Madam

“I am a little upset myself,” he said, “because you know I’ve been mixed up with it all from the beginning, which makes one feel very differently from those that don’t know the story. I couldn’t help just letting out a little. I beg your pardon for taking up your time with what perhaps doesn’t interest you.”

This stung the other man to the quick. “It interests me more, perhaps, than you could understand,” he cried. “But,” he added, after a pause, “it remains to be seen whether the family wish me to know—not certainly at second-hand.”

Hamerton sprang to his feet in hot revulsion of feeling. “If you mean me by the second-hand,” he said; then paused, ashamed both of the good impulse and the less good which had made him thus betray himself. “I beg your pardon,” he added; “I’ve been travelling all day, and I suppose I’m tired and apt to talk nonsense. Good-night.”

Jules and Adolphe were glad. They showed the young Englishman to his room with joy, making no doubt that the other would follow. But the other did not follow. He sat for a time silently, with his head on his hand. Then he rose, and walking to the other side of the great bouquet of laurels, paused in the profound shadow, where there stood, as he divined rather than saw, a human creature in mysterious anguish, anxiety, and pain. He made out with difficulty a tall shadow against the gloomy background of the close branches. “I do not know who you are,” he said; “I do not ask to know; but you are deeply interested in what that—that young fellow was saying?”

The voice that replied to him was very low. “Oh, more than interested; it is like life and death to me. For God’s sake, tell me if you know anything more.”

“I know nothing to-night—but to-morrow— You are the lady whom I met in Spain two years ago, whose portrait stands on Rosalind Trevanion’s writing-table.”

There was a low cry; “Oh! God bless you for telling me! God bless you for telling me!” and the sound of a suppressed sob.

“I shall see her to-morrow,” he said. “I have come thousands of miles to see her. It is possible that I might be of use to you. May I tell her that you are here?”

The stir among the branches seemed to take a different character as he spoke, and the lady came out towards the partial light. She said firmly, “No; I thank you for your kind intentions;” then paused. “You will think it strange that I came behind you and listened. You will think it was not honorable. But I heard their name, and Roland Hamerton knows me. When a woman is in great trouble she is driven to strange expedients. Sir,” she cried, after another agitated pause, “I neither know your name nor who you are, but if you will bring me news to-morrow after you have seen them—if you will tell me—it will be a good deed—it will be a Christian deed.”

“Say something more to me than that,” he cried, with a passion that surprised himself; “say that you will wish me well.”

She moved along softly, noiselessly, with her head turned to him, moving towards the moonlight, which was like the blaze of day, within a few steps from where they had been standing. The impression which had been upon his mind of a fugitive—a woman abandoned and forlorn—died out so completely that he felt ashamed ever to have ventured upon such a thought. And he felt, with a sudden sense of imperfection quite unfamiliar to him, that he was being examined and judged. He felt, too, with an acute self-consciousness, that the silver in his hair shone in the white light, and that the counterbalancing qualities of fine outline and manly color must be wanting in that wan and colorless illumination. He could not see her face, except as an abstract paleness, turned towards him, over-shadowed by the veil which she had put back, but which still threw a deep shade; but she gazed into his, which he could not but turn towards her in the full light of the moon. The end of the examination was not very consolatory to his pride. She sighed and turned away. “The man whom she chooses will want no other blessing,” she said.

A few minutes after Jules and Adolphe were happy, shutting up the doors, putting out the lights, betaking themselves to the holes and corners under the stairs, under the roofs, in which these sufferers for the good of humanity slept.

