“I intend this letter to be read after my death, and I purpose calling
it plainly a Justification of my conduct towards my Niece. Not because
I think my conduct wants any excuse--but because others, ignorant of
my true motives, may think that my actions want justifying, and may
wickedly condemn me unless I make some such statement in my own
defense as the present. There may still be living one member of my late
brother’s family, whose voice would, I feel sure, be raised against me
for what I have done. The relation to whom I refer has been--”
(Here Mat, who had read carefully thus far, grew impatient, and growling
out some angry words, guided himself hastily down the letter with his
finger till he arrived at the second paragraph.)
“--It was in the April month of 1827 that the villain who was the ruin
of my niece, and the dishonor of the once respectable family to which
she belonged, first came to Dibbledean. He took the little four room
cottage called Jay’s Cottage, which was then to be let furnished, and
which stands out of the town about a quarter of a mile down Church-lane.
He called himself Mr. Carr, and the few letters that came to him were
directed to ‘Arthur Carr, Esq.’
“He was quite a young man,--I should say not more than four or five and
twenty--very quiet mannered and delicate--or rather effeminate looking,
as I thought--for he wore his hair quite long over his shoulders, in the
foreign way, and had a clear, soft complexion, almost like a woman’s.
Though he appeared to be a gentleman, he always kept out of the way of
making acquaintances among the respectable families about Dibbledean. He
had no friends of his own to come and see him that I heard of, except
an old gentleman who might have been his father, and who came once or
twice. His own account of himself was, that he came to Jay’s Cottage for
quiet, and retirement, and study; but he was very reserved, and would
let nobody make up to him until the miserable day when he and my brother
Joshua, and then my niece Mary, all got acquainted together.
“Before I go on to anything else, I must say first, that Mr. Carr was
what they call a botanist. Whenever it was fine, he was always out of
doors, gathering bits of leaves, which it seems he carried home in a
tin case, and dried, and kept by him. He hired a gardener for the bit
of ground round about Jay’s Cottage; and the man told me once, that his
master knew more about flowers and how to grow them than anybody he ever
met with. Mr. Carr used to make little pictures, too, of flowers and
leaves set together in patterns. These things were thought very odd
amusements for a young man to take up with; but he was as fond of them
as others of his age might be hunting or shooting. He brought down many
books with him, and read a great deal; but from all that I heard, he
spent more time over his flowers and his botany than anything else.
“We had, at that time, the two best shops in Dibbledean. Joshua sold
hosiery, and I carried on a good dress-making and general millinery
business. Both our shops were under the same roof, with a partition wall
between. One day Mr. Carr came in Joshua’s shop, and wanted something
which my brother had not got as ready to hand as the common things that
the townspeople generally bought. Joshua begged him to sit down for a
few minutes; but Mr. Carr (the parlor door at the bottom of the shop
being left open) happened to look into the garden, which he could see
very well through the window, and said that he would like to wait there,
and look at the flowers. Joshua was only too glad to have his garden
taken such notice of, by a gentleman who was a botanist; so he showed
his customer in there, and then went up into the warehouse to look for
what was wanted.
“My niece, Mary, worked in my part of the house, along with the other
young women. The room they used to be in looked into the garden; and
from the window my niece must have seen Mr. Carr, and must have slipped
down stairs (I not being in the way just then) to peep at the strange
gentleman--or, more likely, to make believe she was accidentally walking
in the garden, and so get noticed by him. All I know is, that when I
came up into the workroom and found she was not there, and looked out of
the window, I saw her, and Joshua, and Mr. Carr all standing together
on the grass plot, the strange gentleman talking to her quite intimate,
with a flower in his hand.
