Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 282
THE PORTRAIT
First published in 1910, this historical novel is set during the reign of William and Mary, who shared rule over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1689 to 1694, and is mostly concerned with court intrigues and frivoloities of the time. The novel tells the story of Mr Bettesworth, a learned but proud man – foreshadowing Ford’s later creation Christopher Tietjens – who agrees to a riduclaous wager of £20,000 to discover and marry the subject of a portrait he has never seen. Following his unlikely and comical quest, suffering humiliation, he learns the errors of his ways, at the instruction of his eventual bride. The novel features a range of Restoration scenes, several of which were inspired by the comedy plays of the time, with a flavour of Hogarthian satire.
Although The Portrait is mostly comedic in tone, it finishes with a moralising standpoint. The novel has received little attention since its publication, being criticised for its ‘sketchy’ nature and lack of historical interest or depth, compared to the author’s other historical works.
King William and Queen Mary
CONTENTS
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
PART IV.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
BUT the white satin, sir...” Mr Boodle said from the floor where he knelt, rolling up his stuffs. “You have to remember my credit, sir, if not your own, and to wear white satin at your entry upon the Town!..
In a blue silk dressing-gown, with a white cloth knotted in turban fashion about his shaven head, Mr. Bettesworth held before his face the book of the opera The Island Princess, in which he was reading, and made no answer to the tailor. The tailor appealed to Mr. Roland Bettesworth, who, his legs crossed, and already dressed, leaned against the side of the tall window and played with his sword-knot.
“It will be known to the Quality,” Mr. Boodle said, “that Mr. Bettesworth has his trousseau and his toilet of me, and I protest that to appear upon the Town in white satin, unless one is to marry on the morrow—”
“Friend Boodle,” Mr. Roland Bettesworth said from the window, “my brother will wear the white satin.’’ Spare your breath, and send it home before noon.”
Mr. Boodle finished rolling his patterns up in his apron, and rising to his feet, he sighed —
“To be sure there is only one button-hole to sew. It shall be here by noon,” he said. His large spectacles hung sideways over his nose; the breast of his snuff-coloured, linsey-woolsey coat was decorated with an innumerable multitude of pins. He had a piece of chalk above his right ear; his tape-measure hung from his breeches’ pocket to a level with his shins; and his feet, in black slops, shuffled unhappily when he went out of the door. Mr. Roland ran out and overtook him on the great stone landing. He caught him by the opening of the waistcoat and pushed him almost behind a shoulder-high, red granite pedestal, upon which stood a white marble Susannah drawing her garments about her with one hand and modestly extending the other towards the beholder. Having the tailor well pinned in here, Mr. Roland Bettesworth planted his legs apart, pushed his black, three-cornered hat back on his head, and stood with his arms akimbo.
“The necessary, Brother Snip,” he said; “unpouch the Jacobuses, the Carroluses, the Moidores, the Shekels.”
Cowering behind the statue, the little tailor gave vent to grunts and gasps of despair and want of comprehension.
“Why, if you had read as many old plays, Brother Snip, as my brother Bettesworth, you would know that these are gold coins, and gold coins I will have of you. Guineas, broad guineas, as the present Age has it. But what’s in a name — ?”
Again the tailor squeaked.
“ — Now, here was our compact. When, being bearleader to my brother Bettesworth, I commended to him your shears, I was to have half your bill and you were to double each of the items on it. Now you have an order for three hundred and twenty-six guineas, and I will have one hundred and sixty-one and a half. Now! Instantly! Precipidado!”
“But, sir,” the tailor said, “the amount of my bill against you is more than that. I was minded to keep this money, and then you will be honourably out of my debt.”
Mr. Roland threw his head back and laughed.
“Honourably, quotha,” he said. “For the two thieves that we are that is a fine word. No, sirrah, understand first this one simple thing: I will have one hundred and sixty-one and a half guineas from thee, and then I will discourse upon the point of honour.”