CHAPTER LIV

The incident of that evening had a very disturbing effect upon the family at Bonport. Little Amy, waking next morning much astonished to find herself in Rosalind’s room, and very faintly remembering what had happened, was subjected at once to questionings more earnest than judicious—questionings which brought everything to her mind, with a renewal of all the agitation of the night. But the child had nothing to say beyond what she had said before—that she had dreamed of mamma, that mamma had called her to come down to the lake, and be taken home; that she wanted to go home, to go to mamma—oh, to go to mamma! but Rosalind said she was dead, and Sophy said they were never, never to see her again. Then Amy flung herself upon her sister’s breast, and implored to be taken to her mother. “You don’t know how wicked I was, Rosalind. Russell used to say things till I stopped loving mamma—oh, I did, and did not mind when she went away! But now! where is she, where is she? Oh, Rosalind! oh, Rosalind! will she never come back? Oh, do you think she is angry, or that she does not care for me any more? Oh, Rosalind, is she dead, and will she never come back?” This cry seemed to come from Amy’s very soul. She could not be stilled. She lay in Rosalind’s bed, as white as the hangings about her, not much more than a pair of dark eyes looking out with eagerness unspeakable. And Rosalind, who had gone through so many vicissitudes of feeling—who had stood by the mother who was not her mother with so much loyalty, yet had yielded to the progress of events, and had not known, in the ignorance of her youth, what to do or say, or how to stand against it— Rosalind was seized all at once by a vehement determination and an intolerable sense that the present position of affairs was impossible, and could not last.

“Oh, my darling!” she cried; “get well and strong, and you and I will go and look for her, and never, never be taken from her again!”

“But, Rosalind, if mamma is dead?” cried little Amy.

The elder people who witnessed this scene stole out of the room, unable to bear it any longer.

“It must be put a stop to,” John Trevanion said, in a voice that was sharp with pain.

“Oh, who can put a stop to it?” cried Mrs. Lennox, weeping, and recovering herself and weeping again. “I should not have wondered, not at all, if it had happened at first; but, after these years! And I that thought children were heartless little things, and that they had forgot!”

“Can Russell do nothing, now you have got her here?” he cried with impatience, walking up and down the room. He was at his wits’ end, and in his perplexity felt himself incapable even of thought.

“Oh, John, did you not hear what that little thing said? She put the children against their mother. Amy will not let Russell come near her. If I have made a mistake, I meant it for the best. Russell is as miserable as any of us. Johnny has forgotten her, and Amy cannot endure the sight of her. And now it appears that coming to Bonport, which was your idea, is a failure too, though I am sure we both did it for the best.”

“That is all that could be said for us if we were a couple of well-intentioned fools,” he cried. “And, indeed, we seem to have acted like fools in all that concerns the children,” he added, with a sort of bitterness. For what right had fate to lay such a burden upon him—him who had scrupulously preserved himself, or been preserved by Providence, from any such business of his own?

“John,” said Mrs. Lennox, drying her eyes, “I don’t think there is so much to blame yourself about. You felt sure it would be better for them being here; and when you put it to me, so did I. You never thought of the lake. Why should you think of the lake? We never let them go near it without somebody to take care of them in the day, and how could any one suppose that at night—”

Upon this her brother seized his hat and hurried from the house. The small aggravation seemed to fill up his cup so that he could bear no more, with this addition, that Mrs. Lennox’s soft purr of a voice roused mere exasperation in him, while his every thought of the children, even when the cares they brought threatened to overwhelm him, was tender with natural affection. But, in fact, wherever he turned at this moment he saw not a gleam of light, and there was a bitterness as of the deferred and unforeseen in this sudden gathering together of clouds and dangers which filled him almost with awe. The catastrophe itself had passed over much more quietly than could have been thought. But, lo, here, when no fear was, the misery came. His heart melted within him when he thought of Amy’s little pale face and that forlorn expedition in the stillness of the night to the side of the lake which betrayed, as nothing else could have done, the feverish working of her brain and the disturbance of her entire being. What madness of rage and jealousy must that have been that induced a man to leave this legacy of misery behind him to work in the minds of his little children years after he was dead! and what appalling cruelty and tyranny it was which made it possible for a dead man, upon whom neither argument nor proof could be brought to bear, thus to blight by a word so many lives! All had passed with a strange simplicity at first, and with such swift and silent carrying-out of the terrible conditions of the will that there had been no time to think if any expedient were possible. Looking back upon it, it seemed to him incredible that anything so extraordinary should have taken place with so little disturbance. She had accepted her fate without a word, and every one else had accepted it. The bitterness of death seemed to have passed, except for the romance of devotion on Rosalind’s part, which he believed had faded in the other kind of romance more natural at her age. No one but himself had appeared to remember at all this catastrophe which rent life asunder. But now, when no one expected it, out of the clear sky came the explosions of the storm. He had decided too quickly that all was over. The peace had been but a pretence, and now the whole matter would have to be re-opened again.

