Besides these seasonal visitors there were the residents, and the first of these on whom Miss Wychwood’s eyes fell, as she glanced round the Pump Room, was Lord Beckenham. He was talking to a lady in a preposterous hat, trimmed with several upstanding ostrich feathers, but as soon as he perceived Miss Wychwood he excused himself and purposefully threaded his way towards her between the several groups of people which separated them. Lucilla, having located Corisande Stinchcombe, darted away in her direction, and Miss Wychwood was left to Lord Beckenham’s mercy.
He greeted her with his usual punctiliousness, but almost immediately said, with a grave look, that he was excessively sorry to learn that her young friend’s visit had led to a disagreeable consequence. “I understand that Oliver Carleton has come to Bath, and that you have been obliged to receive him,” he said heavily. “It was inevitable, of course, that he should call in Camden Place, but I trust it was to make arrangements to remove his niece from Bath?”
“Oh, no, not immediately!” replied Miss Wychwood cheerfully. “That would certainly be a disagreeable consequence! I hope to have her company for some time yet. She is a delightful child—positively a ray of sunshine in the house!”
“I own she appeared to be an amiable girl, and I was favourably impressed by her manners,” he conceded, with a patronizing air which she found intolerable. “The danger attached to her visit is that you may find yourself obliged to become more closely acquainted with her uncle than can be thought desirable. You will not object to my venturing to give you a hint, I know.”
“On the contrary, sir! I object very much to it,” she said, sparks of wrath in her eyes. “I think it is a gross impertinence—to give you the word with no bark on it!—for what right have you to give me hints on how I should conduct myself? None that I have granted you!”
He looked to be a little confounded by this forthright speech, but embarked on a ponderous explanation of the purity of his intention, in which his regard for her, his hope that he might one day have the right to guide her judgment, his conviction that the warning he had uttered would meet with her brother’s warm approval, and his knowledge of the world, became entangled almost beyond unravelling. He seemed to be aware of this, for he brought his speech to an end by saying: “In short, dear Miss Annis, you are ignorant—as indeed one would wish you to be!—of how very undesirable an acquaintance for a delicately nurtured female Carleton is! Particularly for a lady of quality such as yourself! I am persuaded that your good brother would echo my sentiments on this occasion, and that there is no need for me to say more.”
She bestowed a glittering smile upon him, and said: “No need at all, sir! In point of fact, there was no need for you to have said as much. But since you seem to be so much concerned with my welfare let me assure you that my acquaintance with Mr Carleton is unattended by any danger either to my reputation or to my virtue! He is quite the rudest man I have ever met, and I am not so ignorant as to be unaware that he is what I believe is termed a man of the town,but I have it on the best of authority—his own!—that he never attempts to seduce ladies of quality! So you may be easy—and I beg you will say no more on this subject!”
An amused voice spoke at her elbow. “I expect he will, though, and you can see he is far from easy,” said Mr Carleton. He nodded at Beckenham, who was visibly swelling with hostility, and greeted him with a careless tolerance which still further exacerbated his lordship’s resentment. “How do you do?” he said. “They tell me it was you who bought that dubious Brueghel at Christie’s last month, but I daresay rumour lied!”
“I did buy it, and I do not consider it dubious!” responded his lordship, growing almost purple in the face from his effort to suppress his spleen. “I heard that you had a fancy for it, Carleton!”
“No, no! not when I had had the opportunity to inspect it more closely!” replied Mr Carleton soothingly. “I wasn’t the bidder who ran you up so high—in fact, I wasn’t in the bidding at all!” Observing, with satisfaction, the effect this had on the infuriated connoisseur, he added, by way of rubbing salt into the wound: “I don’t think I was told who your unsuccessful rival was: some silly gudgeon, no doubt!”
“Do I understand you to mean that I too am a gudgeon?” demanded Lord Beckenham fiercely.
Mr Carleton put up his black brows in exaggerated surprise, and said in a bewildered voice: “Now, what in the world can I have said to put such a notion as that into your head? It cannot have escaped your notice, my dear Beckenham, that I carefully refrained from saying ‘some other silly gudgeon’!”
“I shall take leave to tell you, Carleton, that I find your—your wit offensive!”
“By all means!” replied Mr Carleton. “You have my leave to tell me anything you choose! How unjust it would be in me to refuse to grant you leave to do so when it has never occurred to me that I should ask your permission to say that I find you a dead bore, which I’ve been doing for years.”
“If it were not for our surroundings,” said Lord Beckenham, between his teeth, “I should be strongly tempted to land you a facer, sir!”
“It’s to be hoped you would have the strength of mind to resist temptation,” said Mr Carleton, with spurious sympathy. “Such a very gudgeon-ish thing to do, don’t you agree?”
Since Beckenham was well aware that Mr Carleton was almost as famous for his punishing skill in the boxing-ring as for his rudeness this reply infuriated him so much that, with only the briefest of bows to Miss Wychwood, he turned on his heel and walked off, his brow thunderous, and his lips tightly compressed.
“I have never been able to understand,” remarked Mr Carleton, “why it is that so many persons find it impossible to rid themselves of such pompous bores as that fellow!”
“Perhaps,” offered Miss Wychwood, “it is because very few persons—if any at all!—are as rude as you are!”
“Ah, no doubt that is the reason!” he nodded.
“You should be ashamed of yourself!” she told him.
“No, no, how can you say so? You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t wish to be rid of him!”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “I did wish it, but that was because he vexed me to death. I was going to do the thing myself if you hadn’t interrupted us! And I shouldn’t have been grossly uncivil!”
“You can’t be very well-acquainted with him if you imagine you would have succeeded,” he said. “Nothing short of the grossest incivility has ever been known to pierce his armour of self-importance. He can empty a room quicker than any man I’ve ever known.”
She smiled, but said charitably: “Poor man! One can’t but feel sorry for him.”
“A waste of sympathy, believe me! He would be incredulous, I daresay, if it were disclosed to him that he was an object for pity. In his own eyes, his consequence is so great that when people smother yawns in the middle of one of his pretentious lectures he is sorry for them,because it is plain to him that they are persons of vastly inferior intellect, quite unworthy to receive instruction from him.”
Recalling very vividly the numerous occasions when she had been provoked almost to screaming point by his lordship’s disquisitions, accompanied as they invariably were, by kindly but intolerable attempts to enlighten her ignorance, or to correct what his superior taste assured him were her false artistic judgments, she could not suppress a little chuckle, but she atoned for this by saying that even if his lordship were a trifle prosy he had many excellent qualities.