‘Yes – but for my curst leg! However, if I hadn’t taken a toss I daresay I might never have met Damerel, so I don’t regret it.’
‘It must be very agreeable to be able to talk with someone who enters into the things you care for most,’ she agreed.
‘It is,’ he said frankly. ‘What’s more, he knows better than to ask me, a dozen times in an hour, how I feel, or if I wouldn’t like another pillow! I don’t mean thatyoudo so, but Nurse is enough to throw a saint into a pelter! I wish you had not brought her: Marston can do all I need – and without putting me in a bad skin!’ he added, with his rueful, twisted smile.
‘My dear, I couldn’t have kept her away from you! Tell meoncehow you find yourself this morning, and then I promise – word of a Lanyon! – I won’t ask you again!’
‘Oh, I’m well enough!’ he replied shortly. She said nothing, and after a moment he relented, and grinned at her. ‘If youmustknow, I feel devilish – as though I had dislocated every joint in my body! But Bentworth assures me it’s no such thing, so my aches are of no consequence, and will soon go off, I daresay. Let us play piquet – that is, if you mean to stay for a while? You’ll find some cards somewhere – on that table, I think.’
She was fairly well satisfied, although upon first entering the room she had thought he looked pale and drawn. It was not to be expected, however, that a boy of such frail physique should not have been badly shaken by his fall; that he was not in one of his testy, unapproachable moods encouraged her to hope that he had not suffered any very serious set-back. When Nurse presently came in, to put a fresh compress round his swollen ankle, Venetia saw, at a glance, that she too was taking an optimistic view of his situation, and was still more cheered. Nurse might show a lamentable want of tact in her management of Aubrey, but she knew his constitution better than anyone, and if she, with years of experience at her back, saw more cause for scolding than for solicitude an anxious sister could banish foreboding.
Upon Marston’s coming into the room with a glass of milk for the invalid Venetia drew Nurse into the adjoining dressing-room, saying, as she shut the door: ‘You know what he is! If he thoughtwecared whether he drank it or no he would refuse to touch it, just to teach us not to treat him as though he were a baby!’
‘Oh, yes!’ said Nurse bitterly. ‘Anything Marston or his lordship tells him he’ll do, just as if it was them that had looked after him from the day he was born! For all the useIam I might as well be back at home – not that I mean to leave this house until he does, nor ever did, so his lordship could have spared his breath!’
‘Why, did he try to send you away?’ Venetia asked, surprised.
‘No, and I should hope he knew better than to think he could! It was me saying to Master Aubrey that if he preferred to have Marston to wait on him I’d as lief pack up and go – well, miss, he was so twitty and troublesome last night that anyone might be excused for being put out! But as for meaning it, his lordship should have known better, and no need at all for him to remind me that it wouldn’t do for you to visit here without I’m in the house! I know that well enough, and better you shouldn’t come at all, Miss Venetia! It’s my belief Master Aubrey wouldn’t care if neither of us came next or nigh him, not while he can clutter up his bed with a lot of unchristian books, and lie there talking to his lordship about his nasty heathen gods!’
‘He would very soon wish for you if he were to be really ill,’ Venetia said soothingly. ‘I think too that he is just at the age when he’s not a child, but not quite a man either, and excessively jealous of his dignity. Do you remember how uncivil Conway was to you at very much the same age? But when he came home from Spain he didn’t care how much you cosseted and scolded him!’
Since Conway held the chief place in her heart Nurse would by no means admit that he had ever conducted himself in any way that fell short of perfection, but she disclosed that his lordship had said much the same thing as had Venetia about Master Aubrey. She added that no one understood better than she Master Aubrey’s hatred of his disability, and his passionate desire to show himself as hearty and as independent as his more fortunate contemporaries: an unprecedented announcement which furnished Venetia with a pretty accurate notion of his lordship’s skill in handling hostile and elderly females.
There could be no doubt that he had succeeded in considerably mollifying Nurse. She might resent Aubrey’s preference for his society, but she could not wholly condemn anyone who,besides showing so proper a regard for Aubrey’s well-being, managed to keep him in cheerful spirits under conditions calculated to cast him into a state of irritable gloom.
