Chapter IX: The Hill

After this a long interval passed, which it is needless to describe in detail. Five years is a long time in a life; how much it does! Makes ties and breaks them, gives life and withdraws it, finds you happy and leaves you miserable, builds you up or plucks you down; and at the same time how little it does! Buffets you, caresses you, plays at shuttlecock with you; yet leaves you the same man or woman, unchanged. Most of this time James Beresford had spent in absences, now here, now there; not travels according to the old happy sense, though in a real and matter-of-fact sense they were more travels than those he had made so happily in the honeymooning days. But he did not like to use the word. He called his long voyages absences, nothing more. And they were of a very different kind from those expeditions of old. He avoided the Continent as if pestilence had been there, and would not even cross it to get the mail at Brindisi, but went all the way round from Southampton when he went to the East. He went up the Nile, with a scientific party, observing some phenomena or other. He went to America in the same way. He was not a very good sailor, but he made up his mind to that as the best way of fighting through those lonely years. Once he went as far north as any but real Arctic explorers, with their souls in it, had ever done. Once he tracked the possible path of Russia across the wildest border wastes to the Indian frontier. He went everywhere languidly but persistently, seldom roused, but never discouraged. A man may be very brave outside, though he is not brave within; and weakness is linked to strength in ways beyond our guessing. He went into such wilds once, that they gave him an ‘ovation’ at the Geographical Society’s meeting, not because of any information he had brought them, or anything he had done, but because he had been so far off, where so few people had ever been. And periodically he came back to the Square; he would not leave that familiar house. His wife’s drawing-room was kept just as she had liked it, though no one entered the room: the cook and John the butler, who had married, having the charge of everything. And when Mr. Beresford came back to England, he went home, living downstairs generally, with one of his travelling companions to bear him company. Maxwell and he had dropped apart. They were still by way of being fast friends, and doubtless, had one wanted the other, would still have proved so--last resource of friendship, in which the severed may still hope. But, as nothing happened to either, their relations waxed cold and distant. The doctor had never got clear of the suspicion which had risen in his mind at Mrs. Beresford’s death. It is true that had James Beresford given the poor lady that ‘strong sweet dose’ she once had asked for, Maxwell would have forgiven his friend with all his heart. I do not know, in such a strange case, what the doctor could have done; probably exactly as he did afterwards do, invent a death-certificate which might be accepted as possible, though it was not in accordance with the facts. But, anyhow, he would have taken up warmly, and stood by his friend to his last gasp. This being the case, it is impossible to tell on what principle it was that Maxwell half hated Beresford, having a lurking suspicion that he had done it--a suspicion contradicted by his own statement and by several of the facts. But this was the case. The man who would have helped his wife boldly, heart-brokenly, to escape from living agony, was one thing; but he who would give her a fatal draught, or connive at her getting it, and then veil himself so that no one should know, was different. So Mr. Maxwell thought. The inconsistency might be absurd; but it was so. They positively dropped out of acquaintance. The men who visited James Beresford when he was at home, were men with tags to their names, mystic initials, F.G.S.’s, F.R.S.’s, F.S.A.’s, and others of that class. And Maxwell, who was his oldest friend, dropped off. He said to himself that if Beresford ever wanted him badly, he would find his friendship surviving. But Beresford did not want Maxwell nor Maxwell Beresford; and thus they were severed for a suspicion which would not have severed them had it been a reality, or so at least Maxwell thought. The doctor still went down once a week regularly to visit Miss Charity, and so kept up his knowledge of the family; but ‘nothing came’ of the old fancy that had been supposed to exist between him and Cherry. They all hardened down unconsciously, these middle-aged folk, in their various ways. The doctor became a little rougher, a little redder, a trifle more weather-beaten; and Miss Cherry grew imperceptibly more faded, more slim, more prim. As for Miss Charity, being now over seventy, she was younger than ever; her unwrinkled cheeks smoother, her blue eyes as blue, her step almost more alert, her garden more full of roses. ‘After seventy,’ she tersely said, ‘one gets a new lease.’ And Mrs. Burchell, at the Rectory, was a little stouter, and her husband a little more burly, and both of them more critical. Fifty is perhaps a less amiable age than three-score and ten. I am not sure that it is not the least amiable age of all; the one at which nature begins to resent the fact of growing old. Of all the elder generation, James Beresford was the one to whom it made least change, notwithstanding that he was the only one who had ‘come through’ any considerable struggle. He was still speculative, still fond of philosophical talk, still slow to carry out to logical conclusions any of the somewhat daring theories which he loved to play with. He was as little affected as ever by what he believed and what he did not believe.

