The Letter of Marque, page 28
Left alone, Stephen reflected. At one time it had occurred to him that Diana might possibly make her balloon ascents by way of amusement; now it seemed far more probable that his first idea, and Blaine's, was right. Her present life might not be grinding poverty, but it was certainly very far from wealth. His mind ran on, trying to compose his extreme hurry and agitation of spirits so that he might work out a persuasive, coherent way of expressing himself. He took the apothecary's bottle from his pocket and he was breaking the sealing-wax on the wrapping when she came back, carrying his parcel. 'Stephen,' she said, 'you left this in the carriage. Pishan brought it to the kitchen.'
'Oh thank you,' he cried, thrusting the bottle back. 'It is the coca-leaves I bought in Stockholm.'
'What are they for?'
'They relieve fatigue, and properly administered they make you feel clever and even witty. I sent you some from South America.'
'Alas, they never came. I should have liked to feel clever, or even witty.'
'I am so sorry. Things miscarry. Tell me, did you ever receive a letter I sent from Gibraltar, just before sailing on the South American voyage? I gave it to Andrew Wray, who was travelling home overland.'
'Surely to God, Maturin, you did not trust that infernal scrub Wray, did you? I saw him once or twice after he came back - said he had seen you in Malta and that you had listened to music together - you seemed to be amusing yourself prodigiously with a diving-bell and the other delights of Valletta. He never spoke of any letter or message. I hope it was nothing confidential.'
'There was nothing in it that a stranger would have understood,' said Stephen standing up, for at this point an old lady opened the door. She was Countess Tessin. Diana made the introductions, speaking French and adding that Stephen was a friend of Gedymin's; she presented him as Monsieur Maturin y Domanova, which was perfectly correct, though disingenuous. She need not have troubled: the old lady was somewhat confused, and on learning that Jagiello was not expected until after dinner she set off again, though pressed to stay.
'May I give you my arm, ma'am?' asked Stephen.
'You are very kind, sir, most amiable; but I have Axel waiting for me, and he is so used to my pace.'
'If ever I become old,' said Diana at dinner, 'I do hope I shall manage to keep up with the changing ideas of money.'
'Not many people do so.'
'No. Countess Tessin has not; and the change has frightened her into - well, I do not like to say avarice, because she is really very kind. But she says she has to watch every penny, and she has turned almost all her servants away. She charges me a shocking great rent and she has let out practically the whole park for grazing, so that I have only one poor little paddock. I had so hoped to breed Arabians, but there is no room. Stephen, you are not eating. I have a couple - one an enchanting little mare that I must show you after dinner - but if only I had anything like that fine sweep of short grass at Jack Aubrey's place, up on the down, I should have a score.'
'I am afraid my agitation is affecting her,' thought Stephen. 'This is not her manner at all.' He applied himself to eating with all the appearance of appetite he could manage, and listened to her remarks about English lessons: little scope for her endeavours, since so many Swedes spoke English anyhow - and about this absurd showman who gave her quite large sums for going up in balloons. 'He wants me to wear spangles next time,' she said.
Stephen had rarely been less master of his emotions, less capable of small talk; he felt this increasing upon him and he positively blessed the false movement on Diana's part that sent the decanter crashing to the ground.
'That was the last of the wine,' she said with a smile, 'But at least I can make you a decent cup of coffee. That is one thing I can do in the domestic line.'
The coffee was indeed excellent. They drank it sitting on a terrace to the south of the house, and the Arabian mare came to see them, walking with polite diffident steps until she was sure of her welcome. She stood with her head over Diana's shoulder, looking into her face with great lustrous eyes, and Diana said 'She follows me about like a dog, when she can get indoors, upstairs and down. She is the only horse I have ever known I should dare to get into the car of a balloon with.'
'I doubt I have ever seen such a beautiful and sympathetic creature before,' said Stephen. The mare's beauty heightened Diana's and the pair they made filled him with a troubled joy.
When they had seen the stables, the other Arabian - 'only a gelding', Diana observed - and when they had thoroughly condemned the paddock they walked back to the house. The tension had fallen and they talked easily: Diana's cousins, Sophie's children, the rebuilding of the Grapes, Mrs Broad's prosperity. In the hall Stephen said 'My dear, may I retire? and may I also have a glass? I must take a dose.'
Sitting there he measured out the laudanum, his practised thumb over the bottle's mouth: a dose suited to the occasion. The first sip startled him extremely. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he said, 'the troll must use akvavit.' He soon grew used to the different taste, however - a difference that he attributed entirely to the different spirit used in the tincture. When he had finished his glass he took off his breeches and not without pain he disengaged the blue diamond, strapped to his person with court-plaster. He wiped the warm stone, looked at it with renewed admiration, and put it into his waistcoat pocket.
Even as he went down the stairs he felt that his dose was already working, and he walked into the little square room in a reasonably collected state of mind, determined to stake his happiness on the one throw.
Diana looked round with a smile. 'I must get this piano tuned,' she said, playing a little ripple of notes with her right hand as she stood there. 'Do you remember that piece of Hummel's that Sophie used to work at so hard, long, long ago? It came into my head, but there is a false note here' - playing it - 'that throws everything out."
