CHAPTER XXIV
The night was terrible for this peaceful household in a more extended sense than that deep misery which the arrival of the stranger cost Miss Susan. Those quiet people, mistresses and servants, had but just gone to bed when the yells of the child rang through the silence, waking and disturbing every one, from Jane, who slept with the intense sleep of youth, unawakable by all ordinary commotions, to Augustine, who spent the early night in prayer, and Miss Susan, who neither prayed nor slept, and felt as if she should be, henceforth, incapable of either. These yells continued for about an hour, during which time the household, driven distracted, made repeated visits in all manner of costumes to the door of the East room, which was locked, and from which the stranger shrilly repelled them.
“Je dois le dompter!” she cried through the thick oaken door, and in the midst of those screams, which, to the unaccustomed ear, seem so much more terrible than they really are.
“It’ll bust itself, that’s what it’ll do,” said the old cook: “particular as it’s a boy. Boys should never be let scream like that; it’s far more dangerous for them than it is for a gell.”
Cook was a widow, and therefore an authority on all such subjects. After an hour or so the child was heard to sink into subdued sobbings, and Whiteladies, relieved, went to bed, thanking its stars that this terrible experience was over. But long before daylight the conflict recommenced, and once more the inmates, in their night-dresses, and Miss Susan in her dressing-gown, assembled round the door of the East room.
“For heaven’s sake, let some one come in and help you,” said Miss Susan through the door.
“Je dois le dompter,” answered the other fiercely. “Go away, away! Je dois le dompter!”
“What’s she a-going to do, ma’am?” said Cook. “Dump ’um? Good Lord, she don’t mean to beat the child, I ’ope – particular as it’s a boy.”
Three times in the night the dreadful experience was repeated, and I leave the reader to imagine with what feelings the family regarded its new inmate. They were all downstairs very early, with that exhausted and dissipated feeling which the want of sleep gives. The maids found some comfort in the tea, which Cook made instantly to restore their nerves, but even this brought little comfort to Miss Susan, who lay awake and miserable in her bed, fearing every moment a repetition of the cries, and feeling herself helpless and enslaved in the hands of some diabolical creature, who, having no mercy on the child, would, she felt sure, have none on her, and whom she had no means of subduing or getting rid of. All the strength had gone out of her, mind and body. She shrank even from the sight of the stranger, from getting up to meet her again, from coming into personal contact and conflict with her. She became a weak old woman, and cried hopelessly on her pillow, not knowing where to turn, after the exhaustion of that terrible night. This, however, was but a passing mood like another, and she got up at her usual time, and faced the world and her evil fortune, as she must have done had an earthquake swept all she cared for out of the world – as we must all do, whatever may have happened to us, even the loss of all that makes life sweet. She got up and dressed herself as usual, with the same care as always, and went downstairs and called the family together for prayers, and did everything as she was used to do it – watching the door every moment, however, and trembling lest that tall black figure should come through it. It was a great relief, however, when, by way of accounting for Cook’s absence at morning prayers, Martha pointed out that buxom personage in the garden, walking about with the child in her arms.
“The – lady’s – a-having her breakfast in bed,” said Martha. “What did the child do, ma’am, but stretches out its little arms when me and Cook went in first thing, after she unlocked the door.”
“Why did two of you go?” said Miss Susan. “Did she ring the bell?”
“Well, ma’am,” said Martha, “you’ll say it’s one o’ my silly nervish ways. But I was frightened – I don’t deny. What with Cook saying as the child would bust itself, and what with them cries – but, Lord bless you, it’s all right,” said Martha; “and a-laughing and crowing to Cook, and all of us, as soon as it got down to the kitchen, and taking its sop as natural! I can’t think what could come over the child to be that wicked with its ma.”
“Some people never get on with children,” said Miss Susan, feeling some apology necessary; “and no doubt it misses the nurse it was used to. And it was tired with the journey – ”
“That’s exactly what Cook says,” said Martha. “Some folks has no way with children – even when it’s the ma – and Cook says – ”
“I hope you have taken the lady’s breakfast up to her comfortably,” said Miss Susan; “tell her, with my compliments, that I hope she will not hurry to get up; as she must have had a very bad night.”
“Who is she?” said Augustine, quietly.
Miss Susan knew that this question awaited her; and it was very comforting to her mind to know that Augustine would accept the facts of the story calmly without thinking of any meaning that might lie below them, or asking any explanations. She told her these facts quite simply.
