The front-door of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish
Street had not long closed behind the retreating figure of a swarthy,
black-eyed young foreign gentleman when the pleasant-faced elderly
woman whose duty it was to answer its bell brought to the Lady
Superintendent a card upon a little inlaid tray. She took the card and
smiled.
“Tell Mr. Bertham that I will come down in a few minutes. And I hope
you did not call him ‘Master Robert’ this time, Husnuggle?”
“I did, Miss Ada, love, as sure as my name’s a queer one, and him a
Secretary of State at War.”
“He is not Secretary at War now, Husnuggle, though he may be again. Who
can tell, when Governments are always changing and Cabinets being made
and remade?”
“A-cabinet-making he went as a boy, and cut his fingers cruel, and the
Wraye Abbey housekeeper fainted dead away at the sight of the blood,
they said!--and the head-house-maid gave notice at being asked for
cobwebs, which she vowed and declared not one were to be found in the
place, though answer for attics how can you? And he had my name pat,
Miss Ada, so soon as I answered the door. ‘Halloa, Husnuggle!’ he says;
‘so you’ve come up from Peakshire to help nurse the sick governesses?’
And I says: ‘Yes, Master Robert, and it’s like the good old times come
back, to see your handsome, smiling face again.’ And you’ll come to him
in a few minutes?”
“The minutes have passed, Husnuggle, while you have been talking. I am
going down to Mr. Bertham now.”
She found him in a little ground-floor parlor, sacred to accounts and
the semi-private interviews accorded by the Lady Superintendent to
shabby-genteel visitors with hungry faces (growing still more wan as
the tale of penury was told) and smartish visitors with impudent faces,
apt to flush uncomfortably under the keen scrutiny of those blue-gray
eyes. It was plainly but comfortably furnished, and a red fire glowed
in its grate of shining steel, and a plump and sleek and well-contented
cat dozed happily upon its hearthrug.
You saw Bertham as a tall, lightly-built man of barely thirty, with a
bright, spirited, handsome face and a frank, gay, cordial manner. No
trace of the pompousness of the ex-Secretary of State either in his
appearance, voice or handshake: a warm and cordial grip was to be had
from Bertham; or, in default of this, a brusque nod that said: “You are
objectionable, and I prefer to keep clean hands!”
He was striding lightly up and down the little parlor, with the loose
ends of his black satin cravat--voluminous, according to the fashion of
the time--floating behind him; and each time he covered the distance
from the hearthrug to the muslin-blinded window he would stop, look
impatiently at his watch, and recommence his walk.
She said, standing in the doorway, watching him do this:
“You are not in a genuine hurry, or you would not be here at all.”
“Ada!” He turned with a look of glad relief, and as she noiselessly
closed the door and came to meet him, he took both the womanly cordial
hands she held out to him, and pressed them in his own. “It does one
good to see you. It does one good even to know you anchored here in
Cavendish Street, and not flying from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to
Rome, from Rome to Heaven-knows-where--comparing foreign systems of
Hospital management and sanitation with our own, and finding ours
everywhere to be hopelessly out of date, and inferior, and wrong....”
“As it is!” she said--“And is it not time we knew it? so that we can
prove those mistaken who say, _‘To be insular is to be strong, perhaps,
but at the same time it is to be narrow-minded.’_”
“Ah! Ada, Ada!” he said, and his sweet and mellow voice had sadness in
it. “If we all lived up to your standard, the Millennium would have
come, and Governments would cease from troubling, and War Secretaries
would be at rest.”
“Are you not at rest just now?” she asked, and added, even before he
shook his head: “But no! You are overworked; your face shows it.”
“Mary said so this morning,” he answered; “but if my looks pity me, as
Peakshire folk would say, I feel fit and well.”
“Where is my Mary?” she asked. “Why have you not brought her?”
“Mary has flown down to Hayshire,” he said, “on the wings of the
Portsmouth Express. One of the crippled children at the Home was to be
operated on, under chloroform, for the removal of a portion of diseased
hip-bone; and though my wife shrank from the ordeal of seeing pain,
even dulled by the anæsthetic, she felt it was her duty to be upon the
spot.”
