A Civil Contract

  Mr Wimmering looked rather struck. He said: ‘I must own that one would have supposed –’ He stopped, as a thought occurred to him, and asked hopefully: ‘Have you, perhaps, received news from Belgium, my lord?’

  ‘I’ve received a good deal of news during the past weeks,’ Adam replied coolly. ‘I won’t deceive you, however: I haven’t any secret source of information, and I’ve heard nothing that confirms or refutes my father-in-law’s story.’ He paused; the disturbing smile grew more marked. ‘Have there been moments in your life, Wimmering, when you have felt, within yourself, a strong – oh, an overwhelming compulsion to do something that perhaps your reason tells you is imprudent – even dangerous? When you don’t hesitate to stake your last groat, because you know the dice are going to fall your way?’ He saw the look of horror in Wimmering’s face, and laughed. ‘No, you don’t understand, do you? Well, never mind!’

  But Mr Wimmering was unable to follow this advice. In a flash of enlightenment he had recognized his late patron in the present Viscount, and his heart sank like a plummet. He shuddered to recall the number of times the Fifth Viscount had yielded to the compulsion of an inner and too often lying voice, how many times he had been confident that his luck had changed. He sank into despair, knowing from bitter experience how useless it would be to attempt to bring his lordship to reason. There was nothing he could do to restrain him, but he did utter an anguished protest when Adam, enumerating his tangible assets, said: ‘Then there’s Fontley. You know as well as I do how much land I have left unmortgaged – unsettled too! My father blamed himself for that, didn’t he? I wish he could know how thankful I am today that the estate never was resettled!’

  Mr Wimmering was obliged to draw what comfort he could from the hope that my lord’s intangible asset would rescue him from penury. It would certainly weigh more heavily in his favour in the mind of Mr Drummond than any security he could offer – provided the banker did not discover that he was acting in defiance of Mr Chawleigh’s advice.

  ‘He won’t,’ said Adam. ‘My father-in-law banks with Hoare’s.’

  ‘My lord!’ said Wimmering desperately, ‘have you thought – have you considered – what would be your position if this – this gamble of yours should fail?’

  ‘It won’t fail,’ replied Adam, with so much calm confidence that Wimmering was impressed in spite of himself.

  But he begged Adam not to command him to carry to Drummond’s proposals of which he wholly disapproved. A very faint hope that these words might give his lordship pause was of brief duration.

  ‘Not I!’ said Adam, impish laughter in his eyes. ‘If Drummond were to catch sight of that Friday-face you’re wearing, my tale would be told! He wouldn’t lend me as much as a coach-wheel!’ Laughter faded; he looked at Wimmering for a minute without speaking, and then said perfectly seriously: ‘I don’t think Providence holds out chance upon chance to one. I think – if I were to refuse this – I should never be offered another. It means a great deal to me. Can’t you understand?’

  Mr Wimmering nodded, and answered mournfully: ‘Yes, my lord. I have for long been aware, alas –’ He left the sentence unfinished, only sighing heavily.

  ‘Don’t mistake me!’ Adam said quickly. ‘It’s some quirk in me – an odd kick in my gallop, my father would have said! – no fault of Mr Chawleigh’s! I’ve received nothing but kindness from him. Indeed, I hold him in considerable affection!’

  Mr Wimmering knew that there was no more to be said. He was well enough acquainted with Mr Chawleigh to feel a profound sympathy for anyone who lay within his power; but he still could not repress a hope that Mr Drummond would prove less accommodating than my lord anticipated. But no sooner did he entertain this hope than it was shattered by a macabre vision of my lord caught in the toils of some blood-sucking moneylender, which so much appalled him that when he presently climbed into a hack the jarvey had to ask him twice where he wanted to go before he could collect himself sufficiently to utter the address of his office in the City.

