Маргарет Олифант
Madam
“God bless them,” said Jane. She put the books down out of her hands, which she had been pretending to arrange, and turned her face towards her mistress, who said “Amen!” with a sudden gleam and lighting-up of her pale face like the sky after a storm.
“I have done very wrong,” said Mrs. Trevanion; “there is never self-indulgence in the world but some one suffers for it. Jane, my little Amy is ill. She dreams about her poor mother. She has taken to walking in her sleep.”
“Well, Madam, that’s no great harm. I have heard of many children who did—”
“But not through—oh, such selfish folly as mine! I have grown so weak, such a fool! And they have sent for Russell, and Russell is here. You may meet her any day—”
“Russell!” Jane said, with an air of dismay, clasping her hands; “then, Madam, you must make up your mind what you will do, for Russell is not one to be balked. She will find us out.”
“Why should I fear to be found out?” said Mrs. Trevanion, with a faint smile. “No one now can harm me. Jane, everything has been done that can be done to us. I do not fear Russell or any one. And sometimes it seems to me that I have been wrong all along. I think now I have made up my mind—”
“To what? oh, to what, Madam?” Jane cried.
“I am not well,” said Mrs. Trevanion; “I am only a shadow of myself. I am not at all sure but perhaps I may be going to die. No, no— I have no presentiments, Jane. It is only people who want to live who have presentiments, and life has few charms for me. But look at me; you can see through my hands almost. I am dreadfully tired coming up those stairs. I should not be surprised if I were to die.”
She said this apologetically, as if she were putting forth a plea to which perhaps objections might be made.
“You have come through a deal, Madam,” said Jane, with the matter-of-fact tone of her class. “It is no wonder if you are thin; you have had a great deal of anxiety. But trouble doesn’t kill.”
“Sometimes,” said her mistress, with a smile, “in the long run. But I don’t say I am sure. Only, if that were so—there would be no need to deny myself.”
“You will send for the children and Miss Rosalind.” Jane clasped her hands with a cry of anticipation in which her whole heart went forth.
“That would be worth dying for,” said Madam, “to have them all peaceably for perhaps a day or two. Ah! but I would need to be very bad before we could do that; and I am not ill, not that I know. I have thought of something else, Jane. It appears that they have found out, or think they have found out, that I am here. I cannot just steal away again as I did before. I will go to them and see them all. Ah, don’t look so pleased; that probably means that we shall have to leave afterwards at once. Unless things were to happen so well, you know,” she said, with a smile, “as that I should just really—die there; which would be ideal—but therefore not to be hoped for.”
“Oh, Madam,” said Jane, with a sob, “you don’t think, when you say that—”
“Of you, my old friend? But I do. You would be glad to think, after a while, that I had got over it all. And what could happen better to me than that I should die among my own? I am of little use to Edmund—far less than I hoped. Perhaps I had no right to hope. One cannot give up one’s duties for years, and then take them back again. God forgive me for leaving him, and him for all the faults that better training might have saved him from. All the tragedy began in that, and ends in that. I did wrong, and the issue is—this.”
“So long ago, Madam—so long ago. And it all seemed so simple.”
“To give up my child for his good, and then to be forced to give up my other children, not for their good or mine? I sometimes wonder how it was that I never told John Trevanion, who was always my friend. Why did I leave Highcourt so, without a word to any one? It all seems confused now, as if I might have done better. I might have cleared myself, at least; I might have told them. I should like to give myself one great indulgence, Jane, before I die.”
“Madam!” Jane cried, with a panic which her words belied, “I am sure that it is only fancy; you are not going to die.”
“Perhaps,” said her mistress; “I am not sure at all. I told you so; but only I should not be surprised. Whether it is death or whether it is life, something new is coming. We must be ghosts no longer; we must come back to our real selves, you and I, Jane. We will not let ourselves be hunted down, but come out in the eye of day. It would be strange if Russell had the power to frighten me. And did I tell you that Reginald is here, too, and young Roland Hamerton, who was at Highcourt that night? They are all gathered together again for the end of the tragedy, Jane.”
“Oh, Madam,” cried Jane, “perhaps for setting it all right.”
Her mistress smiled somewhat dreamily. “I do not see how that can be. And, even if it were so, it will not change the state of affairs. But we are not going to allow ourselves to be found out by Russell,” she added, with a curious sense of the ludicrous. The occasion was not gay, and yet there was something natural, almost a sound of amusement, in the laugh with which she spoke. Jane looked at her wistfully, shaking her head.
