Lolly Willowes
OR
THE LOVING HUNTSMAN
SYLVIA
TOWNSEND WARNER
Published by
CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON
*
CLARKE, IRWIN & CO. LTD
TORONTO
First published 1926
_To_
BEA ISABEL HOWE
LOLLY WILLOWES
_Part_ I
When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her
elder brother and his family.
‘Of course,’ said Caroline, ‘you will come to us.’
‘But it will upset all your plans. It will give you so much trouble. Are
you sure you really want me?’
‘Oh _dear_, yes.’
Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had
already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the
small spare-room. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it
be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fireplace?
Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes,
that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false
handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the
spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly
had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had
no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for
two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she
could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and
potted plants would look very nice.
Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would
soon fit into her new home. The small spare-room would be rather a loss.
They could not give up the large spare-room to Lolly, and the small
spare-room was the handiest of the two for ordinary visitors. It seemed
extravagant to wash a pair of the large linen sheets for a single guest
who came but for a couple of nights. Still, there it was, and Henry was
right--Lolly ought to come to them. London would be a pleasant change
for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a
better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to
make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty.
Poor Lolly! black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her
pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that
very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if
one bought it in a country town.
While these thoughts passed through Caroline’s mind, Laura was not
thinking at all. She had picked a red geranium flower, and was staining
her left wrist with the juice of its crushed petals. So, when she was
younger, she had stained her pale cheeks, and had bent over the
greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank
showed only a dark shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in
the old holy painting that hung in the dining-room and was called the
Leonardo.
‘The girls will be delighted,’ said Caroline. Laura roused herself. It
was all settled, then, and she was going to live in London with Henry,
and Caroline his wife, and Fancy and Marion his daughters. She would
become an inmate of the tall house in Apsley Terrace where hitherto she
had only been a country sister-in-law on a visit. She would recognise a
special something in the physiognomy of that house-front which would
enable her to stop certainly before it without glancing at the number or
the door-knocker. Within it, she would know unhesitatingly which of the
polished brown doors was which, and become quite indifferent to the
position of the cistern, which had baffled her so one night when she lay
awake trying to assemble the house inside the box of its outer walls.
She would take the air in Hyde Park and watch the children on their
ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in Rotten Row, and go to the
theatre in a cab.
London life was very full and exciting. There were the shops,
processions of the Royal Family and of the unemployed, the gold tunnel
at Whiteley’s, and the brilliance of the streets by night. She thought
of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately
diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in
turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed
streets and squares--but they would be familiar then--complying with the
sealed orders of the future; and presently she would be taking them for
granted, as the Londoners do. But in London there would be no greenhouse
with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and
warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and
sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and
hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray. She must
leave all this behind, or only enjoy it as a visitor, unless James and
Sibyl happened to feel, as Henry and Caroline did, that of course she
must live with them.
Sibyl said: ‘Dearest Lolly! So Henry and Caroline are to have you.... We
shall miss you more than I can say, but of course you will prefer
London. Dear old London with its picturesque fogs and its interesting
people, and all. I quite envy you. But you mustn’t quite forsake Lady
Place. You must come and pay us long visits, so that Tito doesn’t forget
his aunt.’
‘Will you miss me, Tito?’ said Laura, and stooped down to lay her face
against his prickly bib and his smooth, warm head. Tito fastened his
hands round her finger.
‘I’m sure he’ll miss your ring, Lolly,’ said Sibyl. ‘You’ll have to cut
the rest of your teeth on the poor old coral when Auntie Lolly goes,
won’t you, my angel?’
‘I’ll give him the ring if you think he’ll really miss it, Sibyl.’
Sibyl’s eyes glowed; but she said:
‘Oh no, Lolly, I couldn’t think of taking it Why, it’s a family ring.’
When Fancy Willowes had grown up, and married, and lost her husband in
the war, and driven a lorry for the Government, and married again from
patriotic motives, she said to Owen Wolf-Saunders, her second husband:
‘How unenterprising women were in the old days! Look at Aunt Lolly.
Grandfather left her five hundred a year, and she was nearly thirty when
he died, and yet she could find nothing better to do than to settle down
with Mum and Dad, and stay there ever since.’
‘The position of single women was very different twenty years ago,’
answered Mr. Wolf-Saunders. ‘_Feme sole_, you know, and _feme covert_,
and all that sort of rot.’
Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss
Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make
a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such
possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father
being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into
the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as
if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will, was ready
to be disposed of as they should think best.
The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a
conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not
prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat
upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the
good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and
well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law
applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the
mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon
them by the example of their ancestors.
