A Country Gentleman and his Family

CHAPTER XVIII

The moment, however, was approaching when Warrender had to declare for himself what he intended to do. It is true that he had given indications of previous intention which had put his family on their guard. He had said to Cavendish and to others that it was doubtful whether he would return to Oxford, – words which had made the ladies look at each other, which had drawn a sharp exclamation from Minnie, but which even she had consented to say nothing of until his resolution was more evident. It might be but a caprice of the moment, one of the hasty expressions which Theo was not unaccustomed to launch at his little audience, making them stare and exclaim, but which were never meant to come to anything. Most likely this was the case now. And the preparations went on as usual without anything further said. Mrs. Warrender had curbed her own impatience; she had yielded to his wishes and remained at the Warren, with a sympathy for his sudden fascination and for the object of it which no one else shared; but she looked not without longing for the time when he should return to his studies, – when there should no longer be any duty to keep her to the Warren, nothing to make self-denial necessary. The thought of the free air outside this little green island of retreat almost intoxicated her by times, as the autumn days stole on, and October came red and glowing, with sharp winds but golden sunsets which tinged the woods. By this time, Chatty, too, began to have sensations unusual to her, – such as must thrill through the boat upon the shore, when the little waves run up and kiss its sides, wooing it to the water, for which it was made. Chatty had been almost as much a piece of still life as the boat: but the baptism of the spray had been flung in her face, and dreams of triumphant winds and dazzling waves outside had crept into her cave. Minnie was conscious of no longings, but she knew that it was time to prepare Theo's linen, to see that everything was marked, so that he might have a chance at least of getting his things back from the wash. And Chatty had knitted him half a dozen pairs of silk socks, – some in stripes of black and white, some violet, like a cardinal's, – suitable for his mourning. No one, however, mentioned the subject until the beginning of October, when, as they sat at luncheon one day, it was suddenly introduced by Miss Warrender without timidity, or recollection that there was any doubt about it. "When does term begin, Theo?" his sister asked, in the midst of the usual conversation. The other ladies, who were more quick to sympathise with his feelings, held their breath; but Minnie put her question quite simply, as if she expected him (as she did) to say "the 15th" or "the 17th," as the case might be.

Theo paused a moment, and cast a glance round them all. Then he answered in a voice which seemed louder than usual because it was somewhat defiant. "I don't know," he said slowly; "and if you want the truth, I don't care."

"Theo!" cried Minnie, with a little scream. Chatty, who had been contemplating at her ease, when this conversation began, the bubbles rising in a glass of aerated water which she was holding up to the light, set it down very quickly, and gave him an appealing look across the table. Mrs. Warrender looked at him too, pretending, poor lady, not to understand. "But, my dear," she said, "we must get everything ready; so it is very necessary to know."

"There is nothing to be got ready, so far as I am aware," he replied, with a flush on his face, and the look of a man who is making a stand against his opponents. "I am not going up this term, if that is what you mean."

Then all three looked at him with different degrees of remonstrance, protest, or appeal. Mrs. Warrender was much too sensible of her incapacity to prevail against him to risk any controversy. And even Minnie was so confounded by the certainty of his tone that, except another resounding "Theo!" the tone of which was enough to have made any man pause in an evil career, she too, for the moment, found nothing to say.

"My dear, don't you think that's a great pity?" his mother remarked very mildly, but with a countenance which said much more.

"I don't wish to discuss the question," he said. "I thought I had told you before. I don't mean to be disagreeable, mother; but don't you think that in my own case I should know best?"

"Theo!" cried Minnie for the third time, "you are more than disagreeable; you are ridiculous. How should you know best, – a boy like you? You think you can do what you like because poor papa is dead, and we are nothing but women. Oh, it is very ungenerous and undutiful to my mother, but it is ridiculous too."

"My mother can speak for herself," said the young man. "I don't owe any explanations to you."

"You will have to give explanations to every one, whether you owe them or not!" cried Minnie. "I know what people think and what they say. There is always supposed to be some reason for it when a young man doesn't go back to his college. They think he has got into disgrace; they think it is some bad scrape. We shall have to make up excuses and explanations."

"They may think what they please, so far as I am concerned," he replied.

"But, my dear, she is right, though that does not matter very much," said Mrs. Warrender. "There will be a great many inquiries; and explanations will have to be given. That is not the most important, Theo. Didn't you tell me that if you lost this term you could not go in, as you call it, for honours? I thought you had told me so."

"Honours!" he said contemptuously. "What do honours mean? I found out the folly of that years ago. They are a sort of trade-mark, very good for business purposes. Brunson has sense on his side when he goes in for honours. They are good for the college to keep up its reputation as a teaching machine; and they are good for a schoolmaster in the same way. But what advantage would all the honours of the University be to me?" he added, with a laugh of scorn. "There's an agricultural college somewhere. There would be some meaning in it if I took honours there."

