Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (329 page)

CHAPTER II
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MR. ROLAND BETTESWORTH was younger than Mr. Bettesworth by some six years. With a younger son’s portion he had lived upon the Town mostly by means of post-obits. But upon the reading of his uncle’s will, three months before, it was found that everything went to Mr. Bettesworth; and no one in the world could have been more chapfallen than Mr. Roland on the day of that ceremony.

It took place in the Manor-house of Winterbourne, on Salisbury Plain. Mr. Roland had not seen this house nor his brother in the last six years, for his uncle would neither let the younger son come down from Town nor the elder go up to it. The uncle having attempted to drive his coach up the steps of St. Paul’s whilst the Te Deum Service was being held after the battle of Wagenau, and having been forcibly prevented by William the Third’s order and by William the Third’s Bodyguard — the uncle having arrived at the conclusion that this was his right as Lord of the Courts-Baron of Winterbourne, of Bassett, of Pitt Minima, and of Cheveril St. Francis. The most learned jurists have since denied this claim, which was revived by his nephew, the present Mr. Bettesworth, the decision being that the

right which was granted by Henry the Third had been to ride one horse and lead three up the steps of the Church of St. Paul in the village of Ludger, the words of the deed being: “
Ecclesiœ sancti Pauli apud Lugd
” — Squire Bettesworth had turned his coach right round from the steps of St. Paul’s and had driven down to Winterbourne, vowing that he would never come back to London unless the King, with his own hand, should lead his coach horses up the steps of St. Paul’s during a Te Deum Service. This had never occurred; and, indeed, Mr. Bettesworth being a troublesome person both at Court and in the Parliament House, there seemed to be no reason why it should. Mr. Bettesworth had never in those thirty years returned to the Town of London. Once, having made a bet with the Earl of Pembroke that he would purchase from the Pope a picture by Raphael that hung in the Sistine Chapel, Mr. Bettesworth had set out by way of Southampton to take his nephew upon the Grand Tour. The Sistine Madonna he had been unable to purchase, but he had brought back a lady called Poppæa, who was declared to have been the mistress of Pope Innocent XII; and since then he had insisted that all his man-servants, down to his stable-lads, should be arrayed in the garb of the Halberdiers of St. Peter’s. Poppæa, whether or no she had been the mistress of the Pope, was certainly the making of Mr. Bettesworth’s heir. She was a large, wise, dark woman; and having once settled down at Winterbourne it seemed as if she became a part of the house itself. She grew fatter and fatter, and more and more indolent; and she was the one person who could curb the passions of young Mr. Bettesworth. She said to him one day, and she repeated it many times: “Caro mio, you will always be a headstrong maniac. Cultivate, then, a coldness of manner.” She taught him, indeed, in actual fact, to count forty before he spoke if he felt himself in any way agitated. “For,” she said, “a man in anger is always ridiculous, and it is ridicule mostly that you will have to avoid in this world. Now, your actions will always be ridiculous. They will be chivalrous, obstinate, high-flown, tyrannous, or what you will. And what you have to achieve is the doing of these ridiculous actions in a manner that is not ridiculous. Cultivate, then, reserve. Act after long pauses. Speak after long pauses. If it is possible, you will, during these pauses, reflect and take a more prudent course. If that is not possible you will at least have the appearance of having acted and spoken after reflection, and that is always confusing to an adversary, if there be any adversary to deal with.”

