THE FIRST STRUGGLE.
Lucy knew nothing of this till the next forenoon after breakfast, and
after the many morning occupations which a lady has in her own house.
She looked wistfully at both her brother and her husband when they met
at table, and it was a great consolation to her, and lightening of her
heart, when she perceived that they were quite at ease with each other;
but still she was burning with curiosity to know what had passed. Sir
Tom had not said a word. He had been just as usual, not even looking a
consciousness of the unexplained question between them. She was glad and
yet half sorry that all was about to blow over, and to be as if it had
not been. After going so far, perhaps it would have been better that it
had gone farther and that the matter had been settled. This she said to
herself in the security of a respite, believing that it had passed away
from Sir Tom's mind. She wanted to know, and yet she was afraid to ask,
for her heart revolted against asking questions of Jock which might
betray to him the fear of a possible quarrel. After she had
superintended little Tom's toilet, and watched him go out for his walk
(for the weather was very mild for the time of the year), and seen Mrs.
Freshwater, the housekeeper, and settled about the dinner, always with a
little quiver of anxiety in her heart, she met Jock by a happy chance,
just as she was about to join Lady Randolph in the drawing-room. She
seized his arm with energy, and drew him within the door of the library;
but after she had done this with an eagerness not to be disguised, Lucy
suddenly remembered all that it was inexpedient for her to betray to
Jock. Accordingly she stopped short, as it were, on the threshold, and
instead of saying as she had intended, "What did he say to you?" dropped
down into the routine question, "Where are you going--were you going
out?"
"I shall some time, I suppose. What do you grip a fellow's arm for like
that? and then when I thought you had something important to say to me,
only asking am I going out?"
"Yes, clear," said Lucy, recovering herself with an effort. "You don't
take enough exercise. I wish you would not be always among the books."
"Stuff, Lucy!" said Jock.
"I am sure Tom thinks the same. He was telling me--now didn't he say
something to you about it last night?"
"That's all bosh," said the boy. "And if you want to know what he said
to me last night, he just said nothing at all, but told me old stories
of school that I've heard a hundred times. These old d---- fellows,"
(Jock did not swear; he was going to say duffers, that was all) "always
talk like that. One would think they had not had much fun in their life
when they are always turning back upon school," Jock added, with fine
sarcasm.
"Oh, only stories about school!" said Lucy with extreme relief. But the
next moment she was not quite so sure that she was comfortable about
this entire ignoring of a matter which Sir Tom had seemed to think so
grave. "What sort of stories?" she said dreamily, pursuing her own
thoughts without much attention to the answer.
"Oh, that old stuff about Ascot and about the old master that stopped
them. It isn't much. I know it," said Jock, disrespectfully, "as well as
I know my a, b, c."
"It is very rude of you to say so, Jock."
"Perhaps it is rude," the boy replied, with candour; but he did not
further explain himself, and Lucy, to veil her mingled relief and
disquietude, dismissed him with an exhortation to go out.
"You read and read," she cried, glad to throw off a little excitement in
this manner, though she really felt very little anxiety on the subject,
"till you will be all brains and nothing else. I wish you would use your
legs a little too." And then, with a little affectionate push away from
her, she left him in undisturbed possession of his books, and the
morning, which, fine as it was, was not bright enough to tempt him away
from them.
Then Lucy pursued her way to the drawing-room: but she had not gone many
steps before she met her husband, who stopped and asked her a question
or two. Had the boy gone out? It was so fine it would do him good, poor
little beggar; and where was her ladyship going? When he heard she was
going to join the Dowager, Sir Tom smilingly took her hand and drew it
within his own. "Then come here with me for a minute first," he said.
And strange to say, Lucy had no fear. She allowed him to have his way,
thinking it was to show her something, perhaps to ask her advice on some
small matter. He took her into a little room he had, full of trophies of
his travels, a place more distinctively his own than any other in the
house. When he had closed the door a faint little thrill of alarm came
over her. She looked up at him wondering, inquiring. Sir Tom took her by
her arms and drew her towards him in the full light of the window. "Come
and let me look at you, Lucy," he said. "I want to see in your eyes what
it is that makes you afraid of me."
She met his eyes with great bravery and self-command, but nothing could
save her from the nervous quiver which he felt as he held her, or from
the tell-tale ebb and flow of the blood from her face. "I--I am not
afraid of you, Tom."
"Then have you ceased to trust me, Lucy? How is it that you discuss the
most important matters with Jock, who is only a boy, and leave me out?
You do not think that can be agreeable to me."
"Tom," she said; then stopped short, her voice being interrupted by the
fluttering of her heart.
