The Country Gentleman (2 page)

But then,
mirabile dictu
, one night changed all this. It was at Almack’s late in May, as the Season reached its height. A tall, fair gentleman with an open, handsome countenance asked Lady Jersey to introduce him to Lady Guilfoyle. This favour granted, it soon became clear he had wished to know the mother solely in order to know the daughter, whom he had seen and (like many other gentlemen, for she was excessively pretty) hoped to ask to dance. And when his hopes had been answered and the dance accomplished, and a glass of lemonade brought to Anne by her partner, Maria and Lady Guilfoyle observed from across the room the two of them begin an extremely animated discussion—and not merely begin, but prolong and pursue it so heedlessly of their surroundings that her ladyship finally felt it best to dispatch Maria to interrupt the colloquy.

This tall, fair gentleman was soon to become familiar to the ladies as George, Lord Ensley, second son of the Marquess of Denbury. In the carriage on their way home to
Holles Street that night Anne sang his praises: Lord Ensley was so agreeable; he was amazingly intelligent; fancy his being secretary to a secretary of Henry Addington at twenty-three! They had not agreed on every thing—Anne had thought they might come to cuffs on the subject of taxation—but how well informed he was! How interested to hear her own views! Lady Guilfoyle and Maria exchanged glances and smiles while Anne chattered on: finally, a break in the gloom, a gentleman Anne could like.

In the morning Lady Guilfoyle set about her researches. A series of discreet questions dropped in the course of three or four well-chosen calls and she had her answer. It was not the one she had hoped for: every one agreed Ensley would never offer for Anne. Denbury was in no immediate need, but the estate was failing, the family fortune much reduced. The oldest son having run off to Scotland last year to wed the dowryless, rather vulgar Miss Burnham, it was clear that Ensley must marry to bolster up both the finances and the consequence of his family. Miss Guilfoyle was all very well, but Ensley needed a brilliant connexion. Thus the oracles.

Disappointed yet resigned to her duty, Lady Guilfoyle went home and told her daughter what she had learnt.

But, “Good heavens, ma’am!” answered that lady. “May not a girl enjoy a civilized conversation with a gentleman without marrying him?”

Lady Guilfoyle was tempted to reply that no, a shrewd girl might not; but she held her tongue, and so began the pattern of Anne’s life. To oblige her mother, she danced with other admirers, accepted their offers to ride out in the park or to take her in to supper; but all her affection was reserved for Ensley. Now they seemed to meet him every where; and each occasion, Lady Guilfoyle knew,
only strengthened the regard between him and her daughter. For (“More’s the pity,” her ladyship tartly observed to Maria) it was soon clear that Ensley returned Anne’s partiality with equal fervour. Indeed, if the spiteful matchmaking mammas had a legitimate complaint to lay at Anne’s door, it was that (without in the least benefiting by it herself!) she utterly absorbed the so eligible Lord Ensley, and prevented him from looking elsewhere.

The girls’ first Season closed upon this situation. Lord Ensley went home to Denbury; the Guilfoyle ladies, with Maria, embarked upon a long chain of visits to friends in various counties. Perhaps, during this interlude, Ensley endeavoured not to think of Anne; perhaps Anne likewise set herself to forget Ensley. If so, their efforts went for nought. Maria believed that her friend had not at first credited the justice of Lady Guilfoyle’s prediction. By the time she did it was too late: Anne was in love. Whatever the case, when, quite without expecting it, the Guilfoyle party discovered themselves engaged to stop through the whole of January at a house where Lord Ensley also was a guest, the two young people renewed their acquaintance with a delight and a naturalness that made Lady Guilfoyle’s heart sink.

At about this time, Lady Guilfoyle began to be ill. Mother and daughter returned to London in the middle of February; Maria went back at last to Halfwistle House. The irony of her passing nearly a year in London yet remaining unattached, only to encounter her future husband the very week she went home (her older brother Frank brought him there, a very dashing Captain Insel, of Frank’s own regiment), was widely, and humorously, remarked upon for many months in the neighbourhood of Eling-on-Duckford. The wedding came in April, but
Anne Guilfoyle was conspicuously absent: her mother had succumbed to a wasting fever and died in March.

