PRESENTLY they all assembled in the hall—a miserable party. The door of the breakfast-room stood open, but no one went near it. They stood in a knot, all huddled together, speaking almost in whispers. Considering that everybody in the house now knew that Madam had never been in bed at all, that she must have left Highcourt secretly in the middle of the night, no precaution could have been more foolish. But Mrs. Lennox had not realized this; and her anxiety to silence scandal was extreme. She stood quite close to her brother, questioning him. “But what do you mean? How could Reginald do it? What did he imagine? And, oh! couldn’t you put a stop to it, for the sake of the family, John?”
Young Reginald stood on the other side, confused between anger and ignorance, incapacity to understand and a desire to blame some one. “What does she mean by it?” he said. “What did father mean by it? Was it just to make us all as wretched as possible—as if things weren’t bad enough before?” It was impossible to convey to either of them any real understanding of the case. “But how could he part the children from their mother?” said Aunt Sophy. “She is their mother, their mother; not their stepmother. You forget, John; she’s Rosalind’s stepmother. Rosalind might have been made my ward; that would have been natural; but the others are her own. How could he separate her from her own? She ought not to have left them! Oh, how could she leave them?” the bewildered woman cried.
“If she had not done it the children would have been destitute, Sophy. It was my business to make her do it, unless she had been willing to ruin the children.”
“Not me,” cried Reginald, loudly. “He could not have taken anything from me. She might have stuck to me, and I should have taken care of her. What had she to be frightened about? I suppose,” he added after a pause, “there would have been plenty—to keep all the children too—”
“Highcourt is not such a very large estate, Rex. Lowdean and the rest are unentailed. You would have been much impoverished too.”
“Oh!” Reginald cried, with an angry frown; but then he turned to another side of the question, and continued vehemently, “Why on earth, when she knew papa was so cranky and had it all in his power, why did she aggravate him? I think they must all have been mad together, and just tried how to spite us most!” cried the boy, with a rush of passionate tears to his eyes. The house was miserable altogether. He wanted his breakfast, and he had no heart to eat it. He could not bear the solemn spying of the servants. Dorrington, in particular, would come to the door of the breakfast-room and look in with an expression of mysterious sympathy for which Reginald would have liked to kill him. “I wish I had never come away from school at all. I wish I were not going back. I wish I were anywhere out of this,” he cried. But he did not suggest again that his mother should have “stuck to” him. He wanted to know why somebody did not interfere; why this thing and the other was permitted to be done. “Some one could have stopped it if they had tried,” Reginald said; and that was Aunt Sophy’s opinion too.
The conclusion of all was that Mrs. Lennox left Highcourt with the children and Rosalind as soon as their preparations could be made, by way of covering as well as possible the extraordinary revolution in the house. It was the only expedient any of these distracted people could think of to throw a little illusion over Mrs. Trevanion’s abrupt departure. Of course they were all aware everything must be known. What is there that is not known? And to think that a large houseful of servants would keep silent on such a piece of family history was past all expectation. No doubt it was already known through the village and spreading over the neighborhood. “Madam” had been caught meeting some man in the park when her husband was ill, poor gentleman! And now, the very day of the funeral, she was off with the fellow, and left all her children, and everything turned upside down. The older people all knew exactly what would be said, and they knew that public opinion would think the worst, that no explanations would be allowed, that the vulgarest, grossest interpretation would be so much easier than anything else, so ready, so indisputable—she had gone away with her lover. Mrs. Lennox herself could not help thinking so in the depths of her mind, though on the surface she entertained other vague and less assured ideas. What else could explain it? Everybody knew the force of passion, the way in which women will forsake everything, even their children, even their homes—that was comprehensible, though so dreadful. But nothing else was comprehensible. Aunt Sophy, in the depth of her heart, though she was herself an innocent woman, was not sure that John was not inventing, to shield his sister-in-law, that incredible statement about the will. She felt that she herself would say anything for the same purpose—she would not mind what it was—anything rather than that Grace, a woman they had all thought so much of, had “gone wrong” in such a dreadful way. Nevertheless it was far more comprehensible that she had “gone wrong” than any other explanation could be. Though she had been a woman upon whom no breath of scandal had ever come, a woman who overawed evil speakers, and was above all possibility of reproach, yet it was always possible that she might have “gone wrong.” Against such hazards there could be no defence. But Mrs. Lennox was very willing to do anything to cover up the family trouble. She even went the length of speaking somewhat loudly to her own maid, in the hearing of some of the servants of the house, about Mrs. Trevanion’s “early start.” “We shall catch her up on the way,” Mrs. Lennox said. “I don’t wonder, do you, Morris, that she went by that early train? Poor dear! I remember when I lost my first dear husband I couldn’t bear the sight of the house and the churchyard where he was lying. But we shall catch her up,” the kind-hearted hypocrite said, drying her eyes. As if the housemaids were to be taken in so easily! as if they did not know far more than Mrs. Lennox did, who thus lent herself to a falsehood! When the children came down, dressed in their black frocks, with eyes wide open and full of eager curiosity, Mrs. Lennox was daunted by the cynical air with which Sophy, her namesake and godchild, regarded her. “You needn’t say anything to me about catching up mamma, for I know better,” the child said, vindictively. “She likes somebody else better than us, and she has just gone away.”
