The Country Gentleman (6 page)

They came within view of Middlewich amidst a steady downpour, at about six in the evening. The prudent thing to do would have been to stop the night at the Rose and Crown, where they ate dinner; but being prudent did not make it affordable, as Anne remarked to Maria, and so they set forth again. The last leg of their journey, the good innkeeper assured them, would keep them on the road no longer than an hour. They had only to put the town at their backs, keep a good sharp eye out for Jack Gant’s farm (which they couldn’t possibly miss), and then mind they took the left fork up at the big elm…Anne listened with half an ear to the parade of dreary landmarks which, she supposed, would soon become as familiar to her as Pall Mall and Hanover Square. “Then drive up the road a bit to a great cunning ant-hill, you’ll know it the
minute you see it,” she murmured sarcastically to Maria, “and after that, you’ll see a place where three oak leaves are turning red early…”

The carriages rolled back out through the narrow streets of the town, its damp walls brought oppressively together by the gloomy aspect of the darkening sky. Neither Miss Guilfoyle nor Maria Insel had ever been to Middlewich. Still they could muster but little interest in it now. They were soon out of the town again and slogging over a sodden road that ran between fields dotted with cottages and interrupted by stretches of dense, dark forest. The landscape was softened and obscured by the rain, which had slowed now to a fine mizzle. Under other circumstances (say, a day’s excursion from London for a pic-nic) the ladies might have found the country quite beautiful, with its gentle swells and muted colours; but as they faced simultaneously with it the prospect of living, will they nill they, constantly surrounded by it, they viewed it with sinking rather than cheerful hearts.

Which was a shame, because as it happened they were to see a monstrous great deal of it that very evening, and later that night to travel quite up and down it, though scarcely seeing it at all. Not to put too fine a point upon it, they got horribly lost—first one carriage, then the other, then both severally, and again (coming at one another near ten o’clock, each with the joyful idea the other carried a local citizen who could point the way) together. Whether or not one could possibly miss Jack Gant’s farm, as the sanguine keeper of the Rose and Crown had put it, they did; and so began one of the most uncomfortable, vexatious evenings any of the travellers could recall. For it had begun to rain again in earnest, so that even to move in the wrong direction they had often to stop and emerge
from the carriages, as during the afternoon, till the wheels were unstuck. In the end Anne went and helped the men pull—it was better, she said, than standing like a clod of mud oneself, getting muddier and more cloddish by the minute.

At about ten-thirty she began to get giddy, a condition Maria at first mistook for hysteria (more what she was feeling). By eleven the whole company was somewhat madly a-giggle, all drenched, all filthy, with fine points such as who was mistress and who servant quite forgot. In more or less this state they finally turned in to what John Clemp swore simply had to be, by default if nothing else, the drive to Linfield. It was a long drive, and the exhausted voyagers had plenty of time to remember to wonder what was at the end of it—a hovel? a castle?

The night was too dark, as it developed, to see. Something large, an imposing edifice, perhaps Tudor, perhaps not—the darkness was impenetrable. No lamp had been lit to welcome the travellers, though Anne had written to warn the house they were coming.

“Of course, it is nearly midnight,” Mrs. Insel suggested in defence of the household, when Anne complained of this scant hospitality. “They must naturally have imagined we were not coming, and gone to bed.”

“They might still have left a lamp burning,” Miss Guilfoyle objected, striving to peer through the shadows at her great uncle’s bequest. The carriage slowing to a stop, the ladies wrung themselves out as best they could and poured out the door John Clemp held open. James, who had been driving the second carriage, had already loudly sounded the house bell, and stood knocking briskly. Rain continued blandly to tumble from the sky.

“It’s a second Flood,” Anne murmured to Maria,
leaning against a pillar on the wide front porch while James hammered at the door. Her voice was hoarse (she hoped from their madcap singing, though she feared a cold). She had just started to mutter, “Where in the name of God are the blasted serv—” when the huge oaken door at last swung open, revealing a plump young lady in a mob-cap holding a smoking candle.

Anne marched past her without a word, pulling Maria in and, in view of the weather, gesturing the rest of the ragtag assembly in behind her as well. The girl, too surprised to object, stood back a little and watched goggle-eyed as the front hall filled with strangers. “I am Miss Guilfoyle,” Anne finally vouchsafed, when the door had been closed against the night. She spoke peremptorily, all the irritability engendered in her by the night’s drive perfectly audible in her tone. “We are wet, and tired, and you have given us but a dim, haphazard welcome. What is your name?” she demanded, as the young woman gawped but said nothing.

