The Sleeping Fury (11 page)

“The first missionary to penetrate into …?”

“Yes, into darkest Ebernovia. Take care not to be eaten alive.”, Charlotte was walking with her left hand in her muff, and at that moment she felt Alfred's hand slip through her bent arm. “I should miss you, Charlotte,” he added, with an intensity which was obvious under the absurdity of his words, “if you were eaten alive.”

Charlotte felt suddenly embarrassed and afraid. She tried to laugh, but it was a timid, unamused laugh. “Poor Mamma!” she said. “She's not really as hard as she sometimes seems.”

Alfred's hand dropped from her arm. “She has a heart of gold,” he replied warmly, “but, like many golden objects, it is kept in a padded case and very carefully guarded.”

That brief incident during her walk with Alfred troubled Charlotte. It had brought into their friendship something which, for her, clouded its candour, and the next time he invited her to go for a walk she accepted with misgiving. But her fears, it turned out, were groundless; Alfred was the same as he had always been, and they returned from the walk with their old relationship fully re-established.

• • • • • • • •

Early in March Lady Mardale was to go to stay with her sister in Devonshire, and so, on the first Friday in March, Charlotte's visit to Haughton came to an end. The brougham was at the door, and Alfred stood waiting for her in the hall. He had come to know Charlotte very well during that two months' visit. In the old days he had always liked her better than Beatrix, without knowing why. The gay, expansive Beatrix was much more obviously likeable than the quiet, restrained, immature girl which Charlotte had always seemed. She was still restrained but not so narrowly as in the old days; but he knew now why he had always liked her best, for, seeing her with his mother, and himself winning her slowly to a greater intimacy during the last two months, he had discovered her real excellence—the warm heart and the incorruptible honesty under the outer reserve. He loved, not only her mind and spirit, but her body also—the tall, shy dignity of her young
womanhood, and her face, pale under the dark brows and hair, with the wide, beautifully shaped mouth and the agate-coloured eyes.

As he stood there thinking of her and waiting for her, she came into the hall with his mother, and, as she turned to embrace the little old lady, he realised all her hidden tenderness of heart. But what he had not been able to discover was the nature of her feelings towards him. Had her shy withdrawal from him that day during their walk together meant no more than shyness, or had it meant distaste? He did not know, and his ignorance bewildered him. If only he were as certain of her feelings as of his own, how easy it would be. As it was, he was afraid of upsetting her, of frightening her away from him perhaps, if he spoke too soon, when a little patience and forbearance would allow her feelings to develop in their own time.

He followed her down the steps and into the brougham. As they drove off, she leaned forward and gazed out of the window.

“Dear, dear Haughton!” she murmured. “How I love it!”

He saw that her eyes were full of tears.

It seemed to Charlotte that she had been away a year. The pleasant, low-roomed house at Fording greeted her eyes with the freshness of something known long ago and rediscovered. She had never before realised how charming it was. Nor had she realised before how strong was the attachment between herself and her mother. She had found her waiting for her at the station, and when they reached home she returned to a house gay with flowers as if for a party—a great bowl of daffodils in her sitting-room and a blue pot of crocuses in her bedroom. Cousin Fanny hovered in the background, eager-eyed, and self-effacing, waiting till Lady Hadlow's excitement had died down; and Elizabeth and the other servants greeted her with such warmth that her heart glowed with gratitude.

“My dear child,” said her mother, breaking out afresh at dinner, “how nice it is to have you back! You've no idea how dull the house has been, hasn't it, Fanny, with no one but us two old women?”

After dinner, when Cousin Fanny had slipped away discreetly to her own room, Lady Hadlow began to chatter as if Charlotte's coming had released feelings pent up and accumulating ever since her departure. Charlotte discovered for the first time something pathetic in her mother's eager garrulity. “She's been starved for years,” she thought to
herself; “ever since Papa died and she came to live in the country.”

When Lady Hadlow's energy had to some extent exhausted itself, and there actually fell a pause between them, Charlotte, who had risen from the sofa where she had been sitting beside her mother and stationed herself by the fire with one elbow on the mantelpiece, turned and looked at her.

