Маргарет Олифант
Madam
Notwithstanding this, of all the people present, there was no one who in his heart had stood by her so closely as John Trevanion. But circumstances had so determined it that he must be her judge now. He made a pause, and then pointed to the doorway in which the two young men stood with a mutual scowl at each other. “Explain that,” he said, in sharp, staccato tones, “first of all.”
“Yes, John, I will explain,” Mrs, Trevanion said, with humility. “When I met my husband first—” She paused as if to take breath—“I was married, and I had a child. I feel no shame now,” she went on, yet with a faint color rising over her paleness. “Shame is over for me; I must tell my story without evasion, as you say. It is this, John. I thought I was a deserted wife, and my boy had a right to his name. The same ship that brought Reginald Trevanion brought the news that I was deceived. I was left in a strange country without a friend—a woman who was no wife, with a child who had no father. I thought I was the most miserable of women; but now I know better. I know now—”
John’s countenance changed at once. What he had feared or suspected was never known to any of them; but his aspect changed; he tried to interrupt her, and, coming back to her side, took her other hand. “Grace,” he cried, “Grace! it is enough. I was a brute to think— Grace, my poor sister—”
“Thank you, John; but I have not done. Your father,” she went on, unconsciously changing, addressing another audience, “saw me, and heard my story. And he was sorry for me—oh, he was more than sorry. He was young and so was I. He proposed to me after a while that if I would give up my boy—and we had no living, nothing to keep us from starvation—and marry him, he would take care of the child; it should want for nothing, but that I must never see it more. For a long time I could not make up my mind. But poverty is very sharp; and how to get bread I knew not. The child was pining, and so was I. And I was young. I suppose,” she said in a low voice, drooping her head, “I still wished, still needed to be happy. That seems so natural when one is young. And your father loved me; and I him—and I him!”
She said these words very low, with a pause between. “There, you have all my story,” with a glimmer of a smile on her face. “It is a tragedy, but simple enough, after all. I was never to see the child again; but my heart betrayed me, and I deceived your father. I went and looked at my boy out of windows, waited to see him pass—once met him on a railway journey when you were with me, Rosalind—which was all wrong, wrong—oh, wrong on both sides; to your father and to him. I don’t excuse myself. Then, poor boy, he fell into trouble. How could he help it? His father’s blood was in him, and mine too—a woman false to my vow. He was without friend or home. When he was in great need and alarm, he came—was it not natural?—to his mother. What could be more natural? He sent for me to meet him, to help him, to tell him what to do. What could I do but go—all being so wrong, so wrong? Jane knows everything. I begged my poor boy to go away; but he was ignorant, he did not know the danger. And then Russell, you know, who had never loved me—is she there, poor woman?—found us out. She carried this story to your father. You think, and she thinks,” said Mrs. Trevanion, raising herself with great dignity in her chair, “that my husband suspected me of—of— I cannot tell what shameful suspicions. Reginald,” she went on, with a smile half scornful, “had no such thought. He knew me better. He knew I went to meet my son, and that I was risking everything for my son. He had vowed to me that in that case I should be cut off from him and his. Oh, yes, I knew it all. My eyes were open all the time. And he did what he had said.” She drew a long breath. There was a dispassionate sadness in her voice, as of winding up a history all past. “And what was I to do?” she resumed. “Cut off from all the rest, there was a chance that I might yet be of some use to him—my boy, whom I had neglected. Oh, John and Rosalind, I wronged you. I should have told you this before; but I had not the heart. And then, there was no time to lose, if I was to be of service to the boy.”
Everything was perfectly still in the room; no one had stirred; they were afraid to lose a word. When she had thus ended she made a pause. Her voice had been very calm, deliberate, a little feeble, with pauses in it. When she spoke again it took another tone; it was full of entreaty, like a prayer. She withdrew her hand from Rosalind.
“Reginald!” she said, “Rex! have you nothing to say to me, my boy!”
The direction of all eyes was changed and turned upon the lad. He stood very red, very lowering, without moving from his post against the door. He did not look at her. After a moment he began to clear his voice. “I don’t know,” he said, “what there is to say.” Then, after another pause: “I suppose I am expected to stick to my father’s will. I suppose that’s my duty.”
“But for all that,” she said, with a pleading which went to every heart; her eyes filled, which had been quite dry, her mouth quivered with a tender smile—“for all that, oh, my boy! it is not to take me in, to make a sacrifice; but for once speak to me, come to me; I am your mother, Rex.”