  He had offered to await the result of his client’s visit to the bank at Fenton’s, but Adam (looking alarmingly like a school-boy bent on mischief) said that he was not going to return to the hotel until late at night, because he meant to take good care to keep out of his father-in-law’s way, and it was well within the bounds of probability that Mr Chawleigh might call there to make certain that his advice was being followed. ‘I should be obliged to tell him the truth, and that wouldn’t do at all,’ Adam said. ‘I’ll come to your place of business, and very likely remain there. I shouldn’t think he would call there, would you? He will suppose you to be running all about the City, trying to dispose of my stock. In any event, we will warn your clerk! Is there a cupboard I can slip into, in case of need?’

  Jolting over the cobbles in the aged and malodorous hack, Mr Wimmering reflected that with all his faults the Fifth Viscount had never demanded of his man of business a cupboard in which he could hide.

  Arrived at his office, he had some time to wait before he heard Adam’s halting step on the dusty stairs. He got up from behind his desk, as Adam was ushered into his room, but he had no need to ask how my lord had fared: the answer was plain to see in his smile. Wimmering had had time to recover his usual composure, and he said, in a tone of mere respectful enquiry: ‘Your lordship has prospered in your errand?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Yes, of course! Did you think I should not? Fifty thousand – can you buy up to that figure?’

  ‘Fifty thousand?’ echoed Wimmering. ‘Drummond will lend you fifty-thousand-pounds, my lord?’

  ‘But why not? Consider! I’ve something in the region of twenty thousand invested in the Funds already; I have Fontley, with the demesne lands; and besides that there are the three farms which –’

  ‘Did he know for what purpose you wanted such a sum, my lord?’

  ‘Certainly! He doesn’t think I’ve run mad! Nor is he shaking like a blancmanger because we may have suffered a reverse. We had a long talk together: he’s a sensible man – really a great gun!’ He regarded Wimmering with a decided twinkle, and said reproachfully: ‘No, no, you are quite mistaken!’

  ‘My lord?’ said Wimmering, startled.

  ‘I told him, at the outset, that I wished to impress upon him most particularly that what I had to propose to him had nothing whatsoever to do with my father-in-law.’

  Wimmering opened his mouth, and shut it again. He could well imagine what the effect of this warning must have been. He began to suspect that he had underrated his lordship, but all he said was: ‘Just so, my lord. Very proper!’

  Adam laughed. ‘Well, he can’t say I didn’t tell him the exact truth, at all events! Now, listen, Wimmering! Mr Chawleigh assured me that you would know how to sell my stock, so I trust you may know how to buy more for me.’

  ‘There will be no difficulty about that, my lord,’ replied Wimmering, at his dryest.

  ‘Good! I don’t know how low the price may sink, but I think I ought not to run any risks, so buy now, if you please!’

  Mr Wimmering closed his eyes for an anguished moment. ‘Run any risks…!’ he repeated faintly.

  ‘If I delayed, in the hope of buying cheaper still, I might miss my tip. At any moment now we may expect to get news from Headquarters, which will put an end to the panic in the City. Drummond warns me not to look for any startling rise immediately. He considers that it’s unlikely that the price will go beyond what it was when the books were closed, so do the best you can for me, Wimmering! I know you will.’

  ‘I should prefer to say that I shall obey your orders, my lord,’ Wimmering replied.

  Though he set about his task with extreme reluctance, he performed it to his patron’s entire satisfaction. ‘As low as that!’ Adam exclaimed, still in that mood of alarming elation. ‘You’re a wizard, Wimmering! how the devil did you contrive to do it? I wish you will try to look a little more cheerful!’

  ‘My lord,’ said Wimmering, ‘had I found it impossible
to buy at so low a figure I should feel more cheerful!’

