Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  Once indeed I mentioned to Miss Wollaston that Mr Musters was very charming, but one never knew what he thought – so that, in consequence, one imagined all kinds of terrible things.

  ‘I believe I know very well what he is thinking of,’ she said. ‘I suppose you have thought it, too, or will think it.’

  We were sitting in the garden, on the gravelled walk, on a bench positioned between the windows leading into the drawing room. Mary was reading on the sofa inside; at least, she had a book in hand. I believe she was asleep. Nevertheless, I kept my voice low, and as the summer’s day was loud in other noises, there seemed little danger of our being overheard.

  ‘Is there an engagement? I cannot be sure; sometimes he acts as if there is.’

  ‘I believe there is an understanding,’ Miss Wollaston said.

  ‘I cannot understand the need for secrecy. Their fortunes are equal; the families both respectable, and disposed to the match.’

  ‘Yes,’ – for the first time, she hesitated. ‘Perhaps there is no secrecy. It has been spoken of so long, perhaps there was no occasion for making it explicit.’

  ‘And yet, if there can be any doubt …’

  We sat like this, companionably enough, enjoying the heat of the afternoon. Miss Wollaston sometimes let the shade of her parasol fall over my face, before withdrawing it again. A kind of game, I supposed, but when I looked at her, with a smile, she appeared unconscious of it. So I said, ‘Sometimes I believe she is almost frightened of him.’

  ‘You have been reading too many novels,’ she said. ‘In life, in Nottinghamshire at least, there is still such a thing as a good match, a comfortable engagement, and a happy marriage.’

  ‘Then I see no reason for so much secrecy and hesitation.’

  ‘It may be,’ she said, after a minute, ‘there is always a little fear, in such cases, which accounts for much of what you say – on both sides.’ Then, with a laugh: ‘You look very serious, my lord. You need not worry on her account. She has a great gift for doing exactly what she pleases. But I believe you are not, you speak mostly on your own.’

  ‘I do not think you understand my cousin as well as you pretend to. She seems to me not at all happy.’

  ‘Oh, it is the novels again; you see everything through novels. And pray, why is she so unhappy? With ten thousand a year, and Annesley Hall, and the prettiest eyes and figure in – perhaps she is unhappy because of her eyes. You mean, I suppose, that she is too pretty to be happy? Though as for that one can’t be always happy. Even I, with five hundred pounds to my name and a hook nose, am not always happy.’

  ‘What are you conspiring about?’ Mary called from within. ‘I have been having most unpleasant dreams; I keep hearing my name.’

  ‘We have been talking about you, of course,’ Miss Wollaston said, turning round.

  *

  Lord Grey has taken up residence in Newstead. I returned one afternoon for the sake of a few books I had left in his study and found him quite naturally installed in my former bedroom. I came up the back way, through his study, through the dark. ‘Alice,’ he said, as I pushed open the door; but he received me very hospitably and offered to send for her and bid her make up a bed in a corner of the great hall.

  ‘I suppose old Owen has been telling you stories about the crickets,’ he added, on seeing my face. ‘I have no objection to sharing my own – we get used to bed-fellows quickly enough at school.’

  But in the end I decided to take my luck in the hall; and after a sleepless night, returned in the morning to Annesley. Lord Grey and I breakfasted together. He had caught the sun, as he said, in his mountains, and looked for once quite happily indifferent to his own appearance: very brown and red in the face. I invited him to join our expedition to Peaks Hole and was rather relieved when he declined. He had travelled enough for one summer. But he inquired pleasantly into the arrangements. Miss Chaworth was a wonderfully pretty girl, and he knew Mr Musters slightly at college – he had the reputation of a ‘Man of Method’. I asked him what this meant. Most of his college set, he said, had a touch of the Method – it signified very little, but then he broke off to ask if by this stage they were decently engaged?

  ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘Miss Chaworth and Mr Musters? Nobody will say, though it is generally presumed.’ I added, ‘Mr Musters claimed your acquaintance. He said you often went hunting together.’

  ‘A kind of hunting,’ Lord Grey replied.

