by D. J. Taylor
And yet what is it that continues to agitate him? What is it that Mr. Crabbe is muttering to himself as he raps on the front door, is smartly admitted by the butler, who knows his master’s habits, and is divested once more of hat, coat and scarf, and why is it that his hand continues to play upon the slip of paper concealed in his breast pocket? The Crabbe interior is, to all intents and purposes, a cheerful one. There is a Mrs. Crabbe—Mr. Crabbe married late in life, it should be said—reading a novel and a pair of fine bouncing girls seated at the pianoforte, and Mr. Crabbe, advancing into the drawing room where these recreations are taking place, is consequently made much of, kissed, petted, asked if the fire should be poked up for his benefit and whether he will take a tea cake or a glass of negus. Has he spent a pleasant evening? his wife enquires. And Mr. Crabbe, very meek and humble—how astonished his clerk would be if he could but see him now—intimates that he has spent a very pleasant evening, very. His elder daughter, a somewhat high-minded and severe young person, hopes that Papa hasn’t been to “that dreadful club,” whereupon Papa replies that no, he has had the pleasure of attending upon His Grace the Duke of——, causing his younger daughter to demand whether or not Her Grace was looking very beautiful.
This, it may be acknowledged, is the pleasantest half hour of Mr. Crabbe’s day, and for a moment the slip of paper lurking in his waistcoat pocket is all but forgotten. It is a shame, avers his younger daughter (whom in his heart of hearts Mr. Crabbe prefers), that Papa should have to go calling on duchesses when he could be safe at home in front of his own fire with herself to bring his slippers, and Mr. Crabbe thinks, also in his heart of hearts, that it is a shame. An hour passes. The drawing-room fire is all but extinguished, and the lamps turned down. Mr. Crabbe’s butler is nodding over his pantry table. The two bouncing daughters have retired to their boudoir, the elder to ponder a volume of the Reverend Rantaway’s brimstone sermons, the younger to read one of Miss Edgeworth’s novels. Mrs. Crabbe is fast asleep with her hair done up in a turban and a cambric counterpane pulled up close under her nose. What is it, then, that draws Mr. Crabbe to his study desk at this late hour, with a candle at his elbow and a nightcap resting on his grizzled old head? What letter can be so important that it requires to be written at eleven o’clock at night, and so troublesome the manner of its composition that half a dozen previous attempts lie in fragments in the wastepaper basket? To be sure, the butler, looking over his master’s leavings the next morning with his customarily attentive eye, will wonder who this Mr. Dixey is and why Mr. Crabbe finds such difficulty in addressing him. Meanwhile, high in his eyrie Mr. Crabbe scribbles on into the night as the lights go out all around him, and there is no one awake in West Halkin Street, and no sound except the draw of his breath and the tread of the policeman’s boots on the pavement thirty feet below.
VIII
JORROCKS’S CART
Well, I have seen Mr. Crabbe,” were John Carstairs’s first words that evening as he plunged into his mother’s drawing room, rather startling that lady by the force of his irruption.
“Indeed? And what did Mr. Crabbe have to say?”
“What did he say? What do lawyers ever say?” John Carstairs glanced round the room, which was a kind of shrine to the memory of the late Mr. Carstairs, culminating in a portrait of that gentleman dressed in the uniform of the Suffolk Fencibles, satisfied himself that there was no one else in it and continued: “It seems that poor Isabel is quite deranged, living in seclusion in the country and that kind of thing. At any rate, Crabbe explained it all.”
John Carstairs was perhaps aware, as he uttered this synopsis of Mr. Crabbe’s opinion, that it would scarcely do. But if he expected any close questioning from his fond parent, he was disappointed—or shall we say relieved? Mrs. Carstairs, as she handed her son his cup of tea and resumed her seat, merely remarked that it was very dreadful but that she was glad to have an explanation. Of the little scheme she had meditated during the day involving a Bradshaw and a directory of the County of Norfolk, she wisely kept silent.
