The Unknown Ajax

“I’ll go bail you haven’t!” replied the Major, amused.

He mentioned his expedition to none but Anthea. She regarded him in frank admiration, exclaiming: “All by yourself? Weren’t you nervous? Just the least bit nervous?”

“Nay, I was as brave as a lion!” he assured her.

She laughed, but said: “Well, I must own I think you were! And you didn’t see or hear anything horrid?”

“No, but I wasn’t expected,” he said. “Another time maybe I might see something.”

“You mean you believe that there’s no ghost, only Spurstow? If it is so, he’ll never dare to try to hoax you—not when he knows you weren’t afraid to walk all round the house in the middle of the night! What are you hoping to do? To find if smugglers do use the Dower House, or to lay the ghost?”

“Well, I’d like to do that,” he answered.

‘To be sure! Miss Melkinthorpe would wish it laid, of course!”

“Who’s she?” asked Hugo, taken off his guard.

She opened her eyes at him. “But, my dear cousin—! Miss Amelia Melkinthorpe!”

“Miss Amel—” He broke off abruptly, and Anthea was glad to perceive that he had the grace to blush. “Oh! Her!”

She said, in a shocked voice: “You cannot, surely, have forgotten her?”

“Ay, but I had,” he confessed, rubbing his nose. “I’m that road, you see: out of sight, out of mind!”

Miss Darracott realized, with considerable indignation, that the Major had yielded once more to the promptings of his worser self, and said, somewhat ominously: “Indeed?”

He nodded, meeting her smouldering gaze with one of his blandest looks. “Ay. Mind you, I wouldn’t forget a lass I’d formed a lasting passion for!” He sighed. “The trouble is I mistook my own heart. Of course, she being so beautiful, it’s no wonder I was carried away.”

“I should suppose her to have all Yorkshire at her feet,” said Anthea. “I remember thinking, when you described her to me, that she must be the loveliest creature imaginable! Almost too lovely to be true, in fact. There is something so particularly ravishing about brown eyes, and black curls, isn’t there?”

“Nay!” he said reproachfully. “That was another one! Amelia’s got blue eyes, and golden curls.”

She choked.

“The thing is, she wouldn’t be the right kind of wife for me when I get to be a peer. She wouldn’t wish to leave Huddersfield, either—on account of her mother.”

“Her mother,” said Anthea encouragingly, “could come to live with you.”

“No, that won’t fit. She’s bedfast,” explained the Major, ever-fertile.

Anthea strove with herself.

“Besides, we shouldn’t suit. And there’s no use thinking his lordship would take to her, because he wouldn’t.”

“Surely, cousin, you cannot mean to jilt her?” said Anthea, in accents of reprobation.

“Nay, it wouldn’t be seemly,” he agreed. “I’ll just have to dispose of her, as you might say.”

“Good God! Murder her?”

“There’s no need to be in a quake,” he said reassuringly. “No one will ever know!”

“If only—oh, if only I could do to you what I long to do!” exclaimed Anthea. “If you were but afew inches shorter—!”

He said hopefully: “Nay, don’t let that fatch you, love I It’ll be no trouble at all to lift you up: in fact, there’s nothing I’d like better!”

Furiously blushing, she retorted: “I didn’t mean that I wished to kiss you!”

He heaved a despondent sigh. “I was afraid you didn’t,” he said, sadly shaking his head. “I was reet taken- aback, but I thought to myself: Come now, lad! She’d never raise your hopes only to cast you down! So—”

“Cousin Hugo, you are outrageous!”said Anthea, in a shaking voice.

Horrified, he replied: “You’re reet; I am, love! I need someone to take me in hand, and that’s the truth! Of course, if Amelia had been a different sort of a lass—more after your style!—she’d have been just the one to undertake me, but—”

“Cousin Hugo!” interrupted Anthea, feeling that it was high time he was brought to book, “you may bamboozle everyone else, but you won’t bamboozle me!”

“Do you think I don’t know that, love?” he said, smiling at her in a very disturbing way.

“You invented Amelia Melkinthorpe because you were afraid you might find yourself obliged to offer for me!” continued Anthea, prudently ignoring this interpolation. “And if you think—”

“Nay, you’re fair and far off, lass!”

“Am I? Then perhaps, cousin, you will tell me why you did invent her? Not,” she added scathingly, “that I shall believe a word of it!”

“Are you telling me I’m a liar?” demanded Hugo, insulted.

“Yes!” responded Anthea doggedly.

“I thought you were,” said Hugo, relapsing with disconcerting suddenness into dejection.

Miss Darracott, realizing with bitter resentment that she was quite unable to control her own voice, averted her gaze, and took her quivering underlip firmly between her teeth.

Much encouraged, the abandoned creature before her said confidentially: “It was this road, love! By the time you took me up to the picture-gallery my spirits were so low and oppressed by all the black looks I’d had cast on me, and I was feeling that lonely—eh, I was never more miserable in my life!”

“F-Fiddle!” uttered Anthea, shaken but staunch.

“I won’t deny the old gentleman threw me into a terrible quake when he told me the scheme he had in his mind,” pursued Hugo, making a clean breast of it. “It seemed to me there was only one thing for it: to shab off as fast I could before I found myself gapped! For of all the proud, disagreeable females—”

“Yes, but I—You know v-very well why I—”

“The way you sat there beside me at the dinner-table, never so much as looking at me!” he said reminiscently. “And not a word to be got from you but Yes, and No, except once, when you said Indeed! I thought you were reet cruel. There I was, scared out of my wits—”

“You weren’t! You were not!”

“—scared out of my wits,” he repeated firmly, “and my heart in my shoes, and you weren’t even civil to me, let alone friendly!”

“You need not th-think I don’t know you are m-merely trying to overset me! You didn’t care a rush for any of us!”

“However, when you told me how it was,” he continued, still lost in reminiscence, “I saw I’d been mistaken in you. That was the first time you smiled at me. Ee, lass, you’ve got a lovely smile! Happen you don’t know the way it starts in your eyes, giving them such a mischievous look, as—”

“That will do!” interposed Anthea, rigorously suppressing a strong desire to encourage him to develop this agreeable theme.

“I was only trying to explain how I came to invent Amelia!” he said in an injured voice. “The thing was that when you smiled at me it set me cudgelling my brains to hit on some way I could get you to stop thinking you had to keep me at a distance, which I could see you’d be bound to do, the way his lordship was trying to throw us together, unless I could put it into your head that there was no reason why you should.”

“It is possible that you have the—the audacity to suppose that you can make me believe that I had only to smile to make you wish to marry me?” demanded Anthea, justly incensed.

“Nay, I never said that!” he protested. “All I wanted was a friend! In fact,” he added, with the air of one brilliantly inspired, “it was Hobson’s Choice! I don’t say I wouldn’t liefer have made up to my Aunt Aurelia, mind, but—”

“Will you stop behaving in this odious fashion?” begged Anthea, in sore straits. “You are utterly without conduct, or—or propriety of taste! You would be very well-served if you did find yourself riveted to me! I promise you, you’d come home by weeping cross!”