Cressida (2 page)

“Of course I recollect, now that you have reminded me of it,” Lady Constance said with dignity, “but you 
know
I have no head for business, my love. The only thing that came into my mind when you spoke the name was that there was a gentleman named Rossiter whom your cousin Letitia mentioned to me once, who was in the Army and was most particular in his attentions to you while your great-aunt Estella was still alive, only of course an engagement was out of the question, as he was not at all a suitable person—

“It is the same man,” Cressida said. “And we
were
engaged—for all of a week. Then we had a blazing quarrel and broke it off—or perhaps I should say he broke it off.”

He
broke it off?” Lady Constance looked scandalised. “But, my dear, no
gentleman
would—

“Oh, Rossiter is a very odd sort of gentleman,” Cressida said coolly. “By birth he has all the credentials—the younger son of a cadet branch of the Derbyshire Rossiters, one cousin an earl and another a bishop— but he had already been engaged in every imaginable sort of riot and rumpus even when I knew him, seven years ago. And though I understand he has not been in England since, except to carry out his Waterloo
coup, 
there have been some very warm tales circulating about of his adventures on several continents, both in the Army and out of it. ”

“None,” said Lady Constance, assuming an air of great propriety, “that
I
have ever heard, I am sure. It is my opinion, my dearest Cressy, that you encourage gentlemen to speak far too freely to you upon subjects that we females had much better know nothing whatever about. As for Mr. Rossiter, I am sure a Royal Duke may know whom he likes, but I do hope you will not feel obliged to renew
your
acquaintance with him when he comes to London.
Not
that I expect you would wish to, if he cried off from an engagement that I cannot help thinking you must have entered into only because you were a
very
young and inexperienced girl.

“You are quite right on both heads. I don’t wish to, and I was—very young and inexperienced, that is,” Cressida said, and went back to her
Morning Post.

But when Lady Constance left the breakfast-parlour a few minutes later the
Morning Post
was laid aside again, and Cressida sat for some time with her chin in her cupped hands, frowning into space as her mind went back, almost in spite of herself, to the Cressy Calverton of seven years before.

Very young and inexperienced
—that was an understatement, surely, for the girl who had been reared by a widowed mother, under circumstances of genteel poverty, in a village in the Cotswolds, and who had then, following her mother’s death, lived for three years with an elderly, invalidish, and immensely rich great-aunt in Cheltenham. She had never in all her eighteen years met a man like Captain Deverell Rossiter when her uncle Arthur, descending upon her great-aunt Estella’s secluded villa during race-week, had been moved—she could only suppose, by sympathy for her youth and the stifling atmosphere of lavender-water, hartshorn, and old age surrounding her—to carry her off to enjoy some of the social gaieties provided by Cheltenham in that midsummer season. He had taken her to the races and to the Assemblies, had bought her a new hat and a topaz set (Uncle Arthur, in spite of being perpetually out of funds, with Calverton Place sprouting new mortgages each year like spring flowers, was incurably generous), and, most important of all, had introduced Dev Rossiter to her.

That she should have fallen head-over-ears in love with Captain Rossiter within four-and-twenty hours of her first setting eyes on him was, she considered, in the light of her present half-dozen years’ experience on the town, entirely predictable. She was young, full of restless energy and romantic fancies, and Rossiter, though certainly not handsome, had a kind of wary, sardonic charm that had already caused more than one impressionable female to overlook the more obvious disadvantages of his rather harsh-featured face and abrupt and quite unconciliating manner.

Why
he
had fallen in love with
her
—if he
had
fallen in love, instead of having been, as she now suspected, merely relieving what had undoubtedly been to him the tameness of a provincial race-meeting by a flirtation that had unexpectedly got into deeper waters—it was more difficult for her to decide. Certainly, she thought, Cressida Calverton, at eighteen, had had little to recommend her to an experienced and cynical soldier— neither conventional beauty nor manner nor fashion— but upon this point she was overmodest, for, though possessing none of these advantages, there had been a freshness, an eager reaching out for life by an unconventional mind and a vivid personality, that had caused a number of gentlemen to give more than a second glance during that race-week to the tall young girl on Arthur Calverton’s arm, for all her obvious lack of town-bronze and her very dull though very good frock.

