Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle

11

Sylvester, when presently applied to, gave his support to both contestants. He said that Tom must certainly not be abandoned to his fate; but he also said that Phoebe had no need to delay her journey on that account, since he himself would remain at the Blue Boar, delegating to Keighley the task of conveying her to her grandmother. She could not but be grateful to him for so practical a solution to her difficulty, her only remaining anxiety being the fear that she would be overtaken by her father before the arrival of Sylvester’s chaise at the Blue Boar.

“I can only say, Miss Marlow,” responded Sylvester to this confidence,” that if the first vehicle to reach us from the west is not my chaise two Hounslow-bred postilions will shortly be seeking situations in some other household than mine!”

In fact, his chaise arrived two days later, within a very short time of the snow’s ceasing to fall. Since it had taken the postilions more than two hours to accomplish the stage between Marlborough and Hungerford, Swale’s graphic description of the perils overcome in the cause of duty were not needed to convince Phoebe that the condition of the roads was still too bad to make her father’s appearance on the scene anything but a remote contingency.

Sylvester sent his chaise on to the Halfway House, a couple of miles up the road, but kept Swale at the Blue Boar. Swale, discovering that he must share a bedchamber with Keighley, and eat all his meals in the kitchen, was so much affronted that he hovered for as much as thirty seconds on the brink of tendering his resignation to his noble employer. He bowed stiffly when commanded to wait upon Mr. Orde, and sought solace for his lacerated sensibilities in treating that hapless young gentleman with such meticulous politeness that Tom was very soon begging Sylvester to leave him to the less expert but less intimidating ministrations of Will Scaling. Tom’s shyness of Sylvester had not survived forty-eight hours of depending upon him for his every need; and within an hour of having lodged this laughing complaint with him he was taking him roundly to task for having acted upon it in an ill-judged manner. “The lord knows what you said to the poor fellow, but if I’d guessed you would say anything at all I never would have told you about it!” he said. “It was worse than anything! He has been in here, begging my pardon, and telling me a bamboozling tale of having been feeling out of sorts, and hoping I shan’t have cause to complain to you again! Lord! I promise you I was never more mortified in my life! A pretty sneaksby you made me, Salford! Did you threaten to turn him off, just because he don’t care to wait on me?”

“I’m not so high-handed, Thomas. I only asked him to tell me if he was quite happy in my service.”

“Oh, was that all?” exclaimed Tom. “No wonder he was looking so tyburn-faced! And you say you’re not highhanded! Well, I think you’re mediaeval!”

That made Sylvester laugh. “But in what way am I mediaeval? I pay him a handsome wage, you know.”

“But you didn’t hire him to take care of me!”

“My dear Thomas, what in the world has he to do besides?” Sylvester interrupted, a little impatiently. “All the work he has to do for me in this hedge-tavern could not occupy him for as much as a couple of hours out of the twenty-four!”

“No, but he is your valet, not mine! You might as well have ordered him to groom your horses, or sweep the floor. And beyond all else you told him he must share Keighley’s room! Now, Salford, you must know that your valet is much above your groom’s touch!”

“Not in my esteem.”

“Very likely not, but—”

“But nothing, Thomas! In my own household my esteem is all that signifies. Does that seem mediaeval to you? If it seems so to Swale he may leave me: he’s not my slave!” He smiled suddenly. “Keighley is more my slave, I assure you—and I never engaged him, and could never dismiss him. Now, what is there in that to make you frown at me?”

“I wasn’t—I mean, I can’t explain it, only my father always says one should take care not to offend the sensibilities of inferior persons, and though I daresay you didn’t intend to do so, it does seem to me as if—But I should not say so!” Tom ended, rather hurriedly.

“Well, you have said so, haven’t you?” said Sylvester, quite gently, but with the smile hardening on his lips.

“I beg your pardon, sir!”

Sylvester made no reply to this, but remarked in a thoughtful tone: “To have become acquainted with you and with Miss Marlow ought to do me a great deal of good, I hope. What a number of faults I have of which I was never previously made aware!”