The cause of the sudden return of all minds to the great family disaster and misery seemed to him more than ever confused by this last event. The condition which had led to Amy’s last adventure seemed to make it more possible, notwithstanding Sophy’s supposed discovery, that the story of the apparition was an illusion throughout. The child, always a visionary child, must have had, in the unnatural and strained condition of her nerves and long repression of her feelings, a dream so vivid as, like that of last night, to take the aspect of reality; and Rosalind, full of sympathy, and with all her own keen recollections ready to be called forth at a touch, must have received the contagion from her little sister, and seen what Amy had so long imagined she saw. Perhaps, even, it was the same contagion, acting on a matter-of-fact temperament, which had induced Sophy to believe that she, too, had seen her mother, but in real flesh and blood. Of all the hypotheses that could be thought of this seemed to him the most impossible. He had examined all the hotel registers, and made anxious inquiries everywhere, without finding a trace of Mrs. Trevanion. She had not, so far as he was aware, renounced her own name. And, even had she done so, it was impossible that she could have been in the hotel without some one seeing her, without leaving some trace behind. Notwithstanding this certainty, John Trevanion, even while he repeated his conviction to himself, was making his way once more to the hotel to see whether, by any possibility, some light might still be thrown upon a subject which had become so urgent. Yet even that, though it was the first thing that presented itself to him, had become, in fact, a secondary matter. The real question in this, as in all difficulties, was what to do next. What could be done to unravel the fatal tangle? Now that he contemplated the matter from afar, it became to him all at once a thing intolerable—a thing that must no longer be allowed to exist. What was publicity, what was scandal, in comparison with this wreck of life? There must be means, he declared to himself, of setting an unrighteous will aside, whatever lawyers might say. His own passiveness seemed incredible to him, as well as the extraordinary composure with which everybody else had acquiesced, accepting the victim’s sacrifice. But that was over. Even though the present agitation should pass away, he vowed to himself that it should not pass from him until he had done all that man could do to set the wrong right.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was walking into Aix with the speed of a man who has urgent work before him, though that work was nothing more definite or practical than the examination over again of the hotel books to see if there he could find any clew. He turned them over and over in his abstraction, going back without knowing it to distant dates, and roaming over an endless succession of names which conveyed no idea to his mind. He came at last, on the last page, to the name of Arthur Rivers, with a dull sort of surprise. “To be sure, Rivers is here!” he said to himself aloud.

“Yes, to be sure I am here. I have been waiting to see if you would find me out,” Rivers said behind him. John did not give him so cordial a welcome as he had done on the previous night.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have so much on my mind I forget everything. Were you coming out to see my sister? We can walk together. The sun is warm, but not too hot for walking. That’s an advantage of this time of the year.”

“It is perhaps too early for Mrs. Lennox,” Rivers said.

“Oh, no, not too early. The truth is we are in a little confusion. One of the children has been giving us a great deal of anxiety.”

“Then, perhaps,” said Rivers, with desperate politeness, “it will be better for me not to go.” He felt within himself, though he was so civil, a sort of brutal indifference to their insignificant distresses, which were nothing in comparison with his own. To come so far in order to eat his breakfast under the dusty trees, and dine at the table d’hôte in a half-empty hotel at Aix, seemed to him so great an injustice and scorn in the midst of his fame and importance that even the discovery he had made, though it could not but tell in the situation, passed from his mind in the heat of offended consequence and pride.

John Trevanion, for his part, noticed the feeling of the other as little as Rivers did his. “One of the children has been walking in her sleep,” he said. “I don’t want to get a fool of a doctor who thinks of nothing but rheumatism. One of them filled my good sister’s mind with folly about suppressed gout. Poor little Amy! She has a most susceptible brain, and I am afraid something has upset it. Do you believe in ghosts, Rivers?”

“As much as everybody does,” said Rivers, recovering himself a little.

“That is about all that any one can say. This child thinks she has seen one. She is a silent little thing. She has gone on suffering and never said a word, and the consequence is, her little head has got all wrong.”

By this time Rivers, having cooled down, began to see the importance of the disclosure he had to make. He said, “Would you mind telling me what the apparition was? You will understand, Trevanion, that I don’t want to pry into your family concerns, and that I would not ask without a reason.”

