Charity Girl

by Джорджетт Хейер

  “It was certainly imprudent,” she said, maintaining her air of calm. “Had I been at home at the time I should have told her that she must take one of the footmen, or one of the maids, but I drove out myself quite early this morning, to visit an invalid, and so knew nothing about it, until I returned, an hour ago.”

  “Had I known to what dangers, to what neglect, my tender, innocent child was being exposed—!” he groaned. “But how could I have known? How could I have guessed that the woman to whose care I committed her would prove herself to be utterly unworthy of my trust, and would cast her on the world, careless into what hands she might fall?”

  “Well, she didn’t. She gave her into her aunt’s hands. And I can’t but feel, sir, that if you had kept her informed of your whereabouts she would have written to you, to tell you that Lady Bugle had taken Cherry to live with her.”

  “I shall not weary you, ma’am, with an account of the circumstances which obliged me to withhold my direction from Miss Fletching,” he said loftily. “I am a man of many affairs, and they take me all over Europe. In fact, I rarely know from one day to the next where they will take me, or for how long. I believed my child to be safe and happy in Miss Fletching’s charge. Never for an instant did I entertain the thought that she would hand her over to one who has ever been—after my father and my brother—my worst enemy! She has much to answer for, and she shall answer for it! As I have told her!”

  “Forgive me!” said Henrietta, “but have not you more to answer for than Miss Fletching, sir? It seems strangely unnatural for a father—particularly such an affectionate father as yourself!—to leave his daughter for so long without a word that she was forced to mourn him as dead!”

  Mr Steane dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “If I had been dead she would have been informed of it,” he said. “It was quite unnecessary for me to write to her. I will go further: it would have been folly to have done so, for who knows but what she might have wished to leave school, and join me abroad? I was not, at that time, in a position to provide her with a settled home.”

  “Oh!” said Henrietta. “Are you now in that position, sir?”

  “Certainly!” he replied. “That is to say, as settled as one can ever hope to be. But of what use is it to dwell upon what might have been? I must resolutely banish the temptation to take the poor child away. I must deny myself the solace of her company. I must resign myself to loneliness. My duty is inescapable: I must see her righted in the eyes of the world!”

  “Good gracious, has she ever been wronged?” Henrietta said, opening her eyes at him. “If you are talking of her having run away from her aunt, you must let me tell you that you are making a mountain out of a molehill, Mr Steane! To be sure, it was rather a hurly-burly thing to do, and might have led her into dangerous trouble; but since, as good luck would have it, Lord Desford overtook her on the road, and brought her here, no harm has come of it.”

  He heaved a deep sigh, that verged on a moan, and covered his eyes with one fat hand. “Alas that it should fall to my lot to destroy your belief in Lord Desford’s integrity!”

  “Oh, you won’t do that!” she said brightly. “So pray don’t fall into the dismals!”

  He let his hand drop, and said, with a touch of asperity: “That may be the story Lord Desford told you, ma’am, but—”

  “It is. And it is also the story Cherry told me,” interpolated Henrietta.

  “Instructed, I have no doubt at all, by his lordship! It is not the story I heard from Amelia Bugle! Far from it indeed! Very far from it! She told me that although she had been unable to discover when it was that Desford first met Cherry, it was certainly before the night of the ball at her house, when one of her daughters was a witness of his secret assignation with her, and in the course of which the elopement must have been planned.”

  “What nonsense!” said Henrietta contemptuously. “Elopement, indeed! I wonder you should have let yourself be bamboozled by such a ridiculous tale, sir! It’s easy enough to see why she told it, of course: she was scared that you might discover that it was her abominable treatment that drove Cherry to run away! But that is the plain truth! As for Lord Desford’s part in the business, you may think yourself very much obliged to him, for if he had not taken her up in his curricle, heaven knows what might have happened to her! I may add that as soon as he had established her in my mother’s care he left immediately to find Lord Nettlecombe! He ran him to earth at Harrowgate—and any other man would have abandoned the search when he discovered that he would be obliged to travel more than two hundred miles to reach his lordship!”

