Маргарет Олифант
Whiteladies
CHAPTER IX
“DON’T you think he is better, mamma – a little better to-day?”
“Ah, mon Dieu, what can I say, Reine? To be a little better in his state is often to be worst of all. You have not seen so much as I have. Often, very often, there is a gleam of the dying flame in the socket; there is an air of being well – almost well. What can I say? I have seen it like that. And they have all told us that he cannot live. Alas, alas, my poor boy!”
Madame de Mirfleur buried her face in her handkerchief as she spoke. She was seated in the little sitting-room of a little house in an Alpine valley, where they had brought the invalid when the Summer grew too hot for him on the shores of the Mediterranean. He himself had chosen the Kanderthal as his Summer quarters, and with the obstinacy of a sick man had clung to the notion. The valley was shut in by a circle of snowy peaks toward the east; white, dazzling mountain-tops, which yet looked small and homely and familiar in the shadow of the bigger Alps around. A little mountain stream ran through the valley, across which, at one point, clustered a knot of houses, with a homely inn in the midst. There were trout in the river, and the necessaries of life were to be had in the village, through which a constant stream of travellers passed during the Summer and Autumn, parties crossing the steep pass of the Gemmi, and individual tourists of more enterprising character fighting their way from this favorable centre into various unknown recesses of the hills. Behind the chalet a waterfall kept up a continual murmur, giving utterance, as it seemed, to the very silence cf the mountains. The scent of pine-woods was in the air; to the west the glory of the sunset shone over a long broken stretch of valley, uneven moorland interspersed with clumps of wood. To be so little out of the way – nay, indeed, to be in the way – of the Summer traveller, it was singularly wild and quaint and fresh. Indeed, for one thing, no tourist ever stayed there except for food and rest, for there was nothing to attract any one in the plain, little secluded village, with only its circle of snowy peaks above its trout-stream, and its sunsets, to catch any fanciful eye. Sometimes, however, a fanciful eye was caught by these charms, as in the case of poor Herbert Austin, who had been brought here to die. He lay in the little room which communicated with this sitting-room, in a small wooden chamber opening upon a balcony, from which you could watch the sun setting over the Kanderthal, and the moon rising over the snow-white glory of the Dolden-horn, almost at the same moment. The chalet belonged to the inn, and was connected with it by a covered passage. The Summer was at its height, and still poor Herbert lingered, though M. de Mirfleur, in pleasant Normandy, grew a little weary of the long time his wife’s son took in dying; and Madame de Mirfleur herself, as jealous Reine would think sometimes, in spite of herself grew weary too, thinking of her second family at home, and the husband whom Reine had always felt to be an offence. The mother and sister who were thus watching over Herbert’s last moments were not so united in their grief and pious duties as might have been supposed. Generally it is the mother whose whole heart is absorbed in such watching, and the young sister who is to be pardoned if sometimes, in the sadness of the shadow that precedes death, her young mind should wander back to life and its warmer interests with a longing which makes her feel guilty. But in this case these positions were reversed. It was the mother who longed involuntarily for the life she had left behind her, and whose heart reverted wistfully to something brighter and more hopeful, to other interests and loves as strong, if not stronger, than that she felt in and for her eldest son. When it is the other way the sad mother pardons her child for a wandering imagination; but the sad child, jealous and miserable, does not forgive the mother, who has so much to fall back upon. Reine had never been able to forgive her mother’s marriage. She never named her by her new name without a thrill of irritation. Her stepfather seemed a standing shame to her, and every new brother and sister who came into the world was a new offence against Reine’s delicacy. She had been glad, very glad, of Madame de Mirfleur’s aid in transporting Herbert hither, and at first her mother’s society, apart from the new family, had been very sweet to the girl, who loved her, notwithstanding the fantastic sense of shame which possessed her, and her jealousy of all her new connections. But when Reine, quick-sighted with the sharpened vision of jealousy and wounded love, saw, or thought she saw, that her mother began to weary of the long vigil, that she began to wonder what her little ones were doing, and to talk of all the troubles of a long absence, her heart rose impatient in an agony of anger and shame and deep mortification. Weary of waiting for her son’s death – her eldest son, who ought to have been her only son – weary of those lingering moments which were now all that remained to Herbert! Reine, in the anguish of her own deep grief and pity and longing hold upon him, felt herself sometimes almost wild against her mother. She did