Jilted Read Free

of raised voices proceeding from the drawing-room. No doubt Mr and Mrs Morrison would take great delight in blaming her for Morrison’s defection. She was sure that her mother and father would defend her admirably. Then a voice deep inside her seemed to say, why should they? Pride came to her aid as she stiffened her spine and walked to the drawing-room door, dismissing Cumber, who had been about to open it for her. It would do those Morrisons no harm to see her in her wedding dress. On hearingher mother’s voice, she paused briefly outside the door. Lady Hope had raised that powerful instrument to the volume which Eustacia had always privately called ‘rear stalls level’.
    ‘I repeat, where is the wretched boy?’ her ladyship demanded, rolling her r’s on the word ‘wretched’ and thus giving it added emphasis. ‘He belongs to you, does he not? Surely you must have some idea where he is?’
    ‘The same might be said of your daughter, ma’am,’ retorted a voice that Eustacia recognized as belonging to Mr Morrison senior.
    ‘My daughter’s whereabouts are irrelevant, sirrah,’ said Lady Hope haughtily. ‘She, after all, has not just left someone standing at the altar.’
    ‘But she must take her share of the blame,’ replied Mrs Morrison.
    Judging that to remain outside the room any longer could be construed as eavesdropping, Eustacia pushed the door further open and walked in.
    ‘She drove him to it,’ quavered Mrs Morrison, pointing at Eustacia with a short, plump, trembling finger.
    Eustacia had intended to be quietly respectful and sympathetic to Mr and Mrs Morrison who, after all, had suffered as severe a shock as had she. Instead, she found herself saying tartly, ‘No doubt I planned to get myself jilted from the very beginning.’
    This response had the effect of making Mrs Morrison dissolve into tears, whilst Lady Hope raised a hand to her brow and stalked across to the window, where she stood gazing out across the meadow towards the church from which they had come so recently.
    Sir Wilfred, who until now had kept silent, left his position at the fireplace with his foot on the fender, encouraged his daughter to take a seat with a sympathetic smile and a warm grip on her shoulder, and approached Mr Morrison, holding out his snuff box. ‘Whatever may be our own feelings on the matter, there is no sense in coming to cuffs about it,’ he said pleasantly, waiting for the other man to take some before doing so himself. ‘Today’s eventswere not of my contrivance, nor were they of yours.’
    ‘No indeed,’ agreed the other man, hesitating briefly before taking a pinch. He looked at Eustacia in rather an embarrassed way. ‘They were not of yours either, my dear. I’m very sorry for what I said just now. I spoke in haste. I’m also very sorry for what has happened today, and my wife will be too. Just now she is overwrought.’
    Eustacia nodded her thanks. As before, this expression of kindness almost overset her, and she could not trust herself to speak.
    Sir Wilfred nodded. ‘It might be better to postpone further discussion until we are all cooler,’ he said. ‘Of one thing I am certain, however: I have no desire to give the neighbourhood any kind of entertainment by being at odds with you.’
    Mr Morrison being in agreement, soon bore his stricken wife away with him.
    ‘I think I will go to my room,’ Eustacia said, after the couple had gone.
    Neither her mother nor her father sought to detain her. ‘Now what?’ asked Lady Hope after a short silence.
    ‘There’s a lot of food to eat,’ her husband remarked.
    ‘Heavens,’ declared his wife turning towards him and throwing her hands in the air. ‘It will all be wasted.’
    ‘Not quite all of it,’ her husband replied mildly. ‘We have to eat, after all, and so do the servants.’
    ‘Poor Eustacia,’ said Lady Hope. ‘Do you think that I should go to her? It is at times like this, my dear, that we need our loved ones to cherish