The Dowager broke in impatiently on this digression. ‘Now, listen to me,’ she commanded, driving her cane into the carpet with an imperative thud. ‘Very pretty talking, all of this, but if you think – any of you! – that I’ll give my consent to this havey-cavey business you very much mistake the matter!’
‘But, Grandmama!’ interposed Cressy, releasing Kit’s hand, and sitting down beside the Dowager. ‘You told me more than once that you liked Kit! Why, this very day you said that he was a very proper man, and were ready to eat me for seeming to be unwilling to accept his offer! You said I was no better than a moonling!’
‘Hold your tongue, girl! I’ll have you know that there has never been any scandal attached to the Stavelys, and I’ll have no hand in helping you to create one! A fine piece of work this is!’
‘Well, of course, it is a little awkward,’ agreed Lady Denville, ‘but I daresay it will soon be forgotten!’
‘That,’ said the Dowager witheringly, ‘is an observation only worthy of such a jingle-brain as you are, Amabel!’
A flush rose to Evelyn’s lean cheeks; but before he could speak Sir Bonamy forestalled him. ‘Perfectly true!’ he pronounced, fixing the Dowager with his round-eyed stare. ‘I never knew a scandal that wasn’t precious soon ousted by another! What’s more,’ he added, pointing a stubby finger at her, and wagging it, ‘if it hadn’t been for that dashed silly notice in the Morning Post there ain’t a soul worth a rush who would have known anything about this affair!’
‘Yes!’ Evelyn struck in. ‘Who was responsible for that notice? Not you, Mama!’
‘No, indeed!’ Lady Denville replied indignantly. ‘I may be jingled-brained but never have I been guilty of vulgarity!’
‘No one said you had!’ said the Dowager testily, and for once in her life disconcerted. ‘We all know it was Albinia who was responsible for that! Not that it’s proved against her, mind, but I’m not one to blink what’s as plain as the nose on your face! It was her doing, no question about it! I wrote instantly to tell her that I knew it, and not one word has she dared set down on paper in reply! And if she thinks that because she has given Stavely an heir she’ll hear no more of the business she will very soon learn her mistake! But,’ pursued the old lady, making a gallant recovery, ‘I’ll thank you all to remember that pretty well every member of the family believes that it was you, Denville, whom they was invited to meet in my son’s house, and you who had made her an offer!’
‘What of that?’ demanded Sir Bonamy, continuing to fret the Dowager with his unnervingly blank stare. ‘It ain’t to be supposed they’ll spread it about that they was hoaxed! They’ll do what you bid ’em, my lady!’
‘Not all of them!’ replied the Dowager unexpectedly. ‘Stavely saw fit to gather his relations together stock and block, and there were several sprigs there I never saw before in my life, and don’t wish to see again!’
‘That’s very true!’ said Lady Denville. ‘Only think of that tiresome young man who pestered Kit to buy a horse which I know poor Evelyn doesn’t want to own!’
‘Lucton!’ ejaculated Evelyn
. ‘Kester, you didn’t?’
Kit, who had seated himself a little apart from the rest of the group, replied briefly: ‘Nothing else I could do.’
‘Gudgeon!’ said Evelyn. ‘An abominable screw! Why didn’t you consult Challow?’
He won no answer at all to this inquiry, Kit having relapsed into frowning abstraction. He took no part in the lively discussion that followed, although once or twice he showed that he was not wholly deaf to it by raising his eyes from contemplation of his own clasped hands to glance thoughtfully at one or other of the disputants. If the Dowager was brought to own that, despite his perfidy, she would be very well pleased to see her granddaughter married to Kit, only that hitherto pattern of superior sense and propriety herself maintained, in what the Dowager did not scruple to inform her was an unbecomingly highty-tighty manner, her unshakeable indifference to public opinion. Lady Denville was fully alive to the necessity of concealing (by unexplained means) the true facts of the case from the world; Evelyn, knowing that these could only be extremely prejudicial, if not fatal, to his twin’s career, came down heavily on the Dowager’s side; and threw Sir Bonamy into disorder by demanding whether he, an experienced exponent of the established mode, was sincere in declaring that no one would think anything more of the hoax than that it was a very good joke.
