Cressida (19 page)

“They
can’t
care a groat for each other!’ Cressida thought, which reflection ought to have lifted her spirits considerably; but since Rossiter’s manner towards
her 
was so cool as to make his attitude towards Kitty seem, by contrast, positively ardent, she really found very little in the situation upon which to congratulate herself.

As was customary, Sir Octavius kept his gentlemen for some time in the dining room over their wine after the ladies had retired to the drawing room, during which period Cressida had ample opportunity to wonder what on earth he expected to accomplish from this extraordinarily dull and uncomfortable dinner-party. She also wondered whether she would have the opportunity to speak privately to Rossiter which Sir Octavius had apparently intended her to have, and, if so, what she would say to him.

Everything must depend, she felt, upon Rossiter’s own attitude—and that that attitude had undergone a marked change for the worse, as far as she was concerned, during the period he had spent with Sir Octavius and Captain Harries in the dining room, was at once apparent when he entered the drawing room. Coolness seemed to have given way to a definite exasperation, and the look he bent upon her was so decidedly unfriendly that she hastily moved to a table at the other side of the room and picked up Pococke’s
Description of the East,
which lay upon it.

But Sir Octavius, who could be as masterful when the situation demanded it as he could be subtle when subtlety was called for, soon put an end to this temporising.

“Now, Cressy, my dear,” he said, firmly taking Mr. Pococke’s volume from her and replacing it upon the table, “I shall show you my Egyptian Room. It is quite complete at all points now, and I know you will find it interesting. Come along. And, as she moved off obediently down the room with him, he went on, steering her over to the chaste Adam mantelpiece against which Rossiter was moodily leaning, “I shan’t bore the others with it, but you, Rossiter”—drawing the unwilling Captain irresistibly into his orbit—“will enjoy having a look at it. My new Egyptian Room, that is.” And he repeated, this time for the Captain’s benefit, “Come along. ”

Unless Rossiter was prepared to be very rude indeed to his host and state firmly that he had not the least interest in seeing the Egyptian Room, there was nothing for it but for him to accompany Sir Octavius and Cressida across the broad hall to a small apartment decorated in the pale yellows and bluish greens, relieved by black and gold, which, as Sir Octavius kindly informed them, predominated among the pigments of ancient Egypt.

“You might note particularly the statue of Sen-Nefer,” he remarked, as he led them into the room. “A very unusual piece, I believe. And now I must rejoin my other guests. ”

He went off with his blandest smile, leaving Cressida and Rossiter confronting each other before the massive granite figure to which he had referred. It was Rossiter who spoke first, with a slight, contemptuous curl of the lip.

“Transparent!” he said. “Is this your doing? But for what purpose? If it is to assure me that that little scene I witnessed that night at the Maybridges’ leaves you entirely innocent of any designs upon Miles, Mayr has already contrived to drop a word in my ear to let me know how matters stand in that regard. And it is a pity,” he went on in an even more savage tone, for quite evidently he had been driven to the very end of his patience by this evening of discomfort and sudden revelation, “that no one had the wit to inform me of Miles’s attachment for Miss Chenevix before I offered for her myself! It had been
my
understanding that he was dangling after you!”

If Cressida had done what any intelligent young woman would have done, and what she had fully determined beforehand to do should any opportunity for such action present itself, she would have melted into tears, cast herself upon Rossiter’s breast, and declared her own love for him in modest, though shaken, accents.

What she actually did, however, was to say with entire candour and considerable spirit that if he hadn’t been a nodcock he would have been able to see for himself how matters stood. She then realised that she had said quite the wrong thing, and in an effort to retrieve her mistake began hastily to speak again, but was at once interrupted by Rossiter.

“How the devil,” he demanded wrathfully, “was I to know how matters stood when Miles was underfoot in Mount Street every time I stepped inside your front door? And then to come upon him embracing you—”

“In a purely
brotherly
way,” Cressida interjected with great hauteur, her chin well up in the air.

“Very well: in a
brotherly
way, if you insist! But embracing you, all the same! If you weren’t such a curst flirt—”

“I do
not
flirt! And especially not with someone like Miles. I
told
you I wouldn’t!” said Cressida indignantly, rapidly finding the pose of aloof superiority she had adopted in her preceding speech quite inadequate for the occasion and descending to more earthbound levels.