  *

  My mother has written again and again, complaining of my absence. She wishes to know when I intend to return to school. She has had a letter from Mr Hanson about it, who had a letter from Dr Drury; and now she is threatening to come to Newstead herself. But I am hardly at Newstead these days, with everything in preparation for Peaks Hole. I will make up my mind about school on my return. The dance at Matlock Bath has been put off, owing to a small fire in the kitchens. There was some talk it would be abandoned altogether, but a new date has been fixed, and we have arranged ourselves accordingly. But the weeks have passed. August is over, and already the chestnut trees, which run either side of the approach to Annesley, begin to lose their leaves – they have withered in the heat. After a wet beginning, the summer has had no rain, and the farmers almost despair of it. But the great day is here at last, which has been looming so large. Tomorrow morning the party from Southwell arrive at Annesley, for a hasty breakfast, before we dispose ourselves in the two carriages and continue our journey into Derbyshire.

  ***

  Mr Becher and I have been given a room together, at the Old Bath Hotel; but his bed is empty, he is still at the dance below, the sounds of which make their way up through the chimney and boards of the hotel. And I have lit a candle and sat down to the only table at hand, and pushed the washbasin aside, to write – in order to relieve my feelings, which are strained to bursting.

  The breakfast party went off well enough. The duty of introductions fell by necessity to me, which was painful to my diffidence, but I acquitted myself tolerably. There was only one awkward moment. Mr Becher, mistaking John Musters for Lord Grey, reached out his hand and said, ‘We knew each other a little at Oxford.’ But in fact they had not met and Mr Musters gave him rather a puzzled, cold stare.

  Elizabeth and Mary professed themselves greatly pleased with each other, and I had the occasion to compare them in the flesh. It amazes me now that I ever considered her pretty. Her face is too narrow and brown and her complexion not at all good, though she makes up for this by the liveliness of her expressions. She is also perhaps a hand’s breadth shorter than Mary, which I had not suspected, and carries herself in an under-bred comfortable way. But they claimed each other instantly as friends. Elizabeth said to me, as we left the breakfast table and disposed ourselves again in the yard, ‘I am glad she is pretty; she is really very pretty. I should not have liked you to fall in love with a frump.’

  And Mary, when she sent me in again for something she had forgotten, Thompson’s Tooth-powder, which she could not at all do without, whispered in my ear, ‘I like her immensely. She is not so pretty as I.’

  It was agreed at breakfast that Southwell, as the Pigots were called (with the addition of Mr Becher), and Annesley should intermix – it only remained uncertain to which party I belonged. In the end, Mr Musters took us all in hand. He accompanied Elizabeth and her brother John, along with Miss Wollaston, in Lady Hathwell’s barouche, leaving Mrs Pigot, Mr Becher and Mary to me. This occasioned the first little drop in Mary’s countenance. But we set off in high spirits. The weather, as Elizabeth promised it must be, was perfectly blue and clear. There was just a shadow of autumn in the sky, which prevented the sun from scorching and robbed the fields and the hills of any garish brightness. Mary attempted to flirt with Mr Becher.

  When we passed through Kirkby, on the half-hour, the bells of St Wilfrid’s tolled, and even Mary fell quiet because there was something to see. If only the usual sights. A dressmaker’s, showing a dark red dress in its window, with the hems undon
e; a tea shop; a baker’s – at which Mary called quickly for the coachman to stop and sent me out for a currant loaf. Then Mrs Pigot wanted another, and John emerged from Lady Hathwell’s barouche on a similar errand. I asked him, as we waited with our pennies in hand, what he made of Mr Musters.

  ‘I don’t make much of him,’ John said. ‘We had an argument about sitting in the box. He strikes me as one of those men who won’t have a favour done him. But I won out at last. I said, I can’t be sitting with my sister. But Lizzy finds him amusing enough. At least, all I can hear is her laughing. Miss Wollaston, too.’

  When I gave Mrs Pigot her loaf, Mary complained, ‘It is really shameful of Mr Musters to have put us in the post-chaise. I had much rather travel in a barouche, in this weather. Are you not intolerably hot, Mrs Pigot? Perhaps we may have the hood down, a little; the sun is not very strong. I apologize for Mr Musters, but it is always his way, he always takes the best plum for himself.’

