After a great deal of travelling in the most beautiful scenery in the
world, and after the excitement of settling down, of furnishing, of
arranging, of putting all your future life in order, there is apt to
follow a certain blank, a somewhat disconcerting consciousness that all
expectation is now over, when you are left alone with everything
completed to live that life to which you have been for so long looking
forward. Lady Car was very conscious of this in her sensitive and
delicate soul, although there was for a long time a sustaining force of
expectation of another kind in her that kept her up. All the people in
the neighbourhood, it is needless to say, made haste to call upon Lady
Caroline Beaufort: and she found them a little flat, as country society
is apt to be. She went out with her husband a number of times to dinner
parties, specially convoked in her honour, and did not find them
enlivening. She was one of those women who never get rid of the ideal
and always retain a vague hope in coming to a new place, in beginning
anything new, that the perfect is at last to be revealed to her--the
good society, the spirits _d’élite_, whom she has always longed for but
never yet encountered. She did not encounter them here any more than in
other places, and a sense of dull certainty settled down upon her after
a while, which was depressing. Such impressions are modified when the
idealist finds out that, however much his or her surroundings may lack
the superlative, there is always a certain _fond_ of goodness and of the
agreeable and sympathetic in the dullest circle when you come to know
it. Surrey, however, no more than any other place, discloses these
homely, compensating qualities all at once, and the period of
disenchantment came. Everything settled down, even the landscape became
less wide, less attractive, the woods less green, the cottage roofs less
picturesque. The real encroached upon the glamour of the imagination at
every corner, and Carry felt herself settle down. It is a process which
every dreamer has to go through.
But it was a long time before her mind would consent to the other
settling down, which took place slowly but surely as the days and the
years went on. Beaufort was in reality a little stirred up at first by
the revival of so many old plans and thoughts, though it was in her
mind, not in his, that they revived. He was constrained by a hundred
subtle influences to resume at least the attitude of a student. Her
verses, which were so pretty, the gentle feminine music of a true,
though small singer, were such a reproach to him as words cannot
describe. She had picked up her thread, so slight, so fragile as it was,
and resumed her little melodious strain with enthusiasm not less, but
greater, than when she had dropped it in the despair of parting with her
hero. The little poem brought back to him faint, undefinable echoes of
that past which seemed to be a thousand years off. What was it that he
had intended to do which she remembered so well, which to him was like a
forgotten dream? He could not pick up his thread; he had smiled at
himself by turns during the progress of the intervening centuries over
the futility of his forgotten ambition. ‘I, too, used to mean great
things,’ he had said with a laugh and a sigh to the younger men: the
sigh had been fictitious, the laugh more genuine. What a fool any man
was to think that he could accomplish any revolution! What a silly
business to think that with your feeble hand you could upset the economy
of ages! The conceit, too! but he had been very young, he had said to
himself, and youth is an excuse for everything. That any faithful memory
should preserve the image of him as he was in those old days of
delusion, ambition, and self-opinion, had seemed incredible to him. He
was half affronted, as well as astonished, that Carry should have
retained that visionary delusion in her mind: but still her expectation
was a curious stimulus. And the first steps into which he was forced by
it deluded her as well as himself. He began to arrange his books, to
search, as he persuaded himself, for old notes, a search which occupied
a great deal of time and involved many discoveries, amusing to him,
delightful to her. For weeks together this investigation, through all
manner of old notebooks, occupied them both and kept Carry very happy.
She was full of excitement as to what each new collection would bring
forth. He had a great many notebooks, dating not only from his college
days but even from his school time, and there was hardly one of them out
of which some little fossil of the past, some scrap of verse or
translation, did not come. Carry, delighted, listened to them all as to
so many revelations. She traced him back to his boyhood, and found a
pleasure beyond description in that record of all his intellectual
vagaries, and the hopes and ambitions they expressed. Perhaps had she
read them calmly with her own eyes, although those eyes were full of
glamour, faint lights of criticism might have arisen and revealed the
imperfections. But he read them to her in his mellow voice, with little
explanations, reminiscences not disagreeable to himself, and which
suggested other and more lengthened recollections, all of which were
delightful to his admiring wife. It was not till Christmas, when she
suddenly woke up to the passage of time by the startling reminder of
little Tom’s return from school for the holidays, that she remembered
how much time had passed. To be brought suddenly to a pause in the midst
of one’s enthusiasm is always disagreeable, and the thought had been
uneasy in Carry’s mind for several days before she put it timidly into
words.
‘It has all been delightful,’ she said. ‘To trace you back through all
your school-boy time and at college is so nice that I know I have been
persuading you to make the most of it for my sake. But, Edward, you
must not humour me any more. I feel that it is wasting your time.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘when one has to pick up one’s thread it is best to do it
thoroughly. This will all be of service, every word of it.’
‘I see, you mean to begin with a retrospect,’ she cried, brightening
again.
‘Not so much as a retrospect,’ he said, with a twinge of conscience,
‘but one’s early ideas, though they are often absurd, are very
suggestive.’
‘Oh, not absurd,’ she cried. It wounded her to hear such a word applied
to anything of his.
