The Sleeping Fury (10 page)

But Lady Hadlow was full of confidence now. “Undoubtedly,” she said, “the worst is over. Dear, good old Lord Mardale! How thankful we ought to be, Charlotte!'

A week later, with no warning, came the news of his death.

• • • • • • • •

Though Charlotte had ceased to be a child, she had hitherto retained a child's confidence, in life. Life, for her, was good; love and happiness were as secure and certain as dawn and nightfall. But now she knew that life could be cruel; that, however good she might be, however much she might pray
to God to protect those she loved, life might at any moment strike a fatal blow at her love and her happiness, and change disastrously the whole of her existence. Only now she knew how devoted she had been to Lord Mardale. After Mamma and Beatrix and Lady Mardale, she loved him more than anyone else in the world. Haughton, and the visits to Haughton, would never be quite the same again. She became for the first time tragically conscious of the people and things she loved as of things she might lose at any minute, that she inevitably must lose sooner or later, and her heart clung to them with a passionate fondness. But these changes occurred in the depths of her being. Outwardly she did not change; her manner and behaviour lost nothing of the quiet reserve which made those who did not know her intimately believe that she was without deep feelings. She felt now painfully excluded from Haughton. The desolating change of Lord Mardale's death had befallen little Lady Mardale and Alfred, and she was not there to share it with them. They had shut themselves away from her; they would be different when she met them again.

It was a melancholy Christmas at Fording this year. Last year it had been overshadowed by the absence of Beatrix, but at least they had achieved some sort of cheerfulness, and had had the customary holly and turkey and plum-pudding. But this year they didn't decorate the house, and, though the servants had a goose and a plum-pudding, Charlotte and her mother agreed that they themselves, except for the giving of presents, would not keep Christmas at all. Even Cousin Fanny was away. Lady Hadlow
and Charlotte spent the day alone together except for the morning and evening expeditions to church.

• • • • • • • •

Early in the New Year, Lady Hadlow received a letter from Alfred. Having run through it in silence, she read it aloud to Charlotte.

“ ‘I wonder if you would spare Charlotte to come and stay with my mother.' ” Charlotte's heart leapt with joy. “ ‘She is bearing up very bravely, but she is very lonely and depressed, and I feel sure that if Charlotte—who, as you know, was always her favourite—would come and be with her for a while, and look after her, it would do her a great deal of good. When I suggested it to her this morning, her face brightened at once. I am sure you will understand, my dear Lady Hadlow, why I do not ask you to come. My fear is that to have such an old friend with her now, and one with whom she had so many memories in common, would make her dwell too much on old times. This will be a relief to her later on, but at present I am sure it would be too painful. But a companion so much younger, and devoted to my mother as Charlotte is, would make her comfortable in a hundred ways, and also take her out of herself, which is what she especially needs at present. When will Charlotte come? The sooner she can arrange it, the happier we shall be.' ”

Lady Hadlow at once became full of arrangements, and Charlotte, feeling that her sad exclusion from Haughton was at last ended, responded eagerly.

“I think we could get you off to-morrow, child.”

“Certainly, Mamma. Shall we send Alfred a
telegram at once, saying I shall arrive by the usual train?”

Lady Hadlow had a moment of misgiving. “But, my dear child, you've never travelled alone.”

“Then it's time I began, Mamma.”

“And the crossing of London …”

“Can safely be left to the cab.”

For the first time for weeks they both laughed. They felt almost cheerful.

“Well, at least I shall give the guard half a crown to look after you as far as London.”

Charlotte acquiesced. If half a crown would set her mother's scruples at rest, it would be well spent.

