Jane and the Man of the Cloth (20 page)

But my own curiosity could not be gainsaid, and speculation hounded me like a nipping dog the remainder of the evening. Though Mademoiselle LeFevre sustained an admirable composure, and Mr. Sidmouth retreated into a mute gravity, all enjoyment of the party for
themselves
was at an end. It could not be merely that Captain Fielding's disapprobation of their domestic circumstance had inspired such strong dislike, such discomposure of manner; and that
some other
episode lay among the three, I was firmly convinced.

But all my idle thoughts must be deferred for social necessity, though Mr. Sidmouth
would
place himself at my right hand once we had followed the Honourable Barnewalls to the dinner table, utterly confounding the slower Captain Fielding, whose game leg in this instance proved a decided encumbrance. Mademoiselle LeFevre, I observed, was safely seated between my father and Mr. Armstrong (whom I suspected to be quite deaf); and so the gallant Captain had no choice but to place himself between Miss Lucy Armstrong and my mother, at the far end of the table where Miss Crawford held sway. I found myself breathing a sigh of relief.

“And so, Mrs. Austen, I find that your dear child has been torn from the maternal bosom,” Miss Crawford declared, in a very loud voice indeed, so that her words travelled the length of the table. “I
do
hope that you shall be blest with another sight of her. How you can find
any
enjoyment in Lyme, with the constant concern for Miss Austen's health that must daily plague you, I cannot think.” The officious woman appeared insensible of the start her words gave my poor mother, and swept on in an ill-considered tide.

“How melancholy one's thoughts, in parting from a child in decline! What terrors, what palpitations! I am sure that if I had been blest with a daughter of my own— had Fortune proved kinder—I could never have suffered her to be taken from
me
in such a parlous state. I should sooner have thrown myself beneath the carriage wheels, than submitted to a like parting!”

My mother's looks were very nearly apoplectic, as though she waited
now
only for poor Cassandra to be brought into the room, a cold and lifeless form, in retribution for her parents’ heedlessness; and so I hastened to interject some reason to the scene.

“We were so fortunate as to have very good news of my sister only a few days ago, Miss Crawford, and from Mr. Crawford himself,” I said, leaning towards the nether end of the table. “I wonder he did not tell you of it? He met with my brother, Mr. Austen, and his party in the very midst of Weymouth, just after the embarkation of the Royal Family, which I understand my sister failed to witness, being preoccupied with the finery in a neighbouring shop window.”

“Aye, so he told me,” Miss Crawford said, nodding sagely. “It is ever such absence of mind, such regard for the smallest detail, that will herald a rapid decline. My own Mr. Filch was prone to spending hours in his hothouse, his poor gaze fixed upon the first tender sprouting of a prize tulip, in his final days. It is as though the soul would cling to the insignificant in life, at the very moment of parting with it. I would adjudge your sister's preoccupation with the shop window a very malignant sign, Miss Austen. Very malignant.”

Poor Lucy Armstrong was sunk in a misery of mortification, her cheeks flushed and her eyes upon her soup; her mother, happily, was engrossed in discussing horse-racing with Mrs. Barnewall, and those two ladies appeared to have heard nothing of what Miss Crawford had said. My mother, on the other hand, was completely devoid of animation; and I knew her to be suffering from terrors of the acutest kind.

“And what of my absorption in fossils, Augusta?” Mr. Crawford interjected impatiendy. “Do you but wait for me to fall dead in the pit, the very victim of your worst predictions? It is utter nonsense!”

“So you may say, Cholmondeley, but time shall prove the right of it.”

“Undoubtedly,” Mr. Sidmouth drily replied, “for in the long run, we shall all of us be dead.”

“Hear, hear,” my father said quietly from his place by Seraphine, and devoted himself to the soup, which was admirably made.

“Miss Jane Austen,” Miss Crawford continued, in an imperious tone, “may I be so bold as to enquire whether you are a needle woman?”

The question was so very unexpected, coming as it did on the heels of an altogether different topic, that I may perhaps be forgiven for starting, and letting fall my soup spoon.

“There, I have put the girl out of countenance. I suppose she never learnt.” The old termagant could barely suppress a smile of triumph.

“Indeed, Miss Crawford/’ my mother broke in, with a look of mortification down the length of the table, “I think I may assure you that Jane is as pretty a hand with the needle as may be. She has the fashioning of all her sister's clothes.”

