A Quiet Adjustment (26 page)

‘Oh, my dear,' he said, taking her cheek in his hand. (She had lifted her chin, bravely, to look up at him.) But he could not resist asking, as much from the simplest curiosity as from a father's desire to correct in his daughter her unhappy illusions: ‘And did he ever love you?'

‘If I leave him,' she promptly replied, ‘perhaps we may find out.' He had never admired her more. Her curiosity, it seemed, was still greater than his, but before he could give a voice to his admiration, she had continued, in just the same sensible considering tone. ‘Is it very bad? I mean, my letter. Does it—affect our case?'

‘I'm afraid it may. Your mother has consulted Sir Samuel Romilly, a very eminent lawyer, who has proposed another, a civilian, by the name of Lushington. She has written to say that the least suggestion on your part of a willingness to make it up could be interpreted by the courts as grounds for refusing a separation. If it comes to the worst.'

‘Oh, if it comes to the worst,' she felt for the first time a temptation to give up her secret to them and almost yielded to it, regarding her father with a significant eye, ‘I believe we can meet him, squarely.'

Chapter Four

LADY MILBANKE WAS TO SPEND
the week in town, to see to the legal side of their affairs, and Annabella, who had always enjoyed the mild weather of her father's moods, passed the days pleasantly in his company. Ada, in their relations, made a congenial third. Her grandfather grew more comfortable with the child as she fattened and learned to smile, and Annabella was supported in her affliction by the illusion of keeping up, with Sir Ralph, a sort of conjugal arrangement. It was broken only by the child herself, who introduced at times, with a sudden fierceness, the note of her own absent father.

Annabella had never till then given much attention to what might be called the little feathers of character her daughter had revealed. These were still hidden, as it were, under her wings; they would grow out eventually to the full bright plumage. But missing the girl's father, perversely, as Annabella had begun to do, even the quick living unhappiness he brought out in her (which had been succeeded, in her parents' house, by a pace of grief for the most part slower and duller), she learned to take a greater interest in his child. It was, after all, the only piece of Lord Byron that Augusta had no share in—she was almost willing to put it as plainly as this. Ada slept and fed, and her bouts of more violent complaint were rare enough that one could almost suspect the poor girl of calculations, by which her supply of useful and choleric protest was husbanded and meted out. She was, in short, a very good quiet kind of a baby, if a little reserved, which was just what her mother had been, Sir Ralph remarked, at the child's age. He leapt, whenever they offered themselves, at comparisons—out of shyness, perhaps, unless they seemed to him merely a painless and natural occasion for pressing his case. How could she
not
be quiet, her mother did not say, when her father had been so loud. Ada's eyes had lately begun to meet and blackly answer a curious stare; and Lady Byron was grateful for the excuse it gave her to avert her own from Sir Ralph's more intimate glances. She could almost feel, from his gentle hand, the stones dropped within her. They were sounding her out, and she wondered, indeed, how many she was supposed to endure, painfully reverberating, before they might grow sick of hearing the reports.

The voice that was silent, of course, was Lord Byron's own, though she imagined her father had had the privilege of hearing his views. Her father, she knew perfectly well, was reading her letters, on no less eminent an authority than Sir Samuel Romilly's; but no one had yet extended the freedom to her of reading theirs. What she absolutely refused to do—it was the one thing on which ‘she had put her foot down'—was to give up her communication with Augusta. It seemed, on the one hand, too generous a concession to leave the field, and she knew quite well whom she meant by that word, entirely to Gus. On the other, she could not quite resign herself, at a single stroke, to giving up both of the Byrons. One at a time was surely enough; and there was, in the secret she harboured deep within her, a power of hurting poor Gus that inspired in her already the anxious loving desire to be forgiven. ‘I have wronged you,' she wrote, ‘and you have never wronged me. It makes me feel I have no claim to what you give.' Her wrongs thus far had been slight enough, but she knew quite well her power of adding to them. What she was testing, really, was whether or not an admission, however vague, of the
worst
had prepared in her the ground for attempting it. How much was her conscience strong enough to bear? She was, if nothing else, giving it a steady exercise; and the feeling, as she stretched it out tentatively in every direction, reminded her of nothing so much as the first few weeks of her marriage. She had been forced on their honeymoon to admit, at her husband's insistence, just what she was capable of. There was little at the time she had stopped short at—a proof of her character that gave her every reason to fear for Augusta now.

