Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (330 page)

“I will have your company and your advice in London,” the Squire said petulantly. “I will have it; I desire it; I need it.”

“Let us consider now the case of this young man, your brother,” the Signora said, “for I am very determined not to come with you to London, but will stay here to administer this house, where I am very comfortable. That from time to time you will need advice in larger matters, such as matters of the heart, I can well believe. For that purpose you may come down here to receive my advice if you will have it. But in such matters as what clothes you should choose, or what company you should seek, I could help you very little — or rather, not at all. This much is determined and settled. Now, what will you do for your brother, since your uncle has very badly treated him?”

The Squire walked across the hall to close the door upon the feasters. Having reached the punchbowl, they were making very loud noises. He came slowly back; his head hung down, whilst he reflected.

“Hark’ee, Roland,” he said, “you are a man of fashion?”

“Of a very poor fashion as the cat jumps,” Roland said. “You have got all the gold I should have had.”

“How many years shall I live?” the Signora asked in Italian. “Let us say ten. Then for ten years you must provide for this brother of yours. When I die he shall have all I have.”

A spasm of jealousy passed over the Squire’s face. “You like him better than you like me,” he said.

“It is not liking, but justice,” she said. “My fortune should help you very little, such as it is; but such as it is it came from your uncle, who has used this young man very badly.”

Bettesworth said: “Well, well!” but the young man burst in —

“Hark’ee, brother, and you Signora. This is cursed ill-breeding to jabber in that lingo while my neck is in the noose. If there is any money for me, let me have it. If not, let me go.”

“I am minded to instal myself in Bettesworth House in London,” the Squire said.

“Then I must pack from there, too?” Roland asked bitterly, for he lived in three rooms of the great Bettesworth House that was in Golden Square.

“There is no need until I marry,” Bettesworth answered.

“And when will you marry?” Roland asked.

“When I find a wife,” the Squire said, and Roland ejaculated: “Oh!” He had thought that his brother’s intention had been to marry the Signora Poppæa.

“Now tell me,” the Squire said, “do you know a man of some fashion who is all that a man of fashion should be, who eats grossly, cocks his wig on the wrong side, hems when he should not hem, and does all things ill? So you know of such a man and is he to be hired?”

Roland Bettesworth, who as yet knew his brother very little, raised his eyebrows.

“Do you need a running footman?” he asked. “No, I seek a tutor in the ways of the Town,” the Squire answered gravely.

Roland pushed his wig on one side and scratched the back of his head.

“Are you minded to become such a bear, brother,” he said, “as was our worthy uncle, who set all London by the ears with his brawlings?”

“It is for that reason that I would have such a man always before my eyes,” Bettesworth said, “the better to avoid his example.”

“But, brother...” Roland began.

The Signora blinked with enigmatic amusement.

“I am determined upon this,” Mr. Bettesworth said grimly, “for I will know what to avoid still more than what to do, and this was the expedient of the Spartans. Surely such a man can be found. Is not Tom Rakes such an one?”

Roland Bettesworth, having shrugged his shoulders minutely, addressed himself seriously to the matter.

“You may find fifty,” he said, “by sending a crier round Golden Square. Tom Rakes is such an one, but he is it only by will and in low companies. He is a cully and a bully, a cheat and a braggart, when he likes; but in the society of his betters he is very well behaved.”

“Then he will be of no use to me,” the Squire said, “for I am his better. Yet I have seen him comport himself very ill at our Assemblies at Salisbury.”

“Oh, your Assemblies at Salisbury!” Roland Bettesworth said ironically.

“Well, I am anxious to learn, brother,” the Squire said. “Are our Assemblies at Salisbury utterly contemptible? Could one not mention them without raising laughter in a fashionable rout?”

