Black Sheep

by Джорджетт Хейер

  Mr Balking had been kindness itself, but Oliver, his spirits as much as his gaunt frame worn down by recurrent fever, foresaw that he was destined to become a clerk in the counting-house from which lowly position he was unlikely to rise for many dreary years. He had set no store by Uncle Leonard’s assurances that he was very well satisfied with his work in Calcutta: that was the sort of thing that an affectionate uncle might be expected to say. He had reached Bath in a state of deep depression, but as his health improved so did his spirits, and he began to think that it might not be so very long before he worked his way up to a position of trust. When he was able to look back dispassionately over the two years he had spent in India, he thought that perhaps his uncle really was satisfied with his progress there. He had found his work of absorbing interest, and knew that he had a talent for business. In fact, if he had been a windy-wallets, boasting of his every small success, he would have said that he had done pretty well in the Calcutta house. As he was a diffident, and rather reticent young man, he maintained a strict silence on the subject, and waited, in gradually increasing hopefulness, for the day when his doctor should pronounce him well enough to apply himself once more to business.

  But his optimism did not lead him to the length of supposing that the Wendovers would ever consider him to be an eligible husband for Fanny. Older than his years, he recognized in Fanny’s passionate attachment to Stacy a schoolgirl’s brief, violent infatuation. He was reminded of the throes into which Lavinia, at the age of fifteen, had been cast when she fell suddenly, and inexplicably, in love with one of the visiting professors at Miss Timble’s Seminary. It had made her remarkably tiresome for several weeks, but there had been no harm in it, her passion being unrequited, and the professor a respectable man, with a wife, and five children, to all of whom he was devoted. Neither Oliver nor Mrs Grayshott had set any store by the event; Oliver thought that he would have set as little by Fanny’s present bewitchment had she but lost her foolish heart to a man of character. As it was, he was pretty sure that she had walked into a snare set for her by a handsome fortune-hunter, and he was extremely uneasy. Something Lavinia had let slip from her tongue, and hastily retracted, had given rise in his mind to the incredible suspicion that a runaway marriage was in contemplation. He found that his mother shared this suspicion, and was only partly reassured when he learned that she had warned Miss Abigail Wendover of possible danger. Miss Abigail was no fool, but he felt that the situation demanded a man’s hand. Failing her brother, who did not seem to be one on whom Miss Abigail placed any reliance, the obvious man to intervene was Mr Miles Calverleigh. But Miles showed no disposition to do so, or even to take any interest in his nephew’s activities. That did not surprise Oliver: he had not spent several weeks in Mr Calverleigh’s company without discovering that he never did take any interest in persons he didn’t like. It was inconceivable that a man of his cut could like Stacy, and useless to suppose that regard for the good name of his family would impel him to exert himself to preserve it: he had no such regard. On the other hand, there could be no doubt that he liked Miss Abigail Wendover very much indeed. Oliver, naturally precluded from discussing Stacy with Stacy’s uncle, could only hope that his tendre for her would move him to come to her assistance. He was a strange man, so cold, and yet so kind; there was no understanding him, but one thing was sure: if he did befriend one, there were no Emits to the help he would, in his unconcerned way, extend. It was possible, of course, that Miss Abigail, like himself, would feel all the awkwardness of broaching the matter to him. Oliver thought that perhaps his mother might prevail upon her to overcome such scruples, and decided to nudge her into making the attempt.

  During the drive to Wells he realized, as quickly as her aunt, that Fanny was doing her best to hide some inward care under a mask of gaiety. His heart went out to her, the sweet, silly baby that she was. He felt almost sick with the longing to gather her into his arms; but that desire must be repressed: not only did his circumstances make it impossible for him to declare himself, butFanny did not want his love, but only his friendship. She had said once, when his mother had reproved him for calling her by her name: “Oh, but I begged him to do so, ma’am! Because Lavvy and I have always been like sisters, so Oliver must be my brother!”

  Half a loaf was better than no bread: he didn’t know who had been responsible for that silly proverb, only that he must have been a cod’s head. It wasn’t better; when the lovely, darling girl you would have given your soul to possess invited you to be her brother it was infinitely worse.

