The Sleeping Fury (4 page)

And she had been right. She told herself even now that she had been right. It had been the merest chance that, when it was already too late, she had
actually met the man who had wakened into vivid life the vague romantic dream. Yes, just a desolating mischance. If she had refused Alfred, the course of her life would have been different; she would not have gone to live at Haughton, and Maurice Wainwright would never have crossed her path.

Such were the thoughts and memories that drifted along the stream of her consciousness during the days that followed the garden-party at the Penning-tons'. One afternoon, when her mind was full of the past, she had pulled out an old photograph-album from a heap of books which were piled under a table in a corner of the morning-room, and, drawing up a chair to the table, she had remained there, in that uninhabited corner of the large, airy room, turning over the pages. She had become so engrossed that her husband's voice startled her: she had not even heard the door open.

“Hallo, Charlotte, what are you doing over there? I didn't see you.”

“And I didn't hear you. I was just looking at this old album.”

He walked over, and stood by her chair with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the album.

“Just look at Mamma,” she said, glancing up at him. “Mamma ought to have ruled a nation, not merely two rather stupid daughters. How well she brought us up.”

“Yes, too well, we used to think.”

“That's what Beatrix once said.”

“Your mother is a wonderful woman, but as a ruler she hadn't, I'm afraid, enough regard for the
liberty of the subject. You and Beatrix, as girls, were little more than shadows of your mother.”

“Well, you can hardly blame her for that. She is ten times the woman that either Beatrix or I am even now.”

Lord Mardale stooped over her shoulder, turned a page of the album, and pointed to anotherphotograph.

Charlotte Mardale regarded herself of thirty-one years ago with a grim smile. “What a fright!” she said.

“Fright, indeed!” he answered. “I'm afraid you're a little prejudiced, my dear. If you weren't, you would see that she is a very handsome creature. The only thing wrong with her is that she's not awake.”

Charlotte glanced up at her husband. “No,” she said, “I was not awake then. How old was I?”

“Nineteen. There's the date—1894. ‘Charlotte Hadlow, 1894.' You signed it at my request. Don't you remember?”

Lady Mardale examined the signature. “Even the writing,” she said, “is a child's writing. And there's Beatrix. She's not quite awake either; though more so than I. So you think that Mamma prevented us from waking?”

“It was rather the fashion, wasn't it, among parents of those days to discourage wakefulness?”

“You've always been very good to Mamma, Alfred.”

Lord Mardale smiled. “I was always very fond of your mother, Charlotte; more, I think, than you and Beatrix were in the old days. But, after all, I could afford to be; I was independent of her.”

Lady Mardale raised surprised but not indignant eyes. “Alfred, what
do
you mean?”

“Well, you two were afraid of her. I wasn't.”

Lady Mardale nodded. “Yes,” she admitted, “we were.” She paused, and then added with conviction, “And a good thing, too.”

“You think so?” Lord Mardale smiled. “Is Sylvia afraid of
you?”

“No,” said Lady Mardale; “but, as it happens, it's not necessary that she should be.”

“Not necessary? Sylvia is too good to need it, you mean?”

“Oh, certainly she's good; but it isn't so much a matter of goodness. Beatrix and I were good enough; too good, I sometimes think. It's more a matter of being sensible. We two were really rather stupid girls; I especially. We had to have good sense knocked into us, and that's exactly what Mamma's rule did.”

“Whereas Sylvia, fortunately, has good sense ready made, so that we are spared the uncomfortable process of knocking it in?”

Lady Mardale smiled. “Yes,” she said; “as it happens, she has.”

“And she has it, my dear,” said her husband, “precisely because she's
not
afraid of us. Remember, the cart always comes
after
the horse.”

Lady Mardale did not reply. She turned another page of the album.

“Dear me!” she said, as if to herself, gazing incredulously at her own photograph again, a photograph taken eight years after the previous one,

“That one is the best you ever had taken,” said Lord Mardale. “You were twenty-seven then.”

Lady Mardale still gazed at herself. She had not seen that photograph for many years.

