Childish Loves (9 page)

‘Did she have a preference, among her works, for a particular novel?' I asked her.

‘Oh, she loved
The Romance of the Forest
above everything else. Indeed, she had read it twice through almost entirely from beginning to end. Nothing could be so fine as
The Romance of the Forest
. She never saw the use of going to the trouble of reading two books, when one will do. It is bound to be the same thing as before, only a little worse.'

I felt stupidly dejected returning home. All society disappoints you, until you become accustomed to it. Sympathy is a great illusion; there is only sometimes a coincidence of manner.

*

Yesterday, after returning from supper, I discovered Alice in my bedroom. The lamp was unlit and nothing but the green of a summer's evening made its way through the covered windows. She had in her arms one of my silk shirts; the buttons are silver. The closet stands beside the door to the study, and since I had come up by the servants' stairs (sometimes I like to sit in the garden after dining, and it is the nearest way), I practically tumbled upon her. Surprising us both; by instinct I reached for her with my hand, and she stood so stiff I almost fell over her.

‘Let go of me,' Alice said, in her thick accents.

‘Owen Mealy told me you were a thief,' I said.

She looked at me so stupidly that I struck her.

*

Mary softens upon acquaintance. In the course of a week, she says, she has come to depend upon me. There is so little society at Annesley that sometimes she finds herself wandering into the kitchen to look for Mrs Thomason, and then she sits there until positively dismissed. I have yet to make up my mind about her. She is very restless and impatient. Even when she tries, and she
has
tried, to enter into a sense of my situation, the effort bores her, as she admits herself.

‘Dear Byron,' she said to me once, ‘it is very tiresome I am sure to have such a mother, but it is also tiresome to talk about her, and to think about her, too.'

‘You are as bad as Miss Pigot. You only wish to think about what is pleasant.'

‘And yet there are very few things, in my experience, that are entirely pleasant.' After a minute: ‘Who is Miss Pigot?'

‘The daughter of Mrs Pigot, in Southwell. Her brother is a great friend of mine.'

‘And she herself extremely pretty, I suppose?' etc. and we descend again into pleasantries.

John Musters (of Colwick Hall) is sometimes present during my visits and sometimes not. He says he knows Lord Grey; they have been hunting together. Mr Musters is handsome and reserved, with a face both broad and fine – a statesman's face. His father was High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire. Mary complains that she never knows what he is thinking, he is so quiet, and gives me to understand that I at least afflict her in a different fashion, which surprises me, as I think myself very awkward and silent.

Once, when she left us alone together, Mr Musters said to me, ‘I like them to have long necks, for they bend easily.'

The younger Miss Wollaston, who lives in Kirkby, is also a frequent visitor. Her sister has gone to London to stay with an aunt and we hear continual reports of her progress. Last week, for example, she attended a ball in Hanover Square and was introduced to a nephew of Admiral Jervis. This is the kind of thing. The younger Miss Wollaston is short, fat, lively, and shouts. She calls me ‘Lord It-grieves-me-to-say' – apparently this is a phrase I am much addicted to. But is otherwise good-natured enough, and hardly seems to mind that her sister, who is taller, more timid, and more accomplished, makes her way in society without her. She is determined to amuse herself regardless and is constantly proposing balls, parties, expeditions and other amusements. Mary is indolent, but has at last agreed to the use of the carriage for the purpose of visiting the caverns at Peaks Hole, to be followed by a dance at Matlock Bath. A good day's journey; Miss Wollaston has written already to reserve rooms at the Old Bath Hotel.

Neither of these prospects interests me particularly, but I have agreed to go. It is just as well, for the days are increasingly taken up with making plans, and I should feel foolish and unnecessary without a role in the business. Mr Musters is coming, too.

*

Yesterday, I rode over to Annesley in the afternoon and found Mary alone in the dining room. She wished to hang a picture, which lay on the table; she was considering where it might show to best advantage. The dining room at Annesley is a low, dark, panelled hall, fifty years out of the fashion, with two small windows set rather high and commanding a view of the hills.

