‘My love,’ he cried, ‘I trust you for everything; but, Carry, I am sadly afraid you are preparing disappointment for yourself. I am by no means sure that I could write anything were I to try; and as for plans——’
‘Don’t say that, Edward. Don’t you remember how we used to talk in the dark old Kander Thal long ago? You had planned it out all so clearly. I thinkIcould write down the plan, and even the names of the chapters, if you have forgotten. But I am sure youhave not forgotten. It has only been suspended for want of time—for want of the books you needed—for want—oh! if I might flatter myself so far?—for want, perhaps, of me; but that’s the vainest thing to say.’
‘It is the only truth in the whole matter,’ he said—‘for want of you! I think I must have invented that plan on the spot to please you.’
‘Hush, hush!’ said Carry, putting up her hand to his mouth. ‘Don’t blaspheme. You were full of it, it was a new world to me. First to think that Iknewa man with such great things in his mind, then that he would talk to me about it, then that my enthusiasm helped him on a little, that he looked to me for sympathy. Edward,’ she said, with a little nervous laugh, changing colour, and casting down her eyes, ‘I wrote some little verses about it in the old days, but never finished them, and this morning I found them, and scribbled a little more.’
‘My love, my love!’ he cried, in a troubled tone, in which love, shame, compunction, andeven a far-off trembling of ridicule had place. What could he say to this? The romance, the sentiment, the good faith, the enthusiasm, altogether overwhelmed him. He could have laughed, he could have wept, he did not know what to say. How he despised himself for being so much below her expectations, for being, as he said himself, such a poor creature! He changed colour; her moist eyes, her little verses filled him with shame and penitence, yet a rueful amusement too. The verses were very pretty: he did not despise them, it was only himself whom he despised.
‘My darling, that’s so long ago! I was a fool, puffed up by your enthusiasm and by seeing that you believed in me. A young man, don’t you know, is always something of an actor when he begins to see that a girl has faith in him. It is—how long, Carry?—fifteen years ago?’
‘And what of that?’ she said. ‘If I could pick up my little thread, as I tell you, how much more easily could you pick up your great one? This was why I wanted tobe within reach of London, within reach of the great libraries. It is quite easy to run up for the day to refer to anything you want—indeed, I might do it for you if you were very busy. And I can see that you have no interruptions, Edward. We must settle our hours and everything from that point of view.’
He felt himself at liberty to laugh as she came down to this more familiar ground. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘all my plans were in the air—they never came to execution of any kind. I don’t know even, as I told you, whether I can writeat all.’
‘Edward!’ she cried, in an indignant tone.
‘Well, my love’—the flattery went to his heart, notwithstanding all he knew against it—‘that is the easiest of the matter to be sure; but everybody can write nowadays, and why should the world listen to me more than another? Besides, my favourite questions of social economy, as against political, have all beenexploitésby other hands since then.’
‘Not by other hands so capable as yours.’
‘Oh, Carry!’ he cried, with a laugh in which there was pleasure as well as a little ridicule; ‘I fear you have a quite unwarrantable confidence in me; I am only——’
‘Hush!’ she said, again putting up her hand to his mouth; ‘I don’t want to hear your opinion of yourself. I am a better judge than you are on that point. Besides, let us hear who have written on that question?’ She sat quite upright in her chair. ‘Bring them forward, and let them be judged,’ she said.
‘I cannot bring forth a whole school of writers before your tribunal, my lady. Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘there’s Ruskin for one—who has said all I once wanted to say, in an incomparable way, and gone a great deal further than I could go.’
‘Ah!’ she cried; ‘that is just the whole matter. Mr. Ruskin is incomparable, as you say, but he goes a great deal too far. He is a poet. People adore him, but don’t put serious faith in him. Mr. Ruskin has nothing to do with it, Edward: he could not forestallyou.’
‘No, no more than the sun could forestall a farthing candle. Carry, my dear, don’t make me blush for myself. Come,’ he added, ‘let me see the little verses—for the moment that is more to the point. Perhaps when you have showed me how you have picked up your threads I may see how to pick up mine.’
‘Should you really like to see them, Edward? They are nothing: they are very little verses indeed. I have left them in my writing-book.’
‘Get them, then,’ he said, opening the door for her, with a smile. Poor Lady Car! She raised a happy face to him as she passed, with eyes glistening, still a little moist, very bright, full of sweetness and gentle agitation. The soft sound of her dress, sweeping after her, the graceful movement, the gracious turn of the head, were all so many exquisite additional details to the exquisite room, so perfect in every point, in which she had housed him. But Beaufort’s face was full of uneasiness and perplexity. He had floated so far away fromthose innocent days in the Kander Thal. He had ceased to believe in the panaceas that had seemed all-powerful to him then. The wrongs of political economy and the rights of the helpless had ceased to occupy his mind. He had become one of the helpless himself, and yet had drifted, and been not much the worse. Now he had drifted into the most charming, sunshiny, landlocked harbour, where no fierce wind could trouble him more. He had no desire to invent labours and troubles for himself, to spend his strength in putting up beacons and lighthouses to which the people whom they were intended to help would pay no attention. He opened one of the windows and looked out upon the night, upon the soft, undulating landscape, half-lighted by a misty moon. Everything looked like peace out of doors, peace and every tranquil pleasure that the soul could desire were within. He gave an impatient laugh at himself and his wife, and life in general, as he stood cooling his hot forehead, looking out waiting her return. He was quite contented; why shouldhe be goaded forth to fight with windmills which he no longer believed to be knights in armour? Don Quixote disenchanted, ready himself to burn all his chevalier books, and see the fun of his misadventures, but urged to take the field by some delicate Dulcinea, could not have been more embarrassed and disturbed. It was too annoying to be amusing, and too tender and beautiful either to be angry with or to laugh at. What under these circumstances was a man who had long abandoned the heroic to do?
Aftera great deal of travelling in the most beautiful scenery in the world, and after the excitement of settling down, of furnishing, of arranging, of putting all your future life in order, there is apt to follow a certain blank, a somewhat disconcerting consciousness that all expectation is now over, when you are left alone with everything completed to live that life to which you have been for so long looking forward. Lady Car was very conscious of this in her sensitive and delicate soul, although there was for a long time a sustaining force of expectation of another kind in her that kept her up. All the people in the neighbourhood, it is needless to say, made haste to call upon Lady Caroline Beaufort: and she found them a little flat, as countrysociety is apt to be. She went out with her husband a number of times to dinner parties, specially convoked in her honour, and did not find them enlivening. She was one of those women who never get rid of the ideal and always retain a vague hope in coming to a new place, in beginning anything new, that the perfect is at last to be revealed to her—the good society, the spiritsd’élite, whom she has always longed for but never yet encountered. She did not encounter them here any more than in other places, and a sense of dull certainty settled down upon her after a while, which was depressing. Such impressions are modified when the idealist finds out that, however much his or her surroundings may lack the superlative, there is always a certainfondof goodness and of the agreeable and sympathetic in the dullest circle when you come to know it. Surrey, however, no more than any other place, discloses these homely, compensating qualities all at once, and the period of disenchantment came. Everything settled down, even the landscapebecame less wide, less attractive, the woods less green, the cottage roofs less picturesque. The real encroached upon the glamour of the imagination at every corner, and Carry felt herself settle down. It is a process which every dreamer has to go through.
