The house was in a curious commotion up-stairs. The nursery apartments
were at the end of a passage, but on the same level with those of Mrs.
Trevanion, in which Jane, Madam’s attendant and anxious maid, was
watching--coming out now and then to listen, or standing within the
shelter of the half-closed door. Mrs. Trevanion’s room opened into the
gallery to which the great staircase led, and from which you could look
down into the hall. The nursery was at the end of a long passage, and,
when the door was open, commanded also a view of the gallery. There many
an evening when there was fine company at Highcourt had the children
pressed to see the beautiful ladies coming out in their jewels and
finery, dressed for dinner. The spectacle now was not so imposing, but
Russell, seated near the door, watched it with concentrated interest.
She was waiting too to see what would happen, with excitement
indescribable and some terror and sense of guilt. Sometimes Jane would
do nothing more than open her mistress’s door, and wait within for any
sound or sight that might be possible. Sometimes she would step out with
a furtive, noiseless step upon the gallery, and cast a quick look round
and below into the hall, then return again noiselessly. Russell watched
all these evidences of an anxiety as intense as her own with a sense of
relief and encouragement. Jane was as eager as she was, watching over
her mistress. Why was she thus watching? If Madam had been blameless,
was it likely that any one would be on the alert like this? Russell
herself was very sure of her facts. She had collected them with the care
which hatred takes to verify its accusations; and yet cold doubts would
trouble her, and she was relieved to see her opponent, the devoted
adherent of the woman whose well-being was at stake, in a state of so
much perturbation and anxiety. It was another proof, more potent than
any of the rest. The passage which led to Russell’s domain was badly
lighted, and she could not be seen as she sat there at her post like a
spy. She watched with an intense passion which concentrated all her
thoughts. When she heard the faint little jar of the door she brightened
involuntarily. The figure of Jane--slim, dark, noiseless--standing out
upon the gallery was comfort to her very soul. The children were playing
near. Sophy, perched up at the table, was cutting out pictures from a
number of illustrated papers and pasting them into a book, an occupation
which absorbed her. The two younger children were on the floor, where
they went on with their play, babbling to each other, conscious of
nothing else. It had begun to rain, and they were kept indoors perforce.
A more peaceful scene could not be. The fire, surrounded by the high
nursery fender, burned warmly and brightly. In the background, at a
window which looked out upon the park, the nursery-maid--a still figure,
like a piece of still life but for the measured movement of her
hand--sat sewing. The little ones interchanged their eager little
volleys of talk. They were “pretending to be” some of the actors in the
bigger drama of life that went on over their heads. But their little
performance was only Comedy, and it was Tragedy incarnate, with hands
trembling too much to knit the little sock which she held, with dry lips
parted with excitement, eyes feverish and shining, and an impassioned
sense of power, of panic, and of guilt, that sat close to them in her
cap and apron at the open door.
When Rosalind’s figure flitted across the vacant scene, which was like
the stage of a theatre to Russell, her first impulse was to start up and
secure this visitor from the still more important field of battle below,
so as to procure the last intelligence how things were going; and it was
with a deepened sense of hostility, despite, and excitement that she now
saw her approached by the rival watcher. Jane arrested the young lady on
her way to her room, and they had an anxious conversation, during which
first one and then both approached the railing of the gallery and looked
over. It was all that the woman could do to restrain herself. What were
they looking at? What was going on? It is seldom that any ordinary human
creature has the consciousness of having set such tremendous forces in
motion. It might involve ruin to her mistress, death to her master. The
children whom she loved might be orphaned by her hand. But she was not
conscious of anything deeper than a latent, and not painful, though
exciting, thrill of guilt, and she was very conscious of the exultation
of feeling herself an important party in all that was going on. What had
she done? Nothing but her duty. She had warned a man who was being
deceived; she had exposed a woman who had always kept so fair an
appearance, but whom she, more clear-sighted than any one, had suspected
from the first. Was she not right in every point, doing her duty to Mr.
