‘Oh, dear!’ she sighed. ‘That’s tempting, but – No, I must not! The invitation cards have come from Brighton, and I am going to help Lady Denville to send them out for the Public Day. She has settled to hold it next week, so there’s no time to be lost.’
He was just about to offer his services when he remembered that his handwriting was very different from Evelyn’s scrawl. He bit the words back, all at once realizing that a fresh danger threatened him. Sooner or later, he thought, one of his guests would ask him for a frank. He could write the one word, Denville, in a passable imitation of Evelyn’s fist; but he felt it would be beyond his power to transcribe a full name and address. His father, rigidly meticulous, had always done so; he wondered if every peer and Member of Parliament adhered so strictly to the letter of the law. He rather fancied that most of them distributed their franks very freely; on the other hand he had an uneasy recollection of having read in some newspaper that franks were being subjected to close scrutiny by the Post Office, in an attempt to check the abuse of this privilege. He could only hope that Evelyn’s signature was not yet well-known to any local postmaster; and decide that if the worst befell he would trade on the illegibility of Evelyn’s writing, recommending the seeker after a frank to superscribe the letter himself, to ensure its safe arrival.
Cressy stood back, the better to survey her handiwork. ‘I hope Lady Denville will like it,’ she said. ‘I think it is quite tolerable, don’t you?’
‘Just passable!’ he said gravely.
She laughed. ‘Let me tell you, sir, that I preen myself a little on my flower arrangements!’
‘I can see that you do. If you won’t ride with me, will you take a turn about the gardens with me?’
She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, and picked up her simple straw bergère hat. ‘Yes, that would be very agreeable – for half-an-hour?’
He nodded. They went out together, and passed down the terrace steps on to the lawn, and across it to a succession of shallow terraces backed by wide flower-borders on one side, and low stone parapets on the other. Cressy sighed. ‘What a pity it is that dear Godmama doesn’t care for the country! It is so beautiful here!’
‘No, Mama finds it a dead bore, unless the house is filled with entertaining guests.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you very fond of the country, Cressy?’
She considered the matter, wrinkling her brow in the way he had come to think charming. Then she said, with the flicker of a smile: ‘That’s a home question! When I’m here, and in such delightful weather, I wonder how I can support life in London. But the melancholy suspicion occurs to me that I am, au fond, a town-creature!’ She glanced round at him, arching her brows quizzically. ‘Does that cast you down? I recall that you told me, at that first encounter, that if you knew yourself to be master here you would choose to spend all but the spring months at Ravenhurst,
or in Leicestershire. Don’t be alarmed! I promise you I won’t repine!’
He said nothing for a moment, for it flashed across his mind that her words had supplied him with the answer to the problem which had been troubling him. Evelyn, a far keener sportsman than himself, had always loved Ravenhurst for the congenial amusements it offered; and, perhaps from a natural aptitude for the life of a country landowner, perhaps because he had known all his life that it would one day be his own, he had taken much more interest in the management of the estates than had his twin. But his impetuous, autocratic temper made it impossible for him to bear with equanimity the humiliation of being master only in name; and that was why he had, apparently, plunged into the wild career of a regular dash, or Bond Street Spark. Kit could perceive, dispassionately, that this was folly, but he accepted it without criticism because it was a part of Evelyn, neither to be censured nor amended. The only thought in his head was that by hedge or by stile the Trust must be brought to an end. That Miss Stavely personified neither of these homely objects was a thought which had entered his head several days previously, and had taken such firm root there that it had swiftly become something to be taken for granted.
Watching him, Cressy said gently: ‘Vexed, sir?’
His eyes, which had been looking frowningly ahead, travelled to her face, and smiled again. ‘No, far from it!’
‘In a little worry, then?’
‘A little,’ he acknowledged. ‘For reasons which I can’t, at present, explain to you. Bear with me!’
‘Why, of course!’ She strolled on beside him for a few paces. ‘Did you wish to say something of a particular nature when you asked me to come into the garden?’
‘No – that is, I have much to say to you of a very particular nature, but not yet!’ He broke off, as the evils of his situation came home to him more forcibly than ever before. He felt himself to be at a stand, for, although every impulse urged him to disclose the truth to Cressy, to do so under the existing circumstances, and while he was uncertain of her mind, would be to run the risk of flooring not only himself but Evelyn as well.
