Summer Will Show (5 page)

Her fury had been intensified by his choice of a woman.

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way. Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better. A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old, as old as Frederick or older — this was the woman whom Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Her fury lasted still. Walking swiftly and heedlessly, she had made her way from the tomato house to the park. And now she stood under the wasp-droning shade of a lime tree with a dozen sheep staring at her. The leader moved a step nearer, the others shuffled after it. She must have been here a long while for their timid curiosity to have brought them so close. If I were to speak as I feel, she thought, eyeing them sardonically, how you would scatter! She kept silence, silent as she had been from the moment she first heard the news, scornfully silent before the sheepishness of mankind. For all that any one knew Mrs. Willoughby was still patiently and unresentfully awaiting her husband’s return from the Continent.

It was fortunate that Mamma’s death had taken place when it did — before Sophia’s discovery of Minna Lemuel. Mamma — a rather stupid and trifling woman, the slave of her grandchildren, the gull of any village slut who chose to wear a tattered bodice and lose a husband, amply deceived by her son-in-law, and constantly buying tender greenhouse rarities which turned out to be chickweed — had yet been able to keep her daughter almost in awe by a power of reading the most carefully concealed thoughts. From the moment when Sophia had first suspected Frederick, Mamma had known of it; and though not a word had been spoken, Sophia was made aware of Mamma’s knowledge. For a shawl had been handed like a shelter; a “Thank you, my dear,” at the passing of a cup of tea had murmured: “My poor forsaken child, I know all, and feel for you as only a mother can”; a second glass of port accepted with, “Well, Sophia, since you insist,” had said: “But you always were headstrong.” And day by day Sophia had felt herself more like some strong rustic animal entangled in a net. The net was never drawn close. She had but to stamp or bellow a little, and it shrank to the silken twist of Mamma’s netting, which had again trailed off that black silk lap and needed to be picked up. With the rather pompous disapproval of a strong character, Sophia deplored her mother’s feminine intuition. It was too subtle, it was the insight of a slave. Exercised upon her childhood it had fostered her with subtle attentions, gratifying her wishes before she herself was aware of them. But slaves, it is well known, make the most admirable attendants to young children.

So it was a good thing that Mamma had died, her silken net sinking into the grave after her as a dead leaf is drawn under the mould by earthworms, before the first, the only and final rupture with Frederick. Even after the funeral Sophia had walked cautiously, suspecting the net might be trailing still, that, put away among gloves, or her own baby clothes, or in letter-case or jewel-case, she might find a letter from Mamma, saying what only impregnable death would give her the daring to say, condoling or counselling. Such a letter, and most of all, a letter of counsel, was a thing to dread. For Sophia respected death, that final and heavily material power, as greatly as she despised finesse and feminine intuition; and however little the living mother had been honoured, the dead mother was another matter. But there was nothing either of sympathy or counsel. Mamma had betaken herself bag and baggage to the grave, even the lilac-paged albums were inscribed: To be Burned Unread after my Death. Nothing had been left over except a packet of letters that slipped through the lining of an old dressing-case, letters written by Mamma to Papa shortly before their marriage. Sophia had read them, a little guiltily, carrying them to the stale window-light of the winter dusk, for to light candles would have illuminated the act into an impropriety. But she had not read long. They were cold and insipid, reading them was like eating jelly.

The sheep were within a hand’s-breadth now, and her fury had died down. She was glad. She had no wish to feel anger when anger was so unavailing. Of the two moods possible to her, such rage, and the icy disdain in which her letter to Frederick had been written, she preferred disdain. It was more dignified, and it allowed her to get on with her work. For now all her passion of life should be poured into what she had to do: bring up her children, order the house and the estate, govern the village. That should be enough, surely, for any woman who had outgrown her follies; and cool enough now to smile at herself, she considered what small half-hearted follies hers had been. For though while Frederick was wooing her she had been quite thoroughly and properly in love with him, from the day of the marriage she had known without illusion what lay before her: respectable married life with its ordered contacts and separations, the attentive acceptance that a married woman should feel for a man who must be made allowances for, a man much like other men — a compromise that one might hope would in time solidify into something positive and convenient. Nor, from these soberly chilling ashes, had the sudden explosion even of Minna Lemuel raised up a flame of that folly of loving too well. It was not that Frederick had ceased to love her, but that he should love such a one as Minna, that had tormented her, and must be at intervals her torment still.

