The Unknown Ajax Page 22

  ‘Nay, that ’ud be sackless, Mester Hugo! Hark-ye-but, if there’s nowt carried in there’ll be nowt carried out! There’s nobbut a half-squadron o’ dragoons quartered twixt here and t’North Forleand, besides t’gadgers – and noan so many of them, by what I learn – and there’s plenty of other places need a watch kept on ’em. But I’ll tell you summat, sir!’

  He paused, nodding. Hugo waited patiently, and after a few moments, during which he seemed to be chewing the cud of his own reflections, John Joseph said: ‘T’young Riding-officer’s more frack than t’owd one, and since t’last run, when him and them dragoons was made April-gowks of, chasing after nobbut a few loads o’ faggots, Peasmarsh way, while t’run was carried off, it were rumoured, not so very far from here, I’ll take my accidavy he’s got his eye fixed on Spurstow again. Happen he’s not so sickened on watching the Dower House as he makes out, for there’s them as is ready to swear they seen him up t’lane now-and-now. There’s been no dragoons stationed thereabouts this while back, and no manner o’ good gin there had been, for Clotton – him as is his lordship’s head groom – tells me they’d got so that they took every bush for a boggart, and reet laughable it was one night when a couple of ’em – nobbut ignorant lads! – came sticklebutt into t’Blue Lion, frining and faffling that there was a flaysome thing jangling round t’Dower House, and wailing fit to freeze t’blood in a body’s veins. At-after that t’sergeant went up there, wi’ another chap, neither of ’em being flaid o’ boggarts.’ He smiled dourly. ‘They say in t’village t’sergeant weren’t very well suited wi’ what he saw and heard. Hooseever, he challenged t’boggart, but it vanished into t’shrubbery, and he didna care to gae after it, chance it happened Spurstow went frumping to t’owd lord that he’d been trespassing.’

  ‘Spurstow himself, with a sheet draped round him!’ said Hugo. ‘Well, I thought as much.’

  ‘Nay, hold thee a minute, Mester Hugo! Tha’s out there: it weren’t Spurstow. That’s sure, because Spurstow stuck his head out o’ t’window, calling out to know who was there, and tha knows there’s no road he could have got back into t’house from t’shrubbery without t’sergeant would have seen him, let alone he’d no time to do it.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Hugo slowly. He was silent for a minute, and then looked thoughtfully at John Joseph, and said: ‘Keep your eyes and your ears open, will you, John Joseph?’

  ‘Ay – and my tongue between my teeth. Happen it’s nobbut a silly lad playing tricks, Mester Hugo.’

  ‘Happen it is,’ Hugo agreed. ‘I think I’ll go up to the Dower House myself one night.’

  John Joseph grunted. ‘Tha’ll need to bide a spirt, till t’moon’s up a bit. I’ll gae wi’ ye.’

  ‘The devil you’ll not! Do you think I’m afraid of ghosts?’

  ‘Nay, it’s no ghost, sir!’

  ‘I’ll go alone, thank you, John Joseph.’

  Several days elapsed before the waxing moon afforded enough light to make a midnight visit to the grounds of the Dower House practicable, and when the Major did go he saw nothing more alarming than Spurstow, who came out of the house (he said) to discover who was prowling about the gardens. As the Major had strolled all round the house in full view of its windows, and knew that even in the dim light his great size made him easily recognizable, he doubted this statement, but he replied in his pleasant way that he was sorry if he had alarmed Spurstow. ‘I came up to see this ghost of yours, but it seems to be shy of me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t ought to listen to what they’ll tell you in the village, sir. It’s all foolishment! Leastways, I’ve never seen it!’ Spurstow said, in a surly tone.

  ‘I’ll go bail you haven’t!’ replied the Major, amused.

  He mentioned his expedition to none but Anthea. She regarded him in frank admiration, exclaiming: ‘All by yourself? Weren’t you nervous? Just the least bit nervous?’

  ‘Nay, I was as brave as a lion!’ he assured her.

  She laughed, but said: ‘Well, I must own I think you were! And you didn’t see or hear anything horrid?’

  ‘No, but I wasn’t expected,’ he said. ‘Another time maybe I might see something.’

