Reprise (14 page)

“Don’t speak so! Uncle will not be killed. Seville will not
kill
him!” Oh, but what if he did? She was as good as a murderess.

“There is no saying with that sort of people. I’m sorry we ever got mixed up with them. This is all Dammler’s doings. It was he who introduced you to that Seville.”

The morning dragged on for hours while the duel took place, the wound was dressed and the victim got home. When at last Clarence returned to Grosvenor Square, the ladies had reached a state bordering on distraction. What a blessed sight to see him walking up to the door. Not dead, not wounded, not anything but dear old Uncle Clarence, looking sobered by his ordeal, but alive. Prudence dashed to him and threw herself crying on his neck. “Oh, Uncle, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Can you ever forgive me?” she sobbed.

He was bathed in forgiveness and pride at his recklessness at nearly participating in a duel. “Now, now, what is this? Tears? I thought you would have a pot of tea ready against my victorious return,” he smiled benignly.

“How about Mr. Seville? Is he--is he alive?” she asked fearfully.

“Yes, yes, I didn’t kill him,” Clarence told her.

“I am so happy you both deloped,” she said.

She was not allowed off with this misapprehension. “Deloped! No such a thing!
He
did not delope. Aimed right for the heart, the scoundrel, but he is a wretched shot.”

“He has the reputation of being an excellent shot,” she reminded him.

“He won’t have after today’s work,” Clarence said, but then he said no more, so Prudence was free to believe Clarence was touching up the picture to suit himself. It was fatally easy to imagine both men had deloped, and Clarence was adding to his glory by pretending, or even by now believing, Seville had aimed to kill.

Between his own ignominious part in the duel and his “word of a gentleman,” Clarence kept a tight check on his tongue. He grew into a perfect model of taciturnity as the day progressed. Prudence concluded she was in the doghouse because of losing her lord, and kept pretty well out of his way. Her mama was of the same mind and behavior, so it was necessary for him to seek them out to be silent before them, to stand looking stern and noble, which expression bore such a strong resemblance to his more customary sulks that it was mistaken for that.

“Where is Lord Dammler?” Prudence once ventured to inquire, which brought her a rather testy reply.

“Gone home to bed.”

“To
bed?”
she asked, incredulous.

Seeing he had skated dangerously close to letting the cat out of the bag, Clarence rushed on to conceal it. “Was up half the night carousing, and had his eyes half closed all through the duel. He has gone home for a rest. I daresay you’ll see him later.”

Dammler lay in his bed waiting for Prudence to come to him. She would know by now, he thought at mid-afternoon. He made no effort to bring himself to a healthier appearance. He lay pale and weak against the pillows, with the blood seeping through his bandages, spurning food and drink that he might look as pitiful as possible when she came. She would not be so hardhearted as to hold it against him he had done what he had. Who had suffered but himself’? Why had he done it but for her? Impossible she should be anything but grateful. The romance and drama of it must appeal to her heart, even if her head pretended to be displeased. But why didn’t she come? When still he lay alone at nightfall, he saw he had miscalculated the affair in some manner. Certainly she would have had the whole story long since from Clarence. Was she such a monster she felt no remorse for her part in it? Was she really angry with him--so angry she didn’t intend to come to see how he went on? He might be dying for all she knew! He could not eat, but he drank a little wine and fell into a state that was half coma, half sleep.

By morning, it was more than half coma, and accompanied by a fever as well, so that his servants sent off for Lady Melvine. Hettie was soon bustling into his room, bursting with curiosity. She looked with acute dismay at the unmoving body in the bed, felt his forehead, and sent a footman off for Dr. Knighton. Knighton came and undid the bandage to find a wound, infected, with angry red streaks beginning to run into  the shoulder and down along the arm. He prophesied a bad spell, possibly worse fever and delirium, both of which came true. Hettie sat by his bed until he was conscious, urged broth and liquids on him, quizzed him as much as his condition allowed, until she had got the gist of the story from him.

 “What of Prudence? Why does she not come?” she asked, perplexed.

“She’s mad that I took Clarence’s place, I expect.”