“She is the daughter-in-law of the Austins of Bruges – their son’s widow – her child is Herbert’s next of kin and heir presumptive. Since dear Bertie has got better, his chances, of course, have become very much smaller; and, as I trust,” said Miss Susan fervently, with tears of pain coming to her eyes, “that my dear boy will live to have heirs of his own, this baby, poor thing, has no chance at all to speak of; but, you see, as they do not know that, and heard that Herbert was never likely to recover, and are people quite different from ourselves, and don’t understand things, they still look upon him as the heir.”
“Yes,” said Augustine, “I understand; and they think he has a right to live here.”
“It is not that, dear. The young woman has quarrelled with her husband’s parents, or she did not feel happy with them. Such things happen often, you know; perhaps there were faults on both sides. So she took it into her head to come here. She is an orphan, with no friends, and a young widow, poor thing, but I am most anxious to get her sent away.”
“Why should she be sent away?” said Augustine. “It is our duty to keep her, if she wishes to stay. An orphan – a widow! Susan, you do not see our duties as I wish you could. We who are eating the bread which ought to be the property of the widow and the orphan – how dare we cast one of them from our doors! No, if she wishes it, she must stay.”
“Augustine!” cried her sister, with tears, “I will do anything you tell me, dear; but don’t ask me to do this! I do not like her – I am afraid of her. Think how she must have used the child last night! I cannot let her stay.”
Augustine put down the cup of milk which was her habitual breakfast, and looked across the table at her sister. “It is not by what we like we should be ruled,” she said. “Alas, most people are; but we have a duty. If she is not good, she has the more need of help; but I would not leave the child with her,” she added, for she, too, had felt what it was to be disturbed. “I would give the child to some one else who can manage it. Otherwise you cannot refuse her, an orphan and widow, if she wishes to stay.”
“Austine, you mistake, you mistake!” cried Miss Susan, driven to her wits’ end.
“No, I do not mistake; from our door no widow and no orphan should ever be driven away. When it is Herbert’s house, he must do as he thinks fit,” said Augustine; “at least I know he will not be guided by me. But for us, who live to expatiate – No, she must not be sent away. But I would give the charge of the child to some one else,” she added with less solemnity of tone; “certainly I would have some one else for the child.”
With this Augustine rose and went away, her hands in her sleeves, her pace as measured as ever. She gave forth her solemn decision on general principles, knowing no other, with an abstract superiority which offended no one, because of its very abstraction, and curious imperfection in all practical human knowledge. Miss Susan was too wise to be led by her sister in ordinary affairs; but she listened to this judgment, her heart wrung by pangs which she could not avow to any one. It was not the motive which weighed so largely with Augustine, and was, indeed, the only one she took account of, which affected her sister. It was neither Christian pity for the helpless, nor a wish to expatiate the sins of the past, that moved Miss Susan. The emotion which was battling in her heart was fear. How could she bear it to be known what she had done? How could she endure to let Augustine know, or Herbert, or Reine? – or even Farrel-Austin, who would rejoice over her, and take delight in her shame! She dared not turn her visitor out of the house, for this reason. She sat by herself when Augustine had gone, with her hands clasped tight, and a bitter, helpless beating and fluttering of her heart. Never before had she felt herself in the position of a coward, afraid to face the exigency before her. She had always dared to meet all things, looking danger and trouble in the face; but then she had never done anything in her life to be ashamed of before. She shrank now from meeting the unknown woman who had taken possession of her house. If she had remained there in her room shut up, Miss Susan felt as if she would gladly have compounded to let her remain, supplying her with as many luxuries as she cared for. But to face her, to talk to her, to have to put up with her, and her companionship, this was more than she could bear.
