Chapter 9

'Perhaps you remember seeing him at the Christmas dance at Wyndway?' she inquired. 'He is a good-natured fellow. Afterwards he sent me that portfolio of sketches you see in the corner. He might possibly do something in the world as a painter if he were obliged to work at the art for his bread, which he is not.' She added with bitter pleasantry: 'In bare mercy to his self-respect I must remain unseen here.'

It impressed Christopher to perceive how, under the estrangement which arose from differences of education, surroundings, experience, and talent, the sympathies of close relationship were perceptible in Ethelberta's bearing towards her brothers and sisters. At a remark upon some simple pleasure wherein she had not participated because absent and occupied by far more comprehensive interests, a gloom as of banishment would cross her face and dim it for awhile, showing that the free habits and enthusiasms of country life had still their charm with her, in the face of the subtler gratifications of abridged bodices, candlelight, and no feelings in particular, which prevailed in town. Perhaps the one condition which could work up into a permanent feeling the passing revival of his fancy for a woman whose chief attribute he had supposed to be sprightliness was added now by the romantic ubiquity of station that attached to her. A discovery which might have grated on the senses of a man wedded to conventionality was a positive pleasure to one whose faith in society had departed with his own social ruin.

The room began to darken, whereupon Christopher arose to leave; and the brothers Sol and Dan offered to accompany him.

14. A TURNPIKE ROAD

'We be thinking of coming to London ourselves soon,' said Sol, a carpenter and joiner by trade, as he walked along at Christopher's left hand. 'There's so much more chance for a man up the country. Now, if you was me, how should you set about getting a job, sir?'

'What can you do?' said Christopher.

'Well, I am a very good staircase hand; and I have been called neat at sash-frames; and I can knock together doors and shutters very well; and I can do a little at the cabinet-making. I don't mind framing a roof, neither, if the rest be busy; and I am always ready to fill up my time at planing floor-boards by the foot.'

'And I can mix and lay flat tints,' said Dan, who was a house painter, 'and pick out mouldings, and grain in every kind of wood you can mention--oak, maple, walnut, satinwood, cherry-tree--'

'You can both do too much to stand the least chance of being allowed to do anything in a city, where limitation is all the rule in labour. To have any success, Sol, you must be a man who can thoroughly look at a door to see what ought to be done to it, but as to looking at a window, that's not your line; or a person who, to the remotest particular, understands turning a screw, but who does not profess any knowledge of how to drive a nail. Dan must know how to paint blue to a marvel, but must be quite in the dark about painting green. If you stick to some such principle of specialty as this, you may get employment in London.'

'Ha-ha-ha!' said Dan, striking at a stone in the road with the stout green hazel he carried. 'A wink is as good as a nod: thank'ee--we'll mind all that now.'

'If we do come,' said Sol, 'we shall not mix up with Mrs. Petherwin at all.'

'O indeed!'

'O no. (Perhaps you think it odd that we call her "Mrs. Petherwin," but that's by agreement as safer and better than Berta, because we be such rough chaps you see, and she's so lofty.) 'Twould demean her to claim kin wi' her in London--two journeymen like we, that know nothing besides our trades.'

'Not at all,' said Christopher, by way of chiming in in the friendliest manner. 'She would be pleased to see any straightforward honest man and brother, I should think, notwithstanding that she has moved in other society for a time.'

'Ah, you don't know Berta!' said Dan, looking as if he did.

'How--in what way do you mean?' said Christopher uneasily.

'So lofty--so very lofty! Isn't she, Sol? Why she'll never stir out from mother's till after dark, and then her day begins; and she'll traipse about under the trees, and never go into the high-road, so that nobody in the way of gentle-people shall run up against her and know her living in such a little small hut after biding in a big mansion-place. There, we don't find fault wi' her about it: we like her just the same, though she don't speak to us in the street; for a feller must be a fool to make a piece of work about a woman's pride, when 'tis his own sister, and hang upon her and bother her when he knows 'tis for her good that he should not. Yes, her life has been quare enough. I hope she enjoys it, but for my part I like plain sailing. None of your ups and downs for me. There, I suppose 'twas her nater to want to look into the world a bit.'

'Father and mother kept Berta to school, you understand, sir,' explained the more thoughtful Sol, 'because she was such a quick child, and they always had a notion of making a governess of her. Sums? If you said to that child, "Berta, 'levenpence-three-farthings a day, how much a year?" she would tell 'ee in three seconds out of her own little head. And that hard sum about the herrings she had done afore she was nine.'

'True, she had,' said Dan. 'And we all know that to do that is to do something that's no nonsense.'

'What is the sum?' Christopher inquired.

'What--not know the sum about the herrings?' said Dan, spreading his gaze all over Christopher in amazement.

'Never heard of it,' said Christopher.

