She gave a little start, and turned her head to smile at him. “I wasn’t thinking of that. I was—oh, remembering! Do you ever look back over the years, Bonamy? It does sink one’s spirits a little: so long ago! so many mistakes! so much unhappiness! But there are happy memories too, of course! Do you recall the first time we met?”
“Ay, as if it were yesterday, and so I shall to the end of my life! All in white, you were, my lovely one, with your glorious gold hair glinting under just a light powder, and your eyes like sapphires! I fell in love with you the instant I saw you—swore I’d win your hand, or remain a bachelor! Which I have done! And, what’s more, I was never tempted to break that oath! For no man, my pretty, that loved you,” said Sir Bonamy earnestly, conveniently forgetting the several articles of virtue whom he had subsequently maintained at enormous expense, “could ever feel the smallest tendre for any other female!”
Lady Denville, recalling one veritable Incognita, and at least three high-flyers, who had enjoyed Sir Bonamy’s protection, stifled a giggle, and said soulfully: “And Papa married me to Denville! We danced together, didn’t we? And the next day you sent me a bouquet of white and yellow roses—so many that there was no counting them! That should be a happy memory, but it makes me want to cry. Not that I mean to do so,” she added, with one of her dancing gleams of mischief, “for there is nothing so tedious as a female who turns herself into a watering-pot! I’ve never done that, have I?”
“Never!” he declared, raising her hand to his lips. “Well, I hope it will be set down in my favour in the judgement-book, and I do feel it may be, for I haven’t had a happy life. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and I perfectly realize that poor Denville had as much to bear as I had—well, almost as much! The truth is that we were each of us deceived in the other, and should never, never have been married!” She wrinkled her brow. “I’ve often wondered why he believed himself to have fallen in love with me, for he disapproved of me amazingly, and he was so cold—so formal—that even now it makes me shiver to remember it!”
“Ah, my poor pretty!” said Sir Bonamy, much moved. “If you had married me, how happy we should both have been!”
Her eyes quizzed him laughingly. “Well, I might have been, but perhaps you would have been as much provoked by me as Denville was! Consider my shocking want of management, and economy, and my fondness for gaming, and my dreadful debts!”
Sir Bonamy snapped his fingers in the air. “That for such fiddle-faddle! Your debts? Pooh!—an almond for a parrot! Let me settle them! Over and over I’ve told you I’m able to stand more of the nonsense than you ever dreamed of, my lovely one. It don’t do to be prating like some counter-coxcomb, but I’m no chicken-nabob. Well, I’m not a nabob at all, of course: I inherited my fortune, and how much I’m worth I can’t tell you, for it don’t signify: even you couldn’t spend the half of it!”
“Good gracious, Bonamy, you must be rich!” she countered.
“I am,” he said simply. “Richest man in the kingdom, for I fancy I have a trifle the advantage of Golden Ball. Much good it does me! I had as lief be living on a mere competence, for I’ve not a soul to spend it on, Amabel, and it didn’t win me the only thing I wanted. You may say it’s of no consequence—no consequence at all!”
Since she was well aware that he lived in the height of luxury, maintaining, in addition to his mansion in Grosvenor Square, establishments at Brighton, Newmarket, York and Bath (to which slightly outmoded resort he occasionally retired, when his constitution demanded rehabilitation); stabling teams of prime cattle on no fewer than five of the main post-roads; and gaming for preposterous stakes either at Watier’s, or at Oatlands, the residence of his extremely expensive crony, the Duke of York, she had no overmastering desire to avail herself of this permission. But, although her lips quivered, and there was just the suspicion of a choke in her voice, she responded, with a shake of her head: “No, indeed! How very sad it is, my dear friend! How empty your life has been! How lonely!”
“Ay, so it has!” he agreed, struck for the first time in many years by the truth of this sympathetic remark. He took her hand again, pressing it in his own very warm and slightly damp one, and said with great earnestness: “All the use I ever had for my wealth was to bestow it upon you, my dear! It’s yours for the asking, and always will be. Only let me take your debts on my shoulders! Let me—”
She interrupted him, raising her beautiful eyes to his face, and saying: “Bonamy, are you—after all these years—asking me to marry you?”
There was a stunned pause. Sir Bonamy’s round eyes stared down into hers. They were never expressive, but they were now more than ordinarily blank; and the rich colour faded perceptibly from his pendulous cheeks. Twenty-six years earlier he had been a suitor for her hand; during the years of her marriage he had been her constant and devoted cavaliere servente, and very agreeably had those years slipped past. She was indeed the only woman he had ever wished to marry; but although the disappointment he had suffered when the late Lord Baverstock had preferred the Earl of Denville’s offer to his had been severe it had not been very long before his cracked heart had mended sufficiently for him not only to appreciate the advantages of his single state, but to offer a carte blanche to a charming, if somewhat rapacious, ladybird, universally acknowledged to be a dasher of the first water. But throughout this left-hand connexion, and the many which had succeeded it, he had maintained his devotion to the lovely Countess of Denville, earning for himself the envious respect of his less favoured contemporaries, and, in due course, the reputation of being a man who, having once lost his heart, would never again offer it (with his enormous fortune) to any other lady. After a couple of years, even the most determined matron, with marriageable daughters on her hands, considered it a waste of time to throw out lures to him, and observed his light, elegant flirtations without a flicker either of hope or of jealousy.
Such a state of affairs exactly suited his indolent, hedonistic disposition. He had settled down into a state of opulent bachelordom, enjoying every luxury which his wealth could provide, rapidly becoming the intimate of the Prince of Wales, and of his scarcely less expensive brother, the Duke of York; abandoning the struggle to overcome a tendency to corpulence; and achieving, by his impeccable lineage, his amiable manners, his lavish hospitality, the genius of his tailor, and the favour of the most admired lady in the land, the position of being a leader of fashion, and one whom any ambitious hostess was proud to include amongst her guests.
Credited by his world with an undying passion for his first love, it had never until this moment occurred to him to question his own heart; and had it been suggested to him that his original infatuation had gently but inevitably declined into fondness he would have been much affronted. But now, staring down into Lady Denville’s beautiful face, an even more beautiful kaleidoscope of his comfortable, untrammelled existence intervened.
Lady Denville’s soft laughter recalled him from this vision; she said, in a voice of affectionate chiding: “Oh, Bonamy, what a complete hand you are! A Banbury man, no less! You don’t wish to marry me, do you?”
He pulled himself together, declaring valiantly: “The one wish of my heart!”