Susie made no answer, but closed the door between their rooms, and she did not go down until dinner was announced.
CHAPTER VII
Among the people who called on Susie from Mr. Price’s Paradise, the county, was Lady Varens, David Varens’s stepmother. Sir Richard and Cyril were admirably suited to one another because the old man was a sportsman by nature and practice. He had had an adventurous youth and “mercifully,” as Cyril said, “forgotten the details.” Then, on his father’s death, he came back to Millshire and managed the estate with the same thoroughness that had brought him success in less peaceful enterprises. He married first a guest of one of his hunting neighbours. She was lying unconscious on a bank, with her horse grazing beside her, when he saw her for the first time; and when he had brought her round and taken her home and called every other day to ask how she was it seemed natural to regard her as his own property. She died when David was nine, and Sir Richard married, two years afterwards, a lady whom he thought to have been unjustly divorced from a drunken old peer who had married her from the schoolroom.
She was good to David and kept her own counsel, so Millshire allowed her to carry on the tradition of Varens hospitality; in fact there was an extra piquancy about her parties owing to the opportunity they gave for a little private skeleton hunting among intimate friends. Towards the following Christmas, while Evangeline was staying with Evan’s sisters, Sir Richard invited Cyril to take a day or two’s hunting with him and stay over the week-end. Lady Varens hoped that Mrs. Fulton would come too, and bring her daughter, to hunt or not, as she liked. Evangeline being away, Teresa was torn from her heart’s delight, the alleys, the rotting garrets and the dingy clubs where she groped all day for the scattered remnant of what seemed to her the lost birthright of the bottom class, their right to the fellowship of common desires and tastes with the people who filled her mother’s drawing-room.
“What is the good of this eternal talk about all men being able to reach any position they are fitted for, if, when you come across the most lovable people in that class, you can hardly bear to sit with them for five minutes because of smells and anxieties and habits that shut them off like a cage that they didn’t make themselves and can’t get out of?” she asked Emma Gainsborough.
“We are trying to get them out,” said Emma.
“I know,” Teresa answered, “but I don’t see how you can unless you kill Mrs. Carpenter.” She and Mrs. Carpenter had perhaps the same end in view when they worked among the dismal crowds that swarmed in the mud and hideousness of the poorer quarters, but to the casual observer it looked as though the “charity ladies,” as Strickland called them, were under the impression that in their promotion of health and virtue they were pressing something new on somebody who had never heard of it, while Teresa hoped to restore a treasure that had been lost by past generations.
Her own experience was showing her that the cage door gives way before devotees who will suffer the violation of everything that makes life sweet to them for the sake of what they hold dearer, and she also learned the freemasonry of hard work; the point where she stuck was the apparent impossibility of ever bridging the gulf between Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Potter. How to wean Mrs. Carpenter from the idea that the social order was all right because she was on the bright side of it, and at the same time convince Mrs. Potter that it was not all wrong because she was on the dark one? As one of Emma’s friends pointed out, twenty centuries had passed since the only serious attempt had been made to bring about an understanding between the ancestors of those two irreconcilable ladies. The best spiritual engineering had been carried on ever since along the lines then laid down; communications had been devised and traffic of a sort carried on. But as soon as Mrs. Potter advanced a little and caught sight of Mrs. Carpenter and went for her, bald-headed, and when Mrs. Carpenter sailed along from her end of the bridge and then sat down and sang to Mrs. Potter——. I must stop this allegory or the reader will break down in tears of perplexity and perhaps send the book straight back to the library; unless he has himself lived for a time miserably wedged between the philanthropists and the slums of a city.
To get on with the story. Teresa was, as I have said, torn from her absorbing occupation and compelled to go with her father and mother to be the Varens’ guest at Aldwych Court.
I believe there is no place so comfortable to stay in as an English country house belonging to a good hostess. The luxury of dressing in any part of her room without the penalty of gooseflesh; the deep, scented bath and warm towel three feet square; the rich, dry fluffiness under foot, and the cup of tea afterwards, brought by a maid who seemed to have nothing else to do, banished all visions of Mrs. Potter to such a remote corner of Teresa’s consciousness that when she did remember her again the recollection had no more sting than a bad dream. She ate her dinner, served by willing men and women who performed their duties like priests of Isis, instead of, as dear Strickland did, giving her the uneasy feeling that one course would have been quite enough if ladies were not so greedy. She had observed sometimes to Evangeline that Millport maids treated their mistresses as if they were parrots whose dirty cages had to be cleaned out, and whom it “took up people’s time” to feed.