Cressida (15 page)

“And as a result,” she told herself in a cold fury, as she began to walk on slowly again towards that blinding sun-dazzle, “you have all but flung him into Kitty Chenevix’s arms! What a
fool
you have been, Cressy Calverton! What a self-willed, destructive little fool! And now you will have to live with what you have done for the rest of your life!”

But even as the words said themselves in her head, she knew that they were not true. She had been a fool— yes, there was no denying that. But if anything she could do or say now had the power of erasing the effects of her stupid and odious behaviour, she was certainly going to do and say it. She had not stopped loving Dev Rossiter— it was no good not admitting that to herself now—and if there was even the remotest chance that, in spite of all her disagreeableness to him and the disagreeableness to her that it had evoked in return, he still cared for her as well, she was most assuredly going to give him every opportunity to discover that his feelings were reciprocated.

The first step along this line obviously was an immediate departure from Calverton Place, and she accordingly turned her steps back at once towards the house. As she was entering the front door she came upon Arthur Calverton, and requested him without ceremony to send round to the stables and have her chaise made ready at once to leave for London.

“What—leaving already?” Mr. Calverton enquired, looking astonished but also somewhat relieved. “I don’t know what’s got into people this morning—first Rossiter haring off at the crack of dawn, after he’d told me he was going to stop till the end of the week, and now you—” Cressida, coming out of her preoccupation with her own disturbed thoughts, gave him her sudden mischievous smile.

“And
don’t
tell me you won’t be happy to see my back, she said, “because I know differently. Where is Cousin Letty? I must see her, too, before I go.”

“You aren’t thinking of taking her with you?” Arthur Calverton said hopefully. “No reason for her to stop on here now—”

“What, and wait hours for her to decide whether she wishes to go or not and then for her to pack up her things? I am in the greatest haste to leave, Uncle Arthur! Please understand that, and have that message sent round to the stables at once!”

She then walked up the stairs in search of Moodle, leaving Mr. Calverton quite bewildered by this sudden burning desire of hers to quit the premises, and had the good fortune to come upon Lady Letitia just emerging from her bedchamber with a very damp handkerchief in her hand, into which she had been crying without interruption ever since Cressida had left the house.

“Oh, Cousin Letty, how
glad
I am to see you!” Cressida said, swooping down upon her and enveloping her in such a violently affectionate embrace that Lady Letitia was quite terrified. “I am off for London at once, but first I must thank you for telling me everything! And if things do not turn out exactly as I wish, you really must not blame yourself, for it was not in the least your fault, I know, because Great-aunt Estella could always bullock people into doing anything she wished them to!”

She then vanished into her own bedchamber, where she was immediately to be heard instructing Moodle to pack up her portmanteaux in the greatest haste. Lady Letitia, left alone and bewildered in the passage, had the dreadful feeling that somehow she had managed, by her revelations, to open Pandora’s box (though what was in that mysterious casket she had not the faintest idea) and thought she might be going to cry again, but on the whole found the situation too interesting to take the time for it, and went off instead into a state of rather agitating but highly gratifying romantic speculation.

It was not until her travelling-chaise was bowling well on its way over the grey-green Cotswold hills that it occurred to Cressida that it was all very well for her to be pelting back to London as fast as she could go, but that once she arrived there she had not the least idea how to go about attaining the object that had sent her speeding from Calverton Place in such haste.

If it had been a question of getting up an ordinary flirtation with a man—any man—she had not been six years on the town for nothing, and could have brought the matter about during a single waltz, without missing a step or causing her heart to beat a fraction of a second faster. But it was quite another thing to be obliged to inform one particular man that you had been thinking ill of him without cause for seven years, and had behaved, as a result, quite horridly to him, but that if he wished to fall in love with you now all over again, you would have not the least objection to it.

