She poured the brandy on the grass and held up the bottle to him. “Look! Now it is empty and everything is right side up. But liquid does not turn a thing upside down. Why is it, Mr. Cork?”
He could discover no interest in a problem which struck her as of more importance than the rules of grammar. He did not agree that the Royal Society should be informed so that they might study it in their scientific investigations. Now it was she who was dissatisfied with her tutor’s intelligence, since a scholar should at least wish to know why a full bottle showed them standing on their heads.
But a more immediate problem engaged them and that was Mr. Hambridge’s, who had entered the room and wished to know why the brandy bottle was empty.
Sunlight and shadow moved across the pewter dish. The beech-trees tossed and shouted in the wind, mocking Mr. Cork’s voice as it read of a perfect garden where the first man and woman, naked but prim, entertained an angel to a dinner of cold fruit laid on a table out of doors, and listened to his instructive lecture with a patience Nan could not emulate.
As soon as he stopped, she would say, “Rory’s new litter is in the big barn and three of the puppies are spotted. Will you come now and see them?”
But she never said it, for old Giles put a face like a mop round the door and said in his yammering voice which could never finish his words because he could never shut his mouth properly, “If you please, Mr. Cork sir, the pedlar’s here in the courtyard. And young mistress too, the maids said I was to tell,” he added, opening his mouth again wider than ever and snapping it up and down like a trap among all the hairy tufts on his cheeks and chin.
Down went Adam and Eve and the angel on the table. Even Nan did not spring up more quickly than Mr. Cork.
The pedlar had brought shoe-latchets of green and of chrome leather but none of red to match the missing thong on her clogs. No pedlar ever had just what one wanted, and she would not change the colour since she had chosen red. She would have to go shod in parti-colour like a Fool at the Fair, and Keziah hooted like a hysterical owl at the notion, laying a broad hand on her young mistress’s shoulder while the other pointed out all the treasures she might get for the house. All the maids clustered and swirled round her, beseeching her to buy so that they might have the pleasure of seeing the purchases made. The pedlar had pepper and cloves and mops and feather brooms, he had pins with coloured heads and handkerchiefs and ribbons, and the new oblong brass door-knobs which all the gentry were using in London instead of the old-fashioned latches. He had a book of theology for Mr. Cork which he had been ordered to bring from Cambridge.
Mr. Cork did not leave when he had bought it but lingered on the outskirts of the group. Nan saw that he was watching her nonsense with Keziah and exaggerated it. She told Keziah she would get her a new broom, for hers must be worn out by the way she sat against it as though she were accustomed to ride on it.
“A witch! a witch!” cried the other girls. “They say red hair for a witch.”
Keziah went scarlet and flung up her hands to scratch, no one knew whose face, for Nan’s arm was round her in that instant. “She is not a witch. I never meant it. You are all jealous of her hair because it is the same colour as the Good Queen’s. Remember that, Keziah, your hair is as good as Queen Bess’s ever was, and next time you go to the fair you shall have a crimson petticoat and a white waistcoat.” She had a brief vision as she spoke of streets filled with cheering crowds, of extraordinary gaiety, but it could not recall to her why she had thought of Keziah’s gala dress as a white waistcoat and a crimson petticoat.
She had forgotten Mr. Cork but now she saw him smile. He was continually placing her in some mental category of his own according to some such process as item: a generous impulse; or item: a foolish answer. Of this she was sometimes vaguely and rather uncomfortably aware, although of the nature of the category she often had no further evidence than a protracted “H’m.” But even his disapproval could flatter one who had never before been considered, weighed, and questioned as to what manner of person she was. She, as well as Keziah, held her head a little higher than when she had first come out.
Now that all the purchases had been made, the pedlar produced a stale copy of the Intelligencer and read bits to the company in a thin well-educated voice, for he had been an usher before he had fallen on evil days. His paper was a poor substitute for a news-letter, for it had no tales of murder and witchcraft, only long complaints of some people who still dared to print books without first showing them to Sir Roger L’Estrange to see if they were fit and proper to be printed or not. The maids drifted away, and at the third mention of the licence of the Press, Nan followed them, for Mr. Cork had ceased to take any interest in her, he had even asked her sarcastically what pleasure or understanding she could find in such reading. That was not fair, since he had already told her of that odious Sir Roger, and so she should be able to understand; and she would have liked to ask why seditious printing should be called “the feminine part of revolt.”
Dawdling and lingering, she looked back as she was turning at the end of the wall, and saw the pedlar put a black oblong box into Mr. Cork’s hands. Why had not the pedlar displayed it or Mr. Cork asked for it before, when he bought the book? Was there a secret in the box such as her sister Alice kept? Everyone had a secret in a box except herself.
Mr. Cork had seen her looking. He strode across the yard to her. “What do you do there?” he asked in a hard voice.
It was useless to lie. “I was wondering what was in that box,” said Nan.
“Prying and spying,” he stormed, “you are the kind that would do your truest friends a mischief.” Then his face, which had been twisted in wrath, changed oddly as though he were deliberately smoothing it out. He watched her darkly as he stood between her and the pedlar and said, “There is nothing in the box that all the world might not see. Come and satisfy your idle curiosity for yourself.”
