On her return, she met Mr. Cork striding over the fields in search of her. He spoke wildly as he came up to her.
“I must go tomorrow,” he said. “You cannot have known it. I thought I had told you but I grow absent. I may not be back for some weeks. Surely I told you it was tomorrow I leave for Cambridge.”
“Yes, you told me. What is the matter?”
A blackbird was mocking her. On the topmost branch of a tree he whistled up into the yellow sky a few clear notes like the first notes of the dance tune, “Oh dear what can the matter be?” He could not finish the line but began again and again as though he were trying to remember it, but the tune danced on in her head. She had to play it on her fingers to keep from singing it aloud.
But she had known as she spoke what was the matter. He was going to reproach her for wandering so long away from him on his last day here, and if he did not, if he shut his mouth down like a trap on his reproaches, it would be much worse. Yet they had no more to say to each other today than yesterday or any other day for weeks and weeks.
He would tell her no more stories. She was afraid of all she said to him lest it should hurt or anger. The union of the soul had proved no more lasting than that of the flesh. She was glad that he was going and had known it just now when she was in her secret house. Yet now, seeing him with that ravaged look upon his face, she wished that she was sorry. Before he could speak, she held out her hands to him and cried, “But what can we do? We don’t love each other any more. You have said so.”
“I said it of you, not of myself, and if I did it was because I was driven to it.”
“What drives you?” she asked, bewildered, for his face did indeed give the look of a man who is urged forward by some impulse not his own. And so, though he answered “Myself,” she felt it was not fair, that something had happened to him that he as well as herself could not understand, nor help.
He put his hands on her shoulders. He was asking her in a thick hurried tone, and low, though the fields and marsh were bare as the sky all round them, to come to him once again that evening, for the last time if she wished it. “It may be the last time I shall ever see you,” he said, “I may never come back.”
As he said that, something leaped in her heart like the fish she had just seen in the pool. She said to herself, “Now I know why I was so happy,” for twice a fish had come to tell her she would be. Then she was ashamed and shut her eyes tight, but still the fish leaped like a curved sword in the sunlight, and the kingfisher darted away down the stream.
She heard him say, “Why do you shut your eyes against me?” And then, “You have found my love irksome and repellent. I know that. But forget that now. Nan, it will be different, I promise you it will be different from ever before. Nan, do you hate me now? Do you love anyone else?”
She opened her eyes on a dazzle of evening sunshine and Mr. Cork’s face dark against it. “You know there is no one else to love,” she said.
His laughter went reeling and tearing away over the fields. She threw her arms round him, looking up into his face. “Oh,” she cried, “I will love you, indeed I will love you, if only you will not be so unhappy.”
“Oh dear what can the matter be?” sang the blackbird.
It could not matter, it could make no difference, she had given herself to him before, and now it was only for the last time.
Only once more would she go down the long gallery, in and out of the seven squares of dark light chequered with criss-cross lines where the summer night shone through the small window panes.
So soon was she doing this that it seemed she had but thought of it and then was there, that it was not herself at all that was walking down the long gallery, but only someone in a dream that she had dreamed that afternoon.
Part IV
Ned Tarleton came again to Stoking and not of his own accord. He had learnt that it was unwise to make jokes on politicians to their faces, that it was even unwise to make them on the King, and above all on his mistresses, to the public in a play. For that reason, his absence from Court had been recommended as beneficial for a season, and Lord Stoking had kindly offered his country house as shelter. The French and Italian cooks were not there of course, nor the new hangings nor most of the furniture, but there were two or three old country servants left to look after the place who would see to him and his horse, and there would be no one but village wenches to get him into trouble.
For the first few days Ned enjoyed having the great house to himself. He could wander through the rooms and imagine himself the master of them, plan how he would alter or furnish them and fill them with his friends.
Here had stood the group round the basset table when the Mazarin played high, there they had broken a vase with their battledores and shuttlecock, here he had quarrelled with Mrs. B., but was never quite sure if she had quarrelled with him, and there in that corner had stood the little Lesbia’s cage of white sparrows. For the life of him he could not see her in a blue bandeau as his actual eyes had done; the Mazarin’s commanding tones had carried more conviction, “My Puss, if you had any sense you would wear black ribbons,” and black she wore in his imagination while the black and white spaniels leapt about her feet, and once again the air seemed full of brittle sounds, the twitter of birds, the laughter of a girl, the tinkle of dogs’ bells and sharp metallic tiny barks, the chink of gold coins on the basset table.
Then again it was silent, the room was full only of shadows from the half-shuttered windows; it felt chill in here away from the sunlight and Ned felt melancholy and went out into the gardens to pace up and down the rose walk and think that this was what he would be when he was an old man like Mr. Evelyn who cared for gardens more than companions.
“And I too am old, for I have only memories for company,” and he thought with bitterness of all the merry friends he had left in the town who had at once forgotten him when he was in disgrace. No, that was not all true though he hated to admit it, for bitterness is sweet when it is thorough, and in a few more turns of the rose walk Ned would have been comparing himself not to Mr. Evelyn but to Timon of Athens or possibly King Lear.
