THERE is nothing more strange in all the experiences of humanity than the manner in which a great convulsion either in nature or in human history ceases after a while to affect the world. Grass grows and flowers wave over the soil which an earthquake has rent asunder; and the lives of men are similarly torn in twain without leaving a much more permanent result. The people whom we see one year crushed by some great blow, when the next has come have begun to pursue their usual course again. This means no infidelity of nature, no forgetting; but only the inevitable progress by which the world keeps going. There is no trouble, however terrible, that does not yield to the touch of time.
Some two years after these events Rosalind Trevanion felt herself, almost against her will, emerging out of the great shadow which had overwhelmed her life. She had been for a time swallowed up in the needs of the family, all her powers demanded for the rearrangement of life on its new basis, and everything less urgent banished from her. But by degrees the most unnatural arrangements fall into the calm of habit, the most unlooked-for duties become things of every day. Long before the period at which this history resumes, it had ceased to be wonderful to any one that Rosalind should take her place as head of the desolated house. She assumed unconsciously that position of sister-mother which is one of the most touching and beautiful that exist, with the ease which necessity brings—not asking how she could do it, but doing it; as did the bystanders who criticise every course of action and dictate what can and what cannot be done, but who all accepted her in her new duties with a composure which soon made everybody forget how strange, how unlikely, to the girl those duties were. The disappearance of the mother, the breaking-up of the house, was no doubt a nine-days’ wonder, and gave occasion in the immediate district for endless discussions; but the wonder died out as every wonder dies out. Outside of the county it was but vaguely known, and to those who professed to tell the details with authority there was but a dull response; natural sentiment at a distance being all against the possibility that anything so extraordinary and odious could be true. “You may depend upon it, a woman who was going to behave so at the end must have shown signs of it from the beginning,” people said, and the propagation of the rumor was thus seriously discouraged. Mrs. Lennox, though she was not wise, had enough of good sense and good feeling not to tell even to her most intimate friends the circumstances of her sister-in-law’s disappearance; and this not so much for Madam’s sake as for that of her brother, whose extraordinary will appeared to her simple understanding so great a shame and scandal that she kept it secret for Reginald’s sake. Indeed, all she did in the matter was for Reginald’s sake. She did not entertain the confidence in Madam with which Rosalind and John enshrined the fugitive. To Rosalind, Mrs. Lennox said little on the subject, with a respect for the girl’s innocence which persons of superior age and experience are not always restrained by; but that John, a man who knew the world, should go on as he did, was a thing which exasperated his sister. How he could persuade himself of Mrs. Trevanion’s innocence was a thing she could not explain. Why, what could it be? she asked herself, angrily. Everybody knows that the wisest of men or women are capable of going wrong for one cause; but what other could account for the flight of a woman, of a mother from her children, the entire disappearance of her out of all the scenes of her former life? When her brother told her that there was no help for it, that in the interests of her children Madam was compelled to go away, Aunt Sophy said “Stuff!” What was a woman good for if she could not find some means of eluding such a monstrous stipulation? “Do you think I would have minded him? I should have disguised myself, hidden about, done anything rather than desert my family,” she cried; and when it was suggested to her that Madam was too honorable, too proud, too high-minded to deceive, Sophy said nothing but “Stuff!” again. “Do you think anything in the world would make me abandon my children—if I had any?” she cried. But though she was angry with John and impatient of Rosalind, she kept the secret. And after a time all audible comments on the subject died away. “There is something mysterious about the matter,” people said; “I believe Mrs. Trevanion is still living.” And then it began to be believed that she was ill and obliged to travel for her health, which was the best suggestion that could have been made.
And Rosalind gradually, but nevertheless fully, came out of the shadow of that blighting cloud. What is there in human misery which can permanently crush a heart under twenty? Nothing, at least save the last and most intolerable of personal losses, and even then only in the case of a passionate, undisciplined soul or a feeble body. Youth will overcome everything if it has justice and fresh air and occupation. And Rosalind made her way out of all the ways of gloom and misery to the sky and sunshine. Her memory had, indeed, an indelible scar upon it at that place. She could not turn back and think of the extraordinary mystery and anguish of that terrible moment without a convulsion of the heart, and sense that all the foundations of the earth had been shaken. But happily, at her age, there is not much need of turning back upon the past. She shivered when the momentary recollection crossed her mind, but could always throw it off and come back to the present, to the future, which are always so much more congenial.
