CHAPTER IX

Mistletoe

When Arabella Trefoil started from London for Mistletoe, with no companion but her own maid, she had given more serious consideration to her visit than she had probably ever paid to any matter up to that time.  She had often been much in earnest but never so much in earnest as now.  Those other men had perhaps been worthy, worthy as far as her ideas went of worth, but none of them so worthy as this man.  Everything was there if she could only get it;—­money, rank, fashion, and an appetite for pleasure.  And he was handsome too, and good-humoured, though these qualities told less with her than the others.  And now she was to meet him in the house of her great relations,—­in a position in which her rank and her fashion would seem to be equal to his own.  And she would meet him with the remembrance fresh in his mind as in her own of those passages of love at Rufford.  It would be impossible that he should even seem to forget them.  The most that she could expect would be four or five days of his company, and she knew that she must be upon her mettle.  She must do more now than she had ever attempted before.  She must scruple at nothing that might bind him.  She would be in the house of her uncle and that uncle a duke, and she thought that those facts might help to quell him.  And she would be there without her mother, who was so often a heavy incubus on her shoulders.  She thought of it all, and made her plans carefully and even painfully.  She would be at any rate two days in the house before his arrival.  During that time she would curry favour with her uncle by all her arts, and would if possible reconcile herself to her aunt.  She thought once of taking her aunt into her full confidence and balanced the matter much in her mind.  The Duchess, she knew, was afraid of her,—­or rather afraid of the relationship, and would of course be pleased to have all fears set at rest by such an alliance.  But her aunt was a woman who had never suffered hardships, whose own marriage had been easily arranged, and whose two daughters had been pleasantly married before they were twenty years old.  She had had no experience of feminine difficulties, and would have no mercy for such labours as those to which her less fortunate niece was driven.  It would have been a great thing to have the cordial co-operation of her aunt; but she could not venture to ask for it.

She had stretched her means and her credit to the utmost in regard to her wardrobe, and was aware that she had never been so well equipped since those early days of her career in which her father and mother had thought that her beauty, assisted by a generous expenditure, would serve to dispose of her without delay.  A generous expenditure may be incurred once even by poor people, but cannot possibly be maintained over a dozen years.  Now she had taken the matter into her own hands and had done that which would be ruinous if not successful.  She was venturing her all upon the die,—­with the prospect of drowning herself on the way out to Patagonia should the chances of the game go against her.  She forgot nothing.  She could hardly hope for more than one day’s hunting and yet that had been provided for as though she were going to ride with the hounds through all the remainder of the season.