Collected Works of Frances Trollope

by Frances Milton Trollope

But we must return to the tête-à-tête which these remarks have interrupted; no so sooner had the idea occurred to Madame von Schwanberg, that the physician might not be the fool which he was probably fee’d to appear; than she determined to give him a hint or two which might prevent the thraldom in which she was placed, from being utterly intolerable. Fortunately for all the parties concerned, born and unborn, she found him apt; and from that time, till his final dismissal after the birth of her child, he proved himself a very useful friend, cleverly contriving to become the recipient of the baron’s parental meditations, whether hopeful or fearful, and procuring thereby something like comparative peace to the unfortunate object of his anxiety.

  CHAPTER III.

  BUT, at last, the great, the important day arrived, which was to repay the Baron von Schwanberg for all the anxieties he had endured, by blessing his longing eyes with the sight of the illustrious little baron, whose distinguished destiny it was, to perpetuate the honours of the Schwanberg race.

  The judicious professional attendant of the lady had succeeded in persuading him, that the most serious and deplorable consequences might ensue, if the latter part of the time, which preceded the anticipated event, were not passed by her in the unbroken repose of her own dressing-room; and it is highly probable, that this friendly precaution, on the part of the rational and kind-hearted individual, who, from an involuntary persecutor, had become a pitying friend, saved her from such a fever on the spirits, as might have endangered her own life, if not that of her child; for if the ceaseless worry and impatience, in which the father expectant passed this interval, had been shared, or even witnessed by his unfortunate wife, it is scarcely possible that it could have failed of producing very painful effects.

  As it was, however, the Baroness von Schwanberg brought forth in safety. But, alas! her offspring was a daughter! I will not attempt to describe the state of mind into which the announcement of this fact threw the baron. This was an occurrence which, from a strange sort of infatuation had never occurred to him as possible. In fact, his mind, which was not a very expansive one, had been, not only since his marriage, but long before it, so fully and wholly occupied by the idea of having a son, that the possibility of his having a daughter had never occurred to him.

  The Herr Walters was not only a kind-hearted, but really a sensible man, which was proved by the manner in which he had contrived to prevent his very unnecessary presence in the family from being an annoyance to its unfortunate mistress. But it should seem that he was not a brave man; for his courage failed him altogether, when he remembered that the baron had made promise to come to him in person, as soon as the child was born, that he might at once learn his opinion exactly as to its state of health, and so forth.

  But the good doctor really dared not face the baron under such circumstances. The task of telling him that all his noble anticipations of seeing before him the glorious prospect of an endless race of barons were vain, and that, instead of this, he must content himself with being the father of a little girl, was more than he had courage to perform. The direful tidings were therefore conveyed to the unfortunate nobleman by one of the attendants, with an intimation that Herr Walters was in attendance upon the baroness, and could not leave her just at present.

  It would be equally vain and needless to attempt describing the condition into which this announcement threw the unfortunate father; for, however powerful the description might be, it could only convey an idea of his real condition to those capable of conceiving it, and fortunately the great majority of human beings would, judging from their own feelings, conceive such a description to be unnatural. Yet such things are.

  The judicious Herr Walters took care to prevent his perfectly contented patient from being disturbed during the first days of her convalescence by the presence of her husband, lest the real state of his mind might become apparent to her; and by so doing he certainly contributed very essentially to her comfort; nevertheless, the lady would probably have progressed with equal certainty towards recovery, if these precautions had been omitted; for the temper, the spirits, and even the feelings of Madam von Schwanberg, had become pretty near callous to all the superb absurdities of her husband; and most assuredly it would have been greatly beyond his power to have expressed or manifested any feeling concerning the arrival of her new-born treasure, which could in the least degree have lessened her happiness in possessing it.

  Meanwhile the little Gertrude grew, and prospered; and as it was the will of Heaven that she should be an only child, not even the inferiority of her sex could prevent her becoming a person of considerable consequence, even in the estimation of her father.

  To her devoted mother she certainly appeared to be as near perfection as it was possible for any mortal mixture of earth’s mould to be; and even her disappointed father soon began to think that, although unfortunately she was not a son, she was such a daughter as only the house of Schwanberg could produce.

  Allowance must me made, however, for the natural partiality both of father and mother. Gertrude von Schwanberg was a splendidly handsome child, and showed early symptoms both of intelligence and good temper; but nevertheless, the young baroness was very far from being the perfect being her progenitors supposed her to be; for in truth she inherited, in a very considerable degree, the faults of both. But she wore these faults with a difference; or rather, the fact of their being blended, produced a result by no means very exactly resembling the character either of the one or the other.

  From her father she certainly inherited a kind temper and a generous hand. Like him, she could never witness want or suffering, without feeling a very earnest wish to relieve it. But she inherited from him also no inconsiderable portion of pride.