This great catastrophe, which made a sort of chasm between her and her former life, had given a certain maturity to Rosalind. At twenty she had already much of the dignity, the self-possession, the seriousness of a more advanced age. She had something of the air of a young married woman, a young mother, developed by the early experiences of life. The mere freshness of girlhood, even when it is most exquisite, has a less perfect charm than this; and the fact that Rosalind was still a girl, notwithstanding the sweet and noble gravity of her responsible position, added to her an exceptional charm. She was supposed by most people to be five years at least older than she was: and she was the mother of her brothers and sisters, at once more and less than a mother; perhaps less anxious, perhaps more indulgent, not old enough to perceive with the same clearness or from the same point of view, seeing from the level of the children more than perhaps a mother can. To see her with her little brother in her lap was the most lovely of pictures. Something more exquisite even than maternity was in this virgin-motherhood. She was a better type of the second mother than any wife. This made a sort of halo around the young creature who had so many responsibilities. But yet in her heart Rosalind was only a girl; the other half of her had not progressed beyond where it was before that great crisis. There was within her a sort of decisive consciousness of the apparent maturity which she had thus acquired, and she only such a child—a girl at heart.
In this profound girlish soul of hers, which was her very self, while the other was more or less the product of circumstances, it still occurred to Rosalind now and then to wonder how it was that she had never had a lover. Even this was meant in a manner of her own. Miss Trevanion of Highcourt had not been without suitors; men who had admired her beauty or her position. But these were not at all what she meant by a lover. She meant what an imaginative girl means when such a thought crosses her mind. She meant Romeo, or perhaps Hamlet—had love been restored to the possibilities of that noblest of all disenchanted souls—or even such a symbol as Sir Kenneth. She wondered whether it would ever be hers to find wandering about the world the other part of her, him who would understand every thought and feeling, him to whom it would be needless to speak or to explain, who would know; him for whom mighty love would cleave in twain the burden of a single pain and part it, giving half to him. The world, she thought, could not hold together as it did under the heavens, had it ceased to be possible that men and women should meet each other so. But such a meeting had never occurred yet in Rosalind’s experience, and seeing how common it was, how invariable an occurrence in the experience of all maidens of poetry and fiction, the failure occasioned her always a little surprise. Had she never seen any one, met about the world any form, in which she could embody such a possibility? She did not put this question to herself plainly, but there was in her imagination a sort of involuntary answer to it, or rather the ghost of an answer, which would sometimes make itself known, from without, she thought, more than from within—as if a face had suddenly looked at her, or a whisper been breathed in her ear. She did not give any name to this vision or endeavor to identify it.
But imagination is obstinate and not to be quenched, and in inadvertent moments she half acknowledged to herself that it had a being and a name. Who or what he was, indeed, she could not tell; but sometimes in her imagination the remembered tone of a voice would thrill her ears, or a pair of eyes would look into hers. This recollection or imagination would flash upon her at the most inappropriate moments; sometimes when she was busy with her semi-maternal cares, or full of household occupation which left her thoughts free—moments when she was without defence. Indeed, temptation would come upon her in this respect from the most innocent quarter, from her little brother, who looked up at her with eyes that were like the eyes of her dream. Was that why he had become her darling, her favorite, among the children? Oh, no; it was because he was the youngest, the baby, the one to whom a mother was most of all wanting. Aunt Sophy, indeed, who was so fond of finding out likenesses, had said— And there was a certain truth in it. Johnny’s eyes were very large and dark, shining out of the paleness of his little face; he was a delicate child; or perhaps only a pale-faced child looking delicate, for there never was anything the matter with him. His eyes were very large for a child, appearing so, perhaps, because he was himself so little; a child of fine organization, with the most delicate, pure complexion, and blue veins showing distinctly through the delicate tissue of his skin. Rosalind felt a sort of dreamy bliss come over her when Johnny fixed his great, soft eyes upon her, looking up with a child’s devout attention. She loved the child dearly, was not that enough? And then there was the suggestion. Likenesses are very curious; they are so arbitrary, no one can tell how they come; there was a likeness, she admitted to herself; and then wondered—half wishing it, half angry with herself for the idea—whether perhaps it was the likeness to her little brother which had impressed the face of a stranger so deeply upon her dreams.
Who was he? Where did he come from? Where, all this long time, for these many months, had he gone? If it was because of her he had come to the village, how strange that he should never have appeared again! It was impossible it could have been for her; yet, if not for her, for whom could he have come? She asked herself these questions so often that her vision gradually lost identity and became a tradition, an abstraction, the true lover after whom she had been wondering. She endowed him with all the qualities which girls most dearly prize. She talked to him upon every subject under heaven. In all possible emergencies that arose to her fancy he came and stood by her and helped her. No real man is ever so noble, so tender, so generous as such an ideal man can be. And Rosalind forgot altogether that she had asked herself whether it was certain that he was a gentleman, the original of this shadowy figure which had got into her imagination she scarcely could tell how.