The Semicolon

The clock on the stairs struck two, and Wardlow gave up trying to sleep.

He had lain three hours with one question, and it had not let him alone. Where had he read that voice before? He put on his dressing gown, lit a candle at the embers of his bedroom fire and went down through the cold house to the library.

The ash log had burned to a red bed. He laid two more on it and waited until they caught. Then he took the key from his desk drawer and unlocked the cabinet beside the hearth.

The portfolio was where he had put it ten days ago, tied with its tape. He carried it to the desk and set it down on his own side of the inkstand. From the blotter he took everything that was in her hand. There was the first page. There were the nine they had made on Saturday, most of them written by her as he spoke. There were his own four pages from the week before, with her cuts and her notes down the margins.

He had told Cecily that he was only doing a sum. He was fairly sure he knew the answer to this one before he untied the tape.

He began with the page about Tom Pickering, because it was the one that had troubled him. I ask you only not to wait an hour. The feeling was kept back until the last line and then let go in one turn. He lifted the cuttings over until he found the sixteenth of May.

Lord W— rose on Tuesday to speak for the climbing boys; one hears that he has hopes of sitting down by Michaelmas.

He had read that sentence so often that he no longer saw it. He made himself see it now. There were twelve harmless words, and a semicolon, and then the blow. The first half was there only to make the reader stand still for the second.

He turned to the third of the Saturday pages. She had written down what he said about the parishes, and she had changed one thing. He had said it as two sentences. She had made it one. The same sweep comes on the same day and asks the same charge; he brings a bundle of canes where he used to bring a child.

It had the same semicolon in the same place, with the weight coming down after it.

One likeness proved nothing. He told himself so, and went on.

In the margin of his fourth page, beside the brine, she had written a line to tease him on Thursday morning. One observes that the brine has been waiting since line three. He had smiled at it then. He went through the cuttings with his thumb. There was the Admiral, from October. One observes that Admiral B— has a new wig; the old one, it is thought, has been retired on half-pay. He found one observes in August and twice in the spring, and one hears in more columns than he troubled to count.

Then there was the spelling. On her seventh page stood the sentence about the maker’s bills. Let any of your lordships ask, and I will shew him every one. He wrote the word with an o himself, as his tutor had taught him. Half of England still wrote it her way, and by itself it was nothing. But Mrs. Nettle wrote it her way too. A countess had taken an opera box in order to shew her diamonds to the music.

Last of all there was the verb. She had told him on Tuesday that his came at the wrong end, thirty words late, when the House had stopped listening. Hers came at the end too, but it came quickly, and it was the last thing in the sentence. A child of six is sold. When they broke the wall, he was dead. He found a column from the winter of last year. The Bishop of — preached on charity for an hour; his curate, on forty pounds a year, listened.

He sat back. The candle flame stood straight up in the still room.

There was the other sum too, the one he had shewn his sister. Eleven of the last twenty columns carried something first said at Lady Halewood’s table. No guest had been at more than three of those dinners. The household had been at all of them. He had gone through that household in the Scarrow pew a week ago, and he had crossed off the companion, because nobody told anything to a woman in a darned glove.

Men will say a good deal across a companion’s head. She had said that to him yesterday, in this chair. She had handed all five of his lost peers their tea, and she knew what one of them carried in his watch-case.

The rest came without his looking for it. There was the finger stained black down one side, with a stain too old for a week of visiting cards. There were nine letters to a wine merchant, written with her head bent low so that nobody could see the page. On the way to the Row she had told him she walked two miles every Saturday from her mother’s door to Fleet Street. The Lantern was printed in a court off Fleet Street, and it came out on a Saturday.

There was Dean Swift, too. The government offered three hundred pounds to anybody who would give him up. Nobody took it, I believe. She had said it very steadily, looking him in the face. He had taken it for learning. She had been telling him what she thought of his hundred guineas.

“A name costs some people more than it costs others,” he said aloud, to the bust on the shelf.

Mrs. Nettle was Miss Ludlow. He had sat a yard from her for six days.

