Complete works of ford m.., p.295
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 295
“What is it you are pleased to perceive?” he said coldly.
Mr. Chuckel, whose face had turned from a rice-white to an ashen grey, stuttered —
“Your Worship, nothing! Nothing in the world!”
Mr. Bettesworth coldly ignored these asseverations. He swept his eye inexorably over the surface of the water, over the trunks of the trees on the opposite bank, over what was visible of the lawn, the terrace, and the house front. His cold stare came back to the trees on the right-hand side, and then, deliberately, he said, “Ah!” and stepped amongst the trees of the avenue. His remorseless eyes had perceived what Mr. Chuckel’s had before him — the extreme end of a gown whose wearer was otherwise hidden from them. In advancing towards it Mr. Bettesworth uttered no word at all, and Mr. Chuckel followed him, clenching and unclenching his hands in impotent fury and dismay. He could understand nothing, and the first thing that came into his muddled mind when they had a full sight of Lydia was a question as to where in this world his stepdaughter had procured this dress that he had never seen upon her?
Lydia Chuckel had been seated in a genuine pensiveness on the gnarled and spreading bole of one of the small thorn-trees that grew in under the oaks of the park, and, becoming aware of the approach of Mr. Bettesworth, she maintained the attitude for the sake of an effect that delighted her. The strawberry frail was at her feet, she held in her hand the broad pink ribbons of the immense garden-hat that lay in her lap. And all her actress’ soul bubbled with delight at the thought that she must present exactly the appearance of “Celia in her Arbour.”
Having escaped from Mrs. Hitchcock’s by the front door, she had run as fast as she could to the park gates, and then in a bee-line through the trees towards the house — she had meant to throw herself at Mr. Bettesworth’s feet, and to implore protection from the dangerous men who, with lethal weapons, had sought to carry her off. She imagined that she would thus present to Mr. Bettesworth, if not the exact picture of “Celia in her Arbour,” at least a very convincing one of Celia in distress. But even to her small sparrow’s soul Mr. Bettesworth seemed a personality somewhat minatory and alarming. She had treated him with playful disrespect, but she had done it all the time with a concealed trepidation.
Thus, having nearly run herself out of breath, and aware that she might reach Mr. Bettesworth more hot, flushed, and tousled than beauty in distress altogether demanded, she had sat down upon this mossy bole to let her complexion recover its normal pink and white, and give herself time for reflection.
It was all, after all, simply a matter of terms. She was by then undoubtedly launched upon the career of Celia. Mr. Williamson had sworn to it; Major Penruddock had confirmed the oaths by his actions; Mr. Harcourt had obviously not a doubt of the matter. But she was not so certain of Mr. Bettesworth; and of Mr. Roland she was very dubious indeed. Mr. Bettesworth she knew to be immensely rich. She knew, also, that he was pledged by a very heavy wager — the London Mercury said it was a wager of at least a hundred thousand guineas — to carry off the original of Celia. So that to Mr. Bettesworth, if he accepted her as Celia, she would obviously be worth a good round sum. But, on the other hand, Mr. Harcourt and Major Penruddock presented also the appearance of men of fashion and of wealth. One of them the journals stated to be a man of very broad acres in the West. The other was at least a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council, with enormous patronage at his disposal, and means enough at least to permit him to engage upon this enormous wager.
She sat upon her mossy bole and, pensive, with a mournful and romantic air, with her eyelids drooping, her mouth contemplative and tender, the dark locks falling upon her shiny shoulders, with an air of virginal reverie, she addressed herself to her reflections. It seemed to her probable that Major Penruddock and Mr. Harcourt together must be worth at least as much as Mr. Bettesworth alone, and in her small soul she felt a greater kinship to either Mr. Harcourt or Major Penruddock than to Mr. Bettesworth. If Mr. Bettesworth was the more shining figure, he was also much more serious. She had hardly seen him smile — she could not imagine that he could laugh or give way to any intemperateness. Major Penruddock she had heard to swear, and to give way to passion. Mr. Harcourt had a pleasant ogle in the corner of his dark eyes. And it occurred to her — she felt it rather than thought it out — that to be the mistress of Mr. Bettesworth would be an affair of intolerable dulness. She wanted lights, riot, and abandonment; and at the thought of Mr. Bettesworth her flowerlike lips drooped, and her dark, uncandid eyes grew shadowed. Besides, Mr. Harcourt and Major Penruddock were already convinced that she was the original of Celia: Mr. Bettesworth remained to be convinced. And he must be convinced in a manner so overwhelming that she could reap an enormous and immediate reward, so that when Mr. Bettesworth himself became intolerable, or discovered the cheat — if it was a cheat — she could upon the instant abandon him for a life more gay, and one in which she could be her own mistress. An absolute and overwhelming belief!...
