Sylvester (16 page)

‘But what about the Duke?’

She considered the Duke. ‘Oh, well, at least I’m not afraid of him! And I must own that although I cannot approve of his conduct—he seems to think he can have anything he wants, you know!—he
has
made us excessively comfortable. Only fancy, Tom! I have a fire in my bedchamber! A thing Mama never allowed at home, except when I have been ill! Then he said he must have a private parlour, and would hire the coffee-room, I daresay not so much as considering whether it might not be inconvenient for Mrs Scaling to give it to him—and of course she didn’t dare say a word, because she is so much dazzled by his being a duke that she would give up the whole house to him if he should take it into his head to wish for it.’

‘I expect he will pay her handsomely—and who would be coming here on such a night?’ said Tom. ‘Are you going to sit down to dinner with him? Shall you find it awkward?’

‘Well, I daresay it may be a trifle awkward,’ she acknowledged. ‘Particularly if he should ask why I am on my way to London. However, he may not do so, because he will very likely still be in a miff with me.’

‘In a miff with you? Why?’ demanded Tom. ‘He didn’t seem to me as though he cared a groat for your having run away!’

‘Oh, no! Only we quarrelled, you see. Would you believe it? He had the intention of sending poor Keighley to fetch the surgeon! It put me in such a passion that there was no bearing it, and—well, we came to cuffs! But he
did
go himself, in the end, so I don’t regret it. In fact,’ she added reflectively, ‘I am glad of it, because I was feeling miserably shy before I quarrelled with him, and there is
nothing
like quarrelling with a person to set one at one’s ease!’

Unable to take this philosophic view of the matter, Tom said, in a shocked voice: ‘Do you mean to tell me you sent him out just to fetch the surgeon for me?’

‘Yes, why not?’ said Phoebe.

‘Well, my God, if that’s not the outside of enough! as though he had been
anybody!
You are the most outrageous girl, Phoebe! I shouldn’t think he would ever wish to offer for you after such treatment as that!’

‘Well, what a good thing that would be! Not that I think he ever did wish to offer for me. It is the strangest business! I wonder why he came to Austerby?’

Speculation on this point was interrupted by the entrance of Keighley, bearing a heavily laden tray. Neither his injury nor his subsequent potations having impaired Tom’s appetite, he temporarily lost interest in any other problem than what might be concealed beneath the several covers on the tray. Keighley, setting the whole down on the table by the bed, asked him in a fatherly way if he was feeling peckish; and upon being assured by Tom that he was, smiled benevolently at him, and said: ‘That’s the barber! Now, you keep still, sir, and leave me to fix you up so as you can manage! As for you, miss, the covers are set downstairs, and his grace is waiting for you.’

Dismissed in this kind but firm manner Phoebe withdrew, promising in response to a somewhat peremptory command from Tom to return to him as soon as she should have dined. Tom had suddenly been attacked by qualms. Phoebe was at once too innocent and too intimate with him to see anything equivocal in her position; he was fully alive to its impropriety, and he felt that he ought to keep her under his eye. Sylvester had certainly seemed to him to be a very good sort of a man, but he did not know him, after all: he might be a hardened rake, and if that were so a very uncomfortable time Phoebe would have of it, alone with him in the coffee-room, while her supposed protector lay tied by the leg in the best bedroom.

Had he but known it, Sylvester was not feeling at all amorous. He was tired, hungry, and in a fair way to regretting the impulse which had made him stop at the Blue Boar. To assist in an elopement was conduct quite unbecoming his position; moreover, it would lay him open to censure, which would not be easier to bear because it was justified. He was frowning down into the fire when Phoebe came into the room, and although he looked up at her entrance the frown did not immediately leave his brow.

She read in it condemnation of her attire, for she was still wearing her stuff travelling dress. He, on the other hand, had changed his buckskins and frockcoat for pantaloons and a longtailed coat of fine blue cloth, and had arranged a fresh necktie in intricate folds about his throat. It was morning dress, but it made her feel dowdy. To her vexation she found herself explaining that she had not changed her own dress because she would be obliged to go out again to the stable.

