Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (339 page)

The five gentlemen, including Mr. Roland and Mr. Jack Williamson, passed an agreeable evening, with supper and cards and wine.

CHAPTER VI
.

MR. JACK WILLIAMSON was invaded by an invincible restlessness. It is true that ten minutes before — it being then half-past ten of the following morning — he had received his marching orders from Mr. Bettesworth. He was to visit the wives of the town shopkeepers, and to discover from them how many and which of their daughters had sat as models for the painter of “Celia in her Arbour.” Mr. Jack Williamson, however, was the younger brother of the Squire of Crawley, and this, he was accustomed to say, had been the sign of what had ruined him all through life. He meant that he was deficient in initiative.

“If I’d ha’ been a man of parts,” he was accustomed to exclaim, cocking his hat over his right eyebrow, and that more particularly when he was in his cups, “I should ha’ pushed my way into the world before my brother; but what must I do but wait like a lamb and come second. There you have me, Jack Williamson, and nobody’s enemy but his own.”

He was invariably wavering except when he had any business in hand, then he would have the persistence of a blood-hound after something else.

Nothing would stop him. He was thirty-three.

He had naturally red hair and blue eyes with a cast in one of them, and upon occasions of state he would wear a suit of rusty blue and chestnut full wig. These and a suit of greasy grey, with grey woollen stockings, and a small sword with a pinchbeck hilt, were all that he possessed in the world. From Mr. Bettesworth he had a pound by the week, and his victuals and housing. He was as bold as a lion when he had a leader, but if you found him alone you might pull his nose three times before he could make up his mind to draw.

Having had set to him the errand of catechising the Ashford town madams, Mr. Williamson was pervaded by an irresistible desire to do what he called saluting the cherry lips of Lydia Chuckel. He was aware that the neglect of the one task and the performance of the other would alike bring down on his head the cold anger of Mr. Bettesworth. But he had no sooner been dismissed by his employer, with the command to go instantly into the town, than, finding himself in the great hall with its echoing black-and-white marble tiles, its Ionic stone columns, dim light, and antique busts on tall marble plinths, he felt the irresistible impulse not to turn to the left and so out of the front door. He turned, instead, right-handed.

The hall, with its monuments, ran through the whole breadth of the more modern portion of the building. At the inner end were very tall white doors with silver-gilt handles and finger-plates. And these gave at once on to a very low, rather musty-smelling corridor, with low, leaded windows, black roof beams, and a floor of uneven red brick.

Through the obscure windows could be seen a dovecote, a quantity of stable manure, and the hide and offal of a steer that had been killed for their entertainment that morning. These lay in the yard formed by two wings of the house. Carried along by the feeling that so inevitably brought him into mischief and misfortunes, Mr. Williamson turned towards the western wing. He pulled open a rusty-hinged wicket-gate at the bottom of some mouldering stairs. At the top of them he entered the western wing, for he remembered to have heard dimly from some one — he had been fuddled for most of the preceding day — that Mr. Chuckel’s family inhabited some portion of the rear of the house. The stairs descended as precipitately as they had gone up. They were more worm-eaten; they smelt of decaying wood, and they went down into an entire obscurity. The bottom step half gave way beneath his tread, and saving himself he fell against a door. It gave way, and he found himself in a long, low kitchen that had a brick floor all in waves like the sea, with sink-water standing in a puddle near the bake-.oven, and suspended from the rafter a quantity of gammons of bacon and of dried pot-herbs. A very ancient woman in a discoloured skirt, from which the rags depended, and half naked as to the upper part of her person, her thin hair no more than a grey wisp, her eyes bleared and rheumy with the wood smoke, hung over a crock that depended from an iron rack, and mumbled in time to the bubbling of the water.

When Mr. Williamson inquired as to the whereabouts of Miss Lydia, she turned her head over her shoulder, displayed a single tooth, and with an expression of rage such as is seen upon the features of a huge and disturbed ape, she uttered a single harsh, rattling shriek. As if that had settled the matter, and would protect her from further interruption, she returned her face to her broth and to her mumbling.

