Tom gave it up in despair. He had a very fair notion how matters stood, but there seemed to be nothing he could do to promote a lasting reconciliation. He was pretty sure Sylvester had forgotten Ugolino when he had uttered that unfortunate remark, but it was useless to say that to Phoebe. She was so morbidly sensitive about her wretched romance that even the mention of a book was liable to overset her. And however little Sylvester had remembered The Lost Heir when he spoke of a villain, he was remembering it now.
Phoebe retired immediately she rose from the dinner-table, Sylvester merely bowing when she said that she was tired, and would bid them goodnight. And when he had closed the door on her retreating form, Sylvester turned, and said, smiling: “Well, what is to be, Thomas? Piquet? Or shall we try whether there is a chessboard to be had?”
It was really quite hopeless, thought Tom, deciding in favour of chess.
He ate a hasty breakfast next morning, and went off with Keighley to the coach-office. When he returned, he found Sylvester standing by the window and reading a newspaper, and Phoebe engaged in the homely task of wiping the egg-stains from Edmund’s mouth. He said: “I’ve got all our gear downstairs, Phoebe. Keighley’s waiting to know which of your valises you wish him to take up to your room. And I found this as welclass="underline" here you are!”
She took the letter from him quickly, recognizing Lady Ingham’s writing. “The smaller one, if you please, Tom. Edmund! where are you off to?”
“Must speak to Keighley!” Edmund said importantly, and dashed off in the direction of the stairs.
“Unfortunate Keighley!” remarked Sylvester, not looking up from the newspaper.
Tom departed in Edmund’s wake, and Phoebe, her fingers slightly trembling, broke the wafer that sealed her letter, and spread open the single, crossed sheet. Sylvester lowered the newspaper, and watched her. She did not say anything when she had finished reading the letter, but folded it again, and stood holding it, a blind look in her eyes.
“Well?”
She turned her head towards the window, startled. She had never heard Sylvester speak so roughly, and wondered why he should do so.
“You may as well tell me. Your face has already informed me that it is not a pleasant missive.”
“No,” she said.” She supposed me—when she wrote this—to have persuaded Tom to take me home. I think Muker must have encouraged her to think it, to be rid of me. She is very jealous of me. She may even have believed me to be running away with Tom. That—that was my fault.”
“Unnecessary to tell me that! You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself.”
She looked at him for a moment, hurt and surprise in her eyes, and then turned away, and walked over to the fire. It seemed so needlessly cruel, and so unlike him, to taunt her when he knew her to be distressed that she felt bewildered. It was certainly a taunt, but there had been no mockery in his voice, only anger. Why he should be angry, what she had done to revive his furious resentment, she could not imagine. She found it a little difficult to speak, but managed to say: “I am afraid I have. I seem always to be tumbling into a scrape. Hoydenish, my mother-in-law was used to call me, and did her best to teach me prudence and propriety. I wish she had succeeded.”
“You are not alone in that wish!” he said savagely.
The harsh, angry voice was having its inevitable effect on her: she began to feel sick, inwardly shivering, and was obliged to sit down, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.
“You tumbled into a scrape, as you are pleased to call it, when I first made your acquaintance!” he continued. “It would be more correct to say that you flung yourself into it, just as you flung yourself aboard that ship! If you choose to behave like a hoyden it is your own affair, but that is never enough for you! You don’t scruple to embroil others in your scrapes! Thomas has been a victim, I have been one—my God, have I not!—and now it is your grandmother! Does she cast you off? Do you think yourself hardly used? You have no one but yourself to thank for the ills you’ve brought on your own head!”
She listened to this tirade, rigid with shock, scarcely able to believe that it was Sylvester and not a stranger who hurled these bitter accusations at her. The thought flitted across her brain that he was deliberately feeding his wrath, but it was overborne by her own anger, which leaped from a tiny spark to a blaze.
He said suddenly, before she could speak: “No—no! It’s of no use! Sparrow, Sparrow!”
She hardly heard him. She said in a voice husky with passion: “I have one other person to thank! It is yourself, my lord Duke! It was your arrogance that caused me to make you the model for my villain! But for you I should never have run away from my home! But for you no one need have known I was the author of that book! But for you I should not have flung myself aboard that schooner! You are the cause of every ill that has befallen me! You say I ill-used you: if I did you are wonderfully revenged, for you have ruined me!”
To her astonishment, and, indeed, indignation, he gave the oddest laugh. As she glared at him he said in the strangest voice she had yet heard: “Have I? Well—if that’s so, I will make reparation! Will you do me the honour, Miss Marlow, of accepting my hand in marriage?”
Thus Sylvester, an accomplished flirt, making his first proposal.
It never occurred to Phoebe that he had shaken himself off his balance, and was as self-conscious as a callow youth just out of school. Still less did it occur to her that the laugh and the exaggerated formality of his offer sprang from embarrassment. He was famed for his polished address; she had never, until this day, seen him lose his mastery over himself. She believed him to be mocking her, and started up from her chair, exclaiming: “How dare you?”
Sylvester, burningly aware of his own clumsiness, lost no time in making bad worse. “I beg your pardon! you mistake! I had no intention—Phoebe, it was out before I well knew what I was saying! I never meant to ask you to marry me—I was determined I would not! But—” He broke off, realizing into what quagmires his attempts to explain himself were leading him.
“That I do believe!” she said hotly. “You have been so obliging as to tell me what you think of me, and I believe that too! You came to Austerby to look me over, as though I had been a filly, and decided I was not up to your weight! Didn’t you?”
“What next will you say?” he demanded, an involuntary laugh shaking him.
“Didn’t you?”
“Yes. But have you forgotten how you behaved? How could I know what you were when you tried only to disgust me? It wasn’t until later—”
“To be sure!” she said scathingly. “Later, when I first made you a victim, embroiling you in my improper flight from Austerby, and next wounded your pride as I daresay it was never wounded before, then you began to think I was just the wife that would suit you! The fervent offer which you have been so flattering as to make me springs, naturally, from the folly that led me to thrust myself into your affairs, and so make it necessary for you to undertake a journey under circumstances so much beneath your dignity as to be positively degrading! How green of me not to have known immediately how it would be! You must forgive me! Had I dreamt that my lack of conduct would attach you to me I would have assumed the manners of a pattern of propriety whenever you came within sight of me! You would then have been spared the mortification of having your suit rejected, and I should have been spared an intolerable insult!”