Маргарет Олифант
Whiteladies
CHAPTER XIX
Everard was too late, as might have been expected, for the table d’hôte. When he reached the village, very tired after his long walk, he met the diners there, strolling about in the soft evening – the men with their cigars, the ladies in little groups in their evening toilettes, which were of an unexciting character. On the road, at a short distance from the hotel, he encountered Madame de Mirfleur and M. de Bonneville, no doubt planning the advent of M. Oscar, he thought to himself, with renewed fury; but, indeed, they were only talking over the failure of their project in respect to himself. Reine was seated in the balcony above, alone, looking out upon the soft night and the distant mountains, and soothed, I think, by the hum of voices close at hand, which mingled with the sound of the waterfall, and gave a sense of fellowship and society. Everard looked up at her and waved his hand, and begged her to wait till he should come. There was a new moon making her way upward in the pale sky, not yet quite visible behind the hills. Reine’s face was turned toward it with a certain wistful stillness which went to Everard’s heart. She was in this little world, but not of it. She had no part in the whisperings and laughter of those groups below. Her young life had been plucked out of the midst of life, as it were, and wrapped in the shadows of a sick-chamber, when others like her were in the full tide of youthful enjoyment. As Everard dived into the dining-room of the inn to snatch a hasty meal, the perpetual contrast which he felt himself to make in spite of himself, came back to his mind. I think he continued to have an unconscious feeling, of which he would have been ashamed had it been forced upon his notice or put into words, that he had himself a choice to make between his cousins – though how he could have chosen both Kate and Sophy, I am at a loss to know, and he never separated the two in his thoughts. When he looked, as it were, from Reine to them, he felt himself to descend ever so far in the scale. Those pretty gay creatures “enjoyed themselves” a great deal more than poor Reine had ever had it in her power to do. But it was no choice of Reine’s which thus separated her from the enjoyments of her kind – was it the mere force of circumstances? Everard could remember Reine as gay as a bird, as bright as a flower; though he could not connect any idea of her with drags or race-courses. He had himself rowed her on the river many a day, and heard her pretty French songs rising like a fresh spontaneous breeze of melody over the water. Now she looked to him like something above the common course of life – with so much in her eyes that he could not fathom, and such an air of thought and of emotion about her as half attracted, half repelled him. The emotions of Sophy and Kate were all on the surface – thrown off into the air in careless floods of words and laughter. Their sentiments were all boldly expressed; all the more boldly when they were sentiments of an equivocal character. He seemed to hear them, loud, noisy, laughing, moving about in their bright dresses, lawless, scorning all restraint; and then his mind recurred to the light figure seated overhead in the evening darkness, shadowy, dusky, silent, with only a soft whiteness where her face was, and not a sound to betray her presence. Perhaps she was weeping silently in her solitude; perhaps thinking unutterable thoughts; perhaps anxiously planning what she could do for her invalid to make him better or happier, perhaps praying for him. These ideas brought a moisture to Everard’s eyes. It was all a peradventure, but there was no peradventure, no mystery about Kate and Sophy; no need to wonder what they were thinking of. Their souls moved in so limited an orbit, and the life which they flattered themselves they knew so thoroughly ran in such a narrow channel, that no one who knew them could go far astray in calculation of what they were about; but Reine was unfathomable in her silence, a little world of individual thought and feeling, into which Everard did not know if he was worthy to enter, and could not divine.
While the young man thus mused – and dined, very uncomfortably – Madame de Mirfleur listened to the report of her agent. She had a lace shawl thrown over her head, over the hair which was still as brown and plentiful as ever, and needed no matronly covering. They walked along among the other groups, straying a little further than the rest, who stopped her from moment to moment as she went on, to ask for her son.
“Better, much better; a thousand thanks,” she kept saying. “Really better; on the way to get well, I hope;” and then she would turn an anxious ear to M. de Bonneville. “On such matters sense is not to be expected from the English,” she said, with a cloud on her face; “they understand nothing. I could not for a moment doubt your discretion, cher Monsieur Bonneville; but perhaps you were a little too open with him, explained yourself too clearly; not that I should think for a moment of blaming you. They are all the same, all the same! – insensate, unable to comprehend.”
