A Quiet Adjustment (5 page)

It seemed to Annabella, as she bade her goodnight, that Lady Caroline was trying to throw her in Lord Byron's way. And she wondered how far she would be justified in accepting the connection, if only in the hope of offering his lordship a model of female conduct that Lady Caroline was particularly unsuited to providing. As she crossed the room, she for the first time noted that Augusta had joined the party; Lord Byron was talking in her ear. She smiled to think of the brother and sister, each as shy as the other, made all the more so by the mutual solace of their company. Augusta looked very beautiful in a dark blue dress patterned with spangles, in whose glimmer her eyes showed especially black. She was encouraging her brother to join the gentlemen; she did not wish to keep him from his friends. Annabella thought she could just make out Lord Byron answering, ‘I have not a friend in the world', and was pierced by the persuasion that he was speaking the simple truth. But Augusta laughed at him and said, ‘You only think yourself friendless, because no one else loves you so well as I.' In Annabella, a wave of jealousy followed swiftly on the back of her compassion.

Mary, on their journey home, quizzed her friend about Lord Byron. ‘I saw him talking to you in his very best low tone,' she said, ‘and wondered what he was being quietly significant about.'

‘You are teasing me; everybody teases me,' Annabella replied.

‘I thought you were held in such universal admiration that it was my privilege alone to mock you.'

‘Well, Lady Caroline has now taken her turn. She loves him so much she would have me love him, too.'

‘Is she not supposed to be of a jealous disposition?'

‘She was very puzzling; I could not make her out.'

‘And did she succeed, in making you love him?'

Annabella recognized in this a more promising inquiry. She prided herself on her truthfulness, especially when she believed it might cost her pains. In fact, she was glad to give her impression of the poet; she wanted to talk of him and analyse her feelings out of their confusion. ‘He is certainly very agreeable in conversation and very handsome, etc. His manners prove him to be one of nature's gentlemen. I confess that I felt he was the most attractive person in that company.' Their coachman shouted at some disturbance in the street, and as she collected her thoughts Annabella congratulated herself on being confident enough in her affections to criticize them openly. ‘I was not bound to him by any strong sympathy,' she continued, ‘until he said, not to me but in my hearing,
I have not a friend in the world! There is an instinct in the human heart that attaches us to the friendless. I consider it to be an act of humanity and a Christian duty not to deny him any temporary satisfaction he can derive from my acquaintance—though I shall not seek to increase it.' And then, when Mary only smiled at her, she insisted in a warmer tone, ‘He is not a dangerous person to me.'

‘I respect you so greatly,' Mary countered, ‘that I wonder if the same could be said about him, in regard to you.'

As usual, Annabella felt, her friend had wilfully misunderstood her finer motives. But the carriage had arrived at Mary's home in Wilmot Street, where it deposited her amidst mutual good wishes before carrying Annabella on to Gosford House and a sleepless bed.

Chapter Four

THEIR ACQUAINTANCE, THUS BEGUN,
had the full summer in which to ripen, but Annabella was becoming disappointed by its progress. She despaired of doing him any good by her example. His affair with Lady Caroline reached a pitch of excess that promoted it from the hushed gossip of the privileged few to the talk of the newspapers. Worse still, they both looked unhappy on it. Lady Caroline, whose charms were more animating than comfortable, had discovered to her cost the effects of repetition on even the warmest declarations of love. Her feelings had not altered, yet she could not disguise from herself the fact that the tone of their relations unquestionably
had
. The consciousness made her desperate. Lord Byron, who for his part hated a scene, found himself unwillingly placed in the midst of several. He was soft-hearted enough in the presence of affection to suffer anything for its sake, but absence quickly hardened him to sterner measures. And Annabella's aunt, Lady Melbourne, seemed to grow tired of plotting the cuckoldom of her son: she began to entertain other plans for the young poet.

Meanwhile, Sir Ralph and Judy had entrusted their daughter to the care of Lady Gosford. Annabella had written to her mother a full account of the evening at Lady Cowper's. ‘What will you think,' she began, ‘when I tell you that Lord Byron himself sought me out, in the gentlest manner, to sing my praises?' In spite of her differences with Lady Milbanke, there was no one Annabella preferred for confession. Her mother, it should be said, had the strongest appetite for hearing her daughter admired; and Annabella had long since ceased to feel any shame in appealing to it. ‘I have met with much evidence of his goodness,' she continued. ‘He sincerely repented his treatment of poor Blacket. You know how easily the noblest heart may be perverted by unkindness—perhaps the most easily a noble heart, because it is the more susceptible to ungenerous indignities. I believe that the criticisms he suffered from every quarter for his own first poetical effusions taught him only to visit similar judgements upon a young pretender. He freely confessed that he should have learnt forbearance instead. But while there are many virtues that depend on high feelings if they are to be acted upon, there are others, and forbearance among them, that proceed only from quiet spirits, which he has never known himself two days in succession. I have begged him to study tranquillity. There is nothing his noble intellect might not master if he applied himself to it, but he lacks direction. Alas, that none of his acquaintance seems inclined to give it! His conversation is very pleasing, but he wants that calm benevolence which could only touch my heart.' And then she repeated her assurance to Mary Montgomery: ‘He is not a dangerous person to me.'

