ROSALIND spent a very restless night. She could not sleep, and the rain coming down in torrents irritated her with its ceaseless pattering. She thought, she could not tell why, of the poor people who were out in it—travellers, wayfarers, poor vagrants, such as she had seen about the country roads. What would the miserable creatures do in such a dismal night? As she lay awake in the darkness she pictured them to herself, drenched and cold, dragging along the muddy ways. No one in whom she was interested was likely to be reduced to such misery, but she thought of them, she could not tell why. She had knocked at Mrs. Trevanion’s door as she came up-stairs, longing to go in to say another word, to give her a kiss in her weariness. Rosalind had an ache and terrible question in her heart which she had never been able to get rid of, notwithstanding the closeness of the intercourse on the funeral day and the exuberant profession of faith to which she had given vent: “You can do no wrong.” Her heart had cried out this protestation of faith, but in her mind there had been a terrible drawing back, like that of the wave which has dashed brilliantly upon a stony beach only to groan and turn back again, carrying everything with it. Through all this sleepless night she lay balancing between these two sensations—the enthusiasm and the doubt. Her mother! It seemed a sort of blasphemy to judge or question that highest of all human authorities—that type and impersonation of all that was best. And yet it would force itself upon her, in spite of all her holding back. Where was she going that night? Supposing the former events nothing, what, oh, what was the new-made widow going to do on the eve of her husband’s funeral out in the park, all disguised and concealed in the dusk? The more Rosalind denied her doubts expression the more bitterly did that picture force itself upon her—the veiled, muffled figure, the watching accomplice, and the door so stealthily opened. Without practice and knowledge and experience, who could have done all that? If Rosalind herself wanted to steal out quietly, a hundred hinderances started up in her way. If she tried anything of the kind she knew very well that every individual whom she wished to avoid would meet her and find her out. It is so with the innocent, but with those who are used to concealment, not so. These were the things that said themselves in her mind without any consent of hers as she labored through the night. And when the first faint sounds of waking began to be audible, a distant door opening, an indication that some one was stirring, Rosalind got up too, unable to bear it any longer. She sprang out of bed and wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, resolved to go to her mother’s room and disperse all those ghosts of night. How often had she run there in childish troubles and shaken them off! That last court of appeal had never been closed to her. A kiss, a touch of the soft hand upon her head, a comforting word, had charmed away every spectre again and again. Perhaps Rosalind thought she would have the courage to speak all out, perhaps to have her doubts set at rest forever; but even if she had not courage for that, the mere sight of Mrs. Trevanion was enough to dispel all prejudices, to make an end of all doubts. It was quite dark in the passages as she flitted across the large opening of the stairs. Down-stairs in the great hall there was a spark of light, where a housemaid, kneeling within the great chimney, was lighting the fire. There was a certain relief even in this, in the feeling of a new day and life begun again. Rosalind glided like a ghost, in her warm dressing-gown, to Mrs. Trevanion’s door. She knocked softly, but there was no reply. Little wonder, at this hour of the morning; no doubt the mother was asleep. Rosalind opened the door.
There is a kind of horror of which it is difficult to give any description in the sensations of one who goes into a room expecting to find a sleeper in the safety and calm of natural repose and finds it empty, cold, and vacant. The shock is extraordinary. The certainty that the inhabitant must be there is so profound, and in a moment is replaced by an uncertainty which nothing can equal—a wild dread that fears it knows not what, but always the worst that can be feared. Rosalind went in with the soft yet confident step of a child, who knows that the mother will wake at a touch, almost at a look, and turn with a smile and a kiss to listen, whatever the story that is brought to her may be. Fuller confidence never was. She did not even look before going straight to the bedside. She had, indeed, knelt down there before she found out. Then she sprang to her feet again with the cry of one who had touched death unawares. It was like death to her, the touch of the cold, smooth linen, all folded as it had been in preparation for the inmate—who was to sleep there no more. She looked round the room as if asking an answer from every corner. “Mother, where are you? Mother! Where are you, mother?” she cried, with a wild voice of astonishment and dismay.