But it was a long time before her mind would consent to the other settling down, which took place slowly but surely as the days and the years went on. Beaufort was in reality a little stirred up at first by the revival of so many old plans and thoughts, though it was in her mind, not in his, that they revived. He was constrained by a hundred subtle influences to resume at least the attitude of a student. Her verses, which were so pretty, the gentle feminine music of a true, though small singer, were such a reproach to him as words cannot describe. She had picked up her thread, so slight, so fragile as it was, and resumed her little melodious strain with enthusiasm not less, but greater, than when she had dropped it in the despair of parting with her hero. The littlepoem brought back to him faint, undefinable echoes of that past which seemed to be a thousand years off. What was it that he had intended to do which she remembered so well, which to him was like a forgotten dream? He could not pick up his thread; he had smiled at himself by turns during the progress of the intervening centuries over the futility of his forgotten ambition. ‘I, too, used to mean great things,’ he had said with a laugh and a sigh to the younger men: the sigh had been fictitious, the laugh more genuine. What a fool any man was to think that he could accomplish any revolution! What a silly business to think that with your feeble hand you could upset the economy of ages! The conceit, too! but he had been very young, he had said to himself, and youth is an excuse for everything. That any faithful memory should preserve the image of him as he was in those old days of delusion, ambition, and self-opinion, had seemed incredible to him. He was half affronted, as well as astonished, that Carry should have retained that visionary delusion in her mind: but still her expectation was a curious stimulus. And the first steps into which he was forced by it deluded her as well as himself. He began to arrange his books, to search, as he persuaded himself, for old notes, a search which occupied a great deal of time and involved many discoveries, amusing to him, delightful to her. For weeks together this investigation, through all manner of old notebooks, occupied them both and kept Carry very happy. She was full of excitement as to what each new collection would bring forth. He had a great many notebooks, dating not only from his college days but even from his school time, and there was hardly one of them out of which some little fossil of the past, some scrap of verse or translation, did not come. Carry, delighted, listened to them all as to so many revelations. She traced him back to his boyhood, and found a pleasure beyond description in that record of all his intellectual vagaries, and the hopes and ambitions they expressed. Perhaps had she read them calmly with her own eyes, although those eyes were full of glamour, faint lights of criticism might have arisen and revealed the imperfections. But he read them to her in his mellow voice, with little explanations, reminiscences not disagreeable to himself, and which suggested other and more lengthened recollections, all of which were delightful to his admiring wife. It was not till Christmas, when she suddenly woke up to the passage of time by the startling reminder of little Tom’s return from school for the holidays, that she remembered how much time had passed. To be brought suddenly to a pause in the midst of one’s enthusiasm is always disagreeable, and the thought had been uneasy in Carry’s mind for several days before she put it timidly into words.
‘It has all been delightful,’ she said. ‘To trace you back through all your school-boy time and at college is so nice that I know I have been persuading you to make the most of it for my sake. But, Edward, you mustnot humour me any more. I feel that it is wasting your time.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘when one has to pick up one’s thread it is best to do it thoroughly. This will all be of service, every word of it.’
‘I see, you mean to begin with a retrospect,’ she cried, brightening again.
‘Not so much as a retrospect,’ he said, with a twinge of conscience, ‘but one’s early ideas, though they are often absurd, are very suggestive.’
‘Oh, not absurd,’ she cried. It wounded her to hear such a word applied to anything of his.
But little Tom had come home for his holidays, which showed that it was four or five months since the settling down. They had taken possession of Easton in the end of August. Tom came home very manly and grown up after his first ‘half’ at school. He was close upon eleven, and he had a very high opinion of his own position and prospects. His school was a large preparatory one, where things were done as much as possible on the model of Eton, which was the goal of all the little boy’s ambitions. It was a little disappointing after the first genuine moment of pleasure in coming home, and the ecstatic sense of being a very great man to Janet, to find that after all Janet was only a little girl and did not understand the half of what he told her. He felt the want of male society very much upon the second day, and to think that there would not be a fellow to speak to for a whole month damped the delightful prospect of being his own master for that time, which had smiled so much upon him. Janet, it is scarcely necessary to say, gave a boundless faith to her brother, and listened to the tale of his achievements, and of what the fellows did, with an interest unalloyed by criticism. Her mouth and her eyes were full of a round O! of wonder and admiration. She never tired of hearing of the feats and the scrapes and the heroic incidents of school. To dazzle her so completely was something; but a mind accustomed to the company of the nobler sexsoon tired of the tameness of feminine society, and with the candour of his age Tom very soon made it apparent that he was bored.
‘There’s a lot of houses about,’ he said. ‘Aren’t there any fellows down there, or there’—he pointed to distant roofs and groups of chimneys appearing at intervals from among the leafless trees— ‘that one could speak to? It’s awfully dull here after knowing so many at school.’
‘There are some children at that white house with the blue roof,’ said Janet, ‘but they’re not good enough, nurse says; and I don’t know nobody to play wiz,’ the little girl added rather wistfully—she made all her ‘th’s’ into ‘z’s’ still—‘I only take walks.’
‘Children!’ said Tom contemptuously. ‘I wasn’t asking about children. I meant fellows at school. If they’re at a good school they’re good enough. I’ll soon find out. When a fellow has been out in the world, and goes to school, you don’t suppose he minds what nurse says.’
‘Oh, but nurse says a great, great manyzings,’ said Janet. ‘She says Easton’s a little poky house, and that we should be in our own family place. What’s a family place? Do you know? It is something fazer is buried in,’ the little girl added after a moment, with a little thrill of solemnity. Tom burst into a laugh in the pleasure of his superior knowledge.
‘Youarea little ass, Jan! Of course I know. My family place is a grand one, with a big tower, and a flag on it when I’m at home—like the Queen at Windsor! The worst is I’m never at home: but I shall be when I’m big, and then shan’t we have times! I’ve told a lot of fellows. I’ll have them up to my place in Scotland for the shooting, don’t you know.’
Janet only gave him a look out of her large light eyes. ‘Girls don’t shoot,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be at your shooting. Tom, do you remember fazer? He’s buried there.’
