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‘If you would only let them be married!’ sighed Miss Fairfax.
He ignored this remark, and, upon a servant’s coming in to lay the covers, merely invited Miss Fairfax to sit down at the table. She obeyed him, but although she had fancied herself to have been hungry, and was now confronted with a very handsome dinner, she found that she was too tired to partake of anything but the lightest of repasts. The Earl pressed her in vain to salmon, lamb, green goose, and apricot tartlets: she would take nothing but some soup and a glass of wine.
‘To tell you the truth,’ she said candidly, ‘I feel a trifle sick.’
‘This, I collect, is a reproach to me for having obliged you to come with me!’ said his lordship, in a goaded voice.
‘Oh, no!’ she murmured.
He went on eating his dinner, a heavy frown on his face. Miss Fairfax was wondering whether she would be permitted to go to bed before the Earl’s return from Newark, with (or without) his ward, when one of the servants came into the room with the intelligence that a lady and gentleman had that instant arrived at the inn, and were demanding to see his lordship.
‘A lady and gentleman?’ repeated the Earl. ‘Demanding to see me??
?? He looked towards Miss Fairfax in the liveliest astonishment. ‘This is certainly unexpected!’ he said. ‘Can it be that Lucilla has thought better of her rashness?’
Miss Fairfax, who had risen from the table and gone back to the fireside, did not feel equal to hazarding any conjecture. She agreed that it was indeed unexpected.
It turned out to be more unexpected than the Earl had bargained for. Instead of Miss Gellibrand and her swain, a matron with a face not unlike a parrot’s sailed into the parlour, closely followed by an insipid-looking gentleman in a sad-coloured redingote.
The Earl stood staring, his napkin still grasped in one hand, the other lightly holding the back of his chair. The matron, having paused on the threshold, tottered forward, all the plumes in her beehive-bonnet nodding in sympathy with her evident agitation, and pronounced in thrilling accents, ‘We are in time!’
‘What in the name of heaven does this mean?’ demanded the Earl, looking black as thunder.
Miss Fairfax, who had recognized the newcomers as the Earl’s aunt-in-law and her son, his cousin and heir, blinked at them in considerable surprise.
Lady Wilfrid Drayton paid no heed to her, but said, addressing her nephew, ‘It means, Charles, that I am in time to stop your doing what you will regret all your life!’
‘Upon my word, ma’am, someone seems to have been busy! What the – what do you know of the matter, pray?’
‘I know all!’ said the lady comprehensively.
‘The devil you do! Perhaps you will be so obliging as to tell me, ma’am, to which of my servants you are indebted for your information?’
‘It does not signify talking!’ she said, sweeping this home-question aside. ‘Most solemnly I warn you, Charles, that you are making a terrible mistake!’
Her son, who had been engaged in sucking the knob of his cane, removed it from his mouth to say, ‘Knowing it to be a matter closely concerning us –’
‘I know nothing of the sort,’ interrupted the Earl, looking at him with cold contempt. ‘In fact, I cannot conceive what the devil you mean by thrusting yourself into my affairs!’
‘Your actions are the concern of all your family,’ announced Lady Wilfrid. ‘When I learned how you had set off with this woman, and with what disastrous purpose, I saw my duty plain before me!’
A slight flush rose to the Earl’s cheeks. ‘Be good enough, if you please, to speak of Miss Fairfax with civility, ma’am!’
‘I shall never believe that the whole affair has not been her doing!’
‘That, ma’am, is not a question for you to decide!’
‘You may say what you please, but I know better. I knew her for a designing female the instant I clapped eyes on her, though never did I dream she would have gone to these lengths!’
‘Miss Fairfax’s conduct,’ said the Earl surprisingly, ‘has throughout been unimpeachable!’
‘My poor Charles, you have been sadly deceived! As a mother, as your aunt, I most earnestly implore you to give up this project, and return with us to London! Do not allow your own good judgment to be overcome by the wiles of an unprincipled woman!’
‘You are labouring under a misapprehension, ma’am,’ said the Earl, meticulously polite, but with a dangerous sparkle in his eyes. ‘So far from my having acted upon Miss Fairfax’s instigation, she is here wholly against her will!’
The effect of this pronouncement was hardly what he had expected. Lady Wilfrid uttered a shriek, and exclaimed, ‘Merciful heavens!’ while her son turned a pair of goggling eyes upon Miss Fairfax, saying,
‘Good Gad! You don’t say so, cousin! Well, if this does not beat all! ’Pon my soul, I would not have thought it of you, no, damme, I would not!’
