Next day, as they drove out in the usual afternoon hour while Mr.
Trevanion took his nap after luncheon, a little incident happened which
was nothing, yet gave Rosalind, who was alone with her stepmother in the
carriage, a curious sensation. A little way out of the village, on the
side of the road, she suddenly perceived a man standing, apparently
waiting till they should pass. Madam had been very silent ever since
they left home, so much more silent than it was her habit to be that
Rosalind feared she had done something to incur Mrs. Trevanion’s
displeasure. Instead of the animated conversations they used to have,
and the close consultations that were habitual between them, they sat by
each other silent, scarcely exchanging a word in a mile. Rosalind was
not herself a great talker, but when she was with this other and better
self, she flowed forth in lively observation and remark, which was not
talk, but the involuntary natural utterance which came as easily as her
breath. This day, however, she had very little to say, and Madam
nothing. They leaned back, each in her corner, with a blank between
them, which Rosalind now and then tried to break with a wistful question
as to whether mamma was cold, whether she did not find the air too keen,
if she would like the carriage closed, etc., receiving a smile and a
brief reply, but no more. They had fallen into silence almost absolute
as they passed through the village, and it was when they emerged once
more into the still country road that the incident which has been
referred to took place. Some time before they came up to him, Rosalind
remarked the man standing under one of the hedgerow trees, close against
it, looking towards them, as if waiting for the carriage to pass. Though
she was not eager for the tales of the village like Sophy, Rosalind had
a country girl’s easily roused curiosity in respect to a stranger. She
knew at once by the outline of him, before she could make out even what
class he belonged to, that this was some one she had never seen before.
As the carriage approached rapidly she grew more and more certain. He
was a young man, a gentleman--at least his dress and attitude were like
those of a gentleman; he was slim and straight, not like the country
louts. As he turned his head towards the carriage, Rosalind thought she
had never seen a more remarkable face. He was very pale; his features
were large and fine, and his pallor and thinness were made more
conspicuous by a pair of very large, dreamy, uncertain dark eyes. These
eyes were looking so intently towards the carriage that Rosalind had
almost made up her mind that there was to be some demand upon their
sympathy, some petition or appeal. She could not help being stirred with
all the impetuosity of her nature, frank and warm-hearted and generous,
towards this poor gentleman. He looked as if he had been ill, as if he
meant to throw himself upon their bounty, as if-- The horses sped on with
easy speed as she sat up in the carriage and prepared herself for
whatever might happen. It is needless to say that nothing happened as
far as the bystander was concerned. He looked intently at them, but did
no more. Rosalind was so absorbed in a newly awakened interest that she
thought of nothing else, till suddenly, turning round to her companion,
she met--not her stepmother’s sympathetic countenance, but the blackness
of a veil in which Mrs. Trevanion had suddenly enveloped herself. “That
must surely be the gentleman Sophy was talking of,” she said. Madam gave
a slight shiver in her furs. “It is very cold,” she said; “it has grown
much colder since we came out.”
“Shall I tell Robert to close the carriage, mother?”
“Oh, no, it is unnecessary. You can tell him to go home by the Wildwood
gate. I should not have come out if I had known it was so cold.”
“I hope you have not taken cold, mamma. To me the air seems quite soft.
I suppose,” Rosalind said, in that occasional obtuseness which belongs
to innocence, “you did not notice, as you put down your veil just then,
that gentleman on the road? I think he must be the gentleman Sophy
talked about--very pale, with large eyes. I think he must have been ill.
I feel quite interested in him too.”
“No, I did not observe--”
“I wish you had noticed him, mamma. I should know him again anywhere; it
is quite a remarkable face. What can he want in the village? I think you
should make the doctor call, or send papa’s card. If he should be ill--”
“Rosalind, you know how much I dislike village gossip. A stranger in the
inn can be nothing to us. There is Dr. Smith if he wants anything,” said
Madam, hurriedly, almost under her breath. And she shivered again, and
drew her furred mantle more closely round her. Though it was November,
the air was soft and scarcely cold at all, Rosalind thought in her young
hardiness; but then Mrs. Trevanion, shut up so much in an overheated
room, naturally was more sensitive to cold.
