When the newly married people returned home, after an absence of about
two months, the new rule soon but gradually made itself felt at
Fontanel. Though Mr Summerhayes had for a long time been the inspiring
influence there, there was still all the difference between his will as
interpreted by Mrs Clifford and his will as accomplished by himself. Of
the two, it must be allowed that the retainers of the family preferred
the cordial, kind, inconsistent sway of poor Mary to the firm and steady
government of her new husband; and then everybody had acknowledged her
right to rule, which came by nature, while every soul secretly rebelled
against his, which was a kind of contradiction to nature. Mr
Summerhayes’s path was not strewn with roses when he came back to
Fontanel; then, for the first time, he had the worst of it. After she
was fairly married, and everything concluded beyond the possibility of
change, Mary, like a true woman, had found it quite possible to forget
all her previous doubts and difficulties, and to conclude, with that
simple philosophy which carries women of her class through so many
troubles, that now everything must come right. It was no embarrassing
new affection now, but acknowledged duty, that bound her to her husband,
and she would not contemplate the possibility of this duty clashing with
her former duties. So she came home, having fully regained the composure
of her mind, very happy to see her children again, and utterly
forgetting that they had not yet become accustomed, as she had, to look
upon “Cousin Tom” as the head of the house. But it was now that
gentleman’s turn to suffer the pains and penalties of the new position
which he had taken upon himself. He was fully conscious of all the
troubled sidelong glances out of Loo’s brown eyes; and when Charley
burst into the house in schoolboy exuberance at Easter, for his few days
of holiday, Mr Summerhayes noted the gulp in the throat of the Etonian,
when he found it necessary to ask the new master of the house about
something hitherto settled between himself and the old groom, with
perhaps a reference to the indulgent mother, who could never bear to
deprive her boy of any pleasure. Mr Summerhayes let Charley have his
will with the best grace in the world, but still saw and remarked that
knot of discontent in the boy’s throat—that apple of Adam, which Charley
swallowed, consciously, yet, as he himself thought, unobserved by any
man. The younger children were perhaps still more difficult to deal
with; for it was hard to teach them that Mr Summerhayes was no longer
Cousin Tom, to be romped with, but that it was necessary to be quiet and
good, and not to disturb the meditations of the head of the house. True,
it fell to Mary’s lot to impress this fact upon the rebellious
consciousness of Harry and little Alf; but Mr Summerhayes, who at that
particular period of his life was all eyes and ears, and missed nothing,
did not fail to have the benefit. Then some of the servants were
petulant—some were insolent, presuming on their old favour with their
mistress—some resigned altogether when they knew “how things was agoing
to be;” the most part sneaked and gave in, with secret reflections,
every one of which was guessed and aggravated by the new master. It is
easy to see that his position had its difficulties and disagreeables;
but, to do Mr Summerhayes justice, he behaved with great temper and
forbearance in this troublesome crisis. He made it apparent to everybody
that he was not to be trifled with; but, at the same time, pretended not
to see the little petulancies which were in reality so distinctly
apparent to him, and which galled him so much. He swallowed many a
mortification just then more bitter and stinging than Charley’s
soon-forgotten gulp of boyish pride; and steadily and gradually, without
any one knowing much about it, the new master of Fontanel won the day.
He was a man whose previous life had, to a considerable extent, belied
his real character. He had lived idly and without any apparent ambition
during these forty years, contenting himself apparently, for the last
ten, with his dreary old manor-house and spare income. But this was not
because he was of a light and easy temper, or satisfied with his lot. He
was active enough in reality, now that he had affairs in his hands of
sufficient magnitude to occupy him—and thoughtful enough to keep his
purposes locked in his own heart, from which they came forth in act and
deed, only when full fledged and ready for the gaze of the world. The
house of Fontanel gradually recognised the hand of the master. Without
any visible coercion upon Mary, the open, liberal, hospitable house came
by imperceptible degrees under that stern regime which had made life
possible at the manor-house upon the much diminished means of the
Summerhayes’. The process was like nothing so much as the change of a
ship’s course in a stormy sea. The vessel wavered, reeled for a moment
as the helm went round in the new direction, but next minute had righted
herself, and was ploughing steadily on in her new course, leaving the
ignorant passengers below in total unconsciousness of anything that had
happened, except that momentary stagger and uncertainty which it was so
easy to account for. Mary was not cut down, either in her hospitalities
or charities—or at least, if she was, did not know it; but before a year
had elapsed, the expenditure in Fontanel house was smaller, and the
expenditure on Fontanel estate greater than it had ever been in the
memory of man. Mr Summerhayes was an enterprising and enlightened
landlord. He took up the Home Farm with such energy that every
tenant-farmer within twenty miles learned, or ought to have learned, the
salutary lesson; and he gave loans and bonuses upon improvement, such as
suggested to the unimproving sundry sarcasms as to the facility with
which men parted with other people’s money. If it had been his own,
instead of belonging to his wife and her children, it would have made a
difference, people said; but then it was only the unprogressive, whom Mr
Summerhayes decidedly snubbed and disapproved of, who made that
ill-natured remark. To tell the truth, however, when he set out upon
this active career, which was so unlike his former life, Mr Summerhayes
of Fontanel became much less popular in the county than the poor squire
at the manor had been in old days. Perhaps, in the change from poverty
to wealth, he carried things with too high a hand. Perhaps he failed to
recognise his own position as an interloper, and acted the master too
completely to please the popular fancy. At all events, nobody was
satisfied—not even his sisters in the old house, which they had all to
themselves; certainly not the little community in his present home,
which obeyed and feared and suspected him—perhaps not even his wife.