"I told you: you are afraid. What have I ever done to make my wife
afraid of me?" he said.
"Oh, Tom, it is not that! it is only that I felt--there has never been
anything said, and you have always done all, and more than all, that I
wished; but I have felt that you were opposed to me in one thing. I may
be wrong, perhaps," she added, looking up at him suddenly with a
catching of her breath.
Sir Tom did not say she was wrong. He was very kind, but very grave. "In
that case," he said, "Lucy, my love, don't you think it would have been
better to speak to me about it, and ascertain what were my objections,
and why I was opposed to you--rather than turn without a word to another
instead of me?"
"Oh!" cried Lucy, "I could not. I was a coward. I could not bear to make
sure. To stand against you, how could I do it? But if you will hear me
out, Tom, I never, never turned to another. Oh! what strange words to
say. It was not another. It was Jock, only Jock; but I did not turn even
to him. It was he who brought it forward, and I---- Now that we have
begun to talk about it, and it cannot be escaped," cried Lucy, with
sudden nervous boldness, freeing herself from his hold, "I will own
everything to you, Tom. Yes, I was afraid. I would not, I could not do
it, for I could feel that you were against it. You never said anything;
is it necessary that you should speak for me to understand you? but I
knew it all through. And to go against you and do something you did not
like was more than I could face. I should have gone on for years,
perhaps, and never had courage for it," she cried. She was tingling all
over with excitement and desperate daring now.
"My darling," said Sir Tom, "it makes me happier to think that it was
not me you were afraid of, but only of putting yourself in opposition to
me; but still, Lucy, even that is not right, you know. Don't you think
that it would be better that we should talk it over, and that I should
show you my objections to this strange scheme you have in your head, and
convince you----"
"Oh!" cried Lucy, stepping back a little and putting up her hands as if
in self-defence, "that was what I was most frightened for."
"What, to be convinced?" he laughed: but his laugh jarred upon her in
her excited state. "Well, that is not at all uncommon; but few people
avow it so frankly," he said.
She looked up at him with appealing eyes. "Oh, Tom," she cried, "I fear
you will not understand me now. I am not afraid to be convinced. I am
afraid of what you will think when you know that I cannot be convinced.
Now," she said, with a certain calm of despair, "I have said it all."
To her astonishment her husband replied by a sudden hug and a laugh.
"Whether you are accessible to reason or not, you are always my dear
little woman," he said. "I like best to have it out. Do you know, Lucy,
that it is supposed your sex are all of that mind? You believe what you
like, and the reason for your faith does not trouble you. You must not
suppose that you are singular in that respect."
To this she listened without any response at all either in words or
look, except, perhaps, a little lifting of her eyelids in faint
surprise; for Lucy was not concerned about what was common to her sex.
Nor did she take such questions at all into consideration. Therefore,
this speech sounded to her irrelevant; and so quick was Sir Tom's
intelligence that, though he made it as a sort of conventional
necessity, he saw that it was irrelevant too. It might have been all
very well to address a clever woman who could have given him back his
reply in such words. But to Lucy's straightforward, simple, limited
intellect such dialectics were altogether out of place. Her very want of
capacity to understand them made them a disrespect to her which she had
done nothing to deserve. He coloured in his quick sense of this, and
sudden perception that his wife in the limitation of her intellect and
fine perfection of her moral nature was such an antagonist as a man
might well be alarmed to meet, more alarmed even than she generously was
to displease him.
"I beg your pardon, Lucy," he said, "I was talking to you as if you were
one of the ordinary people. All this must be treated between you and me
on a different footing. I have a great deal more experience than you
have, and I ought to know better. You must let me show you how it
appears to me. You see I don't pretend not to know what the point was. I
have felt for a long time that it was one that must be cleared up
between you and me. I never thought of Jock coming in," he said with a
laugh. "That is quite a new and unlooked-for feature; but begging his
pardon, though he is a clever fellow, we will leave Jock out of the
question. He can't be supposed to have much knowledge of the world."
"No," said Lucy, with a little suspicion. She did not quite see what
this had to do with it, nor what course her husband was going to adopt,
nor indeed at all what was to follow.
"Your father's will was a very absurd one," he said.
At this Lucy was slightly startled, but she said after a moment, "He did
not think what hard things he was leaving me to do."
"He did not think at all, it seems to me," said Sir Tom; "so far as I
can see he merely amused himself by arranging the world after his
fashion, and trying how much confusion he could make. I don't mean to
say anything unkind of him. I should like to have known him: he must
have been a character. But he has left us a great deal of botheration.
