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.
CHAPTER XVII
The next day was the same, and the next and the next. On the fourth day, urged by despair, Carrie sat down to write to Sebastian the whole tale of her woe.
‘Sir, I shall die,’ she wrote. ‘ ’Tis terrible; I do not like living with women, I find men vastly more agreeable. Pray, pray, dear sir—my dearest dada—write and summon me home, for I am weary of my life here at Wynford.’
Sebastian laughed a good deal over this mournful missive, and wrote Carrie to try to cultivate patience and the womanly graces.
But before his letter had reached her, help had come to Carrie from an unexpected quarter. Lady Mallow, by the kindness of Heaven, fell sick of an influenza, which painful disorder confined the poor lady to her bed, and set Carrie at liberty.
And ennui fled: and with happy hurrying feet Carrie raced down the avenue and along the sweet hedge-bordered roads, going she knew not whither—but away, away from bondage and embroidery and double-dummy whist!
She turned off into a side lane, and then stood looking across the country to see which direction seemed the most promising.