Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle

26

They went aboard the packet in a light drizzle, and with less opposition from Master Rayne than might have been expected. When it was borne in upon him that his all-powerful uncle was unable to waft him miraculously across the sea he did indeed hover on the brink of a painful scene, saying: “No, no, no! I won’t go on a ship, I won’t, I won’t!” on a rising note that threatened a storm of tears. But Sylvester said: “I beg your pardon?” in such blighting accents that he flushed up to the ears, gave a gulp, and said imploringly: “If you please, I don’t want to! It will give me that dreadful pain in me pudding-house!”

“In your what?”

Edmund knuckled his eyes.

“I thought there was more steel in you,” said Sylvester contemptuously.

“There is steel in me!” declared Edmund, his eyes flashing. “Keighley says I have good bottom!”

“Keighley,” said Sylvester, in a casual tone, “ is waiting for us at Dover. Miss Marlow, I must beg you won’t mention to him that Edmund found he couldn’t throw his heart over. He would be very much shocked.”

“I will go on that ship!” said Edmund in a gritty voice. “We Raynes can throw our hearts over anything!”

His heart shyed a little at the gangway, but Sylvester said: “Show us the way, young Rayne!” and he stumped resolutely across it.

“Edmund, you’re a great gun!” Tom told him.

“Game as a pebble!” asserted Edmund.

For Phoebe the crossing was one of unalleviated boredom. Sylvester, wrapping his boat-cloak round Edmund, kept him on deck; and since there was clearly nothing for her to do, and it continued to rain, she could only retire to her cabin and meditate on a bleak future. The packet took nine hours to reach Dover, and never had nine hours seemed longer. From time to time she was visited by Tom, bringing her either refreshments, or the latest news of Edmund. He had been a little sick, Tom admitted, but nothing to cause alarm. They had found a sheltered spot on deck, and were taking it in turns to remain there with him. No, there was nothing for her to do: Edmund, having slept for a time, now seemed pretty bobbish.

Towards the end of the crossing the rain ceased, and Phoebe went on deck. She found Edmund in a boastful mood, and Sylvester civil but curt. It was the first time Sylvester had been called upon to look after his nephew, and he was devoutly hoping it would be the last.

When the packet entered the Tidal Harbour it was nearly eight o’clock, and all four travellers were tired, chilled, and not in the best of spirits. The sight of Keighley’s face, however, exercised a beneficial effect on two of the party: Edmund fell upon him with a squeal of joy, and Sylvester said, with a perceptible lightening of his frown: “Thank God! You may have him, John!”

“That’s all right, your grace,” said Keighley, grinning at him. “Now, give over, do, Master Edmund, till I have his grace’s portmanteau safe!”

He was surprised to see Phoebe, and still more so when Tom hailed him; but he accepted with apparent stolidity Sylvester’s explanation that he was indebted to Miss Marlow and Mr. Orde for the recovery of Edmund’s person. All he said was: “Well, to be sure, your grace! And how do you do, sir? I see that leg’s a bit stiff-like still.”

Keighley had engaged rooms for Sylvester at the King’s Head. He seemed to think there would be no difficulty in securing two more, but Phoebe said that she must lose no time in rejoining Lady Ingham.

“It would be wiser to ascertain first that she is still there,” Sylvester said, his frown returning. “May I suggest that you accompany us first to the King’s Head while Keighley makes inquiries at the Ship?”

“No need to send Keighley,” Tom interposed. “I’ll go there. Take care of Phoebe till I get back, Salford!”

Phoebe was reluctant to let him go without her, for she felt it to be unfair that he should be obliged to bear the brunt of Lady Ingham’s displeasure; but he only laughed, told her that he could stand a knock far better than she would ever be able to, and went off.

The King’s Head was less fashionable than the Ship. Keighley thought that there was no one putting up there who was at all likely to recognize his grace. He had engaged a parlour, and was soon able to assure Phoebe that there was a good bedchamber to be had, if she should need it. Phoebe, who was sitting beside Edmund while he ate his supper, said: “Thank you, but—oh, surely I shan’t need it?”

“How can I tell?” Sylvester replied. “It occurs to me that you have been absent above a se’enight. I must own I shouldn’t expect Lady Ingham to kick her heels in Dover for so long, but you should know her better than I.”

“I wrote to her,” she faltered. “She must have known I should return. Or, if I could not, that Tom would.”

“Then no doubt she is awaiting his arrival,” he said.

