AT POYNINGS.
Life at Poynings had its parallel in hundreds of country-houses, of
which it was but a type. It was a life essentially English in its
character, in its staid respectability, in its dull decorum. There are
old French chateaux without number, visible in bygone days to
travellers in the banquettes of diligencies, and glimpses of which may
still occasionally be caught from the railways, gray, square, four
pepper-box turreted old buildings, wherein life is dreary but not
decorous, and sad without being staid. It is the day-dream of many an
English country gentleman that his house should, in the first place,
be respectable, in the second place, comfortable, in the third place,
free from damp; after these successes are achieved, he takes no
further thought for it; within and without the dulness may be
soul-harrowing; that is no affair of his. So long as his dining-room
is large enough to contain the four-and-twenty guests who, on
selected moonlight nights, are four times in every year bidden to
share his hospitality--so long as the important seignorial dignities
derivable from the possession of lodge, and stable, and kennel are
maintained--so long as the state devolving upon him as justice of the
peace, with a scarcely defined hope of one day arriving at the
position of deputy-lieutenant, is kept up, vaulting ambition keeps
itself within bounds, and the young English country gentleman is
satisfied. More than satisfied, indeed, was Mr. Capel Carruthers in
the belief that all the requirements above named were properly
fulfilled. In his earlier life he had been haunted by a dim conviction
that he was rather an ass than otherwise; he remembered that that had
been the verdict returned at Rugby, and his reflections on his very
short career at Cambridge gave him no reason to doubt the decision of
his schoolfellows. Not a pleasant source of reflection even to a man
of Mr. Carruthers's blunted feelings; in fact, a depressing, wrong,
Radical state of mind, for which there was only one antidote--the
thought that he was Mr. Carruthers of Poynings, a certain settled
stable position which would have floated its possessor over any amount
of imbecility. Carruthers of Poynings! There it was in old county
histories, with a genealogy of the family and a charming copper
engraving of Poynings at the beginning of the century, with two ladies
in powder and hoops fishing in an impossible pond, and a gentleman in
a cocked-hat and knee-breeches pointing out nothing in particular to
nobody at all. Carruthers of Poynings! All the old armour in the hall,
hauberks and breastplates, now propped upon a slight wooden frame,
instead of enclosing the big chests and the thews and sinews which
they had preserved through the contests of the rival Roses or the
Cavaliers and Roundheads--all the old ancestors hanging round the
dining-room, soldiers, courtiers, Kentish yeomen, staring with grave
eyes at the smug white-whiskered old gentleman, their descendant--all
the old tapestry worked by Maud Carruthers, whose husband was killed
in the service of Mary Stuart--all the carvings and gildings about the
house, all the stained glass in the windows, all the arms and
quartering and crests upon the family plate--all whispered to the
present representative of the family that he was Carruthers of
Poynings, and as such had only to make a very small effort to find
life no very difficult matter, even for a person scantily endowed with
brains. He tried it accordingly--tried it when a young man, had
pursued the course ever since, and found it successful. Any latent
suspicion of his own want of wisdom had vanished long since, as how,
indeed, could it last? When Mr. Carruthers took his seat as chairman
of the magisterial bench at Amherst, he found himself listening with
great admiration to the prefatory remarks which he addressed to the
delinquent in custody before passing sentence on him, unconscious that
those remarks only echoed the magistrate's clerk, who stood close
behind him whispering into his ear. When, as was his regular custom,
he walked round the barn, where, on rent-days, the tenants were
assembled at dinner, and heard his health proposed in glowing terms,
and drunk with great enthusiasm--for he was a good and liberal
landlord--and when he addressed a few conventional words of thanks in
reply, and stroked his white whiskers, and bowed, amidst renewed
cheering, how should a thought of his own shortcomings ever dawn upon
him?
