A/N:
What if the Captain, after breaking up with Elsa, waited another day or two to talk to Maria in the gazebo?
The inspiration for this chapter was a "behind the scenes" picture of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. And Jane Eyre. Again.
Disclaimer: Same as usual.
"Ex nihilo nihil fit." (Nothing comes from nothing.) Parmenides, Ancient Greek Philosopher, ca. 514 B.C.
Work is a balm, Maria had heard said more than once. And it was. After breakfast, she found herself being dragged by the children to a whirlwind of activities. It seemed they wanted to make up for their lost week together, doing everything they would have done together in seven days in just a few hours. And she let them, gladly. It kept her attention on the children, and not him and the Baroness. She only noticed them driving away sometime before lunch, but never saw them return. The Captain was certainly taking her out to lunch in some sophisticated little restaurant in town.
She headed towards the nursery after breakfast. Listening behind doors had never been a habit of hers. But she could not help it, when she realized that they were talking about their grandmother's mysterious phone call.
"… so I don't know what it was about," said Liesl. "I don't know what she said to him, but he was boiling mad. I could only hear a "this is none of your concern. I have a feeling that grandmother is coming to see us very soon."
The children began talking all at once, and Maria was about to make her presence known, but the sound of her name, spoken by Friedrich, made her stop on her tracks.
"Never mind Gromi, it is Fraülein Maria we should worry about. She is the same, and she is not at the same time," the boy remarked. "She looks…"
"Dreadful!" Maria recognized Brigitta´s voice, and had to smile. The girl never made any secret of what she thought about her convent clothes.
"It is not that, Brigitta. No one looks good in those kinds of clothes," said Louisa. "That is not the point, and you know it."
"The new dress is not as bad as that first one…" a small voice said.
"Martha is right," Liesl said. "It is not the dress, it is her. Even her voice changed. She sounds so serious now,"
"That is right, it is at least an octave lower than it used to be," Brigitta observed.
"I am happy. But I am not happy," Gretl said forlornly.
"I don't understand. How can that be? I never thought I could be so happy and so sad at the same time," Brigitta spoke again.
Unable to hear anymore, Maria burst into the room. "Happy and sad girls? Why is that?" Maria asked, trying to sound like her cheerful old self.
"She means we are happy you are back, Fraülein. But father marrying that… evil Baroness…" Louisa shuddered.
Maria sighed. Then she tried to control the timbre of her voice. "She is not evil, Louisa. A bit snobbish, maybe, but it is just… the way she was brought up to be. You can't blame her for that, as much as you can't blame me for being the way I am."
There – at least she was honest. She firmly believed what she had told the children. Maybe she should hate the Baroness, but she did not. In a way, the woman was trapped in her own world, just as Maria was.
"I still can't picture her as our mother," Liesl said forlornly. "I see her and father together, and it doesn't look like… like father and mother. Something is missing."
"You mean it is not like it was with your mother?" Maria dared to ask. Seven children nodded. "But it will never be, Liesl. No one will ever take your mother's place, either in your hearts, and, most of all, in your father's heart," she felt her chest tightening after she said that. "However, wherever your mother is, I don't think she would want to see her family unhappy, especially you children. You must at least try."
"But we will never be happy with her," Kurt said.
"Oh, you can't know that, can you, Kurt? Do you know what I think?"
"What, Fraülein?"
"I think you should give the Baroness a chance. Just like you have given me after I sat on that pine cone."
"But you were not going to marry our father; you were just going to be our governess. She is marrying father and she will become our mother!" Martha spoke up.
Brigitta´s eyes widened. "Don't you see it? Maybe that is the problem. Maybe…"
Maria interrupted, knowing, and yet not wishing to know what was in the girl's mind. "The Baroness needs time. She is not used to children, least of all children as spirited as you are. It is quite a change for her."
"But you were not used to children when you first came," Brigitta observed. "You knew nothing of being a governess, you said so yourself. And you had us all in the palm of your day in less than a day."
"Oh did I? What about the frog, the pinecone, the blue water, the spiders… and my wimple in the flagpole. Do I have it all in the right order? It took some time for the pranks to stop, for all of you to accept me."
"But you had never even been a governess before," Gretl repeated.
"Just promise me you will all try. For me."
"All right."
"I guess so."
"Yes."
They did not sound convincing, but that would have to do for the moment, Maria thought. It was the one mission left for her to accomplish in that house. To make sure the children would be all right, no matter what happened. With that thought, once more she felt more stable again.
At least for a while.
Lunch was served at the usual time, and Max was there. But, as usual, he'd rather tease the children than chat with their governess – which suited Maria perfectly, since she was still not exactly in a chatty mood, even after being cheered up by the children.
Just being with them had done wonders to her spirits. She felt lighter, and only from time to time, when she had a moment to breathe, the dark thoughts would return to him again, and she remembered...
Maria tried banish the unwelcome thoughts and tried to concentrate again on the book she picked up form the library. She had grabbed the first book from a pile Liesl had left there, only to notice, with a grimace, it was Jane Eyre.
How ironic, she sneered. Then she opened it randomly.
"You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you -- and you may mark my words -- you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current -- as I am now. "
She closed the book instantly, but Rochester's passionate words lingered in her mind. She did hear the Captain speak like that once. It was the night he had spoken to her about his wife. The night he had practically accused Maria of never actually having lived before.
