Friendship and Folly: The Merriweather Chronicles Book I

by Meredith Allady

  It became quickly apparent that Mrs. Robinson’s powers of self-deception were never greater than when employed on behalf of her daughters. Any attempt to point out the discrepancies between the two accounts was cozily laughed away as due to a minor confusion, typical of young ladies in an excited state. Although she could not quite bring herself to say that her own daughters were unfailingly truthful, she did not see that Kitty’s reputation in this respect had any bearing on the matter at all. Not that she questioned Miss Kitty’s word--no indeed! Such a thing was farthest from her mind! She was shocked at the inference! Mr. Parry had taken her up wrong entirely! She was sure that Miss Kitty had spoken nothing but the truth--as had her own dear daughters. Where was the difficulty in that? Mr. Parry might claim to see one, but Mrs. Robinson, while all deference, was sure he must be mistaken.

  Lady Frances’s surprise mounted throughout this exchange, so that she was unable to contribute one word, but fixed on Mrs. Robinson an eye of mute astonishment, which gradually become so diffused with pity, as to speak eloquently of her reduced assessment of their visitor’s rational faculties. This troubled that lady not at all, perhaps because she was too busy striving to correct Mr. Parry’s wrong-headed notions, to pay heed to aught else in the room. Mr. Parry remained outwardly composed, and although Mrs. Robinson seemed willing to chase words in circles forever, he eventually brought the painful interview to a close, by commenting, “Madam, it does not appear to me that we have anything further to say to one another. You cannot be persuaded to believe that it is impossible for two contradictory accounts to possess equal verity: I, that they can. This is no doubt due to an antiquated little truth I learned as a child of six, taking my first lesson in Logic: A is A, and not Non-A. One evening, if you can spare the time from your cards, you might ask your husband to explain to you the concept contained in the phrase ‘Veritas in omnem partem sui semper eadem est.’[Editor’s note: “Truth is always the same in every part of it.”] And now, I wish you good day.” This was perhaps a trifle uncharitable of Mr. Parry, but one must admit that he had provocation.

  After Mrs. Robinson had been ushered out, unabashed and still confiding that the Parrys would soon see the matter according to her own lights, Lady Frances shook her head, and remarked compassionately that the strength of Mrs. Robinson’s attachment to her daughters appeared to have entirely hidden from her their propensity for falsehoods. Mr. Parry replied that he believed such a reading of Mrs. Robinson’s conversation impugned their caller’s intelligence to a greater degree than it warranted, and that he was of the opinion that such obstinate fallaciousness was, rather, to be attributed to her determination to protect her daughters from the consequences of their deeds at all costs. Lady Frances, thus foiled in her attempt to vindicate one subject, immediately cast about for another, and next murmured a doubt that Mr. Robinson, who might perhaps have treated the affair more justly, had ever received the note which had brought his wife in such haste to their door, and which had, in fact, been directed to him.

  Mr. Parry agreed that in all likelihood his missive had indeed been diverted, but added that in the matter of Mr. Robinson’s culpability, he did not perceive that it made any great degree of difference who had received it. “Mr. Robinson may indeed be guiltless of having disregarded my request, due to the scheming of his wife, just as both of them are undoubtedly innocent of any intent to bring Kitty to harm by abandoning her on the street. Nevertheless, he has not replied, and Kitty was abandoned. A man could not be so consistently led about by his own family unless he was, to some extent, willing to be deceived; and by such voluntary ignorance he is, to my mind, just as responsible for the behavior of his wife and daughters as if he had daily instructed them in dishonesty.”

  With these words he dismissed that “sadly mismanaged household,” but it was the next day before Ann saw that he had entirely mastered his indignation against them (for he was then able to draw their attention to the newspaper notice that, “On Tuesday, Mrs. T. M_____ had a musical party at her house in ____-street” with no more than a few dry comments), and aside from being mentioned once or twice in family prayers, thereafter the name of Robinson made an abrupt exit from the vocabularies at Merrion House. Lady Thomasin, calling to express her shock and dismay in three-quarters of an hour of “Ha’s” and exclamation points, was the last to speak it in Ann’s hearing. Lady Frances, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to turn the conversation, at last managed it by beginning to praise the Lenox family; whose credit with the Parrys, as one might expect, had risen proportionately with the sinking of the Robinsons’.

