Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (332 page)

“I will bet each of the four gentlemen who has already betted five thousand pounds apiece that I myself will find, fetch, house, and marry this lady, subject to the proviso that Sir Francis Dashwood has made, each and all of us to be bound by their promise of honour not to question Mr. Hitchcock, and Mr. Hitchcock to bind himself to give no clue.”

There was a little buzz of subdued conversation round the table, and then Mr. Roland Bettesworth said: “By God! a cool bet, brother, when you have not seen the picture.”

“Not seen the picture!” Sir Francis exclaimed, his eyes opening wider. “Oh!”

He appeared to reflect for a moment, his glance upon the tablecloth, and then he said, “Well, we have all taken your bet. Let it be inscribed in the minutes of this Society, and we will put our names to it. But there must be a term agreed upon.”

“Oh, surely there must be a term agreed upon,” the Duke of Norfolk said. “It might last twenty years. I should not wish to have the housing of a wrinkled and toothless creature. Let us say six months.”

“Your Grace,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “let us make it one month, and let us have a committee of inquiry into all other matters before we begin. I would wish to invite all the gentlemen who have betted to drink a dish of coffee at my house tomorrow, in the afternoon.”

CHAPTER V
.

CROUCHING in the darkness, under the garden wall of Ashford House, Mr. Roland Bettesworth threw up several times an iron hook, which had attached to it a stout cord. The hook caught at last in the
cheveux de frise
that crowned the wall, and, with a heavy cloak over his arm, with some difficulty he commenced the ascent of the rope, which was knotted at intervals to give him a foothold. At the top of the wall, swinging by one hand, he contrived with the other to cast his cloak over the spikes. Arrived on the top, he sat himself down complacently upon the cloak. He let the rope down upon the other side of the wall, and sat peering into the thick darkness. The leaves of an aspen rustled perpetually in the faint wind; a nightingale began to sing high up in the dusky obscurity, and suddenly a small, clear voice said from below —

“This has cost me two paduasoy mantuas.”

Mr. Roland swiftly descended his rope and landed in a bed of flowers. In the thick darkness he could hardly perceive more than the loom of two figures and the faint white disks of two faces. “Why, I will buy the two mantuas back from the excellent Trott for five guineas,” he said, and

he waded through the high flowers till his feet touched the gravel of the walk. “Maria, adorable charmer!” he exclaimed, and held out his arms.

“Trott, you perceive, is here,” Maria Trefusis exclaimed.

“Angel of light,” he said, “can you not trust yourself with me?”

“In the dark,” she answered, “I would rather trust myself to you and Trott. What is your very great news?”

“My brother, Mr. Bettesworth,” Roland said, “has betted a round twenty thousand pound that he will marry the lady who was the model for ‘Celia in her Arbour.’”

Maria Trefusis said: “Oh! oh! oh!” and in the darkness the maid Trott tittered.

“Now,” said Mr. Roland,’ “how may I best turn this to account? Twenty thousand pound is a round sum, and from it, win or lose, if the matter be skilfully handled, there should be some pickings for me — and for the excellent Trott,” he added.

In the dark Trott appeared profoundly, and in silence, to consider the matter.

“I do not see how my brother can win the bet,” Mr. Roland continued. “Or, indeed, he cannot win the bet, the lady being married, but I very much desire that he should continue for a long time in the search, for so long as he continues seeking he will remain unmarried, and so long as he remains unmarried, but no longer, I shall retain my post about his person and my comfortable honorarium. And with a few lucky casts of the
 
dice.... Oh, rapture!”

“You will never gain enough by the dice to marry me upon,” Maria said. “You have been making the attempt too long.”

“The more likely that Fortune will smile. The luck must change if one keeps at it long enough. Fortune’s a woman, to be won by wooing.”

“Fortune’s a jade,” Maria said, “that loves not empty purses.”

“I can give you but four minutes more,” Trott said. “Sir John’s nurse may call to me at any moment for sherry whey or posset, or who knows what.”

