by Clare Darcy
Cressida stared at him. “Yes, he has,” she said. “But how did you—?”
“How did I know it was that affair that you had come to see me about in such alarmed haste? Really, my dear Cressy, you must not take me for a complete clothhead,” Sir Octavius said, leaning back comfortably in his chair, his dark eyes amused. “It has been perfectly obvious to me from the first time I saw you and Rossiter together in this office that the two of you were top-over-tail in love with each other. Nothing else would account for the quite ferocious rudeness of your manner towards each other. And why else,” he continued inexorably, as Cressida attempted to put in a word, “do you think I informed you, as soon as I heard of it, that Rossiter was buying Calverton Place, except to send you after him and give you both every opportunity to quarrel yourselves to a standstill and then make up your differences, as people in love are so frequently apt to do? I gather that in this case, though, the plot failed to achieve its purpose.”
“Yes, it did,” Cressida said with some asperity. “So you needn’t have been so devious, after all. I loathe and despise devious people!”
“Which is exactly why you have come to me today,” Sir Octavius said mildly. “But very well, then—since you so much prefer frankness, why don’t you simply tell Rossiter that you are in love with him and would like him to marry you instead of Miss Chenevix?”
“As if I could—or would—do such a thing! Cressida said indignantly. “You know that is utterly impossible!” “Do I?” said Sir Octavius. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps I do. We should have no three-volume novels if characters came straight to the point and said exactly what was on their minds, and people in real life are so tiresomely apt to behave in the same way, quite as if they had been made up by an author with more pages to fill than matter to put into them. Very well; my second piece of advice to you, then, is to find someone else for Miss Chenevix.”
“But I have! I mean, there is someone!” Cressida said. “Captain Harries is very sincerely attached to her, and would marry her tomorrow if she would have him. But he is nowhere near as rich as Dev, and I am sure she will never consider marrying him as long as she can have Dev instead.
“All of which,” Sir Octavius said, looking at her with his right eyebrow raised very high, “sounds as if you were remarkably certain that Miss Chenevix is not marrying for love.”
“Well, she isn’t,” Cressida said decidedly. “In point of fact, I shouldn’t think it’s likely she knows what it is to fall in love, or ever will. She is one of those ambitious, comfort-loving creatures, like a cat, who will always be concerned only with seeing that she has the largest saucer of cream and the softest velvet cushion in the house. And if that makes me sound like the biggest cat in Christendom,” she added reflectively, “I really can’t help it, because it is true.”
“Never having met the young lady, I am not able to give an opinion in the matter,” Sir Octavius said. “But I do know Rossiter, and I should say it was in the highest degree unlikely that he should have captivated a young lady of the description you have given. If Miss Chenevix were romantically inclined, that, of course, would be another matter: he has all the ingredients necessary to inspire a fatal passion in a young lady of that turn of mind. But in a girl of a—as you have so eloquently described it —feline temperament, no. He is far too brusque-mannered to inspire anything but distaste in her. So if you are right, it is merely his fortune and position that are attracting her, and it therefore seems to me that we shall be quite justified in thrusting a spoke into her wheel.
Cressida said rather despairingly that she would like very much to thrust in several, if she thought there was the least chance Rossiter still cared for her; but she could not be at all sure of that.
“You see, he thinks I have behaved very badly about Langmere, and so I have, only I never should have done if he hadn’t come back to England, ” she said. “And now he thinks I am in love with Miles Harries, or at least that I am trying to lure him into my clutches, like a villainess in a melodrama. ”
“Good God, why should he think that?” Sir Octavius enquired, and Cressida told him rather guiltily about the scene on the balcony at the Maybridges’ the night before.
“I don’t know,” said Sir Octavius resignedly, when she had concluded, “why things of that sort always appear to happen to you. I daresay it is because you are so devastatingly attractive that men can’t help thinking the worst of you. If you were plain, now, it would make matters a great deal simpler for me.”