  **

  Chapter XXI

  Poor Mr. Lenox was shortly to discover, that in restoring Kitty, he had done himself a grave disservice. He perceived the danger soon enough, and attempted to ward it off with a pose of gracious indifference, meeting their gratitude with a smile that tolerated the extravagant anxieties of parents, and echoing, as if from mere civility, his brother’s eager inquiries about Kitty’s health. He had not control enough, however, to conceal from them his relief at the good report; and to his further undoing, upon hearing a brief account of how she came to be on the street, his indignation betrayed itself in the flash of an eye, and a darkening of his expression. It was gone the next instant, but the Parrys had seen it, and later efforts to retrieve his slip availed little: he was already confirmed in their minds as a kind, trustworthy man, who felt about things as he ought, and there’s an end on ’t.

  Julia must have proved the greatest disappointment to him, for after having been at such pains to persuade her of his unpleasantness, with only a handful of words and a short carriage ride for her sister, all his careful work had come to nothing. That minute pocket of resentment which had resisted both the encomiums of Sir Warrington, and the rather dubious claims of gratitude, was now completely shattered by his act of reluctant knight-errantry. As one of Kitty’s rescuers he had excuses of every description tripping to his defense, and Julia was ready to receive them all, quite unasked. She could not quite deny that his response to her upon their introduction, had been ill-calculated to increase his brother’s delight, had been less than cordial; but as for the motive, to which she had attributed his “reticence”, there was nothing in it at all, and she was ashamed of having given credence to a charge so openly circumstantial. She was only too thankful that her folly in this respect, was known only to Ann.

  Ann, however, though trusting that she was no less thankful for Kitty’s recovery, was certainly less willing to thus dismiss all the evidence of her critical faculties. She demurred at the pale toothlessness of “reticence,” and suggested “antagonism” instead: but no, this was considered too strong. Julia had desired a word, signifying a modest departure from courtesy, and she was quite pleased with the one she had chosen: it relegated his moment of ungraciousness to its place of proper insignificance, and rendered all her fanciful deductions from it, “the ridiculous over-bubblings of an outraged conceit.”

  Ann’s part in these deductions, of having been the one to propose them in the first place, was forgotten; as was his conversation with her, in which he had to a great degree admitted the motive so unfairly ascribed to him, and without the least trace of shame. When reminded of these circumstances, Julia was rather confused, but then, pushing such disorderly facts aside, she expressed her assurances, one, that dear Ann, in an attempt to cheer her friends, would say anything, without the slightest intent of being taken seriously (which was true); and two, that speech was a medium sadly open to misconstruction, and Mr. Lenox might have meant something entirely different from what they had assumed. Then, lest she be challenged to actually provide an alternate construction, she hurriedly advanced the notion, which had just come to her, of his manner at being introduced to herself arising from shyness; arguing, from Kitty’s example, that an excessive anxiety to please, and a fear of not being able to do so, could manifest itself in an unnatural constraint. “You know what dear Cowper says of those who suffer from bashfulness
:

  “‘Our sensibilities are so acute,

  The fear of being silent makes us mute.’”

  At this, Ann merely laughed, and said, that if Julia would claim that for Mr. Lenox, no improbability was beneath her; and she was not going to stay, and watch her friend dismantle a perfectly good intellect, in her desperation to find excuses, for a man who did not even want them.

  One thing he might have done, which would have done much toward restoring her unfavorable opinion of him: he might have responded to Kitty’s thanks, as he had to those of her parents. If, when she ventured to come to him, with trembling hand and blushing cheek, and eyes kept raised to his face by only the sternest effort of will, to present her gratitude and her apologies (for the Kitties of this world must always be apologizing for something) in an inextricably tangled murmur--if, I say, he had hardened himself to indifference then, and belittled all the torments she had undergone with an indulgently dismissive smile--then might he have retired, complacent in the knowledge that he was established in Julia’s blackbooks forever. There was no one to instruct him in these finer points, however; he was unacquainted with the Robinsons, and no other family was so well-equipped to show him the best way to go about blackening his name to the Parrys; and the result was as anyone might have foreseen. He took Kitty’s hand with all gentleness, and deepened her gratitude immeasurably by accepting it simply and at once, instead of attempting to brush it away as unnecessary, thus forcing her to repeat and urge, what had cost her some struggle even to articulate the first time. In vain, after that, did he excuse himself from their invitations; in vain did he summon up tepid smiles and meager bows, and cultivate an air of having-somewhere-else-to-be. As Ann could have told him, the favor of the Parrys, once bestowed, was not easily dismissed; and Mr. Lenox had neither the disposition, nor the fortitude, to sustain that level of objectionable behavior which would have been necessary to repulse it.

