IT is not to be supposed that during this period the visits of Mrs. Brown, the schoolmistress, to her friend at the Hall, who was so like yet so unlike her—so unlike in personal importance—so superior in position, and yet so strangely resembling—should have ceased. There were no other two persons in all the precincts of Watcham so evidently belonging to the same world and species, and yet there were no two more separate in all those externals that distinguish life. Mrs. Brown’s visits were almost all paid in the evening, sometimes very late, sometimes at that hour before dinner when Mrs. Swinford was known to receive no one. But there was no bar at any time against the entrance of this privileged visitor. On the evening which Lord Will spent at the Hall Mrs. Brown came late, while dinner was going on. She had an entrance of her own by which she preferred to come in, a door which gave admittance to the servants’ quarters, but which was always open, and spared the schoolmistress the intervention of Morris, whom she did not dislike to see now and then, and metaphorically put her foot upon with the pride of a superior knowledge which he could not understand. But this malicious gratification, though she enjoyed it occasionally, was not enough to make up for the disadvantage of having her movements known and chronicled, and it suited her character and habits better to have a mode of access absolutely free and beyond control. She was so swift and subtle in her movements, and so fortunate, as the clandestine often are, in finding her passage free, that on many occasions she had glided through the great house, mounted the great stairs, and appeared noiseless in the ante-room occupied by Julie, the maid, without an individual in the house being aware that she was there. It had so happened on this particular night when even Julie was out of the way. Mrs. Brown came in noiseless, slightly breathless, having hurried upstairs, and just escaped meeting a strange young man, whose wide shirt-front indicated him in the partial darkness of the corridor as if he had carried a light, but whom to her surprise she did not know. A woman with her wits so much about her, knew by sight by this time everybody in the neighbourhood who was likely to dine with Leo. She avoided him by a rapid step aside, and consequently she was a little out of breath when she arrived in Julie’s room, where there was no one, a dereliction of duty that might have cost Julie her place had it been known. Mrs. Brown looked round her with a nod of satisfaction as she put off the heavy veil in which she was accustomed to wrap herself on these visits. She went into the inner room, and looked round with an even more vivid look of satisfaction. Mrs. Swinford’s luxurious room was as she had left it in the perfection of silent repose and comfort—soft light, soft warmth, everything that the most refined suggestion of luxury and ease could command. Mrs. Brown gave a sigh, and then a laugh. She said to herself, ‘How little a difference would have made me like this!’ and then she said, ‘What a bore it would have been!’ The laugh suited her better than the sigh. It called forth a twinkle of mischief and lurking vagabondism in her eyes. She then lay down on Mrs. Swinford’s sofa, put back her head upon the cushions, took up first one book, then another, and read a page or two. Then she threw them down one after another, and looked round the room again. How pretty it was! Her eyes lingered for a moment here and there on the pictures, the little graceful bronzes, the prevailing ornament, the lights, carefully planned to the advantage of the decorations. And then a strange shadow came over her face. Good heavens, to lie here, and remember! she said. Perhaps in her energy of feeling, these words were said aloud. At least, they brought in Julie, who had in the meantime returned to her room, not suspecting the presence of this visitor, and who peeped in suspicious, half-terrified, with her hand on her breast. ‘C’est vous, Madame?’ she said, with a look of mingled terror and relief.
‘Who else should it be, unless a thief?’ said Mrs Brown. ‘But as it might have been a thief and not me, you know, you ought not to be absent, ma chère.’
Julie clasped her hands and entreated that Madame would not say anything. ‘This is not the house for thiefs,’ she said.
‘On the contrary, it is just the house. Don’t you know all the robberies of jewels are done when the family are at dinner?’ Mrs. Brown rose from the sofa and took a low chair beside the fire, where she continued to sit when she had dismissed Julie much alarmed by the admonition. Many thoughts went through her mind while she waited, and she had a long time to wait. She compared her own vagabond lot, now up, now down, which she had led after her own wild fancy—the life rather of a man than of a woman—with this beauty and luxury, with a shudder of pity going over her. The pity was not for herself, but for the other woman shut in, in this gilded cage to—— remember! The pictures on the walls, the carefully arranged lights, the unchangeable surroundings, all luxury and brightness, affected her like a spell. Good heavens! to sit there day after day, evening after evening, and remember! Mrs. Brown thought of her own little rooms which it had given her pleasure to arrange and decorate in a manner which she felt to be fictitious and out of character, but which amused her all the same, and which she laughed at, having done it, with a full consciousness that it was trumpery, and that the trumpery was out of place, as a woman who knew better could not fail to see. ‘Ah, well!’ she said to herself, ‘I’d rather have my trumpery that I can throw away any day, and probably shall some day, and that I can run away from when I like, when it gets too absurd.’ And then there were the books: French novels, going over and over with fantastic variations the one story—the story of (so-called) love—that is, the complicated ways by which two people, generally old enough to know better, are brought into the relations of intrigue or passion with each other—which ends badly, either in the death of one or the disgust of both: and so da capo, always beginning over again. ‘Good heavens!’ said Mrs. Brown to herself again, ‘how can she go on day after day, day after day, reading that—and remembering!’ The schoolmistress had no objection to a French novel of this class herself now and then; and reading only now and then—being within reach of such indulgences only now and then—naturally she got only the best, the ones that had wit and genius in them. But the unhappy woman who lived upon that food for ever! What garbage, what insipidity of nastiness must go through her hands! The poor Bohemian whose life was a continual scuffle (chiefly of her own choosing) looked upon this unvarying luxury, ease, and wealth, with a horror and wonder which it would be difficult to describe. ‘Good heavens!’ she repeated to herself; ‘why doesn’t she take a little chloral and be done?’
