The Country Gentleman

by Hill, Fiona

  At last Maria brought forth two small slips of paper—her published advertisements clipped from the Times. “I have taken some action for myself,” she said, handing them to Anne, “and am well on the way to a solution. I have had several answers to each of them,” she added, as Miss Guilfoyle bent her head over the clippings.

  But when Anne looked up tears stood in her eyes. “Maria! Do you really wish to leave me? If you do, I shall not argue; but if you do not—” Her voice broke and she could only finish, “I should regret you very much.”

  Overcome with dismay, Maria threw her arms round her. She had not thought she was so important to Anne, whose apparent self-sufficiency sometimes deceived even her. “Of course I do not wish to go,” she protested. “I simply— I cannot bear the idea of your using up your precious days of freedom only so that I may quit the neighbourhood. Promise me you will not do so; promise me you will let me go alone, that you will find another companion. Temporarily!” she added, squeezing Anne’s hand.

  “Promised,” agreed Anne, blinking away the sudden tears. “And promise me you will write to all your correspondents and tell them they have answered too late, that you have accepted a post and that the lady of family has her companion. Will you?”

  “Promised,” Maria said gladly.

  Anne seized her hand and finally led her out the door. “I think we are both in need of an airing now,” she exclaimed, then, “‘Mrs. John!’ Indeed!”

  Ensley’s marriage having taken place on a Monday, his first post-nuptial letter to Anne had been written on the Tuesday, and arrived in Cheshire Thursday, the last day of October. If anything, it was more affectionate than its predecessors. The writer reported his wedding to have gone off well; but he hinted that he could not help feeling pained, and even angry, that the face behind the bridal veil did not belong to…well, someone he thought of very tenderly as he stood before the altar. The new-married couple had taken a house in Cavendish Square, and Ensley devoted a paragraph or two to a description of it, and the way it was being furnished, ending, “But you will soon see it yourself, for November begins in four days, and that is the month you promised to come. Tell me the day exactly in your next to me, I beseech, that I may begin counting the hours. How I need you! Yours faithfully—” And so on.

  Anne read and reread the letter, folded it, and made an inward resolve. The more she reflected, the more she believed what she had said to Maria: If she had been in earnest all these years of her friendship with Ensley, she must not fail now to avail herself of an opportunity unlikely ever to come again. Marriage to Henry Highet would not only restore her fortune to her but would grant her even a greater degree of freedom than she had had as a single lady. She had gone over and over what she knew of Mr. Highet without finding any thing to make him ineligible, or to persuade her an alliance with him was ill-advised. And she could not help but be swayed by the prospect of escape from captivity at Linfield. Even a palace is a prison to one constrained to stay there. On Friday she sent a letter to Fevermere to ask Mr. Highet to wait upon her the following morning.

  He obeyed, arriving full of news regarding the livestock he had sold at Chester. If he felt conscious or awkward with Miss Guilfoyle, he did not show it. For her part, Anne had anticipated the meeting with some considerable nervousness; but Mr. Highet’s tales of heifers and sows, his report on the price of butter, his easy manner, even his rough, mud-flecked boots reassured her. She had only a few questions for him, chiefly how she could insure he would not, in a fit of Spencean generosity perhaps, give her land away or (more plausibly) sell it; how—with all deference to his excellent character—she could be certain he would forward to her a proper share of the income from the proposed joint estate; and the like. Mr. Highet received her questions without offence. He intended, he said, to have the exact terms of their agreement drawn into a marriage contract—as was not uncommon, after all—and politely begged her to have her own man of business in London look it over before she accepted it.

  “But have you no other concern?” he inquired, after they had established this much. They had gone out together to walk on the lawn, for it was a fine day and a shame, as he had said, to be indoors. Though the leaves were fallen, the dark branches against the bright blue sky had a simple beauty of their own. There had been a frost the night before, and the ground still crunched under their feet. “You see no other flaw in the idea itself?”

  She said, “Not as yet. Though I shall, of course, consult Mr. Dent as you suggest.”

  “Ah, Mr. Dent,” he took up, smiling. “Nicodemus, is it not? ‘Mr. Dent informed me—’ ‘I had understood from Mr. Dent—’” He paused to give one of what Miss Guilfoyle thought of now as his horse laughs and went on, chuckling, “The look on your face! If only you could have seen it.”

