Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton (24 page)

Lady Skelton professed herself much comforted and solaced by those godly discourses and by the prayers which Hogarth, his honest face buried in his hands, offered up on her behalf.

His zeal and fervour (on top of the household accounts), though edifying, was exhausting for them both and so Lady
Skelton, after these spiritual exercises, was accustomed to offer the good man some light refreshment which she had ready on a side table – a cup of sack or fruit syrup and a manchet of bread.
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Hogarth partook of this standing up for, true to his word, he treated Lady Skelton, in spite of the parlous condition of her soul, with all the deference due to an honoured mistress.

It was about this time that Hogarth showed the first symptoms of his illness, being seized in the night with vomiting and cramps in the stomach. Hogarth was not a man to allow ill health to interfere with his work, and he struggled on for some time before he would admit that the bouts of sickness and pain which gripped him with increasing frequency were anything more serious than a bad attack of colic. He continued to help Lady Skelton disentangle her household accounts, to administer to her seasonable and comforting words and assist her virtuous meditations, though sometimes it was all that he could do to stand upright in her presence or to partake of the drink which she courteously offered him.

‘This will not harm your stomach – poor Hogarth,' she would say, fixing her eyes on him with a look of concern. And, as he drank it down with an effort, he thought how greatly her character had altered for the better since her conversion to grace. Even before his discovery of her misdeeds he had been obliged (in spite of his natural respect for his master's wife) to regard her as a proud, light-minded and wilful lady, hardly fit, in his opinion, to be the spouse of the estimable Sir Ralph. Now there was a gentleness and
meekness, as well as a pensiveness, in her demeanour that testified most pleasantly to her change of heart.

The morning came when Hogarth was no longer able to wait upon his mistress, being too much prostrated by sickness and cramps to rise from his bed. Lady Skelton shared her husband's concern over their faithful servant's illness. As lady of the manor, it was her duty to minister to the invalids in the household. As a rule she was content to leave such doctoring as was necessary to her mother-in-law, who was only too ready to try her skill on any sufferer. But now she took entire charge of the sick steward, had him moved to a bedchamber in the main part of the house where she could more conveniently attend to him, and prepared all his nourishment – the broths, paps and caudles
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considered suitable for an invalid – with her own hands. Old Lady Skelton was disconcerted, and somewhat offended, to find herself superseded by her daughter-in-law in a sphere that she had been accustomed to consider exclusively her own. She begged Barbara not to over-tax her own frail health with this sedulous nursing and, when Barbara suavely ignored her advice, had to content herself with looking over her collection of nauseating prescriptions, and grumbling to Agatha Trimble how she would have treated Hogarth had she had the nursing of him.

Sir Ralph had nothing but approval for Barbara in her new role. Hogarth was a valued servant, a man in whom Sir Ralph had absolute confidence and trust. No effort should be spared to restore him to health. Moreover this was how he liked his wife to be – not an elusive, unaccountable creature with something disconcerting even about her beauty, but bustling, efficient, occupied in a truly womanly task.

As for Hogarth he was deeply grateful to his mistress for her care, comparing her in his mind with Dorcas,
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and other ministering women of Scripture. For her sake, because he believed that her regenerate soul needed his continued care, he made piteous but vain efforts to get well.

Hogarth was dying. This was obvious even to Sir Ralph, who was bluffly optimistic as a rule about everyone's health except his own. Old Lady Skelton wiped away a tear as she thumbed her prescriptions. ‘Take twenty-four swallows − alas, poor Hogarth!' ‘I fear that neither swallows nor anything else will save the poor fellow now from great pains, a lingering death and a thousand other inconveniences,' said Agatha Trimble with lugubrious relish.

The physician summoned from Buckingham looked grave when he saw the sick man. He had seen nothing like this before – the running at the nose and eyes, the brownish colour of the skin – this was something more deadly than colic or food poisoning. He spoke learnedly and at some length about the four humours, blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy, and of how when the delicate balance between them was upset illness inevitably resulted, ordered an opiate for the patient to relieve his pain and went away shaking his head.

The weather had broken, the heavy sullen rain of late summer turned the gardens and park into a dripping greenness, darkened the old house and added to the gloom of its inmates. The household moved about with mournful steps and spoke with hushed voices. Hogarth was liked and
respected. Even the younger servants, who laughed at his pious talk and ways, knew him to be a just and kindly man. He had been in charge of Sir Ralph's ‘family' for so long it was hard to imagine Maryiot Cells without him.

Though everyone had given up hope of his recovery – his arms and legs were now partially paralysed and he was prostrated by vomiting and pain – young Lady Skelton never slackened in her care of him. She looked wan, there were dark shadows under her eyes as she moved about the sickroom, a gallant, gracious figure, in the opinion of the household, battling forlornly with the angel of death.

And Hogarth himself? As he lay there behind the curtains of his bed in the stuffy, darkened sickroom, submerged in awful weakness, many thoughts, some hazy, some startlingly clear, drifted through his clouded mind. He knew that he was about to die and death itself held few terrors for him. Death was a commonplace, the one great certainty in an uncertain world, and its very certainty gave it an awful dignity and reassurance. Who was he, a man of fifty, without wife or children, to shrink from death when he had seen young infants, blooming maidens, lusty young men fall like autumn leaves from life's tree? His faith, however narrow and interwoven with human complacency, was sincere and did not fail him in this dread hour. He was ready, in all humility, to submit the account of his life to his supreme Master.

