Madam. Маргарет Олифант

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 give to the nursery would secure the easily diverted regard of the babies, to whom their nurse was the principal figure in earth and heaven. And that nurse was so good, so careful, so devoted, that it would have been selfishness indeed to have deprived the children of her care because of a personal grievance of this kind. “Why should Russell dislike me so much?” she would say sometimes to Rosalind, who tried to deny the charge, and Jane, who shook her head and could not explain. “Oh, dear mamma, it is only her temper. She does not mean it,” Rosalind would say. And Madam, who had so much to suffer from temper in another quarter, did not reject the explanation. “Temper explains a great many things,” she said, “but even that does not quite explain. She is so good to the children and hates their mother. I feel I have a foe in the house so long as she is here.” Rosalind had a certain love for her nurse, notwithstanding her disapproval of her, and she looked up with some alarm. “Do you mean to send her away?”

      “Miss Rosalind,” said Jane, “my lady is right. It is a foe and nothing less, a real enemy she has in that woman; if she would send Russell away I’d be very glad for one.”

      “You need not fear, my love,” Madam said. “Hush, Jane, if she is my foe, you are my partisan. I will never send Russell away, Rosalind; but when the children are grown up, if I live to see it, or if she would be so kind as to marry, and go off in a happy way, or even if when you are married she preferred to go with you— I think I should draw my breath more freely. It is painful to be under a hostile eye.”

      “The nurse’s eye, mamma, and you the mistress of the house!”

      “It does not matter, my dear. I have always had a sympathy for Haman, who could not enjoy his grandeur for thinking of that Jew in the gate that was always looking at him so cynically. It gets unendurable sometimes. You must have a very high opinion of yourself to get over the low view taken of you by that sceptic sitting in the gate. But now I must go to your father,” Mrs. Trevanion said. She had come up-stairs with a headache, and had sat down by the open window to get a little air, though the air was intensely cold and damp. It was a refreshment, after the closeness of the room in which the invalid sat with an unvarying temperature and every draught shut out. Rosalind stood behind her mother’s chair with her hands upon Mrs. Trevanion’s shoulders, and the tired woman leaned back upon the girl’s young bosom so full of life. “But you will catch cold at the window, my Rose! No, it does me good, I want a little air, but it is too cold for you. And now I must go back to your father,” she said, rising. She stooped and kissed the cheek of the girl she loved, and went away with a smile to her martyrdom. These moments of withdrawal from her heavy duties were the consolations of her life.

      “Miss Rosalind,” said Jane, “that you should love your old nurse I don’t say a word against it—but if ever there is a time when a blow can be struck at my lady that woman will do it. She will never let the little ones be here when their mamma can see them. They’re having their sleep, or they’re out walking, or they’re СКАЧАТЬ