A Little Folly (2 page)

‘Ah! well, there it is,’ said Mr Lappage, with peaceful finality, and was about to enquire about dinner, when his wife caught him up with vehemence.

‘But how did they appear? Louisa and Valentine – they will look I am sure very well in mourning, with their height and colouring – but how do they bear up? With dignity I am sure – they never lack that, though heaven knows how they maintained it under
his
rule – but, then, they are very unaccustomed to that sort of exposure, poor creatures.’

‘Well, if you want the truth of it,’ said Mr Lappage, seating himself and thoughtfully patting his waistcoat, ‘I never saw anyone so absolutely broken up as those two today. Lord! It was as if the world had ended.’

Mrs Lappage pondered on this; and astonishment soon made room for understanding. The liveliness of her interest in the two young people quickened to an almost unbearable degree; but it was not to be easily assuaged. She had too much delicacy to call at a house where only a week ago her presence had been forbidden: it seemed a vulgar presumption – as if to say that now
he
was out of the way she could do as she liked. But to the accustomed quiet and retirement of a house in mourning there seemed, in the subsequent weeks and then months, something else added. Neither Louisa nor Valentine was much seen about: short polite notes were sent out in reply to those who had made the formalities of condolence; and from any evidence that Mrs Lappage could gather, there might have been no change at Pennacombe House – no lifting of a weight of oppressive authority – nothing to show that the estate had a new master and mistress, young, free, and with the world before them.

‘I am very much afraid,’ she said to herself, as she walked again by the high park walls, and in the leafless grey of February, ‘that that monstrous old man – not to speak ill of him – is still in command of that house, and that his influence will never end!’

‘L
ouisa,’ said Valentine, as they sat together after dinner one evening, ‘do you want the fire-screen?’

‘No,’ she replied, somewhat startled, for her brother had been sunk in deep reflection for a good half-hour. ‘No, thank you, Valentine.’

‘You never do want the fire-screen, do you?’

Still surprised, Louisa considered. ‘Well, no: if I feel the fire too much, I generally draw back my chair.’

‘Which is exactly the case with me,’ Valentine said with energy; and springing up, he approached the fire-screen and examined it as if he had never seen it before. ‘It is not a handsome article by any means.’

‘Decidedly ugly.’

‘All these – these cherubs.’

‘I am not an admirer of cherubs. And one of them is doing something particularly disagreeable with an arrow.’

‘I really see no reason, you know,’ he said, laying hands on the fire-screen, ‘why we should keep this in the drawing-room any longer, when neither of us uses it or likes it. Do you?’

It was a simple enough question; but there was a great challenge in it too, a challenge reflected in the long look, half anxious, half elated, that brother and sister exchanged, before Louisa answered in a firm voice: ‘No, Valentine, I do not.’

‘Very well, then.’

Briskly Valentine folded the screen and carried it out of the room. A momentary agitation assailed her, in which she nearly called out to him that he had better put it back; but she conquered it.

‘Where did you put it?’ she asked, when he returned, a little flushed with triumph.

‘Oh, in the summer parlour for now. We can find a place for it in time. – Perhaps in one of the guest bedrooms.’

‘Ah, those,’ she said doubtfully; for while there were several spare bedrooms at Pennacombe House, she had never thought of them as guest bedrooms, for the cogent reason that they never had any guests.

But Valentine caught her look and, with a deeper flush, urged: ‘Well, Louisa, who knows? After all, we—’ He stopped pacing about, and joined her on the sofa. ‘We can surely talk of this now. After all, we have begun, haven’t we?’

Their glance fell in unison on the spot where the fire-screen had stood. It had been, of course, their father’s fire-screen: as peculiar to him as his snuff-box, his gout-slippers, his cold, scornful laugh, and his brassy shout of command.

‘What
have
we begun, I wonder?’ she said.

‘To live,’ Valentine said, seizing her hand. ‘Louisa, do you not agree that we are entitled to do so? No one could reproach us for not observing a due period of mourning. Nor – I believe – can either of us reproach ourselves for any hardness of heart. I freely confess that there were times with Father – the worst times – when secretly I almost wished him gone. You can imagine the agony of that recollection when the blow did fall. I have spent so long hating myself – feeling that I was unjust to him in life, and fearing that I fail in respect for his memory … Do you understand me?’

‘No one could understand you better, Valentine. And I am sure we are entitled to live. – But it is so very strange. People in our position often console themselves with the thought that “He would wish us to go on with life, and be happy.” And yet, try as I may, I cannot apply that comforting formula to Father.’

‘No,’ he said, fully; and they sat for some moments looking at each other in an intense perplexity, divided between laughter and tears.

