The Country Gentleman (17 page)

Meanwhile she heard regularly from Ensley. His letters were kindly conceived and minutely executed, containing exact records of discussions behind Government doors, or of lively conversations at Holland or Melbourne House. His lordship had a keen eye, and he did not hesitate to include, as part of a Chancellor’s communication, a quick twitch of one corner of his sly mouth, or a slow change in the angle of his left eyebrow. Besides these informative and entertaining passages, his lordship never failed to devote at least a paragraph, often more, to his feelings for Anne: how he wanted her, regretted her, dreamed of her, admired her. At the risk (he noted) of re-igniting her wrath, he begged her to keep in mind his project of bringing her back to London, and to remember she could call upon him to enact it at any time. Nor was he so craven as to censor the wedding plans which, she knew, must make
up a good deal of his life now. He referred to them briefly but forthrightly. And though it did pain her, Anne liked him for this. It was as she had told Maria: Ensley’s confidence, his affection, were still hers. It was she who had wavered.

But with so much distance between them, and receiving such loyal, vivid, and loving letters, Anne was finding it easier to care for Ensley again. The hurt and confusion of the past few months were nothing compared to the ten years of happy, mutual esteem they had enjoyed. For the first time since that terrible hour in Charles Grypphon’s library, Anne felt things coming right in herself again, and rejoiced. Her replies to Ensley lost their forced, wary accents, growing tender and trustful once more. With relief, she resumed her habit of thinking of him as her dear, constant friend.

At the same time, she began to consider it rather fortunate than otherwise that events had conspired to take her out of his way just when they had. Trustful or no, mere common sense informed her it could never have been pleasant for her to be near him while his marriage to another woman went forward. She revised her plan of taking one of her two months in London during the Little Season, when the wedding events would be at their height, and postponed the journey till November instead. Since Ensley was due back in Cheshire in September, she still need not go more than six weeks without at least seeing him. She advised Maria and Celia Grypphon (in whose town house she meant to stay) accordingly, and set herself the double task of feeling completely at peace about Ensley’s marriage by then, and amusing herself meanwhile.

Aiding her in this latter object more than she ever
expected were two frequent visitors to Linfield, to wit, Mr. Mallinger and Mr. Highet.

Mr. Mallinger got in the way of calling upon the ladies every Wednesday afternoon about five, staying an hour or so on each occasion. His first visit had the ostensible purpose of bringing to Mrs. Insel a book on Scotland he had mentioned during their previous meeting, at the dinner party. His next visit had the object of collecting this book. His third had the aim of fetching to Miss Guilfoyle a volume he mentioned during his second—Colonel Kirkpatrick’s 1793
Account of the Kingdom of Nepaul
, and— By his fourth, this pretence of a very obliging lending library could be dropped in favour of a mere sociable visit by a gentleman to a pair of ladies he esteemed.

If Mr. Mallinger noticed that, Wednesday being the afternoon Miss Guilfoyle did the estate books with Mr. Rand, he had chosen a poor day on which to make his habitual visits to her and her companion—for Anne was often engaged with her steward until as late as five-thirty or even six o’clock—he neither remarked nor acted upon the circumstance. On the contrary, he seemed always rather surprised that she should be so engaged just when he happened to call. Still, he sat pretty happily with Mrs. Insel to wait for her. Mrs. Insel, modest to a fault, accepted this piece of recurrent forgetfulness without drawing special conclusions therefrom. She had been struck, since the night of the dinner, by the complete effacement from Mr. Mallinger’s manner of any hint or suggestion of flattery to herself. So far from renewing his addresses, he had come to behave towards herself exactly as if he were a friend of long standing, the sort of stable, unexceptionable friend one might make through a family connexion.
Relieved of the need to hold him at arm’s length, she had come to like him very much indeed, for he was on all occasions genial, attentive, mild, and sympathetic. Anne, she knew, mistrusted his ideas; but the way he explained them to her, they seemed to Maria to make a great deal of sense. Education, for example: An infant was only an infant, after all. Why should not the child of a labourer grow up to be as clever as that of a lord, so long as their educations were the same? And she thought Mr. Mallinger spoke very feelingly of the plight of the poor around Faulding Chase, and was right to deplore it. If that made him a radical, perhaps Maria was a radical as well. However, she did not say so to Anne.

