A Maggot - John Fowles Read Online Free PDF

His
compliments, sir. With your pardon.'
    The actor throws a sharp look at the man by the fire,
but he shows no sign of expectation fulfilled. Yet it is he who
speaks impatiently to the landlord.
    'Who?'
    'Mr Beckford, sir.'
    'And who may Mr Beckford be?'
    'Our parson, sir.'
    The man by the fire looks down, it seems almost with
relief, then up again at the actor.
    'Forgive me, uncle. I am tired. Let me not prevent
you.'
    The actor smoothly, if belatedly, takes his cue.
'Tell the reverend gentleman I shall be pleased to wait on him
downstairs. My nephew craves his indulgence.'
    'Very good, sir. At once. Your honours.'
    He withdraws. The younger man makes a small grimace.
    'Gird yourself, my friend. One last throwing of
dust.'
    'I cannot leave our conversation here, sir.'
    'Be rid of him as soon as you civilly can.'
    The actor feels for his neck-stock, touches his hat
and straightens his coat.
    'Very well.'
    With a slight bow, he goes to the door. His hand is
already on it when the younger man speaks one last time.
    'And kindly ask our worthy landlord to send up more
of his wretched tallow. I would read.'
    The actor silently bows again, and leaves the room.
For a few moments the man by the fire stares at the floor. Then he
goes and carries the small table near the window to beside the chair
he was sitting in; he fetches the candle-branch from the supper table
and
    sets it there in preparation. Next, feeling in the
pocket of his knee-length waistcoat for a key, he goes and crouches
and unlocks the brassbound chest by the door. It seems to contain
nothing but books and loose manuscript papers. He rummages a little
and finds a particular sheaf, takes it to his chair and begins to
read.
    In a few moments there is
a knock on the door. An inn maid comes in, carrying another lit
branch on a tray. She is gestured to put it on the table beside him;
which she does, then turns to clear the supper things. Mr Bartholomew
does not look at her; as if he lived not two hundred and fifty years
ago, but five centuries ahead, when all that is menial and irksome
will be done by automata. Leaving with the dishes on the tray, she
turns at the door, and curtseys awkwardly towards the oblivious
figure in the armchair, absorbed in his reading. He does not look up;
and awed, perhaps because reading belongs to the Devil, or perhaps
secretly piqued by such indifference, since even in those days inn
maids were not hired for their plain looks, she silently goes.
    * * *
    In a much humbler room above, a garret beneath the
roof, the young woman lies seemingly asleep beneath her brown
ridingcloak, spread over her as blanket on a narrow truckle-bed. At
the end of the unceiled room, by the one small gable-window, sits a
single candle on a table, whose faint light barely reaches the far
and inner end of the room where the girl lies; half on her stomach,
her legs bent up beneath the cloak, and a crooked arm on the coarse
pillow, on which she has spread the linen band that she used as a
muffler. There is something childlike in her pose and in her face,
with its slightly snub nose and closed eyelashes. Her left hand still
holds the limp last of her violets. A mouse rustles as it runs here
and there below the table, investigating and sniffing.
    On the back of a chair beside the bed sits perched
above the discarded chip hat something apparently precious and taken
from the opened bundle on the floor: a flat white cambric hat, its
fronts and sides goffered into little flutes, with hanging from the
sides, to fall behind the wearer's ears, two foot-long white
lappetbands. It seems strangely ethereal, even faintly absurd and
impertinent in that rough room. Such caps, without the lappets, were
in history to become a mark of the house-maid and waitress, but they
were then worn by all female fashionable society, mistresses and
maids alike, as indeed were aprons on occasion. Male servants, the
slaves of livery, were easily known; but female ones, as at least one
contemporary male