You talk of bringing Mary and me together again. Would it answer, I wonder? Sentiment is one thing, but practicability is another. Having told you that I loved Mary, I have said all that either woman or man can say. Likings change and alter, but love is for ever. Yet, whether we could live together, whether she could trust me, whether she would understand the past, and feel how little I wished or intended to interfere with her, I cannot tell; unless she could, it would almost be better to leave us as we are. So long as a woman is young, as Mary is, it is doubtful and dangerous, I am afraid, to try any relationships but those that are quite natural. She is with you, you dearest, kind friend, as if she were your own child. You can do her nothing but good; but I am not so very much older than she is. I am older—centuries older—but not to outward appearance; and can you not suppose a state of things in which the last chapter of our lives might be, one way or other, repeated again? I say this not with any sort of vanity, Heaven knows, but with fear and trembling. For I should be happier with her—far happier—but not if she came to me with a single doubt in her mind, a single thought which was uncertain or suspicious. Do not tell her this one difficulty which seems to me to stand in our way, but judge for us both what is best. I want her for myself and for my boy.We belong to each other, and no one else in the world belongs to us. How often I long for her when I am sitting alone! How many things I have in my mind to say to her! But not unless it would be well for her, to whom anything may happen. Nothing that I know of, except through her or my baby, can now happen to me.
IWILL not enter into all the particulars of our discussion after this, for time would fail me. The last part of Mary’s letter, which she said was not to be shown to me, made me angry. I thought it was vanity on her part to be afraid of interfering with me again. “In what way?” I could not but ask, and that sharply; how could the last chapter of our lives be repeated? Mrs Tufnell only smoothed my hair and soothed me, and called me “dear” and “darling,” but would give no explanation. “What does she mean?” I asked. “Oh, she means, my love—probably she means nothing. It is just a way of talking that people fall into,” said my old lady. I knew this was said simply to quiet me, but on the whole perhaps I preferred it to anything more definite; and, after a time, I allowed myself to be persuaded to pay my stepmother a visit. What a strange journey into the past it seemed! and yet actually we went far away from the scene of the past, into a place so new and unknown to me, that it could awaken no associations. We drove in the comfortable old fly, with the old sleek horse and the old fat man, which was as good as Mrs Tufnell’s private carriage. She did not keep a carriage ofher own, but I am sure this fly, in which she drove every day of her life except when she was ill, cost her more than a carriage would have done. She was very apologetic about it always. “I could not undertake the responsibility of a carriage,” she would say; “horses are always getting ill, and your coachman drinks, or he gets into trouble with the maids, or something. Old Groombridge and his fly suit me quite well. No, he is not an old rogue. I have to pay him, of course, for all his trouble, and for the loss of customers, and so forth. You know, Mary, he always suits himself to my convenience at whatever sacrifice——”
This was her idea, and nothing would convince her otherwise. So we drove in Groombridge’s old fly—which was one of the most expensive vehicles in town—out Hampstead way, but past all the houses, past everything, till we came to new houses again, and skeleton roads and villas growing up like mushrooms, in one of those long straggling arms that London puts out into the country. I had got excited so often thinking that we must be quite close upon the place, that at last I ceased to be excited, and felt as if we had set out upon a hopeless circle, and were going to wind in and out and round and round, till we worked back to the point from which we started. How dreary they look, those new places—roads newly laid out, breaking in upon the fields, which somehow look so superior, so desecrated, and vulgarised by those new muddylines with the unnecessary kerbstones; and then all the half-built houses, each one uglier than the other, with their bow-windows, all made by the gross (I suppose), and their thin little walls that the wind whistles through, and even their monotonous attempt at irregularity. A steady, solid row which is very ugly and nothing more, is endurable. I was saying this, when suddenly the fly made a sharp turn, and immediately the villas and the kerbstones became invisible. We had got within a mossy wall, through a large old-fashioned gate. There was an avenue, not very long nor very grand, but still an avenue, with odd old trees all gnarled and mossed over, and I suppose in a very bad condition, but still old, and trees—trees which our grandfathers might have walked under. The house was an old red-brick house, very dark red, and covered with little brown and yellow lichens. It was neat, but yet one could see it was in want of repair, and looked like a poor lady in a faded gown and mended lace by the side of the fine shop-people in silk and satin. It was a winter day—a very still and bright one. The shadows of all the leafless trees made a network upon the brown gravel path. The old house seemed to be basking, warming itself in the sun. There were a great many twinkling windows, but not a creature to be seen except one little child on the white step of the deep doorway. There was a porch, and probably his nurse was there, but the little fellow wasstanding out in the sun, cracking a little whip he had, with his hair shining in the bright light, and his little face like an apple-blossom. He was shouting out some baby nonsense at the top of his voice. He did not care for us, nor for anyone. He was the monarch of all—quite alone in his kingdom, independent of everybody.
“Who do you think that is, Mary?” said Mrs Tufnell, taking my hand suddenly, as I looked out laughing and amused by him. Good heavens! I had never once thought. I fell back into my corner and began to cry, I cannot tell why. Of course I knew at once whom it must be.
And thenshecame, not in the least altered, kissing me just as if we had parted yesterday. But she was agitated, though she tried not to show it. She took the little boy and brought him to me, and thrust him into my arms without a word, and her lip quivered, and for some minutes she could not say anything. The meeting was hard altogether. When the thing that sundered you is too far off to be talked about, and when everybody counsels you to avoid explanations and go on again as if nothing had happened, it is very hard; you may succeed in uniting the old strands and twisting them together once more, but it is perhaps more likely that you will fail. We went into Mary’s new home, and saw the lady who was the head of the school. It was holiday time—the Christmas holidays—and they were alone. This lady was middle-aged, olderthan Mary, but not so old as Mrs Tufnell. She was an unmarried woman, and I could at once understand what Mary had said, that her very name and her widow’s cap told for something in the place. But what was most evident of all was that little Jack was the sovereign of Grove House. Whatever anybody might do or say, he was supreme. Miss Robinson was fond of his mother, and “appreciated” her, as she told us; but little Jack was the monarch, and did what he pleased.
Our visit was, as people say, quite successful. It went off perfectly well—we kissed when we met and when we parted—we had a great deal to say to each other of what had passed since we met—and there was little Jack to make acquaintance with, and a great many of his wonderful adventures to be told of. Mrs Tufnell came away with the thought that it had been a great success, and that henceforward nothing more was wanted—that Mary and I would be one again.