Anne, for her part, came rather to look forward to Mr. Mallinger’s visits as well. She tweaked him about his reading, and they crossed swords in a friendly way. Later, as he started to tell the ladies some details of the lives of his students, she began to think well of his dedication, and to admire the subtle, playful ingenuity with which he administered his lessons.

As to the other visitor, Mr. Highet, he was at Linfield even more often than Mr. Mallinger. Sometimes Miss Guilfoyle sent for him, as when a farmer on one of her tenant farms died, and she needed to know how to let it again, and what to do for the widow; sometimes he came on business that touched both his estate and hers. Anne did not know quite how it was, but he rendered her so many good services and kind favours that she felt herself obliged nearly every Saturday to ask him and his revered mother to dine. He seemed to be at Linfield almost daily. Even when the weather was foul, and Miss Guilfoyle had settled down to a long day of reading and writing indoors, she might often look up to hear Dolphim announce Henry
Highet. Going in to the drawing-room, she would find he had by error received twice the number of oilcakes he needed, and wished to know if she could use the surplus; or he was going to order a weighing machine, and wondered if she would like him to order one for Linfield as well. That much of this intercourse might have been carried on by note did not escape Miss Guilfoyle. But a farm, she was learning, was a lonely place, and if a neighbour rode over instead of writing, it could not but make a welcome interruption.

His manner to her on these occasions was civil and friendly, no more, no less. Anne imagined the visits were, for him, a natural extension of those he had made to the house in Herbert Guilfoyle’s time. The only change was she could not, as a single lady, return them. So he came twice as often. In no other respect, however, did he seem to notice the difference in their sexes. Certainly he never flattered her. In his sleepy gaze she discerned no interest at all in how she looked, or moved, or gazed back at him. Except to ask how she did, he confined his remarks to estate matters. (He was a little wider in his topics, though not much, when they dined in company.) Occasionally he made a joke, always very broad, which he then enjoyed with much knee-slapping and head-tossing. Anne, a wooden half-smile on her lips, would wait quietly for him to subside. But he did not laugh at her. Indeed, he seemed increasingly to accord her the respect he would give to any conscientious, thoughtful fellow landlord.

Treated in such a steady, friendly, undramatic manner, Anne could not help but begin to relax with him, and respond in kind. She ceased to compare him to town beaux and town wits, to statesmen and Corinthians, and started to look for in him what he had in abundance: experience
in farming, knowledge of the land, a shrewd sense of his neighbours. Gradually her tendency to blush in his presence abated. She might feel it rising once in a while, as on the occasion when Mr. Highet caught up her hand and thrust it with his own into the thick fleece on the back of a ewe, that she might feel how it differed from another bred not for wool but mutton. But such episodes were brief. In the main she spoke to Mr. Highet with neither more nor less interest than she felt when conferring with Mr. Rand (whom she had succeeded, by dint of hard study and management, in subduing if not winning over). So mild, indeed, did her feelings towards Henry Highet become, that he quite ceased to appear among Lord Quaffbottle’s adventures—where he had initially cut a very noticeable, clumsy, and rather ridiculous figure. Mrs. Highet, it might be noted, remained.

Meanwhile summer drew on towards its close. In the fields the corn ripened and turned gold. The harvest at Linfield (which its mistress could never have accomplished properly without the advice of her neighbour at Fevermere) was a good one—not excellent, by any means, but not at all the disastrous failure so widespread in England that year. The days became slowly shorter; the air turned and crisped. Miss Guilfoyle rode into the park less for exercise now than for pleasure in its beauty. Often she dismounted and walked for the mere enjoyment of feeling the brown earth beneath her feet. There was a difference between wandering here and wandering through the parks of London, or even the parks of the numerous estates at which she had hitherto made one of the party. There was something invigorating in the solitude, in knowing the land was her own. After the harvest, she felt a certain pride, even a love, for the earth that had
been worked under her direction, and that had brought forth fruit. She liked to watch the threshing and winnowing of the grain, to see it carted to the mill and brought back flour. When, one late August afternoon (after she had been visiting the threshing floor) she read in the
Times
that Parliament was again in session, the news had an alien and artificial look to her, and she wondered with a smile by what cycle of nature Parliament knew itself ready to recommence.