And Mr. Bettesworth, approaching through the trees that made, as it were, aisles, arches, and even frames, around him and the small, changing interstices of bright landscape, exclaimed suddenly the one word “Celia!” whilst at the same moment, behind his back, Mr. Chuckel cried out: “By Heaven, Lydia!”
Mr. Bettesworth imagined that in a flash he understood the perfidy of Mr. Chuckel — all the stutterings, the perturbation, and the reluctance to come out of the house. The mutterings about Papists, smugglers, Jacobites, and the lawless, had been merely false suggestions to throw him off the track. Chuckel, it came to him convincingly, had sold the secret to his rivals. His brother, when he had leapt through the window, must have seen Celia on the way to some rendezvous to which Mr. Chuckel, using his brutal authority, must have coerced his stepdaughter.
“Believe me,” he said to Lydia, “you have nothing to fear from this man Chuckel or any other man.”
The words threw Mr. Chuckel into an extraordinary state of agitation. He imagined that without doubt Mr. Bettesworth had his men waiting amongst the trees to arrest him. There could be no other construction to be put on it.
And suddenly, with a hissing expiration of the breath, he flung his hat violently upon the turf, and dashing from behind Mr. Bettesworth’s back he ran away into the open, across the broad stretches of sunlight towards the park gate. It appeared to Mr. Bettesworth that Mr. Chuckel must be running to warn his confederates. In his habitual caution, however, he did not set to work to question his new-found Celia. He had gazed so often and so searchingly upon the faceless sketch for the picture that he could have no doubt that this indeed was the Celia he sought. There was the very dress itself, of a lilac white shade, worked with little sprigs of pink silk isolated and in lines. The throat was bare, the broad collar falling right away from the aperture to well beyond the shoulders in a drooping line that suggested at once freshness and modesty. The very folds of the skirt had been preserved in the ridges and monticules, since the stuff had been starched and ironed into the precise radiations that Mr. Hitchcock needed. The little basket was there at Celia’s feet, of a straw-work so delicate and minute that it resembled the fineness of a cream-jug; the broad hat, slung from her bare arm by great pink ribbons, resembled in the straight flow of its lines a great, pale palm-leaf; and the left arm, to which the hat hung, crossed her bosom and her heart, the left depending so that the small, plump hand rested half hidden in a fold of the stiff dress. And looking at her face he perceived that it would exactly fill the outline of the space that had been left white and blank upon his canvas.
It filled up a void; it afforded him an intense satisfaction for his curiosity and an irresistible conviction. He removed his hat from beneath his arm, and, extending it to some six inches in a lateral direction from his right hip, exclaimed —
“Madam, I have the honour to salute Celia in an Arbour.” He glanced up at the thorn-tree upon whose bole she was resting. If it had not spread above her so brown and so umbrageous as the foliage that Mr. Hitchcock had given to his picture, he was nevertheless well content. For he was aware that painters must beautify natural objects, and that such trees as you shall see in paintings are neither upon the earth nor in the seas. But shadow fell across her, which was of itself enough to complete the resemblance; though behind her, inartistically, nature had spread a sward of green all blazing with sunlight, across which there stepped slowly a herd of pale deer, their coats seeming to focus and to reflect the light; and in lieu of the broad ray that Mr. Hitchcock had sent to illumine his sitter’s features and form, a single beam filtered through the thorn-leaves and played, shivering tenuously, upon the bright filaments of her dark hair, upon her bare shoulder, and to be reflected upwards upon the brown ovals of her left cheek.