He had not noticed what she was wearing, and he replied in the light, indifferent tone which always set up her back: ‘My dear Miss Marlow, there is no occasion to change your dress that I know of—and none for you to visit the stable again tonight, let me add!’

‘I must be satisfied that Trusty has not contrived to rid himself of his poultice,’ she said firmly. ‘I have very little faith in Will Scaling.’

‘You may have complete faith in Keighley.’

She made no reply to this, for while she felt that Keighley, who was developing a cough, ought not to leave the house, she was reluctant to reopen a quarrel just as she was about to sit down to dinner with Sylvester. She glanced uncertainly at him, and saw that the frown had yielded to a look of slight amusement. Having no idea that her countenance was a tolerably exact mirror for her thoughts, or that he had correctly interpreted the changes of expression that flitted across it, she was surprised, and looked inquiringly at him, her head a little tilted to one side.

She put him in mind of some small, brown bird. He laughed, and said: ‘You look like—a sparrow! Yes, I know just what you are wondering whether or not to say. As you wish, Miss Marlow: I will cast an eye over the horses before I go to bed, and if I find that that singularly inappropriately named horse has eaten his poultice I will engage to supply him with a fresh one!’

‘Do you know how to mix a bran poultice?’ she asked sceptically.

‘Better than you, I daresay. No, I don’t, in general, apply them myself, but I hold it to be an excellent maxim that every man should know more than his grooms, and be as well able to deal with whatever need may arise in his stables. When I was a boy the farrier was one of my closest friends!’

‘Do you have your own farrier?’ she asked, diverted. ‘My father does not, and it is something I have always wished for! But you will not mix
a
poultice in those clothes!’

‘Rather than incur your displeasure I will even do that!’ he assured her. ‘It will expose me to Keighley’s displeasure, of course, but I shan’t regard that. Which puts me in mind of something I have to tell you. I find that the grooms’ quarters here are not at all what Keighley is accustomed to: there is, in fact, only the room in which the ostler sleeps and that, being above that very ill-built stable, is extremely cold. I know you will agree that that will not do, and I hope you won’t dislike the arrangement I have made, which is that the daughter of the house is to give up her chamber to Keighley, and herself sleep on a trestle-bed in your room.’

‘Why shouldn’t she sleep in her mother’s room?’ objected Phoebe, by no means pleased with this further example of Sylvester’s high-handed ways.

‘There is not space enough,’ said Sylvester.

‘Or Keighley might share Will Scaling’s room?’

‘He would be afraid to.’

‘Nonsense! the poor boy is perfectly harmless!’

‘Keighley has the greatest dislike of half-wits.’

‘Then why don’t you let him set up a trestle-bed in
your
room?’ she demanded.

‘Because I should be very likely to catch his cold,’ explained Sylvester.

She sniffed, but appeared to find this answer reasonable, for she said no more. A welcome interruption was provided by the arrival upon the scene of Miss Alice Scaling, panting under the load of a tray piled high with covered dishes. She was a strapping girl, with apple-red cheeks, and a wide grin, and when she had dumped the tray down on the sideboard she paused a moment to fetch her breath before bobbing a curtsey to Sylvester, and reciting: ‘Mother’s compliments, and there’s chickens, and rabbit-stew, and a casserole of rice with the giblets, and curd pudding, and apple fritters, and please to say if your honour would fancy the end of the mutton-pie Mother and me and Will had to our dinner.’ A hissing admonition from the passage caused her to amend this speech. ‘Please to say if
your grace
would fancy it! There’s a tidy bit of it left, and it’s good,’ she added confidentially.

‘Thank you, I am sure it is,’ he replied. ‘I hardly think we shall need it, however.’

‘You’re welcome if you do,’ said Miss Scaling, setting out the dishes on the table with hearty good-will. ‘And no need to fear going short tomorrow, because you’re going to have a boiled turkey. I shall wring his neck first thing in the morning, and into the pot he’ll go the instant he’s plucked and drawed. That way he won’t eat tough,’ she explained. ‘We hadn’t meant to have killed him, but Mother says dukes is more important than a gobble-cock, even if he
Is
a prime young ’un. And after that we’ll have Mr Shap’s pig off of him, and there’ll be the legs and the cheeks, and the loin, and the chitterlings and all, your honour! No, your
grace
!
I do be forgetting!’ she said, beaming apologetically.

