Arabella Read online

  In pursuance of this resolve, Mr Beaumaris sent for his curricle next morning. Ulysses, who had shared his breakfast, bundled ahead of him down the steps of his house, leaped into the curricle, and disposed himself on the passenger’s seat with all the air of a dog born into the purple.

  ‘No!’ said Mr Beaumaris forcibly. Ulysses descended miserably from the curricle, and prostrated himself on the flag-way. ‘Let me tell you, my friend,’ said Mr Beaumaris, ‘that I have a certain reputation to maintain, which your disreputable appearance would seriously jeopardise! Do not be alarmed! – I am not, alas, going out of your life for ever!’ He climbed into the curricle, and said: ‘You may stop grinning, Clayton, and let ’em go!’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said his groom, obeying both these behests, and swinging himself expertly up on to the curricle as it passed him. After a minute to two, having twice glanced over his shoulder, he ventured to inform Mr Beaumaris that the little dog was following him.

  Mr Beaumaris uttered an oath, and reined in his reluctant pair. The faithful hound, plodding valiantly along, with heaving ribs, and several inches of tongue hanging from his parted jaws, came up with the curricle, and once more abased himself in the road. ‘Damn you!’ said Mr Beaumaris. ‘I suppose you are capable of following me all the way to Wimbledon! It now remains to be seen whether my credit is good enough to enable me to carry you off. Get up!’

  Ulysses was very much out of breath, but at these words he mustered up enough strength to scramble into the curricle once more. He wagged a grateful tail, climbed on to the seat beside Mr Beaumaris, and sat there panting blissfully. Mr Beaumaris read him a short lecture on the evils of blackmail, which sorely tried the self-control of his groom, discouraged him peremptorily from hurling a challenge at a mere pedestrian dog in the gutter, and proceeded on his way to Wimbledon.

  The Dowager Duchess of Wigan, who was the terror of four sons, three surviving daughters, numerous grandchildren, her man of business, her lawyer, her physician, and a host of dependants, greeted her favourite grandson characteristically. He found her imbibing nourishment in the form of slices of toast dipped in tea, and bullying the unmarried daughter who lived with her. She had been a great belle in her day, and the ravages of her former beauty were still discernible in the delicate bones of her face. She had a way of looking at her visitors with an eagle-like stare, had never been known to waste politeness on anyone, and was scathingly contemptuous of everything modern. Her children were inordinately proud of her, and lived in dread of her periodical commands to them to present themselves at her house. Upon her butler’s ushering Mr Beaumaris into her morning-room, she directed one of her piercing looks at him, and said: ‘Oh! So it’s you, is it? Why haven’t you been to see me since I don’t know when?’

  Mr Beaumaris, bowing deeply over her hand, replied imperturbably: ‘On the occasion of my last visit, ma’am, you told me you did not wish to see me again until I had mended my ways.’

  ‘Well, have you?’ said the Duchess, conveying another slip of soaked toast to her mouth.

  ‘Certainly, ma’am: I am in a fair way to becoming a philanthropist,’ he replied, turning to greet his aunt.

  ‘I don’t want any more of them about me,’ said her grace. ‘It turns my stomach enough already to have to sit here watching Caroline at her everlasting knitting for the poor. In my day, we gave ’em vails, and there was an end to it. Not that I believe you. Here, take this pap away, Caroline, and ring the bell! Maudling one’s inside with tea never did any good to anyone yet, and never will. I’ll tell Hadleigh to fetch up a bottle of Madeira – the lot your grandfather laid down, not that rubbish Wigan sent me t’other day!’

  Lady Caroline removed the tray, but asked her parent in a shrinking tone if she thought that Dr Sudbury would approve.

  ‘Sudbury’s an old woman, and you’re a fool, Caroline!’ replied the Duchess. ‘You go away, and leave me to talk to Robert! I never could abide a pack of females hangin’ round me!’ she added, as Lady Caroline gathered up her knitting: ‘Tell Hadleigh the good Madeira! He knows. Well, sir, what have you to say for yourself now you have had the impudence to show your face here again?’