“Exactly!” said Rossiter grimly. “You told me you wouldn’t, and—the more fool I!—I believed you! Which is why, when I saw the two of you together at that damnable ball, I thought it must be serious and that you— that he—”

“Oh, Dev!” exclaimed Cressida, halfway between laughter and tears at this sudden revelation of the state of mind that had led to that abrupt proposal of marriage at the Maybridges’ ball. “Do you mean you thought Miles and I were intending to marry and
that
was why you went and offered for Kitty in the middle of a set of country dances? But how
could
you? You
must
think me the most fickle creature alive, to be turning Langmere off in one breath and taking poor Miles on in the next!”

“I have good reason,” said Rossiter scathingly, “to think you the most fickle creature alive, my girl! Since I have come back to London I have had nothing but tales of your conquests dinned into my ears—how you have had one poor devil after another dangling at your shoestrings, leading each of them up to the very brink of matrimony before you turn cat in pan and are off again after greener fields! But if you are thinking you have added me to your list, you are fair and far off! God knows, if I had had the slightest inkling that Miles had formed an attachment for Miss Chenevix, I should never have made her an offer myself; but if it hadn’t been Miss Chenevix, I can assure you that it would have been any other female in London rather than you! He broke off, regarding her now stormy face inimicably, and then went on, between shut teeth, “What is it, exactly, that you want of me. Cressy? To prove to yourself that you can whistle me back whenever you wish, as you can all the others? Well, I will tell you now, there is not the least chance of that! I’ve no fancy to be made a bobbing-block for the whole town to snigger over, as Langmere was when you flung
him
off—”

“Oh! ” gasped Cressida, who could contain herself no longer. “What a
contemptible
wretch you are! As if I 
wished
to make Leonard unhappy, or ridiculous!
I
have been far more unhappy, I am sure, than he! But that, of course, is nothing to you! And if I,” she went on, so full of rage and disappointment now that she could scarcely control her shaking voice, “am the last woman in London you would wish to offer for, you may be assured that
you 
are the last man in London from whom I should accept an offer! Arrogant, disagreeable, unreasonable—I am sure I pity poor Kitty Chenevix from the bottom of my heart!”

She could not remain a moment longer, she felt, facing him before that great, serene statue, which had endured in its granite impassivity for thousands of years while lovers had quarrelled and broken their hearts and disappeared into the darkness of time past. She moved swiftly past him out of the room, pausing in the hall, beneath the equally impassive gaze of a liveried footman stationed beside the door, to dash the angry tears from her eyes before she re-entered the drawing room.

If she had not been so taken up with her own unhappy feelings, the tableau she saw before her as she came into the room might have given her a moment’s astonished pause. Captain Harries and Kitty stood together at the far end of the room before a large, glass-fronted case containing a magnificent display of early seventeenth century Le Bourgeoys flintlocks, their stocks decorated with silver, mother-of-pearl, gilt brass, and carved ivory. These they appeared to be examining, although far more interested, it seemed, in their own conversation than in the display before them, while beside the fireplace Lady Constance and Sir Octavius sat together, deep in confidential talk. So absorbed were the latter two, in fact, that for a few moments neither of them was aware of Cressida’s presence. What they could be finding to talk of, upon this their first meeting, that was of such great mutual interest Cressida could not imagine, but she distinctly overheard the words, “marriage settlements,” uttered by Lady Constance as she trod across the carpet towards them, and she wondered bitterly if it were possible that even Sir Octavius had so far despaired of her cause, despite his own efforts in her behalf, that he was now discussing with Lady Constance the settlements that Rossiter would make upon Kitty when they were married.

Still there was, she considered in slight surprise as she sat down beside them, a distinctly startled, almost guilty, look upon Lady Constance’s face as she looked up and saw her, which would scarcely have been the case had she merely been talking of Kitty, and even Sir Octavius’s usual quizzical calm seemed to have deserted him momentarily. A certain unwonted air of satisfaction was evident in his manner, and there was a gleam in those ordinarily shrewdly veiled dark eyes which, men active upon Change might have informed her (some very ruefully), appeared there only when their owner had concluded a most advantageous bargain.

