A Quiet Adjustment (9 page)

Chapter Eight

MISS MONTGOMERY, UNEXPECTEDLY
, had been inspired by the fine weather to propose their venturing out in it, and Annabella was glad of the chance to relieve her considerable indecision by the exercise of her two legs. She had decided to put a term to her hesitation. Her sense of what was due Lord Byron precluded a lengthy period of reflection, and this limitation, practically a decision in itself, had given her an almost vertiginous dose of high spirits. Besides, she always felt vigorous, innocent and free in the company of her ailing friend. Her mood seemed to her, as they strolled through the fall of leaves into Regent Street, a hint of internal decisions struck, which would soon bubble up. That sense of rising
uncertainty was among the effects she decided to ascribe to ‘being in love': it suggested to her the first blustery onset of the positive. She was conscious, indeed, of the need for a sober corrective, which no one was better placed to administer than Mary Montgomery. But this fact could not entirely subdue in Annabella a childish impatience, which the stronger always feel towards the weaker. She supposed herself on the verge of a prominence that might for ever change their relation to each other; and it seemed to her somewhat hard, in the act of attaining it, to have to abide in their discussion of the question to the old proportions.

What she learned, however, from her conversation with Miss Montgomery struck her as a kind of reminder: this is the force of which a friend is capable. Mary, with one of her grateful ironies, had claimed the due of Annabella's arm; and as they passed briefly into Regent Street together, Miss Milbanke, guiltlessly enough, acknowledged to herself the pleasure she took in the contrast they afforded the passers-by. Her friend, with her clever and humorous features squeezed into the corners of her face: stooped, pale, dependent. Herself, blooming in the hothouse heat produced in her pretty round head by the necessity of a decision: free-striding, supportive, erect. Mary liked Regent Street only from the security of one of its coffee houses, where she could enjoy the view of every Tom and Jerry in their tour of the shops with, as she said, ‘a little elbow-room to mock them in'. She was, in her reputation as an invalid, sufficiently the ‘real article' that the press of people against her occasioned sensible distress. Regent Street, in particular, was very much the parade of the men. The ordinary rules of gallantry seemed not to apply. Even Annabella, protected as she already perceived herself to be by a subtle shield of self-importance—held up, as it were, by her idea of Lord Byron himself, and forged from the interest he took in her—was glad, at last, when the traffic deposited the pair of them upon the banks of St James's Park and allowed them the freedom of quiet.

Annabella, as they took their seat upon one of the benches that lined the water, remarked on the felicity of the weather. It was positively golden. The autumn had reached just that stage of the gilding when things begin to go brittle and break off. Pools of leaves at their feet equalled, beautifully, the sparseness of the trees. The ducks, too, seemed a pleasant proof of nature's gift for the
buffo
, the humorous touch. It was strange, Annabella remarked, that garrulous people never so prettily adorned a scene. Mary, for once, refused to ‘make conversation'; and as Annabella continued to let the flow of her spirits spill out in ‘small talk', she felt herself, unfairly, being cast in the role of the duck.

‘I have heard,' Mary finally, and by a change of key, broke in, ‘that Mr Eden has taken up the incumbency near Bury St Edmunds; that he has quit London.'

Annabella confessed to having seen him go. ‘He had been,' she kindly added, ‘delighted by the situation. It was almost all he could have wished for.' A recognition, on Annabella's part, of what lay hidden in that ‘almost' affected her, it seemed, with something of her friend's mood for they lapsed again into silence. Mary, happily, let them. She had the air of someone waiting out the trivial, as if she trusted in what might be called her magnetizing force to draw the real metal to herself—the dross, for once, held no attraction for her. ‘I have some news,' Annabella offered at last. ‘I want your advice.' But humourlessness was just what she had not counted for, and she found her recitation of Lord Byron's ‘approach' oddly interrupted by it. She had been expecting, at the very least, to quicken curiosity, which would have given air to the fuel of her confession. What met her, instead, was the silence of concern; she heard, echoed back at her, only the noise she was making. She almost gasped at the clatter, which seemed, indeed, to give her intentions away, as much to herself as to her friend: she planned to accept him.

When she was finished, the first thing Mary decided to question was whether his ‘approach', since this was the word they were giving it, had not been suspiciously quick. Annabella had scarce seen him a dozen times and had conversed with him, it might be, on fewer than half of those occasions. Her fortune was, thank God, well known to be entangled enough that one could not imagine Lord Byron to be hunting after it; but (and Mary attempted to smile her insult into pleasantry) one presumed that Lord Byron had sufficiently ‘the pick' of beauty that Annabella's claims to it, great as they were, could hardly be said to have decided him. Annabella began to redden. She considered for a moment a dignified return to silence. But she feared, with a burst of self-analysis, that her dignity could not outface her friend's, so she decided to make a point of her advantages—of her intimacy with the poet. ‘He is inclined,' she said, with a confidential air, ‘to open his heart unreservedly to those whom he believes good, even without the preparation of much acquaintance. He is extremely humble towards persons whose character he respects, and to them he has been known to confess his errors—and his love—with almost precipitate haste.'

This seemed all very well, as far as it went, but Mary would not admit that it went very far. His own precipitation could scarcely claim, as the price paid for it, a similar rush of imprudence from Annabella. Surely it was the part of the wiser head to defer any engagement until a deeper and more durable basis for it had been established. It seemed to Mary, distinctly, to be ‘plucking at chances' to accept him now; it was unlike Annabella to seize at such things. By ‘things', Annabella quickly took up, Mary surely did not merely mean ‘good fortune'. Annabella should hate to find that she had acquired the reputation, among her dearest friends, of someone who refused whatever came her way from a sense of honour that was really only a mask for indecision and timidity. That word conjured an image of her father; and taking strength from real feeling, she saw her way to addressing an aspect of the question much nearer her heart. Conscious of emerging at last onto the higher ground, however exposed, Annabella added, that she had seen in these past weeks prospects opened before her—of love and beauty, enhanced by all that wealth, fame, and genius could accomplish—which she had hardly dreamed of. It seemed to her that the best she could hope for was to deserve them; she might for ever regret the failure to attempt it.

