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.