M. Austin, the shopkeeper, took off his cap to her, and answered “Oui, madame,” blandly; then, with that instant perception of her nationality, for which the English abroad are not always grateful, he added, “Madame is Inglese? we too. I am Inglese. In what can I be serviceable to madame?”
“Oh, you understand English? Thank heaven!” said Miss Susan, whose French was far from fluent. “I am very glad to hear it, for that will make my business so much the easier. It is long since I have been abroad, and I have almost forgotten the language. Could I speak to you somewhere? I don’t want to buy anything,” she said abruptly, as he stood aside to let her come in.
“That shall be at the pleasure of madame,” said the old man with the sweetest of smiles, “though miladi will not find better damask in many places. Enter, madame. I will take you to my counting-house, or into my private house, if that will more please you. In what can I be serviceable to madame?”
“Come in here—anywhere where we can be quiet. What I have to say is important,” said Miss Susan. The shop was not like an English shop. There was less light, less decoration, the windows were half blocked up, and behind, in the depths of the shop, there was a large, half-curtained window, opening into another room at the back. “I am not a customer, but it may be worth your while,” said Miss Susan, her breath coming quick on her parted lips.
The shopkeeper made her a bow, which she set down to French politeness, for all people who spoke another language were French to Miss Susan. He said, “Madame shall be satisfied,” and led her into the deeper depths, where he placed a chair for her, and remained standing in a deferential attitude. Miss Susan was confused by the new circumstances in which she found herself, and by the rapidity with which event had followed event.
“My name is Austin too,” she said, faltering slightly. “I thought when I saw your name, that perhaps you were a relation of mine—who has been long lost to his family.”
“It is too great an honor,” said the old shopkeeper, withanother bow; “but yes—but yes, it is indeed so. I have seen already another gentleman, a person in the same interests. Yes, it is me. I am Guillaume Austin.”
“Guillaume?”
“Yes. William you it call. I have told my name to the other monsieur. He is, he say, the successive—what you call it? The one who comes—”
“The heir—”
“That is the word. I show him my papers—he is satisfied; as I will also to madame with pleasure. Madame is also cousin of Monsieur Farrel? Yes?—and of me? It is too great honor. She shall see for herself. My grandfather was Ingleseman—trés Inglese. I recall to myself his figure as if I saw it at this moment. Blue eyes, very clear, pointed nose—ma foi! like the nose of madame.”
“I should like to see your papers,” said Miss Susan. “Shall I come back in the evening when you have more time? I should like to see your wife—for you have one, surely? and your children.”
“Yes, yes; but one is gone,” said the shopkeeper. “Figure to yourself, madame, that I had but one son, and he is gone! There is no longer any one to take my place—to come after me. Ah! life is changed when it is so. One lives on—but what is life? a thing we must endure till it comes to an end.”
“I know it well,” said Miss Susan, in a low tone.
“Madame, too, has had the misfortune to lose her son, like me?”
“Ah, don’t speak of it! But I have no son. I am what you call a vile fee,” said Miss Susan; “an old maid—nothing more. And he is still living, poor boy; but doomed, alas! doomed. Mr. Austin, I have a great many things to speak to you about.”
“I attend—with all my heart,” said the shopkeeper, somewhat puzzled, for Miss Susan’s speech was mysterious, there could be little doubt.
“If I return, then, in the evening, you will show me your papers, and introduce me to your family,” said Miss Susan, getting up. “I must not take up your time now.”
“But I am delighted to wait upon madame now,” said the old man, “and since madame has the bounty to wish to see myfamily—by here, madame, I beg—enter, and be welcome—very welcome.”
Saying this he opened the great window-door in the end of the shop, and Miss Susan, walking forward somewhat agitated, found herself all at once in a scene very unexpected by her, and of a kind for which she was unprepared. She was ushered in at once to the family room and family life, without even the interposition of a passage. The room into which this glass door opened was not very large, and quite disproportionately lofty. Opposite to the entrance from the shop was another large window, reaching almost to the roof, which opened upon a narrow court, and kept a curious dim day-light, half from without, half from within, in the space, which seemed more narrow than it need have done by reason of the height of the roof. Against this window, in a large easy chair, sat an old woman in a black gown, without a cap, and with one little tail of gray hair twisted at the back of her head, and curl-papers embellishing her forehead in front. Her gown was rusty, and not without stains, and she wore a large handkerchief, with spots, tied about her neck. She was chopping vegetables in a dish, and not in the least abashed to be found so engaged. In a corner sat a younger woman, also in black, and looking like a gloomy shadow, lingering apart from the light. Another young woman went and came toward an inner room, in which it was evident the dinner was going to be cooked.
A pile of boxes, red and blue, and all the colors of the rainbow, was on a table. There was no carpet on the floor, which evidently had not been frotté for some time past, nor curtains at the window, except a melancholy spotted muslin, which hung closely over it, making the scanty daylight dimmer still. Miss Susan drew her breath hard with a kind of gasp. The Austins were people extremely well to do—rich in their way, and thinking themselves very comfortable; but to the prejudiced English eye of their new relation, the scene was one of absolute squalor. Even in an English cottage, Miss Susan thought, there would have been an attempt at some prettiness or other, some air of nicety or ornament; but the comfortable people here (though Miss Susan supposed all foreigners to be naturally addicted to show and glitter), thought of nothing but the necessities of living. They were not in the least ashamed, as an English family would have been, of being“caught” in the midst of their morning’s occupations. The old lady put aside the basin with the vegetables, and wiped her hands with a napkin, and greeted her visitor with perfect calm; the others took scarcely any notice. Were these the people whose right it was to succeed generations of English squires—the dignified race of Whiteladies? Miss Susan shivered as she sat down, and then she began her work of temptation. She drew forth her picture, which was handed round for everybody to see. She described the estate and all its attractions. Would they let this pass away from them? At least they should not do it without knowing what they had sacrificed. To do this, partly in English, which the shopkeeper translated imperfectly, and partly in very bad French, was no small labor to Miss Susan; but her zeal was equal to the tax upon it, and the more she talked, and the more trouble she had to overcome her own repugnance to these new people, the more vehement she became in her efforts to break their alliance with Farrel, and induce them to recover their rights. The young woman who was moving about the room, and whose appearance had at once struck Miss Susan, came and looked over the old mother’s shoulder at the picture, and expressed her admiration in the liveliest terms. The jolie maison it was, and the dommage to lose it, she cried: and these words were very strong pleas in favor of all Miss Susan said.
“Ah, what an abominable law,” said the old lady at length, “that excludes the daughters!—sans ça, ma fille!” and she began to cry a little. “Oh, my son, my son! if the good God had not taken him, what joy to have restored him to the country of his grandfather, to an establishment so charming!”
Miss Susan drew close to the old woman in the rusty black gown, and approached her mouth to her ear.
“Cette jeune femme-là est veuve de voter fils?”
