A Country Gentleman and His Family quotes

Warrender was well enough aware that he could, if he chose, make up the lost way and leave Brunson “nowhere” in the race for honours; but it was his first disenchantment, and he felt it deeply.

Letters are dear and honours sweet, but our own beloved personality is dearer still; and there is no one who does not feel humbled and wounded when he finds out that he is esteemed, not for himself, but for what he can do

—and poor Theo was only twenty, and had been made much of all his life.

The sensation of standing beside that which was not, although it was, his father, went through and through the being of the sensitive young man.

Death is always most impressive in the case of a commonplace person, with whom we have no associations but the most ordinary ones of life.

What had come to him?—to the mind which had been so much occupied with the quality of his beef-tea?

At last Friday came. It was a dull day, of the colour most congenial to such a ceremony. A gentle shower fell upon the wreaths and crosses that covered the coffin. There was a large assembly from all the country round, for

Mr. Warrender had been a man who never harmed anybody, which is perhaps a greater title to respect than those possess who have taken more trouble.

When you try to do good, especially in a rural place, you are sure to stir up animosities; but Mr. Warrender had never stirred up anybody. He was greatly respected.

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?

It was a brutal speech, he was aware.

Brothers and sisters are permitted to be brutal to each other without much harm done.

Minnie had begun calmly, with the usual, “Oh, Theo!” before the meaning of the question struck her. She stopped suddenly, looked up at him, with eyes and lips open, with an astonished stare of inquiry.

He meant them to see that their position was changed—that they were not as of old, in assured possession; and he reckoned upon that slowness of apprehension which probably would altogether preserve them from any painful consciousness.

But it is astonishing how the mind and the senses are quickened when it is ourselves who are in question.

Minnie was the leader of the two. She was the first to understand; and then it communicated itself partly by magnetism to Chatty, who woke up much more slowly, having caught as it were only an echo of what her brother said.

“There will be peace in our days,” said the rector, “and after all, Fanny, we can’t have a revolution coming because Lizzie Hampson—”

“Lizzie Hampson,” said his wife solemnly, “is a sign of the times. She may be nothing in herself⁠—none of them are anything in themselves⁠—but I call her a sign of the times.”

“What a grand name for a little girl!” he said, with a laugh. But he added seriously, “I wish that house belonged to Theo, or someone we could bring influence to bear upon; but what does a city man care?

Without him always there in the background, what, she asked herself, would existence be to her? She asked herself this question when it first began to be suggested by her friends that Geoff should be sent to school.

It is one special feature in the change and downfall that happens to a woman when she becomes a widow that all her friends find themselves at liberty to advise her.

However bad or useless her husband may be, so long as he lives she is safe from this exercise of friendship; but when he is dead all mouths are opened. Mr.

It is one special feature in the change and downfall that happens to a woman when she becomes a widow that all her friends find themselves at liberty to advise her.

However bad or useless her husband may be, so long as he lives she is safe from this exercise of friendship; but when he is dead all mouths are opened.

Mr. Scarsdale paid her a visit solemnly, in order to deliver his soul in this respect. “I came on purpose,” he said, as if that was an additional virtue, “to speak to you, dear Lady Markland, very seriously about Geoff.”

and that she need contemplate the other dreadful alternative no more. Lady Markland was more grateful to Theo than words could say, and she told all her friends, with a serene countenance, that she had made up her mind to the tutor.

It is a great thing to have made up one’s mind.

It gave a satisfaction and calm to her spirits that nothing else could have done.

“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.

“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.”

“Oh,” said the boy, “then he does it for something? You said tutors worked for money, and that Theo was well off, and did not want money. I see; then he wants something else.

Is no one kind just for kindness? Must everybody be paid?

”

Perhaps he did not understand the instinctive suspicion in his mind—indeed, there is no possibility that he could understand it; but it moved him with a keen premonition of danger.

“I should think it was easiest to pay in money,” he said, with precocious wisdom. “How could you and me be kind?”

They strolled homeward during this conversation along the bare avenue, through the lines of faint, weak-kneed young trees which had been planted with a far-off hope of some time, twenty years hence, filling up the gaps.

and Geoff, upon his back, made no remonstrance. The boy began to get a little confused by the turnings, by the landscape, by the effect of the wide atmosphere and the wind blowing in his face. He forgot almost that he was Geoff.

He was a little boy on his way to fairyland, riding on and on in a dream.

and yet it was no romance of the poets, but had a real existence, and was here, here by her side, in the monotonous little world which had never been touched by such a presence before.

She said to herself that it would never come to anything but misery and pain; yet even misery was better than nothingness, and he who had loved had lived.

To think that a quiet, middle-aged Englishwoman, a pattern of domestic duty, should think thus, and exult in her son’s inconceivable and, as she believed, unhappy passion, is almost too much to be credible. Yet so it was.

He is old enough to judge for himself. He will not accept guidance from me—ah, nor from you either, except in the one way.” She returned the pressure of her visitor’s hand, which had relaxed, with one that was as significant.

“It is not so easy to lay spirits when they are once raised,” she said.

Lady Markland gave her a sudden, alarmed, inquiring look; but Theo came forward at that moment with her cloak, and nothing could be said more.

She clasped her hands upon his arm, looking up at him with a sort of pitying pride. “She must think of it, Theo—everybody must think of it; ah yes, and even yourself, at the last.

