“He is, of course, but there’s no saying he wouldn’t be a good husband, for he is very kind, and honourable, and— and respectable, which I believe are excellent qualities in a husband.”
“No doubt! But not in your husband!”
“No, I believe we should tease one another to death. The thing was, you see, that because he was Papa’s godson Papa permitted him to visit us, and so we grew to know him very well, and when he wished to marry me I did wonder (though it was not at all what I wanted) whether perhaps it might not be better for me to do so than to grow into an old maid, hanging on Conway’s sleeve. However, if Aubrey dislikes him as much as that it won’t do. Oh dear, you have allowed your garden to grow into a wilderness! Only look at those rose-trees! They can’t have been pruned for years!”
“Very likely not. Shall I set a man on to attend to them? I will, if it would please you.”
She laughed. “Not at this season! But later I wish you will: it might be such a delightful garden! Where are you taking me?”
“Down to the stream. There’s a seat in the shade, and we can watch the trout rising.”
“Oh, yes, let us do that! Have you fished the stream this year? Aubrey once caught a three-pounder in it.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t poaching, I assure you! Croyde gave him leave—he does so every year. You don’t fish it yourself, after all!”
“Now I know why I’ve had such poor sport each time I’ve taken my rod out! What a couple you are! First my blackberries, and now my trout!” he said.
The laughing devil was in his eyes, but she was not looking at him, and replied without a trace of embarrassment: “What a long time ago that seems!”
“And how angry you were!”
“I should rather think I was! Well, of all the abominable things to have done!”
“I didn’t find it so!”
She turned her head at that, looking up at him in a considering way, as though she were trying to read the answer to a problem in his face. “No, I suppose not. How very odd, to be sure!”
“What is?”
She walked on, her brow a little furrowed. “Wishing to kiss someone you never saw before in your life. It seems quite madbrained to me, besides showing a sad want of particularity.” She added charitably: “However, I daresay it is one of those peculiarities of gentlemen even of the first respectability which one cannot hope to understand, so I don’t refine too much upon it.”
He gave one of his sudden shouts of laughter. “Oh, not of the first respectability!”
They had emerged by this time from the rose-garden through an archway cut in the hedge on to the undulating lawns which ran down to the stream. Venetia paused, exclaiming: “Ah, this is a delightful prospect! Looking at the Priory from the other side of the river, one can’t tell that you have that distant view. I have never been here before.”
“I’ve seldom been here myself. But I prefer the nearer prospect.”
“Do you? Just green trees?”
“No, a green girl. That is why I’ve remained here. Had you forgotten?”
“I don’t think I am green. It’s true I only know what I’ve read in books, but I’ve read a great many books—and I think you are flirting with me.”
“Alas, no! only trying to flirt with you!”
“Well, I wish you will not. I conjecture that you came into Yorkshire to ruralize. Isn’t that what they call it, when you find yourself cleaned-out?”
“Not so very green!” he said, laughing. “That’s it, fair fatality!”
“If but one half the stories told about you are true you must be very expensive,” she observed reflectively. “Do you indeed keep your own horses on all the main post-roads?”
“I had need to be a Dives to do that! Only on the Brighton and Newmarket roads, I fear. What other stories do they tell of me? Or are they unrepeatable?”
She allowed him to guide her to a stone bench, under an elm tree, and sat down on it, clasping her hands loosely in her lap. “Oh, no! None that were told me, of course.” She turned her face towards him, her eyes brimming with mischief. “It was always We could an if we would whenever we tried—Conway and I—to discover why you were the Wicked Baron. That was our name for you! But no one would tell us, so we were obliged to resort to imagination You wouldn’t believe the crimes we saddled you with! Nothing short of piracy would do for us until Conway, who was always less romantic than I, decided that that must be impossible. I would then have turned you into a highwayman, but even that wouldn’t do for him. He said you had probably killed someone in a duel, and had been forced to flee the country.”
He had been listening to her in amusement, but at that his expression altered. He was still smiling, but not pleasantly, and although he spoke lightly there was a hard note in his voice. “But how acute of Conway! I did kill someone, though not in a duel. My father.”
She was deeply shocked, and demanded: “Who said that to you?” Then, as he merely shrugged, she said: “It was an infamous thing to have said! Idiotish, too!”
“Far from it. The news of my elopement caused him to suffer a stroke, from which he never recovered. Didn’t you know that?”
