When Mrs. Trevanion came to Highcourt, she brought with her a maid who
had, during all the sixteen years of her married life, remained with her
without the slightest breach of fidelity or devotion. Jane was, the
household thought, somewhat like her mistress, a resemblance in all
likelihood founded upon the constant attendance of the one upon the
other, and the absorbing admiration, rising almost to a kind of worship,
with which Jane regarded her lady. After all, it was only in figure and
movement, not in face, that the resemblance existed. Jane was tall like
Mrs. Trevanion. She had caught something of that fine poise of the head,
something of the grace, which distinguished her mistress; but whereas
Mrs. Trevanion was beautiful, Jane was a plain woman, with somewhat
small eyes, a wide mouth, and features that were not worth considering.
She was of a constant paleness and she was marked with smallpox, neither
of which are embellishing. Still, if you happened to walk behind her
along one of the long passages, dressed in one of Madam’s old gowns, it
was quite possible that you might take her for Madam. And Jane was not a
common lady’s maid. She was entirely devoted to her mistress, not only
to her service, but to her person, living like her shadow--always in her
rooms, always with her, sharing in everything she did, even in the
nursing of Mr. Trevanion, who tolerated her presence as he tolerated
that of no one else. Jane sat, indeed, with the upper servants at their
luxurious and comfortable table, but she did not live with them. She had
nothing to do with their amusements, their constant commentary upon the
family. One or two butlers in succession--for before Mr. Trevanion gave
up all active interference in the house there had been a great many
changes in butlers--had done their best to make themselves agreeable to
Jane; but though she was always civil, she was cold, they said, as any
fish, and no progress was possible. Mrs. Jennings, the cook and
housekeeper, instinctively mistrusted the quiet woman. She was a deal
too much with her lady that astute person said. That was deserting her
own side: for do not the masters form one faction and the servants
another? The struggle of life may be conducted on more or less honorable
terms, but still a servant who does not belong to his own sphere is
unnatural, just as a master is who throws himself into the atmosphere of
the servants’ hall. The domestics felt sure that such a particular union
between the mistress and the maid could not exist in the ordinary course
of affairs, and that it must mean something which was not altogether
right. Jane never came, save for her meals, to the housekeeper’s room.
She was always up-stairs, in case, she said, that she should be wanted.
Why should she be wanted more than any other person in her position?
When now and then Mrs. Trevanion, wearied out with watching and
suffering, hurried to her room to rest, or to bathe her aching forehead,
or perhaps even to lighten the oppression of her heart by a few tears,
Jane was always there to soothe and tend and sympathize. The other
servants knew as well as Jane how much Madam had to put up with, but yet
they thought it very peculiar that a servant should be so much in her
mistress’s confidence. There was a mystery in it. It had been suspected
at first that Jane was a poor relation of Madam’s; and the others
expected jealously that this woman would be set over their heads, and
themselves humiliated under her sway. But this never took place, and the
household changed as most households change, and one set of maids and
men succeeded each other without any change in Jane. There remained a
tradition in the house that she was a sort of traitor in the camp, a
servant who was not of her own faction, but on the master’s side; but
this was all that survived of the original prejudice, and no one now
expected to be put under the domination of Jane, or regarded her with
the angry suspicion of the beginning, or supposed her to be Madam’s
relation. Jane, like Madam, had become an institution, and the present
generation of servants did not inquire too closely into matters of
history.
This was true of all save one. But there was one person in the house who
was as much an institution as Jane, or even as Jane’s mistress, with
whom nobody interfered, and whom it was impossible to think of as
dethroned or put aside from her supreme place. Russell was in the
nursery what Madam herself was in Highcourt. In that limited but
influential domain she was the mistress, and feared nobody. She had been
the chosen of the first Mrs. Trevanion, and the nurse of Rosalind, with
whom she had gone to her Aunt Sophy’s during Mr. Trevanion’s widowhood,
and in charge of whom she had returned to Highcourt when he married.
