XIX
She must have remembered the words, for she shivered a little, and when Bertham asked her: “Of what are you thinking?” she answered:
“Of youngMr.Dunoisse, and the struggle that is before him. He is courageous.... He means so well.... He is so earnest and sincere and high-minded and generous.... But one cannot forget that he has not been tried, or that fiercer tests of his determination and endurance will come as the years unfold, and——”
“He will—supposing him a man of flesh and blood like other men!” said Bertham—“find his resolution—if it be one?—put, very shortly, very thoroughly to the proof. For—the Berlin papers of last Wednesday deal voluminously with the subject, and the Paris papers of a later date have even condescended to dwell upon it at some length—his grandfather, the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz, who practically has been dead for years, is at last dead enough for burying; and the question of Succession having cropped up, it may occur to the Catholic subjects of the Principality that they would prefer a Catholic Prince—even with a bar-sinister, badly erased, upon his ’scutcheon—to being governed by a Lutheran Regent. And that is all I know at present.”
“It is a curious, almost a romantic story,” she said, with her grave eyes upon the glowing fire, and a long, fine, slender hand propping her cheek, “that provokes one to wonder how it will end?”
“It will end, dear Ada,” smiled Bertham, “in this young fellow’s putting his Quixotic scruples in his pocket, taking the goods the gods have sent him—with the Hereditary diadem, when it is offered on a cushion!—marrying some blonde Princess-cousin, with the requisite number of armorial quarterings; and providing,—in the shortest possibletime, the largest possible number of legitimate heirs to the throne. I lay no claim to the prophetic gift; but I do possess some knowledge of my fellow-men. And—if your prejudice against gaming does not preclude a bet, I will wager you a pair of gloves, or half a dozen pairs, against the daguerreotype of you that Mary and I are always begging for and never get;—that M. Dunoisse’s scruples and objections will be overcome in the long-run, and that the whole thing will end as I have prophesied.”
She listened with a little fold between her eyebrows, and her thoughtful eyes upon the speaker’s face.
“I fear you may be right. But I shall be glad if you prove wrong, Bertham. One thinks how bravely he has borne the pinch of poverty, and the dearth of the pleasantnesses and luxuries that mean so much to young men of his age——”
“‘Of his age?’.... You talk as though you were a sere and withered spinster, separated from the world of young men and young women by a veritable gulf of years!” cried Bertham, vexed.
She did not hear. She was looking at the fire, leaning forwards in her low chair with her beautiful head pensively bent, and her slender strong hands clasped about the knee that was a little lifted by the resting of one fine arched foot—as beautiful in its stocking of Quakerish gray and its plain, unbuckled leather slipper as though it had been covered with silk, and shod with embroidered kid or velvet—upon the high steel fender.
“One would like to be near him sometimes unseen—in one of those moments of temptation that will come to him—temptations to be false to his vow, and take the price of dishonor, for the devil will fight hard, Bertham, for that man’s soul! Just to be able to give a pull here, or a push in that direction, according as circumstances seek to mold or sway him, to say ‘Do this!’ or ‘Do not do that!’ at the crucial moment, would be worth while!...”
“‘Faith, my dear Ada,” Bertham said lightly, “therôleof guardian angel is one you were cut out for, and suits you very well. But be content, one begs of you, to play it nearer home!... I know a worthy young man, at present in a situation in a large business-house at Westminster, who would very much benefit by a push here anda pull there from a hand invisible or visible—visible preferred! And to be told ‘Do this!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’ in a moment of doubt or at a crisis of indecision, would spare the Member for West Wealdshire a great many sleepless nights.”
They laughed together; then she said, with the rose-flush fading out of her pale cheeks and the light of merriment in her blue-gray eyes subdued again to clear soft radiance:
“I do not like those sleepless nights. Can nothing be done for them?”
“They are my only chance,” he answered, “of gaining any acquaintance with the works of modern novelists.”
“You do not take Sir Walter Scott, orMr.Thackeray, orMr.Dickens, or the author ofJane Eyre, as sleeping-draughts?”
“No,” returned Bertham, “for the credit of my good taste. But there are others whose works Cleopatra might have called for instead of mandragora. As regards the newspapers, if it be not exactly agreeable or encouraging to know exactly how far Misrepresentation can go without being absolute Mendacity—it is salutary and wholesome, I suppose, to be told when one has fallen short of winning even appreciation for one’s honest endeavor to do one’s duty—or what one conceives to be one’s duty—tolerably well?”