Even so, she knew herself well enough to recognize that when she was threatened, she retreated into her conscience; and she was just as willing to acknowledge where the gravest threat to her lay. She was giving up love, for her parents' sake, as well as her own. By clinging to Augusta she hoped to salvage, from the wreck of it, a plank on which to float. Her temper was such, she had always congratulated herself, that she could make out of any trial the food of health. Consequently, she was surprised to find herself, during a long cold month at Kirkby Mallory, being starved of something. And what she was starved of his sister might learn to supply. Augusta, she supposed, if she did her duty, might be her little reward—she was hoping to keep her, that is, as a sort of memento, all to herself. She had something of her brother's look; she had something of his manner and lightness of touch, and still more, after all, of what was really his distinctive quality, a willingness to be loved. But Augusta was useless to her while she lived with
him
—a reflection that had everything to do with the fact (and this, as the weeks passed, was the note that grew only louder and more painfully insistent) that she was unspeakably jealous of both of them for continuing to live with each other in Piccadilly, in what was, after all, the house of her marriage. Jealousy was always the sin to which her virtuous nature was most likely to surrender. And there were times, at night, in the confinement of her room, when she clung to Ada so tightly, as the last living relic of those relations, that Mrs Clermont herself, at hearing the child's cries, was forced to intervene, to rescue the girl from the clutch of her mother's arms, and to leave the mother herself on the floor of her room, beating her fists against the back of her head.

It was these paroxysms (she could hardly, in a house as echoing as Kirkby Mallory, keep them quiet) that suggested to her parents, after her mother had returned from London, the possibility that Annabella was holding something back. She could see them, with every word she spoke, counting up her miseries; and they could not conceal from their daughter, miserable as she appeared, that they were coming up short. How quickly, how lightly, indeed, had Annabella accepted their intervention—their meddling, she might otherwise have called it. She had met them halfway, and that fact alone pointed to a fall more deep than any she had yet revealed to them. It wasn't so much that they doubted her. Only, they seemed to recognize, in the show of her continuing submission, a kind of excess. In spite of their gentleness, they had the air of people determined, in accounting for their involvement in Annabella's affairs, that everything should
add
up
: even though that total, as they knew quite well, was composed of nothing less than the sum of their daughter's unhappiness.

She might have taken a greater offence at the tone of calculation, which her mother especially could not keep out of her sympathies, if Annabella hadn't so completely inherited the tone herself. She was also vividly conscious of withholding just such a secret of her husband's cruelty as might be expected to square even Lady Milbanke's most extravagant claims for her daughter's redress. For the moment, at least, she was confident of putting her off; and she rejoiced in the fact, as a testament to her powers of healing, that she could still indulge herself in the vanity of such a possession. It seemed to her sometimes that she had kept back, at a general feast, the last precious cake for herself; and she was waiting for everyone to grow hungry again, before she could, with the greatest credit to her generosity, begin to share it around. She knew, however—this was one of the thoughts she was wrestling with—that she might have kept her rich little secret too long, to take
only
credit for preserving it so well. Just what the fact might suggest about her own complicity in the passionate guilt of the Byrons, she couldn't yet judge herself coldly enough to admit to.

The law, at least, offered some consolation. It gave her, if nothing else, something to talk to her mother about. ‘I would not but have seen Lushington for the world'—this was, in the end, the report that brought Lady Milbanke home again.

He seems the most gentlemanlike, clear-headed and clever man I ever met with, and agrees with all others that a proposal should be sent by your father for a quiet adjustment. But observe that he insists on Lord B not being allowed to remain an instant at Kirkby, should he go there, and he says you must not see him on any account—and that your father should remain in the room with you. If you see him voluntarily or if he is suffered to remain, you are wholly in his power, and he may apply to the Spiritual Court for a restoration of conjugal rights, as they term it, and oblige you to return. The law, I'm afraid, is against the wives. But a great deal, he says, may be done with a public man by the fear of exposure, which we need not, I presume, fear at all? He is confident, in your case, of coming to terms, though less so of saving your daughter. He insists, again, on what we have already told you—that you must not answer his letters—and was surprised to find that I had given this advice before I left Kirkby. He said it was the best possible. He wants to meet you: there are questions only he can ask. I am coming, my love; you have only to wait for me.

