A Country Gentleman and His Family

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 Aeschylus 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.

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 brokenhearted? 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.

“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.

Dick Cavendish went out for a walk. It was a little chilly after the beautiful day; there was rain in the air, and neither moon nor stars, which in the country, where there are no means of artificial lighting, makes it unpleasant for walking. He went right into the big clump of laurels, and speared himself on the prickles of the old hawthorn before he emerged from the Rectory gates. After that it was easier. Many of the cottage people were indeed going to bed, but by the light which remained in a window here and there he was able to preserve himself from accident as he strolled along. Two or three dogs, sworn enemies to innovation, scented him, and protested at their loudest against the novelty, not to say wickedness, of a passenger at that hour of the night. It was, perhaps, to them what Lizzie Hampson’s independence was to Mrs. Wilberforce⁠—a sign of the times. He made his way along, stumbling here and there, sending into the still air the odour of his cigar, towards the spot where the window of the little shop shone in the distance like a low, dim, somewhat smoky star, the rays of which shaped themselves slightly iridescent against the thick damp atmosphere of the night. Cavendish went up to this dull shining, and stared through the window for a moment through the sticks of barley sugar and boxes of mustard and biscuits. He did not know there was any special significance in the sight of Lizzie Hampson seated there within the counter, demurely sewing, and apparently unconscious of any spectators, but it was enough to have startled any of the neighbours who were aware of Lizzie’s ways.

A minute after he was in the room where Lady Markland sat with her great writing table against the light. He did not know how he got there. It seemed impossible that it could have been by mere walking out of one room into another in the ordinary mechanical way. She rose up, dark against the light, when he went in, which was not at all her habit, but he was not sufficiently self-possessed to be aware of that. She turned towards him, which perhaps was an involuntary, instinctive precaution, for against the full daylight in the great window he could but imperfectly see her features. The precaution was unnecessary. His eyes were not clear enough to perceive what was before him. He saw his conception of her, serene in a womanly majesty far above his troubled state of passion, and was quite incapable of perceiving the sympathetic trouble in her face. She held out her hand to him before he could say anything, and said, with a little catch in her breath, “Oh, Mr. Warrender! I⁠—Geoff⁠—we were not sure whether we should see you today.”

This was a perfectly unintentional speech and quite uncalled for; for nobody could be more regular, more punctual, than Warrender. It was the first thing she could find to say.

“Did you think I could stay away?” he asked, in a low and hurried tone, which was not at all the beginning he had intended.