The Fourth Rehearsal

Kitty Lorimer was to be married at Lady Day to a man who had never proposed to her, which was perhaps why she stopped on the half-landing to watch the gentleman from Lincoln's Inn come in out of the dark. He arrived at a little after four, when the lamps in the hall had been lit for the better part of an hour, in a hired gig from Bury with the collar of his greatcoat turned up and two despatch-boxes on the seat beside him, and so far as she could see, very little else.

She had not meant to be on the half-landing. She had been sent up for her aunt's shawl, the grey one, and had come down again with it, and had then discovered that the half-landing commanded the whole of the hall and the door and the steps beyond it, and that her aunt's shoulders could very well wait a minute and a half. It was not curiosity, precisely. At Nether Rushbrook in the week before Christmas a stranger was an event of the first magnitude, and it would have been a kind of affectation not to look.

He was tall; that was the first thing, and it was a great deal of the first thing, because he had to stoop to come under the lintel and did it with the air of a man who had been stooping under lintels all his life and had ceased to resent it. Then he straightened, and was taller still. He gave his hat to Poulter and kept the despatch-boxes, one under each arm, and when Poulter reached for them he said something she could not hear, and Poulter withdrew his hands as if they had been reproved, though she did not think they had been.

"Mr Revett," said her aunt, advancing across the flags. "You are very welcome. You will have had a cold drive of it. I am afraid the road from the turnpike is a disgrace; Mr Colville has been speaking of it to the surveyor these two years. You will want to go up directly — Poulter will show you — and we dine at half past five, which I know is shockingly early for a London man, but we are country people and must be forgiven. You are not afraid of a fire that smokes a little? The west chamber smokes a little when the wind is in the north. And you will not mind — Poulter, where have you put the épergne?"

Poulter, it appeared, had put the épergne in the butler's pantry, which was where it had lived since the reign of Queen Anne, and her aunt was reassured, and Mr Revett, who had been bowing at intervals throughout this speech, bowed once more and said that he was not in the least afraid of smoke and was very sensible of Mrs Bavistock's kindness in taking him in over the season. His voice was lower than she had expected and a good deal more careful, as if each word were being checked against something before it was let out.

Then he looked up.

It was not that he had heard her; she had not moved. It was only that he was a man, evidently, who looked at a room entire before he did anything in it, and the half-landing was part of the room. His glance travelled up the stair, found her, and rested on her for perhaps a second — long enough to take in the shawl over her arm, and her dress, and whatever else there was to take in — and then went on to the portrait of the late Mr Bavistock's grandfather above her head, and rested on that for very nearly as long.

Kitty came down the stairs with the shawl and was introduced, and curtseyed, and was told that Mr Revett had come to them about the Enclosure, and said that she hoped he would find Nether Rushbrook agreeable, and he said that he was sure he should, and nobody said anything that was not perfectly proper; and all the while she was aware that she had been assessed at the same rate as a portrait of a man in a full-bottomed wig, and that she did not like it.

Mr Colville came at a quarter past five, as he came most Saturdays, because Chevington Hall was only a mile and a half by the carriage road and a widower's table on a winter evening was a melancholy thing. He was shown into the drawing-room, where the family were assembled by the fire, and he greeted Mrs Bavistock, and Charlotte, and Maria, and Frederick — who was down from Cambridge and was lying in a chair with his legs across the hearth as though Cambridge had exhausted him — and then he greeted Kitty, last and differently, which was how he always greeted her.

It was nothing that anybody could have objected to. He did not take her hand for longer than was right, or stand nearer than was right, or say anything that could not have been said in front of the rector. He only said, "Miss Lorimer," in the voice of a man naming a field he had lately bought, and she said, "Mr Colville," and gave him the smile she kept for him, which was a good smile and had cost her some pains, and the room settled round the two of them as water settles round a stone.

He was a large man and carried it well. He was fifty and kept his figure in the way men of property do, by riding round it every morning, and his grey hair was thick and his colour was high and his linen was very white. She had once, in October, set herself to consider his hands, since it seemed to her that a woman ought to have some view of the hands she was to spend her life beside, and she had looked at them all through a long dinner at Chevington and had come away with no opinion of them whatever. They were hands. They held a knife and fork. She had thought about that a good deal more than she had thought about the hands.

Mr Revett came down at the half-hour exactly. He had changed his coat for a blue one that somebody had cut very well, and it did a great deal for the length of his back and a great deal more for his shoulders, and she observed this in the same moment in which she observed that his hair, which was chestnut and too long, had been brushed back from his forehead with some determination and was already coming forward again. Her aunt made the introduction. Mr Colville said that he was glad to meet the gentleman who was to do the Bill, and Mr Revett said that he was very glad to meet Mr Colville, and there followed a short pause in which the two men looked at one another with a peculiar and courteous attention, like a pair of dogs who have been told they are to be friends.

Then Poulter opened the doors, and Mr Colville turned and offered Kitty his arm.

He did not ask. He never asked; it had been three months since he had asked, and the question had gone out of it as the question goes out of any custom, so that now it was merely a thing that happened, like the soup. Mr Revett, who should by rights have taken in her aunt as the only stranger present, was left to discover that Frederick had already done it, and took in Charlotte instead, and Maria came in behind on her own, which she did not mind in the least, being fifteen and having a novel in her reticule.