"You have a strange idea of your own position, Theo," said Mrs. Warrender, roused to indignation. "You are not a farmer, but a country gentleman."

"Of the very smallest," he said, – "a little squire. If I were a good farmer and knew my trade, I should be more good."

"A country gentleman," cried Minnie, who had kept silence with difficulty, and seized the first opportunity to break in, "is just the very finest thing a man can be. Why, what are half the nobility compared to us? There are all sorts of people in the nobility, – people who have been in trade, brewers and bankers and all sorts; even authors and those kind of people. But I have always heard that an English country gentleman who has been in the same position for hundreds of years – Why, Theo, there is not such a position in the world! We are the bulwark of the country. We are the support of the constitution. Where would the Queen be, or the church, or anything, without the gentry? Why, Theo, an English country gentleman – "

She paused from mere want of breath. On such a subject Miss Warrender felt that words could never have failed; and she devoutly believed everything she said.

"If he's so grand as that," said Theo, with a laugh, "what do you suppose is the consequence of a little more Latin and Greek?"

Minnie would have said with all sincerity, Nothing at all; but she paused, remembering that there were prejudices on this subject. "You might as well say, What's the use of shoes and stockings," she said, "or of nice, well-made clothes, such as a gentleman ought to wear? By the bye, Mr. Cavendish, though I did not care so much for him this time as the last, had his clothes very well made. Education is just like well-made things," she added, with a sense that she had made, if not an epigram, something very like it, – a phrase to be remembered and quoted as summing up the discussion.

"If that's all," said Warrender, "I've got enough for that." The reference to Cavendish and the epigram had cleared the atmosphere and given a lighter tone to the family controversy, and the young man felt that he had got over the crisis better than he hoped. He waved his hand to Minnie amicably as he rose from the table. "I thank thee, Jew," he said with a lighter tone and laugh than were at all usual with him, as he went away. The ladies sat silent, listening to his steps as he went through the hall, pausing to get his hat; and no one spoke till he suddenly appeared again, crossing the lawn towards the gate that led into the village. Then there was a simultaneous long breath of fulfilled expectation, not to be called a sigh.

"Ah!" said Minnie, "I thought so. He always goes that way."

"It is the way that leads to all the places Theo would be likely to go to."

"You mean it leads to Markland, mamma. Oh, I know very well what Theo means. He thinks he is very deep, but I see through him; and so would you, if you chose. I never thought him so clever as you all did – but that he should let that woman twist him round her little finger, and give up everything for her! – I could not have supposed he would have been so silly as that."

Mrs. Warrender made no reply except a brief reproof to her daughter for speaking of Lady Markland as that woman. Perhaps she was herself a little vexed with Lady Markland, though she was aware it was unjust. But she was not vexed with Theo. She followed his foolishness (for to be sure it was foolishness, poor boy!) with a warmth of sympathy such as very rarely animates a mother in such circumstances. In her growing anxiety about him, in the commotion of mind with which she had watched the rising passion in his, there had been something which seemed to Mrs. Warrender like a new vicarious life. She had been, as it were, the spectator of this drama from the day when, to her great surprise, Theo had urged, almost compelled her to offer her services and society to the young widow. His vehemence then and a look in his eyes with which she was noways acquainted, but of which, as a woman capable of similar emotion, she divined the meaning, had awakened her, with a curious upspringing of her whole being, to the study of this new thing, to see what was going to come of it, and how it would develop. She had never known in her own person what passion was; she had never been the object of it, nor had she felt that wild and all-absorbing influence; but she recognised it when she saw it in her son, with the keenest thrill of sympathetic feeling. She watched him with a kind of envy, a kind of admiration, a wondering enthusiasm, which absorbed her almost as much as his love absorbed him. She who had been surrounded by dulness all her life, mild affections, stagnant minds, an easy, humdrum attachment which had all the external features of indifference, – it brought a curious elation to her mind to see that her boy was capable of this flaming and glowing passion. It had curbed her impatience as nothing else could have done, and made her willing to wait and watch, to withstand the pressure of the long monotonous days, and content herself with the dead quiet of her life. She had not known even anxiety in the past. That of itself was a vivifying influence now.