‘It makes no matter what you call me, but pray don’t wring your turkey’s neck on my account!’ he said, with a quelling glance at Phoebe, who showed every sign of succumbing to an unseemly fit of giggling.

‘What’s a turkey?’ said Miss Scaling, in a large-minded spirit. ‘Happen we can come by another of
them
,
but dukes ain’t found under every bush, that’s what Mother says.’

On this piece of worldly wisdom she withdrew, pulling the door shut behind her with enough vigour to drown Phoebe’s sudden peal of laughter.

‘What an atrocious girl you are!’ remarked Sylvester. ‘Don’t you know better than to laugh at yokels?’

‘It was your face, when she said you were more important than a gobble-cock!’ explained Phoebe, wiping her eyes. ‘Has anyone ever told you that before?’

‘No, never. I take it to be a handsome compliment. But she mustn’t slay that turkey.’

‘Oh, you have only to give her the price of another bird and she will be perfectly satisfied!’

‘But nothing would prevail upon me to eat a bird that had been thrust warm into the pot!’ he objected. ‘And what are chitterlings?’

‘Well, they are the i
nside
parts of the pig,’ said Phoebe, bubbling over again.

‘Good God! Heaven send it may stop snowing before we come to
that!
In the meantime, shall I carve these chickens, or will you?’

‘Oh, no! You do it, if you please!’ she replied, seating herself at the table. ‘You cannot imagine how hungry I am!’

‘I can, for I am very hungry myself. I wonder why quite half this bird has been removed? Oh, I suppose it was for Orde! How is he, by the bye?’

‘Well, he seems to be going on quite prosperously, but the doctor said he must not get up for a week. I don’t know how I shall contrive to keep him in bed, for he will find it a dead bore, you know.’

He agreed to this, reflecting, however, that Tom would not be the only one to find a prolonged sojourn at the inn a dead bore.

Conversation during the meal was desultory, Sylvester being tired and Phoebe careful to inaugurate no topic for discussion that might lead him to ask embarrassing questions. He asked her none, but his mind was not so much divorced from interest in her adventure as she supposed. Between the snow and Tom’s broken leg it seemed probable that they would all of them be chained to the Blue Boar for some appreciable time. Sylvester had taken his own measures to invest Phoebe’s situation with a certain measure of propriety, but very little doubt existed in his brain that it was the part of a man of the world at least to do what lay within his power to frustrate an elopement. The evils of so clandestine an adventure might not be apparent to a country-bred boy of nineteen, but Sylvester, older than Tom by far more than the eight years that lay between them, was fully alive to them. He supposed he could do no less than bring them to Tom’s notice. He had not the smallest intention of discussing the affair with Phoebe: an awkward task in any circumstances, and in her case likely to prove fruitless, since her entire freedom from the confusion natural to a girl discovered in an escapade she must know to be grossly improper argued a singularly brazen disposition.

As soon as dinner was over she withdrew to Tom’s room, to find that he had been devoting considerable thought to her predicament. One aspect of it had struck him forcibly, and he lost no time in presenting it to her.

‘You know what we were saying, when Keighley brought in my dinner? About the Duke’s not wishing to offer for you? Well, if that’s the case, Phoebe, you need not go to London after all! What a pair of gudgeons we were not to have thought of that before! I have been racking my brains to hit upon a way of getting you there, too!’

‘I did think of it,’ replied Phoebe. ‘But even though the Duke won’t be a danger I am quite determined to go to my grandmother. It isn’t only being afraid of Mama, Tom—though when I consider how angry she will be with me for running away, I own I feel
sick
with terror!—it is—oh, having once escaped I cannot—
will
not—go back! You see, even Papa doesn’t love me very much. Not enough to support me, when I implored him to do so. When he held it over my head that if I wouldn’t accept an offer from Salford he would tell Mama I felt myself freed from
every
bond.’