“Rosalind,” Mrs. Lennox cried, in dismay, “I hope that woman is not coming with us, that horrible woman that puts such things into the children’s heads. I hope you have sent Russell away.”
But when the little ones were all packed in the carriage with their aunt, who could not endure to see any one cry, there was a burst of simultaneous weeping. “I neber love nobody but Nana. I do to nobody but Nana,” little Johnny shouted. His little sister said nothing, but her small mouth quivered, and the piteous aspect of her face, struggling against a passion of restrained grief, was the most painful of all. Sophy, however, continued defiant. “You may send her away, but me and Reginald will have her back again,” she said. Aunt Sophy could scarcely have been more frightened had she taken a collection of bombshells with her into the carriage. The absence of mamma was little to the children, who had been so much separated from her by their father’s long illness; but Russell, the “Nana” of their baby affections, had a closer hold.
With these rebellious companions, and with all the misery of the family tragedy overshadowing her, Rosalind made the journey more sadly than any of the party. At times it seemed impossible for her to believe that all the miseries that had happened were real. Was it not rather a dream from which she might awaken, and find everything as of old? To think that she should be leaving her home, feeling almost a fugitive, hastily, furtively, in order to cover the flight of one who had been her type of excellence all her life: to think that father and mother were both gone from her—gone out of her existence, painfully, miserably; not to be dwelt upon with tender grief, such as others had the privilege of enduring, but with bitter anguish and shame. The wails of the children as they grew tired with the journey, the necessity of taking the responsibility of them upon herself, hushing the cries of the little ones for “Nana,” silencing Sophy, who was disposed to be impertinent, keeping the weight of the party from the too susceptible shoulders of the aunt, made a complication and interruption of her thoughts which Rosalind was too inexperienced to feel as an alleviation, and which made a fantastic mixture of tragedy and burlesque in her mind. She had to think of the small matters of the journey, and to satisfy Aunt Sophy’s fears as to the impossibility of getting the other train at the junction, and the risk of losing the luggage, and to persuade her that Johnny’s restlessness, his refusal to be comforted by the anxious nursery-maid, and wailing appeals for Russell, would wear off by and by as baby-heartbreaks do. “But I have known a child fret itself to death,” Mrs. Lennox cried. “I have heard of instances in which they would not be comforted, Rosalind; and what should we do if the child was to pine, and perhaps to die?” Rosalind, so young, so little experienced, was overwhelmed by this suggestion. She took Johnny upon her own lap, and attempted to soothe him, with a sense that she might turn out a kind of murderer if the child did not mend. It was consolatory to feel that, warmly wrapped, and supported against her young bosom, Johnny got sleepy, and moaned himself into oblivion of his troubles. But this was not so pleasant when they came to the junction, and Rosalind had to stumble out of the carriage somehow, and hurry to the waiting train with poor little Johnny’s long legs thrust out from her draperies. It was at this moment, as she got out, that she saw a face in the crowd which gave her a singular thrill in the midst of her trouble. The wintry afternoon was falling into darkness, the vast, noisy place was swarming with life and tumult. She had to walk a little slower than the rest on account of her burden, which she did not venture to give into other arms, in case the child should wake. It was the face of the young man whom she had met in the park—the stranger, so unlike anybody else, about whom she had been so uncomfortably uncertain whether he was or not— But what did that matter? If he had been a prince of the blood or the lowest adventurer, what was it to Rosalind? Her mind was full of other things, and no man in the world had a right to waylay her, to follow her, to trace her movements. It made her hot and red with personal feeling in the midst of all the trouble that surrounded her. He had no right—no right; and yet the noblest lover who ever haunted his lady’s window to see her shadow on the blind had no right; and perhaps, if put into vulgar words, Romeo had no right to scale that wall, and Juliet on her balcony was a forward young woman. There are things which are not to be defended by any rule, which youth excuses, nay, justifies; and to see a pair of sympathetic eyes directed towards her through the crowd—eyes that found her out amid all that multitude—touched Rosalind’s heart. Somehow they made her trouble, and even the weight of her little brother, who was heavy, more easy to bear. She was weak and worn out, and this it was, perhaps, which made her so easily moved. But the startled sensation with which she heard a voice at her side, somewhat too low and too close, saying, “Will you let me carry the child for you, Miss Trevanion?” whirled the softer sensation away into eddies of suspicion and dark thrills of alarm and doubt. “Oh, no, no!” she cried, instinctively hurrying on.
