Derby Day (56 page)

*

Mr Happerton was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He is not much mourned, save by a very few cognoscenti of the Blue Riband Club. Rosa, now living in Wardour Street, Soho, and perhaps not so well situated as she might be, says he is the most odious man who ever lived.

The election for the Chelsea Districts took place in due course, and despite Mr Dennison’s best efforts was lost by Sir Charles Devonish to that hot radical Mr Cartwright, formerly the member for Stepney.

After old Mr Gresham’s death, which was attributed by his doctor to pneumonia, six months after the trial, Mrs Happerton retired to Bath, where she lived in a house on the Crescent, attended tea-parties and was fêted by the Bath ladies as the pitiable victim of gross male subterfuge. But somehow Bath and the Bath ladies did not suit her, and within a year she had removed herself to the continent, been seen in Paris, and supposed to have come to rest in Baden-Baden. Certainly a lady answering her description was seen at the tables there, spending a great deal of money, and it is said that a share prospectus issued on behalf of the Baden-Baden Peruvian Mining Company bore the name of Messrs Schickelgrubers’ bank acting as her proxy. Mrs D’Aubigny, who wrote to her once, got no reply. Mr Fop, the great dandy, dined at her hotel once on one of his European tours, but he never went there again. It is thought that Mrs Happerton – she still calls herself Mrs Happerton despite her husband’s disgrace – may be supported in her new vocations by Miss Nokes, who has certainly not been seen in the Belgrave region or at the Bag o’ Nails for many a month.

Mr Pardew was never seen again. A man answering to his appearance was arrested at a lodging house in Vienna, but when questioned was able to supply such convincing proofs of his identity and bona fides that he was released, to the infinite disgust of Captain McTurk, who found out about it a week later.

Jemima is living with her sister in Islington. It is said that this lady, to spite her, produced a Peerage and challenged her to find Lord Fairhurst’s name in it.

Major Hubbins, retiring from his profession in glory, accepted an invitation from his friend the Earl of Ilchester to supervise his stud. He lives in Hampshire, has grown stout, and is very comfortable.

There was some doubt as to what might happen to Tiberius. One legal argument held that as he had been fraudulently acquired, he did not now belong to Mr Happerton. In the end, though, he was put up for auction in a sale of Mr Happerton’s effects (otherwise inconsiderable) and sold to a sporting syndicate. His subsequent career may be followed in
Ruff
.

Miss Kimble, Mrs Happerton’s cousin, married the Captain Powell who always spoke to her so politely in the park – Mrs Venables lent her drawing room for the reception – and is now living, more or less happily, in Bayswater while the captain, having sold out of his regiment, looks for something more suited to his accomplishments and aptitudes.

The Honourable Major Stebbings is still much exercised by the question of army reform.

The house in Belgravia is shut up, with brown paper over the chandeliers and the old housekeeper living on board wages. Mr Happerton’s – or rather Mr Gresham’s – study is as left, with the portrait of Tiberius still staring from the wall.

Anstruther, RA’s ‘Head of an Officer’ came up for sale at Mr Fitch’s auctioneering rooms only the other day, and was knocked down for ten guineas. No one knows who bought it.

Mr Delaney gets by.

The Blue Riband Club is in a very flourishing state.

Mr Glenister went back to Lincolnshire after the trial, where it was thought that he was to be married.

*

It had been a very quiet autumn in Lincolnshire, so quiet that Mr Jorkins arriving in his cart to bring the
Grantham Intelligencer
was a great event and the sound of the Scroop foxhounds out in the lanes beyond Edgard Dyke a Saturnalia that had them talking for a week. And yet Miss Ellington had not been idle, for there had been Evie to tend, and her
Christian Year
to read at, not to mention sheets to turn and restitch – there being no one else to sew them – and a multitude of tasks to perform which would be thought inconvenient for a staff of ten, next to whom Hester, Mrs Castell and she were but the merest makeweights. And so, however precariously, the routines of their existence were preserved. The lamps were still lit, and the stair carpet swept. The windfall apples were gathered up from the orchard floor, and Evie’s muslins set to dry on the currant bushes, and they were an example to each other, if not to anyone else, for all that Mrs Castell said she was a fool to stay, and that Hester would be lucky to get her wages paid on December quarter-day.