A tremor in her voice, “Joan, ma’am,” she replied. “Would you be—”

“Well, Joan,” Anne cut her off, “I wonder if there is someone here who can make us a pot of tea?”

Joan either did not know or would not say. Though her mouth was open, she stood silent.

“Go on, Joan. You look a clever, capable girl. Suppose you put some water on the hob and wake the housekeeper. We shall want her to show us our rooms. Go on,” she added, as the girl still stood there. “No use staying to watch us drip on the floor. It’s the only trick we know and we’ve already done it the best we’re able.”

The plump girl contrived at last to take her eyes from Anne Guilfoyle and found tongue enough to say, “One
moment, ma’am, if you please.” She turned to go, but Anne reached out and caught her apron string.

“Joan—”

“Ma’am?”

“Light a candle for us, please, before you go.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The girl went to a sideboard and lit two branches of a candelabra, discovering to the visitors that they had come into a large hall with a lofty, arching ceiling and a parquet floor.

“That’s a girl,” said Anne, as Joan scurried away. Anne turned to Maria with murder in her eyes. She drew her a little apart from the others, who were hovering in an awkward knot, uneasy at entering the house with their mistress. “Have you ever seen such a thing?” she demanded in a frantic whisper. “The most perfect imbecile I have ever encountered in my life, and we must either turn her off or find some use for her. I wonder what she knows how to do, other than open the door? She does speak English, in a sort of a way. And she seemed to know her own name. These are hopeful signs. Do you suppose she could learn—”

At this moment, Anne became aware of a man’s steps coming into the hall. She wheeled and saw the ruddy, puzzled countenance of a very tall person indeed, a person of about five-and-thirty with dark, curling hair, a fine, wide brow, large, heavy-lidded eyes, and a generous, well-shaped red mouth. He was dressed in an old-fashioned striped flannel night-gown and what appeared to be a black frock-coat. A pair of unbuckled country boots, well-worn, completed his costume. Added to the look of utter confoundment on his face, it would not be too much to say that this man, whoever he was, looked ridiculous.

Anne, forgetting for a moment that she—begrimed,
drenched, sopped and soaked again, her hair a mop, her clothes draggled—likewise was not at her best, took one glance at him and laughed aloud. She had stepped forward a little ahead of the others, signalling in this wise that he had to deal with her.

The gentleman, after a moment, looked as if he might have liked to laugh (whether with or at her) as well, but did not. He merely smiled and gave a little bow, pulling the frock-coat tighter over his broad shoulders. He had a sleepy smile more than an intelligent one. He inquired, “May I know whom I have the honour of addressing?”

Anne, suddenly furious at the impertinence of this groom, or valet, or butler, or whatever he was, receiving her in his night clothes, replied in so chilling a tone that it was a wonder the rain in her dripping hair did not turn to ice, “You have the honour of addressing Miss Anne Guilfoyle. What is your name?”

“Miss Guilfoyle,” the other repeated, not answering her question at once but appearing instead to muse, either from stupidity or rudeness, over this information.

When she judged full half a minute of silence had gone by, “No,
I
am Miss Guilfoyle,” said that lady. “I asked you who
you
are. Butler? Boots? Coachman, perhaps?”

The fellow gave a happy laugh, as if he did not hear the contempt in her words, and bowed again, more deeply this time. “I am Mr. Henry Highet, Miss Guilfoyle,” he answered finally. “You are in my house. How do you do?”

Miss Guilfoyle felt the clutch of something like panic in her chest. With a will of its own, her hand reached back for Maria, who grasped it damply but securely.

“Mr. Dent informed me—” Miss Guilfoyle brought forth, and stopped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I had understood from Mr. Nicodemus Dent—”

Mr. Highet shrugged as once again Anne’s words froze on her lips. Either he did not know the name of Mr. Dent, or he did not care about it.

“Do you think we might sit down?” Maria suddenly interposed. She dropped Anne’s hand to come forward and shake Mr. Highet’s. “Mrs. Insel. How do you do?”

He bowed. “And these—?” he asked, with a glance at Lizzie and the others.

“Perhaps the kitchen…” Maria suggested with some little embarrassment.

Mr. Highet retreated a few steps and pulled the cord of a bell; in a moment, Joan returned and was asked to show the newcomers to the kitchen, then bring tea into “the best parlour.”

