A Quiet Adjustment (4 page)

‘And yet,' Annabella interjected, ‘and I have felt the force of it myself, there is a kind of eloquence that can properly be said to
create
truth
, even where there was none before. Perhaps that is what I meant to convey in my picture of his character and conversation. It is certainly the impression he makes upon everyone around him.'

‘Well,' Lady Gosford announced with some satisfaction, ‘there is only one thing to be done: we must make a trial of him ourselves.' It was suggested that Sir Ralph might provide the best means of introduction, seeing that his sister, Lady Melbourne, was well known to be Lord Byron's favourite adviser—by necessity almost, as her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline, had begun to ‘express such unguarded preference' for the poet. But Sir Ralph, though he was fond of his sister Elizabeth, said he disliked exposing any of his family to her taste for gossiping and begged very humbly to be excused from playing a part in their scheme. Annabella could not be sure whether a feeling of gratitude towards her father or impatience with him predominated in her at hearing this timid speech. At that point, Lady Gosford offered to ‘speak to my dear friend Lady Cowper, who is on the best of terms with Lady Kinnaird—owing perversely, it is said, to her having formerly refused
Lord
Kinnaird, none other than the poet's banker. I trust, Lord Gosford, you have no objection to a supper party?'

He had none, and so the matter was decided upon—to everyone's satisfaction perhaps but Annabella's own. She had taken comfort from the thought of keeping to herself something for her mother to disapprove of.

Before retiring, Annabella stopped in again to bid her mother goodnight. Her rebellious impulses were always followed first by remorse and then by a childish wish for conciliation. She feared, as she declared to Lady Milbanke's back or rather to the reflection of her face in the dressing-mirror, that her reference to Byron's family quarrels might have struck her mother as improper; she had not wished to offend. Judy was gratified to feel the pull in her reins take effect. She still had the power of bringing her daughter in, but it was best exercised with kindness. She turned now towards Annabella. ‘There can be nothing improper,' she said, ‘in telling the truth.' Lady Milbanke looked always handsomest in her nightdress. There was something very dignified in her weathered countenance and long upright mottled neck: they exposed an indifference to self that was really the best pride.

Annabella lingered in the doorway, conscious of her face and hands, the softness of her youth. She asked, in a different voice, as her mother resumed her evening toilette, ‘How much of life, mama, do you think may be understood from books?'

Without turning, Judy answered, ‘That depends—upon the taste and discernment of the reader.'

‘A reader with the best taste and the sharpest discernment may understand a great deal of the world, even without the benefit of experience?'

‘She may. Although taste and discernment are often acquired only with reference to experience—without which, even the best minds may be easily misled.'

‘An attentive observer, however, may learn a great deal from a very little life?'

Judy, smiling, stood up and took her daughter's hands. ‘It is only a question of eggs,' she mocked. And then, ‘Have you had enough of life already, my dear?' And Annabella, answering her mother's smile, replied, ‘Sometimes I almost believe I have,' and kissed her goodnight.

Chapter Three

IN THE EVENT
, Lady Cowper deemed it best to hold the party at her own house; and the Milbankes themselves had returned to Seaham before Annabella had a chance of renewing her acquaintance with Lord Byron.

Mary Montgomery called on Annabella at Gosford House; they were to make their way together to the party. Mary was a pale, invalidish, good-natured and sharp-tongued girl. She flattered Annabella's sense of kindliness twice over: by seeming to require her friend's devoted attendance and by indulging an appetite for gossip which was crueller and more honest than Annabella dared to trust her conscience with. This gave her several happy occasions for reproof. The great joke between them, to which Annabella contributed only her silent enjoyment, had to do with Annabella's suitors: their number, their qualities, their ardours, and their inevitable disappointments. Mary was something of a favourite at Cumberland Place, owing to the lighter spirits into which she coaxed her friend; and she amused the Gosfords on their short carriage-ride by counting over the ranks of Annabella's ‘unhopefuls', many of whom they could expect to meet at Lady Cowper's. There were George Eden, Augustus Foster, William Bankes . . .

‘You seem quite the fashion, my dear,' Lady Gosford said. ‘Mankind bow before you.'

‘At least they did last year,' Mary replied for her friend. ‘But she has left so many famous wrecks behind her that no one now dares approach. I have high hopes of salvaging someone among them for my own uses. I dare say, nobody would want me else.' There was, in the gentle rebuke to which Annabella subjected her friend, not quite the sharpness of disagreement.