But Mary and I felt differently. I did, at least, and I am sure so did she. You cannot mend a rent so easily. Such a rent—a rent that had lasted more than five years—how can it be drawn together again by any hasty needle and thread like a thing done yesterday? We parted friends, with promises to meet again; but with hearts, oh! so much more apart from each other than they had been an hour before! An hour before we met Ihad all sorts of vague hopes in my mind—vague feelings that she would understand me, that I should understand her—vague yearnings towards the old union which was almost perfect. Did you ever see the great glass screen they have in some houses to shield you from the heat of the fire? You can see the cheerful blaze through it, but you feel nothing. Something of the kind was between Mary and me. We saw through it as well as ever, and seemed, to enjoy the pleasant warmth; but no other sensation followed, only the chill of a disappointment. I felt that she was now nothing, nothing to me; and I—I cannot tell how I seemed to her. We had the old habit suddenly brought to life and put on again, but none of the old meaning. We were like mummers trying to make ourselves out to be heroines of the past, but knowing we were not and never could be what we appeared. I was very silent during our drive home I did not know what to say to my dear old lady. She looked very fragile with her pretty rose-cheeks, lying back in the corner of the fly; she was fatigued, and in the daylight I suddenly woke up to see that she did look very fragile. I had not believed in it before. And how could I vex her by telling her of my disappointment? I could not do it; she was pleased and happy; she held my hand, and nodded to me and said: “Now you see you are not so much alone as youthought you were. Now you see you have friends who belong to you.” How could I have had the heart to say otherwise—to say I had found out that we were separated for ever, Mary and I?
That evening, however, after tea, she began to talk to me very seriously. We were sitting over the fire—she on her favourite sofa, I on a low chair near her. The firelight kept dancing about, lighting up the room fitfully. It was a large room. We had some candles on the mantel-piece, which shone, reflected in the great mirror, as if from some dim, deep chamber opening off this one; but it was really the firelight that lighted the room. I had been singing to her, and I half thought she had been asleep, when suddenly she roused up all at once, and sat upright in her little prim way.
“I want to speak to you, Mary,” she said; and then, after a pause—“You think I meant nothing but love and kindness when I took you to see Mrs Peveril to-day; but I am a scheming, wicked old woman, Mary. I had more than that in my mind.”
I was a little, but only a little, startled by this: I knew her way. I looked up at her, smiling. “You are so designing,” I said; “I might have known there was something underneath. You are going to ask them to spend the rest of their holidays here?”
“That if you like,” she said brightly, encouraged,I could see, by my tone; “but more than that, Mary; more than that.”
I was not curious. I looked with an indolent amusement at the shining of the firelight and the reflection in the mirror of the flame of the candles, which shone out of its surface without seeming to move the dark ruddy gloom beyond. A glass is always an inscrutable, wonderful thing, like an opening into the unseen: it was especially so that night.
“Mary,” Mrs Tufnell resumed, with a voice that faltered, I could not tell why; “do you remember when I first spoke to you of Mrs Peveril—when I was ill?—and what I said?”
“Yes,” I answered, with sudden alarm, looking up at her. “You don’t feel ill now?”
“No, but I have got a shake,” she said. “When a woman at my time of life is ill, though it may seem to pass quite away, it always leaves a something. I shall never be as strong as I have been, my dear child. I feel I have got a shake. My life has come to be like the late leaves on the top of a tree. They may last through many gales, but the first gust may blow them off. I cannot feel sure for a day.”
I went close up to her in my fright, and knelt down by the sofa, and put my arms round her. “Do not speak so,” I said; “you could not leave me? What could I do without you? I am not an orphan as long as I have you. You cannot have the heart——”
“Oh, Mary! hush; don’t overwhelm me. It was of that I wanted to speak. I shall live as long as I can, for your sake. But, dear, old people cannot stay always, however much they may be wanted. I have been thinking of it a great deal, and there is a proposal I have to make to you—with Mrs Peveril’s consent, Mary. You must listen to all I have to say.”
“Oh, you have consulted Mrs Peveril!” said I; and I got up, feeling my heart grow chill and sore, and went back to my seat to hear what was to be said to me. In the depths of my heart I must have been jealous of her still. It came all back upon me like a flood. My dear old lady gave me a grieved look, but she did not stop to explain. She went quickly on with what she had to say:—
“Grove House is a nice old-fashioned house, and cheap, and they have a good list of scholars; and Miss Robinson would be glad to retire, and would not ask very much for the furniture and things; and Mrs Peveril is so much liked by everybody. I have always set apart as much as I thought was right of my little property, intending it for you, Mary——”
“Don’t!” I cried, in a voice so shrill and sharp that it startled even myself who spoke.
“It is not very much,” she went on, “but it is all I can give away, and my whole heart has been set upon doing something for you with this money that would make you independent. My dear Mary,I am half afraid you don’t like the thought, you are so silent. I had thought of buying Grove House for Mrs Peveril and you.”
“For Mrs Peveril and me!”
“Yes—don’t you like the idea, Mary?—don’t you like the idea? I thought it was something that would please you so much. You have always said you liked teaching, and it would be a living for you, dear, and a home when I am gone. I have so wished to make these arrangements for you, Mary——”
“Is it all settled?” I said.
“Nothing could be settled without your consent. All that I want is your good. I could not leave you, could I, at your age, without anyone to stand by you, without a home to go to, without a friend——”
Thus she apologised to me for those kind, tender plans of hers; and I sat like a clod, feeling that I could not reply. I was dull and heavy and miserable; not grateful, yet feeling how grateful I ought to be; understanding her, yet not owning even to myself that I understood her. It was not a very great destiny that was thus allotted to me, but that was not what I was thinking. My mind did not revolt against the idea of being the mistress of a school; which was a natural lot enough. To tell the truth, I cannot quite say what it was that gave me so miserable a feeling. Here was my life marked out for me; there was neverto be any change in it; no alteration for the brighter or better occurred to this dear old woman who loved me. She wanted to make sure I should have daily bread and a roof to shelter me, and some sort of companionship. How right she was! How good and how kind! and yet, oh, how dreary, how unutterably blank and hopeless seemed the prospect! I felt this with a dull fighting and struggle of the two things in me—wanting to please her by looking pleased, feeling how good she was, and how kind, how just, how suitable was the arrangement. I felt all this in a kind of way, and then I felt the struggle not to be wildly angry, not to burst out and ask her how she could think of condemning me so—for my life?
She was grieved and disappointed at the way I received her proposal, but she was so good that she took no notice, but kissed me, and said nothing should be done or thought of against my consent. For my part my heart was so heavy and dull that I could not even thank her for her kindness; but I hung about her when she went to bed, and held her fast in a speechless way that she understood, I think, though I said nothing. She cried; she looked at me with her kind old eyes full of tears. “Oh, Mary,” she said, “don’t break my heart! If I could live for ever and go on always taking care of you, don’t you think I would do it, for your sake and yourfather’s too? But I cannot. One must die when one’s time comes, however much one may be wanted: and I must provide for that.”
“Oh, why can’t I provide for it?” I cried. “Why can’t I die too? That would be the best way.”
And then she was angry—half angry—as much as it was in her nature to be. And presently I found myself alone, and had to sit down and think it over, and make up my mind to it, as one has so often to do in this life. I had to teach myself to see how good it was. And I did. I made up my mind to it. What was there else in heaven or earth—as I could not die with my only friend, or compel her to live, what was there else that I could do?
