L A D Y C A R
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SPOTTISWOODE & CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

LADY CAR

T H E S E Q U E L O F A L I F E
BY
MRS OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF ‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD’ ETC.
NEW EDITION
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1890
All rights reserved

LADY CAR
THE SEQUEL OF A LIFE

CHAPTER I

Lady Caroline Beaufort was supposed to be, as life goes, an unusually fortunate woman. It is true that things had not always gone well with her. In her youth she had been married almost by force—as near it as anything ever is in an age when parental tyranny is of course an anachronism—to a man unlike herself in every way—an uncultured, almost uncivilised, rich boor of the neighbourhood, the descendant of a navvy who had become a millionaire, and who inherited all the characteristics of his race along with their money, although he had never known anything of navvydom, but had been born a Scotch country gentleman with a great estate. It is to be supposed that her father and mother believed it to be for her real good when they placed poor Car, fainting with fright and horror, in the arms of a man whose manners made even them wince, though they were forced into no such constant contact with him, for they were far from being wicked parents or bad people in any way. There is nothing in the world so difficult to understand as the motives which lead fathers and mothers to such acts, not so common as they used to be, yet not so rare as they ought to be. They think, perhaps, that a little aversion at first tells for next to nothing in the long run, and that an affectionate, gentle creature, submissive to law and custom, will end by loving any man who belongs to her, or having at least some sort of sentiment which will answer for love; and that, on the other hand, no fantastic passion of youth is to be trusted to surmount all the risks of life in the lottery of marriage, which affords so many changed points of view; whereas wealth is a solid and unchangeable good which outlives every sentiment. These, I suppose, were the conclusions of Lord and Lady Lindores when they married their daughter to Mr. Thomas Torrance—or, rather, these were the conclusions of the Earl, in which his wife concurred very doubtfully, and with much reluctance, rather failing in courage to support her child in any effort for liberty than helping to coerce her. If Lord Lindores was determined as to the value of wealth, Lady Lindores was one of those women who have come to the silent conclusion that nothing is of any great value, and that life has no prizes at all. What does it matter? she was in the habit of saying to herself. She did not believe in happiness—a little less comfort or a little more was scarcely worth struggling for; and no doubt, as Lord Lindores said, wealth was one of the few really solid and reliable things in the world, a thing with which many minor goods could be purchased—relief to the poor, which was always a subject of satisfaction, and other alleviations of life. Lady Car was sacrificed to these tenets. But Providence had been good to her: and while she was still young her husband had died. If he did not justify Lord Lindores’ expectations in his life he did in his death. For he left everything in his wife’s hands; not only had she the excellent jointure which her settlements secured her—a jointure without any mean and petty clause about marrying again—but everything was left in her hands—the control of the property during little Tom’s minority, and almost every advantage which a queen-mother could have. Tom was a little fellow of six, so that a long period of supremacy was in Carry’s hands, and the rough fellow whom she had almost hated, from whom her very soul had shrunk with a loathing indescribable, had done her the fullest justice. It is doubtful whether Lady Car was at all touched by these evidences of devotion on the part of a man who had bullied and oppressed her for years. But she was startled into violent and passionate compunction, extraordinary in so gentle a person, by the still wilder and more impassioned joy which swept over her soul when she heard of his sudden death. Poor Lady Car had not been able to resist that flood of exultation which took possession of her against her will. What did she want with his money? He was dead and she was free. It filled her with a guilty, boundless delight, and then with compunction beyond expression, as she tried to return from that wild joy and took herself to task.

And then, after a very short interval, she had married again; she had married what in the earlier years of the century people called the man of the heart—the lover of old days who had been dropped, who had been ignored when Lord Lindores came to his title and the prospects of the family had changed. How much Lady Caroline knew or did not know of the developments through which Mr. Beaufort had passed in the meantime no one ever discovered. She found him much as he had been when her family had dropped him, only not so young. A man who had made no way, a man without reproach, yet without success, who had kept stationary all the time, and was still a man of promise when his contemporaries had attained all that they were likely to attain. Beaufort was poor, but Lady Car was now rich. There was not the least reason why they should not marry unless he had been fantastic and refused to do so on account of her superior wealth. But he had no such idiotic idea. So that Lady Car was considered by most people, especially those who had a turn for the sentimental, as a very lucky woman. There had been the Torrance episode when she had not been happy, and which had left her the mother of two children, destined, perhaps, some time or other, to give her trouble. But they were children amply provided for, and she had an excellent jointure, and had been able to marry at thirty the man of her heart. She was a very lucky woman, more fortunate than most—far more fortunate than three parts of those women who make, compulsorily or otherwise, ill-assorted marriages to begin with. In very few cases indeed does the undesirable husband die, leaving his wife so much money as that, unburdened by any condition as to marrying again; and very seldom indeed does the woman so happily left pick up again in the nick of time her first love, and find him unchanged. It was quite a romantic story, and pleased people: for, however worldly minded we may be, we all like to hear of a fortunate chance like this, and that all is well that ends well, and that the hero and heroine live happy ever after, which was the conclusion in this case.

The first part of Lady Car’s history has been written before: but probably the reader remembers nothing of it, and no one would blame him; for it is an old story, and a great many episodes of that human history which we call fiction have been presented to his attention since then. She was tall, of a pliant, willowy figure, soft grey eyes, and an abundance of very soft light-brown hair. Her complexion was pale but clear, and her nose a trifle, the merest trifle, longer than the majority of noses. This conduced greatly (though I don’t deny that it was a defect) to the general impression made by Lady Caroline, who was what is called aristocratic in appearance from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot. It was the grand distinction, an air such as some of the humblest-minded and most simple of women often have of that ethereal superiority of race which we all believe in. As a matter of fact, her brother, Lord Rintoul, had a great deal less distinction in his appearance than many a poor clerk. But Lady Car might have been a princess in her own right, and so, to be sure, she was. Unfortunately, I am obliged to describe her to begin with, since it is impossible to bring her forward in her own person until I have told a little of her story. She was amazingly, passionately happy in her second marriage—at first. If she saw any drawbacks she closed her eyes to them, as passionately determined to admit nothing that went against her bliss—but perhaps she did not see anything. And, after all, there was not much to see. Mr. Beaufort was a gentleman. He was a man of great cultivation of mind, an excellent scholar, understanding every literary allusion that could be made, never at a loss for a happy phrase or quotation, quite an exceptional man in the way of culture and accomplishment. He was extremely good-looking, his manners were admirable, his character without reproach. Nothing seemed wanting in him that a woman could desire. And, notwithstanding the uncomfortable episode of her first marriage, and the two black-browed children, who had not a feature of their mother’s, he was Lady Car’s only love, and, so far as anybody knows, or as was ever known, she was his. By how many devious ways a pair may be led who are destined to meet at last! He in various wanderings over the world; she, in the blank of her dreadful life, through all her martyrdoms, had all the time been tending to this. And now they were happy at last.

‘No,’ she said, ‘Edward; don’t let us settle down; I can’t: a house would not contain me. I want the grand air, as the French say. I should be making horrible comparisons, I should be thinking’—she stopped with a shiver—‘of the past. Let us go abroad. I have not been abroad since we were parted; it will look like taking up the story where it dropped.’

Beaufort gave a half-conscious glance towards the spot outside where the black-browed children were playing. He felt, perhaps, that it would not be so easy to take up the story where it had dropped; but he assented, with quiet gentleness soothing her. ‘I am always fond of wandering. I have done little else all my life—and with you!’

‘Yes, with you!’ she repeated. She was accustomed to the children, and did not think of the anachronism of their presence at the moment of taking up the story. ‘You shall take me to all the new places where you have been alone, and we’ll go to the old places where we were that summer together; we’ll go everywhere and see everything, and then when all the novelty is exhausted we shall come back and make a home of our own. And then, Edward, you shall be left free for your work. How we used to talk of it that summer! You have not done much to it yet?’

‘Nothing at all,’ he said, with something like a blush.

‘So much the better,’ cried Lady Car. ‘I should have been jealous had you done it without me—you could not do it without me. You shall not touch a pen while we are away, but observe everything, and investigate mankind in all aspects, and then we’ll come home—and then, Edward, what care I shall take that you are not disturbed—how shall I watch and keep off every care! You shall have no trouble about anything, no noises or foolish interruption, no one to disturb you but me. And I will be no interruption.’

‘Never, my love,’ he said fervently; but this was the only thing to which he responded clearly. He had not, perhaps, the same intentions about that great work as once he had. He did not see it in the same light; but it gave him a certain pleasure to see her enthusiasm. It surprised him, indeed, that she could be capable of that enthusiasm just as if the story had never dropped. Women, sweet souls! are so strange. There had been nothing in his life so definite as the Torrance marriage and the black-browed children; but yet she was capable of taking up the dropped story just where it had been thrown aside. So far as love went he felt himself capable of that too, but then he had not dropped the love when the story was dropped. Whereas she—In all these records there was something to be got over with a faint uneasiness, to be ignored if possible. He could not return with the same unity of mind as she displayed to the half-forgotten things of the past. But he was sure that her presence would never be any interruption, and he was pleased to fall into her eager, delightful plans, and to think of wandering with her wherever two people can wander, and when the two people are man and wife that is virtually everywhere. He was very ready for that dream of life.

Besides, if there is anything out of the way in the conditions of a new beginning, it is always a good thing to go abroad. Little anomalies which stand out from the surface of quiet life at home look so much less in the atmosphere of strange places and among the varieties of travel. The best way to forget that there has been once a great gap between two who are to be one, and a lifetime passed by each in surroundings so different, is to go far away and make new joint associations for each which will bridge over that severance. Neither of them gave this reason: she, perhaps, because she was unconscious of it; he, because he had no desire to state the case either to the world or to her—or even to himself. He was, in his way, with the many precautions which he had taken to keep disagreeable subjects at a distance, a genuine philosopher in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

Accordingly they went abroad, for something more than the longest honeymoon, the black-browed children accompanying them more or less, that is, they performed certain journeys in the wake of the pair, and were settled here and there, at suitable centres, with all the attendance of skilled nurses and governesses which wealth makes it so easy to procure, while Lady Car and her husband pursued their further way, never altogether out of reach. She never forgot she was a mother even in the first rapture of her new happiness. And he was very good to the children. At their early age most children are amusing, and Mr. Beaufort was eminently gentle and kind. His wife’s eyes shone when she saw him enter into their little lives as if they had been his own. What a thing for them to have such a man from whom to derive their first ideas of what a man should be! What a thing! She stopped and shuddered when she realised her own meaning; and yet how true it was—that the instructor they might have had, the example, the warning, the man who was their father, had been taken away, to leave the room open for so much better a teacher, for a perfect example, for one who would be a real father to them! Poor children! Lady Car felt for them something of the conventional pity for the fatherless even in the midst of the swelling of her heart over this great gift that had come to them. Their father indeed!

The years of the honeymoon flew like so many days of happiness. They went almost everywhere where a sea voyage was not indispensable, for Lady Car was a very bad sailor. They avoided everything that could have been troublesome or embarrassing in the conversations, and were quite old married people, thoroughly used to each other, and to all their mutual diversities of feeling and ways of thinking, before they returned home. They were both vaguely aware that the homecoming would be a trying moment, but not enough so to be afraid of it or resist the conviction that the time had come when it was no longer possible to put it off. It was before they returned home, however, in the first consultations over their future dwelling, that the first real divergence of opinion arose.

CHAPTER II

‘We must think of where we are going to live,’ Lady Car said; ‘we have never discussed that question. The world is all before us where to choose——’

The boat lay faintly rocking upon the little wavelets from which the ruddy reflection of the sunset was just fading. The beautiful outline of the mountains on the Savoy side stood out blue and half-cold against the glowing west, the Dent du Midi had still a flush of rose colour upon its pinnacles, but had grown white and cold too in the breadth of its great bosom. Evening was coming on, and, though there was still little chill in the air, the sentiment of the September landscape was cold. That suspicion of coming winter which tells the birds so distinctly that it is time to be gone breathed a hint to-night into human faculties more obtuse. Carry threw her shawl round her with a little shiver which was quite fantastic and unnecessary. She did not really mean that it began to be cold, but only that something had made her think of a fireside.

He was seated in front of her with his oars resting idly in the rowlocks. It was a lovely night, and they were close to their temporary home, within a few minutes of the shore. ‘Where we are going to live?’ he said. ‘Then you don’t think of going to your own house.’

She started a little. He would never have found it out had they been on solid ground, but the boat responded to every movement. It was only from this that he knew he had startled her, for she recovered herself immediately, and said, ‘Would you like that, Edward?’ in a voice which she evidently meant to be as easy as usual, but from which consciousness was not altogether banished.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘my love, it will be the time of year for Scotland, and I suppose there is plenty of game; but I neither like nor dislike, Car. I have not thought about it. I suppose I had taken it for granted that your own house would be the place to which you would go.’

‘I never thought of it as my own home,’ she said, in a low, hurried tone, which he could scarcely hear. ‘Oh, no, no. I could not go there.’

‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, ‘then of course we sha’n’t go there. I don’t care where we go; wherever you are, there is my home. I had not known one till I had you: it is for you to choose.’

