On a perfect summer afternoon in mid-July, Lady Mary sat in the
terrace garden at Barracombe, before the open windows of the silent
house, in the shade of the great ilex; sometimes glancing at the book
she held, and sometimes watching the haymakers in the valley, whose
voices and laughter reached her faintly across the distance.
Some boys were playing cricket in a field below. She noted idly that
the sound of the ball on the bat travelled but slowly upward, and
reached her after the striker had begun to run. The effect was
curious, but it was not new to her, though she listened and counted
with idle interest.
The old sisters had departed for their daily drive, which she daily
declined to share, having no love for the high-road, and much for the
peace which their absence brought her.
It was an afternoon which made mere existence a delight amid such
surroundings.
Long shadows were falling across the bend of the river, below the
wooded hill which faced the south-west; whilst the cob-built,
whitewashed cottages, and the brown, square-towered church lay full in
sunshine still. The red cattle stood knee-deep in the shallows, and an
old boat was moored high and dry upon the sloping red banks.
The air was sweet with a thousand mingled scents of summer flowers:
carnations, stocks, roses, and jasmine. The creamy clusters of
Perpetual Felicity rioted over the corner turret of the terrace, where
a crumbling stair led to the top of a small, half-ruined observatory,
which tradition called the look-out tower.
Flights of steps led downwards from the garden, where the bedded-out
plants blazed in all their glory of ordered colour, to the walks on
the lower levels. Here were long herbaceous borders, backed by the
mighty sloping walls of old red sandstone, which, like an ancient
fortification, supported the terrace above.
The blue larkspur flourished beside scarlet gladioli, feather-headed
spirea, and hardy fuchsia. There were no straight lines, nor any order
of planting. The Madonna lilies stood in groups, lifting up on thin,
ragged stems their pure and spotless clusters, and overpowering with
their heavy scent the fainter fragrance of the mignonette. Tall, green
hollyhocks towered higher yet, holding the secret of their loveliness,
until these should wither; when they too would burst into blossom, and
forestall the round-budded dahlia.
In the silence, many usually unheeded sounds made themselves very
plainly heard.
The tapping of the great magnolia-leaves upon the windows of the south
front; the rustling of the ilex; the ceaseless murmur of the river;
the near twittering or distant song of innumerable birds; the steady
hum of the saw-mill below; the call of the poultry-woman at the
home-farm, and the shrieking response of a feathered horde flying and
fighting for their food--sounds all so familiar as to pass unnoticed,
save in the absence of companionship.
As Lady Mary mused alone, she could not but recall other summer
afternoons, when she had not felt less lonely because her husband's
voice might at any moment break the silence, and summon her to his
side. Days when Peter had been absent at school, instead of, as now,
at play; and when the old ladies had also been absent, taking their
regular and daily drive in the big barouche.
Then she had prized and coveted the solitude of a summer afternoon on
the lawn, and had stolen away to read and dream undisturbed in the
shadow of the ilex.
It was now, when no vexatious restraint was exercised over her--when
there was no one to reprove her for dreaming, or to criticize or
forbid her chosen book--that solitude had become distasteful to her.
She was restless and dissatisfied, and the misty sunlit landscape had
lost its charm, and her book its power of enchaining her attention.
She had tasted the joy of real companionship; the charm of real
sympathy; of the fearless exchange of ideas with one whose outlook
upon life was as broad and charitable as Sir Timothy's had been narrow
and prejudiced.
She had scarcely dared to acknowledge to herself how dear John Crewys
had become to her, even though she knew that she rested thankfully
upon the certainty of his love; that she trusted him in all things;
that she was in utter sympathy with all his thoughts and words and
ways.
Yet she had wished him to go, that she might be free to devote herself
to her boy--to be very sure that she was not a light and careless
mother, ready to abandon her son at the first call of a stranger.
And John Crewys had understood as another might not have understood.
His clear head and great heart had divined her feelings, though
perhaps he would never quite know how passionately grateful she was
because he had divined them; because he had in no way fallen short of
the man he had seemed to be.
She had sacrificed John to Peter; and John, who had shown so much
wisdom and delicacy in leaving her alone with her son, was avenged;
for only his absence could have made clear to her how he had grown
into the heart she had guarded so jealously for Peter's sake.
She knew now that Peter's companionship made her more lonely than
utter solitude.
The _joie de vivre_, which had distinguished her early days, and was
inherent in her nature, had been quenched, to all appearance, many
years since; but the spark had never died, and John had fanned it into
brightness once more.
His strong hand had swept away the cobwebs that had been spun across
her life; and the drooping soul had revived in the sunshine of his
love, his comradeship, his warm approval.