NEXT morning when I woke, the impression on my mind was, that Mrs Tufnell must have died in the night. I cannot tell why I thought so, but I woke with such a horror in my mind, that I threw a shawl over my shoulders and rushed to her door to ask how she was, before I could take breath. She was not up; but smiled at me from her bed, where she lay with all the pictures and the portraits of her friends about her, the centre of a silent company. “I am quite well—better than usual,” she said; but I think she knew the meaning of my terror, and felt that after all that had been said it was natural I should be afraid. This perhaps threw just a little cloud upon her serenity too, during the morning, for however calmly one may think of dying, I suppose it must startle one to see that others are thinking of it. I suppose so—it seems natural. She was very grave, thoughtful, and somewhat silent during the forenoon; and when I went and sat down by her, and asked her to forgive me, and said I was ready to do whatever she thought best, she took me into her arms and cried and kissed me. “Oh, that it should be necessary to change!” she said. “I do not feelas if I could face the change—but, Mary, for your good——”
It was about noon as we thus sat talking it over. It comforted me to see that she liked it as little as I did; that she would rather have kept me with her to the last moment of her life. But then what should I have done?—this was what she thought of. We were talking it all over very seriously, with more pain than either of us would show. It was a chilly winter morning. The room was bright, to be sure, with a good fire burning, and all the comforts that so many poor people are without; but there was a chill that went to one’s heart—the chill of the grave for her, which she thought near; and the chill of the outside world, from which she had sheltered me so long, for me. I remember the look of that morning—there was a black frost outside which bound all the dry street, and seemed to hold the naked trees in the square so fast that they dared not rustle, though an icy wind was blowing through them. There were traces still on the windows, notwithstanding the fire, of the frosty network of the night. The sun had begun to shine as it approached noon, but even the sun was white and cold, and seemed rather to point out how chilly the world was, than to warm it. After we had got through all our explanations and said all that was to be said, and arranged that Mary was to be invited to the Square with her child to spend a week of the holidays and arrange everything, westill kept sitting together holding each other’s hands, not saying much. I could not pretend that I liked it even to please her, and she did not like it, though she thought it right; but all the same it was settled, and there was nothing more to say.
It was all settled by twelve o’clock, fixed and decided with that double certainty which is given by pain. If we had liked it we should not have felt half so sure. At half-past twelve the mid-day post came in, and I was still sitting by my dear old lady, holding her hand, feeling my heart sink lower and lower every moment, thinking how I should have to leave her when she wanted me most—when Mrs Tufnell’s maid came in with the letters. She gave some to her mistress, and she gave one to me. I do not think I recognised the writing at first. But I got few letters, and it gave me a little thrill of agitation, I could not quite tell why. It was a foreign letter, with a number of unintelligible postmarks. I got up and went to the window, partly because my heart began to beat very loud, and partly to leave Mrs Tufnell at liberty to read her letters. I recollect looking out unconsciously and seeing the dried-up, dusty, frosty look of everything, the ice-wind sweeping the dust round the corners, the bare shivering trees—with a momentary thrill of sensation that my life was like that, dried-up, frost-bound, for ever and ever. And then, with my fingers trembling and my heart beating, and a consciousness of something coming, Icould not tell what, I opened the envelope and found—— This was what I found; without any preface or introduction—without anything to soften the difference between what was before my eyes and what was going to be.
There was no beginning to the letter; there were a good many blots in it, as if it had been written with a hand which was not very steady. There was not even a date until the end. He who had written it had been as much agitated as she who read it; and she who read it did so as in a dream, not knowing where she was standing, feeling the world and the white curtains and the frosty square to be going round and round with her, making a buzzing in her ears and a thumping against her breast.
What a plunge into a new world—into an old world—into a world not realised, not possible, and yet so strange in its fascination, so bewildering! Was it a dream—or could it be true?
“I have long wanted, and often tried, to write to you again. I do not know now whether I may or whether I ought. If this letter should come to another man’s wife, if it should fall into your hands in such changed circumstances that you will scarcely remember the writer’s name—and I cannot hide from myself that all this may be the case—then forgive me, Mary, and put it in the fire without further thought. It will not be for you, inyour new life, but for someone else whom you will have forgotten, though I can never forget her. But if you are still little Mary Peveril as you used to be, oh, read it! and try to throw your thoughts back to the time when you knew me—when we used to meet. You were not much more than a child. How much I have thought of that time; how often and often I have gone over it in my thoughts I need not tell you. You were badly used, dear Mary. I was wrong—I will say it humbly on my knees if you like: having got your promise and your heart—for I did have that, if only for a little while—nothing could have justified me in appearing for one moment to place you otherwise than first in all I did or said. I will not excuse myself by saying how much startled I was by the sight of Miss Martindale, nor how anxious I was to know whether my mother had any share, or what share she had, in her disappearance from our house. I will say nothing about all that, but only that I was wrong, wrong without any excuse. Had I thought of what I was risking by my curiosity, I would have bitten my tongue out sooner than have asked a single question. Do you think, could you think, that I would have sacrificed you to the old foolish business which was over years before? I was an utter fool, I allow, but not such a fool as that. Therefore, Mary dear, dearest, whom I have always thought of, listen to me again; take me back again! I will beg your pardon a hundredand a thousand times. I will humbly do whatever penance you may appoint me; but listen to me now. You would not listen to me at first—and perhaps I was not so ready at first to acknowledge how wrong I was. I have had five long years to think of it, and I see it all. You were rightly angry, dear, and I was wrong; and if ever man repented, I have repented. Mary, Mary! take me back!“I have been wandering about the world all this time, working and doing well enough. I can offer you something better now than the little cottage we once spoke of, though that would have been Paradise. I am leaving along with this letter, and hope to arrive in England almost as soon. I do not ask you to write—unless indeed you would, of your own sweet kindness—one word—to Chester Street? But even if you don’t do that, I will go to Russell Square in the hope of finding you. Mary! don’t break my heart. You liked me once. If I knew what to say that would move you, I would make this letter miles long; but I don’t know what more to say, except that I love you better than ever, and no one but you; and that I am coming back to England for you, for you only—half hopeless, only determined to try once more. Perhaps by the time you have read this I may be at your door.“Ever and ever yours,“George Durham.”
