Maulever Hall (16 page)

For the moment she let Sadie loose in the rich grass of the lawn and followed her ancient guide to the front door that stood hospitably open among more climbing roses. Inside, the house bore a curious resemblance to its owner. Here, too, were odd contrasts and curious contradictions. The floor was of well-scrubbed brick, but a magnificent Persian carpet lay in front of the empty fireplace in the little parlor. Half the furniture was what you might expect to find in any village cottage; the rest would not have been out of place in a Mayfair drawing room. A rough wheel
-
backed chair was drawn up to a delicate lady’s writing desk; a charming little bookcase, full of leather volumes, stood on top of a plain deal chest. The odd and charming effect of the whole was accentuated by the silver vases that stood everywhere, all of them full of big buxom sweet-scented country roses.

“Sit down.” The old woman gestured Marianne to a delicate little sofa whose upholstery had faded to a strange silver gray. Then she raised her voice to an eldritch screech: “Mary, Mary, where have you got to now? We have a visitor.”

A door to the back of the house popped open and another old woman put her head round it. “A visitor?” Marianne was not, by now, in the least surprised that this voice was rich Cockney. The face, too, was a Londoner’s face, with the almost suspicious sharpness that is bred in city streets. Compared with her mistress, this old woman might almost pass as young, her face was still round and rosy and oddly unlined and her stout figure in the striped cotton gown and voluminous apron still robust. “A visitor?” she said again, “well bless us and keep us all and where did she spring from?”

“From the moor. And that will be enough talk, Mary. We will have a luncheon at once. Our guest is exhausted.”

“A luncheon? Dinner more like at this hour and there’s nought in the house but cold meat, my lady.”

“Then off with you and bring it, and don’t ‘my lady’ me,” said her mistress. Then, turning to Marianne: “I know you will not want to stay for anything more elaborate, since your parents must already be anxious about you. Now, tell me about yourself. Where do you come from? Who are you? And what are your family thinking of to let you be riding about the moor, alone, on a bolting horse.”

Marianne smiled at the brisk, imperative string of questions, but set herself to answer them as simply as she could. “My name is Marianne Lamb,” she began, “I am companion to Mrs. Mauleverer of Maulever Hall. And it was my fault, not Sadie’s. I was not thinking what I was doing, and an adder startled her.”

“You must be a good rider. Companion, eh? I’ve heard of Mrs. Mauleverer. Plays cards, don’t she? Has a bad-tempered son who never got over being scarred at Waterloo. But good enough sort of people; none of your jumped-up second generation gentry. You might have done worse for yourself. Lamb, you said? Marianne? Mother reading French books? Or just Jane Austen? Well, one thing, it won’t take you much more than an hour to reach Maulever Hall by road—that is if that mare of yours can still go. Ought to have a rub down really, but there’s only me and Mary. Mary’s scared silly of horses, and I’d rather talk to you. Pretty girls don’t drop into my garden every day, and it’s pleasant to talk to someone I can hear. Ah! food; thank you, Mary, that will do. Don’t want to hurry you, my dear, but best eat fast and be on your way or they’ll have the search parties out from Maulever Hall. Come back another day and tell me what you’re doing tied to Mrs. Mauleverer’s apron strings.”

“I’d like to.” Marianne found herself enormously drawn to this ugly old woman, with her sharp eyes and her oddly mannish way of talking. “If you’re sure I won’t be a nuisance.”

“Nuisance! I should think not. Came down here for solitude; that’s true enough; but that was twenty years ago, and I had a broken heart for company. Forgotten what it felt like now, but occupying, I remember, very occupying. I missed it for a while
...
Quiet in the country. Mary said, why not go back to town, but, I ask you, why? Can’t leave the garden for one thing—always something to do there—have
some more strawberries? No? Well then, best be going, if you’ve the strength, and you look to have. Not a town girl either, are you? Knew it at once. Yes, do come again, my dear, I’d like it.”

Slightly dazed, Marianne listened to her curt but lucid directions as to the best way back to Maulever Hall and then rose to take her leave: “I do not know how to thank you, Lady—” She paused expectantly.