“I called out to her to come back to her work directly. She looked up at
me, smiling in her bold impudent way, and said:--‘Father has told me I
may stop and learn what this gentleman is so kind as to teach me about
my geraniums.’ After that, I could say nothing more before the stranger:
and when he was gone, and she came back triumphing, and laughing, and
singing about the room, more like a mad play-actress than a decent young
woman, I kept quiet and bore with her provocation. But I went down to my
brother Joshua the same day, and talked to him seriously, and warned him
that she ought to be kept stricter, and never let to have her own way,
and offered to keep a strict hand over her myself, if he would only
support me properly. But he put me off with careless, jesting words,
which he learned to repent of bitterly afterwards.
“Joshua was as pious and respectable a man as ever lived: but it was
his misfortune to be too easy-tempered, and too proud of his daughter.
Having lost his wife, and his eldest boy and girl, he seemed so fond of
Mary, that he could deny her nothing. There was, to be sure, another one
left of his family of children, who--”
(Here, again, Mat lost patience. He had been muttering to himself
angrily for the last minute or two, while he read--and now once more he
passed over several lines of the letter, and went on at once to a new
paragraph.)
“I have said she was vain of her good looks, and bold, and flighty; and
I must now add, that she was also hasty and passionate, and reckless.
But she had wheedling ways with her, which nobody was sharp enough to
see through but me. When I made complaints against her to her father,
and proved that I was right in making them, she always managed to get
him to forgive her. She behaved, from the outset, (though I stood in the
place of a mother to her,) as perversely towards me as usual, in respect
to Mr. Carr. It had flattered her pride to be noticed and bowed to just
as if she was a born lady, by a gentleman, and a customer at the shop.
And the very same evening, at tea time, she undid before my face the
whole effect of the good advice I had been giving her father. What with
jumping on his knee, kissing him, tying and untying his cravat, sticking
flowers in his button-hole, and going on altogether more like a child
than a grown-up young woman, she wheedled him into promising that he
would take her next Sunday to see Mr. Carr’s garden; for it seems the
gentleman had invited them to look at his flowers. I had tried my best,
when I heard it, to persuade my brother not to accept the invitation and
let her scrape acquaintance with a stranger under her father’s own nose;
but all that I could say was useless now. She had got the better of me,
and when I put in my word, she had her bold laugh and her light answer
ready to insult me with directly. Her father said he wondered I was not
amused at her high spirits. I shook my head, but said nothing in return.
Poor man! he lived to see where her ‘high spirits’ led her to.
“On the Sunday, after church, they went to Mr. Carr’s. Though my advice
was set at defiance in this way, I determined to persevere in keeping a
stricter watch over my niece than ever. I felt that the maintaining the
credit and reputation of the family rested with me, and I determined
that I would try my best to uphold our good name. It is some little
comfort to me, after all that has happened, to remember that I did my
utmost to carry out this resolution. The blame of our dishonor lies not
at my door. I disliked and distrusted Mr. Carr from the very first; and
I tried hard to make others as suspicious of him as I was. But all
I could say, and all I could do, availed nothing against the wicked
cunning of my niece. Watch and restrain her as I might, she was sure--”
(Once more Mat broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence. This
time, however, it was to strike a light. The brief day of winter was
fast fading out--the coming darkness was deepening over the pages of
Joanna Grice’s narrative. When he had lit his candle, and had sat down
to read again, he lost his place, and, not having patience to look for
it carefully, went on at once with the first lines that happened to
strike his eye.)
“Things were now come, then, to this pass, that I felt certain she was
in the habit of meeting him in secret; and yet I could not prove it to
my brother’s satisfaction. I had no help that I could call in to assist
me against the diabolical cunning that was used to deceive me. To set
other people to watch them, when I could not, would only have been
spreading through Dibbledean the very scandal that I was most anxious to
avoid. As for Joshua, his infatuation made him deaf to all that I could
urge. He would see nothing suspicious in the fondness Mary had suddenly
taken for Botany, and drawing flowers. He let Mr. Carr lend her
paintings to copy from, just as if they had known each other all their
lives. Next to his blind trust in his daughter, because he was so fond
of her, was his blind trust in this stranger, because the gentleman’s
manners were so quiet and kind, and because he sent us presents of
expensive flowers to plant in our garden. He would not authorize me to
open Mary’s letters, or to forbid her ever to walk out alone; and he
even told me once that I did not know how to make proper allowances for
young people.
