The French Lieutenant's Woman (62 page)

"Your name, if you
please?"

He noted the absence of
the "sir"; perhaps she was not a maid; her accent was far
superior to a maid's. He handed her his card.

"Pray tell her I
have come a long way to see her."

She unashamedly read the
card. She was not a maid. She seemed to hesitate. But then there was
a sound at the dark far end of the hall. A man some six or seven
years older than Charles stood in a doorway. The girl turned
gratefully to him.

"This gentleman
wishes to see Sarah."

"Yes?"

He held a pen in his
hand. Charles removed his hat and spoke from the threshold.

"If you would be so
good ... a private matter ... I knew her well before she came to
London."

There was something
slightly distasteful in the man's intent though very brief appraisal
of Charles; a faintly Jewish air about him, a certain careless
ostentation in the clothes; a touch of the young Disraeli. The man
glanced at the girl.

"She is ... ?"

"I think they talk.
That is all."

"They" were
apparently her charges: the children.

"Then take him up,
my dear. Sir."

With a little bow he
disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. The girl indicated that
Charles should follow her. He was left to close the door for himself.
As she began to mount the stairs he had time to glance at the crowded
paintings and drawings. He was sufficiently knowledgeable about
modern art to recognize the school to which most of them belonged;
and indeed, the celebrated, the notorious artist whose monogram was
to be seen on several of them. The furore he had caused some twenty
years before had now died down; what had then been seen as fit only
for burning now commanded a price. The gentleman with the pen was a
collector of art; of somewhat suspect art; but he was no less
evidently a man of some wealth.

Charles followed the
girl's slender back up a flight of stairs; still more paintings, and
still with a predominance of the suspect school. But he was by now
too anxious to give them any attention. As they embarked on a second
flight of stairs he ventured a question.

"Mrs. Roughwood is
employed here as governess?"

The girl stopped in
midstair and looked back: an amused surprise. Then her eyes fell.

"She is no longer a
governess."

Her eyes came up to his
for a moment. Then she moved on her way. They came to a second
landing. His sibylline guide turned at a door.

"Kindly wait here."

She entered the room,
leaving the door ajar. From outside Charles had a glimpse of an open
window, a lace curtain blowing back lightly in the summer air, a
shimmer, through intervening leaves, of the river beyond. There was a
low murmur of voices. He shifted his position, to see better into the
room. Now he saw two men, two gentlemen. They were standing before a
painting on an easel, which was set obliquely to the window, to
benefit from its light. The taller of the two bent to examine some
detail, thereby revealing the other who stood behind him. By chance
he looked straight through the door and into Charles's eyes. He made
the faintest inclination, then glanced at someone on the hidden other
side of the room.

Charles stood stunned.

For this was a face he
knew; a face he had even once listened to for an hour or more, with
Ernestina beside him. It was impossible, yet ... and the man
downstairs! Those paintings and drawings! He turned hastily away and
looked, a man woken into, not out of, a nightmare, through a tall
window at the rear end of the landing to a green back-garden below.
He saw nothing; but only the folly of his own assumption that fallen
women must continue falling--for had he not come to arrest the law of
gravity? He was as shaken as a man who suddenly finds the world
around him standing on its head.

A sound.

He flashed a look round.
She stood there against the door she had just closed, her hand on its
brass knob, in the abrupt loss of sunlight, difficult to see clearly.

And her dress! It was so
different that he thought for a moment she was someone else. He had
always seen her in his mind in the former clothes, a haunted face
rising from a widowed darkness. But this was someone in the full
uniform of the New Woman, flagrantly rejecting all formal
contemporary notions of female fashion. Her skirt was of a rich dark
blue and held at the waist by a crimson belt with a gilt star clasp;
which also enclosed the pink-and white striped silk blouse,
long-sleeved, flowing, with a delicate small collar of white lace, to
which a small cameo acted as tie. The hair was bound loosely back by
a red ribbon.

This electric and
bohemian apparition evoked two immediate responses in Charles; one
was that instead of looking two years older, she looked two years
younger; and the other, that in some incomprehensible way he had not
returned to England but done a round voyage back to America. For just
so did many of the smart young women over there dress during the day.
They saw the sense of such clothes--their simplicity and
attractiveness after the wretched bustles, stays and crinolines. In
the United States Charles had found the style, with its sly and
paradoxically coquettish hints at emancipation in other ways, very
charming; now, and under so many other new suspicions, his cheeks
took a color not far removed from the dianthus pink of the stripes on
her shirt.

But against this
shock--what was she now, what had she become!--there rushed a surge
of relief. Those eyes, that mouth, that always implicit air of
defiance ... it was all still there. She was the remarkable creature
of his happier memories--but blossomed, realized, winged from the
black pupa.

For ten long moments
nothing was spoken. Then she clutched her hands nervously in front of
the gilt clasp and looked down.

"How came you here,
Mr. Smithson?"

She had not sent the
address. She was not grateful. He did not remember that her inquiry
was identical to one he had once asked her when she came on him
unexpectedly; but he sensed that now their positions were strangely
reversed. He was now the suppliant, she the reluctant listener.