‘Oh, humbug! he’s buried in the church-yard, where all the dead people are buried.Of course I remember him. What’s that got to do with it? I remember having a ride on his big black mare, such a big tall beast, and nobody could ride her except me and—him you know. He was behind when I rode her, and she carried us both as easy as a lamb. Old Duncan told me so—as easy as a lamb—because she knew who was her master!’ the boy cried, with the colour mounting up into his cheeks. He began to switch the chairs with a little cane he had in his hand, and bade them to ‘get on’ and ‘gee-up,’ to Janet’s considerable disturbance, for she had already learned that a boy’s boots were apt to be muddy, and that chairs covered with brocade, and carved and gilded, were not meant to be ridden or to gee-up.
‘Don’t, Tom,’ she said; ‘they’re mozer’s pretty chairs.’
‘Oh, bother!’ cried the boy, ‘where’s mother? I want to tell her lots of things, but I won’t if she’s so particular about her chairs and stays so long away.’
‘She’s in the library with Beau,’ said Janet; ‘they are always in the library. It is so pretty. Mozer likes it better than the drawing-room. But they will soon come in for tea.’
‘I say,’ cried Tom, ‘do you have tea here always, not in the nursery? Oh, I say! I am not going to stand that. I know what they do at afternoon tea. You have a small piece of bread and butter, or perhaps an atom of cake, and you mustn’t make any crumbs or enjoy yourself at all. You should see our teas at school. There’s sometimes three kinds of jam, and in summer the fellows have strawberries as many as ever they like, and this half Summerfield major was allowed cold partridge.’
‘For tea!’ cried Janet with ever so many notes of admiration.
‘Oh, his people send him such whopping hampers,’ said Tom; ‘he could never get through it all if he didn’t have it for tea.’
‘Nasty meat!’ said little Janet with a grimace; ‘but the jam is very nice,’ she added with a sigh. ‘There’s no nursery when you’re gone. Mozer gives us very nice teaand plenty of cake; but she thinks I am better downstairs, not always with nurse.’
‘And do you think so? You were always a little——’
‘It’s nice when mozer talks to me and not to Beau,’ said Janet with reluctance. The grievance of the many times when the reverse was the case was implied, not put into words. ‘But when there is you and me it will be very nice,’ cried the little girl. ‘There is a plain little table in the corner not carved or anything. It has a cover on, but that comes off, and I am allowed to have it to paint pictures upon and play at anything you like. We’ll have it between us in the corner as if it was a little party,’ cried little Janet, ‘and they will never mind us, as long as we don’t make much noise.’
‘But I want to make a noise. I want to have a real square meal. It isn’t good for a fellow, when he’s growing, to be kept short of his grub. I want——’
‘Oh, Tom, what a horrible, horrible word!’
‘Much you know!’ cried the boy. ‘Fellows’ sisters all like it—to learn the same words as we say. But if you think I’m coming back from Hall’s, where they have all Eton rules, to sit as quiet as a mouse in the drawing-room, and have afternoon tea like an old fogey, I shan’t, and there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom.
Lady Car came in as he gave forth this determination in a loud voice. She came in very softly, as was her wont, with the soft trail of her satin gown on the soft mossy carpet, on which her light steps made no sound. In her eyes was still the dreamy smile of her pleasure in all the details and chronicles of a school-boy life, so elevated and ethereal, its dreams and its visions and its high purposes. She was imagining to herself a poem in which it might all be set forth in chapters or cantos. ‘The dawning genius’ would be the title of the first. She saw before her the spiritual being, all thought and enthusiasm, making a hundred chimeras divine—the boy-poet, the heir of all the ages,the fine flower of human promise. Half the adoring wife and half the woman of genius, she came in softly, with delicate charms of verses already sounding in her mind, and the scheme of the poem rising before her. Not like the Prelude: oh no; but the development, the dawn (a far more lovely word), the dawning of genius, of which in its time it might be her delightful mission to record the completion too.
She was roused from this vision by the noisy boyish voice. ‘I shan’t, and there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom, and she raised her dreamy eyes, startled to see the boy standing red in the face and defiant, his legs apart, his sturdy little square figure relieved against the window. How different from the ideal boy of whom she had been dreaming! the real boy, her son.
They both looked at her with an alarmed aspect, not knowing what would happen. Poor Carry was the gentlest of mothers. She never punished them, never scolded, but yet no one could tell why, they had always theair of being afraid of her. They looked at her now as children might have looked who were accustomed to be sent into solitary confinement, shut up in a dark closet, or some other torture. Tom’s voice fell in a moment, and Janet came out in defence like the little woman in a weatherhouse, when the little man skulks indoors disconcerted by the good weather. Janet came forward with a little hand raised. ‘Mozer, it was not naughtiness. It was because he has been out in the world and knows things different from me.’
‘Yes?’ said Lady Car, smiling upon them, ‘and what are the things this man of the world knows? To be sure, dear, he must be greatly in advance of you and me.’
The children were all the more abashed by this speech, though its tone was so gentle. They stared at her for a moment with their father’s face, dark and stolid, the likeness intensified in Tom by the sullen alarm of his look. She put out her hand to him, to draw him close to her. ‘What is it,’ she said, ‘mylittle boy?’ She was, to tell the truth, rather afraid of him too.
‘It’s nothing,’ Tom replied. ‘It’s something she’s said.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ cried Janet with a sense of injury. ‘Mozer, he says, they have such nice teas at school—strawberries, and sometimes cold partridge, and whopping hampers.’
‘My dear!’
‘That’s how the fellows talk,’ said Tom. ‘That’s not the right thing for a girl.’
‘Was the cold partridge in the whopping hamper?’ said a voice behind. ‘Carry, I don’t wonder the boy’s indignant. You have sent him no hampers. A first half at school and not so much as a big cake. I feel for Tom. Never mind, old fellow; you see she never was at school.’
They had both turned round their anxious faces to him as he came in. They were instinctively jealous of him. Yet both turned with a certain relief, or at least Tom did so, who was aware that Beau was one of his own faction, a man, against the sway ofthe everlasting feminine. Janet took the hand which the mother had stretched out towards her boy and clung to it, drawing herself close into Lady Car’s skirts. Beau was not of her faction in any sense of the word. The little girl pulled her mother’s face towards her, and whispered her tale into Carry’s ear.
‘To have your tea upstairs! Why, doesn’t he want to be with us, dear, after being away so long? You shall have what you like best, my dear children. If you really prefer the nursery to the drawing-room, and my company.’
‘He says they have three kinds of jam,’ said Janet in her mother’s ear, ‘and do whatever they like,’ she added after a pause.
Lady Car gave her husband a look which the children noted though they did not understand. There was a slight appeal in it, and some relief. He had said that she must keep them with her, as much as if he had not been there: that he would not separate her not for an hour, not for a meal from her children: andshe had thought it her duty to have them there, though their presence and his together kept Carry in a harassed consciousness of the two claims upon her. They concluded that mother was not angry with great relief; but they did not understand the guilty satisfaction of Carry in finding that they liked the nursery best.
