A Quiet Adjustment (6 page)

‘I don't suppose Mr George Eden would make you unhappy—you, who want for nothing, and consequently have no desires of your own to act upon.'

‘That is unfair, Mary, but I know you are only teasing me into a reaction. Mr Eden is a fine, upright man and shall make no doubt an excellent preacher and a very comfortable husband.' She remembered Lord Byron's account of him—‘now there is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man . . . and a dull man'—and desired very much to repeat it now for her friend's amusement. Yet she feared an appearance of impropriety and so bit her tongue and continued, ‘But I wonder if his understanding is not too confined to what is reasonable and proper. There are corners of my conscience I should not like him to stumble upon. I doubt very much if he would recognize what he found, and I fear he might blame me for his own incomprehension.'

Mary set down her cup to press her hands together and raise them to her lips. ‘My dear sweet Bella,' she began—when her friend interrupted her, crossly, to say, ‘Now you have got what you want and shall mock me for it.'

‘Not for the world; only, I cannot make you out. A very good man and a notorious libertine have fallen in love with you. Both honour you for your perfections, so much so, that the one only just dares to approach you, while the other scarcely understands you. If you are a very good girl, you must marry Mr Eden; but if you are a bad one, Lord Byron may sympathize but won't love you for it. I think on the whole you had better be a very good girl.'

‘I said you would mock me, and what if I am something between the two?'

‘Heaven help you, my dear, if you prove human. But forgive me: I should like, more than anything, to see you trust in your desires as much as you have been used to trusting in your virtue. I only wonder whether your sins stretch quite as far as you fear, whether loving-kindness and patience and charity are not predominant in you. Perhaps Mr Eden understands you well enough. I do believe you wish to be a little less perfect than you are.'

‘This is the strangest flattery,' Annabella said, quietly giving way to tears. ‘It feels very much like being cut.'

‘My poor sweet girl,' Mary answered, in a different tone. She had a blanket laid across her knees; from among its recesses she discovered a handkerchief, which she offered with an outstretched hand. ‘I had not supposed you were so unhappy on it.'

Annabella dried her eyes. ‘I hardly know myself.' And then, when she deemed herself presentable again: ‘Do you really think he is in love with me?'

Chapter Five

AFTER HIS RETURN FROM OXFORD,
Mr Eden began to press forward in his attentions. There was something about the tone of their discourse that made it impossible for Annabella to put him off. They professed to share a sense of how little the pleasures of society in
general
were worth, and it was their agreement on the matter that seemed to secure for him perpetual recourse to the pleasure of hers
in particular whenever he liked. He claimed her at the beginning and end of every dance; cornered her in conversation; and attended to her at dinner, on departure, in a manner that declared, with every word or gesture, that he knew his own mind and could answer for Annabella's. He was acutely aware, as he repeatedly professed, of being about to take his place in the world; the prospect had not so much shaken as confirmed his faith in his judgement. He had pared his wants to their essential and was gratified to discover the scope of enjoyment that promised from the remainder. Indeed, what surprised Annabella, as a fresh response in her, was not so much that she wished from obstinate perversity to dispute his confidence in her, but that her self-possession allowed her to transform that perversity into something useful and more deeply flattering to her vanity. She observed, with a jealous eye, every jealous glance Lord Byron cast their way.

Once, after a banquet at Lady Melbourne's, Annabella found herself ‘short of air', as she said, and turned for relief to the narrow balcony onto which the French windows of the drawing room opened. Mr Eden had only just retired. He was conscious, he had told her, of possessing personal charms that rarely survived the conclusion of a meal. His conversation, he trusted, might benefit the digestion and enliven the supper-table but could not serve the higher spirits that prevailed afterwards. She had not answered, except to smile, and he took her silence as his cue to depart without her. The little blush of sadness that she felt at his disappointment surprised Annabella, and she sought the balcony to reflect on it alone. Her first response at finding Lord Byron already installed, contemplating the expanse of the gardens below him, all noiseless in the summer heat, was mortification at the thought that he would suppose her guilty of an approach. She begged his pardon and prepared to turn inside.

‘Stay,' he said, quickly touching her shoulder with his hand. ‘What I wished to escape, inside, has not followed me out.' For a moment, she thought he must mean Mr Eden, but before she could defend him, Lord Byron continued. His voice was beautifully modulated to the evening, low and musical. ‘I have been imagining for the past half hour what the effects would be of my keeping an unbroken silence—if anybody would take note and join me in it. I had a most delightful vision of the entire company standing and staring at each other, as quiet as sparrows. But there, I am as guilty as the rest of them—you have come out for a minute's peace, and I have spoilt it, have I not?'