'Why down in these parts just as you try a man's soul by the Ten Commandments, you try his head by that there sum--hey, Sol?'

'Ay, that we do.'

'A herring and a half for three-halfpence, how many can ye get for 'levenpence: that's the feller; and a mortal teaser he is, I assure 'ee. Our parson, who's not altogether without sense o' week days, said one afternoon, "If cunning can be found in the multiplication table at all, Chickerel, 'tis in connection with that sum." Well, Berta was so clever in arithmetic that she was asked to teach summing at Miss Courtley's, and there she got to like foreign tongues more than ciphering, and at last she hated ciphering, and took to books entirely. Mother and we were very proud of her at that time: not that we be stuck-up people at all--be we, Sol?'

'Not at all; nobody can say that we be that, though there's more of it in the country than there should be by all account.'

'You'd be surprised to see how vain the girls about here be getting. Little rascals, why they won't curtsey to the loftiest lady in the land; no, not if you were to pay 'em to do it. Now, the men be different. Any man will touch his hat for a pint of beer. But then, of course, there's some difference between the two. Touching your hat is a good deal less to do than bending your knees, as Berta used to say, when she was blowed up for not doing it. She was always one of the independent sort--you never seed such a maid as she was! Now, Picotee was quite the other way.'

'Has Picotee left Sandbourne entirely?'

'O no; she is home for the holidays. Well, Mr. Julian, our road parts from yours just here, unless you walk into the next town along with us. But I suppose you get across to this station and go by rail?'

'I am obliged to go that way for my portmanteau,' said Christopher, 'or I should have been pleased to walk further. Shall I see you in Sandbourne to-morrow? I hope so.'

'Well, no. 'Tis hardly likely that you will see us--hardly. We know how unpleasant it is for a high sort of man to have rough chaps like us hailing him, so we think it best not to meet you--thank you all the same. So if you should run up against us in the street, we should be just as well pleased by your taking no notice, if you wouldn't mind. 'Twill save so much awkwardness--being in our working clothes. 'Tis always the plan that Mrs. Petherwin and we agree to act upon, and we find it best for both. I hope you take our meaning right, and as no offence, Mr. Julian.'

'And do you do the same with Picotee?'

'O Lord, no--'tisn't a bit of use to try. That's the worst of Picotee--there's no getting rid of her. The more in the rough we be the more she'll stick to us; and if we say she shan't come, she'll bide and fret about it till we be forced to let her.'

Christopher laughed, and promised, on condition that they would retract the statement about their not being proud; and then he wished his friends good-night.

15. AN INNER ROOM AT THE LODGE

At the Lodge at this time a discussion of some importance was in progress. The scene was Mrs. Chickerel's bedroom, to which, unfortunately, she was confined by some spinal complaint; and here she now appeared as an interesting woman of five-and-forty, properly dressed as far as visible, and propped up in a bed covered with a quilt which presented a field of little squares in many tints, looking altogether like a bird's-eye view of a market garden.

Mrs. Chickerel had been nurse in a nobleman's family until her marriage, and after that she played the part of wife and mother, upon the whole, affectionately and well. Among her minor differences with her husband had been one about the naming of the children; a matter that was at last compromised by an agreement under which the choice of the girls' names became her prerogative, and that of the boys' her husband's, who limited his field of selection to strict historical precedent as a set-off to Mrs. Chickerel's tendency to stray into the regions of romance.

The only grown-up daughters at home, Ethelberta and Picotee, with their brother Joey, were sitting near her; the two youngest children, Georgina and Myrtle, who had been strutting in and out of the room, and otherwise endeavouring to walk, talk, and speak like the gentleman just gone away, were packed off to bed. Emmeline, of that transitional age which causes its exponent to look wistfully at the sitters when romping and at the rompers when sitting, uncertain whether her position in the household is that of child or woman, was idling in a corner. The two absent brothers and two absent sisters--eldest members of the family--completed the round ten whom Mrs. Chickerel with thoughtless readiness had presented to a crowded world, to cost Ethelberta many wakeful hours at night while she revolved schemes how they might be decently maintained.

'I still think,' Ethelberta was saying, 'that the plan I first proposed is the best. I am convinced that it will not do to attempt to keep on the Lodge. If we are all together in town, I can look after you much better than when you are far away from me down here.'

'Shall we not interfere with you--your plans for keeping up your connections?' inquired her mother, glancing up towards Ethelberta by lifting the flesh of her forehead, instead of troubling to raise her face altogether.

'Not nearly so much as by staying here.'

'But,' said Picotee, 'if you let lodgings, won't the gentlemen and ladies know it?'

