Chapter XI

Ambrosia was almost incredulous of the extreme vexation that this attitude on the part of Fanny promised. To have been only ten days in the house, and to have already arrived at this pitch, a deep and petulant quarrel with Oliver! Oliver would be to blame, no doubt; but that did not make the position any the less galling to Ambrosia. She endeavoured to be cool and amiable.

“Of course, you must not take Oliver so seriously,” she smiled. “I do not know what happened, but I dare say he was unendurable, but you, who seem to have so many accomplishments, will be able to overlook that. You are no raw schoolgirl, my dear Fanny, to be so easily affronted.”

“I do not think that I am affronted,” replied the Italian girl candidly. “Really, he said nothing to offend me, but I have decided to make an end of the whole affair. A lady may, I suppose, change her mind. Madame de Mailly always said so.”

“But you would convict yourself of an almost incredible lightness!” said Ambrosia. “You have engaged yourself to Oliver; you have come over here to his house; everyone knows about it--oh, of course it is unthinkable! You _must_ marry him! I am sure, Fanny, you will see that. Do not talk so easily and so carelessly of breaking off anything as serious as a matrimonial engagement.”

“But I cannot marry him!” replied the girl resolutely. “Indeed I cannot! I did not know him, I was scarcely aware of his character until yesterday. Last night he behaved with the greatest harshness. I have been doubtful, ever since I got to Cornwall, whether I could marry him, you know, but I thought I would say nothing about it. In Italy everything seemed different.”

“Then you do, after all, dislike the country,” said Ambrosia, “though you would not confess it? You do find it all grey and grim and dull?”

“No,” replied the Countess Fanny; “I am not speaking of the country, but of Oliver. You may have noticed his behaviour to me, it has not been gracious. And worse than his behaviour, there is something else--his greedy, staring looks, the way I must be always with him, never out of his sight.”

At this Ambrosia stiffened.

“You did your best to turn his head, I suppose,” she remarked.

“Oh, yes, I expect I did,” replied the Italian girl, with her careless, brilliant smile. “That was amusing, but a man must not let you see that you have turned his head: that is bad breeding.”

“It is bad breeding,” retorted Ambrosia, “too flagrantly to play the coquette and the rattle. If you have flirted with Oliver, you really must take the consequences. He is very fond of you--I can see that, however unkindly he may appear to behave, believe me he is very fond of you.”

But the Countess Fanny shook her shoulders, and made a little grimace, and said that she did not think “fond” was the word.

“He has a passion for me,” she said, “and I do not understand it nor care about it. I am rather like something he has bought--a toy or an ornament or a trifle, something that he must look at and handle and get tired of, he really does not understand me at all.”

“This is a very sudden conclusion, it seems to me,” remarked Ambrosia, aghast. “And you have such an air of self-assurance.”

“He is too old,” continued the Countess Fanny, in her light, relentless accent, unheeding this protest on the part of Ambrosia. “He is really old enough to be my father, is he not? Everyone round here has said so; you know that. Everyone has thought how grotesque for us to be married.”

“But you did not think so yourself, in Italy.”

“No; matters were different in Italy. Madame de Mailly was there, and she provoked me into opposition. Every time she said anything against Oliver, I was the more resolved to admire him, and I could not, on any occasion, have married the Count--my cousin.”

“But even yesterday you gave no hint of this decision, of this swift change of mind!” cried Ambrosia in dismay. “What a situation you put us all into! If you will not marry Oliver, how can you remain here, in this house?”

“How not?” answered the Italian girl. “Are you not my nearest relations?”

“But do you think,” asked Ambrosia angrily, “that Oliver can endure to live in the same house with you, knowing that you have jilted him?”

And again the Countess Fanny, with a heartless tone in her voice, asked:

“Why not?”

“It would be impossible!” said Ambrosia heavily; and she began to walk impatiently and restlessly up and down the over-furnished, over-heated, and perfumed room that had been so transformed from its chill simplicity by the light fingers of the Countess Fanny and her sprightly maid.

Outside was the dark grey, and the bare trees, and the wind; one would not get away from that--no, not for months to come.

The spring seemed further off than it had seemed yesterday. What a ridiculous situation was she now required to face. This queer, capricious, heartless girl, and the undoubted passion of Oliver.

