CHAPTER XI.
MRS. MEREDITH.
It was Mrs. Meredith who lived next door—an old friend, who was the only person Mrs. Beresford had permitted to come and see her when she returned ill, and of whom Miss Cherry had felt with confidence that Cara would find a friend in her. She had lived there almost ever since Cara was born, with her two sons, boys a little older than Cara; a pretty gentle woman, ‘not clever,’ her friends said—‘silly,’ according to some critics, of whom poor Annie Beresford had been one—but very popular everywhere and pleasant; a woman whom most people were glad to know. It would be hard to say exactly in what her charm lay. There were handsomer women than she to be met with by the score who were much less beloved—and as for her mind, it scarcely counted at all in the estimate of her merits. But she was kind, sympathetic, sweet-mannered—affectionate and caressing when it was becoming to be so—smiling and friendly everywhere. Great talkers liked her, for she would listen to them as if she enjoyed it; and silent people liked her, for she did not look bored by their side, but would make a little play of little phrases, till they felt themselves actually amusing. She had very sweet liquid brown eyes—not too bright or penetrating, but sympathetic always—and a soft, pretty white hand. She was not young, nor did she look younger than she was; but her sympathies flowed so readily, and her looks were so friendly, that she belonged to the younger part of the world always by natural right. Her boys were her chief thought and occupation. One of them was six, one four years older than Cara; so that Oswald was three-and-twenty and Edward on the eve of his majority when the girl arrived at her father’s house. Mrs. Meredith’s perpetual occupation with these boys, her happiness in their holiday times, her melancholy when they went to school, had kept her friends interested for a number of years. Men who breathed sighs of relief when the terrible period of the holidays came to an end, and their own schoolboys were got rid of, put on soft looks of pity when they heard that Oswald and Edward were gone too; and mothers who were themselves too thankful that no drownings or shootings, not even a broken collar-bone or a sprained ankle, had marked the blissful vacations in their own house, half cried with Mrs. Meredith over the silence of hers ‘when the boys were away.’ They came and carried her off to family dinners, and made little parties to keep her from feeling it; as if there had been no boys in the world but those two. ‘For you know her circumstances are so peculiar,’ her friends said. The peculiarity of her circumstances consisted in this, that, though she had lived alone for these fifteen years in the Square, she was not a widow—neither was she a separated or in any way blameable wife. All that could be said was that the circumstances were very peculiar. She who was so sweet, whom everybody liked, did not somehow ‘get on’ with her husband. ‘’Abody likes me but my man,’ said a Scotch fisherwoman in a similar position. Mrs. Meredith did not commit herself even to so terse a description. She said nothing at all about it. Mr. Meredith was in India—though whether he had always been there, or had judiciously retired to that wide place, in consequence of his inability to get on with the most universally-liked of women, it was not generally known. But there he was. He had been known to come home twice within the fifteen years, and had paid a visit at the Square among other visits he had paid—and his wife’s friends had found no particular objections to him. But he had gone back again, and she had remained, placidly living her independent life. She was well off. Her boys were at Harrow first, and then at the University, where Edward still was disporting himself; though he had just got through his examination for the Indian Civil Service, and had more practical work in prospect. Oswald, who had ended his career at Oxford, was living at home; but even the grown-up son in the house had not removed any of her popularity. She had a perpetual levée every afternoon. Not a morning passed that two or three ladies did not rush in, in the sacred hours before luncheon, when nobody is out, to tell her or ask her about something; and the husbands would drop in on their way from business, from their offices or clubs, just for ten minutes before they went home. This was how her life was spent—and though sometimes she would speak of that life despondently, as one passed under a perpetual shadow, yet, in fact, it was a very pleasant, entertaining, genial life. To be sure, had she been passionately attached to the absent Mr. Meredith, she might have found drawbacks in it; but, according to appearances, this was scarcely the case, and perhaps never had been.
This lady was the first visitor Cara had in the Square. She came in next morning, about twelve o’clock, when the girl was languidly wondering what was to become of her. Cara had not spent a cheerful morning. Her father had come to breakfast, and had talked to her a little about ordinary matters, and things that were in the newspaper. He was as much puzzled as a man could be what to do with this seventeen-year-old girl whom he had sent for, as a matter of course, when he himself came home to settle, but whom now he found likely to be an interruption to all his habits. He did not know Cara, and was somehow uneasy in her presence, feeling in her a suspicion and distrust of himself which he could by no means account for. And Cara did not know him, except that she did distrust and suspect him, yet expected something from him, she could not tell what; something better than the talk about collisions and shipwrecks in the papers. She tried to respond, and the breakfast was not a sullen or silent meal. But what a contrast it was from the bright table at the Hill, with the windows open to the lawn, and all the spontaneous happy talk, which was not made up for any one, but flowed naturally, like the air they breathed! Mr. Beresford was much more accomplished than Aunt Cherry; a clever man, instead of the mild old maiden whom everybody smiled at, but—— All this went through Cara’s mind as she poured out his coffee, and listened to his account of the new steamboat. There was a perfect ferment of thought going on in her brain while she sat opposite to him, saying yes and no, and now and then asking a question, by way of showing a little interest. She was asking herself how things would have been if her mother had lived; how they would have talked then: whether they would have admitted her to any share in the talk, or kept her outside, as they had done when she was a child? All these questions were jostling each other in her mind, and misty scenes rising before her, one confusing and mixing up with the other; the same breakfast table, as she remembered it of old, when the father and mother in their talk would sometimes not hear her questions, and sometimes say, ‘Don’t tease, child,’ and sometimes bid her run away to the nursery; and as it might have been with her mother still sitting by, and herself a silent third person. Mr. Beresford had not a notion what the thoughts were which were going on under Cara’s pretty hair, so smoothly wound about her head, and shining in the autumn sunshine, and under the pretty dark blue morning dress which ‘threw up,’ as Cherry meant it to do, the girl’s whiteness and brightness. She could make him out to some degree, only putting more meaning in him than he was himself at all aware of; but he could not make out her. Did thought dwell at all in such well-shaped little heads, under hair so carefully coiled and twisted? He did not know, and could no more divine her than if she had been the Sphinx in person; but Cara, if she went wrong, did so by putting too much meaning into him.