A little later Mrs. Warrender drove into Highcombe with Chatty, an expedition which she had made several times of late, as often as the horses could be spared. The house in Highcombe, which was her own, which she was to live in with the girls if Theo married or anything happened, was being put in order, and that too was a gentle interest. Fortunately, upon this afternoon Minnie was occupied in the parish. It was her "day," and nothing in heaven or earth was ever permitted to interfere with Minnie's "day." The other two were pleased to be alone together, though they never said so, but kept up even between themselves the little fiction of saying, What a pity Minnie could not come! Chatty sympathised with her mother more than Minnie had ever done, and was very glad in her heart to ask a question or two about what was happening and what Theo could mean, to which Mrs. Warrender answered with much greater ease and fulness than if her elder daughter had been present to give her opinion. Chatty asked with bated breath whether there was not something wicked and terrible in the thought that Lady Markland, a woman who was married, and who had been consoled in her affliction by the clergyman and all her friends reminding her that her husband was not lost but gone before, and that she would meet him again, – that she should be loved and wooed by another man. Chatty grew red with shame as she asked the question. It seemed to her an insult to any woman. "As if our ties were for this world only!" she said. Mrs. Warrender in her reply waived the theological question altogether, and shook her head, and declared that it was not the thought that Lady Markland was a widow or that she was Theo's senior which troubled her. "But she will never think of him," said the mother. "Oh, Chatty, my heart is sore for my poor boy. He is throwing away his love and the best of his life. She will never think of him. She is full of her own affairs and of her child. She will take all that Theo gives her, and never make him any return."

"Then, mamma, would you wish – " cried Chatty, astonished.

"I wish anything that would make him happy," her mother said. "It is a great thing to be happy." She said this more to herself than to her daughter; and to be sure, to a young person, it was a most unguarded admission for a woman to make.

"Does being happy always mean – ?" Here Chatty paused, with the sudden flame of a blush almost scorching her cheeks. She had turned her head in the opposite direction, as if looking at something among the trees; and this was perhaps why Mrs. Warrender did not hear what she said. Always mean love – Chatty did not say. Various events had suggested this question, but on the whole she was very glad her mother did not hear.

CHAPTER XIX

Warrender went off very quickly upon his long walk. He could not but feel, notwithstanding his little bravado of indifference, that it was a very important decision, which he had made irrevocable by thus publishing it. For some time it had been a certainty in his mind; but nothing seems a certainty until it has been said, and now that it had been said, the thought that he had absolutely delivered himself over into the nameless crowd, that he had renounced all further thought of distinction in the only way he knew of for acquiring it, was somewhat awful to him. The unimaginable difference which exists between a man within whose reach a first class is still dangling and him who has no hope but to be "gulfed," is little comprehensible by the unacademical mind; but it is one not to be contemplated without a shudder. When he thought of what he was resigning, when he thought of what he must drop into, the blood seemed to boil in Theo's veins and to ring in his ears. To be a passman; to descend among the crowd; to consort with those who had "pulled through," perhaps with difficulty, who had gone through all sorts of dull workings and struggles, and to whom their books were mere necessary instruments of torture, to be got done with as soon as possible, – these were things terrible to contemplate. And in the silence of his own soul, it was difficult to console himself with those theories about the trade-mark, and the merely professional use of academic distinction. It was all true enough, and yet it was not true. Even now he thought of his tutor with a pang; not the tutor at college, who had dropped him for Brunson, but the genial old tutor at school, who had hoped such great things for him. He said, "Poor old Boreas!" to himself, sympathising in the disappointment with which the news would be received. Warrender a passman! Warrender "gulfed"! Nobody would believe it. This gave him many pangs as he set out upon his walk. He had sacrificed his early glories to the fastidious fancy of youth; but he had never really intended to be distanced by Brunson, to fall out of the ranks at the end.

Softer thoughts began to steal over him as he pursued his way, as he began to draw near the other country in which she abode. Half-way between the houses was a little wood, through which the road passed, and which was like a vestibule to the smiling place where her throne and empire was. To other eyes it was no more smiling than the other side, but as soon as Theo became conscious, in the distance, of the bare height, all denuded of trees, on which Markland stood, the landscape seemed to change for him. There was sunshine in it which was nowhere else, more quiet skies and warmer light. He threw down the burden of his thoughts among the autumn leaves that strewed the brook in that bit of woodland, and, on the other side, remembered with an elation that went to his head, that he had this sacrifice, though she might never know it, to lay at her feet; the flower of his life, the garland of honour, the violet crown, all to scatter on her path. He would rather she should put her foot on them than that they should decorate his brow, – even if she never knew.

