The Two Mrs Scudamores

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The Two Mrs Scudamores

By Mrs. Oliphant

AUTHOR OF "MARJORIBANKS," "JOHN," "THE PERPETUAL CURATE."

Part I

CHAPTER I.

Scudamore Park is in Berkshire, in the heart of one of the leafiest and greenest of English counties. There is nothing very beautiful in the house itself It is of the time of Queen Anne, with red birch gables and gleaming lines of windows straight and many. The center of the corps de logis is crowned with a pediment, and the house stands upon a broad green terrace broken by flights of white stone steps.

The garden surrounding one wing has been kept up in the old-fashioned trim which belonged to the period in which it was made. There are clipped yews and formal parterres, however, which can scarcely be called more formal than the ribbon beds of the modern pleasure-garden at the other end of the house.

The Park has always been kept up in the very best style, and the newest and most fashionable kind of gardening is to be found there. Whatever the Scudamores may have sacrificed, however they may have wasted their goods, they have never been indifferent to their "place," and on the summer day when this story begins it was in its full beauty. The lovely green lawn stretched from the foot of the terrace till it disappeared in the woodland scenery of the Park. On the terrace great rustic baskets of flowers were standing all ablaze with red and yellow; the windows were open, the white curtains blowing softly in the breeze. The air was sweet with the delicate perfumes of the limes and with the sound of bees. Except that sound, everything was still in the languid afternoon. The prospect from those open windows was of nothing but greenness and luxuriance. The lines of trees thickened and deepened, from the feathery-footed limes close at hand, to the great oak standing with "knotted knees" "muffled deep in fern," in the distance. Afternoon was in the languid sounds and sights, and it is in such a place that the languor of the afternoon is most sweet.

But the last ornament which had been adopted at Scudamore was one which hung suspended from the front of the house,—a doleful decoration,—the hatchment which announced to all the world that the lord of the place had betaken himself to another; and the family in the great drawing-room were all in deep mourning.

There were but three of them,—the mother, a handsome woman about forty, a son of twenty and a daughter of eighteen,—all in sorrowful black, weighted with the still more sombre darkness of crape. The white cap which marked Mrs. Scudamore's widowhood was the most cheerful article of toilette among them. They were very still, for the man whom they mourned had not been more than a fortnight in his grave, and Mrs. Scudamore, who had been ill of exhaustion after his death, had resumed the old habits of her life only that day. She was seated with a book in her hand in a great chair, but the book was a pretense, and her attention wandered far away from it. With eyes which saw nothing, she gazed into the Park among the great trees. In that stillness she was going over her life.

But there was not much in this widow's look of the prostration and despondency common to most women when they face existence for the first time by themselves, after a long life spent in conjunction with that of another. Mrs. Scudamore had a vague sense of exhaustion about her—the exhaustion of great and long-continued fatigue and endurance. Nobody quite knew how much she had borne during that last illness.

The dead Scudamore had not been a good man, and he was not a good husband. During all the earlier years of her married life he had neglected her; more than this, he had outraged her in the way women feel most deeply. She had acted like a stoic or a heroine throughout; having once made up her mind that it was not for her children's advantage or her own that she should leave him, she had remained at Scudamore, making no complaints, guarding her children from the contamination of his habits, and overawing him into decency. His extravagances and wickedness, after a while, were confined to his expeditions to town, in which she did not accompany him, but remained at home as he grew older and his son approached manhood.

Mr. Scudamore was understood to have sown his wild oats, and to have become a respectable member of society. People even blamed his wife, when a passing rumor of his dissipations in London was brought down to the country, for not going with him and "keeping him straight." And nobody realized that that had happened to Mrs. Scudamore which does happen much oftener than the world wots of—she had become disgusted with her husband. Love can support a great deal, but love in the mind of a woman car rarely support that vast contempt of love which lies at the bottom of systematic immorality. In this case the man had disgusted the woman: and he suspected it. This is the last offense of which a woman is capable towards a man—that she should find him otherwise than personally agreeable whenever he chooses to come back from whatsoever scenes he comes, is a sin with which the best-tempered of sinners could scarcely be expected to put up.