“Dear Mary!” she said, and if Dunoisse had seen her face he would no
longer have thought it lacking in warmth and color: “True, good, noble
woman.”
Bertham answered, with feeling in his own face and voice:
“The dearest, living!... the noblest I ever knew--but one, Ada!”
She passed the words as though she had not heard, and said, with the
soft, clear laugh that had music in it for the ears of those who loved
her, and this man was one of the many:
“Husnuggle was made so happy by your not forgetting her, poor good
soul!”
“Her face conjured up Wraye Rest,” he said, “and the yew-tree gateway
between the park and the garden; and the green terraces with the
apple-espaliers and the long borders of lavender-bushes; and Darth down
at the bottom of the deep valley, foaming over her bed of limestone
rock, and the steep paths down to the trout-pools that were easier to
tread than the slippery ways of Diplomacy.”
“One can always go back!” she returned, though her sigh for all the
distant sweetness had echoed his, “either to my dear Wraye Rest or your
own peculiar Eden of Wraye Abbey.”
“Taking our respective loads of aims and ambitions and responsibilities
with us,” said Bertham. “My badly-housed Military Invalid Pensioners
for whom I want tight roofs, and dry walls, and comfortable beds. My
Sandhurst Cadets, trussed up in absurd trappings, and harassed with
rules as trumpery--hide-bound with conditions quite as detrimental
to health as their cut-and-dried discipline, and innumerable
supererogatory belts, straps, and buckles. My Regimental Schools, where
illiterate soldiers and their wives are to learn to read and write
and cipher; and my Infants’ Classes, where the soldier’s children may
be taught as well. My Improved Married Quarters, which should--but do
not, more’s the pity!--occupy a separate block in every Barracks in
the Kingdom, where the women and their men may live in decent privacy,
and not under conditions not at all distantly recalling--to our shame!
and the Red Tapeism that preserves these conditions in their unadorned
and ancient ugliness ought to blush the redder for it!--the primitive
promiscuities of the Stone Age. With a distinct bias in favor of that
period!”
* * * * *
His handsome face was bitter and dark with anger; his voice, though
barely raised above the level of ordinary fireside chat, rang and
vibrated with passionate indignation.
“It has been borne in on me, Ada, in God knows how many hours
of weariness and bitter disappointment, that our Peninsular
triumphs--achieved in what we are accustomed to call the good old
days--are a heavy clog upon our advancement as a nation now, and a
cloud upon our eyes. They were not good old days, Ada, as windbaggy
orators like to call them; they were bad old days, inhuman old days,
cruel old days, when Napoleon Bonaparte possessed France upon a bridal
bed of bloody corpses; and ragged, underfed, untaught, unsheltered
soldiers upheld, in what neglect, what misery and suffering, you and
I can barely realize, amidst Famine and Slaughter and Pestilence and
Devastation hideous and indescribable, the traditional glory of the
British nation, the strength and fire and power of British Arms. Let us
have done with the pride of those days! Let us cease to boast of them!
Let us prove our advancement in Civilization, Humanity, and Science
by no longer treating these our fellow-creatures as human pawns in a
devilish game of chess, or as thoughtless children treat toy-soldiers;
to be moved hither and thither at will, swept off the board when
necessary, and jostled promiscuously into dark and stuffy boxes until
we are pleased to call for them again! Since Great Britain owes so
much to her Army and her Navy, let her treat the men who serve her by
land and sea with respect, and decent consideration. And in so far as
Governments and Administrations of the old days ignored their rights to
honest, humane, and Christian usage, let us have done with those damned
old days forever, and while the life is red in us, hurry on the new!”
“They cannot come too quickly!” she said, giving back his earnest look.
“Surely by raising the moral tone, cultivating the mental faculties,
and improving the social condition of the private soldier, he is nerved
and tempered, not softened and unstrung.”
“As it is we owe him honor,” said Bertham, “that, with so many
disadvantages as he labors under to-day, and in the face of the bad
example too often set him as to moral conduct and neglect of duty by
his superiors, he is what we know him to be!”
“Ah, that is true--most true!” she answered, breaking the silence
in which she had sat listening to the silvery voice of which even
Bertham’s enemies admitted the singular charm. “May the day soon dawn
when we shall see him what we hope he will become!”
