“Ha, ha,” shouted Mr. Hambridge. “That is a good one. I’ll tell her so I will.” His laughter died uncomfortably away as it appeared that Mr. Cork had not after all intended a joke. These sharp fellows, they said things that sounded funny, and then sat and stared at you when you laughed as if you were a half-wit.
As in his wine-inspired perceptions on that Sunday when Mr. Cork had preached extempore, he knew his companions to be growing remote from him, and now from each other. Each member of the trio sat uneasily isolated. They would have believed the winter to last for ever, did they not know, and each of them often state, that now the days had finished drawing in, so they must inevitably in course of time begin to be drawing out.
Birds tapped at the windows of the oak room, seeing the bright fire inside, and thinking to get in out of the cold. The two figures that sat there so stiff and silent, they took to be part of the furniture. One figure was very tall and sat straight up against the high carved back of his chair; his peruke fell in a long black curtain on either side of his face, shadowing it so that it too looked as if it were carved out of dark wood. The face of the other figure could not be seen, it bent so low, the hair falling forward over the table, the small shoulders hunched, and one hand moving laboriously.
Mr. Cork believed that to make Nan a scholar, or at least an educated woman, would justify and console their union. It needed consolation, for he found the pleasures of the flesh an uneasy torment. His self-interest was terrified of exposure, his pride despised his fear.
She wished to be what he wanted her; with the frequent lack of humour of women in love, she sometimes wished she were a better woman for his sake. When he pointed out that that would scarcely further their intrigue, she cried a little, for it was all so hopeless, she could not be both good and bad. The dilemma was so absurd that she began to laugh. “You are right,” she said, “I am a bad woman and it is much better so. How could I be your lover if I were not? And then the King is bad as you are always telling me, and the Court, the women there have hosts of lovers. Why should people only be good in the country, and only the women there too? It is not just or reasonable.”
These arguments were not for herself but for him. She was continually trying to ease his conscience, for he was always worrying, always reproaching, sometimes himself, more often her, most often humanity. She wished as he hated humanity so much, he would let it alone more. It was as if he had expected it, and him, and her, to have changed utterly from the moment when he saw her message in his sermon, and preached about love.
“It did change,” he cried, “the gates of Paradise were opened.”
“And you have entered,” she answered, flinging her arms round him.
He suspected Paradise to be only another cage.
One day she came running to him with a breathless tale, that Nurse had told her how Tom the carter’s boy had had it from the cottage at Far End that King Charles had lain for one night at Stoking some weeks ago, and held court in the cellars because it was the properest place to drink, and in honour of it a crown had been stuck up over the main arch. He had been within eight miles of her and all this time she had never known of it. He saw her eyes shining as they had not done for many a day, and scarcely knew what sickness made his head feel hot and swimming.
He had heard that women changed their whole natures when in love, that these frivolous and idle butterflies then contrived to wrap themselves in a thick cocoon of affection which bound their wings close and rendered them steady to the point of immobility. This he had never believed till now, when he wished to do so.
“If this woman really loves me,” he thought, “could such a trifle inflame her curiosity, and God knows what loose desires?” He said aloud, “That was on a night early in December, the very same that you took shelter in my arms, as you told me later, from a like crew of drunkards,” and waited to watch his effect. He made one but not what he expected.
“You knew of it and never told me!”
“I guessed you to have had enough of such company, but your courage is insatiable.”
His tone made her smart. She did not know of what she was accused, but felt herself an inferior creature. If he rated her, she would give him cause.
“That same night!” she said. “Then it might have been a courtier, perhaps even the King—” She broke off, for his face began to frighten her.
“What might?” he asked, and persisted. She flung back her head, shutting her eyes, and tried to speak lightly.
“Why, the strange gallant in a satin coat that I left lying on the floor of my room when I came to you. Think, Mr. Cork, I may have left the “King to come to you.”
Her words ended on a cry for she felt his fingers round her throat. He told her if ever there were a chance of her becoming the King’s whore he would kill her. “What is it you want?” he cried. “Is it gowns, jewels, a duchy?”
“I want gaiety and good company,” she said, choking.
He released her. “You’ll get none of these things from me. Why did you come to me? I never called you. Why did you not stay with your drunken gallant on the floor? What did you think to get from me, a ruined man, a country chaplain, a dry pedantic Puritan?”
“Love,” she said, and her laugh had a wild sound. Her hands were round her neck, feeling it tenderly. She moved to go. He stood aghast at himself. He was driving her from him, and she was all that he cared for in the world. He must speak to prevent her, he must tell her he was sorry for treating her so, that perhaps he had been unnecessarily harsh. But the words would not come, his mouth was dry, his heart was dry, withered with a bitter angry wind that tossed his spirit to and fro, telling him he had been a fool to love too late.
“Love” was her own word. He could still say he loved her. She would listen to that if to nothing else. But was he then to love and leave all in a tangle, unexplained, to reduce their intercourse to that of beasts that have no understanding?
She was putting up the latch. In another moment he would be quiet to explain things to himself, but she would have gone. He began in a hurry, his voice faint and husky, and to his own ears abject. “Nan—wait—I did not mean—perhaps you are not as much to blame as I.”