“She has some gall, being mad at anything! She ought to be here on her knees, apologizing. I have a good idea to go over there and give her a piece of my mind.”

“No! If she doesn’t come of her own accord, we’ll let her alone.”

At Grosvenor Square, Prudence sat in a similar state of perplexity and offense that Dammler did not come to her. The duel, she assumed, had gone off in a satisfactory manner. Clarence was alive and well; Seville, too, had survived. Was it not odd he didn’t come and speak to them about it? The whole affair was
his
doing--he had called Seville out. He cared enough for her reputation that he had done that, so why did he not come? She questioned Clarence discreetly as to Dammler’s attitude on the fateful morning. Had he been angry?

“Not a bit of it. He was cool as a cucumber.”

“Do you not think you ought to call on him, Uncle?”

“What for? He knows where I am if he wants to stop around.”

Clarence knew Nevvie would not stop around until he got his arm out of the sling--a day or two. There was enough of shame in his own part that he was reluctant to call, but after a few urgings by Prudence he did stop by one afternoon three days after the duel, when he figured the sling would be abandoned, and he might bring Dammler home with him.

He found Dammler recovering, but pretty close to being hostile. “Not scribbling?” Clarence asked merrily. “I made sure you would be dashing off the whole into a play. You must do it. It would make a dandy dramatic scene, and there would be no need to use real bullets, of course."

“I don’t write farce, Mr. Elmtree. How is Prudence? What does she think of the affair?”

“She has asked me a dozen times why I don’t call on you, and that is why I am here. She wants to know how you go on."

This conveyed to Dammler that Prudence knew he was wounded. “Be sure to tell her I am fine.”

“I certainly will. She will be happy to hear it. She has been worried sick about you.”

“Not worried enough to call in person, however.”

“You know how busy she keeps herself. Shall I tell her you want to see her?”

“No! No, thank you,” he said angrily.

“She wouldn’t begrudge the time in the least.”

“Very generous of her, but I wouldn’t like to tear her away from more worthwhile pursuits.”

This cool reception of Prue’s inquiries threw Clarence into a dudgeon. He told his niece he had gone to see the poet, and he was as toplofty as a lord.

“Did he ask for me?” she inquired quite shamelessly, for she was becoming desperate for news.

“He mentioned how you were taking it. I said as well as could be expected.”

“He didn’t say he would call?”

“No, no, he won’t be calling,” Clarence said gruffly.

He felt uneasy at the duplicity, but bucked up by the specific injunction that it was a great secret, he gave no reason for the lack of calling.

“Is he angry?” she pressed on.

“He is in a bit of a pucker about something,” Clarence admitted. “Acting very strange and standoffish. He wasn’t like himself at all. Why, I wasn’t even offered a glass of wine, now I think of it. I daresay now he has had time to think the business over he is unhappy he ever got drawn into it.”

“He pitched himself into it!”

“So he did. It is all his own fault, entirely. Well, we sha’n’t bother our minds about Lord Dammler. Isn’t it time you got sending another book off to Murray? What is everyone to read it you don’t write them a book?”

How was it possible to write under this cloud? She was worried half to death. Not a visit, nor even a note from Allan. He was done with her. She had forgiven him Cybele, but he had not been able to forgive her the book. Never once did it occur to her he was unwell. She did not go out for several days, nor did any of their mutual friends come to call. Hettie had taken the resolve never to speak to the hussy again, and was holding firm to it.

Chapter Eleven

Dammler was slow to recover.
The spreading poison in his arm weakened him, nor had he any emotional desire to get well quickly. For what? To face a life of disillusionment? He had feigned it in his first youthful cantos, but it had been a joyous cynicism, a good-natured wink at convention with a laugh at the hypocrisy of his own sort of people. This is what we say, and this is what we really do, he had pointed out, with lavish examples, whose very enthusiasm belied any condemnation. He was now feeling condemnatory, the very worst possible frame of mind to promote a cure. But with a hardy constitution and the nursing of Knighton and Hettie, he gradually returned to health. Nor was he allowed to sequester himself in his study and put down on paper all his black thoughts.

