Sophia, Stanley J. Weyman [new ebook reader TXT] 📗

But he so teased me,
And he so pleased me,
What I did, you must have done!

as he followed the maid along the passage.

The only sour in his cup, indeed, arose from his costume. That he knew to be better fitted for the road than for a lady's chamber; to be calculated rather to strike the youthful eye and captivate the romantic imagination at a distance than to become a somewhat puny person at short range. As he passed an old Dutch mirror, that stood in an angle of the stairs, he made a desperate attempt to reduce the wig, and control the cloak; but in vain, it was only to accentuate the boots. Worse, his guide looked to see why he lingered, caught him in the act, and tittered; after which he was forced to affect a haughty contempt and follow. But what would he not have given at that moment for his olive and silver, a copy of Mr. Walpole's birth-night suit? Or for his French grey and Mechlin, and the new tie-wig that had cost his foolish father seven guineas at Protin, the French perruquier's? Much, yet what mattered it, since he had conquered? Since even while he thought of these drawbacks, he paused on the threshold of his lady's chamber, and saw before him his divinity--pouting, mutinous, charming. She was standing by the table waiting for him with down cast eyes, and the most ravishing air in the world.

Strange to say he felt no doubt. It was his firm belief, born of Wycherley and fostered on Crébillon that all women were alike, and from the three beauty Fitzroys to Oxford Kate, were wax in the hands of a pretty fellow. It was this belief that had spurred him to great enterprises, if not as yet, to great conquests; and yet so powerfully does virtue impress even the sceptics, that he faltered as he entered the room. Besides that ladyship of hers dashed him! He could not deny that his heart bounced painfully. But courage! As he recalled the invitation he had received, he recovered himself. He advanced, simpering; he was ready, at a word, to fall at her feet. "Oh, ma'am, 'tis a happiness beyond my desert," he babbled--in his heart damning his boots, and trying to remember M. Siras' first position. "Only to be allowed to wait on your ladyship places me in the seventh heaven! Only to be allowed to worship at the shrine of beauty is--is a great privilege, ma'am. But to be permitted to hope--that I am not altogether--I mean, my lady," he amended, growing a little flustered, "that I am not entirely----"

"What?" Lady Betty asked, eyeing him archly, her finger in her mouth, her head on one side.

"Indifferent to your ladyship! Oh, I assure your ladyship never in all my life have I felt so profound a----"

"Really?"

"A--an admiration of any one, never have I----"

"Said so much to a lady! That, sir, I can believe!"

This time the voice was not Betty's, and he started as if he had been pricked. He spun round, and saw Sophia standing beside the fire, a little behind the door through which he had entered. He had thought himself alone with his inamorata; and his face of dismay was ludicrous. "Oh!" he faltered, bowing hurriedly, "I beg your pardon, ma'am, I--I did not see you."

"So I suppose," she answered, coldly, "or you would not have presumed to say such words to a lady."

He cringed. "I am sure," he stammered, "if I have been wanting in respect, I beg her ladyship's pardon! I am sure, I know----"

"Are you sure--you know who you are?" Sophia asked with directness.

He was all colours at once, but strove to mask the wound under a pretty sentence. "I trust a gentleman may aspire to--to all that beauty has to give," he simpered. "I may not, ma'am, be of her ladyship's rank."

"No, it is clear that you are not!" Sophia answered.

"But I am a gentleman."

"The question is, are you?" she retorted. "There are gentlemen and gentlemen. What is your claim to that name, sir?"

"S'help me, ma'am!" he exclaimed, affecting the utmost surprise and indignation. "The Fanshaws of Warwickshire have been commonly taken for such."

"The Fanshaws of Warwickshire?"

"Yes, my lady."

"Perhaps so. It may be so. I do not know them. But the Fanshaws of nowhere in particular? Or shall I say the Lanes of Piccadilly?"

His face flamed scarlet below the black wig. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His eyes flickered as if she had threatened to strike him. For a moment he was a pitiable sight. Then with a prodigious effort, "I--I don't know what you are talking about," he muttered hoarsely. "I don't understand you, ma'am." But his smile was sickly, and his eye betrayed his misery.