She said nothing more for a time, but leant a little over the side of the boat, putting down her hand into the darkening ripples. ‘After all, the lake is as warm as if it were summer still,’ she said. It was she who had introduced the subject, but something had blown across her, a breath from the past, which had taken all the pleasure out of it. She shivered a little again, with a contradictoriness of which she was unaware. ‘There must have been snow somewhere, I think, up among the hills.’

‘It is you who are blowing hot and cold, Carry,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I think myself it is a perfect evening. Look at the last steamer, passing along against the line of the hills, with its lights, and crammed with tourists from stem to stern. Shall we go in? There’s time enough before it gets here, but I know you don’t like the wash.’

‘I don’t like anything that agitates the water, or anything else, perhaps.’

‘Not so bad as that; it is I who am most tolerant of the dead level. You like a little agitation, or commotion, or what shall I call it?’

‘Do you think so, Edward? No, I love calm; I am most fond of peace, the quiet lake, and the still country, and everything that goes softly.’

‘My love,’ he said, ‘you like what is best always, and the best has always movement in it. You never liked monotony. Let things go softly, yes, but let them go; whereas I can do very well without movement. I like to lie here and let the water sway us where it pleases; you want me to take the oars and move as we will.’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a soft laugh, ‘perhaps I do. You see through me, but not altogether,’ she added, with another hasty movement, betrayed once more by the boat.

‘No, not altogether,’ he said, with a look which, in the gathering dimness of the twilight, she did not perceive. Besides, his head was turned away, and his mind also. She hoped indeed he did not, he would never divine the almost horror that had sprung up in her at the idea which he had taken so calmly, that of going back to what he called her own house. Her own house! it had never been hers. She thought that she would never go back then to a place full of the old life that was past, thank God! yet never could be quite past so long as her recollection so ached at the thought of it. It seemed to Lady Car that if she went back she might find that he was still there, and that everything that had been since was but a dream.

The night falls faster in these regions than in the lingering North. It was almost dark already, though so short a time since the sun set. The steamer came rustling along, more audible than visible, a bustling shadow against the opal gleam of the water and the cold blue of the hills, with its little bright lights like jewels, and swift progress, throbbing along through the heart of the twilight. Lights began to appear in the windows of the tall houses along the bank. The night was gradually stealing into the vacant place of the day. The steamer came on with a rush of purpose and certain destruction, and roused her from her thoughts to a little nervous tremor. ‘I wish you would take the oars, Edward, as you say, and let us go in, please. I know it will do us no harm; but——’

‘You are frightened all the same,’ he said, leisurely settling to the oars.

‘It is like a spirit of evil,’ she cried.

He took the boat in, making haste to free her from that little nervous thrill of apprehension, though with a laugh. She was aware that she was fantastic in somethings, and that he was aware of it. It was a little imperfection that did no harm. A woman is the better of having these little follies. He felt a fond superiority as he rowed her in with a few strokes, amused at her sense of danger. And it was not till some time later, after they had climbed a somewhat rugged path to their villa among the trees, and had looked into the room where little Janet lay fast asleep, and then had supped cheerfully at a table close to the broad window, that the subject was resumed. By this time all the noises were stilled, a full moon was rising slowly, preparing to march along the sky in full majesty in the midst of the silent tranquillity of the night; there was not a breath of air stirring, not a cloud upon the blue heavens, which were already almost as clear as day by the mere resplendence of her coming over the solid mountains, with their many peaks, which ‘stepped along the deep.’ The steamer had rustled away to its resting-place, wherever that was. The tourists had found shelter in the hotels, which shone with their many lights along the edge of the lake. These big caravansaries were unseen from the villa, all that was noisy and common was out of sight; the lake all still, not a boat out, with a silver line of ripples making a straight but broken line across the large glimmer of its surface; the dark hills opposite, with a silver touch here and there, and the great open-eyed, abundant moon above looking down upon them, they and she the only things living in that wonderful space which was all beauty and calm. They sat looking out for some time without saying anything. Such a night is in itself a sort of ecstasy, especially to those who want nothing, and with whom, as with the whole apparent world stretched out before them, all is well.

‘And to think we shall have to leave all this presently and enter into the fret and care of settling down!’ he said, with a half-laugh. ‘I interrupted you, dear, to-night when you were talking of that. I suppose it was I that diverted your thoughts. Since it is not to be your Towers, where is it to be?’

‘Not my Towers,’ she said, with a little half-reproachful look at him and a sudden clasping together of her lightly interlaced fingers.

‘Well, let us say Tom’s Towers; but in present circumstances it is very much the same.’

Once more a little shiver ran over her, though there was no chill at all in the soft air that came in from the lake and the moonlight. But her voice was a little uncertain with it, as if her teeth had chattered. ‘Don’t talk of it,’ she said; ‘I want no Towers. I want not a place at all, or any quarters, but a house, a pretty house, just big enough for us and them, somewhere, wherever you would like, Edward.’

‘I shall like what you like,’ he said.

‘But that is not what I wish at all; I want you to tell me what will please you. You would like to be within reach of the great libraries, within reach of what is going on. No one can write what is to live without being within reach——’

He shook his head. ‘You are too partial in your estimate of what I am likely to do; so long as I am within reach of you—and thank God nothing can put me out of that!—I don’t know that I care for anything more.’

‘That is what I should say, Edward,’ she said, with some vehemence, ‘not you. Do you think I am such a silly woman as to wish you to be entirely occupied with me? No, no; that is the woman’s part.’

‘Well,’ he said, with his usual soft laugh, ‘mine is the feminine rôle, you know, to a great extent. Fortunately, my disposition quite chimes in with it.’

‘What do you mean by the feminine rôle?’

‘My love, I don’t mean anything. I mean that life was too many for me when you and I were parted. I was the divided half, don’t you know, “of such a friendship as had mastered time.” Being sundered from my mate, time mastered me: I took to floating, as you don’t like to do, even on the lake.’

‘Edward,’ she cried, ‘if anything could make it more dreadful to me to think of that time, it would be hearing you speak so.’

‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘there is no occasion; after all, neither time nor anything else masters one if it is not in one’s nature. You think too well of me, Carry. Some people are made to float.’

‘And what was I then?’ she said. ‘I was swept away. I could not resist the force against me. It was worse for me, oh! far worse, Edward, than for you. I was caught by the torrent: there was no floating in my case. Perhaps you will say I was made to be carried away.’

‘My darling,’ he said, ‘that’s all over and past. Don’t let us think of what is done with. Here we are now, two people, not very old, quite able to enjoy all the good things of this life, and who have got them, thank Heaven! in a large share. What would you and I have attained with all the fighting possible, compared to the happiness of being together, having each other’s constant company? And we have got that, with many pretty things besides,’ he added, with his gentle laugh.

Lady Car felt the words like a flood pouring to her lips, but she was silent; how could she speak? Did it never occur to him how these pretty things were attained—how it was that he and she sat out here by this window looking out upon Lake Leman and the moonlight in circumstances such as only rich people can secure, both of them to start with being so poor—how it was that they had been able to wander about together, a pair of lovers, for years, with all the accessories of happiness as well as the happiness itself? She clasped her slight fingers together till the pressure hurt; but she said nothing, having nothing—having far too much to say. Such thoughts had glanced across her mind before, faintly, for a moment. She could not have told why they had become so much more vivid now. It was, no doubt, because of the change which was about to take place in their life, the giving up of the wandering, the settling down. Her thoughts carried her away altogether as she sat gazing out with vacant eyes at the lake and the moonlight, forgetting where she was and that she had an answer to make to the question addressed to her. At last her husband’s gentle voice, so refined and soft, startled her back to the reality of the moment.

‘You don’t say anything, Carry. If I were of a jealous temper I might ask whether, perhaps, you were beginning to doubt? but I don’t, I don’t, my love; you need not defend yourself. We both know that is the best that life could give us, and it has come to us almost without an effort. Isn’t it so? For my part, I’ve got all I want, and the rest of the circumstances are indifferent to me—where we live or what we do—you in my house and my home—and my occupation—and my content. I want no more.’

Could anything be said more sweet to a woman? According to all the conventionalities, no—according to many of the most natural feelings, no. What could be better than each other’s constant society, to be together always, to share everything, to own no thought that was not within the charmed circle of their happiness? As he said these words slowly, with little pauses between, she took in all the sweetness of them, with a commentary in her mind that was not sweet, an impatience which scarcely could be controlled, a blank sensation as of impossibility which held back the impatience. Was there not something more to be said—something more?

Mr. Beaufort had lit his cigarette, which was so habitual to him, so completely the breath of his reflective leisure and gentleness and calm, that the most sensitive of women could not have objected to it; nothing so aggressive as a cigar ever touched his lips, as little as any lady could he tolerate a pipe. The little curl of blue smoke, the pungent but aromatic odour, the very attitude of the shapely hand holding it, were characteristic. The smoke curled softly upwards from his soft brown beard and moustache. He was a very handsome man, handsomer in his way than Carry, whose nose was a trifle too long and her mobile lips a trifle too thin. She was, indeed, a little too thin altogether, whereas he was perfect in the fullness of his manhood, just over forty, but as young and strong as, and enjoying his youth and strength more than, at twenty-five. She looked at him and was silent. Is not a man better than a woman at that age above all? Is not he more likely to have discovered the real secret of life? Was not he better able to judge than Carry, a creature who had never been wise, who had been hurried, passive, through so many horrors, and dragged out of a tragedy of awful life, to be landed at last on this pleasant shore? Surely, seeing it must be so, her troubled mind made a wild circle from the point where they had parted until this, when they were one, and for a moment, in the dimness behind his chair, it seemed to Lady Car that she saw a spectre rise. She almost thought a shadowy face looked at her over Beaufort’s head—a face black-browed, with big, light, fiery eyes, burning as she had often seen them burn—the same eyes that were closed in sleep in little Janet’s crib—the same that sometimes gloomed out from her little boy’s dark countenance. Her faithful recollection made his picture on the air while Beaufort took dainty puffs of his cigarette. He had no such ghost to daunt him, his memory was pure and calm, while hers was filled with that dreadful shadow, and with reason, for without that shadow this happiness could never have been. What a thought for a woman—what a thought! and to think that it should never once cross the imagination of the man who was enjoying all the other had lost—all and so much more, and that but for the other this happiness could never have been!

These thoughts came like a wave over Carry while she sat with her fingers clasped tight, arrested, dumb, incapable of any reply. What a blessed thing that even one’s nearest and dearest cannot divine the quick thoughts that come and go, the visions that flash across us, while we sit by their side and reveal nothing! If Beaufort could have seen that black-browed spectre, and realised all that Torrance had brought for him, would he have maintained that attitude of thoughtful leisure, that calm of assured satisfaction and happiness? To be sure he did know; there was no secret in it; everybody knew. There was nothing wrong, no guilt, nothing to blush for. The shame was all fanciful, as was that sense of her husband’s strange obtuseness and want of perception which had seized upon Carry, as if they had been horrible things, when they were quite innocent, natural things, which she ought to have most desired for him. It was curious, too, to think that between two people who loved each other so, who were so entirely in sympathy, one could be so unimpressed by the feelings of the other; that the air should be so full for her of ghosts, of passion, and misery past, of the strange, horrible thought that it was by those passions and miseries that she had purchased both for him and herself this calm, and yet that he should divine nothing, but think it only a light question of locality, of where to settle down, of a desirable neighbourhood! Apparently the lightness of the decision they had to make, its entirely unimportant character, struck him as he lay back in his chair with his face towards the lake and the moonlight, and the faint blue curl of fragrant smoke rising in the air. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said suddenly, with a laugh, ‘to facilitate this tremendous decision. We’ll take a succession of houses in different places, and find out by experiment which we like best.’

She brought herself back to the triviality of the discussion with a gasp, as if she had fallen, and with a great effort to dismiss those other thoughts. ‘But that would be no better than travelling,’ she said, ‘of which I am a little tired. I want a home of my own, a house which belongs to no one else,’ she added, with a slight shiver, ‘but you and me, Edward, no ghosts of other people in it.’

‘Do you call their little pictures ghosts?’ he said, looking round at the dim walls, which were hung with portraits of the Swiss family to whom the villa belonged; ‘not lovely ones certainly, but quite innocent. Then, Carry my love, do just as you please. I shall come with you, like Tom and Janet, to see the new place. If you choose one that’s very ugly and out of the way, we will all protest. But, so far as I am concerned, it can’t be ugly while you are there,’ he said, putting his hands upon hers with a tender pressure. Then added, with a look of solicitude, putting away the cigarette, ‘Why, you are in a fever, Carry. Your poor little hands are like fire. I hope you haven’t taken cold on the lake.’

‘I never take cold,’ she said, smiling. ‘I suppose it is mere silliness, thinking that this time is over, and that we are going back to the world.’

‘If that vexes you, my darling, don’t let us go back to the world.’

‘Edward, you make me wild, you are so indifferent! You speak as if nothing mattered, as if we could go on and just please ourselves and think of nothing else for ever.’

‘Well, my love, I tell you nothing matters to me except yourself, and I don’t think the world would mind much. But don’t be vexed, Carry. I know the boy must go to school and all the rest of it. We’ll do our duty like men—I mean like women, which is far more thorough. And, for my part, I’m not a bit afraid of the world. Even London I can face quite tranquilly with you by my side, especially as at this time of the year there’s nobody there.’