But Lord Stoking had given him shelter and good advice, told him to go away and learn not to be so sharp as to cut himself, told him that “you writing devils clap a man into satire faster than the old Oliver men used to clap ’em into jail,” told him to take time and thought away from the wits who talked so much they had little time to write, and see if he couldn’t turn out a play as good as they used to have in his father’s time, for in his opinion, “and you may call me an old-fashioned fool if you will, my boy, but I’ll stick to it,” there had been nothing since to beat old Will Shakespeare. And here was Ned with an advantage Will Shakespeare can never have had, in being sent down to a great empty house in the country all alone to write. Certainly he ought to think of a play that would beat any of his.
The air was cold for lace June but the sky shone blue above, the roses bloomed all round him, he was in Paradise, and as an old friend of Prince Rupert’s had remarked,
Two Paradises ’twere in one,
To be in Paradise alone.
But the satirical fellow was a Puritan and a politician, you could not go by him. And though he felt bored and lonely he could think of nothing tragic. Perhaps when he was as old as Mr. Evelyn, a grave majestic phrase might leap unbidden to his lips such as he had once heard him speak in discussing foreign troubles abroad; “there came an uncertain bruit from Barbadoes of some disorder there.”
But Ned was of the younger generation and must belong to his time, and when he meditated a poem on Nature in his stern determination not to be in the mode, it turned out in some such way as this:
Chloris, the spring in grassy glade
Paints emerald on every bough,
But not her freshest leaf or blade
Shows verdure quite as green as thou.
He doubted if he were truly one of the tragic poets. The Court Cupid favoured the Comic Muse. Who then coul
d write a tragedy of love, and if not of love, what else was there?
Then he remembered that on the last day of his last visit here, riding alone on a suddenly wintry morning, he had all but thought of a tragedy, he had intended to shut himself up in his own room as soon as he returned and write a play that would make a revolution in Court drama. But when he returned, the place was all in a bustle, everyone was going back to the town and he had to join in the preparations; there had been some sort of fuss and trouble with the women, he had forgotten what; then he had found that he had missed the King, and then that he had offended Sir Roger L’Estrange; and these troubles outweighed the importance of any imaginary tragedy so that long before he had reached London it was crushed flat in his mind and he had not thought of it since.
“Till now,” he said aloud and laughed up at the sky so that a startled bird flew from one tree to another, chattering and scolding. Here was an adventure ready to hand. He would ride to Cricketts and discover whose was the lady’s room he had slept in so inadvertently on his last visit.
The groom thought his young master must have been recalled to London, so cheerfully did he stride into the courtyard and bawl his abuse at the lazy lousy lout for keeping him waiting. He made his toilet with care, and finer than was necessary for a country ride.
He rode across a golden marshland and wondered that he had ever thought this landscape grim and forbidding. He rode up a drive of rustling beech-trees so high and green that he seemed to be riding in an avenue at the bottom of the sea. He came to a big square house whose stone front looked warm and mellow in the light of the late afternoon. He had expected it to be grey. All this green and gold had made the scene so different from the one he had left more than six months ago that he had a momentary doubt lest he had come to the wrong place.
He was reassured by the old man who came into the yard as he entered, for he could not fail to recognize that loose-hung jaw, covered with uneven tufts of greyish hair. He asked three times for Mr. Hambridge before he learned that the master was four miles off at a bull-baiting and all the lazy lads of the place with him. He would be back for supper for sure.
“Then I’ll wait,” said Ned, and dismounted.
He went up the steps into the hall but no servants came out towards him. In the darkness of the interior the place now reminded him of his first impressions of it, for it looked uncared for and decayed. He saw a wide staircase that he remembered, and unconsciously felt his finger for a nip in the flesh that had long since healed.
“It was through that door that we fed and drank so long,” he thought, and opened a door into a long low room that smelt of food and stale air. It was nearly dark because both walls and ceiling were panelled with oak and the windows small with leaded panes of greenish bottle-glass.
Because of this and because she was so still, he did not at the first instant see that a female figure was sitting at the end of the room in a high carved chair, looking at him out of the gloom like a white bottled spider out of its dark corner. This repulsive image flew into his mind before he had had time to observe what the female was like, but now he saw that she was big and fat and very white, that her eyes regarded him with a strangely passive expression, for they showed no surprise or interest. Nor did she move her head as much as an eyelid in greeting as he advanced towards her. Her appearance was in every way odd, for her clothes were sluttish and bedraggled and cut in the manner of a country servant’s, and yet they were of very handsome stuff; she was plastered over with brooches, lockets and pendants of a heavy old-fashioned kind, and on each dirty white sausage of a finger there shone a ring, her hands spread on the arms of the chair, displaying them.
He bowed, he begged to present his apologies for taking her by surprise, his regrets that he had not forewarned Mr. Hambridge of his arrival, his request—but here he faltered and lost courage, he did not think that he could now bear to wait for nothing more than the oaf’s return and in the company of this creature. It swept over him with horror, with a shamed repugnance that none of his own misdeeds had ever caused him, that it must have been in this woman’s chamber that he had spent his previous night at Cricketts. He felt he had been contaminated, he longed to fly from the food-ridden air.
