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A Husband for Fanny
1
‘HIS ATTENTIONS,’ SAID the widow, fixing a pair of large, rather anxious brown eyes on her cousin’s face, ‘are becoming most marked, I assure you, Honoria!’
‘Fiddle!’ said Lady Pednor.
The widow, who had just raised a delicate cup to her lips, started, and spilled some of the morning chocolate into the saucer. A drop fell on her dress. She set the cup and saucer down, and began to rub the mark with her handkerchief, saying despairingly: ‘There! Only see what you have made me do! I dare say it will never come out!’
‘Very likely it will not,’ agreed her hostess, in no way repentant. ‘You will be obliged to buy a new dress, and that, let me tell you, Clarissa, will be an excellent thing!’
‘I cannot afford a new dress!’ said the widow indignantly. ‘All very well for you, as rich as you are, to talk in that unfeeling way, but you know –’
‘I am not rich,’ said Lady Pednor composedly, ‘but I can afford a new dress, because I do not squander every penny I possess upon my daughter.’
Mrs Wingham blushed, but replied with spirit: ‘You have no daughter!’
‘What is more,’ continued her ladyship, unheeding, ‘I will accompany you to buy the dress, or I dare say you will choose just such another dowdy colour!’
‘Purple-bloom, and very suitable!’ said Mrs Wingham defiantly.
‘Extremely so – for dowagers!’
‘I am a dowager.’
‘You are a goose,’ replied her cousin calmly. ‘It would be interesting to know what you spent on that spangled gauze gown Fanny wore at Almack’s last night!’ She paused, but Mrs Wingham only looked guilty. ‘Pray, what is to be the end of all this extravagance, Clarissa? You will be ruined!’
‘No, no! I have saved every penny I could spare ever since Fanny was a baby, just for this one season! If only I can see her creditably established, it will have been worth it! And although you may say “fiddle!” if you choose to be so uncivil, it is true about Harleston! From the moment of your bringing him up to me at Almack’s that night, I could see that he was instantly struck by my darling’s beauty. And never can I be sufficiently obliged to you, Honoria!’
‘If I had thought that you would be so foolish, my dear, I never would have presented him,’ said Lady Pednor. ‘Harleston and Fanny! Good God, he must be forty if he is a day! How old is she? Seventeen? You are out of your senses!’
The widow shook her head. ‘I don’t wish her to be poor, and –’ She broke off, and looked away from her cousin. ‘Or to marry a very young man. It doesn’t endure, the sort of attachment one forms when one is young, and young men don’t make comfortable husbands, Honoria. With such a man as Lord Harleston – in every way so exactly what one would desire for one’s child! – she would be very happy and never know care, and – and the disagreeable effects of poverty!’
‘My love,’ said Lady Pednor, ‘because your mama made a bad bargain for you when she married you to Tom Wingham, is not to say that every young man must prove to be a monster of selfishness!’
‘I was in love with Tom: it was not all Mama’s doing!’
‘I dare say. An excessively handsome creature, and he could be perfectly amiable, if events fell out according to his wishes.’
‘I have sometimes thought,’ said Mrs Wingham wistfully, ‘that if only his Uncle Horsham had not married again and had a son, after all those years, and poor Tom had succeeded to the title, as he always expected to do, he would have been quite different!’
‘Well, he would have had more money to fling away,’ said Lady Pednor dryly. ‘That might, of course, have made him more amiable.’
‘But that is exactly what I have been saying,’ said the widow eagerly. ‘It was the poverty that made him often so cross and so disobliging! Heaven knows I do not wish to say unkind things of Tom, but can you wonder at me for – yes, for scheming, like the most odious match-maker alive, to provide my Fanny with everything that will make her life all that mine was not?’
‘I wish you will stop talking as though you were in your dotage!’ said her ladyship irascibly. ‘Let me remind you that you are not yet thirty-seven years old! If you would not drape yourself in purple you might well pass for Fanny’s sister! As for these precious schemes of yours, Fanny should rather be falling in love with an ineligible young man. In fact, I thought that that was what she had done. Didn’t you tell me of some boy in the –th Foot?’
‘No, no!’ cried the widow. ‘At least, I did, but it was only a childish fancy. He has no expectations, and I am persuaded that it was nothing more than the circumstance of his being a neighbour of ours in Buckinghamshire. Why, he cannot afford even to buy his promotion! And since I have brought Fanny to town, and she has met so many gentlemen of far greater address than Richard Kenton, I am persuaded she has forgotten all about him. Fanny marry into a Line regiment, pinching and scraping, living in garrison towns, and – No, a thousand times, no!’
‘I dare say she would enjoy it very much,’ said Lady Pednor.
‘I won’t have it!’ declared the widow. ‘Call me worldly, if you will, but only consider! What comparison can there be between Richard Kenton and the Marquis of Harleston? Mind, if Harleston were not the man he is, I would not for one moment countenance his suit. But have you ever, Honoria – tell me candidly – have you ever, I say, met any gentleman more likely to make a female happy? Setting aside his position and his wealth, where will you find such delightful manners, such engaging solicitude, and, oh, such smiling eyes? What could Fanny find in Richard to rival these attributes?’
‘His youth,’ replied Lady Pednor, with a wry smile. ‘Indeed, I hope she may find a dozen things, for I tell you, Clarissa, if she is setting her cap at Harleston –’
‘Never! I have not uttered a word to her on this subject, and to suppose that she could do anything so vulgar –’
‘So much the better! Not, however, that she would be the first to do so, my love. No man has been more pursued than Harleston; no man has more frequently confounded expectation. They say that he suffered a severe disappointment in youth: be that as it may, it is certain that he has now no thought of marriage. If you had not buried yourself in the country these fifteen years, Clara, you would know that not even such a hardened match-maker as Augusta Daventry would waste one moment’s speculation on Harleston.’
