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A Country Gentleman and His Family

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Title: A Country Gentleman and His Family

Author: Mrs. Oliphant


        
Release date: January 2, 2010 [eBook #30835]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN AND HIS FAMILY ***




Produced by Delphine Lettau and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net









A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
AND HIS FAMILY


BY

MRS. OLIPHANT

AUTHOR OF 'THE WIZARD'S SON,' 'HESTER,' ETC.


London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1887

_All rights reserved_


_Printed (3 Vols. Crown 8vo) by_ R. & R. CLARK, _1886_.
_Printed, Crown 8vo, 1 Vol., 1887._




A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN.




CHAPTER I.


Theodore Warrender was still at Oxford when his father died. He was a
youth who had come up from his school with the highest hopes of what he
was to do at the university. It had indeed been laid out for him by an
admiring tutor with anticipations which were almost certainties: "If you
will only work as well as you have done these last two years!" These
years had been spent in the dignified ranks of Sixth Form, where he had
done almost everything that boy can do. It was expected that the School
would have had a holiday when he and Brunson went up for the scholarships
in their chosen college, and everybody calculated on the "double event."
Brunson got the scholarship in question, but Warrender failed, which at
first astonished everybody, but was afterwards more than accounted for
by the fact that his fine and fastidious mind had been carried away by
the Æschylus paper, which he made into an exhaustive analysis of the
famous trilogy, to the neglect of other less inviting subjects. His
tutor was thus almost more proud of him for having failed than if he
had succeeded, and Sixth Form in general accepted Brunson's success
apologetically as that of an "all-round" man, whose triumph did not mean
so much. But if there is any place where the finer scholarship ought to
tell, it should be in Oxford, and his school tutor, as has been said,
laid out for him a sort of little map of what he was to do. There
were the Hertford and the Ireland scholarships, almost as a matter of
course; a first in moderations, but that went without saying; at least
one of the Vice-Chancellor's prizes--probably the Newdigate, or some
other unconsidered trifle of the kind; another first class in Greats; a
fellowship. "If you don't do more than this I will be disappointed in
you," the school tutor said.

The college tutors received Warrender with suppressed enthusiasm,
with that excitement which the acquisition of a man who is likely to
distinguish himself (and his college) naturally calls forth. It was not
long before they took his measure and decided that his school tutor was
right. He had it in him to bring glory and honour to their doors. They
surrounded him with that genial warmth of incubation which brings a
future first class tenderly to the top of the lists. Young Warrender
was flattered, his heart was touched. He thought, with the credulity of
youth, that the dons loved him for himself; that it was because of the
attractions of his own noble nature that they vied with each other
in breakfasting and dining him, in making him the companion of their
refined and elevated pleasures. He thought, even, that the Rector--that
name of fear--had at last found in himself the ideal which he had vainly
sought in so many examples of lettered youth. He became vain, perhaps,
but certainly a little self-willed, as was his nature, feeling himself
to be on the top of the wave, and above those precautions for keeping
himself there which had once seemed necessary. He did not, indeed, turn
to any harm, for that was not in his nature; but feeling himself no longer
a schoolboy, but a man, and the chosen friend of half the dons of his
college, he turned aside with a fine contempt from the ordinary ways of
fame-making, and betook himself to the pursuit of his own predilections
in the way of learning. He had a fancy for out-of-the-way studies, for
authors who don't pay, for eccentricities in literature; in short, for
having his own way and reading what he chose. Signals of danger became
gradually visible upon his path, and troubled consultations were held
over him in the common room. "He is paying no attention to his books,"
remarked one; "he is reading at large whatever pleases him." Much was
to be said for this principle, but still, alas, these gentlemen were all
agreed that it does not pay.

"If he does not mind, he will get nothing but a pass," the Rector said,
bending his brows. The learned society shrank, as if a sentence of death
had been pronounced.

"Oh no, not so bad as that!" they cried, with one voice.

"What do you call so bad as that? Is not a third worse than that? Is not
a second quite as bad?" said the majestic presiding voice. "In the gulf
there are no names mentioned. We are not credited with a mistake. It will
be better, if he does not stick to his books, that he should drop."

Young Warrender's special tutor made frantic efforts to arrest this
doom. He pointed out to the young man the evil of his ways. "In one
sense all my sympathies are with you," he said; "but, my dear fellow,
if you don't read your books you may be as learned as ----, and as
clear-sighted as ----" (the historian, being unlearned, does not know
what names were here inserted), "but you will never get to the head of
the lists, where we have hoped to see you."

"What does it matter?" said Warrender, in boyish splendour. "The lists
are merely symbols. You know one's capabilities without that; and as for
the opinion of the common mass, of what consequence is it to me?"

A cold perspiration came out on the tutor's brow. "It is of great
consequence to--the college," he said. "My dear fellow, so long as we
are merely mortal we can't despise symbols; and the Rector has set his
heart on having so many first classes. He doesn't like to be disappointed.
Come, after it's all over you will have plenty of time to read as you
like."

"But why shouldn't I read as I like now?" said Warrender. He was very
self-willed. He was apt to start off at a tangent if anybody interfered
with him,--a youth full of fads and ways of his own, scorning the common
path, caring nothing for results. And by what except by results is a
college to be known and assert itself? The tutor whose hopes had been
so high was in a state of depression for some time after. He even made
an appeal to the school tutor, the enthusiast who had sent up this
troublesome original with so many fine prognostications: who replied
to the appeal, and descended one day upon the youth in his room, quite
unexpectedly.

"Well, Theo, my fine fellow, how are you getting on? I hope you are
keeping your eyes on the examination, and not neglecting your books."

"I am delighted to see you, sir," said the lad. "I was just thinking I
should like to consult you upon"--and here he entered into a fine question
of scholarship,--a most delicate question, which probably would be
beyond the majority of readers, as it is of the writer. The face of the
public-school man was a wonder to see. It was lighted up with pleasure,
for he was an excellent scholar, yet clouded with alarm, for he knew the
penalties of such behaviour in a "man" with an examination before him.

"My dear boy," he said, "in which of your books do you find any reference
to that?"

"In none of them, I suppose," said the young scholar. "But, you don't
think there is any sanctity in a set of prescribed books?"

"Oh no, no sanctity: but use," said the alarmed master. "Come, Theo,
there's a good fellow, don't despise the tools we all must work with.
It's your duty to the old place, you know, which all these newspaper
fellows are throwing stones at whenever they have a chance: and it's
your duty to your college. I know what you are worth, of course: but
how can work be tested to the public eye except by the lists?"

"Why should I care for the public eye?" said the magnanimous young man.
"_We_ know that the lists don't mean everything. A headache might make
the best scholar that ever was lose his place. A fellow that knows
nothing might carry the day by a fluke. Don't you remember, sir, that
time when Daws got the Lincoln because of that old examiner, who gave
us all his own old fads in the papers? Every fellow that was any good
was out of it, and Daws got the scholarship. I am sure you can't have
forgotten that."

"Oh no, I have not forgotten it," said the master ruefully. "But that was
only once in a way. Come, Theo, be reasonable. As long as you are in
training, you know, you must keep in the beaten way. Think, my boy, of
your school--and of me, if you care for my credit as a tutor."

"You know, sir, I care for you, and to please you," said Warrender,
with feeling. "But as for your credit as a tutor, who can touch that?
And even I am not unknown here," he added, with a little boyish pride.
"Everybody who is of any importance knows that the Rector himself has
always treated me quite as a friend. I don't think"--this with the
ineffable simple self-assurance of youth, so happy in the discrimination
of those who approve of it that the gratification scarcely feels like
vanity--"that I shall be misunderstood here."

"Oh, the young ass!" said the master to himself, as he went away. "Oh,
the young idiot! Poor dear Theo, what will be his feelings when he finds
out that all they care for is the credit of the college?" But he was
not so barbarous as to say this, and Warrender was left to find out by
himself, by the lessening number of the breakfasts, by the absence of
his name on the lists of the Rector's dinner-parties, by the gradual
cooling of the incubating warmth, what had been the foundation of all
the affection shown him. It was not for some time that he perceived the
change which made itself slowly apparent, the gradual loss of interest
in him who had been the object of so much interest. The nest was, so to
speak, left cold, no father bird lending his aid to the development; his
books were no longer forced on his consideration; his tutor no longer
made anxious remarks. Like other silly younglings, the lad for a while
rejoiced in his freedom, and believed that he had succeeded in making
his pastors and teachers aware of a better way. And it was not till
there flashed upon him the awful revelation that _they were taking up
Brunson_, that he began to see the real state of affairs. Brunson was
the all-round man whom Sixth Form despised,--a fellow who had little or
no taste for the higher scholarship, but who always knew his books by
heart, mastering everything that would "pay" with a determined practical
faculty fertile of results. There is no one for whom the dilettante mind
has a greater contempt; and when Warrender saw that Brunson figured at
the Rector's dinner-parties as he himself had once done, that it was
Brunson who went on the river with parties of young dons and walked out
of college arm in arm with his tutor, the whole meaning of his own brief
advancement burst upon him. Not for himself, as he had supposed in the
youthful simplicity which he called vanity now, and characterised by
strong adjectives; not in the least for him, Theo Warrender, scholar and
gentleman, but for what he might bring to the college,--the honours, the
scholarships, the credit to everybody concerned in producing a successful
student. That he became angry, scornful, and Byronic on the spot need
surprise nobody. Brunson! who never had come within a hundred miles of him
or of his set at school; did not even understand the fine problems which
the initiated love to discuss; was nothing but a plodding fellow, who
stuck to his work, and cared no more for the real soul of Greek literature
or philosophy than the scout did. Warrender laughed aloud,--that hollow
laugh, which was once so grand an exponent of feeling, and which, though
the Byronic mood has gone out of fashion, will never go out of fashion
so long as there is youthful pride to be wounded, and patient merit
has to accept the spurns of the unworthy. No, perhaps the adjective is
mistaken, if Shakespeare ever was mistaken; not patient, but exasperated
merit, conscious to the very finger points of its own deserts.

Warrender was well enough aware that he could, if he chose, make up the
lost way and leave Brunson "nowhere" in the race for honours; but it was
his first disenchantment, and he felt it deeply. Letters are dear and
honours sweet, but our own beloved personality is dearer still; and there
is no one who does not feel humbled and wounded when he finds out that
he is esteemed, not for himself, but for what he can do,--and poor Theo
was only twenty, and had been made much of all his life. He began to ask
himself, too, whether his past popularity, the pleasant things that had
been always said of him, the pleasant way in which his friendship had
been sought, were perhaps all inspired by the same motive,--because he
was likely to do credit to his belongings and friends. It is a fine
thing to do credit to your belongings, to be the pride of your community,
to be quoted to future generations as the hero of the past. This was
what had occurred to him at school, and he had liked it immensely.
Warrender had been a word to conjure withal, named by lower boys with
awe, fondly cherished in the records of Sixth Form. But the glimmer in
the Head Master's eye as he said good-bye, the little falter in his
tutor's voice,--did these mean no more than an appreciation of his
progress, and an anticipation of the honour and glory he was to bring
them at the university, a name to fling in the teeth of the newspaper
fellows next time they demanded what were the results of the famous
public school system? This thought had a sort of maddening effect upon
the fastidious, hot-headed, impatient young man. He flung his books
into a corner of the room, and covered them over with a yellow cairn of
railway novels. If that was all, there let them lie. He resolved that
nothing would induce him to touch them more.

The result was--but why should we dwell upon the result? It sent a
shiver through the college, where there were some faithful souls who
still believed that Warrender could pick up even at the last moment,
if he liked. It produced such a sensation in his old school as relaxed
discipline entirely, and confounded masters and scholars in one dark
discouragement. "Warrender has only got a ---- in Mods." We decline to
place any number where that blank is; it filled every division (except
the lowest) with consternation and dismay. Warrender! who was as sure
of a first as--why, there was nobody who was so sure as Warrender! The
masters who were Cambridge men recovered their courage after a little,
and said, "I told you so! That was a boy who ought to have gone to
Cambridge, where individual characteristics are taken into consideration."
Warrender's tutor took to his bed, and was not visible for a week, after
which only the most unsympathetic, not to say brutal, of his colleagues
would have mentioned before him Warrender's name. However, time
reconciles all things, and after a while the catastrophe was forgotten
and everything was as before.

But not to Warrender himself. He smiled, poor boy, a Byronic smile,
with a curl of the upper lip such as suited the part, and saw himself
abandoned by the authorities with what he felt to be a lofty disdain;
and he relapsed into such studies as pleased him most, and set
prescribed books and lectures at defiance. What was worst to bear
was that other classes of "men" made up to him, after the men of
distinction, those whom the dons considered the best men, had withdrawn
and left him to pursue his own way. The men who loafed considered him
their natural prey; the æsthetic men who wrote bad verses opened their
arms, and were ready to welcome him as their own. And perhaps among
these classes he might have found disinterested friendship, for nobody
any longer sought Warrender on account of what he could do. But he
did not make the trial, wrapping himself up in a Childe-Harold-like
superiority to all those who would consort with him, now that he had
lost his hold of those with whom only he desired to consort. His mother
and sisters felt a little surprised, when they came up to Commemoration,
to find that they were not overwhelmed by invitations from Theo's friends.
Other ladies had not a spare moment: they were lost in a turmoil of
breakfasts, luncheons, water-parties, concerts, flower-shows, and knew
the interior of half the rooms in half the colleges. But with the Miss
Warrenders this was not so. They were asked to luncheon by Brunson,
indeed, and had tea in the rooms of a young Cavendish, who had been at
school with Theo. But that was all, and it mortified the girls, who were
not prepared to find themselves so much at a disadvantage. This was the
only notice that was taken of his downfall at home, where there was no
academical ambition, and where everybody was quite satisfied so long as
he kept his health and did not get into any scrape. Perhaps this made
him feel it all the more, that his disappointment and disenchantment
were entirely shut up in his own bosom, and that he could not confide to
any one the terrible disillusionment that had befallen him on the very
threshold of his life. That the Rector should pass him with the slightest
possible nod, and his tutor say "How d'ye do, Warrender?" without even a
smile when they met, was nothing to anybody except himself. Arm in arm
with Brunson, the don would give him that salutation. Brunson, who had
got his first in Mods, and was going on placidly, admired of all, to
another first in the final schools.

But if there was any one who understood Warrender's feelings it was this
same Brunson, who was in his way an honest fellow, and understood the
situation. "It is all pot-hunting, you know," this youth said. "They
don't care for me any more than they care for Jenkinson. It's all for
what I bring to the college, just as it was for what they expected
you were going to bring to the college; only I understood it, and you
didn't. I don't care for them any more than they do for me. Why, they
might see, if they had any sense, that to work at you, who care for that
sort of thing, would be far better than to bother me, who only care for
what it will bring. If they had stuck to you they might have done a deal
with you, Warrender: whereas I should have done just the same whether
they took any notice of me or not."

"You mean to say I'm an empty-headed fool that could be cajoled into
anything!" cried the other angrily.

"I mean nothing of the sort. I mean that I'm going to be a schoolmaster,
and that first classes, etc., are my stock in trade. You don't suppose I
work to please the Rector? And I know, and he knows, and you know, that
I don't know a tenth part so much as you do. If they had held on at you,
Theo, they might have got a great scholar out of you. But that's not what
they want. They want so many firsts, and the Hertford, and the Ireland,
and all the rest of it. It's all pot-hunting," Mr. Brunson said. But this
did not lessen the effect of the disenchantment, the first disappointment
of life. Poor Theo became prone to suspect everybody after that first
proof that no one was above suspicion,--not even the greatly respected
head of one of the first colleges in the world.

After that dreadful fiasco in the schools, Warrender continued to keep
his terms very quietly; seeing very few people, making very few friends,
reading after his own fashion with an obstinate indifference to all
systems of study, and shutting his eyes persistently to the near approach
of the final ordeal. Things were in this condition when he received a
sudden telegram calling him home. "Come at once, or you will be too
late," was the message. The Rector, to whom he rushed at once, looked
at it coldly. He was not fond of giving an undergraduate leave in the
middle of the term. "The college could have wished for a more definite
message," he said. "Too late for what, Mr. Warrender?" "Too late to see
my father alive, sir!" cried the young man; and as this had all the
definiteness that the college required he was allowed to go. This was
how his studies were broken up just as they approached their conclusion,
although, as he had been so capricious and self-willed, nobody expected
that in any circumstances it could have been a very satisfactory close.




CHAPTER II.


The elder Mr. Warrender was a country gentleman of an undistinguished
kind. The county gentry of England is a very comprehensive class. It
includes the very best and most delightful of English men and English
women, the truest nobility, the finest gentlemen; but it also includes
a number of beings the most limited, dull, and commonplace that human
experience knows. In some cases they are people who do well to be proud
of the generation of gentlefolk through whom they trace their line, and
who have transmitted to them not only the habit of command, but the
habit of protection, and that easy grace of living which is not to be
acquired at first hand; and there are some whose forefathers have handed
down nothing but so many farms and fields, and various traditions, in
which father and son follow each other, each smaller and more petty of
soul than he that went before. The family at the Warren were of this
class. They were acknowledged gentry, beyond all question, but their
estates and means were small and their souls smaller. Their income never
reached a higher level than about fifteen hundred a year. Their paternal
home was a house of rather mean appearance, rebuilt on the ruins of the
old one in the end of last century, and consequently as ugly as four
square walls could be. The woods had grown up about it, and hid it almost
entirely from sight, which was an advantage, perhaps, to the landscape,
but not to those who were condemned to dwell in the house, which was
without light and air and everything that was cheering. The name of the
Warren was very well adapted to the place, which, except one corner of
the old house which had stood fast when the rest was pulled down, might
almost have been a burrow in the soft green earth, damp and warm and
full of the mould of ages, though it was a mere new-comer in the world.
Its furniture was almost entirely of the same date as the house, which
means dingy carpets, curtains of harsh and unpliable stuff, and immense
catafalques of mahogany in the shape of sideboards, arm-chairs, and
beds. A four-poster of mahogany, with hangings of red moreen, as stiff
as a board and much less soft,--that was the kind of furnishing; to be
sure, it was full of feather-beds and pillows, warm blankets and fresh
linen, which some people thought made amends.

The family consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Warrender, two daughters, and the
son, with whom the reader has already made acquaintance. How he had
found his way into such a nest was one of those problems which the
prudent evolutionist scarcely cares to tackle. The others were in their
natural place: the father a Warrender like the last dozen Warrenders who
had gone before him, and the girls cast exactly in the mould of all the
previous Minnies and Chattys of the family. They were all dull, blameless,
and good--to a certain extent; perfectly satisfied to live in the Warren
all the year long, to spend every evening of their lives round the same
hearth, to do the same thing to-day as they had done yesterday and should
do to-morrow. To be so easily contented, to accommodate one's self with
such philosophy to one's circumstances,--what an advantage that is!
But it required no philosophy on the part of the girls, who had not
imagination enough to think of anything different, and who devoutly
believed that nothing on earth was so virtuous, so dignified, so
praiseworthy, as to keep the linen in order, and make your own
underclothing, and sit round the fire at home. When any one would read
aloud to them they wanted no better paradise; but they were not very
exacting even in the matter of reading aloud. However exciting the
book might be, they were quite willing that it should be put away at a
quarter to ten, with a book-marker in it to keep the place. Once Chatty
had been known to take it up clandestinely after prayers, to see whether
the true murderer was found out; but Minnie waited quite decorously
till eight o'clock next evening, which was the right hour for resuming
the reading. Happy girls! They thus had in their limited little world
quite a happy life, expecting nothing, growing no older from year
to year. Minnie was twenty-five, Chatty twenty-three: they were
good-looking enough in their quiet way, very neat and tidy, with brown
hair so well brushed that it reflected the light. Theodore was the
youngest, and he had been very welcome when he came; for otherwise the
property would have gone to a distant heir of entail, which would not
have been pleasant for any of the family. He had been a very quiet boy
so long as he was at home, though not perhaps in the same manner of
quietness as that of the girls; but since he was thirteen he had been
away for the greater part of the years, appearing only in the holidays,
when he was always reading for something or other,--so that nobody was
aware how great was the difference between the fastidious young scholar
and the rest of his belongings.

