Sir George saw his opening and jumped for it viciously. ‘I fear you honour me too much,’ he said, in the tone of elaborate politeness, which was most likely to embarrass a woman in her position. ‘Most certainly you do, if you are really under the impression that I fought Mr. Dunborough on your account, my girl!’
‘Did you not?’ she stammered; and the new-born doubt in her eyes betrayed her trouble.
‘Mr. Dunborough struck me, because I would not let him fire on the crowd,’ Sir George explained, blandly raising his quizzing glass, but not using it. ‘That was why I fought him. And that is my excuse. You see, my dear,’ he continued familiarly, ‘we have each an excuse. But I am not a hypocrite.’
‘Why do you call me that?’ she exclaimed; distress and shame at the mistake she had made contending with her anger.
‘Because, my pretty Methodist,’ he answered coolly, ‘your hate and your love are too near neighbours. Cursing and nursing, killing and billing, come not so nigh one another in my vocabulary. But with women — some women — it is different.’
Her cheeks burned with shame, but her eyes flashed passion. ‘If I were a lady,’ she cried, her voice low but intense, ‘you would not dare to insult me.’
‘If you were a lady,’ he retorted with easy insolence, ‘I would kiss you and make you my wife, my dear. In the meantime, and as you are not — give up nursing young sparks and go home to your mother. Don’t roam the roads at night, and avoid travelling-chariots as you would the devil. Or the next knight-errant you light upon may prove something ruder than — Captain Berkeley!’
‘You are not Captain Berkeley?’
‘No.’
She stared at him, breathing hard. Then, ‘I was a fool, and I pay for it in insult,’ she said.
‘Be a fool no longer then,’ he retorted, his good-humour restored by the success of his badinage; ‘and no man will have the right to insult you, ma belle.’
‘I will never give you the right!’ she cried with intention.
‘It is rather a question of Mr. Dunborough,’ he answered, smiling superior, and flirting his spy-glass to and fro with his fingers. ‘Say the same to him, and — but are you going, my queen? What, without ceremony?’
‘I am not a lady, and noblesse oblige does not apply to me,’ she cried. And she closed the door in his face — sharply, yet without noise.
He went down the stairs a step at a time — thinking. ‘Now, I wonder where she got that!’ he muttered. ‘Noblesse oblige! And well applied too!’ Again, ‘Lord, what beasts we men are!’ he thought. ‘Insult? I suppose I did insult her; but I had to do that or kiss her. And she earned it, the little firebrand!’ Then standing and looking along the High — he had reached the College gates— ‘D — n Dunborough! She is too good for him! For a very little — it would be mean, it would be low, it would be cursed low — but for two pence I would speak to her mother and cheat him. She is too good to be ruined by that coarse-tongued boaster! Though I suppose she fancies him. I suppose he is an Adonis to her! Faugh! Tommy, my lord, and Dunborough! What a crew!’
The good and evil, spleen and patience, which he had displayed in his interview with the girl rode him still; for at the door of the Mitre he paused, went in, came out, and paused again. He seemed to be unable to decide what he would do; but in the end he pursued his way along the street with a clouded brow, and in five minutes found himself at the door of the mean house in the court, whence the porter of Pembroke had gone out night and morning. Here he knocked, and stood. In a moment the door was opened, but to his astonishment by Mr. Fishwick.
Either the attorney shared his surprise, or had another and more serious cause for emotion; for his perky face turned red, and his manner as he stood holding the door half-open, and gaping at the visitor, was that of a man taken in the act, and thoroughly ashamed of himself. Sir George might have wondered what was afoot, if he had not espied over the lawyer’s shoulder a round wooden table littered with papers, and guessed that Mr. Fishwick was doing the widow’s business — a theory which Mr. Fishwick’s first words, on recovering himself, bore out.
‘I am here — on business,’ he said, cringing and rubbing his hands. ‘I don’t — I don’t think that you can object, Sir George.’
‘I?’ said Soane, staring at him in astonishment and some contempt. ‘My good man, what has it to do with me? You got my letter?’
‘And the draft, Sir George!’ Mr. Fishwick bowed low. ‘Certainly, certainly, sir. Too much honoured. Which, as I understood, put an end to any — I mean it not offensively, honoured sir — to any connection between us?’
Sir George nodded. ‘I have my own lawyers in London,’ he said stiffly. ‘I thought I made it clear that I did not need your services further.’
