The Reluctant Husband Read Online Free

Hatherley and produce daubs to your heart’s content.”
    Ormiston stood and paced the room. He wanted to lash out, to kick, to hurl ornaments out of the window. But he would not. He turned and paced back. He would go to Europe. That was the vital thing, his real goal. Fury would be a waste. He was being manipulated into doing as his father wanted, but Europe was what he wanted, and after all, this match could be dispensed with on his return from the Continent. If he returned.
    â€œVery well, sir. I shall do my duty.”
    This capitulation astounded Dacre. “Marchmont will be here at tea-time, with the lawyers.”
    â€œI shall join you then.” Ormiston bowed and left the room, heading out immediately. There would be someone at Angelo’s willing to spar or fence or wrestle—certainly his fellows in the prank which had seen them all sent down from Oxford to rusticate indefinitely. He would lunch with his friends, and then, for once, he would drink, deeply, and then he would return to Dacre House in time to meet his bride.
    As Ormiston paced toward Bond Street and other less salubrious haunts, he tried to picture his betrothed. He remembered going down to Sawards years before, but recollect Miss Marchmont he could not. There had been two young children, he seemed to recall. She was the elder of the two children. She could be no more than fourteen now. What his father proposed seemed to him barbaric. But of a piece with the man.
    Everything about Dacre repulsed his son: his bulk, his heartiness, his gambling, his mistresses, his drunken sham-blings and late nights, his philistinism, his gun-dogs and horses, his farmer’s talk and manners. Ormiston regarded the marquis as a crude vulgarian and strove to present himself in as different a light as possible.
    The viscount saw himself as a sophisticated creature of some refinement. Of course, there were lapses from that ideal. It was hard to refrain entirely from the usual pursuits of young men and last term there had been the unfortunate incident with the provost and the fountain, following an unusually riotous dinner.
    At least Ormiston’s university career was only temporarily curtailed rather than terminated, due in part to the marquis’s influence, and also because Ormiston had had to drop away from the main body of malefactors so that he might redistribute the dinner he had eaten in a convenient urn. The aftermath of the episode was a sense of shame and a continuing tussle between the conscience of the young viscount, which required him to eschew all frivolities, and his common sense, which dictated that a gentleman ought to be able to hold his drink in all company.
    The viscount found solace in painting, a talent he had inherited from his mother. The marquis, who had been fond of his bride and saddened by her death in childbirth, was glad to see some sign of her in her son. He fostered Ormiston’s artistic ability with the engagement of good drawing-masters at Hatherley and later at Harrow. By his fifteenth year, the viscount was producing creditable depictions of the Hatherley park and its environs.
    Wild ideas of spurning his father’s machinations and making off into London to apprentice himself to some master were considered and then dismissed. He had no funds whatsoever and had the idea that men only took apprentices on with some financial inducement. Besides which, Ormiston’s amour-propre could accept neither the prospect of taking orders nor the notion that he might end up in the homes of his former cronies painting their portraits. While he affected dedication to art, the truth was that the viscount’s true deity was comfort.
    So, he would go through with this match with as much grace as he could muster and the devil take the marquis, which, given the old man’s reprobate habits and loose morals, might occur soon enough, although not soon enough to suit Ormiston. At least, so he had resolved by the time he