  ‘You mean you believe that there’s no ghost, only Spurstow? If it is so, he’ll never dare to try to hoax you – not when he knows you weren’t afraid to walk all round the house in the middle of the night! What are you hoping to do? To find if smugglers do use the Dower House, or to lay the ghost?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to do that,’ he answered.

  ‘To be sure! Miss Melkinthorpe would wish it laid, of course!’

  ‘Who’s she?’ asked Hugo, taken off his guard.

  She opened her eyes at him. ‘But, my dear cousin – ! Miss Amelia Melkinthorpe!’

  ‘Miss Amel –’ He broke off abruptly, and Anthea was glad to perceive that he had the grace to blush. ‘Oh! Her!’

  She said, in a shocked voice: ‘You cannot, surely, have forgotten her?’

  ‘Ay, but I had,’ he confessed, rubbing his nose. ‘I’m that road, you see: out of sight, out of mind!’

  Miss Darracott realized, with considerable indignation, that the Major had yielded once more to the promptings of his worser self, and said, somewhat ominously: ‘Indeed?’

  He nodded, meeting her smouldering gaze with one of his blandest looks. ‘Ay. Mind you, I wouldn’t forget a lass I’d formed a lasting passion for!’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is I mistook my own heart. Of course, she being so beautiful, it’s no wonder I was carried away.’

  ‘I should suppose her to have all Yorkshire at her feet,’ said Anthea. ‘I remember thinking, when you described her to me, that she must be the loveliest creature imaginable! Almost too lovely to be true, in fact. There is something so particularly ravishing about brown eyes, and black curls, isn’t there?’

  ‘Nay!’ he said reproachfully. ‘That was another one! Amelia’s got blue eyes, and golden curls.’

  She choked.

  ‘The thing is, she wouldn’t be the right kind of wife for me when I get to be a peer. She wouldn’t wish to leave Huddersfield, either – on account of her mother.’

  ‘Her mother,’ said Anthea encouragingly, ‘could come to live with you.’

  ‘No, that wouldn’t fit. She’s bedfast,’ explained the Major, ever-fertile.

  Anthea strove with herself.

  ‘Besides, we shouldn’t suit. And there’s no use thinking his lordship would take to her, because he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Surely, cousin, you cannot mean to jilt her?’ said Anthea, in accents of reprobation.

  ‘Nay, it wouldn’t be seemly,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll just have to dispose of her, as you might say.’

  ‘Good God! Murder her?’

  ‘There’s no need to be in a quake,’ he said reassuringly. ‘No one will ever know.’

  ‘If only – oh, if only I could do to you what I long to do!’ exclaimed Anthea. ‘If you were but a few inches shorter – !’

  He said hopefully: ‘Nay, don’t let that fatch you, love! It’ll be no trouble at all to lift you up: in fact, there’s nothing I’d like better!’

  Furiously blushing, she retorted: ‘I didn’t mean that I wished to kiss you!’

  He heaved a despondent sigh. ‘I was afraid you didn’t,’ he said, sadly shaking his head. ‘I was reet taken-aback, but I thought to myself: Come now, lad! She’d never raise your hopes only to cast you down! So –’

  ‘Cousin Hugo, you are outrageous!’ said Anthea, in a shaking voice.

  Horrified, he replied: ‘You’re reet; I am, love! I need someone to take me in hand, and that’s the truth! Of course, if Amelia had been a different sort of a lass – more after your style! – she’d have been just the one to undertake me, but –’

  ‘Cousin Hugo!’ interrupted Anthea, feeling that it was high time he was brought to book, ‘you may bamboozle everyone els
e, but you won’t bamboozle me!’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that, love?’ he said, smiling at her in a very disturbing way.

  ‘You invented Amelia Melkinthorpe because you were afraid you might find yourself obliged to offer for me!’ continued Anthea, prudently ignoring this interpolation. ‘And if you think –’

  ‘Nay, you’re fair and far off, lass!’

  ‘Am I? Then perhaps, cousin, you will tell me why you did invent her? Not,’ she added scathingly, ‘that I shall believe a word of it!’

  ‘Are you telling me I’m a liar?’ demanded Hugo, insulted.

  ‘Yes!’ responded Anthea doggedly.

  ‘I thought you were,’ said Hugo, relapsing with disconcerting suddenness into dejection.

