Chapter X: The Square

It was a rainy afternoon when Cara reached the Square. It had been settled, against Miss Cherry’s will, that she was to go alone. The girl, who was often ‘queer,’ especially when anything connected with her natural home, her father’s house, was in question, had requested that it should be so--and Miss Charity approved, to whose final decision everything was submitted at Sunninghill. ‘Don’t interfere with her,’ Miss Charity had said; ‘she is like her mother. She has a vein of caprice in her. You never could argue (if you remember) with poor Annie. You had either to give in to her, or to say no once for all, and stick to it. Carry is not like her mother all through--there are gleams of the Beresford in her. But there is a vein of caprice, and I wouldn’t cross her, just at this crisis of her life.’

‘But I don’t see why it should be such a crisis. It is a change of scene, to be sure, and leaving us ought to be a trial,’ said Miss Cherry, dubiously. The feeling within herself was, that she would have been glad had she been more sure that this was a trial. Girls were ungrateful in their lightheartedness, and sometimes loved the risks of independence. ‘It is not as if she were going among strangers,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘She is going to her home, and to her father.’

‘A father whom she has never known since she was a child--a house that has never lost the shadow of that dying!’

‘Then why must not I go with her?’ said Miss Cherry. The old lady shrugged her shoulders, but said no more. And Cara got her way. As she was to go alone, she was packed, with all her belongings, into the carriage; nurse going with her, who was to help in the housekeeping, and take care of the young mistress of the old familiar house. The railway, it is true, would have carried them there in half the time; but Cara liked the preparation of the long, silent drive, and it pleased the elder ladies that their darling should make her solitary journey so to her father’s house. The road led through beautiful royal parks, more than one, and by glimpses of the pleasant river. It was like an old-fashioned expedition made in the days before railways, with full time for all the anticipations, all the dreams, of what was to come. Though her mind was full of natural excitement and sadness, Cara could not help feeling herself like one of the heroines of Miss Austen’s novels as she drove along. She had plenty of grave matters to think about, and was very much in earnest as to her life generally; yet, with the unconscious doubleness of youth, she could not help feeling only half herself, and half Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Moreland going off into the world. And, indeed, without sharing the difficulties of these young ladies, Cara Beresford in her own person had no small problem before her. To fill the place of her mother, an accomplished woman, she who was only a girl; to make his home pleasant to her father; to set agoing once more something like family life. And she only seventeen, and so differently situated, she said to herself, from other girls! Had she not enough to think of? The trees and the bridges, the gleams of shining river, the great stretches of wooded country, all glided past her like things in a dream. It was they that were moving, not she. Nurse talked now and then; but nurse’s talking did not disturb Cara; she knew by long experience just how to put in convenient ayes and noes, so as to keep the good woman going. And thus she went on, her head full of thoughts. Her difficulties were more grave than those which generally fall to the lot of so young a girl--but, nevertheless, with the frivolity of youth, she could feel herself something like Catherine Moreland, hurrying along to Northanger Abbey, and all the wonders and mysteries there.

She had expected to find her father already arrived and awaiting her; but he did not come until she had been an hour or two in the house--which was half a relief and half an offence to her. She was received with a kind of worship by John and cook, to whom their young mistress, whom they had only known as a child, was a wonder and delight, and who mingled a greater degree of affectionate familiarity with the awe they ought to have felt for her than was quite consistent with Cara’s dignity. They were anxious to pet and make much of her on her arrival--cook hurrying upstairs, unnecessarily Cara thought, to show how prettily her room had been prepared; and John bringing her tea, with cake and the daintiest bread and butter, and a broad smile of pleasure on his face. Cara thought it incumbent upon her to send away the cake and bread and butter, taking only the tea, to prove beyond all power of misconception that she was no longer a child--but she was sorry for it after, when John, protesting and horrified, had carried it away downstairs again. Still, though one is slightly hungry, it is best to keep up one’s dignity, and ‘begin,’ as Aunt Cherry said, ‘as you meant to go on.’ Cara would not let herself be governed by old servants, that she had determined--and it was best to show them at once that this could not be.