“There will be a dark night before its dawning,” Bertham returned, and
his smile had sadness in its very brilliancy. “For England must lose
much to win that more, be assured.”
He added as his look met hers, seeing the slight bewildered knitting of
her eyebrows:
“There is a grand old white head nodding at the upper end of the Green
Council Board at the War Office, or soundly sleeping, in the inner
sanctum at the covered passage-end that has always been known as the
office of the Commander-in-Chief,--that Britain, in her gratitude
and loyal regard and tender reverence for its great owner,--and God
forbid that I should rob him of one jot or tittle of what has been
so gloriously won!--has left there long years since the brain within
it became incapable, by the natural and inevitable decay of its once
splendid faculties, of planning and carrying out any wholesome,
needful reform in our Army’s organization--even of listening to those
who have suggestions to offer, or plans to submit, with anything but
an old man’s testy impatience of what seems new. This is deplored by
personages nominally subordinate, really wielding absolute power. ‘Sad,
sad!’ they say, ‘but the nation would have it so.’ Yet little more
than a year ago, when, as by a miracle, the strength and vigor of the
old warrior’s prime seemed, if only for an instant, to have returned
to him--when the dim fires of the gray eagle-glance blazed out again,
and the trembling hand, strung to vigor for the nonce, penned that
most electrifying letter,--published a few weeks back by what the New
England Party regard as a wise stroke of policy, and Officialdom as
an unpardonable indiscretion,--that letter declaring the country’s
defenses to be beggarly and inadequate, its naval arsenals neglected,
its dockyards undermanned, its forts not half-garrisoned.... What sort
of criticism did it evoke? Those who were openly antagonistic declared
it to be preposterous; those who were loyal treated its utterances with
contemptuous, galling indulgence.... To me it was as though a prophetic
voice had spoken in warning from the tomb! And even before the graven
stone sinks down over the weary old white head, Ada, and the laurels
are withered that lie above, the country he loved and served so grandly
may be doing pennance in dust and ashes for that warning it despised!”
“And if the War-call sounded to-morrow,” she said, with her intent look
upon him, and her long white fingers knitted about her knee, “and the
need arose--as it would arise--for a man of swift decision and vigorous
action to lead us in the field--upon whom would we rely? Who would
step into the breach, and wield the _baton_?”
“A man,” returned Bertham, “sixty-six years old, who served on the
Duke’s staff and lost his left arm at Waterloo; who has never held any
command or had any experience of directing troops in War, and whose
life, for forty years or so, has been spent in the discharge of the
duties, onerous but not active, devolving upon a Military Secretary.
The whole question as to fitness or not fitness turns upon an ‘if.’”
The speaker spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly, and
a whimsical spark of humor gleamed in the look he turned upon the
listener, as a star might shine through the wild blue twilight of a day
of gale and storm, as he resumed:
“If the possession of the Wellingtonian manner,--combined with an
empty sleeve--all honor to the brave arm that used to be inside it!--a
manner full of urbanity and courtesy--nicely graduated and calculated
according to the rank and standing of the person addressed; and
admirable command of two Continental languages, and a discreet but
distinct appreciation of high company and good living, unite to make an
ideal Commander-in-Chief, why, Dalgan will be the man of men!...”
“But surely we need something more,” she said, meeting Bertham’s glance
with doubt and questioning.
“Something indeed!” he returned dryly. “But be kind to me, and let me
forget my bogies for a little in hearing of all the good that you have
done and mean to do.... Tell me of your experiences at Kaiserswerke
amongst the Lutheran Deaconesses--tell me about your visit to the
Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul at the Hospital of the Charité, or your
sojourn with the _dames religieuses_ of St. Augustine at the Hôtel
Dieu. Or tell me about your ancient, super-annuated, used-governesses.
I should like to know something of them, poor old souls!...”
* * * * *
“They are not all old,” she explained, “though many of them are
used-up, and all, or nearly all, are incapable; and Bertham, with a
very few exceptions, sensible and ladylike as most of them are, they
are so grossly ignorant of the elementary principles of education
that one wonders how the poor pretense of teaching was kept up at
all? And how it was that common honesty did not lead them to take
service as housemaids? and how the parents of their pupils--Heaven help
them!--could have been blind enough to confide the training of their
children to such feeble, incompetent hands?”