“La! Mr. Bettesworth,” she said, “how can you be so certain that I am Celia? To be sure, I do not know it my own self.”
“But!” Mr. Bettesworth said, “do you not know what cloths you have sat for?”
Her face expressed a guileless and charming stupidity.
“And how should I?” she said. “Here sit I, and there standeth he, peaking and squinting at my face over his glasses and through’em, and then with an underlook. And’a painteth and’a hath un’s paintings framed, always its back to me, so how should I know if I be Celia or not Celia, for I have never seen his pieces? But I go to him through a tunnel that stretcheth from the pot-room to the temple, and I sit monstrous still, nor may I so much as gawp nor yawn be the fit never so strong. And old Mr. Hitchcock is for all the world like a badger or a hedgehog at the bottom of a burrow, and it is all my life is worth to speak to him. So he will growl and spit, but when he comes out again he will stick comfits in my mouth and buss me, and be for all the world like old Tom the plough-horse when he is turned into the cloverfield.”
Mr. Bettesworth placed his hat that was so loaded with gold lace upon the gold lace that covered his heart. He inclined himself in a formal manner, and said, with a carefully built up reverence of tone —
“Madam, I have to beg of you that you will accept, firstly, my escort up to London; then hospitality; thirdly, my invitation to dine with the Right Honourable the Society of the Dilettanti; and fourthly, my hand in marriage.”
The large straw hat dropped to the ground, the virginal mouth fell wide apart, the left hand clenched itself suddenly over the heart.
“God help me!” she exclaimed, “you will make a fine lady of me! Shall I have little patches cut like a coach and four horses, with the coachman’s whip and four horses on my right cheek?”
The multitudinous prospect, and this realization of incredible ambitions in tiny matters, overwhelmed her for a moment. She started to her feet, her hands half stretched out as if in invocation; her mouth still fell open. “But after all, why not?” she suddenly resumed. “Am I not livelier and comelier than any washed-out City madam? I do not need your dyes and your cosmetics for my cheeks, nor your eye-brights nor your lip salves. And there is a hundred thousand or more pounds to gain by it. And I thought you must affect me from the first!” And suddenly she cast herself upon him, her hands clasping upon the tie of his wig, from which the powder disengaged itself and filtered in a little cloud into the sunlight.
“Oh, my benefactor!” she exclaimed. “Will I marry you? Why, I would marry ten of you and eight more for luck!”
Mr. Bettesworth, moving his head stiffly back, attempted to disengage himself, and to explain that the offer of marriage should be accompanied by a forfeit if he failed to perform the undertaking; but she clung to him so that for the moment he could not get his breath. The dark face of the Signora Poppæa, her blinking, ironic, and amused expression, came before his eyes. Once more he regretted that he had forgotten her prescription. He wished he had counted forty before he had spoken; he wished he had more exactly rounded off his speech.
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
MR. BETTESWORTH displayed upon his features no marked triumph or elation, when, to eat supper with Major Penruddock and Mr. Harcourt, he entered the inn-yard of the Turk’s Head. But the yard, in the falling dusk, appeared to be unusually filled with men who were not horsemen; a pike gleamed in the lantern-light beneath one gallery, and a couple of musket-barrels beneath another. From a certain subdued buzz that went up upon his arriving, Mr. Bettesworth imagined that the town had heard of his wager, as of his success, and was applauding his victorious entry. But the noise was hushed with whispers, and he rode through a silence to the inn-door. He had dressed himself with more than usual care, so that the light, falling upon him from within, revealed him beneath his riding-cloak, which was cast back upon one shoulder, as a scintillation of gold lace, of purple velvet, of white ruffles; and, beneath his hat, his hair was powdered till it was a snowy white. Behind him Mr. Roland was very gay in scarlet and gold; and even Mr. Williamson shone in a riding-suit of blue and silver, which Mr. Bettesworth had presented
to him from his own wardrobe in satisfaction at his discovery and defence of Celia. The host bowed more double than ever before him; the servants crowded into the dim, flagged hall to peer over each other’s shoulders at his erect and engrossed figure. He observed that when his eyes lit upon them the faces of the wenches expressed as much fear as admiration. One of them, standing in the shadow of a fat cook, gave a little scream, which she stifled at once with the corner of her apron.