“Sir John’s nurse!” Mr. Roland exclaimed.

“Sir John is very ill,” Maria answered. “Ever since your brother confronted him — how like a lion he was! — Sir John has kept his bed. They say he babbles and clutches at the bedclothes. And these should be bad signs.”

“Then!” Mr. Roland exclaimed.

“Then,” Maria answered.

“This will need very careful reflecting upon. I had not thought of this.”

“I can give you no more time,” Trott said remorselessly.

“Oh, a quarter of an hour — ten minutes — only five,” Mr. Roland said.

But the maid answered: “You must back into the house, mistress. My place suits my taste too well for me to lose it.”

“Lord! what a thing these servants be! How smooth and fawning before the public eye; how tyrannous in private! For there is not a woman of the world but has her secrets, and needs private letter-carriers and the like.”

“Madam,” the girl said, “if you gave more time to courtship, or the business in hand, and less to sentiments upon things in general, you would get more said.”

“Well, I am coming,” Maria said. She began to move away, and then came back.

“Mr. Roland Bettesworth,” she said, “I do not think that I am any more minded to marry you, but I will keep secret in the matter of the portrait. And for Trott, you must buy her secrecy as best you may.”

“Not minded to marry him!” Trott exclaimed. “What has the poor gentleman done?”

“Oh, I know very well,” Maria answered, “that you have found my secret meetings with Mr. Roland Bettesworth a source of profit, and that you have cut short this meeting in order to make a second out of it. But if a woman may love, a woman may withdraw her love, and I am minded to withdraw mine.”

Mr. Roland fell upon one knee on the garden-path, and, though he found the stones cruel to his knee, he protested valiantly of broken hearts.

“Oh, I know very well,” Maria said, “you are practised in lamentations. You have five other flames that I know of, and how many others? Sukey Tremaine has shown me your billets to her, and there are the same doves and Cupid’s arrows, and tresses and ringlets and despairing sighs, as there are in all of mine.”

“Jealousy!” Mr. Roland exclaimed. “I swear — !”

“Oh, do not swear,” she answered. “I know you will say I am the only one. I could say it all for you, with the fitting gestures and apostrophes. So I am not jealous. But you may think, if you like, that I have seen a man that I like better. I will be a sister to you.”

Mr. Roland answered: “One kiss!” She dwindled away into the darkness, and he rose to his feet exclaiming: “The devil, and I have to climb back over this weary wall!”

Mr. Bettesworth rose very betimes on the morrow. He neglected his levee of tradesmen, poets, and musicians, and having permitted himself to be dressed with haste, if with care, he sat for some time reflecting. The buzz of half-awe which his incursion into the betting of the night before had created filled him with a secret satisfaction. The monstrous nature of the bet was sufficient to ensure for him a great measure of distinction. And if the task set him was a hard one, and the search appeared a little insane, he was undertaking it in very good company. Moreover, the search and the undertaking were, on his part, so much the bolder in that he had never seen the picture itself. He was, however, going to rectify that omission very immediately, and having drunk his cup of morning chocolate he took his stick and his hat and set out for the Argyle Rooms, where Mr. Hitchcock’s pictures were being shown. He had the pleasure of seeing Sir Francis Dashwood, very light, debonair, and smiling, holding a little lace handkerchief in his hand, run down the high, rounded steps into the street, and walk away in the opposite direction beside a sedan-chair carried by two porters in Sir Francis’s own livery. It occurred to him that, like himself, Sir Francis was attempting to refresh his memory with a careful study of the picture.

Mr. Hitchcock was alone in the first room, small, square and low, lit from above, and hung round with landscapes, and portraits of gentlemen in red coats, and ladies with small busts and very
décolleté
shoulders. Mr. Hitchcock was smiling his sardonic, inscrutable smile; his spectacles were down on the bottom of his nose. In the palette on his thumb he had a formidable array of brushes.

“You are come to measure more pictures?” Mr. Hitchcock asked.