Mr. Fishwick rubbed his hands. ‘I have that from your own lips, Sir George,’ he said. ‘Mrs. Masterson, my good woman, you heard that?’
Sir George glowered at him. ‘Lord, man?’ he said. ‘Why so much about nothing? What on earth has this woman to do with it?’
Mr. Fishwick trembled with excitement. ‘Mrs. Masterson, you will not answer,’ he stammered.
Sir George first stared, then cursed his impudence; then, remembering that after all this was not his business, or that on which he had come, and being one of those obstinates whom opposition but precipitates to their ends, ‘Hark ye, man, stand aside,’ he said. ‘I did not come here to talk to you. And do you, my good woman, attend to me a moment. I have a word to say about your daughter.’
‘Not a word! Mrs. Masterson,’ the attorney cried his eyes almost bursting from his head with excitement.
Sir George was thunderstruck. “Is the man an idiot?” he exclaimed, staring at him. And then, “I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Fishwick, or whatever your name is — a little more of this, and I shall lay my cane across your back.”
“I am in my duty,” the attorney answered, dancing on his feet.
“Then you will suffer in it!” Sir George retorted. “With better men. So do not try me too far. I am here to say a word to this woman which I would rather say alone.”
“Never,” said the attorney, bubbling, “with my good will!”
Soane lost patience at that. “D — n you!” he cried. “Will you be quiet?” And made a cut at him with his cane. Fortunately the lawyer evaded it with nimbleness; and having escaped to a safe distance hastened to cry, “No malice! I bear you no malice, sir!” with so little breath and so much good-nature that Sir George recovered his balance. “Confound you, man!” he continued. “Why am I not to speak? I came here to tell this good woman that if she has a care for this girl the sooner she takes her from where she is the better! And you cannot let me put a word in.”
“You came for that, sir?”
“For what else, fool?”
“I was wrong,” said the attorney humbly. “I did not understand. Allow me to say, sir, that I am entirely of your opinion. The young lady — I mean she shall be removed to-morrow. It — the whole arrangement is improper — highly improper.”
“Why, you go as fast now as you went slowly before,” Sir George said, observing him curiously.
Mr. Fishwick smiled after a sickly fashion. “I did not understand, sir,” he said. “But it is most unsuitable, most unsuitable. She shall return to-morrow at the latest.”
Sir George, who had said what he had to say, nodded, grunted, and went away; feeling that he had performed an unpleasant — and somewhat doubtful — duty under most adverse circumstances. He could not in the least comprehend the attorney’s strange behaviour; but after some contemptuous reflection, of which nothing came, he dismissed it as one of the low things to which he had exposed himself by venturing out of the charmed circle in which he lived. He hoped that the painful series was now at an end, stepped into his post-chaise, amid the reverent salaams of the Mitre, the landlord holding the door; and in a few minutes had rattled over Folly Bridge, and left Oxford behind him.
CHAPTER VII
ACHILLES AND BRI
SEIS
The honourable Mr. Dunborough’s collapse arising rather from loss of blood than from an injury to a vital part, he was sufficiently recovered even on the day after the meeting to appreciate his nurse’s presence. Twice he was heard to chuckle without apparent cause; once he strove, but failed, to detain her hand; while the feeble winks which from time to time he bestowed on Mr. Thomasson when her back was towards him were attributed by that gentleman, who should have known the patient, to reflections closely connected with her charms.
His rage was great, therefore, when three days after the duel, he awoke, missed her, and found in her place the senior bedmaker of Magdalen — a worthy woman, learned in simples and with hands of horn, but far from beautiful. This good person he saluted with a vigour which proved him already far on the road to recovery; and when he was tired of swearing, he wept and threw his nightcap at her. Finally, between one and the other, and neither availing to bring back his Briseis, he fell into a fever; which, as he was kept happed up in a box-bed, in a close room, with every window shut and every draught kept off by stuffy curtains — such was the fate of sick men then — bade fair to postpone his recovery to a very distant date.
In this plight he sent one day for Mr. Thomasson, who had the nominal care of the young gentleman; and the tutor being brought from the club tavern in the Corn Market which he occasionally condescended to frequent, the invalid broke to him his resolution.
‘See here, Tommy,’ he said in a voice weak but vicious. ‘You have got to get her back. I will not be poisoned by this musty old witch any longer.’
