Джорджетт Хейер - Arabella

“There is not a doubt of it. Moreover, the formality of making application to your father for permission to address you is quite antiquated, and we shall do well to dispense with it. If some little feeling still exists in the minds of old-fashioned persons against marrying minors out of hand, it need not concern us, after all.”

“N-no,” agreed Arabella, rather doubtfully. “Do you think people will—will be very much shocked, sir?”

“No,” said Mr. Beaumaris, with perfect truth. “No one will be in the least shocked. When would you like to elope?”

“Would tomorrow be too soon?” asked Arabella anxiously.

Mr. Beaumaris might wish that his love would give him her confidence, but it would have been idle to have denied that he was hugely enjoying himself. Life with Arabella would contain few dull moments; and although her estimate of his morals was unflattering enough to have discomposed any man of sensibility it left his withers unwrung, since he was well-aware that her assumption of his readiness to behave in so improper a fashion sprang from an innocence which he found enchanting. He replied with great promptness: “Not a moment too soon! But for the recollection that there are one or two preparations which perhaps I should make I should have suggested that we should leave this building together at once.”

“No, that would be impossible,” said Arabella seriously. “In fact—I do not know very much about such things, but I cannot but feel that it will be excessively difficult for me to escape from Park Street without anyone’s knowing! For I must carry a valise with me, at least, besides my dressing-case, and how may it be contrived? Unless I crept out at dead of night, of course, but it would have to be very late indeed, for the porter always waits up for Lord Bridlington to come in. And I might fall asleep,” she added candidly.

“I have a constitutional dislike of eloping at dead of night,” said Mr. Beaumaris firmly. “Such exploits entail the use of rope-ladders, I am credibly informed, and the thought of being surprised perhaps by the Watch in the very act of throwing this up to your window I find singularly unnerving.”

“Nothing,” said Arabella, “would prevail upon me to climb down a rope-ladder! Besides, my bedroom is at the back of the house.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Beaumaris, “you had better leave me to make the necessary arrangements.”

“Oh, yes!” responded Arabella gratefully. “I am sure you will know just how it should be contrived!”

This reflection upon his past career Mr. Beaumaris bore with an unmoved countenance. “Just so, Miss Tallant,” he said gravely. “Now, it occurs to me that, tomorrow being Wednesday, there will be a gala night at Vauxhall Gardens.”

“Yes, Lady Bridlington thought at one time of taking me to it,” agreed Arabella. “But then, you know, she recalled that it is the night of the party at Uxbridge House.”

“A very dull affair, I have no doubt. I shall invite Lady Bridlington—and Bridlington, I suppose—to do me the honour of joining my party at Vauxhall. You will naturally be included in this invitation, and at a convenient moment during the course of the evening, we shall slip away together to the street entrance, where my chaise will be awaiting us.”

Arabella considered this proposition, and discovered two objections to it. “Yes, but how very odd it would seem to Lady Bridlington if you were to go away in the middle of your own party!”

The reflection that Lady Bridlington might well deem this eccentricity the least odd feature of the affair Mr. Beaumaris kept to himself. He said: “Very true. A note shall be delivered to her after our departure.”

“Well, I suppose that would be better than nothing,” Arabella conceded. “Oh, will she ever forgive me for treating her so?” This involuntary exclamation seemed to escape her without her knowledge. She raised the second of her objections, “And in any event it will not answer, because I cannot take a valise to Vauxhall!”

“That you will also leave to me,” said Mr. Beaumaris.

“But you cannot call in Park Street to fetch it!” she pointed out.

“Certainly not.”

“And I will not elope without a change of clothes, or my hairbrushes, or my tooth-powder!” declared Arabella.

“Most improper,” agreed Mr. Beaumaris. “All these things shall be forthcoming.”

“You cannot buy such things for me!” gasped Arabella, shocked.

“I assure you I should enjoy doing it.”

She stared at him, and then exclaimed wretchedly: “How dreadful it all is! I never, never thought I should come to this! I daresay it seems the merest commonplace to you, but to me—But I see that it is of no use to cavil!”