“No. There she is—there in the corner; she who neither smiles nor speaks,” said the mother, putting up the napkin with which she had dried her hands, to her eyes.
The whole situation had in it a dreary tragi-comedy, half pitiful, half laughable; a great deal of intense feeling veiled by external circumstances of the homeliest order, such as is often to be found in comfortable, unlovelybourgeoishouseholds. How it was, in such a matter-of-fact interior, that the great temptation of her lifeshould have flashed across Miss Susan’s mind, I cannot tell. She glanced from the young wife, very soon to be a mother, who leant over the old lady’s chair, to the dark shadow in the corner, who had never stirred from her seat. It was all done in a moment—thought, plan, execution. A sudden excitement took hold upon her. She drew her chair close to the old woman, and bent forward till her lips almost touched her ear.
“L’autre est—la même—que elle?”
“Que voulez-vous dire, madame?”
The old lady looked up at her bewildered, but, caught by the glitter of excitement in Miss Susan’s eye, and the panting breath, which bore evidence to some sudden fever in her, stopped short. Her wondering look turned into something more keen and impassioned—a kind of electric spark flashed between the two women. It was done in a moment; so rapidly, that at least (as Miss Susan thought after, a hundred times, and a hundred to that) it was without premeditation; so sudden, that it was scarcely their fault. Miss Susan’s eyes gleaming, said something to those of the old Flamande, whom she had never seen before, Guillaume Austin’s wife. A curious thrill ran through both—the sting, the attraction, the sharp movement, half pain, half pleasure, of temptation and guilty intention; for there was a sharp and stinging sensation of pleasure in it, and something which made them giddy. They stood on the edge of a precipice, and looked at each other a second time before they took the plunge. Then Miss Susan laid her hand upon the other’s arm, gripping it in her passion.
“Venez quelque part pour parler,” she said, in her bad French.
ICANNOTtell the reader what was the conversation that ensued between Miss Susan and Madame Austin of Bruges, because the two naturally shut themselves up by themselves, and desired no witnesses. They went upstairs, threading their way through a warehouse full of goods, to Madame Austin’s bedroom, which was her reception-room, and, to Miss Susan’s surprise, a great deal prettier and lighter than the family apartment below, in which all the ordinary concerns of life were carried on. There were two white beds in it, a recess with crimson curtains drawn almost completely across—and various pretty articles of furniture, some marqueterie cabinets and tables, which would have made the mouth of any amateur of old furniture water, and two sofas with little rugs laid down in front of them. The boards were carefully waxed and clean, the white curtains drawn over the window, and everything arranged with some care and daintiness. Madame Austin placed her visitor on the principal sofa, which was covered with tapestry, but rather hard and straight, and then shut the door. She did not mean to be overheard.
Madame Austin was the ruling spirit in the house. It was she that regulated the expenses, that married the daughters, and that had made the match between her son and the poor creature downstairs, who had taken no part in the conversation. Her husband made believe to supervise and criticise everything, in which harmless gratification she encouraged him; but in fact his real business was to acquiesce, which he did with great success. Miss Susan divined well when she said to herself that his wife would never permit him to relinquish advantages so great when she knew something of what they really implied; but she too had been broken down by grief, and ready to feel that nothing was of any consequencein life, when Farrel-Austin had found them out. I do not know what cunning devil communicated to Miss Susan the right spell by which to wake up in Madame Austin the energies of a vivacious temperament partially repressed by grief and age; but certainly the attempt was crowned with success.
They talked eagerly, with flushed faces and voices which would have been loud had they not feared to be overheard; both of them carried out of themselves by the strangely exciting suggestion which had passed from one to the other almost without words; and they parted with close pressure of hands and with meaning looks, notwithstanding Miss Susan’s terribly bad French, which was involved to a degree which I hardly dare venture to present to the reader; and many readers are aware, by unhappy experience, what an elderly Englishwoman’s French can be. “Je reviendrai encore demain,” said Miss Susan. “J’ai beaucoup choses à parler, et vous dira encore à votre mari. Si vous voulez me parler avant cela, allez à l’hôtel; je serai toujours dans mon appartement. Il est pas ung plaisir pour moi de marcher autour la ville, comme quand j’étais jeune. J’aime rester tranquil; et je reviendrai demain, dans la matin, á votre maison ici. J’ai beaucoup choses de parler autour.”
Madame Austin did not know what “parler autour” could mean, but she accepted the puzzle and comprehended the general thread of the meaning. She returned to her sitting-room downstairs with her head full of a hundred busy thoughts, and Miss Susan went off to her hotel, with a headache, caused by a corresponding overflow in her mind. She was in a great excitement, which indeed could not be quieted by going to the hotel, but which prompted her to “marcher autour la ville,” trying to neutralize the undue activity of her brain by movement of body. It is one of nature’s instinctive ways of wearing out emotion. To do wrong is a very strange sensation, and it was one which, in any great degree, was unknown to Miss Susan. She had done wrong, I suppose, often enough before, but she had long outgrown that sensitive stage of mind and body which can seriously regard as mortal sins the little peccadilloes of common life—the momentary failures of temper or rashness of words, which the tender youthful soul confesses and repents of as great sins. Temptation had not come near her virtuous and equable life; and, to tell thetruth, she had often felt with a compunction that the confession she sometimes made in church, of a burden of guilt which was intolerable to her, and of sins too many to be remembered, was an innocent hypocrisy on her part. She had taken herself to task often enough for her inability to feel this deep penitence as she ought; and now a real and great temptation had come in her way, and Miss Susan did not feel at all in that state of mind which she would have thought probable. Her first sensation was that of extreme excitement—a sharp and stinging yet almost pleasurable sense of energy and force and strong will which could accomplish miracles: so I suppose the rebel angels must have felt in the first moment of their sin—intoxicated with the mere sense of it, and of their own amazing force and boldness who dared to do it, and defy the Lord of heaven and earth. She walked about and looked in at the shop-windows, at that wonderful filagree work of steel and silver which the poorest women wear in those Low Countries, and at the films of lace which in other circumstances Miss Susan was woman enough to have been interested in for their own sake. Why could not she think of them?—why could not she care for them now?—A deeper sensation possessed her, and its first effect was so strange that it filled her with fright; for, to tell the truth, it was an exhilarating rather than a depressing sensation. She was breathless with excitement, panting, her heart beating.