“I don’t know what more I can do than beg your pardon,” Tom said stiffly.

“Why, nothing! Unless you like to instruct me how I should treat my servants?” He paused, as Tom looked at him with belligerence in his eyes, and his lips very resolutely closed, and said quickly: “Oh, no! What an unhandsome thing to say to you! Forgive me: I didn’t mean it!”

There could be no resisting that coaxing note, or the softened expression, half contrite, half quizzical, that put to rout the satyr-look. Tom had been conscious of a thin film of ice behind which Sylvester had seemed to withdraw; he had resented it; but it had melted, and he found himself no longer angry, but stammering: “Oh, stuff! Besides, I had no business to be criticizing you! Particularly,” he added rather naively, “when you have been so devilish kind to me!”

“Humdudgeon!”

“No, it ain’t. What’s more—”

“If you mean to be a dead bore, Thomas, I’m off!” Sylvester interrupted. “And let me tell you that if you are trying to turn me up sweet you will be speedily bowled out! Kind was not the epithet you chose to describe my charitable attempt to make your bed more comfortable this morning!”

“Oh, well, I see I can’t please you!” Tom said, grinning. “First, I’m ungrateful, and now I’m a dead bore! But I’m not ungrateful, you know. I thought the trap was down when you arrived here, and so it was, for I’m in no case to help Phoebe. But you mean to do so, don’t you?”

“Do I? Oh, convey her to London! Yes, I’ll do that,” Sylvester replied. “If she still wishes it—though what she now hopes to achieve by it I don’t immediately perceive.”

Tom was unable to enlighten him, but Phoebe told him frankly that she hoped never to return to Austerby. This was sufficiently startling to make him put up his brows. She said, her eyes searching his face: “My grandmother told me once that she wished she might have me to live with her—had always wished it! Only when my mother died it was not possible, from some cause or another, for her to make that offer to Papa. And then, you know, he married Mama, which made it, she thought, unnecessary, as well as grossly uncivil, to remove me from Austerby.”

A slightly sardonic gleam of amusement flickered in his eyes. “But she did not, last year, invite you to remain with her?” he suggested.

A look of anxiety came into her face; her eyes, still fixed on his, seemed to question him. She said: “No. But she thought—Sir Henry Halford warning her against any unusual exertion—well, she thought it not right to ask Papa to leave me in her charge, since she is unequal to the task of taking me to balls, and—But I think—I am sure—she didn’t perfectly enter into my sentiments upon that head! I don’t care for balls, or fashionable life. At least, it was very agreeable when I went out with my aunt Ingham, for she is excessively good-natured, and doesn’t scold, or watch one all the time, or—But indeed I don’t hanker after gaiety, and although, at that time, it didn’t occur to me to ask her if I might live with her, when—” She paused, feeling the ice thin under her feet, and coloured.

“When you feared to be forced into a distasteful marriage?” he supplied helpfully.

Her colour deepened, but his words brought her engaging twinkle into her eyes. “Well, yes!” she acknowledged. “When that happened, I thought suddenly that if Grandmama would let me reside with her I need not be a trouble, but, on the contrary, useful, perhaps. And, in any event, it won’t be so very long now before I come of age, and then I hope—I believe—the case will be quite altered, and I need be a charge on no one.”

He instantly suspected her of having formed an attachment for some hopeless ineligible, and asked her bluntly if she had matrimony in view.

“Matrimony! Oh, no!” she responded. “I daresay I shall never be married. I have another scheme—quite different!” She added, in some confusion: “Excuse me on that head, if you please! I had not meant to speak of it, and must not! Pray do not regard it! Only tell me if you think—for perhaps you are better acquainted with her than I—that my grandmother will like to have me to live with her?”

He believed that there was nothing Lady Ingham would like less; but he believed also, and maliciously, that she would find it impossible to repulse her granddaughter; and he replied, smiling: “Why not?”

