Annabella, as they took their seat upon one of the benches that lined the water, remarked on the felicity of the weather. It was positively golden. The autumn had reached just that stage of the gilding when things begin to go brittle and break off. Pools of leaves at their feet equalled, beautifully, the sparseness of the trees. The ducks, too, seemed a pleasant proof of nature’s gift for the buffo, the humorous touch. It was strange, Annabella remarked, that garrulous people never so prettily adorned a scene. Mary, for once, refused to ‘make conversation’; and as Annabella continued to let the flow of her spirits spill out in ‘small talk’, she felt herself, unfairly, being cast in the role of the duck.
‘I have heard,’ Mary finally, and by a change of key, broke in, ‘that Mr Eden has taken up the incumbency near Bury St Edmunds; that he has quit London.’
Annabella confessed to having seen him go. ‘He had been,’ she kindly added, ‘delighted by the situation. It was almost all he could have wished for.’ A recognition, on Annabella’s part, of what lay hidden in that ‘almost’ affected her, it seemed, with something of her friend’s mood for they lapsed again into silence. Mary, happily, let them. She had the air of someone waiting out the trivial, as if she trusted in what might be called her magnetizing force to draw the real metal to herself—the dross, for once, held no attraction for her. ‘I have some news,’ Annabella offered at last. ‘I want your advice.’ But humourlessness was just what she had not counted for, and she found her recitation of Lord Byron’s ‘approach’ oddly interrupted by it. She had been expecting, at the very least, to quicken curiosity, which would have given air to the fuel of her confession. What met her, instead, was the silence of concern; she heard, echoed back at her, only the noise she was making. She almost gasped at the clatter, which seemed, indeed, to give her intentions away, as much to herself as to her friend: she planned to accept him.
When she was finished, the first thing Mary decided to question was whether his ‘approach’, since this was the word they were giving it, had not been suspiciously quick. Annabella had scarce seen him a dozen times and had conversed with him, it might be, on fewer than half of those occasions. Her fortune was, thank God, well known to be entangled enough that one could not imagine Lord Byron to be hunting after it; but (and Mary attempted to smile her insult into pleasantry) one presumed that Lord Byron had sufficiently ‘the pick’ of beauty that Annabella’s claims to it, great as they were, could hardly be said to have decided him. Annabella began to redden. She considered for a moment a dignified return to silence. But she feared, with a burst of self-analysis, that her dignity could not outface her friend’s, so she decided to make a point of her advantages—of her intimacy with the poet. ‘He is inclined,’ she said, with a confidential air, ‘to open his heart unreservedly to those whom he believes good, even without the preparation of much acquaintance. He is extremely humble towards persons whose character he respects, and to them he has been known to confess his errors—and his love—with almost precipitate haste.’
This seemed all very well, as far as it went, but Mary would not admit that it went very far. His own precipitation could scarcely claim, as the price paid for it, a similar rush of imprudence from Annabella. Surely it was the part of the wiser head to defer any engagement until a deeper and more durable basis for it had been established. It seemed to Mary, distinctly, to be ‘plucking at chances’ to accept him now; it was unlike Annabella to seize at such things. By ‘things’, Annabella quickly took up, Mary surely did not merely mean ‘good fortune’. Annabella should hate to find that she had acquired the reputation, among her dearest friends, of someone who refused whatever came her way from a sense of honour that was really only a mask for indecision and timidity. That word conjured an image of her father; and taking strength from real feeling, she saw her way to addressing an aspect of the question much nearer her heart. Conscious of emerging at last onto the higher ground, however exposed, Annabella added, that she had seen in these past weeks prospects opened before her—of love and beauty, enhanced by all that wealth, fame, and genius could accomplish—which she had hardly dreamed of. It seemed to her that the best she could hope for was to deserve them; she might for ever regret the failure to attempt it.
‘My dear Bell,’ Mary quickly and with greater warmth rejoined, ‘you do me no credit to suggest that I have any fear for your deserts. You deserve worlds; it is rather that I suspect Lord Byron himself incapable of living up to you than the reverse.’
