Маргарет Олифант
Madam
“It will be that, of course, though I did not hear wheels; and what a dismal night for his drive, poor old gentleman. That wind always makes me wretched. It moans and groans like a human creature. But it is very odd, Rosalind, that we did not hear any wheels.”
“The wind drowns other sounds,” Rosalind said.
“That must be so, I suppose. Still, I hope he doesn’t think of walking, Rosalind; an old man of that age.”
And then once more all fell into silence in the great luxurious house. Outside the wind blew in the faces of the wayfarers. The rain drenched them in sudden gusts, the paths were slippery and wet, the trees discharged sharp volleys of collected rain as the blasts blew. To struggle across the park was no easy matter in the face of the blinding sleet and capricious wind; and you could not hear your voice under the trees for the din that was going on overhead.
CHAPTER XXI
Rosalind spent a very restless night. She could not sleep, and the rain coming down in torrents irritated her with its ceaseless pattering. She thought, she could not tell why, of the poor people who were out in it—travellers, wayfarers, poor vagrants, such as she had seen about the country roads. What would the miserable creatures do in such a dismal night? As she lay awake in the darkness she pictured them to herself, drenched and cold, dragging along the muddy ways. No one in whom she was interested was likely to be reduced to such misery, but she thought of them, she could not tell why. She had knocked at Mrs. Trevanion’s door as she came up-stairs, longing to go in to say another word, to give her a kiss in her weariness. Rosalind had an ache and terrible question in her heart which she had never been able to get rid of, notwithstanding the closeness of the intercourse on the funeral day and the exuberant profession of faith to which she had given vent: “You can do no wrong.” Her heart had cried out this protestation of faith, but in her mind there had been a terrible drawing back, like that of the wave which has dashed brilliantly upon a stony beach only to groan and turn back again, carrying everything with it. Through all this sleepless night she lay balancing between these two sensations—the enthusiasm and the doubt. Her mother! It seemed a sort of blasphemy to judge or question that highest of all human authorities—that type and impersonation of all that was best. And yet it would force itself upon her, in spite of all her holding back. Where was she going that night? Supposing the former events nothing, what, oh, what was the new-made widow going to do on the eve of her husband’s funeral out in the park, all disguised and concealed in the dusk? The more Rosalind denied her doubts expression the more bitterly did that picture force itself upon her—the veiled, muffled figure, the watching accomplice, and the door so stealthily opened. Without practice and knowledge and experience, who could have done all that? If Rosalind herself wanted to steal out quietly, a hundred hinderances started up in her way. If she tried anything of the kind she knew very well that every individual whom she wished to avoid would meet her and find her out. It is so with the innocent, but with those who are used to concealment, not so. These were the things that said themselves in her mind without any consent of hers as she labored through the night. And when the first faint sounds of waking began to be audible, a distant door opening, an indication that some one was stirring, Rosalind got up too, unable to bear it any longer. She sprang out of bed and wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, resolved to go to her mother’s room and disperse all those ghosts of night. How often had she run there in childish troubles and shaken them off! That last court of appeal had never been closed to her. A kiss, a touch of the soft hand upon her head, a comforting word, had charmed away every spectre again and again. Perhaps Rosalind thought she would have the courage to speak all out, perhaps to have her doubts set at rest forever; but even if she had not courage for that, the mere sight of Mrs. Trevanion was enough to dispel all prejudices, to make an end of all doubts. It was quite dark in the passages as she flitted across the large opening of the stairs. Down-stairs in the great hall there was a spark of light, where a housemaid, kneeling within the great chimney, was lighting the fire. There was a certain relief even in this, in the feeling of a new day and life begun again. Rosalind glided like a ghost, in her warm dressing-gown, to Mrs. Trevanion’s door. She knocked softly, but there was no reply. Little wonder, at this hour of the morning; no doubt the mother was asleep. Rosalind opened the door.