And Mr. Scudamore was not good-tempered. His wife did all that a high-spirited woman could do to conceal the impression he had made upon her, but he discerned it, and though not a word was said between them on the subject, it filled him with a sort of frenzy. His temper, everybody said, grew worse and worse before he died, especially to her; yet he would not suffer her to be absent from him, and made incessant demands upon her with the most fretful irritability. He thus deprived her even of the softening impressions which a long illness often brings. He would not allow her to forget the troubles he had brought her by his sick-bed, but carried on the struggle to the very edge of the grave. Her strength had been so strained that when the necessity for exertion was over she had fallen like one dead, and for days after had lain in a strange dreamy peacefulness, in which something that was not quite sorrow, but sufficiently like it to answer the requirements of her position, mingled.

She was sad, not for his loss, but for him; profoundly sad to think that the man was over and ended for this world, and that nothing better had come of him; and self-reproachful, as every sensitive spirit is, wondering, wistfully, could she have done more for him; had she fulfilled her duty? But underneath this sadness was that sense of relief which breathed like balm over her, which she blamed herself for, and which she tried to ignore, but which was there notwithstanding, dwelling like peace itself. Her struggle was over. She had her life and her children's lives as it were in her hands, to mould to better things. This was what she was thinking, with a faint, exquisite sense of deliverance, as she sat gazing out dreamily over the Park.

Mrs. Scudamore had been an heiress, and all through her married life had felt the additional pang of inability to perform the duties she owed to her own people. Now that was removed, and in some rare fit of better judgment her husband had made her guardian of the children, and left everything under her control. Her only partner in the guardianship of her children was the family lawyer, who had known her all his life, and who had never yet got over his astonishment that the girl whom he recollected so well should have grown so clever, and so able to understand business. In his hands she was very safe. She had now power for the first time in her life. True, as far as the entailed portion of the Scudamore estates went, that could only last till Charles was twenty-one, an event not much more than a year off. But even then more than half the property would still be in her hands. It would be hard to say that it was happiness that was stealing into her heart as she sat there in her crape and widow's cap, and yet it was strangely like happiness, notwithstanding that the gravity of her face and the subdued stillness of her thoughts made it possible for her to receive condolences without any apparent break in the ordinary proprieties.

"Mrs. Scudamore looks exactly as a person in her position ought to look," was what Mr. Pilgrim, her fellow-executor, said. "We cannot expect her to be overwhelmed with grief." And yet in its heart the world objected to her that she was not overwhelmed with grief, and offered her heaps of consolation, such as it offers to the broken-hearted. They said to her:—"It is sad for you, but oh, think what a blessed change for him." They adjured her to remember that such partings were not forever (which made the poor woman shudder), and when they had left her they shook their heads and said:—"She is very composed; I don't think she feels it very much."—"Feels it! She feels nothing; I always said she had not a bit of heart."—"But, then, she was always a quiet sort of woman." This was what the world said, half condemning, and nobody but old Miss Ridley ventured to say:—"What a blessed riddance for her, poor soul!"

While she sat thus dreamily looking out, with her new life floating as it were about her, Charlie and Amy went out without disturbing their mother. There were only these two, and two very small girls in the nursery. The long gap between meant much to Mrs. Scudamore, but to no one else, for the little hillocks in the church-yard bore little meaning to the children. The brother and sister were great companions—more so than brother and sister usually are, and the delight of having Charlie home from Oxford had soon dried up the few fresh youthful tears which Amy wept for her father.

They strolled out arm in arm by the open window upon the green terrace. Charlie had a book in his hand, the last new poem he had fallen into enthusiasm with, and Amy read it over his shoulder with both her arms clasped through his. It would have been difficult to find a prettier picture. The boy was very slight and tall, not athletic as his father wished, but fond of poetry and talk, and full of enthusiasm after a fashion which has almost died out, the fashion of a time before athletics had begun to reign. The girl was slim and straight too, as a girl ought to be? but more developed than her brother, though she was two years younger. Her hair was brighter than his, her complexion sweeter. She was an out-of-door girl and he had been an in-door young man, but yet the likeness was great between them.

Amy leant half across him, hanging with all her weight upon his arm, her bright face bent upon the book which he was reading aloud. "Is not that glorious; is that not fine?" he asked, his cheek flushing and his eye sparkling; while Amy, intent with her eyes upon the book, ran on with it while he stopped and rhapsodized.

