On the day of the marriage Agnes Lockwood sat alone in the little
drawing-room of her London lodgings, burning the letters which had been
written to her by Montbarry in the bygone time.
The Countess’s maliciously smart description of her, addressed to
Doctor Wybrow, had not even hinted at the charm that most distinguished
Agnes—the artless expression of goodness and purity which instantly
attracted everyone who approached her. She looked by many years younger
than she really was. With her fair complexion and her shy manner, it
seemed only natural to speak of her as “a girl,” although she was now
really advancing towards thirty years of age. She lived alone with an
old nurse devoted to her, on a modest little income which was just
enough to support the two. There were none of the ordinary signs of
grief in her face, as she slowly tore the letters of her false lover in
two, and threw the pieces into the small fire which had been lit to
consume them. Unhappily for herself, she was one of those women who
feel too deeply to find relief in tears. Pale and quiet, with cold
trembling fingers, she destroyed the letters one by one without daring
to read them again. She had torn the last of the series, and was still
shrinking from throwing it after the rest into the swiftly destroying
flame, when the old nurse came in, and asked if she would see “Master
Henry,”—meaning that youngest member of the Westwick family, who had
publicly declared his contempt for his brother in the smoking-room of
the club.
Agnes hesitated. A faint tinge of colour stole over her face.
There had been a long past time when Henry Westwick had owned that he
loved her. She had made her confession to him, acknowledging that her
heart was given to his eldest brother. He had submitted to his
disappointment; and they had met thenceforth as cousins and friends.
Never before had she associated the idea of him with embarrassing
recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother’s marriage to
another woman had consummated his brother’s treason towards her, there
was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old
nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her
hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely
word for Henry. “He says, he’s going away, my dear; and he only wants
to shake hands, and say good-bye.” This plain statement of the case had
its effect. Agnes decided on receiving her cousin.
He entered the room so rapidly that he surprised her in the act of
throwing the fragments of Montbarry’s last letter into the fire. She
hurriedly spoke first.
“You are leaving London very suddenly, Henry. Is it business? or
pleasure?”
Instead of answering her, he pointed to the flaming letter, and to some
black ashes of burnt paper lying lightly in the lower part of the
fireplace.
“Are you burning letters?”
“Yes.”
“_His_ letters?”
“Yes.”
He took her hand gently. “I had no idea I was intruding on you, at a
time when you must wish to be alone. Forgive me, Agnes—I shall see you
when I return.”
She signed to him, with a faint smile, to take a chair.
“We have known one another since we were children,” she said. “Why
should I feel a foolish pride about myself in your presence? why should
I have any secrets from you? I sent back all your brother’s gifts to me
some time ago. I have been advised to do more, to keep nothing that can
remind me of him—in short, to burn his letters. I have taken the
advice; but I own I shrank a little from destroying the last of the
letters. No—not because it was the last, but because it had this in
it.” She opened her hand, and showed him a lock of Montbarry’s hair,
tied with a morsel of golden cord. “Well! well! let it go with the
rest.”
She dropped it into the flame. For a while, she stood with her back to
Henry, leaning on the mantel-piece, and looking into the fire. He took
the chair to which she had pointed, with a strange contradiction of
expression in his face: the tears were in his eyes, while the brows
above were knit close in an angry frown. He muttered to himself, “Damn
him!”
She rallied her courage, and looked at him again when she spoke. “Well,
Henry, and why are you going away?”
“I am out of spirits, Agnes, and I want a change.”
She paused before she spoke again. His face told her plainly that he
was thinking of _her_ when he made that reply. She was grateful to him,
but her mind was not with him: her mind was still with the man who had
deserted her. She turned round again to the fire.
“Is it true,” she asked, after a long silence, “that they have been
married to-day?”
He answered ungraciously in the one necessary word:—“Yes.”
“Did you go to the church?”
He resented the question with an expression of indignant surprise. “Go
to the church?” he repeated. “I would as soon go to—” He checked
himself there. “How can you ask?” he added in lower tones. “I have
never spoken to Montbarry, I have not even seen him, since he treated
you like the scoundrel and the fool that he is.”
She looked at him suddenly, without saying a word. He understood her,
and begged her pardon. But he was still angry. “The reckoning comes to
some men,” he said, “even in this world. He will live to rue the day
when he married that woman!”
Agnes took a chair by his side, and looked at him with a gentle
surprise.
“Is it quite reasonable to be so angry with her, because your brother
preferred her to me?” she asked.