Timidly, she had learnt to live, to laugh, to look about her, and dare
utter her own thoughts and opinions, instead of falsely echoing those
she did not share. Lady Mary had recovered her individuality; the
serene consciousness of a power within herself to live up to the ideal
her lover had conceived of her.
But now, in his absence, that confidence had been rudely shaken. She
had come to perceive that she, who charmed others so easily, could
not charm her sullen son. It was part of the penalty she paid for her
quick-wittedness, that she could realize herself as Peter saw her,
though she was unable to present herself before him in a more
favourable light.
"I must be myself--or nobody," she thought despairingly. But Peter
wanted her to be once more the meek, plainly dressed, low-spirited,
silent being whom Sir Timothy had created; and who was not in the
least like the original laughing, loving, joyous Mary Setoun.
It did not occur to her, in her sorrowful humility, that possibly her
qualities stood on a higher level than Peter's powers of appreciation.
Yet it is certain that people can only admire intelligently what
is good within their comprehension; and their highest flights of
imagination may sometimes scarcely touch mediocrity.
The noblest ideals, the fairest dreams, the subtlest reasoning, the
finest ethics, contained in the writings of the mighty dead, meant
nothing at all to Sir Timothy. His widow knew that she had never heard
him utter one high or noble or selfless thought. But with, perhaps,
pardonable egotism, she had taken it for granted that Peter must be
different. Whatever his outward humours, he was _her_ son; rather a
part of herself, in her loving fancy, than a separate individual.
The moment of awakening had been long in coming to Lady Mary; the
moment when a mother has to find out that her personality is not
necessarily reproduced in her child; that the being who was once the
unconscious consoler of her griefs and troubles may develop a nature
perfectly antagonistic to her own.
She had kept her eyes shut with all her might for a long time, but
necessity was forcing them open.
Perhaps her association with John Crewys made it easier to see Peter
as he was, and not as she had wished him to be.
And yet, she thought miserably to herself, he had certainly tried hard
to be affectionate and kind to her--and probably it did not occur to
him, as it did to his mother, how pathetic it was that he should have
to try.
Peter did not think much about it.
Sometimes, during his short stay at Barracombe, he had walked through
a game of croquet with his mother--it was good practice for his left
hand--or he listened disapprovingly to something she inadvertently
(forgetting he was not John) read aloud for his sympathy or
admiration; or he took a short stroll with her; or bestowed his
company upon her in some other dutiful fashion. But these filial
attentions over, if he yawned with relief--why, he never did so in her
presence, and would have been unable to understand that Lady Mary saw
him yawning, in her mind's eye, as plainly as though he had indulged
this bad habit under her very nose. He bestowed a portion of his
time on his aunts in much the same spirit, taking less trouble to be
affectionate, because they were less exacting, as he would have put it
to himself, than she was.
The scheme of renting a house in London had duly been laid before him,
and rejected most decisively by the young gentleman. His father had
never taken a house in town, and he could see no necessity for it. His
aunts were lost in admiration for their nephew's firmness. Peter had
inherited somewhat of his father's dictatorial manner, and their
flattery did not tend to soften it. When his aged relatives
mispronounced the magic word _kopje_, or betrayed their belief that a
_donga_ was an inaccessible mountain--he brought the big guns of his
heavy satire to bear on the little target of their ignorance without
remorse. He mistook a loud voice, and a habit of laying down the law,
for manly decision, and the gift of leadership; and imagined that in
talking down his mother's gentle protests he had convinced her of his
superior wisdom.
When he had made it sufficiently clear, however, that he did not wish
Lady Mary to accompany him to town, young Sir Peter made haste to
depart thither himself, on the very reasonable plea that he required a
new outfit of clothes.
Was it possible that his departure brought a dreadful relief to the
mother who had prayed day and night, for eight-and-twenty months, that
her son might return to her?
She tried and tried, on her knees in her own room, to realize what her
feelings would have been if Peter had been killed in South Africa.
She tried to recall the first ecstasy of joy at his home-coming. She
remembered, as she might have remembered a dream, the hours of agony
she had passed, looking out over these very blue hills, and dumbly
beseeching God to spare her boy--her only son--out of all the mothers'
sons who were laying down their lives for England.
A terrible thought assailed her now and then, like an ugly spectre
that would not be laid--that if Peter had died of his wound--if he had
fallen as so many of his comrades had fallen, in the war--he would
have been a hero for all time; a glorious memory, safely enshrined and
enthroned above all these miserable petty doubts and disappointments.
She cast the thought from her in horror and piteous grief, and
reiterated always her passionate gratitude for his preservation. But,
nevertheless, the living, breathing Peter was a daily and hourly
disappointment to the mother who loved him. His ways were not her
ways, nor his thoughts her thoughts; and often she felt that she could
have found more to say to a complete stranger, and that a stranger
would have understood her better.
