Arabella Read online

  The future candidate for Parliament heralded his entrance into the schoolroom with a muted hunting-cry, followed immediately by the announcement that some people were unfairly favoured by fortune.

  Arabella clasped both her hands at her breast, and raised a pair of speaking eyes to his face. ‘Bertram, is it indeed true? Now, don’t try to roast me – pray don’t!’

  ‘Lord, yes! But who told you?’

  ‘Harry, of course,’ replied Sophia. ‘The children know everything in this house!’

  Mr Bertram Tallant nodded gloomily, and pulled up his sleeves a trifle. ‘You don’t want him in here: shall I turn him out?’ he enquired.

  ‘Ho!’ cried Harry, leaping to his feet, and squaring up to his senior in great good-humour. ‘A mill!’

  ‘Not in here!’ shrieked his sisters, with one accustomed voice.

  But as they had no expectation of being attended to, each damsel made a dive to snatch her own particular property out of harm’s way. This was just as well, since the room, besides being small, was crowded with knick-knacks. The brothers struggled and swayed together for a brief minute or two, but since Harry, though a lusty lad, was no match for Bertram, he was very soon thrust outside the room, and the door slammed against him. After dealing the scarred panels a few kicks, and threatening his senior with gruesome reprisals, he took himself off, whistling loudly through the convenient gap occasioned by the loss of one of his front teeth; and Bertram was able to remove his shoulders from the door, and to straighten his cravat.

  ‘Well, you are to go,’ he informed Arabella. ‘I wish I had a rich godmother, that’s all! Much old Mrs Calne ever did for me, except to give me a devilish book called the Christian Comforter, or some such thing, which was enough to send a fellow to the dogs directly!’

  ‘I must say, I think it was excessively shabby of her,’ agreed Margaret. ‘Even Papa said that if she had thought you had a taste for such literature, she might have supposed that you would find it upon his shelves.’

  ‘Well, my father knows I have no turn in that direction, and this I will say for him, he don’t expect it of me,’ said Bertram handsomely. ‘He may be devilish straitlaced, and full of old-fashioned notions, but he’s a right one at heart, and don’t plague one with a pack of humbug.’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ said Arabella impatiently, ‘but does he know of this letter? Will he let me go?’

  ‘I fancy he don’t like it above half, but he said he could not stand in your way, and must trust to your conducting yourself in Society with propriety, and not allowing your head to be turned by frivolity and admiration. And as to that,’ Bertram added, with brotherly candour, ‘I don’t suppose they will think you anything out of the way amongst all the nobs, so there’s precious little chance of its happening.’

  ‘No, I am sure they will not,’ said Arabella. ‘But tell me the whole! What did Lady Bridlington say in her letter?’

  ‘Lord, I don’t know! I was trying to make sense of a whole rigmarole of Greek when Mama came in, and I wasn’t listening with more than half an ear. I daresay she’ll tell it all to you. She sent me to say she wants you in her dressing-room.’

  ‘Good gracious, why could you not have told me that before?’ cried Arabella, stuffing the half-finished shirt into a work-bag and flitting out of the room.

  The Parsonage, although built on two storeys only, was a large, old-fashioned house, and to reach Mrs Tallant’s dressing-room Arabella was obliged to traverse several corridors, all carpeted with a worn drugget, and all equally draughty.

  The living of Heythram was respectable, being worth some three hundred pounds a year, in addition to which the present incumbent was possessed of a small independence; but the claims of a numerous family made the recarpeting of passages more a thing to be dreamed of than an allowable expense. The Vicar, himself the son of a landed gentleman, had married the beautiful Miss Theale, who might have been expected to have done better for herself than to have thrown her cap over the windmill for a mere younger son, however handsome he might be. Indeed, it had been commonly said at the time that she had married to disoblige her family, and might, if she had chosen, have caught a baronet on her hook. Instead she had fallen in love with Henry Tallant at first sight. Since his birth was genteel, and her parents had other daughters to dispose of, she had been permitted to have her way; and apart from wishing sometimes that the living were worth more, or that Henry would not put his hand in his pocket for every beggar who crossed his path, she had never given anyone reason to suppose that she regretted her choice. To be sure, she would have liked to have installed into the Parsonage one of the new water-closets, and a Patent Kitchen Range; or, like her brother-in-law up at the Hall, have been able, without feeling the pinch, to have burnt wax candles in all the rooms; but she was a sensible woman, and even when the open fire in the kitchen smoked, and the weather made a visit to the existing water-closet particularly disagreeable, she realised that she was a great deal happier with her Henry than ever she could have been with that almost forgotten baronet. She naturally concurred in his decision that whatever became of their daughters their sons at least must receive every advantage of education; but even while employing every shift of economy to ensure the respectable maintenance of James and Bertram at Harrow she was gradually building her ambitions more and more on the future of her eldest and most beautiful daughter. Without precisely regretting the circumstances which had made it impossible for herself to shine farther afield than York and Scarborough, she was determined that Arabella should not be similarly circumscribed. Perhaps it had been with this hope already at the back of her mind that she had invited her school-friend, Arabella Haverhill, who had contracted such a brilliant match, to stand as godmother to her infant daughter. Certainly her resolve to send the younger Arabella to make her début into society under the aegis of Lady Bridlington was of no very recent date. She had maintained throughout the years an infrequent but regular correspondence with her old friend, and was tolerably certain that fashionable life had in no way impaired the easy good-nature which had characterised the plump and cheerful Miss Haverhill. Lady Bridlington was not herself blessed with daughters – she was, in fact, the mother of only one child, a son, some seven or eight years older than Mrs Tallant’s daughter – but from her friend’s point of view this was a decided advantage. The mother of a family of hopeful girls, however good-natured, would not be in the least likely to take under her wing yet another young female in search of an eligible husband. But a widow in comfortable circumstances, with a strong inclination for all the amusements of fashion, and no daughters to launch upon the world, might reasonably be supposed to welcome the opportunity of chaperoning a young protégée to the balls, routs, and Assemblies she herself delighted in. Mrs Tallant could not conceive it to be otherwise. Nor was she disappointed. Lady Bridlington, crossing several sheets of gilt-edged notepaper with her sprawling pen, could not imagine why she should not have hit upon the notion herself. She was excessively dull, and liked nothing in the world so much as having young persons about her. It had long been a grief to her, she wrote, that she had no daughter of her own; and as she had no doubt that she would love her dearest Sophia’s girl on sight she should await her arrival in the greatest impatience. Mrs Tallant had had no need to mention her object in sending Arabella to town: Henry Tallant might consider that Lady Bridlington’s letters betrayed little but folly and frivolity, but her ladyship, however lacking in mental profundity, had plenty of worldly sense. Sophia might rest assured, she wrote, that she would leave no stone unturned to provide Arabella with a suitable husband. Already, she hinted, she had several eligible bachelors in her eye.

  It was small wonder, then, that Arabella, peeping into her mother’s dressing-room, should have found that admirable lady lost in a pleasant daydream.

  ‘Mama?’

  ‘Arabella! Come in, my love, and close the door! Your godmother has written, and in the kindest w