Then she went up with some shrinking, feeling like a sea-bather making the first plunge, into the drawing-room, which no one had used for the last five years. She was obliged to confess that it was very pretty, notwithstanding that it frightened her. She half expected some one to rise from the chair before the first newly-lighted October fire to receive her as she went in. The little cabinets, the pretty brackets for the china, the scraps of old lace upon the velvet, the glimmer of old, dim, picturesque mirrors, the subdued yet brilliant colour in the bits of tapestry, all moved her to admiration. At Sunninghill they had, as became a lady’s house, many pretty things, but with as little idea of art as it is possible in the present day to succeed in having. Miss Cherry knew nothing of art; and it had been invented, Miss Charity thought, since her days, which was the time when people liked to have respectable solid furniture, and did not understand æsthetics. The graceful balance and harmony of this new old house gave Cara a new sensation of admiring pleasure--and yet she did not like it. It would be hard to tell what was the cause of the painful impression which prejudiced her mind--yet there it was. Her own mother--her dead mother--that visionary figure, half nurse, half goddess, which gives a quite visionary support and consolation to some motherless children, did not exist for Cara. She remembered how she had been sent off to the Hill when they went away to enjoy themselves, and how she had been sent off to the nursery when they sat talking to each other. It had been a happy home, and she had been petted and made much of by times--but this was what she recollected most clearly. And then there rose up before her, intensified by distance, that scene in her mother’s room, which she had never confided to any one. She resented this mystery that was in the past, which returned and wrapped her in a kind of mist when she came back. Why had not her parents been straightforward people, with no mysteries such, as Cara said to herself, she hated? Why was there a skeleton in the cupboard? All the things she had read in books about this had made Cara angry, and it vexed her to the heart to feel and know that there was one in her home. She had buried the secret so completely in her own bosom that it had made an aching spot all round it where it lay: like that bit of a garden which lies under a noxious shadow--like that bit of a field where a fire has been--was this place in her heart where her secret lay. She felt it, in all its force, when she came home. At the Hill there were no secrets; they lived with their windows open and their hearts, fearing no sudden appearance, no discovery. But here it seemed that the old trouble had been waiting all these years, till the girl went back who alone knew all about it, the father’s past and the mother’s past; and even the atmosphere of the long-shut-up house felt pernicious. Cara did not like to look round her as it came to be dark, lest she see _some one_ sitting in the corner in the shadow. It seemed to her more than once that somebody moved in the distance, going out or coming in, with a sweep of a long skirt, just disappearing as she looked up. This meant, I suppose (or at least so many people would say), that her digestion was not in such good order as it should have been--but digestion was not a thing which came within Cara’s range of thought.

Her father arrived about half-past six by the Continental train. Cara stood at the door of the drawing-room, with her heart beating, wondering if she ought to run down and receive him, or if he would come to her. She heard him ask if she had come, and then he added, ‘I will go to my room at once, John. I suppose dinner is nearly ready. I did not expect to have been so late. Bring my things to my room.’

‘Shall I call Miss Cara, sir?’

‘No; never mind. I shall see her at dinner,’ he said.

