Summer Will Show (12 page)

She raised her lantern, and sent its light forward. A furze bush seemed to leap towards her, massive and threatening. In the darkness beyond she heard a rustle and the sound of something breathing, the noise of some startled animal making off. Still holding up her lantern she went on, and with a few more paces had caught him in her light. He was sitting on the ground, his back to the kiln for warmth, his arms folded, his eyes watching her advance. He made no move to get up, his features did not alter from their look of dull resentment.

She was out of breath with the climb, and the warmth and fumes of the place made her feel suddenly dizzy and unreal. She sat down on the ground, a few feet away from him, settling the lantern beside her. It shone on her ringed hand, and on the muddied hem of her crape flounces.

“You’ve walked hard,” said the man, after a pause. His voice was like his look: dull and proud.

Her limbs were trembling. The cold of the spongy ground was like a wound.

“This is a queer time for a lady like you to be out a-walking — for you are a lady, I reckon.”

With an effort she controlled her voice and said,

“I have some reason for it.”

“Aye?” said the man. He spoke slowly, dragging out the word, so that it hardly condescended to be an enquiry.

“I have come here once before. But that was by day, and I brought my two children with me.”

He shifted himself a little, moving his back against the wall, luxuriously.

“Now they are dead. Dead of smallpox.”

His expression changed, though not to pity. Its sullenness strengthened to wrath, a change of countenance impersonal and senseless as a sudden reddening of that canopy of lurid and shadowy air beneath which he sat.

“Children do die hereabouts,” he said. “There’s the smallpox, and the typhus, and the cholera. There’s the low fever, and the quick consumption. And there’s starvation. Plenty of things for children to die of.”

“You speak with little pity, my man.”

“I’m like the gentry, then. Like the parsons, and the justices, and the lords and ladies. Like that proud besom down to Blandamer.”

He spoke with such savage intent that she leaped to her feet. But he had not moved, nor changed his look from its sullen dull pride.

“Plenty more children, they say, where the dead ones came from. If they die like cattle, the poor, they breed like cattle too. Plenty more children. That’s what I say to you. Rich and poor can breed alike, I suppose.

“Eh?” he shouted, lumbering to his feet and thrusting his face into hers.

In her plunge to escape him she forgot her lantern. She stumbled in the darkness, thought he was upon her. But there was no footfall, no sound; and at last she had to go back for her lantern, stooping to pick it up under the reach of his hand. He stood looking after her, she knew. His raging glance was like a goad on her back, driving her on into the darkness. As she reached the track she heard, shrill and fleering, the sound of a woman’s laughter, a forced hysterical cackle that taunted her out of earshot.

All her life long Sophia heard it said that the labouring classes were insolent, mutinous and violent. She had agreed to this as to a matter of course, accepting the rightness of any legislation designed to keep them down, and in her own dealings with the poor at her gate going upon the assumption that even such apparently toothless animals as widows and Sunday School children should be given their pounds of tea or their buns through the bars. Yet until this evening she had never heard a speech that was not respectful. Even the Labourers’ Rising of 1830 had shown itself to her as a procession of men wearing their best clothes, men with washed smocks and oily church-going heads. In those ranks she had recognised, reining in her pony to watch them go by, Harry Dymond the blacksmith, who but a week before had shod the pony, old Ironsides, who every summer presented her with a peeled and patterned elder-wand, Bill Cobb, who was engaged to the laundry-maid, Herring the smallholder, whose hedges she ransacked for white violets. Those of the village who knew her had pulled their forelocks, and the rest had followed suit, eyeing, with the Englishman’s pleasure in a smart turn-out, the handsome girl-child and the bright-coated beast. That evening they had marched up the drive and arranged themselves in a semicircle before the house. Mamma had talked of Marie Antoinette, but Papa, tapping his snuff-box, had gone out and addressed them from the top of the steps, assuring them that their behaviour was foolish, and their throats, no doubt, after so much ill-advised shouting, dry. Whereupon he had returned to his Marsala, and a barrel of beer had been rolled out into the kitchen courtyard. This, apparently, had ended the matter, except for the laundry-maid, who presently began to go about red-eyed and weeping. Bill, said Mrs. Perry the housekeeper, had gone too far. Bill had been transported, and that foolish Ellen should have been thankful for her mercies, and that she was not burnt in her bed, instead of crying into the starch.

