by Hill, Fiona
All this way she had been planning her actions, considering how she would say to Mr. Highet what she had to say. The more she thought of it, the more convinced she became that what she was doing was necessary and right; at the same time, however, the closer she got, the more difficult, even dangerous, her task seemed. Suppose her announcement horrified him! Or disgusted him! And yet, the more she reflected, the more she had an idea…
Never mind. She would not concern herself with consequences. Never in her life had she felt so wholly in the grip of an emotion. Frightened as she was, she could no more hide her feelings from Mr. Highet than—well, than Mr. Mallinger had been able to hide his from Maria.
Trigg admitted her, politely ignoring how travel-stained, crumpled, and weary she was (though not half so much so as when she first crossed the threshold of Fevermere). Holding his hands out for her bedraggled cape, “Very good to see you back, if I may say so, madam,” he told her, his red face beaming.
“You may certainly say so,” Anne replied with a smile. She turned to permit him to remove the cape. “And if I may say so, it is very good to be back. Mrs. Trigg’s rheumatism—?”
“Better, thank you for asking, ma’am.”
“Ah, that is well. And is—er—is Mrs. Archibald Highet at home?”
“Mrs. Archibald is at the rectory, taking tea with Mrs. Samuels.”
Well, that was good luck. Untying her bonnet, “And—ah, Mrs. Insel?”
“With Mrs. Archibald, ma’am.”
This was a disappointment; but Anne sternly told herself it was just as well. She drew a deep breath and asked finally, “And is Mr. Highet at home?”
“In the library, ma’am.”
Oh heaven! So near as that! Her heart at once began to thump. “Will you tell him, please, that I shall look for him there at five?” she said, handing over the bonnet. “And ask Joan if she will kindly fetch some tea and a basin of hot water to my room.”
“Very good, madam.” Trigg bowed his round head and vanished on his errand. Anne climbed the stairs muttering to herself, “I must not be afraid, I must not be afraid…” Once in her bed-chamber, she bathed her temples, swallowed some lavender drops, changed her shoes, and tried to compose her thoughts. Her very spirit seemed to tremble inside her, but she would not lose her courage. “I must be brave, I must be brave,” she mumbled to herself while (tea drunk, toilette freshened as well as could be) she made her way back down. A ship’s clock on the mantel of the library struck five exactly as she knocked on the door, then entered. Mr. Highet was alone.
He looked up from the depths of a leather-covered armchair, letting the volume he had been studying fall to his lap. He seemed enormous—impossibly broad-shouldered, impossibly long of leg. Even his features were overlarge, the soft, brown, sleepy-lidded eyes, the red mouth, the dark spill of curls. Anne’s jade eyes widened unconsciously as she looked at him, and the expression on her face made it appear that he had somehow startled her by being where he was.
After a moment he stood, smiled, and came across the room to shake her hand. His dark eyes scanned hers as if searching for something—the reason of her sudden return, no doubt—then turned away as he offered her a seat on the leather sofa, a glass of negus or a cup of tea.
“I have had tea, thank you, sir,” she said, striving to appear calm in spite of an ungovernable quaver in her voice.
He sat beside her on the sofa, gazing down on her golden head. “Paris has done you good, I think,” he said, still smiling. “How glad I am to see you. But—”
“Why am I come home?” she filled in as he hesitated, then coloured and amended, “Why am I come back to England?”
“No. I was going to remark,” he said, with his customary slowness, “that you seem nervous. Is any thing amiss?” Impulsively, he took her hand, which was shaking (and shook the more after he took it, for she had felt again that shock of pleasure he sometimes inspired in her). “You are trembling,” he observed, kindly concern in his voice.
“Mr. Highet, I shall speak bluntly and quickly, for I do not know how else to tell you what I have come to say. I apologize in advance, for I fear I must take you by surprise. Indeed, as you once said to me, you may dislike what I have to say very much. You may deplore it. In that case—as you also said to me—I can only beg you to remember I would not have spoke except for”—she faltered, looked confused, went on—“expect for the very sincere admiration and—”
Again she faltered. Mr. Highet’s face had gone from looking rather alarmed to an expression of complete absorption in her words.
