“GOING away?” said Giovanna. “M. ’Erbert, you go away already? is it that Viteladies is what you call dull? You have been here so short of time, you do not yet know.”
“We are going only for a day; at least not quite two days,” said Reine.
“For a day! but a day, two days is long. Why go at all?” said Giovanna. “We are very well here. I will sing, if that pleases, to you. M. ’Erbert, when you are so long absent, you should not go away to-morrow, the next day. Madame Suzanne will think, ‘They lofe me not.’ ”
“That would be nonsense,” said Herbert; “besides, you know I cannot be kept in one place at my age, whatever old ladies may think.”
“Ah! nor young ladies neither,” said Giovanna. “You are homme, you have the freedom to do what you will, I know it. Me, I am but a woman, I can never have this freedom; but I comprehend and I admire. Yes, M. ’Erbert, that goes without saying. One does not put the eagle into a cage.”
And Giovanna gave a soft little sigh. She was seated in one of her favorite easy chairs, thrown back in it in an attitude of delicious easy repose. She had no mind for the work with which Reine employed herself, and which all the women Herbert ever knew had indulged in, to his annoyance, and often envy; for an invalid’s weary hours would have been the better often of such feminine solace, and the young man hated it all the more that he had often been tempted to take to it, had his pride permitted. But Giovanna had no mind for this pretty cheat, that looked like occupation. In her own room she worked hard at her own dresses and those of the child, but downstairs she sat with her large, shapely white hands in her lap, in all the luxury of doing nothing; and this peculiarity delighted Herbert. He was pleased, too, with what she said; he liked to imagine that he was an eagle who could not be shut into a cage, and to feel his immense superiority, as man, over the women who were never free to do as they liked, and for whom (he thought) such an indulgence would not be good. He drew himself up unconsciously, and felt older, taller. “No,” he said, “of course it would be too foolish of Aunt Susan or any one to expect me to be guided by what she thinks right.”
“Me, I do not speak for you,” said Giovanna; “I speak for myself. I am disappointed, me. It will be dull when you are gone. Yes, yes, Monsieur ’Erbert, we are selfish, we other women. When you go we are dull; we think not of you, but of ourselves, n’est ce pas, Mademoiselle Reine? I am frank. I confess it. You will be very happy; you will have much pleasure; but me, I shall be dull. Voilà tout!”
I need not say that this frankness captivated Herbert. It is always more pleasant to have our absence regretted by others, selfishly, for the loss it is to them, than unselfishly on our account only; so that this profession of indifference to the pleasure of your departing friend, in consideration of the loss to yourself, is the very highest compliment you can pay him. Herbert felt this to the bottom of his heart. He was infinitely flattered and touched by the thought of a superiority so delightful, and he had not been used to it. He had been accustomed, indeed, to be in his own person the centre of a great deal of care and anxiety, everybody thinking of him for his sake; but to have it recognized that his presence or absence made a place dull or the reverse, and affected his surroundings, not for his sake but theirs, was an immense rise in the world to Herbert. He felt it necessary to be very friendly and attentive to Giovanna, by way of consoling her. “After all, it will not be very long,” he said; “from Friday morning to Saturday night. I like to humor the old ladies, and they make a point of our being at home for Sunday; though I don’t know how Sophy and Kate will like it, Reine.”
“They will not like it at all,” said Giovanna. “They want you to be to them, to amuse them, to make them happy; so do I, the same. When they come here, those young ladies, we shall not be friends; we shall fight,” she said with a laugh. “Ah, they are more clever than me, they will win; though if we could fight with the hands like men, I should win. I am more strong.”
“It need not come so far as that,” said Herbert, complaisant and delighted. “You are all very kind, I am sure, and think more of me than I deserve.”
“I am kind—to me, not to you, M. ’Erbert,” said Giovanna; “when I tell you it is dull, dull à mourir the moment you go away.”
“Yet you have spent a good many months here without Herbert, Madame Jean,” said Reine; “if it had been so dull, you might have gone away.”
“Ah, mademoiselle! where could I have gone to? I am not rich like you; I have not parents that love me. If I go home now,” cried Giovanna, with a laugh, “it will be to the room behind the shop where my belle-mère sits all the day, where they cook the dinner, where I am the one that is in the way, always. I have no money, no people to care for me. Even little Jean they take from me. They say, ‘Tenez Gi’vanna; she has not the ways of children.’ Have not I the ways of children, M. ’Erbert? That is what they would say to me, if I went to what you call ’ome.”
