The Country Gentleman

by Hill, Fiona

  “And would you have me tell Mr. Mallinger my own family will not receive me, but insist my place is with my husband?” Maria broke in. “That they are so unnatural as to turn away their flesh and blood? Put yourself in my place, Anne, and say whether you would tell a gentleman whose esteem you valued such horrors? But perhaps you cannot imagine it. Nothing but honour attaches to your history—no straitened means, no sordid connexion—” Again Maria could not finish; indeed, she already regretted having expressed resentment to Anne. Remorsefully, “I am sorry,” she said, imagining she saw surprise and hurt in her friend’s eyes. “Pray forgive me. It is not true. You are the most sympathetic and generous of friends. If you had not taken me in after I ran away from John, I do not know how I should have gone on. I suppose I must have returned to Canada—”

  “Please, no more!” Anne had never quite realized before what it meant to the other to live dependent of her, what humiliation it must necessarily entail, what daily trials, what small, painful inequities. Naturally Maria must compare their lots, and feel the injustice of her own the more keenly. Anne’s heart ached for her friend. She could not bear to hear another word of gratitude, and put a hand up to silence her. “I told you then and I tell you now: It is you who did me a kindness. Miss Gully’s retirement could not have been delayed another twelvemonth. After that I should have been obliged— Indeed, I do not know what I should have done. Gone back to Overton”—she shuddered—“or hired a companion. Anyhow, I like to have you with me. If Miss Gully had been twenty, I should still have wished you to stay. What would my life be without you?” She moved to put her arm round Maria’s shoulders again and laughed to cheer her up. “A sad charade, a lonely comedy. Especially”—she looked round the sparsely furnished room (now brightened a little by some few of her belongings)—“here!”

  Maria seemed comforted, if not persuaded, by this reasoning. She smiled and was quiet a while, then sat up. “But help me think what I can do for Mr. Mallinger,” she entreated. “I feel so guilty for having encouraged him; and I fear—well, without being vain, I do fear he will not give me up so easily as that.”

  Anne thought for a moment, then said slowly, “If he does not forget you, and will not forget you, I think we must take you out of his way for a while; for we cannot expect Mr. Mallinger to give up his post.”

  Maria objected immediately, “But you cannot stay here without me; and you must not take any of your precious time away when London is de—”

  “What a drama! Before we trouble ourselves about such eventualities, let us see whether they arise. In all earnestness, Mr. Mallinger seems a very sensible man to me. He will make an effort to govern his feelings and in time he will succeed. Oh, for a week or two no doubt he will pine and mope. After all, he has been obliged to give up my Miss Dove…But he is no tragic hero. I am sure a month will see him right as a trivet again. Now you must have some sleep, poor thing.” Fondly, she brushed a hand along Mrs. Insel’s thin cheek, then helped her to rise and escorted her, arm round her waist, to the door. “Good night.”

  Maria smiled, thanked her for her good sense, and turned to leave.

  “Oh, one moment,” Anne called out brightly, as Maria was almost gone. “I nearly forgot to tell you. I had a little letter from Ensley to-day. Nothing of note, only he will be unable to come…”

  Eight

  Whether Miss Guilfoyle herself believed the comforting prognostications she made to Maria regarding Mr. Mallinger’s return to spirits was not clear. What became all too clear, as the weeks wore on, was that she had been wrong. Adjured to stay away, the schoolmaster did. But as Mrs. Insel had foreseen, nothing short of complete sequestration—his or hers—could have prevented their running into one another. Not two days after the dreadful evening when Maria had banished him from her sight, Mr. Mallinger was spied by the ladies from their carriage, walking away from Faulding Chase as they drove towards it. Another two days and they saw him in church. Sickened at heart by his wretched look, his extreme pallor and haggardness, Maria resolved after this to keep indoors all week, and immured herself in Linfield. But the following Saturday, unable to bear it any longer, she wrapped herself in a cloak and crept into the park for a walk—and walked directly into Mr. Mallinger. On this occasion, as on the others, they nodded and made a show of civility. Maria could see her admirer did all his possible to conceal his misery—only it went too deep for a bow and a determined display of manners to cover it up. What she could not know was how perfectly her own wan face mirrored the unhappiness in his. But Mr. Mallinger saw it, and was less inclined than ever to forget her.

