‘Amongst so many, ma’am, I am flattered to know that you remarked my absence,’ responded Mr Beaumaris, shaking hands. ‘I have been out of town for some days, and only returned this morning. Miss Tallant! ’Servant, Bridlington!’
Arabella, who had started violently upon hearing his name uttered, and quickly turned her head, took his hand in a clasp which seemed to him slightly convulsive, and raised a pair of strained, enquiring eyes to his face. He smiled reassuringly down into them, and bent a courteous ear to Lady Bridlington, who was making haste to assure him that she had come to the Museum merely to show the Grecian treasure to Arabella, who had not been privileged to see them on their first showing. Lord Bridlington, not averse from any aggrandisement to his audience, began in his consequential way to expound his views on the probable artistic value of the fragments, a recreation which would no doubt have occupied him for a considerable period of time had Mr Beaumaris not cut him short by saying, in his most languid way; ‘The pronouncements of West, and of Sir Thomas Lawrence, must, I imagine, have established the ësthetic worth of these antiquities. As to the propriety of their acquisition, we may, each one of us, hold to our own opinion.’
‘Mr Beaumaris, do you care to visit Somerset House with us?’ interrupted Lady Bridlington. ‘I do not know how it comes about that we were not there upon Opening Day, but such a rush of engagements have we been swept up in that I am sure it is a wonder we have time to turn round! Arabella, my love, I daresay you are quite tired of staring at all these sadly damaged bits of frieze, or whatever it may be called – not but what I declare I could feast my eyes on it for ever! – and will be glad to look at pictures for a change!’
Arabella assented to it, throwing so beseeching a look at Mr Beaumaris that he was induced to accept a seat in the barouche.
During the drive to the Strand, Lady Bridlington was too much occupied in catching the eyes of chance acquaintances, and drawing their attention to the distinguished occupant of one of the back seats by bowing and waving to them, to have much time for conversation. Arabella sat with her eye downcast, and her hand fidgeting with the ribands tied round the handle of her sunshade; and Mr Beaumaris was content to watch her, taking due note of her pallor, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes. It was left to Lord Bridlington to entertain the company, which he did very willingly, prosing uninterruptedly until the carriage turned into the courtyard of Somerset House.
Once inside the building, Lady Bridlington, whose ambitions had for some time been centred on promoting a match between Arabella and the Nonpareil, seized the first opportunity that offered of drawing Frederick away from the interesting pair. She stated her fervent desire to see the latest example of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s art, and dragged him away from a minute inspection of the President’s latest enormous canvas to search for this fashionable masterpiece.
‘In what way can I serve you, Miss Tallant?’ said Mr Beaumaris quietly.
‘You – you had my letter?’ faltered Arabella, glancing fleetingly up into his face.
‘This morning. I went instantly to Park Street, and, apprehending that the matter was of some urgency, followed you to Bloomsbury.’
‘How kind – how very kind you are!’ uttered Arabella, in accents which could scarcely have been more mournful had she discovered him to have been a monster of cruelty.
‘What is it, Miss Tallant?’
Bearing all the appearance of one rapt in admiration of the canvas before her, she said: ‘I daresay you may have forgot all about it, sir, but – but you told me once – that is, you were so obliging as to say – that if my sentiments underwent a change –’
Mr Beaumaris mercifully intervened to put an end to her embarrassment. ‘I have certainly not forgotten it,’ he said. ‘I perceive Lady Charnwood to be approaching, so let us move on! Am I to understand, ma’am, that your sentiments have undergone a change?’
Miss Tallant, obediently walking on to stare at one of the new Associates’ Probationary Pictures (described in her catalogue as ‘An Old Man soliciting a Mother for Her Daughter who was shewn Unwilling to consent to so disproportionate a match’) said baldly: ‘Yes.’
‘My surroundings,’ said Mr Beaumaris, ‘make it impossible for me to do more than assure you that you have made me the happiest man in England, ma’am.’
‘Thank you,’ said Arabella, in a stifled tone. ‘I shall try to be a – to be a comformable wife, sir!’
