She seemed to think this was a great virtue in a husband, but Marianne, following her dutifully downstairs, told herself that she personally preferred Mauleverer’s less elaborate style of dressing. Better a gentleman than a dandy any day.
This once, however, Mauleverer was not awaiting them in the drawing room, and when he did appear, five minutes later, Marianne was amused to notice the signs that he had, for once, taken a good deal of trouble over his appearance. The plain set of studs he had so far worn night after night had been replaced by enameled ones, his cravat was, for him, elaborate, and his dark blue coat, she very much suspected, new for the occasion. It was really rather touching, she thought, to see the efforts he was making to please Lady Heverdon, but the quick, anxious glances she caught him giving her own and his mother’s appearance was something else again. He is afraid we shall disgrace him, she thought. Well...
Conversation limped. Mauleverer’s thoughts were obviously upstairs, while both his mother’s and Marianne’s were in the kitchen with the irate cook. The big grandfather clock in the hall struck half-past six, then quarter to seven ... there was a rustling on the stairs and Mauleverer, hurrying to the door, led in Lady Heverdon, a shimmering vision in cascades of demure lavender-colored ruffles.
“My dear Mrs. Mauleverer, what must you think of me!” She was the well-behaved little girl again. “My idiot of a maid is all thumbs tonight. I thought I should never be ready. And nothing would satisfy her but that I should make a full toilette: she is a sad bully, I am afraid—she was my mother’s before me and thinks me a child still. I told her you would rather have me in my dirt and keep your cook—who is I have no doubt in a perfect tearer in the kitchen—but she would have it that this was an Occasion and I must be properly dressed for it.” A rueful but basically self-satisfied glance swept down from her bare shoulders to the rustling gown which was, indeed, more suited to a London ball than a quiet country dinner.
She had clasped Mrs. Mauleverer’s hands in her own as she spoke, in a pretty, impulsive gesture that Marianne, sardonic in the background, suspected of having been carefully rehearsed. Now she pressed them warmly and let them go. “You will forgive me, will you not?” she asked. “Your son has, I know, but that is nothing; it is you that I care about.” She had contrived, during all this flood of talk, absolutely not to see Marianne, who found herself in the curious position of being not only invisible but, she suspected, inaudible. There was no need, however, for the moment, to put this to the proof, since Mrs. Mauleverer and her son were both busy assuring their guest that she looked ravishing, which was true, and that her lateness had put the household to no inconvenience whatever, which was not.
But now Mauleverer was taking Lady Heverdon’s arm to lead her in to dinner. “Oh, no”—she colored in pretty confusion—“I cannot walk before your Mamma. You promised you would treat me quite like one of the family if I came to you, and is this how you begin?”
“Very well then.” He smiled down at her, obviously much pleased. “An arm of each; thus.”
And Marianne, meekly following, thought how lucky it was that the two ladies were small inside their sweeping skirts of silk and satin, and the doorways wide.
The dinner went off rather better than she had expected. The cook, under her inspiration, had performed perfect prodigies of preservation and adaptation. The capons that should have been fresh roast had been allowed to cool and then served up in a delectable sauce. The leg of lamb, it was true, was dark brown and not so tender as it might have been, but the side dishes made up for any deficiency by their number and variety, while Lady Heverdon praised everything with indiscriminate enthusiasm. The food was delicious; the dining room just exactly the size she best liked; the flower arrangement in the center of the table beyond anything. “And then the flowers in my room! Pansies—so original. I cannot tell you how sick I get of dreary, expensive meaningless hothouse flowers. You are quite an original in your ideas, ma’am, I can see.”
“Oh, no.” Mrs. Mauleverer smilingly disclaimed the suggestion that she might ever do anything so like work as arranging flowers. “It is Miss Lamb that we have to thank for our decorations.”
“Of course: Miss Lamb. I should have known. Then, thank you, Miss Lamb, for my delicious pansies.” She contrived, while addressing Marianne, still not quite to see her, as if she was talking, perhaps, to some inanimate object, and Marianne, in her turn, merely bowed her thanks for the compliment—if such it could be called.