“Oh, brother, brother,” young Bettesworth said, “all this is much too raw. Your Salisbury Assemblies may be very well, — they may be monstrous well near Salisbury, — but if you mention them in Town it must be only in such a way as that, in giving a toast, you should say: ‘Here’s to the fine eyes of Maria that shot the fatal dart through me in the Salisbury Assembly, where I was by accident owing to the breaking of my coach-wheel.’ Or, again, you might say, that at the Salisbury Assembly, where you went out of duty to your tenantry, you observed a monstrous ridiculous lady who said: ‘Tee-hee!’ and was sick with a surfeit of macaroons. But as for hired bullies, riformados, returned captains that never trailed a pike nor smelt saltpetre, why, if you will go in the Park when the fashion is there, if you will throw up a sheet of paper with your desire writ upon it, a hundred will start out of the ground before it touches earth. But if it is not a hired bully you desire, but only a poor person of quality who is gross and oafish and to be hired, why I commend you to Jack Williamson, who is brother to the Squire of Crawley. It is true that he is kept by Sir John, the husband of our cousin, Lady Eshetsford, to be made a butt of. Jack Williamson can do nothing well, nor say anything but folly, so that in the course of a day he will three times upset his cup of clary on Cousin Polly’s gown and twice fall over her ladyship’s lap-dog. But I will wager Sir John keeps him so straitened that you may easily buy him to be your butt, or a foil to show off the handsomeness of your person, or whatever it is that you desire him for. And Sir John will part with him, I think, not very unwillingly, for he maintains him only to plague his wife, whom the goodly knight cannot abide. But how will all this save me from taking purses on the highway?”

“And our cousin Polly?” the Squire asked. “How does she stand in the world of fashion?”

“Oh, Lady Eshetsford is — Lady Eshetsford! She is at the head of the Ton; to be commended by her for your figure or your address is to be a made man with all women of quality. She has a laughing mouth and a drooping eye, and, for all she wields a fan with the best of them, she is said to have so tender a heart that she does more for her husband than most husbands care to have done for them.”

“And her husband does not affect her?”

“Oh, her husband is one of your rake-helly Parliament men who squanders his substance in brothels, beats watchmen, and returns home at two in the morning — if he return at all — with a crowd of choice spirits like Jack Williamson and my Lord Pomain, to howl in her ladyship’s antechamber and wake her from her sleep. Sir John desires to spoil her ladyship’s beauty, he says, but he succeeds ill. He had once great lands in Hampshire, but I think they are all gone save such as are entailed, and his wife’s jointure, which is a pretty penny.”

“And how stands our cousin affected to you?” the Squire asked.

“Oh, Polly likes me well enough,” Mr. Roland answered. “She has said that, had I your inheritance, I should be the prettiest young fellow about the Town. And her ward Maria — In short, I have my place at Polly’s table four days a week, if I have not elsewhere to eat.”

He spoke with an unaffected negligence. Mr. Bettesworth asked in Italian, of the Signora Poppæa: “Do you think my brother speaks truth?” And the Signora answered: “He has all the air of it. But to test him you must surely wait until you come to Town to see for yourself.”

“But I design to put this poor fool out of his agony,” the Squire said.

“I have nothing against it,” the Signora answered. “Only count forty before your generosities as before your angers.”

The Squire stood still and silent, as if he were reflecting. And suddenly Roland Bettesworth broke out —

“Curse me, brother! if you were not my brother I would run you through the vitals. This is the very damn’dest bad breeding, and you are not so much my brother neither; for though we were begot by one father, yet you have so robbed and cozened me, and fawned upon my uncle and backbitten, that here I stand, a broken man, with ten times your parts. You are only a poor rustic, trained to do no more than hallo after any fourfooted creature that will do you the compliments to flee before you. You have no parts; you have no presence; you cannot so much as twirl a cane in the approved manner. In short, you have gained a great inheritance by remaining a rustic brute. If I had stayed like you, training my nose to the scent of a hare, I might have shared my uncle’s inheritance, but had remained a booby. Now, I am the elegantest blood upon the Town — ask Polly Eshetsford if that is not so. And I thank God, though I have not a maravedi in my fob, that I am not such an one as thou, brother of mine.”

The Squire crooked his hat under his arm and bowed minutely.

“Brother Roland,” he said, “if your plain-speaking be equalled by your elegance, then, indeed, you may well be the elegantest young blood upon the Town; and the whole manner and course of your future livelihood, in so far as it is in my hands, and if you will not liefer take the road, depends upon this, that you be the mirror of modes. But hark’ee, Tom, if this be not so, an ensigncy in a marching regiment shall be all that falls to your part from the purse of me. But if Polly Eshetsford endorse—”

“Oh, Cousin Polly will endorse all that and more,” Roland Bettesworth grumbled between his teeth.

