A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘Lord Byron has practically declared,’ Mrs Villiers insisted on reading out from Augusta’s letter, which she had persuaded her to give up, the more scandalous bits, ‘that he never loved anyone but Augusta, and that only Augusta could ever love him. He says: Do not be uneasy, and do not hate yourself. That is very striking, I think; almost an admission. He says: If you hate either, let it be me. And then he thinks better of such just remorse and adds: But do not; it would kill me. And so on. And then—here we come to it at last. She, or rather the separation, he says (a very significant distinction, I believe) has broken my heart. And then: I feel as if an elephant had trodden on it. Hardly the word of a gentleman, but that is not the line I meant. No, here it is: I always loved you better, he says, than any earthly existence, and I always shall, unless I go mad. That is very clear, I believe, quite unequivocal. You should see how poor Mrs Leigh hangs her head at that, hangs her head and says nothing. It is the saying, I suppose, we must bring her to at last. It will make all the difference.’

  Annabella could scarcely, at such disclosures, refrain from considering their personal allusion, though the letter also inspired in her strange sympathies for Augusta. Her own correspondence with Lord Byron had been forcibly exposed to her mother’s inspection and suspended. Nothing, in its way, had been more painful to her than the forfeit of her right to communicate with him. She had got, almost in spite of herself, into the habit of tenderness he had instilled in her; and to give up her dose of expressed affection had had the effect on her of breaking the habit. It struck her then that this was, in its way, just the effect they were seeking. There could be no clearer proof, she supposed, of the strength of her spirit than the willingness she showed to make use of the lesson in suffering she had had at their hands. That, at least, was the lesson she sought to apply; and she offered at last, to their little salon, a suitable object for the delicate difficult duty they had undertaken to fulfil. They must persuade Augusta to resign to herself the conduct of her correspondence with Lord Byron. Annabella was willing, she said, for the sake of Augusta’s character, to accept a responsibility that would involve her so often in revisiting old wounds.

  Just what would bring Augusta to give up her rights as his sister was still the question, and here it was that Mary herself proved, in answering it, unexpectedly resourceful. There had been, as she afterwards admitted to Annabella just before bed, over a cup of green tea, a not unselfish motive behind her little inspiration: she had wished to enlist in their cause a figure that might lend it the unimpeachable sanctity of his reputation. She was well aware, she said, of the resemblance they might suggest in the public eye to a ‘coven of women’; there was nothing they could do to dispel it so simple as accepting the good offices of a man. The right man, indeed, almost instantly came to mind. No one was better placed to administer to the conscience of Mrs Leigh than their old friend and her vicar, Mr Eden. She had mentioned his name with a cautious sidelong glance, but Lady Byron met it with a bright generous measure of her own unblinking gaze. She was willing, she said (just mindful of the repetition), for the sake of Augusta, to expose to one who might be said to possess the most painful scrutiny the sad brief history of her marriage. She confessed that he was not unacquainted with certain details, and they might expect of him the really remarkable sympathies of his understanding. She supposed that he could, almost as a matter of professional pride, bring to bear upon Augusta a moral pressure that—

  It was at this point that Mrs Villiers begged them to allow to her another day or two to ‘work upon’ her subject. She had yet to play what she called her trump card, which was only to impart to Augusta the not quite innocent truth that Lord Byron had betrayed her secret, several times over, and mostly to other women. She had great hopes of the effect of this little revelation. It might just push her, indignantly, into the open. Thérèse believed that Mrs Leigh was clinging to nothing so fiercely as to what she supposed to be her brother’s honourable intentions. And it was decided at last, that they could do no better than ‘work’ in concert towards what they could now more clearly envisage as the end and object of all their designs: Augusta’s confession and the conscious resignation of her affairs into Lady Byron’s hands. Mrs Villiers finally took her leave with an almost grotesque expression of confederate eagerness, and Annabella retired to the room she had begun to keep in Wilmot Street—her disposition had become, as she put it, incorrigibly nomadic, and she had begun to draw on the full range of her acquaintance for her nightly bed—to write what they might easily imagine would prove a painful and difficult letter to Mr Eden.