Mauleverer broke an awkward little silence by asking Lady Heverdon how she had enjoyed her visit to the Countess of Lashton.
“Oh, immensely.” The pretty little face lit up with enthusiasm. “I have never been so entertained. Picnics, riding parties, dancing in the evening ... I declare I am quite worn out with it all. But you look grave, Mr. Mauleverer. You are thinking, I know, of the poor little boy, and so do I, every moment of the day, but I put a brave face on it, for my friends’ sake. The Countess read me quite a lecture when I first arrived at her house: ‘If grieving would bring him back,’ she said, ‘or depressing your friends with unrelieved black, I would be the first to urge it, but life must go on, my dear; we owe a duty to others.’ Of course, I took the hint and put my blacks away, though I confess it went hard with me to give them up even for half mourning like this—” A loving hand stroked her lavender-colored ruffles as she turned from Mauleverer to his mother. “I cannot tell you, dear madam, what a relief it is to me to have come here to live quietly like one of your family. I do hope you have arranged no entertainment for me.”
“Indeed I have not,” said Mrs. Mauleverer, “and to tell truth, my dear, I would be hard put to it to do so, so quietly do we live here among our country neighbors.”
“That is excellent,” said Lady Heverdon enthusiastically. “That is just what I shall like. We will read and embroider together, and perhaps visit the deserving poor in your village—or further afield, if it will be of assistance to Mr. Mauleverer in this election he is so concerned over. But I have not asked you yet, Mr. Mauleverer. Pray do tell me how it goes. They were sadly unpolitical at Lashton House and I am completely in the dark as to the news of the day.”
“I am afraid you will waste your philanthropic activities so far as this district is concerned,” said Mauleverer dryly, “for our election in Exton is as good as lost already, but I believe that it is a very different story elsewhere: the Reform party are sweeping the country. It is all the more shameful that we should do so poorly here.”
“But how can you help yourself?” said Lady Heverdon. “The seat is entirely in Lord Exton’s gift, is it not? Surely you have long been resigned to waiting until your Bill is passed before you can go to Parliament as Member for Exton. I only wish you would take what is rightfully yours and go at once to the Lords as Heverdon.”
“I may have no alternative.” Marianne, eagerly listening, told herself that this was a subject that they had discussed many times before. “I have had a most unpromising answer from the College of Arms, and even Lord Grey begins to be urgent that I go to the Lords.” The tone of his voice suggested to Marianne that this, even more than the Exton election, must be the reason for his black mood of the last few days.
“Do not be angry with me”—Lady Heverdon looked up at him with enormous, pleading blue eyes—“if I say how much I wish you would. Surely your Bill needs defending in the Lords too—more so than in the Commons, I am sure you have told me. I know how much you think of being Mauleverer of Maulever Hall—and that you have been here since the Conquest, and all that—but we Heverdons have our distinction too. Let your second son be Mauleverer...” She colored prettily. “And as for me, I cannot tell you how gladly I will put on my dowager’s turban and become Miranda, Lady Heverdon.”
“You a dowager!” It was, Marianne thought, the inevitable response. “I can as readily imagine myself a lord. Though it is true what you say of the battle there; they are the Bill’s inveterate enemies; even the bishops vote against it, and I thi
nk Lord Grey will end by having to make lords enough to carry it, but you know well that my heart is in another place.”
“Your heart”—she made great kittens’ eyes at him—“you know perfectly well you have no such thing, but merely a thinking machine that serves you in its stead.”
“It does not serve me at all.” His emphasis on the word “me” made it a pretty compliment. “What, Mother, are you leaving me so soon? Well, I promise I will not be long behind you.”
“I am sure you will not,” said his mother dryly as she rose to lead the way from the room. She was not used to sitting so long silent at her own table.
