Friendship and Folly: The Merriweather Chronicles Book I (19 page)

But at this, alarm loosened Ann’s tongue, and breaking in upon his musings, she gave him to understand, that a direct apology to Miss Parry was the last thing he should contemplate, if he truly desired to make amends for his former behavior. “No, no, you must say nothing! It would only embarrass her, for she has never acknowledged herself injured; and to be told that you
had
blamed her in the past, for whatever reason, would be as distressing to her, as if you continued to do so. She felt your--your censure as a mere--shadow on a sunny day. It will be enough if the cloud is removed from before the sun; the deed itself is what ensures comfort; there is no need to
talk
of such things.”

She could see that he was not entirely convinced of the validity of her argument; but given the relation in which they stood to each other at that precise moment--rebuker to rebukee, injured to injurer--he could hardly be churlish enough to enter into a dispute with her over which of them was most able to judge what would best constitute Julia’s happiness. With knit brows he conceded her right to prescribe the form of his reparation, and shortly afterward took his leave. Only then did Ann’s racing heart begin to quiet.

She could not quite believe in the progress of their interview, so different had it been from all her imaginings. She sat staring at the door for some minutes, beset by astonishment, relief, and an emotion she could not name, but which, if it ever recovered from the fright it had suffered, she decided might very well resolve itself into gladness. But her nerves would not allow her to be still for long, and she soon rose and paced about the room until discomfort demanded that the restlessness of her mind give way for a space to the inadequacies of her frame. Once more on the sofa, she found a certain relief in adopting a series of Attitudes, and it was whilst engaged in an tolerable representation of A Young Lady Distracted, that she was inspired to invent an Attitude of her own, illustrative of A Young Lady Visited By An Entirely New Idea.

Why, what a fool she was! To be sitting, all fluttered and confounded, because Mr. Lenox had received her meddling with unexpected meekness, when in the circumstances he could scarcely have responded in any other fashion! To be amazed at his forbearance, when in the very speech attacking his behavior, she had removed the reason for it!

In the midst of her tirade against him, she had unthinkingly sketched a picture of Sir Warrington, with his heart wholly given over to one, who not only had no intention of accepting the hand which accompanied it, but also no desire to grieve him by a precipitate rejection. Mr. Lenox must needs have been a good deal stupider than Ann knew him to be, not to have realized at once, that no other situation could have as effectively secured the safety of his inheritance. Sir Warrington, heart-whole and searching, was a danger; Sir Warrington, attached, and with prospects of success, an horror; but a Sir Warrington in love, and hopelessly so--why should Mr. Lenox not have been gracious?

Ann could have laughed aloud at her own simplicity in supposing, even for a moment, that it had been her own eloquence, her own impassioned arguments, that had wrought such a sudden and marvelous change of heart in her visitor. But what did it matter, after all? It was not his heart that concerned her, only his demeanor, and that he had vowed to amend. His motives for doing so were entirely his own affair: let him remain as selfish as he liked, as long as he did not continue to distress Julia with his disapproval.

This was not, of course, the end of all thought on the matter for Ann; but her nerves were greatly steadied by her discovery, for it helped to allay her apprehensions, that he might, in an excess of “remorse,” have felt it necessary to reveal the conversation that had prompted it.

The Parrys, having been led astray by a likely-looking park, did not arrive home, until a full two hours after he had taken his leave; by which time Ann was sitting once more before the fire, composed and guileless, but, as Lady Frances immediately exclaimed over, and sent to rectify, mysteriously lacking in shawls.

**

The dinner given by Lady Lenox, being duly attended, proved to be much less memorable than Ann had feared. As matters stood, it was perhaps foolish of her to be in lively dread of her next encounter with Mr. Lenox, but dread it she did. She did not for a moment suppose that he would meet Julia at the door with loud exclamations of joy at her condescension in coming, beg from her a thousand forgivenesses for his previous behavior, fervently kiss her hand upon receiving them, and thereafter assiduously give himself over to maintaining her happiness until the last second when he handed her reluctantly into the carriage; but still, she could not help but wonder in what manner he would “remove the cloud.” Would he be delicate enough? Would Julia wonder? Would she suspect? Worse, would she ask questions?