  Adam went off to Brooks’s, where he dined, and spent the evening. There were a large number of members present, and for a time he was kept tolerably well-entertained, talking to friends, and listening with amusement to the ridiculous theories being put forward about the progress of the war; but as the evening wore on he ceased to be amused. He began to be irritated, and several times responded to remarks addressed to him with a shortness which bordered on incivility. He moved away presently, wondering why the pessimists should be so much more numerous and vociferous than the optimists. He was a little surprised to find that absurdities could make him angry; but he thought that those who spread ominous stories, which were invariably vouched for as having emanated from trustworthy sources, deserved to be given a sharp set-down. Only fools placed the slightest credence in reports repeated by prattleboxes who had heard them from a friend to whom they had been told by someone who had met a man just arrived from Belgium, but when everyone must be feeling a considerable degree of anxiety it was really criminal to disseminate rumours that could only serve to encourage despondency. He removed himself out of earshot of the war-group, and sat down to glance through the latest issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. There was nothing in it of interest; he tried to read one article, but found his mind wandering, perhaps because two elderly gentlemen distracted him by arguing hotly on the respective merits of Turner and Claude. Fragments of other conversations reached his ears: the Panorama in Leicester Fields, somebody’s latest witticism, somebody’s run of luck at macao: it was incredible that people could be absorbed in such fripperies at such a moment!

  His head had begun to ache; he felt depressed, and realized that he was very tired. That accounted for his inability to concentrate his mind on a dull article. It was time he went to bed. He left the club, and walked up the street to his hotel, telling himself that a good night’s sleep was all that was needed to restore him to that mood of supreme confidence which had possessed him all day.

  He had expected to drop asleep immediately, but no sooner had he closed his eyes than his brain became active, thinking of the day’s transactions, speculating on what might have happened across the Channel. He tried to drag it away from the war, and to fix it instead on the schemes he had made for the improvement of his estate, but it was too strong for him. His body ached with fatigue, but whatever position he adopted was uncomfortable within a very few minutes, and the wearier he became the livelier grew his brain. He told himself that his diminishing confidence was a mere reaction from his previous elation, remembering how often, after a hard-won battle, a fit of dejection had succeeded the mood of triumph and rejoicing; but the endless argument in his head went on and on. Doubt shook him; defeat, which had seemed the remotest of possibilities, became probable; far larger in his brain than the memories of Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria loomed the thought that Wellington had never before faced Napoleon himself. He had laughed at the people who had said that to him, but it was true: Masséna had been the best of the Marshals sent against Wellington: a good general, but not a Napoleon. It was also true, of course, that Wellington had never lost a battle, but that could be said of any general before his first defeat. Struggling against this creeping conviction of disaster, he thought of all the splendid fellows who had made up the Peninsular Army: drunken rascals, perhaps, but more than a match for three times their number of Frogs, as they had proved again and again. All very well in attack, Johnny Crapaud, but when it came to a dogged stand there were no soldiers in the world that bore comparison with the British.

  The flicker of confidence flared high for a moment, and sank. There were too many foreigners in this new Army of Wellington’s, too many raw battalions. The recruit who had never been shot over might perform prodigies of valour, but it was only the seasoned soldier who could be trusted to maintain his ground in the face of determined attack. The Allied Army was not the Peninsular Army: it was a polyglot force, stiffened certainly by veteran Regiments, but its ranks swelled by such unknown quantities as the Dutch-Belgians, the Brunswickers (many of whom, Major Rowan wrote, were mere children), and Hanoverian Landwehr battalions.

  In the small hours of the morning the realization came to Adam that he had acted like a madman; and until a restless, nightmare-ridden sleep overcame him he endured worse agonies than any he had suffered under the surgeons’ hands.

  When Kinver drew back the blinds in his room, and he awoke, the more lurid of his imaginings seemed absurd; but he got up feeling more jaded than when he had retired to bed, and not much more hopeful.

  He was never afterwards able to recall what he had done during that interminable day. When the newspapers appeared they contained the first accounts of actions fought on the 16th and the 17th June. Making every allowance for exaggerations and misapprehensions, they did not afford very reassuring reading. There was no official dispatch: a sure sign that the actions at Ligny and Quatre-Bras had been the prelude merely to the main battle, of which no news had yet reached London.