But there was something that troubled him – young Lady Skelton and her reclaimed soul. Even when she was not actually bending over his bedside holding a cup to his lips, he could see her green eyes regarding him pleadingly
– with meekness – with mockery? No! God forbid – with true remorse and penitence.

He had been privileged to set her erring feet on the straight and narrow way. Would she have the spiritual strength to stay there? Soon she would have to stand alone. He would not be there to guide and encourage her, to wrestle in prayer on her behalf. He saw her eyes again staring at him – how green they were – how strangely shaped – insolent – sly – cat's eyes. No one would share her secret now. She would have to bear the burden of it alone – would have to carry it down with her to her grave. She was saying to him, ‘You promise that my ugly secret will die with you?' Her voice was meek but her sleepy eyes were full of menace. And suddenly the mists of his pain and weakness cleared, and he
knew.

Paulina, passing by the door of the sickroom, heard his feeble cry and hurried in. She parted the bed-curtains and bent over him. Sweat had broken out on his discoloured forehead, his wasted hands were clutching at the bedclothes, his eyes were full of entreaty.

‘Hogarth, what is it? A drink?'

He gasped, ‘No, Sir Ralph − quick. I must tell him.'

‘I will fetch him at once.'

She turned and found herself face to face with Barbara.

Barbara gave her an angry look. ‘What are you doing here, Paulina? Why did you not call me? I will attend to him.'

Paulina said bluntly, ‘He does not need your attentions. He wants Sir Ralph.'

‘Sir Ralph? Why? He is wandering in his mind. He must sleep now. Later when he is rested he shall see Sir Ralph.'

Paulina said, ‘I am going now to fetch my brother.'

The two young women faced each other, tense as duellists. There was the sound of voices and footsteps in the passage. Paulina ran to the door. ‘Brother, is it you? Come quickly. Hogarth wants you. There is no time for delay.'

The sickroom, dim from its shrouded curtains and the rain and falling dusk outside, seemed full of people. Old Lady Skelton, Agatha Trimble, Aunt Doll, had followed Sir Ralph. Even Cousin Jonathan, hearing the commotion, had lumbered in.

Sir Ralph, his florid face paler from emotion, had gone behind the bed-curtains. He emerged again, his prominent eyes like those of an anxious fish. ‘Barbara, I cannot hear him. There is something he is trying to say, poor fellow. He is rambling about “the flinging off of all honour” – his voice is so weak, I cannot make out the rest.'

Barbara swept forward with a rustle of her silk gown. ‘Let me try. I am accustomed to the faintness of his voice. I will try to catch his words. Stand back everyone! In his feeble state the sight or sound of so many people round him might be fatal.'

Her tone was commanding. Her eyes blazed with a look of power. Sir Ralph willingly stood aside. She parted the bed-curtains and drew them behind her. She was enclosed with the sick man in the muffled gloom of the bed as in a little room. She bent over Hogarth, gently drew the feather pillow from beneath his head and placed it over his face…

When she came out from behind the curtains, her face was deathly white. She answered the anxious and enquiring looks with a shake of her head.

She said dully, ‘It is too late. I raised his head. I tried to hear. Too late. He has gone to his reward.'

She fell down fainting to the floor.

‘False hearts and broken vows.'
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H
OGARTH WAS BURIED
, and with him Lady Skelton's secret. So she told herself, not so much in triumph or hatred (for after her first outburst of frustrated rage she had come to feel little more than a pitying contempt for the deluded steward), but with an enveloping sense of relief. The disposal of Hogarth (for so she expressed it to herself) had been an unpleasant necessity. She had hastened his departure to those heavenly regions in which he took so keen an interest, without compunction but without undue malice. Indeed, in her role of sick nurse, she had really tried to alleviate his pain and discomfort, as far as was consistent with the business in hand. It had been an irksome, exhausting and, to one of her fastidious senses, a somewhat revolting affair.

But it was over now. Sir Ralph had given him a handsome funeral, distributing gloves and scarves among the mourners as if, as Agatha Trimble had remarked acidly, he had been a member of the family. Barbara resolved to put Hogarth out of her mind, to bury him for a second time, as it were, in the dark regions below conscious thought. She felt almost deliriously safe and free. She felt, rising imperious within her, the craving to escape as soon as possible from
this gloomy house, cradled in the damp, dripping greenness of its clustering trees, to the warmth of her lover's arms.

It was the saddest night of rain, the night after the funeral, that had been known that season. The rain fell steadily, stubbornly, as though the skies were dissolving into water. Not a night to venture abroad, but Barbara could not wait. When the household had retired to its rest she went up to the little hidden room, dressed herself impatiently in her man's clothes, masked herself, and stole out of the house.

Cantering along the yew hedges, she was sheltered by the thick walls of the yew hedges themselves and the interlacing branches of the trees overhead from the teeming wetness of the night. But out in the open countryside it seemed to her as if she were riding through a waterfall. The earth, squelching mud and water beneath her horse's hoofs, seemed to be trying to liquefy in sympathy with the weeping sky. The rain pelted down on to her slouched hat and ran in rivulets on to her cloak; her leather gloves were sodden as she held the reins, her hair hung wet as seaweed on her cheeks. But she did not care. She even rejoiced in the inclemency of the night, finding a savage refreshment in the raw air and the rain, after her nights of vigil in the sour-smelling sick-room, all the stuffy hypocrisy in which she had been forced to indulge. No more prayers, contrition, pious homilies for Barbara Skelton, but the highway, the pistol-shot and the embraces of her lawless lover!