“Caught you, my fine fellow!” he shouted. “I’ll find out what you’ve been doing. I’ll have you put in the stocks, God’s body so I will, for getting the better of us all like this. Here all of you,” he called to the devout flock that were following their shepherd, “here’s Joe Haskins thinking to get the better of us by playing truant from church, but we’ll pay him back with rotten apples when he’s in the stocks for it.”
He shook himself to and fro with laughter and all the people on the path laughed too and carried the news back over their shoulders to those behind. Mr. Hambridge was not ill-natured but the stocks appealed to him as an exquisitely witty form of punishment, an opinion which was shared by his village, who thought him a just and a merry gentleman. It was not right that one of their company should mind his own business or pleasure while they had to sit in the church attending to God’s. Small reason he would have to praise the shortness of the sermon they were all discussing.
All through supper that evening Mr. Hambridge told them how the rascal Joe had run along to the Broad Close to serve cattle, and finding a bull, put him into a pound and baited him with a dog until he was weary of the sport. There was a lad of mettle, to think he could amuse himself on a Sunday morning with a bull-baiting while the rest of them had to cramp their toes in church listening to Little Benjamin’s sermons.
“Little Benjamin, hey? Look at him. Over two yards high, like the King himself, he’ll tell you. Did they call you Benjamin because of your height, or weren’t you as tall then? I dare say not, I dare say not,” and he shook his head profoundly. For once he was talking more than anybody, for once those two chatter-boxes who thought themselves so clever were sitting silent, not moving, not even looking at each other; they sat as if enchanted.
He saw them less and less clearly, sometimes they seemed quite close and sometimes far away, two poor-spirited white-faced numskulls who could not know when to laugh at his jokes, who grew ever more insignificant and more indistinct, until at last he could see them no longer, for the table had risen and swum over his head.
As his voice ceased and he sank from their company, the room seemed to grow the fuller. The silence throbbed in their ears, they could now look nowhere but at each other.
Admiration, awe, respect, these Nan felt for the first time and took for love. She longed to speak to Mr. Cork, but feared to disappoint him. She would never again be thoughtless and silly, she would never hurt him again.
The servants were dragging Mr. Hambridge from beneath the table. His now almost unconscious face rose slowly before her sight; it had sunk sideways on to his shoulder, the mouth was half open in a foolish grin, the eyes were fixed and staring. She looked on her husband’s face as if for the first time; a strange grief beset her; she began to cry, to cover her face with her hands, and sob between them, “Is this all? Is this all?” but she did not know what she meant, she did not know what to do, she would not now look at Mr. Cork, and suddenly she ran from the room.
Nurse bent over her loom. She sat close to the small window for the light, and the profile of her nose and chins, tied up in the white handkerchief that fastened round her cap and neck, were like three potatoes in a bag. She was weaving the first dress Nan had ever had made for her; it would take about a year to finish, for Nurse could not give much time to it, “but you shall have it to wear at your baby’s christening.”
The shuttle danced in and out, carrying its thread now into the sunlight and now into the shadow. Nurse answered its faint rattle with a crooning tune that Nan had heard her sing to it since she was a baby:
Shuttle, weave both warp and woof,
Send my love beneath this roof.
A girl had once sat weaving in her cottage doorway when the King’s son rode down the street, and to her shuttle she spoke the words that Nurse now sang, and the shuttle sprang from the loom and went dancing after the King’s son. He turned to see a beautiful pattern of trees and flowers and animals being woven behind him. He rode back over the magic tapestry until he found that it came from the girl’s cottage, and entered beneath her roof and led her away.
But things did not happen like that nowadays.
“Nurse, dear Nurse—”
“Well, chuck?”
“Do you not think the chaplain looks nobly at times?”
“I think he looks like a starved crow. But there, I know nothing of nobility. I know something of you though, Miss, and I think jollity would suit your father’s child better.”
“So I used to think,” said Nan pensively, “but I have changed. There is much in me that you do not know.”
