Page 8

That is not to say that, on many a quiet night, after retiring to her bed chamber, Margaret did not let her thoughts drift to far-off places. One section of her journal became filled with such thoughts, and she found her hopes and dreams had begun to tilt the scale against becoming a wife quite so soon as she had once intended.

On other nights — usually after she and Cecilia had been to tea with Mrs. Jennings and her daughter, Lady Middleton, and had been informed of all the swoon-worthy details of the latest Season — she decided that to be courted by a very handsome suitor, followed by a wedding trip to places she had never been before, would be just the thing.

Chapter VI.

It is a truth as reliable as any in the almanac that a man who has once contrived to get the better of his conscience will find the operation easier each time it is repeated, and that after a certain number of repetitions he will cease to be aware that there was any operation at all. Mr. John Willoughby had begun the business in the winter of his twenty-sixth year, in a small back drawing-room in Bond Street, and by the time he was thirty it had passed into that department of the mind which is reserved for the weather. He did not think of it. It had happened, as things did; it had been unfortunate; it was over. And he was, upon the whole, a good deal more comfortable than he had any right to be.

He was comfortable, in the first place, in a manner that would have been impossible to him upon his own means, the old aunt at Allenham, upon whose fortune he had once counted, having struck him out of her will in the very month of his disgrace; for the lady he had married in such haste, and, as he had told himself at the time, in such despair, had brought to the settlement fifty thousand pounds, and this sum, applied with judgment, had produced remarkable effects. Combe Magna, which had been going gently to ruin in the hands of an uncle who thought drains unnecessary, acquired a new roof, a new stable, a set of kennels that were the envy of Somersetshire, and a terrace laid out in the modern taste; and in Upper Grosvenor Street there was a fine tall house with a handsome staircase, in which, during the London season, a great many people who mattered had been persuaded to drink a great deal of very good wine. Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were asked everywhere. He danced as well as he had ever done. He rode better. He had the same open, laughing countenance, the same air of being delighted with whatever was before him; and it would have been a keen observer who could have discovered in this cheerful figure, riding to hounds over the Somerset levels with his coat flying, any trace of the disgrace of four years before. It was there. It was simply put away.

His wife was the one person in England who could have told him where.

Sophia Willoughby was a small, upright, sharp-featured woman, with a good complexion, a quick eye, and a quicker tongue; and she had never been under the smallest illusion. She had been twenty-two when she was married, and had understood perfectly, on the morning after, that she had bought a very handsome husband at a very high price; and she had made up her mind, in the course of the wedding journey, to see that she had the value of her money. It was to this end that she had said to him, upon the third day, over the breakfast table at Bath, with the cool clarity of a lawyer summing up for the defence: “I know why you married me, Mr. Willoughby, and you know why I married you. I do not see that either of us need be tiresome about it.”

He had stared. And then, in spite of himself, and for the first time since the beginning of the affair, he had laughed; a real, hearty, surprised laugh; and Sophia had gone on buttering her toast with an expression of the most complete gravity, though the corner of her mouth had moved.

It had settled the terms of the marriage. They were not the terms of a love match, and neither of them pretended otherwise; but they were the terms of a truce, and truces, if honestly kept, can be more comfortable than passions. She had London, and the opera, and the whist tables, and a great deal of very unsentimental pleasure in being the mistress of the best-appointed house in Upper Grosvenor Street. He had the country, and the horses, and a wife who never asked where he had been and was never deceived when he told her. They liked each other, overall, more than either would have admitted. They did not love each other, and there were a few evenings a year on which they both suspected that they might have been happier if they had. But those evenings passed.

Of the Dashwoods he had heard nothing, except a paragraph in an old newspaper that had wrapped a parcel from a gunsmith, and which informed him, in half a dozen lines, that Colonel Brandon of Delaford, in the county of Dorset, had married the second Miss Dashwood, of Barton. He had read it standing up, in the shop. He had folded it, and put it in the fire, and gone out into Bond Street and bought something, which he could not remember just what, when he later tried to recall it.

It was in the autumn of the third year at Combe Magna that his wife came down to breakfast a little later than usual, with an expression he had never seen on her, and sat, and unfolded her napkin, and took a cup of coffee, and said, in the tone in which she might have observed that the weather was likely to change:

“I am going to have a child, Mr. Willoughby, in May. I thought that, as you have some interest in the matter, you had better be told.”

He put down the coffee pot. He did not drop it, but he put it down in a manner that suggested he had considered dropping it.

“A child,” said he.

“That is the usual result.”

