Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  But he never seemed to have the time, and the girls were always occupied with a host of engagements, and Dick, their elder son, could never be dug out of his own country estates near Bath, and Henry, their second, was busy in Ireland ruling the country his father had conquered. Still it was peace unutterable to go by herself to the Woodrow High House and sit in its little oak rooms and walk in its walled gardens looking over the wooded hills of Buckinghamshire, and never be reminded of the grandeur that had once clothed a slaughtered king, and now sat on herself like scarlet on an ape.

  And it was there behind the house in the rare afternoon sunshine of that cold July of 1658 that she walked and brushed soapsuds on to the greenfly of her rose trees, and thought of all these things.

  Until, hearing a heavy step on the gravel, she looked up with a world of fear in her heart, and saw Oliver coming towards her with bowed massive shoulders as of some great wounded beast dragging his weary weight over the ground, and heard, as clearly as if he said it aloud, a sentence he had written to her years ago, “I grow an old man.”

  She ran to meet him, she took his hands and asked him what had happened, why he had come. He did not even hear her question and she did not repeat it, for his face made her dread the answer. She turned and led him into the house and poured him out ale, and put bread and butter and ham in front of him as in the old days, and while she did so she thought of all the things that could have happened to hurt him. His health had given her anxiety for years, he had fits of ague which this cold spring had increased, he suffered from gout and the stone, and he had had two driving accidents in the last few years, when his coach had been knocked to pieces and he himself had miraculously escaped, but badly shaken up. He looked as though he had had some such jar now, and yet, as she waited for some word from him in the silence, she knew that the shock, however far it would reach in time through his nerves and sinews, was not as yet to his body but to his soul.

  And now, hurriedly marshalling them in array, she thought of their children and wondered which of them could have dealt him this blow; had Betty run away with the Duke of Buckingham, or Dick, his heir to England, disappointed him even more deeply than he had yet done by his cloddish indifference to affairs of State, his single-minded devotion to country sports? “I would not have one Englishman killed to keep me in power,” Dick had once said, and his father had despaired of him after that.

  But it was not Dick. Dick could not bring this heavy anguish to his father’s eyes.

  Oliver drank the ale and took a piece of bread but did not eat it, only crumbled it between his fingers. Not raising his eyes from it, he said in a low voice, “Is it possible to fall from grace?”

  He had never asked her a question that she could remember, but he was not asking it of her, but of God. She answered as firmly as she could, “It is not possible.”

  “Then I am still in grace,” he said, “for I know that once I was.”

  She sat beside him and said, “Will you not tell me?” but still he did not look at her; he sighed, and his breath caught on a groan of pain, and he broke it to cry out, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

  Then Oliver thought he was dying, not, as in the old days, of his fancied terrors, but because he knew he was ill, so ill that he must die. “What is it?” she cried. “Why do you think you are dying?”

  Her voice was sharp with anxiety, it had the shrill note of the scold in it that used to enforce her commands to him to be more careful of his health, and it startled him into the old compliance to her. He was aware of her now, looking at her, trying to spare her something,—if only he could see that this suspense was torturing her worse than any news!

  “God has chastened our family very sorely,” he said; “we do not deserve the world’s envy—and perhaps we deserve no better. Betty is very ill,” he added in an undertone.

  She had known it all along. But why had Oliver not gone straight to Betty at Hampton Court, instead of here to herself? She asked him and he said, “I came for you.” And suddenly he slipped from the seat beside her and was kneeling with his head on her lap, enclosing her body with his arms and shaking it with his sobs as he used to do in the old quiet days of her peace and his torment. In that instant, all the years rolled back; he needed her again, then, as utterly as of old, and as of old had no need even to appeal to her. He had come for her, and that was enough.

  For him, but not for her. Time flew so fast now, she must keep something of this moment to treasure it inside her to the end of her life. Clasping that bowed, grizzled head to her, she whispered, “You still love me——?”

  He raised his head, and his savage and resolute eyes looked into hers. “You are dearer to me than any creature,” he told her.

  She had that to keep with her when Oliver died on the third of September, just four weeks after his daughter’s death.

  Where Beauty Lies

  Hyacinthe Anne FranÇois Saint Cupidon, Marquis des Beaux Airs, awoke on the morning of June 2nd, 1725, in that state of unhappy indecision common to most men about to marry.

  This state was only aggravated by his unusual freedom of choice, for he was to marry one of three young ladies whom he had met for the first time on the previous evening, and could as yet discover no reason why he should choose one rather than another. All three were much of the same age and height, all tolerably pretty, witty and docile. Almost he was inclined to blame his host, their father, the noble Comte des Brioches, for the unwonted generosity that had left the choice in so delicate a matter to himself rather than to their respective parents.

  “Whichever I choose,” he petulantly declared to his valet, “is sure to turn out the wrong one.”

  “It is inevitable, Monsieur,” agreed the valet.

  “Alas, it is not inevitable, that is the worst of it. By fastening the responsibility on me, our parents have deprived me of the satisfaction of railing either at them or at Fate. I shall only have myself to blame.”

