Among the people who called on Susie from Mr. Price’s Paradise, the county, was Lady Varens, David Varens’s stepmother. Sir Richard and Cyril were admirably suited to one another because the old man was a sportsman by nature and practice. He had had an adventurous youth and “mercifully,” as Cyril said, “forgotten the details.” Then, on his father’s death, he came back to Millshire and managed the estate with the same thoroughness that had brought him success in less peaceful enterprises. He married first a guest of one of his hunting neighbours. She was lying unconscious on a bank, with her horse grazing beside her, when he saw her for the first time; and when he had brought her round and taken her home and called every other day to ask how she was it seemed natural to regard her as his own property. She died when David was nine, and Sir Richard married, two years afterwards, a lady whom he thought to have been unjustly divorced from a drunken old peer who had married her from the schoolroom.
She was good to David and kept her own counsel, so Millshire allowed her to carry on the tradition of Varens hospitality; in fact there was an extra piquancy about her parties owing to the opportunity they gave for a little private skeleton hunting among intimate friends. Towards the following Christmas, while Evangeline was staying with Evan’s sisters, Sir Richard invited Cyril to take a day or two’s hunting with him and stay over the week-end. Lady Varens hoped that Mrs. Fulton would come too, and bring her daughter, to hunt or not, as she liked. Evangeline being away, Teresa was torn from her heart’s delight, the alleys, the rotting garrets and the dingy clubs where she groped all day for the scattered remnant of what seemed to her the lost birthright of the bottom class, their right to the fellowship of common desires and tastes with the people who filled her mother’s drawing-room.
“What is the good of this eternal talk about all men being able to reach any position they are fitted for, if, when you come across the most lovable people in that class, you can hardly bear to sit with them for five minutes because of smells and anxieties and habits that shut them off like a cage that they didn’t make themselves and can’t get out of?” she asked Emma Gainsborough.
“We are trying to get them out,” said Emma.
“I know,” Teresa answered, “but I don’t see how you can unless you kill Mrs. Carpenter.” She and Mrs. Carpenter had perhaps the same end in view when they worked among the dismal crowds that swarmed in the mud and hideousness of the poorer quarters, but to the casual observer it looked as though the “charity ladies,” as Strickland called them, were under the impression that in their promotion of health and virtue they were pressing something new on somebody who had never heard of it, while Teresa hoped to restore a treasure that had been lost by past generations.
Her own experience was showing her that the cage door gives way before devotees who will suffer the violation of everything that makes life sweet to them for the sake of what they hold dearer, and she also learned the freemasonry of hard work; the point where she stuck was the apparent impossibility of ever bridging the gulf between Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Potter. How to wean Mrs. Carpenter from the idea that the social order was all right because she was on the bright side of it, and at the same time convince Mrs. Potter that it was not all wrong because she was on the dark one? As one of Emma’s friends pointed out, twenty centuries had passed since the only serious attempt had been made to bring about an understanding between the ancestors of those two irreconcilable ladies. The best spiritual engineering had been carried on ever since along the lines then laid down; communications had been devised and traffic of a sort carried on. But as soon as Mrs. Potter advanced a little and caught sight of Mrs. Carpenter and went for her, bald-headed, and when Mrs. Carpenter sailed along from her end of the bridge and then sat down and sang to Mrs. Potter——. I must stop this allegory or the reader will break down in tears of perplexity and perhaps send the book straight back to the library; unless he has himself lived for a time miserably wedged between the philanthropists and the slums of a city.
To get on with the story. Teresa was, as I have said, torn from her absorbing occupation and compelled to go with her father and mother to be the Varens’ guest at Aldwych Court.
I believe there is no place so comfortable to stay in as an English country house belonging to a good hostess. The luxury of dressing in any part of her room without the penalty of gooseflesh; the deep, scented bath and warm towel three feet square; the rich, dry fluffiness under foot, and the cup of tea afterwards, brought by a maid who seemed to have nothing else to do, banished all visions of Mrs. Potter to such a remote corner of Teresa’s consciousness that when she did remember her again the recollection had no more sting than a bad dream. She ate her dinner, served by willing men and women who performed their duties like priests of Isis, instead of, as dear Strickland did, giving her the uneasy feeling that one course would have been quite enough if ladies were not so greedy. She had observed sometimes to Evangeline that Millport maids treated their mistresses as if they were parrots whose dirty cages had to be cleaned out, and whom it “took up people’s time” to feed.
David Varens is to play his part on the stage now, but there is to be no sudden change in the music to waltz time, nor cries of the villagers, “But here comes the Prince! Gay and dancing, bright and prancing, sing we now our welcome,” nor will the light fade and moon children glide out from under trees and sit upon their mushrooms while he sings, “Queen of the dusk and lodestar of my dreams.” He comes on like Cyril’s millionaire, “walking quite unaffectedly” among a number of ordinary people. It was not until Teresa and her mother went away on Monday that she began seriously to prefer him to Mrs. Potter. It may be difficult for anyone who is unacquainted with the love of Beauty for the Beast to understand what a disappointment it was to her to find that her heart had betrayed her and was transferring its allegiance to a normal object. It was something between childish terror of the sea and the remorse of a pilgrim whose prayers have grown cold that followed on the joy his presence gave her. “How happy I am,” she thought, and then, as a ghostly voice demanded the truth, she added, “and I don’t care a hang what Mrs. Potter is doing.”
