I will not attempt to follow in detail the course of that autumn. It was
a fine season, and Mrs. Kingsward was taken to her home in the country
and recovered much of her lost health in the serene ending of the month
and the bright days of October, which was a model October--everything
that month ought to be. The trees had scarcely begun to take any
autumnal colouring upon them when they reached Kingswarden--a house
which stood among the Surrey hills; an old house placed not as modern
houses are, pitched upon hillsides, or at points where there is “a
view.” The old Kingswards had been moved by no such ridiculous modern
sentiments. They had planted their mansion in a sheltered spot, where it
would be safe from the winds that range over the country and all the
moorland heights. The gates opened upon a wild country road with an
extravagant breadth of green pathway and grassy bank on either
side--enough to have made a farmer swear, but very pleasant to the eye
and delightful to a horse’s feet, as well as to the pedestrians, whether
they were tramps or tourists, who walked or rode on bicycles--the latter
class only--from London to Portsmouth. The house was old, red, and
straggling, covered with multitudes of creepers. Sheets of purple
clematis--the Jackmanni, if anybody wishes to know; intolerable name for
such a royal garment of blossom--covered half-a-dozen corners, hanging
down in great brilliant wreaths over old ivy and straggling Virginia
creeper and the strong stalks of the climbing roses, which still bore
here and there a flower. Other sheets of other flowers threw themselves
about in other places as if at their own sweet will, especially the wild
exuberance of the Traveller’s Joy; though I need not say that this
wildness was under the careful eye of the gardener, who would not let it
go too far. I cannot attempt to tell how many other pleasant and
fragrant and flowery things there were which insisted on growing in that
luxurious place, even to the fastidious Highland creeper, which in that
autumn season was the most gay, luxuriant, and delightful of all. The
flowers abounded like the children, not to be checked, as healthy and as
brilliant, in the fine, peaty soil and pure air. The scent of the
mignonette, which in this late season straggled anywhere, seemed to fill
half the country round. The borders were crowned with those autumn
flowers which make up as well as they can for their want of sweetness by
lavish wealth of colour--the glowing single dahlias, which this
generation has had the good sense to re-capture from Nature after the
quilled and rosetted artificial things which the gardeners had
manufactured out of them, and the fine scarlet and blue of the salvias,
and the glory of all those golden tribes of the daisy kind that now make
our borders bright, instead of the old sturdy red geranium, which once
sufficed for all the supplies of autumn, an honest servant but a poor
lord. I prefer the sweetness of the Spring, when every flower has a soul
in it, and breathes it all about in the air, that is full of hope. But
as it cannot always be Spring, that triumph of bright hues is something
to mask the face of winter with until the time when the tortured and
fantastic chrysanthemum reigns alone.
This was the sort of garden they had at Kingswarden; not shut off in a
place by itself, but bordering all the lawns, which were of the velvet
it takes centuries to perfect. The immediate grounds sloped a little to
the south, and beyond them was a very extensive, if somewhat flat,
prospect, ending on the horizon in certain mild blue shadows which were
believed to be hills. There was not much that could be called a park at
Kingswarden. The few farms which Colonel Kingsward possessed pressed his
little circle of trees rather close; but as long as the farms were let
the family felt they could bear this. It gave them a comfortable feeling
of modest natural wealth and company; the yeomen keeping the squire
warm, they in their farmsteadings, he in the hall.