They were standing thus when they attracted the notice of some people in a carriage which was driving up the avenue. There was no door in the terrace front of the house, but the avenue ran past it under the lime-trees, giving a passing peep of the house. Two people were in this carriage, one a lady in deep mourning, the other a man with a keen sharp face. The sound of their passage did not disturb the young people, but the travelers looked out at them with eager interest. The lady was a pale little woman between forty and fifty, wearing a widow's cap like Mrs. Scudamore; she was in a tearful condition, and leant half out of the window. "Oh, Tom! Tom, there are the children, you may be sure, and how can I do it! how can I do it," she said with excitement. "Nobody wants you to do it; you must keep still and keep your papers ready, and I'll look after the rest" said her companion. He was a man of about thirty, rather handsome than otherwise, but for the extreme sharpness of his profile. He too was in mourning, and in his hand he carried a little letter-case which he gave the lady as they alighted at the door. He had to give her his arm at the same time, to keep her from falling, and he pulled down her crape veil almost roughly to conceal her tears, which were falling fast. She was very much frightened and quite dissolved in weeping. Her poor little dim eyes were red, and so was her nose. "Oh, please don't make me! for the last time, Tom dear, don't make me!" she cried as she stumbled out of the carriage. He seemed to give her a little shake as he drew her hand through his arm.

"Now, Auntie," he said in her ear, "if there is any more of this nonsense I shall just go right away and leave you here; how should you like that? You foolish woman, do you care nothing for your rights?"

"Oh, Tom!" was all the answer she made, weeping. This conversation was not audible to the servant, who stood amazed watching their descent, but he could not help seeing the little conflict; it gave, him time to recover his wits, which had been confused by the novelty of this unlooked-for arrival. When he had watched the two unknown visitors descend from the green vehicle, which was the only hackney carriage of the neighborhood, he made a step in advance and said calmly: "Missis receives no visitors at present. Not at home, Sir," and held the door as with intention to close it in the new-comers' faces.

"Your mistress will receive this lady," said the stranger, pushing unceremoniously into the hall. "There, there, I understand all about it. Go and tell her that a lady wishes to see her on very particular business—must see her, in short—on business connected with the late Mr.2"

"Oh, Tom, don't say that, please."

"Your late master," said the stranger. "Now come, quick: the lady can't wait, do you understand? and if you keep her waiting it will be the worse for you. Tell your mistress, your present mistress, that we must see her at once."

"Oh, Tom, don't be so—My good man, if you will be so good as to give the message, we can wait here."

"You shall not wait here," said the other. "Show us in somewhere; your late master would never have forgiven you for leaving this lady in the hall, neither would your present mistress, you may be sure. Show us into some room or other; now look sharp. Do you think we can be kept waiting like this?"

Jasper was a young footman not long entered upon his office, and he turned from the strange man to the weeping lady with absolute bewilderment; and probably if the butler had not at this time made his solemn appearance, he would still have been standing between the two in consternation. But Woods, who was the butler, was a very serious and indeed alarming person, and I have always thought that the sharp stranger took him for the moment for a clergyman visiting at the house, which subdued him at once. Woods received their message very gravely, and then without a word, with only a move of his majestic hand, put them into a little room off the hall and shut the door upon them.

His gesture and look were so serious that the lady shook more than ever; she turned about in alarm when Woods shut the door. "Oh," she said with a start, "he has locked us in; what are we to do?"—"Hold your tongue," said Tom, "and take care of your papers and keep up your courage. Well, I must say it's worth a little struggle to have such a place as this. What use you will be able to be of to all your relations—Hallo! there are the pictures of the two we saw on the lawn."

The lady turned with an exclamation of interest to two small photographs which hung over the mantel-piece. As she gazed at them the tears came trooping down her pale cheeks. "Oh Tom! and I never had any children; I never had any children," she said, looking affectingly into his face.

"So much the more reason to be spiteful at this one," said the man roughly. "She has everything she wants, money, comfort, good reputation, and the children besides. By Jove, Auntie, if it was me I'd flash up and pluck a spirit from the sight."

"Oh Tom! how little you understand," said the poor lady; and she was standing thus in spite of all his endeavors to seat her majestically in a chair, gazing at the photographs with the tears upon her cheeks, when the door opened and Mrs. Scudamore, like a white ghost enveloped in her mournings, came into the room.

CHAPTER II.

"A lady and gentleman?" Mrs. Scudamore had said, starting from her revery. "Who are they, Woods? Did you say I saw no one?"

"They were positive, ma'am, as you'd see them," said Woods, solemnly. "I think I would see them, ma'am, if it wasn't too much trouble. I was to tell you it was something about my master—"

"Mr. Scudamore, Woods?"