The passing of the summer tended to justify this conviction. She met him again and again, at suppers and dances, but he was too much the object of a general attention for one who prided herself on an indifference to fashions to make much way with him. And he seemed to continue shy of her. Once, at a dinner given by Samuel Rogers, the conversation turned again to a question of poetical sincerity. Their host, himself a poet, who was rather admired than read, gave his opinion that there could be no good poetry without true feeling; Annabella was greatly surprised to find Lord Byron take up the argument against him. He invited any of his readers to determine from any particular passage what his real feelings on the subject were; often, he had no notion himself of what he believed or did not believe when the
estro
took him. Besides, he could never answer for his own feelings for more than one hour together.

Dinner was finished, and the gentlemen had rejoined the ladies in the drawing room. There was something in the bleak elegance of Rogers's apartments to encourage ‘philosophy', as Sir Walter Scott pleasantly declared. Annabella had read his novels, and Scott's open, manly countenance greatly impressed her. It was hard to imagine him lost in the business of fancy. He looked like a family lawyer, and his manners had the excellence of that profession: he was particularly kind to young ladies. He nodded at Annabella as he said the word. Her reputation as a blooming intellectual was sufficiently established to provoke the gentlemen into little tributes to it. She had found, however, that her opinions were more frequently honoured than asked for. And she began to summon within herself the courage to do justice to them.

Their host himself, a small, narrow, sour-faced man, who looked as if he suffered equally from hunger and indigestion, was perpetually engaged in straightening a picture, or resettling a cushion, or aligning a gem on the mantelpiece. It was quite a game with Lord Byron to shift one of these little ornaments in his progress through the room: to observe Rogers, like a restless ant, busily re-establishing order. The lamplight tended to exaggerate his shadowy fretfulness against the wall. Byron teased Rogers for being ‘the ghost of small adjustments'—a quip that, not unkindly meant, served only to irritate the feeling it was intended to relieve. The older poet, Annabella guessed, resented the fact that Byron continued to hold the floor over a question of inspiration. But nothing could divert the flow of inquiry.

It was suggested to his lordship that what mattered was his sincerity at the time of composition. Something of the force of his true sentiments, however changeable, could not be kept from the language. These would declare themselves in the gross power of the eloquence, if nowhere else. There could be no poetry without passion; and passion, whatever its moral tone, was little susceptible of being doubted if felt. Lord Byron smiled at this ruefully and said, ‘I hold my tongue, I hold my tongue, I should not like the ladies present to suspect how much the gentlemen
put
up
for show.' Annabella did not understand the tittering that greeted this remark and responded, lifting her voice to drown her nerves, that ‘perhaps it was the business of a discerning reader to decide for himself the truth or otherwise of poetical sentiments. I mean to say, that there is something in the act of publication which may be said to reveal an author to himself more clearly than any examination of his own conscience, unaided by such reflection
,
in its literal sense, could ever hope to do.'

Lord Byron bowed at her gravely and said ‘that he could never wish for a fairer discernment than Miss Milbanke's; that he feared she placed but too much faith in the power of an author's understanding to live up to her own; that her generous mind interpreted virtues where none were present, but that he himself would study to deserve them.'

A ripple of applause greeted this gracious speech, and Annabella blushed, not entirely for pleasure. He had touched on, however inadvertently, what Annabella conceived to be the great obstacle to their deepening acquaintance, as she later explained it to Miss Montgomery: ‘He puts so much faith in my goodness, such as it is, that he has correspondingly little in his right to attract me.' George Eden had been among the party. The look he directed at her, after Lord Byron's pretty compliment, was less one of reproof than calculation. Annabella bridled at any suspicion that she had fallen under the poet's spell and gave him but a cold farewell when Mr Eden excused himself early—hoping to anticipate, he said, by only a day, the forbearance which is always extended to the clergy for appearing unsociable. He was travelling to Oxford in the morning for the purpose of his ordination.

