Nan hung her head and looked wooden, a dull, disobedient child. At last she said that Bess had been there before she came, and things were very well as they were.
“Have you no decency? No proper pride? Do you wish always to remain a virgin? Don’t you wish your husband to love you, fool?”
“No, Ma’am.” She had nearly said it; her lips framed the words but did not make the sound. She would have enjoyed saying it; there was no reason, now that she was free from her mother, why she should not; she even discerned dimly that her mother would like her the better, and that it might be the beginning of a friendship such as they could never have enjoyed while she was under her authority. But the habit of lying to her had been formed from infancy, it was too strong to break so lightly.
So she stood “muttering there,—afraid to speak up,” as Lady Ingleby complained, unreasonably, for she had been astonished and rather put out by the extent to which Nan had already spoken up. “She was there before I came,” indeed. It might have been her father speaking in the silly way he had of making every case appear a separate instance instead of chained each to each by the laws of consistency. There had been no way of dealing with him, no means of foreseeing how he would act.
And in a frightening flash of memory, she saw him as he had been in that brief time when he had been in love with her; a powerful young man, laughing and teasing, carrying her about as though she were a child instead of the tallest and shrewdest of her family; frantic when jealous, yet showing it not in anger but in an added urgency, almost an agony in his love-making. And once when she had no notion what she had done to rouse him, he lay at her feet and looked up at her with a strange light flame in his eyes, telling her that if she killed him now she would have him her own for ever. He had terrified her, his submission was that of some great fierce beast, she had covered her eyes to keep from seeing it, and wished she were at home again with her nurse and her mother and people who behaved like reasonable human beings. She wished she could love him more or he love her less. And before she could realize it both these things came to pass, so that though he was merry and good-humoured with her she never again saw him wild and unreasonable with her. For the rest of his life she tried to make him so.
“Why didn’t I know how to love him earlier?” she asked herself. “They teach girls to read and write, to sew their samplers, sometimes even Latin and Greek, but what is the use of all that if they don’t know how to love in time?” The wildness of her thought would have astounded her if she had had time to consider it, but her whole life was racing through her mind, a race in which she always came too late.
There stood her youngest daughter before her; the girl moved lightly, her hips were straight, her breasts small and firm, she was married yet she was still free, a virgin. Should this brat escape her obligations where a character as much stronger as her mother had had to pay? It was against nature, she did not know what girls were coming to, Nan must yield as she had yielded, or else—else she would know that perhaps she herself might have directed her life better, that she had not always been strong, that she too might have been freer to carry a light heart. She could not bear to think that. If she had failed, it was because all womankind was doomed to failure.
A gust of rain splashed against the small leaded panes so that the scene outside looked dark and of a wintry grey. The east wind had not dried the roads sufficiently, and Lady Ingleby had to leave at once lest any further rain should increase the mud. She rose wearily and demanded to see her son-in-law.
“Mr. Hambridge is very busy somewhere about a badger,” said Nan chivalrously. Then, as Lady Ingleby did not look very credulous, she added, “indeed I do not think he is returning to the house before the cock-fight, and the tithe barn is five fields off.”
“When you tell a lie,” said her mother, “must you tell so many?”
She strode out of the house and ran Mr. Hambridge to earth in a stable. One of the grooms said afterwards that he jumped into the stall to hide from her but that she hauled him out, “and by the Lord Harry I thought she would have basted him with his own riding-crop.”
The encounter cheered her flagging spirits for a moment, she instructed the coachman Jake to cut at Bess Tiddle with his whip as she stood gaping at the Lodge door, and departed in a satisfaction that was allayed only when one of the wheels got wedged in the mud and she had to sit in a ditch for close on two hours before it could be dug out.
She shifted her position from one damp patch of moss to another, her chin sunk in her hands, her hooded eyelids dropping over her tired old eyes as she surveyed the rain-filled clouds, and the mud that for thirty years had isolated her from all company but that of her household.
All over the waste heath, the furze bushes stuck up in shapeless black spikes into the grey air. Another winter was fast approaching. She thought of the long sunless months, of the drip of rain in the courtyard and the winds that every year sought out her rheumatism more cunningly, of solitude, of salt meat, since it was ruinous to kill the half-starved winter sheep, of old age that was settling on her like a longer winter with no hope of spring to come, crippling her bones, numbing her blood and her perceptions, so that nothing any longer had the importance it had once possessed. Like the surrounding scene, her brain seemed cloudy and her life a meaningless waste.
She had given birth to many lives, but in this moment of returned despair, the sharper because her rare visit had enlivened her, she could perceive in them no more form and purpose than in these black scrubs that sprouted out of the waste land. Her Hal was now Sir Henry and much good it had done him; he trailed his title through half the Courts of Europe as his ancestor had trailed a pike, and to as little purpose; he dared not come home because of his debts; he never wrote. All her thoughts and prayers and wishes for him must have died before they reached him, since they could blossom into no answering sign of kindness from him. Of all her children she had had some pride and entertainment only from Moll, now Maria, who had reached the town, and perhaps that was why.