Observing those canons, no member of the Willowes family had risen to
much eminence. Perhaps great-great-aunt Salome had made the nearest
approach to fame. It was a decent family boast that great-great-aunt
Salome’s puff-paste had been commended by King George III. And
great-great-aunt Salome’s prayer-book, with the services for King
Charles the Martyr and the Restoration of the Royal Family and the
welfare of the House of Hanover--a nice example of impartial piety--was
always used by the wife of the head of the family. Salome, though
married to a Canon of Salisbury, had taken off her embroidered kid
gloves, turned up her sleeves, and gone into the kitchen to mix the
paste for His Majesty’s eating, her Venice-point lappets dangling above
the floury bowl. She was a loyal subject, a devout churchwoman, and a
good housewife, and the Willoweses were properly proud of her. Titus,
her father, had made a voyage to the Indies, and had brought back with
him a green parrokeet, the first of its kind to be seen in Dorset. The
parrokeet was named Ratafee, and lived for fifteen years. When he died
he was stuffed; and perched as in life upon his ring, he swung from the
cornice of the china-cupboard surveying four generations of the Willowes
family with his glass eyes. Early in the nineteenth century one eye fell
out and was lost. The eye which replaced it was larger, but inferior
both in lustre and expressiveness. This gave Ratafee a rather leering
look, but it did not compromise the esteem in which he was held. In a
humble way the bird had made county history, and the family acknowledged
it, and gave him a niche in their own.
Beside the china-cupboard and beneath Ratafee stood Emma’s harp, a green
harp ornamented with gilt scrolls and acanthus leaves in the David
manner. When Laura was little she would sometimes steal into the empty
drawing-room and pluck the strings which remained unbroken. They
answered with a melancholy and distracted voice, and Laura would
pleasantly frighten herself with the thought of Emma’s ghost coming back
to make music with cold fingers, stealing into the empty drawing-room as
noiselessly as she had done. But Emma’s was a gentle ghost. Emma had
died of a decline, and when she lay dead with a bunch of snowdrops under
her folded palms a lock of her hair was cut off to be embroidered into a
picture of a willow tree exhaling its branches above a padded white
satin tomb. ‘That,’ said Laura’s mother, ‘is an heirloom of your
great-aunt Emma who died.’ And Laura was sorry for the poor young lady
who alone, it seemed to her, of all her relations had had the misfortune
to die.
Henry, born in 1818, grandfather to Laura and nephew to Emma, became
head of the house of Willowes when he was but twenty-four, his father
and unmarried elder brother dying of smallpox within a fortnight of each
other. As a young man Henry had shown a roving and untraditional
temperament, so it was fortunate that he had the licence of a cadet to
go his own way. He had taken advantage of this freedom to marry a Welsh
lady, and to settle near Yeovil, where his father bought him a
partnership in a brewery. It was natural to expect that upon becoming
the head of the family Henry would abandon, if not the Welsh wife and
the brewery, at least Somerset, and return to his native place. But this
he would not do. He had become attached to the neighbourhood where he
had spent the first years of his married life; the ill-considered jest
of his uncle the Admiral, that Henry was courting a Welshwoman with a
tall hat like Mother Shipton’s who would carry her shoes to church, had
secretly estranged him from his relations; and--most weighty reason of
all--Lady Place, a small solid mansion, which he had long
coveted--saying to himself that if ever he were rich enough he would
make his wife the mistress of it--just then came into the market. The
Willowes obstinacy, which had for so long kept unchanged the home in
Dorset, was now to transfer that home across the county border. The old
house was sold, and the furniture and family belongings were installed
at Lady Place. Several strings of Emma’s harp were broken, some feathers
were jolted out of Ratafee’s tail, and Mrs. Willowes, whose upbringing
had been Evangelical, was distressed for several Sundays by the
goings-on that she found in Salome’s prayer-book. But in the main the
Willowes tradition stood the move very well. The tables and chairs and
cabinets stood in the same relation to each other as before; the
pictures hung in the same order though on new walls; and the Dorset
hills were still to be seen from the windows, though now from windows
facing south instead of from windows facing north. Even the brewery,
untraditional as it was, soon weathered and became indistinguishably
part of the Willowes way of life.
* * * * *
Henry Willowes had three sons and four daughters. Everard, the eldest
son, married his second cousin, Miss Frances D’Urfey. She brought some
more Willowes property to the Somerset house: a set of garnets; a buff
and gold tea-service bequeathed her by the Admiral, an amateur of china,
who had dowered all his nieces and great-nieces with Worcester, Minton,
and Oriental; and two oil-paintings by Italian masters which the younger
Titus, Emma’s brother, had bought in Rome whilst travelling for his
health. She bore Everard three children: Henry, born in 1867; James,
born in 1869; and Laura, born in 1874.
On Henry’s birth Everard laid down twelve dozen of port against his
coming of age. Everard was proud of the brewery, and declared that beer
was the befitting drink for all classes of Englishmen, to be preferred
over foreign wines. But he did not extend this ban to port and sherry;
it was clarets he particularly despised.
