“Oh, my God, what a muttonhead! What a damned, well-meaning clunch!” exclaimed Philip bitterly.
“Yes, but there’s nothing to say the boy wasn’t shot in the neck,” said Mr Templecombe. “And if it weren’t for the doctor’s continued presence at Staplewood, there’d be a good deal less scandal-broth brewed! Lady Broome says he’s there on Sir Timothy’s account, but that won’t fit! We all know he was sent for when Torquil took the smallpox, and dashed nearly slipped his wind, and that was before Sir Timothy got to be so feeble! Well, there’s a nasty ondit being whispered over the tea-cups: daresay you know what it is!”
“I can guess! That Delabole is Minerva’s lover? I don’t think it’s true, but true or not it was bound to be said,” replied Philip indifferently.
“Yes,” agreed Mr Templecombe. “The thing is she ain’t over and above popular, dear boy! And another thing that has people in a puzzle—well, it has me in a puzzle too!—is why the devil she brought Miss Malvern to Staplewood. Seems an odd start!” Receiving no answer to this, he said, with a shrewd glance at Philip: “Very agreeable girl, ain’t she?”
“Very,” agreed Philip.
“Got a great deal of countenance,” persevered Mr Templecombe.
“Yes.”
“Oh, very well!” said Mr Templecombe, incensed. “If you don’t choose to tell me you’re tail over top in love with her, it’s all one to me! I may not be one of the tightish clever ’uns, but I’ve got eyes in my head, and I know what’s o’clock!”
Chapter XV
Kate lay awake for a long time after she had blown out her candle that night, trying to think what she ought to do; but although she had longed all the evening for the opportunity to consider her problems in the seclusion of her own room, she found herself quite unable to pursue any very consecutive or useful line of thought. When she tried to think dispassionately about Philip’s proposal, and to weigh in the balance the possible advantages to him of the marriage against the certain disadvantages, her mind refused to remain fixed, but strayed into foolish recollections: how he had looked when he had first met her; how his smile transformed his face; what he had said to her in the rose-garden; what he had said in the shrubbery; what he had said in his curricle; and what he had looked like on all these occasions. The mischief was that no sooner had his image imposed itself on her mind’s eye than she was wholly unable to banish it, which was not at all conducive to impartial consideration. She came to the conclusion that she was too tired to think rationally, and tried to go to sleep. When she had tossed and turned for half an hour, she told herself that it was the moonlight which was keeping her awake, and she slid out of bed to draw the blinds across the unshrouded windows. Every night Ellen shut the windows, and drew the blinds; every night, when Ellen had left her, she flung up the windows, and swept back the blinds; and every morning Ellen, who had a deeply inculcated belief in tie baneful influence of the night air, and seemed to be incapable of understanding that her young mistress had become inured to it during the years she had spent in the Peninsula, remonstrated with her, and prophesied all manner of ills which were bound to spring from admitting into the room the noxious night airs. Failing to convince Ellen that she could not sleep in a stuffy room, Kate had adopted the practice of opening her windows when Ellen had carefully closed the curtains round the bed, and withdrawn to her own airless and tiny bedchamber.
The wind had died with the sun, and it was a hot, June night, so still that Kate could almost have supposed that a storm was brewing. But the sky was cloudless, with the moon, approaching the full, sailing serenely in a sky of dark sapphire. Nothing seemed to be stirring abroad: not even an owl hooted; and the nightingales, which had enchanted Kate when she had first come to Staplewood, had been silent for several weeks. Kate stayed for a moment by one of the windows, gazing out upon the moonlit gardens, wondering if Philip had yet returned from Freshford House, and listening for the sound of horses trotting up the avenue. Ghostly in the distance, the stable-clock struck the hour. She listened to it, counting the strokes, and could hardly believe it when it stopped at the eleventh, for it seemed to her that she had been lying awake for hours. She had never felt less like sleeping; and, after one look at the crumpled bedclothes, drew a chair to the window, and sat down, wishing that a breeze would get up to relieve the oppressiveness of the atmosphere. The house was wrapped in silence, as though everyone in it but herself was asleep. She concluded that Lady Broome must be better, until her ears caught the sound of someone coming on tiptoe along the gallery, and guessed that the doctor was on his way to take a last look at his patient. Or had he done so, and was he creeping back to his quarters in the West Wing? It had seemed to her that the footsteps were coming from the direction of her aunt’s bedchamber. A board creaked outside her door, and the footsteps stopped. She waited, her eyes widening, and her breathing quickened. Someone was listening, no doubt for some sound to betray that she was still awake. There was a nerve-racking pause, and then she heard a faint grating noise, as of someone cautiously inserting a key into the lock of her door. She was out of her chair in a flash, and had reached the door and wrenched it open before Sidlaw, wearing a drab dressing-gown, and a nightcap which imperfectly concealed the curl-papers with which she had screwed up her sparse grey locks, could turn the key in the wards. For a moment they confronted each other, Kate’s eyes flashing with wrath, and Sidlaw obviously discomposed. The key had been jerked out of her hand, and lay on the floor. She stooped to pick it up, and Kate said, in a dangerously calm voice: “Thank you! I’ll take that!”
