Red Sky at Night, Lovers' Delight Page 17

  “Good gracious, how should I know? Their governess makes all that kind of arrangement, and very high-handedly she sets about it, too.”

  If only he could say, “Their governess is about to become my wife.” Well, in a day or so, no doubt, he would be able to. In the meantime, he moved towards the bell-pull by the door. “If you do not know, we had best find out,” he said. “I’ll send for the children.”

  “Not here, cousin, I do beg of you. My sensibilities are shattered enough with the shock of your unexpected coming, without having a parcel of noisy children inflicted on my privacy.”

  He bit off a sharp retort. Experience had taught him that this would merely bring on one of her attacks of hysterics. “Then I will leave you in peace and send for the children to my study.”

  “You will probably find Susan there.” Miss Lintott applied herself to her vinaigrette to suggest that the interview was at an end.

  Susan was reading Clarissa Harlowe. Deep in her book, she had not noticed the stir of Hawth’s coming, and looked up in amazement when he appeared in the study doorway. “Father!” She jumped, to her feet, surprised, and, could it be, frightened? She also looked quite amazingly older. Grown up, in fact. A young lady.

  “Susan!” He could not remember ever to have been alone with her before and was almost as taken aback as she was. He had never pretended to be an affectionate father, but what did you do when your daughter turned into a young lady and made you a timid curtsy? “How are you?” he asked. “In looks, I can see.”

  It won him a shy smile and a blush. “I’m well,” she said.

  He did not really think she looked it. There were dark smudges under her blue eyes, and her newlv formed figure was too elegantly slender for real health. He thought he could have spanned her waist with a hand, And that was not the kind of thought to have about one’s daughter, “Do you get out?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes. Miss Warrender makes us go out for a walk every day.”

  “She has to make you?”

  “I like to sit in here and read,” she said. “You don’t mind? You did say …”

  “Of course not. But you should be riding.”

  “That’s what—” she paused for a moment—“Miss Warrender says.”

  “Then why not?”

  “There’s nothing my weight in the stable,” she explained, her fair skin colouring all over again. “And Giles has outgrown his pony, too.”

  “Damnation! Why did no one tell me?”

  She hung her head. “Miss Lintott said we were lucky to be here. We mustn’t be a trouble. She and Miss Warrender had … had an argument about it.”

  “Miss Warrender should have written me.”

  “Miss Lintott said it wasn’t her place,” said Susan.

  “Damn Miss Lintott. You’d better dine with us tonight, Susan, or I may say something to her that I will regret.”

  “And then she’ll have hysterics.” Susan had indeed grown up. But why did she still look so anxious? “Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you be using the study, now you are home?”

  “Of course. But you may take whatever books you like.”

  “Thank you.” She looked miserable. Frightened? What in the world?

  “You need somewhere of your own.” He thought he had it. “The children disturb you. I’ll talk to Mrs. Warrender about it in the morning.” Comforting to be so sure that Mrs. Warrender would know what was best to do. Well, if all went as he expected it to, she would be more or less the children’s grandmother. What a very strange thought.

  Dinner was not a success. A neat meal of two courses and several removes justified Hawth’s confidence in a staff trained by Mrs. Warrender, but he was the only one who did justice to it. Miss Lintott had a regime of her own and picked daintily at potatoes drenched in vinegar, explaining that they were all that her poor constitution would stand. And Susan was not much better. Helped lavishly by her father to the breast of one of a pair of chickens in tarragon sauce, she pushed the food about her plate, sipped at her claret and coloured scarlet when Miss Lintott told her not to put on airs to be interesting. “I have to diet myself.” said that lady, “because of my wretched state of health, but such megrims in a child of your age are quite the outside of enough. I’d have been whipped if I had made such an exhibition of myself as a child.”

  “I’m not a child!” Susan disproved this by bursting into a flood of tears and rising, with a mute apology, to hurry from the room.

  Miss Lintott never took dessert, and the depressing meal was soon over. Left alone over his port, Hawth did not linger, Knowles should have turned in his books by now, and he meant to go through them at once.

