The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.

—Marx, Zur Judenfrage (1844)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to thank the following for permission to quote: the Hardy Estate and Macmillan & Co. Ltd. for extracts from The Col­lected Poems of Thomas Hardy; the Oxford University Press for quotations from G. M. Young’s Victorian Essays and Portrait of an Age; Mr. Martin Gardner and the Penguin Press for a slightly com­pres­sed quotation from The Ambidextrous Universe; and finally Mr. E. Royston Pike and Allen & Unwin Ltd . . . not only for permission to quote directly but also for three contemporary extracts and countless minor details I have “stolen” from his Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age (pub­lished in the United States by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc . . . under the title Golden Times: Human Documents of the Victorian Age). I recommend this brilliant antho­logy most warmly to any reader who would like to know more of the reality behind my fiction.

—J. F.

Stretching eyes west Over the sea, Wind foul or fair, Always stood she Prospect-impressed; Solely out there Did her gaze rest, Never elsewhere Seemed charm to be.

—Hardy, “The Riddle”

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay— Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched southwestern leg—and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabili­ties about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

The Cobb has invited what familiarity breeds for at least seven hundred years, and the real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old gray wall that flexes itself against the sea. In fact, since it lies well apart from the main town, a tiny Piraeus to a microscopic Athens, they seem almost to turn their backs on it. Certainly it has cost them enough in repairs through the centuries to justify a certain resentment. But to a less tax-paying, or more discriminating, eye it is quite simply the most beautiful sea rampart on the south coast of England. And not only because it is, as the guidebooks say, redolent of seven hundred years of English history, because ships sailed to meet the Armada from it, because Monmouth landed beside it . . . but finally because it is a superb fragment of folk art.

Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass. I exaggerate? Perhaps, but I can be put to the test, for the Cobb has changed very little since the year of which I write; though the town of Lyme has, and the test is not fair if you look back towards land.

However, if you had turned northward and landward in 1867, as the man that day did, your prospect would have been harmonious. A picturesque congeries of some dozen or so houses and a small boatyard—in which, arklike on its stocks, sat the thorax of a lugger— huddled at where the Cobb runs back to land. Half a mile to the east lay, across sloping meadows, the thatched and slated roofs of Lyme itself; a town that had its heyday in the Middle Ages and has been declining ever since. To the west somber gray cliffs, known locally as Ware Cleeves, rose steeply from the shingled beach where Monmouth entered upon his idiocy. Above them and beyond, stepped massively inland, climbed further cliffs masked by dense woods. It is in this aspect that the Cobb seems most a last bulwark—against all that wild eroding coast to the west. There too I can be put to proof. No house lay visibly then or, beyond a brief misery of beach huts, lies today in that direction.

The local spy—and there was one—might thus have deduced that these two were strangers, people of some taste, and not to be denied their enjoyment of the Cobb by a mere harsh wind. On the other hand he might, focusing his tele­scope more closely, have suspected that a mutual solitude interested them rather more than maritime architecture; and he would most certainly have remarked that they were peo­ple of a very superior taste as regards their outward appear­ance.

The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness—and shortness, since two white ankles could be seen beneath the rich green coat and above the black boots that delicately trod the revetment; and perched over the netted chignon, one of the impertinent little flat “pork-pie” hats with a delicate tuft of egret plumes at the side—a millinery style that the resident ladies of Lyme would not dare to wear for at least another year; while the taller man, impeccably in a light gray, with his top hat held in his free hand, had severely reduced his dundrearies, which the arbiters of the best English male fashion had declared a shade vulgar—that is, risible to the foreigner—a year or two previously. The colors of the young lady’s clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion.

But where the telescopist would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber, curving mole. It stood right at the seawardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel upended as a bollard. Its clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood mo­tionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living me­morial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.

In that year (1851) there were some 8,155,000 females of the age of ten upwards in the British population, as compared with 7,600,000 males. Already it will be clear that if the accepted destiny of the Victorian girl was to become a wife and mother, it was unlikely that there would be enough men to go round.

—E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age

I’ll spread sail of silver and I’ll steer towards the sun, I’ll spread sail of silver and I’ll steer towards the sun, And my false love will weep, and ray false love will weep, And my false love will weep for me after I’m gone.

—West-country folksong: “As Sylvie Was Walking”

“My dear Tina, we have paid our homage to Neptune. He will forgive us if we now turn our backs on him.”

“You are not very galant.”

“What does that signify, pray?”

“I should have thought you might have wished to prolong an opportunity to hold my arm without impropriety.”

“How delicate we’ve become.”

“We are not in London now.”

“At the North Pole, if I’m not mistaken.”

“I wish to walk to the end.”

And so the man, with a dry look of despair, as if it might be his last, towards land, turned again, and the couple continued down the Cobb.

“And I wish to hear what passed between you and Papa last Thursday.”

“Your aunt has already extracted every detail of that pleasant evening from me.”

The girl stopped, and looked him in the eyes.

“Charles! Now Charles, you may be as dry a stick as you like with everyone else. But you must not be stick-y with me.”

“Then how, dear girl, are we ever to be glued together in holy matrimony?”

“And you will keep your low humor for your club.” She primly made him walk on. “I have had a letter.”

“Ah. I feared you might. From Mama?”

“I know that something happened . . . over the port.”

They walked on a few paces before he answered; for a moment Charles seemed inclined to be serious, but then changed his mind.

“I confess your worthy father and I had a small philosoph­ical disagreement.”

“That is very wicked of you.”

“I meant it to be very honest of me.”

“And what was the subject of your conversation?”

“Your father ventured the opinion that Mr. Darwin should be exhibited in a cage in the zoological gardens. In the monkey house. I tried to explain some of the scientific arguments behind the Darwinian position. I was unsuccessful. Et voila tout.”

“How could you—when you know Papa’s views!”

“I was most respectful.”

“Which means you were most hateful.”