As for Cara, however, these five years had made a great difference to her; they had widened the skies over her head and the earth under her feet. Whereas she had been but twelve, a child, groping and often in the dark, now she was seventeen, and every new day that rose was a new wonder to her. Darkness had fled away, and the firmament all around her quivered and trembled with light; night but pretended to be, as in summer, when twilight meets twilight, and makes the moment of so-called midnight and darkness the merriest and sweetest of jests. Everything was bright around her feet, and before her in that flowery path which led through tracts of sunshine. She was no more afraid of life than the flowers are. Round about her the elders, who were her guides, and ought to have been her examples, were not, she might have perceived, had she paused to think, exuberantly happy. They had no blessedness to boast of, nor any exemption from common ills; but it no more occurred to Cara to think that she, _she_ could ever be like her good Aunt Cherry, or Mrs. Burchell, than that she could be turned into a blue bird, like the prince in the fairy tale. The one transformation would have been less wonderful than the other. She had lived chiefly at Sunninghill during her father’s absence, and it was a favourite theory with the young Burchells, all but two (there were ten of them), that she would progress in time to be the Miss Cherry, and then the Miss Charity, of that maiden house. A fate was upon it, they said. It was always to be in the hands of a Miss Beresford, an old-maidish Charity, to be transmitted to another Charity after her. This was one of the favourite jokes of the rectorial household, warmly maintained except by two, _i.e._ Agnes, the eldest, a young woman full of aspirations; and Roger, the second boy, who had aspirations too, or rather who had one aspiration, of which Cara was the object. She would not die Charity Beresford if he could help it; but this was a secret design of which nobody knew. Cara’s presence, it may be supposed, had made a great deal of difference at Sunninghill. It had introduced a governess and a great many lessons; and it had introduced juvenile parties and an amount of fun unparalleled before in the neighbourhood. Not that she was a very merry child, though she was full of visionary happiness; but when she was there, there too was drawn everything the two other elder Charity Beresfords could think of as delightsome. The amusements of the princesses down in St. George’s were infinitely less considered. To be sure there were many of them, and Cara was but one. She would have been quite happy enough in the garden, among the roses; but because this was the case she had every ‘distraction’ that love could think of, and all the young people in the neighbourhood had reason to rejoice that Cara Beresford had come to live with her aunts at Sunninghill.

However, these delights came to an end when Mr. Beresford came home at length ‘to settle.’ To say with what secret dismay, though external pleasure, this news was received at ‘the Hill’ would require a volume. The hearts of the ladies there sank into their shoes. They did not dare to say anything but that they were delighted.

‘Of course I am to be congratulated,’ Miss Charity said, with a countenance that seemed to be cut out of stone. ‘To see James settle down to his life again is the greatest desire I can have. What good was he to any one, wandering like that over the face of the earth? We might all have been dead and buried before we could have called him back.’

‘Of course we are _delighted_,’ said Miss Cherry, with a quaver in her voice. ‘He is my only brother. People get separated when they come to our time of life, but James and I have always been one in heart. I am more glad than words can say.’ And then she cried. But she was not a strong-minded or consistent person, and her little paradoxes surprised nobody. Miss Charity herself, however, who was not given to tears, made her blue eyes more muddy that first evening after the news came, than all her seventy years had made them. ‘What is the child to do?’ she asked abruptly when they were alone; ‘of an age to be “out,” and without a chaperon, or any sense in his head to teach him that such a thing is wanted?’

‘You would not like him to marry again?’ said Miss Cherry, blowing her agitated nose.

‘I’d like him to have some sense, or sensible notions in his head, whatever he does. What is to become of the child?’

Alas! I fear it was, ‘What is to become of us without her?’ that filled their minds most.

It was autumn; the end of the season at which the Hill was most beautiful. It had its loveliness too in winter, when the wonderful branching of the trees--all that symmetry of line and network which summer hides with loving decorations--was made visible against the broader background of the skies, which gained infinitude from the dropping of those evanescent clouds of foliage. But the common mind rejected the idea of the Hill in winter as that place of bliss which it was acknowledged to be during the warmer half of the year. In autumn, however, the ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ of the great plain, the tints of fervid colour which came to the trees, the soft hazy distances and half-mournful brightness of the waning season, gave the place a special beauty. There were still abundant flowers fringing the lawn; blazing red salvias, geraniums, all the warm-hued plants that reach the ‘fall;’ big hollyhocks flaunting behind backs, and languishing dahlias. Some late roses lingered still; the air was sweet with the faint soft perfume of mignonette; petunias, just on the point of toppling over into decay, made a flutter of white and lilac against the walls, and here and there a bunch of belated honeysuckle, or cluster of jessamine stars out of date, threw themselves forth upon the trellis. It was on the sweetest mellow autumnal day, warm as July, yet misty as October, that the Miss Beresfords had their last garden-party for Cara. All their parties were for Cara; but this was especially hers, her friends far and near coming to take leave of her, as her life at the Hill terminated.

