Cressida (13 page)

“No!” said Mr. Calverton, with unexpected firmness. He got up and stood looking at her with an expression of alarmed resolution on his face. “Now, look here, Cressy, ” he said, “I’m dashed if I’m going to be hunted by a pair of women in my own house over a matter neither of ’em has the least right to meddle in! I’ve already had Letty ringing a peal over me about it, and I don’t want another from you! Now you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like—no, come to think of it, it’s Rossiter’s house now, but I daresay he won’t object—but only if you’ll agree to stop badgering me over something 
I
can’t do anything about—”

Fortunately for the maintenance of good relations between them, they were interrupted at this point by the sound of Lady Letitia’s footsteps cautiously proceeding down the stairs.

“There’s Letty,” said Mr. Calverton hastily, and bolted, leaving Cressida to make up her mind in some vexation that the only course now left open to her was to approach Rossiter himself on the matter. Perhaps, she thought, if she was very civil to him and represented to him in a quiet and logical manner the impropriety of her uncle s having disposed of a property that had been in the family since the time of Charles I, he would see reason.

But she could not feel very sanguine in this hope. It was far more likely, she considered, that he would be his usual mocking, unco-operative self and that she would lose her temper. As for offering him a considerably higher sum for the house than he had paid for it, she did not think it would serve any good purpose since he had become so odiously rich, but she was prepared, as a last resort, to try this tack as well.

At dinner, which, owing to Lady Letitia’s disapproving silence and Cressida’s feeling of grievance against both Rossiter and her uncle, was not a very comfortable meal, she perfected her plans for her attack upon him. He and Mr. Calverton would, of course, remain in the dining room over their wine after she and Lady Letitia had retired to the Blue Saloon, but when the gentlemen joined them again she must, she thought, contrive a way to have Rossiter to herself, if only for a short time.

A less dashing and experienced young lady might have been hard put to it to find a way to bring this about in such a small party, but Cressida had not gained her reputation for taking the most direct means to an end, regardless of convention, for nothing, and when Rossiter appeared with her uncle in the Blue Saloon and strolled over to her chair she said to him at once, in a composed voice, “It is an intolerably warm evening to remain indoors—don’t you agree? Shall we take a turn in the garden? You may smoke an after-dinner cheroot there without offending Cousin Letty—I daresay you
have 
taken up that habit, like all the other men I know who served in the Peninsula?”

Any other gentleman of her acquaintance—with the possible exception of Addison, who considered that his pretensions to the role of
premier dandy
precluded him from exhibiting any emotion other than boredom—would have accepted this invitation with grateful alacrity; but Rossiter merely gazed down at her with what she felt was a rather sardonically amused expression on his dark face.

“So you haven’t given up yet,” he remarked. “I will say that for you, Cressy—you go down fighting to the last ditch. But it won’t do you the least bit of good, you know. I’m quite immune to your charms, my dear, being well aware that any exhibition of them for my benefit has nothing but the coolest calculation behind it.”

It was on the tip of Cressida’s tongue to return a crushing rejoinder, but she had determined not to allow him to make her lose her temper, and, swallowing her wrath with some difficulty, she gave him an agreeable smile instead.

“Come, Dev,” she said, “you have said yourself that it is folly for us to be at dagger-drawing with each other every time we meet. I
do
want Calverton Place from you—I admit it freely—but I am also stifling in this warm room, and of course Cousin Letty will raise an outcry if I suggest we have the windows opened. Why
do 
people persist in sitting in tightly closed rooms even on the sultriest night?”

She rose as she spoke and, placing her hand on his arm, stood looking up at him, prepared for him to accompany her outside. He grinned and shrugged.

“Very well,” he agreed. “Far be it from me to resist the opportunity for a tête-à-tête with the dashing Miss Calverton. But I warn you in advance, my girl, that you are going to all this trouble for nothing. I have got Calverton Place and I mean to keep it, no matter how inclined you are to play dog in the manger in the affair.”

