A MAN who passes his evening as I had passed mine, may go to bed
afterward if he has nothing better to do. But he must not rank among
the number of his reasonable anticipations the expectation of getting
a night's rest. The morning was well advanced, and the hotel was astir,
before I at last closed my eyes in slumber. When I awoke, my watch
informed me that it was close on noon.
I rang the bell. My servant appeared with a letter in his hand. It had
been left for me, three hours since, by a lady who had driven to the
hotel door in a carriage, and had then driven away again. The man had
found me sleeping when he entered my bed-chamber, and, having received
no orders to wake me overnight, had left the letter on the sitting-room
table until he heard my bell.
Easily guessing who my correspondent was, I opened the letter. An
inclosure fell out of it--to which, for the moment, I paid no attention.
I turned eagerly to the first lines. They announced that the writer
had escaped me for the second time: early that morning she had left
Edinburgh. The paper inclosed proved to be my letter of introduction to
the dressmaker returned to me.
I was more than angry with her--I felt her second flight from me as a
downright outrage. In five minutes I had hurried on my clothes and was
on my way to the inn in the Canongate as fast as a horse could draw me.
The servants could give me no information. Her escape had been effected
without their knowledge.
The landlady, to whom I next addressed myself, deliberately declined to
assist me in any way whatever.
"I have given the lady my promise," said this obstinate person, "to
answer not one word to any question that you may ask me about her. In
my belief, she is acting as becomes an honest woman in removing herself
from any further communication with you. I saw you through the keyhole
last night, sir. I wish you good-morning."
Returning to my hotel, I left no attempt to discover her untried. I
traced the coachman who had driven her. He had set her down at a shop,
and had then been dismissed. I questioned the shop-keeper. He remembered
that he had sold some articles of linen to a lady with her veil down and
a traveling-bag in her hand, and he remembered no more. I circulated a
description of her in the different coach offices. Three "elegant young
ladies, with their veils down, and with traveling-bags in their hands,"
answered to the description; and which of the three was the fugitive
of whom I was in search, it was impossible to discover. In the days of
railways and electric telegraphs I might have succeeded in tracing
her. In the days of which I am now writing, she set investigation at
defiance.
I read and reread her letter, on the chance that some slip of the pen
might furnish the clew which I had failed to find in any other way. Here
is the narrative that she addressed to me, copied from the original,
word for word:
"DEAR SIR--Forgive me for leaving you again as I left you in Perthshire.
After what took place last night, I have no other choice (knowing my own
weakness, and the influence that you seem to have over me) than to
thank you gratefully for your kindness, and to bid you farewell. My sad
position must be my excuse for separating myself from you in this rude
manner, and for venturing to send you back your letter of introduction.
If I use the letter, I only offer you a means of communicating with me.
For your sake, as well as for mine, this mu st not be. I must never give
you a second opportunity of saying that you love me; I must go away,
leaving no trace behind by which you can possibly discover me.
"But I cannot forget that I owe my poor life to your compassion and your
courage. You, who saved me, have a right to know what the provocation
was that drove me to drowning myself, and what my situation is, now that
I am (thanks to you) still a living woman. You shall hear my sad story,
sir; and I will try to tell it as briefly as possible.
"I was married, not very long since, to a Dutch gentleman, whose name
is Van Brandt. Please excuse my entering into family particulars. I have
endeavored to write and tell you about my dear lost father and my old
home. But the tears come into my eyes when I think of my happy past
life. I really cannot see the lines as I try to write them.
"Let me, then, only say that Mr. Van Brandt was well recommended to
my good father before I married. I have only now discovered that he
obtained these recommendations from his friends under a false pretense,
which it is needless to trouble you by mentioning in detail. Ignorant of
what he had done, I lived with him happily. I cannot truly declare that
he was the object of my first love, but he was the one person in the
world whom I had to look up to after my father's death. I esteemed him
and respected him, and, if I may say so without vanity, I did indeed
make him a good wife.
"So the time went on, sir, prosperously enough, until the evening came
when you and I met on the bridge.
"I was out alone in our garden, trimming the shrubs, when the
maid-servant came and told me there was a foreign lady in a carriage at
the door who desired to say a word to Mrs. Van Brandt. I sent the maid
on before to show her into the sitting-room, and I followed to receive
my visitor as soon as I had made myself tidy. She was a dreadful woman,
with a flushed, fiery face and impudent, bright eyes. 'Are you Mrs. Van
Brandt?' she said. I answered, 'Yes.' 'Are you really married to him?'
she asked me. That question (naturally enough, I think) upset my temper.
I said, 'How dare you doubt it?' She laughed in my face. 'Send for Van
Brandt,' she said. I went out into the passage and called him down from
the room upstairs in which he was writing. 'Ernest,' I said, 'here is
a person who has insulted me. Come down directly.' He left his room the
moment he heard me. The woman followed me out into the passage to meet
him. She made him a low courtesy. He turned deadly pale the moment he
set eyes on her. That frightened me. I said to him, 'For God's sake,
what does this mean?' He took me by the arm, and he answered: 'You shall
know soon. Go back to your gardening, and don't return to the house till
I send for you.' His looks were so shocking, he was so unlike himself,
that I declare he daunted me. I let him take me as far as the garden
door. He squeezed my hand. 'For my sake, darling,' he whispered, 'do
what I ask of you.' I went into the garden and sat me down on the
nearest bench, and waited impatiently for what was to come.
"How long a time passed I don't know. My anxiety got to such a pitch at
last that I could bear it no longer. I ventured back to the house.
"I listened in the passage, and heard nothing. I went close to the
parlor door, and still there was silence. I took courage, and opened the
door.
