The Graftons: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

They went home by way of Havre and Southampton, and reached Abington without going to London. The Abbey was empty. Miss Waterhouse was away visiting, and Grafton was tied to the Bank that week. He was to stay at Stone Cottage over the week-end and Caroline made the most loving preparations for his reception.

Her happiness, but for the cloud brought by Barbara's fears, which try as she would she could not treat otherwise than as a cloud, was complete. The cottage, which had been renovated for them throughout, was as charming a little house as any newly married couple could wish to inhabit. Her father had offered to enlarge it for her, but she had wanted to run it on a modest scale, with only one servant, and as the wife of a poor man to do a great deal in it herself. Electric light had been installed, and a sumptuously fitted bathroom. Otherwise, except for its new paint and papers, it was as Mollie Pemberton and her mother had made themselves happy in.

Caroline had had her way with all the furnishing and arrangements of the Abbey when they had come to live there, but her zest for her very own little house was in no way diminished. It was almost too full of wedding presents, many of which would have been more suitable for the wife of a rich man than of a poor one. But Caroline had a genius for making a room. Mollie Pemberton opened her eyes when she saw what she had done with Stone Cottage.

Mollie and her husband, the Prescotts, Worthing, and Ella Carruthers, all came to see her on the day of her arrival, or the day after, and all helped her to get into order. She thought she must know from Ella's manner if what Barbara dreaded had come to pass, or was coming to pass. But she could tell nothing. Ella was just the same to her as ever, and showed herself delighted and excited at having her back. She seemed to have nothing to hide, and talked about Grafton with the frank affection that she had always exhibited towards him. If Caroline had not seen Barbara, no idea of any change would have come to her.

And yet she was not sure that Barbara was not right.

On the third morning she went to the Abbey to fetch some things for her father, who was coming down that evening.

It was rather sad to see it deserted, by all except the servants. But she did not feel sad on her own account. She now stood outside it, and the life it represented. She went through the large and beautiful rooms, so different from those in which her own life was to be spent, and asked herself whether she would regret anything that she had given up to marry Maurice. She could not find in herself the least desire to inhabit such a house again, even with him. She had immensely enjoyed coming to it, and dealing with it, but those enjoyments seemed now to have belonged to a different person. She had taken naturally the good things that had come to her through wealth, and found pleasure in them; but she wanted them no longer. She had something much better. Her happiness, as she went through the house, and into the gardens, was singing in her. The house and the gardens themselves had given her happiness, but it was nothing to this new-found happiness, and they spoke to her scarcely at all now for herself. She was thinking all the time of her own little house in the village.

Not quite all the time. Her thoughts were much occupied with her father. The empty house, which for some time he would have to inhabit alone, or with the companionship of guests instead of that of his children who had surrounded him with love and affection, brought home to her fully for the first time what he had lost. If the light of the house had gone out for her, it had gone out for him also. But she had her home and her centre of love elsewhere.

She thought of the mother whom she had known and loved as a child, and still loved, as she knew he did. If she had been alive he would not thus have come to the end of most of what had made his home dear to him. She wondered what it would have felt like to come home from her honeymoon and find her mother waiting for her. Her old home would not have lost so much of its meaning if she had been there. But she did not think much about herself except to ask what she could do to make up to her father for his loss.

She thought, rather sadly on his behalf, that the very perfection of their family life must make the change worse for him. She would be much with him when he came down to Abington, but not the constant companion she had been hitherto. He had done hardly anything there without her, and she had devoted herself to him as now she would devote herself to her husband. She had gained immeasurably, and a great part of her gain was his loss. She knew that she had been more to him than any of the others, and that he had come more and more to depend upon her. She had loved him to come to her with any new idea or discovery, which would have lost half its value to him unless they had shared it. His letters since her marriage had been full of little jokes and felicities to which he had wanted her response; and she had always given it, but with the knowledge that it was no longer to him that she would take her own little discoveries and appreciations, and that he might sooner or later, unless she was very careful, be saddened by the change in her. He would never claim more than his right, but the change would be there, of necessity, and the loss to him.