‘My best answer, I believe,' Annabella said, finding her wits, ‘should be to ignore the question.'

He bowed his head, and they stood side by side, breathing the still air. She exulted in the confidence that her power of silence would outlast his own. He had set them a little game to play, and she was determined to beat him at it: she could act the misanthrope as well as he. A minute passed, and then another. She heard the low waves of conversation from the drawing room behind her. Someone had sat down to the piano. There is nothing sweeter, she thought, than the sound of music
within
. She was thoroughly stirred up by the secret of their presence on the balcony. Mounting silence was like a spring of joy within her, bubbling up. She could barely suppress her pleasure in it any longer—until he broke it, in a casual tone that suggested no sympathy with the contest in her at all. Perhaps she was going mad.

‘When we first met,' he began, ‘I believe I asked you a question. Do you remember what it was?'

She nodded and summoned her voice. ‘You said: Is there anyone here who dares look into himself?'

‘And have you discovered, in the course of these months, a happier answer to make to it?'

Annabella reflected; the tone of her answer was everything. ‘I met with one or two who, like myself, did not appear absorbed in the present scene—and who interested me in a degree. I had a wish to find amongst men the character I had often imagined, but I found only parts of it. One gave proofs of worth but had no sympathy for high aspirations. Another seemed full of affection towards his family, and yet he valued the world.'

‘You might just as well have said,' he replied, smiling, ‘I found an Augustus Foster, a William Bankes. I know them and pity them the more for being found out as well as turned away. But was there no one who answered your complete idea?'

She blushed and looked down.

‘I believe I understand you,' he said. For an instant, she thought he had, but then he continued, ‘And wish you every happiness in your garden of—'

The door behind them opened, and Lady Caroline put her head out. ‘There you are, Annabella. The gentlemen have been complaining of a want of pretty ladies for waltzing with. No one is excused; we must all do our part . . .' Then, ‘Even you, Lord Byron.'

Mr Eden's proposal arrived with the inevitability of summer, or its end. He applied first to Lady Gosford, as Miss Milbanke's chaperon in the city; and she warned Annabella to expect a caller in the morning, who had a question to ask of her. ‘I suppose you know his business as well as your own,' Lady Gosford said. ‘My only piece of advice, and I don't flatter myself that it will be taken, is this: do not answer hastily. I believe that a good night's sleep has never stood in the way of a decision.'

Annabella received him in the drawing room. She had put on for the occasion her simplest muslin. Her hair was tied up in cream ribbons. She wished to convey the impression, for Mr Eden's benefit, of a creature whose indifference was only the flowering of her innocence; she wished to suggest that the only answer she could ever give a man was, no. She had made up her mind to respond in the negative but, even so, was conscious of being supported by his attachment in that vanity which gave her the courage to refuse him.

Mr Eden, arriving somewhat late, had already put Annabella out of spirits. She had risen from her chair, on which she believed the light to fall most flatteringly, half a dozen times and sat down again on every seat in the room, to make a trial of it, before returning to her position by the window. He was shown in, not in the least sweaty with hurry and larger indeed than she had remembered him: a solid, proper man, quite unlike the creature of her imaginations. She rose stiffly to greet him and held out her hand. He kissed it with warm, dry lips and, as they sat down together, offered his explanation.

‘He little presumed that his arrival attracted such a weight of anticipation that any delay would be felt as a burden, yet he wished to apologize for his lateness—if only because he had so often professed to Miss Milbanke the value he placed in satisfying the letter as well as the spirit of one's obligations that a departure from his usual rule would strike her as the worst hypocrisy. Word had only just reached him regarding an incumbency, the gift of which he had sufficiently despaired of receiving before the end of the summer, that he had only yesterday decided to anticipate it by the question he intended to pose her. Its arriving just in time that morning was the cause of his being late in setting out, but he was confident that Miss Milbanke would forgive a delay that allowed him to frame his proposal to her in a manner more becoming to her deserts. He had been offered and intended to accept, subsequent to their conversation, a vicarage in Sutton, outside Newmarket. The rectory, which he had visited himself on a number of occasions when poor Mr Torking presided there, God rest his soul, was a comfortable, dry and gentlemanly place, with a large orchard attached to it; and the income from the living would fully justify him, given his private resources, to keep an establishment in town. He mentioned these claims though perfectly conscious that Miss Milbanke would consent to marry only on the grounds of affection and that the charm of a fortune could never persuade her where the charms of the person had failed to; but he was sensible of the fact that a level of material comfort was, not only her proper due, but the best security for the increase of those sentiments a young couple could command on setting out in life.'