“It is a crying evil,” said Bertham, “or, rather, a whimpering one, and
needs to be dealt with. One day we will change all that.... As to these
sick and sorrowful women, the generation that will rise up to take
their places will be qualified, I hope, to teach, by having learned;
and the quality of their teaching will, I hope again, be guaranteed by
a University diploma. And, superior knowledge having ceased to mean
the temporary possession of the lesson-book, children will learn to
treat their teachers with respect, and we shall hear fewer tales of the
despised governess.”
She returned, glancing at Bertham’s handsome, resolute face, and noting
the many fine lines beginning to draw themselves about the corners of
the eyes and mouth, the worn hollows of the temples and cheekbones, and
the deepening caves from which the brilliant eyes looked out in scorn,
or irony, or appealing, ingratiating gentleness.
* * * * *
“All governesses are not despised or despicable. There are many
instances, Robert, where the integrity and conscientiousness of the
poor dependent gentlewoman has held up a standard of conduct for the
pupil, well or ill taught, to follow which has borne good fruit in
after-years. We have a worthy lady here, a governess long resident
in Paris, against whose exquisite French I polish up my own when I
have time--a rather scarce commodity in this house!... Miss Caroline
Smithwick has been cast on the mercy of the world in her old age, after
many years of faithful service, because she dared tell her wealthy
employer that a claim he pursued and pressed was dishonest and base.
The man’s son thinks with her, and has chosen to be poor rather than
profit by riches--and, I gather, rank--so gained. It is a wholesome
story,” she said, “and when he told me to-day of his intention to
support the gentle old soul who was so true to him, out of his pay as
an officer of the French Army,--I could have clapped my hands and cried
aloud--but I did not,--for the Superintendent of a Governesses’ Home
must be, above all, discreet;--_‘Bravo, M. Hector Dunoisse!’_”
“‘Dunoisse, Dunoisse’?” He turned the name upon his tongue several
times over, as though its flavor were in some measure familiar to
him. “Dunoisse.... Can it be a son of the dyed and painted and padded
old lion, with false claws and teeth and a name from the wigmaker’s,
who was Bonaparte’s _aide_ at Marengo and cut a dashing figure at
the Tuileries in 1804? The Emperor created him Field-Marshal after
Austerlitz, and small blame to him!... He ran away with a Bavarian
Princess after the Restoration--a Princess who happened to be a
professed nun, and somewhere about 1828, when the son of their union
may have been seven or eight years old,--when the Throne of St. Louis
was rocking under that cumbersome old wooden puppet Charles X.,--when
the tricolor was on the point of breaking out at the top of every
national flagstaff in France,--when you got a whiff of violets from the
button-hole of every Imperialist who passed you in the street,--when
the Catholic religion was about to be once more deprived of State
protection and popular support, Marshal Dunoisse, swashbuckling old
Bonapartist that he is, reclaimed the lady’s large dowry from her
Convent, and with the aid of De Martignac, Head of the Ministry of that
date, succeeded in getting it.”
“It is the son of the very man you describe,” she told him; “who
visited his old governess here to-day.”
Bertham shrugged his shoulders, and, leaning down, silently stroked the
sleek cat, white-pawed and whiskered, and coated in Quaker gray, that
lay outstretched at ease upon the hearthrug. But his eyes were on the
woman’s face the while.
“So that was it!” she said, leaning back in the low fireside chair
she had taken when Bertham wheeled it forwards. Her musing eyes were
fixed upon the red coals glowing in the old-world grate of polished
steel. Perhaps the vivid face with the black eyes burning under their
level brows rose up before her; and it might have been that she heard
Dunoisse’s voice saying, through the purring of the cat upon the
hearthrug and the subdued noises of the street:
“_May the hour that sees me spend a sou of that accursed money be an
hour of shame for me, and bitterness and humiliation! And should ever
a day draw near that is to see me trick myself in dignities and honors
stolen by a charlatan’s device and assume a power to which I have no
more moral right than the meanest peasant of the State it rules--before
its dawning I pray that I may die! and that those who come seeking a
clod of mud to throw in the face of a Catholic State may find it lying
in a coffin!_”