“Well, I’m sure, miss!—” said Sidlaw, bridling. “If I’d known you was awake, I would have brought it in to you, but not hearing a sound, and not wishing to wake you out of your first sleep, I thought it best to slip it into the lock on the outside.”
“Indeed?” said Kate, still standing with her hand imperatively outstretched.
Sidlaw reluctantly surrendered the key, plunging at the same time into an unconvincing account of having found it earlier in the day, but having forgotten to restore it to Kate’s door until this very moment, when she had suddenly remembered it. “I’ve been so taken with up with her ladyship, miss, that I’m sure it’s no wonder the key slipped my memory!”
“And I expect you found it in a most unexpected place, having hunted for it for weeks!” said Kate, with false affability, and a glittering smile. “I won’t embarrass you by asking where it was. Goodnight!”
She shut the door, not waiting for a response, and audibly locked it, resolving to afford no one the chance of abstracting the key again, but to keep it in her pocket all day.
However, it was a large, old-fashioned key, and when, next morning, she put it into the pocket which hung round her waist, and was reached through a slit in her petticoat, it knocked uncomfortably against her leg whenever she moved, so she was obliged to put it in her reticule instead, until she could find a safe hiding-place for it.
She found only Torquil in the breakfast-parlour, and he seemed to have finished eating, and to be waiting for her to appear, for he had no sooner responded to her cheerful greeting than he said impulsively: “You aren’t angry with me, coz, are you?”
More important considerations had thrust so far to the back of her mind the recollection of his conduct on the previous day that she had almost forgotten it, and replied, in surprise: “Angry with you? No—why should I be? Oh!—You mean because you fired at that poor, friendly dog, and missed hitting me by inches? No, I’m not angry, though I own that I was vexed to death at the time! Good morning, Pennymore!”
“I knew you wouldn’t be!” said Torquil, ignoring the butler, who was setting a teapot down before Kate, and a dish of the hot scones she liked. “Matthew said you were all on end, and ready to come dagger-drawing with me, but I knew that was a danker!”
“Dr Delabole exaggerates, but I was certainly very much shocked, she replied, with reserve. “The dog was not a stray, but a truant, and hardly more than a puppy: you had n
o business to be firing at him, you know!”
“He had no business to be in the park! Besides, I don’t like dogs! And I didn’t miss you by inches! You shouldn’t have moved!”
“Well, never mind!” she said placably. “Have you heard how your mother does this morning?”
“No, and I don’t—Oh, yes! Matthew said she had had a restless night, I think: I wasn’t attending particularly! He’s with her now. But that’s not important! I didn’t mean to frighten you yesterday, Kate! And if you were frightened I’m sorry for it! There!”
He uttered this apology with the air of one putting considerable force upon himself, and she was obliged to laugh, which made him look black. However, his brow cleared, and his eyes lost their dangerous sparkle, when she begged him not to ring a peal over her before she had finished her breakfast, and he said, with a little giggle: “You are such a funny one, coz! I wish you will marry me! Why won’t you? Don’t you like me?”
“Not enough to marry you,” she answered calmly. “And, let me tell you, Torquil, if there is one thing I dislike more than quarrelling over the breakfast-cups, it is having offers of marriage made to me over them! You should remember that if I did marry you you would find yourself leg-shackled to a haggish old woman while you were still in your prime!”
“Yes,” he said naively, “but Mama says that if I’m married to you she’ll let me go to London!”
Her eyes danced appreciatively. “That is certainly an object,” she agreed.
“And you would be Lady Broome, you know, because when my father dies Staplewood will be mine, and the title, too, of course. I shouldn’t think it will be long before he pops off the hooks, either, because he’s pretty well burnt to the socket now.”
She felt no desire to laugh at this speech, which was uttered in a voice of total unconcern; and replied coldly: “It so happens that I have no wish to be Lady Broome. Pray don’t say any more on this head! Believe me, you don’t appear to advantage when you speak of your father in that callous style!”
“Oh, pooh! Why shouldn’t I? I don’t care a rush for bun, or he for me!”
The entrance of the doctor put an end to any further remarks of this nature. Pointedly turning her shoulder on Torquil, Kate inquired after her aunt’s condition. Dr Delabole said that he had hoped that her fever might have abated itself by today, but that it had been a particularly violent catching, aggravated by colic. She had suffered a disturbed night, and was still a little feverish, and disinclined to talk. “So I think you should not visit her until she feels rather more the thing,” he said. “I have great hope that a change of medicine will put her in better cue. Torquil, my dear boy, do you care to drive with me into Market Harborough to procure it?”
“Not if you mean to handle the reins!” said Torquil rudely.
“No, no!” said the doctor, laughing indulgently. “I shall be happy to sit at my ease while you do the work. I know you are a better whip than I am—almost as good a fiddler as Mr Philip Broome! And where, by the way, is Mr Broome? I didn’t hear him come in last night, so no doubt he has overslept this morning!”
