IT was Mrs. Dennistoun whose letter brought John Tatham such dismay. It was dated Lakeside, Waterdale, Penrith—an address with which he had no associations whatever, and which he gazed at blankly for a moment before he attempted to read the letter, not knowing how to connect it with the well-known writing which was as familiar as the common day.
“You will wonder to see this address,” she wrote. “You will wonder still more, dear John, when I tell you we have come here for good. I have left the Cottage in an agent’s hands with the hope of letting it. Windyhill is such a healthy place that I hope somebody will soon be found to take it. You know Elinor would not let me make any explanation. And the constant questions and allusions to his movements which people had seen in the papers, and so forth, had got on her nerves, poor child. You can understand how easily this might come about. At last she got that she could not bear it longer. Mary Dale, who always lives half the year with her sister at the Rectory, was coming back. You know it was she who brought the first tale about him, and she knows, I think, all the gossip that ever was got up about any one. Poor Elinor—though I don’t believe Mary had any bad meaning; and it would, alas! have been for all our good had we listened to what she said—Elinor cannot bear her; and when she heard she was coming, she declared she would take her baby and go away. I tried to bring her to reason, but I could not. Naturally it was she who convinced me—you know the process, John. Indeed, in many things I can see it is the best thing we could do. I am not supremely attached to Windyhill. The Cottage had got to be very homelike after living in it so long, but home is where those are whom one loves. And to live among one set of people for so many years, if it has great advantages, has at the same time very great disadvantages too. You can’t keep anything to yourself. You must explain every step you take, and everything that happens to you. This is a lovely country, a little cold as yet, and a little damp perhaps, being so near the lake—but the mountains are beautiful, and the air delicious. Elinor is out all the day long, and baby grows like a flower. You must come and see us as soon as ever you can. That is one dreadful drawback, that we shall not have you running up and down from Saturday to Monday: and I am afraid you will be vexed with us that we did not take your advice first—you, who have always been our adviser. But Elinor would not hear a word of any advice. I think she was afraid you would disapprove: and it would have been worse to fly in your face if you had disapproved than to come away without consulting you: and you know how impetuous she is. At all events the die is cast. Write kindly to her; don’t say anything to vex her. You can let yourself out, if you are very angry, upon me.
“One thing more. She desires that if you write you should address her as Mrs. Compton only, no Honourable. That might attract attention, and what we desire is to escape notice altogether, which I am sure is a thing you will thoroughly understand, now that we have transplanted ourselves so completely. Dear John, form the most favourable idea you can of this sudden step, and come and see us as soon as it is possible.
“Yours affectly.,
“M. D.”
To say that John was thunderstruck by this letter is to describe his sensations mildly, for he was for a time bitterly angry, wounded, disappointed, disturbed to the bottom of his soul; but perhaps if truth were told it could scarcely be said that he disapproved. He thought it over, which he naturally did all that day, to the great detriment of his work, first with a sort of rage against Elinor and her impetuosity, which presently shaded down into understanding of her feelings, and ended in a sense that he might have known it from the first, and that really no other conclusion was possible. He came gradually to acquiesce in the step the ladies had taken. To have to explain everything to the Hudsons, and Hills, and Mary Dales, to open up your most sacred heart in order that they might be able to form a theory sufficient for their outside purposes of your motives and methods, or, what was perhaps worse still—to know that they were on the watch, guessing what you did not tell them, putting things together, explaining this and that in their own way—would have been intolerable. “That is the good of having attached friends,” John exclaimed to himself, very unjustly: for it is human nature that is to blame, if there is any blame attaching to an exercise of ingenuity so inevitable. As a matter of fact, when Miss Dale brought the true or something like the true account to Windyhill, the warmth of the sympathy for Elinor, the wrath of the whole community with her unworthy husband, was almost impassioned. Had she been there it would not have been possible for those good people altogether to conceal from her how sorry and how indignant they were; even perhaps there might have been some who could not have kept out of their eyes, who must have betrayed in some word or shake of the head the “I told you so” which is so dear to human nature. But how was it possible that they could remain uninterested, unaffected by the trouble in the midst of them, or even appear to be so? John, like Elinor, threw a fiery dart of impatience at the country neighbours, not allowing that everywhere in the greatest town, in the most cosmopolitan community, this would have been the same. “The chattering gossips!” he said, as if a club would not have been a great deal worse, as if indeed his own club, vaguely conscious of a connection by marriage between him and the dis-Honourable Phil, had not discussed it all, behind his back, long ago.