She looked relieved, but said very earnestly: “Every day I spend away from Austerby strengthens my resolve never to go back there! I was never so happy in my life before! You can’t understand how that should be so, I daresay, but I have felt, these last few days, as though I had escaped from a cage!” Her solemnity vanished. “Oh! what a trite simile! Never mind!”

“Very well,” he said. “Keighley shall escort you to London as soon as the roads are passable.”

She thanked him, but said doubtfully: “And Tom?”

“I shall send a message to his parents, when you are gone. Don’t you trust me? I shan’t leave him until I have handed him over to his father.”

“Yes, indeed I trust you. I was wondering only whether I ought to accept so much help from you—using your chaise—depriving you of your groom!” She added naively: “When I was not, at first, very civil to you!”

“But you are never civil to me!” he complained. “You began by giving me a heavy set-down, and you followed that with a handsome trimming! And now you threaten to deny me a chance to retrieve my character!” He laughed, seeing her at a loss for words, and took her hand, and lightly kissed it. “Cry friends, Sparrow! Am I so very bad?”

“No! I never said that, or thought it!” she stammered. “How could I, when I scarcely knew you?”

“Oh, this is worse than anything!” he declared. “No sooner seen than disliked! I understand you perfectly: I have frequently met such persons—only I had not thought myself to have been one of them!”

Goaded, she retorted: “One does not, I believe!” Then she immediately looked stricken, and faltered: “Oh, dear, my wretched tongue! I beg your pardon!”

The retort had made his eyes flash, but the look of dismay which so swiftly succeeded it disarmed him. “If ever I met such a chastening pair as you and Orde! What next will you find to say to me, I wonder? Unnecessary, I’m persuaded, to tell you not to spare me!”

“Now that is the most shocking injustice!” she exclaimed. “When Tom positively toad-eats you!”

“Toad-eats me? You can know nothing of toad-eaters if that is what you think!” He directed a suddenly penetrating look at her, and asked abruptly: “Do you suppose that that is what I like? to be toad-eaten?”

She thought for a moment, and then said: “No, not precisely. It is, rather, what you expect, perhaps, without liking or disliking.”

“You are mistaken! I neither expect it nor like it!” She bowed her head, it might have been in acquiescence, but the ghost of a smile on her lips nettled him.

“Upon my word, ma’am—!” he said angrily, and there stopped, as she looked an inquiry. A reluctant laugh was dragged out of him. “I recall now that I was told that you were not just in the common way, Miss Marlow!”

“Oh, no! Did someone indeed say that of me?” she demanded, turning quite pink with pleasure. “Who was it? Oh, do pray, tell me!”

He shook his head, amused by her eagerness. It was such a mild compliment, yet here she was, all agog to learn its source, looking like a child tantalized by a toy held out of her reach. “Not I!”

She sighed. “How infamous of you! Were you hoaxing me?”

“Not at all! Why should I?”

“I don’t know, but it seems as though you might do so. People don’t say pretty things of me—or, if they do, I never heard of it.” She pondered it. “Of course, it might mean that I was merely odd—in a gothic way,” she said doubtfully.

“Yes—or outrageous!”

“No,” she decided. “It couldn’t have meant that, because I wasn’t outrageous when I went to London. I behaved with perfect propriety—and insipidity.”

“You may have behaved with propriety, but insipidity I cannot allow!”

“Well, you thought so at the time!” she said tartly. “And, to own the truth, I was insipid. Mama was watching me, you see.”

He remembered how silent and stupid she had appeared at Austerby, and said: “Yes, you must certainly escape from her. But not on the common stage, and not unescorted! Is that agreed?”

“Thank you,” she replied meekly. “I own it will be more comfortable to travel post. When shall I be able to set forward, do you think?”

“I can’t tell that. No London vehicles have gone by yet, which leads me to suppose that the drifts must be lying pretty thick beyond Speenhamland. Wait until we have seen the Bristol Mail go past!”

“I have a lowering presentiment that we shall see Mama’s travelling-carriage instead—and it will not go past,” stated Phoebe, in a hollow tone.

