Bath Tangle

10

The engaged couple, neither of whom wasted a moment’s thought on what must be the inevitable conclusions arrived at by the interested, admitted only two persons into the secret. One was Fanny, and the other Mrs Kirkby. The Major could not be happy until he had made Serena known to his mother; and since she was reluctant to appear in any way neglectful, it was not long before she was climbing the hill to Lansdown Crescent, escorted by her handsome cavalier.

Had the expedition been left to the Major’s management, Serena would have been carried in a sedan-chair, his rooted conviction that no female was capable of exertion making it quite shocking to him to think of her undertaking so strenuous a walk. But Serena had other ideas. “What, stuff myself into a chair in such bright May weather? Not for the world!” she declared.

“Your carriage, then? My mother goes out so seldom that she has not thought it worth while to keep hers in Bath, or I would—”

“My dear Hector,” she interrupted him, “you cannot in all seriousness suppose that I would have my own or your mother’s horses put to merely to struggle up that steep hill!”

“No, which is why I suggested you should hire a chair. I am afraid you will be tired.”

“On the contrary, I shall enjoy the walk. I feel in Bath as though I were hobbled. Only tell me the exact direction of Mrs Kirkby’s house, and I will engage to present myself punctually, and in no need of hartshorn to revive me!”

He smiled, but said: “I shall fetch you, of course.”

“Well, that will be very agreeable, but I beg you won’t put yourself to the trouble if your reason is that you fear for my safety in this excessively respectable town!”

“Not your safety, precisely, but I know that you won’t take your maid, and I own I cannot like you to go out alone.”

“You would be surprised if you guessed how very well able I am to take care of myself. I was done with young ladyhood some years ago. What is more, my dear, times have changed a trifle since you lived in England before. In London, I might gratify you by taking my maid with me—though it is much more likely that I should prefer to go in my carriage, and alone!—but in Bath it is quite unnecessary.”

“Nevertheless I hope you will allow me to be your escort.”

“Indeed, I shall be glad of your company,” she responded, not choosing to argue the point further, and trusting that time would dull the edge of a solicitude she found a little oppressive.

Certainly the pace she set when they walked up to Lansdown Crescent did not encourage him to suppose that she was less healthy than she looked. She had never lost the rather mannish stride she had acquired in youth, when, to the disapproval of most of her relations, she had been reared more as a boy than as a girl, and she could never shorten it to suit Fanny’s demure steps. A walk with Fanny was to Serena a form of dawdling, which she detested; it was a real pleasure to her to be pacing along beside a man again. She would not take the Major’s arm, but went up the hill at a swinging rate, and exclaimed, when she was obliged to hold her hat on against the wind: “Ah, this is famous! One can breathe up here! I wished we might have found a house in Camden Place, or the Royal Crescent, but there were none to be hired that Lybster thought eligible.”

“I myself prefer the heights,” he admitted, “but there’s I no doubt Laura Place is a more convenient situation.”

“Oh, yes! And Fanny would not have liked the hill,” she agreed cheerfully.

A few minutes later she was making the acquaintance of her future mother-in-law.

Mrs Kirkby, a valetudinarian of retiring habits, and a timid disposition, was quite overpowered by her visitor. She had been flustered at the outset by the intelligence that her only remaining son was betrothed to a lady of title whose various exploits were known even to her. An inveterate reader of the social columns in the journals, she could have told the Major how many parties the Lady Serena had graced with her presence, what was the colour of her dashing phaeton, how many times she had been seen in Hyde Park, mounted on her long-tailed grey, what she had worn at various Drawing-rooms, in whose company she had visited the paddock at Doncaster, and a great many other items of similar interest. Nor was she ignorant of the Lady Serena’s predilection for waltzing, and in quadrilles; while as for the Lady Serena’s previous engagement, so scandalously terminated within so short a distance from the wedding-day, she had marvelled at it, and shaken her head at it, and moralized over it to all her acquaintance. It had therefore come as a severe shock to her to learn that her son was proposing to ally himself to a lady demonstrably unsuited to a quiet Kentish manor and she had not been able to forbear asking him, in a quavering voice: “Oh, Hector, but is she not very fast?”

“She is an angel!” he had replied radiantly.