‘When you speak of beginning to live,’ she said at last, ‘you mean changing our way of living?’

‘I mean
living
. Again, it is hard to talk of this without seeming to cast an ill reflection on Father. But if we were to enlarge our views, to be more active in the world, to make decisions – what is to say us nay?’

‘Only the consideration of what Father would think.’

‘Precisely. Now I am three-and-twenty. You are one-and-twenty.’

‘This is easier. My arithmetic is equal to this.’

‘At such an age, we may surely depend upon our own judgement. Indeed we must, for there is now no other to depend upon. Shall we be afraid of this – or shall we welcome it?’

‘I confess the prospect inclines me to both emotions. I may be one-and-twenty, but I am not sure I feel it consistently. Sometimes I feel as staid and sober as forty; other times as foolish as fourteen.’

‘I don’t remember you foolish at fourteen,’ he said gently. ‘You were not permitted to be.’

Even so tentative a criticism of their father’s rule left them guiltily silenced for a moment.

‘Valentine,’ Louisa said, squeezing his hand, ‘if we were to have guests, I do not think we should inflict the fire-screen on them. The cherubs might give them nightmares. – That is,
if
we were to have guests.’

‘Ah, I say again, who knows?’ Valentine cried, with his keenest and most animated look. ‘My dear Louisa, who knows what may happen?’

Mrs Lappage’s suppositions about life at Pennacombe House were shrewd; but the picture her fancy painted was both gloomier and simpler than the reality.

For the children of the late Sir Clement Carnell, the period following his death was scarcely to be comprehended in any rational sense. They had existed in it as in a dream that held them baffled, paralysed and unable to wake. So accustomed were they to his daily direction that for some time they had drifted rudderless, unable without great trouble to make the most trifling decision. They even began to believe that he was right: that they were the feeble and disappointing creatures he had always made them out to be – and that they could not do without him.

And yet at the same time they were living on; and through that fog of bereft bewilderment, which Mrs Lappage had guessed at, came shafts of light in which Louisa and Valentine Carnell stood blinking and wondering. For they did not have to fear any more. The guilty starts, the hurried explanations and excuses, the dreary dread of a gathering temper-fit were gone: quite gone. They could sit at ease and think, and no harsh voice would break in on them demanding to know what the devil they were doing idling there. They could even, potentially, do what they wanted; though such was the impress of their father’s domination that neither quite knew what that was, and could only contemplate it like a mysterious parcel not to be opened.

And all this had come about as the result of the death of their only parent! Such a terrible tangle of the feelings could not be quickly undone. The long silence and seclusion that had perturbed Mrs Lappage was inevitable; as inevitable, indeed, as its end. The disposal of the fire-screen, in itself a simple act, represented a momentous turning-point; though on this new path they had taken, Valentine stepped forth with more assurance than Louisa.

He had suffered, perhaps, more than she from Sir Clement’s overbearing influence, and was correspondingly more impatient to escape it. But his own temper was in any case more volatile than hers. Though generous and warm-hearted, he had always been a prey to dark moods, and to finding refuge in gloomy introspection, where she found hers in a carefully guarded sense of the ridiculous. To laugh him out of his distresses had long been her cherished task. Now she found herself lagging a little behind him in the impetuosity of his spirits – though still with that perfect understanding of his feelings produced by their enduring and exceptional bond.

The months following their father’s death had seen him of necessity taking on those duties that Sir Clement had jealously preserved to himself. Valentine was now master of the estate – the squire of Pennacombe, though there was very little that was conventionally squirish about his light, elegant, nervous figure or his sharp mobility of expression – and must learn the ways of the land-agent and the tenants’ roll. This was all very well, but it was only being his father. Responsibility was solid, but it did not shine. His instincts were as liberal as his father’s had been parsimonious, and so he was content to raise wages, order some gifts of timber and game, and leave the rest in the hands of the steward. Likewise the removal of the fire-screen was followed by some eager declarations about the tearing out of fusty old panelling, of the desirability of french windows and oilcloth; but it was plain to Louisa that the alteration he chiefly sought was to their sequestered and unvarying manner of living; that he craved stimulation, novelty, and company.

For her own part Louisa was very willing to encounter these: she had often sighed, though silently and inwardly, at the dullness of Pennacombe House – but she always had found a means of escape in the library, which had been well stocked by her grandfather, and had richly furnished her mind with amusement and wonder – and a capacity for dreaming besides, which would have shocked Sir Clement, if it had not been beyond his limited powers of imagination to guess at it. Valentine had no such resource. His eyes were turned devotedly outward: each day, following their agreement to begin living, revealed it in some new plan or project. She understood, she sympathised, for she longed also to encounter that greater world of which her reading had given her a tantalising and imperfect idea – but the voice of caution still spoke in her. It was, perhaps, inseparable from the remembered voice of her father, so particularly chill and cutting when either of them made the rare attempt to act independently of his wishes, and came to inevitable grief. The triumphant ring of that
I told you so
was not to be so easily disposed of as the fire-screen.