But Mrs. Carstairs was a woman of resolve. The next morning, having ascertained from her son before he left the house that he intended to dine at his club and would not be back until a late hour, she dressed herself in her travelling clothes, instructed the parlourmaid to step outside to Marylebone High Street and summon a cab, and had herself taken off to Shoreditch Railway Station. Here she purchased a return ticket to Watton, this being the stopping point suggested by her researches to be nearest to Easton Hall. It was by now about eleven o’clock in the morning. Mrs. Carstairs calculated that she could travel down to Norfolk, achieve the object of her quest and return once again to Marylebone without her son being any the wiser.
It was a mild, windy day with great ragged clouds moving over the Essex flats, and Mrs. Carstairs, as the train moved eastwards, was sensible of a faint exhilaration. That she might not achieve her aim—might not even insinuate her way into Mrs. Ireland’s presence—she thought very possible, but it would be something to have tried. Mr. Dixey might refuse to see her, might pretend, indeed, that he was not at home, but to bead him on his very doorstep would be to prove a point. And thus Mrs. Carstairs reassured herself as the train rattled on past Colchester and Manningtree, where the fog hung over the ships’ masts in the estuary and the geese lay in great flocks on the riverbank, deep into the Suffolk plain. A gentleman seated on the farther side of the carriage, after an examination of the lowering sky, deposed very courteously that it might rain, and Mrs. Carstairs graciously assented.
At Ipswich she descended from her carriage and walked along the station platform to the refreshment room to recruit herself with a glass of sherry and a biscuit. Thus did she maintain her spirits, preserve them in fact almost to the moment when the outward part of her journey was done and the train deposited her at Watton in such a cloud of steam and soot that she might have been Bluebeard’s sister in the play rising out of the orchestra pit to strike factitious terror in the hearts of her admiring audience. It was only then, as I say, that she experienced a faint misgiving. An unreasonable optimism had led Mrs. Carstairs to suppose that Watton would run to some kind of conveyance. It did not. It ran only to a long, low platform set forlornly in a field, to a solitary waiting room and an equally solitary porter in whom Mrs. Carstairs’s enquiry about the existence of a station fly produced only a shake of the head. “A carriage then,” Mrs. Carstairs persisted, having explained the object of her quest. “Surely there must be something that can take me to Easton?” “There’s Jorrocks’s cart, ma’am, I suppose.” And so Mrs. Carstairs found herself absolutely compelled to climb into the back of a haywain, where with two bales of straw and an empty rabbit hutch she was despatched across the Norfolk backroads at a speed of perhaps five miles to the hour.
It was by now half past one in the afternoon, with a stiff wind blowing from the east and the roadside trees all blown back along one side as if they found the sight of Jorrocks’s cart labouring along the little track beside them too objectionable to be borne and yearned to be away. Beyond the hedge the fields, bare and grubbed up, descended in a melancholy way towards a flat expanse of wood and heath. To be sure, the compilers of gazetteers and guidebooks always represent Norfolk as a picturesque county, but I confess that I have never found it so myself in spring. There are too many flat fields, too many dank little lanes, perilous to the feet, leading nowhere in particular; there is too much wind, too much mud, too much silence—except for the cries of birds that must be the most mournful in all England. Mrs. Carstairs, peering out between the slats of Jorrocks’s cart, jolted almost out of her wits by the unevenness of the road, reckoned it a very desolate place.
By this stage, it need scarcely be said, her earlier exhilaration had altogether passed off. She was cold. The motion of the cart was torture to her. More especially she feared that the effect of the journey, should it ever come to her son’s ears or those of anyone who knew the circumstances of the case, would be to make her seem
foolish. There was also—a fact not perhaps intelligible to the reader who learns of her adventure in the comfort of a fireside armchair—something about her present situation, here on the rutted road with the high hedges towering on either side and the melancholy cries of the birds ringing in her ears, that she did not altogether like. Possibly as a child Mrs. Carstairs had lingered too impressionably over that engraving in which a man, journeying down a country road at night, finds himself pursued by a fearful fiend, but it is a fact that she more than once turned her head and regarded the road behind her with an expression of grave foreboding. Then the cart lurched forward into a damp, gloomy avenue of trees where the wind amidst the branches produced a sensation of unseen hands tugging at her skirts, and Mrs. Carstairs felt that she would give anything to be back in her comfortable drawing room in Marylebone with the fire to poke and the parlourmaid to bully.
“Dear me, this is a most lonely spot, is it not?” she enquired of the carter.
