The incident of that evening had a very disturbing effect upon the
family at Bonport. Little Amy, waking next morning much astonished to
find herself in Rosalind’s room, and very faintly remembering what had
happened, was subjected at once to questionings more earnest than
judicious--questionings which brought everything to her mind, with a
renewal of all the agitation of the night. But the child had nothing to
say beyond what she had said before--that she had dreamed of mamma, that
mamma had called her to come down to the lake, and be taken home; that
she wanted to go home, to go to mamma--oh, to go to mamma! but Rosalind
said she was dead, and Sophy said they were never, never to see her
again. Then Amy flung herself upon her sister’s breast, and implored to
be taken to her mother. “You don’t know how wicked I was, Rosalind.
Russell used to say things till I stopped loving mamma--oh, I did, and
did not mind when she went away! But now! where is she, where is she?
Oh, Rosalind! oh, Rosalind! will she never come back? Oh, do you think
she is angry, or that she does not care for me any more? Oh, Rosalind,
is she dead, and will she never come back?” This cry seemed to come from
Amy’s very soul. She could not be stilled. She lay in Rosalind’s bed, as
white as the hangings about her, not much more than a pair of dark eyes
looking out with eagerness unspeakable. And Rosalind, who had gone
through so many vicissitudes of feeling--who had stood by the mother who
was not her mother with so much loyalty, yet had yielded to the progress
of events, and had not known, in the ignorance of her youth, what to do
or say, or how to stand against it-- Rosalind was seized all at once by a
vehement determination and an intolerable sense that the present
position of affairs was impossible, and could not last.
“Oh, my darling!” she cried; “get well and strong, and you and I will go
and look for her, and never, never be taken from her again!”
“But, Rosalind, if mamma is dead?” cried little Amy.
The elder people who witnessed this scene stole out of the room, unable
to bear it any longer.
“It must be put a stop to,” John Trevanion said, in a voice that was
sharp with pain.
“Oh, who can put a stop to it?” cried Mrs. Lennox, weeping, and
recovering herself and weeping again. “I should not have wondered, not
at all, if it had happened at first; but, after these years! And I that
thought children were heartless little things, and that they had
forgot!”
“Can Russell do nothing, now you have got her here?” he cried with
impatience, walking up and down the room. He was at his wits’ end, and
in his perplexity felt himself incapable even of thought.
“Oh, John, did you not hear what that little thing said? She put the
children against their mother. Amy will not let Russell come near her.
If I have made a mistake, I meant it for the best. Russell is as
miserable as any of us. Johnny has forgotten her, and Amy cannot endure
the sight of her. And now it appears that coming to Bonport, which was
your idea, is a failure too, though I am sure we both did it for the
best.”
“That is all that could be said for us if we were a couple of
well-intentioned fools,” he cried. “And, indeed, we seem to have acted
like fools in all that concerns the children,” he added, with a sort of
bitterness. For what right had fate to lay such a burden upon him--him
who had scrupulously preserved himself, or been preserved by Providence,
from any such business of his own?
“John,” said Mrs. Lennox, drying her eyes, “I don’t think there is so
much to blame yourself about. You felt sure it would be better for them
being here; and when you put it to me, so did I. You never thought of
the lake. Why should you think of the lake? We never let them go near it
without somebody to take care of them in the day, and how could any one
suppose that at night--”
Upon this her brother seized his hat and hurried from the house. The
small aggravation seemed to fill up his cup so that he could bear no
more, with this addition, that Mrs. Lennox’s soft purr of a voice roused
mere exasperation in him, while his every thought of the children, even
when the cares they brought threatened to overwhelm him, was tender with
natural affection. But, in fact, wherever he turned at this moment he
saw not a gleam of light, and there was a bitterness as of the deferred
and unforeseen in this sudden gathering together of clouds and dangers
which filled him almost with awe. The catastrophe itself had passed over
much more quietly than could have been thought. But, lo, here, when no
fear was, the misery came. His heart melted within him when he thought
of Amy’s little pale face and that forlorn expedition in the stillness
of the night to the side of the lake which betrayed, as nothing else
could have done, the feverish working of her brain and the disturbance
of her entire being. What madness of rage and jealousy must that have
been that induced a man to leave this legacy of misery behind him to
work in the minds of his little children years after he was dead! and
what appalling cruelty and tyranny it was which made it possible for a
dead man, upon whom neither argument nor proof could be brought to bear,
thus to blight by a word so many lives! All had passed with a strange
simplicity at first, and with such swift and silent carrying-out of the
terrible conditions of the will that there had been no time to think if
any expedient were possible. Looking back upon it, it seemed to him
incredible that anything so extraordinary should have taken place with
so little disturbance. _She_ had accepted her fate without a word, and
every one else had accepted it. The bitterness of death seemed to have
passed, except for the romance of devotion on Rosalind’s part, which he
believed had faded in the other kind of romance more natural at her age.
