The Corinthian (24 page)

He smiled, but there was a pucker between his brows. 'Yes, indeed, but it seems so strange! Why did she say she had gone out to meet you, I wonder?'

It was apparent to Pen that Miss Daubenay possessed his thoughts to the exclusion of everyone else. Repressing a strong desire to favour him with her opinion of that young lady, she recounted as briefly as she could what had passed between her and Lydia in the orchard. Any expectation she might have had of his viewing his betrothed's conduct in the same light as she did was banished by his exclaiming rapturously: 'She is such an innocent little thing! It is just like her to have said that! I see it all now!'

This was too much for Pen. 'Well, I think it was a ridiculous thing to have said.'

'You see, she knows nothing of the world, Pen,' he said earnestly. 'Then, too, she is impulsive! Do you know, she always makes me think of a bird?'

'A goose, I suppose,' said Pen somewhat tartly.

'I meant a wild bird,' he replied, with dignity. 'A fluttering, timid, little—'

'She didn't seem to me very timid,' Pen interrupted. 'In fact, I thought she was extremely bold to ask a perfectly strange young man to pretend to be in love with her.'

'You don't understand her. She is so trusting! She needs someone to take care of her. We have loved one another ever since our first meeting. We should have been married by now if my father had not picked a foolish quarrel with the Major. Pen, you cannot think what our sufferings have been! There seems to be no end to them! We shall never induce our fathers to consent to our marriage, never!'

He sank his head in his hands with a groan, but Pen said briskly: 'Well, you will have to marry without their consent. Only you both of you seem to be so poor-spirited that you will do nothing but moan, and meet in woods! Why don't you elope?'

'Elope! You don't know what you are saying, Pen! How could I ask that fragile little thing to do anything of the sort? The impropriety, too! I am persuaded she would shrink from the very thought of it!'

'Yes, she did,' agreed Pen. 'She said she would not be able to have attendants, or a lace veil.'

'You see, she has been very strictly reared—has led the most sheltered life! Besides, why should she not have a lace veil, and—and those things which females set store by?'

'For my part,' Pen said, 'I would not care a fig for such fripperies if I loved a man!'

'Oh, you are different!' said Piers. 'You were always more like a boy than a girl. Just look at you now! Why are you masquerading as a boy? It seems to me most peculiar, and not quite the thing, you know.'

'There were circumstances which—which made it necessary,' said Pen rather stiffly. 'I had to escape from my aunt's house.'

'Well, I still don't see why—'

'Because I was forced to climb out of a window!" snapped Pen. 'Moreover, I could not travel all by myself as a female, could I?'

'No, I suppose you could not. Only you should not be travelling by yourself at all. What a madcap you are!' A thought occurred to him; he glanced down at Pen with a sudden frown. 'But you were with Sir Richard Wyndham when I came in, and you seemed to be on mighty close terms with him, too! For heaven's sake, Pen, what are you about? How do you come to be in his company?'

The interview with her old playmate seemed to be fraught not only with disappointment, but with unforeseen difficulties as well. Pen could not but realize that Mr Luttrell was not in sympathy with her. 'Oh, that—that is too long a story to tell!' she replied evasively. 'There were reasons why I wished to come home again, and—and Sir Richard would not permit me to go alone.'

'But, Pen!' He sounded horrified. 'You are surely not travelling with him?'

His tone swept away adventure, and invested her exploit instead with the stigma of impropriety. She coloured hotly, and was searching her mind for an explanation that would satisfy Piers when the door opened, and Sir Richard came into the room.

One glance at Mr Luttrell's rigidly disapproving countenance; one glimpse of Pen's scarlet cheeks and over-bright eyes, were enough to give Sir Richard a very fair notion of what had been taking place in the parlour. He closed the door, saying in his pleasant drawl: 'Ah, good-morning, Mr Luttrell! I trust the—er—surprising events of last night did not rob you of sleep?'

A sigh of relief escaped Pen. With Sir Richard's entrance the reeling world seemed, miraculously, to have righted itself. She left the window-seat, and went instinctively towards him. 'Sir, Piers says—Piers thinks—' She stopped, and raised a hand to her burning cheek.