A woman was not meant to live alone, even in her household, like a toad in a hole. Company, gaiety, the bustle of shops, people of her own kind nodding their heads, agreeing with her, all that might have made her forget that she was growing old, that she was a poor weak woman whom no one had ever sufficiently helped. But it was a mistake to think of “weak women.” They had the sense; if they could rule affairs, life might be more tolerable. If she could order the State it was little she would care for persons, King or Protector. She would make good roads, that was all she would care for.
And before her haggard and indomitable eyes there passed a vision of smooth straight roads, so well built and drained that they could proceed over marsh and fen, bringing provisions, talk, company to the loneliest homesteads, enabling mothers to visit their married daughters, and sons their mothers, making of life a many-coloured intricate pattern instead of one grey monotonous thread. She did not want to influence indirectly as the women did now, but to give orders, to have people acknowledging and praising her work, to be told publicly in speeches, or better still in letters that would last for ever, that she was doing what no woman, and not merely no woman but no one, had ever done before.
Along the smooth road of her prophetic vision, there passed a stream of easily driven vehicles, carrying civilization into the rural desert. A host of independent Englishwomen would also march with long strides down those roads of the future, seeking good hard exercise between their parish organizations, their committees or their political contests; they also would regard themselves as the pioneers of their generations; but though her lonely imagination had helped to place these on their stoutly shod feet, she could not recognize them, nor know that she was of their company.
Mr. Hambridge brought his guests back late from the tithe barn. Nan heard their boots tramping into the hall and their gruff good-humoured voices. Mr. Hambridge’s did not sound so good-humoured as usual and no wonder after his encounter with her mother. All the serva
nts were tittering about it. Perhaps he had lost the match as well. In any case it was more amusing for him downstairs with his company than for her alone in her room with Nurse. The tallow candles guttered and smelled disgustingly. They were stuck in magnificent silver sconces as her mother had noticed. “Fine state here in his father’s day,” she had said, “but he himself keeps the place like a pigsty.”
Clear candlelight spread from tapers of finest wax; broad windows of plate glass to let in the daylight in a flood instead of the chequered pattern of small dim panes; smooth gilded walls instead of tapestry; shining silks; frank speech and laughter and the free company of men with women; this world that grew lighter every day went on outside the dark room where Nan sat with her Nurse and listened to the revelry of her husband and his friends below.
“What are they saying now, do you think? Why are they laughing?”
But Nurse would repeat the old formula, “Ask no questions and you’ll get told no lies.” She would go on grumbling about the maids here, how inferior they were to those at home, how she would not put up with it another day if it were not for her charge, and that what Nan would do without her she did not know, starved outright she would be and more ragged than she was now, since she was incapable of putting in a stitch for herself. And as to that impudent Keziah, put her down, she would, if she had to take a slipper to her.
Nan’s waning interest revived in the middle of a yawn. “Why, what has she done to you?”
“Done? No chance for that much, I can tell you. But bragging and boasting and picking and stealing, that I will not have. Said straight out to me, she did, and proud of it, ‘Well, whatever I may do, I don’t flick my hair with lard like some old women. I do use a bit of butter to it.’”
Nurse was so much offended at Nan’s laughter that she put her to bed earlier than usual, snuffed out the candles, and left to get her own supper. Nan lay within the drawn curtains and heard the noise rise upward in increasing waves like a swelling tide. Mr. Cork left it early. She heard his step mounting the stair and go down the long gallery to his room. There he would be beyond all sound of it, he would read until he forgot it and all else. Or would he sit staring, not at his book but beyond it at the opposite wall, as she had sometimes caught him lately at their studies in the oak room, the idle page unturned before him as he looked at the dark panels, seeing not them either but some image of his mind?
A louder roar drove away her image of him, so immediate was it that she guessed the oak-room door to be open, and when she got up and opened her own, she discovered this to be the case. Someone was bawling out the catch of an old cavalier ditty. When she was a very young child it had been dangerous to sing that song; she remembered singing it in the village street at home and Chris and the other children running from her as the sheriff’s man rode through. She had been braver than all the boys, and here she was sent to bed like a child while the men made merry below. It was a poor thing to be a woman, at any rate in the country. She wished she were singing and laughing too, but as another roar of laughter burst on her ears she drew back into her room and jumped into bed. The sound frightened her, it was so huge and silly and beyond any control, as though it had come from it did not know where and might lead to it did not know what.
