Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (350 page)

CHAPTER V
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“MADAM,” the Signora said, “no, very assuredly, I do not think that this medicine has been too strong for Mr. Bettesworth.”

Lady Eshetsford drew her skirts more high in front of the wood-fire, for though it was by then June, the Winterbourne, still full, ran round the house, and in the evening the mists rose.

“Why,” she said, “you have known him for years longer than I. But it seems to me that Sir Francis will not lie more than three days abed now, and so far I have had not three hours of converse with Mr. Bettesworth.”

“I have not known my benefactor for more than three weeks,” Mr. Williams said, “so that I do not know how he was before these troubles, but if ever I have seen a madman, Mr. Bettesworth is one.”

The Signora’s boudoir, a tall, dark, panelled room, was filled with odd objects of her former career. Over the chimney-piece was a huge steel engraving of St. Peter’s, with three gentlemen in enormous skirted coats pointing with tasselled canes at various portions of the cupola. Flanking this, and glaring at each other, were portraits of the late Mr. Bettesworth and of the late Pope Innocent XIII. The

white marble statuette of a stricken deer should have occupied a shelf to itself beside the door, but it was overlaid with books of devotion, and with account books of the Signora’s estate and charities. The complete dress of purple paduasoy, that she was in the habit of wearing of a morning, was suspended across a corner of the room, enormous and inflated with a string that passed through the sleeves and was attached to two nails. One of the halberds, still decorated with the long mourning weepers that had been carried by the servants at the late Mr. Bettesworth’s funeral, loomed dimly in another corner of the room.

“This state of mind,” Mr. Williams continued, “is one that I have frequently seen in those about to suffer conversion — this moodiness, this paying no attention either to his victuals or to the general conversation. I have seen men like this for several days — nay, for weeks on end — and then suddenly they will spring into the air and cry Glory! Glory!”

The Signora regarded him with a humorous and kindly glance.

“No doubt,” she said, “Mr. Bettesworth and Lady Eshetsford and myself will find conversion upon the same day, and we shall spring into the air and cry ‘Glory! Glory!’ which in my case will be a greater miracle than such as I have seen worked by Cardinal Capelone sixteen years ago come Michaelmas.”

“Why, we have worked greater miracles of conversion than this,” Mr. Williams said.

“I don’t doubt it,” the Signora answered; “but for the moment the point to be considered is which of us three shall beard Mr. Bettesworth? You, sir, might do it by virtue of your sacred office. Yet it is a matter of doubt whether even here, of a certainty, your office is at all sacred, which I say with no intention of discourtesy, but only as one anxious to discover what may best serve my former pupil.”

“Madam,” Mr. Williams said, “for the moment I will willingly waive any claims that I may have to this ministration. For there is about Mr. Bettesworth at the present time an icy humour that I cannot very willingly cope with. He has read more in books of law and of theology; he has indited more petitions and scrutineered more accounts in these last few days than I had conceived had been within the powers of endurance of any mortal man, not upheld by a sacred passion. And this gives me the greater hopes of his conversion, for may not this be the working of a fiend within him? On the other hand, his preoccupation is mostly of a purely carnal kind. He is seeking revenge, aggrandizement, and the assertion of the temporal law. But this, again, in certain parts of it gives me more hope. For certainly his activities make for the alleviation of the sufferings of the poor, the humble, the oppressed; such as the stick-picker of Ashford and the dead harlot.”

“For myself,” Lady Eshetsford said, “I set little store by stick-pickers and harlots, and the poor and humble. These must fare after their kind. But I think it is a symptom of a beneficent disorder that Mr. Bettesworth applies himself thus diligently to a hard task, and one that he himself alone can undertake.”

The Signora grasped to herself her black ebony crutch, and pulling herself by the arms of the chair out of its deep recesses, she groaned with pain but stood upon her feet.

“I,” she said, “even I myself will go and speak with him, and I do not think that either of you will take this as presumption in me. For upon the one hand, in the presence of Lady Eshetsford he may feel himself moved by shame, mortification, and failure. In the presence of you, Mr. Williams, he might feel anger and disgust. This would not be so much because of your personal properties as because Lady Eshetsford, being on the
ton
, must remind him of the wager he imagines himself to have lost, and Mr. Williams of his ridiculous plight in the Round House. Whereas I, though I am only an old woman, having remained here in the home of his youth, where I taught him much of all that he knows, may give him emotions of softness, and may bring to his eyes the drops of human contrition.”

Gazing at the fire, Lady Eshetsford was not above grasping at her bosom with a sudden motion of jealousy.

“I beg,” she said coldly, “that you will not—”

The Signora Poppæa was shuffling her uneasy bulk towards the door.

“Oh, rest easy,” she said, though she could not turn her head; “that which is yours, whether of revelation or of possession, shall be retained for you; my province is only to soften and render ductile the wax that is his soul.”

Mr. Bettesworth, too, was gazing at the fire in his great library. It was a tall apartment, as large as the nave of Winterbourne Church, and for the greater part its books were in obscurity, for he had only two candles upon a Chinese lacquered table at his elbow before the fire. His books were divided into such sections as those of Law, Topography, the Chase, and the History of the Ancients, by tall wooden pillars, upon each of which stood a black marble bust of Caesar, of a Greek, or of a Roman lawgiver, upon plinths of polished granite.

Upon an easel close to the fire was a cabinet picture by Pompeo Cibboni; it had a gilt frame, that shone in the light of the candles, and represented the “Rape of Ganymede.”