“He did say that he would not let his daughter marry a man who considered his grandfather to be an ape. But I think on reflection he will recall that in my case it was a titled ape.”

She looked at him then as they walked, and moved her head in a curious sliding sideways turn away; a characteristic gesture when she wanted to show concern—in this case, over what had been really the greatest obstacle in her view to their having become betrothed. Her father was a very rich man; but her grandfather had been a draper, and Charles’s had been a baronet. He smiled and pressed the gloved hand that was hooked lightly to his left arm.

“Dearest, we have settled that between us. It is perfectly proper that you should be afraid of your father. But I am not marrying him. And you forget that I’m a scientist. I have written a monograph, so I must be. And if you smile like that, I shall devote all my time to the fossils and none to you.”

“I am not disposed to be jealous of the fossils.” She left an artful pause. “Since you’ve been walking on them now for at least a minute—and haven’t even deigned to remark them.”

He glanced sharply down, and as abruptly kneeled. Por­tions of the Cobb are paved with fossil-bearing stone.

“By jove, look at this. Certhidium portlandicum. This stone must come from the oolite at Portland.”

“In whose quarries I shall condemn you to work in perpe­tuity—if you don’t get to your feet at once.” He obeyed her with a smile. “Now, am I not kind to bring you here? And look.” She led him to the side of the rampart, where a line of flat stones inserted sideways into the wall served as rough steps down to a lower walk. “These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persua­sion.”

“How romantic.”

“Gentlemen were romantic . . . then.”

“And are scientific now? Shall we make the perilous de­scent?”

“On the way back.”

Once again they walked on. It was only then that he noticed, or at least realized the sex of, the figure at the end.

“Good heavens, I took that to be a fisherman. But isn’t it a woman?”

Ernestina peered—her gray, her very pretty eyes, were shortsighted, and all she could see was a dark shape.

“Is she young?”

“It’s too far to tell.”

“But I can guess who it is. It must be poor Tragedy.”

“Tragedy?”

“A nickname. One of her nicknames.”

“And what are the others?”

“The fishermen have a gross name for her.”

“My dear Tina, you can surely—”

“They call her the French Lieutenant’s . . . Woman.”

“Indeed. And is she so ostracized that she has to spend her days out here?”

“She is . . . a little mad. Let us turn. I don’t like to go near her.”

They stopped. He stared at the black figure.

“But I’m intrigued. Who is this French lieutenant?”

“A man she is said to have . . .”

“Fallen in love with?”

“Worse than that.”

“And he abandoned her? There is a child?” “No. I think no child. It is all gossip.” “But what is she doing there?” “They say she waits for him to return.” “But . . . does no one care for her?”

“She is a servant of some kind to old Mrs. Poulteney. She is never to be seen when we visit. But she lives there. Please let us turn back. I did not see her.” But he smiled.

“If she springs on you I shall defend you and prove my poor gallantry. Come.”

So they went closer to the figure by the cannon bollard. She had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black coat—which was bizarre, more like a man’s riding coat than any woman’s coat that had been in fashion those past forty years. She too was a stranger to the crinoline; but it was equally plain that that was out of oblivion, not knowledge of the latest London taste. Charles made some trite and loud remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. The couple moved to where they could see her face in profile; and how her stare was aimed like a rifle at the farthest horizon. There came a stronger gust of wind, one that obliged Charles to put his arm round Ernestina’s waist to support her, and obliged the woman to cling more firmly to the bollard. Without quite knowing why, perhaps to show Ernestina how to say boo to a goose, he stepped forward as soon as the wind allowed.

“My good woman, we can’t see you here without being alarmed for your safety. A stronger squall—”

She turned to look at him—or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favored feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face, like Ernestina’s. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period’s standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.

Again and again, afterwards, Charles thought of that look as a lance; and to think so is of course not merely to de­scribe an object but the effect it has. He felt himself in that brief instant an unjust enemy; both pierced and deservedly diminished.

The woman said nothing. Her look back lasted two or three seconds at most; then she resumed her stare to the south. Ernestina plucked Charles’s sleeve, and he turned away, with a shrug and a smile at her. When they were nearer land he said, “I wish you hadn’t told me the sordid facts. That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.”

She teased him then: the scientist, the despiser of novels.

But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organization of every living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, though each being assuredly is well fitted for its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct re­lations to present habits of life.

—Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)

Of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in.

—G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age

Back in his rooms at the White Lion after lunch Charles stared at his face in the mirror. His thoughts were too vague to be described. But they comprehended mysterious elements; a sentiment of obscure defeat not in any way related to the incident on the Cobb, but to certain trivial things he had said at Aunt Tranter’s lunch, to certain characteristic evasions he had made; to whether his interest in paleontology was a sufficient use for his natural abilities; to whether Ernestina would ever really understand him as well as he understood her; to a general sentiment of dislocated purpose originating perhaps in no more—as he finally concluded—than the threat of a long and now wet afternoon to pass. After all, it was only 1867. He was only thirty-two years old. And he had always asked life too many questions.

Though Charles liked to think of himself as a scientific young man and would probably not have been too surprised had news reached him out of the future of the airplane, the jet engine, television, radar: what would have astounded him was the changed attitude to time itself. The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things—as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning flash. But for Charles, and for almost all his contemporaries and social peers, the time signature over existence was firmly adagio. The problem was not fitting in all that one wanted to do, but spinning out what one did to occupy the vast colonnades of leisure available.

One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is de­structive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil boredom. It is true that the wave of revolutions in 1848, the memory of the now extinct Chartists, stood like a mountainous shadow behind the period; but to many—and to Charles—the most significant thing about those distant rumblings had been their failure to erupt. The ‘sixties had been indisputably prosper­ous; an affluence had come to the artisanate and even to the laboring classes that made the possibility of revolution recede, at least in Great Britain, almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library; and whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later indiscriminate consumption, Charles would almost certainly not have believed you—and even though, in only six months from this March of 1867, the first volume of Kapital was to appear in Hamburg.

