The Ladies Lindores · Chapter 46 (1/3)

XLVI

After this there ensued a brief pause in the history of the family in all its branches: it was a pause ominous, significant⁠—like the momentary hush before a storm, or the torrent’s smoothness ere it dashes below. The house of Lindores was like a besieged stronghold, mined, and on the eve of explosion. Trains were laid in all directions under its doomed bastions, and the merest breath, a flash of lightning, a touch of electricity anywhere, would be enough to bring down its defences in thunders of ruin. It seemed to stand in a silence that could be felt, throwing up its turrets against the dull sky⁠—a foreboding about it which could not be shaken off. From every side assaults were preparing. The one sole defender of the stronghold felt all round him the storm which was brewing, but could not tell when or how it was to burst forth. Lord Lindores could scarcely have told whence it was that this vague apprehension came. Not from any doubt of Rintoul, surely, who had always shown himself full of sense, and stood by him. Not from Edith⁠—who had, indeed, been very rebellious, but had done her worst. And as for Carry: Carry, it was true, was left unfettered and her own mistress, so to speak; but he had never found any difficulty with her, and why should he fear it now? An uneasiness in respect to her future had, however, arisen in his mind. She had made that violent protest against interference on the night of the funeral, which had given him a little tremor of alarm; but why should he anticipate danger, he said to himself? It might be needful, perhaps, to proceed with a little delicacy, not to frighten her⁠—to go very softly; but Carry would be amenable, as she had always been. And thus he endeavoured to quiet the apprehensions within him.

There was one thing, however, which the whole family agreed upon, which was, in an uneasy sense, that the presence of Beaufort in their neighbourhood was undesirable. If they agreed in nothing else they agreed in this. It was a shock to all of them to find that he had not departed with Millefleurs. Nothing could be more decided than Rintoul was in this respect. So far as that went, he was evidently disposed to take to the full the same view as his father. And Edith, though she had been so rebellious, was perfectly orthodox here. It was not for some time after the departure of Millefleurs, indeed, that the ladies made the discovery, not only that Beaufort was still at Dalrulzian, but that he had been at Tinto. The latter fact had been concealed from Lord Lindores, but it added sadly to the embarrassment and trouble of the others. They were all heavy with their secrets⁠—all holding back something⁠—afraid to divulge the separate course which each planned to take for themselves. A family will sometimes go on like this for a long time with the semblance of natural union and household completeness, while it has in reality dropped to pieces, and holds together only out of timidity or reluctance on the part of its members to burst the bonds of tradition, of use and wont. But on one point they were still united. Carry was the one subject upon which all were on the alert, and all agreed. Rintoul had no eyes for Edith’s danger, and Edith⁠—notwithstanding many an indication which would have been plain enough to her in other circumstances⁠—never even suspected him; but about Carry the uneasiness was general. “What is that fellow doing hanging about the place?⁠—he’s up to no good,” Rintoul said, even in the midst of his own overwhelming embarrassments. “I wonder,” was Lady Lindores’s way of putting it⁠—not without a desire to make it apparent that she disapproved of someone else⁠—“I wonder how John Erskine, knowing so much as he does, can encourage Mr. Beaufort to stay.” “Mamma! how can you suppose he encourages him⁠—can he turn him out of his house?” cried Edith, flaming up in instant defence of her lover, and feeling her own guilt and hidden consciousness in every vein. There was no tender lingering now upon Beaufort’s name, no hesitation or slip into the familiar “Edward.” As for Rintoul, he had been providentially, as he felt, delivered from the necessity of speaking to his father of his own concerns, by being called away suddenly to the aid of a fellow officer in trouble. It tore his heart, indeed, to be out of reach of Nora; but as Nora would not see him, the loss was less than it might have been, and the delay a gain. Edith’s story was in abeyance altogether; and their mourning, though it was merely of the exterior, brought a pause in the ordinary intercourse of social life. They did not go out, nor receive their neighbours⁠—it was decorous to refrain even from the very mild current of society in the country. And this, indeed, it was which made the pause possible. Lord Lindores was the only member of the family who carried on his usual activities unbroken, or even stimulated by the various catastrophes that had occurred. He was more anxious than ever about the county hospitals and the election that must take place next year; and he began to employ and turn to his own advantage the important influence of the Tinto estate, which he, as the little heir’s grandfather, was certainly entitled, he thought, to consider as his own. Little Tommy was but four; and though, by a curious oversight, Lord Lindores had not been named as a guardian, he was, of course, in the circumstances, his daughter’s natural guardian, who was Tommy’s. This accession of power almost consoled him for the destruction of his hopes in respect to Millefleurs. He reflected that, after all, it was a more legitimate way of making himself indispensable to his country, to wield the influence of a great landed proprietor, than by any merely domestic means; and with Tinto in his hands, as well as Lindores, no man in the county could stand against him. The advantage was all the greater, since Pat Torrance had been on the opposite side of politics, so that this might reasonably be concluded a county gained to the Government. To be sure, Lord Lindores was far too high-minded, and also too safe a man, to intimidate, much less bribe. But a landlord’s legitimate influence is never to be undervalued; and he felt sure that many men who had been kept under, in a state of neutrality, at least, by Torrance’s rough and brutal partisanship⁠—would now be free to take the popular side, as they had always wished to do. The influence of Tinto, which he thus appropriated, more than doubled his own in a moment. There could not have been a more perfect godsend to him than Torrance’s death.

