‘Mr Charlie,’ said Janet desperately, ‘I can hear by your voice that you are not in earnest; and as for taking a fancy, I was only a child, and that could mean nothing. And the whole of it was just—just sport to you and it is for a joke you’re doing it now.’
‘Joke! it’s no joke,’ he said. ‘I know what you think; you think I’m not gentleman enough for you. But I’ll have plenty of money, and your father, if he had lived, would not have turned me from his door. Hallo! who’s there?’ he cried, starting up as some one hit him sharply on the shoulder. Janet, looking up in fresh alarm, felt a mingled rush of terror and relief when she saw over Blackmore’s head the lowering countenance of Tom.
‘I say, Charlie get out of that,’ said Tom. ‘I’m not going to stand this sort of thing, you know. I may be going to the dogsmyself, but my sister shan’t. Be off, I tell you, and leave her alone.’
‘Am I the dogs, Mr. Tom? No such black dogs as you’re going to, my friend. Keep your good advice to yourself, and don’t intrude where you are not wanted. We can manage our affairs without you.’
‘By Jove!’ cried Tom, ‘if you speak another word to my sister, I’ll pitch you over the cliff!’
Blackmore began to laugh with an exasperating contempt—contempt which exasperated Janet, though Tom too had touched the same note of the intolerable. She sprang up hastily, putting out her arm between them. ‘You are two men,’ she said, ‘but Tom is not much more than a boy, and you are quarrelling about me that wants nothing in the world so much as to get away from both of you. Do you hear me? I would not vex mother,’ Janet cried, ‘for all the men in the world. Oh, can’t you see that you are like two fools wrangling over me?’
‘Let him take himself off, then,’ said Tom.
‘And let him hold his tongue, the confounded young scamp!’ cried the other, ‘that dares to challenge me—when he knows I could lick him within an inch of his life.’
Tom was half mad with disappointment and humiliation. He was very proud in his way, with the mingled pride of the peasant and thenouveau riche, the millionaire and the (Scotch) clown. He had meant, after he had ‘had his fun,’ to have settled down when his time came, and to have married a lady like his mother. Without imagination, or sense, or principle, or restraint of honour, he had pursued his reckless career, too precipitate and eager in pursuit of pleasure to leave time to think, even if he had been able to think. The abominable treachery of which he had intended to be guilty had not touched his conscience, not having appeared to his obtuse understanding as anything worse than many ‘dodges’ which other fellows adopted to get what they wanted. And it was with a rage and humiliation unspeakable that he found himself—he, the son of the man who hadmarried Lady Caroline Lindores, married in his turn to a girl from a little Oxford shop, a little shopgirl, a common little flirt, less than nobody, not so good by ever so many grades as his mother’s maid. To find that he had married her when he meant only to deceive her, and made her mistress of the Towers, which was as Windsor Castle to Tom, and put her in the place of Lady Car, was gall and bitterness to him. His conscience had given him little trouble, but his wounded pride, his mortification, his humiliation were torture to him. He had come out raging with these furious pangs, eager to find something, anything, with which he could fight and assuage his burning wrath. To pitch Charlie Blackmore over the cliffs, even to be pitched over them himself, and roll down the sharp rocks and plunge in the cold sea beneath, he felt as though it would be a relief from the gnawing and the rage within.
‘Come on, then!’ he cried, furious; ‘I’ll take no licking from any man, if he were Goliath. Come on!’
‘Mr. Charlie,’ cried Janet, putting out her hands, ‘if it’s true, you may do one thing for me. One thing I ask you to do as if you were the best gentleman in the world, and I will think you so if you will do it: leave me to him and him to me. And good-bye; and neither say you like us nor hate us, but just go—oh go! Do you hear me?’ she said, stamping her foot. ‘I ask you as a gentleman.’ She had caught her brother by the arm and held him while she waved the other away.
‘That’s a strong argument,’ said Blackmore. He was moved by what she said, and also by common sense which told him his suit was folly. ‘If we’re fools, you’re none, Miss Janet Torrance,’ he said with a laugh, ‘which is more than I thought. What! am I to turn my back upon a man that’s clenching his neives at me? Well, maybe you’re right! There’s none in the county will think Charlie Blackmore stands in fear of Tom Torrance. Yes, missie, you shall have your will. I’m going—good-bye to both him and you.’