This was in the afternoon; and on the same evening there occurred the
incident of the bramble, and all the misery that followed, concluding
in Mr. Trevanion’s attack, and the sudden gloom and terror thrown upon
the house. Rosalind had no recollection of so trifling a matter in the
excitement and trouble that followed. She saw her stepmother again only
in the gray of the winter morning, when waking suddenly, with that sense
of some one watching her which penetrates the profoundest sleep, she
found Mrs. Trevanion seated by her bedside, extremely pale, with dark
lines under her eyes, and the air of exhaustion which is given by a
sleepless night.
“I came to tell you, dear, that your father, at last, is getting a
little sleep,” she said.
“Oh, mamma-- But you have had no sleep--you have been up all night!”
“That does not much matter. I came to say also, Rosalind, that I fear my
being so late last night and his impatience had a great deal to do with
bringing on the attack. It might be almost considered my fault.”
“Oh, mamma! we all know,” cried Rosalind, inexpressibly touched by the
air with which she spoke, “how much you have had to bear.”
“No more than what was my duty. A woman when she marries accepts all the
results. She may not know what there will be to bear, but whatever it is
it is all involved in the engagement. She has no right to shrink--”
There was a gravity, almost solemnity, in Madam’s voice and look which
awed the girl. She seemed to be making a sort of formal and serious
explanation. Rosalind had seen her give way under her husband’s cruelty
and exactions. She had seen her throw herself upon the bed and weep,
though there had never been a complaint in words to blame the father to
the child. This was one point in which, and in which alone, the fact
that Rosalind was his daughter, and not hers, had been apparent. Now
there was no accusation, but something like a statement, formal and
solemn, which was explained by the exhaustion and calm as of despair
that was in her face.
“That has been my feeling all through,” she said. “I wish you to
understand it, Rosalind. If Reginald were at home--well, he is a boy,
and I could not explain to him as I can to you. I want you to understand
me; I have had more to bear, a great deal more, than I expected. But I
have always said to myself it was in the day’s work. You may perhaps be
tempted to think, looking back, that I have had, even though he has been
so dependent upon me, an irritating influence. Sometimes I have myself
thought so, and that some one else-- But if you will put one thing to
another,” she added, going on in the passionless, melancholy argument,
“you will perceive that the advantage to him of my knowledge of all his
ways counter-balances any harm that might arise from that; and then
there is always the doubt whether any one else would not have been
equally irritating after a time.”
“Mother,” cried Rosalind, who had raised herself in her bed and was
gazing anxiously into the pale and worn-out face which was turned half
away from her, not looking at her; “mother! why do you say all this to
me? Do I want you to explain yourself, I who know that you have been the
best, the kindest--”
Mrs. Trevanion did not look at her, but put up her hand to stop this
interruption.
“I am saying this because I think your father is very ill, Rosalind.”
“Worse, mamma?”
“I have myself thought that he was growing much weaker. We flattered
ourselves, you know, that to be so long without an attack was a great
gain; but I have felt he was growing weaker, and I see now that Dr.
Beaton agrees with me. And to have been the means of bringing on this
seizure when he was so little able to bear it--”
“Oh, mamma! how can you suppose that any one would ever blame--”
“I am my own judge, Rosalind. No, you would not blame me, not now at
least, when you are entirely under my influence. I think, however, that
had it not been this it would have been something else. Any trifling
matter would have been enough. Nothing that we could have done would
have staved it off much longer. That is my conviction. I have worked out
the question, oh, a hundred times within myself. Would it be better to
go away, and acknowledge that I could not-- I was doing as much harm as
good--”
Rosalind here seized upon Mrs. Trevanion’s arm, clasping it with her
hands, with a cry of “Go away! leave us, mother!” in absolute
astonishment and dismay.
“And so withdraw the irritation. But then with the irritation I should
have deprived him of a great deal of help. And there was always the
certainty that no other could do so much, and that any other would soon
become an irritation too. I have argued the whole thing out again and
again. And I think I am right, Rosalind. No one else could have been at
his disposal night and day like his wife. And if no one but his wife
could have annoyed him so much, the one must be taken with the other.”
