XVIII
The front-door of the Hospice for Sick Governesses in Cavendish Street had not long closed behind the retreating figure of a swarthy, black-eyed young foreign gentleman when the pleasant-faced elderly woman whose duty it was to answer its bell brought to the Lady Superintendent a card upon a little inlaid tray. She took the card and smiled.
“TellMr.Bertham that I will come down in a few minutes. And I hope you did not call him ‘Master Robert’ this time, Husnuggle?”
“I did, Miss Ada, love, as sure as my name’s a queer one, and him a Secretary of State at War.”
“He is not Secretary at War now, Husnuggle, though he may be again. Who can tell, when Governments are always changing and Cabinets being made and remade?”
“A-cabinet-making he went as a boy, and cut his fingers cruel, and the Wraye Abbey housekeeper fainted dead away at the sight of the blood, they said!—and the head-house-maidgave notice at being asked for cobwebs, which she vowed and declared not one were to be found in the place, though answer for attics how can you? And he had my name pat, Miss Ada, so soon as I answered the door. ‘Halloa, Husnuggle!’ he says; ‘so you’ve come up from Peakshire to help nurse the sick governesses?’ And I says: ‘Yes, Master Robert, and it’s like the good old times come back, to see your handsome, smiling face again.’ And you’ll come to him in a few minutes?”
“The minutes have passed, Husnuggle, while you have been talking. I am going down toMr.Bertham now.”
She found him in a little ground-floor parlor, sacred to accounts and the semi-private interviews accorded by the Lady Superintendent to shabby-genteel visitors with hungry faces (growing still more wan as the tale of penury was told) and smartish visitors with impudent faces, apt to flush uncomfortably under the keen scrutiny of those blue-gray eyes. It was plainly but comfortably furnished, and a red fire glowed in its grate of shining steel, and a plump and sleek and well-contented cat dozed happily upon its hearthrug.
You saw Bertham as a tall, lightly-built man of barely thirty, with a bright, spirited, handsome face and a frank, gay, cordial manner. No trace of the pompousness of the ex-Secretary of State either in his appearance, voice or handshake: a warm and cordial grip was to be had from Bertham; or, in default of this, a brusque nod that said: “You are objectionable, and I prefer to keep clean hands!”
He was striding lightly up and down the little parlor, with the loose ends of his black satin cravat—voluminous, according to the fashion of the time—floating behind him; and each time he covered the distance from the hearthrug to the muslin-blinded window he would stop, look impatiently at his watch, and recommence his walk.
She said, standing in the doorway, watching him do this:
“You are not in a genuine hurry, or you would not be here at all.”
“Ada!” He turned with a look of glad relief, and as she noiselessly closed the door and came to meet him, he took both the womanly cordial hands she held out to him, and pressed them in his own. “It does one good to seeyou. It does one good even to know you anchored here in Cavendish Street, and not flying from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to Rome, from Rome to Heaven-knows-where—comparing foreign systems of Hospital management and sanitation with our own, and finding ours everywhere to be hopelessly out of date, and inferior, and wrong....”
“As it is!” she said—“And is it not time we knew it? so that we can prove those mistaken who say,‘To be insular is to be strong, perhaps, but at the same time it is to be narrow-minded.’”
“Ah! Ada, Ada!” he said, and his sweet and mellow voice had sadness in it. “If we all lived up to your standard, the Millennium would have come, and Governments would cease from troubling, and War Secretaries would be at rest.”
“Are you not at rest just now?” she asked, and added, even before he shook his head: “But no! You are overworked; your face shows it.”
“Mary said so this morning,” he answered; “but if my looks pity me, as Peakshire folk would say, I feel fit and well.”
“Where is my Mary?” she asked. “Why have you not brought her?”
“Mary has flown down to Hayshire,” he said, “on the wings of the Portsmouth Express. One of the crippled children at the Home was to be operated on, under chloroform, for the removal of a portion of diseased hip-bone; and though my wife shrank from the ordeal of seeing pain, even dulled by the anæsthetic, she felt it was her duty to be upon the spot.”