There was no light in the room; a faint paleness to show the window, a silence that was terrible, an atmosphere as of death itself. Rosalind flew, half frantic, into the dressing-room adjoining, which for some time past had been occupied by Jane. There a night-light which had been left burning flickered feebly, on the point of extinction. The faint light showed the same vacancy—the bed spread in cold order, everything empty, still. Rosalind felt her senses giving way. Her impulse was to rush out through the house, calling, asking, Where were they? Death seemed to be in the place—death more mysterious and more terrible than that with which she had been made familiar. After a pause she left the room and hurried breathless to that occupied by her uncle. How different there was the atmosphere, charged with human breath, warm with occupation. She burst in, too terrified for thought.
“Uncle John!” she cried, “Uncle John!” taking him by the shoulder.
It was not easy to wake him out of his deep sleep. At last he sat up in his bed, half awake, and looked at her with consternation.
“Rosalind! what is the matter?” he cried.
“Mamma is not in her room—where is she, where is she?” the girl demanded, standing over him like a ghost in the dark.
“Your mother is not— I—I suppose she’s tired, like all the rest of us,” he said, with a sleepy desire to escape this premature awakening. “Why, it’s dark still, Rosalind. Go back to bed, my dear. Your mother—”
“Listen, Uncle John. Mamma is not in her room. No one has slept there to-night; it is all empty; my mother is gone, is gone! Where has she gone?” the girl cried, wildly. “She has not been there all night.”
“Good God!” John Trevanion cried. He was entirely roused now. “Rosalind, you must be making some mistake.”
“There is no mistake. I thought perhaps you might know something. No one has slept there to-night. Oh, Uncle John, Uncle John, where is my mother? Let us go and find her before everybody knows.”
“Rosalind, leave me, and I will get up. I can tell you nothing—yes, I can tell you something; but I never thought it would be like this. It is your father who has sent her away.”
“Papa!” the girl cried; “oh, Uncle John, stop before you have taken everything away from me; neither father nor mother!—you take everything from me!” she said, with a cry of despair.
“Go away,” he said, “and get dressed, Rosalind, and then we can see whether there is anything to be done.”
An hour later they stood together by the half-kindled fire in the hall. John Trevanion had gone through the empty rooms with his niece, who was distracted, not knowing what she did. By this time a pale and gray daylight, which looked like cold and misery made visible, had diffused itself through the great house. That chill visibleness, showing all the arrangements of the room prepared for rest and slumber, where nobody had slept, had something terrible in it that struck them both with awe. There was no letter, no sign to be found of leave-taking. When they opened the wardrobe and drawers, a few dresses and necessaries were found to be gone, and it appeared that Jane had sent two small boxes to the village which she had represented to be old clothes, “colored things,” for which her mistress would now have no need. It was to Rosalind like a blow in the dark, a buffet from some ghostly hand, additional to her other pain, when she found it was these “colored things” and not the prepared, newly made mourning which her stepmother had taken with her. This seemed a cutting off from them, an entire abandonment, which made her misery deeper; but naturally John Trevanion did not think of that. He told her the story of the will while they stood together in the hall. But he could think of nothing to do, nor could he give any hope that this terrible event was a thing to be undone or concealed. “It must have happened,” he said, “sooner or later; and though it is a shock—a great shock—”
“Oh, Uncle John, it is—there was never anything so terrible. How can you use ordinary words? A shock! If the wind had blown down a tree it would be a shock. Don’t you see, it is the house that has been blown down? we have nothing—nothing to shelter us, we children. My mother and my father! We are orphans, and far, far worse than orphans. We having nothing left but shame—nothing but shame!”
“Rosalind, it is worse for the others than for you. You, at least, are clear of it; she is not your mother.”
“She is all the mother I have ever known,” Rosalind cried for the hundredth time. “And,” she added, with quivering lips, “I am the daughter of the man who on his death-bed has brought shame upon his own, and disgraced the wife that was like an angel to him. If the other could be got over, that can never be got over. He did it, and he cannot undo it. And she is wicked too. She should not have yielded like that; she should have resisted—she should have refused; she should not have gone away.”