There were, too, countless personal reasons why Charles was unfitted for the agreeable role of pessimist. His grandfa­ther the baronet had fallen into the second of the two great categories of English country squires: claret-swilling fox hunters and scholarly collectors of everything under the sun. He had collected books principally; but in his latter years had devoted a deal of his money and much more of his family’s patience to the excavation of the harmless hummocks of earth that pimpled his three thousand Wiltshire acres. Crom­lechs and menhirs, flint implements and neolithic graves, he pursued them ruthlessly; and his elder son pursued the portable trophies just as ruthlessly out of the house when he came into his inheritance. But heaven had punished this son, or blessed him, by seeing that he never married. The old man’s younger son, Charles’s father, was left well provided for, both in land and money.

His had been a life with only one tragedy—the simultane­ous death of his young wife and the stillborn child who would have been a sister to the one-year-old Charles. But he swallowed his grief. He lavished if not great affection, at least a series of tutors and drill sergeants on his son, whom on the whole he liked only slightly less than himself. He sold his portion of land, invested shrewdly in railway stock and un-shrewdly at the gambling-tables (he went to Almack’s rather than to the Almighty for consolation), in short lived more as if he had been born in 1702 than 1802, lived very largely for pleasure . . . and died very largely of it in 1856. Charles was thus his only heir; heir not only to his father’s diminished fortune—the baccarat had in the end had its revenge on the railway boom—but eventually to his uncle’s very considerable one. It was true that in 1867 the uncle showed, in spite of a comprehensive reversion to the claret, no sign of dying.

Charles liked him, and his uncle liked Charles. But this was by no means always apparent in their relationship. Though he conceded enough to sport to shoot partridge and pheasant when called upon to do so, Charles adamantly refused to hunt the fox. He did not care that the prey was uneatable, but he abhorred the unspeakability of the hunters. There was worse: he had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman’s pastime except in the Swiss Alps. He had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but he had the born naturalist’s hatred of not being able to observe at close range and at leisure. However, fortune had been with him. One autumn day, many years before, he had shot at a very strange bird that ran from the border of one of his uncle’s wheatfields. When he discovered what he had shot, and its rarity, he was vaguely angry with himself, for this was one of the last Great Bustards shot on Salisbury Plain. But his uncle was delighted. The bird was stuffed, and forever after stared beadily, like an octoroon turkey, out of its glass case in the drawing room at Winsyatt.

His uncle bored the visiting gentry interminably with the story of how the deed had been done; and whenever he felt inclined to disinherit—a subject which in itself made him go purple, since the estate was in tail male—he would recover his avuncular kindness of heart by standing and staring at Charles’s immortal bustard. For Charles had faults. He did not always write once a week; and he had a sinister fondness for spending the afternoons at Winsyatt in the library, a room his uncle seldom if ever used.

He had had graver faults than these, however. At Cam­bridge, having duly crammed his classics and subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, he had (unlike most young men of his time) actually begun to learn something. But in his second year there he had drifted into a bad set and ended up, one foggy night in London, in carnal possession of a naked girl. He rushed from her plump Cockney arms into those of the Church, horrifying his father one day shortly afterwards by announcing that he wished to take Holy Orders. There was only one answer to a crisis of this magnitude: the wicked youth was dispatched to Paris. There his tarnished virginity was soon blackened out of recognition; but so, as his father had hoped, was his intended marriage with the Church. Charles saw what stood behind the seductive appeal of the Oxford Movement—Roman Catholicism propria terra. He declined to fritter his negative but comfortable English soul— one part irony to one part convention—on incense and papal infallibility. When he returned to London he fingered and skimmed his way through a dozen religious theories of the time, but emerged in the clear (voyant trop pour nier, et trop pen pour s’assurer) a healthy agnostic.[1] What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible; a hundred years earlier he would have been a deist, perhaps even a pantheist. In company he would go to morning service of a Sunday; but on his own, he rarely did.

He returned from his six months in the City of Sin in 1856. His father had died three months later. The big house in Belgravia was let, and Charles installed himself in a smaller establishment in Kensington, more suitable to a young bache­lor. There he was looked after by a manservant, a cook and two maids, staff of almost eccentric modesty for one of his connections and wealth. But he was happy there, and besides, he spent a great deal of time traveling. He contributed one or two essays on his journeys in remoter places to the fashion­able magazines; indeed an enterprising publisher asked him to write a book after the nine months he spent in Portugal, but there seemed to Charles something rather infra dig.—and something decidedly too much like hard work and sustained concentration—in authorship. He toyed with the idea, and dropped it. Indeed toying with ideas was his chief occupation during his third decade.

Yet he was not, adrift in the slow entire of Victorian time, essentially a frivolous young man. A chance meeting with someone who knew of his grandfather’s mania made him realize that it was only in the family that the old man’s endless days of supervising bewildered gangs of digging rus­tics were regarded as a joke. Others remembered Sir Charles Smithson as a pioneer of the archaeology of pre-Roman Britain; objects from his banished collection had been grate­fully housed by the British Museum. And slowly Charles realized that he was in temperament nearer to his grandfather than to either of his grandfather’s sons. During the last three years he had become increasingly interested in paleontology; that, he had decided, was his field. He began to frequent the conversazioni of the Geological Society. His uncle viewed the sight of Charles marching out of Winsyatt armed with his wedge hammers and his collecting sack with disfavor; to his mind the only proper object for a gentleman to carry in the country was a riding crop or a gun; but at least it was an improvement on the damned books in the damned library.

However, there was yet one more lack of interest in Charles that pleased his uncle even less. Yellow ribbons and daffodils, the insignia of the Liberal Party, were anathema at Winsyatt; the old man was the most azure of Tories—and had interest. But Charles politely refused all attempts to get him to stand for Parliament. He declared himself without political conviction. In secret he rather admired Gladstone; but at Winsyatt Gladstone was the arch-traitor, the unmen­tionable. Thus family respect and social laziness conveniently closed what would have been a natural career for him.