Waiting, it's true, she almost smiled at her mother's percipience, was really all that she had. Well, she was good at waiting. Ada slept in the lap of the chair beside her; her cheeks were besmirched with pimples, which clustered around the depression of her nose, beneath her eyes. Mrs Clermont, when she came in to relieve her, could be trusted to wash the child's face. It was just after breakfast, and a part of Annabella's thoughts were occupied by the apple-dumplings that had been promised them for lunch that day. She had never been so hungry in her life.

Still, there was a great deal in Lady Milbanke's account to occupy a woman who had thus far consented to cut herself off from the source of original news: her husband's letters. She had to admit that the threat of losing her daughter struck her with a less thrilling fear than the thought, thus delicately put by Dr Lushington, that Lord Byron could insist on the restoration of his conjugal rights. There had been nothing, certainly, in Augusta's communications to suggest the least possibility that Lord Byron might come to Kirkby; and she wondered whether he had been, to her father, more eager to propose a conciliation. Lord Byron had written at least three letters since Annabella's flight from Piccadilly. Sir Ralph had seized them all. They sat, under a stone on which, in her childhood, his daughter had painted a red turtle, on the desk in his study. Annabella could see them, whenever the door was open, as she passed by it on the way to the warmer fire in the back parlour. Certainly, if Augusta hoped to keep him to herself (and it would, Annabella reasonably enough supposed, in spite of her jealousy, be the most natural thing in the world for a sister to attempt it), Gus could do no better than presenting him, as she had done, as the indifferent victim of his own wilfulness. ‘I don't know whether,' she had written, ‘I should say, he is miserable for you, or for himself, or whether he is miserable at all. I suspect, my dear sister, it might be best for your sake that he wasn't at all? He is, of course, a little, and might be more; only, he has resumed, out of what you will, the worst of his bachelor habits, and is nightly drunk with the very men a wife should keep him from.'

Annabella could not conceal from herself that she had, at this, the most important crisis of her life, willingly resigned to anyone who would accept it the burden of her decisions; and the fact was brought home to her when the woman who had taken on the greatest part of them returned from London. Lady Milbanke had never looked better. Her colour was entirely restored, and she moved, from the ledge of the coach to the house, with the fresh vigour of a woman who had lately been given the largest licence to make herself useful. Annabella, watching her from her bedroom window, confessed inwardly to a sinking heart at the thought of what she might be capable of conceding to Lady Milbanke's persuasion. The peace she had occasionally enjoyed in her mother's absence was only the calm of postponement. Her return, at least, signalled the beginning of the grand event. A ‘quiet adjustment', indeed! Her mother had a talent for compressing, in the most innocent phrase, such violent quantities. If the contest for her future was to be played out between Mrs Leigh and Lady Milbanke, Annabella began to fear what the defeat, which she considered almost inevitable, of her sister's views might eventually bring down (it was sure to be a great heap) upon Augusta's own head.

It was almost by way of apology that Annabella, that night, recounted for her sister's sake the shock of her mother's arrival.

I almost fainted when she first came in, and looked paler than usual when I meant to look better. I don't know that my heart has done beating yet. I found her in the sitting room with a mouth full of buttered bread. She was terribly hungry after her journey, but the note of apology in her voice, for putting me off, was perfectly calculated, as you may guess, to make me anxious. I waited for her to finish, and she showed herself every bit willing to take her time. At last I could bear it no longer and said, ‘Is there any news from London?' To which she replied, with every appearance of sympathy, ‘I believe the news is all on your end. Have you made up your mind?' I scarcely dared answer, ‘To what?' before she continued, ‘To come to London. You must, by this stage, have received my last letter. Dr. Lushington wishes to meet with you. He is the most dry, consoling man; it is quite like putting your hand on a book. But he cannot act, he says, without the fullest information. Believe me, I tried to spare you and offered to supply it myself, but he, all gentleness, maintained that you alone were in a position to render a full account.' Well, my dear, you may guess how this made my heart jump and the blood rush. It was all I could do to nod away my blushes and say, ‘I should not myself desire to lift a hand against him,' before giving in to tears. Which she, with a touch of impatience, thus met: ‘Your character is like proof spirits—not fit for common use. I could almost wish the tone of it lowered nearer the level of us everyday people. I have not slept on a bed of roses through my life. I have had afflictions and serious ones, though none so severe as the present. But in my sixty-fifth year I have endeavoured to rally—and shall rally, if you do. There are troubles that must be faced up to oneself. Now, my love, here is a Sunday's sermon for you, and here it shall end; for I am mucky with travel and in need of a bath.'