“Perhaps,” said her mistress; “I am not sure at all. I told you so; but only I should not be surprised. Whether it is death or whether it is life, something new is coming. We must be ghosts no longer; we must come back to our real selves, you and I, Jane. We will not let ourselves be hunted down, but come out in the eye of day. It would be strange if Russell had the power to frighten me. And did I tell you that Reginald is here, too, and young Roland Hamerton, who was at Highcourt that night? They are all gathered together again for the end of the tragedy, Jane.”
“Oh, Madam,” cried Jane, “perhaps for setting it all right.”
Her mistress smiled somewhat dreamily. “I do not see how that can be. And, even if it were so, it will not change the state of affairs. But we are not going to allow ourselves to be found out by Russell,” she added, with a curious sense of the ludicrous. The occasion was not gay, and yet there was something natural, almost a sound of amusement, in the laugh with which she spoke. Jane looked at her wistfully, shaking her head.
“When I think of all that you have gone through, and that you can laugh still!—but perhaps it is better than crying,” Jane said.
Mrs. Trevanion nodded her head in assent, and there was silence in the dim room where these two women spent their lives. It gave her a certain pleasure to see Jane moving about. There was a sort of lull of painful sensation, a calm, and disinclination for any exertion on her own part; a mood in which it was grateful to see another entirely occupied with her wants; anxious only to invent more wants for her, and means of doing her service. In the languor of this quiet it was not wonderful that Mrs. Trevanion should feel her life ebbing away. She began to look forward to the end of the tragedy with a pleased acquiescence. She had yielded to her fate at first, understanding it to be hopeless to strive against it; with, perhaps, a recoil from actual contact with the scandal and the shame which was as much pride as submission; but at that time her strength was not abated, nor any habit of living lost. Now that period of anguish seemed far off, and she judged herself and her actions not without a great pity and understanding, but yet not without some disapproval. She thought over it all as she sat lying back in the great chair, with Jane moving softly about. She would not repeat the decisive and hasty step she had once taken. She could not now, alas, believe in the atonement which she then thought might still be practicable in respect to the son whom she had given up in his childhood; nor did she think that it was well, as she had done then, to abandon everything without a word—to leave her reputation at the mercy of every evil-speaker. To say nothing for herself, to leave her dead husband’s memory unassailed by any defence she could put forth, and to cut short the anguish of parting, for her children as well as for herself, had then seemed to her the best. And she had fondly thought, with what she now called vanity and the delusion of self-regard, that, by devoting herself to him who was the cause of all her troubles, she might make up for the evils which her desertion of him had inflicted. These were mistakes, she recognized now, and must not be repeated. “I was a fool,” she said to herself softly, with a realization of the misery of the past which was acute, yet dim, as if the sufferer had been another person. Jane paused at the sound of her voice, and came towards her—“Madam, did you speak?”
“No, except to myself. My faithful Jane, you have suffered everything with me. We are not going to hide ourselves any longer,” she replied.
CHAPTER LX.
A resolution thus taken is not, however, strong enough to overcome the habits which have grown with years. Mrs. Trevanion had been so long in the background that she shrank from the idea of presenting herself again to what seemed to her the view of the world. She postponed all further steps with a conscious cowardice, at which, with faint humor, she was still able to smile.
“We are two owls,” she said. “Jane, we will make a little reconnaissance first in the evening. There is still a moon, though it is a little late, and the lake in the moonlight is a fine sight.”
“But, Madam, you were not thinking of the lake,” said Jane.