by Clare Darcy
“No—don’t!” she was obliged to say to him hastily, putting out both hands to ward off the embrace in which he attempted to enfold her as she trod into the drawing room, where Harbage had bestowed him. “Leonard— dear Leonard, you are at liberty to think me the greatest wretch alive, but I must tell you at once—I cannot marry you. I have had time to think it all over very carefully now, and indeed it will not do!”
To say that Lord Langmere was taken aback by this forthright and determined statement would give but a very inadequate impression of his feelings at that moment. There was no room here for hoping that what he had just heard was the blushful temporising of a young lady who was waiting only to be urged to change her mind; he was obliged to believe that he was being given his congé, and that Cressida had no intention whatever of altering her resolution in the matter.
Lord Langmere was a mild-mannered man, and to have said that he was deeply in love would have been dignifying by too strong a term, perhaps, his admiration of the dashing Miss Calverton, his pride in having been able to exhibit her preference for him before the world, and his quite genuine intention to settle himself in life with her and to make her the most exemplary of husbands. But even mild-mannered men who are mildly in love do not take kindly to having all their expectations overturned in the twinkling of an eye, and it was therefore scarcely surprising that, as a consequence, a rather painful scene took place in the drawing room of the Mount Street house. His lordship so far forgot himself as to insinuate with some bitterness that he had been led down the garden path; Cressida, though conscious that he spoke with some justice, was much too full of her own troubles to sympathise properly with his, and as a result neglected to sooth him down with asseverations of her undying regard and other bits of flattering nonsense that would at least have sent him away with the comforting conviction that he had been engaging in a star-crossed romance instead of merely making a fool of himself over a heartless flirt.
Accordingly, a quarter hour after he had entered the drawing room he left it hastily and in an obviously black mood, almost caroming into Kitty in the hall, who regarded him thoughtfully and then went on into the drawing room herself to tell Cressida, whom she had not seen since the latter’s return, how pleased she was to have her so soon back in London.
Cressida, who felt that, of all the people in the world she did not wish to see at that moment, Kitty stood highest on the list, said shortly that she was glad to be back, and then added more kindly, wrenching her thoughts with some effort from the scene with Lord Langmere, that she hoped Kitty had been enjoying herself while she had been gone.
“Oh yes, Miss Calverton!” said Kitty, in such a quiet, natural voice that Cressida, who had just had a sudden, rather unpleasant sensation that Kitty’s blue eyes had been regarding her with a sharp and somewhat speculative intensity, thought she must have been mistaken. “I can never thank you enough for giving me such a splendid opportunity,” Kitty continued, her eyes, now radiating sincerity, raised earnestly to Cressida’s.
Cressida wondered momentarily what change might occur in that modest, self-assured demeanour if she were to inform its possessor of the conversation that had taken place between her and Mrs. Mills in Keppel Street, but, being conscious of a certain duplicity in her own behaviour in not informing Kitty frankly of the fact that she intended to do everything in her power to take Rossiter away from her, she scarcely felt that it behooved her to animadvert upon anyone else’s conduct at the moment, and went upstairs to her bedchamber in a rather low mood. This was not improved by the fact that it had just begun to rain in a depressingly steady way that made it quite obvious that it was determined to continue to do so for at least four-and-twenty hours.
Nor were her spirits raised, as the hour approached at which she was to leave for the Maybridges’ ball, and therefore to meet Rossiter for the first time since her feelings towards him had so markedly changed, by the onslaught of a sensation of nervous self-consciousness such as she believed herself to have outgrown years before. She could not decide on which gown to wear, rejected an orange-blossom sarsnet as too missish and a water-green silk as too daring, had Moodle dress her hair in a Sappho and then à la Tite, and as a result kept the Honourable Drew Addison, who had condescended to gallant the Mount Street ladies to the ball, cooling his heels in the drawing room with Kitty and Lady Constance for almost half an hour. This brought down upon her several waspish comments, to which she replied so absently that Addison, who was unaccustomed to seeing his barbs fly wide of their target, was irritated all over again.