John Trevanion looked at him intently with a startled curiosity and earnestness. “I can’t suppose,” he said, “when it comes to that, much as we have paid for concealment, that you have not heard something—”

“Miss Trevanion told me,” said Rivers—he paused a moment, feeling that it was a cruel wrong to him that he should be compelled to say Miss Trevanion—he who ought to have been called to her side at once, who should have been in a position to claim her before the world as his Rosalind—“Miss Trevanion gave me to understand that the lady whom I had met in Spain, whose portrait was on her table, was—”

“My sister-in-law—the mother of the children—yes, yes—and what then?” John Trevanion cried.

“Only this, Trevanion—that lady is here.”

John caught him by the arm so fiercely, so suddenly, that the leisurely waiters standing about, and the few hotel guests who were moving out and in in the quiet of the morning stopped and stared with ideas of rushing to the rescue. “What do you mean?” he said. “Here? How do you know? It is impossible.”

“Come out into the garden, where we can talk. It may be impossible, but it is true. I also saw her last night.”

“You must be mad or dreaming, Rivers. You too—a man in your senses—and— God in heaven!” he said, with a sudden bitter sense of his own unappreciated friendship—unappreciated even, it would seem, beyond the grave—“that she should have come, whatever she had to say, to you—to any one—and not to me!”

“Trevanion, you are mistaken. This is no apparition. There was no choice, of me or any one. That poor lady, whether sinned against or sinning I have no knowledge, is here. Do you understand me? She is here.”

They were standing by this time in the shadow of the great laurel bushes where she had sheltered on the previous night. John Trevanion said nothing for a moment. He cast himself down on one of the seats to recover his breath. It was just where Hamerton had been sitting. Rivers almost expected to see the faint stir in the bushes, the evidence of some one listening, to whom the words spoken might, as she said, be death or life.

“This is extraordinary news,” said Trevanion at last. “You will pardon me if I was quite overwhelmed by it. Rivers, you can’t think how important it is. Where can I find her? You need not fear to betray her—oh, Heaven, to betray her to me, her brother! But you need not fear. She knows that there is no one who has more—more regard, more respect, or more— Let me know where to find her, my good fellow, for Heaven’s sake!”

“Trevanion, it is not any doubt of you. But, in the first place, I don’t know where to find her, and then—she did not disclose herself to me. I found her out by accident. Have I any right to dispose of her secret? I will tell you everything I know,” he added hastily, in answer to the look and gesture, almost of despair, which John could not restrain. “Last night your friend, young Hamerton, was talking—injudiciously, I think”—there was a little sweetness to him in saying this, even in the midst of real sympathy and interest—“he was talking of what was going on in your house. I had already seen some one walking about the garden whose appearance I seemed to recollect. When Hamerton mentioned your name” (he was anxious that this should be made fully evident), “she heard it; and by and by I perceived that some one was listening, behind you, just there, in the laurels.”

John started up and turned round, gazing at the motionless, glistening screen of leaves, as if she might still be there. After a moment—“And what then?”

“Not much more. I spoke to her afterwards. She asked me, for the love of God, to bring her news, and I promised—what I could—for to-night.”

John Trevanion held out his hand, and gave that of Rivers a strong pressure. “Come out with me to Bonport. You must hear everything, and perhaps you can advise me. I am determined to put an end to the situation somehow, whatever it may cost,” he said.

CHAPTER LV

The two men went out to Bonport together, and on the way John Trevanion, half revolted that he should have to tell it, half relieved to talk of it to another man, and see how the matter appeared to a person unconcerned, with eyes clear from prepossession of any kind, either hostile or tender, gave his companion all the particulars of his painful story. It was a relief; and Rivers, who had been trained for the bar, gave it at once as his opinion that the competent authorities would not hesitate to set such a will aside, or at least, on proof that no moral danger would arise to the children, would modify its restrictions greatly. “Wills are sacred theoretically; but there has always been a power of revision,” he said. And he suggested practical means of bringing this point to a trial—or at least to the preliminary trial of counsel’s advice, which gave his companion great solace. “I can see that we all acted like fools,” John Trevanion confessed, with a momentary over-confidence that his troubles might be approaching an end. “We were terrified for the scandal, the public discussion, that would have been sure to rise—and no one so much as she. Old Blake was all for the sanctity of the will, as you say, and I—I was so torn in two with doubts and—miseries—”

“But I presume,” Rivers said, “these have all been put to rest. There has been a satisfactory explanation—”

“Explanation!” cried John. “Do you think I could ask, or she condescend to give, what you call explanations? She knew her own honor and purity; and she knew,” he added with a long-drawn breath, “that I knew them as well as she—”

“Still,” said Rivers, “explanations are necessary when it is brought before the public.”