There is a kind of horror of which it is difficult to give any description in the sensations of one who goes into a room expecting to find a sleeper in the safety and calm of natural repose and finds it empty, cold, and vacant. The shock is extraordinary. The certainty that the inhabitant must be there is so profound, and in a moment is replaced by an uncertainty which nothing can equal—a wild dread that fears it knows not what, but always the worst that can be feared. Rosalind went in with the soft yet confident step of a child, who knows that the mother will wake at a touch, almost at a look, and turn with a smile and a kiss to listen, whatever the story that is brought to her may be. Fuller confidence never was. She did not even look before going straight to the bedside. She had, indeed, knelt down there before she found out. Then she sprang to her feet again with the cry of one who had touched death unawares. It was like death to her, the touch of the cold, smooth linen, all folded as it had been in preparation for the inmate—who was to sleep there no more. She looked round the room as if asking an answer from every corner. “Mother, where are you? Mother! Where are you, mother?” she cried, with a wild voice of astonishment and dismay.
There was no light in the room; a faint paleness to show the window, a silence that was terrible, an atmosphere as of death itself. Rosalind flew, half frantic, into the dressing-room adjoining, which for some time past had been occupied by Jane. There a night-light which had been left burning flickered feebly, on the point of extinction. The faint light showed the same vacancy—the bed spread in cold order, everything empty, still. Rosalind felt her senses giving way. Her impulse was to rush out through the house, calling, asking, Where were they? Death seemed to be in the place—death more mysterious and more terrible than that with which she had been made familiar. After a pause she left the room and hurried breathless to that occupied by her uncle. How different there was the atmosphere, charged with human breath, warm with occupation. She burst in, too terrified for thought.
“Uncle John!” she cried, “Uncle John!” taking him by the shoulder.
It was not easy to wake him out of his deep sleep. At last he sat up in his bed, half awake, and looked at her with consternation.
“Rosalind! what is the matter?” he cried.
“Mamma is not in her room—where is she, where is she?” the girl demanded, standing over him like a ghost in the dark.
“Your mother is not— I—I suppose she’s tired, like all the rest of us,” he said, with a sleepy desire to escape this premature awakening. “Why, it’s dark still, Rosalind. Go back to bed, my dear. Your mother—”
“Listen, Uncle John. Mamma is not in her room. No one has slept there to-night; it is all empty; my mother is gone, is gone! Where has she gone?” the girl cried, wildly. “She has not been there all night.”
“Good God!” John Trevanion cried. He was entirely roused now. “Rosalind, you must be making some mistake.”
“There is no mistake. I thought perhaps you might know something. No one has slept there to-night. Oh, Uncle John, Uncle John, where is my mother? Let us go and find her before everybody knows.”
“Rosalind, leave me, and I will get up. I can tell you nothing—yes, I can tell you something; but I never thought it would be like this. It is your father who has sent her away.”
“Papa!” the girl cried; “oh, Uncle John, stop before you have taken everything away from me; neither father nor mother!—you take everything from me!” she said, with a cry of despair.
“Go away,” he said, “and get dressed, Rosalind, and then we can see whether there is anything to be done.”
An hour later they stood together by the half-kindled fire in the hall. John Trevanion had gone through the empty rooms with his niece, who was distracted, not knowing what she did. By this time a pale and gray daylight, which looked like cold and misery made visible, had diffused itself through the great house. That chill visibleness, showing all the arrangements of the room prepared for rest and slumber, where nobody had slept, had something terrible in it that struck them both with awe. There was no letter, no sign to be found of leave-taking. When they opened the wardrobe and drawers, a few dresses and necessaries were found to be gone, and it appeared that Jane had sent two small boxes to the village which she had represented to be old clothes, “colored things,” for which her mistress would now have no need. It was to Rosalind like a blow in the dark, a buffet from some ghostly hand, additional to her other pain, when she found it was these “colored things” and not the prepared, newly made mourning which her stepmother had taken with her. This seemed a cutting off from them, an entire abandonment, which made her misery deeper; but naturally John Trevanion did not think of that. He told her the story of the will while they stood together in the hall. But he could think of nothing to do, nor could he give any hope that this terrible event was a thing to be undone or concealed. “It must have happened,” he said, “sooner or later; and though it is a shock—a great shock—”
“Oh, Uncle John, it is—there was never anything so terrible. How can you use ordinary words? A shock! If the wind had blown down a tree it would be a shock. Don’t you see, it is the house that has been blown down? we have nothing—nothing to shelter us, we children. My mother and my father! We are orphans, and far, far worse than orphans. We having nothing left but shame—nothing but shame!”
