Cressida (3 page)

“Wanting! You! A Calverton!” exclaimed Lady Constance, in her deepest tones. “The man, my dear, is an impertinent fool!”

“Not at all!” said Cressida, laughing again, “though I won’t say he is not riding his collector’s hobbyhorse in this instance, with an eye out for obtaining only the rarest and most distinguished article of its kind. In fact, I have sometimes suspected him of having designs upon one of the Royal Princesses: there are so many of them, and all pining for husbands, poor things! But he was really quite complimentary in dismissing
my
pretensions. ‘I see through you, my dear,’ he told me, “and yet I allow you to twist me around your little finger, which is a very poor situation for a husband to find himself in. What
you
need is a man who sees through you and can still stand up to all that will and charm—’

“Well, that is Langmere. Langmere could do that,” Lady Constance said stoutly, putting in a word for the absent marquis; but this statement was manifestly so absurd, since the love-stricken Lord Langmere would notoriously have gone through fire and through water, though much against his better judgement, at his beloved’s bidding, that even Lady Constance felt she had not got the better of
that
exchange.

Something less than an hour later Miss Calverton, stepping down from her carriage before a building near one of Wren’s charming little City churches, St. Mildred’s Poultry, was met by an obsequious clerk of Sir Octavius Mayr’s and escorted upstairs to the elegantly furnished office where Sir Octavius himself was awaiting her.

“Well, Cressy?” he greeted her, with the lift of a quizzical eyebrow, as he rose from the large armchair in which he had been sitting behind a magnificent Bellange desk decorated with green bronze paterae and resting on eight winged lions sculpted in mahogany. “Only a quarter hour late today? You are improving! Were you so late coming from the Campetts’ ball last night that you could not bring yourself to leave your bed this morning, or am I to gather that the reason for your tardiness is that that fetching costume was donned for my benefit, and required a great deal of time and thought in the selection?’

Cressida, who was indeed looking very smart that morning in a walking-dress of water-green crape, with a daring hat a la Hussar set at a jaunty angle on her tawny curls, grimaced at him and regarded the Vulliamy timepiece that stood on the mantelshelf, its hands pointing uncompromisingly to three quarters past the hour.

“I daresay your clock is wrong,” she said. “It can’t possibly be so late.”

“The clock, ” said Sir Octavius tranquilly, “keeps excellent time. I could wish, my dear Cressy, that one could say the same of you. However, in view of the charming picture you present, I am not disposed to cavil over a mere quarter hour.”

He smiled at her—an amiably cynical smile that had made more people than Miss Cressida Calverton realise that there was very little use in trying the ordinary small social deceptions on him. He was a rather small, neatly built man, with a noble head crowned by iron-grey hair, and not a trace of his Danish origin lingered in his speech, despite the fact that he had been eighteen years of age when he had first come to England to begin his career there as a clerk in the offices of a well-known Baltic merchant.

Once there, his ascent in the world of business had been phenomenally rapid. Within the space of four years he had amassed a small fortune and set up in business for himself, at which time he had come to the notice of Miss Estella Calverton, who was then living in London. Miss Calverton, with her usual strong-minded eccentricity of behaviour, had taken him under her wing, introduced him into the literary and artistic
salons
she frequented, and entrusted her considerable fortune to his care—a course of action that had been amply justified over the years as that fortune had grown, under his management, into a truly splendid one.

Upon Miss Estella Calverton’s death, Octavius Mayr (he was Sir Octavius by that time, having been knighted for services to the Crown not well known to the public, but of exceeding value to a monarchy perennially in financial distress over the French wars) had accepted the charge laid upon him in her will to act as one of her great-niece’s trustees, the other being Arthur Calverton, who neither knew nor cared anything about finance except how mortgages and loans were arranged, and was quite content to leave the whole complicated matter of his niece’s fortune in Sir Octavius’s hands.