Mary had a woman’s usual experience before she married her second
husband and made this complication of affairs. She knew as a certainty,
what all the younger brides have to learn by hard personal training,
that the husband must be different from the lover; that the habits of
ordinary life will return after a while; and that the wife’s happiness
must be of a different kind, if she is happy at all, from that of the
bride, to whose pleasure, for the moment, everything defers by a tender
fallacy and sophism of nature. But somehow, in its own case, the heart
is always incredulous. To marry him had, after all, cost this soft woman
a great many natural pangs, and it was hard to find so soon all the
affectionate conferences and consultations, by means of which he had at
first won her, ceasing altogether, and to feel that the affairs which
she had managed so long were now in inexorable hands, and ruled by plans
which were only communicated to her when they were ready for execution,
if even then. Then poor Mary, who had always been looked on with
indulgent eyes, began to feel herself under a sterner regard, and to see
that her acts and words were judged solely on their own merits, and not
with any softening glamour of love, making everything beautiful because
it was she. It is impossible to describe how nervous and unsteady this
consciousness made her, and how much more ready she was to make
mistakes, from knowing that her mistakes would not be excused, or looked
upon affectionately as wisdom in disguise. Poor soul! he was very kind
to her at the same time; but his eye was on when she caressed her
children; his quick ear somehow caught the little secrets they whispered
to her in that sacred twilight hour in her dressing-room before dinner,
where Mr Summerhayes had now acquired the habit of coming in to talk
with his wife, and finding the children in the way. When they were all
sent off on such occasions, it was well for Loo that she generally
headed the retreat, before the new master lighted his wife’s candles,
and threw an intrusive glare into the sacred atmosphere. Loo was a
heroine, but she had a temper. But as for poor Mary, to see her
disappointed children trooping away, and to guess with quick instinct
the thoughts that were already rising in their little angry hearts, and
to lose that sweet moment in which her soul was _retrempé_ and made
strong, was very bitter even to her yielding temper and loving heart.
She could have cried but for fear of her husband; and many a time had
bitter drops in her eyes, which had to be crushed back somehow, and
re-absorbed into her breast, when those tell-tale candles flashed their
unwelcome light upon her. Yet, notwithstanding all this, she had no
right nor wish to call herself an unhappy wife. He _was_ very kind to
her—seemed as though he loved her, which makes up to a woman for a great
many things; but still a sense of having overturned the world somehow,
and disturbed the course of nature—of having introduced bewilderment and
confusion she could not tell how, and a false state of affairs—combined,
with a certain ache of disappointment, of wounded pride, and
unappreciated confidence, to make poor Mary’s musings weary and
troubled, and to plant thorns in her pillow.
Thus it happened that nobody was pleased with the change which had taken
place at Fontanel, except, perhaps, Mr Summerhayes himself, who seemed
sufficiently contented with all that he had done and was doing.
Certainly he devoted himself to the improvement of the estate. Such
crops had never been dreamt of in the county as those that began to be
usual upon the well-tilled acres of the Home Farm; and, when leases fell
in, the lumbering old tenants had no chance against the thriving
agriculturists whom the King-Consort brought in over their heads at
advancing rents, to the benefit of the rent-roll and the country, though
not without some individual misery at the same time to lessen the
advantage. Some old people emigrated, and got their death by it; some
hopeful farmer-families dispersed and were broken up, and found but a
checkered fortune awaiting them in the cold world, outside of those
familiar fields which they had believed themselves born to cultivate,
and almost thought their own; and Mrs Summerhayes had red eyes after
these occurrences, and took to headaches, which were most unusual to
her; but it was unquestionably the most enlightened policy—it was very
good for the land and the country and things in general; and, in
particular, there could not be any doubt it was good for the rent-roll
of Fontanel.