“I ask nothing but to relieve you,” he said.
“Oh, thanks! I am much obliged to you, but it is impossible. It would wake him,” she said hurriedly, not looking up.
“You think me presumptuous, Miss Trevanion, and so I am; but it is terrible to see you so burdened and not be able to help.”
This made her burden so much the more that Rosalind quickened her steps, and stumbled and almost fell. “Oh, please,” she said, “go away. You may mean to be kind. Oh, please go away.”
The nursery-maid, who came back at Mrs. Lennox’s orders to help Rosalind, saw nothing particular to remark, except that the young lady was flushed and disturbed. But to hurry along a crowded platform with a child in your arms was enough to account for that. The maid could very well appreciate such a drawback to movement. She succeeded, with the skill of her profession, in taking the child into her own arms, and repeated Mrs. Lennox’s entreaties to make haste. But Rosalind required no solicitation in this respect. She made a dart forward, and was in the carriage in a moment, where she threw herself into a seat and hid her face in her hands.
“I knew it would be too much for you,” said Aunt Sophy, soothingly. “Oh, Thirza is used to it. I pity nurses with all my heart; but they are used to it. But you, my poor darling, in such a crowd! Did you think we should miss the train? I know what that is—to hurry along, and yet be sure you will miss it. Here, Thirza, here; we are all right; and after all there is plenty of time.” After a pause Aunt Sophy said, “I wonder who that is looking so intently into this carriage. Such a remarkable face! But I hope he does not mean to get in here; we are quite full here. Rosalind, you look like nothing at all in that corner, in your black dress. He will think the seat is vacant and come in if you don’t make a little more appearance. Rosalind— Good gracious, I believe she has fainted!”
“No, Aunt Sophy.” Rosalind raised her head and uncovered her pale face. She knew that she should see that intruder looking at her. He seemed to be examining the carriages, looking for a place, and as she took her hands from her face their eyes met. There was that unconscious communication between them which betrays those who recognize each other, whether they make any sign or not. Aunt Sophy gave a wondering cry.
“Why, you know him! and yet he does not take his hat off. Who is it, Rosalind?”
“I have seen him—in the village—”
“Oh, I know,” cried little Sophy, pushing forward. “It is the gentleman. I have seen him often. He lived at the Red Lion. Don’t you remember, Rosalind, the gentleman that mamma wouldn’t let me—”
“Oh, Sophy, be quiet!” cried the girl. What poignant memories awoke with the words!
“But how strange he looks,” cried Sophy. “His hat down over his eyes, and I believe he has got a beard or something—”
“You must not run on like that. I dare say it is quite a different person,” said Aunt Sophy. “What made me notice him is that he has eyes exactly like little Johnny’s eyes.”
It was one of Aunt Sophy’s weaknesses that she was always finding out likenesses; but Rosalind’s mind was disturbed by another form of her original difficulty about the stranger. It might be forgiven him that he hung about her path, and even followed at a distance; it was excusable that he should ask if he could help her with the child; but having thus ventured to accost her, and having established a sort of acquaintance by being useful to her, why, when their eyes met, did he make no sign of recognition? No, he could not be a gentleman! Then Rosalind awoke with horror to find that on the very first day after all the calamities that had befallen her family she was able to discuss such a question with herself.