“Allowances! I knew my niece better, and my duty as one of an honest
family better, than to make allowances for such conduct as hers. I kept
the tightest hand over her that I could. I advised her, argued with her,
ordered her, portioned out her time for her, watched her, warned her,
told her in the plainest terms, that she should not deceive me--she or
her gentleman! I was honest and open, and said I disapproved so strongly
of the terms she kept up with Mr. Carr, that if ever it lay in my power
to cut short their acquaintance together, I would most assuredly do it.
I even told her plainly that if she once got into mischief, it would
then be too late to reclaim her; and she answered in her reckless,
sluttish way, that if she ever did get into mischief it would be nothing
but my aggravation that would drive her to it; and that she believed
her father’s kindness would never find it too late to reclaim her again.
This is only one specimen of the usual insolence and wickedness of all
her replies to me.”
(As he finished this paragraph, Mat dashed the letter down angrily on
his knee, and cursed the writer of it with some of those gold-digger’s
imprecations which it had been his misfortune to hear but too often in
the past days of his Californian wanderings. It was evidently only by
placing considerable constraint upon himself, that he now refrained from
crumpling up the letter and throwing it from him in disgust. However, he
spread it out flat before him once more--looked first at one paragraph,
then at another, but did not read them; hesitated--and then irritably
turned over the leaf of paper before him, and began at a new page.)
“When I told Joshua generally what I had observed, and particularly what
I myself had seen and heard on the evening in question, he seemed
at last a little staggered, and sent for my niece, to insist on an
explanation. On his repeating to her what I had mentioned to him, she
flung her arms round his neck, looked first at me and then at him, burst
out sobbing and crying, and so got from bad to worse, till she had a
sort of fit. I was not at all sure that this might not be one of her
tricks; but it frightened her father so that he forgot himself, and
threw all the blame on me, and said my prudery and conspiring had
tormented and frightened the poor girl out of her wits. After being
insulted in this way, of course the only thing I could do was to leave
the room, and let her have it all her own way with him.
“It was now the autumn, the middle of September; and I was at my wit’s
end to know what I ought to think and do next--when Mr. Carr left
Dibbledean. He had been away once or twice before, in the summer, but
only for a day or two at a time. On this occasion, my niece received
a letter from him. He had never written to her when he was away in the
summer; so I thought this looked like a longer absence than usual, and
I determined to take advantage of it to try if I could not break off
the intimacy between them, in case it went the length of any more
letter-writing.
“I most solemnly declare, and could affirm on oath if necessary, that in
spite of all I had seen and all I suspected for these many months, I
had not the most distant idea of the wickedness that had really been
committed. I thank God I was not well enough versed in the ways of sin
to be as sharp in coming to the right conclusion as other women might
have been in my situation. I only believed that the course she was
taking might be fatal to her at some future day; and, acting on that
belief, I thought myself justified in using any means in my power to
stop her in time. I therefore resolved with myself that if Mr. Carr
wrote again, she should get none of his letters; and I knew her
passionate and proud disposition well enough to know that if she could
once be brought to think herself neglected by him, she would break off
all intercourse with him, if ever he came back, immediately.
“I thought myself perfectly justified, standing towards her as I did
in the place of a mother, and having only her good at heart, in taking
these measures. On that head my conscience is still quite easy. I
cannot mention what the plan was that I now adopted, without seriously
compromising a living person. All I can say is, that every letter
from Mr. Carr to our house, passed into my hands only, and was by me
committed to the flames unread. These letters were at first all for my
niece; but towards the end of the year two came, at different intervals,
directed to my brother. I distrusted the cunning of the writer and the
weakness of Joshua; and I put both those letters into the fire, unread
like the rest. After that, no more came; and Mr. Carr never returned to
Jay’s Cottage. In reference to this part of my narrative, therefore, I
have only now to add, before proceeding to the miserable confession of
our family dishonor, that I never afterwards saw, and only once heard of
the man who tempted my niece to commit the deadly sin which was her ruin
in this world, and will be her ruin in the next.
