Chapter XI: Mrs. Meredith

It was Mrs. Meredith who lived next door--an old friend, who was the only person Mrs. Beresford had permitted to come and see her when she returned ill, and of whom Miss Cherry had felt with confidence that Cara would find a friend in her. She had lived there almost ever since Cara was born, with her two sons, boys a little older than Cara; a pretty gentle woman, ‘not clever,’ her friends said--‘silly,’ according to some critics, of whom poor Annie Beresford had been one--but very popular everywhere and pleasant; a woman whom most people were glad to know. It would be hard to say exactly in what her charm lay. There were handsomer women than she to be met with by the score who were much less beloved--and as for her mind, it scarcely counted at all in the estimate of her merits. But she was kind, sympathetic, sweet-mannered--affectionate and caressing when it was becoming to be so--smiling and friendly everywhere. Great talkers liked her, for she would listen to them as if she enjoyed it; and silent people liked her, for she did not look bored by their side, but would make a little play of little phrases, till they felt themselves actually amusing. She had very sweet liquid brown eyes--not too bright or penetrating, but sympathetic always--and a soft, pretty white hand. She was not young, nor did she look younger than she was; but her sympathies flowed so readily, and her looks were so friendly, that she belonged to the younger part of the world always by natural right. Her boys were her chief thought and occupation. One of them was six, one four years older than Cara; so that Oswald was three-and-twenty and Edward on the eve of his majority when the girl arrived at her father’s house. Mrs. Meredith’s perpetual occupation with these boys, her happiness in their holiday times, her melancholy when they went to school, had kept her friends interested for a number of years. Men who breathed sighs of relief when the terrible period of the holidays came to an end, and their own schoolboys were got rid of, put on soft looks of pity when they heard that Oswald and Edward were gone too; and mothers who were themselves too thankful that no drownings or shootings, not even a broken collar-bone or a sprained ankle, had marked the blissful vacations in their own house, half cried with Mrs. Meredith over the silence of hers ‘when the boys were away.’ They came and carried her off to family dinners, and made little parties to keep her from feeling it; as if there had been no boys in the world but those two. ‘For you know her circumstances are so peculiar,’ her friends said. The peculiarity of her circumstances consisted in this, that, though she had lived alone for these fifteen years in the Square, she was not a widow--neither was she a separated or in any way blameable wife. All that could be said was that the circumstances were very peculiar. She who was so sweet, whom everybody liked, did not somehow ‘get on’ with her husband. ‘’Abody likes me but my man,’ said a Scotch fisherwoman in a similar position. Mrs. Meredith did not commit herself even to so terse a description. She said nothing at all about it. Mr. Meredith was in India--though whether he had always been there, or had judiciously retired to that wide place, in consequence of his inability to get on with the most universally-liked of women, it was not generally known. But there he was. He had been known to come home twice within the fifteen years, and had paid a visit at the Square among other visits he had paid--and his wife’s friends had found no particular objections to him. But he had gone back again, and she had remained, placidly living her independent life. She was well off. Her boys were at Harrow first, and then at the University, where Edward still was disporting himself; though he had just got through his examination for the Indian Civil Service, and had more practical work in prospect. Oswald, who had ended his career at Oxford, was living at home; but even the grown-up son in the house had not removed any of her popularity. She had a perpetual levée every afternoon. Not a morning passed that two or three ladies did not rush in, in the sacred hours before luncheon, when nobody is out, to tell her or ask her about something; and the husbands would drop in on their way from business, from their offices or clubs, just for ten minutes before they went home. This was how her life was spent--and though sometimes she would speak of that life despondently, as one passed under a perpetual shadow, yet, in fact, it was a very pleasant, entertaining, genial life. To be sure, had she been passionately attached to the absent Mr. Meredith, she might have found drawbacks in it; but, according to appearances, this was scarcely the case, and perhaps never had been.

