The Country Gentleman (13 page)

But it was not so straightforward a task as that, for the park had been laid with a veritable maze of paths, set at
any one of a score of angles, and they had made their way in (so engrossed in talk were they) without the least thought for how to come out. “Blast those blasted romantic writers!” Anne was saying frankly by the time they had hurried a mile or more without coming any closer (so far as they could tell) to house or road. “Blast them for their blasted nuisances of romantic forests; and blast my great uncle for reading them!”

“Anne!”

“Well, as you like then. Do not blast him. But blast everyone else. Chateaubriand!” She began to stride ahead more quickly, spitting out the names as she went. “Rousseau! Byron! Rows of plane trees were not good enough for them, I suppose! Neat alleys and wide lanes made them sad, I expect. They needed nice dark vines and tangles to cheer them, doubtless,” she muttered, while Maria, straggling behind her, began to giggle at the ridiculousness of this diatribe. “Nothing like a clump of gloomy pines to brighten a person’s day! The taller the better—no sense letting the sun shine— Oh! Excuse me,” she suddenly broke off, for she had been talking so loudly and moving so fast that she actually collided with another walker before she saw him. They had both lost their balance a little. Dusting her skirts off, “Mr. Mallinger!” Anne exclaimed, while Maria came up even with them. “God sent you to us. Where are we?”

“Miss Guilfoyle. Mrs. Insel.” Lawrence Mallinger bowed his compliments while he absently brushed off his hat. “Have you lost your bearings?”

“Our bearings, our wits, our mittens,” Anne told him cheerfully, “all.”

“Then I am doubly glad to happen upon you, for I shall
have the pleasure of escorting you home. You were going home?”

The ladies nodded.

Mr. Mallinger turned them round and offered an arm for each of them to lean on; but as the path was really not sufficiently wide too permit such an arrangement, and as Miss Guilfoyle particularly disliked leaning while she walked, “I shall go behind you, if you do not mind,” she said.

Maria glanced meaningly at her friend. Surely Anne recalled the schoolmaster’s marked behaviour to her when first they met? Did she not guess Maria would rather have remained lost than risk a reprise of his flattering attentions? But she saw in Anne’s green gaze a look which seemed to say, “Best confront him now, my dear; I cannot always be with you.” And since Maria was obliged to admit the truth of this, she made an inward resolution. Aloud, she merely murmured politely to Miss Guilfoyle,

“If you are certain you would not prefer…”

“Perfectly certain,” said that lady firmly, relinquishing with a gesture her claim upon the gentleman’s arm. “Walk ahead. I am quite content to splash in your wake.” And she kicked up a little cloud of brown pine needles demonstratively.

Maria laid a light hand on Mr. Mallinger’s sleeve and began to walk on. Perhaps he would not, after all, resume his earlier manner towards her. Perhaps she would be spared any confrontation. But in fact the schoolmaster very soon fell into the tone of his first remarks to her. He repeated, in an undervoice which, though it did not attempt to exclude Anne, did not strive to reach her either, that he was delighted by this chance meeting. He asked Mrs. Insel how she had been occupying herself, then how
she liked the country. When she replied that she liked it very well, Mr. Mallinger assured her that it must like her in return, for she was looking blooming. Maria (who moreover doubted this was true) saw her opportunity and took it.

“Sir,” she began, “forgive me if I refine too much—too foolishly—in what I am about to say, but I must tell you your…your kind compliments to me, today and when we met, only make me uneasy. In short, I wish you will not— I must ask you not to—” She broke off in confusion, colouring deeply.

“I understand you,” Mr. Mallinger took up, directly he saw she had lost the struggle for words. With a sincerity so natural she knew it was neither forced nor assumed, “Pray allow me to apologize for causing you discomfort,” he went on. “It is the last thing I desire.” And as he contrived to speak even these last words in a tone so civil, so restrained, that no hint of flattery was in them, Maria believed him and began to relax.

“Tell me about your school,” she begged, hitting upon this topic to set him at his ease again. “How many students have you?”

