Venetia Read online

  ‘Very true, but as he thought you were in the library and I knew you were not I abandoned the quest. I only wanted to give you Reid’s Intellectual Powers, and I left it on your desk.’

  ‘Oh, good! Thank you! I was in the gunroom, as Ribble might have guessed, if he ever took the trouble to think. By the by, I found that passage: it was Virgil, but in the Georgics, not the fourth Eclogue. Come up to the house, and I’ll show you!’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it. I can’t stay now. I have an uneasy feeling, moreover, that if I linger I may be called upon to drown a litter of kittens and I prefer to leave that task to you!’

  ‘Is that what brought you here?’ enquired Aubrey, of his sister. ‘Yes, I remember now: you said something about it at breakfast, didn’t you?’ He cast a cursory glance at the orphans, and added: ‘Give ’em to Fingle: he’ll drown ’em for you.’

  ‘For shame! Have you no sensibility?’ Damerel said lightly. He held out his hand to Venetia. ‘I must go. He’s right, you know: you’ll never rear them!’ He kept her hand in his for a moment, and then, as though yielding to compulsion, raised it to his lips and kissed it. Their eyes met only fleetingly, but she saw in his the answer to the question in her heart, and the tiny doubt that had disturbed her happiness vanished.

  It struck Fingle, however, covertly observing Damerel as he saddled up for him, that his lordship was looking uncommonly grim. He had generally a pleasant word and a smile for anyone who performed a service for him, but he seemed to have nothing to say on this occasion beyond a curt Thank you when he took the bridle in his hand, and swung himself into the saddle. He did not forget to bestow his usual douceur upon Fingle, but no smile went with it: he seemed to be thinking of something else, and nothing so very agreeable either, to judge by the frown on his face, thought Fingle.

  Damerel rode slowly back to the Priory, for a considerable part of the way with a slack rein, allowing the gray to walk. The frown did not lift from his brow; rather it deepened; and it was not until Crusader, startled by the sudden uprising of a pheasant, stopped dead, throwing up his head and snorting, that he was jerked out of his abstraction. He admonished Crusader, but leaned forward to pat his neck as well, because he knew the fault was his. ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Like your master – who is something worse than a fool. Would she could make of me a saint, or I of her a sinner – Who the devil wrote that? You don’t know, and I’ve forgotten, and in any event it’s of no consequence. For the first part it’s too late, old friend, too late! And for the second – it was precisely my intention, and a rare moment this is to discover that if I could I would not! Come up!’

  Crusader broke into a trot, and was kept to it, until, rounding a bend in the lane that brought the main gates of the Priory within view, Damerel saw a solitary horseman, walking his horse, and ejaculated: ‘Damn the boy!’

  Young Mr Denny, looking over his shoulder, braced himself, and wheeled about, and took up a position in the centre of the lane with the evident intention of disputing the right of way if his quarry should try to elude him. The set of his jaw was pugnacious, but he also looked to be suffering a considerable degree of embarrassment, which, indeed, he was.

  Impetuosity had betrayed him into a false position from which he could see no way of extricating himself with credit. Leaving Undershaw on the crest of his fury he had indulged for a time in very much the sort of imaginings which Damerel had described to Venetia; but even such wrath as his could not be maintained at fever-heat for long. Thanks to Damerel’s dawdling return to the Priory his had subsided into resentment some time before the gray horse came into sight, and for a full half hour he had been trying to make up his mind what to do, and without once allowing it to wander into the realm of fancy. From the moment when it occurred to him that the humiliation he had suffered was the direct result of his own misconduct the affair had been too serious for grandiose dreams. He suddenly perceived that Damerel had played the part he had imagined for himself: it was the villain who had rescued the lady from the hero. So appalling was this realization that for several minutes he could see no other solution to his troubles than instant flight from Yorkshire, and a future spent in obscurity, preferably at the other end of the world. His next and more rational impulse was to abandon his plan of challenging Damerel to a duel; and he had actually started for home when another hideous thought entered his head: he had addressed fatal words to Damerel, and if he did not make them good Damerel would believe that he had failed to do so because he was afraid. So he turned back again, because whatever else Damerel might say of him he was determined he should never be able to say that he had no more pluck than a dunghill cock. The challenge must be delivered, but try as he would Oswald could not recapture his eagerness. An uneasy suspicion that persons more familiar with the Code of Honour than himself would condemn his action as grossly improper nagged at him; and when he placed himself in Damerel’s path he would have given everything he possessed to have been a hundred miles away.

  Damerel pulled the gray up, and surveyed his youthful foe sardonically. ‘All that is needed to complete the picture is a mask and a pair of horse-pistols,’ he remarked.

  ‘I have been waiting for you, my lord!’ said Oswald, gritting his teeth.

  ‘I see you have.’

  ‘I imagine your lordship must know why! I said – I told you that you should hear from me!’

  ‘You did, but you’ve had time enough to think better of it. Try for a little wisdom, and go home!’

  ‘Do you think I’m afraid of you?’ Oswald demanded fiercely. ‘I’m not, my lord!’

  ‘I can see no reason why you should be,’ said Damerel. ‘You must know that there’s not the least possibility of my accepting a challenge from you.’

  Oswald flushed. ‘I know nothing of the sort! If you mean to say I’m unworthy of your sword I’ll take leave to tell you, sir, that I’m as well-born as you!’

  ‘Don’t rant! How old are you?’

  Oswald glared at him. There was a derisive gleam in the eyes which scanned him so indifferently, and it filled him with a primitive longing to smash his fist between them. ‘My age is of no consequence!’ he snapped.

  ‘On the contrary: it is of the first consequence.’

  ‘Here it may be! I don’t regard that, and you need not either! I have been about the world a little, and visited places where –’ He stopped, suddenly recollecting that he was talking to a man who had travelled widely.

  ‘If you have visited places where men of my years accept challenges from boys who might well be their sons you must have strayed into some pretty queer company,’ remarked Damerel.

  ‘Well, anyway, I’m reckoned to be a fair shot!’ said Oswald.

  ‘You terrify me. On what grounds do you mean to issue this challenge?’

  The angry young eyes held his for an instant longer, and then looked away.

  ‘I won’t press you for an answer,’ said Damerel.

  ‘Wait!’ Oswald blurted out, as Crusader moved forward. ‘You shan’t fob me off like that! I know I ought not to have – I never meant – I don’t know how I came to – But there was no need for you to –’

  ‘Go on!’ said Damerel encouragingly, as Oswald broke off. ‘No need for me to rescue Miss Lanyon from a situation which she was plainly not enjoying? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Damn you, no!’ Oswald sought for words to express the hopeless tangle of his thoughts; none came to him, only the age-old cry of youth: ‘You don’t understand!’

  ‘You may ascribe the astonishing guard I have so far kept over my temper to the fact that I do,’ was the rather unexpected reply. ‘Patience, however, was never numbered amongst my few virtues, so the sooner we part the better. I am very sorry for you, but there’s nothing I can do to help you to recover from these pangs, and your inability to open your mouth without going off into rodomontade does rather alienate my sympathy, you know.’