Mr. Warrender himself was not a scholar. He had got through life
very well without ever being at the university. In his day it was not
considered such a necessity as now. And he was not at all critical of
his son. So long as the boy got into no scrapes he asked no more of him.
He was quite complacent when Theo brought home his school prizes, and
used to point them out to visitors. "This is for his Latin verses," he
would say. "I don't know where the boy got a turn for poetry. I am sure
it was not from me." The beautiful smooth binding and the school arms
on the side gave him great gratification. He had a faint notion that as
Theo brought home no prizes from Oxford he was not perhaps getting on so
well; but naturally he knew nothing of his son's experiences with the
Rector and the dons. And by that time he was ill and feverish, and far
more taken up about his beef-tea than about anything else in the world.
They did not make it half strong enough. If they only would make it
strong he felt sure he would soon regain his strength. But how could a
man pick up, who was allowed nothing but slops, when his beef-tea was
like water? This was the matter that occupied him most, while his son
was going through the ordeal above described,--there never was any taste
in the beef-tea. Mr. Warrender thought the cook must make away with the
meat; or else send the best of the infusion to some of her people in
the village, and give it to him watered. When it was made over the
fire in his room he said his wife had no skill; she let all the goodness
evaporate. He never could be satisfied with his beef-tea; and so,
grumbling and indignant, finding no savour in anything, but thoroughly
convinced that this was "their" fault, and that they could make it
better if they were to try, he dwindled and faded away.

It was a long illness; a family gets used to a long illness, and after
a while accepts it as the natural course of events. And the doctor
had assured them all that no sudden "change" was to be looked for.
Nevertheless, there was a sudden change. It had become the routine of
the house that each of the ladies should spend so many hours with papa.
Mrs. Warrender was with him, of course, the greater part of the day, and
went out and in to see if he was comfortable every hour or two during
the night; but one of the girls always sat with him in the evening,
bringing her needlework upstairs, and feeling that she was doing her
duty in giving up the reading just when the book was at its most
interesting point. It was after Chatty had fulfilled this duty, and
everybody was serenely preparing to go to bed, that the change came.
"How is he?" Mrs. Warrender had said, as they got out the Prayer-Book
which was used at family prayers. "Just as usual, mamma: quite quiet and
comfortable. I think he was asleep, for he took no notice when I bade
him good-night," Chatty said; and then the servants came in, and the
little rites were accomplished. Mrs. Warrender then went upstairs, and
received the same report from her maid, who sat with the patient in the
intervals when the ladies were at prayers. "Quite comfortable, ma'am,
and I think he is asleep." Mrs. Warrender went to the bedside and drew
back the curtain softly,--the red moreen curtain which was like a board
suspended by the head of the bed,--and lo, while they all had been so
calm, the change had come.

The girls thought their mother made a great deal more fuss than was
necessary; for what could be done? It might be right to send for the
doctor, who is an official whose presence is essential at the last act
of life; but what was the good of sending a man on horseback into
Highcombe, on the chance of the telegraph office being still open? Of
course it was not open; and if it had been, Theo could not possibly
leave Oxford till next morning. But then it was a well-known fact that
mamma was excitable, and often did things without thought. He lingered
all night, "just alive, and that is all," the doctor said. It was Chatty
who sent for the rector, who came and read the prayers for the sick at
the bedside, but agreed with Dr. Durant that it was of no use attempting
to rouse the departing soul from the lethargy in which he lay. And before
Theodore arrived all was over. He knew it before he entered the house by
the sight of the drawn blinds, which received him with a blank whiteness
of woe as soon as he caught sight of the windows. They had not sent to
meet him at the station, thinking he would not come till the later
train.

"Try and get mamma to lie down," Minnie said, as she kissed her brother.
"She is going on exciting herself for nothing. I am sure everything was
done that could be done, and we can do him no good by making ourselves
more miserable now."

Minnie had cried in the early morning as much as was right and
natural,--her eyes were still a little red; but she did not think it
necessary to begin over again, as Chatty did, who had a tendency to
overdo everything, like mamma. As for Theodore, he did not cry at all,
but grew very pale, and did not say a word when he was taken into the
chamber of death. The sight of that marble, or rather waxen, figure
lying there had a greater effect upon his imagination than upon that
of either of the girls, who perhaps had not got much imagination to be
affected. He was overawed and silenced by that presence, which he had
never met before so near. When his mother threw herself into his arms,
with that excess of emotion which was peculiar to her, he held her close
to him with a throb of answering feeling. The sensation of standing
beside that which was not, although it was, his father, went through
and through the being of the sensitive young man. Death is always most
impressive in the case of a commonplace person, with whom we have no
associations but the most ordinary ones of life. What had come to
him?--to the mind which had been so much occupied with the quality of his
beef-tea? Was it possible that he could have leaped all at once into the
contemplation of the highest subjects, or must there not be something
intermediate between the beef-tea and the _Gloria in Excelsis_? This
was the thought, inappropriate, unnatural, as he felt it, which came
into his mind as he stood by the bed upon which lay that which had
been the master of the Warren yesterday, and now was "the body"; a
solemn, inanimate thing arranged with dreadful neatness, presently to be
taken away and hid out of sight of the living. Tears did not come even
when he took his mother into his arms, but only a dumb awe not unmixed
with horror, and even that sense of repulsion with which some minds
regard the dead.

It was the height of summer, the time at which the Warren looked its
best. The sunshine, which scarcely got near it in the darker part of the
year, now penetrated the trees on every side, and rushed in as if for a
wager, every ray trying how far it could reach into the depths of the
shade. It poured full into the drawing-room by one window, so that Minnie
was mindful at all times to draw down that blind, that the carpet might
not be spoiled; and of course all the blinds were down now. It touched
the front of the house in the afternoon, and blazed upon the lawn, making
all the flowers wink. Inside, to people who had come out of the heat and
scorching of other places more open to the influences of the skies, the
coolness of the Warren in June was delightful. The windows stood open,
the hum of bees came in, the birds made an unceasing chorus in the trees.
Neither birds nor bees took the least notice of the fact that there
was death in the house. They carried on their jubilation, their hum of
business, their love-making and nursery talk, all the same, and made the
house sound not like a house of mourning, but a house of rejoicing; all
this harmonious noise being doubly audible in the increased stillness
of the place, where Minnie thought it right to speak in a whisper, and
Chatty was afraid to go beyond the example of her sister. Mrs. Warrender
kept her room, except in the evening, when she would go out with Theo
for a little air. Only in the grounds! no farther,--through the woods,
which the moonlight pierced with arrows of silver, as far as the pond,
which shone like a white mirror with all the great leaves of the
water-lilies black upon its surface. But the girls thought that even
this was too much. They could not think how she could feel able for it
before the funeral. They sat with one shaded lamp and the shutters all
closed, "reading a book," which was their severest estimate of gravity.
That is to say, each had a book: one a volume of sermons, the other
_Paradise Lost_, which had always been considered Sunday reading by the
Warrenders, and came in very conveniently at this moment. They had been
busy all day with the maid and the dressmaker from the village, getting
their mourning ready. There were serious doubts in their minds how high
the crape ought to come on their skirts, and whether a cuff of that
material would be enough without other trimmings on the sleeves; but as
it was very trying to the eyes to work at black in candlelight, they
had laid it all aside out of sight, and so far as was possible out of
thought, and composed themselves to read as a suitable occupation for
the evening, less cheerful than either coloured or white needlework, and
more appropriate. It was very difficult, especially for Minnie, upon
whom the chief responsibility would rest, to put that question of the
crape out of her thoughts; but she read on in a very determined manner,
and it is to be hoped that she succeeded. She felt very deeply the
impropriety of her mother's proceedings. She had never herself stirred
out-of-doors since her father's death, and would not till after the
funeral, should the interests of nations hang on it. She, at least,
knew what her duty was, and would do it. Chatty was not so sure on this
subject, but she had been more used to follow Minnie than to follow
mamma, and she was loyal to her traditions. One window was open a little
behind the half-closed shutters, and let in something of the sounds and
odours of the night. Chatty was aware that the moon was at the full, and
would have liked to stretch her young limbs with a run; but she dared
not even think of such a thing in sight of Minnie's face.

"I wonder how long mamma means to stay. One would think she was _enjoying_
it," Minnie said, with a little emphasis on the word. As she used it, it
seemed the most reprehensible verb in the world.

"She likes to be with Theo," said Chatty; "and she is always such a one
for the air."

"Likes!" said her sister. "Is this a time to think of what one likes,
with poor dear papa in his coffin?"

"She never left him as long as he wanted her," said the apologetic
sister.

"No, indeed, I should hope not; that would have been criminal. Poor dear
mamma would never do anything really bad; but she does not mind if she
does a thing that is unusual. It is _very_ unusual to go out before the
funeral; it is a thing that is never done, especially by the ladies of
the house."

"Shall we be able to go out on Friday, Minnie?" Friday was the funeral
day.

"It would be very bad taste, I think. Of course, if it does not prove
too much for us, we ought to go to church to meet the procession. Often
it is thought to be too much for the ladies of a family."

"I am sure it would not be too much for me. Oh, I shall go as far as we
can go with him--to the grave, Minnie."

"You had better wait till you see whether it will not be too much for
you," said the elder sister, while Chatty dried her eyes. Minnie's eyes
had no need of drying. She had cried at the right time, but it was
little more than levity to be always crying. It was nearly as bad as
enjoying anything. She did not like extravagance of any kind.

And then they turned to their reading again, and felt that, whatever
mamma might think herself at liberty to do, they, at least, were
paying that respect to their father's memory which young women in a
well-regulated household should always be the first to pay.




CHAPTER III.


Meanwhile the mother and son took their walk. It was a very silent walk,
without much outward trace of that enjoyment which Minnie had felt so
cruelly out of place: but no doubt to both there was a certain pleasure
in it. Mr. Warrender had now been lying in that silent state which the
most insignificant person holds immediately after death, for three days,
and there was still another to come before he could be laid away in the
dark and noisome bed in the family vault, where all the Warrenders made
their last assertion of superiority to common clay. This long and awful
pause in the affairs of life was intolerable to the two people now
walking softly through the paths of the little wood, where the moonbeams
shone through the trees; to the son, because he was of an impatient
nature, and could not endure the artificial gloom which was thus forced
upon him. He had felt keenly all those natural sensations which the
loss of a father calls forth: the breaking of an old tie, the oldest
in the world; the breach of all the habits of his life; the absence
of the familiar greeting, which had always been kind enough, if never
enthusiastic; the general overturn and loss of the usual equilibrium in
his little world. It was no blame to Theo if his feelings went little
further than this. His father had been no active influence in his life.
His love had been passive, expressing itself in few words, without
sympathy in any of the young man's pursuits, or knowledge of them, or
desire to know,--a dull affection because the boy belonged to him, and
satisfaction in that he had never got into any scrapes or given any
trouble. And the return which the son made was in the same kind. Theo
had felt the natural pang of disruption very warmly at the moment; he
had felt a great awe and wonder at sight of the mystery of that pale
and solemn thing which had lately been so unmysterious and unsolemn. But
even these pangs of natural sensation had fallen into a little ache and
weariness of custom, and his fastidious soul grew tired of the bonds
that kept him, or would have kept him, precisely at the same point of
feeling for so many hours and days. This is not possible for any one,
above all for a being of his temper, and he was restless beyond measure,
and eager to get over this enforced pause, and emerge into the common
life and daylight beyond. The drawn blinds somehow created a stifling
atmosphere in his very soul.

Mrs. Warrender felt it was indecorous to begin to speak of plans and
what was to be done afterwards, so long as her dead husband was still
master of the oppressed and melancholy house; but her mind, as may be
supposed, was occupied by them in the intervals of other thoughts. She
was not of the Warrender breed, but a woman of lively feelings; and as
soon as the partner of her life was out of her reach she had begun to
torment herself with fears that she had not been so good to him as she
ought. There was no truth, at least no fact, in this, for there could
have been no better wife or more careful nurse. But yet, as every
individual knows more of his or her self than all the rest of the world
knows, Mrs. Warrender was aware that there were many things lacking in
her conjugal devotion. She had not been the wife she knew how to be; in
her heart she had never given herself credit for fulfilling her duty. Oh
yes, she had fulfilled all her duties. She had been everything to him
that he wanted, that he expected, that he was capable of understanding.
But she knew very well that when all is said, that is not everything
that can be said; and now that he was dead, and could no longer look
in her face with lack-lustre eyes, wondering what the deuce the woman
meant, she threw herself back upon her own standard, and knew that she
had not come up to it. Even now she could not come up to it. Her heart
ought to be desolate; life ought to hold nothing for her but perhaps
resignation, perhaps despair. She ought to be beyond all feeling for
what was to come. Yet she was not so. On the contrary, new ideas, new
plans, had welled up into her mind,--how many, how few hours after she
had laid down the charge, in which outwardly she had been so faithful,
but inwardly so full of shortcomings? These plans filled her mind now as
she went by her son's side through the mossy paths where, even in the
height of summer, it was always a little cold. She could not speak of
them, feeling a horror of herself, an ashamed sense that to betray the
revulsion of her thoughts to her boy would be to put her down from her
position in his respect for ever. Between these mutual reluctances to
betray what was really in them the two went along very silently, as if
they were counting their steps, their heads a little bowed down, the
sound of their feet making far more commotion than was necessary in the
stillness of the place. To be out-of-doors was something for both of
them. They could breathe more freely, and if they could not talk could
at least think, without the sense that they were impairing the natural
homage of all things to the recently dead.

"Take care, Theo," she said, after a long interval of silence. "It is
very damp here."

"Yes, there is a good deal of timber that ought to go." He caught his
breath when he had said this, and she gave a slight shiver. They both
would have spoken quite freely had the father been alive. "The house is
damp, too," said he, taking courage.

"In winter, perhaps, a little, when there is much rain."

And then there was a long pause. When they came within sight of the
pond, which glistened under the moonlight, reflecting all the trees in
irregular masses, and showing here and there a big white water-lily bud
couched upon a dark bank of leaves, he spoke again: "I don't think it
can be very healthy, either, to have the pond so near the house."

"You have always had your health, all of you," she said.

"That is true; but not very much of it. We are a subdued sort of family,
mother."

"That is because the Warrenders----" She stopped here, feeling the
inappropriateness of what she was about to say. It very often happens
that a wife has but little opinion of the race to which her husband
belongs. She attributes the defects of her own children to that side
instinctively. "It is character," she said, "not health."

"But all the same, if we had a little more air and a little less
shade----"

He was becoming bolder as he went on.

"Theo," she said tremulously, "it is too soon to begin to talk of that."

And then there was a pause again. When they came to the edge of the
pond, and stopped to look at the water-lilies, and at the white flood
of the moonlight, and all the clustering masses of the trees that hung
round as if to keep it hidden and sheltered, it was she who spoke: "Your
father was very fond of this view. Almost the last time he was out we
brought him here. He sat down for a long time, and was quite pleased. He
cared for beautiful things much more than he ever said."

The thought that passed through Theo's mind was very rapid, that it
might well be so, seeing nothing was ever said on the subject; but his
remark was, "Very likely, mother," in a soft and soothing voice.

"I should be very sorry to see any--I mean I hope you will not make much
alteration here."

"It is too soon," he said hastily, "to speak of that."

"Much too soon," she replied, with a quick sense of shame, taking
her son's arm as they turned back. Even to turn back made the burden
heavier, and dispelled the little advantage which they had got by the
walk.

"There will be, I suppose, a great number of people--on Friday."

"Yes, I think a great number; everybody about."

"What a nuisance! People might have sense enough to know that at such a
moment we don't want a lot of strange faces peering at us, finding out
how we bear up."

"My dear, it would have pleased him to know everybody would be there."

"I suppose so," said Theo, in a tone which was half angry and half
resigned.

"We will have to take a little thought how they are to go. Lord Markland
must come first, after the relations."

"Why? They never took much notice of us, and my father never liked him.
I don't see why he should come at all."

"Oh yes, he will come, and your dear father would have liked it. The
Warrenders have always thought a great deal of such things."

"I am a Warrender, I hope, and I don't."

"Ah, Theo, you! But you are much more like my family," she said, with a
little pressure of his arm.

This did not give him so much pleasure as it did her; for, after all,
however near a man may be to his mother's family, he generally prefers
his own, and the name which it is his to bear. They got back under the
thick shadow of the trees when the conversation came to this point, and
once more it was impressed upon both that the path was very damp, and
that even in June it was difficult to get through without wet feet; but
Mrs. Warrender had felt herself checked by her son's reply about the
alterations, and Theo felt that to betray how much he was thinking of
them would be horrifying to his mother: so they both stepped into the
marshy part without a word.

"You are still decided to go on Friday,--you and the girls?"

"Surely, Theo: we are all in good health, Heaven be praised! I should
not feel that I had done everything if I did not go."

"You are sure it will not be too much for you, mother?"

This question went to her heart. She knew that it ought to be too much
for her. Had she been the wife she ought to have been, the widow with a
broken heart, then, perhaps, there might have been a doubt. But she knew
also that it would not be too much for her. Her heart ached for the
ideal anguish, which nobody looked for, nor would have understood. "He
would have liked it," she said, in a subdued voice. That, at least, was
quite true: and to carry out all his wishes thus faithfully was something,
although she could not pay him the homage which was his due,--the supreme
compliment of a broken heart.

At last Friday came. It was a dull day, of the colour most congenial to
such a ceremony. A gentle shower fell upon the wreaths and crosses that
covered the coffin. There was a large assembly from all the country
round, for Mr. Warrender had been a man who never harmed anybody, which
is perhaps a greater title to respect than those possess who have taken
more trouble. When you try to do good, especially in a rural place, you
are sure to stir up animosities; but Mr. Warrender had never stirred up
anybody. He was greatly respected. Lord Markland was what the farmers
called "a wild young sprig," with little regard to the proprieties; but
he was there, and half the clergymen of the diocese, and every country
gentleman on the west side of the county. The girls from behind their
crape veils watched the procession filing into church, and were deeply
gratified; and Mrs. Warrender felt that he would have liked it, and that
everything was being done according to his wishes. She said to herself
that this was what he would have done for her if she had died first; and
immediately there rose before her eyes (also behind her crape veil) a
picture of what might have been, had the coffin in the middle of the
church been hers; how he would have stepped and looked, and the way in
which he would have held out his hand silently to each of the company,
and the secret pleasure in the fulfilment of all that was just and
right which would have been in his mind. It was instantaneous, it was
involuntary, it made her smile against her will; but the smile recalled
her to herself, and overwhelmed her with compunction and misery.
Smile--when it was he who lay there in the coffin, under that black
pall, expecting from her the last observances, and that homage which
ought to come from a breaking heart!

The blinds were drawn up when they returned home, the sunshine pouring
in, the table spread. Minnie, leading Chatty with her, not without a
slight struggle on that young lady's part, retired to her room, and lay
down a little, which was the right thing to do. She had a tray brought
upstairs, and was not disinclined for her luncheon: mercifully, their
presence at the funeral had not been too much for them. And all the
mourning was complete and everything in order, even so far as to the
jet necklaces which the girls put on when they went down to tea. Mrs.
Warrender had been quite overcome on re-entering the house, feeling,
though she had so suffered from the long interval before the funeral,
that to come back to a place from which he had now been solemnly shut
out for ever was more miserable than all that had gone before; for it
will be perceived that she was not of the steady mettle of the others,
but a fantastic woman, who changed her mind very often, and whose
feelings were always betraying her. The funeral had been early, and the
distant visitors had been able to leave in good time, so that there was
no need for a large luncheon party; and the lawyer and a cousin of Mr.
Warrender's were the only strangers who shared that meal with the mother
and son. Then, as a proper period had now been arrived at, and as
solicitors rush in where heirs fear to tread, open questions were asked
about the plans of the family and what Theo meant to do. He said at
once, "I see no need for plans. Why should there be any discussion of
plans? So far as outward circumstances go, what change is there? My
mother and the girls will just go on as usual, and I, of course, will go
back to Oxford. It will be more than a year before I can take my
degree."