“And esteem…” Her voice broke off. She was pale, and gave (though she did not know it) an appearance of being very fragile and small. She glanced down at the hand that still held hers, steeled herself to one last push and said, “In brief, sir, I know it is no part of our agreement—in fact quite the opposite—and I am very sorry for it; but I have come in the last months to like you so well, to esteem you so much, to enjoy your company so greatly, that I can only conclude— Can only conclude—”
Here the words stuck in her throat. As in a nightmare, she could not go on. She looked wildly about. When she heard the following words, she could not at first locate their source:
“I love you.”
Had she said it? She swallowed. Her mouth and throat were dry as dust. She did not think— Anyhow, the voice had not seemed to be her voice— But Mr. Highet was turning towards her, taking his hand from hers and using it to hold her shoulders, to hold her so she faced him. His large eyes were looking intently into hers and— Good God, it must have been he who said it! Listen, he was saying it again!
“I love you, Anne. If that is what you have come to say to me, if that is what you apologize for feeling, pray tell me so at once,” he entreated her. Tears—she quite thought tears stood in his eyes.
She could only peep, “Yes,” gaze up at him, and be suddenly crushed in his embrace. And here, in his arms, her face covered with kisses, she came as close to fainting as she did on that long-ago day—years and years ago, it seemed—when Mr. Dent had told her her fortune was sunk under the sea.
However, she recovered, and in due course regained her composure to such a degree that (mind, this took half an hour or so) she could sit back and ask, “But my dear—Henry—if you felt all this for me, why did you…? When did you…?”
“Begin to love you? Before we married.” Mr. Highet also sat back, folded his hands, and gave a smile that was unmistakably sly. “You see, long before you came into Cheshire, I knew of you. Not only through Herbert, but because—contrary to your prejudices—we are not quite so sleepy here as you imagine. I am perfectly aware of the identities of a whole host of London personalities. I read the papers (as I hope you are aware by now, at least). Moreover, I correspond with any number of people who go—as I do not go—up to town now and then. I knew your reputation as a wit, and as a beauty. When you came, I found both reputations richly earned. But you see, to me wit and beauty are all very well—very enjoyable, most gratifying—but they are neither of them attributes that make a person admirable or worthy. They are attractive, but hardly sustaining.”
Mr. Highet paused here to stroke his wife’s face, then tenderly kiss her forehead. Only her impatient, “Yes, and then what?” recalled him to the fact that he had broke his story off at the middle.
“Ah, yes.” Carefully, he folded his hands together and placed them firmly in his lap, as if bidding them to stay there. “I confess, then, that when you first arrived here, I viewed you with a good deal of—well, scepticism. Your contempt—at the very least, your condescension,” he put in, seeing she was about to protest, “towards me and, indeed, every aspect of farm life, I observed directly and without surprise. I must admit, I had quite a bit of fun at your expense in those early days—when you no doubt imagined you were having fun at mine.”
Anne leaned forward to object. Then she remembered the first time the Highets had come to dine with her at Linfield, recalled Mr. Highet’s (as
it seemed to her) extreme, blundering obtuseness, his unwanted pity for her, and a flood of other details—and sat back in silence.
“Yes,” said Henry, seeing in her face that his point had been made. “And yet I found as time wore on that you were a deal more spirited than I had expected. Behind your wit lay, not only contempt, but real intelligence and—occasionally—sincere good humour. Behind your beautiful face was a thinking mind: and not only thinking, but generous, as I saw from your behaviour towards Mrs. Insel, towards the staff of servants left to you there, and even, eventually, to me. I began to suspect, as was indeed the case, that you had no choice but to stay here. I admired the cheerfulness with which you confronted what must have been a dreadful change. In brief, I came by slow degrees first to admire, then to love you.
“And yet,” Mr. Highet went on, “there was the problem of Lord Ensley. For although I know you did not think it, I was perfectly aware all the while of your—” Now it was Mr. Highet’s turn to stumble in his words, and to change colour a little. Darkening, “Your liaison with him,” he presently resumed. “What was I to make of that? I knew your removal to Cheshire must have unsettled things greatly between you. When I met him—I make no secret of it—I did not like him. But finally I read in the Gazette the announcement of his betrothal. Cheerful reading for me, I assure you,” he continued. “I made up my mind to offer for you as near to the very hour of his marriage as I could manage.”
