REDCOT INTERIOR, AND THE WOMEN OF THE FAMILY.

John Prior walked to his house across a corner of what was more an old-fashioned paddock, with extensive shrubberies girdling a lawn intersected by an avenue of lime trees, than anything so imposing as a park.

Redcot was of some antiquity, but no great dignity, unless that of age and rambling space. The building had been a farm-house at one time, but so venerable a farm-house that it became, after all, a question whether the place did not date back to a homely manor-house in the days when the lines between yeomen, squires, and farmers were by no means so sharp as in later generations. Picturesqueness had not been aimed at in the low square building put down in a hollow, and encumbered with offices--some of which had been cleared away, while others, though empty and disused, remained a monument of the unhesitating simplicity of our ancestors, who were not ashamed of their apple-rooms and cheese-rooms, their barns and thrashing mills, their cow-houses and pig-styes, any more than of their stables and kennels, their dairies and poultry yards. The greatest improvement after the removal of the said cow-house and pig-stye had been in the gradual laying out of the lawn and shrubberies until they had attained a respectable amount of order and beauty--all the more attractive that the style was a little antiquated with stack-shaped hollies and gable-pointed yews, and a pleasant garden opening out of a cunning labyrinth of shrubs. The scene was not marred in any way by Mr. Prior’s pits. These were out of sight, sound, and smell, miles away on Kershaw Moor. Indeed, although mines and miners were at the root of the family prosperity or adversity, they did not come to any great extent into the Priors’ outward life.

The house was not heavily draped like the quarry. There was a prejudice a century or two ago against ivy and clematis, jessamine and roses, as promoters of damp, and nests for wasps, spiders, and earwigs. That prejudice rode roughshod over whole sets of utilitarian and straightforward householders. One advantage of the absence of creepers was that the brick walls were as mellow and mossy as the garden wall, the passion for dryness having fortunately stopped short of perpetual scraping, pointing, and painting fiery-red. The windows had retained their stone mullions and small panes, as if in obliging anticipation of the freak of retrogression in modern taste, while, unencumbered by leaves, the light was let into the long, low-roofed rooms with a cheerful prosaic candour, not so much approved by æsthetic dogma.

No doubt it was from a mere accident that so much remained the same within as well as without at Redcot. The master of the house on coming to his kingdom had been indifferent--rather averse to change. His wife had entertained a romantic reverence and affectionate fondness for the early landmarks which had come home to her personal experience. The panelled rooms--oak in the dining-room, and painted, in Philistine defiance of darkness, a clear French grey in the drawing-room--were as John Prior and his wife had found them, barring necessary repairs and renewals. There had been no complete clearing away of the original furniture. The one room was full of heavy mahogany and warm-tinted damask. The other was distinguished by spindle-legged rosewood, pale brocade protected by paler chintz, and a superabundance of glass and gilt decoration in the form of mirrors and girandoles, chandeliers, picture-frames, time-pieces, and tables lacquered to their very legs. Additions had been made not always harmoniously. The most subduing element had been the lingering, softening touches of time, fading here and dimming there, till the whole had worn into a kind of tender congruity. This was not fatally marred by the pretended preciousness of the scalloped, inlaid slabs, and the fluted yellow legs of the side tables, or by the yawning mirrors over the prim marble chimney-pieces, and over the various doors of the room, reflecting pitilessly every object it contained, from the brittle porcelain basket on the cabinet, to the worked tulips and wall-flowers on the hearth-rug.