A visitor who came to Scroop each November to stand on the gravel drive and look at the mullioned windows would no doubt have found it unchanged. The water still dripped out of the eaves; the rooks still flew up at the least interruption; the caryatid still sat in lonely splendour on her fountain-rock; the wild garden still ran down to the wood where Mr Davenant had kept his gibbet. But beyond that all was in flux. There were no horses in the stable, for they had all been taken away; the logs that lay in the stable yard had been sold to the Lincoln timber-merchant; and there was no more milk creamed up in the dairy. Indeed, on the days when Evie and Miss Ellington put on their cloaks and bonnets and went out wandering in the spinneys it was as if they were a pair of ghosts, bred by an age that had passed away and would never come again. There was no money, Mr Glenister said, and would not be until Mr Davenant’s affairs were truly gone into and settled by the lawyers, and if Miss Ellington did not turn and restitch the sheets there would be no bed for her to lie on.

And yet if they had been quiet, and secluded, and if the rain had vexed them beyond endurance, they had not lacked diversion. Mr Happerton’s trial interested them greatly. The newspapers which reported it were handed about at the breakfast table and discussed among them as they went about their work, and Mr Glenister’s account of it, when he returned from London, they listened to as if it were a fresh instalment of the Scriptures brought down that morning from Sinai. Hearing what had taken place in the courtroom, Hester flew into a passion and said that Mr Happerton should hang, but that his wife was worse, because she had not stood by her husband, which was a wife’s duty, and she should be put in the stocks to be pelted. For herself, Miss Ellington looked at the portrait of Mr Happerton and, considering what he had done, regretted that she had been so foolish as to esteem him or be flattered by the civility of his address. But as Mrs Macfarlane used to say, Lucifer has many disguises and could be found under the fairest countenance. There was a picture of Mrs Happerton, too, which Miss Ellington looked at and thought that she did not understand the world or the people in it, that she was a country mouse who had best keep to hedgerows and hay-wains where she might be safe from peril.

One day in November the establishment had a visitor. This was Dora, or Mrs Jorkins as they were now to call her, brought over by Mr Jorkins in his cart, and so beribboned that, as Mrs Castell said, it was as if she intended herself as a maypole. She said that Jorkins was the meekest old man in Christendom, and was very happy, and they were very comfortable together. ‘And you, too, Annie,’ she said, ‘I hope you will be happy.’ Which embarrassed Miss Ellington very much, not thinking her circumstances widely known, and not liking attention to be drawn to it, which old Mrs Macfarlane said was the sovereignest thing for going to a girl’s head and spoiling her chance. But then, when Dora had gone, she repented of her anger, realising that she meant only to compliment her, and wish her well, and gathered up Evie in her arms, to whom she was reading, and made her do as proxy.

Who has a tortoiseshell cat, now, called Arabella, that she torments.

Who sits sometimes in terror beneath the portraits of her ancestors as if they were real people who might jump out of their frames into her lap.

Whom Miss Ellington acknowledged that she did not love, but should do her duty by always.

Evie should be sent away, Mr Glenister said, if Miss Ellington wished it. But she did not wish it, and told him no.

She should be a burden to him, she protested to Mr Glenister, as they walked that afternoon in the meadow, and it was not her place to live at Glenister Court and be its mistress, and Mr Glenister said that she should not, and that it was, that no one knew their places in life until they came upon them and saw that they fitted them. And thinking of this, it was as if Miss Ellington’s head was filled with a series of pictures, so sharp and lifelike that she could not comprehend what had driven them there – Tiberius in his stall, Mr Davenant’s face upon the rail, the rooks soaring above the elms, Mr Silas’s gig grinding up the gravel in the drive – and she took Mr Glenister’s arm, who smiled at her, she thought, very winningly, and walked off across the green grass, and was, she thought, so very happy.

