Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood

“No, Babie is left with Mrs. Evelyn.”

“So poor little Elvira came safe home?”

“Yes, and is Mrs. Allen Brownlow. Poor child, you rescued her from a sad fate. She believed to the last you were coming with her, and she lost your note, or you would have heard from us sooner.”

Janet went on asking questions about the others. Her mother dreaded to put any, and only replied. Janet asked where they had been living, and she answered:

“In the old house, while the two Johns have been studying medicine.”

“Not Lucas?” cried Janet, sitting upright in her surprise.

“Yes, Lucas. The dear fellow gave up all his prospects in the army, because he thought it would be more helpful to me for him to take this line, and he has passed so well, Janet. He has got the silver medal, and his essay was the prize one.”

“And—” Janet stood up and walked to the window, as she said “and you have told him—”

“Yes. But, Janet, it was too late. Some hints of your father’s had been followed up, and the main discovery worked out, though not perfected.”

Janet’s eyes glistened for a moment as they used to do in angry excitement, and she asked, “Could he bear it?”

“He was chiefly concerned lest I should be disappointed. Then he reminded me that the benefit to mankind had come all the sooner.”

“Ah!” said Janet with a gasp, “there’s the difference!” She did not explain further, but said, “It has not poisoned his life!”

Then seeking in her bag, she took out a packet. “I wish you to know all about it, mother,” she said. “I wrote this to send home by Elvira, but then my heart failed me. It was well, since she lost my note. I kept it, and when I did not hear from you, I thought I would leave it to be posted when all was over with me. I should like you to read it, and I will tell you anything else you like to know.”

There came the interruption of the hotel luncheon, after which a room was engaged for Janet, and the use of a private parlour secured for the afternoon and evening. Jock came and went. He was very much excited about the frightful reports he heard of the ravages of yellow fever in the south, and went in search of medical papers and reports. Janet directed him where to seek them. “I was just starting to offer myself as an attendant,” she said. “I shall still go, to-morrow.”

“You? Oh, Janet, not now!” was her mother’s first exclamation.

“You will understand when you have read,” quietly said Janet.

All that afternoon, according to her manifest wish, her mother was reading that confession of hers, while she sat by replying to each question or comment, in the repose of a confidence such as had not existed for fifteen years.

“Magnum Bonum,” wrote Janet. “So my father named it. Alas! it has been Magnum Malum to me. I have thought over how the evil began. I think it must have been when I brooded over the words I caught at my father’s death-bed, instead of confessing to my mother that I had overheard them. It might be reserve and dread of her grief, but it was not wholly so. I did not respect her as I ought in my childish conceit. I was an old-fashioned girl. Grandmamma treated her like a petted eldest child, and I had not learnt to look up to her with any loyalty. My uncle and aunt too, even while seeming to uphold her authority, betrayed how cheaply they held her.”

“No wonder,” said Caroline. “I was a very foolish creature then.”

“I saw you differently too late,” said Janet. “Thus unchecked by any sober word, my imagination went on dwelling on those words, which represented to me an arcanum as wonderful as any elixir of life that alchemists dream of, and I was always figuring to myself the honour and glory of the discovery, and fretting that it was destined to one of my brothers rather than myself. Even then, I had some notion of excelling them, and fretted at our residence at Kenminster because I was cut off from classes and lectures. Then came the fortune, and I saw at the first glance that wealth would hinder all the others, even Robert, from attempting to fulfil the conditions, and I imagined myself persevering and winning the day. As to the concealment of the will, I can honestly say that, to my inexperienced fancy, it appeared utterly unlike my father’s and grandmother’s, and at the moment I hid it, I only thought of the disturbance and discomfort, which scruples of my mother’s would create, and the unpleasantness it would make with Elvira, with whom I had just been quarrelling. When as I grew older, and found the validity of wills did not depend on the paper they were written upon, I had qualms which I lulled by thinking that when my education was safe, and Elvira safely married to Allen, I would look again and then bring it to light, if needful. My mother’s refusal to commit the secret to me on any terms entirely alienated me, I am grieved to say. I have learnt since that she was quite right, and that she could not help it. It was only my ignorance that rebelled; but I was enraged enough to have produced the will, and perhaps should have done so, if I had not been afraid both of losing my own medical training, and of causing Robert to take up that line, in which I knew he could succeed better than anyone.”

“Janet, this must be fancy!”

“No, mother. There’s no poison like a blessing turned into a curse. This is the secret history of what made me such a disagreeable, morose girl.