‘It is strange,' she said to me, while we both cast our eyes over the walls. ‘By the accident of my father's death, everything you see has come to me; and I have arrived without the least striving or contrivance into the possession of the very thing I was taught all my life to seek out, a home and station.'

The picture, lying on the table, showed a modern, cream-coloured mansion and the level grounds before it. A groom led one horse by the rein, while a gentleman in a cloth hat sat astride another.

I asked her where she had acquired the painting and she said Mr Musters had given it her; it was a view of Colwick Hall by George Stubbs. His father had commissioned it. His father was the gentleman in the cloth hat. She had expressed her admiration for it, on a recent visit to Colwick, and a few weeks later it arrived in the gardener's cart.

‘When I was there,' she said, ‘the housekeeper spoke only of “Carr of York”. The architect, you understand; though Mrs Dawes repeated his name so often I thought she must mean a public house. If Annesley wants improvement, she said, you could do worse than asking Carr of York. Bless me, I told her, isn't he dead? But he isn't dead, apparently; not yet.'

‘Does Annesley want improvement?'

But instead of answering, she directed my attention to the horse in the picture, which was led by hand.

‘Look,' she said, ‘do you see?'

The clouds above its back had a sort of freshness, though they were heavy and dark, as if a storm brewed or a fire burned in the house behind.

‘She has been painted over – Mrs Musters, I mean. She was unfaithful and deserted both husband and child, and John's father employed another painter to paint over her, which is why the clouds look ugly and thick. I had this from Mrs Dawes' own lips. She returned some years later, while John was away at school, and was taken in again. But I suppose he doesn't like to be reminded of her; she died last summer. The picture is handsome enough.'

‘I expect he means to marry you,' I said.

She moved a chair to the hearthstone and climbed on top of it, in order to replace the painting over the mantel: a dirty view of a canal, and two men plying a boat along it, done in the Dutch manner. The square of panelling behind looked dark and dirty, too. I rescued the picture from her and gave her my hand, and she descended again, with a sort of curtsey. This was my first touch of her hand.

‘I expect he means to marry you,' I said again.

‘I expect he does.'

Shortly after I took my leave.

I know nothing of painting, unless it reminds me of something I have seen or think it possible to see. Of all the arts it is the most artificial and unnatural, and yet I was never more struck by anything
in
a picture than by the absence of Mrs Musters.

*

There has been some difficulty about the Peaks Hole scheme. Mr Wollaston will be away on business in London, and Mrs Clarke refuses to travel so far in the heat of summer. We are unchaperoned.

Miss
Wollaston declines to believe in the seriousness of this impediment. There can be nothing improper, she says, in satisfying our curiosity about the caverns; she has no intention of marrying at present; Miss Chaworth and Mr Musters are practically engaged. I am a
boy
and might be spared the suspicions even of the slanderous. What they have in mind is nothing more odious than a day-trip, with a dance appended to it, in a respectable hotel.

But Mary refuses to set forth unsupervised. Mr Musters is announced and the whole business is gone over from the beginning. Upon reflection, he offers to resign his place in the carriage – leaving, he says (bowing at Miss Wollaston) ‘two cousins and a lady'. But this, Mary objects, seems to her a sad sort of summer party. It would hardly be worth the trouble to the coachman – which makes me brighten a little, feeling it in my face.

Miss Wollaston says, ‘We must petition your mother again. Once she knows how much we depend on her, she will not stand in our way. The carriage may be covered at least half the journey, if the sun is strong; and I shall write the hotel directly and request a foot-bath for our arrival.'

‘Her constitution is not equal to yours. It is always the way – no one can imagine the sufferings of others.'

‘I believe a great deal of our sufferings are
entirely
imaginary. The women in this respect being more to blame than the men – we are always suffering, we are always imagining. It is my conviction that afflictions, like manners, deserve to be corrected from time to time, even in mothers.'

Mrs Clarke at that moment entering, exclaimed, ‘You are very hard on us poor mothers, my dear Julia, but there are reasons I
must
leave to your imagination. It is no use describing them, and you will discover in time very good reasons of your own. A day's journey in a hot coach in the midst of August, with nothing more to do or see at the other end than a hole in the ground and a dance at an hotel –'

‘Oh,' Miss Wollaston broke in, who was cheerful enough in spite of her disappointment, ‘when a woman hints darkly to me of her age, even I know enough to keep quiet.'