Another twelve dozen of port was laid down for James, and there it
seemed likely the matter would end.
Everard was a lover of womankind; he greatly desired a daughter, and
when he got one she was all the dearer for coming when he had almost
given up hope of her. His delight upon this occasion, however, could not
be so compactly expressed. He could not lay down port for Laura. At last
he hit upon the solution of his difficulty. Going up to London upon the
mysterious and inadequate pretext of growing bald, he returned with a
little string of pearls, small and evenly matched, which exactly fitted
the baby’s neck. Year by year, he explained, the necklace could be
extended until it encircled the neck of a grown-up young woman at her
first ball. The ball, he went on to say, must take place in winter, for
he wished to see Laura trimmed with ermine. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs.
Willowes, ‘the poor girl will look like a Beefeater.’ But Everard was
not to be put off. A stuffed ermine which he had known as a boy was
still his ideal of the enchanted princess, so pure and sleek was it, and
so artfully poised the small neat head on the long throat. ‘Weasel!’
exclaimed his wife. ‘Everard, how dare you love a minx?’
Laura escaped the usual lot of the new-born, for she was not at all red.
To Everard she seemed his very ermine come to true life. He was in love
with her femininity from the moment he set eyes on her. ‘Oh, the fine
little lady!’ he cried out when she was first shown to him, wrapped in
shawls, and whimpering at the keen sunlight of a frosty December
morning. Three days after that it thawed, and Mr. Willowes rode to
hounds. But he came back after the first kill. ‘’Twas a vixen,’ he said.
‘Such a pretty young vixen. It put me in mind of my own, and I thought
I’d ride back to see how she was behaving. Here’s the brush.’
Laura grew up almost as an only child. By the time she was past her
babyhood her brothers had gone to school. When they came back for their
holidays, Mrs. Willowes would say: ‘Now, play nicely with Laura. She has
fed your rabbits every day while you have been at school. But don’t let
her fall into the pond.’
Henry and James did their best to observe their mother’s bidding. When
Laura went too near the edge of the pond one or the other would
generally remember to call her back again; and before they returned to
the house, Henry, as a measure of precaution, would pull a wisp of grass
and wipe off any tell-tale green slime that happened to be on her
slippers. But nice play with a sister so much younger than themselves
was scarcely possible. They performed the brotherly office of teaching
her to throw and to catch; and when they played at Knights or Red
Indians, Laura was dutifully cast for some passive female part. This
satisfied the claims of honour; if at some later stage it was discovered
that the captive princess or the faithful squaw had slipped away
unnoticed to the company of Brewer in the coachhouse or Oliver Cromwell
the toad, who lived under the low russet roof of violet leaves near the
disused melon pit, it did not much affect the course of the drama. Once,
indeed, when Laura as a captive princess had been tied to a tree, her
brothers were so much carried away by a series of single combats for her
favour that they forgot to come and rescue her before they swore
friendship and went off to the Holy Land. Mr. Willowes, coming home from
the brewery through a sunset haze of midges, chanced to stroll into the
orchard to see if the rabbits had barked any more of his saplings. There
he found Laura, sitting contentedly in hayband fetters, and singing
herself a story about a snake that had no mackintosh. Mr. Willowes was
extremely vexed when he understood from Laura’s nonchalant account what
had happened. He took off her slippers and chafed her feet. Then he
carried her indoors to his study, giving orders that a tumbler of hot
sweet lemonade should be prepared for her immediately. She drank it
sitting on his knee while he told her about the new ferret. When Henry
and James were heard approaching with war-whoops, Mr. Willowes put her
into his leather arm-chair and went out to meet them. Their war-whoops
quavered and ceased as they caught sight of their father’s stern face.
Dusk seemed to fall on them with condemnation as he reminded them that
it was past their supper-time, and pointed out that, had he not
happened upon her, Laura would still have been sitting bound to the _Bon
Chrétien_ pear-tree.
This befell upon one of the days when Mrs. Willowes was lying down with
a headache. ‘Something always goes wrong when I have one of my days,’
the poor lady would complain. It was also upon one of Mrs. Willowes’s
days that Everard fed Laura with the preserved cherries out of the
drawing-room cake. Laura soon became very sick, and the stable-boy was
sent off post-haste upon Everard’s mare to summon the doctor.
Mrs. Willowes made a poor recovery after Laura’s birth; as time went on,
she became more and more invalidish, though always pleasantly so. She
was seldom well enough to entertain, so Laura grew up in a quiet
household. Ladies in mantles of silk or of sealskin, according to the
season of the year, would come to call, and sitting by the sofa would
say: ‘Laura is growing a big girl now. I suppose before long you will be
sending her to a school.’ Mrs. Willowes heard them with half shut eyes.
