Chapter IV: The Breach Accomplished

Before Christmas it was all over. Christmas! Perhaps we make a good deal of unnecessary fuss about this festival--not that the associations about it, the traditions of universal kindness and good-will which, fortunately for us, are so English, and still more fortunately are more or less so honestly carried out, can ever be exaggerated. Yet it is no doubt true that the universal jollity, the rude fun and sometimes mawkish sentiment which have got to be associated with the name, just as often disgust and sadden as delight those who have learned by time or trouble that Christmas does not always bring the reunion and happiness which are supposed to be its particular privilege. Alas! on the contrary, how sharply it reminds some of us of gaps not to be filled again, of empty places, of life diminished and wearing out! But whether we do rightly or not in making a saturnalia of its homely delights, certain it is that of all times to choose for a parting, Christmas is the least appropriate. I don’t think Mrs. Tremenheere thought of this; she had so many things to think about, how should she remember dates? It was the morning of the 24th of December, but she had forgotten, so full was her mind of other things, that the 24th of December was Christmas eve. She went away in the afternoon in a cab to the railway station, with Eddy by her side, dull and lowering and miserable, not knowing why she was so unhappy. No explanations had been entered into with the children. Mrs. Tremenheere was in reality so miserable that she desired to avoid dramatic effect as far as this was possible, and her husband, naturally, as a man and an Englishman, hated scenes. So the curious boy and girl, full of secret interest in the something going on which was not confided to them, were put off with the intimation that mamma was going away for a time, taking Eddy with her, while Vera was to stay at home to “take care of papa.” Eddy for one was never taken in by this false explanation, but Vera in the delight of her own importance, contrived to stave off her vague inquietude on the subject, and accepted it. The boy’s inquietude was equally vague, but it was stronger. He felt himself a very forlorn waif and stray as the dreary cab traversed the streets, where all the shops were decked for Christmas, and where so many holiday parties were wandering about, looking in at the shop windows for their Christmas presents. “Mamma,” he said at last, when his heart was too full to bear the pressure longer, “isn’t it very odd to leave home to-day when to-morrow is Christmas?” A big tear was forming in the corner of his eye. He did not like to look up at her, lest she should see it, or lest--still more terrible possibility--it should fall.

Mrs. Tremenheere put her arm round him. I will not say that she was in much better plight than Eddy was, though a strong sense of duty held her up. Something was choking in her throat which was not exactly the fog, and her heart was wrung with a sterner pang. She paused a moment, to be quite firm and collected, and drew him close to her. “Yes,” she said, “it is very odd, very odd; but I can’t help it, Eddy.” There was a kind of apology, a kind of appeal in her voice, and it went to Eddy’s heart, who vaguely comprehended, though it would have been utterly impossible for him to put in words what it was he felt and understood. He crouched himself up close against his mother, and caressed the hand that was round him, and allowed those two tears with which his eyes were big to drop upon it; and thus the pain in both was a little softened and sweetened, though the child was as far from understanding intellectually what the woman had in her mind as if they had been creatures of different species. But to go away to a hotel in Brighton through the cold, through the wintry dimness and brightness, through the crowds of travellers that encumbered every railway, the clusters of happy holiday people, and all the hampers and all the presents--one must have done it to know what it is. Mrs. Tremenheere bought some Christmas numbers of various periodicals at the station to amuse the boy. They were all about meetings, dances, mistletoe, wanderers returning and hard hearts relenting, and every kind of revolution made in every kind of life by the simple agency of Christmas carols, snow, church-bells and sentiment. “Merry Christmas!” the very shops flaunted at them in big print. “Merry Christmas!” the porter said when he got his sixpence. And so the strong-minded woman and her boy went off into the yellow misty distance which led to Brighton, if you please, but which was the cold outside world,--outside of home.