Thetime of Tom’s holidays was rather a holiday also for Beaufort, who, having got a certain amount of amusement out of the notebooks and their record of school-life, was beginning to be bored by himself, and to think, under his breath, what a little prig and ass he had been in his boyish days, and how astounding it was that Carry should take it all in with such undoubting faith. He was a little of a philosopher in his idle way, and Carry began to be a sometimes disconcerting but often amusing problem to him. He laughed softly sometimes when he was by himself to see how seriously she took him, and how much his youthful superiority impressed her. It had not been in his intention when he unearthed the notebooks to increase, as he had certainlydone, her admiration, and, consequently, her expectations of himself. He had hoped, if anything, to beguile her a little from the pursuit of results, to make her less in earnest about the great work on which she had set her heart. But his expedient had not succeeded. She was more than ever bent upon the fulfilling of that early promise which was so beautiful and so wonderful in her eyes. Beaufort was half flattered, half vexed by this result. It is hard to resent a woman’s admiration even if it is of something which is no longer yourself. It softened his heart, but it embarrassed him more than ever, as it made her more and more sure. He took advantage of Tom with a little secret chuckle to himself behind backs. Tom amused this philosopher too. He liked to draw him out, to watch the movements of character in him, even to speculate what kind of a man it had been that had produced this child. He must be like his father, Beaufort said to himself, without any sentiment even of animosity towards Carry’s husband. Certainly he had got the better of that man. He had obliteratedTorrance, as it were, from the face of the earth; but he had no such feeling as Carry had about Torrance’s life and Torrance’s money. He took it all much more calmly than she could do, not even thinking of the curiousness of the succession which made him owe all his comfort and happiness to Torrance. Tom, however, was the subject of various speculations in his stepfather’s mind. If this was what the little Torrance was modified by Lindores, what must the original have been? And what would this one turn to? an ordinary country gentleman, no better or worse than his neighbours, or what? A vague sense in his mind that there might be future trouble to Carry in the child’s development moved him mildly—for the distance between childhood and manhood seems long looking forward to it, though so short when we look back: and any such danger must be far in the future. It was rather as a droll little problem, which it was amusing to study, that Mr. Beaufort looked at Tom; but for that reason, and to free himself a little from the ever-increasingpressure of his wife’s solicitude in respect to his work and eager anticipation of something from him, he took during the holidays the greatest interest in the boy, going out with him, sometimes riding, sometimes driving, sometimes to the meet, where Tom’s eagerness was scarcely to be restrained. Mr. Beaufort himself did not hunt. He was not an ungraceful horseman for a moderate and mild canter; but if he had ever been possessed of sufficient energy to follow the hounds, that energy had long left him. He did not dislike, however, to ride to the meet or drive his wife over, Tom accompanying them upon his pony. Lady Car thought it was nothing less than devotion to her son which induced him to depart from his studious seclusion on account of the boy. She was very grateful to her husband, yet deprecated gently. ‘You are so very, very good to Tom: but I cannot bear to think of all the sacrifices you are making for him, Edward, wasting your time which is so much too valuable to be thrown away upon a little boy.’
‘I wish my time was more valuable, to show you how willingly I would give it up for anything belonging to you, Carry, not to say for your boy.’
‘Oh thanks, thanks, dear Edward; but I can’t have you burdened with Tom.’
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I like—boys.’ It was almost too much for him to say that he liked this particular boy. ‘And Tom interests me very much,’ he added. Carry looked at him with a wistful curiosity. A gleam of colour passed over her face. Was it possible that Tom was interesting to such a man as Edward Beaufort? She felt guilty to ask herself that question. She had been afraid that Tom was not very interesting, not a child to attract any one much who did not belong to him. To be sure the child did belong to him, in a sort of a way.
‘So you like school, Tom,’ said Beaufort, looking down from his tall horse at the little fellow on his pony, strenuously keeping up with him. Had Beaufort been a more athletic person, he would have appreciated more theboy’s determination not to be left a step behind.
‘Well,’ said Tom, reflectively, ‘I like it, and I don’t like it. I think lessons are great rot.’
‘Oh, do you?’ said his tall companion.
‘Don’tyou, Beau? They don’t teach anything a fellow wants. What’s the good of Latin, let alone Greek? They’re what you call dead languages, and we don’t want what’s dead. When you’ve got to make your living by them it’s different, like Hall’s sons that are going to be the schoolmasters when he dies.’
‘Did you think of all that by yourself, Tom?’
‘No,’ said the boy after a stare of a moment, and some hesitation. ‘It wasn’t me, it was Harrison major. His father’s very rich, and he’s in trade. And Harrison says what’s the good of these things. You never want them. They’re only an excuse for sending in heavy bills, Harrison says.’
‘He must be a great authority,’ said Mr. Beaufort gravely.
‘He knows a deal,’ said Tom reassured, for he had some doubts whether Harrison major’s opinions would have been received with the deference they deserved. ‘He’s the biggest fellow in the school, though he’s not very swell in learning. But he doesn’t mind. He says fellows that are to have plenty of money don’t want it.’
‘That’s a frequent opinion of people in trade,’ said Beaufort. ‘I would not put too much faith in it if I were you.’
‘Eh?’ cried Tom, opening his big light eyes under his dark brows more widely than ever, and staring up into his stepfather’s face.
‘You will have plenty of money, I suppose?’ said Beaufort calmly.
‘Oh, don’t you know? I’ll be one of the richest fellows in Scotland,’ cried the boy.
‘Who told you that, Tom?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I know it, that’s all. It was perhaps only nurse,’ he added with reluctance; ‘but she’s been to my place, and she knows all about it. You can ask her if you haven’t heard.’
‘So you have got a place besides being so rich?’ Beaufort said, in calm interrogation, without surprise.
Tom was very much embarrassed by this questioning. He stared at his stepfather more than ever. ‘Hasn’t mother told you? I thought she told you everything.’
‘So did I. But all this about your place I never heard. Let’s have the rest of it, Tom.’
‘Oh, I don’t know that there’s much more,’ said the boy. ‘It’s a great big place with a high tower, and a flag flying when I’m at home—like the Queen—and acres upon acres in the park. It was my father’s, don’t you know? and now it’s mine.’
‘How old are you, Master Tom?’
‘Eleven in April,’ said Tom, promptly.
‘Then it will be ten years before you have anything to say to your place, as you call it. I’ve seen your place, Tom. It is not so very much of a place; as for a flag, you know we might mount a flag at Easton if we liked and nobody would mind.’
Tom’s black brows had gathered, and hiseyes looked with that fierceness mingled with fear which belongs to childhood, into his stepfather’s face. He was very wroth to have his pretensions thus made light of, but the habitual faith of his age alarmed him with a sense that it might be true.