Holding her head deprecatingly upon one side, she returned evasive
answers. When by quite shutting her eyes she had persuaded them to go,
she would call Laura and say: ‘Darling, aren’t your skirts getting a
little short?’
Then Nannie would let out another tuck in Laura’s ginghams and merinos,
and some months would pass before the ladies returned to the attack.
They all liked Mrs. Willowes, but they were agreed amongst themselves
that she needed bracing up to a sense of her responsibilities,
especially her responsibilities about Laura. It really was not right
that Laura should be left so much to herself. Poor dear Miss Taylor was
an excellent creature. Had she not inquired about peninsulas in all the
neighbouring schoolrooms of consequence? But Miss Taylor for three hours
daily and Mme. Brevet’s dancing classes in winter did not, could not,
supply all Laura’s needs. She should have the companionship of girls of
her own age, or she might grow up eccentric. Another little hint to Mrs.
Willowes would surely open the poor lady’s eyes. But though Mrs.
Willowes received their good counsel with a flattering air of being just
about to become impressed by it, and filled up their teacups with a
great deal of delicious cream, the silk and sealskin ladies hinted in
vain, for Laura was still at home when her mother died.
During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually
more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the
final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said,
yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, ‘I think I will go to my grave now,’ and
had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.
Laura mourned for her mother in skirts that almost reached the ground,
for Miss Boddle, the family dressmaker, had nice sensibilities and did
not think that legs could look sorrowful. Indeed, Laura’s legs were very
slim and frisky, they liked climbing trees and jumping over haycocks,
they had no wish to retire from the world and belong to a young lady.
But when she had put on the new clothes that smelt so queerly, and
looking in the mirror saw herself sad and grown-up, Laura accepted the
inevitable. Sooner or later she must be subdued into young-ladyhood; and
it seemed befitting that the change should come gravely, rather than
with the conventional polite uproar and fuss of ‘coming out’--which odd
term meant, as far as she could see, and when once the champagne bottles
were emptied and the flimsy ball-dress lifted off the thin shoulders,
going-in.
As things were, she had a recompense for the loss of her liberty. For
Everard needed comfort, he needed a woman to comfort him, and abetted by
Miss Boddle’s insinuations Laura was soon able to persuade him that her
comfortings were of the legitimate womanly kind. It was easy, much
easier than she had supposed, to be grown-up; to be clear-headed and
watchful, to move sedately and think before she spoke. Already her hands
looked much whiter on the black lap. She could not take her mother’s
place--that was as impossible as to have her mother’s touch on the
piano, for Mrs. Willowes had learnt from a former pupil of Field, she
had the _jeu perlé_; but she could take a place of her own. So Laura
behaved very well--said the Willowes connection, agreeing and approving
amongst themselves--and went about her business, and only cried when
alone in the potting-shed, where a pair of old gardening gloves repeated
to her the shape of her mother’s hands.
Her behaviour was the more important in that neither of her brothers was
at home when Mrs. Willowes died. Henry, now a member of the Inner
Temple, had just proposed marriage to a Miss Caroline Fawcett. When he
returned to London after the funeral it was impossible not to feel that
he was travelling out of the shadow that rested upon Lady Place to bask
in his private glory of a suitable engagement.
He left his father and sister to find consolation in consoling each
other. For though James was with them, and though _his_ sorrow was
without qualification, they were not likely to get much help from James.
He had been in Germany studying chemistry, and when they sent off the
telegram Everard and Laura reckoned up how long he would take to reach
Lady Place, and planned how they could most comfortingly receive him,
for they had already begun to weave a thicker clothing of family
kindness against the chill of bereavement. On hearing the crunch of the
wagonette in the drive, and the swishing of the wet rhododendrons, they
glanced at each other reassuringly, taking heart at the thought of the
bright fire in his bedroom, the carefully chosen supper that awaited
him. But when he stood before them and they looked at his red twitching
face, they were abashed before the austerity of a grief so differently
sustained from their own. Nothing they had to offer could remedy that
heart-ache. They left him to himself, and sought refuge in each other’s
society, as much from his sorrow as theirs, and in his company they sat
quietly, like two good children in the presence of a more grown-up grief
than they could understand.
James might have accepted their self-effacement with silent gratitude;
or he might not have noticed it at all--it was impossible to tell. Soon
after his return he did a thing so unprecedented in the annals of the
family that it could only be explained by the extreme exaltation of mind
which possessed him: for without consulting any one, he altered the
furniture, transferring a mirror and an almond-green brocade settee from
his mother’s room to his own. This accomplished, he came slowly
downstairs and went out into the stable-yard where Laura and his father
were looking at a litter of puppies. He told them what he had done,
speaking drily, as of some everyday occurrence, and when they, a little
timidly, tried to answer as if they too thought it a very natural and
convenient arrangement, he added that he did not intend to go back to
Germany, but would stay henceforth at Lady Place and help his father
with the brewery.
