No one had understood this more whole-heartedly than Sophia, and in the second week of her honeymoon, as she and Frederick strolled under the archway of their twelfth Rhine castle, she had come to a sudden decision to cut short their travels and return to Blandamer House, where the settling down could be more effectively put into action. Seated upon a block of crumbling masonry and prodding the earth with the tip of her parasol, she listened to Frederick reading aloud legends of robber barons and mysterious maidens. It had taken another week to move him: legends by day and roulette and the opera-house in the evening made up a life that Frederick was loth to relinquish; but at last, seated in their travelling carriage on the deck of the Channel boat, she beheld the chalk cliffs of Kent whose whiteness promised her the chalk downs of Dorset. She could not turn to her husband to express her pleasure, since he was walking up and down with his cigar; but indeed she had not needed to; her pleasure was sufficient without expression.
Already she had been quite well able to do without Frederick; and returning to her father’s house, she seemed to be bringing her husband with her like one of the objects of art which she had bought on her travels. Inevitably a return to sensible real life meant a return to Blandamer. The Willoughby house, too large and traditionally splendid for the Willoughby means, was let on a long lease to a Person from the North who had made a fortune during the wars. Edward Willoughby and his wife, flourishing on the rental in London, had no mind to encourage a younger brother and his country wife to settle near by. A visit or two had shown Sophia that she was not popular with them, and hearing them speak of the Person from the North, she had suspected that to them she had seemed socially little better than he, since to a mind so elegant as Mrs. Edward Willoughby’s the production of military small-clothes and the ownership of an estate in the West Indies were almost equally commercial and suspect. Conscious of this, she had determined to make a country gentleman of Frederick; and since he would one day or other share with her the ownership of Blandamer, it seemed to her, and to Papa too, sufficiently conscious of that dowry of debts which Frederick had brought to the marriage, proper that her husband should begin at once to accustom himself to the life which the course of time would entail upon him.
So they had settled down. To her this process meant arranging the west wing as their peculiar domain, teaching the servants to address her as Madam instead of Miss, holding her own with Mamma, choosing her clothes for herself, and awaiting the birth of her first child. Now, looking back upon those years, she could admit that for Frederick things might not have been so easy. Re-rooted in her old life, the more strongly settled there by the additional weight of marriage and maternity, she had watched Frederick fidget — at first watching with compunction, then with annoyance, at last with indifference. Then, scarcely noticing his absence, she had let him go again. Frederick was in Northamptonshire, staying with friends for the shooting season; Frederick was at Brighton for his health; Frederick was at Aix-les-Bains being a companion to an uncle from whom he had expectations. From these absences he would return, affable, wearing new clothes and laden with gifts, to admire the growth of his children, to exercise his riding horse, to lounge and twiddle through a spell of bad weather until he went off again. Sometimes, taking pity on his aimlessness, she would put aside her work and play a match of billiards with him; she was a better player than he, though not so well in practice, and their rivalry under these circumstances was almost the only thing that made their relations real and living. Meanwhile Mamma ate, slept, netted, and fondled her grandchildren, and Papa, suddenly grown old, laid every day more and more of the cares of the estate upon Sophia’s shoulders. In the evenings, before the tea-equipage was brought to the drawing-room, the four would play whist together, and Sophia and her father would beat Frederick and Mamma.
She was too haughty to deny herself that luxury of the proud-minded — a sense of justice. Justice made her admit that things were not too easy for Frederick. And on the day when the growing sympathy of the neighbourhood for that poor neglected young Mrs. Willoughby first penetrated the calm of Blandamer, it had been natural for her to reply that no sensible person could expect Frederick to stay perpetually tied to her apron-strings. Resenting this first waft of criticism, she had written to her husband encouraging him to prolong his stay at Aix. Frederick immediately returned. Sophia engaged lodgings in Mayfair, provided herself with clothes of the latest fashion, and took him off for a month of gaiety, leaving behind her full and exact directions of everything that should be done in the nursery, the home farm, the Sunday School and the hot-houses during her absence. With the same method and resolution she had arranged four weeks of exemplary fashion and enjoyment — dinners, balls, breakfast-drums, the races, the opera, Hyde Park and the hairdresser; and during the first week she had as unflinchingly stormed her sister-in-law for introductions and invitations. But this had not been necessary, after all; Frederick knew already every man, woman, and head-waiter they encountered.
Filling her diary with careful accounts of everything seen, done, heard, and visited, Sophia had thought to herself, as day after day was written down and disposed of, Once back at Blandamer I can be happy and sensible again; and it was with a feeling of nearing the winning-post that she left her farewell cards, paid the bills, and dropped kid gloves and bon-bon boxes into the waste-paper basket.
