding.
    Richard heard it, and trembled, enraged and impotent. Ruth heard it, and was stirred despite herself to a feeling of gratitude towards Wilding for the patience and toleration he had
displayed.
    There for a while the matter rested, and the days passed slowly. But Sir Rowland's nature — mean at bottom — was spurred to find him some other way of wiping out the score that lay
'twixt him and Mr. Wilding, a score mightily increased by the shame that Mr. Wilding had put upon him in that encounter from which — whatever the issue — he had looked to cull great
credit in Ruth's eyes.
    He had been thinking constantly of the incautious words that Richard had let fall, thinking of them in conjunction with the startling rumours that were now the talk of the whole countryside. He
laid two and two together, and the four he found them make afforded him some hope. Then he realized — as he might have realized before had he been shrewder — that Richard's mood was one
that made him ripe for any villainy. He thought that he was much in error if a treachery existed so black that Richard would quail before it, if it but afforded him the means of ridding himself and
the world of Mr. Wilding. He was considering how best to approach the subject, when it happened that one night when Richard sat at play with him in his own lodging, the boy grew talkative through
excess of wine. It happened naturally enough that Richard sought an ally in Blake, just as Blake sought an ally in Richard. Indeed, their fortunes — so far as Ruth was concerned — were
bound up together. The baronet saw that Richard, half-fuddled, was ripe for any confidences that might aim at the destruction of his enemy. He questioned him adroitly, and drew from him the story
of the rising that was being planned, and of the share that Mr. Wilding — one of the Duke of Monmouth's chief movement-men — bore in the business that was toward.
    When, towards midnight, Richard Westmacott went home, he left in Sir Rowland's hands an instrument which the latter accounted potential not only for the destruction of Anthony Wilding, but
perhaps also for laying the foundations to the building of his own fortunes anew.
     
    CHAPTER VII
    THE NUPTIALS OF RUTH WESTMACOTT
    HERE was Sir Rowland Blake in high fettle at knowing himself armed with a