“I know you will never be like your sister Alice, however long you pull down your face. All these fantods of who you like and what you are like, they’d blow away fast enough if you had a lively crowing brat in your arms. That’s the best cure for the vapours. Get your baby, and if your husband won’t give you one, I’ll not ask who does.”
“Hush! Listen! There is a coach on the road.”
Nan’s head and shoulders were out of the window. “Nurse, it’s turned at the gates. It’s coming down the drive.”
So often had a phantom messenger driven up at home with news from the King. “Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, cart,” all four had had the power to bring Sir Roderick and his children to the window in an ecstasy of anticipation.
Nan could still await the King’s messenger, the King himself, as she watched the yellow coach wheels come to a stand among the uprising whirl of pigeons. The door was pushed open before the coach was still; there protruded from it a large portion of bony shank and a stiff broad-brimmed hat. Nan dropped beside Nurse and put her head in her lap. “It is my mother,” she said.
“And is that any reason for knocking away my shuttle, a great girl like you to go flinging yourself about like a baby?” But Nurse’s true thought was muttered not quite inaudibly as she replaced her shuttle and patted and tried to smooth Nan’s hair: “Now what has brought the grey mare out of her stable?”
The thought of her husband had brought Lady Ingleby. Gossip had at last reached her of the peculiar matrimonial conditions at Cricketts Manor. Her instinct was to let matters alone, but it occurred to her that this was just what her husband would have done. She recalled his lack of fixed principles, of standards of behaviour, of any reason for thinking or doing one thing rather than another. In fact he never thought and never argued. Logical and controversial, Lady Ingleby was the more determined to have a settled standard of conduct decided by the best reasons the mind could accord. She could refer to this code of ethics in any matter at a moment’s notice; it at once pronounced her late husband’s probable conduct with regard to his son-in-law as shallow and negligent, typical of all men in that it shirked a difficult and unpleasant duty. As soon as the word duty came into her mind she sent for the hired coach from Rampton.
“Go and greet your mother, bud,” said Nurse, pulling her refractory charge to the door.
“I’ll not go. I might not have seen her. I’ll wait till she sends for me. I know she has come to scold me.”
“And small wonder if she has heard how you keep house.”
“Dear Nurse, do you see her first and say I am learning. Please, Nurse—”
They were still at it when Lady Ingleby marched into the room. Nurse curtsied. Nan knelt for her blessing. Neither looked as much surprised as they should have done if they were to appear ignorant of her arrival. But Lady Ingleby wasted no time in inquiring why she was not welcomed. She settled herself in the tall chair, crossed one leg high over the other, and called to Nurse in a voice like the crack of a whip, “Never tell me you are cooking pigeon-pies already.”
She must have nosed out the kitchens from the back of the hall, and Nurse was after all to bear the first brunt. Nan suppressed a giggle of delight as Lady Ingleby proceeded to tell them that at this rate they would kill off the dovecot by the New Year and have nothing but their Martinmas beef for the rest of the winter. Suddenly her mother swerved on to her and
said, “This is what comes of neglecting your duties. Too idle, aren’t you, to lock up even the spice-box?”
“But Nurse does it all, Ma’am, and much better than I could.”
“Unnatural!” exclaimed Lady Ingleby, who had little thought that a daughter of hers could think someone else would keep house better than herself.
Nurse in self-defence diverted the attack. They were curing meat for the winter as fast as they could, she said.
“And what of beans?” interrupted Lady Ingleby on a deep note. Nurse reassured her. All the beans that could be spared had been salted or cured, there was no waste anywhere. This present orgy of pigeon-pies was in honour of a supper that the master was giving tonight after a cock-fight in the tithe barn against my Lord Stoking’s birds. My Lord himself and one or two other gentlemen were riding over for the fight and had sent word that they would not stay to supper on account of the distance and the dark roads, for now the weather had turned so cloudy there was small chance of the moon showing its face. But there would be all the yeomen farmers and country gentlemen round who would have no such scruples about getting home. Where they supped they would breakfast, and no need to provide beds for them—they would sit round the table until they fell under it.
“See to it that your mistress is in bed before any of the company arrives.”