“When I think of all that you have gone through, and that you can laugh still!—but perhaps it is better than crying,” Jane said.
Mrs. Trevanion nodded her head in assent, and there was silence in the dim room where these two women spent their lives. It gave her a certain pleasure to see Jane moving about. There was a sort of lull of painful sensation, a calm, and disinclination for any exertion on her own part; a mood in which it was grateful to see another entirely occupied with her wants; anxious only to invent more wants for her, and means of doing her service. In the languor of this quiet it was not wonderful that Mrs. Trevanion should feel her life ebbing away. She began to look forward to the end of the tragedy with a pleased acquiescence. She had yielded to her fate at first, understanding it to be hopeless to strive against it; with, perhaps, a recoil from actual contact with the scandal and the shame which was as much pride as submission; but at that time her strength was not abated, nor any habit of living lost. Now that period of anguish seemed far off, and she judged herself and her actions not without a great pity and understanding, but yet not without some disapproval. She thought over it all as she sat lying back in the great chair, with Jane moving softly about. She would not repeat the decisive and hasty step she had once taken. She could not now, alas, believe in the atonement which she then thought might still be practicable in respect to the son whom she had given up in his childhood; nor did she think that it was well, as she had done then, to abandon everything without a word—to leave her reputation at the mercy of every evil-speaker. To say nothing for herself, to leave her dead husband’s memory unassailed by any defence she could put forth, and to cut short the anguish of parting, for her children as well as for herself, had then seemed to her the best. And she had fondly thought, with what she now called vanity and the delusion of self-regard, that, by devoting herself to him who was the cause of all her troubles, she might make up for the evils which her desertion of him had inflicted. These were mistakes, she recognized now, and must not be repeated. “I was a fool,” she said to herself softly, with a realization of the misery of the past which was acute, yet dim, as if the sufferer had been another person. Jane paused at the sound of her voice, and came towards her—“Madam, did you speak?”
“No, except to myself. My faithful Jane, you have suffered everything with me. We are not going to hide ourselves any longer,” she replied.
CHAPTER LX
A resolution thus taken is not, however, strong enough to overcome the habits which have grown with years. Mrs. Trevanion had been so long in the background that she shrank from the idea of presenting herself again to what seemed to her the view of the world. She postponed all further steps with a conscious cowardice, at which, with faint humor, she was still able to smile.
“We are two owls,” she said. “Jane, we will make a little reconnaissance first in the evening. There is still a moon, though it is a little late, and the lake in the moonlight is a fine sight.”
“But, Madam, you were not thinking of the lake,” said Jane.
“No,” her mistress said; “the sight of a roof and four walls within which are—that is more to you and me than the most beautiful scenery in the world. And to think for how many years I had nothing to do but to walk from my room to the nursery to see them all!”
Jane shook her head with silent sympathy. “And it will be so again,” she said, soothingly, “when Mr. Rex is of age. I have always said to myself it would come right then.”
It was now Madam’s turn to shake her head. The smile died away from her face. “I would rather not,” she said, hurriedly, “put him to that proof. It would be a terrible test to put a young creature to. Oh, no, no, Jane! If he failed, how could I bear it?—or did for duty what should be done for love? No, no; the boy must not be put to such a test.”
In the evening she carried out her idea of making a reconnaissance. She set out when the moon was rising in a vaporous autumnal sky, clearing slowly as the light increased. Madam threw back the heavy veil which she usually wore, and breathed in the keen, sweet air with almost a pang of pleasure. She grasped Jane’s arm as they drove slowly round the tufted mound upon which the house of Bonport stood; then, as the coachman paused for further instructions in the shade of a little eminence on the farther side, she whispered breathlessly that she would walk a little way, and see it nearer. They got out, accordingly, both mistress and maid, tremulous with excitement. All was so still; not a creature about; the lighted windows shining among the trees; there seemed no harm in venturing within the gate, which was open, in ascending the slope a little way. Mrs. Trevanion had begun to say faintly, half to herself, half to her companion, “This is vanity; it is no use,” when, suddenly, her grasp upon Jane’s arm tightened so that the faithful maid had to make an effort not to cry out. “What is that?” she said, in a shrill whisper, at Jane’s ear. It was nothing more than a little speck, but it moved along under the edge of the overhanging trees, with evident life in it; a speck which, as it emerged into the moonlight, became of a dazzling whiteness, like a pale flame gliding across the solid darkness. They both stood still for a moment in awe and wonder, clinging to each other. Then Madam forsook her maid’s arm, and went forward with a swift and noiseless step very different from her former lingering. Jane followed, breathless, afraid, not capable of the same speed. No doubt had been in Mrs. Trevanion’s mind from the first. The night air lifted now and then a lock of the child’s hair, and blew cold through her long, white night-dress, but she went on steadily towards the side of the lake. Once more Amy was absorbed in her dream that her mother was waiting for her there; and, and unconscious, wrapped in her sleep, had set out to find the one great thing wanting in her life. The mother followed her, conscious of nothing save a great throbbing of head and heart. Thus they went on till the white breadth of the lake, flooded with moonlight, lay before them. Then, for the first time, Amy wavered. She came to a pause; something disturbed the absorption of her state, but without awaking her. “Mamma,” she said, “where are you, mamma?”
