Arabella

Mr Beaumaris returned to his London house in time to partake of a late breakfast on Tuesday morning, having been absent for six days. It had been considered probable by his dependants that he would be away for a full week, but as he rarely gave any positive information on his movements, counted no cost, and had accustomed his highly-paid servants to live in a constant state of expectation of being obliged, at a moment’s notice, to provide suitable entertainment for himself, or for a score of guests, his premature arrival caused no one any dismay. It caused one member of his household a degree of joy bordering on delirium. A ragged little mongrel, whose jauntily curled tail had been clipped unhappily between his legs for six interminable days, and who had spent the major part of this time curled into a ball on the rug outside his master’s door, refusing all sustenance, including plates of choice viands prepared by the hands of the great M. Alphonse himself, came tumbling down the stairs, uttering canine shrieks, and summoned up enough strength to career madly round in circles before collapsing in an exhausted, panting heap at Mr Beaumaris’s feet. It spoke volumes for the light in which Mr Beaumaris’s whims were regarded by his retainers that the condition to which his disreputable protégé had wilfully reduced himself brought every member of the household who might have been considered in some way responsible into the hall to exonerate himself from all blame. Even M. Alphonse mounted the stairs from his basement kingdom to describe to Mr Beaumaris in detail the chicken-broth, the ragout of rabbit, the shin of beef, and the marrow-bone with which he had tried to tempt Ulysses’ vanished appetite. Brough broke in on his Gallic monologue to assure Mr Beaumaris that he for one had left nothing undone to restore Ulysses’ interest in life, even going to the lengths of importing a stray cat into the house, in the hope that this outrage would galvanise one notoriously unsympathetic towards all felines to activity. Painswick, with a smug air that rendered him instantly odious to his colleagues, drew attention to the fact that it had been his superior understanding of Ulysses’ processes of thought which Mr Beaumaris had to thank for his finding himself still in possession of his low-born companion: he had conceived the happy notion of giving Ulysses one of Mr Beaumaris’s gloves to guard.

Mr Beaumaris, who had picked Ulysses up, paid no heed to all these attempts at self-justification, but addressed himself to his adorer. ‘What a fool you are!’ he observed. ‘No, I have the greatest dislike of having my face licked, and must request you to refrain. Quiet, Ulysses! quiet! I am grateful to you for your solicitude, but you must perceive that I am in the enjoyment of my customary good health. I would I could say the same of you. You have once more reduced yourself to skin and bone, my friend, a process which I shall take leave to inform you I consider as unjust as it is ridiculous. Anyone setting eyes on you would suppose that I grudged you even the scraps from my table!’ He added, without the slightest change of voice, and without raising his eyes from the creature in his arms: ‘You would also appear to have bereft my household of its senses, so that the greater part of it, instead of providing me with the breakfast I stand in need of, is engaged in excusing itself from any suspicion of blame and – I may add – doing itself no good thereby.’

Ulysses, to whom the mere sound of Mr Beaumaris’s voice was ecstasy, looked adoringly up into his face, and contrived to lick the hand that was caressing him. On his servants, Mr Beaumaris’s voice operated in quite another fashion: they dispersed rapidly, Painswick to lay out a complete change of raiment; Brough to set the table in the breakfast-parlour; Alphonse to carve at lightning speed several slices of a fine York ham, and to cast eggs and herbs into a pan; and various underlings to grind coffee-beans, cut bread, and set kettles on to boil. Mr Beaumaris tucked Ulysses under one arm, picked up the pile of letters from the table in the hall, and strolled with them into his library. To the zealous young footman who hastened to fling open the door for him, he said: ‘Food for this abominable animal!’ – a command which, relayed swiftly to the kitchen, caused M. Alphonse to command his chief assistant instantly to abandon his allotted task, and to prepare a dish calculated to revive the flagging appetite of a Cambacérès.