And Cara instinctively closed the drawing-room door at which she had been standing, as she heard him begin to come up the stairs. She stood there, with her heart beating, in case he should call her; but he did not. Then she too went to dress, with a chilled and stifled sensation, the first sense of repulse which she had ever experienced. When she was ready, she went back again very quickly and noiselessly, leaving the door open. By-and-by her father’s step became audible coming down, and he paused when he got to the door; but then resumed and went on again, sending her word that she would find him in the dining-room. It was unreasonable, the high swelling of offence and injured pride that she felt in her heart--but there it was. Was this how he meant to use her--her, his only child--now the mistress of his house? She went down, after an interval of proud and painful reluctance, a slim, girlish creature, in her white dress, her blue eyes somewhat strained and large, more widely opened than was consistent with perfect composure. She was not beautiful, like her mother. A certain visionary youthful severity was in her looks. She was different altogether, different in every way, from the pet and darling of the ladies at the Hill. Her father had not seen her since she had leaped into long dresses and young-womanhood, and he was startled by the change. Involuntarily, as he looked at her, her mother’s description of the child Cara came back to his mind. Perhaps he was all the more quick to notice this that his eye had been caught as he paused at the drawing-room door by the last purchase he had made in bric-à-brac, the Buen Retiro cup, of which his wife had said playfully that Cara would insist that he should tell the dealer the exact value before he bought it. This strange idea brought a half smile to his face, and yet his memories were so far from smiling. The cup had been broken to bits in the careless packing of that last journey home, when bric-à-brac had lost all interest in the gathering mists of suffering and despondency--and then afterwards, in an interval of apparent improvement, had been carefully put together and placed on a shelf, high up, where its imperfections were not visible. It was the sight of it which had kept Beresford from going into the room. He would have made the effort for Cara’s sake, he thought, but that this relic, so connected with the last chapter of all, had thrust that recollection upon him. He had never entered poor Annie’s drawing-room since the week she died.

‘Well, Cara, my dear, I am glad to see you,’ he said, putting his arm round his daughter, and kissing her. ‘You must forgive me for not coming upstairs. How you have grown!--or rather, you have become a young lady all at once. I don’t know that you are much taller.’

‘No; I have not grown,’ said Cara. ‘I suppose the long dress makes a difference. It is that, perhaps.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sit down, my dear; dinner waits. I have had a long journey, and I want something. I never eat much when I am travelling. I came by Dieppe, which is a route I detest. Ah, I forgot! You have never been across the Channel, yet, Cara.’

‘No.’

They both recollected why--and that ‘the next expedition’ after those long honeymooning travels was to have been accompanied by ‘the child.’ Cara remembered this with a certain bitterness; her father merely with melancholy sentiment.

‘Ah!’ he said, vaguely, ‘we must mend that--some day. And how are the aunts? I can fancy that my sister looks just as she always did. She and I are at the age when people change little. But Aunt Charity? she is getting quite an old woman now--over seventy. Have you been dull in the country, Cara? or have they petted you so much that you will feel it dull to be here?’

He looked at her with a smile which lit up his face, and touched her heart just a little; but the question touched something else than her heart--her pride and sense of importance.

‘I was not dull,’ she said. ‘One is not dull when one has something to do--and is with those whom one loves.’

‘Ah!’ he said, looking at her with a little curiosity; ‘that is a better way of putting it, certainly,’ he added, with a smile.

Then there was a pause. John, behind Mr. Beresford’s chair, who had been in the house when Cara was born, and who thought he knew his master thoroughly, had much ado not to interfere, to whisper some instructions in her father’s ear as to how a child like this should be dealt with, or to breathe into Cara’s an entreaty that she would humour her papa. He said to his wife afterwards that to see them two sitting, pretending to eat their dinners, and never speaking, no more nor if they were wax images--or, when they did talk, talking like company--made him that he didn’t know whether he was standing on his head or his heels. How many hints our servants could give us if decorum permitted their interference! John felt himself a true friend of both parties, anxious to bring them as near to each other as they ought to be; but he knew that it would have been as much as his place was worth had he ventured to say anything. So he stood regretfully, wistfully, behind backs and looked on. If he could but have caught Miss Cara’s eye! but he did not, not even when, in the confusion of his feelings, he offered her mustard instead of sugar with her pudding. _Her_ feelings were so confused also that she never noticed the mistake. Thus the dinner passed with nothing but the sparest company conversation. There were but these two in the world of their immediate family, therefore they had no safe neutral ground of brothers and sisters to talk about.