“I must return first, however, to what happened from my burning of the
letters. When my niece found that week after week passed, and she never
heard from Mr. Carr, she fretted about it much more than I had fancied
she would. And Joshua unthinkingly made her worse by wondering, in her
presence, at the long absence of the gentleman of Jay’s Cottage. My
brother was a man who could not abide his habits being broken in on. He
had been in the habit of going on certain evenings to Mr. Carr’s (and,
I grieve to say, often taking his daughter with him) to fetch the London
paper, to take back drawings of flowers, and to let my niece bring
away new ones to copy. And now, he fidgeted, and was restless, and
discontented (as much as so easy-tempered a man could be) at not
taking his usual walks to Jay’s Cottage. This, as I have said, made his
daughter worse. She fretted and fretted, and cried in secret, as I could
tell by her eyes, till she grew to be quite altered. Now and then, the
angry fit that I had expected to see, came upon her; but it always
went away again in a manner not at all natural to one of her passionate
disposition. All this time, she led me as miserable a life as she could;
provoking and thwarting and insulting me at every opportunity. I believe
she suspected me, in the matter of the letters. But I had taken my
measures so as to make discovery impossible; and I determined to wait,
and be patient and persevering, and get the better of her and her wicked
fancy for Mr. Carr, just as I had made up my mind to do.
“At last, as the winter drew on, she altered so much, and got such a
strange look in her face, which never seemed to leave it, that Joshua
became alarmed, and said he must send for the doctor. She seemed to
be frightened out of her wits at the mere thought of it; and declared,
quite passionately, all of a sudden, that she had no want of a doctor,
and would see none and answer the questions of none--no! not even if her
father himself insisted on it.
“This astonished me as well as Joshua; and when he asked me privately
what I thought was the matter with her, I was obliged of course to tell
him the truth, and say I believed that she was almost out of her mind
with love for Mr. Carr. For the first time in his life, my brother
flew into a violent rage with me. I suspect he was furious with his own
conscience for reminding him, as it must have done then, how foolishly
overindulgent he had been towards her, and how carelessly he had allowed
her as well as himself, to get acquainted with a person out of her
own station, whom it was not proper for either of them to know. I said
nothing of this to him at the time: he was not fit to listen to it--and
still less fit, even had I been willing to confide it to him, to hear
what the plan was which I had adopted for working her cure.
“As the weeks went on, and she still fretted in secret, and still looked
unlike herself, I began to doubt whether this very plan, from which I
had hoped so much, would after all succeed. I was sorely distressed in
my mind, at times, as to what I ought to do next; and began indeed to
feel the difficulty getting too much for me, just when it was drawing on
fast to its shocking and shameful end. We were then close upon Christmas
time. Joshua had got his shop-bills well forward for sending out, and
was gone to London on business, as was customary with him at this
season of the year. I expected him back, as usual, a day or two before
Christmas Day.
“For a little while past, I had noticed some change in my niece. Ever
since my brother had talked about sending for the doctor, she had
altered a little, in the way of going on more regularly with her work,
and pretending (though she made but a bad pretense of it) that there
was nothing ailed her; her object being, of course, to make her father
easier about her in his mind. The change, however, to which I now refer,
was of another sort, and only affected her manner towards me, and her
manner of dressing herself. When we were alone together, now, I found
her conduct quite altered. She spoke soft to me, and looked humble, and
did what work I set her without idleness or murmuring; and once, even
made as if she wanted to kiss me. But I was on my guard--suspecting
that she wanted to entrap me, with her wheedling ways, into letting
out something about Mr. Carr’s having written, and my having burned
his letters. It was at this time also, and a little before it, that I
noticed the alteration in her dress. She fell into wearing her things in
a slovenly way, and sitting at home in her shawl, on account of feeling
cold, she said, when I reprimanded her for such untidyness.
