The morning rose, as they had said to each other, upon a new life.
How strange it is to realise, after the first blow has fallen, that this
changed life is still the same! When it brings with it external changes,
family convulsions, the alteration of external circumstances, although
these secondary things increase the calamity, they give it also a
certain natural atmosphere; they are in painful harmony with it. But
when the shock, the dreadful business of the moment, is all over, when
the funeral has gone away from the doors and the dead has been buried,
and everything goes on as before, this commonplace renewal is, perhaps,
the most terrible of all to the visionary soul. Minnie and Chatty got
out their work,--the coloured work, which they had thought out of
place during the first week. They went in the afternoon for a walk,
and gathered fresh flowers, as they returned, for the vases in the
drawing-room. When evening came they asked Theo if he would not read to
them. It was not a novel they were reading; it was a biography, of a
semi-religious character, in which there were a great many edifying
letters. They would not, of course, have thought of reading a novel at
such a time. Warrender had been wandering about all day, restless, not
knowing what to do with himself. He was not given to games of any kind,
but he thought to-day that he would have felt something of the sort
a relief, though he knew it would have shocked the household. In the
afternoon, on a chance suggestion of his mother's, he saw that it was
a sort of duty to walk over to Markland and ask how Lady Markland was.
Twelve miles--six there and six back again--is a long walk for a student.
He sent up his name, and asked whether he could be of any use, but he
did not receive encouragement. Lady Markland sent her thanks, and was
quite well ("she says," the old butler explained, with a shake of the
head, so that no one might believe he agreed in anything so unbecoming).
The Honourable John had been telegraphed for, her husband's uncle, and
everything was being done; so that there was no need to trouble Mr.
Warrender. He went back, scarcely solaced by his walk. He wanted to be
doing something. Not Plato; in the circumstances Plato did not answer at
all. When he opened his book his thoughts escaped from him, and went off
with a bound to matters entirely different. How was it possible that he
could give that undivided attention which divine philosophy requires,
the day after his father's funeral, the first day of his independent
life, the day after----! That extraordinary postscript to the agitations
of yesterday told, perhaps, most of all. When the girls asked him to
read to them, opening the book at the page where they had left off,
and preparing to tell him all that had gone before, so that he might
understand the story ("although there is very little story," Minnie
said, with satisfaction; "chiefly thoughts upon serious subjects"), he
jumped up from his chair in almost fierce rebellion against that sway of
the ordinary of which his mother had spoken. "You were right," he said
to her; "the common routine is the thing that outlasts everything. I
never thought of it before, but it is true."
Mrs. Warrender, though she had herself been quivering with the
long-concentrated impatience for which it seemed even now there could be
no outlet, was troubled by her son's outburst, and, afraid of what it
might come to, felt herself moved to take the other side. "It is very
true," she said, faltering a little, "but the common routine is often
best for everything, Theo. It is a kind of leading-string, which keeps
us going."
The girls looked up at Theo with alarm and wonder, but still they were
not shocked at what _he_ said. He was a man; he had come to the Warren
from those wild excitements of Oxford life, of which they had heard
with awe; they gazed at him, trying to understand him.
"I have always heard," said Minnie, "that reading aloud was the most
tranquillising thing people could do. If we had each a book it would
be unsociable; but when a book is read aloud, then we are all thinking
about the same thing, and it draws us together;" which was really the
most sensible judgment that could have been delivered, had the two
fantastic ones been in the mood to understand what was said.
Chatty did not say anything, but after she had threaded her needle
looked up with great attention to see how the fate of the evening was
to be decided. It was a great pleasure when some one would read aloud,
especially Theo, who thus became one of them, in a way which was not at
all usual; but perhaps she was less earnest about it this evening than
on ordinary occasions, for the biographical book was a little dull, and
the letters on serious subjects were dreadfully serious. No doubt, just
after papa's death, this was appropriate; but still it is well known
there are stories which are also serious, and could not do any one harm,
even at the gravest moments.
"There are times when leading-strings are insupportable," Theo said; "at
any time I don't know that I put much faith in them. We have much to
arrange and settle, mother, if you feel able for it."
"Mamma can't feel able yet," returned Minnie. "Oh, why should we make
any change? We are so happy as we are."