Cressida said rather rebelliously that if she were plain Rossiter wouldn’t wish to marry her.
“Oh yes, he would,’ Sir Octavius said. “He fell in love with you when you were—I won’t say plain, for that you never were, but a hobbledehoy schoolgirl with not the faintest notion of how to dress or carry yourself, exactly as you were when I saw you first. And now you have turned into the dashing Miss Calverton, with all London at your feet, and of course he thinks you are a heartless Jezebel. He sighed. “Very well,’ he said, “you may dine with me on Wednesday next—you, and Miss Chenevix, and, if you can persuade her, Lady Constance. I shall send cards to Rossiter and Harries, too, of course. It will be a very uncomfortable dinner party, but I daresay no worse than most.”
Cressida stared at him. “But why a dinner-party?” she enquired. “What purpose will that possibly serve—?” For one thing, my dear, it will bring you and Rossiter together in the same room without five or six hundred other people there as well to complicate matters, Sir Octavius said. “And for another, it will give you something to occupy your mind over the next several days while Rossiter and Miss Chenevix go through the process—as we must devoutly hope they will—of discovering that being engaged to each other is not quite so agreeable as they may have imagined it would be. And in the third place, it will give me an opportunity to meddle, which is why you came to me in the first place, isn’t it? So go away now, my good child; I am very busy this morning, and have no more time to devote to love’s complications!”
This speech sent Cressida home in a rather chastened, but much more hopeful, mood, and as she had great reliance upon Sir Octavius, she was able to face the ensuing days quite well, with their inevitable accompaniment of congratulatory calls upon Kitty, Lady Constance’s vacillations between being very proud of herself and guilty interludes of feeling she had ruined Cressida’s life, and Rossiter’s occasional presence in the house when he came to take Kitty for a drive in the Park.
It did not escape Cressida’s notice that, after these latter excursions, Kitty returned to the house looking notably subdued. She never confided to either Cressida or Lady Constance the circumstances that had caused this, but Cressida heard from Dolly Dalingridge that Rossiter had on one occasion encouraged his affianced bride to take the reins of his phaeton in an effort to teach her to drive, and that she had shown herself so inept a pupil that he had restrained his temper with difficulty, treated her to a brief, biting lecture, and promised never to allow her to handle any of his cattle again.
“And after that, of course,” Dolly had continued, “Addison must come up to them on that splendid new bay of his and begin paying the girl the most extravagantly galant compliments, so that he drew her quite out of the combination of sulks and terrors she had fallen into. If you wish my opinion, she is far more éprise with him than she has ever been with Rossiter, and no wonder, for he lays himself out to be at his most charming whenever he is with her. And Rossiter sat there paying them not the slightest heed, merely looking bleak, my dear, and then he whipped up his horses and off they flew, leaving Addison in the middle of a compliment. One can’t think, really, why Rossiter ever offered for the girl, for it is quite clear that they will never suit; but she has got him, and I daresay she means to keep him. Quite penniless, one hears, and they say he is rich enough now to buy an Abbey—
All this was of mixed comfort to Cressida, since no matter how satisfactory it might be to have her conviction confirmed that Rossiter did not
care for Kitty, it was just as unsatisfactory to reflect that there was no honourable way for him to cry off from his obligation to marry her, so long as Kitty chose to hold him to it. But she possessed her soul in tolerable patience until the Wednesday evening, when she, Kitty, and Lady Constance (the latter under protest, for she could never forget that Sir Octavius, in spite of his present eminence, had begun his career in a counting-house) drove to the elegant mansion in Pall Mall that was Sir Octavius’s residence when he was in town.
Lady Constance, of course, had never entered that austerely gracious portal before, but Cressida could see that she was immediately struck by the luxury and taste that surrounded her as soon as she had stepped across the threshold. Sir Octavius, the friend and patron of most of the great figures in the London world of art and literature over the past thirty years, had been over that same period an amateur of the arts whose collection was the envy of the most knowledgeable connoisseurs in the kingdom. Chinese porcelains, French boiseries and tapestries, a rare red-figured Etruscan hydria, a mediaeval silver bowl ingeniously decorated with chased and engraved letters from the old black-letter alphabet, Flemish miniatures, Oriental japanned cabinets—each apartment contained something unusual and exquisite, displayed with unerring taste.