‘We’ll mount one this afternoon,’ his tormentor said; ‘it will be fun for you and me taking it down when your mother goes out for her drive, and hoisting it again when she comes back. She deserves a flag better than you do, don’t you think? Almost as well as the Queen. The only danger is that the country people might take Easton for the Beaufort Arms, and want to come in and drink beer. What do you think?’
‘I say, Beau, are you in real earnest about a flag?’
‘To be sure. I don’t know what you have on yours at the Towers, but we have a famous blazon on the Beaufort side. We’ll get a square of silk from your mother, and paint it as soon as we go in. I forget what your arms are, Tom?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the boy, humbly. ‘I never heard anything about them. I didn’t know you had arms on a flag.’
‘Ah!’ said Beaufort, ‘you see there are a great many things you don’t know yet. And about matters that concern gentlemen, I wouldn’t advise you either to take nurse’s opinion or that of your young man whose father is in trade.’
Tom rode along by his stepfather’s side in silence for some time. He felt much taken down—crushed by a superiority which he could not resist, yet very unwilling to yield. There was always the uncomfortable conviction in his mind that what Beaufort said must be true, mingled with the uneasy feeling that Beau might be chaffing all the time, a combination confusing for every simple mind. Tom was not at all willing to give in. He felt instinctively that a flag at Easton would turn his own grandeur, which he believed in so devoutly, into ridicule: for Easton was not much more than a villa, in the suburbs of a little town. At the same time he could notbut feel that to haul it up and down when his mother went out or came in would be fun; and the painting of the flag with a general muddle of paints and means ofbarbouillagein general still greater fun, and the most delightful way of spending the afternoon.
‘I say, Beau,’ he asked, after a long interval, ‘what’s in your arms, as you call them? I should like to know.’
Beaufort laughed. ‘You must not ask what’s in them, but what they are, Tom. A fellow of your pretensions ought to know. Fancy a chatelain in ignorance of such a matter!’
‘What’s a chatelain? You are only laughing at me,’ cried the boy, with lowering eyebrows. ‘It’s a thing mother wears at her side, all hanging with silver chains.’
‘It’s the master of a place—like what you suppose yours to be. My arms are rather too grand for a simple gentleman to bear. We quarter the shields of France and England,’ said Beaufort, gravely, forgetting who hiscompanion was for the moment. Then he laughed again. ‘You see, Tom, though I have not a castle, I have a flag almost as grand as the Queen’s.’
All this was rather humbling to poor Tom’s pride, and confusing to his intellect, but he came home full of the plan of painting and putting up this wonderful flag. There was an old flagstaff somewhere, which had been used for the decorations of some school feast. Beaufort, much amused, instructed his small assistant to paint this in alternate strips of blue and white. ‘The colours of the bordure, you know, Tom.’ ‘Oh, are they?’ cried Tom, determined to pretend to understand. And Lady Car found him in the early afternoon, in a shed appropriated to carpentering behind the house, delightfully occupied about his task, and with patches of blue and white all over him from shoe to chin.
‘What are you doing, Tom?’ she cried. Janet following stood transfixed with her eyes widening every moment—half with wonder,half with envy. What she would have given to paint the staff and herself in imitation of Tom!
‘It’s the colours of the bordure,’ said the boy. ‘I’m doing it for Beau.’
‘The colours of what?’ Lady Car was as ignorant of heraldry as Tom himself.
‘Have we got a bordure? and what’s our colours? and I want to know what are the arms, mother. I mean my arms: for I suppose,’ he said, pausing in his work to look at her, ‘yours are just Beau’s now?’
‘What does the boy mean?’ said Carry. ‘Janet, you must not go too near him; you will spoil your frock. Tom, your jacket will never be fit to be seen again.’
‘I don’t care for my jacket. Mother, look here. Beau’s going to put up a flag for you like the Queen, and I’m doing the stick. But I want to know about my own shield, and my colours; and if I’ve got a bordure, and if we’re in quarters, or what. I want to know about the flag at the Towers.’
Lady Car made a step backward as if she had received a blow. ‘There was no flag atthe Towers—I mean there were no arms upon it.—There were no—who put such nonsense into your head, Tom?’
‘It’s not nonsense. Beau told me—he’s going to give me a lesson how to do it. He knows all about it. He says it’s no use asking nurse or Harrison major whose father is in trade. It’s only gentlemen that have this sort of thing. Mother, have I got a bordure?’
‘Mozer,’ said little Janet, ‘please buy him a bordure.’
Poor Carry was not fond of any allusion to her former home. She was glad to laugh at the little girl’s petition—though with a tremor that was half hysterical. ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said. ‘I will buy him anything that he wants, that is good for him, but oh, dear, what a mess he is in! Your lines are not straight, and you are all over paint. Jan, come away from that painted boy.’
‘Oh, mozer, let me stay!’ cried Janet, possessing herself of a stray brush.
It was perhaps those black brows of theirs that gave them such an air of determination. Carry did not feel herself able to cope with the two little creatures who looked at her with their father’s eyes. She had to yield oftener than was good for them or than she felt to be becoming. She took her usual expedient of hurrying in to her husband to consult him as to what it was best to do. He was in his library, and she had no doubt he was hard at work. It was generally with some little difficulty and after some delay that on ordinary occasions he had to be gently beguiled into his own sacred room after luncheon: but he had gone to-day at once with an alacrity which made Carry sure he had some new ideas to put down. And her heart was light and full of satisfaction. He was seated at his table leaning over it, so busy that he did not hear the door open, and she paused there for a moment, happiness expanding her breast, and a smile of tender pleasure on her face. She would not interrupt him when he was busy withany trivial matter of hers. She stood and watched him with the purest satisfaction. Then she stole in quietly, not to interrupt him, only to look over his shoulder, to give him perhaps a kiss of thanks for being so busy. Poor Carry! what she found when she approached was that Beaufort’s head was bent with every appearance of profound interest over an emblazoned book, from which he was drawing on a larger scale, upon a big sheet of paper, the Beaufort arms. She breathed forth an ‘Oh!’ of sickening disappointment; and he turned his head.
‘Is it you, Carry? Look here. I have got a new toy.’
‘So I perceive,’ she said. It was all she could do to keep the tears from showing in her eyes; but he would not have seen them, having turned back to his work again.
‘A moral purpose is a feeble thing,’ he said over his compasses and pencils. ‘I began it as a lesson to Tom, to take him down a bit; but I find it quite interesting enough on its own account. Look here.We are going to rig you up a flag, as Tom says, like the Queen.’
Poor Carry! How her tender heart went up and down like a shuttlecock, as she stood with her hand on the back of his chair. Her eyes full of bitter tears of disappointment; the thought that it was out of interest in Tom and love for her that this futile occupation had been taken up, melted her altogether. How could she allow, even in her own mind, a shadow of blame to rest on one so tender and so good? She laid her hand upon his shoulder, and patted it softly, like the mother of a foolish, delightful child.