“I pledge you my word you shan’t be dragged back to Austerby—and that you may depend on!”

“What a very rash promise to make!” she observed.

“Yes, isn’t it? I am fully conscious of it, I assure you, but having given my word I am now hopelessly committed, and can only pray to heaven I may not find myself involved in any serious crime. You think I’m funning, don’t you? I’m not, and will immediately prove my good faith by engaging Alice’s services.

“Why, what can she do?” demanded Phoebe. “Go with you as your maid, of course. Come, come, ma’am! After such a strict upbringing as you have endured is it for me to tell you that a young female of your quality may not travel without her abigail?”

“Oh, what fustian!” she exclaimed. “As though I cared for that!”

“Very likely you do not, but Lady Ingham will, I promise you. Moreover, if the road should be worse than we expect you might be obliged to spend a night at some posting-house, you know.”

This was unanswerable, but she said mutinously: “Well, if Alice doesn’t choose to go I shan’t regard such nonsensical stuff!”

“Oh, now you are glaringly abroad! Alice will do precisely what I tell her to do,” he replied, smiling.

The easy confidence with which he uttered these words made her hope very much that he would meet with a rebuff from Alice, but nothing so salutary happened. Learning that she was to accompany Miss to the Metropolis, Alice fell into blissful ecstasy, gazing upon Sylvester with incredulous wonder, and breathing reverently: “Lunnon!” When it was disclosed to her that she should be given five pounds to spend, and her ticket on the stage for her return-journey, she became incapable of speech for several minutes, being afeared, as she presently informed her awed parent, to bust her stay-laces.

The thaw set in, and with it arrived the errant ostler, full of hair-raising accounts of the state of the road. Mrs. Scaling told him darkly that he would be sorry presently that he had not made a push to return immediately to the Blue Boar; and when he learned what noble guests she was entertaining he was indeed sorry. But when he discovered that the stables had fallen under the governance of an autocrat who showed no disposition to abdicate in his favour, but, on the contrary, every disposition to set him to work harder than he had ever done, he was not so sorry. He might have missed handsome largesse, but he had also missed several days of being addressed as “my lad”, and having his failings crisply pointed out to him, and being commanded to perform all over again such tasks as Keighley considered him to have scamped. Nor were his affronted sensibilities soothed by the treatment he received at Swale’s hands. Swale was forced to eat his dinner in the kitchen among the vulgar, but no power known to man could force him to notice the existence of a common ostler. So aloof was his demeanour, so disdainful his glance, that the ostler at first mistook him for his master. He discovered later that the Duke was more approachable.

The first vehicles to pass the inn came from the west, a circumstance which made Phoebe very uneasy; but a day later the Bristol Mail went by, at so unusual an hour that Mrs. Scaling said they might depend upon it the road was still mortal bad to the eastward. “Likely as not they’ve been two days or more getting here,” she said. “They do be saying in the tap that there’s been nothing like it since four years ago, when the river froze over in London-town, and they had bonfires on it, and a great fair, and I don’t know what-all. I shouldn’t wonder at it, miss, if you was to be here for another se’enight,” she added hopefully.

“Nonsense!” said Sylvester, when this was reported to him. “What they say in the tap need not cast you into despair. Tomorrow I’ll drive to Speenhamland, and discover what the mailcoachmen are saying.”

“If it doesn’t freeze again tonight,” amended Phoebe, a worried frown between her brows. “It was shockingly slippery this morning, and you will have enough to do in holding those greys of yours without having that added to it! I could not reconcile it with my conscience to let you set forth in such circumstances!”

“Never,” declared Sylvester, much moved, “did I think to hear you express so much solicitude on my behalf, ma’am!”

“Well, I can’t but see what a fix we should be in if anything should happen to you,” she replied candidly.

The appreciative gleam in his eyes acknowledged a hit, but he said gravely: “The charm of your society, my Sparrow, lies in not knowing what you will say next—though one rapidly learns to expect the worst!”

