In that part of the world the early autumn is the most lovely season of
the year. The country in its variety and sudden violences of shape and
colour seemed to her sensationally lovely after the mild beauty of her
own midland landscape, dominated and restrained by the level skylines
of Cotswold. Considine, who spoke very little as he drove, but was a
stylish whip, told her the names of the villages through which they
passed, names that were as soft and sleepy as Lapton Huish itself. He
showed her his church, with a flicker of pride, and the hung slates of
the Rectory wall through a gap in the green. Then they passed into the
open drive of Lapton Manor.
He explained to her that the estate had been neglected and was now the
subject of an experiment; but it seemed to her that the level fields
through which the drive extended had already come under the influence
of his orderly mind. To everything that Considine undertook there
clung an atmosphere of formal precision that suggested nothing so much
as the eighteenth century. The Manor, suddenly sweeping into view from
behind a plantation of ilex, confirmed this impression. It was such a
house as Considine must inevitably have chosen, a solid Georgian
structure, square and sombre, with a pillared portico in front shading
the entrance and its flanking windows. The window panes of the upper
storey blazed in the setting sun.
In the hall Gabrielle Considine awaited them. She was dressed in
black--probably she was still in mourning for Jocelyn--with a white
muslin collar such as a widow might have worn. To Mrs. Payne, by an
unconscious personal contrast, she seemed very tall and graceful and
exceedingly well-bred. No doubt Considine had prepared the way for
this impression. On the drive up he had spoken several times of Lord
Halberton, "my wife's cousin." Mrs. Considine's voice was very soft,
with the least hint of Irish in it, an inflection rather than a brogue.
Her hands, her neck and her face were very white. Possibly her skin
seemed whiter because of the blackness of her hair and of her dress and
the beautiful shape of her pale hands. Curiously enough, the chief
impression she made on Mrs. Payne was not the obvious one of youth; and
this shows that Gabrielle, outwardly, at any rate, had changed
enormously in the last year. Mrs. Payne did not know then, and
certainly would never have guessed, that the lady of the house was
under twenty years of age. She only saw a creature full of grace, of
dignity, and of quietness, and she knew that Considine was proud of
these qualities that his wife displayed. There was nothing to suggest
that the pair were not completely happy in their marriage.
After dinner they proceeded to business. They sat together in the
drawing-room, Mrs. Considine busy with her embroidery at a small table
apart, while her husband, capably judicial, begged Mrs. Payne to tell
him the peculiar features of Arthur's case. She found Considine
sympathetic, and the telling so easy that she was able to express
herself naturally in the most embarrassing part of her story.
Considine helped her with small encouragements. Gabrielle said
nothing, bending over her work while she listened. Indeed, she had
scarcely spoken a dozen words since Mrs. Payne's arrival. When she
came to the episode of Arthur's expulsion from the school at
Cheltenham, Considine made an uneasy gesture suggesting that his wife
should retire, and Gabrielle quietly rose.
Mrs. Payne begged her to stay. "It is much better that you should both
know everything," she said. "I want you to realise things at their
worst. It is much better that you should know exactly where we stand."
She wondered afterwards why Considine had suggested that Gabrielle
should go. At first she had taken it for granted that he was merely
considering her own maternal feelings in an unpleasant confession. It
was not until she thought the matter out quietly at Overton that she
decided that his action was really in keeping with the rest of his
attitude towards his wife; that he did, in fact, regard her as a small
child who should be repressed and denied an active interest in his
affairs. Gabrielle's quietness had puzzled her. Perhaps this was its
explanation.
For the time the story absorbed her and she thought no more of
Gabrielle. Considine was such an excellent listener, sitting there
with his long fingers knotted and his eyes fixed on her, that she found
herself subject to the same sort of mesmeric influence as had overcome
Lord Halberton. He inspired her with a curious confidence, and she
began to hope, almost passionately, that he would undertake the care of
Arthur. Before she had finished her narrative she was assailed with a
fear that he wouldn't--he seemed to be weighing the matter so carefully
in his mind--and burst out with an abrupt: "But you _will_ take him,
won't you?"
Considine smiled. "I shall be delighted," he said.
Her thankfulness, at the end of so much strain, almost bowled her over.
"You make me feel more settled about him already," she said. "I'm
almost certain that he will be happy here. I feel that I'm so lucky to
have heard of you. You and your wife," she added, for all the time
that she had been speaking, she had been conscious of the silent
interest of Gabrielle. When it came to a question of terms there was
nothing indefinite about Considine. The fees that he suggested were
enormous, but Mrs. Payne's faith in him was by this time so secure that
she would gladly have paid anything. All through the rest of her visit
this slow and steady confidence increased. From the bedroom in which
she slept she could see the wide expanse of the home fields. It seemed
to her that the quiet of Lapton was deeper and mellower and more
intense than any she had ever known. It was saturated with the sense
of ancient, stable, sane tradition. It breathed an atmosphere in which
nothing violent or strange or abnormal could ever flourish. She felt
that, in contrast with their restless modern Cotswold home, its intense
normality must surely have some subtle reassuring effect upon her son.
Gazing over those yellow fields in the early morning she felt a more
settled happiness than she had ever known since her husband's death.