‘Then it should be as nothing to construct a few items for the St. Michael's Ladies Auxiliary,” Miss Crawford replied, without hesitation. “We are collecting a contribution from all of Lyme's ladies, and should count ourselves honoured to include
yours,
Miss Austen.”

“Now, Augusta—” Mr. Crawford interjected, with something less than his usual good humour.

“I am sure Miss Austen cannot mind it. It is a trifling enough affair, for a girl of
her
age, and as yet unburdened with the dudes of a married woman.”

It was the Honourable Mathew who served as my deliverer. Having heard nothing of what had passed, he emerged of a sudden from a brown study, and leaned across the napery to prod Mr. Sidmouth with a blunt forefinger.

“I say, Sidmouth, that was a demmed fine horse you rode the other day. Confounded the demmed dragoons in the handiest fashion. How much would you take for ‘im?”

A sudden silence gripped the table, marked only by the slightest cough from Captain Fielding. If a cough could be declared
ironic,
then his was the very soul of irony. I could not lift my eyes to observe his countenance, nor yet Mr. Sidmouth's; but the air between us seemed to crackle with contained emotion. Did I imagine it, or had the master of High Down been paralysed at a word?

Then Mr. Sidmouth raised his serviette delicately to his lips, and the tension seemed to ease. “I should not have believed you abroad at such an hour, Barnewall. I trust you were merely returning
home
from the previous evening's entertainments, rather than already about your business for the day.”

Mathew Barnewall threw back his head in raucous laughter, to the evident disgust of Miss Crawford. “Capital!” he cried, slapping his thigh with the greatest enjoyment. “You have the right of it, sir. But it makes no odds. What about the horse, man?”

“I should not part with him for a kingdom.”

“You drive a hard bargain. I like that in a fellow.” Barnewall glanced roguishly down the table to his wife, who regarded Mr. Sidmouth with an indulgent smile, as though he were a very small boy. “Perhaps I shall have Evie work upon you, eh? The woman can charm a cock out of a henhouse.”

“I fear even such a talent would prove of little use in the present case, Barnewall,” Captain Fielding interposed drily. “Sidmouth holds tenaciously to his dearest possessions. There is no wrath more powerful a man may excite, than to wrest from him that which he prizes.” The two men exchanged a long look, and that the Captain spoke of far more than Sidmouth's horse, I felt convinced.

But it was Mr. Sidmouth who dropt his eyes first, seeming absorbed in the fork he turned in his hand. “Though Mrs. Barnewall may claim a stupendous advantage over poultry, and I
am
given to crowing on occasion, I beg to consider myself as anything but fowl,” he said with a slight smile. “The horse is not for sale.” With that, he turned away from the Honourable Mathew, as though the conversation were at an end, and bent his dark glance upon my countenance; but Barnewall was not so easily put aside.

“Come, come, Sidmouth! Having bested the dragoons at their own game, you cannot wish to engage them further! One would think you intended a swift escape from the country, and would keep the stallion at the ready!”

“And what do
you
intend for Satan?” Mr. Sidmouth enquired levelly—halting the table at the very mention of the horse's evil name.

Mr. Barnewall hesitated, and looked about the dining-room, some of the wind drooping from his sails. “By Jove,” he muttered, “I hadn't thought to buy a horse with such an ill-made handle. Might bring all the wrath of God upon the house.”

“He intends to race him,” Mrs. Barnewall said briskly in the continued quiet. “You know, Sidmouth, that Mathew is a formidable owner of a string of nags. He is quite the prop of the Jockey Club at home—to the detriment of our funds. He has excessive plans for Kingsland, does he ever come into his inheritance—and does he fail to squander it before he may truly lay his claim.”

“I gather from your lady's words, Barnewall, that she fears your liberality, and should rather I
kept
my horse in Lyme, than sold him to you; and so much for her celebrated charm. We may consider the matter as setded.”

“Now, now,” Mathew Barnewall exclaimed, his scowl for his wife giving way to a fatuous smile, “don't force me to rob your stables!”

“If you did, my dear sir, it should avail you nothing,” Mr. Crawford broke in, “for Sidmouth so prizes his horseflesh, he has undertaken to mark them in a singular manner. You should not get far without discovery.”

