After several days, during which his lordship made no mention of her, and certainly did not go to pay her a morning call, it began to seem as though he had either decided to ignore her, or had forgotten her existence. Mr Trevor knew that it was his duty to remind him, but he refrained, feeling that the moment was unpropitious. His lordship had been obliged to endure three visits — two from his elder sisters, and one from his heir’s widowed mother — all of which had bored him so much that every member of his household took great pains not to put him out of temper. “For I assure you, Mr Wicken,” said his lordship’s top-lofty valet, condescending to his lordship’s butler, “that when he is nettled his lordship can create quite a humdurgeon, as they say.”
“I am well aware of that, Mr Knapp,” returned his colleague, “being as I have been acquainted with his lordship from his cradle. He reminds me of his father, the late lord, but you, of course, didn’t know him,” he added, depressing pretension.
His lordship had indeed been sorely tried. Lady Buxted, never one to accept defeat, had come to Alverstoke House, on the flimsiest of pretexts, accompanied by her eldest daughter, who, failing to soften her uncle’s heart by cajolery, had dissolved into tears. But as she was not one of those few, fortunate females who could cry without rendering themselves hideous he was as impervious to her tears as to his sister’s account of the straitened circumstances to which she had been reduced. Only penury, Lady Buxted declared, had compelled her to apply to her brother for his assistance in the all-important duty of launching her dearest Jane into the ton. But her brother, speaking with the utmost amiability, told her that parsimony, not penury, was the correct word; upon which her ladyship lost her temper, and gave him what James, the first footman, who was waiting in the hall, described to his immediate subordinate as a rare bear-garden jaw.
Mrs Dauntry was his lordship’s second visitor. Like Lady Buxted, she was a widow; and she shared her cousin’s conviction that it was Alverstoke’s bounden duty to provide for her offspring. There the resemblance between them ended. Lady Buxted was frequently designated, by the vulgar, as a hatchet; but no one could have applied such a term to Mrs Dauntry, who presented an appearance of extreme fragility, and bore with noble fortitude all the trials which beset her. As a girl she had been an accredited beauty, but a tendency to succumb to infectious complaints had encouraged her to believe that her constitution was sickly; and it was not long after her marriage that she began (as Lady Jevington and Lady Buxted unkindly phrased it) to quack herself. Her husband’s untimely demise had set the seal on her ill-health: she became the subject of nervous disorders, and embarked on a series of cures and diets, which, since they included such melancholy remedies as goat’s whey (for an imagined consumption), soon reduced her to wraith-like proportions. By the time she was forty she had become so much addicted to invalidism that unless some attractive entertainment was offered her she spent the better part of her days reclining gracefully upon a sofa, with a poor relation in attendance, and a table beside her crowded with bottles and phials which contained Cinnamon Water, Valerian, Asafoetida Drops, Camphorated Spirits of Lavender, and any other paregoric or restorative recommended to her by her friends or by the maker’s advertizement. Unlike Lady Buxted, she was neither ill-tempered nor hardfisted. She had a faint, plaintive voice which, when she was thwarted, merely became fainter and more exhausted; and she was as ready to squander fortunes upon her children as upon herself. Unfortunately, her jointure (described by the Ladies Jevington and Buxted as an easy competence) was not large enough to enable her to live, without management and economy, in the style to which, she said, she was accustomed; and as she was too invalidish to study these arts, she was for ever outrunning the constable. She had been Alverstoke’s pensioner for years; and although heaven knew how much she wished to be independent of his generosity she could not but feel that since her handsome son was his heir it was his duty to provide also for her two daughters.
As the elder of these, Miss Chloë Dauntry, was some weeks short of her seventeenth birthday, her presentation had not exercised Mrs Dauntry’s mind until she learned, from various garbled sources, that Alverstoke was planning to give a magnificent ball in honour of Miss Jane Buxted. A weak female she might be, but in defence of her beloved children, she declared, she could become a lioness. In this guise she descended upon Alverstoke, armed with her most powerful weapon: her vinaigrette.
She made no demands, for that was not her way. When he entered the saloon, she came towards him, trailing shawls and draperies, and holding out her hands, which were exquisitely gloved in lavender kid. “Dear Alverstoke!” she uttered, raising huge, sunken eyes to his face, and bestowing one of her wistful smiles upon him. “My kind benefactor! How can I thank you?”
Wholly ignoring her left hand, he briefly clasped the other, saying: “Thank me for what?”
“So like you!” she murmured. “But although you may forget your generosity, I cannot! Oh, I am quite in disgrace with poor Harriet, and the girls, for venturing out-of-doors in such chilly weather, but I felt it was the least I could do! You are a great deal too good!”
“Well, that’s something new, at all events,” he remarked. “Sit down, Lucretia, and let me have the word with no bark on it! What have I inadvertently done to excite your gratitude?”
Nothing had ever been known to disturb the saintliness of Mrs Dauntry’s voice and demeanour; she replied, as she sank gracefully into a chair: “Dissembler! I know you too well to be taken-in: you don’t like to be thanked — and, indeed, if I were to thank you for all your goodness to me and mine, your never-failing support, your kindness to my loved ones, I fear I should become what you call a dead bore! Chloë, dear child, calls you our fairy godfather!”
“She must be a wet-goose!” he responded.
“Oh, she thinks no one the equal of her magnificent Cousin Alverstoke!” said Mrs Dauntry, gently laughing. “You are quite first-oars with her, I assure you!”
“No need to put yourself in a worry over that,” he said. “She’ll recover!”
“You are too naughty!” Mrs Dauntry said playfully. “You hope to circumvent me, but to no avail, I promise you! Well do you know that I am here to thank you — yes, and to scold you! — for coming — as I, alas, could not! — to Endymion’s assistance. That beautiful horse! Complete to a shade, he tells me! It is a great deal too good of you.”
“So that’s what you came to thank me for, is it?” said his lordship, a sardonic look in his eye. “You shouldn’t have ventured out on such an unnecessary errand: I said, when he joined, that I would keep him decently mounted.”
“So generous!” she sighed. “He is deeply sensible of it! As for me, I wonder sometimes what must have become of me when I was bereft of my beloved husband if I had not been able to depend upon your support through every trial.”
“My faith in you, dear cousin, leads me to believe that you would have lost no time in discovering some other support,” he answered, in a voice as sweet as hers. He smiled slightly, watching her bite her lip, and said, as he opened his snuff-box: “And what is the trial at present besetting you?”
She opened her eyes very wide at this, saying in a bewildered tone: “My dear Alverstoke, what can you mean? Apart from my wretched health — and I never talk of that, you know — none at all! I’ve discharged my errand, and must take my leave of you before my poor Harriet begins to fancy I’ve suffered one of my stupid spasms. She is waiting for me in the carriage, for she wouldn’t hear of my coming alone. Such good care as she takes of me! I am quite spoilt between you all!” She rose, drawing her shawl around her, and putting out her hand. But before he could take it she let it fall, exclaiming: “Oh, that puts me in mind of something I have been wanting to discuss with you! Advise me, Alverstoke! I am quite in a quandary!”