But the more he perceived and felt the importance of this, the more did the presence of Beaufort disturb and alarm him. It became daily a more urgent subject in the family. When Lord Lindores got vague information that Carry had met somewhere her old lover on the roadside⁠—which somebody, of course, saw and reported, though it did not reach his ears till long after⁠—his dim apprehensions blazed into active alarm. He went to his wife in mingled anger and terror. To him, as to so many husbands, it always appeared that adverse circumstances were more or less his wife’s fault. He told her what he had heard in a tempest of indignation. “You must tell her it won’t do. You must let her know that it’s indecent, that it’s shameful. Good heavens, just think what you are doing!⁠—letting your daughter, your own daughter, disgrace herself in the sight of the whole county. Talk about the perceptions of women! They have no perceptions⁠—they have no moral sense, I believe. Tell Carry I will not have it. If you don’t, I must interfere.” Lady Lindores received this fulmination with comparative silence. She scarcely said anything in her own defence. She was afraid to speak lest she should betray that she had known more than her husband knew, and was still more deeply alarmed than he was. She said, “You are very unjust,” but she said no more. That evening she wrote an anxious note to John Erskine; the next day she drove to Tinto with more anxiety than hope. Already a great change had come over that ostentatious place. The great rooms were shut up; the less magnificent ones had already begun to undergo a transformation. The large meaningless ornaments were being carried away. An air of home and familiar habitation had come about the house. Carry, in her widow’s cap, had begun to move lightly up and down with a step quite unlike the languor of her convalescence. She was not convalescent any longer, but had begun to bloom with a soft colour and subdued air of happiness out of the cloud that had enveloped her so long. To see her so young (for her youth seemed to have come back), so fresh and almost gay, gave a wonderful pang of mingled pain and delight to her mother’s heart: it showed what a hideous cloud that had been in which her life had been swallowed up, and to check her in her late and dearly bought renewal of existence was hard, and took away all Lady Lindores’s courage. But she addressed herself to her task with all the strength she could muster. “My darling, I am come to⁠—talk to you,” she said.

“I hope so, mother dear; don’t you always talk to me? and no one so sweetly,” Carry said, with her lips upon her mother’s cheek, in that soft forestalling of all rebuke which girls know the secret of. Perhaps she suspected something of what was coming, and would have stopped it if she could.

“Ah, Carry! but it is serious⁠—very serious, dear: how am I to do it?” cried Lady Lindores. “The first time I see light in my child’s eye and colour on her cheek, how am I to scold and threaten? You know I would not if I could help it, my Carry, my darling.”

“Threaten, mamma! Indeed, that is not in your way.”

“No, no; it is not. But you are mother enough yourself to know that when anything is wrong, we must give our darlings pain even for their own dear sakes. Isn’t it so, Carry? There are things that a mother cannot keep still and see her dear child do.”

Carry withdrew from behind her mother’s chair, where she had been standing with one arm round her, and the other tenderly smoothing down the fur round Lady Lindores’s throats. She came and sat down opposite to her mother, facing her, clasping her hands together, and looking at her with an eager look as if to anticipate the censure in her eyes. To meet that gaze which she had not seen for so long, which came from Carry’s youth and happier days, was more and more difficult every moment to Lady Lindores.

“Carry, I don’t know how to begin. You know, my darling, that⁠—your father is unhappy about you. He thinks, you know⁠—perhaps more than you or I might do⁠—of what people will say.”

“Yes, mother.”