But little Tom had come home for his holidays, which showed that it was
four or five months since the settling down. They had taken possession
of Easton in the end of August. Tom came home very manly and grown up
after his first ‘half’ at school. He was close upon eleven, and he had a
very high opinion of his own position and prospects. His school was a
large preparatory one, where things were done as much as possible on
the model of Eton, which was the goal of all the little boy’s ambitions.
It was a little disappointing after the first genuine moment of pleasure
in coming home, and the ecstatic sense of being a very great man to
Janet, to find that after all Janet was only a little girl and did not
understand the half of what he told her. He felt the want of male
society very much upon the second day, and to think that there would not
be a fellow to speak to for a whole month damped the delightful prospect
of being his own master for that time, which had smiled so much upon
him. Janet, it is scarcely necessary to say, gave a boundless faith to
her brother, and listened to the tale of his achievements, and of what
the fellows did, with an interest unalloyed by criticism. Her mouth and
her eyes were full of a round O! of wonder and admiration. She never
tired of hearing of the feats and the scrapes and the heroic incidents
of school. To dazzle her so completely was something; but a mind
accustomed to the company of the nobler sex soon tired of the tameness
of feminine society, and with the candour of his age Tom very soon made
it apparent that he was bored.
‘There’s a lot of houses about,’ he said. ‘Aren’t there any fellows down
there, or there’--he pointed to distant roofs and groups of chimneys
appearing at intervals from among the leafless trees-- ‘that one could
speak to? It’s awfully dull here after knowing so many at school.’
‘There are some children at that white house with the blue roof,’ said
Janet, ‘but they’re not good enough, nurse says; and I don’t know nobody
to play wiz,’ the little girl added rather wistfully--she made all her
‘th’s’ into ‘z’s’ still--‘I only take walks.’
‘Children!’ said Tom contemptuously. ‘I wasn’t asking about children. I
meant fellows at school. If they’re at a good school they’re good
enough. I’ll soon find out. When a fellow has been out in the world, and
goes to school, you don’t suppose he minds what nurse says.’
‘Oh, but nurse says a great, great many zings,’ said Janet. ‘She says
Easton’s a little poky house, and that we should be in our own family
place. What’s a family place? Do you know? It is something fazer is
buried in,’ the little girl added after a moment, with a little thrill
of solemnity. Tom burst into a laugh in the pleasure of his superior
knowledge.
‘You _are_ a little ass, Jan! Of course I know. My family place is a
grand one, with a big tower, and a flag on it when I’m at home--like the
Queen at Windsor! The worst is I’m never at home: but I shall be when
I’m big, and then shan’t we have times! I’ve told a lot of fellows. I’ll
have them up to my place in Scotland for the shooting, don’t you know.’
Janet only gave him a look out of her large light eyes. ‘Girls don’t
shoot,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be at your shooting. Tom, do you
remember fazer? He’s buried there.’
‘Oh, humbug! he’s buried in the church-yard, where all the dead people
are buried. Of course I remember him. What’s that got to do with it? I
remember having a ride on his big black mare, such a big tall beast, and
nobody could ride her except me and--him you know. He was behind when I
rode her, and she carried us both as easy as a lamb. Old Duncan told me
so--as easy as a lamb--because she knew who was her master!’ the boy
cried, with the colour mounting up into his cheeks. He began to switch
the chairs with a little cane he had in his hand, and bade them to ‘get
on’ and ‘gee-up,’ to Janet’s considerable disturbance, for she had
already learned that a boy’s boots were apt to be muddy, and that chairs
covered with brocade, and carved and gilded, were not meant to be ridden
or to gee-up.
‘Don’t, Tom,’ she said; ‘they’re mozer’s pretty chairs.’
‘Oh, bother!’ cried the boy, ‘where’s mother? I want to tell her lots of
things, but I won’t if she’s so particular about her chairs and stays so
long away.’
‘She’s in the library with Beau,’ said Janet; ‘they are always in the
library. It is so pretty. Mozer likes it better than the drawing-room.
But they will soon come in for tea.’
‘I say,’ cried Tom, ‘do you have tea here always, not in the nursery?
Oh, I say! I am not going to stand that. I know what they do at
afternoon tea. You have a small piece of bread and butter, or perhaps an
atom of cake, and you mustn’t make any crumbs or enjoy yourself at all.
You should see our teas at school. There’s sometimes three kinds of jam,
and in summer the fellows have strawberries as many as ever they like,
and this half Summerfield major was allowed cold partridge.’
‘For tea!’ cried Janet with ever so many notes of admiration.
‘Oh, his people send him such whopping hampers,’ said Tom; ‘he could
never get through it all if he didn’t have it for tea.’
‘Nasty meat!’ said little Janet with a grimace; ‘but the jam is very
nice,’ she added with a sigh. ‘There’s no nursery when you’re gone.
Mozer gives us very nice tea and plenty of cake; but she thinks I am
better downstairs, not always with nurse.’