She had not been able to look at her letters in her preoccupied and excited state; but when she turned them over now, in the pause that ensued after Augustine’s departure, she found a letter from old Guillaume Austin, full of trouble, narrating to her how his daughter-in-law had fled from the house in consequence of some quarrel, carrying the child with her, who was the joy of their hearts. So far as she was concerned, the old man said, they were indifferent to the loss, for since Giovanna’s child was born she had changed her character entirely, and was no longer the heart-broken widow who had obtained all their sympathies. “She had always a peculiar temper,” the father wrote. “My poor son did not live happy with her, though we were ready to forget everything in our grief. She is not one of our people, but by origin an Italian, fond of pleasure, and very hot-tempered, like all of that race. But recently she has been almost beyond our patience. Madame will remember how good my old wife was to her – though she cannot bear the idle – letting her do nothing, as is her nature. Since the baby was born, however, she has been most ungrateful to my poor wife, looking her in the face as if to frighten her, and with insolent smiles; and I have heard her even threaten to betray the wife of my bosom to me for something unknown – some dress, I suppose, or other trifle my Marie has given her without telling me. This is insufferable; but we have borne it all for the child, who is the darling of our old age. Madame will feel for me, for it is your loss, too, as well as ours. The child, the heir, is gone! who charmed us and made us feel young again. My wife thinks she may have gone to you, and therefore I write; but I have no hopes of this myself, and only fear that she may have married some one, and taken our darling from us forever – for who would separate a mother from her child? – though the boy does not love her, not at all, not so much as he loves us and his aunt Gertrude, who thinks she sees in him the boy whom she lost. Write to me in pity, dear and honored madame, and if by any chance the unhappy Giovanna has gone to you, I will come and fetch her away.”
The letter was balm to Miss Susan’s wounds. She wrote an answer to M. Austin at once, then bethought herself of a still quicker mode of conveying information, and wrote a telegram, which she at once dispatched by the gardener, mounted on the best horse in the stable, to the railway. “She is here with the child, quite well. I shall be glad to see you,” Miss Susan wrote; then sat down again, tremulous, but resolute to think of what was before her. But for the prospect of old Guillaume’s visit, what a prospect it was that lay before her! She could understand how that beautiful face would look, with its mocking defiance at the helpless old woman who was in her power, and could not escape from her. Poor old Madame Austin! Her sin was the greatest of all, Miss Susan felt, with a sense of relief, for was it not her good husband whom she was deceiving, and had not all the execution of the complot been left in her hands? Miss Susan knew she herself had lied; but how much oftener Madame Austin must have lied, practically, and by word and speech! Everything she had done for weeks and months must have been a lie, and thus she had put herself in this woman’s power, who cruelly had taken advantage of it. Miss Susan realized, with a shudder, how the poor old Flemish woman, who was her confederate, must have been put to the agony! how she must have been held over the precipice, pushed almost to the verge, obliged perhaps to lie and lie again, in order to save herself. She trembled at the terrible picture; and now all that had been done to Madame Austin was about to be done to herself – for was not she, too, in this pitiless woman’s power?
A tap at the door. She thought it was the invader of her peace, and said “Come in” faintly. Then the door was pushed open, and a tottering little figure, so low down that Miss Susan, unprepared for this pygmy, did not see it at first, came in with a feeble rush, as babies do, too much afraid of its capabilities of progress to have any confidence of holding out. “Did you ever see such a darling, ma’am?” said Cook. “We couldn’t keep him not to ourselves a moment longer. I whips him up, and I says, ‘Miss Susan must see him.’ Now, did you ever set your two eyes on a sweeter boy?”
Miss Susan, relieved, did as she was told; she fixed her eyes upon the boy, who, after his rush, subsided on to the floor, and gazed at her in silence. He was as fair as any English child, a flaxen-headed, blue-eyed Flemish baby, with innocent, wide-open eyes.
“He ain’t a bit like his ma, bless him, and he takes to strangers quite natural. Look at him a-cooing and a-laughing at you, ma’am, as he never set eyes on before! But human nature is unaccountable,” said Cook, with awe-stricken gravity, “for he can’t abide his ma.”
“Did you ever know such a case before?” said Miss Susan, who, upon the ground that Cook was a widow, looked up to her judgment on such matters as all the rest of the household did. Cook was in very high feather at this moment, having at last proved beyond doubt the superiority of her knowledge and experience as having once had a child of her own.
“Well, ma’am,” said Cook, “that depends. There’s some folk as never have no way with children, married or single, it don’t matter. Now that child, if you let him set at your feet, and give him a reel out of your work-box to play with, will be as good as gold; for you’ve got a way with children, you have; but he can’t abide his ma.”
“Leave him there, if you think he will be good,” said Miss Susan. She did more than give the baby a reel out of her work-box, for she took out the scissors, pins, needles, all sharp and pointed things, and put down the work-box itself on the carpet. And then she sat watching the child with the most curious, exquisite mixture of anguish and a kind of pleasure in her heart. Poor old Guillaume Austin’s grandchild, a true scion of the old stock! but not as was supposed. She watched the little tremulous dabs the baby made at the various articles that pleased him. How he grasped them in the round fat fingers that were just long enough to close on a reel; how he threw them away to snatch at others; the pitiful look of mingled suffering, injured feeling, and indignation which came over his face in a moment when the lid of the box dropped on his fingers; his unconscious little song to himself, cooing and gurgling in a baby monologue. What was the child thinking? No clue had he to the disadvantages under which he was entering life, or the advantages which had been planned for him before he was born, and which, by the will of Providence, were falling into nothing. Poor little unconscious baby! The work-box and its reels were at this moment quite world enough for him.