‘My dear Bell,' Mary quickly and with greater warmth rejoined, ‘you do me no credit to suggest that I have any fear for your deserts. You deserve worlds; it is rather that I suspect Lord Byron himself incapable of living up to you than the reverse.'

‘But you must see, much as you love me,' Annabella now softly replied, ‘that any association with a man of Lord Byron's prominence, whatever you may think of his prudence, offers possibilities —if nothing else, then, of seeing my own merits acknowledged—which I could never aspire to, without it.'

‘I should have thought that the warm and particular regard of your dearest friends would have sufficed you.'

‘You mistake me, kindly, lovingly, but almost wilfully, my dear Mary. I mean by possibilities the full extent of the moral education that any contact with a nature as expansive, as noble, as ambitious, as Lord Byron's must entail.'

Mary echoed the word, as if by a change in tone to give it its real meaning. ‘Ambitious.'

And Annabella, fully conscious of her friend's understanding, and rising to it, repeated, ‘Yes, ambitious. I confess it, Mary: I am ambitious.' And then, as if by a distant shot having narrowed the gap between them, until their ships lay enmeshed in each other, she began to board and address the argument, hand-to-hand. ‘I admit to possessing a greater portion of ambition than you do, with this exception: that I should have thought you no less ambitious
for
me.'

‘Did Mr Eden, then,' Mary answered her, descending to tactics herself, ‘never declare his feelings to you?'

Annabella, frankly, stopped short at this. ‘He did.'

‘And you declined him?'

‘I did.'

Mary, quietly, took this in and then, after a moment, said, ‘I confess to having thought him a proper, loving, honourable, amiable man. I am sorry for him. I am sorry for both of you.'

Annabella perceived in this last general expression of pity a wrong note. It shifted at once, like all wrong notes, her attention from the music. It recalled to her the nature of the performer: a lively, clever, affectionate girl, who deserved the largest acknowledgement in return but was confined by illness to a dependence on her female friends. Annabella saw now in Mary's pity the hand of envy; and having found it out, she refused to believe that envy had not had its hand in the whole song. It was only a question of whether the fact could be gracefully acknowledged by some subtle distinction in her reply.

She was prevented at first from attempting it by the recognition, amidst the general foot-traffic, of Lord and Lady Gosford, approaching from the side of Piccadilly in their barouche. ‘How delightful it was, the way the weather brought about these coincidences! It really was so fine,' Lady Gosford declared, as soon as her foot touched the ground, ‘that she didn't know whether she mightn't after all attempt a walk. Nothing should give her greater pleasure than the young ladies' joining her.' She added, for the benefit of Miss Montgomery, that a little perambulation was supposed to do one a great deal of good:
a good walk
was the only medicine her doctor could not excessively prescribe. Annabella, seeing her chance for just the necessary ‘distinction', pointedly took up the offer, as if their confidences had reached a natural term; there was nothing left to be said. The four of them set off together, with Mary taking the arm of Lord Gosford.

As they crossed the little bridge, he inquired of Miss Montgomery what the pair of them had been so busily gossiping over. Mary, archly, confessed a horror of gossip; they had, she said, been discussing poetry. The question had come up, of whether Lord Byron's present popularity had not had a pernicious effect on his readers. It was Mary's belief that he had excited an appetite for sensations which had begun to vitiate the pleasure one had been accustomed to taking in the modest, the sensible, the durable, and the good. Annabella, lagging on Lady Gosford's arm, now looked over her shoulder for a chance to intrude. In a high, sweet voice (that tasted in her own mouth like apple-cider going hard), she remarked that ‘among the strangest of what you call the effects of Lord Byron's company, upon myself, is that he tends to make me exceedingly pious. I am never more jealous of my own propriety, of my modesty, sense, and goodness, as you put it, than in the company of that reputed libertine. His manners are so perfectly those of a gentleman that one feels, in oneself, any deviation from that standard to the most painful degree.'

‘It was not the effect of his company,' Mary replied, with the air of one insisting on her own game by continuing to play it, ‘that formed the object of my remarks; rather, the influence of his poetry itself.'

Annabella had by this time drawn her hostess into the footpath beside her friend. A little shifting all round became necessary, to steer Lady Gosford out of the bank of leaves at the edges. ‘As for that,' Annabella resumed the discussion, when this was accomplished, ‘I believe myself to be so tainted with the
blue
that I may as well aspire to some of the privileges of that tribe. It is our vanity, which we are best humoured in, to trust in our literary convictions as the honest may be supposed to trust in their consciences. I admit that the moral and immoral are dangerously mixed in Lord Byron's verses, although in a manner which, I think, we may call “true to the life”. Vice is never indulged in but as a lesson to the virtuous. His heroes, at least, always suffer for their sins.'

‘I believe his heroines suffer even more.' It was wonderful to Annabella how coolly her friend had kept up the tone, though what followed had the air of a stronger sincerity. ‘For myself, I confess,' Mary said, ‘to having seen much in his writing that I should not dare to claim the comprehension of. Not all of us possess so fine a critical understanding as Miss Milbanke's, and there may be some who delight in his depiction of vice merely for vice's sake.'