And the autumn went on in its natural course, gaining colour as it began
to lose its greenness and the days their warmth. The fruit got all
gathered in after the corn, the apple trees that had been such a sight,
every bough bent down with its balls of russet or gold, looked shabby
and worn, their season done, the hedges ran over with their harvest,
every kind of wild berry and feathery seedpod, wild elderberries, hips
and haws, the dangerous unwholesome fruit of the nightshade, the
triumphant wreaths of bryony of every colour, green, crimson, and
purple. The robins began to appear about Kingswarden, hopping about the
lawns, and coming very near the dining-room windows after breakfast,
when the little tribe of the nursery children had their accustomed
half-hour with mamma, and delighted in nothing so much as to crumble the
bread upon the terrace and tempt the redbreasts nearer and nearer. When,
quite satisfied and comforted about his wife’s looks, Colonel Kingsward
went off to the shooting, this little flock of children trailed after
mamma wherever she went, a little blooming troop. By this time Charlie
had gone back to Oxford, and the little ones liked to have the run of
the lawns outside and the sitting rooms within, with nothing more
alarming than Betty to keep them in order. It is to be feared that the
relaxation of discipline which occurred when papa was absent was
delightful to all those little people, and neither was Mrs. Kingsward
sorry now and then to feel herself at full ease--with no necessity
anywhere of further restraint than her own softened perceptions of
family decorum required. It was a moment in which, if that could be
said, she was self-indulgent--sometimes not getting up at her usual
hour, but taking her breakfast in her room, with clusters of little boys
and girls all over her bed, and over the carpet, sharing every morsel,
climbing over her in their play. And when she went out to drive she had
the carriage full of them; and when she took her stroll about the
grounds they were all about, shouting and racing, nobody suggesting that
it would be “too much for her,” or sending them off because they
disturbed mamma. She was disturbed to her heart’s content while the
Colonel was away. She said, “You know this is very nice for a time, but
it would not do always,” to her elder daughter: but I think that she saw
no necessity, except in the return of her husband, why it should not
do, and she enjoyed herself singing to them, dancing (a very little)
with them, playing for them as only the mother of a large family ever
can play, that simple dance music which is punctuated and kept in
perfect time by her heart as much as by her ear. For myself, I know the
very touch upon the piano of a woman who is the orchestra of the
children, who makes their little feet twinkle to the music. There is no
band equal to it for harmony, and precision, and go. They enjoyed the
freedom of having no one to say, “Hush, don’t make such a noise in the
house,” of the absence of all the disturbable people, “the gentlemen,”
as the servants plainly said, “being away” more, Mrs. Kingsward
sometimes thought, with a faint twinge of conscience, than it was right
they should enjoy anything in the absence of papa. Charlie was quite as
bad as papa, and declared that they made his head ache, and that no
fellow could work with such a row going on; it made the little carnival
all the more joyous that he was out of the way.
Bee had spent the six weeks since their return in a sort of splendour of
girlish superiority and elation, of which her mother had not been
unobservant, though nothing had been said between them. I am not sure
that Bee did not enjoy the situation more than if Aubrey had been at
Kingswarden wooing her all day long, playing tennis with her, riding
with her--in every way appearing as her accepted lover. Circumstances
had saved her from this mere vulgarity of beatitude, and she felt that
in the very uncertainty of their correspondence, which was
private--almost secret, and yet not clandestine--there was a wonderful
charm, a romance and tinge of the unhappy and desperate, while yet
everything within herself was happy and triumphant. It had never been
said, neither by the Colonel nor by his wife (who had said nothing at
all), that Bee was not to write letters to Aubrey nor to receive letters
from him. I cannot imagine how Colonel Kingsward, in bidding her
understand that all was over between Aubrey and herself, did not make a
condition of this. But probably he thought her too young and simple to
maintain any such correspondence, and her lover too little determined,
too persuadeable, to begin it. When Bee had received her lover’s first
letter it had been under her father’s very eyes. It had come at
breakfast between two girl-epistles, and Colonel Kingsward would not
have been guilty of the pettiness of looking at his daughter’s
correspondence for any inducement yet before him. She had the tremendous
thrill and excitement of reading it in his very sight, which she did not
hesitate to do, for the sake of the bravado, feeling her ears tingle and
the blood coursing in her veins, never imagining that he would not
observe, and setting her young slight strength like a rock in momentary
expectation of a question on the subject. But no question came. Colonel
Kingsward was looking at the papers, and at the few letters which came
to him at his house. The greater part of his correspondence went to the
office. He took it very quietly, and he never remarked Bee at all, which
was little less than a miracle, she thought. And it was very well for
her that this was one of the mornings on which mamma did not come
downstairs.
This immense excitement was a little too strong for ordinary use, and
Bee so arranged it afterwards that her letters came by a later post,
when she could read them by herself in her room. The servants knew
perfectly well of this arrangement--the butler who opened the post bag
at Kingswarden, and the maid who carried Miss Bee’s letters
upstairs--but neither father nor mother thought of it. That is, I will
not answer for Mrs. Kingsward. She perhaps had her suspicions; but, if
her husband did not forbid correspondence, she said to herself that it
was not her business to do so. It seemed to her that nothing else could
keep Bee so bright. Her disappointment, the shock of the severance, must
have affected her otherwise than appeared if she had not been buoyed up
by some such expedient. As for the Colonel, he thought nothing about it.
