Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (214 page)

‘It looks very attractive, as far as I can see by this light,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘But is it not rather too brilliant in colour — blue and red together, like that?  Remember, as I often tell you, people in town never wear such bright contrasts as they do in the country.’

‘O Berta!’ said Cornelia, in a deprecating tone; ‘don’t object.  If there’s one thing I do glory in it is a nice flare-up about my head o’ Sundays — of course if the family’s not in mourning, I mean.’  But, seeing that Ethelberta did not smile, she turned the subject, and added docilely: ‘Did you come up for me to do anything?  I will put off finishing my bonnet if I am wanted.’

‘I was going to talk to you about family matters, and Picotee,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘But, as you are busy, and I have a headache, I will put it off till to-morrow.’

Cornelia seemed decidedly relieved, for family matters were far from attractive at the best of times; and Ethelberta went down to the next floor, and entered her mother’s room.

After a short conversation Mrs. Chickerel said, ‘You say you want to ask me something?’

‘Yes: but nothing of importance, mother.  I was thinking about Picotee, and what would be the best thing to do — ’

‘Ah, well you may, Berta.  I am so uneasy about this life you have led us into, and full of fear that your plans may break down; if they do, whatever will become of us?  I know you are doing your best; but I cannot help thinking that the coming to London and living with you was wild and rash, and not well weighed afore we set about it.  You should have counted the cost first, and not advised it.  If you break down, and we are all discovered living so queer and unnatural, right in the heart of the aristocracy, we should be the laughing-stock of the country: it would kill me, and ruin us all — utterly ruin us!’

‘O mother, I know all that so well!’ exclaimed Ethelberta, tears of anguish filling her eyes.  ‘Don’t depress me more than I depress myself by such fears, or you will bring about the very thing we strive to avoid!  My only chance is in keeping in good spirits, and why don’t you try to help me a little by taking a brighter view of things?’

‘I know I ought to, my dear girl, but I cannot.  I do so wish that I never let you tempt me and the children away from the Lodge.  I cannot think why I allowed myself to be so persuaded — cannot think!  You are not to blame — it is I.  I am much older than you, and ought to have known better than listen to such a scheme.  This undertaking seems too big — the bills frighten me.  I have never been used to such wild adventure, and I can’t sleep at night for fear that your tale-telling will go wrong, and we shall all be exposed and shamed.  A story-teller seems such an impossible castle-in-the-air sort of a trade for getting a living by — I cannot think how ever you came to dream of such an unheard-of thing.’

‘But it is
not
a castle in the air, and it
does
get a living!’ said Ethelberta, her lip quivering.

‘Well, yes, while it is just a new thing; but I am afraid it cannot last — that’s what I fear.  People will find you out as one of a family of servants, and their pride will be stung at having gone to hear your romancing; then they will go no more, and what will happen to us and the poor little ones?’

‘We must all scatter again!’

‘If we could get as we were once, I wouldn’t mind that.  But we shall have lost our character as simple country folk who know nothing, which are the only class of poor people that squires will give any help to; and I much doubt if the girls would get places after such a discovery — it would be so awkward and unheard-of.’

‘Well, all I can say is,’ replied Ethelberta, ‘that I will do my best.  All that I have is theirs and yours as much as mine, and these arrangements are simply on their account.  I don’t like my relations being my servants; but if they did not work for me, they would have to work for others, and my service is much lighter and pleasanter than any other lady’s would be for them, so the advantages are worth the risk.  If I stood alone, I would go and hide my head in any hole, and care no more about the world and its ways.  I wish I was well out of it, and at the bottom of a quiet grave — anybody might have the world for me then!  But don’t let me disturb you longer; it is getting late.’

Ethelberta then wished her mother good-night, and went away.  To attempt confidences on such an ethereal matter as love was now absurd; her hermit spirit was doomed to dwell apart as usual; and she applied herself to deep thinking without aid and alone.  Not only was there Picotee’s misery to disperse; it became imperative to consider how best to overpass a more general catastrophe.

CHAPTER 24.

