life at poynings had its parallel in hundreds of country-houses, of which it was but a type. it was a life essentially english in its character, in its staid respectability, in its dull decorum. there are old french chateaux without number, visible in bygone days to travellers in the banquettes of diligencies, and glimpses of which may still occasionally be caught from the railways, gray, square, four pepper-box turreted old buildings, wherein life is dreary but not decorous, and sad without being staid. it is the day-dream of many an english country gentleman that his house should, in the first place, be respectable, in the second place, comfortable, in the third place, free from damp; after these successes are achieved, he takes no further thought for it; within and without the dulness may be soul-harrowing; that is no affair of his. so long as his dining-room is large enough to contain the four-and-twenty guests who, on selected moonlight nights, are four times in every year bidden to share his hospitality--so long as the important seignorial dignities derivable from the possession of lodge, and stable, and kennel are maintained--so long as the state devolving upon him as justice of the peace, with a scarcely defined hope of one day arriving at the position of deputy-lieutenant, is kept up, vaulting ambition keeps itself within bounds, and the young english country gentleman is satisfied. more than satisfied, indeed, was mr. capel carruthers in the belief that all the requirements above named were properly fulfilled. in his earlier life he had been haunted by a dim conviction that he was rather an ass than otherwise; he remembered that that had been the verdict returned at rugby, and his reflections on his very short career at cambridge gave him no reason to doubt the decision of his schoolfellows. not a pleasant source of reflection even to a man of mr. carruthers's blunted feelings; in fact, a depressing, wrong, radical state of mind, for which there was only one antidote--the thought that he was mr. carruthers of poynings, a certain settled stable position which would have floated its possessor over any amount of imbecility. carruthers of poynings! there it was in old county histories, with a genealogy of the family and a charming copper engraving of poynings at the beginning of the century, with two ladies in powder and hoops fishing in an impossible pond, and a gentleman in a cocked-hat and knee-breeches pointing out nothing in particular to nobody at all. carruthers of poynings! all the old armour in the hall, hauberks and breastplates, now propped upon a slight wooden frame, instead of enclosing the big chests and the thews and sinews which they had preserved through the contests of the rival roses or the cavaliers and roundheads--all the old ancestors hanging round the dining-room, soldiers, courtiers, kentish yeomen, staring with grave eyes at the smug white-whiskered old gentleman, their descendant--all the old tapestry worked by maud carruthers, whose husband was killed in the service of mary stuart--all the carvings and gildings about the house, all the stained glass in the windows, all the arms and quartering and crests upon the family plate--all whispered to the present representative of the family that he was carruthers of poynings, and as such had only to make a very small effort to find life no very difficult matter, even for a person scantily endowed with brains. he tried it accordingly--tried it when a young man, had pursued the course ever since, and found it successful. any latent suspicion of his own want of wisdom had vanished long since, as how, indeed, could it last? when mr. carruthers took his seat as chairman of the magisterial bench at amherst, he found himself listening with great admiration to the prefatory remarks which he addressed to the delinquent in custody before passing sentence on him, unconscious that those remarks only echoed the magistrate's clerk, who stood close behind him whispering into his ear. when, as was his regular custom, he walked round the barn, where, on rent-days, the tenants were assembled at dinner, and heard his health proposed in glowing terms, and drunk with great enthusiasm--for he was a good and liberal landlord--and when he addressed a few conventional words of thanks in reply, and stroked his white whiskers, and bowed, amidst renewed cheering, how should a thought of his own shortcomings ever dawn upon him?