“I do not think my discretion was at fault,” said the Frenchman. “It is, as you say, an inherent inability to understand. If he had not seen the folly of irritating himself, I have no doubt that your young friend would have resorted to the brutal weapons of the English in return for the interest I showed him; in which case,” said M. de Bonneville, calmly, “I should have been under a painful necessity in respect to him. For your sake, Madame, I am glad that he was able to apologize and restrain himself.”
“Juste ciel! that I should have brought this upon you!” cried Madame de Mirfleur; and it was after the little sensation caused in her mind by this that he ventured to suggest that other suitor for Reine.
“My son is already sous-préfet,” he said. “He has a great career before him. It is a position that would suit Mademoiselle your charming daughter. In his official position, I need not say, a wife of Mademoiselle Reine’s distinction would be everything for him; and though we might look for more money, yet I shall willingly waive that question in consideration of the desirable connections my son would thus acquire; a mother-in-law like Madame de Mirfleur is not to be secured every day,” said the negotiant, bowing to his knees.
Madame de Mirfleur, on her part, made such a curtsey as the Kanderthal, overrun by English tourists, had never seen before; and she smiled upon the idea of M. Oscar and his career, and felt that could she but see Reine the wife of a sous-préfet, the girl would be well and safely disposed of. But after her first exultation, a cold shiver came over Reine’s mother. She drew her shawl more closely round her.
“Alas!” she said, “so far as I am concerned everything would be easy; but, pity me, cher Baron, pity me! Though I trust I know my duty, I cannot undertake for Reine. What suffering it is to have a child with other rules of action than those one approves of! It should be an example to every one not to marry out of their own country. My child is English to the nail-tips. I cannot help it; it is my desolation. If it is her fancy to find M. Oscar pleasing, all will go well; but if it is not, then our project will be ended; and with such uncertainty can I venture to bring Monsieur your son here, to this little village at the end of the world?”
Thus the elder spirits communed not without serious anxiety; for Reine herself, and her dot and her relationships, seemed so desirable that M. de Bonneville did not readily give up the idea.
“She will surely accept your recommendation,” he said, discouraged and surprised.
“Alas! my dear friend, you do not understand the English,” said the mother. “The recommendation would be the thing which would spoil all.”
“But then the parti you had yourself chosen – Monsieur Everard?” said the Frenchman, puzzled.
“Ah, cher Baron, he would have managed it all in the English way,” said Madame de Mirfleur, almost weeping. “I should have had no need to recommend. You do not know, as I do, the English way.”
And they turned back and walked on together under the stars to the hotel door, where all the other groups were clustering, talking of expeditions past and to come. The warm evening air softened the voices and gave to the flitting figures, the half-visible colors, the shadowy groups, a refinement unknown to them in broad daylight. Reine on her balcony saw her mother coming back, and felt in her heart a wondering bitterness. Reine did not care for the tourist society in which, as in every other, Madame de Mirfleur made herself acquaintances and got a little amusement; yet she could not help feeling (as what girl could in the circumstances?) a secret sense that it was she who had a right to the amusement, and that her own deep and grave anxiety, the wild trembling of her own heart, the sadness of the future, and the burden which she was bearing and had to bear every day, would have been more appropriate to her mother, at her mother’s age, than to herself. This thought – it was Reine’s weakness to feel this painful antagonism toward her mother – had just come into a mind which had been full of better thoughts, when Everard came upstairs and joined her in the balcony. He too had met Madame de Mirfleur as he came from the hotel, and he thought he had heard the name “Oscar” as he passed her; so that his mind had received a fresh impulse, and was full of belligerent and indignant thoughts. He came quite softly, however, to the edge of the balcony where Reine was seated, and stood over her, leaning against the window, a dark figure, scarcely distinguishable. Reine’s heart stirred softly at his coming; she did not know why; she did not ask herself why; but took it for granted that she liked him to come, because of his kindness and his kinship, and because they had been brought up together, and because of his brotherly goodness to Herbert, and through Herbert to herself.
“I have got an idea, Reine,” Everard said, in the quick, sharp tones of suppressed emotion. “I think the Kanderthal is too close; there is not air enough for Herbert. Let us take him up higher – that is, of course, if the doctor approves.”
“I thought you liked the Kanderthal,” said Reine, raising her eyes to him, and touched with a visionary disappointment. It hurt her a little to think that he was not pleased with the place in which he had lingered so long for their sakes.