“I have long wanted, and often tried, to write to you again. I do not know now whether I may or whether I ought. If this letter should come to another man’s wife, if it should fall into your hands in such changed circumstances that you will scarcely remember the writer’s name—and I cannot hide from myself that all this may be the case—then forgive me, Mary, and put it in the fire without further thought. It will not be for you, inyour new life, but for someone else whom you will have forgotten, though I can never forget her. But if you are still little Mary Peveril as you used to be, oh, read it! and try to throw your thoughts back to the time when you knew me—when we used to meet. You were not much more than a child. How much I have thought of that time; how often and often I have gone over it in my thoughts I need not tell you. You were badly used, dear Mary. I was wrong—I will say it humbly on my knees if you like: having got your promise and your heart—for I did have that, if only for a little while—nothing could have justified me in appearing for one moment to place you otherwise than first in all I did or said. I will not excuse myself by saying how much startled I was by the sight of Miss Martindale, nor how anxious I was to know whether my mother had any share, or what share she had, in her disappearance from our house. I will say nothing about all that, but only that I was wrong, wrong without any excuse. Had I thought of what I was risking by my curiosity, I would have bitten my tongue out sooner than have asked a single question. Do you think, could you think, that I would have sacrificed you to the old foolish business which was over years before? I was an utter fool, I allow, but not such a fool as that. Therefore, Mary dear, dearest, whom I have always thought of, listen to me again; take me back again! I will beg your pardon a hundredand a thousand times. I will humbly do whatever penance you may appoint me; but listen to me now. You would not listen to me at first—and perhaps I was not so ready at first to acknowledge how wrong I was. I have had five long years to think of it, and I see it all. You were rightly angry, dear, and I was wrong; and if ever man repented, I have repented. Mary, Mary! take me back!
“I have been wandering about the world all this time, working and doing well enough. I can offer you something better now than the little cottage we once spoke of, though that would have been Paradise. I am leaving along with this letter, and hope to arrive in England almost as soon. I do not ask you to write—unless indeed you would, of your own sweet kindness—one word—to Chester Street? But even if you don’t do that, I will go to Russell Square in the hope of finding you. Mary! don’t break my heart. You liked me once. If I knew what to say that would move you, I would make this letter miles long; but I don’t know what more to say, except that I love you better than ever, and no one but you; and that I am coming back to England for you, for you only—half hopeless, only determined to try once more. Perhaps by the time you have read this I may be at your door.
“Ever and ever yours,“George Durham.”
“Mary!” cried some one calling me; “Mary, what is the matter? Have you bad news, my dear? Mary! Good gracious, the child will faint! Mary, don’t you hear me?”
“Oh, hush, hush!” I cried, not knowing what I said. “Hark! listen! is that him at the door?”
It was not him just then; and after a little while the curtains stopped going round, and the floor and the Square and everything about grew solid and steady, and I came to myself. To myself, yes—but not to the same self as had been sitting so sadly holding my old lady’s hand. What a change all in a moment! If I had not been so happy, I should have been ashamed to think that a man’s letter could all in a moment make such a change in a woman’s life. It is demoralising to the last degree—it comes in the way of all the proper efforts of education and independent thought, and everything that is most necessary and elevating. If in a moment, without any virtue of yours, without any exertion of yours, you are to have your existence all altered for you—the greyness turned into brightness, the labour into ease, the poverty into wealth—how is it to be supposed that you can be trained aright? It is demoralising: but it is very pleasant. Oh, the change in one half-hour!
But I should find it very difficult to explain to anyone how it was that I behaved like a rational creature at this moment, and did not take a badturn and torture him and myself with objections. It was not wisdom on my part; I think it was the absolute suddenness of the whole transaction. Had he left me more time to think, or prepared me for his reception, my pride and my delicacy would have come in, and probably I should have thrown away both his happiness and my own. But fortunately he arrived that very afternoon, before the first excitement was over, and hearing that Miss Peveril was at home, and that the servants had not been forbidden to admit him, walked upstairs when I was not thinking, and took possession of me as if there had been no doubt on the subject. Mrs Tufnell was begging me to write to him at the very moment. I had shown her my letter, and she was full of excitement about it. “Be an honest girl, Mary,” she was saying: “a girl should not worry a man like that: you ought to be frank and open, and send him a word to meet him when he comes home. Say you are as fond of him as he is of you——”
“No, I could not—I could not,” I was beginning to say; when suddenly something overshadowed us, and a big, ringing voice said behind me, “How could she? Let us be reasonable.” Reasonable! After that there was no more to say.
But if it had not all passed like a dream; if he had not been so sudden; if he had taken more time and more, care—the chances are, I know,that I should have behaved like a fool, and hesitated and questioned, and been proud and been foolish. As it was, I had to be honest and happy—there was no time for anything else.
This was of course the ending of the whole matter. I have often wondered whether, had my dear old lady been burdened with the anxiety of her charge of me, she would have died. As it is, she has not died. She lives with us often now, and we with her. On my wedding day she talked of departing in peace; but so far from departing in peace, she has been stronger ever since, and has a complexion any girl of twenty might envy. When I look back to Southampton Street and to Russell Square, where I was so unhappy, they all grow delightful and beautiful to me. It was very bad, no doubt (I suppose), while it lasted, but how I smile now at all my dolours! The delightful fact that they are over makes them pleasant. “That is how it will be, Mary,” my dearest old lady says, “with all our sorrows, when we die and get safely out of them. We shall smile—I know it—and wonder how we could have made such a fuss over those momentary woes.” This is a serious way of ending a story, which after all has turned out merely a love-story, a thing I never contemplated when I began to confide my early miseries to you. How miserable I was! and how it all makes me smile now!
As for Mary—the other Mary—we carried out that arrangement for her which had been proposed for me. We bought Grove House for her. I do not know what we could have done better. I never see that she is dull or weary of her life. What languors she may have she keeps from common view. Little Jack has grown a great boy, and she is very happy in him. But she does not give herself up to him, like so many mothers. “I must keep my own life,” she said to me once, when I wanted her to give up, to live quietly at home and devote herself to my little brother alone. “He will go out into the world after a while,” she went on; “he must, he has to make his way—and I, what should I do then? follow him or stay at home all alone?—No! I must keep my own life.” And so she does. Happiness? I cannot tell if she has happiness: so many people get on without that—though some of us, I thank God humbly on my knees, have it without deserving it—without having done anything for it. Mary, I believe, never takes time to ask herself how about that. She said so once; she is not unhappy, and never will be; she has her life.
“WHERE shall we go first? that is the only question. I know there are a hundred places to go to. Westminster and Whitehall, and the Tower, and St Paul’s, and to see the pictures, and the river, and the Temple, and Cheapside. We cannot, of course,” cried the eager girl, half regretfully, half pleased with the certainty of so much excitement, “see them all in one day.”
“Considering that they are at different points of the compass, no,” said the father, a serious man, who rarely relaxed even with his children. They were seated round a breakfast table in a London hotel—not one of the great caravansaries of the present day, but a small, grey, comfortable, quiet, very dear hotel in a little London street not far from Piccadilly. The houses opposite seemed almost within reach of their hands to the two girls, fresh and young and eager, who had for the first time that morning opened their eyes upon England. England! The thought made the blooddance in their veins. It was a little disenchanting, no doubt, to look out upon those grey houses opposite; but the fog through which the said houses loomed vaguely had an attraction of its own. A London fog: it was the right medium through which to see the metropolis of the world: they were almost as much interested in it as in Hyde Park or St Paul’s. They were interested in everything; the very names of the streets made their hearts beat. They had arrived from Canada in the great steamboat the day before, had travelled up from Liverpool through a country veiled in the early and lingering dusk of a winter afternoon—for, though it was nominally spring, it was still winter—and entered London in the dark. When they opened their eyes this morning it had been, as they thought, upon a new world. They could hear the noise of wheels in Piccadilly, and that sound also went to their hearts. All England was before them. They had heard of it all their lives, and this arrival had been before them for months, a sensation keenly anticipated, and experienced now with a commotion of their whole being. Notwithstanding, it was a very ordinary table at which they sat, scarcely able to eat anything for sheer excitement. The room was somewhat dingy. The fog pressed upon the window like something palpable, the houses opposite looming grimly through it. There was very little in their external surroundings to justify the sublimated state of theirfeelings; but Grace and Milly Yorke wanted nothing to justify their feelings. These sentiments sustained themselves. They had never been out of Canada before, but England, as long as they could recollect, had been called “home” to them. They had said, “We are going home,” when they communicated the great news to their friends. And now the moment had come to which they had looked forward for years.
