CHAPTER X.
‘My heart is sad and heavy,In this merry month of May,As I stand beneath the lime-treeOn the bastion old and gray.’
‘My heart is sad and heavy,In this merry month of May,As I stand beneath the lime-treeOn the bastion old and gray.’
‘My heart is sad and heavy,In this merry month of May,As I stand beneath the lime-treeOn the bastion old and gray.’
‘My heart is sad and heavy,
In this merry month of May,
As I stand beneath the lime-tree
On the bastion old and gray.’
‘This moment’ has come. As Mrs. Denis, routed, but by no means vanquished, disappears hastily round one corner of the pretty cottage, someone else comes round the other. A young girl, singing sweetly, merrily, though in a subdued voice. Just as she reaches her corner she looks behind her; her singing ceases, and an amused look brightens her face—a face that has known much sadness. Again she looks behind her, as if expecting something, this time turning her back on Wyndham; and now, a momentlater, a huge dog tears across the grass and literally flings himself upon the girl, whose tall but slender frame seems to give way beneath his canine embraces. For a second only; then she recovers herself, her pliant body sways forward, and, catching the dog’s handsome head in her arms, a merry tussle ensues between them. It is almost a dance, so agile is the girl, so bent is the dog on entering into the spirit of the fun with all his heart.
Wyndham, watching, feels no sense of amusement. Indignation is still full upon him, and now it grows more intense as he sees the dog—his dog—a brute hitherto devoted to himself, lavishing its affection upon an utter stranger.
He makes an impatient movement, which the dog’s quick eye sees, and, bolting from his late companion, he comes bounding towards Wyndham, from whom, it must be confessed, he gets but a poor welcome.
The girl, turning, surprised at the dog’s desertion of her, becomes suddenly awarethat there is someone beyond, and as Wyndham emerges into sight she makes a movement to fly, then stands stricken, as if turned to stone.
It is impossible, under the circumstances, but that she should be known to Wyndham; but as he looks at her he tells himself that, if he had not known that Denis had brought her down here on the morning of the Professor’s death, he would never have recognised her. Her dress, for one thing, is so different. Of course he had found time to send a cheque to Mrs. Moriarty before going abroad for the use of the ‘waif,’ as he had somehow called the girl to himself, not knowing her name—a sum handsome enough to dress her as the young heiress of a most unexpected three hundred a year should be dressed—and it comes to him now that the ‘waif’ had not been slow in the spending of it. No doubt Mrs. Moriarty had been the ‘middle man,’ but the ‘waif’ had known what she was about, or else some well-born instinct had directed her.
‘Well born!’ Pah! A poor, miserable girl like that, with a shawl thrown over her head when first he saw her—and yet, her face, her feet——
He can see them from beneath her petticoats. They are not like mice, by any means, but they are of the proportions usually assigned to those who have many grandfathers, and they are very delicately clad.
If he had not recognised her at all at first, she had barely recognised him. That was because of the surprise—the shock, perhaps. She had almost come to believe in the possibility of living here always and alone, never seeing anyone except kind Mrs. Moriarty and Nero, the dog.
She has turned as white as death; and Wyndham, looking at her, tells himself it is the memory of that last dreadful night, when she had accepted death as her portion, rather than the life that lies behind her, that has blanched her cheeks and brought that terror into her eyes.
But in a minute all these theories of theclever barrister are distilled and float into air.
Having seen him, and dwelt upon his face, the colour in her own face has crept back, and with a sharp sigh of relief she draws nearer to him slowly, the dog, who has gone back to her, following, his muzzle in her hand.
‘I—I thought you were a stranger,’ says she faintly.
It is an odd sentence. A stranger! What else is he to her? Her manner, however, makes it clear to him that she has lived, since her entrance into the Cottage, in constant dread of being discovered by someone, and of being dragged back to a former existence—to which death, as she had proved to him that night, seems far preferable.
This accounts for the locked gates, and the girl’s admiration for the walls—an admiration that no doubt has but little to do with the ivy and the Virginian creeper, now throwing out its palest leaves of green, and the other trailing glories that have lifted them into a dream of beauty.
‘Your thought was very nearly right,’ says Wyndham, with a cold smile; he is quite unmoved by the nervous pallor and the frightened expression on the young face before him. Barristers after a while get accustomed to young, frightened faces, and lose their interest in them. ‘But, no doubt, you remember me?’
He pauses, and the girl looks at him for a moment.
‘Yes,’ says she slowly, her eye sinking to the ground. That last dreadful scene, in which he had played so conspicuous a part, and when in the sullenness of her despair she had welcomed death, lies once again clear as a picture to her eyes. She shudders, and a faint moisture breaks out upon her forehead.
