‘Oh mother!’ Janet cried, with a glow upon her face. She had passed the bread-and-butter stage, and was cutting herself a hunk of cake. The knife fell out of her hand from excitement and pleasure.
‘Shall you both like it so very much? Then,’ said Lady Car, sitting straight up with a look of pale resolution in her face which did not seem called for by such a simple determination, ‘then, children, you shall go——’
‘Hurrah!’ cried Tom, ‘that’s the jolliest thing I’ve heard for long; that’s exactly what I want! I want to know it,’ he cried; ‘I do want to know it before I go there and settle down.’
Lady Car turned her eyes upon him with a wonderful, inquiring look. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural. Yet to hear that someone would go there, not for holidays, but to settle down, oppressed poor Carry’s soul. She faded into whiteness, as if she were fainting. It seemed to her that his father looked over Tom’s shoulder—the father whom the boy was so like—his living image, as people said. Not so tall and strong, but with the features and the eyes and the aspect, which poor Carry had so feared.
‘Beau!’ cried both the young people in one voice. ‘Oh, I believe it’s his doing, Tom!’ ‘He must have a hand in it, Jan!’ ‘Beau, next holidays we are going to the Towers. Mother says so. We are going next holidays to the Towers.’
‘Your mother is full of sense,’ said Beaufort, who had just come in. ‘I knew that she would see it to be the right thing to do.’
Poor Carry! She felt as if she could not bear it, this sacrifice of all her own feelings and wishes. She said to herself that she could not do it; that before the time came she must die! And perhaps there was a forlorn hope that this was what would happen in her heart as she sat and saw her husband and her children rejoicing over the tea-table—most naturally, most justly, she knew; at least it was but natural and just so far as the children were concerned.
She had to give great orders and make many arrangements about the opening up of the house. It was so long since it had been shut up. Tom had been only six, and now he was seventeen and a half. She wrote to her sister Edith and to Edith’s husband, John Erskine, as well as to the factor on the estate and the servants who were in charge. And there were a number of things sent from town ‘to make it habitable.’ To make it habitable! She could not help the feeling that this was what he would have liked least of all, when she remembered the wonderful costly catafalques of furniture of which he had been so proud, and the decorations that would make poor Edward miserable. Edward did not mind the fact that it was his money which made Easton so comfortable; but to put up with his wardrobes and sideboards—that was a different matter. Even in her humiliation and in the much greater troubles she had to occupy her, she could not help a shudder to think of Edward in the midst of all those showy relics of the past. Eleven years had not dimmed her own recollection of her old surroundings. She remembered with an acute recollection, which was pain, where everything stood, and sent detailed directions as to how all was to be altered. ‘Dear Edith, do see that everything is changed. Don’t let anything look as it used to do. It would kill me if the rooms were left as they were,’ she wrote to her sister. ‘Do—do see that everything is changed.’
Perhaps it was by dint of having thus exhausted all feeling and forestalled all emotion that when she did find herself at the Towers at last, it was almost without sentiment of any kind. Edith had carried out her consigne very well, and she was standing under the mock mediæval doorway to receive her sister when Lady Car drove up. The sisters had not met for a long time—not for several years, and the meeting in itself did much to break the spell. Carry awoke with wonder and a little relief to find herself next morning in her old home, and to feel that she did not mind. Torrance did not meet her at his own hearth; he did not look at her from the mirror; he did not follow her about the corridor. She was very much relieved after all her imaginary anguish to feel that the reality was less dreadful than she had feared.
And it was something to see the children so truly happy. The quiet little Janet, who said so little, was quite roused out of herself. She became almost noisy, rushing with Tom from the top of the tower to the very cellars, going over everything. Her voice mingled shrill in the hurrah! with which Tom contemplated the flag of which he had dreamed, the sign of his own domination in this house of his fathers, which was to the boy as if it had been the shrine of the noblest of races. ‘I see now,’ he said, ‘that rag at Easton was all sham, but this is the real thing.’ ‘This is the real thing,’ said Janet decisively, ‘the other was only nonsense.’ They had not been twenty-four hours in the place before they had seen, and as they said recognised, everything. All their upbringing in scenes so different, all the associations of their lives, seemed to go for nothing. They were intoxicated with pleasure and pride. A couple of young princes restored to their kingdom could not have accepted their grandeur with a more undoubting sense that they had at last recovered their rights.