The house soon filled with visitors and company, guests who came for sport, and guests who came for curiosity, and the great county people who were friends of the Lindores, and the smaller people who were friends of Torrance. And with both sets of these visitors Carry could not help seeing—or perhaps she only imagined it—that though her husband and herself were treated with great courtesy, it was Tom who was looked to with the chief interest. He was the future possessor of all. Though she had entire sway in the house as she never had before, yet she was nothing but a shadow, as she had always been. And the children in their haste to enjoy would have liked if possible to ignore her too. As for Tom, he got altogether beyond her control. When he was not shooting, taking upon himself premature airs of the master, he was riding about the country as his father had done, going to all kinds of places, making acquaintances everywhere. He came home on several occasions, after a day of roaming, with wild eyes, half-falling, half-leaping off his horse, making his entrance audible by all the tumult of rough excitement, calling loudly to the servants, discharging oaths at them for imaginary delay. The first time this happened, Lady Car only suspected it with alarm, which everybody about stilled as best they could, getting the young culprit out of the way. ‘The matter? there is nothing the matter?’ Beaufort said, coming to her, a little pale, but with a laugh. ‘Tom has lost his temper. He is vexed with himself for being late for dinner. I’ll have a talk with him by-and-by.’ ‘Is that all, Edward?’ she said. ‘What should it be more?’ her husband replied. But on another occasion, as evil luck would have it, Tom made his entrance just as the party, a large one, in which his place was vacant, was sweeping across the hall to dinner, and his mother, who came last, had the full advantage of that spectacle. Her son, standing all bespattered, unsteady, his dull eyes fierce with angry light. ‘Hallo, mother! I’m a bit late. Never mind. I’ll come as I am,’ he cried, steadying himself, beating his muddy boot with his whip. Lady Car threw an anguished look at the new butler, who stood splendid and indifferent at the door. There was not even an old servant full of resource to coax the foolish wretched boy away.
She had to go in and sit down smiling at the head of her table, and entertain her guests, not knowing any minute whether the boy might not burst in and make his shame visible to all. In the midst of the sounds of the dinner-table, the talk, and the ring of the knives and forks, and the movements of the servants, other sounds seemed to reach her ear of loud voices and noise outside. She had to bear it all and make no sign, but talk that her neighbours on each side might not notice, with what was almost noisiness for Carry. Perhaps, though it seems more horrible at such a crisis to be in the midst of the compulsory make-belief of society, it is better for the sufferer. She kept up, and never winced till the dinner was over, and the endless hour in the drawing-room after, and all the guests gone, those who were from the neighbourhood to their homes, those who were in the house to their rooms. Then, and only then, did she dare to breathe, to give way to the devouring anxiety in her mind. She had bidden her husband ‘Go, go!’ to the smoking-room, or anywhere with the last guests, and she was alone. The whole house had been changed; the old furniture displaced, all its associations altered: and yet in that moment everything came back again, the catafalques of old, the vulgar splendour, the old dreary surroundings. Her boy! Her boy! She thought she saw his father come out before her, as she had feared to see him all these years, saying with his old brutal laugh, ‘Your boy! none of yours. Mine! mine!’
CHAPTER IX
Beaufort behaved very well at this crisis of domestic history. He shook off his usual languor and became at once energetic and active. What he said to Tom remains undisclosed, but he ‘spoke to’ the boy with great force, and even eloquence, representing to him the ruin entailed by certain bad habits, which—more than other vices, probably worse in themselves—destroy a man’s reputation and degrade him among his fellows. Though he was himself a man over-refined in his ways, he was clever enough to seize the only motives which were likely to influence the ruder nature of his stepson. And then he went to poor Carry, who in this home of evil memories sat like a ghost surrounded by the recollections of the past, and seeing for ever before her eyes the disordered looks and excited eyes of her boy. He was not, alas! the son of her dreams, the child whom every mother hopes for, who is to restore the ideal of what a man should be. Many disappointments had already taught Lady Car that her son had little of the ideal in him, and nothing, or next to nothing, of herself; but still he was her son: and to think of him as the rude and violent debauchee of the country-side seemed more than she could bear. Beaufort came in upon her miserable seclusion like a fresh breeze of comfort and hope. This was so far from his usual aspect that the effect was doubled. Tender he always was, but to-day he was cheerful, hopeful, full of confidence and conscious power. ‘There must be no more of this,’ he cried. ‘Come, Carry, have a little courage. Because the boy has been a fool once—or even twice—that is not to say that there is anything tragical in it, or that he is abandoned to bad habits. It is probably scarcely his fault at all—a combination of circumstances. Nobody’s fault, indeed. Some silly man, forgetting he was a boy, persuading him out of supposed hospitality to swallow something his young head could not stand. How was the boy in his innocence to know that he could not stand it? It is a mere accident. My love, you good women are often terribly unjust and sweeping in your judgments. You must not from one little foolish misdemeanour judge Tom.’