  Mr Steane shook his head at her, a sad, pitying smile curling his lips. “That,” he sighed, “is the tale Desford’s young brother tried to hoax me with. I do not for a moment mean to suggest that you are trying to hoax me, Miss Silverdale, for it is plain to me that you too have been hoaxed. For how is it possible that Lord Desford—a man who has been on the town I know not how many years—should have supposed that my father would have contemplated for as much as a moment such a journey? You may not be aware that he is as scaly a snudge as was ever born, but Lord Desford must surely know it! Why, he has scarcely stirred out of Albemarle Street for years past! If he did find that his health demanded a change of air, the farthest he would have gone from London would have been Tunbridge Wells. Though I rather fancy,” he added, considering the matter, “that he would have retired to Nettlecombe Manor. Lodgings in watering-places, you know, are never to be had dog-cheap. As for the cost of travelling to Harrowgate—no, no, ma’am! That is doing it much too brown, believe me!”

  “Nevertheless, he did go to Harrowgate, and is there at this moment. Perhaps his bride persuaded him to undertake the expense of the journey,” said Henrietta, with a wonderful air of innocence.

  “His what?” ejaculated Mr Steane, starting upright in his chair, and staring at her very hard.

  “Oh, didn’t you know that he was lately married?” she said. “Desford didn’t know either, until he was introduced to the lady. I understand she was used to be his housekeeper. Not, I fear, the pink of gentility, but I feel, don’t you, that it was very sensible of him to marry someone whom he can trust to look after him, and to manage his household exactly as he likes!”

  She had introduced this new topic in the hope of diverting Mr Steane from the real object of his visit, and the gambit succeeded to admiration, though not in the way she had expected. Instead of going into a passion, he burst into a guffaw, slapping his thigh, and gasping: “By God, that’s the best joke I’ve heard in years! Caught in parson’s mousetrap, is he? Damme if I don’t write to felicitate him! That’ll sting him on the raw! Why, he cast me off for eloping with Jane Wisset, and though I don’t say she was of the first rank she wasn’t a housekeeper!” He went off into another guffaw, which ended in a wheezing cough; and as soon as he was able to fetch his breath again, invited Henrietta to describe his stepmother to him. She was unable to do this, but she did regale him with some of the things Desford had told her. He was particularly delighted by the quarrel between the newly married couple which had sprung up over the silk shawl, and again slapped his thigh, declaring that it served the old hunks right. He then said, wistfully, that he wished he could have seen his brother’s face when the news had been broken to him. He began to chuckle, but another thought occurred to him, and brought a cloud to his brow. “The worst of it is he can’t cut Jonas out of the inheritance,” he said gloomily. “Still,” he added after brooding over this reflection for a few moments, and speaking in a more hopeful tone: “I shouldn’t wonder at it if this housekeeper makes the old muckworm bleed freely, so the chances are Jonas won’t come into as big a fortune as he expected to.” He favoured Henrietta with a bland smile, and said: “One should always try to look on the bright side. It has ever been my rule. You would be astonished, I daresay, how often the worst disasters do have a brighter aspect.”

  She was as much diverted as she was shocked by this simple revelation of Mr Stean
e’s character, and felt herself unable to do more than murmur an affirmative. Any hope that she might have entertained of Mr Steane’s forgetting his daughter’s predicament in the contemplation of his brother’s rage and chagrin were dispelled by his next words. “Well, well!” he said. “Little did I think that I should enjoy such an excellent joke today! But it will not do, Miss Silverdale! Jokes are out of place at such a time, when my breast is racked with anxiety. I accept that Lord Desford did go to Harrowgate; and I can only say that if he was such a dummy as to think he could fob my unfortunate child off on to her grandfather he has been like a woodcock, justly slain by its own treachery. Or words to that effect. My memory fails me, but I know a woodcock comes into it.”

  What she might have been goaded to retort remained unspoken, for at this moment the Viscount came into the room. The thought that flashed into her mind was that he might have been designed to form a contrast to Wilfred Steane. There were fewer than twenty years between them, and it was easy to see that Steane had been a handsome man in his youth. But his good looks had been ruined by dissipation; and his figure spoke just as surely as his face of a life of indolence and over-indulgence. Nor were these faults remedied by his manner, or his dress. In both he favoured a florid style, which made him appear, in Henrietta’s critical eyes, disastrously like a demi-beau playing off the airs of an exquisite. Desford, on the other hand, was complete to a shade, she thought. He had a handsome countenance; a lithe, athletic figure; and if the plain coat of blue superfine which he wore had had a label stitched to it bearing the name of Weston it could not have proclaimed the name of its maker more surely than did its superb cut. His air was distinguished; his manners very easy, and unaffected; and while there was no suggestion of the Pink, or the Bond Street Spark, about his trim person it was generally agreed in tonnish circles that his quiet elegance was the Real thing.

