Black Sheep

'You came mighty near it, didn't you?' he said quizzically. He got up, and held out his hands to her. 'Come! If we don't make our way back to that inn, and get the horses put-to again, we shall be devilish late, and Miss Wendover will be thinking that you have eloped, not Fanny!'

She allowed him to pull her to her feet. As she walked beside him, towards the inn where they had left the curricle, she said tentatively: 'I hope you are not offended?'

He glanced down at her, and she was relieved to see that he was smiling again, very tenderly. 'No, not a bit. I was trying to decide whether I love you most when you're awake upon every suit, or when you're a pea-goose.'

Her eyes sank, as her colour rose; she said, with an uncertain laugh: 'I must seem like a pea-goose, I know. It is your fault, for – for putting windmills into my head! It doesn't seem so to you, but you have set me a problem, which I must solve, I think, by myself – if you understand me?'

'Well enough, at all events, not to press you further today. When I do press you further, I'll take care I don't do so here! Or in any other place where there's a hoary legend to take possession of your mind!'

'Hoary legend?' she repeated, momentarily puzzled. Her brow cleared suddenly. 'Oh, the bride and her attendants being turned into those stones! I had forgotten it.'

This interlude did much to lessen her constraint. During the drive back to Bath he talked on indifferent topics, so that she was very soon at her ease. She was careful not to introduce Fanny's name into her conversation, and was considerably surprised when he did so, saying abruptly: 'Don't tease yourself too much over Fanny! Have you any reason for fearing that she means to run away with Stacy? I'm inclined to doubt it, you know.'

She replied calmly: 'I don't know. She doesn't mean to do so before Thursday, I believe. She was discussing which of her new gowns she should wear for the party only this morning, so I think myself reasonably safe for the present. Afterwards – well, if she does mean to elope, she will find it a more difficult adventure than she bargained for!'

'I should think you would be more than a match for her,' he said. 'But that puts me in mind of something! I must make my excuses to your sister: I shan't be in Bath next week.'

She was conscious of feeling a disproportionate degree of disappointment, and a little disquiet. She said: 'My sister will be sorry. Are you – do you expect to be away for long?'

'Not longer than I need. There's some business I must attend to, and it won't do to put it off.'

'No, of course not,' she replied sedately. Then, as a thought occurred to her, she uttered an exclamation of annoyance, and said: 'Now, if only I had known, we need not have sent a card to Stacy!'

'Did you do so? Why?'

'Oh, because Selina would have it that if you were to be invited, Stacy must be too!'

'No! Did she really wish to invite me so much that she was prepared to receive Stacy? I must have made a bigger hit with her than I knew!' he remarked, in gratified accents.

Abby bit her lip, and replied with great dignity: 'My sister – I regret to say! – doesn't hold him in dislike. She thinks him very pretty-behaved, so it isn't a hardship to her to be obliged to entertain him!'

Twelve

The news that Mr Calverleigh had left Bath was brought to Sydney Place by Miss Butterbank on the following morning. She was a little disappointed to find that Miss Wendover was already aware of it, having received a brief note from him excusing himself from attending her rout-party; but as he had not divulged his reason for leaving Bath, his destination, or the means by which he proposed to travel, she was quickly able to repair two of these omissions. She was known, behind her back, as the Bath Intelligencer, but although she could tell Miss Wendover that Mr Calverleigh had set out on the London Mail Coach, at five o'clock on the previous evening, she had not discovered the nature of his business, and could only advance a few conjectures.

Miss Wendover heard of the departure with relief, and indulged the hope that Mr Calverleigh did not mean to return to Bath. Foolish she might be, but it had not escaped her notice that he and Abby had become wondrous great, which was a circumstance which filled her with misgiving. He was an interesting man, and one who had been, in her opinion, hardly used, but no more ineligible husband for Abby could have been imagined. When the suggestion had first been slyly made to her that Abby was encouraging his advances she had been as incredulous as she was indignant, but when Abby, not content with accompanying him to the theatre, took to driving about the neighbouring countryside with him, she became very uneasy, and disclosed to the faithful Miss Butterbank that she wished neither of the Calverleighs had ever come to Bath.