ETHELBERTA’S HOUSE (continued) — THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Mrs. Chickerel, in deploring the risks of their present speculative mode of life, was far from imagining that signs of the foul future so much dreaded were actually apparent to Ethelberta at the time the lament was spoken.  Hence the daughter’s uncommon sensitiveness to prophecy.  It was as if a dead-reckoner poring over his chart should predict breakers ahead to one who already beheld them.

That her story-telling would prove so attractive Ethelberta had not ventured to expect for a moment; that having once proved attractive there should be any falling-off until such time had elapsed as would enable her to harvest some solid fruit was equally a surprise.  Future expectations are often based without hesitation upon one happy accident, when the only similar condition remaining to subsequent sets of circumstances is that the same person forms the centre of them.  Her situation was so peculiar, and so unlike that of most public people, that there was hardly an argument explaining this triumphant opening which could be used in forecasting the close; unless, indeed, more strategy were employed in the conduct of the campaign than Ethelberta seemed to show at present.

There was no denying that she commanded less attention than at first: the audience had lessened, and, judging by appearances, might soon be expected to be decidedly thin.  In excessive lowness of spirit, Ethelberta translated these signs with the bias that a lingering echo of her mother’s dismal words naturally induced, reading them as conclusive evidence that her adventure had been chimerical in its birth.  Yet it was very far less conclusive than she supposed.  Public interest might without doubt have been renewed after a due interval, some of the falling-off being only an accident of the season.  Her novelties had been hailed with pleasure, the rather that their freshness tickled than that their intrinsic merit was appreciated; and, like many inexperienced dispensers of a unique charm, Ethelberta, by bestowing too liberally and too frequently, was destroying the very element upon which its popularity depended.  Her entertainment had been good in its conception, and partly good in its execution; yet her success had but little to do with that goodness.  Indeed, what might be called its badness in a histrionic sense — that is, her look sometimes of being out of place, the sight of a beautiful woman on a platform, revealing tender airs of domesticity which showed her to belong by character to a quiet drawing-room — had been primarily an attractive feature.  But alas, custom was staling this by improving her up to the mark of an utter impersonator, thereby eradicating the pretty abashments of a poetess out of her sphere; and more than one well-wisher who observed Ethelberta from afar feared that it might some day come to be said of her that she had

‘Enfeoffed herself to popularity:

That, being daily swallowed by men’s eyes,

They surfeited with honey, and began

To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little

More than a little is by much too much.’

But this in its extremity was not quite yet.

We discover her one day, a little after this time, sitting before a table strewed with accounts and bills from different tradesmen of the neighbourhood, which she examined with a pale face, collecting their totals on a blank sheet.  Picotee came into the room, but Ethelberta took no notice whatever of her.  The younger sister, who subsisted on scraps of notice and favour, like a dependent animal, even if these were only an occasional glance of the eye, could not help saying at last, ‘Berta, how silent you are.  I don’t think you know I am in the room.’

‘I did not observe you,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘I am very much engaged: these bills have to be paid.’

‘What, and cannot we pay them?’ said Picotee, in vague alarm.

‘O yes, I can pay them.  The question is, how long shall I be able to do it?’

‘That is sad; and we are going on so nicely, too.  It is not true that you have really decided to leave off story-telling now the people don’t crowd to hear it as they did?’

‘I think I shall leave off.’

‘And begin again next year?’

‘That is very doubtful.’

‘I’ll tell you what you might do,’ said Picotee, her face kindling with a sense of great originality.  ‘You might travel about to country towns and tell your story splendidly.’

‘A man in my position might perhaps do it with impunity; but I could not without losing ground in other domains.  A woman may drive to Mayfair from her house in Exonbury Crescent, and speak from a platform there, and be supposed to do it as an original way of amusing herself; but when it comes to starring in the provinces she establishes herself as a woman of a different breed and habit.  I wish I were a man!  I would give up this house, advertise it to be let furnished, and sally forth with confidence.  But I am driven to think of other ways to manage than that.’

Picotee fell into a conjectural look, but could not guess.