It was his indifferent voice again; she said no more, but as Edmund finished his supper she took him away to put him to bed. A plump chambermaid came to offer her services and, as Edmund took an instant liking to her, Phoebe was able to leave him to her supervision. It seemed probable that he would detain her for a considerable period, entertaining her with his saga, for as Phoebe closed the door behind her she heard him say chattily: “I am a great traveller, you know.”

She found, on re-entering the parlour, that Tom had returned from his mission. He was talking to Sylvester, and she saw at once that he was looking grave. She paused, an anxious question in her eyes. He smiled at her, but what he said was: “She ain’t there, Phoebe. Seems to have gone back to London.”

Her eyes went from his face to Sylvester’s. Sylvester said: “Come and sit down, Miss Marlow! It is disappointing for you not to find her here, but of no great consequence, after all. You will be with her by tomorrow evening.”

“To have gone back to London! She must be very vexed with me!”

“Nothing of that!” Tom said, in a heartening tone. “She never had your letter. Here it is! You’d have thought the gudgeons would have forwarded it to London, but not they! Well, I never did think the Ship was half the place it sets up to be! Not since I found the boot-catcher’s thumb-mark on my new top-boots!”

“Then she cannot know where I went! All these days—Oh, good God, what must she be thinking?”

“Well, she knows I was with you, so she can’t have thought you’d fallen into the sea, at all events. I only hope she ain’t thinking I’ve eloped with you!”

She pressed a hand to her temple. “Oh, she must know better than that! Was she alarmed? Did she try to discover where we had gone, or—What did they tell you at the Ship?”

“Precious little,” confessed Tom. “You know what it’s like there! All hustle and bustle, with people arriving and leaving at all hours. What I did discover is that your grandmother had a spasm, or some such thing, and went back to London the day after we disappeared, in rather queer stirrups. They had a doctor to her, but she can’t have been very bad, you know, or she couldn’t have travelled.”

But Phoebe, quite appalled, had sunk into a chair, and covered her face with her hands.

“My dear Thomas,” said Sylvester, in an amused tone, “Lady Ingham’s spasms are her most cherished possession! She adopted them years ago, and must find them invaluable, for while they never interfere with her pleasures they always intervene to prevent her being obliged to engage in anything that might bore her. Depend upon it, she posted back to town to pour out her troubles to Halford.”

“I daresay that’s exactly so,” agreed Tom. “The lord knows I had the deuce of a time bringing her up to the scratch at all. It’s plain enough what happened: I let go the rein, and she bolted back to the stable. No need to fall into a fit of the dismals, Phoebe.”

“How can I help but do so?” she said. “I have been so troublesome to her—” She broke off, turning away her face. After a short pause she said more quietly: “She left no message?”

“Well,” said Tom reluctantly, “only about our baggage! Muker told them at the Ship that if anyone was to ask for it they were to be told it was at the coach-office.”

“Very sensible,” said Sylvester, walking over to the sideboard. “Obviously she guessed you would be returning. Miss Marlow, I know your tastes too well to hope you will let me pour you out a glass of sherry, so ratafia it must be.”

She accepted the glass he handed her, and sat holding it. “At the coach-office—to be called for! She thought, then—She believed me capable of deserting her?”

“More likely took a pet,” said Tom.

“Much more likely,” said Sylvester. “Madeira or sherry, Thomas? Until we confront Lady Ingham, Miss Marlow, it must be all conjecture—and singularly profitless. I’ll engage to convince her that without your aid Edmund would have been irretrievably lost to me.”

“You have said yourself, Duke, that I had nothing to do with his recovery,” she said, with a faint smile. “It is quite true, moreover.”

“Oh, I shan’t tell her that!” he promised.

“But I shall!”

“Thank the lord she didn’t take our baggage back to Green Street!” said Tom, somewhat hastily. “I’m going with Keighley to collect it the first thing tomorrow morning, and shan’t I be glad to be able to leave off the clothes I have on!”

“When I consider,” said Sylvester, “that the shirt you are wearing is mine, not to mention the neckcloth, and that I could very ill spare them, I resent that remark, Thomas!”

Phoebe, recognizing an attempt to give her thoughts a more cheerful direction, dutifully laughed, and made no further reference to Lady Ingham. A waiter came to lay the covers for dinner; and a perfectly spontaneous laugh was drawn from Phoebe when Tom, as soon as the first course was laid before them, recommended his host to send it back to the kitchens at once.

“Send it back?” repeated Sylvester, taken off his guard. “Why should I?”