He thought--but no doubt he must have been mistaken--that a blank look
came over his mother's face; but it was so impossible that she could
have thought of anything else that he dismissed the idea from his mind.
She said nothing, but Mr. Longstaffe replied--

"At present that is no doubt the wisest way; but I think it is always
well that people should understand each other at once and provide for
all emergencies, so that there may be no wounded feeling, or that sort
of thing, hereafter. You know, Mrs. Warrender, that the house in
Highcombe has always been the jointure house?"

"Yes," she said, with a certain liveliness in her answer, almost
eagerness. "My husband has often told me so."

"We are authorised to put it in perfect repair, and you are authorised
to choose whatever you please out of the furniture at the Warren to make
it according to your taste. Perhaps we had better do that at once, and
put it into your hands. If you don't live there, you can let it, or lend
it, or make some use of it."

"It might be convenient," Mrs. Warrender said, with a slight hesitation,
"if Theodore means, as I suppose he does, to carry out improvements
here."

And yet she had implored him yesterday not to make many alterations!
Theo felt a touch of offence with his mother. He began to think there
was something in the things the girls used to say, that you never knew
when you had mamma, or whether she might not turn upon you in a moment.
She grew much more energetic, all at once, and even her figure lost the
slight stoop of languor that was in it. "If you are going to cut any
trees, or do any drainage, Theo, we could all live there while the works
went on."

He gave a slight start in person, and a much greater in spirit, and a
fastidious curve came to his forehead. "I don't know that I shall cut
any trees now. You know you said the other day, We can talk of that
after."

"Oh yes, it is early days," said the lawyer. "Of course it is not as if
there were other heirs coming in, or any compulsory division were to be
made. You can take your time. But I have always observed that things went
smoother when it was understood from the first, in case of a certain
emergency arising, or new conditions of any kind, so and so should
follow. You understand what I mean."

"It is always wisest," said the Warrender cousin, "to have it all put
down hard and fast, so that nobody may be disappointed, whatever should
happen. Of course Theo will marry."

"I hope so," said his mother, permitting herself to smile.

"Of course he will marry," said the lawyer.

"But he had better take his degree first," the cousin added, feeling
that he had distinguished himself; "and in the meantime the girls and
you will have time to look about you. Highcombe is rather a dull place.
And then the house is large. You could not get on in it with less than
four or five servants."

"Four would do," said Mr. Longstaffe.

"And supposing my cousin kept a pony chaise, or something? She could not
get on without a pony chaise. That means another."

Theodore pushed back his chair from the table with a harsh peremptoriness,
startling them all. "I am sure my mother doesn't want to go into these
calculations," he said; "neither do I. Leave us alone to settle what we
find to be best."

"Dear me," said cousin Warrender, "I hope you don't imagine me to have
any wish to interfere." Theo did not make any reply, but gave his mother
his arm, and led her upstairs.

"I did not wish you to be troubled with business at all; certainly not
to-day," he said to her, half apologetically. But there was something
in her face which he did not quite understand, as she thanked him and
smiled, with an inclination to cry. Was it possible that she was a
little disappointed to have the discussion stopped, and that she took
much interest in it, and contemplated not at all with displeasure the
prospect of an entire change in her life?




CHAPTER IV.


It will be divined from what has been said that there was one element in
the life at the Warren which has not yet been entered into, and that was
Mrs. Warrender. The family were dull, respectable, and proper to their
fingers' ends. But she was not dull. She had been Mr. Warrender's wife
for six-and-twenty years,--the wife of a dull, good man, who never wanted
any variety in his life, who needed no change, no outbursts of laughter
or tears, nothing to carry away the superabundance of the waters of life.
With him there had been no superabundance, there had never been any
floods; consequently there was no outlet necessary to carry them away.
But she was a woman of another sort: she was born to hunger for variety,
to want change, to desire everything that was sweet and pleasant. And
lo! fate bound her to the dullest life,--to marry Mr. Warrender, to live
in the Warren. She had not felt it so much in the earlier part of her
life, for then she had to some extent what her spirit craved. She had
children: and every such event in a woman's life is like what going
into battle is to a man,--a thing for which all his spirits collect
themselves, which she may come out of or may not, an enormous risk, a
great crisis. And when the children were young, before they had as yet
betrayed themselves what manner of spirits they were, she had her share
of the laughter and the tears; playing with her babies, living for them,
singing to them, filling her life with them, and expecting as they grew
up that all would be well. Many women live upon this hope. They have not
had the completion of life in marriage which some have; they have failed
in the great lottery, either by their own fault or the fault of others:
but the children, they say to themselves, will make all right. The
_désillusionment_ which takes this form is the most bitter of all.
The woman who has not found in her husband that dearest friend, whose
companionship can alone make life happy, when she discovers after a
while that the children in whom she has placed her last hope are his
children, and not hers,--what is to become of her? She is thrown back
upon her own individuality with a shock which is often more than flesh
and blood can bear. In Mrs. Warrender's case this was not, as in some
cases, a tragical discovery, but it had an exasperating and oppressive
character which was almost more terrible. She had been able to breathe
while they were children; but when they grew up they stifled her, each
with the same "host of petty maxims" which had darkened the still air
from her husband's lips. How, in face of the fact that she had been their
teacher and guide far more than their father ever was, they should have
learned these, and put aside everything that was like her or expressed
her sentiments, was a mystery which she never could solve; but so it
was. Mr. Warrender was what is called a very good father. He did not
spoil them; bonbons of any kind, physical or spiritual, never came to
them from his hands. He could not be troubled with them much as babies,
but when they grew old enough to walk and ride with him he liked their
company; and they resembled him, which is always flattering. But he had
taken very little notice of them during the first twelve years or so of
their life. During that time they had been entirely in their mother's
hands, hearing her opinions, regulated outwardly by her will: and yet
they grew up their father's children, and not hers! How strange it
was, with a touch of the comic which made her laugh!--that laugh of
exasperation and impatience which marks the intolerable almost more than
tears do. How was it? Can any one explain this mystery? She was of a
much more vivacious, robust, and vigorous race than he was, for the
level of health among the Warrenders, like the level of being generally,
was low; but this lively, warm-blooded, energetic creature was swallowed
up in the dull current of the family life, and did not affect it at
all. She nursed them, ruled them, breathed her life into them, in vain:
they were their father's children,--they were Warrenders born.

This was not precisely the case with Theo, her only son. To him she
had transmitted something; not her energy and love of life, but rather
something of that exasperated impatience which was so often the temper
of her mind in later years, though suppressed by all the powers of
self-control she possessed, and modified, happily, by the versatility
of her nature, which could not brood and mope over one subject, however
deeply that might enter into her life. This impatience took in him the
form of a fastidious intolerance, a disposition to start aside at a touch,
to put up with nothing, to hear no reason even, when he was offended or
crossed. He was like a restive horse, whom the mere movement of a shadow,
much more the touch of a rein or the faintest vibration of a whip, sets
off in the wildest gallop of nervous self-will or self-assertion. The
horse, it is to be supposed, desires his own way as much as the man does
when he bolts or starts. Theo was in this respect wonderfully unlike the
strain of the Warrenders, but he was not on that account more like his
mother; and he had so much of the calm of the paternal blood in his
veins along with this unmanageableness that he was as contented as the
rest with the quiet of the home life, and so long as he was permitted to
shut himself up with his book wished for no distraction,--nay, disliked
it, and thought society and amusements an intolerable bore.

Thus it was the mother alone to whom the thought of change was pleasant.
A woman of forty-five in widow's weeds, who had just nursed her husband
through a long illness and lost him, and whose life since she was nineteen
had been spent in this quiet house among all these still surroundings,
amid the unchangeable traditions of rural life,--who could have ventured
to imagine the devouring impatience that was within her, the desire to
flee, to shake the dust off her feet, to leave her home and all her
associations, to get out into the world and breathe a larger air and be
free? Sons and daughters may entertain such sentiments; even the girls,
whose life, no doubt, had been a dull one, might be supposed willing
enough, with a faint pretence of natural and traditionary reluctance,
and those few natural tears which are wiped so soon, to leave home and
see the world. But the mother! In ordinary circumstances it would
have been the duty of the historian to set forth the hardness of Mrs.
Warrender's case, deprived at once, by her husband's death, not only of
her companion and protector, but of her home and position as head of an
important house. Such a case is no doubt often a hard one. It adds a
hundred little humiliations to grief, and makes bereavement downfall,
the overthrow of a woman's importance in the world, and her exile from
the sphere in which she has spent her life. We should be far more sure
of the reader's sympathy if we pictured her visiting for the last time
all the familiar haunts of past years, tearing herself away from the
beloved rooms, feeling the world a blank before her as she turned away.

On the contrary, it is scarcely possible to describe the chill of
disappointment in her mind when Theo put an abrupt stop to all
speculations, and offered her his arm to lead her upstairs. She ought,
perhaps, to have wanted his support to go upstairs, after all, as
her maid said, that she had "gone through": but she did not feel the
necessity. She would have preferred much to know what was going to be
done, to talk over everything, to be able to express without further
sense that they were premature and inappropriate, as much as it would be
expedient to express of her own wishes. The absolute repression of those
five dark days, during which she had said nothing, had been almost more
intolerable to her than years of the repression which was past. When you
know that nothing you can do or say is of any use, and that whatsoever
struggle you may make will be wholly ineffectual to change your lot,
it is comparatively easy, in the composure of impossibility, to keep
yourself down; but when all at once you become again master of your own
fate, even a temporary curb becomes intolerable. Mrs. Warrender went
into her room by the compulsion of her son and conventional propriety,
and was supposed to lie down on the sofa and rest for an hour or two.
Her maid arranged the cushions for her, threw a shawl over her feet,
and left her on tip-toe, shutting the door with elaborate precautions.
Mrs. Warrender remained still for nearly half an hour. She wept, with
a strange mixture of feelings; partly out of a poignant sense of the
fictitiousness of all these observances by which people were supposed to
show "respect" to the dead, and partly out of a real aching of the heart
and miserable sense that even now, that certainly by and by, the man who
had been so all-important a little while ago would be as if he had not
been. She wept for him, and yet at the same time wept because she could
not weep more for him, because the place which knew him had already begun
to know him no more, and because of the sham affliction with which they
were all supplementing the true. It was she who shed the truest tears,
but it was she also who rebelled most at the make-believe which convention
forced upon her; and the usual sense of hopeless exasperation was strong
in her mind. After a while she threw off the shawl from her feet and the
cushions that supported her shoulders, and got up and walked about the
room, looking out upon the afternoon sunshine and the trees that were
turning their shadows to the east. How she longed, with a fervour scarcely
explainable, not at all comprehensible to most people, to leave the
place, to open her wings in a large atmosphere, to get free!

At half-past four o'clock Minnie and Chatty went down to tea. They were
to the minute, and their mother heard them with a half smile. It was
always time enough for her to smooth her hair and her collar, and take a
new handkerchief from her drawer, when she heard the sisters close their
door. She went downstairs after them, in her gown covered with crape,
with her snowy cap, which gave dignity to her appearance. Her widow's
dress was very becoming to her, as it is to so many people. She had a
pretty complexion, pure red and white, though the colour was perhaps a
little broken, and not so smooth as a girl's; and her eyes were brown
and bright. Notwithstanding the weeks of watching she had gone through,
the strain of everything that had passed, she made little show of her
trouble. Her eye was not dim, nor her natural force abated. The girls
were dull in complexion and aspect, but their mother was not so. As she
came into the room there came with her a brightness, a sense of living,
which was inappropriate to the hour and the place.

"Where is Theo?" she asked.

"He is coming in presently; at least, I called to him as he went out,
and told him tea was ready, and he said he would be in presently,"
Chatty replied.

"I wish he would have stayed, if it had even been in the grounds,
to-day," said Minnie. "It will look so strange to see him walking about
as if nothing had happened."

"He has been very good; he has conformed to all our little rules," said
the mother, with a sigh.

"Little rules, mamma? Don't you think it of importance, then, that every
respect----"

"My dear," said Mrs. Warrender, "I am tired of hearing of every respect.
Theo was always respectful and affectionate. I would not misconstrue him
even if it should prove that he has taken a walk."

"On the day of dear papa's funeral!" cried Minnie, with a voice unmoved.

Mrs. Warrender turned away without any reply; partly because the tears
sprang into her eyes at the matter-of-fact statement, and partly because
her patience was exhausted.

"Have you settled, mamma, what he is going to do?" said Chatty.

"It is not for me to decide. He is twenty-one; he is his own master. You
have not," Mrs. Warrender said, "taken time to think yet of the change
in our circumstances. Theo is now master here. Everything is his to do
as he pleases."

"Everything!" said the girls in chorus, opening their eyes.

"I mean, of course, everything but what is yours and what is mine. You
know your father's will. He has been very just, very kind, as he always
was." She paused a little, and then went on: "But your brother, as you
know, is now the master here. We must understand what his wishes are
before we can settle on anything."

"Why shouldn't we go on as we always have done?" said Minnie. "Theo is
too young to marry; besides, it would not be decent for a time, even if
he wanted to, which I am sure he does not. I don't see why he should
make any change. There is nowhere we can be so well as at home."

"Oh, nowhere!" said Chatty.

Their mother sat and looked at them, with a dull throb in her heart.
They had sentiment and right on their side, and nature too. Everybody
would agree that for a bereaved family there was no place so good as
home,--the house in which they were born and where they had lived all
their life. She looked at them blankly, feeling how unnatural, how
almost wicked, was the longing in her own mind to get away, to escape
into some place where she could take large breaths and feel a wide sky
over her. But how was she to say it, how even to conclude what she had
been saying, feeling how inharmonious it was with everything around?

"Still," she said meekly, "I am of Mr. Longstaffe's opinion that
everything should be fully understood between us from the first. If we
all went on just the same, it might be very painful to Theo, when the
time came for him to marry (not now; of course there is no question of
that now), to feel that he could not do so without turning his mother
and sisters out-of-doors."

"Why should he marry, so long as he has us? It is not as if he had
nobody, and wanted some one to make him a home. What would he do with
the house if we were to leave it? Would he let it? I don't believe he
could let it. It would set everybody talking. Why should he turn his
mother and sisters out-of-doors? Oh, I never thought of anything so
dreadful!" cried Minnie and Chatty, one uttering one exclamation, and
another the other. They were very literal, and in the minds of both
the grievance was at once taken for granted. "Oh, I never could have
thought such a thing of Theo,--our own brother, and younger than we
are!"

The mother had made two or three ineffectual attempts to stem the tide
of indignation. "Theo is thinking of nothing of the kind," she said at
last, when they were out of breath. "I only say that he must not feel he
has but that alternative when the time comes, when he may wish--when it
may be expedient----No, no, he has never thought of such a thing. I only
say it for the sake of the future, to forestall after-complications."

"Oh, I wish you wouldn't frighten one, mamma! I thought you had heard
about some girl he had picked up at Oxford, or something. I thought we
should have to turn out, to leave the Warren--which would break my
heart."

"And mine too,--and mine too!" cried Chatty.

"Where we have always been so happy, with nothing to disturb us!"

"Oh, so happy! always the same, one day after another! It will be
different," said the younger sister, crying a little, "now that dear
papa---- But still no place ever can be like home."

And there was the guilty woman sitting by, listening to everything they
said; feeling how good, how natural, it was,--and still more natural,
still more seemly, for her, at her age, than for them at theirs,--yet
conscious that this house was a prison to her, and that of all things
in the world that which she wanted most was to be turned out and driven
away!

"My dears," she said, not daring to betray this feeling, "if I have
frightened you, I did not mean to do it. The house in Highcombe, you
know, is mine. It will be our home if--if anything should happen. I
thought it might be wise to have that ready, to make it our headquarters,
in case--in case Theo should carry out the improvements."

"Improvements!" they cried with one voice. "What improvements? How could
the Warren be improved?"

"You must not speak to me in such a tone. There has always been a
question of cutting down some of the trees."

"But papa would never agree to it; papa said he would never consent to
it."

"I think," said Mrs. Warrender, with a guilty blush, "that he--had begun
to change his mind."

"Only when he was growing weak, then,--only when you over-persuaded
him."

"Minnie! I see that your brother was right, and that this is not a time
for any discussion," Mrs. Warrender said.

There was again a silence: and they all came back to the original state
of mind from which they started, and remembered that quiet and subdued
tones and an incapacity for the consideration of secular subjects were
the proper mental attitude for all that remained of this day.

It was not, however, long that this becoming condition lasted. Sounds
were heard as of voices in the distance, and then some one running at
full speed across the gravel drive in front of the door, and through the
hall. Minnie had risen up in horror to stop this interruption, when the
door burst open, and Theo, pale and excited, rushed in. "Mother," he
cried, "there has been a dreadful accident. Markland has been thrown by
those wild brutes of his, and I don't know what has happened to him. It
was just at the gates, and they are bringing him here. There is no help
for it. Where can they take him to?"

Mrs. Warrender rose to her feet at once; her heart rising too almost
with pleasure to the thrill of a new event. She hurried out to open the
door of a large vacant room on the ground floor. "What was Lord Markland
doing here?" she said. "He ought to have reached home long ago."

"He has been in _that_ house in the village, mother. They seemed to
think everybody would understand. I don't know what he has to do there."

"He has nothing to do there. Oh, Theo, that poor young wife of his! And
had he the heart to go from--from--us, in our trouble--there!"

"He seems to have paid for it, whatever was wrong in it. Go back to the
drawing-room, for here they are coming."

"Theo, they are carrying him as if he were----"

"Go back to the drawing-room, mother. Whatever it is, it cannot be
helped," Theodore said. He did not mean it, but there was something in
his tone which reminded everybody--the servants, who naturally came
rushing to see what was the matter, and Mrs. Warrender, who withdrew at
his bidding--that he was now the master of the house.




CHAPTER V.


Markland was a much more important place than the Warren. It was one
of the chief places in the county in which the family had for many
generations held so great a position. It was a large building, with all
that irregularity of architecture which is dear to the English mind,--a
record of the generations which had passed through it and added to it,
in itself a noble historical monument, full of indications of the
past. But it lost much of its effect upon the mind from the fact that
it was in much less good order than is usual with houses of similar
pretensions; and above all because the wood around it had been wantonly
and wastefully cut, and it stood almost unsheltered upon its little
eminence, with only a few seedling trees, weedy and long, like boys who
had outgrown their strength, straggling about the heights. The house
itself was thus left bare to all the winds. An old cedar, very large but
very feeble, in the tottering condition of old age to which some trees,
like men, come, with two or three of its longest branches torn off by
storm and decay, interposed its dark foliage over the lower roof of the
west wing, and gave a little appearance of shelter, and a few Lombardy
poplars and light-leaved young birches made a thin and interrupted
screen to the east; but the house stood clear of these light and
frivolous young attendants in a nakedness which made the spectator
shiver. The wood in the long avenue had been thinned in almost the same
ruthless way, but here and there were shady corners, where old trees,
not worth much in the market, but very valuable to the landscape, laid
their heads together like ancient retainers, and rustled and nodded
their disapproval of the devastation around.

Young Lady Markland, with her boy, on the afternoon of the June day on
which Mr. Warrender was buried, walked up and down for some time in
front of the house, casting many anxious looks down the avenue, by
which, in its present denuded state, every approaching visitor was so
easily visible. She was still very young, though her child was about
eight; she having been married, so to speak, out of the nursery, a young
creature of sixteen, a motherless girl, with no one to investigate too
closely into the character of the young lover, who was not much more
than a boy himself, and between whom and his girlish bride a hot,
foolish young love had sprung up like a mushroom, in a week or two of
acquaintance. She was twenty-five, but did not look her age. She was
small in stature,--one of those exquisitely neat little women whose
perfection of costume and appearance no external accident disturbs. Her
dress had the look of being moulded on her light little figure; her hair
was like brown satin, smooth as a mirror and reflecting the light. She
did not possess the large grace of abstract beauty. There was nothing
statuesque, nothing majestic, about her, but a kind of mild perfection,
a fitness and harmony which called forth the approval of the more
serious-minded portion of humanity as well as the admiration of the
younger and more frivolous.