‘She goes just at the proper moment,’ Miss Charity said, sitting out on the lawn in her white crape shawl, receiving her visitors, with St. George’s and all the plain beyond shining through the autumn branches like a picture laid at her feet. ‘She takes the full good of us to the last, and when winter comes, which lays us bare, she will be off with the other birds. She lasts just a little longer than the swallows,’ said the old lady with a laugh.

‘But you can’t wonder, dear Mrs. Beresford, that she should wish to go to her father. What can come up to a father?’ said Mrs. Burchell, meaning, it is to be supposed, to smooth over the wound.

Miss Charity lifted her big green fan ominously in her hand. It was closed, and it might have inflicted no slight blow; and, of all things in the world, it would have pleased the old lady most to bring it down smartly upon that fat hand, stuffed desperately into a tight purple glove, and very moist and discoloured by the confinement, which rested on the admirable clergywoman’s knee.

Meanwhile Roger Burchell, who was bold, and did not miss his chances, had got Cara away from the croquet players and the talk, on pretence of showing her something. ‘I am coming to see you in town,’ he said. ‘It is as easy to go there as to come here, and I shan’t care for coming here when you are gone. So you need not say good-bye to me.’

‘Very well,’ said Cara, laughing; ‘is that all? I don’t mean to say good-bye to any one. I am not going for good. Of course I shall come back.’

‘You will never come back just the same,’ said Roger; ‘but mind what I tell you. I mean to come to town. I have an aunt at Notting Hill. When I get leave from the college I shall go there. The old lady will be pleased; and so you shall see me every Sunday, just as you do now.’

‘Every Sunday!’ said Cara, slightly surprised. ‘I don’t mind, Roger; it can’t matter to me; but I don’t think they will like it here.’

‘They will like it if you do,’ said the enterprising youth. He was twenty, and soon about to enter on his profession, which was that of an engineer. He was not deeply concerned as to what his parents might feel; but at the same time he was perfectly confident of their appreciation of Cara as an excellent match, should that luck be his. This is not intended to mean that Roger thought of Cara as a good match. He had, on the contrary, an honest boyish love for her, quite true and genuine, if not of the highest kind. She was the prettiest girl he knew, and the sweetest. She was clever too in her way, though that was not his way. She was the sort of girl to be proud of, wherever you might go with her; and, in short, Roger was so fond of Cara, that but for that brilliant idea of his, of passing his Sundays with his aunt at Notting Hill instead of at home, her departure would have clouded heaven and earth for him. As it was, he felt the new was rather an improvement on the old; it would throw him into closer contact with the object of his love. Cara took the arrangement generally with great composure. She was glad enough to think of seeing some one on the dull Sundays; and somehow the Sundays used to be duller in the Square, where nobody minded them, than at the Hill, where they were kept in the most orthodox way. Thus she had no objection to Roger’s visits; but the prospect did not excite her. ‘I suppose you are soon going away somewhere?’ she said, with great calm. ‘Where are you going? to India? You cannot come from India to your aunt at Notting Hill.’

‘But I shall not go--not as long as I can help it--not till----’

Here Roger looked at her with eager eyes. He was not handsome; he was stoutly built, like his father, with puffy cheeks and premature black whiskers. But his eyes at the present moment were full of fire. ‘Not till----’ How much he meant by that broken phrase! and to Cara it meant just nothing at all. She did not even look at him, to meet his eyes, which were so full of ardour. But she was not disinclined to loiter along this walk instead of joining the crowd. She was thinking her own thoughts, not his.

‘I wonder if papa will be changed? I wonder if the house will look strange? I wonder----’ said Cara, half under her breath. She was not talking to him, yet perhaps if he had not been with her, she would not have said the words aloud. He was a kind of shield to her from others, an unconscious half-companion. She did not mind what she said when he was there. Sometimes she replied to him at random; often he so answered her, not knowing what she meant. It was from want of comprehension on his part, not want of attention; but it was simple carelessness on hers. He listened to these wonderings of hers eagerly, with full determination to fathom what she meant.

