Childish Loves (23 page)

‘What claims has he on yours, I should like to know. There are stories told about him which do not bear repeating.'

‘My dear Long, I am not so innocent as you believe. There is something very flattering in your concern. It supposes me to be what I am not and what I never was.'

‘You are not so difficult to know as you would perhaps wish.'

But then, he has got in with the clerical set, which includes Hodgson and Burton-Smith. They attend Widmore's lecture on Church history and meet afterwards at the Crowne. His shelves are filled with volumes of Canon Ryman's
Reflections and Interpretations
, and when he brings his ‘cello to my rooms, as he continues to do, he plays Purcell's fantasias or something from Croft's
Musica Sacra
. I believe his new friends discourage these visits, but Hodgson is not a bad sort and has besides this great inducement to sociability – he is short of cash.

I have been forced again to apply to Mrs Massingberd. Augusta refused to stand as security for another Jew-debt, and, which was worse, alerted Hanson to my predicament. It seems as easy to renounce a sister (whom, after all, one has hardly known) as disown a mother. Mrs Massingberd is more persuadable. It is a great vice to think about money at all, but without it, one thinks of nothing but money. A subscription was put round for a statue of Pitt, who was a frequent visitor of the college and died early this year. Hanson has said to me (several others have remarked the same) that they expect my true calling to be oratory. I gave some thirty pounds. It has also been necessary for me to maintain a carriage. Finding nothing that would satisfy, I went to the expense of having one built.

Bankes begins to quiz me about Edleston. It is perhaps his greatest vice that he interprets everything in the light of his own character. The truth is that I do not entirely disagree with Long. A few of his
Sunday
boys have become through his influence habitual drunks; one of them was even barred from chapel. Since he lived on the parish, this child (for he is little better than a child) has forfeited not only his position in the choir but his dwelling-place also. Edleston tells me it is not known where or how he lives. But Edleston himself, who has a great horror of drawing attention, is sober and modest and chaste. It is for his sake that I have bought the carriage, as he dislikes the
show
of appearing publicly with me. In this way we travel freely unobserved.

*

A few weeks ago, I took Edleston to the weir above Grantchester, where we swam from its banks. Or rather, I swam while he watched me, clutching his arms together – in spite of the warm May morning, full of motes and sunshine. I stripped and dived in and lay with my head on the water, but Edleston grew cold even before I did and wished to return to the carriage – a half-mile tramp through wet grass.

His father, who was in trade, died a few years before; his mother he never knew. There is a sister, too, a few years his elder, from whom he has jealously kept me. Perhaps they have other relations, but none has claimed them. Since his father's death, he has ‘sung in the choir and made his bed' in the orphanage – he knows no persons of influence but Reverend Broughton and Mrs Carmichael, who runs the priory school. From them he has learned manners and a little Latin. His sister dislikes Mr Bankes, or dislikes his visiting him, which amounts to the same thing; but he has never before had a penny to call his own, and Mr Bankes is generous. Each Sunday he tells himself to keep away but cannot.

He was born almost to the day two years before me, a fact which affords us some astonishment and much pleasure; but he might from the look of him be three or four years my junior.

Bankes, as I say, quizzes me a great deal about him, and not only Bankes but Matthews, too. They talk of the Method and call me a very pious Methodist. But Edleston's modesty is infectious and, for his sake, I feel everything I ought. He dislikes my connections with women, even of the theatre. Between Long and Edleston I keep to a very narrow path, but in London I am free to do as I please, and a great deal pleases me. Then when I am sick of self and love return to Cambridge. But my money has run out, and there is nothing for it but a summer in Southwell to replenish the supply. I am almost glad of it. Edleston alone ties me to Cambridge, and sometimes he strikes me as a very good reason for going.

Several days I put off telling him, and then I could not put it off any longer. He had come to my room after chapel when I was still in bed. He sat at the head of it, as he sometimes did, and I said, ‘I am glad you have come today, for I mean to go to Southwell tomorrow, to see my mother.' Adding, after a minute: ‘The truth is, I am rather dipped at the moment and hope to persuade her to raise a loan on my behalf. Come here; you needn't take fright so.'

