Cressida (18 page)

On the following morning, accordingly, she sent a message to Sir Octavius enquiring if she might consult him on a matter of the utmost importance, and, having received a prompt affirmative response, she was about to leave the house for the City when she was interrupted by the arrival of Lady Dalingridge.

“I shall just stay for the
tiniest
moment, Cressy dear!” said Lady Dalingridge, who had observed Cressida’s bonnet and gloves and the carriage waiting before the door, but had no intention of allowing them to stay her in her course. “I have come, you see, only to warn you of that
charming snake,
Addison—one of the most irresistible men I have ever met, of course, my dear, but quite madly
orgueilleux,
as you know yourself. I remember Prince Pückler-Muskau saying once— you
do
recall Pückler, don’t you?—one of the few really 
attractive
Germans we have had over here, I have always said, and it never surprised me that he came within amesace of carrying off Lady Lansdowne and her fortune before her daughter thrust a spoke into his wheel—but, at any rate, he was used to say that he could
not
understand why our English dandies felt called upon to avenge even the most unimportant social slight in the most
vindictive
way. Really quite appalling, it appeared to him, and I must say that in Addison’s case it is
not
an exaggeration.
Do
you think he might find some excuse now to call Rossiter out?”

“Not,” said Cressida impatiently, “unless he wishes to make himself ridiculous by giving notice to the world that he cares whether Rossiter marries Kitty or not. And now, Dolly, I really must—”

“—go. Yes, I know,” said Lady Dalingridge obligingly, but making no move to arise from the very comfortable armchair in which she had seated herself. “And I really shan’t keep you more than a
moment
longer—only I thought you and Lady Con
ought
to know, since you are in the way of being responsible for Miss Chenevix at present, that they are laying bets at White’s that Addison will have the girl in the end, after all. Dalingridge was there after the Maybridge ball last night, and he says the affair has caused the most extraordinary brouhaha— which is no great wonder, of course, because everyone has
seen
from the start that Addison was quite green over Rossiter’s having been taken up by the
ton
without
his 
approval, and then this affair of the girl—”

“Yes—well, you must tell Lady Con all about it; I can hear her coming downstairs now,” said Cressida, still more impatiently; and she made good her escape and went out to her carriage.

She was shown into Sir Octavius’s office at once when she arrived, and it was not until she had sat down in her favourite gondola armchair and heard his first quizzical enquiry as to what had brought her to him in such urgent haste that it occurred to her that she had no idea how to begin upon her tale, or what she expected Sir Octavius to do when she had finished it.

To her intense surprise, however, Sir Octavius, seeing her at a loss, at once began upon the matter himself.

“I hear,” he remarked, with a kindly air, “that Rossiter has asked Miss Chenevix to marry him.”

Cressida stared at him. “Yes, he has,” she said. “But how did you—?”

“How did I know it was that affair that you had come to see me about in such alarmed haste? Really, my dear Cressy, you must not take me for a complete clothhead,” Sir Octavius said, leaning back comfortably in his chair, his dark eyes amused. “It has been perfectly obvious to me from the first time I saw you and Rossiter together in this office that the two of you were top-over-tail in love with each other. Nothing else would account for the quite ferocious rudeness of your manner towards each other. And why else,” he continued inexorably, as Cressida attempted to put in a word, “do you think I informed you, as soon as I heard of it, that Rossiter was buying Calverton Place, except to send you after him and give you both every opportunity to quarrel yourselves to a standstill and then make up your differences, as people in love are so frequently apt to do? I gather that in this case, though, the plot failed to achieve its purpose.”

“Yes, it did,” Cressida said with some asperity. “So you needn’t have been so devious, after all. I loathe and despise devious people!”

“Which is exactly why you have come to me today,” Sir Octavius said mildly. “But very well, then—since you so much prefer frankness, why don’t you simply tell Rossiter that you are in love with him and would like him to marry you instead of Miss Chenevix?”

