The mental picture Dunoisse had formed of the surroundings of Miss
Smithwick turned out to be pleasantly remote from the reality.
The Hospice for Sick Governesses was a tall, prim, pale-faced family
mansion in Cavendish Street, London, West, whose neat white steps led
to a dark green door with a bright brass plate and a gleaming brass
knocker, through a wide hall hung with landscape-paintings of merit and
fine old engravings in black frames, up a softly-carpeted staircase to
an airy, cheerful bedroom on the second floor, where with birds and
fragrant flowers, and many little luxuries about her to which poor
Smithwick in her desperate battle with adversity had for long been a
stranger, the simple gentlewoman, grown a frail, white-haired, aged
woman, lay in a pretty chintz-curtained bed, whose shining brasswork
gave back the ruddy blaze of a bright wood fire, listening to the quiet
voice of a capped, and caped, and aproned nurse, who sat on a low chair
beside her, reading from a volume that lay upon her knee.
Dunoisse, from the doorway, to which he had been guided by an elderly
woman, similarly capped, and caped, and aproned, and evidently prepared
for the arrival he had announced by letter to his poor old friend, took
in the scene before patient or nurse had become aware of his presence.
The voice that read was one of the rare human organs that are gifted to
make surpassing melody of common ordinary speech. Soft, but distinct,
through the dull roar of London traffic in the street below, every
syllable came clearly. And the shabby leather-bound volume with
the tarnished gilt clasps brought back old memories of Dunoisse’s
childhood. From its sacred pages he had been taught the noble English
of Tyndale, following the traveling crochet-hook of simple Smithwick
from Gospel text to text; and the words that reached him now had
thus been made familiar; and they told of Heavenly pity and love for
sorrowful, earth-born, Divinely-endowed humanity, and counseled brave
endurance of the sufferings and sorrows of this world, for the sake
of One all-sinless, Who drank of its bitter cup and wore its crown of
thorns long, long before our stumbling feet were set upon its stony
ways....
Dunoisse’s elderly guide had turned away at the urgent summons of a
bell, after knocking at the partly-open door and signing to the visitor
to step across the threshold. He had waited there, listening to the
soft, melodious cadences of the voice that read, for some moments
before his presence was perceived. Then, his poor old friend cried out
his name in a tremulous flutter of delight and agitation, and Dunoisse
crossed the soft carpets to her bedside, and took her thin hand, and
kissed her wrinkled forehead between the scanty loops of her gray hair.
And the capped, and caped, and aproned nurse who had been reading, and
had risen and closed the Book, and laid it noiselessly aside upon a
table at the first moment of Miss Smithwick’s recognition, said to him:
“The patient must not be over-excited, sir. You will kindly ring for
assistance should she appear at all faint.”
Then she went, with an upright carriage and step that rather reminded
the visitor of the free, graceful gait of Arab women, out of the room,
soundlessly shutting the door behind her.
“I did not tell her you were coming.... I so much wished that you
should see her!... Dearest Hector! My own sweet Madame Dunoisse’s
beloved boy!” poor Smithwick tittered, and Hector kindly soothed her,
being nervously mindful of the nurse’s warning, the while she held his
strong, supple, red hand in both her frail ones, and gazed into the
man’s face, wistfully looking for the boy.
He was not conscious of the old uncomfortable shrinking from poor
Smithwick. Her nose was not so cold; her little staccato, mouselike
squeaks of emotion were missing. Most of her sentimentalities and all
of her affectations had fallen away from her with her obsolete velvet
mantles and queer old trinkets, fallals of beads, and hair, and steel,
and the front of brown curls that deceived nobody, and never even
dreamed of trying to match the scanty knob behind. The honest, genuine,
affectionate creature that she was and had always been, shone forth
now.... For Death is a skillful diamond-cutter who grinds and slices
flaws and blemishes away, and leaves, although reduced in size, a gem
of pure unblemished luster, worthy to be set in Heaven’s shining floor.
And now he was to learn the reason of her harsh dismissal, and to
respect her worth yet more. She charged him with her affectionate
humble duty to his father....