‘Oh, Edward!’ she said, with a tender exasperation; ‘it is very soothing to be everything in the world to the man you love; and yet——’

CHAPTER III

They all came home, as people say—though it was no home to which they were coming, and they had been very much at home in their Swiss villa, notwithstanding the portraits of the Swiss owners of the place on all the walls. It is very delightful after a long absence to come home when that familiar place is open and waiting for you, and the children run about the rooms in a tumult of joy, recognising everything, and you settle into your old chair, in your old corner, as if you had never been away. It is quite a different thing when a family comes home to settle down. Looking for a house is apt to be a weary operation, and a small house in London in autumn, in the meantime, is not very gay. But, on the other hand, in October London is not the dismal place it often appears to the stranger: there are still days of bright and sunny weather; the brown grass in the parks has begun to recover itself a little, the trees grow red and yellow, and lend a little light of their own to supplement the skies. Though St. James’s Park is rarely more than in monotone, like a drawing in sepia, the wider breadths between the Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner are brighter, and there is a little stir in the air of people coming back. It was rather a depressed and downcast family party that arrived after a brief but rough crossing of the Channel and all the wear and tear of the journey—Lady Car very pale, with lines on her forehead that showed all the freshly awakened anxiety with which the sight of her native country, involving, as it did, the renewing of many responsibilities and of life in its commonplace aspect after a long holiday, had filled her; little Janet, very fretful and tired, almost paler than her mother, with her black brow and black hair, and big blue lips accentuating the whiteness of her face; Tom, distracted with the confinement and the impossibility of any play or commotion beyond that which could be carried on within the limited space of a railway carriage, exasperated and exasperating; and an attendant group of tired maids, rendered half frantic by his pranks and the impossibility of keeping him in order. Mr. Beaufort had an immense superiority amid this group. He had not turned a hair, the rough crossing had no effect upon him. He was very kind to little Janet, who had succumbed, and was quietly miserable, lying on a bench, and he took the tenderest care of his wife, who never at the worst moment lost her air of distinction or was humbled to a common level even by the waves of the Channel. His tall figure, in a long ulster, with his fine brown beard blowing a little in the wind, his cigarette always giving forth a curl of dainty smoke, was a comfort to see, even at a distance, facing the breeze at the other end of the ship. Tom, who would not be kept down, clung to his stepfather, whom on other occasions he showed no great love for, trotting after him, standing in his shelter, with little legs set well apart, and now and then a clutch at the ulster to steady himself, characteristically selecting the most sturdy member of the party to hold by. When the party tumbled into the hotel in the winterly evening, half dazed with fatigue, Beaufort was still the master of the situation. He was quite fresh and self-possessed. Coming back to England, which oppressed Lady Car with so many thoughts, did not affect him any more than crossing to Paris, or to Vienna, or to any other capital. The fact of beginning a new chapter of existence did not affect him. He felt it, indeed, to be no new chapter of existence, only a continuance of the former. He was pleased enough to arrive, not sorry to end the wandering, glad enough to settle down. It meant rather rest to him than any excitement of a new beginning. He was half amused at and altogether indulgent and tolerant of Carry’s fancy about not going to her own house. It was, perhaps, a little absurd, for Scotland, of course, was the right place to go to at this time of the year; and to look for a new house in a new place, when a house that belongs to you, in the most eligible position, is standing vacant, was, no doubt, a strange caprice. But if that was how she felt, far should it be from him to cross her. He was not a great sportsman. A day or two’s shooting, even a week or two, perhaps, could not harm any man, but he did not very much care if he never touched a gun. Still it was so obvious that it was the natural place to go to. He smiled to himself as he walked to the club after dinner, taking himself off that she might get to bed, to the rest she wanted so much, at this caprice of hers. Dear Carry, if it had been a much greater matter, so far as he was concerned, she should have her way; but he allowed to himself, with a smile, that it was a little silly. When you have been married for a time you are able to allow this without any derogation to your divinity. He admired and loved her as much as a man could do, but it was a pleasure to feel that a little indulgence had to be exercised, to mingle now and then with his chivalrous reverence and love. He would do nothing to cross her. She should get her house where she pleased, furnish it—with some aid from his own taste—how she pleased, and be happy as she would. He smiled as he walked along the familiar streets; it was a pleasure to be in London again. It was a pleasure to be so well off, he who had often been poorly enough off, doubtful sometimes whether he could afford to order his dinner at the club. All that was over now, and he had no objection to owe it to his wife. What did it matter which of them had the money? Had he possessed it, how gladly would he have spent it upon Carry, to give her everything that heart could desire! This is, when one comes to think of it, the real generosity, the most noble way of taking such a matter. To think that it was not Carry’s money, but the money of Torrance, that made everything so comfortable for them, happily did not dwell in his mind as it did in hers. He did not even think of it—it was so of course, and of course she had purchased this competence which she shared with her second husband by being an excellent wife to the previous husband, and winning his trust and confidence. Mr. Beaufort luckily did not feel that there was any reason for dwelling upon that side of the question.

Next morning the whole party was revived and cheerful. The children, when they burst into the room, after a long enforced waiting in the temporary nursery which looked to the back, and from which they saw nothing but chimneys and the backs of other houses, rushed to the large window of the room in which Lady Car was breakfasting, with a scream of pleasure. To look out upon the busy road full of carriages and people, and the trees and space of Hyde Park beyond, delighted them. Little Tom stood smacking the whip which was his perpetual accompaniment, and making ejaculations. ‘Oh, I say! What lots and lots of people! There’s a pony! but he can’t ride a bit, that fellow on it. Where’s he going to ride? What’s inside those gates? is it a palace or is it a park, or what is it? I say, Beau!—what a liar he is, Jan! he said there was nobody in London—and there’s millions!’

‘Tom,’ said Lady Car; ‘if you say such things you will be sent away.’

‘Let him talk,’ said Beaufort; ‘he is quite right from his point of view. You must remember, Tom, that, though you’re a clever fellow, you don’t know everything; and there may be millions of people in London though there’s nobody.’

They both turned upon him incredulous faces, with that cynicism of childhood which is as remarkable as its trust, overawed by a sense of his superior knowledge, yet quite unconvinced of his good faith. Their faces were very like each other—rather large and without colour, their eyebrows shaggy and projecting, their large round eyes à fleur de tête. Janet’s little red mouth, which was her pretty feature, was open with suspicion and wonder. Tom’s bore an expression of half-assumed scorn. He was a little afraid of ‘Beau,’ and had an alarmed belief in him, at the bottom of much doubt of his meaning and resistance generally.

‘You seem to have a great budget of correspondence this morning, Car.’

‘From the house-agents; there seem to be houses to be had everywhere. Instead of any difficulty in finding one, we shall only be troubled where to choose. What do you say to Richmond? the river is so lovely, and the park so delightful for the children, and——’

‘If Tom is going to school, as I suppose he is, there will only be one child to consider, and little Jan is not difficile.’

‘Am I going to school, mother?’ Tom faced round again suddenly from the window and stood against the light with his legs apart, a very square, solid little form to reckon with.

‘You must, my dear boy; your education has been kept back so long. To be sure, he knows French,’ said Carry, with a wistful look at her husband, seeking approval, ‘which so few boys of his age do.’ Mr. Beaufort had considered that it would be advantageous for Tom to be at school before now.

‘I don’t mind,’ said the boy. ‘I like it. I want to go. I hated all those French fellows—but they’re different here.’

‘The first thing they will ask you at Eton is whether you will take a licking,’ said Beaufort; ‘that was how it was in my day.’

‘I won’t,’ cried Tom; ‘not if it was the biggest fellow in the school. Did you, Beau?’

‘I can’t remember, it’s so long ago,’ said the stepfather. ‘No, not Richmond, if you please, Car; it’s pretty, but it’s cockney. Sunday excursions spoil all the places about London.’

‘Windsor? One would still have the river within reach, and rides in the forest without end.’

‘Windsor still less, Carry my love. It’s a show place. Royal persons always coming and going, and crowds to stare at them. If you love me, no.’

‘That’s a large argument, Edward. We should not live in the town, of course, and to see the Queen driving about would always be a little excitement.’

‘Does she drive in a big umbrella like the gentlemen upon the omnibus?’ said Janet, whose eyes had been caught by that wonder. Tom had seen it too, and was full of curiosity, but kept his eye upon Beaufort to see whether he would laugh at the question.

‘Much grander, with gold fringe and a little royal standard flying from the top,’ said Beaufort gravely. ‘You know the Doge at Venice always had an umbrella, and other great princes.’

Tom stared very steadily, with his big, round eyes, to watch for the suspicion of a smile, but, seeing none, ventured, with a little suppressed doubt and defiance of the possibly ‘humbugging’ answer, ‘Who are the men on the omnibuses? They can’t all be princes; they’re just like cochers,’ cried Tom.

‘Don’t you trust to appearances, my boy. Did you never hear that the greatest swells drove mail coaches? Not Windsor, Car, not Windsor.’

‘Surrey, Edward? Guildford, Haslemere, Dorking—somewhere in that direction?’

‘At Dorking we should be in the way of the battle, Tom.’

‘I should like that,’ cried the boy; ‘and I suppose you can fire a gun, Beau,’ he added, after a moment’s hesitation, scrutinising his stepfather closely, glad to have the chance of one insult, but something afraid of the response.

‘Tom!’ cried his mother, in a warning tone.

‘More or less,’ said Beaufort languidly; ‘enough to hit a Dutchman if there was one before me—you know they’re very broad. At Guildford people are buried on the top of a hill for the sake of the view. Yes, I think Surrey would do.’

‘Am I to go to Eton straight off, mother—is that in Surrey? I want to go a good long way off. I don’t want to be near home. You would be coming to see me, and Jan, and kiss me, and call me “Tom,” and make the other fellows laugh.’

‘What should you be called but Tom?’ said Lady Car, with a smile.

‘Torrance!’ cried the child with pride, as who should say Plantagenet. She had been looking at him, smiling, but at this utterance of the boy Lady Car started and turned burning red, then coldly pale. Why should she? Nothing could be more fantastic, more absurd, than the feeling. She had done no harm in making a second marriage, in which she had found happiness, after the first one, which had brought nothing but misery. She had offended against no law, written or unwritten. She had wiped out Torrance and his memory, and all belonging to him (except his money), for years. Why should the name which she had once borne, which was undeniably her son’s name, affect her so deeply now? The smile became fixed about the corner of her mouth, but the boy, of course, understood nothing of what was passing in his mother’s mind, though he stared at her a little as if he did, increasing her confusion. ‘The fellows never call a fellow by his christened name,’ said Tom, great in the superiority of what he had learned from various schoolboys on their travels. These were things, he was aware, which of course women didn’t know.

‘You’d better come and have a stroll with me, Master Tom,’ said Beaufort. ‘I’ll show you Piccadilly, which is always something; as for the park, you wouldn’t care for it: there are no riders in the Row now. You see, as I told you, there’s nobody in London. Come, get your hat, quickly.’

‘Me too,’ said little Janet, with a pout of her small mouth.

‘Not any ladies to-day, only two fellows, as Tom says, taking a stroll together.’

‘In a moment, Beau!’ cried Tom, delighted, rushing to get his hat. ‘I told you, Jan, old Beau’s a gentleman—sometimes,’ the boy added, as his sister ran after him to see what arrangements of her own she could make to the same end.

‘You are very good to them, Edward—oh! very good. How can I ever thank you?’ said Lady Car, with tears in her eyes. Her nerves had been a little shaken by that shock, and by the vain perception that stole over her of two parties in the family, two that would become more distinctly two by the progress of years, unlike in nature and constitution, and even in name. It is not necessary to insist upon the family name of children travelling with their mother. No one had been much the wiser during these years of wandering. But Tom’s ‘Torrance!’ was a revelation, and opened before her possibilities unknown.

‘Good, am I? That’s all right, that’s something to the credit side, but I was not aware of it,’ said Beaufort, in his easy way; ‘all the same,’ he added, laughing, ‘Master Tom will want looking after if we are to make anything of him. He will want a tight hand, which, I fear, does not belong either to you or me.’

It cost Lady Car a pang to hear even this mild expression of opinion about her boy. A mother says many things, and feels many things, about her children which no one else may say before her. She looked at him wistfully, with a faint smile, which was full of pain. ‘He is only a child,’ she said, apologetically, ‘and then he will get that at school.’ She could not contradict him, and she could not argue with him. Poor little Tom! he was her own, though he might not be all she wished him to be—the plea rose to her lips unconsciously that he was fatherless, that he had drawbacks to contend against, poor child. What a plea to form even unconsciously in her mind! She looked at her husband with such a troubled and wistful appeal that his heart smote him. He laid his hand upon her head caressingly, and stooped to kiss her.

‘To be sure,’ he said; ‘the boy will be all right, Car. He has plenty of spirit, and that is the best thing, after all. Ready, Tom? Come along, then. I’m ready too.’