Elinor Meadows joined them next day, in the strange hotel looking out upon the quay, which Mrs. Tremenheere had chosen as the first step in her self-banishment. It was not that Miss Meadows had not many cheerful houses to which to go for Christmas, but being a kind-hearted soul, as well as a strong-minded woman, she preferred to come to Brighton, and spend the festival in the dismallest way, over the fire in a sitting-room of a big vulgar inn, with her depressed and somewhat irritable friend. Never was a work more worthy of a good Samaritan. She came in the middle of the day, after church, which was the only cheerful portion of the Christmas to poor Eddy. The holly-berries and the wreaths pleased the child, and the Christmas hymns which he could sing, and which did him good, till they came out of church into the dreary world again. To be sure, Eddy wanted a hundred times during the service to nudge Vera, and call her attention to a bit of decoration that pleased him, or to the little girl in the next pew who fell asleep, or to the clergyman curtesying to the altar in his long cassock and surplice, or some one of the other anythings, nothings, that caught his childish eyes; but still church is church, wherever you are, and not so terribly dull as a strange place far from home. And then it was a hopeless sort of Christmas day, with neither sunshine nor frost, such as are orthodox and befitting, but a drizzling dull rain, and skies so low, so leaden, and so cloudy that they seemed to Eddy to be coming down upon him, threatening to crush him every minute. After Elinor came (whom the children called Aunt Elinor, for friendship’s sake, though there was no relationship between them), it grew duller and duller for Eddy. He had not anything to do with the conversation of his mother and her friend, which was carried on in subdued tones, and with occasional warning glances from one to the other at himself, which showed him that he was in the way--upon which, being proud, Eddy gathered together the Christmas papers his mother had bought him, and drew a chair to the window, in front of which he placed himself, shutting out half of the gray and stifled daylight there was, and pored over first one and then another of his stories, wondering to himself rather why all those tales were of people who came back, and not one of people who went away just at Christmas. He read and read, hearing behind him the murmur of the two voices, the sound of the sparkling, crackling fire, and seeing, when by chance he lifted his eyes, the gray sea breaking in a muddy soiled rim of white upon the gray pebbles, and the street, which looked like a very dismal Sunday street--“only rather more so,” Eddy thought. But he did not often raise his eyes. He read on and on, one tale after another, scarcely quite sure where one ended and another began, till the monotony of his reading and of the lapping waves outside, and the murmuring voices within, lulled the lonely boy into a kind of dream.

The ladies had drawn their chairs to the fire; they had eaten their luncheon, they had done their best to be cheerful; and now the floods of remark and criticism and question which were in Elinor’s mind could be contained no longer. She began even before poor Eddy withdrew, leaving them at liberty; and showed her sympathy, as so many friends do, by taunt and sudden reproach.

“Well,” she said, “you have done it now. It is all over, and every place of repentance comfortably cut off. How do you like it? You have given up your husband to confusion and remorse. You have left your child----”

“Mr. Tremenheere has nothing to be remorseful about,” said his wife, with a slight shiver, turning away from the last suggestion. “You mistake the matter altogether, Elinor. You do not understand either me or him. I blame him for nothing. He has no need to be remorseful on my account.”

“Then why, in the name of heaven, did you go away? I never believed you would carry it out. I expected you to threaten and frighten him, and then to relent.”

“That is to say,” cried Mrs. Tremenheere, “that you expected me to do exactly what the woman does whom you find fault with in books, and are indignant about as a man’s idea of women. You expect me to say things I don’t mean, and do the reverse of what I say, and act like a creature without conscience, or honor, or moral responsibility.”

“Ada! No, I don’t do anything of the sort. Don’t please come down upon an unoffending person in that way. I don’t quite see why, in a case where the feelings are concerned, you should not act as a great many other people act, who are not without honor or conscience.”

“I may be wrong,” said Mrs. Tremenheere. “No one is free from the risk of taking a wrong view, but to threaten anything without meaning to do it is not possible to me. This seemed to me right----”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Elinor. “We need not discuss it over again. Isn’t there a book which is called ‘He Knew He was Right?’ We must put it the other way now. You are right and you are satisfied. And now what are you going to do? You can’t stay always here.”