“I gather, my dear Cressy, that you had no success in persuading the not-so-gallant Captain to give up Calverton Place to you,” he observed pointedly, as he seated himself beside her in the carriage. “No, don’t look surprised, my good child; of course I know all about the reason for that sudden excursion of yours into Gloucestershire. I also know,” he continued suavely as the carriage rolled off down the street, “that Langmere has at last put his fate to the touch and been given his congé. Oh yes, my dear; he was at White’s this afternoon, and in such a fit of the blue-devils that one could not help putting two and two together. I believe he won two thousand from Dalingridge at hazard. Unlucky in love, you know—”
Here Lady Constance, who could no longer contain herself upon hearing this startling and most unwelcome piece of news (for Cressida had said nothing to her of what had passed between her and Lord Langmere that day), burst into the conversation to demand what in the world Addison meant by making such an absurd and totally untrue statement.
“Of course nothing of the sort has occurred,” she scolded him, “and I beg you will not go about repeating such a faradiddle to everyone you meet! It is true that there is no understanding as yet between Cressida and Langmere—”
“Nor ever will be,” Addison said languidly. “Am I not right, Cressy, my dearest? You have laid another of your victims in the dust, and now have certainly no wish—having shown yourself the goddess triumphant once more—to raise him.”
“Do stop talking such fustian, Drew!” Cressida said coldly. “One would think you had been indulging in reading lending library novels—which you profess to abhor!”
“And so I do, my sweet,” said Addison, smiling at her calmly. “But if one’s friends will persist in behaving as if they belonged between the covers of those revoltingly sentimental works, what is one to do? You really must break yourself of the habit of leading besotted males to the very brink of matrimony and then baulking at the last moment at stepping over the edge with them, Cressy darling; it always leads to low drama in the general conversation.”
Cressida, who had hoped to be able to explain to Rossiter herself in a very dignified manner that she and Langmere had mutually agreed that they would not suit, and that any thought of marriage between them was now at an end, felt her heart sink. From Addison’s words it was perfectly apparent that her rejection of Lord Langmere’s suit would be one of the principal topics of conversation at the ball that evening, so that Rossiter would be certain to be treated upon every side with the most highly coloured interpretation of her conduct that gossip, and sometimes malicious gossip, could give it. A heartless jilt—that was what would be said of her; and Rossiter himself had as much as pronounced those very words in the garden at Calverton Place. How was she to explain to him, in a crowded ballroom, that it was only because she had rediscovered her love for him that she had given Langmere his dismissal? If only she might see him alone—
But the impossibility of achieving such a wish on this evening, of all others, was made abundantly clear to her as the carriage entered Cavendish Square, which was the scene at the moment of an even greater confusion than ordinarily attended the hour of arrival at a large ball. Lady Maybridge’s parties were famous for being the greatest squeezes of the Season, and the Square was already filled with a crush of jostling carriages and excited horses when they arrived, so that it seemed next to impossible that they would ever be able even to reach the door of May
bridge House.
“Tiresome!” commented Addison, regarding with some distaste the efforts of a swearing coachman driving an elegant town-chariot with a crest upon the panel to force his way in before them in the line of carriages that was slowly crawling along the street. “One does so wonder if it is worth the effort to make an appearance at one of Gussie Maybridge’s balls. Even when one succeeds in getting inside, one is always at least half an hour on the staircase, pressed in cheek by jowl, as like as not, with some quite unconversable foreign ambassador, with his wife’s ostrich plumes tickling one’s nose. Unfortunately, one cannot consider attending a party that is so very unsuccessful that one can enter the house with ease. It would be too drearily unfashionable—”
He went on speaking, but Cressida was no longer attending to him. She had caught sight, through the slanting, silvery rain, of a tall figure just alighting from a carriage that had that moment drawn up before the doorway of Maybridge House. She could see only the broad shoulders, the erect back, and the well-shaped head with its severely cropped black hair, but she knew she could not be mistaken. It was Rossiter, and if only, she thought, in sudden wild, hopeful impatience, Addison’s coachman would make haste to bring their carriage up to the door, she might manage to spend that interminable half hour upon the crowded staircase, to which Addison had alluded, in such close proximity to him that something of what she wished to inform him about her change in feelings might be conveyed to him, in spite of foreign ambassadors, their wives, and their wives’ ostrich plumes.