Lady Car followed him with her wistful eyes. They were not full of admiring delight, as when a mother watches her children going out with their father, proud of both him and them, and of their love for each other. What it must be to have a life without complications, full of unity, in which a woman can feel like that! Carry longed to whisper in her child’s ear, to bid him, oh! to be good, to mind what Beau said to him, to behave like a gentleman to one who was so kind—so kind! But she had to let him go without that warning, fearing that he would be disrespectful, and come back in disgrace, though Edward was so gentle with him, and never complained, except to say that he would want a tight hand. How well she knew that he wanted a tight hand! and how certain she was that it was not from her he would get that needful restraint! And from whom, then? At school, from some master who would know nothing about him, nor give him credit for the complications in his lot, his having no father. Perhaps, she said to herself in her troubled thoughts, it is better for a boy to have any kind of a father than no father at all. His father would have flogged him, had no mercy upon him, taught him to swear and swagger, and ride wild horses, and run wild about the country. Would that have been better? She stopped, with a shudder, unable to pursue the question. Better—oh heavens! But for her what would it have been? She turned to meet little Janet’s large eyes fixed upon her, and started with alarm and a kind of horror. It seemed to her that the child must have read her thoughts.

‘Are you cold, mozer?’ Janet said. Though she was eight, she had still difficulties with the ‘th,’ difficulties perhaps rather of a foreigner than a child.

‘No, dear,’ said Lady Car, again shuddering, but smiling upon the little girl. ‘It is not at all cold.’

‘Mozer, take me out with you, since Tom has gone with Beau. I don’t want to go out with nurse. I want to be wiz you.’

‘Dear,’ said Carry, wooing her little daughter for a favourable reply with soft caresses, ‘isn’t Beau kind to Tom? Don’t you love Beau?’

The child searched her face, as children do, in an unconscious but penetrating search for motives unknown. Janet saw that her mother was wistful and unassured, though she did not probably know how to name these motives. ‘I do well enough,’ she said. ‘I don’t think of him. Mozer, take me out with you.’

And this was all that could be got out of Janet. The black brow and the dark hair made her look so much more resolute and determined than usual that poor Carry was almost afraid of her little girl, and believed that she hid beneath that careless answer thoughts and feelings which were quite determined and well-assured.

CHAPTER IV

The house was found after a great many not unpleasurable researches—little expeditions, now and then, which Lady Caroline and her husband took together, with reminiscences of their first honeymoon travels, which had been so sweet. She forgot, as a woman is so ready to do, all the little deceptions and disappointments of the intervening years, and when they found at last the very thing they wanted the elation and exhilaration of a new beginning entered fully into Carry’s mind. If Edward had shown himself too contented with his life, too little ambitious, too indifferent to any stimulant, there was something in the fact of being unsettled, of having no certain motive of his life, of moving about constantly from one place to another, which would very well account for that. But when he was no longer subject to interruption, when his time and his thoughts were free, who could doubt that a new spring of energy would burst forth? In the old days, when they had first met, he had been full of projects. Was not that one of the charms that had caught her girlish heart? He had so fully meant to make himself a great influence in the world, to help to sway the course of events, to make the world a better place. They had talked of that before even they talked of love—and her enthusiasm had been roused and fired by his. He had told her—how well she remembered!—that it was a mistake of dull minds to think that it was hard to obtain an influence upon one’s fellow-men. On the contrary, if you are but in earnest—in such earnest that none could mistake your sincerity and true feeling—then the response, especially of the young, especially of the working people, whom it was of so much importance to influence for good, was most ready, almost immediate. So he said, discoursing for hours as they wandered about the Swiss valley in which they had met, Carry Lindores all in a flame of enthusiastic listening, responding with her whole heart. What a beautiful lot it had seemed to her to share this work and this life of this new crusader, this chief of men! She was not Lady Caroline then, but a poor little girl in a faded frock, her father far out of the succession, and no grandeur of rank or anything else surrounding the wandering family. Carry’s imagination went back to that moment with a leap, ignoring, oh so thankfully! all that had gone between. She had hardly done much with her unfaithfulness to congeal her Edward’s enthusiasm, to turn him from his hopefulness to misanthropy and pessimism. He had fallen into apathy because he had been forsaken and unhappy. But now everything was to begin anew—a settled home on English ground, a position of his own in which his leisure and his peace should be undisturbed and his mind free to throw itself into the old studies. Who could doubt that with all this his energy and his enthusiasm would come back to him again?

The house was near one of the charming little towns of Surrey. It was on the slope of a hill, a house partly antique for beauty, and with a new part built on behind, happily out of sight, for comfort. A wide landscape of breezy undulations stretched before the windows; the town, upon another low hill, all its red roofs picturesquely outlined among the trees, stood out a charming object in the view, not near enough to add any association of noise or gossip. The very railway ran in a cutting, invisible, though near enough to be exceedingly convenient, nothing but a puff of steam showing now and then over the trees. The landscape embraced, as it were, two worlds—heather and fir trees on one side, luxuriant English cornfields, woods, and villages on the other. The altitude of their hillside was not great, but as there was nothing greater about it, it might have been Mont Blanc for the feeling of wide atmosphere and sky; yet they were within a mile or two of the little country town, and within an hour and a half of London! What could be more delightful, combining every advantage? Carry had all the delight of a bride in furnishing her house—nay, of a bridegroom too, for one of her chief cares was to fit up a study for Beaufort, in which every taste should be satisfied. Though she was by nature so gentle and yielding a woman, she it was who was the purveyor of everything, who had the purse in her hands. The only thing upon which Beaufort had made a stand at the time of his marriage was this—that the money which was hers should remain with her, that he should have nothing to do with its expenditure. He had his own little income, which was very small, yet sufficed for his personal wants. He lived a fairy life, without any necessity for money, his house kept for him, his living all arranged, everything that he wanted or could desire coming without a thought; but he preserved his feeling of independence by having nothing to do with the expenditure. Thus Carry combined everything in her own person, the bride and the bridegroom—even something of the mother. Her drawing-room was fitted up according to all the new lights. She had weaknesses towards the æsthetic, and something of the delicacy of those heroines of Mr. Du Maurier whose bibelots are their religion, and who cannot be happy in a room which has curtains not of the right tint. But even the anxiety to secure everything right in the drawing-room was secondary to her anxiety about the library, which was to be Beaufort’s room, the future centre of all his occupations. He had himself a number of books laid up in various stores, and they had bought a number more in their wanderings—fine old examples in delicate old vellum like ivory and luxurious editions. Carry was occupied for weeks in arranging them, in procuring the right kind of bookcases, and hanging and decorating the room in just the subdued beauty which is appropriate for a place of study. There was one great window commanding the finest view, there was another looking into a sunny nook of the garden. The writing table stood within reach of the fire, and near that sunny window, so that it might always command both warmth and light. The chairs were few, but luxurious to sit in, and moving at a touch, without noise, upon the deep, mossy softness of the carpet. The bookcases were inlaid and exquisite with lines of delicate sculpture and gilding between the shelves, out of which the mellow gold of the old bindings and the sober background of Russia leather and the tempered ivory of the vellum showed like a picture. He had not even seen it till it was completed. No lover ever spent upon his lady’s boudoir more tender care and delicate fancy than Carry lavished upon her husband’s study. When they went down finally to take possession of Easton Manor there were various things incomplete in the rest of the house, but this was perfect. She took him by the arm and led him to the door. ‘This is my present to you, Edward,’ she said, a little breathless with happiness and anxiety to know if it would please him. At this period when furniture is supposed to make so great a part of our comfort, the moment was intense—would it please him, after all?

It did please him, or, at least, he graciously declared it did, with an enthusiasm perhaps a little strained, but Carry, who was half crying with joy and pleasure, never found this out, if, indeed, there was anything to find out. She ran about the room, pointing out everything—all the details of the arrangements, the drawers for papers, the portfolios for prints, the shelves that could be filled at pleasure, the space that still was vacant to be filled up. Everything that heart could desire was in this dilettante shrine. There was a little picture on the mantelpiece, an original, a lovely little Fra Angelico, in the daintiest of carved shrines, which good luck had thrown in their way in Italy—a gem for an emperor’s closet. He gave a little cry when he saw this. ‘Carry, your own picture—the one you love best!’

‘I shall love it better here than anywhere else,’ said Carry, falling a-weeping and a-laughing with a joy that was not hysterical, but only driven to the bounds of all things to find expression. She was so happy! She had never in all her life been so happy before. In her own house, her own home, all hers and his, the sanctuary of their joint life to come. When a woman comes to this climax of happiness, she generally does so more thoroughly with her arrière-pensée than a man. Only one thing could have made Carry’s bliss more exquisite—if he had done it for her—and yet, on the whole, I am not sure that to have done it for him was not a higher pleasure still. Little Janet had held by her mother’s dress coming into the new, strange house, and thus had been swept into this rapture without intention, and stood gazing at it with great eyes, half wondering, half critical. What there was to cry about Janet did not know. She was a spectator, though she was only a child, and broke the spell. Lady Car felt more than Beaufort did what the interruption was. And thus the edge was a little taken off her delight. But in the evening, when Janet was happily in bed, she led her husband back to his beautiful room. He would rather, perhaps, as a matter of fact, have remained in the uncompleted drawing-room with her. A thing which is incomplete has a charm of its own. He was suggesting various things which were needed to fill up, and enjoying the occupation. He had even made a few rough sketches, rough, yet full of ‘feeling,’ showing with only a line or two how many improvements could still be made. She was delighted by the suggestions, but a little impatient, longing to make sure that he had seen all the many luxuries provided for himself. She took his arm when he had shown her where he would place the little fantastic Venetian étagère. ‘Yes, Edward; but I don’t want to stay here any longer: I want to spend the first evening in the library, in your own room.’

‘In the library,’ he said with a slight vexation; then recovering himself he followed her impulse with the best grace in the world. Poor Carry! it would ill become him not to humour her. ‘But is there a lamp there?’ he said. She laughed for pleasure at the question. A lamp! There was the most beautiful arrangement of lights which the art of that period had yet devised. The reign of the electric light had not begun, but candles with every kind of silvery shading that had been then invented were round the walls, and the light was so soft, so equable, so diffused, that no electric lighting could have been more perfect. ‘You who are so fond of light, how could you think I would forget that?’ she said.

‘You never forget anything: you are my good angel,’ he said, holding her in his arms: the perfect tenderness and the perfect taste went to his heart. ‘You are too good to me—and all this is far too good for a useless fellow who never did anything.’

‘It is the circumstances that are to blame for that,’ she said, vaguely. ‘You have never had the leisure and the ease that is necessary for great work.’

He laughed a little, and perhaps coloured too, could she have seen it in the flattering soft glow of the shaded light. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that a man who is overcome by circumstances is rather a poor sort of creature; but we won’t enter into that.’

‘No, indeed,’ she said; ‘there is no such question before the house, Edward. Now sit down in your own chair and let us talk. How many talks we are to have here! This is the place where we shall discuss everything, and you will tell me how your thoughts are taking shape, and read me a page here and there, and here I’ll bring my little troubles to be calmed down, but never to interrupt anything, you may trust me for that.’

‘My love,’ he cried, ‘I trust you for everything; but, Carry, I am sadly afraid you are preparing disappointment for yourself. I am by no means sure that I could write anything were I to try; and as for plans——’

‘Don’t say that, Edward. Don’t you remember how we used to talk in the dark old Kander Thal long ago? You had planned it out all so clearly. I think I could write down the plan, and even the names of the chapters, if you have forgotten. But I am sure you have not forgotten. It has only been suspended for want of time—for want of the books you needed—for want—oh! if I might flatter myself so far?—for want, perhaps, of me; but that’s the vainest thing to say.’

‘It is the only truth in the whole matter,’ he said—‘for want of you! I think I must have invented that plan on the spot to please you.’

‘Hush, hush!’ said Carry, putting up her hand to his mouth. ‘Don’t blaspheme. You were full of it, it was a new world to me. First to think that I knew a man with such great things in his mind, then that he would talk to me about it, then that my enthusiasm helped him on a little, that he looked to me for sympathy. Edward,’ she said, with a little nervous laugh, changing colour, and casting down her eyes, ‘I wrote some little verses about it in the old days, but never finished them, and this morning I found them, and scribbled a little more.’

‘My love, my love!’ he cried, in a troubled tone, in which love, shame, compunction, and even a far-off trembling of ridicule had place. What could he say to this? The romance, the sentiment, the good faith, the enthusiasm, altogether overwhelmed him. He could have laughed, he could have wept, he did not know what to say. How he despised himself for being so much below her expectations, for being, as he said himself, such a poor creature! He changed colour; her moist eyes, her little verses filled him with shame and penitence, yet a rueful amusement too. The verses were very pretty: he did not despise them, it was only himself whom he despised.

‘My darling, that’s so long ago! I was a fool, puffed up by your enthusiasm and by seeing that you believed in me. A young man, don’t you know, is always something of an actor when he begins to see that a girl has faith in him. It is—how long, Carry?—fifteen years ago?’

‘And what of that?’ she said. ‘If I could pick up my little thread, as I tell you, how much more easily could you pick up your great one? This was why I wanted to be within reach of London, within reach of the great libraries. It is quite easy to run up for the day to refer to anything you want—indeed, I might do it for you if you were very busy. And I can see that you have no interruptions, Edward. We must settle our hours and everything from that point of view.’

He felt himself at liberty to laugh as she came down to this more familiar ground. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘all my plans were in the air—they never came to execution of any kind. I don’t know even, as I told you, whether I can write at all.’

