“I’m glad to hear it,” Miles said, “for it means you could help me to pass the time very agreeably while I’m on leave, providing you’ve nothing better to do, of course,” and before giving her a chance to protest, “I usually take my furloughs during the hunting season, and go out six days a week. This is the first summer I’ve been home since I was commissioned and frankly I’m finding it dull.”
She was not absolutely sure what niche a gunner occupied in the complicated military hierarchy, but she was aware that it was higher than most. She said, “I wanted my husband to remain in the army. He was a lieutenant in the East India Company, the ‘John Company’ he always calls it. I believe you’re in the Royal Horse Artillery, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, proudly, “and I’ll wager you are the only woman of your age in the district who would know as much. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “I got the impression at that croquet party that you didn’t approve of me and wouldn’t have cared two straws which regiment I served. I take it as a compliment that you not only found out but also remembered.”
It struck her, with a kind of wonder, that everything one said to Miles Manaton was construed by him into some kind of compliment and attempting to alter this state of affairs she said, quickly, “Pray don’t jump to conclusions, Mr. Manaton. I’ve been interested in military matters ever since the Crimea and in your case I recognised the badge. I can tell you most things about soldiering, and even which regiment takes precedence over others. I know, for instance, that all you regular officers look down on the Indian army and that the Guards look down on you.”
The laugh that greeted this was not conventional. It ran clear across the river, starting a moorhen out of the reeds. “You’re too sharp for me, Mrs. Swann,” he said, “and I promise upon my honour not to tease you again.” Then, standing back a pace, he looked her up and down in what many women would have considered an almost indecent fashion, and would have made her blush if he had not added, with obvious sincerity, “You can’t imagine what a relief it is to chat to a very pretty woman who treats you as though you were a brother, and doesn’t take refuge in meaningless chatter. It used to be fun with my sisters, but they’ve suddenly grown up, and put on the most ridiculous airs, whereas every so-called ‘eligible’ my mother introduces into the house acts like a doll wound up by mamma and likely to run down at any moment.”
She found that she liked this line of talk for it made her feel very much at ease. “I know what you mean,” she said, “and I’m sure Adam would, but you can hardly include me in the eligible class, can you, Mr. Manaton?” expecting him to laugh again.
He did not, however, but dropped his gaze, appearing, to her considerable astonishment, somewhat confused. Then, turning away and looking across the river, he said, sombrely, “No, unfortunately not, Mrs. Swann, and I’ll risk offending you by saying that I consider your husband a very fortunate fellow indeed. Among the most fortunate in the county!”
Who could avoid being flattered by this from a man like him, she asked herself. She had noted his bored acceptance of the adulation he had received from all the unmarried girls at the party, some of them pretty, but there was something almost abject in the way he propped himself against the doorpost and avoided her eye, as though her presence subjected him to a deep emotional strain. Whether this was so or not the certainty of his interest in her as a woman rather than a neighbour excited her. It was a long time since she had regarded herself as anything much more than a man's plaything, and while this satisfied her vanity it was pleasant to learn that a man existed, and a young and handsome man at that, who regarded her as a person in her own right. She was still cautious, however, and said, “I don’t think you should say that to me in these circumstances,” but was careful to keep coquetry from her voice. “After all, Mr. Manaton, there must be a great number of unattached girls about here who would be very flattered by any attention you paid them.”
“I daresay,” he replied, with a boy's surliness, “but not one among them with a thought in her head except what the Empress Eugenie is wearing, and a whiff or two of local scandal.” Suddenly he faced her with what she could not help but regard as an air of desperation. “You must have realised that I’ve been very much aware of you, ever since we met at Mrs. Halberton's.”
“I’m aware of nothing of the kind,” she said, truthfully. “How could I be? We’ve never met again until this moment.”
“That's so,” he said, smiling now, “but I’ve watched you walking and riding about here none the less, and often been tempted to hail you, for you were always alone.” His engaging smile faded and he looked at her with a new kind of interest. “Why are you always alone? Isn’t your husband concerned about you roving the countryside afoot and on horseback, without an escort?”
She said, smiling, “To tell the truth I don’t think he knows, for he's away so often about his business. But if he did I think he would trust me to look out for myself.”
“Aye,” he said, giving her another of his appreciative scrutinies, “and I’d wager you could if it came to the pinch. Your husband runs a transport service, doesn’t he? Surely that's a rum thing for a gentleman to do, especially a man who rode in Cardigan's charge. I’m not the only one to remark on it. It puzzles a majority about here. Did you know that, Mrs. Swann?”
“Yes,” she said, calmly. “I knew it. It doesn’t do to be in trade with some folk, but Adam says it will soon be accepted, even by county families like yours. He says it's quite silly to pretend otherwise. That was why he didn’t give a fig for family tradition.”
“What tradition was that?”
“Why the Swann tradition,” she said, proudly. “A Swann has served in every major war since Crécy, or so the Colonel, my father-in-law, tells me. He fought under the Grand Old Duke, and was wounded at Waterloo. He gets invited to the Waterloo dinner every June, and his father fought under Lord Cornwallis, in America. When America was a colony, of course.”
