MRS. BROWN walked quickly through the darkening house. She met a footman with a lamp, who stood bewildered at the strange figure, and a housemaid in the upper corridor, who stopped her to ask what she wanted, but was soon intimidated by her look and voice. The stranger wanted no guidance, no indication, to which side to turn, as the maid perceived, who stood watching her, and saw her swift, familiar approach to Mrs. Swinford’s door. ‘Missis will go out of her senses,’ said Mary Jane to herself, and she hurried away, to be out of it, whatever might happen. ‘Nobody can say as I let her in,’ the young woman said.
Madame Julie, the maid, came to the door in answer to Mrs. Brown’s light knock, but not before that lady, waiting for no one, had opened it and stepped into the ante-room in which Julie sat. Mrs. Swinford’s apartment was as complete as English comfort and French refinement could make it. The ante-room, in which Julie sat, was finer than any of the village drawing-rooms, kept comfortable by many carpets and thick curtains, and lighted by a large window turned to the west, by the remaining light in which she regarded with alarm and fury the bold intruder.
‘What you want here?’ she said in her doubtful English, unintimidated by the aspect of the lady who had overawed Mary Jane. ‘Madame reçoit personne,’ she added, in a less assured tone.
‘Moi exceptée toujours, Julie,’ said Mrs. Brown.
Upon which Julie started and clasped her hands. ‘Mon Dieu!’ she said, ‘Madame Artémise!’
‘You need not announce me, I’ll find my way by myself. Has she lights, Julie? Is she alone?’
‘You will startle Madame out of her life, Madame Artémise.’
‘Not a bit. What is pleasant harms no one, and you know she is always happy to see me.’
Julie knew, yet did not look quite sure. ‘I will say but a word, a petit mot. Madame will not look up, but it will prepare her. Ah, she hears us talk!’ for a bell at this moment tinkled into the stillness. Julie put aside the curtain and opened a door, from which came a gleam of light, and a voice saying querulously, ‘You are talking with some one; how often must I say no one must come here?’
‘It is not Julie’s fault: it is I, Cecile, come to welcome you home.’
Mrs. Swinford rose up from the couch upon which she had been reclining, with a cry. She made a step forward, and allowed herself to drop into the arms which the visitor held forth. It was a strange embrace, apparently altogether on one side; the other passive, receiving only the marks of affection. Yet there was something in the abandon with which the great lady let herself go into the stranger’s arms, which showed almost a greater warmth in the receiver than giver of the embrace. She put down her head on Mrs. Brown’s shoulder with a murmur of welcome and satisfaction; then raised it to wave an angry hand towards Julie, bidding her go. The maid retired without a word. She was a middle-aged Frenchwoman, very neat, and rather grim, black-haired, and dark-complexioned, with a black gown, and hair elaborately dressed. She obeyed her mistress in utter silence, closing the door noiselessly behind her, but threw her head and body, like a pendulum, to and fro as she went back to the work which she had been doing under the west window by the waning light. Evidently this stranger was no welcome apparition to Julie, any more than to more important persons in the house.
‘What wind has blown you here? and where do you come from, just when I felt such enormous need of you?’ Mrs. Swinford said.
‘Some people would say it was an ill wind; and you know I feel always when you want me,’ said Mrs. Brown.
‘You must have known that when I came here, where there are so many horrible associations, I must have wanted you. It is an instinct. Listen, Artémise. Leo has forced me here against my will. He has all his father’s foolish notions, with more added of his own. And he has the upper hand, which his father never had——’
‘Sometimes, my dear.’
‘Once, you mean,’ said Mrs. Swinford. She was old, though she kept that fact at bay, and did not admit it by any outward sign: but she flushed over all her face like a girl at these words. ‘Once, no more: and you know how that is brought back to me here, and every incident of the time. That woman at my very door, bearing the name—— which she never would have had but for me.’
‘I never liked the expedient, Cecile.’
‘Why, it was you who—— and it was the only way. But now that the whole dreadful tale is swept away into the past, and everybody, except you and me, has forgotten it, there she sits at my door, calm, with that name. And I have to receive her; to call her friend; to kiss her—— imagine! I have kissed Emily Plowden, and called her by that name!’
‘I don’t see what else you could do. It was your own doing, the whole affair. I will always stand by you, through thick and thin. But I never approved of that, Cecile. It was too heavy a responsibility. If you like to do certain things you know you will have to pay for them. You get nothing for nothing in this world. But I don’t like meddling with another creature’s life.’