Everard was much pleased at this. His faith in the merits of brewing had
been rudely jolted by the refusal of his eldest son to have anything to
do with it. Even before Henry left school his ambition was set on the
law. Hearing him speak in the School Debating Society, one of the
masters told him that he had a legal mind. This compliment left him with
no doubts as to what career he wished to follow, and before long the
legal mind was brought to bear upon his parents. Everard was hurt, and
Mrs. Willowes was slightly contemptuous, for she had the old-fashioned
prejudice against the learned professions, and thought her son did ill
in not choosing to live by his industry rather than by his wits. But
Henry had as much of the Willowes determination as either his father or
his mother, and his stock of it was twenty-five years younger and
livelier than theirs. ‘Times are changed,’ said Everard. ‘A country
business doesn’t look the same to a young man as it did in my day.’
So though a partnership in the brewery seemed the natural destiny for
James, Everard was much flattered by his decision, and hastened to put
into practice the scientific improvements which his son suggested.
Though by nature mistrustful of innovations he hoped that James might be
innocently distracted from his grief by these interests, and gave him a
new hopper in the same paternal spirit as formerly he had given him a
rook-rifle. James was quite satisfied with the working of the hopper.
But it was not possible to discover if it had assuaged his grief,
because he concealed his feelings too closely, becoming, by a hyperbole
of reticence, reserved even about his reserve, so that to all
appearances he was no more than a red-faced young man with a moderate
flow of conversation.
Everard and Laura never reached that stage of familiarity with James
which allows members of the same family to accept each other on surface
values. Their love for him was tinged with awe, the awe that love learns
in the moment of finding itself unavailing. But they were glad to have
him with them, especially Everard, who was growing old enough to like
the prospect of easing his responsibilities, even the inherent
responsibility of being a Willowes, on to younger shoulders. No one was
better fitted to take up this burden than James. Everything about him,
from his seat on a horse to his taste in leather bindings, betokened an
integrity of good taste and good sense, unostentatious, haughty, and
discriminating.
The leather bindings were soon in Laura’s hands. New books were just
what she wanted, for she had almost come to the end of the books in the
Lady Place library. Had they known this the silk and sealskin ladies
would have shaken their heads over her upbringing even more deploringly.
But, naturally, it had not occurred to them that a young lady of their
acquaintance should be under no restrictions as to what she read, and
Mrs. Willowes had not seen any reason for making them better informed.
So Laura read undisturbed, and without disturbing anybody, for the
conversation at local tea-parties and balls never happened to give her
an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on
the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches. In fact, as she was generally
ignorant of the books which _their_ daughters were allowed to read, the
neighbouring mammas considered her rather ignorant. However they did not
like her any the worse for this, for her ignorance, if not so sexually
displeasing as learning, was of so unsweetened a quality as to be wholly
without attraction. Nor had they any more reason to be dissatisfied with
her appearance. What beauties of person she had were as unsweetened as
her beauties of mind, and her air of fine breeding made her look older
than her age.
Laura was of a middle height, thin, and rather pointed. Her skin was
brown, inclining to sallowness; it seemed browner still by contrast with
her eyes, which were large, set wide apart, and of that shade of grey
which inclines neither to blue nor green, but seems only a much diluted
black. Such eyes are rare in any face, and rarer still in conjunction
with a brown colouring. In Laura’s case the effect was too startling to
be agreeable. Strangers thought her remarkable-looking, but got no
further, and those more accustomed thought her plain. Only Everard and
James might have called her pretty, had they been asked for an opinion.
This would not have been only the partiality of one Willowes for
another. They had seen her at home, where animation brought colour into
her cheeks and spirit into her bearing. Abroad, and in company, she was
not animated. She disliked going out, she seldom attended any but those
formal parties at which the attendance of Miss Willowes of Lady Place
was an obligatory civility; and she found there little reason for
animation. Being without coquetry she did not feel herself bound to
feign a degree of entertainment which she had not experienced, and the
same deficiency made her insensible to the duty of every marriageable
young woman to be charming, whether her charm be directed towards one
special object or, in default of that, universally distributed through a
disinterested love of humanity. This may have been due to her
upbringing--such was the local explanation. But her upbringing had only
furthered a temperamental indifference to the need of getting
married--or, indeed, of doing anything positive--and this indifference
was reinforced by the circumstances which had made her so closely her
father’s companion.
There is nothing more endangering to a young woman’s normal inclination
towards young men than an intimacy with a man twice her own age. Laura
compared with her father all the young men whom otherwise she might have
accepted without any comparisons whatever as suitable objects for her
intentions, and she did not find them support the comparison at all
well. They were energetic, good-looking, and shot pheasants with great
skill; or they were witty, elegantly dressed, and had a London club; but
still she had no mind to quit her father’s company for theirs, even if
they should show clear signs of desiring her to do so, and till then she
paid them little attention in thought or deed.