Over her luncheon of cold chicken and claret, Sophia found herself pondering the conduct of Uncle Julius Rathbone with unexpected approval. Julius Rathbone was her father’s half-brother. At her father’s death she had, so to speak, inherited him, and with the inheritance had come something of Papa’s masculine tolerance. Julius was part-owner and manager of the estate in the West Indies which supplied the Aspen wealth; and twice a year or so he sent large consignments of guava jelly, molasses, preserved pineapple, and rum. These were for general family consumption, and so were the portraits of his elegant sharp-nosed wife and his three plain daughters. Other consignments were of a kind more confidential — accounts of his scrapes, financial and amatory; and now he was entrusting to Sophia his illegitimate son, a half-caste. “
He is now fourteen years old
,” wrote Uncle Julius, “
and I do not want him to get false ideas into his head. I should be very grateful if you could place him in some moderate establishment where he could receive a sound commercial education
.” Then, as though with a waving of the hand, the letter had turned to a more detailed account of the guava jellies, etc., which would accompany the boy across the Atlantic, and ended with “
your dear Aunt, as usual, sends her fondest love, and so do the Girls
.”

It was scarcely a matter in which she could consult with people of her own standing, even had she felt inclined to do so. She told her solicitor to advertise the requirements, and send the answers to her. They came in hundreds, it seemed as though England’s chief industry was keeping boarding-schools where religion and tuition had united to put into the heads of bastards all the suitable ideas and no false ones. Most of the prospectuses came from Yorkshire, but finally she settled upon a school in Cornwall; and though Uncle Julius had begged her not to put herself out in any way, Sophia could do nothing without becoming conscientious and determined to do it thoroughly, so workmanly pride as well as humaner considerations made her travel to Cornwall to inspect the Trebennick Academy. It was a tall house standing alone on a sweep of moorland, having on one side of it a lean garden filled with cabbages. The moorland sloped to a valley, and on the opposite slope, against the skyline, was a prick-eared church with a well-filled graveyard. She saw the Trebennick Academy on an April afternoon, but unless a gardener’s eye were to find it in the condition of the cabbages, there was no sign of spring in the landscape. Stones of various sizes were tumbled over the moor, rusty bracken was plastered against them by the winter’s rain, and a fine mist limpened the folds of her pelisse and bloomed her gloves. The air was such as she had never smelt before, very fresh and smelling of earth. Her first impression was one of distaste, almost of fear; and that evening, coughing over the peat-fire of the Half Moon Inn, she all but decided against the Trebennick Academy. Yet on the morrow, smelling again that fresh, earth-scented air, she found herself queerly in love with the place, and reluctant to leave it so slightly tasted, as when a child she had felt reluctant to leave, half-eaten, some pot of stolen jam.

There was no doubt that, in some unsuspected way, she could have been very happy at Trebennick. That air, so pure and earthy, absolved one back into animal, washed off all recollection of responsibilities; one waft of wind there would blow away the cares from one’s mind, the petticoats from one’s legs, demolish all the muffle of imposed personality loaded upon one by other people, leaving one free, swift, unburdened as a fox. At intervals during the summer Sophia had found herself betrayed by fancy into Cornwall, and leading there a wild romantic life in which, unsexed and unpersoned, she rode, sat in inns, slept in a bracken bed among the rocks, bathed naked in swift-running brooks, knocked people down, outwitted shadowy enemies, poached one night with gipsies, in another went a keeper’s round with a gun under her arm. Out of these rhapsodies she would fall as suddenly as she had fallen into them, and without a moment’s pause go on with what she was doing: a memorandum for the bailiff, a letter to the dressmaker, the paper boat her hands had been folding and fastening for Augusta to sail on the pond. In a space no longer than it takes to open one’s eyes she was back in her accustomed life, in a leap was transferred to daylight from darkness. And yet, as by the mere closing of eyelids, one can surmise a darkness stranger than any star has pierced, a darkness of no light which only the blind can truly possess, she knew that by a moment’s flick of the mind she could levant into a personal darkness, an unknown aspect of Sophia as truly hers as one may call the mysterious sheltering darkness of one’s eyelid one’s own.