‘But you must see, much as you love me,’ Annabella now softly replied, ‘that any association with a man of Lord Byron’s prominence, whatever you may think of his prudence, offers possibilities —if nothing else, then, of seeing my own merits acknowledged—which I could never aspire to, without it.’
‘I should have thought that the warm and particular regard of your dearest friends would have sufficed you.’
‘You mistake me, kindly, lovingly, but almost wilfully, my dear Mary. I mean by possibilities the full extent of the moral education that any contact with a nature as expansive, as noble, as ambitious, as Lord Byron’s must entail.’
Mary echoed the word, as if by a change in tone to give it its real meaning. ‘Ambitious.’
And Annabella, fully conscious of her friend’s understanding, and rising to it, repeated, ‘Yes, ambitious. I confess it, Mary: I am ambitious.’ And then, as if by a distant shot having narrowed the gap between them, until their ships lay enmeshed in each other, she began to board and address the argument, hand-to-hand. ‘I admit to possessing a greater portion of ambition than you do, with this exception: that I should have thought you no less ambitious for me.’
‘Did Mr Eden, then,’ Mary answered her, descending to tactics herself, ‘never declare his feelings to you?’
Annabella, frankly, stopped short at this. ‘He did.’
‘And you declined him?’
‘I did.’
Mary, quietly, took this in and then, after a moment, said, ‘I confess to having thought him a proper, loving, honourable, amiable man. I am sorry for him. I am sorry for both of you.’
Annabella perceived in this last general expression of pity a wrong note. It shifted at once, like all wrong notes, her attention from the music. It recalled to her the nature of the performer: a lively, clever, affectionate girl, who deserved the largest acknowledgement in return but was confined by illness to a dependence on her female friends. Annabella saw now in Mary’s pity the hand of envy; and having found it out, she refused to believe that envy had not had its hand in the whole song. It was only a question of whether the fact could be gracefully acknowledged by some subtle distinction in her reply.
She was prevented at first from attempting it by the recognition, amidst the general foot-traffic, of Lord and Lady Gosford, approaching from the side of Piccadilly in their barouche. ‘How delightful it was, the way the weather brought about these coincidences! It really was so fine,’ Lady Gosford declared, as soon as her foot touched the ground, ‘that she didn’t know whether she mightn’t after all attempt a walk. Nothing should give her greater pleasure than the young ladies’ joining her.’ She added, for the benefit of Miss Montgomery, that a little perambulation was supposed to do one a great deal of good: a good walk was the only medicine her doctor could not excessively prescribe. Annabella, seeing her chance for just the necessary ‘distinction’, pointedly took up the offer, as if their confidences had reached a natural term; there was nothing left to be said. The four of them set off together, with Mary taking the arm of Lord Gosford.
As they crossed the little bridge, he inquired of Miss Montgomery what the pair of them had been so busily gossiping over. Mary, archly, confessed a horror of gossip; they had, she said, been discussing poetry. The question had come up, of whether Lord Byron’s present popularity had not had a pernicious effect on his readers. It was Mary’s belief that he had excited an appetite for sensations which had begun to
vitiate the pleasure one had been accustomed to taking in the modest, the sensible, the durable, and the good. Annabella, lagging on Lady Gosford’s arm, now looked over her shoulder for a chance to intrude. In a high, sweet voice (that tasted in her own mouth like apple-cider going hard), she remarked that ‘among the strangest of what you call the effects of Lord Byron’s company, upon myself, is that he tends to make me exceedingly pious. I am never more jealous of my own propriety, of my modesty, sense, and goodness, as you put it, than in the company of that reputed libertine. His manners are so perfectly those of a gentleman that one feels, in oneself, any deviation from that standard to the most painful degree.’
‘It was not the effect of his company,’ Mary replied, with the air of one insisting on her own game by continuing to play it, ‘that formed the object of my remarks; rather, the influence of his poetry itself.’
