‘The house is Tom’s, not mine. And I shall be at my own house at Easton—if I am living.’
‘Oh,’ said Janet. Carry, though a little roused in her own defence, almost quailed before the look in the girl’s eyes. ‘You will be happier then,’ she said, with the air of an assailant hurling a stone at his victim; ‘for you will be all by yourself—with Beau.’
‘Go upstairs, Janet: I can have no more of this!’
‘I will not,’ she cried; ‘you said it was Tom’s house, not yours. He would not let me be sent away out of his hall, from father’s picture, for—anyone—if he were here.’
Carry raised her eyes and saw him standing behind his child. There seemed a dull smile of triumph in his painted eyes. ‘You thought they were yours—but they are mine,’ Torrance seemed to say. Both of them! their father’s in every nerve and fibre—nothing to do with her.
CHAPTER X
Apart from these painful struggles with her children which were quite new to Lady Car, there were many things that pained her in her residence at the Towers.
First of all there was her nearest neighbour, her dearest friend, her only sister Edith; the dearest companion of her life, who had stood by her in all her troubles, and to whom she had given a trembling support in her struggle, more successful than poor Carry’s against the husband her father had chosen for her. Edith had succeeded at last in marrying her only love, which was a poor marriage for an Earl’s daughter. They had, indeed, finally, both of them, made poor marriages; but what a contrast between them! Carry living ignobly with the husband of her choice upon Torrance’s money, the result of her humiliation; while Edith was at the head of a happy, frugal family, carefully ordered, with little margin for show or pleasure, but yet in all the plenitude of cheerful life, without a recollection to rankle, or any discord or complication in all her candid existence. Her father had not been able to force the will of Edith. She had not loved her John any better than poor Carry had loved in her early tender youth the lover of all her dreams, the Edward Beaufort who was now her husband; but Carry had not been able to resist the other husband, the horrible life. Even in that Edith had so much, so much the advantage over her sister! And then—oh, wonder to think of it—— John—John, from whom nothing had been expected, except that he should show himself, as he had always done, the good fellow, the honest gentleman, the true friend he was, whether by development of his own respectable mind or by the influence of Edith (though she was never clever like Carry), or by the united force of both, John had long been one of the most important men in the district, member for his county, trusted and looked up to both by his constituency at home and the people at head-quarters, who took his advice, it was said, on Scotch affairs more than anyone’s; whereas Edward—— Carry had long made that poignant comparison in her heart, but to see them together now bowed her to the ground with a secret humiliation which she could never acknowledge—not to her sister, who also in the old days had put so much faith in Beaufort’s genius; not to Edward himself—oh no, to humiliate him. He did not seem to feel the contrast at all himself, or, if he did perceive it, he thought it apparently to be to his own advantage, speaking now and then of the narrowness of practical men, of the deadening influence of politics, and of how completely John Erskine’s interest was limited to matters of local expediency and questions before Parliament. ‘And he used to have his share of intelligence,’ said all unconscious the useless man, whose failure his wife felt so passionately. Then, as if this were not enough, there was Jock, little Jock, who was younger than Janet, only fourteen, but already at Eton like Tom, and holding a place above that of the seventeen-year-old big lower boy. The reader must understand that this history is not of to-day, and that in those times big lower boys were still possible, though it is so no longer. Tom was only a lower boy, and little Jock might have fagged his cousin, had it not been that Jock was in college, on the foundation, saving the money which was not too plentiful at Dalrulzian. ‘A Tug!’ Tom had cried with contempt intensified by the sense of something in his mother’s eyes, the comparison which made her heart sick. Little Jock at fourteen, so far above the boy who was almost a man: John Erskine, in his solid good sense, so much more important a man than Edward with his genius manqué. It went to Carry’s heart.
It is difficult to feel that sense of humiliation, that overwhelming consciousness of the superiority of another family, however closely connected, to our very own, without a little grudge against the happy, the worthy, the fortunate. Carry loved her sister tenderly, and Edith’s happiness was dear to her; but the sight of that happiness before her eyes was more than the less fortunate sister could bear. She could not look upon Edith’s bright boy, with his candid countenance, without thinking with a deeper pang of Tom’s lowering brows, and that horrible look of intoxication which she had seen in his face; nor could she see her brother-in-law busy and cheerful with his public work, his table piled with letters, blue-books, all the paraphernalia of business, without thinking of Beaufort’s dilettante ease, his dislike of being appealed to, his ‘Oh, I know nothing of business!’ Why did he know nothing of business; why was he idle, always idle, good for nothing, while others—oh, with not half his powers!—were working for the country? It was still Carry’s desperate belief that no one had half his powers—yet sometimes she said to herself that, had he been stupid as some were, she could have borne it, but that it was the waste of these higher qualities which she could not bear. Even this little refuge of fancy was taken from her on the occasion of a meeting about some county movement, to which her husband was called as the guardian of young Tom, and where he had to make a speech much against his will. His speech was foolish, tedious, and ignorant—how indeed should he know about the affairs of a Scotch county?—while John Erskine held the matter and the attention of the hearers in his hand. ‘I thought Lady Car’s new husband had been a very clever man,’ she heard, or fancied she heard, someone say as the people dispersed. Perhaps she only fancied she heard it, caught it in a look. And how they applauded John Erskine, who did so well!—oh, she knew he did well, the master of his subject and of the people’s sympathies; whereas what information could poor Edward have, what common interest with all these people? Poor Edward! Carry’s heart contracted with an ineffable pang to think she could have called him so.
She loved Edith all the same—oh, yes! how could she fail to love her only sister, the person most near to her in all the world? But yet she shrank from seeing Edith, and felt at the sound of her happy voice as if she, Carry, must fly and hide herself in some dark and unknown place, and could not bear the contact of the other, who had the best of everything, and in whose path all was bright. To sympathise with one’s neighbour’s blessedness, when all that makes her happy is reversed in one’s own lot, is hard, the hardest of all the exercises of charity. Carry said to herself that she was glad and thankful that all was so well with Edith; but to hide her own face, to turn to the wall, not to be the witness of it, was the best thing to do. To look on at all, with the aching consciousness of failure on her own part, and smile over her own trouble at Edith’s happiness, was more than she was able to do: yet this was what she did day after day. And she read in Edith’s eyes that happy woman’s opinion of Tom, her verdict upon Beaufort, and her disappointment in Janet. Though Edith said nothing, Carry knew all that she could have said, and even heard over intervening miles, and through stone walls, how her sister breathed with a sigh her melancholy name. Poor Carry! Her heart fainted within her to realise everything, yet she did it, and covered her face and covered her ears not to hear and see that pity, which she could neither have heard nor seen by any exercise of ordinary faculties. But the mind by other means both sees and hears.