So that under the care of this lady, who was more than an aunt to him, during seven years the young Squire had grown to be thirty. He could fence; he could dance; he could read a great many Italian novels, English plays, and law books. He rode well to hounds; could use a hawk upon the Plain; and he was, above all, learned in the lives of painters and in the phraseology of pictures, which he had studied with assiduity and passion during his Italian journey. He had, it is true, a proper opinion of the worth of the Bettesworths of Winterbourne Longa. Winterbourne Longa lies in a hollow; he had to climb long and weary hills before he could even see land that would not be one day his own. And from the tops of those downs how many weathercocks of churches could he not see, — villages where, when on a Sunday he came out of church, the inhabitants would kneel down until he was past them. He was tall, erect and fair, aquiline nosed, rather sharp jawed, and of that very symmetrical comeliness which is to be found more particularly amongst the Anglo-Saxons of the West of England. As a young man he had been rather slight of figure, but when he was rising thirty he rode already thirteen stone without the saddle. He spoke Italian as well as English; he was an assiduous dancer in the Assemblies of the City of Salisbury; the Earl of Pembroke liked his company and he imagined that when at last he should come to his own he would dictate the tastes and fashions of London Town much as he imagined his uncle had done before him. And he thought that once his foot was in the stirrup he would assert the claim to drive up the steps of St. Paul’s more successfully, because more tactfully, than his uncle had done. In the meantime he hunted much. He had a very excellent strain of game-cocks of his own breeding; he paid some attention to the lands and needs of his uncle’s tenants, and imagined that he paid a great deal; and he was fond of lecturing his dependents on the duties of their stations.

It would have been more difficult for him to step into his uncle’s shoes had that hard-swearing, broadfaced, bulky figure not lain for more than six months before its burial in paralytic silence in a room full of bleeding-basins and lancets. And his uncle’s stroke occurring just ten days before Michaelmas, the young Squire had upon his hands the full authority to renew leases, to preside at the Audit dinners and at the Courts, where the Copyholders rendered suit and service. This had, indeed, given him a still stronger sense of the immense authority that God had placed in his hands. He imagined himself about to become the third or fourth richest Commoner in England, and he knew himself to be vastly wealthier than the Herberts, — all this wealth and power being set upon that firmest of all bases, the land, the very Earth itself.

The reading of the will took place in the great dancing-hall of the Manor-house. The attorneys and their clerks sat at a table covered with green cloth. Beside them, immediately on the one side, sat the Signora Poppæa, now very fat and with gouty fingers, dressed in a great black panniered dress, with a large black fan, and a formidable black cap that rose to nearly a foot above her head. Behind her stood the new Squire in a black coat, with a mourning sword, his hair tied by immense black ribbons; and just beside her chair stood Roland, hat in hand, dressed like his brother. On the other side of the table were some poor Bettesworths from Yeovil, and all behind them stood a large crowd of bare-headed tenantry, of stewards, of water-bailiffs, of parsons, and of the other humble dependents. They were kept in their place in a half-moon ring by the servants who, still habited like Halberdiers of the Pope of Rome, exhibited no other sign of mourning than immense streamers of black hanging from huge battle-axes at the head of their pikes. Mr. Bettesworth regarded this last exotic display of his late uncle’s eccentricity with a certain haughty disfavour. He had an idea that it rendered him ridiculous to stand in this ring of retainers, attired for all the world like beef-eaters. Indeed, seeing the world very much through the Signora Poppæa’s eyes, the whole ceremony appeared to him to be of a barbarous and grotesquely antique kind.

A small lawyer arose from the table and, making three bows, stood before him, holding out in front of his spectacles the long vellum strip with the air and attitude of a town-crier announcing a sale by auction.

“Give him a bell,” Roland whispered, “and let him cry: ‘O yez! O yez! O yez!’”

And so, declaring him to be sound body and mind, old Mr. Bettesworth’s voice spoke from the grave. Young Mr. Bettesworth was his sole heir: Poppæa was left the use of the Dower House at Berwick St. James, and one hundred pounds wherewith to purchase a portrait either of the late Pope Innocent XII or of Squire Bettesworth himself, according to which of the two mates, upon reflection, she preferred. Poppæa smiled pleasantly. The largest sum that had been conferred upon any bona-roba since 1610 had been settled upon her when she left Rome under Mr. Bettesworth’s protection. So that the poor Bettesworths on the other side of the table, unaware of this fact, were able to smile maliciously, until these in turn were brought up by the mention of their names, coupled in each case with a sum, larger indeed than they had expected, but accompanied by a condition or a comment which made him or her for the moment the laughing-stock of the whole assembly. Miss Lavinia Bettesworth of Cuddesdon, a lacrymose spinster of fifty, got up, indeed, to whisper to the attorney’s clerk.