“No, I am come to measure my wit against Sir Francis Dashwood’s,” Mr. Bettesworth answered.

The old painter laughed.

“You must rise very early to do that,” he answered.

Mr. Bettesworth moved past him into the farther room. Here there were hung hunting-pieces, flower-pieces, and sea-scapes. He ran them all over with his eye. He could see no picture containing a woman of any kind. In the wall immediately facing him there was, however, a blank space. He turned his head over his shoulder and asked of the painter: “Where is ‘Celia in her Arbour’?” and the old man smiled a not very mirthful smile.

“Sir Francis,” he said, “bought that piece of me this morning, and carried it off in a sedan-chair.”

Mr. Bettesworth counted forty before he spoke.

CHAPTER VI
.

MR. BETTESWORTH found Lady Eshetsford still at her toilet, in a flowing bedgown of white and silver and pink, her dark hair as yet unpowdered. She was much gayer, she spoke in a voice more natural, her motions were more sinuous, her hands more free. She sat to a Chinese table of greenish-yellow olive-wood, from the centre of which there rose a tall mirror framed in silver. Let into the table-top were twelve small cells containing a profusion of little articles, patch-boxes in French porcelain, powder-dredgers in English silverware, pomanders in silver gilt, and a number of little golden keys. Lady Eshetsford was just dismissing a small milliner with a huge band-box. Trott, with her demure face and downcast eyes, stood behind the mirror, and, obedient and silent, Maria was at her guardian’s side.

“No, I will buy no more silks,” Lady Eshetsford was saying to the milliner as Mr. Bettesworth was admitted, “ — or not for some days yet.” And then she threw back her head and laughed and laughed and laughed. “Here is our wagerer,” she said. “Have you come to seek clues here?”

Mr. Bettesworth, who had dressed with an unusual care in a plum-coloured coat with a waistcoat of Spitalfields brocade, on which were figured primroses and columbines in their natural colours, nerved himself to an assurance of dignity. To have displayed confusion then would have been to have let all be lost. He cocked his hat beneath his arm and made a courtly, stiff obeisance.

“Truly, madam,” he said, “to what better place could I come to seek for a clue?”

Lady Eshetsford dropped her dark eyes, and meditatively rubbed the edge of her hand-mirror against her lower lip. She murmured, “Hem!” and then, “No, truly, you could have come to no better place.”

Long and apprehensive glances passed between Trott and Maria.

“Assuredly I stand in need of help,” Mr. Bettesworth said. And he told them of how Sir Francis Dashwood had taken away the portrait. Lady Eshetsford’s lips pursed up into a little whistle, but before she could speak Partridge entered the room.

“Madam,” he said, “there are three gentlemen of the undertaking persuasion upon the doorstep. One of them is recommended by Doctor Bobus, one by Sir William Ratcliffe, and the other by no one at all — but happening to pass this way, and seeing by the doorstep two of his brothers of the Scutcheon and Hearse, he very nimbly ascended and knocked upon the door.”

“Partridge,” Lady Eshetsford said, “I will in no way be disturbed either by tradesmen or friends for the rest of this morning.”

“Madam,” Partridge said, knowing his lady had a taste for the comic, “I understood that such was the case, but Messrs. Sable and Mowlem are pleased to be very importunate for an interview with your ladyship. For they say that should Sir John have a very long illness, and unfortunately decease at its end, they, or whichever of them your ladyship chooses to perform the obsequies, could save your ladyship a matter of two crowns a day if your ladyship should now commission them instead of waiting till hereafter — the two crowns a day being the fee they would charge for a watcher to wait outside the house and bring news of the decease.”

“The unconscionable vultures,” Lady Eshetsford said. “Bid the porter whip them from the door.”