CHAPTER 12
Of course nothing so fortunate occurred. Instead, she was obliged, during the five-and-twenty minutes she spent ascending, step by step, the magnificent red-carpeted staircase of Maybridge House, to endure the torments of Tantalus, seeing Rossiter’s dark head directly before her the whole time, but separated from her by the stout and exceedingly solid bulk of a lady in a puce satin gown and a diamond tiara. By the time she had reached the head of the staircase he had already exchanged greetings with Lord and Lady Maybridge and passed on into the ballroom, and seeking for him there, she knew, amidst upwards of six hundred people, half of whom were dancing, while the other half milled about in a kaleidoscopic fashion behind the red-velvet ropes that divided the dance-floor from the rest of the room, would certainly be a tedious and perhaps unsuccessful task.
To her discomfort, the first person she did see was Lord Langmere, who was pressed, willy-nilly, almost directly up to her in the crush, bowed slightly to her with a somewhat heightened colour, and immediately made the most determined effort to escape from her presence.
“So you haven’t given him his marching orders!” Addison’s cynical voice said behind her. “Dearest Cressy, do you think me quite muttonheaded, that you expect me to swallow such a rapper as that? He had as well be wearing a placard reading Rejected Lover on the back of his coat! And what odds, ” he added thoughtfully, “will you give me that young Harries won’t be the next to succeed to his honours? The bettors at White’s, I may tell you, will be badly scorched if he is not: he has been so much in your company of late that a good many of them are plunging heavily on him. But here he comes now. Will you stand up to dance with him and swing the odds even more in his favour, or do you intend to cause a panic by snubbing him?”
Cressida felt that if it were possible and legal to kill someone in a ballroom, the odds were that Drew Addison would be dead at that moment by her hand, but she was obliged to content herself with ignoring him as completely as if she had not heard a word he had spoken, and greeted Captain Harries with great cordiality instead.
“Good evening, Miss Calverton; I’d like very much to ask you to do me the honour of standing up with me for the next dance,” said the Captain, who looked, as usual, rather harassed by the responsibility of living up to his elegant coat and knee breeches but very pleased to see her. “But they tell me it’s to be the quadrille, and for the life of me I haven’t been able to master the steps.
He then looked at Kitty, who appeared to the greatest advantage that evening in a robe of pale blue crape caught together down the front with small silver clasps over a white sarsnet slip, and he was obviously about to address himself to her when, Addison having dropped a few words into her ear, she turned to Lady Constance and very prettily asked her permission to stand up for the quadrille with him. Lady Constance looked disapproving, but she was too well aware of the power Addison wielded in Society to cross swords with him, and, with a slight, expressive shrug of her shoulders, gave her consent.
“Detestable man!” she said, as the two walked off together. “He is only singling her out for his attentions to set Rossiter on end, and though I am as well aware as the next person that there is nothing like a little jealousy to bring some gentlemen to the point, Rossiter does not appear to me to be that sort of man. If Kitty is not careful, she will find she has whistled him down the wind. ” She broke off to greet a dowager in purple-bloom silk, with whom she at once moved away down the room. Cressida looked at Captain Harries.
“I see,” she said, “that you have not been having a great deal of success while I have been away. ”
The Captain, looking downcast, said no, he had not. “But I’m bound to say,” he added, plucking up his spirits slightly, “that, with Dev away, too, it’s that Addison fellow who’s been claiming most of her time, and they say there’s safety in numbers.”