  Meanwhile, Anne continued to counsel her to let time do its work. She herself was busy, for (at Mr. Highet’s suggestion) she had decided to make certain improvements on some of her tenant farms before winter set in; but she saw as well as the schoolmaster how Maria suffered. If it did not pass off within another fortnight she must persuade her to go away…though where precisely to send her was another question, not to mention how Anne could find a suitable companion to keep her household respectable. That Captain Insel! It made Anne simply furious to think of him abusing Maria, then going on his merry, brawling, drinking way after she fled. He had never—well, perhaps one ought merely to be grateful for this, but it was unnatural—he had never made a single attempt to communicate with his wife in England. Anne had once asked Ensley if he couldn’t at least be discharged from the Army for his conduct—he ought to be punished some how. But Ensley said the Army did not interfere in such private matters; and in any case, was it not better for Mrs. Insel that her husband remain in Canada?

  She supposed it was; yet the injustice of it rankled her. For Maria, besides having endured the pain and mortification he had dealt her, was prevented by his continued pernicious existence from having a proper life of her own. Anne could not be sure how deep her affection for Mr. Mallinger ran, but surely Maria must long to establish herself properly with some one. At Linfield, no matter what either lady said, she depended for her bread entirely on Anne’s whim, or charity, or liking. No wonder she had spoke so bitterly the other night. And this was the best she could do, since those selfish, cold, sanctimonious—But Anne would not allow herself to think of the Pilkintons: It only fanned the flames of her indignation.

  It occurred to her more than once that she would have liked to share these reflections with Henry Highet. He had observed Mr. Mallinger’s dejection and mentioned it to the assembled company one Saturday at dinner. Maria had gone white, while Mrs. Highet launched into a loud, and lengthy, disquisition on inflammations of the stomach, and their tendency to weaken the blood. Anne longed to take Mr. Highet aside and pour the whole story into his ear, that he might agree in his solemn, ponderous way how really unjust it was. Naturally, however, she did no such thing. In all the world only herself and Ensley knew, besides the Insels and the Pilkintons.

  For her part, Maria also suffered for lack of a confidant. She realized that, ironically, she might well have turned to Mr. Mallinger himself for support, had the matter been a different one. Of course she had Anne; but she did not like to vex her with repeated lamentations. And she had a special reason for keeping silent with her friend too, which she would not confess to her: The example of Lord Ensley (whose constant presence near Anne had, Maria believed, prevented that lady from forming an eligible and satisfying connexion of her own) weighed heavily on her, making her feel it all the more imperative that she remove herself from Mr. Mallinger, since he could not remove from her. With an aching heart, and after much inward debate, Mrs. Insel formed a plan and resolved to carry it out if Mr. Mallinger did not look much improved by the middle of October. And since, on Sunday the thirteenth, she perceived him in church to be pale and exhausted, with hollow cheeks and a dull look in his sunken eyes, the next day she took advantage of Anne’s absorption in the affairs of her tenants and drove into Faulding Chase herself.

  Here, in the coffee-room of the Red Lion, she bespoke pen and ink and wrote (albeit slowly, and blo
tting more than one tear from the paper under her hand) an advertisement offering herself as hired companion to any suitable reader of the Times. At the same time, she wrote a second notice advertising that a young lady of good family in Cheshire was in need of a companion. Interested correspondents were requested to reply to Mrs. John, in care of the Red Lion, Faulding Chase.

  Then she drove home.