Must she indeed use this two thousand pounds as her wedding portion, or in the alternative for the purchase of handkerchiefs to be wept into on the deaths of her successive spaniels? She was sure, she said, that she could not use so many handkerchiefs as two thousand pounds’ worth in the whole of her life; and as for husbands, she detested the creatures!

Mr. Roland Bettesworth laughed with the rest, but as the reading of the will went on his face grew longer and longer; and then they came to the words: “Item, to my nephew Roland Bettesworth I do give and bequeath the sum of one shilling in lawful English money to dispose of as he will, and the sum of twenty shillings wherewith to purchase a spyglass the better to see the life of London.”

Mr. Roland Bettesworth became of a deadly pallor. He grinned stiffly, and muttered: “A hit! The old boy has made a hit!” For his quarrel with his uncle had been that he had gone up to London Town to see the life of it. He heard no more of the reading of the will, but stood, white and pallid, looking down at the ground, and a long time afterwards the Halberdiers cleared the large room.

The Signora Poppæa sat large and inert; only her black eyes twinkled and moved. From the dining-room, of which the door stood open behind their backs, in the centre of the great wall there came a clink of glasses and the sound of many voices. The poorer Bettesworths were regaling themselves. Mr. Bettesworth stood erect, his eyes looking straight in front of him. Tall windows showed the lawns of the not very large garden bounded by a high brick wall; an immense yew-tree towered up very close to the house and darkened the windows at the lower end of the hall.

“You are thinking,” the Signora said in Italian, “that now, at last, you will cut that tree down? Tell me, how does it feel to be in power? Will you chase me, the parasite, from this house? and what will you do with that poor wretch there?”

Mr. Roland Bettesworth did not understand the Italian tongue. Mr. Bettesworth bent slowly down, and raising the Signora’s hand upon his white fingers put it gracefully to his lips.

“You have been the saving of this house from much shame,” he said, “for you have curbed many of the worst extravagancies and follies of my uncle, and the man that I am I owe to you. Therefore it is my intention that you shall come with me to London, and there live in any grandeur of condition that shall be to your mind.”

“Oh, po-wow-wow!” Mr. Roland said. “Whilst you kichi-kichi I must get myself ready to take purses on the high road. I thank God that I have a good horse and a pair of pistols in my holsters; and for a visor, may I not cut holes in my mourning band?”

He cocked his hat under his arm, snapped his heels together, bowed ceremoniously to Mr. Bettesworth, and said —

“Squire brother, I felicitate you upon the eleven months and eighteen days by which you preceded me to the world.”

“Why, I am six years older than you,” Mr. Bettesworth said.

“Oh, a fico for niceties of reckoning,” Mr. Roland said. “Had it been of two hours, sure, it would have been all one. You would still have rolled in your coach, and I should still have popped my head in at the window with the barkers at your nose, and so relieved your purse of its great weight.”

“There are easier ways of lightening my purse,” the Squire said gravely. “Think of some of them.”

“ — What! shall I put your name to a bill?”

The Signora Poppæa regarded them indulgently with her kind eyes.

“What should I do in your London,” she said; “a poor, fat old woman that hobbles on a stick? No, if your Worship will trust me not to steal your silver—”

The Squire opened his mouth impatiently to speak, but the old lady interrupted him —

“Count forty before you speak. I am talking ironically of stealing your spoons, and I know you are very vexed that I will not come with you to London Town. But that I will not come is certain, for, in the first place, I am too old to learn new manners; and in the second place, as you know, I do not think it justice that great Signors should live in idleness, eating up in the Metropolitan City the rents that are wrung from the earth by their sweating hinds, and leaving no supervisor and no dispenser of charities upon their domains.”