Childish Loves (11 page)

Mrs Pigot asked Mary why her daughter called us always ‘the inveterate cousins'. The phrase meant nothing to her, but she supposed there was some scandal attached to it.

‘A little scandal,' I said, ‘but briefly told. My wicked great-uncle killed Mary's grandfather in a duel. My uncle was very drunk at the time, and Mr Chaworth, I presume, not very sober either.'

‘Was this not all a very long time ago?'

‘A long time ago, but it is still remembered. In towns, Mrs Pigot,' Mary said, ‘you have the great fortune of involving yourself in any dozen little quarrels you wish to. You may pick and choose, and they are all quickly resolved by their own rapid succession. But the Chaworths have only the Byrons, and the Byrons have only the Chaworths, to be disagreeable to; which is why we prize the memory of it so greatly.'

‘And was he hanged – your great-uncle, I mean?'

‘He was not. He was tried in the House of Lords and acquitted at last, whereupon he retired to Newstead and went mad. It is just what all Byrons wish in their hearts to do – to retire to Newstead and go mad. I have been attempting it myself this summer.'

‘Nonsense, Mrs Pigot,' Mary said. ‘He is not nearly so strange as he pretends and has been living at Annesley, more or less without interruption, since the beginning of August. We all feel it as a great betrayal of principle, but his presence is otherwise acceptable to us.'

*

We dined at Castleton. There was some talk of visiting the ruins of Peveril Castle, but Mary has not the least interest in ruins, and Miss Wollaston was eager to see the caverns and be gone – it is two hours by coach to Matlock Bath. This was a great disappointment to me, as there was nothing else that interested me half as much as the ruins. Mr Musters' sympathies surprised me. He took me by the arm, out of the coaching-inn, and led me along the street and around a corner, until we could see, at the top of a green hill, a square grey turret and a low grey wall. Crows settled and unsettled against the walls, and a few herring gulls wheeled above them. A half-hour's good walk might have brought us to the summit, but then, I should have preferred a horse.

‘We are all the slaves of female pleasure,' Mr Musters said. ‘We do what they please and not what pleases us.'

For a minute we stood arm in arm, looking up, with the sun behind us. ‘And yet there is in their presence,' I told him, moved for the first time into a kind of confession, ‘a comfortable
something
, which I cannot at all account for; and
their
pleasure pleases us, too.'

It was left to me to propose our return.

‘Where have you been?' Mary cried when she saw us. She had come a little way down the road to meet us, which was all dust and pebbles, and looked rather ghostly under the shade of her parasol. ‘We have been waiting this hour at least. The horses are all in harness.'

We disposed ourselves as before and returned to the carriages. Mr Becher had brought along a volume of Jonson's containing a masque, which he proposed to read to us, as it was set in Derbyshire and included some reference to Peaks Hole. But he read a little way in and then gave up the attempt; there was too much indecency in it. It was entirely unsuitable, and he spent the rest of the journey turning over the pages and sometimes shaking his head.

Mrs Pigot sat at his right hand. ‘Oh, let me look,' she complained. ‘I have seen a great deal more of life, young man, than you. There is nothing that shocks me so much as propriety.'

‘I thought it would please you,' I said to Mary in a low voice. ‘If Mr Musters is to become your – particular friend. I thought, the least service I could render you is to make him
mine
.'

‘Oh, the least service … I suppose you were talking all the time about me.'

‘This at least may be read by a
clergyman
without a blush,' Mr Becher said at last, bowing towards Mary.

He began to recite, until Mrs Pigot interrupted him.

‘If it is decent or not, I should not like to say,' she said. ‘But it is certainly nonsense.'

‘That is not the bit I meant, I have lost my place.'

‘If you mean to marry him,' I said to Mary, ‘I should like to know him better, because he has always appeared to me uncomfortably mysterious. He frightens me a little. When I am alone with him, I feel something very much like fear.'

‘Who said that I meant to marry him?'

‘I thought it was generally understood, and Miss Wollaston confirmed it.'