his shortcomings!--the shortcomings of mr. carruthers of poynings? if, indeed, in his earlier days there had been a latent belief in the existence of anything so undesirable and so averse to the proper status of a county magnate, it had long since died out. it would have been hard and unnatural, indeed, for a man so universally respected and looked up to, not to give in to the general creed, and admit that there were undoubted grounds for the widespread respect which he enjoyed. there are two kinds of "squires," to use the old english word, who exercise equal influence on the agricultural mind, though in very different ways. the one is the type which fielding loved to draw, and which has very little altered since his time--the jocund sporting man, rib-poking, lass-chin-chucking franklin, the tankard-loving, cross-country-riding, oath-using, broad-skirted, cord-breeched, white-hatted squire. the other is the landed proprietor, magistrate, patron of the living, chairman of the board of guardians, supporter of the church and state, pattern man. mr. carruthers of poynings belonged to the latter class. you could have told that by a glance at him on his first appearance in the morning, with his chin shaved clean, his well-brushed hair and whiskers, his scrupulously white linen, his carefully tied check neckcloth, his portentous collars, his trimmed and polished nails. his very boots creaked of position and respectability, and his large white waistcoat represented unspotted virtue. looking at him ensconced behind the bright-edged bible at early morning prayers, the servants believed in the advantages derivable from a correct life, and made an exception in their master's favour to the doom of dives. by his own measure he meted the doings of others, and invariably arose considerably self-refreshed from the mensuration. hodge, ploughman, consigned to the cage after a brawl with giles, hedger, consequent upon a too liberal consumption of flat and muddy ale at the three horseshoes, known generally as the shoes, and brought up for judgment before the bench, pleading "a moog too much" in extenuation, might count on scanty commiseration from the magistrate, who never exceeded his four glasses of remarkably sound claret. levi hinde, gipsy and tramp, arraigned for stealing a loaf from a baker's shop--as he said, to save the life of his starving child--impressed not one whit the portly chairman of the amherst branch of the county bank. mr. carruthers never got drunk, and never committed theft; and that there could be any possible temptation for other people so to act, was beyond the grasp of his most respectable imagination.

a man of his stamp generally shows to the least advantage in his domestic relations. worshipped from a distance by outsiders, who, when occasion forces them into the presence, approach, metaphorically, in the siamese fashion, on hands and knees, there is usually a good deal too much grand lama-like mystery and dignity about the recipient of all this homage to render him agreeable to those with whom he is brought into daily contact. mr. carruthers was not an exception to the rule. he had a notion that love, except the extremely respectable but rather weak regard felt by mothers towards their infants, was a ridiculous boy-and-girl sentiment, which never really came to anything, nor could be considered worthy of notice until the feminine mind was imbued with a certain amount of reverence for the object of her affection. mr. carruthers had never read tennyson (in common with his class, he was extremely severe upon poets in general, looking upon them not merely as fools, but as idle mischievous fools, who might be better employed in earning a decent livelihood, say as carters or turnpike-men); but he was thoroughly impressed with the idea that "woman is the lesser man," and he felt that any open display of affection on his part towards his wife might militate against what he considered entirely essential to his domestic happiness--his "being looked up to." he was in the habit of treating his wife in ordinary matters of social intercourse very much as he treated the newly-appointed justice of the peace at the meetings of the magisterial bench, viz. as a person whose position was now recognized by the laws of society as equal to their own, but who must nevertheless feel inwardly that between him and mr. carruthers of poynings there was really a great gulf fixed, the bridging of which, however easy it may appear, was really a matter of impossibility.

if these feelings existed, as they undoubtedly did in mr. carruthers under the actual circumstances of his marriage, it may be imagined that they would have been much keener, much more intensified, had he taken to wife, instead of the quiet widow lady whom, to the astonishment of the county, he chose, any of the dashing girls who had danced, dressed, and flirted at him perseveringly, but in vain. poynings was a sufficiently nice place to render its master a catch in the county, and to induce husband-hunting misses to discount his age and pomposity, so that when the cards of mr. and mrs. capel carruthers were sent round (it was before the contemptuous days of "no cards "), and it was discovered that the new mistress of poynings was somebody quite out of "the set," immediately "that dear mr. carruthers" became "that horrid old thing," and it required years of open-handed hospitality to reestablish him in favour.

but capel carruthers had chosen wisely, and he knew it. with all his weakness and vanity, a gentleman in thought and tastes, he had taken for his wife a lady whose birth and breeding must have been acknowledged in any society; a lady whose age was not ill-suited to his own, whose character was unimpeachable, who was thoroughly qualified to superintend the bringing out of his niece, and whose sole vulnerable point for criticism--her poverty--was rendered invulnerable as soon as she became mrs. carruthers of poynings. and, under all the cold placid exterior which never thawed, under all the set grandisonian forms of speech which were never relaxed, under the judicial manner and the board-of-guardians address, flowed a warm current of love for his wife which he himself scarcely suspected. with such poor brains as he had, he had occasionally fallen to the task of self-examination, asking himself how it was that he, mr. carruthers of poynings (even in his thoughts he liked the ring of that phrase), could have so far permitted himself to be swayed by any one, and then he told himself that he was reverenced and looked up to, that his state, position, and dignities were duly acknowledged, and in a satisfied frame of mind he closed the self-colloquy. loved his wife--eh! neither he nor any one else knew how much. george dallas need not have been anxious about the treatment of his mother by his stepfather. when the young man cursed his exile from his mother's presence and his stepfather's home, he little knew the actual motives which prompted mr. carruthers to decide upon and to keep rigidly in force that decree of banishment. not only his stepson's wildness and extravagance; though a purist, mr. carruthers was sufficient man of the world to know that in most cases there are errors of youth which correct themselves in the flight of time. not a lurking fear that his niece, thrown in this prodigal's way, should be dazzled by the glare of his specious gifts, and singe her youth and innocence in their baleful light. not a dread of having to notice and recognize the young man as his connection in the chastened arena of county society.

