Chapter III: A Mediator

Mr. Tremenheere took a very strange step on the morning after this discussion. He went to call on his wife’s chief friend, Miss Elinor Meadows, a single woman of fortune and advanced opinions, his aversion hitherto, and the very impersonation of everything he disliked--and put the case into her hands. And in less than an hour after, Miss Meadows burst into the drawing-room at Hyde Park Square. She was a handsome woman, with a wind of motion always about her, a “tempestuous petticoat,” and hair somewhat wild at the best of times. Her hair was gray, curly, and frizzy, and full of life, running into curls and eddies, even when the most decorous attempts had been made to get it into order. On this occasion, when she had walked, and walked quickly, in the teeth of a breeze which had dragged it out from under her bonnet, and twisted it up in her veil, her broad white forehead shone out among the unruly locks with greater solidity and breadth than ever. She had an eager heartiness of manner which corresponded with her wind-tossed aspect. Her clear brown eyes shone with the excitement of her mission. When she came into the orderly room it was as if a fresh breeze had been let loose there. She rushed up to Mrs. Tremenheere, put her hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss upon either cheek.

“Why, Ada,” she said, “what is this? What have you been doing? Do you mean it, or are you only frightening this poor man?”

“What poor man? Of course it is you, Nelly. No one else comes in like a gale.”

“I have come to puff the cobwebs away,” said Miss Meadows. “I have had a penitent husband with me this morning. Fancy! you may imagine how very droll I found it that he should appeal to me.”

“Before you go further, let us understand each other,” said her friend, steadily. “The poor man and the penitent husband do not of course mean Mr. Tremenheere. Any one else you please you can speak of so, but not him.”

“Ada, he has been making me his confidant. It is very strange, I allow, but still he has done it. Are you both out of your senses, or what on earth do you mean?”

“We mean, my dear Nelly, as he has taken you into his confidence, to do the wisest thing we have done for a long time--to withdraw amicably from each other’s society. I don’t know what he may have said to you, but this is really how it is. We differ very much in sentiment and opinion. We have different ways of regarding things. He considers all subjects by their bearing on society,--I for what they are in themselves. This makes frequent dissensions between us. We don’t seem able to modify our views, or rather, our way of looking at life, and we cannot allow the children to grow up in constant presence of that which, while it is only reasonable controversy to us, will look like strife and discord to them. There! you have the whole affair in a nutshell, as Mr. Tremenheere says.”

Mrs. Tremenheere warmed unconsciously as she spoke, and her voice quivered till it ended in a little outburst. She was perfectly self-possessed, but not unmoved or callous. In the little tremblings of her dress, in the slight vibration of her head when she ceased speaking, in the movements of her hand, she betrayed excitement which was almost passionate, though so powerfully restrained.

“Ada, I don’t know what you have been quarrelling about,” said the intercessor, with deprecating meekness of speech, “but I could see he is very sorry. If he has provoked you badly, as I suppose, I could almost promise he will never do it again. Come, Ada----”

“Is it Mr. Tremenheere you are speaking of, as if he was a child who had gone wrong? I cannot allow it--this is taking an entirely false view of the subject.”

“Upon my word! and so because he is _your_ husband no one is to say a word about him. You will quarrel with him yourself, but to others he shall be a demigod!” said Miss Meadows. “_I_ don’t care for the man. I never did, as you know. I don’t care for men generally. There is not good enough in them, to make amends for the trouble they give. It is just like you. At all times everything that was yours was better than anybody else’s. But I am not going to be put down; I have a mission, and I must do my duty to my principal. Come, Ada, be reasonable. Fight it out and be done with it. After all, I don’t suppose he is any worse than other people. He likes his own way, and so do you, and I, and all of us. That is why I never understood your marriage at all, for any one more determined to be in the right than you are I never saw. Give in a little, and things will come round.”