‘Edward!’ she cried, in an indignant tone.

‘Well, my love’—the flattery went to his heart, notwithstanding all he knew against it—‘that is the easiest of the matter to be sure; but everybody can write nowadays, and why should the world listen to me more than another? Besides, my favourite questions of social economy, as against political, have all been exploités by other hands since then.’

‘Not by other hands so capable as yours.’

‘Oh, Carry!’ he cried, with a laugh in which there was pleasure as well as a little ridicule; ‘I fear you have a quite unwarrantable confidence in me; I am only——’

‘Hush!’ she said, again putting up her hand to his mouth; ‘I don’t want to hear your opinion of yourself. I am a better judge than you are on that point. Besides, let us hear who have written on that question?’ She sat quite upright in her chair. ‘Bring them forward, and let them be judged,’ she said.

‘I cannot bring forth a whole school of writers before your tribunal, my lady. Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘there’s Ruskin for one—who has said all I once wanted to say, in an incomparable way, and gone a great deal further than I could go.’

‘Ah!’ she cried; ‘that is just the whole matter. Mr. Ruskin is incomparable, as you say, but he goes a great deal too far. He is a poet. People adore him, but don’t put serious faith in him. Mr. Ruskin has nothing to do with it, Edward: he could not forestall you.’

‘No, no more than the sun could forestall a farthing candle. Carry, my dear, don’t make me blush for myself. Come,’ he added, ‘let me see the little verses—for the moment that is more to the point. Perhaps when you have showed me how you have picked up your threads I may see how to pick up mine.’

‘Should you really like to see them, Edward? They are nothing: they are very little verses indeed. I have left them in my writing-book.’

‘Get them, then,’ he said, opening the door for her, with a smile. Poor Lady Car! She raised a happy face to him as she passed, with eyes glistening, still a little moist, very bright, full of sweetness and gentle agitation. The soft sound of her dress, sweeping after her, the graceful movement, the gracious turn of the head, were all so many exquisite additional details to the exquisite room, so perfect in every point, in which she had housed him. But Beaufort’s face was full of uneasiness and perplexity. He had floated so far away from those innocent days in the Kander Thal. He had ceased to believe in the panaceas that had seemed all-powerful to him then. The wrongs of political economy and the rights of the helpless had ceased to occupy his mind. He had become one of the helpless himself, and yet had drifted, and been not much the worse. Now he had drifted into the most charming, sunshiny, landlocked harbour, where no fierce wind could trouble him more. He had no desire to invent labours and troubles for himself, to spend his strength in putting up beacons and lighthouses to which the people whom they were intended to help would pay no attention. He opened one of the windows and looked out upon the night, upon the soft, undulating landscape, half-lighted by a misty moon. Everything looked like peace out of doors, peace and every tranquil pleasure that the soul could desire were within. He gave an impatient laugh at himself and his wife, and life in general, as he stood cooling his hot forehead, looking out waiting her return. He was quite contented; why should he be goaded forth to fight with windmills which he no longer believed to be knights in armour? Don Quixote disenchanted, ready himself to burn all his chevalier books, and see the fun of his misadventures, but urged to take the field by some delicate Dulcinea, could not have been more embarrassed and disturbed. It was too annoying to be amusing, and too tender and beautiful either to be angry with or to laugh at. What under these circumstances was a man who had long abandoned the heroic to do?

CHAPTER V

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.

CHAPTER VI

The time of Tom’s holidays was rather a holiday also for Beaufort, who, having got a certain amount of amusement out of the notebooks and their record of school-life, was beginning to be bored by himself, and to think, under his breath, what a little prig and ass he had been in his boyish days, and how astounding it was that Carry should take it all in with such undoubting faith. He was a little of a philosopher in his idle way, and Carry began to be a sometimes disconcerting but often amusing problem to him. He laughed softly sometimes when he was by himself to see how seriously she took him, and how much his youthful superiority impressed her. It had not been in his intention when he unearthed the notebooks to increase, as he had certainly done, her admiration, and, consequently, her expectations of himself. He had hoped, if anything, to beguile her a little from the pursuit of results, to make her less in earnest about the great work on which she had set her heart. But his expedient had not succeeded. She was more than ever bent upon the fulfilling of that early promise which was so beautiful and so wonderful in her eyes. Beaufort was half flattered, half vexed by this result. It is hard to resent a woman’s admiration even if it is of something which is no longer yourself. It softened his heart, but it embarrassed him more than ever, as it made her more and more sure. He took advantage of Tom with a little secret chuckle to himself behind backs. Tom amused this philosopher too. He liked to draw him out, to watch the movements of character in him, even to speculate what kind of a man it had been that had produced this child. He must be like his father, Beaufort said to himself, without any sentiment even of animosity towards Carry’s husband. Certainly he had got the better of that man. He had obliterated Torrance, as it were, from the face of the earth; but he had no such feeling as Carry had about Torrance’s life and Torrance’s money. He took it all much more calmly than she could do, not even thinking of the curiousness of the succession which made him owe all his comfort and happiness to Torrance. Tom, however, was the subject of various speculations in his stepfather’s mind. If this was what the little Torrance was modified by Lindores, what must the original have been? And what would this one turn to? an ordinary country gentleman, no better or worse than his neighbours, or what? A vague sense in his mind that there might be future trouble to Carry in the child’s development moved him mildly—for the distance between childhood and manhood seems long looking forward to it, though so short when we look back: and any such danger must be far in the future. It was rather as a droll little problem, which it was amusing to study, that Mr. Beaufort looked at Tom; but for that reason, and to free himself a little from the ever-increasing pressure of his wife’s solicitude in respect to his work and eager anticipation of something from him, he took during the holidays the greatest interest in the boy, going out with him, sometimes riding, sometimes driving, sometimes to the meet, where Tom’s eagerness was scarcely to be restrained. Mr. Beaufort himself did not hunt. He was not an ungraceful horseman for a moderate and mild canter; but if he had ever been possessed of sufficient energy to follow the hounds, that energy had long left him. He did not dislike, however, to ride to the meet or drive his wife over, Tom accompanying them upon his pony. Lady Car thought it was nothing less than devotion to her son which induced him to depart from his studious seclusion on account of the boy. She was very grateful to her husband, yet deprecated gently. ‘You are so very, very good to Tom: but I cannot bear to think of all the sacrifices you are making for him, Edward, wasting your time which is so much too valuable to be thrown away upon a little boy.’

‘I wish my time was more valuable, to show you how willingly I would give it up for anything belonging to you, Carry, not to say for your boy.’

‘Oh thanks, thanks, dear Edward; but I can’t have you burdened with Tom.’

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘I like—boys.’ It was almost too much for him to say that he liked this particular boy. ‘And Tom interests me very much,’ he added. Carry looked at him with a wistful curiosity. A gleam of colour passed over her face. Was it possible that Tom was interesting to such a man as Edward Beaufort? She felt guilty to ask herself that question. She had been afraid that Tom was not very interesting, not a child to attract any one much who did not belong to him. To be sure the child did belong to him, in a sort of a way.

‘So you like school, Tom,’ said Beaufort, looking down from his tall horse at the little fellow on his pony, strenuously keeping up with him. Had Beaufort been a more athletic person, he would have appreciated more the boy’s determination not to be left a step behind.

‘Well,’ said Tom, reflectively, ‘I like it, and I don’t like it. I think lessons are great rot.’

‘Oh, do you?’ said his tall companion.

‘Don’t you, Beau? They don’t teach anything a fellow wants. What’s the good of Latin, let alone Greek? They’re what you call dead languages, and we don’t want what’s dead. When you’ve got to make your living by them it’s different, like Hall’s sons that are going to be the schoolmasters when he dies.’

‘Did you think of all that by yourself, Tom?’

‘No,’ said the boy after a stare of a moment, and some hesitation. ‘It wasn’t me, it was Harrison major. His father’s very rich, and he’s in trade. And Harrison says what’s the good of these things. You never want them. They’re only an excuse for sending in heavy bills, Harrison says.’

‘He must be a great authority,’ said Mr. Beaufort gravely.

‘He knows a deal,’ said Tom reassured, for he had some doubts whether Harrison major’s opinions would have been received with the deference they deserved. ‘He’s the biggest fellow in the school, though he’s not very swell in learning. But he doesn’t mind. He says fellows that are to have plenty of money don’t want it.’

‘That’s a frequent opinion of people in trade,’ said Beaufort. ‘I would not put too much faith in it if I were you.’

‘Eh?’ cried Tom, opening his big light eyes under his dark brows more widely than ever, and staring up into his stepfather’s face.

‘You will have plenty of money, I suppose?’ said Beaufort calmly.

‘Oh, don’t you know? I’ll be one of the richest fellows in Scotland,’ cried the boy.

‘Who told you that, Tom?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I know it, that’s all. It was perhaps only nurse,’ he added with reluctance; ‘but she’s been to my place, and she knows all about it. You can ask her if you haven’t heard.’

‘So you have got a place besides being so rich?’ Beaufort said, in calm interrogation, without surprise.

Tom was very much embarrassed by this questioning. He stared at his stepfather more than ever. ‘Hasn’t mother told you? I thought she told you everything.’

‘So did I. But all this about your place I never heard. Let’s have the rest of it, Tom.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that there’s much more,’ said the boy. ‘It’s a great big place with a high tower, and a flag flying when I’m at home—like the Queen—and acres upon acres in the park. It was my father’s, don’t you know? and now it’s mine.’

‘How old are you, Master Tom?’

‘Eleven in April,’ said Tom, promptly.

‘Then it will be ten years before you have anything to say to your place, as you call it. I’ve seen your place, Tom. It is not so very much of a place; as for a flag, you know we might mount a flag at Easton if we liked and nobody would mind.’

Tom’s black brows had gathered, and his eyes looked with that fierceness mingled with fear which belongs to childhood, into his stepfather’s face. He was very wroth to have his pretensions thus made light of, but the habitual faith of his age alarmed him with a sense that it might be true.

‘We’ll mount one this afternoon,’ his tormentor said; ‘it will be fun for you and me taking it down when your mother goes out for her drive, and hoisting it again when she comes back. She deserves a flag better than you do, don’t you think? Almost as well as the Queen. The only danger is that the country people might take Easton for the Beaufort Arms, and want to come in and drink beer. What do you think?’

‘I say, Beau, are you in real earnest about a flag?’

‘To be sure. I don’t know what you have on yours at the Towers, but we have a famous blazon on the Beaufort side. We’ll get a square of silk from your mother, and paint it as soon as we go in. I forget what your arms are, Tom?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the boy, humbly. ‘I never heard anything about them. I didn’t know you had arms on a flag.’

‘Ah!’ said Beaufort, ‘you see there are a great many things you don’t know yet. And about matters that concern gentlemen, I wouldn’t advise you either to take nurse’s opinion or that of your young man whose father is in trade.’

Tom rode along by his stepfather’s side in silence for some time. He felt much taken down—crushed by a superiority which he could not resist, yet very unwilling to yield. There was always the uncomfortable conviction in his mind that what Beaufort said must be true, mingled with the uneasy feeling that Beau might be chaffing all the time, a combination confusing for every simple mind. Tom was not at all willing to give in. He felt instinctively that a flag at Easton would turn his own grandeur, which he believed in so devoutly, into ridicule: for Easton was not much more than a villa, in the suburbs of a little town. At the same time he could not but feel that to haul it up and down when his mother went out or came in would be fun; and the painting of the flag with a general muddle of paints and means of barbouillage in general still greater fun, and the most delightful way of spending the afternoon.

‘I say, Beau,’ he asked, after a long interval, ‘what’s in your arms, as you call them? I should like to know.’

Beaufort laughed. ‘You must not ask what’s in them, but what they are, Tom. A fellow of your pretensions ought to know. Fancy a chatelain in ignorance of such a matter!’

‘What’s a chatelain? You are only laughing at me,’ cried the boy, with lowering eyebrows. ‘It’s a thing mother wears at her side, all hanging with silver chains.’

‘It’s the master of a place—like what you suppose yours to be. My arms are rather too grand for a simple gentleman to bear. We quarter the shields of France and England,’ said Beaufort, gravely, forgetting who his companion was for the moment. Then he laughed again. ‘You see, Tom, though I have not a castle, I have a flag almost as grand as the Queen’s.’

All this was rather humbling to poor Tom’s pride, and confusing to his intellect, but he came home full of the plan of painting and putting up this wonderful flag. There was an old flagstaff somewhere, which had been used for the decorations of some school feast. Beaufort, much amused, instructed his small assistant to paint this in alternate strips of blue and white. ‘The colours of the bordure, you know, Tom.’ ‘Oh, are they?’ cried Tom, determined to pretend to understand. And Lady Car found him in the early afternoon, in a shed appropriated to carpentering behind the house, delightfully occupied about his task, and with patches of blue and white all over him from shoe to chin.

‘What are you doing, Tom?’ she cried. Janet following stood transfixed with her eyes widening every moment—half with wonder, half with envy. What she would have given to paint the staff and herself in imitation of Tom!

‘It’s the colours of the bordure,’ said the boy. ‘I’m doing it for Beau.’

‘The colours of what?’ Lady Car was as ignorant of heraldry as Tom himself.