so now, when Madame de Mirfleur, with a certain calm, though she was crying, shook her head and lamented that such gleams of betterness were often the precursors of the end. Reine did not weep when her mother buried her face in her delicate perfumed handkerchief. She said to herself fiercely, “Mamma likes to think so; she wants to get rid of us, and get back to those others,” and looked at her with eyes which shone hot and dry, with a flushed cheek and clenched hands. It was all she could do to restrain herself, to keep from saying something which good sense and good taste, and a lingering natural affection, alike made her feel that she must not say. Reine was one of those curious creatures in whom two races mingle. She had the Austin blue eyes, but with a light in them such as no Austin had before; but she had the dark-brown hair, smooth and silky, of her French mother, and something of the piquancy of feature, the little petulant nose, the mobile countenance of the more vivacious blood. Her figure was like a fairy’s, little and slight; her movements, both of mind and body, rapid as the stirrings of a bird; she went from one mood to another instantaneously, which was not the habit of her father’s deliberate race. Miss Susan thought her all French – Madame de Mirfleur all English; and indeed both with some reason – for when in England this perverse girl was full of enthusiasm for everything that belonged to her mother’s country, and when in France was the most prejudiced and narrow-minded of English women. Youth is always perverse, more or less, and there was a double share of its fanciful self-will and changeableness in Reine, whose circumstances were so peculiar and her temptations so many. She was so rent asunder by love and grief, by a kind of adoration for her dying brother, the only being in the world who belonged exclusively to herself, and jealous suspicion that he did not get his due from others, that her petulance was very comprehensible. She waited till Madame de Mirfleur came out of her handkerchief, still with hot and dry and glittering eyes.
“You think it would be well if it were over,” said Reine; “that is what I have heard people say. It would be well – yes, in order to release his nurses and attendants, it would be well if it should come to an end. Ah, mamma, you think so too – you, his mother! You would not harm him nor shorten his life, but yet you think, as it is hopeless, it might be well: you want to go to your husband and your children!”
“If I do, that is simple enough,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “Ciel! how unjust you are, Reine! because I tell you the result of a little rally like Herbert’s is often not happy. I want to go to my husband, and to your brothers and sisters, yes – I should be unnatural if I did not – but that my duty, which I will never neglect, calls upon me here.”
“Oh, do not stay!” cried Reine vehemently – “do not stay! I can do all the duty. If it is only duty that keeps you, go, mamma, go! I would not have you, for that reason, stay another day.”
“Child! how foolish you are!” said the mother. “Reine, you should not show at least your repugnance to everything I am fond of. It is wicked – and more, it is foolish. What can any one think of you? I will stay while I am necessary to my poor boy; you may be sure of that.”
“Not necessary,” said Reine – “oh, not necessary! I can do all for him that is necessary. He is all I have in the world. There are neither husband nor children that can come between Herbert and me. Go, mamma, – for Heaven’s sake, go! When your heart is gone already, why should you remain? I can do all he requires. Oh, please, go!”
“You are very wicked, Reine,” said her mother, “and unkind! You do not reflect that I stay for you. What are you to do when you are left all alone? – you, who are so unjust to your mother? I stay for that. What would you do?”
“Me!” said Reine. She grew pale suddenly to her very lips, struck by this sudden suggestion in the sharpest way. She gave a sob of tearless passion. She knew very well that her brother was dying; but thus to be compelled to admit and realize it, was more than she could bear. “I will do the best I can,” she said, closing her eyes in the giddy faintness that came over her. “What does it matter about me?”
“The very thought makes you ill,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “Reine, you know what is coming, but you will never allow yourself to think of it. Pause now, and reflect; when my poor Herbert is gone, what will become of you, unless I am here to look after you? You will have to do everything yourself. Why should we refuse to consider things which we know must happen? There will be the funeral – all the arrangements – ”
“Mamma! mamma! have you a heart of stone?” cried Reine. She was shocked and wounded, and stung to the very soul. To speak of his funeral, almost in his presence, seemed nothing less than brutal to the excited girl; and all these matter-of-fact indications of what was coming jarred bitterly upon the heart, in which, I suppose, hope will still live while life lasts. Reine felt her whole being thrill with the shock of this terrible, practical touch, which to her mother seemed merely a simple putting into words of the most evident and unavoidable thought.