Cressida, who had dined at the house on several previous occasions, was quite prepared to be dazzled anew, but she saw Lady Constance’s eyes narrow appreciatively as they took in the splendours that surrounded her—“So like the Single Cube Room at Wilton,” she complimented the magnificent proportions of the drawing room, with its chimney-pieces of Italian marble, its ornate coved ceiling, and its exuberant display of carved and gilded wood—and even Kitty, whose idea of art did not go beyond the latest design for her tambour-work, was obviously overawed.
Perhaps fortunately for Cressida’s self-composure, Rossiter had not yet put in an appearance before she and her party arrived, and they found only Captain Harries seated with their host. She was therefore able to greet Rossiter, when he did come in, from the advantageous position of being a member of a group, and was further buoyed up by seeing that, unlike her, he had obviously had no advance information as to whom he was to meet that evening.
This rather surprised her, as she had expected, as a matter of course, that Kitty would have told him; but she soon discovered that communication between the two betrothed lovers scarcely seemed to be of the sort to encourage confidences even of an ordinary social nature. They were placed side by side at dinner, but their conversation, from what Cressida could hear of it, consisted of the merest commonplaces, and each appeared relieved when able to turn to converse with the person upon his or her other side.
“They can’t care a groat for each other!’ Cressida thought, which reflection ought to have lifted her spirits considerably; but since Rossiter’s manner towards her was so cool as to make his attitude towards Kitty seem, by contrast, positively ardent, she really found very little in the situation upon which to congratulate herself.
As was customary, Sir Octavius kept his gentlemen for some time in the dining room over their wine after the ladies had retired to the drawing room, during which period Cressida had ample opportunity to wonder what on earth he expected to accomplish from this extraordinarily dull and uncomfortable dinner-party. She also wondered whether she would have the opportunity to speak privately to Rossiter which Sir Octavius had apparently intended her to have, and, if so, what she would say to him.
Everything must depend, she felt, upon Rossiter’s own attitude—and that that attitude had undergone a marked change for the worse, as far as she was concerned, during the period he had spent with Sir Octavius and Captain Harries in the dining room, was at once apparent when he entered the drawing room. Coolness seemed to have given way to a definite exasperation, and the look he bent upon her was so decidedly unfriendly that she hastily moved to a table at the other side of the room and picked up Pococke’s Description of the East, which lay upon it.
But Sir Octavius, who could be as masterful when the situation demanded it as he could be subtle when subtlety was called for, soon put an end to this temporising.
“Now, Cressy, my dear,” he said, firmly taking Mr. Pococke’s volume from her and replacing it upon the table, “I shall show you my Egyptian Room. It is quite complete at all points now, and I know you will find it interesting. Come along. And, as she moved off obediently down the room with him, he went on, steering her over to the chaste Adam mantelpiece against which Rossiter was moodily leaning, “I shan’t bore the others with it, but you, Rossiter”—drawing the unwilling Captain irresistibly into his orbit—“will enjoy having a look at it. My new Egyptian Room, that is.” And he repeated, this time for the Captain’s benefit, “Come along. ”
Unless Rossiter was prepared to be very rude indeed to his host and state firmly that he had not the least interest in seeing the Egyptian Room, there was nothing for it but for him to accompany Sir Octavius and Cressida across the broad hall to a small apartment decorated in the pale yellows and bluish greens, relieved by black and gold, which, as Sir Octavius kindly informed them, predominated among the pigments of ancient Egypt.
“You might note particularly the statue of Sen-Nefer,” he remarked, as he led them into the room. “A very unusual piece, I believe. And now I must rejoin my other guests. ”
He went off with his blandest smile, leaving Cressida and Rossiter confronting each other before the massive granite figure to which he had referred. It was Rossiter who spoke first, with a slight, contemptuous curl of the lip.
