It will be divined from what has been said that there was one element in
the life at the Warren which has not yet been entered into, and that was
Mrs. Warrender. The family were dull, respectable, and proper to their
fingers' ends. But she was not dull. She had been Mr. Warrender's wife
for six-and-twenty years,--the wife of a dull, good man, who never wanted
any variety in his life, who needed no change, no outbursts of laughter
or tears, nothing to carry away the superabundance of the waters of life.
With him there had been no superabundance, there had never been any
floods; consequently there was no outlet necessary to carry them away.
But she was a woman of another sort: she was born to hunger for variety,
to want change, to desire everything that was sweet and pleasant. And
lo! fate bound her to the dullest life,--to marry Mr. Warrender, to live
in the Warren. She had not felt it so much in the earlier part of her
life, for then she had to some extent what her spirit craved. She had
children: and every such event in a woman's life is like what going
into battle is to a man,--a thing for which all his spirits collect
themselves, which she may come out of or may not, an enormous risk, a
great crisis. And when the children were young, before they had as yet
betrayed themselves what manner of spirits they were, she had her share
of the laughter and the tears; playing with her babies, living for them,
singing to them, filling her life with them, and expecting as they grew
up that all would be well. Many women live upon this hope. They have not
had the completion of life in marriage which some have; they have failed
in the great lottery, either by their own fault or the fault of others:
but the children, they say to themselves, will make all right. The
_desillusionment_ which takes this form is the most bitter of all.
The woman who has not found in her husband that dearest friend, whose
companionship can alone make life happy, when she discovers after a
while that the children in whom she has placed her last hope are his
children, and not hers,--what is to become of her? She is thrown back
upon her own individuality with a shock which is often more than flesh
and blood can bear. In Mrs. Warrender's case this was not, as in some
cases, a tragical discovery, but it had an exasperating and oppressive
character which was almost more terrible. She had been able to breathe
while they were children; but when they grew up they stifled her, each
with the same "host of petty maxims" which had darkened the still air
from her husband's lips. How, in face of the fact that she had been their
teacher and guide far more than their father ever was, they should have
learned these, and put aside everything that was like her or expressed
her sentiments, was a mystery which she never could solve; but so it
was. Mr. Warrender was what is called a very good father. He did not
spoil them; bonbons of any kind, physical or spiritual, never came to
them from his hands. He could not be troubled with them much as babies,
but when they grew old enough to walk and ride with him he liked their
company; and they resembled him, which is always flattering. But he had
taken very little notice of them during the first twelve years or so of
their life. During that time they had been entirely in their mother's
hands, hearing her opinions, regulated outwardly by her will: and yet
they grew up their father's children, and not hers! How strange it
was, with a touch of the comic which made her laugh!--that laugh of
exasperation and impatience which marks the intolerable almost more than
tears do. How was it? Can any one explain this mystery? She was of a
much more vivacious, robust, and vigorous race than he was, for the
level of health among the Warrenders, like the level of being generally,
was low; but this lively, warm-blooded, energetic creature was swallowed
up in the dull current of the family life, and did not affect it at
all. She nursed them, ruled them, breathed her life into them, in vain:
they were their father's children,--they were Warrenders born.
This was not precisely the case with Theo, her only son. To him she
had transmitted something; not her energy and love of life, but rather
something of that exasperated impatience which was so often the temper
of her mind in later years, though suppressed by all the powers of
self-control she possessed, and modified, happily, by the versatility
of her nature, which could not brood and mope over one subject, however
deeply that might enter into her life. This impatience took in him the
form of a fastidious intolerance, a disposition to start aside at a touch,
to put up with nothing, to hear no reason even, when he was offended or
crossed. He was like a restive horse, whom the mere movement of a shadow,
much more the touch of a rein or the faintest vibration of a whip, sets
off in the wildest gallop of nervous self-will or self-assertion. The
horse, it is to be supposed, desires his own way as much as the man does
when he bolts or starts. Theo was in this respect wonderfully unlike the
strain of the Warrenders, but he was not on that account more like his
mother; and he had so much of the calm of the paternal blood in his
veins along with this unmanageableness that he was as contented as the
rest with the quiet of the home life, and so long as he was permitted to
shut himself up with his book wished for no distraction,--nay, disliked
it, and thought society and amusements an intolerable bore.
Thus it was the mother alone to whom the thought of change was pleasant.
A woman of forty-five in widow's weeds, who had just nursed her husband
through a long illness and lost him, and whose life since she was nineteen
had been spent in this quiet house among all these still surroundings,
amid the unchangeable traditions of rural life,--who could have ventured
to imagine the devouring impatience that was within her, the desire to
flee, to shake the dust off her feet, to leave her home and all her
associations, to get out into the world and breathe a larger air and be
free? Sons and daughters may entertain such sentiments; even the girls,
whose life, no doubt, had been a dull one, might be supposed willing
enough, with a faint pretence of natural and traditionary reluctance,
and those few natural tears which are wiped so soon, to leave home and
see the world. But the mother! In ordinary circumstances it would
have been the duty of the historian to set forth the hardness of Mrs.
