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She nodded. ‘Yes. I couldn’t help hearing,’ she answered, a slight quaver in her otherwise solemn voice.
‘We must go back to London at once,’ said the Marquis.
‘Yes,’ agreed Miss Morland.
‘For one thing,’ said the Marquis, ‘I want a change of clothes and for another this Gretna scheme was a piece of nonsense. I am not going to be married in company with that pair. We must have a special licence.’
‘But we are not going to be married,’ said Miss Morland. ‘It was all a jest. I was mad – I never meant to come with you!’
‘You had to come with me,’ retorted the Marquis. ‘I won you and you’re mine.’
Miss Morland was trembling a little. ‘But –’
‘I have been in love with you for months, and you know it!’ said the Marquis.
‘Oh!’ said Miss Morland on the oddest little sob. ‘I did think sometimes that you were not – not indifferent to me, but indeed, indeed this is impossible!’
‘Is it?’ said the Marquis grimly. ‘We’ll see!’
It seemed to Miss Morland that he swooped on her. Certainly she had no time to escape. She was nipped into a crushing embrace, and kissed so hard and so often that she had no breath left to expostulate. The Marquis did at last stop kissing her, but he showed not the least inclination to let her go, but looked down into her eyes, and said in an awe-inspiring voice: ‘Well? Are you going to marry me?’
Miss Morland, quite cowed by such treatment, meekly nodded her head.
Snowdrift
A thin covering of snow already lay on the ground when the Bath and Bristol Light Post Coach set out from Holborn at two o’clock in the afternoon of a bleak December day. Only two hardy gentlemen ventured to ride on the roof; and the inside passengers consisted only of a pessimistic man in a muffler, a stout lady with several bandboxes, a thickset young man with small eyes, and a jowl, a scarlet-coated young lady and a raw-boned countrywoman, who appeared to be her maid.
The scarlet-coated lady and the young man sat opposite each other, and occasionally exchanged glances of acute dislike. Upon their initial encounter in the yard of the White Horse Inn, the gentleman had uttered: ‘You going to Bath? Much good may it do you!’ and the lady had retorted: ‘You travelling upon the stage, Joseph? I had thought you would have gone post!’
‘I am not one to waste my substance,’ had pronounced the gentleman heavily.
Since then they had indulged in no conversation.
The coach was making bad time. At Maidenhead Thicket the snowflakes were swirling dizzily, and the temperature had dropped to an uncomfortably low degree. The young man wrapped himself in a rug; the young lady hummed a defiant tune: she had not provided herself with a rug.
Slower and slower went the coach. At Reading the fat woman got down, and her place was taken by a farmer, who said that he disremembered when there had been such another hard winter, and prophesied that the roads would be six foot under snow by Christmas. The pessimist said that he had known at the outset that they would never reach their destination.
The coach laboured on, but past Theale actually picked up its pace a little, and for perhaps ten minutes encouraged the passengers to suppose that the weather was clearing. Then the snow began to fall more thickly still, the coachman lost his bearings, and the whole equipage lurched off the road into a deep drift.
It was thrown on to its side with some violence. The two outside passengers were hurled over the hedge into a field, and those inside landed in a heap on the near-side door.
The thickset young man was first to extricate himself, and to force open the off-side door. He scrambled through it, rudely thrusting the pessimist out of the way, floundered into deep snow, and fell upon his face, a circumstance which afforded the pessimist a sour pleasure.
The farmer and the young lady were too much occupied with the abigail, who had fallen awkwardly, to notice this interlude. The abigail said in a faint voice: ‘I’ve broke my leg, Miss Sophy.’
‘Oh, Sarah, do not say so!’ besought her mistress.
‘Well, it’s just what she has done,’ said the farmer frankly. ‘We’ll have to get her out of this, missie.’ He hauled himself up to look out through the open door, and shouted: ‘Hi, you! Come and lend a hand with the poor wench here! Lively, now!’
Thus adjured, the thickset young man came back to the coach, asking rather ungraciously what was wanted. He seemed disinclined to lend his aid, and the scarlet-coated young lady, who had been trying unavailingly to move her henchwoman into an easier position, raised a flushed face in which two large gray eyes sparkled with wrath, and uttered: ‘You are the most odious wretch alive, Joseph! Help to lift Sarah out this instant, or I shall tell my grandfather how disobliging you have been!’
‘You may tell him what you choose – if you reach Bath, which you are not now very likely to do, my dear cousin!’ retorted Joseph.
‘You hold your gab, and do what I tell you!’ interposed the farmer. ‘Jump out first, missie: you’ll only be in my way here!’
Miss Trent, pausing only to pick up her cousin’s abandoned rug, allowed herself to be hoisted through the door. Joseph received her from the farmer, and lost no time in setting her down. Her feet sank above the ankles in the snow, but the pessimistic man helped her to reach the road. By the time she had spread the rug out on the snow Sarah had been extricated from the coach, and the coachman was helping the guard to unharness one of the leaders.
Sarah was laid on the rug; Miss Trent, her bonnet fast whitening under the gathering flakes, knelt beside her; and the coachman informed the assembled company that there was no need for anyone to worry, since the guard would ride on at once to Woolhampton, and get some kind of a vehicle to fetch them all in.