Nurse promised. Nan promised. It cost her little, since Lord Stoking’s party from the town were not coming up to the house. She longed to hear more talk of them. She wished she dared tell her mother of the glimpse she had had through the windows of Stoking House, and so prompt further gossip. She said merely, “I hear that one of the ladies there dresses like a man, and keeps a blackamoor.”
It was a happy move. With a snort like the warhorse when he sayeth “ha, ha!” Lady Ingleby charged the modern fashions and morals. She had no patience with these women who aped the men, wore horsemen’s coats and periwig hats or caps with ribands and laced bands instead of modest hoods, lost their virginity as soon, interfered with politics, appointed ministers, which was why they were all young and lively instead of old and wise, brought on wars, seized all the money.
“What can the men have come to, I should like to know,” she cried, as though she had never met such a man in her life, “who can allow the women to manage their affairs for them?” But then the men in their turn were just like women, they cared for nothing but dancing and music and idle experiments that only led them to question everything from witchcraft to water-divining, whereas any fool knew what harm was done by the first and what use was made of the latter.
Nan had occasionally heard her mother talk like this and paid no heed to it because it answered to nothing in her head, it was just her mother’s way of scolding the world. But now she knew from Mr. Cork that the Royal Society had discovered spiders preserved in amber, and pieces of unicorn’s horn, and that the Duke of Buckingham loved to make red glass. Without confessing her escapade, she too could show her knowledge of the world.
“I heard,” she said, “that the King ordered Mr. Wren to make him a globe of the moon which he keeps among the curiosities in his cabinet and that there are hills and hollows in it which make the shadows we see on the face of the moon.”
“Indeed,” said Lady Ingleby, “and will you tell me of what use that is to anyone?”
She regarded her daughter with surprised attention. Nan, not yet a wife, had already changed greatly from the half-savage child who would do what she was told only when faced with the alternative of a beating. She set up to think for herself, and before her mother too, and gave her opinion with a confidence that must have been bred by her conversation with that proud upstart scholar, for of conversation with her husband she could have had none. She was not at all sure that the change was in the right direction.
“I cannot see why,” she said to Nurse, “that I should be cursed with yet another unwomanly daughter.”
Nurse made a clucking sound expressive of no opinion except general sympathy, and sought to turn the current by asking after Eliza.
“Humph,” said Lady Ingleby and fell into a silence from which she presently emerged to ask Nurse what she thought of marrying her to Mr. Wake.
Nurse thought nothing of it. “A man of that age! Where are her children to come from?”
Lady Ingleby was of opinion that no one could make a worse mother than Eliza, and that she might make a worse marriage. He was absent-minded but she never noticed it. She was morose but he never noticed it. Their union would be on the basis of letting each other alone, a very modern affair.
But the globe of the moon still disturbed her thoughts. It was a saying that no one had ever seen the other side of the moon; she would like to know that she had seen it, but then, as she had said, to what purpose?
“Men delight in such tricks and fancies,” she said to Nan, so close on her last remarks that at first they thought she was still discussing Mr. Wake’s marriage with Eliza, “but you should show yourself a woman by now.”
Women, it seemed, were made of sterner stuff, and yet men were contemptible if they let them manage their affairs for them. But Nan did not ponder this long. She was busy considering her mother’s hat.
Twenty years ago it had been a cavalier hat of soft leather and sumptuous curves belonging to Sir Roderick, a plume had then waved from its brim, but the only reminder of that was the square steel buckle which stuck up with an empty and forlorn air like a gate that led to nowhere in the midst of a desert. The hat was now as stiff as a board and indeterminate in colour, by reason not merely of all the rains and hard wear it had withstood, but also of that sympathy that causes clothes, like servants, when old and constant, to grow like their masters. Many of Lady Ingleby’s garments looked as though they were made of wood, and the hat that had once been unmistakably Sir Roderick’s could now by no possibility belong to anyone but his widow.