Sir Richard looked at Piers with slightly raised brows. 'Well?' he said gently. 'What does Piers say and think?'

Mr Luttrell got up. Under that ironical, tolerant gaze, he too began to blush. 'I only said—I only wondered how Pen comes to be travelling in your company!'

Sir Richard unfobbed his snuff-box, and took a pinch. 'And does no explanation offer itself to you?' he enquired.

'Well, sir, I must say it seems to me—I mean—'

'Perhaps I should have told you,' said Sir Richard drawing Pen's hand through his arm, and holding it rather firmly, 'that you are addressing the future Lady Wyndham.'

The hand twitched in Sir Richard's, but in obedience to the warning pressure of his fingers Miss Creed remained silent.

'Oh, I see!' said Piers, his brow clearing. 'I beg pardon! It is famous news indeed! I wish you very happy! But—but why must she wear those clothes, and what are you doing here? It still seems very odd to me! I suppose since you are betrothed it may be argued that— But it is most eccentric, sir, and I do not know what people may say!"

'As we have been at considerable pains to admit no one but yourself into the secret of Pen's identity, I hardly think that people will say anything at all,' replied Sir Richard calmly. 'If the secret were to leak out—why, the answer is that we are a very eccentric couple!'

'It will never leak out through me!' Piers assured him. 'It is no concern of mine, naturally, but I can't help wondering what should have brought you here, and why Pen had to get out of a window. However, I don't mean to be inquisitive, sir. It was only that—having known Pen all my life, you see!'

It was Miss Creed's turn now to give Sir Richard's hand a warning pinch. In fact, so convulsive was her grip that he glanced down at her with a reassuring little smile.

'I am afraid I cannot tell you our reasons for coming here,' he said. 'Certain circumstances arose which made the journey necessary. Pen's attire, however, is easily explained. Neither of us wished to burden ourselves with a duenna upon a mission of—er—extreme delicacy; and the world, my dear Luttrell, being a censorious place, it was judged expedient for Pen to pretend to be, instead of my affianced wife, my young cousin.'

'To be sure, yes! of course!' said Piers, mystified, but overborne by the Corinthian's air of assurance.

'By now,' said Sir Richard, 'we should be on our way back to London, had it not been for two unfortunate circumstances. For one of these, you, I must regretfully point out to you, are responsible.'

'I?' gasped Piers.

'You,' said Sir Richard, releasing Pen's hand. 'The lady to whom you, I apprehend, are secretly betrothed, has, in a somewhat misguided attempt to avert suspicion from the truth informed her parent that Pen is the man with whom she had an assignation in the spinney last night.'

'Yes, Pen told me that. Indeed, I wish she had not done it, sir, but she is so impulsive, you know!'

'So I have been led to infer,' said Sir Richard. 'Unhappily, since I am for the present compelled to remain in Queen Charlton, her impulsiveness has rendered our situation a trifle awkward.'

'Yes, I see that,' owned Piers. 'I am very sorry for it, sir. But must you remain here?'

'Yes,' replied Sir Richard. 'No doubt it has escaped your memory, but a murder was committed in the spinney last night. It was I who discovered Brandon's body, and conveyed the news to the proper quarter.'

Piers looked troubled at this, and said: 'I know, sir, and I do not like it above half! For, in point of fact,
I
first found Beverley, only you told-me not to say sol'

'I hope you did not?'

'No, because it is so excessively awkward, on account of Miss Daubenay's presence in the spinney! But if she has said that she went there to meet Pen—'

'You had better continue to preserve a discreet silence, my dear boy. The knowledge that you also were in the spinney would merely confuse poor Mr Philips. You see, I have the advantage of knowing who killed Brandon.'

'I think,' said Pen judicially, 'we ought to tell Piers about the diamond necklace, sir.'

'By all means,' agreed Sir Richard.