“Who, I trust, has long since pardoned me for what he well might
deem presumption in venturing to judge his actions, and question
his”--Smithwick hemmed--“strict adherence to the--shall I call it
compact?--made with your dear mother, at the time when she conceived
it her duty to resume the religious habit she had discarded under the
influence of--of a passion, Hector, which has made many of my sex
oblivious to the peculiar sacredness of vows.” She added, reading no
clear comprehension of her meaning in the brilliant black eyes that
looked at her: “I refer to the Marshal’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain
from His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz recognition,
and”--she hesitated--“acceptance of--yourself, dear boy, as the--in
point of fact--the legitimate heir to his throne!”
“Can my father have conceived such a thing possible?” said Dunoisse,
doubting if he had heard aright. “Can he have courted insult, rebuff,
contempt, by making such an approach? Think again, dear friend! Is it
not possible you may be mistaken? No hint of any such proceeding on my
father’s part has ever been breathed to me. I beg you, think again!”
Miss Smithwick shook her head and sighed, and said that there was no
mistake at all about it. She had received her dismissal for--it might
be presumptuously--venturing to expostulate, when the public prints
made the matter a subject for discussion. It had been going on for
some time previously; the comments of the principal newspapers of
Widinitz, and of the leading Press organs of Munich and Berlin were
largely quoted in the Paris journals which had enlightened Smithwick
on the subject of her patron’s plans. The cuttings she had preserved.
They were in her desk, there upon the little table. Hector might see
them if he would.... Her thin fingers hunted under the velvet-covered
flaps of the absurd little old writing-box that her old pupil handed
her; she followed the movements of the well-made manly figure in the
loosely-fitting gray traveling-suit, with fond, admiring eyes. A blush
made her old cheeks quite pink and young as she said:
“Forgive me, dear Hector!--but you have grown so handsome.... Has ...
has no beautiful young lady told you so? With her eyes, at least, since
verbally to commend the personal appearance of a gentleman would be
unmaidenly and unrefined.”
“You have lived too long out of France to remember, dear friend,”
said Hector, showing his small, square white teeth in a laugh of
heart-whole amusement, “that young ladies, with us, are not supposed to
have eyes at all!”
He forgot meek Smithwick for a moment, remembering an Arab girl at
Blidah who had seemed to love him.... Adjmeh had been very pretty, with
the great blue-black dewy eyes of a gazelle, and the hoarse cooing
voice of a dove, despite the little indigo lilies and stars tattooed
on her ripe nectarine-colored cheeks; on the backs of her slender,
red-tipped hands, and upon the insteps of her slim arched feet, dyed
also with henna; their ankles tinkling with little gold and silver
coins and amulets, threaded on black silk strings similar to those
bound about her tiny wrists, and plaited into the orthodox twenty-five
tresses of her night-black hair....
Ah, yes! though at twenty she would be middle-aged, at thirty a
wrinkled hag, Adjmeh was very pretty--would be for several years to
come.... Who might be telling her so at that particular moment?...
Dunoisse wondered, and then the conjured-up perfumes of sandal and
ambergris grew faint; the orange glow of the African sunset faded from
the flat, terraced roof of the little house at Blidah, the tinkle of
the Arab _tambur_ was nothing but the ring of a London muffin-man’s
bell--and Miss Smithwick was tendering him a little flat packet of
yellowed clippings from the _Monarchie_, the _National_, the _Presse_,
the _Patrie_....
Taking these with a brief excuse, Dunoisse moved to the window,
and the cold gray light of the February morning fell upon the face
that--conscious of the mingled anger and humiliation written upon
it--he was glad to hide from the invalid. Recollections were buzzing in
his ears like angry wasps, roused by the poking of a stick into their
habitation, and each one had its separate sting. It is not agreeable to
be compelled to despise one’s father, and the last shred of the son’s
respect fell from him as he read.
The chief among the Paris newspapers from which the cuttings had been
taken, bore the date of a day or two previous to that old boyish duel
at the Technical School of Military Instruction. The conversation
occurring between the Duke and his guests, which, as repeated by de
Moulny, had produced the quarrel, had undoubtedly arisen through
discussion of these.
Press organs of Imperial convictions upheld the action of the Marshal,
denounced the policy of the reigning Prince of Widinitz, in rejecting
the pretensions of his daughter’s son, as idiotic and unnatural in an
elderly hereditary ruler otherwise destitute of an heir. Legitimist
journals sneered. Revolutionary prints heaped scorn upon the man,
sprung from homely Swiss peasant-stock, who sought to aggrandize
himself by degrading his son. The satirical prints had squibs and
lampoons ... the _Charivari_ published a fearful caricature of the
Marshal, in his gorgeous, obsolete, Imperial Staff uniform, tiptoe on
the roof of the Carmelite Convent of Widinitz in the attempt to reach
down the princely insignia dangling temptingly above him, whilst the
aureoled vision of Ste. Térèse vainly expostulated with the would-be
marauder from clouds of glory overhead. The _Monarchie_ quoted at
length an article from a leading Munich newspaper. Judge whether or no
the reader went hot and cold.