Now and then she looked behind her as if some one were pursuing her. She looked at the people whom she met with a conscious defiance, bidding them with her eyes find out, if they dared, the secret which possessed her completely. This thought was not as other thoughts which come and go in the mind, which give way to passing impressions, yet prove themselves to have the lead by returning to fill up all crevices. It never departed from her for a moment. When she went into the shops to buy, as she did after awhile by way of calming herself down, she was half afraid of saying something about it in the midst of her request to look at laces, or her questions as to the price; and, like other mental intoxications, this unaccomplished intention of evil seemed to carry her out of herself altogether; it annihilated all bodily sensations. She walked about as lightly as a ghost, unconscious of her physical powers altogether, feelingneither hunger nor weariness. She went through the churches, the picture galleries, looking vaguely at everything, conscious clearly of nothing, now and then horribly attracted by one of those terrible pictures of blood and suffering, the martyrdoms which abound in all Flemish collections. She went into the shops, as I have said, and bought lace, for what reason she did not know, nor for whom; and it was only in the afternoon late that she went back to her hotel, where Jane, frightened, was looking out for her, and thinking her mistress must have been lost or murdered among “them foreigners.” “I have been with friends,” Miss Susan said, sitting down, bolt upright, on the vacant chair, and looking Jane straight in the face, to make sure that the simple creature suspected nothing. How could she have supposed Jane to know anything, or suspect? But it is one feature of this curious exaltation of mind, in which Miss Susan was, that reason and all its limitations is for the moment abandoned, and things impossible become likely and natural. After this, however, the body suddenly asserted itself, and she became aware that she had been on foot the whole day, and was no longer capable of any physical exertion. She lay down on the sofa dead tired, and after a little interval had something to eat, which she took with appetite, and looked on her purchases with a certain pleasure, and slept soundly all night—the sleep of the just. No remorse visited her, or penitence, only a certain breathless excitement stirring up her whole being, a sense of life and strength and power.
Next morning Miss Susan repeated her visit to her new relations at an early hour. This time she found them all prepared for her, and was received not in the general room, but in Madame Austin’s chamber, where M. Austin and his wife awaited her coming. The shopkeeper himself had altogether changed in appearance: his countenance beamed; he bowed over the hand which Miss Susan held out to him, like an old courtier, and looked gratefully at her.
“Madame has come to our house like a good angel,” he said. “Ah! it is madame’s intelligence which has found out the good news, whichcette pauvre chériehad not the courage to tell us. I did never think to laugh of good heart again,” said the poor man, with tears in his eyes, “but this has made me young; and it almost seems as if we owed it to madame.”
“How can that be?” said Miss Susan. “It must have been found out sooner or later. It will make up to you, if anything can, for the loss of your boy.”
“If he had but lived to see it!” said the old man with a sob.
The mother stood behind, tearless, with a glitter in her eyes which was almost fierce. Miss Susan did not venture to do more than give her one hurried glance, to which she replied with a gleam of fury, clasping her hands together. Was it fury? Miss Susan thought so, and shrank for a moment, not quite able to understand the feelings of the other woman who had not clearly understood her, yet who now seemed to address to her a look of wild reproach.
“And my poor wife,” went on the old shopkeeper, “for her it will be an even still more happy—Tu es contente, bien contente, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, mon ami,” said the woman, turning her back to him, with once more a glance from which Miss Susan shrank.
“Ah, madame, excuse her; she cannot speak; it is a joy too much,” he cried, drying his old eyes.
Miss Susan felt herself constrained and drawn on by the excitement of the moment, and urged by the silence of the other woman, who was as much involved as she.
“My poor boy will have a sadder lot even than yours,” she said; “he is dying too young even to hope for any of the joys of life. There is neither wife nor child possible for Herbert.” The tears rushed to her eyes as she spoke. Heaven help her! she had availed herself, as it were, of nature and affection to help her to commit her sin with more ease and apparent security. She had taken advantage of poor Herbert in order to wake those tears which gave her credit in the eyes of the unsuspecting stranger. In the midst of her excitement and feverish sense of life, a sudden chill struck at her heart. Had she come to this debasement so soon? Was it possible that in such an emergency she had made capital and stock-in-trade of her dying boy? This reflection was not put into words, but flashed through her with one of those poignant instantaneous cuts and thrusts which men and women are subject to, invisibly to all the world. M. Austin, forgetting his respect in sympathy, held out his hand to her to press hers with a profound and tender feeling which wentto Miss Susan’s heart; but she had the courage to return the pressure before she dropped his bond hastily (he thought in English pride and reserve), and, making a visible effort to suppress her emotion, continued, “After this discovery, I suppose your bargain with Mr. Farrel-Austin, who took such an advantage of you, is at an end at once?”
“Speak French,” said Madame Austin, with gloom on her countenance; “I do not understand your English.”
“Mon amie, you are a little abrupt. Forgive her, madame; it is the excitation—the joy. In women the nerves are so much allied with the sentiments,” said the old shopkeeper, feeling himself, like all men, qualified to generalize on this subject. Then he added with dignity, “I promised only for myself. My old companion and me—we felt no desire to be more rich, to enter upon another life; but at present it is different. If there comes an inheritor,” he added, with a gleam of light over his face, “who shall be born to this wealth, who can be educated for it, who will be happy in it, and great and prosperous—ah, madame, permit that I thank you again! Yes, it is you who have revealed the goodness of God to me. I should not have been so happy to-day but for you.”
Miss Susan interrupted him almost abruptly. The sombre shadow on Madame Austin’s countenance began to affect her in spite of herself. “Will you write to him,” she said, “or would you wish me to explain for you? I shall see him on my return.”
“Still English,” said Madame Austin, “when I say that I do not understand it! I wish to understand what is said.”
The two women looked each other in the face: one wondering, uncertain, half afraid; the other angry, defiant, jealous, feeling her power, and glad, I suppose, to find some possible and apparent cause of irritation by which to let loose the storm in her breast of confused irritation and pain. Miss Susan looked at her and felt frightened; she had even begun to share in the sentiment which made her accomplice so bitter and fierce; she answered, with something like humility, in her atrocious French:
“Je parle d’un monsieur que vous avez vu, qui est allez ici, qui a parlé à vous de l’Angleterre. M. Austin et vous allez changer votre idées,—et je veux dire à cet monsieur que quelquechose de différent est venu, que vous n’est pas de même esprit que avant. Voici!” said Miss Susan, rather pleased with herself for having got on so far in a breath. “Je signifie cela—c’est-à-dire, je offrir mon service pour assister votre mari changer la chose qu’il a faites.”
“Oui, mon amie,” said M. Austin, “pour casser l’affaire—le contrat que nous avons fait, vous et moi, et que d’ailleurs n’a jamais été exécuté; c’est sa; I shall write, and madame will explique, and all will be made as at first. The gentleman was kind. I should never have known my rights, nor anything about the beautiful house that belongs to us—”
“That may belong to you, on my poor boy’s death,” said Miss Susan, correcting him.
“Assuredly; after the death of M. le propriétaire actuel. Yes, yes, that is understood. Madame will explain to ce monsieur how the situation has changed, and how the contract is at least suspended in the meantime.”
“Until the event,” said Miss Susan.
“Until the event, assuredly,” said M. Austin, rubbing his hands.
“Until the event,” said Madame Austin, recovering herself under this discussion of details. “But it will be wise to treat ce monsieur with much gentleness,” she added; “he must be ménagé; for figure to yourself that it might be a girl, and he might no longer wish to pay the money proposed, mon ami. He must be managed with great care. Perhaps if I were myself to go to England to see this monsieur—”
“Mon ange! it would fatigue you to death.”
