Cressida (6 page)

Cressida said he and the Princess appeared to be very happy, and that she dared say the Princess did not regret now having broken off her engagement to the Prince of Orange, in spite of the furor it had caused at the time. She then bit her lip, wishing she could take back her last remark, as it obviously presented Addison with a perfect opportunity to speak of another broken engagement, namely, hers to Rossiter.

But, somewhat to her surprise, the subject was not brought up, and she was obliged to believe, with a slight sense of chagrin, that she had misjudged Rossiter in accusing him of spreading the tale of that old engagement about, for if anyone else in London, beyond the four persons who had been in Sir Octavius’s office that morning, had heard of it, it was certain that Addison would have done so as well. He knew everyone’s secrets, and had no scruples about using them to their owners’ discomfort.

It was too much, however, to expect that Rossiter’s name would not be brought up at all, which it promptly was, Addison observing in his usual bored way that the lion of the evening, it appeared, had not yet arrived, preferring, like all lions, to do his roaring before the largest possible audience.

“And how many woolly lambs,” he went on, casting a jaundiced eye over the brilliant room, “in the shape of marriageable young ladies with ambitious mamas, are to be trotted out this evening for his inspection, I leave it for you, my dear Cressy, to determine. A half-dozen fabulous Indian rubies—I daresay you have heard that that was the source of the money he plunged with on Change?—transformed into a solid English fortune, will wash out any number of ‘damned spots’ in a man’s past, it seems, in spite of anything Lady Macbeth may say. To continue in the Shakespearean vein, I could a tale unfold, my love, on the subject of Captain Deverell Rossiter, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood—”

“Do stop declaiming, Drew!” said Cressida. “Next you will be telling me that you will cause my knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine—which is not at all in the mode, you know. And I daresay half the stories that are being told of Captain Rossiter are not true, at any rate. Dolly is quite capable of inventing half a dozen hair’s-breadth escapes and amorous adventures singlehanded, only to make her party more interesting.

“But I do so agree, my dearest love,” said Addison. “Undoubtedly he will turn out to be an entirely tame lion, and quite dreadfully dull, as most men of action are. By the bye, I daresay he
is
a gentleman? I have just had the misfortune to be presented to a Captain Harries, who appears to be not only a business associate of his but a close friend as well, and I can assure you that
he
is not 
quite
the thing.”

“Captain Harries? Is he here?” Cressida looked quickly about the room, and had no difficulty in discovering the object of her search at its other end, for as the Captain was head and shoulders taller than most of the other guests, his fair head emerged like the dome of St. Paul’s from the lesser edifices surrounding it. “I must go and speak to him,” she said. “I am quite sure he doesn’t know a soul in this room, and in spite of your slighting remarks, Drew, he is really a very agreeable person.”

“My dear Cressy, to win such a charitable statement from
you,
he must be a paragon! But pray don’t go yet. I want you to present me to your young protegee when Langmere has finished his duty-dance with her. A Miss Chenevix, I understand? A relation of Lady Con’s?”

“Why be interrogative, my dear, when you already know all about it?” asked Cressida, not at all surprised to find Addison wishing to be beforehand of everyone else in the room in discovering all there was to be discovered about Kitty. “But I shall be delighted to present you to her, ” she went on, “if you will promise me to do your possible to bring her into fashion. She is Barry Chenevix’s daughter, you know, and I need not tell you there is no fortune there, so Lady Con will be grateful for help from any quarter in firing her off this Season.”