Laziness was, I am afraid, Charles’s distinguishing trait. Like many of his contemporaries he sensed that the earlier self-responsibility of the century was turning into self-importance: that what drove the new Britain was increasing­ly a desire to seem respectable, in place of the desire to do good for good’s sake. He knew he was overfastidious. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space?

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence. He had, in short, all the Byronic ennui with neither of the Byronic outlets: genius and adultery.

But though death may be delayed, as mothers with marriageable daughters have been known to foresee, it kindly always comes in the end. Even if Charles had not had the further prospects he did, he was an interesting young man. His travels abroad had regrettably rubbed away some of that patina of profound humorlessness (called by the Victorian earnestness, moral rectitude, probity, and a thousand other misleading names) that one really required of a proper English gentleman of the time. There was outwardly a cer­tain cynicism about him, a sure symptom of an inherent moral decay; but he never entered society without being ogled by the mamas, clapped on the back by the papas and simpered at by the girls. Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading them, and their ambitious parents, on. Thus he had gained a reputation for aloofness and coldness, a not unmerited reward for the neat way—by the time he was thirty he was as good as a polecat at the business—he would sniff the bait and then turn his tail on the hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps that endangered his path.

His uncle often took him to task on the matter; but as Charles was quick to point out, he was using damp powder. The old man would grumble.

“I never found the right woman.”

“Nonsense. You never looked for her.”

“Indeed I did. When I was your age . . .”

“You lived for your hounds and the partridge season.”

The old fellow would stare gloomily at his claret. He did not really regret having no wife; but he bitterly lacked not having children to buy ponies and guns for. He saw his way of life sinking without trace.

“I was blind. Blind.”

“My dear uncle, I have excellent eyesight. Console your­self. I too have been looking for the right girl. And I have not found her.”

What’s done, is what remains! Ah, blessed they Who leave completed tasks of love to stay And answer mutely for them, being dead, Life was not purposeless, though Life be fled.

—Mrs. Norton, The Lady of La Garaye (1863)

Most British families of the middle and upper classes lived above their own cesspool . . .

—E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian Golden Age

The basement kitchen of Mrs. Poulteney’s large Regency house, which stood, an elegantly clear simile of her social status, in a commanding position on one of the steep hills behind Lyme Regis, would no doubt seem today almost in­tolerable for its functional inadequacies. Though the occu­pants in 1867 would have been quite clear as to who was the tyrant in their lives, the more real monster, to an age like ours, would beyond doubt have been the enormous kitchen range that occupied all the inner wall of the large and ill-lit room. It had three fires, all of which had to be stoked twice a day, and riddled twice a day; and since the smooth domestic running of the house depended on it, it could never be allowed to go out. Never mind how much a summer’s day sweltered, never mind that every time there was a south­westerly gale the monster blew black clouds of choking fumes—the remorseless furnaces had to be fed. And then the color of those walls! They cried out for some light shade, for white. Instead they were a bilious leaden green—one that was, unknown to the occupants (and to be fair, to the tyrant upstairs), rich in arsenic. Perhaps it was fortunate that the room was damp and that the monster disseminated so much smoke and grease. At least the deadly dust was laid.

The sergeant major of this Stygian domain was a Mrs.

Fairley, a thin, small person who always wore black, but less for her widowhood than by temperament. Perhaps her sharp melancholy had been induced by the sight of the endless torrent of lesser mortals who cascaded through her kitchen. Butlers, footmen, gardeners, grooms, upstairs maids, down­stairs maids—they took just so much of Mrs. Poulteney’s standards and ways and then they fled. This was very dis­graceful and cowardly of them. But when you are expected to rise at six, to work from half past six to eleven, to work again from half past eleven to half past four, and then again from five to ten, and every day, thus a hundred-hour week, your reserves of grace and courage may not be very large.

A legendary summation of servant feelings had been deliv­ered to Mrs. Poulteney by the last butler but four: “Madam, I should rather spend the rest of my life in the poorhouse than live another week under this roof.” Some gravely doubted whether anyone could actually have dared to say these words to the awesome lady. But the sentiment behind them was understood when the man came down with his bags and claimed that he had.

Exactly how the ill-named Mrs. Fairley herself had stood her mistress so long was one of the local wonders. Most probably it was because she would, had life so fallen out, have been a Mrs. Poulteney on her own account. Her envy kept her there; and also her dark delight in the domestic catastrophes that descended so frequently on the house. In short, both women were incipient sadists; and it was to their advantage to tolerate each other.

Mrs. Poulteney had two obsessions: or two aspects of the same obsession. One was Dirt—though she made some sort of exception of the kitchen, since only the servants lived there—and the other was Immorality. In neither field did anything untoward escape her eagle eye.

She was like some plump vulture, endlessly circling in her endless leisure, and endowed in the first field with a miracu­lous sixth sense as regards dust, fingermarks, insufficiently starched linen, smells, stains, breakages and all the ills that houses are heir to. A gardener would be dismissed for being seen to come into the house with earth on his hands; a butler for having a spot of wine on his stock; a maid for having slut’s wool under her bed.

But the most abominable thing of all was that even outside her house she acknowledged no bounds to her authority. Failure to be seen at church, both at matins and at evensong, on Sunday was tantamount to proof of the worst moral laxity. Heaven help the maid seen out walking, on one of her rare free afternoons—one a month was the reluctant allowance—with a young man. And heaven also help the young man so in love that he tried to approach Marlborough House secretly to keep an assignation: for the gardens were a positive forest of humane man-traps—“humane” in this con­text referring to the fact that the great waiting jaws were untoothed, though quite powerful enough to break a man’s leg. These iron servants were the most cherished by Mrs. Poulteney. Them, she had never dismissed.