Mr Beaumaris, tossing a pile of invitations and bills aside, came upon a billet which had not been delivered through the medium of the Penny Post, and which was superscribed, urgent. The writing, certainly feminine, was unknown to him. ‘Now, what have we here, Ulysses?’ he said, breaking the wafer.

They had not very much. ‘Dear Mr Beaumaris,’ ran the missive, ‘I should be very much obliged to you if you would do me the honour of calling in Park Street as soon as may be convenient to you, and requesting the butler to inform me of the event. I remain, Ever yours most sincerely, Arabella Tallant.’

This model of the epistolary art, which had caused Miss Tallant so much heart-searching, and so many ruined sheets of hot-pressed notepaper, did not fail of its effect. Mr Beaumaris cast aside the rest of his correspondence, set Ulysses down on the floor, and bent his powerful mind to the correct interpretation of these few, heavily underlined, words. He was still engaged on this task when Brough entered the room to announce that his breakfast awaited him. He carried the letter into the parlour, and propped it against the coffee-pot, feeling that he had not yet got to the bottom of it. At his feet, Ulysses, repairing with enthusiasm the ravages of his protracted fast, was rapidly consuming a meal which might have been judged excessive for the satisfaction of the appetite of a boa-constrictor.

‘This,’ said Mr Beaumaris, ‘was delivered here three days ago, Ulysses!’

Ulysses, whose keen olfactory sense had discovered the chicken giblets cunningly hidden in the middle of his plate, could spare no more than a perfunctory wag of the tail for this speech; and to Mr Beaumaris’s subsequent demand to know what could be in the wind he returned no answer at all. Mr Beaumaris pushed away the remains of his breakfast, a gesture which was shortly to operate alarmingly on the sensibilities of the artist below stairs, and waved aside his valet, who had just entered the room. ‘My town dress!’ he said.

‘I have it ready, sir,’ responded Painswick, with dignity. ‘There was just one matter which I should perhaps mention.’

‘Not now,’ said Mr Beaumaris, his eyes still bent upon Miss Tallant’s tantalising communication.

Painswick bowed, and withdrew. The matter was not, in his fastidious estimation of sufficient importance to justify him in intruding upon his employer’s evident preoccupation; nor did he broach it when Mr Beaumaris presently came upstairs to change his riding-dress for the blue coat, yellow pantaloons, chaste waistcoat, and gleaming Hessians with which he was wont to gratify the eyes of beholders in the Metropolis. This further abstention was due, however, more to the sense of irretrievable loss which had invaded his soul on the discovery that a shirt was missing from Mr Beaumaris’s execrably packed portmanteau than from a respect for his master’s abstraction. He confined his conversation to bitter animadversions on the morals of inn-servants, and the depths of depravity to which some unknown boots had sunk in treating Mr Beaumaris’s second-best pair of Hessians with a blacking fit only to be used on the footwear of country squires. He could hardly flatter himself that Mr Beaumaris, swiftly and skilfully arranging the folds of his neckcloth in the mirror, or delicately paring his well-cared-for finger-nails, paid the least heed to his discourse, but it served in some measure to relieve his lacerated feelings.

Leaving his valet to repair the damage to his wardrobe, and his faithful admirer to sleep off the effects of a Gargantuan meal, Mr Beaumaris left the house, and walked to Park Street. Here he was met by the intelligence that my lord, my lady, and Miss Tallant had gone out in the barouche to the British Museum, where Lord Elgin’s much disputed marbles were now being exhibited, in a wooden shed built for their accommodation. Mr Beaumaris thanked the butler for this information, called up a passing hackney, and directed the jarvey to drive him to Great Russell Street.