Useless.
It all had been useless. She had poured her heart out to the Reverend Mother, revealed feelings that she swore she would never ever reveal to anyone, renounced her former life, and it all had been for nothing. She felt… cheated, humiliated. Ashamed. After all, what had she been thinking? Had it all happened just in her head? Had she imagined everything, in spite of what the Baroness said? Was the Captain only being kind and attentive to her, because the children loved her so? Had she been reading too many of Liesl´s discarded romantic novels so that she had began to have unrealistic expectations, based on how fictional characters behaved? Was she suffering only from a silly crush on the first handsome man who had ever smiled to her?
Maria opened the book again and this time, she looked for a specific passage.
""YOU," I said, "a favorite with Mr. Rochester? YOU gifted with the power of pleasing him? YOU of importance to him in any way? Go! your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference -- equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe! -- Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night? -- Cover your face and be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication."
Jane's anguish, which before had only the power to annoy her, and think that she was weak and whinny, now mirrored her own. Never before had those words touched her until now, and she kept on reading for a while.
"No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking, -- a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
(…) I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me."
Tears welled up in her eyes again, and Maria impulsively threw the book away. It landed on top of a shrub, and she hoped she had the energy to retrieve it later.
The best thing to do was to consider the facts only, and as objectively as she could. And the fact was, as she was reminded by her brilliant and wiser fictional counterpart, that she was merely a governess, a commoner, with not a drop of blue blood in her ancestry. She had no breeding, no education – unlike Agathe, unlike Elsa von Schraeder. And him… People like him just did not marry people like her; they did not fall in love people like her.
No, she should not think about him. Ever again, if she could help it.
The trouble was that it had been so easy to love him… How on earth was she supposed to unlove him? Before, she naïvely used to think that everything and anything that could be done could also be undone in some way or another. Close a door, open a window – you will still have a way out.
But now she had lost that certainty that had carried her through life. Some things just could not be fixed. The window had indeed been opened, but it was high, and she had fallen from it.
She remembered the words of her new found mentor, Miss Eyre, on the subject:
"I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me -- because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction -- because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her robes as she passed; who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation. I could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would soon marry this very lady -- because I read daily in her a proud security in his intentions respecting her -- because I witnessed hourly in him a style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be sought than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its very pride, irresistible."
There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair."
Maria watched the children play, wistfully. Her thoughts turned to the future.
What am I going to do now? I can't go back to the Abbey, I can't be a nun, and I can't stay here, in this house. No, I can't stay in his town, in this country. The Reverend Mother must help me, at least to find a place for me, a job. As far away as possible, somewhere where they never heard of Captain von Trapp, never heard of Salzburg… America, maybe, Africa. China. Anywhere in Europe would be too close. Are there only Buddhist monasteries or are there convents in Tibet, I wonder? Could I become a Buddhist Monk? Is there a need for European governesses in Siberia? Are there mountains in Siberia? I refuse to go anywhere without mountains.
These thoughts encouraged her. Maybe she would look for other doors and windows after all. A tiny smile came to her lips, as Liesl, Louisa and Brigitta approached her. They sat around her, in a protective circle.
"Fraülein Maria, what is wrong?"
"Hummm?"
"You were smiling right now, but it was such a sad smile," Brigitta observed.
"There is nothing wrong, girls, all is going to be just fine."
"Yes, now that you are back. But we've never seen you look so… gloomy."
"You nearly cried at breakfast," Brigitta remarked. "We all saw. Even father."
"He did?" she asked, not quite realizing she had said the words aloud. "I was… I was touched by the gift you left me. The note with the pine cone."
"Don't even get us started on father, he's been acting funny too."
"Do you miss the Abbey again already?" Louisa asked.
"No, I…" she could not tell them, not now, that she was not going to stay for good, on the contrary. She decided to stay as close to the truth as possible, without revealing too much. "I don't miss the convent anymore. I was thinking about something the Reverend Mother used to say to me."
"What?"
"When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window," she quoted.
"That is beautiful, Fraülein. But then what do you look like you don't believe it anymore?" Liesl insisted.
Because I don't, she wanted to answer truthfully. Instead, she said, trying to stay closer to the truth as possible. "Because she forgot to tell me that sometimes someone comes and closes that window just a second before you reach it."
"Is it closed now?" Brigitta asked, not quite grasping the fact that they were speaking through metaphors.
"Practically!"
"Well, open it!" suggests Louisa vehemently.
"I can't, it is too… too high."
"Jump." Brigitta suggests. "Kick it open. Break it."
"I'm not strong enough."
"We'll help."
"I wish you children could help, but…" The others approached them and asked what that was all about.
"Fraülein Maria has to open a window that is locked and does not know how to," Brigitta says, puzzled, and still trying to make sense of the words, wondering what it all meant. "In any case, we must help her."
The little one begin offering their suggestions and asking questions, all at the same time.
"I know, I know!"
"How is this window?"
"Is it a big lock?"
"Where is it?"
"Father could open it for you. He is very strong."
"Or Uncle Max!"
"Uncle Max can't even open his own wine, you silly!"
The Captain chose that moment to arrive.
A/N: All quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.