Lady Heverdon had noted her tone and, pausing only for one long golden-lashed glance upward at Mauleverer, who was holding the door for them, she hurried to take her hostess’s arm. “My dear madam, I have bored you with my talk of politics—but your son makes them so fascinating.” Her raised voice ensured that he heard her. And then, as he shut the door behind Marianne: “Really, with him for my teacher, I feel that I might even end by understanding the difference between a Whig and a Tory, which, I can tell you, is something I have never been able to fathom yet, though I would not dare say it in any other company but yours, and beg you will be sure to keep my guilty secret. But now we are alone”—and for all the notice she took of Marianne they might well have been—“I will make bold to ask, what I have been dying to do all evening, how, deep in the country as you are, you contrive to keep so devastatingly in the mode. Why, that dress could dine out in St. James’s tomorrow—and as for the arrangement of your hair!—I do beg you will let your maid confide the secret to mine.”
Thus shamelessly flattered, Mrs. Mauleverer relaxed and expanded in talk of leg-of-mutton sleeves, mousseline de soie and her new gospel, La Belle Assemblée. She did not, much to Marianne’s relief, mention her responsibility, both for the magazine and for the hair style. If there was one thing she did not wish to find herself doing, it was acting as coiffeuse to someone for whom she had contrived, in the course of the evening, to develop a hearty and not altogether unreasonable dislike. It was not, she told herself, doing her best, in her corner of the room, to pretend that she was merely a part of the chair she sat on, that Lady Heverdon ignored her in so insulting a manner. She had resigned herself to this in advance. It was the hypocrisy of the creature that she could not bear, and still harder to bear was the sight of Mauleverer so patently its dupe and her slave.
Before Lady Heverdon’s arrival, the initial dislike his brusque manners had aroused in her had given way to a reluctant respect for his intelligence. It galled her to see that keen brain bemused, those sharp eyes blinded by a pretty manner and a battery of languishing glances. Oh yes, the lovely Lady Heverdon had fooled him to the top of his bent. He was her slave, and, from her manner, she intended to have him. They would be engaged, no doubt, before the visit was over. Perhaps, indeed, they were so already, for Lady Heverdon’s mourning, however lightly she might take it, would prohibit any official or public engagement for some time to come. But, watching Mauleverer’s manner as he joined them a few minutes later, Marianne decided that they were not even privately engaged yet. His eager attentions were those of a hopeful, but not of an accepted lover.
The evening seemed interminable. Lady Heverdon sang a succession of Scotch ballads in a pretty, well-trained, thin little voice and contrived to suggest that she was doing Marianne a great honor in allowing her to accompany her. Then, at Mauleverer’s unexpected request. Marianne played for them. “I have heard you many times,” he said, “when you thought no one was listening.”
It was quite true. One of the things she had discovered about herself was that she was never so happy as when seated at the piano sight-reading her way through the sonatas by Haydn and Mozart that she had found in a great, dusty pile in the cupboard behind the piano. She acquiesced now without fuss or protest. After all, she was happier playing to herself than sitting neglected in her corner, and she was comfortably certain that no one was listening. Mrs. Mauleverer was nodding in her chair, while her son was seated close beside Lady Heverdon, talking to her in what was very nearly a whisper. Once, pausing to turn the page, Marianne heard him say, “Miranda ... she who ought to be admired,” and skipped several bars to burst into a violent rondo and drown the rest of it.
Next day was the beginning of the Exton election, and Mauleverer had apologized to his guest in advance for the fact that he must spend the day there. Marianne rather suspected that Lady Heverdon would have liked to be invited to accompany him, but, if so, she was disappointed, for he rode off before anyone but Marianne herself was up. She was superintending the early morning activities in kitchen and dairy when he came in to her, dressed for the road. “Give my apologies to Lady Heverdon,” he said. “And may I count on you, Miss Lamb, to help my mother to entertain her? I am afraid she will find life here somewhat dull after being with the Countess of Lashton.”
How could he be so stupid? Help to entertain Lady Heverdon, when the beauty hardly admitted that she existed? But he was looming impatiently over her, waiting for her answer. “I will do my best,” she said dryly. And then, with relief, “But it is my day to take the Bible class in the village.”
“Invite her to go with you. She has told me”—dark color suddenly flooded his face—“how much she is interested in our village arrangements. She had so little time at Heverdon that she had not properly got into the way of things there...”
“I will certainly ask her to come.” Marianne’s tone suggested, despite herself, that the answer was a foregone conclusion, but if he noticed this, he did not show it.
“Do, Miss Lamb. I knew I could count on you.” And with that he was gone.