  He shut the door, and advanced towards Henrietta, who had exclaimed thankfully: “Desford!”

  “Hetta, my love!” he responded, smiling at her, and kissing her hand. He stood holding it in a warm clasp for a minute, as he said: “Had you despaired of me? I think you must have, and I do beg your pardon! I had hoped to have been with you before this.”

  She returned the pressure of his fingers, and then drew her hand away, saying playfully: “Well, at all events, you’ve arrived in time to make the acquaintance of Cherry’s father, who isn’t dead, after all! You must allow me to make you known to each other: Mr Wilfred Steane, Lord Desford!”

  The Viscount turned, and raised his quizzing-glass, and through it surveyed Mr Steane, not for very long, but with daunting effect. Henrietta was forced to bite her lip quite savagely to suppress the laughter that bubbled up in her. It was so very unlike Des to do anything so odiously top-lofty! “Oh,” he said. He bowed slightly. “I am happy to make your acquaintance, sir.”

  “I would I might say the same!” returned Mr Steane. “Alas that we should meet, sir, under such unhappy circumstances!”

  The Viscount looked surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Lord Desford, I have much to say to you, but it would be better that I should speak privately to you!”

  “Oh, I have, no secrets from Miss Silverdale!” said Desford.

  “My respect for a lady’s delicate sensibilities has hitherto sealed my lips,” said Steane reprovingly. “Far be it from me to ask a question that might bring a blush to female cheeks! But I have such a question to put to you, my lord!”

  “Then by all means do put it to me!” invited Desford. “Never mind Miss Silverdale’s sensibilities! I daresay they aren’t by half as delicate as you suppose—in fact, I’m quite sure they are not! You don’t wish to retire, do you, Hetta?”

  “Certainly not! I have not the remotest intention of doing so, either. I cut my eye-teeth many years ago, Mr Steane, and if what you have already said to me failed to bring a blush to my cheeks it is not very likely that whatever you are about to say will succeed in doing so! Pray ask Lord Desford any question you choose!”

  Mr Steane appeared to be grieved by this response, for he sighed, and shook his head, and murmured: “Modern manners! It was not so in my young days! But so be it! Lord Desford, are you betrothed to Miss Silverdale?”

  “Well, I certainly hope I am!” replied the Viscount, turning his laughing eyes towards Henrietta. “But what in the world has that to say to anything? I might add—do forgive me!—what in the world has it to do with you, sir?”

  Mr Steane was not really surprised. He had known from the moment Desford had entered the room, and had exchanged smiles with Henrietta, that a strong attachment existed between them. But he was much incensed, and said, far from urbanely: “Then I wonder at your shamelessness, sir, in luring my child away from the protection of her aunt’s home with false promises of marriage! As for your effrontery in bringing her to your affianced wife—”

  “Don’t you think,” suggested the Viscount, “that foolhardiness would be a better word? Or shall we come down from these impassioned heights? I don’t know what you hope to achieve by mouthing such fustian rubbish, for I am persuaded you cannot possibly be so bacon-brained as to suppose that I am guilty of any of these crimes. The mere circumstance of my having placed Cherry in Miss Silverdale’s care must absolve me from the two other charges you have laid at my door, but if you wish me to deny them categorically I’ll willingly do so! So far from luring Cherry from Maplewood, when I found her trudging up to London I did my possible to persuade her to return to her aunt. I did not offer her marriage, or, perhaps I should add, a carte blanche! Finally, I brought her to Miss Silverdale because, for reasons which must be even better known to you than they are to me, my father would have taken strong exception to her presence under his roof!”

  “Be that as it may,” said Mr Steane, struggling against the odds, “you cannot—if there is any truth in you, which I am much inclined to doubt!—deny that you have placed her in a very equivocal situation!”

