Charles’s thoughts on his own eventual way back to Lyme were all variations on that agelessly popular male theme: “You’ve been playing with fire, my boy.” But it was precisely that theme, by which I mean that the tenor of his thoughts matched the verbal tenor of the statement. He had been very foolish, but his folly had not been visited on him. He had run an absurd risk; and escaped unscathed. And so now, as the great stone claw of the Cobb came into sight far below, he felt exhilarated.
And how should he have blamed himself very deeply? From the outset his motives had been the purest; he had cured her of her madness; and if something impure had for a moment threatened to infiltrate his defenses, it had been but mint sauce to the wholesome lamb. He would be to blame, of course, if he did not now remove himself, and for good, from the fire. That, he would take very good care to do. After all, he was not a moth infatuated by a candle; he was a highly intelligent being, one of the fittest, and endowed with total free will. If he had not been sure of that latter safeguard, would he ever have risked himself in such dangerous waters? I am mixing metaphors—but that was how Charles’s mind worked.
And so, leaning on free will quite as much as on his ashplant, he descended the hill to the town. All sympathetic physical feelings towards the girl he would henceforth rigorously suppress, by free will. Any further solicitation of a private meeting he would adamantly discountenance, by free will. All administration of his interest should be passed to Aunt Tranter, by free will. And he was therefore permitted, obliged rather, to continue to keep Ernestina in the dark, by the same free will. By the time he came in sight of the White Lion, he had free-willed himself most convincingly into a state of self-congratulation… and one in which he could look at Sarah as an object of his past.
A remarkable young woman, a remarkable young woman. And baffling. He decided that that was—had been, rather—her attraction: her unpredictability. He did not realize that she had two qualities as typical of the English as his own admixture of irony and convention. I speak of passion and imagination. The first quality Charles perhaps began dimly to perceive; the second he did not. He could not, for those two qualities of Sarah’s were banned by the epoch, equated in the first case with sensuality and in the second with the merely fanciful. This dismissive double equation was Charles’s greatest defect—and here he stands truly for his age.
There was still deception in the flesh, or Ernestina, to be faced. But Charles, when he arrived at his hotel, found that family had come to his aid.
A telegram awaited him. It was from his uncle at Winsyatt. His presence was urgently requested “for most important reasons.” I am afraid Charles smiled as soon as he read it; he very nearly kissed the orange envelope. It removed him from any immediate further embarrassment; from the need for further lies of omission. It was most marvelously convenient. He made inquiries… there was a train early the next morning from Exeter, then the nearest station to Lyme, which meant that he had a good pretext for leaving at once and staying there overnight. He gave orders for the fastest trap in Lyme to be procured. He would drive himself. He felt inclined to make such an urgent rush of it as to let a note to Aunt Tranter’s suffice. But that would have been too cowardly. So telegram in hand, he walked up the street.
The good lady herself was full of concern, since telegrams for her meant bad news. Ernestina, less superstitious, was plainly vexed. She thought it “too bad” of Uncle Robert to act the grand vizir in this way. She was sure it was nothing; a whim, an old man’s caprice, worse—an envy of young love.
She had, of course, earlier visited Winsyatt, accompanied by her parents; and she had not fallen for Sir Robert. Perhaps it was because she felt herself under inspection; or because the uncle had sufficient generations of squirearchy behind him to possess, by middle-class London standards, really rather bad manners—though a kinder critic might have said agreeably eccentric ones; perhaps because she considered the house such an old barn, so dreadfully old-fashioned in its furnishings and hangings and pictures; because the said uncle so doted on Charles and Charles was so provokingly nephewish in return that Ernestina began to feel positively jealous; but above all, because she was frightened.