Their coming had certainly cut up her peace. First, there had been Stacy (poor young man!), whose very understandable attentions to Fanny had brought down James's wrath upon her head, and even, to some extent, Abby's; and who had turned out to be sadly unsteady, if James and George were to be believed, though it would not surprise her to find that they had grossly exaggerated Stacy's failings, for there was something so particularly winning about his graceful manners, and the deference he used towards his elders. He was the head of his family, too, and the owner of a considerable estate in Berkshire. She had never visited Danescourt, but she had looked for it in an old volume entitled Seats of the Nobility and Gentry, and there, sure enough, it was, with an illustration depicting a large, sprawling house of obvious antiquity, and a quantity of interesting information about its history, and that of the Calverleighs, who seemed to have owned it for an impressive number of centuries. If it was true, as George had told Abby it was, that it was so grossly encumbered that it was in imminent danger of passing out of Calverleigh hands, it could not be regarded as an asset, of course, for its loss must diminish Stacy's consequence to vanishing point, and transform him from a desirable parti into a scapegrace who had wasted his inheritance, and reduced himself to penury. But how could she have known this, when she had welcomed Stacy to Sydney Place? It was most unjust of James to have sent her such a scold; and for her part she would find it hard to believe that, whatever the poor young man's misfortunes might be, he had come to Bath in search of a rich wife. As for the shocking suspicion Abby had, that he meant to elope with Fanny, that she never would believe; and she wondered how Abby could suppose dear little Fanny to be so dead to all feelings of shame, or how she herself could be so regardless of her sister's precarious health as to put such ideas into her head as must give rise to the sort of agitating reflections calculated to throw her nerves into disorder.

And then, as though all this were not bad enough, Mr Miles Calverleigh had descended upon them, and lost no time at all in attaching himself particularly to Abby! There was no doubt about his reputation, for, however much one might pity him for the harsh treatment meted out to him by his father, the fact remained that not the most rigorous father would pack his son off to India without good reason. And if James thought he could lay the blame for this black sheep's intrusion into Abby's life at her door he was never more mistaken, and so she would tell him. Who, in the world, could have thought that Abby, rejecting the offer of the noble lord who addressed himself to her surrounded by the aura of dear Papa's approval, holding up her nose at such admirable suitors as Mr Peter Dunston, would succumb to the advances of a man who had nothing whatsoever to recommend him to one so notoriously picksome as she was? He was not at all handsome; he had none of his nephew's address; his manners were the reverse of graceful; and his raiment, so far from being elegant, showed neither neatness nor propriety. Not only did he pay morning-visits in ridingbreeches and indifferently polished top-boots, but, more often than not, he looked as though he had dressed all by guess, tying his neckcloth in a careless knot, and shrugging himself into his coat. Anyone would have supposed that Abby, herself always precise to a pin, would have held such a shabrag in disgust – even if he had been unrelated to the Calverleigh she held in positive abhorrence! She had always been capricious, but to allow the uncle to make up to her while she refused to countenance the nephew's courtship of her niece carried caprice into the realm of distempered freakishness. And one had thought that she had outgrown what dear Rowland had called the odd kick in her gallop!

Abby, well aware that Selina was watching her with misgiving, betrayed none of her own misgivings. Away from Miles Calverleigh's disturbing presence, she could be mistress of herself; and she pursued her usual avocations without a sign that her cheerful calm concealed a heart and a mind suffering from a serious disorder. Mr Calverleigh's shortcomings were as obvious to her as to Selina, and as little as Selina did she know why, after so many fancy-free years, she should have fallen in love with one so hopelessly ineligible and so totally unlike any of the gentlemen with whom she had enjoyed passing flirtations. She had been attracted by his smile, but no smile, however fascinating it might be, could cause a cool-headed female of more than eight-and-twenty so wholly to lose her poise and her judgment that she felt she had met, in its owner, the embodiment of an ideal. Fumbling for an explanation, she thought that it was not Miles Calverleigh's smile which had awakened an instant response in her, but the understanding behind the smile. She had been conscious, almost from the start of their acquaintance, of an intangible link between them, as though he had been her counterpart; and nothing he had said, no disclosure of cynical unconcern, or total disregard of morals, had weakened the link. He could infuriate her, he frequently shocked her, but still she felt herself akin to him.