When Aunt Emmy came back from India and filled the spare-room with
cedar-wood boxes, she exclaimed briskly to Everard: ‘My dear, it’s high
time Laura married! Why isn’t she married already?’ Then, seeing a
slight spasm of distress at this barrack-square trenchancy pass over her
brother’s face, she added: ‘A girl like Laura has only to make her
choice. Those Welsh eyes.... Whenever they look at me I am reminded of
Mamma. Everard! You must let me give her a season in India.’
‘You must ask Laura,’ said Everard. And they went out into the orchard
together, where Emmy picked up the windfall apples and ate them with the
greed of the exile. Nothing more was said just then. Emmy was aware of
her false step. Ashamed at having exceeded a Willowes decorum of
intervention she welcomed this chance to reinstate herself in her
brother’s good graces by an evocation of their childhood under these
same trees.
But Everard kept silence for distress. He believed in good faith that
his relief at seeing Laura’s budding suitors nipped in their bud was due
to the conviction that not one of them was good enough for her. As
innocently as the unconcerned Laura might have done, but did not, he
waited for the ideal wooer. Now Emmy’s tactless concern had thrown a
cold shadow over the remoter future after his death. And for the near
future had she not spoken of taking Laura to India? He would be good. He
would not say a word to dissuade the girl from what might prove to be to
her advantage. But at the idea of her leaving him for a country so
distant, for a manner of life so unfamiliar, the warmth went out of his
days.
Emmy unfolded her plan to Laura; that is to say, unfolded the outer
wrappings of it. Laura listened with delight to her aunt’s tales of
Indian life. Compounds and mangoes, the early morning rides along the
Kilpawk Road, the grunting song of the porters who carried Mem Sahibs in
litters up to the hill-stations, parrots flying through the jungle,
ayahs with rubies in their nostrils, kid-gloves preserved in pickle jars
with screw-tops--all the solemn and simple pomp of old-fashioned Madras
beckoned to her, beckoned like the dark arms tinkling with bangles of
soft gold and coloured glass. But when the beckonings took the form of
Aunt Emmy’s circumstantial invitation Laura held back, demurred this way
and that, and pronounced at last the refusal which had been implicit in
her mind from the moment the invitation was given.
She did not want to leave her father, nor did she want to leave Lady
Place. Her life perfectly contented her. She had no wish for ways other
than those she had grown up in. With an easy diligence she played her
part as mistress of the house, abetted at every turn by country servants
of long tenure, as enamoured of the comfortable amble of day by day as
she was. At certain seasons a fresh resinous smell would haunt the house
like some rustic spirit. It was Mrs. Bonnet making the traditional
beeswax polish that alone could be trusted to give the proper lustre to
the elegantly bulging fronts of talboys and cabinets. The grey days of
early February were tinged with tropical odours by great-great-aunt
Salome’s recipe for marmalade; and on the afternoon of Good Friday, if
it were fine, the stuffed foxes and otters were taken out of their glass
cases, brushed, and set to sweeten on the lawn.
These were old institutions, they dated from long before Laura’s day.
But the gradual deposit of family customs was always going on, and
within her own memory the sum of Willowes ways had been augmented. There
was the Midsummer Night’s Eve picnic in Potts’s Dingle--cold pigeon-pie
and cider-cup, and moth-beset candles flickering on the grass. There was
the ceremony of the hop-garland, which James had brought back from
Germany, and the pantomime party from the workhouse, and a very special
kind of sealing-wax that could only be procured from Padua. Long ago the
children had been allowed to choose their birthday dinners, and still
upon the seventeenth of July James ate duck and green peas and a
gooseberry fool, while a cock-pheasant in all the glory of tail-feathers
was set before Laura upon the ninth of December. And at the bottom of
the orchard flourished unchecked a bed of nettles, for Nannie Quantrell
placed much trust in the property of young nettles eaten as spring
greens to clear the blood, quoting emphatically and rhythmically a rhyme
her grandmother had taught her:
‘If they would eat nettles in March
And drink mugwort in May,
So many fine young maidens
Would not go to the clay.’
Laura would very willingly have drunk mugwort in May also, for this
rhyme of Nannie’s, so often and so impressively rehearsed, had taken
fast hold of her imagination. She had always had a taste for botany, she
had also inherited a fancy for brewing. One of her earliest pleasures
had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats
while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged
a long stick through the clotted froth which, working and murmuring,
gradually gave way until far below through the tumbling, dissolving rent
the beer was disclosed.