“We cannot sufficiently pity the son of the high-bred, misguided,
repentant lady, doomed in the green bough of inexperienced youth to be
the tool of an unprincipled and unscrupulous adventurer, the handful of
mud flung in the face of a Bavarian Catholic State, whose rulers have
for centuries rendered to Holy Mother Church the most profound respect,
and the most duteous allegiance.”
_“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!...”_
The old, boyish, absurd expletive hissed impotently on the glowing
coals of the man’s fierce indignation, quenching them not at all. The
writer continued:
“He who thought little of dragging the pallet from under the dying
peasant, whose greed has locked and bolted the doors of the Carmelite
House of Mercy in the faces of the sick and suffering poor, now lays
desecrating hands upon the princely mantle, covets the hereditary and
feudal scepter for his base-born son, adding to the impudent dishonesty
of the Swiss innkeeper the vulgar braggadocio and swaggering assurance
of the paid hireling of the Corsican usurper, who dared to mount
the sacred throne of St. Louis; who presumed to adulterate with the
plebeian blood of a Beauharnais the patrician tide flowing in the veins
of a daughter of the reigning House of Wittelsbach.”
Dunoisse’s face was not pleasant to see, as, perusal ended, he set
his small white teeth viciously upon his lower lip, and, breathing
vengeance upon unknown offenders through his thin, arched nostrils,
scowled menacingly at the smug-faced, genteel houses on the opposite
side of Cavendish Street. His father’s boast about the “blood royal”
came back to him, and that “fine Serene Highness” the Marshal had
promised those good people of Widinitz. Ah! what an infamy the whole
thing had been! But at least one might count it buried; forgotten like
these perishing strips of discolored, brittle paper. That was something
to be thankful for.
He cleared his forehead of its thunder-clouds, and turned back towards
the bed, but something of the ordeal of shame he had passed through was
written on his face for Smithwick, in spite of the smile with which he
dressed it, as he silently laid the yellowed fold of cuttings on the
coverlet near her hand.
“They--they have given you pain?” faltered the poor lady.
“It is past and over, dear friend. These paragraphs have cleared up
something that was obscure to me before,” said Dunoisse--“conveyed a
hint of _his_ that was never again made. One cannot pretend to judge
him. He has always been a law unto himself.”
The bitterness of the words, and the ironical smile that curved the
speaker’s lips as he uttered them, were lost upon the simple woman who
answered:
“I have always felt that. There are characters so highly elevated
above the crowd of ordinary individuals, that one can hardly expect
them to be influenced by the ordinary considerations, the commonplace
principles that guide and govern the rest of us----”
“Fortunately for ourselves!” interpolated Dunoisse.
“--That, my dear, we who know ourselves their inferiors in intellect,
as in personal advantages, cannot pretend to judge them,” finished the
poor lady.
“And in proportion with the baseness of their motives and the mean
selfishness of their aims,” said Dunoisse, “the admiration of their
more moral and upright fellow-creatures would appear to be lavished
upon them.”
“Too true, I fear, my dear Hector,” admitted Miss Smithwick, flushing
inside the neat frills that bordered her cap. “But had you beheld
your father in the splendor of his earlier years, you would”--she
coughed--“have perhaps regarded the devotion with which it was his fate
to inspire persons of the opposite sex, with greater leniency and
tolerance.”
“How did his path cross my mother’s?” asked Dunoisse, amused, in spite
of himself, at the unremitting diligence with which the Marshal’s
faithful votary availed herself of every opportunity that presented
itself, to spread a brushful of gilding on her battered idol. “I have
often wondered, but never sought to learn.”
“During the last years of the Emperor Napoleon’s sequestration at
St. Helena, my dear, your father, chafing at the lack of public
appreciation which his great talents should have commanded, and his
distinguished martial career certainly had earned, found distraction
and interest in traveling as a private gentleman through the various
countries he had visited in a less peaceful character. And, during a
visit to the country estate of a Bavarian nobleman, whose acquaintance
he had made during--unless I err--the second campaign of Vienna, as the
result of one of those accidents which so mold our after-lives, Hector,
that one cannot doubt that Destiny and Fate conspire to bring them
about, he crossed your mother’s path.”
