The Talisman Ring

‘I will undress, and I will go to bed,’ announced Eustacie.

‘Yes, miss.’

‘And I wish, moreover, that I had gone to Madame Guillotine in a tumbril, alone!’

Country-bred Lucy, a far more appreciative audience than Sir Tristram, gave a shudder, and said: ‘Oh, miss, don’t speak of such a thing! To think of you having your head cut off, and you so young and beautiful!’

Eustacie stepped out of her muslin gown, and pushed her arms into the wrapper Lucy was holding. ‘And I should have worn a white dress, and even the sans-culottes would have been sorry to have seen me in a tumbril!’

Lucy had no very clear idea who the sans-culottes might be, but she assented readily, and added, in all sincerity, that her mistress would have looked lovely.

‘Well, I think I should have looked nice,’ said Eustacie candidly. ‘Only it is no use thinking of that, because instead I am going to be married.’

Lucy paused in her task of taking the pins out of her mistress’s hair to clasp her hands, and breathe ecstatically: ‘Yes, miss, and if I may make so bold, I do wish you so happy!’

‘When one is forced into a marriage infinitely distasteful one does not hope for happiness,’ said Eustacie in a hollow voice.

‘Good gracious, miss, his lordship surely isn’t a-going to force you?’ gasped Lucy. ‘I never heard such a thing!’

‘Oh!’ said Eustacie. ‘Then it is true what I have heard in France, that English ladies are permitted to choose for themselves whom they will marry!’ She added despondently: ‘But I have not seen anyone whom I should like to have for my husband, so it does not signify in the least.’

‘No, miss, but – but don’t you like Sir Tristram, miss? I’m sure he’s a very nice gentleman, and would make anyone a good husband.’

‘I do not want a good husband who is thirty-one years old and who has no conversation!’ said Eustacie, her lip trembling.

Lucy put down the hair-brush. ‘There, miss, you’re feeling vapourish, and no wonder, with everything come upon you sudden, like it has! No one can’t force you to marry against your wishes – not in England, they can’t, whatever they may do in France, which everyone knows is a nasty murdering place!’

Eustacie dried her eyes and said: ‘No, but if I do not marry my cousin I shall have to live with a horrid chaperon when my grandpapa dies, and that would be much, much worse. One must resign oneself.’

Downstairs Sir Tristram had just reached the same conclusion. Since, sooner or later, he would have to marry someone, and since he had determined never again to commit the folly of falling in love, his bride might as well be Eustacie as another. She seemed to be tiresomely volatile, but no sillier than any other young woman of his acquaintance. She was of good birth (though he thought her French blood to be deplored), and in spite of the fact that if he had a preference it was for fair women, he was bound to admit that she was very pretty. He could have wished she were older, but it was possible that Sylvester, whose experience was undoubtedly wide, knew what he was talking about when he said that her extreme youth was in her favour. In fact, one must resign oneself.

Upon the following morning the betrothed couple met at the breakfast-table and took fresh stock of each other. Sir Tristram, whose mulberry evening-dress had not met with Eustacie’s approval, had had the unwitting tact to put on a riding-suit, in which severe garb he looked his best; and Eustacie, who had decided that, if she must marry her cousin, it was only proper that he should be stimulated to admiration of her charms, had arrayed herself in a bergère gown of charming colour and design. Each at first glance felt moderately pleased with the other, a complacent mood which lasted for perhaps ten minutes, at the end of which time Sir Tristram was contemplating with grim misgiving the prospect of encountering vivacity at the breakfast-table for the rest of his life, and Eustacie was wondering whether her betrothed was capable of uttering anything but the most damping of monosyllables.

During the course of the morning, Sir Tristram was sent for to Sylvester’s bedroom. He found his great-uncle propped up very high in bed, and alarmingly brisk, and learned from him that his nuptials would be celebrated upon the following day. When he reminded Sylvester that marriages could not be performed thus out of hand, Sylvester flourished a special licence before his eyes, and said that he was not so moribund that he could not still manage his affairs. Sir Tristram, who liked being driven as little as most men, found this instance of his great-uncle’s forethought so annoying that he left him somewhat abruptly, and went away to cool his temper with a gallop over the Downs. When he returned it was some time later, and he found the doctor’s horse being walked up and down before the Court, and the household in a state of hushed expectancy. Sylvester, having managed his affairs to his own satisfaction, drunk two glasses of Madeira, and thrown his snuff-box at his valet for daring to remonstrate with him, had seemed suddenly to collapse. He had sunk into a deep swoon from which he had been with difficulty brought round, and the doctor, summoned post-haste, had announced that the end could not now be distant more than a few hours.

Regaining consciousness, Sylvester had, in a painful but determined whisper, declined the offices of a clergyman, recommended the doctor to go to hell, forbidden the servants to open his doors to his nephew Basil, announced his intention of dying without a pack of women weeping over him, and demanded the instant attendance of his nephew Tristram.

Sir Tristram, hearing these details from the butler, stayed only to cast his hat and coat on a chair, and went quickly up the stairs to the Great Chamber.

Both the valet and the doctor were in the room, the valet looking genuinely grieved and the doctor very sour. Sylvester was lying flat in the huge bed with his eyes shut, but when Tristram stepped softly on to the dais, he opened them at once, and whispered: ‘Damn you, you have kept me waiting!’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘I did not mean to die until to-morrow,’ said Sylvester, labouring for breath. ‘Damme, I’ve a mind to make a push to last the night if only to spite that snivelling leech!…Tristram!’

‘Sir?’

Sylvester grasped his wrist with thin, enfeebled fingers. ‘You’ll marry that child?’

‘I will, Sylvester: don’t tease yourself !’

‘Always meant Ludovic to have her…damned young scoundrel! Often wondered. Do you think he was telling the truth – after all?’

Shield was silent. Sylvester’s pale lips twisted. ‘Oh, you don’t, eh? Well, you can give him my ring if ever you see him again – and tell him not to pledge it! Take it: I’ve done with it.’ He slid the great ruby from his finger as he spoke, and dropped it into Shield’s hand. ‘That Madeira was a mistake. I ought to have kept to the Burgundy. You can go now. Don’t let there be any mawkish sentiment over my death!’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Shield. He bent, kissed Sylvester’s hand, and without more ado turned and went out of the room.

Sylvester died an hour later. The doctor who brought the news to Shield, and to Beau Lavenham, both waiting in the library, said that he had only spoken once more before the end.