Cressida (20 page)

While this bewildering flood of word was being poured out, Cressida, according it only half her attention, was reading the few lines written in an elegant masculine hand on the sheet of notepaper that Lady Constance had given her.

My dearest love,
the words ran,
I have completed the arrangements. You will meet me at the White Hart in Welwyn. As we planned, you must contrive an errand in Bond Street this afternoon with no one but Lady Con’s maid accompanying you. Give her the slip, and the chaise will be waiting around the corner in Bruton Street. The off-leader will wear a white cockade. Don’t give the game away by taking anything with you, and, if you love me, don’t leave a note behind. Too, too bourgeois, my dear, and it will do Cressy and Lady Con a world of credit to have a genuine disappearance on their hands. One does so like to create a sensation in the middle of the Season, when everyone is
ennuye
with balls and breakfasts.
A bientot.
Your
most devoted
Addison.

Cressida looked up in utter astonishment. “No, I
can’t
believe it!” she said. “Kitty to be planning an elopement with Addison—and in broad daylight! She must be mad! They must both be mad! He cannot possibly wish to marry her—”

“Oh, no! I am
quite
persuaded that he does not!” Lady Constance distractedly agreed. “But no doubt he has cozened her into
believing
that he does. This talk of meeting her in Welwyn—of course it will appear to
her 
that he intends taking her north to the Border—but can you imagine Addison, of all men, planning to be married in Gretna over the anvil? It is perfectly plain that he means merely to ruin the girl, in order to revenge himself upon Rossiter.”

Cressida, who had grown a trifle paler but was now quite in command of herself, continued to stare fixedly down at the note in her hand.

“But can he really have considered the consequences?” she said after a moment, more to herself, it seemed, than to Lady Constance. “If he
does
ruin Kitty, Rossiter will be certain to call him out—”

“Oh, my dear, I daresay he does not care for that!” Lady Constance said. “He is held to be an excellent shot, I have always heard it said, and you know he has been out more than once—that affair of poor young Worthington, for example. ” She shrugged her shoulders with an air of meaningful cynicism. “My dear papa was always used to say,” she observed trenchantly, “that when a man’s lower nature was aroused, he feared
nothing,
and I believe that is exactly the state Addison is in, or he would never have concocted such a monstrous scheme! But what are we to
do
to stop him?”

Cressida, becoming conscious at this moment of the impropriety of their continuing the conversation where any passing servant might overhear them, led her into the drawing room and closed the door.

“Do?” she said then, slowly. “Why, we might lock her in her room, I daresay—that would scotch the plan for today, at least. But we most certainly cannot keep her there indefinitely, and if she remains in London he may very easily contrive to see her again and make other plans for eloping with her. He has enough gall to do so even if we confront him with this note! And we
can’t
tell Rossiter of it: that
would
throw the fat in the fire! He would be quite certain to call Addison out—

“And then there would be a scandal, and no doubt he wouldn’t marry Kitty, after all!” Lady Constance said, sinking down upon an ivory satinwood sofa with a tragical expression upon her face. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! That wretched, idiotish girl! She has always seemed so
very 
sensible—and then to do such a wicked, foolish thing as this, just when she is on the verge of being settled so prosperously!”

“She doesn’t care for him, you know,” Cressida said, standing very erect and still in the centre of the room, her face quite expressionless. “I daresay, if the truth were told, she doesn’t care for either of them— only she is frightened of Dev, and dazzled by Addison. To be the chosen bride of the
premier dandy
in London—” She made a sudden gesture of violent impatience. “Good God, is she really so enamoured of herself as to believe that a poor little dab of a girl like her can have penetrated the armour of that man’s indifference and pride?” she exclaimed. “It would take a Royal princess to accomplish that! But we must not stand here doing nothing! We must have some sort of plan, or heaven knows what will come of all this!”