He thought that, as for love, properly so called, the thing was
preposterous for a girl of her years, and that the foolish business had
been all made up of imaginative novelty, and the charm of the position,
which had flattered and dazzled the girl. Now that she had returned to
all her old associations and occupations, the pretty bubble had floated
away into the air. It had not been necessary even to burst it--it had
dispersed of itself, as he said to himself he always knew it would. Thus
he deceived himself with the easiest mind and did not interfere.
Mrs. Kingsward had come upon her daughter seated out on the lawn under
the great walnut tree, reading one of these letters, one morning when
she had gone out earlier than usual, on an exceptionally fine day. Bee
had thrust it away hastily into her pocket and came forward with burning
cheeks when she heard her mother’s voice--but it was not till some time
later that Mrs. Kingsward spoke. The day had kept up its morning
promise. It was one of those warm days that sometimes come in October,
breathing the very spirit of that contented season, when all things have
come to fruition and the work of the year is done, and its produce
garnered into the barns. Now we may sit and rest, is the sentiment of
the much toiling earth--all the labour being over, the harvest done,
and no immediate need yet to rise again and plough. The world hangs
softly swaying in space, the fields are fallow, the labourer rests. The
sunshine lay warm upon the velvet grass, the foliage, thinned by one
good blast a week ago, gave just shade enough, not too much; the
tea-table was set out upon the lawn--the little horde had gone off
shouting and skirmishing through the grounds, Betty at the head of them,
supposed captain and controller, virtually ringleader, which comes to
much the same thing. The air so hushed and silent in itself, half drowsy
with profound peace, was just touched and made musical by their shouts,
and Bee and her mother, with this triumphant sound of a multitude close
by, were alone.
“Bee,” Mrs. Kingsward said, “I have long wanted an opportunity to speak
to you.”
“Yes, mamma,” she said, looking up with a rush of blood to her heart,
feeling that the moment had come. But she would not have been Bee if she
had not put a little something of her own into the thick of the crisis.
“There were plenty of opportunities--we have been together all day.”
“You know what I mean,” said Mrs. Kingsward. “Bee, I saw you reading a
letter this morning.”
“Yes, mamma.”
“Who was it from?”
Bee looked her mother in the face. “I have never made any secret of it,”
she said. “I have read them openly before papa--I never would pretend
they were anything different. Of course it was from Aubrey, mamma.”
“Oh, Bee!” said her mother. “You have never told me what your father
said to you that morning. He told me that it was all over and done
with--that he would never listen to another word on the subject.”
“That was what he told me.”
“Oh, Bee, Bee! and yet----”
“Stop a moment, mamma! He never said I was not to write; he never said
there was to be no correspondence. Had he said so, I should have, at
least, considered what it was best to do.”
“Considered what was best! But you were not the judge. I hope you would
have obeyed your father, Bee.”
“I cannot say, mamma. You must remember that it is my case and not his.
I don’t know what I should have done. But it was not necessary, for he
said nothing about it.”
“Bee, my dear child, he may have said nothing; but you know very well
that when he said it was entirely broken off he meant what he said.”
“Papa is very capable of saying what he means,” said Bee. “I did not
think it was any business of mine to inquire what might be his secret
meaning. Mamma, dear, don’t be vexed; but, oh, that would have been too
hard! And for Aubrey, too.”
“I think much less of Aubrey that he should carry on a clandestine
correspondence with a girl like you.”
“Clandestine!” cried Bee, with blazing eyes. “No more clandestine than
your letters that come by the post with your own name upon them. If
Aubrey did not scorn anything that is clandestine, I should. There is
nothing like that between him and me.”
“I never supposed you would be guilty of any artifice, Bee; but you are
going completely against your father--making a fool of him,
indeed--making it all ridiculous--when you carry on a correspondence, as
if you were engaged, after he has broken everything off.”
“I am engaged,” said Bee, very low.
“What do you say? Bee, this is out of the question. I shall have to tell
your father when he comes back. “Oh! child, child, how you turn this
delightful time into trouble. I shall be obliged to tell your father
when he comes back.”
“Perhaps it will be your duty, mamma,” said Bee, the colour going out of
her face; “and then I shall have to consider what is mine,” she said.
“Oh, Bee, Bee! Oh! how hard you make it for me. Oh! how I wish you had
never seen him, nor heard of him,” Mrs. Kingsward cried.