"Yes, from Mrs. Van Cortlandt, to be the governess of her daughter, a sweet little girl of six. She has often spoken about it, and now I have an urgent despatch from her. She is in need of some one at once, and she greatly prefers you."
"Do you mean, Mrs. Mavick, that--you--want--that I am to leave Evelyn, and you?" The room seemed to whirl around her.
"It is not what we want, McDonald," said Mrs. Mavick calmly and still beaming, "but what is best. Your service as governess has continued much longer than could have been antic.i.p.ated, and of course it must come to an end some time. You understand how hard this separation is for all of us. Mr. Mavick wanted me to express to you his infinite obligation, and I am sure he will take a substantial way of showing it. Evelyn is now a young lady in society, and of course it is absurd for her to continue under pupilage. It will be best for her, for her character, to be independent and learn to act for herself in the world."
"Did she--has Evelyn--"
"No, I have said nothing to her of this offer, which is a most advantageous one. Of course she will feel as we do, at first."
"Why, all these years, all her life, since she was a baby, not a day, not a night, Evelyn, and now--so sweet, so dear--why Mrs. Mavick!" And the Scotch woman, dazed, with a piteous appeal in her eyes, trying in vain to control her face, looked at her mistress.
"My dear McDonald, you must not take it that way. It is only a change.
You are not going away really, we shall all be in the same city. I am sure you will--like your new home. Shall I tell Mrs. Van Cortlandt?"
"Tell Mrs. Van Cortlandt? Yes, tell her, thanks. I will go--soon--at once. In a little time, to get-ready. Thanks." The governess rose and stood a moment to steady herself. All her life was in ruins. The blow crushed her. And she had been so happy. In such great peace. It seemed impossible. To leave Evelyn! She put out her hand as if to speak. Did Mrs. Mavick understand what she was doing? That it was the same as dragging a mother away from her child? But she said nothing. Words would not come. Everything seemed confused and blank. She sank into her chair.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Mavick, I think I am not very strong this morning." And presently she stood on her feet again and steadied herself. "You will please tell Evelyn before--before I see her." And she walked out of the room as one in a trance.
The news was communicated to Evelyn, quite incidentally, in the manner that all who knew Mrs. Mavick admired in her. Evelyn had just been in and out of her mother"s room, on one errand and another, and was going out again, when her mother said:
"Oh, by-the-way, Evelyn, at last we have got a splendid place for McDonald."
Evelyn turned, not exactly comprehending. "A place for McDonald? For what?"
"As governess, of course. With Mrs. Van Cortlandt."
"What! to leave us?" The girl walked back to her mother"s chair and stood before her in an att.i.tude of wonder and doubt. "You don"t mean, mamma, that she is going away for good?"
"It is a great chance for her. I have been anxious for some time about employment for her, now that you do not need a governess--haven"t really for a year or two."
"But, mamma, it can"t be. She is part of us. She belongs to the family; she has been in it almost as long as I have. Why, I have been with her every day of my life. To go away? To give her up? Does she know?"
"Does she know? What a child! She has accepted Mrs. Van Cortlandt"s offer. I telegraphed for her this morning. Tomorrow she goes to town to get her belongings together. Mrs. Van Cortlandt needs her at once. I am sorry to see, my dear, that you are thinking only of yourself."
"Of myself?" The girl had been at first confused, and, as the idea forced itself upon her mind, she felt weak, and trembled, and was deadly pale. But when the certainty came, the enormity and cruelty of the dismissal aroused her indignation. "Myself!" she exclaimed again. Her eyes blazed with a wrath new to their tenderness, and, stepping back and stamping her foot; she cried out: "She shall not go! It is unjust! It is cruel!"
Her mother had never seen her child like that. She was revealing a spirit of resistance, a temper, an independence quite unexpected. And yet it was not altogether displeasing. Mrs. Mavick"s respect for her involuntarily rose. And after an instant, instead of responding with severity, as was her first impulse, she said, very calmly:
"Naturally, Evelyn, you do not like to part with her. None of us do. But go to your room and think it over reasonably. The relations of childhood cannot last forever."
