A Quiet Adjustment (22 page)

‘Do you know, a confessional is almost what I had in mind.'

He stooped a little, emerging from the arch of the door into the open air. In the light of day, she could see more clearly what the effect of two years (not to mention the rigours of his vocation) had been upon her friend. His face had taken on a countrified complexion. The thin line of his mouth had settled into an expression of professional kindliness, both vague and durable. Looking down, she saw that his shoes were caked around the sole with mud; blades of grass had become entangled in the laces. She remembered the promise he had once made her, of an income sufficient to meet the expense of a residence in town, and presumed that the narrow round of his duties had kept him from seizing his opportunity. He would hardly dare to appear in the best society in such a condition. She smiled at the thought of calculating from the state of his shoes a larger picture of the manners with which he might present himself. He had an air, generally, of retraction: as if he had learned to survive on worse food and company, on poorer ambitions, and on fewer thoughts than he was wont to do.

The skies had cleared a little. A patch of blue had spread itself like a picnic cloth (she was perfectly aware, to whom she owed the fancy) over the trees of the cemetery; and the lanes between the graves were just dry enough, away from the long-haired grass that grew around the stones, to permit a lady to pass. ‘I must congratulate you,' she had left it to him to begin, ‘on your marriage to Lord Byron. I heard of it only recently, as a piece of those rumours that brought the news of your residence in Six Mile Bottom. I have become, I'm afraid, something of a gossip.' He looked at her and laughed. ‘It is one of the sins of the church, though you would be flattered to know, I'm sure, the part you play in such tattle. Lady Byron has attracted a great deal of interest and admiration. She is said to be very beautiful and clever. He is said to be very—well matched.'

‘I imagine,' she had found, she believed, her opening, ‘the rumours say more than that.'

The kindly look he gave her suggested his willingness on such subjects to keep quiet. Annabella was fair-minded enough to acknowledge that the impatience he aroused in her had less to do with his tact than with her own awkward urge ‘to confess everything'—a total that might become clear to her for the first time as she attempted to ‘add it up'. She was forced, in the silence that followed, to turn her questioning on him. He gathered his thoughts for a minute into something like succinctness: he was very happy, he said; he was very busy, and quiet, too. Perhaps he had—shrunk in scope, which was just as well, he believed, as he was perfectly aware of the tendency his profession had to stretch out, if nothing else, one's speeches. But—he smiled, suddenly, and broke off to say, that he should for once attend his own sermon and take his own advice to heart.

Annabella had guessed the nature of the speech he might have launched himself into, and she was starved enough for flattery to attempt to draw him out. She begged him to continue. She had acquired since he had seen her last a sharper appetite for good advice, if only because she believed herself to be so greatly in need of it. He answered her deprecation with another little smile, which proved to Annabella at once, in her anxious impatience, that he was still refusing to take her at her word. He said he had only stopped short for fear that the sentiment he wished to deliver himself of, though perfectly complimentary, required nevertheless a delicacy of expression which he no longer trusted himself, with his country manners, to keep up. He wished to say only that he had, since . . . since he had seen her last, acquired a still greater admiration for Miss Milbanke's, he begged her pardon, for Lady Byron's good sense. He was not one of those men who, from a duty of modesty, rate themselves below their deserts; but he was willing to admit that her—and he hesitated, not over the word, but over the propriety of addressing her with it—that her genius would never have found a suitable expression in the life he had proposed she share with him. Though he had had at the time his reservations over Lord Byron's character, he had none whatsoever over . . . over Annabella's ability to deserve the scope of ambition she would enjoy as his wife. And the fact that she had chosen to accept him in marriage had proved to him that she was confident of being able to repair and to regulate a disposition which, apart from the defects of his youth, of his upbringing, of his too early taste of fame, had such a generous nobility to recommend it. In short—but here Annabella, with a sudden and desperate break in the tone of their discourse, interrupted him.

‘I cannot repair him; I cannot regulate him. He is ungovernable. He is impossible.'