“It shall never be brought before the public!”

“My dear Trevanion! How then are you to do anything, how set the will aside?”

This question silenced John; and it took further speech out of the mouth of his companion, who felt, on his side, that if he were about to be connected with the Trevanion family, it would not be at all desirable, on any consideration, that this story should become public. He had been full of interest in the woman whose appearance had struck him before he knew anything about her, and who had figured so largely in his first acquaintance with Rosalind. But when it became a question of a great scandal occupying every mind and tongue, and in which it was possible his own wife might be concerned—that was a very different matter. In a great family such things are treated with greater case. If it is true that an infringement on their honor, a blot on the scutcheon, is supposed to be of more importance where there is a noble scutcheon to tarnish, it is yet true that a great family history would lose much of its interest if it were not crossed now and then by a shadow of darkness, a tale to make the hearers shudder; and that those who are accustomed to feel themselves always objects of interest to the world bear the shame of an occasional disclosure far better than those sprung from a lowlier level whose life is sacred to themselves, and who guard their secrets far more jealously than either the great or the very small. Rivers, in the depth of his nature, which was not that of a born patrician, trembled at the thought of public interference in the affairs of a family with which he should be connected. All the more that it would be an honor and elevation to him to be connected with it, he trembled to have its secrets published. It was not till after he had given his advice on the subject that this drawback occurred to him. He was not a bad man, to doom another to suffer that his own surroundings might go free; but when he thought of it he resolved that, if he could bring it about, Rosalind’s enthusiasm should be calmed down, and she should learn to feel for her stepmother only that calm affection which stepmothers at the best are worthy of, and which means separation rather than unity of interests. He pondered this during the latter part of the way with great abstraction of thought. He was very willing to take advantage of his knowledge of Mrs. Trevanion, and of the importance it gave him to be their only means of communication with her; but further than this he did not mean to go. Were Rosalind once his, there should certainly be no room in his house for a stepmother of blemished fame.

And there were many things in his visit to Bonport which were highly unsatisfactory to Rivers. John Trevanion was so entirely wrapped in his own cares as to be very inconsiderate of his friend, whose real object in presenting himself at Aix at all he must no doubt have divined had he been in possession of his full intelligence. He took the impatient lover into the grounds of the house where Rosalind was, and expected him to take an interest in the winding walks by which little Amy had strayed down to the lake, and all the scenery of that foolish little episode. “If her sister had not followed her, what might have happened? The child might have been drowned, or, worse still, might have gone mad in the shock of finding herself out there all alone. It makes one shudder to think of it.” Rivers did not shudder; he was not very much interested about Amy. But his nerves were all jarred by the contrariety of the circumstances as he looked up through the shade of the trees to the house at the top of the little eminence, where Rosalind was, but as much out of his reach as if she had been at the end of the world. He did not see her until much later, when he returned at John Trevanion’s invitation to dinner. Rosalind was very pale, but blushed when she met him with a consciousness which he scarcely knew how to interpret. Was there hope in the blush, or was it embarrassment—almost pain? She said scarcely anything during dinner, sitting in the shadow of the pink abat-jour, and of her aunt Sophy, who, glad of a new listener, poured forth her soul upon the subject of sleep-walking, and told a hundred stories, experiences of her own and of other people, all tending to prove that it was the most usual thing in the world, and that, indeed, most children walked in their sleep. “The thing to do is to be very careful not to wake them,” Mrs. Lennox said. “That was Rosalind’s mistake. Oh, my dear, there is no need to tell me that you didn’t mean anything that wasn’t for the best. Nobody who has ever seen how devoted you are to these children—just like a mother—could suppose that; but I understand,” said Aunt Sophy with an air of great wisdom, “that you should never wake them. Follow, to see that they come to no harm, and sometimes you may be able to guide them back to their own room—which is always the best thing to do—but never wake them; that is the one thing you must always avoid.”