He found Miss Tallant, her disinterested gaze fixed upon a sculptured slab from the Temple of Nike Apteros, enduring a lecture from Lord Bridlington, quite in his element. It was Lady Bridlington who first perceived his tall, graceful figure advancing across the saloon, for since she had naturally seen the collection of antiquities when it was on view at Lord Elgin’s residence in Park Lane, and again when it was removed to Burlington House, she felt herself to be under no obligation to look at it a third time, and was more profitably engaged in keeping a weather eye cocked for any of her acquaintances who might have elected to visit the British Museum that morning. Upon perceiving Mr Beaumaris, she exclaimed in accents of delight: ‘Mr Beaumaris! What a lucky chance, to be sure! How do you do? How came you not to be at Kirkmichael’s Venetian Breakfast yesterday? Such a charming party! I am persuaded you must have enjoyed it! Six hundred guests – only fancy!’

‘Amongst so many, ma’am, I am flattered to know that you remarked my absence,’ responded Mr Beaumaris, shaking hands. ‘I have been out of town for some days, and only returned this morning. Miss Tallant! ’Servant, Bridlington!’

Arabella, who had started violently upon hearing his name uttered, and quickly turned her head, took his hand in a clasp which seemed to him slightly convulsive, and raised a pair of strained, enquiring eyes to his face. He smiled reassuringly down into them, and bent a courteous ear to Lady Bridlington, who was making haste to assure him that she had come to the Museum merely to show the Grecian treasure to Arabella, who had not been privileged to see them on their first showing. Lord Bridlington, not averse from any aggrandisement to his audience, began in his consequential way to expound his views on the probable artistic value of the fragments, a recreation which would no doubt have occupied him for a considerable period of time had Mr Beaumaris not cut him short by saying, in his most languid way; ‘The pronouncements of West, and of Sir Thomas Lawrence, must, I imagine, have established the ësthetic worth of these antiquities. As to the propriety of their acquisition, we may, each one of us, hold to our own opinion.’

‘Mr Beaumaris, do you care to visit Somerset House with us?’ interrupted Lady Bridlington. ‘I do not know how it comes about that we were not there upon Opening Day, but such a rush of engagements have we been swept up in that I am sure it is a wonder we have time to turn round! Arabella, my love, I daresay you are quite tired of staring at all these sadly damaged bits of frieze, or whatever it may be called – not but what I declare I could feast my eyes on it for ever! – and will be glad to look at pictures for a change!’

Arabella assented to it, throwing so beseeching a look at Mr Beaumaris that he was induced to accept a seat in the barouche.

During the drive to the Strand, Lady Bridlington was too much occupied in catching the eyes of chance acquaintances, and drawing their attention to the distinguished occupant of one of the back seats by bowing and waving to them, to have much time for conversation. Arabella sat with her eye downcast, and her hand fidgeting with the ribands tied round the handle of her sunshade; and Mr Beaumaris was content to watch her, taking due note of her pallor, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes. It was left to Lord Bridlington to entertain the company, which he did very willingly, prosing uninterruptedly until the carriage turned into the courtyard of Somerset House.

Once inside the building, Lady Bridlington, whose ambitions had for some time been centred on promoting a match between Arabella and the Nonpareil, seized the first opportunity that offered of drawing Frederick away from the interesting pair. She stated her fervent desire to see the latest example of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s art, and dragged him away from a minute inspection of the President’s latest enormous canvas to search for this fashionable masterpiece.

‘In what way can I serve you, Miss Tallant?’ said Mr Beaumaris quietly.

‘You – you had my letter?’ faltered Arabella, glancing fleetingly up into his face.

‘This morning. I went instantly to Park Street, and, apprehending that the matter was of some urgency, followed you to Bloomsbury.’

‘How kind – how very kind you are!’ uttered Arabella, in accents which could scarcely have been more mournful had she discovered him to have been a monster of cruelty.

‘What is it, Miss Tallant?’

Bearing all the appearance of one rapt in admiration of the canvas before her, she said: ‘I daresay you may have forgot all about it, sir, but – but you told me once – that is, you were so obliging as to say – that if my sentiments underwent a change –’

Mr Beaumaris mercifully intervened to put an end to her embarrassment. ‘I have certainly not forgotten it,’ he said. ‘I perceive Lady Charnwood to be approaching, so let us move on! Am I to understand, ma’am, that your sentiments have undergone a change?’