There was a strange unreality for Charlotte in that winter journey to Haughton. The land was bleak and lifeless. Under a grey sky that threatened snow the sad, frost-bound country wheeled black and grey, warmed only at rare intervals by the rusty brown of bracken and beech-thickets. She half dreaded and half longed for her arrival, and those conflicting emotions held her in a kind of limbo, a state of suspended animation like the state of the country through which the train was whirling her. She had taken a book with her, and read it deliberately all the way to London, sometimes forgetting herself in it and sometimes reading page after page without assimilating a single word. And, when she had crossed London and taken her place in the train at Paddington, she forced herself to continue her reading, pausing only to take a sandwich out of the packet on her knee. But the sight of the little train at Wilmore brought her back to reality with a stab of pain, and on that last stage of her journey she read no more, but looked out of the window as they had always done on their journeys to Haughton.

How piercingly familiar, and yet how changed the country was! She had never seen it in winter before, and the sight of it lying colourless, frozen, and dead, at such a time as this, was, for her, a symbol of the death which had come to Haughton.
Wichford, Shelling, Lavington, Abbot's Randale, King's Randale, were all changed; their greeting was like the pale, drawn smile of one who has been long ill. At each halt, steam loomed up in a cloud from under the carriages, blurring Charlotte's view of the station. One or two people with pinched faces passed the window or stood on the platform stamping their feet. The mere at Lannock was frozen to a waste of black flint. The swans were still there, but there was no water for them to swim in, and they stood on the ice under a bare willow-tree, looking ungainly and top-heavy on their crooked black legs. At Rimple the river was still flowing, but there was a crust of thin, frosted ice along its margins, and long icicles hung from the mill-wheel. When the train steamed out of Annet Brook, Charlotte's heart began to beat violently. Her state of limbo was almost at an end; in a moment she would be at Templeton, and then she would no longer be able to hold life and feeling at bay: they would have to be faced and braved. But she sat still, waiting listlessly, until she heard the sharp, quick rush of the bridge overhead. Then, shaking off her numbness, she stood up and opened the window.

As she did so, she had a sudden memory of old Lord Mardale, smart and upright on the box of the yellow-wheeled dogcart; Kester and Phil standing with ears pricked, and Kester impatiently clinking his bit. It was unbelievable that he had gone, vanished for ever; that she would never see him again. Nobody would greet her at the station now. Alfred would be with his mother. They would have sent a closed carriage to meet her; Walter, the
groom, would be on the look-out for her on the platform.

The white palings trickled across the windows, trickled slower and slower, till they stopped. She scanned the platform, distinguishing nobody. Then she saw that Alfred was coming towards her. A warm sense of relief came over her. He smiled and waved his hand, and Charlotte noticed, as she always noticed when she met him again, how much finer and stronger and more vivid his face was than her memory of it. His black coat and hat showed up the healthy colour of his clean-shaven face and the warm golden-brown of the hair at his temples. His fine, steadfast, blue-grey eyes looked up at her now as he opened the door of her carriage, and she realised for the first time that he was beautiful with a beauty that was at the same time austere and profoundly human. Her heart warmed with friendliness.

Their greeting was quiet; they exchanged brief, commonplace phrases. But words did not matter; each was aware of a warmth of friendship in the other which had no need of words. The air struck raw and chill after the warmth of the railway-carriage, and they hurried out of the station to the brougham which was waiting for them. Charlotte had dreaded the first meetings both with Alfred and with Lady Mardale. She had felt that the change which death had brought to them all would produce in them a feeling of repression and embarrassment. But at the meeting with Alfred there had been none, and during the drive to Haughton he spoke freely and serenely of his mother and the death of his father.

“Your coming will be a great comfort to her, Charlotte,” he said, laying his hand affectionately over hers.

But Charlotte still dreaded the meeting with Lady Mardale. She dreaded the change which she knew she would find in her, and she was afraid that if she showed the grief and sympathy which she felt she would upset her, and if she hardened her heart and hid her feelings, she would seem not to care and to be withholding the love which Lady Mardale so much needed.

Her heart sank as they turned into the lodge gates, and the mass of the many-windowed house, like a great, finely wrought casket, began to show through the leafless boughs and twigs of the lime-avenue. How bare and starved the grounds looked, denuded of all their summer greenery, their colours shrunk away to mere black and grey! But the house itself, with its mellow golden stone and its shining windows, looked warm and rich even at such a bleak time as this.