‘He will be changed, and so will the house,’ said Roger. ‘We may be sure of it. You were but a child when you left; now you are a--young lady. Even if he was not changed, you would think him so,’ cried Roger, with insight which surprised himself; ‘but those who have grown up with you, Cara--I, for instance, who have seen you every day, I can never change. You may think so, but you will be mistaken. I shall always be the same.’

She turned to look at him, half amused, half wondering. ‘You, Roger; but what has that to do with it?’ she said. How little she cared! She had faith in him: oh, yes; did not think he would change; believed he would always be the same. What did it matter? It did not make her either sadder or gladder to know that it was unlikely there would be any alteration in him.

‘What are you doing here, Cara, when you ought to be looking after your guests, or playing croquet, or amusing yourself?’

‘I am amusing myself, Aunt Cherry, as much as I wish to amuse myself. It is not amusing to go away.’

‘My darling, we must think of your poor father,’ said Miss Cherry, her voice trembling; ‘and there are all your young friends. Will you go and help to form that game, Roger? They want a gentleman. Cara, dear, I would rather you did not walk with Roger Burchell like this, when everybody is here.’

‘He said he had something to show me,’ said Cara. ‘I was glad to get away. All this looks so like saying farewell; as if I might never be here again.’

‘Cara, if you make me cry, I shall not be fit to be seen; and we must not make a show of ourselves before all these people.’ Miss Cherry pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. ‘I am so silly; my eyes get so red for nothing. What did Roger have to show you? He ought to be at work, that boy.’

‘He has an aunt at Notting Hill,’ said Cara, with a soft laugh; ‘and he told me he meant to come to town on Sundays instead of coming here. He says he shall see me quite as often as usual. I suppose he thought I should miss him. Poor Roger! if that were all!’

‘But, Cara, we must not allow that,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘I must speak to his mother. See him every Sunday, as usual! it is ridiculous; it must be put a stop to. Roger Burchell! a lad who is nobody, who has his way to make in the world, and neither connections, nor fortune, nor any advantage----’

Here Miss Cherry was arrested by Cara’s look turned calmly upon her, without excitement or anxiety, yet with that half smile which shows when a young observer has seen the weak point in the elder’s discourse.

‘What should his connections or his fortune have to do with it if he wanted to see me and I wanted to see him?’ said Cara; ‘we have been friends all our lives. But do not make yourself uneasy, Aunt Cherry; for though I might, perhaps, like well enough to see Roger now and then, I don’t want him every Sunday. What would papa say? Roger thinks Sunday in the Square is like Sunday here--church and then a stroll, and then church again. You know it was not like that when I was at home before.’

‘No,’ said Miss Cherry, with a sigh; ‘but then it was different.’ She had her own thoughts as to whose fault that was, and by whose influence James had been led away from natural churchgoing; but she was far too loyal, both to the dead and to the living, to show this. ‘Cara,’ she added, hurriedly, ‘in that respect, things will be as you like best hereafter. You will be the one to settle what Sunday is to be--and what a great many other things are to be. You must realise what is before you, my dear child.’

‘I can’t realise Roger there in papa’s library,’ said Cara, ‘or upstairs. Am I to live _there_? in the drawing-room. Will it never be changed?’

‘It is so pretty, Cara--and you would like the things to be as pleased her,’ said Miss Cherry, in trembling tones.

Cara did not make any response--her face wore a doubtful expression, but she did not say anything. She turned her back upon the landscape, and looked up at the house. ‘Shall I never come back just the same?’ she said. ‘Roger says so; but he is not clever--how should he know? what should change me? But the Square is not like the Hill,’ she added, with a little shiver. ‘Papa will not think of me as you do--everything for Cara; that will make a change.’

‘But you can think of him,’ said Cherry, ‘everything for _him_; and, perhaps, for a woman that is the happiest way of the two.’

Once more Cara was silent. Clouds of doubt, of reluctance, of unwilling repugnance, were floating through her mind. She had a horror and fear of the Square, in which her life was henceforward to be passed--and of her father, of whom she knew so much more than he was aware. For a moment the old tumult in her soul about the secret she had never told came surging back upon her, a sudden tide from which she could scarcely escape. ‘Come, Aunt Cherry,’ she said, suddenly seizing her astonished companion by the arm. ‘Come and play for us. We must have a dance on the lawn my last day.’