The Meaning of Night (55 page)

given me the greatest possible concern, since making certain discoveries in the course of

my work. I must state that I have not relied merely on fallible memory in the composition

of this account. Throughout my life I have kept a daily journal, scrupulously written up

each evening before I retire. These records have been constantly before me, and will be

found to corroborate and amplify this necessarily condensed summary of particulars I

regard as being, to a greater or lesser extent, pertinent to the case.

To set things in their proper light, I must first say something about myself and my

situation.

I began my present employment, as secretary to my cousin, the twenty-fifth Baron

Tansor, in August, 1821. I had come down from Oxford three years earlier with little

notion of what I would do in life, and for a time, I fear, idled most irresponsibly at home.

We lived then – my father and mother and I, my elder brother having by then

secured a diplomatic position abroad – in a good deal of comfort, just across the river

from Evenwood, at Ashby St John, in a fine old house that had been purchased by my

paternal great-grandfather, the founder of the family’s prosperity. But, as the younger

son, I could not remain in a state of dependency on my father indefinitely; and, besides, I

wished to marry – wished very much to marry – the eldest daughter of one of our

neighbours, Miss Marina Hunt-Graham. And so I resolved at last, after a little travelling,

to follow my elder brother Lawrence into the Foreign Service, having at my disposal,

besides a respectable degree and the good offices of my brother, a powerful

recommendation from my cousin, Lord Tansor, to the then Foreign Secretary.? On the

strength of this resolve, my father – albeit reluctantly – agreed to my proposing to Miss

Hunt-Graham and to providing us with a small allowance until I had established myself

in my new career. She accepted me, and we were married in June, 1821, on a day that I

shall always regard as one of the happiest of my life.

But within a month of my marriage my father was taken ill and died; and with his

death came ruin. Unknown to us all, even to my mother, the former Sophia Duport, he

had committed all his capital to ruinous speculations, had borrowed most injudiciously,

and as a consequence had left us almost destitute. The house, of course, had to be sold,

along with my father’s prized collection of Roman coins; and there was no question now

of my new wife and I making a new life for ourselves in London. My poor mother

suffered greatly with the shame of it all, and if it had not been for the generosity of her

noble nephew, in immediately offering me a position as his private secretary, together

with accommodation for us all with his step-mother in the Dower House at Evenwood, I

do not well know what we should have done. I owe him everything.

At the time I took up my employment, my cousin was married to his first wife,

Laura, Lady Tansor, whose people, like my father’s family, were from the West Country.

There had recently been a rift between Lord and Lady Tansor, apparently now healed,

during which her Ladyship had left her husband to spend over a year in France. I am

aware of the immediate cause of the rift but do not wish to elaborate on it here. Suffice it

to say that it involved a close relative of Lady Tansor’s. Beyond, that, I do not feel it is

incumbent on me to say more. What it is important to know is that Lady Tansor had

returned from the Continent in late September of the previous year – that is, 1820 – a

changed woman.

I cannot think of her Ladyship without affection. It is impossible. I acknowledge

that her character was flawed, in many ways; but when I first knew her, in the early years

of her marriage to my cousin, she seemed to my impressionable mind to be like Spenser’s

Cyprian goddess, ‘newly born of th’ Oceans fruitfull froth’.? I was already in love with

Miss Hunt-Graham, and had eyes for no one else; but I was flesh and blood, and no

young man so composed could fail to admire Lady Tansor. She was all beauty, all grace,

all spirit; lively, amusing, accomplished in so many ways; a soul, as I may say, so fully

alive that it made those around her seem like dumb automata. The contrast with my

cousin, her husband, could not have been greater, for he was by nature grave and

reserved, and in every way the opposite of his vivacious wife; yet, for a time, they had

seemed curiously suited to each other; each, as it were, neutralizing the excesses of the

other’s temperament.

I had almost daily opportunity to observe my cousin and his wife after the latter’s

return from France. I had been given a work-room adjoining the Library at Evenwood, on

the ground floor of what is called Hamnet’s Tower,? the upper storey of which comprised

the Muniments Room, containing legal documents, accounts, estate and private

correspondence, inventories, and such forth relating to the Duport family and stretching

back to the time of the first Baron Tansor in the thirteenth century. To this work-room I

would come every day to undertake my duties, which soon also began to encompass

general stewardship of the Library – then uncatalogued – after I evinced an informed

interest in the manuscript books, stored in the Muniments Room, which had been

collected by my cousin’s grandfather.

My first duty of the morning would be to call upon my cousin at eight o’clock to

receive his instructions for the day. He would usually be taking breakfast with his wife in

what was known as the Yellow Parlour, sitting at a small table set in a bow-window

looking out upon a secluded walled garden on the south side of the house. Lady Tansor

had been back in England, and seemingly reconciled with her husband, for nearly a year

when I began my employment at Evenwood. A portrait of her, begun before the rift of

which I have just spoken, hung unfinished on one of the walls of this modest apartment,

and provided a stark daily reminder of the strange transformation of her physical

appearance that had taken place since the artist had first begun to paint her – from the

dazzling, captivating beauty of former times, with proud flashing eyes and abundant

raven hair, to the gaunt and slightly stooped figure, her hair now prematurely flecked

with grey, who sat opposite her husband each morning, silently staring out, come rain or

shine, and whatever the season, over his shoulder into the garden, whilst he, with his back

to the window, read The Times and drank his coffee. Such a change! And so sad to see!