So, full of hope, she returned to Overton and announced the
arrangements she had made to Arthur. He took to them gladly. He was
tired of the unnatural indolence of Overton, and in any case he would
have welcomed a change. In everything but his fatal abnormality he was
an ordinary healthy boy, and the prospect of going into a new county,
and learning something of estate management, a subject in which he was
really interested, appealed to him. She described the drive from the
station, the house, and the general conditions in detail. Her
enthusiasm for Considine rather put him off.
"I hope he isn't quite such a paragon as you make out," he said, "or
he'll have no use for me."
Gabrielle appeared as a rather shadowy figure in his mother's
background. "Oh, there's a wife, is there?" he said. "That's rather a
pity." She smiled, for this was typical of his attitude towards women.
Even though she smiled at it her heart was full of thankfulness, for,
as he had grown older, she had lived in an indefinite terror of what
might happen when Arthur did begin to notice women. It was quite bad
enough that he should be without a conscience in matters of truth and
property; if he were to be found without conscience in matters of sex
there was no end to the complications with which she might have to
deal. She always remembered the specialist's prophecy that the period
of puberty might be marked by a complete change for the better in his
dangerous temperament, but she was secretly haunted by a fear that this
critical age might, by an equal chance, reveal some new abnormality or
even aggravate the old. Arthur was now nearly seventeen, and
physically, at any rate, mature. For the present she lived in a state
of exaggerated hopes and fears.
The amazing part of the whole business was that Arthur didn't realise
it. He looked upon the anxiety which Mrs. Payne found it so difficult
to conceal as feminine weakness. He wished to goodness that she
wouldn't fuss over him, being convinced that he himself was an
ordinary, plain-sailing person who had submitted for long enough to an
unreasonable degree of pampering. He didn't see any reason why he
shouldn't be treated like any other boy of his age, and felt that he
had already been cheated of many of the rights of youth. One of the
principal reasons why he welcomed the Lapton plan was that it would
free him from the constant tug of apron-strings, and allow him to mix
freely with creatures of his own age and sex.
He went off to Lapton in the highest spirits, determined to have a good
time, rejoicing in the prospect of freedom in a way that made his
mother feel that she had been something of an oppressor. She could not
resist the temptation of seeing the last of him, and so they travelled
down together. This time she stayed a couple of days at Lapton. It
was part of Considine's plan to let parents see as much of the place as
they wanted, if only to convince them that they were getting their
money's worth.
Everything that Mrs. Payne saw reassured her. The routine of the house
seemed to be reasonable and healthy. The mornings were devoted to
lessons in the library. After lunch the pupils went out over the
fields or into the woods where Considine instructed them in details of
farming and forestry. Their work was not merely theoretical. They had
to learn to use their hands as well as their brains, to plough a
furrow, or bank a hedge, or dig a pit for mangolds. Considine kept
them busy, and at the same time made them useful to himself. They used
to come in at tea-time flushed with exercise and pleasantly fatigued.
The late afternoon and evening were their own. They played tennis or
racquets, or read books in the library, a long room with many tall
windows that had been set aside for their instruction and leisure.
Mrs. Payne rejoiced to find that their life at Lapton was so full. In
the absence of any idleness that was not well-earned she saw the
highest wisdom of Considine's system; for it seemed to her that her
anxiety for Arthur had probably done him an injustice in depriving him
of a natural outlet for his energies. At Lapton he could scarcely find
time for wickedness.
In this way her admiration for Considine increased. She only regretted
that she had not been able in the past to secure a tutor of his capable
and energetic type. Reviewing the series of languid and futile young
men whom the very best agencies had sent her, she came to the
conclusion that no man of Considine's type could ever have been forced
to accept a tutor's employment. Even in the choice of his pupils she
saw signs of his discrimination. In addition to the two Traceys, whose
delightful manners were undeniable, he had secured two other boys: one
the younger son of an East Anglian peer, and the other a boy whose
father was a colonel in the Indian army. The paragraph in Considine's
advertisement that had first attracted her had made her wonder if his
school might not develop into a collection of oddities, but all the
pupils that she saw were not only the sons of gentlemen but obviously
normal. She felt that their influence, seconding the control of
Considine, must surely have a stabilising effect upon Arthur, and was
content.
During the two days of her visit she still found Gabrielle a little
puzzling. She couldn't quite believe that her extreme quietness and
reserve were nothing more than simplicity. Knowing nothing of her
origins she did not realise that Gabrielle was actually shy of her, and
that this, and nothing else, explained her air of mystery. On the last
night, however, feeling that after all Gabrielle was the only woman in
the house in whom she could confide, she overcame her own diffidence,
and told her the whole story over again from a personal and feminine
point of view. Gabrielle listened very quietly.
"I'm so anxious that I felt bound to tell you, just in the hope that
you'd be interested," said Mrs. Payne. "One woman feels that it takes
another woman to understand her. If you had children of your own,
you'd understand quite easily what I mean."
"I think I do understand," said Gabrielle.
"There are little things about which I should be ashamed to worry your
husband. I wonder if it would be asking too much of you to hope that
you would sometimes write to me, and tell me how he is? Naturally I
can't expect you to take a special interest in Arthur, more than in
others----" She found it difficult to say more.
"Of course I will write to you if you want me to," said Gabrielle.
Mrs. Payne, impulsively, kissed her.