At this moment the door slowly opened, and the small figure of Vera, fully equipped, appeared, framed in by the doorway. The child stood in her little velvet coat and furs, her little hat, with its long feather pushed off her forehead, everything perfect and carefully arranged about her, an example of luxury and warmth and comfort. But Vera, though she loved her best hat as a little woman ought, was not thinking of it for the moment. She stood on the threshhold of the room and searched it with widening eyes of wonder and anxiety and dismay. The changes on her little countenance amused the visitor, who had stopped short in her speech to look at the child. All expectation, pleasure and brightness, just clouded with the suspense of a moment, was the little face when it first appeared; then the blue eyes grew bigger and searched with a slight shade of fear in them; then the corners of her mouth began to droop. “Perhaps he is in the library,” said Vera, slowly. “It is not possible that he can have forgotten;” and then the little mouth quivered, and a shower of quick tears came down in a moment. “But no, no; Aunt Elinor is there, and he does not like her, and she has frightened him away.”

“I am much obliged to you, Vera,” said Miss Meadows, laughing; “but on the contrary, my dear, your father likes me very well, and it is he who has sent me----”

“To take us to meet him,” cried the child, with a sudden recovery of sunshine, despising all probabilities; upon which a gruffer voice arose behind her, and Eddy said curtly, himself unseen: “He never intended it. I told you so. Vera, come along and don’t cry!”

“Your papa is very busy; he was obliged to go out early. I will remind him when he comes home,” said Mrs. Tremenheere.

Vera rushed into the room and pulled off her best hat violently, pulling off along with it the pretty ribbon that tied her hair. She clenched her fists like a little fury, looking out through a mist of shiny locks with tears and rage in her eyes, and stamped her little foot on the carpet. “Eddy said so,” she cried, “but I could not believe him. I would not believe him. Oh, isn’t it dreadful; isn’t it shameful! To break his word: You would kill me for it if it was me.”

“Vera, you forget yourself,” said her mother.

“But I don’t forget my promises!” cried the child, “and why should big people be let do things which children musn’t! No, I shan’t come, Eddy. I’ll stay here. I don’t want to go out. I don’t care for anything. I have had a disappointment;” and Vera marched to a corner of the room and sat down, gloomily turning her face to the wall.

The two women looked on with more interest than the situation warranted, Vera ought to have been whipped, I allow; but the circumstances gave a certain changed character to her childish petulance. Elinor Meadows went up to her friend and stood over her chair, stooping to whisper that the child might not hear. “If you carry out your intentions,” she said, feeling herself to be delivering a stroke against which no woman could have any defence, “what is to be done about _them_? Are they to be divided and separated like your other goods? Ada, Ada, you can never have thought of that.”

“I have thought of little else,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a twitching about her lips. “Of course it is the chief thing to think of. It has been my thought night and day. In the ordinary way of arranging such matters Vera would go with me, and Eddy with his father; but----”

“But----?”

“If you only knew how long and how much I have thought of it! Yes--if I had Vera I should bring her up to be like myself--and I am not such a great success as I might have been, Nelly; while his father would chill Eddy into a nobody, and leave him to grow up as he pleased, or as his schoolmaster pleased. But Mr. Tremenheere is proud of _the child_.” Here Mrs. Tremenheere’s voice grew choked, and for the moment she broke down.

“Ada,” cried her friend, “for heaven’s sake don’t be obstinate. Why should you bring all this pain upon yourself?”

“I do it for the best,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, faintly; then she recovered her tone of authority. “There is, I believe a principle in human nature which makes men kinder to women (in the abstract) and women kinder to men than either are to their own sex--at least such is the general opinion. Bringing up Vera would be to me a matter of course; one knows all about it--it is a thing of routine; as we were trained ourselves--or exactly the reverse--we train our daughters; but a boy--that requires thought. Therefore, Nelly, it is my opinion that I could do most justice to Eddy.”

“And Vera?” said Miss Meadows, “she whom you call _the child_? I know she is the apple of your eye, however you may choose to deny it; is Mr. Tremenheere, do you think, likely to do the most justice to her?”