This lady was the first visitor Cara had in the Square. She came in next morning, about twelve o’clock, when the girl was languidly wondering what was to become of her. Cara had not spent a cheerful morning. Her father had come to breakfast, and had talked to her a little about ordinary matters, and things that were in the newspaper. He was as much puzzled as a man could be what to do with this seventeen-year-old girl whom he had sent for, as a matter of course, when he himself came home to settle, but whom now he found likely to be an interruption to all his habits. He did not know Cara, and was somehow uneasy in her presence, feeling in her a suspicion and distrust of himself which he could by no means account for. And Cara did not know him, except that she did distrust and suspect him, yet expected something from him, she could not tell what; something better than the talk about collisions and shipwrecks in the papers. She tried to respond, and the breakfast was not a sullen or silent meal. But what a contrast it was from the bright table at the Hill, with the windows open to the lawn, and all the spontaneous happy talk, which was not made up for any one, but flowed naturally, like the air they breathed! Mr. Beresford was much more accomplished than Aunt Cherry; a clever man, instead of the mild old maiden whom everybody smiled at, but---- All this went through Cara’s mind as she poured out his coffee, and listened to his account of the new steamboat. There was a perfect ferment of thought going on in her brain while she sat opposite to him, saying yes and no, and now and then asking a question, by way of showing a little interest. She was asking herself how things would have been if her mother had lived; how they would have talked then: whether they would have admitted her to any share in the talk, or kept her outside, as they had done when she was a child? All these questions were jostling each other in her mind, and misty scenes rising before her, one confusing and mixing up with the other; the same breakfast table, as she remembered it of old, when the father and mother in their talk would sometimes not hear her questions, and sometimes say, ‘Don’t tease, child,’ and sometimes bid her run away to the nursery; and as it might have been with her mother still sitting by, and herself a silent third person. Mr. Beresford had not a notion what the thoughts were which were going on under Cara’s pretty hair, so smoothly wound about her head, and shining in the autumn sunshine, and under the pretty dark blue morning dress which ‘threw up,’ as Cherry meant it to do, the girl’s whiteness and brightness. She could make _him_ out to some degree, only putting more meaning in him than he was himself at all aware of; but he could not make out her. Did thought dwell at all in such well-shaped little heads, under hair so carefully coiled and twisted? He did not know, and could no more divine her than if she had been the Sphinx in person; but Cara, if she went wrong, did so by putting too much meaning into him.

When breakfast was over, he rose up, still holding his paper in his hand. ‘I am afraid you will feel the want of your usual occupations,’ he said. ‘Lessons are over for you, I suppose? It is very early to give up education. Are you reading anything? You must let me know what you have been doing, and if I can help you.’

How helpless he looked standing there, inspecting her! but he did not look so helpless as he felt. How was he, a man who had never done any of life’s ordinary duties, to take the supervision of a girl into his hands? If she had been a boy, he might have set her down by his side (the confusion of pronouns is inevitable) to work at Greek--a Greek play, for instance, which is always useful; but he supposed music and needlework would be what she was thinking of. No; if she had been a boy, he would have done better than take her to his study and set her down to a Greek play; he could have sent her to the University, like Edward Meredith, like every properly educated young man. But a girl of seventeen, he had always understood, was of an age to take the control of her father’s house--was ‘out’--a being to be taken into society, to sit at the head of his table (though rather young); and the idea that she might require occupation or instruction between the moments of discharging these necessary duties had not occurred to him. It did now, however, quite suddenly. What was she going to do? When he went into his library, she would go to the drawing-room. Would she take her needlework? would she go to the long disused piano? What would the young strange female creature do?

‘Thank you, papa,’ said Cara; which was of all other the most bewildering reply she could have given him. He gazed at her again, and then went away in his utter helplessness.

‘You will find me in the library, if you want me,’ he said aloud. But in himself he said, with more confidence, ‘Mrs. Meredith will know;’ or rather, perhaps, if the truth must be said, he thought, ‘_She_ will know. She will see at once what ought to be done. She will tell me all about it to-night!’ And with this consolation he went into his library and betook himself to his important morning’s work. He had to verify a quotation, which he thought had been wrongly used in his friend Mr. Fortis’ book about Africa. He had to write to one or two Fellows of his pet Society, about a series of lectures on an interesting point of comparative science, which he thought the great authority on the subject might be persuaded to give. He had to write to Mr. Sienna Brown about a Titian which had been repainted and very much injured, and about which he had been asked to give his opinion by the noble proprietor, whom he had met on his return home. It will be perceived that it would have been a serious disadvantage to public interests had Mr. Beresford been required to withdraw his thoughts from such important matters, and occupy them with the education of an unremarkable girl.

And Cara went upstairs. She had already seen cook, who had kindly told her what she thought would be ‘very nice’ for dinner, and had agreed humbly; but had not, perhaps, been quite so humble when cook entreated ‘Miss Cara, dear,’ with the confidence of an old servant, not to be frightened, and assured her that she’d soon get to know her papa’s ways.

