THE SLEEPLESS.
There were more than the marquis left awake and thinking; amongst the
rest one who ought to have been asleep, for the thoughts that kept her
awake were evil thoughts.
Amanda Serafina Fuller was a twig or leaf upon one of many decaying
branches, which yet drew what life they had from an ancient genealogical
tree. Property gone, but the sense of high birth swollen to a vice, the
one thought in her mother's mind, ever since she grew capable of looking
upon the social world in its relation to herself, had been how, with
stinted resources, to make the false impression of plentiful ease. For
one of the most disappointing things in high descent is, that the
descent is occasionally into depths of meanness. Some who are proudest
of their lineage, instead of finding therein a spur to nobility of
thought and action, find in it only a necessity for prostrating
themselves with the more abject humiliation at the footstool of Mammon,
to be admitted into the penetralia of which foul god's favours, they
will hasten to mingle the blood of their pure descent with that of the
very kennels, yellow with the gold to which a noble man, if poor as
Jesus himself, would loathe to be indebted for a meal. In 'the high
countries' there will be a finding of levels more appalling than
strange.
Hence Amanda had been born and brought up in falsehood, had been all her
life witness to a straining after the untrue so energetic, as to assume
the appearance of conscience; while such was the tenor and spirit of the
remarks she was constantly hearing, that she grew up with the ingrained
undisputed idea that she and her mother, whom she had only known as a
widow, had been wronged, spoiled indeed of their lawful rights, by a
combination of their rich relatives; whereas in truth they had been the
objects of very considerable generosity, which they resented the more
that it had been chiefly exercised by such of the family as could least
easily afford it, yet accepted in their hearts, if not in their words,
as their natural right. The intercession through which Amanda had been
received into lady Margaret's household, was the contribution towards
their maintenance of one of their richer connections: the marquis
himself, although distantly related, not having previously been aware of
their existence.
But Amanda felt degraded by her position, and was unaware that to
herself alone she owed the degradation: she had not yet learned that the
only service which can degrade is that which is unwillingly rendered. To
be paid for such, is degradation in its very essence. Every one who
grumbles at his position as degrading, yet accepts the wages thereof,
brands himself a slave.
The evil tendencies which she had inherited, had then been nourished in
her from her very birth--chief of these envy, and a strong tendency to
dislike. Mean herself, she was full of suspicions with regard to others,
and found much pleasure in penetrating what she took to be disguise, and
laying bare the despicable motives which her own character enabled her
either to discover or imagine, and which, in other people, she hated.
Moderately good people have no idea of the vileness of which their own
nature is capable, or which has been developed in not a few who pass as
respectable persons, and have not yet been accused either of theft or
poisoning. Such as St. Paul alone can fully understand the abyss of
moral misery from which the in-dwelling spirit of God has raised them.
The one redeeming element in Amanda was her love to her mother, but
inasmuch as it was isolated and self-reflected, their mutual attachment
partook of the nature of a cultivated selfishness, and had lost much of
its primal grace. The remaining chance for such a woman, so to speak,
seems--that she should either fall in love with a worthy man, if that be
still possible to her, or, by her own conduct, be brought into dismal
and incontrovertible disgrace.
She had stood in the hall within a few yards of Dorothy, and had
intently watched her face all the time Richard was before the marquis.
But not because she watched the field of their play was Amanda able to
read the heart whence ascended those strangely alternating lights and
shadows. She had, by her own confession, conceived a strong dislike to
Dorothy the moment she saw her, and without love there can be no
understanding. Hate will sharpen observation to the point of microscopic
vision, affording opportunity for many a shrewd guess, and revealing
facts for the construction of the cleverest and falsest theories, but
will leave the observer as blind as any bat to the scope of the whole,
or the meaning of the parts which can be understood only from the whole;
for love alone can interpret.