“Then I will take you,” the Squire began, “as my master of horse, as my steward, as my major-domo — as anything you will save my brother. For I am certain there is very little brotherly love between us.”

Roland pulled out from the table the little tabouret stool upon which the attorney had been sitting, and for the first time sat down.

“This would call for a great deal of reflection,”

he said; “but with the devil behind me what the devil else can I do?”

“To take the road would be a freer life,” his brother said maliciously.

“Till it ended at the end of a confining rope,” Roland answered. “How would you like to have it said that a Bettesworth had adopted High Toby?”

“It would only enhance the rumour of my great possessions as showing that I had all,” Mr. Bettesworth retorted, “and get me the more adulation.”

Roland bent down to pluck a small white feather from his black silk stockings.

“As a man of broad acres,” he said, “I am of no account. But when it comes to bear-leader am I not the most eminent that you should find? Your need of me, then, is as great as mine of you.”

“Brother,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “if you will haggle, haggle. If you will leave it in my hands, leave it in my hands. Or if you will haggle and state your highest price, then I will double it. In short, you shall share my purse to the reasonable extent of the cost of living of a young man upon the Town. And this engagement shall continue between us until such times as I think fit to marry.”

“Then it is set to me,” Mr. Roland said, “to impede by all the means I can your marrying any woman.”

“That risk I will take,” said Mr. Bettesworth, with a grim humour. He squared his shoulders and stood erect, blond and masculine. “If it comes to a rivalry between you and me, I think I may bear my part. But if you marry before me, you shall have a suitable settlement.”

“So that it ends in a race between thee and me, brother,” Mr. Roland said, “as to who first shall find a yoke-fellow.”

CHAPTER III
.

AT three in the afternoon of the day when Mr. Boodle sent home the white satin suit, Mr. Bettesworth and Mr. Roland Bettesworth sat at dinner with their cousin. Lady Eshetsford, and her ward, Maria Trefusis. The room was very tall and white, the windows very tall with large square panes. The lackey, in his blue livery, wore a large bouquet of pinks in his button-hole, and carried in the dishes. The maid who served them had very short skirts, very high-heeled shoes, stockings with clocks, and a very bare throat over which was knotted a handkerchief of lawn.

“You have come from viewing Mr. Hitchcock’s pictures,” Lady Eshetsford said in a high and studied company voice. She held her elbows close to her waist and moved stiffly above her hips. “And you have not seen ‘Celia in her Arbour’! That is to go to Venice and not to have seen the Campanile. It is the talk of the Town; it is the buzz of the Town. Mr. Hitchcock, now, will pay his rent, for he has been a tenant of ours this many year, and not a farthing of his money has our steward fingered.”

“Madam,” Mr. Roland answered, “in the two hours we were in the rooms I all the while bathed myself in the charms of that most delectable of

creatures,” — he bowed to Lady Eshetsford and muttered, “Save one,” but he shot a long glance at Maria Trefusis, which Lady Eshetsford did not miss, “but my brother,” he continued, “is one of the Cognoscenti. Those two hours he spent over a three-four of canvases, with the artist at his side, and his increasing-glass, and his tape-measure.”

Lady Eshetsford raised her eyes at her elder cousin.

“A new mode,” she said. “La! what will the Cognoscenti be doing next!”

Pausing before he spoke, Mr. Bettesworth uttered gravely —

“It is no new mode, madam, but a series diversion I have set myself — none other than to discover the secrets of the chiaroscuro of the ancient masters.

I hold a theory that in the case of nearly all their finest pieces shadow is to light in the proportion of two to one, and I have various other theories with which I will not weary you. But I made measurements of many hundreds of canvases when I was in Italy, and I have much evidence to support me. It was upon these measurements that I was engaged in Mr. Hitchcock’s rooms this morning, and that is how I came not to attain to a sight of the piece you so belaud.”

“La!” Lady Eshetsford said. “To be sure, I have the fellow of it somewhere in this house. It is a cloth called ‘Celia Reading,’ but it is a very small one. Stay, where is it now!”

She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “It was offered me this last week as ever was, by the painter, either as an act of homage or as in view of the rent which he does not pay for the house in Ashford, where his wife and children live. But you shall see it,” she said with affected briskness. “Maria, go look in my closet. Trott, go you and seek it in the blue chamber. Partridge, you to my anteroom, for I may have left it there.”