Trevanion and the house that had sheltered her so long? Was not she
indeed the benefactor of the house, preserving it from shame and injury?
So she said to herself, justifying her own actions with an excitement
which betrayed a doubt; and in the meantime awaiting the result with
passionate eagerness, incapable of a thought that did not turn round
this centre-- What was to happen? Was there an earthquake, a terrible
explosion, about to burst forth? The stillness was ominous and dreadful
to the watching woman who had put all these powers in motion. She feared
yet longed for the first sound of the coming outburst; and yet all the
while had a savage exultation in her heart in the thought of having been
able to bring the whole world about her to such a crisis of fate.
Jane in the meantime had stopped Rosalind, who was breathless with her
run across the park. The woman was much agitated and trembling. “Miss
Rosalind,” she said, with pale lips, “is there something wrong? I see
Madam in the hall; she is not with master, and he so ill. Oh! what is
wrong--what is wrong?”
“I don’t know, Jane; nothing, I hope. Papa is perhaps asleep, and there
is some one-- Mr. Blake--come to see him. My mother is waiting till he is
gone.”
“Oh! that is perhaps why she is there,” said Jane, with relief; then she
caught the girl timidly by the arm. “You will forgive me, Miss Rosalind;
she has enemies--there are some who would leave nothing undone to harm
her.”
“To harm mamma!” said Rosalind, holding her head high; “you forget
yourself, Jane. Who would harm her in this house?”
Jane gave the girl a look which was full of gratitude, yet of miserable
apprehension. “You will always be true to her, Miss Rosalind,” she
said; “and oh, you have reason, for she has been a good mother to you.”
Rosalind looked at the woman somewhat sternly, for she was proud in her
way. “If I did not know how fond you are of mamma,” she said, “I should
be angry. Does any one ever talk so of mother and daughter? That is all
a matter of course; both that she is the best mother in the world, and
that I am part of herself.”
Upon this Jane did what an Englishwoman is very slow to do. She got hold
of Rosalind’s hand, and made a struggle to kiss it, with tears. “Oh,
Miss Rosalind, God bless you! I’d rather hear that than have a fortune
left me,” she cried. “And my poor lady will want it all; she will want
it all!”
“Don’t be silly, Jane. My mother wants nothing but that we should have a
little sense. What can any one do against her, unless it is you and the
rest annoying her by foolish anxiety about nothing. Indeed, papa is very
ill, and there is reason enough to be anxious,” the girl added, after a
pause.
In the meantime Madam Trevanion sat alone in the hall below. She
received Blake, when he arrived, as we have seen, and she had a brief
conversation with her brother-in-law, which agitated her a little. But
when he left her, himself much agitated and not knowing what to think,
she sat down again and waited, alone and unoccupied; a thing that
scarcely ever in her full life happened to her. She, too, felt the
stillness before the tempest. It repeated itself in her mind in a
strange, fatal calm, a sort of cessation of all emotion. She had said to
John Trevanion that she did not care what came after; and she did not;
yet the sense that something was being done which would seriously affect
her future life, even though she was not susceptible of much feeling on
the subject, made the moment impressive. Calm and strong, indeed, must
the nerves be of one who can wait outside the closed door of a room in
which her fate is being decided, without a thrill. But a sort of false
tranquillity--or was it perhaps the calmest of all moods, the stillness
of despair?--came on her as she waited. There is a despair which is
passion, and raves; but there is a different kind of despair, not called
forth by any great practical danger, but by a sense of the
impossibilities of life, the powerlessness of human thought or action,
which is very still and says little. The Byronic desperation is very
different from that which comes into the heart of a woman when she
stands still amid the irreconcilable forces of existence and feels
herself helpless amid contending wills, circumstances, powers, which she
can neither harmonize nor overcome. The situation in which she stood was
impossible. She saw no way out of it. The sharp sting of her present
uselessness, and the sense that she had been for the first time turned
away from her husband’s bedside, had given a momentary poignancy to her
emotions which roused her, but as that died away she sat and looked her
position in the face with a calm that was appalling. This was what she
had come to at the end of seventeen years--that her position was
impossible. She did not know how to turn or what step to take. On either
side of her was a mind that did not comprehend and a heart that did not
feel for her. She could neither touch nor convince the beings upon whom
her very existence depended. Andromeda, waiting for the monster to
devour her, had at least the danger approaching but from one quarter,
and, on the other, always the possibility of a Perseus in shining armor
to cleave the skies. But Madam had on either side of her an insatiable
fate, and no help, she thought, on earth or in heaven. For there comes a
moment in the experience of all who have felt very deeply, when Heaven,
too, seems to fail. Praying long, with no visible reply, drains out the
heart. There seems nothing more left to say even to God, no new argument
to employ with him, who all the while knows better than he can be told.