'A Judas of a note,' said Stephen. His hands wandered over the keys, taking pieces from the Hummel, working out variations on them, improvising, and then he played the air of Alma viva's Contessa perdono. He could not trust himself to sing with it; his voice would be ludicrous or false or both; but closing the piano he said 'Diana, I have come to be forgiven.'
'But my dear you are forgiven. You have been this great while. I am very fond of you. There is not a scrap of rancour or resentment or ill-will in my heart, I swear."
'That is not quite what I meant, honey.'
'Oh, as for the rest, Stephen, our marriage was absurd in the first place. I should never make any kind of a wife for you. I love you dearly, but we could only wound one another -completely unsuited - each as independent as a cat.'
'I should ask nothing but your company. I have made a great deal of prize-money; I have inherited more. I say this only because it means you could have room for your Arabians - you could have half the Curragh of Kildare - you could have a great stretch of English downland."
'Stephen, you know what I said to Jagiello: I will not put myself in any man's power. But if ever I were to live with a man as his wife, it would be with you: there is no one else at all. I beg you to take that for my answer.'
'I will not be importunate, my dear,' said Stephen. He stood at the window, looking out on to the lime-tree's perfect green. After some moments he turned with a somewhat artificial smile and said, 'Will I tell you an extraordinarily vivid dream I had this morning, Villiers? It had to do with a balloon.'
'A fire-balloon or an air-balloon?'
'I think it must have been an air-balloon: I should have remembered the fire. In any event, there I was in its car and I was above the clouds, a vast stratum of white clouds, rolling and immensely domed in themselves, but all in a united plane below me. And above there was the unbelievably pure and very dark blue sky.'
'Oh yes, yes!' cried Diana.
'All this I had from a man who had been up, for myself I have never left the ground at all. But what I had not derived from his account was the extraordinary intensification of living, the palpable depth of the universal silence, and the very great awareness of the light and colour of this other world - an otherness that was made all the stronger because through an occasional gap in the clouds our ordinary world could be seen, with silver rivers very, very far below and the roads distinct. Yet in time that changed to rock and ice, even farther below; and in my keen delight there was mingled an undefined sense of a dread as huge as the sky itself; it was not merely a fear of being destroyed, but worse; perhaps that of being wholly and entirely lost, body and soul.'
'How did it end?'
'It did not end at all. There was Jack roaring out that the boat was alongside.'
'Jagiello used to tell me dismal stories of people being carried higher and higher and farther and farther - swept quite away - perished with cold - starved - never seen again. But I only go up in an air-balloon, one with a valve so that you can let the stuff out and come down; and we have an anchor on a long rope. I always have Gustav with me; he is thoroughly experienced and very strong, and we never go far.'
'Dear Villiers, I am not trying to frighten you or put you off, God forbid. This was my dream, not a lecture or a parable. I found it deeply impressive, particularly the enhanced sense of colour - the balloon itself was a noble red - and I told it to you partly for that reason, though the Dear knows my account was most pitifully bald, never touching the essence at all, and partly to set a space between what we were talking about before and what I am going to say next. A space by way of symbolizing the total independence of the two conversations. Do you remember d'Anglars, in Paris, La Mothe's friend?'
'Yes,' she said, her somewhat remote, defiant expression changing to one of enquiry.
'He promised that you should have your great diamond back, the Blue Peter: that eventually he would send it after us. He kept his word, and a messenger brought it just after Jack's trial. Here it is."
He had never seen her lose her composure to such a degree. As he passed the stone naked in the blaze of the sun her face showed doubt, amazement, delight and even a kind of fear before dissolving entirely as she burst into tears.
Stephen returned to the window and stood there until he heard her blow her nose and sniff. She sat there with the diamond cupped in her hands; he observed that her pupils were dilated, so much so that her blue eyes looked black. 'I never thought I should see it again,' she said in a tremulous voice. 'And I loved it so; oh I loved it sinfully. I still love it sinfully,' she said, turning it this way and that in the shaft of sunlight. 'I cannot tell you how grateful I am. And I was so odiously unkind to you, Stephen. Forgive me.' A voice outside called 'Diana!' She said 'Oh God, there are the Jagiellos' and looked quickly round; but there was no escape and a moment later the door was pushed open. It was the little Arabian mare that walked in, however, followed some moments later by the Jagiellos.
Although Stephen was standing with his back to the strong light Jagiello recognized him at once; for a moment his first look of astonished delight changed to one of extreme reserve, but then his potential adversary came forward, took him affectionately by the hand, thanked him for his kindness to Diana and congratulated him on his coming marriage and his promotion ; for Jagiello's beautiful mauve coat now had a colonel's marks of rank, and he wore golden spurs.
