THE ONLY WITNESS GONE.
One afternoon, about eighteen years later, certain mourning-coaches,
returning home from a funeral, drew up before a house in Bryanston
Square. There were three coaches. From the first descended a young man
of twenty or thereabouts, still slight and boyish in figure. He had
been sitting alone in the carriage.
From the second came a middle-aged man of the greatest respectability,
to look at. He was so respectable, so eminently respectable, that he
could not possibly be anything but a butler. With him was a completely
respectable person of the other sex, who could be no other than a
housekeeper.
In the third carriage there were two young maid-servants in black, and
a boy in buttons. At the halting of the carriage they clapped their
handkerchiefs to their eyes, because they knew what was expected on
such an occasion; and they kept up this external show of grief until
they had mounted the steps and the door was shut. The page, who was
with them, had been weeping freely ever since they started; not so
much from unavailing grief, as from the blackness of the ceremony, and
the dreadful coffin, and the horror and terror and mystery of the
thing. He went up the stairs snuffling, and so continued for the rest
of the day.
The young gentleman mounted to the drawing-room, where his mother,
sitting in a straight, high chair, more like an office-chair than
one designed for a drawing-room, was dictating to a shorthand girl
secretary. The table was covered with papers. In the back drawing-room
two other girls were writing. For Lady Woodroffe was president of
one society, chairman of committee of another, honorary secretary
of a third; her letters and articles were on subjects and works of
philanthropy, purity, rescue, white lilies, temperance, and education.
Her platform advocacy of such works had placed her in the forefront of
civilizing women; she was a great captain in Israel, a very Deborah, a
Jael.
She was also, which certainly assisted her efforts, a very handsome
woman still, perhaps austere: but then her eloquence was of the severe
order. She appealed to the conscience, to duty, to responsibility,
to honour. If sinners quailed at contemplating the gulf between
themselves and the prophetess, who, like Jeremiah, had so little
sympathy with those who slide backwards and enjoy the exercise, it
was a perpetual joy to ladies of principle to consider an example so
powerful.
She was dressed in black silk, but wore no widow's weeds; her husband,
the first Sir Humphrey, had been dead four years.
The young gentleman threw himself into a chair. Lady Woodroffe nodded
to her secretary, who gathered up her papers and retreated to the
back drawing-room, closing the door.
"Well, mother," said the boy, carelessly, "we've buried the old woman."
"Yes. I hope you were not too much distressed, Humphrey. I am pleased
that you went to the funeral, if only to gratify the servants."
"How could I refuse to attend her funeral?--an old servant like that.
It's a beastly thing--a funeral,--and a beastly nuisance."
"We must not forget her services," the lady replied. "It was in return
for those services that I kept her here, and nursed her through her
old age. One does not encumber one's self with sick old women except
in such cases as this."
"No, thank goodness." The young man was in no gracious mood. "Give me
a servant who takes her wages and goes off, without asking for our
gratitude."
"Still, she was your nurse--and a good nurse."
"Too ostentatious of her affection, especially towards the end."
"She was also"--Lady Woodroffe pursued her own thoughts, which was her
way--"a silent woman; a woman who could be trusted, if necessary, with
secrets--family secrets."
"Thank goodness, we've got none. From family secrets, family
skeletons, family ghosts, good Lord, deliver us!"
"There are secrets, or skeletons, in every family, I suppose.
Fortunately, we forget some, and we never hear of others. You are
fortunate, Humphrey, that you are free from the vexation--or the
shame--or the shock--of family secrets, which mean family scandals.
Now, at all events, you are perfectly safe, because there is no one
living who can create a family ghost for you, or provide you with a
skeleton."
Humphrey laughed lightly. "Let the dead bury their dead," he replied.
"So long as I know nothing about the skeleton, it can go on grinning
in the cupboard, for aught I care.
"Did I tell you," the young man continued, after a pause, "of her last
words?"
"What last words?"
"I thought I had told you. Curious words they were. I suppose her mind
was wandering."
"Humphrey," said his mother, sharply, "what did she say? What words?"
"Well, they sent for me. It was just before the end. She was lying
apparently asleep, her eyes shut. I thought she was going. The nurse
was at the other end of the room, fussing with the tea-cups. Then she
opened her eyes and saw me. She whispered, 'Low down, low down, Master
Humphrey.' So I stooped down, and she said, 'Don't blame her, Master
Humphrey. I persuaded her, and we kept it up, for your sake. Nobody
suspects. All for your sake I kept it up,' Then she closed her eyes,
and opened them no more."
"What do you understand by those words, Humphrey?"
