Whiteladies

“It is not that, dear. The young woman has quarrelled with her husband’s parents, or she did not feel happy with them. Such things happen often, you know; perhaps there were faults on both sides. So she took it into her head to come here. She is an orphan, with no friends, and a young widow, poor thing, but I am most anxious to get her sent away.”

“Why should she be sent away?” said Augustine. “It is our duty to keep her, if she wishes to stay. An orphan – a widow! Susan, you do not see our duties as I wish you could. We who are eating the bread which ought to be the property of the widow and the orphan – how dare we cast one of them from our doors! No, if she wishes it, she must stay.”

“Augustine!” cried her sister, with tears, “I will do anything you tell me, dear; but don’t ask me to do this! I do not like her – I am afraid of her. Think how she must have used the child last night! I cannot let her stay.”

Augustine put down the cup of milk which was her habitual breakfast, and looked across the table at her sister. “It is not by what we like we should be ruled,” she said. “Alas, most people are; but we have a duty. If she is not good, she has the more need of help; but I would not leave the child with her,” she added, for she, too, had felt what it was to be disturbed. “I would give the child to some one else who can manage it. Otherwise you cannot refuse her, an orphan and widow, if she wishes to stay.”

“Austine, you mistake, you mistake!” cried Miss Susan, driven to her wits’ end.

“No, I do not mistake; from our door no widow and no orphan should ever be driven away. When it is Herbert’s house, he must do as he thinks fit,” said Augustine; “at least I know he will not be guided by me. But for us, who live to expatiate – No, she must not be sent away. But I would give the charge of the child to some one else,” she added with less solemnity of tone; “certainly I would have some one else for the child.”

With this Augustine rose and went away, her hands in her sleeves, her pace as measured as ever. She gave forth her solemn decision on general principles, knowing no other, with an abstract superiority which offended no one, because of its very abstraction, and curious imperfection in all practical human knowledge. Miss Susan was too wise to be led by her sister in ordinary affairs; but she listened to this judgment, her heart wrung by pangs which she could not avow to any one. It was not the motive which weighed so largely with Augustine, and was, indeed, the only one she took account of, which affected her sister. It was neither Christian pity for the helpless, nor a wish to expatiate the sins of the past, that moved Miss Susan. The emotion which was battling in her heart was fear. How could she bear it to be known what she had done? How could she endure to let Augustine know, or Herbert, or Reine? – or even Farrel-Austin, who would rejoice over her, and take delight in her shame! She dared not turn her visitor out of the house, for this reason. She sat by herself when Augustine had gone, with her hands clasped tight, and a bitter, helpless beating and fluttering of her heart. Never before had she felt herself in the position of a coward, afraid to face the exigency before her. She had always dared to meet all things, looking danger and trouble in the face; but then she had never done anything in her life to be ashamed of before. She shrank now from meeting the unknown woman who had taken possession of her house. If she had remained there in her room shut up, Miss Susan felt as if she would gladly have compounded to let her remain, supplying her with as many luxuries as she cared for. But to face her, to talk to her, to have to put up with her, and her companionship, this was more than she could bear.

She had not been able to look at her letters in her preoccupied and excited state; but when she turned them over now, in the pause that ensued after Augustine’s departure, she found a letter from old Guillaume Austin, full of trouble, narrating to her how his daughter-in-law had fled from the house in consequence of some quarrel, carrying the child with her, who was the joy of their hearts. So far as she was concerned, the old man said, they were indifferent to the loss, for since Giovanna’s child was born she had changed her character entirely, and was no longer the heart-broken widow who had obtained all their sympathies. “She had always a peculiar temper,” the father wrote. “My poor son did not live happy with her, though we were ready to forget everything in our grief. She is not one of our people, but by origin an Italian, fond of pleasure, and very hot-tempered, like all of that race. But recently she has been almost beyond our patience. Madame will remember how good my old wife was to her – though she cannot bear the idle – letting her do nothing, as is her nature. Since the baby was born, however, she has been most ungrateful to my poor wife, looking her in the face as if to frighten her, and with insolent smiles; and I have heard her even threaten to betray the wife of my bosom to me for something unknown – some dress, I suppose, or other trifle my Marie has given her without telling me. This is insufferable; but we have borne it all for the child, who is the darling of our old age. Madame will feel for me, for it is your loss, too, as well as ours. The child, the heir, is gone! who charmed us and made us feel young again. My wife thinks she may have gone to you, and therefore I write; but I have no hopes of this myself, and only fear that she may have married some one, and taken our darling from us forever – for who would separate a mother from her child? – though the boy does not love her, not at all, not so much as he loves us and his aunt Gertrude, who thinks she sees in him the boy whom she lost. Write to me in pity, dear and honored madame, and if by any chance the unhappy Giovanna has gone to you, I will come and fetch her away.”

