Madam - Mrs. Oliphant

Скачать книгу

of that mad temper which she had been acquainted with all her life. What her father said about his wife was about as reasonable as his outburst of certainty that England was going to the devil when the village boys broke down one of the young trees. She did not judge papa for such a statement. She cried a little at his vehemence, which did himself so much harm, and laughed a little secretly, with a heavy sense of guilt, at his extravagance and exaggerations. Poor papa! it was not his fault, it was because he was so ill. He was too weak and ailing to be able to restrain himself as other people did. But he did not mean it—how could he mean it? To say that mamma wanted to break his neck if she did not put his pillow as he liked it, to accuse her of a systematic attempt to starve him if his luncheon was two minutes late or his soup not exactly to his taste—all that was folly. And no doubt it was also folly, all that about raising her from nothing and taking her without a penny. Rosalind, though very much disturbed when she was present at one of these scenes, yet permitted herself to laugh at it when it was over or she had got away. Poor papa! and then when he had raged himself into a fit of those heart-spasms he was so ill; how sad to see him suffering so terribly, gasping for breath! Poor papa! to think that he did so much to bring it on himself was only a pity the more.

      Thus things had gone on for years. When Dr. Beaton came to live in the house there had been a temporary amendment. The presence of a stranger, perhaps, had been a check upon the patient; and perhaps the novelty of a continual and thoroughly instructed watcher—who knew how to follow the symptoms of the malady, and foresaw an outburst before it came—did something for him; and certainly there had been an amendment. But by and by familiarity did away with these advantages. Dr. Beaton exhausted all the resources of his science, and Mr. Trevanion ceased to be upon his guard with a man whom he saw every day. Thus the house lived in a forced submission to the feverish vagaries of its head; and he himself sat and railed at everybody, pleased with nothing, claiming every thought and every hour, but never contented with the service done him. And greater and greater became the force of his grievances against his wife and his sense of having done everything for her; how he had stood by her when nobody else would look at her, how he had lifted her out of some vague humiliation and abandonment, how she owed him everything, yet treated him with brutal carelessness, and sought his death, were the most favorite accusations on his lips. Mrs. Trevanion listened with a countenance that rarely showed any traces of emotion. She had shrunk a little at first from these painful accusations; but soon had come to listen to them with absolute calm. She had borne them like a saint, like a philosopher; and yet within the last month everybody saw there had been a change.

       Table of Contents

      When Mrs. Trevanion came to Highcourt, she brought with her a maid who had, during all the sixteen years of her married life, remained with her without the slightest breach of fidelity or devotion. Jane was, the household thought, somewhat like her mistress, a resemblance in all likelihood founded upon the constant attendance of the one upon the other, and the absorbing admiration, rising almost to a kind of worship, with which Jane regarded her lady. After all, it was only in figure and movement, not in face, that the resemblance existed. Jane was tall like Mrs. Trevanion. She had caught something of that fine poise of the head, something of the grace, which distinguished her mistress; but whereas Mrs. Trevanion was beautiful, Jane was a plain woman, with somewhat small eyes, a wide mouth, and features that were not worth considering. She was of a constant paleness and she was marked with smallpox, neither of which are embellishing. Still, if you happened to walk behind her along one of the long passages, dressed in one of Madam’s old gowns, it was quite possible that you might take her for Madam. And Jane was not a common lady’s maid. She was entirely devoted to her mistress, not only to her service, but to her person, living like her shadow—always in her rooms, always with her, sharing in everything she did, even in the nursing of Mr. Trevanion, who tolerated her presence as he tolerated that of no one else. Jane sat, indeed, with the upper servants at their luxurious and comfortable table, but she did not live with them. She had nothing to do with their amusements, their constant commentary upon the family. One or two butlers in succession—for before Mr. Trevanion gave up all active interference in the house there had been a great many changes in butlers—had done their best to make themselves agreeable to Jane; but though she was always civil, she was cold, they said, as any fish, and no progress was possible. Mrs. Jennings, the cook and housekeeper, instinctively mistrusted the quiet woman. She was a deal too much with her lady that astute person said. That was deserting her own side: for do not the masters form one faction and the servants another? The struggle of life may be conducted on more or less honorable terms, but still a servant who does not belong to his own sphere is unnatural, just as a master is who throws himself into the atmosphere of the servants’ hall. The domestics felt sure that such a particular union between the mistress and the maid could not exist in the ordinary course of affairs, and that it must mean something which was not altogether right. Jane never came, save for her meals, to the housekeeper’s room. She was always up-stairs, in case, she said, that she should be wanted. Why should she be wanted more than any other person in her position? When now and then Mrs. Trevanion, wearied out with watching and suffering, hurried to her room to rest, or to bathe her aching forehead, or perhaps even to lighten the oppression of her heart by a few tears, Jane was always there to soothe and tend and sympathize. The other servants knew as well as Jane how much Madam had to put up with, but yet they thought it very peculiar that a servant should be so much in her mistress’s confidence. There was a mystery in it. It had been suspected at first that Jane was a poor relation of Madam’s; and the others expected jealously that this woman would be set over their heads, and themselves humiliated under her sway. But this never took place, and the household changed as most households change, and one set of maids and men succeeded each other without any change in Jane. There remained a tradition in the house that she was a sort of traitor in the camp, a servant who was not of her own faction, but on the master’s side; but this was all that survived of the original prejudice, and no one now expected to be put under the domination of Jane, or regarded her with the angry suspicion of the beginning, or supposed her to be Madam’s relation. Jane, like Madam, had become an institution, and the present generation of servants did not inquire too closely into matters of history.

      This was true of all save one. But there was one person in the house who was as much an institution as Jane, or even as Jane’s mistress, with whom nobody interfered, and whom it was impossible to think of as dethroned or put aside from her supreme place. Russell was in the nursery what Madam herself was in Highcourt. In that limited but influential domain she was the mistress, and feared nobody. She had been the chosen of the first Mrs. Trevanion, and the nurse of Rosalind, with whom she had gone to her Aunt Sophy’s during Mr. Trevanion’s widowhood, and in charge of whom she had returned to Highcourt when he married. Russell knew very well that the estates were entailed and that Rosalind could not be the heir, but yet she resented the second marriage as if it had been a wrong done at once to herself and her charge. If Jane was of Madam’s faction, Russell was of a faction most strenuously and sternly antagonistic to Madam. The prejudice which had risen up against the lady who came from abroad, and whom nobody knew, and which had died away in the course of time, lived and survived in this woman with all the force of the first day. She had been on the watch all these years to find out something to the discredit of her mistress, and no doubt the sentiment had been strengthened by the existence of Jane, who was a sort of rival power in her own sphere, and lessened her own importance by being as considerable a person as herself. Russell had watched these two women with a hostile vigilance which never slackened. She was in her own department the most admirable and trustworthy of servants, and when she received Mrs. Trevanion’s babies into her charge, carried nothing of her prejudice against their mother into her treatment of them. If not as dear to her as her first charge, Rosalind, they were still her children, Trevanions, quite separated in her mind from the idea of their mother. Perhaps the influence of Russell accounted for certain small griefs which Madam had to bear as one of the consequences of her constant attendance on her husband, the indifference to her of her little children in their earlier years. But she said to herself with a wonderful philosophy that she could expect no less; that absorbed as she was in her husband’s sick-room all day, it was not to be expected that the chance moments she could

Скачать книгу