“Still rather a fright,” she remarked detachedly. But she was recalling the fact that she had given one of these to Maurice. It was very like what she had been then, but how utterly different from the face she saw in her looking-glass every morning nowadays; and it struck her suddenly that if Maurice were to return now he would not know her. A pang shot through her heart. She closed the album and rose from the table.

Lady Hadlow, with her two daughters, Beatrix and Charlotte, and Fanny Hadlow, an impoverished cousin of her husband's who acted as their governess, had lived in a pleasant country house on the edge of the village of Fording. Lady Hadlow called it a small house because she had previously been accustomed to life on a large scale, and she called the garden of three acres a small garden. Her husband had held a high position in the Foreign Office, and during his lifetime they had lived for the most part in London. His early death had left her and her two little girls without income enough to keep up the London house, and so she had removed to Fording, feeling that reduced circumstances were less noticeable in the country than in the town. She herself was one of the Ebernoes of Tetford, and when she married Robert Hadlow her family had felt that she might have done better, until his rapid rise to distinction, and the K.C.B. and K.C.M.G. that accompanied it, had enabled them to revise their view. Life in London had suited her perfectly, for she was an energetic woman, of a sharp though limited intelligence, fond of society, and an excellent hostess. She loved to feel important, and during Sir Robert's lifetime she
was
important. She was a special favourite with her husband's chief, who often discussed official matters in her presence, and even
invited her opinion. She had other admirable and useful qualities, for she was not an Ebernoe of Tetford for nothing. Like all her family, she was a true Victorian—one of those fortunate creatures who know absolutely, and without the smallest possibility of compromise, what things are done and what are not done. Nor was this knowledge confined to social matters; it covered the whole field of morals, religion, private behaviour, and even private opinion. It was an invaluable gift, for it enabled her to lay down the law with absolute conviction, and therefore without the smallest scruple. Though she had a warm heart, and was deeply attached to her two girls, she never indulged her feelings when it would have been weakness to do so; and, although it often cost her a pang to refrain, the certainty that she was right made that pang brief and easy to bear.

The change from the busy, social, important life in London to a quiet and comparatively insignificant existence in the country was at first very painful to Lady Hadlow. She felt once more, as she had at first been made to feel when she married, that she had fallen in social status. Her only consolation now was that the invitations to stay at large and pleasant houses did not cease with the death of her husband, and so she was not, she felt, quite shut out from society. The chief of these consolations was the Mardales. The Mardales were old friends of the Ebernoes, and when she had married Robert Hadlow they had extended their friendship to him. How nice of them that had been! Every summer she and Robert had been invited to Haughton for a fortnight, and, now that she was a widow, she and the children were
pressed to prolong their visit to a month. She was unaffectedly devoted to the Mardales, but her delight in her yearly visit to them was undeniably heightened by the fact that they were members of the English aristocracy. Lady Hadlow had a profound veneration for blood. Aristocracy, for her, covered a multitude of sins. Apart from individual character, there was, for her, a virtue in blue blood. Though she was naturally warm-hearted, and had a sincere regard for individuals of almost every class, and though she would never tolerate irregularities even in an aristocrat, nevertheless she held that in some subtle and almost mystical sense the blue-blooded were the elect of God. The fact that the Mardales were her intimate friends saved her self-respect and helped her over a very painful period. Besides, she loved them, and she loved Haughton, which had, after all these years, come to seem almost a second home to her; and a home now, when Fording seemed to her anything but a home, was an immense consolation.