“It is true; and then a country so strange—a cuisine abominable. But I should not hesitate to sacrifice myself, as you well know, Guillaume, were it necessary. Write then, and we will see by his reply if he is angry, and I can go afterward if it is needful.”
“And madame, who is so kind, who has so much bounty for us,” said the old man, “madame will explain.”
Once more the two women looked at each other. They had been so cordial yesterday, why were not they cordial to-day?
“How is it that madame has so much bounty for us?” said the old Flemish woman, half aside. “She has no doubt her own reasons?”
“The house has been mine all my life,” said Miss Susan, boldly. “I think perhaps, if you get it, you will let me live there till I die. And Farrel-Austin is a bad man,” she added with vehemence; “he has done us bitter wrong. I would do anything in the world rather than let him have Whiteladies. I thought I had told you this yesterday. Do you understand me now?”
“I begin to comprehend,” said Madame Austin, under her breath.
Finally this was the compact that was made between them. The Austins themselves were to write, repudiating their bargain with Farrel, or at least suspending it, to await an event, of the likelihood of which they were not aware at the time they had consented to his terms; and Miss Susan was to see him, and smooth all down and make him understand. Nothing could be decided till the event. It might be a mere postponement—it might turn out in no way harmful to Farrel, only an inconvenience. Miss Susan was no longer excited, nor so comfortable in her mind as yesterday. The full cup had evaporated, so to speak, and shrunk; it was no longer running over. One or two indications of a more miserable consciousness had come to her. She had read the shame of guilt and its irritation in her confederate’s eyes; she had felt the pain of deceiving an unsuspecting person. These were new sensations, and they were not pleasant; nor was her brief parting interview with Madame Austin pleasant. She had not felt, in the first fervor of temptation, any dislike to the close contact which was necessary with that homely person, or the perfect equality which was necessary between her and her fellow-conspirator; but to-day Miss Susan did feel this, and shrank. She grew impatient of the old woman’s brusque manner, and her look of reproach. “As if she were any better than me,” said poor Miss Susan to herself. Alas! into what moral depths the proud Englishwoman must have fallen who could compare herself with Madame Austin! And when she took leave of her, and Madame Austin, recovering her spirits, breathed some confidential details—half jocular, and altogether familiar, with a breath smelling of garlic—into Miss Susan’s ear, she fell back, with a mixture of disdain and disgust which it was almost impossible to conceal. She walked back to the hotel this time without any inclinationto linger, and gave orders to Jane to prepare at once for the home journey. The only thing that did her any good, in the painful tumult of feeling which had succeeded her excitement, was a glimpse which she caught in passing into the same lofty common room in which she had first seen the Austin family. The son’s widow still sat a gloomy shadow in her chair in the corner; but in the full light of the window, in the big easy chair which Madame Austin had filled yesterday, sat the daughter of the house with her child on her lap, leaning back and holding up the plump baby with pretty outstretched arms. Whatever share she might have in the plot was involuntary. She was a fair-haired, round-faced Flemish girl, innocent and merry. She held up her child in her pretty round sturdy arms, and chirruped and talked nonsense to it in a language of which Miss Austin knew not a word. She stopped and looked a moment at this pretty picture, then turned quickly, and went away. After all, the plot was all in embryo as yet. Though evil was meant, Providence was still the arbiter, and good and evil alike must turn upon the event.
“DON’T you think he is better, mamma—a little better to-day?”
“Ah, mon Dieu, what can I say, Reine? To be a little better in his state is often to be worst of all. You have not seen so much as I have. Often, very often, there is a gleam of the dying flame in the socket; there is an air of being well—almost well. What can I say? I have seen it like that. And they have all told us that he cannot live. Alas, alas, my poor boy!”
Madame de Mirfleur buried her face in her handkerchief as she spoke. She was seated in the little sitting-room of a little house in an Alpine valley, where they had brought the invalid when the Summer grew too hot for him on the shores of the Mediterranean. He himself had chosen the Kanderthal as his Summer quarters, and with the obstinacy of a sick man had clung to the notion. The valley was shut in by a circle of snowy peaks toward the east; white, dazzling mountain-tops, which yet looked small and homely and familiar in the shadow of the bigger Alps around. A little mountain stream ran through the valley, across which, at one point, clustered a knot of houses, with a homely inn in the midst. There were trout in the river, and the necessaries of life were to be had in the village, through which a constant stream of travellers passed during the Summer and Autumn, parties crossing the steep pass of the Gemmi, and individual tourists of more enterprising character fighting their way from this favorable centre into various unknown recesses of the hills. Behind the chalet a waterfall kept up a continual murmur, giving utterance, as it seemed, to the very silence cf the mountains. The scent of pine-woods was in the air; to the west the glory of the sunset shone over a long broken stretch of valley,uneven moorland interspersed with clumps of wood. To be so little out of the way—nay, indeed, to be in the way—of the Summer traveller, it was singularly wild and quaint and fresh. Indeed, for one thing, no tourist ever stayed there except for food and rest, for there was nothing to attract any one in the plain, little secluded village, with only its circle of snowy peaks above its trout-stream, and its sunsets, to catch any fanciful eye. Sometimes, however, a fanciful eye was caught by these charms, as in the case of poor Herbert Austin, who had been brought here to die. He lay in the little room which communicated with this sitting-room, in a small wooden chamber opening upon a balcony, from which you could watch the sun setting over the Kanderthal, and the moon rising over the snow-white glory of the Dolden-horn, almost at the same moment. The chalet belonged to the inn, and was connected with it by a covered passage. The Summer was at its height, and still poor Herbert lingered, though M. de Mirfleur, in pleasant Normandy, grew a little weary of the long time his wife’s son took in dying; and Madame de Mirfleur herself, as jealous Reine would think sometimes, in spite of herself grew weary too, thinking of her second family at home, and the husband whom Reine had always felt to be an offence. The mother and sister who were thus watching over Herbert’s last moments were not so united in their grief and pious duties as might have been supposed. Generally it is the mother whose whole heart is absorbed in such watching, and the young sister who is to be pardoned if sometimes, in the sadness of the shadow that precedes death, her young mind should wander back to life and its warmer interests with a longing which makes her feel guilty. But in this case these positions were reversed. It was the mother who longed involuntarily for the life she had left behind her, and whose heart reverted wistfully to something brighter and more hopeful, to other interests and loves as strong, if not stronger, than that she felt in and for her eldest son. When it is the other way the sad mother pardons her child