as nature had not endowed mr. carruthers with a capacity for winning affection, though it was not to be denied that there were qualities in his character which commanded respect, it was fortunate for him that he cared less about the former than the latter. nevertheless, he would probably have been rendered very uncomfortable, not to say unhappy, had he supposed that his wife. "mrs. carruthers of poynings," as there is reason to suppose he designated her, even in his inmost thoughts, positively did not love him. such a supposition, however, never had occurred to him, which was fortunate; for mr. carruthers was apt to hold by his suppositions as strongly as other people held by their convictions, as, indeed, being his, why should he not? and it would have been very difficult to dislodge such a notion. the notion itself would have been, in the first place, untrue, and in the second, dangerous. mrs. carruthers of poynings loved her rather grim and decidedly uninteresting but unimpeachably respectable husband, if not passionately, which was hardly to be expected, very sincerely, and estimated him after the fashion of wives--that is to say, considerably above his deserts. all women like their husbands, except those who notoriously do not, and mrs. carruthers was no exception to the rule. she had a much greater sense of justice in her than most women, and she used it practically--applied it to her own case. she knew the fault had been her son's in the great sorrow which had destroyed all the pride and pleasure which her prosperous marriage would otherwise have brought her, and she did not charge it upon her husband, or, except in so far as her unconquerable anxiety and depression caused him annoyance, did she inflict the penalty of it on him. she knew him to be a hard man, and she did not look for softness from, him; but she accepted such advantages as hardness of character possesses, and bore its disadvantages well. "if i were he," she had said to herself, even in the first hours of her anguish of conviction of her boy's unworthiness, and when his stepfather's edict of exclusion was but newly published, "and i had so little knowledge of human nature as he has, if life had never taught me toleration, if clare were my niece and george his son, would i not have acted as he has done? he is consistent to the justness and the sternness of his character." thinking thus, mrs. carruthers acted on the maxim that to judge others aright we should put ourselves in their position. so she accepted the great trial of her life, and suffered it as quietly and patiently as she could. it would be difficult to define with precision the nature of mr. carruthers's sentiments towards george dallas. the young man had met his stepfather but rarely, and had on each occasion increased the disfavour with which from the first the elder man had regarded him. he had never tried to propitiate, had, indeed, regarded him with contemptuous indifference, secure in what he fancied to be the security of his mother's position; and there had been covert antagonism between them from the first. how much astonished mr. carruthers would have been had any revelation been made to him of the secrets of his own heart, whereby he would have discovered that a strong sentiment of jealousy lay at the root of his antipathy to george dallas--jealousy which intensified his hardness and sternness, and forbade him to listen to the promptings of common sense, which told him that the line he was taking towards the son was so cruel to the mother as to neutralize all the advantages presented by the fine marriage she had made, and for which, by the way, he expected her to be constantly demonstratively grateful. in this expectation he was as constantly disappointed. mrs. carruthers was an eminently true woman, and as she felt no peculiar exuberance of gratitude, she showed none. she was a lady too--much more perfectly a lady than mr. carruthers was unimpeachably a gentleman--and, as such, she filled her position as a matter of course, as she would have filled one much higher, or one much lower, and thought nothing about it. she was of so much finer a texture, so much higher a nature, than her husband, that she did not suspect him of any double motive in his treatment of george dallas. she never dreamed that mr. carruthers of poynings was secretly uneasily jealous of the man who had died in his prime many years before, and the son, who had been first the young widow's sole consolation and then her bitterest trial. the living and the dead combined to displease mr. carruthers, and he would have been unequivocally glad, only in decorous secrecy, could he have obtained any evidence to prove that george dallas was remarkably like his father in all the defective points of his personal appearance and in all the faults of his character. but such evidence was not within his reach, and mr. carruthers was reduced to hoping in his secret heart that his suppositions were correct on this point, and discovering a confirmation of them in his wife's scrupulous silence with regard to her first husband. she had never, in their most confidential moments, remarked on any likeness between george and his father; had never, indeed, mentioned captain dallas at all, which appeared extremely significant to mr. carruthers, but seeing that captain dallas had been dead twelve years when his widow became mrs. carruthers of poynings, would not have occasioned much surprise to the world in general. mr. carruthers regarded himself as his wife's benefactor, but she did not partake of his views in that respect. the notion which he entertained of his position with regard to his niece clare was better founded and more reasonable.