It was generally known in the county that this young lady had far from
a happy life. She had been married in haste and over-confidence by
guardians who, if not glad to be rid of her, were at least pleased to
feel that their responsibility was over, and the orphan safe in her
husband's care, without taking too much pains to prove that the husband
was worthy of that charge, or that there was much reasonable prospect of
his devotion to it. Young Markland, it was understood, had sown his wild
oats somewhat plentifully at Oxford and elsewhere; and it was therefore
supposed, with very little logic, that there were no more to sow. But
this had not proved to be the case, and almost before his young wife
had reached the age of understanding, and was able to put two and two
together, he had run through the fortune she brought him--not a very
large one--and made her heart ache, which was worse, as hearts under
twenty ought never to learn how to ache. She was not a happy wife. The
country all about, the servants, and every villager near knew it, but
not from Lady Markland. She was very loyal, which is a noble quality,
and very proud, which in some cases does duty as a noble quality, and is
accepted as such. What were the secrets of her married life no one ever
heard from her; and fortunately those griefs which were open to all the
world never reached her, at least in detail. She did not know, save
vaguely, in what society her husband spent the frequent absences which
separated him from her. She did not know what kind of friends he made,
what houses he frequented, even in his own neighbourhood; and she was
still under the impression that many of her wrongs were known by herself
alone, and that his character had suffered but little in the eyes of the
world.

There was one person, however, from whom she had not been able to hide
these wrongs, and that was her child;--her only child. There had been
two other babies, dead at their birth or immediately after, but Geoff
was the only one who had lived, her constant companion, counsellor, and
aid. At eight years old! Those who had never known what a child can be
at that age, when thus entrusted with the perilous deposit of the family
secrets, and elevated to the post which his father ought but did not
care to fill, were apt to think little Geoff's development unnatural;
and others thought, with reason, that it was bad for the little fellow
to be so constantly with his mother, and it was said among the Markland
relations that as he was now growing a great boy he ought to be sent
to school Poor little Geoff! He was not a great boy, nor ever would
be. He was small, _chétif_, unbeautiful; a little sandy-haired,
sandy-complexioned, insignificant boy, with no features to speak of and
no stamina, short for his age and of uncertain health, which had indeed
been the first reason of that constant association with his mother which
was supposed to be so bad for him. During the first years of his life,
which had been broken by continual illness, it was only her perpetual
care that kept him alive at all. She had never left him, never given up
the charge of him to any one; watched him by night and lived with him
by day. His careless father would sometimes say, in one of those brags
which show a heart of shame even in the breast of the vicious, that if
he had not left her so much to herself, if he had dragged her about into
society, as so many men did their wives, she never would have kept her
boy; and perhaps there was some truth in it. While he pursued his
pleasures in regions where no wife could accompany him, she was free to
devote all her life, and to find out every new expedient that skill or
science had thought of to lengthen out the child's feeble days, and to
gain time to make a cure possible. He would never be very strong was the
verdict now, but with care he would live: and it was she who had over
again breathed life into him. This made the tie a double one; not out of
gratitude, for the child knew of no such secondary sentiment, but out of
the redoubled love which their constant association called forth. They
did not talk together of any family sorrows. It was never intimated
between them that anything wrong happened when papa was late and mamma
anxious, or when there were people at Markland who were not _nice_,--oh,
not a word; but the child was anxious as well as mamma. He too got the
habit of watching, listening for the hurried step, the wild rattle of
the phaeton with those two wild horses, which Lord Markland insisted
on driving, up the avenue. He knew everything, partly by observation,
partly by instinct. He walked with his mother now, clinging with both
hands to her arm, his head nearly on a level with her shoulder, and
close, close to it, almost touching, his little person confused in
the outline of her dress. The sunshine lay full along the line of the
avenue, just broken in two or three places by the shadow of those old
and useless trees, but without a speck upon it or a sound.

"I don't think papa can be coming, Geoff, and it is time you had your
tea."

"Never mind me. I'll go and take it by myself, if you want me to, and
you can wait here."

"Why?" she said. "It will not bring him home a moment sooner, as you and
I know."

"No, but it feels as if it made him come; and you can see as far as the
gate. It takes a long time to drive up the avenue. Oh yes, stop here;
you will like that best."

"I am so silly," she said, which was her constant excuse. "When you are
grown up, Geoff, I shall always be watching for you."

"That you shan't," said the boy. "I'll never leave you. You have had
enough of that."

"Oh yes, my darling, you will leave me. I shall want you to leave me.
A boy cannot be always with his mother. Come, now, I am going to be
strong-minded. Let us go in. I am a little tired, I think."

"Perhaps the funeral was later than he thought," said the boy.

"Perhaps. It was very kind of papa to go. He does not like things of that
kind; and he was not over-fond of Mr. Warrender, who, though he was very
good, was a little dull. Papa doesn't like dull people."

"No. Do you like Theo Warrender, mamma?"

"Well enough," said Lady Markland. "I don't know him very much."

"I like him," said the child. "He knows a lot: he told me how to do that
Latin. He is the sort of man I should like for my tutor."

"But he is a gentleman, Geoff. I mean, he would never be a tutor. He is
as well off as we are,--perhaps better."

"Are men tutors only when they are not well off?"

"Well, dear, generally when they require the money. You could not expect
young Mr. Warrender to come here and take a great deal of trouble,
merely for the pleasure of teaching you."

"Why not?" said Geoff. "Isn't it a fine thing to teach children? It was
you that said so, mamma."

"For me, dear, that am your mother; but not for a gentleman who is not
even a relation."

"Gentlemen, to be sure, are different," said Geoff, with an air of
deliberation. "There's papa, for instance----"

His mother threw up her hand suddenly. "Hark, Geoff! Do you hear
anything?"

They had come indoors while this talk was going on, and were now seated
in a large but rather shabby sitting-room, which was full of Geoff's
toys and books. The windows were wide open, but the sounds from without
came in subdued; for this room was at the back of the house, and at
some distance from the avenue. They were both silent for some moments,
listening, and then Lady Markland said, with an air of relief, "Papa is
coming. I hear the sound of the phaeton."

"That is not the phaeton, mamma; that is only one horse," said Geoff,
whose senses were very keen. When Lady Markland had listened a little
longer, she acquiesced in this opinion.

"It will be some one coming to call," she said, with an air of
resignation; and then they went on with their talk.

"Gentlemen are different; they don't take the charge of the children
like you. However, in books," said Geoff, "the fathers very often are a
great deal of good; they tell you all sorts of things. But books are not
very like real life; do you think they are? Even Frank, in Miss Edgeworth,
though you say he is so good, doesn't do things like me. I mean, I should
never think of doing things like him; and no little girl would ever be
so silly. Now, mamma, say true, what do you think? Would any little girl
ever be so silly as to want the big bottle out of a physic shop? Girls
may be silly, but not so bad as that."

"Perhaps, let us hope, she didn't know so much about physic shops, as
you call them, as you do, my poor boy. I wonder who can be calling
to-day, Geoff! I should have thought that everybody near would be
thinking of the Warrenders, and---- It is coming very fast, don't you
think? But it does not sound like the phaeton."

"Oh no, it is not the phaeton. I'll go and look," said Geoff. He came
back in a moment, crying, "I told you--it's a brougham! Coming at such a
pace!"

"I wonder who it can be!" Lady Markland said.

And when the boy resumed his talk she listened with inattention, trying
in vain to keep her interest fixed on what he was saying, making vague
replies, turning over a hundred possibilities in her mind, but by some
strange dulness, such as is usual enough in similar circumstances, never
thinking of the real cause. What danger could there be to Markland in a
drive of half a dozen miles, in the daylight; what risk in Mr. Warrender's
funeral? The sense that something which was not an ordinary visit was
coming grew stronger and stronger upon her, but of the news which was
about to reach her she never thought at all.

At last the door opened. She rose hastily, unable to control herself, to
meet it, whatever it was. It was not a ceremonious servant announcing a
visit, but Theo Warrender, pale as death itself, with a whole tragic
volume in his face, but speechless, not knowing, now that he stood
before her, what to say, who appeared in the doorway. He had hurried
off, bringing his mother's little brougham to carry the young wife to
her husband's bedside; but it was not until he looked into her face and
heard the low cry that burst from her that he realised what he had to
tell. He had forgotten that a man requires all his skill and no small
preparation to enable him to tell a young woman that her husband, who
left her in perfect health a few hours before, was now on the brink of
death. He stopped short on the threshold, awed by this thought, and only
stared at her, not knowing what to say.

"Mr. Warrender!" she said, with the utmost surprise; then, with growing
wonder and alarm, "You have come---- Something has happened!"

"Lady Markland--yes, there has been an accident. My mother--sent me with
the brougham. I came off at once. Will you go back with me? The horse is
very fast, and you can be there in half an hour."

This was all he could find to say. She went up to him, holding out her
hands in an almost speechless appeal. "Why for me? Why for me? What has
it got to do with me?"

He did not know how to answer her question. "Lady Markland!" he cried,
"your husband----" and said no more.

She was at the door of the brougham in a moment. She had not taken off
her garden hat, and she wanted no preparation. The child sprang to her
side, caught her arm, and went with her without a word or question, as
if that were undeniably his place. Everybody knew and remarked upon the
singular union between the neglected young wife and her only child, but
Warrender felt, he could scarcely tell why, that it annoyed and irritated
him at this moment. When he put her into the carriage, and the boy
clambered after her, he was unaccountably vexed by it,--so much vexed
that his profound sympathy for the poor lady seemed somehow checked.
Instead of following them into the carriage, which was not a very roomy
one, he shut the door upon them sharply. "I will walk," he said. "I am
not needed. Right, Jarvis, as fast as you can go." He stood by to see
them dash off, Lady Markland giving him a surprised yet half-relieved
look, in the paleness of her anxiety and misery. Then it suddenly became
apparent to him that he had done what was best and most delicate, though
without meaning it, out of the sudden annoyance which had risen within
him. It was the best thing he could have done: but to walk six miles at
the end of a fatiguing and trying day was not agreeable, and the sense
of irritation was strong in him. "If ever I have anything to do with
that boy----" he said involuntarily within himself. But what could he
ever have to do with the boy, who probably by this time, little puny
thing that he was, was Lord Markland, and the owner of all this great,
bare, unhappy-looking place, eaten up by the locusts of waste and ruin.

The butler, an old servant, had been anxiously trying all this time to
catch his eye. He came up now, as Warrender turned to follow on foot the
carriage, which was already almost out of sight. "I beg your pardon,
sir," he said, with the servant's usual formula, "but I've sent round
for the dogcart, if you'll be so kind as to wait a few minutes. None
of us, sir, but feels your kindness, coming yourself for my lady, and
leaving her alone in her trouble, poor dear. Mr. Warrender, sir, if I
may make so bold, what is the fact about my lord? Yes, sir, I heard what
you told my lady; but I thought you would nat'rally say the best, not to
frighten her. Is there any hope?"

"Not much, I fear. He was thrown out violently, and struck against a
tree; they are afraid that his spine is injured."

"Oh, sir, so young! and oh, so careless! God help us, Mr. Warrender, we
never know a step before us, do we, sir? If it's the spine, it will be
no pain; and him so joky, more than his usual, going off them very steps
this morning, though he was going to a funeral. Oh, Mr. Warrender, that
I should speak so light, forgetting---- God bless us, what an awful
thing, sir, after what has happened already, to happen in your house!"

Warrender answered with a nod,--he had no heart to speak; and, refusing
the dogcart, he set out on his walk home. An exquisite summer night:
everything harsh stilled out of the atmosphere; the sounds of labour
ceasing; a calm as of profoundest peace stealing over everything. The
soft and subdued pain of his natural grief, hushed by that fatigue and
exhaustion of both body and mind which a long strain produces, was not
out of accord with the calm of nature. But very different was the harsh
note of the new calamity, which had struck not the house in which the
tragedy was being enacted, but this one, which lay bare and naked in the
last light of the sinking sun. So young and so careless! So young, so
wasteful of life and all that life had to give, and now parted from it,
taken from it at a blow!




CHAPTER VI.


Lord Markland died at the Warren that night. He never recovered
consciousness, nor knew that his wife was by his side through all the
dreadful darkening of the summer evening, which seemed to image forth
in every new tone of gathering gloom the going out of life. They told
her as much as was necessary of the circumstances,--how, the distance
between the Warren and the churchyard being so short, and the whole
cortège on foot, Lord Markland's carriage had been left in the village;
how he had stayed there to luncheon (presumably with the rector, for no
particulars were given, nor did the bewildered young woman ask for any),
which was the reason of his delay. The rest was very easily explained:
everybody had said to him that "some accident" would happen one day or
other with the horses he insisted on driving, and the prophecy had been
fulfilled. Such prophecies are always fulfilled. Lady Markland was very
quiet, accepting that extraordinary revolution in her life with a look
of marble, and words that betrayed nothing. Was she broken-hearted? was
she only stunned by the suddenness, the awe, of such a catastrophe? The
boy clung to her, yet without a tear, pale and silent, but never, even
when the words were said that all was over, breaking forth into any
childish outburst. He sat on the floor in her shadow, even when she was
watching by the deathbed, never left her, keeping always a hold upon her
arm, her hand, or her dress. Mrs. Warrender would have taken him away,
and put him to bed,--it was so bad for him; but the boy opposed a steady
resistance, and Lady Markland put down her hand to him, not seeing
how wrong it was to indulge him, all the ladies said. After this, of
course nothing could be done, and he remained with her through all that
followed. What followed was strange enough to have afforded a scene for
a tragedy. Lady Markland asked to speak to Warrender, who had retired,
leaving his mother, as was natural, to manage everything. He came to her
at the door of the room which had so suddenly, with its bare, unused
look, in the darkness of a few flickering candles, become a sort of
presence chamber filled with the solemnity of dying. Her little figure,
so neat and orderly, an embodiment of the settled peace and calm of
life having nothing to do with tragedies, with the child close pressed
against her side, his pale face looking as hers did, pale too and
stony--never altogether passed from the memory of the man who came,
reluctant, almost afraid, to hear what she had to say to him. It was
like a picture against the darkness of the room,--a darkness both
physical and moral, which centred in the curtained gloom behind, about
which two shadowy figures were busy. Often and with very different
sentiments he saw this group again, but never wholly forgot it, or had
it effaced from the depths of his memory.

"Mr. Warrender," she said, in a voice which was very low, yet he thought
might have been heard all over the house, "I want you to help me."

"Whatever I can do," he began, with some fervour, for he was young, and
his heart was touched.

"I want," she continued, "to carry him home at once. I know it will not
be easy, but it is night, and all is quiet. You are a man; you will know
better how it can be done. Manage it for me."

Warrender was entirely unprepared for such a commission. "There will be
great difficulties, dear Lady Markland," he said. "It is a long way. I
am sure my mother would not wish you to think of her. This is a house of
death. Let him stay."

She gave him a sort of smile, a softening of her stony face, and put out
her hand to him. "Do it for me," she said. She was not at all moved by
his objections,--perhaps she did not even hear them; but when she had
thus repeated her command, as a queen might have done, she turned back
into the room, and sat down, to wait, it seemed, until that command
should be accomplished. Warrender went away with a most perplexed and
troubled mind. He was half pleased, underneath all, that she should have
sent for him and charged him with this office, but bewildered with the
extraordinary commission, and not knowing what to do.

"What is it, Theo? What did she want with you?" his sisters cried, in
subdued voices, but eager to know everything about Lady Markland, who
had been as the stars in the sky to them a little while before.

He told them in a few words, and they filled the air with whispered
exclamations. "How odd, how strange; oh, how unusual, Theo! People will
say it is our doing. They will say, How dreadful of the Warrenders! Oh,
tell her you can't do it! How could you do it, in the middle of the
night!"

"That is just what I don't know," Warrender rejoined.

"Mr. Theo," said the old man, who was not dignified with the name of
butler, "the lady is quite right. I can't tell you how it's to be done,
but gardener, he is a very handy man, and he will know. The middle of
the night--that's just what makes it easy, young ladies; and instead o'
watching and waiting, the 'holl of us 'ull get to bed."

"That is all you're thinking of, Joseph."

"Well, it's a deal, sir, after all that's been going on in this house,"
Joseph said, with an aggrieved air. He had to provide supper, which was
a thing unknown at the Warren, after all the trouble that every one had
been put to. He was himself of opinion that to be kept up beyond your
usual hours, and subjected to unexpected fatigues, made a "bit of supper"
needful even for the uncomfortable and incomprehensible people whom he
called the quality. They were a poorish lot, and he had a mild contempt
for them, and to get them supper was a hardship; still, it was his own
suggestion, and he was bound to carry it out.

It is unnecessary to enter into all Warrender's perplexities and all the
expedients that were suggested. At last the handy gardener and himself
hit upon a plan by which Lady Markland's wishes could be carried out.
She sat still in the gloomy room where her husband lay dead, waiting
till they should be ready; doubting nothing, as little disturbed by any
difficulty as if it had been the simplest commission in the world which
she had given the young man. Geoff sat at her feet, leaning against her,
holding her hand. It is to be supposed that he slept now and then, as
the slow moments went on, but whenever any one spoke to his mother his
eyes would be seen gleaming against the darkness of her dress. They sat
there waiting, perfectly still, with the candles flickering faintly
about the room in the night air that breathed in through the open windows.
The dark curtains had been drawn round the bed. It was like a catafalque
looming darkly behind. Mrs. Warrender had used every persuasion to induce
her guest to come into another room, to take something, to rest, to
remember all that remained for her to do, and not waste her strength,--all
those formulas which come naturally to the lips at such a moment. Lady
Markland only answered with that movement of her face which was intended
for a smile and a shake of her head.

At last the preparations were all complete. The night was even more
exquisite than the evening had been; it was more still, every sound
having died out of the earth except those which make up silence,--the
rustling among the branches, the whirr of unseen insects, the falling
of a leaf or a twig. The moon threw an unbroken light over the broad
fields; the sky spread out all its stars, in myriads and myriads,
faintly radiant, softened by the larger light; the air breathed a
delicate, scarcely perceptible fragrance of growing grass, moist earth,
and falling dew. How sweet, how calm, how full of natural happiness!
Through this soft atmosphere and ethereal radiance a carriage made its
way that was improvised with all the reverence and tenderness possible,
in which lay the young man, dead, cut off in the very blossom and
glory of his days, followed by another in which sat the young woman
who had been his wife. What she was thinking of who could tell? Of their
half-childish love and wooing, of the awaking of her own young soul to
trouble and disappointment, of her many dreary days and years; or of the
sudden severance, without a moment's warning, without a leave-taking, a
word, or a look? Perhaps all these things, now for a moment distinct,
now mingling confusedly together, formed the current of her thoughts.
The child, clasped in her arms, slept upon her shoulder; nature being
too strong at last for that which was beyond nature, the identification
of his childish soul with that of his mother. She was glad that he
slept, and glad to be silent, alone, the soft air blowing in her face,
the darkness encircling her like a veil.