Sophy had been behind the curtain all the time, wrapped in it, peering out with her restless, dancing eyes. She was still only a child. Her little bosom had begun to ache with sobs kept in, her face to work, her mind to be moved by impulses beyond her power. She had tried to mould herself upon Rex, until Rex, with the shadow of the other beside him, holding back, repelling, resisting, became contemptible in Sophy’s keen eyes. It was perhaps this touch of the ridiculous that affected her sharp mind more than anything else; and the sound of her mother’s voice, as it went on speaking, was more than nature could bear, and roused impulses she scarcely understood within her. She resisted as long as she could, winding herself up in the curtain; but at these last words Sophy’s bonds were loosed; she shook herself out of the drapery and came slowly forward, with eyes glaring red out of her pale face.
“They say,” she said suddenly, “that we shall lose all our money, mamma, if we go to you.”
Mrs. Trevanion’s fortitude and calm had given way. She was not prepared for this trial. She turned towards the new voice and held out her arms without a word. But Sophy stood frightened, reluctant, anxious, her keen eyes darting out of her head.
“And what could I do?” she cried. “I am only a little thing, I couldn’t work. If you gave up your baby because of being poor, what should we do, Rex and I? We are younger, though you said you were young. We want to be well off, too. If we were to go to you, everything would be taken from us!” cried Sophy. “Mamma, what can we do?”
Mrs. Trevanion turned to her supporters on either side of her with a smile; her lips still trembled. “Sophy was always of a logical mind,” she said, with a faint half-laugh. The light was flickering round her, blackness coming where all these eager faces were. “I—I have my answer. It is just enough. I have no—complaint.”
There was a sudden outcry and commotion where all had been so still before. Jane came from behind the chair and swept away, with that command which knowledge gives, the little crowd which had closed in around. “Air! air is what she wants, and to be quiet! Go away, for God’s sake, all but Miss Rosalind!”
John Trevanion hurried to open the window, and the faithful servant wheeled the chair close to it in which her mistress lay. Just then two other little actors came upon the scene. Amy had obeyed her mother literally. She had gone and dressed with that calm acceptance of all wonders which is natural to childhood; then sought her little brother at play in the nursery. “Come and see mamma,” she said. Without any surprise, Johnny obeyed. He had his whip in his hand, which he flourished as he came into the open space which had been cleared round that chair.
“Where’s mamma?” said Johnny. His eyes sought her among the people standing about. When his calm but curious gaze found out the fainting figure he shook his hand free from that of Amy, who led him. “That!” he said, contemptuously; “that’s not mamma, that’s the lady.”
Against the absolute certainty of his tone there was nothing to be said.
CHAPTER LXIII
Rivers had stood listening all through this strange scene, he scarcely knew why. He was roused now to the inappropriateness of his presence here. What had he to do in the midst of a family tragedy with which he had no connection? His heart contracted with one sharp spasm of pain. He had no connection with the Trevanions. He looked round him, half contemptuous of himself, for some one of whom he could take leave before he closed the door of this portion of his life behind him, and left it forever. There was no one. All the different elements were drawn together in the one central interest with which the stranger had nothing to do. Rivers contemplated the group around Mrs. Trevanion’s chair as if it had been a picture. The drama was over, and all had resolved itself into stillness, whether the silence of death, or a pause only and interruption of the continuity, he could not tell. He looked round him, unconsciously receiving every detail into his mind. This was what he had given a year of his life for, to leave this household with which he had so strongly identified himself without even a word of farewell and to see them no more. He lingered only for a moment, the lines of the picture biting themselves in upon his heart. When he felt it to be so perfect that no after-experience could make it dim he went away; Roland Hamerton followed him to the door. Hamerton, on his side, very much shaken by the agitating scene, to which his inexperience knew no parallel, was eager to speak to some one, to relieve his heart.
“Do you think she is dead?” he said under his breath.
“Death, in my experience, rarely comes so easily,” Rivers replied. After a pause he added, “I am going away to-night. I suppose you remain?”
“If I can be of any use. You see I have known them all my life.”
“There you have the advantage of me,” said the other, sharply, with a sort of laugh. “I have given them only a year of mine. Good-bye, Hamerton. Our way—does not lie the same—”
“Good-bye,” said Roland, taken by surprise, and stopping short, though he had not meant to do so. Then he called after him with a kindly impulse, “We shall be sure to hear of you. Good luck! Good-bye.”
Good luck! The words seemed an insult; but they were not so meant. Rivers sped on, never looking back. At the gate he made up to Everard, walking with his head down and his hands in his pockets, in gloomy discomfiture. His appearance moved Rivers to a kind of inward laugh. There was no triumph, at least, in him.