Evelyn stood for a moment undecided. Her mother"s calm self-control had not deceived her. She was no longer a child. It was a woman reading a woman. All her lifetime came back to her to interpret this moment. In the reaction of the second, the deepest pain was no longer for herself, nor even for Miss McDonald, but for a woman who showed herself so insensible to n.o.ble feeling. Protest was useless. But why was the separation desired? She did not fully see, but her instinct told her that it had a relation to her mother"s plans for her; and as life rose before her in the society, in the world, into which she was newly launched, she felt that she was alone, absolutely alone. She tried to speak, but before she could collect her thoughts her mother said:
"There, go now. It is useless to discuss the matter. We all have to learn to bear things."
Evelyn went away, in a tumult of pa.s.sion and of shame, and obeyed her impulse to go where she had always found comfort.
Miss McDonald was in her own room. Her trunk was opened. She had taken her clothes from the closet. She was opening the drawers and laying one article here and another there. She was going from closet to bureau, opening this door and shutting that in her sitting-room and bedroom, in an aimless, distracted way. Out of her efforts nothing had so far come but confusion. It seemed an impossible dream that she was actually packing up to go away forever.
Evelyn entered in a haste that could not wait for permission.
"Is it true?" she cried.
McDonald turned. She could not speak. Her faithful face was gray with suffering. Her eyes were swollen with weeping. For an instant she seemed not to comprehend, and then a flood of motherly feeling overcame her.
She stretched out her arms and caught the girl to her breast in a pa.s.sionate embrace, burying her face in her neck in a vain effort to subdue her sobbing.
What was there to say? Evelyn had come to her refuge for comfort, and to Evelyn the comforter it was she herself who must be the comforter.
Presently she disengaged herself and forced the governess into an easy chair. She sat down on the arm of the chair and smoothed her hair and kissed her again and again.
"There. I"m going to help you. You"ll see you have not taught me for nothing." She jumped up and began to bustle about. "You don"t know what a packer I am."
"I knew it must come some time," she was saying, with a weary air, as she followed with her eyes the light step of the graceful girl, who was beginning to sort things and to bring order out of the confusion, holding up one article after another and asking questions with an enforced cheerfulness that was more pathetic than any burst of grief.
"Yes, I know. There, that is laid in smooth." She pretended to be thinking what to put in next, and suddenly she threw herself into McDonald"s lap and began to talk gayly. "It is all my fault, dear; I should have stayed little. And it doesn"t make any difference. I know you love me, and oh, McDonald, I love you more, a hundred times more, than ever. If you did not love me! Think how dreadful that would be. And we shall not be separated-only by streets, don"t you know. They can"t separate us. I know you want me to be brave. And some day, perhaps" (and she whispered in her ear--how many hundred times had she told her girl secrets in that way!), "if I do have a home of my own, then--"
It was not very cheerful talk, however it seemed to be, but it was better than silence, and in the midst of it, with many interruptions, the packing was over, and some sort of serenity was attained even by Miss McDonald. "Yes, dear heart, we have love and trust and hope." But when the preparations were all made, and Evelyn went to her own room, there did not seem to be so much hope, nor any brightness in the midst of this first great catastrophe of her life.
XXII
The great Mavick ball at Newport, in the summer long remembered for its financial disasters, was very much talked about at the time. Long after, in any city club, a man was sure to have attentive listeners if he, began his story or his gossip with the remark that he was at the Mavick ball.
It attracted great attention, both on account of the circ.u.mstances that preceded it and the events which speedily followed, and threw a light upon it that gave it a spectacular importance. The city journals made a feature of it. They summoned their best artists to ill.u.s.trate it, and illuminate it in pen-and-ink, half-tones, startling colors, and photographic reproductions, sketches theatrical, humorous, and poetic, caricatures, pictures of tropical luxury and aristocratic pretension; in short, all the bewildering affluence of modern art which is brought to bear upon the aesthetic cultivation of the lowest popular taste. They summoned their best novelists to throw themselves recklessly upon the English language, and extort from it its highest expression in color and lyrical beauty, the novelists whose mission it is, in the newspaper campaign against realism, to adorn and dramatize the commonest events of life, creating in place of the old-fashioned "news" the highly spiced "story," which is the ideal aspiration of the reporter.