"My solicitor was
told you live here. I do not know by whom."

"Your solicitor?"

"Did you not know I
broke my engagement to Miss Freeman?"

Now she was the one who
was shocked. Her eyes probed his a long moment, then looked down. She
had not known. He drew a step closer and spoke in a low voice.

"I have searched
every corner of this city. Every month I have advertised in the hope
of ..."

Now they both stared at
the ground between them; at the handsome Turkey carpet that ran the
length of the landing. He tried to normalize his voice.

"I see you are ..."
he lacked words; but he meant, altogether changed.

She said, "Life has
been kind to me."

"That gentleman in
there--is he not... ?"

She nodded in answer to
the name in his still incredulous eyes.

"And this house
belongs to ..."

She took a small breath
then, so accusing had become his tone. There lurked in his mind idly
heard gossip. Not of the man he had seen in the room; but of the one
he had seen downstairs. Without warning Sarah moved to the stairs
that went yet higher in the house. Charles stood rooted. She gave him
a hesitant glance down.

"Please come."

He followed her up the
stairs, to find she had entered a room that faced north, over the
large gardens below. It was an artist's studio. On a table near the
door lay a litter of drawings; on an easel a barely begun oil, the
mere ground-lines, a hint of a young woman looking sadly down,
foliage sketched faint
behind
her head; other turned canvases by the wall; by another wall, a row
of hooks, from which hung a multi-colored array of female dresses,
scarves, shawls; a large pottery jar; tables of impedimenta--tubes,
brushes, color-pots. A bas relief, small sculptures, an urn with
bulrushes. There seemed hardly a square foot without its object.

Sarah stood at a window,
her back to him.

"I am his
amanuensis. His assistant."

"You serve as his
model?"

"I see."

"Sometimes."

But he saw nothing; or
rather, he saw in the corner of his eye one of the sketches on the
table by the door. It was of a female nude, nude that is from the
waist up, and holding an amphora at her hip. The face did not seem to
be Sarah's; but the angle was such that he could not be sure.

"You have lived
here since you left Exeter?"

"I have lived here
this last year."

If only he could ask her
how; how had they met? On what terms did they live? He hesitated,
then laid his hat, stick and gloves on a seat by the door. Her hair
was now to be seen in all its richness, reaching almost down to her
waist. She seemed smaller than he remembered; more slight. A pigeon
fluttered to alight on the sill in front of her; took fright, and
slipped away. Downstairs a door opened and closed. There was a faint
sound of men's voices as they made their way below. The room divided
them. All divided them. The silence became unbearable.

He had come to raise her
from penury, from some crabbed post in a crabbed house. In full
armor, ready to slay the dragon--and now the damsel had broken all
the rules. No chains, no sobs, no beseeching hands. He was the man
who appears at a formal soiree under the impression it was to be a
fancy dress ball. "He knows you are not married?"

"I pass as a
widow."

His next question was
clumsy; but he had lost all tact.

"I believe his wife
is dead?"

"She is dead. But
not in his heart."

"He has not
remarried?"

"He shares this
house with his brother." Then she added the name of another
person who lived there, as if to imply that Charles's scarcely
concealed fears were, under this evidence of population, groundless.
But the name she added was the one most calculated to make any
respectable Victorian of the late 1860s stiffen with disapproval. The
horror evoked by his poetry had been publicly expressed by John
Morley, one of those worthies born to be spokesmen (i.e., empty
facades) for their age. Charles remembered the quintessential phrase
of his condemnation: "the libidinous laureate of a pack of
satyrs." And the master of the house himself! Had he not heard
that he took opium? A vision of some orgiastic menage a quatre--a
cinq if one counted the girl who had shown him up--rose in his mind.
But there was nothing orgiastic about Sarah's appearance; to advance
the poet as a reference even argued a certain innocence; and what
should the famous lecturer and critic glimpsed through the door, a
man of somewhat exaggerated ideas, certainly, but widely respected
and admired, be doing in such a den of iniquity? I am overemphasizing
the worse, that is the time-serving, Morleyish half of Charles's
mind; his better self, that self that once before had enabled him to
see immediately through the malice of Lyme to her real nature, fought
hard to dismiss his suspicions.

He began to explain
himself in a quiet voice; with another voice in his mind that cursed
his formality, that barrier in him that could not tell of the
countless lonely days, lonely nights, her spirit beside him, over
him, before him ... tears, and he did not know how to say tears. He
told her of what had happened that night in Exeter. Of his decision;
of Sam's gross betrayal.

He had hoped she might
turn. But she remained staring, her face hidden from him, down into
the greenery below. Somewhere there, children played. He fell silent,
then moved close behind her. "What I say means nothing to you?"

"It means very much
to me. So much I..."

He said gently, "I
beg you to continue."

"I am at a loss for
words."

And she moved away, as
if she could not look at him when close. Only when she was beside the
easel did she venture to do so.

She murmured, "I do
not know what to say."

Yet she said it without
emotion, without any of the dawning gratitude he so desperately
sought; with no more, in cruel truth, than a baffled simplicity.