  A nasty business, Quatre-Bras: that much was evident. Boney had taken the Duke by surprise: the miracle was that Ney did not seem to have pressed home his attack on a force he must have known to be numerically far inferior to his own. Forgetting his personal anxieties, Adam thought that they must have stood like heroes, the fellows who held the ground until Picton brought up the Reserve, midway through the afternoon. Dutch-Belgians, too: well, that was cheering, at all events! But Picton had been badly cut up, and there was no mention of any British cavalry. A scrambling, desperate fight it must have been, attended by big losses, but mercifully inconclusive. The cavalry skirmishes at Genappe on the 17th furnished exciting material for the journalists’ pens, but were relatively unimportant. The worst news was that the Prussians seemed to have been shockingly mauled, and flung back in disarray. There was even a rumour that Blücher had been killed; and where the Prussians were now, whether re-forming, or retreating, no one knew. It might be a serious business, Adam thought, if their officers failed to get them together again.

  Trying to build up a picture of the situation from unreliable reports was not easy, but for a short time Adam felt more hopeful, taking comfort from the reflection that although the Reserve must be terribly weakened Wellington had been able to withdraw his troops in good order, and, apparently, without being much harassed by the enemy.

  There was no more published news, but as the day dragged on more and more ominous rumours reached London, and were passed from mouth to mouth. The Allied Army had endured a crushing defeat; the remnants of it had fallen back in disorder on Brussels, and had been seen defiling out through the Antwerp gate; deserters from the battlefield had been encountered as far away as Ghent and Antwerp, telling of an unprecedented bombardment, overwhelming attacks by enormous forces of cavalry, hideous carnage.

  Adam recognized the falsity of much that he heard, but it was impossible to maintain optimism under the cumulative weight of reported disaster. When not one scrap of reassuring news was received one could no longer laugh rumour to scorn: even if the stories were grossly exaggerated they must be founded on truth; and one was forced, at last, to confront, not the possibility of defeat, but the incredible certainty of it. The confidence which had burned like a flame in Adam all the previous day, sunk to embers during the night, and then flickered fitfully but with diminishing strength with his efforts to keep it alive, was not quite dead when he walked down the street to Brooks’s that evening. It still smouldered, but with such a tiny glow that he was barely conscious of it. He felt rather numb, as though he had been battered into insensibility. He tried to realize that the Army had been beaten, but the words conveyed nothing to his brain: they were as meaningless as gibberish. It was easier to realize that he had completed the work of bringing his house to ruin. In the throes of reaction, he had uttered aloud: ‘My God, what have I done?’ in horror at what then seemed an act of madness; but he had still been able to cherish the hope that his gamble would
yet prove successful. The little spark of hope that lurked beneath despair and self-blame was no more based on reason than the disbelief that flashed into his brain when some fresh tale of ignoble rout was forced on him. He knew that when he had staked everything he possessed, even Fontley, he had not thought it a gamble, but he could not recapture the confidence that had then prompted him, or understand how he could have been so crassly, so wickedly stupid as to fly in the face of Mr Chawleigh’s advice, and of Wimmering’s entreaties.

  The club was crowded, and, for once, very few of its members were in the card-room. Everyone was talking about the reports from Belgium, but there was no fresh news, not a hint that any word had been received at the Horse Guards from the Duke’s Headquarters. In the large room overlooking St James’s Street Lord Grey was proving to the apparent satisfaction of a numerous audience that Napoleon was established in Brussels at that moment. Napoleon had two hundred thousand men across the Sambre, which set the question beyond argument. Nobody attempted to argue; Sir Robert Wilson began to read aloud a letter which confirmed the rumour that what was left of the Army had evacuated Brussels, and was retreating to the coast.

  An elderly stranger, standing beside Adam before one of the windows, said in an angry undervoice: ‘Gammon! Pernicious humdudgeon! I don’t believe a word of it, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Adam replied.

  The babel of voices rose; peace terms were being discussed. The noise stopped suddenly as someone said sharply: ‘Listen!’

  The sound of cheering could be heard in the distance. It drew nearer. Adam’s unknown companion thrust his head out of the window, peering up the street in the failing light. He said: ‘It’s a chaise, I think. Yes, but – here, sir, your eyes are younger than mine! What are those things sticking out of the windows?’