“You are being absurd!” she declared, in a much stronger voice. “Marry you to escape from poor Maria? I never heard anything to equal it! You must be out of your mind!”
“No—unless to be deep in love is to be out of one’s mind! I am, you see. After all these years, to have found the woman I had come to think didn’t exist—!” He saw that she was looking at him in considerable astonishment, and exclaimed, with a rueful crack of laughter: “Oh, my God, what a mull I’m making of it! I deserve that you should refuse ever to speak to me again, don’t I?”
“Yes,” she said candidly.
“I can’t make elegant speeches. I wish I could! If I could find the words to tell you what’s in my heart—!” He broke off, and took a quick turn about the room.
“Do you always find it impossible to make elegant speeches?” she asked. “I can’t bring myself to believe that, sir. You must have made many pretty speeches in your time—unless report has wronged you.”
“To the incognitas? That’s a very different matter!” he said impatiently. “A man don’t form a connection with a convenient with the same feelings as he has when he forms a lasting passion for the one woman in the world he wishes to make his wife!” He came to a sudden stop in his agitated perambulation, and directed a look of fierce enquiry at her, saying incredulously: “Good God, are you holding it against me that I have frequently had some high-flyer in keeping?”
This blunt reference to his checkered career, coupled as it was with his cool acceptance of her understanding of the meaning of such terms as he had used to describe his mistresses, pleased rather than shocked her, and certainly did him no harm in her eyes. Contrasting his attitude with her brother’s, she thought it was as refreshing as it was unusual, and, insensibly, she warmed to him. The abominable Mr Carleton was not one either to credit unmarried ladies with an innocence very few of them possessed, or to subscribe to the convention that prohibited a gentleman from mentioning in their presence any subject that could bring a blush to their cheeks. She liked this, but saw no reason why she should say so. Instead, she said, with unruffled composure: “By no means, sir! Your past life concerns no one but yourself. But if I were to accept your extremely obliging offer your future life would also concern me, and, at the risk of offending you, I must tell you that I have no ambition to marry a rake.”
He did not seem to be at all offended; rather, he seemed to be amused. He heard her out in appreciative silence, but when she came to an end, he adjured her not talk like a ninnyhammer. “Which, dear love, I know well you are not! You should know better than to suppose I should continue in that way of life if I were married to you. I shouldn’t even wish to! No man who had the inestimable good fortune to call you his wife would ever desire any other woman. If you don’t know that, there is nothing I can do or say to convince you!”
She felt her cheeks growing hot, and instinctively pressed her hands to them. “You are very obliging, sir, but—but sadly mistaken, I fear! I am not the—the paragon you seem to think me!” she stammered. “I—I know that I am generally held to be quite pretty, but—”
“If ever I heard such a whisker!” he interjected. “Generally held to be quite pretty? You are generally held to be a diamond of the first water, my girl! And don’t tell me you don’t know it, for I am a hard man to bridge, and I give you fair warning that you’ll catch cold if you try to gammon me!”
She smiled. “That I can well believe! Try, in your turn, to believe me when I say that I don’t admire my kind of—oh, beauty, for want of a better word!”
“There isn’t one,” he said. “I have a wide experience of beauties, but during the course of a misspent career I have never set eyes on a woman as beautiful as you are.”
She tried to laugh, and said: “It is clearly midsummer moon with you! I think you have fallen in love with my face, Mr Carleton!”
“Oh, no!” he responded, without hesitation. “Not with your face, or with your elegant figure, or your graceful carriage, or with any of your obvious attributes! Those I certainly admire, but I didn’t fall in love with any of them, any more than I fell in love with Botticelli’s Venus, greatly though I admire her beauty!”
She knit her brows, in honest bewilderment. “But you know nothing about me, Mr Carleton! How could you, on so short an acquaintance?”
“I don’t know how I could: I only know that I do. Don’t ask me why I love you, for I don’t know that either! You may be sure, however, that I don’t regard you as a valuable piece to be added to my collection!”
This acid reference to Lord Beckenham’s determined courtship drew a smile from her, but she said: “You have paid me so many extravagant compliments, that I need not scruple to tell you that yours is not the first offer I have received.”
“I imagine you must have received many.”
“Not many, but several. I refused them all, because I preferred my—my independence to marriage. I think I still do. Indeed, I am almost sure of it.”
“But not quite sure?”
“No, not quite sure,” she said, in a troubled tone. “And when I asked myself what you could give me in exchange for my liberty, which is very dear to me, I—oh, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Nothing but my love. I have wealth, but that’s of no consequence. If it were—if you were purse-pinched—I would never offer you any of my possessions as inducements. If you marry me, it must be because you wish to spend your life at my side, not for any other reason! There are many things I can give you, but I don’t mean to dangle them before you, in the hope that you might be bribed into marrying me.” His eyes gleamed. “You would send me to the rightabout in two shakes of a lamb’s tail if I did, wouldn’t you, my dear hornet? And I wouldn’t blame you!”
“It would certainly be carrying incivility to the verge of insult!” she said, trying for a lighter note. “There’s no saying, however, that you might be able to bribe me by promising never to snap my nose off!”