  A bell marked the quarter when we set off. There was in fact a shout of laughter from the carriage ahead, as we cleared the graveyard and followed the turn of the road towards Sutton. Uphill and down again, with a view of the spire at Kirkby, on one side, and the spires of Hilcote and Huthwaite showing by glimpses. Between the towns, the wide green fields bending to their hedgerows – fields where nothing distinguished itself but a few odd cows and trees.

  Mary said, ‘I often find that the spirits of a party of people sound much higher at a distance. I can’t think what Mr Musters might be saying. He can never think of anything to say to me.’

  My heart sank at all this, for it showed Mary in the strongest light; and if I had planned, as I half intended, to confess my feelings to Mr Becher the opinion he must be forming served as a sufficient check. He could not understand her. But it pained me also to see Mary jealous; it made me jealous. Lady Hathwell’s barouche, which preceded us by twenty paces, had such an elegant, spirited air. There are men whose worst suspicion is that they belong always to the gloomier half of any party, and I seem in a fair way to becoming one of them.

  Mrs Pigot asked Mary why her daughter called us always ‘the inveterate cousins’. The phrase meant nothing to her, but she supposed there was some scandal attached to it.

  ‘A little scandal,’ I said, ‘but briefly told. My wicked great-uncle killed Mary’s grandfather in a duel. My uncle was very drunk at the time, and Mr Chaworth, I presume, not very sober either.’

  ‘Was this not all a very long time ago?’

  ‘A long time ago, but it is still remembered. In towns, Mrs Pigot,’ Mary said, ‘you have the great fortune of involving yourself in any dozen little quarrels you wish to. You may pick and choose, and they are all quickly resolved by their own rapid succession. But the Chaworths have only the Byrons, and the Byrons have only the Chaworths, to be disagreeable to; which is why we prize the memory of it so greatly.’

  ‘And was he hanged – your great-uncle, I mean?’

  ‘He was not. He was tried in the House of Lords and acquitted at last, whereupon he retired to Newstead and went mad. It is just what all Byrons wish in their hearts to do – to retire to Newstead and go mad. I have been attempting it myself this summer.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mrs Pigot,’ Mary said. ‘He is not nearly so strange as he pretends and has been living at Annesley, more or less without interruption, since the beginning of August. We all feel it as a great betrayal of principle, but his presence is otherwise acceptable to us.’

  *

  We dined at Castleton. There was some talk of visiting the ruins of Peveril Castle, but Mary has not the least interest in ruins, and Miss Wollaston was eager to see the caverns and be gone – it is two hours by coach to Matlock Bath. This was a great disappointment to me, as there was nothing else that interested me half as much as the ruins. Mr Musters’ sympathies surprised me. He took me by the arm, out of the coaching-inn, and led me along the street and around a corner, until we could see, at the top of a green hill, a square grey turret and a low grey wall. Crows settled and unsettled against the walls, and a few herring gulls wheeled above them. A half-hour’s good walk might have brought us to the summit, but then, I should have preferred a horse.

  ‘We are all the slaves of female pleasure,’ Mr Musters said. ‘We do what they please and not what pleases us.’

  For a minute we stood arm in arm, looking up, with the sun behind us. ‘And yet there is in their presence,’ I told him, moved for the first time into a kind of confession, ‘a comfortable something, which I cannot at all account for; and their pleasure pleases us, too.’

  It was left to me to propose our return.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Mary cried when she saw us. She had come a little way down the road to meet us, which was all dust and pebbles, and looked rather ghostly under the shade of her parasol. ‘We have been waiting this hour at least. The horses are all in harness.’

  We disposed ourselves as before and returned to the carriages. Mr Becher had brought along a volume of Jonson’s containing a masque, which he proposed to read to us, as it was set in Derbyshire and included some reference to Peaks Hole. But he read a little way in and then gave up the attempt; there was too much indecency in it. It was entirely unsuitable, and he spent the rest of the journey turning over the pages and sometimes shaking his head.

