CHAPTER XXIX
“Going to stay till Herbert comes back! but, my dear Aunt Susan, since you don’t want her – and of course you don’t want her – why don’t you say so?” cried Everard. “An unwelcome guest may be endured for a day or two, or a week or two, but for five or six months – ”
“My dear,” said Miss Susan, who was pale, and in whose vigorous frame a tremble of weakness seemed so out of place, “how can I say so? It would be so – discourteous – so uncivil – ”
The young man looked at her with dismay. He would have laughed had she not been so deadly serious. Her face was white and drawn, her lips quivered slightly as she spoke. She looked all at once a weak old woman, tremulous, broken down, and uncertain of herself.
“You must be ill,” he said. “I can’t believe it is you I am speaking to. You ought to see the doctor, Aunt Susan – you cannot be well.”
“Perhaps,” she said with a pitiful attempt at a smile, “perhaps. Indeed you must be right, Everard, for I don’t feel like myself. I am getting old, you know.”
“Nonsense!” he said lightly, “you were as young as any of us last time I was here.”
“Ah!” said Miss Susan, with her quivering lips. “I have kept that up too long. I have gone on being young – and now all at once I am old; that is how it is.”
“But that does not make any difference in my argument,” said Everard; “if you are old – which I don’t believe – the less reason is there for having you vexed. You don’t like this guest who is going to inflict herself upon you. I shouldn’t mind her,” he added, with a laugh; “she’s very handsome, Aunt Susan; but I don’t suppose that affects you in the same way; and she will be quite out of place when Herbert comes, or at least when Reine comes. I advise you to tell her plainly, before the old fellow goes, that it won’t do.”
“I can’t, my dear – I can’t!” said Miss Susan; how her lips quivered! – “she is in my house, she is my guest, and I can’t say ‘Go away.’ ”
“Why not? She is not a person of very fine feelings, to be hurt by it. She is not even a lady; and till May, till the end of May! you will never be able to endure her.”
“Oh, yes I shall,” said Miss Susan. “I see you think that I am very weak; but I never was uncivil to any one, Everard, not to any one in my own house. It is Herbert’s house, of course,” she added quickly, “but yet it has been mine, though I never had any real right to it for so many years.”
“And you really mean to leave now?”
“I suppose so,” said Miss Susan faltering, “I think, probably – nothing is settled. Don’t be too hard upon me, Everard! I said so – for them, to show them that I had no power.”
“Then why, for heaven’s sake, if you have so strong a feeling – why, for the sake of politeness! – Politeness is absurd, Aunt Susan,” said Everard. “Do you mean to say that if any saucy fellow, any cad I may have met, chose to come into my house and take possession, I should not kick him out because it would be uncivil? This is not like your good sense. You must have some other reason. No! do you mean No by that shake of the head? Then if it is so very disagreeable to you, let me speak to her. Let me suggest – ”
“Not for the world,” cried Miss Susan. “No, for pity’s sake, no. You will make me frantic if you speak of such a thing.”
“Or to the old fellow,” said Everard; “he ought to see the absurdity of it, and the tyranny.”
She caught at this evidently with a little hope. “You may speak to Monsieur Guillaume if you feel disposed,” she said; “yes, you may speak to him. I blame him very much; he ought not to have listened to her; he ought to have taken her away at once.”
“How could he if she wouldn’t go? Men no doubt are powerful beings,” said Everard laughing, “but suppose the other side refused to be moved? Even a horse at the water, if it declines to drink – you know the proverb.”
“Oh, don’t worry me with proverbs – as if I had not enough without that!” she said with an impatience which would have been comic had it not been so tragical. “Yes, Everard, yes, if you like you may speak to him – but not to her; not a word to her for the world. My dear boy, my dear boy! You won’t go against me in this?”
“Of course I shall do only what you wish me to do,” he said more gravely; the sight of her agitation troubled the young man exceedingly. To think of any concealed feeling, any mystery in connection with Susan Austin, seemed not only a blasphemy, but an absurdity. Yet what could she mean, what could her strange terror, her changed looks, her agitated aspect, mean? Everard was more disturbed than he could say.
This was on Sunday afternoon, that hour of all others when clouds hang heaviest, and troubles, where they exist, come most into the foreground. The occupations of ordinary life push them aside, but Sunday, which is devoted to rest, and in which so many people honestly endeavor to put the trifling little cares of every day out of their minds, always lays hold of those bigger disturbers of existence which it is the aim of our lives to forget. Miss Susan would have made a brave fight against the evil which she could not avoid on another day, but this day, with all its many associations of quiet, its outside tranquillity, its peaceful recollections and habits, was too much for her. Everard had found her walking in the Priory Lane by herself, a bitter dew of pain in her eyes, and a tremble in her lips which frightened him. She had come out to collect her thoughts a little, and to escape from her visitors, who sometimes seemed for the moment more than she could bear.