Neighboring ladies had been summoned to meet her. It was all very well knowing her father could buy up all their respective fathers and husbands lock, stock and barrel; she felt herself looked down on (though she was simply envied) and snubbed in various subtle ways. Nor did she much relish the prospect of eventually living at Winsyatt, though it allowed her to dream of one way at least in which part of her vast marriage portion should be spent exactly as she insisted—in a comprehensive replacement of all those absurd scrolly wooden chairs (Carolean and almost priceless), gloomy cupboards (Tudor), moth-eaten tapestries (Gobelins), and dull paintings (including two Claudes and a Tintoretto) that did not meet her approval.
Her distaste for the uncle she had not dared to communicate to Charles; and her other objections she hinted at with more humor than sarcasm. I do not think she is to be blamed. Like so many daughters of rich parents, before and since, she had been given no talent except that of conventional good taste… that is, she knew how to spend a great deal of money in dressmakers’, milliners’ and furniture shops. That was her province; and since it was her only real one, she did not like it encroached upon.
The urgent Charles put up with her muted disapproval and pretty poutings, and assured her that he would fly back with as much speed as he went. He had in fact a fairly good idea what his uncle wanted him so abruptly for; the matter had been tentatively broached when he was there with Tina and her parents… most tentatively since his uncle was a shy man. It was the possibility that Charles and his bride might share Winsyatt with him—they could “fit up” the east whig. Charles knew his uncle did not mean merely that they should come and stay there on occasion, but that Charles should settle down and start learning the business of running the estate. Now this appealed to him no more than it would have, had he realized, to Ernestina. He knew it would be a poor arrangement, that his uncle would alternate between doting and disapproving… and that Ernestina needed educating into Winsyatt by a less trammeled early marriage. But his uncle had hinted privately to him at something beyond this: that Winsyatt was too large for a lonely old man, that he didn’t know if he wouldn’t be happier in a smaller place. There was no shortage of suitable smaller places in the environs… indeed, some figured on the Winsyatt rent roll. There was one such, an Elizabethan manor house in the village of Winsyatt, almost in view of the great house.
Charles guessed now that the old man was feeling selfish; and that he was called to Winsyatt to be offered either the manor house or the great house. Either would be agreeable. It did not much matter to him which it should be, provided his uncle was out of the way. He felt certain that the old bachelor could now be maneuvered into either house, that he was like a nervous rider who had come to a jump and wanted to be led over it.
Accordingly, at the end of the brief trio in Broad Street, Charles asked for a few words alone with Ernestina; and as soon as Aunt Tranter had retired, he told her what he suspected.
“But why should he have not discussed it sooner?”
“Dearest, I’m afraid that is Uncle Bob to the life. But tell me what I am to say.”
“Which should you prefer?”
“Whichever you choose. Neither, if needs be. Though he would be hurt…”
Ernestina uttered a discreet curse against rich uncles. But a vision of herself, Lady Smithson in a Winsyatt appointed to her taste, did cross her mind, perhaps because she was in Aunt Tranter’s not very spacious back parlor. After all, a title needs a setting. And if the horrid old man were safely from under the same roof… and he was old. And dear Charles. And her parents, to whom she owed…
“This house in the village—is it not the one we passed in the carriage?”
“Yes, you remember, it had all those picturesque old gables—”
“Picturesque to look at from the outside.�
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“Of course it would have to be done up.”
“What did you call it?”
“The villagers call it the Little House. But only by comparison. It’s many years since I was in it, but I fancy it is a good deal larger than it looks.”
“I know those old houses. Dozens of wretched little rooms. I think the Elizabethans were all dwarfs.”
He smiled (though he might have done better to correct her curious notion of Tudor architecture), and put his arm round her shoulders. “Then Winsyatt itself?”
She gave him a straight little look under her arched eyebrows.
“Do you wish it?”
“You know what it is to me.”
“I may have my way with new decorations?”
“You may raze it to the ground and erect a second Crystal Palace, for all I care.”
“Charles! Be serious!”
She pulled away. But he soon received a kiss of forgiveness, and went on his way with a light heart. For her part, Ernestina went upstairs and drew out her copious armory of catalogues.
