I, Libertine

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Meadows said, “That face—”

  “It impresses me too,” said Lance quickly, and took Miss Callow’s hand. “We’d best be getting back to Minden.” As she turned eagerly and gratefully to him, Lance understood what had happened. Meadows, irresistibly off on his Hippocratic urge, had seen the sprinkle of acne across her brow and down the sides of her nose. Single-minded as he was, he must have concluded that this was a patient; and with dedication such as his, a patient is not a person, but a disease. The chances are good that there had been nothing in his mind at all as he crossed the room toward her except lists of ingredients from his impulsive apothecary. None of this was explicable, hence: “He’s interested in you,” in a quick whisper, and to the anxious Meadows, “I’ll bring her back. Soon.” and he whisked her out.

  “He frightened me,” she said candidly when they reached the footbridge.

  “Only mysteries fear a scientist,” said Lance; it was one of Barrowbridge’s saws. “He was interested in you, that’s all.”

  “My,” she breathed, “what has come over me these days?”

  Nothing yet, he said, but silently. He felt miserable. He liked plans which worked out.

  “We needn’t walk so fast,” she said a little breathlessly. “Sir Gregory has gone to London with Miss Elaine, and cook can take care of the other two.”

  “I must hurry back. He’ll need me. He’s doing a great work.”

  “Oh. Oh dear, what is it?”

  “I can’t tell you until it’s finished.”

  “Oh of course; I’m sorry. …You needn’t walk all the way to Minden, Captain. Not if it will obstruct your work.”

  “Why, I couldn’t think of—”

  “Please. I shall be safe; it’s still broad daylight. And with Sir Gregory not there—well, you needn’t. Really.”

  He knew she didn’t mean a word of it, but he stopped and doffed his hat. “Very well, then; it’s most thoughtful of you, Miss Callow.”

  “Good-by,” she said wistfully, and, “Tomorrow?”

  He had a horrid intuition that if he denied her she would follow him home. “Tomorrow,” he said, the breathy, stringed-instrument way.

  He watched her go, heartily wishing she would fall into the brook, wishing he were back in London. London … whatever was going on in London by this time? He must ride for the post.

  He strolled slowly back to the house. A hangdog Meadows awaited him. “I say, old man, I was a boor. No, don’t be decent about it. I was. I don’t know what’s got into me.”

  “You’ve been working too hard.”

  “Perhaps I ought to go back to London and—”

  “I haven’t been helping you enough, that’s all.”

  “Oh, you have! I shouldn’t be able to do anything without your ideas, your confidence in me.”

  “What confidence?” He couldn’t help it; it slipped out.

  “Ah,” said Meadows, “you’re pulling my leg. I say, that Miss Fallow—”

  “Callow. She isn’t fallow,” said Lance with deep conviction.

  “I just couldn’t do anything else. Those eruptions on her; my, what I wouldn’t give to have them here to work on. What is it?”

  “Twonk’s disease,” said Lance soberly.

  “Oh dear. Well, the poor thing. I’d like to help.”

  “Perhaps she’s better off the way she is.”

  “You can’t mean that!”

  “I don’t suppose I can.” He turned to the door. “I have to go—you know.” He went inside.

  “Brave chap,” murmured Meadows. He went to the lab to see if he could find, in Paracelsus, a reference to Twonk’s disease.

  Upstairs, Lance flung himself into Barrowbridge’s great chair. The barrister looked at him questioningly and Lance simply shook his head.

  “I wish I could help, lad.”

  “That’s what Meadows said.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “That he did. I told him she had Twonk’s disease, and off he scurried to invent some foul concoction to cure her.”

  “Got it!”

  “Good heavens, sir!” Lance sank back; Barrowbridge’s sudden exclamation had bent him like a bow.

  “A scandal you wanted, a scandal you’ll get.” Barrowbridge began to laugh, and then he began to talk.

  It was warm and dark. The great hall was dimly lit by two candles, a lanthorn and the fireplace, and some stray light from the laboratory, where the interminable simmering and kilning proceeded regardless of the hour.

  Lance led Miss Callow in. They paused and listened; all was quiet. He had extracted her from Minden without being seen, in the best romantic tradition—a pebble at her window, a whispered word. They had hardly spoken to one another on the way down, except for the heavy pulse that beat against him as he held her before him on his horse.