‘Miss Wollaston takes a great interest in marriage without the least intention of marrying herself. I should not credit Miss Wollaston with anything besides a wish to amuse herself – often at my expense.'

‘I think she meant you no harm. Perhaps she meant to protect me.'

Mary said at last, ‘Am I very terrible?'

‘This is better,' Mr Becher said and began to read again, in what Elizabeth always calls his
sermony
voice.

‘Now I
am
offended,' Mrs Pigot afterwards declared. ‘I suppose you mean, because I am old myself, it should please. I confess that the rest meant nothing to me, but I recollect the beginning very well, which ran, To the old, clutch not so fast to your treasures, or something of that sort.'

I said to Mary, ‘You mock me. You think of me always as a boy.'

‘I am not so easily kidded as that,' Mr Becher replied. ‘I know when I am being teased. But this is not what I had wished for at all. I had hoped there should be some fine description of the scenery, but it is all in his humour.'

‘For shame, Mr Becher, that when the hills surround us in the sunshine, as they do, when there is a beautiful lady to be looked at, and talked to, you should seek your pleasures in books.'

‘You must not blame Mr Becher, Mrs Pigot,' Mary said. ‘Lord Byron gives out that it is generally understood I am
spoken
for, which has frightened away every other gentleman. At least, this must be my consolation. But indeed, the view of these hills is very fine, and the ascent not very rough.'

We arrived at last at a station a few hundred yards distant from the caverns, where there was a small cottage with a hut attached to it and a hitching-post in the yard. Mr Musters, who had by this stage thoroughly taken charge of the party, gave Saunders the coachman instructions regarding the horses, and the rest of us arranged ourselves in no very great order around the yard and stretched our legs. It was now three o'clock, and still cloudless and windless, but not excessively hot; the shadows had begun to stretch in the sun.

Elizabeth said to me, ‘Mr Musters is quite charming and exactly the kind of man my brother dislikes.'

‘Why do you quiz me about Mr Musters?' I said to her. ‘He is nothing to me.'

‘I believe he may be something to Miss Chaworth.'

‘That is their own affair. I am not in the least in love with her.'

‘Perhaps I won't tease you,' she said. ‘You look very solemn. It ruins the sport.'

The cottage belonged to a farmer, who offered us one of his sons as a guide, for not much money; and after a brief negotiation, in which I played no part, he led the way up a steep single track with grass growing in it. This son was very tall and already a little stooped. He said nothing but walked in long strides, carrying across his shoulders a kind of sack; the rest of us pursued him at a short distance. Mr Musters gave his arm to Mary. They were followed first by Mr Becher and Elizabeth, and then John and Miss Wollaston. Mrs Pigot and I trailed a little behind the others, which suited both of us – as she is a thin, frail, weak-winded woman, and we could ‘scramble up' (as she put it) at our leisure.

‘You are much missed in Southwell,' Mrs Pigot said to me. ‘And much talked about. All the ladies pine after you.'

‘I think you don't mean Elizabeth. I think you mean my mother.'

‘Oh, Elizabeth talks about you, too.'

There was a short general pause while we turned to look at the view, which had expanded beneath us until it included much of Castleton in a fold of the hills. The sound of the Peakshole was already becoming louder, and we could see the water falling and making its way, by fragments, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of us; and then, appearing again beneath our feet, more sluggishly and silently, as it approached the village.

‘I have an idea,' I said, ‘that I am always happiest among hills. Flat lands oppress me. I was raised among hills in Aberdeen; perhaps that accounts for it. And there is a view from Harrow Hill I am greatly attached to.'

‘Your mother complains that you have no notion of returning.'

‘Confess, Mrs Pigot – my mother is always complaining.'

‘I will just say this much, that she shares with you a passion for
opposition.'

‘I have no such passion. It is just because I wish to live peacefully that I mean in future to keep my distance from
her
and Harrow. There is a master there who abuses his rights over me. It must come to blows in the end, and as I have no particular liking for scrapes, or for myself in a rage, it seems only sensible to put myself out of the way of temptation.'

‘But where will you live?'

‘At Newstead. Lord Grey makes no objection.'