Henry turned on her sharply. “Do _you_ defend the Countess, of all the
people in the world?”
“Why not?” Agnes answered. “I know nothing against her. On the only
occasion when we met, she appeared to be a singularly timid, nervous
person, looking dreadfully ill; and _being_ indeed so ill that she
fainted under the heat of my room. Why should we not do her justice? We
know that she was innocent of any intention to wrong me; we know that
she was not aware of my engagement—”
Henry lifted his hand impatiently, and stopped her. “There is such a
thing as being _too_ just and _too_ forgiving!” he interposed. “I can’t
bear to hear you talk in that patient way, after the scandalously cruel
manner in which you have been treated. Try to forget them both, Agnes.
I wish to God I could help you to do it!”
Agnes laid her hand on his arm. “You are very good to me, Henry; but
you don’t quite understand me. I was thinking of myself and my trouble
in quite a different way, when you came in. I was wondering whether
anything which has so entirely filled my heart, and so absorbed all
that is best and truest in me, as my feeling for your brother, can
really pass away as if it had never existed. I have destroyed the last
visible things that remind me of him. In this world I shall see him no
more. But is the tie that once bound us, completely broken? Am I as
entirely parted from the good and evil fortune of his life as if we had
never met and never loved? What do _you_ think, Henry? I can hardly
believe it.”
“If you could bring the retribution on him that he has deserved,” Henry
Westwick answered sternly, “I might be inclined to agree with you.”
As that reply passed his lips, the old nurse appeared again at the
door, announcing another visitor.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, my dear. But here is little Mrs. Ferrari
wanting to know when she may say a few words to you.”
Agnes turned to Henry, before she replied. “You remember Emily Bidwell,
my favourite pupil years ago at the village school, and afterwards my
maid? She left me, to marry an Italian courier, named Ferrari—and I am
afraid it has not turned out very well. Do you mind my having her in
here for a minute or two?”
Henry rose to take his leave. “I should be glad to see Emily again at
any other time,” he said. “But it is best that I should go now. My mind
is disturbed, Agnes; I might say things to you, if I stayed here any
longer, which—which are better not said now. I shall cross the Channel
by the mail to-night, and see how a few weeks’ change will help me.” He
took her hand. “Is there anything in the world that I can do for you?”
he asked very earnestly. She thanked him, and tried to release her
hand. He held it with a tremulous lingering grasp. “God bless you,
Agnes!” he said in faltering tones, with his eyes on the ground. Her
face flushed again, and the next instant turned paler than ever; she
knew his heart as well as he knew it himself—she was too distressed to
speak. He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed it fervently, and,
without looking at her again, left the room. The nurse hobbled after
him to the head of the stairs: she had not forgotten the time when the
younger brother had been the unsuccessful rival of the elder for the
hand of Agnes. “Don’t be down-hearted, Master Henry,” whispered the old
woman, with the unscrupulous common sense of persons in the lower rank
of life. “Try her again, when you come back!”
Left alone for a few moments, Agnes took a turn in the room, trying to
compose herself. She paused before a little water-colour drawing on the
wall, which had belonged to her mother: it was her own portrait when
she was a child. “How much happier we should be,” she thought to
herself sadly, “if we never grew up!”
The courier’s wife was shown in—a little meek melancholy woman, with
white eyelashes, and watery eyes, who curtseyed deferentially and was
troubled with a small chronic cough. Agnes shook hands with her kindly.
“Well, Emily, what can I do for you?”
The courier’s wife made rather a strange answer: “I’m afraid to tell
you, Miss.”
“Is it such a very difficult favour to grant? Sit down, and let me hear
how you are going on. Perhaps the petition will slip out while we are
talking. How does your husband behave to you?”
Emily’s light grey eyes looked more watery than ever. She shook her
head and sighed resignedly. “I have no positive complaint to make
against him, Miss. But I’m afraid he doesn’t care about me; and he
seems to take no interest in his home—I may almost say he’s tired of
his home. It might be better for both of us, Miss, if he went
travelling for a while—not to mention the money, which is beginning to
be wanted sadly.” She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and sighed
again more resignedly than ever.
“I don’t quite understand,” said Agnes. “I thought your husband had an
engagement to take some ladies to Switzerland and Italy?”
“That was his ill-luck, Miss. One of the ladies fell ill—and the others
wouldn’t go without her. They paid him a month’s salary as
compensation. But they had engaged him for the autumn and winter—and
the loss is serious.”
