THE FAMILY
Colonel Eldridge rode into his stable-yard and delivered up his horse to
Timbs, who came hobbling out to receive it with a cheerful morning air
and a general appearance of satisfaction with himself and his
circumstances. Yet there were those who would have said that Timbs had
no particular reason to be pleased with the way things had gone for him.
He had come to Hayslope Hall as groom ten years before, and had
succeeded the old coachman four years later. He might have considered
himself lucky then, for he was only twenty-six years of age. He had half
a dozen horses in his stables and two grooms under him. There was also a
chauffeur for the big car and the little runabout. Timbs had a young
wife and a new baby, and comfortable quarters in which to keep them. In
fact there seemed nothing left for him to desire, unless it was another
baby of a sex complementary to the first one.
Then the war came. Timbs joined up among the first, and was turned into
a good soldier, always cheerful and reliable, and diligent in writing
home to the young wife who was being taken care of at Hayslope. Colonel
Eldridge, who had gone back to soldiering himself, had exercised
pressure, where it was required, as it was not in the case of Timbs,
upon the able-bodied men on his estate to join the army, but had
done his utmost to ensure their leaving their homes free of anxiety to
those dependent upon them. So Mrs. Timbs and the baby prospered, while
Timbs fought for his country; but Mrs. Timbs always wished that the war
would end and Timbs would come home again, in which she differed from
many wives in similar circumstances.
Timbs did come home at last, and she did not have to wait for him until
quite the end. His left leg was shattered, and he had been for a long
time in a hospital before she was allowed to have him. About the time
the armistice was signed he was ready for work again. But it was not in
his master's power to give him the work he had done before the war.
Hayslope Hall could no longer support a coachman, two or three grooms
and a chauffeur. Timbs took the place of all of them. One horse was kept
and both the cars, but the bigger one was seldom used because of the
price of petrol and tires. Timbs turned himself into an efficient
chauffeur, and liked the change in his duties. He had higher wages than
before, but perhaps not quite so high as he could have got elsewhere if
he hadn't preferred to stick to his old master. His quarters were the
same, his wife was as devoted to him as ever, and his baby had grown
into a pretty little girl of seven, who was the apple of his eye, and
made a pet of by the young ladies. Timbs thought himself well off, even
with his crooked leg; and perhaps he was, as things go nowadays.
Timbs knew when the Colonel was in the mood for a little chat, and when
it was wise to render quick service with a silent tongue. In the good
old days the Colonel had seldom come in from his morning ride without a
cheery word or two to this favourite servant of his. He loved his horses
and found plenty to say about them, though most of it might have been
said many times before. And he would have something to say to Timbs
about what he might have seen in the course of his inspection of farms
and fields, which he liked to undertake before breakfast in the summer.
In the autumn there were early starts for cubbing, and then of course
there was plenty to talk about on the return.
The good days did not seem to have disappeared entirely when the war was
over, though Hugo's death had made him more silent than before, and the
reduction in stables and outdoor upkeep generally had already begun. But
there was a season's hunting, and Pamela had made her first appearance
in the field. Timbs, with one groom to help him, had been kept busy
enough, but his first winter at home had seemed to him very good. This
was what the Colonel and he had always looked forward to--the time when
the young ladies would hunt regularly, one after the other. Miss Pamela
was good company for her father. He would soon pick up his spirits, and
everything would be as it had been again.
But by the next season the economies had increased. There was no more
hunting from Hayslope Hall. The Colonel kept one horse to get about on,
and there was an old pony for pottering work on the place, which the
younger children sometimes rode. That was what the war had brought to
Colonel Eldridge in return for his services, which had included a year
in the field, and after that four years of routine work in various
provincial centres of industry. As a soldier he made no complaints. At
his age he expected no reward other than the conviction of having done
his duty where he could be made most useful. As a landowner he had many
complaints to make, but kept them mostly to himself. He had passed for a
rich man before the war; now he was a poor one. But one did not flaunt
one's poverty before the world. That was why he had dropped hunting
altogether; his old Caesar would have carried him well enough for a day
or so a week, if he had cared to go on.
The morning chats with Timbs were getting rarer. There would certainly
be none this morning. After a look at his master's face Timbs led Caesar
away without a word, and the Colonel went into the house. Something
happened to put him out. Timbs's own face was overcast, and it was fully
two minutes before he began to whistle at his work.