Miss Tallant, obediently walking on to stare at one of the new Associates’ Probationary Pictures (described in her catalogue as ‘An Old Man soliciting a Mother for Her Daughter who was shewn Unwilling to consent to so disproportionate a match’) said baldly: ‘Yes.’

‘My surroundings,’ said Mr Beaumaris, ‘make it impossible for me to do more than assure you that you have made me the happiest man in England, ma’am.’

‘Thank you,’ said Arabella, in a stifled tone. ‘I shall try to be a – to be a comformable wife, sir!’

Mr Beaumaris’s lips twitched, but he replied with perfect gravity: ‘For my part, I shall try to be an unexceptionable husband, ma’am!’

‘Oh, yes, I am sure you will be!’ said Arabella naïvely. ‘If only –’

‘If only – ?’ prompted Mr Beaumaris, as she broke off.

‘Nothing!’ she said hastily. ‘Oh, dear, there is Mr Epworth!’

‘A common bow in passing will be enough to damp his pretensions,’ said Mr Beaumaris. ‘If that does not suffice, I will look at him through my glass.’

This made her give an involuntary gurgle of laughter, but an instant later she was serious again, and evidently struggling to find the words with which to express herself.

‘What very awkward places we do choose in which to propose to one another!’ remarked Mr Beaumaris, guiding her gently towards a red-plush couch. ‘Let us hope that if we sit down, and appear to be engrossed in conversation no one will have the bad manners to interrupt us!’

‘I do not know what you must think of me!’ said Arabella.

‘I expect I had better not tell you until we find ourselves in a more retired situation,’ he replied. ‘You always blush so delightfully when I pay you compliments that it might attract attention to ourselves.’

She hesitated, and then turned resolutely towards him, tightly gripping his sunshade, and saying: ‘Mr Beaumaris, you do indeed wish to marry me?’

‘Miss Tallant, I do indeed wish to marry you!’ he asserted.

‘And – and you are so wealthy that my – my fortune can mean nothing to you?’

‘Nothing at all, Miss Tallant.’

She drew an audible breath. ‘Then – will you marry me at once?’ she asked.

Now, what the devil’s the meaning of this? thought Mr Beaumaris, startled. Can that damned young cub have been getting up to more mischief since I left town?

‘At once?’ he repeated, voice and countenance quite impassive.

‘Yes!’ said Arabella desperately. ‘You must know that I have the greatest dislike of – of all formality, and – and the nonsense that always accompanies the announcement of an engagement! I – I should wish to be married very quietly – in fact, in the strictest secrecy – and before anyone has guessed – that I have accepted your very obliging offer!’

The wretched youth must have been deeper under the hatches than I guessed, thought Mr Beaumaris, and still she dare not tell me the truth! Does she really mean to carry out this outrageous suggestion, or does she only think that she means it? A virtuous man would undoubtedly, at this juncture, disclose that there is not the smallest need for these measures. What very unamusing lives virtuous men must lead!

‘You may think it off of me, but I have always thought it would be so very romantic to elope!’ pronounced Papa’s daughter defiantly.

Mr Beaumaris, whose besetting sin was thought by many to be his exquisite enjoyment of the ridiculous, turned a deaf ear to the promptings of his better self, and replied instantly. ‘How right you are! I wonder I should not have thought of an elopement myself! The announcement of the engagement of two such notable figures as ourselves must provoke a degree of comment and congratulation which would not be at all to our taste!’

‘Exactly so!’ nodded Arabella, relieved to find that he saw the matter in so reasonable a light.

‘Consider, too, the chagrin of such as Horace Epworth!’ said Mr Beaumaris, growing momently more enamoured of the scheme. ‘You would be driven to distraction by their ravings!’

‘Well, I do think I might be,’ said 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 Nollekens’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 of 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!’