‘But if she will not come?’ said Mr. Thomasson sadly.
‘The little fool threw up the sponge when she came before,’ the patient answered, tossing restlessly. ‘And she will come again, with a little pressure. Lord, I know the women! So should you.’
‘She came before because — well, I do not quite know why she came,’ Mr. Thomasson confessed.
‘Any way, you have got to get her back.’
The tutor remonstrated, ‘My dear good man,’ he said unctuously, ‘you don’t think of my position. I am a man of the world, I know—’
‘All of it, my Macaroni!’
‘But I cannot be — be mixed up in such a matter as this, my dear sir.’
‘All the same, you have got to get her,’ was the stubborn answer. ‘Or I write to my lady and tell her you kept mum about my wound. And you will not like that, my tulip.’
On that point he was right; for if there was a person in the world of whom Mr. Thomasson stood in especial awe, it was of Lady Dunborough. My lord, the author of ‘Pomaria Britannica’ and ‘The Elegant Art of Pomiculture as applied to Landscape Gardening,’ was a quantity he could safely neglect. Beyond his yew-walks and his orchards his lordship was a cipher. He had proved too respectable even for the peerage; and of late had cheerfully resigned all his affairs into the hands of his wife, formerly the Lady Michal M’Intosh, a penniless beauty, with the pride of a Scotchwoman and the temper of a Hervey. Her enemies said that my lady had tripped in the merry days of George the Second, and now made up for past easiness by present hardness. Her friends — but it must be confessed her ladyship had no friends.
Be that as it might, Mr. Thomasson had refrained from summoning her to her son’s bedside; partly because the surgeons had quickly pronounced the wound a trifle, much more because the little he had seen of her ladyship had left him no taste to see more. He knew, however, that the omission would weigh heavily against him were it known; and as he had hopes from my lady’s aristocratic connections, and need in certain difficulties of all the aid he could muster, he found the threat not one to be sneezed at. His laugh betrayed this.
However, he tried to put the best face on the matter. ‘You won’t do that,’ he said. ‘She would spoil sport, my friend. Her ladyship is no fool, and would not suffer your little amusements.’
‘She is no fool,’ Mr. Dunborough replied with emphasis. ‘As you will find, Tommy, if she comes to Oxford, and learns certain things. It will be farewell to your chance of having that milksop of a Marquis for a pupil!’
Now, it was one of Mr. Thomasson’s highest ambitions at this time to have the young Marquis of Carmarthen entrusted to him; and Lady Dunborough was connected with the family, and, it was said, had interest there. He was silent.
‘You see,’ Mr. Dunborough continued, marking with a chuckle the effect his words had produced, ‘you have got to get her.’
Mr. Thomasson did not admit that that was so, but he writhed in his chair; and presently he took his leave and went away, his plump pale face gloomy and the crow’s feet showing plain at the corners of his eyes. He had given no promise; but that evening a messenger from the college requested Mrs. Masterson to attend at his rooms on the following morning.
She did not go. At the appointed hour, however, there came a knock on the tutor’s door, and that gentleman, who had sent his servant out of the way, found Mr. Fishwick on the landing. ‘Tut-tut!’ said the don with some brusqueness, his hand still on the door; ‘do you want me?’ He had seen the attorney after the duel, and in the confusion attendant on the injured man’s removal; and knew him by sight, but no farther.
‘I — hem — I think you wished to see Mrs. Masterson?’ was Mr. Fishwick’s answer, and the lawyer, but with all humility, made as if he would enter.
The tutor, however, barred the way. ‘I wished to see Mrs. Masterson,’ he said drily, and with his coldest air of authority. ‘But who are you?’
‘I am here on her behalf,’ Mr. Fishwick answered, meekly pressing his hat in his hands.
‘On her behalf?’ said Mr. Thomasson stiffly. ‘Is she ill?’
‘No, sir, I do not know that she is ill.’
‘Then I do not understand,’ Mr. Thomasson answered in his most dignified tone. ‘Are you aware that the woman is in the position of a college servant, inhabiting a cottage the property of the college? And liable to be turned out at the college will?’
‘It may be so,’ said the attorney.
‘Then, if you please, what is the meaning of her absence when requested by one of the Fellows of the college to attend?’
‘I am here to represent her,’ said Mr. Fishwick.