It did not freeze again that night; and the first news that greeted Phoebe, when she peeped into Tom’s room on her way downstairs to breakfast, was that he had heard a number of vehicles pass the inn, several of which he was sure came from the east. This was presently confirmed by Mrs. Scaling, who said, however, that there was no telling whether they had come from London, or from no farther afield than Newbury. She was of the opinion that it would be unwise to venture on such a hazardous journey until the snow had entirely gone from the road; and was regaling Phoebe with a horrid story of three outside passengers on the stage-coach who had died of the cold in just such weather, when Sylvester arrived on the scene, and put an end to this daunting history by observing that since Miss Phoebe was not proposing to travel to London on the roof of a stage-coach there was no need for anyone to feel apprehensive on her account. Mrs. Scaling reluctantly conceded this point, but warned his grace that there was a dangerous gravel-pit between Newbury and Reading, very hard to see when there had been heavy falls of snow.

“Like the coffee pot,” said Sylvester acidly. “I don’t see that at all—and I should wish to do so immediately, if you please!”

This had the effect of sending Mrs. Scaling scuttling off to the kitchen. “Do you suppose there really is any danger of driving into a gravel-pit, sir?” asked Phoebe.

“No.”

“I must say, it sounds very unlikely to me. But Mrs. Scaling seems to think—”

“Mrs. Scaling merely thinks that the longer she can keep us here the better it will be for her,” he interrupted.

“Well, you need not snap my nose off!” countered Phoebe. “Merely because you have come down hours before you are used to do!”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am!” he said frigidly.

“It’s of no consequence at all,” she assured him, smiling kindly at him. “I daresay you are always disagreeable before breakfast. Many people are, I believe, and cannot help themselves, try as they will. I don’t mean to say that you do try, of course: why should you, when you are not obliged to be conciliating?”

It was perhaps fortunate that the entrance of Alice at this moment obliged Sylvester to swallow the retort that sprang to his lips. By the time she had withdrawn again he had realized (with far less incredulity than he would have felt a week earlier) that Miss Marlow was being deliberately provoking; and he merely said. “Though I may not be obliged to conciliate, you should reflect, ma’am, that it is otherwise with you! I rose at this unseasonable hour wholly on your behalf, but I might yet decide not to go to Newbury after all.”

“Oh, are you capricious as well?” asked Phoebe, raising eyes of innocent inquiry to his face.

“As well as what?” demanded Sylvester. He saw her lips part, and added hastily: “No, don’t tell me! I can hazard a tolerably accurate conjecture, I imagine!”

She laughed, and began to pour out the coffee. “I won’t say another word till you’ve come out of the sullens,” she promised.

Though strongly tempted to reply in kind, Sylvester decided, upon reflection, to hold his peace. Silence prevailed until, looking up from his plate a few minutes later, he found that she was watching him, with so much the air of a bird hopeful of crumbs that he burst out laughing, and exclaimed: “Oh, you—Sparrow! What an abominable girl you are!”

“Yes, I am afraid I am,” she said, quite seriously. “And nothing seems to cure me of saying things I ought not!”

“Perhaps you don’t try to overcome the fault?” he suggested, quizzing her.

“But, in general, I do try!” she assured him. “It is only when I am with persons such as you and Tom—I mean—”

“Ah, just so!” he interrupted. “When you are with persons whose opinions are of no particular consequence to you, you allow rein to your tongue?”

“Yes,” she agreed, pleased to find him of so ready an understanding. “That is the matter in a nutshell! Will you have some more bread-and-butter, sir?”

“No, thank you,” he responded. “I find I have quite lost my appetite.”

“It would be wonderful if you had not,” she said cheerfully. “Cooped up in the house as you have been all this while!

Will you set out for Newbury soon? I daresay it is foolish of me, but I can’t be easy! Whatever should I do if Mama were to arrive while you are gone?”

“Hide in the hay-loft!” he recommended. “But if she has a particle of commonsense she won’t make the smallest push to recover you!”