“You did not! You deliberately—?”
With a smile, “Naturally,” he said. “I suppose you thought it coincidence?”
She nodded, staggered to learn Henry Highet could have been so calculating.
Smoothly he went on, “It was quite the opposite of coincidence, I assure you. I could not imagine a moment you would be more likely to accept the idea. For I knew then, you see, that you still did not love me. I believed—or hoped—that I had earned your good opinion, and even to some extent a mild affection. I suspected that, in time, if I played carefully upon your—well, let us call it a streak of delightful perversity in your nature—if I kept myself distant enough, you might eventually come to me. But I offered knowing full well I might be letting myself in for a life of the extremest frustration. Still, at the least I could be your friend, and do you a service, and then—” Finally, he shrugged. “Life is long. I suppose I had my hopes,” he concluded. “And indeed, when I saw you in London; when I heard you say you had broke with Ensley—I fancy I saw you do it, in fact, at your dinner party?” he interrupted himself.
Anne nodded again.
“Yes. My hopes began to rise. I asked you to Cheshire on the pretext of helping Mrs. Insel, but if she had not needed help, I should have thought of another reason. And when you came, and seemed to enjoy yourself so well—when I saw you play with my nephews, and even laugh at yourself—well, I confess it was all I could do to keep from seizing you and carrying you off to— Ah, er-umph,” Mr. Highet broke into a short fit of coughing and lamely concluded, “Ah…seizing you.”
“But if you felt all that,” Anne objected, still rather stunned by this recitation, “why were you so awkward and distant with me my last weeks here? You were, you know. It hurt me.”
With a long sigh, “I know,” he said. “It was the only way I could keep myself from—from doing—the other…” He looked so uncomfortable that she laughed and said,
“You mean, the ah, er-umph! seizing thing? I see. But even so—why did you not make a clean breast of it? Tell me every thing, as I told you today?” she asked, in real perplexity.
Gently, “I wanted you to come to me,” he said. “If I had told you…”
He fell silent and Anne realized that, indeed, if he had told her, until very recently she would have been at best confused, at worst repelled.
“It was too soon, at Christmas, any how,” he took up presently. “I suppose I would have told you, one day—but first I hoped you would come to me.”
“As I have,” she said, reaching her hands to him and slowly submitting to be drawn again into his embrace. “What a story!” she said, after an interval. “How could I ever have imagined? I feel rather like a fly who has been strolling—whistling and thinking of nothing in particular—round and round on a spider’s web! And you, sir, are the spider!”
But this he would not endure. “You are something of a spider yourself, Miss Innocence,” he objected. “Do you suppose I am ignorant of the identity of ‘A.’?”
Aghast, she drew back from him. “You do not—”
“Oh, but I do! All the while you were here, and were writing of Lord Quaffbottle in the country, I was reading of Mr. Mutton Slowtop, the idiot sheep farmer,” he informed her. “And his giantess mother! Merciless, you are! Do not deny it. Lord Quaffbottle, like you, has gone recently to France—and now how astonished I will be if he does not find something to take him away. Oh, you are ‘A.’ right enough. In the flesh!”
“Then you knew all the while?” Her chagrin, her horrified remorse, were such that she could say no more, but only sat with her mouth agape, staring at him while she recollected how many insults she had heaped upon the cloddish Mr. Slowtop and his monstrous parent. “You never told your mother?” she demanded, as this new, awful possibility dawned on her.
Mr. Highet shook his head. “She will have enough to perplex her when she learns our marriage of convenience is to become one of great inconvenience to her,” he said. Then, observing the relief on Anne’s formerly stricken countenance, he threw his large head back. He opened his mouth, was silent, then whipped forward with a terrific whoop and exploded into as hearty and prolonged a fit of laughter as any his wife had heard from him. But this time, instead of remaining aloof, or settling into a freezing silence, or even sitting apart with a polite smile pasted on her lips—this time Anne joined in.
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