It was an hour or two later before the stranger came downstairs. She had put on a black silk dress, and done up her hair carefully, and made her appearance as imposing as possible; and, indeed, so far as this went, she required few external helps. The child took no notice of her, sheltered as he was under Miss Susan’s wing, until she took him up roughly, disturbing his toys and play. Then he pushed her away with a repetition of last night’s screams, beating with his little angry hands against her face, and shrieking, “No, no!” his only intelligible word, at the top of his lungs. The young woman grew exasperated, too, and repaid the blows he gave with one or two hearty slaps and a shake, by means of which the cries became tremulous and wavering, though they were as loud as ever. By the time the conflict had come to this point, however, Cook and Martha, flushed with indignation, were both at the door.
“Il ne faut pas frapper l’enfang!” Miss Susan called out loudly in her peculiar French. “Vous ne restez pas un moment ici vous no donnez pas cet enfang au cook; vous écoutez? Donnez, donnez, touto de suite!” Her voice was so imperative that the woman was cowed. She turned and tossed the child to Cook, who, red as her own fire, stood holding out her arms to receive the screaming and struggling boy.
“What do I care?” said the stranger. “Petit sot! cochon! va! I slept not all night,” she added. “You heard? Figure to yourself whether I wish to keep him now. Ah, petit fripon, petit vaurient! Va!”
“Madame Austin,” said Miss Susan solemnly, as the women went away, carrying the child, who clung to Cook’s broad bosom and sobbed on her shoulder, “you do not stay here another hour, unless you promise to give up the child to those who can take care of him. You cannot, that is clear.”
“And yet he is my child,” said the young woman, with a malicious smile. “Madame knows he is my child! He is always sage with his aunt Gertrude, and likes her red and white face. Madame remembers Gertrude, who lost her baby? But mine belongs to me.”
“He may belong to you,” said Miss Susan, with almost a savage tone, “but he is not to remain with you another hour, unless you wish to take him away; in which case,” said Miss Susan, going to the door and throwing it open, “you are perfectly at liberty to depart, him and you.”
The stranger sat for a moment looking at her, then went and looked out into the red-floored passage, with a kind of insolent scrutiny. Then she made Miss Susan a mock curtsey, and sat down.
“They are welcome to have him,” she said, calmly. “What should I want him for? Even a child, a baby, should know better than to hate one; I do not like it; it is a nasty little thing – very like Gertrude, and with her ways exactly. It is hard to see your child resemble another woman; should not madame think so, if she had been like me, and had a child?”
“Look here,” Miss Susan said, going up to her, and shaking her by the shoulders, with a whiteness and force of passion about her which cowered Giovanna in spite of herself – “look here! This is how you treated your poor mother-in-law, no doubt, and drove her wild. I will not put up with it – do you hear me? I will drive you out of the house this very day, and let you do what you will and say what you will, rather than bear this. You hear me? and I mean what I say.”
Giovanna stared, blank with surprise, at the resolute old woman, who, driven beyond all patience, made this speech to her. She was astounded. She answered quite humbly, sinking her voice, “I will do what you tell me. Madame is not a fool, like my belle mère.”
“She is not a fool, either!” cried Miss Susan. “Ah, I wish now she had been! I wish I had seen your face that day! Oh, yes, you are pretty – pretty enough! but I never should have put anything in your power if I had seen your face that day.”
Giovanna gazed at her for a moment, still bewildered. Then she rose and looked at herself in the old glass, which distorted that beautiful face a little. “I am glad you find me pretty,” she said. “My face! it is not a white and red moon, like Gertrude’s, who is always praised and spoiled; but I hope it may do more for me than hers has done yet. That is what I intend. My poor pretty face – that it may win fortune yet! my face or my boy.”
Miss Susan, her passion dying out, stood and looked at this unknown creature with dismay. Her face or her boy! – what did she mean? or was there any meaning at all in these wild words – words that might be mere folly and vanity, and indeed resembled that more than anything else. Perhaps, after all, she was but a fool who required a little firmness of treatment – nothing more.