Mrs Kirkby did not think that Serena looked like an angel. Angels, in her view, were ethereal creatures, and there was nothing at all ethereal about Serena. She was a tall and beautiful young woman of fashion, the picture of vigorous health, and so full of vitality that half an hour in her company left the invalid a prey to headache, palpitations, and nervous spasms. It was not, as Mrs Kirkby faintly assured her elderly companion, that she was loud-voiced, for her voice was particularly musical. It was not that she was talkative, or assertive, or fidgety, for she was none of these things. In fact, Mrs Kirkby had been unable to detect faults; what had prostrated her were the Lady Serena’s virtues. “Anyone can see,” she said, between sniffs at her vinaigrette, “that she has never moved in any but the first circles! Her manners have that well-bred ease that shows she has been used to act as hostess to every sort of person, from Royalty, I daresay, to commoners! Nothing could have been more perfect than her bearing towards me, and what I have ever done to deserve to have such a daughter-in-law thrust upon me I’m sure I don’t know!”

Happily, the Major was far too dazzled by his goddess’s brilliant good looks to notice any lack of enthusiasm in his mother’s demeanour. It seemed to him that Serena brought light into a sunless room, and it never occurred to him that anyone could find it too strong. So great was his certainty that no one could set eyes on Serena without being captivated, and so complete was his absorption, that he accepted at face value all his mother’s acquiescent answers to the eager questions he later put to her. Had she ever seen such striking beauty? No, indeed, she had not. So much countenance, such a complexion! Yes, indeed! Those eyes, too! he had known she could not choose but to be fascinated by them. So changeable, and expressive, and the curve of the lids above them giving them that smiling look! Very true: most remarkable! She must have been pleased, he dared swear, with the perfection of her manners, so easy, so polished, and yet so unaffected! Exactly so! And the grace of her every movement! Oh, yes! most graceful! He did not know how it was, for she never tried to dominate her company, but when she came into a room, her personality seemed to fill it: had his mother been conscious of it? Most conscious of it! Would she think him fanciful if he told her that it seemed to him as though those glorious eyes had some power of witchcraft? He thought they cast a spell over anyone on whom they rested! Yes, indeed! Mrs Kirkby (in a failing voice) thought so too.

So the Major was able to tell Serena, in all good faith, that his mother was in transports over her; and such was his infatuation that he would have found nothing to cavil at in Mrs Kirkby’s subsequent assertion, to the sympathetic Miss Murthly, that the Lady Serena had bewitched her son.

In his saner moments, slight doubts of his mother’s approval of all Serena’s actions did cross the Major’s mind; and, without being precisely aware of it, he was glad that the seclusion in which she lived made it unlikely that certain freaks would come to her ears. Although herself of respectable lineage, she had never moved in the highest circle of society, and possibly might not appreciate that the code of conduct obtaining there was less strict than any to which she had been accustomed. Great ladies permitted themselves more license than was the rule among the lesser gentry. Their manners were more free; they expressed themselves in language shocking to the old-fashioned; secure in birth and rank, they cared little for appearances, and were far less concerned with the proprieties than were more obscure persons. When he had first encountered Serena, the Major had been struck by the marked difference which existed between her relations with the elders of her family, and those that were the rule in his own family. That she should have lived on terms of unceremonious equality with an indulgent father was not perhaps surprising; but the extremely frank style of her conversations with her formidable aunt had never ceased to astonish him. There was no lack of ceremony about the Lady Theresa Eaglesham, but while, on the one hand, she had not hesitated to censure conduct which she considered unbecoming in her niece, on the other, she had not scrupled to gossip with her, as with a contemporary. Young Hector Kirkby, seven years earlier, had been quite unable to picture any of his aunts informing his sister that Lady M—was big with child, and the wits laying bets on the probable paternity of the unborn infant. Major Hector Kirkby, no longer a green boy, devoutly trusted that Serena would never, in the future, regale these prim spinsters with extracts from Lady Theresa’s singularly unrestricted letters. He even refrained from repeating to his mother a very good story Lady Theresa had sent her niece about the Royal Wedding. “Rumour has it,” wrote Lady Theresa, “that the ceremony went off well, except for an entrave at the end, when the P. Charlotte was kept waiting for hall an hour in the carriage, while Leopold hunted high and low for his greatcoat, which no one could find. The P. Regent, très benin until then, hearing the cause of the delay, burst out with “D—his greatcoat!” It is now believed, by the by, that he is not dropsical—”

No: decidedly that was not a story for Mrs Kirkby, quite as inveterate an admirer of Royalty as Fanny.