That visit to London had done much to stay local criticism. The pity due to a neglected wife faltered before the aspect of such a fashionably dressed young woman who had heard Grisi and seen Vestris. But the excursion, so well calculated to circumvent the doubts of others, had done as much, or more, to breed uneasiness in herself. Heretofore an absent Frederick had been a shadowy creature, a something dismissed to wander in exile from the real life and centre of life at Blandamer, to drink watered milk and eat stale vegetables, breathe bad air, and keep unhealthy hours. Now the place of this spectre was taken by the Frederick she had seen in London, a Frederick popular, sought-after, light-hearted, affable, open-handed and probably open-hearted — her satellite of Blandamer changed to a separate and self-lit star.
A weaker or an idler woman might have been jealous; a woman in love would certainly have been so. Indifference and responsibility preserved her from any sharper pang than annoyance, and the grim admission that the current opinion as to her pitiable state must be, in the eyes of the world, well-founded. Papa’s death, the growth and illnesses of her children, the cholera, the potato disease, and Mamma’s strange florescence of widowhood distracted her attention from the increasing frequency and length of her husband’s absences, his uneasy behaviour, half-frivolous, and half-servile, when he was with her. Even when she knew for certain that he had been many times unfaithful to her, and was again neck-deep in an adultery, she was not jealous. She was furious.
Her fury had been intensified by his choice of a woman.
For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way. Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better. A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old, as old as Frederick or older — this was the woman whom Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.
Her fury lasted still. Walking swiftly and heedlessly, she had made her way from the tomato house to the park. And now she stood under the wasp-droning shade of a lime tree with a dozen sheep staring at her. The leader moved a step nearer, the others shuffled after it. She must have been here a long while for their timid curiosity to have brought them so close. If I were to speak as I feel, she thought, eyeing them sardonically, how you would scatter! She kept silence, silent as she had been
from the moment she first heard the news, scornfully silent before the sheepishness of mankind. For all that any one knew Mrs. Willoughby was still patiently and unresentfully awaiting her husband’s return from the Continent.
It was fortunate that Mamma’s death had taken place when it did — before Sophia’s discovery of Minna Lemuel. Mamma — a rather stupid and trifling woman, the slave of her grandchildren, the gull of any village slut who chose to wear a tattered bodice and lose a husband, amply deceived by her son-in-law, and constantly buying tender greenhouse rarities which turned out to be chickweed — had yet been able to keep her daughter almost in awe by a power of reading the most carefully concealed thoughts. From the moment when Sophia had first suspected Frederick, Mamma had known of it; and though not a word had been spoken, Sophia was made aware of Mamma’s knowledge. For a shawl had been handed like a shelter; a “Thank you, my dear,” at the passing of a cup of tea had murmured: “My poor forsaken child, I know all, and feel for you as only a mother can”; a second glass of port accepted with, “Well, Sophia, since you insist,” had said: “But you always were headstrong.” And day by day Sophia had felt herself more like some strong rustic animal entangled in a net. The net was never drawn close. She had but to stamp or bellow a little, and it shrank to the silken twist of Mamma’s netting, which had again trailed off that black silk lap and needed to be picked up. With the rather pompous disapproval of a strong character, Sophia deplored her mother’s feminine intuition. It was too subtle, it was the insight of a slave. Exercised upon her childhood it had fostered her with subtle attentions, gratifying her wishes before she herself was aware of them. But slaves, it is well known, make the most admirable attendants to young children.
So it was a good thing that Mamma had died, her silken net sinking into the grave after her as a dead leaf is drawn under the mould by earthworms, before the first, the only and final rupture with Frederick. Even after the funeral Sophia had walked cautiously, suspecting the net might be trailing still, that, put away among gloves, or her own baby clothes, or in letter-case or jewel-case, she might find a letter from Mamma, saying what only impregnable death would give her the daring to say, condoling or counselling. Such a letter, and most of all, a letter of counsel, was a thing to dread. For Sophia respected death, that final and heavily material power, as greatly as she despised finesse and feminine intuition; and however little the living mother had been honoured, the dead mother was another matter. But there was nothing either of sympathy or counsel. Mamma had betaken herself bag and baggage to the grave, even the lilac-paged albums were inscribed: To be Burned Unread after my Death. Nothing had been left over except a packet of letters that slipped through the lining of an old dressing-case, letters written by Mamma to Papa shortly before their marriage. Sophia had read them, a little guiltily, carrying them to the stale window-light of the winter dusk, for to light candles would have illuminated the act into an impropriety. But she had not read long. They were cold and insipid, reading them was like eating jelly.
The sheep were within a hand’s-breadth now, and her fury had died down. She was glad. She had no wish to feel anger when anger was so unavailing. Of the two moods possible to her, such rage, and the icy disdain in which her letter to Frederick had been written, she preferred disdain. It was more dignified, and it allowed her to get on with her work. For now all her passion of life should be poured into what she had to do: bring up her children, order the house and the estate, govern the village. That should be enough, surely, for any woman who had outgrown her follies; and cool enough now to smile at herself, she considered what small half-hearted follies hers had been. For though while Frederick was wooing her she had been quite thoroughly and properly in love with him, from the day of the marriage she had known without illusion what lay before her: respectable married life with its ordered contacts and separations, the attentive acceptance that a married woman should feel for a man who must be made allowances for, a man much like other men — a compromise that one might hope would in time solidify into something positive and convenient. Nor, from these soberly chilling ashes, had the sudden explosion even of Minna Lemuel raised up a flame of that folly of loving too well. It was not that Frederick had ceased to love her, but that he should love such a one as Minna, that had tormented her, and must be at intervals her torment still.