No one but himself had appeared to remember at all this catastrophe
which rent life asunder. But now, when no one expected it, out of the
clear sky came the explosions of the storm. He had decided too quickly
that all was over. The peace had been but a pretence, and now the whole
matter would have to be re-opened again.
The cause of the sudden return of all minds to the great family disaster
and misery seemed to him more than ever confused by this last event. The
condition which had led to Amy’s last adventure seemed to make it more
possible, notwithstanding Sophy’s supposed discovery, that the story of
the apparition was an illusion throughout. The child, always a visionary
child, must have had, in the unnatural and strained condition of her
nerves and long repression of her feelings, a dream so vivid as, like
that of last night, to take the aspect of reality; and Rosalind, full of
sympathy, and with all her own keen recollections ready to be called
forth at a touch, must have received the contagion from her little
sister, and seen what Amy had so long imagined she saw. Perhaps, even,
it was the same contagion, acting on a matter-of-fact temperament, which
had induced Sophy to believe that she, too, had seen her mother, but in
real flesh and blood. Of all the hypotheses that could be thought of
this seemed to him the most impossible. He had examined all the hotel
registers, and made anxious inquiries everywhere, without finding a
trace of Mrs. Trevanion. She had not, so far as he was aware, renounced
her own name. And, even had she done so, it was impossible that she
could have been in the hotel without some one seeing her, without
leaving some trace behind. Notwithstanding this certainty, John
Trevanion, even while he repeated his conviction to himself, was making
his way once more to the hotel to see whether, by any possibility, some
light might still be thrown upon a subject which had become so urgent.
Yet even that, though it was the first thing that presented itself to
him, had become, in fact, a secondary matter. The real question in this,
as in all difficulties, was what to do next. What could be done to
unravel the fatal tangle? Now that he contemplated the matter from afar,
it became to him all at once a thing intolerable--a thing that must no
longer be allowed to exist. What was publicity, what was scandal, in
comparison with this wreck of life? There must be means, he declared to
himself, of setting an unrighteous will aside, whatever lawyers might
say. His own passiveness seemed incredible to him, as well as the
extraordinary composure with which everybody else had acquiesced,
accepting the victim’s sacrifice. But that was over. Even though the
present agitation should pass away, he vowed to himself that it should
not pass from him until he had done all that man could do to set the
wrong right.
While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was walking into
Aix with the speed of a man who has urgent work before him, though that
work was nothing more definite or practical than the examination over
again of the hotel books to see if there he could find any clew. He
turned them over and over in his abstraction, going back without knowing
it to distant dates, and roaming over an endless succession of names
which conveyed no idea to his mind. He came at last, on the last page,
to the name of Arthur Rivers, with a dull sort of surprise. “To be sure,
Rivers is here!” he said to himself aloud.
“Yes, to be sure I am here. I have been waiting to see if you would find
me out,” Rivers said behind him. John did not give him so cordial a
welcome as he had done on the previous night.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have so much on my mind I forget
everything. Were you coming out to see my sister? We can walk together.
The sun is warm, but not too hot for walking. That’s an advantage of
this time of the year.”
“It is perhaps too early for Mrs. Lennox,” Rivers said.
“Oh, no, not too early. The truth is we are in a little confusion. One
of the children has been giving us a great deal of anxiety.”
“Then, perhaps,” said Rivers, with desperate politeness, “it will be
better for me not to go.” He felt within himself, though he was so
civil, a sort of brutal indifference to their insignificant distresses,
which were nothing in comparison with his own. To come so far in order
to eat his breakfast under the dusty trees, and dine at the table d’hôte
in a half-empty hotel at Aix, seemed to him so great an injustice and
scorn in the midst of his fame and importance that even the discovery he
had made, though it could not but tell in the situation, passed from his
mind in the heat of offended consequence and pride.
