Chapter VIII

Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately.

TENNYSON’S _Maud_.

Carol and Tim travelled home together at the end of the half, speeding through the golden summer. It was early August, and everywhere the full-eared grain swayed ripe for the sickle. Here and there the harvest had already begun to be gathered in, and the fields were dotted with the reapers, cutting and binding into sheaves. Larks full-throated hung poised in the quivering air, the woods were in their richest summer green; poppies in field and hedgerow, geraniums on lawn and terrace, blazed each its own scarlet. Shadows were small and black, and lights broad and warm. And above all stretched the sky, cloudless to the horizon, and blue as Carol’s eyes.

To be nearly nineteen, to have left school behind one, to be six feet high, to have fine broad shoulders, and a brown, honest, handsome face, good teeth, good spirits, and a good digestion--surely if any one may fairly be called happy in this world, it would be the favoured possessor of all these good things. And yet Carol, who was all this, and more too, was pensive as he sat with his newspaper on his knees and stared out of window. Leaving school is one of the first regrets of a purely sentimental nature, that boys meet with in life, and it lends a tinge of romance to existence. To have come to the end of anything, pleasant or otherwise, is always rather a solemn thing. To fold and lay aside a period of our life, saying, ‘Whatever comes or goes, _that_ is done with and cannot return,’ must have a sobering effect, with however high a courage we turn to meet the untried. People with whom most things go pretty smoothly are apt to think that the happy time just past is the happiest of their lives, and indeed I doubt if at any later date a healthy popular boy is likely to taste such pure joys as during the last few years of his public-school life. It was the first time that Carol had ever been in any but the highest spirits at going home to Darley. Tim, you may be sure, respected his companion’s mood, and made but few attempts at conversation; the feeling of class distinction between ‘upper division’ and ‘Remove’ was still strong upon him, and kept him rather constrained. He would have been hardly less at ease with the Emperor of Russia, had he encountered that autocrat in a first-class carriage, than with this other boy scarcely older than himself in the eyes of their elders,--for whom the distances between the various stages of boyhood get foreshortened and lost, like the distances between the stars; both are so very far away. But Carol, now he had burst the trammels of Eton conventionalism, meant to see more of Tim, for whom he had always entertained a friendly feeling, and as a first step towards this footing of greater intimacy, invited him to come up and see him next day, when they would go for a walk together. So the next afternoon, when the shadows were beginning almost imperceptibly to lengthen, Tim skipped off, heart elate, for the Court. His way lay through pleasant shady woods, and past the memorable coppice where the accident had occurred, nearly six years before, which had first brought him acquainted with Carol. Much of the old childish Tim lingered in his nature, round the alien growth of the last two years, and he was seized with a sudden longing to revisit the scene of their first meeting. He parted the rods carefully, and stepped into the thicket, finding as nearly as possible the exact spot where he had sat. Let us leave him kneeling there, and go before him to the Court, nor seek to pry into that cool shade of hazel boughs.

In front of the door at Darley Court--not the state entrance with the tall flight of steps and the Doric portico, but the little side-door more generally used--is a stone porch over-grown with clematis and honeysuckle, and containing two benches. On the afternoon in question it was pleasantly screened by its festoons of creepers from the western sun, which blazed hotly on the gravel before it, where two fox-terriers were lying on their sides enjoying the roasting that is distasteful to the lords of the creation. The stillness and hush of a hot day had fallen on the big house, in which nothing seemed alive. The blinds were pulled down, and an artificial twilight reigned in the darkened rooms. Even the gray parrot was too lazy to talk. On one of the benches in the porch, in keeping with the drowsiness around him, Carol was stretched in an attitude of loose-limbed repose, awaiting his small friend. He made no effort to read the book in his hand, but was watching with a listless eye the apparently purposeless gyrations of a pair of white butterflies that were flitting round the honeysuckle blossoms, the only bit of active life in all the still picture. They darted and whirled and turned over and over one another in endless play, only broken now and then by a moment’s rest with folded wings on some leaf or tendril. One of the dogs got up and passed round the corner of the house with that slow waddle which dogs adopt between sleeping and sleeping, as though they were afraid of waking themselves too thoroughly in the short interval. By and by the other followed, finding the sun-baked gravel too hot even for him, and Carol was left alone. He was conscious of a delightful sensation of relaxation, such as he remembered to have experienced in a hot bath after a day’s hunting; he had abstracted a big cushion from the library sofa as he came out, and rammed it into the small of his back. What wonder that as he watched the sports of the two butterflies he felt his eyes grow heavy, and the narcotic influence of his surroundings beginning to tell upon him, he gradually fell asleep.

