The moment, however, was approaching when Warrender had to declare for
himself what he intended to do. It is true that he had given indications
of previous intention which had put his family on their guard. He had
said to Cavendish and to others that it was doubtful whether he would
return to Oxford,--words which had made the ladies look at each other,
which had drawn a sharp exclamation from Minnie, but which even she had
consented to say nothing of until his resolution was more evident. It
might be but a caprice of the moment, one of the hasty expressions which
Theo was not unaccustomed to launch at his little audience, making them
stare and exclaim, but which were never meant to come to anything. Most
likely this was the case now. And the preparations went on as usual
without anything further said. Mrs. Warrender had curbed her own
impatience; she had yielded to his wishes and remained at the Warren,
with a sympathy for his sudden fascination and for the object of it
which no one else shared; but she looked not without longing for the
time when he should return to his studies,--when there should no longer
be any duty to keep her to the Warren, nothing to make self-denial
necessary. The thought of the free air outside this little green island
of retreat almost intoxicated her by times, as the autumn days stole on,
and October came red and glowing, with sharp winds but golden sunsets
which tinged the woods. By this time, Chatty, too, began to have
sensations unusual to her,--such as must thrill through the boat upon
the shore, when the little waves run up and kiss its sides, wooing it to
the water, for which it was made. Chatty had been almost as much a piece
of still life as the boat: but the baptism of the spray had been flung
in her face, and dreams of triumphant winds and dazzling waves outside
had crept into her cave. Minnie was conscious of no longings, but she
knew that it was time to prepare Theo's linen, to see that everything
was marked, so that he might have a chance at least of getting his things
back from the wash. And Chatty had knitted him half a dozen pairs of
silk socks,--some in stripes of black and white, some violet, like a
cardinal's,--suitable for his mourning. No one, however, mentioned the
subject until the beginning of October, when, as they sat at luncheon
one day, it was suddenly introduced by Miss Warrender without timidity,
or recollection that there was any doubt about it. "When does term
begin, Theo?" his sister asked, in the midst of the usual conversation.
The other ladies, who were more quick to sympathise with his feelings,
held their breath; but Minnie put her question quite simply, as if she
expected him (as she did) to say "the 15th" or "the 17th," as the case
might be.
Theo paused a moment, and cast a glance round them all. Then he answered
in a voice which seemed louder than usual because it was somewhat defiant.
"I don't know," he said slowly; "and if you want the truth, I don't
care."
"Theo!" cried Minnie, with a little scream. Chatty, who had been
contemplating at her ease, when this conversation began, the bubbles
rising in a glass of aerated water which she was holding up to the
light, set it down very quickly, and gave him an appealing look across
the table. Mrs. Warrender looked at him too, pretending, poor lady, not
to understand. "But, my dear," she said, "we must get everything ready;
so it is very necessary to know."
"There is nothing to be got ready, so far as I am aware," he replied,
with a flush on his face, and the look of a man who is making a stand
against his opponents. "I am not going up this term, if that is what you
mean."
Then all three looked at him with different degrees of remonstrance,
protest, or appeal. Mrs. Warrender was much too sensible of her incapacity
to prevail against him to risk any controversy. And even Minnie was so
confounded by the certainty of his tone that, except another resounding
"Theo!" the tone of which was enough to have made any man pause in an
evil career, she too, for the moment, found nothing to say.
"My dear, don't you think that's a great pity?" his mother remarked very
mildly, but with a countenance which said much more.
"I don't wish to discuss the question," he said. "I thought I had told
you before. I don't mean to be disagreeable, mother; but don't you think
that in my own case I should know best?"
"Theo!" cried Minnie for the third time, "you are more than disagreeable;
you are ridiculous. How should you know best,--a boy like you? You think
you can do what you like because poor papa is dead, and we are nothing
but women. Oh, it is very ungenerous and undutiful to my mother, but it
is ridiculous too."
"My mother can speak for herself," said the young man. "I don't owe any
explanations to you."
"You will have to give explanations to every one, whether you owe them
or not!" cried Minnie. "I know what people think and what they say.
There is always supposed to be some reason for it when a young man
doesn't go back to his college. They think he has got into disgrace;
they think it is some bad scrape. We shall have to make up excuses and
explanations."
"They may think what they please, so far as I am concerned," he replied.
"But, my dear, she is right, though that does not matter very much," said
Mrs. Warrender. "There will be a great many inquiries; and explanations
will have to be given. That is not the most important, Theo. Didn't you
tell me that if you lost this term you could not go in, as you call it,
for honours? I thought you had told me so."
"Honours!" he said contemptuously. "What do honours mean? I found out
the folly of that years ago. They are a sort of trade-mark, very good
for business purposes. Brunson has sense on his side when he goes in
for honours. They are good for the college to keep up its reputation as
a teaching machine; and they are good for a schoolmaster in the same
way. But what advantage would all the honours of the University be to
me?" he added, with a laugh of scorn. "There's an agricultural college
somewhere. There would be some meaning in it if I took honours there."
"You have a strange idea of your own position, Theo," said Mrs.
Warrender, roused to indignation. "You are not a farmer, but a country
gentleman."
"Of the very smallest," he said,--"a little squire. If I were a good
farmer and knew my trade, I should be more good."
"A country gentleman," cried Minnie, who had kept silence with difficulty,
and seized the first opportunity to break in, "is just the very finest
thing a man can be. Why, what are half the nobility compared to us?
There are all sorts of people in the nobility,--people who have been in
trade, brewers and bankers and all sorts; even authors and those kind
of people. But I have always heard that an English country gentleman who
has been in the same position for hundreds of years--Why, Theo, there is
not such a position in the world! We are the bulwark of the country. We
are the support of the constitution. Where would the Queen be, or the
church, or anything, without the gentry? Why, Theo, an English country
gentleman----"
She paused from mere want of breath. On such a subject Miss Warrender
felt that words could never have failed; and she devoutly believed
everything she said.
