‘Magnanimous indeed! Thank you!’
The steps were let up; Alice’s voice was the last to be heard before the door was shut. ‘Hot bricks, and a fur rug, miss!’ disclosed Alice. ‘Spanking, I call it!’
Phoebe leaned forward to wave farewell, the ostlers let go the wheelers’ heads, and the chaise started to move, swaying on its excellent springs. Sylvester stood watching it until it disappeared round a bend in the road, and then turned to Keighley, waiting beside him, the bridle of a hired riding-hack in his hand. ‘Get them to London tonight if you can, John, but run no risks,’ he said. ‘Money, pistols-I think you have everything.’
‘Yes, your grace, but I wish you’d let me come back!’
‘No, wait for me at Salford House. I can’t take both you and Swale. Or, at any rate, I won’t! Curricles were never meant to carry three persons.’
Keighley smiled grimly, as he hoisted himself into the saddle. ‘I thought your grace was being a trifle crowded,’ he remarked, with a certain amount of satisfaction.
‘And hope it may be a lesson to me! Be-damned to you!’ retorted Sylvester.
He accomplished the short journey back to the Blue Boar at a leisurely trot, his mind occupied, not altogether pleasurably, with the events of the past week. He ought never to have stopped at the Blue Boar. He wondered what could have possessed him, and was much inclined to think it had been perversity: John had tried to dissuade him-damn John for being in the right of it, as usual!-and he had done it as much to tease him as for any other reason. Well, he had been well served for that piece of mischief! Once he had found young Orde in such a fix he had been fairly caught: only a monster could have abandoned the boy to his fate. Besides, he liked Thomas, and had not foreseen that his act of charity would precipitate him into the sort of imbroglio he particularly disliked. He could only be thankful that he was not a frequent traveller on the Bath Road: he had given them plenty to talk about at the Halfway House, and to afford the vulgar food for gossip was no part of his ambition. That hurly-burly girl! She wanted both manners and conduct; she was disagreeably pert, and had no beauty: he cordially disliked her. What the devil had made him come to her rescue, when all his saner self desired was to see her thoroughly set-down? There had not been the least necessity-except that he had pledged his word. But when he had seen her on the stairs, so absurdly woebegone but trying rather pathetically to smile, he hadn’t recollected that foolish promise: he had acted on impulse, and had only himself to thank for the outcome. Here he was, tied still to a primitive inn, and a young man whose welfare was no concern of his; deprived of his groom; open to the justifiable censure of some unknown country squire-the sort of worthy person, in all probability, whom he entertained at Chance on Public Days; and the subject (if he knew his world) of scandalous conjecture. In some form or another the story would be bound to leak out. The best he could hope for was to be thought to have taken leave of his senses; the worst, that for all his famed fastidiousness he had fallen laughably in love with a dab of a female without style or countenance, who scorned his supposed advances.
No, decided Sylvester, turning neatly into the yard of the Blue Boar: that was rather too much to expect him to bear! Miss Marlow should not exhibit her poor opinion of him to the interested ton. Miss Marlow, in fact, should exhibit something very different from contempt: he was damned if he was going to be the only one to learn a salutary lesson!
His expression, when he alighted from the curricle, and stood watching, with a merciless eye, the exact carrying out of his curt orders, was unamiable enough to make the ostler break into a sweat of anxiety; but when he presently strolled into Tom’s room all traces of ill-humour had vanished from his countenance.
He entered upon a scene of constraint. The Squire, peckish after his ride, had just disposed of a substantial nuncheon, and Tom, having talked himself out of arguments, had been preserving for the past ten minutes a silence pregnant with resentment. He looked round at the opening of the door, his eyes still smouldering, and as soon as he saw that it was Sylvester who had come in, burst out: ‘Salford! The-the most damnable thing! Perhaps you can prevail upon my father to listen to reason! I never would have believed it possible he could-oh, this is my father!’
‘I don’t know what you would never have believed possible,’ said the Squire, getting up from his chair, and bowing to Sylvester, ‘but let me tell you, my boy, I wouldn’t have believed you had only to be away from home for a week to lose your manners! I should think your grace must be wondering if he was reared in a cow-byre, and I’m sure I don’t blame you. He wasn’t, however-and a thundering scold he’d get from his mother if she were here!’ He saw that Sylvester, advancing into the room, was holding out his hand, and shook it warmly. ‘I’m honoured to make your grace’s acquaintance-and feel myself to be devilish obliged to you, as you may guess! You’ve been a great deal too kind to Tom, and how to thank you I don’t know!’
‘But there’s no need to thank me at all, I assure you, sir,’ Sylvester said, at his most charming. ‘I’ve spent a most entertaining week-and made a new friend, whom I can’t allow you to scold! It would be most unjust, you know, for he abandoned his really oppressive civility only at my request. Besides, he has endured six days of boredom without a murmur of complaint!’
‘Ay, and serve him right!’ said the Squire. ‘A bad business this, my lord Duke! I left Marlow in a rare taking, I can tell you. Well, well! he’s the best man to hounds I ever saw, but I never thought his understanding more than moderate. Gretna Green, indeed! Of all the harebrained notions to have taken into his head!’
‘I wish to God I had taken her to Gretna Green!’ said Tom savagely. ‘Salford, my father is determined to carry her back to Austerby! I can’t make him understand that only a regular brute would do so, after such an escapade as this!’
‘Now, now!’ said the Squire. ‘There’s been no harm done, and no one but ourselves any the wiser-thanks to his grace!-and so I shall tell her ladyship.’
‘As though she would pay the least heed! And what a figure I must cut! I wouldn’t let her go on the stage, and if I had she would have been with Lady Ingham days ago! I promised to take her there myself, and all I’ve done is to land her in a worse case than ever! Father-’
‘Calm yourself, Galahad!’ interposed Sylvester. ‘There is really no occasion to be cast into despair. Miss Marlow left for London an hour ago.’
An astonished silence succeeded these words. Tom broke it with a shout of triumph. ‘Oh, you Trojan, Salford!’
This made Sylvester laugh; but an instant later he was putting up his brows, for the Squire, after staring at him fixedly, said bluntly: ‘If that was your grace’s doing, as I collect it must have been, I shall take leave to tell you it was wrong of you, my lord Duke-very wrong!’
Tom, recognizing that look of withdrawal, intervened quickly. ‘You mustn’t say that, Father-indeed you must not! Pray-!’
‘I shall say just what I think, Tom,’ said the Squire, still looking at Sylvester from under his brows. ‘If his grace don’t like it, why, I’m sorry for it, but I’ve said it, and I stand by it!’
Tom glanced apprehensively at Sylvester, but his intervention had been more successful than he knew. Meeting his eyes Sylvester realized, with a slight shock, that he was trying to prevent the Squire’s being wounded by a snub. He had been unaware of his own stiffening; for an instant he remembered Phoebe’s words. He had dismissed them as an impertinent attempt to vex him; he wondered now if it could be true that he, who prided himself on his good manners, appeared to others to be insufferably high in the instep. He said, smiling: ‘Well, I don’t like it, for you are doing me an injustice, sir! You may have pledged your word to Marlow, but I pledged mine to his daughter!’