If Cressida had been an ordinary girl, there is little doubt that Sir Octavius would have managed, as soon as she had attained her majority, to shift his responsibility for her fortune on to other shoulders and go on about his own more important affairs. But Cressida was not an ordinary girl, and Sir Octavius, who had found the nine-teen-year-old heiress shy, odd, and delightful, found her even more delightful, though no longer shy or odd, as her star had risen and attained its present shining eminence in the
ton.
He was not a man to whom it had ever been granted to fall in love, for finance was his golden and demanding mistress; but he sometimes congratulated himself upon the fact that he had not come upon Cressida twenty years earlier, when he might still have been young enough to have committed the folly of losing his head and his heart to a young woman who, however great her charm and however generous her spirit, he was well aware could be impetuous, self-willed, and, to the male mind, quite maddeningly unreasonable when she chose.

Having seen her comfortably ensconced now in a gondola armchair of gilded wood upholstered in green, he did not at once proceed to the matter of business he wished to discuss, but allowed himself instead the indulgence of a few minutes’ social conversation with her. It had been several weeks since he had seen her, during which time the Regent’s daughter, the Princess Charlotte, had been married with great ceremony to Prince Leopold of Coburg and the Byron scandal had come to a head with that disastrous ball at Almack’s which had been given for him by his few remaining friends in the 
ton
with the intention of rehabilitating him in the eyes of Society, but which had ended instead in abysmal failure.

“It was
horrid,”
Cressida, who had been present, said in describing the affair to him. “The room simply emptied as soon as he walked into it. I do think he is a bit of a bore, with his posturings and the Cheltenham tragedies he is always enacting for one, but on the other hand I have not the least patience with Lady Byron. Any
sensible
woman would have known how to manage matters better than to land them both in the middle of all this scandal-broth. But from what I hear, she is enjoying her own martyrdom, and enjoying even more having made Byron a pariah to all England.

Sir Octavius said, with his usual cynical wisdom, that he dared say if the truth were known Byron was rather enjoying it, too, and would play Ishmael for all he was worth all over Europe, now that he had been driven out of England.

“And speaking of Ishmaels,” he remarked, “I may tell you that you are about to be rewarded for your lack of punctuality by meeting the man who—though his reputation may not quite rival Byron’s—will no doubt be taking his place this Season in providing the town with its more interesting
on-dits.
In other words, I am expecting the famous—or should I say, the notorious?— Captain Rossiter, and when he arrives I shall make a point of presenting him to you, so that you may boast to all your friends that
you
were the one who met him first. ”

He broke off, cocking an interrogative eyebrow at her, for in the not very agreeable surprise of hearing what he had just told her she had been unable to prevent herself from colouring up slightly and looking vexed. She herself was aware of this, and, with some annoyance at herself for such an unexpected piece of self-consciousness, managed to say in a cool and quite unconcerned voice, “Unnecessary! I am already acquainted with Captain Rossiter.”

“Indeed? Sir Octavius continued to look at her, the eyebrow still raised. “Do I detect, perhaps,” he enquired after a moment, “a slight coolness in your tone?”

Cressida shrugged and said nothing.

“Yes,” Sir Octavius answered his own question thoughtfully, “a very definite coolness, I believe! Now where, I wonder, can you have made the acquaintance of the dashing Captain? He has been so little in England, I understand—”

“It was in Gloucestershire, and years ago,” Cressida said, preserving her indifferent air. “Do let us leave the subject, Octavius! If my being late to my appointment really has put you out, I wonder that you should wish to be wasting your time on gossip!”

Sir Octavius looked far from satisfied over this cavalier dismissal of the subject of Captain Rossiter; but he made no attempt to continue it, turning instead to the business he had to discuss with her. He had been agreeably surprised to find, upon first making her acquaintance, that she was quite capable of taking an intelligent interest in the management of her fortune, and he never made any important decision now concerning it without informing her fully. They accordingly had a brief and very businesslike conversation upon the matter of the latest investments he wished to make upon her account, and then there was a tap at the door and an elderly clerk, entering noiselessly, came in and murmured a few words in Sir Octavius’s ear.

“Ah, yes! Show them in at once, Smollett,” said Sir Octavius, with a glance at Cressida.