He put his hands flat on the desk and waited for the anger. He had carried it for two Seasons, and he knew its weight. It had stood beside him at the bar of the House on the twelfth of May. It had ridden north with him and Cecily in the July of last year, in a closed carriage, with his sister white and dry-eyed in the corner. He had promised it a name. He had the name now, and he waited to feel what he had always supposed he would feel.

What came first was a tall woman at the level of his knees, with her bonnet over one ear, telling him that she had gone in to the armpits.

He tried again. He thought of the fourteenth of June. That one did hurt. It hurt as it always had, and he did not think it would ever stop. Cecily had burned the paper in the breakfast-room grate and had not cried. The woman who wrote that paragraph had eaten his sister’s Christmas goose. She had tied his sister’s parcels with her on Wednesday, the two of them alone in the still-room for half a day.

But the same woman had sat on Hannah Eyre’s bed with a choking child against her shoulder, and had known what to do. She had heard the worst thing he knew about himself and had not offered him one word of comfort that he could despise. She had put her hand over his.

She had done that knowing what she had called him. He went cold as he understood it. She had coined the Earl of Soot. On Christmas night she had stood where he was sitting and learned what the soot was. He remembered her face in the candlelight. He had thought it was pity. He believed now that it had been a good deal worse for her than pity.

There was more to weigh, and he tried to weigh it fairly. Yesterday he had told her why Tarrant voted against him. Her pen had stopped in the air. I dislike a lie, my lord. I dislike it more when it has been believed. Then she had written two sentences into his own speech to kill the lie she had printed. She had ruled the line under them hard enough to dent the paper.

So she knew the patent paragraph was false. She had not known it in May, or she would not have looked so on Saturday. She had learned it in this house, and it had made her ill.

Did she know the other was false? He could not tell. Cecily might have spoken in the still-room, or she might not. His sister did not make conversation of that summer.

He got up and walked to the hearth and back.

He ought to tell her. He knew that at once, and plainly. He ought to wait for her at this desk at nine o’clock and say, “Miss Ludlow, I know who you are.” It was the honest course. It was what he would have wanted in her place.

And then what? She would have no choice but to answer. Whatever she said after that, she would say with the pass full of snow, under his roof and at his mercy, to the man who had set a hundred guineas on her head. If she said she was sorry, how was he ever to know whether she meant it? If she made amends, they would be amends he had demanded of her. He had told Cecily that he would make Mrs. Nettle answer for the fourteenth of June. He found, at half past two in the morning, that he did not want to make this woman do anything.

He wanted her to do it herself.

She was close to it. He thought so. A woman did not sit up until two to write a man’s speech for him, or go white at Halewood’s verse, or rule lines that dented the paper, unless something was pressing on her hard. She had come to him yesterday morning with the words “I have something to confess”, and it had been only a sheet of paper. One morning it would be the rest.

That would be worth having. A confession freely given, with her name to it, was the very thing he had told his sister he needed. It would be worth ten of anything he could force. It was the fair course toward Miss Ludlow, and it was the fair course toward Cecily too.

There was the other matter, and he made himself look at it, since he was being honest. On Saturday at dusk he had held still across an inkstand with her face a hand’s width from his. He had wanted more than he had any right to want. He had better be very sure of the woman before he let himself want it again. A few days would tell him what she was. He would watch, and wait until he was certain.

A small cold voice in him said that he had waited to be certain once before.

He answered it quite reasonably. Nobody was dying in this wall. Nobody would be hurt by a few days. It was a kindness to wait. He called it fairness, and he believed it. He did not see that he was sitting in his old place with his ear against the plaster, watching the clock.

He could be sure in five minutes, if he chose. He thought of the leather bag on the hall table. Her packet for London had lain in it since Monday, with a direction on it in her hand. Jessop had the key. He had only to ask.

He would not. A man did not read his guest’s letters, or the outsides of them either. And he did not want to learn it from the bag. He wanted to hear it from her.

He put the cuttings back in their order and tied the tape. He locked the portfolio in the cabinet and laid her pages on the blotter again, square, as she had left them. Then he opened the drawer of the desk and took out his memorandum book.

It was a small thing bound in green morocco, and he had carried one like it since he came into the title. It held the depth of the sough and the price of larch, and the names of men who had promised him their votes. He dipped his pen and wrote under Saturday’s coal.