“Dear Mary!” she said, and if Dunoisse had seen her face he would no longer have thought it lacking in warmth and color: “True, good, noble woman.”
Bertham answered, with feeling in his own face and voice:
“The dearest, living!... the noblest I ever knew—but one, Ada!”
She passed the words as though she had not heard, and said, with the soft, clear laugh that had music in it for the ears of those who loved her, and this man was one of the many:
“Husnuggle was made so happy by your not forgetting her, poor good soul!”
“Her face conjured up Wraye Rest,” he said, “and the yew-tree gateway between the park and the garden; and the green terraces with the apple-espaliers and the long borders of lavender-bushes; and Darth down at the bottom of the deep valley, foaming over her bed of limestone rock, and the steep paths down to the trout-pools that were easier to tread than the slippery ways of Diplomacy.”
“One can always go back!” she returned, though her sigh for all the distant sweetness had echoed his, “either to my dear Wraye Rest or your own peculiar Eden of Wraye Abbey.”
“Taking our respective loads of aims and ambitions and responsibilities with us,” said Bertham. “My badly-housed Military Invalid Pensioners for whom I want tight roofs, and dry walls, and comfortable beds. My Sandhurst Cadets, trussed up in absurd trappings, and harassed with rules as trumpery—hide-bound with conditions quite as detrimental to health as their cut-and-dried discipline, and innumerable supererogatory belts, straps, and buckles. My Regimental Schools, where illiterate soldiers and their wives are to learn to read and write and cipher; and my Infants’ Classes, where the soldier’s children may be taught as well. My Improved Married Quarters, which should—but do not, more’s the pity!—occupy a separate block in every Barracks in the Kingdom, where the women and their men may live in decent privacy, and not under conditions not at all distantly recalling—to our shame! and the Red Tapeism that preserves these conditions in their unadorned and ancient ugliness ought to blush the redder for it!—the primitive promiscuities of the Stone Age. With a distinct bias in favor of that period!”
His handsome face was bitter and dark with anger; his voice, though barely raised above the level of ordinary fireside chat, rang and vibrated with passionate indignation.
“It has been borne in on me, Ada, in God knows how many hours of weariness and bitter disappointment, that our Peninsular triumphs—achieved in what we are accustomed to call the good old days—are a heavy clog upon our advancement as a nation now, and a cloud upon our eyes. They were not good old days, Ada, as windbaggy orators like to call them; they were bad old days, inhuman old days, cruel old days, when Napoleon Bonaparte possessedFrance upon a bridal bed of bloody corpses; and ragged, underfed, untaught, unsheltered soldiers upheld, in what neglect, what misery and suffering, you and I can barely realize, amidst Famine and Slaughter and Pestilence and Devastation hideous and indescribable, the traditional glory of the British nation, the strength and fire and power of British Arms. Let us have done with the pride of those days! Let us cease to boast of them! Let us prove our advancement in Civilization, Humanity, and Science by no longer treating these our fellow-creatures as human pawns in a devilish game of chess, or as thoughtless children treat toy-soldiers; to be moved hither and thither at will, swept off the board when necessary, and jostled promiscuously into dark and stuffy boxes until we are pleased to call for them again! Since Great Britain owes so much to her Army and her Navy, let her treat the men who serve her by land and sea with respect, and decent consideration. And in so far as Governments and Administrations of the old days ignored their rights to honest, humane, and Christian usage, let us have done with those damned old days forever, and while the life is red in us, hurry on the new!”
“They cannot come too quickly!” she said, giving back his earnest look. “Surely by raising the moral tone, cultivating the mental faculties, and improving the social condition of the private soldier, he is nerved and tempered, not softened and unstrung.”
“As it is we owe him honor,” said Bertham, “that, with so many disadvantages as he labors under to-day, and in the face of the bad example too often set him as to moral conduct and neglect of duty by his superiors, he is what we know him to be!”
“Ah, that is true—most true!” she answered, breaking the silence in which she had sat listening to the silvery voice of which even Bertham’s enemies admitted the singular charm. “May the day soon dawn when we shall see him what we hope he will become!”