He rose, pushing his chair aside, and took a turn in the room that carried him to the window.
“One has made mistakes,” he said, keeping his face turned from her soft kind look; “but so have other fellows, without being pilloried and pelted for them! And two years back, when the office of Secretary At War seemed to have been created for the purpose of affording His Grace the Secretary For War and other high officials, unlimited opportunities of pulling down what the first-named had built up, and of building up what he, with hopes of doing good, had pulled down, the pelting bruised. But—Jove! if that part of my life were mine to live all over again, with Experience added to my youthful enthusiasms, I might reasonably hope to achieve much! Happy you”—he came and stood beside her chair, looking down at the calm profile and plainly-parted, faintly-rippling brown hair with a certain wistfulness—“most happy are you, dear Ada, who have so nobly fulfilled the high promiseof your girlhood, and have no need to join in useless regrets with me!”
She smiled, and lifted her warm, womanly hand to him, and said, as he enclosed it for a second in his own:
“Wrong leads and false ideals are the lot of all of us. And you were of so much use in your high office, Robert, and wielded your power so much for others’ good; you strive so chivalrously now, in thankless, unpopular causes; you make your duty so paramount above your ambition in all things,—that I am tempted to paraphrase your words to me, and tell you that you have gloriously contradicted the promise of your Eton boyhood, when everything that was not Football, or Boating, or Cricket, was ‘bad form.’”
“To my cousin de Moulny’s annoyance and disgust unspeakable,” he returned, with a lighter tone and a lighter look, though he had glowed and kindled at the praise from her. “I did indulge—at those periods when he was staying at Wraye Abbey—in a good deal of that sort of bosh. But—quite wrongly, I dare say!—he seemed to me a high-falutin’, pompous young French donkey; and it became a point of importance not to lose an opportunity of taking him down. By the way, I heard from him quite lately. He gave up the idea of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood after some clash or collision with the Rules of the Fathers Directors, and is now an Under-Secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.”
“He should have a notable career before him!” she commented.
“The Legitimist Party, at this present juncture, possess not one featherweight in the scale of popularity or influence. France is on the eve,” said Bertham, “or so it seems to me, of shedding her skin, and whether the new one will be of one color or of Three, White it will not be; I’ll bet my hat on that! So possibly it may be fortunate for de Moulny that the harness he pulls in has an Imperial Crown upon it. I need hardly say a pretty hand is upon the reins.”
Her laugh made soft music in the cosy, homely parlor, and amusement danced on her sweet firelit eyes....
“Whose is the hand?”
“It appertains, physically, to a certain Comtesse de Roux, and legally to a purple-haired, fiercely-whiskered,fiery-featured Colonel Comte de Roux—by whose original creation Comte is a little uncertain—but a brave and distinguished officer, commanding the 999th of the Line.”
She said, with a memory stirring in her face:
“That is the regiment—according to his old governess, for he did not tell me—to which M. Hector Dunoisse is attached.”
Bertham might not have heard. He said:
“I regret not having met Madame de Roux. One would like to see de Moulny’s reigning goddess.”
“She is most beautiful in person and countenance. Your term of ‘goddess’ is not inappropriate. She walks as though on clouds.”
Her ungrudging admiration of another woman’s beauty was a trait in her that always pleased him.
“Where did you meet?”
“I saw her in Paris a twelvemonth back, on the steps that lead to the vestibule of the Théâtre Française, one night when Rachel was to play in ‘Phédre.’”
“I thought you had forsworn all public entertainments, theaters included?”
“If I had I should not have endangered my oath by seeing Madame de Roux pass from her carriage and walk up the steps leading to the vestibule.”
“You were not in the streets of Paris alone, and on foot, at night?”
She answered simply, looking directly at him:
“I was in the Paris streets that evening, on foot, certainly, but not alone. Sister Saint Bernard was with me.”
“Who is Sister Saint Bernard?”