He smiled, rather condescendingly she thought, offered her his hand, and led the way out of the bower into the sunshine. “You really are an intriguing person, Mrs. Swann. Here's your husband running a freight service all over the country, and getting his name into all the newspapers, and all you can talk of is his family's military tradition.”
“I can’t help that,” she said, equably, “it's the way I’m made.”
“But what on earth does your husband think about it? About your attitude to trade I mean?”
“Oh, he just laughs at it and goes about his own business no matter what me and the Colonel say to the contrary, but he has made me a promise and I mean to see that he keeps it.”
“What promise is that? Or is it a secret?”
“No, it's no secret. He's promised me our son Alexander shall take up a commission in a good regiment as soon as he's done with school. It would have been Stella, of course, but she turned out to be a girl.”
“Were you very disappointed?”
“At the time I was, but I got over it as soon as Alex was born, and I mean to have other sons. After all, I’m only twenty-four.”
Her artlessness had the power to silence him. It was so unlike the simulated ingenuousness of garrison town wives to which he was accustomed, or the rather tiresome naïveté of the kind of girls Mrs. Halberton invited to her croquet parties. Suddenly, and quite definitely, she began to interest him for it occurred to him that a woman who could talk so frankly to a man she hardly knew might well prove a very easy conquest inasmuch as her mind did not run along the rigidly prescribed lines of current fashion. Already he had half made up his mind to try his luck, partly because this promised to be an excessively dull furlough but mostly because Miles Manaton was a man who regarded every pretty woman he encountered as a challenge. He was not especially ruttish, and rarely consorted with the professional drabs who infested the barracks and overseas stations where he had served, but for all that he was a very dedicated womaniser, using women as a kind of diet to feed an
insatiable ego that had been his principal characteristic ever since he had discovered, at the age of about three, how strikingly beautiful he was, and how natural it was that his sisters, and all the old trouts in married quarters should go out of their way to spoil him. He could never have enough flattery. Without it, even for a day, he was like an addict deprived of his opium. The act of physically possessing a woman meant very little to him, but her homage, even for the few sweaty moments she was beneath him, meant everything, for he assessed each conquest in the way a miser assesses a bargain or a piece of gold. At twenty-six he had already accumulated a sizeable hoard, beginning with an adolescent encounter with a besotted young governess, and ending a month or so before he began this furlough, with the wife of his military tailor in Canterbury. He had sired a number of children here and overseas, but he thought of them not as children but as proofs of his infallibility with women, all kinds of women, from housemaids and milkmaids to the wives of elderly officers and busy merchants. What was even more unusual than his tally, however, was his adroitness in evading the consequences of nonstop lechery. He operated like a skilled fencer, first estimating the ability of his opponent to defend herself, then deciding upon an approach, then moving into attack, and finally skipping back out of range and usually out of sight, for none of his affairs engaged him sufficiently to hold his attention for more than a month. Once heavily engaged, however, it became a point of honour with him not to desist until the quarry had either capitulated or made it absolutely clear to him that she never would. In the latter case he would drift away and take his revenge by dropping hints among colleagues concerning the woman's character and here again he was almost unique among men who made a practice of seduction. He had never, in the whole of his life, been troubled by a single twinge of conscience.
There was a kind of scale in his armoury of tactics, and its pitch was dictated by the overture. If the prospect looked easy he could be wildly passionate, but if there was likely to be opposition he could simulate the despairing, lovesick youth better than any professional actor performing at Drury Lane. Sometimes, according to the quarry's mood, it was necessary to compromise, alternating rapidly between paroxysms of desire and transports of despair, and occasionally he had to resort to a less direct approach, seeming to seek a soulmate rather than a bedmate, a woman equipped to solace his loneliness and be an older sister to him. There was even a fourth approach, the one he decided upon now, and that was to reverse the tide of flattery, feeding it back to the woman who, he had decided, was not simply bored, as in the cases of most wives he had seduced, but dwarfed by a dominant partner, and perhaps on the point of having her individuality extinguished altogether.
When he encountered such a person his wealth of experience told him precisely how to act. He would gently isolate his victim from her background and then, almost inadvertently, display her to herself as an earthbound goddess whose celestial qualities had been churlishly overlooked by her partner. This, he found, was almost certain to bring her back to him again and again, until the moment arrived when he could dart in like a bullfighter and end the contest at a blow. He walked back to the tethered cob in Henrietta's wake, planning his moves like a pickpocket. She was very pretty. She was very vain. She was neglected. She was virtually subdued by that lout of a husband, who was so deficient in commonsense as to throw up a military career (even a pinchpenny one among sepoys) to become not a merchant but a hawker, whose income depended upon what he was given to lug about the country in a cart. Moreover, the poor fool was not only absent from home most of the time but allowed his wife to range the countryside like a ripe little milkmaid or cattle-herder, ready to be ravished behind the nearest haystack by the first man who happened along. The conquest of Henrietta Swann, he decided, would be swift and complete.