“Then came the opportunity that enabled me to glance at the book of my father’s notes. Barbara’s eyes made me lock the desk in haste and confusion. It was really and truly accident that I locked the book out instead of in. As you know, Barbara hid away the davenport, and I could not restore the book, when I had pored over it half the night, and found myself quite incompetent to understand the details, though I perceived the main drift. I durst not take the book out of the house, and the loss of my keys cut me off from access to it. Meantime I studied, and came to the perception that a woman alone could never carry out the needful experiments, I must have a man to help me, but I was too much warped by this time to see how my mother was thus justified. I still looked on her as insanely depriving me of my glory, the world of the benefit for a mere narrow scruple. Then I fell in with Demetrius Hermann. How can I tell the story? How he seemed to me the wisest and acutest of human beings, the very man to assist in the discovery, and how I betrayed to him enough by my questions to make him think me a prize, both for my secret and my fortune. He says I deceived him. Perhaps I did. Any way, we are quits. No, not quite, for I loved him as I should not have thought it in me to love anyone, and the very joy and gladness of the sensation made me see with his eyes, or else be preposterously blind. I think his southern imagination made his expectations of the secret unreasonable, and I followed his bidding blindly and implicitly in my two attempts to bring off Magnum Bonum, which I had come to believe my right, unjustly withheld from me. The second attempt, as you know, ended in the general crash.

“Afterwards, all the overtures were made by my husband. I would not share in them. I was too proud and would not come as a beggar, or see him threaten and cringe as unhappily I knew he could do, nor would I be seen by my mother or brothers. I knew they would begin to pity me, and I could not brook that. My mother’s assurance of exposure, if he made any use of the stolen secret, made Demetrius choose to go to America.

“He said it all came out before my military brother. Did that change Lucas’s destination?” said Janet, looking up.

“Ask him?”

“No, indeed,” said Jock, when he understood. “I turned doctor as the readiest way of looking after mother.”

“Did you understand nothing?”

“Only that she had some memoranda of my father’s, that the sc– that Hermann wanted. I never thought of them again till she told me.”

Mrs. Brownlow started at the next few words.

“My child was born only two days after we landed at New York.”

But a quick interrogative glance kept her silent. “She was very small and delicate, and her father was impatient both of her weakness and mine. I think that was when I began to long for my mother. He made me call her Glykera, after his mother. I had taught him to be bitter against mine.”

“O mother, if you could have seen her,” suddenly exclaimed Janet, “she was the dearest little thing,” and she drew from her bosom a locket with a baby face on one side, and some soft hair on the other, put it into her mother’s hand and hid her face on her shoulder.

“Oh! my poor Janet, you have suffered indeed! How long did you keep the little darling?”

“Two years. You will hear! I was not quite wretched while I had her. Go on, mother. There’s no talking of it.”

“We tried both practising and lecturing, feeling our way meantime towards the Magnum Bonum. We found, however, in the larger cities that people were quite as careful about qualifications as at home, and that we wanted recommendations. I could have got some practice among women if Demetrius would have rested long enough anywhere, but he liked lecturing best. I had been obliged to perceive that he had very little real science, and indeed I had to give him the facts and he put them in his flowery language. While as to Magnum Bonum, he had gained enough to use it in a kind of haphazard way, for everything. I trembled at what he began doing with it, when in the course of our wanderings we got out of the more established regions into the south-west. In Texas we found a new township, called Burkeville, without a resident medical man, and the fame of his lectures had gone far enough for him to be accepted. There we set up our staff, and Demetrius—it makes me sick to say so—tried to establish himself as the possessor of a new and certain cure. I was persuaded that he did not know how to manage it, I tried to make him understand that under certain conditions it might be fatal, but he thought I was jealous. He had had one or two remarkable successes, his fame was spreading, he was getting reckless, and I could not watch as carefully as I sometimes did, for my child was ill, and needed all my care. The favourite of all the parish was the minister’s daughter, a beautiful, lively, delicate girl, loved and followed like a sort of queen by the young men, of whom there were many, while there were hardly any other young women, none to compare with her. Demetrius had lost some patients, it was a sickly season, and I fancy there was some mistrust and exasperation against him already, for he was incompetent, and grew more averse to consulting me when his knowledge was at fault. I need not blame him. Everyone at home knows that I do not always make myself agreeable, and I had enough to exacerbate me, with my child pining in the unhealthy climate, and my father’s precious secret used with the rough ignorance of an empiric. I knew enough of the case of this Annie Field to be sure that there were features in it which would make that form of treatment dangerous. I tried to make him understand. He thought me jealous of his being called in rather than myself. Well—she died, and such a storm of vengeance arose as is possible in those lawless parts. I knew and heeded nothing of it, for my little Glykera was worse every day, and I thought of nothing else, but it seems that reports unfavourable to us had come from some one of the cities where we had tried to settle, and thus grief and rage had almost maddened one of Annie’s lovers, a young man of Irish blood, a leader among the rest. On the day of her funeral all the ruffianism in the place was up in arms against us. My husband had warning, I suppose, for I never saw or heard of him since he went out that morning, leaving me with my little one moaning on my lap. She was growing worse every hour, and I knew nothing else, till my door was burst open by a little boy of eight or ten years old, crying out, ‘Mrs. Hermann, Mrs. Hermann, quick, they are coming to lynch you! come away, bring the baby. If father can’t stop them, there’s no place safe but our house.’