He smiled, and shook his head. “I never make empty promises!”
She could not help laughing, but she said: “A grim warning, in fact! I begin to suspect, sir, that you already wish you hadn’t made me an offer, and are now trying to frighten me into refusing it!”
“You know better!” he said. “Could I frighten you? I doubt it! It would be an easy matter to promise never to be out of temper, but I mean you to find me as good as my word, and the deuce is in it that I have an untoward disposition, and a hasty temper!”
“Yes, I have noticed that!”
“You could hardly have failed to!” He hesitated, and then said roughly: “I’ve several times hurt you—snapping your nose off, as you say—but never without wishing that I hadn’t done so. But when I’m put out my tongue utters cutting things before I can check it!”
“What an admission to make!”
“Shocking, ain’t it? It cost me something to make it, but I like pound dealing, and I won’t attempt to fob myself off on to you with court-promises.” She did not reply to this, and, after a moment, he said: “Have I made you take me in dislike? Be frank with me, my dear!”
“No—oh, no!” she said. “I too like pound dealing, and I will be frank with you. I don’t know if you can understand—or think that I must be indulging a distempered freak—but the truth is that my mind is all chaos!” She got up jerkily, and again pressed her hands to her cheeks, saying with an uncertain litde laugh: “I beg your pardon! I must sound detestably missish!”
“I think I do understand. You have persuaded yourself into the belief that you prefer to live alone—and that, if the alternative was to live with your brother and sister-in-law, is perfectly understandable. You have grown so much accustomed to your single state that to change it seems to you unthinkable. But you are thinking of it! That’s why your mind is all chaos. If you felt that to continue to live alone would be infinitely preferable to living with me, you would have refused to marry me without an instant’s hesitation. Was your mind thrown into chaos
when Beckenham proposed to you? Of course it wasn’t! You regard him with indifference. But you don’t regard me with indifference! I’ve taken you by surprise, and I am threatening to turn your beautifully ordered life upside-down, and you don’t know whether you would like it or loathe it.”
“Yes,” she said gratefully. “You do understand! It’s true that I don’t regard you with indifference, but it is such a big step to take—such an important step—that you must grant me a little time to think it over carefully before I answer you. Don’t—don’t press me to answer you now! Pray do not!”
“No, I won’t press you,” he said, unexpectedly gentle. He took her hands, and smiled into her eyes. “Don’t look so fussed and bewildered, you absurd child! And don’t turn me into a Bluebeard while I am away! I have a damnably quick temper, I have no agreeable talents, and very little regard for the proprieties, but I’m not an ogre, I assure you!” His clasp on her hands tightened; he raised them to his lips, kissed them, and released them, and went out of the room without another word.
Chapter 12
It was long before Miss Wychwood was able to regain some measure of composure, and longer still before she could try to unravel the tangle of her thoughts. Never before had she been confronted with any question concerned with her life which she had experienced the least difficulty in answering, and it vexed her beyond bearing that a proposal from Mr Carleton should have so disastrously overset the balance of her mind as to have made it impossible for her to consider it with the calm judgment on which she had hitherto prided herself. The hardest question which had confronted her had been whether or not to remove from Twynham, and to carve a life for herself; but when she recalled what had been her sentiments on this occasion she knew that the only difficulty which had then made her hesitate had been a natural reluctance either to offend her brother, or to wound his gentle spouse. She had never had a doubt of her own sentiments, nor of the wisdom of her ultimate decision. Nor had she experienced the slightest heart-burning when she had refused the many offers of marriage which had been made to her, though several of them had been (as she remembered, with an inward but reprehensibly saucy smile) extremely flattering. Endowed as she was with beauty, an impeccable lineage, and a handsome fortune, she had taken the ton by storm in her very first Season, and might, at this moment, have been married to the heir to a dukedom had she been content to marry for the sake of a great position, and to have let love go by the board. But she had not been so content, and she had never regretted her decision to refuse the young Marquis’ proposal. Geoffrey, of course, had been shocked beyond measure, and had prophesied that she would end her days an old maid. That dismal prospect had not at all dismayed her: she was very sure that, comfortably circumstanced as she was, it would be far better to remain single than to marry a man for whom she felt nothing more than a mild liking. She was still sure of it, but she was well aware that there was nothing mild about her feeling for Mr Carleton. No man had ever before held such power to sway her emotions from one extreme to another, making her feel at one moment that she hated him, and at the next that she liked him much too well for her peace of mind. It was easy enough to understand why she should so often hate him; nearly impossible to know what it was in him that made her feel that if he were to go out of it her life would become a blank. Trying to solve this mystery, she recalled that he had told her not to ask him why he loved her, because he didn’t know; and she wondered if that was the meaning of love: one might fall in love with a beautiful face, but that was a fleeting emotion: something more was needed to inspire one with an enduring love, some mysterious force which forged a strong link between two kindred spirits. She was conscious of feeling such a link, and could not doubt that Mr Carleton felt it too, but why it should exist between them she was wholly unable to discover. They were for ever coming to cuffs, and surely kindred spirits didn’t quarrel? Surely there ought never to be any differences of opinion between them? No sooner had she put this question to herself than she thought, involuntarily: “How very dull it would be!” It made her laugh softly to picture herself and Mr Carleton living together in perfect agreement, and suddenly it occurred to her that it would make him laugh too—if it didn’t make him say How mawkish! which, in all probability it would.