Carry gave her no assistance, but sat looking at her with lips apart, and that eager look in her eyes⁠—the look that in old times had given such a charm to her face, as if she would have read your thought before it came to words.

“Carry, dear, I am sure you know what I mean. You know⁠—Mr. Beaufort is at Dalrulzian.”

“Edward? Yes, mother,” said Carry, a blush springing up over her face; but for all that she did not shrink from her mother’s eyes. And then her tone sunk into infinite softness⁠—“Poor Edward! Is there any reason why he shouldn’t be there?”

“Oh, Carry!” cried Lady Lindores, wringing her hands, “you know well enough⁠—there can only be one reason why, in the circumstances, he should wish to continue there.”

“I think I heard that my father had invited him, mamma.”

“Yes. I was very much against it. That was when he was supposed to be with Lord Millefleurs⁠—when it was supposed, you know, that Edith⁠—and your father could not ask the one without asking the other.”

“In short,” said Carry, in her old eager way, “it was when his coming here was misery to me⁠—when it might have been made the cause of outrage and insult to me⁠—when there were plans to wring my heart, to expose me to⁠—Oh, mother, what are you making me say? It is all over, and I want to think only charitably, only kindly. My father would have done it for his own plans. And now he objects when he has nothing to do with it.”

“Carry, take care, take care. There can never be a time in which your father has nothing to do with you: if he thinks you are forgetting⁠—what is best in your position⁠—or giving people occasion to talk.”

“I have been told here,” said Carry, with a shiver, looking round her, “that no one was afraid I would go wrong; oh no⁠—that no one was afraid of that. I was too proud for that.” The colour all ebbed away from her face; she raised her head higher and higher. “I was told⁠—that it was very well known there was no fear of that: but that it would be delightful to watch us together, to see how we would manage to get out of it⁠—and that we should be thrown together every day. That⁠—oh no⁠—there was no fear I should go wrong! This was all said to your daughter, mother: and it was my father’s pleasure that it should be so.”

“Oh Carry, my poor darling! No, dear⁠—no, no. Your father never suspected⁠—”

“My father did not care. He thought, too, that there was no fear I should go wrong. Wrong!” Carry cried, starting from her seat in her sudden passion. “Do you know, mother, that the worst wrong I could have done with Edward would have been whiteness, innocence itself, to what you have made me do⁠—oh, what you have made me do, all those hideous, horrible years!”

Lady Lindores rose too, her face working piteously, the tears standing in her eyes. She held out her hands in appeal, but said nothing, while Carry, pale, with her eyes shining, poured forth her wrong and her passion. She stopped herself, however, with a violent effort. “I do not want even to think an unkind thought,” she said⁠—“now: oh no, not an unkind thought. It is over now⁠—no blame, no reproach; only peace⁠—peace. That is what I wish. I only admire,” she cried, with a smile, “that my father should have exposed me to all that in the lightness of his heart and without a compunction; and then, when God has interfered⁠—when death itself has sheltered and protected me⁠—that he should step in, par example, in his fatherly anxiety, now!⁠—”

“You must not speak so of your father, Carry,” said Lady Lindores; “his ways of thinking may not be yours⁠—or even mine: but if you are going to scorn and defy him, it must not be to me.”

Carry put her mother down in her chair again with soft caressing hands, kissing her in an accès of mournful tenderness. “You have it all to bear, mother dear⁠—both my indignation and his⁠—what shall I call it?⁠—his over-anxiety for me; but listen, mother, it is all different now. Everything changes. I don’t know how to say it to you, for I am always your child, whatever happens; but, mamma, don’t you think there is a time when obedience⁠—is reasonable no more?”

“It appears that Edith thinks so too,” Lady Lindores said gravely. “But, Carry, surely your father may advise⁠—and I may advise. There will be remarks made⁠—there will be gossip, and even scandal. It is so soon, not more than a month. Carry, dear, I think I am not hard; but you must not⁠—indeed you must not⁠—”

“What, mother?” said Carry, standing before her proudly with her head aloft. Lady Lindores gazed at her, all inspired and glowing, trembling with nervous energy and life. She could not put her fears, her suspicions, into words. She did not know what to say. What was it she wanted to say? to warn her against⁠—what? There are times in which it is essential for us to be taken, as the French say, at the half word, not to be compelled to put our terrors or our hopes into speech. Lady Lindores could not name the ultimate object of her alarm. It would have been brutal. Her lips would not have framed the words.

“You know what I mean, Carry; you know what I mean,” was all that she could say.