The hall was dimly lighted, the fire dying out in the great fireplace,
everything shadowy, cold, without cheer or comfort. Mr. Trevanion had
been conveyed to his room between the doctor and his valet, his wife
following, as usual, in the same order and fashion as was habitual,
without any appearance of change. Rosalind, who was buried in a great
chair, nothing visible but the whiteness of her dress in the imperfect
light, and John Trevanion, who stood before the fire there as he had
done in the drawing-room, with his head a little bent, and an air of
great seriousness and concern, watched the little procession without a
word as it went across the hall. These attacks were too habitual to
cause much alarm; and the outburst of passion which preceded was,
unfortunately, common enough also. The house was not a happy house in
which this volcano was ready to burst forth at any moment, and the usual
family subterfuges to conceal the family skeleton had become of late
years quite impossible, as increasing weakness and self-indulgence had
removed all restraints of self-control from the master of the house.
They were all prepared for the outbreak at any moment, no matter who was
present. But yet there were things involved which conveyed a special
sting to-night. When the little train had passed, the two spectators in
the hall remained for some time quite silent, with a heaviness and
oppression upon them which, perhaps, the depressing circumstances
around, the want of light and warmth and brightness, increased. They did
not, as on ordinary occasions, return to the drawing-room. For some time
they said nothing to each other. By intervals a servant flitted across
the hall, from one room to another, or the opening of a door roused
these watchers for a moment; but presently everything fell back into
stillness and the chill of the gathering night.
“Rosalind, I think you should go to bed--”
“Oh, Uncle John, how can I go to bed? How can any one in this house rest
or sleep?”
“My dear, I admit that the circumstances are not very cheerful. Still,
you are more or less accustomed to them; and we shall sleep all the
same, no doubt, just as we should sleep if we were all to be executed
to-morrow.”
“Should we? but not if some one else, some one we loved--was to
be--executed, as you say.”
“Perhaps that makes a little difference: while the condemned man sleeps,
I suppose his mother or his sister, poor wretches, are wakeful enough.
But there is nothing of that kind in our way, my little Rose. Come! it
is no worse than usual: go to bed.”
“It is worse than usual. There has never before--oh!” the girl cried,
clasping her hands together with a vehement gesture. Her misery was too
much for her: and then another sentiment came in and closed her mouth.
Uncle John was very tender and kind, but was he not on _the other side_?
“My dear,” he said gently, “I think it will be best not to discuss the
question. If there is something new in it, it will develop soon enough.
God forbid! I am little disposed, Rosalind, to think that there is
anything new.”
She did not make any reply. Her heart was sore with doubt and suspicion;
the more strange these sentiments, all the more do they scorch and
sting. In the whirl which they introduced into her mind she had been
trying in vain to get any ground to stand upon. There might have been
explanations; but then how easy to give them, and settle the question.
It is terrible, in youth, to be thrown into such a conflict of mind, and
all the more to one who has never been used to think out anything alone,
who has shared with another every thought that arose in her, and
received on everything the interchanged ideas of a mind more
experienced, wiser, than her own. She was thus suddenly cut off from her
anchors, and felt herself drifting on wild currents unknown to her,
giddy, as if buffeted by wind and tide--though seated there within the
steadfast walls of an old house which had gone through all extremities
of human emotion, and never quivered, through hundreds of troublous
years.
“I think,” said John Trevanion, after a pause, “that it would be good
for you to have a little change. Home, of course, is the best place for
a girl. Still, it is a great strain upon young nerves. I wonder we none
of us have ever thought of it before. Your aunt Sophy would be glad to
have you, and I could take you there on my way. I really think,
Rosalind, this would be the best thing you could do. Winter is closing
in, and in present circumstances it is almost impossible to have
visitors at Highcourt. Even young Hamerton, how much he is in the way;
though he is next to nobody, a young fellow! Come! you must not stay
here to wear your nerves to fiddlestrings. I must take you away.”
She looked up at him with an earnest glance which he was very conscious
of, but did not choose to meet. “Why at this moment above all others?”
she said.