Nor was Ann at all eager for an evening spent listening to the verbal blushes which were Sir Warrington’s contribution to any conversation essayed in the presence of his mother; still less, for a further display of that lady’s skill in disposing of them. In short, there was not one member of the Lenox family whose absence Ann did not consider would greatly improve her prospects for enjoyment, and she dressed for the dinner, with the Kittyish hope, that there might be so vast an assortment of guests, as to preclude her ever having to say much to any of them.

Her chief fears were banished almost at once, for Mr. Lenox greeted them all in exactly the same manner, as he had always done; toward herself, even, there was no added shade either or warmth or coolness. There being no other sign of consciousness between them, she faced the rest of the evening with sensations of relief, which were soon augmented by the sight of the number of persons already collected. There were, besides herself and the three eldest Parrys, a friend of Lady Lenox’s, Lady Charlotte H_____, and her husband and daughter, and the daughter’s companion; Lady Lenox’s uncle, Lord Bertram D_____, and his wife; and a gentleman who, by the excessive gallantry of his behavior to his hostess, immediately established himself as one of her beaus, and by his conversation, as a person whose birth or fortune must have been weighty indeed, to counterbalance its deficiencies of sense and content. But he was very entertainingly dressed, and on the whole, gave no more trouble to the company than a pug might, unwisely sent for, and insufficiently disciplined by its owner; and one could be grateful that at least he did not wheeze and snort. For the rest, there was only one other gentleman, and a young lady, his ward. The man was found to be, by his introduction, a clergyman; by his speech, a son of Erin (though not as thoroughly so as the baronet); and by the reception accorded him by his hostess, a poor relation, of the most objectionable sort. This last prejudiced Ann in his favor at once, a prejudice which received support from his behavior, which was unaffected, and thoughtfully cordial. She thought he gazed upon the Parrys with peculiar interest, and she noted also that the sons of the house did not share their mother’s disapprobation, for Sir Warrington spoke of and to Mr. Hayden (for such was his name) with great respect, and it seemed to Ann that Mr. Lenox took special pains to make him known to the Parrys, as someone worthy of their particular attention.

The young lady who accompanied him was so very shy, that they were for some time left in doubt as to anything beyond the smooth alabaster of her brow, and the length of her eyelashes. When at last she was persuaded to look up for a moment, it was seen that she was pretty merely with the prettiness given by youth, and a good complexion. She had, perhaps, the better of Ann by the darkness of her lashes, and the curl of her hair, but little else; and beside Julia, of course, she was nothing at all, so that only Julia herself could have seen in the pair, anything to make her whisper to Ann in passing, “Berry Hill, I think!”

But it cannot have been for a fancied likeness to any heroine of fiction that Julia chose to devote herself to Miss Denbigh’s ease of mind; rather, it must have been her marked resemblance to Kitty, in manner if not in appearance. At first, timidity would scarcely allow her to look up even when directly addressed. But seeing that Julia did not growl or snap at her for the inadequacy of her answers, or lose interest in her because of them, she gradually grew more at ease, and able to meet the gaze of her patient interlocutor for longer than half a second. Julia continued to talk of various matters, until at last she found one on which Miss Denbigh could speak with rather more readiness than any other--this happened to be the dozen or so hens that she kept at their home at Burndall, Sir Warrington’s property--which subject was then delicately pursued, until she grew confident enough to move beyond domestic fowl, and the darling little donkey given her by Sir Warrington himself, to a whole range of topics, including the precise nature of her connection to the family. This proved to be pretty much as Ann had thought. Her guardian being an nth-removed cousin of the late Sir Sylvan Lenox, he had been given a small cottage on that gentleman’s estate, and offered a certain living as soon as it should fall vacant; an offer which had been renewed by the briefly be-Sir’d Edmund, and happily confirmed by the rightful Sir Warrington. Lady Lenox, however, had been considerably vexed by her sons’ concordance in the matter, having designed the place for a favorite of her own, a young gentleman who combined a notable ancestry with captivating manners, and had been recently frustrated in his desire to obtain a commission in the army, due to the circumstance of his having lost the purchase price at whist. Edmund she had quite forgiven, for he had done nothing but willfully disregard her wishes; but Sir Warrington had begged her pardon in a terrified manner, and declared that he would give the living to anyone she pleased, if only his brother would agree to it; and his brother remaining adamant, she naturally continued to hold Sir Warrington fully responsible for her disappointment.