With these thoughts, he sped along the country road, which no longer was so green, so warm with sunshine, as before. Markland looked already cold in its bareness against the distant sky, all flushed with flying clouds, the young saplings about, bending before the wind, as if they supplicated for shelter and a little warmth, and the old tottering cedar behind the house, looking as if the next blast would bring it down with a crash. There had been a great deal of planting going on, but this only added to the straggling lines of weak-kneed, uncomfortable younglings, who fluttered their handful of leaves, and shivered in every wind that blew. Lady Markland no longer sat on the terrace. She received her familiar visitor where only intimate friends were allowed to come, in the morning-room, to which its new distinction gave something of the barrenness and rigidity of a room of business. The big writing-table filled up the centre, and nothing remained of its old aspect except Geoff's little settlement within the round of the window; a low table for his few lesson books, where less lawful publications, in the shape of stories, were but too apt to appear, and a low, but virtuously hard chair, on which he was supposed to sit, and – work; but there was not much work done, as everybody knew.

Lady Markland did not rise to receive her visitor. She had a book in her right hand, which she did not even disturb herself to put down. It was her left hand which she held out to Warrender, with a smile: and this mark of a friendship which had gone beyond all ceremony made his heart overflow. By an unusual chance, Geoff was not there, staring with his little sharp eyes, and this made everything sweeter. He had her to himself at last.

"Do I disturb you? Are you busy?" he said.

"Not at all. At least, if I am busy, it is nothing that requires immediate attention. I am a little stupid about those drainages, and what is the landlord's part. I wonder if you know any better? You must have the same sort of things to do?"

"I am ashamed to say I don't, now; but I'll get it all up," he said eagerly, – "that must be perfectly easy, – and give you the result."

"You will cram me, in short," said Lady Markland, with a smile. "You ought to be somebody's private secretary. How well you would do it! That was all right about the lease. Mr. Longstaffe was very much astonished that I should know so much. I did not tell him it was you."

"It was not me!" cried Warrender. "I had only the facts, and you supplied the understanding. I suppose that is to be my trade too; it will be something to think that you have trained me for it."

"That we have studied together," she said, "with most of the ignorance on my side, and most of the knowledge on yours. Oh, I am not too humble. I allow that I sometimes see my way out of a difficulty, with a jump, before you have reasoned it out. That sort of thing is conceded to a woman. I am 'not without intelligence,' Mr. Longstaffe himself says. But what do you mean to imply by that tone of regret – you suppose it is to be your trade?"

"I don't mean anything, – to make you ask, perhaps. I have no doubt I mean that finding out what was the exact pound of flesh the farmers could demand, and how much on our side we could exact, did not seem very lofty work: until I remembered that you were doing it too."

"My doing it makes no difference," said Lady Markland. "You ought to know better than to make me those little compliments. But for all that, it is a fine trade. Looking after the land is the best of trades. Everything must have begun with it, and it will go on for ever. And the pleasure of thinking one can improve, and hand it over richer and better for the expenditure of a little brains upon it, as well as other condiments – " she said, with a laugh. "Guano, you will say, is of more use perhaps than the brains."

She carried off a little enthusiasm, which had lit up her eyes, with this laugh at the end.

"I don't think so," said Warrender. "Do you think I meant any compliment? but to see you giving yourself up to this, you, who – and to remember that I had been perhaps grumbling, thinking of the schools, and other such paltry honours."

"Oh, not paltry, – not paltry at all; very, very much the reverse. I am sure no one interested in you can think so."

"I think so myself," he said. "I must tell you my little experiences on that subject." And with this he told her all his little story about the devotion of the Dons; about their discovery of his pursuits, and the slackening of their approbation; and about how Brunson (a very good fellow, and quite aware of their real meaning) had taken his place. Lady Markland was duly interested, amused, and indignant; interested enough to be quite sincere in her expressions, and yet independent enough to smile a little at the conflict between wounded feeling and philosophy on Warrender's part.

"But," she added, with a woman's liking for a practicable medium, "you might have postponed your deeper reading till you had done what was necessary, and so pleased both them and yourself."

"I thought one could not serve two masters," said Theo; "and that is why I encourage myself, by your example, to take to the land and its duties, and give up the other poor little bubble of reputation."

"Don't talk of my example," she said. "I am not disinterested. I am making no choice. What I am doing is for the only object I have in life, the only thing I have in the world."

He did not ask any question, but he fixed her with intent, inquiring eyes.

"You need not look as if you had any doubt what it was. It is Geoff, of course. I don't care very much for anything else. But to hand back his inheritance unburdened, to make a man of my poor little Geoff – " Her bright eyes moistened with quick-springing tears. She smiled, and her face looked to Theo like the face of an angel; though he was impatient of the motive, he adored her for it. And she gave her head a little toss, as if to shake off this undue emotion. "I need not talk any high-flown nonsense about such a simple duty, need I?" she said, once more with a soft laugh. Instead of making the most of her pathetic position, she would always ignore the claims she had upon sympathy. Her simple duty, – that was all.