Gratified by these sights and sounds, Mr. Bettesworth entered a small room at the end of the passage. He wore an air of modest satisfaction, which he had carefully studied before his glass for some three-quarters of an hour before setting out upon his expedition. His blond features were composed and serene; his lips were even pressed together, as if he came to announce news that was grave rather than triumphant. With an equal gravity Major Penruddock greeted them. Mr. Harcourt, on the other hand, whilst bowing, averted his glance. The cloth was laid and the candles lighted, but as yet no meats were upon the board. They stood and conversed as to the weather, as to the inconvenience of town dress for riding in the country, as to how the Major and Mr. Harcourt felt after last night’s wine. And Mr. Bettesworth, whilst lamenting that a too great press of business had prevented his waiting upon them before they had taken their departure, very earnestly pressed upon them the praises of a pill invented by a Doctor Johns of Salisbury, which was sovereign for dispelling the humours of the morning after a night spent with the juice of the grape.
Mr. Bettesworth had very seriously enjoined upon Mr. Williamson that he should keep his mouth shut and display no undue elation. His intention was, when the cloth should be removed, and the time for toasting arrived, to give them that of Celia herself. Then he would display to them her consent in writing to go with him to Town, to accept his hospitality, to be present at a dinner of the Dilettante Society, and, finally, to take his hand in marriage. This letter he had had to write with his own hand, for Lydia could do no more than make the merest of pothooks, with her tongue following round her lips the motions of her pen.
But once in the company of his equals, Mr. Williamson’s obedience dissolved. He was unable to resist grinning at Major Penruddock, making a hideous grimace at Mr. Harcourt’s averted features, and winking with contortions of his whole face at Mr. Roland, who stood with him behind his brother. And it was evident to Mr. Bettesworth that the contest of the morning had left a certain stiffness between all these gentlemen. Only Mr. Roland, who, with his gallant insouciance, was disengaging a strand of his coat lace from the hilt of his sword, seemed entirely at his ease.
But then, Mr. Bettesworth reflected, that was not difficult, since it was Mr. Roland who had held his horse-pistol to the Major’s stomach, a remembrance that might well make both the Major and Mr. Harcourt experience unpleasant emotions. He imagined that these would disappear before the first taste of venison and the first bottle of Burgundy. His quick ear caught, too, the sound of many and heavy footsteps on the flags outside the door. There came an occasional thump as of a heavy body or a metal-bound staff. Mr. Bettesworth interpreted these signs as meaning that the two gentlemen, acknowledging their failure, had ordered unusual preparations to be made for his entertainment. They were acknowledging defeat in a spirit of generosity, and he was to be saluted as a conquering hero. This filled him with satisfaction, and the more so in that he would be able to announce to them that by not carrying out his marriage with Lydia Chuckel, he would be forfeiting the reward for his wager and retaining only the glory of success. And he began suddenly to wonder how Lady Eshetsford could have assured him that he would find the original of Celia in every wit as desirable as herself. He could give Lady Eshetsford credit for a critical taste; he must now believe her to be as modest as she was noble. For if Lydia were, indeed, as she might be called, a small replica of her aunt by blood — if her eyes, her lips, her chin, her cheeks, her hair were, indeed, exactly her aunt’s, she was a small piece, she had quick little motions, and none of the pigeon-like parade and grace of Lady Eshetsford’s grand manner. She used her firm, white teeth upon sweetmeats like a little ape or a grinning negro boy. And Mr. Bettesworth, having settled in his mind that when this matter of the wager was at rest he would send Lydia down to Winterbourne Longa to be at the instruction of the Signora Poppæa — having settled this, Mr. Bettesworth fell into a sudden reverie upon the charms of Lady Eshetsford. He stood in a silence unconventional but impressive.