Miss Augustine came up on her way from the afternoon service at the Almshouses, while Everard spoke. She was accompanied by Giovanna, and it was a curious sight to see the tall, slight figure of the Gray sister, type of everything abstract and mystic, with that other by her side, full of strange vitality, watching the absorbed and dreamy creature with those looks of investigation, puzzled to know what her meaning was, but determined somehow to be at the bottom of it. Giovanna’s eyes darted a keen telegraphic communication to Everard’s as they came up. This glance seemed to convey at once an opinion and an inquiry. “How droll she is! Is she mad? I am finding her out,” the eyes said. Everard carefully refrained from making any reply; though, indeed, this was self-denial on his part, for Giovanna certainly made Whiteladies more amusing than it had been when he was last there.
“You have been to church?” said Miss Susan, with her forced and reluctant smile.
“She went with me,” said Miss Augustine. “I hope we have a great acquisition in her. Few have understood me so quickly. If anything should happen to Herbert – ”
“Nothing will happen to Herbert,” cried Miss Susan. “God bless him! It sounds as if you were putting a spell upon our boy.”
“I put no spell; I don’t even understand such profane words. My heart is set on one thing, and it is of less importance how it is carried out. If anything should happen to Herbert, I believe I have found one who sees the necessity as I do, and who will sacrifice herself for the salvation of the race.”
“One who will sacrifice herself!” Miss Susan gasped wildly under her breath.
Giovanna looked at her with defiance, challenging her, as it were, to a mortal struggle; yet there was a glimmer of laughter in her eyes. She looked at Miss Susan from behind the back of the other, and made a slow, solemn courtesy as Augustine spoke. Her eyes were dancing with humorous enjoyment of the situation, with mischief and playfulness, yet with conscious power.
“This – lady?” said Miss Susan, “I think you are mad; Austine, I think you are going mad!”
Miss Augustine shook her head. “Susan, how often do I tell you that you are giving your heart to Mammon and to the world! This is worse than madness. It makes you incapable of seeing spiritual things. Yes! she is capable of it. Heaven has sent her in answer to many prayers.”
Saying this, Augustine glided past toward the house with her arms folded in her sleeves, and her abstract eyes fixed on the vacant air. A little flush of displeasure at the opposition had come upon her face as she spoke, but it faded as quickly as it came. As for Giovanna, before she followed her, she stopped, and threw up her hands with an appealing gesture: “Is it then my fault?” she said, as she passed.
Miss Susan stood and looked after them, her eyes dilating; a kind of panic was in her face. “Is it, then, God that has sent her, to support the innocent, to punish the guilty?” she said, under her breath.
“Aunt Susan, take my arm; you are certainly ill.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, faintly. “Take me in, take me out of sight, and never tell any one, Everard, never tell any one. I think I shall go out of my mind. It must be giving my thoughts to Mammon and the world, as she said.”
“Never mind what she says,” said Everard, “no one pays any attention to what she says. Your nerves are overwrought somehow or other, and you are ill. But I’ll have it out with the old duffer!” cried the young man. They met Monsieur Guillaume immediately after, and I think he must have heard them; but he was happily quite unaware of the nature of a “duffer,” or what the word meant, and to tell the truth, so am I.
Miss Susan was not able to come down to dinner, a marvellous and almost unheard of event, so that the party was still less lively than usual. Everard was so concerned about his old friend, and the strange condition in which she was, that he began his attack upon the old shopkeeper almost as soon as they were left alone. “Don’t you think, sir,” the young man began, in a straightforward, unartificial way, “that it would be better to take your daughter-in-law with you? She will only be uncomfortable among people so different from those you have been accustomed to; I doubt if they will get on.”
“Get on?” said Monsieur Guillaume, pleasantly. “Get on what? She does not wish to get on anywhere. She wishes to stay here.”
“I mean, they are not likely to be comfortable together, to agree, to be friends.”
M. Guillaume shrugged his shoulders. “Mon Dieu,” he said, “it will not be my fault. If Madame Suzanne will not grant the little rente, the allowance I demanded for le petit, is it fit that he should be at my charge? He was not thought of till Madame Suzanne came to visit us. There is nothing for him. He was born to be the heir here.”