Warrender went with this melancholy cortége, making its way slowly
across the sleeping country. He saw everything done that could be done:
the dead man laid on his own bed; the living woman, in whom he felt so
much more interest, returned to the shelter of her home and the tendance
of her own servants. His part in the whole matter was over when he stepped
back into the brougham which she had left. The Warrenders had seen but
little of the Marklands, though they were so near. The habits of the young
lord had naturally been little approved by Theo Warrender's careful
parents; and his manners, when the young intellectualist from Oxford met
him, were revolting at once to his good taste and good breeding. On the
other hand, the Warrenders were but small people in comparison, and
any intimacy with Lord and Lady Markland was almost impossible. It was
considered by all the neighbours "a great compliment" when Lord Markland
came to the funeral. Ah, poor Markland, had he not come to the funeral!
Yet how vain to say so, for his fate had been long prophesied, and
what did it matter in what special circumstances it came to pass! But
Warrender felt, as he left the house, that there could be no longer
distance and partial acquaintance between the two families. Their lines
of life--or was it of death?--had crossed and been woven together. He
felt a faint thrill go through him,--a thrill of consciousness, of
anticipation, he could not tell what Certainly it was not possible that
the old blank of non-connection could ever exist again. _She_, to whom
he had scarcely spoken before, who had been so entirely out of his
sphere, had now come into it so strangely, so closely, that she could
never be separated from his thoughts. She might break violently the
visionary tie between them,--she might break it, angry to have been
drawn into so close a relation to any strangers,--but it never could be
shaken off.

He drove quickly down the long bare avenue, where all was so naked and
clear, and put his head out of the carriage window to look back at the
house, standing out bare and defenceless in the full moonlight, showing
faintly, through the white glory which blazed all around, a little
pitiful glimmer of human lights in the closed windows, the watch-lights
of the dead. It seemed a long time to the young man since in his own
house these watch-lights had been extinguished. The previous event
seemed to have become dim to him, though he was so much more closely
connected with it, in the presence of this, which was more awful, more
terrible. He tried to return to the thoughts of the morning, when his
father was naturally in all things his first occupation, but it was
impossible to do it. Instead of the thoughts which became him, as being
now in his father's place, with the fortunes and comfort of his family
more or less depending upon him, all that his mind would follow were the
events of this afternoon, so full of fate. He saw Lady Markland stand,
with the child clinging to her, in the dim room, the shrouded bed and
indistinct attendant figures behind, the dimly flickering lights. Why
had she so claimed his aid, asked for his service, with that certainty
of being obeyed? Her every word trembled in his ear still:--they were
very few; but they seemed to be laid up there in some hidden repository,
and came out and said themselves over again when he willed, moving him
as he never had been moved before. He made many efforts to throw off
this involuntary preoccupation as the carriage rolled quickly along;
the tired horse quickening its pace as it felt the attraction of home,
the tired coachman letting it go almost at its own pleasure, the broad
moonlight fields, with their dark fringes of hedge, spinning past. Then
the village went past him, with all its sleeping houses, the church
standing up like a protecting shadow. He looked out again at this,
straining his eyes to see the dark spot where his father was lying, the
first night in the bosom of the earth: and this thought brought him back
for a moment to himself. But the next, as the carriage glided on into
the shadow of the trees, and the overgrown copses of the Warren received
him into their shadow, this other intrusive tragedy, this story which
was not his, returned and took possession of him once more. To see her
standing there, speaking so calmly, with the soft tones that perhaps
would have been imperious in other circumstances: "Do it for me." No
question whether it could be done, or if he could do it. One thing
only there was that jarred throughout all,--the child that was always
there, forming part of her. "If ever I have anything to do with that
boy"--Warrender said to himself; and then there was a moment of dazzle
and giddiness, and the carriage stopped, and a door opened, and he found
himself standing out in the fresh, soft night with his mother, on the
threshold of his own home. There was a light in the hall behind her,
where she stood, with the whiteness of the widow's cap, which was still
a novelty and strange feature in her, waiting till he should return. It
was far on in the night, and except herself the household was asleep.
She came out to him, wistfully looking in his face by the light of the
moon.

"You did everything for her, Theo?"

"All that I could. I saw him laid upon his bed. There was nothing more
for me to do."

"Are you very tired, my boy? You have done so much."

"Not tired at all. Come out with me a little. I can't go in yet. It is a
lovely night."

"Oh, Theo, lovely and full of light!--the trees, and the bushes, and
every blade of grass sheltering something that is living; and yet death,
death reigning in the midst."

She leaned her head upon his arm and cried a little, but he did not make
any response. It was true, no doubt, but other thoughts were in his
mind.

"She will have great trouble with that child, when he grows up," he said,
as if he had been carrying on some previous argument. "It is ridiculous
to have him always hanging about her, as if he could understand."

Mrs. Warrender started, and the movement made his arm which she held
tremble, but he did not think what this meant. He thought she was tired,
and this recalled his thoughts momentarily to her. "Poor mother!" he
said; "you sat up for me, not thinking of your own fatigue and trouble,
and you are over-tired. Am I a trouble to you, _too_?" His mind was
still occupied with the other train of thinking, even when he turned to
subjects more his own.

"Do you know," she said, not caring to reply, "it is the middle of the
night?"

"Yes, and you should be in bed. But I couldn't sleep. I have never had
anything of the kind to do before, and it takes all desire to rest out
of one. It will soon be daylight. I think I shall take my bath, and then
get to work."

"Oh no, Theo. You would not work,--you would think; and there are some
circumstances in which thinking is not desirable. Come out into the
moonlight. We will take ten minutes, and then, my dear boy, good-night."

"Good-morning, you mean, mother, and everything new,--a new life. It has
never been as it will be to-morrow. Have you thought of that?" She gave
a sudden pressure to his arm, and he perceived his folly. "That I should
speak so to you, to whom the greatest change of all has come!"

"Yes," she said, with a little tremor. "It is to me that it will make
the most difference. And that poor young creature, so much younger than
I, who might be my child!"

"Do you think, when she gets over all this, that it will be much to her?
People say----"

"That is a strange question to ask," she said, with agitation,--"a very
strange question to ask. When we get over all this,--that is, the shock,
and the change, and the awe of the going away,--what will it be then, to
all of us? We shall just settle down once more into our ordinary life,
as if nothing had happened. That is what will come of it. That is what
always comes of it. There is nothing but the common routine, which goes
on and on for ever."

She was excited, and shed tears, at which he wondered a little, yet was
compassionate of, remembering that she was a woman and worn out. He put
his hand upon hers, which lay on his arm. "Poor mother!" he murmured,
caressing her hand with his, and feeling all manner of tender cares for
her awake in him. Then he added softly, returning in spite of himself to
other thoughts, "The force of habit and of the common routine, as you
say, cannot be so strong when one is young."

"No," she said; and then, after a pause, "If it is poor Lady Markland
you are thinking of, she has her child."

This gave him a certain shock, in the softening of his heart. "The child
is the thing I don't like!" he exclaimed, almost sharply. Then he added,
"I think the dawn must be near; I feel very chilly. Mother, come in; as
you say, it is the best thing not to think, but to go to bed."




CHAPTER VII


The morning rose, as they had said to each other, upon a new life.

How strange it is to realise, after the first blow has fallen, that this
changed life is still the same! When it brings with it external changes,
family convulsions, the alteration of external circumstances, although
these secondary things increase the calamity, they give it also a
certain natural atmosphere; they are in painful harmony with it. But
when the shock, the dreadful business of the moment, is all over, when
the funeral has gone away from the doors and the dead has been buried,
and everything goes on as before, this commonplace renewal is, perhaps,
the most terrible of all to the visionary soul. Minnie and Chatty got
out their work,--the coloured work, which they had thought out of
place during the first week. They went in the afternoon for a walk,
and gathered fresh flowers, as they returned, for the vases in the
drawing-room. When evening came they asked Theo if he would not read to
them. It was not a novel they were reading; it was a biography, of a
semi-religious character, in which there were a great many edifying
letters. They would not, of course, have thought of reading a novel at
such a time. Warrender had been wandering about all day, restless, not
knowing what to do with himself. He was not given to games of any kind,
but he thought to-day that he would have felt something of the sort
a relief, though he knew it would have shocked the household. In the
afternoon, on a chance suggestion of his mother's, he saw that it was
a sort of duty to walk over to Markland and ask how Lady Markland was.
Twelve miles--six there and six back again--is a long walk for a student.
He sent up his name, and asked whether he could be of any use, but he
did not receive encouragement. Lady Markland sent her thanks, and was
quite well ("she says," the old butler explained, with a shake of the
head, so that no one might believe he agreed in anything so unbecoming).
The Honourable John had been telegraphed for, her husband's uncle, and
everything was being done; so that there was no need to trouble Mr.
Warrender. He went back, scarcely solaced by his walk. He wanted to be
doing something. Not Plato; in the circumstances Plato did not answer at
all. When he opened his book his thoughts escaped from him, and went off
with a bound to matters entirely different. How was it possible that he
could give that undivided attention which divine philosophy requires,
the day after his father's funeral, the first day of his independent
life, the day after----! That extraordinary postscript to the agitations
of yesterday told, perhaps, most of all. When the girls asked him to
read to them, opening the book at the page where they had left off,
and preparing to tell him all that had gone before, so that he might
understand the story ("although there is very little story," Minnie
said, with satisfaction; "chiefly thoughts upon serious subjects"), he
jumped up from his chair in almost fierce rebellion against that sway of
the ordinary of which his mother had spoken. "You were right," he said
to her; "the common routine is the thing that outlasts everything. I
never thought of it before, but it is true."

Mrs. Warrender, though she had herself been quivering with the
long-concentrated impatience for which it seemed even now there could be
no outlet, was troubled by her son's outburst, and, afraid of what it
might come to, felt herself moved to take the other side. "It is very
true," she said, faltering a little, "but the common routine is often
best for everything, Theo. It is a kind of leading-string, which keeps
us going."

The girls looked up at Theo with alarm and wonder, but still they were
not shocked at what _he_ said. He was a man; he had come to the Warren
from those wild excitements of Oxford life, of which they had heard
with awe; they gazed at him, trying to understand him.

"I have always heard," said Minnie, "that reading aloud was the most
tranquillising thing people could do. If we had each a book it would
be unsociable; but when a book is read aloud, then we are all thinking
about the same thing, and it draws us together;" which was really the
most sensible judgment that could have been delivered, had the two
fantastic ones been in the mood to understand what was said.

Chatty did not say anything, but after she had threaded her needle
looked up with great attention to see how the fate of the evening was
to be decided. It was a great pleasure when some one would read aloud,
especially Theo, who thus became one of them, in a way which was not at
all usual; but perhaps she was less earnest about it this evening than
on ordinary occasions, for the biographical book was a little dull, and
the letters on serious subjects were dreadfully serious. No doubt, just
after papa's death, this was appropriate; but still it is well known
there are stories which are also serious, and could not do any one harm,
even at the gravest moments.

"There are times when leading-strings are insupportable," Theo said; "at
any time I don't know that I put much faith in them. We have much to
arrange and settle, mother, if you feel able for it."

"Mamma can't feel able yet," returned Minnie. "Oh, why should we make
any change? We are so happy as we are."

"I am quite able," said Mrs. Warrender. She had been schooling herself
to the endurance which still seemed to be expected of her, but the moment
an outlet seemed possible the light kindled in her eye. "I think with
Theo that it is far better to decide whatever has to be done at once."
Then she cried out suddenly, carried away by the unexpected unhoped-for
opportunity, "O children, we must get away from here! I cannot bear it
any longer. As though all our own trouble and sorrow were not enough,
this other--this other tragedy!" She put up her hands to her eyes, as
though to shut out the sight that pressed upon them. "I cannot get it
out of my mind. I suppose my nerves and everything are wrong; all night
long it seemed to be before me,--the blood on his forehead, the ghastly
white face, the labouring breath. Oh, not like your father, who was good
and old and peaceful, who was just taken away gently, led away,--but so
young and so unprepared! Oh, so unprepared! What could God do with him,
cut off in the midst of----"

Minnie got up hastily, with her smelling-salts, which always lay on the
table. "Go and get her a glass of water, Theo," she said
authoritatively.

Mrs. Warrender laughed. It was a little nervous, but it was a laugh. It
seemed to peal through the house, which still was a house of mourning,
and filled the girls with a horror beyond words. She put out her hands
to put their ministrations away. "I do not want water," she said, "nor
salts either. I am not going into hysterics. Sit down and listen to me.
I cannot remain here. It is your birthplace, but not mine. I am dying
for fresh air and the sight of the sun. If you are shocked, I cannot
help it. Theo, when you go back to Oxford I will go to--I don't know
where; to some place where there is more air; but here I cannot stay."

This statement was as a thunderbolt falling in the midst of them, and
the poor woman perceived this instinctively. Her son's impatience had
been the spark which set the smouldering fire in her alight, but even he
was astounded by the quick and sudden blaze which lit up the dull wonder
in his sisters' faces. And then he no longer thought of going to Oxford.
He wanted to remain to see if he could do anything,--perhaps to be of
use. A husband's uncle does not commend himself to one's mind as a very
devoted or useful ministrant, and even he would go away, of course; and
then a man who was nearer, who was a neighbour, who had already been so
mixed up with the tragedy,--that was what he had been thinking of; not
of Oxford, or his work.

"It is not worth while going back to Oxford," he said; "the term is
nearly over. One can read anywhere, at home as well as--I shall not go
back at present." He was not accustomed yet to so abrupt a declaration
of his sentiments, and for the moment he avoided his mother's eye.

Minnie went back to her seat, and put down the bottle of salts on the
table, with an indignant jar. "I am so glad that you feel so, Theo,
_too_."

Mrs. Warrender looked round upon her children with despairing eyes. They
were all _his_ children,--all Warrenders born; knowing as little about
her and her ways of thinking as if she had been a stranger to them. She
was indeed a stranger to them in the intimate sense. The exasperation
that had been in her mind for years could be repressed no longer. "If it
is so," she said, "I don't wish to interfere with your plans, Theo; but
I will go for--for a little change. I must have it. I am worn out."

"Oh, mamma, you will not surely go by yourself, without us! How could
you get on without us!" cried Chatty. She had perhaps, being the youngest,
a faint stir of a feeling in her mind that a little change might be
pleasant enough. But she took her mother at her word with this mild
protest, which made Mrs. Warrender's impatient cry into a statement of
fixed resolution: and the others said nothing. Warrender was silent,
because he was absorbed in the new thoughts that filled his mind;
Minnie, because, like Chatty, she felt quite apart from any such
extraordinary wishes, having nothing to do with it, and nothing to say.

"It will be very strange, certainly, for me to be alone,--very strange,"
Mrs. Warrender said, with a quiver in her voice. "It is so long since I
have done anything by myself; not since before you were all born. But if
it must be," she added, "I must just take courage as well as I can,
and--go by myself, as you say."

Once more there was no response. The girls did not know what to say.
Duty, they thought, meant staying at home and doing their crewel-work;
they were not capable of any other identification of it all at once. It
was very strange, but if mamma thought so, what could they do? She got
up with nervous haste, feeling now, since she had once broken bounds,
as though the flood of long-restrained feeling was beyond her control
altogether. The natural thing would have been to rush upstairs and pack
her things, and go off to the railway at once. That, perhaps, might not
be practicable; but neither was it practicable to sit quietly amid the
silence and surprise, and see her wild, sudden resolution accepted
dully, as if a woman could contemplate such a severance calmly. And yet
it was true that she must get fresh air or die. Life so long intolerable
could be borne no longer.

"I think in the meantime," she said, with a forced smile, "I shall go
upstairs."

"You were up very late last night," returned Theo, though rather by way
of giving a sort of sanction to her abrupt withdrawal than for any other
reason, as he rose to open the door.

"Yes, it was very late. I think I am out of sorts altogether. And if I
am to make my plans without any reference to the rest of the family----"

"Oh, that is absurd," he said. "Of course the girls must go with you, if
you are really going. But you must not be in a hurry, mother. There is
plenty of time; there is no hurry." He was thinking of the time that
must elapse before the doors of Markland would be open even to her who
had received Lord Markland into her house. Till then he did not want her
to go away. When she had left the room he turned upon his sisters and
slew them.

"What do you mean, you two? I wonder if you have got hearts of stone, to
hear the poor mother talk of going away for a little change, and to sit
there like wooden images, and never open your mouths!"

The girls opened their mouths wide at this unexpected reproach. "What
could we say? Mamma tells us all in a moment she wants to go away from
home! We have always been taught that a girl's place is at home."

"What do you call home?" he asked.

It was a brutal speech, he was aware. Brothers and sisters are permitted
to be brutal to each other without much harm done. Minnie had begun
calmly, with the usual, "Oh, Theo!" before the meaning of the question
struck her. She stopped suddenly, looked up at him, with eyes and lips
open, with an astonished stare of inquiry. Then, dull though she was,
growing red, repeated in a startled, awakened, interrogative tone, "Oh,
Theo!" with a little gasp as for breath.

"I don't mean to be disagreeable," he said. "I never should have been,
had not you begun. The mother has tried to make you understand half a
dozen times, but I suppose you did not want to understand. Don't you
know everything is changed since--since I was last at the Warren? Your
home is with my mother now, wherever she chooses to settle down."

It must be said for Warrender that he meant no harm whatever by this.
He meant, perhaps, to punish them a little for their heartlessness. He
meant them to see that their position was changed,--that they were not
as of old, in assured possession; and he reckoned upon that slowness
of apprehension which probably would altogether preserve them from
any painful consciousness. But it is astonishing how the mind and the
senses are quickened when it is ourselves who are in question. Minnie
was the leader of the two. She was the first to understand; and then it
communicated itself partly by magnetism to Chatty, who woke up much more
slowly, having caught as it were only an echo of what her brother said.

"You mean--that this is not our home any more," said Minnie. Her eyes
filled with sudden tears, and her face was flushed with the shock. She
had seldom looked so well, so thoroughly awakened and mistress of her
faculties. When she was roused she had more in her than was apparent on
the surface. "I did not think you would be the one to tell us that. Of
course we know that it is quite true. Chatty and I are older than you
are, but we are only daughters, and you are the boy. You have the power
to turn us out,--we all know that."

"Minnie!" cried Chatty, struck with terror, putting out a hand to stop
these terrible words,--words such as had never been said in her hearing
before.

"But we did not think you would have used it," the elder sister said
simply, and then was silent. He expected that she would end the scene by
rushing from the room in tears and wrath. But what she did was much more
embarrassing. She dried her tears hastily, took up her crewel-work, sat
still, and said no more. Chatty threw an indignant but yet at the same
time an inquiring glance at him. She had not heard or observed the
beginning of the fray, and did not feel quite sure what it was all
about.

"I am sure Theo would never do anything that was unkind," she remarked
mildly; then after a little pause, "Wouldn't it have been much better to
have had the reading? I have noticed that before: when one reads and the
others work, there is, as the rector says, a common interest, and we
have a nice evening; but when we begin talking instead--well, we think
differently, and we disagree, and one says more than one means to say,
and then--one is sorry afterwards," Chatty said, after another pause.

On the whole, it was the girls who had the best of it in this encounter.
It is impossible to say how much Theo was ashamed of himself when, after
Chatty's quite unaccustomed address, which surprised herself as much
as her brother and sister, and after an hour of silence, broken by an
occasional observation, the girls put aside their crewels again, and
remarked that it was time to go to bed. A sense of opposition and
that pride which prevents a man from being the first to retire from a
battle-field, even when the battle is a failure and the main armies
have never engaged, had kept him there during the evening, in spite of
himself. But when they left him master of the ground, there can be no
doubt that he felt much more like a defeated than a triumphant general.
This first consequence of the new _régime_ was not a beautiful or
desirable one. There were thus three parties in the house on the evening
of the first day of their changed existence: the mother, who was so
anxious to leave the scene of her past existence behind her; the girls,
who clung to their home; the brother, the master, who, half to show that
he took his mother's side, half out of instinctive assertion of himself,
had let them know roundly that their home was theirs no longer. He was
not proud of himself at all as he thought of what he had said; but yet
when he recalled it he was not perhaps so sorry for having said it as
he had been the minute after the words left his lips. It was better,
possibly, as the lawyer, as the mother, as everybody, had said, that the
true state of affairs should be fully understood from the first. The
house was theirs no longer. The old reign and all its traditions had
passed away; a new reign had begun. What that new reign might turn to,
who might share it, what wonderful developments it might take, who could
tell?