Mr. Highet advised her to marl certain fields of hers before the ploughing and cultivating began. Mr. Rand, in accordance with old Cheshire notions, advised against. Anne decided to trust Mr. Highet, so great was her faith in him now. She had long since concluded he could not possibly know the full terms of Herbert Guilfoyle’s will. If he had, he would not have befriended her so.

Into this tranquil, steady flow of days erupted an evening of event. It was the second Wednesday in September. The men had just begun to harrow. Anne had passed a lengthier afternoon than usual with Mr. Rand, for the time to sell the wether lambs had come and a number of decisions were necessary. She emerged from her office just before six to learn from Dolphim that a letter from London had arrived, and that Mr. Mallinger and Mrs. Insel were waiting for her in the Green Parlour.

“Who is the letter from, can you tell?”

“I believe Lord Ensley, ma’am,” said he, in a tone whose practised indifference expertly concealed a hearty mistrust of this particular correspondent.

“Oh, then I must look at it before I join the others. Where is it?”

Dolphim fetched it while his mistress retired again into her now empty office. She had just had a letter from
Ensley the day before, so this one was an agreeable surprise. The butler returned with it at last and Anne broke the seal as he discreetly bowed himself out the door.

But her eagerness soon turned to disappointment. The words were few and to the point. Anne would remember the legislation Ensley had spoke of in his to her dated August 30? Well then, Liverpool being determined to press on with it before…Her eyes skipped to the bottom of the page. It was as she feared: Ensley was obliged to cancel his visit to Linfield. He was chagrined, he deplored it—et cetera, et cetera—but it could not be helped.

Anne knew when Ensley wrote cancel rather than postpone he meant he would not come till after she had seen him in London. Dully she returned her gaze to the top of the page and read the full text. She did not doubt but that it was true. If Lady Juliana or her family had been what kept him in town, he would have said it bluntly.

With a deep sigh, she rose from her desk, folding the letter into a drawer. She would write a reply later; for the moment she wanted only to lie down. Passing Dolphim in the front hall,

“Would you tell Mr. Mallinger and Mrs. Insel I am not feeling quite the thing?” she asked him. “I shall take my dinner in my room.” And she ascended the staircase leaning heavily on the bannister.

Dolphim, though far too well-trained to show it, observed his mistress’ manner closely before going to carry out his errand. Unseen, he shook his head disapprovingly. He could not like Lord Ensley, for all his valet reported he was a good, kind man. It wasn’t natural, the way he kept after Miss Anne. In fact, none of Miss Guilfoyle’s
household favoured Lord Ensley’s suit, or friendship, or whatever it was.

“Miss Guilfoyle regrets to say she is slightly ill and will not come in,” he announced, putting his head into the Green Parlour. He wondered briefly whether Mrs. Insel ought properly to stay alone with her guest, and not even a pretext of a chaperon on the way; but it was not for him to judge. He returned to the hall. Miss Charlotte Veal, no doubt, would be happy to plant her dry stick of a self in the Parlour and so lend the meeting respectability; but Mr. Dolphim was not about to contribute new fuel to Miss Veal’s already inflamed idea of her own consequence, and that was that.

The correct, conscientious Mr. Dolphim might have changed his mind if he could have heard what was said in the Parlour after he vanished. But he could not hear, which was just the point. Mr. Mallinger, seeing his moment at last, could no longer restrain himself. Interrupting what had been a rather arid but certainly correct discourse on the subject of higher mathematics, he stood, walked up the room and down it, then begged Mrs. Insel’s leave to address her on a matter of some importance to him.

Startled, Maria nevertheless told him, “If it is important, I am honoured you should wish to consult me on it. Pray, go on.”

Mr. Mallinger thanked her, walked up and down the room again, turned resolutely to face her, turned away, walked again into the long stretch of late sunlight by the fireplace, and back to the sofa on which Mrs. Insel sat, where he burst out, “Dear ma’am! You charged me soon after we met to make no remark touching your personal—er, that is,” he amended, “to restrict my remarks to you
to such as might be made by any civil gentleman to any lady. I am sure you recall that request?”