Warrender's case, deprived at once, by her husband's death, not only of
her companion and protector, but of her home and position as head of an
important house. Such a case is no doubt often a hard one. It adds a
hundred little humiliations to grief, and makes bereavement downfall,
the overthrow of a woman's importance in the world, and her exile from
the sphere in which she has spent her life. We should be far more sure
of the reader's sympathy if we pictured her visiting for the last time
all the familiar haunts of past years, tearing herself away from the
beloved rooms, feeling the world a blank before her as she turned away.
On the contrary, it is scarcely possible to describe the chill of
disappointment in her mind when Theo put an abrupt stop to all
speculations, and offered her his arm to lead her upstairs. She ought,
perhaps, to have wanted his support to go upstairs, after all, as
her maid said, that she had "gone through": but she did not feel the
necessity. She would have preferred much to know what was going to be
done, to talk over everything, to be able to express without further
sense that they were premature and inappropriate, as much as it would be
expedient to express of her own wishes. The absolute repression of those
five dark days, during which she had said nothing, had been almost more
intolerable to her than years of the repression which was past. When you
know that nothing you can do or say is of any use, and that whatsoever
struggle you may make will be wholly ineffectual to change your lot,
it is comparatively easy, in the composure of impossibility, to keep
yourself down; but when all at once you become again master of your own
fate, even a temporary curb becomes intolerable. Mrs. Warrender went
into her room by the compulsion of her son and conventional propriety,
and was supposed to lie down on the sofa and rest for an hour or two.
Her maid arranged the cushions for her, threw a shawl over her feet,
and left her on tip-toe, shutting the door with elaborate precautions.
Mrs. Warrender remained still for nearly half an hour. She wept, with
a strange mixture of feelings; partly out of a poignant sense of the
fictitiousness of all these observances by which people were supposed to
show "respect" to the dead, and partly out of a real aching of the heart
and miserable sense that even now, that certainly by and by, the man who
had been so all-important a little while ago would be as if he had not
been. She wept for him, and yet at the same time wept because she could
not weep more for him, because the place which knew him had already begun
to know him no more, and because of the sham affliction with which they
were all supplementing the true. It was she who shed the truest tears,
but it was she also who rebelled most at the make-believe which convention
forced upon her; and the usual sense of hopeless exasperation was strong
in her mind. After a while she threw off the shawl from her feet and the
cushions that supported her shoulders, and got up and walked about the
room, looking out upon the afternoon sunshine and the trees that were
turning their shadows to the east. How she longed, with a fervour scarcely
explainable, not at all comprehensible to most people, to leave the
place, to open her wings in a large atmosphere, to get free!
At half-past four o'clock Minnie and Chatty went down to tea. They were
to the minute, and their mother heard them with a half smile. It was
always time enough for her to smooth her hair and her collar, and take a
new handkerchief from her drawer, when she heard the sisters close their
door. She went downstairs after them, in her gown covered with crape,
with her snowy cap, which gave dignity to her appearance. Her widow's
dress was very becoming to her, as it is to so many people. She had a
pretty complexion, pure red and white, though the colour was perhaps a
little broken, and not so smooth as a girl's; and her eyes were brown
and bright. Notwithstanding the weeks of watching she had gone through,
the strain of everything that had passed, she made little show of her
trouble. Her eye was not dim, nor her natural force abated. The girls
were dull in complexion and aspect, but their mother was not so. As she
came into the room there came with her a brightness, a sense of living,
which was inappropriate to the hour and the place.
"Where is Theo?" she asked.
"He is coming in presently; at least, I called to him as he went out,
and told him tea was ready, and he said he would be in presently,"
Chatty replied.
"I wish he would have stayed, if it had even been in the grounds,
to-day," said Minnie. "It will look so strange to see him walking about
as if nothing had happened."
"He has been very good; he has conformed to all our little rules," said
the mother, with a sigh.
"Little rules, mamma? Don't you think it of importance, then, that every
respect----"
"My dear," said Mrs. Warrender, "I am tired of hearing of every respect.
Theo was always respectful and affectionate. I would not misconstrue him
even if it should prove that he has taken a walk."
"On the day of dear papa's funeral!" cried Minnie, with a voice unmoved.
Mrs. Warrender turned away without any reply; partly because the tears
sprang into her eyes at the matter-of-fact statement, and partly because
her patience was exhausted.
"Have you settled, mamma, what he is going to do?" said Chatty.
"It is not for me to decide. He is twenty-one; he is his own master. You
have not," Mrs. Warrender said, "taken time to think yet of the change
in our circumstances. Theo is now master here. Everything is his to do
as he pleases."
"Everything!" said the girls in chorus, opening their eyes.
"I mean, of course, everything but what is yours and what is mine. You
know your father's will. He has been very just, very kind, as he always
was." She paused a little, and then went on: "But your brother, as you
know, is now the master here. We must understand what his wishes are
before we can settle on anything."
