This event, which set me completely free, caused a repetition of
certain formalities. The doctor visited me, and regaled me with
doleful words and sighs. In the course of conversation I endeavoured
to extract from him some information as to the peculiar form of
illness from which my mother had been so long a sufferer, but all the
satisfaction I could obtain from him was that she had always been
"weak, very weak," and always "low, very low," and that she
had for years been "gradually wasting away." She suffered from
"sleeplessness," she suffered from "nerves," her pulse was too quick,
her heart was too slow, and so on, and so on. His speech was full of
feeble medical platitudes, and threw no light whatever upon the
subject.
"In such cases," he said, "all we can do is to sustain, to prescribe
strengthening things, to stimulate, to invigorate, to give tone to the
constitution. I have remarked many times that the poor lady might go
off at any moment. She had the best of nurses, the best of nurses!
Mrs. Fortress is a most exemplary woman. Between you and me she
understood your mother's ailments almost as well as I did."
"If she did not understand them a great deal better," I thought, "she
must have known very little indeed."
In my conversations with the lawyer Mrs. Fortress's name also cropped
up.
"A most remarkable woman," he said, "strong-minded, self-willed, with
iron nerves, and at the same time exceedingly conscientious and
attentive to her duties. Your lamented father entertained the highest
opinion of her, and always mentioned her name with respect. The kind
of woman that ought to have been born a man. Very tenacious, very
reserved--a very rare specimen indeed. Altogether an exception. By the
way, I saw her a few minutes ago, and she asked me to inform you that
she did not consider she had any longer authority in the house, and
that she would soon be leaving."
At my desire the lawyer undertook for a while the supervision of
affairs, and sent a married couple to Rosemullion to attend to
domestic matters.
Three days after my mother's funeral Mrs. Fortress came to wish me
good-bye. Although there had ever been a barrier between us I could
not fail to recognise that she had faithfully performed her duties,
and I invited her to sit down. She took a seat, and waited for me to
speak. She was wonderfully composed and self-possessed, and had such
perfect control over herself that I believe she would have sat there
in silence for hours had I not been the first to speak.
"You are going away for good, Mrs. Fortress?" I said.
"Yes, sir," she answered, "for good."
It was the first time she had ever called me "sir," and I understood
it to be a recognition of my position as Master of Rosemullion.
"Do you intend to seek another service?" I asked.
"No, sir; it is not likely I shall enter service again. You are aware
that your father was good enough to provide for me."
"Yes, and I am pleased that he did so. Had he forgotten, I should have
been glad to acknowledge in a fitting way your long service in our
family."
"You are very kind, sir."
"Where do you go to from here?"
"I have a home in Cornwall, sir."
"Indeed. I do not remember that you have ever visited it."
"It is many years since I saw it, sir."
"Not once, I think, since you have been with us."
"Not once, sir."
"Your duties here have been onerous. Although we are in mourning you
must be glad to be released." I pointed to her dress; she, like
myself, was dressed in black; but she made no comment on my remark.
"Will you give me your address, Mrs. Fortress?"
"Willingly, sir."
She wrote it on an envelope which I placed before her, and I put it
into my pocket-book.
"If I wish to communicate with you, this will be certain to find you?"
"Yes, sir, quite certain."
"Circumstances may occur," I said, "which may render it necessary for
me to seek information from you."
"Respecting whom, or what, sir?"
"It is hard to say. But, perhaps respecting my mother."
"I am afraid, sir, it will be useless to communicate with me upon that
subject."
"Mrs. Fortress," I said, nettled at the decisive tone in which she
spoke, "it occurs to me that during the many years you have been with
us you have been unobservant of me."
"You are mistaken, sir."
"Outwardly unobservant, perhaps I should have said. When you entered
my father's service I must have been a very young child. I am now a
man."
"Yes, sir, you will be twenty-two on your next birthday. I wish you a
happy life, whether it be a long or a short one."