“The worst of it is, ” she thought despairingly, “that if I simply try to tell him quite frankly how I feel, he will undoubtedly think I am being horrid again, only in a different way, and that I have it in mind to do something very clever and disagreeable as soon as I have brought him round my thumb. And if he says as much to me,
I 
shall certainly lose my temper and it will all end in another quarrel. Deuce take it,
why
must men be so difficult?”

Which was hardly fair to Captain Rossiter, perhaps, as he had certainly been no more difficult than had she; but then her brain was in such a whirl of astonishment, joy, and apprehension at the moment that it was not surprising that her mental processes were, on the whole, more than a little erratic.

The turmoil in her mind was not improved by the additional consideration that the first thing she must do upon reaching London was to send for Lord Langmere and inform him that under no circumstances did she now wish to avail herself of his flattering offer to make her his wife. It was an interview that she looked forward to with no pleasure at all and a considerable sense of guilt, as there could be not the least doubt that she had given his lordship a good deal of reason to expect that his suit would be successful.

However, as it was obvious that she could never convince Rossiter that she was now prepared to accept an offer from
him
unless she had previously made it crystal clear that she had no intention of accepting one from Langmere, it was a deed that had to be done, and her first care, upon reaching London just before noon on the following day, was therefore to sit down at her writing-desk and dash off a note to his lordship, requesting him to call upon her in Mount Street at his earliest convenience.

This was not accomplished without a number of interruptions from Lady Constance, who could not understand why she had had to travel all the way to Gloucestershire only to turn around and come back almost as soon as she had arrived there. She first asked a great many questions, and then told her that Rossiter had stood up for three dances with Kitty at the Russian embassy ball the night before, having arrived very late and made Drew Addison look nohow by taking her down to supper just as Addison, in his infuriatingly superior way, had signified his intention to a select circle of intimates to do her the honour of taking her down himself.

“I
do
think he—I mean Captain Rossiter, of course —is quite upon the verge of making her an offer, ” Lady Constance confided, with justifiable pride at the prospect of bringing such a prize catch into her protegee’s net. “He has been so
very
particular in his attentions, my dear, and everyone is saying now that his buying Calverton Place proves he has the intention of settling himself permanently in England, and that dear Kitty
must
be the bride he has in mind. If only Addison does not contrive somehow to throw a rub in the way—for you know he can be a perfect
fiend
when his vanity is wounded, and he has no regard whatever for what is
comme il faut 
when he is in a rage—I am quite persuaded that we shall see Kitty settled at Calverton Place before the year is out.”

All this, of course, did nothing to soothe the tumult in Cressida’s mind, and it was all she could do not to sit down at once and write another note, this one to Rossiter, requesting him to call in Mount Street too, so that she could tell him how her feelings towards him had changed.

But this was manifestly quite impossible;
that
was a matter that would require far more subtlety than the frank statement she must make to Lord Langmere. She was pleased to gather from Lady Constance’s conversation, at any rate, that she was certain to see Rossiter if she attended the ball to be given that evening by Lady Maybridge in honour of one of the visiting German princelings, as he had signified his intention to be present at it; and she accordingly determined to possess her soul in patience until that time.

Meanwhile, there was Lord Langmere to be faced, who presented himself in Mount Street, with loverlike impatience, a mere half hour after her message to him had been delivered.

“No—don’t!” she was obliged to say to him hastily, putting out both hands to ward off the embrace in which he attempted to enfold her as she trod into the drawing room, where Harbage had bestowed him. “Leonard— dear Leonard, you are at liberty to think me the greatest wretch alive, but I must tell you at once—I cannot marry you. I have had time to think it all over very carefully now, and
indeed
it will not do!”

To say that Lord Langmere was taken aback by this forthright and determined statement would give but a very inadequate impression of his feelings at that moment. There was no room here for hoping that what he had just heard was the blushful temporising of a young lady who was waiting only to be urged to change her mind; he was obliged to believe that he was being given his
congé,
and that Cressida had no intention whatever of altering her resolution in the matter.