Diana had a great sense of social duty and having led the horse away and done what she could to a face much altered by tears - blubbered was hardly too strong a word, for she was not a woman who cried easily or without trace - she did her best to entertain her guests. But Lovisa, Jagiello's fiancee, was exceedingly young; she had always been in awe of Diana, held up by Jagiello as a paragon; and now her youth, her respect, and her sterling native stupidity combined with her ignorance of French and her suspicion that the atmosphere was uneasy to make her a very heavy burden. Jagiello was a little better, but he did see that his usual gay prattle would be out of place in the present context, and being so taken aback by the whole situation he could not readily hit upon an alternative. Stephen, whose social sense could never have recommended him anywhere, said a few civil things to Lovisa, who was indeed absurdly pretty, and then, perceiving that Diana was telling Jagiello the latest news of Jack Aubrey, he too lapsed into silence. He had been feeling very strange for some time, and this he attributed to intensity of emotion: just what the nature of the emotion was, apart from the obvious desolation of failure, he could not yet tell - there was the analogy of wounds in battle: you knew you had been hit and roughly where, but whether by blade, point, ball or splinter you could not tell, nor how gravely, until you had time to examine the wounds and name them. Yet he did long for these people to go away so that he might take a second dose, a dose that would quieten his heart and enable him to walk back to Stockholm with at least the appearance of equanimity.
At last Diana was inspired to tell Jagiello that his grandmother had called before dinner and to suggest that he should hurry to the big house to prevent her setting out again. Countess Tessin would surely have seen them go by, and the double walk would be too much for her.
Jagiello thankfully agreed; he had felt in the way from the first few minutes without being able to contrive any plausible reason for taking his leave. But after the first farewells, and at the open hall door itself, Lovisa began to tell Diana about her wedding clothes. She went on and on and on, in Swedish most of the time, and Stephen backed and backed until with a final bow he could disappear upstairs.
Once again he was astonished at the strength of his draught, and this time it occurred to him that the difference might lie in the opium rather than the menstruum. 'And yet," he reflected as he walked downstairs, 'I have never heard of any marked variation between the pharmacopoeias of different countries in that respect. Within the range of a few scruples to the ounce, the tincture is the same at a respectable apothecary's in Paris or Dublin, Boston or Barcelona.'
'Lord, Maturin," said Diana, 'I thought they would never go. That silly pretty goose was still talking about the embroidery on her gown when Countess Tessin came in sight. But then I did give Jagiello a shove at last and he took her away.'
'There is much to be said for Jagiello.'
'Yes. And this time he did not utter a single word against balloons, though he knows very well I mean to go up on Saturday."
'This coming Saturday?'
'Yes. They have begun filling it already.'
'May I come too?"
'Of course you may. It is the red balloon this time, so there will be plenty of room in the car. Would you like to see it?" Stephen did not answer until she said 'Would you like to see it?' again. Then he looked up, a little dazed, and replied 'That would be delightful. Do you keep it here?'
'Oh no, no. It is a vast great thing. But they are filling it at the foundry - they use iron filings and vitriol to make the inflammable air, you know - and you can see it from the tower. Stephen, are you feeling quite well?'
'A trifle odd, my dear, I must confess; but then I was roused before dawn. I am perfectly capable of running up the tower.'
'We will take it gently. There is a spy-glass on top of the cupboard behind you.'
She led the way to a vaulted corridor at the back of the hall and so to the dark tower beyond, far older than the present house. 'Take great care, Stephen,' she called back as she climbed the spiral staircase. 'Keep to the wall side, there is no rail in the middle after half way."
Winding and winding in the dim shadows they came to a dwarvish door at the top and crept out into the brilliant light. They were surprisingly high and the whole island lay spread out below them. 'This way,' said Diana, leading him to the eastern parapet: there was the old city of Stockholm about an hour's walk away and rather to one side of it the tall chimneys of industry. Diana had been carrying the Blue Peter; she now wrapped it in a handkerchief, put it in her pocket, and levelled the telescope at the chimneys. 'There,' she said, 'Get the one that is smoking so, move to the left, and there in the yard you see the upper half of a great round red thing. That is my balloon!'
'God bless it,' said Stephen, handing back the glass.
'I think we should go down and have a cup of tea,' said Diana, studying his face. 'You look like whitey-brown paper. You go first and I will follow; I know just where to find the bolts.'
Stephen opened the door, said something indistinct about Saturday and pitched headlong into the void.
It seemed that in spite of obscure delays and disturbances the ascent had been postponed rather than cancelled; at least if it had been a public performance at all it must have been on a very modest scale, since he could remember no crowd, no noise. He did have confused memories of a tumble, of indeterminate injuries and fuss, which muffled the immediate past, and now they had risen above the clouds - a fairly apt parallel for his passing fogginess of mind - and now they were in the pure upper air with that strangely familiar dark blue above and on either hand unless he looked over the edge of the car and down to the fantastic convolutions and the slowly changing geography of the cloud-world below: all much purer and more intense even than his dream, which he remembered perfectly. And although his dream had heightened colour it had not done so to this miraculous degree; the wickerwork of the car had an infinity of very beautiful shades from dark brown to something lighter than straw, while the ropes that led from the network enveloping the balloon itself had a subtlety all their own. It was as though he had never seen rope before, or as though he had recovered his sight after many years of blindness, and when he looked across at Diana, the perfection of her cheek fairly caught his breath. She was sitting there in a green riding-habit with her hands folded in her lap; she was looking down at her diamond and her eyes were almost closed, the long lashes hiding them.