He walked back to the pedlar. Nan followed him for a few steps and then in her silent cloth slippers she turned and went into the house. He moved to go after her, then he thought, no, he had taught her to have some little awe of him, and he would lessen it if he ran after her to make up their quarrel like a couple of children. She would not long stay in the house in a huff when there was a pedlar and a secret box outside. He would await her without seeming to do so and buy her some trifle that would appease her without need of words.
He did so, and the pedlar removed the innocent theological work he had hastily placed in the box while Mr. Cork spoke to Nan, and substituted the original pamphlets, of which he besought him to have the greatest care. His recent shock had exhausted Mr. Cork.
“Suspicion, fear, anger,” he complained. “What a price we pay for thinking what we would!” If thought went free, life might be happy, but he did not say this last aloud for the pedlar was a blunt business man, concerned more with the trade of illicit printing than with its possible benefits to mankind.
“Slit noses and cropped ears, that’s the price Sir Roger would charge,” he said. Only forty years ago the pedlar’s grandfather had paid with both for the pleasure of calling a bishop “an anti-Christian mushroom.”
But the world changed fast now. The Star Chamber was out of date. Tolerance was the fashion, or would be if the King could make it so. His idea of concord was when “His nonsense suits their nonsense.” He held that the restrictions did more harm than good and that everyone might as well be left to print what he would. The King’s conformity with the stern regicide, Milton, impressed Mr. Cork for a moment with the similarities of men rather than their differences.
All his life he himself had worked and hoped and suffered alone. He wondered if, in His Majesty’s careless phrase, his nonsense could ever suit anyone else’s nonsense.
He watched the doorway in the tail of his eye; a hundred times he thought he saw Mrs. Anne in its shadow, her neck bent in that rare pensive curve that had once before delighted him. So strongly did his fancy paint her that it seemed he
r image would always haunt that place, and others as well as himself would see her standing there, looking out into the yard, awaiting his signal.
But it was nothing but a shadow, she was not there, she did not come out. He had meant to be kind to her and he had only wearied and then hurt her, he was not fit to deal with women, he had not the necessary arts and graces. The pedlar talked of that glass of fashion and professor of vice, the Duke of Buckingham, turned Nonconformist leader in consequence of a quarrel with Barbara Palmer, now Duchess of Cleveland; of the possible effects of his discontent and determination to form a party in the country. Mr. Cork only thought of the Duke of Buckingham’s thousand successful amours, of the coats and cravats that he wore but once and then gave away to his valet, of the insolent mimicry, the licentious buffoonery, the mad caprices that passed for wit and spirit among those who could not appreciate true worth. The rascal could even write verse. Or thought he could. Or—stay, yes, that was more like it—others thought he could. Of course it was some poor starving poet who wrote His Grace’s plays for him. He wondered he had not known it before.
The Duke of Buckingham had added another to his diverse functions; he had made Mr. Cork see Nan as a woman rather than as a child whose neglected education it was his duty to try to improve. Had he seen her so before, he would not have tried, for in his own way he was as averse from women as Mr. Hambridge; either he had found them chattering and vain or else of dull intelligence, and in all cases not to be trusted. Mrs. Anne’s pert fancy could distract his thoughts, her interest, volatile as it was, could flatter him lightly, but he would not have troubled with her had not his first image of her been confused with that of a small and helpless creature to whom the world was unkind. Now the image had shifted a little.
The pedlar left with the opinion that Mr. Cork’s long and ignoble sojourn as a country chaplain had dulled his wits too far to make him considerable in any plans for the future.
Mr. Cork hurried back to the oak room and found it empty.
The window was narrow, but she was as agile as a monkey. She could have squeezed through it and jumped to the ground. She was off on her wanderings again, this time perhaps in a fit of the sulks, but that would not last long with her. She would soon be back.
Nan ran over the common; the wind made a sail of her skirts and blew her along like a boat over the rippling sea of coarse grass where the pools and rivulets lay in patches and snake-like streaks of silver. She did not know for how many hours she travelled thus; the wind was behind her, the world before her, she might come to the edge of it and look over, had she not been told that the world was round, but that she could never believe.
She came at last to a little hill, and on the other side the country was all quite different, a fine wooded park lay below, and the chimneys of a great house. She found her way to a wall which she managed to climb, and dropped down from it on to a lawn where heavy yew-trees stood all round like thunderclouds. The afternoon had clouded over and the sky showed signs of storm. She stood there half afraid in the silence. A few pale leaves scampered over the grass, and then, following them in a dancing flight, some faint notes of music. Nan stepped softly through the yew-trees on to a gravelled terrace and started back, for there were people standing, unnaturally still. Then she saw that they were only stone griffins, and that she was close up to a house which was so big that it must be a palace.
She could see nobody and thought that if she went into the kitchens she would find the servants fast asleep with cobwebs hanging from their noses, or else find nobody at all and that silent pairs of hands would bring her food and drink and play the music which had died on her approach. But at that instant it again came tripping out of the house. She stood on a flower-pot and looked in through the nearest window.