‘Is your room comfortable?’ Mr. Beresford said, when they had got through a comfortless meal. ‘If I had been here sooner, I should have refurnished it; but you must do it yourself, Cara, and please your own taste.’

‘I don’t think I have any taste,’ she said.

‘Ah, well!--perhaps it does not matter much; but the things that pleased you at ten will scarcely please you at seventeen. Seventeen are you? and _out_, I suppose? One might have been sure of that. Cherry would have no peace till she had you to go to parties with her.’

‘We very rarely go to parties,’ said Cara, with dignity. ‘Of course at seventeen one is grown up. One does not require parties to prove _that_.’

He looked at her again, and this time laughed. ‘I am afraid you are very positive and very decided,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it is necessary, my dear, to be so sure of everything. You must not think I am finding fault.’

Her heart swelled--what else could she think? She did not wish, however, to appear angry, which evidently was impolitic, but shifted the subject to her father’s recent travels, on which there was much to be said. ‘Are you going to the geographical meeting? Are they to have one expressly for you, like last year?’ she said, not without a hidden meaning, of which he was conscious in spite of himself.

‘You know what they said last year? Of course there was no reason for it; for I am not an explorer, and discovered nothing; but how could I help it? No; there will be no meeting this time, thank Heaven.’

And he saw that a faint little smile came upon Cara’s lips. Instead of being delighted to see that her father had come to such honour, this little creature had thought it humbug. So it was--but it galled him to know that his daughter felt it to be so. Had she laughed out, and given him an account of the scene at the Hill; how Aunt Cherry had read the account out of the papers with such joy and pleasure; and Aunt Charity had wiped her spectacles and taken the paper herself to read the record of his valiant deeds--the little family joke would have drawn them together, even if it had been half at his expense. But no man likes to feel that his claims to honour are judged coolly by his immediate belongings, and the little remark wounded him. This, he said to himself, was not the sort of sweet girl who would make the house once more a home to him. He let her go upstairs without saying anything of his further intentions for the evening. And Cara felt that she had been unsuccessful in the keynote she had struck; though without blaming herself seriously, for, after all, it was he and not she who ought to have struck this keynote. She went upstairs in a little flutter of dissatisfaction with herself and him. But, as soon as she had got upstairs, Cara, with true feminine instinct, began to make little overtures of reconciliation. She went round the room to see what could be done to make it more homelike. She lighted the candles on the mantelpiece, and placed some books uppermost on the table, about which she could talk to him. She was not fond of work in her own person, but she had read in good story-books that needlework was one of the accessories to an ideal scene of domesticity--therefore, she hunted up a piece of work and an oft-mislaid case with thimble and scissors, and placed them ready on a little table. Then she called John, softly, as he went upstairs, to ask him if her father took tea, or rather, when he took tea, the possibility of leaving out that ceremonial altogether not having occurred to her.

‘If you please, miss,’ said John, with a deprecating air, ‘master has had his cup of coffee, and he’s gone out. I think he ain’t gone no further than next door; and I’ll make bold to say as he’ll be back--soon,’ said John.

Cara went back to her chair, without a word; her heart beat high--her face grew crimson in spite of herself. She retreated to her seat and took up a book, and began to read at a furious pace. She did not very well know what it was about; but she had read a long chapter before John, going downstairs and then coming up again in a middle-aged, respectable butler’s leisurely way, could place the little tea-tray on the table near her. There was but one cup. It was evident that she was expected to take this refreshment alone. She gave a little good-humoured nod at the man as he looked round, with the comprehensive glance of his class, to see if anything wanted removal--and went on reading. The book was about unconscious cerebration, and other not highly intelligible things. Some of the phrases in it got entangled, like the straws and floating rubbish on a stream, with the touch of wild commotion in her mind, and so lived in her after this mood and a great many others had passed away. She went on reading till she had heard John go down, and reach his own regions at the bottom of the stairs. Then she put the book down, and looked up, as if to meet the look of some one else who would understand her. Poor child! and there was no one there.

This was Cara’s first night in the Square.