by Clare Darcy
She led the way to a small gilt sofa set along the wall, out of the way of the dancers, and Captain Harries followed her obediently, but with the look upon his face of a young subaltern going into action for the first time and terrified, not of the danger, but of the possibility of doing something to disgrace his uniform.
“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?” Cressida asked, as he sat down beside her on the edge of the sofa. “I know I must have given you a very poor opinion of me that morning in Octavius Mayr’s office, but I do assure you I am not always so shockingly rag-mannered. That was only because of Dev. I expect you are a great friend of his and never quarrel with him, but we began our acquaintance by coming to cuffs and I am afraid we always will.”
She was then vexed with herself for bringing Rossiter’s name into the conversation, convinced herself that Captain Harries would certainly believe she had desired this tete-a-tete only for the purpose of talking of him, and assumed an air of such coolness that her companion had only the courage to say in a rather abashed way that he and Dev had not quarrelled more than once that he could remember, and that, perhaps, didn’t really signify, because it had only been over a bottle of very poor red wine.
“A bottle of wine?” said Cressida, looking interested and forgetting her vexation.
“Yes, explained the Captain seriously. “You see, there wasn’t any more to be had and I dropped it, but I shouldn’t have done if he hadn’t jogged my elbow. It was in Portugal, and a very thirsty day,” he added, as if that must make everything perfectly clear.
The picture his words conjured up of the dashing current hero of the London ton and the fair young giant beside her squabbling like a pair of schoolboys over a broken bottle of cheap red wine was too much for Cressida; she burst out laughing and Captain Harries, looking surprised but a good deal relieved, gave her a rather sheepish grin.
“You must come to Mount Street very soon—perhaps tomorrow?” Cressida said, “and tell me all about your adventures. One can’t talk properly at a ball. Were you at Waterloo? Or had you sold out before that?”
“Yes; Dev and I both sold out in 14, after Boney had been romped and sent to Elba,” said Captain Harries. “You see, Dev had been in India and he wanted to go back—”
“For those fabulous rubies—of course!” Cressida said. “I wish you will tell me all about them tomorrow. I shall be the envy of all my friends if I am the only one of them to know the whole story—unless, of course, Dev decides to spread the tale himself this evening. I understand he is to put in an appearance here?”
“Yes—or I shouldn’t be here myself!” the Captain said with a rueful grin. “Nor even have been invited! I’ve told him, there’s no need for him to drag me into it when he is going into Society, for I’m like a cat on a hot bakestone in a place like this—”
“Nonsense!” said Cressida roundly. “You may enjoy yourself here as well as anywhere else in London. I daresay there is not a man here who is not envying you your adventures, to say nothing of those very broad shoulders that cast their own pitiful padded ones quite in the shade! And as for the young ladies—do you care for dancing? I am sure I can introduce you to any number of pretty girls who will be happy to stand up with you.”
A slight flush crept unexpectedly into the Captain’s face, and his blue eyes went to the ballroom floor, lingering there, it seemed, upon one particular dancer.
“Yes, there is—that is, I should like you to introduce me to—to one young lady,” he stammered, with an air of some self-consciousness. “The—the young lady who came with you this evening—”
“Miss Chenevix? But of course!” said Cressida cordially. “She will be delighted! She is only just arrived in London, you see, and is as little acquainted here as yourself, for she has lived almost all her life in Devonshire.” Captain Harries, almost interrupting her in his pleasure at the coincidence, said he came from Devonshire himself, and, apparently deciding at about this moment that Cressida was to be considered as friend and not enemy, relaxed sufficiently to talk to her in a quite easy way about his home near Plymouth, and how he hoped in time to become well enough off, owing to his association with Rossiter, to buy a respectable property in that neighbourhood and settle down to a country life.
“I’m not in the least like Dev, you know,” he confided to her. “In fact, I can’t for the life of me see why he chooses to put up with me, except that we’ve been in a fair number of tight places together and—well, we’ve always stood by each other. But he is at home to a peg anywhere he goes, whether it’s Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro or London, and there’s no saying, you know, how high he may go if he likes. Why, he might marry the daughter of a duke!”