Whatever may be said about the power of the press, it is undeniable that it can set the entire public thinking and talking about any topic, however insignificant in itself, that it may elect to make the sensation of the day--a wedding, a murder, a political scandal, a divorce, a social event, a defalcation, a lost child, an unidentified victim of accident or crime, an election, or--that undefined quickener of patriotism called a casus belli. It can impose any topic it pleases upon the public mind. In case there is no topic, it is necessary to make one, for it is an indefeasible right of the public to have news.
These reports of the Mavick ball had a peculiar interest for at least two people in New York. Murad Ault read them with a sardonic smile and an enjoyment that would not have been called altruistic. Philip searched them with the feverish eagerness of a maiden who scans the report of a battle in which her lover has been engaged.
All summer long he had lived upon stray bits of news in the society columns of the newspapers. To see Evelyn"s name mentioned, and only rarely, as a guest at some entertainment, and often in connection with that of Lord Montague, did not convey much information, nor was that little encouraging. Was she well? Was she absorbed in the life of the season? Did she think of him in surroundings so brilliant? Was she, perhaps, unhappy and persecuted? No tidings came that could tell him the things that he ached to know.
Only recently intelligence had come to him that at the same time wrung his heart with pity and buoyed him up with hope. He had not seen Miss McDonald since her dismissal, for she had been only one night in the city, but she had written to him. Relieved by her discharge of all obligations of silence, she had written him frankly about the whole affair, and, indeed, put him in possession of unrecorded details and indications that filled him with anxiety, to be sure, but raised his courage and strengthened his determination. If Evelyn loved him, he had faith that no manoeuvres or compulsion could shake her loyalty. And yet she was but a girl; she was now practically alone, and could she resist the family and the social pressure? Few women could, few women do, effectively resist under such circ.u.mstances. With one of a tender heart, duty often takes the most specious and deceiving forms. In yielding to the impulses of her heart, which in her inexperience may be mistaken, has a girl the right--from a purely rational point of view--to set herself against, nay, to destroy, the long-cherished ambitions of her parents for a brilliant social career for her, founded upon social traditions of success? For what had Mr. Mavick toiled? For what had Mrs.
Mavick schemed all these years? Could the girl throw herself away? Such disobedience, such disregard for social law, would seem impossible to her mother.
Some of the events that preceded the Mavick ball throw light upon that interesting function. After the departure of Miss McDonald, Mrs. Mavick, in one of her confidential talks with her proposed son-in-law, confessed that she experienced much relief. An obstacle seemed to be removed.
In fact, Evelyn rather surprised her mother by what seemed a calm acceptance of the situation. There was no further outburst. If the girl was often preoccupied and seemed listless, that was to be expected, on the sudden removal of the companion of her lifetime.
But she did not complain. She ceased after a while to speak of McDonald.
If she showed little enthusiasm in what was going on around her, she was compliant, she fell in at once with her mother"s suggestions, and went and came in an att.i.tude of entire obedience.
"It isn"t best for you to keep up a correspondence, my dear, now that you know that McDonald is nicely settled--all reminiscent correspondence is very wearing--and, really, I am more than delighted to see that you are quite capable of walking alone. Do you know, Evelyn, that I am more and more proud of you every day, as my daughter. I don"t dare to tell you half the nice things that are said of you. It would make you vain."
And the proud mother kissed her affectionately. The letters ceased. If the governess wrote, Evelyn did not see the letters.
As the days went by, Lord Montague, in high and confident spirits, became more and more a familiar inmate of the house. Daily he sent flowers to Evelyn; he contrived little excursions and suppers; he was marked in his attentions wherever they went. "He is such a dear fellow,"
said Mrs. Mavick to one of her friends; "I don"t know how we should get on without him."
Only, in the house, owing to some unnatural perversity of circ.u.mstances, he did not see much of Evelyn, never alone for more than a moment. It is wonderful what efficient, though invisible, defenses most women, when they will, can throw about themselves.