“Madam,” Mr. Partridge said, “this is the mere custom of the trade and trick of the physicians and chirurgeons and apothecaries. For your ladyship must know that whenever one of these has a patient of distinction as to whose recovery he entertains grave doubts, he confides his misgivings to one of these Sable gentry, receiving in return a handsome honorarium. Then the undertakers set watchers to watch upon the house, and the fee for the watching, as your ladyship has heard, is charged to the relict. But in this case Doctor Bobus and Sir William Ratcliffe, having been called into consultation, had each recommended a different and several undertaker. Now it happened that they met upon the doorstep, and having fallen to fisticuffs upon the point of precedence, the third gentleman, who had dogged the footsteps of one of them, ran nimbly up the steps and was in at the door before the porter could say no.”

Lady Eshetsford looked pensively at the ground, and motioned with her hand for Partridge to withdraw.

“Sir John is very ill,” Lady Eshetsford said. “Poor brute, I think he will never upset a watch-box again.”

“I should not have thought your ladyship would have wept much,” Trott, the maid, commented.

“Nor shall I,” Lady Eshetsford answered; “but if you have fought with a stalwart foe for a matter of years, surely you will give him the honours of war to the extent of a pensive moment?”

Maria turned her blue eyes upon Mr. Bettesworth’s face, and said, with her rather piping intonation —

“Sir John has never held up his head since the baiting you gave him last Thursday as ever was.”

“Why, I should be sorry to have been the cause of his death,” Mr. Bettesworth said.

“Oh, for sure, your Honour is not the cause of his Worship’s death,” the maid commented. “Your Honour let his blood and so saved him. Till Friday he was only crestfallen, but it was on Friday that Mr. Jack Williamson, his jackal, came to him and said he would no longer serve as companion to such a lily-livered quake-jaw. From outside the door I heard him speaking in high tones, and Sir John kept silent all the time and stared at his toes, that stuck up through the sheet. And when Mr. Williamson said that he would to all the mohocks of the Town tell the tale of his Worship’s cowardice and of the oaths he took, Sir John groaned once very lamentably and then was silent.”

“This Mr. Williamson came into my service on Friday night,” Mr. Bettesworth said.

“That was the great grief of Sir John,” Lady Eshetsford commented. “I should not much affect your Mr. Williamson.”

“Truly, I do not much affect him,” Mr. Bettesworth answered, “but I retain him as an example to be avoided. And so Sir John is sick to death of grief?”

“Oh, not of grief!” Lady Eshetsford exclaimed.

“His nurse,” the maid said, “fell asleep on Friday night, and Sir John, who had been docked of all liquor, crept downstairs to the cellar, where he knew there was a small anker of brandy. And, as is surmised, bearing this in his arms to stow it under his bed, he fell on the great staircase, and so split his skull where before it had been split by the watchman’s pike-stave. So that unless we put it down that his desire for liquor was caused by his grief — which we may in no wise do, since he has not been sober these two years, save last Thursday, that was when he lay abed — your Worship need in no wise consider that Sir John’s blood is upon your hands. For if he die, he will die like the Worshipful knight he is, in his own bed.”

“Well, I am very glad of it,” Mr. Bettesworth said.

Lady Eshetsford considered for a moment. “Touching the portrait...” she said. And then, “You, Maria, and you, Trott, go and wait behind the door of my anteroom and when, with preternaturally grave faces, the ward and the maid had disappeared behind a little white door whose handle and furnishings were of chased silver-gilt, she said, with a certain earnestness —

“Mr. Bettesworth, to be frank with you, I know very well who the model for the portrait was; as you know, the painter is a protégé and a tenant of my own, and since — nay, do not deny it! — I have singular cause to be grateful to you, I will, if you wish it, reveal to you this secret.”

Mr. Bettesworth counted forty before he answered, and when he spoke he spoke very slowly. He had been considering what course Lady Eshetsford and all persons of proper spirit would wish him to pursue.

“No,” he said at last. “I do not think — though I have no claim at all upon the gratitude of your ladyship — that I will ask this favour of you. For,” he continued, “if we consider this wager from the moral point of view, it was to be one of some difficulty, and I should run upon equal terms with my competitors. Now, although in the terms of the wager nothing was said as to your ladyship, it was very expressly said that none of us should hold communication with the painter — and that I take to include such other persons as Mr. Hitchcock’s confederates.”