‘Dear Edward, I almost grudge that you should think of so many things for me,’ she said.
‘My dear, it was not primarily for you, but as a lesson to Tom,’ he said, fixing the leg of his compasses firmly in the paper. ‘You must take him to—his place as he calls it, Carry. But I confess that for the moment I had forgotten my object. To give a moral lesson is a fine thing; but it’s nothing to the invention of a new toy.’
Theflag, so casually suggested, became in effect a very favourite toy, both with Beaufort and his stepson. The one was a very ordinary little boy, the other a highly cultivated man. But they seemed to take equal pleasure in the flutter of the flag from the blue and white staff which Tom had painted with so much trouble, and in rushing out to pull it down when Lady Car in her little pony carriage drove from the door. They sometimes tumbled over each other in their haste and zeal to perform this office. And Beau’s legs were so much the longest. It gave him a great and scarcely just advantage over Tom.
Carry was pleased, she was touched and flattered, and such vanity as she had was so delicately ministered to, that for some timethis little folly which took the air of homage to her, made her feel happy. To see the grave and gentle philosopher, with a long swift stride, almost stepping over the children to get at the cord, and pull up the fluttering flag, a brilliant piece of colour among the bare trees, as she appeared with her ponies in the little avenue! It was a little absurd, but so sweet. Edward did it, she allowed herself to imagine, as he had said, for a lesson to Tom—to teach him thus broadly though symbolically the honour that was due to his mother—not to Carry individually who never claimed homage, but to the mother whose claims, perhaps, the boy was not sufficiently conscious of. This was not at all the lesson which Beaufort had intended to teach Tom—but what did that matter? It had a certain effect in that way, though none in the way that Beaufort intended. It did give Tom an impression of the importance of his mother. ‘Mother’s not just a woman like the rest,’ he said to Janet. ‘She is what you may call a great lady, Jan, don’t you know? There’s Mrs. Howard and that sort; you don’t run up flags for them. Mother’s really something like the Queen—it’s in earnest. Beau thinks so. I can tell you he’s awfully proud of mother. And so am I too.’
‘Oh, Tom, so am I.’
‘Yes, but you’re just natural. You don’t understand. But me and Beau know why we do it,’ said Tom. And when he got back to school if he did not boast so much of his place in Scotland, having acquired an uneasy sort of doubt of its magnificence, he intimated that his parentage was not like that of the others. ‘When my people drive from the door the flag goes down,’ he said. ‘It’s such fun rushing and getting hold of the rope and up with a tug, as soon as they come into the avenue. Sometimes, when it’s been raining, the rope won’t run. It’s such fun,’ cried Tom, while even Harrison major’s mouth was closed. The flag was beyond him. As for Janet, she looked on staring and observed everything, and drew many silent conclusions never perhaps to be revealed.
But when the holidays were over Carry’s anxious expectations and suspense increased again. Beaufort kept to his new toy even when Tom was gone. He would interrupt his studies, springing up, whatever he was doing, to pull down or put up that flag, till poor Carry’s heart grew sick of the little formula which accompanied all her movements. She began to feel that he liked to be disturbed and that idling forth into the air to perform this little ceremony was more delightful to him than to get on with that work, which, so far as she could make out, was not yet begun. He had found more notebooks after Tom went away, but the notebooks now began to pall a little. And slowly, slowly, Carry’s eyes began to open. She never whispered it to herself, but she began to understand, as the years went on many things that were never put into words. She became first of all very sick of the notebooks and the wonderful number of them, and all those tantalising scraps which never came to anything. Her own little poemwhich she had begun had gone no further. The dawning of genius—but the dawn was still going on. It had never come to be day yet. Would it ever come? Slowly, reluctantly, this began to be revealed to her, broken by many gleams of better hope, by moments when she said to herself that she was the most unjust woman in the world, grudging her husband the leisure in which alone great thoughts can develop—grudging him the very quiet which it had been the desire of her heart to attain for him. The most unjust of women! not his wife and assistant, but his judge, and so hard a one! It was bitter sweet to Carry to be able thus to condemn herself; but it did not change the position of affairs.
One evening they were seated together in a happy mood. It was summer, and it was some years after the incidents above described. Carry by this time knew almost everything about Beaufort, and what he could not or would not do. And yet her expectations were not quenched. For it ishard to obliterate hope in a woman; and now and then at intervals there would still spring up little impulses in him, and for a few days she would forget (yet all the same never forget) her dolorous discoveries and certainties. It was after one of thoseélanswhen he had displayed every appearance of being at work for several days, and Lady Car’s heart despite of a thousand experiences had risen again, that in the evening, in a very sweet summer twilight, they sat together and watched the stars coming out over the tops of the waving trees. Janet, now grown almost to her full height—she was never very tall—had been wandering about flitting among the flowers in her white frock not unlike (at a distance) one of the great white lilies which stood about in all the borders. It was early in July, the time when these flowers are at their sweetest. The air was full of their delicate fragrance, yet not too full; for there was a little warm breeze which blew it over the whole country away to the heather and gorse on the Haslemereside, and brought back faint echoes of wilder scents, the breath of the earth and of the moors. Janet had been roaming about, never without a glance through the branches at the two figures on the lawn. She was like one of the lilies at a distance, tall for fourteen, though not tall for a full-grown woman, and slim too in the angularity of her age, though of a square solid construction which contradicted all poetical symbols. She had always an eye upon them wherever she went. Nothing had changed her spectator attitude, not even the development of many tender and loyal feelings altogether unknown to the outer world. So far as appeared outside, Janet was still the same steady little champion of her brother that she had been from her baby days, and not much more. The pair who were seated on the lawn were as always conscious of the girl’s presence, which was a certain restraint upon their freedom. There was not between them all the same ease that generally exists in a family. Though she was quite out of hearing, they did noteven talk with perfect freedom. When she had gone to bed, called by the all-authoritative nurse of whom even her mistress was a little afraid, Beaufort drew a long breath. He had a sort of habitual tenderness for Janet as a child who had grown up under his eyes and was one of the accessories of daily life. But yet he was more at his ease when she was gone. ‘How dark it is getting!’ he said; ‘the light comes from the lilies not from the sky, and Janet’s white frock, now she has gone, has taken a little away.’
‘My poor little Janet,’ said Lady Car. ‘I wish I could think she would be one of those who give light.’
‘Like her mother. It is a pity they are so little like you Carry. Both the same type, and that so much inferior. But children are very perverse in their resemblances as much as in other things.’