But on the whole John was forced not to disapprove. To say that he went the length of approving would be too much, and to deny that he launched forth a tremendous letter upon Mrs. Dennistoun, who always bore the brunt, is more than my conscience would permit. He did do this, throwing out, as the French say, fire and flame, but a few days after followed it up by a much milder letter (need I say this was addressed to Elinor?), allowing that he understood their motives, and that perhaps, from their own point of view, they were not so very much to blame. “You will find it very damp, very cold, very different from Windyhill,” he said, with a sort of savage satisfaction. But as it happened to be unusually good weather among the lakes when his letter came, this dart did not do much harm. And that John felt the revolution in his habits consequent upon this move very much, it would be futile to deny. To have nowhere to go to freely when he pleased from Saturday to Monday (he had at least a score of places, but none like the Cottage) made a wonderful difference in his life. But perhaps when he came to think of it soberly, as he did so often in the brilliant Saturday afternoons of early summer, when the sunshine on the trees made his heart a little sick with the idea that he had, as he said to himself, nowhere to go to, he was not sure that the difference was not on the whole to his advantage. A man perhaps should not have it in his power to enjoy, in the most fraternal intimacy, the society of another man’s wife whenever he pleased, even if to her he was, as he knew, of as little importance (notwithstanding that she was, as she would have said, so fond of John) as the postman, say, or any other secondary (yet sufficiently interesting) figure in the country neighbourhood. John knew in his heart of hearts that this was not a good thing nor a wholesome thing for him. He was not a man, as has been said, who would ever have hurried events, or insisted upon appropriating a woman, even when he loved her, and securing her as his very own. He would always have been able to put that off, to subordinate it to the necessity of getting on in the world, and securing his position: and he was by no means sure when he questioned his own heart (which was a thing he did seldom, knowing, like a wise man, that that shifty subject often made queer revelations, and was not at all an easy object to cross-examine), that the intercourse which he had again dropped into with Elinor was not on the whole as much as he required. There was no doubt that it kept him alive from one period to another; kept his heart moderately light and his mind wonderfully contented—as nothing else had ever done. He looked forward to his fortnightly or monthly visit to the Cottage (sometimes one, and sometimes the other; he never indulged himself so far as to go every week), and it gave him happiness enough to tide over all the dull moments between: and if anything came in his way and detained him even from his usual to a later train, he was ridiculously, absurdly angry. What right had he to feel so in respect to another man’s wife? What right had he to watch the child—the child whom he disliked so much to begin with—developing its baby faculties with an interest he was half ashamed of, but which went on increasing? Another man’s wife and another man’s child. He saw now that it was not a wholesome thing for him, and he could never have given it up had they remained. It had become too much a part of his living; should he not be glad therefore that they had taken it into their own hands, and gone away? When it suddenly occurred to John, however, that this perhaps had some share in the ladies’ hasty decision, that Mrs. Dennistoun perhaps (all that was objectionable was attributed to this poor lady) had been so abominably clear-sighted, so odiously presuming as to have suspected this, his sudden blaze of anger was foudroyant. Perhaps she had settled upon it for his sake, to take temptation out of his way. John could scarcely contain himself when this view of the case flashed upon him, although he was quite aware for himself that though it was a bitter wrench, yet it was perhaps good for him that Elinor should go away.