As she gazed on the signs of conflicting emotion in Dorothy's changes of
colour and expression, Amanda came quickly enough to the conclusion that
nothing would account for them but the assumption that the sly
puritanical minx was in love with the handsome young roundhead. How else
could the deathly pallor of her countenance while she fixed her eyes
wide and unmoving upon his face, and the flush that ever and anon swept
its red shadow over the pallor as she cast them on the ground at some
brave word from the lips of the canting psalm-singer, be in the least
intelligible? Then came the difficulty: how in that case was her share
in his capture to be explained? But here Amanda felt herself in her own
province, and before the marquis rose, had constructed a very clever
theory, in which exercise of ingenuity, however, unluckily for its
truth, she had taken for granted that Dorothy's nature corresponded to
her own, and reasoned freely from the character of the one to the
conduct of the other. This was her theory: Dorothy had expected Richard,
and contrived his admission. His presence betrayed by the mastiff, and
his departure challenged by the warder, she had flown instantly to the
alarm-bell, to screen herself in any case, and to secure the chance, if
he should be taken, of liberating him without suspicion under cover of
the credit of his capture. The theory was a bold one, but then it
accounted for all the points--amongst the rest, how he had got the
password and why he would not tell--and was indeed in the fineness of
its invention equally worthy of both the heart and the intellect of the
theorist.
Nor were mistress Fuller's resolves behind her conclusions in merit: of
all times since first she had learned to mistrust her, this night must
Dorothy be watched; and it was with a gush of exultation over her own
acuteness that she saw her follow the men who bore Richard from the
hall.
If Dorothy knew more of her own feelings than she who watched her, she
was far less confident that she understood them. Indeed she found them
strangely complicated, and as difficult to control as to understand,
while she stood gazing on the youth who through her found himself
helpless and wounded in the hands of his enemies. He was all in the
wrong, no doubt--a rebel against his king, and an apostate from the
church of his country; but he was the same Richard with whom she had
played all her childhood, whom her mother had loved, and between whom
and herself had never fallen shadow before that cast by the sudden
outblaze of the star of childish preference into the sun of youthful
love. And was it not when the very mother of shadows, the blackness of
darkness itself, swept between them and separated them for ever, that
first she knew how much she had loved him? What if not with the love
that could listen entranced to its own echo!--love of child or love of
maiden, Dorothy never asked herself which it had been, or which it was
now. She was not given to self-dissection. The cruel fingers of analysis
had never pulled her flower to pieces, had never rubbed the bloom from
the sun-dyed glow of her feelings. But now she could not help the
vaporous rise of a question: all was over, for Richard had taken the
path of presumption, rebellion, and violence--how then came it that her
heart beat with such a strange delight at every answer he made to the
expostulations or enticements of the marquis? How was it that his
approval of the intruder, not the less evident that it was unspoken,
made her heart swell with pride and satisfaction, causing her to forget
the rude rebellion housed within the form whose youth alone prevented it
from looking grand in her eyes?
For the moment her heart had the better of--her conscience, shall I say?
Yes, of that part of her conscience, I will allow, which had grown weak
by the wandering of its roots into the poor soil of opinion. In the
delight which the manliness of the young fanatic awoke in her, she even
forgot the dull pain which had been gnawing at her heart ever since
first she saw the blood streaming down his face as he passed her in the
gateway. But when at length he fell fainting in the arms of his captors,
and the fear that she had slain him writhed sickening through her heart,
it was with a grim struggle indeed that she kept silent and conscious.
The voice of the marquis, committing him to the care of mistress Watson
instead of the rough ministrations of the guard, came with the power of
a welcome restorative, and she hastened after his bearers to satisfy
herself that the housekeeper was made understand that he was carried to
her at the marquis's behest. She then retired to her own chamber,
passing in the corridor Amanda, whose room was in the same quarter, with
a salute careless from weariness and pre-occupation.
The moment her head was on her pillow the great fight began--on that
only battle-field of which all others are but outer types and pictures,
upon which the thoughts of the same spirit are the combatants, accusing
and excusing one another.