“I hope I have a heart like all the rest of the world,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “And you are excited and beside yourself, or I could not pass over your unkindness as I do. Yes, Reine, it is my duty to stay for poor Herbert, but still more for you. What would you do?”
“What would it matter?” cried Reine, bitterly – “not drop into his grave with him – ah, no; one is not permitted that happiness. One has to stay behind and live on, when there is nothing to live for more!”
“You are impious, my child,” said her mother. “And, again, you are foolish; you do not reflect how young you are, and that life has many interests yet in store for you – new connections, new duties – ”
“Husbands and children!” cried Reine with scornful bitterness, turning her blue eyes, agleam with that feverish fire which tells at once of the necessity and impossibility of tears, upon her mother. Then her countenance changed all in a moment. A little bell tinkled faintly from the next room. “I am coming,” she cried, in a tone as soft as the Summer air that caressed the flowers in the balcony. The expression of her face was changed and softened; she became another creature in a moment. Without a word or a look more, she opened the door of the inner room and disappeared.
Madame de Mirfleur looked after her, not without irritation; but she was not so fiery as Reine, and she made allowances for the girl’s folly, and calmed down her own displeasure. She listened for a moment to make out whether the invalid’s wants were anything more than usual, whether her help was required; and then drawing toward her a blotting-book which lay on the table, she resumed her letter to her husband. She was not so much excited as Reine by this interview, and, indeed, she felt she had only done her duty in indicating to the girl very plainly that life must go on and be provided for, even after Herbert had gone out of it. “My poor boy!” she said to herself, drying some tears; but she could not think of dying with him, or feel any despair from that one loss; she had many to live for, many to think of, even though she might have him no longer. “Reine is excited and unreasonable, as usual,” she wrote to her husband; “always jealous of you, mon ami, and of our children. This arises chiefly from her English ideas, I am disposed to believe. Perhaps when the sad event which we are awaiting is over, she will see more clearly that I have done the best for her as well as for myself. We must pardon her in the meantime, poor child. It is in her blood. The English are always more or less fantastic. We others, French, have true reason. Reassure yourself, mon cher ami, that I will not remain a day longer than I can help away from you and our children. My poor Herbert sinks daily. Think of our misery! – you cannot imagine how sad it is. Probably in a week, at the furthest, all will be over. Ah, mon Dieu! what it is to have a mother’s heart! and how many martyrdoms we have to bear!” Madame de Mirfleur wrote this sentence with a very deep sigh, and once more wiped from her eyes a fresh gush of tears. She was perfectly correct in every way as a mother. She felt as she ought to feel, and expressed her sorrow as it was becoming to express it, only she was not absorbed by it – a thing which is against all true rules of piety and submission. She could not rave like Reine, as if there was nothing else worth caring for, except her poor Herbert, her dear boy. She had a great many other things to care for; and she recognized all that must happen, and accepted it as necessary. Soon it would be over; and all recovery being hopeless, and the patient having nothing to look forward to but suffering, could it be doubted that it was best for him to have his suffering over? though Reine, in her rebellion against God and man, could not see this, and clung to every lingering moment which could lengthen out her brother’s life.
Reine herself cleared like a Summer sky as she passed across the threshold into her brother’s room. The change was instantaneous. Her blue eyes, which had a doubtful light in them, and looked sometimes fierce and sometimes impassioned, were now as soft as the sky. The lines of irritation were all smoothed from her brow and from under her eyes. Limpid eyes, soft looks, an unruffled, gentle face, with nothing in it but love and tenderness, was what she showed always to her sick brother. Herbert knew her only under this aspect, though, with the clear-sightedness of an invalid, he had divined that Reine was not always so sweet to others as to himself.
“You called me,” she said, coming up to his bed-side with something caressing, soothing, in the very sound of her step and voice; “you want me, Herbert?”
