Love and Money Page 6

  “But what an ascendancy she hath gained upon him!” thought Thomas with horror. “And where are Joanna and her child?”

  7

  “ ’Tis a strange chance, Tom, that you seem always to come here when I have sold part of Annotsfield,” said Sir Richard.

  “I came to thank you for the mare,” said Thomas quietly. “You have aged a good deal, Tom, since we robbed a coach together,” said Sir Richard, giving him a shrewd look. “Yes,” said Thomas.

  He might have retorted that his uncle had aged a good deal too, for this was very evident. Sir Richard, though his person was slender and well-shaped as ever, had a haggard and restless look; his fine eyes were bloodshot, his wiry black hair showed threads of grey, a deep frown down the centre of his forehead, a twist of his full lips, marked how an impatient and angry temper grew upon him. He ate very little, drank very much; when his steward brought him papers to sign and he wished for explanations, his pointing forefinger with the heavy emerald ring quite trembled with exasperation. He had returned very late the night before and slept very late this morning; now in a handsome gown of purple brocade edged with fur he lounged by the fire, sipping mulled wine and snapping irritably at all who came near him.

  “Well, Tom,” he said at length—his voice, once so genial and full of fun, had now a perpetual note of bitterness: “Since you are grown into such a solid figure of a man, with so much dignity of speech and carriage, perhaps you will do an errand for me on your way home. Eh? Wilt thou?”

  “I hope it will speed better than the last errand you sent me on,” said Thomas drily.

  “Why, so do I indeed,” said Sir Richard. “I seem to remember that on your last errand I forestalled you.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas.

  “There is no chance of that here. This concerns Joanna.”

  Thomas set his mouth firm and waited.

  “She married her cousin, William Lees, a couple of years ago,” said Sir Richard in a careless tone. “He is a weaver on a hillside ’twixt here and Annotsfield. As canting, psalm-singing, puritanic a fellow as ever entered a conventicle. Now it has come to my knowledge that this Lees means to seek his fortune in the New World.”

  “In the Americas?” said Thomas, startled.

  “Aye. In New England. There he can worship his God as William Lees and nobody else chooses.”

  “There is something to be said for that,” said Thomas thoughtfully.

  “Spare me your sermons, Thomas. I have had enough of them from William Lees, I warrant you.” Thomas, vexed, was silent.

  “Joanna took the child with her when she married Lees. But she is my child, after all,” said Sir Richard, frowning. “She is now, I make it, rising seven. Shall she be packed off to die on a harsh coast? Shall I part her from her mother and keep her at Bellomont? That might be a harsh coast too. Shall I send money to ease her way?”

  “Should you not go to Joanna yourself?” faltered Thomas, alarmed by the magnitude of the task his uncle set him.

  “Nay, Tom,” said Sir Richard in a tone of weary irritation: “If I go near William Lees he throws half the Bible at me. That would not trouble me, but I fear he rants and raves at Joanna when I have left. Now do you go to them, Tom, and use your eyes while you are there. Is the child well cared for? What would best be done? Take Simon with you, he knows the way, and send a message back to me with him. Hadst best write it down, for Simon grows old and dull. Everything in the world grows old and dull nowadays, I think, Tom,” concluded Sir Richard, sighing angrily.

  Just as Sir Richard had said, the sound of a psalm sung in a man’s deep voice rang out from the cottage in the fold of the hill beside the stream, almost drowning the clack of the shuttle. Thomas dismounted, and bidding Simon walk the horses on the few yards of level ground, knocked on the door. The shuttle and the singing did not cease, but Thomas heard footsteps within, and soon the door was quietly opened.

  “Master Thomas!” exclaimed Joanna.

  She looked quieter and older, but not unhappy, like a woman who had been through much storm but survived into calmer waters. She was very soberly dressed in a dark cloth, with a plain white collar round her throat such as puritans had taken to wearing of late, and her hair was dressed close to her head; the fashion suited her. Her eyes were as kind, her cheek as warm, as ever, but she seemed disinclined to admit him.

