'My dear ma'am, how you do run on!' said Mrs Winkworth,
frowning at her.
She was instantly penitent. 'I never could learn to bite the tongue! It is very bad! Papa was used to say it ran like a fiddlestick, but Mr Clapham liked my silly bibble-babble. But you are very right: I have been boring on for ever! I won't do so any more. Tell us about yourself, Mr Calverleigh! Do you live in London, or in the country?'
'Oh, in London – though I was bred up in the country.'
'I thought you did,' she said artlessly. 'I mean to live there myself, for I'm sure I couldn't bear to continue living at the Towers without Mr Clapham. He took me there once, and I liked it excessively. We stayed at a very comfortable hotel – I can't remember what it was called, but Mr Clapham always stayed there when he was obliged to go to London, because he said they served the best dinners of all the hotels.'
'Then I collect it was the Clarendon.'
She clapped her hands together. 'Yes, that was it! How clever of you to guess! Only I shouldn't wish to live in a hotel. I mean to buy a house.'
'Hire a house, ma'am,' corrected Mrs Winkworth.
'Well, perhaps – if that's what they do in London,' said Mrs Clapham doubtfully. She looked at Stacy. 'Is it? Do you hire your house?'
He smiled, and said, with a great air of frankness: 'No, I have a lodging merely.'
'Oh!' She considered this for a moment. 'I daresay a lodging is less trouble to you – being a gentleman.'
'Much less trouble!' he said, with a comical grimace.
'Yes, but – but a house of one's own is more agreeable, I think. More homelike!'
'Not my house!' he said humorously.
'But you said you had only a lodging!'
'In London! I have a place in Berkshire: my family has
owned it for generations. I daresay you know the style of thing: very historical, very inconvenient, and needs an army of servants to keep it in order. Quite beyond my touch! I'd sell it, if I could.'
'Can't you? If you don't wish to live in it?'
He threw up his hands in mock horror. 'Sell Danescourt? My dear ma'am, never let any member of my family hear you suggest such a thing! I promise you, they would think it little short of blasphemy!'
He judged that he had said quite enough (and rather neatly, too) to impress her, and soon took his leave. Mrs Winkworth bestowed quite an approving smile upon him, which showed him that his candid avowal of his straitened circumstances had had its calculated effect on her.
Fourteen
The acquaintance, so promisingly begun, ripened quickly, but the difficulties foreseen by Mr Stacy Calverleigh soon began to loom large. Within the walls of the White Hart it was an easy matter to pursue his delicate courtship; outside this hostelry, it became perilous. He had known that it would be; and his forebodings were confirmed when (at her request) he escorted Mrs Clapham to the Pump Room, and instantly attracted unwelcome notice. It had been impossible to evade that public appearance. 'Oh, Mr Calverleigh!' had uttered the widow, in a flutter of shyness. 'Pray go with me! For I don't know a soul, and that is so very uncomfortable!'
He had been obliged to accompany her, and even to introduce her to such ladies of his acquaintance as he could not avoid; but although he fancied he had carried it off pretty well ('Your la'ship must allow me to present Mrs – Mrs Clapham to you. She is a stranger to Bath – putting up at the White Hart!') he was well aware that he had become the subject for every kind of inquisitive conjecture. He realised, too late, what a gudgeon he had been to have devoted himself so exclusively to Miss Fanny Wendover, and did what he could to allay suspicion by replying to the demand of a matron, famed for her blunt manners, to be told who, pray, was this Mrs Clapham? with his engaging air of boyish candour: 'I haven't the least notion, ma'am, but perfectly respectable, I believe! Yes, I know what you are thinking, but I won't have her abused! Not, perhaps, quite up to the rig, but – but excessively amiable!'
The droll look that went with this conveyed volumes, but he could not be sure that these had been read with understanding. He was thankful that Mrs Clapham's scruples forbade her to attend any balls, and wished that these had included concerts. But Mrs Winkworth had said that concerts were unexception able, and he was obliged to accept, with every sign of pleasure, an invitation to accompany both ladies to one which held out, as an apparently irresistible lure, the promise of a performance, by four distinguished instrumentalists, of Mozart's Quartet in G Minor. Mr Stacy Calverleigh was not musical, and nor, judging by the infelicitous nature of her remarks, was Mrs Clapham; but when he entered the concert-room, with the widow leaning on his arm, it seemed, to his jaundiced eyes, that not one of the Bath residents with whom he was acquainted shared his indifference to classical music. The room was packed as full as it could hold. He felt, as he escorted his ladies past the benches, to the chairs provided for such well-inlaid persons as Mrs Clapham, that the entire genteel population of Bath was present. Amongst the company, were Mrs Grayshott, with her son and daughter, and when he glanced in their direction, Stacy encountered a long, unsmiling look from Oliver. It made him rage inwardly, for he read into it contempt and condemnation. He thought that it would not be long before the insufferable puppy found the means to communicate with Fanny; and wondered if there was any fear that when she next met him she would subject him to a painful scene. He spent the better part of the evening trying to hit upon some means of detaching Mrs Clapham from Bath. It was not until they emerged from the Rooms into a mizzle of rain that a possible solution occurred to him. Then, as Mrs Clapham asked despairingly if it was always raining in Bath, he expressed surprise that she should not have chosen to go to Leamington Priors rather than to Bath. No doubt she must know that it was a spa enjoying no toriously good weather, and offering visitors, besides beneficial waters, every amenity, from Pleasure Gardens to Assembly Rooms as elegant as any in the country. No, Mrs Clapham, strangely enough, had never been there, for all it was so close to Birmingham. She accused him archly of wishing to be rid of her. 'That, ma'am, is an absurdity which neither merits, nor will obtain, n
otice!' he replied. 'To own the truth, I have a strong notion of going there myself !'
'I wonder,' said Mrs Clapham demurely, 'if drinking the waters there would do me good?'
It was as well that this question was merely rhetorical, for, never having visited the spa, he had no idea for what the Leamington Waters were held to be beneficial, and could scarcely have answered it. Nor, when he procured, on the following day, a guide book to the Principal Watering and Sea-bathing places, was he any better equipped to do so. The guide book was not reticent on the subject: it presented him with a list of the diseases for which the waters were known to be efficacious, but as these consisted of such distressing disorders as Obstinately Costive Habits, Scrofulous Tumours, White Swellings of the Knee, and Intestinal Worms, Mr Calverleigh could only hope that Mrs Clapham would not enquire more closely into the matter.
He told Mrs Winkworth that Bath was a hotbed of scandal, warning her, with his ready laugh, that it was enough for an unattached gentleman to offer his arm to a single lady for the length of a street to set all the quizzies tattling that he was dangling after her. That, he hoped, would drive a spoke in the wheel of any mischief-maker who might seek to convince her that he was a fickle and desperate flirt.
Mrs Winkworth had relented towards him, and no longer directed suspicious looks at him. She even apologised for having been, as she phrased it, a trifle starched-up when she had first made his acquaintance. 'You wouldn't wonder at it, if you knew how many burrs and downright fortune-hunters I've had to drive off, Mr Calverleigh,' she said. 'Sometimes I wish to goodness I hadn't agreed to live with Nancy, when Clapham died, but I've known her since she was a child, and I hadn't the heart to say no to her. No more than anyone ever has had, more's the pity! Not that she isn't a sweet little thing, but she'd let any scamp come over her, because she hasn't a particle of nous. And as for being fit to manage her affairs – well, there!'
'I expect her trustees will take care she doesn't fritter away her fortune,' Stacy said.