Frederica Page 20

  ‘I see nothing romantic in wishing to turn Charis into a picture! In fact, I am much inclined to think that you were right when you told me that he was a dull dog,’ she said, with her usual candour.

  He laughed. ‘Why, yes! – but deeply reverential, I assure you! He considers Charis’s beauty to be pure and perfect, and wishes it might remain so.’

  She stared at him for a frowning moment, and then said decidedly: ‘That proves he hasn’t the smallest tendre for her! How very vexatious! You know, he did seem to me to be so promising!’

  His eyes gleamed, but he responded with perfect gravity: ‘You will be obliged to look about for another eligible parti. Can I be of assistance? I recall that you have come to the conclusion that a young man won’t do for Charis, and it occurs to me – Tell me, would you object to a widower?’

  ‘Yes, I should!’ said Frederica. ‘Furthermore, cousin, I beg you won’t concern yourself in our affairs! I never asked more of you than an introduction to the ton, and you gave us that – for which I am excessively grateful! – and I don’t expect, or wish, you to trouble yourself further! Indeed, there is not the least need!’

  ‘Oh, no, don’t stir coals!’ he protested. ‘Just when you’ve provided me with an interest, too!’

  ‘Finding widowers for Charis!’

  ‘That was a joke,’ he explained.

  ‘Not a funny one!’ she said severely.

  ‘I beg a thousand pardons! I won’t introduce my widower to your sister’s notice, but you may believe me when I say that you may command my services, or my advice, at any time.’

  She was surprised, and for a moment suspected him of mockery. But the familiar glint was absent from his eyes; and, as she met their steady regard, he laid his hand over hers, which was resting on the banister, and clasped it strongly, saying: ‘Is it agreed? You don’t want for sense, or force of mind, but you’re not yet up to snuff, my child.’

  ‘No – no, I kn-know I’m not,’ she said, stammering a little. ‘Thank you! you are very good! Indeed, I can’t think whom else I could turn to, if I needed guidance – or got into a scrape! But I don’t mean to embroil you in any more scrapes, I promise you!’

  She would have drawn her hand away as she spoke, but he prevented her, lifting it from the banister, and lightly kissing it. She had the oddest sensation of having suffered an electric shock; she even felt a trifle dizzy; and it was several moments after he had left her before she went back into the drawing-room. It was no longer customary for gentlemen to kiss hands; and although oldfashioned persons frequently kissed the hands of married ladies, his lordship was not oldfashioned, and she was not married. She wondered what he meant by it, and was obliged to give herself a mental shake. Probably he meant nothing at all, or was trying to get up a flirtation. By all accounts that was the sort of thing he might do, for idle amusement, because she had unwisely told him she had never been in love. This was a lowering thought – not that it signified, except that she had come to look upon him as a safe friend, and it would be very uncomfortable if she could no longer do so. If he thought she was going to figure as his latest flirt he was sadly mistaken: for one thing she had no taste for flirtation; and for another no ambition to join the ranks of his discarded flirts.

  However, when she met him, three days later, in Bond Street, he showed no sign of gallantry, but greeted her with a frown, and a demand to know why she was unaccompanied. ‘I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!’

  ‘You did!’ she retorted. ‘And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!’

  ‘Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!’

  She could not help laughing, but said as coldly as she could: ‘She is making a purchase in that shop, and is to meet me in Hookham’s Library presently. I trust you are satisfied!’

  ‘I am not at all satisfied. Unless you wish to appear as a fast female, you will not show yourself unattended in any of London’s fashionable lounges – least of all in Bond Street! If that is your ambition, look for another sponsor! And don’t nauseate me with fiddle-fiddle about your advanced years! You may pass in Herefordshire for a woman of sense, but here you are merely a green – a very green girl, Frederica!’

  These harsh words aroused conflicting emotions in her breast. Her first impulse was to give him a sharp set-down. Such arrogance certainly deserved a set-down; on the other hand, he was quite capable of withdrawing his patronage, which, if it did not ruin her plans, would be extremely inconvenient. The thought that with his friendship she would lose all her comfort she thrust to the back of her mind. She said, achieving a respectable compromise: ‘To be sure, I am very green, for until I saw you coming towards me I didn’t know this was a fashionable lounge! I’m much obliged to you for telling me, and I can’t think how I came to be so stupid! As though I had never heard of Bond Street beaux, which of course I have! Are you – what do you call it? – on the strut?’

