Cressida Read online

  “Yes, but one never knows about gentlemen,” Cressida said, unable to resist the temptation of continuing the jest. “Langmere is well past thirty, and has never married; there have been more cases than one of men of that age who have made cakes of themselves over schoolroom misses, you know!”

  Lady Constance looked with some consternation into her face, but, seeing Cressida’s primmed-up lips and dancing eyes, her anxiety relaxed.

  “Now you are funning again, my dear!” she said severely. “But, really, it is not a matter for levity. Langmere is quite the most agreeable man in London, to say nothing of his being by far the most eligible, and fond though I am prepared to be of Kitty, I cannot think it would be at all proper for her to steal him from you. Not that I am persuaded she could do so, but—

  “But there is no relying upon gentlemen. Indeed, no!” Cressida finished it for her, with a mischievous glance. “They are kittle-cattle creatures, are they not? Always running after the latest sensation! And yet they have the temerity to say it is we who are fickle!”

  They found the subject of their discussion, as Moodle had informed them, in her bedchamber, carefully putting the last exquisite stitch into the torn flounce of a gown of pomona green sarsnet.

  “But you really must not do such things for me!” Cressida protested. “You are here to enjoy yourself— and it is quite unnecessary!”

  And the next moment she wished she had not spoken, for Kitty, looking hurt, said really, she had loved doing it because Miss Calverton had been so very kind to her—after which Cressida, self-convicted of base ingratitude, felt obliged to fall back upon admiring her needlework and averring that she was quite sure Moodle herself could not have done it so well. It would be a trifle wearing, Cressida thought, as she escaped a few minutes later to her own bedchamber, if Kitty was going to be so very grateful to her that she herself would constantly be obliged to be grateful in return. But she consoled herself with the thought that, once young Miss Chenevix found herself immersed in the ceaseless round of balls, Venetian breakfasts, theatre-parties, and routs that would be offered for her diversion during the London Season, she would lose some of this excessive zeal to show herself properly appreciative of what was being done for her.

  And, indeed, when the following evening arrived and Cressida came downstairs to the drawing room, where Lady Constance and Kitty were already seated, awaiting the arrival of Lord Langmere, who was to escort them to the ball, she found her young protegee as full of absorbed excitement as she could have wished. Cressida, casting a critical eye over her, was inclined to agree with Lady Constance’s satisfied observation that she was sure to be a success. The gown of white spider-gauze gave her the fragile appearance of a fairy princess; her very fair hair had been dressed by Moodle’s skilful fingers in an aureole of curls that softened the slight angularity of her delicate features; and her toilette, thanks to Cressida’s generosity, was complete to the last fashionable detail of white satin sandals, long kid gloves, and the length of silver net drapery caught up over her arms at the elbows.

  If Lady Constance still harboured any slight apprehension that Kitty’s youthful charms would cause Lord Langmere to swerve for a moment from his devotion to Cressida, however, she was soon made to realise that her fears had been groundless. Lord Langmere, who was a pattern of courtesy, did indeed acknowledge his introduction to Miss Chenevix with every appearance of polite attention, but it was obvious that his eyes were all for Cressida, who herself appeared to great advantage that evening in one of Fanchon’s most fashionable creations—a gown of jonquil Italian crape, deeply decollete, with the scalloped flounce that finished its hem revealing rather more of a pair of slender ankles than a less dashing young lady would have deemed quite proper.

  Lord Langmere, however, though the soul of propriety himself, showed no sign of disapproval, and on the contrary complimented her appreciatively upon her appearance. He was a handsome man in his middle thirties, vigorous and virile, with a well-set-up figure admirably suited to the evening fashion of severely cut, formfitting coats, knee breeches, and silk stockings, and, like any gentleman of the haut ton, would have been disappointed in the gown worn by the lady of his choice only if it had not conformed to the latest and more daring whim of the current mode.