The letter was balm to Miss Susan’s wounds. She wrote an answer to M. Austin at once, then bethought herself of a still quicker mode of conveying information, and wrote a telegram, which she at once dispatched by the gardener, mounted on the best horse in the stable, to the railway. “She is here with the child, quite well. I shall be glad to see you,” Miss Susan wrote; then sat down again, tremulous, but resolute to think of what was before her. But for the prospect of old Guillaume’s visit, what a prospect it was that lay before her! She could understand how that beautiful face would look, with its mocking defiance at the helpless old woman who was in her power, and could not escape from her. Poor old Madame Austin! Her sin was the greatest of all, Miss Susan felt, with a sense of relief, for was it not her good husband whom she was deceiving, and had not all the execution of the complot been left in her hands? Miss Susan knew she herself had lied; but how much oftener Madame Austin must have lied, practically, and by word and speech! Everything she had done for weeks and months must have been a lie, and thus she had put herself in this woman’s power, who cruelly had taken advantage of it. Miss Susan realized, with a shudder, how the poor old Flemish woman, who was her confederate, must have been put to the agony! how she must have been held over the precipice, pushed almost to the verge, obliged perhaps to lie and lie again, in order to save herself. She trembled at the terrible picture; and now all that had been done to Madame Austin was about to be done to herself – for was not she, too, in this pitiless woman’s power?

A tap at the door. She thought it was the invader of her peace, and said “Come in” faintly. Then the door was pushed open, and a tottering little figure, so low down that Miss Susan, unprepared for this pygmy, did not see it at first, came in with a feeble rush, as babies do, too much afraid of its capabilities of progress to have any confidence of holding out. “Did you ever see such a darling, ma’am?” said Cook. “We couldn’t keep him not to ourselves a moment longer. I whips him up, and I says, ‘Miss Susan must see him.’ Now, did you ever set your two eyes on a sweeter boy?”

Miss Susan, relieved, did as she was told; she fixed her eyes upon the boy, who, after his rush, subsided on to the floor, and gazed at her in silence. He was as fair as any English child, a flaxen-headed, blue-eyed Flemish baby, with innocent, wide-open eyes.

“He ain’t a bit like his ma, bless him, and he takes to strangers quite natural. Look at him a-cooing and a-laughing at you, ma’am, as he never set eyes on before! But human nature is unaccountable,” said Cook, with awe-stricken gravity, “for he can’t abide his ma.”

“Did you ever know such a case before?” said Miss Susan, who, upon the ground that Cook was a widow, looked up to her judgment on such matters as all the rest of the household did. Cook was in very high feather at this moment, having at last proved beyond doubt the superiority of her knowledge and experience as having once had a child of her own.

“Well, ma’am,” said Cook, “that depends. There’s some folk as never have no way with children, married or single, it don’t matter. Now that child, if you let him set at your feet, and give him a reel out of your work-box to play with, will be as good as gold; for you’ve got a way with children, you have; but he can’t abide his ma.”

“Leave him there, if you think he will be good,” said Miss Susan. She did more than give the baby a reel out of her work-box, for she took out the scissors, pins, needles, all sharp and pointed things, and put down the work-box itself on the carpet. And then she sat watching the child with the most curious, exquisite mixture of anguish and a kind of pleasure in her heart. Poor old Guillaume Austin’s grandchild, a true scion of the old stock! but not as was supposed. She watched the little tremulous dabs the baby made at the various articles that pleased him. How he grasped them in the round fat fingers that were just long enough to close on a reel; how he threw them away to snatch at others; the pitiful look of mingled suffering, injured feeling, and indignation which came over his face in a moment when the lid of the box dropped on his fingers; his unconscious little song to himself, cooing and gurgling in a baby monologue. What was the child thinking? No clue had he to the disadvantages under which he was entering life, or the advantages which had been planned for him before he was born, and which, by the will of Providence, were falling into nothing. Poor little unconscious baby! The work-box and its reels were at this moment quite world enough for him.