  “I can and do deny it!” replied the Viscount.

  “A man of honour,” persisted Mr Steane, with the doggedness of despair, “would have restored her to her aunt!”

  “That may be your notion of honour, but it isn’t mine,” said the Viscount. “To have forced her into my curricle, and then to have driven her back to a house where she had been so wretchedly unhappy that she fled from it, preferring to seek some means, however menial, of earning her bread to enduring any more unkindness from her aunt and her cousins, would have been an act of wicked cruelty! Moreover, I hadn’t a shadow of right to do it! She begged me to carry her to her grandfather’s house in London, hoping that he might allow her to remain there, and convinced that if he refused to do that he would at least house her until she had established herself in some suitable situation.”

  “Well, if you thought he’d do any such thing, either you don’t know the old snudge, or you’re a gudgeon!” said Mr Steane. “And from what I can see of you it’s my belief you’re the slyest thing in nature! Up to every move on the board!”

  “Oh, not quite that!” said Desford. “Only to your moves, Steane!”

  “You remind me very much of your father,” said Mr Steane, eyeing him with considerable dislike.

  “Thank you!” said Desford, bowing.

  “Also that young cub of a brother of yours! Both of a hair! No respect for your seniors! A pair of stiff-rumped, bumptious bouncers! Don’t think you can put the change on me, Desford, trying to hoax me with your Banbury stories, because you can’t!”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t dream of doing so!” instantly replied his lordship. “I never compete against experts!”

  Henrietta said apologetically: “Pray forgive me, but are you not straying a little away from the point at issue? Whether Desford was a gudgeon to think that Lord Nettlecombe would receive Cherry, or whether he thought what any man must have thought, doesn’t seem to me to have any bearing on the case. He did drive her to London, only to find Lord Nettlecombe’s house shut u
p. He then brought her to me. What, Mr Steane, do you suggest he should rather have done?”

  “Thrown in the close!” murmured the Viscount irrepressibly.

  “I must decline to enter into argument with you, ma’am,” said Steane, with immense dignity. “I never argue with females. I will merely say that in accosting my daughter on the highway, coaxing her to climb into his curricle, and driving off with her his lordship behaved with great impropriety—if no worse! And since he abandoned her here—if she is here, which I gravely doubt!—what has he done to redress the injury her reputation has suffered at his hands? He would have me think that he sought my father out in the belief that he would take the child to his bosom—”

  “Not a bit of it!” interrupted Desford. “I hoped I could shame him into making her an allowance, that’s all!”

  “Well, if that’s what you hoped you must be a gudgeon!” said Mr Steane frankly. “Not that you did, of course! What you hoped was to be able to fob her off on to the old man, and you wouldn’t have cared if he’d offered to engage her as a cook-maid as long as you were rid of her!”

  “Some such offer was made,” said Desford. “Not, indeed, by your father, but by your stepmother. I refused it.”

  “Yes, it’s all very well to say that, but how should I know if you’re speaking the truth? All I know is that I return to England to find that my poor little girl has been tossed about amongst a set of unscrupulous persons, cast adrift in a harsh world—”

  “Take a damper!” said the Viscount. “None of that is true, as well you know! The unscrupulous person who cast her adrift is yourself, so let us have less of this theatrical bombast! You wish to know what I have done to redress the injury to her reputation she has suffered at my hands, and my answer is, Nothing—because her reputation has suffered no injury either at my hands, or at anyone else’s! But when I found that your father had gone out of town, the lord only knew where, and that Cherry had nowhere to go, not one acquaintance in London, and only a shilling or two in her purse, I realized that little though I might like it I must hold myself responsible for her. With your arrival, my responsibility has come to an end. But before I knew that you were not dead, but actually in this country, I drove down to Bath, to take counsel of Miss Fletching. I was a day behind you, Mr Steane. Miss Fletching most sincerely pities Cherry, and is, I think, very fond of her. She offers her a home, until she can hear of a situation which Cherry might like. She has one in her eye already, with an invalid lady whom she describes as very charming and gentle, but all depends upon her present companion, who is torn between her duty to her lately widowed parent, and her wish to remain with her kind mistress.”