The Country Gentleman (21 page)

Mrs. Insel considered this line of reasoning rather baroque, but then she had never quite understood Anne’s attachment to Ensley anyhow. She could not help but feel inclined, as Anne looked to her for a further response, to encourage the match—for at least this way Anne would be married to a kind, correct gentleman. Moreover, she was not so blind to her own advantage as to fail to realize such an alliance would resolve her own troubles—for if Anne could leave Cheshire, so could she. Still, she would not urge so grave a step on such narrow principles as these.

“How do you feel?” she asked at length. “Can you imagine yourself Mrs. Henry Highet?”

Anne actually shivered. “What a way to put it!” she exclaimed. “I suppose I would be.” She shrugged. “Anyhow, I am glad you are not horrified. I thought perhaps you would consider this another ‘bargain,’ as you called it, and take me to task for not slapping him on the face. Oh,
but I was forgetting: Mr. Highet is the very gentleman you cited as being incapable of proposing such a thing!” And she laughed affectionately at the consternation on Maria’s features.

But, “This is quite a different business,” Maria protested, rather stiffly. “The opposite, in fact. Mr. Highet offers you marriage.”

“Without love,” Anne added. “Which is quite acceptable. Whereas love without marriage,” she laughed, “is unthinkable. Oh, quite.”

“Laugh if you like—”

“I am laughing!”

“—but there is an important distinction. You will find society on my side.”

“Goose!” Anne rose and went to drop a kiss on Maria’s brow. “I am only chaffing you because you are such fun to chaff. Don’t frown. I shall do nothing for the moment. Mr. Highet is gone to market at Chester and will not be here again till to-morrow at the soonest.”

“You will not answer him to-morrow!” Maria cried, aghast. “You must take at least six months to consider such a proposal as this. Tell him you will know by—” She paused to count. “By May.”

“May! Good God, and bury myself here all winter, when I might be free? By heaven, I’ll ride to Chester and tell him at once.”

“Then you mean to accept him?”

Struck, “I do not know,” Anne replied. “Perhaps I do. Only…” The only, as Maria could very well guess, was that she had not yet heard from Ensley. “Only I shall wait at least till Sunday. Will that answer? Now come, little dove,” she went on before Maria could reply. Rising and
leading her to the door, “I know a dove who needs an airing,” she said, “and I must take her into the woods.”

But for once Maria resisted her. “Anne dear,” she began as they stood in the doorway, “before we go down, I must beg you at least to make no decision for my sake. You know I feel I ought to remove myself from Mr. Mallinger’s neighbourhood. You have seen him, I am sure, still dismal, though it is weeks since…since that day. But I wish you to know— Well, in short—”

She fumbled in her reticule. In truth, Anne had already considered the advantage the proposed marriage would create for Maria, and she did indeed weigh it into her deliberations. Nor was it only on account of Mr. Mallinger that she placed Mrs. Insel on the Yes side of the balance: Anne also ascribed to her the same longings she herself felt for London and society.

At last Maria brought forth two small slips of paper—her published advertisements clipped from the
Times
. “I have taken some action for myself,” she said, handing them to Anne, “and am well on the way to a solution. I have had several answers to each of them,” she added, as Miss Guilfoyle bent her head over the clippings.

But when Anne looked up tears stood in her eyes. “Maria! Do you really wish to leave me? If you do, I shall not argue; but if you do not—” Her voice broke and she could only finish, “I should regret you very much.”

Overcome with dismay, Maria threw her arms round her. She had not thought she was so important to Anne, whose apparent self-sufficiency sometimes deceived even her. “Of course I do not wish to go,” she protested. “I simply— I cannot bear the idea of your using up your precious days of freedom only so that I may quit the neighbourhood. Promise me you will not do so; promise me you
will let me go alone, that you will find another companion. Temporarily!” she added, squeezing Anne’s hand.

“Promised,” agreed Anne, blinking away the sudden tears. “And promise me you will write to all your correspondents and tell them they have answered too late, that you have accepted a post and that the lady of family has her companion. Will you?”

“Promised,” Maria said gladly.

Anne seized her hand and finally led her out the door. “I think we are both in need of an airing now,” she exclaimed, then, “‘Mrs. John!’ Indeed!”