And the three being suddenly gone, she leaned without any languor or haste across the table, and said, very business-like and with her voice natural, to Mr. Roland —

“Sir, give me the billet that you have been seeking all day to slip into Maria’s hands.”

Roland threw himself back in his chair and laughed.

“So your ladyship has seen all those little feints,” he said. “The one with the hat behind my back?”

“And the one with the fan,” her ladyship said. “And the glances and the squeezed hands.”

Lady Eshetsford of Ashford — formerly a Miss Douglas of Blair Gowrie — had been twenty-eight when she married Sir John, the small-pox having attacked her thus late in life. But having passed through that ordeal unscathed, she was a very marriageable woman, and she was now thirty-two to her husband’s forty-five. She had brought him a matter of ten thousand a year in lands which he could not hypothecate, and she was accounted the ruler of the modes and the sharpest tongue about the Town. At twenty-eight she had had, indeed, a laughing mouth and a laughing eye, as Mr. Roland Bettesworth had said. At thirty-two she had, under pressure from a detesting and brutal husband, acquired an air of abstraction, of self-containment, and of power. Very tall, dark, with hair that was always powdered to a grey-white, the natural red upon her cheek-bones made her black eyes and red lips add an agreeable sympathy of red, white, and black. She wore at that moment a rather long skirt of grey silk, from which the overskirt of pink rose-embroidery upon white satin draped back, somewhat in the mode of a curtain drawing up on each side before scenery. This rose-embroidered satin came up in the jabot of her waist, so that grey-haired, grey-skirted, red-cheeked and rose-clad, mocking, but with quite firm intonation, as she reached across the small dining-table to take the note from her ineligible cousin, she made against the white of the panelling such a symphony of greys and pinks and whites as she very well knew how to calculate. And because she so well knew how to calculate these things she could make or mar any young man upon the Town. To be permitted to hold her fan was sufficient to make you eligible for an heiress with five thousand pounds. To have been understood to have enjoyed her more intimate favours was sufficient to let young Tom Wyndham, penniless as he was, make a match with the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. Leaning across the table, she had secured the little twisted note which had been intended by Roland Bettesworth for her ward, Maria. But suddenly, heralded by a splitting thump upon the white panels, and by the raucously shouted words —

“So I’ve claret in store

Then in peace I’ve...”

through the opening door, Sir John Eshetsford stumbled into the room. His three-cornered hat, together with his wig, sat over the right eye of his flushed countenance; one tail of his long blue coat was torn off, so that it hung, dangling, from a shred of gold lace before his knees.

“... and in peace I jog on to the devil.”

He finished his snatch of song. His one eye, that could be seen, lit up incredulously and joyfully. “The devil!” he said. “In truth I have jogged on to the devil, and I feel his horns. They sprout, they sprout, on my own forehead.”

His voice had in it both irony and liquor.

“So,” he said, “I am come in time to see my lady’s gallant hand my lady a billet. It is well my wig is over my eye or I should see two billets.” He rolled paunchily towards the table. Lady Eshetsford leaned perfectly motionless, her extended hand holding the white note very visibly in her fingers. Her face was expressionless; she remained dumb, and suddenly she tossed the note at Sir John’s feet. In his effort to pick it up his hat and wig fell on to his toes; but unsteadily, and with a shaking hand, he untwisted the little note. His shaven head revealed a large cicatrice, the effect of a blow he had received from a pike in a scuffle with the watch four nights before. Swaying on his legs, he held the note a long way from his eyes and attempted, with great difficulty, to read it aloud. He had got as far in a muzzy voice as, “
Adorable charmer and angel,”
when in the tall doorway behind him there appeared at once the figure of Maria Trefusis — and, peering round the door-post, with a red face and chestnut wig, that of Jack Williamson, his bully, who was on his hands and knees because he was too drunk to stand. Tall, erect, her blonde and burnished hair unpowdered, Maria was a figure all in white, and she held one hand up and listened, her startled blue eyes passing from face to face.

“‘
Be at the Buttery window a little after twelve of night,’”
Sir John read out with a beery ferocity. “Had ever man more damned damning proof of his own cuckolding? ‘I
think your house will be abed by then
,
and if the old bull
...’”