"Why shouldn't we go on as we always have done?" said Minnie. "Theo is
too young to marry; besides, it would not be decent for a time, even if
he wanted to, which I am sure he does not. I don't see why he should
make any change. There is nowhere we can be so well as at home."
"Oh, nowhere!" said Chatty.
Their mother sat and looked at them, with a dull throb in her heart.
They had sentiment and right on their side, and nature too. Everybody
would agree that for a bereaved family there was no place so good as
home,--the house in which they were born and where they had lived all
their life. She looked at them blankly, feeling how unnatural, how
almost wicked, was the longing in her own mind to get away, to escape
into some place where she could take large breaths and feel a wide sky
over her. But how was she to say it, how even to conclude what she had
been saying, feeling how inharmonious it was with everything around?
"Still," she said meekly, "I am of Mr. Longstaffe's opinion that
everything should be fully understood between us from the first. If we
all went on just the same, it might be very painful to Theo, when the
time came for him to marry (not now; of course there is no question of
that now), to feel that he could not do so without turning his mother
and sisters out-of-doors."
"Why should he marry, so long as he has us? It is not as if he had
nobody, and wanted some one to make him a home. What would he do with
the house if we were to leave it? Would he let it? I don't believe he
could let it. It would set everybody talking. Why should he turn his
mother and sisters out-of-doors? Oh, I never thought of anything so
dreadful!" cried Minnie and Chatty, one uttering one exclamation, and
another the other. They were very literal, and in the minds of both
the grievance was at once taken for granted. "Oh, I never could have
thought such a thing of Theo,--our own brother, and younger than we
are!"
The mother had made two or three ineffectual attempts to stem the tide
of indignation. "Theo is thinking of nothing of the kind," she said at
last, when they were out of breath. "I only say that he must not feel he
has but that alternative when the time comes, when he may wish--when it
may be expedient----No, no, he has never thought of such a thing. I only
say it for the sake of the future, to forestall after-complications."
"Oh, I wish you wouldn't frighten one, mamma! I thought you had heard
about some girl he had picked up at Oxford, or something. I thought we
should have to turn out, to leave the Warren--which would break my
heart."
"And mine too,--and mine too!" cried Chatty.
"Where we have always been so happy, with nothing to disturb us!"
"Oh, so happy! always the same, one day after another! It will be
different," said the younger sister, crying a little, "now that dear
papa---- But still no place ever can be like home."
And there was the guilty woman sitting by, listening to everything they
said; feeling how good, how natural, it was,--and still more natural,
still more seemly, for her, at her age, than for them at theirs,--yet
conscious that this house was a prison to her, and that of all things
in the world that which she wanted most was to be turned out and driven
away!
"My dears," she said, not daring to betray this feeling, "if I have
frightened you, I did not mean to do it. The house in Highcombe, you
know, is mine. It will be our home if--if anything should happen. I
thought it might be wise to have that ready, to make it our headquarters,
in case--in case Theo should carry out the improvements."
"Improvements!" they cried with one voice. "What improvements? How could
the Warren be improved?"
"You must not speak to me in such a tone. There has always been a
question of cutting down some of the trees."
"But papa would never agree to it; papa said he would never consent to
it."
"I think," said Mrs. Warrender, with a guilty blush, "that he--had begun
to change his mind."
"Only when he was growing weak, then,--only when you over-persuaded
him."
"Minnie! I see that your brother was right, and that this is not a time
for any discussion," Mrs. Warrender said.
There was again a silence: and they all came back to the original state
of mind from which they started, and remembered that quiet and subdued
tones and an incapacity for the consideration of secular subjects were
the proper mental attitude for all that remained of this day.
It was not, however, long that this becoming condition lasted. Sounds
were heard as of voices in the distance, and then some one running at
full speed across the gravel drive in front of the door, and through the
hall. Minnie had risen up in horror to stop this interruption, when the
door burst open, and Theo, pale and excited, rushed in. "Mother," he
cried, "there has been a dreadful accident. Markland has been thrown by
those wild brutes of his, and I don't know what has happened to him. It
was just at the gates, and they are bringing him here. There is no help
for it. Where can they take him to?"
Mrs. Warrender rose to her feet at once; her heart rising too almost
with pleasure to the thrill of a new event. She hurried out to open the
door of a large vacant room on the ground floor. "What was Lord Markland
doing here?" she said. "He ought to have reached home long ago."
"He has been in _that_ house in the village, mother. They seemed to
think everybody would understand. I don't know what he has to do there."
"He has nothing to do there. Oh, Theo, that poor young wife of his! And
had he the heart to go from--from--us, in our trouble--there!"
"He seems to have paid for it, whatever was wrong in it. Go back to the
drawing-room, for here they are coming."
"Theo, they are carrying him as if he were----"
"Go back to the drawing-room, mother. Whatever it is, it cannot be
helped," Theodore said. He did not mean it, but there was something in
his tone which reminded everybody--the servants, who naturally came
rushing to see what was the matter, and Mrs. Warrender, who withdrew at
his bidding--that he was now the master of the house.