Ensley’s marriage having taken place on a Monday, his first post-nuptial letter to Anne had been written on the Tuesday, and arrived in Cheshire Thursday, the last day of October. If anything, it was more affectionate than its predecessors. The writer reported his wedding to have gone off well; but he hinted that he could not help feeling pained, and even angry, that the face behind the bridal veil did not belong to…well, someone he thought of very tenderly as he stood before the altar. The new-married couple had taken a house in Cavendish Square, and Ensley devoted a paragraph or two to a description of it, and the way it was being furnished, ending, “But you will soon see it yourself, for November begins in four days, and that is the month you promised to come. Tell me the day exactly in your next to me, I beseech, that I may begin counting the hours. How I need you! Yours faithfully—” And so on.

Anne read and reread the letter, folded it, and made an inward resolve. The more she reflected, the more she believed what she had said to Maria: If she had been in earnest all these years of her friendship with Ensley, she must
not fail now to avail herself of an opportunity unlikely ever to come again. Marriage to Henry Highet would not only restore her fortune to her but would grant her even a greater degree of freedom than she had had as a single lady. She had gone over and over what she knew of Mr. Highet without finding any thing to make him ineligible, or to persuade her an alliance with him was ill-advised. And she could not help but be swayed by the prospect of escape from captivity at Linfield. Even a palace is a prison to one constrained to stay there. On Friday she sent a letter to Fevermere to ask Mr. Highet to wait upon her the following morning.

He obeyed, arriving full of news regarding the livestock he had sold at Chester. If he felt conscious or awkward with Miss Guilfoyle, he did not show it. For her part, Anne had anticipated the meeting with some considerable nervousness; but Mr. Highet’s tales of heifers and sows, his report on the price of butter, his easy manner, even his rough, mud-flecked boots reassured her. She had only a few questions for him, chiefly how she could insure he would not, in a fit of Spencean generosity perhaps, give her land away or (more plausibly) sell it; how—with all deference to his excellent character—she could be certain he would forward to her a proper share of the income from the proposed joint estate; and the like. Mr. Highet received her questions without offence. He intended, he said, to have the exact terms of their agreement drawn into a marriage contract—as was not uncommon, after all—and politely begged her to have her own man of business in London look it over before she accepted it.

“But have you no other concern?” he inquired, after they had established this much. They had gone out together to walk on the lawn, for it was a fine day and a
shame, as he had said, to be indoors. Though the leaves were fallen, the dark branches against the bright blue sky had a simple beauty of their own. There had been a frost the night before, and the ground still crunched under their feet. “You see no other flaw in the idea itself?”

She said, “Not as yet. Though I shall, of course, consult Mr. Dent as you suggest.”

“Ah, Mr. Dent,” he took up, smiling. “Nicodemus, is it not? ‘Mr. Dent informed me—’ ‘I had understood from Mr. Dent—’” He paused to give one of what Miss Guilfoyle thought of now as his horse laughs and went on, chuckling, “The look on your face! If only you could have seen it.”

This reference to the night they met did little, naturally, to endear Mr. Highet to Anne. “You were a trifle distrait yourself,” she reminded him tartly.

Mr. Highet wiped an hilarious tear from his eye, then went on, mimicking the voice of a condescending lady and gesturing grandly, “Run along, Joan! Fetch some tea! Come here, Joan, and light this candle before you—”

“Thank you, I quite recollect it now,” said Anne repressively. At the same time, as if to make him be quiet, she caught at one of his broadly gesturing arms, striving to bring it down to his side. She stopped him in mid-movement, in consequence whereof her hand slipped along his sleeve to his hand—which, most unexpectedly, closed over hers in a grip almost convulsive. He released her in an instant, but the momentary touch had already brought them both up short, sobering him and making her suddenly eager to close the interview. Her hands now folded tightly together at her waist (Mr. Highet’s hands had somehow dived into his pockets), Anne told him, “If it does not disturb you, I should like to think on this another
night before I give my answer. I shall see you in church to-morrow, no doubt. Perhaps you will be so good as to ride over here at four or five o’clock?”

“I shall be happy to do so. But pray do not imagine it disturbs me to wait. This is a decision of consequence for both of us.”

