Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (351 page)

“For the administration of justice I care very little, or nothing at all,” the Signora answered; “but that you, having been befooled, should advertise yourself to the whole world as a fool of the most immense dimensions, that would appear to me to be to throw the cracked pot after the spilt rice. These Justices would seem to me to be such simple rustics that it would be best to leave them to their folly, rather than to go clamouring about them to the King and his Court; and for these two gentlemen, since they are your equals, not by amercements and fines, but by your sword you should be revenged upon them.”

Mr. Bettesworth turned over his papers again, and came upon three other letters.

“Here,” he said, “are cartels that I have written to those two and to the Duke of Norfolk, bidding them to meet me half-way between this town and London, or in any better place thirty miles outside the City that they shall elect to find convenient. You perceive that I have left no stone unturned towards the complete avenging of these insults.” The Signora slowly shrugged her immense shoulders until they came up beyond her ears. “For myself,” she said, “I leave to you the question of avenging this ridicule; of the Courts of male honour I know nothing, they seem to me to be confused, perplexed, and turbid. But it appears to me that if you should kill all these three gentlemen you shall be none the less of a fool, since they have tricked you.”

“Signora,” Mr. Bettesworth said, “of these matters you can know nothing or very little.”

She held her head upon one side, as if she were balancing it; her black eyebrows arched very high, as if in a sort of judicial superciliousness. “I have said,” she uttered in tones of remarkable and fluting precision, “that of such matters I know nothing or very little, but if I were you I would set to work in a very different manner.”

“In the name of God what?” he exclaimed petulantly.

“Why,” she said, “if they have covered you with ridicule, cast upon them ridicule still more huge. If they deem themselves to have tricked you, prove to them that they have overreached themselves. Make them to be borne away upon such a tide of ludicrosity that your mischances shall be washed out and forgotten, in such a way as the blood from three Christian throats, if you cut them, could never achieve.”

In turn he shrugged his shoulders rather wearily. “This might be very well,” he said, “but it is idle preaching to a beggar to buy golden trappings for a horse that he does not possess. How should I cast ridicule upon all these men, who hold complete in their hands all the picture cards of the pack?”

She worked her lips as if she were chewing a succulent morsel.

“Did you never,” she observed, and she lowered her voice to gain a dramatic effect, “consider that after all it was not yet proven that this natural niece of my lady’s was the model for Celia?”

Mr. Bettesworth turned his back upon her with a petulant motion.

“This is childishness,” he said. “Why else should they have been so eager to take possession of her?”

“But why,” she said subtly, “should you be so modest? and God knows that it is not like you to imagine that these gentlemen have had granted to them by the Almighty an especial perspicacity in the discovery of concealed damsels.”

Mr. Bettesworth pivoted round as quickly as he could upon his injured foot.

“My own eyes—” he exclaimed.

There came from the shadow by the farther portal a sound of surprised tittering. The invisible door closed upon them, and over the tiled floor there came the hard footsteps of an elated man.

Mr. Roland appeared in the light of the candles. He wore very enormous riding-boots, which, as the fashion of the year was, were turned over at the top with red morocco.

“Mr. Bettesworth,” he said in a tone of truculent sternness, “you owe me ten thousand pounds, for Maria Trefusis has consented to make me the happiest of men.”

A spasm of jealous anger contracted Mr. Bettesworth’s eyebrows. He stood in silence for a minute; and, since Mr. Roland was not minded to wait until his brother should have counted forty, he continued: “This I do not ask as a favour but as a debt. You promised me, at Ashford Manor-house, that upon my marriage with Maria you would set against the ten thousand of her dowry ten thousand for mine. Until you struck me I served you with a great fidelity, using my sword in your interest, and releasing you from the jail. So that I make no bones nor false pride in making this just demand of you, nor do I abate one jot of my anger against you.”

Mr. Bettesworth had very perceptibly ceased counting, and yet there came no word from him. Mr. Roland approached still nearer into the ring of light, his face working with anger and concern.

“Sure you will not refuse me this,” he muttered; but by then he was come within reach of the Signora’s chair, and, raising her hand, she delayed him with a slight pressure upon his chest.

“Why, go away!” she said. “We were debating much more important matters.”

“But, by God!” Mr. Roland shouted, “I will have this money. For I am tired of being a slave and tending horses, and being treated to blows.”

His mouth worked itself upwards and to one side with a grin of malice. “Maria was affected by your princely airs,” he exclaimed, “to give me the slip. She thought she had never seen so fine a gentleman till she saw you upon the turf. Since then she has done nothing but laugh at you. You could have heard her laughing outside the door.”

The Signora attempted to hush him with little hisses as if he had been a child. But suddenly, his face very rigid and calm, Mr. Bettesworth spoke —

“If you will send for Lawyer Chase from Wilton,” he said, “the settlements shall be made out this night. I think you have served me with all the devotion that brother can await from brother — and with a little more — for the sake of your name and yourself.”

Mr. Roland stood very rigid, tapping his whip upon his great boot. He looked at his brother with a certain rigidity in his blue eyes; he moved his left foot as if to turn and go.

“Brother,” Mr. Bettesworth said painfully, “my ankle is very stiff, so that I think I should kneel with difficulty. Yet I remember that at Ashford you said you would never be friends with me again till I had offered you an apology kneeling. But if you will take the obeisance as offered figuratively and in the spirit, I ask your pardon now.”