‘Do you think I’ll let the fellow go likethat?’ cried Tom, making a step after him, but perhaps his fury fell at the sight of the might and strength of the retiring champion—perhaps it was only the wretchedness in his mind that fell from the burning to the freezing point. He sat down gloomily, after having watched him disappear, on the bench from which Charlie Blackmore had risen.
‘I don’t care what becomes of me, Jan,’ he said. ‘I’m done. Nothing that ever happens will be any good to me now. I’ve choked that fellow off, that’s one thing, and he’ll never dare speak to you again. But as for me, I’m done, and I’ll never lift my head any more.’
‘Oh Tom!’ Janet cried. She was too much excited by her own affairs to turn in a moment with this new evolution to his—but that panting cry bore any meaning according to the hearer’s apprehension, and he was too deep in his own thoughts to need more.
‘Yes,’ said Tom, ‘it’s all over with me. Just come of age and lots of money to spend, and all the world before me, as you might say—but I’ll never have the heart to make any stand again. To think that all I’ve got, and might have done so much with, is to go to a woman that never had sixpence in her life and knows no more than a dog how to behave herself! As for hurting her, it wouldn’t have hurt her, not a bit—and if she’d had the chance she would have done just as bad by me. Law,’ cried Tom, with bitter contempt, ‘what’s the good of law when it can’t protect a fellow before he comes to his full senses! To think I should have tied such a burden on my back, and done for myself for ever before I came of age. It’s horrible,’ he cried with the earnestness of conviction; ‘it’s damnable—that’s what it is.’
‘Oh Tom, perhaps it will not be so bad,’ said Janet, putting her hand within his to show her sympathy. She was very uncertain as to what it was that caused this despair, and she had been vaguely impressed with the fact that this time what Tom had done was something terrible; but neither her own trouble nor any doubt about his conduct (which was so seldomblameless) could quench the sympathy with which she responded to his appeal.
‘Oh, yes, it will be quite as bad and worse—and I’m a ruined man,’ cried Tom. ‘Done for! although it was only last week,’ he said with a piteous quiver of the lip which a half-grown moustache nearly shaded, ‘that I came of age.’
Janet felt the pathos of this appeal go to the bottom of her heart. She did not know what to say to comfort him, and she could not keep her own eyes from straying after Charlie, who after all had been very kind, who had gone away at her prayer like the most complete of gentlemen. She was very thankful to be released, yet her eyes followed him with something like pride in his docility, and in the vigour and strength and magnanimity of her first lover. Though she was much afraid of him, Janet forgave him kindly as soon as he was gone. The tears came into her eyes for Tom’s distress, while yet, with a thought for the other, she watched him with a corner of her eye over Tom’s bowed head.He turned round and took off his hat to her before he disappeared under the low arch, and Janet, in politeness and regret, made the faintest little bow and gave him a last glance. This made her pause before she answered Tom.
‘It’s all Beau’s fault,’ said Tom, as if he had been talking of stolen apples. ‘She would never have been any wiser, nor mother either, if it hadn’t been for Beau with his confounded law. And I don’t believe it now,’ he said; ‘I won’t believe it. Think, Jan—to be married and done for, and no way of getting out of it, before you are twenty-one!’
‘But wasn’t it—your own doing, Tom?’
Then Tom got up and gave vent to a great moral aphorism. ‘There is nothing in this world your own doing,’ he said; ‘you’re put up to it, or you’re led into it, and one tells you one thing and another another. But when you’ve been and done it after what’s been told you, and every one has had a hand in it to lead you on, then theyall turn round upon you, and you have to bear it by yourself. And everybody says it’s your own doing. And neither the law nor your friends will help you. And you’re just ruined and done for—before you ever had begun at all.’
‘Oh Tom,’ cried Janet, ‘come home—and perhaps it will not turn out so bad after all.’
‘It can’t turn out anything but bad—and I’ll just go and drown myself and be done with it all.’
‘Oh Tom, Tom!’