  Mr Beaumaris, closing the door behind his aunt, came back into the room, and said with deceptive meekness that he was happy to find his grandmother in such excellent health and spirits.

  ‘Graceless jackanapes!’ retorted the Duchess with relish. She ran her eye over his handsome person. ‘You look very well – at least, you would if you didn’t make such a figure of yourself in that rig! When I was a girl, no gentleman would have dreamed of paying a social call without powder, let me tell you! Enough to make your grandfather turn in his grave to see what you’ve all come to, with your skimpy coats, and your starched collars, and not a bit of lace to your neckcloth, or your wristbands! If you can sit down in those skin-tight breeches, or pantaloons, or whatever you call ’em, do so!’

  ‘Oh, yes, I can sit down!’ said Mr Beaumaris, disposing himself in a chair opposite to hers. ‘My pantaloons, like Aunt Caroline’s gifts to the poor, are knitted, and so adapt themselves reasonably well to my wishes.’

  ‘Ha! Then I’ll tell Caroline to knit you a pair for Christmas. That’ll send her into hysterics, for a bigger prude I never met!’

  ‘Very likely, ma’am, but as I am sure that my aunt would obey you, however much her modesty was offended, I must ask you to refrain. The embroidered slippers which reached me last Christmas tried me high enough. I wonder what she thought I should do with them?’

  The Duchess gave a cackle of laughter. ‘Lord bless you, she don’t think! You shouldn’t send her handsome gifts.’

  ‘I send you very handsome gifts,’ murmured Mr Beaumaris, ‘but you never reciprocate!’

  ‘No, and I never shall. You’ve got more than’s good for you already. What have you brought me this time?’

  ‘Nothing at all – unless you have a fancy for a mongrel-dog?’

  ‘I can’t abide dogs, or cats either. Fifty thousand a year if you’ve a penny, and you don’t bring me as much as a posy! Out with it, Robert! What did you come for?’

  ‘To ask you whether you think I should make a tolerable husband, ma’am.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed her grace, sitting bolt upright in her chair, and grasping the arms with her frail, jewelled hands. ‘You’re never going to offer for the Dewsbury girl?’

  ‘Good God, no!’

  ‘Oh, so that’s yet another idiot who’s wearing the willow for you, is it?’ said her grace, who had her own ways of discovering what was going on in the world from which she had retired. ‘Who is it now? One of these days you’ll go a step too far, mark my words!’

  ‘I think I have,’ said Mr Beaumaris.

  She stared at him, but before she could speak her butler had entered the room, staggering under a specimen of the ducal plate which her grace had categorically refused to relinquish to the present Duke, on the twofold score that it was her personal property, and that he shouldn’t have married anyone who gave his mother such a belly-ache as that die-away ninny he had set in her place. This impressive tray Hadleigh set down on the table, casting, as he did so, a very expressive look at Mr Beaumaris. Mr Beaumaris nodded his understanding, and rose, and went to pour out the wine. He handed his grandmother a modest half-glass, to which she instantly took exception, demanding to know whether he had the impertinence to suppose that she could not carry her wine.

  ‘I daresay you can drink me under the table,’ replied Mr Beaumaris, ‘but you know very well it’s extremely bad for your health, and also that you cannot bully me into pandering to your outrageous commands.’ He then lifted her disengaged hand to his lips, and said gently: ‘You are a rude and an overbearing old woman, ma’am, but I hope you may live to be a hundred, for I like you so much better than any other of my relatives!’

  ‘I daresay that’s not saying much,’ she remarked, rather please
d by this audacious speech. ‘Sit down again, and don’t try to hoax me with any of your faradiddles! I can see you’re going to make a fool of yourself, so you needn’t wrap it up in clean linen! You haven’t come here to tell me you’re going to marry that brass-faced lightskirt you had in keeping when I last saw you?’

  ‘I have not!’ said Mr Beaumaris.

  ‘Just as well, for laced mutton being brought into the family is what I won’t put up with! Not that I think you’re fool enough for that.’