“Stop my vitals, a wise woman!” Mr. Williamson said. “If I had it I would cross her palm with gold.”

He opened a door and came upon a cupboard, empty save for cobwebs. He opened another, and found it full of old horse furniture and of straw that had been carried in by rats. A white-washed, wooden archway, that promised to lead him nowhere, let him round a dark angle into a low passage where the sunlight fell. Through a half-open door he perceived Lydia Chuckel beyond a littered table, sewing at a pink-and-white garment. She was, indeed, in her underskirt and bodice, sewing at her sprigged silk, which the day before had galled her under the armpits. Mr. Williamson, whose tremulous nerves had been rendered more tremulous by the sight of the old woman, rather fell against her door, and found himself incapable of speech. He determined to drink sherry instead of brandy for the rest of the week. Lydia looked up at him with some composure.

“I cannot come to my uncle,” she said, “not for this twenty minutes.”

“Stop my vitals!” Mr. Williamson panted, “I am not the lackey in this errand. I am the principal. I am not a note-bearer, I am a gentleman of high degree.”

“Sure you have all the air,” Lydia said. A cobweb was across his right cheek, and he had collected several more, to drape his battered hat, from the low passages.

“I am a gentleman,” he repeated truculently. “I can feel the smart of Cupid’s dart like another. You have the neatest back in Christendom.”

“Sure, your Worship saw only my back last night,” Lydia replied.

“Why, had I been in the mood,” he answered, “I had slain Mr. Bettesworth with one thrust of my sword and worshipped you to the face.”

“Well, you are in the mood now it seems,” Lydia said.

But the imaginative effort of his previous speech had once more so taken away his breath that Mr. Williamson could do no more than extend two wavering arms, and exclaim huskily —

“One kiss!”

Her laugh started him into such an energy that, refraining from an oath to spare his breath, he started to run round the table. She was back over her stool before he could take it in, and suddenly he found his already dim eyes obscured by yards of muslin. She had cast a discarded petticoat, which composedly she seized from the littered table, over his head; she had carefully dropped her silken gown on to her mother’s sofa, to be out of harm’s way, and she was round the table and half out of the door before he was well disengaged. He swore then and started to follow her. He observed that she took down a key from a nail in the lime wash of the corridor wall; she opened a door, and was in the stable-yard. He ran lamely in her tracks.

Mr. Roland Bettesworth stood with his back to his brother in one of the long windows of the great saloon. He, too, had received his marching orders. He was to visit the wives of the physicians, chirurgeons, attorneys, and apothecaries of the town of Ashford. But inasmuch as this class was comparatively small in the town, there was less haste for his departure. The park spread out below his eyes: three avenues radiating towards the horizon, the central one filled with the ornamental water, and ended by the spire of the church and the cockling roofs of the town.

“Hang me, brother!” he said, “but you have a very comfortable way of life. You are always on the top notch of the tally.”

Mr. Bettesworth said, “As how, brother?”

“Why,” Mr. Roland answered, “there you sit always in this draughty, big room, with the big windows every one can look in at. When you go to write a letter you must sit out upon the lawn, as stiff as a ramrod, to a table covered with damask. And you are never in négligé.”

“Why, brother,” Mr. Bettesworth answered, “for my part I would be ever e
n grande tenue
, and sit as much in public as may be.”

“When there are here more than fourteen small retiring rooms, anterooms, and book-closets! Give me a little room, a bottle of claret, and a wench!”

“Thus you lost Maria!” Mr. Bettesworth said sardonically.

“And so you would win — Now, who is it, brother, you would win? Nor I have not lost Maria so much by wenching, neither, as by lack of a portion. Maria would take me if I had my ten thousand to put against hers.”

“Why, if you say that,” Mr. Bettesworth answered, “to her; and you shall have your ten thousand pounds upon proof of her consent.”