It was an hour or two later before the stranger came downstairs. She had put on a black silk dress, and done up her hair carefully, and made her appearance as imposing as possible; and, indeed, so far as this went, she required few external helps. The child took no notice of her, sheltered as he was under Miss Susan’s wing, until she took him up roughly, disturbing his toys and play. Then he pushed her away with a repetition of last night’s screams, beating with his little angry hands against her face, and shrieking, “No, no!” his only intelligible word, at the top of his lungs. The young woman grew exasperated, too, and repaid the blows he gave with one or two hearty slaps and a shake, by means of which the cries became tremulous and wavering, though they were as loud as ever. By the time the conflict had come to this point, however, Cook and Martha, flushed with indignation, were both at the door.

“Il ne faut pas frapper l’enfang!” Miss Susan called out loudly in her peculiar French. “Vous ne restez pas un moment ici vous no donnez pas cet enfang au cook; vous écoutez? Donnez, donnez, touto de suite!” Her voice was so imperative that the woman was cowed. She turned and tossed the child to Cook, who, red as her own fire, stood holding out her arms to receive the screaming and struggling boy.

“What do I care?” said the stranger. “Petit sot! cochon! va! I slept not all night,” she added. “You heard? Figure to yourself whether I wish to keep him now. Ah, petit fripon, petit vaurient! Va!”

“Madame Austin,” said Miss Susan solemnly, as the women went away, carrying the child, who clung to Cook’s broad bosom and sobbed on her shoulder, “you do not stay here another hour, unless you promise to give up the child to those who can take care of him. You cannot, that is clear.”

“And yet he is my child,” said the young woman, with a malicious smile. “Madame knows he is my child! He is always sage with his aunt Gertrude, and likes her red and white face. Madame remembers Gertrude, who lost her baby? But mine belongs to me.”

“He may belong to you,” said Miss Susan, with almost a savage tone, “but he is not to remain with you another hour, unless you wish to take him away; in which case,” said Miss Susan, going to the door and throwing it open, “you are perfectly at liberty to depart, him and you.”

The stranger sat for a moment looking at her, then went and looked out into the red-floored passage, with a kind of insolent scrutiny. Then she made Miss Susan a mock curtsey, and sat down.

“They are welcome to have him,” she said, calmly. “What should I want him for? Even a child, a baby, should know better than to hate one; I do not like it; it is a nasty little thing – very like Gertrude, and with her ways exactly. It is hard to see your child resemble another woman; should not madame think so, if she had been like me, and had a child?”

“Look here,” Miss Susan said, going up to her, and shaking her by the shoulders, with a whiteness and force of passion about her which cowered Giovanna in spite of herself – “look here! This is how you treated your poor mother-in-law, no doubt, and drove her wild. I will not put up with it – do you hear me? I will drive you out of the house this very day, and let you do what you will and say what you will, rather than bear this. You hear me? and I mean what I say.”

Giovanna stared, blank with surprise, at the resolute old woman, who, driven beyond all patience, made this speech to her. She was astounded. She answered quite humbly, sinking her voice, “I will do what you tell me. Madame is not a fool, like my belle mère.”

“She is not a fool, either!” cried Miss Susan. “Ah, I wish now she had been! I wish I had seen your face that day! Oh, yes, you are pretty – pretty enough! but I never should have put anything in your power if I had seen your face that day.”

Giovanna gazed at her for a moment, still bewildered. Then she rose and looked at herself in the old glass, which distorted that beautiful face a little. “I am glad you find me pretty,” she said. “My face! it is not a white and red moon, like Gertrude’s, who is always praised and spoiled; but I hope it may do more for me than hers has done yet. That is what I intend. My poor pretty face – that it may win fortune yet! my face or my boy.”

Miss Susan, her passion dying out, stood and looked at this unknown creature with dismay. Her face or her boy! – what did she mean? or was there any meaning at all in these wild words – words that might be mere folly and vanity, and indeed resembled that more than anything else. Perhaps, after all, she was but a fool who required a little firmness of treatment – nothing more.