‘Nobody can say Janet is perverse,’ said Lady Car with that parental feeling which, though not enthusiastic itself, can bear no remark upon the children who are its veryown; and then she went back to a more interesting subject. ‘Edward, in that chapter you have just begun——’
‘My dearest, let us throw all the chapters to the winds. In this calm and sweetness what do we want with those wretched little philosophical pretences? The world as far as we can see it seems all at peace.’
‘But there is trouble in it, Edward, all the same, trouble to be set right.’
‘Not much, so far as we can see. There is nothing very far wrong in our little town: every “poor person,” as you ladies call them, has half-a-dozen soft philanthropists after him to set him right; and we don’t even see the town. Look at all those dim lines of country, Carry. What a breadth in them, and no harm anywhere, the earth almost as soft as the sky! Don’t let us think of anything, but only how sweet it all is. I am glad that shrubbery was cut away. I like to see over half the world—which is what we are doing—as far as eye can carry, it comes to much the same. May I light my cigarette?’
‘Edward,’ she cried, ‘it is all quite true. There is not much harm just here; but think how much there is in the world, how helpless the poor people are, how little, how little they can do. And what does it matter that we all try a little in the way of charity? Right principles are the only things that can set us all right. I have heard you say a hundred times—in the old days——’
‘You have heard me say a great deal of nonsense in the old days.’
‘Was it all nonsense,’ cried Lady Car, ‘all that was said and thought then? There seemed so many splendid things we could do; set up a standard of higher justice, show a better way both to the poor and the rich, and—and other things. I love the landscape and the sweet evening, Edward, oh so much! and to sit and look at them with you, and to feel all the peace around us, and the quiet, and that there is no reason why we should not be happy; but better than that I should love to see you lift up that standard, and show the better way, you who can do it,you who understand all the problems. That is what I wish, that is what I have always wished—above all, above all!’ she cried, clasping her hands. The enthusiasm of her sensitive nature overwhelmed Carry. She could not contain herself any longer. ‘I would rather even not have been happy and seen you great and doing great work,’ she said.
He stretched out his hand and took hers which he held and caressed softly. ‘My dear little enthusiast!’ he said.
‘Don’t say that, Edward!’ she cried quickly; ‘that was all very well in the old days, which you say were nonsense. I was only a girl then, but now I am middle-aged and not to be put off in that way. I am not a little enthusiast, I am an anxious woman. You should not put me off with phrases of the past.’
‘You are always a girl, Carry, if you should live to be a thousand,’ he said with a faint laugh. ‘If you were so middle-aged as you say, you would be content with results aswe have them. Here we are, we two, together with all the happiness we once so eagerly looked forward to, and which seemed for a time hopeless—very well off, thanks to you. Able to surround ourselves with everything that is delightful and pleasant, besides the central fact of being together, able to help our poor neighbours in a practical way: thanks to you again. Not so much as a crumple in our bed of roses—not a thorn. My dear, that is what you would think of, if you were middle-aged as you say.’
‘Then let me be a silly girl, as in the old times,’ she cried, ‘though it was all nonsense, nothing but nonsense, as you say.’
‘Softly, softly,’ he said, taking her hand again, ‘let us discriminate, Carry. Love can never be nonsense which has lasted like ours. My love, you must not blaspheme.’
‘Love!’ she cried. Carry’s whole frame was trembling, her heart beating to her feet, to her fingers, in her throat. She seemed to herself only to be a slim sheath, the merest covering for that convulsive heart. Therewas something like—could it be scorn in the inflection of her voice. He took her by both hands now, throwing down the cigarette which had betokened the entire ease of his mind, and drew her towards him. Something like alarm had come into his tone, and something like indignation too.
‘Carry,’ he said, holding her hands fast, ‘Carry, what do you mean? Not that my love was nonsense, which never wavered from you, notwithstanding everything—not that you distrust me?’
The darkness is an advantage in many an interview like this. It prevented him from seeing all that was in Lady Car’s face, the impetuous terrible question, the impulse of wild scepticism and unbelief, the intolerable impatience of the idealist not to be altogether restrained. Her eyes asked what her lips could never say. Why did you leave me to be another man’s wife? Why let me be strained, humbled, trodden under foot? Why expose me to all the degradations which nobody could impose on you—and why,why? But Carry said none of these things. She could not. There are some things which the religion of the heart forbids ever to be put in words. She could not say them. He might have read them in her eyes, but the darkness kept that revelation from him which would have been more startling than anything Beaufort had ever encountered in his life. Finally Carry, being only a woman, and a sensitive and delicate one, fell into the universal feminine anti-climax, the foolishness of tears. How often does their irrestrainablenon-sequiturput the deepest reasons out of court, and turn the most solemn burden of the soul into apparent foolishness—a woman’s tears, which often gain a foolish cause, but as often lose a strong one, reducing the deep-hearted to the level of the shallow, and placing the greatest offender in the delightful superior position of the man who makes allowances for and pardons! Beaufort gathered her into his arms, made her have her cry out upon his shoulder, soothed and calmed and caressed her out ofher passion of feeling. If any one could have whispered in his ear what was in the passionate heart that throbbed on his shoulder! but he would have smiled and would not have believed. She was a little enthusiast, still the same young ethereal poet as ever, a creature made up of lovely impulses and sympathies and nerve and feelings—his sweet Carry, his only love.
After this evening Lady Car had a little illness, nothing of any consequence, a chill taken sitting out too late on the lawn, a headache, probably neuralgic—a little ailment, quite simple, such as ladies often have, keeping them, in their rooms and dressing-gowns for a day or two. A woman scarcely respects herself who has not these little breaks from time to time, just to show of what delicate and fragile stuff she is made. But she emerged from her room a little different, no one could quite tell how, with a different look in her face, quieter, less given to restless fits, more composed and gentle. She had always been gentle, with the softestmanners in the world, so that the change was not apparent to the vulgar. Beaufort perceived it for the first day or two, and it gave him a faint shock, as of something invisible, some sudden mystery between them; but the feeling passed over very quickly with a conviction of the utter absurdity of any such impression. Janet, who had never any words in which to convey her discoveries, and no one to say them to if she had found the words, saw it more clearly, and knew that something had happened, though what she could not divine. There were some faint changes scarcely perceptible, but developing gradually, in Lady Car’s habits too. She was less in the library with her husband, abandoning this custom very slowly in the most natural way in the world, compelled by other duties which naturally, with a daughter growing up, became more important every day.