“I am here, my darling.” Mrs. Trevanion’s voice was choked, and scarcely audible, in the strange mystery of this encounter. She dared not clasp her child in her arms, but stood trembling, watching every indication, terrified to disturb the illusion, yet hungering for the touch of the little creature who was her own. Amy’s little face showed no surprise, its lines softened with a smile of pleasure; she put out her cold hand and placed it in that which trembled to receive it. It was no wonder to Amy, in her dream, to put her hand into her mother’s. She gave herself up to this beloved guidance without any surprise or doubt, and obeyed the impulse given her without the least resistance, with a smile of heavenly satisfaction on her face. All Amy’s troubles were over when her hand was in her mother’s hand. Nor was her little soul, in its soft confusion and unconsciousness, aware of any previous separation, or any transport of reunion. She went where her mother led, calm as if that mother had never been parted from her. As for Mrs. Trevanion, the tumult of trouble and joy in her soul is impossible to describe. She made an imperative gesture to Jane, who had come panting after her, and now stood half stupefied in the way, only prevented by that stupor of astonishment from bursting out into sobs and cries. Her mistress could not speak; her face was not visible in the shadow as she turned her back upon the lake which revealed this wonderful group fully against its shining background. There was no sound audible but the faint stir of the leaves, the plash of the water, the cadence of her quick breathing. Jane followed in an excitement almost as overpowering. There was not a word said. Mrs. Trevanion turned back and made her way through the trees, along the winding path, with not a pause or mistake. It was dark among the bushes, but she divined the way, and though both strength and breath would have failed her in other circumstances, there was no sign of faltering now. The little terrace in front of the house, to which they reached at last, was brilliant with moonlight. And here she paused, the child standing still in perfect calm, having resigned her very soul into her mother’s hands.
Then, for the first time, a great fainting and trembling seized upon her. She held out her disengaged hand to Jane. “What am I to do?” she said, with an appeal to which Jane, trembling, could give no reply. The closed doors, the curtained windows, were all dark. A momentary struggle rose in Mrs. Trevanion’s mind, a wild impulse to carry the child away, to take her into her bosom, to claim her natural rights, if never again, yet for this night—mingled with a terror that seemed to take her senses from her, lest the door should suddenly open, and she be discovered. Her strength forsook her when she most wanted it. Amy stood still by her side, without a movement, calm, satisfied, wrapped in unconsciousness, knowing nothing save that she had attained her desire, feeling neither cold nor fear in the depth of her dream.
“Madam,” said Jane, in an anxious whisper, “the child will catch her death. I’d have carried her. She has nothing on but her nightdress. She will catch her death.”
This roused the mother in a moment, with the simplest but most profound of arguments. She bade Jane knock at the door, and, stooping over Amy, kissed her and blessed her. Then she transferred the little hand in hers to that of her faithful maid. A shiver passed through the child’s frame, but she permitted herself to be led to the door. Jane was not so self-restrained as her mistress. She lifted the little girl in her arms and began to chafe and rub her feet. The touch, though was warm and kind, woke the little somnambulist, as the touch of the cold water had done before. She gave a scream and struggled out of Jane’s arms.