Mr Beaumaris’s lips twitched, but he replied with perfect gravity: ‘For my part, I shall try to be an unexceptionable husband, ma’am!’
‘Oh, yes, I am sure you will be!’ said Arabella naïvely. ‘If only –’
‘If only – ?’ prompted Mr Beaumaris, as she broke off.
‘Nothing!’ she said hastily. ‘Oh, dear, there is Mr Epworth!’
‘A common bow in passing will be enough to damp his pretensions,’ said Mr Beaumaris. ‘If that does not suffice, I will look at him through my glass.’
This made her give an involuntary gurgle of laughter, but an instant later she was serious again, and evidently struggling to find the words with which to express herself.
‘What very awkward places we do choose in which to propose to one another!’ remarked Mr Beaumaris, guiding her gently towards a red-plush couch. ‘Let us hope that if we sit down, and appear to be engrossed in conversation no one will have the bad manners to interrupt us!’
‘I do not know what you must think of me!’ said Arabella.
‘I expect I had better not tell you until we find ourselves in a more retired situation,’ he replied. ‘You always blush so delightfully when I pay you compliments that it might attract attention to ourselves.’
She hesitated, and then turned resolutely towards him, tightly gripping his sunshade, and saying: ‘Mr Beaumaris, you do indeed wish to marry me?’
‘Miss Tallant, I do indeed wish to marry you!’ he asserted.
‘And – and you are so wealthy that my – my fortune can mean nothing to you?’
‘Nothing at all, Miss Tallant.’
She drew an audible breath. ‘Then – will you marry me at once?’ she asked.
Now, what the devil’s the meaning of this? thought Mr Beaumaris, startled. Can that damned young cub have been getting up to more mischief since I left town?
‘At once?’ he repeated, voice and countenance quite impassive.
‘Yes!’ said Arabella desperately. ‘You must know that I have the greatest dislike of – of all formality, and – and the nonsense that always accompanies the announcement of an engagement! I – I should wish to be married very quietly – in fact, in the strictest secrecy – and before anyone has guessed – that I have accepted your very obliging offer!’
The wretched youth must have been deeper under the hatches than I guessed, thought Mr Beaumaris, and still she dare not tell me the truth! Does she really mean to carry out this outrageous suggestion, or does she only think that she means it? A virtuous man would undoubtedly, at this juncture, disclose that there is not the smallest need for these measures. What very unamusing lives virtuous men must lead!
‘You may think it off of me, but I have always thought it would be so very romantic to elope!’ pronounced Papa’s daughter defiantly.
Mr Beaumaris, whose besetting sin was thought by many to be his exquisite enjoyment of the ridiculous, turned a deaf ear to the promptings of his better self, and replied instantly. ‘How right you are! I wonder I should not have thought of an elopement myself! The announcement of the engagement of two such notable figures as ourselves must provoke a degree of comment and congratulation which would not be at all to our taste!’
‘Exactly so!’ nodded Arabella, relieved to find that he saw the matter in so reasonable a light.
‘Consider, too, the chagrin of such as Horace Epworth!’ said Mr Beaumaris, growing momently more enamoured of the scheme. ‘You would be driven t
o distraction by their ravings!’
‘Well, I do think I might be,’ said Arabella.
‘There is not a doubt of it. Moreover, the formality of making application to your father for permission to address you is quite antiquated, and we shall do well to dispense with it. If some little feeling still exists in the minds of old-fashioned persons against marrying minors out of hand, it need not concern us, after all.’
‘N-no,’ agreed Arabella, rather doubtfully. ‘Do you think people will – will be very much shocked, sir?’
‘No,’ said Mr Beaumaris, with perfect truth. ‘No one will be in the least shocked. When would you like to elope?’
‘Would tomorrow be too soon?’ asked Arabella anxiously.