CHAPTER XXV

MISS SUSAN AUSTIN was not altogether devoid in ordinary circumstances of one very common feminine weakness to which independent women are especially liable. She had the old-fashioned prejudice that it was a good thing to “consult a man” upon points of difficulty which occurred in her life. The process of consulting, indeed, was apt to be a peculiar one. If he distinctly disagreed with herself, Miss Susan set the man whom she consulted down as a fool, or next to a fool, and took her own way, and said nothing about the consultation. But when by chance he happened to agree with her, then she made great capital of his opinion, and announced it everywhere as the cause of her own action, whatever that might be. Everard, before his departure, had been the depositary of her confidence on most occasions, and as he was very amenable to her influence, and readily saw things in the light which she wished him to see them in, he had been very useful to her, or so at least she said; and the idea of sending for Everard, who had just returned from the West Indies, occurred to her almost in spite of herself, when this new crisis happened at Whiteladies. The idea came into her mind, but next moment she shivered at the thought, and turned from it mentally as though it had stung her. What could she say to Everard to account for the effect Giovanna produced upon her – the half terror, half hatred, which filled her mind toward the new-comer, and the curious mixture of fright and repugnance with which even the child seemed to regard its mother? How could she explain all this to him? She had so long given him credit for understanding everything, that she had come to believe in this marvellous power and discrimination with which she had herself endowed him; and now she shrank from permitting Everard even to see the infliction to which she had exposed herself, and the terrible burden she had brought upon the house. He could not understand – and yet who could tell that he might not understand? see through her trouble, and perceive that some reason must exist for such a thraldom? If he, or any one else, ever suspected the real reason, Miss Susan felt that she must die. Her character, her position in the family, the place she held in the world, would be gone. Had things been as they were when she had gone upon her mission to the Austins at Bruges, I have no doubt the real necessities of the case, and the important issues depending upon the step she had taken, would have supported Miss Susan in the hard part she had now to play; but to continue to have this part to play after the necessity was over, and when it was no longer, to all appearance, of any immediate importance at all who Herbert’s heir should be, gave a bitterness to this unhappy rôle which it is impossible to describe. The strange woman who had taken possession of the house without any real claim to its shelter, had it in her power to ruin and destroy Miss Susan, though nothing she could do could now affect Whiteladies; and for this poor personal reason Miss Susan felt, with a pang, she must bear all Giovanna’s impertinences, and the trouble of her presence, and all the remarks upon her – her manners, her appearance, her want of breeding, and her behavior in the house, which no doubt everybody would notice. Everard, should he appear, would be infinitely annoyed to find such an inmate in the house. Herbert, should he come home, would with equal certainty wish to get rid of so singular a visitor.

Miss Susan saw a hundred difficulties and complications in her way. She hoped a little from the intervention of Monsieur Guillaume Austin, to whom she had written, after sending off her telegram, in full detail, begging him to come to Whiteladies, to recover his grandchild, if that was possible; but Giovanna’s looks were not very favorable to this hope. Thus the punishment of her sin, for which she had felt so little remorse when she did it, found her out at last. I wonder if successful sin ever does fill the sinner with remorse, or whether human nature, always so ready in self-defence, does not set to work, in every case, to invent reasons which seem to justify, or almost more than justify, the wickedness which serves its purpose? This is too profound an inquiry for these pages; but certainly Miss Susan, for one, felt the biting of remorse in her heart when sin proved useless, and when it became nothing but a menace and a terror to her, as she had never felt it before. Oh, how could she have charged her conscience and sullied her life (she said to herself) for a thing so useless, so foolish, so little likely to benefit any one? Why had she done it? To disappoint Farrel-Austin! that had been her miserable motive – nothing more; and this was how it had all ended. Had she left the action of Providence alone, and refrained from interfering, Farrel-Austin would have been discomfited all the same, but her conscience would have been clear. I do not think that Miss Susan had as yet any feeling in her mind that the discomfiture of Farrel-Austin was not a most righteous object, and one which justified entirely the interference of heaven.

But, in the meantime, what a difference was made in her peaceable domestic life! No doubt she ought to have been suffering as much for a long time past, for the offence was not new, though the punishment was; but if it came late, it came bitterly. Her pain was like fire in her heart. This seemed to herself as she thought of it – and she did little but think of it – to be the best comparison. Like fire – burning and consuming her, yet never completing its horrible work – gnawing continually with a red-hot glow, and quivering as of lambent flame. She seemed to herself now and then to have the power, as it were, of taking her heart out of these glowing ashes, and looking at it, but always to let it drop back piteously into the torment. Oh, how she wished and longed, with an eager hopelessness which seemed to give fresh force to her suffering, that the sin could be undone, that these two last years could be wiped out of time, that she could go back to the moment before she set out for Bruges! She longed for this with an intensity which was equalled only by its impossibility. If only she had not done it! Once it occurred to her with a thrill of fright, that the sensations of her mind were exactly those which are described in many a sermon and sensational religious book. Was it hell that she had within her? She shuddered, and burst forth into a low moaning when the question shaped itself in her mind. But notwithstanding all these horrors, she had to conduct herself as became a person in good society – to manage all her affairs, and talk to the servants, and smile upon chance visitors, as if everything were well – which added a refinement of pain to these tortures. And thus the days passed on till Monsieur Guillaume Austin arrived from Bruges – the one event which still inspired her with something like hope.