Over her luncheon of cold chicken and claret, Sophia found herself pondering the conduct of Uncle Julius Rathbone with unexpected approval. Julius Rathbone was her father’s half-brother. At her father’s death she had, so to speak, inherited him, and with the inheritance had come something of Papa’s masculine tolerance. Julius was part-owner and manager of the estate in the West Indies which supplied the Aspen wealth; and twice a year or so he sent large consignments of guava jelly, molasses, preserved pineapple, and rum. These were for general family consumption, and so were the portraits of his elegant sharp-nosed wife and his three plain daughters. Other consignments were of a kind more confidential — accounts of his scrapes, financial and amatory; and now he was entrusting to Sophia his illegitimate son, a half-caste. “He is now fourteen years old,” wrote Uncle Julius, “and I do not want him to get false ideas into his head. I should be very grateful if you could place him in some moderate establishment where he could receive a sound commercial education.” Then, as though with a waving of the hand, the letter had turned to a more detailed account of the guava jellies, etc., which would accompany the boy across the Atlantic, and ended with “your dear Aunt, as usual, sends her fondest love, and so do the Girls.”
It was scarcely a matter in which she could consult with people of her own standing, even had she felt inclined to do so. She told her solicitor to advertise the requirements, and send the answers to her. They came in hundreds, it seemed as though England’s chief industry was keeping boarding-schools where religion and tuition had united to put into the heads of bastards all the suitable ideas and no false ones. Most of the prospectuses came from Yorkshire, but finally she settled upon a school in Cornwall; and though Uncle Julius had begged her not to put herself out in any way, Sophia could do nothing without becoming conscientious and determined to do it thoroughly, so workmanly pride as well as humaner considerations made her travel to Cornwall to inspect the Trebennick Academy. It was a tall house standing alone on a sweep of moorland, having on one side of it a lean garden filled with cabbages. The moorland sloped to a valley, and on the opposite slope, against the skyline, was a prick-eared church with a well-filled graveyard. She saw the Trebennick Academy on an April afternoon, but unless a gardener’s eye were to find it in the condition of the cabbages, there was no sign of spring in the landscape. Stones of various sizes were tumbled over the moor, rusty bracken was plastered against them by the winter’s rain, and a fine mist limpened the folds of her pelisse and bloomed her gloves. The air was such as she had never smelt before, very fresh and smelling of earth. Her first impression was one of distaste, almost of fear; and that evening, coughing over the peat-fire of the Half Moon Inn, she all but decided against the Trebennick Academy. Yet on the morrow, smelling again that fresh, earth-scented air, she found herself queerly in love with the place, and reluctant to leave it so slightly tasted, as when a child she had felt reluctant to leave, half-eaten, some pot of stolen jam.
There was no doubt that, in some unsuspected way, she could have been very happy at Trebennick. That air, so pure and earthy, absolved one back into animal, washed off all recollection of responsibilities; one waft of wind there would blow away the cares from one’s mind, the petticoats from one’s legs, demolish all the muffle of imposed personality loaded upon one by other people, leaving one free, swift, unburdened as a fox. At intervals during the summer Sophia had found herself betrayed by fancy into Cornwall, and leading there a wild romantic life in which, unsexed and unpersoned, she rode, sat in inns, slept in a bracken bed among the rocks, bathed naked in swift-running brooks, knocked people down, outwitted shadowy enemies, poached one night with gipsies, in another wen
t a keeper’s round with a gun under her arm. Out of these rhapsodies she would fall as suddenly as she had fallen into them, and without a moment’s pause go on with what she was doing: a memorandum for the bailiff, a letter to the dressmaker, the paper boat her hands had been folding and fastening for Augusta to sail on the pond. In a space no longer than it takes to open one’s eyes she was back in her accustomed life, in a leap was transferred to daylight from darkness. And yet, as by the mere closing of eyelids, one can surmise a darkness stranger than any star has pierced, a darkness of no light which only the blind can truly possess, she knew that by a moment’s flick of the mind she could levant into a personal darkness, an unknown aspect of Sophia as truly hers as one may call the mysterious sheltering darkness of one’s eyelid one’s own.
However well a life in Cornwall might suit her (not, though, that it was a life that the real and waking Sophia could anywhere find), seeing Caspar she doubted if the Trebennick Academy could possibly do for him. She had arranged her mind before his coming, telling herself that black blood is stronger than that of the white races, that the boy would bear little or no resemblance to Julius, and might well be no more than a woolly negro. But the boy who stepped from the carriage and walked towards her up the sunlit steps might have come, not from any surmisable country, but from a star, and before his extreme beauty and grace she felt her mouth opening like that of any bumpkin.
Summer Will Show Page 4