‘Represent her! Represent a college laundress! Pooh! I never heard of such a thing.’
‘But, sir, I am her legal adviser, and—’
‘Legal adviser!’ Mr. Thomasson retorted, turning purple — he was really puzzled. ‘A bedmaker with a legal adviser! It’s the height of impudence! Begone, sir, and take it from me, that the best advice you can give her is to attend me within the hour.’
Mr. Fishwick looked rather blue. ‘If it has nothing to do with her property,’ he said reluctantly, and as if he had gone too far.
‘Property!’ said Mr. Thomasson, gasping.
‘Or her affairs.’
‘Affairs!’ the tutor cried. ‘I never heard of a bedmaker having affairs.’
‘Well,’ said the lawyer doggedly, and with the air of a man goaded into telling what he wished to conceal, ‘she is leaving Oxford. That is the fact.’
‘Oh!’ said Mr. Thomasson, falling on a sudden into the minor key. ‘And her daughter?’
‘And her daughter.’
‘That is unfortunate,’ the tutor answered, thoughtfully rubbing his hands. ‘The truth is — the girl proved so good a nurse in the case of my noble friend who was injured the other day — my lord Viscount Dunborough’s son, a most valuable life — that since she absented herself, he has not made the same progress. And as I am responsible for him—’
‘She should never have attended him!’ the attorney answered with unexpected sharpness.
‘Indeed! And why not, may I ask?’ the tutor inquired.
Mr. Fishwick did not answer the question. Instead, ‘She would not have gone to him in the first instance,’ he said, ‘but that she was under a misapprehension.’
‘A misapprehension?’
‘She thought that the duel la
y at her door,’ the attorney answered; ‘and in that belief was impelled to do what she could to undo the consequences. Romantic, but a most improper step!’
‘Improper!’ said the tutor, much ruffled. ‘And why, sir?’
‘Most improper,’ the attorney repeated in a dry, business-like tone. ‘I am instructed that the gentleman had for weeks past paid her attentions which, his station considered, could scarcely be honourable, and of which she had more than once expressed her dislike. Under those circumstances, to expose her to his suit — but no more need be said,’ the attorney added, breaking off and taking a pinch of snuff with great enjoyment, ‘as she is leaving the city.’
Mr. Thomasson had much ado to mask his chagrin under a show of contemptuous incredulity. ‘The wench has too fine a conceit of herself!’ he blurted out. ‘Hark you, sir — this is a fable! I wonder you dare to put it about. A gentleman of the station of my lord Dunborough’s son does not condescend to the gutter!’
‘I will convey the remark to my client,’ said the attorney, bristling all over.
‘Client!’ Mr. Thomasson retorted, trembling with rage — for he saw the advantage he had given the enemy. ‘Since when had laundry maids lawyers? Client! Pho! Begone, sir! You are abusive. I’ll have you looked up on the rolls. I’ll have your name taken!’
‘I would not talk of names if I were you,’ cried Mr. Fishwick, reddening in his turn with rage. ‘Men give a name to what you are doing this morning, and it is not a pleasant one. It is to be hoped, sir, that Mr. Dunborough pays you well for your services!’
‘You — insolent rascal!’ the tutor stammered, losing in a moment all his dignity and becoming a pale flabby man, with the spite and the terror of crime in his face. ‘You — begone! Begone, sir.’
‘Willingly,’ said the attorney, swelling with defiance. ‘You may tell your principal that when he means marriage, he may come to us. Not before. I take my leave, sir. Good morning.’ And with that he strutted out and marched slowly and majestically down the stairs.
He bore off the honours of war. Mr. Thomasson, left among his Titian copies, his gleaming Venuses, and velvet curtains, was a sorry thing. The man who preserves a cloak of outward decency has always this vulnerable spot; strip him, and he sees himself as others see or may see him, and views his ugliness with griping qualms. Mr. Thomasson bore the exposure awhile, sitting white and shaking in a chair, seeing himself and seeing the end, and, like the devils, believing and trembling. Then he rose and staggered to a little cupboard, the door of which was adorned with a pretty Greek motto, and a hovering Cupid painted in a blue sky; whence he filled himself a glass of cordial. A second glass followed; this restored the colour to his cheeks and the brightness to his eyes. He shivered; then smacked his lips and began to reflect what face he should put upon it when he went to report to his pupil.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 299
