Sylvester, or The Wicked Uncle

“You have said yourself, Duke, that I had nothing to do with his recovery,” she said, with a faint smile. “It is quite true, moreover.”

“Oh, I shan’t tell her that!” he promised.

“But I shall!”

“Thank the lord she didn’t take our baggage back to Green Street!” said Tom, somewhat hastily. “I’m going with Keighley to collect it the first thing tomorrow morning, and shan’t I be glad to be able to leave off the clothes I have on!”

“When I consider,” said Sylvester, “that the shirt you are wearing is mine, not to mention the neckcloth, and that I could very ill spare them, I resent that remark, Thomas!”

Phoebe, recognizing an attempt to give her thoughts a more cheerful direction, dutifully laughed, and made no further reference to Lady Ingham. A waiter came to lay the covers for dinner; and a perfectly spontaneous laugh was drawn from Phoebe when Tom, as soon as the first course was laid before them, recommended his host to send it back to the kitchens at once.

“Send it back?” repeated Sylvester, taken off his guard. “Why should I?”

“To puff off your consequence, of course. Ask the waiter if he knows who you are! And if you have any trouble, offer to buy the place. We are accustomed to being entertained in the first style of elegance, I can tell you!”

Fascinated, Sylvester demanded the whole history of the journey to Abbeville. He was so much amused by it that he retaliated with a graphic account of Sir Nugent Fotherby’s warm welcome to himself, which he had not hitherto thought in the least diverting. Not only present anxieties were forgotten, but past quarrels too. The good understanding that had been reached at the Blue Boar seemed to have returned; and Tom, seeing how easily Phoebe and Sylvester were sliding into their old ways of exchanging views on any number of subjects, was just congratulating himself on the success of his tactics when an unthinking remark destroyed all the comfort of the evening. “Like the villain in a melodrama!” Sylvester said, wiping the mischievous smile from Phoebe’s lips, bringing the colour rushing into her cheeks, transforming her from the gayest of companions into a stiff figure reminding Tom forcibly of an effigy. Constraint returned. Sylvester, after the tiniest of checks, continued smoothly enough, but the warmth had left his voice; he had withdrawn behind his film of ice, perfectly affably and quite unapproachably.

Tom gave it up in despair. He had a very fair notion how matters stood, but there seemed to be nothing he could do to promote a lasting reconciliation. He was pretty sure Sylvester had forgotten Ugolino when he had uttered that unfortunate remark, but it was useless to say that to Phoebe. She was so morbidly sensitive about her wretched romance that even the mention of a book was liable to overset her. And however little Sylvester had remembered The Lost Heir when he spoke of a villain, he was remembering it now.

Phoebe retired immediately she rose from the dinner-table, Sylvester merely bowing when she said that she was tired, and would bid them goodnight. And when he had closed the door on her retreating form, Sylvester turned, and said, smiling: “Well, what is to be, Thomas? Piquet? Or shall we try whether there is a chessboard to be had?”

It was really quite hopeless, thought Tom, deciding in favour of chess.

He ate a hasty breakfast next morning, and went off with Keighley to the coach-office. When he returned, he found Sylvester standing by the window and reading a newspaper, and Phoebe engaged in the homely task of wiping the egg-stains from Edmund’s mouth. He said: “I’ve got all our gear downstairs, Phoebe. Keighley’s waiting to know which of your valises you wish him to take up to your room. And I found this as well: here you are!”

She took the letter from him quickly, recognizing Lady Ingham’s writing. “The smaller one, if you please, Tom. Edmund! where are you off to?”

“Must speak to Keighley!” Edmund said importantly, and dashed off in the direction of the stairs.

“Unfortunate Keighley!” remarked Sylvester, not looking up from the newspaper.

Tom departed in Edmund’s wake, and Phoebe, her fingers slightly trembling, broke the wafer that sealed her letter, and spread open the single, crossed sheet. Sylvester lowered the newspaper, and watched her. She did not say anything when she had finished reading the letter, but folded it again, and stood holding it, a blind look in her eyes.