“To her most bitter sorrow and her son’s abiding shame!” commented
Dunoisse, but not aloud.
“There is, or was, in the neighborhood of Widinitz--I speak of the
capital of the Bavarian Principality of that name,” went on Miss
Smithwick, “a House of Mercy--under the management of nuns of the
Carmelite Order, whose Convent adjoins the Hospital--now closed in
consequence of the withdrawal from its Endowment Fund of a sum so large
that the charitable institution was ruined by its loss.”
Hector knew well who had brought about the ruin. He sat listening,
and kept his eyes upon the carpet, lest the fierce wrath and scathing
contempt that burned in them should discompose the Marshal’s faithful
partisan.
“One day in the autumn of 1820,” said Miss Smithwick--“the Prince
having ridden out early with all his Court and retinue to hunt--a
gentleman was brought to the Widinitz House of Mercy on a woodman’s
cart. He had been struck upon the forehead and thrown from his saddle
by an overhanging branch as he rode at full speed down a forest road.
The Hunt swept on after the boar-hounds--the insensible man was found
by two peasants and conveyed to the Hospital, as I have said. The
nun in charge of the Lesser Ward--chiefly reserved for the treatment
of accidents, my dear, for there were many among the peasants and
woodcutters, and quarrymen, and miners--and to meet their great need
the House of Mercy, had been founded by a former Prioress of the
Convent--the nun in charge was Sister Térèse de Saint Francois....”
“My mother. Yes?...”
Dunoisse had spoken in a whisper. His eyes shunned gentle Smithwick’s.
He sat in his old, boyish attitude leaning forwards in his chair, his
clasped hands thrust downwards between his knees; and those hands were
so desperately knotted in the young man’s fierce, secret agony of shame
and anger, that the knuckles started, lividly white in color, against
the rich red skin.
“There is no more to tell, my dear!” said Miss Smithwick. “You can
conceive the rest?”
“Easily!” said Dunoisse. “Easily! And, knowing what followed, one is
tempted to make paraphrase of the Scripture story. Had the Samaritans
passed by and left the wounded man to what you have called Fate and
Destiny, the cruses of oil and wine would not have been drained and
broken, the House of Mercy would not have been ransacked and gutted;
its virgin despoiled--its doors barred in the faces of the dying poor.”
He laughed, and the jarring sound of his mirth made his meek hearer
tremble. “It is a creditable story!” he said, “a capital story for
one to hear who bears the name _he_ so willingly makes stink in the
nostrils of honorable men. For if I have Carmel in my blood--to quote
his favorite gibe--I have also _his_. And it is a terrible inheritance!”
“Oh! hush, my dear! Remember that he is your father!” pleaded poor
Smithwick.
“I cannot forget it,” said Dunoisse, smiling with stiff, pale lips.
“It is a relationship that will be constantly brought home. When I
see you lying here, and know what privations you must have endured
before the charitable owners of this house opened its doors to you, and
realize that _his_ were shut because you strove to open his eyes to the
precipice of shame towards which his greed and ambition were hurrying
him, blindly, I ask myself whether, with such Judas-blood running in my
own veins, and such a heritage of gross desires and selfish sensuality
as it must bring with it!--whether it be possible for me, his son, to
live a life of cleanliness and honor? And the answer is----”
“Oh! yes, my dear!” cried the poor creature tearfully. “With the good
help of God! And have you not been honorable and brave, Hector, in
refusing any portion of--that money?” She added, meeting Dunoisse’s
look of surprise: “Do you wonder how it is I know? Your father
wrote and told me--it is now years ago--I hope you will not blame
him!--though the letter was couched in terms of reproach that wounded
me cruelly at the time....” Smithwick felt under her pillow for her
handkerchief and dried her overflowing eyes.
“What charges did he bring against you?” Dunoisse asked, controlling as
best he could the contempt and anger that burned in his black eyes, and
vibrated in his voice.
