‘Oh Tom, Tom!’
He got up from her with his hands deep in his pockets and his gloomy head bent. ‘Leave alone,’ he said, pushing her away with his shoulder as in the old nursery days. ‘Where’s dinner? But I’ll dine at the club, you can tell Beau, if they’ll have me there.’
CHAPTER XVI
There could be no doubt that Beaufort behaved throughout this business in the most admirable way. He made the very best of it to Lady Car, who lay and listened to his voice as to the playing of a pleasant tune, sometimes closing her eyes to hear the better. She had got her death wound. Tom had never been the son she had dreamed. He was his father’s son, not hers, and to see him succumb to the grosser temptations had been misery and torture to her. But the story of that fraud, so fully intended, made with such clear purpose, was one of those overwhelming revelations which go to the very heart. If a woman is unhappy in her married life, if she is tricked and cheated by fate in every other way, there is still always the natural justice to fall back upon, that the children will be left to her—her children in whom to live a new life; to see heaven unfolding again; to have some faint reflection of herself; some flower of her planting, some trace that she has been. And when she has to confess to herself that the child of her affections, the thing that has come from her, the climax of her own being, is in fact all unworthy, a creature of the dunghill, not only base, but incapable of comprehending what is good and true, that final disenchantment is too great for flesh and blood. Nature, merciful, sometimes blinds the woman’s eyes, makes her incapable of judging, fills her with fond folly that sees no imperfection in her own—and that folly is blessed. But there are some who are not blinded by love, but made more keen and quick of sight. She lay silent and listened while Beaufort performed that melody in her ears, feeling a poignant sweetness in it, since at least it was the most beautiful thing for him to do, yet with every word feeling more and more the anguish of the failure and the depth of the death wound which was in her heart.
‘There are boys who torture cats and dogs and tear flies asunder, and yet are not evil creatures,’ Beaufort said; ‘they have not the power of realising the pain they cause. They want imagination. They know nothing of the animals they hurt, except that they are there in their power to be done what they please with. My love, Tom is like that: it is part of the dreadful cynicism that young men seem to originate somehow among themselves. They think they are the subjects of every kind of interested wile, and that such a thing as—this’—Beaufort was not philosopher enough to name Tom’s act more distinctly—‘is nothing more than a sort of balance on their side.’
Lady Car opened her eyes, which were clear with fever and weakness, lucid like an evening sky, and looked at her husband with a piteous smile.
‘My dearest,’ he said hastily, ‘I am saying only how they represent such things to themselves. They don’t take time to think—they rush on to the wildest conclusions. The thing is done before they see or realise what it is. And then, as I tell you, they think themselves the prey, and those, those others the hunters—and take their revenge—when they can.’
But it was hard to go on with that argument with her eyes upon him. When she closed them he could speak. When they opened again in the midst of his plea, those eyes so clear with fever, so liquid, as if every film had been swept from them, and only an all-seeing, unquenchable vision, yet tender as the heavens, left behind—he stopped and faltered in his tale: and then he took refuge in that last resort of human feeling—the thing that had to be done, the expedients by which a wrong can be made to appear as if it were right, and trouble and misery smoothed away, so that the world should believe that all was well.
The conclusion, which was not arrived at for some time, was that which old Lord Lindores took credit to himself for having suggested before, ‘and which might have put a stop to all this,’ he said with a wave of his hand. It was Africa and big game for two or three years, during which ‘the young woman’—the family spoke of her as if she had no name—should be put under careful training. It had been ascertained, still by Beaufort, who conducted himself to everybody’s admiration, that ‘the young woman’ had no bad antecedents, and that so much hope as there could be in such a miserable business might be theirs. Tom was so thoroughly broken down by the discovery which humbled his clownish pride to the dust, and made him feel almost as poor a creature as he was, that he gave in with little resistance to the dictates of the family council. No unhappy university man, however, was beguiled into accompanying this unlikely pupil. He was given into the hands of a mighty sportsman, who treated him like a powder boy, and brought Tom, the Lord of the Towers, the wealthiest commoner in the North, the experienced man of Oxford, into complete and abject subjection—which was the best thing that could have happened to him.