  Miss Darracott, realizing with bitter resentment that she was quite unable to control her own voice, averted her gaze, and took her quivering underlip firmly between her teeth.

  Much encouraged, the abandoned creature before her said confidentially: ‘It was this road, love! By the time you took me up to the picture-gallery my spirits were so low and oppressed by all the black looks I’d had cast on me, and I was feeling that lonely – eh, I was never more miserable in my life!’

  ‘F-Fiddle!’ uttered Anthea, shaken but staunch.

  ‘I won’t deny the old gentleman threw me into a terrible quake when he told me the scheme he had in his mind,’ pursued Hugo, making a clean breast of it. ‘It seemed to me there was only one thing for it: to shab off as fast I could before I found myself gapped! For of all the proud, disagreeable females –’

  ‘Yes, but I– You know v-very well why I –’

  ‘The way you sat there beside me at the dinner-table, never so much as looking at me!’ he said reminiscently. ‘And not a word to be got from you but Yes, and No, except once, when you said Indeed! I thought you were reet cruel. There I was, scared out of my wits –’

  ‘You weren’t! You were not!’

  ‘– scared out of my wits,’ he repeated firmly, ‘and my heart in my shoes, and you weren’t even civil to me, let alone friendly!’

  ‘You need not th-think I don’t know you are m-merely trying to overset me! You didn’t care a rush for any of us!’

  ‘However, when you told me how it was,’ he continued, still lost in reminiscence, ‘I saw I’d been mistaken in you. That was the first time you smiled at me. Ee, lass, you’ve got a lovely smile! Happen you don’t know the way it starts in your eyes, giving them such a mischievous look as –’

  ‘That will do!’ interposed Anthea, rigorously suppressing a strong desire to encourage him to develop this agreeable theme.

  ‘I was only trying to explain how I came to invent Amelia!’ he said, in an injured voice. ‘The thing was that when you smiled at me it set me cudgelling my brains to hit on some way I could get you to stop thinking you had to keep me at a distance, which I could see you’d be bound to do, the way his lordship was trying to throw us together, unless I could put it into your head that there was no reason why you should.’

  ‘Is it possible that you have the – the audacity to suppose that you can make me believe that I had only to smile to make you wish to marry me?’ demanded Anthea, justly incensed.

  ‘Nay, I never said that!’ he protested. ‘All I wanted was a friend! In fact,’ he added, with the air of one brilliantly inspired, ‘it was Hobson’s Choice! I don’t say I wouldn’t liefer have made up to my Aunt Aurelia, mind, but –’

  ‘Will you stop behaving in this odious fashion?’ begged Anthea, in sore straits. ‘You are utterly without conduct, or – or propriety of taste! You would be very well-served if you did find yourself riveted to me! I promise you, you’d come home by weeping cross!’

  ‘Ay, I know I would,’ he agreed. ‘A dog’s life I’d lead, with you riding rough-shod over me, as I don’t doubt you would, seeing that you’re such a shrew, but –’

  ‘Exactly so! So why, pray, do you wish to be married to me?’ said Anthea, pouncing on opportunity.

  ‘Eh, lass, I thought you knew!’ he answered, his eyes round with surprise. ‘To please his lordship, of course!’

  Miss Darracott’s feelings threatened to overcome her. None of the rejoinders that rose to her lips seemed adequate to the occasion; she stared up in seething impotence at her tormentor; saw that he was watching her with an appreciative and extremely reprehensible twinkle in his eyes; and decided that the only way to deal with him was to pay him back in his own coin. So she said, with really very creditable calm: ‘I need scarcely tell you that this is an object with me too, but try as I will I can’t bring myself to the sticking-point.’

  ‘Come now, love, never say that!’ he responded, in heartening accents. ‘To be sure, there’s a lot of me to swallow but you’re too game to be beaten on any suit!’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s not enough of you to swallow,’ she said. ‘I must tell you that my disposition, besides being shrewish, is mercenary. I am determined to marry a man of fortune. Large fortune!’

  ‘Oh, I’ve plenty of brass!’ he assured her.

  ‘I am only interested in gold,’ she said loftily. ‘Furthermore, I have no fancy for living in the Dower House.’

  ‘Well, I can offer you a house in Yorkshire, if you think you could fancy that. I was meaning to sell it, but –’

  ‘Have you really a house in Yorkshire?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Of course I have!’