“I don’t know how long things might have lasted like this, or what the
end might have been, if events had gone on in their own way. But
the dreadful truth made itself known at last suddenly, by a sort of
accident. She had a quarrel with one of the other young women in the
dressmaking-room, named Ellen Gough, about a certain disreputable
friend of hers, one Jane Holdsworth, whom I had once employed, and had
dismissed for impertinence and slatternly conduct. Ellen Gough having,
it seems, been provoked past all bearing by something my niece said
to her, came away to me in a passion, and in so many words told me the
awful truth, that my brother’s only daughter had disgraced herself and
her family for ever. The horror and misery of that moment is present to
me now, at this distance of time. The shock I then received struck me
down at once; I never have recovered from it, and I never shall.
“In the first distraction of the moment, I must have done or said
something down stairs, where I was, which must have warned the wretch in
the room above that I had discovered her infamy. I remember going to her
bed-chamber, and finding the door locked, and hearing her refuse to open
it. After that, I must have fainted, for I found myself, I did not know
how, in the work-room, and Ellen Gough giving me a bottle to smell to.
With her help, I got into my own room; and there I fainted away dead
again.
“When I came to, I went once more to my niece’s bed-chamber. The door
was now open; and there was a bit of paper on the looking-glass directed
to my brother Joshua. She was gone from the honest house that her sin
had defiled--gone from it for ever. She had written only a few scrawled
wild lines to her father, but in them there was full acknowledgment of
her crime and a confession that it was the villain Carr who had caused
her to commit it. She said she was gone to take her shame from our
doors. She entreated that no attempt might be made to trace her, for she
would die rather than return to disgrace her family, and her father
in his old age. After this came some lines, which seemed to have been
added, on second thoughts, to what went before. I do not remember the
exact words; but the sense referred, shamelessly enough as I thought,
to the child that was afterwards born, and to her resolution, if it came
into the world alive, to suffer all things for its sake.
“It was at first some relief to know that she was gone. The dreadful
exposure and degradation that threatened us, seemed to be delayed at
least by her absence. On questioning Ellen Gough, I found that the other
two young women who worked under me, and who were most providentially
absent on a Christmas visit to their friends, were not acquainted with
my niece’s infamous secret. Ellen had accidentally discovered it; and
she had, therefore, been obliged to confess to Ellen, and put trust in
her. Everybody else in the house had been as successfully deceived as I
had been myself. When I heard this, I began to have some hope that our
family disgrace might remain unknown in the town.
“I wrote to my brother, not telling him what had happened, but only
begging him to come back instantly. It was the bitterest part of all
the bitter misery I then suffered, to think of what I had now to tell
Joshua, and of what dreadful extremities his daughter’s ruin might drive
him to. I strove hard to prepare myself for the time of coming trial;
but what really took place was worse than my worst forebodings.
“When my brother heard the shocking news I had to tell, and saw the
scrawled paper she had left for him, he spoke and acted as if he was
out of his mind. It was only charitable, only fair to his previous
character, to believe, as I then believed, that distress had actually
driven him, for the time, out of his senses. He declared that he would
go away instantly and search for her, and set others seeking for her
too. He said, he even swore, that he would bring her back home the
moment he found her; that he would succor her in her misery, and accept
her penitence, and shelter her under his roof the same as ever, without
so much as giving a thought to the scandal and disgrace that her
infamous situation would inflict on her family. He even wrested
Scripture from its true meaning to support him in what he said, and in
what he was determined to do. And, worst of all, the moment he heard
how it was that I had discovered his daughter’s crime, he insisted that
Ellen Gough should be turned out of the house: he declared, in such
awful language as I had never believed it possible he could utter,
that she should not sleep under his roof that night. It was hopeless
to attempt to appease him. He put her out at the door with his own hand
that very day. She was an excellent and a regular workwoman, but sullen
and revengeful when her temper was once roused. By the next morning our
disgrace was known all over Dibbledean.
