Cressida (25 page)

“And that,” said Rossiter reflectively, “puts me nicely in my place, and is my just reward, no doubt, for trying for once in my life to act the
preux chevalier.
Rut how the devil was I to carry you off to follow the drum on a marching officer’s pay when you stood to gain a fortune by the simple fact of my walking out of your life?”

“You might have left the decision to
me,”
Cressida said, still as indignant as it was possible for her to be with his arms about her and her breast pressed so closely to his that she could feel the strong beating of his heart. “If you were so idiotish as to believe a fortune could make me happy—well, it hasn’t! I
tried
to love other people, but I never could—”

“Which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose, for the sort of behaviour that gave
me
every right to believe you had turned into the most heartless flirt in London!” Rossiter said, his dark eyes laughing down at her. “Oh, Cressy, Cressy, what the
devil
of a coil you have put us both through, practically pitchforking me into the arms of that wretched girl, jilting poor Langmere—”

“It was not all
my
fault!’’ Cressida protested, attempting, rather vainly, to speak with some hauteur.

“You should have come back sooner! After all, Great-aunt Estella has been dead for years.”

“As a matter of fact, I did come back,” Rossiter said, “having the poorest opinion of myself as a fellow who had waited only for you to take possession of your fortune before renewing my suit—but then I was still top-over-tail in love, you see, and nobility was wearing rather thin by that time! Only I found you had meanwhile gotten yourself engaged to young Mennin, so it seemed there was nothing for me to do but take myself off again—”

But I didn’t
know
then that you were in love with me,” she protested.

“Nor I that you still cared a button for me,” said Rossiter, and looked down at her with such doubt suddenly in his dark face that she felt her heart turn over with love. “It’s true, isn’t it?” he asked. “You
do
care? I’ve never really dared to hope—not after I walked into Mayr’s office that morning and you looked at me as if I were something you’d turned up under a rock in the garden—”

“I was
odious,’’
Cressida said violently. “I wonder you ever wanted to
see
me again after that!
I
shouldn’t have, if I had been you. ”

But Rossiter declared that not only had he wished then, and always would, to see her again and again and again, but that it was his present intention never to let her out of his sight, no matter how many other people she got engaged to; at which point matters suddenly arrived at such a pass that they were whirled backward in time to become in some mysterious fashion a much younger Captain Deverell Rossiter and a shy and eager Cressy Calverton tasting her first experience of love in the very proper garden of her great-aunt Estella’s Cheltenham villa.

Lady Constance, entering the room without warning, found the fashionable Miss Calverton kissing and being kissed by her tall Captain in a manner that would have astonished the London
ton,
accustomed as they were to considering her a young lady who, however dashing, never lost her elegant composure.

“This is all very well, Cressy dear,” she said, observing with disapproval the unsullied water in the bowl upon the washstand and Rossiter’s unbandaged condition, “and I am very happy to see that you and Captain Rossiter have made up your differences, since it is quite beyond the bounds of reason to expect him to marry Kitty now; but this is
not
what I sent you here to do. ”

She picked up the strip of linen that Cressida had wetted in the bowl and, advancing ruthlessly upon Rossiter, thus obliging him to relinquish his hold upon Cressida, laid bare his injured arm and advised him, in a tone that brooked no opposition, to seat himself while she attended to it. Cressida, in a daze of happiness, looked somewhat rebellious at having the task of ministering to her beloved thus reft from her, but, realising that in her present state she would be far less competent than Lady Constance to do what needed to be done, she contented herself with standing beside him and holding his free hand except when Lady Constance, having finished with his arm, demanded that place for herself so that she could bathe the cut upon his face and put court-plaster upon it.

“I can’t think what you can have been doing to get yourself into such a condition!” she said severely. “Have you been in an accident, in addition to fighting with swords with Addison
?—quite
an outmoded method of duelling, but one which I, personally, find far more romantic than pistols, reminding me as it does of my younger days. ”

Here she looked so sibylline that Cressida and Rossiter regarded her with respectful awe, envisioning dozens of the bewigged, gorgeously satin-coated dandies of an earlier day destroying one another for her favours.

Cressida said proudly that Rossiter had been obliged to overpower two enormous ruffians before he had been able to proceed to rescue her from Addison.

“How very disagreeable!” Lady Constance said placidly. “Where can they have taken themselves off to, I wonder? There is literally no one but ourselves in the house, so that I am very much afraid we shall have to remain here to look after that wretched Addison until someone else can be found to do it. However, I daresay it is all for the best in the end, for it will certainly be quite dark by the time Captain Harries returns with the surgeon, and I have not the least desire to drive all the way back to Welwyn tonight. ”

Cressida, coming out of the new bliss of her happiness, pointed out practically that none of them had dined, and, as there were no servants in the house, it appeared likely that they would be obliged to forage for themselves, and perhaps without a great deal of success.

“Nonsense!” said Lady Constance briskly. “It appeared to me that there was a very acceptable supper laid in the dining room when we came in, and if there is not a sufficiency for everyone, I am sure
something
will be found in the kitchen. I daresay the gentlemen will be happy to dine upon bread and cheese, as Addison, I understand, is an excellent judge of wine and there must certainly be a bottle of something fit to drink in the house.”