She sank down into the chair that stood before an elegant little French writing-desk and, spreading Addison’s note out before her, mechanically read it through again, as if hoping against hope that there might be something in it to cause her to believe that the meaning she and Lady Constance had seen in it might be in error. But the significance was only too clear: Addison certainly meant to ruin Kitty, and Cressida believed him to be quite capable of accomplishing this purpose even if she and Lady Constance were immediately to bundle the girl out of London, back to her home in Devonshire. One could run away from Devonshire quite as well as one could from London; and then there was the fact that the taking of any drastic precautions to protect Kitty from her would-be seducer must necessarily defeat what was, to Cressida at least, their primary purpose—that of keeping Rossiter in the dark as to Addison’s intentions.

For if he were to guess at Addison’s purpose, he would—he must—call him out, and, confident as she was of Rossiter’s ability to drop his opponent, she could in no wise be certain that Addison—also a splendid marksman, as Lady Constance had reminded her— would not likewise be able to hit his mark. She had pooh-poohed the idea of a duel when Lady Dalingridge had broached the matter to her a few days before, not believing for a moment that Addision was willing to advertise to the world, by calling Rossiter out, his pique over the latter’s having carried Kitty off in spite of his own marked attentions to her.

But she was well aware that Addision was no coward, and the prospect of having Rossiter, in the role of the gulled betrothed, call
him
out would certainly add the final fillip to his triumph.

“I
must
find
some
way to prevent all this!” she thought in despair. “If only I could contrive somehow to make
him
appear a figure of ridicule! It is the only thing that will put an end to this horrid plan, for he is vulnerable nowhere but in his vanity!”

Lady Constance’s voice came across the room to her in a kind of low wail.

“Oh, what
are
we to do? I feel myself so responsible! After all, the child
did
put herself so
trustingly
into our care! And now we have led her into
this!”

“Nonsense! said Cressida, her exasperation boiling over at this quite unwarranted aspersion upon herself and Lady Constance. “We have led her into nothing; it is all her own folly and ambition. If she had not foisted the most barefaced untruth upon us by giving us to understand that her aunt was too ill to bring her out, she would never have come near Mount Street, and would have spent the Season with a set of comfortable, worthy nobodies—which would not have suited her in the least, you know! All the same, we can’t let the wretched girl ruin herself! We shall be obliged to do
something,
if only to see to it that Rossiter is not killed on the head of it!” Lady Constance, her attention momentarily diverted from the problem before her, stared at her.

“But what can you mean, my love?” she demanded.

“A barefaced untruth—?”

“Yes!” said Cressida. “There has been, and is, nothing in the world wrong with Mrs. Mills’s health. I met her at Mrs. Torrance’s in Keppel Street not a week after Kitty came to us, and she told me herself that she had not been ill. Of course she had not the least notion that Kitty had alleged
that
as her reason for wishing to come to us; she merely thought it had been all our kindness in inviting her. No,” she went on, as Lady Constance opened her mouth to speak, “I didn’t disillusion her. I only wish now that I had done, and then sent Kitty packing back to Devonshire.
That
has been
my
only fault in this affair!”

She arose and began pacing impatiently up and down the long room. They would have to come to some decision soon, she felt, for Kitty must already be growing uneasy upstairs as the note she had been expecting failed to arrive, and they had no way of knowing what imprudences she might be led into, in her anxiety not to fail in arriving at the chosen rendezvous. Addision had used the words, “as we planned,” so that it was obvious the matter had been discussed by them previously, and Kitty might well be aware of the chaise even now awaiting her arrival in Bruton Street. She would have only to slip out of the house and walk to the fatal corner, and she would be whisked away to her meeting with Addison in Welwyn.

And if someone else were to go in her place?
the thought suddenly came into Cressida’s mind. If Addison were to find, as he stepped forward to hand a blushing and inexperienced girl from the chaise in the inn-yard of the White Hart, that what he had got instead was the dashing Miss Calverton, armed with cool sarcasms and fully prepared to spread the tale of his discomfiture all over London—?