There were other people staying in the house, but she did not notice them and no more need we. Lady Varens and Susie talked and knitted and drove, and Lady Varens liked Susie, because it was impossible not to on a slight acquaintance, and Susie liked Lady Varens because there was mystery about her and she had great charm, with her soft eyes that saw much and told nothing, and her sensitive mouth whose utterances led to conversation, but also told nothing. Susie admired in her the ideal woman, and “we are so much alike” was what she chiefly thought of her. Cyril enjoyed his hunting and sat up late in the smoking-room.
“I hope you will come and see us, Mr. Varens,” said Susie before they left. “Your mother, I know, hardly ever leaves this lovely place, and no more should I if it were mine. But I know you do come into town sometimes. We can always give you lunch and it will be such a change to hear about the beautiful country things in the middle of all our ugliness; I never get used to it. I shall be so anxious to hear whether that dear black cow gets all right again. Cows are such mothers, you know; one feels so sorry for them having to be parted from those sweet calves. You are going to manage the estate now, Sir Richard told me. How delightful that will be, and what a saving of anxiety to him.”
“Yes,” said David, “I come in two or three times a week to the University. Perhaps you would let me come one of those days, may I? Thanks very much.”
He took Teresa through the woods that morning. She said less than usual, and presently he noticed this. “You look worried,” he remarked. “Is anything wrong?”
“I don’t know that you can call it wrong,” she answered, “but I feel almost sick at the thought of going back to Emma Gainsborough and her office. It doesn’t seem any use from here. I was bent on teaching music to Albert Potter the day I came, and now I want to turn him into a calf or a frog. What is the good of Emma going on sending different kinds of splints for him and telling Mrs. Potter how to put them on? The money I have eaten since I came here would have saved him from getting like that a year ago.”
“Look here,” said David seriously, “I have been along that road while I was at Oxford, and it leads nowhere, except into a sort of maze where you lose yourself and die for want of a fresh argument. If I had ideas I would come down to your place and do what you are doing for as long as you wanted me, but I haven’t got any ideas and I have got fields—or rather my father has, and can’t look after them as he used to—and I am going to see what is to be got out of them.”
“I have neither ideas nor fields,” she said, “but I had an enormous family when I left home last week, and now I have been happy and forgotten them.”
“Did you forget them?” he asked.
“Yes, quite,” she answered sadly.
“Then you can’t really care for them enough to succeed,” he said. This struck Teresa a blow. “Don’t you ever forget your farms and things?” she asked, “not for a minute?”
“No, except when I’m asleep or hunting.”
“Hunting! my hunting is done down there,” she said illogically.
“Then where are your farms?”
“Oh, blow!” said Teresa.
“All right. Well, when will you come back here?”
“When I can’t bear any more committees of the charitable. I wish you could see Mrs. Carpenter. Do you remember, she was at the Gainsboroughs the night you were there?”
“Was she? I forget. What like?”
“Like an hour glass, in pink—with the sand quite solid.”
“I didn’t notice. I couldn’t make your Miss Gainsborough talk, that’s all I know. Is there anything the matter with her?”
“Dear me, no,” she answered in surprise. “She’s very amusing when you know her. Mr. Price got her into such a state of nerves. He did me, too. Do you understand him?”
“No, but I think he is only trying to mix society; just what you want to do with Mrs. Potter. If you encourage her you ought to encourage him.”
Teresa looked at him to see whether he was laughing, but they had come to a stile and he was waiting politely for her to get over. Instead of climbing she sat down on it and faced him. “It is absolutely different,” she began to explain. “What I can’t bear is to find people, who would be just like you if they had been sent to school and fed, unable to express themselves and living in such horrible places that one can hardly attend to what they are trying to say because of the awfulness. And it is nonsense to say that they can always get out. All self-made men say afterwards that they were newsboys, but there are thousands of darling newsboys who haven’t got just the bit of extra that made Dick Whittington; and, as my mother says, purring among her furs on a platform, ‘they are often taught to be bad.’ She does talk such rot, and yet often her platitudes wouldn’t be so telling if they were not made up over a small piece of truth. There is nothing like that about that dreadful man Price; is there now? Come, speak up.”
“He wants to get into a better set and explain himself,” said David.
“Nonsense,” answered Teresa, “not a better set at all; only a more fashionable one.”
“Well, but you say that your set isn’t any better than Mrs. Potter’s, only more fashionable. If that is so then Mrs. Potter is a snob like Price. But if you claim some other advantage that you want Mrs. Potter to share, why shouldn’t Price be sensitive about having been born outside a set that claims to be better than his own?”
“I wish I could get someone who has as much ‘lip’ as you have to talk to you,” said Teresa. “I can’t do it, but I know you are wrong.”
“Your Potter vocabulary is beyond me,” said David politely.