However well a life in Cornwall might suit her (not, though, that it was a life that the real and waking Sophia could anywhere find), seeing Caspar she doubted if the Trebennick Academy could possibly do for him. She had arranged her mind before his coming, telling herself that black blood is stronger than that of the white races, that the boy would bear little or no resemblance to Julius, and might well be no more than a woolly negro. But the boy who stepped from the carriage and walked towards her up the sunlit steps might have come, not from any surmisable country, but from a star, and before his extreme beauty and grace she felt her mouth opening like that of any bumpkin.

Could this beauty be for her sight alone? She heard a servant whisper, “What a little blackamoor!” Fools! she said to herself; and like one with something at stake she awaited the moment when her children should be introduced to the newcomer.

The minds of Damian and Augusta had also been arranged beforehand. They had been told something of the colour question, and of the rational humanitarianism which forbids that any race should toil as slaves when they would toil more readily as servants; they had been told, more practically, not to stare and not to be shy. They had also been told (though the question of bastardy had been left undiscussed) not to be too familiar.

Augusta’s conduct was all that could have been asked of her. She had come forward prettily, said her greetings, held out her hand, glanced with her blue eyes as though they beheld nothing out of the ordinary. Damian had both stared and been shy, but his conduct had better pleased his mother. It was obvious that the arrival of this dusky piece of romance had stirred him deeply; and Sophia found herself moved towards her son not as a child but as a companion. His admiration corroborated hers, sanctioned it almost; she was knit to Damian, not by the common bond that tethers a mother to her child, but by the first intimation of that stronger link that time might forge, the close tremulous excited dependence of the woman upon the male she has brought forth. Flying out into the future, launched there the faster by the weighted impetus of her practical character, she decided that Caspar must be present, and honoured, too, at Damian’s coming of age.

Meanwhile the two boys were walking across the lawn, Damian a little stiffly holding the newcomer’s hand.

Augusta’s carefully adjusted sigh intimated that she wished to receive attention.

“How do you like Caspar? Do you think you will be friends with him?”

“I like him very much. Is he a heathen?”

“No, of course not.”

“Oh!”

Regret was implied.

“Did you want him to be a heathen, Augusta?”

“No, not exactly. But if he had been I had a plan, that’s all.”

“To convert him?”

Sophia’s voice had gone a little dry. Once again Papa’s cool shade had neared her, remarking on what one might expect if one chose the nurse for respectable piety. Religion was all very well, and a certain amount of it was necessary, no doubt, if only to comply with custom. Papa himself would have been the first to agree to that. But Sophia did not wish her children to be too religious. Untimely piety, not only in story-books, allured untimely deaths.

“No.”

“Why did you want him to be a heathen, then, my darling?”

Augusta did not answer. She fidgeted, and stared across the lawn. Suddenly she began to cry.

“My love, my little one, what is it? What is the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

“Mamma, Mamma! Don’t let us ever go to that place again.”

“The lime-kiln?”

There was no doubt in Sophia’s mind as to what place Augusta meant. The child’s long shudders vibrated against her bosom, this life she encompassed with her anxious arms was separate and inarticulate to her as an animal’s, it was as though the fiddle should suddenly take a personal life upon it, wailing against the player’s shoulder.