“Anddoesit give you joy, then?” he asked her. “Teaching, I mean, and running your school?”
They had reached a sharp bend in the lane. Ahead of them a wooden stile separated the path from a darkened meadow beyond. They stopped walking by unspoken consent, and he set one elbow on the top bar of the stile and one booted foot on the bottom rung.
“Yes, it does,” she said briskly after giving the question some consideration. “I am happy. One of my reasons for going to London is to inform my man of business that I no longer need the assistance of my benefactor. The school is paying for itself and providing me a little profit besides to put by for my old age. I am contented.”
“I envy you,” he surprised himself by saying.
“I think that hardly likely, Lord Attingsborough,” she said rather sharply as if she believed he mocked her. In the growing darkness it was impossible to see her face clearly.
He laughed and pointed to the west.
“We have not seen the sun all day,” he said, “but at least we have been granted the remnants of a sunset to admire.”
She turned her head away to look at the thin, fiery line of red and purple stretched across the horizon and then up at the dark sky, which was filled with stars and a moon almost at the full.
“How absolutely beautiful,” she said, her voice somehow different, warm and feminine and filled with a nameless longing. “And I have been talking all the time and missing it. How much beauty we allow to pass us by unheeded.”
“Indeed,” he said, looking down at her.
There was something unexpectedly appealing about a woman who had stridden out to meet life head on and believed passionately in the tasks she had set herself. Notphysicallyappealing, perhaps, though she was not exactly an antidote, but…
Well, he was not sorry after all that he had invited her out for this walk. Apart from the scolding, he liked what he had heard from her. Which gave him some faint hope…
She sighed, her face still lifted to the sky.
“I did not even realize,” she said, “how much I needed this walk. It is far more restoring to the spirit than an early retirement to bed.”
Was shereallyhappy? he wondered. Did she ever feel nostalgia for any of her girlhood dreams? But life was made up of a succession of dreams, some few to be realized, most to be set aside as time went on, one or two to persist for a lifetime. It was knowing when to abandon a dream, perhaps, that mattered and distinguished the successful people in life from the sad, embittered persons who never moved on from the first of life’s great disappointments. Or from the airy dreamers who never really lived life at all.
“Idoenvy you,” he said again. “You did not stroll passively along the highway life appeared to have set before you but have stridden purposefully along a path of your own making instead. That is admirable.”
She set a gloved hand on the top bar of the stile, not far from his elbow, and turned her head to look into his face, though he doubted she could see much of it in the darkness.
“And you have not done so?” she asked him. She sounded like a stern schoolteacher calling a pupil to account.
He chuckled softly.
“When one is endowed with the courtesy title of marquess at birth and knows that one day one will be a duke with all the wealth and privilege and responsibility that come with the title,” he said, “one does not think often about escaping onto a new path. Onecouldnot. There is such a thing as duty.”
Though hehaddreamed of escape…
“But there is always choice,” she said. “Life need never be bland. Duties can be shirked, or they can be performed with a minimum of effort and enthusiasm, or they can be embraced with firmness of purpose and a determination to excel.”
“I hope there is no question pending,” he said, laughing. “You are not about to ask me into which of the three categories I fit, Miss Martin, are you?”
“No,” she said. “I beg your pardon. I have grown too accustomed to haranguing my girls. Enthusiasm and a sense of purpose atone for any number of sins, I believe, and surmount any number of hurdles. Passivity is what I find hard to tolerate. It is such awastefulattitude to life.”
He doubted she would fully approve of him, then. He had done well at school, it was true, and had always striven for excellence. He had been a voracious reader ever since. He had spent a great deal of time with his father’s steward as a boy and very young man, learning the business and duties of being a large landowner, and he had always kept himself informed of what went on in both the upper and lower Houses of Parliament since one day—if he survived his father—he would be a member of the latter. But his father appeared to have resented his efforts—as if you are waiting with bated breath for my demise,he had said irritably once when Joseph returned, wet and muddy and happy from an inspection of a new drainage ditch at Anburey with the steward.
And so Joseph’s adult life had been an essentially idle one—as was that of most of his peers, it was true. He kept an eye on proceedings at Willowgreen, the home and modest estate his father had granted him on his twenty-first birthday, though his desire to remain close to Lizzie in London stopped him from going there as often as he would like. His life had not been characterized by any particular vice or excessive extravagance—unlike that of most of those same peers. He paid his servants and all his bills promptly and gave generously to various charities. He did not gamble to excess. He was not a womanizer. There had been the usual succession of brief sexual encounters when he was a very young man, it was true, but then there had been Sonia, and then Lizzie—and just before Lizzie there had been Barbara. All well before he was even twenty-five.
He clenched his hand on the bar of the stile and unclenched it again, gazing off at the fading line of the sunset as he did so. For a number of years now his life had felt essentially empty, as if much of the color had been drawn from it, leaving behind far too many shades of gray. An essentially passive life.
But now at last he was being nudged into taking a giant step that he had determinedly avoided for years. He would marry Portia Hunt before the year was out. Would marriage improve the quality of his life, restore the color to it? After the nuptials he would proceed with the immediate duty of putting a child in his nursery. That might help—though the very thought of fathering a child caused a tightening in his chest that felt like grief.
For still and always there would be Lizzie.
He became aware suddenly that they had not talked for a while and that he was still opening and closing his hand, only inches from Miss Martin’s.