She had begged him not to demand an answer from her until she had had time to think the matter over; she had told him that the step he was asking her to take was too big a one to be taken without careful consideration. It was true, but even as she had said it the realization had darted into her head that it was not the nature of her sentiments which required consideration, but other and more worldly matters which would arise if she married Mr Carleton. They might be relatively unimportant, but they were, in their degree, of some importance. Foremost amongst them was the knowledge that her brother would be most violently opposed to such a marriage. He would do all that lay within his power to dissuade her from marrying a man whom he not only disliked, but of whom he unequivocally disapproved. He would not succeed, but it was possible that he might sever all connection between his household and hers; and that was a prospect she found it hard to face. She had set up for herself because she had found that he and she were continually chafing one another, but she had been careful to do so without wounding him by betraying the real cause of her removal from Twynham. They were unable to live in amity together, but they were bound by ties of family affection, and although these might be loose they existed, and she knew that it would give her great pain if they were to be broken. One could not lightly cut oneself off from one’s home and one’s family. And if Geoffrey did cast her off, it must inevitably redound to Mr Carleton’s discredit, and that was a consequence she would find it very hard to bear.
Then there was the question of being obliged to give up her freedom, to turn her life upside-down, as he had himself said, to submit to his judgment, and how was she to know that he would not prove to be a domestic tyrant? He was certainly of an autocratic disposition. But then she remembered how well (and how unexpectedly) he had understood her jumbled thoughts, and with what sympathetic compassion he had refrained from pressing her to give him an answer, and she decided that however autocratically he might express himself he was no tyrant.
By this time she had reached the point where she was forced to own that she was in love with Mr Carleton, but for no discoverable reason. She thought, disgustedly, that she was behaving like a silly schoolgirl, and that it was a very good thing that he was going away. Probably she would find that she went on quite happily without him, in which case it would be a sure sign that she was not in love, but merely infatuated. So the wisest thing she could do would be to put him out of her mind. After which, she continued to think about him until Jurby came in to tell her severely that it wanted only ten minutes till dinner-time, and if she didn’t come up to change her dress immediately she would be late. “Which is not like you, Miss Annis! A full half-hour have I been waiting for you!”
Miss Wychwood said guiltily that she had been too busy to notice the time, thrust her accounts, on which she had done no work at all, into a drawer, and meekly went upstairs with her stern henchwoman. An attempt to dissuade Jurby from brushing her glowing locks, and pinning them up afresh, failed. “I have my pride to consider, miss, and permit you to go down with your hair looking as though you had come backwards through a bush I will not do!” said Jurby.
So it was ten minutes after the dinner-bell had sounded before Miss Wychwood hurried down to the drawing-room, where she found her guests patiently awaiting her. She apologized, saying, with her lovely smile: “I do beg your pardon, Amabel! So rag-mannered of me to have kept you waiting! I have been busy all the afternoon, and never noticed how the time was slipping by. I’ve been making up my accounts, and an errant shilling persisted in going astray!”
“Oh, and I interrupted you, didn’t I, dear Annis?” exclaimed Miss Farlow remorsefully. “I am sure it is no wonder that you should have lost count of your shillings! The only wonder is that you
should be able to count them up at all, for I can never do so! I daresay it would divert you excessively if I were to tell you of the ridiculous mistakes I make in my addition. Not but what you had already been interrupted when I burst in on you, which, I hope you know me well enough to believe, I would never have done if I had known you had a visitor with you!”
“Yes, Mr Carleton called,” replied Miss Wychwood smoothly. “Good-evening, Ninian!”
Young Mr Elmore was wearing for the first time a new and beautiful pair of Hessians which had been made for him by the first bootmaker in Bath, and he could not resist the urge to draw attention to their shining magnificence, which he did by begging his hostess to forgive him for coming to dine with her in boots. “Which is not at all the thing, of course, but I thought you would excuse it, because I am engaged with a party of friends this evening, and it is not a dress-party.No ladies, I mean, or dancing, or anything of that sort!”
“I see!” said Miss Wychwood, twinkling at him. “Just a few choice spirits! Well, don’t get taken up by the Watch!”
He grinned, and blushed. “No, no, nothing of that nature!” he assured her. “Only a—a small jollification, ma’am!”
“Whatever brought my uncle here?” wondered Lucilla. “I thought I saw you talking to him in the Pump Room, ma’am!”
“Very true: you did!” responded Miss Wychwood. “But as he didn’t then know that he would be obliged to go up to London tomorrow, for a few days, he came to inform us of it. He was sorry not to find you at home, but I promised to make his apologies to you!”
Lucilla’s eyes widened in amazement. “Well!”she gasped. “Whoever heard of his being so civil?” She added shrewdly, and with a mischievous look: “If he really did say he was sorry not to find me at home, it was a great fib, for he never shows the least wish to see me, and I think it is you he always wished to see!”
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