XVI
The mental picture Dunoisse had formed of the surroundings of Miss Smithwick turned out to be pleasantly remote from the reality.
The Hospice for Sick Governesses was a tall, prim, pale-faced family mansion in Cavendish Street, London, West, whose neat white steps led to a dark green door with a bright brass plate and a gleaming brass knocker, through a wide hall hung with landscape-paintings of merit and fine old engravings in black frames, up a softly-carpeted staircase to an airy, cheerful bedroom on the second floor, where with birds and fragrant flowers, and many little luxuries about her to which poor Smithwick in her desperate battle with adversity had for long been a stranger, the simple gentlewoman, grown a frail, white-haired, aged woman, lay in a pretty chintz-curtained bed, whose shining brasswork gave back the ruddy blaze of a bright wood fire, listening to the quiet voice of a capped, and caped, and aproned nurse, who sat on a low chair beside her, reading from a volume that lay upon her knee.
Dunoisse, from the doorway, to which he had been guided by an elderly woman, similarly capped, and caped, and aproned, and evidently prepared for the arrival he had announced by letter to his poor old friend, took in the scene before patient or nurse had become aware of his presence.
The voice that read was one of the rare human organs that are gifted to make surpassing melody of common ordinary speech. Soft, but distinct, through the dull roar of London traffic in the street below, every syllable came clearly. And the shabby leather-bound volume with the tarnished gilt clasps brought back old memories of Dunoisse’s childhood. From its sacred pages he had been taught the noble English of Tyndale, following the traveling crochet-hook of simple Smithwick from Gospel text to text; and the words that reached him now had thus been made familiar; and they told of Heavenly pity and love for sorrowful, earth-born, Divinely-endowed humanity, and counseled brave endurance of the sufferings and sorrows of this world, for the sake of One all-sinless, Who drank of its bitter cup and wore its crown of thorns long, long before our stumbling feet were set upon its stony ways....
Dunoisse’s elderly guide had turned away at the urgent summons of a bell, after knocking at the partly-open door and signing to the visitor to step across the threshold. He had waited there, listening to the soft, melodious cadences of the voice that read, for some moments before his presencewas perceived. Then, his poor old friend cried out his name in a tremulous flutter of delight and agitation, and Dunoisse crossed the soft carpets to her bedside, and took her thin hand, and kissed her wrinkled forehead between the scanty loops of her gray hair. And the capped, and caped, and aproned nurse who had been reading, and had risen and closed the Book, and laid it noiselessly aside upon a table at the first moment of Miss Smithwick’s recognition, said to him:
“The patient must not be over-excited, sir. You will kindly ring for assistance should she appear at all faint.”
Then she went, with an upright carriage and step that rather reminded the visitor of the free, graceful gait of Arab women, out of the room, soundlessly shutting the door behind her.
“I did not tell her you were coming.... I so much wished that you should see her!... Dearest Hector! My own sweet Madame Dunoisse’s beloved boy!” poor Smithwick tittered, and Hector kindly soothed her, being nervously mindful of the nurse’s warning, the while she held his strong, supple, red hand in both her frail ones, and gazed into the man’s face, wistfully looking for the boy.
He was not conscious of the old uncomfortable shrinking from poor Smithwick. Her nose was not so cold; her little staccato, mouselike squeaks of emotion were missing. Most of her sentimentalities and all of her affectations had fallen away from her with her obsolete velvet mantles and queer old trinkets, fallals of beads, and hair, and steel, and the front of brown curls that deceived nobody, and never even dreamed of trying to match the scanty knob behind. The honest, genuine, affectionate creature that she was and had always been, shone forth now.... For Death is a skillful diamond-cutter who grinds and slices flaws and blemishes away, and leaves, although reduced in size, a gem of pure unblemished luster, worthy to be set in Heaven’s shining floor.
And now he was to learn the reason of her harsh dismissal, and to respect her worth yet more. She charged him with her affectionate humble duty to his father....