Cressida, with a quite inexplicably disagreeable feeling somewhere inside her, was about to enquire if Rossiter had any particular duke’s daughter in mind when Captain Harries, his face suddenly brightening, exclaimed, “But here he is now!” and Cressida, following his gaze, saw Rossiter himself, his tall figure showing to excellent advantage in evening-dress which, though entirely fashionable, displayed no affectations of dandyism, standing in the doorway, surveying the brilliant scene before him with something of the cool detachment of a hawk looking over an assemblage of fowls.
CHAPTER 5
It was not to be expected that the lion of the evening would be allowed to progress farther than the doorway of the ballroom before becoming a centre of attention, and Cressida anticipated that her own meeting with him would be long postponed, or—if fortune were with her—not take place at all in the crush of guests crowding the rooms of Dalingridge House.
But she had reckoned without the lion himself—or, it might be more accurate to say, without the hawk, to use the simile that had occurred to her as she had seen him standing in the doorway. For as that keen-eyed predator leisurely selects its victim from its airy circling flight, so Rossiter, from his superior height, gazed around over the lesser heads of the persons clustered about him until, espying his victim across the room, he clove a ruthless way through them, with scarcely an apology, towards his object.
As for Cressida, it was not until he was almost upon her that she realised she was that object.
“Hallo, Miles!” he greeted Captain Harries. “I see you’ve found your feet: didn’t I tell you you would? Miss Calverton”—he bowed slightly, giving her his wry, sardonic smile— I hope I see you in better temper this evening than on the occasion of our last meeting. And now may I request the honour of standing up with you for the next dance?”
Cressida frankly stared at him. “I don’t see why you should care to, after that last meeting!” she said. “But if you are really serious—and I am strongly inclined to doubt that you are!—I may thankfully inform you that I am already engaged. ”
“You are always engaged, it appears!” said Rossiter, regarding her provocatively. “To Lord Langmere this time?”
“Yes, to Lord Langmere—but not in the way you are hinting! said Cressida, wondering why it was that Rossiter could always manage to set her hackles up to the extent that she quite forgot her manners. “Only for the next dance.
“A pity! I had expected you would have made quicker work of him. Very well, then. The dance after that.”
“I am very much afraid,” said Cressida sweetly, but with dangerously glinting eyes, “that I am engaged for that as well. ”
“And for the next, and the next, and the next, I daresay,” said Rossiter affably. “Not being dull of understanding, Miss Calverton, I take your meaning. To put it in the plainest possible terms, you do not care to dance with me.”
“To put it in the plainest possible terms, Captain Rossiter, you are quite correct!”
By this time the set had ended and, Lady Constance being still in the card-room, Addison brought Kitty across the floor to Cressida, at the same moment that Lord Langmere appeared to claim his dance. Cressida, who knew that neither Addison nor Langmere was acquainted with Rossiter, was obliged to perform the introductions, which she did in a dec
idedly offhand manner. She then realised that she had quite unaccountably neglected to present Rossiter and Harries to Kitty, and was about to do so when Rossiter himself, his eyes fixed upon Miss Chenevix in what appeared to be cool but definite admiration, called her attention to this omission.
“Good!” he said, when she had pronounced the necessary social formula. “It wouldn’t have done, you see, for me to have asked Miss Chenevix to dance with me before she had received my credentials as an old acquaintance of yours in good standing, Miss Calverton. ” He addressed Kitty with an air of negligent gallantry. “May I have the honour, Miss Chenevix—?”
Kitty cast a dutifully questioning glance at Cressida, but she so obviously wished to accept the invitation that had been tendered to her that Cressida, under penalty of causing a small, significant scene under Addison’s eyes, was obliged to nod her assent. Rossiter thereupon walked off with Kitty on his arm, while Addison, his brows raised over his cold blue eyes, gazed interrogatively at Cressida.