Mr. Mallinger saw her stratagem and did not resist it. He supplied her with the number of his students and went on with a rough outline of the sort of lessons they learnt, the hopes he had for them, the pleasures and travails of teaching them. He informed her that he had come to Cheshire at the late Mr. Guilfoyle’s behest some three years earlier, when the school was just being established, that before that he had been at Jesus College, Cambridge, and before that at a Mr. Harkwood’s Academy (both places on a scholarship), and before that with his family in Suffolk, who were there still. He agreed that Cheshire
must be quite different to Suffolk. He repeated his praise of Herbert Guilfoyle, regretting that Mrs. Insel could never know him, and confirmed her tentative opinion of Mr. Highet with his own—to wit, that he was as kind, as industrious, as thorough-going a gentleman as he ever hoped to meet. But as he spoke, an hundred questions occurred to him which he dared not set her, as for example: How long had her husband been dead? Had she loved him very much? Was it the freshness of her grief that made her dislike Mr. Mallinger’s erstwhile attentions? If so, why did she no longer wear black? If not, was it an objection to Mr. Mallinger himself? If that, was it something he could alter? Could she imagine how long it had been since a woman of her demeanour—simple, gentle, tactful, quiet (though nervous: he had noticed that, and longed to soothe it away)—had come into his neighbourhood? Had stood before him with her glossy masses of hair, her dark, downturned gaze, and made him feel he must seize and protect her or die? Under that gleaming, chestnut crown, between those narrow temples, hid the answers to all these questions, he knew—and the knowledge made him ache to stop her polite, chattering inquiries, turn and take her face in his hand, and demand she tell him.

But of course he did nothing remotely like this. With only the gentle (too gentle!) pressure of her arm on his to recompense him, he talked on about Linfield and Fevermere, sun and snow, asked her any number of civil questions whose answers did not interest him, and dutifully guided the party (though he would have preferred to lead them round and round just to be longer with Mrs. Insel) through the intricate twists and turns that would take them back to their abode.

He had almost forgot Miss Guilfoyle (who struck him as too ’cute by half, and somehow volatile) for she lagged quite ten feet behind them during the chief of this colloquy; but as they made a peculiarly sharp turn out of a clump of firs, “Huzzah!” she cried out, “I know where we are!”

She came up even with them and asked, “It is that way, is not it? And then through a stand of birches, then left, and left again, and home.” She fairly danced with exultation—an extravagant response, Mr. Mallinger thought, but the truth was, Anne really detested not knowing a thing she ought to know, whether the way home, or the former post of some minor statesman, or how to prove a geometrical theorem. But even the schoolmaster was shortly to bless her, for, “Maria dear, I think we must reward our Virgil,” she declared. “If he had not led us from the dark woods we might have been lost for ever, and would perhaps have had to live on nuts and berries the rest of our days, and combed our hair with pine cones. Do you think dinner a sufficient prize? I do not,” she faced him, “but I fear it is all we can offer. Will you do us the honour to come? Not tonight, for I fear we should make but dishevelled, exhausted company—but to-morrow?”

Mr. Mallinger was looking uncertainly towards Maria Insel. It was hard, but if she did not like him to come, he was resolved to decline.

But, “Pray do,” she endorsed, not fervently or with any tremor of enthusiasm (alas) but evidently without distaste either, and quite sincerely. “We shall like to have you.”

“Then I accept with thanks.”

“Good. It is decided.” Anne put out her hand to shake his. “We shall make a little party of it, perhaps—invite a
friend of mine who is visiting Cheshire, and the Hartley Wares, and—” She remembered a question about the clipping of ewes which she did not like to put to Mr. Rand (who regarded all such questions as admissions of her unfitness to direct Linfield) and added, “—the Highets,
mère et fils
.” She thanked Mr. Mallinger for rescuing them. Maria followed suit, and in a moment they had parted.

“And how did you fare with Mr. Mallinger?” asked Anne rather gaily, as the two ladies crossed the wide lawn to the waiting house. In the grey, horizontal light of afternoon it beckoned pleasantly from atop its gentle hill. “Did he renew his compliments? Were you obliged to set him down?”

“I hope I did not do that,” said Maria. “But I did make it clear to him he must not think of me so.”

“And did he take it well?”

“Very well, it seemed to me. He strikes me as a very courteous gentleman, and most intelligent.”