Ann was sure, from Miss Denbigh’s manner, that she had no thought of deliberately vilifying her hostess by this history, but rather had confided it from a wish of explaining her guardian’s standing with the various Lenoxes. Julia, however, was not comfortable in such a discussion, and rather to Ann’s disappointment, lost no time in leading Miss Denbigh away from this topic; and from enlarging on the kindnesses of the brothers, she was soon encouraged into an explanation of how they came to accompany them to England: a simple one, of her having relatives in town, on her dear late mother’s side, whom she seldom had the opportunity to visit. It was Sir Warrington--or perhaps it might have been Mr. Lenox: it did not signify, their ideas on a subject being generally one and the same--who had first proposed the journey, insisting that they allow him to defray all expenses, from a desire that she might become better acquainted with her kindred, whom she had not seen since her ninth year, when, her widowed mother having died, she had gone to live with her dear guardian on Sir Sylvan’s estate. (This explanation satisfied Ann, who had been wondering how it came about that the girl’s tongue dealt so considerately with the English language.) She herself--continued Miss Denbigh--had been perfectly content at Burndall; but then, it had been very kind of Sir Warrington after all, and to be sure her aunt was everything that was amiable, except that she did smell rather too strongly of scent, and said she only cared for hens, when they had been brought to acknowledge their proper place in life, which was resting tastefully on her plate, and covered in a wine sauce; or perhaps made into a pie, with shallots and anchovies.

As the preferences of her aunt was not a subject upon which Miss Denbigh could dwell without tears, she was hurried away from it, and it was next established, that although she and her guardian were staying with this unfeeling woman, they could often be found dining in Berkeley Square, though not usually in “such fine company”; often, indeed, with no one but Sir Warrington and Mr. Lenox, and more recently--spoken with a gentle sigh--several times only with the latter. (Here Julia glanced ruefully at Ann, realizing that her own family must have been responsible for the baronet’s absence.) On these occasions Miss Denbigh had found it very dull, for though Mr. Lenox had urged her to bring any of her cousins she liked, it happened that she did
not
like, for the boys were loud, and Susan and Caroline very silly, teazy girls, who expected young men always to be saying gallant things to them, and would have been sure to twitter and roll their eyes at Mr. Lenox the while he was trying to eat, so that to subject him to their noise and nonsense would have been but a poor return for his hospitality. And though Mr. Lenox and her dear guardian were very kind, they did tend to talk about things one had no interest in, so that she had been forced to spend a good deal of the evening looking through
The Picture of London
, or some such book.

This led naturally to a discussion of the many things to be seen in town, and of Miss Denbigh’s opportunities for seeing them, in the course of which it transpired, that so far these tours were the only aspect of her journey to England to meet with her whole-hearted approval. Persuaded to describe them, her youthful raptures reminded Ann so forcibly of Sir Warrington, that she leaned forward, and inquired of her, if her guardian was by any chance known to his intimates as “Paddy”? Miss Denbigh was so far soothed by Julia’s handling, that she only started and changed color twice at being thus questioned unexpectedly. However, she refuted the charge as emphatically as if asked, “Had her guardian ever delivered a sermon whilst drunk?”, protesting that his name was James Everett Hayden, and assuring Ann that there really was no truth to the English belief, that every second Irishman was named Patrick. Ann denied ever having entertained such a thought, and immediately withdrew her frightening attentions, without offering any explanation of her sudden curiosity.

**