That she was inclined, for some inscrutable reason, to prefer him to his twin, he knew; but he was no self-flatterer: he thought Evelyn his superior in all the qualities that might be supposed to captivate a lady; and he knew that in position and fortune Evelyn wholly eclipsed him. Cressy’s affections were not engaged – that had been made plain to him at the outset, when he had consented to impersonate his twin for one, vital evening. Under no other circumstance would he have lent himself to such a hoax, but this now seemed to make the situation worse rather than better. Cressy, entering into a marriage of convenience, had shown herself willing to accept an offer which the ton would certainly think splendid. In Kit’s view, that was a sensible thing to do: one could not have everything in an imperfect world, so if one was denied the best thing of all it would be foolish not to accept an offer that carried with it the promise of ease and social distinction. Kit’s own affections might be very thoroughly engaged, but it seemed incredible to him that Cressy, apparently impervious to Evelyn’s charm, had fallen in love with him. She certainly liked him, but it would take more than mere liking to overcome the revulsion she must surely feel if he told her how outrageously she had been deceived. It did not so much as cross his mind that she need never be told: he was going to tell her the whole truth just as soon as he could do it, with Evelyn’s knowledge, and when Cressy was no longer in the intolerable position of being a guest at Ravenhurst. The hoax, at no time acceptable to him, had begun to assume the colour of an unforgivable piece of chicanery. He would not have thought it surprising if Cressy, learning the truth, shook the dust of Ravenhurst from her feet with no more delay than would serve to put her grandmother in possession of the facts. Setting aside his own prospects, he thought there was scarcely a worse turn he could serve Evelyn. Such a break-up to the party would inevitably set tongues wagging, and wits to work; and though the Stavelys would be unlikely to repeat the story there was no dependence to be placed on the reticence of the servants. If only one amongst the score at Ravenhurst guessed the truth, the scandal, probably garbled out of recognition, would spread with the rapidity of a forest-fire. Better by far would it have been to have left Evelyn to make what excuses he could for his defection than to have set out to rescue him, and then to draw back from a task which proved to be harder and more distasteful than had been foreseen, leaving him in very much more serious straits. There was no intention of furthering his pretensions to Cressy’s hand in Kit’s head: loyalty to his twin might be strong, but it stopped short of helping Evelyn to marry, for expedience’s sake, the girl he himself loved. Evelyn would never expect that of him; but Evelyn would expect – only that was the wrong word to use for what each of them knew to be a certainty – that in all other predicaments his twin would stand buff.
Cressy’s voice intruded upon these reflections, telling him that the arrival that morning of the post with the previous day’s London papers had ruffled the temper of one of his guests. She said this very gravely, but he was not deceived, and replied promptly: ‘You terrify me! Tell me the worst!’
Her mouth quivered. ‘It is very bad, I warn you! Your uncle has seen that the Gazette and the Morning Post have received the information that your mama has left London for Ravenhurst Park, and he is very much put out.’
He knew that Lady Denville had sent this notice to the two journals Evelyn was most likely to read; but what concern it was of Cosmo’s he had no idea. Cressy, meeting the surprised question in his eyes with a decided twinkle in her own, said reproachfully: ‘One would have supposed that dear Godmama would have thought it proper to have mentioned that she was entertaining visitors to Ravenhurst, amongst whom –’
‘– are the Hon. Cosmo and Mrs Cliffe, and Ambrose Cliffe, all of whom their host wishes otherwhere!’
‘I don’t think that was precisely how he feels the notice should have been phrased,’ she said, in a considering tone.
He laughed. ‘I’m very sure it’s not! Feels he has been slighted does he? What the deuce does it matter to him? You’d think he must be some trumped up April-squire, wouldn’t you?’
‘I daresay it may come of his being a younger son.’
‘No, that it does not!’ he exclaimed, revolted.
She glanced speculatively at him. ‘A younger son jealous of his elder brother’s position, and one who has made no mark in the world,’ she amended.
He had by this time recollected himself, and merely said: ‘No, it comes from having a maggoty disposition and a vast quantity of self-importance.’
She told him that he was too severe, and passed easily to an indifferent subject. They continued chatting companionably on a variety of topics until Cressy, hearing the stable-clock strike the hour, remembered her promise to her hostess, and was conscience-smitten by the realization that she must have kept her waiting for at least twenty minutes. This, she exclaimed, was the height of bad manners; and despite all Kit’s amused assurances that his mother was more likely to have forgotten that she had planned to send out her invitation cards that morning than to complain of her young guest’s want of conduct, she insisted on hastening back to the house. Kit went with her, offering her handsome odds against the chance that his mother would be found, as expected, in her own drawing-room. But she was found there, though with no thought of directing invitations in her head. She was standing in front of the gilded mirror hanging above the fireplace, surveying, with every sign of disapprobation, her own delightful reflection. A litter of crumpled wrapping-paper on the floor, an open box on the table, with a necklace composed of fine topazes set in filigree lying beside it, indicated that she had received a valuable package from London; sent, possibly, and at a moderate charge, through the medium of the Newhaven Mailcoach, and deposited, with the post, at the receiving office in Nutley; and more probably, as Kit knew, by a special messenger, at large cost.