“Yes; but I don’t want you to do anything. Sit down by me, Reine; I am tired of my own company, that is all.”
“And so am I – of everybody’s company but yours,” she said, sitting down by the bed-side and stooping her pretty, shining head to kiss his thin hand.
“Thanks, dear, for saying such pretty things to me. But, Reine, I heard voices; you were talking – was it with mamma? – not so softly as you do to me.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” said Reine, with a flush. “Did you hear us, poor boy? Oh, that was wicked! Yes, you know there are things that make me – I do not mean angry – I suppose I have no right to be angry with mamma – ”
“Why should you be angry with any one?” he said, softly. “If you had to lie here, like me, you would think nothing was worth being angry about. My poor Reine! you do not even know what I mean.”
“Oh, no; there is so much that is wrong,” said Reine; “so many things that people do – so many that they think – their very ways of doing even what is right enough. No, no; it is worth while to be angry about many, many things. I do not want to learn to be indifferent; besides, that would be impossible to me – it is not my nature.”
The invalid smiled and shook his head softly at her. “Your excuse goes against yourself,” he said. “If you are ruled by your nature, must not others be moved by theirs? You active-minded people, Reine, you would like every one to think like you; but if you could accomplish it, what a monotonous world you would make! I should not like the Kanderthal if all the mountain-tops were shaped the same; and I should not perhaps love you so much if you were less yourself. Why not let other people, my Reine, be themselves, too?”
The brother and sister spoke French, which, more than English, had been the language of their childhood.
“Herbert, don’t say such things!” cried the girl. “You do not love me for this or for that, as strangers might, but because I am I, Reine, and you are you, Herbert. That is all we want. Ah, yes, perhaps if I were very good I should like to be loved for being good. I don’t know; I don’t think it even then. When they used to promise to love me if I was good at Whiteladies, I was always naughty – on purpose? – yes, I am afraid. Herbert, should not you like to be at Whiteladies, lying on the warm, warm grass in the orchard, underneath the great apple-tree, with the bees humming all about, and the dear white English clouds floating and floating, and the sky so deep, deep, that you could not fathom it? Ah!” cried Reine, drawing a deep breath, “I have not thought of it for a long time; but I wish we were there.”
The sick youth did not say anything for a moment; his eyes followed her look, which she turned instinctively to the open window. Then he sighed; then raising himself a little, said, with a gleam of energy, “I am certainly better, Reine. I should like to get up and set out across the Gemmi, down the side of the lake that must be shining so in the sun. That’s the brightest way home.” Then he laughed, with a laugh which, though feeble, had not lost the pleasant ring of youthfulness. “What wild ideas you put into my head!” he said. “No, I am not up to that yet; but, Reine, I am certainly better. I have such a desire to get up: and I thought I should never get up again.”
“I will call François!” cried the girl, eagerly. He had been made to get up for days together without any will of his own, and now that he should wish it seemed to her a step toward that recovery which Reine could never believe impossible. She rushed out to call his servant, and waited, with her heart beating, till he should be dressed, her thoughts already dancing forward to brighter and brighter possibilities.
“He has never had the good of the mountain air,” said Reine to herself, “and the scent of the pine-woods. He shall sit on the balcony to-day, and to-morrow go out in the chair, and next week, perhaps – who knows? – he may be able to walk up to the waterfall, and – O God! O Dieu tout-puissant! O doux Jesu!” cried the girl, putting her hands together, “I will be good! I will be good! I will endure anything; if only he may live! – if only he may live!”
