Eustacie drew back with a gesture conveying both alarm and repugnance. ‘I told you I would not have any interview with you. I do not see why you must follow me, for it is not at all your affair that I choose to bring mademoiselle on a visit to my own cousin!’
‘It is very much my affair, since I am held responsible for you!’ he retorted.
The Beau intervened in his sweetest voice. ‘My dear Tristram, do pray come in! You are the very man of all others we need. I believe you are acquainted with Miss Thane?’
Sir Tristram bowed stiffly. ‘Miss Thane and I have met, but –’
‘Nothing could be better!’ declared the Beau. ‘Miss Thane has done me the honour of coming to see my house, and, alas, you know how lamentably ignorant I am on questions of antiquity! But you, my dear fellow, know so much –’
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Miss Thane, clasping her hands together. ‘If it would not be troubling Sir Tristram – !’
Sir Tristram assumed the expression of a man forced against his will to be complaisant, and said somewhat ungraciously that he would, of course, be pleased to tell Miss Thane anything in his power. The Beau at once reminded him that the wainscoting in the library was held to be worthy of close study, and begged him to take Miss Thane there. He added that if she cared to make a sketch of the room, he was sure his cousin’s taste and knowledge would be of assistance to her.
‘Eustacie and I will wait for you in the drawing-room,’ he said.
It seemed as though Sir Tristram would have demurred, but Miss Thane frustrated this by breaking into profuse expressions of gratitude. He made the best of it, and the instant the library door was closed on them, said: ‘Have you been talking like that all the time?’
Miss Thane sank into a chair in an exhausted attitude. ‘But without pause!’ she said faintly. ‘My dear sir, I
have been inspired! The mantle of my own cousin fell upon my shoulders, and I spoke like her, tittered like her, even thought like her! She is the silliest woman I know. It worked like a charm! He was itching to be rid of me!’
‘I should imagine he might well!’ said Sir Tristram. ‘The wonder is that he did not strangle you.’
She chuckled. ‘He is too well-bred. Did I sound really feather-headed? I tried to.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked at her with a hint of a smile. ‘You are an extremely accomplished woman, Miss Thane.’
‘I have a natural talent for acting,’ she replied modestly. ‘But your own efforts were by no means contemptible, I assure you.’ She got up. ‘We have no time to waste if we are to find the panel. Do you take this side of the room and I will take that.’
‘Oh – the panel!’ said Sir Tristram. ‘Yes, of course.’
Seven
Having got rid of his cousin and of Miss Thane, the Beau turned to Eustacie, and murmured: ‘Could anything be better? Shall we go into the drawing-room?’
Eustacie assented, wondering how long she would be able to hold him in conversation. She did not feel that she possessed quite Miss Thane’s talent for discursive chatter, and she was far too ingenuous to realize that her enchanting little face was enough to keep the Beau by her side until she herself should be pleased to declare the interview at an end. It did occur to her that he was looking at her with an expression of unusual warmth in his eyes, but beyond deciding that she did not like it, she paid very little heed to it. She sat down by the fire, her soft, dove-coloured skirts billowing about her, and remarked that if her dearest Sarah had a fault it was that she was a trifle too talkative.
‘Just a trifle,’ agreed the Beau. ‘Do you really propose to accompany her to town?’
‘Oh yes, certainly!’ she replied. ‘But I cannot remain with her for ever, and it is that which makes everything very awkward. I mean to become a governess, but Sarah does not advise it. What do you think I should do?’
‘Well,’ said the Beau slowly, ‘you could, of course, engage a lady of birth and propriety to live with you and be your chaperon. Sylvester has left you well provided for, you know.’
‘But I do not want a chaperon!’ said Eustacie.
‘No? There is an alternative.’
‘Tell me, then!’
‘Marriage,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I will not marry Tristram. He is not amusing, and, besides, I do not like him.’
‘I am aware,’ said the Beau, ‘but Tristram is not the only man in the world, my little cousin.’
Foreseeing what was coming, Eustacie at once agreed with this pronouncement, and launched out into a eulogy of the Duke she would have married had her grandfather not brought her to England. The fact that she had never laid eyes on this gentleman did not deter her from describing him in detail, and it was fully fifteen minutes before her invention gave out and her cousin was able to interpolate a remark. He observed that since the Duke had gone to the guillotine, her fate, had she married him, would have been a melancholy one.
In this opinion, however, Eustacie could not concur. To have become a widow at the age of eighteen would, she held, have been épatant, and of all things the most romantic. ‘Moreover,’ she added, ‘it was a very good match. I should have been a duchess, and although Grandpapa says – said – that it is vulgar to care for such things, I do think that I should have liked to have been a duchess.’