"I am quite able," said Mrs. Warrender. She had been schooling herself
to the endurance which still seemed to be expected of her, but the moment
an outlet seemed possible the light kindled in her eye. "I think with
Theo that it is far better to decide whatever has to be done at once."
Then she cried out suddenly, carried away by the unexpected unhoped-for
opportunity, "O children, we must get away from here! I cannot bear it
any longer. As though all our own trouble and sorrow were not enough,
this other--this other tragedy!" She put up her hands to her eyes, as
though to shut out the sight that pressed upon them. "I cannot get it
out of my mind. I suppose my nerves and everything are wrong; all night
long it seemed to be before me,--the blood on his forehead, the ghastly
white face, the labouring breath. Oh, not like your father, who was good
and old and peaceful, who was just taken away gently, led away,--but so
young and so unprepared! Oh, so unprepared! What could God do with him,
cut off in the midst of----"
Minnie got up hastily, with her smelling-salts, which always lay on the
table. "Go and get her a glass of water, Theo," she said
authoritatively.
Mrs. Warrender laughed. It was a little nervous, but it was a laugh. It
seemed to peal through the house, which still was a house of mourning,
and filled the girls with a horror beyond words. She put out her hands
to put their ministrations away. "I do not want water," she said, "nor
salts either. I am not going into hysterics. Sit down and listen to me.
I cannot remain here. It is your birthplace, but not mine. I am dying
for fresh air and the sight of the sun. If you are shocked, I cannot
help it. Theo, when you go back to Oxford I will go to--I don't know
where; to some place where there is more air; but here I cannot stay."
This statement was as a thunderbolt falling in the midst of them, and
the poor woman perceived this instinctively. Her son's impatience had
been the spark which set the smouldering fire in her alight, but even he
was astounded by the quick and sudden blaze which lit up the dull wonder
in his sisters' faces. And then he no longer thought of going to Oxford.
He wanted to remain to see if he could do anything,--perhaps to be of
use. A husband's uncle does not commend himself to one's mind as a very
devoted or useful ministrant, and even he would go away, of course; and
then a man who was nearer, who was a neighbour, who had already been so
mixed up with the tragedy,--that was what he had been thinking of; not
of Oxford, or his work.
"It is not worth while going back to Oxford," he said; "the term is
nearly over. One can read anywhere, at home as well as--I shall not go
back at present." He was not accustomed yet to so abrupt a declaration
of his sentiments, and for the moment he avoided his mother's eye.
Minnie went back to her seat, and put down the bottle of salts on the
table, with an indignant jar. "I am so glad that you feel so, Theo,
_too_."
Mrs. Warrender looked round upon her children with despairing eyes. They
were all _his_ children,--all Warrenders born; knowing as little about
her and her ways of thinking as if she had been a stranger to them. She
was indeed a stranger to them in the intimate sense. The exasperation
that had been in her mind for years could be repressed no longer. "If it
is so," she said, "I don't wish to interfere with your plans, Theo; but
I will go for--for a little change. I must have it. I am worn out."
"Oh, mamma, you will not surely go by yourself, without us! How could
you get on without us!" cried Chatty. She had perhaps, being the youngest,
a faint stir of a feeling in her mind that a little change might be
pleasant enough. But she took her mother at her word with this mild
protest, which made Mrs. Warrender's impatient cry into a statement of
fixed resolution: and the others said nothing. Warrender was silent,
because he was absorbed in the new thoughts that filled his mind;
Minnie, because, like Chatty, she felt quite apart from any such
extraordinary wishes, having nothing to do with it, and nothing to say.
"It will be very strange, certainly, for me to be alone,--very strange,"
Mrs. Warrender said, with a quiver in her voice. "It is so long since I
have done anything by myself; not since before you were all born. But if
it must be," she added, "I must just take courage as well as I can,
and--go by myself, as you say."
Once more there was no response. The girls did not know what to say.