Lord Langmere was a mild-mannered man, and to have said that he was deeply in love would have been dignifying by too strong a term, perhaps, his admiration of the dashing Miss Calverton, his pride in having been able to exhibit her preference for him before the world, and his quite genuine intention to settle himself in life with her and to make her the most exemplary of husbands. But even mild-mannered men who are mildly in love do not take kindly to having all their expectations overturned in the twinkling of an eye, and it was therefore scarcely surprising that, as a consequence, a rather painful scene took place in the drawing room of the Mount Street house. His lordship so far forgot himself as to insinuate with some bitterness that he had been led down the garden path; Cressida, though conscious that he spoke with some justice, was much too full of her own troubles to sympathise properly with his, and as a result neglected to sooth him down with asseverations of her undying regard and other bits of flattering nonsense that would at least have sent him away with the comforting conviction that he had been engaging in a star-crossed romance instead of merely making a fool of himself over a heartless flirt.

Accordingly, a quarter hour after he had entered the drawing room he left it hastily and in an obviously black mood, almost caroming into Kitty in the hall, who regarded him thoughtfully and then went on into the drawing room herself to tell Cressida, whom she had not seen since the latter’s return, how pleased she was to have her so soon back in London.

Cressida, who felt that, of all the people in the world she did not wish to see at that moment, Kitty stood highest on the list, said shortly that she was glad to be back, and then added more kindly, wrenching her thoughts with some effort from the scene with Lord Langmere, that she hoped Kitty had been enjoying herself while she had been gone.

“Oh yes, Miss Calverton!” said Kitty, in such a quiet, natural voice that Cressida, who had just had a sudden, rather unpleasant sensation that Kitty’s blue eyes had been regarding her with a sharp and somewhat speculative intensity, thought she must have been mistaken. “I can never thank you enough for giving me such a splendid opportunity,” Kitty continued, her eyes, now radiating sincerity, raised earnestly to Cressida’s.

Cressida wondered momentarily what change might occur in that modest, self-assured demeanour if she were to inform its possessor of the conversation that had taken place between her and Mrs. Mills in Keppel Street, but, being conscious of a certain duplicity in her own behaviour in not informing Kitty frankly of the fact that she intended to do everything in her power to take Rossiter away from her, she scarcely felt that it behooved her to animadvert upon anyone else’s conduct at the moment, and went upstairs to her bedchamber in a rather low mood. This was not improved by the fact that it had just begun to rain in a depressingly steady way that made it quite obvious that it was determined to continue to do so for at least four-and-twenty hours.

Nor were her spirits raised, as the hour approached at which she was to leave for the Maybridges’ ball, and therefore to meet Rossiter for the first time since her feelings towards him had so markedly changed, by the onslaught of a sensation of nervous self-consciousness such as she believed herself to have outgrown years before. She could not decide on which gown to wear, rejected an orange-blossom sarsnet as too missish and a water-green silk as too daring, had Moodle dress her hair in a Sappho and then
à la Tite,
and as a result kept the Honourable Drew Addison, who had condescended to gallant the Mount Street ladies to the ball, cooling his heels in the drawing room with Kitty and Lady Constance for almost half an hour. This brought down upon her several waspish comments, to which she replied so absently that Addison, who was unaccustomed to seeing his barbs fly wide of their target, was irritated all over again.

“I gather, my dear Cressy, that you had no success in persuading the not-so-gallant Captain to give up Calverton Place to you,” he observed pointedly, as he seated himself beside her in the carriage. “No, don’t look surprised, my good child; of course I know all about the reason for that sudden excursion of yours into Gloucestershire. I also know,” he continued suavely as the carriage rolled off down the street, “that Langmere has at last put his fate to the touch and been given his
congé.
Oh yes, my dear; he was at White’s this afternoon, and in such a fit of the blue-devils that one could not help putting two and two together. I believe he won two thousand from Dalingridge at hazard.
Unlucky in love, 
you know—”