He got up from her with his hands deep in his pockets and his gloomy head bent. ‘Leave alone,’ he said, pushing her away with his shoulder as in the old nursery days. ‘Where’s dinner? But I’ll dine at the club, you can tell Beau, if they’ll have me there.’
Therecould be no doubt that Beaufort behaved throughout this business in the most admirable way. He made the very best of it to Lady Car, who lay and listened to his voice as to the playing of a pleasant tune, sometimes closing her eyes to hear the better. She had got her death wound. Tom had never been the son she had dreamed. He was his father’s son, not hers, and to see him succumb to the grosser temptations had been misery and torture to her. But the story of that fraud, so fully intended, made with such clear purpose, was one of those overwhelming revelations which go to the very heart. If a woman is unhappy in her married life, if she is tricked and cheated by fate in every other way, there is stillalways the natural justice to fall back upon, that the children will be left to her—her children in whom to live a new life; to see heaven unfolding again; to have some faint reflection of herself; some flower of her planting, some trace that she has been. And when she has to confess to herself that the child of her affections, the thing that has come from her, the climax of her own being, is in fact all unworthy, a creature of the dunghill, not only base, but incapable of comprehending what is good and true, that final disenchantment is too great for flesh and blood. Nature, merciful, sometimes blinds the woman’s eyes, makes her incapable of judging, fills her with fond folly that sees no imperfection in her own—and that folly is blessed. But there are some who are not blinded by love, but made more keen and quick of sight. She lay silent and listened while Beaufort performed that melody in her ears, feeling a poignant sweetness in it, since at least it was the most beautiful thing for him to do, yet with every word feeling moreand more the anguish of the failure and the depth of the death wound which was in her heart.
‘There are boys who torture cats and dogs and tear flies asunder, and yet are not evil creatures,’ Beaufort said; ‘they have not the power of realising the pain they cause. They want imagination. They know nothing of the animals they hurt, except that they are there in their power to be done what they please with. My love, Tom is like that: it is part of the dreadful cynicism that young men seem to originate somehow among themselves. They think they are the subjects of every kind of interested wile, and that such a thing as—this’—Beaufort was not philosopher enough to name Tom’s act more distinctly—‘is nothing more than a sort of balance on their side.’
Lady Car opened her eyes, which were clear with fever and weakness, lucid like an evening sky, and looked at her husband with a piteous smile.
‘My dearest,’ he said hastily, ‘I am sayingonly how they represent such things to themselves. They don’t take time to think—they rush on to the wildest conclusions. The thing is done before they see or realise what it is. And then, as I tell you, they think themselves the prey, and those, those others the hunters—and take their revenge—when they can.’
But it was hard to go on with that argument with her eyes upon him. When she closed them he could speak. When they opened again in the midst of his plea, those eyes so clear with fever, so liquid, as if every film had been swept from them, and only an all-seeing, unquenchable vision, yet tender as the heavens, left behind—he stopped and faltered in his tale: and then he took refuge in that last resort of human feeling—the thing that had to be done, the expedients by which a wrong can be made to appear as if it were right, and trouble and misery smoothed away, so that the world should believe that all was well.
The conclusion, which was not arrived at for some time, was that which old Lord Lindores took credit to himself for having suggested before, ‘and which might have put a stop to all this,’ he said with a wave of his hand. It was Africa and big game for two or three years, during which ‘the young woman’—the family spoke of her as if she had no name—should be put under careful training. It had been ascertained, still by Beaufort, who conducted himself to everybody’s admiration, that ‘the young woman’ had no bad antecedents, and that so much hope as there could be in such a miserable business might be theirs. Tom was so thoroughly broken down by the discovery which humbled his clownish pride to the dust, and made him feel almost as poor a creature as he was, that he gave in with little resistance to the dictates of the family council. No unhappy university man, however, was beguiled into accompanying this unlikely pupil. He was given into the hands of a mighty sportsman, who treated him like a powder boy, and brought Tom, the Lord ofthe Towers, the wealthiest commoner in the North, the experienced man of Oxford, into complete and abject subjection—which was the best thing that could have happened to him.