for a wandering imagination; but the sad child, jealous and miserable, does not forgive the mother, who has so much to fall back upon. Reine had never been able to forgive her mother’s marriage. She never named her by her new name without a thrill of irritation. Her stepfather seemed a standing shame to her, and every new brother and sisterwho came into the world was a new offence against Reine’s delicacy. She had been glad, very glad, of Madame de Mirfleur’s aid in transporting Herbert hither, and at first her mother’s society, apart from the new family, had been very sweet to the girl, who loved her, notwithstanding the fantastic sense of shame which possessed her, and her jealousy of all her new connections. But when Reine, quick-sighted with the sharpened vision of jealousy and wounded love, saw, or thought she saw, that her mother began to weary of the long vigil, that she began to wonder what her little ones were doing, and to talk of all the troubles of a long absence, her heart rose impatient in an agony of anger and shame and deep mortification. Weary of waiting for her son’s death—her eldest son, who ought to have been her only son—weary of those lingering moments which were now all that remained to Herbert! Reine, in the anguish of her own deep grief and pity and longing hold upon him, felt herself sometimes almost wild against her mother. She did so now, when Madame de Mirfleur, with a certain calm, though she was crying, shook her head and lamented that such gleams of betterness were often the precursors of the end. Reine did not weep when her mother buried her face in her delicate perfumed handkerchief. She said to herself fiercely, “Mamma likes to think so; she wants to get rid of us, and get back to those others,” and looked at her with eyes which shone hot and dry, with a flushed cheek and clenched hands. It was all she could do to restrain herself, to keep from saying something which good sense and good taste, and a lingering natural affection, alike made her feel that she must not say. Reine was one of those curious creatures in whom two races mingle. She had the Austin blue eyes, but with a light in them such as no Austin had before; but she had the dark-brown hair, smooth and silky, of her French mother, and something of the piquancy of feature, the little petulant nose, the mobile countenance of the more vivacious blood. Her figure was like a fairy’s, little and slight; her movements, both of mind and body, rapid as the stirrings of a bird; she went from one mood to another instantaneously, which was not the habit of her father’s deliberate race. Miss Susan thought her all French—Madame de Mirfleur all English; and indeed both with some reason—for when in England this perverse girl was full of enthusiasm for everything that belonged to her mother’s country, andwhen in France was the most prejudiced and narrow-minded of English women. Youth is always perverse, more or less, and there was a double share of its fanciful self-will and changeableness in Reine, whose circumstances were so peculiar and her temptations so many. She was so rent asunder by love and grief, by a kind of adoration for her dying brother, the only being in the world who belonged exclusively to herself, and jealous suspicion that he did not get his due from others, that her petulance was very comprehensible. She waited till Madame de Mirfleur came out of her handkerchief, still with hot and dry and glittering eyes.
“You think it would be well if it were over,” said Reine; “that is what I have heard people say. It would be well—yes, in order to release his nurses and attendants, it would be well if it should come to an end. Ah, mamma, you think so too—you, his mother! You would not harm him nor shorten his life, but yet you think, as it is hopeless, it might be well: you want to go to your husband and your children!”
“If I do, that is simple enough,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “Ciel! how unjust you are, Reine! because I tell you the result of a little rally like Herbert’s is often not happy. I want to go to my husband, and to your brothers and sisters, yes—I should be unnatural if I did not—but that my duty, which I will never neglect, calls upon me here.”
“Oh, do not stay!” cried Reine vehemently—“do not stay! I can do all the duty. If it is only duty that keeps you, go, mamma, go! I would not have you, for that reason, stay another day.”
“Child! how foolish you are!” said the mother. “Reine, you should not show at least your repugnance to everything I am fond of. It is wicked—and more, it is foolish. What can any one think of you? I will stay while I am necessary to my poor boy; you may be sure of that.”
“Not necessary,” said Reine—“oh, not necessary!Ican do all for him that is necessary. He is all I have in the world. There are neither husband nor children that can come between Herbert and me. Go, mamma,—for Heaven’s sake, go! When your heart is gone already, why should you remain? I can do all he requires. Oh, please, go!”
“You are very wicked, Reine,” said her mother, “and unkind!You do not reflect that I stay for you. What are you to do when you are left all alone?—you, who are so unjust to your mother? I stay for that. What would you do?”
“Me!” said Reine. She grew pale suddenly to her very lips, struck by this sudden suggestion in the sharpest way. She gave a sob of tearless passion. She knew very well that her brother was dying; but thus to be compelled to admit and realize it, was more than she could bear. “I will do the best I can,” she said, closing her eyes in the giddy faintness that came over her. “What does it matter about me?”
“The very thought makes you ill,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “Reine, you know what is coming, but you will never allow yourself to think of it. Pause now, and reflect; when my poor Herbert is gone, what will become of you, unless I am here to look after you? You will have to do everything yourself. Why should we refuse to consider things which we know must happen? There will be the funeral—all the arrangements—”
“Mamma! mamma! have you a heart of stone?” cried Reine. She was shocked and wounded, and stung to the very soul. To speak of his funeral, almost in his presence, seemed nothing less than brutal to the excited girl; and all these matter-of-fact indications of what was coming jarred bitterly upon the heart, in which, I suppose, hope will still live while life lasts. Reine felt her whole being thrill with the shock of this terrible, practical touch, which to her mother seemed merely a simple putting into words of the most evident and unavoidable thought.
“I hope I have a heart like all the rest of the world,” said Madame de Mirfleur. “And you are excited and beside yourself, or I could not pass over your unkindness as I do. Yes, Reine, it is my duty to stay for poor Herbert, but still more for you. What would you do?”
“What would it matter?” cried Reine, bitterly—“not drop into his grave with him—ah, no; one is not permitted that happiness. One has to stay behind and live on, when there is nothing to live for more!”
“You are impious, my child,” said her mother. “And, again, you are foolish; you do not reflect how young you are, and that life has many interests yet in store for you—new connections, new duties—”
“Husbands and children!” cried Reine with scornful bitterness, turning her blue eyes, agleam with that feverish fire which tells at once of the necessity and impossibility of tears, upon her mother. Then her countenance changed all in a moment. A little bell tinkled faintly from the next room. “I am coming,” she cried, in a tone as soft as the Summer air that caressed the flowers in the balcony. The expression of her face was changed and softened; she became another creature in a moment. Without a word or a look more, she opened the door of the inner room and disappeared.