But she was caught out both ways that night. Later, she overheard Lord Byron attempting to appease their host at the expense of his departed guest. ‘Now there is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man, a most inoffensive man, a well-informed man, and a dull man, and this last epithet undoes all the rest. It is lucky for him that God loves him, as nothing human will.' Rogers, who for all his severity of manner relished gossip, only simpered at him; and it was left to Annabella, by a pointed turn of her shoulder, to communicate an appropriate disgust at such sentiments. She had heard of this side of his lordship's wit but had never before seen the evidence of it herself; and the worst of it was, that he had hit upon her own awful suspicions of Mr Eden. She was forced to count among the objects of her disapproval her own hypocrisy. Afterwards, he apologized to Miss Milbanke for attacking a reputation he could never aspire to himself, when he knew it to be dear to her—and which he envied on that account. ‘You are too good for a fallen creature to know,' he added.

In the morning, she called upon Miss Montgomery—hoping, by a limited confession, to relieve her mind of its most painful uncertainties. Mary lived in a comfortable house on Wilmot Street. As an only child, she was the spoilt darling of her parents, although more conscious of the luxury entailed by that condition than Annabella, in her own case, was willing to confess to. It was feared she would not live long. Her constitution was very weak and often laid her up a month at a time in the front parlour with nothing but a constant fire and supply of books and gossip to sustain her. Her invalidity had at least one benefit, which she sometimes admitted, that it spared her the pressures which usually attend the coming out of a girl with expectations. She had no real expectations, it was not presumed that she would live to see her wedding day. She only joked of being slighted in Annabella's favour by every suitor to tease her friend; really, she had little desire to surrender her mental independence to any man, however much her material liberty lay at the mercy of her flickering vitality and the vagaries of the weather.

She liked to keep the front room of the house on the first floor for her own use. It was smaller but overlooked the street, whose traffic she took a steady pleasure in remarking upon. (She sometimes said that the only joy to be gotten out of
observation
was that it supplied her with
conversation
; she preferred talking to looking and indulged in the latter only as it served the former.) Miss Milbanke was offered, upon entering, either the seat by the fire or by the window. Only Mary's position combined the two comforts, and as it was a bright April morning, Annabella chose to join her friend at the view. ‘Now, shall we occupy ourselves with something ladylike and improving? Have you brought your embroidery, or will you borrow mine? I believe not: you may claim the privilege of an invalid and do nothing but gossip.' She rang the bell, and when the servant came, called for coffee, which was eventually set down on the card-table between them.

‘I don't understand,' Mary said, after hearing Miss Milbanke's story, which was something between a confession and a complaint, ‘what the matter is. Is it that Lord Byron daren't approach you, because he fears you are too good for him; or is it the trouble that you are in fact too good for him?' It was just like Mary, Annabella thought, to insist on what she had been trying to evade.

‘I could not say,' she replied at last. ‘I flatter myself, perhaps, of being some use to him. And yet if he shuns me on that very account . . . There is also, I believe, some injury to my modesty in his opinion: I am hardly as perfect as he pretends me to be. It does me no good, I know, and can do our relations no good, for him to think me an angel; he plays up to the worst of my vanities and suggests, by that manoeuvre, that he knows me either much too little or much too well for my comfort.'

Mary smiled in admiration at her friend's subtlety. ‘Does it matter,
which
?' she asked.

After a moment's thought, Annabella said, ‘I believe it may.'

‘And which of those alternatives should you prefer, after all?'

Finally, from Annabella, an answering smile, ‘I can't say.'

It was one of those fine April mornings that gives way easily to a sudden shower. A tide of low grey cloud, still instinct with sunshine, had rolled in over the rooftops, and from it a flurry of drops fell to rattle the panes. A shift in the quality of light brought out a new cast of features in the two friends. Mary's face emerged, as vivid in darkness as it had been in brightness, but more intimate, more gravely ill; and Annabella herself appeared to Mary somewhat tired, not so much the pretty incarnation of her own complacence.

‘I'm glad of that,' Mary said, holding her cup in both hands, ‘now I shall have you all morning to myself. You won't venture out in this.' They watched the water soften the stones of the street and begin to gather into channels. ‘And what of Mr Eden?' Mary continued. ‘Shall I entertain any hopes for him? He seems so assured of everything in life that I feel a curious interest in
not
seeing him disappointed in the one thing most essential to his happiness. It's quite perverse of me, I know. We generally delight in finding the expectations of our friends frustrated, if only for their sake, that they may learn patience; but I often prefer to see their desires gratified. There is something very instructive in the spectacle of someone attempting to enjoy his perfect bliss.'

‘And what of me?' Annabella responded. ‘Would you sacrifice my own happiness to see to the end your little experiment upon his?'