  ‘No, vixen, I am not on the strut!’ he replied, an appreciative gleam in his eye. ‘Merely on my way to Jackson’s Boxing Saloon!’

  ‘How horrid!’

  ‘That,’ said his lordship, ‘from one who lately described to me the precise significance of good science, is coming it very much too brown, Frederica!’

  She laughed. ‘Well, it is horrid, for all that! How detestable of you to have encouraged me to make such a cake of myself, when I daresay you know much more about the sport than I do!’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if I did,’ he agreed. ‘Also more about the conventions to be observed by young ladies of quality.’

  ‘That crow has been plucked already! How can you be so unhandsome as to go on scolding? Haven’t I owned I was at fault?’

  ‘If to offer me a gratuitous insult is to own yourself at fault –’

  ‘No, no! not gratuitous, cousin!’ she interposed.

  ‘One of these days,’ said his lordship, with careful restraint, ‘you will come by your just deserts, my girl! At least, so I hope!’

  ‘Oh, how unkind!’ Her eyes twinkled up at him, but she became serious almost immediately, and said contritely: ‘What a charge we are upon you! I beg your pardon: you have been very kind! I never meant, you know, to embroil you in our affairs, and I am determined you shan’t be called upon again to rescue us from sudden dilemmas.’

  ‘From which I deduce that your brothers are not – at the moment – engaged on any hazardous enterprise,’ he remarked.

  ‘Now that,’ she said indignantly, ‘is most unjust! You were not called upon to rescue Felix from the steam-packet; and, as for Jessamy, he at least doesn’t get into scrapes!’

  He acknowledged it; but it was Jessamy who plunged him, not many days later, into the affair of the Pedestrian Curricle.

  This ingenious machine was the very latest crack, and bidding fair to become the transient rage. Of simple construction, it consisted of two wheels, with a saddle hung between them, the foremost of which could be made to turn by means of a bar. It was propelled by the rider’s feet on the road, and experts could achieve quite astonishing speeds, when, admirably balancing themselves, they would lift their feet from the ground and coast along at a great rate, and to the amazement of beholders. Jessamy had seen one of these experts riding his Pedestrian Curricle in the park, and had instantly become fired with the spirit of emulation. His adventurous nature, chafing as much under the loss of his horses as from his self-imposed regimen of rigorous study, flamed into revolt: here, he perceived, was the means by which he could, without involving Frederica in extra expenditure, find an outlet for his restless energy, and demonstrate to the world that his odious little brother was not the only Merriville with bottom enough to engage in hazardous exploits. He discovered that there were several schools where the new art was taught, and which were willing to hire their machines to proficient pupils. It did not take him long to become one of these, or, when he v
entured to sally forth from the school on a hired machine, to learn to guide it through such traffic as he encountered in the quieter streets. Lufra was his companion on these expeditions: a circumstance which led his sisters to assume, with satisfaction, that he had relaxed his stern rule on that faithful hound’s behalf. ‘Which makes me glad, after all, that we did bring Luff to London,’ said Frederica, adding, with a chuckle: ‘And also that he chased the cows in the Green Park, and made Jessamy think that a mere female was not to be trusted with him. Nothing else would have lured him away from his books!’

  Boy enough to wish to startle his family with his unsuspected prowess, Jessamy had said nothing to them about his new hobby. Once he had perfected his balance, and could feel himself to be master of the Pedestrian Curricle, he meant to ride up to the door, and call his sisters out to watch his skill. There was sometimes a little difficulty in mounting the machine, and it would never do to make a mull of that – particularly if Felix were to be one of his audience. So he spent several hours practising this art; and then, as a final test before showing himself off to his family, boldly penetrated into the more populous part of the town. So well did he manage that he could not resist the temptation to coast down the long slope of Piccadilly, both feet daringly lifted from the flagway. This feat attracted a great deal of attention, some of it admiring, some of it scandalised; and, in the end, very much more attention than Jessamy desired.