It was a quarter past eight. Breakfast was at half-past, and as Colonel
Eldridge would ride no more that day, he went upstairs to change his
clothes. He came down as the gong sounded, and his expression had
somewhat cleared. He held strong opinions about keeping an even temper
before his family.
An English family assembled for breakfast in an old-established country
house--the nations of the earth may be invited to contemplation of it.
Here at Hayslope Hall was an example that could have been multiplied by
thousands at that hour, or at one a little later; for as a nation we are
not early risers except on compulsion.
The room was large, but not too large for an air of domesticity when
there was only the family to use it. It had three long small-paned
windows, which on this summer morning were open to the wide, yet
secluded garden. The walls were hung with pictures, some good, some
indifferent, and all so familiar that they were never looked at. Of the
portraits none were older than the middle of the eighteenth century; but
five or six generations of men and women of the same blood who have
lived in the same house, and, allowing for differences of era, in much
the same way, is already something substantial in the way of background.
The furniture was not more than about a hundred years old, of that
period of solid and dignified ugliness which was yet so much more
satisfactory than the fashions succeeding it that by contrast with them
it is now beginning to acquire merit. How it had come to replace the
eighteenth century furniture which the periwigged gentlemen and hooped
ladies on the walls had used when in the flesh was now forgotten; but it
is only of late years that old furniture has been preferred to new, and
there was nothing remarkable in this. The refurnishing of the
dining-room might very well have been set in hand again since the last
clearing out a hundred years before if it had not been thought that it
would do very well as it was, and that there were more important rooms
to spend money on, if money was to be spent in this way. As a setting
for the family that now used it the room was eloquent of an ancestry
already respectably established, and it told somehow of interests that
were not markedly concerned with the decorations and appointments of a
house. To the Eldridges, their dining-room was the place for the
enjoyment of food and the sociability that went therewith, and it
fulfilled all purposes that could be required of it. It was only in the
matter of large assemblies, of which the great expanse of dark mahogany
and the score or so of well-padded chairs seemed to make perpetual
suggestion, that any incongruity might have been felt. The time for that
was not now. But with the table lessened to the needs of family use and
the space around it thus agreeably increased, the normal occupation of
the room was sufficient for it. Here began the day with the assembling
of those who would go their ways, some together and some apart,
throughout its course, but all with a sense of the nearness of the rest;
and here they would meet twice again before the day was done, to keep
alive one of the best of the good things that English country life has
cherished and made complete--the community of the family.
Colonel Eldridge, after greeting his daughters with a mixture of
formality and affection, occupied himself with his breakfast and the
letters which lay in a little pile beside his plate. It had not been his
habit to deal thus with his correspondence in the days before the war.
He had been more ready to talk then. He would choose a few letters out
of the pile and perhaps discuss them, as Mrs. Eldridge did with hers at
the other end of the table, and leave the rest for afterwards. Now he
went through them all, business letters as well as private, and,
schooled as he was to hide his emotions, he could not always keep from
his face some expression of annoyance, or even dismay. But it was only
in his face that this showed, and his wife and daughters knew that it
was not meant to show at all. By degrees they had learnt to ignore it.
If they addressed him he would always respond, and he would have been
annoyed if they had tried to suit themselves to his moods. He liked to
hear them chattering gaily among themselves, though he was not always
ready to join in their chatter. They were, indeed, the reward that all
his anxieties and schemings brought him. It was the happiness and
freedom of their lives in the home which it behooved him to keep intact
about them that sweetened it to him. But for them there would have been
no anxiety, but only some reduction of opportunities which would still
have left the main interests of his life untouched.
Colonel Eldridge was very neat in his suit of grey tweed, well-cut,
well-brushed, but well-worn, his white stock creaseless, his figure thin
and a little stiff, but not with the stiffness of age, his gold-rimmed
glasses on the ridge of his thin, straight nose, his well-shaped nervous
hands manipulating his papers or the implements of his meal. He was as
different as possible, in outward appearance, from those ancestors of
his whose pictures hung upon the walls; but probably he was very like
them at root. Certainly there was not one who had been more attached to
the house and acres which had been theirs and were now his. He had been
a good soldier, of a limited kind, but he was above all a country
gentleman, and looked thoroughly in his place in this room, which could
only have been found, just as it was, in an English country house.