“Who, I trust, has long since pardoned me for what he well might deem presumption in venturing to judge his actions, and question his”—Smithwick hemmed—“strictadherence to the—shall I call it compact?—made with your dear mother, at the time when she conceived it her duty to resume the religious habit she had discarded under the influence of—of a passion, Hector, which has made many of my sex oblivious to the peculiar sacredness of vows.” She added, reading no clear comprehension of her meaning in the brilliant black eyes that looked at her: “I refer to the Marshal’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain from His Serene Highness the Hereditary Prince of Widinitz recognition, and”—she hesitated—“acceptance of—yourself, dear boy, as the—in point of fact—the legitimate heir to his throne!”
“Can my father have conceived such a thing possible?” said Dunoisse, doubting if he had heard aright. “Can he have courted insult, rebuff, contempt, by making such an approach? Think again, dear friend! Is it not possible you may be mistaken? No hint of any such proceeding on my father’s part has ever been breathed to me. I beg you, think again!”
Miss Smithwick shook her head and sighed, and said that there was no mistake at all about it. She had received her dismissal for—it might be presumptuously—venturing to expostulate, when the public prints made the matter a subject for discussion. It had been going on for some time previously; the comments of the principal newspapers of Widinitz, and of the leading Press organs of Munich and Berlin were largely quoted in the Paris journals which had enlightened Smithwick on the subject of her patron’s plans. The cuttings she had preserved. They were in her desk, there upon the little table. Hector might see them if he would.... Her thin fingers hunted under the velvet-covered flaps of the absurd little old writing-box that her old pupil handed her; she followed the movements of the well-made manly figure in the loosely-fitting gray traveling-suit, with fond, admiring eyes. A blush made her old cheeks quite pink and young as she said:
“Forgive me, dear Hector!—but you have grown so handsome.... Has ... has no beautiful young lady told you so? With her eyes, at least, since verbally to commend the personal appearance of a gentleman would be unmaidenly and unrefined.”
“You have lived too long out of France to remember, dear friend,” said Hector, showing his small, square whiteteeth in a laugh of heart-whole amusement, “that young ladies, with us, are not supposed to have eyes at all!”
He forgot meek Smithwick for a moment, remembering an Arab girl at Blidah who had seemed to love him.... Adjmeh had been very pretty, with the great blue-black dewy eyes of a gazelle, and the hoarse cooing voice of a dove, despite the little indigo lilies and stars tattooed on her ripe nectarine-colored cheeks; on the backs of her slender, red-tipped hands, and upon the insteps of her slim arched feet, dyed also with henna; their ankles tinkling with little gold and silver coins and amulets, threaded on black silk strings similar to those bound about her tiny wrists, and plaited into the orthodox twenty-five tresses of her night-black hair....
Ah, yes! though at twenty she would be middle-aged, at thirty a wrinkled hag, Adjmeh was very pretty—would be for several years to come.... Who might be telling her so at that particular moment?... Dunoisse wondered, and then the conjured-up perfumes of sandal and ambergris grew faint; the orange glow of the African sunset faded from the flat, terraced roof of the little house at Blidah, the tinkle of the Arabtamburwas nothing but the ring of a London muffin-man’s bell—and Miss Smithwick was tendering him a little flat packet of yellowed clippings from theMonarchie, theNational, thePresse, thePatrie....
Taking these with a brief excuse, Dunoisse moved to the window, and the cold gray light of the February morning fell upon the face that—conscious of the mingled anger and humiliation written upon it—he was glad to hide from the invalid. Recollections were buzzing in his ears like angry wasps, roused by the poking of a stick into their habitation, and each one had its separate sting. It is not agreeable to be compelled to despise one’s father, and the last shred of the son’s respect fell from him as he read.
The chief among the Paris newspapers from which the cuttings had been taken, bore the date of a day or two previous to that old boyish duel at the Technical School of Military Instruction. The conversation occurring between the Duke and his guests, which, as repeated by de Moulny, had produced the quarrel, had undoubtedly arisen through discussion of these.
Press organs of Imperial convictions upheld the action of the Marshal, denounced the policy of the reigning Princeof Widinitz, in rejecting the pretensions of his daughter’s son, as idiotic and unnatural in an elderly hereditary ruler otherwise destitute of an heir. Legitimist journals sneered. Revolutionary prints heaped scorn upon the man, sprung from homely Swiss peasant-stock, who sought to aggrandize himself by degrading his son. The satirical prints had squibs and lampoons ... theCharivaripublished a fearful caricature of the Marshal, in his gorgeous, obsolete, Imperial Staff uniform, tiptoe on the roof of the Carmelite Convent of Widinitz in the attempt to reach down the princely insignia dangling temptingly above him, whilst the aureoled vision of Ste. Térèse vainly expostulated with the would-be marauder from clouds of glory overhead. TheMonarchiequoted at length an article from a leading Munich newspaper. Judge whether or no the reader went hot and cold.