Mr. Boodle sighed, “But how can I tell, my master, that the Worshipful, your brother, will pay my bill?”
“Why, goodly Snip, my brother, as you well know, owns half of Salisbury Plain; and though he had been as profligate as I, since he came into this fortune but the last month as ever was, surely you will not think it is all dissipated now? Consider, too, this monstrous house, and all these crabbed pictures of our ancestors. Egad! if I had the selling of them—”
“You would pay my bill,” the tailor said.
“Damme, Snip! if thou should’st see one maravedi of it,” the young man answered.
The tailor took a little wooden snuff-box from his skirt pocket and lapped snuff from his thumb with his dry nostrils.
“If this coat is to be finished by noon,” he said, “your Mastership must let me be gone home.”
“But my one hundred and sixty-one and a half guineas?” Mr. Roland said.
“... I will give you a bill of six months for it, and you shall get it discounted where you will.”
Mr. Roland rested his hand on his sword-hilt, and wagged his scabbard beneath the skirt of his blue coat.
“Oh, damme!” he said again, “that will never do.”
“It is all that will be done,” the tailor answered.
“Then shall I denounce your bill to my brother, and you lose his custom!”
“Then shall I tell Mr. Bettesworth” the tailor said, “that you have bidden me charge him double so that you might have half. Then your Worship would lose the ordering of your brother’s purchases.”
“Oh, I am not so assured of that,” Mr. Roland answered. “My Squire brother is the oddest, crabbedest, most obstinate, most egregious creature that ever was known. When you think you have him in one place, up he starts in another. When you think he would act, he will sit as still as a pig. So that I tell you, friend Snip, that if you should advise him this moment that I am set to take this reasonable perquisite, it is all one that he might say: ‘Beggarly tailor, shall a younger son not exist upon the superfluity of his elder? Get thee hence, thou Starveling!’ And so he would thrust a thousand pounds into my bosom and bid me spend it at the tables. Sir, he is a very unaccountable person. And if he had not made the Grand Tour when he was three-and-twenty, — because my uncle was seized with the whimsy to travel, — if he had not made the Grand Tour seven years ago, my brother would have been as musty a rustic as ever was Squire Cranky in the play. Now this whimsy of a white coat, can you explain that, friend Snip?”
“... Unless it be that his mistress have bid him wear it, to tease him.”
“Nay, he has no mistress,” Mr. Roland answered, “ — or none in the Town. He may have fathered half the brats on Salisbury Plain for aught I know. Your cold-eyed men are often given that way. But no, I will tell you how it is. When he was in Italy there was a painter called Perugio, or Graccho, or some such name, and this painter, being monstrously the mode at Rome, was able to force all the coxcombs and madams that came to see his work to put on white dominoes that he lent them. This he did because he said the high colours of their coats killed the low colours on his cloths. Now to-day the Worshipful, the head of my house, is minded to visit the paintings of one Hitchcock, which I have told him are monstrous fine. And he has said that he will make it the mode to do as much honour to our English Correggio as ever Italy can show to hers. So he will go in white, and nothing shall stop him. For he is what it is the mode to call a ‘Character,’ even as his and my uncle was before him. Did you ever hear tell of my uncle Bettesworth, Snip?”
Mr. Boodle rubbed his hand gently on his chin.
“Cocklaw Bettesworth,” he said; “I carried clothes home to him thirty years ago, before he went into the country for ever. It was a sad loss to the gaiety of the Town.”
“The gaiety of the Town,” Mr. Bettesworth ejaculated. “Gaiety, quotha! that’s a brave word for the surliest, sour-facest, rampiest old rustic uncle that ever cut a younger brother out of his will.”
CHAPTER II.
MR. ROLAND BETTESWORTH was younger than Mr. Bettesworth by some six years. With a younger son’s portion he had lived upon the Town mostly by means of post-obits. But upon the reading of his uncle’s will, three months before, it was found that everything went to Mr. Bettesworth; and no one in the world could have been more chapfallen than Mr. Roland on the day of that ceremony.