  ‘Where do you learn your abominable expressions, ma’am?’ demanded Mr Beaumaris.

  ‘I don’t belong to your mealy-mouthed generation, thank God! Who is she?’

  ‘If I did not know from bitter experience, ma’am, that nothing occurs in London but what you are instantly aware of it, I should say that you had never heard of her. She is – or at any rate, she says she is – the latest heiress.’

  ‘Oh! Do you mean the chit that that silly Bridlington woman has staying with her? I’m told she’s a beauty.’

  ‘She is beautiful,’ acknowledged Mr Beaumaris. ‘But that’s not it.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  He reflected. ‘She is the most enchanting little wretch I ever encountered,’ he said. ‘When she is trying to convince me that she is up to every move in the social game, she contrives to appear much like any other female, but when, as happens all too often for my comfort, her compassion is stirred, she is ready to go to any lengths to succour the object of her pity. If I marry her, she will undoubtedly expect me to launch a campaign for the alleviation of the lot of climbing-boys, and will very likely turn my house into an asylum for stray curs.’

  ‘Oh, she will, will she?’ said her grace, staring at him with knit brows. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, she has already foisted a specimen of each on to me,’ he explained. ‘No, perhaps I wrong her. Ulysses she certainly foisted on to me, but the unspeakable Jemmy I actually offered to take under my protection.’

  The Duchess brought her hand down on the arm of her chair. ‘Stop trying to gammon me!’ she commanded. ‘Who is Ulysses, and who is Jemmy?’

  ‘I have already offered to make you a present of Ulysses,’ Mr Beaumaris reminded her. ‘Jemmy is a small climbing-boy whose manifest wrongs Miss Tallant is determined to set right. I wish you might have heard her telling Bridlington that he cared for nothing but his own comfort, like all the rest of us; and asking poor Charles Fleetwood to imagine what his state might now be had he been reared by a drunken foster-mother, and sold into slavery to a sweep. Alas that I was not privileged to witness her encounter with the sweep! I understand that she drove him from the house with threats of prosecution. I am not at all surprised that he cowered before her: I have seen her disperse a group of louts.’

  ‘She sounds to me an odd sort of a gal,’ remarked her grace. ‘Is she a lady?’

  ‘Unquestionably.’

  ‘Who’s her father?’

  ‘That, ma’am, is a mystery I have hopes that you may be able to unravel.’

  ‘I?’ she exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what you think I can tell you!’

  ‘I have reason to believe that her home is within easy reach of Harrowgate, ma’am, and I recall that you visited that watering-place not so very long ago. You may have seen her at an Assembly – I suppose they do have Assemblies at Harrowgate? – or have heard her family spoken of.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t!’ replied her grace bitterly. ‘What’s more I don’t want to hear anything more about Harrowgate! A nasty, cold, shabby-genteel place, with the filthiest waters I ever tasted in my life! They did me no good at all, as anyone but a fool like that snivelling leech of mine would have known from the outset! Assemblies, indeed! It’s no pleasure to me to watch a parcel of country-dowds dancing this shameless waltz of yours! Dancing! I could give you another name for it!’

  ‘I have no doubt that you could, ma’am, but I must beg you to spare my blushes! Moreover, for one who is for ever railing against the squeamishness of the modern miss, your attitude towards the waltz seems a trifle inconsistent.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about consistency,’ retorted her grace, with perfect truth, ‘but I do know indecency when I see it!’

  ‘We are wandering from the point,’ said Mr Beaumaris firmly.

  ‘Well, I never met any Tallants in Harrowgate, or anywhere else. When I wasn’t trying to swallow something that no one is ever going to make me believe wasn’t drained off from the kennels, I was sitting watching your aunt knot a fringe in the most uncomfortable hole of a lodging I’ve been in yet! Why, I had to take all my own bed-linen with me!’