The ‘young woman’ was less easily subdued. She wrote to her relations that it had been all a mistake, but that family reasons had made it impossible for her husband and herself to disclose the true state of affairs before. That instead of being Mrs. Francis Lindores, she was Mrs. Thomas Francis Lindores Torrance, of the Towers, her dear husband being the son of Thomas Torrance, Esq., of the Towers, and of Lady Caroline Lindores, the daughter of the Earl of Lindores, from whom dear Tom took his second name, as they might see in any peerage; that her mother-in-law and all her new family were very nice to her, and that she was going off upon a visit with Lady Edith Erskine, who was her aunt, and dear grandmamma the Countess. And she ordered for herself at once new cards withMrs. F. T. Lindores Torrance upon them, which she thought looked far more distinguished-looking than the original name. But when Mrs. Tom became aware that dear grandmamma and her dear aunt meant to conduct her to an educational establishment, where she was to pass at least the two next years of her life, the young woman rebelled at once. She had never heard, she declared, of a married woman going to school; that her place was with her husband; that she had passed all the standards, and learnt to play the piano, and had taken lessons in French; that no woman, unless she were going to be a governess, wanted more; and, finally, that she flatly refused to go. It was more difficult, much more difficult, than with Tom to convince his wife: for she was still more ignorant than Tom, and thought his giving in ridiculous, and did not see why, with him or without him, she should not go and take up her abode at the Towers, ‘and look after things,’ which she felt must be in great want of someone to look afterthem. She was made to yield at last, but not without difficulty, declaring to the last moment that she could not be refused alimony, and that she would take her alimony and go and live independent at home till her husband came to claim her, rather than go to school at her age. But Beaufort managed this too, to the admiration of everybody. He brought to bear upon the young woman pressure from her ’ome, where her mother, under his skilful manipulation, was brought to see the necessity of going to school, and declined to receive her rebellious daughter. This was at the cost of another allowance from Tom’s estate, for it was not fit that Tom’s mother-in-law should continue to earn her bread poorly without her daughter’s assistance, in a poor little confectioner’s shop. Beaufort managed all this without even betraying the name of this poor old woman, or where she lived, to the researches of the Lindores, for Lady Car was very tender of her boy’s name even now.
And she was taken home—to Easton, which she loved: and said she was much better, and was able to be out on her husband’s arm, and sit on the lawn and watch the sun setting and the stars coming out over the trees. But she had got her death wound. She lay on the sofa for months, for one lingering winter after another, smiling upon all that was done for her, very anxious that Janet should go everywhere and enjoy everything, and that Beaufort should be pleased and happy. She asked nothing for herself, but gave them her whole heart of love and interest to everything that was done by them. She had her sofa placed where she could see them when they went out, and smiled when Beaufort said, always with a slight hesitation, for he thought it was not right to leave her, that he was going to ride over to the club, or to spend a day in town. ‘Do; and bring us back all the news,’ she said. And when Janet went away with compunctions to go to balls with her grandmother, Lady Car was the one who explained away all objections. ‘Quite pleasedto have you go—to have Beau to myself for a little,’ Lady Car said sometimes, a little vexing her child; but, when Janet was gone, urging Beaufort to the pleasure he longed for but did not like to take. ‘It is just what I wanted that you should go to town: and you can bring me back news of my little Den.’ Sometimes they were even a little piqued that she wanted them so little—poor Lady Car!
And thus quite gently she faded away, loved—as other people love, not as she loved: cherished and revered, but not as she would have revered and cherished; with a husband who read the papers and went to his club, and got very gracefully through life, in which he was of no importance to anyone, and her only son banished in Africa shooting big game. Janet was a good child, very good: but her mother never knew how near the girl was to her in the shadowy land where people may wander side by side, but without the intervention of words or some self-betrayal never find each other out. Perhaps had Janetfound the courage to fling herself down at her mother’s side, and say all that was in her heart, the grasp of that warm hand might still have brought Lady Car back to life. But Janet had not the courage and everything went on in its daily calm, and the woman whose every hope had faded into blank disappointment, and all her efforts ended in failure, faded away. During the first summer Lady Car still went out to dine, and walked a little about the garden with her husband’s arm; the next she was carried out to her sofa on the lawn. All went so very gradually, so very softly, that no one noted. She was very delicate. When that gets to be fully recognised, there seems no reason why it should not go on for ever; not so happy a state as perfect health, to be sure, but with no reason in it why there should be any further change.