She had done her duty, but what a remorseless thing that duty was! She
did not, she could not, repent that she had done it, but her heart WOULD
complain that she had had it to do. To her, as to Hamlet, it was a
cursed spite. She had not yet learned the mystery of her relation to the
Eternal, whose nature in his children it is that first shows itself in
the feeling of duty. Her religion had not as yet been shaken, to test
whether it was of the things that remain or of those that pass. It is
easy for a simple nature to hold by what it has been taught, so long as
out of that faith springs no demand of bitter obedience; but when the
very hiding place of life begins to be laid bare under the scalpel of
the law, when the heart must forego its love, when conscience seems at
war with kindness, and duty at strife with reason, then most good
people, let their devotion to what they call their religion be what it
may, prove themselves, although generally without recognising the fact,
very much of pagans after all. And good reason why! For are they not
devoted to their church or their religion tenfold more than to the
living Love, the father of their spirits? and what else is that, be the
church or religion what it will, but paganism? Gentle and strong at once
as Dorothy was, she was not yet capable of knowing that, however like it
may look to a hardship, no duty can be other than a privilege. Nor was
it any wonder if she did not perceive that she was already rewarded for
the doing of the painful task, at the memory of which her heart ached
and rebelled, by the fresh outburst in that same troubled heart of the
half-choked spring of her love to the playmate of her childhood. Had it
fallen, as she would have judged so much fairer, to some one else of the
many in the populous place to defeat Richard's intent and secure his
person, she would have both suffered and loved less. The love, I repeat,
was the reward of the duty done.
For a long time she tossed sleepless, for what she had just passed
through had so thorougly possessed her imagination that, ever as her
wearied brain was sinking under the waves of sleep, up rose the face of
Richard from its depths, deathlike, with matted curls and bloodstained
brow, and drove her again ashore on the rocks of wakefulness. By and by
the form of her suffering changed, and then instead of the face of
Richard it was his voice, ever as she reached the point of oblivion,
calling aloud for help in a tone of mingled entreaty and reproach, until
at last she could no longer resist the impression that she was warned to
go and save him from some impending evil. This once admitted, not for a
moment would she delay response. She rose, threw on a dressing-gown, and
set out in the dim light of the breaking day to find again the room into
which she had seen him carried.
There was yet another in the house who could not sleep, and that was Tom
Fool. He had a strong suspicion that Richard had learned the watchword
from his mother, who, like most people desirous of a reputation for
superior knowledge, was always looking out for scraps and orts of
peculiar information. In such persons an imagination after its kind has
considerable play, and when mother Rees had succeeded, without much
difficulty on her own, or sense of risk on her son's part, in drawing
from him the watchword of the week, she was aware in herself of a huge
accession of importance; she felt as if she had been intrusted with the
keys of the main entrance, and trod her clay floor as if the fate of
Raglan was hid in her bosom, and the great pile rested in safety under
the shadow of her wings. But her imagined gain was likely to prove her
son's loss; for, as he reasoned with himself, would Mr. Heywood, now
that he knew him for the thief of his mare, persist, upon reflection, in
refusing to betray his mother? If not, then the fault would at once be
traced to him, with the result at the very least, of disgraceful
expulsion from the marquis's service. Almost any other risk would be
preferable.
But he had yet another ground for uneasiness. He knew well his mother's
attachment to young Mr. Heywood, and had taken care she should have no
suspicion of the way he was going after leaving her the night he told
her the watchword; for such was his belief in her possession of
supernatural powers, that he feared the punishment she would certainly
inflict for the wrong done to Richard, should it come to her knowledge,
even more than the wrath of the marquis. For both of these weighty
reasons therefore he must try what could be done to strengthen Richard
in his silence, and was prepared with an offer, or promise at least, of
assistance in making his escape.
As soon as the house was once more quiet, he got up, and, thoroughly
acquainted with the "crenkles" of it, took his way through dusk and
dark, through narrow passage and wide chamber, without encountering the
slightest risk of being heard or seen, until at last he stood,
breathless with anxiety and terror, at the door of the turret-chamber,
and laid his ear against it.