2
They had parted on a promise that she would meet him again in a day or so but that this time he would come mounted and give her a lesson in horsemanship. Adam, he acknowledged, had taught her to manage a quiet cob, but there was more to horsemastership than that, and obviously poor Mr. Swann was far too busy with his important concerns to have time to give her the necessary instruction. He would be happy, he said, to teach her something of dressage, and was prepared to bring along a well-mannered hunter from his father's stable for her pleasure.
She said nothing to anyone at Tryst about the encounter for she already thought of it as a safe, stimulating flirtation, of the kind many of Mr. Mudie's heroines indulged in from time to time, without getting themselves fatally enmeshed like poor Lady Isobel, in East Lynne. For that, she decided firmly, was not for her. She was not even physically attracted to Miles, having had a unique opportunity to look him over without benefit of uniform. She thought of him, indeed, as a handsome, rather silly boy, who was, it seemed, as lonely as she had been on occasion and who had, in passing, been almost ruined by the fussy attentions of women, among them his domineering old mother and her three plain daughters. She could, she felt, safely show him a little sisterly affection in return for the personal enlargement his attentions had brought her. She might even let him kiss her, providing he went about it reverently and modestly, and then she would let him know that she was quite unable to return his love, and this offered a mutual bonus for, whereas she was badly in need of a boost, he needed to be shown that there were still women about who were proof against his charms. All men, of course, were egotists, but the egotism of Miles Manaton was exceptional, and deflating it, by means of a series of gentle pinpricks, offered a welcome break in a flattish routine until Adam came cantering home with all that chimney-sweep nonsense out of mind. There was really no comparison between being swept off her feet and tossed about by a real man like Adam Swann, and flattered and petted by a self-inflated masher like Miles Manaton, but Adam's lack of jealousy had always irritated her a little, and it could do no harm, and might even do some good, if he learned, in a roundabout way, that other men not only thought her pretty but in possession of a full set of wits.
It was a rather smug Henrietta who stretched herself out in the big double bed that night, and before she slept she had resolved upon setting out for the tow-path the following afternoon, and discovering whether he had kept his promise about giving her a riding lesson on one of his father's hunters, known to be thoroughbreds.
He was there sitting on his own mare, a dainty little bay, with expensive-looking accoutrements and holding another horse by the leading rein. Moreover, he was wearing the undress uniform of the Royal Horse Artillery, and looked far more manly than he had in ruffled shirt and breeches or, for that matter, flat on his back in the pool. They spent a pleasant, restrained afternoon. He was, she had to admit, a superb horseman and possessed the patience to teach her to jump over a log, which was something Adam had never been able to do. They rode up across the moor and down into the adjacent river valley, and all the time he was gracious and polite and talked to her about army life, recounting a number of amusing anecdotes about his superior officers and their feuding wives. She went home thinking she might have misjudged him, for he was really a most agreeable companion, and seemed to have set aside his outrageous conceit for her benefit, or perhaps because he already realised it failed to impress her.
It was a Monday when she had first crossed to the islet, and by the following Saturday they had enjoyed three similar expeditions, all unremarkable in every way, save that she seemed, by then, to have tamed him completely, for he began to behave towards her with a reverence that she found delightful to contemplate. Nobody had ever shown her the least deference in the past, and the sensation it imparted encouraged her to reward him with any number of soft words and expansive smiles, and even the licence of half an embrace each time he helped her mount and dismount. Once, she noticed, as she leaned her weight on him momentarily, he gave a kind of groan, as though he had a stomach ache, but she thought it impolite to comment and when they parted, and she set off through the wood for home, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him standing there,
a lonely, disconsolate figure, holding the reins of the two horses, and staring after her as though she was one of Mrs. Henry Wood's heroines who had just rejected his advances.
It was, she decided, a very engaging game and perhaps a rather one-sided one but that was no reason at all to end it, for a young man with his looks and prospects could hardly expect to go through life without finding an occasional dose of castor oil on his silver spoon.
She expected that Adam would be home in a day or so and then, of course, this nonsense would have to stop, but in the meantime they had another assignation, having agreed to meet on foot, for the horses were due to be shod and he had suggested she might like to try her hand at fishing. She proposed riding her cob as far as the islet, but he said, quickly, “No, Mrs. Swann, don’t bring the horse, for the best place to try for trout is that gravel bed near the narrow part of the channel, and if the cob is tethered close by they won’t bite. I’ll look out for you our side of the footbridge, and carry you over the stream, for the river's no more than a trickle,” and to this she agreed, reflecting gleefully that it might put a strain on him to have her in his arms for a few seconds.
She dressed very carefully, choosing a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white muslin dress sprigged with forget-me-nots, a cross-over fichu to cover her shoulders, and a pair of white slippers for the ground was bone dry and the distance across the paddock not above half-a-mile.
God is an Englishman Page 47