There would have been a place in the Gestapo for the lady; she had a way of interrogation that could reduce the sturdiest girls to tears in the first five minutes. In her fashion she was an epitome of all the most crassly arrogant traits of the ascendant British Empire. Her only notion of justice was that she must be right; and her only notion of government was an angry bombardment of the impertinent populace.

Yet among her own class, a very limited circle, she was renowned for her charity. And if you had disputed that repu­tation, your opponents would have produced an incontrovert­ible piece of evidence: had not dear, kind Mrs. Poulteney taken in the French Lieutenant’s Woman? I need hardly add that at the time the dear, kind lady knew only the other, more Grecian, nickname.

This remarkable event had taken place in the spring of 1866, exactly a year before the time of which I write; and it had to do with the great secret of Mrs. Poulteney’s life. It was a very simple secret. She believed in hell.

The vicar of Lyme at that time was a comparatively emancipated man theologically, but he also knew very well on which side his pastoral bread was buttered. He suited Lyme, a traditionally Low Church congregation, very well. He had the knack of a certain fervid eloquence in his sermons; and he kept his church free of crucifixes, images, ornaments and all other signs of the Romish cancer. When Mrs. Poulteney enounced to him her theories of the life to come, he did not argue, for incumbents of not notably fat livings do not argue with rich parishioners. Mrs. Poulteney’s purse was as open to calls from him as it was throttled where her thirteen domestics’ wages were concerned. In the winter (winter also of the fourth great cholera onslaught on Victori­an Britain) of that previous year Mrs. Poulteney had been a little ill, and the vicar had been as frequent a visitor as the doctors who so repeatedly had to assure her that she was suffering from a trivial stomach upset and not the dreaded Oriental killer.

Mrs. Poulteney was not a stupid woman; indeed, she had acuity in practical matters, and her future destination, like all matters pertaining to her comfort, was a highly practical consideration. If she visualized God, He had rather the face of the Duke of Wellington; but His character was more that of a shrewd lawyer, a breed for whom Mrs. Poulteney had much respect. As she lay in her bedroom she reflected on the terrible mathematical doubt that increasingly haunted her; whether the Lord calculated charity by what one had given or by what one could have afforded to give. Here she had better data than the vicar. She had given considerable sums to the church; but she knew they fell far short of the prescribed one-tenth to be parted with by serious candidates for paradise. Certainly she had regulated her will to ensure that the account would be handsomely balanced after her death; but God might not be present at the reading of that document. Furthermore it chanced, while she was ill, that Mrs. Fairley, who read to her from the Bible in the evenings, picked on the parable of the widow’s mite. It had always seemed a grossly unfair parable to Mrs. Poulteney; it now lay in her heart far longer than the enteritis bacilli in her intes­tines. One day, when she was convalescent, she took advan­tage of one of the solicitous vicar’s visits and cautiously examined her conscience. At first he was inclined to dismiss her spiritual worries.

“My dear madam, your feet are on the Rock. The Creator is all-seeing and all-wise. It is not for us to doubt His mercy—or His justice.”

“But supposing He should ask me if my conscience is clear?”

The vicar smiled. “You will reply that it is troubled. And with His infinite compassion He will—”

“But supposing He did not?”

“My dear Mrs. Poulteney, if you speak like this I shall have to reprimand you. We are not to dispute His under­standing.”

There was a silence. With the vicar Mrs. Poulteney felt herself with two people. One was her social inferior, and an inferior who depended on her for many of the pleasures of his table, for a substantial fraction of the running costs of his church and also for the happy performance of his nonliturgical duties among the poor; and the other was the representa­tive of God, before whom she had metaphorically to kneel. So her manner with him took often a bizarre and inconse­quential course. It was de haut en bos one moment, de has en haut the next; and sometimes she contrived both positions all in one sentence.

“If only poor Frederick had not died. He would have advised me.”

“Doubtless. And his advice would have resembled mine. You may rest assured of that. I know he was a Christian. And what I say is sound Christian doctrine.”

“It was a warning. A punishment.”

The vicar gave her a solemn look. “Beware, my dear lady, beware. One does not trespass lightly on Our Maker’s pre­rogative.”

She shifted her ground. Not all the vicars in creation could have justified her husband’s early death to her. It remained between her and God; a mystery like a black opal, that sometimes shone as a solemn omen and sometimes stood as a kind of sum already paid off against the amount of penance she might still owe.

“I have given. But I have not done good deeds.”

“To give is a most excellent deed.”

“I am not like Lady Cotton.”

This abruptly secular descent did not surprise the vicar. He was well aware, from previous references, that Mrs. Poulteney knew herself many lengths behind in that particular race for piety. Lady Cotton, who lived some miles behind Lyme, was famous for her fanatically eleemosynary life. She visited, she presided over a missionary society, she had set up a home for fallen women—true, it was of such repentant severity that most of the beneficiaries of her Magdalen Society scram­bled back down to the pit of iniquity as soon as they could—but Mrs. Poulteney was as ignorant of that as she was of Tragedy’s more vulgar nickname.

The vicar coughed. “Lady Cotton is an example to us all.” This was oil on the flames—as he was perhaps not unaware.

“I should visit.”

“That would be excellent.”

“It is that visiting always so distresses me.” The vicar was unhelpful. “I know it is wicked of me.”

“Come come.”

“Yes. Very wicked.”

A long silence followed, in which the vicar meditated on his dinner, still an hour away, and Mrs. Poulteney on her wickedness. She then came out, with an unaccustomed timidi­ty, with a compromise solution to her dilemma.

“If you knew of some lady, some refined person who has come upon adverse circumstances . . .”

“I am not quite clear what you intend.”

“I wish to take a companion. I have difficulty in writing now. And Mrs. Fairley reads so poorly. I should be happy to provide a home for such a person.”

“Very well. If you so wish it. I will make inquiries.” Mrs. Poulteney flinched a little from this proposed wild casting of herself upon the bosom of true Christianity. “She must be of irreproachable moral character. I have my ser­vants to consider.”