"If he's so grand as that," said Theo, with a laugh, "what do you
suppose is the consequence of a little more Latin and Greek?"
Minnie would have said with all sincerity, Nothing at all; but she
paused, remembering that there were prejudices on this subject. "You
might as well say, What's the use of shoes and stockings," she said, "or
of nice, well-made clothes, such as a gentleman ought to wear? By the
bye, Mr. Cavendish, though I did not care so much for him this time
as the last, had his clothes very well made. Education is just like
well-made things," she added, with a sense that she had made, if not an
epigram, something very like it,--a phrase to be remembered and quoted
as summing up the discussion.
"If that's all," said Warrender, "I've got enough for that." The
reference to Cavendish and the epigram had cleared the atmosphere and
given a lighter tone to the family controversy, and the young man felt
that he had got over the crisis better than he hoped. He waved his hand
to Minnie amicably as he rose from the table. "I thank thee, Jew," he
said with a lighter tone and laugh than were at all usual with him, as
he went away. The ladies sat silent, listening to his steps as he went
through the hall, pausing to get his hat; and no one spoke till he
suddenly appeared again, crossing the lawn towards the gate that led
into the village. Then there was a simultaneous long breath of fulfilled
expectation, not to be called a sigh.
"Ah!" said Minnie, "I thought so. He always goes that way."
"It is the way that leads to all the places Theo would be likely to go
to."
"You mean it leads to Markland, mamma. Oh, I know very well what Theo
means. He thinks he is very deep, but I see through him; and so would
you, if you chose. I never thought him so clever as you all did--but
that he should let that woman twist him round her little finger, and
give up everything for her!--I could not have supposed he would have
been so silly as that."
Mrs. Warrender made no reply except a brief reproof to her daughter
for speaking of Lady Markland as that woman. Perhaps she was herself a
little vexed with Lady Markland, though she was aware it was unjust. But
she was not vexed with Theo. She followed his foolishness (for to be
sure it was foolishness, poor boy!) with a warmth of sympathy such as
very rarely animates a mother in such circumstances. In her growing
anxiety about him, in the commotion of mind with which she had watched
the rising passion in his, there had been something which seemed to
Mrs. Warrender like a new vicarious life. She had been, as it were, the
spectator of this drama from the day when, to her great surprise, Theo
had urged, almost compelled her to offer her services and society to
the young widow. His vehemence then and a look in his eyes with which
she was noways acquainted, but of which, as a woman capable of similar
emotion, she divined the meaning, had awakened her, with a curious
upspringing of her whole being, to the study of this new thing, to see
what was going to come of it, and how it would develop. She had never
known in her own person what passion was; she had never been the object
of it, nor had she felt that wild and all-absorbing influence; but she
recognised it when she saw it in her son, with the keenest thrill of
sympathetic feeling. She watched him with a kind of envy, a kind of
admiration, a wondering enthusiasm, which absorbed her almost as much as
his love absorbed him. She who had been surrounded by dulness all her
life, mild affections, stagnant minds, an easy, humdrum attachment which
had all the external features of indifference,--it brought a curious
elation to her mind to see that her boy was capable of this flaming and
glowing passion. It had curbed her impatience as nothing else could have
done, and made her willing to wait and watch, to withstand the pressure
of the long monotonous days, and content herself with the dead quiet of
her life. She had not known even anxiety in the past. That of itself was
a vivifying influence now.
A little later Mrs. Warrender drove into Highcombe with Chatty, an
expedition which she had made several times of late, as often as the
horses could be spared. The house in Highcombe, which was her own, which
she was to live in with the girls if Theo married or anything happened,
was being put in order, and that too was a gentle interest. Fortunately,
upon this afternoon Minnie was occupied in the parish. It was her "day,"
and nothing in heaven or earth was ever permitted to interfere with
Minnie's "day." The other two were pleased to be alone together, though
they never said so, but kept up even between themselves the little fiction
of saying, What a pity Minnie could not come! Chatty sympathised with
her mother more than Minnie had ever done, and was very glad in her
heart to ask a question or two about what was happening and what Theo
could mean, to which Mrs. Warrender answered with much greater ease and
fulness than if her elder daughter had been present to give her opinion.
Chatty asked with bated breath whether there was not something wicked
and terrible in the thought that Lady Markland, a woman who was married,
and who had been consoled in her affliction by the clergyman and all her
friends reminding her that her husband was not lost but gone before, and
that she would meet him again,--that she should be loved and wooed by
another man. Chatty grew red with shame as she asked the question. It
seemed to her an insult to any woman. "As if our ties were for this
world only!" she said. Mrs. Warrender in her reply waived the theological
question altogether, and shook her head, and declared that it was not
the thought that Lady Markland was a widow or that she was Theo's senior
which troubled her. "But she will never think of him," said the mother.
"Oh, Chatty, my heart is sore for my poor boy. He is throwing away his
love and the best of his life. She will never think of him. She is full
of her own affairs and of her child. She will take all that Theo gives
her, and never make him any return."
"Then, mamma, would you wish----" cried Chatty, astonished.
"I wish anything that would make him happy," her mother said. "It is a
great thing to be happy." She said this more to herself than to her
daughter; and to be sure, to a young person, it was a most unguarded
admission for a woman to make.
"Does being happy always mean----?" Here Chatty paused, with the sudden
flame of a blush almost scorching her cheeks. She had turned her head in
the opposite direction, as if looking at something among the trees; and
this was perhaps why Mrs. Warrender did not hear what she said. Always
mean love--Chatty did not say. Various events had suggested this question,
but on the whole she was very glad her mother did not hear.