“That, ma’am, I could not do!”
“Oh, no! I know you never would! Though I daresay she would not be in the least offended if you did,” said Fanny reflectively.
The bright May weather was making Serena increasingly impatient of the quiet life she was obliged to lead. At this time, in any other year, she would have been in the thick of the London season, cramming a dozen engagements into a single day. She did not wish herself in London, and would have recoiled from the thought of breakfasts and balls, but Bath provided no outlet for her overflowing energy. Fanny was content to visit the Pump Room each weekday and the Laura Chapel each Sunday, and found a stroll along the fashionable promenades exercise enough for her constitution; Serena could scarcely endure the unvarying pattern of her days, and felt herself caged in so small a town. She said that Bath was stifling in warm weather, sent to Milverley for her phaeton, and commanded the Major to escort her on a tour of the livery stables of Bath, in search of a pair of job horses fit for her to drive.
He was very willing, fully sympathizing with her desire to escape from the confinement of the town, and realizing that to be driven in a barouche by Fanny’s staid coachman could only bore her. He thought that the phaeton would provide both ladies with an agreeable and unexceptionable amusement. That was before he saw it. But the vehicle which arrived in Bath was not the safe and comfortable phaeton he had expected to see. Serena had omitted to mention the fact that hers was a high-perch phaeton; and when he set eyes on it, and saw the frail body hung directly over the front axle, its bottom fully five feet from the ground, he gave an exclamation of dismay. “Serena! You don’t mean to drive yourself in that?”
“Yes, most certainly I do! But, oh, how much I wish I still had the pair I was used to drive! Match greys, Hector, and such beautiful steppers!”
“Serena—my dearest! I beg you won’t! I know you are an excellent whip, but you could not have a more dangerous carriage!”
“No—if I were not an excellent whip!”
“Even nonpareils have been known to overturn these high-perch phaetons!”
“To be sure they have!” she agreed, with a mischievous smile. “The difficulty of driving them is what lends a spice!”
“Yes, but—My love, you are the only judge of what it is proper for you to do, but to be driving the most sporting of all carriages—Dearest, do females commonly do so?”
“By no means! Only very dashing females!”
“No, don’t joke me about it! Perhaps, in Hyde Park—though I own I should have thought—But in Bath—! You can’t have considered! You would set the whole town talking!”
She looked at him with surprise. “Should I? Yes, very likely!—there is no knowing what people will talk of! But you can’t—surely you can’t expect me to pay the least heed to what they may choose to say of me?”
He was silenced, startled to discover that he did expect this. After a moment, she said coaxingly: “Will you go with me, and see whether I am to be trusted not to overturn myself? I must try these job horses of mine. From what I can see of them I fancy there can be no fear that they will have the smallest desire to bolt with me!”
“You will give Bath enough to stare at without that!” he replied, in a mortified tone, and left her.
It was as well he did so, for quick anger flashed in her eyes, and he might otherwise have had another taste of her temper. His solicitude for her safety, though it might fret her independent spirit, she could understand, and make a push to bear with patience. Criticism of her conduct was an impertinence she would tolerate no better from him than from her cousin Hartley. She had almost uttered a blistering set-down, when he turned on his heel, and was shocked to realize that she had been within an ace of telling him that whatever might be the creed governing the behaviour of the ladies of his set, she was Spenborough’s daughter, and profoundly indifferent to the opinion such persons might hold of her.
It was not to be expected that she would, in this instance, think herself at fault. An easy-going father, famed for his eccentricities, had sanctioned, even encouraged, her sporting proclivities. In much the same spirit as he had told her, facing her first jump, to throw her heart over, he had taught her to handle all the most mettlesome teams in his stables. This very high-perch phaeton had been built for her to his order: disapproval of it was disapproval of him. “Whatever else you may do, my girl,” had said the late Earl, “don’t you be missish!”