“Reine,” said Herbert, in an undertone, “how can you be so cruel, reminding the poor thing how badly off she is? I hope you will not think of going away,” he added, turning to Giovanna. “Reine and I will be too glad that you should stay; and as for your flattering appreciation of our society, I for one am very grateful,” said the young fellow. “I am very happy to be able to do anything to make Whiteladies pleasant to you.”
Miss Susan came in as he said this with Everard, who was going away; but she was too much preoccupied by her own cares to attend to what her nephew was saying. Everard appreciated the position more clearly. He saw the grateful look with which Giovanna turned her beautiful eyes to the young master of the house, and he saw the pleased vanity and complaisance in Herbert’s face. “What an ass he is!” Everard thought to himself; and then he quoted privately with rueful comment,—
“ ‘On him each courtier’s eye was bent,
To him each lady’s look was lent:’
all because the young idiot has Whiteladies, and is the head of the house. Bravo! Herbert, old boy,” he said aloud, though there was nothing particularly appropriate in the speech, “you are having your innings. I hope you will make the most of them. But now that I am no longer wanted, I am going off. I suppose when it is warm enough for water parties, I shall come into fashion again; Sophy and Kate will manage that.”
“Well, Everard, if I were you I should have more pride,” said Miss Susan. “I would not allow myself to be taken up and thrown aside as those girls please. What you can see in them baffles me. They are not very pretty. They are very loud, and fast and noisy—”
“I think so too!” cried Giovanna, clapping her hands. “They are my enemies: they take you away, M. ’Erbert and Mademoiselle Reine. They make it dull here.”
“Only for a day,” said Herbert, bending over her, his eyes melting and glowing with that delightful suffusion of satisfied vanity which with so many men represents love. “I could not stay long away if I would,” said the young man in a lower tone. He was quite captivated by her frank demonstrations of personal loss, and believed them to the bottom of his heart.
Miss Susan threw a curious, half-startled look at them, and Reine raised her head from her embroidery; but both of these ladies had something of their own on their minds which occupied them, and closed their eyes to other matters. Reine was secretly uneasy that Everard should go away; that there should have been no explanation between them; and that his tone had in it a certain suppressed bitterness. What had she done to him? Nothing. She had been occupied with her brother, as was natural; any one else would have been the same. Everard’s turn could come at any time, she said to herself, with an unconscious arrogance not unusual with girls, when they are sure of having the upper hand. But she was uneasy that he should go away.
“I don’t want to interfere with your pleasures, Herbert,” said Miss Susan, “but I must settle what I am to do. Our cottage is ready for us, everything is arranged; and I want to give up my charge to you, and go away.”
“To go away!” the brother and sister repeated together with dismay.
“Of course; that is what it must come to. When you were under age it was different. I was your guardian, Herbert, and you were my children.”
“Aunt Susan,” cried Reine, coming up to her with eager tenderness, “we are your children still.”
“And I—am not at all sure whether it will suit me to take up all you have been doing,” said Herbert. “It suits you, why should we change; and how could Reine manage the house? Aunt Susan, it is unkind to come down upon us like this. Leave us a little time to get used to it. What do you want with a cottage? Of course you must like Whiteladies best.”
“Oh, Aunt Susan! what he says is not so selfish as it sounds,” said Reine. “Why—why should you go?”
“We are all selfish,” said Herbert, “as Madame Jean says. She wishes us to stay because it is dull without us (‘Bien, très dull,’ said Giovanna), and we want you to stay because we are not up to the work and don’t understand it. Never mind the cottage; there is plenty of room in Whiteladies for all of us. Aunt Susan, why should you be disagreeable? Don’t go away.”
“I wish it; I wish it,” she said in a low tone; “let me go!”
“But we don’t wish it,” cried Reine, kissing her in triumph, “and neither does Augustine. Oh, Aunt Austine, listen to her, speak for us! You don’t wish to go away from Whiteladies, away from your home?”
“No,” said Augustine, who had come in in her noiseless way. “I do not intend to leave Whiteladies,” she went on, with serious composure; “but Herbert, I have something to say to you. It is more important than anything else. You must marry; you must marry at once; I don’t wish any time to be lost. I wish you to have an heir, whom I shall bring up. I will devote myself to him. I am fifty-seven; there is no time to be lost; but with care I might live twenty years. The women of our house are long-lived. Susan is sixty, but she is as active as any one of you; and for an object like this, one would spare no pains to lengthen one’s days. You must marry, Herbert. This has now become the chief object of my life.”
