Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (337 page)

“For me,” Lydia said, “I will go to London with him if he will take me; and I will ride in a glass coach, and have footmen to run before and clear the way for me.”

“Why,” Mr. Chuckel resumed his sneer, “I doubt if this gentleman dare show his face in London; and the only coach that you would ride in with him there would be a hangman’s cart to Tyburn.”

“Shall he be a knight of the road now?” Lydia asked, with her nose in the air, and she turned to go.

“No, I am calling him neither highwayman nor thief, nor yet even footpad. But for impostor or Papist I am not so certain. These are troubled times, and who shall say what a great gentleman may not be who comes with a great army of men and meets other gentlemen at inns, spreading wild, fantastical tales of searching for heiresses, and wagers.”

“I will fill the brandy flagon,” Lydia said, “for, for sure, ye ha’ emptied it, though I filled it this morning. And for the rest, I will go hang my silk sprig on a rosemary bush in the sun, that the mustiness may come out, and that it may pleasantly affect Mr. Bettesworth’s nostrils.”

Mr. Chuckel waited till she had closed the door upon her retreat, and then spat the word “Bastard!” after her.

“Husband,” Mrs. Chuckel said, “if you have the courage neither to lay your stick about my daughter’s back nor yet to say things to her face, it would comport more with the character of a man to bite your tongue and spare your breath when you are an angered.”

Mr. Chuckel looked down at the floor. “By God!” he exclaimed, “I think I have this Mr. Bettesworth trapped.”

“God save you,” Mrs. Chuckel said, and she began again to read her novel.

CHAPTER V
.

MR. BETTESWORTH had, indeed, caught a sight of Lydia Chuckel at the house of Mr. Hitchcock, but it had been a glance so short, and so suddenly upon an introduction into a new society, that it had caused him no emotion whether of one kind or another. She had been standing behind the two large, brown-haired daughters of Mr. Hitchcock; she had worn a grey dress; she had vanished before the formality of introduction had been performed. But it had intrigued him slightly to observe through the open window, and upon the grass of the park that he faced, the figure of the girl running swiftly in the direction of the house, her neckerchief held in her hand, the wind blowing back her grey skirts. It intrigued him because she had so very soon reached that portion of the park: he had, indeed, not yet finished the necessary complimenting to Mrs. Hitchcock upon the looks of her daughters, and yet he remembered to have observed that, although the painter’s house had a window giving on to the park, there was no door in the wall at all until you came to the gate, which was a hundred yards or so distant. The girl vanished from the view of the window, and he turned to question Mrs. Hitchcock. They were

by then all seated and very formal. The two girls were very raw-boned, brown-haired, and largemouthed, with great teeth, and kind, sleepy eyes. One of them was sewing at a tambour frame; the other was adjusting her sewing, fitting the outer edge upon the embroidery canvas as the lid of a bandbox goes on. Mrs. Hitchcock, however, who had been removing brandied cherries from a large stoneware receptacle into more convenient vessels of earthenware, sat with her large hands open upon her lap and smiled maternally at Mr. Bettesworth. With a brown face as large as a warming-pan, the skin netted all over with tiny wrinkles, Mrs. Hitchcock had been a peasant girl when Mr. Hitchcock married her, and a peasant woman she remained. She could not write at all, but she could spell out words of two syllables. She was excellent at preserving fruits and in minding her garden; she was ever contented, but her fingers were too large for needlework and her hands too heavy for pastry or cakes, though she made excellent bread because she had so much strength to give to kneading the dough. She was very shrewd; she was no respecter of persons; and the only holiday she ever gave herself was at times to go into the hop gardens where she had spent her youth, to tie a few vines in the spring and in the autumn to pick a bushel or so. Indeed, a spray of last year’s hops depended from a nail above the portrait of her father, that Mr. Hitchcock had painted whilst he was courting her. This hung above the wooden mantelshelf, between the empty gun-racks; for Mr. Hitchcock was no sportsman, not even to the extent of a rabbit or two in the park of an evening; nor did he so much as carry a blunderbuss for his protection when he travelled. The room was tall for its rather small size. It contained little furniture save the table of dark polished wood, on which, upon a sheet of paper, stood a stone crock, with the delft pots half filled with brandied cherries. A bureau with a glass front in the upper part, revealing a few china plates and many blue-and-white jars of conserves, stood against the left-hand wall and reached nearly to the ceiling. The walls were panelled all round in large squares and painted a dull blue. The floor was so sedulously waxed that Mr. Bettesworth’s chair slid every now and then upon it. The room was rather dark, so that near the window the young ladies must hold their eyes close to their embroidery, by reason of the tall trees that hung right over the house.

