likely to rouse painful questionings in the hearts of our young contemporaries. Here was a girl not unconscious that she was what is generally known as “a nice girl,” with everything favorable in her circumstances; and yet she had not as yet either accepted or refused anybody! It was curious. Young Hamerton, who had been staying at Highcourt at the uncomfortable moment already described, was indeed prone to seek her society, and unfolded himself rashly to her in talk, with that indescribable fatuity which young men occasionally show in presence of girls, moved perhaps by the too great readiness of the kind to laugh at their jokes and accept their lead. Rosalind, protected by her knowledge of minds more mature, looked upon Hamerton with a kind of admiring horror, to think how wonderful it was that a man should be a man, and superior to all women, and have an education such as women of ambition admired and envied, and yet be such a –. She did not say fool, being very courteous, and unused to strong language. She only said such a –; and naturally could no more take him into consideration as a lover than if he had been one of the footmen. It was not beyond her consciousness either, perhaps, that Charley Blake, the son and partner of the family lawyer, whom business often brought to Highcourt, contemplated her often with his bold black eyes in a marked and unmistakable way. But that was a piece of presumption which Miss Trevanion thought of as a princess royal might regard the sighs of a courtier. Rosalind had the eclectic and varying political views held by young women of intelligence in the present time. She smiled at the old Toryism about her. She chose her men and her measures from both parties, and gave her favorites a hot but somewhat fluctuating support. She felt very sure that of all things in the world she was not an aristocrat, endeavoring to shut the gates of any exclusive world against success (which she called genius); therefore it could not be this thoroughly old-world feeling which prompted her disdain of Charley Blake. She was of opinion that a poor man of genius struggling upward towards fame was the sublimest sight on earth, and that to help in such a struggle was a far finer thing for a woman to do than to marry a duke or a prince. But no such person had ever come in her way, nor any one else so gifted, so delightful, so brilliant, and so tender as to merit the name of a lover. She was a little surprised, but referred the question to statistics, and said to herself that because of the surplus of women those sort of things did not happen nowadays: though, indeed, this was a theory somewhat invalidated by the fact that most of the young ladies in the county were married or about to be so. The position altogether did not convey any sense of humiliation to Rosalind. It gave her rather a sense of superiority, as of one who lifts her head in native worth superior to the poor appreciation of the crowd. How the sense of being overlooked should carry with it this sense of superiority is for the philosopher to say.
These thoughts belonged to the lighter and happier portion of her life, and were at present subdued by very sombre reflections. When she walked out in the morning after these events there was, however, a certain sense of emancipation in her mind. Her father had again been very ill—so ill that during the whole night the house had been on the alert, and scarcely any one had ventured to go to bed. Rosalind had spent half the night in the hall with her uncle, expecting every moment a summons to the sick-room, to what everybody believed to be the deatbed of the sufferer; and there had crept through the house a whisper, how originating no one could tell, that it was after an interview with Russell that the fit had come on, and that she had carried him some information about Madam which had almost killed him. Nobody had any doubt that it was to Madam that Russell’s report referred, and there were many wonderings and questions in the background, where the servants congregated, as to what it was. That Madam went out of nights; that she met some one in the park, and there had long and agitated interviews; that Jane knew all about it, more than any one, and could ruin her mistress if she chose to speak; but that Russell too had found out a deal, and that it had come to master’s ears through her; and full time it did, for who ever heard of goings-on like this in a gentleman’s house?—this is what was said among the servants. In superior regions nothing was said at all. Rosalind and her uncle kept together, as getting a vague comfort in the universal dreariness from being together. Now and then John Trevanion stole to the door of his brother’s room, which stood open to give all the air possible, to see or hear how things were going. One time when he did so his face was working with emotion.
“Rosalind,” he said, in the whisper which they spoke in, though had they spoken as loudly as their voices would permit no sound could have reached the sick-room; “Rosalind, I think that woman is sublime. She knows that the first thing he will do will be to harm and shame her, and yet there she is, doing everything for him. I don’t know if she is a sinner or not, but she is sublime—”
“Who are you speaking of as that woman?—of MY MOTHER, Uncle John?” cried Rosalind, expanding and growing out of her soft girlhood into a sort of indignant guardian angel. He shook his head impatiently and sat down; and nothing more was said between them till the middle of the night, when Dr. Beaton coming in told them the worst was over, and for the moment the sick man would “pull through.” “But I’ll have that nurse in confinement. I’ll send her to the asylum. It is just manslaughter,” he said. Russell, very pale and frightened, was at her door when Rosalind went up-stairs.
“The doctor says he will have you tried for manslaughter,” Rosalind said, as she passed her. “No, I will not say good-night. You have all but killed papa.”
“It is not I that have killed him,” said Russell; “it’s those that do what they didn’t ought to.”
Rosalind, in her excitement, stamped her foot upon the floor.
“He says you shall be sent to the asylum; and I say you shall be sent away from here. You are a bad woman. Perhaps now you will kill the children to complete your work. We are none of us safe so long as you are here.”
At this Russell gave a bitter cry and threw up her hands to heaven.
“The children,” she cried, “that I love like my own—that I give my heart’s blood for—not safe! Oh, Miss Rosalind! God forgive you!—you, that I have loved the best of all!”
“How should I forgive you?” cried Rosalind, relentless. “I will never forgive you. Hate me if you please, but never dare to say you love me. Love!—you don’t know what it is. You should go away to-night if it were I who had the power and not mamma.”
“She has the power yet. She will not have it long,” the woman cried, in her terror and passion. And she shut herself up in her room, which communicated with the children’s, and flung herself on the floor in a panic which was perhaps as tragical as any of the other sensations of this confused and miserable house.
And yet when Rosalind went out next morning she was able to withdraw herself, in a way inconceivable to any one who has not been young and full of imaginations, from the miseries and terrors of the night. Mr. Trevanion was much exhausted, but living, and in his worn-out, feeble state required constant care and nursing, without being well enough to repay that nursing with abuse, as was his wont. Rosalind, with no one to turn to for companionship, went out and escaped. She got clear of that small, yet so important, world, tingling with emotion, with death and life in the balance, and everything that is most painful in life, and escaped altogether, as if she had possessed those wings of a dove for which we all long, into another large and free and open world, in which there was a wide, delightful air which blew in her face, and every kind of curiosity and interest and hope. How it was she fell to thinking of the curious fact that she had not, and had never had, a lover, at such a moment, who can tell? Perhaps because it occurred to her at first that it would be well to have something, somebody, to escape to and take comfort in, when she was so full of trouble, without knowing that the wide atmosphere and fresh sky and bare trees, that discharged, whenever the breath of the wind touched them, a sharp little shower of rain-drops, were enough at her age to woo her out of the misery which was not altogether personal, though she was so wound up in the lives of all the sufferers. She escaped. That thought about the lover, which was intended to be pathetic, beguiled her into a faint laugh under her breath; for indeed it was amusing, if even only ruefully amusing, to be so unlike the rest of the young world. That opened to her, as it were, the gate; and then her imagination