Lady Cowper had decreed that the young should justify their appetites before receiving any supper; and as the Gosfords and their two protégées mounted the wide steps rising from Hanover Square, they heard the bright beat of a dance in progress. They were shown inside; Mary rested her weight on Annabella's arm. Amidst the confusion of the scene, the girls soon lost sight of their chaperons, and then Mary herself disappeared into the mix. Annabella began to look for her. She was often surprised into sudden depressions by the ease with which even her sickly friend could enter into any kind of public amusement. The happiness of others tended to rouse her bitterest self-reflections, but these, at least, relieved a little her anxiety at the prospect of seeing Lord Byron again. She had spent the day carefully rehearsing a pretext for addressing him and had just returned to the question when she almost stumbled over his leg. He caught her gently by the hand and guided her to a seat beside him. After a minute's silence, which both of them occupied by staring at the commencement of a waltz, Lord Byron bent towards her and whispered, ‘Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself?'

It was her own thought exactly, and she was startled to hear it given a public voice. His remark betrayed the kind of scorn that was her secret comfort. She relied perhaps too much on the drug of misanthropy to soothe her, whenever she felt that nobody would speak to her, that she had nothing to say. But she was doubly grateful for it now that somebody had spoken, in that misanthropy itself supplied the course of the conversation. ‘You are too kind,' she answered, ‘in restricting your contempt merely to the masculine pronoun.'

He bowed.

‘I have not had the honour of an introduction,' she continued after a silence, which he did nothing to correct. She was amazed at her self-possession; yet she was conscious of a kind of giddiness, too, that was distinguished rather for the stillness and clarity of her thoughts than any confusion.

‘I believe I have the advantage of you,' he said. ‘There is no one among Lady Caroline's acquaintance whom she admires more warmly than yourself; and her praises have been so explicit that I flattered myself, my dear Miss Milbanke, we were already old friends.'

‘Well, then, to return the compliment: shall I say that I knew you, if not by reputation alone, then by your poem, whose name is on everyone's lips?'

He hid a rueful smile with the flat of his thumb. ‘You mock me, I believe; so I won't take offence, if only because you intend to give it.'

‘My lord, not at all. There is only too much good in your Harold—so much, that he is ashamed to reveal it.'

‘Then I won't spare your blushes. Your goodness is so generally believed in that the particulars of it often go unnoticed.' There was a pause in which he gathered his thoughts; they watched the dancing couples bow and part. In a more serious vein he continued, ‘I heard of your kindness to Joseph Blacket with as much shame as admiration. Once, for the sake of a rhyme, I did him some injury, which as a poor fellow-poet, poor in the bitterest sense of that abused word, he had done nothing to deserve.'

Blacket was a cobbler from Seaham; he had dreamed of becoming an author and had studied hard to improve himself. Not only had the Milbankes taken on the expense of printing an edition of his verse, Annabella herself had copied and corrected the proofs. But his constitution being weak, he had not lived to publish a second—which might have built on the triumphs of the first and omitted those faults that Lord Byron had formerly seen fit to satirize for their pretension. ‘The errors of our youth,' replied the nineteen-year-old girl, ‘have this virtue: that they teach us to correct them. And if the lesson once learned is never forgot, we may at last deserve to regard them with complacence.'

There was no topic Lord Byron might have hit on that could have pleased Annabella better; the humanity of his feelings on the subject touched her to the quick. And yet there was something so perfect about the quality of attention he bestowed on her that she could not suppress a suspicion that in some large sense she was being teased. His conversation certainly had its ironies, but their real object, she consoled herself, might be nothing other than his own capacity for sympathy—which seemed quick and strong, but also selfish. The great danger, she knew, to a sensitive conscience was that it tended to suffer more for its own sake than for others'.
Poor Blacket
. He had never in life amounted to anything so valuable: he had become a token of Lord Byron's repentance. Annabella found, at least, that she was willing to accept it.

The next dance was beginning. Lord Byron had not stirred; he surveyed the scene with a detachment to which he soon gave a voice. ‘The great object of life is sensation,' he said to Annabella, without turning towards her. ‘Is it not? To feel that we exist, even though in pain . . . It is this craving void which drives us into society and out of it again. The principal attraction, I believe, of any pursuit—whether waltzing, gaming, husband-hunting, or war—is the agitation inseparable from its accomplishment.'

At that moment, George Eden (one of her young ‘unhopefuls', as Mary called them) claimed Annabella for the dance, and she was drawn away—from the periphery of the scene into its centre. Mr Eden was a good-natured gentleman, if a little conceited. It was just like him, Annabella thought, to ‘rescue' her from the attentions of the fashionable poet; he trusted to their shared opinion of his corrupted and corrupting nature. As she turned to look over her shoulder, she saw Lord Byron cross his legs and smile: an unhappy smile, which affected her painfully, as it seemed to imply a fresh disappointment. It was as if she had added her own piece of evidence to the proof of his loneliness. In his eyes, they were no better than the rest of the busy dancers, whose happiness depended on their motion, whose life was a continuing escape from that observant stillness with which Lord Byron regarded them.