  But if a brother was what Fanny wanted, a brother she should have; and perhaps, adopting that distasteful role, he might, at least, be admitted into her confidence, and be granted the opportunity to offer her wiser counsel than she would get from his foolish sister.

  So when they had stayed for some time in the chapel in the north aisle of the Cathedral, where the famous clock had been placed, and had watched the little knights endlessly tilting at each other across the barrier which surmounted it, he detained Fanny, as she was preparing to follow her aunt and Mr Calverleigh to another part of the Cathedral, and suggested that they might go and sit down outside for a while. She agreed readily to this, causing his heart to melt by looking up at him in quick anxiety, and saying: “Yes, to be sure we’ll do that, if you wouldn’t liefer go back to the Swan? There’s nothing so fatiguing as Cathedrals! You are tired already, aren’t you?”

  “No, I promise you I’m not—or only a very little!” he answered. “I think I might be, however, if I were obliged to go all over this place, because that would mean standing to gaze at tombs, and screens, and windows! I don’t know why it should be so, but standing is a thing I can’t yet do, though I am beginning to walk with the best of you.”

  “Well, you shan’t stand. If it is not too chilly for you, we’ll go and sit by the moat round the Palace, and watch the swans. And if my aunt should ask you what you think of the figures on the West Front you may say that you’ve never seen anything truly exquisite. That wouldn’t be a fib, do you think?”

  His eyes were full of tender amusement; he said gravely: “No, just suggestio falsi! Ought I to see them?”

  “Good gracious, no! There are tiers and tiers of them!”

  “In that case, I’m ready to tell any number of fibs—even a real bouncer!”

  She laughed, and then fell silent for a minute or two. He made no attempt to break into her abstraction, but presently she seemedto recall herself, and embarked on some light, everyday chit-chat, rather in the manner of a hostess trying to entertain a difficult guest. It was plainly an effort, and he stopped her, saying involuntarily: “Ah, don’t, Fanny!”

  Startled, she looked quickly up at him, a question in her big eyes. “Don’t?”

  “Don’t think yourself obliged to make conversation! That’s not treating me as though I were your brother!”

  “Oh—!” She blushed, and turned her head away.

  “Is something troubling you?” he asked gently.

  “No—oh, no! Of course not! Look, there are two of the swans! If only we had brought some bread to throw to them! I do think swans are the most beautiful birds in the world, don’t you? Or do you prefer peacocks?”

  “No,” he replied baldly, leading her to a conveniently placed bench. Sitting down beside her, he said: “What is it, Fanny? Don’t say you’re not blue-devilled! That would be a bouncer—almost a plumper!”

  She gave a nervous little laugh. “It’s nothing. Well, nothing very much! Just that I’m at outs with Abby—at least, not precisely at outs with her, but—” She paused, and her eyes darkened. “I thought—But people—grown-up people—” she said, betraying her youth, “don’t understand!.They don’t care for anything but consequence, and propriety, and respectability, and—and eligibility, and whenever you wish to do anything they don’t wish you to do, they say you are far too young, and will soon forget about it!”

  “Yes, and also that one day you will thank them for it!” hea
greed sympathetically. “And the worst of it is that, in general they are right!”

  “Not always!”

  “No, but odiously often!”

  “When you are as old as I am—!” said Fanny, in bitter mimicry.

  “Don’t tell me that Miss Abigail has ever uttered those abominable words!”

  “No. No, she hasn’t done that, but she doesn’t enter into my feelings, and I thought she would! I never dreamed she would be just like my uncle! Worldly, and—and prejudiced, and not thinking it signifies if you are unhappy, as long as you don’t do anything your horrid uncle doesn’t approve of!” She added, with strong indignation: “And she doesn’t even like him!”

  He said nothing for a few moments, but sat frowning ahead at the embattled wall beyond the moat. Fanny, pulling a handkerchief out of her reticule, defiantly blew her nose. Oliver drew a resolute breath, and said, picking his words with care: “If someone who is very dear to you—as you are to Miss Abigail—seems to be set on taking what you believe to be a false step, you must try to prevent it, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, but I am not taking a false step!” said Fanny. “And I am not too young to know my own mind! I have always known it! And I won’t let them ruin my life, even if I have to do something desperate!”