It took place in the Manor-house of Winterbourne, on Salisbury Plain. Mr. Roland had not seen this house nor his brother in the last six years, for his uncle would neither let the younger son come down from Town nor the elder go up to it. The uncle having attempted to drive his coach up the steps of St. Paul’s whilst the Te Deum Service was being held after the battle of Wagenau, and having been forcibly prevented by William the Third’s order and by William the Third’s Bodyguard — the uncle having arrived at the conclusion that this was his right as Lord of the Courts-Baron of Winterbourne, of Bassett, of Pitt Minima, and of Cheveril St. Francis. The most learned jurists have since denied this claim, which was revived by his nephew, the present Mr. Bettesworth, the decision being that the
right which was granted by Henry the Third had been to ride one horse and lead three up the steps of the Church of St. Paul in the village of Ludger, the words of the deed being: “Ecclesiœ sancti Pauli apud Lugd” — Squire Bettesworth had turned his coach right round from the steps of St. Paul’s and had driven down to Winterbourne, vowing that he would never come back to London unless the King, with his own hand, should lead his coach horses up the steps of St. Paul’s during a Te Deum Service. This had never occurred; and, indeed, Mr. Bettesworth being a troublesome person both at Court and in the Parliament House, there seemed to be no reason why it should. Mr. Bettesworth had never in those thirty years returned to the Town of London. Once, having made a bet with the Earl of Pembroke that he would purchase from the Pope a picture by Raphael that hung in the Sistine Chapel, Mr. Bettesworth had set out by way of Southampton to take his nephew upon the Grand Tour. The Sistine Madonna he had been unable to purchase, but he had brought back a lady called Poppæa, who was declared to have been the mistress of Pope Innocent XII; and since then he had insisted that all his man-servants, down to his stable-lads, should be arrayed in the garb of the Halberdiers of St. Peter’s. Poppæa, whether or no she had been the mistress of the Pope, was certainly the making of Mr. Bettesworth’s heir. She was a large, wise, dark woman; and having once settled down at Winterbourne it seemed as if she became a part of the house itself. She grew fatter and fatter, and more and more indolent; and she was the one person who could curb the passions of young Mr. Bettesworth. She said to him one day, and she repeated it many times: “Caro mio, you will always be a headstrong maniac. Cultivate, then, a coldness of manner.” She taught him, indeed, in actual fact, to count forty before he spoke if he felt himself in any way agitated. “For,” she said, “a man in anger is always ridiculous, and it is ridicule mostly that you will have to avoid in this world. Now, your actions will always be ridiculous. They will be chivalrous, obstinate, high-flown, tyrannous, or what you will. And what you have to achieve is the doing of these ridiculous actions in a manner that is not ridiculous. Cultivate, then, reserve. Act after long pauses. Speak after long pauses. If it is possible, you will, during these pauses, reflect and take a more prudent course. If that is not possible you will at least have the appearance of having acted and spoken after reflection, and that is always confusing to an adversary, if there be any adversary to deal with.”
So that under the care of this lady, who was more than an aunt to him, during seven years the young Squire had grown to be thirty. He could fence; he could dance; he could read a great many Italian novels, English plays, and law books. He rode well to hounds; could use a hawk upon the Plain; and he was, above all, learned in the lives of painters and in the phraseology of pictures, which he had studied with assiduity and passion during his Italian journey. He had, it is true, a proper opinion of the worth of the Bettesworths of Winterbourne Longa. Winterbourne Longa lies in a hollow; he had to climb long and weary hills before he could even see land that would not be one day his own. And from the tops of those downs how many weathercocks of churches could he not see, — villages where, when on a Sunday he came out of church, the inhabitants would kneel down until he was past them. He was tall, erect and fair, aquiline nosed, rather sharp jawed, and of that very symmetrical comeliness which is to be found more particularly amongst the Anglo-Saxons of the West of England. As a young man he had been rather slight of figure, but when he was rising thirty he rode already thirteen stone without the saddle. He spoke Italian as well as English; he was an assiduous dancer in the Assemblies of the City of Salisbury; the Earl of Pembroke liked his company and he imagined that when at last he should come to his own he would dictate the tastes and fashions of London Town much as he imagined his uncle had done before him. And he thought that once his foot was in the stirrup he would assert the claim to drive up the steps of St. Paul’s more successfully, because more tactfully, than his uncle had done. In the meantime he hunted much. He had a very excellent strain of game-cocks of his own breeding; he paid some attention to the lands and needs of his uncle’s tenants, and imagined that he paid a great deal; and he was fond of lecturing his dependents on the duties of their stations.