  As he seated himself in his elegant town-chariot, having first seen his three ladies comfortably settled on its velvet cushions, he said to Cressida with the attractive, rather indolent smile that had fluttered more than one feminine heart and caused even his most acerbic political opponents to admit that he was an excellent sort of fellow, after all, “Dolly is not to disappoint us tonight, I understand. You know her boast that she has never yet failed to present her guests with the unusual at her parties? Well, she has got Rossiter tonight. Had she told you?’ As Cressida, in whom several odd and, on the whole, disagreeable sensations had been aroused by this announcement, did not immediately reply, he went on, “You do know who he is, of course? The man who out-Rothschilded Rothschild and crossed the Channel in an open boat in impossible weather after Waterloo to carry out a dazzling coup on Change? He has at last returned to England now; York had him at Oatlands for a few days, but he has been too much occupied with his own affairs, it appears, to accept any other invitations until tonight. It is like Dolly’s luck to nobble him first.

  Cressida said a trifle crossly that she did not consider Dev Rossiter such a prize acquisition that Dolly Dalingridge needed to boast about it.

  “Oh,” said Lord Langmere, looking surprised. “Are you acquainted with him, then?”

  “I am not only acquainted with him, I was once engaged to him,” Cressida said with some asperity, “as he has no doubt been going up and down London telling everyone who will listen to him this past week. He certainly lost no time in reminding me of it very publicly in Octavius Mayr’s office, when I had the misfortune to run across him there.”

  Lord Langmere, appearing somewhat daunted, said, “Oh, ” again, for want of being able to think of anything better to say, which moved Lady Constance to leap into the breach and inform him kindly that it had all been ages ago, before Cressida had ever come up to London, and had lasted only for a week.

  “All the same,” Lord Langmere, who had by this time somewhat recovered himself, said firmly, “it appears to me that he should certainly not have spoken of it to Cressy. A bit of a coxcomb, I gather? Well, I daresay one should have expected it—all these really very odd stories going round about his adventures abroad—”

  “He is not a coxcomb,” Cressida said indignantly. “I may have been excessively green when I lived in Cheltenham and became engaged to him, but I have never been so idiotish as to form an attachment for a coxcomb!

  He is only insufferably rude, and quite selfish, and I can’t see why all this fuss is being made over him! And,” she added dangerously, “if anyone else tells me about his sailing across the Channel in an open boat in impossible weather, they will soon discover how insufferably rude I can be!”

  Lord Langmere looked slightly apprehensive, and not without reason, for the first words Cressida heard from Lady Dalingridge’s lips, when she trod up the crowded staircase of Dalingridge House a few minutes later to be greeted by her host and hostess, were, “Oh, Cressy, my dear, have you heard? I have Rossiter coming tonight! Yes, actually! He is the man, you know, who crossed the Channel in an open boat—”

  CHAPTER 4

  It was impossible, of course, for a young lady of fashion, standing under the blaze of a crystal chandelier at the head of a grand, red-carpeted staircase thronged with dozens of the most illustrious members of London Society, all chattering briskly in an aura of silk gowns, superbly cut evening coats, expensive perfumes, and impressive orders as they awaited their turn to be announced to their host and hostess, to be insufferably rude to anyone; and if she had been, no one would have noticed.

  Lady Dalingridge certainly would not have done, being extremely shortsighted and having momentarily let her face-a-main fall as she
imprudently took both of Cressida’s hands in hers. Nor would Lord Dalingridge, who disliked balls and had cultivated, over the quarter-century during which his marriage to an extremely gregarious wife had obliged him to endure them, a habit of not listening to anyone and confining his own conversation to an occasional interrogative grunt or hasty, “Yes, indeed!” while he mentally replayed the more interesting hands of the whist game he had enjoyed that day at Brooks’s.

  Cressida, who was quite aware of all this, seethed, therefore, in secret, but in public performed her duty of making Kitty known to Lord and Lady Dalingridge, and it was not until she had seen her young protégée safely partnered with Lord Langmere, and joining the set just then forming in the ballroom for a country dance, that the opportunity was presented to her to express her opinion upon the attention that was being lavished on Rossiter by the more sensation-hungry members of the haut ton.

