The Weeping Ash (65 page)

“I am hoping that we can get back before Thomas returns,” she explained as they crossed the bridge over the brook.

“He cannot forbid you to walk in the woods!”

“No; but while I am out my household tasks go neglected.”

“Nonsense! You are the most punctilious housekeeper possible.”

Fanny did not mention what she suspected would be Thomas's main cause of objection to his wife and his cousin taking a long ramble together: the intimacy engendered, the confidences that might be exchanged.

When they passed through the iron gate into the garden they saw that a carriage stood drawn up by the front door.

“Oh, can it be Cal?” exclaimed Scylla joyfully. “I do hope so! I so long for you to meet him!”

Hastening inside, they came on a curiously constrained tableau in the front hall: Patty, silent, excited, staring; Bet all elbows and angles, agape with curiosity; Thomas, evidently just returned, for he still wore his greatcoat; his whole aspect radiated dislike and hostility. If he had been a porcupine, Scylla thought, his prickles could not have been more evident. Cal, similarly garbed in a many-caped greatcoat, leaned as if wearied out against the stair banister.

“Cal!” cried his sister rapturously, and in the same breath Fanny exclaimed:

“Oh, it
is
our cousin! Thomas, why do you not invite him to sit down?”

“Pray, love, have a care!” Trying for a light note, Cal eyed his sister warily as she rushed forward to embrace him. “You see I am not quite secure in my balance yet.”

Puzzled, suddenly afraid, she hesitated, and then, a new nervous stiffness in his movement giving her a clue, she glanced downward and saw that he was supported on a crutch and had a wooden leg.

Country people said of that winter, 1798 to 1799, that it was the worst in living memory; nothing like it had been known for fifty years. The bitter cold that began early in December kept most of Europe ice-bound and immobilized until the end of March; even into April the frosts continued. Snow and more snow fell; the water froze in the wells, animals died of hunger, roads were blocked by snowdrifts. An envoy from Mr. Pitt took three months to reach Berlin. Austria declared war on France, but at first this made little difference; nobody could wage war in such weather.

In England the expectation of an invasion from France was greatly diminished, and consequently Thomas had much less to occupy him. Meanwhile the Sussex roads were in so bad a state that for many weeks Petworth was virtually cut off. Tidings of the new tax on all incomes over
£
60 per annum, passed in December, did come through, and made Thomas quite as angry as Fanny had expected; how
could
Mr. Pitt, a good Tory, do such a thing?

Thomas had a great deal to aggravate him at present. With a recently amputated leg, his cousin Paget was in no case to go off again to sea directly; indeed for several weeks Cal was obliged to keep his bed, the journey from Portsmouth having inflamed the stump and brought on a fever. Thomas had not even the satisfaction of being able to say that his young cousin was a mawkin or a mollycoddle, for Cal bore his pain with commendable fortitude and left his bed as soon as he possibly could.

Not surprisingly, an instant antipathy had sprung up between the two men. Cal represented, to Thomas, everything that he most disliked: the glamour of having traveled in distant places, of having taken part in battles on land and sea and acquitted himself creditably, so that he could not be put down as a namby-pamby or a coxcomb; then there was his poetry writing, which was disgusting enough in itself, and ten times more exasperating because the fellow had actually made two thousand pounds out of it and had, according to Lord Egremont, half of London talking about him.

It was vinegar and gall to Thomas that Egremont had evidently acquired a high opinion of Cal, invited him to come and use the library at Petworth House, and meet flibbertigibbet guests, poets, painters, and other such riffraff. Not that Thomas was courting opportunities to meet such tedious society—but it was infernally irritating that his cousin should, apparently, be idolized by them, and he not even invited! “I know you are too busy,” Egremont sometimes said—a lame excuse if ever there was one. Also, naturally, the females at the Hermitage wasted half their time fluttering around the invalid, offering to read to him, sing to him, and God knows what; if the housekeeping did not get disgracefully neglected, it was only because Thomas, deprived of his normal outdoor outlets, had so much more time to pace about indoors, looking into everything. And that wretched sawbones, Chilgrove, was forever underfoot, telling Cal not to exercise his leg too much at first, not to try horseback exercise, not to be in a hurry.