“There will be a dark night before its dawning,” Bertham returned, and his smile had sadness in its very brilliancy. “For England must lose much to win that more, be assured.”
He added as his look met hers, seeing the slight bewildered knitting of her eyebrows:
“There is a grand old white head nodding at the upper end of the Green Council Board at the War Office, or soundly sleeping, in the inner sanctum at the covered passage-end that has always been known as the office of the Commander-in-Chief,—that Britain, in her gratitude and loyal regard and tender reverence for its great owner,—and God forbid that I should rob him of one jot or tittle of what has been so gloriously won!—has left there long years since the brain within it became incapable, by the natural and inevitable decay of its once splendid faculties, of planning and carrying out any wholesome, needful reform in our Army’s organization—even of listening to those who have suggestions to offer, or plans to submit, with anything but an old man’s testy impatience of what seems new. This is deplored by personages nominally subordinate, really wielding absolute power. ‘Sad, sad!’ they say, ‘but the nation would have it so.’ Yet little more than a year ago, when, as by a miracle, the strength and vigor of the old warrior’s prime seemed, if only for an instant, to have returned to him—when the dim fires of the gray eagle-glance blazed out again, and the trembling hand, strung to vigor for the nonce, penned that most electrifying letter,—published a few weeks back by what the New England Party regard as a wise stroke of policy, and Officialdom as an unpardonable indiscretion,—that letter declaring the country’s defenses to be beggarly and inadequate, its naval arsenals neglected, its dockyards undermanned, its forts not half-garrisoned.... What sort of criticism did it evoke? Those who were openly antagonistic declared it to be preposterous; those who were loyal treated its utterances with contemptuous, galling indulgence.... To me it was as though a prophetic voice had spoken in warning from the tomb! And even before the graven stone sinks down over the weary old white head, Ada, and the laurels are withered that lie above, the country he loved and served so grandly may be doing pennance in dust and ashes for that warning it despised!”
“And if the War-call sounded to-morrow,” she said, with her intent look upon him, and her long white fingers knitted about her knee, “and the need arose—as it would arise—for a man of swift decision and vigorous action to lead us in the field—upon whom would we rely?Who would step into the breach, and wield thebaton?”
“A man,” returned Bertham, “sixty-six years old, who served on the Duke’s staff and lost his left arm at Waterloo; who has never held any command or had any experience of directing troops in War, and whose life, for forty years or so, has been spent in the discharge of the duties, onerous but not active, devolving upon a Military Secretary. The whole question as to fitness or not fitness turns upon an ‘if.’”
The speaker spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders slightly, and a whimsical spark of humor gleamed in the look he turned upon the listener, as a star might shine through the wild blue twilight of a day of gale and storm, as he resumed:
“If the possession of the Wellingtonian manner,—combined with an empty sleeve—all honor to the brave arm that used to be inside it!—a manner full of urbanity and courtesy—nicely graduated and calculated according to the rank and standing of the person addressed; and admirable command of two Continental languages, and a discreet but distinct appreciation of high company and good living, unite to make an ideal Commander-in-Chief, why, Dalgan will be the man of men!...”
“But surely we need something more,” she said, meeting Bertham’s glance with doubt and questioning.
“Something indeed!” he returned dryly. “But be kind to me, and let me forget my bogies for a little in hearing of all the good that you have done and mean to do.... Tell me of your experiences at Kaiserswerke amongst the Lutheran Deaconesses—tell me about your visit to the Sisters ofSt.Vincent de Paul at the Hospital of the Charité, or your sojourn with thedames religieusesofSt.Augustine at the Hôtel Dieu. Or tell me about your ancient, super-annuated, used-governesses. I should like to know something of them, poor old souls!...”
“They are not all old,” she explained, “though many of them are used-up, and all, or nearly all, are incapable; and Bertham, with a very few exceptions, sensible and ladylike as most of them are, they are so grossly ignorant of the elementary principles of education that one wonders how the poor pretense of teaching was kept up at all? And how it was that common honesty did not lead them to takeservice as housemaids? and how the parents of their pupils—Heaven help them!—could have been blind enough to confide the training of their children to such feeble, incompetent hands?”