Botany and brewery she now combined into one pursuit, for at the spur of
Nannie’s rhyme she turned her attention into the forsaken green byways
of the rural pharmacopœia. From Everard she got a little still, from the
family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these
failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been
Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help
her out. She roved the countryside for herbs and simples, and many were
the washes and decoctions that she made from sweet-gale, water purslane,
cowslips, and the roots of succory, while her salads gathered in fields
and hedges were eaten by Everard, at first in hope and trust, and
afterwards with flattering appetite. Encouraged by him, she even wrote
a little book called ‘Health by the Wayside’ commending the use of
old-fashioned simples and healing herbs. It was published anonymously at
the local press, and fell quite flat. Everard felt much more slighted by
this than she did, and bought up the remainders without telling her so.
But mugwort was not included in the book, for she was never allowed to
test its virtues, and she would not include recipes which she had not
tried herself. Nannie believed it to be no less effective than nettles,
but she did not know how to prepare it. Once long ago she had made a
broth by seething the leaves in boiling water, which she then strained
off and gave to Henry and James. But it made them both sick, and Mrs.
Willowes had forbidden its further use. Laura felt positive that mugwort
tea would not have made her sick. She begged for leave to make trial of
it, but to no avail; Nannie’s prohibition was as absolute as that of her
mistress. But Nannie had not lost her faith. She explained that the
right mugwort for the purpose was a very special kind that did not grow
in Somerset, but at the gates of the cobbler in her native village the
mugwort grew fair enough. Long after this discussion had taken place,
Laura found in Aubrey’s _Miscellany_ a passage quoted from Pliny which
told how Artemis had revealed the virtues of mugwort to the dreaming
Pericles. She hastened to tell Nannie of this. Nannie was gratified, but
she would not admit that her faith needed any buttressing. ‘Those Greeks
didn’t know everything!’ she said, and drove a needle into her red cloth
emery case, which was shaped like a strawberry and spotted over with
small yellow beads.
For nearly ten years Laura kept house for Everard and James. Nothing
happened to disturb the easy serenity of their days except the birth of
first one daughter and then another to Henry and Caroline, and this did
not disturb it much. Everard, so happy in a daughter, was prepared to be
happy in granddaughters also. When Henry apologised to him with dignity
for the accident of their sex Everard quoted to him the nursery rhyme
about what little boys and girls were made of. Henry was relieved to
find his father taking so lightly a possible failure in the Willowes
male line, but he wished the old man wouldn’t trifle so. He could not
stoop to give his father the lie over this unscientific theory of sex.
He observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so
much fuss was being made about the education of women.
Henry in his fears for the Willowes’ male line had taken it for granted
that his brother would never marry. And certainly if to lie very low
about a thing is a sign that one is not thinking about it, James had no
thought of marriage. He was nearly thirty-three when he announced with
his usual quiet abruptness that he was going to marry. The lady of his
choice was a Miss Sibyl Mauleverer. She was the daughter of a clergyman,
but of a fashionable London clergyman which no doubt accounted for her
not being in the least like any clergyman’s daughter seen by Everard and
Laura hitherto. Miss Mauleverer’s skirts were so long and so lavish that
they lay in folds upon the ground all round her when she stood still,
and required to be lifted in both hands before she could walk. Her hats
were further off her head than any hats that had yet been seen in
Somerset, and she had one of the up to date smooth Aberdeen terriers. It
was indeed hard to believe that this distinguished creature had been
born and bred in a parish. But nothing could have been more parochial
than her determination to love her new relations and to be loved in
return. She called Everard _Vaterlein_, she taught Laura to dance the
cake-walk, she taught Mrs. Bonnet to make _petits canapés à
l’Impératrice_; having failed to teach Brewer how to make a rock garden,
she talked of making one herself; and though she would have liked old
oak better, she professed herself enchanted by the Willowes walnut and
mahogany. So assiduously did this pretty young person seek to please
that Laura and Everard would have been churlish had they not responded
to her blandishments. Each, indeed, secretly wondered what James could
see in any one so showy and dashing as Sibyl. But they were too discreet
to admit this, even one to the other, and contented themselves with
politely wondering what Sibyl could see in such a country sobersides as
James.
Lady Place was a large house, and it seemed proper that James should
bring his wife to live there. It also seemed proper that she should take
Laura’s place as mistress of the household. The sisters-in-law disputed
this point with much civility, each insisting upon the other’s claim
like two queens curtseying in a doorway. However Sibyl was the visiting
queen and had to yield to Laura in civility, and assume the
responsibilities of housekeeping. She jingled them very lightly, and as
soon as she found herself to be with child she gave them over again to
Laura, who made a point of ordering the _petite canapés_ whenever any
one came to dinner.
Whatever small doubts and regrets Everard and Laura had nursed about
James’s wife were put away when Sibyl bore a man child. It would not
have been loyal to the heir of the Willowes to suppose that his mother
was not quite as well-bred as he. Everard did not even need to remind
himself of the Duchess of Suffolk. Titus, sprawling his fat hands over
his mother’s bosom, Titus, a disembodied cooing of contentment in the
nursery overhead, would have justified a far more questionable match
than James had made.
