False Colours

by Джорджетт Хейер

  Credited by his world with an undying passion for his first love, it had never until this moment occurred to him to question his own heart; and had it been suggested to him that his original infatuation had gently but inevitably declined into fondness he would have been much affronted. But now, staring down into Lady Denville’s beautiful face, an even more beautiful kaleidoscope of his comfortable, untrammelled existence intervened.

  Lady Denville’s soft laughter recalled him from this vision; she said, in a voice of affectionate chiding: “Oh, Bonamy, what a complete hand you are! A Banbury man, no less! You don’t wish to marry me, do you?”

  He pulled himself together, declaring valiantly: “The one wish of my heart!”

  “Well, you didn’t look as if it was! Confess, now! You’ve been shamming it—all these years!”

  He rejected this playful accusation with vehemence. “No, that I haven’t! How can you say such a thing, Amabel? Haven’t I stayed single for your sake?”

  A provocative smile hovered about the corners of her mouth; she seemed to consider him. “That’s what you say,but are you perfectly sure it wasn’t for your own sake, abominable palaverer that you are, my dear?”

  He was so indignant at having a doubt cast on his fidelity that the colour surged up into his face, and he almost glared at her. “No! I mean, yes! I am sure! Upon my word, Amabel—! Have I ever formed an attachment for anyone but yourself? Have I—”

  “Often!” she said cordially. “First, there was that ravishing creature, with black curls and flashing eyes, who was used to drive in the park in a landaulet behind a pair of jet-black horses, perfectly matched, and such beautiful steppers that everyone said they must have cost you a fortune! Then there was that languishing female—the one with the flaxen hair, who was certainly of a consumptive habit! And after her—”

  “Now, that will do!” interposed Sir Bonamy, aghast at these accurate recollections. “Bachelor’s fare! Good God, Amabel, you should know that they don’t mean anything, those little connexions! Why, your own father—Well, well, mum for that!”

  The laughter was quenched in her eyes; she turned her head away, and said in a low voice: “And Denville. Did it mean nothing? It seemed to me to mean so much! What a goose-cap I was!”

  “Amabel!” pronounced Sir Bonamy, controlling himself with a strong effort, “I have never permitted myself to utter a word in dispraise of Denville, and I’ll keep my tongue between my teeth now, but had you married me, the most dazzling bird of Paradise amongst the whole of the muslin company would have thrown out her lures in vain to me!”

  “But it is too late,” she said mournfully. “I’ve worn out your love, my poor Bonamy! I read it in your face, and indeed I cannot wonder at it!”

  “Nothing of the sort!” he replied stoutly. “You misunderstood! I had come to believe that my case was hopeless—can you wonder at it that I was knocked acock? My heart stood still! Was it possible, I asked myself, that its dearest wish might yet be granted? A moment’s rapture, and my spirits were dashed down again, as I realized how absurd it was to think that at my age I could win what was denied me when I was young, and—I fancy—not an ill-looking man!”

  “Very true! Even then you had a decided air of fashion—though it wasn’t until much later that you became of the first stare!”

  “Well, well!” he said, visibly gratified, “I was always one who liked to have everything prime about me, but propriety of taste, you know, comes to one in later years! But I am growing old, my pretty—too old for you, I fear! Alas that it should be so!”

  “Fudge!” said her ladyship briskly. “You are three-and-fifty, just ten years older than I am! A very comfortable age!”

  “But of late years I have grown to be a trifle portly! I don’t ride any more, you know, and I get fagged easily nowadays. Ticklish in the wind, too—I might pop off the hooks at any moment, for I have palpitations!”

  “Yes, you eat too much,” she nodded. “My poor dear Bonamy, it is high time you had me to take care of you! I have thought for years that your constitution must be of iron to have withstood your excesses, and so it is, for you don’t even suffer from the gout, which Denville did, although for every bottle he drank you drank two, if not three!”

  “No, no!” protested Sir Bonamy feebly. “Not three, Amabel! I own I eat more than he did, but recollect that he was of a spare habit! Now, I have a large frame, and I must eat to keep up my strength!”