  And even then she did not do it properly, because the opportunity came in the person of the Honourable Drew Addison, who enjoyed the reputation of possessing —always excepting Mr. Brummell, of course-—the sharpest tongue and the most blighting eyebrow in London. He had never, however, quite been able to challenge Brummell’s position of premier dandy, the general opinion being that, while his tailors, inspired by his acerbic demands, provided him with coats of the most exquisite fit, and while his neckcloths expressed the purest of tastes combined with an almost fiendish skill in arrangement, there was a certain rigidity in the man himself that prevented him from attaining the negligent ease of manner so essential to becoming the prince of fashion that Brummell was.

  Addison was a man in his late thirties, tall and handsome, if one was prepared to overlook a rather large nose and the iciness of the blue eyes under those supercilious brows. Cressida disliked him, but admitted him to her inner circle because he was amusing and extremely difficult to exclude from any gathering—“like a wasp at a picnic,” she had once said of him, which remark, having been repeated for his benefit by a helpful friend, had not endeared her to him, and had resulted in the circulation of several rather disagreeable aphorisms concerning her throughout the ton, which had in turn been repeated to her and to which she had paid no attention at all.

  He had been standing at the other side of the crowded ballroom when she had come in, but, as he always took pains to be seen in conversation with every person of consequence during the course of a social evening, he at once deserted the very minor European Royalty to whom he had been speaking and came across to her.

  “Such unrewarding young bores, these German princelings we have had swarming to England ever since Leopold carried off our young Princess, ” he remarked to her, looking down his nose at his erstwhile companion, after the initial civilities had been exchanged. “Like prize cattle—very fat, very dull, and with smallish, obstinate eyes. And most of them, I daresay, without a penny to bless themselves with, so that if you should be cherishing a secret desire to become a Prinzessin, dearest Cressy, I am sure you have only to throw your handkerchief and there will be a positive scramble to pick it up. Did you know that when Leopold himself first visited London two years ago he could not afford to stop at an hotel and set himself up instead in lodgings over a grocer’s shop in Marylebone High Street? That, of course, was before the Princess Charlotte took him up. The advantages to a young man of having fair hair, hazel eyes, a well-set-up figure, and engaging if somewhat priggish manners, cannot, it seems, be exaggerated in this modern age.”

  Cressida said he and the Princess appeared to be very happy, and that she dared say the Princess did not regret now having broken off her engagement to the Prince of Orange, in spite of the furor it had caused at the time. She then bit her lip, wishing she could take back her last remark, as it obviously presented Addison with a perfect opportunity to speak of another broken engagement, namely, hers to Rossiter.

  But, somewhat to her surprise, the subject was not brought up, and she was obliged to believe, with a slight sense of chagrin, that she had misjudged Rossiter in accusing him of spreading the tale of that old engagement about, for if anyone else in London, beyond the four persons who had been in Sir Octavius’s office that morning, had heard of it, it was certain that Addison would have done so as well. He knew everyone’s secrets, and had no scruples about using them to their owners’ discomfort.

  It was too much, however, to expect that Rossiter’s name would not be brought up at all, which it promptly was, Addison observing in his usual bored way that the lion of the evening, it appeared, had not yet arrived, preferring, like all lions, to do his roaring before the largest possible audience.

  “And how many woolly lambs,” he went on, casting a jaundiced eye over the brilliant room, “in the shape of marriageable young ladies with ambitious mamas, are to be trotted out this evening for his inspection, I leave it for you, my dear Cressy, to determine. A half-dozen fabulous Indian rubies—I daresay you have heard that that was the source of the money he plunged with on Change?—transformed into a solid English fortune, will wash out any number of ‘damned spots’ in a man’s past, it seems, in spite of anything Lady Macbeth may say. To continue in the Shakespearean vein, I could a tale unfold, my love, on the subject of Captain Deverell Rossiter, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood—”

  “Do stop declaiming, Drew!” said Cressida. “Next you will be telling me that you will cause my knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine—which is not at all in the mode, you know. And I daresay half the stories that are being told of Captain Rossiter are not true, at any rate. Dolly is quite capable of inventing half a dozen hair’s-breadth escapes and amorous adventures singlehanded, only to make her party more interesting.