Lady Cardid many things after this period which she had previously disliked to do; but there was one thing which she did not for a long time consent to, and that was to open the house in the North which was called the Towers, which Tom had been used to speak of as ‘my place,’ and which Beaufort thought it foolish of her not to inhabit. He did not know the ghosts that dwelt there. He did not consider that it was the house of her first husband, the house she was taken to as a most wretched bride after the marriage into which she had been forced, and that the dreadful time of that bridehood, and the years she had lived with Torrance, and the moment of awful ecstasy when she had heard of his death, all lingered there waiting forher. Mr. Beaufort only thought it was foolish, when she had a handsome house in Scotland at her command, that the family did not go there in the autumn, where it was natural that families should go. But he was not a man to bore her by any repetition of this wonder. He had been a little surprised, and even, it must be allowed, a little disconcerted, to find himself so much more at his own disposal than of old, and now that Carry was not always at his side his habits, too, changed imperceptibly. His beautiful library was still his chief haunt, but he read the papers there and all kinds of profane things. And he went a great deal to Codalton, where the county club was, and spent a part almost of every day there. It was not that he had any great liking for the gentlemen who found it such a resource. He kept the position among them of a man who was not as they were—a person superior in many ways, a writer (though he never wrote anything), a philosopher. No doubt he was entitled to that last character. He was very civil tothem all, but regarded them from an altitude, making notes of what he called their ‘humours’ and making them the subject of many satirical descriptions when he went home. Sometimes he went up to London for the day, at first to consult books, but latterly without alleging any such reason, and went to many places where there were no books to consult. But it was very rarely that he did not return home in the evening. He had no desire for dissipations of any kind. He was far too much a philosopher, not to say a gentleman. Tom, perhaps, described it best in his school-boy language when he said that Beau liked to loaf. So he did. He had no twist in his character. Had Lady Car followed him in all his excursions she would have found nothing to object to, and indeed he would have enjoyed them much more if she had. But he had, as a matter of fact, no mission such as she had credited him with; he had no gospel to preach, nothing at all to say. If there had ever been anything more than youthful excitement and ambition in hisplans, it had all evaporated in his listless life. He might have pushed on—many young men do—and insisted upon marrying his love, and saved her from Tom Torrance and the dreadful episode of her first marriage. He might have realised at last some of his early promises and anticipations. He might at least have roused himself from his sloth, and written that book upon which her heart was so set. But, indeed, that last was doubtful, for he might only have proved that he could not write a book, which would have been harder on Lady Car than to think he would not. The end of all thing was, however, that he was immensely relieved, and yet made vaguely miserable by the change that had now come over his life. There was a change. The sweet and constant, if sometimes a little exacting companionship of the early years was over, which gave him a vague ache as of desertion, especially at first. And Carry was changed. Her questions, her arguments, her constant persuasions and inducements to go on with that book (expressing always aboundless trust in his powers which it pained him to part with) were all over. On the other hand, he had regained his liberty, was now free to do as he pleased—an indescribable boon. What he pleased to do was always quite gentlemanlike, quitecomme il faut. There was no reason why he should be restrained in doing it. He liked to read, and also to think, without it being supposed to be necessary that anything should come of his reading and thinking. He liked to go to his London club now and then and have the stimulus of a little conversation; he liked, when there was nothing else to do, to go into Codalton, and talk a little to the country gentlemen and the smaller fry about who were sufficiently important to belong to the county club, and to come in occasionally to sit with his wife in her drawing-room, to read to her, to tempt her to talk, even to give Janet a little lecture upon literature, which she cared nothing about. He was on those occasions a delightful companion, so easy in his superior knowledge, so unpretending. Intheir rich and easy life, without cares, without any embarrassment about ways and means, or any need to think of to-morrow, he was indeed an admirable husband, a most charming stepfather, pleasant all round. What could any woman have wished for more?
There was one period in this easy and delightful life which brought the change home to Beaufort with curious force for a moment and no more. It was just after the publication of a book which went over his ground, the ground which it had always been supposed he was going to take. It forestalled him on many points, but in some went quite against him, contradicting his views. He brought in the volume with some excitement to his wife, and read to her those portions with which he disagreed. ‘I must do something about this,’ he said; ‘you see the fellow takes half my argument, and works out from it quite a different conclusion. I have been too supine. I must really get to work at once, and not suffer myself to be forestalled and contradicted like this.’
‘Yes, Edward,’ said Carry gently. She smiled very sweetly upon him, with a curious tender smile, but she did not say any more.
‘You speak as if you did not think it worth my while,’ he said, a little annoyed by her composure.
‘Oh, no. I think it quite worth your while,’ she said. He went off a little disturbed, vexed, half angry, half sad, but certainly stimulated by her. Was it indifference? What was it? Had she responded as of old they would have talked the matter over between them and taken away all its interest; but as she did not respond Beaufort felt the fire burn. He went off to his room, and got out all his preparatory notes and the beginning of the long interrupted manuscript, and worked with vigour all night, throwing his opposite views hastily upon paper. Next day he announced to his wife that he meant ‘to review that fellow’s book’—as the quickest and surest way of expressing his dissent. ‘Yes,’ she said once more, but with a little rising colour, ‘when, Edward?’ ‘Oh, I’llsend it to “Bowles,”’he said, meaning ‘The Nineteenth Century’ of that day. Of course, ‘The Nineteenth Century’ itself had not yet begun its dignified career. And he did an hour’s work that morning, but with softened zeal; and in the afternoon he repeated to himself that it was scarcely worth his while. The people who had read that fellow’s book would not care to read a review; they would be people on the other side, quite unlikely to pay any attention to the opposite argument. And as for the general public, the general public did not care a straw for all the social philosophy or political economy in the world. So, after another hour’s deliberation he put all the papers back again—What was the use?—and went into the county club and brought back a very amusing story of the complicated metaphors and confused reasoning of some of the gentlemen there. It did not strike him that Carry never asked whether he had finished the review, or how he was going to treat the subject. But he remarked her smile with a curious sensation which hecould not explain. It seemed to him something new—very sweet (her smile had always been sweet), very patient, indulgent, with a look of forgiving in it, though he did not know very well what there was to forgive. He forgot in a short time all about the answer he had intended to write to that book, and even the review into which his intended answer had so soon slid—in intention; but he was haunted for a very long time by Carry’s smile. What did it mean?
Tom and Janet were just as little aware why it was that their mother was so much more with them than of old, but this had come on gradually, and it did not strike them except by moments. ‘Why, you’re always with mother now,’ Tom said when he came home for his holidays. He was now at Eton, and, though he had been in several scrapes, had managed to keep his place and was in high hopes of getting into the boats, which was the only distinction he had any chance of.
‘Yes,’ said Janet sedately, ‘for I’m growing up now, and mother says Iwant her most——’
‘Isn’t it awful sap?’ said Tom, which was Eton (at that time) for boredom and hard work. He had the grace to speak low, and Janet gave him a glance upward with raised eyelids, and they both laughed, but softly that no one might ask why.
‘She thinks of such a lot of things that no one can be expected to know,’ said Tom; ‘not that I mind, for she lets me alone now. But I suppose you’ve got to read books all day.’
‘Oh, no. Oh, Tom, we oughtn’t to talk like this and laugh, for she’s—mother’s very kind. She is indeed. She sees in a moment if I’m tired.’