‘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 moment later, 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 aware that 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 the clever 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 without another 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 the barrister 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 prominent a 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, have been 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.