Nor did the Major inform his parent that her future daughter-in-law, riding out of Bath in his company before breakfast, dispensed with a chaperon on these expeditions. Mrs Kirkby would have been profoundly shocked, and he was himself doubtful of the propriety of it. But Serena laughed at him, accusing him of being frightened of all the quizzy people in Bath, and he stifled his qualms. It was a delight to be alone with her, an agony to be powerless to check her intrepidity. She would brook no hand upon her bridle: he had learnt that, when, in actual fact, he had caught it above the bit, instinctively, when her mare had reared. The white fury in her face had startled him; her eyes were daggers, and the virago-note sounded in her voice when she shot at him, from between clenched teeth: Take your hand from my rein!” The dangerous moment passed; his hand had dropped; she got the mare under control, and said quite gently: “You must never do so again, Hector. Yes, yes, I understand, but when I cannot manage my horses I will sell them, and take to tatting instead!”

He thought her often reckless in the fences she would ride at; all she said, when he expostulated, was: “Don’t be afraid! I never overface my horses. The last time I did so I was twelve, and Papa laid his hunting-crop across my shoulders: an effective cure!”

He said ruefully: “Can’t you tell me some other way I might be able to check your mad career?”

“Alas, none!” she laughed.

He had nightmarish visions of seeing her lying with a broken neck beside some rasper; and, to make it worse, Fanny said to him, with a trustful smile: “It is so comfortable to know you are with Serena, when she rides out. Major Kirkby! I know she is a splendid horsewoman, but I can never be easy when she has only Fobbing with her, because she is what the hunting people call a bruising rider, and for all Fobbing has been her groom since she was a little girl she never will mind him!”

“I wish to God I might induce her to mind me,” he ejaculated. “But she will not, Lady Spenborough, and when I begged her to consider what must be my position if she should take a bad toss when in my care, she would do nothing but laugh, and advise me to ride off the instant I saw her fall, and swear I was never with her!”

“Oh, dear!” she sighed. She saw that he was really worried, and added soothingly: “Never mind! I daresay we are both of us too anxious. Lord Spenborough, you know, was used to tell me there was no need for me to tease myself over her. He never did so! If he thought she had been reckless, he sometimes swore at her, but I don’t think he was ever really alarmed!”

“That, ma’am, I could not do!”

“Oh, no! I know you never would! Though I daresay she would not be in the least offended if you did,” said Fanny reflectively.

The bright May weather was making Serena increasingly impatient of the quiet life she was obliged to lead. At this time, in any other year, she would have been in the thick of the London season, cramming a dozen engagements into a single day. She did not wish herself in London, and would have recoiled from the thought of breakfasts and balls, but Bath provided no outlet for her overflowing energy. Fanny was content to visit the Pump Room each weekday and the Laura Chapel each Sunday, and found a stroll along the fashionable promenades exercise enough for her constitution; Serena could scarcely endure the unvarying pattern of her days, and felt herself caged in so small a town. She said that Bath was stifling in warm weather, sent to Milverley for her phaeton, and commanded the Major to escort her on a tour of the livery stables of Bath, in search of a pair of job horses fit for her to drive.

He was very willing, fully sympathizing with her desire to escape from the confinement of the town, and realizing that to be driven in a barouche by Fanny’s staid coachman could only bore her. He thought that the phaeton would provide both ladies with an agreeable and unexceptionable amusement. That was before he saw it. But the vehicle which arrived in Bath was not the safe and comfortable phaeton he had expected to see. Serena had omitted to mention the fact that hers was a high-perch phaeton; and when he set eyes on it, and saw the frail body hung directly over the front axle, its bottom fully five feet from the ground, he gave an exclamation of dismay. “Serena! You don’t mean to drive yourself in that?”

“Yes, most certainly I do! But, oh, how much I wish I still had the pair I was used to drive! Match greys, Hector, and such beautiful steppers!”

“Serena—my dearest! I beg you won’t! I know you are an excellent whip, but you could not have a more dangerous carriage!”

“No—if I were not an excellent whip!”