"My late master, ma'am. I would see 'em, ma'am, if I might dare to give an advice. Master had to do with a many things that had best be seen to by one of the family, and Master Charlie is so young—not meaning no offense."

A momentary flush of irritation rose to Mrs. Scudamore's face, but it passed away almost as quickly as it came. "I will see them," she said, "in a moment," waving him away with her hand. But when he had gone she sat still in her chair, holding her book with a strange reluctance to move. In a moment a cloud seemed to have sprung up over her firmament, which looked so peaceful just now. What did she fear? She feared nothing—her thoughts took no shape—she only felt that some new and unknown calamity was coming. She had thought her troubles were over, and with a bitterness which she could not have put into words, she felt she had mistaken.

Here was something new—something he had left behind him for her to bear. After a while she gathered herself up painfully out of her chair, she put away the book carefully into the place it belonged to, and then she went to the window, she did not know why, and looked out upon her children.

They were both seated upon the grass. Amy talking eagerly, with her animated face bent forward—her brother putting up his hands laughingly, as if to put her away; they were disarming the poem which he held open in his hand. Never was there a prettier picture of the sweet idleness and peacefulness of youth. Mrs. Scudamore looked at them a full minute, and then she turned slowly and went to her visitors. When she entered the little room she was very dignified, very pale and still. She had not the least idea what she was going to meet there, but she felt that it was certainly pain and trouble. These as a matter of course, but what else she could not tell. She was tall, with a handsome, colorless face; a woman of no small resolution, as it was easy to see; and there was something even about the crispness of the crape, and the spotless purity of the long white pendants of tarlatan from her cap, which imposed upon the little weeping, disheveled woman to whom she addressed herself.

This unhappy stranger turned with a start and a little cry from the contemplation of the photographs, wiped her tears with a crumpled handkerchief, and did her best, though she trembled, to meet the lady of the house with something like composure. But she shook so that her pretense was a very poor one indeed, and at sight of the humble little figure and deprecating looks Mrs. Scudamore recovered her courage—nothing very tragical, she felt, could be involved. A smile even came to her face.

"You wished to see me," she said, with grave politeness; "I do not receive any one at present, except my old friends; but as I hear it is on business—"

"Business of the most important kind," said the man, of whom Mrs. Scudamore had taken no notice. She turned now and looked at him, and somehow her very glance, the quiet grace with which she heard and accepted what he said, irritated him almost beyond bearing. He was the sort of man of whom people of Mrs. Scudamore's breeding say: "He is not a gentleman." He might have been much poorer, less educated, lower in the social scale, and yet not have called forth that verdict; he was himself so conscious of the fact, and so determined to screen it with audacity and pretension, that he saw the words on everybody's lips and resented them to begin with. When the lady turned from him, and with her own hand gave the insignificant little woman a chair before she herself sat down, he felt already that there was some plot against him. "By Jove! she's begun her little game too soon. She thinks she can do anything with Auntie," he said to himself. As for Auntie, she looked more and more ready to drop as she received this simple courtesy. She sat down a very image of guilt and suffering, her eyes red, her nose red, her handkerchief too damp to be graceful, or even useful, in her hand, and from time to time lifted her weeping eyes with a deprecating glance to the stately Mrs. Scudamore's face.

"Might I ask you to tell me what the business is," said that lady politely. "I need not say that in my present circumstances I refer to my lawyer everything that does not require my immediate attention."

"I am quite willing to refer it to your lawyer," said the man. "Perfectly willing—indeed, he is the proper person. We don't come as beggars, ma'am, I assure you. Our rights are very clear indeed. It was solely, I believe, out of consideration for your feelings—"

"Oh, don't, Tom, don't!"

"I must take my own way, if you please. We thought it best and wisest—and kindest—to come to you first—feeling that there was some hardship in the circumstances, and that something might be done to soften the blow; but if you don't wish to be troubled, of course the simplest course is the solicitor—I am a solicitor myself."

Mrs. Scudamore looked from him to his aunt, and then at him again. The cloud returned to her with a vague gloom, and yet it seemed impossible that any serious evil, any real harm could come to her from the homely little personage sobbing under her breath in the chair beside her, or from this underbred man. The woman even, she felt sure, had no evil intention; and as for the man, what power could he have? It was money, no doubt; some old debt, some liability more or less disgraceful, but which might be disposed of.