He paused at last. Annabella was almost overwhelmed into silence by the duration of this little speech. Lord Byron's humorous description of Mr Eden recurred to her for a second time, and it was with some difficulty that she held back the smile that might have rewarded his wit. But she was angry, too. She reflected that, in her relations with Mr Eden, her own opinions were rather praised than solicited. It was entirely like the man to ask for her hand in the midst of an earnest and rambling account of his own advancement. Still, she hardly knew what to say and decided that her best response would be an attempt at clarification. ‘Was she to understand that Mr Eden proposed to marry her?'

His large, sensible face had contracted around the eyes. ‘Forgive me,' he said, ‘I am a little overwrought and have been all morning. I could scarcely swallow any breakfast.'

Annabella moved to ring the bell. ‘If Mr Eden was hungry, he had only to say the word. It was quite shocking of her to have forgotten her manners; she begged his pardon. Of course, they must have some tea.' The archness of her tone brought home to her, as nothing else could have, how poorly the innocence she pretended to would serve her in this interview.

‘No, no,' he said, touching her hand, which held the bell, to silence. ‘He could not eat, or think, or breathe, until he knew his fate. He was conscious, no one more so, that his manner suggested a confidence which he was far from possessing. And he had expressed himself very badly, he knew.'

Annabella sat with the bell in one hand on her lap, while her other hand played with its cold tongue. She felt a rush of pity for both of them: for Mr Eden, for proposing; and for herself, for refusing him. ‘The shortness of my answer, I fear, will do little justice to the weight and scope of the question, but I must say, no—and no amount of stretching the syllable out can make it any pleasanter to either of us.'

Mr Eden put his fingers to his mouth, as if to hold in place an intake of breath. ‘May I ask your reasons?' he said, exhaling.

‘I wish I knew them,' she answered in a livelier tone—a rare outbreak in her of simplicity. He was, unquestionably, a suitable match; her mother had said as much. And in the weeks to follow, she pondered deeply not over her decision but over the ease with which she had come to it. It occurred to her now to say that she loved another, but she knew quite well whose countenance the phrase would conjure up, in her own as well as Mr Eden's thoughts. Besides, she couldn't even then have answered for the truth of this evasion. She had been proposed to (she silently counted them up) on five occasions, and though the recollection of their professions of love had often flattered her into a better humour on a gloomy day, she remembered only now the real emotion they had provoked her into at the time: blind fear. What a terrible thing it seemed, to surrender your life to a man! How pleasantly she had always got on in the safety of her parents' love and free from the confinement of a husband's.

Mr Eden had to some extent recomposed himself. ‘Might I hazard to describe them?' he said. His manner was much more like his accustomed manner, more concisely reasonable, and only then did Annabella guess the state of his nerves on his first proposal. His pupils had retracted considerably; they looked very small and calculating in his large eyes. ‘I believe you suppose me generally in want of a wife.' She made a gesture of dissent, which he ignored. ‘You suspect me of lighting upon you as the most suitable to hand; you fancy another will do just as well. I can assure you the reverse is true. I have too great a conviction in my own merit to risk my life with anyone else. You are unquestionably my superior, in beauty, in virtue, in sense, and if I venture to deserve you, it is only because I believe no one else so capable of doing justice to your deserts. If you refuse me, I may with confidence assert: I shall never marry.' As he stood up to take his leave, he added: ‘I ask you to think on this, as much for your own sake, as mine.'

It was a speech she was never given the occasion to forget, but at the time it only made her task easier. She had bristled at his assurance, and as he took her hand, she said, practising her dignity, ‘I respect you too much to compound the injury of my refusal by drawing it out.' She let go of him. ‘I blame myself already for having, however innocently, led you to form expectations which I have always known I could not satisfy; my only excuse can be that I did not guess your feelings in time. You know me well enough to believe that I should not have spoken if I were at all uncertain of my own.'