The music of a spirited and tireless band of robins helped Christian to wake next morning. The character of their cheerful racket defined itself very slowly to his drowsy consciousness. He lay for a long time with closed eyes, listening to it, and letting his mind drift quite at random among the thoughts which it suggested. He knew they were robins because his hostess had said he would hear them; he lazily pictured to himself the tiny red-breasts gathered in the shrubbery outside, in obedience to some mysterious signal of hers, and singing to order thus briskly and unwearyingly to make good her promise.
In what gay, high spirits the little fellow sang! The sun must be shining, to account for so much happiness. He accepted the idea with a sense of profound pleasure, and appropriated it to his own wonderful case.
For him, it was as if happiness had never existed before.
“‘Wilt thou have music? Hark! Apollo plays,
And twenty cagéd nightingales do sing.’”
He murmured the lines in indolent reverie, then opened his eyes, and smiled to think where he was, and what he had become a part of. Lifting himself on his elbow, he looked about him. The beauties of the apartment had not been lost upon him the previous evening. He had carried them with him in vague processional magnificence on his devious march through dreamland; he surveyed them again now in the morning light, rising after a while to pull aside the curtains, and bring in the full sunshine.
The room was, he said over and over to himself, ‘the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. The ruling color was of some blue which could almost be thought a green, and which, embraced as complementary decoration many shades of ocher and soft yellowish browns in woodwork, and in the thick, fleecy rugs underfoot. Around the four sides, at the level of his eyes, ran a continuous band of portraits—the English drawings of Holbein reproduced in the dominant tint of the room, set solidly into the wall, and separated from one another only by thin strips of the same tawny oak which framed them at top and bottom. The hooded, high-bosomed ladies, the cavaliers in hats and plumes and pointed beards, the smoothfaced, shrewd-eyed prelates and statesmen in their caps and fur, all knew him this morning for one of their own, as he went along, still in his nightshirt, and inspected them afresh. They appeared to greet him, and he beamed at them in response.
A dim impression of the earlier morning, which had seemed a shadowy passing phase of his dreams, revealed itself now to him as a substantial fact. Some one had been in the room, moving noiselessly about, and had spread forth for his use a great variety of articles of clothing and of the toilet, most of which he beheld for the first time. Overnight, his cousin Emanuel’s insistence upon his regarding everything in the house as his own for the time being, had had no definite significance to his mind. He looked now through the array of silks and fine cloths, of trinkets in ivory and silver and polished metals, and began dressing himself with a long sigh of delight.
Recollections of the leave-taking at Caermere straggled into his thoughts as he pursued the task. He had seen Lady Cressage again in the conservatory, where she wore another dress, and had her beautiful hair carefully arranged as if in his honor, and poured out tea for him and Lord Julius in wonderful little cups which his great-grandfather, a sailor, had brought from China. Of her conversation he recalled little, and still less of the talk of the other lady, the actress-person, Mrs. Edward, who had joined the party, but whose composed pretty face had been too obviously a mask for anguish not to dampen everybody’s spirits. He wondered now, as he plied his razor on the strap, what had become of her husband, and of that poor-spirited brother of his. Had they joined the pheasant-shooters, after their interview with him? The temptation to fire upon themselves instead of the birds must have sorely beset them.
But it was pleasanter to begin the retrospect some hours later, when the rough country of the Marches, and even Bristol, had been left behind. Lord Julius had explained to him then, as darkness settled upon the low, pasture-land levels they were swinging along past, that Somerset was also a county of the Torrs; two of their three titles were derived from it, indeed, and Somerset marriages had brought into the family, in the days following the downfall of the monasteries, some of the most important of its estates. If the dukes had turned their backs on Caermere two centuries ago, and made their principal seat here in this gentler and more equable land, perhaps the family history might have been different. Christian had absorbed the spirit rather than the letter of his companion’s remarks. English counties were all one to him, but intuitively he had felt that he was getting into a kindlier and more congenial atmosphere. Although it was a black night, he had stared a good deal at the window, trying to discern some tokens of this change in the dimly lighted, empty stations they glided through, or paused reluctantly in.
When they had finally quitted the train at Bridgewater, and had got under way inside the carriage waiting for them there, Christian had asked whether it was not true that the railway servants here were more courteously obliging than they had been in other parts.
Lord Julius had lightly remarked that it might be so; very likely, however, it was some indirect effect of the general psychical change the family underwent in shifting its territorial base. Then he had gone on more gravely, alluding for the first time to the episode of the butler.
“You must be prepared to find everything very different, here,” he had said. “There is such a thing as having too much past—especially when it is of the wrong sort. Caermere is as tenacious of its memories as a prison—and they are as unpleasant. It forces upon you its air of never forgetting a single one of its miseries and injuries—and you feel that it cannot remember any compensating joys. I could see how the effect of it got into your blood, and broke your nerve. Under ordinary circumstances men do not kiss their butlers, or even sob on their bosoms. But I understood perfectly how old Barlow appealed to you. As you beheld him he might have stood as model for a statue of the Family Grief, choking down its yearning to wail over the generations gone to the bad. It was all right, what you did. For that matter, I was precious near raising a howl of lamentation myself. One is always alternating between tears and curses in that criminal old coalmine of a castle. But now you are over a hundred miles away from it all—and if it was a thousand the difference couldn’t be greater. You will find nothing whatever to cry about down here. Nobody has any bad dreams. There isn’t a cupboard that ever sheltered a skeleton even overnight. In these parts, remarkable as it may seem, the Torrs are actually regarded with admiration—quite the salt of the earth—a trifle eccentric, perhaps, but splendid landlords, capable organizers, uncommonly good masters—and above all, happy people who insist that everybody about them shall be happy too. It was important to show you the other side first—at least that was what we decided upon, but you are done with that now—and we’ll give you something to take the taste out of your mouth.”
Christian recalled these assurances, now, with a delicious sense of being already enfolded and upheld by the processes of their fulfillment. The details of his reception at the broad, hospitably lighted door of Emanuel’s house crowded in upon his memory, and merged themselves with other recollections of the later evening hours—the supper, the long, calm, sweetly intimate talk before the fire, the honest, wise, frankly affectionate faces into which he had looked to say “good-night”—it almost overwhelmed him with its weight of unimagined happiness. He had hardly guessed before what other men might mean when they gave a loving sound to the word “home.” Yet now the doors of such a home as he could never have dreamed of had opened to him—to him, the homeless, lonely one! and he was nestled securely in the warm heart of its welcome. He could have groaned aloud under the burden of his rapture at the thought.
At last he went downstairs, his misgivings about the hour not quite allayed by recollection of the parting injunction to sleep his fill and get up when he liked. There were beautiful things to note and linger over on every side as he made his way—pictures and armor and wonderful inlaid work and tapestries, all subordinating themselves with distinguished good breeding to the fact that they were in a home and not a museum—but he moved along in rather conscience-stricken haste toward the part of the house which had seemed to him the previous night to be the center of domestic life. He formed a sudden resolution, as he explored the lower hallway, that when he got some money his first purchase should be of a watch.
After looking into a couple of rooms which were clearly not what he sought, Christian opened the right door, and confronted a breakfast-ta............