His imagination here went away with a leap into realms of sheer
romance. He seemed to see the old house transformed, the free air,
the sweet sunshine pouring in, the homely rooms made beautiful, the
inhabitants---- What was he thinking of? Did ever imagination go so fast
or so far? He stopped himself, with vague smiles stealing to his lips.
All that enchanted ground was so new to him that he had no control over
his fancy, but went to the utmost length with a leap of bewildering
pleasure and daring almost like a child. Yet mingled with this were
various elements which were not lovely. He was not, so far as had been
previously apparent, selfish beyond the natural liking for his own
comfort and his own way, which is almost universal. He had never wished
to cut himself off from his family, or to please himself at their
expense. But something had come into his mind which is nearer than the
nearest,--something which, with a new and uncomprehended fire, hardens
the heart on one side while melting it on the other, and brings
tenderness undreamed of and cruelty impossible to be believed, from the
same source. He felt the conflict of these powers within him when he was
left alone in the badly furnished, badly lighted drawing-room, which
seemed to reproach him for the retirement of those well-known figures
which had filled it with tranquil dulness for so many years, and never
wished it different. With something of the same feeling towards the
inanimate things about him which he had expressed to his sisters, he
walked up and down the room. It too would have to change, like them, to
acknowledge that he was master, to be moulded to new requirements. He
felt as if the poor old ugly furniture, the hard curtains that hung like
pieces of painted wood, the dingy pictures on the walls, contemplated
him with pain and disapproval. They were easier to deal with than the
human furniture; but he had been accustomed to them all his life, and it
was not without a sense of impiety that the young iconoclast contemplated
these grim household gods, harmless victims of that future which as
yet was but an audacious dream. He was standing in front of the great
chiffonnier, with its marble top and plate-glass back, looking with
daring derision at its ugliness, when old Joseph came in at his usual
hour--the hour at which he had fulfilled the same duty for the last
twenty years--to put out the lamps. Warrender could horrify the girls and
insult the poor old familiar furniture, but he was not yet sufficiently
advanced to defy Joseph. He turned round, with a blush and quick movement
of shame, as if he had been found out, at the appearance of the old man
with his candle in his hand, and murmuring something about work, hurried
off to the library, with a fear that even that refuge might perhaps be
closed upon him. Joseph remained master of the situation. He followed
Warrender to the door with his eyes, with a slight contemptuous shrug of
his shoulders, as at an unaccountable being whose "ways" were scarcely
important enough to be taken into account, and trotted about, putting
out one lamp after another, and the twinkling candles on the mantelpiece,
and the little lights in the hall and corridor. It was an office Joseph
liked. He stood for a moment at the foot of the back stairs looking with
complacency upon the darkness, his candle lighting up his little old wry
face. But when his eye caught the line of light under the library door,
Joseph shook his head. He had put the house to bed without disturbance
for so long: he could not abide, he said to himself, this introduction
of new ways.




CHAPTER VIII.


It was a violent beginning; but perhaps it was as well, on the whole,
that the idea of Theo's future supremacy should have been got into the
heads of the duller portion of the family. Warrender was so anxious that
there should be no unnecessary haste in his mother's departure, and
so ready to find out a pleasant place where they could all go, that
everything that had been harsh was forgotten. Indeed, it is very possible
in a family that a great many harsh things may be said and forgotten,
with little harm done--boys and girls who have been brought up in the
same nursery having generally insulted as well as caressed each other
with impunity from their earliest years. This happy effect of the bonds
of nature was no doubt made easier by the placid characters of the girls,
who had no inclination to brood over an unkindness, nor any habit of
thinking what was meant by a hasty word. On the contrary, when they
remembered it in the morning, after their sound night's sleep, they said
to each other that Theo could not possibly have meant it; that he must
have been out of temper, poor fellow. They even consented to listen and
to look when, with unusual amiability, he called them out to see what
trees he intended to cut down, and what he meant to do. Minnie and
Chatty indeed bewailed every individual tree, and kissed the big,
tottering old elm, which had menaced the nursery window since ever they
could remember, and shut out the light. "Dear old thing!" they said,
shedding a tear or two upon its rough bark. "It would be dear indeed if
it brought down the wall and smashed the old play-room," their brother
said,--an argument which even to these natural conservatives bore, now
that the first step had been taken, a certain value. Sometimes it is
not amiss to go too far when the persons you mean to convince are a
little obtuse. They entered into the question almost with warmth at
last. The flower garden would be so much improved, for one thing; there
never had been sun enough for the flowers, and the big trees had taken,
the gardener said, all the goodness out of the soil. Perhaps after all
Theo might be right. Of course he knew so much more of the world!

"And, mother, before you go, you should see--Lady Markland," Theo said.

There was a little hesitation in his voice before he pronounced the
name, but of this no one took any notice, at the time.

"I have been wondering what I should do. There has been no intimacy, not
more than acquaintanceship."

"After what has happened you surely cannot call yourselves mere
acquaintances, you and she."

"Perhaps not that: but it is not as if she had thrown herself upon my
sympathy, Theo. She was very self-contained. Nobody could doubt that she
felt it dreadfully; but she did not fling herself upon me, as many other
women would have done."

"I should not think that was at all her character," said Warrender.

"No, I don't suppose it is her character; and then there were already
two of her, so to speak,--that child----"

"The only thing I dislike in her," he said hastily, "is that child. What
good can a creature of that age do her? And it must be so bad for the
boy."

"I don't know about the good it can do her. You don't any of you
understand," Mrs. Warrender said, with a moistening of her eyes, "the
good there is in a child. As young people grow up they become more
important, no doubt,--oh yes, far more important,--and take their own
place. But a little thing that belongs to you, that has no thoughts but
what are your thoughts, that never wants to be away from you----"

"Very unnatural," said the young man severely, "or else fictitious. The
little thing, you may be sure, would much rather be playing with its own
companions; or else it must be an unhealthy little sentimental----"

Mrs. Warrender shook her head, but said no more. She gave him a look
half remonstrating, half smiling. I had a little boy once, it was on her
lips to say: but she forbore. How was the young man, beginning his own
individual career, thinking of everything in the world rather than of
such innocent consolation as can be given to a woman by a child, to
understand that mystery? She whose daughters, everybody said, must be
"such companions," and her son "such a support," looked back wistfully
upon the days when they were little children; but then she was an
unreasonable woman. She was roused from a little visionary journey back
into her own experiences by the sound of Theo's voice going on:--

"----should call and ask," he was saying. "She might want you. She must
want some one, and they say she has no relations. I think certainly you
should call and ask. Shall I order the brougham for you this afternoon?
I would drive you over myself, but perhaps, in the circumstances, it
would be more decorous----"

"It must be the brougham; if you think I ought to go so soon----"

"Well, mother, you are the best judge; but I suppose that if women can
be of any use to each other it must be at such a--at a time when other
people are shut out."

Mrs. Warrender was much surprised by his fervour: but she remembered that
her husband had been very punctilious about visiting, as men in the
country often are, the duty of keeping up all social connections falling
upon their wives, and not on themselves. The brougham was ordered,
accordingly, and she set out alone, though Minnie would willingly have
strained a point to accompany her. "Don't you think, mamma, that as I am
much nearer her own age she might like me to go?" that young lady said.
But here Theo came in again with his newly acquired authority. "Mother
is the right person," he said.

She did not feel much like the right person as she drove along. Lady
Markland had not wanted consolation; the shock had turned her to stone.
And then she had her child, and seemed to need no other minister. But if
it pleased Theo, that was motive enough. Mrs. Warrender reflected, as
she pursued her way, upon the kind of squire he would make, different
from his father,--oh, very different; not the ordinary type of the
English country gentleman. He would not hunt, he would shoot very
little; but her husband had not been enthusiastic in either of these
pursuits. He would not care, perhaps, for county business or for the
quarter sessions; he would have too much contempt for the country
bumpkins to be popular with the farmers or wield political influence.
Very likely (she thought), he would not live much at the Warren, but
keep rooms at Oxford, or perhaps go to London. She had no fear that he
would ever "go wrong." That was as great an impossibility as that he
should be prime minister or Archbishop of Canterbury. But yet it was
a little odd that he should be so particular about keeping up the
accidental connection with Lady Markland. This showed that he was not
so indifferent to retaining his place in the county and keeping up all
local ties as she thought. As for any other ideas that Theo might
associate with the young widow,--the widow whose husband lay still
unburied,--nothing of the kind entered Mrs. Warrender's head.

The nakedness of the house seemed to be made more conspicuous by the
blank of all the closed windows, the white blinds down, the white walls
shining like a sort of colourless monument in the blaze of the westering
sun. The sound of the wheels going up the open road which was called an
avenue seemed a kind of insult to the stillness which brooded over the
house of death. When the old butler came solemnly down the great steps,
the small country lady, who was not on Lady Markland's level, felt her
little pretence at intimacy quite unjustifiable. The butler came down
the steps with a solemn air to receive a card and inquiries, and to give
the stereotyped reply that her ladyship was as well as could be looked
for: but lifted astonished eyes, not without a gleam of insolence in
them, when Mrs. Warrender made the unexpected demand if Lady Markland
would see her. See _you_! If it had been the duchess, perhaps! was the
commentary legible in his face. He went in, however, with the card in
his hand, while she waited, half indignant, half amused, with little
doubt what the reply would be. But the reply was not at all what she
expected. After a minute or two of delay, another figure, quite different
from that of the butler, appeared on the steps: a tall man, with very
thin, unsteady legs, a face on which the ravages of age were visibly
repaired by many devices unknown to its simpler victims, with an
eye-glass in his eye and a hesitation in his speech. He was not unknown
to the society about, though he showed himself but rarely in it, and was
not beloved when he appeared. He was Lord Markland's uncle, the late
lord's only brother,--he who was supposed to have led the foolish young
man astray. Mrs. Warrender looked at him with a certain horror, as he
came walking gingerly down the steps. He made a very elaborate bow at
the carriage door,--if he were really Satan in person, as many people
thought, he was a weak-kneed Satan,--and gulped and stammered a good
deal (in which imperfections we need not follow him) as he made his
compliments. His niece, he said, had charged him with the kindest
messages, but she was ill and lying down. Would Mrs. Warrender excuse
her for to-day?

"She is most grateful for so much kindness; and there is a favour--ah, a
favour which I have to ask. It is, if you would add to your many kind
services----"

"I have rendered no kind services, Mr. Markland. The accident happened
at our doors."

"Ah, no less kind for that. My niece is very grateful, and I--and I,
too,--that goes without saying. If we might ask you to come to-morrow,
to remain with her while the last rites----"

"To remain with her! Are you sure that is Lady Markland's wish?"

"My dear lady, it is mine, and hers,--hers, too; again, that goes without
saying. She has no relations. She wants countenance,--countenance and
support; and who could give them so fitly as yourself? In the same
circumstances: accept my sincerest regrets. Mr. Warrender was, I have
alway heard, an excellent person, and must be a great loss. But you have
a son, I think."

"Yes, I have a son."

"Who has been here twice to inquire? Most friendly, most friendly, I am
sure. I see, therefore, that you take an interest--Then may we calculate
upon you, Wednesday, as early as will suit you?"

"I will come," said Mrs. Warrender, still hesitating, "if you are quite
sure it is Lady Markland's wish."

While he repeated his assurances, another member of the family appeared
at the door, little Geoff, in a little black dress, which showed his
paleness, his meagre, small person, insignificance, and sickliness more
than ever. He had been there, it would seem, looking on while his uncle
spoke. At this moment he came down deliberately, one step at a time,
till his head was on a level with the carriage window. "It is quite
true," he said. "Mother's in her own room. She's tired, but she wants
you, if you'll come; anyhow, _I_ want you, please, if you'll come. They
say I'm to go, but not mamma: and you know she couldn't be left by
herself; uncle thinks so, and so do I."

The little thing stood shuffling from one foot to another, his hands
in his pockets, his little gray eyes looking everywhere but at the
compassionate face turned to him from the carriage window. There was
a curious ridiculous repetition in the child's attitude of Theo's
assertion of his rights. But Mrs. Warrender's heart was soft to the
child. "I don't think she wants me," she said. "I will do anything at
such a time, but----"

"I want you," said Geoff. He gave her a momentary glance, and she could
see that the little colourless eyes had tears in them. "I shall have to
go and leave her, and who will take care of her? She is to have a thing
like yours upon her head." He was ready to sob, but kept himself in with
a great effort, swallowing the little convulsion of nature. His mother's
widow's cap was more to Geoff than his father's death; at least it was a
visible sign of something tremendous which had happened, more telling
than the mere absence of one who had been so often absent. "Come, Mrs.
Warrender," he said, with a hoarseness of passion in his little voice.
"I can leave her if you are there."

"I will come for your sake, Geoff," she said, holding out her hand, and
with tears in her eyes. He was not big enough to reach it from where he
stood, and the tears in her voice affected the little hero. He dug his
own hands deeper into his pockets, and shuffled off without any reply.
It was the uncle, whose touch she instinctively shrank from, who took
and bowed over Mrs. Warrender's hand. The Honourable John bowed over it
as if he were about to kiss it, and might have actually touched the black
glove with his carmine lips (would they have left a mark?) had not she
drawn it away.

What a curious office to be thus imposed upon her! To give countenance
and support, or to take care of, as little Geoff said, this young woman
whom she scarcely knew, who had not in the depth of trouble made any
claim upon her sympathy. Mrs. Warrender looked forward with anything but
satisfaction to the task. But when she told her tale it was received
with a sort of enthusiasm. "Oh, how nice of her!" cried Minnie and
Chatty; and their mother saw, with half amusement, that they thought all
the more of her because her companionship had been sought for by Lady
Markland. And in Warrender's eyes a fire lighted up. He turned away his
head, and after a moment said, "You will be very tender to her, mother."
Mrs. Warrender was too much confused and bewildered to make any reply.

When the next day came she went, with reluctance and a sense of
self-abnegation, which was not gratifying, but painful, to fulfil this
office. "She does not want me, I know," Mrs. Warrender said to her son,
who accompanied her, to form part of the cortége, in the little brougham
which had been to Markland but once or twice in so many years, and this
last week had traversed the road from one house to another almost every
day. "I think you are mistaken, mother; but even so, if you can do her
any good," said Theo, with unusual enthusiasm. His mother thought it
strange that he should show so much feeling on the subject; and she went
through the great hall and up the stairs, through the depths of the vast
silent house, to Lady Markland's room, with anticipations as little
agreeable as any with which woman ever went to an office of kindness.
Lady Markland's room was on the other side of the house, looking upon
a landscape totally different from that through which her visitor had
come. The window was open, the light unshaded, and Lady Markland sat at
a writing-table covered with papers, as little like a broken-hearted
widow as could be supposed. She was dressed, indeed, in the official
dress of heavy crape, and wore (for once) the cap which to Geoff had
been so overpowering a symbol of sorrow; but, save for these signs, and
perhaps a little additional paleness in her never high complexion, was
precisely as Mrs. Warrender had seen her since she had risen from her
girlish bloom into the self-possession of a wife, matured and stilled by
premature experience. She came forward, holding out her hand, when her
visitor, with a reluctance and diffidence quite unsuitable to her
superior age, slowly advanced.

"Thank you," she said at once, "for coming. I know without a word how
disagreeable it is to you, how little you wished it. You have come
against your will, and you think against my will, Mrs. Warrender; but
indeed it is not so. It is a comfort and help to me to have you."

"If that is so, Lady Markland----"

"That is why you have come," she said. "It is so. I know you have come
unwillingly. You heard--they have taken the boy from me."

"But only for this day."

"Only for the hour, I hope. It is supposed to be too much for me to go."
Here she smiled, with a nervous movement of her face. "Nothing is too
much for me. You know a little about it, but not all. Do you remember
him when we were married, Mrs. Warrender? I recollect you were one of
the first people I saw."

This sudden plunge into the subject for which she was least prepared--for
all her ideas of condolence had been driven out of her mind by the young
woman's demeanour, the open window, the cheerful and commonplace air of
the room--confused Mrs. Warrender greatly. "I remember Lord Markland
almost all his life," she said.

"Here is the miniature of him that was done for me before we were
married," said Lady Markland, rising hurriedly, and bringing it from
the table. "Look at it; did you ever see a more hopeful face? He was so
fresh; he was so full of spirits. Who could have thought there was any
canker in that face?"

"There was not then," said the elder woman, looking through a mist of
natural tears--the tears of that profound regret for a life lost which
are more bitter, almost, than personal sorrow--at the miniature. She
remembered him so well, and how everybody thought all would come right
with the poor young fellow when he was so happily married and had a
home.

"Ah, but there was!--nobody told me; though if all the world had told me
it would not have made any difference. Mrs. Warrender, he is like that
now. Everything else is gone. He looks as he did at twenty, as good and
as pure. What do you think it means? Does it mean anything? Or is there
only some physical interpretation of it, as these horrible men say?"

"My dear," said Mrs. Warrender, quite subdued, "they say it means that
all is pardoned, and that they have entered into peace."

"Peace," she said. "I was afraid you were going to say rest; and he who
had never laboured wanted no rest. Peace,--where the wicked cease from
troubling, is that what you mean? He had no time to repent."

"My dear--oh, I am not clear, I can't tell you; but who can tell what
was in his mind between the time he saw his danger and the blow that
stunned him? If my boy had done everything against me, and all in a
moment turned and called to me, would I refuse him? And is not God,"
cried one mother to the other, taking her hands, "better than we?"

It was she who had come to be the comforter who wept, tears streaming
down her cheeks. The other held her hands, and looked in her face
with dry feverish eyes. "Your boy," she said slowly, "he is good and
kind,--he is good and kind. Will my boy be like him? Or do you think
there is an inheritance in that as in other things?"




CHAPTER IX.


The post town for the Warren was Highcombe, which was about four miles
off. To drive there had always been considered a dissipation, not to say
a temptation, for the Warrenders; at least for the feminine portion of
the family. There were at Highcombe what the ladies called "quite good
shops,"--shops where you could get everything, really as good as town,
and if not cheaper, yet still quite as cheap, if you added on the
railway fare and all the necessary expenses you were inevitably put to,
if you went to town on purpose to shop. Accordingly, it was considered
prudent to go to Highcombe as seldom as possible; only when there was
actually something wanted, or important letters to post, or such a
necessity as balanced the probable inducement to buy things that were
not needed, or spend money that might have been spared. The natural
consequence of this prudential regulation was that the little shop in
the village which lay close to their gates had been encouraged to keep
sundry kinds of goods not usually found in a little village shop, and
that Minnie and Chatty very often passed that way in their daily walks.
Old Mrs. Bagley had a good selection of shaded Berlin wools and a few
silks, and even, when the fashion came in for that, crewels. She had a
few Berlin patterns, and pieces of muslin stamped for that other curious
kind of ornamentation which consisted in cutting holes and sewing them
round. And she had beads of different sizes and colours, and in short
quite a little case of things intended for the occupation of that
super-abundant leisure which ladies often have in the country. In the
days with which we are concerned there were not so many activities
possible as now. The village and parish were not so well looked after.
There was no hospital nearer than the county hospital at Highcombe, and
the "Union" was in the parish of Standingby, six miles off, too far to
be visited; neither had it become the fashion then to visit hospitals
and workhouses. The poor of the village were poor neighbours. The sick
were nursed, with more or less advantage, at home. Beef-tea and chicken
broth flowed from the Warren, whenever it was necessary, into whatsoever
cottage stood in need, and very good, wholesome calf's-foot jelly,
though perhaps not quite so clear as that which came from the Highcombe
confectioners. Everything was done in a neighbourly way, without
organisation. Perhaps it was better, perhaps worse. In human affairs
it is always so difficult to make certain. But at all events the young
ladies had not so much to do. And lawn tennis had not been yet invented,
croquet even was but in the mild fervour of its first existence. Schools
of cookery and ambulances were unknown. And needle-work, bead-work,
muslin-work, flourished. Crochet, even, was still pursued as a fine-art
occupation. That period is as far back as the Crusades to the sympathetic
reader, but to the Miss Warrenders it was the natural state of affairs.
They went to Mrs. Bagley's very often, in the dulness of the afternoon,
to turn over the Berlin wools and the crochet cottons, to match a shade,
or to find a size they wanted. The expenditure was not great, and it
gave an object to their walk. "I must go out," they would say to
each other, "for there is that pink to match;" or "I shall be at a
stand-still with my antimacassar; my cotton is almost done." It was not
the fault of Minnie and Chatty that they had nothing better to do.

