Маргарет Олифант - Madam

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.