“Ef ’n’ you say so, ma’am. There is not many folks as comes here.”
Presently the cart rolled out of its tunnel of trees into a road whose course lay westward through fields of spring wheat, and Mrs. Carstairs’s spirits revived. Still, though, in her heart she was anxious. Twenty minutes or half an hour, she knew, would see her on Mr. Dixey’s doorstep, and then how would she conduct herself? What if Mr. Dixey declined to see her, sent some answer bidding her to go away? As a young married woman she had once startled herself and her husband by giving her opinion of the bill of 1832 to one of Mr. Peel’s young men who sat next to her at dinner, but Mrs. Carstairs knew enough of her character to admit that such irruptions of spirit were behind her now. She was still pondering her probable reception when she became aware that the cart had come to a halt at a point in the road where a path forged off to the right towards a distant lodge gate, and that the carter was awaiting his instructions.
“Is this the place?”
“It be so for zartin, ma’am.”
Mrs. Carstairs took hasty stock of her surroundings. For the past half mile the road had followed the curve of an ancient brick wall, with dense evergreens tightly enclosed behind it. This, she guessed, was the boundary of the Easton Hall estate. Looking eastward, where the track ran away in the direction of the lodge gate, she saw signs of habitation: a cottage or two and an outhouse. Beyond this a gravel drive, soon disappearing into the wall of trees, and in the further distance the outlines of the house itself. Mrs. Carstairs asked herself whether she wished to be observed negotiating Mr. Dixey’s driveway in a hay cart and told herself that she did not. At the same time, the hay cart must somehow be preserved. Descending onto the rough ground and depositing her reticule at her feet, she addressed herself to the carter: “If you will kindly wait for me, I shall give you half a crown.”
Keeping the outline of the gravel drive directly before her, Mrs. Carstairs set off to walk to the house. She was conscious of several sensations: that the carter must think her a fool; that it had begun to rain and she had forgotten to bring an umbrella; that the grounds through which she now progressed seemed very rundown and wretched. As a child Mrs. Carstairs had possessed a venerable great-uncle with an estate in Kent which it had been her delight to visit. There had been flower beds and avenues and a certain walk by a river that even now, fifty years later, she remembered with affection. Easton Hall bore no relation to this juvenile Eden. The trees crowded up close to the path and quite defied you to wander beneath them. There was timber lying in piles on the grass that looked to have been cut ever so many years ago, and a great barn with dogs locked up in it, for she heard them barking as she passed. Not a soul was to be seen. In fact such a desolate prospect did the overgrown lawn before the house present—it was a great barrack of a place, Mrs. Carstairs thought, and must be very uncomfortable—that she feared she would find it shut up.
Happily, the door was opened, albeit by a servant girl—no more than a child the visitor judged—with a doll-like face who regarded her in a manner that suggested callers were very uncommon at Easton Hall. However, Mrs. Carstairs was used to dealing with servant girls. It had been the pastime of her adult life to command, bewilder and confuse them, and the uncertainty of the present situation, here on a gloomy doorstep in Norfolk with the afternoon light glowing through the distant trees, only served to strengthen her resolve.
“I wish to speak to your master. To Mr. Dixey. Is he at home?”
The girl, whom certain signs intelligible only to the female eye suggested to be perhaps seventeen years of age, continued to stare.
“Mr. Dixey. Is he at home?”
“What name, ma’am?”
Whereupon she disappeared hastily from view, leaving Mrs. Carstairs alone in the vestibule and wondering in her heart of hearts whether the enterprise was worth continuing with. And yet, if truth be known, she was not displeased with her endeavours. Whatever else might happen—whatever Bluebeards might subsequently be found lurking behind Easton Hall’s wainscoting—she had at least gained an entrance to the place and could now form some slight opinion of its lineaments. She saw now that she was standing—no one had asked her to sit down—in a spacious lobby or entrance hall, shabbily decorated but genteel after its fashion, with prints on the wall and a profusion of walking sticks and pattens strewn in a heap. She had moved to the further wall and was inspecting a melancholy engraving of the battle of Culloden when the servant girl came running very breathlessly back.
“Ef ’n’ ye please, ma’am, the master says, would you care to wait?”