“Sophia —” He had risen. He seemed uncertain what to do with his hands. “Good God. A — are you certain? Is there no possibility — Have you seen a doctor? I shall send to Bath, I shall send to London, I shall —”

“I have seen Dr. Pryor,” said Sophia, “who says that I am perfectly healthy, and perfectly sensible, and that if you continue to be foolish he will have you sent from the room.” She was looking at him rather curiously, and for once there was no irony in her face at all. “Are you pleased?”

“Am I pleased?” said Willoughby.

He came round the table, and, to the great astonishment of both the footman and the mistress of the house, lifted his wife out of her chair, and held her, and whirled her about the breakfast room; and Sophia, who had not been lifted off her feet by anyone since she was six years old, said something very sharp indeed, and struck him on the shoulder, and laughed so hard that the footman, with great presence of mind, discovered an urgent duty in the pantry.

It was a curious thing, that it was only afterwards, when the room was quiet, and he had gone out to the terrace to be alone, that the other thing came. It came without warning, and it was very small. It was the memory of a letter from a girl in a lodging, a good many miles from Somersetshire, with news of a child that was not going to be acknowledged; and it lasted for perhaps the space of two breaths. He stood quite still with his hand on the stone balustrade, and the morning went on in the garden, with its thrush and its wet grass; and then, in the manner of a man who has had a great deal of practice, he took up the thought and put it away, and turned about, and went in to see if the doctor’s carriage had been sent for.

The child was born in May, in the tall house in Upper Grosvenor Street, after a night which Mr. Willoughby spent, in his shirt-sleeves, pacing the hall and drinking a great deal more brandy than was good for him, and being on several occasions reproved by the housekeeper. He had never known a night so long. He had, in the course of it, made a number of promises to himself which he did not expect to be held to, and some which, in his heart, he thought he might. And at a quarter to six, when the light was beginning to come grey through the fanlight, a nurse came down the stairs with a bundle in her arms and a smile in her plump face, and said:

“A boy, sir. A fine, strong boy. And Mrs. Willoughby is very well, and asking for you; but I thought you would like to see him first. He is the very image of you, sir.”

He took him. He had not intended to be moved; it was not at all in his character; and it occurred to him, as he looked down at the small creased, pink face, and the quantity of black hair, and the fist that had got loose from the shawl and was making, with great determination, at the air, that he had never in his life so completely forgotten to be anybody at all. He felt nothing but joy. He believed that he felt nothing else; and in Willoughby this was very nearly the same thing.

They called him Charles. Sophia, who had views on the subject of names, had determined that it should be Charles after her father, and Willoughby, who was in no state to determine anything, agreed to it with tears in his eyes and did not give it another thought. But he called him privately “the Captain,” on account of the boy’s early and unmistakable air of command, and the name stuck, and in the nursery was never afterwards displaced.

That he should prove a devoted father surprised everyone who knew him, and no one more than himself. He had supposed, if he supposed anything, that he should like the boy well enough at a distance, in the way one likes a good horse, and that the nursery would be the province of the nurse; and he was astonished to find that he could not keep away from it. He was in and out at all hours. He carried the Captain about the house upon his shoulder. He taught him, at ten months, to say “Papa,” and at just over a year to say “horse,” or something close enough to it. By two he had discovered that a child of that age may be perfectly safe upon a pony provided that one’s own hand is on the bridle; and from that day forth the whole of Combe Magna heard the sound of hooves upon the drive, and a small voice shrieking faster, and Mr. Willoughby’s shout of laughter behind it. He dammed the stream at the bottom of the park, so that his son might sail a fleet of walnut shells. He taught him to whistle for the dogs, and to catch a trout, and to bowl underhand; and when the child fell out of the apple tree, and broke nothing but his dignity, it was Willoughby who bore the interview with Sophia, and came out of it, as he told the head groom afterwards, a good deal the worse for it, but perfectly unrepentant.

“He will be a wonderful rider,” said Willoughby, on one of these occasions, standing at the terrace rail with a glass of wine, while the Captain, at four years old, went round the paddock at a determined canter on a pony the size of a large dog. “Look at him, Sophia. He sits it like a man of twenty.”

“He sits it like his father,” said Sophia, who was in a chair beside him with a piece of embroidery in her lap, and had not looked at it in an hour. “It is very alarming.”

“Is it?”

“I believe, Mr. Willoughby,” said his wife, thoughtfully, “that you have at last found the one thing in the world you are entirely serious about.”

“I am not serious about anything,” said Willoughby, lightly.