“I like it well enough,” said Everard; “but it suddenly occurred to me to-day that, buried down here in a hole, beneath the hills, there is too little air for Bertie. He wants air. It seems to me that is the chief thing he wants. What did the doctor say?”
“He said – what you have always said, Everard – that Bertie had regained his lost ground, and that this last illness was an accident, like the thunderstorm. It might have killed him; but as it has not killed him, it does him no particular harm. That sounds nonsense,” said Reine, “but it is what he told me. He is doing well, the doctor says – doing well; and I can’t be half glad – not as I ought.”
“Why not, Reine?”
“I can’t tell, my heart is so heavy,” she cried, putting her hand to her wet eyes. “Before this – accident, as you call it – I felt, oh, so different! There was one night that I seemed to see and hear God deciding for us. I felt quite sure; there was something in the air, something coming down from the sky. You may laugh, Everard; but to feel that you are quite, quite sure that God is on your side, listening to you, and considering and doing what you ask – oh, you can’t tell what a thing it is.”
“I don’t laugh, Reine; very, very far from it, dear.”
“And then to be disappointed!” she cried; “to feel a blank come over everything, as if there was no one to care, as if God had forgotten or was thinking of something else! I am not quite so bad as that now,” she added, with a weary gesture; “but I feel as if it was not God, but only nature or chance or something, that does it. An accident, you all say – going out when we had better have stayed in; a chance cloud blowing this way, when it might have blown some other way. Oh!” cried Reine, “if that is all, what is the good of living? All accident, chance; Nature turning this way or the other; no one to sustain you if you are stumbling; no one to say what is to be – and it is! I do not care to live, I do not want to live, if this is all there is to be in the world.”
She put her head down in her lap, hidden by her hands. Everard stood over her, deeply touched and wondering, but without a word to say. What could he say? It had never in his life occurred to him to think on such subjects. No great trouble or joy, nothing which stirs the soul to its depths, had ever happened to the young man in his easy existence. He had sailed over the sunny surface of things, and had been content. He could not answer anything to Reine in her first great conflict with the undiscovered universe – the first painful, terrible shadow that had ever come across her childish faith. He did not even understand the pain it gave her, nor how so entirely speculative a matter could give pain. But though he was thus prevented from feeling the higher sympathy, he was very sorry for his little cousin, and reverent of her in this strange affliction. He put his hand softly, tenderly upon her hidden head, and stroked it in his ignorance, as he might have consoled a child.
“Reine, I am not good enough to say anything to you, even if I knew,” he said, “and I don’t know. I suppose God must always be at the bottom of it, whatever happens. We cannot tell or judge, can we? for, you know, we cannot see any more than one side. That’s all I know,” he added, humbly stroking once more with a tender touch the bowed head which he could scarcely see. How different this was from the life he had come from – from Madame de Mirfleur conspiring about Oscar and how to settle her daughter in life! Reine, he felt, was as far away from it all as heaven is from earth; and somehow he changed as he stood there, and felt a different man; though, indeed, he was not, I fear, at all different, and would have fallen away again in ten minutes, had the call of the gayer voices to which he was accustomed come upon his ear. His piety was of the good, honest, unthinking kind – a sort of placid, stubborn dependence upon unseen power and goodness, which is not to be shaken by any argument, and which outlasts all philosophy – thank heaven for it! – a good sound magnet in its way, keeping the compass right, though it may not possess the higher attributes of spiritual insight or faith.
Reine was silent for a time, in the stillness that always follows an outburst of feeling; but in spite of herself she was consoled – consoled by the voice and touch which were so soft and kind, and by the steady, unelevated, but in its way certain, reality of his assurance. God must be at the bottom of it all – Everard, without thinking much on the subject, or feeling very much, had always a sort of dull, practical conviction of that; and this, like some firm strong wooden prop to lean against, comforted the visionary soul of Reine. She felt the solid strength of it a kind of support to her, though there might be, indeed, more faith in her aching, miserable doubt than there was in half-a-dozen such souls as Everard’s; yet the commonplace was a support to the visionary in this as in so many other things.
“You want a change, too,” said Everard. “You are worn out. Let us go to some of the simple places high up among the hills. I have a selfish reason. I have just heard of some one coming who would – bore you very much. At least, he would bore me very much,” said the young man, with forced candor. “Let us get away before he comes.”