His shortcomings!--the shortcomings of Mr. Carruthers of Poynings? If,
indeed, in his earlier days there had been a latent belief in the
existence of anything so undesirable and so averse to the proper
status of a county magnate, it had long since died out. It would have
been hard and unnatural, indeed, for a man so universally respected
and looked up to, not to give in to the general creed, and admit that
there were undoubted grounds for the widespread respect which he
enjoyed. There are two kinds of "squires," to use the old English
word, who exercise equal influence on the agricultural mind, though in
very different ways. The one is the type which Fielding loved to draw,
and which has very little altered since his time--the jocund sporting
man, rib-poking, lass-chin-chucking franklin, the tankard-loving,
cross-country-riding, oath-using, broad-skirted, cord-breeched,
white-hatted squire. The other is the landed proprietor, magistrate,
patron of the living, chairman of the board of guardians, supporter of
the church and state, pattern man. Mr. Carruthers of Poynings belonged
to the latter class. You could have told that by a glance at him on
his first appearance in the morning, with his chin shaved clean, his
well-brushed hair and whiskers, his scrupulously white linen, his
carefully tied check neckcloth, his portentous collars, his trimmed
and polished nails. His very boots creaked of position and
respectability, and his large white waistcoat represented unspotted
virtue. Looking at him ensconced behind the bright-edged Bible at
early morning prayers, the servants believed in the advantages
derivable from a correct life, and made an exception in their master's
favour to the doom of Dives. By his own measure he meted the doings of
others, and invariably arose considerably self-refreshed from the
mensuration. Hodge, ploughman, consigned to the cage after a brawl
with Giles, hedger, consequent upon a too liberal consumption of flat
and muddy ale at The Three Horseshoes, known generally as The Shoes,
and brought up for judgment before the bench, pleading "a moog too
much" in extenuation, might count on scanty commiseration from the
magistrate, who never exceeded his four glasses of remarkably sound
claret. Levi Hinde, gipsy and tramp, arraigned for stealing a loaf
from a baker's shop--as he said, to save the life of his starving
child--impressed not one whit the portly chairman of the Amherst
branch of the County Bank. Mr. Carruthers never got drunk, and never
committed theft; and that there could be any possible temptation for
other people so to act, was beyond the grasp of his most respectable
imagination.
A man of his stamp generally shows to the least advantage in his
domestic relations. Worshipped from a distance by outsiders, who, when
occasion forces them into the presence, approach, metaphorically, in
the Siamese fashion, on hands and knees, there is usually a good deal
too much Grand Lama-like mystery and dignity about the recipient of
all this homage to render him agreeable to those with whom he is
brought into daily contact. Mr. Carruthers was not an exception to the
rule. He had a notion that love, except the extremely respectable but
rather weak regard felt by mothers towards their infants, was a
ridiculous boy-and-girl sentiment, which never really came to
anything, nor could be considered worthy of notice until the feminine
mind was imbued with a certain amount of reverence for the object of
her affection. Mr. Carruthers had never read Tennyson (in common with
his class, he was extremely severe upon poets in general, looking upon
them not merely as fools, but as idle mischievous fools, who might be
better employed in earning a decent livelihood, say as carters or
turnpike-men); but he was thoroughly impressed with the idea that
"woman is the lesser man," and he felt that any open display of
affection on his part towards his wife might militate against what he
considered entirely essential to his domestic happiness--his "being
looked up to." He was in the habit of treating his wife in ordinary
matters of social intercourse very much as he treated the
newly-appointed justice of the peace at the meetings of the
magisterial bench, viz. as a person whose position was now recognized
by the laws of society as equal to their own, but who must
nevertheless feel inwardly that between him and Mr. Carruthers of
Poynings there was really a great gulf fixed, the bridging of which,
however easy it may appear, was really a matter of impossibility.
If these feelings existed, as they undoubtedly did in Mr. Carruthers
under the actual circumstances of his marriage, it may be imagined
that they would have been much keener, much more intensified, had he
taken to wife, instead of the quiet widow lady whom, to the
astonishment of the county, he chose, any of the dashing girls who had
danced, dressed, and flirted at him perseveringly, but in vain.
