A Marriage of Convenience Read Online Free Page A

carried out their duty.
    *
    That evening most of the officers of the 15th Hussars were uproariously drunk by the time they poured out of the mess dining room into the ante-room in their many-buttoned blue and gold mess jackets. Only the duty field officer and the orderly officer for the day were unable to celebrate their returning adjutant’s success. A cornet had just purchased his lieutenantship, so tradition obliged him to pay for yet more champagne. Another subaltern had parted company with his horse on parade the day before, so he too was ‘fined’ in the customary manner, and the mess servants were sent scurrying out for more bottles. Later, the junior officers would probably set about tent-pegging on each others’ backs and the smallest among them would end up in the horse troughs. Listening to their loud laughter and arrogant self-assertive voices, Clinton wished he had drunk enough to feel utterly detached. Had he ever been so puerile and absurd as these young men? Very likely he had; and only five years earlier. It would be a long time before he reached the age of sentimental recollection of youthful idiocy; at present his memories made him feel mildly uncomfortable. All that scorn and mockery and blind ignorance of human limitation.
    The war in China, and two months spent in daily terror of summary execution, had given Clinton’s illusions of invulnerable self-sufficiency a lethal mauling. On his return to England, this experience had been followed by another of equal educational force. For the first time he had been worsted in love—by an older married woman, who had cast him adrift after a year of promises to elope with him. An unbroken sequence of earlier successes had left him ill-prepared for suffering at the hands of a woman. Afterwards he very rarely spoke of love with cynical superiority, although in the two years since, he had remained entirely immune.
    Since dinner had left the assembled company too addled to play cards, bets were placed on whether the pips in a particular orange would come to more or less than a certain number. The fruit was solemnly cut open with a sabre and its contents examined. A similar wager was made on the number of serrated leaves on top of a pineapple; then it was the number of horses depicted in the battle prints on either side of the cabinet containing the regiment’s presentation silver; the contestants having to guess without looking . Clinton did not stay long in the ante-room before leaving for his quarters.
    As he walked along the side of the parade ground the slow ache of anxiety, which had oppressed him intermittently for the past month, returned insidiously. In a week he would be back in England for a fortnight’s leave, and then everything would have to be settled. His financial difficulties had almost all been inherited from hisfather, but with current outgoings on mortgage interest and debt repayment exceeding his income by nearly three thousand pounds a year, the origins of his predicament did nothing to make it any more palatable. Recent correspondence with his bank had made it inescapably clear that his credit was exhausted, and that unless he were ready to leave the army at once, and so save the additional thousand he spent annually on regimental bills and subscriptions, he would have to sell the house and estate which his family had owned for two centuries. The choice was not one which Clinton was prepared to make.
    Two other options remained. The negotiation of a substantial loan from his brother, or marriage to an heiress who had already given him good reason to suppose he would be accepted. Believing the odds to be heavily against the loan, marriage seemed the likeliest outcome. He had always lived by the belief that a man’s destiny could be controlled by what was within him, regardless of external facts; and indeed until recently, his moods and emotions had seemed strong enough to change his perspective of the world from within. Now, more and more,