The Major having removed himself, Serena’s wrath was vented, in some sort, on Fanny. “Intolerable!” she declared, striding up and down the drawing-room, in her mannishly cut driving dress. “I to pander to the prejudices of a parcel of Bath dowds and prudes! If that is what he thinks I must do when we are married the sooner he learns that I shall not the better it will be for him! Pretty well for Major Kirkby to tell a Carlow that her behaviour is unseemly!”
“Surely, dearest, he cannot have said that!” expostulated Fanny mildly.
“Implied it! What, does he think my credit to stand upon so insecure a footing that to be seen driving a sporting carriage must demolish it?”
“You know he does not. Don’t be vexed with me, Serena, but it is not only a parcel of Bath dowds who think it a fast thing for you to do!” She added hastily, as the blazing eyes turned towards her: “Yes, yes, it is all nonsense, of course! You need not care for it, but I am persuaded that no man could endure to have his wife thought fast!”
“What Papa countenanced need not offend Hector!”
“I am sure it does not. Now, do, do, Serena, be calm! Did not what your papa countenanced very frequently offend his own sister?” She saw the irrepressible smile leap to those stormy eyes, the lips quiver ruefully, and was emboldened to continue: “What he permitted must have been right—indeed, how could I feel otherwise?—but, you know, he was not precisely the same as other people!”
“No! The eccentric Lord Spenborough, eh?”
“Do you think that it vexed him to be called that?” asked Fanny, fearing that she had offended.
“On the contrary! He liked it! As I do! Anyone who chooses to say that I am as eccentric as my father may do so with my good-will! I don’t seek the title, any more than he did: it is what hum-drum, insipid provincials say of anyone who does not heed all their tiresome shibboleths! I do what I do because it is what I wish to do, not, believe me, my dear Fanny, to court the notice of the world!”
“I know—oh, I know!”
“You may, but it appears that Hector does not!” Serena flashed. “His look—the tone in which he spoke—his final words to me—! Intolerable! Upon my word, I am singularly unfortunate in my prétendants: First Rotherham—”
“Serena!” Fanny cried, with a heightened colour. “How can you speak of Rotherham and Major Kirkby in the same breath?”
“Well, at least Rotherham never lectured me on the proprieties!” said Serena pettishly. “He doesn’t give a button for appearances either.”
“It is not to his credit! I know you don’t mean what you say when you put yourself into a passion, but to be comparing those two is outrageous—now, isn’t it? The one so arrogant, his temper harsh, his disposition tyrannical, his manners abrupt to the point of incivility; and the other so kind, so solicitous for your comfort, loving you so deeply—Oh, Serena, I beg your pardon, but I am quite shocked that you could talk so!”
“So I apprehend! There is indeed no comparison between them. My opinion of Rotherham you know well. But I must be allowed to give the devil his due, if you please, and credit him with one virtue! I collect you don’t count it a virtue! We won’t argue on that head. My scandalous carriage awaits me, and if we are not to aborder one another I’d best leave you, my dear!”
She went away, still simmering with vexation, a circumstance which caused her groom, a privileged person, to say that it was as well she was not driving her famous greys.
“Fobbing, hold your tongue!” she commanded angrily.
He paid no more attention to this than
he had paid to the furies of a seven-year-old termagant, but delivered himself of a grumbling monologue, animadverting severely on her headstrong ways and faults of temper; recalling a great many discreditable incidents, embellished with what he had said to his lordship and what his lordship had said to him; and drawing a picture of himself as an ill-used and browbeaten serf, which must have made her laugh, had she been listening to a word he said.
Her rages were never sullen, and by the time she had discovered the peculiarities of her hired horses, this one had quite vanished. Remorse swiftly took its place, and the truth of Fanny’s words struck home to her. She saw again the Major’s face, as much hurt as mortified, remembered his long devotion, and without knowing that she spoke aloud, exclaimed: “Oh, I am the greatest beast in nature!”