  He took her hand and led her to the central bedroom, taking one of the candles as they passed the fireplace. Inside the room, he put down the candle and took her by the shoulders.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered.

  She tried to speak, apparently could not. She shook her head.

  “You get ready,” he said. He made a gesture.

  “Don’t leave me alone.”

  “You won’t be alone for long.” He slipped back into the hall, back through the kitchen, and up the stairs.

  “That quickly?” Barrowbridge whispered.

  Lance snapped his fingers to show how quickly. Barrowbridge got comfortable by his gimlet-hole. “You made no promises, nothing specific,” he ascertained.

  “Nothing. I was completely misunderstood,” said Lance with satisfaction.

  There came a stirring. “Look!” Lance dived across the bed and took over the gimlet-hole. He saw Meadows stop in the light, look to the right, look to the left, and then approach the bedroom, bearing in both hands before him, like a crown on a cushion, a capacious earthen bowl.

  He went in.

  Lance got a confused glance of rapidly moving figures, and then Barrowbridge’s hard old shoulder shunted him aside. There came a short piercing shriek and a reiterated “No! No! No!” and Meadows’ irritated squeak, “Hold still, dash it all! I won’t hurt you!”

  “Once around,” murmured Barrowbridge. “Twice around.”

  “Please!” Reluctantly, Barrowbridge yielded.

  Lance saw the third round, the fourth. Miss Callow, revealing an astonishingly hairy body covered with great gobbets of yellow-green grease, shot past the bedroom door, with Meadows in hot pursuit, ladling further gobbets of his evil ointment at her and shrilling at her to hold fast. At last she slipped and fell; Meadows, turning sharply to follow her, slipped also and inverted his receptacle over them both. Miss Callow scuttled under the bedstead and out the other side, through the bedroom door, down the great hall, and out into the night as fast as her sturdy legs could carry her. Meadows staggered to the bedroom door and hung there panting and dripping.

  A perfectly monstrous smell rose up and smote them. Lance coughed and stuffed a corner of his handkerchief into the hole.

  The smell began to penetrate the walls. “Phoo! I never thought of that!”

  “Why did he have to use so much?”

  “You know Meadows. If a little is good, a lot is wonderful.”

  “Well this is wonderful,” choked Barrowbridge.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I have to get out.”

  “Why not stay here and be a sage and let me go out?”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” And Lance stumbled to the door.

  Barrowbridge lay back and grinned wryly, and began to use the mechanisms he had learned for controlling pain and despair. They worked quite well on this minor thing.

  Of Miss Callow there was no sign. Lance kept his distance and called from the other end of the hall. “The devil, Meadows! You didn’t have to bath her in the stuff!”

  “She wouldn’t stay still,” said Meadows. He was still breathing hard. “Didn’t she want to heal those nasty things?”

/>   “She may not have understood the exact nature of the treatment. Didn’t you explain at all?”

  “I thought you said you’d do that.”

  “I said I’d get her ready. … I’m sorry, Meadows, but we’ve got to clean this mess up, though short of burning down the house—”

  “It isn’t so bad,” said Meadows judiciously. “I’ve had really bad smells going. I remember—”

  “This is quite bad enough. Come.”

  Together they stripped the room, taking the bed apart, the carpet, the hangings, the chairs and the table. The evil decoction was splashed high on the walls, on the dresser mirror. Everything went. They dragged it all outside and piled it to be burned on the morrow when a fire would attract less attention. Lance set Meadows to smearing the walls and floors with soft soap, preparatory to their being scrubbed by Johnson in the morning, and disgustedly went to bed in the carriage house, curled up on the cushions of the trap.

  It had not amused him, it had not pleased him. It had only been a lot of disgusting work.

  “But worth it, I suppose,” he thought wearily. “Whatever story she tells.”

  Midmorning, and the sound of wheels.

  “I say, Courtenay, there’s a—”

  “I see it. Meadows, clear out, will you? I’ll handle this.”

  “Who—it’s that chap up the path, Sir Gregory Eustace, isn’t it?”