Mrs. Eldridge also looked thoroughly in place behind the old silver and
china of her equipage. She always came down to breakfast in a state of
apparent content with herself and her surroundings, cool and unruffled
both in dress and demeanour. In the time that was past there had been so
much to look forward to in the day of which this gathering was the
inauguration. Though not, presumably, attached to the life of the
country by the same ties as bound her husband, and enjoying her life
equally when the periodic moves were made to London, she would have
chosen the country rather than the town for permanent residence. The
choice had not been hers, but it had had to be made. Much had gone that
had made life agreeable to her at Hayslope, but much remained. On these
summer mornings it was not so unlike what it had always been to her.
There was the pleasant meal with her husband and her children, whom she
loved; the appointments of the table, in which she never failed to take
pleasure, though she had used them regularly for over twenty years; the
sense of being newly and becomingly dressed; the birds singing in the
garden, which was so fresh and inviting, and with the windows open so
much a part, as it were, of the room itself. Her letters never brought
her worries, as her husband's sometimes brought him--only occasionally a
mild regret for opportunities of which she could no longer take
advantage. But at this time of the day she was not much inclined to want
more than she had. Her domestic duties were immediately in front of her,
and she enjoyed them. She enjoyed them even more than before, for with
fewer servants more depended on her. Only half of her desired the
distractions due to wealth; the rest of her was pure domesticity. She
had never been happier than during the first few years of married life,
before her husband had succeeded his father as Squire of Hayslope. She
was happy now in much the same responsibilities as had then devolved
upon her, had she but known it. In these early hours of the day the
consciousness of what she had lost did not trouble her. Besides,
something might always happen in the long hours before her. She was not
so old as to have lost that sense of the unexpected.
Pamela was happy too. She might grumble sometimes--to Norman--about the
restrictions that had come to spoil the life of Hayslope Hall; but she
loved it. And all the future was before her, golden and glamorous. It
wrapped her in a sort of happy aura, which contained no definite point
of desire. Anything might happen to her, in any one of these summer
days, which began with the family meeting at breakfast. Something was
bound to happen some day, and in the meantime life was sweet, and the
shadow that had come to lie over her home hardly darkened at all the
radiance in which she walked.
Judith was as pretty as Pamela in her way, which was an entirely
different way. She was the only dark member of the family, now that
Hugo was dead. Some forgotten ancestress had bequeathed her her lustrous
hair, of which the shadows were almost visibly blue, and her large,
deep, solemn eyes, her very skin was dark, but with the bloom of youth
on it, and the healthy blood that flowed beneath its soft surface, it
was rich and delicate. At the age of eighteen she had not yet come into
the full heritage of her beauty, which did not depend so much as
Pamela's upon youth. She hardly even seemed aware of it, and clothes
were not yet a matter of much interest to her. She had alternations of
childish high spirits and brooding reflection. Out of doors she was
still something of a tomboy, in her young and restless energy; but she
would sit for hours over a book, and in those moods she was oblivious to
everybody and everything around her. She seldom talked about what she
read, and indeed her reading would have been a puzzle to anyone who had
tried to draw inferences of literary taste from it. Pamela had once
reported to Norman the books over which Judith had spent hours of a wet
day. They were Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Wide, Wide World," and Bacon's
Essays, and she seemed to have spent about the same time over each.
Pamela held that she had no literary taste whatever; Norman was inclined
to treat her preferences as a touchstone of merit. If Judith liked
something, it was probably good. This theory was strengthened when she
said she liked a picture of Gaugin's, of which he submitted to her a
reproduction, and weakened by her absorption in Martin Tupper's
"Proverbial Philosophy," which she had found in the library and carried
up to her room with her. She was quite ready to laugh with them over her
tastes, but she would never give any explanation of them. "I like it,"
or "I don't like it," was her sole contribution to literary criticism,
and she would never be moved a hair's breadth by any consensus of
opinion. Judith went her own way in everything, but her way at present
was confined almost entirely to Hayslope, where she found everything
that she wanted. Less than Pamela did she feel the loss of what had made
the life of her home rich in interest before the war. She had grown up
from childhood under the new conditions and was happy in them.
The exceptional family beauty seemed to have stopped short at Judith.