  “So you shall!” said her ladyship, smiling seraphically upon him. “But not to send yourself off in an apoplexy!”

  Regarding her with eyes of fascinated horror, he played his last ace. “Evelyn!” he uttered. “You are forgetting Evelyn, my pretty! Ay, and Kit too, I dare say, though he don’t seem to hold me in such aversion as Evelyn does! But you must know Evelyn wouldn’t stomach it! Why, he never sees me but he looks yellow! Well do I know there ain’t a soul you dote on more, and never would I cause a rift between you!”

  Wholly unimpressed by this noble self-abnegation, she replied: “You couldn’t! Besides, he is going to be married!”

  “What?” he ejaculated, momentarily diverted. “But it’s as plain as a pack-saddle the gal’s head over ears in love with Kit!”

  “Yes, and was there ever anything so delightful? Dear Cressy! she might have been made for Kit! Evelyn has formed what he declares to be a lasting passion for quite another sort of girl. Kit believes it may well be so, but she sounds to me to be positively Quakerish! The daughter of a mere country gentleman—perfectly genteel, but only picture to yourself how ineligible Brumby will think her!—and one of those pale, saintly females, reared in the strictest respectability!”

  “You don’t mean it!” gasped Sir Bonamy, staggered by this disclosure.

  “I do mean it!” she asserted, tears sparkling on her curling eyelashes. She brushed them hurriedly away. “Evelyn thinks I shall love her, but I have the most melancholy conviction that I shan’t, Bonamy! And, what is more, I don’t think she will love me, do you?”

  “No,” he replied candidly. “Not if she’s Quakerish! You wouldn’t deal well at all!”

  “Exactly so! I knew you would understand! Evelyn declares I must continue to live in Hill Street, but that I was determined not to do, even if he had married Cressy! I had quite made up my mind to it that I must retire to an establishment of my own, and dwindle into a mere widow, until you came here, my dear friend, only because I begged you to, and not wanting to leave Brighton in the least, which I know very well you didn’t, and it struck me, like a flash of lightning, that never had you wavered in your attachment to me, and never had you received the smallest reward, or even looked for one, for all your goodness to me, and your exceeding generosity!”

  “I see what it is!” he exclaimed. “Kit blabbed to you that I didn’t have that brooch of yours copied, silly chub that he is! Now, put it out of your mind, my pretty! Yes, yes, you think you must make a sacrifice of yourself, but I won’t permit you to do so!”

  She interrupted him, staring at him with widened eyes. “You didn’t—Do you mean to tell me that I lost the real brooch to Silverdale? And you gave me £500 for it, saying that—Bonamy, did you sell any of my jewellery? Kit has never breathed a word of this! Bonamy—did you?”

  “No, no, of course I didn’t!” he answered, much discomposed. “Now, is it likely I’d let you sell your jewels, and replace ’em with paste and pinchbeck? It was nothing to me, Amabel, so, if Kit didn’t tell you, you may forget it, and oblige me very much!”

  “Oh, Bonamy!” she cried, impulsively stretching out her hands to him, “how good you are! How much, much too good!”

  He responded instinctively, and, the next instant, found himself clasping a fragrant armful to his massive bosom. Lady Denville, adapting her slim form, not without difficulty, to his formidable contour, lifted her face invitingly. His senses swimming, Sir Bonamy tightened his hold about her, and fastened his lips to hers. At the back of his mind lurked the conviction that he wou
ld regret this yielding to temptation, and the premonition that the sybaritic pleasures of his life stood in jeopardy; but never before had he been encouraged to venture more than a chaste salute upon her ladyship’s hand, or, upon rare occasions, her cheek, and he surrendered to intoxication.

  He came to earth again when she gently disengaged herself, saying: “How comfortable it is to reflect that we need neither of us look forward to a lonely old age, which I have always thought the most lowering prospect!”

  His countenance would not have led anyone to suppose that he was deriving much comfort from this reflection, but he replied heroically: “You have made me the happiest man on earth, my beautiful!”