  Sir Warrington, of course, never made the slightest difficulty over accepting the hospitality of the Parrys. He was delighted to have earned their gratitude, and at once began carving out his own path on the steps of Merrion House. He joined Lady Frances in grieving that his brother could not be persuaded to come as well, and promised to bend all his energies toward that end. One presumes he did so, and that the combination of Sir Warrington’s superior weight against him on one side, and the Parrys reaching out cordial hands, with a flattering eagerness for his company on the other, was too much for Mr. Lenox. He began to give ground. He came to dinner, and daunted everyone by the dispassionate perfection of his manners, and his likeness to Lady Lenox, until Clive made him laugh over some piece of foolery, and allowed them a reassuring glimpse of the reality that lived and moved and had its being beneath that impeccable demeanor.

  Sir Warrington, let it be said for a testimony to the sweetness of his disposition, seemed honestly gratified at having procured his brother’s attendance, and beamed away the whole evening as if he had just been made a duke, or been promised a puppet show. This was the more astonishing, in that it was to be seen that, while Mr. Lenox employed none of the methods by which her ladyship so efficiently checked the enthusiasms of her eldest son, nevertheless he exercised a distinctly dampening influence on Sir Warrington. Not sufficient to snuff him out entirely, just enough to prevent his naturally high-spirits from dominating every conversation around him.

  It must be admitted that this discovery caused Ann to look on Mr. Lenox with greater approval. Not that she wished to see Sir Warrington oppressed; but she did wish that his happiness did not so often display the loud, boisterous quality of an indulged child at a nursery tea, who finds hilarity in trifles that his elders find merely tedious, and is continually demanding the attention of every one in the room by his excitable behavior: which, when left to himself, the baronet was rather inclined to do. Upon the advent of his brother, however, Sir Warrington became content just to eat and drink, and talk in moderate tones with his neighbors. In truth, Ann could not determine quite how Mr. Lenox accomplished this, for he never reproved his brother, certainly never finished sentences for him, and the manner in which he addressed him, was as civil as to anyone else. She scrutinized the glances that passed between them, searching for traces of anxiety on the one hand, or warning on the other, but found nothing save those occasional, swift, unspoken messages, which mean so much to those who exchange them, and so little to anyone else. The only obvious signs of their disaffection lay in Sir Warrington’s slight but noticeable hesitancy whenever he addressed his brother by his Christian name (as if he were still unaccustomed to such familiarity, and half expected to be rebuked for it), and in his awkward attempts to please him, by puffing off his accomplishments with as much eagerness and far less subtlety than their mother had done. The cause of fraternal harmony was not noticeably furthered by these attempts, as the only occasions on which Mr. Lenox stirred himself to enter into the baronet’s earnest prattle, were those when he sought to divert him from yet another recital of Scholastic Firsts, and Notable Friends, and Records Triumphantly Broken.

  “My brother,” said Mr. Lenox dryly, on one such occasion, “has, I fear, the dangerous habit of believing everything he is told. I have endeavored to break him of it, but, as you may perceive, despite my consummate physical strength, my towering spiritual discernment, and the unsurpassed brilliance of my mind, my efforts have, unaccountably, met with complete failure.”

  “Nay!” Sir Warrington protested, not really understanding this, “Oi hav it a’ fra’ Mither!”

  “A source,” conceded the other, “of unassailable bias.”

  A remark which caused Sir Warrington to look innocently reassured, Clive to ‘cough’ vigorously into his napkin, and Julia to close the evening by urging Ann to agree, that “dearest Edmund” really had much to recommend him.