“An old acquaintance of yours, Cressy?” he enquired. “You are being very sly, are you not, my love? One would never have gathered, when we were discussing the gallant Captain a short while ago, that you were an old acquaintance of his. ”
“It was a very brief acquaintanceship, I assure you, ” Cressida said, and quite despairing, after her own imprudence in speaking of the matter to both Lady Constance and Langmere, of being able to keep from Addison’s inquisitiveness the facts of that acquaintanceship, added, “Only long enough for us to plight our troth and then unplight it again, which, you know, my dear, to a green girl is a matter of weeks—no more. Leonard, had we not best join the set—?”
Lord Langmere, who, following her instructions, had been talking kindly to Captain Harries, thus depriving the latter of the opportunity to ask Kitty to dance before Rossiter had snatched her up from under his nose, said so they had, and they went off together, leaving Captain Harries behind with the Honourable Mr. Addison, who cast a cold glance upon him and then also walked away.
“I do wish I had not been obliged to present Rossiter to Kitty,” Cressida said in a vexed tone to Langmere as they took their places in the set. “He is not at all the sort of man for a young girl to know—but then I daresay it does not signify in the end. He will certainly not make her the object of his gallantry. ”
And she put the matter out of her mind, until at the end of the set she was startled to see that Rossiter, instead of bringing Kitty back to her, was standing amicably chatting with her, resisting the blandishments of Lady Dalingridge, who wished to parade her captive lion before her guests, and that he apparently had every intention of standing up with Miss Chenevix for the next set as well.
“Devil!” thought Cressida, her indignation mounting once more. “He is only doing it because he thinks it will annoy me!”
But again there was nothing she could do without provoking an undesirable small scene, so she allowed her own partner to lead her into the set, privately determining to get Kitty’s ear at its conclusion and inform her of the extreme inadvisability of a young girl’s making herself conspicuous by standing up twice in one evening with a man of Rossiter’s reputation.
As it happened, however, she was spared the necessity of instructing Kitty upon this point by the arrival upon the scene, just as the set was ending, of a breathless Lady Constance, who, it appeared, had been routed out of the pleasures of a gossipping game of whist in the card-room by a well-meaning dowager who said she was sure she would wish to know that Miss Chenevix had stood up for two dances in a row with Captain Rossiter, and that Dolly Dalingridge was quite livid with disappointment because she had not been able to exchange more than two words with him herself and was telling everyone that she knew nothing at all about Kitty, but that one could see she had been brought up without proper principles.
“And I did so depend upon you, dearest Cressy,” Lady Constance said, the very aigrette on her turban quivering with reproach, “to see to it that she didn’t fall into the briars, because she is quite inexperienced, you know, and didn’t so much as realise, until I warned her of it, that she must on no account waltz in public without the permission of one of the Patronesses of Almack’s! There! Thank goodness, the set is ending! Of course I have never met Captain Rossiter, but I shall most certainly give him a piece of my mind if he is bold enough to ask poor little Kitty to stand up with him for a third time!”
And she hurried off, to be shortly seen snatching Kitty away from an amused Rossiter in a very highhanded sort of way, which would have convinced anyone of the genuineness of her claim to Plantagenet blood.
Lord Langmere, who happened to have been standing beside Cressida when this bit of by-play had taken place, and had watched it with mild interest, now remarked to her that it rather appeared to him that Lady Constance was making a piece of work over nothing.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “she may even be doing your little Miss Chenevix a disservice. Rossiter is obviously attracted by the girl, and if he should have decided at this point in his life to settle himself—which seems possible, by his return to England—he would be a rich prize indeed for a penniless young girl to capture. ”
“Rossiter! You cannot be serious!” Cressida turned an astonished face upon him. “A man of his—his experience, to use the politest term, to marry a girl scarcely out of the schoolroom! He would be bored to death in a week, and she— She shook her head decisively. “No, it is quite absurd! This is only one of his sudden freaks. He was piqued because I would not grant him a dance, and this is his way of being revenged upon me!”
“Of course, you may be right,’ Lord Langmere conceded, but looking unconvinced. “A very thoughtless and ill-judged revenge it would be, though, my dear, to single out a young girl and make her the object of expectations that he has no intention of satisfying. Is he such a paltry fellow? I have only just met him, but he does not appear so to me.”