“Everyone knows it! And also that he died nearly three years later, of a second stroke. Were you accountable for that? To be sure, it was unfortunate you didn’t know he was likely to suffer a stroke, and so were the unwitting cause of it, but if you think he would not have succumbed to it sooner or later you can know very little about the matter! My father had a stroke too: his was fatal. It was not brought about by any shock, and it couldn’t have been averted.” She laid an impulsive hand on one of his, saying earnestly: “I assure you!”
He looked at her, queerly smiling, but whether he mocked himself or her she could not tell. “It doesn’t keep me awake o’ nights, my dear. Not much love was lost between us at the best of times.”
“I didn’t love mine either. In fact, I disliked him. You can’t think how comfortable it is to be able to say that and not fear to be told that I cannot mean it, or that it was my duty to love him! Such nonsense, when he never pretended to care a button for any one of us!”
“Yours seems to have given you little reason to love him, certainly,” he remarked. “Honesty compels me to say, however, that mine had a poor bargain in his only son.”
“Well, if I had an only son—or a dozen sons, for that matter!—I would find something better to do for him when he was in a scrape than cast him off!” declared Venetia. “Would not you?”
“Oh, lord, yes! Who am I to throw stones? I might even make a push to stop him getting into the scrape—though if he were to be half as infatuated as I was I daresay I should fail,” he said reflectively.
After a short pause, during which he seemed to her to be looking back across the years, and with no great pleasure, she ventured to ask: “Did she die?”
His eyes came back to her face, a little startled. “Who? Sophia? Not that I know of. What put that into your head?”
“Only that no one seems to know—and you didn’t marry her—did you?”
“Oh, no!” He saw the troubled look, and grimaced. “You want to know why, do you? Well, if such ancient history interests you, she was not, at the time of Vobster’s death, living under my protection. Oh, don’t look so dismayed!”
“Not dismayed—not that!” she stammered.
“Ah, you feel compassionate? Wasted, my dear! Our mutual passion was violent while it lasted, but soon wore itself out. Fortunately we were saved from dwindling into a state of mutual boredom by the timely appearance on our scene of an accomplished Venetian.”
“An accomplished Venetian!”
“Oh, of the first stare! Handsome, too, and all in print. Air and address were quite beyond my touch!”
“And fortune?” she interpolated.
“That, too. It enabled him to indulge the nattiest of whims! He drove and rode only gray horses, never wore any but black coats, and alw
ays, summer or winter, with a white camellia in his buttonhole.”
“Good God, what a quiz! How could she—Lady Sophia—have liked him?”
“Oh, make no mistake! he was a charming fellow! Besides, poor girl, she had become so devilish bored! Who could blame her for preferring an experienced Tulip to the callow tuft I was in those days? For the life of me I can’t conceive how she contrived to bear with my ardours and jealousies for as long as she did. There were no bounds to my folly: if you can picture Aubrey tail over top in love, I imagine I must have been in much the same style. Chuckfull of scholarship, and with no more commonsense than to bore her to screaming point with classical allusions! I even tried to teach her a little Latin, but the only lesson she learned of me was the art of elopement. She put that into practice before we had reached the stage of murdering one another— for which piece of prudence I’ve lived to thank her. She had her reward, too, for Vobster was so obliging as to break his neck before custom had staled her variety, and her Venetian was induced to marry her. I daresay she threatened to leave him, and he may well have despaired of finding another who would have blended so admirably with his taste for black and white. She had a milky complexion and black hair—raven’s wing black!—and eyes so dark as to appear black at least. A little plump beauty! I’m told she was never afterwards seen abroad except in white gowns and black cloaks, and I’ll swear the effect must have been prodigious!”
The note of derision was marked, but she was not deceived by it. Unable to trust her voice she said nothing, and afraid of showing in her face the indignation that swelled within her she kept her eyes lowered. She made the rather horrifying discovery that the slim fingers of a lady could curl into claws, and quickly straightened them. But perhaps she had not done so quickly enough; or perhaps her silence betrayed her; for after a moment Damerel said, more derisively still: “Did you fancy a tragedy to lie behind me? Nothing so romantic, I fear: it was a farce—not one of the ingredients lacking, down to the inevitable heroic meeting at dawn, with both combatants coming off scatheless—for which I am heartily obliged to my rival! He added superb marksmanship to his other accomplishments, and might have put a bullet through me at double the range, I daresay. In fact, he deloped—fired in the air!”