“We cannot sufficiently pity the son of the high-bred, misguided, repentant lady, doomed in the green bough of inexperienced youth to be the tool of an unprincipled and unscrupulous adventurer, the handful of mud flung in the face of a Bavarian Catholic State, whose rulers have for centuries rendered to Holy Mother Church the most profound respect, and the most duteous allegiance.”
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!...”
The old, boyish, absurd expletive hissed impotently on the glowing coals of the man’s fierce indignation, quenching them not at all. The writer continued:
“He who thought little of dragging the pallet from under the dying peasant, whose greed has locked and bolted the doors of the Carmelite House of Mercy in the faces of the sick and suffering poor, now lays desecrating hands upon the princely mantle, covets the hereditary and feudal scepter for his base-born son, adding to the impudent dishonesty of the Swiss innkeeper the vulgar braggadocio and swaggering assurance of the paid hireling of the Corsican usurper, who dared to mount the sacred throne ofSt.Louis; who presumed to adulterate with the plebeian blood of a Beauharnais the patrician tide flowing in the veins of a daughter of the reigning House of Wittelsbach.”
Dunoisse’s face was not pleasant to see, as, perusal ended, he set his small white teeth viciously upon his lower lip, and, breathing vengeance upon unknown offenders throughhis thin, arched nostrils, scowled menacingly at the smug-faced, genteel houses on the opposite side of Cavendish Street. His father’s boast about the “blood royal” came back to him, and that “fine Serene Highness” the Marshal had promised those good people of Widinitz. Ah! what an infamy the whole thing had been! But at least one might count it buried; forgotten like these perishing strips of discolored, brittle paper. That was something to be thankful for.
He cleared his forehead of its thunder-clouds, and turned back towards the bed, but something of the ordeal of shame he had passed through was written on his face for Smithwick, in spite of the smile with which he dressed it, as he silently laid the yellowed fold of cuttings on the coverlet near her hand.
“They—they have given you pain?” faltered the poor lady.
“It is past and over, dear friend. These paragraphs have cleared up something that was obscure to me before,” said Dunoisse—“conveyed a hint ofhisthat was never again made. One cannot pretend to judge him. He has always been a law unto himself.”
The bitterness of the words, and the ironical smile that curved the speaker’s lips as he uttered them, were lost upon the simple woman who answered:
“I have always felt that. There are characters so highly elevated above the crowd of ordinary individuals, that one can hardly expect them to be influenced by the ordinary considerations, the commonplace principles that guide and govern the rest of us——”
“Fortunately for ourselves!” interpolated Dunoisse.
“—That, my dear, we who know ourselves their inferiors in intellect, as in personal advantages, cannot pretend to judge them,” finished the poor lady.
“And in proportion with the baseness of their motives and the mean selfishness of their aims,” said Dunoisse, “the admiration of their more moral and upright fellow-creatures would appear to be lavished upon them.”
“Too true, I fear, my dear Hector,” admitted Miss Smithwick, flushing inside the neat frills that bordered her cap. “But had you beheld your father in the splendor of his earlier years, you would”—she coughed—“have perhaps regarded the devotion with which it was his fate toinspire persons of the opposite sex, with greater leniency and tolerance.”
“How did his path cross my mother’s?” asked Dunoisse, amused, in spite of himself, at the unremitting diligence with which the Marshal’s faithful votary availed herself of every opportunity that presented itself, to spread a brushful of gilding on her battered idol. “I have often wondered, but never sought to learn.”
“During the last years of the Emperor Napoleon’s sequestration atSt.Helena, my dear, your father, chafing at the lack of public appreciation which his great talents should have commanded, and his distinguished martial career certainly had earned, found distraction and interest in traveling as a private gentleman through the various countries he had visited in a less peaceful character. And, during a visit to the country estate of a Bavarian nobleman, whose acquaintance he had made during—unless I err—the second campaign of Vienna, as the result of one of those accidents which so mold our after-lives, Hector, that one cannot doubt that Destiny and Fate conspire to bring them about, he crossed your mother’s path.”