  “Don’t!” he said. “How could you be happy if you did what must pretty well break Miss Abigail’s heart? Forgive me, Fanny, but I fancy I know what the trouble is, and I wish there was something I could do to help you.” He paused. “Have you ever met my uncle? Not, I’m thankful to say, at all like your uncle! He’s very kind, and very wise, and he once told me never to make important decisions hastily—not to do what couldn’t be undone until I was perfectly sure that I should never wish to undo it.”

  “Of course not!” said Fanny simply. She got up. “Are you rested? Would you care to stroll about the town for a little while ? I don’t think it is warm enough here, do you? We’ll go throughthe Dean’s Eye into Sadler Street: I expect you will like to see that.’

  Her confidences were at an end; and since she had so unmistakably drawn to the blinds against prying eyes there was nothing for him to do but to acquiesce. He won a laugh from her by saying that while he placed himself unreservedly in her hands he could not help feeling that they ran a grave risk of being dapped into prison for such irreverence; and expressed great relief when she explained that the Dean’s Eye was merely an old gateway. This mild joke did much to restore her to ease; he set himself thereafter to divert her, and succeeded well enough to make her say, when they joined their elders at the Swan, to partake of an early dinner there before driving back to Bath, that she had spent a charming afternoon. A little nervously, she added: “And you won’t regard anything I said, will you? It was all nonsense! I daresay you know how it is when one falls into a fit of the dismals: one says things one doesn’t mean.”

  He reassured her, but could not refrain from saying: “Even though I’m only a pretence-brother, will you tell me if ever you are in any kind of a hobble, or—or are not quite sure what you should do?”

  “Oh, thank you! You are very good!” she stammered. “But there’s no need—I mean, it was only being blue-devilled, as you said! Nothing is really amiss!”

  He said no more, but this speech, far from allaying his anxiety, considerably increased it. He wished grimly that he could know what had occurred to agitate her, but it was perhaps as well that his suspicion received no confirmation, since he had neither the right nor, as yet, the physical strength to deal appropriately with Mr Stacy Calverleigh, and would have found it impossible to control his instinct. For Mr Calverleigh, living in imminent danger of foreclosure, and seeing the shadow of the King’s Bench Prison creeping inexorably towards him, had abandoned the hope of winning his heiress by fair means, and had decided (with a strong sense of ill-usage) that there was nothing for it but to elope with her.

  But Fanny, who had so enthusiastically pictured herself in such a romantic adventure, had suddenly been brought to realize that it was one thing to declare one’s readiness to cast off the shackles of one’s upbringing, and to divorce oneself from home and family, and quite another actually to do it.

  Stacy had urged his desperate proposal on her in Bath Abbey, a circumstance which made her feel nervous and uncomfortable at the outset. When he had appointed this rendezvous, she had been almost shocked. It was surely not at all the thing! But he had laughed at her scruples, calling her his adorable little prude, and she had agreed to the assignation—if only to prove to him that she was no prude. It had been made hurriedly, in Meyler’s Library, and it had entailed some difficult, and what she could not but feel horridly deceitful, planning. However, she had done it, and had been rewarded for her hardihood by having her hands passionately kissed, and her bravery extolled. But she was feeling far from brave, and looked round nervously in dread of seeing someone she knew. It was not, of course, very likely that any resident of Bath would be found in the Abbey at an hour when no service was being held, but there was no telling but what someone might be entertaining a guest who wished to visit it. She whispered: “Oh, pray take care!” and pulled her hands away, “If I were to be recognized—! I am in such a quake! I don’t think anyone saw me on the way, but how can one be sure? Grimston went with me to Miss Timble’s, and she will call for me later at Mrs Grayshott’s, but, oh, Stacy, I was obliged to pretend to Miss Timble that I had mistaken the day for my singing lesson, and it made me feel a wretch!”

  “No wonder!” he agreed warmly. “It is intolerable that we should be obliged to stoop to subterfuge: I feel it as acutely as you do, beloved! But since your aunt returned to Bath I’ve been granted no opportunity to snatch as much as five minutes alone with you. How can I talk to you at a concert, or in a ballroom? And talk to you I must!”

  “Yes—oh, yes! I have longed so much to be with you! If only I had a veil! Who are those people over there?”