She herself, however, had had eyes for no one but Rossiter. He had asked her to stand up with him at the Assembly, asked her so negligently that she had been stung into a display of indifference quite foreign to her usual half-shy, half-eager manner. Then in the middle of the dance he had said to her abruptly, “What the deuce is the matter with you? If you didn’t care to dance with me, why say you would?”—and they had been off. She had stiffened, had answered him with a frankness as unconventional as his own, and, quite regardless of the niceties of ballroom etiquette—with which, it had to be said in her defence, she had had little opportunity to become acquainted because of the secluded life she had led—had forthwith walked off the floor.

He had followed her. Within half an hour they had made up their quarrel and were talking to each other as if they had been acquainted all their lives; within four-and-twenty hours she had known she was in love with him; and within a week they were engaged. His regiment had been ordered to Portugal, but she was willing, even eager, to follow the drum with him. Of course great-aunt Estella had had to be informed; she had said little, but that little penetratingly to the point that they were both making utter fools of themselves, and had allowed matters to take their course.

Which of course they had, to the rapid denouement of one broken engagement and one (only one, Cressida was obliged to believe) temporarily broken heart. If Rossiter’s own heart had suffered even the slightest crack, he had managed to conceal it very well both from her and from the rest of the world after that horrid evening when, as she had told Lady Constance, they had had a blazing quarrel and the engagement had been broken off.

Looking back at it afterwards, out of the miasma of bitterness and humiliation in which she had lived for the succeeding months, it had seemed to her that Rossiter had deliberately provoked that quarrel, for it had been he, she was sure, who had first suggested that she think twice before committing her future to the uncertainties of the career of an officer in a Line regiment in wartime. They were both, he had pointed out, without expectations—for at that time no one had had the least notion where Great-aunt Estella intended to leave her fortune— and who was to blame her if she had leapt to the conclusion that his insistence upon this point meant that he himself had had second thoughts about the wisdom of marrying a portionless girl?

She had answered him, she remembered, disdainfully: his own temper was as rough and direct as hers was quick and impetuous, and words had been spoken that it was unlikely either of them would forgive or forget.

And so he had gone off to Portugal alone, and she, after a few months of a horrid kind of corrosive misery, as if acid had somehow got inside her and were eating away all the happy, eager expectations that, in spite of everything, she had always managed to keep bright there, had awakened one morning to find Great-aunt Estella dead and herself the possessor of a fortune beyond her wildest dreams.

It had often occurred to her since to wonder what Captain Deverell Rossiter had felt when he had learned that on the day he had broken off his engagement to young Miss Cressida Calverton he had thrown away a magnificent fortune as well. She would have been more than human if the thought of his chagrin had not spread balm over her misery—and more than human, too, if the change in her life brought about by Great-aunt Estella’s death had not done much to erase the memory of that brief engagement from her mind. Lady Constance, a relation by marriage on her mother’s side and a lady well acquainted in the fashionable world, had been hit upon by her uncle Arthur as the proper person to take her new household in charge and introduce her into the
ton, 
and a hectic London Season had followed, in which offers of matrimony had been showered upon her like autumn leaves and she had, as Lady Constance had approvingly noted, “come on” amazingly in the social arts.

She had been engaged that first Season—engaged, it seemed to her now, more in order to prove to herself that, if Rossiter did not care to marry her, there were other men who did; but there had been none of that wildly magical happiness in the matter that there had been when she had been engaged to Rossiter, although the young man was handsome, the possessor of wealth and title, amiable, intelligent, and in every way the most eligible of
partis.
And in the end, she had cried off from the engagement, censuring herself as severely for doing so as the most conventional of dowagers might have done, but hiding her inner confusion under a coolness that had from that time forth gained her the reputation of being an accomplished and even heartless flirt.