Mrs. Bagley was old, but very lively, and capable, even while selling
soap, or sugar, or a piece of bacon, or a tin tea-kettle, of seeing
through her old spectacles whether the tint selected was one that matched.
She was a woman who had "come through" much in her life. Her children
were all grown up, and most of them dead. Those who remained were
married, with children of their own, making a great struggle to bring
them up, as she herself had done in her day. She had two daughters,
widows,--one in the village, one at some distance off; and living with
herself, dependent on her, yet not dependent altogether, was all that
remained of another daughter, the one supposed to have been her favourite.
It seemed to the others rather hard that granny should lavish all her
benefits upon Eliza, while their own families got only little presents
and helps now and then. But Lizzie was always the one with mother, they
said, though goodness knows she had cost enough in her lifetime without
leaving such a charge on granny's hands. Lizzie Bagley, who in her day
had been the prettiest of the daughters, had married out of her own
sphere, though it could not be said to be a very grand marriage. She
had married a clerk, a sort of gentleman,--not like the ploughman and
country tradesman who had fallen to the lot of her sisters. But he had
never done well, had lost one situation after another, and had gone out
finally to Canada, where he died,--he and his wife both; leaving their
girl with foreign ways and a will of her own, such as the aunts thought
(or at least said) does not develop on the home soil. As poor little
Lizzie, however, had been but two years away, perhaps the blame did not
entirely lie with Canada. Her mother's beauty and her father's gentility
had given to Lizzie many advantages over her cousins. She was prettier
and far more "like a lady" than the best of them; she had a slim, straight
little person, without the big joints and muscles of the race, and with
blue eyes which were really blue, and not whitey-gray. And instead of
going out to service, as would have been natural, she had learned
dressmaking, which was a fine lady sort of a trade, and put nonsense
into her head, and led her into vanity. To see her in the sitting-room
behind the shop, with her hair so smooth and her waist so small and
collars and cuffs as nice as any young lady's, was as gall and wormwood
to the mothers of girls quite as good (they said) as Lizzie, and just as
near to granny, but never cosseted and petted in that way. And what did
granny expect was to become of her at the end? So long as she was sure
of her 'ome, and so long as the young ladies at the Warren gave her a
bit of work now and again, and Mrs. Wilberforce at the Rectory had her
in to make the children's things, all might be well enough. But the
young ladies would marry, and the little Wilberforces would grow up, and
granny--well, granny could not expect to live for ever. And what would
Miss Lizzie do then? This was what the aunts would say, shaking their
heads. Mrs. Bagley, when she said anything at all in her own defence,
declared that poor little Lizzie had no one to look to her, neither
father nor mother, and that if her own granny didn't take her up and do
for her, who should? And that, besides, she did very well with her
dressmaking. But nevertheless, by time, Mrs. Bagley had her own
apprehensions too.

Minnie and Chatty were fond of making expeditions into the shop, as has
been said. They liked to have a talk with Lizzie, and to turn over her
fashion-books, old and new, and perhaps to plan, next time they had new
frocks, how the sleeves should be made. It was a pleasant "object" for
their walk, a break in the monotony, and gave them something to talk
about. They went in one afternoon, shortly after the events which have
been described. Chatty had occasion for a strip of muslin stamped for
working, to complete some of her new underclothing which she had been
making. The shop had one large square window, in which a great many
different kinds of wares were exhibited, from bottles full of barley
sugar and acid drops to bales of striped stuff for petticoats. Bunches
of candles dangled from the roof, and nets of onions, and the old lady
herself was weighing an ounce of tea for one of her poor customers when
the young ladies came in. "Is Lizzie at home, Mrs. Bagley?" said Minnie.
"Don't mind us,--we can look for what we want; and you mustn't let your
other customers wait."

"You're always that good, miss," said the old woman. Her dialect could
only be expressed by much multiplication of vowels, and would not be a
satisfactory representation even then, so that it is not necessary to
trouble the eye of the reader with its peculiarities. A certain amount
of this pronunciation may be taken for granted. "If all the quality
would be as considerate, it would be a fine thing for poor folks."

"Oh, but people with any sense would always be considerate! How is your
mother, Sally? Is it for her you are buying the tea? Cocoa is very
nourishing; it is an excellent thing for her."

"If you please, miss," said Sally, who was the purchaser, "mother do
dearly love a cup of tea."

"You ought to tell her that the cocoa is far more nourishing," said
Minnie. "It would do her a great deal more good."

"Ah, miss, but there isn't the heart in it that there is in a cup o'
tea," said Mrs. Bagley. "It do set a body up when so be as you're low.
Coffee and cocoa and that's fine and warming of a morning; but when the
afternoon do come, and you feels low----"

"Why should you feel low more in the afternoon than in the morning, Mrs.
Bagley? There's no reason in that."

"Ain't there, miss? There's a deal of 'uman nature, though. Not young
ladies like you, that have everything as you want; but even my Lizzie,
I find as she wants her tea badly afternoons."

"And so do we," said Chatty, "especially when we don't go out. Look
here, this is just the same as the last we had. Mrs. Wilberforce had
such a pretty pattern yesterday,--a pattern that made a great deal of
appearance, and yet went so quick in working. She had done a quarter of
a yard in a day."

"You'll find it there, miss," said the old woman. "Mrs. Wilberforce
don't get her patterns nowhere but from me. Lizzie chose it herself,
last time she went to Highcombe. And they all do say as the child has
real good taste, better nor many a lady. Lizzie! Why, here's the young
ladies, and you never showing. Lizzie, child! She's terribly taken up
with a--with a--no, I can't call it a job,--with an offer she's had."

"An offer! Do you mean a real _offer_?" cried the girls together, with
excitement, both in a breath.

"Oh, not a hoffer of marriage, miss, if that's what you're thinking of,
though she's had them too. This is just as hard to make up her mind
about. Not to me," said the old woman. "But perhaps I've give her too
much of her own way, and now when I says, Don't, she up and says, Why,
granny? It ain't always so easy to say why; but when your judgment's
agin it, without no reason, I'm always for following the judgment.
Lizzie! Perhaps, miss, you'd give her your advice."

Lizzie came out, as this was said, through the little glass door, with
a little muslin curtain veiling the lower panes, which opened into the
room beyond. She made a curtsey, as in duty bound, to the young ladies,
but she said with some petulance, "I ain't deaf, granny," as she did so.

"She has always got her little word to say for herself," the old
woman replied, with a smile. She had opened the glass case which held
the muslin patterns, and was turning them over with the tips of her
fingers,--those fingers which had so many different kinds of goods to
touch, and were not, perhaps, adapted for white muslin. "Look at this
one, miss; it's bluebells that is, just for all the world like the
bluebells in the woods in the month o' May."

"I've got the new Moniture, Miss Warrender, and there are some sweet
things in it,--some sweetly pretty things," said Lizzie, holding up her
paper. Minnie and Chatty, though they were such steady girls, were not
above being fluttered by the Moniteur de la Mode. They both abandoned
the muslin-work, and passed through the little door of the counter which
Mrs. Bagley held open for them. The room behind, though perhaps not free
from a little perfume of the cheese and bacon which occupied the back
part of the shop, was pleasant enough; it had a broad lattice window,
looking over the pleasant fields, under which stood Lizzie's work-table,
a large white wooden one, very clean and old, with signs of long scrubbing
and the progress of time, scattered over with the little litter of
dressmaking. The floor was white deal, very clean also, with a bit of
bright-coloured carpet under Lizzie's chair. As it was the sitting-room
and kitchen and all, there was a little fire in the grate.

"Now," said Mrs. Bagley, coming in after them and shutting the door, for
there was no very lively traffic in the shop, "the young ladies is young
like yourself, not to take too great a liberty, and you think as I'm old
and old-fashioned. Just you tell the young ladies straight off, and see
what they'll say."

"It ain't of such dreadful consequence, granny. A person would think my
life depended on it to hear you speak. Sleeves are quite small this
summer, as I said they would be; and if you'll look at this trimming,
Miss Chatty, it is just the right thing for crape."

"People don't wear crape, Miss Muffler tells us, nearly so much as they
used to do," said Miss Warrender, "or at least not nearly so long as
they used to do. Six months, she says, for a parent."

"Your common dresses will be worn out by then, miss," said Lizzie. "I
wouldn't put any on your winter frocks, if I was you, for black materials
are always heavy, and crape don't show on those thick stuffs. I'd just
have a piping for the best, and----"

"What's that," said Chatty, who was the most curious, "that has such a
strong scent--and gilt-edged paper? You must have got some very grand
correspondent, Lizzie."

Lizzie made a hasty movement to secure a letter which lay on the table,
and looked as if about to thrust it into her pocket. She changed her
mind, however, with a slight scowl on her innocent-seeming countenance,
and, reluctantly unfolding it, showed the date in large gilt letters:
"The Elms, Underwood, Highcombe." Underwood was the name of the village.
Minnie and Chatty repeated it aloud; and one recoiled a few steps, while
the other turned upon Lizzie with wide-open, horrified eyes. "The Elms!
Lizzie, you are not going there!"

"That's what I say, miss," cried Mrs. Bagley with delight; "that's what
I tells her. Out o' respect to her other customers she couldn't go
there!"

"To the Elms!" repeated Minnie. She became pale with the horror of the
idea. "I can only say, Lizzie, in that case, that mamma would certainly
never employ you again. Charlotte and I might be sorry as having known
you all our lives, but we could do nothing against mamma. And Mrs.
Wilberforce too," she added. "You may be sure she would do the same. The
Elms--why, no respectable person--I should think not even the Vidlers
and the Drivers----"

"That is what I tells her, miss,--that's exactly what I tells
her--nobody--much less madam at the Warren, or the young ladies as
you're so fond of: that's what I tells her every day."

Lizzie, whose forehead had been puckered up all this time into a frown,
which entirely changed the character of her soft face, here declared
with some vehemence that she had never said she was going to the
Elms,--never! Though when folks asked her civilly, and keeping a
lady's-maid and all, and dressing beautiful, and nothing proved against
them, who was she that she should say she wouldn't go? "And I thought it
might be such a good thing for granny, who is always complaining of bad
times, if she could get their custom. It's a house where nothing isn't
spared," said Lizzie; "even in the servants' hall the best tea and
everything." She was fond of the young ladies, but at such an opportunity
not to give them a gentle blow in passing was beyond the power of woman;
for not even in the drawing-room did the gentlefolks at the Warren drink
the best tea.

"I wouldn't have their custom, not if it was offered to me," said Mrs.
Bagley with vehemence. "And everybody knows as every single thing they
have comes from Highcombe, if not London. I hope as they mayn't find an
empty nest some fine morning, and all the birds away. It would serve
that nasty Molasis right, as is always taking the bread out of country
folk's mouth."

"That's just what I was thinking, granny," said the girl. "If I'd gone
it would have been chiefly for your sake. But since the young ladies and
you are both so set against it, I can't, and there's an end."

"I am sure she never meant it," said the younger sister. "She was only
just flattered for a moment, weren't you, Lizzie? and pleased to think
of some one new."

"That's about the fact, that is," said the old woman. "Something new;
them lasses would just give their souls for something new."

"But Lizzie must know," said Miss Warrender, "that her old customers would
never stand it. I was going to talk about some work, and of coming up
two days next week to the Warren. But if there is any idea of the--other
place----"

"For goodness' sake speak up and say, No, miss, there ain't no thought
of it, Lizzie!"

"Now I know you're so strong against it, of course I can't, and there's
an end," said Lizzie; but she looked more angry than convinced.




CHAPTER X.


The girls went round by the rectory on their way home. It was a large
red brick house, taller almost than the church, which was a very old
church, credibly dating from the thirteenth century, with a Norman arch
to the chancel, which tourists came to see. The rectory was of the days
of Anne, three stories high, with many twinkling windows in framework
of white, and a great deal of ivy and some livelier climbing plants
covering the walls, with the old mellow red bricks looking through
the interstices of all this greenery. The two Miss Warrenders did not
stop to knock or ring, but opened the door from the outside, and went
straight through the house, across the hall and a passage at the other
end, to the garden beyond, where Mrs. Wilberforce sat under some great
limes, with her little tea-table beside her. She was alone; that is, as
near alone as she ever was, with only two of the little ones playing at
her feet, and the little Skye comfortably disposed on the cushions of
a low wicker-work chair. The two sisters kissed her, and disturbed the
children's game to kiss them, and displaced the little Skye, who did
not like it at all. Mrs. Wilberforce was a little roundabout woman, with
fair hair and a permanent pucker in her forehead. She was very well
off,--she and all her belongings; the living was good, the parish small,
the work not overpowering: but she never was able to shake off a visionary
anxiety, the burden of some ancestral trouble, or the premonition of
something to come. She was always afraid that something was going to
happen: her husband to break down from overwork (which for clergymen, as
for most other people in this generation, is the fashionable complaint),
the parish to be invaded with dissent and socialism, the country to go
to destruction. This latter, as being the greatest, and at the same time
the most distant, a thing even which might happen without disturbing
one's individual comfort, was most certain; and she waited till it
should happen, with always an anxious outlook for the first symptoms.
She received Minnie and Chatty, who were her nearest neighbours, and
whom she saw almost daily, with a tone of interest and attachment beyond
the ordinary, as she had done ever since their father's death. Indeed,
they had found this everywhere, a sort of natural compensation for
their "great loss." They were surrounded by the respect and reawakened
interest of all the people who were so familiar with them. A bereaved
family have always this little advantage after a death.

"How are you, dears," Mrs. Wilberforce said, "and how is your dear
mother?" Ordinarily Mrs. Warrender was spoken of as their mother, _tout
court_, without any endearing adjective.

"Mamma is quite wonderful," said Minnie. "She thinks of everything and
looks after everything almost as if--nothing had ever happened."

"She keeps up on our account," said Chatty, "and for Theo's sake. It
is so important, you know, to keep home a little bright--oh, I mean as
little miserable as possible for him."

"Bright, poor child!" said Mrs. Wilberforce pathetically. "You have not
realised as yet what it is. When the excitement is all over, and you
have settled down in your mourning, then is the time when you will feel
it. I always tell people the first six weeks is nothing; you are so
supported by the excitement. But afterwards, when everything falls into
the old routine. I suppose, however, you are going away."

"Mamma said something about it: but we all preferred, you know----"

"You had much better go away. I told you so the moment I heard it. And
as Theo has all the summer to himself before he requires to go back
to Oxford, what is there to stop you?" Mrs. Wilberforce took great
pleasure in settling other people's plans for them, and deciding what
they were to do.

"That wasn't what we came to talk about," said the elder Miss Warrender,
who was quite able to hold her own. "Mrs. Wilberforce, we have just come
from old Mrs. Bagley's at the shop, and there we made quite a painful
discovery. We said what we could, but perhaps it would be well if you
would interfere. I think, indeed, you ought to interfere with authority,
or even, perhaps, the rector."

"What is it? I always thought that old body had a turn for Dissent. She
will have got one of those people from Highcombe to come out and hold a
meeting: that is how they always begin."

"Oh no,--a great deal worse than that."

"Minnie means worse in our way of thinking," the younger sister explained.

"I don't know anything worse," said the clergyman's wife, "than the
bringing in of Dissent to a united parish such as ours has been. But I
know it will come. I am always expecting to hear of it every day; things
go so fast nowadays. What with radicalism, and the poor people all having
votes, and what you call progress, one never knows what to expect, except
the worst. I always look for the worst. Well, what is it then, if it
isn't Dissent?"

Then Miss Warrender gave an account of the real state of affairs. "The
letter was there on the table, dated the Elms, Underwood, Highcombe, as
if--as if it was a county family; just as we put it ourselves on our
paper."

"But far finer than ours,--gilt, and paper so polished and shining, and
a quarter of an inch thick. Oh, much finer than ours!"

"Ours, of course, will be black-edged for a long, long time to come;
there could not be any comparison," said Minnie, with a sigh. "But think
of the assurance of such people! I am so glad to have found you alone,
for we couldn't have talked about it before the rector. And I believe if
we hadn't gone there just at the right moment she would have accepted.
I told her mamma would never employ her again."

"I never had very much opinion of that little thing," said Mrs.
Wilberforce. "She is a great deal too fine. If her grandmother was a
sensible person, she would have put a stop to all those feathers and
flowers and things."

"Still," said Minnie, with some severity, "a young woman who is a
dressmaker and gets the fashion-books, and is perhaps in the way of
temptation, may wear a feather in her hat; but that is not to say that
she should encourage immorality, and make for anybody who asks her:
especially considering the way we have all taken her up."

"Who is it that encourages immorality?" said a different voice, over
Mrs. Wilberforce's head,--quite a different voice; a man's voice, for
one thing, which always changes the atmosphere a little. It was the
rector himself, who came across the lawn in the ease of a shooting-coat,
with his hands in his pockets. He wore a long coat when he went out in
the parish, but at home there can be no doubt that he liked to be at his
ease. He was a man who was too easy in general, and might, perhaps, if
his wife had not scented harm from the beginning, have compromised
himself by calling at the Elms.

"Oh, please!" cried Minnie, with a blush. "Mrs. Wilberforce will tell
you. We really have not time to stay any longer. Not any tea, thank you.
We must be running away."

"There is nothing to be so sensitive about," said the clergyman's wife.
"Of course Herbert knows that you must know: you are not babies. It is
Lizzie Hampson, the dressmaker, who has been asked to go and work at the
Elms."

"Oh!" said the rector. He showed himself wonderfully reasonable,--more
reasonable than any one could have expected. "I wouldn't let her go
there if I was you. It's not a fit place for a girl."

"We are perfectly well aware of that," said Mrs. Wilberforce. "I warned
you from the beginning. But the thing is, who is to prevent her from
going? Minnie has told her plainly, it appears, and I will speak to
her, and as her clergyman I should say it was your duty to say a
word; but whether we shall succeed, that is a different matter. These
creatures seem to have a sort of real attraction for everything that is
wrong."

"We all have that, I'm afraid, my dear."

"But not all in that way. There may be a bias, but it doesn't take
the same form. Do sit down, girls, and take your tea, like reasonable
creatures. She shall never enter the rectory, of course, if--and if
you are sure Mrs. Warrender will do the same. But you know she is very
indulgent,--more indulgent than I should be in her place. There was that
story, you know, about Fanny, the laundry-maid. I don't think we shall
do much if your dear mother relents, and says the girl is penitent as
soon as she cries. She ought to know girls better than that. A little
thing makes them cry: but penitence,--that is getting rarer and rarer
every day."

"There would be no need for penitence in this case. The girl is a very
respectable girl. Don't let her go there, that's all: and give me a cup
of tea."

"Isn't that like a man!" said Mrs. Wilberforce. "Don't let her go there,
and give him a cup of tea!--the one just as easy as the other. I am
sure I tell you often enough, Herbert, what with all that is done for
them and said about them, the poor people are getting more and more
unmanageable every day."

"Our family has always been Liberal," said Minnie. "I think the poor
people have their rights just as we have. They ought to be educated, and
all that."

"Very well," said the other lady; "when you have educated them up to
thinking themselves as good--oh, what am I saying? far better--than
their betters, you'll see what will come of it. I for one am quite
prepared. I pity the people who deceive themselves. Herbert chooses to
laugh, but I can't laugh; it is much too serious for that."

"There will be peace in our days," said the rector, "and after all,
Fanny, we can't have a revolution coming because Lizzie Hampson----"

"Lizzie Hampson," said his wife solemnly, "is a sign of the times. She
may be nothing in herself,--none of them are anything in themselves,--but
I call her a sign of the times."