The bereaved Miss Guilfoyle remained in London, spurning a half-hearted invitation from Overton to make her home there once more. With Miss Gully to chaperon her, her mother’s fortune to support her, and the sedatest entertainments of the Season for diversion, she set about, deeply grieving, to make number 3, Holies Street her own establishment. How welcome, then, was the warm friendship of Lord Ensley! How comforting his attentions! Maria being gone with her new husband to Canada (her brother’s battalion, unhappily, was posted elsewhere) Ensley became the solace of Anne’s mourning. This new Season, and every Season after that for ten years, she owned openly to a particular friendship with him. And when her mourning was over, she went out into society not to find a husband, but to talk, and argue, and laugh. Which, as the reader has heard, she succeeded in doing extremely well, ever more gaily, and within increasingly rarefied circles.

A soberer and more nervous Maria than had left it returned to Holies Street some eight years later, just when Miss Gully’s retirement could be postponed no longer. She wore black, then lavender, and spoke little of her husband, who was generally understood to have been killed accidentally during manoeuvres. Mrs. Insel’s spirits gradually lightening with the passing of time, the house at Number 3 became first comfortable, then happy again; and thus do we find its occupants this July morning: Maria still in lavender but tolerably cheerful, Anne unmarried, nearly twenty-nine, hearty, merry, and looking forward (as no very great coincidence would have it) to dining at Celia Grypphon’s that night in company with Ensley.

As to Ensley, Anne had come to accept that he would
someday marry. She supposed herself reconciled to the eventuality. Indeed, as he postponed it from year to year, the prospect had aged and mellowed till (she quite believed) it had lost its sting. She understood his position; had he offered for her she would have reproached him for talking nonsense; anyway, the slightly vulgar former Miss Burnham having thus far produced no heir, Ensley’s wife must at the least be quite young, with a good many bearing years before her. An attribute, she needed no one to tell her, which no longer applied to Anne.

The Garden Saloon was so called on account of its being hung all over with paper that convincingly depicted an ivy-covered trellis. It was a small sitting-room at the back of the house, in which the ladies generally passed together an hour or two of the earlier part of their day. They re-met there on this day more or less punctually, Maria with a basket, Anne with a book. The weather, now they were awake enough to see it, they perceived to be perfectly awful, hot without being sunny, close and hinting at rain without raining. “Too oppressive for exercise or errands,” they agreed, and throwing wide the windows to receive such paltry and fetid ventilation as was to be had from the alley, each settled to her chosen task. Anne obliged herself to read again a particularly dense passage in Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, which she was determined to understand if it killed her, while Maria profited by the morning light to work a bit of specially fine filagree. And so, in a silence broke by nothing louder than the turning of a page, they sat together some half hour.

Into this quiet intruded first the knock, then the venerable head, of Dolphim, Miss Guilfoyle’s butler. He bowed, then presented to his mistress a letter only just
arrived—a letter of business, she saw as she took it, from her solicitor, Mr. Nicodemus Dent. Guiltily relieved by the distraction, she closed a silver marker into her Kant and opened the letter at once.

Maria, who had looked up, seen Dolphim, seen the letter, and looked down at her filagree again, was startled a minute later to hear, “Good heavens!” and again, “Gracious God!” burst from her friend. She dropped her work to her lap and regarded Anne in some alarm; but as the exclamations were immediately followed by a rich peal of laughter, her emotion changed to mere curiosity. She observed Anne turn the paper over, read farther, then heard her laugh again. She was just on the point of demanding to know what was in it when, looking up and waving the paper about in amused delight, Anne addressed her: “My dear Maria, imagine it! I am the beneficiary of a will.”

Mrs. Insel obligingly responded to this news with eager applications of “Whose?” and “What?”

Anne settled the page in her lap again and, referring to it now and then, informed her, “My great uncle Herbert Guilfoyle. Do you recall, we saw the notice of his death not long ago?”

“Of Cheshire, was not he?”

“The very same.”

“But you said you remembered meeting him only once, in childhood—”

“I was twelve. My father had just begun to ail, and his uncle came to see him. What a queer man he was! The veriest eccentric. He refused to speak to me till I had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Fancy saying so to a girl of twelve!”

“Fancy!” Then, as Anne seemed to have fallen into a reverie of sorts, Mrs. Insel hinted, “It is difficult to
imagine what he may have left you. Not a copy of
La Nouvelle Heloïse
, perchance?”