The dining-room at Nether Rushbrook was a long room with a low ceiling and a great deal of mahogany, and in the week before Christmas it smelt of greenery and beeswax and, faintly, of the fire in the next room, which had been drawing badly since Michaelmas. Kitty sat at Mr Colville's right hand. She always did. Nobody had ever arranged it, and nobody would have dreamt of arranging it otherwise, and she had learned, in three months, that this was how an understanding was conducted in a parish: not by anything so vulgar as an announcement, but by the placing of chairs.

Mr Revett was across from her, with Charlotte on his left. She had not considered, when she sat down, that this would put his face in the line of her eye every time she lifted it from her plate; and she lifted it, in the course of the soup and the fish, a good deal more often than she would have predicted.

He did not look at her. That was what she noticed first, and it annoyed her before she had quite worked out why. He looked at Mr Colville. He listened, with every appearance of interest, while Mr Colville explained to him the condition of the turnpike, and the iniquity of the surveyor, and the price of oats at Bury on Wednesday, and the difficulty of getting a decent drainer out of Norfolk for less than a guinea a week; and she saw that he was not merely listening but taking a kind of inventory, noting down each sentence as it came in some ledger behind his eyes, as if Mr Colville were a document he had been sent to read and meant to read to the end.

"You will have seen the fen, sir," said Mr Colville, "coming in."

"In the dark, I am afraid. I shall walk out and look at it properly tomorrow, if the weather allows."

"Look at it by all means. There is not a great deal to see. A good deal of water and some very bad turf, and half a dozen fellows cutting it who have no more right to it than I have to the moon." Mr Colville took some wine. "When it is drained it will be the best ground in the parish. I have always said so. Miss Lorimer has heard me say so, I dare say, till she is tired of it."

"Not in the least tired," said Kitty, who was.

"Miss Lorimer is very patient with my drains," said Mr Colville, to the table at large, and it was then — at that precise sentence, and not at any earlier one — that Mr Revett looked at her.

It was not an admiring look. She knew admiring looks, she had been receiving them since she was eighteen, and she knew their whole range, from the curate's to the colonel's; she could have told you to within a guinea what any man in west Suffolk thought her worth, and to within a quarter-hour how long he meant to go on thinking it. This was not one of those. It was a look of the most perfect dispassion. It went from Mr Colville to her and back again, and she saw it — she was certain of it — enter her upon the same page as the fen and the drains and the price of oats: Miss Lorimer, patient; understood to be marrying; bears upon the question. And then he returned his attention to his fish.

She felt her ears grow hot, and was grateful to Hannah, who had dressed her hair that afternoon with a great deal of sighing, for dressing it low enough at the sides to cover them.

It was absurd to mind. She told herself so through the whole of the second course. She had been looked at by every man in the county for six years, and had been appraised, and priced, and found desirable or found expensive, and had borne it all with perfect equanimity and had even, when she was honest, enjoyed a good deal of it; it was the only market in England in which she had anything to sell, and she had learned to show her goods to advantage. What she had never before been, in the whole of those six years, was looked at by a man who was not in the market at all — who glanced at the goods only to see whose they were, and wrote down the owner's name, and passed on.

It was the passing on that she minded. She understood that perfectly well, and it did not help.

"And Lady Day," said her aunt, from the foot of the table, where the talk had become general. "Mr Colville, you will be wanting the new chimney-pieces up at the Hall before Lady Day, I suppose."

"Before Lady Day, certainly," said Mr Colville.

"It is such a convenient time," said her aunt. "The roads are better. And the quarter falls so conveniently."

"Very conveniently," said Mr Colville.

Nobody looked at Kitty. That was the art of it. Lady Day was spoken of at every dinner at Nether Rushbrook as a date upon which a great many things would be conveniently completed — the chimney-pieces and the new lodge and the draining of the lower meadows at Chevington — and not one of them was her, and all of them were. She was of age, and her two thousand pounds were in the Funds in her own name and nobody else's, and she had never said yes to anything; and she was nevertheless as bound to Lady Day as the chimney-pieces were, because the whole parish had agreed to it, and a parish's agreement was a great deal harder to undo than a woman's. She had all the obligations of an engagement, as Charlotte had once observed with great interest, and none of its protections, and there was not a single sentence she could speak aloud against it that would not sound, in that dining-room, either mad or ungrateful.

She ate her pudding. Across the table, Mr Revett was asking Mr Colville, very civilly, how many acres Chevington held in the parish, and Mr Colville was telling him.

At tea in the drawing-room, Charlotte had her announcement.

Kitty had known there would be an announcement; her cousin had been writing in the mornings since Advent with the door shut, and had come to breakfast with ink on the cuffs of three separate gowns, and had twice been heard laughing aloud in the schoolroom with nobody there. Charlotte waited until her mother had poured, and the gentlemen had come in from their wine — Mr Colville first, and Mr Revett a little after, with the air of a man who had been detained against his inclination in a discussion of oats — and then set down her cup and said:

"I think I had better tell you all about Twelfth Night."

"We are to have the theatricals, my dear, of course," said her aunt. "I have been meaning to count the chairs."

"We are to have the theatricals, Mamma. But we are not to have Lovers' Vows, which is the one where everybody is sorry, nor The Rivals, which Frederick cannot learn. We are to have an afterpiece in two acts called A Guardian's Scruples; or, The Ward Disposed Of, and I have written it, and it is finished, and it is really very good." She looked round the room with the composure of a general. "There are nine parts. The parts will be given out on St Stephen's Day, after breakfast, in the library, and nobody is to refuse one."

Frederick groaned from the depths of his chair. Maria put down her novel for the first time since dinner.

"Nobody at all?" said Mr Colville, pleasantly. He had been at the theatricals the year before, and had sat in the front row, and had slept.

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