The Way We Live Now | Page 6

or two closed her eyes, as though about to rest.
But she soon remembered that the activity of her life did not admit of
such rest. She therefore seized her pen and began scribbling further
notes.

CHAPTER II
THE CARBURY FAMILY

Something of herself and condition Lady Carbury has told the reader in
the letters given in the former chapter, but more must be added. She has
declared she had been cruelly slandered; but she has also shown that
she was not a woman whose words about herself could be taken with
much confidence. If the reader does not understand so much from her
letters to the three editors they have been written in vain. She has been
made to say that her object in work was to provide for the need of her
children, and that with that noble purpose before her she was struggling
to make for herself a career in literature. Detestably false as had been
her letters to the editors, absolutely and abominably foul as was the
entire system by which she was endeavouring to achieve success, far
away from honour and honesty as she had been carried by her ready
subserviency to the dirty things among which she had lately fallen,
nevertheless her statements about herself were substantially true. She
had been ill-treated. She had been slandered. She was true to her
children especially devoted to one of them and was ready to work her
nails off if by doing so she could advance their interests.
She was the widow of one Sir Patrick Carbury, who many years since
had done great things as a soldier in India, and had been thereupon
created a baronet. He had married a young wife late in life and, having
found out when too late that he had made a mistake, had occasionally
spoilt his darling and occasionally ill-used her. In doing each he had
done it abundantly. Among Lady Carbury's faults had never been that

of even incipient not even of sentimental infidelity to her husband.
When as a lovely and penniless girl of eighteen she had consented to
marry a man of forty-four who had the spending of a large income, she
had made up her mind to abandon all hope of that sort of love which
poets describe and which young people generally desire to experience.
Sir Patrick at the time of his marriage was red-faced, stout, bald, very
choleric, generous in money, suspicious in temper, and intelligent. He
knew how to govern men. He could read and understand a book. There
was nothing mean about him. He had his attractive qualities. He was a
man who might be loved but he was hardly a man for love. The young
Lady Carbury had understood her position and had determined to do
her duty. She had resolved before she went to the altar that she would
never allow herself to flirt and she had never flirted. For fifteen years
things had gone tolerably well with her by which it is intended that the
reader should understand that they had so gone that she had been able
to tolerate them. They had been home in England for three or four years,
and then Sir Patrick had returned with some new and higher
appointment. For fifteen years, though he had been passionate,
imperious, and often cruel, he had never been jealous. A boy and a girl
had been born to them, to whom both father and mother had been over
indulgent but the mother, according to her lights, had endeavoured to
do her duty by them. But from the commencement of her life she had
been educated in deceit, and her married life had seemed to make the
practice of deceit necessary to her. Her mother had run away from her
father, and she had been tossed to and fro between this and that
protector, sometimes being in danger of wanting any one to care for her,
till she had been made sharp, incredulous and untrustworthy by the
difficulties of her position. But she was clever, and had picked up an
education and good manners amidst the difficulties of her childhood
and had been beautiful to look at.
To marry and have the command of money, to do her duty correctly, to
live in a big house and be respected, had been her ambition and during
the first fifteen years of her married life she was successful amidst great
difficulties. She would smile within five minutes of violent ill-usage.
Her husband would even strike her and the first effort of her mind
would be given to conceal the fact from all the world. In latter years he
drank too much, and she struggled hard first to prevent the evil, and

then to prevent and to hide the ill effects