CHAPTER XXI.

ROWING.

To get away with Katy immediately.  These were the terms of the problem now before Albert His plan was to take her to visit friends at the East, and to keep her there until Westcott should pass out of her mind, or until she should be forgotten by the Privileged Infant.  This was not Westcott’s plan of the campaign at all.  He was as much bent on securing Katy as he could have been had he been the most constant, devoted, and disinterested lover.  He would have gone through fire and flood.  The vindictive love of opposition and lust for triumph is one of the most powerful of motives.  Men will brave more from an empty desire to have their own way, than they could be persuaded to face by the most substantial motives.

Smith Westcott was not a man to die for a sentiment, but for the time he had the semblance of a most devoted lover.  He bent everything to the re-conquest of Katy Charlton.  His pride served him instead of any higher passion, and he plotted by night and managed by day to get his affairs into a position in which he could leave.  He meant to follow Albert and Katy, and somewhere and somehow, by working on Katy’s sympathies, to carry off the “stakes,” as he expressed it.  He almost ceased trifling, and even his cronies came to believe that he was really in love.  They saw signs of intense and genuine feeling, and they mistook its nature.  Mrs. Ferret expressed her sympathy for him—­the poor man really loved Kate, and she believed that Kate had a right to marry anybody she pleased.  She did not know what warrant there was in Scripcherr for a brother’s exercising any authority.  She thought Mrs. Plausaby ought to have brought up her son to have more respect for her authority, and to hold Scripcherral views.  If he were her son, now!  What she would have done with him in that case never fully appeared; for Mrs. Ferret could not bring herself to complete the sentence.  She only said subjunctively:  “If he were my son, now!” Then she would break off and give her head two or three awful and ominous shakes.  What would have happened if such a young man as Albert had been her son, it would be hard to tell.  Something unutterably dreadful, no doubt.

Even the charms of Miss Minorkey were not sufficient to detain Albert in his eager haste and passionate determination to rescue Katy.  But to go, he must have money; to get money, he must collect it from Plausaby, or at least get a land-warrant with which he could pre-empt his claim.  Then he would mortgage his land for money to pay his traveling expenses.  But it was so much easier to lend money to Plausaby, Esq., than it was to collect it.  Plausaby, Esq., was always just going to have the money; Plausaby, Esq., had ever ready so many excuses for past failure, and so many assurances of payment in the immediate future, that Charlton was kept hoping and waiting in agony from week to week.  He knew that he was losing ground in the matter of Westcott and Katy.  She was again grieving over Smith’s possible suicide, was again longing for the cheerful rattle of flattery and nonsense which rendered the Privileged Infant so diverting even to those who hated him, much more to her who loved him.