Rossiter, who was feeling a little drunk with happiness at the moment without benefit of wine, excellent or otherwise, said that for his part he could live on love, though he would not say no to bread and cheese, but that in his opinion they made a very odd sort of house-party, and the surgeon, finding his patient suffering from a sword wound, might very well insist on taking the matter before a magistrate.

“Oh, no!” said Lady Constance superbly. “Not at all, my dear man! I shall tell him that, as there are no servants in the house, Addison was obliged to help me cut up a chicken for our supper and wounded himself quite by accident.”

Rossiter gave a shout of laughter, and Cressida, though enthralled by the mental picture of the elegant Addison dismembering a fowl, protested, “But he won’t believe you!”

“Of course he won’t. But he won’t be able to
prove
that it wasn’t so,” said Lady Constance triumphantly, “which is what is always so useful about lies. I mean, it is other people who have to prove they aren’t true. And,” she added, her eyes kindling ominously, “if Addison says a
word
to the contrary, he knows very well what sort of tales will shortly be making the rounds about
him.
But he won’t. He has told me that he intends to take my advice and go abroad for an indefinite stay—which I would say is a
far
better fate than he deserves, except that I have never seen you look so happy, my dear Cressy, which is all
his
doing if one really examines the matter. And then I daresay I shall be able to get Kitty off, too, in the end. Captain Harries seems
quite
taken with her, and I am sure this experience will suffice to lower her crest a little and cause her to see the value of True Worth in a man, rather than looking for nothing but Fortune. Which reminds me,” she added complacently, “that I may have neglected to tell you previously that Sir Octavius Mayr and I have decided to be married in the autumn.”

Cressida stared at her, quite staggered by this totally unexpected bombshell.

“You and Octavius—!” she exclaimed. “But you can’t—! I mean, you’ve only just met him!”

“Yes, my dear, but you see he has such a lovely house and such beautiful things in it, and it does become so very tiresome, perpetually being an impecunious widow,” Lady Constance said, picking up the court-plaster and the Basilicum Powder and preparing to return to her other patient. “You have always told me that he is the wisest man you know, and it seems you were quite right. He made up his mind at first sight, he told me, that I am exactly the chatelaine his house—or I should say his house, for he tells me he has a very agreeable place in Kent—require. My Plantagenet blood, you see: when one is a collector, it seems, one wishes for only the finest. So he broached the matter to me on the spot, at his dinner-party—I
do
adore a man of decision, who sweeps one quite off one’s feet!—and then we met very privately at my solicitor’s this morning and set all the arrangements in train. I may add that the settlements he is making upon me are
most
generous.”

And she walked out of the room, leaving Rossiter and Cressida to stare at each other in an astonished silence.

“No, I
cant
believe it!” Cressida said after a moment. “Octavius and Lady Con! Of course he
has
always had a secret ambition to ally himself with Royalty—I believe so many Royal Houses are indebted to him for financial aid that he rather thinks he is deserving of the distinction—and Lady Con really
has
Plantagenet blood. But it has always raised her bristles, you know, when I have merely mentioned his name!”

“Ah, but
that
was before he had proposed marriage to her,” Rossiter reminded her, with laughter in his eyes. “I have noticed that that makes a great difference to most females, particularly if one has a considerable fortune to offer along with one’s hand and heart. In our own case, thank God, it seems unlikely that either of us is marrying the other for his or her fortune, unless one of us is inordinately greedy or you have decided that it is worth taking me so you may get Calverton Place into your hands.”

“Wretch!” said Cressida, who had found that, in the absence of a convenient sofa or tête-à-tête she could share with her love, a footstool drawn up beside the chair in which Lady Constance had obliged him to sit offered a highly satisfactory substitute, enabling his arm to go about her in a very agreeable and comfortable way. “I still can’t think why you wished to have it, except to spite me—but I have decided to forgive you, since I must confess that the only reason
I
wished to have it was to spite
you.
And it is very nice, I daresay, that we are both so rich now that neither of us needs to marry for money.” she went on, “but I
do
think you should have known, my darling, that I would
far
rather have married you years ago and not have had Great-aunt Estella’s fortune. ”

“I know it now,” said Rossiter, and was about to demonstrate how earth-shakingly important he found that knowledge when Lady Constance came back into the room and said that, since Addison was as comfortable as she could make him, she and Kitty were going downstairs to see what could be done about supper, and would they care to come with them?

“No!” said Cressida and Rossiter in one breath; upon which Lady Constance looked at them indulgently.

“Very well; five minutes, then, she conceded. “We shall need you to open the wine, Captain Rossiter, if any is to be found. And remember that you will have all the rest of your lives together. ”

Whereupon she went away, looking more sibylline than ever.

“The rest of our lives!” Cressida said, sighing happily. “What a lovely thought!”

“Yes, but only five minutes now, remember,” Rossiter reminded her, and, unwilling to lose any of that precious time, he forthwith drew her to him and kissed her.