"The room was empty. There was a letter on the table. It was in my
husband's handwriting, and it was addressed to me. I opened it and read
it. The letter told me that I was deserted, disgraced, ruined. The woman
with the fiery face and the impudent eyes was Van Brandt's lawful wife.
She had given him his choice of going away with her at once or of being
prosecuted for bigamy. He had gone away with her--gone, and left me.
"Remember, sir, that I had lost both father and mother. I had no
friends. I was alone in the world, without a creature near to comfort or
advise me. And please to bear in mind that I have a temper which feels
even the smallest slights and injuries very keenly. Do you wonder at
what I had it in my thoughts to do that evening on the bridge?
"Mind this: I believe I should never have attempted to destroy myself if
I could only have burst out crying. No tears came to me. A dull, stunned
feeling took hold like a vise on my head and on my heart. I walked
straight to the river. I said to myself, quite calmly, as I went along,
'_There_ is the end of it, and the sooner the better.'
"What happened after that, you know as well as I do. I may get on to the
next morning--the morning when I so ungratefully left you at the inn by
the river-side.
"I had but one reason, sir, for going away by the first conveyance that
I could find to take me, and this was the fear that Van Brandt might
discover me if I remained in Perthshire. The letter that he had left on
the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing
of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been
entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was
little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent.
When he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was
dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she had
discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out. Knowing
her furious temper, he had gone away with her, as the one means
of preventing an application to the justices and a scandal in the
neighborhood. In a day or two he would purchase his release from her by
an addition to the allowance which she had already received from him:
he would return to me and take me abroad, out of the way of further
annoyance. I was his wife in the sight of Heaven; I was the only woman
he had ever loved; and so on, and so on.
"Do you now see, sir, the risk that I ran of his discovering me if I
remained in your neighborhood? The bare thought of it made my flesh
creep. I was determined never again to see the man who had so cruelly
deceived me. I am in the same mind still--with this difference, that I
might consent to see him, if I could be positively assured first of the
death of his wife. That is not likely to happen. Let me get on with my
letter, and tell you what I did on my arrival in Edinburgh.
"The coachman recommended me to the house in the Canongate where you
found me lodging. I wrote the same day to relatives of my father, living
in Glasgow, to tell them where I was, and in what a forlorn position I
found myself.
"I was answered by return of post. The head of the family and his wife
requested me to refrain from visiting them in Glasgow. They had business
then in hand which would take them to Edinburgh, and I might expect to
see them both with the least possible delay.
"They arrived, as they had promised, and they expressed themselves
civilly enough. Moreover, they did certainly lend me a small sum of
money when they found how poorly my purse was furnished. But I don't
think either husband or wife felt much for me. They recommended me, at
parting, to apply to my father's other relatives, living in England. I
may be doing them an injustice, but I fancy they were eager to get me
(as the common phrase is) off their hands.
"The day when the departure of my relatives left me friendless was
also the day, sir, when I had that dream or vision of you which I have
already related. I lingered on at the house in the Canongate, partly
because the landlady was kind to me, partly because I was so depressed
by my position that I really did not know what to do next.
"In this wretched condition you discovered me on that favorite walk
of mine from Holyrood to Saint Anthony's Well. Believe me, your kind
interest in my fortunes has not been thrown away on an ungrateful woman.
I could ask Providence for no greater blessing than to find a brother
and a friend in you. You have yourself destroyed that hope by what you
said and did when we were together in the parlor. I don't blame you: I
am afraid my manner (without my knowing it) might have seemed to give
you some encouragement. I am only sorry--very, very sorry--to have no
honorable choice left but never to see you again.
"After much thinking, I have made up my mind to speak to those other
relatives of my father to whom I have not yet applied. The chance that
they may help me to earn an honest living is the one chance that I have
left. God bless you, Mr. Germaine! I wish you prosperity and happiness
from the bottom of my heart; and remain, your grateful servant,
"M. VAN BRANDT.
"P.S.--I sign my own name (or the name which I once thought was mine) as
a proof that I have honestly written the truth about myself, from first
to last. For the future I must, for safety's sake, live under some other
name. I should like to go back to my name when I was a happy girl at
home. But Van Brandt knows it; and, besides, I have (no matter how
innocently) disgraced it. Good-by again, sir; and thank you again."
So the letter concluded.
I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and thoroughly
unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had done, she had done
wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first place, to have married at all.
It was wrong of her to contemplate receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even
if his lawful wife had died in the interval. It was wrong of her to
return my letter of introduction, after I had given myself the trouble
of altering it to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take
an absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration,
and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van Brandt
himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her to sign her
Christian name in initial only. Here I was, passionately in love with a
woman, and not knowing by what fond name to identify her in my thoughts!
"M. Van Brandt!" I might call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel,
Magdalen, Mary--no, not Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but
I owed some respect to the memory of it. If the "Mary" of my early days
were still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as
this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to think
even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of her at all?
Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of tracing her in her
letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace a woman who had gone I
knew not whither, and who herself informed me that she meant to pass
under an assumed name. Had I lost all pride, all self-respect? In the
flower of my age, with a handsome fortune, with the world before me,
full of interesting female faces and charming female figures, what
course did it become me to take? To go back to my country-house, and
mope over the loss of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to
send for a courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among
foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at that
moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my imagination.
I first astonished the people at the hotel by ordering all further
inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt to be stopped; and then I
opened my writing desk and wrote to tell my mother frankly and fully of
my new plans.
The answer arrived by return of post.
To my surprise and delight, my good mother was not satisfied with only
formally approving of my new resolution. With an energy which I had
not ventured to expect from her, she had made all her arrangements for
leaving home, and had started for Edinburgh to join me as my traveling
companion. "You shall not go away alone, George," she wrote, "while I
have strength and spirits to keep you company."
In three days from the time when I read those words our preparations
were completed, and we were on our way to the Continent.