“To puff off your consequence, of course. Ask the waiter if he knows who you are! And if you have any trouble, offer to buy the place. We are accustomed to being entertained in the first style of elegance, I can tell you!”

Fascinated, Sylvester demanded the whole history of the journey to Abbeville. He was so much amused by it that he retaliated with a graphic account of Sir Nugent Fotherby’s warm welcome to himself, which he had not hitherto thought in the least diverting. Not only present anxieties were forgotten, but past quarrels too. The good understanding that had been reached at the Blue Boar seemed to have returned; and Tom, seeing how easily Phoebe and Sylvester were sliding into their old ways of exchanging views on any number of subjects, was just congratulating himself on the success of his tactics when an unthinking remark destroyed all the comfort of the evening. “Like the villain in a melodrama!” Sylvester said, wiping the mischievous smile from Phoebe’s lips, bringing the colour rushing into her cheeks, transforming her from the gayest of companions into a stiff figure reminding Tom forcibly of an effigy. Constraint returned. Sylvester, after the tiniest of checks, continued smoothly enough, but the warmth had left his voice; he had withdrawn behind his film of ice, perfectly affably and quite unapproachably.

Tom gave it up in despair. He had a very fair notion how matters stood, but there seemed to be nothing he could do to promote a lasting reconciliation. He was pretty sure Sylvester had forgotten Ugolino when he had uttered that unfortunate remark, but it was useless to say that to Phoebe. She was so morbidly sensitive about her wretched romance that even the mention of a book was liable to overset her. And however little Sylvester had remembered The Lost Heir when he spoke of a villain, he was remembering it now.

Phoebe retired immediately she rose from the dinner-table, Sylvester merely bowing when she said that she was tired, and would bid them goodnight. And when he had closed the door on her retreating form, Sylvester turned, and said, smiling: “Well, what is to be, Thomas? Piquet? Or shall we try whether there is a chessboard to be had?”

It was really quite hopeless, thought Tom, deciding in favour of chess.

He ate a hasty breakfast next morning, and went off with Keighley to the coach-office. When he returned, he found Sylvester standing by the window and reading a newspaper, and Phoebe engaged in the homely task of wiping the egg-stains from Edmund’s mouth. He said: “I’ve got all our gear downstairs, Phoebe. Keighley’s waiting to know which of your valises you wish him to take up to your room. And I found this as well: here you are!”

She took the letter from him quickly, recognizing Lady Ingham’s writing. “The smaller one, if you please, Tom. Edmund! where are you off to?”

“Must speak to Keighley!” Edmund said importantly, and dashed off in the direction of the stairs.

“Unfortunate Keighley!” remarked Sylvester, not looking up from the newspaper.

Tom departed in Edmund’s wake, and Phoebe, her fingers slightly trembling, broke the wafer that sealed her letter, and spread open the single, crossed sheet. Sylvester lowered the newspaper, and watched her. She did not say anything when she had finished reading the letter, but folded it again, and stood holding it, a blind look in her eyes.

“Well?”

She turned her head towards the window, startled. She had never heard Sylvester speak so roughly, and wondered why he should do so.

“You may as well tell me. Your face has already informed me that it is not a pleasant missive.”

“No,” she said.” She supposed me—when she wrote this—to have persuaded Tom to take me home. I think Muker must have encouraged her to think it, to be rid of me. She is very jealous of me. She may even have believed me to be running away with Tom. That—that was my fault.”

“Unnecessary to tell me that! You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself.”

She looked at him for a moment, hurt and surprise in her eyes, and then turned away, and walked over to the fire. It seemed so needlessly cruel, and so unlike him, to taunt her when he knew her to be distressed that she felt bewildered. It was certainly a taunt, but there had been no mockery in his voice, only anger. Why he should be angry, what she had done to revive his furious resentment, she could not imagine. She found it a little difficult to speak, but managed to say: “I am afraid I have. I seem always to be tumbling into a scrape. Hoydenish, my mother-in-law was used to call me, and did her best to teach me prudence and propriety. I wish she had succeeded.”

“You are not alone in that wish!” he said savagely.

The harsh, angry voice was having its inevitable effect on her: she began to feel sick, inwardly shivering, and was obliged to sit down, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

“You tumbled into a scrape, as you are pleased to call it, when I first made your acquaintance!” he continued. “It would be more correct to say that you flung yourself into it, just as you flung yourself aboard that ship! If you choose to behave like a hoyden it is your own affair, but that is never enough for you! You don’t scruple to embroil others in your scrapes! Thomas has been a victim, I have been one—my God, have I not!—and now it is your grandmother! Does she cast you off? Do you think yourself hardly used? You have no one but yourself to thank for the ills you’ve brought on your own head!”

