She glanced at him, she was making up her mind to speak. The fear in her eyes made him feel sick with apprehension. “What can she say,” he thought, “that I cannot prove myself man enough to bear? It is doubt that has made me craven.”
And he considered what he should hear, that she had been faithless to him, that she had taken another lover in the summer while he was away, and all the time his longing hurried other words in addition—“He has gone back to the town. He has forgotten me among his other loves. I cannot forget him yet—but if you will wait—”
Nan said none of these things. She spoke so low and fast he could hardly catch the few words she threw at him. “I am with child,” she said.
Then she saw the face of his monster grinning from his face. She thought that she had driven him mad, that he would kill her. She fell back from him against the fruit-trees on the wall; she covered her face with her hands and cried, “It is your child.”
He said to himself, “She is lying.” It would have been better if he had continued to know it. But his monster said, “Why destroy your one chance of happiness? Snatch at it, hold it fast.”
So he forced himself to believe her, for he too was frightened at what he might become if deprived of this last secret resource for his proud and empty heart. He found himself putting answers into her mouth as he questioned her. That last night before he went away, it was then that she had conceived, for they had not met as lovers for long before then. Why had she not told him before? She did not know, she had been afraid, she had thought he was angry with her. And so she had turned against him, he believed this might be a natural condition of her state. He thrust his mind into a road it did not easily follow, he argued with himself that if she had been pregnant she could not so lightly have taken a casual lover. She had not then been faithless except perhaps in her wandering fancy, he had tortured himself for nothing, it was his old failing, he could never believe that any good would come to him and so when it came he turned it to bad.
But nothing round him confirmed these reasonable hopes in his heart; it felt dull and leaden as he tried to reassure and comfort her, who greeted all his attempts at kindness with wild sobbing. It seemed they were bound together only to make each other unhappy.
Nan had told Mr. Cork because she might not be able to keep the secret much longer. Nurse had known for some time, Keziah had guessed.
Nurse had advised Nan to tell Mr. Cork the child was his, for there was no knowing what that one might do in a rage. She gave herself the more difficult task of trying to persuade Mr. Hambridge that it was his. She had an anxious moment of it, for he shut one eye very firmly when she spun him a yarn about his coming to his wife’s bed one night when he was drunk. But after mature thought he opened it again, pressed a crown-piece into her hand and told her to tell that tale where she liked, and no other. This he thought was not a bad way of dispelling the prevalent doubts as to his virility.
“And a husband like yours,” said Nurse, “is one that any young woman should thank all the saints for when she is in such a fix as you.” All this talk about love here and love there, and what did it all amount to? Young women should know their own minds to start with and there was an end to it, for they could not both eat their cake and have it.
“No, but you can have another, and that is still better,” said Nan. The world had changed but Nurse could not understand that; she was still creaking out her old saws—“it’s best to be off with the old love before you are on with the new.” Old loves did not matter in this new age, nor cakes once they were eaten. Everybody nowadays grabbed at what they wanted and dropped what they no longer wanted. Caution, forethought, and faithfulness were all very well for the old fogies, but loyalty had gone out of date as soon as people had discovered how little they got for it. Ned had said so and Ned knew the world.
“Nobody in the town remembers an obligation or a former love affair,” she quoted proudly, “and that is where I shall soon be.”
“Yes, and when your fine lover forgets you too, where will you be then, Miss?”
“Ned will remember me all his life.”
“Then it’s more than you deserve with all your chopping and changing.”
“Like old King Hal. He loved to chop and change, didn’t he?
Sing pretty Boleyn, poor pretty Boleyn,
Off with her head and the next comes in.
Dear Nurse, don’t look so solemn. You will be with me in London when I bear my child and you will finish my new dress that is still on the loom so that I can wear it at the christening. And my son shall be a courtier or else a traveller and discover countries no one has ever dreamed of, or perhaps he might even be King, for they say there might be another revolution after this reign and then you know anything may happen any minute. So it’s one foot up and one foot down, and he shall be born in London town.”
She sang with happiness, she danced, she kissed Nurse, she showed her the bit in Ned’s last letter, though Nurse could not read one word, where he told her that he had found the very place for her and Nurse to lodge, and would come again to Stoking with a hired carriage to take them both to London, for he must be with her when their child was born.
His dislike and dread of Cricketts had communicated itself to Nan. She too felt that her child must be born anywhere but there, that in London and with Ned they would be safe. It was a happy omen too that their child should be born in flight and exile from her home, even as Ned had been born on his parents’ flight into France.
He had gone back to London as soon as it was permitted. He had written as often as he could send the letters. The pedlar or packman now had a secret mission for Nan as well as sometimes for the chaplain. Had it not been for Mr. Cork, she could not have read them, and despite her sympathy with this modern and forgetful age and its contempt for gratitude, this sometimes, for a few moments, could spoil her pleasure in them.