  ‘There’s no of course about it!’ she said, with asperity. ‘You tell such shocking whiskers that not the slightest dependence can be placed on anything you say! Where is this house?’

  ‘On the edge of the moor, by Huddersfield. That’s the trouble. When my grandfather gave up the old house, next to the mill, and we went to live at Axby House, it was right in the country, but the town’s been growing and growing, and it will grow still faster now the war’s over, and more and more machines are being invented, and put to use. I hardly recognized the place when I came home at the end of the war in the Peninsula. I don’t think you’d like it, love.’

  ‘No, not at all. I should want a house in London – in the best part, of course!’

  ‘Oh, we’ll have that!’ he replied cheerfully.

  ‘We shan’t have anything of the sort – I mean, we shouldn’t! – because my Uncle Matthew has the town-house!’

  ‘Well, there’s more than one house to be had in town!’

  ‘Dear me, yes! How could I be so stupid? I might have known you meant to purchase a handsome establishment!’

  ‘I was thinking of hiring one, myself.’

  ‘No, no, only think how shabby! Next you will say that you don’t intend to have more than one house in the country!’

  ‘Nay, I shan’t say that! I want one in Leicestershire.’

  ‘Oh, in that case there’s no more to be said, for I’ve set my heart on one in the moon!’

  ‘You don’t mean that, love! Nay then, you can’t have thought!’ he expostulated. ‘It’s much too far from town!’

  An involuntary laugh escaped her, but she said: ‘I might have known you’d have an answer! Do you think we have now talked enough nonsense?’

  ‘I’m not talking nonsense, lass. I’d give you the whole of the moon if I could, and throw in the stars for good measure,’ he said, taking her hand, and kissing it. ‘You couldn’t be content with less?’

  ‘You – you are talking nonsense!’ she said, feeling suddenly breathless, and more than a little startled. She was inexperienced in the art of flirtation, but it had certainly occurred to her on various occasions that in this her large cousin had the advantage of her. His methods (judged by such knowledge as she had acquired during one London Season) were original, but that he might be entertaining serious intentions she had not consciously considered. Nor had she looked into her own heart. She had accepted him, after her f
irst mistrust, as a delightfully easy companion who kept her in a ripple of amusement: not the hero of her vague imaginings, but a simple, solid creature, wholly to be trusted. She now realized, with a sense of shock, that this enormous and apparently guileless intruder had taken the grossest advantage of her innocence, advancing by imperceptible but rapid stages from the position of a stranger to be treated with circumspection to that of the close friend in whom she could safely confide, and who was, for some obscure reason, indispensable to her comfort. Any belief she might have had in the existence of the beautiful Miss Melkinthorpe had admittedly been of short duration, but the thought of marrying the Major herself had not, until this moment, entered her head. It was clearly necessary to temporize. Withdrawing her hand from his, she said, in a rallying tone: ‘Recollect that we have been acquainted for less than a month! You cannot, cousin, have fallen – formed an attachment in so short a time!’

  ‘Nay, love, don’t be so daft!’ he expostulated. ‘There’s no sense in saying I can’t do what I have done!’

  Miss Darracott, an intelligent girl, now perceived that in harbouring for as much as an instant the notion of marrying a man who fell so lamentably short of the ideal lover she was an irreclaimable ninnyhammer. Ideal lovers might differ in certain respects, but in whatever mould they were cast not one of them was so unhandsome as to make it extremely difficult for one not to giggle at their utterances. This hopelessly overgrown and unromantic idiot must be given a firm set-down. Resolutely lifting her eyes to his face, and summoning to her aid a smile which was (she hoped) satirical, but not so unkind as to wound him, she said: ‘You are being quite absurd, my dear cousin! Pray say no more!’

  ‘Never?’

  She transferred her gaze to the topmost button of his coat. If anything had been wanting to convince her that he was quite unworthy of her regard, he had supplied it by putting a pistol to her head in this unchivalrous way. She wished very much that she had not committed the imprudence of looking up into his face, but how, she wondered indignantly, could she have guessed that anyone so incurably frivolous would look so anxious? Any female of sensibility must shrink from inflicting pain upon a fellow-creature, but how did one depress pretension without hurting the sinner, or rendering him unnecessarily despondent?