Mr Beaumaris might wish that his love would give him her confidence, but it would have been idle to have denied that he was hugely enjoying himself. Life with Arabella would contain few dull moments; and although her estimate of his morals was unflattering enough to have discomposed any man of sensibility it left his withers unwrung, since he was well-aware that her assumption of his readiness to behave in so improper a fashion sprang from an innocence which he found enchanting. He replied with great promptness: ‘Not a moment too soon! But for the recollection that there are one or two preparations which perhaps I should make I should have suggested that we should leave this building together at once.’
‘No, that would be impossible,’ said Arabella seriously. ‘In fact – I do not know very much about such things, but I cannot but feel that it will be excessively difficult for me to escape from Park Street without anyone’s knowing! For I must carry a valise with me, at least, besides my dressing-case, and how may it be contrived? Unless I crept out at dead of night, of course, but it would have to be very late indeed, for the porter always waits up for Lord Bridlington to come in. And I might fall asleep,’ she added candidly.
‘I have a constitutional dislike of eloping at dead of night,’ said Mr Beaumaris firmly. ‘Such exploits entail the use of rope-ladders, I am credibly informed, and the thought of being surprised perhaps by the Watch in the very act of throwing this up to your window I find singularly unnerving.’
‘Nothing,’ said Arabella, ‘would prevail upon me to climb down a rope-ladder! Besides, my bedroom is at the back of the house.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Beaumaris, ‘you had better leave me to make the necessary arrangements.’
‘Oh, yes!’ responded Arabella gratefully. ‘I am sure you will know just how it should be contrived!’
This reflection upon his past career Mr Beaumaris bore with an unmoved countenance. ‘Just so, Miss Tallant,’ he said gravely. ‘Now, it occurs to me that, tomorrow being Wednesday, there will be a gala night at Vauxhall Gardens.’
‘Yes, Lady Bridlington thought at one time of taking me to it,’ agreed Arabella. ‘But then, you know, she recalled that it is the night of the party at Uxbridge House.’
‘A very dull affair, I have no doubt. I shall invite Lady Bridlington – and Bridlington, I suppose – to do me the honour of joining my party at Vauxhall. You will naturally be included in this invitation, and at a convenient moment during the course of the evening, we shall slip away together to the street entrance, where my chaise will be awaiting us.’
Arabella considered this proposition, and discovered two objections to it. ‘Yes, but how very odd it would seem to Lady Bridlington if you were to go away in the middle of your own party!’
The reflection that Lady Bridlington might well deem this eccentricity the least odd feature of the affair Mr Beaumaris kept to himself. He said: ‘Very true. A note shall be delivered to her after our departure.’
‘Well, I suppose that would be better than nothing,’ Arabella conceded. ‘Oh, will she ever forgive me for treating her so?’ This involuntary exclamation seemed to escape her without her knowledge. She raised the second of her objections. ‘And in any event it will not answer, because I cannot take a valise to Vauxhall!’
‘That you will also leave to me,’ said Mr Beaumaris.
‘But you cannot call in Park Street to fetch it!’ she pointed out.
‘Certainly not.’
‘And I will not elope without a change of clothes, or my hairbrushes, or my tooth-powder!’ declared Arabella.
‘Most improper,’ agreed Mr Beaumaris. ‘All these things shall be forthcoming.’
‘You cannot buy such things for me!’ gasped Arabella, shocked.
‘I assure you I should enjoy doing it.’
She stared at him, and then exclaimed wretchedly: ‘How dreadful it all is! I never, never thought I should come to this! I daresay it seems the merest commonplace to you, but to me – But I see that it is of no use to cavil!’
The tell-tale muscle at the corner of Mr Beaumaris’s mouth quivered, and was sternly repressed. ‘Well, perhaps not precisely commonplace,’ he said. ‘It so happens that I have not previously eloped with anyone. However, to a man of ordinary ingenuity the affair should not prove impossible to achieve creditably, I trust. I perceive Mrs Penkridge, who is hoping to catch either your eye or mine. We shall permit her to do so, and while she asks you to say if you do not think Nollekens’s bust over there most like, I shall go in search of Lady Bridlington, and engage her to bring you to Vauxhall tomorrow evening.’