Once again Cressida swallowed the stinging retort that rose to her lips, and, with an easy word to her uncle, who had sat down warily beside Lady Letitia, evidently considering her as the lesser of two evils, she walked out of the room beside Rossiter.

The Italian garden upon which an eighteenth-century Calverton had lavished a great deal of expense and irritation (having a Scottish gardener at the time who stubbornly resisted all foreign influences) had long since succumbed to the far more potent opposition of Nature: its once-neat box hedges were fantastically overgrown, and a riotous tangle of weeds of every variety known to the countryside reached out to brush the silken skirts of Cressida’s gown as she and Rossiter strolled slowly along the paths.

“What a dreadful place this is!” she said on a determinedly light note, as she saw that Rossiter had obviously no intention of helping her out by beginning the conversation himself. “I can’t think what can have made you consider buying such a ramshackle piece of property! It will obviously require a fortune to set it to rights.

“Yes, I rather think it will,” Rossiter agreed imperturbably. “But I am quite prepared for that, you know. I shall have an army of workmen in here by next month, and I daresay the place will be presentable by autumn, though of course one can’t make gardens in a day.”

He had paused to look critically at a moss-covered stone satyr leaning aslant the path, its wickedly grinning face appearing even more eerie than its creator had probably intended it to be in the first faint starshine of the evening. Cressida, ignoring the satyr and concentrating on the living man, who was even more hateful to her at the moment, said hadn’t he the least intention, then, of even listening to her reasons for wishing him to give up Calverton Place?

“No,” said Rossiter baldly. His black eyes left the satyr and raked her with their uncomfortably penetrating gaze, which the slight, mocking smile curving his lips did little to make more agreeable to her. “My dear good girl, you may leave off smiling so complaisantly and speaking to me in those dulcet tones,” he said. “I’m quite aware you would like to scratch my eyes out, in spite of all this show of amiability—but I can assure you that neither cajolery nor rage will get you Calverton Place. You cannot advance a single reason why I should give it up to you, beyond your dislike of seeing me have it—”

“Oh, what a
detestable
man you are!” Cressida exclaimed, her indignation surfacing at this piece of plain speaking, in spite of her resolution to remain calm. “I have the very best of reasons: I am a Calverton, and you are not!”

“Come—that’s more like it!” Rossiter said, looking appreciatively at her wrathfully sparkling eyes. “I thought we should come to an end of all that amiability before long.

“And no wonder!” said Cressida fulminatingly. “You would try anyone’s patience with that odiously cynical tongue of yours! I have been making every effort to be civil to you—”

“For purely selfish reasons, my girl; don’t forget that,” said Rossiter, quite unmoved by these self-justifying words.

He flicked the moss-grown satyr with a proprietary finger, and it promptly tottered and fell across the path, where it lay glaring balefully up at them.

“Now
see what you have done!” said Cressida, becoming on the instant the outraged landowner. “I daresay it is broken—and an extremely valuable piece!”

“I’ll make you a present of it,” Rossiter said obligingly. “And if it wants repairing, you can send the bill to me.

“What on earth would I do with it?” Cressida asked witheringly, and Rossiter replied at once that he expected Langmere had an Italian garden at each of his country seats, and she could decide after she had married him which it would best suit.

“And who told you, pray, that I am to marry Lord Langmere?” Cressida enquired, with considerable hauteur.

“What—aren’t you? Don’t tell me you are merely having one of your Maygames with that poor devil as well,” Rossiter said bluntly. “You had best break yourself of that habit, Cressy; to say nothing of its not being a pretty one, you will find yourself lurched in the end. Even your fortune won’t bring you a man worth having if you go on in
this
path. It’s not agreeable to be made a fool of before the world, you know. Langmere has my sympathy—”

By the time he had got this far Cressida was so furious that she could scarcely speak.