“Rosalind, it is worse for the others than for you. You, at least, are clear of it; she is not your mother.”
“She is all the mother I have ever known,” Rosalind cried for the hundredth time. “And,” she added, with quivering lips, “I am the daughter of the man who on his death-bed has brought shame upon his own, and disgraced the wife that was like an angel to him. If the other could be got over, that can never be got over. He did it, and he cannot undo it. And she is wicked too. She should not have yielded like that; she should have resisted—she should have refused; she should not have gone away.”
“Had she done so it would have been our duty to insist upon it,” said John Trevanion, sadly. “We had no alternative. You will find when you think it over that this sudden going is for the best.”
“Oh, that is so easy to say when it is not your heart that is wrung, but some one else’s; and how can it ever be,” cried Rosalind, with a dismal logic which many have employed before her, “that what is all wrong from beginning to end can be for the best?”
This was the beginning of a day more miserable than words can describe. They made no attempt to conceal the calamity; it was impossible to conceal it. The first astounded and terror-stricken housemaid who entered the room spread it over the house like wildfire. Madam had gone away. Madam had not slept in her bed all night. When Rosalind, who could not rest, made one of her many aimless journeys up-stairs, she heard a wail from the nurseries, and Russell, rushing out, suddenly confronted her. The woman was pale with excitement; and there was a mixture of compunction and triumph and horror in her eyes.
“What does this mean, Miss Rosalind? Tell me, for God’s sake!” she cried.
It did Rosalind a little good in her misery to find herself in front of an actor in this catastrophe; one who was guilty and could be made to suffer. “It means,” she cried, with sudden rage, “that you must leave my mother’s children at once—this very moment! My uncle will give you your wages, whatever you want, but you shall not stay here, not an hour.”
“My wages!” the woman cried, with a sort of scream; “do I care for wages? Leave my babies, as I have brought up? Oh, never, never! You may say what you please, you that were always unnatural, that held for her instead of your own flesh and blood. You are cruel, cruel; but I won’t stand it— I won’t. There’s more to be consulted, Miss Rosalind, than you.”
“I would be more cruel if I could— I would strike you,” cried the impassioned girl, clinching her small hands, “if it were not a shame for a lady to do it—you, who have taken away mother from me and made me hate and despise my own father, oh, God forgive me! And it is your doing, you miserable woman. Let me never see you again. To see you is like death to me. Go away—go away!”
“And yet I was better than a mother to you once,” said Russell, who had cried out and put her hand to her heart as if she had received a blow. Her heart was tender to her nursling, though pitiless otherwise. “I saved your life,” she cried, beginning to weep; “I took you when your true mother died. You would have loved me but for that woman—that—”
Rosalind stamped her foot passionately upon the floor; she was transported by misery and wrath. “Do not dare to speak to me! Go away—go out of the house. Uncle John,” she cried, hurrying to the balustrade and looking down into the hall where he stood, too wretched to observe what was going on, “will you come and turn this woman away?”
He came slowly up-stairs at this call, with his hands in his pockets, every line of his figure expressing despondency and dismay. It was only when he came in sight of Russell, flushed, crying, and injured, yet defiant too, that he understood what Rosalind meant by the appeal. “Yes, it will be well that you should go,” he said. “You have made mischief that never can be mended. No one in this house will ever forgive you. The best thing you can do is to go—”
“The mischief was not my making,” cried Russell. “It’s not them that tells but them that goes wrong that are to blame. And the children—there’s the children to think of—who will take care of them like me? I’d die sooner than leave the children. They’re the same as my flesh and blood. They have been in my hands since ever they were born,” the woman cried with passion. “Oh, Mr. Trevanion, you that have always been known for a kind gentleman, let me stay with the children! Their mother, she can desert them, but I can’t; it will break my heart.”
“You had better go,” said John Trevanion, with lowering brows. At this moment Reginald appeared on the scene from another direction, pulling on his jacket in great hurry and excitement. “What does it all mean?” the boy cried, full of agitation. “Oh, if it’s only Russell! They told me some story about— Why are you bullying Russell, Uncle John?”
