CHAPTER XV
It was a long time until Carrie saw Phil again.
‘Master Phil hath gone off to the country to establish his ’ealth,’ Patty said, and it seemed as though he would never return again, Carrie thought; for often as she sighed for her little companion, he did not come, and finally Patty, who seemed to have occult communication with the household in St. James’ Square, informed her that Phil had gone to school. Patty wept as she gave this bit of information, and Carrie, partly, it must be confessed, out of the imitative faculty, wept also at the news. Time, they say, dries every tear—perhaps it does—certainly Carrie’s were soon dried; but she remembered Phil long and tenderly for all that, and used to ask Patty at intervals if she was never going to see him again. Patty always answered these questions with a burst of tears, which response had such a sobering effect upon Carrie that she at last feared to make the inquiry. But one day, fully a year from the date of Phil’s accident, as Patty and Carrie walked round the Square together they met a tall lad, having the shining eyes of Phil, but changed, it seemed, in every other way beyond recognition. He was walking along with another boy, and passed by Carrie with an unregarding stare. Carrie stood still, stamped her little foot in anger, and turned to Patty for sympathy.
‘ ’Twas Phil, Patty!’ she cried, ‘and he passed me without knowing me!’
Patty gave her head an upward toss.
‘Pay no heed to him, Miss Carrie; the men are all alike—not one to mend another,’ she said scornfully. They were passing at that moment the door whence the magnificent Peter had been wont to appear.
Carrie, however, was not so easily answered. She followed Phil’s retreating figure as it disappeared round the Square, before she spoke again, then she said, with great decision—
‘There goes my husband that is to be, Patty.’
‘Lor’! have a care what you say in the streets, Miss Carrie!’ cried Patty, with a delighted giggle.
Thus Phil passed out of Carrie’s life for the time being.
It was not an age of learned women, so though Carrie began her education about this time, she was not the disquieting receptacle of knowledge that modern childhood sometimes is in our progressive age. Carrie learned to read and write, she could do a little arithmetic, and began to sew a sampler of intricate stitchery; but she could not analyse her native tongue, or speak in any other, and I fear even her knowledge of geography was very hazy. Indeed, if the truth must be told about Carrie, she was entirely unintellectual in every way. Lessons were nothing but a pain to her, and as in these days a woman was not thought to add to her charms by wisdom, Carrie was not compelled to pursue her studies after she had attained to a certain very easy standard.
She was compelled, however, to learn all the housekeeping arts, and Mrs. Shepley expected nothing short of perfection in this branch of education. By the time Carrie was thirteen there was a good deal of friction between the mother and daughter. For Carrie, to her want of intellectuality, added a supreme carelessness, which was agonising to her conventional parent. If she had been an incapable girl it would have been different; but Carrie was far from incapable. When she chose, no girl of her age could accomplish any household task better. Yet, where it was a question of pleasure, Carrie would fling aside every duty and amuse herself without a thought. She had indeed a whole-heartedness of joy in living, that would have reconciled almost any one except Mrs. Shepley to her heedless ways. But to her they were unpardonable, and the worst of it all was, that Carrie’s father encouraged her in her careless habits—making it almost useless for her to remonstrate.
How it would have fared between the mother and daughter later in life is hard to say. They were both spared this test. For soon after Carrie’s fourteenth birthday was past, Mrs. Shepley fell ill of a lingering disorder, and lay for many a long month between life and death. Carrie grew less careless in these months of anxiety, grew quieter also, poor child—never shut the doors noisily, and almost forgot how to whistle, while Sebastian went about with a very grave face. Now that Emma was so ill, he recognised what a good wife she had been to him in spite of all her failings, and realised too what it would mean to him should he be left with Carrie motherless on his hands. Whatever Emma’s faults had been, she had been a careful mother, and had given a zealous watchfulness to everything concerning Carrie that he never could have time to give.
It must have been weighing on Emma’s mind also, this matter of how Carrie was to get on without her, but she looked at it in a characteristic light. Almost with her latest breath she called Sebastian to her bedside to pray him to be particular about Carrie’s associates.
