Madam: A Novel

by Mrs. Oliphant

Upon this her brother seized his hat and hurried from the house. The small aggravation seemed to fill up his cup so that he could bear no more, with this addition, that Mrs. Lennox’s soft purr of a voice roused mere exasperation in him, while his every thought of the children, even when the cares they brought threatened to overwhelm him, was tender with natural affection. But, in fact, wherever he turned at this moment he saw not a gleam of light, and there was a bitterness as of the deferred and unforeseen in this sudden gathering together of clouds and dangers which filled him almost with awe. The catastrophe itself had passed over much more quietly than could have been thought. But, lo, here, when no fear was, the misery came. His heart melted within him when he thought of Amy’s little pale face and that forlorn expedition in the stillness of the night to the side of the lake which betrayed, as nothing else could have done, the feverish working of her brain and the disturbance of her entire being. What madness of rage and jealousy must that have been that induced a man to leave this legacy of misery behind him to work in the minds of his little children years after he was dead! and what appalling cruelty and tyranny it was which made it possible for a dead man, upon whom neither argument nor proof could be brought to bear, thus to blight by a word so many lives! All had passed with a strange simplicity at first, and with such swift and silent carrying-out of the terrible conditions of the will that there had been no time to think if any expedient were possible. Looking back upon it, it seemed to him incredible that anything so extraordinary should have taken place with so little disturbance. She had accepted her fate without a word, and every one else had accepted it. The bitterness of death seemed to have passed, except for the romance of devotion on Rosalind’s part, which he believed had faded in the other kind of romance more natural at her age. No one but himself had appeared to remember at all this catastrophe which rent life asunder. But now, when no one expected it, out of the clear sky came the explosions of the storm. He had decided too quickly that all was over. The peace had been but a pretence, and now the whole matter would have to be re-opened again.

The cause of the sudden return of all minds to the great family disaster and misery seemed to him more than ever confused by this last event. The condition which had led to Amy’s last adventure seemed to make it more possible, notwithstanding Sophy’s supposed discovery, that the story of the apparition was an illusion throughout. The child, always a visionary child, must have had, in the unnatural and strained condition of her nerves and long repression of her feelings, a dream so vivid as, like that of last night, to take the aspect of reality; and Rosalind, full of sympathy, and with all her own keen recollections ready to be called forth at a touch, must have received the contagion from her little sister, and seen what Amy had so long imagined she saw. Perhaps, even, it was the same contagion, acting on a matter-of-fact temperament, which had induced Sophy to believe that she, too, had seen her mother, but in real flesh and blood. Of all the hypotheses that could be thought of this seemed to him the most impossible. He had examined all the hotel registers, and made anxious inquiries everywhere, without finding a trace of Mrs. Trevanion. She had not, so far as he was aware, renounced her own name. And, even had she done so, it was impossible that she could have been in the hotel without some one seeing her, without leaving some trace behind. Notwithstanding this certainty, John Trevanion, even while he repeated his conviction to himself, was making his way once more to the hotel to see whether, by any possibility, some light might still be thrown upon a subject which had become so urgent. Yet even that, though it was the first thing that presented itself to him, had become, in fact, a secondary matter. The real question in this, as in all difficulties, was what to do next. What could be done to unravel the fatal tangle? Now that he contemplated the matter from afar, it became to him all at once a thing intolerable—a thing that must no longer be allowed to exist. What was publicity, what was scandal, in comparison with this wreck of life? There must be means, he declared to himself, of setting an unrighteous will aside, whatever lawyers might say. His own passiveness seemed incredible to him, as well as the extraordinary composure with which everybody else had acquiesced, accepting the victim’s sacrifice. But that was over. Even though the present agitation should pass away, he vowed to himself that it should not pass from him until he had done all that man could do to set the wrong right.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was walking into Aix with the speed of a man who has urgent work before him, though that work was nothing more definite or practical than the examination over again of the hotel books to see if there he could find any clew. He turned them over and over in his abstraction, going back without knowing it to distant dates, and roaming over an endless succession of names which conveyed no idea to his mind. He came at last, on the last page, to the name of Arthur Rivers, with a dull sort of surprise. “To be sure, Rivers is here!” he said to himself aloud.

“Yes, to be sure I am here. I have been waiting to see if you would find me out,” Rivers said behind him. John did not give him so cordial a welcome as he had done on the previous night.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have so much on my mind I forget everything. Were you coming out to see my sister? We can walk together. The sun is warm, but not too hot for walking. That’s an advantage of this time of the year.”

“It is perhaps too early for Mrs. Lennox,” Rivers said.

“Oh, no, not too early. The truth is we are in a little confusion. One of the children has been giving us a great deal of anxiety.”

“Then, perhaps,” said Rivers, with desperate politeness, “it will be better for me not to go.” He felt within himself, though he was so civil, a sort of brutal indifference to their insignificant distresses, which were nothing in comparison with his own. To come so far in order to eat his breakfast under the dusty trees, and dine at the table d’hôte in a half-empty hotel at Aix, seemed to him so great an injustice and scorn in the midst of his fame and importance that even the discovery he had made, though it could not but tell in the situation, passed from his mind in the heat of offended consequence and pride.

John Trevanion, for his part, noticed the feeling of the other as little as Rivers did his. “One of the children has been walking in her sleep,” he said. “I don’t want to get a fool of a doctor who thinks of nothing but rheumatism. One of them filled my good sister’s mind with folly about suppressed gout. Poor little Amy! She has a most susceptible brain, and I am afraid something has upset it. Do you believe in ghosts, Rivers?”

“As much as everybody does,” said Rivers, recovering himself a little.