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‘Are you? Well, if you are to reach home before dark you’d best lose no more time. Up with you!’
‘Thank you!’ said Mr Holloway, greatly relieved. ‘I’m excessively obliged to you for not – Oh, you go first, sir!’
‘No, I should only hold you up: I’m not going to drive at your hell-for-leather pace!’
Laughing heartily at this, Mr Holloway, after fervently shaking hands with his lordship, hoisted himself into the chaise, and it moved forward, Miss Tresilian having by this time drawn the curricle to the side of the road. His lordship, heavily frowning, walked back to it. He observed that Miss Tresilian had succumbed to her emotions, and regarded her balefully.
‘Oh, don’t look at me like that, Iver!’ she begged, wiping her streaming eyes. ‘If you could but have seen your own face –!’
‘Much help you were!’ he said, with a reluctant grin. ‘Yes, it’s all very well for you to laugh yourself into stitches, my girl, but where the devil are those pernicious brats?’
‘I said we had come on a wild goose chase! Have we all the time been pursuing that enchanting couple?’
‘Certainly not! Didn’t you hear the boy say they had come from Oxford? They can never have been on our road until they entered Stamford. I have not the smallest doubt that when we entered Stamford we were hard on the heels of our own pair.’
That sobered her. She said, in dismay: ‘Do you mean that they are ahead of us still?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he said decidedly. ‘They haven’t passed any of the pikes. From Stamford we have been following the Holloways.’
She was disturbed, but could not resist quizzing him. ‘Flying from a scent, Iver? You?’
He smiled, but absently, and remained for some moments in frowning silence. He said suddenly: ‘If the line was crossed in Stamford – Good God, why didn’t I think of that before? He has taken the girl to Grantley, of course!’ He saw that Miss Tresilian was bewildered, and added impatiently: ‘Windlesham’s place, beyond Market Deeping! You’ve met Arthur’s sister, haven’t you?’
‘Lady Windlesham! Yes, but what could he hope to achieve by that?’
‘Depend upon it, he has a special licence in his pocket, and means to be married under Caroline’s ægis.’
‘But she has no authority to sanction Lucy’s marriage!’
‘Much she would care for that! Arthur can bring her round his thumb any time he chooses to do it: she dotes on him! She’s of a romantic disposition, what’s more, and to judge by the impassioned entreaties she addressed to me on this subject has confused that precious pair with Romeo and Juliet.’
‘Iver, she could not be so unprincipled as to –’
‘Nothing of the sort!’ he interrupted. ‘She knows that Arthur is his own master, and if she doesn’t know already that you liked the connection well enough until you discovered that I was Arthur’s guardian, it wouldn’t, I assure you, take Arthur more than five minutes to convince her that if only the knot could be tied without your knowledge you would be more likely to fall on her neck than to try to overset the marriage!’
He climbed into his seat again as he spoke, and took the reins from her. She relinquished them unheedingly. ‘If that is indeed so, I can’t deny that it is a great deal better than a flight to the Border, but a marriage performed in such circumstances must give rise to the most odious gossip! I cannot allow it!’
‘There’s no need to fly into high fidgets,’ said his lordship, possibly to soothe alarm, but with a sad lack of sensibility. ‘Caroline is a pretty ninnyhammer, but Windlesham is a man of excellent good sense, and can be depended on to put his foot down on such a scheme.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake –!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can’t you think of anything but that addle-brained pair? For my part, they may go to the devil! I’m sick and tired of both, and have been thinking them a dead bore for the last three hours!’
Jerked by this sudden violence from her preoccupation, she realized that the horses had been set in motion. ‘Pray, where are we off to?’ she demanded. ‘If Arthur has taken Lucy to his sister’s house we have no need to proceed farther north! How can you be so idiotish, Iver?’
‘I’m not idiotish,’ he replied, with an odd laugh. ‘We set out for Gretna Green, and to Gretna Green we’ll go! Our immediate destination, however, is Coltersworth. We shall spend the night at the Angel, and tomorrow, unless you should very much dislike i
t, we will resume our journey to the Border.’
‘I should dislike it excessively,’ said Miss Tresilian, after a little pause.
He halted his team and turned, laying his hand on one of hers, and strongly grasping it. ‘Nell!’ he said, in quite another voice. ‘So many years wasted – so much bitterness –! Nell, my dear love, don’t say it’s too late! You must marry me – you shall!’
Her fingers clung to his, and there was the sparkle of tears in her smiling eyes, but she replied with great dignity: ‘I have every intention of marrying you, but not, I promise you, in such a clandestine fashion as that! Iver, for heaven’s sake –! There’s an accommodation-coach coming towards us – George!’
But as his lordship, with his usual top-lofty disregard of appearances, paid no heed whatsoever to this warning, and Miss Tresilian was powerless (even had she made the attempt) to free herself from his embrace, the roof passengers on the coach were afforded a shocking example of the decay of modern manners, one moralist going so far as to express his desire to see such shameless persons set in the stocks. ‘Kissing and hugging on the public highway!’ he said, craning his neck to obtain the last possible glimpse of the disgusting spectacle. ‘Calling themselves Quality, too!’
But in this he was wrong. With her cheek against his lordship’s, Miss Tresilian said, on a choke of laughter: ‘What a vulgar couple we are, love!’