John Prior came in by a side door into a dark hall, where gun-cases and fishing-rods shouldered an umbrella stand and pegs for hats and wraps, and where stuffed birds kept in countenance engravings too brown to be easily distinguishable. There was one extraordinarily staring wooden picture of Judas and his Master which would have produced recoil in any spectator of average feeling, had not familiarity robbed the picture of all meaning. The squire went straight to the drawing-room, advancing with a shiver to the fire, which glowed with an eclipsing lustre that seemed to ask the worsted tulips and wall-flowers what they were doing blooming there out of season? John Prior planted himself on the hearth-rug, with his boots not free from the clay of the quarry, set doggedly on the tulips and wall-flowers. There was no relaxation of his muscles or sigh of satisfaction. In fact, he wanted more comfort than he got; he was looking round discontentedly at the absence of any preparation for afternoon tea, though five o’clock had not struck. He resented the silence of the only other occupant of the room, who had looked up on his entrance, and then resumed her book. It was like the women, he reflected in his bitterness, to make no provision for his requirements, and to take no interest in what was going on outside, though it might be a matter of life and death to him, and through him to them in their carelessness and heartlessness. Why _she_--she there sitting, engrossed with her trashy novel, or her equally frivolous, never-ending fancy work--fancy work, forsooth! a fit occupation for a woman of her years! or with her old useless, pampered brute of a dog, she knew perfectly, as well as he knew, that Lambert Crabtree was boring for coal on Ladslove, and any day might come upon it. Yet she did not ask a single question as to what he had heard and seen any more than if the boring were going on at Timbuctoo, or than if she had no more to do with it than her great-grandmother could have had. This was all the sympathy that he met with. But if she were to get a letter from her jackanapes and fool of a son telling her that his little finger ached, the whole house would hear of it.

It did not signify in the least, in the temper John Prior was in, that he frequently refused to look at afternoon tea, and that, the last time Mrs. Prior had ventured to inquire as to the result of the boring at Ladslove, he had angrily protested, How should he know? She had better write to Susie, or Crabtree himself, and that would be going to headquarters--and not pester him. The subject was not particularly agreeable, and he had worries enough without this being continually dinned into his ears, &c., &c.

The offending Mrs. Prior did not look, on the most casual glance, like a woman deficient in natural feeling, though there was a certain patient peacefulness in her air and surroundings which might not be without its provocation to an irascible man. For a soft answer, contrary to the verdict of King Solomon, is sometimes the most aggravated offence to an angry disputant.

Mrs. Prior had never been, strictly speaking, a pretty woman. Her dress was old-fashioned--a lace shawl over a dark cashmere gown, and a soft white cap, shading silver-streaked hair. Everything was perfectly neat and by no means unbecoming to her tall, slight figure, and sallow, delicately-outlined face, but the effect of the whole was that she looked older than she really was. She gave the impression that she must always have seemed rather homely and old-fashioned, with a sweet homeliness and old-fashionedness that might have been one of her charms to a certain order of mind, especially when there was plenty of intelligence and no lack of gentle breeding in the simple plainness and dash of quaintness.

Mrs. Prior’s grey eyes were a little faded, but there lingered a light in them which contradicted the inference that there had ever been anything lympathic or lifeless in the loyal conservatism and unaffected genuineness of the woman. On the contrary, a reader of physiognomy might have guessed that the native sprightliness which in this age of sentimental analysis and sublime discontent with the whole structure of the universe, moral as well as physical, is fast becoming a lost feminine grace, had been one of Mrs. Prior’s out-of-date attractions long ago. She might have had enough to say in her youth, though she was inopportunely silent at the present moment; and though the vestiges of her early vivacity were only to be detected by sharp eyes, and just pulled themselves together, as it were, and came to the front again by fits and starts.

In truth, Mrs. Prior had been left behind by most of her children. The eldest daughter, Alice, had married much earlier than her mother, and had seen far more of the world, having gone to India with her husband. She had even been called on to face the great mystery of death at a date before that at which Mrs. Prior had become a woman by right of the love passages between her and John Prior. Susie had possessed from her babyhood more triumphant worldly wisdom than her mother had acquired in all her fifty-five years. Jane, the youngest girl--still a girl and still at home--had kept her terms at a ladies’ college, and was one of the earned products of the age. Only Jack, the one son with his father’s plain face and his mother’s serene, sunny nature, did not drift away from her, but continued faithfully on the same level. And Jack Prior was foredoomed to be a scapegrace if it were but by his father’s extreme disappointment because the son in whom he had centred his hopes showed no sign of retrieving in some unexplained manner the falling fortunes of the family. There was small justice in punishing Jack, because he did not fulfil unreasonable expectations for which the boy had given no warrant. But men like John Prior, the elder, however just in theory are seldom fair in practice.

In place of confirming the extravagant ideas entertained of him, young John Prior, disheartened and almost driven desperate by his father’s irrational displeasure, brought back a greater reputation for scrapes and debts than for honours from college, and drifted about in a desultory fashion, wasting his time among friends with whom he was wonderfully popular, who saved him from the hard necessity of living under the blight of his father’s anger. At last Jack put the crown on his volatile follies rather than serious errors by suddenly taking what appeared an idle vagrant step in a lad who owned no more money than the allowance which his father could ill afford. The heir of Redcot went off on a voyage to Australia, without any apparent intention of becoming a colonist.