The shame of his own birth and botched upbringing had given parenthood a romantic value in the chaplain’s eyes. He longed to protect his unacknowledged child, to help it in careful, unrequited ways, to find in its welfare some purpose less meagre than the schemings of his self-interest, the jealous agonies of a love compounded of lust and fear and tortured vanity. For his tenderness for Nan had long since departed. Sometimes, with that clear sight that left him little peace, he saw that all his desire of late had been to hurt her as she had hurt him. It was a relief to think of an affection that should be pure from all such alloy, the love of a parent for his child.
Yet he knew that doubt would twist that relation also.
His solitary pacings in the long corridor or in the garden now led him farther and faster afield. Through that late autumn he would stride across country as though he would tear it; the brown earth and the birds in the sky could bring no peace to the gaunt black figure aimlessly hurrying over the fields.
Rambling through the wood one December afternoon, he followed the stream for some way, scrambling through the bushes in pursuit of he did not know what. He stumbled on to the roots of a great tree that had caused a natural hollow in the decaying ground. It had been roofed over by gipsies or some village boys, as he thought, with branches interwoven with bracken. There were holes in the roof, one side but had fallen in; the autumn rains had made the green bower bedraggled, brown and sodden.
He peered in and saw black mud and a clump of livid toadstools, but stuck in each corner were bunches of shrivelled scarlet berries.
Something in this magpie decoration of the decayed, secret house told him it was Nan’s work. Some further fancy made his hands tremble, his face grim.
He fell on his knees, he searched the ground for some knot of ribbon, some trinket that might further betray her presence. He could find none, but against a root of the tree there was a flat stone which looked oddly to him. It seemed to have been placed there. He tugged at it and it came up easily enough with a squelching sound as of a hollow beneath. The mud oozed from under it, he groped in it with his fingers, felt
something hard, found its edges, and pulled up a box which at first he took for the box of tea he had given Nan. But on wiping away the mud he saw it to be a tin box such as was used in the kitchens. He tore it open and stood staring at some mildewed letters, a lock of fair hair, tied with a ribbon, and a round, discoloured, wizened object which had once been a gilded orange.
He sat on a root of the tree and read the letters through in the fading light. Then he put them back in the box, and carrying it under his arm he returned to the Manor as though devils pursued him. For the first time in his plotting life, he flung away all caution. He went straight into Nan’s room. Nurse rushed to the door declaring that her mistress was ill and he must not enter. He seized her wrist and thrust her out, calling her bawd.
He turned on Nan who had risen from the curtained bed. The tallow candles were guttering in the draught and their yellow light played up and down on her pale, upturned face.
That very evening she and Nurse were to meet Ned’s carriage on the road from Stoking. Since it had been decided, the suspense had made her feel very ill, but her hopes animated her with courage for the journey. The winter’s wind that sobbed in the trees, her husband’s drunken snores in the hall below, her sickness and fears, were all part of some nightmare, from which she would presently awake to find herself living, as if for the first time, in a world where happy lovers were treated with tolerance.
Now she was confronted with her former lover’s set and staring face.
She knew at that instant that it was her hope that was the idle dream, and this dark room the reality.
Yet still she fought her knowledge, and faced him with a despair that made her wild.
“What can you do to me?” she cried in answer to the accusations that fell on her, incoherent and horrible, an ugly heap of words.
She had never loved him, she did not fear him, she would escape in spite of him. So she told him in answer, and knew it to be false, that she might have escaped had she not of her own doing bound this man to her to be her jailer.
Even as she defied him, she clutched the bedpost, feeling herself grow helpless from the child within her. For this she was born, for this she had lain in Ned’s arms, that she should bring her doom upon her. Terror and exultation filled her, for she was in possession of forces stronger than herself. She lifted her bowed head and looked at him, not seeing him. The knowledge of her fate had raised her to grandeur: she who had been none so pretty, was, as he now saw, beautiful, for the first and last time in her brief, squandered life.
“This,” he thought, “is the woman I love and have driven away.”
The revelation made him frantic. He wept, he cried that he had been to blame, that no woman could love him, and in the same instant he implored her to love him, to lie to him, to pretend to love him if only for a moment. He crawled at her feet and tried to kiss them. She looked at him, sick with horror. Once in the gallery he had offered to play with her as her father had done, and she had dreaded lest he should lose his dignity and be ridiculous. Her father could do anything, but not he. And now he had made himself a loathsome thing she could not bear to look on.
He saw her shudder and turn away. He got up slowly, staring at her. His face had grown quiet in hatred. He held out her secret box to her and began to open it.
At that, her sudden tormented beauty, her very life seemed to drop from her; she fell against the bed, a grey heap.
Wherever he went, there was confusion, panic. The uproar had spread all through the house, maids were running hither and thither, Keziah was sobbing in hysterics at the foot of the stairs. Two of the grooms had run out to seek the village midwife; a third, yet more enterprising, had saddled a horse, and, carrying a storm-lantern, was galloping as fast as he could through the mud to fetch the nearest doctor. Everywhere they were saying that Mrs. Anne was in great danger for she had been brought to bed three months before her time.
Mr. Cork hurried through the corridors, up and down the stairs, on no errand, not knowing where he was going, what he was doing, seeing only the face of an unknown young man who waited somewhere in the wet darkness, and waited in vain.