27 Dec. It is Miss Ludlow. I shall not say so. I want her to tell me.

He sanded it and shut the book. His left hand had gone to the brass plate. He let it stay there a minute, and then he took up his candle and went to bed. He slept at once and did not dream.
***
“You look pleased with yourself,” said Cecily on the chapel path. “It is the second morning running. I begin to be alarmed.”

“I have a speech.”

“You have had a speech since October. It never made you look like that.” She tucked her hand into his arm. The snow squeaked under them, and the sky was the same hard blue. “Mr. Brome says the first page made him cry. He told me so last night and then begged me not to repeat it. Did Miss Ludlow truly write it?”

“She put it in order. She says the words were mine.”

“That is generous of her.” His sister walked a few steps. “I like her, Adrian. I did not expect to like anybody who came in Lady Halewood’s coach. She worked beside me on Wednesday for three hours and never once said a silly thing.”

He looked at the top of her black bonnet. He owed her the truth too. He had kept a sum from her once before, until it was finished, and she had told him what she thought of that.

“I am glad of it,” he said, and he said no more. He would tell her when he could tell her all of it. It would be the confession and the name together, with the amends already made.

It sounded well enough. He noticed that it did not sit quite easily, and he put that down to the hour he had got up.

The household filed in behind them, thirty-one in black, stamping the snow off at the door. There was still no curate. Dick Heathcote had been to the head of the pass with his pole at first light and had come back to say it was five foot yet and frozen like a wall.

Wardlow went to the reading desk. Lady Halewood sat at the end of the front bench with her cane upright between her feet. Her goddaughter was beside her in the grey gown, holding one prayer book for both.

Miss Ludlow had not slept much, that was plain. There was a shadow under each eye, and she kept her face down over the book. She had been carried off from the library on Saturday at a quarter past five and had not come back to it. At dinner she had talked to Brome about turnpikes.

She was thinking of the quill. So was he. But he knew now that she had more to carry than that, and he looked at the bent brown head with a feeling he had not expected to have for Mrs. Nettle. He had hated that lady for a year and a half as a man hates a wasp. It had not once entered his mind that she might be unhappy.

He opened the book and laid his left hand on the wood.

“‘When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.’”

It was only the sentence that stood first in the book. He had read it on Christmas Day and thought nothing of it. He kept his eyes on the page.

He read the Exhortation and the Confession, and the household said it after him. The Colonel came in a full second behind and twice as loud. Halewood, at the end of the second bench, said it to his fingernails. Wardlow listened for one voice among the thirty. He heard it, low and clear, at we have left undone those things which we ought to have done.

He chose a collect, as a layman must, and came to the Psalms for the day. They were short ones, and he knew them nearly by heart. Halfway down the second, the wall rose in front of him.

It was the word deliver. He had felt it coming for a line and a half. He stopped, and his hand closed on the edge of the desk, and he waited.

It was a long wait. He knew his own people would bear it. They had borne it since he was a boy. But there was a movement on the second bench as Halewood crossed one leg over the other. In the quiet, Wardlow heard the man breathe out through his nose, softly, in a way that was very like a laugh.

He did not look at Halewood. He looked up from the book and straight in front of him, to give the word room.

Miss Ludlow had lifted her head.

She was looking at him across the six yards of cold chapel, with her godmother’s prayer book open in her hands. Her face held no pity and no impatience. She had the look she wore at the desk when he was hunting a sentence and she knew that he would find it. And she smiled at him. It was a small, tired, entirely friendly smile, and it said as plainly as words that she had all morning.

Something in his chest eased. The word came.

“‘Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.’”

He heard what he had read only when it was out. Her smile wavered. Her eyes dropped to the book, and the colour ran up her face to the edge of her bonnet.

He ought to have felt that he had caught her. He felt nothing of the kind. He saw a woman who had sat up half the night over his dead, and who had waited for him just now when a viscount would not. She had a thing on her conscience that she had not yet found the courage to say. He had some knowledge of what that was like.

She looked up again. He thought it took some resolution. She found his eyes still on her, and after a moment, uncertainly, the smile came back.

There were fourteen verses still to read, and thirty people waiting for them. He could take a breath’s time and no more.

Wardlow smiled back at her, knowing.
***