CHAPTER X
This little scene took place in the village of Kandersteg, at the foot of the hills, exactly on the day when Miss Susan executed her errand in the room behind the shop, in low-lying Bruges, among the flat canals and fat Flemish fields. The tumult in poor Reine’s heart would have been almost as strange to Miss Susan as it was to Reine’s mother; for it was long now since Herbert had been given up by everybody, and since the doctors had all said, that “nothing short of a miracle” could save him. Neither Miss Susan nor Madame de Mirfleur believed in miracles. But Reine, who was young, had no such limitation of mind, and never could or would acknowledge that anything was impossible. “What does impossible mean?” Reine cried in her vehemence, on this very evening, after Herbert had accomplished her hopes, had stayed for an hour or more on the balcony and felt himself better for it, and ordered François to prepare his wheeled chair for to-morrow. Reine had much ado not to throw her arms around François’s neck, when he pronounced solemnly that “Monsieur est mieux, décidément mieux.” “Même,” added François, “il a un petit air de je ne sais quoi – quelque chose – un rien – un regard – ”
“N’est ce pas, mon ami!” cried Reine transported. Yes, there was a something, a nothing, a changed look which thrilled her with the wildest hopes, – and it was after this talk that she confronted Madame de Mirfleur with the question, “What does impossible mean? It means only, I suppose, that God does not interfere – that He lets nature go on in the common way. Then nothing is impossible; because at any moment, God may interfere if He pleases. Ah! He has His reasons, I suppose. If He were never to interfere at all, but leave nature to do her will, it is not for us to blame Him,” cried Reine, with tears, “but yet always He may: so there is always hope, and nothing is impossible in this world.”
“Reine, you speak like a child,” said her mother. “Have I not prayed and hoped too for my boy’s life? But when all say it is impossible – ”
“Mamma,” said Reine, “when my piano jars, it is impossible for me to set it right – if I let it alone, it goes worse and worse; if I meddle with it in my ignorance, it goes worse and worse. If you, even, who know more than I do, touch it, you cannot mend it. But the man comes who knows, et voilà! c’est tout simple,” cried Reine. “He touches something we never observed, he makes something rise or fall, and all is harmonious again. That is like God. He does not do it always, I know. Ah! how can I tell why? If it was me,” cried the girl, with tears streaming from her eyes, “I would save every one – but He is not like me.”
“Reine, you are impious – you are wicked; how dare you speak so?”
“Oh, no, no! I am not impious,” she cried, dropping upon her knees – all the English part in her, all her reason and self-restraint broken down by extreme emotion. “The bon Dieu knows I am not! I know, I know He does, and sees me, the good Father, and is sorry, and considers with Himself in His great heart if He will do it even yet. Oh, I know, I know!” cried the weeping girl, “some must die, and He considers long; but tell me He does not see me, does not hear me, is not sorry for me – how is He then my Father? No!” she said softly, rising from her knees and drying the tears from her face, “what I feel is that He is thinking it over again.”
Madame de Mirfleur was half afraid of her daughter, thinking she was going out of her mind. She laid her hand on Reine’s shoulder with a soothing touch. “Chérie!” she said, “don’t you know it was all decided and settled before you were born, from the beginning of the world?”
“Hush!” said Reine, in her excitement. “I can feel it even in the air. If our eyes were clear enough, we should see the angels waiting to know. I dare not pray any more, only to wait like the angels. He is considering. Oh! pray, pray!” the poor child cried, feverish and impassioned. She went out into the balcony and knelt down there, leaning her forehead against the wooden railing. The sky shone above with a thousand stars, the moon, which was late that night, had begun to throw upward from behind the pinnacles of snow, a rising whiteness, which made them gleam; the waterfall murmured softly in the silence; the pines joined in their continual cadence, and sent their aromatic odors like a breath of healing, in soft waves toward the sick man’s chamber. There was a stillness all about, as if, as poor Reine said, God himself was considering, weighing the balance of death or life. She did not look at the wonderful landscape around, or see or even feel its beauty. Her mind was too much absorbed – not praying, as she said, but fixed in one wonderful voiceless aspiration. This fervor and height of feeling died away after a time, and poor little Reine came back to common life, trembling with a thrill in all her nerves, and chilled with over-emotion, but yet calm, having got some strange gleam of encouragement, as she thought, from the soft air and the starry skies.
“He is fast asleep,” she said to her mother when they parted for the night, with such a smile on her face as only comes after many tears, and the excitement of great suffering, “quite fast asleep, breathing like a child. He has not slept so before, almost for years.”