In truth, Mrs Clarke looks not at all well. Her eyes are rheumy and she limps in one of her legs whenever she has sat down and stands up again. She bustles about in spite of these things so insistently you feel the impediment more sharply.

‘Still, it is very distressing,' Miss Wollaston continued. ‘I have heard that the caves are as wonderful as the moon, and since we have at our disposal a carriage, and not a hot-air balloon, and it is only thirty or forty miles to Peaks Hole, I had rather go there.'

‘I have no objection to your going,' Mrs Clarke said. ‘It is only my dear daughter who insists on supervision.'

‘That is because, in the absence of a father, it has been left to me to determine what is proper to my position – of which, dear mother, you have very little sense.'

‘Oh, your position. When I was a girl, we thought more of uniforms and less of positions. Besides,' she added, ‘Annesley Hall is your own; you have no need of a husband.'

‘It is because I have no need of them that they are all frightened away. Even Mr Musters, who is practically my only visitor, hardly dares open his mouth.'

‘Confess it, Mary,' Miss Wollaston said, ‘you are only too lazy to go. With your cousin to read to you and Mr Musters to stare at you, you are content to remain on your sofa all summer.'

‘If I stare and keep silent,' Mr Musters said, ‘it is only because there is so much worth looking at and listening to.'

This is a fair sample of how we passed the time. Sometimes I am rather ashamed of playing a part in such scenes, of falling in line so completely with the women. I sit at the edge of my velvet chair and think of Newstead and the ruins surrounding it – the fields uncropped, growing yellow and brown in the sun, and the broken monastery walls, which I have climbed. The lake I have swum in, leaving my clothes in the reeds. Alice – her father – Owen Mealy, appearing by turns. But then, after too long a solitude, I grow strange even to myself, and it is a relief to put on my cleanest shirt and ride to Annesley.

‘Perhaps,' I offered at last, ‘I might enlist some of my Southwell acquaintance. Our vicar, Mr Becher, though young
looks
respectable, and the Pigots are a good, lively, decent county family. Is not that what one calls them? I have heard there is safety in a large party. And then, Mrs Pigot alone would make us safe enough.'

‘Is she so frightful?' Mary said, but it was agreed I should write to them at once.

*

It is all settled; the Pigots are coming. Elizabeth wrote me herself in a state of excitement. Mr Becher is to accompany them in Lady Hathwell's barouche; the box-seat is perfectly adequate for John, which he would prefer in any case if the weather is fine, ‘as it positively
must
be'. Elizabeth is longing to meet Miss Chaworth. My silence, she says, on the subject of my ‘inveterate cousin' has been particularly interesting. ‘What was it you called her once, your little Miss Capulet? I mean to hear all your blushing confessions. It will be curious to see you playing the flatterer with a lady, when we used to have so much fun at their expense – at the flatterers', I mean. Lord Byron in love, who would have supposed it possible?'

There was more in this vein. I don't believe I ever referred to Mary as my
little Miss Capulet
, but it is no use protesting. I begin to have some doubts as to whether introducing these two women will be at all comfortable to my self-opinion. But it is too late, everything has been decided. I rode to Annesley with the letter in hand as soon as it was decently light and was rewarded, for my trouble, with a fried chop and a boiled egg. Miss Wollaston's preference for a cooked breakfast is well known, and she had been staying the night.

Mary, for her part, could hardly contain her curiosity about Miss Pigot. Was she dark or fair? Tall or dumpy? There was always a kind of pause in my breath before I spoke her name. I could never call her simply Miss Pigot. It was always, You know, the sister of my friend from Southwell, or the daughter of my mother's near neighbour, with whom we have a great deal to do.

‘She is as dark and as tall as you,' I said. ‘That is, equally fair and dumpy.' And then, in all honesty, I added, ‘But not so pretty either, though rather more cheerful. Perhaps it will comfort you to know that she teases me, too, about you; I am mocked on all sides.'