“To her most bitter sorrow and her son’s abiding shame!” commented Dunoisse, but not aloud.
“There is, or was, in the neighborhood of Widinitz—I speak of the capital of the Bavarian Principality of that name,” went on Miss Smithwick, “a House of Mercy—under the management of nuns of the Carmelite Order, whose Convent adjoins the Hospital—now closed in consequence of the withdrawal from its Endowment Fund of a sum so large that the charitable institution was ruined by its loss.”
Hector knew well who had brought about the ruin. He sat listening, and kept his eyes upon the carpet, lest the fierce wrath and scathing contempt that burned in them should discompose the Marshal’s faithful partisan.
“One day in the autumn of 1820,” said Miss Smithwick—“the Prince having ridden out early with all his Court and retinue to hunt—a gentleman was brought to the Widinitz House of Mercy on a woodman’s cart. He had been struck upon the forehead and thrown from his saddle by an overhanging branch as he rode at full speed down a forest road. The Hunt swept on after the boar-hounds—the insensible man was found by two peasants andconveyed to the Hospital, as I have said. The nun in charge of the Lesser Ward—chiefly reserved for the treatment of accidents, my dear, for there were many among the peasants and woodcutters, and quarrymen, and miners—and to meet their great need the House of Mercy, had been founded by a former Prioress of the Convent—the nun in charge was Sister Térèse de Saint Francois....”
“My mother. Yes?...”
Dunoisse had spoken in a whisper. His eyes shunned gentle Smithwick’s. He sat in his old, boyish attitude leaning forwards in his chair, his clasped hands thrust downwards between his knees; and those hands were so desperately knotted in the young man’s fierce, secret agony of shame and anger, that the knuckles started, lividly white in color, against the rich red skin.
“There is no more to tell, my dear!” said Miss Smithwick. “You can conceive the rest?”
“Easily!” said Dunoisse. “Easily! And, knowing what followed, one is tempted to make paraphrase of the Scripture story. Had the Samaritans passed by and left the wounded man to what you have called Fate and Destiny, the cruses of oil and wine would not have been drained and broken, the House of Mercy would not have been ransacked and gutted; its virgin despoiled—its doors barred in the faces of the dying poor.” He laughed, and the jarring sound of his mirth made his meek hearer tremble. “It is a creditable story!” he said, “a capital story for one to hear who bears the nameheso willingly makes stink in the nostrils of honorable men. For if I have Carmel in my blood—to quote his favorite gibe—I have alsohis. And it is a terrible inheritance!”
“Oh! hush, my dear! Remember that he is your father!” pleaded poor Smithwick.
“I cannot forget it,” said Dunoisse, smiling with stiff, pale lips. “It is a relationship that will be constantly brought home. When I see you lying here, and know what privations you must have endured before the charitable owners of this house opened its doors to you, and realize thathiswere shut because you strove to open his eyes to the precipice of shame towards which his greed and ambition were hurrying him, blindly, I ask myself whether, with such Judas-blood running in my own veins, and such a heritage of gross desires and selfish sensuality as it mustbring with it!—whether it be possible for me, his son, to live a life of cleanliness and honor? And the answer is——”
“Oh! yes, my dear!” cried the poor creature tearfully. “With the good help of God! And have you not been honorable and brave, Hector, in refusing any portion of—that money?” She added, meeting Dunoisse’s look of surprise: “Do you wonder how it is I know? Your father wrote and told me—it is now years ago—I hope you will not blame him!—though the letter was couched in terms of reproach that wounded me cruelly at the time....” Smithwick felt under her pillow for her handkerchief and dried her overflowing eyes.
“What charges did he bring against you?” Dunoisse asked, controlling as best he could the contempt and anger that burned in his black eyes, and vibrated in his voice.