  The irrepressible laughter, inherited from her by her sons, bubbled up. “No, I haven’t: I’ve thrown you into gloom! But I shall make you happy. Only consider how alike are our tastes, and how very well we are acquainted! Naturally it will seem strange at first, because you are so much accustomed to being a bachelor. To own the truth, I didn’t think I should ever marry again, for I have enjoyed being a widow amazingly! But I am persuaded it will be the best thing for everyone! Particularly for Evelyn!”

  “I hope he may think so!” Sir Bonamy said gloomily.

  “It isn’t of the least consequence if he doesn’t, because it will be. I dare say he won’t care nearly as much now that his mind is full of his angelic Patience. In any event, he’s at the end of his rope, poor love, on account of my wretched debts, which he is determined to discharge, and which he would never be able to do until he is thirty, if he marries Patience, because you may depend upon it Brumby will utterly disapprove of the match! But if he were not obliged to pay my debts that wouldn’t signify in the least, and although he made me promise I would never again borrow money from you, he couldn’t refuse to let you pay the debts if I were your wife, could he?”

  “Well, it won’t make a ha’porth of odds if he does!” said Sir Bonamy, accepting without resentment this unflattering reason for the marriage proposed to him, but regarding his prospective bride with tolerant cynicism. “I might have known that resty young bellows-blower of yours was behind this!”

  “Yes, but how fortunate, Bonamy, that my affairs had come to such a pass that I was obliged to consider the advantages of marrying you! But for that I might never have thought of it!” she said. “Or have perceived how much more comfortable I should be if I did marry you! It is all very well now to be a widow, but only think how dismal when I begin to grow hagged, and have to cover up my throat, because it looks exactly like the neck of a plucked hen, and I’ve no flirts left to me! And then, of course, I thought of you, my poor Bonamy, and my heart was wrung! I, at least, have my beloved sons, and I might become wrapped up in my grandchildren—though it seems most unlikely, and quite sinks my spirits—but what, my dear, will be left to you, when your friends drop off—”

  “Eh?” exclaimed Sir Bonamy, startled.

  “Or die!” continued her ladyship inexorably. “And you find yourself alone, with no one to care a straw what becomes of you—except that odious cousin of yours, who will very likely push you into your grave!—and your whole life wasted? Dear Bonamy I cannot endure the thought of it!”

  “No!” he said fervently. “No, indeed!”

  She smiled brilliantly upon him. “So you see that it will be much better for you too!”

  “Yes,” he agreed, horrified by the picture she had delineated. “Good God, yes!”

  20

  It was not many minutes before Cressy, dutifully accompanying the Dowager on a sedate drive, realized that an open carriage was hardly the place for an exchange of confidences. The Dowager, with a magnificent disregard for the coachman and the footman, perched on the box-seat in front of her, knew no such reticence, and discoursed with great freedom on the birth of an heir to the barony, animadverting with embarrassing candour, and all the contempt of a matriarch who had brought half-a-dozen children into the world without fuss or complications, on sickly young women who fancied themselves to be ill days before their time, and ended by suffering cross births and hard labours. For herself, she had no patience with such nonsense.

  But although she expressed the fervent hope that the heir would not grow up to resemble his mama, it was evident that Albinia (in spite of her hard labour) had grown considerably in her esteem. Lord Stavely’s first wife had been of the Dowager’s choosing, but although she had, naturally, held her up as a pattern of virtue and amiability, she had never been able, in her secret heart, to forgive her for having failed to present her lord with an heir. But Albinia, whom Lord Stavely had married without so much as a by-your-leave, had produced (if his lordship’s ecstatically scribbled letter were to be believed), a bouncing boy, sound in wind and limb, and weighing almost nine pounds; and this feat, notwithstanding her own subsequent exhaustion, raised her pretty high in the Dowager’s esteem. But not so high as to exempt her from censure for her alleged inability to nurse her child. The inescapable duty of a mother to suckle her offspring was one of the Dowager’s hobby-horses; and originated from the shocking discovery that the wet-nurse engaged to supply the wants of her second son (unhappily deceased), had been strongly addicted to spirituous liquors. The Dowager informed her granddaughter, in a very robust way, that she had already written to recommend hot ale and ginger to Albinia.