“Even nonpareils have been known to overturn these high-perch phaetons!”

“To be sure they have!” she agreed, with a mischievous smile. “The difficulty of driving them is what lends a spice!”

“Yes, but—My love, you are the only judge of what it is proper for you to do, but to be driving the most sporting of all carriages—Dearest, do females commonly do so?”

“By no means! Only very dashing females!”

“No, don’t joke me about it! Perhaps, in Hyde Park—though I own I should have thought—But in Bath—! You can’t have considered! You would set the whole town talking!”

She looked at him with surprise. “Should I? Yes, very likely!—there is no knowing what people will talk of! But you can’t—surely you can’t expect me to pay the least heed to what they may choose to say of me?”

He was silenced, startled to discover that he did expect this. After a moment, she said coaxingly: “Will you go with me, and see whether I am to be trusted not to overturn myself? I must try these job horses of mine. From what I can see of them I fancy there can be no fear that they will have the smallest desire to bolt with me!”

“You will give Bath enough to stare at without that!” he replied, in a mortified tone, and left her.

It was as well he did so, for quick anger flashed in her eyes, and he might otherwise have had another taste of her temper. His solicitude for her safety, though it might fret her independent spirit, she could understand, and make a push to bear with patience. Criticism of her conduct was an impertinence she would tolerate no better from him than from her cousin Hartley. She had almost uttered a blistering set-down, when he turned on his heel, and was shocked to realize that she had been within an ace of telling him that whatever might be the creed governing the behaviour of the ladies of his set, she was Spenborough’s daughter, and profoundly indifferent to the opinion such persons might hold of her.

It was not to be expected that she would, in this instance, think herself at fault. An easy-going father, famed for his eccentricities, had sanctioned, even encouraged, her sporting proclivities. In much the same spirit as he had told her, facing her first jump, to throw her heart over, he had taught her to handle all the most mettlesome teams in his stables. This very high-perch phaeton had been built for her to his order: disapproval of it was disapproval of him. “Whatever else you may do, my girl,” had said the late Earl, “don’t you be missish!”

The Major having removed himself, Serena’s wrath was vented, in some sort, on Fanny. “Intolerable!” she declared, striding up and down the drawing-room, in her mannishly cut driving dress. “I to pander to the prejudices of a parcel of Bath dowds and prudes! If that is what he thinks I must do when we are married the sooner he learns that I shall not the better it will be for him! Pretty well for Major Kirkby to tell a Carlow that her behaviour is unseemly!”

“Surely, dearest, he cannot have said that!” expostulated Fanny mildly.

“Implied it! What, does he think my credit to stand upon so insecure a footing that to be seen driving a sporting carriage must demolish it?”

“You know he does not. Don’t be vexed with me, Serena, but it is not only a parcel of Bath dowds who think it a fast thing for you to do!” She added hastily, as the blazing eyes turned towards her: “Yes, yes, it is all nonsense, of course! You need not care for it, but I am persuaded that no man could endure to have his wife thought fast!”

“What Papa countenanced need not offend Hector!”

“I am sure it does not. Now, do, do, Serena, be calm! Did not what your papa countenanced very frequently offend his own sister?” She saw the irrepressible smile leap to those stormy eyes, the lips quiver ruefully, and was emboldened to continue: “What he permitted must have been right—indeed, how could I feel otherwise?—but, you know, he was not precisely the same as other people!”

“No! The eccentric Lord Spenborough, eh?”

“Do you think that it vexed him to be called that?” asked Fanny, fearing that she had offended.

“On the contrary! He liked it! As I do! Anyone who chooses to say that I am as eccentric as my father may do so with my good-will! I don’t seek the title, any more than he did: it is what hum-drum, insipid provincials say of anyone who does not heed all their tiresome shibboleths! I do what I do because it is what I wish to do, not, believe me, my dear Fanny, to court the notice of the world!”

“I know—oh, I know!”

“You may, but it appears that Hector does not!” Serena flashed. “His look—the tone in which he spoke—his final words to me—! Intolerable! Upon my word, I am singularly unfortunate in my prétendants: First Rotherham—”

“Serena!” Fanny cried, with a heightened colour. “How can you speak of Rotherham and Major Kirkby in the same breath?”