But he had retreated to a chair, somewhat encumbered with old clothes.

‘I don't see why you should mind me,' he said.

‘You know very well why I do.' I dislike this sort of talk, and being obliged to declare what everybody knows. Sitting in bed in this way made me feel foolish, so I began to dress in front of him.

‘You have made a great change in my life,' he said. ‘I am grateful for it.'

‘I hope you are more than grateful, and less, too.'

‘But you don't know what my life here is like without you. Since you don't like to know, I don't tell you.'

‘I know well enough; you tell me often enough.'

But he can never keep angry at me long, and we parted for the morning on very good terms, only a little more tenderly and carefully than usual. In the afternoon, we rode out to Grantchester and bathed, diving for eggs, plates, shillings in the weir. There is at a corner in the Cam, about ten or twenty feet submerged, the root of an old tree, to which Long and I make a game of clinging; but as Edleston knew nothing of it, I dived down with a breast full of air and counted to a hundred, looking up all the time into the green sunshiny water to see if he would follow me. When I could breathe no longer I floated up. He was sitting at the edge of the river, with his legs under him and his arms crossed. When he saw me he gave a shout and turned away; and when I had got my own breath back, I joined him on the bank. We lay like that, drying and warming ourselves in the sunshine.

In the morning Edleston met me very early at the door of my room. He could not be sure when I was leaving and had suffered from an anxious night at the thought of missing me. In his hand he held a little box and in the box, which he offered me at once (for he had a horror of farewells), was a little cornelian, attached to a ring, the stone itself no bigger than a suskin.

‘It is very small,' he said. ‘I am only sorry it is so small.'

‘This matters to me not at all, except as I am more likely to lose it.'

‘I wanted to give you something in remembrance. I like to think that, poor as my company is, it has kept you out of worse.'

‘My dear child,' I said, much moved, ‘you are only too good. You are everything I once was and am not. You keep me up to the mark. But this is all nonsense; it is only a month or two. I will see you very soon.'

It is a three-day journey to Southwell, and I spent the first day in a sort of fever of feeling, which could only be relieved by composition.

*

I arrived about four o'clock of a July afternoon. Mrs Pigot was taking tea at Burgage Manor, which I was grateful for as it put Kitty on her good behaviour. She welcomed me with one of her smiles – she does not know herself how ugly they make her. I sat down to a fresh pot and buttered bread. These were brought to me in the drawing room, a pretty enough room when the sun is out (which it was), with a view of the Green – and of my carriage in the road, and the groom attending the horses, and my valet staggering under the weight of my box. Presently he was heard on the stairs; then he showed his head in the doorway, a little breathlessly, and asked where to dispose of it.

‘John is at home,' Mrs Pigot said, when he was gone. ‘He is back from Edinburgh; I should think he will be very pleased to see you.'

‘What have you been talking about?' I said. ‘You have an interrupted air.'

‘Our prodigal sons,' Kitty said.

But Mrs Pigot very slightly shook her head. She has grown still thinner since I saw her last; even Kitty looks well beside her, fat and well. Mrs Pigot for her part praised me for my slender and elegant appearance.

‘You are no longer a boy,' she said. ‘John still looks like a boy.'

‘My clothes have been taken in twice since the new year. I dare say Elizabeth would pass me in the street, without stopping.'

When I had finished the tea, I retired to my room to change; then walked out, looking for John and his sister. They live in a prosperous sort of house, with two columns, at the edge of the Green. Elizabeth herself answered my knock, then called out behind her into the house, ‘John, John! Guess who has come back when he said he wouldn't.'

