The Sleeping Fury (9 page)

“And you all condemn her unheard!”

“Condemn, Charlotte? Who condemns her? Certainly not I.”

Charlotte's heart warmed with gratitude.

“And don't you understand, Charlotte,” he went on, “that our silence is due simply to your mother's silence? It represents her attitude, which, as she is a guest, we are forced to respect, I think it very unlikely that it represents my mother's. As for my condemning her, I'm afraid, my dear Charlotte, you can't think much of me as a parson, or even as a Christian, if you have been imagining that I
condemn her before I have heard, not only her account of the matter, but even yours or Lady Hadlow's.”

“I don't know very much myself,” said Charlotte. “All I know is that Beatrix fell in love with a young doctor when she and Mamma were at Harrogate last autumn, and Mamma refused to let them be engaged.”

“For what reason?”

“Because … well, because his father was a dentist.”

“The first Halnaker we know anything about was a blacksmith.”

Charlotte smiled. “But several centuries ago.”

“Six, as a matter of fact.”

“I'm afraid nothing short of two would weigh with Mamma; and, even then, there's always, isn't there, something a little ludicrous about dentistry?”

Alfred glanced in amused surprise at Charlotte's handsome face. How mature she had become since last year! Last year she would have been incapable of that speech, which criticised her mother with much of her mother's asperity. “Ah, a dentist!” he said. “That accounts for it. Your mother, Charlotte, is far too good an Ebernoe to be a good Christian.”

“Alfred!” She shot a glance at him, and burst into laughter.

“Now promise me not to repeat that, Charlotte.”

“I shall promise nothing of the sort. I shall save it up and say it to Mamma when she's being … well, more of an Ebernoe than she ought to be.”

“Then promise not to say I said it.”

“If she knew it was you who said it, Alfred, it would have twice the effect. She thinks the world of you, you know.”

Alfred was both amused and apprehensive. “Charlotte,” he said, with a seriousness which was only half pretence, “I depend upon you.”

“I've just warned you not to.”

“If you tell, Charlotte, I shall never dare to say anything frivolous to you again.”

“But it would do Mamma so much good.”

Alfred laughed. “It would indeed.”

“And surely you'd like to do Mamma good, Alfred?”

“I'd rather do it a little more tactfully.”

“Very well; if I say it, I'll say it as if from myself. But I'm sorry, Alfred, that you haven't the courage of your convictions.”

Alfred smiled, and then became suddenly sad. “Nobody ever had, my dear Charlotte,” he replied, “except Jesus Christ, and they killed Him for it.”

• • • • • • • •

Lord Mardale was probably the only one whom Charlotte had not misjudged in the matter of Beatrix. She had certainly misjudged Lady Mardale, for two days later, when she and Charlotte were alone in the drawing-room, Lady Mardale working silently at some embroidery stretched on a frame, and Charlotte, with a book on her knees, watching her, Lady Mardale raised her eyes, and, meeting Charlotte's with her kind, steadfast gaze, said, almost as if to herself: “My poor Beatrix. how I wish she were with us!”

How like Lady Mardale, Charlotte thought afterwards, that had been. No hint of rebuke or disapproval; simply regret for her absence. How different from Mamma! But Lady Mardale, thought Charlotte, was a saint, while Mamma, as Alfred had so justly remarked, was an Ebernoe. What, she fell to imagining, would Lady Mardale have done in Mamma's place? Suddenly she surprised herself by leaping to the conviction that if Lady Mardale had been Mamma, Beatrix would never have left home. Yes, even she herself nowadays had arrived at the point of criticising her mother. She had ceased at last to be the submissive child. And not before it was time, for in the autumn after that visit to Haughton she entered her nineteenth year, and before Christmas the schoolroom became her private sitting-room and she gave up lessons.

Cousin Fanny stayed on in an undefined capacity which involved arranging flowers, reading French and Italian with Charlotte, and taking alternate weeks of housekeeping with Charlotte under Lady Hadlow's supervision.

It was about this time that Charlotte received from Beatrix the wonderful news that she was expecting a baby. After Christmas, when the time drew near, Beatrix wrote asking Charlotte to go and stay with her. “Mamma,” she wrote, “will probably refuse to let you come. ‘No, Charlotte; at your age it is most undesirable!' But do try your best to thaw her, because I should love to have you here, dearest Lottie, and you would be the greatest help to me.”

