John saw the shiver, and was gloomily contrite. “I am sorry, Genie. The Iron Maiden isn’t pleasant to think about, I grant you that. But that is what I feel, in England.”
Eugenia sat down, without speaking, and looked at the fire, while John stood humbly and desperately before her. Scotsmen were blood kin to Irishmen. They were one and the same. And what were Irishmen? Clever English novelists and playwrights put them into books and plays, and always they were buffoons and shallow rascals, amusing but contemptible. They were servants by nature. They were cheats and liars, lovable in a crude and cunning way, drunkards and dancers and gay traitors. Scotsmen had this Irish blood in them, in addition to the passionate and cruel wilderness. Eugenia shivered again, and her face became pale stone.
“Come with me,” whispered John. He dropped on one knee near her, but did not dare to touch her. He could only gaze at her yearningly. But behind that expression she saw all the violence of his nature, his loud contemptuousness, his extravagance and heat, his hatred for orderly discipline and restraint, his hot vulgarity. She was terrified of him, but most frighteningly drawn to him. She pressed the palms of her cold hands together to restrain their trembling.
“You have no conception of your duty, John? You would desert your father? You would ask me to desert my invalid mother?”
Now the uncontrollable violence swept over him again.
“Duty!” he cried. “Must we choke in this vile place because of duty to those who are about to die? We must smother in this wet gritty air, and allow others to feed upon our flesh?”
“Don’t!” The word was a disgusted cry forced from her involuntarily. She was very angry. John had never seen her angry before. He stared at her, incredulous. Her bright gray eye flashed with a reflection of his own fury. Then, it was possible for her to be stirred, to be moved, to be infuriated! A tremendous joy broke in him, a great delight. He tried to take her hand, but she snatched it away.
“How can you speak so?” she asked, in a quivering voice. “Your language is ungenteel and revolting. You are not a gentleman. You can never be a gentleman. I must seriously reconsider—” She paused, then continued ruthlessly: “If you have no conception of duty, I must confess that I have. I cannot leave my mother, to go with you to a strange and impossible country. Even if she—were not here, I could not go. There are duties to be considered, disciplines, restraints.”
He forced himself to speak quietly, though his heart was a burning pain in his chest. “You do not care for living, then?”
“John, you are incomprehensible. I do not understand your wild words.”
“You are not a woman,” he said, bitterly.
She gazed at him in stern affront, but did not speak.
John moved to the mantelpiece. He leaned his elbows upon it, covered his face with his hands. Then he began to speak, in low words which came with a muffled sound from between his fingers.
“I cannot stay here. I must go.”
Eugenia composed herself. She said, coldly: “Assume, for a moment, John, that you have gone to America. What would you do in that uncivilized country?”
He dropped his hands and turned to her, and now he was burning with hope and eagerness again. “I don’t know! But it will be something strong and fresh, something to pit one’s strength against, something new and living.”
She smiled her still bleak smile. “There are Indians, I believe, and terrible forests, and wild beasts of all kinds. And wildernesses, unbelievable mountains, and deserts.”
“There are cities, too, Genie.”
“Vulgar, uncivilized outposts, filled with disgusting mixtures of all lawless people. I am afraid you must excuse me from such a life, John. I am an Englishwoman.”
He did not speak, but he regarded her strangely. She was suddenly terrified. She reached out her hand, so unusual a gesture for the controlled Eugenia, and laid it on his arm. It did not respond to her touch.
“You would not leave me, John?”
He averted his head. And then, sighing, he said: “I do not know, Eugenia. But I have not given up hope that you will come.”
She pressed her hands together again, convulsively. Her terror mounted.
“John, please listen to me. Suppose that we wait a number of years, until our dear ones need us no longer? Suppose, then, that we go to India? You will be a merchant, an importer. We can spend a few months a year, in India. I have always wished to visit that exotic place.”
He was silent. His head was bent. Then he said in a voice she had never heard before: “No. No. I want no part of the Empire. I can see that, now. I must go to America.”
She was deeply offended, and outraged. She stood up, smoothing down her dove-gray garments with firm hands.
