Yet the telling was simple enough. He said, ‘The girls have gone. Mrs Williams took them away to Bath last Tuesday sennight. Sophia came to see me and said she regretted it extremely.’
‘Did she leave a message for me?’ asked Jack, his sad face brightening.
‘She did not. In direct terms, she did not. At times it was difficult to follow her in her agitation. Miss Anna Coluthon, overcome by her position – an unattended girl calling upon a single gentleman. Champflower has not seen such a thing. But I do not mistake when I state that in substance she told me you were to know that she did not leave Sussex of her own free will, nor with a light heart.’
‘Do you think I might write to her, under cover to
Diana Villiers?’ asked Jack.
‘Diana Villiers is still here. She does not go to Bath:
she stays at Mapes Court,’ said Stephen coldly.
The news spread. The decision on the prizes was public knowledge, having been reported in the London papers; and there were enough naval officers in the neighbourhood, some of whom were affected by the agent’s defection, to make the extent of the disaster clear.
The announcement ‘at Woolhampton, on the 19th instant, to the lady of General Aubrey, a son’ merely rounded out the anecdote.
Bath was filled with Mrs Williams’s triumph. ‘It is certainly a divine retribution, my dears.
We were told he was a sad rake, and you will remember I never liked him from the first: I
said there was something wrong about his mouth. My instinct is never mistaken. I did not like his eye, neither.’
‘Oh, Mama,’ cried Frances, ‘you said he was the most gentleman-like man you had ever seen, and so handsome.’
‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ cried Mrs Williams. ‘And you may leave the room, Miss Pert. You shall have no pudding, for want of respect.’
It was soon found that other people had never liked Jack either: – his mouth, chin, eyes, lavish entertainment, horses, plans for a pack of hounds, all came in for adverse comment. Jack had seen this process before; he had an outsider’s knowledge of it; but although his condemnation was neither gross nor universal, he found it more painful than he had expected – the first cautious reserve of the tradesmen, a certain easiness and assumption in the country gentlemen, an indefinable want of consideration.
He had taken Melbury for a year, the rent was paid, the house could not be sublet; there was no point in removing. He retrenched, sold his hunters, told his men that although it grieved him they must part as soon as they could find places, and stopped giving dinners.
His horses were fine animals and he sold one for as much as he had given for it; this satisfied the immediate local duns, but it did not re-establish his credit, for although Champflower was willing to believe in any amount of cloudy wealth (and Jack’s fortune had been reckoned very high), it had poverty weighed up to within a pound or two.
Invitations fell off, for not only was he much taken up with his affairs, but he had become prickly, over-sensitive to the least unintentional slight; and presently Mapes was the only place where he dined. Mrs Villiers, supported by the parson, his wife and sister, could perfectly well invite Melbury Lodge.
It was after one of these dinners that they rode back, stabled the cob and the mule and said good night to one another.
‘You would not care for a hand of cards, I suppose?’ said Jack, pausing on the stairs and looking down into the hall.
‘I would not,’ said Stephen. ‘My mind is turned elsewhere.’
His person, too. He walked fast through the night over Polcary Down, carefully skirted a group of poachers in Gole’s Hanger, giving them a wide berth, and paused under a clump of elms that stood, swaying and creaking in the wind, over against Mapes Court. The house was of some antiquity, irregular in spite of its modern alterations, and the oldest wing ended in a blunt square tower:
one window lit. He passed quickly through the kitchen-garden, his heart beating, beating, so that when he stood at the little door deep in the base of the tower he could hear it, a sound like the hoarse panting of a dog. His face set in a steady, unmoved acceptance of defeat as he reached for the handle. ‘I take my happiness in my hands every time I come to this door,’ he said, not trying it for a moment. He felt the lock’s silent response: turned it slowly.
He walked up the spiral staircase to the first floor, where Diana lived: a little sitting-room with her bedroom opening out of it, the whole communicating with the rest of the house by a long corridor that opened into the
main staircase. There was no one in the sitting-room. He sat down on the sofa and looked attentively at the gold-thread embroidery of a sari that was being turned into a European dress. Under the golden light of the lamp gold tigers tore a Company’s officer lying on the spotted ground with a brandy-bottle in his hand: sometimes in his right hand, sometimes in his left, for the pattern had many variations.
‘How late you are, Maturin,’ said Diana, coming in from her bedroom; she was wearing two shawls over her peignoir and her face was tired – no welcome. ‘I was going to bed.
However, sit down for five minutes. Eugh, your shoes are covered with filth.’
Stephen took them off and set them by the door. ‘There was a gang with lurchers over by the warren. 1 stepped off the road. You have a singular gift for putting me at a disadvantage, Villiers.’
‘So you walked again? Are you not allowed out at night? Anyone would think you were married to that man. How are his affairs, by the way? He seemed cheerful enough this evening, laughing away with that goose Annie Strode.’
‘There is no improvement, I am afraid. The ship-owners’ man of business is an avid brute, with no intelligence, sense, or bowels. Ignorant voracity – a wingless vulture – can soar only into the depths of ignominy.’
‘But Lady Keith -‘ She stopped. Lady Keith’s letter had reached Melbury that morning, and it had not been mentioned at dinner. Stephen passed the sari through his hands, observing that sometimes the Company’s officer looked gay, even ecstatic, sometimes agonized. ‘If you suppose you have the right to ask me for explanations,’ said Diana, ‘you are mistaken. We happened to meet, riding. If you think that just because I have let you kiss me once or twice – if you think that just because you have come here when I have been ready to fling myself down the well or play the fool to get away from this odious daily round -nothing but a couple of toothless servants in the house –
that you are my lover and I am your mistress, you are wrong. I never have been your mistress.’
‘I know,’ said Stephen. ‘I desire no explanation; I assume no rights. Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.’ A pause. ‘Will you give me something to drink, Villiers my dear?’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she cried, with a ludicrous automatic return of civility. ‘What may I offer you? Port? Brandy?’
‘Brandy, if you please. Listen,’ he said, ‘did you ever see a tiger?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Diana vaguely, looking for the tray and the decanter. ‘I shot a couple. There are no proper glasses here. Only from the safety of a howdah, of course. You often see them on the road from Maharinghee to Bania, or when you are crossing the mouths of the Ganges. Will this tumbler do? They swim about from island to island. Once I saw one take
to the water as deliberately as a horse. They swim low, with their heads up and their tails long out behind. How cold it is in this damned tower. I have not been really warm right through since I came back to England. I am going to bed; it is the only warm place in the house. You may come and sit by me, when you have finished your brandy.’
The days dropped by, golden days, the smell of hay, a perfect early summer – wasted, as far as Jack was concerned. Or nine parts wasted; for although his naval and legal business grew steadily darker and more complex, he did go twice to Bath to see his old friend Lady Keith, calling up on Mrs Williams in the bosom of her family the first time and meeting Sophia – just happening to meet Sophia
– in the Pump Room the second. He came back both elated and tormented, but still far more human, far more like the cheerful resilient creature Stephen had always known.