LADY CAR did 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 for her. 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 to them 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 his plans, 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 a boundless 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, quite comme 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. In their 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’ll send 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 he could 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 I want 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.’
‘She’d need to,’ said Tom, ‘but I don’t suppose girls mind. You come out now and have a game. Will she let you? If she won’t, just steal away—— ’
‘Oh, Tom,’ cried Janet again, ‘how can you speak of mother so? She never stops any fun, never—when there is any,’ the girl added after a pause.
Lady Car was at the other end of the room, seated in the recess of a broad window which looked over the wide landscape. She had been waiting for Janet, who had asked her assistance in some work she was doing—trumpery work such as disturbed all Carry’s prejudices. Janet was painting flowers upon some little three-legged stools for a bazaar, and though she only copied the ‘patterns,’ she required in the execution some hints from her mother, who had once made considerable progress in the study of art. Janet was entirely unaware that Lady Car’s dreamy landscapes, which were full of distance and suggestion if nothing else, were in any way superior to her ‘patterns,’ and had made her call for aid with the frankest confidence that what she was doing was excellent art. And Carry had prepared the palette from which the dahlias and red geraniums were to be painted with as much care as if it had been wanted by Raphael. When she saw the two, after their whispered conversation at the door, suddenly disappear, perhaps she was not altogether sorry. It is possible that the painting of the stools was ‘sap’ to the mother also. She smiled at them with a little wave of her hand and shake of her head as they passed the window, in mild allusion to the abandoned work; but perhaps she was as much relieved as Janet was. She laid back her head upon the dim-coloured satin of her chair, and watched the two young creatures with their racquets, Janet carrying in her apron a supply of balls for their game. Seventeen and a half, fifteen and a half—in the bloom which was half infantile, half grown up, all fresh about them, nothing as yet to bring in black care. They were not handsome, but Tom had a sturdy manliness and strength, and Janet, her mother thought, looked everything that was simple and trustworthy—a good girl, not clever—but very good-natured and kind; and Tom not at all a bad boy—rough a little, but that was mere high spirits and boyish exuberance. They were neither of them clever. She said to herself, with a faint smile, how silly she had been!
How she had worshipped talent—no, not talent, genius—and had hoped that they would surely have had some gleam of it—the two whom she had brought into the world. They had been surrounded with beautiful things all their lives. When other people read foolish nursery stories to their children she had nourished them upon the very best—fables and legends which were literature as well as story—yet Janet liked the patterns for her stools better than all the poems and pictures, and Tom never opened a book if he could help it. And what matter? she said to herself, with that faint smile of self-ridicule. The children were none the worse for that. Her fantastic expectations, her fantastic disappointment, what did they matter? She was altogether a most fantastic woman—everybody had said it all her life, and she recognised fully the truth of the accusation now. Who should be so happy as she? Her husband so kind, always with her, thinking of everything that would make her happy. Her children so good (really so good!), nice, well-conditioned—Tom so manly, Janet all that a girl should be, very, very different indeed from Carry as a girl. But what a good thing that was; Janet would have no silly ideal, would desire no god to come from the skies, would not torment herself and every one about her with fantastic aspirations. She would love some good honest young fellow when her time came, and would live the common life, the common happy life, as the family at Easton were doing now. Edward, gone over to Codalton to the county club—the natural resource of a man in the country; the brother and sister playing tennis on the lawn—the boy expecting to get into the boats, the girl delighted with a new pattern for her stools. And no cloud anywhere, no trouble about settling them in life, no embarrassment about money or anything else. How happy a family! Everything right and pleasant and comfortable. As Carry lay back in her chair, thinking all these happinesses over, her eyes ran over with sudden tears—for satisfaction surely and joy.
When the tea-tray came in the young ones appeared with it, very hungry, and ready for the good things which covered the little table. Lady Car watched them consume the cakes with the same smile which had puzzled Beaufort. ‘Would you really like so very much,’ she said with a little hesitation, a lingering in her voice, ‘to go to the—Towers for the next holidays, Tom?’