Mrs. Swinford gave a start of pleasure when, sweeping into her room in those long and splendid robes which were more fit for a Court than for a country house of so little distinction as the Hall at Watcham, she perceived Mrs. Brown sitting by the fire. It was, perhaps, the only event which could have lighted up her face with pleasure. She was cross, excited, full of the impatience and exasperation of effort which she felt to be at least only half successful; and Julie had perceived by her first glance at the lines on her lady’s brow that her evening’s task to undress, and soothe, and persuade into calm and sleep this agitated and disturbed old woman would be no easy one. ‘You come at the best time. You always know when I have need of you,’ Mrs. Swinford said, letting herself drop, as was her wont, into Mrs. Brown’s arms. The very passiveness of the embrace was a habit—a habit of reliance and expected help which had never failed. If such a thing as affection had ever been in Mrs. Swinford’s heart it was this other woman, so like her, and so unlike, who was its object.
‘I see you are got up for conquest,’ Mrs. Brown said.
‘Conquest! I am dressed as usual. There was one guest at dinner—an insignificant boy. You can leave us, Julie, till I ring. A boy, but with such a name! What do you think? A nephew—Lord Will they call him fortunately, or it would have been too much.’
‘A nephew——! of——’
‘Do you need to inquire? Then you are growing dull, dull as your surroundings. You who used to understand everything à demi-mot!’
‘I understand. I almost met him on the stairs. I thought there was something familiar in his face. And what does he want here?’
‘Is it necessary to ask? Might he not come to see me, or Leo, whom he knows? But no, no, Artémise, I will not deceive you. He has come to find out about that woman—her rights to his name—which she has none, having stolen it, as you know; and to some money that has fallen in, do I care how! He could not have come to a better quarter. I gave him some information.’
‘What information?’ said Mrs. Brown, sitting up in her chair.
‘I told him all that I knew. You will please to remember it is all I know: that she left the Hall hastily at midnight, that I met her after in Paris bearing his name.’ Mrs. Swinford, too, sat upright, with a colour in her cheeks and a fire in her eyes that recalled something of the beauty of old to her worn face. ‘What do I know more? Nothing,’ she said, with a movement of her hands, which made the rings upon them flash and send out rays like sparks of light.
‘Ah! you told him that?’
‘There is money in the question,’ said Mrs. Swinford, leaning forward and speaking low, ‘and their object is to find out that she has no rights. He took my hints like milk; they were balm to him. Fancy so many thousand pounds—I know no details—and if not to her they will go to him. Is not that worth the trouble?’
‘To the man, perhaps, Cecile—but why to you?’
‘To me much more than to him,’ she said, with flashing eyes.
‘Why?’
‘You are stupid to-night,’ said Mrs. Swinford coldly; ‘not for a long time, for many years, have I found you so before.’
‘Because,’ said Mrs. Brown, ‘this that you have said is, as you are aware, not——’
‘Your scruples are engaging, they are beautiful, they are something to put in a story-book,’ said the lady. ‘You to stand for that! You, who——’
‘It is better not to go too far. I have done a great many reckless things. I am a reckless woman altogether, and have not cared what became of me for many a long day: but I have never done anything like that. Ah yes, I have scruples; every one has, you even, if one knew where to look for them.’
‘It was you,’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘who made the suggestion at the first.’
‘To save you, Cecile, to save you.’
‘I should have found some other way to get out of it. There was never a difficulty yet but I found a way of getting out of it. I should have done so then, had you not come forward to say it was Emily—Emily, a child, a nobody—whom he loved, and that I was his confidante. I can see it all now. He had no escape. Artémise, I have loved you better than any woman all your life, and you repaid me by taking away from me—handing over to that girl——’
Her eyes were ablaze in her flushed yet withered face. Her whole frame was trembling with angry emotion. Mrs. Brown rose quickly and went to her, taking her hands, holding her fast. ‘It is twenty years ago,’ she said, ‘and it was to save your honour, your position, everything, Cecile—your child, your wealth, everything you had in the world.’