  “I have come with a message from Sir Richard Bellomont about Isabella,” said Thomas in a calm ordinary tone, as though the matter were of the most everyday occurrence.

  Joanna stepped back and admitted him to the single downstairs room of the cottage. Leaving Thomas to find his own way to the fireside, she went to the foot of a wooden ladder which led to the upper storey, and called out:

  “William! William!”

  A man’s voice came in question from above, and Joanna made an answer in which Thomas heard the name of Bellomont. Not wishing to be privy to their conversation, he turned aside to the hearth, where Joanna’s spinning-wheel was just ceasing to revolve. Everything in this cottage, unlike everything at Bellomont, gleamed with cleanliness; but here as at Bellomont stood a cradle. But the cradle too was unlike its counterpart at Bellomont, for it was homemade and unpainted, and the child lying snugly asleep there was a boy, rosy and well. Joanna returned and sat down at her wheel.

  “I understand that you married your cousin two years ago, Mistress Joanna,” said Thomas.

  “He heard that I was very wretched, and came to fetch me,” said Joanna simply.

  “She was betrothed to me before that man of sin set eyes on her,” said a deep voice behind him.

  Thomas turned; the weaver was descending the ladder. Notwithstanding the awkwardness of his posture and the homeliness of his clothes—no jacket, leather breeches, a patched shirt with sleeves rolled up beyond the elbows— William Lees made an impression of youth and strength which startled Thomas. He now stood upright at the foot of the ladder, and showed himself to be a man of only middle height, slightly bowed as was often the case with weavers from stooping over their looms, but very broad in the shoulder and with arms knotted with muscle from continual throwing of the shuttle. He had a broad square face, a good colour in his cheeks, thick black hair and eyebrows, and no beard; he stood firm on his feet and gazed at Thomas with a massive contempt. Thomas, who had expected some pale, thin, ugly, frightened man, was taken aback but began his errand as best he could.

  “Sir Richard Bellomont has heard that you mean to seek your fortune in the New World.”

  “He hath heard aright,” said William Lees. “All things go to wreck here, many godly ministers of our persuasion are silenced, and the light of the gospel is like to be put out. We go where we may worship the Lord in our own way.”

  “Sir Richard is naturally concerned,” continued Thomas.

  “Why? My wife is no concern of Sir Richard Bellomont’s,” said William Lees.

  “But Isabella?” urged Thomas. “She is his concern.”

  “He is no very loving father, I fancy,” said William Lees with contempt.

  “You are wrong there,” said Thomas steadily.

  There was a pause.

  “Master Thomas Bellomont,” said the weaver at length: “My wife has always spoken well of you, as an honest and well-meaning young gentleman. Let me ask you then to speak out plainly what Sir Richard’s intention is in sending you here, and I for my part will strive to hear you with patience.”

  “Sir Richard is concerned about his daughter Isabella, lest if she go to New England she will suffer grave hardship, yet if she stay here and be separated from her mother she may suffer more. He desires Mistress Lees to say what she wishes for the child, and Sir Richard will endeavour to accomplish it.”

  “I will take no money,” said the weaver, his colour deepening.

  “Isabella shall never go back to Bellomont,” said Joanna.

  Thomas looked from one to the other. He had always liked Joanna, and now he felt a considerable respect for her husband
. It was strange, he reflected; he could well understand how William Lees regarded Sir Richard as a sinful, tyrannical, useless cumberer of the earth, and how Sir Richard regarded William Lees as a canting hypocrite who wished to take all joy out of life by his unreasonable puritanical restrictions; yet Thomas himself liked both men and would have been glad of either at his side in an awkward fray. However, he must do his errand.

  “I must see Isabella,” he said firmly.

  “Isabella!” called William Lees up the ladder.

  “Come down here, love,” called Joanna.

  The child Isabella ran lightly down the ladder and stood at her stepfather’s side.

  “She is a child of sin,” said William Lees firmly, placing his hand on her head: “But yet I have a great affection for her, unruly though she be.”