  Since he had made his intentions known, he was surprised to find Susan in the study, curled up on the hearthrug, Clarissa Harlowe dropped from her hand, fast asleep.

  “Father!” She jumped to her feet and looked wildly round as if she had just come out of a nightmare. Or into one? “It’s you?”

  “Who else? And high time you were in bed. Take your book with you, if you wish, but do not read any more tonight”

  “No, father.” She made him a timid little curtsy. “Goodnight,” she said.

  “Goodnight, Susan.” He felt an odd temptation to drop a kiss on the tumbled golden curls, but restrained it. She looked quite frightened enough as it was. “You had better take a glass of hot milk to bed with you,” he told her. “You ate nothing at dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry.” She made her escape and left him more convinced than ever of the wisdom of his proposal to Miss Warrender. Stupid of him to have plumped out with it in the aftermath of that scene with Knowles. No wonder she had refused him, but of course when he made his proposal in form, with her mother’s permission, her answer would be quite other. He turned, in a very bad temper, to Knowles’ books.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kate and her mother always walked over to the hall together after their frugal breakfast at the Dower House. Passing the scene of yesterday’s encounter with Knowles and Hawth, Kate wondered for the hundredth time whether she should have told her mother about it. She had passed a sleepless night, tossing and turning in her bed, thinking of Knowles, of Hawth’s amazing offer, and the still more amazing fact that she had rejected it out of hand. There had been a time, after their first dramatic encounter, when her answer would have been very different, but not now … not now. Strange, and almost shaming, to have changed so totally in the course of just one winter, but then, there were reasons.

  “I wonder how long Lord Hawth will stay this time,” said Mrs. Warrender, when they came in sight of the hall, ugly in morning sunshine. Inevitably, news of his arrival had come with their breakfast.

  “Two days?” Kate shrugged. “Three? Long enough so that I can get him to arrange about ponies for Sue a Giles, I hope. Sue looks worse and worse. She eats nothing. I’m worried about her.”

  “Growing up, poor, child,” said Mrs. Warrender. “And not in easy circumstances, I am afraid.”

  “Far from it,” Kate agreed. “With Lord Hawth for a father! I dislike that man more and more,”

  “Why, Kate!” Her mother was deeply shocked. “How can you! And so kind as he has been to us, so thoughtful for our comfort, our convenience.”

  “The benevolent despot,” said Kate crossly. “Making the lives of his slaves endurable.”

  “Slaves? Katharine Warrender, what kind of talk is this?”

  “Subjects, then! The Hanover of Glinde. Thoughtful for our comfort, indeed! When was he ever thoughtful for anything but his own? George Warren’s worth ten of him! He listens when one speaks to him.”

  “Sensible of him” said Mrs. Warrender. “He has so much to learn.”

  “And Hawth knows everything? He certainly behaves as if he did. Pasha Hawth! As for George Warren, admit, mamma, that he learns fast. Futherby says he has done more for the estate in this one winter than papa did in all the years he held it.”

  “Well, that�
�s not saying a great deal,” said Mrs. Warrender sadly. “But, it’s true, Futherby will be glad to see him back.”

  “I wonder if Hawth’s people will.” Kate remembered Knowles, blushed and was silent.

  Parsons was waiting, for them. “My lord’s compliments, ma’am,” he said to Mrs. Warrender, “and he asks if he may call on you in your room at your earliest convenience.”

  “Oh! Why, yes, of course.” Mrs. Warrender sounded fluttered. “It’s very good of his lordship to ask … to come to me. Tell him … tell him I’ll be ready for him in five minutes. And tell the chef, please, Parsons, with my apologies, that I will see him as soon as I can.”

  “I already have, ma’am,” said Parsons.

  “Thank you. I should have known you would have. Oh, Kate!” She grasped her daughter’s hand as they turned down the passage that led to their rooms. “Do you think it’s trouble?”

  “Why should it be, dearest? Don’t forget, he can’t manage without us.” Too late now to warn her mother about what had happened yesterday. What a fool she had been to hope that Hawth would change his mind overnight.