The small, diamond-leaded panes of blown glass made the scene inside dim, but the reflection of firelight lay here and there on surfaces of satin, of polished wood, of glass and silver. She noticed these pools and rivulets of colour, these points as bright as diamonds, before they formed into a pattern, as a kaleidoscope does when it is shaken, and saw that she was looking into a large room where many people were sitting or standing, but so still that she had reversed her mistake with the stone griffins on the terrace and taken them for gorgeous but inanimate objects such as their surrounding furniture. The sound of music was all that moved in the room; the musicians were invisible.
But now, in a picture, though luminously clear, she saw a group of three persons who played a violin, a flute, and the virginals. They moved as in life; the man who played the violin shook back the long curls of his periwig out of the way of his bow, the lady’s bent fingers stepped up and down on the notes of the virginals, the youth swayed to his flute. And all this took place within a frame of a bright green pattern, while close to it a boy with a spaniel in his arms stood gravely listening, so still, his white and pink dress so pinched in and puffed out, so beribboned and rosetted that his figure bore but little resemblance to that of life.
The music died; a spell was lifted from the scene; all those splendid figures stirred, they rose or moved their heads and hands, they turned towards each other in company once more, where each had been isolated by the music. They spoke, and Nan could hear their voices, though not what they were saying. Even the dogs showed they were disenchanted, they trotted about the room, wagging their plumed tails with as languishing an air as the ladies with their fans, rolling up their eyes in melancholy entreaty to the softest and fattest laps.
The musicians walked out of their green frame and mingled with the others, talking to them as though they too were real. Then Nan saw that what she had taken for a picture was a huge mirror such as she had heard of, which had reflected the group of musicians as they sat in the light of the next window, where they had been hidden from her. She had never seen looking-glass except in a small hand-mirror, and then it was dark and blurred; this great sheet of plate glass that shone on the wall like an upright pool of water was as marvellous to her as any magic picture. All the people in that room, all that they did, had an added grace and power when she could catch their reflections in the mirror.
The page in white and pink had left the room and now re-entered, bearing a tray on which there were a number of very small dishes in brilliant colours, and of the shape of water-lilies; steam issued from them; he came so near her that she could distinguish the pattern on them of dragons and monstrous birds with tails like comets.
If she tapped at the pane, one of those bright beings within would come to the window and open it and speak to her. But then what should she say, how explain her crouching there like a thief or a gipsy under one of their rose-bushes? For the first time in her life she was conscious that her hair was wild and uncovered and her feet bare, since she had taken off her shoes and stockings to run the more freely as she had used to do at home. If only she were as handsome and commanding as Eliza or as clever as Moll, she might even so have dared. But she, whom Moll had so often told was “none so pretty,” teasingly twisting her father’s pet name for her into a far from complimentary sense, had no weapons to help her face such odds. She prayed that she might not be seen, and when two of the figures approached her window and opened it, her teeth chattered so with fear and excitement that she put her hand in her mouth to keep them from betraying her.
A delicious burnt fragrance stole on the air. Almost she could taste what they were drinking.
“Why do you look out?” said a pretty lisping foreign voice, flicking her words with light disdain into the air. “There is nothing to look at but clouds and trees. And how dark it grows and how cold.” There was a laugh that sounded like the tinkle of jewels against glass, a tiny clatter, a kiss. “Look, filthy toad, you have spilt it,” in the same tones but now languishing and tender, too tender for reproach. There came the harsh sound of the window pulled to again.
Not for some time did Nan venture to raise her head, holding her hands under her left breast where her heart throbbed so loud she
thought it would burst.
The candles were now being lit inside the room, destroying what was left there of the daylight. The scene, though clearer, seemed now immeasurably remote, as though the piece of glass through which she peered were that of a telescope into another world.
Card-tables had been brought forward and small gilded chairs. A group of girls sat on the floor, their skirts spread round them like the shining petals of crocuses. They appeared to be playing some speaking game which occasioned much whispering and laughter; they pretended to ignore the men who leaned across their shoulders and tried to join in. There were windows on two sides of the room, and on the side away from hers the shutters were closed and curtains drawn of green silk, in which there ran a faint pattern like threads of water. As this dark covering was placed round the room, it shone the more brightly; window after window was blotted out; last of all, her window was approached, and once again she crouched, waited, looked up to see that no trace remained to her of that sparkling scene.
She crept away. Once on the common she ran again but this time with the wind on her face. She grew tired buffeting against it. She had to walk. She was not sure of her way, and she found that she was very hungry. It began to rain a little. It grew dark. She remembered a story her father had once told her of a bird that flew in at an open window of a lighted room where people feasted and made merry, and out through the door at the other end. That, he said, was the life of man, no more than the flight of a bird through a crowded room into the silence and darkness whence it came. A man must die, but the world went on and its bustle and laughter, though he had left it, and he was glad to think it. He told Nan not to be sad when he was dead, but to enjoy her life as he had done.
None So Pretty Page 6