Poynings was a sufficiently nice place to render its master a catch in
the county, and to induce husband-hunting misses to discount his age
and pomposity, so that when the cards of Mr. and Mrs. Capel Carruthers
were sent round (it was before the contemptuous days of "no cards "),
and it was discovered that the new mistress of Poynings was somebody
quite out of "the set," immediately "that dear Mr. Carruthers" became
"that horrid old thing," and it required years of open-handed
hospitality to reestablish him in favour.
But Capel Carruthers had chosen wisely, and he knew it. With all his
weakness and vanity, a gentleman in thought and tastes, he had taken
for his wife a lady whose birth and breeding must have been
acknowledged in any society; a lady whose age was not ill-suited to
his own, whose character was unimpeachable, who was thoroughly
qualified to superintend the bringing out of his niece, and whose sole
vulnerable point for criticism--her poverty--was rendered invulnerable
as soon as she became Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings. And, under all the
cold placid exterior which never thawed, under all the set
Grandisonian forms of speech which were never relaxed, under the
judicial manner and the Board-of-Guardians address, flowed a warm
current of love for his wife which he himself scarcely suspected. With
such poor brains as he had, he had occasionally fallen to the task of
self-examination, asking himself how it was that he, Mr. Carruthers of
Poynings (even in his thoughts he liked the ring of that phrase),
could have so far permitted himself to be swayed by any one, and then
he told himself that he was reverenced and looked up to, that his
state, position, and dignities were duly acknowledged, and in a
satisfied frame of mind he closed the self-colloquy. Loved his
wife--eh! neither he nor any one else knew how much. George Dallas
need not have been anxious about the treatment of his mother by his
stepfather. When the young man cursed his exile from his mother's
presence and his stepfather's home, he little knew the actual motives
which prompted Mr. Carruthers to decide upon and to keep rigidly in
force that decree of banishment. Not only his stepson's wildness and
extravagance; though a purist, Mr. Carruthers was sufficient man of
the world to know that in most cases there are errors of youth which
correct themselves in the flight of time. Not a lurking fear that his
niece, thrown in this prodigal's way, should be dazzled by the glare
of his specious gifts, and singe her youth and innocence in their
baleful light. Not a dread of having to notice and recognize the young
man as his connection in the chastened arena of county society.
As nature had not endowed Mr. Carruthers with a capacity for winning
affection, though it was not to be denied that there were qualities in
his character which commanded respect, it was fortunate for him that
he cared less about the former than the latter. Nevertheless, he would
probably have been rendered very uncomfortable, not to say unhappy,
had he supposed that his wife. "Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings," as there
is reason to suppose he designated her, even in his inmost thoughts,
positively did not love him. Such a supposition, however, never had
occurred to him, which was fortunate; for Mr. Carruthers was apt to
hold by his suppositions as strongly as other people held by their
convictions, as, indeed, being _his_, why should he not? and it would
have been very difficult to dislodge such a notion. The notion itself
would have been, in the first place, untrue, and in the second,
dangerous. Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings loved her rather grim and
decidedly uninteresting but unimpeachably respectable husband, if not
passionately, which was hardly to be expected, very sincerely, and
estimated him after the fashion of wives--that is to say, considerably
above his deserts. All women like their husbands, except those who
notoriously do not, and Mrs. Carruthers was no exception to the rule.
She had a much greater sense of justice in her than most women, and
she used it practically--applied it to her own case. She knew the
fault had been her son's in the great sorrow which had destroyed all
the pride and pleasure which her prosperous marriage would otherwise
have brought her, and she did not charge it upon her husband, or,
except in so far as her unconquerable anxiety and depression caused
him annoyance, did she inflict the penalty of it on him. She knew him
to be a hard man, and she did not look for softness from, him; but she
accepted such advantages as hardness of character possesses, and bore
its disadvantages well. "If I were he," she had said to herself, even
in the first hours of her anguish of conviction of her boy's
unworthiness, and when his stepfather's edict of exclusion was but
newly published, "and I had so little knowledge of human nature as he
has, if life had never taught me toleration, if Clare were my niece
and George his son, would I not have acted as he has done? He is
consistent to the justness and the sternness of his character."