“If she has
my
help, dear Cressy, she will need no other,” said Addison, who had never been known to hide his light under a bushel. He raised his quizzing-glass the better to survey Kitty as she moved with lightness and precision in the dance, the natural delicacy of her slight figure enhanced by the shimmering white spider-gauze gown. “Passable,” he remarked presently, letting the glass fall,“but not likely to cause a stir. You will be fortunate to get her off this Season in spite of that gown, in which I certainly detect Fanchon’s hand—”

“Luckily, everyone is not so particular as you are,” Cressida said, shrugging slightly. “I fancy she will do well enough: she has the knack of making herself agreeable. Will
you
be agreeable enough to stand up with her for the next set? You know how her credit will rise if it is seen that
you
have condescended to ask her to dance. ”

Addison, whose wits were ordinarily quite as needle-sharp as were hers, received this piece of shameless flattery with entire complacency, and upon the set’s ending and Lord Langmere’s bringing Kitty to Cressida, since Lady Constance had already disappeared into the card-room, he graciously bestowed upon Kitty the desired accolade of soliciting her hand for the country dance that was to follow. As he led her off into the set, Cressida was importuned in turn by Lord Langmere and no fewer than three other gentlemen to allow them to do the same for her, but she denied them all for the moment.

“There is someone I must speak to first,” she said. “Yes, you may have the boulanger, Leonard, and each of you”—to her three other swains—“a waltz, but now do bring that very tall, fair young man standing so mournfully against the wall over there to me. His name is Captain Miles Harries.”

The youngest of her admirers dutifully went off, and Lord Langmere looked at her with an enquiring smile.

“Harries?” he said.

“Yes, said Cressida. “I met him the other day in Octavius Mayr’s office, and he is a lamb, but a very uncomfortable one just now, I am afraid. You must be very kind to him, Leonard, because Addison has just told me in a horrid, blighting way that he is not
quite
the thing, and he is sure to be roundly snubbed if someone does not take him in hand. Oh, Captain Harries, how nice to see you again!” she went on, holding out her hand to the bashful Captain as he came up. “This is Lord Langmere, who is going to take you off presently to the refreshment saloon, where you may have champagne and lobster patties, which are the very best reason, I think, for attending any ball. But first you must come and sit down with me, and tell me what you think of us all.

She led the way to a small gilt sofa set along the wall, out of the way of the dancers, and Captain Harries followed her obediently, but with the look upon his face of a young subaltern going into action for the first time and terrified, not of the danger, but of the possibility of doing something to disgrace his uniform.

“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?” Cressida asked, as he sat down beside her on the edge of the sofa. “I know I must have given you a very poor opinion of me that morning in Octavius Mayr’s office, but I do assure you I am not always so shockingly rag-mannered. That was only because of Dev. I expect you are a great friend of his and never quarrel with him, but we began our acquaintance by coming to cuffs and I am afraid we always will.”

She was then vexed with herself for bringing Rossiter’s name into the conversation, convinced herself that Captain Harries would certainly believe she had desired this tete-a-tete only for the purpose of talking of him, and assumed an air of such coolness that her companion had only the courage to say in a rather abashed way that he and Dev had not quarrelled more than once that he could remember, and that, perhaps, didn’t really signify, because it had only been over a bottle of very poor red wine.

“A bottle of wine?” said Cressida, looking interested and forgetting her vexation.

“Yes, explained the Captain seriously. “You see, there wasn’t any more to be had and I dropped it, but I shouldn’t have done if he hadn’t jogged my elbow. It was in Portugal, and a very thirsty day,” he added, as if that must make everything perfectly clear.

The picture his words conjured up of the dashing current hero of the London
ton
and the fair young giant beside her squabbling like a pair of schoolboys over a broken bottle of cheap red wine was too much for Cressida; she burst out laughing and Captain Harries, looking surprised but a good deal relieved, gave her a rather sheepish grin.

“You must come to Mount Street very soon—perhaps tomorrow?” Cressida said, “and tell me all about your adventures. One can’t talk properly at a ball. Were you at Waterloo? Or had you sold out before that?”

“Yes; Dev and I both sold out in 14, after Boney had been romped and sent to Elba,” said Captain Harries. “You see, Dev had been in India and he wanted to go back—”

“For those fabulous rubies—of course!” Cressida said. “I wish you will tell me all about them tomorrow. I shall be the envy of all my friends if I am the only one of them to know the whole story—unless, of course, Dev decides to spread the tale himself this evening. I understand he
is
to put in an appearance here?”