“There was only one more degradation now to be dreaded; and that it
sickened me to think of. I knew Joshua well enough to know that if he
found the lost wretch he was going in search of, he would absolutely
and certainly bring her home again. I had been born in our house at
Dibbledean; my mother before me had been born there; our family had
lived in the old place, honestly and reputably, without so much as
a breath of ill report ever breathing over them, for generations and
generations back. When I thought of this, and then thought of the
bare possibility that an abandoned woman might soon be admitted, and a
bastard child born, in the house where so many of my relations had lived
virtuously and died righteously, I resolved that the day when _she_ set
her foot on our threshold, should be the day when _I_ left my home and
my birth place for ever.
“While I was in this mind, Joshua came to me--as determined in his way
as I secretly was in mine--to ask if I had any suspicions about what
direction she had taken. All the first inquiries after her that he had
made in Dibbledean, had, it seems, given him no information whatever. I
said I had no positive knowledge (which was strictly true), but told him
I suspected she was gone to London. He asked why? I answered, because I
believed she was gone to look after Mr. Carr; and said that I remembered
his letter to her (the first and only one she received) had a London
post-mark upon it. We could not find this letter at the time: the
hiding-place she had for it, and for all the others she left behind her,
was not discovered till years after, when the house was repaired for the
people who bought our business. Joshua, however, having nothing better
to guide himself by, and being resolved to begin seeking her at once,
said my suspicion was a likely one; and went away to London by that
night’s coach, to see what he could do, and to get advice from his
lawyers about how to trace her.
“This, which I have been just relating, is the only part of my conduct,
in the time of our calamity, which I now think of with an uneasy
conscience. When I told Joshua I suspected she was gone to London I was
not telling him the truth. I knew nothing certainly about where she was
gone; but I did assuredly suspect that she had turned her steps exactly
in the contrary direction to London--that is to say, far out Bangbury
way. She had been constantly asking all sorts of questions of Ellen
Gough, who told me of it, about roads, and towns, and people in that
distant part of the country: and this was my only reason for thinking
she had taken herself away in that direction. Though it was but a matter
of bare suspicion at the best, still I deceived my brother as to my real
opinion when he asked it of me: and this was a sin which I now humbly
and truly repent of. But the thought of helping him, by so little
even as a likely guess, to bring our infamy home to our own doors, by
actually bringing his degraded daughter back with him into my presence,
in the face of the whole town--this thought, I say, was too much for me.
I believed that the day when she crossed our threshold again would be
the day of my death, as well as the day of my farewell to home; and
under that conviction I concealed from Joshua what my real opinion was.
“I deserved to suffer for this; and I did suffer for it.
“Two or three days after the lonely Christmas Day that I passed in utter
solitude at our house in Dibbledean, I received a letter from Joshua’s
lawyer in London, telling me to come up and see my brother immediately,
for he was taken dangerously ill. In the course of his inquiries (which
he would pursue himself, although the lawyers, who knew better what
ought to be done, were doing their utmost to help him), he had been
misled by some false information, and had been robbed and ill-used in
some place near the river, and then turned out at night in a storm of
snow and sleet. It is useless now to write about what I suffered from
this fresh blow, or to speak of the awful time I passed by his bed-side
in London. Let it be enough to say, that he escaped out of the very jaws
of death; and that it was the end of February before he was well enough
to be taken home to Dibbledean.