‘I’m not one to condone sin, Miss Venetia,’ she said austerely, ‘but nor I’m not one to deny anyone their due neither, and this I will say: he couldn’t behave kinder to Master Aubrey, not if he was the Reverend himself.’ She added, after an inward struggle: ‘And for all he’d no need to tell me what my duty is to you, Miss Venetia, it was a sign of grace I didn’t think to see in him, and there’s no saying that the Lord won’t have mercy on him, if he was to forsake his way – not but what salvation is far from the wicked, as I’ve told you often and often, miss.’
This lapse into pessimism notwithstanding, Venetia was encouraged to think that Nurse was fairly well reconciled to her sojourn under an unhallowed roof. Aubrey, when regaled with the passage, said that her change of heart could only have arisen from Damerel’s having ridden off to Thirsk for the express purpose of buying a roll of lint.
‘As a matter of fact, it was no such thing: he went on some business of his own, but when Nurse started grumbling about the lint – it’s for my ankle, you know! – he said he would procure some, and she took it into her head he was going to Thirsk for no other reason. Up till then she wasn’t talking about his kindness, I promise you! She said he roared in the congregation.’
‘She didn’t!’ Venetia exclaimed, awed.
‘Yes, she did. Do you know where it comes? We could not find it, though we looked in all the likeliest places.’
‘So you repeated it to Damerel!’
‘Of course I did! I knew he wouldn’t care a rush for what Nurse said of him.’
‘I expect he enjoyed it,’ Venetia said, smiling. ‘When did he set out for Thirsk?’
‘Oh, quite early! Now you put me in mind of it he gaveme a message for you: something about being obliged to go to Thirsk, and hoping you’d pardon him. I forget! It was of no consequence: just doing the civil! I told him there was not the least need. He said he thought he should be back again by noon – oh, yes! and that he trusted you wouldn’t have gone away by then. Venetia, pray look on that table, and see if Tytler is there! Nurse must have moved it when she bandaged my ankle, for I had been reading it, and only laid it down when you came in. She can’t come near me without meddling!Essay on the Principles of Translation– yes, that’s it: thank you!’
‘I think, if you should not objectverymuch to my leaving you, that I’ll take a turn in the garden,’ said Venetia, handing him the book, and watching him in some amusement as he found his place in it.
‘Yes, do!’ said Aubrey absently. ‘They will be plaguing me to eat a nuncheon soon, and I want to finish this.’
She laughed, and was about to leave him when a gentle tap on the door was followed by the entrance of Imber, announcing Mr Yardley.
‘What?’ ejaculated Aubrey, in anything but a gratified tone.
Edward came in, treading cautiously, and wearing his most disapproving face. ‘Well, Aubrey!’ he said heavily. ‘I am glad to see you looking stouter than I had expected.’ He added, in a lower voice, as he clasped Venetia’s hand: ‘This is unfortunate indeed! I knew nothing of what had happened until Ribble told me of it half-an-hour ago! I was never more shocked in my life!’
‘Shocked because I took a toss?’ said Aubrey. ‘Lord, Edward, don’t be such a slow-top!’
Edward’s countenance did not relax; rather it seemed to grow more rigid. He had not exaggerated his state of mind; he was profoundly shocked. He had ridden to Undershaw in happy ignorance, to be met with the alarming tidings that Aubrey had had a bad accident, which had made him instantly fear theworst; and hardly had Ribble reassured him on this head than he was stunned by the further news that Aubrey was lying under Damerel’s roof, with not only Nurse in attendance on him but his sister also. The impropriety of such an arrangement really appalled him; and even when he was made to understand that Venetia was not sleeping at the Priory he could not forebear the thought that any disaster (short of Aubrey’s death, perhaps) would have been less harmful than the chance that had pitchforked her into the company of a libertine whose way of life had for years scandalised the North Riding. The evils of her situation were, in Edward’s view, incalculable; and foremost amongst them was the probability that such a man as Damerel would mistake the inexperience which led her to behave so rashly for the boldness of a born Cytherean, and offer her an intolerable insult.
A level-headed man, Edward did not suppose that Damerel was either so foolhardy or so steeped in villainy as to attempt the seduction of a girl of virtue and quality; but he was very much afraid that Venetia’s open, confiding manners, which he had always deplored, might encourage him to believe that she would welcome his advances; while the peculiar circumstances under which she lived would certainly lead him to think that she had no other protector than a crippled schoolboy.