“I have something to tell you, Mamma; something rather surprising.”

Lady Hadlow glanced at her with a flash of misgiving. “Well, my dear?”

“As Alfred and I drove to the station this morning, he proposed to me.”

Lady Hadlow sat bolt upright and stared at Charlotte for a moment open-mouthed, as if she suspected her of perpetrating a monstrous hoax. Then she rose to her feet and rushed at Charlotte.

“My dear, dear Charlotte!” she cried, hugging her. “What marvellous news! Why, you strange creature … never a sign in your letters! And to think …!” She smothered her own words in kisses and caresses. Then, suddenly articulate again, she exclaimed: “Well, this makes up for everything.”

Charlotte understood
everything
to mean Beatrix.

“Then you think, Mamma,” she said, “that I ought to have accepted him?”

Lady Hadlow reacted like a steel spring. “
Accepted?
” She thrust Charlotte away from her, and, holding her by the elbows and staring into her eyes, she asked with fierce emphasis: “You don't mean to say, child, that you
refused
him?”

“I told him,” said Charlotte, “that I would think it over.”

“Think it over!” Lady Hadlow echoed Charlotte on a note of scornful despair. “Child, you amaze me! But what on earth
is
there to think over? Isn't it a magnificent match for you, and isn't Alfred the finest and dearest creature in the world?”

“Yes, Mamma, I really believe he is.”

“Well then?” Lady Hadlow had let go of Charlotte's elbows, and stood with palms open and expostulating, head thrown back, and eyebrows raised in exasperated interrogation.

“I don't think I'm in love with him, Mamma.”

“Oh, fiddledidee, Charlotte! Look at Beatrix! That's what happens when people think of nothing but love.”

Then, as if that explosion had eased her fury, her voice grew gentle again. “Don't imagine, my child, that I would urge you to marry a man you didn't like or respect. But you and Alfred have always been such friends. He loves you, doesn't he? Of course he does.”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“Then, depend upon it, Charlotte, you'll love him too in time. Love, in the best sense, is a thing that comes by degrees from mutual friendship and respect. Besides, we must be practical too, Charlotte. My income, as you know, is not large. I may feel obliged, in the end, to leave Beatrix her share of it, and then, when I die, you will only have five hundred a year. Five hundred a year is not much for a lady to live on, and, even if it was four times that sum, an old maid's life is to be avoided. Look at your
poor Cousin Fanny. You ought to face the possibility, Charlotte, that you may never receive another proposal. Certainly you will never receive one half so good. Gracious goodness! You are asked to become Lady Mardale, and mistress of Haughton, and you reply that you
will think it over
.”

Charlotte glanced at her mother with a smile of surprise. “Do you know, Mamma, it never occurred to me that if I married Alfred I should be Lady Mardale.”

Lady Hadlow flung up her hands. “Bless the child!” Then she burst out laughing. “In some ways, Charlotte,” she said, “you are very unlike your Mamma.”

• • • • • • • •

Charlotte had promised Alfred to think it over, and she had thought it over as she sat with a closed book on her knee in the train between Templeton and Paddington, and she had come to the decision that she would write and accept Alfred next day. If she had not already made up her mind, she would not have told her mother that evening, for she knew that her mother would instantly throw such a weight into the scales that it would be almost impossible for her to weigh the question soberly and carefully herself. She had found it very difficult to make up her mind, for, though she had never been in love, she knew instinctively that, in spite of her warm friendship for Alfred, she was not in love with him. She liked him, loved him, indeed, with that friendly love which is free of passion, and, now that she had recovered from the shock of his confession, she felt
deeply grateful to him for his love. But her feelings for him had nothing of that intense, secret rapture which the thought of that tall, dark-eyed Christopher whom she had imagined for her lover, had awakened in her; and, thinking of him, the still unmet lover, her heart ached for something which, though she had never found it, she now profoundly felt that she was going to lose for ever. But perhaps, she told herself, no one ever had such feelings for a real man; perhaps they were merely a girlish romanticism which one grew out of. Was not Alfred the dearest friend she had, and would it not be absurd to sacrifice his love and companionship to this vague, romantic dream? If she refused him she would very likely be throwing away her one chance of love, and she was desperately in need of love. How was she to discover the truth? Who could tell her? Nobody. She felt that in such a case as this her mother, even Lady Mardale, could be of no use to her; and, sitting there in the train and gazing with unseeing eyes at the wheeling landscape, she wept silently, drying her eyes from time to time with her pocket-handkerchief.