  “It is always possible to find someone else,” said the valet. “There will be Madame, for instance.”

  Even this consolation failed to reassure his master, who in his restless mood rose very early, dressed rapidly and took a turn in the park before anyone was about. The park was filled with early sunshine and the song of birds who had had no such difficulty as his in mating. The dew sparkled under his feet, roses nodded over his head, a strutting peacock spread his tail and reminded him that he too was a very pretty fellow and that whatever his difficulties regarding matrimony he was unlikely to encounter among them any coldness or indifference.

  At this he smoothed back his powdered hair which the morning breeze had slightly disarranged, pulled his lace ruffles over his hands, brushed a fleck of dust from his red heels, threw out his chest and whistled an air which he quickly abandoned on finding it to be a hymn tune, walked very fast, indeed almost ran over the wide lawns, turned the corner of a box alley, and fell in love.

  At the end of the dark and narrow box alley was a fountain splashing and sparkling in the sunlight. Its drops fell in a shower of jewels on water-lilies, golden and rose-pink like the clouds of sunrise that still adorned the sky. Two swans floating on its basin appeared as spirits from another world in their dazzling whiteness, their marvellous indifference to the marvel that stood before them. For on the edge of the fountain stood a nymph newly risen from its waters, and glittering so that every melting curve and perfect outline of her body seemed modelled in pearl and silver.

  Her head was flung back, her face upturned, but Beaux Airs could not see it, for she held her arms outstretched before it as if rapt in ecstatic adoration of the beneficent sun that had called forth this garden, its flowers, its creatures and herself, into the warmth and light and life of the summer morning. She stood so lightly poised that she appeared to have but just alighted from the upper air, as though she were indeed the goddess of this sacred grove.

  The heart of Beaux Airs stopped within him as if in mortal fear, his
knees shook together, he turned at first hot and then icy cold. He stole away from that place on tiptoe towards the terrace in front of the château. There, his agitation suddenly left him, he found himself strong, calm and assured of his fate. There was only one woman in the world for him to marry. He had only to wait and see which of the three Mesdemoiselles des Brioches would return from her bathe in the park and he would forthwith declare his passion.

  He waited half an hour. An hour. The servants were now about and stared at him. He was no longer strong and calm. He refused the chocolate that his valet brought him, he even poured it over his valet. He returned to the gardens, to the box alley. But his nymph had disappeared. Only the insensate swans glided slowly to and fro, only the fountain played ceaselessly above the place where she had stood.

  He was still sitting there disconsolate, when three vast shapes floated down the alley towards him, sank billowing in a curtsy, and perched themselves on the side of the fountain. Their skirts swelled up in huge semicircular curves and from them rose their whale-boned bodices like square boxes, not fitting to the figure but stiffly encasing it as in flat boards.

  They greeted him with a little twittering chorus of surprise and approbation that he should so soon have discovered their favourite fountain. Did he not admire the water lilies? Did he not adore the swans? Did he know that one could sometimes see a rainbow in the fountain?

  But after his bow and greetings he only stared in baffled dismay at the three boxes rising from the three balloons, so that they wondered if anything could be amiss with the fine dresses that had been ordered from Paris especially for this event. Emboldened by their lucky encounter without the restricting presence of any parent, governess or even servant, they began to twit him with his embarrassment, and Mademoiselle Guilberte, the youngest and pertest, asked if it arose from the difficulty of his choice.

  He answered that that was very possible among so many beauties.

  “So many!” cried the eldest, Mademoiselle Elizabeth. “Why, there are but three of us.”

  “So there were before Paris, Mademoiselle,” he replied, “yet he found it difficult to choose between three goddesses even though they were undisguised.”

  At that they clamoured to know what he meant by disguise for not one of them wore so much as a mask.

  “Alas, Mesdemoiselles,” he sighed, “but you wear so much else.”

  And in despair he could almost have besought them to tell him which of those constructions of hoops and boxes concealed as in a muffled cage the exquisite and living body that he had observed so delicately poised, so all but flying, on the very spot where they now sat stiffly imprisoned.

  But at his last words they had surged up with a crackle and swish of satin like a flight of pigeons from the ground, they had rustled and bustled together, joined hands and swept off down the box alley in scandalized flight from this offence against the modesty of their maiden ears.

  “Decidedly,” said Mademoiselle Elizabeth, “we were mistaken to have conversed with him in such dangerous and illicit solitude.”

  “Must you tell Mamma?” asked Mademoiselle Guilberte, who had looked back at the miscreant, but only three times.

  “That would be a pity,” declared Mademoiselle Madeleine, the second, most silent and most sensible.

  “They might,” she added, “break off the match.”

  Careless of his guilt, Beaux Airs watched only to see which of the three hastily retreating barrel hoops might reveal any chance resemblance to his nymph of the sunrise. She would surely fly as lightly as a fawn down that long alley, flashing white between its walls of dark box hedge. But could he discover those pearl white, those slender and tapering legs beneath the three swirling masses of petticoats that dipped and swayed and undulated away from him? He was forced to try what other indications could help his choice.

