‘Good God!’ he ejaculated. ‘My good child, you are not, I trust, proposing to travel to London in that bonnet?’
‘Yes, I am,’ asserted Miss Massingham. ‘It is the high kick of fashion!’
‘It is quite unsuited to a journey, and still more so to your years,’ said Sir Charles crushingly.
‘Fiddle!’ said Miss Massingham. ‘I am not a schoolgirl now, and if it had not been for Grandpapa’s illness I should have ceased to be one a year ago! I am nineteen, you know, and I have been saving all my money for months to buy just such a hat as this! You could not be so unkind as to forbid me to wear it!’
Sir Charles looked down into the pleading, upturned face; Sir Charles’s groom stared woodenly ahead. ‘What,’ demanded Sir Charles, turning upon the unhappy Mrs Fitton, ‘possessed you to let your mistress buy such a hat?’
‘Oh, don’t scold poor Fitton!’ begged Miss Massingham. ‘Indeed, she implored me not to!’
Sir Charles found himself quite unable to withstand the look of entreaty in those big eyes. A whimper from the creature in Miss Massingham’s arms provided him with a diversion. ‘How did you come by that animal?’ he asked sternly.
‘Is he not the dearest little dog? He came running into the shop, and Madame Lucille told me that her pug has had six puppies just like him! She let me buy this one very cheaply, because she is very desirous of disposing of them all.’
‘I imagine she might be,’ said Sir Charles, viewing the pup with disfavour. ‘However, it is no concern of mine, and we have wasted too much time already. If we are to reach Speenhamland in time for dinner we must make haste.’
‘Oh, yes!’ said Miss Massingham blithely. ‘And may I ride with you in your curricle, Sir Charles?’ She read prohibition in his eye, and added coaxingly: ‘Just for a little way, may I? For your groom, you know, may easily go with Fitton in the chaise.’
Again Sir Charles found it impossible to withstand the entreaty in those eyes. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If you think you won’t be cold, you may jump up beside me.’
3
By the time the curricle had reached Bath Easton, Miss Massingham had begged Sir Charles to call her Nan, because, she said, everyone did so; and Sir Charles had reprimanded her for saying that her friends in Queen’s Square had greatly envied her her good fortune in being escorted to London by one who was well-known to be a buck of the first head.
‘A what?’ said Sir Charles.
‘Well, it is what Priscilla Gretton’s brother said, when she rallied him on the way he tied his neckcloth,’ explained Nan. ‘He said it was just how you tie yours, and that you were a buck of the first head.’
‘I am obliged to Mr Gretton for his approval,’ said Sir Charles, ‘and I dare say that when he has learnt to refrain alike from trying to copy my way with a neckcloth and from teaching cant phrases to schoolgirls he may do tolerably well.’
‘I can see that it is an expression I should not have used,’ said Nan knowledgeably. ‘Must I not call you a Nonpareil either, sir?’
He laughed. ‘If you wish! But why should you talk about me at all? Tell me about yourself!’
She was doubtful whether so limited a subject could interest him, but since she was of a confiding nature it was not long before she was chatting happily to him. When the horses were changed, there was very little about Miss Massingham that he did not know; and since he found her curious mixture of innocence and worldly wisdom something quite out of the common way he was not sorry that she spurned a suggestion that she should continue the journey in the chaise. She was not, she said, at all chilly; she had been wondering, on the contrary, whether she might perhaps be allowed to take the ribbons.
‘Certainly not!’ said Sir Charles.
‘You are such a famous whip yourself, sir, that you could very easily teach me to drive,’ argued Miss Massingham, in persuasive accents.
‘No doubt I could, but I shall not. I dislike being driven.’
‘Oh!’ said Miss Massingham, damped. ‘I don’t mean to tease you, only it would be such a thing to boast of!’
He could not help laughing. ‘Absurd brat! Well—for half an hour, then, but no longer!’
‘Thank you!’ said Miss Massingham, her air of gentle melancholy vanishing.
When she was at last induced to give the reins back to her instructor, the Beckhampton Inn had been passed, and the chaise had long been out of sight. Sir Charles put his pair along at a spanking pace, and would no doubt have overtaken the chaise had his companion not announced suddenly that she was hungry. A glance at his watch showed him that it was past one o’clock. He said ruefully: ‘I should have stopped to give you a luncheon rather than have let you take the ribbons.’
‘We could stop now, could we not, sir?’ said Miss Massingham hopefully.
‘If we do it must only be for a few minutes,’ he warned her.
She agreed readily to this; and as they were approaching Marlborough he drove to the Castle Inn, and commanded the waiter to bring some cold meat and fruit as speedily as possible. Miss Massingham and her puppy, whom she had christened Duke, in doubtful compliment to his Grace of Wellington, both made hearty meals, after which Miss Massingham, while Sir Charles settled the reckoning, took her pet for a run on the end of a blind-cord, which she abstracted from the coffee-room, and for which Sir Charles was called upon to pay. She said that she would walk along the broad village street, and that he might pick her up in the curricle. Ten minutes later he ran her to earth outside a bird-fancier’s shop, the centre of a small crowd of partisans and critics. Upon demand, he learned that Miss Massingham, discovering a number of songbirds cooped inside small wicker-cages, which were piled up outside the shop, had not only released the wretched prisoners, but had hotly harangued the fancier on the cruelty of his trade. It cost Sir Charles a sum grossly in excess of the birds’ worth, and the exercise of his prestige as an obvious member of the Quality, to extricate his charge from this imbroglio, and she was not in the least grateful to him for having done it. She censured his conduct in “having given the man money instead of knocking him down. ‘Which I am persuaded you might have done, because Priscilla’s brother told us that you are a Pink of the Fancy,’ she said severely.
‘I shall be obliged to you,’ said Sir Charles, with asperity, ‘if you will refrain from repeating the extremely improper remarks made to you by Priscilla’s cub of a brother!’
‘Now you are vexed with me!’ said Nan.
‘Yes, for your conduct is disgraceful!’ said Sir Charles sternly.
‘I did not mean to do what you would not like,’ said Miss Massingham, in a small voice.
Sir Charles preserved an unbending silence for several minutes. It was then borne in upon him that Nan, having apparently lost her handkerchief, was wiping away large teardrops with a gloved finger. The result was not happy. Sir Charles, pulling up, produced his own handkerchief, took Nan’s chin in one hand, and with the other removed the disfiguring smudges. ‘There! Don’t cry, my child! Come, smile at me!’
She managed to obey this behest. He knew an impulse to kiss the face he had upturned, but he repressed it, released her chin, and drove on. By the time Froxfield was reached, he had succeeded in diverting her mind, and the rest of the way to Speenhamland might have been accomplished without incident had not Duke, who had been sleeping off his meal, awakened, and signified, in no uncertain manner, his wish to leave the curricle.