  “It is, and there’s about to be the devil to pay,”

  “But it was my—”

  “Damn it, this is bad enough without you cluttering things up. Out of sight—jump!” he barked in the tones a bull-voiced, younger Barrowbridge used to use on his terrified office boy. Meadows muttered, “I say,” but faintly, and jumped.

  Sir Gregory picked his way across the bowling green. He was wearing light brown velvets with white piping and a powdered wig under his brown tricorne; he looked out of place, both for the place and the time of day. He seemed more than ever like an owl—soft, silent, a little ludicrous, unquestionably carnivorous.

  “Good morning, Sir Gregory.”

  “Ah, Courtenay.” His voice was flat, uninflected. He always spoke in short bursts of syllables, rapidly, with long spaces between. Unquestionably, he did not hoot. “Unpleasant business. Nice day. Too bad.”

  “Too bad,” said Lance, utilizing still another of his mentor’s techniques.

  “Unforgivable. All over London. Nine-day wonder. Girl’s a fool. Want you to know full extent. Damage. Never heard of such nonsense.”

  Lance was silent this time. He shrugged humbly.

  “Got her here. Carriage. Face to face, what? Whole story. Only right.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  “Deuced humiliating.”

  “Yes, sir, it is, and I couldn’t be more sorry,” said Lance in tones which brought sincerity upgushing from his very shoe-tops.

  Sir Gregory raised his hand and made a slight gesture. He was apparently being watched from the carriage, because the door opened instantly and the passenger alighted, and with head bowed, with reluctant feet, with shamed tears half-dried on the blushing cheeks, Elaine Eustace crossed the bowling green.

  Elaine Eustace?

  Lance stepped back a pace to lay his hand on the wooden balustrade behind him—something solid, something real. Numbly, he waited.

  Frozen, her father waited.

  She came and stood before them, put her hands behind her, and hid her face in her ruffled collar.

  “Tell him, Elaine. Everything.”

  The imprisoning lashes raised far enough to release a swift screened search for Lance’s face, and dropped again. She said, in a soprano whisper, “I—” and then even that faint sound failed her, and she stood crying silently.

  “Come, girl!”

  Her mouth opened and closed; nothing else about her moved but her slow tears.

  Sir Gregory made an extremely small but acutely impatient gesture. Lance managed to get his eyes off the girl and meet the frosted owl’s eyes. Sir Gregory moved his head sharply and Lance followed the gesture, and the baronet, a few yards. The girl remained standing precisely where she was, facing the nothingness where the men were not, just as helpless, just as crushed.

  “Dammit,” said the baronet, and wet his little lips. “Heavy father. Not my style. Don’t know how, ackshly. What? Can’t stand this. But.” He wet his lips again. Lance thought after a time that he had no more to say, it took him so long. “But Right’s right, what? Can’t have it. Agree?” He flicked an unhappy glance at the girl. “Make amends. Put it right. Want to have a shot? I can’t. I’ll wait.”

  Very, very carefully, Lance phrased his question. “Exactly what do you want me to do, sir?”

  “Get the story. All of it.” Suddenly the owl countenance looked downdrawn and miserable. “No mother, y’know. Dashed nuisance. Go on, go on. Don’t take any. Nonsense, what?”

  “I’ll—try, sir.”

  Sir Gregory turned away and turned back. “I say, Courtenay.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No need to be harsh, what? Sensitive, girls. Never know.” He made an abrupt, disgusted sound and strode back up to the carriage as fast as his neat little legs would carry him.

  Then he returned to the girl. What prompted him to do so, he did not know, but he reached out and took her hand. He led her away from the house to the grove of willows and poplars which grew by the stream, and as if she were made of blown glass, helped her onto the wide swing which hung over the bank. She was submissive, almost inert, but once he had her ensconced and had slipped to the seat beside her, she gave a funny, little-girl wiggle and hunkered back a more comfortable inch. Then she was still again, watching with her nearly closed eyes the hands on her lap, which lay strangely, not folded but one upon the other with the palms up. She had stopped crying.

  One of her curls fell forward off her shoulder and swung to her cheek, where it clung.

  Lance said softly, “Your father wants you to tell me something. Tell me whatever you like.”

  She said nothing.