“I must leave you now, John. My mother needs me. You have spoken very wildly. You are not yourself. I must decline to discuss this absurd matter any longer. I trust, however, that you will soon come to your senses.”
He turned to her. He did not speak. She inclined her head with a stately gesture, and floated out of the room. He made no movement to halt her.
A few moments later he flung himself out of that hateful house, which he could not endure, could never endure.
CHAPTER 2
Eugenia had a certain bloodless capacity to force her thoughts, however turbulent, into disciplined paths, quelling even the very agitated beating of her heart. It was as if she were able, by will alone, to direct the very movement of her blood, chilling it when too fevered. By the time she had climbed, in her calm and stately way, to the upper floor and her mother’s apartments, her ivory face was as composed as ever, her breath serene, her manner controlled. But the faint tint of depression remained in her thoughts and mind, like dissolved mud in clear water. However, upon entering Mrs. MacNeill’s chamber, Eugenia’s smile was lightly affectionate and untroubled.
The widowed Mrs. MacNeill was much given to vapours, to elegant invalidism. In truth, she was quite a healthy lady, with a greedy appetite. Her servants understood this; they discreetly left the pantry doors ajar at night, revealing a cold bird, a bottle of stout, a good cheese and butter and tart already set out invitingly. No one asked who consumed them during the darker hours, by the light of a candle in the great brick kitchen. If Eugenia, and the servants, knew, they were silent. Eugenia, at times, appeared anxious, and the winged black brows would draw together thoughtfully, for she knew that her mother’s physician had ordered that lady to remain on a delicate diet, for reasons of heart. But the girl had neither the indiscretion nor the cruelty to reproach her mother ruthlessly for her gorging at midnight. The pleasant fiction was allowed to exist that Mrs. MacNeill “ate less than a bird, poor lady.” Trays taken to her chaise-longue and bed were always returned hardly touched, while Mrs. MacNeill, on the pillows, assumed an interesting posture of patient suffering languor and mournful sweetness, the while her daughter or her maid bewailed the fact that the tea was only sipped, the fowl merely nibbled at, the muffins in their original pristine condition. And Mrs. MacNeill would listen to these lamentations with a martyred smile, many sighs, many humble pleading gestures and beseeching looks that implored forgiveness for the anxiety she was causing her dear household. “I am sure I am a great burden,” she would murmur, closing weary eyelids, or rolling her eyes heavenward.
This hypocrisy, which a more robust and more obtuse nature would have found furiously intolerable, only increased Eugenia’s pity. She knew that her mother was a foolish woman, selfish, avaricious, greedy and self-indulgent, obsessed only with her own desires and vanities. She knew that Mrs. MacNeill had no qualities of mind or spirit which would attract the interest and attention of others by reason of them, but that, unfortunately, she possessed in unusual strength the natural human desire for this interest and attention. Not being able to draw the love and solicitation of acquaintances and family because of a lovely temperament, spirited conversation, real sympathy or tenderness or awareness of humanity, she had, perforce, to command them by simulating
invalidism. As she was very rich in her own right, she was given that attention and interest which would have been denied a more impecunious lady. These riches, perversely, for that reason, had forced her to resort to invalidism; had she been poor, she would have been denied this luxury, and forced to shift for herself.
Mrs. MacNeill lay in her immense musty chamber, the curtains drawn against even the feeble gray light of the December day. The curtains hung heavily about her canopied bed, where she reclined upon her ruffled pillows. A tiny chuckling fire burned on the black marble hearth. The shapes of her bulky mahogany furniture lurked in the fetid gloom, like misformed animals. Not for her the austerity and elegance which had created the other rooms in the mansion. Mr. MacNeill had been a gentleman of taste, for all his later tendency towards the bottle. But Mrs. MacNeill loved solidity and ugliness and “cosiness.” Her carpets were thick and dusty, and crimson. Her silk-hung walls were also of crimson, shot through with threads of gold. Her draperies were crimson, splashed with poisonous green. The portraits on the walls were heavy with gilt. Here and there a pier mirror caught what livid light penetrated the chamber and reflected it like spectral shadows. The air was smothering in its odours of medicine, tea, attar of roses, dust and stale pampered flesh.