“Thank you, but I am not one to debate a decision overlong,” Anne answered truthfully. They had begun to walk up to the house together, where he would take his leave of her. “If it seems to me sound at first, it generally does so at the last as well. Still, I should like another night.”

Mr. Highet declared himself her servant. They had arrived at the terrace behind the drawing-room, and Miss Guilfoyle was about to walk in through the French doors when he stopped her, saying, “I nearly forgot. There is another matter I wished to discuss with you.” Lowering his voice though they were still outside and alone, “It concerns Mr. Mallinger. Does he seem to you in some wise afflicted?”

On her guard at once, for she felt Mr. Mallinger’s secret was not hers to give away, “I have thought him more subdued of late, yes,” she agreed.

“Subdued! I half fear consumption; but he insists he is healthy enough. Nor can I think he would expose his pupils to any ailment knowingly. Yet…I asked him if his family were well, and he maintains they are.”

He paused, but Anne kept silent.

“At all events, I wondered if you would be amenable to increasing his salary. No man is happy who reckons himself undervalued.” And Mr. Highet named a figure by which he proposed to improve the schoolmaster’s income.

Miss Guilfoyle, though well aware it could do little to
raise Mr. Mallinger’s spirits, willingly agreed to her share in the increase. After this, lady and gentleman went indoors, shook hands, and parted.

They re-met the following morning in church; but no one seeing them could guess any private question hung over them. Their brief conversation there, had anyone overheard it, chiefly celebrated the facts that both had slept soundly the night before and that the weather continued fine. Mr. Samuels then preached on Temptation, which made Mrs. Insel excessively uneasy (for she judged herself one to Mr. Mallinger) and bored everyone else. Afterwards Anne politely declined Lady Crombie’s punctual invitation to dine. She sent Maria alone in the carriage to Linfield, electing to walk, though it was a full five miles.

It was a day like its predecessor: crisp, cool, the sky brilliantly blue. The stillness was broke only by birds, or the occasional rush and thump of a hare startled in the dry bracken. As she had foreseen on her first night in Cheshire, this road was now as familiar to Anne—every bend, every stile, every prospect—as had been Bond Street or Berkeley Square. But she had lost her sullen resentment of it, and begun to see its beauty. She was curious to know how the flat fields would appear when, as must happen in two months or three, snow shrouded and muffled the sleeping earth. She liked the leafless quiet of to-day, in which she could hear the crunch of the ground under her own light feet; she liked the sharp air, and the wide sky. After nearly twenty years, her childhood at Overton started to return to her. She remembered the slow revolutions of the seasons in the country, long walks she had taken in company with her father among bare branches, or budding leaves. The sights and smells of the Cheshire
fields and woods stirred and finally waked her memory of the scenes of her childhood, and with them hungry, poignant vignettes from a time when both her parents still lived. In short, she remembered Nature, and felt its claim on her with almost the strength Artifice, calling from London, opposed to it.

It was after two when she reached Linfield. She had only time to dine hastily and refresh her toilette before Mr. Highet arrived. When he did, she went down to him in the drawing-room at once and (her heart beating rather violently for all she struggled to appear calm and dispassionate) with scant preamble accepted his suit.

Mr. Highet declared himself pleased. A short speech such as might have been made at the joining of two commercial houses followed, delivered by Mr. Highet in his slow baritone, and with his friendly, phlegmatic smile. The happy couple then turned their attention to the calendar, Miss Guilfoyle noting it would need some weeks for her man of affairs to read and return the marriage contract once Mr. Highet’s man had drawn it up. Mr. Highet, after some counting upon his fingers, suggested the twenty-fifth of November as a convenient wedding date, for, as he gravely noted, it would “leave him free to see to the tupping of the sheep on the twenty-eighth.” Mr. Highet would also see, if Miss Guilfoyle liked, to the publication of the banns.

With a queer dreaminess similar to her sensation when Mr. Highet had first proposed his suit, Anne heard herself reply, “If it is not too much trouble, yes, I thank you.”

“I think a quiet ceremony best, do not you?” asked her betrothed. “At the rectory, perhaps.” He sat some way apart from her on the chintz settee—a good vantage point, no doubt, from which to assure himself the horse sailing
over the hedge in the watercolour showed no signs of sinking.