“I have it!” she announced triumphantly. “The very thing!
I
shall go in Kitty’s place!”

Lady Constance, who was still mulling Kitty’s duplicity in the matter of Mrs. Mills indignantly over in her mind, looked at her mistrustfully.

“What did you say, dear?” she enquired.

“I said, I shall go in her place!” Cressida repeated impatiently, making for the door.

Lady Constance gave a faint shriek.

“Now, don’t, pray
don’t
fly up into the boughs!” Cressida admonished her, pausing to give her a bracing hug. “I promise you, I shall be
quite
all right, but I intend to give Mr. Drew Addison the shock of his life! I daresay he will not try a second time to elope with Kitty when he realises
I
have the power to let everyone in London into the jest of his having laid the most elaborate plans to carry off
one
young lady, only to find that he had actually got quite another, who had not the least intention of becoming his innocent victim! And everyone in London
shall
know of it, if I do not receive his most solemn assurance that he will never attempt anything of the sort again! Dear ma’am, pray
don’t
try to stop me,” she added, as Lady Constance, almost overcome with incredulous astonishment and disapproval, again began uttering objections, “for I have quite made up my mind to go! Only let me put on a close bonnet that will hide my face—though I am sure the postillions who are waiting with the chaise in Bruton Street are hired, and have no notion what Kitty looks like—and I shall be off!”

She sped out of the room, giving Lady Constance a last reassuring hug, and in the hall directed Harbage to have the barouche brought round at once. Ten minutes later, having made a rapid change into a demure blue gown of French cambric, and with a large Pamela bonnet concealing her tawny curls and the greater part of her face, she was seating in her carriage on her way to Bond Street, having left Lady Constance almost distracted in the drawing room, with her vinaigrette close at hand, and quite certain that this fateful day would not come to an end before she had seen the utter ruin of one or both of the young ladies now under her charge.

As for Cressida herself, she had no such premonitions. She would go to Welwyn, confront Addison, and return to Mount Street, where she would inform Kitty in no uncertain terms of the fate she had escaped, and attempt to drum some modicum of sense into her head on the subject of men like Addison, who cared more for their own vanity than they would ever do for any woman. In the case of this latter project she was not overly sanguine of success, for young ladies who had allowed
their
vanity to lead them to the point of throwing their cap over the windmill, in the belief that their cleverness would bring them about in the end, were not, in her experience, apt to abandon their golden dreams without a struggle.

Still, if Addison, for his part, were now to quit his pursuit of her, there was very little she could do but abandon those dreams, and settle instead for the reality within her grasp—namely, marriage to Rossiter. It was this thought—that, by saving Kitty from Addison, she was undoubtedly giving up her last opportunity to see the engagement between her and Rossiter broken off— that had caused Cressida, as she had been changing her dress in her bedchamber a few minutes before, almost to falter in her purpose and to let matters take their course as far as Addison and Kitty were concerned.

But a moment’s reflection had stiffened her resolution. She
could not
see Rossiter placed in a position in which he would feel obliged to call Addison out; neither could she allow a girl who was under her protection to be ruined without making a push to prevent it.

So she had gone on with her preparations, and now, arriving in Bond Street, she ordered her coachman to halt the carriage and, having alighted from it, dismissed him, sending him back to Mount Street. A few minutes’ walk then brought her to Bruton Street, and the first thing she saw, when she turned the corner, was a yellowbodied chaise-and-four standing beside the flagway, its off-leader sporting a white cockade.

She approached it, counterfeiting—rather well, she prided herself—timidity and agitation in her demeanour. One of the postillions, observing her, jumped down, opened the door of the chaise, and stood waiting for her to enter. She did so, once more pretending an uncertainty she did not in the least feel, and in a few moments the door had been closed behind her, the postillion had again sprung upon his mount, and the chaise was rattling off quickly through the crowded London streets.

Cressida sat back comfortably against the cushions and folded her hands composedly in her lap.