“But,” Lady Eshetsford interrupted, “it cannot be said that Francis Dashwood has not held communication with the painter, since he purchased and subtracted the picture from under your very nose.”

“That, madam,” Mr. Bettesworth retorted, “is a matter of setting his wit against mine. My own remissness alone let me tell him that I had never seen the portrait; his readiness it was that let him see that if he could purchase and take the portrait away I should be very much at a loss — as indeed I am. I may take it that he has asked no questions of Mr. Hitchcock, so that in that sense he has had no communication with him—”

“In short,” Lady Eshetsford said, “you are determined, quixotically, to have no advantage over any of your rivals.”

“I will have none,” he returned, “save such that God has given me in my parts and wits. Thus, supposing Sir Francis Dashwood or the Duke of Norfolk being hot upon the scent, I should pass their chariot standing in an inn-yard, I would not scruple to remove a lynch-pin, so that a quarter of a mile farther on, their wheel coming off, they should be cast into a ditch and so lose much time. For that I take to be much of a muchness with Sir Francis purchasing the picture. Or, again, since, as I hear, Sir Francis is a very good swordsman, I myself being no indifferent one, I should make no scruple, should he and I both have found the lady, to fight a duel with him, so that either by my proving myself the more skilful of the two I should make progress in the lady’s affections, or by my killing him he should be put out of the way for good.”

“Very strange creatures you men are,” Lady Eshetsford said. “You would rather have a man’s death upon your soul than ask a question from your cousin!”

“Cousin,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “the point is not one of such a nicety as should escape one of your ladyship’s discernment. For the wager Sir Francis, the Duke, Mr. Simon Harcourt, and myself have set ourselves, is to achieve a feat of no mean difficulty. So that if, fortuitously and by hazard, I have stumbled at the very outset upon a possibility of easy solution, and one which, I take it, is not so open to my competitors, I am determined that I will not take advantage and thus beg the issue.”

“And I am not certain,” Lady Eshetsford said,
 
“that I do not applaud you for taking this course, though I am sure that any woman would have more sense. But I take it that I would rather have you a foolish but manlike man, than a womanly but cunning and well-advised one.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “I hope I shall be able to prove to you that I am not a foolish man, but merely a man of honour. For we have passed our words, all of us, that we will none of us ask questions of this painter.”

“But I am not this painter,” Lady Eshetsford said. “Nevertheless, it must be manifest to your ladyships perspicacity that you and certain members of your family are, as it were, in one corporation with Mr. Hitchcock—”

“God forbid,” Lady Eshetsford said, “that I should be put upon a level with the painter!”

“But in this particular matter—” Mr. Bettes-

 
worth answered.

“God forbid,” she interrupted him again, “that in this particular matter, or in any other matter, I should ever be in any corporation with any painter, poet, maker of music, or all such beggarly creatures! I have heard of a gentleman or two who have written plays. But a painter — Heaven forfend!”

“This is very much beside the mark,” Mr. Bettesworth said. “The matter in hand—”

“The matter in hand,” she interrupted him, “is neither here nor there. If you will you may kiss my hand and go, for I will not be bombarded with long speeches as to the customs or habits of the animal called man.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “I foresee that should your husband die I shall very willingly lose this twenty thousand pounds.”

“Sir,” she answered, “I will take to my soul the flattering unction that you would willingly lose a sum of money, but that you should lose a heavy wager laid against so many men — that I do not believe you will find so easy.”

“Madam,” he said, and he raised her hand to his lips, “I have never in my life met one so charming, so —— —”

“Sir,” she answered him, “I will wager all I possess, and such small sums of my husband’s fortune as he has not dissipated,” — a little malicious smile went round her lips,—”I will wager all that, that if ever you find this lady you will deem her just so charming, and so all the other adjectives in nature as ever you will come to bestow on me. Ay, and you will be just as eager to marry her as ever you could be to marry me.”