“My dear lady, of course, of course.” The vicar stood. “And preferably without relations. The relations of one’s dependents can become so very tiresome.”

“Rest assured that I shall not present anyone unsuitable.” He pressed her hand and moved towards the door. “And Mr. Forsythe, not too young a person.” He bowed and left the room. But halfway down the stairs to the ground floor, he stopped. He remembered. He reflect­ed. And perhaps an emotion not absolutely unconnected with malice, a product of so many long hours of hypocrisy—or at least a not always complete frankness—at Mrs. Poulteney’s bombazined side, at any rate an impulse made him turn and go back to her drawing room. He stood in the doorway.

“An eligible has occurred to me. Her name is Sarah Woodruff.”

O me, what profits it to put

An idle case? If Death were seen

At first as Death, Love had not been,

Or been in narrowest working shut,

Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

The young people were all wild to see Lyme.

—Jane Austen, Persuasion

Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet. You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time—in Phiz’s work, in John Leech’s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corre­sponding tilt at the corner of her lips—to extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets— that denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to a man like Charles she proved irresisti­ble. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets, the Georginas, Victorias, Albertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at every ball; yet not quite.

When Charles departed from Aunt Tranter’s house in Broad Street to stroll a hundred paces or so down to his hotel, there gravely—are not all declared lovers the world’s fool?—to mount the stairs to his rooms and interrogate his good-looking face in the mirror, Ernestine excused herself and went to her room. She wanted to catch a last glimpse of her betrothed through the lace curtains; and she also wanted to be in the only room in her aunt’s house that she could really tolerate.

Having duly admired the way he walked and especially the manner in which he raised his top hat to Aunt Tranter’s maid, who happened to be out on an errand; and hated him for doing it, because the girl had pert little Dorset peasant eyes and a provokingly pink complexion, and Charles had been strictly forbidden ever to look again at any woman under the age of sixty—a condition Aunt Tranter mercifully escaped by just one year—Ernestina turned back into her room. It had been furnished for her and to her taste, which was emphatically French; as heavy then as the English, but a little more gilt and fanciful. The rest of Aunt Tranter’s house was inexorably, massively, irrefutably in the style of a quar­ter-century before: that is, a museum of objects created in the first fine rejection of all things decadent, light and graceful, and to which the memory or morals of the odious Prinny, George IV, could be attached.

Nobody could dislike Aunt Tranter; even to contemplate being angry with that innocently smiling and talking— especially talking—face was absurd. She had the profound optimism of successful old maids; solitude either sours or teaches self-dependence. Aunt Tranter had begun by making the best of things for herself, and ended by making the best of them for the rest of the world as well.

However, Ernestina did her best to be angry with her; on the impossibility of having dinner at five; on the subject of the funereal furniture that choked the other rooms; on the subject of her aunt’s oversolicitude for her fair name (she would not believe that the bridegroom and bride-to-be might wish to sit alone, and walk out alone); and above all on the subject of Ernestina’s being in Lyme at all.

The poor girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry. Since birth her slightest cough would bring doctors; since puberty her slightest whim sum­moned decorators and dressmakers; and always her slightest frown caused her mama and papa secret hours of self-recrimination. Now this was all very well when it came to new dresses and new wall hangings, but there was one matter upon which all her bouderies and complaints made no im­pression. And that was her health. Her mother and father were convinced she was consumptive. They had only to smell damp in a basement to move house, only to have two days’ rain on a holiday to change districts. Half Harley Street had examined her, and found nothing; she had never had a serious illness in her life; she had none of the lethargy, the chronic weaknesses, of the condition. She could have—or could have if she had ever been allowed to—danced all night; and played, without the slightest ill effect, battledore all the next morning. But she was no more able to shift her doting parents’ fixed idea than a baby to pull down a moun­tain. Had they but been able to see into the future! For Ernestina was to outlive all her generation. She was born in 1846. And she died on the day that Hitler invaded Poland.

An indispensable part of her quite unnecessary regimen was thus her annual stay with her mother’s sister in Lyme. Usually she came to recover from the season; this year she was sent early to gather strength for the marriage. No doubt the Channel breezes did her some good, but she always descended in the carriage to Lyme with the gloom of a prisoner arriving in Siberia. The society of the place was as up-to-date as Aunt Tranter’s lumbering mahogany furniture; and as for the entertainment, to a young lady familiar with the best that London can offer it was worse than nil. So her relation with Aunt Tranter was much more that of a high-spirited child, an English Juliet with her flat-footed nurse, than what one would expect of niece and aunt. Indeed, if Romeo had not mercifully appeared on the scene that previ­ous winter, and promised to share her penal solitude, she would have mutinied; at least, she was almost sure she would have mutinied. Ernestina had certainly a much stronger will of her own than anyone about her had ever allowed for—and more than the age allowed for. But fortunately she had a very proper respect for convention; and she shared with

Charles—it had not been the least part of the first attraction between them—a sense of self-irony. Without this and a sense of humor she would have been a horrid spoiled child; and it was surely the fact that she did often so apostrophize herself (“You horrid spoiled child”) that redeemed her.

In her room that afternoon she unbuttoned her dress and stood before her mirror in her chemise and petticoats. For a few moments she became lost in a highly narcissistic self-contemplation. Her neck and shoulders did her face justice; she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter’s night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked—a dancer, an actress. And then, if you had been watching, you would have seen something very curious. For she suddenly stopped turning and admiring herself in profile; gave an abrupt look up at the ceiling. Her lips moved. And she hastily opened one of the wardrobes and drew on a peignoir.

For what had crossed her mind—a corner of her bed having chanced, as she pirouetted, to catch her eye in the mirror—was a sexual thought: an imagining, a kind of dimly glimpsed Laocoon embrace of naked limbs. It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny all that gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her mind.

Thus she had evolved a kind of private commandment— those inaudible words were simply “I must not”—whenever the physical female implications of her body, sexual, men­strual, parturitional, tried to force an entry into her con­sciousness. But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness. Ernestina wanted a husband, wanted Charles to be that husband, wanted children; but the payment she vaguely divined she would have to make for them seemed excessive.

