Venetia Read online

  He went away, and Aubrey, after a few minutes, sat down at the desk and expended his spleen on the composition of a venomous Latin epigram. After several unsatisfactory essays he achieved four neat and splendidly scurrilous lines, which pleased him so much that he sat down to dinner in a mood of almost bland complaisance. Informed by Mrs Scorrier that until he expressed contrition for his behaviour she must decline to notice him, he merely bestowed a flickering smile upon her before applying himself with unusual appetite to his dinner.

  Little conversation was exchanged, Mrs Scorrier’s loss of temper having been succeeded by majestic sulks, and Charlotte’s hysterical fit by a nervous despondency which led her to reply to any remark addressed to her in a scared, breathless voice that discouraged further attempts to divert her mind from morbid self-contemplation. On rising from the table she excused herself, pleading a severe headache, and went upstairs to bed; and as Venetia accepted an invitation from Aubrey to play billiards Mrs Scorrier was left to enjoy her sulks in solitude. Whether as a result of this treatment, or from the inescapable realisation that in ostracising the Lanyons she distressed no one but Charlotte, she appeared next morning with so firm a smile, and so inexhaustible a flow of amiable commonplaces, that she might have been supposed to have suffered a complete loss of memory. Venetia was not deceived, for the glitter in Mrs Scorrier’s eyes gave the lie to her smile, but she responded with absent civility to whatever was said to her, too preoccupied with her own affairs to perceive that her abstraction was causing Mrs Scorrier to feel quite as much uneasiness as vexation. It had been forcibly brought home to Mrs Scorrier that in her eagerness to ensure Charlotte’s supremacy at Undershaw she had gone too far. She wanted to rid Undershaw of Venetia and Aubrey, but not under such circumstances as must render herself and Charlotte odious; and she had had the painful experience of seeing the daughter of whom, in her overbearing fashion, she was sincerely fond, turn not to the parent who was fighting her battles but to the detestable old woman who threatened to throw a jug of cold water over her if she did not instantly abate her hysterical tears. It had not previously occurred to Mrs Scorrier that she might drive the Lanyons away only to find that Charlotte, instead of being grateful, and ready to convince Conway that she had been made wretched by their unkindness, was ranged on their side, and a great deal more likely to tell Conway that their eviction had been none of her doing.

  Finding Venetia unresponsive even to compliment, she smiled more widely than before and forced her unwilling tongue to describe the irresistible prompting of maternal instinct to fly to the support of a beloved child. The result of this magnanimous gesture was disappointing, for after staring blankly at her for a minute, all Venetia said was: ‘Oh – Bess! Poor Charlotte! I do hope she will contrive to overcome her fear of dogs. Conway’s are always so boisterous and unruly that I’m afraid her life will be a misery if she doesn’t.’

  After that, she went away, and was next heard desiring Ribble to send a message to the stables that her mare was to be brought up to the house. From what Mrs Scorrier presently overheard her saying to Aubrey she gathered that she was going to visit some tenant or retainer, who was the victim of an unnamed accident; and that at once deepened her resentment, because she felt that it was for Charlotte to enact the rôle of lady bountiful; and she would have liked very much to have accompanied her daughter in the carriage, dispensing comforts to the sick and indigent, giving good advice to the improvident, and in general showing all Conway’s dependants how to contrive to the best advantage.

  Had she but known it, neither charity nor advice would have been acceptable to the afflicted household, whose master was, in fact, a respectable farmer; and the accident which had befallen his youngest son, a lusty young man of some ten summers, was not one that called for jellies or sustaining broths, but rather (in the opinion of his incensed parent) for very different treatment, since all he had done was to break his arm, and that through an act of foolhardy disobedience. Venetia’s visit was one merely of civility, and might not have been paid had she been feeling less restless, or more able to bear with patience the complaints of the various members of the domestic staff at Undershaw, who let no day pass without soliciting her aid against the encroachments of Mrs Scorrier.

  At the time, although she had wished him otherwhere, Aubrey’s intrusion upon a scene that belonged to herself and Damerel alone had not greatly disturbed her. She had been obliged immediately to grapple with a crisis of a very different order; and it was not until much later that she had had the opportunity to think over all that had passed in the library, and to wonder what might have been the meaning behind some of the things Damerel had said to her. She no more doubted that she was loved than that the sun would rise on the morrow; yet, as she lay wakeful in her bed, her deep content, which neither the domestic brawl nor Mrs Scorrier’s sulks had the power to penetrate, became ruffled by a sense of misgiving, too inchoate to be at first recognisable, but gradually turning content to a vague disquiet. Nothing had been said that she could not attribute to some scruple of masculine honour, too frivolous not to be easily overcome; but even as she smiled at man’s folly the fear that a different interpretation could be set upon Damerel’s reluctance to commit himself peeped in her mind for a searing instant. It vanished as swiftly in the recollection of tenderness which instinct told her was far removed from the fleeting lust of a voluptuary; it was causeless, springing either from the irrational misgivings of a tired brain, or from mankind’s superstitious dread of the unknown, malignant gods, whose sport was to ruin mortal happiness.

  In the morning these fears abated. The night had been stormy; Venetia thought, as she looked from her window at the withered leaves blown in drifts across the lawn, that it had been the mournful howl of the wind and the flurries of rain beating against the windowpanes which had kept her awake and encouraged her to indulge morbidity. Damerel was coming to Undershaw, and the night’s apprehensions had been nothing but lurid fancies imposed on weariness by the elements. Then she recalled that he had said he had business to attend to which would keep him at home all the morning, and was daunted again, until she remembered that he had told her that he had summoned his agent to the Priory. The agent was probably an attorney, and must certainly have come from London to wait upon him, and would as certainly be anxious to transact whatever the business was as speedily as might be. Damerel, too, would scarcely wish to keep him kicking his heels in Yorkshire for any longer than was necessary. So she argued away the thought that if Damerel were as lost in love as she believed him to be, no business, however important, would have kept him away from her for so many hours; but the serenity which had been like a warm cloak wrapped about her was disturbed; she found herself questioning what it had never before occurred to her to doubt; could not bring her mind to bear on any other problem than her own, harness her impatience, or tolerate the efforts of Mrs Scorrier or Mrs Gurnard to intrude upon her abstraction.

  The farm she went to visit was in a distant part of the estate; the mare was fresh, and although the day was dull and a sharpness in the wind reminded her that the loveliest autumn within her memory was sliding into winter, the ride did much to lighten the unaccountable oppression of her spirits. She reached Undershaw again a few minutes before noon, knowing that today there was little chance that Aubrey would interrupt a tête-à-tête, since he had gone to one of the farther coverts, packing into the gig himself, his two spaniels, the gamekeeper, his treasured Mantons, and a large hamper containing such a nuncheon as Mrs Gurnard and Cook considered suitable for a delicate youth whose thin form they had for years been trying to fatten. No broken meats would be brought home to wound their sensibilities; and if either dame suspected that the game-pie, the galantine, the pigeon in jelly, and the Queen cakes, warm from the oven, would be much appreciated by the keeper and the spaniels, while Aubrey lunched on a morsel of cheese and an apple, she could be trusted to keep such dispiriting reflections to herself.

  As Vene