“Bless’ee, master,” Mrs. Hitchcock said, “we told that Mr. Harcourt and that Major Penruddock, that was here a week ago, that we wouldn’t tell’em nowt, but—” and she smiled broadly upon him, for she dearly loved a fine upstanding man, and Mr. Bettesworth, with his clear complexion, his high features, his oval face, his square shoulders, his blue coat with the gold buttons, golden sword-hilt, and his erect poise as he sat in his tall-backed chair — all these things, as she ran her jovial brown eyes over him, seemed to make him the very figure of a man for her. Moreover, his serious and unsmiling attentions were just what she asked of a man, gentle or simple. “ — but I’ll tell’ee this as in a manner of a feavour. We wouldn’t tell’ee owt neither. Not for lack of goodwill — for you’re by way of being not only her leddyship’s cousin, but are civil spoken, unlike the other twain, and have hitherto offered me no bribery to betray my lord and master, which was as much as to say that I was no honest woman, and so to set my back against them. But this I’ll tell’ee. If I would I couldn’t, for I know nowt of my master’s doings nor ask nowt; nor yet do I think it my place, being the weaker vessel of the twain, to ask if I should desire to know.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “your ignorance surely, if it springs from such motives, is as much to be commended as it incommodes me.”

“Why, thank’ee, master,” Mrs. Hitchcock said cheerfully. “I thought’ee would say as much, and even so my master is a very secret man. At ten of the clock he will go into his painting room, and we shall not see him, nor hear him, nor smell him — for to say truth he smells always of his paints, which is a smell pleasant enough to me though there be some mislike it. Yes, my master is a very secret man, so that he is even pleased to be pleasant about it, for he has his little quips and rogueries. ‘Meary,’ will he say to me, ‘yo’ may tell all the secrets of mine that yo’ know. For all that yo’ do know could be written down upon a groat, and the writing not so small neither.’”

“But in what do his secrets consist?” Mr. Bettesworth asked.

“Master,” Mrs. Hitchcock laughed broadly, “if I knew, would they be secrets from me? But every man has whimsies after his kind: some seek to be proud; some are mad for money; one will set his heart upon having the best horse; and, bless’ee, my master is set upon not being overlooked. It is a sort of second nature of the man that is like a badger, who cometh out of his hole only o’ nights, and looketh over his shoulder to see that he be not observed. But it troubles me nowt, and is no one else’s affair.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “surely it is the affair of all the world how so great a man as your husband chooses to live?”

Mrs. Hitchcock’s enormous mouth opened, her hands fell open at her sides. “Mercy, man!” she exclaimed. “So great a man as my husband! What has he done to be called great? Is it merely sticking little dabs of paint upon cloths?”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “Mr. Hitchcock’s name is upon the mouths of every one in London Town; there is no man that is more spoken of nor looked up to than the painter of ‘Celia in her Arbour.’”

Mrs. Hitchcock shook her sagacious head.

“Why, men will make toys of anything; and in London Town they have nothing to do but run up and down the streets and gawp at one another, so no doubt they will make a nine days’ wonder of my Johnnie.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “when I, and the Lords of Parliament, and half the great men of to-day, are forgotten and in our graves, people will be making books of your husband and you and your daughters.”

“Of us?” one of the girls tittered.

“Surely,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “you have sat as models for your father?”

“Why, I have sat for drawings of my shoulders now and again,” the girl on the right said in an uncontrolled voice, and her sister echoed her tones with —

“I sat for my ankles, and crouched down once for a picture of Caliban, which was an ugly dwarf.”

“Madam,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “since your husband has told you that you may reveal his secrets, surely it is asking you to commit no disloyalty to ask you what persons in this neighbourhood have been limned by your husband on his cloths, and more particularly for a picture called ‘Celia in her Arbour’?...”