When she got to the drawing-room, she went first to the windows and looked out, and thought that a few more plants in the balcony would be an advantage, and recollected how she used to play in the Square, and gave a side-long glance at the railings of next door, wondering whether ‘the boys’ were at home, and if they had changed. Then she came in, and went to the fire, and looked at herself and the big silent room behind her in the great mirror over the mantelpiece. Cara was not vain--it was not to see how she looked that she gazed wistfully into that reflection of the room in which she was standing, so rich and full with all its pictures, its china, its tapestries and decorations confronting her like a picture, with one lonely little girl in it, in a dark blue dress and white collar, and big, sad, strained blue eyes. What a forlorn little thing that girl seemed! nobody to interchange looks with even, except herself in the glass; and the room so crowded with still life, so destitute of everything else: so rich, so warm, so beautiful, so poor, so destitute, so lonely! What was she to do with herself for the long, solitary day? She could not go out, unless she went with nurse, as she used to do when she was a child. She was an open-air girl, loving freedom, and had been used to roam about as she pleased in the sweet woods about the Hill. You may imagine how lost the poor child felt herself in those stony regions round the Square.

And it was just then that Mrs. Meredith arrived. She came in, rustling in her pretty rich silk gown, which was dark blue too, like Cara’s. She came and took the girl into her kind arms and kissed her. ‘If I had known when you were coming yesterday, I should have been here to receive you,’ she said; ‘my poor, dear child, coming back all by yourself! Why did not Aunt Cherry come with you, to get you a little used to it before you were left alone?’

‘We thought it was best,’ said Cara, feeling all at once that she had brought the greatest part of her troubles on herself. ‘We thought papa would like it best.’

‘Now, my dear,’ said Mrs. Meredith, giving her a kiss, and then shaking a pretty finger at her, ‘you must not begin by making a bugbear of papa. What he wishes is that you should be happy. Don’t look sad, my darling. Ah, yes, I know it is a trial coming back here! It is a trial to me even,’ said Mrs. Meredith, looking round and drying her soft eyes, ‘to come into your poor mamma’s room, and see everything as she left it; and think what a trial it must be to _him_, Cara?’

‘He has never been here,’ said the girl, half melted, half resisting.

‘Poor soul!’ said Mrs. Meredith. ‘Poor man! Oh, Cara! if it be hard for you, think what it is for him! You are only a child, and you have all your life before you, you dear young happy thing.’

‘I am not so very happy.’

‘For the moment, my darling; but wait a little, wait,’ said the kind woman, her eyes lighting up--’till the boys come home. There, you see what a foolish woman I am, Cara. I think everything mends when the boys come home. I ought to say when Edward comes home, to be sure, for I have Oswald with me now. But Edward always was your friend; don’t you remember? Oswald was older; but it makes a great difference somehow when they are men. A man and a boy are two different things; and it is the boy that I like the best. But I have been so calculating upon you, my dear. You must run in half-a-dozen times a day. You must send for me whenever you want me. You must walk with me when I go out. I have no daughter, Cara, and you have no mother. Come, darling, shall it be a bargain?’

The tears were in this sweet woman’s eyes, whom everybody loved. Perhaps she did not mean every word she said--who does? but there was a general truth of feeling in it all, that kept her right. Cara ran straight into her arms, and cried upon her shoulder. Perhaps because she was frightened and distrustful in other particulars of her life, she was utterly believing here. Here was the ideal for which she had looked--a friend, who yet should be something more than a friend; more tender than Cara could remember her mother to have been, yet something like what an ideal mother, a mother of the imagination, would be. Sweet looks, still beautiful, the girl thought in the enthusiasm of her age, yet something subdued and mild with experience--an authority, a knowledge, a power which no contemporary could have. Cara abandoned herself in utter and total forgetfulness of all prejudices, resistances, and doubts, to this new influence. Her mother’s friend, the boys’ mother, who had been her own playmates, and about whom she was so curious, without knowing it--her nearest neighbour, her natural succour, a daughterless woman, while she was a motherless girl. Happiness seemed to come back to her with a leap. ‘I shall not mind if I may always come to you, and ask you about everything,’ she said.

‘And _of course_ you must do that. Did not Cherry tell you so? I thought Cherry would have been faithful to me. Ah! she did? then I am happy, dear; for if I have one weakness more than another it is that my friends should not give me up. But Cherry should have come with you,’ said Mrs. Meredith, shaking her head.

‘It was all for papa----’

‘But that is what I find fault with--papa’s only daughter, only child, thinking for a moment that her happiness was not what he wanted most.’