  Chapter Eight

  AUTUMN HAD COME. Mrs Leigh had been summoned by her husband to Six Mile Bottom. He had got together a little shooting-party, and there was no one who could make everyone as comfortable as Augusta, who was, as her brother used to say, comfort itself. The colonel quite depended on her to see that ‘things went off’. That was the news Mrs Villiers offered, at first, on a dark and dripping afternoon at the beginning of October. She had an air of suppressed high spirits. Mary was sure she had kept something back, and said so, at which Mrs Villiers allowed an awkward silence to grow (Lizzy was bringing the tea) before she declared: ‘Well, I believe, at least, that my work is done.’ And then, when no one replied, she continued: ‘I suppose Mr Eden will find the ground prepared.’

  Mr Eden, Lady Byron broke in, had only just written to say, that he had seen Mrs Leigh and proposed to wait on them at their earliest convenience in London. He intended, he said, to follow the mail into town; she had got the letter that morning and expected him any minute. He had wished particularly to see her. The impression he had received (it was his own odd phrase, Annabella remarked) could not be communicated but in person.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Villiers replied, ‘I suppose I know what he means. I had it myself, you see. You may say that I brought it out in her at last.’ The tea arrived, and while it was being prepared, Thérèse said, ‘If he’s coming now, I guess I had better be quick. I had hoped to draw it out more. I wanted to do it justice.’ She drank a little and set her cup down and closed her eyes briefly: to gather, as she said, her thoughts, before she began. She opened them again and drew a deep sharp breath. ‘It had struck me suddenly, you know, the line I should take—that I really should have taken from the first. I had tried to make her sensible of her wrongs, of the harm she had done and the harm she continued to do by indulging (these were the phrases we confined ourselves to) her brother’s ideas; and she resisted me, quite as you might say, with her head down.’ She stopped to pick out a macaroon from the tray Lizzy had set between them. ‘What I should have attempted is to impress upon her what she owed—to you, my dear. That, I fancied, might just be the thought that makes her look up.’

  Mrs Villiers waited for any kind of a response. It was left to Mary to make it. ‘I shouldn’t like her,’ she said, ‘to look too closely’—a remark vague enough for Thérèse to ignore it. ‘Last week,’ she continued, ‘just before she set off for Newmarket (I was watching her pack), I decided to act on this idea. I said to Augusta, there is nothing that could have saved you but your brother’s marriage. Lady Byron might really be said to be the sacrifice he has made to your virtue.’ Her voice fell to a whisper. ‘It was all but obscenely plain, one might have reached out and touched it. To which she, bowing her head, could only reply, that she knew exactly what the cost of her virtue had been and who had paid it. My dear, I said, you were lucky to find in a sister anyone half so good as Lady Byron; she has been, I think I may say, your guardian angel. “I know it” was her only answer, but, believe me, she felt the shame of having contracted upon so virtuous a woman so grave an obligation.’

  Annabella grew conscious, as her friend made a pause, of a strong wave of disgust. It was by no means confined to Mrs Villiers, as she bit into her macaroon. It took in Mary; it took in them all; it quite overwhelmed them. She had, practically, to keep it down, although it passed just as quickly as it had
come. She might have forgotten the feeling entirely, though it left a sort of taste at the back of her throat, were it not for the fact of its recurrence. The nearest she could come to describing it (an attempt she once made in her diary, many years later) was to say, that if she had set out to eat her own hand, without, that is, being sensible of the pain, and if she had found that it disagreed with her, she might be supposed to have felt just such a strange revulsion. The best that could be said, perhaps, of these fits of nausea was that they left little enough behind for the conscience to dwell on. She owed, in fact, even the brief metaphorical flight of her analogy to Lord Byron himself, who had accustomed her to a number of ideas at which her imagination might once have stoped short.