“He soon got better in his own air--better as to his body, but his mind
was in a sad way. Every morning he used to ask if any news of Mary had
come? and when he heard there was none, he used to sigh, and then hardly
say another word, or so much as hold up his head, for the rest of the
day. At one time, he showed a little anxiety now and then about a letter
reaching its destination, and being duly received; peevishly refusing
to mention to me even so much as the address on it. But I guessed who
it had been sent to easily enough, when his lawyers told me that he had
written it in London, and had mentioned to them that it was going to
some place beyond the seas. He soon seemed to forget this though, and
to forget everything, except his regular question about Mary, which he
sometimes repeated in his dazed condition, even after I had broken it to
him that she was dead.
“The news of her death came in the March month of the new year, 1828.
“All inquiries in London had failed up to that time in discovering
the remotest trace of her. In Dibbledean we knew she could not be; and
elsewhere Joshua was now in no state to search for her himself; or to
have any clear notions of instructing others in what direction to make
inquiries for him. But in this month of March, I saw in the Bangbury
paper (which circulates in our county besides its own) an advertisement
calling on the friends of a young woman who had just died and left
behind her an infant, to come forward and identify the body, and take
some steps in respect to the child. The description was very full and
particular, and did not admit of a doubt, to any one that knew her
as well as I did, that the young woman referred to was my guilty and
miserable niece. My brother was in no condition to be spoken to in this
difficulty; so I determined to act for myself. I sent by a person
I could depend upon, money enough to bury her decently in Bangbury
churchyard, putting no name or date to my letter. There was no law to
oblige me to do more, and more I was determined not to do. As to the
child, that was the offspring of her sin; it was the infamous father’s
business to support and own it, and not mine.
“When people in the town, who knew of our calamity, and had seen the
advertisement, talked to me of it, I admitted nothing, and denied
nothing--I simply refused to speak with them on the subject of what had
happened in our family.
“Having endeavored to provide in this way for the protection of my
brother and myself against the meddling and impertinence of idle people,
I believed that I had now suffered the last of the many bitter trials
which had assailed me as the consequences of my niece’s guilt: I was
mistaken: the cup of my affliction was not yet full. One day, hardly a
fortnight after I had sent the burial money anonymously to Bangbury, our
servant came to me and said there was a stranger at the door who wished
to see my brother, and was so bent on it that he would take no denial.
I went down, and found waiting on the door-steps a very
respectable-looking, middle-aged man, whom I had certainly never set
eyes on before in my life.
“I told him that I was Joshua’s sister, and that I managed my brother’s
affairs for him in the present state of his health. The stranger only
answered, that he was very anxious to see Joshua himself. I did
not choose to expose the helpless condition into which my brother’s
intellects had fallen, to a person of whom I knew nothing; so I merely
said, the interview he wanted was out of the question, but that if he
had any business with Mr. Grice, he might, for the reasons I had already
given, mention it to me. He hesitated, and smiled, and said he was very
much obliged to me; and then, making as if he was going to step in,
added that I should probably be able to appreciate the friendly nature
of the business on which he came, when he informed me that he was
confidentially employed by Mr. Arthur Carr.
“The instant he spoke it, I felt the name go to my heart like a
knife--then my indignation got the better of me. I told him to tell Mr.
Carr that the miserable creature whom his villainy had destroyed, had
fled away from her home, had died away from her home, and was buried
away from her home; and, with that, I shut the door in his face.
My agitation, and a sort of terror that I could not account for, so
overpowered me that I was obliged to lean against the wall of the
passage, and was unable, for some minutes, to stir a step towards going
up stairs. As soon as I got a little better, and began to think about
what had taken place, a doubt came across me as to whether I might not
have acted wrong. I remembered that Joshua’s lawyers in London had made
it a great point that this Mr. Carr should be traced; and, though, since
then, our situation had been altered by my niece’s death, still I felt
uncertain and uneasy--I could hardly tell why--at what I had done. It
was as if I had taken some responsibility on myself which ought not
to have been mine. In short, I ran back to the door and opened it, and
looked up and down the street. It was too late: the strange man was out
of sight, and I never set eyes on him again.