John Trevanion, for his part, noticed the feeling of the other as little
as Rivers did his. “One of the children has been walking in her sleep,”
he said. “I don’t want to get a fool of a doctor who thinks of nothing
but rheumatism. One of them filled my good sister’s mind with folly
about suppressed gout. Poor little Amy! She has a most susceptible
brain, and I am afraid something has upset it. Do you believe in ghosts,
Rivers?”
“As much as everybody does,” said Rivers, recovering himself a little.
“That is about all that any one can say. This child thinks she has seen
one. She is a silent little thing. She has gone on suffering and never
said a word, and the consequence is, her little head has got all wrong.”
By this time Rivers, having cooled down, began to see the importance of
the disclosure he had to make. He said, “Would you mind telling me what
the apparition was? You will understand, Trevanion, that I don’t want to
pry into your family concerns, and that I would not ask without a
reason.”
John Trevanion looked at him intently with a startled curiosity and
earnestness. “I can’t suppose,” he said, “when it comes to that, much as
we have paid for concealment, that you have not heard something--”
“Miss Trevanion told me,” said Rivers--he paused a moment, feeling that
it was a cruel wrong to him that he should be compelled to say Miss
Trevanion--he who ought to have been called to her side at once, who
should have been in a position to claim her before the world as his
Rosalind--“Miss Trevanion gave me to understand that the lady whom I had
met in Spain, whose portrait was on her table, was--”
“My sister-in-law--the mother of the children--yes, yes--and what then?”
John Trevanion cried.
“Only this, Trevanion--that lady is here.”
John caught him by the arm so fiercely, so suddenly, that the leisurely
waiters standing about, and the few hotel guests who were moving out and
in in the quiet of the morning stopped and stared with ideas of rushing
to the rescue. “What do you mean?” he said. “Here? How do you know? It
is impossible.”
“Come out into the garden, where we can talk. It may be impossible, but
it is true. I also saw her last night.”
“You must be mad or dreaming, Rivers. You too--a man in your
senses--and-- God in heaven!” he said, with a sudden bitter sense of his
own unappreciated friendship--unappreciated even, it would seem, beyond
the grave--“that she should have come, whatever she had to say, to
you--to any one--and not to me!”
“Trevanion, you are mistaken. This is no apparition. There was no
choice, of me or any one. That poor lady, whether sinned against or
sinning I have no knowledge, is here. Do you understand me? She is
here.”
They were standing by this time in the shadow of the great laurel bushes
where she had sheltered on the previous night. John Trevanion said
nothing for a moment. He cast himself down on one of the seats to
recover his breath. It was just where Hamerton had been sitting. Rivers
almost expected to see the faint stir in the bushes, the evidence of
some one listening, to whom the words spoken might, as she said, be
death or life.
“This is extraordinary news,” said Trevanion at last. “You will pardon
me if I was quite overwhelmed by it. Rivers, you can’t think how
important it is. Where can I find her? You need not fear to betray
her--oh, Heaven, to betray her to me, her brother! But you need not
fear. She knows that there is no one who has more--more regard, more
respect, or more-- Let me know where to find her, my good fellow, for
Heaven’s sake!”
“Trevanion, it is not any doubt of you. But, in the first place, I don’t
know where to find her, and then--she did not disclose herself to me. I
found her out by accident. Have I any right to dispose of her secret? I
will tell you everything I know,” he added hastily, in answer to the
look and gesture, almost of despair, which John could not restrain.
“Last night your friend, young Hamerton, was talking--injudiciously, I
think”--there was a little sweetness to him in saying this, even in the
midst of real sympathy and interest--“he was talking of what was going
on in your house. I had already seen some one walking about the garden
whose appearance I seemed to recollect. When Hamerton mentioned your
name” (he was anxious that this should be made fully evident), “she
heard it; and by and by I perceived that some one was listening, behind
you, just there, in the laurels.”
John started up and turned round, gazing at the motionless, glistening
screen of leaves, as if she might still be there. After a moment--“And
what then?”
“Not much more. I spoke to her afterwards. She asked me, for the love of
God, to bring her news, and I promised--what I could--for to-night.”
John Trevanion held out his hand, and gave that of Rivers a strong
pressure. “Come out with me to Bonport. You must hear everything, and
perhaps you can advise me. I am determined to put an end to the
situation somehow, whatever it may cost,” he said.