‘There are certain objections a mother might make to Lord Grey,' she said. ‘Besides, I think you mean Annesley.'

We continued our ascent and said nothing for several minutes. Mrs Pigot had grown quite pale, and we both laboured somewhat against the loose stones of the path. Peak's Cavern eventually made its appearance above our heads, like a great faceless cowl, all black within, in spite of the afternoon sun.

‘I must say,' she said, ‘I have never understood this appetite for nature. I have come along to be pleasant, but left to myself I had much preferred a good provincial town, with a church not too far, to be walked to and looked at, before you return quite pleased with yourself to dine at the hotel.' And then, ‘Miss Chaworth is a very pretty, spirited sort of a girl.'

‘She appears not at her best in company. I believe she is not very happy.'

‘That is because you are in love with her. We always suppose that someone must be miserable, if we are in love with them – probably because it makes us a little miserable ourselves.'

‘Oh, Mrs Pigot, I had rather you
mocked
me, as your daughter does, because then I should be less inclined to burst into tears. Perhaps you mean to, after all; you are smiling.'

‘My dear, sweet child, not for the world,' she said. ‘It is only because, for a moment, you sounded so much like the boy from Aberdeen Lizzy is always teasing you for being. Och, Mrs Pigot. But it was not a smile; indeed, I did not smile.'

And with that, we reached the top.

The others had arrived already. Our guide struck a light and then distributed the torches he had been carrying in his sack to each of the gentlemen in turn. I received mine, too. The entrance to the cave looked mean and dirty, but the view was very fine across the valley, broken up into fields, with the shallow grey glitter of Castleton to the east. Above us, a high forehead of limestone reared itself covered in trees and mosses – I grew quite dizzy, leaning back with my hands on my hips to glimpse the top. The path had broadened towards the cliff-face, and the entrance itself was as wide as the clearing in which we stood. But the colour of the cave-mouth had lightened from black to dreary. Mr Musters and John had already advanced some distance, torches in hand, to examine the walls. Most of the women followed uncertainly behind.

Mrs Pigot left me to join her daughter, and for the first time I became aware of the fact that Mary stood some way apart, with her back to the entrance – as if her attention were entirely taken up by the view. I remembered she had been walking with Mr Musters. I called to her, approaching, and she turned around with a smile and took my arm, but said nothing; and together we followed the others into the cave.

The air was much cooler inside, and damp and stony.

‘It smells of Newstead,' I said, ‘where the river has got into the cellars.'

And my words changed as we walked, first diminishing, and then growing again in volume as they found their echo. Gradually the light of day behind us was replaced by the uncertain glow of our torches, and the cold deepened. Miss Wollaston's voice reached us, doubled and redoubled by the cavern walls. She had found something to laugh at, and then her laughter frightened her, and her fear amused her again. Ahead of us we could see, by torch-light, Miss Wollaston on the arm of Mr Musters; Elizabeth and her mother, walking together; and John and Mr Becher arm in arm. The first chamber gave way to a second, and here indeed a perpetual fall of water curtained one of the walls and disappeared again, into God knows what depths. The sound of the water was loud enough to absorb any other, and we all stood silently for a minute – there is an intensity of noise that acts with the force of a blow.

After a hundred paces the path began to taper. The walls of the cavern encroached upon the ceiling, and the space in which a man might walk upright narrowed, as I heard Mr Becher saying, ‘to a shoulder's breadth, look out, look out'. The farmer's son crouched by the side of the wall to let us pass, then stuck a torch into the ground. It had grown dark enough by this stage that the light of day behind us had become indistinguishable from the mineral glow and vague aqueous gleams brought out by our own lights, and since the walls of the cavern to either side gave way in many places to several smaller passages and false fronts, he wished, I suppose, to mark the path of our return. Kindling another torch against the flames of the first, he crept alongside me again to the front of the party. Mary, who had begun to shiver against my arm, said, ‘I don't want to go on. I can't go on.'

‘It is only the cold,' I said, ‘it is nothing worse than the cold.'

‘I have begun to feel very strange. I have begun to feel that you are all strangers to me.'