“As if I could—or
would
—do such a thing! Cressida said indignantly. “You know that is utterly impossible!” “Do I?” said Sir Octavius. He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, perhaps I do. We should have no three-volume novels if characters came straight to the point and said exactly what was on their minds, and people in real life are so tiresomely apt to behave in the same way, quite as if they had been made up by an author with more pages to fill than matter to put into them. Very well; my second piece of advice to you, then, is to find someone else for Miss Chenevix.”

“But I have! I mean, there is someone!” Cressida said. “Captain Harries is very sincerely attached to her, and would marry her tomorrow if she would have him. But he is nowhere near as rich as Dev, and I am sure she will never consider marrying him as long as she can have Dev instead.

“All of which,” Sir Octavius said, looking at her with his right eyebrow raised very high, “sounds as if you were remarkably certain that Miss Chenevix is not marrying for love.”

“Well, she isn’t,” Cressida said decidedly. “In point of fact, I shouldn’t think it’s likely she knows what it is to fall in love, or ever will. She is one of those ambitious, comfort-loving creatures, like a cat, who will always be concerned only with seeing that she has the largest saucer of cream and the softest velvet cushion in the house. And if that makes
me
sound like the biggest cat in Christendom,” she added reflectively, “I really can’t help it, because it is true.”

“Never having met the young lady, I am not able to give an opinion in the matter,” Sir Octavius said. “But I 
do
know Rossiter, and I should say it was in the highest degree unlikely that he should have captivated a young lady of the description you have given. If Miss Chenevix were romantically inclined, that, of course, would be another matter: he has all the ingredients necessary to inspire a fatal passion in a young lady of
that
turn of mind. But in a girl of a—as you have so eloquently described it —feline temperament, no. He is far too brusque-mannered to inspire anything but distaste in her. So if you are right, it is merely his fortune and position that are attracting her, and it therefore seems to me that we shall be quite justified in thrusting a spoke into her wheel.

Cressida said rather despairingly that she would like very much to thrust in several, if she thought there was the least chance Rossiter still cared for her; but she could not be at all sure of that.

“You see, he thinks I have behaved very badly about Langmere, and so I have, only I never should have done if
he
hadn’t come back to England, ” she said. “And 
now
he thinks I am in love with Miles Harries, or at least that I am trying to lure him into my clutches, like a villainess in a melodrama. ”

“Good God, why should he think that?” Sir Octavius enquired, and Cressida told him rather guiltily about the scene on the balcony at the Maybridges’ the night before.

“I
don’t
know,” said Sir Octavius resignedly, when she had concluded, “why things of that sort always appear to happen to you. I daresay it is because you are so devastatingly attractive that men can’t help thinking the worst of you. If you were plain, now, it would make matters a great deal simpler for me.”

Cressida said rather rebelliously that if she were plain Rossiter wouldn’t wish to marry her.

“Oh yes, he would,’ Sir Octavius said. “He fell in love with you when you were—I won’t say plain, for that you never were, but a hobbledehoy schoolgirl with not the faintest notion of how to dress or carry yourself, exactly as you were when I saw you first. And now you have turned into the dashing Miss Calverton, with all London at your feet, and of course he thinks you are a heartless Jezebel. He sighed. “Very well,’ he said, “you may dine with me on Wednesday next—you, and Miss Chenevix, and, if you can persuade her, Lady Constance. I shall send cards to Rossiter and Harries, too, of course. It will be a very uncomfortable dinner party, but I daresay no worse than most.”

Cressida stared at him. “But why a dinner-party?” she enquired. “What purpose will that possibly serve—?” For one thing, my dear, it will bring you and Rossiter together in the same room without five or six hundred other people there as well to complicate matters, Sir Octavius said. “And for another, it will give you something to occupy your mind over the next several days while Rossiter and Miss Chenevix go through the process—as we must devoutly hope they will—of discovering that being engaged to each other is not quite so agreeable as they may have imagined it would be. And in the third place, it will give me an opportunity to meddle, which is why you came to me in the first place, isn’t it? So go away now, my good child; I am very busy this morning, and have no more time to devote to love’s complications!”

