“No, darling, I don’t. Of course you must not tell if you promised,” said I.
But I would have given the world to know what the child had seen in that mysterious room.
Haidee’s strange story had roused again in me all the old feeling of a shadow of some kind hanging over the house on the marsh which had long since worn away in the quiet routine of my daily life there. The locking of the mother’s door against her own child, her wild talk and crying, the “something on the face” that her husband had had to administer to calm her, and the discovery that he himself did not sleep in the same room, all united to call up in my mind the remembrance of that long talk I had had with Mr. Rayner in the schoolroom soon after my arrival, the story he had told me of her boy’s death, and the change it had made in her, and his allusion to “those outbreaks which sometimes cause me the gravest—the very gravest anxiety.”
I had understood then that he feared for his wife’s reason, but, never having witnessed any great change in her cold listless manner myself, and having seen on the whole very little of her except at meals, all fear and almost all remembrance of her possible insanity had faded from my mind, in which she remained a background figure. But now Haidee’s story caused me to wonder whether there was not an undercurrent in the affairs of the household of which I knew little or nothing. What if Mr. Rayner, bright, cheerful, and good-tempered as he always seemed, were really suffering under the burden of a wife whose sullen silence might at any moment break into wild insanity—if he had to wrestle in secret, as, from the child’s story, seemed to have been the case quite recently on two successive nights, with moods of wild wailing and weeping which he at first tried to deal with by gentle remonstrance (Haidee said that on the second night, when she was fully awake, his voice was very low and soft), and at last had to subdue by sedatives!
And then a suggestion occurred to me which would at least explain Sarah’s important position in the household. Was she perhaps in truth a responsible guardian of Mrs. Rayner, such as, if the latter’s reason were really feeble, it would be necessary for her to have in her husband’s absences? I already knew that the relations between mistress and servant were not very amicable. Though she treated her with all outward signs of respect, it was not difficult to see that Sarah despised her mistress, while I had sometimes surprised in the wide gray eyes of the other a side-glance of dislike and fear which made me wonder how she could tolerate in her household a woman from whom she had so strong an aversion. That Mr. Rayner was anxious to keep the scandal of having a mad wife a secret from the world was clear from the fact that not even Mr. Laurence Reade, who seemed to take a particular interest in the affairs of the household at the Alders, had ever shown the least suspicion that this was the case. So the secluded life Mrs. Rayner led came to be ascribed to the caprice—if the village gossips did not use a harsher word—of her husband, while that unfortunate man was really not her tyrant, but her victim.
The only other possible explanation of what Haidee had seen was that Mr. Rayner, kind and sweet-tempered to every one as he always was, and outwardly gentle and thoughtful to a touching degree towards his cold wife, was really the most designing of hypocrites, and was putting upon his wife, under the semblance of devoted affection, a partial restraint which was as purposeless as it was easy for her to break through. This idea was absurd.
The other supposition, dreadful as it was, was far more probable. I was too much accustomed by this time to Mrs. Rayner’s listless moods and the faint far-off looks of fear, or anger, or suspicion that I sometimes saw in her eyes, to be alarmed even by the possibility of a change for the worse in her—the thought that she was perhaps scarcely responsible for her words and actions reconciled me somewhat to her cold manner towards myself and to her jealousy of the hold I was surely getting upon Haidee’s affection. But my strongest feeling was not for the half-witted wife nor for the unfortunate husband, but for the child herself, the unsuspected witness of her mother’s outbreaks of incoherent words and cries. It was strange that these attacks should occur only at night, I thought at first; but then I remembered that day when I had read Adam Bede aloud to her in the drawing-room, the tearful excitement into which, apparently without any cause, she had fallen, which her husband’s entrance had as suddenly subdued—at least for the time; for how could I tell what had followed when he had led her away into that bedroom of hers which was beginning to have for me the fascination of a haunted chamber?
The immediate result of the child’s confidences to me was a great increase of my love for and interest in herself. We became almost inseparable in and out of school-hours; I encouraged her to talk; and she soon fell into the habit of telling me, whether I was listening or not, those long rambling stories which have no beginning, no sequence, and no end, which are the solace of children who have no companions of their own age. When my attention was wandering from these incoherent tales, I sometimes had it abruptly brought back by some flight of her childish fancy, which set me wondering if it had been suggested by some half-forgotten experience. Thus one day, when I was working, and she was sitting on a footstool by my side, with two or three twigs bearing oak-apples which represented, as far as I could judge from her severity to some and her tenderness to the others, the personages of her story, my attention was arrested by the words—
“And so the Prince said to Princess Christie”—the heroine of the story, so named in honor of me—“ ‘I’ve brought you some jewels much finer than yours.’ But Princess Christie cried and said, ‘I don’t want them. Where did you get them? I know where you got them. You are a naughty bad Prince, and I won’t wear any jewels any more.’ ”
And I thought of what Mr. Rayner had told me of his wife’s hearing, on her return home from a ball, of her baby-boy’s death and of her saying she would never wear jewels again. But Haidee had been but a baby-girl at the time; her words must be a mere coincidence. But some of the coincidences of her narrative were less difficult of explanation, for she went on—