And then there was a great sound of movement and alarm from the house. The door was flung open and Rosalind rushed out and seized Amy in her arms. She was followed by half the household, the servants hurrying out one after another; and there arose a hurried tumult of questions in the midst of which Jane stole away unnoticed and escaped among the bushes, like her mistress. Mrs. Trevanion stood quite still supporting herself against a tree while all this confused commotion went on. She distinguished Russell, who came out and looked so sharply about among the dark shrubs that for a moment she felt herself discovered, and John Trevanion, who appeared with a candle in his hand, lifting it high above his head, and inquiring who it was that had brought the child back. John’s face was anxious and full of trouble; and behind him came a tall boy, slight and fair, who said there was nobody, and that Amy must have come back by herself. Then Mrs. Lennox came out with a shawl over her head, the flickering lights showing her full, comfortable person—“Who is it, John? Is there anybody? Oh, come in then, come in; it is a cold night, and the child must be put to bed.” All of them stood about in their individuality, as she had left them, while she looked on in the darkness under the rustling boughs, invisible, her eyes sometimes blurred with moisture, a smile growing about her mouth. They had not changed, except the boy—her boy! She kept her eyes on his face, through the thick shade of the leaves and the flickering of the candles. He was almost a man, God bless him—a slight mustache on his upper lip, his hair darker—and so tall, like the best of the Trevanions— God bless him! But no, no, he must not be put to that test—never to that test. She would not permit it, she said to herself, with a horrible sensation in her heart, which she did not put into words, that he could not bear it. She did not seem able to move from the support of her tree even after the door was closed and all was silent again. Jane, in alarm, groped about the bushes till she had found her mistress, but did not succeed in leading her away. “A little longer,” she said, faintly. After a while a large window on the other side of the door opened and John Trevanion came out again into the moonlight, walking up and down on the terrace with a very troubled face. By and by another figure appeared, and Rosalind joined him. “I came to tell you she is quite composed now—going to sleep again,” said Rosalind. “Oh, Uncle John, something is going to happen; it is coming nearer and nearer. I am sure that, either living or dead, Amy has seen mamma.”
“My dear, all these agitations are too much for you,” said John Trevanion. “I think I must take you away.”
“Uncle John, it is not agitation. I was not agitated to-night; I was quite at ease, thinking about—oh, thinking about very different things; I am ashamed of myself when I remember how little I was thinking. Russell is right, and I was to blame.”
“My dear, I believe there is a safeguard against bodily ailments in that condition. We must look after her better again.”
“But she has seen mamma, Uncle John!”
“Rosalind, you are so full of sense—”
“What has sense to do with it?” she cried. “Do you think the child came back by herself? And yet there was no one with her—no one. Who else could have led her back? Mamma took away her hand and she awoke. Uncle John, none of you can find her; but if she is not dead—and you say she is not dead—my mother must be here.”
Jane had dropped upon her knees, and was keeping down by force, with her face pressed against her mistress’s dress, her sobs and tears. But Mrs. Trevanion clung to her tree and listened and made no sound. There was a smile upon her face of pleasure that was heartrending, more pitiful than pain.
“My dear Rosalind,” said John, in great distress, “my dearest girl! I have told you she is not dead. And if she is here we shall find her. We are certain to find her. Rosalind, if she were here, what would she say to you? Not to agitate and excite yourself, to try to be calm, to wait. My dear,” he said, with a tremble in his voice, “your mother would never wish to disturb your life; she would like you to be—happy; she would like you—you know—your mother—”
It appeared that he became incoherent, and could say no more.
The house was closed again and all quiet before Jane, who had been in despair, could lead Mrs. Trevanion away. She yielded at length from weakness; but she did not hear what her faithful servant said to her. Her mind had fallen, or rather risen, into a state of semi-conscious exaltation, like the ecstasy of an ascetic, as her delicate and fragile form grew numb and powerless in the damp and cold.
“Did you think any one could stand and hear all that and never make a sign?” she said. “Did you see her face, Jane? It was like an angel’s. I think that must be her window with the light in it. And he said her mother— John was always my friend. He said her mother— Where do you want me to go? I should like to stay in the porch and die there comfortably, Jane. It would be sweet; and then there could be no more quarrelling or questions, or putting any one to the test. No test! no test! But dying there would be so easy. And Sophy Lennox would never forbid it. She would take me in, and lay me on her bed, and bury me—like a good woman. I am not unworthy of it. I am not a bad woman, Jane.”
“Oh, Madam,” Jane cried, distracted, “do you know the carriage is waiting all this time? And the people of the hotel will be frightened. Come back, for goodness sake, come back!”
“The carriage,” she said, with a wondering air. “Is it the Highcourt carriage, and are we going home?”