“Now, that, my lady,” said her henchman, surprised and gratified, “I never said, nor wouldn’t. What I do say—and, mind, it’s what his lordship has told you time and again!—is that to be handling a high-spirited pair when you’re in one of your tantrums—”
“Are you scolding still?” interrupted Serena. “Well, if these commoners are your notion of a high-spirited pair, they are not mine!”
“No, my lady, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to you if they was prime ’uns on the fret!” said Fobbing, with asperity.
“It would make a great deal of difference to me,” she sighed. “I wonder who has my greys now?”
“Now, we don’t want to have a fit of the dismals!” he said gruffly. “If you was driving a pair of stumblers, you’d still take the shine out of any other lady on the road, my lady, that I will say! It’s time you was thinking of turning them, if you don’t want to be late back—them not being what you might call sixteen mile an hour tits.”
“Yes, we must go back,” she agreed.
He relapsed into silence, and she was free to pursue her own uncomfortable reflections. By the time they had reached Laura Place again, she had beaten herself into a state of repentance which had to find instant expression. Without pausing to divest herself of her hat or her driving coat, she hurried into the parlour behind the dining-room, stripping off her gloves, and saying over her shoulder to the butler: “I shall be wanting Thomas almost immediately, to deliver a letter for me in Lansdown Crescent.”
She was affixing a wafer to an impetuous and wildly scrawled apology when she heard the knocker on the front door. A few moments later, she heard the Major’s voice saying: “You need not announce me!” and sprang to her feet just as he came quickly into the room.
He was looking pale, and anxious. He shut the door with a backward thrust of his hand, and spoke her name, in a tense way that showed him to be labouring under strong emotion.
“Oh, Hector, I have been writing to you!” she cried.
He seemed to grow paler. “Writing to me! Serena, I beg of you—only listen to me!”
She went towards him, saying penitently: “I was odious! a wretch! Oh, pray forgive me!”
“Forgive you! I? Serena, my darling, I came to beg you to forgive me! That I should have presumed to criticize your actions! That I should—”
“No, no, I used you monstrously. Do not you beg my pardon! If you wish me not to drive my phaeton in Bath, I won’t! There! Am I forgiven?”
But this, she found, would not do for him at all. His remorse for having presumed to remonstrate with his goddess would be soothed by nothing less than her promising to do exactly as she chose upon all occasions. An attempt to joke him out of his mood of exaggerated self-blame failed to draw a smile from him; and the quarrel ended with his passionately kissing Serena’s hands, and engaging himself to drive out with her in the phaeton on the very next day.
11
The Major, reconciled to his goddess, could not be satisfied with setting her back on the pedestal he had built for her: the idealistic trend of his mind demanded that he should convince himself that she had never slipped from it. To have parted with the romantic vision he had himself created would have been so repugnant to him that the instant his vexation had abated, which it very swiftly did, he had set himself to prove to his own satisfaction that not her judgement but his had been faulty. It was impossible that the lady of his dreams could err. What had seemed to him intractability was constancy of purpose; her flouting of convention sprang from loftiness of mind; the levity, which had more than once shocked him, was a social mask concealing more serious thoughts. Even her flashes of impatience, and the dagger-look he had twice seen in her eyes, could be excused. Neither rose from any fault of temper: the one was merely the sign of nerves disordered by the shock of her father’s death; the other had been provoked by his own unwarrantable interference.
Not every difference that existed between imagination and reality could be explained away. The Major’s character was responsible; he had been an excellent regimental officer, steady in command, always careful of the welfare of his men, and ready to help junior officers seeking his advice in any of the private difficulties besetting young gentlemen fresh from school. His instinct was to serve and to protect, and it could not be other than disconcerting to him to find that the one being above all others whom he wished to guide, comfort, serve, and protect showed as little disposition to lean on him as to confide her anxieties to him. So far from seeking guidance, she was much more prone to impose her will upon her entire entourage. She was as accustomed to command as he, and, from having been motherless from an early age, she had acquired an unusual degree of independence. This, joined as it was to a deep-seated reserve, made the very thought of disclosing grief to another repellent to her. When she felt most she was at her most flippant; any attempt to lavish sympathy upon her made her stiffen, and interpose the shield of her raillery. As for needing protection, it was her boast that she was very well able to take care of herself; and when it came to serving her the chances were that she would say, gratefully, but with decision: “Thank you! You are a great deal too good to me—but, you know, I always like to attend to such things myself!”
