Chapter 25

To-morrow

A dozen gentlemen at least, rumour said, would have rejoiced to end for
her, by marriage, this lovely lady's widowhood; but there were but two
she would be like to choose between, and they were different men
indeed. One of them, both her heart and her ambition might have caused
her to make choice of, for he combined such qualities and fortunes as
might well satisfy either.

"Zounds," said an old beau, "the woman who wants more than his Grace of
Osmonde can give--more money, greater estates, and more good looks--is
like to go unsatisfied to her grave. She will take him, I swear, and
smile like Heaven in doing it."

"But there was a time," said Sir Chris Crowell, who had come to town
(to behold his beauty's conquests, as he said) and who spent much time
at the coffee-houses and taverns telling garrulous stories of the days
of Mistress Clo of Wildairs, "there was a time when I would have took
oath that Jack Oxon was the man who would have her. Lord! he was the
first young handsome thing she had ever met--and she was but fifteen
for all her impudence, and had lived in the country and seen naught
but a handful of thick-bodied, red-faced old rakes. And Jack was but
four and twenty and fresh from town, and such a beauty that there was
not a dairymaid in the country but was heartbroke by him--though he may
have done no more than cast his devilish blue eye on her. For he had a
way, I tell ye, that lad, he had a way with him that would have took
any woman in. A dozen parts he could play and be a wonder in every one
of them--and languish, and swear oaths, and repent his sins, and plead
for mercy, with the look of an angel come to earth, and bring a woman
to tears--and sometimes ruin, God knows!--by his very playing of the
mountebank. Good Lord! to see those two at the birthnight supper was a
sight indeed. My Lady Oxon she would have been, if either of them had
been a fortune. But 'twas Fate--and which jilted the other, Heaven
knows. And if 'twas _he_ who played false, and he would come back now,
he will find he hath fire to deal with--for my Lady Dunstanwolde is a
fierce creature yet, though her eye shines so soft in these days." And
he puffed at his churchwarden's pipe and grinned.

Among the men who had been her playmates it would seem that perhaps
this old fellow had loved her best of all, or was more given to being
demonstrative, or more full of a good-natured vanity which exulted in
her as being a sort of personal property to vaunt and delight in; at
all events Sir Chris had come to the town, where he had scarce ever
visited in all his life before, and had in a way constituted himself a
sort of henchman or courtier of her ladyship of Dunstanwolde.