Madam

And, what was more wonderful still, from the moment when she entered Mrs. Lennox’s room at Bonport, the problem seemed to dissolve itself and flee away in unsubstantial vapor-wreaths like a mist, as if it were no problem at all. One of the earliest posts brought a black-edged letter from England, announcing the death of Mr. Blake, the second executor of Reginald Trevanion’s will, and John, with a start of half-incredulous wonder, found himself the only responsible authority in the matter. It had already been his determination to put it to the touch, to ascertain whether such a will would stand, even with the chilling doubt upon his mind that Mrs. Trevanion might not be able to explain the circumstances which involved her in suspicion. But now suddenly, miraculously, it became apparent to him that nothing need be done at all, no publicity given, no scandal made. For who was there to take upon him the odious office of reviving so odious an instrument? Who was to demand its observance? Who interfere with the matter if it dropped into contempt? The evil thing seemed to die and come to an end without any intervention. Its conditions had become a manifest impossibility—to be resisted to the death if need were; but there was no need: for had they not in a moment become no more than a dead letter? Might not this have been from the beginning, and all the misery spared? As John Trevanion looked back upon it, asking himself this question, that terrible moment in the past seemed to him like a feverish dream. No one of the actors in it had preserved his or her self-command. The horror had been so great that it had taken their faculties from them, and Madam’s sudden action, of which the reasons were only now apparent, had cut the ground from under the feet of the others, and forestalled all reasonable attempts to bring something better out of it. She had not been without blame. Her pride, too, had been in fault; her womanish haste, the precipitate measures which had made any better solution impossible. But now all that was over. Why should she die, now that everything had become clear?

The circumstances got revealed, to some extent, in Aix, among the English visitors who remained, and even to the ordinary population in a curious version, the point of the rumor being that the mysterious English lady had died with the little somnambulist in her arms, who, it was hoped for the sake of sensation, had died too. This was the rumor that reached Everard’s ears on the morning after, when he went to seek his mother in the back room she had inhabited at the hotel, and found no trace of her, but this legend to explain her absence. It had been hard to get at his heart, perhaps impossible by ordinary means; but this news struck him like a mortal blow. And his organization was not like hers. He fell prostrate under it, and it was weeks before he got better and could be removed. The hands into which this weakling fell were nerveless but gentle hands. Aunt Sophy had “taken to” him from the first, and he had always responded to her kindness. When he was able to go home she took “Grace’s boy” to her own house, where the climate was milder than at Highcourt; and by dint of a quite uncritical and undiscriminating affection, and perfect contentment with him as he was, in the virtue of his convalescence, did more to make of Edmund Everard a tolerable member of an unexacting society than his mother could ever have done. There are some natures for whose treatment it is well that their parents should be fools. It seems cruel to apply such a word to the kind but silly soul who had so much true bounty and affection in her. She and he gave each other a great deal of consolation and mutual advantage in the course of the years.

Russell had been, like Everard, incapable of supposing that the victim might die under their hands; and when all seemed to point to that certainty, the shock of shame and remorse helped to change the entire tenor of her life. She who had left the village triumphantly announcing herself as indispensable to the family and the children, could not return there in circumstances so changed. She married Mrs. Lennox’s Swiss servant in haste, and thereafter spent her life in angry repentance. She now keeps a Pension in Switzerland, where her quality of Englishwoman is supposed to attract English visitors, and lays up her gains bitterly amid “foreign ways,” which she tells any new-comer she cannot abide.

And Rosalind did what probably Mr. Ruskin’s Rosiere, tired of her seven suitors, would in most cases do—escaping from the illusions of her own imagination and from the passion which had frightened her, fell back upon the steady, faithful love which had executed no hard task for her, done no heroic deed, but only loved her persistently, pertinaciously, through all. She married Roland Hamerton some months after they all returned home. And thus this episode of family history came to an end. Probably she would have done the same without any strain of compulsion had these calamities and changes never been.