In one regard, however, Louisa was resolved to go further in defiance and boldness than her brother. There was one imposition of their father’s that she was very ready to shake off – with no guilt, no lingering sensations of doubt or disloyalty, nothing but delighted vindication. It had a name, and the name was spoken when Valentine made his first solid plan for a change in their way of living.

‘I have been thinking, Louisa, that the third Friday is coming up,’ he said. ‘And thinking that we ought to change it.’

The third Friday in every month was the appointed day on which their father had held a dinner – that is, he had invited the rector, Dr Sayles, to dine, and talked long with him on the necessity of stiff sentences for poachers, and the wiles of the poor, the rector being a man after his own heart in his detestation of greed and licence, and his appreciation of good port. Mourning had furnished an excuse for Valentine and Louisa to discontinue this custom, but the day was approaching when it must be renewed – or, as Valentine suggested, abandoned.

‘For my part, I heartily dislike that self-satisfied old man,’ he said, ‘and I think he has had the run of his teeth at our table quite long enough. Instead, let us have people we like. I should be glad to see poor Mr and Mrs Lappage here: and I am sure the Tresilians will come. We may think of others – but this is surely a start. What do you say?’

‘I would like to see them, certainly. But I wonder whether – well, whether Dr Sayles might not be offended at the omission.’

‘Ah, Louisa, why do you fear to offend someone whose opinion you don’t care for?’ Valentine said gently. ‘To be sure, I do know why. But that is something we must change. Else we cannot begin living at all. However, if your conscience is still tender on the matter, we could oblige Father’s memory, and invite someone very much to his liking. I have had another letter from Pearce Lynley: he will soon be among us.’

Louisa turned away from his look of playful triumph. ‘When is it to be?’ was all she could say.

‘Well, he informs me, in his characteristic style, that he is to depart from Nottinghamshire on the eleventh – which is today – and that he intends arriving at Hythe Place on the fourteenth; which allows just enough time to include him in the party, if our invitation is prompt.’

‘I do not think,’ she said carefully, ‘that Mr Lynley would take up an invitation coming so short upon his arrival home. It would require him to be obliging and sociable, and to consider other claims than his own immediate comfort; a requirement that I cannot think will be met, unless during his absence in Nottinghamshire there has been a great transformation of his character.’

‘Ah, that I doubt. His letter is much in the usual manner – regretting again that he has been unable to tender his commiserations to us in person since Father’s death; but he promises that he will call on us as soon as he is able. Indeed he makes a point of it. You are not to escape him, Louisa.’

Not to escape him! These last words might have been expressly chosen to illustrate Louisa’s feeling about Mr Pearce Lynley, and the relation in which they stood.

He was the man for whom Sir Clement had designed his daughter: whose claims her father had been urging since she was scarcely out of girlhood, and the only one, as he had made clear, that he would consent to her marrying while it lay in his power to control her choice. For many years, as it seemed to Louisa, Mr Lynley had been held out to her as the inevitable shape and image of her future, like a single door at the end of a passage. Her father had never seen any need for delicacy in representing his aims to Mr Lynley himself: had spoken much with that gentleman of his hopes for the future joining of their estates, and referred with his own peculiar species of facetiousness to the little defects of his daughter’s temper and disposition, which it would in time be the pleasure of Mr Lynley as a husband to correct. Anything like an ordinary courtship would not, of course, have suited Sir Clement: he would at once have despised the indulgence of emotion, and mistrusted the liberty of being alone and unobserved that it granted to the participants. But he made sure that Mr Lynley was invited often to Pennacombe House, urged Louisa to help him to the best of the cutlets and to please him with music at the piano afterwards, and generally oversaw and encouraged the business, rather as if it were the progress of a law-suit that he did not doubt would be judged at last in his favour.

Louisa’s own sentiments regarding this appropriation of her hand were so little regarded by her father that on the rare occasions when she was so bold as to hint at her misgivings he was almost bewildered; and it took him a few moments to recover, and to regain the safe ground of ferocity and intransigence. Once there, however, he was quite himself again, and able to inform her that the world was full of coxcombs and rogues whom she was unlikely in her ignorance to spot, and that in choosing Mr Lynley for her he was doing her a service, which he could only hope would not be quite beyond her stupidity to appreciate.