  Thomas’s heart seemed to turn over in his breast. The child was of a singular beauty, with copper-coloured hair which lay in great waves about her face. Her eyes were a very dark blue, sparkling and dancing like Sir Richard’s, her complexion a pure and dazzling ivory. She was neatly though soberly dressed, and clearly well fed and well cared for. At her stepfather’s speech she did not stir, but into her lovely eyes came a look of such insupportable anguish that Thomas wondered her mother did not leap across the room and take her in her arms to comfort her—it was all he could manage not to do so himself. What could it be like to be called constantly a child of sin, thought Thomas; Sir Richard and Joanna and William Lees all wish Isabella well, but between them they are killing her. If her spirit lives, she will turn strumpet; if not, she will sink into a drudge. Thomas gathered himself together, and calmly and steadily and with an air of entire conviction, lied.

  “Sir Richard’s wish,” he said, “is that Isabella should come to my house at Mesburgh, and live there under the protection of my mother.”

  “If Sir Richard desired his daughter to be a gentlewoman, he should have wed her mother before she was begotten,” said William Lees in an angry tone.

  “What like of a woman is your mother, Master Thomas?” enquired Joanna.

  “She is a very worthy, kind and somewhat anxious lady, notable in housewifery,” replied Thomas. “My household is sober and godly,” he continued on a bitter note, for he was quite as angry as William Lees: “There is neither gaming, dicing, drinking nor any other such diversions in it. I am a poor man as gentlemen go, and I live a plain hardworking life. Nevertheless, I believe Isabella would fare better with us than in a house where her birth can never be forgotten, and I believe you would fare better in New England had you only your own children to care for.”

  “It is not a question of faring better or worse,” said William Lees, “but of our duty as servants of the Lord.”

  “We are not commanded to inflict suffering upon ourselves unless it be for some good end,” said Thomas. “A child not your own will always be a thorn in your flesh, Master Lees.”

  “Isabella,” said her mother softly: “Come hither to me.”

  The child ran across the room and buried her face in her mother’s breast. William Lees clicked his tongue.

  “She is ever too violent and too free in her affections,” he said.

  “Isabella—nay, lift up your head,” said Joanna, turning the child’s face gently upwards with her hand. “Look at me, and speak the truth now.”

  Isabella looked up into her mother’s eyes. For a long moment they exchanged a gaze which seemed to Thomas to contain all the anguish they had both experienced since the child’s conception.

  “Wilt thou go with this young gentleman and live in his household with his mother, Isabella?” said Joanna.

  Isabella buried her face in her mother’s breast again and answered:

  “Yes.”

  8

  “If any one of you, man or maid, speaks of my cousin’s birth, either behind her back or to her face, you shall leave my house within the hour,” said Thomas to the groom (who was also the serving-man), the old nurse and the young kitchenmaid, who made up his modest household. He glared at them so sternly that they were quite abashed, and casting down their eyes, decided they had best obey him.

  “He is so obstinate,” complained Mistress Bellomont to old Martha when she heard of this, half pleased, half vexed.

  “He is like his grandfather, a very proper man,” said Martha staunchly. “Not like his father who, saving your presence, mistress, was but a poor tool.”

  These dialogues occurred the day after Isabella’s arrival at Mesburgh. Thomas counted it one of the great mercies of his life that at the moment when they reached the house the child, worn out by riding pillion earlier in the day, was fast asleep in his arms. It is a hard-hearted woman who is not touched by the sight of a sleeping child, and Mistress Bellomont was not hard-hearted, only a trifle calloused on the surface by a trying life. Isabella, pale with fatigue, her copper lashes lying quietly on her cheek, her little arms drooping helplessly, looked most beautiful, gentle and appealing, especially when presented as a little kinswoman of Sir Richard’s. Mistress Bellomont took her straight into her arms.

  “Why, the poor lamb!” she cried. “Martha, put a warming-pan in the bed in the gable room.”

  The two women fussed over the child, feeding her, undressing her, putting her to bed—her clothes, though very plain, were of a cleanliness satisfying even to Mistress Bellomont, which was another mercy. When his mother came down to where Thomas was eating a belated supper, she seemed already to have taken Isabella to her heart.