"And being a man, it is natural that I should desire to know something
of what has been hidden from me."
"You are assuming, sir, that something _has_ been hidden."
"I have not been quite a machine, Mrs. Fortress. Give me credit for at
least an average amount of intelligence. It is not possible for me to
be blind to the fact that there has been a mystery in our family."
"It is you who say so, sir, not I."
"I know, and know, also, that of your own prompting you will say
little or nothing. To what can I appeal? To your womanly sympathies,
to your sense of justice? Until this moment I have been silent. As a
boy I had to submit, and latterly as a man. My parents were living,
and their lightest wish was a law to me. But the chains are loosened
now; they have fallen from me into my mother's grave. Surely you
cannot, in reason or injustice, refuse to answer a few simple
questions."
"Upon the subject you have referred to, sir, I have nothing to tell."
"That is to say, you are determined to tell me nothing."
She rose from her chair, and said, "With your permission, sir, I will
wish you farewell."
"No, no; sit down again for a few minutes. I will not detain you long,
and I will endeavour not to press unwelcome questions upon you. In all
human probability this is the last opportunity we shall have of
speaking together; for even supposing that at some future time you
should yourself desire to volunteer explanations which you now
withhold from me, you will not know how to communicate with me."
"Is it your intention to leave Rosemullion, sir?"
"I shall make speedy arrangements to quit it for ever. It has not been
so filled with light and love as to become endeared to me. I shall
leave it not only willingly but with pleasure, and I shall never again
set foot in it."
"There is no saying what may happen in the course of life, sir. Have
you made up your mind where you are going to live?"
"In no settled place. I shall travel."
"Change of scene will be good for you, sir. It is altogether the best
thing you could do."
"Of that," I said impatiently, "I am the best judge. My future life
can be of no interest to you. It is of the past I wish to speak. Have
you any objection to inform me for how long you have been in my
mother's service?"
"You were but a little over two years of age, sir, at the time I
entered it."
"For nearly twenty years, then. You do not look old, Mrs. Fortress."
"I am forty-two, sir."
"Then you were twenty-three when you came to us?"
"Yes, sir."
"We were poor at the time, and were living in common lodgings in
London?"
"That is so, sir."
"My father's means were so straitened, if my memory does not betray
me, that every shilling of our income had to be reckoned. You did
not--excuse me for the question, Mrs. Fortress--you did not serve my
parents for love?"
"No, sir; it was purely a matter of business between your father and
me."
"You are--again I beg you to excuse me--not the kind of person to work
for nothing, or even for small wages."
"Your father paid me liberally, sir."
"And yet we were so poor that until we came suddenly and unexpectedly
into a fortune, my father could never afford to give me a shilling.
Truly your duties must have been no ordinary ones that you should have
been engaged under such circumstances. It is, I suppose, useless for
me to ask for an explanation of the nature of those duties?"
"Quite useless, sir."
"Will you tell me nothing, Mrs. Fortress, that will throw light upon
the dark spaces of my life?"
"I have nothing to tell, sir."
To a man less under control than myself this iteration of
unwillingness would have been intolerable, but I knew that nothing was
to be gained by giving way to anger. I should have been the sufferer
and the loser by it.
"Looking down, Mrs. Fortress, upon the dead body of my mother, you
made the remark that it was a happy release."
"Death is to all a happy release, sir."
"A common platitude, which does not deceive me."
"You cannot forget, sir, that your mother was a great sufferer."
"I forget very little. Mrs. Fortress, in this interview I think you
have not behaved graciously--nay, more, that you have not behaved with
fairness or justice."
"Upon that point, sir," she said composedly, "you may not be a
competent judge."
Her manner was so perfectly respectful that I could not take exception
to this retort. She seemed, however, to be aware that she was upon
dangerous ground, for she rose, and I made no further attempt to
detain her. But now it was she who lingered, unbidden, with something
on her mind of which she desired to speak. I raised my head, and
wondered whether, of her own free will, she was about to satisfy my
curiosity.