“And indeed upon the air came the sound of a great, horrible, yelling roar unspeakably dreadful. It seems never to have been out of my ears since. I do not know whether an American mob would have proceeded to extremities with a lonely woman and dying child, but there was an Irish and Spanish element of ferocity at Burkeville, and the cold, hard Englishwoman was unpopular, besides that, I was supposed to share in the irregular practice that had had such fatal effects. But with that horrible sound, one did not stop to weigh probabilities. I gathered up my child in her bed-clothes, and followed the boy out at the back door, blindly. And where do you think I found myself? where but in the minister’s house? His wife, whose daughter had just been carried out to her grave, rose up from weeping and praying, to take me into the innermost chamber, where none could see me, and when she saw my darling’s state, to give me all the help and sympathy a good woman could. Oh! that was my first true knowledge of Christian charity.

“Mr. Field himself was striving at the very grave itself to turn away the rage of these men against those whom they held his daughter’s murderers, but he was as nothing against some fifty or sixty gathered, I suppose, some by real or fancied wrongs, some from mere love of violence. Any way, when he found himself powerless against the infuriated speeches of the young Irish lover, he put his little boy over the graveyard wall, and sent him off to take me to the last place where the mob would look for me, the very room where Annie died. Those howls and yells round the empty house, perhaps, too, the shaking of my rapid run, hastened the end with my precious child. I do not believe she could have lived many hours, but the fright brought on shudderings and convulsions, and she was gone from me by nine that evening. They might have torn me to pieces then, and I would have thanked them! I cannot tell you the goodness of the Fields. It could not comfort me then, but I have wondered over it often since.” (There were blistered, blotted tear marks here.) “They knew it was not safe for me to remain, for there had been wild talk of a warrant out against us for manslaughter. They would have had me leave my little darling’s form to their care, but they saw I dreaded (unreasonably I now think) some insult from those ruffians for her father’s sake. Mr. Field said I should lay my little one to her rest myself. They found a long basket like a cradle. We laid her there in her own night-dress, looking so sweet and lovely. Mr. Field himself went out and dug the little grave, close to Annie’s, and there by moonlight we laid her, and the good man put one of the many wreaths from Annie’s grave upon hers, and there we knelt and he prayed. I don’t know what denomination his may be, but a Christian I know he is. Cruel as the very sight of me must have been, they kept me in bed all the next day; and the minister went to see what he could save for me. Finding no one, the mob had wreaked their vengeance on our medicine bottles and glasses, smashed everything, and made terrible havoc of all our books, clothes and furniture. Almost the only thing Mr. Field had found unhurt was mother’s little Greek Testament, which I had carried about, but utterly neglected till then. Mr. Field saw my name in it, brought it to me, and kindly said he was glad to restore it; none could be utterly desolate whose study lay there. I was obliged to tell him how you had sent it after me with that entreaty, which I had utterly neglected, and you can guess how he urged it on me.”

“You have gone on now,” said her mother, looking up at her.

Janet’s reply was to produce the little book from her handbag, showing marks of service, and then to open it at the fly leaf. There Caroline herself had written “Janet Hermann,” with the reference to St. Luke xv. 20. She had not dared to write more fully, but the good minister of Burkeville had, at Janet’s desire, put his own initials, and likewise written in full:

“Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears, for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord, and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord, that thy children shall come again to their own border.”

“He might have written it for me,” said Caroline. “My child—one at least is come to me.”

“Or you have gone into her far country to seek her,” said Janet.

“Can I write to this good man?” asked Caroline. “I do long to thank him.”

“O yes. I wrote to him only the day before yesterday.”

There was but little more of the narrative. “At night he borrowed a waggon, and drove me to a station in time to take the early train for the north-east, supplying me with means for the journey, and giving me a letter to a family relation of his, in New York State. I was most kindly sheltered there for a few days while I looked out for advertisements. I found, however, that I must change my name, for the history of the Burkeville affair was copied into all the papers, and there were warnings against the two impostors, giving my maiden name likewise, as that in which my Zurich diploma had been made out. This cut me off from all medical employment, and I had to think what else I could do, not that I cared much what became of me. Seeing a notice that an assistant was wanted to colour and finish photographs, I thought my drawing, though only schoolroom work, might serve. I applied, showed specimens, and was thought satisfactory. I sent my address to Mr. Field, who had promised to let me know in case my husband made any attempt to trace me, or if I could find my way back to him, but up to this time I have heard absolutely nothing. The few white days in my life are, however, when I get a cheering, comforting letter from him. How I should once have laughed their phraseology to scorn, but then I did not know what reality meant, and they are the only balm of my life now, except mother’s little book, and what they have led me to.

“But you see why I cannot come with Elvira. Not only do I not dare to meet my mother, but it might bring down upon her one whom she could not welcome. Besides, it is clearly fit that I should strive to meet him again; I would try to be less provoking to him now.”

“I see, my dear,” said Caroline. “But why did you never draw on Mr. Wakefield all this time?”

“I never thought we ought to take that money,” said Janet. “I could maintain myself, and that was all I wanted. Besides I was ashamed to bid him use a false name, and I durst not receive a letter under my own, nor did I know whether Demetrius might go on applying.”

“He did once, saying that you were unwell, but Mr. Wakefield declined to let him be supplied with out your signature.”