For a while the profoundest silence rested on the scene--silence broken at last by the voices of women coming up the carriage-drive.

‘I _do_ hope they’ll be at home, mamma; I must rest after this dreadful walk.’

The speaker was a tall slim girl of about sixteen, dressed in cool white linen.

‘My dear child,’ says mamma, a no longer blooming, but still pretty woman, who was swaying a pearl-coloured parasol over her broad gray hat and draperies of lavender muslin, ‘I have no doubt they will let us sit down for a little, even if Mrs. Darley is not at home.’

‘But suppose she _is_ at home and says she isn’t. Old ladies always go to sleep on hot afternoons, or take off their caps, or something. Then if we ask to go in, what will the poor butler do? That would be a terrible situation. Do you remember when they said “Not at home” at the Chillworthys’, and papa insisted on seeing the cedars on the lawn, and there were the whole party having tea? I never shall forget it. I thought my ears would take a week to get white again; and the footman had to say he “found his mistress had come back.” She had on thin morocco shoes and a white dressing-gown, which is not the dress one usually puts on for walking.’

‘Dearest Violet, it was most awkward; don’t refer to it. Perhaps, as you say, we had better not say anything about resting. I noticed a seat as we came up the drive; we can sit down there.’

‘And have no tea, and be too late for it at home! Oh, mamma, why do we make calls when the pony’s lame? It is almost indecent to go hot and dishevelled into people’s drawing-rooms, and with dust on one’s boots.’

Violet is going to be a pretty girl; indeed, as she is well aware, she has already considerable personal attractions: soft brown hair, with red lights, a little rippled on her temples; brown eyes full of merriment, shaded by long dark chestnut lashes, and arched by finely pencilled brows; a very fair skin, flushed now with her hot walk, and slightly freckled about the small straight nose; and, rarest of all beauties in a Northern face, a neat pretty mouth and chin. In her white dress and green ribbons, she is very pleasantly noticeable, as she steps firmly along beside her languid mother. It is characteristic that it is she who complains of the heat, though her step is elastic and figure erect, while her mother, every curve of whose rounded form expresses the last stage of graceful lassitude, endeavours to show the bright side of the picture.

‘It will be much cooler going home, dear; the sun seems to have less power already; to be sure, we are in shade just here, which may have something to do with it.’

‘Oh! mamma dear, of course it has everything to do with it; why, it is barely five, and at this time of year the sun doesn’t set till long after seven, and the lower it gets the more it blazes.’

Thus talking they arrived at the porch, which on all but state occasions served as front door at Darley, and Violet, who was a little ahead, stopped short on the threshold, and looked back at her mother with a gleam of fun in her arch eyes.

‘Why don’t you ring the bell, dear?’ asked that lady.

‘Come and see,’ replied her daughter. The reason is soon apparent. Just below the bell the broad back of a youth was resting against the wall; his arms were crossed and his chin sunk forward on his breast.

‘Well. Some one is at home anyway,’ whispered the girl, ‘and it is not only old ladies who go to sleep on hot afternoons, it seems: this must be “Carol.”’ (By a fine inflection of voice she expressed, maidenly, that the familiar appellation was meant to be in quotation marks, and was not used by her on her own account.) ‘What fun!’

‘Hush, oh! hush, dear; if he should wake and hear you!’

‘Well? it seems the shortest way out of the difficulty,’ retorted Violet.

‘How very awkward,’ said the poor lady, resorting to a favourite phrase of hers. ‘Had we not perhaps better go away, dear?’

But against this Violet protested; she had not walked all this way, to go again without so much as leaving a card; besides (though she only thought this), she had some curiosity to see what the sleeper would look like when awake. ‘I shall ring,’ she said.