‘Oh, pray do not! I dislike Mrs Penkridge excessively!’ she whispered.
‘Yes, an odious woman, but impossible to avoid,’ he returned.
Seeing him rise to his feet, Mrs Penkridge bore down upon him, her acidulated smile on her lips. Mr Beaumaris greeted her with his smooth civility, stayed for perhaps a minute, and then, to Arabella’s indignation, made his bow, and went off in the direction of the next room.
Either Lady Bridlington proved hard to find, or he must have fallen a victim of her garrulity, Arabella thought, for it seemed a very long time before she set eyes on him again. When he did reappear, Lady Bridlington was walking beside him, wreathed in smiles. Arabella made her excuses to Mrs Penkridge, and went across to her godmother, who greeted her with the cheerful intelligence that Mr Beaumaris had formed the most delightful scheme for an evening at Vauxhall. ‘I did not scruple to accept, my love, for I knew you would like it of all things!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Arabella, feeling that she was now committed to an irrevocable and reprehensible course which she would no doubt regret her life long. ‘I mean, oh yes! how very agreeable!’
Sixteen
Upon leaving Somerset House, Mr Beaumaris got into a hackney, and drove to the Red Lion inn. What he learned at that hostelry threw abundant light on to Arabella’s conduct. Since he had his own reasons for believing Arabella’s heart to have been won long since, he was not in the least wounded by the discovery that she proposed to marry him as means of rescuing her brother from debt, but, on the contrary, considerably amused. Having paid Bertram’s bill at the inn, and received his watch back from the landlord, he returned to his own house in yet another hackney.
The same delight in the ridiculous which had made him wear a dandelion in his button-hole for three consecutive days for no better purpose than to enjoy the discomfiture of his misguided friends and copyists made him deeply appreciative of the situation in which he now found himself; and he beguiled the tedium of the drive to Mount Street in wondering when it would cross his absurd love’s mind that the disclosure, following hard upon the wedding-ceremony, that she required a large sum of money from him without a moment’s loss of time, might be productive of a little awkwardness. He could not resist picturing the scene, and was still laughing softly when he reached his house, a circumstance which considerably surprised his butler.
‘Send round to the stables for my Tilbury, will you, Brough?’ he said. ‘And desire Painswick – oh, you’re there, are you?’ he added, as his valet descended the stairs. ‘I want to hear no more about missing shirts, on which excessively boring subjec
t I can see from your expression you are prepared to discourse at length, but you may tell me this! Where is the letter I gave into your hands to be delivered at the Red Lion, to a Mr Anstey, and why did you not tell me that it had not been so delivered?’
‘You may perhaps recall, sir,’ said Painswick reproachfully, ‘that I mentioned to you while you sat at breakfast that there was a matter which I deemed it my duty to bring to your notice. Upon which, sir, you said, Not now.’
‘Did I? I had no idea you could be so easily silenced. Where is the letter?’
‘I placed it, sir, at the bottom of the pile that was awaiting you on the table here,’ replied Painswick, tacitly disclaiming further responsibility.
‘In that case it is in the library. Thank you: that is all.’
Ulysses, who had been lying stretched out in the library, enjoying the sleep of the replete, awoke at Mr Beaumaris’s entrance, yawned, got up, shook himself, sneezed several times, stretched, and indicated by his cocked ears and wagging tail that he was now ready for any adventure.
‘I am glad to see you restored to your usual self,’ said Mr Beaumaris, running through the mass of his neglected correspondence, and picking up his own letter to Bertram. ‘You know, you should not have dissuaded me from going out again that evening! Just look what has come of it! And yet I don’t know. I would not have missed this morning’s interview for a thousand pounds! I suppose you think that I am behaving very badly? I am, of course, but do me the justice to own that she deserves it for being such an adorable little fool!’
Ulysses wagged his tail. He was not only willing to do Mr Beaumaris justice, but presently indicated his readiness to accompany him on whatever expedition he had in mind.
‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that you are occupying Clayton’s seat?’ said Mr Beaumaris, mounting into his tilbury.