Meanwhile Thomas had interrogated Chilgrove, pretty sharply, several times, about the baby: could he detect any definite signs of backwardness, of slowness in development? The fool had hummed and hawed, said it was much too early to make a definite pronouncement, infants differed greatly in their rate of progress. But what about the tumble down the well? Dr. Chilgrove did not think that could have had any adverse effect. At the back of Thomas's mind was another question that he could not ask: what about that period of time in London, as to which Fanny was still resolutely silent—what influence might
that
not have had on the unborn child? Sometimes, these days, Thomas could hardly bear the sight of his wife or her child. And it made him sick to see the way that fellow looked at her, with undisguised admiration and tender liking. Cal had discovered that Fanny could sing, could make up tunes for songs, and the pair of them spent whole evenings, sometimes, matching words to music, Fanny finding tunes for Cal's poems—faugh, what an occupation for a pair of adults! It made it no better that Fanny always took care to have a piece of mending or needlework in hand, so that it could not be said she was neglecting her duties.

Learning also that Fanny could play the harp, had learned to play while still in her father's house, the Pagets had the extravagant impertinence to send off to a shop in Chichester and order one, which, during a brief period of thaw, was delivered by carrier's cart. And then there was no end to the twangling and jangling, even Bet sometimes taking a hand. “You never told me that you could play the harp!” said Thomas resentfully to Fanny, and she replied, “I was afraid that if I mentioned it you might interpret it as a request for one; and I knew that you could not afford that, for you told Bet so.” Fanny always had some piece of self-justification for everything!

Another cause of irritation to Thomas was the fact that his real liking for and interest in his cousin Scylla—now
there
was a fine girl, if you like, spirited, lively, pretty, yet always showing a proper deference to Thomas's opinion—his relations with Scylla were constantly being hampered and obstructed by the strong tie between her and her brother. Any remark in the nature of a setdown to
him
always had an immediately quelling effect on
her
. It was a most infernal situation! And the worst of it was that, if Cal's leg did not recover sufficiently to allow him to go back to sea; he and Scylla talked of removing to London and setting up house together there—a scatterbrained project which Thomas could not at all approve.

There was no real resemblance between Cal and Thomas's deceased half brother Ned—how could there be, indeed?—yet sometimes Thomas found himself possessed by the crazy notion that Cal was an embodiment of long-forgotten Ned, come back to plague him.

* * *

“I am afraid this is all a dismal bore for you,” Scylla said to Cal one day in the stable. She had come out to find him taking refuge here, visiting Goble, with whom he spent hours talking about the navy and life at sea. Goble, at the moment, was next door in the harness room, making a careful adjustment to the base of Cal's wooden leg in order to change the angle where it met the stump, so that he could walk more comfortably.

“Oh, it might be worse!” Cal's tone was flippant, but his dark eyes were serious. “Fanny is the one I feel for. How can she bear him? And she such a rare creature—”

“
Pray
take care, Cal!” his sister said urgently. “If Thomas had the
least
excuse to suspect—”

“Don't fret your head, love. He shall have no cause. He hates me simply because I am younger and luckier.”

“
Luckier!
When you have lost your leg—and he only his finger—”

“That is one of the reasons why he hates me. He had to take his own off. Fate took care of me.”

“You mean he
amputated his own finger and thum
b
? But why? How can you be sure?”

“Why? Men do. So as to have a pretext for leaving the navy. How can I be sure? I feel it in my bones.”

Thinking it over, Scylla felt sure too. Another cause for Thomas to hate his cousin, who had been honorably wounded, who had sufficient justification to leave the service, yet intended to go back if he could.

“At least Phillimore was not a hypocrite,” she said thoughtfully.

“Compared with our cousin, he was a paragon of honesty and uprightness!”

“Cal, tell me—what
did
happen to Phillimore?”

“Gough, MacBride, and I picked him up and threw him overboard. It was not at all difficult—we took him completely by surprise.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Mine. But they were quite in agreement. Phillimore made no secret of what he had done. And none of us felt a single qualm afterward.” He added in a matter-of-fact tone, “It is a pity we are not in the Bay of Biscay
no
w
!”

“Cal! You cannot simply dispose of anybody you happen to dislike!”

“Why not? I only dislike bad people. Now run along back indoors, or Thomas will think we are conspiring against him. Besides, I want to try to write, and I can't do that in the house.”

“Oh, very well.”

Still feeling the reverberations of shock—this was a new Cal indeed—she jumped down from the stall partition where she had been sitting. At that moment Goble returned with Cal's wooden leg, saying:

“'Ere, now, Mus Cal, you try 'er on an' see how she do feel.”

“Ah, that is a great deal better, thank you, Goble; I shall be dancing a cotillion in no time.”

He tried a few steps with his crutch out in the snow, slipped, went white with pain, but recovered himself and laughed.

