CHAPTER XVI
Miss Caroline Shepley, up to the age of seventeen years, had perhaps, in her own way, lived as happy a life as it is granted to many young persons to live. She looked like it too; wearing that air of pleased good humour that is a passport to every heart, and blooming like a rose, in spite of the fact that she had never been out of London all her days. Carrie was very tall, with just the same fearless brilliant blue eyes that her father had, but from her mother she had inherited a skin as white as milk, with a clear pink colour in the cheeks, two bewitching dimples, and ringlets of deep red hair. To see her pass along the streets!—— Do they grow now-a-days, these shining beauties that brightened the world of long ago, or is it that they are so common we scarcely regard them? But as time went on, Carrie’s good looks became such as to be quite embarrassing both to herself and to her father, for she could never go out alone, and even in his company attracted a vast deal of attention.
‘Now,’ said Sebastian, ‘I shall send Carrie to the country with her aunt, as she has so often been pressed to go, else her head will be turned altogether.’
Lady Mallow’s establishment certainly promised to be dull enough for safety. Her Ladyship, who was rich enough to indulge in fancies about climate, had taken an idea that London did not suit her health. On her brother-in-law’s suggestion, she had taken a house in the neighbourhood of Wynford, and there was passing the summer months in genteel and plethoric seclusion—for alas! Lady Mallow was becoming stout in middle life. From all he remembered of Wynford twenty years ago, Sebastian smiled to think of the conventual existence poor Carrie might lead there.
‘You must go to the village of Wynford and see where your grandfather sold drugs; but there’s not one of our name left there now,’ he said.
‘Sir! my dear sir! what would my aunt Charlotte say should I propose to visit where any one related to me had traded in anything, at any time?’ said Carrie—and indeed she was right.
So one splendid May morning Lady Mallow’s coach drew up before the door of the Shepleys’ house, and the beautiful Carrie came out upon the steps, drawing on her long gloves, while her baggage was stowed away in the rumble of the coach.
‘Well, Carrie, adieu to you, and Heaven bless you!’ said her father; and Carrie, unconventional as usual, turned suddenly, in the full view of her aunt’s decorous footman, flung her arms round Sebastian, and kissed him tenderly.
‘I do not wish to leave you, sir; I had rather far stay with you,’ she cried; but Sebastian laughed at her, and bade her not keep those spirited animals which her aunt drove ‘waiting upon her sentimentalities.’
The spirited animals waddled off down the street very deliberately, and Carrie sat back in the coach and waved her hand till she was out of sight. Though she had not been altogether pleased to leave home, it would certainly be a new and delightful thing to leave London smoke behind her, and drive far out into the wonderful green country. No train had yet snorted through these fair English meadows, and the depth of their tranquillity was like a dreamless sleep. To the heart that has known sorrow—and perhaps more to the heart that has missed joy—the jubilant burgeoning of spring will sometimes bring an intolerable sadness. But in the first blossom and fairness of her youth, with her sunny childhood barely left behind, with hope ahead, these stainless blue skies, and the rich promise of the bursting leafage, filled Carrie’s heart with a sort of ecstasy. She fairly clapped her hands at the hackneyed old sight of a meadow where lambs were gambolling, and called out to the coachman, praying him to stop and let her buy a drink of milk at a cottage door where a cow was being milked. Towards the end of the day these pleasures began to pall a little, and when at last the coach drew up at Lady Mallow’s door Carrie was not sorry to alight. The forty miles that lay between her and London seemed very long in the retrospect, and a sudden chill of home-sickness fell over her spirit as she entered the decorous portals of her aunt’s abode. ‘I wonder why I ever came,’ she thought. ‘Aunt Charlotte will fidget me to death—and I shall be so dull, and I think London is ever so much nicer than the country.’ We must all be familiar with such misgivings, and familiar too with the extraordinary difference which a night’s rest makes in such a case. Carrie rose up next morning with much more rose-coloured views of life. ‘Aunt Charlotte is vastly dull, but how agreeable to be here!—and O how beautiful, how beautiful!’ she said as she gazed out at the new surroundings, smelt the country sweetness, and longed for breakfast. Lady Mallow, indeed, was quite shocked by Carrie’s appetite. ‘You will become stout, my dear,’ she said. ‘ ’Tis most ungenteel for a young gentlewoman like you to eat so freely!’ Carrie was a little ashamed of herself.
‘You see, madam,’ she explained, ‘I live always with men, and perhaps their example has made me eat as they do. I do not think I shall become very fat, because all my life I have been hungry, and I have not become fat yet, you see.’
The restrictions of her aunt’s society began to press upon Carrie pretty heavily by the afternoon. All morning she had had to sit indoors sewing at her embroidery, then, about two o’clock, she must drive out for a slow airing until dinner, then came two hours more of talk and embroidery, and after supper a game of whist with double-dummy. And outside, while all these golden hours dragged so slowly past, was the grand, twittering, budding spring world waiting to be explored! Carrie beat an impatient tattoo upon the floor with her little foot, and answered Lady Mallow’s questions rather incoherently.