“Do you brand them, then?” Mrs. Barnewall enquired, her nose wrinkling with repugnance.

“Never,” Sidmouth replied.

“He has his initials cut into their shoes!” Mr. Crawford declared, with a delighted slap upon his mahogany table. “No thief could fail to leave a telling trail behind him.”

“Shoes?” my mother enquired, only now, it seemed, emerging from the fog of suspense into which Miss Crawford's words regarding my sister's fate had thrown her. “But cannot one merely exchange one shoe for another?”

I knew her immediately to have mistaken the
master's
shoe for his horse's, and to have stumbled upon a point all unawares; for Mr. Crawford seized at her apparent perspicacity with the greatest delight. Assuredly, madam, and a clever ruse it would be—but even did the thief know beforehand of the shoes’ mark, he could do nothing without a blacksmith; and horse and thief should undoubtedly be apprehended while still bent upon the forge. I consider it a capital idea.”

This response so confounded my mother's understanding, as to silence her for the moment; and the conversation turned to other things.

MY MASTERY OF CURIOSITY WAS REWARDED AS SUCH MASTERY ONLY
rarely is—with Mr. Sidmouth's broaching the subject of his cousin in a very little while. The ladies had retired to the drawing-room, and at the gentlemen's following soon thereafter, bearing the scents of tobacco and excellent port about their persons, Mr. Sidmouth joined me before Captain Fielding should have the chance. Miss Armstrong had seated herself at the pianoforte, and Mademoiselle LeFevre stood at her side, her voice swelling with Italian airs; so captivatingly beautiful, and so clearly freed of all the evening's anxiety, as to make the heart sing with her.

“Your cousin is very lovely, Mr. Sidmouth,” I ventured, with a glance at his brooding face.

He was engaged in studying Seraphine intently, and seemed almost not to have heard me. After an instant, his dark eyes turned back to mine, and he said abrupdy, “I would ask of you a favour, Miss Austen. My cousin is too much alone. You will have guessed that she labours under the effect of some sad business; discretion, and a care for her delicacy, forbid me from saying more. I would ask only that you consider her gende nature, her evident goodness—the fragility of her understanding—” At this he halted, for the first time in our acquaintance, completely tongue-tied.

“I do not pretend to comprehend your cousin's place in your household,” I began slowly, “nor her entire relationship to yourself. But if I take your meaning correctly, you wish me to visit Mademoiselle LeFevre—to undertake a certain … intimacy.”

Sidmouth had flushed at my initial words, and appeared in an agony of indecision as to his response; but now he bowed his head and touched a hand to his brow. “I cannot convince you of what you have no reason to believe,” he said quietly. “Rumour and calumny are accepted of themselves, and a simpler goodness hardly to be credited. I know to whom I owe your hesitancy. But for Seraphine's sake I will say nothing of this here; I will merely trust in your goodness. You cannot turn away from a soul in suffering—your every aspect declares you to be a woman of sympathy and such warmth as is rarely met with.”

Seraphine's liquid voice rose in the final tremulous notes of an aria—the cry, no doubt, of a woman betrayed and dying, as with all such songs—and fell away into silence. There was a moment's indrawn breath, a hesitation, and then a sudden patter of applauding hands.

“I shall call upon your cousin as soon as ever I may, Mr. Sidmouth,” I said; and received a fervent look of gratitude in return.

I HAD OCCASION TO CONSIDER ALL THAT PASSED SATURDAY E'EN, while sitting this morning with my mother in the little breakfast parlour of Wings cottage—which I must confess is decidedly shabby, when exposed to the strong sunlight of morning.

“I
still
cannot comprehend, my dear, why Mr. Sidmouth should take his shoes to the blacksmith,” my mother was saying to the Reverend Austen, whose head
would
droop over his volume of
Fordyce's Sermons
—when Jenny, our housemaid, threw open the door. Her fresh young face bore a look of alarm, and she twisted her apron in anxious hands.

“Miss Crawford, madam, and Miss Armstrong,” she said, bobbing swiftly as the black-clad form of Augusta Crawford swept by her.

My mother stood up abrupdy, her serviette dropping to the floor, while my father snorted to wakefulness and struggled to his feet A chorus of salutation all around, which afforded me just enough time to notice the marks of weeping upon Lucy Armstrong's face; and then the ladies seated themselves without further ado.