“Yes—or I shouldn’t be here myself!” the Captain said with a rueful grin. “Nor even have been invited! I’ve told him, there’s no need for him to drag me into it when he is going into Society, for I’m like a cat on a hot bakestone in a place like this—”

“Nonsense!” said Cressida roundly. “You may enjoy yourself here as well as anywhere else in London. I daresay there is not a man here who is not envying you your adventures, to say nothing of those very broad shoulders that cast their own pitiful padded ones quite in the shade! And as for the young ladies—do you care for dancing? I am sure I can introduce you to any number of pretty girls who will be happy to stand up with you.”

A slight flush crept unexpectedly into the Captain’s face, and his blue eyes went to the ballroom floor, lingering there, it seemed, upon one particular dancer.

“Yes, there is—that is, I
should
like you to introduce me to—to one young lady,” he stammered, with an air of some self-consciousness. “The—the young lady who came with you this evening—”

“Miss Chenevix? But of course!” said Cressida cordially. “She will be delighted! She is only just arrived in London, you see, and is as little acquainted here as yourself, for she has lived almost all her life in Devonshire.” Captain Harries, almost interrupting her in his pleasure at the coincidence, said he came from Devonshire himself, and, apparently deciding at about this moment that Cressida was to be considered as friend and not enemy, relaxed sufficiently to talk to her in a quite easy way about his home near Plymouth, and how he hoped in time to become well enough off, owing to his association with Rossiter, to buy a respectable property in that neighbourhood and settle down to a country life.

“I’m not in the least like Dev, you know,” he confided to her. “In fact, I can’t for the life of me see why he chooses to put up with me, except that we’ve been in a fair number of tight places together and—well, we’ve always stood by each other. But
he
is at home to a peg anywhere he goes, whether it’s Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro or London, and there’s no saying, you know, how high he may go if he likes. Why, he might marry the daughter of a duke!”

Cressida, with a quite inexplicably disagreeable feeling somewhere inside her, was about to enquire if Rossiter had any particular duke’s daughter in mind when Captain Harries, his face suddenly brightening, exclaimed, “But here he is now!” and Cressida, following his gaze, saw Rossiter himself, his tall figure showing to excellent advantage in evening-dress which, though entirely fashionable, displayed no affectations of dandyism, standing in the doorway, surveying the brilliant scene before him with something of the cool detachment of a hawk looking over an assemblage of fowls.

It was not to be expected that the lion of the evening would be allowed to progress farther than the doorway of the ballroom before becoming a centre of attention, and Cressida anticipated that her own meeting with him would be long postponed, or—if fortune were with her—not take place at all in the crush of guests crowding the rooms of Dalingridge House.

But she had reckoned without the lion himself—or, it might be more accurate to say, without the hawk, to use the simile that had occurred to her as she had seen him standing in the doorway. For as that keen-eyed predator leisurely selects its victim from its airy circling flight, so Rossiter, from his superior height, gazed around over the lesser heads of the persons clustered about him until, espying
his
victim across the room, he clove a ruthless way through them, with scarcely an apology, towards his object.

As for Cressida, it was not until he was almost upon her that she realised
she
was that object.

“Hallo, Miles!” he greeted Captain Harries. “I see you’ve found your feet: didn’t I tell you you would? Miss Calverton”—he bowed slightly, giving her his wry, sardonic smile— I hope I see you in better temper this evening than on the occasion of our last meeting. And now may I request the honour of standing up with you for the next dance?”

Cressida frankly stared at him. “I
don’t
see why you should care to, after that last meeting!” she said. “But if you are really serious—and I am strongly inclined to doubt that you are!—I may thankfully inform you that I am already engaged. ”

“You are always engaged, it appears!” said Rossiter, regarding her provocatively. “To Lord Langmere this time?”

“Yes, to Lord Langmere—but
not
in the way you are hinting! said Cressida, wondering why it was that Rossiter could always manage to set her hackles up to the extent that she quite forgot her manners. “Only for the next dance.

“A pity! I had expected you would have made quicker work of him. Very well, then. The dance after that.”