Madame de Mirfleur looked after her, not without irritation; but she was not so fiery as Reine, and she made allowances for the girl’s folly, and calmed down her own displeasure. She listened for a moment to make out whether the invalid’s wants were anything more than usual, whether her help was required; and then drawing toward her a blotting-book which lay on the table, she resumed her letter to her husband. She was not so much excited as Reine by this interview, and, indeed, she felt she had only done her duty in indicating to the girl very plainly that life must go on and be provided for, even after Herbert had gone out of it. “My poor boy!” she said to herself, drying some tears; but she could not think of dying with him, or feel any despair from that one loss; she had many to live for, many to think of, even though she might have him no longer. “Reine is excited and unreasonable, as usual,” she wrote to her husband; “always jealous of you, mon ami, and of our children. This arises chiefly from her English ideas, I am disposed to believe. Perhaps when the sad event which we are awaiting is over, she will see more clearly that I have done the best for her as well as for myself. We must pardon her in the meantime, poor child. It is in her blood. The English are always more or less fantastic. We others, French, have true reason. Reassure yourself, mon cher ami, that I will not remain a day longer than I can help away from you and our children. My poor Herbert sinks daily. Think of our misery!—you cannot imagine how sad it is. Probably in a week, at the furthest, all will be over. Ah, mon Dieu! what it is to have a mother’s heart! and how many martyrdoms we have to bear!” Madame de Mirfleur wrote this sentence with a very deep sigh, and once more wiped from her eyes a fresh gush of tears.She was perfectly correct in every way as a mother. She felt as she ought to feel, and expressed her sorrow as it was becoming to express it, only she was not absorbed by it—a thing which is against all true rules of piety and submission. She could not rave like Reine, as if there was nothing else worth caring for, except her poor Herbert, her dear boy. She had a great many other things to care for; and she recognized all that must happen, and accepted it as necessary. Soon it would be over; and all recovery being hopeless, and the patient having nothing to look forward to but suffering, could it be doubted that it was best for him to have his suffering over? though Reine, in her rebellion against God and man, could not see this, and clung to every lingering moment which could lengthen out her brother’s life.
Reine herself cleared like a Summer sky as she passed across the threshold into her brother’s room. The change was instantaneous. Her blue eyes, which had a doubtful light in them, and looked sometimes fierce and sometimes impassioned, were now as soft as the sky. The lines of irritation were all smoothed from her brow and from under her eyes. Limpid eyes, soft looks, an unruffled, gentle face, with nothing in it but love and tenderness, was what she showed always to her sick brother. Herbert knew her only under this aspect, though, with the clear-sightedness of an invalid, he had divined that Reine was not always so sweet to others as to himself.
“You called me,” she said, coming up to his bed-side with something caressing, soothing, in the very sound of her step and voice; “you want me, Herbert?”
“Yes; but I don’t want you to do anything. Sit down by me, Reine; I am tired of my own company, that is all.”
“And so am I—of everybody’s company but yours,” she said, sitting down by the bed-side and stooping her pretty, shining head to kiss his thin hand.
“Thanks, dear, for saying such pretty things to me. But, Reine, I heard voices; you were talking—was it with mamma?—not so softly as you do to me.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” said Reine, with a flush. “Did you hear us, poor boy? Oh, that was wicked! Yes, you know there are things that make me—I do not mean angry—I suppose I have no right to be angry with mamma—”
“Why should you be angry with any one?” he said, softly. “If you had to lie here, like me, you would think nothing was worth being angry about. My poor Reine! you do not even know what I mean.”
“Oh, no; there is so much that is wrong,” said Reine; “so many things that people do—so many that they think—their very ways of doing even what is right enough. No, no; it is worth while to be angry about many, many things. I do not want to learn to be indifferent; besides, that would be impossible to me—it is not my nature.”
The invalid smiled and shook his head softly at her. “Your excuse goes against yourself,” he said. “If you are ruled by your nature, must not others be moved by theirs? You active-minded people, Reine, you would like every one to think like you; but if you could accomplish it, what a monotonous world you would make! I should not like the Kanderthal if all the mountain-tops were shaped the same; and I should not perhaps love you so much if you were less yourself. Why not let other people, my Reine, be themselves, too?”
The brother and sister spoke French, which, more than English, had been the language of their childhood.
“Herbert, don’t say such things!” cried the girl. “You do not love me for this or for that, as strangers might, but because I am I, Reine, and you are you, Herbert. That is all we want. Ah, yes, perhaps if I were very good I should like to be loved for being good. I don’t know; I don’t think it even then. When they used to promise to love me if I was good at Whiteladies, I was always naughty—on purpose?—yes, I am afraid. Herbert, should not you like to be at Whiteladies, lying on the warm, warm grass in the orchard, underneath the great apple-tree, with the bees humming all about, and the dear white English clouds floating and floating, and the sky so deep, deep, that you could not fathom it? Ah!” cried Reine, drawing a deep breath, “I have not thought of it for a long time; but I wish we were there.”
The sick youth did not say anything for a moment; his eyes followed her look, which she turned instinctively to the open window. Then he sighed; then raising himself a little, said, with a gleam of energy, “I am certainly better, Reine. I should like to get upand set out across the Gemmi, down the side of the lake that must be shining so in the sun. That’s the brightest way home.” Then he laughed, with a laugh which, though feeble, had not lost the pleasant ring of youthfulness. “What wild ideas you put into my head!” he said. “No, I am not up to that yet; but, Reine, I am certainly better. I have such a desire to get up: and I thought I should never get up again.”
“I will call François!” cried the girl, eagerly. He had been made to get up for days together without any will of his own, and now that he should wish it seemed to her a step toward that recovery which Reine could never believe impossible. She rushed out to call his servant, and waited, with her heart beating, till he should be dressed, her thoughts already dancing forward to brighter and brighter possibilities.
“He has never had the good of the mountain air,” said Reine to herself, “and the scent of the pine-woods. He shall sit on the balcony to-day, and to-morrow go out in the chair, and next week, perhaps—who knows?—he may be able to walk up to the waterfall, and—O God! O Dieu tout-puissant! O doux Jesu!” cried the girl, putting her hands together, “I will be good! I will be good! I will endure anything; if only he may live!—if only he may live!”
Thislittle scene took place in the village of Kandersteg, at the foot of the hills, exactly on the day when Miss Susan executed her errand in the room behind the shop, in low-lying Bruges, among the flat canals and fat Flemish fields. The tumult in poor Reine’s heart would have been almost as strange to Miss Susan as it was to Reine’s mother; for it was long now since Herbert had been given up by everybody, and since the doctors had all said, that “nothing short of a miracle” could save him. Neither Miss Susan nor Madame de Mirfleur believed in miracles. But Reine, who was young, had no such limitation of mind, and never could or would acknowledge that anything was impossible. “What does impossible mean?” Reine cried in her vehemence, on this very evening, after Herbert had accomplished her hopes, had stayed for an hour or more on the balcony and felt himself better for it, and ordered François to prepare his wheeled chair for to-morrow. Reine had much ado not to throw her arms around François’s neck, when he pronounced solemnly that “Monsieur est mieux, décidément mieux.” “Même,” added François, “il a un petit air de je ne sais quoi—quelque chose—un rien—un regard—”
“N’est ce pas, mon ami!” cried Reine transported. Yes, there was a something, a nothing, a changed look which thrilled her with the wildest hopes,—and it was after this talk that she confronted Madame de Mirfleur with the question, “What does impossible mean? It means only, I suppose, that God does not interfere—that He lets nature go on in the common way. Then nothing is impossible; because at any moment, Godmayinterfere if He pleases. Ah! He has His reasons, I suppose. If He were never to interfere at all, but leave nature to do her will, it is not for usto blame Him,” cried Reine, with tears, “but yet always He may: so there is always hope, and nothing is impossible in this world.”