He had told her now as much as she would ever wish to know. He might jeer at the memory of his younger self, but as keenly as though she had been the sufferer did she feel the wound a light woman and a practised man-of-the-town had dealt his pride. She had brothers, and knew that in his pride a boy was most vulnerable. She thought she could see him quite clearly as he must have been: surely a fine young man, tall, straight, and big-shouldered as he was now, but with a face unlined, and eyes full of eagerness, not boredom. He must have been rash, ardent, and perhaps he had been desperately in earnest. Experience had made him a cynic, but he had not been cynical in his fiery youth. He had not then, she knew, been able even to smile at his own folly.
Everything he had done since he had seen himself as a laughing-stock (and she neither knew nor cared to what depths he might have sunk) she perceived to be part of a pattern made inevitable by a wanton’s betrayal. Had they supposed, his righteous parents, that he would return to enact the role of the prodigal son? They should have known better! He might have returned, wedded to his wanton, outfacing the censorious, not, though he ruined himself past recovery, as a cuckolded lover. Ishmael his family had declared him to be, and Ishmael he had chosen to remain, taking a perverse pleasure, she guessed, in providing the interested with rich evidence of his depravity. And all for a little, plump, black-eyed slut, older than himself, whose marriage-ring and noble degree hid the soul of a courtesan!
“Too bad, wasn’t it?” Damerel said. “Instead of dying heroically for love I was left disconsolate—though not, I must admit, for long!”
She raised her eyes at that, and said warmly: “I am excessively glad to hear that, and I do hope your next mistress was entertaining as well as pretty!”
The sneer vanished from his face; the smile that lit his eyes was one of pure amusement. “A charming little ladybird!” he assured her.
“Good! What a fortunate escape you had, to be sure! I daresay it may not have occurred to you, but I have little doubt that by this time Lady Sophia has grown sadly fat. They do, you know, little plump women! I believe the Italians use a great deal of oil in their cookery, too, which would be fatal! I only wish she may not be quite gross!” She added, as his shoulders began to shake: “You may laugh, but I assure you it’s more than likely. What’s more, if your father had warned you of it, instead of behaving in a very foolish and extravagant way, exactly like a Shakespearian father, it would have been very much more to the purpose! Pray, what good did it do old Capulet to fly into a ridiculous passion? Or Lear, or Hermia’s absurd father! But perhaps Lord Damerel was not addicted to Shakespeare?”
His head was down on his hands; he gasped: “It seems he cannot have been!”
Recollecting herself, she said apologetically: “I shouldn’t have said that. It is quite the worst of my bad habits—Aubrey’s too! We say precisely what we happen to be thinking, without pausing to reflect. I beg your pardon!”
He raised his head, still choking with laughter, and said: “Oh, no no! Sweet Mind, then speak yourself ... !”
She wrinkled her brow, and then directed a look of enquiry at him.
“What, lurched, O well-read Miss Lanyon?” he said provocatively. “It was written by Ben Jonson, of another Venetia. I turned it up last night, after you had left me.”
“No, is it indeed so?” she exclaimed, surprised and pleased. “I never heard it before! In fact, I didn’t know there had been any poems written to a Venetia. What was she like?”
“Like yourself, if John Aubrey is to be believed: a beautiful desirable creature!”
Quite unmoved by this tribute, she replied seriously: “I wish you won’t fall into flowery commonplace! It makes you sound like a would-be beau at the York Assemblies!”
“You little wretch!” he exclaimed.
“That’s much better—between friends!” she approved, laughing at him.
“So you think I’m offering you Spanish coin, do you? I can’t imagine why you should, for you know how beautiful you are! You told me so!”
“I?” she gasped. ‘“I never said such a thing!”
“But you did! You were picking blackberries at the time— my blackberries!”
“Oh! Well, that was only to give you a set-down!” she said, blushing a little.
“Good God, girl, and you said you had a mirror!”
“So I have, and it tells me that I am well-enough. I believe I take after my mother in some degree—at least, Nurse told me once, when I was indulging a fit of vanity, that I should never be equal to her.”
“She was mistaken.”
“Oh, did you know her?” she asked quickly. “She died when I was only ten years old, you know, and I can scarcely remember her. We saw so little of her: she and Papa were always away, and her likeness was never taken. Or, if it was, Papa destroyed it when she died. He could not bear even to hear her name spoken—forbade the least mention of her! And no one ever did mention her at Undershaw, except Nurse, on that one occasion. I think it an odd way of showing one’s devotion, but then he was odd. Do I resemble her at all?”