Eugenia gently lit a lamp near the bedside. Mrs. MacNeill winced. “I was drowsing, child,” she whimpered, sharply.
“I have not slept a wink all night. But now, in your perverseness, you must disturb me. You were always an inconsiderate little creature. Never mind. Let the lamp alone. What has delayed you so long?”
Eugenia quietly sat near the bed and folded her hands on her dove-gray lap. She smiled with forced gaiety at her mother. If her marble nostrils drew together to shut out too much of the overpowering smells in the room, the movement was not visible.
As she lay on her plump white pillows, it could be discerned, by the struggling lamplight, that Mrs. MacNeill was a gross and vulgar woman. She was of a big frame, her large bones overlaid with billows of pale and lustrous fat, flabby and scented. These billows gleamed as if oiled, even through the thin and delicate cambric of her ruffled nightgown. Her body made a mound under the silken quilts, bulging and huge. In contrast with the general grossness of that body, her hands were tiny, plump and dimpled, and very white, as were her feet. She was inordinately proud of these members. Her shoulders, however, were mountainous, but as they were also white as snow, and gleaming, she was proud of them, also. She thought of herself as a “fine figure of a woman,” as indeed she had been in her youth, when she had been much admired for her tall and luxurious figure and flamboyant colouring. But now the “fine figure” was dissolved in fat, the colouring much faded. However, her face was small and round, still, the skin milk white and smooth, with a pouting petulance which gave her the appearance of a stupid and pampered child. Her mouth was full and pink, if sulky and sensual. In the midst of this rounded and heavy countenance, the nose was only a tiny sharp peak, tilted upwards, with amazingly thin and delicate nostrils, somewhat pinched and shrewish. Her eyes, which a former suitor had declared were “twin pools of azure light, reflecting stars,” were no longer large and limpid as in her youth, but sunken in the hillocks of her facial flesh so that they appeared to be unusually small and shallow, little round blue disks of polished china, lighted, now, not by stars, but by the restless and unsleeping malice of her soul.
It is a tribute to unfailing human credulity that Mrs. MacNeill believed, against all the evidence of her many mirrors, that she was still the lissome and majestic young Martha of her youth, that her masses of faded blonde hair (still curly and heavy) retained the golden shadows that once distinguished them, that her eyes still blazed with light blue light, and that she was still possessed of enchanting charms. When she could be persuaded to rise from her bed to greet guests in the stately and pallid drawing-rooms which she detested, her toilettes were magnificent and florid, looped, braided, draped and beribboned, with coquettish water-falls cascading from bared shoulders, her hoops extravagant, her jewels overpowering.
Because she was sentimental as well as gluttonous, (two attributes inexorably found together) she believed she was much adored, that her opinions on every subject were gems of wit, that her toilettes set the fashions among the ladies of London, and that she was a power in the city, that every one commiserated with her because she possessed an only daughter completely devoid of charm and coquetry. This latter delusion of hers was always loudly on her lips, especially in Eugenia’s presence. “How I could have given birth to such a pale and miserable little mouse is quite beyond my comprehension,” she would say, sighing, and fanning herself with a martyred expression. “When I was her age, I was the toast of London, if I may be allowed to say so, myself. I had sonnets composed to me. Young gentlemen glowered at each other, and fought duels for the permission to take me to Vauxhall. I was told, on high and incontrovertible authority, that the Queen, herself, once inquired of a certain gentleman, “Who is that magnificent creature in the blue velvet and pearls?’”
Her father, Robert Turnbull, (father of James Turnbull) had adored her. Her mother, the former Mary Chisholm, had become a widow at the age of eighteen. Robert, a widower with one son, (James) had taken her as his second wife. Mary, had presented him with Martha. So it was that she and James were children of the same father but not the same mother. This, she repeatedly emphasized, especially to Eugenia. She assured the girl that the mother of James was reputed to be a meagre and silent little creature, much like Eugenia, added Martha, candidly, and of a very obscure and humble family. In her conversations she ignored her father’s antecedents, and stressed the aristocracy of her own mother, Mary Chisholm.