Annabella had by this time drawn her hostess into the footpath beside her friend. A little shifting all round became necessary, to steer Lady Gosford out of the bank of leaves at the edges. ‘As for that,’ Annabella resumed the discussion, when this was accomplished, ‘I believe myself to be so tainted with the blue that I may as well aspire to some of the privileges of that tribe. It is our vanity, which we are best humoured in, to trust in our literary convictions as the honest may be supposed to trust in their consciences. I admit that the moral and immoral are dangerously mixed in Lord Byron’s verses, although in a manner which, I think, we may call “true to the life”. Vice is never indulged in but as a lesson to the virtuous. His heroes, at least, always suffer for their sins.’
‘I believe his heroines suffer even more.’ It was wonderful to Annabella how coolly her friend had kept up the tone, though what followed had the air of a stronger sincerity. ‘For myself, I confess,’ Mary said, ‘to having seen much in his writing that I should not dare to claim the comprehension of. Not all of us possess so fine a critical understanding as Miss Milbanke’s, and there may be some who delight in his depiction of vice merely for vice’s sake.’
They had by this point returned to their original station, by the bench overlooking the water; the coachman awaited them. Lady Gosford, who was shrewd enough to suspect in their discussion the heat of a deeper opposition, interrupted it to offer the use of her barouche as a conveyance home. They should be a little uncomfortable and close, but it hardly mattered on a journey so short. Lord Gosford, having business in town, declared his intention of walking, upon which Mary gratefully accepted his wife’s invitation.
Annabella reluctantly followed her friend into the barouche. She had hoped to continue their discussion alone: if only, as she put it to herself, to pick the burrs off one’s stockings after their pleasant walk. Mary’s disagreeable reservations had a way of clinging, and Annabella could not rest until she had removed them, one by one. She was fatigued, she had sat down again, but there remained a little to do. ‘It is better, surely, even for them,’ she ventured to say, after an interval in which, one might have supposed, the conversation had been dropped, ‘that Lord Byron’s readers satisfy their tastes in fancy rather than fact.’ At which Mary took it up again and, smiling sweetly, made an end of it. ‘On that point, we may safely agree.’
They continued their short journey in silence. Mary, indeed, a little pale with exercise; her narrow face had contracted still more around the mouth and eyes. But for all her invalidish airs, she gave off, with her crossed arms, a sense of containment, of careful husbandry: she knew perfectly well her own store of fuel and quietly measured out for herself just what was necessary. You are intolerably self-sufficient, Annabella sourly thought—a phrase that suggested perhaps too vividly the prospect of her own dependence. Well, she had no ambition to live as her friend lived; she was confident, in this respect, of desiring better. Still, as she kissed Mary outside the door at Wilmot Street, it was all she could do not to hiss it. You are intolerably self-sufficient. But even the checked violence of that intention stunned her a little, as violence always does. She was glad in the end to have said nothing sharp. It would only have given her another cause for regret. It would only have forced the private acknowledgement of something she still hoped, even privately, to put off.
Chapter Nine
BUT SHE COULD NOT PUT IT OFF FOR EVER. The weight of indecision, secretly supported, had almost exhausted her by the time she retired to bed. She had never felt heavier in her life, but it was the worst of her weariness that rest itself could play no part in relieving it. She rose after a sleepless hour and struck a light, which she hardly blinked against. It occurred to her that she might, following her aunt’s example, attempt to sketch the character of her proposed husband—if for no other reason than to occupy the dead hours of the night. Pressing her hands to her eyes, she breathed deeply and sat down to write at the dressing table. The freedom, of choice, of thought, that she felt, there at the bright centre of her darkened room, struck her even then as extraordinary: she might, after all, do anything with her life; she might, after all, take any place in the world.