“Reine, you speak like a child,” said her mother. “Have I not prayed and hoped too for my boy’s life? But when all say it is impossible—”
“Mamma,” said Reine, “when my piano jars, it is impossible for me to set it right—if I let it alone, it goes worse and worse; if I meddle with it in my ignorance, it goes worse and worse. If you, even, who know more than I do, touch it, you cannot mend it. But the man comes who knows, et voilà! c’est tout simple,” cried Reine. “He touches something we never observed, he makes something rise or fall, and all is harmonious again. That is like God. He does not do it always, I know. Ah! how can I tell why? If it was me,” cried the girl, with tears streaming from her eyes, “I would save every one—but He is not like me.”
“Reine, you are impious—you are wicked; how dare you speak so?”
“Oh, no, no! I am not impious,” she cried, dropping upon her knees—all the English part in her, all her reason and self-restraint broken down by extreme emotion. “The bon Dieu knows I am not! I know, I know He does, and sees me, the good Father, and is sorry, and considers with Himself in His great heart if He will do it even yet. Oh, I know, I know!” cried the weeping girl, “some must die, and He considers long; but tell me He does not see me, does not hear me, is not sorry for me—how is He then my Father? No!” she said softly, rising from her knees and drying the tears from her face, “what I feel is that He is thinking it over again.”
Madame de Mirfleur was half afraid of her daughter, thinking she was going out of her mind. She laid her hand on Reine’s shoulder with a soothing touch. “Chérie!” she said, “don’t you know it was all decided and settled before you were born, from the beginning of the world?”
“Hush!” said Reine, in her excitement. “I can feel it even in the air. If our eyes were clear enough, we should see the angels waiting to know. I dare not pray any more, only to wait like the angels. He is considering. Oh! pray, pray!” the poor child cried, feverish and impassioned. She went out into the balcony and knelt down there, leaning her forehead against the wooden railing.The sky shone above with a thousand stars, the moon, which was late that night, had begun to throw upward from behind the pinnacles of snow, a rising whiteness, which made them gleam; the waterfall murmured softly in the silence; the pines joined in their continual cadence, and sent their aromatic odors like a breath of healing, in soft waves toward the sick man’s chamber. There was a stillness all about, as if, as poor Reine said, God himself was considering, weighing the balance of death or life. She did not look at the wonderful landscape around, or see or even feel its beauty. Her mind was too much absorbed—not praying, as she said, but fixed in one wonderful voiceless aspiration. This fervor and height of feeling died away after a time, and poor little Reine came back to common life, trembling with a thrill in all her nerves, and chilled with over-emotion, but yet calm, having got some strange gleam of encouragement, as she thought, from the soft air and the starry skies.
“He is fast asleep,” she said to her mother when they parted for the night, with such a smile on her face as only comes after many tears, and the excitement of great suffering, “quite fast asleep, breathing like a child. He has not slept so before, almost for years.”
“Poor child,” said Madame de Mirfleur, kissing her. She was not moved by Reine’s visionary hopes. She believed much more in the doctors, who had described to her often enough—for she was curious on such subjects—how Herbert’s disease had worked, and of the “perforations” that had taken place, and the “tissue that was destroyed.” She preferred to know the worst, she had always said, and she had a strange inquisitive relish for these details. She shook her head and cried a little, and said her prayers too with much more fervor than usual, after she parted from Reine. Poor Herbert, if he could live after all, how pleasant it would be! how sweet to take M. de Mirfleur and the children to her son’s château in England, and to get the good of his wealth. Ah! what would not she give for his life, her poor boy, her eldest, poor Austin’s child, whom indeed she had half forgotten, but who had always been so good to her! Madame de Mirfleur cried over the thought, and said her prayers fervently, with a warmer petition for Herbert than usual; but even as she prayed she shook her head; she had no faith in her own prayers. She was a FrenchProtestant, and knew a great deal about theology, and perhaps had been shaken by the many controversies which she had heard. And accordingly she shook her head; to be sure, she said to herself, there was no doubt that God could do everything—but, as a matter of fact, it was evident that this was not an age of miracles; and how could we suppose that all the economy of heaven and earth could be stopped and turned aside, because one insignificant creature wished it! She shook her head; and I think whatever theory of prayer we may adopt, the warmest believer in its efficacy would scarcely expect any very distinct answer to such prayers as those of Madame de Mirfleur.
Herbert and Reine Austin had been brought up almost entirely together from their earliest years. Partly from his delicate health and partly from their semi-French training, the boy and girl had not been separated as boys and girls generally are by the processes of education. Herbert had never been strong, and consequently had never been sent to school or college. He had had tutors from time to time, but as nobody near him was much concerned about his mental progress, and his life was always precarious, the boy was allowed to grow up, as girls sometimes are, with no formal education at all, but a great deal of reading; his only superiority in this point was, he knew after a fashion Latin and Greek, which Madame de Mirfleur and even Miss Susan Austin would have thought it improper to teach a girl; while she knew certain arts of the needle which it was beneath man’s dignity to teach a boy. Otherwise they had gone through the selfsame studies, read the same books, and mutually communicated to each other all they found therein. The affection between them, and their union, was thus of a quite special and peculiar character. Each was the other’s family concentrated in one. Their frequent separations from their mother and isolation by themselves at Whiteladies, where at first the two little brown French mice, as Miss Susan had called them, were but little appreciated, had thrown Reine and Herbert more and more upon each other for sympathy and companionship. To be sure, as they grew older they became by natural process of events the cherished darlings of Whiteladies, to which at first they were a trouble and oppression; but the aunts were old and they were young, and except Everard Austin, had no companions but each other. Then their mother’smarriage, which occurred when Herbert was about fourteen and his sister two years younger, gave an additional closeness, as of orphans altogether forsaken, to their union. Herbert was the one who took this marriage most easily. “If mamma likes it, it is no one else’s business,” he said with unusual animation when Miss Susan began to discuss the subject; it was not his fault, and Herbert had no intention of being brought to account for it. He took it very quietly, and had always been quite friendly to his stepfather, and heard of the birth of the children with equanimity. His feelings were not so intense as those of Reine; he was calm by nature, and illness had hushed and stilled him. Reine, on the other hand, was more shocked and indignant at this step on her mother’s part, than words can say. It forced her into precocious womanhood, so much did it go to her heart. To say that she hated the new husband and the new name which her mother had chosen, was little. She felt herself insulted by them, young as she was. The blood came hot to her face at the thought of the marriage, as if it had been something wrong—and her girlish fantastic delicacy never recovered the shock. It turned her heart from her mother who was no longer hers, and fixed it more and more upon Herbert, the only being in the world who was hers, and in whom she could trust fully. “But if I were to marry, too!” he said to her once, in some moment of gayer spirits. “It is natural that you should marry, not unnatural,” cried Reine; “it would be right, not wretched. I might not like it; probably I should not like it—but it would not change my ideal.” This serious result had happened in respect to her mother, who could no longer be Reine’s ideal, whatever might happen. The girl was so confused in consequence, and broken away from all landmarks, that she, and those who had charge of her, had anything but easy work in the days before Herbert’s malady declared itself. This had been the saving of Reine; she had devoted herself to her sick brother heart and soul, and the jar in her mind had ceased to communicate false notes to everything around.