“Oh, Mr. Reginald, you’ll speak for me. You are my own boy, and you are the real master. Don’t let them break my heart,” cried Russell, holding out her imploring hands.
“Oh, if it’s only Russell,” the boy cried, relieved; “but they said—they told me—”
Another door opened as he spoke, and Aunt Sophy, dishevelled, the gray locks falling about her shoulders, a dressing-gown huddled about her ample figure, appeared suddenly. “For God’s sake, speak low! What does it all mean? Don’t expose everything to the servants, whatever it is,” she cried.
CHAPTER XXII
Presently they all assembled in the hall—a miserable party. The door of the breakfast-room stood open, but no one went near it. They stood in a knot, all huddled together, speaking almost in whispers. Considering that everybody in the house now knew that Madam had never been in bed at all, that she must have left Highcourt secretly in the middle of the night, no precaution could have been more foolish. But Mrs. Lennox had not realized this; and her anxiety to silence scandal was extreme. She stood quite close to her brother, questioning him. “But what do you mean? How could Reginald do it? What did he imagine? And, oh! couldn’t you put a stop to it, for the sake of the family, John?”
Young Reginald stood on the other side, confused between anger and ignorance, incapacity to understand and a desire to blame some one. “What does she mean by it?” he said. “What did father mean by it? Was it just to make us all as wretched as possible—as if things weren’t bad enough before?” It was impossible to convey to either of them any real understanding of the case. “But how could he part the children from their mother?” said Aunt Sophy. “She is their mother, their mother; not their stepmother. You forget, John; she’s Rosalind’s stepmother. Rosalind might have been made my ward; that would have been natural; but the others are her own. How could he separate her from her own? She ought not to have left them! Oh, how could she leave them?” the bewildered woman cried.
“If she had not done it the children would have been destitute, Sophy. It was my business to make her do it, unless she had been willing to ruin the children.”
“Not me,” cried Reginald, loudly. “He could not have taken anything from me. She might have stuck to me, and I should have taken care of her. What had she to be frightened about? I suppose,” he added after a pause, “there would have been plenty—to keep all the children too—”
“Highcourt is not such a very large estate, Rex. Lowdean and the rest are unentailed. You would have been much impoverished too.”
“Oh!” Reginald cried, with an angry frown; but then he turned to another side of the question, and continued vehemently, “Why on earth, when she knew papa was so cranky and had it all in his power, why did she aggravate him? I think they must all have been mad together, and just tried how to spite us most!” cried the boy, with a rush of passionate tears to his eyes. The house was miserable altogether. He wanted his breakfast, and he had no heart to eat it. He could not bear the solemn spying of the servants. Dorrington, in particular, would come to the door of the breakfast-room and look in with an expression of mysterious sympathy for which Reginald would have liked to kill him. “I wish I had never come away from school at all. I wish I were not going back. I wish I were anywhere out of this,” he cried. But he did not suggest again that his mother should have “stuck to” him. He wanted to know why somebody did not interfere; why this thing and the other was permitted to be done. “Some one could have stopped it if they had tried,” Reginald said; and that was Aunt Sophy’s opinion too.