  This reference to the night they met did little, naturally, to endear Mr. Highet to Anne. “You were a trifle distrait yourself,” she reminded him tartly.

  Mr. Highet wiped an hilarious tear from his eye, then went on, mimicking the voice of a condescending lady and gesturing grandly, “Run along, Joan! Fetch some tea! Come here, Joan, and light this candle before you—”

  “Thank you, I quite recollect it now,” said Anne repressively. At the same time, as if to make him be quiet, she caught at one of his broadly gesturing arms, striving to bring it down to his side. She stopped him in mid-movement, in consequence whereof her hand slipped along his sleeve to his hand—which, most unexpectedly, closed over hers in a grip almost convulsive. He released her in an instant, but the momentary touch had already brought them both up short, sobering him and making her suddenly eager to close the interview. Her hands now folded tightly together at her waist (Mr. Highet’s hands had somehow dived into his pockets), Anne told him, “If it does not disturb you, I should like to think on this another night before I give my answer. I shall see you in church to-morrow, no doubt. Perhaps you will be so good as to ride over here at four or five o’clock?”

  “I shall be happy to do so. But pray do not imagine it disturbs me to wait. This is a decision of consequence for both of us.”

  “Thank you, but I am not one to debate a decision overlong,” Anne answered truthfully. They had begun to walk up to the house together, where he would take his leave of her. “If it seems to me sound at first, it generally does so at the last as well. Still, I should like another night.”

  Mr. Highet declared himself her servant. They had arrived at the terrace behind the drawing-room, and Miss Guilfoyle was about to walk in through the French doors when he stopped her, saying, “I nearly forgot. There is another matter I wished to discuss with you.” Lowering his voice though they were still outside and alone, “It concerns Mr. Mallinger. Does he seem to you in some wise afflicted?”

  On her guard at once, for she felt Mr. Mallinger’s secret was not hers to give away, “I have thought him more subdued of late, yes,” she agreed.

  “Subdued! I half fear consumption; but he insists he is healthy enough. Nor can I think he would expose his pupils to any ailment knowingly. Yet…I asked him if his family were well, and he maintains they are.”

  He paused, but Anne kept silent.

  “At all events, I wondered if you would be amenable to increasing his salary. No man is happy who reckons himself undervalued.” And Mr. Highet named a figure by which he proposed to improve the schoolmaster’s income.

  Miss Guilfoyle, though well aware it could do little to raise Mr. Mallinger’s spirits, willingly agreed to her share in the increase. After this, lady and gentleman went indoors, shook hands, and parted.

  They re-met the following morning in church; but no one seeing them could guess any private question hung over them. Their brief conversation there, had anyone overheard it, chiefly celebrated the facts that both had slept soundly the night before and that the weather continued fine. Mr. Samuels then preached on Temptation, which made Mrs. Insel excessively uneasy (for she judged herself one to Mr. Mallinger) and bored everyone else. Afterwards
Anne politely declined Lady Crombie’s punctual invitation to dine. She sent Maria alone in the carriage to Linfield, electing to walk, though it was a full five miles.

  It was a day like its predecessor: crisp, cool, the sky brilliantly blue. The stillness was broke only by birds, or the occasional rush and thump of a hare startled in the dry bracken. As she had foreseen on her first night in Cheshire, this road was now as familiar to Anne—every bend, every stile, every prospect—as had been Bond Street or Berkeley Square. But she had lost her sullen resentment of it, and begun to see its beauty. She was curious to know how the flat fields would appear when, as must happen in two months or three, snow shrouded and muffled the sleeping earth. She liked the leafless quiet of to-day, in which she could hear the crunch of the ground under her own light feet; she liked the sharp air, and the wide sky. After nearly twenty years, her childhood at Overton started to return to her. She remembered the slow revolutions of the seasons in the country, long walks she had taken in company with her father among bare branches, or budding leaves. The sights and smells of the Cheshire fields and woods stirred and finally waked her memory of the scenes of her childhood, and with them hungry, poignant vignettes from a time when both her parents still lived. In short, she remembered Nature, and felt its claim on her with almost the strength Artifice, calling from London, opposed to it.