It was now two years since the malady which had hung over him all his life, had taken a distinct form; though even now, the doctors allowed, there were special points which made Herbert unlike other consumptive patients, and sometimes inclined a physician who saw him for the first time, to entertain doubts asto what the real cause of his sufferings was, and to begin hopefully some new treatment, which ended like all the rest in disappointment. He had been sent about from one place to another, to sea air, to mountain air, to soft Italian villas, to rough homes among the hills, and wherever he went Reine had gone with him. One Winter they had passed in the south of France, another on the shores of the Mediterranean just across the Italian border. Sometimes the two went together where English ladies were seldom seen, and where the girl half afraid, clinging to Herbert’s arm as long as he was able to keep up a pretence of protecting her, and protecting him when that pretence was over, had to live the homeliest life, with almost hardship in it, in order to secure good air or tending for him.
This life had drawn them yet closer and closer together. They had read and talked together, and exchanged with each other all the eager, irrestrainable opinions of youth. Sometimes they would differ on a point and discuss it with that lively fulness of youthful talk which so often looks like eloquence; but more often the current of their thoughts ran in the same channel, as was natural with two so nearly allied. During all this time Reine had been subject to a sudden vertigo, by times, when looking at him suddenly, or recalled to it by something that was said or done, there would come to her, all at once, the terrible recollection that Herbert was doomed. But except for this and the miserable moments when a sudden conviction would seize her that he was growing worse, the time of Herbert’s illness was the most happy in Reine’s life. She had no one to find fault with her, no one to cross her in her ideas of right and wrong. She had no one to think of but Herbert, and to think of him and be with him had been her delight all her life. Except in the melancholy moments I have indicated, when she suddenly realized that he was going from her, Reine was happy; it is so easy to believe that the harm which is expected will not come, when it comes softlyau petit pas—and so easy to feel that good is more probable than evil. She had even enjoyed their wandering, practising upon herself an easy deception; until the time came when Herbert’s strength had failed altogether, and Madame de Mirfleur had been sent for, and every melancholy preparation was made which noted that it was expected of him that now he should die. Poor Reine woke up suddenly outof the thoughtless happiness she had permitted herself to fall into; might she perhaps have done better for him had she always been dwelling upon his approaching end, and instead of snatching so many flowers of innocent pleasure on the road, had thought of nothing but the conclusion which now seemed to approach so rapidly? She asked herself this question sometimes, sitting in her little chamber behind her brother’s, and gazing at the snow-peaks where they stood out against the sky—but she did not know how to answer it. And in the meantime Herbert had grown more and more to be all in all to her, and she did not know how to give him up. Even now, at what everybody thought was his last stage, Reine was still ready to be assailed by those floods of hope which are terrible when they fail, as rapidly as they rose. Was this to be so? Was she to lose him, who was all in all to her? She said to herself, that to nurse him all her life long would be nothing—to give up all personal prospects and anticipations such as most girls indulge in would be nothing—nor that he should be ill always, spending his life in the dreary vicissitudes of sickness. Nothing, nothing! so long as he lived. She could bear all, be patient with everything, never grumble, never repine; indeed, these words seemed as idle words to the girl, who could think of nothing better or brighter than to nurse Herbert forever and be his perpetual companion.
Without him her life shrank into a miserable confusion and nothingness. With him, however ill he might be, however weak, she had her certain and visible place in the world, her duties which were dear to her, and was to herself a recognizable existence; but without Herbert, Reine could not realize herself. To think, as her mother had suggested, of what would happen to her when he died, of the funeral, and the dismal desolation after, was impossible to her. Her soul sickened and refused to look at such depths of misery; but yet when, more vaguely, the idea of being left alone had presented itself to her, Reine had felt with a gasp of breathless anguish, that nothing of her except the very husk and rind of herself could survive Herbert. How could she live without him? To be the least thought of in her mother’s house, the last in it, yet not of it, disposed of by a man who was not her father, and whose very existence was an insult to her, and pushed aside by the children whom she never called brothers and sisters; it would not be shewho should bear this, but some poor shell of her, some ghost who might bear her name.
On the special night which we have just described, when the possibility of recovery for her brother again burst upon her, she sat up late with her window open, looking out upon the moonlight as it lighted up the snow-peaks. They stood round in a close circle, peak upon peak, noiseless as ghosts and as pale, abstracted, yet somehow looking to her excited imagination as if they put their great heads together in the silence, and murmured to each other something about Herbert. It seemed to Reine that the pines too were saying something, but that was sadder, and chilled her. Earth and heaven were full of Herbert, everything was occupied about him; which indeed suited well enough with that other fantastic frenzy of hers, that God was thinking it over again, and that there was a pause in all the elements of waiting, to know how it was to be. François, Herbert’s faithful servant, always sat up with him at night or slept in his room when the vigil was unnecessary, so that Reine was never called upon thus to exhaust her strength. She stole into her brother’s room again in the middle of the night before she went to bed. He was still asleep, sleeping calmly without any hardness of breathing, without any feverish flush on his cheek or exhausting moisture on his forehead. He was still and in perfect rest, so happy and comfortable that François had coiled himself upon his truckle-bed and slept as soundly as the invalid he was watching. Reine laid her hand upon Herbert’s forehead lightly, to feel how cool it was; he stirred a little, but no more than a child would, and by the light of the faint night-lamp, she saw that a smile came over his face like a ray of sunshine. After this she stole away back to her own room like a ghost, and dropped by the side of her little bed, unable to pray any longer, being exhausted—able to do nothing but weep, which she did in utter exhaustion of joy. God had considered, and He had found it could be done, and had pity upon her. So she concluded, poor child! and dropped asleep in her turn a little while after, helpless and feeble with happiness. Poor child! on so small a foundation can hope found itself and comfort come.
On the same night Miss Susan went back again from Antwerp to London. She had a calm passage, which was well for her, for Miss Susan was not so sure that night of God’s protection asReine was, nor could she appeal to Him for shelter against the wind and waves with the same confidence of being heard and taken care of as when she went from London to Antwerp. But happily the night was still, and the moon shining as bright and clear upon that great wayward strait, the Channel, as she did upon the noiseless whiteness of the Dolden-horn; and about the same hour when Reine fell asleep, her relation did also, lying somewhat nervous in her berth, and thinking that there was but a plank between her and eternity. She did not know of the happy change which Reine believed had taken place in the Alpine valley, any more than Reine knew in what darker transactions Miss Susan had become involved; and thus they met the future, one happy in wild hopes in what God had done for her, the other with a sombre confidence in what (she thought) she had managed for herself.