“Lady Fiddlestick! I thought I’d got Mary trained out of it at last, but she’s obstinate as they come. I ask you: Lady Gardener of Mud Hall? Or Lady Boots and Barrows?” She had, in fact, kicked off her Hessian boots on entering the house, but now put them on again preparatory to seeing Marianne to the road. “Call me Mrs. Bundy. It’ll do. I suppose you can mount the brute unaided?”

“If you’ve a garden bench I can use?”

“There’s an old tree trunk I sit on between chores.”

Safely in the saddle again, Marianne bent once more to thank her hostess, whose real name she did not seem likely to learn. But, “Come again,” said Mrs. Bundy.

Sadie was as weary as her rider, and they made their way lethargically home along the little country road to which Mrs. Bundy had directed Marianne. To her relief, the road seemed to keep mainly to the valley and though it wound up and down over the spurs of the hills, there was no really hard climb to test Sadie’s diminished strength. The heat of the day had passed and a little evening breeze sprung up. Birds sang their vespers in the hedges, the stream, which the little lane kept crossing and recrossing, rattled merrily over its stony bed. Marianne was amazed to find she was singing to herself. For a while, interest in Mrs. Bundy (what on earth could be her real name?) had drowned out the memory of her own wretchedness. The old lady had had a broken heart once, twenty years ago, and had even forgotten what it felt like. I must visit her again, thought Marianne, and turned, with relief, from the lane into a larger road that she recognized. Half an hour’s steady riding would bring her home to Maulever Hall.

She was very late for dinner and found Mrs. Mauleverer hovering somewhere between anxiety and irritation; the anxiety genuine, if querulous enough, the irritation carefully fomented, Marianne suspected, by her patient enemy, Martha. She kept her explanations as brief as possible and did not mention the fact that Sadie had run away with her, merely saying that she had lost her way on the moors and
stopped for directions. For some reason that she did not, herself, quite understand, she made no mention of her odd, engaging hostess, letting Mrs. Mauleverer think that she had merely stopped at some remote moorland farm.

To her relief, Sadie was none the worse for their adventure and, as she had now established her right to use her, she rode out every afternoon that she could manage. It was nearly a week before she found time to pay another visit to the cottage in the valley and when she did so she was received like an old and welcome friend by both Mary and her mistress. The strawberries were finished, but she helped her new friend gather raspberries from the canes at the end of the garden and found herself, as she did so, talking much more freely than she had expected about her own circumstances. Mrs. Bundy was a good listener and if she deduced a good deal from Marianne’s few and guarded references to Mauleverer and Lady Heverdon she was too clever to show it, concentrating her questions on the point of Marianne’s identity. “So you are riding about the countryside hoping someone will recognize you? Hopeful, don’t you think? There’s been no hue and cry that I’ve heard of, and, recluse that I am, I hear of most things. It’s odd—very odd. But you’re well enough where you are, hey?”

“Oh yes.” Marianne knew she did not sound quite convinced.

“If not; come here. Always welcome. Plenty to do in the garden. You’d be bored, of course, but there are worse fates. No, no, don’t make a song and dance about it; just come, any day, if you want to. Mary likes you too; so no problem there; said so only the other day. There, that’s enough of those and my back’s breaking. Not so young as I was, you know: can’t stoop, can’t carry, can’t sleep—deuced boring, old age, if you ask me. Let’s go and have lunch.”

After that, Marianne rode over to the cottage at least once a week. There was always a warm welcome for her, and a perfect flood of satisfactory talk. For though Mrs. Bundy called herself a recluse, she kept very much in touch with the world beyond her valley. All the latest books and papers found their way to the little house and she read them with an acute detachment that Marianne found enormously refreshing. Where Mrs. Mauleverer confined herself to
La Belle Assemble,
and preferred its illustrations to its text, Mrs. Bundy would discuss the relative merits of the
Edinburgh
and the
Quarterly Reviews,
with satirical references to particular articles in each. She was keenly interested, too, in the
progress of the Reform Bill through Parliament and delighted Marianne by an occasional flattering reference to Mauleverer’s backstage work for it. She must, Marianne realized, have many and faithful correspondents in London to be so thoroughly
au courant
with affairs there, and she was often tempted to ask Mary who she really was, but refrained. If her kind hostess wished to remain Mrs. Bundy, she must be allowed to do so.