  “Only a parcel of trippers,” he replied soothingly. “Don’t be afraid my sweet one! There is no one here who knows you. Wewill sit down over there, where it is dark, and there’s nothing of interest to attract the trippers. That I should be forced into stealing a meeting with you! It is of all things the most repugnant to me but what other course is open to me? Only one!—to renounce you wholly, and that I cannot bear to do!”

  “Stacy, no!” she gasped, clutching his arm.

  He laid his other hand over hers, clasping it firmly. “I shall never win your aunt’s support: she has made that abundantly plain to me! She will take care that we never see one another, except in company, or as we have done today. Dearest, how can we go on in such a way ?” He took her hand and mumbled kisses into its palm. “If you knew how much I long to take you in my arms, to call you my own!”

  “I want that too,” she said shyly.

  “Then come away with me, as we planned! Dare you snap your fingers in the face of the world? Tell me!”

  “Yes, indeed I dare!” she said, with a sparkling look.

  “How shall I ever be able to prove to you how much I adore you? Let us put a period to this hateful situation into which we have been driven, and let us do it as soon as may be contrived! Tomorrow!”

  “Tomorrow?”Fanny echoed blankly. “Oh, no,Stacy! I—I couldn’t! I mean, it is too soon!”

  “The next day, then!”

  It was at this moment that Fanny began to perceive the difference between dreams and reality. She shook her head, saying pleadingly: “I wish I could, but—you don’t perfectly understand, Stacy! It would be too difficult. I have so many things to attend to!”

  “It must be soon!” he urged. “At any moment you may be swept from me! I suspect that your aunt is contemplating doing so already. If that were to happen, our tale would be told!”

  “No, it wouldn’t!” she objected. “Besides, she isn’t content, plating it! How could she, when we are holding a rout-patty next week? And that’s another reason why I couldn’t possibly run away immediately. I daresay
you may have forgotten about it, but—”

  “What do I care for rout-parties?” he exclaimed. “Our happiness is at stake!”

  Fanny had no objection to Mr Calverleigh’s dramatic utterances, for they bore a close resemblance to the impassioned speeches of her favourite heroes of romance, but a strong vein of commonsense underlay her imaginings, and she replied, in an alarmingly practical spirit: “No, no! How should that be? It means only a little put-off!”

  “Only—! When every hour that I am apart from you seems a week, and every week a year!”

  No arithmetician, she found no fault with this mathematical progression. The sentiment thus expressed made her blush rosily, and slide her hand into his again. “I know. It’s so with me too, but you haven’t considered, my dearest one! How could I run away before Aunt Selina’s party? It would be the most infamous thing to do, because she is looking forward to it so much, poor darling, and it would destroy all her pleasure in it if—Good God! she wouldn’t be able to hold it at all! Only think what an uproar there will be!”

  Exasperation seized him, and for an instant she caught a glimpse of it in his face. It was gone so quickly that she could not be sure that it had ever been there at all. He saw doubt in her widening eyes, and said ruefully: “That I should be willing to consign Aunt Selina to perdition! Isn’t it shocking? So kind as she is, and—as I believe—so much my friend! For how long must I wait before I can call you my own—to cherish and protect?”

  Had she been privileged to hear these noble words, Miss Abigail Wendover would have informed Mr Calverleigh, in explicit terms, that Fanny needed to be protected only from himself. Their effect on Fanny was to make her blush still more vividly, and to whisper: “Not long! I promise!”

  He had seldom felt less amorous, for he considered that she was being irritatingly capricious, but he responded at once with one of his lover-like speeches. His fear was that she might, if she were given time for reflection, draw back from the pro-posed elopement. It had not escaped his notice that she had recoiled from his suggestion of an immediate flight. He set himself to the task of winning her back to her former mood of acceptance, employing all the arts at his command. He did not doubt his power over her, but he reckoned without the streak of obstinacy her aunts knew well: she responded deliciously to his love-making; she listened in soft-eyed rapture to the idyllic picture he drew of the life they would lead together; but she would not consent to elope with him before her aunts’ party. He dared not persist, for there was a mulish look in her face, and his fear was that if he pressed her too hard she might cry off altogether. He assured her that he had no other wish than to please her, and hoped to God that she did not often fall into distempered freaks.