  “I wish you would stay!”

  “I can’t, mamma. The children are expecting me. And Hawth is not.” She felt a wretch, leaving her mother all unprepared, but what else could she do?

  Alone in her comfortable, chintz-furnished room, Mrs. Warrender took off her pelisse and turned to the glass to tweak the cap into place over still golden curls. One light hair had fallen on the black sleeve of her dress, and she removed it with distaste before turning to make sure that all was tidy on her work table. Her accounts were in order. She had nothing to fear from this unexpected visitation. She feared it just the same. Or—was it exactly fear?

  Lord Hawth tapped on the door just five minutes later, and she welcomed him in shyly and offered him the big chair by the desk while she herself subsided nervously on a rosewood sewing chair.

  After the first greetings, he was silent for a moment, looking round him. The newly lit fire crackled in the hearth. Spring flowers in vases explained the faint perfume he had noticed when he entered the room. A tapestry frame tilted towards the light of the bay window caught his eye with its bright colours and, with an apology, he moved over to look at the brilliant embroidery of flowers he had never seen. “Striking,” he said. “Your own design?”

  “Oh, yes.” She blushed vividly. “I have been doing them forever. I meant—they were for the dining chairs at Warren House.”

  “I see.” He remembered George Warren’s Chinese dining room and found himself extraordinarily sad for her. But there was nothing to say—nothing he could think of. He moved back to her big desk and sat down at it, noting the neat piles of papers, and on a far comer, as if relegated, a little pile of books. A Bible, a prayer book and, surprising him, a volume of Mr. Pope’s poems.

  “You read Pope?”

  “Yes. Kate doesn’t like him. She and Mr. Warren keep talking of Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but they don’t write couplets like Pope’s.”

  “No, indeed.” She had given him the opening he needed. “It is about Miss Warrender I am come to speak to you.”

  “Oh?” She leaned forward, tense now, her hands tightly folded in her lap.

  “She did not tell you?”

  “Tell me?”

  “I asked her to marry me yesterday.”

  “You—” She turned so white that he thought for a moment she was going to faint. “You? And Kate?”

  “She did not tell you. Forgive me for surprising you so. She refused me, you see. Well, I was too sudden.” If Kate had not done so, he would not tell Mrs. Warrender about Knowles. “I told her I would speak to you today. Ask your permission to pay her my addresses.”

  “And she told me nothing!” She drew herself up with a small dignity that touched him. “Forgive me, my lord. You have indeed surprised me. I never suspected … never imagined. …” She looked up at him gravely. “Do you love her, my lord?”

  “Love?” Impatiently. “What’s that to do with anything? I need a wife, Mrs. Warrender. You’re not a fool. You must see that as well as I do. Oh, I’m more than grateful for all you and Miss Warrender—Miss Kate—have done for me and for the children. But I still have a house that is no home. Am exposed to the absurdities of that cousin of mine. And then there are the children. Even I can see Susan’s not well. I haven’t seen the other two, but my cousin complains of them a good deal.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Warrender, “Miss Lintott…”

  “I know! I was every kind of fool to invite her, but having done so, how can I get rid of her, short of marriage? She gave up her apartments in Bath to come here.”

  “And the waters suited her so well.” Mrs. Warrender could not help a smile.

  “The supreme sacrifice. And how she does remind one of it.” How easy Mrs. Warrender was to talk to. “So—you see how I am placed. Produce a Countess of Hawth and I can pension off Miss Lintott with a clear conscience. And just think how delighted the children would be.”

  “That,” said Mrs. Warrender, “is hardly a sufficient argument for matrimony. Besides, I thought … You gave us to understand, last year, that there was someone else … someone in London?”

  “I’m afraid I invented her.” Lord Hawth actually sounded guilty. “It made things seem easier at the time,” he explained. “I feel every kind of fool now.”

  She gave him a long, thoughtful look. “You meant it to stop Kate getting ideas?”

  “I was an idiot! I feel it now. Of course,” he exclaimed. “Idiot that I am! Miss Warrender still thinks me engaged elsewhere. No wonder she refused me. Will you tell her, ma’am? Explain for me?”