Alice and Isabelle, who were thirteen and twelve, respectively, had
their abundant fair hair to recommend them, and their active youth, but
nothing much else as yet in the way of looks. They were agreeable
children, much alike in their eager interest in whatever went on around
them, and their unerring pursuit of pleasure. They were always "the
children" to the rest of the family, and what they thought was of small
importance, though what they did sometimes obtruded itself upon their
elders. Sitting at breakfast, one on either side of their mother, in
their neat clothes, which would not be so neat later on in the day,
their thick manes confined in heavy plaits, they seemed eminently _good_
children, showing a healthy appetite, but no greediness, in the
consumption of viands, taking a bright part in the conversation when it
touched their orbit, but not obtruding themselves in such a way as to
make their company noxious. Their presence at the breakfast table
seemed, indeed, to heighten the effect of a family at one and at peace;
for young children in a happy home have no desires outside it. Their
parents, their brothers and sisters, even the servants and dependants
who are also part of the family for the time being, are the chief
characters in their little world. Not even their parents themselves are
so bounded in their interests by the home they have made for them. And
the wonderful imagination of children makes it the chief place of
delight to them, even where its opportunities are small. Opportunities
were not small at Hayslope Hall for these two, and they were as happy as
children of their age could very well be.
If Miss Baldwin, their governess, was not completely happy--as what
woman living always in other people's houses can be?--she was as
contented as the accidents of her lot in life could make her. She was a
precise spinster of middle age, and sat very prim and mindful of her
manners between Pamela and Alice, never speaking unless when spoken to,
but then speaking with an attention to the composition of sentences and
the correct enunciation of her vowels which was a lesson to everybody
present, and intended to be so to at least two of them. Colonel Eldridge
addressed her directly, at least once in the course of every meal at
which she was present, out of politeness. Mrs. Eldridge always found it
difficult to remember that she was there, but also addressed her
occasionally; but her attention was apt to wander over the reply.
Miss Baldwin had been at Hayslope for two years, but was no nearer to
making one of the family circle than when she arrived. She was strict in
the schoolroom and a good teacher in a limited way, but without any real
interest in the subjects which she taught. Nobody would have thought,
from her appearance and manner, that she was an incurable
sentimentalist. She lived in a world of her own--a world of romance, of
which the materials were sent her once a week in official-looking long
envelopes with a typewritten address. Her time came when the children
were in bed, and the life of the house, in which she had no wish to take
part, was concentrated below. Then, in the large quiet schoolroom,
sitting by the open window in the summer, or in winter time by the fire,
she would be wafted away from the actual life about her, with all its
restrictions for one of her age and class, to live richly and freely
with the heroes and heroines of her chosen world. Baldness of narrative
troubled her not at all. In the novels by authors of repute which she
sometimes heard people discussing, there seemed no room for the play of
imagination; the novelist would have it just so and not otherwise, and
the characters to which he introduced his readers were so much like the
characters one might meet at any time in the dull and sterile flesh.
Those strong heroes of her favourite romances were as gods beside the
emasculate earth-dwellers who stood for hero even in the best of stories
bound between boards; the very virtue of their titles, if titles they
had, seemed to be denied them. Nor did the heroines please her any
better. She could never imagine herself one of them with any pleasure.
If stately, they were never stately enough; if blushing and timid, they
were merely passed by as of no account. Even Ouida, for whom she made an
exception, having read some of her novels in early life, under a strong
sense of immodesty, concerned herself with unessentials. Miss Baldwin
wanted no pages of description, however poetic. She could get that in
Wordsworth, duly annotated, so that there should be no mistake as to
locality. If it was question of a garden in which a love scene was to be
enacted, she only wanted to imagine it for herself--the most beautiful
garden that ever was, not without indications of wealth on the part of
its owners; or if a cottage garden, the mere mention of roses and
honeysuckle would suffice. It was the people who mattered and what
happened to them, and with them she smiled and wept, and felt, to the
depths of her being.
So perhaps Miss Baldwin was happy after all, if not in the circumstances
of her daily life, which she went through conscientiously and
efficiently, in that paradise the gates of which were always open to
her, where men were as gods, and women were worshipped by them, and none
of them ever behaved in the way that Miss Baldwin was always impressing
upon her pupils was the only possible way to behave.