"Nothing. I cannot understand them. She was accusing herself, I
suppose, of something--I know not what. What did she keep up? Whom
did she persuade? But why should we want to know?"
"Wandering words. Nurses will tell you that no importance can be
attached to the last words when the brain wanders. Well, Humphrey,
while you were at the funeral I unlocked her drawers and examined the
contents. I found that she had quite a large sum of money invested.
One is not in good service for all these years without saving
something. There is a little pile of photographs of yourself at
various ages. I have put them aside for you, if you like to have them."
"I don't want them," he replied carelessly.
"I shall keep them, then. There is her wardrobe also. I believe she
had nephews and nieces and cousins in her native village in India.
All her possessions shall be sent out to them. Meanwhile, there is a
little packet of things which she tied up a great many years ago, and
has kept ever since. The sight of them caused me a strange shock. I
thought they had been long destroyed. They revived my memories of a
day--an event--certain days--when you were an infant."
"What things are these, then?"
"They were your own things--some of the things which you wore when you
were a child in arms, not more than a few months old."
"Oh, they are not very interesting, are they?"
"Perhaps not." Lady Woodroffe had in her lap a small packet tied up
in a towel or a serviette. She placed it on the table. "Humphrey, I
always think, when I look at old things, of the stories they might
tell, if they could, of the histories and the changes which might have
happened."
"Well, I don't know, mother. I am very well contented with things as
they are, though they might have given my father a peerage. As for
thinking of what they might have been, why, I might, perhaps, have
been born in a gutter."
"You might, Humphrey"--the widow laughed, which was an unwonted thing
in her--"you certainly might. And you cannot imagine what you would be
now, had you been born in a gutter."
"What's the good of asking, then?"
"Look at this bundle of your things."
"I don't want to look at them."
"No, I dare say not. But I do. They tell a story to me which they
cannot tell to you. I am glad the old woman kept them."
Lady Woodroffe untied the parcel, and laid open the things.
"The story is so curious that I cannot help looking at the things.
I have opened the bundle a dozen times to-day, since I found it.
I believe I shall have to tell you that story some day, Humphrey,
whether I like it or not."
"What story can there be connected with a parcel of socks and shoes?"
"To you, at present, none. To me, a most eventful story. The old
nurse knew the story very well, but she never talked about it. See,
Humphrey, the things are of quite coarse materials--one would think
they were made for that gutter child we talked about."
Her son stooped and picked up a paper that had fallen on the floor.
"'His name is Humphrey,'" he read. "A servant's handwriting, one would
think. What was the use of writing what everybody knew?"
"Perhaps some servant was practising the art of penmanship. Well"--she
tied up the parcel again--"I shall keep these things myself."
She put the parcel on the table, and presently carried it to her
room. Her son immediately forgot all about the old nurse's strange
last words, and the parcel of clothes, and everything. This was not
unnatural, because he presently went back to Cambridge, where there is
very little sympathy with the sentiment of baby linen.
When the door closed upon her son, his mother sprang to her feet.
"Oh!" she clasped her hands. Can we put her thoughts into words--the
thoughts that are so swift, into words that are so slow--the thoughts
that can so feebly express the mind with words that are so imperfect?
"I have never felt myself free until to-day. She is dead; she is
buried. On her death-bed she kept the secret. She never wrote it down;
she never told any one: had she written it I should have found it; had
she told any one I should have heard of it before now. And all, as she
said, for the sake of the boy. She meant her long silence. I feared
that at the last, when she lay a-dying, she might have confessed. I
sat in terror when I knew that the boy was at her death-bed. I thought
that when Sir Humphrey died, and the boy succeeded, she might have
confessed. But she did not. Good woman, and true! Never by a word, or
by a look, or by a sigh, did she let me know that she remembered."
She breathed deeply, as if relieved from a great anxiety.
"I have thought it all over, day after day. There is nothing that can
be found out now. The doctor would not recognize me. I suppose he is
still slaving at Birmingham; he did not know my name. The mother never
saw me. At last, I am free from danger! After all these years, I have
no longer any fear."
Over the mantel hung a portrait of her late husband.
"Humphrey," she said, talking to it familiarly, "I did it for your
sake. I could not bear that you should lose your boy. All for your
sake--all for your sake I screened the child from you. At least you
never knew that there is not--there has never been--the least touch of
your nobility in the gutter child. He is mean; he is selfish. He has
never done a kind action, or said a generous word. He has no friends,
only companions. He has already all the vices, but is never carried
away; he will become a sensualist, a cold and heartless sensualist. I
am sorry, Humphrey, truly sorry, my most noble and honourable husband,
that I have given you so unworthy a successor. Yet he is careful; he
will cause no scandal. So far, my husband, your name is safe."