And there she was, still, silent in her soul as well as with her lips,
waiting, with almost a sense of ease in the thought that there was
nothing more to be done, not even a prayer to be said, her heart, her
thoughts, her wishes, all standing arrested as before an impenetrable
wall which stopped all effort. And how still the house was! All the
doors closed, the sounds of the household lost in the distance of long
passages and shut doors and curtains; nothing to disturb the stillness
before the tempest should burst. She was not aware of the anxious looks
of her maid, now and then peering over the balustrade of the gallery
above, for Jane’s furtive footstep made no sound upon the thick carpet.
Through the glass door she saw the clear blue of the sky, radiant in the
wintry sunshine, but still, as wintry brightness is, without the
flickers of light and shadow. And thus the morning hours went on.
A long time, it seemed a lifetime, passed before her repose was
disturbed. It had gradually got to be like an habitual state, and she
was startled to be called back from it. The heavy curtain was lifted,
and first Mr. Blake, then Dr. Beaton, came forth. The first looked
extremely grave and disturbed, as he came out with a case of papers
which he had brought with him in his hand. He looked at Mrs. Trevanion
with a curious, deprecating air, like that of a man who has injured
another unwillingly. They had never been friends, and Madam had shown
her sentiments very distinctly as to those overtures of admiration which
the young lawyer had taken upon himself to make to Rosalind. The
politeness he showed to her on ordinary occasions was the politeness of
hostility. But now he looked at her alarmed, as if he could not support
her glance, and would fain have avoided the sight of her altogether. Dr.
Beaton, on the other hand, came forward briskly.
“I have just been called in to our patient,” he said, “and you are very
much wanted, Mrs. Trevanion.”
“Does he want me?” she said.
“I think so--certainly. You are necessary to him; I understand your
delicacy in being absent while Mr. Blake--”
“Do not deceive yourself, doctor; it was not my delicacy.”
“Come, please,” said the doctor, almost impatiently; “come at once.”
Blake stood looking after them till both disappeared behind the curtain,
then drew a long breath, as if relieved by her departure. “I wonder if
she has any suspicion,” he said to himself. Then he made a long pause
and walked about the hall, and considered the pictures with the eye of a
man who might have to look over the inventory of them for sale. Then he
added to himself, “What an old devil!” half aloud. Of whom it was that
he uttered this sentiment no one could tell, but it came from the bottom
of his heart.
Madam did not leave the sick-chamber again that day. She did not appear
at luncheon, for which perhaps the rest were thankful, as she was
herself. How to look her in the face, with this mingled doubt of her and
respect for her, nobody knew. Rosalind alone was disappointed. The
doctor took everything into his own hands. He was now the master of the
situation, and ruled everybody. “She is the best woman I ever knew,” he
said, with fervor. “I would rather trust her with a case than any Sister
in the land. I said to her that I thought she would do better to stay.
Mr. Trevanion was very glad to get her back.”