“But Miss Austin could have nothing to do with his being born,” cried Everard, laughing. Poor Miss Susan, it seemed the drollest thing to lay to her charge. But M. Guillaume did not see the joke, he went on seriously.
“And I had made my little arrangement with M. Farrel. We were in accord; all was settled; so much to come to me on the spot, and this heritage, this old château – château, mon Dieu, a thing of wood and brick! – to him, eventually. But when Madame Suzanne arrived to tell us of the beauties of this place, and when the women among them made discovery of le petit, that he was about to be born, the contract was broken with M. Farrel. I lost the money – and now I lose the heritage; and it is I who must provide for le petit! Monsieur, such a thing was never heard of. It is incredible; and Madame Suzanne thinks, I am to carry off the child without a word, and take this disappointment tranquilly! But no! I am not a fool, and it cannot be.”
“But I thought you were very fond of the child, and were in despair of losing him,” said Everard.
“Yes, yes,” cried the old shopkeeper, “despair is one thing, and good sense is another. This is contrary to good sense. Giovanna is an obstinate, but she has good sense. They will not give le petit anything, eh bien, let them bear the expense of him! That is what she says.”
“Then the allowance is all you want?” said Everard, with British brevity. This seemed to him the easiest of arrangements. With his mind quite relieved, and a few jokes laid up for the amusement of the future, touching Miss Susan’s powers and disabilities, he strolled into the drawing-room, M. Guillaume preferring to take himself to bed. The drawing-room of Whiteladies had never looked so thoroughly unlike itself. There seemed to Everard at first to be no one there, but after a minute he perceived a figure stretched out upon a sofa. The lamps were very dim, throwing a sort of twilight glimmer through the room; and the fire was very red, adding a rosy hue, but no more, to this faint illumination. It was the sort of light favorable to talk, or to meditation, or to slumber, but by aid of which neither reading, nor work, nor any active occupation could be pursued. This was of itself sufficient to mark the absence of Miss Susan, for whom a cheerful light full of animation and activity seemed always necessary. The figure on the sofa lay at full length, with an abandon of indolence and comfort which suited the warm atmosphere and subdued light. Everard felt a certain appropriateness in the scene altogether, but it was not Whiteladies. An Italian palace or an Eastern harem would have been more in accordance with the presiding figure. She raised her head, however, as he approached, supporting herself on her elbow, with a vivacity unlike the Eastern calm, and looked at him by the dim light with a look half provoking half inviting, which attracted the foolish young man more perhaps than a more correct demeanor would have done. Why should not he try what he could do, Everard thought, to move the rebel? for he had an internal conviction that even the allowance which would satisfy M. Guillaume would not content Giovanna. He drew a chair to the other side of the table upon which the tall dim lamp was standing, and which was drawn close to the sofa on which the young woman lay.
“Do you really mean to remain at Whiteladies?” he said. “I don’t think you can have any idea how dull it is here.”
She shrugged her shoulders slightly, and raised her eyebrows. She had let her head drop back upon the sofa cushions, and the faint light threw a kind of dreamy radiance upon her fine features, and great glowing dark eyes.
“Dull! it is almost more than dull,” he continued; though even as he spoke he felt that to have this beautiful creature in Whiteladies would be a sensible alleviation of the dulness, and that his effort on Miss Susan’s behalf was of the most disinterested kind. “It would kill you, I fear; you can’t imagine what it is in Winter, when the days are short; the lamps are lit at half-past four, and nothing happens all the evening, no one comes. You sit before dinner round the fire, and Miss Austin knits, and after dinner you sit round the fire again, and there is not a sound in all the place, unless you have yourself the courage to make an observation; and it seems about a year before it is time to go to bed. You don’t know what it is.”
What Miss Susan would have said had she heard this account of those Winter evenings, many of which the hypocrite had spent very coseyly at Whiteladies, I prefer not to think. The idea occurred to himself with a comic panic. What would she say? He could scarcely keep from laughing as he asked himself the question.
“I have imagination,” said Giovanna, stretching her arms. “I can see it all; but I should not endure it, me. I should get up and snap my fingers at them and dance, or sing.”
“Ah!” said Everard, entering into the humor of his rôle, “so you think at present; but it would soon take the spirit out of you. I am very sorry for you, Madame Jean. If I were like you, with the power of enjoying myself, and having the world at my feet – ”
“Ah! bah!” cried Giovanna, “how can one have the world at one’s feet, when one is never seen? And you should see the shop at Bruges, mon Dieu! People do not come and throw themselves at one’s feet there. I am not sure even if it is altogether the fault of Gertrude and the belle-mère; but here – ”
“You will have no one to see to,” said Everard, tickled by the part he was playing, and throwing himself into the spirit of it. “That is worse – for what is the good of being visible when there is no one to see?”