“She is a nun of the Order ofSt.Vincent de Paul. You know, the nursing-community. I stayed some time with them at their Convent at Paris, studying their good, wise, enlightened methods, visiting their hospitals with them, helping to tend their sick. We were returning with a patient that night I saw Madame de Roux. It was a case of brain-fever, a young girl, an attendant at one of the gaudy, disreputable restaurants of the Palais-Royal, delirious and desperately ill. No conveyance could be got to take her to the Charité; the Sisters’ van was otherwise engaged. We hired a vegetable-truck from a street fruit-seller, on the understanding that it should be whitewashed before being returned to him, wrapped the poorgirl in blankets, and wheeled her to the Hospital ourselves.”
“By—George!” said Bertham softly and distinctly. His forehead was thunderous, and his lips were compressed. She went on as though she had not heard:
“And so, as we went through the Rue de Richelieu, and Sister Saint Bernard and I, and the truck, were passing the Théâtre Français, into which all fashionable Paris was crowding to see the great actress play ‘Phédre,’ a beautiful woman alighted from a carriage and went in, leaning on the arm of a stout short man in uniform, with some decorations.... I pointed his companion out to Sister Saint Bernard. ‘Tiens,’ she said, ‘voilà Madame la Comtesse de Roux. Une grande dame de par le monde.’ And that is how I came to know M. de Moulny’s enchantress by sight.... I wonder whether M. Dunoisse has met her?”
“It is more than probable, seeing that the lady is his Colonel’s wife. And,” said Bertham, “if he has not yet had the honor of being presented, he will enjoy it very soon. A Hereditary Prince of Widinitz is a personage, even out of Bavaria. And whether the son of the Princess Marie Bathilde and old Nap’saide-de-camplikes his title, or whether he does not, it is his birthright, like the tail of the dog. He can’t get away from that!”
“He does look,” said Ada Merling, with a smile, “a little like what a schoolgirl’s ideal of a Prince would be.”
“Àpropos of that, a Prince who is not in the least like a schoolgirl’s ideal of the character dines with us at Wraye House on Tuesday. The Stratclyffes are coming, and the French Ambassador, with Madame de Berny.”
He added, naming the all-powerful Secretary for Foreign Affairs, with a lightness and indifference that were overdone:
“And Lord Walmerston.”
“Lord Walmerston!...”
Her look was one of surprise, changing to doubtful comprehension. He did not meet it. He was saying:
“It was his wish to come. His friendship for Mary dates from her schoolroom-days, and she cherishes the old loyal affection for her father’s friend in one of her heart’s warmest corners. He is charming to her, always ... and I have hopes of his weight in the balance for my Improved Married Quarters; and he really sees the advantageof the Regimental Schools.... But it is not to bore you with shop that I propose you should make one of us at dinner!” His voice was coaxing. “Do! and give Mary and me a happy evening!”
She shook her head with decision, though regret was in her face.
“I cannot leave my post. Remember, this is not only a Home.... It is also a Hospital. And what it pleases me to call my Staff”—she smiled—“are not experienced. They are willing and earnest, but they must be constantly supervised. And their training for this, the noblest profession that is open to women—as noble as any, were women equally free to follow all—is not the least of my responsibilities. We have lectures and classes here for their instruction in elementary anatomy, surgical dressing and bandaging, sanitation, the proper use of the thermometer and temperature-chart, and so on, almost daily.Mr.Alnwright and Professor Tayleur”—she named a famous surgeon and a celebrated physiologist—“are good enough to give their services, gratuitously; and I must be present at all times to assist them in their demonstrations. So you will understand, there is more to do here than you would have supposed.”
“Good gracious!” rejoined Bertham; “I should say so! And your band of trained attendants who are to supersede—and may it be soon!—the gin-sodden harridans and smiling, civil Incompetents who add to the discomforts and miseries of sickness, and lend to Death another terror—are they—— I suppose some of them are ladies?”
“The ideal nurse ought to be a lady,” she answered him, “in the true sense of the word. Many of these girls are well born and well bred, if that is—and of course it is—the meaning of your question. Some of them are frivolous and selfish and untrustworthy, and these must be weeded out. But the majority are earnest, honest, and sincere; and many of them are noble and high-minded, unselfish, devoted, and brave....”
There was a stately print of the Sistine Madonna of Raffaelle hanging above the fireplace. She lifted her face to the pure, spotless womanhood of the Face that looked out from the frame, and said:
“I try to keep up with these last-named ones, though often they put me to the blush.”
“You put to the blush! Don’t tell me that!” He spoke and looked incredulously.