Giovanna, meanwhile, settled down in Whiteladies with every appearance of intending to make it her settled habitation. After the first excitement of the arrival was over, she fell back into a state of indolent comfort, which, for the time, until she became tired of it, seemed more congenial to her than the artificial activity of her commencement, and which was more agreeable, or at least much less disagreeable to the other members of the household. She gave up the child to Cook, who managed it sufficiently well to keep it quiet and happy, to the great envy of the rest of the family. Every one envied Cook her experience and success, except the mother of the child, who shrugged her shoulders, and, with evident satisfaction in getting free from the trouble, fell back upon a stock of books she had found, which made the weary days pass more pleasantly to her than they would otherwise have done. These were French novels, which once had belonged, before her second marriage, to Madame de Mirfleur, and which she, too, had found a great resource. Let not the reader be alarmed for the morality of the house. They were French novels which had passed under Miss Susan’s censorship, and been allowed by her, therefore they were harmless of their kind – too harmless, I fear, for Giovanna’s taste, who would have liked something more exciting; but in her transplantation to so very foreign a soil as Whiteladies, and the absolute blank which existence appeared to her there, she was more glad than can be described of the poor little unbound books, green and yellow, over which the mother of Herbert and Reine had yawned through many a long and weary day. It was Miss Susan herself who had produced them out of pity for her visitor, unwelcome as that visitor was – and, indeed, for her own relief. For, however objectionable a woman may be who sits opposite to you all day poring over a novel, whether green or yellow, she is less objectionable than the same woman when doing nothing, and following you about, whenever you move, with a pair of great black eyes. Not being able to get rid of the stranger more completely, Miss Susan was very thankful to be so far rid of her as this, and her heart stirred with a faint hope that perhaps the good linen-draper who was coming might be able to exercise some authority over his daughter-in-law, and carry her away with him. She tried to persuade herself that she did not hope for this, but the hope grew involuntarily stronger and stronger as the moment approached, and she sat waiting in the warm and tranquil quiet of the afternoon for the old man’s arrival. She had sent the carriage to the station for him, and sat expecting him with her heart beating, as much excited, almost, as if she had been a girl looking for a very different kind of visitor. Miss Susan, however, did not tell Giovanna, who sat opposite to her, with her feet on the fender, holding her book between her face and the fire, who it was whom she expected. She would not diminish the effect of the arrival by giving any time for preparation, but hoped as much from the suddenness of the old man’s appearance as from his authority. Giovanna was chilly, like most indolent people, and fond of the fire. She had drawn her chair as close to it as possible, and though she shielded her face with all the care she could, yet there was still a hot color on the cheeks, which were exposed now and then for a moment to the blaze. Miss Susan sat behind, in the background, with her knitting, waiting for the return of the carriage which had been sent to the station for Monsieur Guillaume, and now and then casting a glance over her knitting-needles at the disturber of her domestic peace. What a strange figure to have established itself in this tranquil English house! There came up before Miss Susan’s imagination a picture of the room behind the shop at Bruges, so bare of every grace and prettiness, with the cooking going on, and the young woman seated in the corner, to whom no one paid any attention. There, too, probably, she had been self-indulgent and self-absorbed, but what a difference there was in her surroundings! The English lady, I have no doubt, exaggerated the advantages of her own comfortable, softly-cushioned drawing-room, and probably the back-room at Bruges, if less pretty and less luxurious, was also much less dull to Giovanna than this curtained, carpeted place, with no society but that of a quiet Englishwoman, who disapproved of her. At Bruges there had been opportunities to talk with various people, more entertaining than even the novels; and though Giovanna had been disapproved of there, as now, she had been able to give as well as take – at least since power had been put into her hands. At present she yawned sadly as she turned the leaves. It was horribly dull, and horribly long, this vacant, uneventful afternoon. If some one would come, if something would happen, what a relief it would be! She yawned as she turned the page.