Leaning her elbow on the window-sill, and looking out on that bleak prospect lit with such a livid light of colourless and concealed sun, she said:

“Have you told Oliver?”

“I have had no opportunity to tell him. I felt too disordered to face him this morning,” replied the Countess Fanny, who appeared, however, perfectly composed. “And last night he would not listen. He was very angry, he did not wish me to go out alone nor be back so late, and he did not care to see me with Luce.”

“This is absurd!” Ambrosia felt herself forced into this protest. “He would have been pleased to see you with Lucius. Of course, of course, it was not that that made him angry. He was glad you were in such good hands.”

The Countess Fanny laughed. Her embroidery fell from her knee, and she picked it up and smoothed it out, and laughed again; and yet it was not a laughter of humour or happiness, but sounded sad, and even wild.

“If you will not marry Oliver,” said Ambrosia--and there was a hint of wildness in her falling voice also--“you must go home; you must go back to Italy. You cannot remain here.”

“But my land is here,” replied the Italian, “the land that Oliver rents--Flimwel; I have not been taken to see that house yet. I would like to stay. I want to see the storms; I want to go over the lighthouse.”

“All these are childish whims,” said Ambrosia sternly, “and bottomless caprices, and have nothing to do with the matter in hand. That is between you and Oliver. And I must not--do you hear me, Fanny?--I must not, I will not, interfere! I have indeed no key to the situation; I do not know what passed between you and Oliver when you were abroad, nor even,” she added, “what passed between you last night.”

“It is all simple,” was the negligent reply. “I rather liked him; at least, I did not dislike him; and he was different from the other men, and it seemed amusing to make him very fond of me. And then, you know, he importuned me very much.”

Ambrosia recalled Madame de Mailly’s letter, which had contained this same accusation. All the same, she turned with temper upon Fanny.

“You confess to a great frivolity and lightness,” she declared. “I should not say too much, if I were you, of it being amusing and diverting to make a man fond of you. I suppose you would also call it amusing and diverting to break his heart, and upset his whole life.”

To this, after the shortest of breathless pauses, the Italian girl replied:

“Am I, then, to break my own heart, and upset my own life? Do you really think it wise for me to marry Oliver? Do your friends, or anybody here, really think it wise? Does even Oliver himself,” she added impetuously, “think it wise?”

Ambrosia had no reply immediately ready to this. She was caught up in the toils and complications of an impossible situation. She blamed both Fanny and Oliver; she could scarcely blame herself--she had been outside it from the first. Even if she had made a desperate contradiction when the scheme was put before her, in Oliver’s dry letter from Italy, no attention would have been paid to her protest; and she did not know the Countess Fanny well enough to know if her resolution were genuine and sincere or but a passing humour--merely the result of a lovers’ quarrel. Oliver she did know, and the depth and obstinacy of his passions when they were aroused; but this girl remained to her as a stranger.

“I must leave it all alone,” she admitted wearily. “There is really nothing I can do. You had better get up and dress, and see Oliver, Fanny, and explain everything to him; but I really cannot have you in the house if you are going to refuse to marry him--not both of you. I will keep you, with pleasure, till the spring; but Oliver must go to town or abroad. But I hardly think that you would care to remain here alone with me, and it seems much more natural that you should return to Italy.”

“I shall remain,” smiled Fanny.

Ambrosia winced before that smile, and was irritated with herself for doing so. Why should she flinch before this strange creature, this alien, who probably, after all, was to mean nothing in her life, who would most likely return whence she came, to foreign lands?

Yet Ambrosia, still leaning in the window-place, and still looking at that iron-bound prospect of grey and bleakness without, said what she had never meant to say:

“Since when did you take this resolution to be done with Oliver?”

And she heard what she did not wish to hear--the reply of a few words only:

“Since last night.”

As she spoke the Countess Fanny rose, and crossed the room with her swift and joyful step, the folds of white silk billowing round her tall, slender figure, the long locks of black curls shaking on her slender shoulders. She went to her dressing-table and took up a case of keys, and handed them to Ambrosia, saying, sweetly enough:

“These are yours again now. Oliver gave them to me--the keys of your jewels, you know, that belonged to your mother. Somehow I did not care to wear them.”

Ambrosia had noted that, and admired it as a delicacy in Fanny.