‘Have we got a bordure? and what’s our colours? and I want to know what are the arms, mother. I mean my arms: for I suppose,’ he said, pausing in his work to look at her, ‘yours are just Beau’s now?’

‘What does the boy mean?’ said Carry. ‘Janet, you must not go too near him; you will spoil your frock. Tom, your jacket will never be fit to be seen again.’

‘I don’t care for my jacket. Mother, look here. Beau’s going to put up a flag for you like the Queen, and I’m doing the stick. But I want to know about my own shield, and my colours; and if I’ve got a bordure, and if we’re in quarters, or what. I want to know about the flag at the Towers.’

Lady Car made a step backward as if she had received a blow. ‘There was no flag at the Towers—I mean there were no arms upon it.—There were no—who put such nonsense into your head, Tom?’

‘It’s not nonsense. Beau told me—he’s going to give me a lesson how to do it. He knows all about it. He says it’s no use asking nurse or Harrison major whose father is in trade. It’s only gentlemen that have this sort of thing. Mother, have I got a bordure?’

‘Mozer,’ said little Janet, ‘please buy him a bordure.’

Poor Carry was not fond of any allusion to her former home. She was glad to laugh at the little girl’s petition—though with a tremor that was half hysterical. ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said. ‘I will buy him anything that he wants, that is good for him, but oh, dear, what a mess he is in! Your lines are not straight, and you are all over paint. Jan, come away from that painted boy.’

‘Oh, mozer, let me stay!’ cried Janet, possessing herself of a stray brush.

It was perhaps those black brows of theirs that gave them such an air of determination. Carry did not feel herself able to cope with the two little creatures who looked at her with their father’s eyes. She had to yield oftener than was good for them or than she felt to be becoming. She took her usual expedient of hurrying in to her husband to consult him as to what it was best to do. He was in his library, and she had no doubt he was hard at work. It was generally with some little difficulty and after some delay that on ordinary occasions he had to be gently beguiled into his own sacred room after luncheon: but he had gone to-day at once with an alacrity which made Carry sure he had some new ideas to put down. And her heart was light and full of satisfaction. He was seated at his table leaning over it, so busy that he did not hear the door open, and she paused there for a moment, happiness expanding her breast, and a smile of tender pleasure on her face. She would not interrupt him when he was busy with any trivial matter of hers. She stood and watched him with the purest satisfaction. Then she stole in quietly, not to interrupt him, only to look over his shoulder, to give him perhaps a kiss of thanks for being so busy. Poor Carry! what she found when she approached was that Beaufort’s head was bent with every appearance of profound interest over an emblazoned book, from which he was drawing on a larger scale, upon a big sheet of paper, the Beaufort arms. She breathed forth an ‘Oh!’ of sickening disappointment; and he turned his head.

‘Is it you, Carry? Look here. I have got a new toy.’

‘So I perceive,’ she said. It was all she could do to keep the tears from showing in her eyes; but he would not have seen them, having turned back to his work again.

‘A moral purpose is a feeble thing,’ he said over his compasses and pencils. ‘I began it as a lesson to Tom, to take him down a bit; but I find it quite interesting enough on its own account. Look here. We are going to rig you up a flag, as Tom says, like the Queen.’

Poor Carry! How her tender heart went up and down like a shuttlecock, as she stood with her hand on the back of his chair. Her eyes full of bitter tears of disappointment; the thought that it was out of interest in Tom and love for her that this futile occupation had been taken up, melted her altogether. How could she allow, even in her own mind, a shadow of blame to rest on one so tender and so good? She laid her hand upon his shoulder, and patted it softly, like the mother of a foolish, delightful child.

‘Dear Edward, I almost grudge that you should think of so many things for me,’ she said.

‘My dear, it was not primarily for you, but as a lesson to Tom,’ he said, fixing the leg of his compasses firmly in the paper. ‘You must take him to—his place as he calls it, Carry. But I confess that for the moment I had forgotten my object. To give a moral lesson is a fine thing; but it’s nothing to the invention of a new toy.’

CHAPTER VII

The flag, so casually suggested, became in effect a very favourite toy, both with Beaufort and his stepson. The one was a very ordinary little boy, the other a highly cultivated man. But they seemed to take equal pleasure in the flutter of the flag from the blue and white staff which Tom had painted with so much trouble, and in rushing out to pull it down when Lady Car in her little pony carriage drove from the door. They sometimes tumbled over each other in their haste and zeal to perform this office. And Beau’s legs were so much the longest. It gave him a great and scarcely just advantage over Tom.

Carry was pleased, she was touched and flattered, and such vanity as she had was so delicately ministered to, that for some time this little folly which took the air of homage to her, made her feel happy. To see the grave and gentle philosopher, with a long swift stride, almost stepping over the children to get at the cord, and pull up the fluttering flag, a brilliant piece of colour among the bare trees, as she appeared with her ponies in the little avenue! It was a little absurd, but so sweet. Edward did it, she allowed herself to imagine, as he had said, for a lesson to Tom—to teach him thus broadly though symbolically the honour that was due to his mother—not to Carry individually who never claimed homage, but to the mother whose claims, perhaps, the boy was not sufficiently conscious of. This was not at all the lesson which Beaufort had intended to teach Tom—but what did that matter? It had a certain effect in that way, though none in the way that Beaufort intended. It did give Tom an impression of the importance of his mother. ‘Mother’s not just a woman like the rest,’ he said to Janet. ‘She is what you may call a great lady, Jan, don’t you know? There’s Mrs. Howard and that sort; you don’t run up flags for them. Mother’s really something like the Queen—it’s in earnest. Beau thinks so. I can tell you he’s awfully proud of mother. And so am I too.’

‘Oh, Tom, so am I.’

‘Yes, but you’re just natural. You don’t understand. But me and Beau know why we do it,’ said Tom. And when he got back to school if he did not boast so much of his place in Scotland, having acquired an uneasy sort of doubt of its magnificence, he intimated that his parentage was not like that of the others. ‘When my people drive from the door the flag goes down,’ he said. ‘It’s such fun rushing and getting hold of the rope and up with a tug, as soon as they come into the avenue. Sometimes, when it’s been raining, the rope won’t run. It’s such fun,’ cried Tom, while even Harrison major’s mouth was closed. The flag was beyond him. As for Janet, she looked on staring and observed everything, and drew many silent conclusions never perhaps to be revealed.

But when the holidays were over Carry’s anxious expectations and suspense increased again. Beaufort kept to his new toy even when Tom was gone. He would interrupt his studies, springing up, whatever he was doing, to pull down or put up that flag, till poor Carry’s heart grew sick of the little formula which accompanied all her movements. She began to feel that he liked to be disturbed and that idling forth into the air to perform this little ceremony was more delightful to him than to get on with that work, which, so far as she could make out, was not yet begun. He had found more notebooks after Tom went away, but the notebooks now began to pall a little. And slowly, slowly, Carry’s eyes began to open. She never whispered it to herself, but she began to understand, as the years went on many things that were never put into words. She became first of all very sick of the notebooks and the wonderful number of them, and all those tantalising scraps which never came to anything. Her own little poem which she had begun had gone no further. The dawning of genius—but the dawn was still going on. It had never come to be day yet. Would it ever come? Slowly, reluctantly, this began to be revealed to her, broken by many gleams of better hope, by moments when she said to herself that she was the most unjust woman in the world, grudging her husband the leisure in which alone great thoughts can develop—grudging him the very quiet which it had been the desire of her heart to attain for him. The most unjust of women! not his wife and assistant, but his judge, and so hard a one! It was bitter sweet to Carry to be able thus to condemn herself; but it did not change the position of affairs.

One evening they were seated together in a happy mood. It was summer, and it was some years after the incidents above described. Carry by this time knew almost everything about Beaufort, and what he could not or would not do. And yet her expectations were not quenched. For it is hard to obliterate hope in a woman; and now and then at intervals there would still spring up little impulses in him, and for a few days she would forget (yet all the same never forget) her dolorous discoveries and certainties. It was after one of those élans when he had displayed every appearance of being at work for several days, and Lady Car’s heart despite of a thousand experiences had risen again, that in the evening, in a very sweet summer twilight, they sat together and watched the stars coming out over the tops of the waving trees. Janet, now grown almost to her full height—she was never very tall—had been wandering about flitting among the flowers in her white frock not unlike (at a distance) one of the great white lilies which stood about in all the borders. It was early in July, the time when these flowers are at their sweetest. The air was full of their delicate fragrance, yet not too full; for there was a little warm breeze which blew it over the whole country away to the heather and gorse on the Haslemere side, and brought back faint echoes of wilder scents, the breath of the earth and of the moors. Janet had been roaming about, never without a glance through the branches at the two figures on the lawn. She was like one of the lilies at a distance, tall for fourteen, though not tall for a full-grown woman, and slim too in the angularity of her age, though of a square solid construction which contradicted all poetical symbols. She had always an eye upon them wherever she went. Nothing had changed her spectator attitude, not even the development of many tender and loyal feelings altogether unknown to the outer world. So far as appeared outside, Janet was still the same steady little champion of her brother that she had been from her baby days, and not much more. The pair who were seated on the lawn were as always conscious of the girl’s presence, which was a certain restraint upon their freedom. There was not between them all the same ease that generally exists in a family. Though she was quite out of hearing, they did not even talk with perfect freedom. When she had gone to bed, called by the all-authoritative nurse of whom even her mistress was a little afraid, Beaufort drew a long breath. He had a sort of habitual tenderness for Janet as a child who had grown up under his eyes and was one of the accessories of daily life. But yet he was more at his ease when she was gone. ‘How dark it is getting!’ he said; ‘the light comes from the lilies not from the sky, and Janet’s white frock, now she has gone, has taken a little away.’

‘My poor little Janet,’ said Lady Car. ‘I wish I could think she would be one of those who give light.’

‘Like her mother. It is a pity they are so little like you Carry. Both the same type, and that so much inferior. But children are very perverse in their resemblances as much as in other things.’

‘Nobody can say Janet is perverse,’ said Lady Car with that parental feeling which, though not enthusiastic itself, can bear no remark upon the children who are its very own; and then she went back to a more interesting subject. ‘Edward, in that chapter you have just begun——’

‘My dearest, let us throw all the chapters to the winds. In this calm and sweetness what do we want with those wretched little philosophical pretences? The world as far as we can see it seems all at peace.’

‘But there is trouble in it, Edward, all the same, trouble to be set right.’

‘Not much, so far as we can see. There is nothing very far wrong in our little town: every “poor person,” as you ladies call them, has half-a-dozen soft philanthropists after him to set him right; and we don’t even see the town. Look at all those dim lines of country, Carry. What a breadth in them, and no harm anywhere, the earth almost as soft as the sky! Don’t let us think of anything, but only how sweet it all is. I am glad that shrubbery was cut away. I like to see over half the world—which is what we are doing—as far as eye can carry, it comes to much the same. May I light my cigarette?’

‘Edward,’ she cried, ‘it is all quite true. There is not much harm just here; but think how much there is in the world, how helpless the poor people are, how little, how little they can do. And what does it matter that we all try a little in the way of charity? Right principles are the only things that can set us all right. I have heard you say a hundred times—in the old days——’

‘You have heard me say a great deal of nonsense in the old days.’

‘Was it all nonsense,’ cried Lady Car, ‘all that was said and thought then? There seemed so many splendid things we could do; set up a standard of higher justice, show a better way both to the poor and the rich, and—and other things. I love the landscape and the sweet evening, Edward, oh so much! and to sit and look at them with you, and to feel all the peace around us, and the quiet, and that there is no reason why we should not be happy; but better than that I should love to see you lift up that standard, and show the better way, you who can do it, you who understand all the problems. That is what I wish, that is what I have always wished—above all, above all!’ she cried, clasping her hands. The enthusiasm of her sensitive nature overwhelmed Carry. She could not contain herself any longer. ‘I would rather even not have been happy and seen you great and doing great work,’ she said.

He stretched out his hand and took hers which he held and caressed softly. ‘My dear little enthusiast!’ he said.

‘Don’t say that, Edward!’ she cried quickly; ‘that was all very well in the old days, which you say were nonsense. I was only a girl then, but now I am middle-aged and not to be put off in that way. I am not a little enthusiast, I am an anxious woman. You should not put me off with phrases of the past.’

‘You are always a girl, Carry, if you should live to be a thousand,’ he said with a faint laugh. ‘If you were so middle-aged as you say, you would be content with results as we have them. Here we are, we two, together with all the happiness we once so eagerly looked forward to, and which seemed for a time hopeless—very well off, thanks to you. Able to surround ourselves with everything that is delightful and pleasant, besides the central fact of being together, able to help our poor neighbours in a practical way: thanks to you again. Not so much as a crumple in our bed of roses—not a thorn. My dear, that is what you would think of, if you were middle-aged as you say.’

‘Then let me be a silly girl, as in the old times,’ she cried, ‘though it was all nonsense, nothing but nonsense, as you say.’

‘Softly, softly,’ he said, taking her hand again, ‘let us discriminate, Carry. Love can never be nonsense which has lasted like ours. My love, you must not blaspheme.’