  The wedding of George, Lord Ensley, to Lady Juliana Canesford was, as any reader of the London papers must know, fixed for three P.M. on 28 October, at St. George’s Church, Hanover Square. It was a date, oddly, which kept going in and out of the usually orderly mind of Anne Guilfoyle. In fact, all the latter part of October seemed to squirm and wriggle from her mental grasp, so that she was constantly asking herself whether this was Wednesday or Thursday, the sixteenth or the seventeenth, and consulting calendars. When she was busy—and she busied herself a good deal more with estate matters than Mr. Rand, for one, could like—she kept in tolerable spirits. But on her rides into the park, for example, the falling leaves, the air ever more crisp and cold, the ground harder under the horse’s hooves, the earlier dark seemed to her infinitely sad, almost frightening, in their promise of winter. In the evenings, sitting alone in a pool of lamplight, she often caught herself reading the same paragraph twice or thrice without comprehending it at all; instead her mind had wandered off into a nest of small anxieties about the home farm, the tenants, the household; and when she had worried at these ideas some while, she had perforce to admit a deeper one underlay them. With his creator’s mind in such a turmoil, Lord Quaffbottle found his debts conveniently paid by an unexpected windfall, and went back to London and obscurity.

  Invaded by such an accumulating gloom, it might be supposed Miss Guilfoyle became quieter, soberer, in company; but this was not her way. On the contrary, her tendency to joke grew more pronounced than ever. She talked to herself non-stop, and quite shocked Miss Veal by singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” under her breath all the while they studied the household books. Mrs. Samuels was astonished to be asked by her whether Mr. Samuels “gave it a rest” or sermonized right through the night. She told Mrs. Highet (who never left off hinting that the ladies of Linfield must surely long for London) that she had given her house there to an organ-grinder and his monkey, the latter being a particular friend of her Uncle Frederick’s. And she informed Lady Crombie that she did quite right to let her offspring run all over the house screaming however they liked—that in fact she had recently read a monograph by a German scholar, Herr Doktor Hanswurst von Hanswurst, maintaining that any restraint whatever, even smocks and aprons, could permanently injure a child’s spirit, and make him melancholy for life. Ensley’s letters meanwhile continued to arrive with perfect regularity, and professed an attachment to her equally perfect. Once or twice he mentioned, without irony, that his improved acquaintance with Lady Juliana had only served to encourage his early conviction that she was a sensible girl and a tactful one. Anne rightly supposed him to imply by this that she and he had every reason to be cheerful concerning their future undisturbed relations. Somehow, though, she was not quite cheerful.

  On the twenty-seventh she found she did not care to go to church, nor in fact to go any where at all; she passed the entire day in the drawing-room, scowling at a succession of unlucky books. On the twenty-eighth itself she woke to discover she could not get out of bed. After much persuasion, Maria (who had refused on the previous day to venture out alone) consented to visit a few of the tenant farms in her stead. Meanwhile, Anne lay still with a head that throbbed like a threshing floor under a thousand flails. She told herself it would all be over by evening, that it was the anticipation that was the worst, that as soon as she received an affectionate letter from Ensley dated 29 October she would be herself again. Meantime it was all she could do to drink a cup of tea and fall back among the pillows. Lizzie brought her calomel and she took it obediently, but her head continued to pound. At one o’clock Maria came home with a conscientious report on the fence-mending going forward at Farmer Haydon’s. She offered to bathe Anne’s forehead in rosewater; but Anne declined. Mrs. Insel being somewhat afflicted herself (in her case by having caught sight of Mr. Mallinger in the road, looking more wan and woebegone than ever) did not insist.

  At three-thirty in the afternoon Lizzie came in, rather timidly, and told Miss Guilfoyle Mr. Henry Highet was downstairs and begging her most particularly to receive him privately. He knew she was indisposed—Lizzie had told him so herself, forcefully—but the matter on which he wished to address her was of such a distinctive nature, and weighed on him so profoundly, that he would consider it a great kindness if she would come down.

  Miss Guilfoyle sat up in bed and gently held her hands to her temples, which felt as if they might fly away in opposite directions. She had been going mentally through the words of the marriage ceremony, which she recalled only too clearly from weddings she had attended. “I George take thee Juliana to my wedded Wife, to have and to hold…” recited Ensley’s low, sonorous voice; and it was answered by Lady Juliana’s thick, husky tones: “I Juliana take thee George…”

  “You did tell him I was ill?” Anne asked Lizzie, tenderly massaging her brow.

  “Twice, ma’am. I’ll tell him again if you like.”

  “No. Give me my desk.”

