Free Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits

dissuaded me, and after all, it is a mean act, for if I meant to be honourable I would claim it openly. It should be mine by rights, as his son – for a man may abandon the duties of a husband but can never forsake the title of father. Elizabeth said Lord Grey don’t want it but admired very much my father’s good looks and cheerful air.
    I believe Mr Becher is in love with Elizabeth (I can’t always call him Reverend), for he speaks to me often of her. She is a kind of cousin to him, which gives him, he supposes, ‘a right to advise her’. But he does not dare to, and so he advises me. He considers me capable of taking a part in great events and clearing the Byron name of its association with misanthropy and vice; he upbraids me for my idleness. Sometimes, even, he urges me to fall in love. He considers this necessary in a nature such as mine to the establishment of certain habits of feeling: gentleness, but not only gentleness, he means a kind of chivalry.
    â€˜My lord,’ he says to me, ‘I believe you might accomplish out of love what you should never, for your own sake, attempt from ambition.’
    I am inclined to laugh at him, for love in my humble opinion is utter nonsense – a mere jargon of compliments, romance and deceit. ‘I suppose you mean that I should fall in love with Miss Pigot?’
    He looked at me a moment, a little unhappily. ‘In her case, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘there is the question of rank.’
    The Vicarage at Rumpton, where he presides, is being ‘done up’; he is staying for the summer in a small cottage on Burgage Lane, and Lady Hathwell has provided him with her barouche. This is the reason he can spare his horse. Mr Becher has literary ambitions. He means to write a history of penal reform, and his parlour, where he keeps a fire lit, is covered over in loose pages and opened volumes, on which he spends most of his unsociable hours. When he rises to take your hand, you may observe him, for a minute or so after, just perceptibly continuing to unbend until his top and bottom halves are aligned.
    I asked him his opinion of Lord Grey.
    â€˜I knew him at Oxford a little,’ he said. ‘And others of his kind. He was mostly drunk and always in debt. But at seventeen or eighteen, tolerable enough. There is a kind of freshness even in debauchery. But age does not improve men of his type; their methods harden into habits. I should dislike it extremely if you came under his influence.’
    *
    I spent this morning riding over to Newstead and have only just returned – a two hours journey each way. The impression it made was very strong. As soon as I came upon the lake, and the sky opened up within it, I felt the beat of my heart as if a hand lay against it. And beyond it, the Abbey itself rising greyly out of the lawn. That some part of my destiny lies within those walls strikes me as certain – if only that I wish to be buried in its vaults. And yet the mansion itself, or its habitable portions, looks common enough.
    Owen Mealy, the caretaker, answered my shout and opened the door to an undistinguished hall with dirty boots in it. A wired box (for keeping chickens) lay on its side by the door, propping it open. The weather, at least, has improved and the house had the dusky, watchful air of a hot day indoors.
    He has changed very little – he has been away a great deal – and yet I felt Lord Grey’s presence in each of the rooms. Mr Mealy left me to speak to Joe Krull, the gardener, so that I had the upper rooms to myself: the bedroom, a study, and a long hallway that Lord Grey has converted into a dining room, since it has a fireplace at one end and windows that overlook the lake. In the bedroom I found a half-dozen pairs of his shoes ranged against the foot of the wardrobe, and a few clothes within. Two silk cravats, hung up by the middles, which looked rather dirty; a waistcoat; a shirt – such are