'I have thought of that,' said Ethelberta, 'and this is how I shall manage. In the first place, if mother is there, the lodgings can be let in her name, all bills will be receipted by her, and all tradesmen's orders will be given as from herself. Then, we will take no English lodgers at all; we will advertise the rooms only in Continental newspapers, as suitable for a French or German gentleman or two, and by this means there will be little danger of my acquaintance discovering that my house is not entirely a private one, or of any lodger being a friend of my acquaintance. I have thought over every possible way of combining the dignified social position I must maintain to make my story- telling attractive, with my absolute lack of money, and I can see no better one.'

'Then if Gwendoline is to be your cook, she must soon give notice at her present place?'

'Yes. Everything depends upon Gwendoline and Cornelia. But there is time enough for them to give notice--Christmas will be soon enough. If they cannot or will not come as cook and housemaid, I am afraid the plan will break down. A vital condition is that I do not have a soul in the house (beyond the lodgers) who is not one of my own relations. When we have put Joey into buttons, he will do very well to attend to the door.'

'But s'pose,' said Joey, after a glassy look at his future appearance in the position alluded to, 'that any of your gentle-people come to see ye, and when I opens the door and lets 'em in a swinging big lodger stalks downstairs. What will 'em think? Up will go their eye-glasses at one another till they glares each other into holes. My gracious!'

'The one who calls will only think that another visitor is leaving, Joey. But I shall have no visitors, or very few. I shall let it be well known among my late friends that my mother is an invalid, and that on this account we receive none but the most intimate friends. These intimate friends not existing, we receive nobody at all.'

'Except Sol and Dan, if they get a job in London? They'll have to call upon us at the back door, won't they, Berta?' said Joey.

'They must go down the area steps. But they will not mind that; they like the idea.'

'And father, too, must he go down the steps?'

'He may come whichever way he likes. He will be glad enough to have us near at any price. I know that he is not at all happy at leaving you down here, and he away in London. You remember that he has only taken the situation at Mr. Doncastle's on the supposition that you all come to town as soon as he can see an opening for getting you there; and as nothing of the sort has offered itself to him, this will be the very thing. Of course, if I succeed wonderfully well in my schemes for story- tellings, readings of my ballads and poems, lectures on the art of versification, and what not, we need have no lodgers; and then we shall all be living a happy family--all taking our share in keeping the establishment going.'

'Except poor me!' sighed the mother.

'My dear mother, you will be necessary as a steadying power--a flywheel, in short, to the concern. I wish that father could live there, too.'

'He'll never give up his present way of life--it has grown to be a part of his nature. Poor man, he never feels at home except in somebody else's house, and is nervous and quite a stranger in his own. Sich is the fatal effects of service!'

'O mother, don't!' said Ethelberta tenderly, but with her teeth on edge; and Picotee curled up her toes, fearing that her mother was going to moralize.

'Well, what I mean is, that your father would not like to live upon your earnings, and so forth. But in town we shall be near him--that's one comfort, certainly.'

'And I shall not be wanted at all,' said Picotee, in a melancholy tone.

'It is much better to stay where you are,' her mother said. 'You will come and spend the holidays with us, of course, as you do now.'

'I should like to live in London best,' murmured Picotee, her head sinking mournfully to one side. 'I HATE being in Sandbourne now!'

'Nonsense!' said Ethelberta severely. 'We are all contriving how to live most comfortably, and it is by far the best thing for you to stay at the school. You used to be happy enough there.'

Picotee sighed, and said no more.

16. A LARGE PUBLIC HALL

It was the second week in February, Parliament had just met, and Ethelberta appeared for the first time before an audience in London.

There was some novelty in the species of entertainment that the active young woman had proposed to herself, and this doubtless had due effect in collecting the body of strangers that greeted her entry, over and above those friends who came to listen to her as a matter of course. Men and women who had become totally indifferent to new actresses, new readers, and new singers, once more felt the freshness of curiosity as they considered the promise of the announcement. But the chief inducement to attend lay in the fact that here was to be seen in the flesh a woman with whom the tongue of rumour had been busy in many romantic ways--a woman who, whatever else might be doubted, had certainly produced a volume of verses which had been the talk of the many who had read them, and of the many more who had not, for several consecutive weeks.

What was her story to be? Persons interested in the inquiry--a small proportion, it may be owned, of the whole London public, and chiefly young men--answered this question for themselves by assuming that it would take the form of some pungent and gratifying revelation of the innermost events of her own life, from which her gushing lines had sprung as an inevitable consequence, and which being once known, would cause such musical poesy to appear no longer wonderful.