“Perhaps there is,” said Cressida, suddenly feeling an irresistible urge to confide her difficulties to the Captain, who was, after all, in much the same dilemma as she was herself, and had as much interest as she had in seeing to it that Rossiter did not marry Kitty. “But it’s a great deal like playing hazard: there is always the chance that the very number one particularly does not wish to will turn up!”
She glanced about impatiently at the long, crowded room: it was quite useless, she saw, to expect that anywhere within its brilliant confines she might have a few minutes of private, uninterrupted conversation with her companion. But she was familiar with Maybridge House, and remembered suddenly that, behind the heavy crimson brocade draperies before which they were at present standing, there was a shallow embrasure leading to one of the ballroom’s long double windows, each of which had built outside it a narrow balcony enclosed by a low iron railing.
“I should like to talk to you—come along!” she said to the Captain, parting the heavy draperies and passing swiftly into the embrasure.
The Captain obediently followed her, unbolted and flung open the long window at her direction, and then stepped outside with her onto the narrow covered ledge beyond.
“This is far better!” Cressida said, much relieved, and looking about her at the misty darkness. She felt, in fact, so very much relieved, after Addison’s disagreeable words and the knowledge that at that precise moment some equally nasty-minded person was undoubtedly pouring into Rossiter’s ears the most unpleasant version he or she could concoct of her dismissal of Langmere, that she experienced a sudden desire to put her head upon the Captain’s broad, comforting shoulder and wail out her troubles like a schoolgirl. “Oh!” she said, bringing herself up short before she could give way to this ignoble impulse, “you will think I am an idiot, Captain Harries, but I simply must tell someone. I have just learned, you see, that while I was thinking all these years that Dev wished to break off our engagement because of not wanting to marry a girl with no money, he really did it only because he had been told that I shouldn’t inherit my great-aunt’s fortune if I married him. And it has made me feel quite, quite different about him, of course, and—and I don’t at all wish him to marry Kitty Chenevix now, any more than you wish him to do so. Only everyone says he is quite on the point of offering for her, and—oh, Captain Harries, what are we to do?”
Captain Harries, who had hitherto been in the way of regarding Miss Calverton as the sort of goddesslike female who was so capable of managing her own affairs to her entire satisfaction that any male interference in them would be not only unnece
ssary but impertinent, was shocked beyond measure to find a face that distinctly appeared to be upon the verge of tears turned up in despairing appeal to his. But he recovered himself quickly, and, much touched, put his arm around Cressida in an extremely comforting and brotherly way and said he had suspected it all along.
“Suspected what?” said Cressida in a rather muffled voice, giving herself up in an unwonted way to the luxury of having someone to lean on in her distress.
“That you were in love with him, and he with you,” said the Captain simply.
“Oh!” Cressida exclaimed, looking up at him with a radiant face. “Oh, do you really think so?”
And at that precise moment the draperies parted suddenly and Rossiter walked into the embrasure.
The tableau he saw before him at that instant—the dashing Miss Calverton, her waist encircled by a manly arm, gazing up radiantly into the face of her companion —was one he could have been pardoned for misconstruing; in point of fact, it was scarcely possible that he could have avoided misinterpreting it. He remained standing for a moment, thunderstruck, his arm still raised to hold back the draperies, so that the brilliant candlelight from the ballroom streamed full upon the startled pair before him. Then he said, in a harsh, even voice, “I beg your pardon! I came to ask you to dance, Miss Calverton. I was not aware that you were otherwise engaged.”
“But I wasn’t—I mean I’m not—” Cressida, finding her tongue, stammered, quite idiotically, as she was furiously aware.
Rossiter’s contemptuous gaze scorched her. “Good God,” he exclaimed savagely, “don’t think to shuffle Miles aside now while you attempt to add me to your list of conquests for the evening! Isn’t it enough that you have made Langmere a laughingstock, without wishing to do the same for him?”