“Oh!” she gasped. “I wish I were a man, so I could call you out, Dev Rossiter! How
dare
you—
you!
—speak to me so? I didn’t jilt
you
—

“No, my dear, as I understand
that
little affair, it was a matter of mutual agreement, Rossiter said smoothly. His dark eyes wore an expression that was quite unreadable in the faint starshine. “But you were young and green then, and hadn’t yet discovered how amusing it can be to play a man like a fish on a line, and then cut him loose when you have tired of the game. But there is one thing,” he went on, his voice taking on a suddenly sterner note under the jeering lightness with which he had previously spoken, “that I should warn you of. Don’t think to add Miles Harries to the list of your victims or you’ll have me to deal with. He’s not one of your tonnish
cicisbeos
who knows the game as well as you do and can play it with as little heart. ”

He paused, and Cressida said, with awful calm,

“Have you
quite
finished?”

“I think so,” said Rossiter coolly. He took a case from his pocket and extracted a Spanish cigar from it. “I daresay
you
haven’t, but I should advise you in advance to save your breath. Telling me how much you dislike me may relieve your feelings, but the worst bear-garden jaw you can give me won’t change my mind. May I suggest that you join your uncle and Lady Letitia instead? You and she may entertain each other by abusing me to your hearts’ content, and I shall be able to blow a cloud in peace.”

“Yes, I daresay you wish me to go away!” Cressida said, feeling how hot her cheeks were in the darkness and wondering, even in her indignation, how it came about that Rossiter could always penetrate the armour of her fashionable indifference and reduce her to the state of a furious and inelegant schoolgirl. “But I shan’t—not before I’ve said one thing to you! If you
dare
to think I am such a despicable creature as to amuse myself with making a man like Captain Harries fall in love with me, I—I’ll—”

Rossiter flung up a hand. “Very well!” he said ironically. “There’s no need to tell me you’d blow a hole through me for my impertinence if you had the chance; we’ll take that as understood. And I hope I may take it as understood, too, that you’re up to no games with Miles. He’s too good a man to have his heart broken by—”

“By
—?” said Cressida, interrupting him with a dangerous light in her eyes.

“By the reigning toast of the London
ton,
who has no intention whatever of marrying him,” Rossiter finished it blandly.

“And how do
you
know, pray, whom I intend to marry?” Cressida retorted crushingly, and marched away from him down the overgrown path.

But she did not go inside at once when she reached the house. Oddly, she found herself very close to tears, and not tears of rage, but of some hopeless, lost nostalgia, engendered by the soft, still May darkness, by Rossiter’s voice and presence, and by the remembrance of another spring night seven years before when she had walked with him along the prim, neat paths of her great-aunt Estella’s garden in Cheltenham. How deep in love she had fancied herself then!—and now there was nothing left but bitterness, recriminations, this horrid, jarring enmity that they fell into whenever they were together!

Not that it mattered, of course—not in the least! Rossiter would marry that sly, demure little Kitty Chenevix, whom he quite deserved, and she—she would marry Langmere, and become the Queen of London Society, and live happily ever after. Obviously it was the sensible thing to do, and, with the vexed remembrance that she had left her reticule inside and her handkerchief in it, she dashed away with her hand the few hot drops which, despite this happy resolve, had persisted in welling up in her eyes and walked determinedly inside.

“I know you will be relieved to hear, my dear,” Lady Letitia confided to Cressida over the breakfast table the next morning, “that Captain Rossiter has left the house.

I met Arthur as I was coming down the stairs, and he said that he—that is, Captain Rossiter—had had his curricle brought round very early this morning and has gone back to London. Why I do not know, but I cannot but think it is for the best. Perhaps, away from
his
influence, poor Arthur may be made to see the light. ”

Cressida, who had passed a most disagreeably wakeful night, in which she had alternated between wishing fervently that she might never set eyes upon Rossiter again and impatience for the morning to come, so that she might say all the brilliantly crushing things to him that she had unfortunately not thought of during their conversation in the garden, found herself for some reason experiencing a very strange sensation, almost one of disappointment, she might have thought, if that were not so palpably absurd, upon hearing this piece of news.

Of course she was glad that he was gone! she told herself. And to prove it, she poured herself a cup of chocolate, took a piece of buttered toast, and began to eat her breakfast as if she were feeling quite as cheerful as the birds singing outside the window in the bright May morning.