When Charlotte asked for permission to go to Beatrix, Lady Hadlow refused in the very words
that Beatrix had invented for her. Charlotte pleaded in vain.

“Really, Mamma, you seem to forget I'm not a mere girl.”

“Then what are you, pray?”

“I'm a woman. Why, I might be having a baby myself.”

“My dear Charlotte, what will you say next?”

“Well, you told me last year that before long I should probably be marrying a plumber.”

“Really, Charlotte!” Lady Hadlow burst into one of her irresistible laughs.

Charlotte, seeing the moment favourable, tried once more to carry her point, but Lady Hadlow at once became serious again. “No, child. I've said no, and I mean it. I shall send Cousin Fanny.” And Cousin Fanny was sent.

Though Lady Hadlow did her best to preserve an impassive exterior, Charlotte could see that, as the time approached, she was as anxious and excited as herself, and when at last the telegram arrived to announce a son, and both doing well, Lady Hadlow had the weakness to shed tears at the tea-table. “Poor little Beatrix,” she sobbed. “Poor child! I'm a brute not to be there!”

But by the end of tea she had so far recovered as to remark reflectively, and with a sniff: “I little thought, once, that I should share my grandson with a dentist.”

Lady Hadlow's recovery from human weakness seemed to have been thorough, for in the weeks that followed the birth of Beatrix's son she showed no further symptoms of the regrettable lapse which had befallen her at the tea-table on the arrival of the telegram. The earth thawed, trees and plants began to sprout, but Lady Hadlow did not thaw. Cousin Fanny, in her innocence, had returned full of pride and infatuation. The baby had widened the narrow horizons of her life. Before, she had had only Beatrix and Charlotte to live for, and recently Beatrix had been almost lost to her; but now this miracle, Beatrix's baby, had come into her life, and with it Beatrix had in a measure been restored to her. On the evening of her return to Fording she babbled of the baby—the baby in its bath, the baby being fed, of its smile, the colour of its eyes, the precocious noises it made, its amazing superiority to all other babies. For a while Lady Hadlow listened in silence, with an inflexible countenance. Then, with that tightening of the lips which in old days had always accompanied Beatrix's tantrums, she remarked:

“My dear Fanny, from the way you talk one would suppose the baby was the Prince of Wales.”

The light died suddenly out of Cousin Fanny's face; it was as if Lady Hadlow had struck her. She spoke no more of the baby in Lady Hadlow's
presence, but in Charlotte she found an inexhaustible listener; and out of doors, indoors, in Charlotte's sitting-room—that room which had been sacred to Beatrix, Charlotte, and Cousin Fanny—and everywhere, in fact, where Lady Hadlow was not, the two of them chattered to their heart's content.

Life passed as it always passed at Fording; but life was different for Charlotte, for by now she had “come out” and had entered another sphere of existence—that of a grown-up person, which meant that she paid calls with her mother, and, when her mother was invited out to lunch or dinner, Charlotte was invited too. The fact that the punctual routine of lessons was abolished and she had no regular occupation except the simple and pleasant task of housekeeping every alternate week, brought a bracing sense of emancipation. Each morning at half-past nine she felt a little thrill at the discovery that it was no longer her duty to be seated, pen in hand, at the schoolroom table.

Old friends paid their accustomed visits. In their turn the Winchmeres came, and Charlotte privately told Mr. Winchmere the story of Beatrix and
Tess of the D'Ubervilles
.

“Bless my soul!” he laughed. “I suppose it
isn't
a book for young girls. But one forgets these little details, you know, Charlotte, when one has no children of one's own. You'll find, yourself, that the older you grow, the more involved in human sympathies, human loves, and human troubles, the less easy it becomes to know what is proper and what improper. One has to leave it to the prigs and the prudes.”

Charlotte smiled mischievously. “And which would you call Mamma, Mr. Winchmere?”

“My dear Charlotte!” Old Mr. Winchmere, though much tickled, was also obviously much flustered. “My dear Charlotte! Your mother, I'm sure, was perfectly right. And as for you, you're an unscrupulous creature to try to trip up a defenceless old man.”