“They have to learn to save their strength of mind and body, and not put out too much, even in the Christ-blessed service of the sick and suffering,” she said, “lest they should find themselves bankrupt, with no power of giving more. And sometimes the more ardent among them rebel against my rules, which enforce regular exercise, observance of precautions for the preservation of their own health, even the relaxation and amusement which should break the monotony of routine; and then I long to kiss them, Robert, even when I am most severe!”
There were tears in the man’s bright eyes as he looked at her. Her own eyes were on the Raffaelle print; she had forgotten him.
“What I should like best would be to endure long enough to see them outstripping and outdoing the poor example of their humble fellow-student and teacher, developing nursing as a higher Art, and spreading the knowledge of the proper treatment of the sick, until not one of the poorest and the roughest women of what we are content to call the Lower Classes, shall be destitute of some smattering of the knowledge that will save the lives of those she loves best in bitter time of need.”
Her face was rapt. She went on in a clear, low, even tone: “I should like to live to be very old, so old that I was quite forgotten, and sit quietly in some pleasant corner of a peaceful English home seeing the movement grow. For it will grow, and spread and increase, Robert, until it reaches every corner of the world! And to that end every penny that I possess; every ounce of strength that is mine; every drop of blood in my veins, would be cheerfully spent and given.... Do I say would?... Will be! if it please God!” Her eyes left the picture and went to Bertham’s absorbed face. “I have been holding forth at merciless length, have I not?” she said. “But you and I, with Mary, constitute a Mutual Society for the Talking-Over of Plans; and, though I sometimes tax your patience, I am always ready to lend ear. As for your dinner, it is a delightful temptation which I must resist. Beg Mary to tell me all about it afterwards!”
“Your would-be host and hostess will not be the only disappointed ones,” Bertham said, and rose as though totake leave. “Lord Walmerston is one of your admirers, and”—there was a gleam of mischief in the hazel eyes—“Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was urgent for an opportunity of meeting you again.”
“Indeed! I am very much honored.” Her calm eyes and composed face told nothing. But her tone had a clear frosty ring of something colder than mere indifference, and the curve of her lips was a little ironical. Seeing that touch of scorn, the twinkle in Bertham’s eyes became more mischievous. He said:
“The Prince’s lucky star might shine on such a meeting, Ada. A beautiful, wealthy, and wise Princess would be the making of the man.”
“Thatman!” she said, and a shudder rippled through her slight body, and her calm, unruffled forehead lost its smoothness in a frown of repulsion and disgust. She rose as though escaping from actual physical contact with some repellent personality suddenly presented before her, and stood beside Bertham on the hearthrug, as tall as he, and with the same look of high-bred elegance and distinction that characterized and marked out her companion. The spark of mischief still danced in his bright eyes. His handsome mouth twitched with the laughter he repressed as he said:
“So you do not covet the Crown Imperial of France, and tame eagles do not please you? Yet the opportunities an Empress enjoys for doing good must be practically unrivaled.”
Her blue-gray eyes were disdainful now. She said:
“The position of a plain gentlewoman is surely more enviable and honorable than would be hers who should share the throne of a crowned and sceptered adventurer.”
Said Bertham:
“You do not call the First Napoleon that?”
“There was a terrible grandeur,” she returned, “about that bloodstained, unrelenting, icy, ambitious despot; a halo of old, great martial deeds surrounds his name that blinds the eyes to his rapacity and meanness, his selfishness, sensuality, and greed. But this son of Hortense! this nephew, if he be a nephew?—this charlatan trailing in the mire the sumptuous rags of the Imperial purple; this gentlemanly, silken-mannered creature, with phrases of ingratiating flattery upon his tongue, and hatred glimmeringbetween the half-drawn blinds of those sick, sluggish eyes.... God grant, for England’s sake, that he may never mount the throne ofSt.Louis!”
“Ah! Ada—Ada!” Bertham said again, and laughed, awkwardly for one whose mirth was so melodious and graceful as a rule. For the little dinner at Wraye House, at which the Secretary for Foreign Affairs and the French Ambassador were to meet the Pretender to the Imperial Throne of France, was really a diplomatic meeting of somewhat serious political importance, in view of certain changes and upheavals taking place in that restless country on the other side of the Channel, and divers signs and tokens, indicative to an experienced eye that the White Flag, for eighteen years displayed above the Central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries, might shortly be expected to come down.