Mrs. Hitchcock’s broad sides shook with merriment. “Aye,” she said, “I thought you would come to that; but that is what I cannot tell you, for there is not in this countryside a wench that he could get for love or money that my husband has not tumbled, taking from one a shoulder, from another an arm, from another a breast. And for the picture called ‘Celia in her Arbour,’ why, I have never seen it, and all I can tell you is that I have the best husband in the world, as husbands go, and one that is all the better in that he is not much in the house.”

Towards seven of that evening Mr. Bettesworth called to him Lydia Chuckel. The candles were just lighted in the tall, long room that had the great carved mantelpiece and the pictures by Vandyck, but the sunset was falling in great shafts of light across the wide prospect of copsewood and marsh that the tall windows afforded. Because it was chilly, a fire had been lit in the hearth-place, and across the great dogs, with roses of bright brass at their heads, a large log sent up pale flames. Mr. Bettesworth sat on the right of the hearth. He had changed his blue coat for one of grey satin, for he expected that evening a visit from Mr. Harcourt and Major Penruddock. Mr. Roland and Mr. Jack Williamson were playing cards at a little table on the other side of the hearth. They both wore their hats, for they swore the old place was woundily draughty.

“Child,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “I have seen your face before.”

Lydia was in her dress of pink-and-white sprigged silk, her petticoat was of grey satin, her heels were very high, her hair powdered till it was nearly white; and her cheeks were brilliant, and in her bosom were crushed four red roses.

“La! your Worship,” she said, “that your Worship can never have done, for I have lived buried in the grave all my life.”

“Then surely I must have been a grave-digger,” Mr. Bettesworth said.

Mr. Roland and Mr. Jack Williamson were devouring her back with their eyes, Mr. Williamson having interrupted the oaths he was uttering because he had just lost twenty-one shillings to Mr. Roland.

Mr. Bettesworth raised his voice to say —

“I desire to be private with this child.”

Mr. Roland laughed, and Mr. Williamson rose, his hat on one side, his waistcoat disordered, swearing that this was too much of Fortune that he should first lose his money over cards and then be driven from the place when the first possible girl they had seen that ten days came into the room. But, with the air of discomfited musketeers, he and Mr. Roland lounged discontentedly from the room, Mr. Williamson taking up the cards and vowing that he would have his revenge elsewhere. Mr. Chuckel, however, who had stood till now rigid and silent in his black at Lydia’s elbow, for all the world as if he were a serjeant in charge of a prisoner, remained still motionless.

“Mr. Chuckel,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “I said that I would be private with your daughter.”

“But, sir—” Mr. Chuckel expostulated.

“Sir,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “if you suspect that I have designs upon the maid’s innocence, I vow that I have none.”

“Still, sir—” Mr. Chuckel continued, in an extraordinary agitation.

“I do bid you begone,” Mr. Bettesworth said. “At first it was a little matter, but your hesitation arouses my suspicion. Upon another hair’s-breadth of waiting I will discharge you from your stewardship, and seal up your books and papers.”

Mr. Chuckel went with a very obvious reluctance, his feet rubbing on the ground, his head twice making as if it would look over his shoulder.

“Child,” Mr. Bettesworth said to the girl musingly, “I am very sure that I have seen your face and heard your voice before now.”

Lydia stood before him fingering her underskirt, her head hung down in an attitude of shyness.

“Mayhap’twere some one like me,” she said. “I have never been where your Worship has been, for your Worship has never visited here or in any other of my lady’s places.”

“Your father has always been in my lady’s service?” Mr. Bettesworth asked.

She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears, and repeated the words “My father!” with an extraordinary expression of hatred and contempt.

“I hear,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “that you are an indifferent bad daughter to Mr. Chuckel. Yet in his reluctance to leave you with me surely he displayed the spirit of a watchful and a protective parent.” Lydia looked under her eyelashes at Mr. Bettesworth.

“I know your Worship is jesting,” she said. “Mr. Chuckel was afeard that I would let the cat out of the bag. Nay, he knew I would do it if I could to ruin him.”

Mr. Bettesworth sat up in his chair, very solemn and formal. In the falling dusk the firelight and the candles played with yellow reflections on the grey satin of his coat.

“Child,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “where is the duty that you owe to your parent and begetter? Not even the lowliest of the beasts would betray its father to ruin. No, not even the cruel tiger nor the abashed jackal. And the Scriptures shall tell you that the relation of daughter to father — nay, even the pious deportment of Iphigenia towards her sire—”