Mr Eden, Annabella was forced to admit, danced beautifully. His conversation, however, was more declarative than interrogatory. ‘In two weeks,' he said, as they circled each other, ‘he was set to take orders, but he could assure Miss Milbanke that his ambitions were by no means limited to a quiet country parsonage. His modesty was only the plain language of his wants; he had trimmed his expectations in order to realize them in their essentials.'

Annabella was aware of his preference; he was the kind to flatter by confession. Nor could she deny that he was a ‘very respectable match', as Lady Milbanke herself had once remarked. Mr Eden had sensible tastes and two thousand pounds a year to satisfy them. He was not unhandsome either, she considered, as they stepped to the top of the line and faced each other again. His broad, rough countenance conveyed solid virtues: a strong nose, with healthy, articulated nostrils; a large, expansive eye. Only his thin, fluent lips suggested a more delicate gauge. And yet, as Annabella perceived it, there was a want of something spiritual in his character. He knew his own mind and presumed to know hers with so firm a grasp as to exclude her own uncertainties: she had rather be doubted more. As she complained afterwards to Mary Montgomery, ‘Perhaps if he were more unhopeful I should like him better; the fact is, he presumes to know.' Their characters were very much alike, he continued, as she felt her hand grow warm against his: ‘sensible, clever, good'. And when she only smiled at him, he replied, after the music had stopped, ‘That the best modesty included an honest sense of one's merits, as well as their limits.'

Later, over supper, she fell into conversation with Lady Caroline, in whom the charge of mixed company had produced an almost uncontrollable current. She had been over-exerting herself. Her features were small and finely expressive—the least and pettiest of her changing feelings declared itself in her face. Activity had given her a hectic glaze; she looked hot to the touch. She said to Annabella, ‘How well I remember your waltzing. There never was a prettier instructress; I should love to learn at your hands.' Annabella, who was puzzled for a reply, was soon spared the need of one. ‘And what do you think of Lord B? I saw you engrossed together. Was there ever a more miserable charmer? Or a more charming misery?' She linked her arm in Annabella's and together they surveyed the scene. ‘He is somewhat in awe of you,' Lady Caroline continued in a whisper. Annabella, who distrusted her friend, was still aware of the concentration of looks they attracted together: the very good and the very bad girl in confederation.

‘For that, I believe, I have you to thank. He praised your account of my virtues till I grew quite uncomfortable with so much imputed goodness.'

‘Well, and was it less than the truth?' Annabella could not read Lady Caroline's mind: C was one of those jealous women who prided herself on strong sisterly feelings. Her jealousies played strangely off her passion for female friendship. It seemed to Annabella that Lady Caroline wished to set her up as a rival for the purpose of beating her to Lord Byron's heart. It was a game Annabella disliked: she could not help but lose at it. ‘You have had a most remarkable coming out,' Caroline continued. ‘There has never been another like it. To the charms of youth and beauty, you have added those of an unimpeachable goodness; and it has acted upon the gentlemen as riches used to. There was never a more sought-after hand than your own, my dear.'

‘I have never understood what is meant by my goodness. It seems rather an imaginary quality: my real state of grace, only God, and perhaps my mother, can claim to know. As for the rest—I suppose it is a question of manners more than anything else. Men blame me for it to soften the force of my indifference to them; and women praise me for it, so that the men no longer attempt to approach me.'

‘Perhaps you will not be offended,' Lady Caroline replied, smiling, ‘when I say that you reason like a man, since you know how often I have been charged with acting like a boy.'

Annabella still felt the pressure of Lady Caroline's arm in her own. There was something improper in her friend from which she would have preferred to detach herself, not least because her standing there implied a tacit consent, to Lord Byron if nobody else, of those behaviours which had begun to get the pair of them talked about. She remembered with an inward blush her reluctance to attend the waltzing party. It is not a ball, she had reasoned; her aunt was presiding . . . Considerations that, she fully admitted, could play no part in excusing her present visit: how easily she had been seduced into a second meeting! The first step is always hardest.

But her sense of virtue quickly rallied to a justification. She disliked the idea of Lady Caroline's friendship with the poet. His character, it seemed to her, was such that he was often tempted into sin by his finer feelings; and it would take a nice management indeed to prevent the one without suppressing the other. Annabella's interest in Lord Byron was still at that stage where she could persuade herself that all she sought from him was his own moral advantage. She excused herself. ‘My great friend Mary Montgomery,' she said, ‘possesses both high spirits and a weak constitution. I consider it my duty to rescue her from the combination of them. I see her across the room, irritably rubbing the backs of her hands, which is always a sign with her of great fatigue.' Lady Caroline released her on the condition that Annabella would call on her soon. They were practically sisters, and she was anxious to hear her thoughts on Lord Byron, about whom she delighted to speak, especially in a more comfortable seclusion. She was glad that their introduction had now been effected. Lord Byron had long desired it, and it afforded Caroline, at last, the pleasure of testing her opinion of the poet against Annabella's greater penetration.