Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [83]
Once more, a little to Sylvia's surprise--but men are queer creatures!--Sir John seemed to see this objection as quite reasonable, though he heard it with regret and combated it feebly. He went away with a relieved jauntiness; for, if he couldn't have Tietjens he couldn't, and he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old-furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens did come to be in want of money...
Occasionally Sylvia was worried to know why people--as they sometimes did--told her that her husband had great gifts. To her he was merely unaccountable. His actions and opinions seemed simply the products of caprice--like her own; and, since she knew that most of her own manifestations were a matter of contrariety, she abandoned the habit of thinking much about him.
But gradually and dimly she began to see that Tietjens had, at least, a consistency of character and a rather unusual knowledge of life. This came to her when she had to acknowledge that their move to the Inn of Court had been a social success and had suited herself. When they had discussed the change at Lobscheid--or rather when Sylvia had unconditionally given in to every stipulation of Tietjens!--he had predicted almost exactly what would happen, though it had been the affair of her mother's cousin's opera box that had most impressed her. He had told her, at Lobscheid, that he had no intention of interfering with her social level, and she was convinced that he was not going to. He had thought about it a good deal.
She hadn't much listened to him. She had thought, firstly, that he was a fool and, secondly, that he did mean to hurt her. And she acknowledged that he had a certain right. If, after she had been off with another man, she asked this one still to extend to her the honour of his name and shelter of his roof, she had no right to object to his terms. Her only decent revenge on him was to live afterwards with such equanimity as to let him know the mortification of failure.
But at Lobscheid he had talked a lot of nonsense, as it had seemed to her: a mixture of prophecy and politics. The Chancellor of the Exchequer of that date had been putting pressure on the great landlords; the great landlords had been replying by cutting down their establishments and closing their town houses--not to any great extent, but enough to make a very effective gesture of it, and so as to raise a considerable clamour from footmen and milliners. The Tietjens--both of them--were of the great land-owning class: they could adopt that gesture of shutting up their Mayfair house and going to live in a wilderness. All the more if they made their wilderness a thoroughly comfortable affair!
He had counselled her to present this aspect of the matter to her mother's cousin, the morosely portentous Rugeley. Rugely was a great landowner--almost the greatest of all; and he was a landowner obsessed with a sense of his duties both to his dependants and his even remote relatives. Sylvia had only, Tietjens said, to go to the Duke and tell him that the Chancellor's exactions had forced them to this move, but that they had done it partly as a protest, and the Duke would accept it almost as a personal tribute to himself. He couldn't, even as a protest, be expected to shut up Mexborough or reduce his expenses. But, if his humbler relatives spiritedly did, he would almost certainly make it up to them. And Rugeley's favours were on the portentous scale of everything about him. 'I shouldn't wonder,' Tietjens had said, 'if he didn't lend you the Rugeley box to entertain in.'
And that