“Had she done so it would have been our duty to insist upon it,” said John Trevanion, sadly. “We had no alternative. You will find when you think it over that this sudden going is for the best.”
“Oh, that is so easy to say when it is not your heart that is wrung, but some one else’s; and how can it ever be,” cried Rosalind, with a dismal logic which many have employed before her, “that what is all wrong from beginning to end can be for the best?”
This was the beginning of a day more miserable than words can describe. They made no attempt to conceal the calamity; it was impossible to conceal it. The first astounded and terror-stricken housemaid who entered the room spread it over the house like wildfire. Madam had gone away. Madam had not slept in her bed all night. When Rosalind, who could not rest, made one of her many aimless journeys up-stairs, she heard a wail from the nurseries, and Russell, rushing out, suddenly confronted her. The woman was pale with excitement; and there was a mixture of compunction and triumph and horror in her eyes.
“What does this mean, Miss Rosalind? Tell me, for God’s sake!” she cried.
It did Rosalind a little good in her misery to find herself in front of an actor in this catastrophe; one who was guilty and could be made to suffer. “It means,” she cried, with sudden rage, “that you must leave my mother’s children at once—this very moment! My uncle will give you your wages, whatever you want, but you shall not stay here, not an hour.”
“My wages!” the woman cried, with a sort of scream; “do I care for wages? Leave my babies, as I have brought up? Oh, never, never! You may say what you please, you that were always unnatural, that held for her instead of your own flesh and blood. You are cruel, cruel; but I won’t stand it— I won’t. There’s more to be consulted, Miss Rosalind, than you.”
“I would be more cruel if I could— I would strike you,” cried the impassioned girl, clinching her small hands, “if it were not a shame for a lady to do it—you, who have taken away mother from me and made me hate and despise my own father, oh, God forgive me! And it is your doing, you miserable woman. Let me never see you again. To see you is like death to me. Go away—go away!”
“And yet I was better than a mother to you once,” said Russell, who had cried out and put her hand to her heart as if she had received a blow. Her heart was tender to her nursling, though pitiless otherwise. “I saved your life,” she cried, beginning to weep; “I took you when your true mother died. You would have loved me but for that woman—that—”
Rosalind stamped her foot passionately upon the floor; she was transported by misery and wrath. “Do not dare to speak to me! Go away—go out of the house. Uncle John,” she cried, hurrying to the balustrade and looking down into the hall where he stood, too wretched to observe what was going on, “will you come and turn this woman away?”
He came slowly up-stairs at this call, with his hands in his pockets, every line of his figure expressing despondency and dismay. It was only when he came in sight of Russell, flushed, crying, and injured, yet defiant too, that he understood what Rosalind meant by the appeal. “Yes, it will be well that you should go,” he said. “You have made mischief that never can be mended. No one in this house will ever forgive you. The best thing you can do is to go—”
“The mischief was not my making,” cried Russell. “It’s not them that tells but them that goes wrong that are to blame. And the children—there’s the children to think of—who will take care of them like me? I’d die sooner than leave the children. They’re the same as my flesh and blood. They have been in my hands since ever they were born,” the woman cried with passion. “Oh, Mr. Trevanion, you that have always been known for a kind gentleman, let me stay with the children! Their mother, she can desert them, but I can’t; it will break my heart.”
“You had better go,” said John Trevanion, with lowering brows. At this moment Reginald appeared on the scene from another direction, pulling on his jacket in great hurry and excitement. “What does it all mean?” the boy cried, full of agitation. “Oh, if it’s only Russell! They told me some story about— Why are you bullying Russell, Uncle John?”
“Oh, Mr. Reginald, you’ll speak for me. You are my own boy, and you are the real master. Don’t let them break my heart,” cried Russell, holding out her imploring hands.
“Oh, if it’s only Russell,” the boy cried, relieved; “but they said—they told me—”
Another door opened as he spoke, and Aunt Sophy, dishevelled, the gray locks falling about her shoulders, a dressing-gown huddled about her ample figure, appeared suddenly. “For God’s sake, speak low! What does it all mean? Don’t expose everything to the servants, whatever it is,” she cried.