The young members of the party, unable to restrain themselves, laughed at this solemn address. Miss Susan turned away impatient, and sitting down, pulled out the knitting of which lately she had done so little. But as for Augustine, her countenance preserved a perfect gravity. She saw nothing laughable in it. “I excuse you,” she said very seriously, “for you cannot see into my heart and read what is there. Nor does Susan understand me. She is taken up with the cares of this world and the foolishness of riches. She thinks a foolish display like that of last night is more important. But, Herbert, listen to me; you and your true welfare have been my first thought and my first prayer for years, and this is my recommendation, my command to you. You must marry—and without any unnecessary delay.”
“But the lady?” said Herbert, laughing and blushing; even this very odd address had a pleasurable element in it. It implied the importance of everything he did; and it pleased the young man, even after such an odd fashion, to lay this flattering unction to his soul.
“The lady!” said Miss Augustine gravely; and then she made a pause. “I have thought a great deal about that, and there is more than one whom I could suggest to you; but I have never married myself, and I might not perhaps be a good judge. It seems the general opinion that in such matters people should choose for themselves.”
All this she said with so profound a gravity that the bystanders, divided between amusement and a kind of awe, held their breath and looked at each other. Miss Augustine had not sat down. She rarely did sit down in the common sitting-room; her hands were too full of occupation. Her Church services, now that the Chantry was opened, her Almshouses prayers, her charities, her universal oversight of her pensioners filled up all her time, and bound her to hours as strictly as if she had been a cotton-spinner in a mill. No cotton-spinner worked harder than did this Gray Sister; from morning to night her time was portioned out.
I do not venture to say how many miles she walked daily, rain or shine; from Whiteladies to the Almshouses, to the church, to the Almshouses again; or how many hours she spent absorbed in that strange matter-of-fact devotion which was her way of working for her family. She repeated, in her soft tones, “I do not interfere with your choice, Herbert; but what I say is very important. Marry! I wish it above everything else in life.” And having said this, she went away.
“This is very solemn,” said Herbert, with a laugh, but his laugh was not like the merriment into which, by-and-by, the others burst forth, and which half offended the young man. Reine, for her part, ran to the piano when Miss Augustine disappeared, and burst forth into a quaint little French ditty, sweet and simple, of old Norman rusticity.
“A chaque rose que je effeuille
Marie-toi, car il est temps,”
the girl sang. But Miss Susan did not laugh, and Herbert did not care to see anything ridiculed in which he had such an important share. After all it was natural enough, he said to himself, that such advice should be given with great gravity to one on whose acts so much depended. He did not see what there was to laugh about. Reine was absurd with her songs. There was always one of them which came in pat to the moment. Herbert almost thought that this light-minded repetition of Augustine’s advice was impertinent both to her and himself. And thus a little gloom had come over his brow.
“Messieurs et mesdames,” said Giovanna, suddenly, “you laugh, but, if you reflect, ma sœur has reason. She thinks, Here is Monsieur ’Erbert, young and strong, but yet there are things which happen to the strongest; and here, on the other part, is a little boy, a little, little boy, who is not English, whose mother is nothing but a foreigner, who is the heir. This gives her the panique. And for me, too, M. ’Erbert, I say with Mademoiselle Reine, ‘Marie-toi, car il est temps.’ Yes, truly! although little Jean is my boy, I say mariez-vous with my heart.”
“How good you are! how generous you are! Strange that you should be the only one to see it,” said Herbert, for the moment despising all the people belonging to him, who were so opaque, who did not perceive the necessities of the position. He himself saw those necessities well enough, and that he should marry was the first and most important. To tell the truth, he could not see even that Augustine’s anxiety was of an exaggerated description. It was not a thing to make laughter, and ridiculous jokes and songs about.
Giovanna did not desert her post during that day. She did not always lead the conversation, nor make herself so important in it as she had done at first, but she was always there, putting in a word when necessary, ready to come to Herbert’s assistance, to amuse him when there was occasion, to flatter him with bold, frank speeches, in which there was always a subtle compliment involved. Everard took his leave shortly after, with farewells in which there was a certain consciousness that he had not been treated quite as he ought to have been. “Till I come into fashion again,” he said, with the laugh which began to sound harsh to Reine’s ears, “I am better at home in my own den, where I can be as sulky as I please. When I am wanted, you know where to find me.” Reine thought he looked at her when he said this with reproach in his eyes.
