CHAPTER XXII.
No language can paint the utter desolation of poor Caroline's mind; for she was too young, too inexperienced, too much accustomed from infancy, to be the unmurmuring slave of her mother's capricious tyranny to have any thing like a just estimate of her own situation.
Had she ventured to think, which she had never yet done, that when of age she should be her own mistress, she would, as very young people do when they look forward three or four years, have thought the period so remote as to be scarcely an object of hope; while she would still have trembled at the thought of venturing at any time, however distant, to disobey her mother, unless indeed she could be quite sure of never seeing her again.
Lady Palliser's plan of government when Caroline was a mere infant, had been a system of terror; nor had any thing in her subsequent conduct tended to soften that first impression. Frowns and menacing attitudes had been used towards the baby before it could understand words, if when occasionally brought into its mother's presence it had happened to stretch its little hand towards any attractive object. Hours of solitary imprisonment in a dark room had been inflicted on the child, for but a fancied dilatoriness of movement in the execution of a command, till poor Caroline had learned to start with nervous alarm, and fly with the alacrity of terror at the very sound of her mother's voice; while it was melancholy to see, during the seemingly willing movement the little innocent face of the child filled with the contradictory expressions of anxiety and dread.
Thus had early associations followed up by constant tyranny, imposed at the dictates of a temper unreasonable, capricious, and unfeeling, taught Caroline to view with a sinking of the heart the very smiles of her mother's countenance, as played off in company; none of them she knew were intended for her, even when their light, perchance, was turned upon her.
Overweening, all-engrossing vanity, was Lady Palliser's ruling passion; society therefore in which she could be the object of universal admiration was her only element. Not that she was what is commonly called a flirt:—she was too haughty—too exacting of general adoration for such a condescension towards any individual in particular; while yet within her hidden thoughts, concealed beneath an appearance of statue-like coldness, she had a secret delight in imagining every man with whom she was acquainted, as much in love with her as he dared to be, and withheld from a declaration of his passion only by her own haughty reserve: nay, so far did she carry this dream of vanity, that she felt more or less of resentment towards every man of her acquaintance who married or attached himself to any other woman.
Such was the person with whom poor Caroline had hitherto spent every domestic hour she could remember. Her home, which had thus never been a happy one, now by contrast with the vague hopes in which she had latterly ventured to indulge, presented to her imagination a long perspective of tenfold dreariness. The frowns in private, the artificial smiles in public of her unkind parent, were all that she anticipated in future. Her very youth seemed an aggravation of her misery, for the grave itself, which, in her present exaggerated and hopeless state of feeling, was she believed, the only refuge to which she could look forward, appeared at an immeasurable distance, the path to it stretching before her mind's eye an interminable pilgrimage of weariness.
We do not mean to support these views of the subject as rational or just; but Caroline in experience and knowledge of the world, as well as in chancery phraseology, was still an infant; even her love had at present something in it of the feelings of the child turning to the kind and gentle, as a refuge from the harshness of the more severe; and with the idea of Alfred was blended thoughts of his sisters and of Lady Arden, and of their happy home—that scene of cheerfulness and general goodwill, which she had latterly enjoyed the privilege of entering without ceremony, and which she had never quitted without regret.
The most severe, however, of all her sufferings was the thought that Alfred must now hate and despise her.