  A rough-coated retriever was to blame for the disaster. Sedately walking at his master’s heels, this animal no sooner saw the strange vehicle than he took the most violent exception to it, and raced beside it, barking and snapping. Jessamy was too well accustomed to dogs who bounced out to chase any passing carriage to be discomposed by this assault, but Lufra, who had lingered a little way behind to investigate a promising smell, saw that his master was being attacked, and hurled himself to the rescue. The result was inevitable. The dogs, embarking on a fight to the death, cannoned into the Pedestrian Curricle; Jessamy, trying to recover his balance, charged into a man mending chairs, lost control of his machine, and was flung on to the cobbled highway, almost under the hooves of a high-stepping pair harnessed to a landaulet. The coachman was able to swing his horses away, and Jessamy to scramble to his feet, bruised, cut, and considerably shaken, but with no bones broken. A little dazed, and deeply humiliated, he found himself faced with a scene appalling enough to have daunted any sixteen-year-old less stiffly courageous than himself. The sudden swerve of the carriage-horses had dislocated the traffic, and the air was rent by rude, loud voices, uttering accusations and counter-accusations, embellished by threats and strange oaths; the dowager in the landaulet was indulging in a fit of mild vapours; the chair-mender, also picking himself up from the roadway, was claiming enormous damages for his personal injuries and the total wreckage of the chair; and the retriever’s master was furiously shouting for help in separating the dogs. To this task Jessamy turned his attention, and once he had persuaded the irate gentleman to stop belabouring both animals, and to hold his own firmly, he speedily dragged Lufra off. He was just about to stammer an apology when the irate gentleman, stigmatising Lufra as a savage brute, threw all the blame of the encounter upon that noble hound. That, naturally, made him bite back his apology, and point out that all the blame attached to the retriever, who had wantonly attacked him. ‘Would you give a souse for a dog that wouldn’t protect his master, sir?’ he demanded. ‘I would not!’

  From then on the scene rose to nightmarish proportions, so many people claiming damages, or threatening law-suits, that poor Jessamy’s brain reeled. When his name and direction were demanded he had a horrid vision of a stream of injured persons descending upon Frederica, bent on extorting huge sums from her, and, of instinct, he blurted out: ‘Berkeley Square! My – my guardian’s house – the M-Marquis of Alverstoke!’

  He had no thought in his head but to protect Frederica, but it was swiftly borne in upon him that he had uttered magical words. His assurances of redress (hitherto spurned) were accepted; the irate gentleman, saying that he hoped his guardian would make him smart, resumed his progress up the street; and the dowager, recovering from the vapours, read him a severe lecture, and said she would not fail to report what she called his naughtiness to the Marquis.

  Thus it came about that for the second time a Merriville arrived in Berkeley Square at an unseasonable hour, demanding instant speech with the Marquis. Unlike Frederica, however, Jessamy did not reject Charles Trevor’s services; and he was impetuously, and rather incomprehensibly, pouring his story into Charles’s ears when Alverstoke, wearing a long and lavishly caped driving-coat of white drab over his elegant morning-dress, strolled into the room, saying: ‘Now what? Wicken informs me –’ He broke off, and raised his quizzing-glass to his eye, the better to observe Jessamy’s battered appearance. He let it fall, and advanced. ‘Repellent boy, have you been in a mill? Why the devil haven’t you patched him up, Charles?’

  ‘I haven’t yet been allowed to, sir,’ responded Mr Trevor.

  ‘No, no, it’s of no consequence!’ Jessamy said impatiently, wiping away a trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead. ‘I’m not hurt! Nothing to signify! I only want – I mean I didn’t come here because of that, but because – Oh, pray don’t trouble yourself about it, sir!’

  ‘Stand still!’ commanded Alverstoke, taking that dogged chin in his hand, and turning Jessamy’s face to the light.

  ‘It wasn’t a mill! I fell – and it serves me right!’ Jessamy said bitterly, and with suppressed violence.