Their father was not moved by the same ecstatic sentiments. He was not Canadian born, as they were. He had left England about thirty years before, and probably his return had recalled some feelings that were not altogether delightful. He was an angular, tall man, not unlike the commonly received type of an American, with a long face, somewhat sunken cheeks, a very resolute and determined mouth—altogether grey and rugged, like a gnarled tree. His eyes were deep-set and apt to get a fiery sparkle in them on occasions. He was a man of hot temper and inflexible obstinacy, not easy to deal with. But he was never ill-tempered to his children. The boys, indeed, were often more or less in conflict with their father; but to the girls he was always gentle and kind. Perhaps they knew better how to glide over all shoals and reefs, and find the safe channel to his favour. They and their mother knew very well what subjects it was best to avoid. They had put up danger signals on every side, and warned each other off this and thatdifficulty with a glance. They did this without intention, only half conscious of their own diplomacy. But so it was, that the girls were on the best of terms with their father, and to them he never said a hasty or unkind word. He sat very gravely between them, his countenance taking no reflection from the light in theirs. He was disposed rather to say, Confound the fog. He thought London just as dingy and disagreeable as it always had been; but he said nothing. The girls! The girls had their heads turned, poor children. He would not say anything to disturb their illusion. Let them entertain it as long as they could. But he had other things to think of. His mind was thronged with recollections. England was not to him a historical country, a place full of poetry, full of great events; but a very real world, with his own past in it, and many a thought and intent of which the girls knew nothing. He sat between them, scarcely hearing their eager chatter, but recalling with all the force of reality, as if they had happened yesterday, the circumstances which had attended his going away. He had not been very many years older than Grace, he recollected, with a sort of wondering half amusement; but how clear it was! Yesterday was not clearer—not so clear, indeed—for yesterday was nothing very important in his life; whereas that day——
“It is quite true what Mr Winthrop said. I never saw anything so poetical,” said Grace;“such a wonderful dreamy vista!—don’t you think so, papa? When you look out to the end of the street you can’t tell what it is you see. The light is just like a dull topaz—wasn’t that what Mr Winthrop said? and you can’t tell what is beyond; it might be palaces or mountains, or one can’t tell what. And to think it is England! and then that sort of roar of the carriages. It is not like the sea; it is like—— Oh, why should one try for similes?—it is like—just London, I suppose.”
“Wait till you know a little more about London,” said the father, “before you pronounce what it’s like.”
“One knows,” said Grace, with a little solemnity. “One does not need to wait. I suppose London is like no other place in the world.”
“Perhaps not,” Yorke said with a half laugh; “but you will never know what it is if you should live a hundred years.”
He spoke in one sense, they responded in another.
“I can believe that,” said Grace, with the same gravity. “It is a mystery. We cannot know, but we can divine.”
“God forbid!” her father said, and then he changed his tone. “Westminster is one way and St Paul’s another,” he said. “You can’t go both ways at once. You had better make up your minds which you will have.”
And then a little argument ensued. The girls had read a great deal, and they had good memories. One of them espoused the cause of St Paul’s and the other that of Westminster: the one going over the glorious inhabitants of the Abbey, demanding, with Milton—
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bonesThe labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bonesThe labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bonesThe labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
though I hope they knew that Shakespeare was not there—while the other launched herself upon Tennyson’s ode—
“Mighty Seaman, this is he,Was great by land as thou by sea.”
“Mighty Seaman, this is he,Was great by land as thou by sea.”
“Mighty Seaman, this is he,Was great by land as thou by sea.”
The father remained quite silent in the midst of it all. It seemed, indeed, as if he had betrayed them into this fanciful controversy on purpose that he might be able to take refuge in his own thoughts. What was Westminster or St Paul’s to him? His mind was busy with events which no poet had ever celebrated, which had never been put into history. Neither wife nor children knew of them—only some people at home, people who might be dead long ago, whom he had not heard of, and who had not heard of him for thirty years. He got the required leisure and quiet to think this all over while the others were busy with their poetry. They appealed to him, and he gave them a little nod and half smile, one of those smiles that are but for amoment, a gleam of enforced attention instantly falling back into the gravity of prevailing thought. The decision finally was for Westminster. As for these young people, they did not know the difference between St Paul’s and the Abbey. They were both old, reverend, glorious structures to Grace and Milly; but what it might be that made the difference between them they did not know. One meant Poets’ Corner, the other that about the mighty Seaman. They had never seen a Gothic cathedral in their lives.
And perhaps it is not ignorance so profound as this that is qualified to see and understand what is best. The girls read the names on the monuments with a kind of silent ecstasy of wonder. To think that they, two little girls from Canada, should actually be treading the storied pavement in Poets’ Corner, and should be able to read with their own eyes the names upon those monuments, and see the Kings and Queens lying in marble, in solemn state, and touch with their little living modern fingers the chair in which the Confessor had sat! Could anything be more wonderful? They went through it all as if they were in a dream, looking at the monuments, reading all the names, thinking it was their own want of clear historical knowledge that made them at a loss about one here and there. But the Abbey itself was above their comprehension. They thought the Houses of Parliament finer, and were a little shocked that everythingshould be so grey and old. When you have seen nothing that is not new, all your life, it is difficult to understand the darkening of ages. But they spent the entire morning in one dream of pleasure, their hearts standing still as they came upon name after name, which they had heard of all their lives. There too was Whitehall, and that gloomy window, of which, perhaps, it is not true that from thence King Charles stepped to his execution; but they were not too critical; and they walked up the Mall to St James’s Palace with a little thrill of easier admiration (which they thought rather vulgar in themselves, and were disposed to blush at) for the Lifeguardsmen on their horses. The little dingy old palace wounded their feelings somewhat, and brought down the bewildering splendour of imagination into very shabby limits; but they got over that. When they were not silent with awe, or with the shock of trying to reconcile to their own ideal something that fell short of it, they were talking all the way, calling upon each other to see this or that, reading out even the names of the streets to each other with many an “Oh, Milly!” and “Oh, Grace!” They were so absorbed in their sight-seeing that they never noticed the people who looked after them, the amused admiring looks with which the passers-by would contemplate their fresh faces. They were very fresh faces, delicate in colour, clearand animated, and so full of interest that their superabundant life brightened the foggy street. But fortunately the fog had lifted a little, and all the ghostly houses round the park, and the leafless trees, became more real under the mid-day radiance of a veiled sun doing his best to break through; and if they had thought the fog poetical before, you may imagine what they thought it now, with those rays streaming into it. It could not be real, they said to each other; by-and-by they would wake up and find themselves, let us say, in that other London which is on the farther side of the Atlantic. It could not be real; it was too wonderful to be true.