It is strange that Eugenia should love this foolish and venomous woman. But that love was daughter of compassion. Eugenia had subtlety and understanding, for all her fifteen years. Her life had been miserable, secluded and hard. She had retreated to the land of contemplation, her father’s and grandfather’s library, and in these dim cloisters had fashioned a calm dry philosophy of her own, which sustained her in all emergencies. If she was cynical, no one knew this but herself. She had come to suspect, with acrid amusement, all sentimentality, all vulgarity, all extravagance and violence, all volubility and affectation, having discovered how cheap and sordid they were in her mother.
Now, as Eugenia sat so quietly near her mother, smiling her pretty smile, she was filled with anxiety. How fat poor Mamma was becoming! Her breath, too, was so wheezy and laboured. If only some way could be found to restrain her bottomless appetite! Eugenia resolved that she would have a quiet talk with the housekeeper, and try to persuade that formidable but sympathetic individual to leave out a smaller bird, a smaller cheese, and no stout or pastries. Mrs. MacNeill would not dare to complain. Her health, however, would benefit.
“Do not stare at me so emptily, child,” Mrs. MacNeill said, peevishly, shifting on her plump pillows. She blinked angrily. “And do turn out that lamp. You have no consideration for me, at all. How insensible you are, Eugenia. A girl of sensibility would have more sympathy for her mother.”
Eugenia obediently dimmed the lamp. Its flickering rays struggled in the musky air. “I thought that you might like me to read to you, Mamma,” she said, in her soft and chiselled voice. “You were so interested yesterday in Mr. Dicken’s last novel. You said it was so affecting, and that it quite made you cry.”
Now that the conversation was about herself, Mrs. MacNeill was soothed. She sighed, heavily, and touched her eyes with a laced cambric handkerchief.
“I do not think I could bear it today, Eugenia. So affecting. When I saw Mr. Dickens last winter, at Lady Christopher’s elegant dinner, I reproached him, very gently, for his assaults upon our gentler sensibilities.”
Eugenia had heard this story a hundred times before, but this did not prevent her from leaning forward attentively, with every expression of interest.
Mrs. MacNeill shook her head sadly. “Such a coarse man, in spite of his genius
, Eugenia. He laughed in my face. I told Lady Christopher later, with much agitation, of the whole incident. Do you know what the abominable creature replied? Mr. Dickens, I mean, certainly. He said: ‘Madam, gentle sensibilities are a crime, an unwarranted extravagance and hypocrisy in England, while one man is jailed for debt, or one child starves, or one desperate woman is driven to the streets.’”
Eugenia murmured something inaudible. Her interest was not feigned. Though she had never met Mr. Dickens she seemed to see his face while he spoke to her mother, vivid and angry, his voice like a bull’s, his eye flashing with ire and contempt. It seemed to be John’s face. A curious warmth rose in her, and her quiet heart beat faster.
“I was quite taken aback,” continued Mrs. MacNeill, with all the original indignation she had felt. “Such language in a refined drawing-room! But that is what comes of admitting the lower classes into genteel society. Do not tell me that he is a genius, and that genius transcends the borders of class!” Her high voice rose irately. “That is nonsense. The man is nothing at all! Later, though I can hardly believe it, it was reported to me that he declared that England was done, finished, that she would go down, choking, in the warm ocean of fashionable tea brewed in English drawing-rooms! How Lady Christopher and other ladies can endure such a wretch is quite beyond me!”
Mrs. MacNeill, fully aroused, lifted herself upon her pillows and glared at poor Eugenia as though the child was directly guilty for Mr. Dickens, and his appalling notions. And Eugenia blushed faintly. She had been thinking that Mr. Dickens was a brave and noble man, and that he had been quite right. Even to herself, she was perturbed. Such heresy was unfamiliar to her.
The Turnbulls Page 3