Mr. Roland said, “Say you so, brother?” And again: “Say you even so?” He continued to look out of the window in a pensive silence. His situation very well puzzled him. He could not for the life of him tell where he stood; he could not openly and bluffly ask his brother what were his intentions. For he stood in an unholy fear of Mr. Bettesworth’s peculiar turn of mind. Mr. Bettesworth appeared to him so entirely unreasonable in his resolutions, unaccountable in his actions, and whimsical in his methods of putting them into execution. That his brother had been invaded by the tender passion he considered likely, for Mr. Bettesworth would fall into reveries, would sigh at times in a manner not fitting to his full-dressed dignity, would suddenly catch himself up and with some self-consciousness would resume the matter in hand. And, thought Mr. Roland, if a man so frigid and so watchful in his actions could so permit himself to be overheard and overlooked, this must be a sign of a very considerable thirst for some petticoat. Now, if Mr. Bettesworth should marry — for Mr. Roland could not for one moment imagine that his brother would succeed in his quest for the phantom Celia — if Mr. Bettesworth should marry, what would become of himself? The promise of the ten thousand pounds upon his marriage with Maria, if it aided him somewhat in his deliberations, did not aid him very much; for the ten thousand pounds were capitally desirable, but Maria, if she were desirable, was by no means an entire necessity to his peace of mind. He would have her as well as any other who had ten thousand pounds to her name. But he was by no means certain that Maria would have him. Had she not seemed to manifest a sudden passion for Mr. Bettesworth himself? Had she not refused to reveal to himself, Mr. Roland Bettesworth, the identity of Celia’s original? So that, supposing Maria refused him, would Mr. Bettesworth also refuse him the ten thousand pounds? Might he not say Maria or none other? Might he not marry, and turn his brother out of doors, penniless, to beg his bread or trail a pike in Flanders? Or, on the other hand, might Mr. Bettesworth not himself be enamoured of Maria? Might his offer of the ten thousand pounds be not merely a cruel jest? And Mr. Roland said to himself that his brother was coldly inhuman. He had a power too arbitrary, he would end by coming a mad original, like his uncle before him. He would become the laughing-stock of counties, and the cause for jeers of whole cities. What Mr. Bettesworth needed, in Mr. Roland’s eyes, was a prodigious downfall for his vanity, and to be thoroughly fooled by some woman. But that did not help Mr. Roland in his cogitation.

Mr. Bettesworth was sitting in the chair by the chimney-piece. He had upon his knee Lady Eshetsford’s book of addresses. He pretended to himself that he was studying his plan of campaign. More actually he was taking pleasure in the sight of his mistress’s handwriting.

“Now,” thought Mr. Roland, “if I aid him to succeed in his quest, he may marry the original of Celia and turn me adrift.” If, on the other hand, he hindered the search, and Mr. Bettesworth failed, Mr. Roland imagined it exceedingly likely that his brother, disgusted with his first essay to conquer the Town, might very well retire, as his uncle had done, to Winterbourne Longa, never to leave it again. “And what sort of life would that be for me,” Mr. Roland thought ruefully, “amongst middens and deserts?”

He turned into the room to ask —

“Brother, you are prodigious eager to win the wager. You imagine that this person must be within a close circuit of this town of Ashford. Why, then, do you not take to yourself the town-crier and dispatch him to the market-place and streets, offering a great reward in money, or even your hand and heart themselves, to this Celia if she will manifest herself?”

“Brother,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “inasmuch as I am a man, with the brains and perceptions of other men, this thought has presented itself to me also, but I have rejected it. Or, to speak truly, I have deferred it. For you will see, upon reflection, that it should be the last in order of my proceedings. For consider how high a value the offer of my hand would appear to possess. Might there not arise a hundred claimants? How then should I sift between them? Either I must take them up to Town to confront Mr. Hitchcock, or I must bring Mr. Hitchcock down here to confront them; and it is very possible that Mr. Hitchcock might refuse me this service. In any case, there will be a delay resultant, so that this should be only a forlorn hope. We have but three weeks remaining for the prosecution of our search. Now, my plan is to have resort to your friend the bellman only if we have not succeeded otherwise; and many applicants should overwhelm us, we may take all such as are willing to come up to London with us, to be confronted by Mr. Hitchcock.”