  While Lizzie did so, Anne composed her note. She did not make much of Mr. Highet’s asking to see her privately, for once or twice before some confidential business about a tenant of hers—whose son had been caught poaching at Fevermere, for example, or whose daughter was unmarried and with child—had brought Mr. Highet to Linfield requesting a meeting alone with Anne. Consequently she merely wrote, “Is it any thing that can wait? I have a sick head-ache, but will come down if you say it is urgent.” She felt a little improved once Lizzie had departed with the message and almost hoped Mr. Highet would insist. Any thing was better—even poachers—than lying in bed hearing those ghostly vows!

  Very shortly Lizzie returned, with the following written on the back of the note Anne had sent down: “Yes, the matter can wait, only I had hoped to put it before you today. It will require some thought on your part. If you are really ill, I shall try to ride over Wednesday. To-morrow I go to Chester, to market.”

  Paradoxically—such were the mild perversities of her nature—this answer piqued Anne’s curiosity far more than would have any claim of real urgency, and resolved her to go down after all. Cursing the man for having “the timing of a stopped clock,” she nevertheless dispatched Lizzie to tell him to wait, then crawled out of bed and splashed herself thoroughly with cold water. Lizzie returned to dress her, and (gamely rising to the challenge) to arrange her yellow curls into a semblance of order, and some half an hour later Miss Guilfoyle descended to her caller.

  She found him standing in the drawing-room, in a blue coat and pantaloons—which rather surprised her, for normally he rode over, and she saw him only in boots and buckskin breeches, sometimes even in the smock-frock he wore to go out into the fields. She gave him her hand (which he shook without causing her undue perturbation) and begged him to sit down, asking, “Well? What did our good rector give us yesterday—Sacrifice again? Faith? Charity? Not Hope, I hope! I hope I did not miss Hope.”

  Mr. Highet received this mild pleasantry with the friendly but unsmiling gravity she had come to expect when she tried to make him laugh and answered, seating himself on the other end of a chintz-covered settee, “Tolerance, Miss Guilfoyle.”

  “Did he? I never heard Mr. Samuels speak of Tolerance before. I daresay you are making it up, and it was not that at all. You only say it because you believe intolerance my besetting sin. Confess it. Is it not so?”

  “If it is your sin, it is for you to confess,” Mr. Highet returned. Anne thought the reply rather witty (for Mr. Highet, at least) but was not certain he had intended it to be so, and therefore only smiled. “I hope you will forgive my importunity this afternoon,” he went on presently. “I see y
ou are not at your best.”

  Since Anne’s complexion was grey, her small mouth crumpled, and her eyes heavily ringed, she did not bother to demur, but only waited for him to go on. She had been unable so far to guess from his countenance what sort of matter had brought him to her to-day. He did not look particularly solemn or troubled.

  “Miss Guilfoyle, what I am about to suggest,” he resumed after a moment, speaking with a slowness and deliberation unusual even in him, and gazing mostly (it appeared) across the room at a watercolour of a horse clearing a hedge, with only a glance now and then at her, “will surprise you, I think, a good deal. I ask you, therefore, to give no answer at all to-day, but only to hear me out and then to think about it as long as you wish. It is a suggestion, believe me, which I make after long thought. I cannot say how you will like it; you may even dislike it very much, in which case I can only implore you to remember that it is made in the light of the sincere admiration and respect—particularly for your perseverance in learning to manage Linfield—which I have come to feel towards you.”

  “Good God,” Miss Guilfoyle exclaimed rather weakly. Her head had begun to throb again, and she felt giddy. “You terrify me. Pray go on.”

  Mr. Highet briefly cast his sleepy, careful glance at her, then resumed his study of the jumping horse. The days had long been cold enough to require good fires in every room, and the firelight here now spread a leaping, variable glow on the gentleman’s rosy cheeks and wide forehead which began quite to fascinate his auditor. As he did not look at her, she could look at him. To her dizzy, dreamy consciousness, he seemed remarkably handsome.

  “Well then. You know, of course, that the lands of Fevermere and Linfield march on each other along a considerable portion of their perimeters.”