When breakfast was over, he rose up, still holding his paper in his hand. ‘I am afraid you will feel the want of your usual occupations,’ he said. ‘Lessons are over for you, I suppose? It is very early to give up education. Are you reading anything? You must let me know what you have been doing, and if I can help you.’
How helpless he looked standing there, inspecting her! but he did not look so helpless as he felt. How was he, a man who had never done any of life’s ordinary duties, to take the supervision of a girl into his hands? If she had been a boy, he might have set her down by his side (the confusion of pronouns is inevitable) to work at Greek—a Greek play, for instance, which is always useful; but he supposed music and needlework would be what she was thinking of. No; if she had been a boy, he would have done better than take her to his study and set her down to a Greek play; he could have sent her to the University, like Edward Meredith, like every properly educated young man. But a girl of seventeen, he had always understood, was of an age to take the control of her father’s house—was ‘out’—a being to be taken into society, to sit at the head of his table (though rather young); and the idea that she might require occupation or instruction between the moments of discharging these necessary duties had not occurred to him. It did now, however, quite suddenly. What was she going to do? When he went into his library, she would go to the drawing-room. Would she take her needlework? would she go to the long disused piano? What would the young strange female creature do?
‘Thank you, papa,’ said Cara; which was of all other the most bewildering reply she could have given him. He gazed at her again, and then went away in his utter helplessness.
‘You will find me in the library, if you want me,’ he said aloud. But in himself he said, with more confidence, ‘Mrs. Meredith will know;’ or rather, perhaps, if the truth must be said, he thought, ‘She will know. She will see at once what ought to be done. She will tell me all about it to-night!’ And with this consolation he went into his library and betook himself to his important morning’s work. He had to verify a quotation, which he thought had been wrongly used in his friend Mr. Fortis’ book about Africa. He had to write to one or two Fellows of his pet Society, about a series of lectures on an interesting point of comparative science, which he thought the great authority on the subject might be persuaded to give. He had to write to Mr. Sienna Brown about a Titian which had been repainted and very much injured, and about which he had been asked to give his opinion by the noble proprietor, whom he had met on his return home. It will be perceived that it would have been a serious disadvantage to public interests had Mr. Beresford been required to withdraw his thoughts from such important matters, and occupy them with the education of an unremarkable girl.
And Cara went upstairs. She had already seen cook, who had kindly told her what she thought would be ‘very nice’ for dinner, and had agreed humbly; but had not, perhaps, been quite so humble when cook entreated ‘Miss Cara, dear,’ with the confidence of an old servant, not to be frightened, and assured her that she’d soon get to know her papa’s ways.
When she got to the drawing-room, she went first to the windows and looked out, and thought that a few more plants in the balcony would be an advantage, and recollected how she used to play in the Square, and gave a side-long glance at the railings of next door, wondering whether ‘the boys’ were at home, and if they had changed. Then she came in, and went to the fire, and looked at herself and the big silent room behind her in the great mirror over the mantelpiece. Cara was not vain—it was not to see how she looked that she gazed wistfully into that reflection of the room in which she was standing, so rich and full with all its pictures, its china, its tapestries and decorations confronting her like a picture, with one lonely little girl in it, in a dark blue dress and white collar, and big, sad, strained blue eyes. What a forlorn little thing that girl seemed! nobody to interchange looks with even, except herself in the glass; and the room so crowded with still life, so destitute of everything else: so rich, so warm, so beautiful, so poor, so destitute, so lonely! What was she to do with herself for the long, solitary day? She could not go out, unless she went with nurse, as she used to do when she was a child. She was an open-air girl, loving freedom, and had been used to roam about as she pleased in the sweet woods about the Hill. You may imagine how lost the poor child felt herself in those stony regions round the Square.
And it was just then that Mrs. Meredith arrived. She came in, rustling in her pretty rich silk gown, which was dark blue too, like Cara’s. She came and took the girl into her kind arms and kissed her. ‘If I had known when you were coming yesterday, I should have been here to receive you,’ she said; ‘my poor, dear child, coming back all by yourself! Why did not Aunt Cherry come with you, to get you a little used to it before you were left alone?’