She allowed him to pull her to her feet. As she walked beside him, towards the inn where they had left the curricle, she said tentatively: “I hope you are not offended?”
He glanced down at her, and she was relieved to see that he was smiling again, very tenderly. “No, not a bit. I was trying to decide whether I love you most when you’re awake upon every suit, or when you’re a pea-goose.”
Her eyes sank, as her colour rose; she said, with an uncertain laugh: “I must seem like a pea-goose, I know. It is your fault, for—for putting windmills into my head! It doesn’t seem so to you, but you have set me a problem, which I must solve, I think, by myself—if you understand me?”
“Well enough, at all events, not to press you further today When I do press you further, I’ll take care I don’t do so here! Or in any other place where there’s a hoary legend to take possession of your mind!”
“Hoary legend?” she repeated, momentarily puzzled. Her brow cleared suddenly. “Oh, the bride and her attendants being turned into those stones! I had forgotten it”
This interlude did much to lessen her constraint. During the drive back to Bath he talked on indifferent topics, so that she was very soon at her ease. She was careful not to introduce Fanny’s name into her conversation, and was considerably surprised when he did so, saying abruptly: “Don’t tease yourself too much over Fanny! Have you any reason for fearing that shemeans to run away with Stacy? I’m inclined to doubt it, you know.”
She replied calmly: “I don’t know. She doesn’t mean to do so before Thursday, I believe. She was discussing which of her new gowns she should wear for the party only this morning, so I think myself reasonably safe for the present. Afterwards—well, if she does mean to elope, she will find it a more difficult adventure than she bargained for!”
“I should think you would be more than a match for her,” he said. “But that puts me in mind of something! I must make my excuses to your sister: I shan’t be in Bath next week”
She was conscious of feeling a disproportionate degree of disappointment, and a little disquiet. She said: “My sister will be sorry. Are you—do you expect to be away for long?”
“Not longer than I need. There’s some business I must attend to, and it won’t do to put it off.”
“No, of course not,” she replied sedately. Then, as a thought occurred to her, she uttered an exclamation of annoyance, and said: “Now, if only I had known, we need not have sent a card to Stacy!”
“Did you do so? Why?”
“Oh, because Selina would have it that if you were to be invited, Stacy must be too!”.
“No! Did she really wish to invite me so much that she was prepared to receive Stacy ? I must have made a bigger hit with her than I knew!” he remarked, in gratified accents.
Abby bit her lip, and replied with great dignity: “My sister I regret to say!—doesn’t hold him in dislike. She thinks him very pretty-behaved, so it isn’t a hardship to her to be obliged to entertain him!”
Chapter XII
The news that Mr Calverleigh had left Bath was brought to Sydney Place by Miss Butterbank on the following morning. She was a little disappointed to find that Miss Wendover was already aware of it, having received a brief note from him excusing himself from attending her rout-party; but as he had not divulged his reason for leaving Bath, his destination, or the means by which he proposed to travel, she was quickly able to repair two of these omissions. She was known, behind her back, as the Bath Intelligencer, but although she could tell Miss Wendover that Mr Calverleigh had set out on the London Mail Coach, at five o’clock on the previous evening, she had not discovered the nature of his business, and could only advance a few conjectures.
Miss Wendover heard of the departure with relief, and indulged the hope that Mr Calverleigh did not mean to return to Bath. Foolish she might be, but it had not escaped her notice that he and Abby had become wondrous great, which was a circumstance which filled her with misgiving. He was an interesting man, and one who had been, in her opinion, hardly used, but no more ineligible husband for Abby could have been imagined. When the suggestion had first been slyly made to her that Abby was encouraging his advances she had been as incredulous as she was indignant, but when Abby, not content with accompanying him to the theatre, took to driving about the neighbouring countryside with him, she became very uneasy, and disclosed to the faithful Miss Butterbank that she wished neither of the Calverleighs had ever come to Bath.
Their coming had certainly cut up her peace. First, there had been Stacy (poor young man!), whose very understandable attentions to Fanny had brought down James’s wrath upon her head, and even, to some extent, Abby’s; and who had turned out to be sadly unsteady, if James and George were to be believed, though it would not surprise her to find that they had grossly exaggerated Stacy’s failings, for there was something so particularly winning about his graceful manners, and the deference he used towards his elders. He was the head of his family, too, and the owner of a considerable estate in Berkshire. She had never visited Danescourt, but she had looked for it in an old volume entitled Seats of the Nobility and Gentry, and there, sure enough, it was, with an illustration depicting a large, sprawling house of obvious antiquity, and a quantity of interesting information about its history, and that of the Calverleighs, who seemed to have owned it for an impressive number of centuries. If it was true, as George bad told Abby it was, that it was so grossly encumbered that it was in imminent danger of passing out of Calverleigh hands, it could not be regarded as an asset, of course, for its loss must diminish Stacy’s consequence to vanishing point, and transform him from a desirable parti into a scapegrace who had wasted his inheritance, and reduced himself to penury. But how could she have known this, when she had welcomed Stacy to Sydney Place? It was most unjust of James to have sent her such a scold; and for her part she would find it hard to believe that, whatever the poor young man’s misfortunes might be, he had come to Bath in search of a rich wife. As for the shocking suspicion Abby had, that he meant to elope with Fanny, that she never would believe; and she wondered how Abby could suppose dear little Fanny to be so dead to all feelings of shame, or how she herself could be so regardless of her sister’s precarious health as to put such ideas into her head as must give rise to the sort of agitating reflections calculated to throw her nerves into disorder.
And then, as though all this were not bad enough, Mr Miles Calverleigh had descended upon them, and lost no time at all in attaching himself particularly to Abby! There was no doubt about his reputation, for, however much one might pity him for the harsh treatment meted out to him by his father, the fact remained that not the most rigorous father would pack his son off to India without good reason. And if James thought he could lay the blame for this black sheep’s intrusion into Abby’s life ather door he was never more mistaken, and so she would tell him. Who, in the world, could have thought that Abby, rejecting the offer of the noble lord who addressed himself to her surrounded by the aura of dear Papa’s approval, holding up her nose at such admirable suitors as Mr Peter Dunston, would succumb to the advances of a man who had nothing whatsoever to recommend him to one so notoriously picksome as she was? He was not at all handsome; he had none of his nephew’s address; his manners were the reverse of graceful; and his raiment, so far from being elegant, showed neither neatness nor propriety. Not only did he pay morning-visits in riding-breeches and indifferently polished top-boots, but, more often than not he looked as though he had dressed all by guess, tying his neckcloth in a careless knot, and shrugging himself into his coat. Anyone would have supposed that Abby, herself always precise to a pin, would have held such a shabrag in disgust-even if he had been unrelated to the Calverleigh she held in positive abhorrence! She had always been capricious, but to allow the uncle to make up to her while she refused to countenance the nephew’s courtship of her niece carried caprice into the realm of distempered freakishness. And one had thought that she had outgrown what dear Rowland had called the odd kick in her gallop!