  ‘It was then I deemed the time ripe,’ Mrs Villiers took up her story again, ‘for a final thrust—I led trumps. It seems only fair, I said, to inform you that Lord Byron has betrayed your secret, several times over, to what can only be called a variety of women.’ She paused for an effect, which turned out to be as much as she had to offer, though she brought out at last: ‘I was made to feel just how far she still had to sink in her own estimation by the depths I witnessed her plunging to at that moment. But she fell too deep to make herself heard; she was sunk entirely. We must trust Mr Eden to bring her back up again.’

  Mr Eden, however, kept them uncomfortably waiting, though Mrs Villiers showed no signs of turning homeward. The sun had set and a grey dry dusk had replaced a grey wet day before he was announced; the women were about to sit down to a light supper. Miss Montgomery had acquired the habit of dining in her own rooms, to keep out of the way of her father’s company—she sometimes hadn’t the heart for general conversation. Mr Eden, wigless, half-drenched, and stiff with the cold, accepted an invitation to join them, though what he most desired was a seat by the fire and a small strong drink. Thérèse pressed him for ‘news’ while his trousers steamed; he sat practically flat-footed on the hearthstone. ‘Nothing like news,’ he said. He spoke with a sort of economy that just shied short of effrontery and ate, when supper was served, with a steady unhurried appetite that was quite as good as a wall for keeping out their curiosity. Mary had said to Annabella that she shouldn’t in the least bit mind the introduction of the masculine note. Whether she minded or not was impossible to say. The fact was, it quite drowned out all the others—and the noise that it made a great deal resembled General Conversation. He was at his most vicarly, as she afterwards put it, bidding Annabella goodnight, and she for one had fallen so completely in step that she had begun, privately, to rehearse her catechism.

  After supper, when Lizzy had cleared the plates away, he said he should like a private word with Lady Byron. He wondered, was there a room to which they might quietly retire? Thérèse, undaunted, replied that ‘They were all in the business, as far as that went, together.’ Annabella, who felt the force of being singled out, admired her for it. Her friend continued: ‘They kept no secrets from each other or rather, for she hated hiding behind generalities and preferred plain speaking, they kept one secret very much between themselves, and he needn’t scruple to discuss it with them. He might easily suppose that it formed the cornerstone of their conversation. Nothing he could possibly add to it would surprise or shock them.’ It was only when she added, ‘Besides, whatever was said to any of them was bound to be discussed by them all,’ that Annabella found cause to blush for her friend’s self-assurance. Mary had for some time been quiet. She had retreated behind her pallor, as she sometimes did; it kept off a great deal of embarrassment.

  ‘Thank you all the same,’ Mr Eden said, ‘I should like a private word with Lady Byron.’

  This demanded from Miss Montgomery her only contribution. They might have her sitting room for the purpose. She herself was tired and ready to prepare for bed; and Mrs Villiers, she supposed, who had been so assiduous on Lady Byron’s behalf (she could not resist pointing up a distinction), had her duties to return to at home. Mrs Villiers finally reddened; her face looked awkward enough under her wisps of red hair. ‘I trust I might have the pleasure,’ she said to Mr Eden, ‘of finding you here in the morning?’

  No, he was staying with a friend with whom he had a little business in town, and he planned to return at first light to Newmarket. He was not one of those clergymen who saw in a good living an excuse for continual holidays. He disliked leaving his parish; he had made a great exception. The quiet immodesty of his sense of duty recalled Annabella forcibly to just those considerations that had persuaded her to decline his offer of marriage some years before. She took a kind of strength from the reminder. She guessed from his tone that she might have need of it in the upcoming interview.

  When the others had gone, she invited him to a seat. He said he preferred to stand—what he had to say should not take long. Only when Lady Byron herself, pleading fatigue, took up one of the armchairs by the fire, did he begin to feel a little foolish and, in a softer tone, accept its companion, where Miss Montgomery herself was wont to sit. His large stately head was an eloquent register of age and what might best be called the scars of his professional sympathies. A little notch above his nose, no bigger than a thumbprint, suggested the expression that had become to him habitual. His face had fattened, too, and filled with lines, though handsomely enough. And his eyes stood out with a practised openness: one sensed that he rarely enjoyed the luxury of turning them away. Lady Byron, in fact, was unwilling to lead the conversation, and she left it to him to make a breach into the silence that had grown up between them.