Mrs. Prior was forsaken even by Jack, except for the solace of the letters he sent to her, which, to do him justice, had come with tolerable regularity and frequency hitherto. She was left to her low wicker chair in a particular corner by the Redcot drawing-room hearth in winter, and by a special window in summer, to her unintermitting supply of novels, her interminable needlework, and her dog Tommy. The last was a superannuated, not particularly amiable blue Skye terrier. He had been in his bloom the children’s cherished playfellow. He had even been a not unwelcome companion of the children’s father when Tommy had been the most active and joyous of rabbit-hunters and ratters. In those days Mrs. Prior’s domestic happiness was also in its bloom, as she sometimes said, comparing notes with Tommy in an aside half-pathetic, half-tenderly humorous, in accordance with the nature of the woman. But the dog’s time of nimbleness and unclouded ardour in sport was over, just as the woman was taken down from the pinnacle which most mothers and mistresses of households occupy at one period of their lives--an elevation of unapproachable wisdom and cleverness in the eyes of their offspring and dependants. Then a younger generation, with new standards and different wants, arises to pronounce with more or less impatience and carelessness or reverent reluctance, and regretful gentleness, that their predecessors are antiquated and insufficient in their ideas and capabilities.

When Mrs. Prior found herself thus out-stripped in the race of life by her daughters, there was undoubtedly a considerable amount of mild dignity in the manner in which she withdrew from the unequal contest, and ensconced herself in an elderly woman’s fragment of a kingdom. She showed herself resolute and almost satisfied to wait till these well-armed children of hers had need of her again. For deep down in the mother’s heart there was a conviction, half proud, half humble, and wholly tender and true, that human life was hardly likely to run its course without her human skill and experience, of so little account at present, coming into request once more.

It had been far worse for Mrs. Prior, and had caused an unhealing wound in her heart, to know that she was gradually becoming alienated from her husband. The reason for this was partly because her nature could not always touch his in the painful conditions under which he lived, but chiefly because she would not give up her son, whom he was doing his best to goad to destruction. The permanent good understanding and unshaken faith between mother and son, in spite of what John Prior considered his ample grounds for complaint and indignation, exasperated him. He was still farther hurt by his grievous knowledge that all harmony between him and Jack was at an end, and that the father’s confidence in the lad was gone as entirely as the elder man’s high hopes and vaulting ambition.

Settled resentment was very difficult for Mrs. Prior, and the process by which it was brought about exquisitely painful to her. But she did continue to resent her husband’s attitude towards their son. The resentment, however, did not alter the fact that her woman’s nature was in its very susceptibility and delicacy more liberal and juster than the far stronger, but at the same time more headstrong and self-centred, nature of the man. She made allowance for him, so that in the middle of her dumb anger her heart sometimes ached for her husband with a positive intensity of aching.

John Prior stood fuming on the flowery hearth-rug. Mrs. Prior sat entrenched among her belongings. At one side of her was the basket with the rolls of linen and skeins of silk for the quilts which she had been embroidering ever since anybody could remember. Jane alleged with quiet disdain that any weaver could have woven better in a week at the most. At Mrs. Prior’s elbow was her special bookcase, in which the works of her favourite authors and the last volumes received from Mudie’s were ranged. At the other side Tommy was stretched in slightly apoplectic slumber, while he was carefully sheltered from the danger of stray kicks. Every now and then she turned over a leaf of the book on which her eyes were fixed, where it lay in the comfortable hollow of the lap, formed by the raising of the small feet--hardly larger than Susie’s--as they rested side by side on their footstool.

But though Mrs. Prior’s attention appeared placidly concentrated on her own concerns, her interest, even in an unusually good story, was by no means so great as to hinder a whole under-current of perturbed reflections and thronging anxieties, if John Prior could only have conceived what lay beneath the unruffled surface.