“You have come away without knowing if your mother will live or die.”
“What’s the use of waiting on?” said young Everard. “She’ll be all right. They are only faints; all women have them; they are nothing to be frightened about.”
“I think they are a great deal to be frightened about—very likely she will never leave that house alive.”
“Oh, stuff!” Everard said; and then he added, half apologetically, “You don’t know her as I do.”
“Perhaps better than you do,” said Rivers; and then he added, as he had done to Hamerton, “Our ways lie in different directions. Good-bye. I am leaving Aix to-night.”
Everard looked after him, surprised. He had no good wishes to speak, as Roland had. A sense of pleasure at having got rid of an antagonist was in his mind. For his mind was of the calibre which is not aware when there comes an end. All life to him was a ragged sort of thread, going on vaguely, without any logic in it. He was conscious that a great deal had happened and that the day had been full of excitement; but how it was to affect his life he did not know.
Thus the three rivals parted. They had not been judged on their merits, but the competition was over. He who was nearest to the prize felt, like the others, his heart and courage very low; for he had not succeeded in what he had attempted; he had done nothing to bring about the happy termination; and whether even that termination was to be happy or not, as yet no one could say.
CHAPTER LXIV
Madam was conveyed with the greatest care and tenderness to the best room in the house, Mrs. Lennox’s own room, which it was a great satisfaction to that kind soul to give up to her, making the little sacrifice with joy.
“I have always thought what a nice room to be ill in—don’t you think it is a nice room, Grace?—and to get better in, my dear. You can step into the fresh air at once as soon as you are strong enough, and there is plenty of room for us all to come and sit with you; and, please God, we’ll soon have you well again and everything comfortable,” cried Mrs. Lennox, her easy tears flowing softly, her easy words rolling out like them. Madam accepted everything with soft thanks and smiles, and a quiet ending seemed to fall quite naturally to the agitated day. Rosalind spent the night by her mother’s bedside—the long, long night that seemed as if it never would be done. When at last it was over, the morning made everything more hopeful. A famous doctor, who happened to be in the neighborhood, came with a humbler brother from Aix and examined the patient, and said she had no disease—no disease—only no wish or intention of living. Rosalind’s heart bounded at the first words, but fell again at the end of the sentence, which these men of science said very gravely. As for Mrs. Trevanion, she smiled at them all, and made no complaint. All the day she lay there, sometimes lapsing into that momentary death which she would not allow to be called a faint, then coming back again, smiling, talking by intervals. The children did not tire her, she said. Little Johnny, accustomed to the thought that “the lady” was mamma, accepted it as quite simple, and, returning to his usual occupations, drove a coach and four made of chairs in her room, to her perfect satisfaction and his. The cracking of his whip did not disturb her. Neither did Amy, who sat on her bed, and forgot her troubles, and sang a sort of ditty, of which the burden was “Mamma has come back.” Sophy, wandering long about the door of the room, at last came in too, and standing at a distance, stared at her mother with those sharp, restless eyes of hers, like one who was afraid to be infected if she made too near an approach. And later in the afternoon Reginald came suddenly in, shamefaced and gloomy, and came up to the bed, and kissed her, almost without looking at her. At other times, Mrs. Trevanion was left alone with her brother-in-law and Rosalind, who understood her best, and talked to them with animation and what seemed to be pleasure.
“Rosalind will not see,” she said with a smile, “that there comes a time when dying is the most natural—the most easy way of settling everything—the most pleasant for every one concerned.” There was no solemnity in her voice, though now and then it broke, and there were pauses for strength. She was the only one of the three who was cheerful and at ease. “If I were so ill-advised as to live,” she added with a faint laugh, “nothing could be changed. The past, you allow, has become impossible, Rosalind; I could not go away again. That answered for once, but not again.”
“You would be with me, mother, or I with you; for I am free, you know—I am free now.”
Mrs. Trevanion shook her head. “John,” she said, “tell her; she is too young to understand of herself. Tell her that this is the only way to cut the knot—that it is the best way—the most pleasant—John, tell her.”
He was standing by with his head bent upon his breast. He made a hasty sign with his hand. He could not have spoken to save his own life, or even hers. It was all intolerable, past bearing. He stood and listened, with sometimes an outcry—sometimes, alas, a dreadful consent in his heart to what she said, but he could not speak.
