AFTER a 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 country society 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 spirits d’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 certain fond of 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 landscape became 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 little poem 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 must not 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 sex soon 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 many zings,’ 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.
‘You are a 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 tea and 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 the air 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, ‘my little 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 of the 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: and she 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.