The old ladies, returning from their drive, generally took a little
turn upon the terrace. This constituted half their daily exercise,
since their morning walk consisted of a stroll round the kitchen
garden.
"It prevents cramp after sitting so long," one would say to the other.
"And it is only right to show the gardener that we take an interest,"
the other would reply.
The gardener translated the interest they took into a habit of
fault-finding, which nearly drove him mad.
"It du spile the vine weather vor I," he would frequently grumble
to his greatest crony, James Coachman, who, for his part, bitterly
resented the abnormal length of the daily drives. "Zure as vate, when
I zits down tu my tea, cumes a message from one are t'other on 'em,
an' oop I goes. 'Yu bain't been lukin' round zo careful as 'ee shude;
there be a bit o' magnolia as want nailding oop, my gude man.' 'Oh,
be there, mum?' zays I. 'Yiss, there be; an' thart I'd carl yure
attention tu it,' zess she, are zum zuch. 'Thanky, mum, I'm zure,'
zezz I."
"I knows how her goes on," groaned James Coachman.
"Mother toime 'tis zummat else," said the aggrieved gardener. "'Thic
'ere geranum's broke, Willum; but ef yu tuke it vor cuttings, zo
vast's iver yu cude, 'twon't take no yarm, Willum. Yu zee as how us du
take a turble interest.' Ah! 'tis arl I can du tu putt oop wi' 'un;
carling a man from's tea, tu tark zuch vamous vule's tark."
Lady Mary was not much less weary than the gardener and coachman of
the old sisters' habits of criticism. But only the shadow of their
former power of vexing her remained, now that they could no longer
appeal to Sir Timothy to join them in reproving his wife. She was
no more to be teased or exasperated into alternate submission and
rebellion.
Their cousin John, the administrator of Barracombe, had chosen from
the first to place her opinions and wishes above all their protests or
advice. They said to each other that John, before he grew tired of her
and went away, had spoilt poor dear Mary completely; but their hopes
were centred on Peter, who was a true Crewys, and who would soon
be his own master, and the master of Barracombe; when he would,
doubtless, revert to his father's old ways.
They chose to blame his mother for his sudden departure to London, and
remarked that the changes in his home had so wrought upon the poor
fellow, that he could not bear to look at them until he had the power
of putting them right again.
A deeply resented innovation was the appearance of the tea-table on
the lawn before the windows, in the shade of the ilex-grove, which
sheltered the western end of the terrace from the low rays of the sun.
During the previous summer, on their return from a drive, they had
found their cousin John in his white flannels, and Lady Mary in her
black gown, serenely enjoying this refreshment out-of-doors; and the
poor old ladies had hardly known how to express their surprise and
annoyance.
In vain did their sister-in-law explain that she had desired a second
tea to be served in the hall, in their usual corner by the log
fireplace.
It had never been the custom in the family. What would Ash say? What
would he think? How could so much extra trouble be given to the
servants?
"The servants have next to nothing to do," Lady Mary had said; and
young John had actually laughed, and explained that he had had a
conversation with Ash which had almost petrified that tyrant of the
household.
Either Ash would behave himself properly, and carry out orders without
grumbling, or he would be superseded. _Ash_ superseded!
This John had said with quite unruffled good humour, and with a smile
on his face, as though such an upheaval of domestic politics were the
simplest thing in the world. Though for years the insolence and the
idleness of Ash had been favourite grievances with Lady Belstone and
Miss Crewys, they were speechlessly indignant with young John.
Habit had partially inured, though it could never reconcile them, to
the appearance of that little rustic table and white cloth in Lady
Mary's favourite corner of the terrace; and though they would rather
have gone without their tea altogether than partake of it there,
they could behold her pouring it out for herself with comparative
equanimity.
"I trust you are rested, dear Mary, after your terrible long climb in
the woods this morning?"
"It has been very restful sitting here. I hope you had a pleasant
drive, Isabella?" "No; it was too hot to be pleasant. We passed
the rectory, and there was that idle doctor lolling in the canon's
verandah--keeping the poor man from his haymaking. Has the second post
come in? Any news of dear Peter?"
"None at all. You know he is not much of a correspondent, and his last
letter said he would be back in a few days."
"For my part," said Lady Belstone, "I think Peter will come home the
day he attains his majority, and not a moment before."
"He is hardly likely to stay in London through August and September,"
said Lady Mary, in rather displeased tones.
"Perhaps not in London; but there are other places besides London,"
said Miss Crewys, significantly. "We met Mrs. Hewel driving. _She_,
poor thing, does not expect to see Sarah before Christmas, if then,
from what she told us."