‘Love!’ she cried. Carry’s whole frame was trembling, her heart beating to her feet, to her fingers, in her throat. She seemed to herself only to be a slim sheath, the merest covering for that convulsive heart. There was something like—could it be scorn in the inflection of her voice. He took her by both hands now, throwing down the cigarette which had betokened the entire ease of his mind, and drew her towards him. Something like alarm had come into his tone, and something like indignation too.

‘Carry,’ he said, holding her hands fast, ‘Carry, what do you mean? Not that my love was nonsense, which never wavered from you, notwithstanding everything—not that you distrust me?’

The darkness is an advantage in many an interview like this. It prevented him from seeing all that was in Lady Car’s face, the impetuous terrible question, the impulse of wild scepticism and unbelief, the intolerable impatience of the idealist not to be altogether restrained. Her eyes asked what her lips could never say. Why did you leave me to be another man’s wife? Why let me be strained, humbled, trodden under foot? Why expose me to all the degradations which nobody could impose on you—and why, why? But Carry said none of these things. She could not. There are some things which the religion of the heart forbids ever to be put in words. She could not say them. He might have read them in her eyes, but the darkness kept that revelation from him which would have been more startling than anything Beaufort had ever encountered in his life. Finally Carry, being only a woman, and a sensitive and delicate one, fell into the universal feminine anti-climax, the foolishness of tears. How often does their irrestrainable non-sequitur put the deepest reasons out of court, and turn the most solemn burden of the soul into apparent foolishness—a woman’s tears, which often gain a foolish cause, but as often lose a strong one, reducing the deep-hearted to the level of the shallow, and placing the greatest offender in the delightful superior position of the man who makes allowances for and pardons! Beaufort gathered her into his arms, made her have her cry out upon his shoulder, soothed and calmed and caressed her out of her passion of feeling. If any one could have whispered in his ear what was in the passionate heart that throbbed on his shoulder! but he would have smiled and would not have believed. She was a little enthusiast, still the same young ethereal poet as ever, a creature made up of lovely impulses and sympathies and nerve and feelings—his sweet Carry, his only love.

After this evening Lady Car had a little illness, nothing of any consequence, a chill taken sitting out too late on the lawn, a headache, probably neuralgic—a little ailment, quite simple, such as ladies often have, keeping them, in their rooms and dressing-gowns for a day or two. A woman scarcely respects herself who has not these little breaks from time to time, just to show of what delicate and fragile stuff she is made. But she emerged from her room a little different, no one could quite tell how, with a different look in her face, quieter, less given to restless fits, more composed and gentle. She had always been gentle, with the softest manners in the world, so that the change was not apparent to the vulgar. Beaufort perceived it for the first day or two, and it gave him a faint shock, as of something invisible, some sudden mystery between them; but the feeling passed over very quickly with a conviction of the utter absurdity of any such impression. Janet, who had never any words in which to convey her discoveries, and no one to say them to if she had found the words, saw it more clearly, and knew that something had happened, though what she could not divine. There were some faint changes scarcely perceptible, but developing gradually, in Lady Car’s habits too. She was less in the library with her husband, abandoning this custom very slowly in the most natural way in the world, compelled by other duties which naturally, with a daughter growing up, became more important every day.

CHAPTER VIII

Lady Car did many things after this period which she had previously disliked to do; but there was one thing which she did not for a long time consent to, and that was to open the house in the North which was called the Towers, which Tom had been used to speak of as ‘my place,’ and which Beaufort thought it foolish of her not to inhabit. He did not know the ghosts that dwelt there. He did not consider that it was the house of her first husband, the house she was taken to as a most wretched bride after the marriage into which she had been forced, and that the dreadful time of that bridehood, and the years she had lived with Torrance, and the moment of awful ecstasy when she had heard of his death, all lingered there waiting for her. Mr. Beaufort only thought it was foolish, when she had a handsome house in Scotland at her command, that the family did not go there in the autumn, where it was natural that families should go. But he was not a man to bore her by any repetition of this wonder. He had been a little surprised, and even, it must be allowed, a little disconcerted, to find himself so much more at his own disposal than of old, and now that Carry was not always at his side his habits, too, changed imperceptibly. His beautiful library was still his chief haunt, but he read the papers there and all kinds of profane things. And he went a great deal to Codalton, where the county club was, and spent a part almost of every day there. It was not that he had any great liking for the gentlemen who found it such a resource. He kept the position among them of a man who was not as they were—a person superior in many ways, a writer (though he never wrote anything), a philosopher. No doubt he was entitled to that last character. He was very civil to them all, but regarded them from an altitude, making notes of what he called their ‘humours’ and making them the subject of many satirical descriptions when he went home. Sometimes he went up to London for the day, at first to consult books, but latterly without alleging any such reason, and went to many places where there were no books to consult. But it was very rarely that he did not return home in the evening. He had no desire for dissipations of any kind. He was far too much a philosopher, not to say a gentleman. Tom, perhaps, described it best in his school-boy language when he said that Beau liked to loaf. So he did. He had no twist in his character. Had Lady Car followed him in all his excursions she would have found nothing to object to, and indeed he would have enjoyed them much more if she had. But he had, as a matter of fact, no mission such as she had credited him with; he had no gospel to preach, nothing at all to say. If there had ever been anything more than youthful excitement and ambition in his plans, it had all evaporated in his listless life. He might have pushed on—many young men do—and insisted upon marrying his love, and saved her from Tom Torrance and the dreadful episode of her first marriage. He might have realised at last some of his early promises and anticipations. He might at least have roused himself from his sloth, and written that book upon which her heart was so set. But, indeed, that last was doubtful, for he might only have proved that he could not write a book, which would have been harder on Lady Car than to think he would not. The end of all thing was, however, that he was immensely relieved, and yet made vaguely miserable by the change that had now come over his life. There was a change. The sweet and constant, if sometimes a little exacting companionship of the early years was over, which gave him a vague ache as of desertion, especially at first. And Carry was changed. Her questions, her arguments, her constant persuasions and inducements to go on with that book (expressing always a boundless trust in his powers which it pained him to part with) were all over. On the other hand, he had regained his liberty, was now free to do as he pleased—an indescribable boon. What he pleased to do was always quite gentlemanlike, quite comme il faut. There was no reason why he should be restrained in doing it. He liked to read, and also to think, without it being supposed to be necessary that anything should come of his reading and thinking. He liked to go to his London club now and then and have the stimulus of a little conversation; he liked, when there was nothing else to do, to go into Codalton, and talk a little to the country gentlemen and the smaller fry about who were sufficiently important to belong to the county club, and to come in occasionally to sit with his wife in her drawing-room, to read to her, to tempt her to talk, even to give Janet a little lecture upon literature, which she cared nothing about. He was on those occasions a delightful companion, so easy in his superior knowledge, so unpretending. In their rich and easy life, without cares, without any embarrassment about ways and means, or any need to think of to-morrow, he was indeed an admirable husband, a most charming stepfather, pleasant all round. What could any woman have wished for more?

There was one period in this easy and delightful life which brought the change home to Beaufort with curious force for a moment and no more. It was just after the publication of a book which went over his ground, the ground which it had always been supposed he was going to take. It forestalled him on many points, but in some went quite against him, contradicting his views. He brought in the volume with some excitement to his wife, and read to her those portions with which he disagreed. ‘I must do something about this,’ he said; ‘you see the fellow takes half my argument, and works out from it quite a different conclusion. I have been too supine. I must really get to work at once, and not suffer myself to be forestalled and contradicted like this.’

‘Yes, Edward,’ said Carry gently. She smiled very sweetly upon him, with a curious tender smile, but she did not say any more.

‘You speak as if you did not think it worth my while,’ he said, a little annoyed by her composure.

‘Oh, no. I think it quite worth your while,’ she said. He went off a little disturbed, vexed, half angry, half sad, but certainly stimulated by her. Was it indifference? What was it? Had she responded as of old they would have talked the matter over between them and taken away all its interest; but as she did not respond Beaufort felt the fire burn. He went off to his room, and got out all his preparatory notes and the beginning of the long interrupted manuscript, and worked with vigour all night, throwing his opposite views hastily upon paper. Next day he announced to his wife that he meant ‘to review that fellow’s book’—as the quickest and surest way of expressing his dissent. ‘Yes,’ she said once more, but with a little rising colour, ‘when, Edward?’ ‘Oh, I’ll send it to “Bowles,”’ he said, meaning ‘The Nineteenth Century’ of that day. Of course, ‘The Nineteenth Century’ itself had not yet begun its dignified career. And he did an hour’s work that morning, but with softened zeal; and in the afternoon he repeated to himself that it was scarcely worth his while. The people who had read that fellow’s book would not care to read a review; they would be people on the other side, quite unlikely to pay any attention to the opposite argument. And as for the general public, the general public did not care a straw for all the social philosophy or political economy in the world. So, after another hour’s deliberation he put all the papers back again—What was the use?—and went into the county club and brought back a very amusing story of the complicated metaphors and confused reasoning of some of the gentlemen there. It did not strike him that Carry never asked whether he had finished the review, or how he was going to treat the subject. But he remarked her smile with a curious sensation which he could not explain. It seemed to him something new—very sweet (her smile had always been sweet), very patient, indulgent, with a look of forgiving in it, though he did not know very well what there was to forgive. He forgot in a short time all about the answer he had intended to write to that book, and even the review into which his intended answer had so soon slid—in intention; but he was haunted for a very long time by Carry’s smile. What did it mean?

Tom and Janet were just as little aware why it was that their mother was so much more with them than of old, but this had come on gradually, and it did not strike them except by moments. ‘Why, you’re always with mother now,’ Tom said when he came home for his holidays. He was now at Eton, and, though he had been in several scrapes, had managed to keep his place and was in high hopes of getting into the boats, which was the only distinction he had any chance of.

‘Yes,’ said Janet sedately, ‘for I’m growing up now, and mother says I want her most——’

‘Isn’t it awful sap?’ said Tom, which was Eton (at that time) for boredom and hard work. He had the grace to speak low, and Janet gave him a glance upward with raised eyelids, and they both laughed, but softly that no one might ask why.

‘She thinks of such a lot of things that no one can be expected to know,’ said Tom; ‘not that I mind, for she lets me alone now. But I suppose you’ve got to read books all day.’

‘Oh, no. Oh, Tom, we oughtn’t to talk like this and laugh, for she’s—mother’s very kind. She is indeed. She sees in a moment if I’m tired.’

‘She’d need to,’ said Tom, ‘but I don’t suppose girls mind. You come out now and have a game. Will she let you? If she won’t, just steal away—— ’

‘Oh, Tom,’ cried Janet again, ‘how can you speak of mother so? She never stops any fun, never—when there is any,’ the girl added after a pause.

Lady Car was at the other end of the room, seated in the recess of a broad window which looked over the wide landscape. She had been waiting for Janet, who had asked her assistance in some work she was doing—trumpery work such as disturbed all Carry’s prejudices. Janet was painting flowers upon some little three-legged stools for a bazaar, and though she only copied the ‘patterns,’ she required in the execution some hints from her mother, who had once made considerable progress in the study of art. Janet was entirely unaware that Lady Car’s dreamy landscapes, which were full of distance and suggestion if nothing else, were in any way superior to her ‘patterns,’ and had made her call for aid with the frankest confidence that what she was doing was excellent art. And Carry had prepared the palette from which the dahlias and red geraniums were to be painted with as much care as if it had been wanted by Raphael. When she saw the two, after their whispered conversation at the door, suddenly disappear, perhaps she was not altogether sorry. It is possible that the painting of the stools was ‘sap’ to the mother also. She smiled at them with a little wave of her hand and shake of her head as they passed the window, in mild allusion to the abandoned work; but perhaps she was as much relieved as Janet was. She laid back her head upon the dim-coloured satin of her chair, and watched the two young creatures with their racquets, Janet carrying in her apron a supply of balls for their game. Seventeen and a half, fifteen and a half—in the bloom which was half infantile, half grown up, all fresh about them, nothing as yet to bring in black care. They were not handsome, but Tom had a sturdy manliness and strength, and Janet, her mother thought, looked everything that was simple and trustworthy—a good girl, not clever—but very good-natured and kind; and Tom not at all a bad boy—rough a little, but that was mere high spirits and boyish exuberance. They were neither of them clever. She said to herself, with a faint smile, how silly she had been!

How she had worshipped talent—no, not talent, genius—and had hoped that they would surely have had some gleam of it—the two whom she had brought into the world. They had been surrounded with beautiful things all their lives. When other people read foolish nursery stories to their children she had nourished them upon the very best—fables and legends which were literature as well as story—yet Janet liked the patterns for her stools better than all the poems and pictures, and Tom never opened a book if he could help it. And what matter? she said to herself, with that faint smile of self-ridicule. The children were none the worse for that. Her fantastic expectations, her fantastic disappointment, what did they matter? She was altogether a most fantastic woman—everybody had said it all her life, and she recognised fully the truth of the accusation now. Who should be so happy as she? Her husband so kind, always with her, thinking of everything that would make her happy. Her children so good (really so good!), nice, well-conditioned—Tom so manly, Janet all that a girl should be, very, very different indeed from Carry as a girl. But what a good thing that was; Janet would have no silly ideal, would desire no god to come from the skies, would not torment herself and every one about her with fantastic aspirations. She would love some good honest young fellow when her time came, and would live the common life, the common happy life, as the family at Easton were doing now. Edward, gone over to Codalton to the county club—the natural resource of a man in the country; the brother and sister playing tennis on the lawn—the boy expecting to get into the boats, the girl delighted with a new pattern for her stools. And no cloud anywhere, no trouble about settling them in life, no embarrassment about money or anything else. How happy a family! Everything right and pleasant and comfortable. As Carry lay back in her chair, thinking all these happinesses over, her eyes ran over with sudden tears—for satisfaction surely and joy.