She had told him that she was not sure that she loved him, but she had done so not in doubt of her love for him, but in dismay at the realization that she did love him, whatever he was, or whatever he had done. If she had been a besotted schoolgirl, like her niece, she would have melted into his embrace, and have thought the world well lost. But at eight-and-twenty one did not, on an impulse, cast aside all the canons of one's upbringing; and still less did one lightly ignore the duty owed to one's family. Miles Calverleigh did not recognise family claims, and what shocked her most in this was the discovery that she was not shocked, but had experienced instead a pang of envy.

She wondered whether it was the rebellious streak in her, so frequently deplored even by her mother, which had drawn her irresistibly to Miles Calverleigh; but when she considered this, as dispassionately as she could, she thought that it could hardly be so. It might lead her to throw her cap over the windmill, but it found no answering chord in Miles. He was not a rebel. Rebels fought against the trammels of convention, and burned to rectify what they saw to be evil in the shibboleths of an elder generation, but Miles Calverleigh was not of their number. No wish to reform the world inspired him, not the smallest desire to convert others to his own way of thinking. He accepted, out of a vast and perhaps idle tolerance, the rules laid down by a civilised society, and, when he transgressed these, accepted also, and with unshaken good-humour, society's revenge on him. Neither the zeal of a reformer, nor the rancour of one bitterly punished for the sins of his youth, awoke a spark of resentment in his breast. He did not defy convention: when it did not interfere with whatever line of conduct he meant to pursue he conformed to it; and when it did he ignored it, affably conceding to his critics their right to censure him, if they felt so inclined, and caring neither for their praise nor their blame.

Such a character should have been alien to a Wendover. Abby knew it, and tried to convince herself that she was suffering from much the same adolescent madness which had attacked her niece, and from which she would soon recover. She met with no success: she was not an adolescent, but she could remember the throes of her first, frustrated love-affair, and she knew that her present condition was quite unlike the joys and agonies experienced ten years earlier. Like Fanny, she had fallen in love with a handsome countenance, and had endowed its owner with every imaginable virtue. Looking back in amusement upon this episode, she thought how fortunate it was for the undesirable suitor tha

t her father had sent him packing before he had had time to tumble off the pedestal she had built for him. But she had built no pedestal for Miles Calverleigh: the very thought of setting him upon one appealed irresistibly to her lively sense of humour, and made it necessary for her to explain to Selina that her sudden laugh, breaking a long silence, had been caused by the recollection of an old joke, too foolish to be repeated. The discovery that her first suitor had feet of clay would have shattered her infatuation; she had known from the beginning that Miles Calverleigh was no paladin, but his sins were of as little importance to her as his sallow, harsh-featured face. If she married him, it would be with her eyes open to his faults, and in the knowledge that, in consulting only her own ardent desire, she would be subjecting every member of her family to varying degrees of shock, dismay, and even, where Selina and Mary were concerned, to grave distress.

It was a hard problem to solve, and none of the arguments that dashed endlessly in her brain brought her any nearer to a decision, though they nagged at her all day, and kept her awake long into the night.

But no one, watching her as she moved amongst her guests on Thursday evening, would have suspected that anything had occurred to ruffle her serenity; and not the keenest eyes could detect in her face any sign that she was labouring under the pangs of love. So much in command of herself was she that she was even able, when Lady Weaverham enquired archly when they might expect to see Mr Miles Calverleigh in Bath again, to reply smilingly: 'I don't know, ma'am. We miss him, don't we? My sister thinks him much too free and easy, but for my part I find him most entertaining. One never knows what he will say next!'

'Which, to my mind,' Lady Weaverham told Mrs Ancrum, 'isn't the way a young woman talks about a gentleman she's nutty upon! And never a blush, or a conscious look either! Well, I did think it was a case between them, but I daresay it wouldn't have done, so it's as well that it ain't.'