“Why? that goes without saying, Rosalind. Your father, to my mind, has
never been so bad; and your-- I mean Madam--”
“You mean my mother, Uncle John. Well! is she not my mother? I have
never known any other. Poor dear little mamma was younger than I am. I
never knew her. She is an angel in heaven, and she cannot be jealous of
any one on earth. So you think that because papa has never been so ill,
and my mother never had so much to bear, it would be the right thing for
me, the eldest, the one that can be of most use, to go away?”
“She has her own children, Rosalind.”
“Yes, to be sure. Rex, who is at school, and knows about as much of what
she needs as the dogs do; and little Sophy, who is barely nine. You must
think very little of Rosalind, uncle, if you think these children can
make up for me.”
“I think a great deal of Rosalind; but we must be reasonable. I thought
a woman’s own children, however little worth they may be in themselves,
were more to her than any one else’s. Perhaps I am wrong, but that’s in
all the copybooks.”
“You want to make me believe,” said Rosalind, with passion, “that I am
nobody’s child, that I have no right to love or any home in all the
world!”
“My dear! this is madness, Rose. There is your father: and I hope even I
count for something; you are the only child I shall ever love. And your
aunt Sophy, for whom, in fact, I am pleading, gives you a sort of
adoration.”
She got up hastily out of the great gloomy house of a chair and came
into the dim centre of light in which he stood, and clasped his arm with
her hands. “Uncle John,” she said, speaking very fast and almost
inarticulately, “I am very fond of you. You have always been so good and
kind; but I am her, and she is me. Don’t you understand? I have always
been with her since I was a child. Nobody but me has seen her cry and
break down. I know her all through and through. I think her thoughts,
not my own. There are no secrets between us. She does not require even
to speak, I know what she means without that. There are no secrets
between her and me--”
“No secrets,” he said; “no secrets! Rosalind, are you so very sure of
that--now?”
Her hands dropped from his arm: she went back and hid herself, as if
trying to escape from him and herself in the depths of the great chair;
and then there burst from her bosom, in spite of her, a sob--suppressed,
restrained, yet irrestrainable--the heaving of a bosom filled to
overflowing with unaccustomed misery and pain.
John Trevanion did not take advantage of this piteous involuntary
confession. He paused a little, being himself somewhat overcome. “My
dear little girl,” he said at last, “I am talking of no terrible
separation. People who are the most devoted to each other, lovers even,
have to quit each other occasionally, and pay a little attention to
other ties. Come! you need not take this so tragically. Sophy is always
longing for you. Your father’s sister, and a woman alone in the world;
don’t you think she has a claim too?”
Rosalind had got herself in check again while he was speaking. “You mean
a great deal more than that,” she said.
Once more he was silent. He knew very well that he meant a great deal
more than that. He meant that his niece should be taken away from the
woman who was not her mother, a woman of whom he himself had no manner
of doubt, yet who, perhaps--how could any one tell?--was getting weary
of her thankless task, and looking forward to the freedom to come. John
Trevanion’s mind was not much more at rest than that of Rosalind. He had
never been supposed to be a partisan of his brother’s wife, but perhaps
his abstention from all enthusiasm on this subject was out of too much,
not too little feeling. He had been prejudiced against her at first; but
his very prejudice had produced a warm revulsion of feeling in her
favor, when he saw how she maintained her soul, as she went over the
worse than red-hot ploughshares of her long ordeal. It would have
injured, not helped her with her husband, had he taken her part; and
therefore he had refrained with so much steadiness and gravity, that to
Rosalind he had always counted as on the other side. But in his heart he
had never been otherwise than on the side of the brave woman who,
whether her motives had been good or bad in accepting that place, had
nevertheless been the most heroic of wives, the tenderest of mothers. It
gave him a tender pleasure to be challenged and defied by the generous
impetuosity of Rosalind, all in arms for the mother of her soul.