  This last-named quality, however, was more changed by transmission, than these before mentioned; for Gertrude inherited from her mother, not only a bright intelligence, but also the clearness of head, which, if it has fair play, leads to that most precious of all faculties, common sense; and where this is found in action, pride, though it may exist, must cast off its fooleries.

  The mental superiority of her mother, however, could not, either by inheritance or precept, obliterate the self-willed pertinacity of character which was so remarkable in her father; but her mind being of larger scope, her self-will could never have been as perfectly satisfied as his, by the preservation of an unblemished coat of arms.

  And excellent as her mother was, she too had her faults.

  If the baron had too much pride in one direction, she had too much pride in another; and their child was as likely to suffer from this sort of inheritance on the mother’s side, as on the father’s.

  The Baroness von Schwanberg’s adoration of talent, and contempt for the want of it, might very truly be said to know no bounds; and to communicate these feelings to her child, speedily became the great object of her life.

  Had the father of this child been a little less absurd in his estimate of human affairs in general, and of his own position in particular, the feelings of his wife towards him would have been very different, for, in that case, her estimate of her respective duties as a wife and a mother, might have been more justly balanced; but, as it was, she felt as if she had done her child great wrong by permitting herself to be persuaded to form the alliance which had given her so unintellectual a father; and in order to atone for this, she put but little restraint upon herself when discussing the inanity of his pursuits, or the absurdity of his notions.

  But, fortunately for both parties, nature seemed to take the feelings both of the father and the daughter into her own hands, and that, too, without changing the intellectual condition of either. The baron, perhaps, never quite ceased to lament in his inmost soul that his daughter was not his son; but, nevertheless, a very few years sufficed to teach him that a daughter was a thing that might be very dearly loved; and he did love his beautiful Gertrude very dearly.

  The young girl, on the other hand, guided by the same kind of unerring impulse, soon discovered
that though papa did not know so many things as mamma, it was still very nice to have a father so fond of one; and perhaps the worst effect of this divided duty was, that it taught her to feel how much more important she was to both, than either of them was to the other — a discovery which was likely enough to lead to the dangerous conclusion, that she was able to manage them both.

  And that this was, in a great degree, the case, is very certain; and had the young heiress been a little-minded girl, she would have been ruined by it; but fortunately, she was not. She had a multitude of faults, both hereditary and acquired, but littleness of mind was not among them.

  She would have no more condescended artfully to use her influence on either, for the purpose of obtaining any childish indulgence, than she would have cut off her own little finger; but she certainly did not scruple to profit by the indulgence of both, in the way most agreeable to each. It was with her father, therefore, that she enjoyed the great delight of cantering on her beautiful little pony, not only over every part of his wide domain, but considerably beyond its confines, when the doing so could afford her an opportunity of looking on upon the chase, in which her father delighted, and in which he very frequently indulged, considering it as the only amusement which could be strictly considered as truly and exclusively noble.

  In this much-loved recreation her mother could take no part, for she had never been a horse-woman; but having all confidence in the care taken of the little girl by her father in these excursions, her good sense and right feeling taught her to rejoice instead of lament, that there was some portion of her daughter’s days which might be passed in the society of her father, without either positive loss of time or positive privation of pleasure. And this portion, and her presence at his daily meals, appeared to satisfy the good baron completely.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was equally well contented by the portion of this precious daughter’s hours which was allotted to her.

  The only stipulation on which she insisted was, that she should have no governess but herself. Her own education had been well attended to. She was an excellent musician, drew with taste and correctness, and was quite as good a linguist as she wished her daughter to be; all this, she was quite aware, might be also acquired by her Gertrude, by the aid of an accomplished woman, who might easily be hired for the purpose of teaching her; nor was she at all unconscious of the fact that she should herself be spared many hours of fatigue by this arrangement.

  But the steadfast-minded mother had what she conceived to be much higher objects in view than could be obtained in the ordinary routine of education by the assistance of a governess. She had long ceased to lament, with anything like bitterness, the fate which had given her one of the dullest men that ever lived as a husband and companion; for she had enough of practical wisdom to be aware that her happiness would have been much more effectually destroyed by a man who, with less of dullness, had a greater propensity to interfere with the opinions of his wife, and who might have interfered more fatally still with the occupation of her time.

  But although she felt that there might be qualities in a husband worse than dullness, the terrible vision, which was long the bête noir of her existence, arose from the fear that the intellect of her child might resemble that of its father.

  Her chief reason for deciding that she would herself be the instructress of the little Gertrude, arose from the conviction that so only could she be able to form a just estimate of her faculties and disposition. “Should I,” thought she, “find my spirits or my strength unequal to the task, I can resign it; but this shall not be done till I have enabled myself to form something like a correct judgment of what she is.”

  The experiment was made, and the result was most propitious in every way.

  It required no maternal partiality to convince her that, although the little girl might inherit the Schwanberg estates, it was quite impossible that she should ever give evidence of her lawful right to them by any resemblance to their present possessor.