Meanwhile, summer was drawing toward autumn. Co
rn
was stacked in the fields and the first of September had brought all the neighboring gentry out with their guns. Mrs. Mauleverer hoped daily that her son would come down for a few days’ shooting. But his Reform Bill was still being discussed in committee of the House of Commons. Marianne did not expect him. What she was waiting for was the mysteriously still-deferred announcement of his engagement to Lady Heverdon. Even if her state of mourning precluded its public announcement, surely it was time he told his mother about it. There had been, in fact, only one brief note from him since he had returned to London and that had been mainly concerned with the things he had left behind him in his sudden departure from the Hall. Of course, it had fallen to Marianne to make up a parcel of several exquisite cambric shirts, two velvet waistcoats and a file of papers about the Exton election. If she dropped two angry tears into the parcel before sealing it up, that was her own affair.

Lady Heverdon, on the other hand, had written Mrs. Mauleverer a long double letter, lavishly crossed in a hand so delicate and spidery that Mrs. Mauleverer had thrown it to Marianne ordering her to read it aloud: “If you can make it out, that is.”

t seemed to consist largely of a chronicle of the vicissitudes of her journey back to London, with the word “we” very much to the fore, and left Marianne with just the picture she had expected of sociable nights spent with Mauleverer by the roaring fires of country inns where obsequious landlords brought out their best to entertain such honored guests. There was no actual mention of Mauleverer, but when Lady Heverdon said that “we found it impossible to make ourselves hurry,” it was obvious enough what she meant. Every day, when the mail came, Marianne steeled herself for the inevitable announcement of the engagement, and every day suffered the pangs of exquisite disappointment.

Meanwhile, her own suitor had not been idle. She had thought she had given poor Mr. Emsworth such a set-down,
that day in the cutting garden, that he would never trouble her again, but she had, it seemed, very much mistaken her man. He had kept away from her, it was true, for a week or so after her refusal, but then the old encounters began again. She could not object to his visiting her Bible class, since it was, of course, conducted under his auspices, but she hated the way he insisted on seeing her home after it, with jocose remarks about poachers and his anxiety on her behalf. Worse still, he had paid a call at Maulever Hall when she was out riding one day and had contrived to enlist Mrs. Mauleverer on his side. The old lady dearly loved a romance, whether in three volumes or in real life, and refused to believe that Marianne was entirely unmoved by her suitor’s devotion. It would be, she hinted, the most satisfactory possible conclusion to Marianne’s
adventures
: “Of course, I should miss you grievously, my dear, but, after all, it is not as if you would be going far. And the vicarage is a very good sort of a house indeed. It has four reception rooms, if you count that tiny front room, and I am not sure how many bedrooms, but enough, I am sure, for the kind of family a clergyman can afford. Mr. Emsworth has no expectations, it is true, but the living is his for life—truly, child, you could do much worse.”

It is always disconcerting to find oneself less indispensable than one had thought, and Marianne found Mrs. Mauleverer’s persistent urging of Emsworth’s suit increasingly trying. The last straw came one windy September morning when they were busy putting the summer’s crop of dried lavender into bags—a ladylike occupation which Mrs. Mauleverer particularly enjoyed. “I have written Mark about you know what, my dear.” Mrs. Mauleverer tied a neat bow of purple satin ribbon round a bag and put it on one side. “I am sure he will agree that it is the very best thing you can do. I told him how much I should miss you: I really
think
I should have to have a little excursion—to Cheltenham or maybe even Bath to recover the tone of my spirits. If you were to be married at Michaelmas I could make an autumn tour of it, before the roads get too bad. I am sure Mark will think that best: I explained to him that you were hanging off merely, I was sure, for my sake and that such a plan, if he were to propose it, would leave you free to follow the dictates of your heart.”