But--there was a but, terrible though it was to acknowledge it--he had
recognized, as soon as he arrived on this visit, before any indication
of suspicion had been given, that there was some subtile change in Madam
Trevanion--something furtive in her eye, a watchfulness, a standing on
her guard, which had never been there before. It revolted and horrified
him to doubt his sister-in-law; he declared to himself with anxious
earnestness that he did not, never would or could doubt her; and yet, in
the same breath, with that terrible indulgence which comes with
experience, began in an under-current of thought to represent to himself
her terrible provocations, the excuses she would have, the temptations
to which she might be subject. A man gets his imagination polluted by
the world even when he least wishes it. In the upper-current of his
soul he believed in her with faith unbounded; but underneath was a
little warping eddy, a slimy under-draught which brought up silently the
apologies, the reasons, the excuses for her. And if, by any
impossibility, it should be so, then was it not essential that Rosalind,
too pure to imagine, too young to know any evil or what it meant, or how
it could be, should be withdrawn? But he was no more happy than Rosalind
was, in the conflict of painful thoughts.
“Yes; I mean more than that,” he resumed, after an interval. “I mean
that this house, at present, is not a comfortable place. You must see
now that even you cannot help Mrs. Trevanion much in what she has to go
through. I feel myself entirely _de trop_. No sympathy I could show her
would counter-balance the pain she must feel in having always present
another witness of your father’s abuse--”
“Sympathy!” said Rosalind, with surprise. “I never knew you had any
sympathy. I have always considered you as on the other side.”
“Does she think so?” he asked quickly, with a sharp sound of pain in his
voice; then recollected himself in another moment. “Ah, well,” he said,
“that’s natural, I suppose; the husband’s family are on his side--yes,
yes, no doubt she has thought so: the more right am I in my feeling that
my presence just now must be very distasteful. And even you, Rosalind;
think what she must feel to have all that dirt thrown at her in your
presence. Do you think the privilege of having a good cry, as you say,
when you are alone together, makes up to her for the knowledge that you
are hearing every sort of accusation hurled at her head? I believe in my
heart,” he added hurriedly, with a fictitious fervor, “that it would be
the greatest relief possible to her to have the house to herself, and
see us all, you included, go away.”
Rosalind did not make any reply. She gazed at him from her dark corner
with dilated eyes, but he did not see the trouble of her look, nor
divine the sudden stimulus his words had given to the whirl of her
miserable thoughts. She said to herself that her mother would know,
whoever doubted her, that Rosalind never would doubt; and at the same
time there came a wondering horror of a question whether indeed her
mother would be glad to be rid of her, to have her out of the way, to
keep her at least unconscious of the other thing, the secret, perhaps
the wrong, that was taking place in those dark evening hours? Might it
be, as Uncle John said, better to fly, to turn her back upon any
revelation, to refuse to know what it was. The anguish of this conflict
of thought tore her unaccustomed heart in twain. And then she tried to
realize what the house would be without her, with that profound yet
perfectly innocent self-importance of youth which is at once so futile
and so touching. So sometimes a young creature dying will imagine, with
far more poignant regret than for any suffering of her own, the blank of
the empty room, the empty chair, the melancholy vacancy in the house,
when she or he has gone hence and is no more. Rosalind saw the great
house vacant of herself with a feeling that was almost more than she
could bear. When her mother came out of the sick-room, to whom would she
go for the repose, the soothing of perfect sympathy--upon whom would she
lean when her burden was more than she could bear? When Sophy’s lessons
were over, where would the child go? Who would write to Rex, and keep
upon the schoolboy the essential bond of home? Who would play with the
babies in the nursery when their mother was too much occupied to see
them? Mamma would have nobody but Russell, who hated her, and her own
maid Jane, who was like her shadow, and all the indifferent servants who
cared about little but their own comfort. As she represented all these
details of the picture to herself, she burst forth all at once into the
silence with a vehement “No, no!” John Trevanion had fallen into
thought, and the sound of her voice made him start. “No, no!” she cried,
“do you think, Uncle John, I am of so little use? Everybody, even papa,
would want me. Sometimes he will bid me sit down, that I am something
to look at, something not quite so aggravating as all the rest. Is not
that something for one’s father to say? And what would the children do
without me, and Duckworth, who cannot always see mamma about the dinner?
No, no, I am of use here, and it is my place. Another time I can go to
Aunt Sophy--later on, when papa is--better--when things are going
smoothly,” she said, with a quiver in her voice, holding back. And just
then the distant door of Mr. Trevanion’s room opened and closed, and the
doctor appeared, holding back the heavy curtains that screened away
every draught from the outer world.