‘On no account. Violet! I desire, I insist; _so_ awkward!’ cried her mother in an imperative whisper, clutching the hand which the girl was already raising. ‘Perhaps I will. Oh dear! anyway better than you,’ and she tremblingly extended her own hand across the head of the unconscious Carol. But at this moment one of the terriers, roused by the sound of strange voices, looked round the corner and barked, and Carol’s eyes opened with a start, to find a strange lady with outstretched palm, apparently in the act of blessing him. It would be hard to say whether she or Carol blushed the more when, more fully roused to the situation, he had risen and stood before her.

‘So awkward,’ she began, from force of habit; and then feeling that this was not at all what might be expected of her, she continued, ‘Mr. Carol Darley, I suppose--heard of you from Mrs. Darley--going to try and find her at home--only lately come to live in the neighbourhood--must introduce myself--Mrs. Markham Willis; my daughter, Miss Markham Willis’; and Mr. Carol made a fine bow to the young lady, of whose presence he now first became aware.

Mrs. Darley was produced presently from some mysterious seclusion, where she had probably been occupied much as Miss Violet had irreverently supposed. Carol’s grandmother was a little pink-and-white old lady, with prim sausage curls of the softest flossy white hair on her forehead. She wore beautiful caps, trimmed with wonderful brocaded ribbon, and a great quantity of minute old-fashioned lockets and brooches.

‘I see you have made acquaintance with our boy,’ she said. ‘Carol dear, tell your Aunt Kate that Mrs. Wallis is here.’

She had never got her husband’s name right till they had been married a year, and so, as the Squire used to say when he teased her, could not be expected to remember other people’s, but she brought out the mangled words with such a winning graciousness and such an entire belief in herself, that no one thought of being offended, or even surprised. She had called Mr. Ebbesley ‘Eversley,’ ‘Etherington,’ and ‘Ebbrington’ within the first half-hour of their acquaintance, and Tim was either ‘Jim’ or ‘Tom,’ as it happened.

‘How kind of you to come and see me such a hot afternoon,’ she went on. ‘You must be tired to death. You must have some tea. Kate, dear,’ as Carol reappeared with his aunt, ‘never mind saying how-d’ye-do. Mrs. Williams will excuse you, I know, while you tell them to get her some tea as soon as possible; it will be better than ceremony this hot weather; and, Kate, some of the little ginger-bread cakes. You are not too old to like cake, dear,’ laying a kind old hand on Violet. ‘As for Carol, he can’t have enough of them; that boy will eat me out of house and home.’

‘Yes; you must eat our ginger-bread,’ said Carol, laughing. ‘Grandmamma has a wonderful recipe that has come down through generations of grandmammas, till it has caught quite a smell of hot ginger-bread.’

The tea was not long in making its appearance; it was good at the Court, like everything else, and was drunk out of little old Worcester cups, which the present occupant keeps in a tall cabinet, but which were then used every day.

Mrs. Markham Willis, who was one of the earliest victims of the now raging china mania, was in ecstasies over the cups, and wanted to know their date and history and all about them; indeed, if her daughter had not stopped her, she would have turned hers upside down to look at the mark, regardless of consequences; as it was, she held it high and tried to peep underneath it.

‘My father-in-law gave them to us; they were his mother’s,’ said Mrs. Darley; ‘the year after our marriage it was, 1817. I remember because of Princess Charlotte’s death, and we all had to wear mourning; but you are too young to remember, my dear’ (she called every one ‘my dear’). And as Mrs. Markham Willis had been born some ten years after that sad event, there was no gainsaying the truth of the old lady’s statement.

Carol meanwhile was making himself agreeable to Violet, and by the time Tim arrived for the promised walk, they were getting on very comfortably together, considering their uncomfortable ages and still more uncomfortable manner of introduction. So much so, indeed, that Violet was not altogether pleased with the interruption. And any girl might be excused for liking to talk to Carol; he was so big and handsome, so easy and yet so unassuming in manner, that she wished her father could afford to send her brothers to Eton, if this was a specimen of the productions of that school.