Of course this reputation had not deterred a long list of gentlemen from seeking the rich and dashing Miss Calverton’s hand in the years that followed, and more than one of them had carried the matter to the point that rumours of an approaching marriage had been circulated in the
ton;
but there had been no more engagements.

“Deuce take it,” Cressida thought to herself with rueful severity, as she sat over the cold coffee-cups with her chin in hands, “I suppose I really
ought
to marry Leonard, ” who was Lord Langmere, the latest and most importunate of her suitors, a marquis, a power in the Government, a handsome man in his late thirties whose fortune equalled her own and whose tastes ran with hers towards politics, good conversation, and racing. “It is perfectly absurd to expect to feel again like a girl of eighteen loving a stranger
à corps perdu
”— and than Lady Constance put her head in at the door again and demanded in a despairing voice what she was to do about the Chenevix girl.

“Good heavens, ask her to come here for the Season, of course, if you have decided you care to go to the trouble of chaperoning her about,” Cressida said, moved to this act of charity by her remembrance of another young girl who, until Great-aunt Estella had unexpectedly endowed her with a fortune, had been just as poor as Kitty Chenevix was, and reflecting as well that Lady Constance, who had much enjoyed managing the late Mr. Jeremy Havener in his more manageable moods (which had occurred chiefly when there was no opportunity for him to wager money on anything), but had sensibly refrained from attempting to manage Cressida, who had a will of her own, would perhaps derive a good deal of satisfaction from manoeuvring Miss Chenevix into a suitable marriage.

Lady Constance looked gratified.
“So
generous of you, my dear!” she exclaimed. “And I expect she will really turn out not to be a great deal of trouble, after all, for she writes a very pretty, modest letter, and does not seem to be at all a
coming
sort of girl. I can just recollect seeing her at that little house Emily hired one year in Bath—she is quite a martyr to dyspepsia, you know: poor Emily, that is, of course,
not
the child—when she was only a little thing, very fair and quiet, I recall, and with charming manners. It would be
so
dreary to think of her never being given an opportunity to have even a single Season in town!”

Cressida agreed with proper civility that it would be very dreary, and, jumping up forthwith from the table, announced that she must go upstairs at once and dress, or she would be late for her appointment with Sir Octavius Mayr in the City.

“You know I
cannot
approve of your calling upon a gentleman at his place of business, my dear, ” Lady Constance said, for perhaps the dozenth time since she had taken up residence with Cressida. “It would be far more proper for him to wait upon you here”—but Cressida only laughed.

“Of course he would do so if I asked him to—and a great piece of impertinence it would be upon my part!” she said.
“Do
try to recollect, love, that Octavius is a man of vast importance in the City, and that the only reason he condescends to act as my man of business is out of a sense of gratitude to Great-aunt Estella. And if you tell me that he is not a gentleman,” she went on, forestalling another of Lady Constance’s familiar objections, “I shall remind you that Sir Walter Scott himself has spoken warmly of his wit and learning, that he has gathered what is considered to be one of the finest art collections in England, and that he has Royalty to dine at his house whenever he pleases!”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Constance in dismay, for, though she had heard this encomium before, it seemed to her it had never been delivered with quite so much spirit and feeling. ‘‘You are never thinking of marrying
him,
my love! He is
quite
old enough to be your father, by what I have heard, and, as fabulously rich and important as he may be, one cannot
really
call him—” “A gentleman?” Cressida’s mischievous smile was very much in evidence again. “Oh, no, something far better—the wisest man I know! But never fear—I am not at all the sort of female he would consider allying himself with, though I believe he
has
the intention to 
ranger
himself with a lady of suitable rank and years when he is ready to retire from business. He discussed the whole matter with me very seriously one day, and I discovered myself weighed in the balance and found wanting—”