Anita Mills by Miss Gordon's Mistake Read Free Book Online Page B

Mama?” Roland asked incredulously. “A man don’t take a female to Gretna in her equippage— takes his own cattle. Where is Sturbridge, by the by?”
    “Charles will be here directly,” Jessica volunteered.
    “And I cannot like that, missy! It seems to me that he spends as much time with you as with Kitty, and how’s he to fix his interest there, I ask you, if you are forever in the way?”
    Roland choked. “Charles and Kitty? Coming it too strong, Mama! She don’t like him much better’n she likes me, if you want the truth of it. And if there’s any as says otherwise, ’tis a faradiddle they’ve told you.”
    “Rollo, you stay out of that which you do not know,” his sister warned him. “I am sure she thinks a great deal of him.”
    “Humph! Don’t show it if she does.”
    “If you would pay attention to the world rather than dwell in the clouds, fancying yourself a soldier, you might see something,” Jessica retorted. “But every time you are down from Oxford, you spend your days with naught but those musty war books for company, and you know ’tis the truth!”
    “Please!” Mrs. Merriman put her hands to her temples as though to block out yet another brangle between her two eldest. “Of course there is a tendre there. Why else would he be forever here? But that is nothing to the point now,” she recalled. “Where is Kitty?”
    “Don’t know,” Roland muttered. “Ten to one, she went to a turn-up or something—be like her to go off to a mill, if she wanted. Gel don’t go on as she ought, you know.”
    “In the Carolinas, I daresay females are more free in their manner,” Jessica observed loyally, coming to her absent cousin’s defense. “And she is not exactly a green girl, after all. I mean, she is even older than I. Moreover, she did take Jem.”
    “It ought to have been an abigail,” Mrs. Merriman muttered.
    “But she don’t—well, she ain’t used to the ways of the ton,” he pointed out. “Dash it, Jess, but she don’t try to fit in!”
    “All the more reason I had such hopes of Sturbridge,” his mother admitted. “He did not appear to note her—” She groped for a word. “—well, her candor— or her lack of refinement, I suppose I should say. Indeed, but I had thought—”
    “You mean her eccentricities, and if he did not, you can be sure his mama did,” Roland cut in dryly. “If ever there was a Tartar, ’tis she. No, you’d best not count on Charley Trevor coming up to scratch for Kitty, I can tell you.”
    “Of all the unfeeling—”
    “Ain’t unfeeling—just don’t see it, that’s all. Dash it, but he’d be more likely to offer for you than Kit!” He rounded on his sister. “At least you got a notion how to go on!”
    “How would you know? You do not pay attention when you are at home,” Jessica shot back.
    “My hopes in that quarter are quite cut up,” Mrs. Merriman sniffed. “Had it not been for Haverhill, naturally I should have wished—” Her voice trailed off wistfully. “But there is Haverhill, of course, and there’s naught to be done about that. Your dear papa did what he thought he ought, after all. And we cannot say that the money the baron sends Jessica has not been a blessing. Indeed, but since Mr. Merriman passed on, I know not how we should have survived without it.”
    “Fiddle. Uncle Thomas left Kitty enough for all of us,” Roland reminded her.
    For a moment, his mother looked as though she would cry. “No, no he did not.” Then, when both of her children turned disbelieving eyes on her, she shook her head. “I’d not meant to tell any—that is, I’d hoped that Sturbridge would have offered first—”
    “Doing it too brown, Mama!”
    “Oh, Rollo, you know how Kitty is! If she should discover the reverses the Funds have taken, she will not accept his suit! And she must!”
    “Are you telling me that Kitty has no fortune?” Jessica demanded incredulously.
    “Well, there is a little, but nothing like there