It would have been more difficult for him to step into his uncle’s shoes had that hard-swearing, broadfaced, bulky figure not lain for more than six months before its burial in paralytic silence in a room full of bleeding-basins and lancets. And his uncle’s stroke occurring just ten days before Michaelmas, the young Squire had upon his hands the full authority to renew leases, to preside at the Audit dinners and at the Courts, where the Copyholders rendered suit and service. This had, indeed, given him a still stronger sense of the immense authority that God had placed in his hands. He imagined himself about to become the third or fourth richest Commoner in England, and he knew himself to be vastly wealthier than the Herberts, — all this wealth and power being set upon that firmest of all bases, the land, the very Earth itself.
The reading of the will took place in the great dancing-hall of the Manor-house. The attorneys and their clerks sat at a table covered with green cloth. Beside them, immediately on the one side, sat the Signora Poppæa, now very fat and with gouty fingers, dressed in a great black panniered dress, with a large black fan, and a formidable black cap that rose to nearly a foot above her head. Behind her stood the new Squire in a black coat, with a mourning sword, his hair tied by immense black ribbons; and just beside her chair stood Roland, hat in hand, dressed like his brother. On the other side of the table were some poor Bettesworths from Yeovil, and all behind them stood a large crowd of bare-headed tenantry, of stewards, of water-bailiffs, of parsons, and of the other humble dependents. They were kept in their place in a half-moon ring by the servants who, still habited like Halberdiers of the Pope of Rome, exhibited no other sign of mourning than immense streamers of black hanging from huge battle-axes at the head of their pikes. Mr. Bettesworth regarded this last exotic display of his late uncle’s eccentricity with a certain haughty disfavour. He had an idea that it rendered him ridiculous to stand in this ring of retainers, attired for all the world like beef-eaters. Indeed, seeing the world very much through the Signora Poppæa’s eyes, the whole ceremony appeared to him to be of a barbarous and grotesquely antique kind.
A small lawyer arose from the table and, making three bows, stood before him, holding out in front of his spectacles the long vellum strip with the air and attitude of a town-crier announcing a sale by auction.
“Give him a bell,” Roland whispered, “and let him cry: ‘O yez! O yez! O yez!’”
And so, declaring him to be sound body and mind, old Mr. Bettesworth’s voice spoke from the grave. Young Mr. Bettesworth was his sole heir: Poppæa was left the use of the Dower House at Berwick St. James, and one hundred pounds wherewith to purchase a portrait either of the late Pope Innocent XII or of Squire Bettesworth himself, according to which of the two mates, upon reflection, she preferred. Poppæa smiled pleasantly. The largest sum that had been conferred upon any bona-roba since 1610 had been settled upon her when she left Rome under Mr. Bettesworth’s protection. So that the poor Bettesworths on the other side of the table, unaware of this fact, were able to smile maliciously, until these in turn were brought up by the mention of their names, coupled in each case with a sum, larger indeed than they had expected, but accompanied by a condition or a comment which made him or her for the moment the laughing-stock of the whole assembly. Miss Lavinia Bettesworth of Cuddesdon, a lacrymose spinster of fifty, got up, indeed, to whisper to the attorney’s clerk.