“Lord, no! he never does so!” said Torquil. “He was getting up from the table when I came into the room! I daresay he’s with my father.”
He then began to argue with the doctor about which horse should be harnessed to which vehicle; and Kate got up, and left the parlour while the respective merits of the whisky and the more fashionable tilbury were still being discussed.
There was no sign of Philip in any of the rooms on the entrance floor, so that unless he had retired upstairs to the library, he had either gone out, or was indeed sitting with his uncle. Kate, who had been longing to see him ever since she had awakened from an uneasy sleep, felt just a little ill-used. If he was anxious to see her, as surely he should have been, if he was really in love with her, he need not have come down to breakfast at an hour when he must have known she would not be present, she thought, forgetting that it was just possible that he might have wished to avoid meeting her in the presence of Torquil and the doctor. If he had gone out, or was visiting his uncle, it looked very much as if he were avoiding her; which must surely mean that he was trying to find a way of escaping his engagement. Kate, whose overnight lucubrations had led to an uneasy sleep, infested with worrying dreams, was hoping, without realizing it, for reassurance. She did not find it in the library, which was as empty as the saloons; and it was in a despairing mood that she came slowly down the stairs again, trying to persuade herself that it behoved her to make everything easy for Philip by telling him that, after thinking the matter over, she had come to the conclusion that she did not love him enough to marry him.
This melancholy resolve brought tears to her eyes, and although she resolutely wiped them away, she was obliged to keep one hand on the baluster rail, because her vision was still blurred. It cleared miraculously when she heard herself hailed by Mr Philip Broome, who appeared (as it seemed to her) from nowhere, and came up the stairs two at a time, exclaiming: “Kate! I was coming in search of you! What’s this Pennymore has been telling me? No, don’t answer me! We can’t talk on the stairs. Come down to the Red saloon, where we can be private!”
There was nothing at all lover-like, either in this imperious command, or in the ungentle grasp round her wrist; but the depression lifted from Kate’s heart. As he almost dragged her down the stairs, she uttered a protest, which he most uncivilly disregarded, pulling her into the saloon, and shutting the door firmly. He then said, searching her face with hard, penetrating eyes: “When I stepped out on to the terrace before breakfast, I found the carpenter mending one of the gun-room windows! Is it true that it was Torquil who broke in, yesterday, and stole one of my uncle’s shotguns?”
“Why, yes!” she replied, tenderly massaging her wrist. “I shall be excessively obliged to you—Cousin Philip!—if you will have the goodness to inform me of your intention when next you mean to manhandle me! You have bruised me to the bone!”
Swift amusement suddenly softened his eyes; he exclaimed: “Oh, Kate, you dear rogue! What a plumper! Show me this bruise!”
“Very likely it won’t be visible until tomorrow,” she said, with a dignity—that admirably concealed the intense pleasure she felt at being called a dear rogue.
“And still more likely that it will never become visible!” he retorted, advancing upon her, and possessing himself of both her hands, and holding them in a strong clasp. “Stop bantering me, and tell me the truth! Did Torquil, in fact, try to shoot you?”
“Good God, no! Of course he didn’t!” she replied. “He tried to shoot a dog, and missed both the dog and me, for which I am heartily thankful! He’s not fit to be trusted with guns, as I told him! I was in such a rage! But how did Pennymore know of it? He wasn’t there! No one was there, except Badger, and, later, Dr Delabole!”
“One of the stable-hands saw you from the avenue, and was trying to summon up the pluck to dash to your help—or so he says—when the appearance of Badger on the scene relieved him of the necessity to show his mettle. The story had reached Pennymore’s ears by the time you went to bed.”
“Grossly exaggerated, I make no doubt!”
“Very likely. Is it true that Torquil threatened to shoot Badger?”
“With an empty gun! He was only trying to frighten Badger! He gave the gun up to me the instant I told him to do so, and I promise you there is no need for you to be cast into high fidgets!”
“On the contrary, there is a very urgent need!” he said. “Kate, let me take you away from this place!” His clasp tightened on her hands. “It isn’t safe for you to remain here, believe me!” He looked down into her upturned face, and deep into her eyes, his own glowing with a light which made her pulses jump. “You pretty innocent!” he said, in a thickened voice, snatching her into his arms, and roughly kissing her. Then, as she burst into tears of relief, he slackened his embrace, and demanded: “Why, Kate! Kate, my darling, what’s the matter?”
“Oh, no
thing, nothing!” she sobbed. “Only I thought—I was afraid—that you might be regretting it! And although I think you ought to, I couldn’t bear it if you did! And I know you haven’t thought how you would like to be married to a female who has only her nurse to support her at the altar!”
His eyes laughed, but his voice was perfectly grave as he replied: “You are very right! I hadn’t thought of it. You wouldn’t care, I suppose, to depend on my support, if your nurse should be unequal to the task?”
Cousin Kate Page 23