Cara drooped her guilty head. She was guilty; yes, she did not deny it; but probably this goddess-woman, this ideal aid and succour, did not know how little in the happier days had been thought of Cara. _She_ had always thought of ‘the boys’ first of all; but then Mr. Meredith--Cara had an odd sort of recollection somehow that Mr. Meredith was not first, and that perhaps this might account for the other differences. So she did not say anything, but sat down on a stool at her new-old friend’s feet, and felt that the strange, rich, beautiful room had become home.

‘Now I never could do anything like this,’ said Mrs. Meredith, looking round. ‘I am fond of china too; but I never know what is good and what is bad; and sometimes I see your papa take down a bit which I think beautiful, and look at it with such a face. How is one to know,’ she said, laughing merrily, ‘if one is not clever? I got the book with all the marks in it, but, my dear child, I never recollect one of them; and then such quantities of pretty china are never marked at all. Ah, I can understand why he doesn’t come here! I think I would make little changes, Cara. Take down that, for instance’--and she pointed at random to the range of velvet-covered shelves, on the apex of which stood the Buen Retiro cup--‘and put a picture in its place. Confuse him by a few changes. Now stop: is he in? I think we might do it at once, and then we could have him up.’

Cara shrank perceptibly. She drew herself a little away from the stranger’s side. ‘You are frightened,’ cried Mrs. Meredith, with a soft laugh. ‘Now, Cara, Cara, this is exactly what I tell you must not be. You don’t know how good and gentle he is. I can talk to him of anything--even my servants, if I am in trouble with them; and every woman in London, who is not an angel, is in trouble with her servants from time to time. Last time my cook left me---- Why, there is nothing,’ said Mrs. Meredith, reflectively, ‘of which I could not talk to your papa. He is kindness itself.’

This was meant to be very reassuring, but somehow it did not please Cara. A half resentment (not so distinct as that) came into her mind that her father, who surely belonged to her, rather than to any other person on the face of the earth, should be thus explained to her and recommended. The feeling was natural, but painful, and somewhat absurd, for there could be no doubt that she did not know him, and apparently Mrs. Meredith did; and what she said was wise; only somehow it jarred upon Cara, who was sensitive all over, and felt every touch, now here, now there.

‘Well, my dear, never mind, if you don’t like it, for to-day; but the longer it is put off the more difficult it will be. Whatever is to be done ought to be done at once I always think. He should not have taken a panic about this room; why should he? Poor dear Annie! everything she loved ought to be dear to him; that would be my feeling. And Cara, dear, you might do a great deal; you might remove this superstition for ever, for I do think it is superstition. However, if you wish me to say no more about it, I will hold my tongue. And now what shall we do to-day? Shall we go out after luncheon? As soon as you have given your papa his lunch, you shall put on your things, and I will call for you. My people never begin to come before four; and you shall come in with me and see them. That will amuse you, for there are all sorts of people. And your papa and you are going to dine with us; I told him last night you must come. You will see Oswald and renew your acquaintance with him, and we can talk. Oswald is very good-looking, Cara. Do you remember him? he has dark hair now and dark eyes; but I wish he had always remained a boy; though of course that is not possible,’ she said, shaking her head with a sigh. ‘Now I must run away, and get through my morning’s work. No, don’t disturb your papa; evening is his time. I shall see him in the evening. But be sure you are ready to go out at half-past two.’

How little time there seemed to be for moping or thinking after this visit! Cara made a rapid survey of the drawing-room when she returned to it, to see what changes could be made, as her friend suggested. She would not have had the courage to do any such thing, had it not been suggested to her. It was her father’s room, not hers; and what right had she to meddle? But somewhat a different light seemed to have entered with her visitor. Cara saw, too, when she examined, that changes could be made which would make everything different yet leave everything fundamentally the same. Her heart fluttered a little at the thought of such daring. She might have taken such a thing upon her at the Hill, without thinking whether or not she had a right to do it; but then she never could have had time to move anything without Miss Charity or Miss Cherry coming in, in the constant cheery intercourse of the house. But for these changes she would have abundant time; no one would come to inspect while her re-arrangements were going on. However, there was no time to think of them now; the day was busy and full. She came downstairs for luncheon with her bonnet on, that she might not be too late. ‘I am going out with Mrs. Meredith,’ she said to her father, in explanation of her out-of-door costume.

‘Ah, that is right!’ he said. ‘And we are to dine there this evening.’ Even he looked brighter and more genial when he said this. And the languid day had grown warm and bright, full of occupations and interest; and to keep Mrs. Meredith _waiting_--to be too late--that would never do.