“He said I had revenged myself for the withdrawal of his patronage,
and my removal from his service,” gulped poor Smithwick, “by poisoning
the mind of his only child! He complained that you refused to touch a
franc of his money--preferring to work your way upwards under heavy
disadvantages, rather than accept from him, your father, any portion
of the fortune he had always meant should be yours. And”--she put her
handkerchief away and nodded her head in quite a determined manner--“I
wrote back and told him, Hector--that I esteemed your course of
conduct, though my counsels had not inspired it; and that your mother,
when she learned of your determination, would be proud of her noble
son!”
Dunoisse would have spoken here, but Smithwick held up her thin hand
and stopped him.
“For it seems to me, dear child of my dearest mistress, that to take
what has been given to God, is the way to call down the just judgment
of Heaven upon the heads of those who are guilty of such deeds,” said
Smithwick, nodding her mild gray head emphatically. “And, rather than
live in gilded affluence upon those funds, wrested from the coffers of
the Carmelite House of Charity at Widinitz, I would infinitely prefer
to carry on existence--as I have done, dear Hector--until my health
failed me in my attic room at Hampstead, on a penny roll a day. And she
would uphold me and agree with me.”
“Who is _she_, dear friend?” asked Hector, smiling, though his heart
was sore within him at the picture of dire need revealed in these
utterances of the simple lady.
“I speak of our Lady Superintendent.... A remarkable personality, my
dear Hector, if I may venture to say so.... It was she who, finding
this benevolent charity suffering from mismanagement and lack of funds,
endowed it with a portion of her large fortune, induced other wealthy
persons to subscribe towards endowing the foundation with a permanent
income, and, finding no trustworthy person of sufficient capacity to
fill the post, herself assumed the duties of Resident Matron. Imagine
it, my dear!” said gentle Smithwick. “At her age--for she is still
young--possibly your senior by a year or two, certainly not more--to
forego Society and the giddy round of gilded pleasure to be found in
London and dear, dear Paris!-- for the humdrum routine of a Hospital;
the training and management of nurses; the regulation of prescriptions,
diets, and accounts!”
“Indeed! A vocation, one would say!” commented Dunoisse.
“She would ask you,” returned Miss Smithwick, “must one necessarily be
a nun to work for the good of others?”
The words stirred a dim recollection in Dunoisse of having heard them
before. But the image of the Lady Superintendent of the Hospice for
Sick Governesses formed itself within his mind. He saw her as a plain,
sensible, plump little spinster, well advanced towards the thirties,
resigned to exchange hopeless rivalries with other young women, not
only rich, but pretty, for undivided rule and undisputed sway over a
large household of dependents.... preferring the ponderous compliments
of Members of Visiting Committees to the assiduities of impecunious
Guardsmen and money-hunting detrimentals. He said, as the picture faded:
“This lady who has been so kind to you----”
“‘Kind.’... The word is feeble, my dear Hector, to express her
unbounded goodness,” declared Miss Smithwick. “I can but say that in
the midst of sickness, and dire poverty, and other distresses that I
will not further dwell on, she came upon me like an Angel from the
Heaven in which I firmly believe. And when I lay down my head, never
to lift it up again--and I think, my dear, the time is not far off
now!--that great and solemn hour that comes to all of us will be
cheered and lightened, Hector, if she stands beside my pillow and holds
my dying hand.”
The simple sincerity of the utterance brought tears into the listener’s
eyes. He winked them back, and said:
“I pray the day you speak of may not dawn for years! My leave, procured
with difficulty owing to threatening national disturbances which the
Army may be employed in quelling, extends not beyond three days. I
shall hope to see this lady, and thank her for her goodness to my
friend before I go.”
“I trust she will permit it. She is very reticent--almost shrinking--in
her desire to avoid recognition of her....”
Miss Smithwick broke off in the middle of her sentence. She leaned back
upon her pillows, lividly pale, breathing hurriedly; her blue lips
strove to say: “It is nothing. Don’t mind!”
Alarmed for her, repentant for having forgotten the nurse’s warning,
Dunoisse grasped at the bell-rope by the fireplace, and sent an urgent
summons clanging through the lower regions of the tall house. Within
a moment, as it seemed, the door opened, admitting the capped, and
caped, and aproned young woman who had been reading to the patient upon
his arrival. A glance seemed to show her a condition of things not
unexpected. She went swiftly to the bedside, answering, as Dunoisse
turned to her appealingly, the words shaping themselves upon his lips
that asked her: “Shall I go?”
“It will be best!... Wait at the end of the passage, near the window on
the landing.... This looks alarming,” she answered--“but it will not
last long.”