“Poor child,” said Madame de Mirfleur, kissing her. She was not moved by Reine’s visionary hopes. She believed much more in the doctors, who had described to her often enough – for she was curious on such subjects – how Herbert’s disease had worked, and of the “perforations” that had taken place, and the “tissue that was destroyed.” She preferred to know the worst, she had always said, and she had a strange inquisitive relish for these details. She shook her head and cried a little, and said her prayers too with much more fervor than usual, after she parted from Reine. Poor Herbert, if he could live after all, how pleasant it would be! how sweet to take M. de Mirfleur and the children to her son’s château in England, and to get the good of his wealth. Ah! what would not she give for his life, her poor boy, her eldest, poor Austin’s child, whom indeed she had half forgotten, but who had always been so good to her! Madame de Mirfleur cried over the thought, and said her prayers fervently, with a warmer petition for Herbert than usual; but even as she prayed she shook her head; she had no faith in her own prayers. She was a French Protestant, and knew a great deal about theology, and perhaps had been shaken by the many controversies which she had heard. And accordingly she shook her head; to be sure, she said to herself, there was no doubt that God could do everything – but, as a matter of fact, it was evident that this was not an age of miracles; and how could we suppose that all the economy of heaven and earth could be stopped and turned aside, because one insignificant creature wished it! She shook her head; and I think whatever theory of prayer we may adopt, the warmest believer in its efficacy would scarcely expect any very distinct answer to such prayers as those of Madame de Mirfleur.
Herbert and Reine Austin had been brought up almost entirely together from their earliest years. Partly from his delicate health and partly from their semi-French training, the boy and girl had not been separated as boys and girls generally are by the processes of education. Herbert had never been strong, and consequently had never been sent to school or college. He had had tutors from time to time, but as nobody near him was much concerned about his mental progress, and his life was always precarious, the boy was allowed to grow up, as girls sometimes are, with no formal education at all, but a great deal of reading; his only superiority in this point was, he knew after a fashion Latin and Greek, which Madame de Mirfleur and even Miss Susan Austin would have thought it improper to teach a girl; while she knew certain arts of the needle which it was beneath man’s dignity to teach a boy. Otherwise they had gone through the selfsame studies, read the same books, and mutually communicated to each other all they found therein. The affection between them, and their union, was thus of a quite special and peculiar character. Each was the other’s family concentrated in one. Their frequent separations from their mother and isolation by themselves at Whiteladies, where at first the two little brown French mice, as Miss Susan had called them, were but little appreciated, had thrown Reine and Herbert more and more upon each other for sympathy and companionship. To be sure, as they grew older they became by natural process of events the cherished darlings of Whiteladies, to which at first they were a trouble and oppression; but the aunts were old and they were young, and except Everard Austin, had no companions but each other. Then their mother’s marriage, which occurred when Herbert was about fourteen and his sister two years younger, gave an additional closeness, as of orphans altogether forsaken, to their union. Herbert was the one who took this marriage most easily. “If mamma likes it, it is no one else’s business,” he said with unusual animation when Miss Susan began to discuss the subject; it was not his fault, and Herbert had no intention of being brought to account for it. He took it very quietly, and had always been quite friendly to his stepfather, and heard of the birth of the children with equanimity. His feelings were not so intense as those of Reine; he was calm by nature, and illness had hushed and stilled him. Reine, on the other hand, was more shocked and indignant at this step on her mother’s part, than words can say. It forced her into precocious womanhood, so much did it go to her heart. To say that she hated the new husband and the new name which her mother had chosen, was little. She felt herself insulted by them, young as she was. The blood came hot to her face at the thought of the marriage, as if it had been something wrong – and her girlish fantastic delicacy never recovered the shock. It turned her heart from her mother who was no longer hers, and fixed it more and more upon Herbert, the only being in the world who was hers, and in whom she could trust fully. “But if I were to marry, too!” he said to her once, in some moment of gayer spirits. “It is natural that you should marry, not unnatural,” cried Reine; “it would be right, not wretched. I might not like it; probably I should not like it – but it would not change my ideal.” This serious result had happened in respect to her mother, who could no longer be Reine’s ideal, whatever might happen. The girl was so confused in consequence, and broken away from all landmarks, that she, and those who had charge of her, had anything but easy work in the days before Herbert’s malady declared itself. This had been the saving of Reine; she had devoted herself to her sick brother heart and soul, and the jar in her mind had ceased to communicate false notes to everything around.