He had not known it. Fanny, understanding his perplexity, tried to explain Serena to him. “Serena has so much strength of mind, Major Kirkby,” she said gently. “I think her mind is as strong as her body, and that is very strong indeed. It used to amaze me that I never saw her exhausted by all the things she would do, for it is quite otherwise with me. But nothing is too much for her! It was the same with Lord Spenborough. Not the hardest day’s hunting ever made them anything but sleepy, and excessively hungry; and in London I have often marvelled how they could contrive not to be in the least tired by all the parties, and the noise, and the expeditions,” She smiled, and said apologetically: “I don’t know how it is, but if I am obliged to give a breakfast, perhaps, and to attend a ball as well, there is nothing for it but for me to rest all the afternoon.”
He looked as if he did not wonder at it. “But not Serena?” he asked.
“Oh, no! She never rests during the daytime. That is what makes it so particularly irksome to her to be leading this dawdling life. In London, she would ride in the Park before breakfast, and perhaps do some shopping as well. Then, very often we might give a breakfast, or attend one in the house of one of Lord Spenborough’s numerous acquaintances. Then there would be visits to pay, and perhaps a race-meeting, or a picnic, or some such thing. And, in general, a dinner-party in the evening, or the theatre, and three or four balls or assemblies to go to afterwards.”
“Was this your life?” he asked, rather appalled.
“Oh, no! I can’t keep it up, you see. I did try very hard to grow accustomed to it, because it was my duty to go with Serena, you know. But when she saw how tired I was, and how often I had the headache, she declared she would not drag me out, or permit my lord to do so either. You can have no notion how kind she has been to me. Major Kirkby! My best, my dearest friend!”
Her eyes filled with tears; he slightly pressed her hand, saying in a moved tone: “That I could not doubt!”
“She has a heart of gol
d!” she told him earnestly. “If you knew what care she takes of me, how patient she is with me, you would be astonished!”
“Indeed, I should not!” he said, smiling. “I cannot conceive of anyone’s being out of patience with you!”
“Oh, yes!” she assured him. “Mama and my sisters were often so, for I am quite the stupidest of my family, besides being shy of strange persons, and not liking excessively to go to parties, and a great many other nonsensical things. But Serena, who does everything so well, was never vexed with me! Major Kirkby, if it had not been for her I don’t know what I should have done!”
He could readily believe that to such a child as she must have been at the time of her marriage life in the great Spenborough household must have been bewildering and alarming. He said sympathetically: “Was it very bad?”
Her reply was involuntary. “Oh, if I had not had Serena I could not have borne it!” The colour rushed up into her face; she said quickly: “I mean—I mean—having to entertain so many people—talk to them—be the mistress of that huge house! The political parties, too! They were the worst, for I have not the least understanding of politics, and if Serena had not taken care to tell me what was likely to be talked about at dinner I must have been all at sea! The dreadful way, too, the people of the highest ton have of always being related to one another, so that one is for ever getting into a scrape!”
He could not help laughing, but he said: “I know exactly what you mean!”
“Yes, but you see, Serena used to explain everybody to me, and so I was able to go on quite prosperously. And it was she who managed everything. She had always done so.” She paused, and then said diffidently: “When—when perhaps you might sometimes think her wilful, or—or over-confident, you must remember that she has been the mistress of her papa’s houses, and his hostess, and that he relied on her to attend to all the things which, in general, an unmarried lady knows nothing about.”
Bath Tangle Page 14