The conclusion of all was that Mrs. Lennox left Highcourt with the children and Rosalind as soon as their preparations could be made, by way of covering as well as possible the extraordinary revolution in the house. It was the only expedient any of these distracted people could think of to throw a little illusion over Mrs. Trevanion’s abrupt departure. Of course they were all aware everything must be known. What is there that is not known? And to think that a large houseful of servants would keep silent on such a piece of family history was past all expectation. No doubt it was already known through the village and spreading over the neighborhood. “Madam” had been caught meeting some man in the park when her husband was ill, poor gentleman! And now, the very day of the funeral, she was off with the fellow, and left all her children, and everything turned upside down. The older people all knew exactly what would be said, and they knew that public opinion would think the worst, that no explanations would be allowed, that the vulgarest, grossest interpretation would be so much easier than anything else, so ready, so indisputable—she had gone away with her lover. Mrs. Lennox herself could not help thinking so in the depths of her mind, though on the surface she entertained other vague and less assured ideas. What else could explain it? Everybody knew the force of passion, the way in which women will forsake everything, even their children, even their homes—that was comprehensible, though so dreadful. But nothing else was comprehensible. Aunt Sophy, in the depth of her heart, though she was herself an innocent woman, was not sure that John was not inventing, to shield his sister-in-law, that incredible statement about the will. She felt that she herself would say anything for the same purpose—she would not mind what it was—anything rather than that Grace, a woman they had all thought so much of, had “gone wrong” in such a dreadful way. Nevertheless it was far more comprehensible that she had “gone wrong” than any other explanation could be. Though she had been a woman upon whom no breath of scandal had ever come, a woman who overawed evil speakers, and was above all possibility of reproach, yet it was always possible that she might have “gone wrong.” Against such hazards there could be no defence. But Mrs. Lennox was very willing to do anything to cover up the family trouble. She even went the length of speaking somewhat loudly to her own maid, in the hearing of some of the servants of the house, about Mrs. Trevanion’s “early start.” “We shall catch her up on the way,” Mrs. Lennox said. “I don’t wonder, do you, Morris, that she went by that early train? Poor dear! I remember when I lost my first dear husband I couldn’t bear the sight of the house and the churchyard where he was lying. But we shall catch her up,” the kind-hearted hypocrite said, drying her eyes. As if the housemaids were to be taken in so easily! as if they did not know far more than Mrs. Lennox did, who thus lent herself to a falsehood! When the children came down, dressed in their black frocks, with eyes wide open and full of eager curiosity, Mrs. Lennox was daunted by the cynical air with which Sophy, her namesake and godchild, regarded her. “You needn’t say anything to me about catching up mamma, for I know better,” the child said, vindictively. “She likes somebody else better than us, and she has just gone away.”
“Rosalind,” Mrs. Lennox cried, in dismay, “I hope that woman is not coming with us, that horrible woman that puts such things into the children’s heads. I hope you have sent Russell away.”
But when the little ones were all packed in the carriage with their aunt, who could not endure to see any one cry, there was a burst of simultaneous weeping. “I neber love nobody but Nana. I do to nobody but Nana,” little Johnny shouted. His little sister said nothing, but her small mouth quivered, and the piteous aspect of her face, struggling against a passion of restrained grief, was the most painful of all. Sophy, however, continued defiant. “You may send her away, but me and Reginald will have her back again,” she said. Aunt Sophy could scarcely have been more frightened had she taken a collection of bombshells with her into the carriage. The absence of mamma was little to the children, who had been so much separated from her by their father’s long illness; but Russell, the “Nana” of their baby affections, had a closer hold.
With these rebellious companions, and with all the misery of the family tragedy overshadowing her, Rosalind made the journey more sadly than any of the party. At times it seemed impossible for her to believe that all the miseries that had happened were real. Was it not rather a dream from which she might awaken, and find everything as of old? To think that she should be leaving her home, feeling almost a fugitive, hastily, furtively, in order to cover the flight of one who had been her type of excellence all her life: to think that father and mother were both gone from her—gone out of her existence, painfully, miserably; not to be dwelt upon with tender grief, such as others had the privilege of enduring, but with bitter anguish and shame. The wails of the children as they grew tired with the journey, the necessity of taking the responsibility of them upon herself, hushing the cries of the little ones for “Nana,” silencing Sophy, who was disposed to be impertinent, keeping the weight of the party from the too susceptible shoulders of the aunt, made a complication and interruption of her