"Don't lie, sir," Sophia said sternly; and, poor little wretch, found out and exposed, he writhed under her look of scorn. "We know who you are, a tradesman's son, parading in borrowed plumes. What we do not know, what we cannot understand," she continued with ineffable disdain, "is how you can think to find favour in a lady's eyes. In a lady's eyes--you! An under-bred, over-dressed apprentice, who have never done anything to raise yourself from the rank in which you were born! Do you know, have you an idea, sir, what you are in our eyes? Do you know that a lady would rather marry her footman; for, at least, he is a man. If you do not, you must be taught, sir, as the puppy is taught with the whip. Do you understand me?"

In his deserved degradation, his eyes sought Lady Betty's face. She was looking at him gravely; he read no hope in her eyes. What the other woman told him then was true; and, ah, how he hated her! Ah, how he hated her! He did not know that she scourged in him another's offence. He did not know that of her scorn a measure fell on her own shoulders; that she had been deluded by such an one as he was himself. Above all, he did not know that she was resolved that the child with her should not suffer as she had suffered!

He thought that she was moved by sheer wanton brutality; and cringing, smarting under the lash of her tongue, seeing himself for the moment as others saw him--a mean little jackanapes mimicking his betters--he could have strangled her. But he was dumb.

"You had the audacity," Sophia continued, gravely, "to attend me once, I remember, and ply me with your foolish compliments! And you have written to this lady, you, a shopman----"

"I am not a--a shopman!" he stuttered, writhing.

"In grade you are; it were more honour to you were you one in reality!" she retorted. "But I repeat it, you have written to this lady, who, the better to teach you a lesson, did not at once betray what she thought you. For the future, however, understand, sir. If you pester her with attentions, or even cross her path, I will find those who will cane you into behaviour. And in such a way that you will not forget it! For the rest, let me advise you to get rid of those preposterous clothes, change that sword for an ell-wand, and go back to your counter. You may retire now. Or no! Pettitt!" Sophia continued, as she opened the door, "Pettitt!" to Lady Betty's woman, "show this person downstairs."

He sneaked out, dumb. For what was he to say? They were great ladies, and he a person, fit company for the steward's room, a little above the servants' hall. He bent his head under the maid's scornful eye, hurried, stumbling in his boots, down the narrow stairs, nor did he breathe until he reached the dark street, where his little chest beginning to heave, he burst into scalding tears of rage.

He suffered horribly in his tenderest part--his conceit. He burned miserably, impotently, poor weakling, to be revenged. If he could bring those proud women to their knees! If he could see them humbled, as they had humbled him! If he could show them that he was not the poor creature they deemed him! If he could sear their insolent faces--the smallpox seize them! If he could--aye, the smallpox seize them!

Presently he slunk back to the White Lion, where he had his bed; and, finding a fire still burning in the empty taproom--for the evening was chilly--he took refuge there, and, laying his head on the beer-stained table, wept anew. The next time he looked up he found that a man and woman had entered the room, and were standing on the hearth, gazing curiously at him.

If Lady Betty's sprightliness ever deserted her, it returned with the morning as regularly as the light. But by Sophia the depressing influence of a strange place, viewed through sheets of rain, was felt to the full next day. The mind must be strong that does not tinge the future with the colours which the eye presents at the moment; and her's was nowise superior to the temptation. Her spirits, as she rose amid the discomforts of a Sussex inn--and Sussex inns and Sussex roads were then reputed among the worst in England--and prepared to continue the journey, were at their lowest ebb. She dreaded the meeting, now so imminent, with Sir Hervey. She shrank as the bather on the verge of the stream shrinks, from the new sphere, the new home, the new duties on which the day must see her enter; and enter unsupported by love. She was cold, she shook, her knees quaked under her; she had golden visions of what might have been, and her heart sobbed as she plucked herself from them. To Lady Betty's eye, and in the phrase of the day, she had the vapours; alas, she suffered with better reason that the fine ladies who had lately made them the fashion.

When they had once set forth, however, the motion and the change of outlook, even though it was but a change from dripping eaves to woods thrashing in the wet wind, gave something of a fillip to her spirits. Moreover, the nearer we come to a dreaded event, the more important loom the brief stages that divide us from it. We count by months, then by