But before she reached London she had begun to feel calmer, and on the journey from London to Fording she calmly and sadly made up her mind.

When she had told her mother of Alfred's proposal, she had not told her that she had already decided to accept him, because she wanted to sleep on her resolve and consider it again in the cold light of morning before she wrote her letter. But when, after getting into bed, she tried to ponder the question
once more, she found that she was emotionally too tired to do so. She was possessed by a cold recklessness which defied thought, “My mind is made up,” she thought. “Why should I go on tormenting myself? I am going to marry Alfred.”

• • • • • • • •

She awoke early next morning in the same mood of calm decision, but now she no longer felt chilled and sad. Her gratitude to Alfred and her sense of his goodness filled her with a desire to make him happy, and she felt now that she too would be happy with him. A hundred details which, in her emotional agitation yesterday, she had left out of account, came now to reassure her. How wonderful it would be to live at her beloved Haughton, and to escape at last from the control of others into full-grown independence ! It would be invigorating, too, to become suddenly a person of some importance, and still more extraordinary, a person for whom her own mother would involuntarily feel a certain respect. She imagined her mother coming to stay at Haughton, a mere guest in the house where she herself was mistress. The thing seemed so incongruous, so unbelievable, and so comical, that she smiled to herself as she lay in bed.

Then her mind ran off on random dreams and recollections, fragments of talk, real and imaginary, with her mother, and Alfred, and Lady Mardale. She recalled her talk with Alfred about Beatrix and her mother during that walk a few weeks ago, and then suddenly, in a flash of inspiration which was more typical of the artful Beatrix than of Charlotte,
she saw a miraculous opportunity of dragooning her mother into forgiveness of Beatrix.

• • • • • • • •

The presence of Cousin Fanny at breakfast prevented Lady Hadlow from at once attacking, as she was burning to do, the subject of Alfred's proposal; but as soon as it was over, and she and Charlotte found themselves for a moment alone together in the dining-room, she opened fire point-blank.

“Charlotte! Listen to me! Go at once, before you do anything else, and write and accept Alfred.”

Charlotte seemed to consider the suggestion. Then she looked her mother in the eye. “Listen, Mamma! I will strike a bargain with you. If I write to Alfred, as you seem to wish, will you write to Beatrix and invite them to come and stay here at Easter?”

Lady Hadlow shot a sharp, enquiring look at Charlotte. “Come, child! Be serious!” she said.

“But I am serious, Mamma.”

“Then I must say I never heard anything so callous.”

“Callous, Mamma? When I am urging you to forgive your own daughter?”

“Callous,” corrected Lady Hadlow, “because you are ready—or you pretend to be—to allow irrelevant matters to determine a very serious question, instead of obeying your own feelings.”

“But weren't you just now, Mamma, trying to make me obey
your
feelings?”

Lady Hadlow ignored the point. “I wonder
what Alfred would say,” she remarked pensively, “if he heard he was being used as a sort of bait.”

“I happen to know,” said Charlotte, “that if he heard what the bait was for, he would be delighted.”

Lady Hadlow weakened. “Alfred thinks, you mean, that I ought to______?”

The weakness was only temporary. In a moment her face had recovered its usual firmness. “That is a matter entirely between Beatrix and me.”

“And isn't my engagement, Mamma, a matter entirely between Alfred and
me?
”

Lady Hadlow raised her eyebrows, shocked, yet amused in spite of herself. “You're very pert to-day, Charlotte. However, you must, of course, make your own decision as regards Alfred; and mine, as regards Beatrix rests with me.”