23
Portion of this yew
Is a man my grandsire knew…
Hardy, Transformations
The chaise, its calash down to allow Charles to enjoy the spring sunshine, passed the gatehouse. Young Hawkins stood by the opened gates, old Mrs. Hawkins beamed coyly at the door of the cottage. And Charles called to the under-coachman who had been waiting at Chippenham and now drove with Sam beside him on the box, to stop a moment. A special relationship existed between Charles and the old woman. Without a mother since the age of one, he had had to put up with a series of substitutes as a little boy; in his stays at Winsyatt he had attached himself to this same Mrs. Hawkins, technically in those days the head laundrymaid, but by right of service and popularity second only below stairs to the august housekeeper herself. Perhaps Charles’s affection for Aunt Tranter was an echo of his earlier memories of the simple woman—a perfect casting for Baucis—who now hobbled down the path to the garden gate to greet him.
He had to answer all her eager inquiries about the forthcoming marriage; and to ask in his turn after her children. She seemed more than ordinarily solicitous for him, and he detected in her eye that pitying shadow the kind-hearted poor sometimes reserve for the favored rich. It was a shadow he knew of old, bestowed by the innocent-shrewd country woman on the poor motherless boy with the wicked father—for gross rumors of Charles’s surviving parent’s enjoyment of the pleasures of London life percolated down to Winsyatt. It seemed singularly out of place now, that mute sympathy, but Charles permitted it with an amused tolerance. It came from love of him, as the neat gatehouse garden, and the parkland, beyond, and the clumps of old trees—each with a well-loved name, Carson’s Stand, Ten-pine Mound, Ramillies (planted in celebration of that battle), the Oak-and-Elm, the Muses’ Grove and a dozen others, all as familiar to Charles as the names of the parts of his body—and the great avenue of limes, the iron railings, as all in his view of the domain came that day also, or so he felt, from love of him. At last he smiled down at the old laundrymaid. “I must get on. My uncle expects me.” Mrs. Hawkins looked for a moment as if she would not let herself be so easily dismissed; but the servant overcame the substitute mother. She contented herself with touching his hand as it lay on the chaise door. “Aye, Mr. Charles. He expects you.”
The coachman flicked the rump of the leading horse with his whip and the chaise pulled off up the gentle incline and into the fenestrated shadow of the still-leafless limes. After a while the drive became flat, again the whip licked lazily onto the bay haunch, and the two horses, remembering the manger was now near, broke into a brisk trot. The swift gay crunch of the ironbound wheels, the slight screech of an insufficiently greased axle, the old affection revived by Mrs. Hawkins, his now certainty of being soon in real possession of this landscape, all this evoked in Charles that ineffable feeling of fortunate destiny and right order which his stay in Lyme had vaguely troubled. This piece of England belonged to him, and he belonged to it; its responsibilities were his, and its prestige, and its centuries-old organization.
They passed a group of his uncle’s workers: Ebenezer the smith, beside a portable brazier, hammering straight one of the iron rails that had been bent. Behind him, two woodmen, passing the time of day; and a fourth very old man, who still wore the smock of his youth and an ancient billycock… old Ben, the smith’s father, now one of the dozen or more aged pensioners of the estate allowed to live there, as free in all his outdoor comings and goings as the master himself; a kind of living file, and still often consulted, of the last eighty years or more of Winsyatt history.