It was cold comfort, Mrs. Prior thought, for a man to come from the manifold troubles of the outer world into his own house, and not receive so much as a greeting given by those nearest to him. But what could she do? She did not know what to say. When she had spoken to him about this last torture the other day she had only succeeded in galling him. If she spoke on indifferent topics he would accuse her in his mind, if not in his speech, of hypocrisy. Would he never understand that respectful silence might imply the most thoughtful and considerate fellow-feeling and commiseration? If she closed her book, the action might imply that she expected him to tell her something; and she could not, though she had been his wife for thirty years, compel his confidence.

Would Jane never come in and ring for tea? Mrs. Prior was sure her husband was thoroughly chilled and craved a cup of tea this afternoon, though he was apt to despise the womanish indulgence. She might ring, of course, but it was customary for Jane to appear at five and order in tea. The hour had not yet struck, and Jane would descend with widely-open eyes, and a dignified inference that she had been disturbed in important occupations; while men hated the least fuss--if anything, objected more to it than to a slight delay.

Did John remember what addition there was to be to the family party at dinner, and who had proposed riding over in the course of the evening? Had he braced himself to bear the encounter in the conflict that raged within him, or had he forgotten the previous intimation, so that the disagreeable ordeal would take him by surprise? She longed to give him a warning, but she dared not do it. She was not prevented by fear of his wrath, since no more courageous spirit ever breathed than existed in that simple, peaceable, determinedly cheerful woman, but his bitter words smote her like so many stones, and she not only smarted under them--they made her feel ashamed for him in whom she had once taken her greatest pride.

At last the clock struck five, and with the striking Jane Prior walked in. She was over the middle height and fairer in complexion than the rest of her family, with an expression of candour as well as of power of one sort on her broad open forehead. There was a corresponding look of sincerity in her somewhat cold blue eyes, which met her neighbour’s fairly and fully, and in her full, straight, uncompromising mouth. The expression was impressive, and rather heightened her claims to being handsome. “A fine girl” was the epithet which rose to one’s lips--well-grown, well-developed in every respect--a healthy mind in a healthy body--a character in which the intellectual predominated over the emotional. Unless a mania for study overthrew its balance, it could be safely trusted to act logically and consistently.

Jane Prior was dressed with the strict severity of the last utilitarian mode, as opposed to the æsthetic standard and to Paris fashions. Her skirt was short, and not tight. She was destitute alike of unnecessary puffings and swathings. She had no butterfly bows and streaming ends of ribbon, though she had well-tied knots where knots were required, and the lace at her throat and wrists was as fresh and dainty as need be. The severity of her costume extended to the style in which her hair was worn. She had an abundance of hair, which had been flaxen in childhood, and was now what old-fashioned people call fawn or sandy-coloured. It was turned back from the square forehead, and wound round the head by the simplest, most orderly arrangement possible, which took the least time to accomplish, and when it was accomplished, was nearly incapable of disarrangement by hat or bonnet, or even by pre-occupied hands pushing it from the temples, or restless fingers thrust through the tight folds. Altogether Jane’s toilet suited her admirably. She would have been out of place in trailing robes or caught-up flounces, such as Susie affected, in accordance with the last inspiration of her artist friends or her French modiste. Jane would have looked still worse--actually grotesque, with Susie’s fondly-trained fringe straying in artful artlessness to the verge of her arched eyebrows. But the result, if arrived at by any consciousness of Jane’s, was the fruit of an instinctive sense of fitness which belonged to the girl, and not of any elaborate consideration.

Jane Prior came into the drawing-room looking straight before her, and, going directly to the bell, rang for tea. Yet, she had a little the air as if she only saw in part what was passing around her--as if her mind remained busy with some mathematical problem or metaphysical question which she had lately been seeking to solve. She stood by the little table, which still wanted its tray and cups, her hands hanging down, loosely clasped before her, as silent, though not as glum, as her father. The atmosphere about her was meditative and engrossed, though not so as to cause her to forget the hour or neglect her duty of being there to ring for tea and pour it out.

No light girlish chat was to be expected from Jane; something more valuable perhaps, but not the current coin so easily exchanged in the intercourse of daily life. If she spoke just now it would be to make some brief unanswerable observation as to whether the water was boiling, or the cream as it should be, for Jane, though verging on asceticism in her personal tastes and practices, was strict in demanding the fulfilment of household obligations. Or she would address to her father some inquiry with regard to his old college classes and classics, which he could not refuse to answer, though at the present moment he felt inclined to regard it as impertinent.