  “I think it would come better from you.” She was surprising him as much as her daughter had done.

  “Mrs. Warrender.” He rose and took a swift turn over to the window, where he stood for a moment gazing down at the brilliant embroidery. “Can it be that you object to my paying my addresses to your daughter?”

  “Object?” She had turned gracefully in her armless chair to follow him with her eyes and he noticed how slender she was, her dress black against the chair’s light chintz. “I have no right to do that, I think. It is—it must be between you and Kate.” She spoke low and hurriedly, her eyes now downcast to gaze at the hands that writhed together in her lap. “You say she refused you yesterday? My lord, I do not know what to think. To tell truth, I have wondered, been anxious, once or twice this winter, thinking, circumstanced as we are, that she might be beginning to care for you.” She looked up, straight at him. “I thought it impossible,” she said simply. “I still do.”

  “But why?”

  “Lord Hawth and his governess? You’d be laughed at, my lord. You would not like that.”

  “A lot of fools!” But he had thought it himself. “Besides, a Chyngford and a Warrender. You know how our families stand in the county. And if you think she cares for me—”

  “Oh, no,” she said more calmly. “She doesn’t. She told me so this morning. I did not understand it then. I was wrong, I think. This winter. Must have been. I don’t understand her, my lord.”

  “Then you are in no position to speak for her.”

  “That’s what I said. She’s grown up, knows her own mind. Of course, if you wish to speak to “her again, you must do so, but, my lord …” She hesitated, her colour fluctuating.

  “Yes?” He moved nearer to stand beside her chair and look down at the anxious little face and the twisting hands.

  “A marriage without love is… is …” The hands writhed in her lap. Then she looked up at him squarely with blue eyes that held a tear each. “It’s hell on earth,” she said. “For your own sake, for Kate’s, if you don’t love her, don’t ask her. Don’t do it.”

  “But I have asked her. I told her I would speak to you. I am committed.”

  “Then it was not much use coming to me, was it?” She whisked the tears away with a lacy handkerchief. “Naturally, I would not dream o
f withholding my permission. It is, in every worldly sense, a brilliant connection for Kate. Whether it would be a happy one is another matter. You are both high spirited, my lord. Obstinate, if I may say so. Proud. If you loved each other, I think you might be very happy. If not it does not bear thinking of.”

  “Oh, love! Are we back to that again! You’re a grown woman, Mrs. Warrender, not a girl moping over a romance. You know as well as I do that not one marriage in a hundred is made for love.”

  “And I know what comes of it. So does Kate. I doubt she’d have you if she did not love you.”

  “Then if she does?” He was triumphant now, but not in the least happy.

  “I hope you don’t break her heart for her. I don’t think I could bear that.” She spoke it softly, slowly, with finality.

  Now she had shaken him. But he had committed himself. That fact remained. “Of course,” he said, “if you are aware of a previous attachment. I did hear something last autumn. That cousin of hers, perhaps?”

  “Good God, no!” For a surprised moment he wondered if she could be laughing at him. “In love with her cousin?” She was laughing, almost hysterically. He hated hysterics in women, but she was making a gallant effort to control herself. “Oh, no, my lord.” She looked up at him at last to say gravely, “I can give you my word for it that Kate is not in love with her cousin.”

  “Then I will ask her again,” he said, and felt a Rubicon crossed. “You will wish to speak to her first.”

  “Will I? What should I say? That you do not love her, but wish to marry her for convenience’ sake? I would rather you said it for yourself, my lord. This is not a case in which I feel I can advise her.”

  “You surprise me. I thought you cared for her.”

  “Of course I care for her. That’s just why—” she rose to her feet with the quiet dignity that always surprised him—“I think we have said all that we profitably can on this subject, my lord, and now, if you will forgive me, I have work to do.”

  Thus firmly dismissed in his own house, he went crossly off to the study and rang the bell. Best get it over with. And that, he thought, was a very odd way to contemplate proposing marriage.