Thinking thus, Mrs. Carruthers acted on the maxim that to judge others
aright we should put ourselves in their position. So she accepted the
great trial of her life, and suffered it as quietly and patiently as
she could. It would be difficult to define with precision the nature
of Mr. Carruthers's sentiments towards George Dallas. The young man
had met his stepfather but rarely, and had on each occasion increased
the disfavour with which from the first the elder man had regarded
him. He had never tried to propitiate, had, indeed, regarded him with
contemptuous indifference, secure in what he fancied to be the
security of his mother's position; and there had been covert
antagonism between them from the first. How much astonished Mr.
Carruthers would have been had any revelation been made to him of the
secrets of his own heart, whereby he would have discovered that a
strong sentiment of jealousy lay at the root of his antipathy to
George Dallas--jealousy which intensified his hardness and sternness,
and forbade him to listen to the promptings of common sense, which
told him that the line he was taking towards the son was so cruel to
the mother as to neutralize all the advantages presented by the fine
marriage she had made, and for which, by the way, he expected her to
be constantly demonstratively grateful. In this expectation he was as
constantly disappointed. Mrs. Carruthers was an eminently _true_
woman, and as she felt no peculiar exuberance of gratitude, she showed
none. She was a lady too--much more perfectly a lady than Mr.
Carruthers was unimpeachably a gentleman--and, as such, she filled her
position as a matter of course, as she would have filled one much
higher, or one much lower, and thought nothing about it. She was of so
much finer a texture, so much higher a nature, than her husband, that
she did not suspect him of any double motive in his treatment of
George Dallas. She never dreamed that Mr. Carruthers of Poynings was
secretly uneasily jealous of the man who had died in his prime many
years before, and the son, who had been first the young widow's sole
consolation and then her bitterest trial. The living and the dead
combined to displease Mr. Carruthers, and he would have been
unequivocally glad, only in decorous secrecy, could he have obtained
any evidence to prove that George Dallas was remarkably like his
father in all the defective points of his personal appearance and in
all the faults of his character. But such evidence was not within his
reach, and Mr. Carruthers was reduced to hoping in his secret heart
that his suppositions were correct on this point, and discovering a
confirmation of them in his wife's scrupulous silence with regard to
her first husband. She had never, in their most confidential moments,
remarked on any likeness between George and his father; had never,
indeed, mentioned Captain Dallas at all, which appeared extremely
significant to Mr. Carruthers, but seeing that Captain Dallas had been
dead twelve years when his widow became Mrs. Carruthers of Poynings,
would not have occasioned much surprise to the world in general. Mr.
Carruthers regarded himself as his wife's benefactor, but she did not
partake of his views in that respect. The notion which he entertained
of his position with regard to his niece Clare was better founded and
more reasonable.
The beautiful young heiress, who was an unconscious and involuntary
element in the standing grievance of Mrs. Carruthers's life, was the
only child of Mr. Carruthers's brother, and the sole inheritor of his
property. Her father had died while she was a little child, and her
mother's method of educating her has been already described. She was
attached to her uncle, but was afraid of him; and she was happier and
more at ease at the Sycamores than at Poynings. Of course Mr.
Carruthers did not suspect his niece of any such depravity of taste.
It never occurred to him that any one could fancy himself or herself
happier anywhere on the face of the created globe than at Poynings;
and so Clare escaped the condemnation which she would otherwise have
received in no stinted measure.