“Well?”

She turned her head towards the window, startled. She had never heard Sylvester speak so roughly, and wondered why he should do so.

“You may as well tell me. Your face has already informed me that it is not a pleasant missive.”

“No,” she said.” She supposed me—when she wrote this—to have persuaded Tom to take me home. I think Muker must have encouraged her to think it, to be rid of me. She is very jealous of me. She may even have believed me to be running away with Tom. That—that was my fault.”

“Unnecessary to tell me that! You have a genius for bringing trouble upon yourself.”

She looked at him for a moment, hurt and surprise in her eyes, and then turned away, and walked over to the fire. It seemed so needlessly cruel, and so unlike him, to taunt her when he knew her to be distressed that she felt bewildered. It was certainly a taunt, but there had been no mockery in his voice, only anger. Why he should be angry, what she had done to revive his furious resentment, she could not imagine. She found it a little difficult to speak, but managed to say: “I am afraid I have. I seem always to be tumbling into a scrape. Hoydenish, my mother-in-law was used to call me, and did her best to teach me prudence and propriety. I wish she had succeeded.”

“You are not alone in that wish!” he said savagely.

The harsh, angry voice was having its inevitable effect on her: she began to feel sick, inwardly shivering, and was obliged to sit down, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

“You tumbled into a scrape, as you are pleased to call it, when I first made your acquaintance!” he continued. “It would be more correct to say that you flung yourself into it, just as you flung yourself aboard that ship! If you choose to behave like a hoyden it is your own affair, but that is never enough for you! You don’t scruple to embroil others in your scrapes! Thomas has been a victim, I have been one—my God, have I not!—and now it is your grandmother! Does she cast you off? Do you think yourself hardly used? You have no one but yourself to thank for the ills you’ve brought on your own head!”

She listened to this tirade, rigid with shock, scarcely able to believe that it was Sylvester and not a stranger who hurled these bitter accusations at her. The thought flitted across her brain that he was deliberately feeding his wrath, but it was overborne by her own anger, which leaped from a tiny spark to a blaze.

He said suddenly, before she could speak: “No—no! It’s of no use! Sparrow, Sparrow!”

She hardly heard him. She said in a voice husky with passion: “I have one other person to thank! It is yourself, my lord Duke! It was your arrogance that caused me to make you the model for my villain! But for you I should never have run away from my home! But for you no one need have known I was the author of that book! But for you I should not have flung myself aboard that schooner! You are the cause of every ill that has befallen me! You say I ill-used you: if I did you are wonderfully revenged, for you have ruined me!”

To her astonishment, and, indeed, indignation, he gave the oddest laugh. As she glared at him he said in the strangest voice she had yet heard: “Have I? Well—if that’s so, I will make reparation! Will you do me the honour, Miss Marlow, of accepting my hand in marriage?”

Thus Sylvester, an accomplished flirt, making his first proposal.

It never occurred to Phoebe that he had shaken himself off his balance, and was as self-conscious as a callow youth just out of school. Still less did it occur to her that the laugh and the exaggerated formality of his offer sprang from embarrassment. He was famed for his polished address; she had never, until this day, seen him lose his mastery over himself. She believed him to be mocking her, and started up from her chair, exclaiming: “How dare you?”

Sylvester, burningly aware of his own clumsiness, lost no time in making bad worse. “I beg your pardon! you mistake! I had no intention—Phoebe, it was out before I well knew what I was saying! I never meant to ask you to marry me—I was determined I would not! But—” He broke off, realizing into what quagmires his attempts to explain himself were leading him.

“That I do believe!” she said hotly. “You have been so obliging as to tell me what you think of me, and I believe that too! You came to Austerby to look me over, as though I had been a filly, and decided I was not up to your weight! Didn’t you?”