‘There is a chivalrous generosity,’ she wrote, with an inward nod at Mary, ‘in his ideas of love and friendship, and selfishness is totally absent from his character. In secret he is the zealous friend of all the human feelings; but from the strangest perversion that pride ever created, he endeavours to disguise the best points of his character, with such lamentable success, that these are generally misunderstood. Inevitably, he feels himself wronged, but he scorns to show regard to illiberality of opinion by condescending to a justification.’ Condescending to a justification, as Annabella felt borne upon her, was just what she had set out to do; but the flow of her remarks loosened more honest reflections, and she continued. ‘When indignation takes possession of his mind, and it is easily excited, his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity that he had lost (from the immediate impulse of provocation) and repents deeply. So that his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions—from good to evil—from evil to good. It would require in his wife a disposition both mild and forceful to correct such tendencies. The contradiction in these virtues suggests only too well the difficulty one must encounter in uniting them. My own disposition is, in this respect, the mirror of Lord Byron’s, but that I should endeavour to improve it depends not one jot on my acceptance or rejection of his suit.’
This brought the question somewhat close to home, and she sat for a minute considering herself coldly, in the same light she had cast upon Lord Byron. Coldness, in fact, was both the quality and the source of her best nature: she could get by, at a pinch, on very little warmth indeed, and she continued to examine herself with scarcely a shiver. ‘It shall be the duty of my lifetime to mend a temper whose chief defect is its vanity, a sin to which I ascribe my changeable humours and sensitivity to slights. I must also, I believe, attribute to it my reputation for generosity, for innocence, for good sense; but whether my vanity is the cause or the effect of these virtues has become for me of late a painful and uncertain question.’ (Yes, she was equal to that: it was the doubt under her feet; it was the air she was falling through.) ‘One of the benefits to be expected from any prolonged intercourse with Lord Byron is that he might, as they say, knock the wind out of me; I should be forced to draw new breath. I should be forced to draw new breath,’ she repeated, as the bees of sleep began to buzz around her. But she shook her head against them and continued. ‘Sensations, indeed, the striving after them, have been his guide from childhood and have exercised a tyrannical power over his very superior intellect. It is this craving void which drives him to gaming and love, to travel and to strongly felt pursuits of every kind. Yet amongst them are many which deserve to be associated with Christian principles. His love of goodness in its chastest form and his abhorrence of all that degrades human nature prove the uncorrupted purity of his moral sense.’
Yet even as she wrote t
hese words, she heard the little interior vibration of an echo. Her sense of solitude—which, at the best of times, and despite her being an only and cherished daughter, had never been complete—had begun to seem hopelessly porous. What was always leaking in, from this side or that, were the feelings of other people. What flooded in now, almost overwhelmingly, were the feelings of Lord Byron himself. He was watching her; and she, demurely, had begun to adapt her step. She recalled now, at their first meeting, standing out a dance with him. ‘Sensation,’ he had told her, ‘was his great object in life. To feel that we exist, even though in pain.’ Yes, she had borrowed for her character of the poet his own confession. She had seen him only as he had chosen to see himself—or chosen, rather, to present himself to her. The stranger’s hand, which she had felt from time to time resting on her shoulder, now revealed itself: it belonged to Lord Byron. He might, with his wide powers of persuasion, have orchestrated everything from the first—a sum in which she included her own small offering of love.
She was ashamed, almost, of being too innocent to guess a motive for it. That Lady Caroline’s importunities had grown increasingly scandalous, scandal itself had made plain. That Annabella’s spotless reputation might, for the contrast, serve to redeem his own, had already occurred to her; but only, she had presumed, at the expense of his continued relations with Lady Caroline herself. And yet—what was it Mary had said? That there was a something in the poet which she would not care to claim the comprehension of. Lord Byron could with his rough conscience handle a number of truths the mere glimpse of which would defeat Annabella’s curiosity. And one of the lessons she inwardly noted was the need for more courage: for more courage and more curiosity. The scope of the game in which she imagined herself to be an innocent player almost took her breath away—the fact that Lady Melbourne might have been enlisted on his behalf; the fact that Lady Caroline herself might have seen, from her own vantage, the benefit of joining in. It was as if, by a strange alignment of the planets, a single blackness had appeared in the sky. The great variety of what she had failed to understand could be encompassed by its shape. The shape, whose absence clearly defined itself for her, was Lord Byron’s. He had been keeping the light away. His was the darkness more palpably present when she blew her own lamp out; it was the darkness in which she fell asleep.
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