  Mrs Pigot sat at his right hand. ‘Oh, let me look,’ she complained. ‘I have seen a great deal more of life, young man, than you. There is nothing that shocks me so much as propriety.’

  ‘I thought it would please you,’ I said to Mary in a low voice. ‘If Mr Musters is to become your – particular friend. I thought, the least service I could render you is to make him mine.’

  ‘Oh, the least service … I suppose you were talking all the time about me.’

  ‘This at least may be read by a clergyman without a blush,’ Mr Becher said at last, bowing towards Mary.

  He began to recite, until Mrs Pigot interrupted him.

  ‘If it is decent or not, I should not like to say,’ she said. ‘But it is certainly nonsense.’

  ‘That is not the bit I meant, I have lost my place.’

  ‘If you mean to marry him,’ I said to Mary, ‘I should like to know him better, because he has always appeared to me uncomfortably mysterious. He frightens me a little. When I am alone with him, I feel something very much like fear.’

  ‘Who said that I meant to marry him?’

  ‘I thought it was generally understood, and Miss Wollaston confirmed it.’

  ‘Miss Wollaston takes a great interest in marriage without the least intention of marrying herself. I should not credit Miss Wollaston with anything besides a wish to amuse herself – often at my expense.’

  ‘I think she meant you no harm. Perhaps she meant to protect me.’

  Mary said at last, ‘Am I very terrible?’

  ‘This is better,’ Mr Becher said and began to read again, in what Elizabeth always calls his sermony voice.

  ‘Now I am offended,’ Mrs Pigot afterwards declared. ‘I suppose you mean, because I am old myself, it should please. I confess that the rest meant nothing to me, but I recollect the beginning very well, which ran, To the old, clutch not so fast to your treasures, or something of that sort.’

  I said to Mary, ‘You mock me. You think of me always as a boy.’

  ‘I am not so easily kidded as that,’ Mr Becher replied. ‘I know when I am being teased. But this is not what I had wished for at all. I had hoped there should be some fine description of the scenery, but it is all in his humour.’

  ‘For shame, Mr Becher, that when the hills surround us in the sunshine, as they do, when there is a beautiful lady to be looked at, and talked to, you should seek your pleasures in books.’

  ‘You must not blame Mr Becher, Mrs Pigot,’ Mary said. ‘Lord Byron gives out that it is generally understood I am spoken for, which has frightened away every other gentleman. At least, this must be my consolation. But indeed, the view of these hills is very fine, and
the ascent not very rough.’

  We arrived at last at a station a few hundred yards distant from the caverns, where there was a small cottage with a hut attached to it and a hitching-post in the yard. Mr Musters, who had by this stage thoroughly taken charge of the party, gave Saunders the coachman instructions regarding the horses, and the rest of us arranged ourselves in no very great order around the yard and stretched our legs. It was now three o’clock, and still cloudless and windless, but not excessively hot; the shadows had begun to stretch in the sun.

  Elizabeth said to me, ‘Mr Musters is quite charming and exactly the kind of man my brother dislikes.’

  ‘Why do you quiz me about Mr Musters?’ I said to her. ‘He is nothing to me.’

  ‘I believe he may be something to Miss Chaworth.’

  ‘That is their own affair. I am not in the least in love with her.’

  ‘Perhaps I won’t tease you,’ she said. ‘You look very solemn. It ruins the sport.’

  The cottage belonged to a farmer, who offered us one of his sons as a guide, for not much money; and after a brief negotiation, in which I played no part, he led the way up a steep single track with grass growing in it. This son was very tall and already a little stooped. He said nothing but walked in long strides, carrying across his shoulders a kind of sack; the rest of us pursued him at a short distance. Mr Musters gave his arm to Mary. They were followed first by Mr Becher and Elizabeth, and then John and Miss Wollaston. Mrs Pigot and I trailed a little behind the others, which suited both of us – as she is a thin, frail, weak-winded woman, and we could ‘scramble up’ (as she put it) at our leisure.

  ‘You are much missed in Southwell,’ Mrs Pigot said to me. ‘And much talked about. All the ladies pine after you.’