How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that. His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities. His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he would find something to do.
“Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?” Mrs. Daunt’s eyes flashed fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among them;—what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?—the wrecking of others’ faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking ship—she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her; yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.
Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father’s death, told her son of the spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender towards her husband’s memory, in the strength that had saved them all from his weakness.
Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. “It shouldn’t have happened had I known,” he said; “I could have made my way.”
“Made your way, my dear child!” cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. “Do your realize, I wonder, what it cost us to make you?—cost me, rather, for I did it all. Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from determines the height one attains.”
“No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible,” said Geoffrey.
He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.
Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of it, poisoned all her happiness.
Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the rapacities only.
Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.