This speech sent Cressida home in a rather chastened, but much more hopeful, mood, and as she had great reliance upon Sir Octavius, she was able to face the ensuing days quite well, with their inevitable accompaniment of congratulatory calls upon Kitty, Lady Constance’s vacillations between being very proud of herself and guilty interludes of feeling she had ruined Cressida’s life, and Rossiter’s occasional presence in the house when he came to take Kitty for a drive in the Park.

It did not escape Cressida’s notice that, after these latter excursions, Kitty returned to the house looking notably subdued. She never confided to either Cressida or Lady Constance the circumstances that had caused this, but Cressida heard from Dolly Dalingridge that Rossiter had on one occasion encouraged his affianced bride to take the reins of his phaeton in an effort to teach her to drive, and that she had shown herself so inept a pupil that he had restrained his temper with difficulty, treated her to a brief, biting lecture, and promised never to allow her to handle any of his cattle again.

“And after that, of course,” Dolly had continued, “Addison must come up to them on that splendid new bay of his and begin paying the girl the most extravagantly
galant
compliments, so that he drew her quite out of the combination of sulks and terrors she had fallen into. If you wish
my
opinion, she is far more
éprise
with him than she has ever been with Rossiter, and no wonder, for he lays himself out to be at his most charming whenever he is with her. And Rossiter sat there paying them not the slightest heed, merely looking
bleak,
my dear, and then he whipped up his horses and off they flew, leaving Addison in the middle of a compliment. One can’t think, 
really,
why Rossiter ever offered for the girl, for it is quite clear that they will never suit; but she has got him, and I daresay she means to keep him. Quite penniless, one hears, and they say
he
is rich enough now to buy an Abbey—

All this was of mixed comfort to Cressida, since no matter how satisfactory it might be to have her conviction confirmed that Rossiter did not care for Kitty, it was just as unsatisfactory to reflect that there was no honourable way for him to cry off from his obligation to marry her, so long as Kitty chose to hold him to it. But she possessed her soul in tolerable patience until the Wednesday evening, when she, Kitty, and Lady Constance (the latter under protest, for she could never forget that Sir Octavius, in spite of his present eminence, had begun his career in a counting-house) drove to the elegant mansion in Pall Mall that was Sir Octavius’s residence when he was in town.

Lady Constance, of course, had never entered that austerely gracious portal before, but Cressida could see that she was immediately struck by the luxury and taste that surrounded her as soon as she had stepped across the threshold. Sir Octavius, the friend and patron of most of the great figures in the London world of art and literature over the past thirty years, had been over that same period an amateur of the arts whose collection was the envy of the most knowledgeable connoisseurs in the kingdom. Chinese porcelains, French boiseries and tapestries, a rare red-figured Etruscan hydria, a mediaeval silver bowl ingeniously decorated with chased and engraved letters from the old black-letter alphabet, Flemish miniatures, Oriental japanned cabinets—each apartment contained something unusual and exquisite, displayed with unerring taste.

Cressida, who had dined at the house on several previous occasions, was quite prepared to be dazzled anew, but she saw Lady Constance’s eyes narrow appreciatively as they took in the splendours that surrounded her
—“So
like the Single Cube Room at Wilton,” she complimented the magnificent proportions of the drawing room, with its chimney-pieces of Italian marble, its ornate coved ceiling, and its exuberant display of carved and gilded wood—and even Kitty, whose idea of art did not go beyond the latest design for her tambour-work, was obviously overawed.

Perhaps fortunately for Cressida’s self-composure, Rossiter had not yet put in an appearance before she and her party arrived, and they found only Captain Harries seated with their host. She was therefore able to greet Rossiter, when he did come in, from the advantageous position of being a member of a group, and was further buoyed up by seeing that, unlike her, he had obviously had no advance information as to whom he was to meet that evening.

This rather surprised her, as she had expected, as a matter of course, that Kitty would have told him; but she soon discovered that communication between the two betrothed lovers scarcely seemed to be of the sort to encourage confidences even of an ordinary social nature. They were placed side by side at dinner, but their conversation, from what Cressida could hear of it, consisted of the merest commonplaces, and each appeared relieved when able to turn to converse with the person upon his or her other side.