Every mortal, everybody that is human⁠—oh, Theo, the most generous!⁠—looks for something, something in return.

”

Seven-and-twenty! ah, but that was not all! a wife already, to whom it was shame so much as to think of any other man.

A second marriage appeared to her, as to many women, a sort of atheism; a giving up of the religion of the immortal.

If marriage is a tie that endures forever, as it is every happy woman’s creed it is, how could she die, how dare ever to look in the face a man whom because he was dead—no, more than that, because a change had happened to …

Certainly he was very often out of it, and had to sit and stare and listen, which was very good for him but did not make him more affectionate towards Theo.

To feel “out of it” is not a comfortable, but it is a very maturing experience.

Geoff sat by and thought what a lot Theo knew; what a lot mamma knew; what an advantage grown-up people had; and how inattentive to other people’s feelings they were in using it. After luncheon, Theo frequently stayed to talk something over with Lady Markland;

She put up her hand as if to stop his mouth. “Oh, Theo, there are so many things which we must think of. It cannot be all happiness as you suppose. You are not thinking how many troublesome things I bring with me.”

“Let trouble be for tomorrow,” he cried; “nothing but joy on this white day.”

She looked at him with a shiver, yet a smile. “Ah, you are so young! your heart has no ghosts like mine.”

She looked at him with a shiver, yet a smile. “Ah, you are so young! your heart has no ghosts like mine.”

“Speak respectfully of my heart, for it is yours. The ghosts shall be laid and the troubles will fly away. What are ghosts to you and me? One may be subject to them, but two can face the world.”

“O dreamer,” she cried, but the reflection of the light in his face came into hers, almost against her will.

Both mother and daughter were very innocent; they would not think he meant anything except kindness. And if he could not take care of himself, it was a pity!

Thus in the course of his reflections Dick found means to persuade himself that there was nothing culpable in pursuing the way which was pleasant, which he wanted to pursue; a result which unfortunately very often follows upon reflection.

The best way in such an emergency is not to reflect, but to turn and fly at once. But that, he said to himself, not without some complaisance, would be impulse, which he had just concluded to be a very bad thing.

She had lived (for three weeks), and it was over. And now existence was all Afterwards. She found scarcely any time for her habitual occupations while she was in London, but now there would be time for everything.

Afterwards is long, when one is only twenty-four, and it requires a great deal of muslin work and benevolence to fill it up in a way that will be satisfactory to the soul

; but still, to ladies in the country it is a very well known state, and has to be faced, and lived through all the same. To a great many people life is all afternoon, though not in the sense imagined by the poet:

but still, to ladies in the country it is a very well known state, and has to be faced, and lived through all the same.

To a great many people life is all afternoon, though not in the sense imagined by the poet

:

To do our best and to think as little as possible, and things will come round! The absolute mind scorns the mild consolation. To Theo it would have been an irritation, a wrong, but Theo’s betrothed received it with humbler consciousness.

The sympathy calmed her, and that so moderate, so humble, voucher of experience that things come round.

Was it really so? was nothing so bad as it appeared? was it true that the way opened before you little by little in treading it, as she who had gone on so much farther on the path went on to say?

for the first time in his life forbidden to dart into his mother’s room at any moment, with a rush against the door, in full certainty that there could never be a time when she did not want him.

Self-pity is very strong and very simple in a child

, and to see, as it were, a little picture in his mind of a little boy, shut out from his mother, and wanted by no one, was more poignant still than the reality. The world was out of joint:

Dick got it at his club, where he was lingering though it was September, making little runs into the country, but avoiding his home, where he knew many questions would be put to him about what he was going to do.

It is a sad thing when there is nobody who cares what you are going to do⁠—but this is not the view of the matter most apparent to young men.

Dick very much disliked the question. It was not one to which he could give any reply.

And the poor bride, the unfortunate Miss Warrender, should with all her family have sworn everlasting feud with him, whereas it was known that Chatty took his part, and would say nothing but that they were very unfortunate both.

Women should not act like this, they should fly at each other’s throats, they should tear each other to pieces.

But if Chatty (backed up by her mother, it was said) showed undue indulgence, this was not the case with her brother and sister. Theo’s keen temper had taken up and resented the whole matter almost with violence.

“Let us not think of it till we get home, till we have a little calm and—time.”

“As if one could stop thinking till there is time!” said Chatty, with a faint smile.

“But I feel that this is a new light. I must think. What must be dropped? Am not I married to him, mother?”

She even sat down daily at the usual hour and took out her muslin work, a height of tranquillity to which it was indeed difficult to reach. But what woman could do, Chatty would do, and she had accomplished even that.

There are many in the world who must act and cannot sit still, but there are also some who, recognising action to be impossible, can wait with the whole passive force of their being, until that passiveness becomes almost sublime.

Chatty was of this kind. Presumably she did not torment herself hour by hour and day by day, as her mother did, by continual re-arguments of the whole question, but if she did, she kept the process altogether to herself.

From the moment when Geoff’s little voice had broken upon his angry reverie, Dick had begun to recover himself. “Chatty wants you so.” It was only a child that spoke.

But a child does not flatter or deceive, and this was true.

What Eustace Thynne thought, what anybody thought, was of little consequence. Chatty! The simple name brought a softening glow to Dick’s eye. Would she come and open to him?