Instead of answering, she tugged open the door. She could not have understood him, for she seemed in more haste to go than before. He had approached her tentatively, humbly, but now as with averted face she was passing through the door, he caught at her to make her stay. She ducked her head and bit his wrist. At his cry of astonished rage and pain, she looked up with pleasure, and in a flash disappeared.
She was not a woman, she was a savage, a beast. It was as degrading to a man of his culture to love her as if she had been a black Indian, captured from the wilds. He had driven her from him and his heart for ever.
She went out into the yard and sat on some logs there, regardless of the cold, and examined the particles of frost which covered them. Each one stood upright in the shape of a minute fan. When Queen Mab held her court, her smallest elves would flutter these tiny crystal fans.
The pigeons pecked round her feet as tame as ever, though they were fast being killed off for winter pies.
Two stable-boys came into the yard and she called to them, asking news of a wrestling match to be held in the village. They answered her in slow burring voices as thick as honeymead. The voices she had heard through the window of the drawing-room at Stoking had been quick and light.
The sun rolled down over the misty edge of the marsh like a dull red ball. The stable-boys stumped away, blowing on their fingers. Through the dusk came a deep husky call and the sound of other footsteps joining them, going with them down the drive as far as the gates.
Mr. Hambridge and Bess never quarrelled. She did not think they ever spoke. She wondered if they were not the happiest people she knew. If so, she did not wish to be happy. But what then did she wish?
She sat there half frozen, watching the approach of the winter’s night. At last she thought she would go into the
kitchen; it would be warm there, full of bustle, of people coming and going on the red-tiled floor, of firelight and savoury smells and kindly, homely voices, and she would sit so close to the fire that she would begin to nod and fall asleep as a dog does.
But Nurse would be scolding the maids and probably her too as soon as she appeared, for Nurse grumbled the longer and louder as the winter advanced; nothing was right, nobody did any work but herself, and then they accused her of interfering; she locked up the stores as somebody must do and then they accused her of accusing them of stealing; and it all came of having no proper mistress to take charge, as she told Nan now every time she saw her. For Nurse knew by now that she was quite safe in doing so, that her offers or rather threats of abdication would not be accepted, and that she could have the glory of power combined with that of martyrdom.
She needed compensation, for her rheumatism grew worse among the marshes, and she had given up her life-long friends to come with Nan. She and Lady Ingleby had grown to suit each other very well, whereas each day increased her dissatisfaction with Nan. She had adored her as a child, and still really thought of her as one. But she felt it her duty to remember that Nan should now be considered as a young married woman, and as such she did her no credit.
Nan went into the house but did not go to the kitchen. She went upstairs to the gallery where it was all dark, and felt her way from window to window of lighter darkness, until she came to Mr. Cork’s room. She opened the door and stood there a moment, dazzled by the sudden light of the candles. She went silently to his chair, dropped down by his knee and hid her face in his hand.
He could not remember his disappointment in her, but only that he had made her unhappy, that she was indeed not like a woman but a defenceless creature that he, and not he alone, was bound to hurt. An agony of protective passion again beset him. He cursed himself to her for being what he was. “I should never have been born,” he said, but what was the use of that? He told her she should find another gallant, he was too old for her, too glum, severe, and carping. He had often said this before, not wildly as he spoke now, but with a show of reason and altruism. Now that his words broke from him in passionate sincerity, they sounded in his ears like the pronouncement of his own doom.
He had sought to cultivate indifference and thus safeguard himself against the disaster that it made inevitable. His fellow-workers had complained of this same tendency to forestall trouble and therefore cause it. In love, as in ambition, he could not escape himself. For so long he had wished the world were different, now he only wished that he could change.
“I wish I were different too,” she said. In a quick, coiling movement she slid up into his arms; they clutched her to him with the eagerness of a starved man. For a little time they did not wish that anything in the world were different.
When at last the spring began to show itself, he saw that she preferred to roam the fields, seeking for primroses, to talk with stable-boys, to play with the ragged children in the village, rather than learn from him. She came running to him as he walked, but that was only for a few minutes’ heedless chatter, to show him what she had gathered, to ask him to come and see the new lambs in the hill-field or a nest she had discovered.
The spring brought fresh life to her, but it was a life that ebbed away from him. She no longer wept when he told her she should have loved a younger man; she more often lost patience and said very well then, she would not love him if he did not wish it. She flung away, rebellious, her hair tossing in the wind like the mane of a fiery young colt. And yet in less than a minute she was singing with happiness, she had so soon forgotten her anger with him. That hurt him most of all. He stooped and began to pick up the primrose buds that she had dropped as she threw out her hands in that gesture of revolt. They were small and nipped though March was just over.
The spring had come late and cold this year; he told himself it had come like the frost-bitten blooming of his belated hopes. He let the buds fall through his fingers to the hard earth again.