Russell knew very well that the estates were entailed and that Rosalind
could not be the heir, but yet she resented the second marriage as if it
had been a wrong done at once to herself and her charge. If Jane was of
Madam’s faction, Russell was of a faction most strenuously and sternly
antagonistic to Madam. The prejudice which had risen up against the lady
who came from abroad, and whom nobody knew, and which had died away in
the course of time, lived and survived in this woman with all the force
of the first day. She had been on the watch all these years to find out
something to the discredit of her mistress, and no doubt the sentiment
had been strengthened by the existence of Jane, who was a sort of rival
power in her own sphere, and lessened her own importance by being as
considerable a person as herself. Russell had watched these two women
with a hostile vigilance which never slackened. She was in her own
department the most admirable and trustworthy of servants, and when she
received Mrs. Trevanion’s babies into her charge, carried nothing of her
prejudice against their mother into her treatment of them. If not as
dear to her as her first charge, Rosalind, they were still her children,
Trevanions, quite separated in her mind from the idea of their mother.
Perhaps the influence of Russell accounted for certain small griefs
which Madam had to bear as one of the consequences of her constant
attendance on her husband, the indifference to her of her little
children in their earlier years. But she said to herself with a
wonderful philosophy that she could expect no less; that absorbed as she
was in her husband’s sick-room all day, it was not to be expected that
the chance moments she could give to the nursery would secure the easily
diverted regard of the babies, to whom their nurse was the principal
figure in earth and heaven. And that nurse was so good, so careful, so
devoted, that it would have been selfishness indeed to have deprived the
children of her care because of a personal grievance of this kind. “Why
should Russell dislike me so much?” she would say sometimes to Rosalind,
who tried to deny the charge, and Jane, who shook her head and could not
explain. “Oh, dear mamma, it is only her temper. She does not mean it,”
Rosalind would say. And Madam, who had so much to suffer from temper in
another quarter, did not reject the explanation. “Temper explains a
great many things,” she said, “but even that does not quite explain. She
is so good to the children and hates their mother. I feel I have a foe
in the house so long as she is here.” Rosalind had a certain love for
her nurse, notwithstanding her disapproval of her, and she looked up
with some alarm. “Do you mean to send her away?”
“Miss Rosalind,” said Jane, “my lady is right. It is a foe and nothing
less, a real enemy she has in that woman; if she would send Russell away
I’d be very glad for one.”
“You need not fear, my love,” Madam said. “Hush, Jane, if she is my foe,
you are my partisan. I will never send Russell away, Rosalind; but when
the children are grown up, if I live to see it, or if she would be so
kind as to marry, and go off in a happy way, or even if when _you_ are
married she preferred to go with you-- I think I should draw my breath
more freely. It is painful to be under a hostile eye.”
“The nurse’s eye, mamma, and you the mistress of the house!”
“It does not matter, my dear. I have always had a sympathy for Haman,
who could not enjoy his grandeur for thinking of that Jew in the gate
that was always looking at him so cynically. It gets unendurable
sometimes. You must have a very high opinion of yourself to get over the
low view taken of you by that sceptic sitting in the gate. But now I
must go to your father,” Mrs. Trevanion said. She had come up-stairs
with a headache, and had sat down by the open window to get a little
air, though the air was intensely cold and damp. It was a refreshment,
after the closeness of the room in which the invalid sat with an
unvarying temperature and every draught shut out. Rosalind stood behind
her mother’s chair with her hands upon Mrs. Trevanion’s shoulders, and
the tired woman leaned back upon the girl’s young bosom so full of life.
“But you will catch cold at the window, my Rose! No, it does me good, I
want a little air, but it is too cold for you. And now I must go back to
your father,” she said, rising. She stooped and kissed the cheek of the
girl she loved, and went away with a smile to her martyrdom. These
moments of withdrawal from her heavy duties were the consolations of her
life.
