‘Oh, good God, Almeria!’ he said impatiently. ‘There is no occasion for you to assume the air of a Siddons! It’s only a child!’
‘A new come-out for you, Charles, to be taking care of children! May I know why a bolster is necessary to her comfort? An infant in arms, I collect?’
‘Nothing but a romp of a schoolgirl, who had the misfortune to sprain her ankle yesterday!’
It was at this inopportune moment that Nan, dressed for the road, hopped out of the parlour. Duke frisking beside her, and announced brightly that she was ready to set forward on the journey. Duke, perceiving that the door to a larger freedom stood open, made a dash for it.
‘Charles! Stop him!’ shrieked Nan.
The voice in which Sir Charles commanded Duke to come to heel startled that animal into cowering instinctively. Before he could recover his assurance, he had been picked up, and tucked under Sir Charles’s arm.
‘You frightened him!’ said Nan reproachfully. She found that she was being surveyed from head to foot by a lady with an arctic eye and contemptuously smiling lips, and glanced enquiringly at Sir Charles.
‘So this,’ said Lady Almeria, ‘is your schoolgirl!’
Sir Charles, only too well aware of the impression likely to be created by Miss Massingham’s hat, sighed, and prepared to embark on what was (as he ruefully admitted to himself) an improbable explanation of his circumstances.
‘Sir Charles is my brother, ma’am!’ said Miss Massing-ham, coming hopefully to the rescue.
Lady Almeria’s lip curled. ‘My good girl, I am well acquainted with Sir Charles’s sister, and I imagine I need be in no doubt of the relationship which exists between you and him!’
‘Be silent!’ Sir Charles snapped. He put Duke into Nan’s free arm. ‘Go back into the parlour, Nan! I will be with you directly,’ he said, smiling reassuringly down at her.
He closed the parlour door upon her, and turned to confront his betrothed. That he was very angry could be seen by the glint in his eyes. But he spoke with studied amiability ‘Do you know, Almeria, I never knew until today how very vulgar you can be?’ he said.
The Lady Almeria then lost her temper. In the middle of the scene which followed, her brother walked into the inn and stood goggling. His intellect was not quick, and it was several minutes before he could understand anything beyond the appalling fact that his sister, whose uncertain temper had chased away many a promising suitor, was engaged in whistling down the wind a bridegroom rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He looked utterly aghast, and seemed not to know what to say. Sir Charles, who had been refreshing himself with a pinch of snuff, shut his box, and said: ‘The lady in question, Stourbridge, as I have already informed Almeria, is a schoolgirl, whom I am escorting to London.’
‘Well, then, Almeria—!’ said his lordship, relieved.
‘Don’t be a fool!’ said Almeria. ‘I have seen the creature!’
‘I should be loth to offer you violence, Almeria,’ said Sir Charles, ‘but if you again refer to that child in such terms I shall soundly box your ears!’
‘You forget, I think, that I am not unprotected!’
‘Stourbridge?’ said Sir Charles. ‘Oh, no, I don’t forget him! If he cares to call me to book I shall be happy to answer him!’
At this point, Lord Stourbridge, who wished to come to fisticuffs with Sir Charles as little as he wished to expose his portly person to that gentleman’s deadly accuracy with a pistol, attempted to remonstrate with his sister. A glance silenced him; she said furiously: ‘Understand, Sir Charles, that our engagement is at an end! I shall be obliged to you if you will send the necessary notice to the Gazette!’
He bowed. ‘It is always a happiness to me to obey you, Almeria!’ he said outrageously.
6
Rejoining Miss Massingham in the parlour, he found her conscience-stricken. ‘Who was that lady, sir?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Why was she so very angry?’
‘That, my child, was the Lady Almeria Spalding. If you are ready to go—’
‘Lady Almeria! Are—are you not engaged to her?’
‘I was engaged to her!’
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘What have I done? Did she cry off because of me?’
‘She did, but as we are not at all suited to one another I shall not reproach you for that. Foisting a repellant mongrel on me, however, which whined the better part of the night, is another matter; while as for your conduct in Marlborough—’
‘But—but don’t you care that your engagement is broken?’ she interrupted.
‘Not a bit!’
‘Perhaps she will think better of it, and forgive you,’ suggested Nan, in a somewhat wistful tone.
‘I am obliged to you for the warning, and shall insert into the Gazette the notice that my marriage will not take place the instant I reach London,’ he said cheerfully.
‘It is very dreadful, but, do you know, sir, I find I cannot be sorry for it!’
‘I am glad of that,’ he said, smiling.
‘She did not seem to me the kind of female you would like to be married to.’
‘I can imagine none more unlike that female!’
She looked enquiringly up at him, but he only laughed, and said: ‘Come, we must finish this journey of yours, if your grandfather is not to think that we have perished by the wayside!’
‘Do you think he will be angry when he hears all that has happened?’ she asked uneasily.
‘I fear that his anger will fall upon my head. He will say—and with truth!—that I have made a poor hand at looking after you. However, I trust that when he has heard the full tale of your atrocious conduct he will realize that it was experience, and not goodwill, that was lacking in me, and give me leave to study how to do better in future.’
‘I know you are quizzing me,’ said Nan, ‘but I don’t precisely understand what you mean, sir!’
‘I will tell you one day,’ promised Sir Charles. ‘But now we are going to drive to London! Come along!’
She went obediently with him to where the curricle waited, but when he lifted her into it, and disposed her injured foot upon the folded bolster, she sighed, and said shyly: ‘Shall I ever see you again, once I am fixed in Brook Street?’
‘Frequently!’ said Sir Charles, mounting into the curricle, and feeling his horses’ mouths.
Miss Massingham heaved a relieved sigh. ‘I am so glad!’ she said simply. ‘For I don’t feel that I could ever like anyone half as well!’
‘That,’ said Sir Charles, flicking a coin to the expectant ostler, ‘is what I mean to make very sure of, my dear and abominable brat!’
Pink Domino
1
It was a silken domino, of a shade of rose-pink admirably becoming to a brunette. One of the footmen had carried up the bandbox to the Blue Saloon in the great house in Grosvenor Square, where Miss Wrexham was engaged in solving a complimentary charade, sent to her by one of her admirers. This was abandoned; Miss Wrexham pounced on the bandbox, and lifted the lid. The domino was packed in sheet upon sheet of tissue-paper, and as Miss Wrexham lifted it from the box these fluttered to the ground and lay there in drifts. Miss Wrexham gave a coo of delight, and held the cloak up against herself, looking in one of the long mirrors to see how it became her. It became her very well indeed: trust the most expensive modiste in London for that! Somewhere, on the floor, there was a rather staggering bill, but Miss Wrexham cared nothing for that. Bills were of no consequence to a Wrexham of Lyonshall. Being under age, one existed upon an allowance, and frequently outran the constable. But that was of no consequence either, since there was always Mama to come to one’s rescue, or even, at a pinch, Giles. But only at a pinch. A brother who was eight years one’s senior, and one’s legal guardian into the bargain, could not be thought an ideal banker. He had never yet refused to pay one’s debts, but there had been several distressing scenes, and one in particular, when she had lost a considerable sum of money playing loo for high stakes, which she preferred not to remember. For several quaking hours she had expected to be banished to Lyonshall, in charge of her old governess; and Mama, who seemed to have incurred more blame even than herself, had had one of her worst spasms. She had been forgiven, but she still thought it astonishingly mean of Giles to grudge her a few paltry hundreds out of his thirty thousand pounds a year.