*

Nobody quite knew how Mr Synnot had come to Baden. The railway had certainly not brought him there, and the coaching office had no knowledge of him. Despite the enigma of his arrival, there was no mystery about his intentions, for Mr Synnot was plainly in Baden to enjoy himself. He put up at the Imperial Hotel, spent a little money at its gaming tables, loitered among its garden statuary, and could be seen in the establishment’s public rooms, reading newspapers, demanding cups of tea and conversing with such English tourists as came his way. Mr Synnot said that he was an Englishman and, like many Englishmen
en route
through Europe, he was certainly very knowledgeable. He knew when the gaming rooms were open and who was likely to frequent them; he knew the dates of the public balls; where
Galignani
could be obtained and the price of hiring a carriage from the livery stable. All this made Mr Synnot an agreeable addition to that part of English society that settles itself in Baden over the summer. He was at all times ready to escort a party to a distant pleasure garden, to play at écarté after dinner or recommend a church worth the visiting, and for this the ladies were disposed to forgive even his red complexion, over-large hands and pronounced Hibernian accent.

Above all things Mr Synnot loved to sit at a table on the terrace. He had cups of coffee brought out to him there, and he read at copies of
The Racing Calendar
under an umbrella while the summer rain dripped off his hat-brim. An old lady – one of the old ladies he gallantly escorted to picturesque ruins or to early service – had taught him a patience. But best of all he liked to sit and observe the people as they came and went: the English papas sauntering by with their children and nursemaids; the German bankers lazily recruiting themselves in the sunshine; odd, polyglot women jabbering to each other in languages come from beyond the Rhine. French, German, Italian, Spanish: Mr Synnot could order a meal in any of them, and summon a waiter without using any words at all.

On the first two or three occasions that he amused himself in this way he became aware of an English lady sitting on her own, at the farthermost part of the terrace, somewhat apart from the other coffee-drinkers and newspaper-readers. At first he was not conscious of her singularity: then, almost without registering his interest, he began to remark her. She was a slim, sandy-haired woman with remarkably green eyes, always dressed in the height of fashion, with a pretty little foot that peeped out of her skirts as if it knew it should not be there, yet horribly demure and with her head nearly always bent over a book. When a waiter brought her a message or a note on a tray, or a visitor to the hotel passed by her table – one of the English papas, perhaps, with a Continental Bradshaw under one arm and a child on the other – she spoke to them civilly but seemed anxious that their conversation should not be prolonged. She read a great many books. They were mostly in French, but once Mr Synnot thought that he saw a volume of Mr Thackeray’s
Philip
. ‘She is one of those d——d bluestockings, I daresay,’ Mr Synnot said to himself, but still he continued to watch.

There came a time – it was getting on towards September now, and the English confraternity was breaking up – when this watching was not enough, and he applied to the friends he had made at the hotel for information. ‘She is called Mrs Happerton, I believe,’ said the old lady who had taught him the patience – the old lady was in the midst of packing her trunks and had not much time for Mr Synnot – ‘but there is some mystery about her.’ ‘She is very disreputable, I daresay,’ said a stout mamma whose four daughters he had taken by britzka to a romantic castle in the hills. ‘And now, Mr Synnot, will you not join us on our picnic tomorrow, for it is nearly Michaelmas full-term and Mr Davies must be back at chambers within the week?’ But Mr Synnot did not want to go on the picnic. He preferred to sit on the terrace and stare. He wondered if the Englishwoman was one of those ladies who frequent the great hotels of Europe in season and out of it and are, perhaps, no better than they should be, but then one night he saw the bow that the maître d’hôtel of the Imperial gave her as he brought her a glass of hock on a salver, and told himself not to be a fool.

Finally there came an evening – it was in the second week in September, and most of the English families were gone – when Mr Synott thought that he could bear it no longer. The terrace was almost empty apart from the English lady and himself, and a breeze had got up to stir the first of the fallen leaves. Emboldened by the solitude, the first faint chill of the autumn and the thought that he should not perhaps be in Baden for very much longer, Mr Synnot seized his coffee cup – the coffee had gone cold an hour ago – and the
Racing Calendar
he had been affecting to study and made his way to the terrace’s farther end.