They were not a large party, and three out of the five were already known to Tim, but the impression conveyed to him when the door was opened for his entrance, was that of a large company of strangers engaged in animated conversation. Tim’s experience of female society was derived principally from that of Mrs. Quitchett, and he was not at home with ladies; he had an uncomfortable feeling that women would despise him for being small for his age and weak, having gathered from his varied reading the idea that they liked in the opposite sex such qualities as were most of a contrast to themselves. Like most people who have seen very few of their fellow-creatures, he was absurdly self-conscious, and the eight feminine eyes turned upon him as he entered the drawing-room exercised a most bewildering effect on him. Carol came to his rescue with quick kindliness, taking him by the hand and introducing him to the two strangers.

‘It is _so_ pleasant to see so many young people about one,’ said Mrs. Markham Willis graciously, which threw poor Tim into yet fresh agitation, as he was painfully aware that he was not at all what was expected in a young person, and feared that if Mrs. Markham Willis really did like young people about her, and thought that she had found one in him, she would be disappointed. It is such a common form of egoism in children, and one not perhaps altogether unknown to older people, thus to exaggerate the importance of their relation to others, who have most likely never thought at all about them.

‘Is Mr. Heatherly at home now?’ asked Mrs. Darley sweetly.

‘“Ebbesley,” mamma,’ said Miss Kate.

‘Well, dear, I said so,’ returned her mother, quite unruffled, adding sweetly to Tim, ‘We see so little of him here.’

‘He is expected to-morrow,’ answered the boy, who was occupied in balancing his cup, which would slide ominously about the flat saucer, and trying not to crumb his ginger-bread on the carpet. ‘He wrote to me that he couldn’t get back before; he is a good deal away; I am to meet him at Granthurst.’ The cup made a sudden excursion to the very edge of the saucer, and Tim just saved it, turning hot and cold at once at the thought of what might have happened. After this, he refused any more with what was almost a shudder, and Mrs. Markham Willis, who had been pensively regarding the company with her head on one side, remarked, ‘I am afraid we really _must_ go,’ as if it were the outcome of a long conversation, in which all the others had been pressing her to stay. In the confusion of hunting for the pearl-coloured parasol, which she had herself put behind her on sitting down, Carol whispered to Tim, ‘You won’t mind our walk being a little cut down, old fellow. I must see these people home, but you will come with us, and we can have a little turn after we’ve left them.’ What could Tim say but, ‘Oh yes, just as you like’? And so Carol offered his services as an escort, and the four set out together.

‘I don’t think Mrs. Wilkes a very interesting woman, dear,’ said Mrs. Darley to her daughter when the visitors were gone. ‘She doesn’t seem to me to care much for anything but cups and saucers; she asked me why I didn’t put these on the cabinet instead of those pretty vases your father bought last time we were in London; and it is so tiresome of people to have two names. Now I can generally remember one, but two is too much.’

Miss Kate smiled, and turned the conversation to Violet’s beauty; on which subject Master Carol also descanted a little later, when, having deposited the young lady and her mamma at their own door, the two lads were going slowly across the fields to the old manor-house. The sun slanting slowly westwards made their shadows long upon the grass as they walked. Bess and Carol’s terriers trotted on before them, the former slowly lurching in a slightly sidelong manner, but with infinite dignity as became her years, the two smaller dogs jumping hither and thither, and poking their inquisitive noses into every hole in the hedge.

‘Don’t you think,’ Carol was saying, ‘that that Miss Markham Willis is a very pretty girl?’

‘Well, really,’ answered Tim, ‘I daresay she is. Do you know, I don’t think I thought much about it; I noticed she had a very nice white dress, but I didn’t see much of her face; it was rather dark in the drawing-room, and going home you and she were walking on ahead, so that I only saw her back.’

‘Here, Nip; here, Scamp, you little beasts! come out of that!’ called Carol, and added pensively, ‘Yes, she is pretty; at least I think she _will_ be,’ with the calm superiority of a man of the world.

‘Why, how old do you suppose she is, then?’

‘She’s sixteen, she told me--quite a child; though when she comes out next year she will treat me as a mere boy, and think herself far above me. Did you see the score Potts made for Kent the other day? Odd he should have made duck at Lords.’

So the conversation drifted off to cricket, in which, as in how many other things, Tim took a profound interest as long as Carol talked of them.