“Long, long may her lover wait,” he said to himself over and over, humming the words in his head, as though they were the refrain of a song.
The child was born dead. All through the night, Nan cried deliriously that she must ride away to meet Ned, that she was going with him to London.
One foot up and one foot down,
That’s the way to London town,
she sang in a high, thin voice, and then she babbled that the world was round like an orange, and her love would give it her.
Towards morning she was quieter, and Nurse saw that her eyes were half open, gazing into the shadows at the foot of the bed. She spoke to her, but Nan did not hear nor see her. Yet she was not unconscious, she saw the candlelight flicker on the bed curtains, she saw the pattern of a stag and of round tawny fruits that hung from leafy branches.
She thought there was someone waiting for her there by the foot of the bed. Then she saw that one of the fruits was leaning out from the curtains towards her and that it was a gilded orange. She tried to stretch out her hands to it, and Nurse heard her whisper, “Give it me.” She took Nan in her arms and sobbed, “My lamb, my pretty, my heart’s love, what can I give you?”
But she knew that Nan could not hear her, that her thoughts were not with her, but with one or other of the men who had brought her death.
The shadow that lurked in the curtain at the foot of the bed stepped forward and its hand passed over Nan’s face. It was not life that had been waiting for her all this time but death.
“Not life!” she cried in a voice so pierced with anguish that all who heard it shuddered. She fell back, she was dead.
“Not for this world,” Nurse was saying within the hour. “‘Not life’ were her last words they were. These men they’re all alike, and my poor lamb is dead.” She wished that Nan could have loved her only, as she had loved Nan.
Mr. Cork was called upon by Lady Ingleby to write her daughter’s epitaph. He complied. To recognize his love for the dead woman might well have driven him mad. He had perforce to persuade himself of his hate. It was not difficult. She had deceived and betrayed him, scorned him, withered all that was kind and noble in his nature. He had abased himself abjectly before her, “but that was not myself,” his pride implored. Only such devils as women could make a man so poor a beast.
One virtue he might have discovered in her, that for a little time she had felt admiration for him and even affection. But this was not to be enumerated in the epitaph that was supposedly of her husband’s writing; nor was it a safe subject for his own contemplation. One glimpse of it made him turn his eyes hurriedly away instead to all those virtues she did not possess. He would be generous then and heap them on her name.
He would call her fair, when never except for one hideous moment had she been beautiful; chaste, when in the first year of her wedded life she had possessed two lovers; wise, when no village half-wit could have shown more folly.
He would praise the unfeigned piety that could conceal her messages of love in his sermons, and her contempt of the world in whose frenzied pursuit she had sacrificed her life.
He began to write in feverish haste:
To the Pious Merrits of Mrs. Anne Hambridge
In whose everlasting memory this is inscribed by her
afflicted Husband.
She dyed in Childbed
Ætat suæ 18.
Had Death’s Impartial Hand Beene Aw’d to Spare
The Chaste, the Wise, the Vertuous or ye Faire
Had Unfeign’d Piety, Unbiass’d Truth
Unboasted Charity, Unblemished Youth,
Had all that’s Purely Good the Powre to Save
So Wish’d a Life from an Untimely Grave
Sure she had yet survived: But Ah in Vaine
Alas Wee doe her early fate Complaine
The World’s of Her, not s
he of it Bereaven
She looked on’t, liked it not and went to Heaven.
The last line gave him hysterical pleasure. Now he must include the bastard which she had passed off on two men as their own.
Goe pritty Babe and tell thy Happy Mother
If thou hadst liv’d, thou hadst been such another.
Truth enough in that last line whatever there was in the rest.
Mr. Hambridge came himself for the epitaph, he was in such haste to prove to his mother-in-law that whatever talk there may have been, it was not due to any lack of appreciation on his part for his wife. Mr. Cork offered to read it to him but he shook his head.
“She was an unlucky bitch,” he said, “what need for more words about it?”
It made him uncomfortable to see the chaplain there, scribbling away. These clever fellows were the devil, they would write you down as soon as cut you up. Nan had given good sport in her way, and now she was gone. Like all women she could not stay as she was, she changed things and then she went, and he was sorry, for though he had been glad of Mr. Cork’s company at table before she came, he now felt he could not endure it. Such unaccustomed emotion, though to his conscious mind it amounted only to a strange dislike of Master Sourfaced Squaretoes, such as he seldom felt, made him uneasy and ashamed. He had to swagger, to reassert his manhood.
“And now I can have Bess to live in the house,” he said, “which will save a mort of trouble.”
Mr. Cork smiled at the aptness of his own irony. This was how “Wee doe her early fate Complaine.”
He knew now for ever that women were not for him, and could devote himself the more securely to his cause for that knowledge. He thought of Nan’s unknown lover riding back to London, baulked of his tryst; he was probably even now relieved, would soon be thankful, that fate had rid him of such a foolish embarrassment as to run away with a woman with child.
But in this he stretched his scorn too far, and pity, that insidious tormentor, once again caught him unawares. He would have taken care of her, if only she had loved him alone, as he had loved her.
None So Pretty Page 19