Sleeves rolled to the elbow, Marianne had been helping the dairy maid make butter and now the girl recalled her to herself: “Miss Lamb—you will spoil it.”
“And indeed,” she said afterward to her special friend the between maid, “If looks could curdle, we’d not have a drop of fresh cream in the house today. And the butter rancid, too, I should think.”
The cook had planned a demonstration for that morning. It should have been a long and satisfying scene, beginning with her handing in her resignation, and ending, as such scenes always did, in Marianne blandishing and persuading her into staying. But today, nothing went according to plan. Marianne listened, almost, it seemed, absent-mindedly to her recital of grievance, and then, when it wound to its expected climax of notice given, said carelessly: “Oh, very well, if that is the way you feel. You will work your month out, of course.” No persuasion: no blandishment. The poor cook, guns effectively spiked, had to go to work and talk herself out of her predicament—“And she hardly listened to me then either,” she told her friend the butler.
“I don’t expect she did. Mark my words, Mrs. Manning, this Lady Heverdon will have us all at sixes and sevens before we are done with her.”
Marianne had taken her bad temper out into the garden and had contrived to soothe herself by her favorite daily occupation of doing the flowers before Lady Heverdon made her appearance. Like Mrs. Mauleverer, she had had her breakfast in bed and now appeared in the full glory of a daringly fitted plum-colored riding habit. Marianne, entering the little saloon with her arms full of roses, found Mrs. Mauleverer in full tide of apology. Lady Heverdon, it seemed, had been positively ordered by her doctor to ride every day for her health, and she had brought her own saddle horse, but today there was no one to accompany her. “It is too tiresome of dear Mark to be gone out today,” said his mother. “But you must forgive him, Lady Heverdon, for you know, I am sure, how much his politics mean to him.”
“Oh yes, I know well enough,” said the beauty petulantly. And then, with a quick recovery: “But he could scarcely help the election’s being today.” Belatedly, she noticed Marianne. “Good morning, Miss Lamb. You do not ride, I suppose?” It was hardly a question, and Marianne, surprised at being noticed at all, contrived, among her roses, to answer the greeting without the questio
n. She did ride, she was sure of it, but had neither horse nor habit.
“Oh well”—Lady Heverdon shrugged beautifully tailored shoulders—“I shall have to make shift with the groom, I suppose. I will not be gone long, dear ma’am”—she was talking to Mrs. Mauleverer now—“and then I shall be entirely at your disposal for the day.”
Mrs. Mauleverer looked, Marianne thought, a shade frightened at this prospect and, indeed. Lady Heverdon’s tone did suggest that a galaxy of entertainment should naturally be ready for her. The time had come to do Mauleverer’s bidding, however unwillingly.
“Mr. Mauleverer sent you his apologies before he left this morning,” she bolted into it. “And suggested that you might care to accompany me to my Bible class in the village this afternoon.”
“Oh?” Arched eyebrows rose. “A Bible class!” And then, with a sudden and surprising change of tone: “Why, thank you, Miss Lamb, I shall be delighted to accompany you. How thoughtful of Mr. Mauleverer. He knows, you see”—once more, this was for Mrs. Mauleverer—“how ignorant I feel myself in country living, and has promised to set about my education while I am here. So, I will make a beginning today under Miss Lamb’s admirable guidance. Is this a daily duty of yours, Miss Lamb?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Mauleverer, “I could not spare her so often. No, it is only on Wednesday afternoons that she walks over to the village to hear the children their catechisms. And that reminds me, you will scarce wish to walk, Lady Heverdon. I will order the carriage for you.”
But Lady Heverdon insisted that a walk was what she would like above all things. “Though that does put me in mind, dear madam, of a favor I must make bold to ask of you. Could one of your men, perhaps, take a note for me to the dear Countess? I must thank her for all her goodness to me, and then, there is another thing. They talked, when I left, of making a party and riding over here to call on me. Would you be appalled, ma’am, to be the object of such a visitation? There would not, I am sure, be more than six at the most. The Countess and her companion in the carriage, my cousin and the young ladies on horseback.”
Maulever Hall Page 9