She listened to this tirade, rigid with shock, scarcely able to believe that it was Sylvester and not a stranger who hurled these bitter accusations at her. The thought flitted across her brain that he was deliberately feeding his wrath, but it was overborne by her own anger, which leaped from a tiny spark to a blaze.

He said suddenly, before she could speak: “No—no! It’s of no use! Sparrow, Sparrow!”

She hardly heard him. She said in a voice husky with passion: “I have one other person to thank! It is yourself, my lord Duke! It was your arrogance that caused me to make you the model for my villain! But for you I should never have run away from my home! But for you no one need have known I was the author of that book! But for you I should not have flung myself aboard that schooner! You are the cause of every ill that has befallen me! You say I ill-used you: if I did you are wonderfully revenged, for you have ruined me!”

To her astonishment, and, indeed, indignation, he gave the oddest laugh. As she glared at him he said in the strangest voice she had yet heard: “Have I? Well—if that’s so, I will make reparation! Will you do me the honour, Miss Marlow, of accepting my hand in marriage?”

Thus Sylvester, an accomplished flirt, making his first proposal.

It never occurred to Phoebe that he had shaken himself off his balance, and was as self-conscious as a callow youth just out of school. Still less did it occur to her that the laugh and the exaggerated formality of his offer sprang from embarrassment. He was famed for his polished address; she had never, until this day, seen him lose his mastery over himself. She believed him to be mocking her, and started up from her chair, exclaiming: “How dare you?”

Sylvester, burningly aware of his own clumsiness, lost no time in making bad worse. “I beg your pardon! you mistake! I had no intention—Phoebe, it was out before I well knew what I was saying! I never meant to ask you to marry me—I was determined I would not! But—” He broke off, realizing into what quagmires his attempts to explain himself were leading him.

“That I do believe!” she said hotly. “You have been so obliging as to tell me what you think of me, and I believe that too! You came to Austerby to look me over, as though I had been a filly, and decided I was not up to your weight! Didn’t you?”

“What next will you say?” he demanded, an involuntary laugh shaking him.

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes. But have you forgotten how you behaved? How could I know what you were when you tried only to disgust me? It wasn’t until later—”

“To be sure!” she said scathingly. “Later, when I first made you a victim, embroiling you in my improper flight from Austerby, and next wounded your pride as I daresay it was never wounded before, then you began to think I was just the wife that would suit you! The fervent offer which you have been so flattering as to make me springs, naturally, from the folly that led me to thrust myself into your affairs, and so make it necessary for you to undertake a journey under circumstances so much beneath your dignity as to be positively degrading! How green of me not to have known immediately how it would be! You must forgive me! Had I dreamt that my lack of conduct would attach you to me I would have assumed the manners of a pattern of propriety whenever you came within sight of me! You would then have been spared the mortification of having your suit rejected, and I should have been spared an intolerable insult!”

“There was no insult,” he said, very pale. “If I phrased it—if it sounded to you as though I meant to insult you, believe that it was not so! What I said to you before, I said because the crazy things you do convinced me you were not the wife that would suit me! I wanted never to see you again after that night at the Castlereaghs’—I thought so, but it wasn’t so, because when I did see you again—I was overjoyed.”

Not a speech worthy of a man who made love charmingly, but Sylvester had never before tried to make love to a lady seething with rage and contempt.

“Were you indeed?” said Phoebe. “But you soon recovered, didn’t you?”

Nettled, he retorted: “No, I only tried to! Stop ripping up at me, you little shrew!”

“Phoebe, don’t you mean to change your dress?” said Tom, entering the room at this most inauspicious moment. “Keighley took your valise up—” He broke off, dismayed, and stammered: “Oh, I b-beg pardon! I didn’t know—I’ll go!”

“Go? Why?” Phoebe said brightly. “Yes, indeed I mean to change my dress, and will do so immediately!”

Tom held the door for her, thinking that if only Sylvester, interrupted in the middle of an obvious scene, would drop his guard, grant him an opening, he could tell him just how to handle her. He shut the door, and turned.

“Good God, Thomas! This sartorial magnificence! Are you trying to put me to the blush?” said Sylvester quizzingly.