“Yes—no!” Cressida said, obliged to swallow the indignation that had prompted her first reply and give Rossiter his due. “He is not ordinarily devious, I believe. But this—” She stopped speaking suddenly, seeing that Rossiter, once more shaking off the importunities of Lady Dalingridge, who had again attempted to seize upon him as he had been relinquished by Lady Constance, was purposefully approaching. “Oh, good heavens! Here he comes! What now?” she said quickly. “Leonard, if he means to ask me to go down to supper with him, I am already engaged to you—do you understand?”
Lord Langmere said gallantly that it would please him above all things to take her down to supper, as it was for the purpose of asking her to allow him that pleasure that he had just approached her; and then Rossiter was upon them.
“Well, Cressy?” he said in a quizzing tone, regarding her slightly flushed and highly unwelcoming countenance. “I knew I was engaging in a forlorn hope, but just how forlorn it is I can see by your face, before I have so much as made my request. You are firmly determined, I gather, to eat with me no more than you will dance with me.”
Cressida, assuming an air of indifference, shrugged and glanced at Langmere.
“As I daresay you have already guessed, I am engaged to Lord Langmere for supper,” she said pointedly. “And may I particularly request,” she added on a sudden unworthy impulse, which she would certainly have quelled if it had not been for the unwonted perturbation that had brought the colour to her face when she had seen Rossiter approaching her, “that you do not ask Miss Chenevix to go down with you? She is in a way under my charge at present, as she is living under my roof, and I may tell you that I consider you have already drawn quite enough undesirable notice upon her by asking her to stand up with you twice this evening.”
“Do you, by God!” Cressida’s eyes, which had been purposely fixed upon her fan—a pretty thing of frosted crape on ivory sticks—flew up, startled, to his dark face. A slight flush of anger had risen in it, and as she stared at him he continued harshly, “You are responsible for your own actions and incl
inations, my girl, but when you try to make yourself responsible for mine as well, let me tell you that you have gone your length! I shall neither be guided by you nor make myself accountable to you in what I do. If Miss Chenevix’s guardians choose to consider me an unsuitable person for her to know, I shall take the matter up with them; but what you have to do with it—beyond a wish to meddle in what is none of your affair—escapes my understanding!”
And he turned and strode off without another word. Lord Langmere, who had been a somewhat uncomfortable auditor to this exchange, was moved at this point to say fair-mindedly but rather unwisely to Cressida, “Really, my dear, he was quite in the right, you know. The matter rests in Lady Con’s hands, and I am sure she has said everything that is necessary.
“Oh, of course—being a man, you take his part!” flashed Cressida still more unworthily, and, clasping the fragile ivory sticks of her fan so tightly that she felt some of them break between her fingers, she too walked quickly away.
Naturally, being aware that she had acted badly, she was very gay indeed with her next partner, one of the German princelings whom Addison had despised, flirting with him in such a dashing manner that Addison began to speculate seriously on whether his suggestion that she might become a Prinzessin had really taken root in her mind, and causing several of the more proper dowagers present to remark to one another that really, my dear, if Cressida Calverton did not mend her ways, everyone would be saying that she was fast.
Meanwhile, Rossiter had gone straight across the room to where Lady Constance, having secured an eligible if not exciting partner for Kitty in the person of the very young and bashful third son of a baronet, had seated herself beside one of those same censorious dowagers upon a small gilt rout chair, having determined to keep vigilant watch over her charge during the remainder of the evening. Cressida, who, although appearing wholly absorbed in her flirtation with her princeling, was perfectly aware of Rossiter’s movements, was astonished to see him halt before Lady Constance’s chair and, after parleying for a few moments with her and her companion, promptly draw up a third chair and seat himself beside them. The two middle-aged ladies, she could see, were making a valiant attempt to maintain their air of virtuous disapproval in the face of this frontal attack by the Captain; but they were no more immune than would the young ladies they were chaperoning have been to the flattery of having been so pointedly singled out by the lion of the evening, and they were soon smiling and engaging in what appeared to be a very comfortable conversation à trois.