‘I can see the scene now as if it was yesterday—my husband there, blazing like white light. He never looked like that in his life but once. And he—confused, afraid—on the other side of me, trembling for me.’
‘And a little for himself, Cecile.’
‘Silence! If you say so, I will strike you. And you, with your smooth tongue—always with your smooth tongue. How many lies it must have told first to be capable of that!’
‘For your sake; you know it was for your sake. If you remember all that, remember, too, how the storm died down in a moment, and all was well.’
‘Well!’ said the other. She leant back her head upon the breast of the woman whom she was accusing. ‘If it had raged itself out, and done its worst, would not that have been better than all that has followed—the bitterness and the hate, and the horror, and that girl living at my very door, to make me mad?’
‘Why did you see her, Cecile? You might have ignored her altogether, forgotten her existence.’
‘You forget,’ cried Mrs. Swinford. ‘She is the great lady of the village—takes precedence’—she laughed out with a hysterical violence which shook her from head to foot—‘precedence of me, if we were in the world together! Don’t you know that? But it will soon come to an end,’ she added, laughing again with that electric tinkle which wore out the nerves of all who heard her. ‘What a good thing they are so sordid a family, those Pakenhams, loving money as other people love their children, whatever is dearest to them! She will be called on to prove every step, and she will not be able to prove one. And then!—we shall see what the village will think of her title and her precedence then.’
‘You have been agitating yourself in the most imprudent, in the most foolish way. Where are your drops? Her precedence, poor thing, will not hurt you, but a long faint will hurt you. Cecile, must I call your maid to see you in this state, or will you be quiet and listen to me?’
‘Give me my drops. I must not, I must not, have another attack. The doctor says so. Artémise, don’t leave me, don’t leave me!’
‘I will, if you do not turn from this subject at once. Throw it away from you. What on earth is Emily Plowden, or Pakenham, or whatever her name is, to you? Cecile, I begin to think a woman like you never learns, and that you are no better than a fool.’
While she said these words, however, Mrs. Brown was busy with the most affectionate cares, soothing the excited woman, bathing her forehead, rubbing her hands, administering the specific, loosening the elaborate dress, which made the heaving of the shrunken figure, and the strain of the emaciated throat, so much the more dreadful. The passion calmed down by degrees, and then Julie was summoned, and the robes of state replaced by a quilted dressing-gown, scarcely less fine, but more appropriate. After this the conversation was resumed in a less exciting vein. Mrs. Swinford was perhaps a little ashamed to have betrayed the fury of her feelings even to so trustworthy a confidante.
‘It is fine to see a family like that,’ she said, ‘not carried away by passion, Artémise, like you and me. Love or revenge are not in their way, nor hatred; but money, money. To secure a few thousands, they will be my instruments, or any one’s, to punish a traitor. And what you are horrified to think I should want to do, for such good reason as you know, they will do for nothing at all—for money, as I say.’
‘Many people think money a much more sufficient reason than what you call passion,’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘And it will be well to keep your Lord —— whatever you call him, from knowledge of me, for I can spoil his little transaction.’
‘Ah, you—you were there!’
The two women looked at each other, and Mrs. Swinford, notwithstanding her age and her knowledge of the world, was sensible of a sudden heat rising to the edge of her hair; not the blush that comes to more innocent faces, but that burning colour of shame at a self-betrayal which she ought to have been too strong to fall into. Mrs. Brown nodded her head gravely. ‘You said you had no means of knowing, but you perceive that you have: and for me, I can make an end of any such pretension. He had better not come across my path.’
‘You would not balk me, Artémise?’
‘I would balk him, as soon as look at him, and the family, bless them; and I would not bring the innocent to shame, not even for you.’
‘Artémise! after all we know of each other, such a pretension——’
‘My dear Cecile, what I know of you is one thing, what you know of me is another. I have broken every law, especially of society; but to harm the innocent is what I have never done—at least,’ she added after a moment, ‘not in that way. And though I’d give my head for you, which is, of course, a figure of speech, I will not ruin Emily Plowden for you, and that’s flat, whatever you may say.’
‘Don’t interfere, Artémise,’ said Mrs. Swinford, with a sound of tears in her voice, ‘don’t, don’t interfere. Go away, and let things take their chance. No doubt she must have other evidence; I was a fool not to think of that. But don’t you, who are my nearest and dearest, go against me; don’t interfere. It is not, it has never been, a fit position for you, wherever you are; go to London, where I will find a home for you, Artémise.’
‘Do you think after standing out so long, I will consent to be dependent on you now—for a reason?’ Then she laughed, changing her tone. ‘If you can imagine a better place to hide myself in than the Girls’ National School at Watcham,’ she resumed, ‘you have very much the advantage of me.’