Signifying her assent, Mrs. Carstairs allowed herself to be conducted through the vestibule into a wider hallway and thence into a modest anteroom, halfway between a study and a parlour, looking out onto a ragged, unkempt garden. Here half a dozen logs burned in a small grate, and three or four chairs stood in random attitudes against the bookshelves. The general effect was not prepossessing, and Mrs. Carstairs knew it was not. She turned on her heel, but the servant girl had vanished again—apparently into thin air as no sound of her footsteps could be heard elsewhere in the house. As if to prove a point, Mrs. Carstairs seized a chair and took it over to the fire, which she then poked up with a vengeance, but she was not happy. Something about the window and the view beyond, the treetops dancing in the wind and the draggled grass, drew her eye constantly towards it, and she remembered the story of Mr. Le Fanu’s in which the evil governess stands gesticulating in the twilight. Mrs. Carstairs edged her chair a little nearer to the fire and reminded herself that she was in a gentleman’s house in Norfolk on a spring afternoon in the age of steam engines and the Crystal Palace, but still she remembered the evil governess signalling from the twilit garden.
What was to be done? There was a line of pictures—family portraits, she presumed—on the wall above the hearth, of old, dead Dixeys in periwigs and clerical bands. Mrs. Carstairs looked at them for a while, but they brought her no succour. They had pink and white faces and hard eyes and reminded her uncomfortably of cold boiled veal. The books in the bookcase were scientific and abstruse, the objects in a cracked display cabinet by the wall rustic and peculiar—old pieces of bone and rock, with Latin inscriptions beneath them in faded italic. In despair Mrs. Carstairs turned back to the window, where the rain was now falling in torrents. There was something about the scene, about the dismal little garden and the bygone Dixeys in their frames and the scientific histories on the shelf, that altogether disturbed and discountenanced her, but she could not say why. Presently footsteps sounded in the corridor, the doorknob turned—so sharply attuned was Mrs. Carstairs to these developments that the noise seemed to resound in her ears—and a man stood squarely in the doorway.
It had ever been Mrs. Carstairs’s boast that she was, as she put it, “a good judge of a man.” Perhaps there is no general agreement on how such judgements should be arrived at, but Mrs. Carstairs had made them since the days of her girlhood, the days of Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Canning, Mr. Chinnery’s pictures and Miss Austen’
s novels. Military heroes in proud receipt of Her Majesty’s commission, professional persons from lawyers’ chambers and banking offices, divines and gentlemen of leisure: all these had risked the silent appraisal of Mrs. Carstairs’s gaze. In a discreet and unexacting way she had even judged the late Mr. Carstairs. But something told her that she could not judge Mr. Dixey.
In appearance he was a tall, thin, rather elderly man—perhaps a year or two older than herself, perhaps a year or so younger—very pale-faced, with abundant grey hair and bearing such a sharp resemblance to the portraits on the wall that it almost appeared as if he had stepped down from them but a moment ago. And yet it was not in these particulars or his dress—he wore a thick jacket and countrymen’s gaiters—Mrs. Carstairs thought, that his singularity lay. Where it did lie she could not quite be sure. He had restless blue eyes, which darted down upon the walking stick he held between his fingers and then towards the window before alighting on the visitor by the hearth.
“I believe I have the unexpected pleasure of addressing Mrs. Carstairs?”
If anything could have startled Mrs. Carstairs, it was the news that her journey, by subterfuge, across three counties, was an unexpected pleasure to anyone. Rising swiftly out of the chair in which he had found her, she said in a rather doubtful way, “Indeed, sir. I don’t know that I regard it as altogether a pleasure, but—no matter.”
Mr. Dixey’s eyes darted across to the window once more. “I assure you, madam, that in this part of the world a visitor is a visitor and as such highly prized. But what is it that I may do for you?”
This, as Mrs. Carstairs silently acknowledged to herself, was very bad. She knew that whatever she believed—and she was not sure exactly what she did believe—about Mr. Dixey and the question of Henry Ireland’s will, she could not say it to him outright. The man who meets another man on his doorstep at dead of night with a large sack under his arm does not instantly accuse him of being a burglar. And so it was with Mrs. Carstairs, keenly aware of the expression of curiosity on her host’s face but quite unable to frame a satisfactory form of words for her thoughts.