He stopped at last to stare at her. His face showed that he had taken in her appeal, and guiding her by the hand, he led her to a bench, which, situated in the shadow of the church's western wall, had escaped for the most part the brief showers of the day. They sat down. Mr Eden put his hands together and raised them to his lips. ‘You must know that in my professional capacity I am often called upon to listen to confessions in which I have a personal stake. I admit, without pride, that there is in my temper a peculiar willingness to detach itself from such considerations. It is, perhaps, the virtue of the clergyman and the curse of the gentleman that I lack what is thought of as the common touch. I believe it is the effect only of the fact that my sympathies, which, I flatter myself, are reasonably developed, remain proof against their own self interest.'

There was in Mr Eden's manner something that reminded Annabella so vividly of her own, or rather, of her own old manner, that she considered for a moment how well they might have suited each other. Yet the impatience he continued to awake in her suggested how greatly she had stood in need of a corrective—a reflection that recalled her to a sense of her position. It was owing to the violence of that corrective that she now sought relief from Mr Eden. Still, it was with a little contrary effort of the will that she began her confession; and she retained to the end the right to stop short at the fullest disclosure, if only because she supposed that the horror it would inspire in him would be too much like the horror she would have felt before her marriage at the situation in which she found herself. What she would miss in him was the benefit of her own experience. She was not quite as innocent as she believed him still to be, and Annabella discovered to her surprise a kind of pride in her own fall that made her hesitate to implicate herself in the outrage with which he might respond to the facts of it. Yet wasn't it really for that—to arouse such outrage, to witness it, to judge its force and relevance—that she had come to him? In any case, by the time Annabella answered him, she had decently recomposed herself.

‘The question I have been putting to myself,' this was how she began, ‘is why, after all, did he marry me? I don't mean to say that there weren't in the beginning certain testaments of his affection. His temper is variable, and I learned, as his wife, to regard what mathematicians would call the
mean
and not the range of his dispositions. But he has of late—and I am perfectly aware of the tenure of our marriage, and the sorrow that might be suggested by the need I feel to distinguish between its beginning and its present course—so little favoured me with the extraordinary grace of his affections, that I have wondered whether some change in circumstance, some failure in my own—'

Here Mr Eden showed himself capable of the largest simplicity; perhaps he had learned a little more in his professional duties than she had given him credit for. ‘Has he been violent?'

The sense of her suffering renewed itself in her. Annabella bowed her head; she felt the prick of tears. ‘It isn't his violence that I fear. It is his—indifference.'

‘How long, then, has he been—indifferent to you?'

‘It isn't even his indifference. His sister, in whose house we are staying, makes great claims upon his affection. At least, I believe he
feels
them; she may, after all, be innocent. And—'

‘Innocent of what?'

A pigeon in the church eaves cooed hollowly and then, with a flap, resettled on the grass beside their feet. Mr Eden, idly, lifted his foot, and it flew away. The word had been on the tip of her tongue; but the moment, the quiet necessary to a confession, was almost spoilt. She hadn't after all the strength to say it aloud, and she leaned towards him on the bench and whispered something in his ear. For a minute, he hardly shifted. She expected to feel the instancy of relief, but really what she felt was only the sudden fear, or rather, the hope, that what she had said had not put her beyond the possibility of a retreat. She hadn't guessed till then how much she relied upon the chance of that.

What he repeated, in the end, wasn't quite what she had whispered to him. He had come, perhaps, in his own fashion, a long way from the practical innocence with which he had once professed his love to her. ‘You think there has been—something horrible between them?'

She nodded.

‘And you think that—it has been continuing in your presence?'

Afterwards, on the journey home again, and in the years that followed, she remembered her answer to him. There was a great deal she might have still been spared, but she had seen in his eyes the chance of her evasion. Mr Eden, by asking the question for her, had acknowledged its significance. Between the worst that she knew and the worst that she could imagine, there was a great gulf fixed; and his strict sense of the difference left her a little room to live in hope. Hope, in fact, her half-lie made clear to her, was very much the element in which she moved. She wasn't yet willing to resign to Mr Eden, for all his decency and dignity, her claim to the less modest virtues of Lord Byron. She came home, in fact, with a clear sense of the contrast between the two men; and the occasional impatience she had felt with one of them explained to her in part the resentment she was capable of arousing in the other. She would never have believed it possible on setting forth, but she returned to her husband after her ‘church-excursion', as he came to call it, supported by a stiff new resolution: to devote herself to married life with a freedom, as Mary Montgomery had put it to her, that gave to her desires the privilege she had once accorded her sense of virtue.