Duty, they thought, meant staying at home and doing their crewel-work;
they were not capable of any other identification of it all at once. It
was very strange, but if mamma thought so, what could they do? She got
up with nervous haste, feeling now, since she had once broken bounds,
as though the flood of long-restrained feeling was beyond her control
altogether. The natural thing would have been to rush upstairs and pack
her things, and go off to the railway at once. That, perhaps, might not
be practicable; but neither was it practicable to sit quietly amid the
silence and surprise, and see her wild, sudden resolution accepted
dully, as if a woman could contemplate such a severance calmly. And yet
it was true that she must get fresh air or die. Life so long intolerable
could be borne no longer.
"I think in the meantime," she said, with a forced smile, "I shall go
upstairs."
"You were up very late last night," returned Theo, though rather by way
of giving a sort of sanction to her abrupt withdrawal than for any other
reason, as he rose to open the door.
"Yes, it was very late. I think I am out of sorts altogether. And if I
am to make my plans without any reference to the rest of the family----"
"Oh, that is absurd," he said. "Of course the girls must go with you, if
you are really going. But you must not be in a hurry, mother. There is
plenty of time; there is no hurry." He was thinking of the time that
must elapse before the doors of Markland would be open even to her who
had received Lord Markland into her house. Till then he did not want her
to go away. When she had left the room he turned upon his sisters and
slew them.
"What do you mean, you two? I wonder if you have got hearts of stone, to
hear the poor mother talk of going away for a little change, and to sit
there like wooden images, and never open your mouths!"
The girls opened their mouths wide at this unexpected reproach. "What
could we say? Mamma tells us all in a moment she wants to go away from
home! We have always been taught that a girl's place is at home."
"What do you call home?" he asked.
It was a brutal speech, he was aware. Brothers and sisters are permitted
to be brutal to each other without much harm done. Minnie had begun
calmly, with the usual, "Oh, Theo!" before the meaning of the question
struck her. She stopped suddenly, looked up at him, with eyes and lips
open, with an astonished stare of inquiry. Then, dull though she was,
growing red, repeated in a startled, awakened, interrogative tone, "Oh,
Theo!" with a little gasp as for breath.
"I don't mean to be disagreeable," he said. "I never should have been,
had not you begun. The mother has tried to make you understand half a
dozen times, but I suppose you did not want to understand. Don't you
know everything is changed since--since I was last at the Warren? Your
home is with my mother now, wherever she chooses to settle down."
It must be said for Warrender that he meant no harm whatever by this.
He meant, perhaps, to punish them a little for their heartlessness. He
meant them to see that their position was changed,--that they were not
as of old, in assured possession; and he reckoned upon that slowness
of apprehension which probably would altogether preserve them from
any painful consciousness. But it is astonishing how the mind and the
senses are quickened when it is ourselves who are in question. Minnie
was the leader of the two. She was the first to understand; and then it
communicated itself partly by magnetism to Chatty, who woke up much more
slowly, having caught as it were only an echo of what her brother said.
"You mean--that this is not our home any more," said Minnie. Her eyes
filled with sudden tears, and her face was flushed with the shock. She
had seldom looked so well, so thoroughly awakened and mistress of her
faculties. When she was roused she had more in her than was apparent on
the surface. "I did not think you would be the one to tell us that. Of
course we know that it is quite true. Chatty and I are older than you
are, but we are only daughters, and you are the boy. You have the power
to turn us out,--we all know that."
"Minnie!" cried Chatty, struck with terror, putting out a hand to stop
these terrible words,--words such as had never been said in her hearing
before.
"But we did not think you would have used it," the elder sister said
simply, and then was silent. He expected that she would end the scene by
rushing from the room in tears and wrath. But what she did was much more
embarrassing. She dried her tears hastily, took up her crewel-work, sat
still, and said no more. Chatty threw an indignant but yet at the same
time an inquiring glance at him. She had not heard or observed the
beginning of the fray, and did not feel quite sure what it was all
about.
"I am sure Theo would never do anything that was unkind," she remarked
mildly; then after a little pause, "Wouldn't it have been much better to
have had the reading? I have noticed that before: when one reads and the
others work, there is, as the rector says, a common interest, and we
have a nice evening; but when we begin talking instead--well, we think
differently, and we disagree, and one says more than one means to say,
and then--one is sorry afterwards," Chatty said, after another pause.
On the whole, it was the girls who had the best of it in this encounter.