“Transparent!” he said. “Is this your doing? But for what purpose? If it is to assure me that that little scene I witnessed that night at the Maybridges’ leaves you entirely innocent of any designs upon Miles, Mayr has already contrived to drop a word in my ear to let me know how matters stand in that regard. And it is a pity,” he went on in an even more savage tone, for quite evidently he had been driven to the very end of his patience by this evening of discomfort and sudden revelation, “that no one had the wit to inform me of Miles’s attachment for Miss Chenevix before I offered for her myself! It had been my understanding that he was dangling after you!”
If Cressida had done what any intelligent young woman would have done, and what she had fully determined beforehand to do should any opportunity for such action present itself, she would have melted into tears, cast herself upon Rossiter’s breast, and declared her own love for him in modest, though shaken, accents.
What she actually did, however, was to say with entire candour and considerable spirit that if he hadn’t been a nodcock he would have been able to see for himself how matters stood. She then realised that she had said quite the wrong thing, and in an effort to retrieve her mistake began hastily to speak again, but was at once interrupted by Rossiter.
“How the devil,” he demanded wrathfully, “was I to know how matters stood when Miles was underfoot in Mount Street every time I stepped inside your front door? And then to come upon him embracing you—”
“In a purely brotherly way,” Cressida interjected with great hauteur, her chin well up in the air.
“Very well: in a brotherly way, if you insist! But embracing you, all the same! If you weren’t such a curst flirt—”
“I do not flirt! And especially not with someone like Miles. I told you I wouldn’t!” said Cressida indignantly, rapidly finding the pose of aloof superiority she had adopted in her preceding speech quite inadequate for the occasion and descending to more earthbound levels.
“Exactly!” said Rossiter grimly. “You told me you wouldn’t, and—the more fool I!—I believed you! Which is why, when I saw the two of you together at that damnable ball, I thought it must be serious and that you— that he—”
“Oh, Dev!” exclaimed Cressida, halfway between laughter and tears at this sudden revelation of the state of mind that had led to that abrupt proposal of marriage at the Maybridges’ ball. “Do you mean you thought Miles and I were intending to marry and that was why
you went and offered for Kitty in the middle of a set of country dances? But how could you? You must think me the most fickle creature alive, to be turning Langmere off in one breath and taking poor Miles on in the next!”
“I have good reason,” said Rossiter scathingly, “to think you the most fickle creature alive, my girl! Since I have come back to London I have had nothing but tales of your conquests dinned into my ears—how you have had one poor devil after another dangling at your shoestrings, leading each of them up to the very brink of matrimony before you turn cat in pan and are off again after greener fields! But if you are thinking you have added me to your list, you are fair and far off! God knows, if I had had the slightest inkling that Miles had formed an attachment for Miss Chenevix, I should never have made her an offer myself; but if it hadn’t been Miss Chenevix, I can assure you that it would have been any other female in London rather than you! He broke off, regarding her now stormy face inimicably, and then went on, between shut teeth, “What is it, exactly, that you want of me. Cressy? To prove to yourself that you can whistle me back whenever you wish, as you can all the others? Well, I will tell you now, there is not the least chance of that! I’ve no fancy to be made a bobbing-block for the whole town to snigger over, as Langmere was when you flung him off—”
“Oh! ” gasped Cressida, who could contain herself no longer. “What a contemptible wretch you are! As if I wished to make Leonard unhappy, or ridiculous! I have been far more unhappy, I am sure, than he! But that, of course, is nothing to you! And if I,” she went on, so full of rage and disappointment now that she could scarcely control her shaking voice, “am the last woman in London you would wish to offer for, you may be assured that you are the last man in London from whom I should accept an offer! Arrogant, disagreeable, unreasonable—I am sure I pity poor Kitty Chenevix from the bottom of my heart!”