“He said I had revenged myself for the withdrawal of his patronage, and my removal from his service,” gulped poor Smithwick, “by poisoning the mind of his only child! He complained that you refused to touch a franc of his money—preferring to work your way upwards under heavy disadvantages, rather than accept from him, your father, any portion of the fortune he had always meant should be yours. And”—she put her handkerchief away and nodded her head in quite a determined manner—“I wrote back and told him, Hector—that I esteemed your course of conduct, though my counsels had not inspired it; and that your mother, when she learned of your determination, would be proud of her noble son!”
Dunoisse would have spoken here, but Smithwick held up her thin hand and stopped him.
“For it seems to me, dear child of my dearest mistress, that to take what has been given to God, is the way to call down the just judgment of Heaven upon the heads of those who are guilty of such deeds,” said Smithwick, nodding her mild gray head emphatically. “And, rather than live in gilded affluence upon those funds, wrested from the coffers of the Carmelite House of Charity at Widinitz, I would infinitely prefer to carry on existence—as I have done, dear Hector—until my health failed me in my attic room at Hampstead, on a penny roll a day. And she would uphold me and agree with me.”
“Who isshe, dear friend?” asked Hector, smiling, thoughhis heart was sore within him at the picture of dire need revealed in these utterances of the simple lady.
“I speak of our Lady Superintendent.... A remarkable personality, my dear Hector, if I may venture to say so.... It was she who, finding this benevolent charity suffering from mismanagement and lack of funds, endowed it with a portion of her large fortune, induced other wealthy persons to subscribe towards endowing the foundation with a permanent income, and, finding no trustworthy person of sufficient capacity to fill the post, herself assumed the duties of Resident Matron. Imagine it, my dear!” said gentle Smithwick. “At her age—for she is still young—possibly your senior by a year or two, certainly not more—to forego Society and the giddy round of gilded pleasure to be found in London and dear, dear Paris!— for the humdrum routine of a Hospital; the training and management of nurses; the regulation of prescriptions, diets, and accounts!”
“Indeed! A vocation, one would say!” commented Dunoisse.
“She would ask you,” returned Miss Smithwick, “must one necessarily be a nun to work for the good of others?”
The words stirred a dim recollection in Dunoisse of having heard them before. But the image of the Lady Superintendent of the Hospice for Sick Governesses formed itself within his mind. He saw her as a plain, sensible, plump little spinster, well advanced towards the thirties, resigned to exchange hopeless rivalries with other young women, not only rich, but pretty, for undivided rule and undisputed sway over a large household of dependents.... preferring the ponderous compliments of Members of Visiting Committees to the assiduities of impecunious Guardsmen and money-hunting detrimentals. He said, as the picture faded:
“This lady who has been so kind to you——”
“‘Kind.’... The word is feeble, my dear Hector, to express her unbounded goodness,” declared Miss Smithwick. “I can but say that in the midst of sickness, and dire poverty, and other distresses that I will not further dwell on, she came upon me like an Angel from the Heaven in which I firmly believe. And when I lay down my head, never to lift it up again—and I think, my dear, the time is not far off now!—that great and solemn hour that comesto all of us will be cheered and lightened, Hector, if she stands beside my pillow and holds my dying hand.”
The simple sincerity of the utterance brought tears into the listener’s eyes. He winked them back, and said:
“I pray the day you speak of may not dawn for years! My leave, procured with difficulty owing to threatening national disturbances which the Army may be employed in quelling, extends not beyond three days. I shall hope to see this lady, and thank her for her goodness to my friend before I go.”
“I trust she will permit it. She is very reticent—almost shrinking—in her desire to avoid recognition of her....”
Miss Smithwick broke off in the middle of her sentence. She leaned back upon her pillows, lividly pale, breathing hurriedly; her blue lips strove to say: “It is nothing. Don’t mind!”
Alarmed for her, repentant for having forgotten the nurse’s warning, Dunoisse grasped at the bell-rope by the fireplace, and sent an urgent summons clanging through the lower regions of the tall house. Within a moment, as it seemed, the door opened, admitting the capped, and caped, and aproned young woman who had been reading to the patient upon his arrival. A glance seemed to show her a condition of things not unexpected. She went swiftly to the bedside, answering, as Dunoisse turned to her appealingly, the words shaping themselves upon his lips that asked her: “Shall I go?”
“It will be best!... Wait at the end of the passage, near the window on the landing.... This looks alarming,” she answered—“but it will not last long.”