‘Let Charlotte Mallow see that Carrie makes no friends out of her own situation in life—beneath her, in fact.’
‘Lord, Emma, the girl’s all right. I am here to protect her,’ said Sebastian.
‘ ’Tis the old trouble, Sebastian—you do not see what I mean.—Ah! let her grow up a gentlewoman.’
‘I’ll do my best, Emma,’ he said.
‘I pray you to send her to church each Lord’s Day,’ pursued Mrs. Shepley. ‘Send her with Charlotte; you have ever been careless of the Church and its mysteries.’
‘To church she shall go,’ said Sebastian—‘if that will make her a gentlewoman,’ he added to himself.
So Mrs. Shepley, with her little gentilities and punctilios, her tactless ways and her zeal for ordinances, went the way of all flesh.
Sebastian was not broken-hearted, though the house felt empty enough, he thought, without poor Emma; and Carrie, after the first solemn months of mourning were over, missed her mother sadly little.
She lived a perfectly happy unconstrained existence, which accorded well with her simple nature. Sebastian, who was nothing if not truthful, sent her to church weekly with Lady Mallow, and these were the dreariest hours of Carrie’s otherwise unclouded childhood. Each Sunday morning Lady Mallow appeared with horrible regularity, driving in a singularly gloomy-looking coach, which seemed to Carrie to swallow her up as she entered it. In silence they drove through the crowded streets (which on Sunday had a way of looking very gloomy too), and the coach drew up before the door of that sad little building, the church of St. Mary Minories. Lady Mallow occupied one of those carved oak pews which to this day you may see mouldering away in the church, and there in its genteel obscurity Carrie sat, with a sinking heart, counting the slow-passing minutes till she could breathe the fresher air of the everyday world again. Patty had once told her that ‘persons of quality was buried in ’eaps under the floor in St. Mary Minories,’ and Carrie’s imagination hovered over this gruesome thought. She somehow connected that damp old smell which clings about the church with the ‘heaps an’ heaps of persons of quality’ lying in their shrouds under the chancel, and each day as she asserted her belief in the resurrection of the body, found herself wondering how the poor dead people would ever work their way up through those slabs of stone. So Carrie required all the fortitude and cheerfulness which she inherited from her father to sustain the ordeal of Sunday’s gloom.
Service once over, however, she stepped into the auntly coach with a much lighter heart. The drive home seemed an altogether different matter from the drive to church, and each step of the way Carrie’s spirits mounted higher and higher, till, when the coach drew up before the door, she could have danced for joy. Bidding a decorous adieu to her aunt, Carrie was handed out by the man-servant, and mounted the steps to the door with the greatest propriety. But it was well that the departing rumble of the wheels hid from Lady Mallow’s ear that whoop of joy which Carrie uttered as she raced into the parlour and flung her arms round her father’s neck, crying out,
‘ ’Tis done—done for another week, sir!’
Mrs. Shepley had never permitted such demonstrative greetings—they were indeed considered a great breach of decorum in those days; but I fear many polite rules were broken in upon by Carrie and her father, who neither of them cared as much as they should have done for the generally received ideas of the society of their day.
Such good friends were Carrie and her father that the girl sought for no friends of her own age; she went about everywhere with Sebastian when he had leisure to escort her, and when he was busy she amused herself at home, very well content with life and all things. In her father’s company she visited many a strange scene; she would go with him to the hospitals sometimes, and—shade of Mrs. Shepley!—how many a sight she saw in these unsavoury tents of disease! Then Carrie entertained all her father’s friends (those motley friends her poor mother had objected to so much), and in many ways grew up with more of the manners of a boy than of a girl. She was singularly free from the sillinesses and affectations of early girlhood, having heard no talk at all of lovers or admiration, nor having ever entered into rivalry with other women in the matter of looks and charm. Carrie was serenely unconscious that the world held a rival for her; she was the first with all the men of her own little world, and as yet she had not gone beyond it. If she compared her own looks with those of other girls, it was merely from curiosity quite untouched by jealous feeling. The fact was only distantly dawning upon her that she was fair beyond the common; just now she took it as her due from Fortune’s kindly hand.