Vera’s mother bore her friend’s satirical gaze for a moment, then she put up her hands and covered her face. Vera, who was sitting somewhat sullen on a stool in the corner after her outbreak, her pretty hair dishevelled, and her pretty face stained with crying, had begun to wake up from the monotony of a fit of ill-temper, which had lasted two whole minutes, and as her eyes began to wander round the room in search of some excitement, she suddenly perceived this group, which surprised her. Elinor Meadows, with her finger elevated in the air, scolding--as Vera thought--and mamma crying. Such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances had never happened to her knowledge before. She started up from her seat, and threw herself between them.

“Aunt Elinor!” cried Vera, thrusting her small person in front of her mother. “You can tell _me_ what it is if you want to scold--but you shan’t make mamma cry.”

Upon this Elinor, strong-minded woman as she was, began to whimper too.

“Child, you are a darling!” she cried, making a sudden attempt to kiss her; which Vera repulsed, standing up like a little lioness, at her mother’s knee.

Then Mrs. Tremenheere raised her head, and putting an arm round her little defender, drew Vera to her side. Vera deserved that whipping all the same, I do not deny, and her mother knew it; but it was not in human courage to administer it now. She took the little impatient hand which had been raised in her defence, and held it between her own and kissed it. Though she had so much self-command it took her some time to clear her voice.

“Mr. Tremenheere is a good man,” she said, still faltering. “He will do as I mean to do myself. He will feel that it is a new thing, and that he does not understand it, and he will study what is best.”

“But for a girl! A man, without any experience or understanding, left in charge of a girl!”

“Hush!” said Mrs. Tremenheere.

Vera turned round from one to the other, her eyes widening once more with curiosity and eagerness. “Something is going to happen,” she said. “Mamma, tell me what it is?”

“I cannot tell you yet, dear, for I don’t know. Go, Vera, Eddy is calling you.--Who has taught her that something is going to happen?” she said, with a sigh, when they had watched the child’s unwilling departure. She herself looked so melancholy and depressed that Elinor saw her opportunity. She was of an oratorical turn, and, indeed had given some attention to the art of public speaking. She withdrew a step for the greater effect, and shaking her curly gray locks off her broad fair forehead, began:

“Ada! What kind of a woman are you? flesh and blood or rock and stone, to look at that child and leave her, and make up your mind in cold blood to give her up! I say nothing about your boy. He won’t talk to me; I don’t understand him. Mothers have weaknesses for their boys which are inexplicable; the most uninteresting, speechless, stolid beings! (I don’t mean Eddy) and yet women will stand by them--for no reason but an accident of birth--while a child like that!---- If she was mine, they should cut me in little pieces before I parted with her. They should take everything else I possess. Ada! I tell you, if she was mine I should not care for all the men in the world. I should take her, whatever they did--steal her, if it was necessary; run away, hide myself; but part with her!--never--not for the world!”

“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with a trembling voice; “don’t take the devil’s part and tempt me. I must be just. There are two of us, and two of them, father and mother, boy and girl. He has a right to his share as well as I. We must be just. If it is barbarous to give all to the father, it would be equally barbarous to give all to the mother. Nelly, say no more! that would be a crime.”

“Then I should risk the crime,” cried Elinor. “I should care nothing for justice in comparison with Vera. Bah! abstract justice! who minds it? It is a thing to frighten babies with. Do you think Mr. Tremenheere would mind about justice, if he could get the better of you?”

“You are talking of my husband,” said Mrs. Tremenheere, with dignity, “besides, if he were to do wrong a hundred times (which he would not) that would be no excuse for me. I will do him no injustice, whatever happens.”

“Then put up with him, Ada! It is your only alternative. Good heavens! what does it matter? An argument more or less, a discussion here or there. You have always been fond of argument. Make it up! For my part, I’d almost marry him myself,” cried Elinor, in a burst of energy, “to have that child--and you have married him, and got all the worst over. Make it up, Ada; don’t be foolish--make up!”