the beautiful young heiress, who was an unconscious and involuntary element in the standing grievance of mrs. carruthers's life, was the only child of mr. carruthers's brother, and the sole inheritor of his property. her father had died while she was a little child, and her mother's method of educating her has been already described. she was attached to her uncle, but was afraid of him; and she was happier and more at ease at the sycamores than at poynings. of course mr. carruthers did not suspect his niece of any such depravity of taste. it never occurred to him that any one could fancy himself or herself happier anywhere on the face of the created globe than at poynings; and so clare escaped the condemnation which she would otherwise have received in no stinted measure.

accustomed to attach a wonderful amount of importance to duties and responsibilities which were his, if their due fulfilment could add to his dignity and reputation, mr. carruthers was a model of the uncle and guardian. he really liked clare very much indeed, and he was fully persuaded that he loved her--a distinction he would have learned to draw only if clare had been deprived of her possessions, and rendered dependent on him. he spoke of her as "my brother's heiress," and so thought of her, not as "my brother's orphan child;" but in all external and material respects mr. carruthers of poynings was an admirable guardian, and a highly respectable specimen of the uncle tribe. he would have been deeply shocked had he discovered that any young lady in the county was better dressed, better mounted, more obsequiously waited upon, more accomplished, or regarded by society as in any way more favoured by fortune than miss carruthers--not of poynings, indeed, but the next thing to it, and likely at some future day to enjoy that distinction. mr. carruthers did not regret that he was childless; he had never cared for children, and, though not a keenly observant person, he had noticed occasionally that the importance of a rich man's heir was apt, in this irrepressibly anticipative world, to outweigh the importance of the rich man himself. no carruthers on record had ever had a large family, and, for his own part, he liked the idea of a female heir to the joint property of himself and his brother, who should carry her own name in addition to her husband's. he was determined on that. unless clare married a nobleman, her husband should take the name of carruthers. carruthers of poynings must not die out of the land. the strange jealousy which was one of the underlying constituents of mr. carruthers's character came into play with regard to his niece and his wife. mrs. carruthers loved the girl, and would gladly have acted the part of a mother to her; and as clare's own mother had been a remarkably mild specimen of maternal duty and affection, she could have replaced that lady considerably to clare's advantage. but she had soon perceived that this was not to be; her husband's fidgety sense of his own importance, his ever-present fear lest it should be trenched upon or in any way slighted, interfered with her good intentions. she knew the uselessness of opposing the foible, though she did not understand its source, and she relinquished the projects she had formed.

mr. carruthers was incapable of believing that his wife never once dreamed of resenting to clare the exclusion of george, for which the girl's residence at poynings had been assigned as a reason, or that she would have despised herself if such an idea had presented itself to her mind, as she probably must have despised him had she known how natural and inevitable he supposed it to be on her part.

thus it came to pass that the three persons who lived together at poynings had but little real intimacy or confidence between them. clare was very happy; she had her own tastes and pursuits, and ample means of gratifying them. her mother's brother and his wife, sir thomas and lady boldero, with her cousin, their ugly but clever and charming daughter, were much attached to her, and she to them, and, when she got away from poynings to the sycamores, clare acknowledged to herself that she enjoyed the change very much, but was very happy at poynings nevertheless. the sycamores had another interest for her now, another association, and the girl's life had entered upon a new phase. innocent, inexperienced, and romantic as she was, inclined to hero-worship, and by no means likely to form sound opinions as to her heroes, clare carruthers was endowed with an unusual allowance of common sense and perception. she understood mr. carruthers of poynings thoroughly; so much more thoroughly than his wife, that she had found out the jealousy which permeated his character, and recognized it in action with unfailing accuracy. she had considerably more tact than girls at her age ordinarily possess, and she continued to fill a somewhat difficult position with satisfaction not only to others, but to herself. she contrived to avoid wounding her uncle's susceptible self-love, and to keep within the limits which mrs. carruthers's discretion had set to their intimacy, without throwing external coldness or restraint into their relations.