Stammering some excuse about his horse, he was turning towards the door when suddenly he remembered holding in his hand a tiny pointed clog, tied with a thong of scarlet leather. A woman that size could never have worn it. But it was possible that she was diseased, that that was why she did not move, because she could not, and that in that case her feet, from never being used, remained the size of a child’s. But if she could not walk, what need of wearing clogs? Her skirts were long and carefully arranged over her feet which were high mounted on a stool. They could give him no answer. He could torture himself with doubt no longer.
He said bluntly, “You are Mr. Hambridge’s spouse?”
The creature gave a sign of life. She simpered. She said presently, “In a manner of speaking.”
He did not wait for more. He went out of the house and bawled through the empty courtyard for the old man to bring his horse, and demanded of him, “Why did you not tell me the lady of the house was alone within? I would not have intruded had I known.”
“The lady, lady of the house?” yammered the old man.
“Yes, you fool.” On a sudden rising note of hope, he added, “Isn’t it Mr. Hambridge’s wife who is sitting in there?”
“That Mrs. Anne?” chuckled the old man. “You took that one for Mrs. Anne?”
“Who is Mrs. Anne?”
“Why, the master’s lady.”
“And who is that?”
“Why, the master’s miss.”
“And she sits there in the best room? Where’s Mrs. Anne?”
“Ah, that’s where no one can say.” The old man now looked imolerably wise. He wagged his chin so that the tufts on it caught on the breeze.
“Why so secret? There’s no secret about Miss in there,” and he nodded and winked while fingering his purse, so as to look as knowing as the old man.
“’Tis because nobody can know for certain, though mind you, young sir,” and he edged nearer to the house, eyeing the purse very cunningly, “there’ll be worse places to look in than the orchards, I’ll be bound.”
He held out his hand with the air of having conferred a great service. Ned was not quite sure if he had received information, but gave him another shilling and again dismounted, saying with great formality so as to cover the absurdity of his change of movements: “Then in that case, since there is a chance of my receiving the entertainment suitable to a gentleman, I will after all await Mr. Hambridge’s return to supper.”
He could not tell if such a jaw were grinning. He stalked away, trying not to walk too fast, in the direction where the oaf had pointed when he mentioned the orchards. He came through the untidy gardens into a meadow and thought he must be at fault until he saw the fruit-trees clustered together in a hollow at the bottom.
The ground sloped sharply towards them and was covered with long grass and moon daisies, their white and gold faces all turned towards him. A cold breeze turned their heads another way, chasing the evening sunlight from the field so that it looked dark and silver; then in another instant there were the daisies staring at him again, the sun was out, his eyes were dazzled with gold. Birds broke into song and were suddenly silent; he thought he heard bells on the wind but could not be sure. A shaggy donkey scampered away from him as frisky as a colt.
He too began to run downhill, then he stopped at sight of a cherry-tree that was shaking more violently than all the others. Fruit and leaves were tumbling from it, first one branch and then another heaved and trembled. He had the fancy that the tree was coming alive, and as he approached it, an elvish golden face peered out at him. The setting sun shone on it, on the bright leaves and the dark glossy cherries, outlining each of them with a gleaming rim.
He stood still. The face had disappeared. The tree was still. He was staring at
a dazzle of golden leaves. He went beneath it and looked up at a girl who was sitting in the crook of a branch. She looked down at him with eyes that made him think of some shy, wild creature. Her bare foot dangled beneath her skirt. It was brown and small. He stared at it; suddenly he stooped and picked up a clog that lay in the grass under the tree, a small pointed clog tied with a thong of scarlet leather.
“I knew it,” he cried.
“That is my clog,” said the girl in the tree.
“You are Mrs. Anne Hambridge.”
“How did you know?”
He did not wish to tell her how he had once before held that clog in his hand. He said, “I was told I should find you here.”
She too had known him from the moment when she had seen through the branches a young man running lightly down the hillside towards her, the fair curls of his periwig dancing on his shoulders, buckles flashing on his shoes, love-knots dangling all down his sleeves, lace tossing at his knees and wrists; curls, love-knots, laces, blown on the wind like the wings of cherubim bearing him towards her. Here was the young gallant Mr. Cork had so often told her to find instead of himself, here was her true love that the fortune grasses had told her she should meet this year, the beggar who dressed in satin and lived in a palace and would love her for ever.
She looked down at him and laughed. He looked up at her, he held out his hands to help her down, the grave look he had worn ever since he saw her broke into a smile and thence into easy laughter. The air was full of it, of the twitter of startled birds, the rustle of leaves, the scrambling, sliding sounds of her descent to a sprawling lower branch where he perched delicately beside her with due attention to his clothes. Not till then did they begin to talk, suddenly, rapidly, confidently, as though they would never stop.
None So Pretty Page 16