  It was after two when she reached Linfield. She had only time to dine hastily and refresh her toilette before Mr. Highet arrived. When he did, she went down to him in the drawing-room at once and (her heart beating rather violently for all she struggled to appear calm and dispassionate) with scant preamble accepted his suit.

  Mr. Highet declared himself pleased. A short speech such as might have been made at the joining of two commercial houses followed, delivered by Mr. Highet in his slow baritone, and with his friendly, phlegmatic smile. The happy couple then turned their attention to the calendar, Miss Guilfoyle noting it would need some weeks for her man of affairs to read and return the marriage contract once Mr. Highet’s man had drawn it up. Mr. Highet, after some counting upon his fingers, suggested the twenty-fifth of November as a convenient wedding date, for, as he gravely noted, it would “leave him free to see to the tupping of the sheep on the twenty-eighth.” Mr. Highet would also see, if Miss Guilfoyle liked, to the publication of the banns.

  With a queer dreaminess similar to her sensation when Mr. Highet had first proposed his suit, Anne heard herself reply, “If it is not too much trouble, yes, I thank you.”

  “I think a quiet ceremony best, do not you?” asked her betrothed. “At the rectory, perhaps.” He sat some way apart from her on the chintz settee—a good vantage point, no doubt, from which to assure himself the horse sailing over the hedge in the watercolour showed no signs of sinking.

  “Oh, excellent.” Miss Guilfoyle either verified the presence or inspected the cleanliness (it was not clear which) of her ten fingernails before adding, “I hope we shall not be too much discommoded with bride visits and that sort of thing. Although—” She looked up in confusion, and there was upon her face an expression of almost shyness which Mr. Highet (though it is doubtful whether Miss Guilfoyle knew this, for she was looking not at him but out the French doors) observed with visible satisfaction, “I wonder where, exactly, such a visit might be paid?” she finished dubiously.

  “If you mean, here or at Fevermere, the question has crossed my mind as well. I have no wish to uproot you, but as you will no doubt be returning to London to set up an establishment of your own very shortly, it seems to me foolish for you to keep up Linfield as well.” Speaking haltingly at first he continued, “If it would not discomfit you too much, there is quite a wing of Fevermere my mother and I can spare to you and Mrs. Insel. Some few of the Linfield servants, perhaps, will come with you. For the others, I happen to know that Mrs. Ware’s brother—recently widowed, alas—is looking for a house to let in the neighbourhood of his sister, for himself and his children. He would be only too glad, I think, to take Linfield—and as he has no wife, perhaps the estimable Miss Veal…”

  He paused suggestively, and Anne took up, “Oh indeed, it would mean a new life to her!” She had not failed to notice his generous, unprompted inclusion of Maria in her plans, and her gratitude made it a little harder to say what she nevertheless felt she must: “Mr. Highet,” she commenced, standing and (in spite of her recent long walk) restlessly moving across the room, her back towards him, “there is one aspect of my life I must make clear to you. If you lived more in London you would know it yourself, for it is well understood among the ton; but as you do not…” Her restlessness drove her quite to the French doors, where she stared out at the terrace and the dark woods beyond. A new note of resolution, almost of ruthlessness, sounded in her voice as she presently went on, “I have a friend there with whom I am on, and have for ten years been on, extremely close and particular terms. This gentleman, whom you have met—”

  She was quite startled—almost frightened—to hear his voice suddenly interrupt, “Ensley, you mean.” There was sternness in his tone, she thought. He went on, coldly and as if the matter slightly disgusted him, “I am quite aware of your special bond to him. It neither concerns me nor touches our agreement.”

  She expected him to say more, but he did not. She had kept her back towards him while he spoke. When at length she turned, she found him poised at the door. She partly crossed the room to him, saying in a low voice, “I felt I should mention it.”

  Mr. Highet bowed in silence. In his face she saw that same quality she had heard in his voice—sternness, she called it to herself—and it surprised her a little. She felt she had displeased him, which was not her wish. She gave what she hoped was a conciliatory smile.

  “Should you like me to go with you to your mother, to tell her our news?” she asked, to turn the topic.

  “That will not be necessary.” Frowning, his features taut, Mr. Highet presented almost a new countenance to her. She had never imagined him to have so much—what? Pride? Anger?