All her life Nan had regarded this object only as a symbol of maternal authority, to be avoided with dread haste whenever it suddenly protruded itself among the branches in the orchard or over the wall of the vegetable patch when the young peas were tender enough to eat raw. But now for the first time her attention was emancipated, and when her mother talked of modest hoods she saw, as any dispassionate observer might have done, that her mother was wearing a hat, and a man’s hat. A spell had been broken, scales had fallen from her eyes, which turned at Lady Ingleby’s mention of the disgraceful modern skirts that displayed the wearer’s legs for fully two or three inches above the ankle, to Lady Ingleby’s own voluminous skirts of a nondescript dust colour. They had been looped up by various tapes and strings in so partial and erratic a fashion that whereas they trailed in some places to the danger of her heels, in others they displayed an uninterrupted view of her knee, stockinged in thick black cloth.
To accuse such a spectacle of immodesty was as impossible as to accuse an ancient hornbeam of displaying its gnarled joints. But a glimmering perception of her inconsistency aroused in Nan the nearest approach to affection she had ever felt for her mother. It was quickly rewarded, for Lady Ingleby, following the course of her daughter’s glance, did a thing which made Nan realize her new status as a married women. She explained herself.
“If I wear a hat and loop up my skirts,” she said, “it is for my own comfort and convenience and not for the fashion.”
Then since her mother did not follow the fashion, the fashion must be following her. In any case this condescension had set her at liberty to conjecture. “Maybe, Ma’am, the modern fashion is also for comfort and convenience.”
But that was too much. Fashion, she was told, had no motive but to render its votaries conspicuous.
As for all this talk about modern comfort, what need was there for chairs that one could loll and lounge in as long as there was a comfortable bed in the house, or for larger windows and lighter rooms since there was plenty of light out of doors? Young people talked about their eyes now in a way they should be ashamed to do at ninety. “And why, pr
ay, should the very furniture be cosseted? I hear they put rugs from Persia on the tables as if even they should be kept warm, or is it that the modesty they will not extend to their own legs covers those of the tables in compensation?” China? It was not to be mentioned. She had heard that even the young men of the town collected it, and for her part would sooner have seen her sons wielding swords against each other on opposite sides in the late civil wars, than dandling vases in degraded effeminacy.
A craze of china has ever had a strong effect on the heart of our nation. In righteous indignation, Punch, that British champion of the 1870’s, discovered that our young men were addicted to strange vices, the worst and newest of them being blue china. And “vices—fopperies and fripperies—” said Lady Ingleby on the same subject a couple of centuries earlier, “affectations—nonsense.”
Her tongue darted between her teeth like a lizard, she threw back her head and crossed and uncrossed her legs, flinging her skirts the higher with each unguarded movement. She had not expected to enjoy her visit so much. Nurse had brought her a large piece of the abused pigeon-pie and a bumper of sherry sack. “Never let me see tea in my daughter’s house,” said Lady Ingleby, “people will poison themselves to be modish as they call it. They will even take these new hot Eastern drinks of tea and coffee for breakfast instead of wholesome British beer. These young women who take to tea-drinking ought to be whipped.”
Nan quivered, flung back her head, tried vainly to remember a certain delectable burnt fragrance. Was it tea? Was it coffee? Would she ever know the taste of these strange, wicked drinks?
Suddenly Lady Ingleby remembered the object of her visit. Was the marriage consummated or not? Well then, since it was not, why had Nurse sent her no message and why had Nan not managed to preserve appearances at least by inducing her husband to spend the last two or three hours of the night or rather morning in her bed, if only to get his first sleep there? The great thing was to make a beginning. The Queen herself had had to endure the company of Barbara Palmer or Castlemaine or Cleveland as she was now, yet that proud whore who clutched all these titles and half the wealth of the kingdom to her lap, was now forced to entertain her successful French rival, and practise a humiliating friendship with her to the extent of trying on each other’s hats in public for all the world to see. Mighty melancholy the old favourite had looked under it too, for all that she had a yellow plume in hers that far exceeded Madame Frog’s. Which was satisfactory, since it showed that fate, like everything else, followed a rule and brought in due time its exact revenges. And now what had Mrs. Anne to say for herself?
None So Pretty Page 8
