Arabella

Mr. Beaumaris, bowing deeply over her hand, replied imperturbably: “On the occasion of my last visit, ma’am, you told me you did not wish to see me again until I had mended my ways.”

“Well, have you?” said the Duchess, conveying another slip of soaked toast to her mouth.

“Certainly, ma’am: I am in a fair way to becoming a philanthropist,” he replied, turning to greet his aunt.

“I don’t want any more of them about me,” said her grace. “It turns my stomach enough already to have to sit here watching Caroline at her everlasting knitting for the poor. In my day, we gave ’em vails, and there was an end to it. Not that I believe you. Here, take this pap away, Caroline, and ring the bell! Maudling one’s inside with tea never did any good to anyone yet, and never will. I’ll tell Hadleigh to fetch up a bottle of Madeira—the lot your grandfather laid down, not that rubbish Wigan sent me t’other day!”

Lady Caroline removed the tray, but asked her parent in a shrinking tone if she thought that Dr. Sudbury would approve.

“Sudbury’s an old woman, and you’re a fool, Caroline!” replied the Duchess. “You go away, and leave me to talk to Robert! I never could abide a pack of females hangin’ round me!” She added, as Lady Caroline gathered up her knitting: “Tell Hadleigh the good Madeira! He knows. Well, sir, what have you to say for yourself now you have had the impudence to show your face here again?”

Mr. Beaumaris, closing the door behind his aunt, came back into the room, and said with deceptive meekness that he was happy to find his grandmother in such excellent health and spirits.

“Graceless jackanapes!” retorted the Duchess with relish. She ran her eye over his handsome person. “You look very well—at least, you would if you didn’t make such a figure of yourself in that rig! When I was a girl, no gentleman would have dreamed of paying a social call without powder, let me tell you! Enough to make your grandfather turn in his grave to see what you’ve all come to, with your skimpy coats, and your starched collars, and not a bit of lace to your neckcloth, or your wristbands! If you can sit down in those skin-tight breeches, or pantaloons, or whatever you call ’em, do so!”

“Oh, yes, I can sit down!” said Mr. Beaumaris, disposing himself in a chair opposite to hers. “My pantaloons, like Aunt Caroline’s gifts to the poor, are knitted, and so adapt themselves reasonably well to my wishes.”

“Ha! Then I’ll tell Caroline to knit you a pair for Christmas. That’ll send her into hysterics, for a bigger prude I never met!”

“Very likely, ma’am, but as I am sure that my aunt would obey you, however much her modesty was offended, I must ask you to refrain. The embroidered slippers which reached me last Christmas tried me high enough. I wonder what she thought I should do with them?”

The Duchess gave a cackle of laughter. “Lord bless you, she don’t think! You shouldn’t send her handsome gifts.”

“I send you very handsome gifts,” murmured Mr. Beaumaris, “but you never reciprocate!”

“No, and I never shall. You’ve got more than’s good for you already. What have you brought me this time?”

“Nothing at all—unless you have a fancy for a mongrel-dog?”

“I can’t abide dogs, or cats either. Fifty thousand a year if you’ve a penny, and you don’t bring me as much as a posy! Out with it, Robert, what did you come for?”

“To ask you whether you think I should make a tolerable husband, ma’am.”

“What?” exclaimed her grace, sitting bolt upright in her chair, and grasping the arms with her frail, jewelled hands. “You’re never going to offer for the Dewsbury girl?”

“Good God, no!”

“Oh, so that’s yet another idiot who’s wearing the willow for you, is it?” said her grace, who had her own ways of discovering what was going on in the world from which she had retired. “Who is it now? One of these days you’ll go a step too far, mark my words!”

“I think I have,” said Mr. Beaumaris.

She stared at him, but before she could speak her butler had entered the room, staggering under a specimen of the ducal plate which her grace had categorically refused to relinquish to the present Duke, on the twofold score that it was her personal property, and that he shouldn’t have married anyone who gave his mother such a belly- ache as that die-away ninny he had set in her place. This impressive tray Hadleigh set down on the table, casting, as he did so, a very impressive look at Mr. Beaumaris. Mr. Beaumaris nodded his understanding, and rose, and went to pour out the wine. He handed his grandmother a modest half-glass, to which she instantly took exception, demanding to know whether he had the impertinence to suppose that she could not carry her wine.

“I daresay you can drink me under the table,” replied Mr. Beaumaris, “but you know very well it’s extremely bad for your health, and also that you cannot bully me into pandering to your outrageous commands.” He then lifted her disengaged hand to his lips, and said gently: “You are a rude and an overbearing old woman, ma’am, but I hope you may live to be a hundred, for I like you so much better than any other of my relatives!”

“I daresay that’s not saying much,” she remarked, rather pleased by this audacious speech. “Sit down again, and don’t try to hoax me with any of your taradiddles! I can see you’re going to make a fool of yourself, so you needn’t wrap it up in clean linen! You haven’t come here to tell me you’re going to marry that brass-faced lightskirt you had in keeping when I last saw you?”

“I have not!” said Mr. Beaumaris.

“Just as well, for laced mutton being brought into the family is what I won’t put up with! Not that I think you’re fool enough for that.”

“Where do you learn your abominable expressions, ma’am?” demanded Mr. Beaumaris.

“I don’t belong to your mealy-mouthed generation, thank God! Who is she?”

“If I did not know from bitter experience, ma’am, that nothing occurs in London but what you are instantly aware of it, I should say that you had never heard of her. She is—or at any rate, she says she is—the latest heiress.”

“Oh! Do you mean the chit that that silly Bridlington woman, has staying with her? I’m told she’s a beauty.”

“She is beautiful,” acknowledged Mr. Beaumaris. “But that’s not it.”

“Well, what is it?”

He reflected. “She is the most enchanting little wretch I ever encountered,” he said. “When she is trying to convince me that she is up to every move in the social game, she contrives to appear much like any other female, but when, as happens all too often for my comfort, her compassion is stirred, she is ready to go to any lengths to succour the object of her pity. If I marry her, she will undoubtedly expect me to launch a campaign for the alleviation of the lot of climbing-boys, and will very likely turn my house into an asylum for stray curs.”

“Oh, she will, will she?” said her grace, staring at him with knit brows. “Why?”

“Well, she has already foisted a specimen of each on to me,” he explained. “No, perhaps I wrong her. Ulysses she certainly foisted on to me, but the unspeakable Jemmy I actually offered to take under my protection.”

The Duchess brought her hand down on the arm of her chair. “Stop trying to gammon me!” she commanded. “Who is Ulysses, and who is Jemmy?”

“I have already offered to make you a present of Ulysses,” Mr. Beaumaris reminded her. “Jemmy is a small climbing-boy whose manifest wrongs Miss Tallant is determined to set right. I wish you might have heard her telling Bridlington that he cared for nothing but his own comfort, like all the rest of us; and asking poor Charles Fleetwood to imagine what his state might now be had he been reared by a drunken foster-mother, and sold into slavery to a sweep. Alas that I was not privileged to witness her encounter with the sweep! I understand that she drove him from the house with threats of prosecution. I am not at all surprised that he cowered before her: I have seen her disperse a group of louts.”

“She sounds to me an odd sort of a gal,” remarked her grace. “Is she a lady?”

“Unquestionably.”

“Who’s her father?”

“That, ma’am, is a mystery I have hopes that you may be able to unravel.”

“I?” she exclaimed. “I don’t know what you think I can tell you!”

“I have reason to believe that her home is within easy reach of Harrowgate, ma’am, and I recall that you visited that watering-place not so very long ago. You may have seen her at an Assembly—I suppose they do have