‘And do you think so? You were always a little----’
‘It’s nice when mozer talks to me and not to Beau,’ said Janet with
reluctance. The grievance of the many times when the reverse was the
case was implied, not put into words. ‘But when there is you and me it
will be very nice,’ cried the little girl. ‘There is a plain little
table in the corner not carved or anything. It has a cover on, but that
comes off, and I am allowed to have it to paint pictures upon and play
at anything you like. We’ll have it between us in the corner as if it
was a little party,’ cried little Janet, ‘and they will never mind us,
as long as we don’t make much noise.’
‘But I want to make a noise. I want to have a real square meal. It isn’t
good for a fellow, when he’s growing, to be kept short of his grub. I
want----’
‘Oh, Tom, what a horrible, horrible word!’
‘Much you know!’ cried the boy. ‘Fellows’ sisters all like it--to learn
the same words as we say. But if you think I’m coming back from Hall’s,
where they have all Eton rules, to sit as quiet as a mouse in the
drawing-room, and have afternoon tea like an old fogey, I shan’t, and
there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom.
Lady Car came in as he gave forth this determination in a loud voice.
She came in very softly, as was her wont, with the soft trail of her
satin gown on the soft mossy carpet, on which her light steps made no
sound. In her eyes was still the dreamy smile of her pleasure in all the
details and chronicles of a school-boy life, so elevated and ethereal,
its dreams and its visions and its high purposes. She was imagining to
herself a poem in which it might all be set forth in chapters or cantos.
‘The dawning genius’ would be the title of the first. She saw before her
the spiritual being, all thought and enthusiasm, making a hundred
chimeras divine--the boy-poet, the heir of all the ages, the fine
flower of human promise. Half the adoring wife and half the woman of
genius, she came in softly, with delicate charms of verses already
sounding in her mind, and the scheme of the poem rising before her. Not
like the Prelude: oh no; but the development, the dawn (a far more
lovely word), the dawning of genius, of which in its time it might be
her delightful mission to record the completion too.
She was roused from this vision by the noisy boyish voice. ‘I shan’t,
and there’s an end of it,’ cried Tom, and she raised her dreamy eyes,
startled to see the boy standing red in the face and defiant, his legs
apart, his sturdy little square figure relieved against the window. How
different from the ideal boy of whom she had been dreaming! the real
boy, her son.
They both looked at her with an alarmed aspect, not knowing what would
happen. Poor Carry was the gentlest of mothers. She never punished them,
never scolded, but yet no one could tell why, they had always the air
of being afraid of her. They looked at her now as children might have
looked who were accustomed to be sent into solitary confinement, shut up
in a dark closet, or some other torture. Tom’s voice fell in a moment,
and Janet came out in defence like the little woman in a weatherhouse,
when the little man skulks indoors disconcerted by the good weather.
Janet came forward with a little hand raised. ‘Mozer, it was not
naughtiness. It was because he has been out in the world and knows
things different from me.’
‘Yes?’ said Lady Car, smiling upon them, ‘and what are the things this
man of the world knows? To be sure, dear, he must be greatly in advance
of you and me.’
The children were all the more abashed by this speech, though its tone
was so gentle. They stared at her for a moment with their father’s face,
dark and stolid, the likeness intensified in Tom by the sullen alarm of
his look. She put out her hand to him, to draw him close to her. ‘What
is it,’ she said, ‘my little boy?’ She was, to tell the truth, rather
afraid of him too.
‘It’s nothing,’ Tom replied. ‘It’s something she’s said.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ cried Janet with a sense of injury. ‘Mozer, he says, they
have such nice teas at school--strawberries, and sometimes cold
partridge, and whopping hampers.’
‘My dear!’
‘That’s how the fellows talk,’ said Tom. ‘That’s not the right thing for
a girl.’
‘Was the cold partridge in the whopping hamper?’ said a voice behind.
‘Carry, I don’t wonder the boy’s indignant. You have sent him no
hampers. A first half at school and not so much as a big cake. I feel
for Tom. Never mind, old fellow; you see she never was at school.’
They had both turned round their anxious faces to him as he came in.
They were instinctively jealous of him. Yet both turned with a certain
relief, or at least Tom did so, who was aware that Beau was one of his
own faction, a man, against the sway of the everlasting feminine. Janet
took the hand which the mother had stretched out towards her boy and
clung to it, drawing herself close into Lady Car’s skirts. Beau was not
of her faction in any sense of the word. The little girl pulled her
mother’s face towards her, and whispered her tale into Carry’s ear.
‘To have your tea upstairs! Why, doesn’t he want to be with us, dear,
after being away so long? You shall have what you like best, my dear
children. If you really prefer the nursery to the drawing-room, and my
company.’
‘He says they have three kinds of jam,’ said Janet in her mother’s ear,
‘and do whatever they like,’ she added after a pause.
Lady Car gave her husband a look which the children noted though they
did not understand. There was a slight appeal in it, and some relief. He
had said that she must keep them with her, as much as if he had not been
there: that he would not separate her not for an hour, not for a meal
from her children: and she had thought it her duty to have them there,
though their presence and his together kept Carry in a harassed
consciousness of the two claims upon her. They concluded that mother was
not angry with great relief; but they did not understand the guilty
satisfaction of Carry in finding that they liked the nursery best.