  “But I do so agree, my dearest love,” said Addison. “Undoubtedly he will turn out to be an entirely tame lion, and quite dreadfully dull, as most men of action are. By the bye, I daresay he is a gentleman? I have just had the misfortune to be presented to a Captain Harries, who appears to be not only a business associate of his but a close friend as well, and I can assure you that he is not quite the thing.”

  “Captain Harries? Is he here?” Cressida looked quickly about the room, and had no difficulty in discovering the object of her search at its other end, for as the Captain was head and shoulders taller than most of the other guests, his fair head emerged like the dome of St. Paul’s from the lesser edifices surrounding it. “I must go and speak to him,” she said. “I am quite sure he doesn’t know a soul in this room, and in spite of your slighting remarks, Drew, he is really a very agreeable person.”

  “My dear Cressy, to win such a charitable statement from you, he must be a paragon! But pray don’t go yet. I want you to present me to your young protegee when Langmere has finished his duty-dance with her. A Miss Chenevix, I understand? A relation of Lady Con’s?”

  “Why be interrogative, my dear, when you already know all about it?” asked Cressida, not at all surprised to find Addison wishing to be beforehand of everyone else in the room in discovering all there was to be discovered about Kitty. “But I shall be delighted to present you to her, ” she went on, “if you will promise me to do your possible to bring her into fashion. She is Barry Chenevix’s daughter, you know, and I need not tell you there is no fortune there, so Lady Con will be grateful for help from any quarter in firing her off this Season.”

  “If she has my help, dear Cressy, she will need no other,” said Addison, who had never been known to hide his light under a bushel. He raised his quizzing-glass the better to survey Kitty as she moved with lightness and precision in the dance, the natural delicacy of her slight figure enhanced by the shimmering white spider-gauze gown. “Passable,” he remarked presently, letting the glass fall,“but not likely to cause a stir. You will be fortunate to get her off this Season in spite of that gown, in which I certainly detect Fanchon’s hand—”

  “Luckily, everyone is not so particular as you are,” C
ressida said, shrugging slightly. “I fancy she will do well enough: she has the knack of making herself agreeable. Will you be agreeable enough to stand up with her for the next set? You know how her credit will rise if it is seen that you have condescended to ask her to dance. ”

  Addison, whose wits were ordinarily quite as needle-sharp as were hers, received this piece of shameless flattery with entire complacency, and upon the set’s ending and Lord Langmere’s bringing Kitty to Cressida, since Lady Constance had already disappeared into the card-room, he graciously bestowed upon Kitty the desired accolade of soliciting her hand for the country dance that was to follow. As he led her off into the set, Cressida was importuned in turn by Lord Langmere and no fewer than three other gentlemen to allow them to do the same for her, but she denied them all for the moment.

  “There is someone I must speak to first,” she said. “Yes, you may have the boulanger, Leonard, and each of you”—to her three other swains—“a waltz, but now do bring that very tall, fair young man standing so mournfully against the wall over there to me. His name is Captain Miles Harries.”

  The youngest of her admirers dutifully went off, and Lord Langmere looked at her with an enquiring smile.

  “Harries?” he said.

  “Yes, said Cressida. “I met him the other day in Octavius Mayr’s office, and he is a lamb, but a very uncomfortable one just now, I am afraid. You must be very kind to him, Leonard, because Addison has just told me in a horrid, blighting way that he is not quite the thing, and he is sure to be roundly snubbed if someone does not take him in hand. Oh, Captain Harries, how nice to see you again!” she went on, holding out her hand to the bashful Captain as he came up. “This is Lord Langmere, who is going to take you off presently to the refreshment saloon, where you may have champagne and lobster patties, which are the very best reason, I think, for attending any ball. But first you must come and sit down with me, and tell me what you think of us all.