“Miss Rosalind,” said Jane, “that you should love your old nurse I don’t
say a word against it--but if ever there is a time when a blow can be
struck at my lady that woman will do it. She will never let the little
ones be here when their mamma can see them. They’re having their sleep,
or they’re out walking, or they’re at their lessons; and Miss Sophy the
same. And if ever she can do us an ill turn--”
“How could she do you an ill turn? That is, Jane, I beg your pardon, she
might, perhaps, be nasty to _you_--but, mamma! What blow, as you call
it, can be struck at mamma?”
“Oh, how can I tell?” said Jane; “I never was clever; there’s things
happening every day that no one can foresee; and when a woman is always
watching to spy out any crevice, you never can tell, Miss Rosalind, in
this world of trouble, what may happen unforeseen.”
This speech made no great impression on Rosalind’s mind at the time, but
it recurred to her after, and gave her more trouble than any wickedness
of Russell’s had power to do. In the meantime, leaving Jane, she went to
the nursery, and with the preoccupation of youth carried with her the
same subject, heedless and unthinking what conclusions Russell, whose
faculties were always alert on this question, might draw.
“Russell,” she said, after a moment, “why are you always so disagreeable
to mamma?”
“Miss Rosalind, I do hate to hear you call her mamma. Why don’t you say
‘my stepmother,’ as any other young lady would in your place?”
“Because she is not my stepmother,” said the girl, with a slight stamp
on the floor. “Just look at little Johnny, taking in all you say with
his big eyes. She is all the mother I have ever known, and I love her
better than any one in the world.”
“And just for that I can’t bear it,” cried the woman. “What would your
own dear mamma say?”
“If she were as jealous and ill-tempered as you I should not mind what
she said,” said the girl. “Don’t think, if you continue like this, you
will ever have any sympathy from me.”
“Oh, Miss Rosalind, what you are saying is as bad as swearing; worse,
it’s blasphemy; and the time will come when you’ll remember and be
sorry. No, though you think I’m a brute, I sha’n’t say anything before
the children. But the time will come--”
“What a pity you are not on the stage, Russell! You would make a fine
Meg Merrilies, or something of that kind; the old woman that is always
cursing somebody and prophesying trouble. That is just what you are
suited for. I will come and see you your first night.”
“Me! on the stage!” cried Russell, with a sense of outraged dignity
which words cannot express. Such an insult had never been offered to her
before. Rosalind went out of the room quickly, angry but laughing when
she had given this blow. She wanted to administer a stinging
chastisement, and she had done so. Her own cleverness in discovering
what would hit hardest pleased her. She began to sing, out of wrathful
indignation and pleasure, as she went down-stairs.
“Me! on the stage!” Russell repeated to herself. A respectable upper
servant in a great house could not have had a more degrading suggestion
made to her. She could have cried as she sat there gnashing her teeth.
And this too was all on account of Madam, the strange woman who had
taken her first mistress’s place even in the heart of her own child.
Perhaps if Rosalind had treated her stepmother as a stepmother ought to
be treated, Russell would have been less antagonistic; but Mrs.
Trevanion altogether was obnoxious to her. She had come from abroad; she
had brought her own maid with her, who was entirely unsociable, and
never told anything; who was a stranger, a foreigner perhaps, for
anything that was known of her, and yet was Russell’s equal, or more, by
right of Madam’s favor, though Russell had been in the house for years.
What subtle antipathy there might be besides these tangible reasons for
hating them, Russell did not know. She only knew that from the first
moment she had set eyes upon her master’s new wife she had detested her.
There was something about her that was not like other women. There must
be a secret. When had it ever been known that a maid gave up
everything--the chat, the game at cards, the summer stroll in the park,
even the elegant civilities of a handsome butler--for the love of her
mistress? It was unnatural; no one had ever heard of such a thing. What
could it be but a secret between these women which held them together,
which it was their interest to conceal from the world? But the time
would come, Russell said to herself. If she watched night and day she
should find it out; if she waited for years and years the time and
opportunity would come at last.