"What a grand name for a little girl!" he said, with a laugh. But he
added seriously, "I wish that house belonged to Theo, or some one we
could bring influence to bear upon; but what does a city man care? I
wish we could do as the Americans do, and put rollers under it, and cart
it away out of the parish."

"Can the Americans do that?"

"They say so. They can do every sort of wonderful thing, I believe."

"And that is what we are coming to!" said Mrs. Wilberforce, with an air
of indignant severity, as if this had been the most dreadful accusation
in the world.

"I suppose," said the rector, strolling with the young ladies to the
gate, "that Theo holds by the family politics? I wonder whether he has
given any attention to public questions. At his age a young fellow
either does--or he does not," he added, with a laugh. "Oxford often
makes a change."

"We don't approve of ladies taking any part in politics," said Minnie,
"and I am sure I have never mentioned the subject to Theo."

"But you know, Minnie, mamma said that Theo was--well, I don't remember
what she said he was, but certainly not the same as he was brought up."

"Then let us hope he has become a Conservative. Landholders should be
and clergy must," said the rector, with a sigh. Then he remembered that
this was not a style of conversation likely to commend itself to the two
girls. "I hope we shall see you back next Sunday at the Sunday school,"
he said. "Of course I would not hurry you, if you found it too much;
but a little work in moderation I have always thought was the very
best thing for a grief like yours. Dear Mrs. Warrender, too," he added
softly. He had not been in the habit of calling her dear Mrs. Warrender;
but it seemed a term that was appropriate where there had been a death.
"I hope she does not quite shut herself up."

"Mamma has been with Lady Markland several times," said Minnie, with a
mixture of disapproval and satisfaction. "Naturally, we have been so
much thrown together since----"

"To be sure. What a sad thing!--twice in one house, within a week, was
it not, the two deaths?"

"Just a week," said Chatty, who loved to be exact.

"But you know Lord Markland was no relation," added Minnie, too
conscientious to take to herself the credit of a grief which was not
hers. "It was not as if we felt it in that way."

"It was a dreadful thing to happen in one's house, all the same. And
Theo, I hear, goes a great deal to Markland. Oh, it is quite natural.
He had so much to do for her from the first. And I hear she is a very
attractive sort of woman, though I don't know much of her, for my own
part."

"Attractive? Well, perhaps she may be attractive, to some people," said
Minnie; "but when a woman has been married so long as she has, one never
thinks--and her attractiveness has nothing to do with Theo," she added,
with some severity.

"Oh no, I suppose not," said the rector. "Tell him I hope we shall soon
see him here, for I expect his friend Dick Cavendish in the end of the
week. You remember Cavendish? He told me he had met you at Oxford."

"Oh yes," said Chatty quickly. Minnie, who was not accustomed to be
forestalled in speech, trod upon this little exclamation, as it were,
and spoilt its effect. "Cavendish! I am not sure. I think I do recollect
the name," she said.

And then they shook hands with the rector across the gate, and went upon
their way. But it was not for the first moment quite a peaceful way.
"You were dreadfully ready to say you remembered Mr. Cavendish," said
the elder sister. "What do you know of Mr. Cavendish? If I were you, I
would not speak so fast, as if Mr. Cavendish were of such importance."

"Oh no, he is of no importance; only I do recollect him quite well. He
gave us tea. He was very----"

"He was exactly like other young men," said Miss Warrender. And then
they proceeded in silence, Chatty having no desire to contest the
statement. She did not know very much about young men. Their way lay
across the end of the village street, beyond which the trees of the
Warren overshadowed everything. There was only a fence on that side of
the grounds, and to look through it was like looking into the outskirts
of a forest. The rabbits ran about by hundreds among the roots of the
trees. The birds sang as if in their own kingdom and secure possessions.
To this gentle savagery and dominion of nature the Miss Warrenders were
accustomed; and in the freshness of the early summer it was sweet. They
went on without speaking, for some time, and then it seemed wise to the
younger sister to forestall further remark by the introduction of a new
subject, which, however, was not a usual proceeding on Chatty's part.

"Minnie," she said, "do you know what the rector meant when he spoke of
Lady Markland, that she was an attractive woman? You took him up rather
sharply."

"No, I didn't," said Minnie, with that ease which is noticed among near
relations. "I said she was rather old for that."

"She is scarcely any older than you. I know that from the Peerage. I
looked her up."

"So did I," said Miss Warrender. "That does not make her a day younger
or more attractive. She is four years older than Theo: therefore she is
as if she were not to him. Four years is a dreadful difference when it
is on the wrong side."

Chatty was ridiculously simple for a person of three-and-twenty. She
said, "I cannot think what that has to do with it. The rector is really
very silly at times in what he says."

"I don't see that he is silly. What he means is that Lady Markland will
take advantage of Theo, and he will fall in love with her. I should say,
for my part, that it is very likely. I have seen a great many things
of the kind, though you never open your eyes. He is always going to
Markland to see what he can do, if there is anything she wants. He is
almost sure to fall in love with her."

"Minnie, a married woman!"

"Oh, you little simpleton! She is not a married woman, she is a widow; and
she is left extremely well off and with everything in her hands,--that
is to say, she would be very well off if there was any money. A widow is
in the best position of any woman. She can do what she likes, and nobody
has any right to object."

"Oh, Minnie!" protested the younger sister again.

"You can ask mamma, if you don't believe me. But of course she would not
have anything to say to Theo," Miss Warrender said.




CHAPTER XI.


"When is Dick Cavendish coming?" said Mrs. Wilberforce to her husband.
"I wish he hadn't chosen to come now, of all times in the world, just
when we can do nothing to amuse him; for with the Warrenders in such
deep mourning, and those other horrible people on the other side, and
things in general getting worse and worse every day----"

"He is not acquainted with the parish, and he does not know that things
are getting worse and worse every day. It is a pity about the mourning;
but do you think it is so deep that a game of croquet would be impossible?
Croquet is not a riotous game."

"Herbert!" cried Mrs. Wilberforce. She added in a tone of indignant
disapproval, "If you feel equal to suggesting such a thing to girls
whose father has not yet been six weeks in his grave, I don't."

The rector was reduced to silence. He was aware that the laws of decorum
are in most cases better understood by ladies than by men, and also that
the girls at the Warren would sooner die than do anything that was not
according to the proper rule that regulated the conduct of persons in
their present circumstances. He withdrew, accordingly, to his study,
with rather an uneasy feeling about the visit of Dick Cavendish. The
rector's study was on the opposite side of the hall, at the end of a
short passage, which was a special providence; for nothing that Mrs.
Wilberforce could do would prevent him from smoking, and by this means
the hall, at least, and the chief sitting-room were kept free of any
suggestions of smoke. He said of himself that he was not such a great
smoker, but there was no doubt that it was one of the crosses which his
wife said everybody had to bear. That was her cross, her husband's pipe,
and she tried to put up with it like a Christian. This is one of the cases
in which there is very often a conflict of evidence without anything
that could be called perjury on either side: for Mrs. Wilberforce
declared to her confidants (she would not have acknowledged it to the
public for worlds) that her husband smoked morning, noon, and night;
whereas he, when the question was put to him casually, asserted that
he was not at all a great smoker, though he liked a pipe when he was
working, and a cigar after dinner. "When you are working! Then what a
diligent life you must lead, for I think you are always working,"
the wife would remark. "Most of my time, certainly, dear," said the
triumphant husband. There are never very serious jars in a family where
smoke takes so important a place. Mr. Wilberforce retired now, and took
a pipe to help him to consider. The study was a commodious room, with a
line of chairs against the further wall, which the parish mostly took when
the bumpkins had anything to say to the parson. A large writing-table,
fitted with capacious drawers, stood in the middle of the room, of which
one side was for parish business, the other magisterial: for the rector
of Underwood was also a justice of the peace, and very active in that
respect. He was a man who did not fail in his duty in any way. His
sermons he kept in a handsome old carved-oak bureau against the wall,
where--for he had been a dozen years in Underwood, and had worked
through all the fasts and feasts a great many times--he had executed a
classification, and knew where to put his hand on the Christmas sermons,
and those for the saints' days, and even for exceptional occasions, such
as funerals, almost in the dark. Two large windows, one of which opened
upon the lawn, and the other, round the corner, in the other wall of the
house, commanded a pretty view of the village, lying with its red roofs
in the midst of a luxuriant greenness. Saint Mary-under-wood was the
true name of the parish, for it lay in a part of the country which was
very rich in trees.

Here he sat down with his friend's letter, and thought. The Cavendishes
had once held an important position in the county, and lived in one of
the greatest "places" in the neighbourhood. But they had met with a fate
not unknown to the greatest favourites, and had descended from their
greatness to mediocrity, without, however, sacrificing everything, and
indeed with so good a margin that, though they were no longer included
among the most eminent gentry of England, they still held the place of
a county family. They had shifted their headquarters to a much smaller
house, but it was one which had already been possessed by them before
they became great. The younger sons, however, had very little to look
to, and Dick, who was considered clever, was going to the bar. He was a
friend, more or less, of young Warrender's, and had been at Oxford with
him, where he was junior to Theo in the university, though his senior in
years. For Dick had been a little erratic in his ways. He had not been
so orderly and law-abiding as a young English gentleman generally is. He
had gone away from home very young, and spent several years in wandering
before he would address himself to serious life. He had been in Canada
and in the backwoods, and though California was not known then as now,
had spent a few months at the gold diggings, in the rude life and strife
which English families, not yet acquainted with farming in Manitoba and
ranches in the far West, heard of with horror, and where only those sons
who were "wild," or otherwise unmanageable, had as yet begun to go. When
he returned, and announced that he was going to Oxford, and after that
to the bar, it was like the vision of the madman clothed and in his
right mind to his parents. This their son who had been lost was found.
He came into a little fortune, left him by his godfather, when he
returned; and, contrary to the general habit of families in respect to
younger sons, his parents were of opinion that if some "nice girl" could
be found for Dick it would be the best thing that could happen,--a thing
which would lighten their own responsibilities, and probably confirm him
in well-doing.

But with all the new-fashioned talk about education and work for women,
which then had just begun, nice girls were not quite so sure as they
used to be that to reclaim a prodigal, or consolidate a penitence, was
their mission in life. Perhaps they were right; but the old idea was
good for the race, if not for the individual woman, human sacrifices
being a fundamental principle of natural religion, if not of the
established creed. And it cannot be said that it was altogether without
a thought of finding the appropriate victim that the prodigal had been
invited to Underwood. He was not altogether a prodigal, nor would she be
altogether a victim. People do not use such hard words. He was a young
fellow who wanted steadying, for whom married life (when he had taken
his degree), or even an engagement, might be expected to do much. And
the Miss Warrenders were "nice girls," whose influence might be of the
greatest advantage to him. What need to say any more?

But it was tiresome that, after having made up this innocent little
scheme for throwing them together, Dick should choose, of all times in
the world, to arrive at the rectory just after Mr. Warrender's death,
when the family were in mourning, and not "equal to" playing croquet, or
any other reasonable amusement. It was hard, the rector thought. It was
he, and not his wife, strangely enough, who had thrown himself into this
project of match-making. The Warrender girls were the most well-regulated
girls in the world, and the most likely to keep their respective
husbands straight; and Mr. Wilberforce also thought it would be a very
good thing for the girls themselves, who were so much out of the way of
seeing eligible persons, or being sought. The rector felt that if Minnie
Warrender once took the young man in hand he was safe. And they had
already met at Oxford during Commemoration, and young Cavendish had
remembered with pleasure their fresh faces and slightly, pleasantly
rustic and old-fashioned ways. He was very willing to come when he was
told that the Wilberforces saw a great deal of Warrender's nice sisters.
"Why, I am in love with them both! Of course I shall come," he had said,
with his boyish levity. But with equal levity had put it off from time
to time, and at last had chosen the moment which was least convenient,
the most uncomfortable for all parties,--a moment when there was nothing
but croquet, or picnics, or other gentle pleasures which require feminine
co-operation, to amuse the stranger, and when the feminine co-operation
which had been hoped for was for the time altogether laid on the shelf
and out of the question. Few things could be more trying than this state
of affairs.

Notwithstanding which Dick Cavendish arrived, as had been arranged.
There was nothing remarkable about his appearance. He was an ordinary
brown-haired, blue-eyed young man,--not, perhaps, ordinary, for that
combination is rather rare,--and there were some people who said that
something in his eye betrayed what they called insincerity; indeed there
was generally about him an agreeableness, a ready self-adaptation to
everybody's way of thinking, a desire to recommend himself, which is
always open to censure. Mrs. Wilberforce was one of the people who shook
her head and declared him to be insincere. And as he went so far as to
agree that the empire very possibly was dropping to pieces, and the
education of the poor tending to their and our destruction, in order to
please her, it is possible that she was not far wrong. As a matter of
fact, however, his tactics were successful even with her; and though
she did not relinquish her deep-seated conviction, yet the young man
succeeded in flattering and pleasing her, which was all that he wanted,
and not that she should vouch for his sincerity. He was very sorry to
hear that the Warrenders were in mourning. "I saw the death in the
papers," he said, "and thought for a moment that I had perhaps better
write and put off; for some people look their worst in mourning. But
then I reflected that some others look their best; and their hearts are
soft, and a little judicious consolation nicely administered----"

Though it was not perhaps of a very high quality, the rector was
delighted with his young friend's wit.

"It must be nicely administered," he said, "and you will not find them
inaccessible. They are the best girls in the world, but too natural to
make a fuss, as some girls do. He was a very insignificant, neutral-tinted
kind of man. I cannot think why they should be supposed to be so
inconsolable."

"Oh, Herbert!" said his wife.

"Yes, I know, my dear; but Oh, Herbert, is no argument. Nobody is
missed so much as we expect, not the very best. Life may have to make
itself a new channel, but it flows always on. And when the man is quite
insignificant, like poor Mr. Warrender----"

"Don't blaspheme the dead, Herbert. It is dreadful to hear you, you
are so cynical; and when even a clergyman takes up such opinions,
what can we expect of other people?" Mrs. Wilberforce said, with marked
disapproval, as she left the gentlemen after dinner. She left them in
a novel sort of way, going out of the window of the dining-room to the
lawn, which ran along all that side of the house. The drawing-room, too,
opened upon it, and one window of the rector's study; and the line of
limes, very fine trees, which stood at a little distance, throwing a
delightful shadow with their great silken mass of foliage over the
velvety grass, made the lawn into a kind of great withdrawing-room,
spacious and sweet. Mrs. Wilberforce had a little settlement at one end
of this, with wicker-work chairs and a table for her work and one for
tea, while her husband, at the other end, clinging to his own window,
which provided a mode of escape in case any one should appear to whom
his cigar might be offensive, smoked at the other, throwing now and then
a few words at her between the puffs. While thus indulging himself he
was never allowed to approach more near.

"I am afraid we have not very much amusement for you," the rector said.
"There is nothing going on at this season, and the Warren, as my wife
says, is shut up."

"Not so much shut up but that one may go to see Warrender?"

"Oh no."

"And in that case the ladies must be visible, too: for I entertained
them, you know, in my rooms at Commem. They must at least ask me to tea.
They owe me tea."

"Well, if you are content with that. My wife is dreadfully particular,
you know. I daresay we may be able to manage a game, for all Mrs.
Wilberforce says; and if the worst comes to the worst, Dick, I suppose
you can exist without the society of ladies for a few days."

"So long as I have Mrs. Wilberforce to fall back upon, and Flo. Flo is
growing very pretty, perhaps you don't know? Parents are so dull to that
sort of thing. But there is somebody else in the parish I have got to
look after. What is their name? I can't recollect, but I know the name
of the house. It is the Elms."

"The Elms, my dear fellow!" cried the rector, with consternation. He
turned pale with fright and horror, and, rising, went softly and closed
the window, which his wife had left open. "For Heaven's sake," he said,
"don't speak so loud; my wife might hear."

"Why shouldn't she hear?" said Dick undaunted. "There's nothing wrong,
is there? I don't remember the people's name----"

"No, most likely not; one name will do as well as another," said the
rector solemnly. "Dick, I know that a young fellow like you looks at
things in another light from a man of my cloth; but there are things
that can be done, and things that can't, and it is simply impossible,
you know, that you should visit at a place like that from my house."

"What do you mean by a place like that? I know nothing about the place.
It belongs to my uncle Cornwall, and there is something to be done to
it, or they won't stay."

The rector drew a long breath. "You relieve me very much," he said. "Is
the Mr. Cornwall that bought the Elms your uncle Cornwall--without a
joke? Then you must tell him, Dick, there's a good fellow, to do nothing
to it, but for the love of Heaven help us to get those people away."

"Who are the people?" said the astonished Dick. It is uncertain whether
Mr. Wilberforce managed to make any articulate reply, but he sputtered
forth some broken words, which, with the look that accompanied them,
gave to his visitor an idea of the fact which had been for a month or
two whispered, with bated breath, by the villagers and people about.
Dick, who was still nominally of the faction of the reprobates, fell
a-laughing when the news penetrated his mind. It was not that his
sympathies were with vice as against virtue, as the rector was disposed
to believe; but the thought of the righteous and strait-laced uncle, who
had sent him into what would have been to Mr. Cornwall the very jaws of
hell, and of all that might have happened had he himself, Dick, announced
in Mrs. Wilberforce's presence his commission to the Elms, was too comical
to be resisted, and the peals of his laughter reached the lady on the
lawn, and brought the children pressing to the dining-room window to
see what had happened. Flo, of whom Dick had said that she was getting
pretty, but who certainly was not shy, and had no fear of finding herself
out of place, came pertly and tapped at the window, and, looking in with
her little sunny face, demanded to know what was the fun, so that Dick
burst forth again and again. The rector did not see the fun, for his
part; he saw no fun at all. Even when Dick, almost weeping with the
goodness of the joke, endeavoured to explain how droll it was to think
of his old uncle sending him there, Mr. Wilberforce did not see it. "My
wife will ask me what you were laughing about, and how am I to tell her?
She will see no joke in it, and she will not believe that I was not
laughing with you--at all that is most sacred, Emily will say." No one
who had seen the excellent rector at that moment would have accused him
of sharing in the laughter, for his face was as blankly serious as if he
had been at a funeral: but he knew the view which Mrs. Wilberforce was
apt to take.

And his fears came so far true that he did undergo a rigid
cross-questioning as soon as the guest was out of the way. And though
the rector was as discreet as possible, it yet became deeply impressed
upon the mind of his wife that the fun had something to do with the
Elms. That gentlemen did joke on such subjects, which were not fit to
be talked about, she was fully aware; but that her own husband, a man
privileged beyond most men, a clergyman of the Church of England,
should do it, was bitter indeed to her. "I know what young men are," she
said; "they are all the same. I know there is nothing that amuses and
attracts them so much as improper people. But, Herbert, you! and when
vice is at our very doors, to laugh! Oh, don't say another word to me on
the subject!" Mrs. Wilberforce cried.




CHAPTER XII.


The recollection of that unexplained and ill-timed merriment clouded
over the household horizon even next morning; but Dick was so cheerful
and so much at his ease that things ameliorated imperceptibly. The heart
of a woman, even when most disapproving, is softened by the man who takes
the trouble to make himself agreeable to her children. She thought that
there could not be so very much harm in him, after all, when she saw
the little ones clustering about him, one on his knees and one on his
shoulders. "There is a sort of instinct in children," she said afterwards:
and most people would be in this respect of Mrs. Wilberforce's opinion.
And about noon the rector took his guest to call at the Warren. Though
this was not what an ordinary stranger would have been justified in
doing, yet when you consider that he had known Theo at Oxford and
entertained the ladies at Commem., you will understand why the rector
took this liberty. "I suppose I may ask the girls and Theo to come over
in the afternoon," said Mr. Wilberforce.

"Oh, certainly, Herbert, you may _ask_ them," she replied, but with a
feeling th

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