  Mademoiselle Elizabeth had decidedly the handsomest features. She had an excellent forehead and her ears were admirably shaped.

  But Mademoiselle Madeleine wore a strange and secretive smile.

  But then Mademoiselle Guilberte had looked back at him three times.

  No, none of these things could help him, since none could tell him which was the nymph of the fountain.

  Suddenly he remembered that one had called it her favourite fountain. That should tell him. Which of them had said it? With a groan of despair he remembered that all had done so.

  That afternoon he asked an audience of the Dowager Madame des Brioches, grandmother to the young ladies. He had frequented her salon in Paris where, immense, imperturbable, and apparently immovable, she had sat enthroned like some grotesque idol among the hundreds that thronged to enjoy a philosophy as broad as her person.

  She had once been a famous beauty but had recollected in better time than most that she might soon lose the pleasures of love but could always retain those of the table and the tongue. She had therefore cultivated with enjoyment her palate and her observation at an age when her contemporaries were half killing themselves in the despairing efforts to preserve their figures, complexions and lovers.

  Beaux Airs had been entertained by her wit, which the squeamish modern fools mistook for grossness, and had relied much on her wisdom and experience. In fact he had eagerly consented to this project of marriage for the sake of so eligible a parti as the grandmother.

  To her he now confided the story of that brief glimpse of perfection which had decided his fate for him, and of his baffled attempt to discover which of the three sisters” dresses concealed that fate. In the torture of his perplexity he even permitted himself to rail impiously against the good God for having, presumably, inspired the correct and fashionable costume of the day, and to pray that the devil might one day circumvent Him by inventing a dress that did not conceal and distort the female form.

  The old lady’s little black eyes gave an instructive twinkle amidst the vast folds of her face, and she replied, “Then the devil will lose his pains and woman her charms. A man is doubly insensible to the beauties he sees every day, and none will turn to remark the female legs that troop in thousands through Paris and London.”

  After this prophetic utterance she seemed to be staring two hundred years into the future, but returned to the present in order to tell him that he had fallen in love, not with a woman, but with the beauties of nature. “You are enamoured of love itself,” she said, “of life, of beauty, of youth, of the sparkling water, the morning sunlight, the song of birds. That is correct, and just as it should be. Take all these things and give them the name of any woman and you will be happy with her.”

  “What do you mean?” he stammered. “How am I to choose?”

  “How? Why, by tossing a penny or cutting the cards. My granddaughters are all much alike in person and none of them especially well made. Now I, as a girl—but what would you …” She surveyed her corpulency without a sigh, and continued, “Remember that “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.” Only believe that the one you marry is your nymph of the fountain, and you can then believe that you have found your ideal.”

  “But does it make no difference if I have or not?”

  “None. Provided she is not actively ill-humoured, distasteful, or imbecile, any woman can make any man happy, if he chooses to believe that she will do so.”

  He protested that she did not understand, he even reminded her that she was old, and in any case he doubted if she had ever truly loved.

  She paid no attention to his execrable rudeness for it delighted her when, as she expressed it, she had caused people to tear off their wigs.

  She answered him with her blandest twinkle and the story of Actæon who saw Diana bathing and was turned into a stag.

  “I advise you, Monsieur, to be warned by this simple fable, for the man who before his marriage sees his wife naked, is likely to wear horns.”

  Beaux Airs was naturally enraged at the grossness which old-fashioned fools mistook for wit, and at the folly and inexperience which made her confound the com
monplaces of passion with the rarity, purity and divinity of his singular emotion.

  He left her presence to see if intrigue and espionage might help where an old woman’s advice could only irritate. He summoned the head footman, a stupid dolt with a narrow head and flat dull eyes who appeared to Beaux Airs a miracle of intelligence when, in answer to his enquiries as to the young ladies” movements, he informed him that he had with his own eyes seen Mademoiselle Elizabeth leave the château that morning at a quarter to five.

  He thrust a gold coin into the astonished footman’s hand, and ran headlong from him to the gallery where the young ladies were assembled in the presence of their mother, telling himself as he ran that he had not needed to enquire, for instinct, that surer and diviner guide, had told him at the first.

  “I knew it was she all the time,” he thought. “Did I not worship her incomparable forehead, and the entrancing shape of her ears? Only such features could accompany such a form.”

  Arrived at the gallery, it was all that he could do to restrain himself from declaring the burning ardour of his passion before them all. As it was, he appeared in such strange excitement that they were fluttered and uneasy, fearing he would make some further indiscretion before their austere mamma. He retained enough presence of mind however to converse politely with her for some time and then with an unnatural air of carelessness he joined Mademoiselle Elizabeth and asked her to explain to him the subject of her embroidery. She did so very prettily, but he did not appear to attend to a word she said and the instant she had finished he asked abruptly if she often walked out at an early hour.