What do you weigh?’
‘Eight stone and five pounds,’ said Sophia, hanging her head.
‘You are fine-boned, sure; but for an upstanding young woman like you it is not nearly enough. You must take porter with your dinner. I shall tell your mother. A pint of good stout will do all that is required: or almost all.’
‘A gentleman to see Miss Williams,’ said the maid. ‘Mr Bowles,’ she added, with a knowing look.
‘I am not at home, Peggy,’ said Sophie. ‘Beg Miss Cecilia to see him in the drawing-room.
Now I have told a lie,’ she said, catching her lip behind her teeth. ‘How dreadful. Dr Maturin, would you mind coming for a walk in the park, and then it will be true?’
‘With all the pleasure in life, lamb,’ said Stephen.
She took his arm and led him quickly through the shrubbery. When they came to the wicket into the park she said, ‘I am so wretchedly unhappy, you know.’ Stephen pressed her arm, but said nothing. ‘It is that Mr Bowles. They want me to marry him.’
‘Is he disagreeable to you?’
‘He is perfectly hateful to me. Oh, I don’t mean he is rude or unkind or in the least disrespectful – no, no, he is the worthiest, most respectable young man. But he is such a bore, and he has moist hands. He sits and gasps -he thinks he ought to gasp, I believe –
he sits with me for hours and hours, and sometimes I feel that if he gasps at me just once more, I shall run my scissors into him.’ She was speaking very quick, and now indignation had given her colour again. ‘I always try to keep Cissy in the room, but she slips away –
Mama calls her – and he tries to get hold of my hand. We edge slowly round and round the table – it is really too ridiculous. Mama – nobody could mean to be kinder than my dear Mama, I am sure – makes me see him – she will be so vexed when she hears I was not at home to him today – and I have to teach Sunday school, with those odious little tracts. I don’t mind the children, much – poor little things, with their Sundays spoilt, after all that long church – but visiting the cottagers makes me perfectly wretched and ashamed –
teaching women twice my age, with families, who know a hundred times more about life than I do, how to be economical and clean, and not to buy the best cuts of meat for their husbands, because it is luxurious, and God meant them to be poor. And they are so polite and I know they must think me so conceited and stupid. I can sew a little, and I can make a chocolate mousse, but I could no more run a cottage with a husband and little children in it on ten shillings a week than I could sail a first rate. Who do they think they are?’ she cried. ‘Just because they can read and write.’
‘I have often wondered,’ said Stephen. ‘The gentleman is a parson, I take it?’
‘Yes. His father is the bishop. And I will not marry him, no, not if I have to lead apes in Hell. There is one man in the world I will ever marry, if he would have me
– and I had him and I threw him away.’
The tears that had been brimming now rolled down her cheeks, and silently Stephen passed her a clean pocket-handkerchief.
They walked in silence: dead leaves, frosted, withered grass, gaunt trees; they passed the same palings twice, a third time.
‘Might you not let him know?’ asked Stephen. ‘He cannot move in the matter. You know very well what the world thinks of a man who offers marriage to an heiress when he has
no money, no prospects, and a load of debts. You know very well what your mother would say to such a proposal: and he is delicate in the point of honour.’
‘I did write to him: I said all I could in modesty; and indeed it was the most forward, dreadful thing. It was not modest at all.’
‘It came too Late. .
‘Too late. Oh, how often I have said that to myself, and with such grief. If he had come to Bath just once again, I know we should have come to an understanding.’
‘A secret engagement?’
‘No. I should never have consented to that: but an understanding – not to bind him, you understand, but just to say that I should always wait. Anyhow, that is what I agreed in myself; but he never came again. Yet I did say it, and I feel myself bound in honour, whatever happens, unless he should marry elsewhere. I should wait and wait, even if it means giving up babies – and I should love to have babies. Oh, I am not a romantic girl: I am nearly thirty, and I know what I am talking about.’
‘But surely now you could make him understand your mind?’
‘He did not come in London. I cannot pursue him, and perhaps distress and embarrass him. He may have formed other attachments – I mean no blame: these things are quite different with men, I know.’
‘There was that wretched story of an engagement to marry a Mr Allen.’
‘I know.’ A long pause. ‘That is what makes me so cross and ill-natured,’ said Sophia at last, ‘when I think that if I had not been such an odious ninny, so jealous, I might now be. .
. But they need not think I shall ever marry Mr Bowles, for I shall not.’
‘Would you marry without your mother’s consent?’
‘Oh, no. Never. That would be terribly wrong. Besides, quite apart from its being wicked –
and I should never do it – if I were to run away, I should not have a penny; and I should love to be a help to my husband, not a burden. But marrying where you are told, because it is suitable, and unexceptionable, is quite different. Quite different. Quick – this way.
There is Admiral Haddock, behind the laurels. He has not seen us – we will go round by the lake:
no one ever comes there. Do you know he is going to sea again, by the way?’ she asked in another tone.
‘In command?’ cried Stephen, astonished.
‘No. To do something at Plymouth – the Fencibles or the Impress Service – I did not attend.
But he is going by sea. An old friend is to give him a lift in the Généreux.’
‘That is the ship Jack brought into Mahon when Lord Nelson’s squadron took her.’
‘Yes, I know: he was second of the Foudroyant then. And the admiral is so excited, turning over all his old uniform-cases and taking in his laced coats. He has asked Cissy and me for the summer, for he has an official residence down there. Cissy is wild to go. This is where I come to sit when I cannot bear it any longer in the house,’ she said, pointing to a little green-mouldy Grecian temple,
leprous and scaling. ‘And this is where Diana and I had our quarrel.’
‘I never heard you had quarrelled.’
‘I should have thought we could have been heard all over the county, at least. It was my fault; I was horrid that day. I had had Mr Bowles to endure all the afternoon, and I felt as though I had been flayed: so I went for a ride as far as Gatacre, and then came back here.
But she should not have taunted me with London, and how she could see him whenever she liked, and that he had not gone down to Portsmouth the next day at all. It was unkind, even if I had deserved it. So I told her she was an ill-natured woman, and she called me something worse, and suddenly there we were, calling names and shouting at one another like a couple of fishwives – oh, it is so humiliating to remember. Then she said something so cruel about letters and how she could marry him any moment she chose, but she had no notion of a half-pay captain nor any other woman’s leavings that I quite lost my temper, and swore I should thrash her with my riding-crop if she spoke to me like that.
I should have, too: but then Mama came, and she was terribly frightened and tried to make us kiss and be friends. But I would not; nor the next day, either. And in the end Diana went away, to Mr Lowndes, that cousin in Dover.’
‘Sophie,’ said Stephen, ‘you have confided so much in me, and so trustingly. .
‘I cannot tell you what a relief it has been, and what a comfort to me.’