The clerk departed, and Cressida rose and began drawing on her gloves.

“I shall leave you to Captain Rossiter then, Octavius,” she said. “I expect you will have a charming conversation—”

“What—running away?” Sir Octavius enquired, in mock-surprise. “It is not like you to be so poor-spirited, Cressy! What has Rossiter done to make himself so feared by you?”

“I am
not
afraid of Dev Rossiter!” said Cressida, with rather more emphasis than was strictly necessary. She stood looking indignantly at Sir Octavius for a moment and then sat down again. “Very well, I shall stay!” she said. “But only long enough to put the notion out of your head that I do not care to meet him. It is a matter of complete indifference to me!”

“Is it, indeed?” said Sir Octavius politely; and then, at the sound of footsteps approaching the door, turned his gaze in that direction.

The next moment a tall man in his middle thirties, with the black hair and disquietingly arrogant eyes of the dark Celt, and wearing riding dress instead of the more fashionable town costume of pantaloons and Hessians, appeared upon the threshold. He was followed by an equally tall, but somewhat younger, fair-haired man, with a modest manner and an agreeable smile.

Cressida, who had naturally been remembering a much younger Rossiter, had the peculiar sensation, as her eyes took in the dark face of the first arrival, with its harsh lines and direct, penetrating, rather cynical eyes, that she was looking at a stranger—one closely related, perhaps, to a person she had once known, but still a stranger. The shock of surprise was so great, in fact, that she scarcely heard his greeting to Sir Octavius and his introduction of his companion as Captain Miles Harries. Following these brief civilities, his eyes turned indifferently in her direction, and then paused there in a sudden hard, incredulous gaze.

As if that abrupt meeting of eyes had returned her presence of mind to her, she smiled at him composedly.

“Yes, it is really I,” she said, in a voice that had suddenly become far more mannered than it had been when she had been talking to Sir Octavius, as if she were an actress who had just come on stage and had begun to speak her lines in the character of a dashing young lady of fashion. “How are you, Dev? Or perhaps I should say 
Captain Rossiter?
It has been a very long time, after all, and our acquaintance was of a rather
brief
duration.”

Rossiter did not return her smile. He was regarding her frowningly, still, it seemed, not quite believing what he saw.

“You’ve changed, ” he said abruptly, after a moment.

“But, my dear man, of course! One does, you know. After all, it has been years! Did you expect I should still be the same poor little green girl you knew in Cheltenham?” She turned to Captain Harries. “But we are being very uncivil! Won’t you present your friend to me?”

Captain Harries was duly presented to Miss Calverton, and acknowledged the introduction with frank admiration and an accent that revealed itself at once, to Cressida’s quick ear, as having no connexion with the higher ranks of English society. In spite of this, however, and of his being in company with the odious Rossiter, she liked him at first sight, for there was an engaging candour, mingled with a forthright kind of shrewdness, in his manner—a combination not often met with in fashionable circles.

“You are in the Army, then, Captain Harries?” she said, pointedly turning her attention to him to the exclusion of Rossiter, who, having sat down, was still subjecting her to a frowning scrutiny.

Captain Harries said he had been in the Light Bobs during the war, but had sold out when the Peace had come and was now engaged, in a small way, in Rossiter’s present business ventures.

“Captain Rossiter, I may tell you,” Sir Octavius put in, addressing Cressida with a look of the blandest innocence upon his face, “not satisfied with his
coup
on Change at the time of Waterloo—of which I am sure you, along with all England, have heard—is now attempting to steal a march on the rest of us in the development of the new steam locomotives. ”

“Is he? But how too drearily respectable!” said Cressida, dismissing the subject with a cavalier lack of interest that made Sir Octavius long to shake her, and then wonder what even more drastic impulses were being repressed behind Rossiter’s dark, impassive face. “And just when one was
so
depending upon you to run true to form,” she continued, addressing Rossiter, “and enliven this very dull Season by doing something quite desperately unrespectable! Like India—it
was
in India, wasn’t it, that you ran off with the local potentate’s favourite dancing-girl and very nearly caused a war?”