A year later Everard, amid solemnity, lit the solitary candle of his
grandson’s first birthday upon the cake that Mrs. Bonnet had made, that
Laura had iced, that Sibyl had wreathed with flowers. The flame wavered
a little in the draught, and Everard, careful against omens, ordered the
French windows to be shut. On so glowing a September afternoon it was
strange to see the conifers nodding their heads in the wind and to hear
the harsh breath of autumn go forebodingly round the house. Laura gazed
at the candle. She understood her father’s alarm and, superstitious
also, held her breath until she saw the flame straighten itself and the
first little trickle of coloured wax flow down upon the glittering tin
star that held the candle. That evening, after dinner, there was a show
of fireworks for the school children in the garden. So many rockets were
let off by Everard and James that for a while the northern sky was laced
with a thicket of bright sedge scattering a fiery pollen. So hot and
excited did Everard become in manœuvring this splendour that he forgot
the cold wind and took off his coat.
Two days after he complained of a pain in his side. The doctor looked
grave as he came out of the bed-chamber, though within it Laura had
heard him laughing with his old friend, and rallying him upon his
nightcap. Everard had inflammation of the lungs, he told her; he would
send for two nurses. They came, and their starched white aprons looked
to her like unlettered tombstones. From the beginning her soul had
crouched in apprehension, and indeed there was at no time much hope for
the old man. When he was conscious he lay very peacefully, his face
turned towards the window, watching the swallows fly restlessly from
tree to tree. ‘It will be a hard winter,’ he said to Laura. ‘They’re
gathering early to go.’ And then: ‘Do you suppose they know where
they’re going?’
‘I’m sure they do,’ she answered, thinking to comfort him. He regarded
her shrewdly, smiled, and shook his head. ‘Then they’re wiser than we.’
When grandfather Henry, that masterful man, removed across the border,
he was followed by a patriarchal train of manservants and maidservants,
mares, geldings, and spaniels, vans full of household stuff, and slow
country waggons loaded with nodding greenery. ‘I want to make sure of a
good eating apple,’ said he, ‘since I am going to Lady Place for life.’
Death was another matter. The Willowes burial-ground was in Dorset, nor
would Henry lie elsewhere. Now it was Everard’s turn. The dead appeared
to welcome him without astonishment--the former Everards and Tituses,
Lauras and Emmelines; they were sure that he would come, they approved
his decision to join them.
Laura stood by the open grave, but the heap of raw earth and the planks
sprawling upon it displeased her. Her eyes strayed to the graves that
were completed. Her mind told the tale of them, for she knew them well.
Four times a year Mrs. Willowes had visited the family burying place,
and as a child Laura had counted it a solemn and delicious honour to
accompany her upon these expeditions. In summer especially, it was
pleasant to sit on the churchyard wall under the thick roof of lime
trees, or to finger the headstones, now hot, now cold, while her mother
went from grave to grave with her gauntlet gloves and her gardening
basket. Afterwards they would eat their sandwiches in a hayfield, and
pay a visit to old Mrs. Dymond, whose sons and grandsons in hereditary
office clipped the grass and trimmed the bushes of the family enclosure.
As Laura grew older the active part of these excursions fell upon her;
and often of late years when she went alone she half yielded her mind to
the fancy that the dead mother whose grave she tended was sitting a
little apart in the shade, presently to rise and come to meet her,
having just recalled and delicately elaborated some odd trait of a
neighbouring great-uncle.
The bees droned in the motionless lime trees. A hot ginny churchyard
smell detached itself in a leisurely way from the evergreens when the
mourners brushed by them. The sun, but an hour or so declined, shone
with an ardent and steadfast interest upon the little group. ‘In the
midst of life we are in death,’ said Mr. Warbury, his voice sounding
rather shameless taken out of church and displayed upon the basking
echoless air. ‘In the midst of death we are in life,’ Laura thought,
would be a more accurate expression of the moment. Her small body
encased in tremendous sunlight seemed to throb with an intense vitality,
impersonally responding to heat, scent, and colour. With blind
clear-sighted eyes she saw the coffin lowered into the grave, and the
earth shovelled in on top of it. She was aware of movement around her,
of a loosening texture of onlookers, of footsteps and departures. But it
did not occur to her that the time was come when she too must depart.
She stood and watched the sexton, who had set to work now in a more
business-like fashion. An arm was put through hers. A voice said: ‘Dear
Laura! we must go now,’ and Caroline led her away. Tears ran down
Caroline’s face; she seemed to be weeping because it was time to go.
Laura would have turned for one more backward look, but Caroline
prevented her. Her tears ran faster and she shook her head and sighed.
They reached the gate. It closed behind them with a contented click, for
they were the last to leave.