The brougham drew up, Alfred helped her out, and together they climbed the steps to the front door. Where would Lady Mardale be, Charlotte wondered? Upstairs in her little boudoir perhaps, sitting there in her widow's black, waiting. How different from the days when she came out, small and exquisite, to greet them on the doorstep! Charlotte sadly entered the hall. After the cold light of out of doors it seemed to her at first quite dark. A great log fire crackled on the hearth, filling the dark cavern with flickering red lights. The air was full of the sweet, heart-searching scent of hyacinths, and for one unreasoning moment Charlotte, her mind
oppressed with the forlorn sense of Lord Mardale's absence, believed that it was the scent of the funeral flowers.

She awoke to reality to see that a small black figure was hurrying towards her, and in a moment she and little Lady Mardale were in one another's arms. They embraced in silence, and then Lady Mardale, in a voice that seemed softer and remoter than the old voice, greeted Charlotte, telling her how glad she was to have her there. A footman carrying a large lighted lamp moved across the hall and set the lamp on a table, filling the hall with soft golden light. Charlotte gazed at the little woman beside her. How small and frail she looked in her black! It seemed as if she too, like the country through which she had travelled all day, had faded under the winter, abandoning the delicate, restrained colours which had been hers before—the dove grey, the lilac, the blue of her eyes, and the pink of her small, beautiful face; for her face and hands, emerging from the black dress, were very white, and her eyes, under the shadow of the brows, were black. She appeared to have become a very old woman. Charlotte's heart bled at the sight of her. But the old sweetness and gentleness and the wonderful dignity were still there, and, behind her grief, the old serenity which nothing would ever shake. More than ever Charlotte realised how precious this little saint-like woman was to her. “If it had been her,” she thought, “instead of Lord Mardale!” And it seemed to her that such a loss would have been unendurable.

• • • • • • • •

The days and the weeks passed silently and uneventfully in the great empty house. At the old summertime visits to Haughton the house, though always quiet, had seemed populous, and full of light and movement, even when, as occasionally happened, there were no other visitors than the Hadlows. Now it seemed empty and silent; but its emptiness came not from the absence of Beatrix and Lady Hadlow. It was the disappearance of one old man, and the knowledge that he would never come back, that so denuded the place. Lady Mardale, Alfred, and Charlotte inhabited, as it were, a smaller house inside the large one, for they took their meals in a room which during the Hadlows' summer visits, had sometimes been used as a breakfast-room. The large dining-room, because of the cold and the smallness of their party, was abandoned. So, too, was the great drawing-room; their drawing-room now was the morning-room, a pleasant room less than half its size, on the east side of the house; and in the evenings they sat in Alfred's study. Charlotte's days were spent in writing letters for Lady Mardale, reading to her, and accompanying her on short walks in the grounds, and in being for her what a daughter might have been at such a time. And often in the afternoon, between luncheon and tea-time, Charlotte and Alfred would take long walks in the country.

It was a happy time for Charlotte. To be with Lady Mardale and to feel that she was of help to her was happiness itself; and the walks with Alfred—those smart, invigorating walks during which their relationship, as if in sympathy with the rhythm and
glow of their bodies, achieved the harmony and candour of perfect friendship—were unfailingly delightful too. Their talk flowed easily from theme to theme; they talked of friends and relations and books, of mutual reminiscences, of Alfred's intention to take the living of Templeton, of which the Mardales had the gift, as soon as it fell vacant, which was likely to happen soon. The business incidental to Lord Mardale's death and the care of the Haughton estate had made his presence at Haughton indispenable, and obliged him to resign his London curacy.

They talked, too, of Beatrix. “Isn't it time,” said Alfred one day, “that your mother was converted?”

“To convert Mamma is more easily said than done,” said Charlotte.” You pointed out yourself last summer that Mamma is an Ebernoe. Are you prepared to undertake the conversion of an Ebernoe?”

“I shall certainly try when you both come next summer, and so, I am sure, will my mother. Your business, Charlotte, is to prepare the ground.”