“I am sure you are always an example to us all!” said Miss Wraxton acidly. “One can only envy you your iron composure! I, alas, am made of weaker stuff and must confess to have been very much startled by such an unprecedented noise in this house. I do not know what you can have been about, Charles. Or is it indeed Miss Stanton-Lacy’s pistol, and was she exhibiting her skill to you?”
“On the contrary! It was I who shot disgracefully wide of my mark. May I clean this for you, Sophy?”
She shook her head and held out her hand for the gun. “Thank you, but I like to clean and load it myself.”
“Load it?” gasped Lady Ombersley. “Sophy, you do not mean to load that horrid thing again, surely?”
Hubert laughed. “I said she was a redoubtable girl, Charles! I say, Sophy, do you always keep it loaded?”
“Yes, for how can one tell when one may need it, and what is the use of an empty pistol? You know what a delicate business it is, too! I daresay Charles can do it in a trice, but I cannot!”
He gave the gun into her hand. “If we go down to Ombersley this summer, we much have a match, you and I,” he said. As their hands met, and she took the gun, his grasped her wrist and held it for a moment. “An infamous thing to have done,” he said, in a slightly lowered tone. “I beg your pardon — and I thank you!”
Chapter 13
IT WAS not to be supposed that this incident would be pleasing to Miss Wraxton. A degree of understanding seemed to be existent between Mr. Rivenhall and his cousin which was not at all to her taste, for although she was not in love with him, and indeed, would have considered such an emotion very far beneath her station, she had made up her mind to marry him and was feminine enough to resent his paying the least attention to any other female.
Fortune had not smiled upon Miss Wraxton. She had been contracted, in schoolroom days, to a nobleman of impeccable lineage and respectable fortune, who had been carried off by an attack of smallpox before she was of an age to be formally affianced to him. Several eligible gentlemen had shown faint tendencies to dangle after her during her first two seasons upon the Marriage Mart, for she was a handsome girl with a handsome portion; but for unaccountable reasons none of them had come up to scratch, as her elder brother, Lord Orsett, rather vulgarly phrased it. Mr. Rivenhall’s offer had been made at a moment when she had begun to fear that she might be left upon the shelf, and had been thankfully received. Miss Wraxton, reared in the strictest propriety, had never taken any undesirably romantic notions into her head and had had no hesitation in informing her papa that she was willing to receive Mr. Rivenhall’s addresses. Lord Brinklow, who held Lord Ombersley in the greatest aversion, would certainly not have entertained Mr. Rivenhall’s offer for as much as a minute had it not been for the providential death of Matthew Rivenhall. But the old nabob’s fortune was something not to be despised even by the most sanctimonious of peers. Lord Brinklow had informed his daughter that Charles Rivenhall’s suit carried his blessing with it; and Lady Brinklow, a sterner moralist even than her spouse, had clearly indicated to Eugenia where her duty lay and by what means she might hope to detach Charles from his unregenerate family.