Meantime the father went on responding a little, but only a little, to the constant claim made upon his attention. He said “Yes” and “No,” or even “Very pretty,” “Very nice,” “Very interesting” on occasion. For his part he did not care very much about the monuments. Sometimes his eye would wander away among the aisles, or through the lovely tracery and carved work of the roofs, to where the faint red sun caught a painted window, and threw a rosy oblique ladder of many colours across the grey. He understood the Abbey better than the girls did; but what he saw in the Abbey was, scenes of the past—the past, not of Shakespeare or the old Kings, but his own. He had been there in his youth, and he had been inother places which were recalled and suggested by this, and he remembered and mused in his heart. His companions were not surprised, because he was always a man of few words; though afterwards it gave them many thoughts, and the question, what he had been thinking of, what fancies might have been rising unconsciously in his mind, was often discussed by them; but at the present moment, as was natural, they did not realise that there was anything out of the way in his silence. They went back to their hotel late for their luncheon; they were tired in body, but not in their minds, which flowed over with wonder and pleasure. “Are you the least little bit disappointed?” said Milly to Grace. “No, not the least. Disappointed!” cried Grace with enthusiasm, though the next moment she was conscious of that little chill in her soul about St James’s, and even felt that she had missed something in Westminster. This being the case with Grace, Milly cleared up in a moment from the slightest little cloud that had fallen upon her, and felt that neither was she disappointed, oh, not the least in the world! It was like walking with Shakespeare, they both said. And Mr Yorke gave a little nod across the table, and lifted his eyebrows at them. It was almost as much as he ever did when they were in full tide of enthusiasm. Papa was always quiet; though perhaps, indeed, he was more preoccupiedthan usual to-day. The winterly spring afternoon was beginning to close in a little before their meal was over. They were preparing, however, to go out again when their father called them to the window where he was sitting, looking more grave even than he was accustomed to look.
“I am going out,” he said. “Can you manage for yourselves till dinner? I have something to do—out.”
“Can’t we go with you, papa?” they both said in a breath.
There was a kind of embarrassment on his face. “Not to-day, I think. After—perhaps: I have a call to make.”
“Oh, it is about business!” said Milly, wondering, yet apologetic, looking at Grace.
“If it is not about business,” said Grace promptly, “you ought to take us with you, papa. It is the right thing in England. In England girls don’t go about by themselves; and then we want some friends, we want to know the people as well as the place.”
A half smile went over his face. “You shall get the benefit of all the introductions,” he said. “Don’t be afraid; but you must not expect to be taken much notice of in London, just on the edge of the season, you know. People are very busy here; and then there are so many to be looked after—people of more pretensions than you. Youmust not expect too much; but I am not going to deliver any of the letters. I am going—to see an—old friend.”
“Oh, then, bring him here—will you please bring him here? Do, papa, do! If it is an old friend, so much the more reason that we should know him. Is it a friend you had before you went to Canada? Why has he never come to see us? We have always wondered that you never had any old friends come to see you, papa.”
Yorke did not make any direct reply. He said only, “What will you do with yourselves while I am away?”
The two girls looked at each other somewhat blankly.
“We can’t stay in here,” cried Milly, while Grace drew herself up with youthful dignity.
“As for staying in every time you have any business to do or any calls to make,” she said, with serious emphasis, “you must see that is impossible, papa. English girls may stop in-doors if they please, but we cannot. We are Canadian girls; we are used to take care of ourselves. Milly and I can surely take care of each other wherever we go. It would be too humbling,” she cried, “in the country of Shakespeare, to think two girls couldn’t go out without—what was it, Milly?—unpleasantness. I don’t believe a word of it. Mrs Bidwell is only a vulgar Englishwoman. Unpleasantness! I don’t believe it; and even ifI did believe it I shouldn’t allow it to be true.”
“Come,” said her father, “you must not talk so of vulgar Englishwomen—you who are such enthusiasts for England. No, I don’t see any harm in it. Come with me so far, I’ll take you to where the shops are. Of course you would like to look into the shops.”
They would have liked a great deal better to go with him upon this mysterious call, but he would not permit it, and accordingly they were taken to Regent Street, where he left them with a beautiful confidence. It might not be the best place in the world to leave young girls alone on a spring afternoon, no doubt; but what did they know of that? They were innocent, proud, modest girls, to whom no one had ever said a disrespectful word, and who were afraid of nobody. Nor did they get any new light upon the subject from that walk. The innocent do not even suspect the dangers which the knowing see all about them. Nobody molested Grace and Milly: they walked along in their armour of honest maidenhood, knowing no evil; and were as safe as in their own rooms. It was true, however, that their rapture waned a little, and a touch of local patriotism came over them.
“I don’t think so very much of the shops,” said Milly doubtfully.
Milly was often the first to start an opinion, but she never was quite sure whether she held it or not tillshe had the support of Grace’s authority, which this time, as so often, was unhesitatingly given.
“I don’t think anything of the shops,” said Grace. “Of course one doesn’t come to England to look at shops. Paris for that, I suppose; but it is England all the same.”
“Oh yes,” said Milly, “certainly it is England all the same. I wish the houses were a little bigger and cleaner-looking, and the streets broader. I wish there were some trees——”
“Trees! in the heart of London,” said Grace with high contempt. “Trees are the things that show how new a place is. Where you have nothing else you have trees. But think how many people must have walked about here. If we only could see them all strolling up and down this pavement—people you would give your head to see.”
“But Shakespeare—and people like that—could not have walked about Regent Street: it is not old enough.”
“No; not Shakespeare, perhaps. I don’t know—he might have walked about here, though it was not Regent Street then.”
“I wonder,” said Milly suddenly, “where papa can have gone. I never heard him talk of any old friends before; nor relations. By the way, isn’t it very funny that we have no relations in England, Grace?”
“It is strange,” said Grace thoughtfully.
It was not a subject which had occurred to themtill now. Their father they were aware had been thirty years in Canada without ever going “home;” and he had no family correspondence, nobody belonging to him that they knew of except themselves. Their mother was a Canadian born, and she had relations in plenty; and cousins on their father’s side had not seemed a necessity before. But as they thought of it, a little additional chill came into the air. England—so dear and delightful as it was, the home of all their traditions—they had begun to make acquaintance with. But to think that they had not a relation in England, nothing to justify their fond identification of themselves with this old country! The idea was somewhat alarming as it burst upon them. It increased the little shade of disappointment which had crept over them against their will, and sent them to their hotel, which was all that answered for home at this moment, with a little heaviness at their hearts.