"If I thought you were not angry, sir," she said, "and would not take
offence, I should like to ask you a question, and if you answer it
according to my expectation, one other in connection with it."
"I shall not take offence," I said, "and I promise to exercise less
reserve than you have done."
"I thank you, sir," she said, gazing steadily at me, so steadily,
indeed, as to cause me to doubt whether, in a combat of will-power
between us I should be the victor. "My questions are very simple. Do
you ever hear the sounds of music, without being able to account for
them?"
The question, simple as it was, startled, and for a moment almost
unnerved me. What she suggested had occurred to me, at intervals
perhaps of two or three months, and always when I was alone, and had
worked myself into a state of exaltation. I do not exactly know at
what period of my life this strange experience commenced, but my
impression is that it came to me first in the night when I awoke from
sleep, and was lying in the dark. It had occurred at those times
within the last two or three years, and had it not been that it had
already become somewhat familiar to me in hours of sunshine as well as
in hours of darkness, I should probably have decided that it was but
the refrain of a dream by which I was haunted. In daylight I
frequently searched for the cause, but never with success. Lately I
had given up the search, and had argued myself into a half belief that
it was a delusion, produced by my dwelling upon the subject, and
magnifying it into undue importance. For the most part the mysterious
strains were faint, but very sweet and melodious; they seemed to come
from afar off, and as I listened to them they gradually died away into
a musical whisper, and grew fainter and more faint till they were lost
altogether. But it had happened on two or three occasions, instead of
their dying softly away and leaving me in a state of calm happiness,
that the sweet strains were abruptly broken by what sounded now like a
wail, now like a suppressed shriek. This violent and, to my senses,
cruel termination of the otherwise melodious sounds set my blood
boiling dangerously, and unreasonably infuriated me--so much so that
the power I held over myself was ingulfed in a torrent of wild passion
which I could not control. The melodious strains were always the same,
and the air was strange to me. I had never heard it from a visible
musician.
Not to a living soul had I ever spoken of the delusion, and that the
subject should now be introduced into our conversation, and not
introduced by me, could not but strike me as of singular portent. As
Mrs. Fortress asked the question I heard once more the soft spiritual
strains, and I involuntarily raised my right hand in the act of
listening; I hear them at the present moment as I write, and I lay
aside my pen a while, until they shall pass away. So! They are
gone--but they will come again.
I answered Mrs. Fortress briefly, but not without agitation.
"Yes, I have heard such sounds as those you mention."
"You hear them now?"
"Yes, I hear them now. Do you?"
"My powers of imagination, sir, are less powerful than yours," she
said evasively, and passed on to her second question. "It is not an
English air, sir?"
"No, it is not English, so far as I am a judge."
"It comes probably," she suggested, and I was convinced that she spoke
with premeditation, "from a foreign source."
"Most probably," I said.
"Perhaps from the mountains in the Tyrol."
A Tyrolean air! I seized upon the suggestion, and accepted it as fact,
though I was quite unable to speak with authority. But why to me, who
had never been out of England, should come this melody of the Tyrol? I
could no more answer this question than I could say why the impassive,
undemonstrative woman before me was, as it were, revealing me to
myself and probing my soul to its hidden depths.
"It may be so," I said. "Do you seek for any further information from
me?"
"No, sir." But there was a slight hesitancy in her voice which proved
that this was not the only subject in her mind which bore upon my
inner life.
"And now," I said, "I must ask you why you put these questions to me,
and by what means you became possessed of my secret, mention of which
has never passed my lips?" She shook her head, and turned towards the
door, but I imperatively called upon her to stay. "You cannot deal
with me upon this subject as you have upon all others. I have a
distinct right to demand an explanation."
"I can give you no explanation, sir," she said, with deference and
respect.
"You refuse?"
"I _must_ refuse," she replied firmly, and then she bowed, and saying,
"With my humble duty, sir," was gone.