  **

  Chapter XXII

  Dearest Edmund made no haste to return the compliment. Incomprehensible as it was to Ann, that first evening spent with the Parrys did not mark his complete surrender to the charm of their society; rather, he continued to bear the marks of a man, who, having survived his first taste of sulfur waters, determines to finished the glass, on the understanding that, however vile, it will do him some obscure good.

  Not that he ever openly expressed his distaste for the dose. On the contrary, he downed it with manful fortitude; and if he could not always suppress all traces of discomfort as he did so, these traces were subtle enough, to pass unnoticed by any one not previously aware of his objections. But Ann perceived that though he might keep the distance of the room between them, he could not disguise the way his gaze continually turned toward Sir Warrington, whenever that gentleman obtained the notice of Miss Parry. Kitty might talk with the baronet all she pleased; it was only Julia who aroused in his breast such an apprehension of danger, that he could not dissemble it.

  Happy for his brother’s nerves, was the hour when Sir Warrington discovered in Kitty the listener for whom he had all his life been searching. It is a sad fact, that most human creatures, once they reach the age of about five or six, cease to find much gratification in hearing the same thing repeated over and over again. They tend to think, that two, or at the most three, repetitions should suffice, and then a thing is thoroughly known, and the talk should be allowed to pass on to other subjects. Sir Warrington’s mind had retained all the vigor of his youth, and consequently his reputation as a conversationalist had suffered at the hands of those whose mental tenacity had not survived the passage of years. It cannot be said that Kitty was his equal in this respect; but she made up for any lack thereof, with an abundant store of sympathetic patience, which no one had ever yet been able to exhaust. Sir Warrington did not even begin to do so, as his chosen theme happened to be one as near and dear to her heart, as it could possibly have been to his own. He could rhapsodize as long as he liked over Julia, the Lovely, the Delightful, and never doubt of Kitty’s eager attendance on his every word, whether she could distinguish it
s exact meaning or not. And whenever he paused (as even Sir Warringtons must, on occasion), she was never at a loss, but straightway primed him anew, by relating some act, or speech, or preference of Julia’s, until he could have passed an Examination on the subject with ease.

  Of course, even these two, zealots as they were, could not always, every moment be speaking of Julia; sometimes Sir Warrington would refresh himself, by praising his brother for an interval. On these occasions Kitty would smile, and nod, and agree, and privately be very glad, that she had Clive instead. Mr. Lenox was all very well, and she could find no fault with his behavior to herself, but she did not consider that he gave Julia her due measure of admiration.

  Ann pointed out, that, as a single gentleman, any attentions he might have paid in that quarter, would instantly have provoked Kitty to disquiet, and that she should, rather, be grateful for his forbearance. Kitty replied, that indeed she was; but at the same time, the marked absence of these worrisome attentions indicated a heart and mind, to all intents and purposes, quite moribund. She could not think so very ill of anyone for long, however, and eventually resolved the matter, by endowing him with a long-standing attachment to an amiable Irish girl. When Ann inquired, why, with this fair colleen a mere packet away, he should be kicking his heels around London, she replied, that as Sir Warrington had insisted on coming to England to find a wife, Mr. Lenox had of course to come and look after him.

  Ann had not expected such a sensible reply, and she was silent before its truth--though a truth, not quite of Kitty's intending. Kitty took silence for disbelief, however, and began earnestly to elaborate on her claim. “Sir Warrington,” said she, “has told me, that though he knows very well the kind of young lady he admires, he finds, that when he thinks a thing is good, he is very often wrong, and his brother has to correct him. Once, you see, not long after he was returned to his family, he went to a fair and bought a horse for a great deal of money, and when Mr. Lenox found out about it he was excessively displeased, and showed him all its bad points, and why he had paid too much for it, and made the dealer take it back. Sir Warrington said that although at first the man was angry, and argued, after Mr. Lenox spoke to him he grew quiet and said that he was very sorry for the mistake, and offered to sell it to Sir Warrington for much less than it was worth because of it; but his brother would not let him take it at any price. At first he was upset about this, because it was a such a handsome animal, and he could not see that it was so very bad; but then Mr. Lenox took him to a different part of the fair, to a man he knew, and they chose another horse, just as pretty as the first, and much nicer to ride.”