‘Should I like!’ cried the boy, jumping up with his mouth full of bread and butter. ‘Why, mother, better than anything in the world!’
‘Oh mother!’ Janet cried, with a glow upon her face. She had passed the bread-and-butter stage, and was cutting herself a hunk of cake. The knife fell out of her hand from excitement and pleasure.
‘Shall you both like it so very much? Then,’ said Lady Car, sitting straight up with a look of pale resolution in her face which did not seem called for by such a simple determination, ‘then, children, you shall go——’
‘Hurrah!’ cried Tom, ‘that’s the jolliest thing I’ve heard for long; that’s exactly what I want! I want to know it,’ he cried; ‘I do want to know it before I go there and settle down.’
Lady Car turned her eyes upon him with a wonderful, inquiring look. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural. Yet to hear that someone would go there, not for holidays, but to settle down, oppressed poor Carry’s soul. She faded into whiteness, as if she were fainting. It seemed to her that his father looked over Tom’s shoulder—the father whom the boy was so like—his living image, as people said. Not so tall and strong, but with the features and the eyes and the aspect, which poor Carry had so feared.
‘Beau!’ cried both the young people in one voice. ‘Oh, I believe it’s his doing, Tom!’ ‘He must have a hand in it, Jan!’ ‘Beau, next holidays we are going to the Towers. Mother says so. We are going next holidays to the Towers.’
‘Your mother is full of sense,’ said Beaufort, who had just come in. ‘I knew that she would see it to be the right thing to do.’
Poor Carry! She felt as if she could not bear it, this sacrifice of all her own feelings and wishes. She said to herself that she could not do it; that before the time came she must die! And perhaps there was a forlorn hope that this was what would happen in her heart as she sat and saw her husband and her children rejoicing over the tea-table—most naturally, most justly, she knew; at least it was but natural and just so far as the children were concerned.
She had to give great orders and make many arrangements about the opening up of the house. It was so long since it had been shut up. Tom had been only six, and now he was seventeen and a half. She wrote to her sister Edith and to Edith’s husband, John Erskine, as well as to the factor on the estate and the servants who were in charge. And there were a number of things sent from town ‘to make it habitable.’ To make it habitable! She could not help the feeling that this was what he would have liked least of all, when she remembered the wonderful costly catafalques of furniture of which he had been so proud, and the decorations that would make poor Edward miserable. Edward did not mind the fact that it was his money which made Easton so comfortable; but to put up with his wardrobes and sideboards—that was a different matter. Even in her humiliation and in the much greater troubles she had to occupy her, she could not help a shudder to think of Edward in the midst of all those showy relics of the past. Eleven years had not dimmed her own recollection of her old surroundings. She remembered with an acute recollection, which was pain, where everything stood, and sent detailed directions as to how all was to be altered. ‘Dear Edith, do see that everything is changed. Don’t let anything look as it used to do. It would kill me if the rooms were left as they were,’ she wrote to her sister. ‘Do—do see that everything is changed.’
Perhaps it was by dint of having thus exhausted all feeling and forestalled all emotion that when she did find herself at the Towers at last, it was almost without sentiment of any kind. Edith had carried out her consigne very well, and she was standing under the mock mediæval doorway to receive her sister when Lady Car drove up. The sisters had not met for a long time—not for several years, and the meeting in itself did much to break the spell. Carry awoke with wonder and a little relief to find herself next morning in her old home, and to feel that she did not mind. Torrance did not meet her at his own hearth; he did not look at her from the mirror; he did not follow her about the corridor. She was very much relieved after all her imaginary anguish to feel that the reality was less dreadful than she had feared.