The tell-tale muscle at the corner of Mr. Beaumaris’s mouth quivered, and was sternly repressed. “Well, perhaps not precisely commonplace,” he said. “It so happens that I have not previously eloped with anyone. However, to a man of ordinary ingenuity the affair should not prove impossible to achieve creditably, I trust. I perceive Mrs. Penkridge, who is hoping to catch either your eye or mine. We shall permit her to do so, and while she asks you to say if you do not think Nolleken’s bust over there most like, I shall go in search of Lady Bridlington, and engage her to bring you to Vauxhall tomorrow evening.”

“Oh, pray do not! I dislike Mrs. Penkridge excessively!” she whispered.

“Yes, an odious woman, but impossible to avoid,” he returned.

Seeing him rise to his feet, Mrs. Penkridge bore down upon him, her acidulated smile on her lips. Mr. Beaumaris greeted her with his smooth civility, stayed for perhaps a minute, and then, to Arabella’s indignation, made his bow, and went off in the direction of the next room.

Either Lady Bridlington proved hard to find, or he must have fallen a victim to her garrulity, Arabella thought, for it seemed a very long time before she set eyes on him again. When he did reappear, Lady Bridlington was walking beside him, wreathed in smiles. Arabella made her excuses to Mrs. Penkridge, and went across to her godmother, who greeted her with the cheerful intelligence that Mr. Beaumaris had formed the most delightful scheme for an evening at Vauxhall. “I did not scruple to accept, my love, for I knew you would like it of all things!” she said.

“Yes,” said Arabella, feeling that she was now committed to an irrevocable and reprehensible course which she would no doubt regret her life long. “I mean, oh, yes! how very agreeable!”

Upon leaving Somerset House, Mr. Beaumaris got into a hackney, and drove to the Red Lion Inn. What he learned at that hostelry threw abundant light on to Arabella’s conduct. Since he had his own reasons for believing Arabella’s heart to have been won long since, he was not in the least wounded by the discovery that she proposed to marry him as a means of rescuing her brother from debt, but, on the contrary, considerably amused. Having paid Bertram’s bill at the inn, and received his watch back from the landlord, he returned to his own house in yet another hackney.

The same delight in the ridiculous which had made him wear a dandelion in his button-hole for three consecutive days for no better purpose than to enjoy the discomfiture of his misguided friends and copyists made him deeply appreciative of the situation in which he now found himself; and he beguiled the tedium of the drive to Mount Street in wondering when it would cross his absurd love’s mind that the disclosure, following hard upon the wedding-ceremony, that she required a large sum of money from him without a moment’s loss of time, might be productive of a little awkwardness. He could not resist picturing the scene, and was still laughing softly when he reached his house, a circumstance which considerably surprised his butler.

“Send round to the stables for my tilbury, will you, Brough?” he said. “And desire Painswick—oh, you’re there, are you?” he added, as his valet descended the stairs. “I want to hear no more about missing shirts, on which excessively boring subject I can see from your expression you are prepared to discourse at length, but you may tell me this! Where is the letter I gave into your hands to be delivered at the Red Lion, to a Mr. Anstey, and why did you not tell me that it had not been so delivered?”

“You may perhaps recall, sir,” said Painswick reproachfully, “that I mentioned to you while you sat at breakfast that there was a matter which I deemed it my duty to bring to your notice. Upon which, sir, you said, Not now.”

“Did I? I had no idea you could be so easily silenced. Where is the letter?”

“I placed it, sir, on the bottom of the pile that was awaiting you on the table here,” replied Painswick, tacitly disclaiming further responsibility.

“In that case it is in the library. Thank you: that is all.”

Ulysses, who had been lying stretched out in the library, enjoying the sleep of the replete, awoke at Mr. Beaumaris’s entrance, yawned, got up, shook himself, sneezed several times, stretched, and indicated by his cocked ears and wagging tail that he was now ready for any adventure.

“I am glad to see you restored to your usual self,” said Mr. Beaumaris, running through the mass of his neglected correspondence, and picking up his own letter to Bertram. “You know, you should not have dissuaded me from going out again that evening! Just look what has come of it! And yet I don’t know. I would not have missed this morning’s interview for a thousand pounds! I suppose you think that I am behaving very badly? I am, of course, but do me the justice to own that she deserves it for being such an adorable little fool!”