  The fate of Madame von Schwanberg had certainly not hitherto been a happy one. She had known what it was to love, and be disappointed. She had known, too, the weariness, not to say misery, of becoming the wife of a man utterly incapable of being a companion, and yet, perhaps, not quite deserving the feeling he inspired.

  But, be this as it may, she soon discovered that her only resource against something very like despair must be sought in herself; and, fortunately, she was not long in discovering that she should not seek it in vain. The quiet baron had not the slightest objection to her exercising her own taste in the arrangement of her apartments; and if her constant additions to his fine old library had cost him thousands instead of hundreds, he would have made no sort of objection to it, for it would have caused him no inconvenience; nay, even if it had, and that his forests, or his flocks either, had been thinned to furnish what she needed, he would greatly have preferred making the sacrifice to enduring the idea that his wife, the Baroness von Schwanberg, should want anything which the most powerful of German nobles could obtain. Of course, this sort of indulgence, together with the perfectly well-founded conviction that the baron did not expect his baroness to bestow much of her company upon him, in a great degree reconciled her to her lot.

  And then, heaven graciously sent her the little Gertrude!

  Her satisfaction at the arrival of this precious treasure would have been more perfect still, had not the fears before-mentioned blended her hopes with doubts.

  The scheme she had hit upon, of being herself her little daughter’s governess, was extremely well imagined, and perfectly successful; for, before the little baroness had completed her tenth year, her mother had become very comfortably convinced that there was as little intellectual resemblance between the father and daughter as she could possibly desire; and having ascertained this important fact very completely to her satisfaction, she prayed God to forgive her for having been so very anxious about it; and also for the extreme gratification which she derived from the result of her watchful study of infant character.

  This important question being thus settled to her satisfaction, the baroness, like a good woman as she was, took care not to impede, but, on the contrary, to foster, by every rational means in her power, the growing attachment between the father and daughter.

  The little girl had her mother’s beautiful eyes, hair, and teeth, but she also, in many respects, resembled her father. Her growth, and finely-formed limbs, seemed to promise that, in a feminine degree, she would prove a worthy scion of the stately house of Schwanberg; and it was, happily, very evident also that, in the vigorous healthfulness of her constitution, she much more nearly resembled her father than her mother.

  Of this resemblance the baron was fully as conscious as his lady could be of the child’s intellectual features; and it would be difficult to say which parent was best pleased by the resemblance which each traced.

  The good baron, however, reasoned about it much less than his philosophical-minded lady. It is very possible that, sincerely as she wished that a strong mutual attachment should exist between the father and his child, she might have been less willing to see them so well pleased in each other’s society, had the resemblance between them been of an intellectual instead of a physical kind. Could she have believed that, during the many hours in which they were riding or walking together, the spirit of the child would have kindled into the same sort of eager animation, that it was the delight of her heart to witness, when she was herself the bright young creature’s only companion, a feeling of no very pleasant kind would have been the result. In short, had the father and daughter been more intellectually alike, the mother might have been less willing to see them share so many hours of exercise and amusement together.

  CHAPTER IV.

  BUT Madame de Schwanberg was not quite right in supposing that those very hours could be thus passed tête-à-tête with her father, without producing some effect upon the child’s mind, and manner of thinking. In forming this opinion, she
had forgotten that the mind of the baron had its particular hobby, as well as her own, and that her feelings of love and reverence for genius and knowledge, were neither more active nor more ardent, than his for high descent and aristocratic station. Nor did the ample stores of her library furnish more fitting materials for making her child intellectual, than the ample extent of his domain offered for rendering his heiress proud.

  And, in fact, she rode by his side, and listened to the long stories he recounted of the succession of noble ancestors who had possessed, and ruled over, these fields and forests, and indulged their subject tenants, and their favoured friends, by permitting them to join in the glorious chase, to which their magnificent extent offered such rare facilities, till the little girl certainly did begin to think that her papa was a very great man indeed.

  Nor did he permit her to remain long in ignorance of the agreeable fact, that she was destined by providence to become, in the course of time, a very great woman herself. At first, she only laughed at this, and thought he was joking; and then, when she perceived he was in earnest, she blushed, and felt half shocked, and half frightened, at the idea of becoming the ruler and the queen over so many grown-up people.

  Upon the whole, however, the idea was by no means disagreeable; and by degrees she began to wonder that her dear mamma (who must, of course, know all about her future greatness as well as her papa) had never said one single word to her on the subject. By degrees, too, this reserve became painful to her; and when she was about twelve years old, she suddenly took the resolution of asking her mother why, among all the things she taught her about what was right, and what was wrong, she never said anything as to the sort of way in which she ought to behave when she came into possession of her father’s great estates.

  “I could give you many reasons, Gertrude, for never spending any of our precious time upon such a subject,” replied her mother.