CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
Ellen thought of the dinner table, the tea, the four hundred things he wished to know and the single one he had managed to ask.
“And no one ever told him it was a falsehood? That the old duke’s grief was not a punishment for affection, only the price of having affection and a price most people would pay over again gladly? ”
“Who was there to tell him? His father believed it too. His father had taken it in from the same cold house and the same cold man, and a child believes the house he is raised in, having no other house against which to measure it.” Augusta set a careful stitch.
“I told him myself, once. He was perhaps nineteen, and I had grown brave enough at last. I sat him down and I said, Theodore, your grandfather was not destroyed by holding your grandmother in his highest esteem, he was destroyed by losing her, which is an entirely different thing, and the affection was the one good your grandfather was ever given, and he would tell you so himself if the drink had left him the words for it. And do you know what your husband said to me, at nineteen years of age?”
“What did he say?”
“He said, very civilly, that he took my point entirely, and that he had decided nonetheless that he would far rather have the cold and the safety than the good and the risk, because the good might be taken from him at any moment and the cold could not.” Augusta’s mouth tightened on the memory.
“Nineteen, and he had it worked out like a sum, like the acreage of the river land. I could have wept. I did weep, a little, afterward, where he could not see it, for there is nothing on this earth colder than a clever child who has sat down and reasoned his way to being safe.”
The rain went down the glass.
“And then Theodore’s mother passed, when he was four-and-twenty,” Augusta said.
“The one warm person the family had managed to produce in three generations, the one who rode and laughed and named cottages, and Theodore had cherished her without guarding against it because she was his mother and a boy does not think to guard against that. And when she passed he had his proof. Two generations of it. Affection a thing in the open, and the world will gather to watch you destroyed when you lose it. So he built his wall, and he has lived behind it very successfully for eleven years, and he has been, I think, until this autumn, entirely alone inside it, and entirely safe, which he had come to believe were the same thing.”
Ellen sat very still. “And now.”
“And now there is a girl in his house who raised a garden and faced down his housekeeper and worked out the whole of him in a fortnight, and he has begun taking the wall down stone by stone, at his age, against everything three generations beat into him, and I find I can hardly breathe for watching it, because I do not know whether he will get it down in time, or whether he will lose his nerve at the last and mortar it all back up, and I am too old to watch this family make the same mistake a fourth time.” Augusta knotted her thread, and her hands were not quite steady.
“He is not cold, Ellen. That is the thing you were never told. He is the opposite of cold. He is a man who feels too much and was taught from the cradle that the sentiment is a loaded weapon, which will inevitably discharge and prove his undoing. So as a result, and he has spent his life keeping it pointed at the floor. Do not mistake the caution for the absence. It is the most common mistake made about him, and it is entirely wrong.”
That evening Theodore did not come to dinner.
He sent word, by the maid, with the old formal courtesy, that estate business kept him and that he hoped Her Grace would not wait on him, and Ellen ate alone with Augusta’s voice still going in her, the wall and the old duke and the loaded weapon kept pointed at the floor, and she understood that she had spent four months reading his silence as a closed account when it had been, the whole time, a man holding his breath.
She went up early. She let Bess undress her and take down her hair and bank the fire, and she sent the girl away, and then she sat on the edge of her bed in her nightgown with a single candle going and looked at the connecting door in the panelled wall.
She thought about the wedding night, the dark and the dutifulness, and understood it now for what it must have been from his side, a man performing a necessary thing while holding the whole of himself a careful distance off, not from coldness but from terror, because to have done it warmly would have been to open the wall to her on the first night, and he had not been able to bear it.
She thought about the violets with no card, and the mare bought for no reason she had ever been given, and the wall raised quietly around her against her brother, and the ride into the dark to bring her home, and the tea, one sugar in the morning and none in the afternoon, gathered at a candlelit table because it was the only courtship the man had the language for.
She turned each of them over the way Augusta had bid her, looking this time at the underside, and on the underside of every cold thing was the same warm and frightened thing, kept all this while carefully pointed at the floor.
She sat a long while with the candle and the closed door, and the great house went quiet around her, the particular deep quiet of old stone after midnight.
She thought about being brave. She had been brave a good deal in her life, brave for her brother, brave at the draper’s window, brave in a falling household keeping accounts no one else would touch, and not once in any of it had she been brave for herself, brave toward a thing she wanted rather than away from a thing she feared.
This would be the first time. It frightened her rather more than the folly had, because the folly had cost her only her pride, and this could cost her a thing she had been without for a long while and had only lately discovered she owned again, which was hope.
She got up, before she could reason herself out of it, and crossed the cold floor to the door, and put her hand on her own bolt and drew it back, and the small sound of it in the quiet room was the loudest thing she had ever done.