But it was Mr. Prior and not his daughter who broke the silence, which was awkward and constrained, between husband and wife, and quite unconstrained and very much a matter of course, where Jane was in question, between father and daughter.

‘Where are the children?’ he asked shortly, as if he must find fault with something in the circumstances, though if they had been altered in one respect it would have been the presence and not the absence of the children to which he would have objected.

‘They cannot leave the schoolroom,’ answered Jane with calm decision. ‘I have had them near me the whole of the afternoon, yet Ally has not been able to parse half a page, Tom’s spelling to dictation is frightful, and it really looks as if that boy Sam were never to know his letters. I wish I could give them more time, and if nurse would only let them rise at six instead of seven it might be managed.’

Here Mrs. Prior interposed, which she seldom did now, even on behalf of her grandchildren, whom Jane had appropriated in the most meritorious manner. Indeed, Jane was doing so much for her dead sister’s children--taking so great an interest in them--even sacrificing a good deal that she prized highly on their account, that Mrs. Prior, with her conscientiousness, kindliness, and foresight, scrupled to interfere between the young aunt and her charge. ‘Jane has earned a right to say what is best for the poor little things, and though she makes mistakes like all young rulers, she is remarkably judicious on the whole, unless on this question of education, where nurse has been a sufficient check hitherto. The children will have Jane to turn to when I have ceased to be of much use to them; their mother’s contemporary is her natural substitute, doubtless.’ So thought Mrs. Prior, and she contented herself with a casting vote on the side of such grandmotherly indulgences as Jane would hear of. She felt called upon to utter a remonstrance to-day, and either because of the rarity of the remonstrance, or because it was a welcome reminder of what, if Jane conducted the matter in her own way, as she was tolerably sure to do--would certainly be a relief to her, the interference was received very graciously.

‘You get up too early already, my dear,’ said her mother, ‘and the children need more sleep than you do. Wait till they get their governess, and she will set these troubles to rights.’

‘Yes; I find I must begin immediately to look out for a governess,’ chimed in Jane, briskly. ‘The difficulty is where to get a thoroughly good one, for I will have no make-shift--no poor creature of a nursery governess with a little bad music and worse French to cover her boundless ignorance. I am determined the children shall be well grounded from the very beginning.’

‘Humph!’ was all the remark John Prior made on this praiseworthy stipulation, and a very sarcastic ‘humph!’ it was. He remembered the gratified pride with which he had first discovered his little daughter Jane’s unusual amount of brain power, and the interest he had taken in its proper development. What had it all come to? It had rendered Jane unlike other girls--at least the girls he had known--a gain doubtful in itself. She was self-reliant, certainly, but the self-reliance was not always agreeable. She was constantly occupied with her studies, and seemed to follow the pursuit of knowledge with unflagging zest. She did not seek for other entertainment than she could procure for herself at small cost. She had excellent health, in spite of her occasional eccentricities and absurdities. But, after all, her mind and memory were not better endowed and equipped than the average mind and memories of fairly intelligent and industrious undergraduates. Yet she was an exceptional woman for the other women like daws to peck at, who had not been able to escape entirely a shade of self-consciousness and pedantry, though being the real not the fictitious woman of culture, she was as free from such objectionable qualities as could reasonably have been expected.

But John Prior had never been reasonable in his expectations, and he had not counted on the possible loss involved in Jane’s acquirements. Neither was he reasonable in his apprehensions. He never knew when Jane might not make some extravagant display of the student or professor in petticoats, when she might not propose to quit Redcot and the protection of her father and mother, in order to take the head of a grammar school for girls, if such a place existed, or such an appointment came in her way. He should not like it, though he was, according to his own belief, to a great extent free from class prejudices, and though his youngest daughter was neither particularly useful--apart from her care of the little Woods--nor particularly ornamental at home, neither could she be said to contribute much to the sociality of the family. If it had been her brother who inherited Jane’s brains something might have come of them, and Jane might have had Jack’s senselessly light-hearted temper and dangerously-accommodating ways, which were worse than useless in a man, with some advantage to a woman and a stay-at-home daughter. But, then, everything had gone wrong with the squire of Redcot, even to the distribution of character and ability among his children. John Prior was not an irreligious or irreverent man, and there had been a time when his faith and his views of life had been in harmony; but they seemed to have passed into hopeless discord.