She sometimes wondered why God had permitted such a bestial version of Duty to spoil such an innocent longing. Most women of her period felt the same; so did most men; and it is no wonder that duty has become such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian age—or for that mat­ter, such a wet blanket in our own.[2]

Having quelled the wolves Ernestina went to her dressing table, unlocked a drawer and there pulled out her diary, in black morocco with a gold clasp. From another drawer she took a hidden key and unlocked the book. She turned imme­diately to the back page. There she had written out, on the day of her betrothal to Charles, the dates of all the months and days that lay between it and her marriage. Neat lines were drawn already through two months; some ninety num­bers remained; and now Ernestina took the ivory-topped pencil from the top of the diary and struck through March 26th. It still had nine hours to run, but she habitually allowed herself this little cheat. Then she turned to the front of the book, or nearly to the front, because the book had been a Christmas present. Some fifteen pages in, pages of close handwriting, there came a blank, upon which she had pressed a sprig of jasmine. She stared at it a moment, then bent to smell it. Her loosened hair fell over the page, and she closed her eyes to see if once again she could summon up the most delicious, the day she had thought she would die of joy, had cried endlessly, the ineffable . . .

But she heard Aunt Tranter’s feet on the stairs, hastily put the book away, and began to comb her lithe brown hair.

Ah Maud, you milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.

—Tennyson, Maud (1855)

Mrs. Poulteney’s face, that afternoon when the vicar made his return and announcement, expressed a notable ignorance. And with ladies of her kind, an unsuccessful appeal to knowl­edge is more often than not a successful appeal to disappro­val. Her face was admirably suited to the latter sentiment; it had eyes that were not Tennyson’s “homes of silent prayer” at all, and lower cheeks, almost dewlaps, that pinched the lips together in condign rejection of all that threatened her two life principles: the one being (I will borrow Treitschke’s sarcastic formulation) that “Civilization is Soap” and the other, “Respectability is what does not give me offense.” She bore some resemblance to a white Pekinese; to be exact, to a stuffed Pekinese, since she carried concealed in her bosom a small bag of camphor as a prophylactic against cholera . . . so that where she was, was always also a delicate emanation of mothballs.

“I do not know her.”

The vicar felt snubbed; and wondered what would have happened had the Good Samaritan come upon Mrs. Poulteney instead of the poor traveler.

“I did not suppose you would. She is a Charmouth girl.”

“A girl?”

“That is, I am not quite sure of her age, a woman, a lady of some thirty years of age. Perhaps more. I would not like to hazard a guess.” The vicar was conscious that he was making a poor start for the absent defendant. “But a most distressing case. Most deserving of your charity.”

“Has she an education?”

“Yes indeed. She was trained to be a governess. She was a governess.”

“And what is she now?”

“I believe she is without employment.”

“Why?”

“That is a long story.”

“I should certainly wish to hear it before proceeding.”

So the vicar sat down again, and told her what he knew, or some (for in his brave attempt to save Mrs. Poulteney’s soul, he decided to endanger his own) of what he knew, of Sarah Woodruff.

“The girl’s father was a tenant of Lord Meriton’s, near Beaminster. A farmer merely, but a man of excellent princi­ples and highly respected in that neighborhood. He most wisely provided the girl with a better education than one would expect.”

“He is deceased?”

“Some several years ago. The girl became a governess to Captain John Talbot’s family at Charmouth.”

“Will he give a letter of reference?”

“My dear Mrs. Poulteney, we are discussing, if I under­stood our earlier conversation aright, an object of charity, not an object of employment.” She bobbed, the nearest acknowledgment to an apology she had ever been known to muster. “No doubt such a letter can be obtained. She left his home at her own request. What happened was this. You will recall the French barque—I think she hailed from Saint Malo—that was driven ashore under Stonebarrow in the dreadful gale of last December? And you will no doubt recall that three of the crew were saved and were taken in by the people of Charmouth? Two were simple sailors. One, I un­derstand, was the lieutenant of the vessel. His leg had been crushed at the first impact, but he clung to a spar and was washed ashore. You must surely have read of this.”

“Very probably. I do not like the French.”

“Captain Talbot, as a naval officer himself, most kindly charged upon his household the care of the . . . foreign officer. He spoke no English. And Miss Woodruff was called upon to interpret and look after his needs.”

“She speaks French?” Mrs. Poulteney’s alarm at this appall­ing disclosure was nearly enough to sink the vicar. But he ended by bowing and smiling urbanely.

“My dear madam, so do most governesses. It is not their fault if the world requires such attainments of them. But to return to the French gentleman. I regret to say that he did not deserve that appellation.”

“Mr. Forsythe!”

She drew herself up, but not too severely, in case she might freeze the poor man into silence.

“I hasten to add that no misconduct took place at Captain Talbot’s. Or indeed, so far as Miss Woodruff is concerned, at any subsequent place or time. I have Mr. Fursey-Harris’s word for that. He knows the circumstances far better than I.” The person referred to was the vicar of Charmouth. “But the Frenchman managed to engage Miss Woodruff’s affec­tions. When his leg was mended he took coach to Weymouth, there, or so it was generally supposed, to find a passage home. Two days after he had gone Miss Woodruff requested Mrs. Talbot, in the most urgent terms, to allow her to leave her post. I am told that Mrs. Talbot tried to extract the woman’s reasons. But without success.”

“And she let her leave without notice?”

The vicar adroitly seized his chance. “I agree—it was most foolish. She should have known better. Had Miss Woodruff been in wiser employ I have no doubt this sad business would not have taken place.” He left a pause for Mrs. Poulteney to grasp the implied compliment. “I will make my story short. Miss Woodruff joined the Frenchman in Weymouth. Her conduct is highly to be reprobated, but I am informed that she lodged with a female cousin.”