‘But it’s something you have frequently done before!’ urged Cressy. ‘Would people be so very much shocked?’
‘I should hope they would be!’ replied Evelyn tartly. ‘Good God, Cressy, I’d a better opinion of your understanding! Of course we have done it before, but only for the sport of it! That was one thing: this is quite another!’
‘Oh, dear, that is exactly what Kit said!’ exclaimed Lady Denville guiltily. ‘I ought never to have asked him to do it! It is all my wretched fault – only I was fully persuaded that you would have done the same thing for him!’
The swift change in his expression betrayed the difference that lay between his own mercurial temperament and Kit’s more evenly balanced one. The frown of fretting anxiety vanished; a zestful gleam, compound of recklessness and amusement, heightened the brilliance of his eyes; he burst out laughing. ‘You were right, love!’ he told his mother. ‘I would! In a crack!’ He threw a challenging look at the Dowager. ‘You might as well blame my brother for drawing breath as for coming to my rescue, ma’am: he couldn’t help himself! Nor could I! But he, if I know him, took my place that evening only for that reason, and with extreme reluctance; whereas I, standing in his shoes, should have had no reluctance whatsoever! I don’t know that I should have carried it off as well as he must have done, but I should certainly have enjoyed the fling, which he, even more certainly, did not!’
‘No doubt!’ she retorted. ‘It didn’t need your uncle Brumby to tell me that your brother’s worth a dozen of you, young man!’
‘Oh, anyone could have told you that, ma’am!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Indeed, I know of only two persons who would deny so obvious a truth: Kester himself, and my mother – who considers us both to be above criticism! Well, we are not, but you may believe, Lady Stavely, that neither he nor I would have entered into this particular hoax had we known that it would ever become known, or that we should be obliged to maintain the imposture! My brother presented himself to you that evening in the belief that either I had forgotten the date of the engagement, or had been delayed by some hitch, or accident, and must surely reappear at any moment. In fact, I had suffered an accident which knocked me senseless for days. When I did recover consciousness, and realized that the date of my engagement was past, I thought I must have ruined myself, and – to own the truth! – I was too pulled and battered to care! Had I known that my brother was in England, and desperately trying to save my face – but I didn’t know it, until I saw the notice in the newspaper! By that time he had not only been forced to keep up the pretence – which, once having entered into, he couldn’t abandon without, as he believed, serving me the worst possible turn – but he had fallen in love with Cressy, and she with him. But what I wish you will understand, ma’am, is that at the outset he had no other thought than to save my face!’
‘And mine!’ Cressy interpolated. ‘That thought also was in his mind, and in Godmama’s mind too, and whatever the outcome I should have been grateful to them for sparing me the humiliation I must have suffered had he not presented himself in your stead that evening!’
‘Very noble!’ said the Dowager. She added, in the querulous tone of a very old lady rapidly approaching exhaustion: ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your glib-tongued pittle-pattle! Find a way out of this abominable scrape that won’t set every tongue wagging, and Cressy may marry your brother with my goodwill! And that’s my last word!’
‘Well, if that’s so, a way must be found!’ said Evelyn. ‘But the only way I can see is for Kester to continue to be me, and for me to be him!’
The Dowager threw him a contemptuous glance; Cressy laughed; and Sir Bonamy paid no heed. But Lady Denville said earnestly: ‘No, no, dearest, that would never do! Only think how awkward it would be for you in Vienna, trying to make everyone believe you were Kit, when I daresay you don’t know anything about foreign affairs, or even who anyone is!’
‘For heaven’s sake, don’t be such a widgeon!’ snapped the Dowager, quite exasperated. ‘And if you can think of nothing better to do in this pass, Denville, than to cut silly jokes –’
‘Not at all!’ said Evelyn incorrigibly. ‘Kester could perform his part without the least difficulty, but Mama is far from being a widgeon! She has detected, in a flash, the flaw in my scheme! I had never the least turn for politics –’
‘Or I,’ interposed Kit, getting up, ‘for the management of estates!’ He came forward, and said, addressing himself to the Dowager: ‘May I make a suggestion, ma’am? I know how tired you must be, but – but I think it just possible that there is a way out of the tangle.’