‘No,' she had said to Mr Eden. ‘Not in my presence; I am sure of it.'

That night she had her first chance to test her resolution. Her visit to Mr Eden (Annabella, after the fact, made no secret of the object of her ‘church-excursion') had put Lord Byron in one of his most loving humours. It was his disposition, as she expressed it to herself, to deem that whatever he
had
was worthless. Only the threat of losing them brought home to him the value of his possessions—she was almost eager, by this stage, to lump herself among them. Indeed, she saw it as a measure of the difference between them that he answered such threats with what she had described to Mr Eden as the ‘grace of his affections'. Jealousy, Annabella knew, inspired in herself really the worst of her vanities. After dinner, he asked her to play for them and instead of occupying himself with his sister on the settee, he stood over Annabella's shoulder and turned for her the pages of the songbook. ‘Who could resist you, singing,' he said, when she, at last, complained of fatigue and faced him. He added, with that simple honesty which even the most watchful soul sometimes slips into: ‘It is only the stiffness of one of your dignities that makes me bristle.'

‘I had never supposed,' she began, ‘that dignity was something to be objected to.'

But he had, for once, enough good humour to laugh her out of it. ‘No, my dear, only you'll admit, it can be a little uncomfortable for us poor sinners'—she wondered, for a moment, whether this was a class that included his sister and felt a pang of envy at her exclusion from it, until he continued—‘for us poor sinners, who dream of resting on you.'

She took his hands at this; she was almost in tears. ‘Rest against me. There is nothing I should like better. You—you mustn't believe that my dignities are any more comfortable to me than to you.' They looked at each other, and to apologize for her show of feeling, she added, letting go of him and wiping her eyes: ‘You see, I am sure, how easily
I
am managed. The least kindness unbends me.' She feared, as she said it, that a note of unintended reproach had crept into her voice, but he was equal to the justice of her correction. ‘I can be kind or loving,' he said, ‘only upon inspiration, which dries up. I am sorry for that.' He continued, with the patient curiosity of famous men, regarding their own characters, in which the interest, they confidently presume, is sufficiently general: ‘My temper, luckily, is vicious on the same condition. I always dry up, Pip. You can count on that, at least.' It was a kind of apology, Annabella supposed—at least, it was the only one he made for what she had suffered at his sister's house. And it struck her, then, as a proof of how little she
did
count on, that she was willing to take comfort from it.

They were leaving for London in the morning, and that night, for the first time, Lord Byron came up with his wife to bed. It was a sign (she quietly exulted in it) of her triumph over Augusta: she would win in the end.
Hers
was really the permanent relation, the one he must live with. And the fact that he felt the force of that necessity was made plain by the new note he attempted to strike in their relations. He was trying to find a way to love her—that was the desperation by which she excused, in the first pain of the aftermath, the violence done her. She was dressing for bed with her back towards him. She could feel him watching her, for once; his voice seemed to grow out of that feeling.

He said that he had become accustomed, in his travels through the East, to some of the local customs or practices, which had the reputation among the English as the worst of those vices against which a foreigner must, as it were, shut his eyes, if he is to keep up with the natives the pretence of civility. Well, he laughed, he had not shut his eyes, and without, as it happens, the least sacrifice of civility. It was only the pretence of it that one relinquished. He remembered that his friend Hobhouse used to complain in Turkey that he had no notion of comfort because he could sleep where none but a brute could—and certainly where none but brutes did. Thus they lived, one day in the palace of the Pasha (who had taken a particular fancy to him) and the next in the most miserable hut of the mountains. The hospitality they received was consistent, at least, in this respect: that Hobhouse refused from certain scruples to enjoy the full extent of it, wherever they were. Well, he had had no scruples, and he frankly confessed that he
had
enjoyed himself.