“That does not excuse her in my eyes.”

“Assuredly not. But you must remember that she is not a

lady born. The lower classes are not so scrupulous about appearances as ourselves. Furthermore I have omitted to tell you that the Frenchman had plighted his troth. Miss Woodruff went to Weymouth in the belief that she was to marry.”

“But was he not a Catholic?”

Mrs. Poulteney saw herself as a pure Patmos in a raging ocean of popery.

“I am afraid his conduct shows he was without any Chris­tian faith. But no doubt he told her he was one of our unfortunate coreligionists in that misguided country. After some days he returned to France, promising Miss Woodruff that as soon as he had seen his family and provided himself with a new ship—another of his lies was that he was to be promoted captain on his return—he would come back here, to Lyme itself, marry her, and take her away with him. Since then she has waited. It is quite clear that the man was a heartless deceiver. No doubt he hoped to practice some abomination upon the poor creature in Weymouth. And when her strong Christian principles showed him the futility of his purposes, he took ship.”

“And what has happened to her since? Surely Mrs. Talbot did not take her back?”

“Madam, Mrs. Talbot is a somewhat eccentric lady. She offered to do so. But I now come to the sad consequences of my story. Miss Woodruff is not insane. Far from it. She is perfectly able to perform any duties that may be given to her. But she suffers from grave attacks of melancholia. They are doubtless partly attributable to remorse. But also, I fear, to her fixed delusion that the lieutenant is an honorable man and will one day return to her. For that reason she may be frequently seen haunting the sea approaches to our town. Mr. Fursey-Harris himself has earnestly endeavored to show to the woman the hopelessness, not to say the impropriety, of her behavior. Not to put too fine a point upon it, madam, she is slightly crazed.”

There was a silence then. The vicar resigned himself to a pagan god—that of chance. He sensed that Mrs. Poulteney was calculating. Her opinion of herself required her to appear shocked and alarmed at the idea of allowing such a creature into Marlborough House. But there was God to be accounted to.

“She has relatives?”

“I understand not.”

“How has she supported herself since . . . ?”

“Most pitifully. I understand she has been doing a little

needlework. I think Mrs. Tranter has employed her in such work. But she has been living principally on her savings from her previous situation.”

“She has saved, then.”

The vicar breathed again.

“If you take her in, madam, I think she will be truly saved.” He played his trump card. “And perhaps—though it is not for me to judge your conscience—she may in her turn save.”

Mrs. Poulteney suddenly had a dazzling and heavenly vision; it was of Lady Cotton, with her saintly nose out of joint. She frowned and stared at her deep-piled carpet.

“I should like Mr. Fursey-Harris to call.”

And a week later, accompanied by the vicar of Lyme, he called, sipped madeira, and said—and omitted—as his ec­clesiastical colleague had advised. Mrs. Talbot provided an interminable letter of reference, which did more harm than good, since it failed disgracefully to condemn sufficiently the governess’s conduct. One phrase in particular angered Mrs. Poulteney. “Monsieur Varguennes was a person of consider­able charm, and Captain Talbot wishes me to suggest to you that a sailor’s life is not the best school of morals.” Nor did it interest her that Miss Sarah was a “skilled and dutiful teacher” or that “My infants have deeply missed her.” But Mrs. Talbot’s patent laxity of standard and foolish sentimen­tality finally helped Sarah with Mrs. Poulteney; they set her a challenge.

So Sarah came for an interview, accompanied by the vicar. She secretly pleased Mrs. Poulteney from the start, by seeming so cast down, so annihilated by circumstance. It was true that she looked suspiciously what she indeed was— nearer twenty-five than “thirty or perhaps more.” But there was her only too visible sorrow, which showed she was a sinner, and Mrs. Poulteney wanted nothing to do with anyone who did not look very clearly to be in that category. And there was her reserve, which Mrs. Poulteney took upon herself to interpret as a mute gratitude. Above all, with the memory of so many departed domestics behind her, the old lady abhorred impertinence and forwardness, terms synony­mous in her experience with speaking before being spoken to and anticipating her demands, which deprived her of the pleasure of demanding why they had not been anticipated.

Then, at the vicar’s suggestion, she dictated a letter. The handwriting was excellent, the spelling faultless. She set a more cunning test. She passed Sarah her Bible and made her read. Mrs. Poulteney had devoted some thought to the choice of passage; and had been sadly torn between Psalm 119 (“Blessed are the undefiled”) and Psalm 140 (“Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man”). She had finally chosen the former; and listened not only to the reading voice, but also for any fatal sign that the words of the psalmist were not being taken very much to the reader’s heart.

Sarah’s voice was firm, rather deep. It retained traces of a rural accent, but in those days a genteel accent was not the great social requisite it later became. There were men in the House of Lords, dukes even, who still kept traces of the accent of their province; and no one thought any the worse of them. Perhaps it was by contrast with Mrs. Fairley’s uninspired stumbling that the voice first satisfied Mrs. Poulteney. But it charmed her; and so did the demeanor of the girl as she read “O that my ways were directed to keep Thy statutes!”

There remained a brief interrogation.

“Mr. Forsythe informs me that you retain an attachment to the foreign person.”

“I do not wish to speak of it, ma’m.”

Now if any maid had dared to say such a thing to Mrs. Poulteney, the Dies Irae would have followed. But this was spoken openly, without fear, yet respectfully; and for once Mrs. Poulteney let a golden opportunity for bullying pass.

“I will not have French books in my house.”

“I possess none. Nor English, ma’m.”

She possessed none, I may add, because they were all sold; not because she was an early forerunner of the egregious McLuhan.

“You have surely a Bible?”

The girl shook her head. The vicar intervened. “I will attend to that, my dear Mrs. Poulteney.”

“I am told you are constant in your attendance at divine service.”

“Yes, ma’m.”

“Let it remain so. God consoles us in all adversity.”

“I try to share your belief, ma’m.”

Mrs. Poulteney put

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 971