No; Fording at first was certainly not a home. For her first year there she was very unhappy, and she shut herself up in her unhappiness. Village affairs, as compared with national affairs, seemed to her so utterly trivial that at first she could not bring herself to be interested in them, though in later years she consented to become the dictator—it would have been inaccurate to call her the chairman—of certain village committees. Meanwhile her unemployed energies turned themselves upon her two daughters: she ruled them and her small household as in happier days she had ruled the
British Empire. Her rule was a strict one. If she had been a morose or ill-tempered woman it would have been easier to resist it, but she was nothing of the kind. She was lively, energetic, and affectionate, and she always took it for granted that her commands would be instantly and cheerfully obeyed. When they were not, when she was forced to exercise severity, that severity lasted only until it had attained its object. She never bore malice. Her cook, her waiting-maid, and her head housemaid had been in her service ever since her marriage. They adored her. As for her daughters, Beatrix, who was two years older than Charlotte, did not always submit to her mother's rule with the docility of Charlotte and the household staff. From time to time she would break out into what was known as “one of Beatrix's tantrums.” It never occurred to Charlotte to wonder whether there was any reason for these outbreaks; for her they were merely periodic occurrences which required explanation, like Mamma's headaches. Beatrix so obviously gained nothing by them that Charlotte never regarded them as having any practical object, such as the overthrow of Mamma's rule. After a display of shrieking and stamping, Beatrix was locked into her room by Mamma, Cousin Fanny being powerless on these occasions. Thereupon an awed restraint took possession of the household, and Mamma, went about the house with an appearance of high rectitude and a mouth which had become very straight and very narrow. When, after some hours, Beatrix had cooled down, the constraint was lifted from the household, Mamma's mouth resumed its normal shape, and Beatrix herself
returned to her usual position in the family, having achieved nothing whatsoever. Charlotte herself had no temper, and sometimes, during one of Beatrix's tantrums, Mamma would address her with a sigh of relief as “My good little girl.” Whenever this happened, Charlotte was aware of an uncomfortable sense of over-virtuousness. Nobody ever spoke of Beatrix's tantrums except when they were actually occurring, and Beatrix herself never referred to them at all. As she grew older they became less spectacular. At fifteen she no longer stamped and howled, and was no longer locked into her room. She retired there voluntarily now, after bursting into tears and calling her mother a beast, for which, at Lady Hadlow's request, she ceremoniously apologised afterwards.

To hear Beatrix call their mother a beast never failed to shock Charlotte, but the shock was not altogether an unpleasant one. There was something thrilling, almost bracing, in its effect. But even now Beatrix never spoke to Charlotte of her feelings on these occasions, nor ever discussed or criticised their mother, and it was not till Beatrix was eighteen, and Charlotte herself sixteen, that she accidentally discovered, to her immense astonishment, that Beatrix actually dared to flout Mamma's sacred rule. The law-breaking was, of course, done in secret; externally the family equilibrium remained as perfect as ever; but to Charlotte the discovery was nothing short of a cataclysm. There was for her something terrible, and at the same time enthralling, in the realisation that Beatrix, her own sister, actually in cold blood, and not merely in the momentary heat of
a tantrum, disobeyed their mother, and regarded her as fallible. It brought to her a sense of unforseen release. From that moment, life, for her, was different.

It was the spring of 1892. A few months earlier two old friends of Lady Hadlow's, a Mr. and Mrs. Winchmere, had paid them a visit. The Winchmeres were great readers; it was from them that Lady Hadlow learnt what new books were worth reading. As for Beatrix and Charlotte, they regarded them as infallible in all matters of literature and art, and it was one of their greatest treats when, in the evenings, Mr. Winchmere read Dickens or Thackeray aloud to them, or Mrs. Winchmere, who had a lovely voice, softly declaimed Byron or Lord Tennyson. On this occasion the Winchmeres were full of a new novel which had appeared some months before; its name was
Tess of the D' Urbervilles.
“A great work of art!” Mr. Winchmere had said to Lady Hadlow; “undoubtedly a great work of art!” And he had gone on to speak of the pathos and tragedy of the story, and the profound sense of the English countryside which filled the book, until it assumed in Charlotte's mind a solemn richness which she longed to experience. When the Winchmeres had gone away they sent the book to Lady Hadlow, and Beatrix and Charlotte watched her every evening as she sat absorbed in it, expecting her to break into appreciative remarks, as she so often did, and to read passages aloud; a habit which, when they themselves were immersed in books of their own, they found exceedingly trying. But now they both longed for her to do so. But she did not do so. She read on in silence for a week, and at the end of the week she made the
book into a parcel. “A powerful work,” she remarked, as she folded the brown paper in at each end of the parcel, “but quite unsuitable for you girls!”