Accustomed to attach a wonderful amount of importance to duties and
responsibilities which were his, if their due fulfilment could add to
his dignity and reputation, Mr. Carruthers was a model of the uncle
and guardian. He really liked Clare very much indeed, and he was fully
persuaded that he loved her--a distinction he would have learned to
draw only if Clare had been deprived of her possessions, and rendered
dependent on him. He spoke of her as "my brother's heiress," and so
thought of her, not as "my brother's orphan child;" but in all
external and material respects Mr. Carruthers of Poynings was an
admirable guardian, and a highly respectable specimen of the uncle
tribe. He would have been deeply shocked had he discovered that any
young lady in the county was better dressed, better mounted, more
obsequiously waited upon, more accomplished, or regarded by society as
in any way more favoured by fortune than Miss Carruthers--not of
Poynings, indeed, but the next thing to it, and likely at some future
day to enjoy that distinction. Mr. Carruthers did not regret that he
was childless; he had never cared for children, and, though not a
keenly observant person, he had noticed occasionally that the
importance of a rich man's heir was apt, in this irrepressibly
anticipative world, to outweigh the importance of the rich man
himself. No Carruthers on record had ever had a large family, and, for
his own part, he liked the idea of a female heir to the joint property
of himself and his brother, who should carry her own name in addition
to her husband's. He was determined on that. Unless Clare married a
nobleman, her husband should take the name of Carruthers. Carruthers
of Poynings must not die out of the land. The strange jealousy which
was one of the underlying constituents of Mr. Carruthers's character
came into play with regard to his niece and his wife. Mrs. Carruthers
loved the girl, and would gladly have acted the part of a mother to
her; and as Clare's own mother had been a remarkably mild specimen of
maternal duty and affection, she could have replaced that lady
considerably to Clare's advantage. But she had soon perceived that
this was not to be; her husband's fidgety sense of his own importance,
his ever-present fear lest it should be trenched upon or in any way
slighted, interfered with her good intentions. She knew the
uselessness of opposing the foible, though she did not understand its
source, and she relinquished the projects she had formed.
Mr. Carruthers was incapable of believing that his wife never once
dreamed of resenting to Clare the exclusion of George, for which the
girl's residence at Poynings had been assigned as a reason, or that
she would have despised herself if such an idea had presented itself
to her mind, as she probably must have despised him had she known how
natural and inevitable he supposed it to be on her part.
Thus it came to pass that the three persons who lived together at
Poynings had but little real intimacy or confidence between them.
Clare was very happy; she had her own tastes and pursuits, and ample
means of gratifying them. Her mother's brother and his wife, Sir
Thomas and Lady Boldero, with her cousin, their ugly but clever and
charming daughter, were much attached to her, and she to them, and,
when she got away from Poynings to the Sycamores, Clare acknowledged
to herself that she enjoyed the change very much, but was very happy
at Poynings nevertheless. The Sycamores had another interest for her
now, another association, and the girl's life had entered upon a new
phase. Innocent, inexperienced, and romantic as she was, inclined to
hero-worship, and by no means likely to form sound opinions as to her
heroes, Clare Carruthers was endowed with an unusual allowance of
common sense and perception. She understood Mr. Carruthers of Poynings
thoroughly; so much more thoroughly than his wife, that she had found
out the jealousy which permeated his character, and recognized it in
action with unfailing accuracy. She had considerably more tact than
girls at her age ordinarily possess, and she continued to fill a
somewhat difficult position with satisfaction not only to others, but
to herself. She contrived to avoid wounding her uncle's susceptible
self-love, and to keep within the limits which Mrs. Carruthers's
discretion had set to their intimacy, without throwing external
coldness or restraint into their relations.