“Well, at least Rotherham never lectured me on the proprieties!” said Serena pettishly. “He doesn’t give a button for appearances either.”

“It is not to his credit! I know you don’t mean what you say when you put yourself into a passion, but to be comparing those two is outrageous—now, isn’t it? The one so arrogant, his temper harsh, his disposition tyrannical, his manners abrupt to the point of incivility; and the other so kind, so solicitous for your comfort, loving you so deeply—Oh, Serena, I beg your pardon, but I am quite shocked that you could talk so!”

“So I apprehend! There is indeed no comparison between them. My opinion of Rotherham you know well. But I must be allowed to give the devil his due, if you please, and credit him with one virtue! I collect you don’t count it a virtue! We won’t argue on that head. My scandalous carriage awaits me, and if we are not to aborder one another I’d best leave you, my dear!”

She went away, still simmering with vexation, a circumstance which caused her groom, a privileged person, to say that it was as well she was not driving her famous greys.

“Fobbing, hold your tongue!” she commanded angrily.

He paid no more attention to this than he had paid to the furies of a seven-year-old termagant, but delivered himself of a grumbling monologue, animadverting severely on her headstrong ways and faults of temper; recalling a great many discreditable incidents, embellished with what he had said to his lordship and what his lordship had said to him; and drawing a picture of himself as an ill-used and browbeaten serf, which must have made her laugh, had she been listening to a word he said.

Her rages were never sullen, and by the time she had discovered the peculiarities of her hired horses, this one had quite vanished. Remorse swiftly took its place, and the truth of Fanny’s words struck home to her. She saw again the Major’s face, as much hurt as mortified, remembered his long devotion, and without knowing that she spoke aloud, exclaimed: “Oh, I am the greatest beast in nature!”

“Now, that, my lady,” said her henchman, surprised and gratified, “I never said, nor wouldn’t. What I do say—and, mind, it’s what his lordship has told you time and again!—is that to be handling a high-spirited pair when you’re in one of your tantrums—”

“Are you scolding still?” interrupted Serena. “Well, if these commoners are your notion of a high-spirited pair, they are not mine!”

“No, my lady, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to you if they was prime ’uns on the fret!” said Fobbing, with asperity.

“It would make a great deal of difference to me,” she sighed. “I wonder who has my greys now?”

“Now, we don’t want to have a fit of the dismals!” he said gruffly. “If you was driving a pair of stumblers, you’d still take the shine out of any other lady on the road, my lady, that I will say! It’s time you was thinking of turning them, if you don’t want to be late back—them not being what you might call sixteen mile an hour tits.”

“Yes, we must go back,” she agreed.

He relapsed into silence, and she was free to pursue her own uncomfortable reflections. By the time they had reached Laura Place again, she had beaten herself into a state of repentance which had to find instant expression. Without pausing to divest herself of her hat or her driving coat, she hurried into the parlour behind the dining-room, stripping off her gloves, and saying over her shoulder to the butler: “I shall be wanting Thomas almost immediately, to deliver a letter for me in Lansdown Crescent.”

She was affixing a wafer to an impetuous and wildly scrawled apology when she heard the knocker on the front door. A few moments later, she heard the Major’s voice saying: “You need not announce me!” and sprang to her feet just as he came quickly into the room.

He was looking pale, and anxious. He shut the door with a backward thrust of his hand, and spoke her name, in a tense way that showed him to be labouring under strong emotion.

“Oh, Hector, I have been writing to you!” she cried.

He seemed to grow paler. “Writing to me! Serena, I beg of you—only listen to me!”

She went towards him, saying penitently: “I was odious! a wretch! Oh, pray forgive me!”

“Forgive you! I? Serena, my darling, I came to beg you to forgive me! That I should have presumed to criticize your actions! That I should—”

“No, no, I used you monstrously. Do not you beg my pardon! If you wish me not to drive my phaeton in Bath, I won’t! There! Am I forgiven?”

But this, she found, would not do for him at all. His remorse for having presumed to remonstrate with his goddess would be soothed by nothing less than her promising to do exactly as she chose upon all occasions. An attempt to joke him out of his mood of exaggerated self-blame failed to draw a smile from him; and the quarrel ended with his passionately kissing Serena’s hands, and engaging himself to drive out with her in the phaeton on the very next day.