The conviction that now is the moment to die, that death is the most natural, noble, even agreeable way of solving a great problem, and making the path clear not only for the individual most closely concerned, but for all around, is not unusual in life. Both in the greater historical difficulties, and in those which belong to private story, it appears often that this would be the better way. But the conviction is not always sufficient to carry itself out. Sometimes it will so happen that he or she in whose person the difficulty lies will so prevail over flesh and blood, so exalt the logic of the situation, as to attain this easy solution of the problem. But not in all cases does it succeed. Madam proved to be one of those who fail. Though she had so clearly made out what was expedient, and so fully consented to it, the force of her fine organization was such that she was constrained to live, and could not die.
And, what was more wonderful still, from the moment when she entered Mrs. Lennox’s room at Bonport, the problem seemed to dissolve itself and flee away in unsubstantial vapor-wreaths like a mist, as if it were no problem at all. One of the earliest posts brought a black-edged letter from England, announcing the death of Mr. Blake, the second executor of Reginald Trevanion’s will, and John, with a start of half-incredulous wonder, found himself the only responsible authority in the matter. It had already been his determination to put it to the touch, to ascertain whether such a will would stand, even with the chilling doubt upon his mind that Mrs. Trevanion might not be able to explain the circumstances which involved her in suspicion. But now suddenly, miraculously, it became apparent to him that nothing need be done at all, no publicity given, no scandal made. For who was there to take upon him the odious office of reviving so odious an instrument? Who was to demand its observance? Who interfere with the matter if it dropped into contempt? The evil thing seemed to die and come to an end without any intervention. Its conditions had become a manifest impossibility—to be resisted to the death if need were; but there was no need: for had they not in a moment become no more than a dead letter? Might not this have been from the beginning, and all the misery spared? As John Trevanion looked back upon it, asking himself this question, that terrible moment in the past seemed to him like a feverish dream. No one of the actors in it had preserved his or her self-command. The horror had been so great that it had taken their faculties from them, and Madam’s sudden action, of which the reasons were only now apparent, had cut the ground from under the feet of the others, and forestalled all reasonable attempts to bring something better out of it. She had not been without blame. Her pride, too, had been in fault; her womanish haste, the precipitate measures which had made any better solution impossible. But now all that was over. Why should she die, now that everything had become clear?
The circumstances got revealed, to some extent, in Aix, among the English visitors who remained, and even to the ordinary population in a curious version, the point of the rumor being that the mysterious English lady had died with the little somnambulist in her arms, who, it was hoped for the sake of sensation, had died too. This was the rumor that reached Everard’s ears on the morning after, when he went to seek his mother in the back room she had inhabited at the hotel, and found no trace of her, but this legend to explain her absence. It had been hard to get at his heart, perhaps impossible by ordinary means; but this news struck him like a mortal blow. And his organization was not like hers. He fell prostrate under it, and it was weeks before he got better and could be removed. The hands into which this weakling fell were nerveless but gentle hands. Aunt Sophy had “taken to” him from the first, and he had always responded to her kindness. When he was able to go home she took “Grace’s boy” to her own house, where the climate was milder than at Highcourt; and by dint of a quite uncritical and undiscriminating affection, and perfect contentment with him as he was, in the virtue of his convalescence, did more to make of Edmund Everard a tolerable member of an unexacting society than his mother could ever have done. There are some natures for whose treatment it is well that their parents should be fools. It seems cruel to apply such a word to the kind but silly soul who had so much true bounty and affection in her. She and he gave each other a great deal of consolation and mutual advantage in the course of the years.
Russell had been, like Everard, incapable of supposing that the victim might die under their hands; and when all seemed to point to that certainty, the shock of shame and remorse helped to change the entire tenor of her life. She who had left the village triumphantly announcing herself as indispensable to the family and the children, could not return there in circumstances so changed. She married Mrs. Lennox’s Swiss servant in haste, and thereafter spent her life in angry repentance. She now keeps a Pension in Switzerland, where her quality of Englishwoman is supposed to attract English visitors, and lays up her gains bitterly amid “foreign ways,” which she tells any new-comer she cannot abide.
And Rosalind did what probably Mr. Ruskin’s Rosiere, tired of her seven suitors, would in most cases do—escaping from the illusions of her own imagination and from the passion which had frightened her, fell back upon the steady, faithful love which had executed no hard task for her, done no heroic deed, but only loved her persistently, pertinaciously, through all. She married Roland Hamerton some months after they all returned home. And thus this episode of family history came to an end. Probably she would have done the same without any strain of compulsion had these calamities and changes never been.
