“Decidedly, you mortify your flesh in enduring this evening! I am even more in your debt, sir. Do gentlemen such as yourself patronise the Muslin Company? Or is that reserved for an elder set?”
If I had expected to jar his complacency — excite his consciousness of his father’s affairs — I was to be disappointed.
“I spoke of those who possess means,” he reminded me, “not merely birth. The High Flyers scorn those of us whose hearts are ampler than our purses; and if I may be so coarse as to declare it, Miss Austen, your genteel ladies are much the same. I have a title — a certain breeding — but I am heir to a château presently in ruins somewhere in the Auvergne, and the doors of the ton are not always open to me, you understand. When the gift of friendship is offered — as Mrs. Latouche offers it — I should be a fool to do other than honour her. Presently she will beg me to play the pianoforte — that is my gift — and after a little show of modest unwillingness, I shall oblige. It is possible I may have to earn my bread in such a way, with time.”
“Surely not! Even in England there are any number of expensive young men, whose fortunes are unequal to their births,” I persisted. “Second sons, for instance — or seventh sons. Surely they shift and contrive?”
“You think me suited to the Church?” said he, with a sardonic lift of the brow. “My father’s cleverness and my mother’s art are my sole inheritances, Miss Austen; neither is given to a pious turn. I had much better marry my fortune — if any schoolroom chit possessed of means will entertain my suit. That is the solution so many of your second sons employ. But which heiress? Perhaps Miss East will have me, if I can but acquire a taste for reading.”
The cynicism of the speech should have been an effrontery, had it not been uttered with a boy’s painful bitterness; and for an instant, I glimpsed the raw youth full-blown behind the polished manners, and pitied Count Julien. He reminded me a little of my Willoughby — born to a station he could not maintain, but for a desperate gaming — the courting of aged relatives — and finally, the sale of his soul in pursuit of an heiress. Society is reckless, in teaching its youth to despise honest labour.
“If not the Church, then consider the Law,” I suggested. “Or, my dear Count—! You might be endlessly useful as a secretary, particularly among such men as require translations from the French! Consider the realm of politics. Surely with your father’s connexions … I know of an Earl’s son, Charles Malverley, who finds no shame in such a situation. … ”
Count Julien rose abruptly from his chair, tho’ the second course was hardly begun. “I can well believe that Malverley is insensible to shame,” he said, in a voice tense and low. “He has no feelings to offend. You must forgive me, Miss Austen — I find I cannot support this party after all.”
He would have quitted the room on these words, but that Mrs. Latouche clapped her hands, and said with obvious delight, “Julien! Do you mean to play? His performance on the pianoforte is most superior, I assure you.” With effort, and an enchanting smile, the impoverished nobleman bowed. “Of course, chère madame,” he said. “You have only to call the tune.”
IT WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST EXQUISITE music I have ever been privileged to hear. His fingers moved with a delicacy and precision that lacked nothing in skill; but the emotions they conjured forth owed everything to passion. I had only to listen once to Count Julien d’Entraigues, to know that in him I had met a young man of complex forces; a man whose obvious charm hid a subtler, more potent self; a man who might be capable of anything.
I quitted the house on Portman Square not long after his hands had stilled, and the sweetness of the final notes died away in the air. There seemed nothing more to keep us in that over-furnished drawing-room.
“Beethoven, I think,” Eliza murmured as our hackney pulled up in Sloane Street; and I was still sufficiently bemused — canvassing every detail, every word of my conversation with the Frenchman that evening— that I failed to pay sufficient attention to her words, or even to Eliza herself. I was already mounting the stairs as she paid off the jarvey; I had opened the door — it had been left on the latch — and had stepped into the front passage as the hackney pulled away. It was only as I turned to pull off my gloves and remove my bonnet, that I caught Eliza’s sharp cry.
Chapter 24
The Gentleman in His Cups
Monday, 29 April 1811, cont.
SHE LAY IN A CRUMPLED HEAP OF FEATHERS AND silk on the flagway, but a yard from the door.
“Eliza!” I cried in horror. “Manon — Manon, come quickly! Your mistress has swooned!”
I hastened back across the threshold and knelt over the limp form. Eliza’s arms were flung above her head, and her reticule had slipped from her hand; in the glow of the streetlamp her pallor was dreadful.
“Good God, what can have happened?” I placed my arm behind her shoulders to support her, and raised her from the stones. She groaned pitiably.
“Sacre dieu!” Manon muttered beside me. She wore her nightdress and cap; the faint scent of lavender rose from the fresh linen on the chill night air. The maid’s fingers, where they touched my arm, were icy; and I saw that she had not stayed even to don a dressing gown. “Let us take her inside.”
I grasped Eliza’s torso, and Manon supported her knees; and so we half-carried, half-dragged my sister’s lifeless form inside the house. Madame Bigeon was standing in the front passage, her candle raised, her aged face piteously crumpled.
“Pauvre madame! She fainted?”
“I must suppose it to be so — and then struck her head, perhaps, on the flagway. She is certainly insensible.”
“With that little indisposition, and her delicate constitution — she ought not to have gone out. I told Monsieur Henri how it should be, if he left her — how she would be gay to the point of dissipation, at the very risk of her life—”
“Lay her on the sopha, Manon, and Madame Bigeon — some hartshorn, please, or feathers we might burn beneath her nose—”
“Brandy is what she requires,” Madame Bigeon said bluntly, and turned towards the kitchen.
We settled Eliza on the sopha, and I bent to untie her bonnet strings. Manon threw a log on the drawing-room fire, which had been allowed to go out, and began to work the bellows.
“Never mind that! Chafe her wrists,” I commanded, and removed the bonnet.
Eliza groaned more violently than before, and her eyelids fluttered open. Then, with an expression of acute agony, she murmured, “Oh, Lord! My head,” and fell back once more into a swoon.
“I shall step next door to Mr. Haden’s,” I said hurriedly, and ran for the surgeon.
“SHE WAS STRUCK A FEARSOME BLOW FROM BEHIND,” I told Mr. Chizzlewit when he called in Sloane Street this morning, in answer to the summons I had penned in the wee hours and despatched at first light in the hands of Henry’s manservant. “The instrument was a cobblestone, Mr. Haden believes — and but for the cushioning effect of her bonnet, the force might well have cracked her skull. We may thank God that my sister lives; and other than a tenderness in the region, a lump the size of a potato, and a good deal of indignation at the way in which she has been served, she suffers no severe effects. Indeed, she will not even allow me to inform my brother of the event — which shows her to remain unaffectedly silly, despite her sufferings.”
“I am shocked,” he said with unwonted gravity— “indeed, I am grieved. That so lovely a creature as Mrs. Henry should be assaulted with such violence— But is there no one who can describe her assailant?”