“And here is his ring,” she said, taking a large diamond from her finger. “All this must go back to Oliver.”

“But not by me,” said Ambrosia. “I certainly cannot be your intermediary in this most painful matter.”

“No, I will give them to him myself,” said Fanny; but there seemed a slight faltering in her serene courage, in her careless indifference of manner. “But he is apt to be violent,” she added; and Ambrosia guessed, for the first time, that she was secretly afraid of Oliver, and she remembered what the girl had just said, and what Madame de Mailly had stated in her letter: that Oliver had importuned the girl, exerting all his strength of character, all his violence of temper, all the massive darkness of his personality to dominate and overawe her. Really, after all, one ought not to blame Fanny. It had been Oliver’s fault from the beginning.

So Ambrosia spoke with a certain warmth of affection:

“You must not be afraid of him. If you really feel that you can’t go through with it, you must be frank about it. Of course, you have been in fault, but then, so has he. You must not be afraid of him!”

The Countess Fanny would not confess to fear. She shook her head.

“You are right,” she said. “I have been in fault, and therefore--well, it is not a pleasant thing to do.”

“Wait a day or two,” suggested Ambrosia. “Let this quarrel blow over, and think about the thing in cold blood.”

But the girl put the keys and the ring apart from her other trinkets, and, shaking her head again, said:

“Never, never can I change my mind!”

“Then you must go away,” urged Ambrosia. “It is the only possible thing to do. Of course you must see that!”

The Countess Fanny, however, declared that she intended to spend the winter in Cornwall.

“Perhaps Oliver will go away,” she suggested. “Perhaps he will be glad to do so.”

“But it is his home,” said Ambrosia, in some indignation. “It is his place, and he has a great deal to do here. He loves Sellar’s Mead above everything. It is really you, Fanny, who should go away.”

At this the Italian girl laughed, but in melancholy fashion.

“Very well, I will go to Flimwel, then,” she said. “I will send for Madame de Mailly, and live there: that will be quite proper and decorous, will it not?”

“But the house has been shut up for years!” cried Ambrosia. “It is damp and in decay and disrepair, and almost, I believe, unfurnished!”

“That does not matter. I have some money; I will get the place furnished, and there I will go and live, and enjoy my Cornish winter after all.”

Ambrosia tried to cure herself of a pang of apprehension by the reflection:

“This is only a mood or a whim. Probably by to-morrow she and Oliver will be the best of friends again, and have forgotten everything about this.” And aloud she said, in a tone that she strove to render as ordinary as possible:

“You had better dress and come downstairs, Fanny; it looks odd in you to remain here. One does not want the servants to gossip.”

“Do they ever do anything else, however one behaves?” smiled Fanny.

Ambrosia felt rebuked, and was vexed that she should so feel. It was really impossible for her to be intimate and friendly with this queer girl.

She went downstairs rapidly; mid-morning now, and Lucius had not come. Why must she notice that? Of course, she was upset by this scene with Fanny--a ridiculous, whimsical creature. Best not to say a word about it, but to hope that the thing would end as soon as it had begun, and that never would she talk of breaking off her engagement again.

There in the hall was Oliver, sullen and fuming because Fanny had not yet appeared.

“You were unkind to her last night, no doubt,” remarked Ambrosia, “and it shows most foolish and ill-natured in you, Oliver. Surely she was safe enough with Lucius, and it was quite natural that she should wish to turn into the church!”

“When _I_ asked her to go there,” said Oliver, “she refused; and if I were you, Amy, I should not be so pleased at this intimacy with Lucius.”

“How ridiculous!” cried Ambrosia sharply. “You must control yourself, Oliver, and not make these jealous insinuations. As for Fanny, I think she is still out of humour with you, but she is coming down immediately, and will speak to you herself. It is most odious for me, I can assure you, to have these perpetual scenes.”

“You have a quick tongue,” replied Oliver grimly. “You do not help to smooth things over, do you, Amy?”

She felt convicted of meanness, of lack of generosity, and the ready tears came into her eyes.

“Oh, Oliver dear,” she cried, “I do not mean to be like that--not to be hateful! But it is all so difficult. I have felt in a confusion--a sense of tension--for some time now. While you were away it was a strain, and now you have come back it is confusing! Forgive me! I will do my best! And do you use a little kindness and softness towards Fanny, for she, I believe, can ill endure harshness.”