* * *

That evening Fanny shyly revealed that, while she had been helping Mrs. Strudwick chop fruit and suet and prepare the Christmas puddings, a tune had come into her head for Cal's
Weeping Ash
poem. “It came all of itself!” She played it to them on the harp.

“Again!” said Cal. “Fanny, it is exquisite! It suits the words to a nicety—haunting, mysterious, yet swiftly moving. Scylla, you can sing it?”

“Play it over again, Fanny!”

Scylla had a clear, light soprano which had been carefully trained by Mr. Winthrop Musson. She sang:

“All-Father! Odin! who did sacrifice

One eye to drink at Mimir's mystic spring.

The lore obtained at such a cruel price

Wrought havoc far beyond imagining!”

“Bravo, Scylla! Try it a trifle faster!”

Scylla sang again, this time Fanny softly joining in, while Bet looked on enviously, wishing she had the courage to take part.

“Ash upon elm our fathers rasped, to bring

Fire leaping from the wood. Those fires now rage

Unquenched in every breast, and, ravening,

Devour the world, and will from age to age

The furious fires of love, that nothing can assuage!”

Thomas, who had been checking his clerk's accounts in the dining room, came in angrily, intending to say, “Can you contrive to make less commotion, pray?” But, on seeing that it was Scylla who was the singer, he lingered, eyeing her with reluctant admiration.

“That is my poem about your weeping ash tree, Cousin Thomas,” said Cal when the verse was sung.

“I am sure I do not know why you are all making such a to-do about this weeping ash!”

“Do you not think it strange, Cousin Thomas, that Cal and I should have dreamed about it before ever we saw it?”

“Dreams! Fiddlestick!” Thomas did not utter aloud his opinion that the twins had invented their dream in order to impress Fanny, but his feelings were plain from his expression.

“You do not believe, Cousin Thomas, that dreams are a portent of things to come?”

“If I did, I wish I might dream that my mill would make a handsome profit,” said Thomas sourly. “It is high time, Bet, that you were abed.”

With which strong hint he returned to his accounts.

* * *

Christmas passed quietly. Fanny was too careful of Thomas's touchy mood to provide more in the way of festivities than an excellent dinner of beef sirloin, plumb pudding, and mince pies, but the Paget twins produced gifts for everybody, small fairings bought by Scylla at the Petworth shops, and books. In consequence of which, Thomas was obliged to confiscate and burn Fanny's gift from Cal, a volume of poems by a Scotsman, Robert Burns, which he considered grossly indelicate and unsuitable for a female's eyes.

“I am truly sorry for that,” Cal apologized to Fanny several days later when—Thomas having ridden out on press gang business—they were able to converse in comfort without his watchful jealous eye marking every nuance of expression. As the snow had temporarily melted, and only a thick white hoarfrost covered the grass, they were attempting a cautious promenade in the yew-tree walk, Cal in a greatcoat, balancing on his crutch, Fanny in a thick shawl and pattens.

“Pray do not regard it, Cousin! I think, whatever you had given me, it would have been the same.” Fanny then looked conscience-stricken and added quickly, “But I am very sorry, because the poems were so delightful. I loved especially the one describing the flowery banks of bonnie Doon—it made me think of this valley in summer. I wish you could see it then!”

“I hope that I may be able to, sometime. But it is beautiful now: see how the movement of the sun creates shadows of frost, which are outstripped by the shadows of light.”

Fanny turned to look at the gray-green slopes and the ghostly darkness of the leafless woods beyond.

Cal was watching her profile; he said suddenly:

“There is another poem by a Scot that reminds me of you, Fanny: I read it last week, up in Lord Egremont's library. It is by a writer with an uncouth name—James Hogg!—but it has the very feel of you about it: a poem about a girl called Kilmeny—do you know it?”

Shy at having his attention thus focused on her, Fanny said she did not, and asked what the poem was about.

“Well! Kilmeny goes out and falls asleep in the wood and vanishes quite away. And then, after a long, long time, when all hope for her has been given up, she comes home again: ‘Late, late in the evening, Kilmeny came home.' And she is strangely changed.

“As still was her look, and as still was her e'e,

As the mist that sleeps on a waveless sea

For Kilmeny had been, she knew not where,

And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.

“And where
had
she been?” Fanny's attention was engaged, she looked wonderingly at Cal. Had Scylla—could she have?—divulged Fanny's confidence, told him about her visit to London? But there was no consciousness in the look he gave her, only a kind of tender gravity.

“She had been to a land of thought—a land of love and light—oh, you will have to read it!—it is a long and beautiful poem. I will borrow it from Liz Wyndham.