Politics and love had failed him, but there remained truth. He would embody what he had learnt from the bitterness of his experience in a satire called The Mirror of Mankind, showing that men could only believe what they wished, and could never see themselves except when reflected in the flattering mirror of their hopes and vanity. Cheered by this thought, he resumed the pacings that had been interrupted by an idle intrusion, and meditated on the ragged lawn so many sarcasms on the folly of love, the fickleness of woman and the weakness of man, that surely this time his labours would bring recognition of his parts, in wealth, in appreciation from even such as Nan.
In the woods was a stream between deep banks. At one place the earth had fallen away beneath the massive trunk of a tree, exposing its great roots. Nan sat on one of them, swinging her feet, then she crept underneath, where there was still room to sit upright, and more if she lay down. She looked up at the roots and thought they were like the beams of a house. The trees were all still quite bare, so she had thought, but at that moment the sun came out and a thousand little points of green suddenly gleamed before her. They had all come in the last few days, and the primroses in this sheltered spot had opened into full moon faces.
A fish sprang out of the water into the sunlight. The brown stream gurgling over its stones, the brown earth and brown bare trees, were all spangled with jewels. She clapped her hands together, she thought how she would bring Mr. Cork here to see what she had just seen. But then she thought she would not bring him, she would show this place to nobody, and later on she would make a house here which nobody would ever know of but herself.
The tree she sat under was a chestnut, its buds would soon grow fat and sticky and then burst into green fans, growing broader and broader. She would pick branches of them, and great fronds of fern and bracken, and lay them crossways over the roots to make a roof, and she would make a fire, and tickle trout and roast it, and pick some of the cresses that grew upstream, and stay here all night when it was hot, and see the moon come up over the trees, and perhaps have a gipsy for a lover since Mr. Cork no longer cared for her, and the gipsy woman on the road had told her she should have three husbands but only one ring.
She had picked some lobed grasses to chew as she came through the fields, and began to pull off the lobes so as to tell her fortune concerning this new gallant that Mr. Cork was always telling her to find. The first grass told her she should meet her true love this year, the second that he was a beggar, the third that he lived in a palace, the fourth that he dressed in satin, the fifth that he would love her for ever.
With the sun hot on her head and the primroses at her feet, she began to laugh and laugh as though she were going mad with joy, as the poor people do in Muscovy when the spring comes suddenly after the long winter. So Mr. Cork had said. He would never go mad with joy. Let him be unhappy then since that was what he wished. But it disturbed her to have thought of him. Whatever she planned or played at, he was there in the background, waiting for her to come back to him. She thought, “What if I never go back, but stay in my secret house from now on?”
And in a sense she did, for from that day she knew she had that place all her own to escape to, and whatever happened to trouble her, the thought of it gave her security.
So suddenly did the sunshine and mild rains come when once they began, so quickly did her hiding-place change from brown to green, and show itself on each visit more set about with flowers, first gold-mines of celandines and then anemones as bright as stars, and then deep-hued violets and then bluebells, that one noonday as she sat there and looked out on the stream in the first swift rush of early summer, it was as though it were on the same occasion as when she first found it, and that all that she had done was to wish; so that with one accord, not waiting for the due course of nature, a roof of leafy branches and bracken, warm and crumpling, was spread above her head, and a shimmer of teeming life now hummed and danced in the heat.
A host of mayflies skimmed the pool. Bubble
s floated up to its surface from some unknown life sunk in the mud, and each as it sped down the sunlit stream bore ahead of it a bigger, brighter globe of reflected light. Everything reflected made a globe, even the long legs of the water-spiders, thin as hairs.
The chestnut blossoms fallen from the tree above her swam fast along, sporting their minute pink and white sails, each with a shining world at its feet. As on the water, they brought their reflected worlds into her mind, an image of the page she had seen in the autumn, all frilled and beribboned in white and dull pinky-red, of the cups he had carried, like painted egg-shells. They brought a suggestion of fashion and rarity, of fragility and savagery, of monstrous birds and dragons depicted on porcelain, of the shockingly amusing new play Moll had written of, that had made china unmentionable especially by a Country Wife.
She had seen nothing, been nowhere, met nobody, but ignorance and folly do not shut the spirit. She possessed the world in miniature as she sat in her house of roots and branches, looking out upon the stream.
A cloud built like a castle came up over the brilliant sky; it had white turrets and a long black banner flying out before it on a wind that had not yet reached her. In a few minutes, the mayflies and the white butterflies dancing over the burnished gold of the broom flowers would be destroyed in a thunder shower.
As on the cold spring day when she had dreamed all this, a fish leaped into the sunlight. There came another splash, a glimpse of unearthly blue, and a kingfisher darted over the pool and away down-stream.
Delight, dazzling and transient, seized her. She saw that life was gorgeous, cruel, and swift, lasting but a second, she saw that men are as helpless as mayflies. She knew nothing of what she saw, only that she was glad because Mr. Cork was going away tomorrow for a long time, that she was tired of him and he of her, but there was no need for them all to be gloomy for ever, especially now the summer had come. He had often told her that the union of the flesh was of small account compared with that of the soul, why then should they repine because theirs had ceased?
None So Pretty Page 15