‘I am glad to see you quite recovered,’ says he in a tone which belies his words. ‘If you will be so good as to come indoors, I should like to speak to you for a few minutes about your future.’
His tone is so curt, so positively unpleasant, that the girl, colouring deeply and withoutanother word, moves towards the hall-door of the charming cottage, and leads the way through the porch—so exquisitely festooned with delicate greeneries—into the long many-windowed room beyond. This room runs the entire length of the house, and overlooks the garden. As she goes a deep melancholy falls upon her. What has he come to say? Why is his manner so unkind? That night—that awful night—he had seemed to befriend her—to take her part—and now——
‘You are of course aware,’ says Wyndham formally, when they have reached the drawing-room—the drawing-room that used to be his, but that now seems to slip out of his possession, as he sees the slender figure of the girl turn after his entrance, as if to receive him. ‘You are of course aware that the late Professor, Mr. Hennessy, left you three hundred a year?’
The girl, standing midway between one of the windows and Wyndham, makes a slight affirmative movement of her head. She would have spoken, but words failed her.
‘That was in accordance with his promise to you. If the experiment failed, well’—with a careless shrug—‘there was nothing. If it was successful—you were to be the gainer by it.’
His voice is clear, unemotional; there is a sort of ‘laying down the law’ about it that takes every spark of sympathy that there might have been quite out of it.
‘Yes.’ This time she manages to speak, but she colours as she speaks, and blushes very painfully; and now her eyes seek the ground. If one were to exactly describe her, one would say—but very reluctantly, I think—that she looks ashamed.
‘With three hundred a year you should be able to——’
She interrupts him.
‘It is too much—far too much,’ says she, with an effort. ‘I don’t want so much as that. Fifty pounds a year would be enough; I am sure I could——’
She stops.
‘All that is beyond question,’ says thebarrister coldly. ‘It was the Professor’s wish that you should have three hundred a year, and now that he is gone, there can be no further argument about it. He has no near relations so far as I can make out, so that there is no reason why you should not accept the money left to you by him. What I came to-day for was, not about the Professor’s gift to you, but to know what you intend to do with it.’
‘With it?’
‘Yes; what, in fact, are you going to do?’
‘What am I going to do?’ She looks up at him for the first time; a startled expression grows in her large dark eyes.
‘We all have a future before us,’ says Wyndham, ‘and you——’ He hesitates here, hardly knowing how to go on with those earnest eyes on his. ‘Of course I feel that, for the time being, I am in a sense bound to look after you, the Professor being an old friend of mine, and you——’ Again he stops. It seems impossible, indeed, to refer to that strange scene where he had had so prominenta part. ‘You will understand,’ says he, ‘that the Professor wished you to be placed in an assured position, and he left me to see to that.’
Here the girl makes a sharp movement of her hands descriptive of fear.
‘Naturally,’ says Wyndham, in answer to that swift movement of the pretty hands, ‘you object to my interference. But I must ask your forbearance in a matter that’—with a steady look at her—‘does not concern me in the slightest degree. You must really forgive me if I seem impatient; but, as you are aware, I know nothing about you, and to look after you as the Professor asked me to do requires thought. I am in complete ignorance about you. I can see that you are educated, but beyond that I know nothing.’
‘Ah! you know nothing indeed,’ says she quickly. ‘I am not educated. I know hardly anything. I am one of the most ignorant people alive.’
‘And yet——’
‘I have read anything I could find to read,’interrupts she; ‘and at one time I went to a day-school, but that is all.’
‘I see,’ says Wyndham. His tone is indifferent, but, inwardly, curiosity is stirring him. So little education, and yet so calm, so refined a manner! Who is this girl, with her well-bred air, but with, too, the little touches here and there that betray the fact of her having lived not only out of the fashionable world, but very far from even the outskirts of it? What whim of fate has given her that shapely head, those shell-like ears and pointed fingers, yet given her into the clutches of the middle classes?
‘You would wish to enlarge your studies?’ asks he presently.
For the first time since she came towards him, in the garden outside, she now lets her eyes rest frankly upon his.
‘Oh, if I could!’ says she.
‘That is very easily to be managed, I should think. You have three hundred a year of your own, and can command advantages that hitherto, I imagine, from what you say, havebeen withheld from you.’ He waits a moment, as if expecting her to speak, to make some comment on his words, but she remains mute.
‘If you could tell me something of yourself—your history—what brought you to this,’ says Wyndham, ‘it might make matters simpler for both you and me.’
The girl shrinks backwards as though he had struck her.
‘No, no!’ cries she quickly.