  ‘No doubt, but it doesn’t serve me right to have you bleeding all over my house. Charles, I wish you will be good enough to – No, I’ll attend to it myself. Come along, you young cawker! You can tell me all about it while I put some sticking-plaster over this cut.’

  Willy-nilly, Jessamy followed him out of the room, and up the broad stairs, protesting all the way that his wounds and abrasions were of no consequence, and that he had come to his lordship’s house merely to make a clean breast of his iniquity; to warn him that a number of persons of varying degree were probably following hard upon his heels, to demand compensation for the damage they had incurred at his hands; and to beg him to disburse whatever sums were required, under promise of repayment by the culprit.

  Presently, having washed the dirt and the bloodstains from his face and hands, relinquished his muddy coat into Knapp’s hands, submitted to having the more accessible of his many bruises anointed, and his brow adorned with a strip of plaster, and swallowed a judicious mixture of brandy and water, his jangled nerves grew quieter, and he was able to give the Marquis a fairly coherent account of his accident, speaking in a voice of rigid control, and betraying only by the clenching and unclenching of his thin hands the inward turmoil under which his spirit laboured. He ended on a harsh note, meeting Alverstoke’s cool, faintly amused eyes with a fierce look in his own. ‘I had no right to furnish them with your name, sir, or to lead them to suppose that I live here. I know it, and I beg your pardon! I – I want to explain! I only did it because I couldn’t bear to have them coming down upon Frederica! I don’t know what I may have to pay: a great deal, I daresay, because the machine was smashed as well as that chair, and – But whatever it is I will pay, and not my sister! With all the expense of Charis’s come-out – and I was determined not to add to it!’

  He ended on a note of anguish, but the Marquis applied an effective damper by saying in a prosaic and slightly bored voice: ‘Very proper. What is it you wish me to do for you?’

  Pulled up short on the verge of an emotional outburst, Jessamy flushed, biting his lip, and managed to reply with tolerable self-command: ‘To lend me whatever sum may be needed – if you would be so very obliging, sir! On the understanding that I pay it back to you out of my allowance. You see, I haven’t very much left just – just at the moment. There were the lessons I had, and the hire of the machine, so –’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you!’ advised his lordship. ‘I shan’t
dun you!’

  Jessamy’s flush deepened. ‘I know that! Pray don’t say I needn’t pay you back at all, or tell me not to worry! Nothing would prevail upon me not to pay you back, and I ought to worry! At the first test I yielded to temptation! Vainglory! Yes, and worse! I wanted to outshine Felix! Could anything be more contemptible, or show how – how unfitted I am even to think of entering into Holy Orders?’

  ‘Yes, quite a number of things,’ replied Alverstoke. ‘Stop magnifying a trivial incident into a major sin! All you have done is to get into a scrape, through no particular fault of your own, and there is no need whatsoever for any soul-searching. I am glad to know you can fall into scrapes: you’ll be a better parson if you have understanding of human frailty than if you were to be a saint at sixteen years of age!’

  Jessamy looked to be rather struck by this, but after frowning over it for a moment, he said: ‘Yes, but – but when one has made a resolution – not to have the strength to resist temptation shows such weakness of character – doesn’t it, sir?’

  ‘If your resolution was to behave like an ascetic, it shows that you stand in grave danger of becoming a prig!’ said his lordship brutally. ‘Well, you’ve applied to me for assistance, in which you’ve at least shown that you don’t lose your wits in an emergency! I’ll settle the reckoning and you can repay me when you can do so without leaving yourself at a standstill. As for all the threats that were hurled at you, forget them! If any coachman, chair-mender, or any other such person, had the temerity to come here, demanding your blood, you may depend upon it that Mr Trevor would be fully capable of dealing with such impudence! But they won’t come.’

  ‘No,’ Jessamy said, his brow darkening. ‘I didn’t give your name for that reason – it didn’t even occur to me! – but as soon as I said you were my guardian –’ He stopped, brooding over it, and then said, raising his austere eyes to Alverstoke’s face: ‘That’s as contemptible as the rest!’

  ‘Possibly, but you’ll own it’s convenient! Spare me any moralising on the hollowness of worldly rank, and pay attention to what I am going to say to you!’