It was probably this wave of fierce and, as we are aware, quite unreasonable anger rushing over him that produced the change which everybody saw in John’s life about this time. It was about the beginning of the season when people’s enjoyments begin to multiply, and for the first time in his life John plunged into society like a very novice. He went everywhere. By this time he had made a great start in life, had been brought into note in one or two important cases, and was, as everybody knew, a young man very well thought of, and likely to do great things at the bar; so that he was free of many houses, and had so many invitations for his Sundays that he could well afford to be indifferent to the loss of such a humble house as the Cottage at Windyhill. Perhaps he wanted to persuade himself that this was the case, and that there really was nothing to regret. And it is certain that he did visit a great deal during that season at one house where there were two or three agreeable daughters; the house, indeed, of Sir John Gaythorne, who was Solicitor-General at that time, and a man who had always looked upon John Tatham with a favourable eye. The Gaythornes had a house near Dorking, where they often went from Saturday to Monday with a few choice convives, and “picknicked,” as they themselves said, but it was a picknicking of a highly comfortable sort. John went down with them the very Saturday after he received that letter—the Saturday on which he had intended to go to Windyhill. And the party was very gay. To compare it for a moment with the humdrum family at the Cottage would have been absurd. The Gaythornes prided themselves on always having pleasant people with them, and they had several remarkably pleasant people that day, among whom John himself was welcomed by most persons; and the family themselves were lively and agreeable to a high degree. A distinguished father, a very nice mother, and three charming girls, up to everything and who knew everybody; who had read or skimmed all the new books of any importance, and had seen all the new pictures; who could talk of serious things as well as they could talk nonsense, and who were good girls to boot, looking after the poor, and visiting at hospitals, in the intervals of their gaieties, as was then the highest fashion in town. I do not for a moment mean to imply that the Miss Gaythornes did their good work because it was the fashion: but the fact that it is the fashion has liberated many girls, and allowed them to carry out their natural wishes in that way, who otherwise would have been restrained and hampered by parents and friends, who would have upbraided them with making themselves remarkable, if in a former generation they had attempted to go to Whitechapel or St. Thomas’s with any active intentions. And Elinor had never done anything of this kind, any more than she had pursued music almost as a profession, which was what Helena Gaythorne had done; or learned to draw, like Maud (who once had a little thing in the Royal Academy); or studied the Classics, like Gertrude. John thought of her little tunes as he listened to Miss Gaythorne’s performance, and almost laughed out at the comparison. He was very fond of music, and Miss Gaythorne’s playing was something which the most cultivated audience might have been glad to listen to. He was ashamed to confess to himself that he liked the “tunes” best. No, he would not confess it even to himself; but when he stood behind the performer listening, it occurred to him that he was capable of walking all the miles of hill and hollow which divided the one place from the other, only for the inane satisfaction of seeing that baby spread on Elinor’s lap, or hearing her play to him one of her “tunes.”
He went with the Gaythornes to their country-place twice in the month of June, and dined at the house several times, and was invited on other occasions, becoming, in short, one of the habitués when there was anything going on in the house—till people began to ask, which was it? It was thought generally that Helena was the attraction, for John was known to be a musical man, always to be found where specially good music was going. Some friends of the family had even gone so far as to say among themselves what a good thing it was that dear Helena’s lot was likely to be cast with one who would appreciate her gift. “It generally happens in these cases that a girl marries somebody who does not know one note from another,” they said to each other. When, all at once, John flagged in his visits; went no more to Dorking; and finally ceased to be more assiduous or more remarked than the other young men who were on terms of partial intimacy at the Gaythorne house. He had, indeed, tried very hard to make himself fall in love with one of Sir John’s girls. It would have been an excellent connection, and the man might think himself fortunate who secured any one of the three for his wife. Proceeding from his certainty on these points, and also a general liking for their company, John had gone into it with a settled purpose, determined to fall in love if he could: but he found that the thing was not to be done. It was a pity; but it could not be helped. He was in a condition now when it would no longer be rash to marry, and he knew now that there was the makings of a domestic man in him. He never could have believed that he would take an interest in the sprawling of the baby upon its mother’s knee, and he allowed to himself that it might be sweet to have that scene taking place in a house of his own. Ah! but the baby would have to be Elinor’s. It must be Elinor who should sit on that low chair with the firelight on her face. And that was impossible. Helena Gaythorne was an exceedingly nice girl, and he wished her every success in life (which she attained some time after by marrying Lord Ballinasloe, the eldest son of the Earl of Athenree, a marriage which everybody approved), but he could not persuade himself to be in love with her, though with the best will in the world.
During this time he did not correspond much with his relations in the country. He had, indeed, some letters to answer from his father, in which the interrogatories were very difficult: “Where has Mary Dennistoun gone? What’s become of Elinor and her baby? Has that fashionable fellow of a husband deserted her? What’s the meaning of the move altogether?” And, “Mind you keep yourself out of it,” his father wrote. John had great trouble in wording his replies so as to convey as little information as possible. “I believe Aunt Mary has got a house somewhere in the North, probably to suit Elinor, who would be able to be more with her if she were in that neighbourhood.” (It must be confessed that he thought this really clever as a way of getting over the question.) “As for Compton, I know very little about him. He was never a man much in my way.” Mr. Tatham’s household saw nothing remarkable in these replies; upon which, however, they built an explanation, such as it was, of the other circumstances. They concluded that it must be in order to be near Elinor that Mrs. Dennistoun had gone to the North, and that it was a very good thing that Elinor’s husband was not a man who was in John’s way. “A scamp, if I ever saw one!” Mr. Tatham said. “But what’s that Jack says about Gaythorne? Mary, I remember Gaythorne years ago; a capital friend for a young man. I’m glad your brother’s making such nice friends for himself; far better than mooning about that wretched little cottage with Mary Dennistoun and her girl.”