Sir John peered round from face to face with a liquorish sagacity. “The old bull is myself,” he said, and he lightly touched his forehead as if he expected to find it wet. “‘
I have news,’
” he read on, “‘
not so good as I had expected
,
nor yet so bad as at one time seemed
...’”

Sir John abandoned the reading of the note, which was very troublesome to him since he was no scholar. “News!” he exclaimed. “News not so bad nor yet so good. I’fackins, here’s bad news, for my lady has played me false; here’s good news, for now I will have a bill of divorce, and that is the best news I have had this four year.”

Her ladyship, motionless, threw over her shoulder at him the words —

“Then you will go starve, Sir John, for you have nothing but my jointure.”

“By God, no!” Sir John shouted, “I will have the divorce and your jointure too. If that be not the law, I am a Parliament man, and will get the law changed. I married your ladyship for your jointure, and your jointure I will have. I have had four years of the cursedest, growlingest life with a measly, whining, nagging clog on my ankles. Now,” and he waved the note in the air, “I hold the means to be a free man.”

Walking like a pigeon on account of her very high heels, Maria, her hand lifted too, went swiftly past her guardian, and pulled the note from his unresisting fingers as she passed. She had been flushing and paling, and she slipped quickly to the other side of the table behind the two Bettesworths. Roland had an amused grin round the corners of his mouth, but upon the brows of Mr. Bettesworth there descended, with every word of the Knight, a deeper and deeper frown.

“What you make with my letter I do not know, Sir John,” Maria said. Sir John was wavering more than ever on his feet.

“Your letter, heyday!” he said. “Minx! Strumpet!” And then suddenly an inspiration came through his puzzlement.

“Ha! a plot,” he said. “I am not to be plotted; nor no such plot shall shield my lady from the weight of my arm and the law — the law will be heavy enough, but my arm more so. But first, I will have the letter back, and beat thee for plotting.”

Grown suddenly ferocious, he staggered swiftly behind his wife, round the table, and was brought up before the risen figure of Mr. Bettesworth in his white satin.

“Ho, a white cockatoo!” he exclaimed, and he staggered back. “Out of the way, Pander! Here is my wife well furnished with a minx for a pimp and a white knight for a go-between. But I will have my sword about all your backs...”

Mr. Bettesworth did not speak; he was counting forty. Mr. Roland Bettesworth leaned back on his chair, tilting the forelegs off the ground. He had his hands in his fob pockets, his coat-tails swept the floor. In spite of the discovery of his intrigue with Maria Trefusis he was grinning ironically.

“This is what it is to take other men’s billets, my Lady Polly,” he said. “And,” thought he, “if a man may not come to it by the Buttery window an ardent flame will find out how to go down a chimney.”

A deep and all-covering flush was upon the face of Maria Trefusis. She looked upon the ground and twisted the note between her fingers. She hated the disclosure. She dreaded her aunt’s tongue in the privacy that would come afterwards.

Mr. Bettesworth’s white figure, with the set face and the moving lips, gave Sir John the idea that here was a man tremulous with fear. His nose had been pressed almost against Mr. Bettesworth’s, and he staggered a pace and a half back to give himself room. His hand, with the muddied ruffles, fumbled at the torn skirt of his coat for his sword-head. His eyes blazed with the fury of a bully opposed to a coward; his red cheeks grew more inflamed.

“By God! I will cut off all your ears,” he shouted. “I will slit your nostrils, as we did with the tailor’s apprentice last night.” He had by then found his sword-hilt, and wrenching at the handle, much as a man does with a corkscrew, for the blade was rusty, he succeeded at last in drawing. Mr. Williamson, his long periwig sweeping the ground, having tried three times without success to assume an erect posture, had navigated the table behind Lady Eshetsford’s back upon all-fours. And, with somewhat of the aspect of a spaniel, he leered at Mr. Bettesworth from beside his employer’s bulging calves.

“Ay, slit noses, cut off ears!” he babbled, with a cheerful grin. “We’re mohocks still if we cannot stand.”

Mr. Bettesworth’s grey steel came out from the thin black scabbard with what seemed to Sir John an extraordinary suddenness — with a suddenness so extraordinary that he felt upon his wrist the sharp pain of the touch of a light sword before his muddled brain had realised that he faced an adversary. His point dropped to the floor, and, beginning with his nose, a green pallor turned his features to a semblance of verdigrised copper.