Mr. Roland clasped his crop to his side. “Why, brother,” he said, “when I think of the matter again I — will figure you to myself as kneeling to me, and that shall afford me all the more gratification.”

He considered for a moment, and then began again —

“I will not say that I am under any obligation to you, for what you have done was no more than my due. But this I will say, that you seem to be under the dominion of a set of women who keep you as it were upon a hot griddle. They are fooling you, I warn you, for their own ends, and this Lydia Chuckel—”

“Brother,” Mr. Bettesworth said in a soft voice, “I will take it as a kindness if you will go with no more words; and if you will not, I will command you to do so.”

Mr. Roland pressed his hat down over his eyes.

“Why,” he said, “I was minded to do you the best turn that has been done you since our uncle did you the favour of dying, but if you will not have it so — and this is the second time that I have attempted to do you this service — why, there is no more to it than ‘Your servant!’”

He lifted his hat ironically and swung away out of the room, clinking his spurs together with the gait that that year was fashionable. He stopped at the door to say to the Signora, raising his voice because of the distance —

“I made inquiries just now at Wilton, and Sir Francis Dashwood is out of his bed to-day. This signifies that since, by the conditions of the wager, the days of his illness were days of suspension, there are still four days more in which to win it.”

Mr. Bettesworth carefully watched his closing of the door until the crack of light from outside had vanished, and then suddenly, with his whole face distorted, he burst into a fit of ungovernable rage.

And when he grew coherent, “It was but three weeks ago,” he said, with a bitter scorn, “that that wench doted upon my shoe-buckles.”

“Why, it rejoices my ears to hear you swear oaths,” the Signora said placidly. “For it makes you the less to resemble a marble monument. But must you have every woman in the world to be in love with you?”

He shrugged his shoulders, and said “Pish!” many times.

“Friend,” the Signora said, “such as Maria’s is the nature of the frivolous brain of the world. To some you seem cast down, and they will laugh at you.

To others you are not cast down at all; but the world will appraise you at your seeming value.”

“Not cast down!” he exclaimed, with a hideous bitterness. “Is there one thing that I have attempted that I have not failed in? I find Celia; she is raped away from me. I am bedevilled by magistrates, and you say I must not even have revenge on them. I detect in fraud and theft a land-steward, and he saves himself from under my very grasp. I go to fight a duel with a man whose life is in my hands as that of a kitten — and I must trip and fall as if I had not the use of my feet. What then remains for me but to immure myself amongst my people here, who must tremble at my smallest frown? Aye,” and he contorted his visage into a hideous grimace and crushed his nails into his palm, “if one of my hinds or tenants here so much as smiles behind my back, he shall be ruined utterly and for ever. For here I am the King, and it will be easy.”

The Signora pulled out her black snuff-box and reflectively took a pinch of the brown dust, which she held between finger and thumb, shaking the superfluity back into the receptacle.

“Little nephew,” she said, “there is the whole of you. You will always be a king amongst men as if you had the powers of a god, but only where it is easy. You will have the lives of men who are in your hands impotent as kittens. You will have vengeance on poor, tricked magistrates by the expenditure of a small amount of your immense superfluity. Why, when you go to seek a model for Celia you will take up the first ringleted girl who can trick you with a gown and a sash. And you are for ever thinking of your great dignity as if you had a divine right, as if God Almighty and the blessed Virgin, and all the little Saints whirled round your head in a cloud of glory. But I tell you, little nephew, as I have told you often before, that this is great folly. You are a man whom Fortune has favoured beyond most others, and without effort of yours; but if you will be of any avail on this earth, or amass credit from any save panders and parasites, and girls with empty heads, you must achieve this credit at the cost of some effort of your own. Why, there have been a thousand princes in Italy of ten times as great wealth as yourself; they lived negligible, they squandered their fortunes, and their very names are obliterated save upon old monuments. And if it were only this I would say yet that it might be very well, since it is the common lot of mortality to be forgotten; but remember your uncle, who in his youth, I have heard, was a personable, jovial, and kindly man, yet consider how, before he died, his death was prayed for by all the countryside. The poor are a small matter, and not very much to be considered, but it is better to have their prayers than their curses; just as it is better to live a sober life than that of a frantic maniac. And when I look upon what you have already achieved, I perceive J nothing at all save only that you have promised to redress injuries wrought upon a mad priest, a picker-up of sticks, and a woman of the town, — and even these promises you have not yet redeemed. Since you have come to your estate you have done nothing but order a few suits of clothes and make a mad wager, whereas it is I that have kept down your proud land-steward, that have rendered your charities to your sundry little churches, and have seen to it that the river here did not overflow when the great rains were. So that you are nothing and have achieved nothing, and are tearing out your heart about a grief that need have no existence. For, having set your hand to a wager, it is necessary for the honour of your house and name that you should continue it to the best of your abilities; nevertheless, here you skulk in your tent, though, as you have heard your brother say, four days of time remain to you in which you might win it.”

Mr. Bettesworth shook his head with a patient sadness.

“Why,” he said, “let that folly be at an end if you will. What should I achieve in four days, who have done nothing in the best part of a month? But I will do even as you will; that is to say, I will live as goodly as I can here where I am, and control my stewards, and give charity to the churches, and see to it that the rivers do not overflow their bounds when the cattle are in the water pastures.”