The coming of the Winchmeres had reminded Charlotte of
Tess
, and awakened the old longing to read it, and, next time she and her mother were making a list of books to send to the library, she expressed a wish to order
Tess
. When Lady Hadlow acquiesced without any visible hesitation, Charlotte knew that even her mother had begun at last to regard her as grown up.

“And I think,” said Lady Hadlow, “that we'll try
The Woodlanders
as well. The Winchmeres insist that Thomas Hardy is a great writer. And what else was it that Mr. Winchmere recommended?” She went to a desk, opened a small drawer, and returned peering at a slip of paper. “
A Gentleman of France
, by Stanley Weyman, which, he said, was
my
style of novel. You remember how we enjoyed
The House of the Wolf
, Charlotte, when I read it to Beatrix and you? Then there's
Catriona
, a new book by the
Treasure Island
man, Stevenson; and something by a very young writer called Kipling—Rudyard Kipling—still in his twenties, so Mr. Winchmere said.
The Fight that
… what is it? No,
The Light … The Light that Failed
. Put that down too, Charlotte dear.”

On a morning towards the end of June, Lady Hadlow, looking through her letters during breakfast, picked one out eagerly. “From Lady Mardale, Charlotte,” she said. “This will be to arrange about our visit next month.”

She tore open the envelope, and Charlotte watched her as she read.

Suddenly her face fell. “Oh, dear!” she said. “Oh, dear! Poor Lord Mardale!” She read on abstractedly.

Charlotte's heart sank. “What is it, Mamma?” she asked.

“Lord Mardale was taken ill last Thursday,” said Lady Hadlow, “and it seems to be rather serious.” She read a passage aloud. “ ‘Yesterday the doctor told me that there were signs of pneumonia, which, of course, at my husband's age, gives us great anxiety. I will let you know, my dear Emily, how he progresses, but I fear that, unless things go better than we dare hope, we shall have to postpone your visit. Need I say how disappointed we shall be. Alfred hopes to come home to-morrow.' ”

The news came as a great shock to Charlotte. It was the first time that anyone she knew well and loved had been in danger, for it had not occurred to her that there was any danger to Beatrix in the birth of her baby. When she thought of Lord Mardale now, she pictured him always as he had appeared two years ago when he had met them at Templeton station, seated, upright and handsome, on the box of the yellow-wheeled dogcart, the reins in one brown gloved hand. She had always looked upon him as a permanent part of her life. But now she felt that
the world of her affections, that world which she had always supposed safe and permanent, was threatened with disaster, and she went about with a weight at her heart.

She longed for comfort. If only she had someone whom she loved so deeply that nothing else in the world mattered! Her thoughts turned again to that tall, dark Christopher whom she had imagined for a lover. She had thought of him often since the day she had invented him. If only she had him now! But something might happen to him too, for no one was safe; then she would have nothing, nothing whatever left to live for. How dangerous it was to fall in love! How did anyone ever dare so to tempt fortune?

Week by week brief notes came from Lady Mardale or Alfred, and with every note came disappointment to their hopes of improvement. Occasionally the news was more alarming: the doctors were becoming anxious about the state of Lord Mardale's heart. Then there was mention of a proposed operation to drain the left lung, and a letter a week later announced that it had been successfully performed. The date of the yearly visit to Haughton was now long past. The summer drew to a close. In the garden at Fording the sycamores and cherry-trees began to turn. Soon the whole place was a glory of red and yellow, and then, after a week of rain, the leaves began to fall. A morning of sharp white frost revealed every tree bare, its leaves strewn on the grass in a circle about its trunk. The news became a little more reassuring. The old man was making a wonderful fight, and, though he had not yet begun
to get well, the fact that no complications had shown themselves was a hopeful sign. “My father has been distinctly better for the last four days,” said Alfred's next letter, “but we dare not be too hopeful. He is, of course, extremely weak, and even a slight check in his present condition might have serious consequences.”

Again Charlotte pictured him hale and handsome on the box of the dogcart, and then, as she read once more the words, “He is, of course, extremely weak,” she realised that her picture of him was a thing of the past; it was no longer true to life. And suddenly, with heart-rending distinctness, she saw him immovable in bed, his face pale and sunken, lying like a hollow mask on the white of the bedclothes. The vision sent a chill to her heart. Though Alfred's news had been more reassuring than usual, it had brought home to her more vividly than ever before the danger that threatened her old friend.