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 amatter 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 gave me 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 object very much 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 the worst; 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 forbear 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 scandalized 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.
Edward saw his duty clear; he saw too that the performance of it was more than likely to involve him in consequences repugnant to a man of taste and sensibility; but he did not shrink from it: he set his jaw, and rode off to the Priory, not in such a spirit of knight-errantry as Oswald Denny would have brought to the task, but inspired by a sober man’s determination to protect the reputation of the lady whom he had chosen to be his bride. At the best, he hoped to bring her to a sense of her impropriety; at the worst, he must bring Damerel to a precise understanding of Venetia’s true circumstances. This task could not be other than distasteful to one who prided himself on his correct and well-regulated life; and it might, if Damerel were as careless of public opinion as he was said to be, plunge him into just the sort of scandal his disposition urged him to avoid. He was by no means deficient in courage, but he had not the smallest wish, whatever Damerel’s offences might be, to find himself confronting his lordship early one morning with a pistol in his hand and twenty yards of cold earth between them. If it came to that it would be because Aubrey’s recklessness and Venetia’s incorrigible imprudence had forced him into a position from which, as a man of honour, he could not draw back, even when he considered her to have courted whatever ill might befall her by stepping beyond the barriers of strict propriety, and so giving such men as Damerel a false notion of her character.
It was therefore not with romantic ardour that he rode from Undershaw to the Priory but with a sense of outrage and an exacerbated temper rather hardened than mollified by being kept under rigid control.
His arrival almost coincided with that of Damerel, from Thirsk. As he dismounted, Damerel came striding round the corner of the house from the stables, a package tucked, with his riding-whip, under one arm while he pulled off his gloves. At sight of Edward he checked, in surprise, and for a few moments they stood looking one another over in silence, hard suspicion in one pair of eyes, and in the other a gathering amusement. Then Damerel lifted an enquiring eyebrow, and Edward said stiffly: “Lord Damerel, I believe?”