These four turned as the chaise went past, and raised arms, and the billycock. Charles waved seigneurially back. He knew all their lives, as they knew his. He even knew how the rail had been bent… the great Jonas, his uncle’s favorite bull, had charged Mrs. Tomkins’s landau. “Her own d—d fault”—his uncle’s letter had said—“for painting her mouth scarlet.” Charles smiled, remembering the dry inquiry in his answer as to why such an attractive widow should be calling at Winsyatt unchaperoned…
But it was the great immutable rural peace that was so delicious to reenter. The miles of spring sward, the background of Wiltshire downland, the distant house now coming into view, cream and gray, with its huge cedars, the famous copper beech (all copper beeches are famous) by the west wing, the almost hidden stable row behind, with its little wooden tower and clock like a white exclamation mark between the intervening branches. It was symbolic, that stable clock; though nothing—despite the telegram—was ever really urgent at Winsyatt, green todays flowed into green tomorrows, the only real hours were the solar hours, and though, except at haymaking and harvest, there were always too many hands for too little work, the sense of order was almost mechanical in its profundity, in one’s feeling that it could not be disturbed, that it would always remain thus: benevolent and divine. Heaven—and Millie—knows there were rural injustices and poverties as vile as those taking place in Sheffield and Manchester; but they shunned the neighborhood of the great houses of England, perhaps for no better reason than that the owners liked well-tended peasants as much as well-tended fields and livestock. Their comparative kindness to their huge staffs may have been no more than a side-product of their pursuit of the pleasant prospect; but the underlings gained thereby. And the motives of “intelligent” modern management are probably no more altruistic. One set of kind exploiters went for the Pleasant Prospect; the others go for Higher Productivity.
As the chaise emerged from the end of the avenue of limes, where the railed pasture gave way to smoother lawns and shrubberies, and the drive entered its long curve up to the front of the house—a Palladian structure not too ruthlessly improved and added to by the younger Wyatt—Charles felt himself truly entering upon his inheritance. It seemed to him to explain all his previous idling through life, his dallying with religion, with science, with travel; he had been waiting for this moment… his call to the throne, so to speak. The absurd adventure in the Undercliff was forgotten. Immense duties, the preservation of this peace and order, lay ahead, as they had lain ahead of so many young men of his family in the past. Duty—that was his real wife, his Ernestina and his Sarah, and he sprang out of the chaise to welcome her as joyously as a boy not half his real age.
He was greeted in return, however, by an empty hall. He broke into the dayroom, or drawing room, expecting to see his uncle smilingly on his feet to meet him. But that room was empty, too. And something was strange in it, puzzling Charles a moment. Then he smiled. There were new curtains—and the carpets, yes, they were new as well. Ernestina would not be pleased, to have had the choice taken out of her hands—but what surer demonstration could there be of the old bachelor’s intention gracefully to hand on the torch?
Yet something else had also changed. It was some moments before Charles realized what it was. The immortal bustard had been banished; where its glass case had last stood w
as now a cabinet of china.
But still he did not guess.
Nor did he—but in this case, how could he?—guess what had happened to Sarah when she left him the previous afternoon. She had walked quickly back through the woods until she came to the place where she normally took the higher path that precluded any chance of her being seen from the Dairy. An observer would have seen her hesitate, and then, if he had had as sharp hearing as Sarah herself, have guessed why: a sound of voices from the Dairy cottage some hundred yards away down through the trees. Slowly and silently Sarah made her way forward until she came to a great holly bush, through whose dense leaves she could stare down at the back of the cottage. She remained standing some time, her face revealing nothing of what passed through her mind. Then some development in the scene below, outside the cottage, made her move… but not back into the cover of the woods. Instead she walked boldly from out behind the holly tree and along the path that joined the cart track above the cottage. Thus she emerged in full view of the two women at the cottage door, one of whom carried a basket and was evidently about to set off on her way home.
Sarah’s dark figure came into view. She did not look down towards the cottage, towards those two surprised pairs of eyes, but went swiftly on her way until she passed behind the hedge of one of the fields that ran above the Dairy.
One of the women below was the dairyman’s wife. The other was Mrs. Fairley.
24
I once heard it suggested that the typical Victorian saying was, “You must remember he is your uncle…”
G. M. Young, Victorian Essays
“It is monstrous. Monstrous. I cannot believe he has not lost his senses.”
“He has lost his sense of proportion. But that is not quite the same thing.”
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 19