When the tea-tray came in the young ones appeared with it, very hungry, and ready for the good things which covered the little table. Lady Car watched them consume the cakes with the same smile which had puzzled Beaufort. ‘Would you really like so very much,’ she said with a little hesitation, a lingering in her voice, ‘to go to the—Towers for the next holidays, Tom?’

‘Should I like!’ cried the boy, jumping up with his mouth full of bread and butter. ‘Why, mother, better than anything in the world!’

‘Oh mother!’ Janet cried, with a glow upon her face. She had passed the bread-and-butter stage, and was cutting herself a hunk of cake. The knife fell out of her hand from excitement and pleasure.

‘Shall you both like it so very much? Then,’ said Lady Car, sitting straight up with a look of pale resolution in her face which did not seem called for by such a simple determination, ‘then, children, you shall go——’

‘Hurrah!’ cried Tom, ‘that’s the jolliest thing I’ve heard for long; that’s exactly what I want! I want to know it,’ he cried; ‘I do want to know it before I go there and settle down.’

Lady Car turned her eyes upon him with a wonderful, inquiring look. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural. Yet to hear that someone would go there, not for holidays, but to settle down, oppressed poor Carry’s soul. She faded into whiteness, as if she were fainting. It seemed to her that his father looked over Tom’s shoulder—the father whom the boy was so like—his living image, as people said. Not so tall and strong, but with the features and the eyes and the aspect, which poor Carry had so feared.

‘Beau!’ cried both the young people in one voice. ‘Oh, I believe it’s his doing, Tom!’ ‘He must have a hand in it, Jan!’ ‘Beau, next holidays we are going to the Towers. Mother says so. We are going next holidays to the Towers.’

‘Your mother is full of sense,’ said Beaufort, who had just come in. ‘I knew that she would see it to be the right thing to do.’

Poor Carry! She felt as if she could not bear it, this sacrifice of all her own feelings and wishes. She said to herself that she could not do it; that before the time came she must die! And perhaps there was a forlorn hope that this was what would happen in her heart as she sat and saw her husband and her children rejoicing over the tea-table—most naturally, most justly, she knew; at least it was but natural and just so far as the children were concerned.

She had to give great orders and make many arrangements about the opening up of the house. It was so long since it had been shut up. Tom had been only six, and now he was seventeen and a half. She wrote to her sister Edith and to Edith’s husband, John Erskine, as well as to the factor on the estate and the servants who were in charge. And there were a number of things sent from town ‘to make it habitable.’ To make it habitable! She could not help the feeling that this was what he would have liked least of all, when she remembered the wonderful costly catafalques of furniture of which he had been so proud, and the decorations that would make poor Edward miserable. Edward did not mind the fact that it was his money which made Easton so comfortable; but to put up with his wardrobes and sideboards—that was a different matter. Even in her humiliation and in the much greater troubles she had to occupy her, she could not help a shudder to think of Edward in the midst of all those showy relics of the past. Eleven years had not dimmed her own recollection of her old surroundings. She remembered with an acute recollection, which was pain, where everything stood, and sent detailed directions as to how all was to be altered. ‘Dear Edith, do see that everything is changed. Don’t let anything look as it used to do. It would kill me if the rooms were left as they were,’ she wrote to her sister. ‘Do—do see that everything is changed.’

Perhaps it was by dint of having thus exhausted all feeling and forestalled all emotion that when she did find herself at the Towers at last, it was almost without sentiment of any kind. Edith had carried out her consigne very well, and she was standing under the mock mediæval doorway to receive her sister when Lady Car drove up. The sisters had not met for a long time—not for several years, and the meeting in itself did much to break the spell. Carry awoke with wonder and a little relief to find herself next morning in her old home, and to feel that she did not mind. Torrance did not meet her at his own hearth; he did not look at her from the mirror; he did not follow her about the corridor. She was very much relieved after all her imaginary anguish to feel that the reality was less dreadful than she had feared.

And it was something to see the children so truly happy. The quiet little Janet, who said so little, was quite roused out of herself. She became almost noisy, rushing with Tom from the top of the tower to the very cellars, going over everything. Her voice mingled shrill in the hurrah! with which Tom contemplated the flag of which he had dreamed, the sign of his own domination in this house of his fathers, which was to the boy as if it had been the shrine of the noblest of races. ‘I see now,’ he said, ‘that rag at Easton was all sham, but this is the real thing.’ ‘This is the real thing,’ said Janet decisively, ‘the other was only nonsense.’ They had not been twenty-four hours in the place before they had seen, and as they said recognised, everything. All their upbringing in scenes so different, all the associations of their lives, seemed to go for nothing. They were intoxicated with pleasure and pride. A couple of young princes restored to their kingdom could not have accepted their grandeur with a more undoubting sense that they had at last recovered their rights.

The house soon filled with visitors and company, guests who came for sport, and guests who came for curiosity, and the great county people who were friends of the Lindores, and the smaller people who were friends of Torrance. And with both sets of these visitors Carry could not help seeing—or perhaps she only imagined it—that though her husband and herself were treated with great courtesy, it was Tom who was looked to with the chief interest. He was the future possessor of all. Though she had entire sway in the house as she never had before, yet she was nothing but a shadow, as she had always been. And the children in their haste to enjoy would have liked if possible to ignore her too. As for Tom, he got altogether beyond her control. When he was not shooting, taking upon himself premature airs of the master, he was riding about the country as his father had done, going to all kinds of places, making acquaintances everywhere. He came home on several occasions, after a day of roaming, with wild eyes, half-falling, half-leaping off his horse, making his entrance audible by all the tumult of rough excitement, calling loudly to the servants, discharging oaths at them for imaginary delay. The first time this happened, Lady Car only suspected it with alarm, which everybody about stilled as best they could, getting the young culprit out of the way. ‘The matter? there is nothing the matter?’ Beaufort said, coming to her, a little pale, but with a laugh. ‘Tom has lost his temper. He is vexed with himself for being late for dinner. I’ll have a talk with him by-and-by.’ ‘Is that all, Edward?’ she said. ‘What should it be more?’ her husband replied. But on another occasion, as evil luck would have it, Tom made his entrance just as the party, a large one, in which his place was vacant, was sweeping across the hall to dinner, and his mother, who came last, had the full advantage of that spectacle. Her son, standing all bespattered, unsteady, his dull eyes fierce with angry light. ‘Hallo, mother! I’m a bit late. Never mind. I’ll come as I am,’ he cried, steadying himself, beating his muddy boot with his whip. Lady Car threw an anguished look at the new butler, who stood splendid and indifferent at the door. There was not even an old servant full of resource to coax the foolish wretched boy away.

She had to go in and sit down smiling at the head of her table, and entertain her guests, not knowing any minute whether the boy might not burst in and make his shame visible to all. In the midst of the sounds of the dinner-table, the talk, and the ring of the knives and forks, and the movements of the servants, other sounds seemed to reach her ear of loud voices and noise outside. She had to bear it all and make no sign, but talk that her neighbours on each side might not notice, with what was almost noisiness for Carry. Perhaps, though it seems more horrible at such a crisis to be in the midst of the compulsory make-belief of society, it is better for the sufferer. She kept up, and never winced till the dinner was over, and the endless hour in the drawing-room after, and all the guests gone, those who were from the neighbourhood to their homes, those who were in the house to their rooms. Then, and only then, did she dare to breathe, to give way to the devouring anxiety in her mind. She had bidden her husband ‘Go, go!’ to the smoking-room, or anywhere with the last guests, and she was alone. The whole house had been changed; the old furniture displaced, all its associations altered: and yet in that moment everything came back again, the catafalques of old, the vulgar splendour, the old dreary surroundings. Her boy! Her boy! She thought she saw his father come out before her, as she had feared to see him all these years, saying with his old brutal laugh, ‘Your boy! none of yours. Mine! mine!’

CHAPTER IX

Beaufort behaved very well at this crisis of domestic history. He shook off his usual languor and became at once energetic and active. What he said to Tom remains undisclosed, but he ‘spoke to’ the boy with great force, and even eloquence, representing to him the ruin entailed by certain bad habits, which—more than other vices, probably worse in themselves—destroy a man’s reputation and degrade him among his fellows. Though he was himself a man over-refined in his ways, he was clever enough to seize the only motives which were likely to influence the ruder nature of his stepson. And then he went to poor Carry, who in this home of evil memories sat like a ghost surrounded by the recollections of the past, and seeing for ever before her eyes the disordered looks and excited eyes of her boy. He was not, alas! the son of her dreams, the child whom every mother hopes for, who is to restore the ideal of what a man should be. Many disappointments had already taught Lady Car that her son had little of the ideal in him, and nothing, or next to nothing, of herself; but still he was her son: and to think of him as the rude and violent debauchee of the country-side seemed more than she could bear. Beaufort came in upon her miserable seclusion like a fresh breeze of comfort and hope. This was so far from his usual aspect that the effect was doubled. Tender he always was, but to-day he was cheerful, hopeful, full of confidence and conscious power. ‘There must be no more of this,’ he cried. ‘Come, Carry, have a little courage. Because the boy has been a fool once—or even twice—that is not to say that there is anything tragical in it, or that he is abandoned to bad habits. It is probably scarcely his fault at all—a combination of circumstances. Nobody’s fault, indeed. Some silly man, forgetting he was a boy, persuading him out of supposed hospitality to swallow something his young head could not stand. How was the boy in his innocence to know that he could not stand it? It is a mere accident. My love, you good women are often terribly unjust and sweeping in your judgments. You must not from one little foolish misdemeanour judge Tom.’

‘Oh, Edward!’ she cried, ‘judge him! my own boy! All that I feel is that I would rather have died than seen that look, that dreadful look, in my child’s face.’

‘Nonsense, Carry. That is what I call judging him. You should never have seen it, but as for rather dying—— Would Tom be the better for it if he lost his mother, the best influence a boy can have——?’

She shook her head: but how to tell her husband of the spectre who had risen before her in the house that was his, claiming the son who was his, his heir and not Carry’s, she did not know. Influence! she had been helpless by the side of the father, and in the depths of that dreadful experience Carry foresaw that the son, so like him, so moulded upon that man whom she had feared to the bottom of her heart, and alas! unwillingly hated, had now escaped her too. There are moments which are prophetic, and in which the feeblest vision sees clear. He had escaped her influence, if, indeed, he had ever acknowledged any influence of hers. As a child he had been obliged to obey her, and even as a youth the influence of the household—that decent, tranquil, graceful household at Easton—which henceforward Tom would compare so contemptuously with his own ‘place,’ and the wealth which was soon to be his—had kept him in a fashion of submission. But Tom had always looked at his mother with eyes in which defiance lurked: there had never been in them anything of that glamour with which some children regard their mother, finding in her their first ideal. It had always been a weariness to Tom to be confined to the restraint of her society. When they were children even, he and his sister had schemed together to escape from it. She was dimly aware that even Janet—— These things are hard for a mother to realise, but there are moments when they come upon her with all the certainty of fate. Her influence! She could have laughed or wept. As it was with the father, so would it be with the son. For that moment at least poor Carry’s perceptions were clear.

But what could she say? She said nothing; not even to Beaufort could she disclose that miserable insight which had come to her. Your own children, how can you blame them to another, even if that other is your husband? how say that, though so near in blood and every tie, they are alien in soul? how disclose that sad intuition? Carry never said a word. She shook her head; not even perhaps to their own father could she have revealed that discovery. A mother’s part is to excuse, to pardon, to bear with everything, even to pretend that she is deceived and blinded by the partiality of love, never to disclose the profound and unutterable discouragement with which she has recognised the truth. She shook her head at Beaufort’s arguments, leaving him to believe that it was only a woman’s natural severity of judgment against the sins with which she had no sympathy. And by-and-by she allowed herself to be comforted. He thought that he had brought her back to good sense and the moderation of a less exacting standard, and had convinced her that a boyish escapade, however blamable, was not of the importance she imagined. He thought he had persuaded her not to be hard upon Tom, not to reproach him, to pass it over as a thing which might be trusted to his good sense not to occur again. Carry did not enter into any explanations. She had by this time come to understand well enough that she must not expect anyone to divine what was in her heart.

Meanwhile Janet, who was vaguely informed on the matter, and knew that Tom was in disgrace, though not very clearly why, threw herself into his defence with all the fervour that was in her nature. She went and sat by him while he lingered over a late breakfast with all the ruefulness of headache. ‘Oh, Tom, what have you done?’ she said. ‘Oh, why didn’t you come in time for dinner? Oh, where were you all the afternoon? We were looking for you everywhere, Jock and I.’ Jock was an Erskine cousin, the eldest of the tribe.

‘What does it matter to you where I was?’ said the sullen boy.