“No, I am going--to devote myself to _his_ education.”

She would not say Eddy’s name to attract his attention. Was he not happily unconscious, absorbed in his Christmas stories? so, at least, she thought.

“That too is abstract, Ada. Don’t tell me where you mean to go unless you like--but give me some idea of your plans.”

“I have not any yet. I must find out what is best.”

“Put him to school, Ada. That is always best for boys. Put him to some good school, and then when you are free of responsibility, come abroad with me. I have been thinking of it all the morning. You want change, you want refreshment. You have been worried and tired. Get the boy comfortably disposed of, so that you need have no anxiety about him, and come with me.”

“Get him comfortably disposed of, where I shall have no anxiety about him!” Mrs. Tremenheere repeated slowly, with a smile.

“Yes,” said Elinor, suspecting no sarcasm in her tone, “it would be the very thing to do. That is the chief good of children at his age; you can dispose of them in so satisfactory a way. Vera under the care of her father, Eddy at school; and then you and I----”

“Can go and enjoy ourselves?” Said Mrs. Tremenheere with a forced laugh.

“Why not? Of course we should enjoy ourselves. Don’t you recollect, before you were married, that trip we took? I was not much more than a girl, and how I did enjoy it! I never thought there would be such luck for me again. Come, Ada, now you are free, with only the boy to dispose of, this is the very thing to do. We might start almost at once; stay at Nice or Cannes, to rest ourselves a little, and then on to Rome.”

Mrs. Tremenheere rose before eager Elinor had got this length, and began to walk about the room in an agitated way. Then she went across to where Eddy, in front of the window, had dropped half asleep over the stories, with the monotony and the misery and the stillness. She woke him up bending over him, taking his curly head between her hands and kissing his forehead, a caress which the drowsy, confused child responded to by stumbling from his chair with a sudden start, and all but knocking her down.

“Mamma!” cried Eddy, overpowered, and beginning in spite of his manhood, to cry without knowing it.

“Yes, my darling,” she said, with quivering lips, soothing him. Elinor sat still, turning round in her chair, gazing eagerly at her, not knowing what it all meant. What had this sudden demonstration to do with what she had been saying--with that plan of hers which would be so pleasant and so easily carried out?

While Eddy and his mother got through this dreary Christmas afternoon a great many things had happened to Vera. She had managed to keep herself going all the previous day. A lively, vivacious, independent disposition, and a great sense of importance were as wings to the little heroine. She gave herself a great many airs, to the pitying wonder and admiration of the servants, who, I need not say, were indignant beyond the power of utterance at Mrs. Tremenheere. Vera walked about over the house to see that everything was ready for her father when it came to be time for his return. She interfered with the butler in laying out his things in his dressing-room. She interfered with the cook, requesting to know what was ordered for dinner, and suggesting an additional pudding “out of her own head.” She went to the dining-room and insisted upon helping to arrange the dessert. Her mind was full of a lofty determination to make her father so comfortable that “he should not miss mamma!” Accordingly she took care to remove his claret from the fire where it had been carefully placed, and let fall the bottle, which was warm, from her small fingers.

“If it hadn’t a been for the hearthrug, miss, you’d have broke it, and spilt the wine all over the floor,” said Jervis.

“But why do you put it there? Gentlemen take ice in their wine, they don’t like it hot!” cried Vera, stamping her foot, as she saw it put back again. “Take it away, take it away!”

Then when Mr. Tremenheere came in, Vera placed herself at the table beside him, and pressed him to eat of every dish, especially the pudding she had ordered.

“I told cook to make it myself, papa.”

“Then you had better have some of it,” he said, and Vera was nothing loth. She sat with him while he took his wine, chattering without pause or intermission, and she led him up-stairs and made tea for him, her little heart beating with a mingled pain and pleasure which she did not analyze, poor child, but which excited her as either sensation unmingled seldom does.