‘I detest you when you preach, Artémise; you have so fine a position for that; hands so clean! From whence do you come now? from wandering to and fro upon the earth——’
‘Seeking whom I may devour? No, I am devouring no one; I have settled myself—at your very door, too—to do good, my dear.’
‘To do—— good!’
‘You are surprised. Don’t you know there comes a time when we would all like to be sisters of charity? But I have not gone so far as that. I have a very nice little post in the village, gained chiefly by a recommendation you once gave me, and your poor husband—— naturally that had great weight here—and other things. I am schoolmistress of the girls’ school, Watcham parish. At your service, Madame Cecile.’
Mrs. Swinford uttered that exclamation, which means so little in French and so much in English. She did not join in the laugh with which her visitor broke off. She was a more tragical person altogether than Mrs. Brown.
‘Mistress of the school, living in the village! You are welcome, as you know, to live with me. Why should you demean yourself in such a way? Why do you always try to compromise——’
‘Not you, Mrs. Swinford. I have never compromised you. I don’t choose to be your dependent; to eat that bitter bread. But you have never had any trouble brought into your life by me.’
‘Not that of being ignorant for years together where you are? of not knowing what you are doing? whether you may be in want? whether you may be ill? if you may have died——’
‘On some roadside, or in some hospital, nobody knowing anything about me,’ said Mrs. Brown, with a harsh little laugh, ‘and not a bad thing either, and probably the way it will happen at the last. But I should always, unless it was sudden, take care that you knew. It is a curious thing,’ she said, laughing again, and winking her eyes rapidly, as if to shake off some moisture, ‘that you and I, two such women as we are, not of the soft kind, should in a sort of a way, not caring much for anybody else, love each other, Cecile!’
We need not be sentimental and talk of it at least,’ said the other; ‘I see nothing wonderful in it. With others always contradiction and contrariety, but between you and me understanding—even when you take upon you, so much younger as you are, not to approve.’
‘Oh, I must always reserve that power—if I were only four, instead of forty,’ said Mrs. Brown.
‘Forty and a little more.’
‘If you think I am in any danger of forgetting the little more—forty-six—a sensible age. You would not imagine at that discreet period of existence that my chief friend in Watcham should be a young man.’
Mrs. Swinford shrugged her shoulders as if nothing could be more perfectly indifferent to her.
‘Who keeps me informed of all that is going on,’ she added, after a moment’s pause.
‘Ah!’ Even this, however, did not awake the great lady’s interest; for what were the village news to her?
‘I hear of Leo’s proceedings. He seems to mean to turn everything upside down.’
‘The foolish boy! he has got it into his head that he has neglected his duties. What are his duties? I know not. One, that he does not regard, is to make life as pleasant as time and circumstances will admit to his mother. It is not much I ask. To reside where I can breathe. To see a few people whom I like, who understand me. To be kept from sordid calculations and cares. What he thinks more important is to come back here to look after his people, as he calls them. His people! How are they his people? They pay him rent, that is all. And he thinks more of them than of what is comfort and life to me!’
‘I feel very much for you, Cecile, in many ways,’ said Mrs. Brown, not without a hidden tone of satire, ‘but do you know, I cannot see that you are much deficient in point of comfort here.’
Mrs. Swinford looked round the pretty room with an air of disgust. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more luxurious. The old grandfather’s decorations had been removed or softened with a taste more French than English, yet exquisite in its way. The curtains were of the softest rich stuffs. The walls were hung with a few bright pictures, little English water-colours, French genre subjects, as cheerful and smiling as could be desired. It was lighted with soft lamps carefully shaded, giving a subdued silvery light. There were books of all kinds, from those in rows of beautiful binding, which filled the low bookcases, to the French novels in yellow paper, which occupied the table at Mrs. Swinford’s hand. If there was anything wanting to the beauty or comfort of this wonderful little room it was difficult to find it out. Mrs. Brown instantly compared it with the sitting-room in the schoolhouse, and burst into a laugh.
‘You should see the rooms in which I live,’ she said, ‘and yet I don’t think they are bad rooms. I have known worse. I consider myself very well off. Oh, you are different, a great lady as you have always been, and I only a waif and stray.’
‘That was at your own will, Artémise.’
‘I know; I blame nobody. I have been the wilful one that have always taken my own way; you have generally succeeded in making other people take yours.’
Mrs. Swinford smiled faintly, and then she said, her face resuming its discontented expression:
‘That is over; now, it is my son I have to deal with; my son, who owes me everything.’