Cressida, however, was in no case to speculate upon the significance of these details, being fully occupied with her own harried emotions, which were divided at the moment between despair at her having thrown away her last chance to detach Rossiter from Kitty and a feeling of vengeful satisfaction at having at least given as good as she had got during the disagreeable scene that had just taken place in the Egyptian Room. Not even with the penalty of going through life with a permanently broken heart, she thought impenitently, would she had given up the satisfaction of rejecting him as rudely as he had rejected her. And this consideration was sufficient to carry her, with battle colours still flying, through the remainder of the evening, which fortunately was of no long duration, for Rossiter, upon returning to the drawing room, almost immediately took his departure.

This was the signal for Cressida to indicate a wish to do likewise, and, though Lady Constance showed a surprising unwillingness to leave so soon, and even Kitty, who was being consoled in the most agreeable manner for Rossiter’s almost total neglect of her that evening by Captain Harness’s modestly admiring attentions, seemed more eager to remain than to go, Cressida carried the day, and the carriage was sent for.

In the hall, as they were taking leave of their host, Sir Octavius took the opportunity to have a private word with her.

“I gather,” he said, looking at her shrewdly, “my meddling was to no good effect?

“None whatever,” she said shortly, drawing on her gloves.

“A pity!” said Sir Otavius, and added enigmatically, “I should otherwise have considered this a most successful evening.”

She glanced up at him in astonishment, but the carriage had been brought round and the others were already going out the door. There was nothing for her to do but to follow them, and so she did, but what possible sort of success Sir Octavius could have attributed to an evening that had been, so far as she had been able to see compounded merely of dullness and frustration, it was beyond her powers of imagination to conceive.

The upshot of the evening, as far as she herself was concerned, was that it had ended as it had begun—with Rossiter as firmly betrothed to Kitty as ever, and with his still having not the least notion of the true state of her feelings towards him. The entire situation was, she considered, in a hopeless muddle, and so despondent was she over it that she almost wished that the letter that had been sent off to Kitty’s mama in Devonshire, informing her of the splendid prospect before her daughter and requesting her blessing upon the engagement, might receive an affirmative reply the very next day, so that immediate arrangements might be made for the wedding.

“Once he is actually married, I daresay I shall be able to put him out of my mind quite easily,” she told herself the next morning, with more bravado than conviction; and to prove to herself how little she really cared for the odious Captain, she accepted an invitation from a very dashing Polish count to drive out to the Botanical Gardens, where she flirted outrageously with him and promised him that he might escort her to the Venetian breakfast that was to be given at a great house in Chiswick the following day.

All of which in no way lifted the oppression of spirit that had lain so heavily upon her ever since the evening of the Maybridges’ ball, and as she entered the front door of her house in Mount Street, after bidding farewell in her gayest voice to the Polish count, she was hoping devoutly that no one had, or would, come to call upon them, as what she would really like to do was to go upstairs to her own bedchamber and cry her eyes out.

Her wish was fulfilled to the extent that no sound of polite conversation reached her ears as she passed the drawing-room door, but she had not gone five paces past it before Lady Constance suddenly emerged from it and pounced upon her.

“Oh, Cressy, I am
so
glad you are come home!” she exclaimed, and Cressida saw with some surprise that her face wore an expression of highly affronted agitation upon it. “I have not the
least
notion what to do,” she went on, “and there is that wretched girl upstairs pretending to be doing nothing more wicked than mending a rent in my puce satin gown, when all the while I
know 
what is in her mind, and that she is merely
waiting
for this note to be brought to her!” And to Cressida’s astonishment she thrust a crumpled sheet of notepaper into her hand, adding tragically, “I
knew,
of course, the moment I came upon Harbage with it a few minutes ago and he said Mr. Addison’s groom had brought it by hand for Miss Chenevix, what it was! I think I must have had a premonition! So I said I would take it to her myself, and instead I opened it and read it—such a really
immoral 
thing to do, I daresay, but then it would have been even 
more
wicked to let her read it, when I
knew
it could mean nothing but mischief! It has all seemed
quite
too good to be true, you see—such a
very
advantageous offer, and in her first Season—and now she is going to throw it all away, and be ruined, besides, for Addison will
never
marry her, you know, no matter what he says!”