  ‘You always do, ma’am,’ said Mr Beaumaris, who had several times been privileged to see the start of one of the Duchess’s impressive journeys. ‘Also your own plate, your favourite chair, your steward, your –’

  ‘I don’t want any of your impudence, Robert!’ interrupted her grace. ‘I don’t always have to take ’em!’ She gave her shawl a twitch. ‘It’s nothing to me whom you marry,’ she said. ‘But why you must needs dangle after a wealthy woman beats me!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think she has any fortune at all!’ replied Mr Beaumaris coolly. ‘She only said she had to put me in my place.’

  He came under her eagle-stare again. ‘Put you in your place? Are you going to tell me, sir, that she ain’t tumbling over herself to catch you?’

  ‘Far from it. She holds me at arm’s length. I cannot even be sure that she has even the smallest tendre for me.’

  ‘Been seen in your company often enough, hasn’t she?’ said her grace sharply.

  ‘Yes, she says it does her a great deal of good socially to be seen with me,’ said Mr Beaumaris pensively.

  ‘Either she’s a devilish deep ’un,’ said her grace, a gleam in her eye, ‘or she’s a good gal! Lord, I didn’t think there was one of these niminy-piminy modern gals alive that had enough spirit not to toadeat you! Should I like her?’

  ‘Yes, I think you would, but to tell you the truth, ma’am, I don’t care a button whether you like her or not.’

  Surprisingly, she took no exception to this, but nodded, and said: ‘You’d better marry her. Not if she ain’t of gentle blood, though. You ain’t a Caldicot of Wigan, but you come of good stock. I wouldn’t have let your mother marry into your family if it hadn’t been one of the best – not for five times the settlements your father made on her!’ She added reminiscently: ‘A fine gal, Maria: I liked her better than any other of my brats.’

  ‘So did I,’ agreed Mr Beaumaris, rising from his chair. ‘Shall I propose to Arabella, risking a rebuff, or shall I address myself to the task of convincing her that I am not the incorrigible flirt she has plainly been taught to think me?’

  ‘It’s no use asking me,’ said her grace unhelpfully. ‘It wouldn’t do you any harm to get a good set-down, but I don’t mind your bringing the gal to see me one day.’ She held out her hand to him, but when he had punctiliously kissed it, and would have released it, her talon-like fingers closed on his, and she said: ‘Out with it, sir! What’s vexing you, eh?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Not precisely that, ma’am – but I have the stupidest wish that she would tell me the truth!’

  ‘Pooh, why should she?’

  ‘I can think of only one reason, ma’am. That is what vexes me!’ said Mr Beaumaris.

  Twelve

  On his way home from Wimbledon, Mr Beaumaris drove up Bond Street, and was so fortunate as to see Arabella, accompanied by a prim-looking maidservant, come out of Hookham’s Library. He pulled up immediately, and she smiled, and walked up to the curricle, exclaiming: ‘Oh, how much better he looks! I told you he would! Well, you dear little dog, do you remember me, I wonder?’

  Ulysses wagged his tail in a perfunctory manner, suffered her to stretch up a hand to caress him, but yawned.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Ulysses, t
ry to acquire a little polish!’ Mr Beaumaris admonished him.

  Arabella laughed. ‘Is that what you call him? Why?’

  ‘Well, he seemed, on the evidence, to have led a roving life, and judging by the example we saw it must have been adventurous,’ explained Mr Beaumaris.

  ‘Very true!’ She watched Ulysses look up adoringly into his face, and said: ‘I knew he would grow to be attached to you: only see how he looks at you!’

  ‘His affection, Miss Tallant, threatens to become a serious embarrassment.’

  ‘Nonsense! I am sure you must be fond of him, or you would not take him out with you!’

  ‘If that is what you think, ma’am, you can have no idea of the depths to which he can sink to achieve his own ends. Blackmail is an open book to him. He is well aware that I dare not deny him, lest I should lose what little reputation I may have in your eyes.’

  ‘How absurd you are! I knew, as soon as I saw how well you handled him, that you know just how to use a dog. I am so glad you have kept him with you.’

  She gave Ulysses a last pat, and stepped back on to the flag-way. Mr Beaumaris said: ‘Will you not give me the pleasure of driving you to your door?’

  ‘No, indeed, it is only a step!’