Joan bobbed and obeyed.

Henry Highet took up a candlestick and led the ladies through a series of turning corridors to a room at the back of the house. It was a large saloon and they could make out no more of it, by the half-dozen candles he lit there, than that it had many windows and was cosily, if unstylishly, furnished.

Mr. Highet motioned the ladies to a small sofa. They sat on its edge, for fear of drenching the cushions. He took an arm-chair across from them but immediately sprang up and drew out from under him a bristling pincushion. He held it up to display.

“My mother,” he remarked, and Anne thought, “Dear God, he’s already installed her here as well!”

Aloud she said, “Sir, I fear an error has been committed.” As she hesitated, wondering how exactly to frame her next sentence, she wished Mr. Highet would think to excuse himself and go dress properly. She found it extremely unnerving to confront a gentleman in such deshabille; but Henry Highet seemed hardly aware of it at all. He was sitting back now with his sleepy, stupid smile upon his face, waiting to hear her for all the world as if they had both been in court dress.

“Mr. Nicodemus Dent informed me,” she went on
presently, “that I am the inheritor of this house. May I ask if you have had intelligence to the contrary?”

She was not sure whether he raised an eyebrow slightly, or if it was only a trick of the candlelight. He said, very slowly—he spoke maddeningly slowly, whatever he said—“No. No specific intelligence, that is to say. But as my great grandfather built this house one hundred and thirty years ago, I must admit the information given you by—Mr. Dent, I think you said?—surprises me.”

A dawning apprehension stirred in the recesses of Anne’s mind. “Are we at Linfield, sir?” she asked abruptly, to have the worst of it over with at once.

“Linfield?” Mr. Henry Highet smiled, threw his head back, held the attitude some instants in silence (“While the idea sank into the marshes of his brain,” Anne later said to Maria), then threw his head forward, broke into a tremendous guffaw, slapped his knee and laughed till tears came to his eyes. He wiped at these last, chuckling helplessly, then shook his head and stamped the floor lightly with both feet alternately.

Miss Guilfoyle, who hated above all things to be laughed at (unless she intended it), said, when she thought he could hear her again, in a very small, very cold voice, “I take it that we are not.”

Mr. Highet calmed himself, apologizing, and shook his head again. “No, Miss Guilfoyle. You are at Fevermere. I thought some confusion might have been in the wind when I heard of your behaviour towards Joan.” Here he went off again in a gale of snickers and appreciative hoots. “The poor girl— Excuse me— I knew your great uncle well—” He broke off and seemed to set himself to recover his composure. In a minute Joan came in with tea and a plate of bread-and-butter. From the way he looked up at
her, Miss Guilfoyle feared he was about to explain her own (hilarious, as he seemed to find it) mistake to the girl there and then; but he did not, only thanking her for the tea and sending her back to the kitchen.

Anne turned her gaze to Maria, who smiled encouragingly and began to pour tea. But, “Mr. Highet, we have trespassed upon your hospitality long enough,” Anne said, rising as she spoke and shaking out her damp skirt as well as she could. She turned again to Maria, who had naturally looked up at her from the teapot, and nodded meaningfully. Mrs. Insel (though not without a mutinous glance, for she dearly wanted her tea) replaced the pot and stood as well.

Henry Highet jumped to his feet. The frock-coat dropped open, revealing a long row of red buttons down his middle. He snatched it shut again and commenced imploringly, “But my dear ma’am, you are wet through. You cannot possibly leave without taking—”

“Thank you, Mr. Highet,” Anne broke in, firmly and freezingly, “but no.”

The gentleman turned to Mrs. Insel. “Intercede for me,” he begged, gesturing widely with large, work-reddened hands. “Tell her—”

“We are perfectly fine, I thank you,” Anne interrupted again, “and if you will be kind enough to tell my coachman how to reach Linfield, we need disturb you no longer.” With this she gasped, opened her mouth, clapped a hand over it, looked horrified, and gave a thumping great sneeze. She fumbled for her reticule (which she had left in the carriage) in search of her handkerchief (which she had lost in the mud two counties back). Finally she was obliged to accept one Henry Highet had found in his frock-coat pocket, which he had
been trying to give her all along. Looking away, she blew her nose, stuffed the handkerchief into her sleeve and muttered, “I shall send it back laundered to-morrow,” then added very faintly indeed, “Thank you.”