‘Oh, Edward!’ she cried, ‘judge him! my own boy! All that I feel is that I would rather have died than seen that look, that dreadful look, in my child’s face.’
‘Nonsense, Carry. That is what I call judging him. You should never have seen it, but as for rather dying—— Would Tom be the better for it if he lost his mother, the best influence a boy can have——?’
She shook her head: but how to tell her husband of the spectre who had risen before her in the house that was his, claiming the son who was his, his heir and not Carry’s, she did not know. Influence! she had been helpless by the side of the father, and in the depths of that dreadful experience Carry foresaw that the son, so like him, so moulded upon that man whom she had feared to the bottom of her heart, and alas! unwillingly hated, had now escaped her too. There are moments which are prophetic, and in which the feeblest vision sees clear. He had escaped her influence, if, indeed, he had ever acknowledged any influence of hers. As a child he had been obliged to obey her, and even as a youth the influence of the household—that decent, tranquil, graceful household at Easton—which henceforward Tom would compare so contemptuously with his own ‘place,’ and the wealth which was soon to be his—had kept him in a fashion of submission. But Tom had always looked at his mother with eyes in which defiance lurked: there had never been in them anything of that glamour with which some children regard their mother, finding in her their first ideal. It had always been a weariness to Tom to be confined to the restraint of her society. When they were children even, he and his sister had schemed together to escape from it. She was dimly aware that even Janet—— These things are hard for a mother to realise, but there are moments when they come upon her with all the certainty of fate. Her influence! She could have laughed or wept. As it was with the father, so would it be with the son. For that moment at least poor Carry’s perceptions were clear.
But what could she say? She said nothing; not even to Beaufort could she disclose that miserable insight which had come to her. Your own children, how can you blame them to another, even if that other is your husband? how say that, though so near in blood and every tie, they are alien in soul? how disclose that sad intuition? Carry never said a word. She shook her head; not even perhaps to their own father could she have revealed that discovery. A mother’s part is to excuse, to pardon, to bear with everything, even to pretend that she is deceived and blinded by the partiality of love, never to disclose the profound and unutterable discouragement with which she has recognised the truth. She shook her head at Beaufort’s arguments, leaving him to believe that it was only a woman’s natural severity of judgment against the sins with which she had no sympathy. And by-and-by she allowed herself to be comforted. He thought that he had brought her back to good sense and the moderation of a less exacting standard, and had convinced her that a boyish escapade, however blamable, was not of the importance she imagined. He thought he had persuaded her not to be hard upon Tom, not to reproach him, to pass it over as a thing which might be trusted to his good sense not to occur again. Carry did not enter into any explanations. She had by this time come to understand well enough that she must not expect anyone to divine what was in her heart.
Meanwhile Janet, who was vaguely informed on the matter, and knew that Tom was in disgrace, though not very clearly why, threw herself into his defence with all the fervour that was in her nature. She went and sat by him while he lingered over a late breakfast with all the ruefulness of headache. ‘Oh, Tom, what have you done?’ she said. ‘Oh, why didn’t you come in time for dinner? Oh, where were you all the afternoon? We were looking for you everywhere, Jock and I.’ Jock was an Erskine cousin, the eldest of the tribe.
‘What does it matter to you where I was?’ said the sullen boy.