This particular thing, you know, that you are driving yourself crazy
about is sheer absurdity, Lucy. Solomon himself could not do it,--and
who are you, a little girl without any knowledge of the world, to see
into people's hearts, and decide whom it is safe to trust?"
"You are putting more upon me than poor papa did, Tom," said Lucy, a
little more cheerfully. "He never said, as we do in charities, that it
was to go to deserving people. I was never intended to see into their
hearts. So long as they required it and got the money, that was all he
wanted."
"Well, then, my dear," said Sir Tom, "if your father in his great sense
and judgment wanted nothing but to get rid of the money, I wonder he did
not tell you to stand upon Beachy Head or Dover Cliff on a certain day
in every year and throw so much of it into the sea--to be sure," he
added with a laugh, "that would come to very much the same thing--for
you can't annihilate money, you can only make it change hands--and the
London roughs would soon have found out your days for this wise purpose
and interrupted it somehow. But it would have been just as sensible.
Poor little woman! Here I am beginning to argue, and abusing your poor
father, whom, of course, you were fond of, and never so much as offering
you a chair! There is something on every one of them, I believe. Here,
my love, here is a seat for you," he said, displacing a box of
curiosities and clearing a corner for her by the fire. But Lucy resisted
quietly.
"Wouldn't it do another time, Tom?" she said with a little anxiety, "for
Aunt Randolph is all by herself, and she will wonder what has become of
me; and baby will be coming back from his walk." Then she made a little
pause, and resumed again, folding her hands, and raising her mild eyes
to his face. "I am very sorry to go against you, Tom. I think I would
rather lose all the money altogether. But there is just one thing, and
oh, do not be angry! I must carry out papa's will if I were to die!"
Her husband, who had begun to enter smilingly upon this discussion, with
a certainty of having the best of it, and who had listened to her
smilingly in her simple pleas for deferring the conversation, pleas
which he was very willing to yield to, was so utterly taken by surprise
at this sudden and most earnest statement, that he could do nothing but
stare at her, with a loud alarmed exclamation, "Lucy!" and a look of
utter bewilderment in his face. But she stood this without flinching,
not nervous as many a woman might have been after delivering such a
blow, but quite still, clasping her hands in each other, facing him with
a desperate quietness. Lucy was not insensible to the tremendous nature
of the utterance she had just made.
"This is surprising, indeed, Lucy," cried Sir Tom. He grew quite pale in
that sensation of being disobeyed, which is one of the most disagreeable
that human nature is subject to. He scarcely knew what to reply to a
rebellion so complete and determined. To see her attitude, the look of
her soft girlish face (for she looked still younger than her actual
years), the firm pose of her little figure, was enough to show that it
was no rash utterance, such as many a combatant makes, to withdraw from
it one hour after. Sir Tom, in his amazement, felt his very words come
back to him; he did not know what to say. "Do you mean to tell me," he
said, almost stammering in his consternation, "that whatever I may think
or advise, and however mad this proceeding may be, you have made up your
mind to carry it out whether I will or not?"
"Tom! in every other thing I will do what you tell me. I have always
done what you told me. You know a great deal better than I do, and never
more will I go against you; but I knew papa before I knew you. He is
dead; I cannot go to him to ask him to let me off, to tell him you don't
like it, or to say it is more than I can do. If I could I would do that.
But he is dead: all that he can have is just that I should be faithful
to him. And it is not only that he put it in his will, but I gave him my
promise that I would do it. How could I break my promise to one that is
dead, that trusted in me? Oh, no, no! It will kill me if you are angry;
but even then, even then, I must do what I promised to papa."
The tears had risen to her eyes as she spoke: they filled her eyelids
full, till she saw her husband only through two blinding seas: then they
fell slowly one after another upon her dress: her face was raised to
him, her features all moving with the earnestness of her plea. The
anguish of the struggle against her heart, and desire to please him, was
such that Lucy felt what it was to be faithful till death. As for Sir
Tom, it was impossible for such a man to remain unmoved by emotion so
great. But it had never occurred to him as possible that Lucy could
resist his will, or, indeed, stand for a moment against his injunction;
he had believed that he had only to say to her, "You must not do it,"
and that she would have cried, but given way. He felt himself utterly
defeated, silenced, put out of consideration. He did nothing but stare
and gasp at her in his consternation; and, more still, he was betrayed.
Her gentleness had deceived him and made him a fool; his pride was
touched, he who was supposed to have no pride. He stood silent for a
time, and then he burst out with a sort of roar of astonished and angry
dismay.
"Lucy, do you mean to tell me that you will disobey me?" he cried.