“Good! Now you may enjoy his acquaintance in tranquillity. Merciful heavens, but my feet feel ready to fall off! Don’t yours?” She went on without giving Maria time to answer, “Though I must confess, once I felt sure of emerging from them alive, I rather liked the woods. They are pretty, and somehow soothing. Do you know, I realized as I went what had happened to me—about Ensley, I mean. It is merely that the news of his marriage startled me. He did not care to tell me of it before it was settled, lest it should come to nothing; and so when he did, announcing it as a
fait accompli
…Well, that would startle any one, I expect. But once I have had some time to think of it, to get accustomed to the reality, I am sure I shall approve it as heartily in its actual mode as I did in its theoretical. Lady Juliana is a pleasant-enough girl, I think.
We shall all deal famously with one another, no doubt.” And before Maria could find a polite way to tell her friend this whole line of thought sounded like fustian to her, Anne had gone on, “Thank you, dear, for listening to me babble before. I was rather confused.” She laughed, but the purpose of her words was plain: She was withdrawing her earlier invitation to Maria to speak her mind about Ensley. “I must send a note to him at once,” she finished, shaking her head at her own brief folly. “The poor man no doubt suspects all this country air has quite unseated my reason!”

Miss Guilfoyle was at her merriest when she greeted her guests the following evening. She had added the rector, Mr. Samuels, and his stout, comfortable wife, to her invitation list, so that the party made an even ten. Ensley arrived, by special permission, a little ahead of the others; and Anne discovered herself (to her relief) fairly easy with him now.

She waved him into a plush arm-chair in the drawing-room, seating herself in its twin nearby. “I fear the company is not just what you have been used to see,” she warned him teasingly (her apology and his glad acceptance of it having been sent by messenger, both felt the subject of her behaviour to him on the previous afternoon to be closed). “But you will know how to enjoy yourself, I am sure.” And she went on to give him several deft, not entirely respectful portraits of the people he was about to meet. When she came to Mr. Mallinger’s reading Thomas Spence,

“Good God,” Ensley exclaimed, quizzing her, “and does he teach his students they have a right to own the
land they farm? What a queer nabs your great uncle must have been to engage him!”

“Queer indeed! I assure you, I have fallen into a very hotbed of radical ideas. The library here fairly flames with nonsense of that sort—and I collect Mr. Henry Highet, whom you will soon know, has a mind very much of that stamp as well.”

“Ah, this is the neighbour you mentioned, I think? What manner of man is he?” And Ensley dropped his quizzing glass and settled back with a half smile on his lips, ready to be entertained by another of Anne’s pithy, acid sketches.

But Anne found herself unaccountably incapable of obliging him. “Oh, well, the first—” she began lightly, then stopped all at once. She had been going to describe her first meeting with Highet, when he received her in flannel and unbuckled boots. But even as she framed the quick sentences in her head, the thought came to her that this would be an ill-natured act indeed when, after all, it was she who had waked him, he who had been so kind as to come out into a beastly night to escort her home.

Her nimble mind, still searching for fun, leapt to look at Mr. Highet from another angle. She could say he was dull, could not she? The sort who considered the design of a plough good conversation, and irrigation scintillating…“He is—” she recommenced; but this too was rather unfair. After all, farming was his life’s work; and what did Ensley talk about (if one let him) except his work? True enough, Ensley’s career was far more interesting to Anne than Mr. Henry Highet’s. But that did not change the principle of the thing.

Anyhow, she discovered herself curiously reluctant to prejudice Ensley’s mind against Mr. Highet. She could
not have explained why; but in the end all she said of the latter to the former was, “The truth is, I scarcely know him. He seems a good, plain gentleman, I guess—steady, careful with his tenants, happy experimenting with potatoes and the like. Rather tedious, of course, but affable. He is a bachelor—” To her horrified amazement, Miss Guilfoyle felt herself begin to colour with these words. She hastened on, “—and lives with his mother.” She plunged into an excoriating, and quite accurate, portrait of that lady, till her blush subsided. She was glad when Ensley laughed and seemed not to have remarked the brief flaming in her cheeks.

But half an hour later, when Mr. Highet and his formidable progenitrix actually arrived, Anne was sure not only Ensley but Maria and Mr. Mallinger and even the Hartley Wares could not have failed to notice the quickening of her breath and pulses, the blood again creeping heavenwards from her neck, the mist of perspiration on her brow at the sight of the master of Fevermere. Useless to will these manifestations away: While Mr. Highet bowed to her, and beamed down about her, and asked how she did, they intensified relentlessly. Not even the strident booming of Mrs. Highet’s voice while (apparently as surprised to see them as if their families had lived on separate stars) she greeted the Wares could break the spell, and give Anne surcease. She was finally obliged to pretend the sudden recollection of an overlooked detail, and to hurry abruptly from the drawing-room. Outside, encountering Dolphim, she turned her red face away from his solicitous gaze and pretended to be coughing. Then she scurried round a turning in the corridor, where he could not see her, and, holding her hand above her heart, commanded it to behave.