And it was something to see the children so truly happy. The quiet little Janet, who said so little, was quite roused out of herself. She became almost noisy, rushing with Tom from the top of the tower to the very cellars, going over everything. Her voice mingled shrill in the hurrah! with which Tom contemplated the flag of which he had dreamed, the sign of his own domination in this house of his fathers, which was to the boy as if it had been the shrine of the noblest of races. ‘I see now,’ he said, ‘that rag at Easton was all sham, but this is the real thing.’ ‘This is the real thing,’ said Janet decisively, ‘the other was only nonsense.’ They had not been twenty-four hours in the place before they had seen, and as they said recognised, everything. All their upbringing in scenes so different, all the associations of their lives, seemed to go for nothing. They were intoxicated with pleasure and pride. A couple of young princes restored to their kingdom could not have accepted their grandeur with a more undoubting sense that they had at last recovered their rights.
The house soon filled with visitors and company, guests who came for sport, and guests who came for curiosity, and the great county people who were friends of the Lindores, and the smaller people who were friends of Torrance. And with both sets of these visitors Carry could not help seeing—or perhaps she only imagined it—that though her husband and herself were treated with great courtesy, it was Tom who was looked to with the chief interest. He was the future possessor of all. Though she had entire sway in the house as she never had before, yet she was nothing but a shadow, as she had always been. And the children in their haste to enjoy would have liked if possible to ignore her too. As for Tom, he got altogether beyond her control. When he was not shooting, taking upon himself premature airs of the master, he was riding about the country as his father had done, going to all kinds of places, making acquaintances everywhere. He came home on several occasions, after a day of roaming, with wild eyes, half-falling, half-leaping off his horse, making his entrance audible by all the tumult of rough excitement, calling loudly to the servants, discharging oaths at them for imaginary delay. The first time this happened, Lady Car only suspected it with alarm, which everybody about stilled as best they could, getting the young culprit out of the way. ‘The matter? there is nothing the matter?’ Beaufort said, coming to her, a little pale, but with a laugh. ‘Tom has lost his temper. He is vexed with himself for being late for dinner. I’ll have a talk with him by-and-by.’ ‘Is that all, Edward?’ she said. ‘What should it be more?’ her husband replied. But on another occasion, as evil luck would have it, Tom made his entrance just as the party, a large one, in which his place was vacant, was sweeping across the hall to dinner, and his mother, who came last, had the full advantage of that spectacle. Her son, standing all bespattered, unsteady, his dull eyes fierce with angry light. ‘Hallo, mother! I’m a bit late. Never mind. I’ll come as I am,’ he cried, steadying himself, beating his muddy boot with his whip. Lady Car threw an anguished look at the new butler, who stood splendid and indifferent at the door. There was not even an old servant full of resource to coax the foolish wretched boy away.
She had to go in and sit down smiling at the head of her table, and entertain her guests, not knowing any minute whether the boy might not burst in and make his shame visible to all. In the midst of the sounds of the dinner-table, the talk, and the ring of the knives and forks, and the movements of the servants, other sounds seemed to reach her ear of loud voices and noise outside. She had to bear it all and make no sign, but talk that her neighbours on each side might not notice, with what was almost noisiness for Carry. Perhaps, though it seems more horrible at such a crisis to be in the midst of the compulsory make-belief of society, it is better for the sufferer. She kept up, and never winced till the dinner was over, and the endless hour in the drawing-room after, and all the guests gone, those who were from the neighbourhood to their homes, those who were in the house to their rooms. Then, and only then, did she dare to breathe, to give way to the devouring anxiety in her mind. She had bidden her husband ‘Go, go!’ to the smoking-room, or anywhere with the last guests, and she was alone. The whole house had been changed; the old furniture displaced, all its associations altered: and yet in that moment everything came back again, the catafalques of old, the vulgar splendour, the old dreary surroundings. Her boy! Her boy! She thought she saw his father come out before her, as she had feared to see him all these years, saying with his old brutal laugh, ‘Your boy! none of yours. Mine! mine!’