We spent the afternoon in the garden, which overlooks on one side a series of fields, rising into the hills of Annesley. Another wall is shared with the Pigots' neighbour, a public house. As the weather was fine, and it was a Sunday afternoon, their gardens were crowded; and the noise of people carrying over the wall gave us a pleasant sense of seclusion. John had just come back from studying medicine. He was very amusing on the subject and has become acquainted with almost every class of human misery. But we also exchanged Southwell gossip. Julia Leacroft has got engaged to the son of Lady Hathwell's steward. It appears he has been boasting from Rainworth to Newark of having attracted the preference of Lord Byron's
established favourite
, and broken his heart. But Mr Leacroft is disappointed and hopes to take up his cause with me. All of which meant nothing more than that Elizabeth had decided to tease me. I was sorry to find she had so little news of her own.

Kitty, when I returned at last, was less sanguine than before. She had not known I was going out, she said. Mrs Pigot had left shortly after my arrival (this was not true), to allow her a decent period for the welcome of her own son. I could imagine her disappointment on finding me, etc. After supper, she began to inquire into my financial obligations, interrupting herself from time to time to exclaim, ‘I promised myself to keep quiet on this point, this evening. But I cannot, I will not.' And beginning again. She discovered the coach and four stationed in the road and went out to inspect it with a lantern in her hand.

‘I wonder I did not note it at once,' she cried.

‘It is a gift, for you,' I said, following her out into the cool of the evening. ‘The mother of Lord Byron should not be seen in such a thing as the little two-in-hand you go about in.'

‘Go about! I like that, when I am confined to these four walls, unless Mrs Pigot invites me to what she calls a
family supper
, because she is ashamed of me, too.'

But we bade our good-nights at last, and the house grew quiet.

***

I have now been here six weeks. Most afternoons I spend at the Pigots' house or riding with John or walking through town with Elizabeth. And in the evenings, when I am not engaged, I write. Ridge has agreed to print a collection of my verses for private distribution. The title gives me a great deal of trouble; Elizabeth and John and Mr Becher have all made suggestions. I gave them the poems in manuscript, after Elizabeth corrected and copied them in a fair hand. A few of the verses Mr Becher deems ‘in advance of provincial life', and Elizabeth also expressed some fears of the
interpretations
that might be made on them. There is no one who has been more publicly associated with Lord Byron than herself; she still has some concern for her reputation. But this is only her teasing, and I do not mind it much.

The stanzas objected to belong, most of them, to a series of poems addressed ‘To Mary'. Now this Mary is not one of your Southwell ladies. I met her in Newark at the printer's, at Ridge's office, which sits above the bank. There is a shop on the High Street as well, but he is mostly to be found beside his press, which he attends himself. Mary is one of his assistants, and took my hat when I came in – with chalky fingers – promised to clean it and forgot. She is a short shapely lively girl, not pretty but spirited, with a pock-marked face and small speckled eyes, like quails' eggs. On taking my leave, I saw her chasing after the carriage, hat in hand, with a bright eager look of apology in her face – and before we had gone five hundred yards on the road to Southwell, the business of our apology was finished, and she had scrambled out again.

I have sketched her as well as I can, but she refuses to
sit
long enough for a full study. Her father was a coachman who lost his leg under a horse; her mother is dead. For two or three years she has supplemented the small income of the printing-press with private clients. I believe she is sixteen or seventeen years old – she is sometimes vague. She remembers only the date of her mother's death four years ago. Her father, whom I have not met, hardly leaves his room, where she also sleeps, but he introduces her where he can among his former associates. When the room is required, he sits on the steps and waits. I have made it a point of honour to rescue her from these surroundings, which he tolerates, as I am a lord, and he believes there might be some profit in it to himself.

On the road from Newark to Southwell there is an old mill-house, which has fallen to ruin; but it has retained four walls and half a roof, which keeps one room dry (there are only two). It is used sometimes as a hunting-lodge. Mary sleeps there and I have gone to the expense of repairing the roof and two of the windows and providing a door. Once a day I ride out to her, unless it is wet; but then, she is only more eager the next day. Ridge, who knows nothing of these arrangements, complained to me of her disappearance, which has caused him some delay, as she was a very willing useful sort of girl, in this respect as well. But it is four miles on foot from the mill-house to Newark, and four miles to Southwell, which suits me perfectly and keeps her at home. Whenever I ride out to her, I tell Kitty I am going on printer's business.