The front part of the room was well filled, rows of listeners showing themselves like a drilled-in crop of which not a seed has failed. They were listeners of the right sort, a majority having noses of the prominent and dignified type, which when viewed in oblique perspective ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place. Ethelberta's plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair--as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends. By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed. She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near her or not, and, in her fear of seeming artificial, spoke too low. This defect, however, she soon corrected, and ultimately went on in a charmingly colloquial manner. What Ethelberta relied upon soon became evident. It was not upon the intrinsic merits of her story as a piece of construction, but upon her method of telling it. Whatever defects the tale possessed--and they were not a few--it had, as delivered by her, the one pre-eminent merit of seeming like truth. A modern critic has well observed of De Foe that he had the most amazing talent on record for telling lies; and Ethelberta, in wishing her fiction to appear like a real narrative of personal adventure, did wisely to make De Foe her model. His is a style even better adapted for speaking than for writing, and the peculiarities of diction which he adopts to give verisimilitude to his narratives acquired enormous additional force when exhibited as viva-voce mannerisms. And although these artifices were not, perhaps, slavishly copied from that master of feigning, they would undoubtedly have reminded her hearers of him, had they not mostly been drawn from an easeful section in society which is especially characterized by the mental condition of knowing nothing about any author a week after they have read him. The few there who did remember De Foe were impressed by a fancy that his words greeted them anew in a winged auricular form, instead of by the weaker channels of print and eyesight. The reader may imagine what an effect this well- studied method must have produced when intensified by a clear, living voice, animated action, and the brilliant and expressive eye of a handsome woman--attributes which of themselves almost compelled belief. When she reached the most telling passages, instead of adding exaggerated action and sound, Ethelberta would lapse to a whisper and a sustained stillness, which were more striking than gesticulation. All that could be done by art was there, and if inspiration was wanting nobody missed it.

It was in performing this feat that Ethelberta seemed first to discover in herself the full power of that self-command which further onward in her career more and more impressed her as a singular possession, until at last she was tempted to make of it many fantastic uses, leading to results that affected more households than her own. A talent for demureness under difficulties without the cold-bloodedness which renders such a bearing natural and easy, a face and hand reigning unmoved outside a heart by nature turbulent as a wave, is a constitutional arrangement much to be desired by people in general; yet, had Ethelberta been framed with less of that gift in her, her life might have been more comfortable as an experience, and brighter as an example, though perhaps duller as a story.

'Ladywell, how came this Mrs. Petherwin to think of such a queer trick as telling romances, after doing so well as a poet?' said a man in the stalls to his friend, who had been gazing at the Story-teller with a rapt face.

'What--don't you know?--everybody did, I thought,' said the painter.

'A mistake. Indeed, I should not have come here at all had I not heard the subject mentioned by accident yesterday at Grey's; and then I remembered her to be the same woman I had met at some place--Belmaine's I think it was--last year, when I thought her just getting on for handsome and clever, not to put it too strongly.'

'Ah! naturally you would not know much,' replied Ladywell, in an eager whisper. 'Perhaps I am judging others by myself a little more than--but, as you have heard, she is an acquaintance of mine. I know her very well, and, in fact, I originally suggested the scheme to her as a pleasant way of adding to her fame. "Depend upon it, dear Mrs. Petherwin," I said, during a pause in one of our dances together some time ago, "any public appearance of yours would be successful beyond description."'

'O, I had no idea that you knew her so well! Then it is quite through you that she has adopted this course?'

'Well, not entirely--I could not say entirely. She said that some day, perhaps, she might do such a thing; and, in short, I reduced her vague ideas to form.'

'I should not mind knowing her better--I must get you to throw us together in some way,' said Neigh, with some interest. 'I had no idea that you were such an old friend. You could do it, I suppose?'

'Really, I am afraid--hah-hah--may not have the opportunity of obliging you. I met her at Wyndway, you know, where she was visiting with Lady Petherwin. It was some time ago, and I cannot say that I have ever met her since.'

'Or before?' said Neigh.

'Well--no; I never did.'

'Ladywell, if I had half your power of going to your imagination for facts, I would be the greatest painter in England.'

'Now Neigh--that's too bad--but with regard to this matter, I do speak with some interest,' said Ladywell, with a pleased sense of himself.

'In love with her?--Smitten down?--Done for?'

'Now, now! However, several other fellows chaff me about her. It was only yesterday that Jones said--'

'Do you know why she cares to do this sort of thing?'

'Merely a desire for fame, I suppose.'

'I should think she has fame enough already.'

'That I can express no opinion upon. I am thinking of getting her permission to use her face in a subject I am preparing. It is a fine face for canvas. Glorious contour--glorious. Ah, here she is again, for the second part.'

'Dream on, young fellow. You'll make a rare couple!' said Neigh, with a flavour of superciliousness unheeded by his occupied companion.

Further back in the room were a pair of faces whose keen interest in the performance contrasted much with the languidly permissive air of those in front. When the ten minutes' break occurred, Christopher was the first of the two to speak. 'Well, what do you think of her, Faith?' he said, shifting restlessly on his seat.