After a time the talk fell on school matters. Carol, like most boys who have lately left, was full of anecdotes of what had happened ‘up to’ this master and that; how Smith major once showed up the same pœna, a hundred lines of Virgil, three times to a short-sighted and long-suffering instructor, once for an _Æneid_, once for “write out and translate the lesson,” and once for a book of _Paradise Lost_; with many other such edifying details, to all of which winged words his steadfast admirer lent a greedy ear. From such stories as these, they passed to more personal reminiscences, and Tim was forced to confess that his early life at Eton had not been altogether a bed of roses.

‘I was rather a brute not to see more of you there,’ said Carol, ‘but then boys _are_ brutes.’

Oh, high new standpoint from which to look back and speak of ‘boys’!

‘Indeed, indeed, I did not think so, Darley--Carol, I mean; you were as good as possible to me; you could not do more; you had all your friends before I came, and you were so much higher up, and----’

‘You’re a good little soul, Tim,’ Carol interrupted, ‘and believe in every one; you’d make excuses for a man who robbed and murdered you.’

‘But you never robbed and murdered me,’ the little boy answered, venturing to be facetious for the first time. ‘I am sure you did all you could, and took me for your fag and everything. I’m glad I shall be in Fifth Form next half, for I should never get used to fagging for any one else.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said the other deprecatingly, ‘but anyway now we are Carol and Tim again, and no longer upper division and lower boy; I hope we may be friends. You will have to write me full accounts of the old place; most of my friends have left, so if you don’t I shall never hear anything. Mind you tell me what new boys there are at my tutor’s next half, and if any of ’em can play football, and what new choices Harcourt gives their colours to, and who are likely to give us trouble for the cup.’

‘How funnily it all came about, Carol,’ said Tim modestly, after promising faithfully to comply with all these injunctions,--‘my having you for a friend, I mean. One would have thought I was the last person you would ever have noticed. I can’t play football, or anything you like; indeed, I’m no good at any games.’

‘You give me a good character,’ answered his friend, laughing, ‘to suppose me the brutal athlete who selects his friends by their muscle; you don’t give me much credit, it seems, for intellectual tastes. Seriously though,’ he added, looking down at him kindly, ‘you are a first-rate little friend, and will be my link with the dear old place.’

Tim was silent, feeling very grateful and happy.

‘I hope nothing will ever break our friendship,’ he said presently.

‘Oh! nothing ever will,’ replied the other airily; ‘at least it will be your fault if it does.’

Would it be his fault? Tim smiled at the idea. Would he ever be the one to cast aside what he most valued in all the world? He dwelt upon the thought with some amusement; it seemed too absurd even for protest. Could any one have foretold to us last year eight out of ten of the things that have befallen us in this, how we should have laughed at them! Still, though Tim laughed, one thought seemed to oppress him even in his mirth; it was an odd feeling too indefinite to be called an apprehension, and it had its root and origin in Violet. She was the first young girl he had ever seen placed in juxtaposition to Carol, and the sight of the two together, and his friend’s chance remarks upon her beauty, had opened up quite a new vista of possibilities to him. We may laugh at the notion of any one forecasting results from the meeting of a lad of eighteen and a girl of Violet’s age, but we must remember the augur himself was but fourteen, and that to him these other two seemed almost more than grown up. He had come to look on Carol as crowned with all fulfilment, a being to whom no future years could add any power or maturity, and Violet was tall and self-possessed enough for twenty; her position as the eldest of a large family had made her old for her age. All the complications of love and romance, never hitherto included in any of Tim’s views of the future, started into threatening being for the first time, the more alarming for their vagueness; they seemed to cast quite a new light upon his favourite text, as he repeated it to himself on his knees after his prayers that night, as his habit was. ‘Passing the love of woman.’ ‘The love of woman’; he had never thought of it that way before. He had supposed it meant mother’s love, sister’s love, all the good things he had never known, poor child; and could only imagine the love of women generally as being gentler and more loving than men. Would Carol ever be what the books called ‘in love’? ever marry? and in this remote and awful contingency could they stay close friends, or had he been assured that day for the first time in words of the friendship he most coveted, only to see it melt from his grasp as he claimed it? In vain he asked these questions of his own heart. Of course, he told himself, some day it was sure to happen; he was a fool not to have thought of it before. But what were the words? ‘_Passing_,’ yes, ‘_passing_ the love of woman,’--that part at least he could always keep true.