“It is a crying evil,” said Bertham, “or, rather, a whimpering one, and needs to be dealt with. One day we will change all that.... As to these sick and sorrowful women, the generation that will rise up to take their places will be qualified, I hope, to teach, by having learned; and the quality of their teaching will, I hope again, be guaranteed by a University diploma. And, superior knowledge having ceased to mean the temporary possession of the lesson-book, children will learn to treat their teachers with respect, and we shall hear fewer tales of the despised governess.”
She returned, glancing at Bertham’s handsome, resolute face, and noting the many fine lines beginning to draw themselves about the corners of the eyes and mouth, the worn hollows of the temples and cheekbones, and the deepening caves from which the brilliant eyes looked out in scorn, or irony, or appealing, ingratiating gentleness.
“All governesses are not despised or despicable. There are many instances, Robert, where the integrity and conscientiousness of the poor dependent gentlewoman has held up a standard of conduct for the pupil, well or ill taught, to follow which has borne good fruit in after-years. We have a worthy lady here, a governess long resident in Paris, against whose exquisite French I polish up my own when I have time—a rather scarce commodity in this house!... Miss Caroline Smithwick has been cast on the mercy of the world in her old age, after many years of faithful service, because she dared tell her wealthy employer that a claim he pursued and pressed was dishonest and base. The man’s son thinks with her, and has chosen to be poor rather than profit by riches—and, I gather, rank—so gained. It is a wholesome story,” she said, “and when he told me to-day of his intention to support the gentle old soul who was so true to him, out of his pay as an officer of the French Army,—I could have clapped my hands and cried aloud—but I did not,—for the Superintendent of a Governesses’ Home must be, above all, discreet;—‘Bravo, M. Hector Dunoisse!’”
“‘Dunoisse, Dunoisse’?” He turned the name uponhis tongue several times over, as though its flavor were in some measure familiar to him. “Dunoisse.... Can it be a son of the dyed and painted and padded old lion, with false claws and teeth and a name from the wigmaker’s, who was Bonaparte’saideat Marengo and cut a dashing figure at the Tuileries in 1804? The Emperor created him Field-Marshal after Austerlitz, and small blame to him!... He ran away with a Bavarian Princess after the Restoration—a Princess who happened to be a professed nun, and somewhere about 1828, when the son of their union may have been seven or eight years old,—when the Throne ofSt.Louis was rocking under that cumbersome old wooden puppet Charles X.,—when the tricolor was on the point of breaking out at the top of every national flagstaff in France,—when you got a whiff of violets from the button-hole of every Imperialist who passed you in the street,—when the Catholic religion was about to be once more deprived of State protection and popular support, Marshal Dunoisse, swashbuckling old Bonapartist that he is, reclaimed the lady’s large dowry from her Convent, and with the aid of De Martignac, Head of the Ministry of that date, succeeded in getting it.”
“It is the son of the very man you describe,” she told him; “who visited his old governess here to-day.”
Bertham shrugged his shoulders, and, leaning down, silently stroked the sleek cat, white-pawed and whiskered, and coated in Quaker gray, that lay outstretched at ease upon the hearthrug. But his eyes were on the woman’s face the while.
“So that was it!” she said, leaning back in the low fireside chair she had taken when Bertham wheeled it forwards. Her musing eyes were fixed upon the red coals glowing in the old-world grate of polished steel. Perhaps the vivid face with the black eyes burning under their level brows rose up before her; and it might have been that she heard Dunoisse’s voice saying, through the purring of the cat upon the hearthrug and the subdued noises of the street:
“May the hour that sees me spend a sou of that accursed money be an hour of shame for me, and bitterness and humiliation! And should ever a day draw near that is to see me trick myself in dignities and honors stolen by a charlatan’s device and assume a power to which I have nomore moral right than the meanest peasant of the State it rules—before its dawning I pray that I may die! and that those who come seeking a clod of mud to throw in the face of a Catholic State may find it lying in a coffin!”