"She should not have let Lady Tintern adopt Sarah if she is to be for
ever regretting it. It was her own doing," said Lady Mary.
"That is just what I told her," said Lady Belstone, triumphantly.
"Though how she can be regretting such a daughter I cannot
conjecture."
"Sarah is a saucy creature," said Miss Crewys. "The last time I saw
her she made one of her senseless jokes at me."
"She has no tact," said Lady Belstone, shaking her head; "for when
Peter saw you were annoyed, and tried to pass it off by telling her
the Crewys family had no sense of humour, instead of saying, 'What
nonsense!' she said, 'What a pity!'"
"Her mother was full of a letter from Lady Tintern about some grand
lord or other, who wanted to marry Sarah. I did my best to make her
understand how very unlikely it was that any man, noble or otherwise,
would care to marry a girl with carroty hair."
"I doubt if you succeeded in convincing her, Georgina, though you
spoke pretty plain, and I am very far from blaming you for it. But she
is ate up with pride, poor thing, because Sarah gets noticed by
Lady Tintern's friends, who would naturally wish to gratify her by
flattering her niece."
"I am afraid the girl is setting her cap at Peter," said Miss Crewys;
"but I took care to let her mother know, casually, what our family
would think of such a marriage for him."
"Peter is a boy," said Lady Mary, quickly; "and Sarah, for all
practical purposes, is ten years older than he. She is only amusing
herself. Lady Tintern is much more ambitious for her than I am for
Peter."
"How you talk, Mary!" said Miss Crewys, indignantly. "She is hardly
twenty years of age, and the most designing monkey that ever lived.
And Peter is a fine young man. A boy, indeed! I hope if she succeeds
in catching him that you will remember I warned you."
"I will remember, if anything so fortunate should occur," said Lady
Mary, with a faint smile. "I cannot think of any girl in the world
whom I would prefer to Sarah as a daughter."
"I, for one, should walk out of this house the day that girl entered
it as mistress, let Peter say what he would to prevent me," said Lady
Belstone, reddening with indignation.
"I wonder where you would go to?" said Lady Mary, with some curiosity.
"Of course," she added, hastily, "there is the Dower House."
"I am sure it is very generous of you to suggest the Dower House, dear
Mary," said Miss Crewys, softening, "since our poor brother, in his
unaccountable will, left it entirely to you, and made no mention of
his elder sisters; though we do not complain."
"It is in accordance with custom that the widow should have the Dower
House. A widow's rights should be respected; but I thought our names
would be mentioned," said Lady Belstone, dejectedly.
"Of course he knew," said Lady Mary, in a low voice, "that Peter's
house would be always open to us all, as my boy said himself."
"Dear boy! he has said it to us too," said the sisters, in a breath.
"I don't say that, in my opinion," said Lady Mary, "it would not be
wiser to leave a young married couple to themselves; I have always
thought so. But Peter would not hear of your turning out of your old
home; you know that very well."
"Peter would not; but nothing would induce _me_ to live under the
same roof as that red-haired minx," said Lady Belstone, firmly. "And
besides, as you say, my dear Mary, you could not very well live by
yourself at the Dower House."
"Since Mary has been so kind as to mention it, there would be many
advantages in our accompanying her there, in case Sarah should succeed
in her artful aims," said Miss Crewys. "It would be near Peter, and
yet not _too_ near, and we could keep an eye on _her_."
"If she does not succeed, somebody else will," said Lady Belstone,
sensibly; "and, at least, we know her faults, and can put Peter on his
guard against them."
A host of petty and wretched recollections poured into Lady Mary's
mind as she listened to these words.
Poor Timothy; poor little hunted, scolded, despairing bride; poor
married life--of futile reproaches and foolish quarrelling.
How many small miseries she owed to those ferret searching eyes, and
those subtly poisonous tongues! But such miseries lurked in the dull
shadows of the past. Standing now in the bright sunshine of the
present, she forgave the sisters with all her heart, and thought
compassionately of their great age, their increasing infirmities,
their feeble hold on life.
Not to them did she owe real sorrow, after all; for nothing that does
not touch the heart can reach the fountain of grief.
Peter's hand--the hand she loved best in the world--had set the waters
of sorrow flowing not once, but many times; but she had become aware
lately of a stronger power than Peter's guarding the spring.
She looked from one sister to the other.
Despite the narrowness of brow, and sharpness of eye and feature,
they were both venerable of aspect, as they tottered up and down the
terrace where they had played in their childhood and sauntered through
youth and middle age to these latter days, when they leant upon
silver-headed sticks, and wore dignified silk attire and respectable
poke-bonnets.
"Don't you think it would be better," said Lady Mary, slowly, "if you
left Peter to find out his wife's faults for himself; whether she be
Sarah--or another?"