“I suppose some might think so. Her features—as I recall—were more perfect than yours, but your hair is a richer gold, your eyes a deeper blue, and your smile is by far the sweeter.”
“Oh dear, now you are back in your nonsensical vein! You cannot possibly remember at this distance of time how blue her eyes were, or how gold her hair, so stop hoaxing me!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly. “I had far rather talk of your eyes, or even of your pretty lips, which you quite wrongly described as indifferent red.”
“I cannot conceive,” she interrupted, with some severity, “why you will persist in recalling an episode which you would do better to forget!”
“Can’t you?” He put out his hand, and took her chin in his long fingers, tilting it up. “Perhaps to remind you, my dear, that although I am obliged at this present to behave with all the propriety of a host it’s only a veneer—and God knows why I should tell you so!”
She removed his hand, but said with a chuckle: “I don’t think your notion of propriety would take in the first circles! And furthermore, my dear friend, it is high time you stopped trying to make everyone believe you are much blacker than you have been painted. That’s a habit you fell into when you were young and foolish, and perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Though also very like Conway, when he used to boast to me of the shocking pranks he played at Eton. Banbury stories, most of them.”
“Thank youl But I have never done that: there has been no need for Banbury stories. With what improbable virtues are you trying to endow me? An exquisite sensibility? Delicacy of principle?”
“Oh, no, nothing of that nature!” she replied, getting up. “I allow you all the vices you choose to claim—indeed, I know you for a gamester, and a shocking rake, and a man of sadly unsteady character!—but I’m not so green that I don’t recognize in you one virtue at least, and one quality.”
“What, is that all? How disappointing! What are they?”
“A well-informed mind, and a great deal of kindness,” she said, laying her hand on his arm, and beginning to stroll with him back to the house.
VII
Edward Yardley returned to Netherfold in a mood of dissatisfaction but with no apprehension that Damerel might prove to be his rival. He had not liked him, and could perceive nothing either in his manners or his appearance that might reasonably be supposed to take Venetia’s fancy. Punctilious himself in every expression of civility, Edward considered that Damerel’s easy carelessness was unbecoming in a man of rank; while his rather abrupt way of talking could only disgust. As for his appearance, it was no great thing, after all: his figure was good, but his countenance was harsh, with features by no means regular, and a swarthy complexion; and there was nothing particularly modish about his raiment. Females, Edward believed, were often dazzled by an air of fashion; and had Damerel worn yellow pantaloons, Hessians of mirror-like gloss, a tightly waisted coat, a monstrous neckcloth, exaggerated shirt-points, rings on his fingers, and fobs dangling at his waist it might have occurred to Edward that he was a dangerous fellow. But Damerel wore a plain riding-coat and buckskin breeches, quite a modest neckcloth, and no other ornaments than a heavy signet ring, and a quizzing-glass: he was no Pink of fashion; he was not even a very down-the-road looking man, though report made him a first-rate driver: quite a top-sawyer, in fact. Edward, who had expected a Corinthian, was disposed to rate him pretty cheap: more squeak than wool, he thought, remembering some of the exotic stories which had filtered back to Yorkshire. He flattered himself that he had never believed the half of them: that noble Roman lady, for instance, who was said to have deserted husband and children to cruise with Damerel in the Mediterranean aboard the yacht which he had had the effrontery to christen Corinth; or the dazzling high-flyer, whose meteoric progress across liberated Europe under his protection had been rendered memorable by the quantites of fresh rose-petals he had caused to be strewn on the floors of her various apartments, and the sea of pink champagne provided for her refreshment. Edward, solemnly trying to compute the cost of this extravagant freak, had certainly not believed that tale; and now that he had met Damerel face to face he wholly discredited it. He had not really been afraid that a sensible female would succumb to the lure of such trumpery magnificence, but when he rode away from the Priory there was an unacknowledged relief in his breast. Damerel might try to make Venetia the object of his gallantry (though he had not seemed to be much impressed by her beauty), but Edward, who knew his own worth, could not feel that he stood in danger of being eclipsed in her eyes by such a brusque, bracket-faced fellow. Females were naturally lacking in judgment, but Edward considered Venetia’s understanding to be superior to that of the generality of her sex, and although she had met few men the three whom she knew well—her father, Conway, and himself—must have provided her with a standard of manners and propriety by which she had enough sense to measure Damerel.
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