She said, "Go on, please, I am ready to hear," with the faintest little tone of weariness in her voice. But the weariness disappeared from her face as he went on. The man with his underbred air, his pretension and audacity, became to her like one of the terrible Fates. After the first flush of instinctive rage and indignation with which she refused to believe, the certainty that, horrible as it was, it was the truth, sunk into her very soul and overpowered her. She preserved her immovable resolute face, and heard him to an end—heard the documents which he read—saw these documents carefully collected and replaced in the case—saw the miserable little woman, the wretched creature who was the cause of it all, weeping over that case which she held in her hand; and then rose majestic to reply. To them she seemed the very personation of indignant unbelief and scorn, but the firmness that inspired her, that gave power to her voice and majesty to her figure as she turned to them, was sheer and conscious despair.

"Is that all?" she said. "Now I have heard you to an end, may I ask what you have come here for, and what you mean to do?"

"What we have come here for?" said the man with an assumption of surprise.

"Yes," Mrs. Scudamore said quickly, feeling that her sight and voice began to fail her. "What have you come here for? "You must feel that we cannot remain under one roof if your story is true—not even for an hour. If your story is true—I need not say that I give it no credit, that I—refuse—to believe."

She had got as far as this when the sight and the voice both failed, a sound as of a hundred rushing wheels came over her brain, and everything else died out of her consciousness. She dropped on the floor before the two who had been looking at her almost with awe, so proudly strong had she looked up to the very moment when she fell. The woman gave a great cry and ran to her. The man sprang up with a loud exclamation. "Ring the bell, for God's sake—get water—call some one," said she. He, half frightened, but resolute to do nothing that was suggested to him, stood still and gazed. "She'll come round—never fear, she'll come round," he said. "By Jove, Auntie, that proves she felt it more than she would allow."

"Ring the bell! ring the bell!" said the woman. The servants, however, outside had heard the fall and the cry, and came rushing in without being called—Mrs. Scudamore's maid, hastily called by Jasper, following the butler into the room. They lifted her upon a sofa,—the visitor taking command of the situation, as if it had been natural to her. This little weeping woman, so helpless before, was at once elevated into a rational being by the emergency. "Lay her head down flat; take away the pillow, poor dear, poor dear!" she murmured, keeping her place beside the sufferer. "Give me the water—oh, quickly, quickly—give it to me."

"Aunt, come away, this is not your place—let her come to herself," said the man. She turned round upon him with a certain momentary fury in her poor, red, tear-worn eyes. She stamped her foot at him, as she stood with the eau de Cologne in her hand. "Go away, sir; it's all your doings," she said in a sharp, high-pitched voice—"go away."

And he was so completely taken by surprise that he went away. He had not known that it was possible for his poor little aunt, whom everybody snubbed and ordered about as they would, to turn upon any one so. She had been absent from her family most of her life, and now when she came back it had been in all the excitement of a great discovery. The man was so bewildered that he went out and stayed about in the hall, with his hat on, looking curiously at everything.

While he was thus occupied, Charlie and Amy came in, and gazed at him with wondering eyes. He returned their look with a stare; but either some tradition of good-breeding, or else Amy's fresh young beauty moved him. He took off his hat with a kind of stupid instinct. The two young people, who did not know there was anything amiss, had a momentary consultation with each other. "Nothing of the sort," said the brother, turning his back. "Then I will," said the girl, and before either knew what she was about, she made a sudden step towards the stranger. "Did you want mamma?" she said, with her soft child-like smile, looking fearlessly into his face. "Perhaps my brother or I would do instead; mamma is not well; she has been very much tired and worn out. Is it anything, please, that you could say to me?"

Anything that he could say to her! He was not sensitive, but a thrill went through the man, proving at least that he was human. Say it to her? He shrank back from her with an agitation which he could not account for. Amy's utter ignorance of any reason, however, made her slow to perceive the effect of her words upon him; and before she could repeat her question, Jasper rushed forward with that zeal to communicate evil tidings which belongs to the domestic mind. "If you please, miss, your mamma's took very bad and fainted, in the little library."—"Mamma! fainted?" said Amy, and she rushed into the little room, forgetting all about the stranger, who, however, did not forget her. He stood half bewildered, looking after her. He was a young man, and the sight of the girl, her sweet courtesy to the enemy she did not know, the look she had given him, her innocent question had moved him as he never had been moved before. He was vulgar, pretentious, and mercenary, but still he had blood left in his veins, and something that did duty for a heart. He stood looking after her till Charlie turned round upon him, a very different antagonist.