And now though her door was shut, the sound did indeed seem nearer, surging upwards in a mighty and continuous wave towards her. A trampling of heavy boots was again mingled in it; the men had come out of the oak room, they were coming up the stairs, they were coming to her room. She lay for an instant in a cold sweat, unable, as in a nightmare, to move hand or foot. They were just outside her door, fumbling at the handle; she heard Mr. Hambridge’s voice, very thick and muddy, reeling out, “See for yourselves, I say, you can see for yourselves.”
She sprang from her stupor, seized the curtains above her head and climbed up the post. The bed was a high one with a wooden roof; she had scrambled over the edge and was lying flat on it, face downwards, by the time they had burst into the room, her husband in front, still telling them they should see for themselves this wren, this starveling sparrow that had been foisted on him by its rapacious dam.
“Why, what an insect dragon it must be under such a Saint George!” one barked out in a hurry lest his wit should be lost in his hiccoughs, and a very sleepy, drawling voice said twice over so as to get it clear, “Say rather the pea under the nine mattresses.”
A feeble light rolled upwards over the walls, chased by great shadows of moving figures. By stretching her head a little, Nan could see that one of them was carrying a rushlight in the oak stand that usually stood on a shelf at the bottom of the stairs. It swayed and guttered; she thought it should be an easy matter to flap it out with the curtain and then escape in the darkness and confusion. But fear kept her from the attempt, as did shame from the simpler resort of screaming to the servants. She would not be found by them in such a plight; she lay stiff and taut as the men drew back the curtains, called to her, and then exclaimed at her absence, shouted “Gone away,” rummaged the bedclothes, looked under the bed and behind the furniture. They were too drunk, she thought, to limb up the bed; but her eyes scanned the edge backwards and forwards for an encroaching hand, fat, red and fumbling, her husband’s hand, in which as soon as it appeared she would fasten her teeth until they met in the middle.
A strange exultation came upon her; she was free of those creatures below, they could do nothing to her, “nothing, nothing,” she said to herself through her clenched teeth, not even if they killed her, for her husband and his friends were nothing to her. And if she could have remembered it at such a moment, it would have amazed her that once she had wept at sight of her husband’s drink-sodden face.
The search was slackening; someone yawned; someone else asked why they had left the drink, and the question was acclaimed with ardour. They had not looked too thoroughly and perhaps Mr. Hambridge had no great wish that they should; he had vindicated himself to his fellows, he had shown them and himself he was a lad of spirit and not to be cowed by any woman, even though he had been caught by one.
“How do I know which of the grooms she’s sleeping with?” he shouted when they grumbled that he had led them a dance for nothing. Having restored his self-respect with this sally he was lurching out of the room, when a mouse gave a shrill squeak and sprang out into the midst of his company. They did not see what it was and were startled into an ignominious rout, for one fell against his neighbour and sent him crashing to the floor, the others cried out to know what was happening, and the man who had knocked the other down swore at him for a clumsy fool.
Bewildered and blundering, the heavy nightmare rolled away, resurged down the stairs and left Nan lying trembling and sick with exhaustion on top of the bed.
She could not stay in this room for the rest of the night, she could not be alone. She would go and find Nurse. She slid down the post and stepped back only just in time to avoid treading on the prone figure of a man that lay half concealed by the bed-curtains. The door had been left open, and a faint light from the passage lay for a little way inside the room. She lifted back the curtain and distinguished the dim outline of a shoulder as still as that of a dead man. He lay face downwards, his neck hidden by the curls of his peruke. The light from outside caught the puckers and creases of satin on his coat so that little hills and paths, shining like silver, ran among the deep pools of shadow. His hand was outstretched, long and passive, like a dead hand, and on it a ring sparkled with subdued splendour in the half-darkness. She thought of the hand, fat, red and fumbling, that she had watched for and waited to bite. And suddenly the room seemed full again of huge and staggering shadows, of stupid laughter.
She would not go to Nurse. Nurse would pet and dandle her but Nurse would tell her it was her duty to love her husband no matter what he did, and to try and make him love her, and that when she carried his child within her womb, then she would know that men mattered little once they had served their purpose, as she should know herself for she
had been a flighty wench, carrying on with one man and then another until she had her children and knew that that was all it was for.
But now Nan thought that if she were with child by Mr. Hambridge she would kill herself before she bore it. She was trembling; she had to shut her teeth tight together to prevent them from chattering aloud; she longed for something violent to happen, a thunderbolt, the house on fire, sudden death, anything that would provide some wild escape from this intolerable present.
And once again, as though she were looking through a small window at a scene very far away, she saw Mr. Cork sitting in his room at the end of the gallery, hearing nothing, knowing nothing of her torment, reading in old books, or perhaps not reading, perhaps staring, not at his book but at the opposite wall, seeing there some image of his mind, an image that was perhaps herself, as she now saw his image.
She took the curtain in her hand to step past it and that still figure. But as she did so, the words of a round game she had often played with the others at home came into her head of themselves and went round and round like children dancing.
None So Pretty Page 9