As I entered the room each morning, she barely noticed my presence, and would take no

part in my conversations with her husband. Sometimes she would rise absently from the

table, letting her napkin drop to the floor, and, without a word, would drift from the room

like some poor ghost.

She spent days on end, especially during the dreary winter months, shut away in

her suite of rooms above the Library, and generally saw no one, except her maid and her

companion, Miss Eames, and of course her husband at meal-times. But then she would

sometimes, and on a sudden, take it into her head to go up to Town, or to some other

place, regardless of the weather and the state of the roads. Once, I remember, she insisted,

with something of her old force, that she absolutely must go to see an old friend, and so

off she went to the South Coast in the midst of a most ferocious downpour, accompanied

only by Miss Eames, to the considerable disapproval of my cousin, and the consternation

of those of us who loved her and fretted after her well-being.

That, as I recall, was in the spring – April, I think – of 1822. I remember it

particularly because, after she returned from the coast, she appeared to have regained a

little of her former spirit, almost as if a weight had been lifted from her. Little by little,

she began to show her husband small considerations, and as I came into the Yellow

Parlour of a morning I would sometimes even catch her smiling at some trifling

pleasantry of Lord Tansor’s – a slight, wistful smile, to be sure; but it gladdened my heart

to see it. And then, as the summer went on, she began to busy herself a little – planning a

new area of garden, replacing the window-curtains in her private sitting-room, arranging

a weekend party for some of her husband’s political associates, sometimes accompanying

his Lordship to Town. And so contentment returned to my cousin’s marriage, though

things were not – nor ever would be – as they had been formerly, and my Lady’s eyes

never again regained the radiant energy captured so well in the unfinished portrait that

hung by the breakfast-table in the Yellow Parlour.

This partial restoration of happiness between my cousin and his wife, muted and

delicate though it was, continued into the autumn, culminating in an announcement, made

to the general delight of their many friends, that her Ladyship was with child. Lord

Tansor’s joy at the news was plain for all to see, for it had been the cause of much

distress and anxiety for my cousin that his union with Lady Tansor had, so far, denied

him the thing he desired above all others: an heir of the direct line.

The change in him was quite remarkable. I even remember hearing him whistle,

something I had never heard him do before, as he was coming down the stairs one

morning, a little later than usual, to take his breakfast. He became wonderfully solicitous

towards his wife, showing her every attention she could have wished for; so absorbed in

her welfare did he become that he would often send me away of a morning, saying that he

could not put his mind to business at such a time, or reprimanding me sharply for

intruding when, as he said, I could see that her Ladyship was tired, or that her Ladyship

needed his company that morning, or strongly conveying by word or look some other

mark of his determination to do nothing else that day but devote himself to my Lady’s

service.

The object of his concern, however, received these unwonted demonstrations of

partiality with little outward show of satisfaction; indeed she appeared to regard them

with an increasing irritation that seemed likely to throw into disarray the state of peace

and equilibrium that had latterly been established between them. This did not in the least

deflect her husband from his purpose, but it produced an uncomfortable atmosphere in

which my cousin doggedly, and with unusual patience, sought ever more ways of

expressing his care for his wife’s condition, whilst she became peevish and captious,

brushing off his well-meant enquiries with a brusqueness that I fear he did not deserve.

Once, when I was about to knock at the door of the Yellow Parlour as usual one morning,

I heard her telling him sharply that she did not want to be molly-coddled so by him, that

she neither desired it nor deserved it. I reflected afterwards on her words, concluding that

some residual action of guilt for having abandoned her husband was responsible, in

concert with the natural anxieties of impending motherhood, for her peppery behaviour.

So things went on until the seventeenth of November, in the year ’22, when, at a

little after three o’clock in the afternoon, my Lady gave birth to a son. The boy, who

would be christened Henry Hereward, was a hale and hearty creature from the first; but

his mother, grievously weakened by the exertion of bringing him into the world, sank into

a deep decline that lasted several days. She lay, hardly breathing, lingering between life

and death, in the great curtained bed, fashioned to a fantastic design by du Cerceau,? that

had been brought to Evenwood by Lady Constantia Silk on her marriage to Lord Tansor’s

father. Gradually, she began to revive, take a little food, and sit up. A week to the day

after the birth of her son, her husband, accompanied by the wet-nurse, brought the child

to her for the first time; but she would not look at it. Propped up in the heavy-curtained

bed, she closed her eyes and said only that she wished to sleep. My cousin remonstrated

gently that she ought to make the acquaintance of their fine son and heir; but, with her

eyes still shut, she told him, in a barely audible whisper, that she had no wish to see him.

‘I have done my duty,’ was all she would say when pressed by her husband to

open her eyes just a little and look upon her son’s face for the first time. She would not

even consent to attend the boy’s christening, which had been held off until she should

have recovered sufficiently.

So Lord Tansor left her, and did not return. Thenceforth he devoted himself to the

nurture of his son, where formerly his wife had been his only care. ?

Friday, 21st October, 1853 (continued).

II.

Winter came on, damp and raw. Her Ladyship left her bed, but refused to dress,

sitting instead wrapped up in a shawl in an arm-chair before the fire, which burned night

and day, and sometimes falling asleep there until her maid came in to draw back the

window-curtains in the morning. The weeks passed, but still she would not see her son or

quit her apartments. Her reply, when urged by friends to rouse herself and take up the

duties of motherhood, was always the same: ‘I have done my duty. The debt is paid.