clare found herself very often doing or not doing, saying or refraining from saying, some particular thing, in order to avoid "getting mrs. carruthers into a scrape," and of course she was aware that the constantly-recurring necessity for such carefulness argued, at the least, a difficult temper to deal with in the head of the household; but she did not let the matter trouble her much. she would think, when she thought about it at all, with the irrepressible self-complacency of youth, how careful she would be not to marry an ill-tempered man, or, at all events, she would make up her mind to marry a man so devotedly attached to her that his temper would not be of the slightest consequence, as, of course, she should never suffer from it. on the whole, it would be difficult to find a more dangerous condition of circumstances than that in which clare carruthers was placed when her romantic meeting with paul ward took place--a meeting in which the fates seemed to have combined every element of present attraction and future danger. practically, clare was quite alone; she placed implicit confidence in no one, she had no guide for her feelings or actions, and she had just drifted into a position in which she needed careful direction. she refrained from mentioning her meeting with the stranger, more on mrs. carruthers's account than on her own, from the usual motive--apprehension lest, by some unreasonable turn of mr. carruthers's temper, she might be brought "into a scrape." her curiosity had been strongly excited by the discovery that mrs. carruthers had some sort of acquaintance with paul ward, or, at least, with his name; but she adhered to her resolution, and kept silence for the present.

mrs. carruthers's son had always been an object of tacit interest to clare. she had not been fully informed of the circumstances of her uncle's marriage, and she understood vaguely that george dallas was an individual held in disfavour by the august master of poynings; so her natural delicacy of feeling conquered her curiosity, and she abstained from mentioning george to his mother or to mr. carruthers, and also from giving encouragement to the gossip on the subject which occasionally arose in her presence.

in mrs. carruthers's dressing-room a portrait hung, which clare had been told by mrs. brookes was that of her mistress's son, when a fine, brave, promising boy of ten years old. clare had felt an interest in the picture, not only for mrs. carruthers's sake, but because she liked the face which it portrayed--the clear bright brown eyes, the long curling hair, the brilliant dark complexion, the bold, frank, gleeful expression. once or twice she had said a few words in praise of the picture, and once she had ventured to ask mrs. carruthers if her son still resembled it. the mother had answered her, with a sigh, that he was greatly changed, and no one would now recognize the picture as a likeness of him.

the dignified and decorous household at poynings pursued its luxurious way with less apparent disunion among its principal members than is generally to be seen under the most favourable circumstances, but with little real community of feeling or of interest. mrs. carruthers was a popular person in society, and clare was liked as much as she was admired. as for mr. carruthers, he was mr. carruthers of poynings, and that fact sufficed for the neighbourhood almost as completely as it satisfied himself.

the unexpected return of her uncle from york had caused clare no particular emotion. she was standing at the french window of the breakfast-room, feeding a colony of birds, her outdoor pensioners, when the carriage made its appearance. she had just observed the fact, and was quietly pursuing her occupation, when mrs. carruthers, who had left the breakfast-room half an hour before, returned, looking so pale, and with so unmistakeable an expression of terror in her face, that clare looked at her in astonishment.

"your uncle has come back," she said. "i am not well, i cannot meet him yet. go to the door, clare, and tell him i am not well, and am still in my room. pray go, my dear; don't delay a moment."

"certainly i will go," answered clare, leaving the window and crossing the room as she spoke; "but--"

"i'll tell you what ails me another time, but go now--go," said mrs. carruthers; and, without another word, the girl obeyed her. she had seen the carriage at a turn in the avenue; now the wheels were grinding the gravel of the sweep opposite the hall-door. in a minute clare was receiving her uncle on the steps, and mrs. carruthers, having thrown the bonnet and shawl she had just taken out for her proposed expedition to the shrubbery back into the wardrobe, removed her gown, and replaced it by a dressing-gown, was awaiting her husband's approach with a beating heart and an aching head. had he met her son? had he passed him unseen upon the road? would mrs. brookes succeed, unseen and unsuspected, in executing the commission with which she had hurriedly charged her?

"she is in a scrape of some sort," clare thought, as she accompanied her uncle to his wife's dressing-room. "what can have happened since he left home? can it have anything to do with paul ward?"