MR YORKE went out in the quickly fading spring afternoon with an air of seriousness and resolution, which, indeed, had been upon his countenance all day; but which was not much like the expression of a holiday visitor. He had a long drive out to the northern outskirts of London, across those miles on miles of insignificant streets which are almost more imposing in their shabby dreariness than the more important portions of the greatest of cities. But though they wearied him with endless lines of shabbiness and monotony, the mind of the stranger was not sufficiently at liberty to make any reflection upon them. It was twilight before he reached, mounting upwards slowly for the last mile or so, the suburban heights to which he was bound. He dismissed his cab at the entrance to a leafy lane, lined on each side with detached houses, which were scarcely perceptible among the bare trees and thick hedges. To the servant who admitted him he gave a name which was certainly not that which he had borne an hour before in his hotel. The house which he entered just at the moment of twilight, before the lamps were lighted, was very warmly carpeted andcurtained, and almost too warm in the air of its balmy soft interior. He waited for a moment in the hall, with an extraordinary gravity—the seriousness of painful restrained excitement on his face. Then a door opened suddenly, and a lady came out carrying a candle in her hand. The light shone pleasantly upon a fresh face and pretty eyes, undimmed by some fifty years of life; but those eyes were puckered up with a curious, anxious, alarmed gaze, looking into the darkness. She advanced hurriedly for two or three steps, then stopped short in front of the stranger, examining him not without some distress in her look. “Leonard Crosthwaite?” she said, “it is very many years since we have heard that name. Is it some distant cousin we know nothing about? or is it—— is it——”
“It is I, Mary. We have not seen each other for thirty years—but I should have known you anywhere, I think. Certainly, here, in the old house.”
She held up her candle and gazed at him, then shook her head slowly. “It is so sudden,” she said. “It is such a long time——”
“And you did not expect to see me, while I expected—hoped—to see you.” Then he put out his hand. “Mary—you are not still Mary—not a Crosthwaite still, as in the old time? No—I can see that. You have married, and had children—like me.”
This drew a faint little smile from her in spite of herself. “Yes, I have married. I have a son as tall as you. I am a widow. I—— Oh, but I don’t know if I ought to enter into family particulars. How am I to know that you are—Leonard? You are—a little like him.”
“Is there any reason why you should hesitate to own me?” he said, half sternly, yet with a smile.
This brought an overpowering flush of colour over her comely, matronly face; but the next moment she cried out with agitation, “Oh, no, no! How could you think so of me?—not for the world, not for the world! If every penny we had depended on it”—and here she stopped short, confused, and looked at him again.
“I will not meddle with your pennies, Mary, whatever you may mean by that. I have plenty. You need not fear for me. Ah!—Uncle Abraham, I suppose, is dead?—he must be dead long ago: and there is something—— The old people are all dead, I suppose?”
“It is not that,” she said, faltering, which was no answer to his question; but he understood it well enough. He looked at her with increased seriousness, and she shrank before his eye.
“Yes: they are all dead——”
“Uncle Abraham and all——” He looked at her more and more keenly, with a slight smile on his face. “But he did not take his moneywith him, I suppose, as he used to threaten to do?”
To this the lady made no reply; and there was a pause, he standing somewhat sternly, with his eyes fixed upon her; she with her head drooping a little, drawn back a few steps, not looking at him. The door behind her was open, and after a minute, a voice called from it, “Mary, to whom are you talking?”
The stranger started visibly. He said, with a sudden catch in his voice, “Anna! Is she here?”
“Oh yes, Leonard, yes,” said the lady. “She is here—so changed! so changed! I think it is because she has been unhappy.”
“Unhappy!” he said softly. His tone had changed and softened; only to hear it the listener might be certain that there were tears in his eyes. “Unhappy! after thirty years.”
The man was touched and flattered and compunctious all in one. There was no difficulty in interpreting the inflections in his voice. It was full of tenderness, of a mournful pleasure, and surprise as well—“while I have been making myself so comfortable,” he added in an undertone.
“Oh, not in that way,” the lady said, but in a whisper. “No, no,” shaking her head, “not in that way.”
His mood of tender complaisance was perhaps alittle subdued by this, but only a little. “If you think she would let me see her,” he said—
At this moment she was called again—“Mary! there is a perfect gale blowing in at the door. Who have you there?”
The lady who was called Mary advanced to him confidentially. “She heard your name just as well as I did,” she said, “but she pretends to take no notice; wait here till I go and speak to her. Oh, she is so changed!”
He caught her by the hand and detained her. “Nothing has happened? She must be old like all of us, I know——”
“She is as handsome as ever she was,” said the other hastily. “I am coming, I am coming, Anna! It is a visitor—an old friend”—and she turned round with the quickness of a girl, leaving the stranger standing where she had found him, the candle on the hall table watching him like a little wakeful sentinel. A glow of warmth and light came from the door of the open room. He had not noticed it before; now it appeared to him like a glimpse into some sanctuary. He could see a beautiful Persian carpet, a softly-tinted wall hung with pictures; not that he noticed what these details were, but took them in vaguely as producing an effect of delicate brightness and luxury. Memory stole softly over the far-travelled visitor. His present life had departed from him altogether—he was living in the past, in his youth, thinkingof the pretty caprices of the girl whom he had thought the most beautiful, the most delightful creature that God had made, in all her whims and fancies. She had always been like that; and through all those thirty years it had been constantly suggested to him, in the inmost recesses of his mind, when he saw anything that was graceful or pretty, “It is just like Anna—Anna would have liked that.” He had felt inclined to say it to his wife a thousand times—his good wife, who never had heard of Anna, and would not have heard of her with any pleasure. And now, here was Anna close to him, enshrined in the warmth and surrounded by all the prettinesses she had loved. It made his heart beat to think that he was so near her, that he would see her presently—and even that she had been unhappy. At fifty-five men are not often sentimental, but the hardest would be softened by the thought of a beautiful woman who had been unhappy about him for thirty years. He stood quite patiently, and waited for admittance. The hesitation of the other, her evident unwillingness to consent to his identity, which he could see was mingled all the time with a conviction that he was the person he claimed to be, had irritated and filled him with suspicions; but all this flew away upon the breath of old, old, unchangeable feeling. Anna! he had never ceased to think that the very name was music all these years.
The sound of the voices within the room was lowat first, but afterwards grew louder. Then it was mingled with impatient tappings as of a stick on the floor, and Mary’s voice—he could trace both voices, they were so different, even in the murmur of talk at the beginning—took an expostulatory tone.
“I assure you, Anna—”
“Assure me nothing. Let him come in, let him come in: and I will let him know what I think of him.”
It was certainly her voice; but in all his recollection he had never heard this tone in it. He waited listening, half amused, half sad, beginning to wonder more and more. At last he yielded to a sudden impulse, and went straight forward to the half-opened door.