“What you want is a new flirt to cheer you up,” Hettie told him, her mind already having settled on the very girl, one of the performers in his
Shilla.
She mentioned her choice, and he frowned.

“When I am ready to take up with women again, it won’t be an actress,” he said. “One day I must find a suitable lady and settle down. 'Til that time, I mean to do some serious writing.”

“Excellent! A new play, Allan. Something bright and lively to pull you out of the megrims.”

“It was something in the nature of philosophy I had in mind. Possibly a translation of some Latin until I feel more creative.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t think of it! Enough to lay a healthy man low, and who on earth would be interested to read it?”

Having very little enthusiasm for this project, he did not forge ahead with it, but Hettie proceeded with his cure. If it was marriage that would joggle his mind out of this despond he was settling into, she would find him a bride.

It was not a particularly felicitous season for debs. Really no one she could welcome with open arms as a niece-in-law, but she could do better than Miss Mallow, at least. The Duke of Wykombe had a presentable daughter. A silly little ninny, pretty and eligible. Lady Dorothy was brought to meet him, out of his bed now, and often to be found in his study, surrounded by a depressing wall of books that must be enough to cast the healthiest mind into the dumps. Nor did that empty chair to match Madame du Barry’s desk help in the least! The meeting was a disaster. What must Dammler take into his head to discuss that afternoon but physics! He was working out a theory that climate modified behavior, with heat the culprit in the story, from what Hettie could figure.

“Do you mean then that cold is at the bottom of morality?” Lady Dorothy asked, in forgivable confusion.

“There is no such a thing as cold,” he told her. “There is only a relative absence of heat.”

Lady Dorothy accepted this dictum without argument. “Did you find people more moral in cooler climates?” she asked politely.

“I found them less degenerate,” he replied, realizing as he spoke that he preferred the warmer climes, for both bodily temperature and social mingling. He was tainted, a degenerate. He would move north.

“Less comfortable too I should think,” Hettie threw in, yawning. “What we ought all to do is board up our fireplaces and put off our wraps and be chilled into goodness. But if there is no such a thing as cold, then there is no point in chasing after it, I suppose.”

“It is a relative word--when we say cold, we mean usually less warm than our own body temperature. Though, of course, being relative, it may refer to something other than the human body.”

“Tell me, wise philosopher, is there such a thing as foolishness? I must own that relative to your former conversation, I find this discussion without sense,” his aunt teased him.

“Folly can be absolute,” he decided instantly.

“I give you no argument on that pronouncement. I have the evidence of it before my eyes. Come, Lady Dorothy, let us go before we take a chill in all this lack of heat. Dammler has begun his reformation by putting out his fires.”

She gathered up her protégé and took her home. For two days she left Dammler to his own lugubrious thoughts. He wrote three chapters of a horror story, then gave up on his reformation and lit a fire with them.

After two days Hettie hit on the notion of introducing to Dammler a lady of blue reputation, an intellectual who might argue him into spirits. Miss Samson had little looks and no excess of breeding, but she was reputed to be very clever. Hettie raised the matter of physics, telling Miss Samson that Dammler had decreed there was no such a thing as coldness. For three-quarters of an hour she sat back and listened to them go to it. Dictionaries were drawn out to support Miss Samson’s theory, while the physics tomes counterattacked with their definition. Poetry and novels were applied to. Left out in the cold, for instance, used the word as a noun, therefore it must exist. Nonsense, that had nothing to do with temperature; it was used figuratively to denote rejection. It was an abstract idea merely.

Was it not possible for one to catch a cold then? An
obvious
colloquialism--and more often accompanied by a fever than a lowering of temperature, thus indicating to the meanest capacity it had nothing to do with the matter under discussion. Miss Samson was ready to argue the point forever, long after Dammler was bored to tears with it. When next Hettie returned, she was commanded never to bring that demmed argumentative female near him again. She had given him a migraine.

“You are too much alone these days, Allan: Time to give a party. Have a housewarming party. I’ll look after all the details for you.”

“I’ve already had a housewarming party, the night
Shilla
opened.” His glance to Madame du Barry’s desk told his aunt what he was thinking.