Ambrosia, dreading to extend the interview lest this pleasant note should not last, hastened away, taking her keys from her girdle and hurrying to the servants’ quarters. These little daily duties, these little monotonous and insistent tasks, must occupy her now, so that she did not watch the clock for Lucius, nor interfere between Oliver and Fanny.

Oliver Sellar waited impatiently in the wide hall, leaning against the newel post--a sombre and a dark figure.

It was not long before the Countess Fanny came down the wide, shallow stairs, a black lace scarf thrown carelessly over her stiff, striped green and white sarcenet dress, her coral bracelets clasped round her fine wrists, and her coral combs in her black hair.

“Why do you not now wear,” asked Oliver at once, “some of the ornaments I have given you?”

She passed him lightly, with a tantalising swiftness.

“Come, don’t tease!” he said harshly. “I am sorry about last night, I dare say I went too far; but you put me into a great anxiety, and you must never do that, Fanny, for when you do, I become so desperate I hardly am responsible for my actions or my words! Come, don’t tease, but be friends again!”

He spoke with a rough articulation and profound emotion, but Fanny, without answering, sped into the parlour, which was almost dark in the shadow of the big cedar on the lawn, which blotted out the bleak and pallid light of the winter’s morning. Oliver followed her light, gay presence, which did indeed seem to irradiate that dark and sombre room.

“Come, Fanny! Won’t you speak to me?” He was pleading now, she moving farther away from him, panting a little, until she could move no farther, but must pause by the wall and turn there and face him, laughing a little defiantly, more defiantly at herself and her own tremors than at him and his advances.

“But you will not care to hear what I have to say,” she said breathlessly. “Let it go for the moment; indeed, Oliver, I wish you well. I am sorry.”

“That is enough!” he replied at once. “No need for more!”

He had put out his large white hand as if to touch her, but she had slipped away, still trying to carry the moment with a laugh.

“Oliver, you know we have made a very great mistake. We were never meant to get married--I dare say we both knew that from the first.”

“Don’t torment me, Fanny,” he replied harshly, “or I shall become angry again.”

“But I do not speak to torment you--only to let you know what I have told Ambrosia just now, that I have decided--oh, believe me, quite decided--that we cannot be married.”

He laughed, and she had always--even in the early days in Italy--disliked his rare laugh, which broke up his face to disadvantage. He was not very handsome when he smiled or laughed.

“Come, come!” he said, with an effort to be good-humoured; “you must have your jests, I suppose. But it’s gone far enough. We won’t talk any more about it. I’ve told you I’m sorry for last night; let it go at that. Would you like to go into Truro, or even, for a few days, to London? Have you got enough clothes and trinkets? I should have thought I bought you enough in Paris and Florence, but, if you want any more, you shall have them.”

Fanny had her hand in the little satchel that hung at her waist by two silver ribbons, in a coquettish style; out of this she took the ring and the keys that she had set apart on her dressing-table half an hour before, and offered them to him with a coolness which concealed a good deal of courage; for she was afraid of him, and had always been afraid, though never so afraid as at this moment. But she was true to her own resolution.

“Indeed, I am not going to marry you, Oliver,” she said, with an attempt at her usual negligent indifference, “and here are your keys of the jewel-boxes, which must be taken from my room to-day; and your ring. And please be kind about it! I was wrong, of course, but when I said I would marry you I did not understand.”

“What do you understand now?” he demanded in a thunderous rage. “Who has told you to understand anything? What are you talking of? Do not provoke me, Fanny, I beseech you!”

“And I beseech you--oh, set me free!” she cried, in a voice that was beginning to break. “It was all a game of play, I never meant it seriously!”

He made some passionate exclamation under his breath, but she could not, did not, wish to hear.

“I will leave your house!” she cried hastily, “unless you wish to go away.”

“You will go to Italy?” he exclaimed.

“No; I want to stay in Cornwall.”

“And why do you want to stay in Cornwall?” he flamed; “and how can you stay here?”

“I’ll go to Flimwel Manor--I’ll have that opened and furnished. I’ll send for Madame de Mailly----” talking rapidly and fiercely.

He swept away her words by a coarse interjection.

“Don’t talk like a fool, Fanny!”