Now, in the kilnman, the insolence of the labouring classes had been demonstrated. Oddly enough, the outrage had left her neither shocked nor angry. Indeed, it seemed to have done her good; for after the moment of terror had blown off she found herself tautened and stimulated, as though a well-administered slap in the face had roused her from a fainting-fit. Her blood ran living again, her wits revived, her natural vitality, which seemed to have died with the death of her children, returned to her, and once again thinking was a satisfaction, and the use of her limbs a pleasure. Not even the fact that a woman had been there in hiding, listening to her discomforture and laughing over it, could dash her strange sense of something triumphant in this ignominious escapade. “His vixen with him!” she exclaimed, and heard her chuckle sound out over the silent field, coarse and free-hearted, a sound as kindred to the country night as an owl’s tu-whoo, or the barking of a fox.

What strange loves those must be, up there on the hill, canopied by the wavering ruddied smoke: loves bitter and violent as the man’s furious mind, but in the upleaping of that undaunted lust of a strength which could outface violence and bitterness.

Too rough a sire, perhaps, for the heir of Blandamer. But his words, plain and vile, had served her purpose, fathering a determination in her mind. Plenty more children, he had said. Rich and poor can breed alike. Fate should not defeat her, she would have a child yet. And having already a husband it was certainly best and most convenient that the child should be his. So she would go to Paris, fetch Frederick back if needs be, beguile him, at the barest, explain her purpose and strike a bargain. As other women could trudge up to the lime-kiln, Mrs. Willoughby might go to Paris.

Though more prosaically. A wish, half truly, half ironically felt, arose in her that she could know what manner of love it was that would take one out on a November midnight to lie embracing on the soggy turf. But one could not hope for everything; and what she wanted, what she must have, was a child.

So, on the night before her journey, she uncurtained her window once more, looked towards the ruddy star on the hillside, and nodded to it briefly, the acknowledgment one resolute rogue might give another. The determination set in her by the kilnman had never wavered or bleached into fantasy. It proved so sturdy that she had been able to delay, trusting it to carry the burden of various postponements — a visit to London to observe fashions and buy new clothes, the conclusion of a purchase of some land adjoining hers, the choice of a parson to replace Mr. Harwood whose Michaelmas goose had carried him off, entertaining Caspar for the Christmas holidays. Seeing him she had remembered her fancy that the half-caste should step into the shoes of her dead children — a moment’s scheme, a doting desperate fancy. He showed nothing to recommend him for her pug’s place now, his Sambo charm smudged out by a violent cold in his head, his fingers too heavy with chilblains to twitch more than a few jangling notes from his guitar, his only pleasure to sit by the fire sucking lozenges.

Holding by the belief that she might choose her time, she had allowed time to slip through her fingers, pleased to feel that every day’s delay increased the impetus of her dammed-up purpose; and when Harlowe slipped and sprained her wrist, Sophia, firmly bandaging that genteel white flesh, forgot to be annoyed at this further impediment, absorbed in the pleasure of doing something which she knew she did well. To travel without a maid was not possible. So she thought, till a few days without Harlowe’s ministrations showed her that she could brush hair and lace stays quite as well as she could wind on a bandage, and then every consideration seemed to point out the superior convenience of travelling alone. Only the world was against it. But since her visit to the lime-kiln Sophia was against the world.

Now it was the third week in February, and in her head still sounded the clamour of bird-song which had rung down the sun of her last day at Blandamer. In the space, proper to well-managed journeys, between everything done and only the journey to do, she had gone out for a walk, to be suddenly ravished into the first evening of spring. Drenched with long rains, the meadows were green as emerald in the level light. Clouds, like the dividing folds of a stage curtain drawing up and aside, made all the sky dramatic. Everywhere around her was the excited chatter of running water, every ditch and drain babbling and hastening. Large as toys the birds sat on the bare boughs, or darted through the watery, lake-still air. Their clamour was dazzling, the counterpart to the ear of the brilliant gash of the sunset.

It was as though everything had combined to egg her on — the hastening water and the acclaiming birds, the drama of the clouds and the swell of the fields, where the sun’s shadowplay drew a sharper furrow. And to remember that all this seeming concurrence was the accident of the day, and that she amid all the fervid excitement and quickening of the hour walked with her separate secret purpose doubled her proud fever, her confidence, and her delight in thinking that now at last her will should be unscabbarded and flash free.