“You frighten me, mamma; is it so very serious? And you have done
nothing--nothing?”
Here Mrs. Trevanion for the first time turned and looked into Rosalind’s
face.
“Yes,” she said. There was a faint smile upon her lips, so faint that it
deepened rather than lightened the gravity of her look. She shook her
head and looked tenderly at Rosalind with this smile. “Ah, my dear,” she
said, “you would willingly make the best of it; but I have done
something. Not, indeed, what he thinks, what perhaps other people think,
but something I ought not to have done.” A deep sigh followed, a long
breath drawn from the inmost recesses of her breast to relieve some pain
or pressure there. “Something,” she continued, “that I cannot help,
that, alas! I don’t want to do; although I think it is my duty, too.”
And then she was silent, sitting absorbed in her own thoughts by
Rosalind’s bed. The chilly winter morning had come in fully as she
talked till now the room was full of cold daylight, ungenial, unkindly,
with no pleasure in it. Rosalind in her eager youth, impatient of
trouble, and feeling that something must be done or said to make an end
of all misery, that it was not possible there could be no remedy, held
her mother’s hand between hers, and cried and kissed it and asked a
hundred questions. But Madam sat scarcely moving, her mind absorbed in a
labyrinth from which she saw no way of escape. There seemed no remedy
either for the ills that were apparent or those which nobody knew.
“You ought at least to be resting,” the girl said at last; “you ought to
get a little sleep. I will get up and go to his room and bring you word
if he stirs.”
“He will not stir for some time. No, I am not going to bed. After I have
bathed my face Jane will get me a cup of tea, and I shall go down again.
No, I could not sleep. I am better within call, so that if he wants
me-- But I could not resist the temptation of coming in to speak to you,
Rosalind. I don’t know why--just an impulse. We ought not to do things
by impulse, you know, but alas! some of us always do. You will remember,
however, if necessary. Somehow,” she said, with a pathetic smile, her
lips quivering as she turned to the girl’s eager embrace, “you seem more
my own child, Rosalind, more my champion, my defender, than those who
are more mine.”
“Nothing can be more yours, mother, all the more that we chose each
other. We were not merely compelled to be mother and child.”
“Perhaps there is something in that,” said Mrs. Trevanion.
“And the others are so young; only I of all your children am old enough
to understand you,” cried Rosalind, throwing herself into her
stepmother’s arms. They held each other for a moment closely in that
embrace which is above words, which is the supreme expression of human
emotion and sympathy, resorted to when all words fail, and yet which
explains nothing, which leaves the one as far as ever from understanding
the other, from divining what is behind the veil of individuality which
separates husband from wife and mother from child. Then Mrs. Trevanion
rose and put Rosalind softly back upon her pillow and covered her up
with maternal care as if she had been a child. “I must not have you
catch cold,” she said, with a smile which was her usual motherly smile
with no deeper meaning in it. “Now go to sleep, my love, for another
hour.”
In her own room Madam exchanged a few words with Jane, who had also been
up all night, and who was waiting for her with the tea which is a tired
watcher’s solace. “You must do all for me to-day, Jane,” she said; “I
cannot leave Mr. Trevanion; I will not, which is more. I have been,
alas! partly the means of bringing on this attack.”
“Oh, Madam, how many attacks have there been before without any cause!”
“That is a little consolation to me; still, it is my fault. Tell him how
unsafe it is to be here, how curious the village people are, and that I
implore him, for my sake, if he thinks anything of that, and for God’s
sake, to go away. What can we do more? Tell him what we have both told
him a hundred times, Jane!”
“I will do what I can, Madam; but he pays no attention to me, as you
know.”
“Nor to any one,” said Madam, with a sigh. “I have thought sometimes of
telling Dr. Beaton everything; he is a kind man, he would know how to
forgive. But, alas! how could I tell if it would do good or harm?”
“Harm! only harm! He would never endure it,” the other said.
Again Mrs. Trevanion sighed; how deep, deep down was the oppression
which those long breaths attempted to relieve. “Oh,” she said, “how
happy they are that never stray beyond the limits of nature! Would not
poverty, hard work, any privation, have been better for all of us?”
“Sixteen years ago, Madam,” Jane said.