“Not at all. Or rather, perhaps he has, for he’s left me his entire estate.”

“But my dear,” Maria said, wondering in this case at her friend’s light tone (for she could not help thinking it would be no small thing to her to be left a home of her own), “that is very fine indeed! How peculiar, yes; but also, how fortunate, how kind.”

Anne laughed again. “You have not heard all, my love; I told you he was eccentric. My great uncle leaves me—” She scanned the page, frowning lightly, for some particular word. “Here it is. ‘Linfield, at Faulding Chase in Cheshire, its house, its land, and its income’—
providing I reside there ten months a year!
Having—let me see, where is it? Oh yes, here: ‘Having a horror most particular and principled of a landlord who knows not the condition and character of his tenants, his lands, his etc. etc…’ Hm; Oh yes, here we are again. ‘Having such a particular horror, the estate is left to his only surviving relation of whom he at least knows no certain evil—’” Anne paused to smile at the thought of Frederick hearing that. “‘The estate is left to his great niece Anne Guilfoyle on condition she reside there—’ Well, what I told you. ‘In the event the above-named Miss Guilfoyle prove whether unwilling or unable to conform to this provision, either now or at any future time, the estate and all its’ so on and so forth ‘to pass irreversibly to—’” Anne ran a finger along the lines, searching again. “Ah, to ‘Mr. Henry Highet, Gentleman, Fevermere, Faulding Chase, Cheshire—’” She folded the letter and looked up, finishing, “Whose lands apparently adjoin those of my great uncle.”

Mrs. Insel, who did not appear to share her friend’s
hilarity, inquired, “But surely you may sell it? It is not to pass to Mr.—Mr. Highet for nothing?”

“As I read it, it is indeed.”

“But how unkind of your great uncle. To offer such a gift, yet at the same time remove it by his terms.”

“I am relieved to hear you say so; for a moment I half feared, from the seriousness of your countenance, that you intended to suggest I accept the bargain.”

“No, indeed not. It is only that I dislike to see such a boon pass through your hands.”

“Your concern is generous,” Anne smiled, “but pray recollect this particular boon is, thank heaven, as unneeded by us as it was unlooked for. If we accepted only half the invitations we receive to stop in the country we should never be in London at all; what use have we for an estate? I know nothing of farming and less of Cheshire, and the more I think of that the better I like it. Imagine passing ten months a year in the country—the deepest country! It makes one’s blood run cold. Why, every thing to make life agreeable, to give it order and pleasure”—Maria knew she thought of Ensley—“is in London. And consider: it must be a two days’ journey at least from here to Chester. That would leave us…let me see, taking July and August in town, since they are the two longest together—fifty-eight days in London annually. Good God! ’Tis not to be thought of.” And she rose at once to go to a large library table. “I shall tell Mr. Dent I decline the legacy with respectful thanks,” she went on, sitting down and collecting paper and pen, “and you and I, my dear, will never mention this painful, I may even say cruel, suggestion again.” She dipped her pen. “‘3 July, 1816,’” she read aloud as she wrote. “‘My dear Mr. Dent—’”

“You don’t suppose we ought at least to visit the property before you refuse it,” Maria suggested timidly. “After all, the Season will shortly dwindle to nothing, and we might spare a week or two—”

“Have you forgot we are engaged to go down to Devonshire?” Anne interrupted rather sharply.

Mrs. Insel had not forgot. Lord and Lady Bambrick had invited them, and Lord Ensley was to be there too, until Parliament reconvened. At which time, Mrs. Insel had no doubt, Anne would discover some business to bring her back to town as well. Maria sighed. She would have been glad to see a little less, all in all, of Lord Ensley. She esteemed him very much; but she could not help feeling he had done her friend an ill service over the years. His constant attendance on Anne had done more than delay his own marriage: it had impeded—practically speaking, had prevented—hers. In the last weeks, moreover, Mrs. Insel had heard, not rumours exactly, but hints, intimations of the coming of an announcement she doubted very much Miss Guilfoyle was prepared for. Though perhaps she was prepared; perhaps Ensley had told her. One couldn’t know with them, they were very deep and secret together. At all events, she let drop the idea of a visit to Cheshire. Really, it was an impossible offer. Mr. Herbert Guilfoyle must surely have been a quite impossible man.