  Cressy bore this with tolerable equanimity, but when the Dowager abruptly deserted the subject of the proper sustenance of the Honourable Edward John Francis Stavely, to warn her that the appearance of this young gentleman on the scene made it imperative for her to withdraw from Mount Street to an establishment of her own, she laid a hand on her outspoken grandmother’s knee, and warningly directed her attention to the stolid, liveried backs on the box of the landaulet.

  The Dowager appeared to appreciate the propriety of this reminder. She said: “Drat these open carriages! I never could abide ’em! Coachman! Drive back to Ravenhurst!”

  She reinforced this command by digging him in the back with her cane, an indignity which he suffered with perfect good humour, having decided, days previously, that she was a rare old griffin, full of pluck, and game to the scratch.

  “I want to talk to you, Cressy,” she said grimly. “It’s high time you emptied the bag! So we’ll go back, and you’ll come with me to my room, and give me a round tale before I take my nap!”

  “Yes, ma’am: certainly!” responded Cressy, with smiling composure.

  The Dowager favoured her with a searching glance, but refrained from comment. She beguiled the rest of the drive with roseate plans for the future Lord Stavely’s career, in which agreeable occupation she was much encouraged by Cressy; but although this put her into great good humour, it was with marked asperity that she commanded Cressy, as soon as she had removed her sable-plumed bonnet, and sunk into the winged chair, thoughtfully placed in her bedroom by her hostess, to declare herself, and without any roundaboutation.

  “And don’t put on any simpering, missish airs, girl, for I abominate ’em!” she added sharply.

  “Now, that, Grandmama, is most unjust!” said Cressy, in deeply injured accents. “I have a great many faults, but I am not a simpering miss!”

  “No,” acknowledged the Dowager, always mollified by a fearless retort, “you’re not! Come here, child!”

  Cressy obeyed her, sinking down at her feet, and folding her hands with a meekness belied by the twinkling look she cast up at her formidable grandparent. “Yes, ma’am?” she said innocently.

  “Baggage!” said the Dowager, in no way deceived, but palliating the severity of this remark by pinching Cressy’s cheek. “Now, you listen to me, girl! You’ll find that this brat of Albinia’s has put your nose out of joint, so, if you take my advice, you’ll bring all this paltering of yours to an end, and accept Denville’s offer. I said I wouldn’t press you, and I stand by my word; but I know Albinia, and I tell you to your head that if you found her hard to deal with before she gave birth to a son you’ll find her insupportable now that
she’s puffed up in her own conceit! What’s more, she won’t rest until she’s rid of you: make up your mind to that! As for your father, he’s fond of you, but he won’t take your part: he’s a weak man—none of my sons ever had an ounce of spunk between them! Took after their father, more’s the pity! Bag and baggage policy was all you could look for in any of ’em.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t wish Papa to take my part, ma’am—or, rather, I know that it would be very improper to encourage him to do so!”

  “It wouldn’t fadge if you did. If Albinia ain’t a shrew I’m much mistaken!”

  “Impossible!” Cressy said, laughing at her.

  The dowager’s fierce eyes gleamed, but she said: “None of your impudence, miss! Not that I’m often mistaken, for I haven’t lived to be an old woman without learning to know one point more than the devil, as they say.” Her eyes softened, as she looked down into Cressy’s face. “Never mind that! I’ve more fondness for you than for anyone, child, and I want to see you established, and happy. I told you at the outset I set no store by Denville’s rank or fortune, and no more I would have, if I’d discovered him to be the frippery young care-for-nobody Brumby thinks him. Not but what he’s a prize catch, and has had ’em all on the scramble for him ever since his come-out! However, I’ve lived long enough to know that it ain’t by any means everything to land a big fish, and not a word of censure would you have heard from me, Cressy, if you’d had a preference for some lesser gentleman—provided, of course, that his birth matched your own, and he was up to the rig!”