“I think you are wanted now,” said Miss Susan; “there are many things I wished to consult you about. I wish you would not go away.”
But he was obstinate. “No, no; there is nothing for me to do,” he said; “no journeys to make, no troubles to encounter. You are all settled at home in safety; and when I am wanted you know where to find me,” he added, this time holding out his hand to Reine, and looking at her very distinctly. Poor Reine felt herself on the edge of a very sea of troubles: everybody around her seemed to have something in their thoughts beyond her divining. Miss Susan meant more than she could fathom, and there lurked a purpose in Giovanna’s beautiful eyes, which Reine began to be dimly conscious of, but could not explain to herself. How could he leave her to steer her course among these undeveloped perils? and how could she call him back when he was “wanted,” as he said bitterly? She gave him her hand, turning away her head to hide a something, almost a tear, that would come into her eyes, and with a forlorn sense of desertion in her heart; but she was too proud either by look or word to bid Everard stay.
This was on Thursday, and the next day they were to go to the Hatch, so that the interval was not long. Giovanna sang for them in the evening all kinds of popular songs, which was what she knew best, old Flemish ballads, and French and Italian canzoni; those songs of which every hamlet possesses one special to itself. “For I am not educated,” she said; “Mademoiselle must see that. I do all this by the ear. It is not music; it is nothing but ignorance. These are the chants du peuple, and I am nothing but one of the peuple, me. I am très-peuple. I never pretend otherwise. I do not wish to deceive you, M. ’Erbert, nor Mademoiselle.”
“Deceive us!” cried Herbert. “If we could imagine such a thing, we should be dolts indeed.”
Giovanna raised her head and looked at him, then turned to Miss Susan, whose knitting had dropped on her knee, and who, without thought, I think, had turned her eyes upon the group. “You are right, Monsieur ’Erbert,” she said, with a strange malicious laugh, “here at least you are quite safe, though there are much of persons who are traitres in the world. No one will deceive you here.”
She laughed as she spoke, and Miss Susan clutched at her knitting and buried herself in it, so to speak, not raising her head again for a full hour after, during which time Herbert and Giovanna talked a great deal to each other. And Reine sat by, with an incipient wonder in her mind which she could not quite make out, feeling as if her aunt and herself were one faction, Giovanna and Herbert another; as if there were all sorts of secret threads which she could not unravel, and intentions of which she knew nothing. The sense of strangeness grew on her so, that she could scarcely believe she was in Whiteladies, the home for which she had sighed so long. This kind of disenchantment happens often when the hoped-for becomes actual, but not always so strongly or with so bewildering a sense of something unrevealed, as that which pressed upon the very soul of Reine.
Next morning Giovanna, with her child on her shoulder, came out to the gate to see them drive away. “You will not stay more long than to-morrow,” she said. “How we are going to be dull till you come back! Monsieur Herbert, Mademoiselle Reine, you promise—not more long than to-morrow! It is two great long days!” She kissed her hand to them, and little Jean waved his cap, and shouted “Vive M. ’Erbert!” as the carriage drove away.
“What a grace she has about her!” said Herbert. “I never saw a woman so graceful. After all, it is a bore to go. It is astonishing how happy one feels, after a long absence, in the mere sense of being at home. I am sorry we promised; of course we must keep our promise now.”
“I like it, rather,” said Reine, feeling half ashamed of herself. “Home is not what it used to be; there is something strange, something new; I can’t tell what it is. After all, though, Madame Jean is very handsome, it is strange she should be there.”
“Oh, you object to Madame Jean, do you?” said Herbert. “You women are all alike; Aunt Susan does not like her either, I suppose you cannot help it; the moment a woman is more attractive than others, the moment a man shows that he has got eyes in his head—But you cannot help it, I suppose. What a walk she has, and carrying the child like a feather! It is a great bore, this visit to the Hatch, and so soon.”
“You were pleased with the idea; you were delighted to accept the invitation,” said Reine, injudiciously, I must say.
“Bah! one’s ideas change; but Sophy and Kate would have been disappointed,” said Herbert, with that ineffable look of complaisance in his eyes. And thus from Scylla which he had left, he drove calmly on to Charybdis, not knowing where he went.