This consideration evidently was not without its effect. Giovanna raised herself lazily on her elbow and looked at him across the table. “You come,” said she, “and this ’Erbert.”
“Herbert!” said Everard, shading his head, “he is a sickly boy; and as for me – I have to pay my vows at other shrines,” he added with a laugh. But he found this conversation immensely entertaining, and went on representing the disadvantages of Whiteladies with more enjoyment than perhaps he had ever experienced in that place on a Sunday evening before. He went on till Giovanna pettishly bade him go. “At the least, it is comfortable,” she said. “Ah, go! It is very tranquil, there is no one to call to you with sharp voice like a knife, ‘Gi’vanna! tu dors!’ Go, I am going to sleep.”
I don’t suppose she meant him to take her at her word, for Giovanna was amused too, and found the young man’s company and his compliments, and that half-mocking, half-real mixture of homage and criticism, to be a pleasant variety. But Everard, partly because he had exhausted all he had got to say, partly lest he should be drawn on to say more, jumped up in a state of amusement and satisfaction with himself and his own cleverness which was very pleasant. “Since you send me away, I must obey,” he said; “Dormez, belle enchanteresse!” and with this, which he felt to be a very pretty speech indeed, he left the room more pleased with himself than ever. He had spent a most satisfactory evening, he had ascertained that the old man was to be bought off with money, and he had done his best to disgust the young woman with a dull English country-house; in short, he had done Miss Susan yeoman’s service, and amused himself at the same time. Everard was agreeably excited, and felt, after a few moments’ reflection over a cigar on the lawn, that he would like to do more. It was still early, for the Sunday dinner at Whiteladies, as in so many other respectable English houses, was an hour earlier than usual; and as he wandered round the house, he saw the light still shining in Miss Susan’s window. This decided him; he threw away the end of his cigar, and hastening up the great staircase three steps at once, hurried to Miss Susan’s door. “Come in,” she said faintly. Everard was as much a child of the house as Herbert and Reine, and had received many an admonition in that well-known chamber. He opened the door without hesitation. But there was something in the very atmosphere which he felt to daunt him as he went in.
Miss Susan was seated in her easy chair by the bedside fully dressed. She was leaning her head back upon the high shoulder of the old-fashioned chair with her eyes shut. She thought it was Martha who had come in, and she was not careful to keep up appearances with Martha, who had found out days before that something was the matter. She was almost ghastly in her paleness, and there was an utter languor of despair about her attitude and her look, which alarmed Everard in the highest degree. But he could not stop the first words that rose upon his lips, or subdue altogether the cheery tone which came naturally from his satisfied feelings. “Aunt Susan,” he cried, “come along, come down stairs, now’s your time. I have been telling stories of Whiteladies to disgust her, and I believe now you could buy them off with a small annuity. Aunt Susan! forgive my noise, you are ill.”
“No, no,” she said with a gasp and a forlorn smile. “No, only tired. What did you say, Everard? whom am I to buy off?” This was a last effort at keeping up appearances. Then it seemed to strike her all at once that this was an ungrateful way of treating one who had been taking so much trouble on her account. “Forgive me, Everard,” she said; “I have been dozing, and my head is muddled. Buy them off? To be sure, I should have thought of that; for an annuity, after all, though I have no right to give it, is better than having them settled in the house.”
“Far better, since you dislike them so much,” said Everard; “I don’t, for my part. She is not so bad. She is very handsome, and there’s some fun in her.”
“Fun!” Miss Susan rose up very tremulous and uncertain, and looking ten years older, with her face ashy pale, and a tottering in her steps, all brought about by this unwelcome visitor; and to hear of fun in connection with Giovanna, made her sharply, unreasonably angry for the time. “You should choose your words better at such a moment,” she said.
“Never mind my words, come and speak to her,” cried Everard. He was very curious and full of wonder, seeing there was something below the surface more than met his eyes, and that the mystery was far more mysterious than his idea of it. Miss Susan hesitated more than ever, and seemed as if she would have gone back before they reached the stairs; but he kept up her courage. “When it’s only a little money, and you can afford it,” he said. “You don’t care so much for a little money.”
“No, I don’t care much for a little money,” she repeated after him mechanically, as she went downstairs.