‘The way of marriage,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘Otherwise perhaps the poetess may live to become what Dryden called himself when he got old and poor — a rent-charge on Providence. . . . .  Yes, I must try that way,’ she continued, with a sarcasm towards people out of hearing.  I must buy a “Peerage” for one thing, and a “Baronetage,” and a “House of Commons,” and a “Landed Gentry,” and learn what people are about me.  ‘I must go to Doctors’ Commons and read up wills of the parents of any likely gudgeons I may know.  I must get a Herald to invent an escutcheon of my family, and throw a genealogical tree into the bargain in consideration of my taking a few second-hand heirlooms of a pawnbroking friend of his.  I must get up sham ancestors, and find out some notorious name to start my pedigree from.  It does not matter what his character was; either villain or martyr will do, provided that he lived five hundred years ago.  It would be considered far more creditable to make good my descent from Satan in the age when he went to and fro on the earth than from a ministering angel under Victoria.’

‘But, Berta, you are not going to marry any stranger who may turn up?’ said Picotee, who had creeping sensations of dread when Ethelberta talked like this.

‘I had no such intention.  But, having once put my hand to the plough, how shall I turn back?’

‘You might marry Mr. Ladywell,’ said Picotee, who preferred to look at things in the concrete.

‘Yes, marry him villainously; in cold blood, without a moment to prepare himself.’

‘Ah, you won’t!’

‘I am not so sure about that.  I have brought mother and the children to town against her judgment and against my father’s; they gave way to my opinion as to one who from superior education has larger knowledge of the world than they.  I must prove my promises, even if Heaven should fall upon me for it, or what a miserable future will theirs be!  We must not be poor in London.  Poverty in the country is a sadness, but poverty in town is a horror.  There is something not without grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain; but a back garret in a rookery, and the other starvers in the room insisting on keeping the window shut — anything to deliver us from that!’

‘How gloomy you can be, Berta!  It will never be so dreadful.  Why, I can take in plain sewing, and you can do translations, and mother can knit stockings, and so on.  How much longer will this house be yours?’

‘Two years.  If I keep it longer than that I shall have to pay rent at the rate of three hundred a year.  The Petherwin estate provides me with it till then, which will be the end of Lady Petherwin’s term.’

‘I see it; and you ought to marry before the house is gone, if you mean to marry high,’ murmured Picotee, in an inadequate voice, as one confronted by a world so tragic that any hope of her assisting therein was out of the question.

It was not long after this exposition of the family affairs that Christopher called upon them; but Picotee was not present, having gone to think of superhuman work on the spur of Ethelberta’s awakening talk.  There was something new in the way in which Ethelberta received the announcement of his name; passion had to do with it, so had circumspection; the latter most, for the first time since their reunion.

‘I am going to leave this part of England,’ said Christopher, after a few gentle preliminaries.  ‘I was one of the applicants for the post of assistant-organist at Melchester Cathedral when it became vacant, and I find I am likely to be chosen, through the interest of one of my father’s friends.’

‘I congratulate you.’

‘No, Ethelberta, it is not worth that.  I did not originally mean to follow this course at all; but events seemed to point to it in the absence of a better.’

‘I too am compelled to follow a course I did not originally mean to take.’  After saying no more for a few moments, she added, in a tone of sudden openness, a richer tincture creeping up her cheek, ‘I want to put a question to you boldly — not exactly a question — a thought.  Have you considered whether the relations between us which have lately prevailed are — are the best for you — and for me?’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Christopher, hastily anticipating all that she might be going to say; ‘and I am glad you have given me the opportunity of speaking upon that subject.  It has been very good and considerate in you to allow me to share your society so frequently as you have done since I have been in town, and to think of you as an object to exist for and strive for.  But I ought to have remembered that, since you have nobody at your side to look after your interests, it behoved me to be doubly careful.  In short, Ethelberta, I am not in a position to marry, nor can I discern when I shall be, and I feel it would be an injustice to ask you to be bound in any way to one lower and less talented than you.  You cannot, from what you say, think it desirable that the engagement should continue.  I have no right to ask you to be my betrothed, without having a near prospect of making you my wife.  I don’t mind saying this straight out — I have no fear that you will doubt my love; thank Heaven, you know what that is well enough!  However, as things are, I wish you to know that I cannot conscientiously put in a claim upon your attention.’