Clare found herself very often doing or not doing, saying or
refraining from saying, some particular thing, in order to avoid
"getting Mrs. Carruthers into a scrape," and of course she was aware
that the constantly-recurring necessity for such carefulness argued,
at the least, a difficult temper to deal with in the head of the
household; but she did not let the matter trouble her much. She would
think, when she thought about it at all, with the irrepressible
self-complacency of youth, how careful _she_ would be not to marry an
ill-tempered man, or, at all events, she would make up her mind to
marry a man so devotedly attached to her that his temper would not be
of the slightest consequence, as, of course, she should never suffer
from it. On the whole, it would be difficult to find a more dangerous
condition of circumstances than that in which Clare Carruthers was
placed when her romantic meeting with Paul Ward took place--a meeting
in which the fates seemed to have combined every element of present
attraction and future danger. Practically, Clare was quite alone; she
placed implicit confidence in no one, she had no guide for her
feelings or actions, and she had just drifted into a position in which
she needed careful direction. She refrained from mentioning her
meeting with the stranger, more on Mrs. Carruthers's account than on
her own, from the usual motive--apprehension lest, by some
unreasonable turn of Mr. Carruthers's temper, she might be brought
"into a scrape." Her curiosity had been strongly excited by the
discovery that Mrs. Carruthers had some sort of acquaintance with Paul
Ward, or, at least, with his name; but she adhered to her resolution,
and kept silence for the present.
Mrs. Carruthers's son had always been an object of tacit interest to
Clare. She had not been fully informed of the circumstances of her
uncle's marriage, and she understood vaguely that George Dallas was an
individual held in disfavour by the august master of Poynings; so her
natural delicacy of feeling conquered her curiosity, and she abstained
from mentioning George to his mother or to Mr. Carruthers, and also
from giving encouragement to the gossip on the subject which
occasionally arose in her presence.
In Mrs. Carruthers's dressing-room a portrait hung, which Clare had
been told by Mrs. Brookes was that of her mistress's son, when a fine,
brave, promising boy of ten years old. Clare had felt an interest in
the picture, not only for Mrs. Carruthers's sake, but because she
liked the face which it portrayed--the clear bright brown eyes, the
long curling hair, the brilliant dark complexion, the bold, frank,
gleeful expression. Once or twice she had said a few words in praise
of the picture, and once she had ventured to ask Mrs. Carruthers if
her son still resembled it. The mother had answered her, with a sigh,
that he was greatly changed, and no one would now recognize the
picture as a likeness of him.
The dignified and decorous household at Poynings pursued its luxurious
way with less apparent disunion among its principal members than is
generally to be seen under the most favourable circumstances, but with
little real community of feeling or of interest. Mrs. Carruthers was a
popular person in society, and Clare was liked as much as she was
admired. As for Mr. Carruthers, he was Mr. Carruthers of Poynings, and
that fact sufficed for the neighbourhood almost as completely as it
satisfied himself.
The unexpected return of her uncle from York had caused Clare no
particular emotion. She was standing at the French window of the
breakfast-room, feeding a colony of birds, her outdoor pensioners,
when the carriage made its appearance. She had just observed the fact,
and was quietly pursuing her occupation, when Mrs. Carruthers, who had
left the breakfast-room half an hour before, returned, looking so
pale, and with so unmistakeable an expression of terror in her face,
that Clare looked at her in astonishment.
"Your uncle has come back," she said. "I am not well, I cannot meet
him yet. Go to the door, Clare, and tell him I am not well, and am
still in my room. Pray go, my dear; don't delay a moment."
"Certainly I will go," answered Clare, leaving the window and crossing
the room as she spoke; "but--"
"I'll tell you what ails me another time, but go now--go," said Mrs.
Carruthers; and, without another word, the girl obeyed her. She had
seen the carriage at a turn in the avenue; now the wheels were
grinding the gravel of the sweep opposite the hall-door. In a minute
Clare was receiving her uncle on the steps, and Mrs. Carruthers,
having thrown the bonnet and shawl she had just taken out for her
proposed expedition to the shrubbery back into the wardrobe, removed
her gown, and replaced it by a dressing-gown, was awaiting her
husband's approach with a beating heart and an aching head. Had he met
her son? Had he passed him unseen upon the road? Would Mrs. Brookes
succeed, unseen and unsuspected, in executing the commission with
which she had hurriedly charged her?
"She is in a scrape of some sort," Clare thought, as she accompanied
her uncle to his wife's dressing-room. "What can have happened since
he left home? Can it have anything to do with Paul Ward?"