thoughts which Rosalind was too inexperienced to feel as an alleviation, and which made a fantastic mixture of tragedy and burlesque in her mind. She had to think of the small matters of the journey, and to satisfy Aunt Sophy’s fears as to the impossibility of getting the other train at the junction, and the risk of losing the luggage, and to persuade her that Johnny’s restlessness, his refusal to be comforted by the anxious nursery-maid, and wailing appeals for Russell, would wear off by and by as baby-heartbreaks do. “But I have known a child fret itself to death,” Mrs. Lennox cried. “I have heard of instances in which they would not be comforted, Rosalind; and what should we do if the child was to pine, and perhaps to die?” Rosalind, so young, so little experienced, was overwhelmed by this suggestion. She took Johnny upon her own lap, and attempted to soothe him, with a sense that she might turn out a kind of murderer if the child did not mend. It was consolatory to feel that, warmly wrapped, and supported against her young bosom, Johnny got sleepy, and moaned himself into oblivion of his troubles. But this was not so pleasant when they came to the junction, and Rosalind had to stumble out of the carriage somehow, and hurry to the waiting train with poor little Johnny’s long legs thrust out from her draperies. It was at this moment, as she got out, that she saw a face in the crowd which gave her a singular thrill in the midst of her trouble. The wintry afternoon was falling into darkness, the vast, noisy place was swarming with life and tumult. She had to walk a little slower than the rest on account of her burden, which she did not venture to give into other arms, in case the child should wake. It was the face of the young man whom she had met in the park—the stranger, so unlike anybody else, about whom she had been so uncomfortably uncertain whether he was or not— But what did that matter? If he had been a prince of the blood or the lowest adventurer, what was it to Rosalind? Her mind was full of other things, and no man in the world had a right to waylay her, to follow her, to trace her movements. It made her hot and red with personal feeling in the midst of all the trouble that surrounded her. He had no right—no right; and yet the noblest lover who ever haunted his lady’s window to see her shadow on the blind had no right; and perhaps, if put into vulgar words, Romeo had no right to scale that wall, and Juliet on her balcony was a forward young woman. There are things which are not to be defended by any rule, which youth excuses, nay, justifies; and to see a pair of sympathetic eyes directed towards her through the crowd—eyes that found her out amid all that multitude—touched Rosalind’s heart. Somehow they made her trouble, and even the weight of her little brother, who was heavy, more easy to bear. She was weak and worn out, and this it was, perhaps, which made her so easily moved. But the startled sensation with which she heard a voice at her side, somewhat too low and too close, saying, “Will you let me carry the child for you, Miss Trevanion?” whirled the softer sensation away into eddies of suspicion and dark thrills of alarm and doubt. “Oh, no, no!” she cried, instinctively hurrying on.
“I ask nothing but to relieve you,” he said.
“Oh, thanks! I am much obliged to you, but it is impossible. It would wake him,” she said hurriedly, not looking up.
“You think me presumptuous, Miss Trevanion, and so I am; but it is terrible to see you so burdened and not be able to help.”
This made her burden so much the more that Rosalind quickened her steps, and stumbled and almost fell. “Oh, please,” she said, “go away. You may mean to be kind. Oh, please go away.”
The nursery-maid, who came back at Mrs. Lennox’s orders to help Rosalind, saw nothing particular to remark, except that the young lady was flushed and disturbed. But to hurry along a crowded platform with a child in your arms was enough to account for that. The maid could very well appreciate such a drawback to movement. She succeeded, with the skill of her profession, in taking the child into her own arms, and repeated Mrs. Lennox’s entreaties to make haste. But Rosalind required no solicitation in this respect. She made a dart forward, and was in the carriage in a moment, where she threw herself into a seat and hid her face in her hands.
“I knew it would be too much for you,” said Aunt Sophy, soothingly. “Oh, Thirza is used to it. I pity nurses with all my heart; but they are used to it. But you, my poor darling, in such a crowd! Did you think we should miss the train? I know what that is—to hurry along, and yet be sure you will miss it. Here, Thirza, here; we are all right; and after all there is plenty of time.” After a pause Aunt Sophy said, “I wonder who that is looking so intently into this carriage. Such a remarkable face! But I hope he does not mean to get in here; we are quite full here. Rosalind, you look like nothing at all in that corner, in your black dress. He will think the seat is vacant and come in if you don’t make a little more appearance. Rosalind— Good gracious, I believe she has fainted!”
“No, Aunt Sophy.” Rosalind raised her head and uncovered her pale face. She knew that she should see that intruder looking at her. He seemed to be examining the carriages, looking for a place, and as she took her hands from her face their eyes met. There was that unconscious communication between them which betrays those who recognize each other, whether they make any sign or not. Aunt Sophy gave a wondering cry.