  She essayed another smile. “You are very kind to offer to take Maria in as well as myself.”

  He said only, “Not at all”; but his scowl softened a little.

  “She holds you in the highest esteem,” Anne went on, still smiling. “I know she will be glad to hear of our—our alliance. You have not yet had an opportunity, I suppose,” she added, through a chain of thought invisible to Mr. Highet, “to speak to Mr. Mallinger?”

  “Not yet. I shall go to him, perhaps, when I leave here.” His expression relaxing yet more, “I doubt money is at the root of it, however. It exasperates me, for I fear he will leave us. I should hate to lose him.”

  “Oh, I do not think he will leave,” Anne replied a little mysteriously. “I expect by Christmas, say, he will be right again.”

  Mr. Highet appeared to have heard this with only half an ear. His scowl at last quite gone, he told her in much warmer tones, “You know, I hope, that we shall always be glad to see you at Fevermere, Miss Guilfoyle. Even so soon as Christmas, you may wish to return. Or if not, whenever you do like to come, you must stay as short or as long as you please, and bring any party you care to. Only give the house a little warning, and—” His brow darkened again as he went on, “I do think it would be inadvisable to bring Lord Ensley here again. In fact, that is my condition. I will ask you to observe it.”

  Anne murmured, “Willingly, sir,” and set herself to regain, through charm and smiles, the ground she had somehow lost again; but this time Mr. Highet’s scowl vanished more readily. A few more pleasantries, Mr. Highet’s assurance he would ride to Chester to-morrow to see his man of business about the contract, and the gentleman took his leave. This time Miss Guilfoyle bowed while Mr. Highet put out his hand. But they smiled at their awkwardness, and Mr. Highet did not take his hand away as she had done upon that earlier occasion. Instead he put the other out as well, took both hers (though very briefly), smiled, released her, and was gone.

  The wedding
of Mr. Henry Highet and Miss Anne Guilfoyle took place in the rectory of the Reverend Septimus Samuels, at two-thirty P.M, on 25 November, Year of our Lord 1816. In attendance were Mrs. John Insel, Mrs. Archibald Highet (the bridegroom’s mother), and Mrs. Samuels. The bride’s Uncle Frederick had sent, to represent him, a letter congratulating his niece on having found “a way out of her difficulties” (her first intimation that he knew she had been in them) and, a week later, a silver bowl Anne recognised as having once belonged to her mother for a wedding gift. From Celia Grypphon—who of course knew her situation rather more intimately—came a letter equally congratulatory and a good deal warmer. Anne having written to her exactly the terms upon which she entered matrimony, Celia agreed the offer was a godsend, and only urged her to return to London as soon as ever she could. Lady Grypphon meanwhile would scout for a house to let. As for Ensley, Celia reported him looking much more cheerful since this news had come. Ensley reporting the same to Anne directly, it appeared they were all of one opinion.

  How then to account for the weak knees, the racing heart, the damp brow with which Miss Guilfoyle faced Mr. Samuels? Sentiment—sentiment and superstition were the culprits the bride scornfully put them down to herself. She urged herself to think of Ensley, but the thought did not steady her. “Clunchery! Sheer shatter-headedness!” ran her inward apostrophe, while she listened to Mr. Samuels’ caution that the estate of matrimony was not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.

  She glanced at the man beside her. Well, he looked sober enough. Indeed she could not read his face at all: Handsome, heavy, impassive, his features were composed into the same sleepy mask she had seen an hundred times. When he said, “I will,” when he took his vows, his voice was deep and calm. His hand, enfolding hers, was warm; hers, taking his, cold and moist. Mr. Highet could hardly hold Anne’s finger still enough to slip the ring upon it, so much did it tremble. She was relieved to be licenced to take his hand again, a moment later, and hold it through the rest of the ceremony—for she felt giddy and faint, and his large paw reassured her. At the conclusion of the ceremony they looked into one another’s eyes for the first time. Anne felt dimly that she had done some thing, some momentous thing, she could hardly say what. Then Mr. Highet leaned down and drily kissed her dewy forehead. He led her out of the rectory into the fresh air, which she eagerly gulped. His mother, following, cried a little; Maria appeared at the rectory door a moment later and begged the elder Mrs. Highet to come in.