Mr. Bettesworth was in his fullest of dress — a purple velvet long-coat with silver lace, and tight knee-breeches of white satin that shone like opals in the firelight. His wig of chestnut curls was longer than any he had ever worn before. He had regained none of his flesh; his nose was still sunken and very hooked, though his skin had lost the greater part of its tan, and had the transparency of a bigaroon cherry. His eye gazed at the flames with the blind abstraction of a spaniel’s; he remained perfectly motionless, and suddenly his right hand slipped from his knee and fell open at the side of the chair, with a gesture of weariness, of despair, and of abandonment.

From the soft, tall gloom behind his back there came the shuffle of slowly dragging feet, the tap of a crutch, and a deep wheezing and laborious breath. He knew very well that the Signora Poppæa was coming to him, but he did not turn his head. She leaned at last heavily, her elbow upon his shoulder. She looked down upon him, blinking with her always humorous eyes. She had the air of one of those immensely fat priests who, their hands clasped across their stomachs, sun themselves on benches beside their presbyteries, and regard with a tolerant amusement the passions, the strivings, and the play of the children in their parishes.

“My little nephew,” she said at last, using an allocution that she had employed many years before, “what have you been doing with your Worship’s time?” He did not look at her face, he remained silent upon the rustle of the flames, and suddenly he exclaimed, with a violent intonation, “I shall never again go to London Town; I will live here all my life, as my uncle did before me.”

The Signora wrinkled up the skin around her nose. “Before saying that too,” she said, “you should have counted forty; you would have fared very much better if you had always paid heed to that admonition of mine.”

Mr. Bettesworth swore savagely, alike at the follies that his precipitancy had urged him into, and because, having unguardedly moved his sprained ankle, he had experienced a very severe twinge of pain. “Let me be explicit,” he exclaimed; “it is not because I fear to face laughter or ridicule that I will no more go to London. It is because, having been once made to appear ridiculous, my voicc will not have its proper weight in assemblies and places where the Quality congregate.”

“My friend,” the Signora said amiably, “you are half lying, and you know that you are half lying, for you care very little for London that your voice should have weight in assemblies on account of your gravity or your knowledge; and you would rather have won this wager than have written one of the treatises of Demosthenes, so that you fear ridicule and the laughter of impertinent girls more than if you had lost half your estate.”

Mr. Bettesworth continued to look at the fire and to reflect.

“Why, I believe,” he said, “that I would rather have paid away half my estate than that this should have happened. I have an enormous superfluity yet that shall now avail me little in the society of my equals.”

“Yet,” the Signora said, “the way to encounter these circumstances is to meet them to the face. You had far better go to London, and by the sobriety of your bearing, and the dignity of your carriage, the gravity of your pursuits, and your eager championing of the cause of virtue and the arts, so bear yourself as to become a considerable figure, than thus to retire like a fool or Achilles to your tent, having of yourself only the recollection of failure and rout.”

Mr. Bettesworth smote himself upon the thigh. “No, by God! neither will it be so,” he exclaimed; “for I will make about the ears of some people such a buzz as they will think thirty hornets’ nests have been thrown into their bedroom windows.” He rose to his feet with a swiftness of motion remarkable in him, and walked with a gingerly rapid step, cherishing his injured ankle, into the shadows and hid in an end of the room. He returned bearing a black portfolio bulging with papers. The Signora had settled herself down into his chair, and he stood before her once more, making his back very erect in front of the fire which his broad purple coat-tails almost entirely obscured.

“When this memorial shall reach the King’s Privy Council,” he said, “some persons shall rue the day when they first heard my name.”

The Signora smiled with her enigmatic aloofness. “Your eyes are very feverish and your voice is like a rasp,” she said. “I think you are not very certain that His Majesty’s Council will not treat your memorials as the ramblings of a negligible idiot.”

Mr. Bettesworth swallowed in his throat with rage, but she held out her fat and trembling white hand in a gesture that had always controlled him. “Why, calm yourself,” she said. “I do not say that you are a negligible idiot. But it is as well to consider what may be the worst that may befall you.”

“If they shall not hear me,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “and if they will not do as I desire, then I will spend every penny I possess to bring down this Ministry, for they will be treating me worse than ever my uncle Bettesworth was treated.”

“Little nephew,” the Signora exclaimed, “your uncle Bettesworth was not ill-treated; he was a foolish old man who would have upset all the channels of public life had he succeeded in his first attempt, and if you will not question your conscience rather than your passions you will be just such another, and all the world may be very glad that you chain yourself up here like a sulky bear.”

“But shall I not,” Mr. Bettesworth exclaimed hotly, “take my revenge upon those who have injured me?”

He held the portfolio open before his breast. “Here,” he said, and he fumbled out a sealed packet, “is instructions to my lawyer to swear an information against Major Penruddock and Mr. Harcourt for perjury and conspiracy. They shall not easily escape under a fine of ten thousand pounds.”

He turned over more papers, and extended towards her a thin white packet of great dimensions.

“Here is a memorial to the Privy Council against the Justices of Ashford.”

“And what will you do against the Justices of Ashford?” she said. “Since they acted upon sworn informations and complaints, I think that not even the King’s Privy Council, with all the bribes you can bestow upon their secretaries, their footmen, and whores, could behave so unjustly as to inconvenience these Justices in your instance.”

“Why,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “I have considered that; but what can be the administration of justice in that County when upon the instance of such men as those two, and a land-steward, they should arrest such a man as me for the Duke of Berwick? Is it not well known that the Duke of Berwick is of the age of seventy and a dotard; and could any but a maniac imagine that forty thousand French troops could land and progress to within a mile of the town of Ashford without creating such a din as should arouse half the County of Kent? Yet it is to such fools that the administration of justice is nowadays confided.”