On the next night, too, she was to remember the kilnman and his ruddy signalling star, for then she was at sea, looking towards the lights of Calais. It was a pleasure to be in France again — a light-of-love country which, making no claims on her esteem, was the more likeable and refreshing. That coastline in the dawn might look as English as it pleased, wear a church spire and be trimmed with ample woods; but it was France, a country where one went for pleasure, whose inhabitants, as the children’s geography primer said, “were very fond of dancing, wine, and the Pope.”

To this toy country toy trains had been added since her last visit; and it was with a confirming acquiescence that she learned at the station that owing to a mechanical misfortune the Paris train would not run until after midday. The train stood in the station, and an old woman with her head bound up in a spotted nightcap shook out a feather whisk from a compartment window. The driver leaned from the cab, conversing with a porter. At intervals he patted the engine with a soothing hand as though it might rear. Since there seemed nothing to stay her from wandering where she pleased, she walked along the track, feeling a cat’s impulse to move into the fresh sunlight.

“I tell you,” said the porter, “we must have a change. We’ve had altogether too much of the old pear lately. He fattens himself too much, that pear.”

“Fat or thin,” said the driver, “they’re all the same.”

Pear must be the station-master, she thought, sliding her glance along the bright rails. Monsieur Poire. It was exactly what a French official would be called. But the porter had pursued her, and now was observing that although there was no immediate danger, since the Paris train would be for some hours more stationary, yet the promenade she had chosen was not what one could call propitious, and was, in fact, forbidden to passengers.

“I will go and have breakfast,” she said, smiling, pleased with herself and with him for pleasing her. For he was young, light and nimble, his eyes were sleek black-currants, the glib grandeur of his speech was like the polish of a new toy, so that altogether the encounter was like nibbling up a crisp young radish.

Beau pays de France
. She felt suddenly happy, lightened in spirits as though a wand had been waved over her. She knew, too, that she was looking handsome, and in her stately mourning, spirited; that her gloves fitted her triumphantly, that she had not forgotten how to speak French. And though there was no one to admire her, she was quite content to admire herself — indeed, a great part of her high spirits and good-humour sprang from her solitary and unprotected state. What a mercy it was that Harlowe had sprained that wrist! For with Harlowe tagging after me, she thought, clutching my dressing-case and mouthing with sea-sickness, there would have been no escape. I should not be rambling out for my breakfast, and looking forward to a whole forenoon of picking up entertainment where I please. No! I should be hunting for somewhere that could supply a good English cup of tea, or sitting in the waiting-room. And she had a vision of Harlowe covering the bench with a sheet of newspaper before she would risk her seat on it.

The air was still the air of early morning, the sky a very pale blue. Along the quayside was a crowd of fishing craft. Looking down on them she saw how, amidst a seemingly irreparable filth and untidiness, some one was intently busy at polishing one particular knob. The smell of the sea, melancholy like a whine, rose from the filthy clucking water. Catches were being auctioned, and she listened for a while, holding her skirts about her, yawning with hunger and early rising.

But before breakfasting she must buy a newspaper, a great many newspapers. And over her coffee she read with the sharpened interest which the mind gives to what is passing and alien how a boatload of convicts had left Havre for Belle Isle, how a mayor had been decorated, how a bishop had preached a formidable sermon against secret societies, how Lady Normanby had attended a reception at the Hôtel Talleyrand, how M. Guizot had expressed his disapproval of banqueting. His speech was reported at length, but she did not read it very attentively, only smiling at his Liberal language which compelled him to refer to the throne as
le Fauteuil
. A good description of that well-stuffed prudent monarch. Sophia held due English views of the Orléans dynasty. It carried on the business well enough, no doubt, but it was not the Old Firm, and its concessions to democracy must certainly have impaired the quality of its teas and sugars. Local prejudice too had strengthened her feelings for the Old Firm. Had not Charles X come in exile to her own country, a fragment of history walking slowly between the primroses of the park of Lulworth Castle, walking there with Marie Antoinette’s daughter, the man and woman out of the past pacing black as shadows under the spring sky, hearing the indifferent plaudits of the rooks, who had heard the roars of an acclaiming and a bloodthirsty people? After this, one naturally felt that Louis Philippe was rather tame.