Alas that it should be so!”
“Fudge!” said her ladyship briskly. “You are three-and-fifty, just ten years older than I am! A very comfortable age!”
“But of late years I have grown to be a trifle portly! I don’t ride any more, you know, and I get fagged easily nowadays. Ticklish in the wind, too—I might pop off the hooks at any moment, for I have palpitations!”
“Yes, you eat too much,” she nodded. “My poor dear Bonamy, it is high time you had me to take care of you! I have thought for years that your constitution must be of iron to have withstood your excesses, and so it is, for you don’t even suffer from the gout, which Denville did, although for every bottle he drank you drank two, if not three!”
“No, no!” protested Sir Bonamy feebly. “Not three, Amabel! I own I eat more than he did, but recollect that he was of a spare habit! Now, I have a large frame, and I must eat to keep up my strength!”
“So you shall!” said her ladyship, smiling seraphically upon him. “But not to send yourself off in an apoplexy!”
Regarding her with eyes of fascinated horror, he played his last ace. “Evelyn!” he uttered. “You are forgetting Evelyn, my pretty! Ay, and Kit too, I dare say, though he don’t seem to hold me in such aversion as Evelyn does! But you must know Evelyn wouldn’t stomach it! Why, he never sees me but he looks yellow! Well do I know there ain’t a soul you dote on more, and never would I cause a rift between you!”
Wholly unimpressed by this noble self-abnegation, she replied: “You couldn’t! Besides, he is going to be married!”
“What?” he ejaculated, momentarily diverted. “But it’s as plain as a pack-saddle the gal’s head over ears in love with Kit!”
“Yes, and was there ever anything so delightful? Dear Cressy! she might have been made for Kit! Evelyn has formed what he declares to be a lasting passion for quite another sort of girl. Kit believes it may well be so, but she sounds to me to be positively Quakerish! The daughter of a mere country gentleman—perfectly genteel, but only picture to yourself how ineligible Brumby will think her!—and one of those pale, saintly females, reared in the strictest respectability!”
“You don’t mean it!” gasped Sir Bonamy, staggered by this disclosure.
“I do mean it!” she asserted, tears sparkling on her curling eyelashes. She brushed them hurriedly away. “Evelyn thinks I shall love her, but I have the most melancholy conviction that I shan’t, Bonamy! And, what is more, I don’t think she will love me, do you?”
“No,” he replied candidly. “Not if she’s Quakerish! You wouldn’t deal well at all!”
“Exactly so! I knew you would understand! Evelyn declares I must continue to live in Hill Street, but that I was determined not to do, even if he had married Cressy! I had quite made up my mind to it that I must retire to an establishment of my own, and dwindle into a mere widow, until you came here, my dear friend, only because I begged you to, and not wanting to leave Brighton in the least, which I know very well you didn’t, and it struck me, like a flash of lightning, that never had you wavered in your attachment to me, and never had you received the smallest reward, or even looked for one, for all your goodness to me, and your exceeding generosity!”
“I see what it is!” he exclaimed. “Kit blabbed to you that I didn’t have that brooch of yours copied, silly chub that he is! Now, put it out of your mind, my pretty! Yes, yes, you think you must make a sacrifice of yourself, but I won’t permit you to do so!”
She interrupted him, staring at him with widened eyes. “You didn’t—Do you mean to tell me that I lost the real brooch to Silverdale? And you gave me £500 for it, saying that—Bonamy, did you sell any of my jewellery? Kit has never breathed a word of this! Bonamy—did you?”
“No, no, of course I didn’t!” he answered, much discomposed. “Now, is it likely I’d let you sell your jewels, and replace ’em with paste and pinchbeck? It was nothing to me, Amabel, so, if Kit didn’t tell you, you may forget it, and oblige me very much!”
“Oh, Bonamy!” she cried, impulsively stretching out her hands to him, “how good you are! How much, much too good!”
He responded instinctively, and, the next instant, found himself clasping a fragrant armful to his massive bosom. Lady Denville, adapting her slim form, not without difficulty, to his formidable contour, lifted her face invitingly. His senses swimming, Sir Bonamy tightened his hold about her, and fastened his lips to hers. At the back of his mind lurked the conviction that he would regret this yielding to temptation, and the premonition that the sybaritic pleasures of his life stood in jeopardy; but never before had he been encouraged to venture more than a chaste salute upon her ladyship’s hand, or, upon rare occasions, her cheek, and he surrendered to intoxication.
He came to earth again when she gently disengaged herself, saying: “How comfortable it is to reflect that we need neither of us look forward to a lonely old age, which I have always thought the most lowering prospect!”
His countenance would not have led anyone to suppose that he was deriving much comfort from this reflection, but he replied heroically: “You have made me the happiest man on earth, my beautiful!”
The irrepressible laughter, inherited from her by her sons, bubbled up. “No, I haven’t: I’ve thrown you into gloom! But I shall make you happy. Only consider how alike are our tastes, and how very well we are acquainted! Naturally it will seem strange at first, because you are so much accustomed to being a bachelor. To own the truth, I didn’t think I should ever marry again, for I have enjoyed being a widow amazingly! But I am persuaded it will be the best thing for everyone! Particularly for Evelyn!”
“I hope he may think so!” Sir Bonamy said gloomily.
“It isn’t of the least consequence if he doesn’t, because it will be. I dare say he won’t care nearly as much now that his mind is full of his angelic Patience. In any event, he’s at the end of his rope, poor love, on account of my wretched debts, which he is determined to discharge, and which he would never be able to do until he is thirty, if he marries Patience, because you may depend upon it Brumby will utterly disapprove of the match! But if he were not obliged to pay my debts that wouldn’t signify in the least, and although he made me promise I would never again borrow money from you, he couldn’t refuse to let you pay the debts if I were your wife, could he?”
“Well, it won’t make a ha’porth of odds if he does!” said Sir Bonamy, accepting without resentment this unflattering reason for the marriage proposed to him, but regarding his prospective bride with tolerant cynicism. “I might have known that resty young bellows-blower of yours was behind this!”
“Yes, but how fortunate, Bonamy, that my affairs had come to such a pass that I was obliged to consider the advantages of marrying you! But for that I might never have thought of it!” she said. “Or have perceived how much more comfortable I should be if I did marry you! It is all very well now to be a widow, but only think how dismal when I begin to grow hagged, and have to cover up my throat, because it looks exactly like the neck of a plucked hen, and I’ve no flirts left to me! And then, of course, I thought of you, my poor Bonamy, and my heart was wrung! I, at least, have my beloved sons, and I might become wrapped up in my grandchildren—though it seems most unlikely, and quite sinks my spirits—but what, my dear, will be left to you, when your friends drop off—”
“Eh?” exclaimed Sir Bonamy, startled.
“Or die!” continued her ladyship inexorably. “And you find yourself alone, with no one to care a straw what becomes of you—except that odious cousin of yours, who will very likely push you into your grave!—and your whole life wasted? Dear Bonamy I cannot endure the thought of it!”
“No!” he said fervently. “No, indeed!”
She smiled brilliantly upon him. “So you see that it will be much better for you too!”
“Yes,” he agreed, horrified by the picture she had delineated. “Good God, yes!”