  “Maybe you’d rather not tell me,” Lance said, rather stupidly, he thought. “But if you don’t, I’ll have to know what to say to Sir Gregory.”

  Still she said nothing and made no move, but by some extra sense, he knew there was a change. She was no longer just sitting; she was waiting.

  Impulsively, recalling more with his fingers than with his mind how it had been to take her hand, he said, “Would you like to hold my hand while you tell me?”

  She said, not moving her head and barely her mouth, “Da can see.”

  “I think that would be all right.”

  “Not if I reached for your hand.”

  “Well then!” and he took her hand. She then raised her lashes and looked at him with her eyes wide open. He all but gasped. He had never seen her eyes before. He had hardly seen her before. The thing lasted perhaps a tenth of a second, and perhaps its effect on him was neither deep nor important, but he knew it was permanent. After that bright blaze, her eyes hid away again and she gave her gaze back to the hand he had left in her lap.

  “Now can you tell me what this is about?”

  “I don’t know. I … want to.”

  “Then do.”

  “I want to tell you all of it.” Her voice was steady but almost inaudible, and pitched surprisingly low for a child. If she was a child. He tried very hard to imagine how this must be for her, an unaccustomed exercise for him. “But there’s a part I can’t say,” she whispered.

  He recalled how Barrowbridge used to shock the truth out of reluctant clients, and tried a very gentle version of the same: “What’s the part you can’t say? Say it!”

  “I love you.” She laughed then, perhaps four pure clear syllables before the tears returned most unfairly, without warning, so that she choked and had to cough. He had no clean handkerchief to offer (and for that, made a solemn vow) and she tried awkwardly to reach one which peeped out of her puffed left sleeve with her free left
hand. He released the hand he held but she would not remove it, so he reached over and plucked out the handkerchief and handed it to her. “Oh dear, I’m just awful,” she said miserably, and in the same breath, without pause, and with nothing but joy, “I said it, didn’t I?”

  “I’m very pleased you said it. Is that what your father wanted you to tell me?”

  “I don’t think so. I have to tell you what I did yesterday.” There followed a continuous rush of words so rapid and confusing that at first Lance was lost totally, and his impulse was to stop her and make her start over. But then he began picking up things from context, until abruptly the whole picture cleared: “Barby that’s my sister thought of the armor,” was the way she began, “and that made me hurt inside because it was silly but it was a very beautiful and right thing to think about you and I should have thought of it, and I hated her because she did it instead. Bella that’s my other sister always saw you coming up the path, riding or walking, every time you came, early, late, Barby saw you first, and that hurt me inside too because I was the one who should have seen you coming every time if I really love you I’d know when you were coming and I’d hate to think I didn’t.” The blaze of eyes came and was gone, so quickly that he almost missed it. “I hurt and that was silly because they’re just children and don’t know how to love or anything like that. Then I hurt about Callow, Miss Callow I should say, she had you to herself all the time almost every single day for hours and hours. But I thought about that and it stopped hurting quite so much because who could love Miss Callow? and besides I suddenly thought you were with Miss Callow so you could talk and talk about me. Please don’t say if you did or didn’t, I don’t want to know.” She swung a foot, pointed the toe and swung it again, failing to reach the turf. “Swing us. Please?”

  “I beg your—? Oh.” He set them to swinging gently. Her left hand still slept curled in her lap like a pink shell, and still she spoke down into it, gazed down into it, as if filling it carefully with the little seeds of her words. “So I hurt about Barby and about Bella and about Callow excuse me, Miss Callow. Then Da took me to London and I thought of something so wonderful I almost couldn’t sleep the whole night before. And I did it, I never thought everybody would be upset. I told everybody, just everybody I could, that I was to be married. Married, married, married to you.” This time it was not a blaze, a flash; it was a long, careful, wide-eyed examination of his face, his mouth, the tilt of his head, up to his hair, down to his chin and around its point. During it he sat steady and watched her eyes doing this careful thing, knowing that the slightest misconstrued quiver of a cheek, shift of a lip, tension of jaw and temple, might wound her beyond bearing. He was not aware of trying not to wound her; he simply knew he could. He did not. When she dropped her gaze it was like putting down a weight; her very shoulders slumped with relief.