‘A cheat! Fudged, by Jove!’ cried Captain Chambers. ‘Give it up, Audley, you dog!’
‘Not a bit of it,’ responded the Colonel, fitting it in his buttonhole. ‘He who could reach it might take it. I abode most strictly by the rules.’ He held out his hands to Barbara. ‘Come down from your perch! You invited me here tonight and have not vouchsafed me one word.’
She laid her hands in his, but drew them away as soon as she stood on the floor again. ‘Oh, you must be content with having won your prize!’ she said carelessly. ‘I warn you, it came from a hothouse and will soon fade. Dear Jack, I’m devilish thirsty!’
The young man addressed offered his arm; she was borne away by him into an adjoining salon. With a shade of malice in his voice the Comte de Lavisse said: ‘Hélas! You are set down, mon Colonel!’
‘I am indeed,’ replied Audley, and went off to flirt with one of the Misses Arden.
He was presently singled out by his host, who wanted his opinion of the military situation. Lord Vidal was suffering from what his irreverent younger brother described as a fit of the sullens, but he was pleasant enough to Audley. His wife, her hard sense bent on promoting a match between an improvident sister-in-law and a wealthy (though foreign) nobleman, seized the opportunity to inform the Colonel that her family expected hourly to receive the tidings of Bab’s engagement to the Comte de Lavisse. The desired effect of this confidence was a little spoiled by her husband’s saying hastily: ‘Pooh! nonsense! I don’t more than half like it.’
Augusta said with a tinkle of laughter: ‘I doubt of Bab’s considering that, my dear Vidal, once her affections have been engaged.’
The Marquis reddened, but said: ‘The old man wouldn’t countenance it. I wish you will not talk such rubbish! Come now, Audley! In my place, would you remove to England?’
‘On my honour, no!’ said the Colonel. He correctly guessed ‘the old man’ to be the Duke of Avon, a gentleman of reputedly fiery temper, who was the Lady Barbara’s grandfather, and lost very little time in finding Lord Harry Alastair again.
There was no more friendly youth to be found than Lord Harry. He was perfectly ready to tell the Colonel anything the Colonel wanted to know, and it needed only a casual question to set his tongue gaily wagging.
‘Devil of a tartar, my grandfather,’ said Lord Harry. ‘Used to be a dead shot—daresay he still is, but he don’t go about picking quarrels with people these days, of course. Killed his man in three duels before he met my grandmother. Those must have been good times to have lived in! But I believe he settled down more or less when he married. George is the living spit of what he used to be, if you can trust the portraits. Bab and Vidal take after my great-grandmother. She was red-haired, too, and French into the bargain. And her husband—my great-grandfather, that is—was the devil of a fellow!’ He tossed off a glass of wine, and added, not without pride: ‘We’re a shocking bad set, you know. All ride to the devil one way or another. As for Bab, she’s as bad as any of us.’
The Lady Barbara seemed, that evening, to be determined to prove the truth of this assertion. No folly was too extravagant for her to throw herself into; her flirtations shocked the respectable; the language she used gave offence to the pure-tongued; and when she crowned an evening of indiscretions by organising a table of hazard, and becoming, as she herself announced, badly dipped at it, it was felt that she had left nothing undone to set the town by the ears.
She was too busy at her hazard table to notice Colonel Audley’s departure, nor did he attempt to interrupt her play to take his leave. But seven o’clock next morning found him cantering down the Allée Verte to meet a solitary horse-woman mounted on a grey hunter.
She saw him approaching, and reined in. When he reached her she was seated motionless in the saddle, awaiting him. He raised two fingers to his cocked hat. ‘Good morning! Are you in a quarrelsome humour today?’ he asked.
She replied abruptly: ‘I did not expect to see you.’
‘We don’t start for Ghent until noon.’
‘Ghent?’
‘Yes, Ghent,’ he repeated, not quite understanding her blank stare.
‘Oh, the devil! What are you talking about?’ she demanded with a touch of petulance. ‘Are you going to Ghent? I did not know it.’
‘Didn’t you? Then I don’t know what the devil I’m talking about,’ he said.
A laugh flashed in her eyes. ‘I wish I didn’t like you, but I do—I do!’ she said. ‘Do you wonder that I didn’t expect to see you here this morning?’
‘If it was not because you thought me already on my way to Ghent I most certainly do.’
‘Odd creature!’ She gave him one of her direct looks, and said: ‘I behaved very shabbily to you last night.’
‘You did indeed. What had I d
one? Or were you merely cross?’
‘Nothing. Was I cross? I don’t know. I think I wanted to show you how damnably I can conduct myself.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Colonel, bowing in some amusement. ‘What will you show me next? How well you can conduct yourself?’
‘I never conduct myself well. Don’t laugh! I am in earnest. I am odious, do you understand? If you will persist in liking me, I shall make you unhappy.’
‘I don’t like you,’ said the Colonel. ‘It was true what I told you the first time I set eyes on you. I love you.’
She looked at him with sombre eyes. ‘How can you do so? If you were in a way to loving me did not that turn to dislike when you saw me at my worst?’