“When mamma comes back you can tell her how I took care of you,” she cried in triumph. “I do love to pour out your tea, papa!”

All this touched him beyond description with a strange little flavor of sharp sweetness amid a great deal of pain. Mr. Tremenheere felt the world’s comments hanging over him, felt that already the servants were all “sitting upon” himself and his private affairs, and that ere a day had passed “everybody” in the narrow sense that belongs to that word in society, would be aware of what had happened, and would discuss them too. How was he to face their remarks, what account was he to give even to his best friends? “Incompatibility of temper;” but how few people would believe that there was not something else below that well-worn plea? Some _faux pas_ on her part, some atrocity on his--which was being veiled on one side or the other. As it was, he was very irritable to the servants, and launched out upon poor Jervis about that very claret which he had saved from Vera’s meddling little hands.

“But, Lord bless you, to see her there a setting beside him, comforting of him, I hadn’t the heart to say as it was Miss Vera’s fault,” that dignitary said, when he went down-stairs; “and though he’s in the devil’s own temper, I could’nt stand up to him, not to-night. Poor beggar, it ain’t very nice for him, whatever you may say.” Nobody, however, down-stairs took up this challenge, or had a word to say in favor of Mrs. Tremenheere. She was universally condemned.

“A woman as thinks of herself first didn’t ought to have children,” said cook, who was a great domestic authority.

“And how any woman as hadn’t a heart of stone could go and leave my little Duckie!” whimpered the nurse.

In short the house was in a state of moral indignation. But Vera went to bed, straight from the drawing-room, after tea, supported by her own elation; and only wept two or three tears when she remembered that mamma would not come to kiss after she was asleep.

Next morning, however, it was different. Mr. Tremenheere did not go to church, but he stayed at home with a sullen respect for the festival which was so far from being a festival to him. What a day it was! A drizzling dull Christmas, with scarcely anybody about the streets, the shops shut, the houses either shut up or turned outside in, as it were, everything cheerful being concentrated in doors. Vera came down full of prattle to breakfast, but her father replied to her with an effort. He was very kind, and kissed her, and gave her a little locket which he had bought for her for Christmas, and which made her quite happy for five minutes; but after that he let the child run on without any reply, and got impatient when she clamored for an answer. “Hush child, I am busy,” he said. As soon as he had finished his breakfast he went off to the library to write letters; and Vera went up-stairs, her heart sinking more and more, and sat down on the carpet close to one of the long drawing-room windows. She leaned her poor little head against the pane, looking out. There were only a few people passing under dripping umbrellas. Everybody who was not out of town was at church, or else preparing for the festivities of the evening. The house was very still; there were no preparations going on in Hyde Park Square. Vera’s little heart sank lower and lower--all the world seemed to ebb away from her,--mother, brother, even nurse and cook; only herself and her father remained, two forlorn and shipwrecked people. There came into Vera’s mind a picture of the Flood, which she had seen somewhere, in which two people perched on the smallest point of rock were holding by each other. “Like me and poor papa!” she said to herself, with a rising sob in her lonely little bosom. Just at that moment, however, she heard her father’s voice down-stairs.

“I am going out,” Mr. Tremenheere was saying. “Probably I shall dine out. You needn’t prepare anything; and tell nurse to look after Miss Vera.” When nurse did go, very ill-tempered to have her holiday thus interfered with, she found Vera lying on the floor, crying her little heart out. The loneliness had swallowed up all her little bravery, her resolution and courage. She put her hand to the locket round her neck to try and console herself; but even that did not reanimate her failing spirit. Poor little Vera! It was she now who was on that peak alone, with the hurrying muddy waters sweeping round her, and nobody to lay hold of. She sank down like a weak little unfledged bird. Was mamma in that cruel ark, floating, floating away, taking no thought for her? Love and help and kindness seemed to have abandoned the child. Her pretty hair was ruffled, her eyes blind with tears; she laid down her head and thought she would die. And it was Christmas day!