  “What a lovely child! A kinswoman of Sir Richard’s, say you? She hath a look of him, do you not think so, Thomas? About the eyes,” said Mistress Bellomont innocently.

  Thomas choked a little over his ale and plunged into an account of the iniquities of Mistress Brownwood and Sir John Resmond, at which his mother, poor ingenuous lady, was so filled with horror and alarm that there was no room in her mind for any other subject, this being what Thomas intended. When she showed a disposition presently to return to Isabella’s degree of kinship with Sir Richard, Thomas cut short his supper and made off to bed.

  But in the middle of the night he was suddenly jarred awake. Mistress Bellomont threw wide the door of his bedchamber, rushed into the room and drew back his bed-curtain with an angry hand. Holding a candle dramatically high, wrapped in a very shabby old housegown, with some kind of fard on her cheeks and her grey hair screwed up into short plaits above her ears, she had a rather ridiculous air, but Thomas was too kind a son to find her appearance comical. Moreover, she was in a towering rage.

  “Thomas Bellomont!” she addressed him in a loud angry tone: “That child you’ve fobbed off on me—she’s a natural daughter of Sir Richard’s!”

  “Yes,” said Thomas.

  “She’s a love-child,” cried Mistress Bellomont. “Yes,” said Thomas.

  “How could you do it, Thomas?” said his mother, bursting into tears. “How could you do that to me? Even your father never did that to me!”

  It was clear that to Mistress Bellomont an illegitimate child was something obscene and disgraceful and altogether disgusting, not to be suffered in an honest house. Since his experience of his uncle’s licentious household, Thomas was not at all inclined to disagree with his mother as to the general undesirability of bastards, but there was another point of view.

  “Her birth is not the child’s fault, mother,” said he.

  “Whatever it is, it is naught to do with us. I will not have her, Thomas,” said his mother, her chin quivering and the hard tears of middle age rolling down her lined cheek: “I will not have her in the house.”

  “You force me to say what I do not wish,” said Thomas.

  “Say it, say it!” cried his mother shrilly. “Do not pause from any love for me.”

  “It is my house,” said Thomas.

  Mistress Bellomont’s sobs rattled like the beating of a drum.

  “Nay, mother,” said Thomas kindly. “Do not distress yourself. Give me the candle,” he added, sitting u
p, for his mother was shaking tallow all over the floor. He took it from her hand and set it down on a table by his bed, and Mistress Bellomont, quite overpowered by grief, flung herself into his arms. Thomas drew her grey head to his shoulder and comforted her, quite as though he were the older of the two.

  “Isabella’s mother has married a puritan weaver and they intend to try their fortune in New England,” he began— not without guile, for his mother, he knew, did not care for puritan weavers. “The child is wretched with them.”

  “Well; very well; that I can easily believe; but let Sir Richard care for his own children,” wept his mother. “Let him take her back to Bellomont.”

  “Mother,” said Thomas very seriously and sincerely: “If you saw Mistress Rosamond Brownwood you would not confide any child to her care. She is altogether vile.”

  “That, again, I can easily believe,” said Mistress Bellomont, giving her head a virtuous little toss, so that the ends of her plaits tickled Tom’s chin. “But why should we take the child, Thomas?”

  “I am Sir Richard’s heir. He confides in me. There are matters betwixt us of which you know nothing,” replied Thomas solemnly.

  His mother looked up at him, suitably impressed. “Couldst not tell me of these matters, son? Thy mother?” she ventured in a timid tone.

  Thomas smiled grimly—screams and fainting would be the least of the reception his mother would give to the news that he had assisted Sir Richard in a highway robbery, he thought—and was silent.

  “Sir Richard wishes us to take the child, then?” pursued Mistress Bellomont.

  “My uncle Richard,” said Thomas, lying firmly: “wishes you to have the care of Isabella, because you are an honest woman and will grow her into an honest woman.”

  “Well, that is so,” agreed Mistress Bellomont, raising her head and smiling happily at this flattery. “That is true, Thomas. I think I may say I can give her the education of a virtuous gentlewoman. After all, I have lived in great houses in my day. I do verily believe I can bring the child up as she should be brought.”