The history of the diamond necklace, as recounted by Miss Creed, made Mr Luttrell forget for a few moments his graver preoccupations. He seemed very much more the Piers of her childhood when he exclaimed: 'What an adventure!' and by the time he had described to her his surprise at receiving a visit from Beverley, whom he had known but slightly up at Oxford; and had exchanged impressions of Captain Horace Trimble, they were once more upon very good terms. Sir Richard, who thought that his own interests would best be served by allowing Pen uninterrupted intercourse with Mr Luttrell, soon left them to themselves; and after Piers had once more felicitated Pen on her choice of a husband—felicitations which she received in embarrassed silence—the talk soon returned to his own difficulties.

She listened to his enraptured description of Miss Daubenay with as much patience as she could muster, but when he begged her not to divulge her sex to the lady for fear lest her nice sense of propriety might suffer too great a shock, she was so much incensed that she was betrayed into giving him her opinion of Miss Daubenay's morals and manners. A pretty squabble at once flared up, and might have ended in Piers' stalking out of Pen's life for ever had she not remembered, just as he reached the door, that she had engaged herself to further his pretensions to Lydia's hand.

It took a few moments' coaxing to persuade him to relax his air of outraged dignity, but when it was borne in upon him that Lydia had summoned Pen to her side that morning, he did seem to feel that such forward conduct called for an explanation. Pen waved his excuses aside, however. 'I don't mind that, if only she would not cry so much!' she said.

Mr Luttrell said that his Lydia was all sensibility, and deprecated, with obvious sincerity, a suggestion that a wife suffering from an excess of sensibility might prove to be a tiresome acquisition. As he seemed to feel that the support of Lydia was his life's work, Pen abandoned all thought of trying to wean him from his attachment to the lady, and announced her plans for his speedy marriage.

These palpably took Mr Luttrell aback. Lydia's refusal to elope with him he regarded as natural rather than craven, and when Pen's false-abduction scheme was enthusiastically described to him he said that she must be mad to think of such a thing.

'I declare I have a good mind to wash my hands of the whole affair!' said Pen. 'Neither of you has the courage to make the least push in the matter! The end of it will be that your precious Lydia will be married to someone else, and then you will be sorry!'

'Oh, don't suggest such a thing!' he begged. 'If only my father would be a little conciliating! He used to like the Major well enough before they quarrelled.'

'You must soften the Major's heart.'

'Yes, but how?' he asked. 'Now, don't, pray, suggest any more foolish abduction schemes, Pen! I daresay you think them very fine, but if you would but consider the difficulties! No one would ever believe we had not planned it all, because if she eloped with you she would not then wish to marry me, now, would she?'

'No, but we could say that I had forcibly abducted her. Then you could rescue her from me.'

'How should I know that you had abducted her?' objected Piers. 'And just think what a pucker everyone would be in! No, really, Pen, it won't answer! Good God, I should have to fight a duel with you, or something of that nature! I mean, how odd it would look if all I did was to take Lydia home!'

'Well, so we could!' said Pen, her eyes brightening, as new horizons swam into her ken. 'I could have my arm in a sling, and say that you had wounded me! Oh, do let us, Piers! It would be such a famous adventure!'

'You don't seem to me to have changed in the least!' said Piers, in anything but a complimentary tone. 'You are the most complete hand indeed! I cannot conceive how you came to be betrothed to a man of fashion like Wyndham! You know, you will have to mend your ways! In fact, I cannot conceive of your being married at all! You are a mere child.'

Another quarrel might at this point have sprung up between them, had not Sir Richard come back into the room just then, with Mr Philips in his wake. He was looking faintly amused, and the instant expression of extreme trepidation which transformed the countenances of the youthful couple by the window made his lips twitch involuntarily. However, he spoke without a tremor in his voice. 'Ah, Pen! Would you explain, if you please, your— er—owl story, to Mr Philips?'

'Oh!' said Pen, blushing furiously.

The magistrate looked severely across at her. 'From the information I have since received, young man, I am forced to the conclusion that your story was false.'

Pen glanced towards Sir Richard. Instead of coming to her rescue, he smiled maliciously, and said: 'Stand up, my boy, stand up, when Mr Philips addresses you!'