There he stood for a moment arrested, struck dumb. And they, too, struck by the sound of the man’s foot, so different from their own velvet steps, turned round and looked at him. Was that Anna? His heart, which had been beating so high, stopped short, and seemed to drop, drop into some unknown depths. “Oh yes, I see,” he said to himself. “I see, I see. She is as handsome as ever——” But was that Anna? He stood on the threshold of this room, which was sacred to her, holding his breath.
Then the strange old woman, who was Anna, beckoned to him imperiously with her hand.
“Come in, come in,” she said, “whoever you are,who are using a name—— Come in. I do not know if you are aware that Mr Leonard Crosthwaite, whose name you are assuming——” Here she stopped and fixed two great, brilliant, dark eyes upon him, opened to their full width, glowing like angry stars. She made a pause of about a minute long, which seemed to the two others like an hour. Then she dropped her voice with a careless inflection, as if after that gaze she disdained the risk she was running—“died,” she added indifferently, but pausing on the word—“at least twenty years ago.”
“He did not die, Anna, since I am here,” said the stranger.
It was impossible to speak to her, even now, without some tenderness getting into his voice.
“Do not venture to speak to me, sir, by my Christian name. Do you know there is a punishment for impostors? Oh, you think perhaps you know just how far you can go without infringing the law. Perhaps you think, too, that we are alone here, and you can frighten us. But that is a mistake. There is a butler, a strong man, whom I can summon in a moment with this bell, and there is my nephew. Any attempt at bullying or extortion will be useless here.”
“Oh, Anna!” her sister cried; then she clasped her hands, turning to the visitor—“I told you she was changed.”
A series of different emotions passed over theCanadian’s face—he smiled, then laughed angrily, growing red and hot; but over these variations stole such a softening of regret as combined all in one sorrowful sense of change. He nodded his head gently in reply to what the other sister said.
“You are right,” he said in a low tone; “as handsome as ever, but how different! Anna, Anna, though we have been separated so long—though you cast me off, and I thought had forgotten me—though I am married and a happy man—yet you have never been put out of your place in my heart all these years.”
She looked at him with those keen eyes; though she kept up wonderfully her air of lofty scorn and indifference, it was possible to perceive a gleam of something else, a mixture of satisfaction and anger in her face. “It is part of the rôle, of course,” she said, “to call me by my Christian name. But Leonard Crosthwaite, whatever he might be else, was a gentleman. So you will keep to your part better by acting like a gentleman in this point. That is one way of making an impostor look like him.”
He restrained himself with an effort. “What am I to call you then?” he said, looking at her sister. “Has she never married? How wonderful that is! Miss Crosthwaite then: since you wish it, I will call you so.”
A momentary shadow of humiliation went overthe proud face. She had chosen not to marry. She had always been beautiful, and she was not without fortune; but nobody whom she thought good enough had ever asked Anna Crosthwaite to marry him. And she did not like to remember this in presence of her old lover, whom she had loved once in her silly youth, though she forsook him: it was not, however, because of that love, or anything connected with it, that she received him thus now.
“I am Miss Crosthwaite,” she said, “though you affect to be surprised. It is not all a woman thinks of to marry any fool that turns up, and to become the mother of fools. Go away to your son, Mary. That was your ambition: as it is your folly now, to believe in every deception, and allow yourself to be led by the nose. I think yourprotégéhad better withdraw too, now that I have seen him. He has not a feature of poor Leonard Crosthwaite,” she added, eyeing him steadfastly. “No one, I suppose, can doubt my capacity to judge. His complexion is different, his features are different. Go away, sir, and be thankful we don’t turn you over at once to the police.”
“Is this,” he said, half-stifled with astonishment and indignation, “is this all you have to say to me—”
“It is all I have to say to you,” she said; “and this is my room, where I am supposed to have some right to choose my visitors. Go! You cando anything you please; I, for one, am not afraid of you. You may go.”
He burst out laughing at the extraordinary perversity of the scene. If he had not laughed he must have been furious—it was his only deliverance; and yet it may be supposed there was not much laughing in his heart.
“This is the most extraordinary reception to meet with,” he said, “after coming so far, after staying away so long. If it is a jest, it is a bad jest, Anna. Suppose that it is hard upon us after all this long interval, to look upon each other with such changed eyes—still there is such a thing as justice. You know me as well as I know you. It is by instinct—it is because we cannot help it. For, heaven knows, you are as unlike the Anna I left as night is to day.”
She did not reply. A hasty gleam of passion came out of her keen eyes. Then she put out her hand to the bell. “Simmons,” she said, “will see this person to the door, Mary. I don’t want to be hard upon any acquaintance of yours; you know a very strange set of people, I must say; but I will not be insulted. Simmons must see this person out of the house.”
The other sister looked at him with a look of agonised entreaty, clasping her hands. He was touched by it, though his only answer to Anna was another outburst of harsh laughter. “I would not like to be in your Simmons’ shoes,” he said,“if he tries to see me anywhere that I do not choose to go. But I do not care to thrust myself on anybody. Good-bye, Anna; we shall meet ere long in different circumstances, never fear.”
With that he went out hastily into the hall, where the sentinel candle was still burning. There he was met by a young man who looked at him surprised. There was so much resemblance in this new-comer to the lady called Mary that there could be no doubt who he was. The Canadian did not pause to inquire. He put his hand on the young man’s arm—“Come out with me, or take me somewhere where I can talk to you. There is a mystery that wants clearing up, and you can help me. I am your mother’s cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite. What! you have heard the name before?”
“Indeed, I have heard the name; but you were supposed to be dead long ago,” the young man said.
“I am not dead—your mother will tell you—I am newly returned from Canada. Tell me what reason there is to wish me dead,” he said peremptorily. “It will be no worse for you——”
“No reason at all, sir,” said the young man promptly. “I do not know who you are, but there is nothing to conceal. You are welcome to hear it all from me.”
Then he led the visitor into a small room at the other side of the hall, into which after a while theyoung man’s mother stole softly, crying and greatly agitated. She was startled beyond measure to find the visitor with her son, to whom she was going for consolation. But they were not long in convincing her that it was better that all there was to tell should be told.
When Mr Yorke left the house it was very dark and cold, and the rain beginning to drizzle. Young Geoffrey Underwood would have gone with him, or, failing that, pressed all manner of wraps upon him, as his mother had pressed refreshments: but the Canadian smiled at the cold, and the dismal, continuous, but not violent rain. “I am used to worse cold than this,” he said. He went out into the night, more grave than when he had entered, but with a fire in his eye and in his heart of which there had then been no sign. He walked slowly along making calculations, arranging his course of procedure as he went down the hill. The rain came down faster and faster, till it swept like a great sheet of water from the inky sky. It swept all the suburban streets both of passengers and vehicles; nothing was to be seen but the wavering dismal lamps, making distorted reflections on the wet pavement—not a cab, not a place of shelter. Mr Yorke was drenched to the bones and chilled to the very heart.