“I am sorry to hear it, Emily. Let us hope he will soon have another
chance.”
“It’s not his turn, Miss, to be recommended when the next applications
come to the couriers’ office. You see, there are so many of them out of
employment just now. If he could be privately recommended—” She
stopped, and left the unfinished sentence to speak for itself.
Agnes understood her directly. “You want my recommendation,” she
rejoined. “Why couldn’t you say so at once?”
Emily blushed. “It would be such a chance for my husband,” she answered
confusedly. “A letter, inquiring for a good courier (a six months’
engagement, Miss!) came to the office this morning. It’s another man’s
turn to be chosen—and the secretary will recommend him. If my husband
could only send his testimonials by the same post—with just a word in
your name, Miss—it might turn the scale, as they say. A private
recommendation between gentlefolks goes so far.” She stopped again, and
sighed again, and looked down at the carpet, as if she had some private
reason for feeling a little ashamed of herself.
Agnes began to be rather weary of the persistent tone of mystery in
which her visitor spoke. “If you want my interest with any friend of
mine,” she said, “why can’t you tell me the name?”
The courier’s wife began to cry. “I’m ashamed to tell you, Miss.”
For the first time, Agnes spoke sharply. “Nonsense, Emily! Tell me the
name directly—or drop the subject—whichever you like best.”
Emily made a last desperate effort. She wrung her handkerchief hard in
her lap, and let off the name as if she had been letting off a loaded
gun:—“Lord Montbarry!”
Agnes rose and looked at her.
“You have disappointed me,” she said very quietly, but with a look
which the courier’s wife had never seen in her face before. “Knowing
what you know, you ought to be aware that it is impossible for me to
communicate with Lord Montbarry. I always supposed you had some
delicacy of feeling. I am sorry to find that I have been mistaken.”
Weak as she was, Emily had spirit enough to feel the reproof. She
walked in her meek noiseless way to the door. “I beg your pardon, Miss.
I am not quite so bad as you think me. But I beg your pardon, all the
same.”
She opened the door. Agnes called her back. There was something in the
woman’s apology that appealed irresistibly to her just and generous
nature. “Come,” she said; “we must not part in this way. Let me not
misunderstand you. What is it that you expected me to do?”
Emily was wise enough to answer this time without any reserve. “My
husband will send his testimonials, Miss, to Lord Montbarry in
Scotland. I only wanted you to let him say in his letter that his wife
has been known to you since she was a child, and that you feel some
little interest in his welfare on that account. I don’t ask it now,
Miss. You have made me understand that I was wrong.”
Had she really been wrong? Past remembrances, as well as present
troubles, pleaded powerfully with Agnes for the courier’s wife. “It
seems only a small favour to ask,” she said, speaking under the impulse
of kindness which was the strongest impulse in her nature. “But I am
not sure that I ought to allow my name to be mentioned in your
husband’s letter. Let me hear again exactly what he wishes to say.”
Emily repeated the words—and then offered one of those suggestions,
which have a special value of their own to persons unaccustomed to the
use of their pens. “Suppose you try, Miss, how it looks in writing?”
Childish as the idea was, Agnes tried the experiment. “If I let you
mention me,” she said, “we must at least decide what you are to say.”
She wrote the words in the briefest and plainest form:—“I venture to
state that my wife has been known from her childhood to Miss Agnes
Lockwood, who feels some little interest in my welfare on that
account.” Reduced to this one sentence, there was surely nothing in the
reference to her name which implied that Agnes had permitted it, or
that she was even aware of it. After a last struggle with herself, she
handed the written paper to Emily. “Your husband must copy it exactly,
without altering anything,” she stipulated. “On that condition, I grant
your request.” Emily was not only thankful—she was really touched.
Agnes hurried the little woman out of the room. “Don’t give me time to
repent and take it back again,” she said. Emily vanished.
“Is the tie that once bound us completely broken? Am I as entirely
parted from the good and evil fortune of his life as if we had never
met and never loved?” Agnes looked at the clock on the mantel-piece.
Not ten minutes since, those serious questions had been on her lips. It
almost shocked her to think of the common-place manner in which they
had already met with their reply. The mail of that night would appeal
once more to Montbarry’s remembrance of her—in the choice of a servant.
Two days later, the post brought a few grateful lines from Emily. Her
husband had got the place. Ferrari was engaged, for six months certain,
as Lord Montbarry’s courier.
THE SECOND PART