It is impossible to say how much Theo was ashamed of himself when, after
Chatty's quite unaccustomed address, which surprised herself as much
as her brother and sister, and after an hour of silence, broken by an
occasional observation, the girls put aside their crewels again, and
remarked that it was time to go to bed. A sense of opposition and
that pride which prevents a man from being the first to retire from a
battle-field, even when the battle is a failure and the main armies
have never engaged, had kept him there during the evening, in spite of
himself. But when they left him master of the ground, there can be no
doubt that he felt much more like a defeated than a triumphant general.
This first consequence of the new _regime_ was not a beautiful or
desirable one. There were thus three parties in the house on the evening
of the first day of their changed existence: the mother, who was so
anxious to leave the scene of her past existence behind her; the girls,
who clung to their home; the brother, the master, who, half to show that
he took his mother's side, half out of instinctive assertion of himself,
had let them know roundly that their home was theirs no longer. He was
not proud of himself at all as he thought of what he had said; but yet
when he recalled it he was not perhaps so sorry for having said it as
he had been the minute after the words left his lips. It was better,
possibly, as the lawyer, as the mother, as everybody, had said, that the
true state of affairs should be fully understood from the first. The
house was theirs no longer. The old reign and all its traditions had
passed away; a new reign had begun. What that new reign might turn to,
who might share it, what wonderful developments it might take, who could
tell?
His imagination here went away with a leap into realms of sheer
romance. He seemed to see the old house transformed, the free air,
the sweet sunshine pouring in, the homely rooms made beautiful, the
inhabitants---- What was he thinking of? Did ever imagination go so fast
or so far? He stopped himself, with vague smiles stealing to his lips.
All that enchanted ground was so new to him that he had no control over
his fancy, but went to the utmost length with a leap of bewildering
pleasure and daring almost like a child. Yet mingled with this were
various elements which were not lovely. He was not, so far as had been
previously apparent, selfish beyond the natural liking for his own
comfort and his own way, which is almost universal. He had never wished
to cut himself off from his family, or to please himself at their
expense. But something had come into his mind which is nearer than the
nearest,--something which, with a new and uncomprehended fire, hardens
the heart on one side while melting it on the other, and brings
tenderness undreamed of and cruelty impossible to be believed, from the
same source. He felt the conflict of these powers within him when he was
left alone in the badly furnished, badly lighted drawing-room, which
seemed to reproach him for the retirement of those well-known figures
which had filled it with tranquil dulness for so many years, and never
wished it different. With something of the same feeling towards the
inanimate things about him which he had expressed to his sisters, he
walked up and down the room. It too would have to change, like them, to
acknowledge that he was master, to be moulded to new requirements. He
felt as if the poor old ugly furniture, the hard curtains that hung like
pieces of painted wood, the dingy pictures on the walls, contemplated
him with pain and disapproval. They were easier to deal with than the
human furniture; but he had been accustomed to them all his life, and it
was not without a sense of impiety that the young iconoclast contemplated
these grim household gods, harmless victims of that future which as
yet was but an audacious dream. He was standing in front of the great
chiffonnier, with its marble top and plate-glass back, looking with
daring derision at its ugliness, when old Joseph came in at his usual
hour--the hour at which he had fulfilled the same duty for the last
twenty years--to put out the lamps. Warrender could horrify the girls and
insult the poor old familiar furniture, but he was not yet sufficiently
advanced to defy Joseph. He turned round, with a blush and quick movement
of shame, as if he had been found out, at the appearance of the old man
with his candle in his hand, and murmuring something about work, hurried
off to the library, with a fear that even that refuge might perhaps be
closed upon him. Joseph remained master of the situation. He followed
Warrender to the door with his eyes, with a slight contemptuous shrug of
his shoulders, as at an unaccountable being whose "ways" were scarcely
important enough to be taken into account, and trotted about, putting
out one lamp after another, and the twinkling candles on the mantelpiece,
and the little lights in the hall and corridor. It was an office Joseph
liked. He stood for a moment at the foot of the back stairs looking with
complacency upon the darkness, his candle lighting up his little old wry
face. But when his eye caught the line of light under the library door,
Joseph shook his head. He had put the house to bed without disturbance
for so long: he could not abide, he said to himself, this introduction
of new ways.