  ‘I have spoken to Mrs Leigh,’ he said at last. If he had had any hesitation in commencing upon so delicate a subject, it expressed itself by adopting the straightest line—‘as you requested me to do. She is, as you may imagine, an indifferent churchgoer, but I made a point, on seeing her one morning in town, of desiring her attendance the following Sunday. The sermon I preached,’ he smiled now at his cheap subtlety, ‘was on Jonah and the whale, on sin and secrets, and it had, at least, the desired result. She approached me afterwards in the confessional.’ This brought him up short again, and he shifted in his seat and picked up a poker, which was leaning against the hearth, and weighed it in his hand and set it down again, before resuming. ‘Whatever was said to me there lies between her and her God, but I believe I may venture on an impression—that is the word I have chosen to use—and it is really of that impression that I wish to speak to you now.’ He paused again and looked up at Lady Byron with his large clear eyes. ‘She was quite painfully overwrought. I mean, it was painful to me to witness the state of her nerves, which had been stretched, almost exquisitely, just to the—in fact, she broke down on several occasions in tears. I presume she is not unused to such shows, but they had become habitual; she could only with a kind of violence break out of them again. I don’t mean to say that she was in the least hysterical; she was quiet and steady and miserable. Left to herself, she might have cried for days. It seemed such a terrible effort for her not to cry: it was quite like holding her breath. I held my breath, too. I had the sense—I had the sense that she had been practised upon. One saw upon her, as it were, the effect of several rough hands. I did not like—I do not like to think that one of them was yours.’

  It was a charge so vague as to be almost unanswerable; Annabella, at least, did not attempt to answer it. Instead, she said, ‘I suppose you know who she was crying for?’ And when he kept silent at that, she added, with just a touch of rising pride: ‘And did you give her, while holding your breath, absolution?’

  This brought out in him a sharper note. ‘It isn’t only a question,’ he all but cried, before stopping short. ‘There is a kind of innocence,’ he began again, with a gentleness that still better expressed how much he was keeping back, ‘which is better left unblessed—by which I mean, unshriven. Which cannot survive what you might call a full confession. I believe Mrs Leigh has it and would not like to answer for the consequences—’

  ‘Of what?’ Annabella
broke in, her temper just flashing. ‘You speak, I have noticed, little enough of my own injured innocence.’

  But his anger was equal to it; it was as bright almost as love. ‘I did not believe that you possessed such an innocence, it’s true, but a virtue infinitely higher, which could make, nor ever fear, the completest confession.’

  It hung there, for a minute, between them (as palpable practically as the heat from the fire), the thought that she might confess to him now, she might empty her heart entirely; and in the silence that followed, she was almost tempted to give in to what was really his greater indignation. Just what she might have confessed to, however, was for several days the question that puzzled her. She had, as a quantity, after his visit, a strong sense of wrongdoing; it was only the terms that might make up its sum that eluded her. Instead, she said: ‘For myself, I have little pretension just now to the virtue I used to consider my special pride. Lord Byron, you might say, has beaten it out of me—it was such a great weight. I used to care, I believe, less for the virtue of others’ than for my own. Perhaps I may take some credit now for the fact that my concerns are all the other way.’ She grew conscious, uncomfortably, of the name commonly given to such selflessness. It was very crude: hypocrisy was only a fraction of what she suffered from. ‘No one is dearer to me,’ she attempted a warmer explanation, ‘than Augusta. She is all that remains to me—of his.’ She had hesitated over the word, but the pronoun in the end seemed clear enough. ‘I have done what I can to save her, and there is nothing quite so dangerous to her as what you are pleased to call her innocence. At least, that is what I, what all three of us, have set out to protect her from.’