“Is it some one from England?” said Reine.
“I don’t know where he is from – last. You don’t know him. Never mind the fellow; of course that’s nothing to the purpose. But I do wish Herbert would try a less confined air.”
“It is strange that the doctor and you should agree so well,” said Reine, with a smile. “You are sure you did not put it into his head. He wants us to go up to Appenzell, or some such place; and Herbert is to take the cure des sapins and the cure de petit lait. It is a quiet place, where no tourists go. But, Everard, I don’t think you must come with us; it will be so dull for you.”
“So what? It is evident you want me to pay you compliments. I am determined to go. If I must not accompany you, I will hire a private mule of my own with a side-saddle. Why should not I do the cure de petit lait too?”
“Ah, because you don’t want it.”
“Is that a reason to be given seriously to a British tourist? It is the very thing to make me go.”
“Everard, you laugh; I wish I could laugh too,” said Reine. “Probably Herbert would get better the sooner. I feel so heavy – so serious – not like other girls.”
“You were neither heavy nor serious in the old times,” said Everard, looking down upon her with a stirring of fondness which was not love, in his heart, “when you used to be scolded for being so French. Did you ever dine solemnly in the old hall since you grew up, Reine? It is very odd. I could not help looking up to the gallery, and hearing the old scuffle in the corner, and wondering what you thought to see me sitting splendid with the aunts at table. It was very bewildering. I felt like two people, one sitting grown-up down below, the other whispering up in the corner with Reine and Bertie, looking on and thinking it something grand and awful. I shall go there and look at you when we are all at home again. You have never been at Whiteladies since you were grown up, Reine?”
“No,” she said, turning her face to him with a soft ghost of a laugh. It was nothing to call a laugh; yet Everard felt proud of himself for having so far succeeded in turning her mood. The moon was up now, and shining upon her, making a whiteness all about her, and throwing shadows of the rails of the balcony, so that Reine’s head rose as out of a cage; but the look she turned to him was wistful, half-beseeching, though Reine was not aware of it. She half put out her hand to him. He was helping her out of that prison of grief and anxiety and wasted youth. “How wonderful,” she said, “to think we were all children once, not afraid of anything! I can’t make it out.”
“Speak for yourself, my queen,” said Everard. “I was always mortally afraid of the ghost in the great staircase. I don’t like to go up or down now by myself. Reine, I looked into the old playroom the last time I was there. It was when poor Bertie was so ill. There were all our tops and our bats and your music, and I don’t know what rubbish besides. It went to my heart. I had to rush off and do something, or I should have broken down and made a baby of myself.”
A soft sob came from Reine’s throat and relieved her; a rush of tears came to her eyes. She looked up at him, the moon shining so whitely on her face, and glistening in those drops of moisture, and took his hand in her impulsive way and kissed it, not able to speak. The touch of those velvet lips on his brown hand made Everard jump. Women the least experienced take such a salutation sedately, like Maud in the poem; it comes natural. But to a man the effect is different. He grew suddenly red and hot, and tingling to his very hair. He took her hand in both his with a kind of tender rage, and knelt down and kissed it over and over, as if to make up by forced exaggeration for that desecration of her maiden lips.
“You must not do that,” he said, quick and sharply, in tones that sounded almost angry; “you must never do that, Reine;” and could not get over it, but repeated the words, half-scolding her, half-weeping over her hand, till poor Reine, confused and bewildered, felt that something new had come to pass between them, and blushed overwhelmingly too, so that the moon had hard ado to keep the upper hand. She had to rise from her seat on the balcony before she could get her hand from him, and felt, as it were, another, happier, more trivial life come rushing back upon her in a strange maze of pleasure and apprehension, and wonder and shamefacedness.
“I think I hear Bertie calling,” she said, out of the flutter and confusion of her heart, and went away like a ghost out of the moonlight, leaving Everard, come to himself, leaning against the window, and looking out blankly upon the night.
Had he made a dreadful fool of himself? he asked, when he was thus left alone; then held up his hand, which she had kissed, and looked at it in his strange new thrill of emotion with a half-imbecile smile. He felt himself wondering that the place did not show in the moonlight, and at last put it up to his face, half-ashamed, though nobody saw him. What had happened to Everard? He himself could not tell.