‘Be reasonable; he owes you his birth, of course, and a great deal of petting when he was a boy——’
‘And the sacrifice of my life,’ said Mrs. Swinford. ‘Do you think I ever would have done what I did and given up all I cared for, if it had not been for Leo? Do you think I would have cared for scandal or anything but for the boy? or for what his father might say or do? The whole thing was for him. Emily may thank him for her title, as they call it—ridiculous title! When I hear that name and her rank, talked of—her rank, forsooth—and that she takes precedence of everybody—even, I suppose, she will, with a fierce laugh, ‘of me——’
‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘that’s something, I did not think of that; but take care, Cecile, that she does not take precedence of you in other ways.’
‘In what way? You mean, I suppose, that she is younger and has a sort of beauty! I cannot deny that she has a sort of beauty. She is not the common pretty girl that Emily Plowden was. It is not for nothing that I helped to plunge her into the world. She knows something of life, and though she will never make anything of the advantages she possesses, still she has them. You may imagine I looked at her with sharp eyes enough, remembering what she used to be and what she was. But her world is not my world, and what do I care for her village precedence, or for any comparison that may be made here?’
‘There will be no comparison made, Cecile.’
Mrs. Brown looked with a curious pitying glance at the woman, who was old, yet had never given up the pretensions of youth. She was nearly twenty years younger, and saw the futility of these pretensions with perfect lucidity of vision; but there was kindness as well as pity in her eyes. Did not her glass say anything to this old woman, that she should talk of comparison between her and Lady William’s mature but unfaded years? Did not common sense say anything? As Mrs. Brown was much more near to Lady William’s age than Mrs. Swinford’s, the case was perfectly clear to her eyes.
‘No, I do not suppose so,’ Mrs. Swinford said; ‘and my hope is that he will tire of it presently. What attraction can he find in a country village in England? There is nothing. His philanthropy, bah! his people, ridiculous! It is ignorance that makes him talk of his people as if he were a great potentate, when he is only a country gentleman.’
‘It is his breeding,’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘How was he to find out the difference in Paris? and you always treated him, you who are, as I tell you, a great lady by nature, as if he were a grand seigneur.’
‘I must be patient,’ said Mrs. Swinford; ‘it is difficult, but I must be patient: I gave him three months to be sick of the life, and the half of the time is not gone; I don’t think he will hold out a month more——’
‘Unless there should in the meantime arise some other attraction.’
‘What other attraction?’ Mrs. Swinford caught her visitor by the arm. ‘An attraction—in this village? Artémise, you have heard of something! A woman? who is she? I must know, I must know!’
‘Do not be frightened. But I think you are imprudent, Cecile; you should have filled the house with company, you should have come back in a storm of gaiety; he should have known nothing of the village at all.’
‘Who is she?’ said Mrs. Swinford, tightening her grasp on the other’s arm; ‘some wretched girl with a baby face.’
‘It is no girl, it is nothing of that sort; it is a woman as old, nearly as old as I am. I told you I had a young admirer too, who comes to me for the superiority of my conversation, and my knowledge of the world. So does Leo; to discuss the world, and things in general, and the topics of the day.’
‘You are either laughing at everything, as has been your custom all your life, or you are announcing to me a great danger; the loss of all my power.’
‘Do not always be so high heroical. Let me tell you my own story first. My young friend is Jim, the Rector’s son. He saw me with a gay party in Oxford, and I thought that he would betray me. But he is as innocent as a child, and respects and admires me as one who has seen better days. I keep him from vulgar dangers; from the “Blue Boar”—but you don’t know the perils of the “Blue Boar”——’
‘What are all these puerilities to me?’ said Mrs. Swinford. ‘You weary me. Do you think it is interesting to me, this story of the Rector’s son?’
‘I am aware it wearies you; one sees that on your still fine countenance, Cecile: but I am coming to what will interest you. In the same way Leo frequents a cottage, a very genteel cottage, far superior to the schoolmistress’s house. There is a mother and a daughter in it. He may be falling in love with the daughter, but I think not, for the little thing is plain. But the mother is not plain; she is a woman who has known the world. She has been buried here, among the bucolics, for years. But when she sees a man of manners, who also knows the world, is there anything wonderful in it if she likes his conversation too?’
‘Artémise, who is she? Tell me her name.’
Mrs. Brown did not say a word, but looked at her companion with wondering eyes.