To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received
Raye’s letter.
It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds.
She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and
over. ‘It is mine?’ she said.
‘Why, yes, can’t you see it is?’ said the postman, smiling as he
guessed the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.
‘O yes, of course!’ replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly
tittering, and blushing still more.
Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman’s
departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the
letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with
tears.
A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her
bed-chamber. Anna’s mistress looked at her, and said: ‘How dismal you
seem this morning, Anna. What’s the matter?’
‘I’m not dismal, I’m glad; only I—’ She stopped to stifle a sob.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve got a letter—and what good is it to me, if I can’t read a word in
it!’
‘Why, I’ll read it, child, if necessary.’
‘But this is from somebody—I don’t want anybody to read it but myself!’
Anna murmured.
‘I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?’
‘I think so.’ Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: ‘Then will you
read it to me, ma’am?’
This was the secret of Anna’s embarrassment and flutterings. She could
neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by
marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain
where, even in days of national education, there had been no school
within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there
had been nobody to investigate Anna’s circumstances, nobody to care
about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she
had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had
come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a
kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in
which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not
unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of
her mistress’s phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting
a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was
slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the
letter.
Edith Harnham’s large dark eyes expressed some interest in the
contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into
her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the
short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna
to send him a tender answer.
‘Now—you’ll do it for me, won’t you, dear mistress?’ said Anna eagerly.
‘And you’ll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn’t
bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the
earth with shame if he knew that!’
From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions,
and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern
filled Edith’s heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her
happiness to the issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed
herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so
seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the
time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly
within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However, what
was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna’s only
protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna’s eager request
that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this
young London man’s letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his
attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she
might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.
A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham’s
hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in.
Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna’s humble
note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life,
the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham’s.
‘Won’t you at least put your name yourself?’ she said. ‘You can manage
to write that by this time?’
‘No, no,’ said Anna, shrinking back. ‘I should do it so bad. He’d be
ashamed of me, and never see me again!’
The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have
seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such
a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same
process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her
mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter
being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer
read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.
Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs.
Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had
retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which
takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been
brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day.
For the first time since Raye’s visit Anna had gone to stay over a
night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence
had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had
replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart,
without waiting for her maid’s collaboration. The luxury of writing to
him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she
had indulged herself therein.
Why was it a luxury?
Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the
British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than
free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had
consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a _pis aller_, at the
age of seven-and-twenty—some three years before this date—to find
afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her
still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.
She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the
bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so
much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and
voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing
of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had
insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till
there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents,
notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That
he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning
though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.
They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas—lowered to monosyllabic
phraseology in order to keep up the disguise—that Edith put into
letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna’s delight,
who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty
fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith
found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the
young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added
from Anna’s own lips made apparently no impression upon him.
The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her
return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about
something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.
There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs.
Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking
down at Edith’s knees, she made confession that the result of her
relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.
Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast
Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from
her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking
such steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to
Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note
hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.
Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her
news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.
But a week later the girl came to her mistress’s room with another
note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find
time for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham’s
counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and
bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was
imperative: to keep the young man’s romantic interest in her alive.
Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her _protégée_, request him
on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to
inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to
be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities.
She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it
again from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he
should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to
discuss what had better be done.
It may well be supposed that Anna’s own feelings had not been quite in
accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress’s judgment had
ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. ‘All I want is that _niceness_ you can
so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can’t
for the life o’ me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same
thing and feel it exactly when you’ve written it down!’
When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone,
she bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept.
‘I wish it was mine—I wish it was!’ she murmured. ‘Yet how can I say
such a wicked thing!’