One evening she was out of doors longer than usual—a soft lingering summer night—so warm that even an invalid could get no harm out of doors. She loved so to see thedaylight gradually fade away, and the stars come out above, and over all the wide champaign below a twinkle of little human lights here and there. She took almost a childish pleasure in those lights, thinking as much of the villages and scattered houses—identifying their humanity low down among the billows of the wood or the sweep of the upland slopes—as of the stars above. ‘The greater and the lesser lights,’ she said, and then murmured low to herself, ‘Compensations,’ under her breath.
‘What do you mean by compensations, Carry?’
‘I do not much believe in them,’ she said. ‘Nothing can compensate for what one loses. It is better not. Looking to the east, Edward, see, there are no lights, but only that silvery misty greyness where any glory might lie hidden only we see it not. Now I have come so far as this I think I like that best.’
‘So far as what, Carry’ Somethingcold and chill seemed to come over them like a cloud. ‘It is growing chilly, you ought to come indoors, my love.’
‘Yes, presently. I have always been fond of the lights—like a baby; but look the other way. You would say at first there was nothing to be seen at all; but there are all the shades of greyness from one tint to another, and everything lying still, putting out no self-assertion, content to be in God’s hand. And so am I, Edward.’
‘Yes, my love.’
‘Quite content. I have had everything, and—and nothing. The heart of it has always been stolen from me, all the lights put out; but the dark is sweet too; it is only dim, dim, not discernible—don’t call it dark.’
‘Carry! whatever you please, dear.’
‘Edward, do you know what this means—the peace that passeth understanding?’
‘Carry, my darling, you break my heart. No—how should I know?’
I think I do,’ she said softly. ‘It lies upon your heart like the dew, yet nothing to bring it, no cause, a thing that is withoutreason, what you would call irrational altogether—that passeth understanding. Edward, if ever you think afterwards, remember that I told you. I think that I have got it—I wanted other things, but they were not given me. I begin to think that this—is the best.’
‘My dearest, let me carry you in; it is getting quite dark and chilly.’
‘You are tired of my little sermon, Edward,’ she said, with the faint tender smile which he divined rather than saw.
‘I—tired? of anything you may say or do! But you must not be longer out in the night air. Come, Carry, let me lift you.’
Whether her mind had begun to wander, or if it was a prevision, or what moved her, no one could ever tell. She resisted a little, putting her hands on his arm. ‘You must not forget,’ she said, ‘to give my love to Tom.’
Beaufort called loudly to her maid, who was waiting. ‘It is too late, too late for her to be out! Come and take the cushions,’ he said in the sudden panic that had moved him.
‘And my little Den,’ she said, ‘my little Den—they will perhaps as they get older—Edward, I am afraid I feel a little faint.’
He took her in his arms, his heart sinking with a sudden panic and blind terror as if the blackness of darkness was sweeping over him. But they succeeded in getting her to her room and her bed, where she said good-night and kissed him, and dropped sweetly asleep, as they thought—but never woke again. They found her in the morning lying in the same attitude, with the same smile.
Thus Lady Car ended the tragedy which had been going on unseen, unknown to anyone—the profound, unrivalled tragedy of her life. But so sweetly that no one ever knew the tragedy it had been. Her husband understood more or less the failure of her heart over her children—her son—but he never even imagined that it was he himself that had given the first and perhaps thedeepest blow; though not thecoup de grâce, which had been left for Tom.
Poor little Janet was summoned home from the merry house to which she had gone, where there were many entertainments going on. She was roused out of the fatigue of pleasure, out of her morning sleep after the ball, to be told that her mother was dead. They thought the girl’s heart would have burst. The cry of ‘Mozer, Mozer!’ her old child’s cry, sounded to those who heard it like something that no consolation could touch. But, to be sure, her tears were dried, like all other tears, after awhile.
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