“This was in March, 1828, the same month in which the advertisement
appeared. I am particular in repeating the date because it marks the
time of the last information I have to give, in connection with the
disgraceful circumstances which I have here forced myself to relate. Of
the child mentioned in the advertisement, I never heard anything, from
that time to this. I do not even know when it was born. I only know
that its guilty mother left her home in the December of 1827. Whether it
lived after the date of the advertisement, or whether it died, I never
discovered, and never wished to discover. I have kept myself retired
since the days of my humiliation, hiding my sorrow in my own heart, and
neither asking questions nor answering them.”
At this place Mat once more suspended the perusal of the letter. He had
now read on for an unusually long time with unflagging attention, and
with the same stern sadness always in his face, except when the name
of Arthur Carr occurred in the course of the narrative. Almost on every
occasion, when the finger by which he guided himself along the close
lines of the letter, came to those words, it trembled a little, and the
dangerous look grew ever brighter and brighter in his eyes. It was in
them now, as he dropped the letter on his knee, and, turning round, took
from the wall behind him, against which it leaned, a certain leather
bag, already alluded to, as part of the personal property that he
brought with him on installing himself in Kirk Street. He opened it,
took out a feather fan, and an Indian tobacco-pouch of scarlet cloth;
and then began to search in the bottom of the bag, from which, at
length, he drew forth a letter. It was torn in several places, the ink
of the writing in it was faded, and the paper was disfigured by stains
of grease, tobacco, and dirt generally. The direction was in such a
condition, that the word “Brazils,” at the end, was alone legible.
Inside, it was not in a much better state. The date at the top, however,
still remained tolerably easy to distinguish: it was “December 20th,
1827.”
Mat looked first at this, and then at the paragraph he had just been
reading, in Joanna Grice’s narrative. After that, he began to count on
his fingers, clumsily enough--beginning with the year 1828 as Number
One, and ending with the current year, 1851, as Number Twenty-three.
“Twenty-three,” he repeated aloud to himself, “twenty-three years: I
shall remember that.”
He looked down a little vacantly, the next moment, at the old torn
letter again. Some of the lines, here and there, had escaped stains and
dirt sufficiently to be still easily legible; and it was over these that
his eyes now wandered. The first words that caught his attention ran
thus:--“I am now, therefore, in this bitter affliction, more than ever
desirous that all past differences between us should be forgotten,
and”--here the beginning of another line was hidden by a stain, beyond
which, on the cleaner part of the letter, the writing proceeded:--“In
this spirit, then, I counsel you, if you can get continued employment
anywhere abroad, to accept it, instead of coming back”--(a rent in the
paper made the next words too fragmentary to be easily legible). * * *
“any good news be sure of hearing from me again. In the mean time, I say
it once more, keep away, if you can. Your presence could do no good; and
it is better for you, at your age, to be spared the sight of such sorrow
as that we are now suffering.” (After this, dirt and the fading of
the ink made several sentences near the end of the page almost totally
illegible--the last three or four lines at the bottom of the letter
alone remaining clear enough to be read with any ease.) * * * “the poor,
lost, unhappy creature! But I shall find her, I know I shall find her;
and then, let Joanna say or do what she may, I will forgive my own Mary,
for I know she will deserve her pardon. As for _him,_ I feel confident
that he may be traced yet; and that I can shame him into making the
atonement of marrying her. If he should refuse, then the black-hearted
villain shall--”
At this point, Mat abruptly stopped in his reading; and, hastily folding
up the letter, put it back in the bag again, along the feather fan and
the Indian pouch. “I can’t go on that part of the story now, but the
time _may_ come--” He pursued the thought which thus expressed itself
in him no further, but sat still for a few minutes, with his head on
his hand and his heavy eyebrows contracted by an angry frown, staring
sullenly at the flame of the candle. Joanna Grice’s letter still
remained to be finished. He took it up, and looked back to the paragraph
that he had last read.
“As for the child mentioned in the advertisement”--those were the words
to which he was now referring. _“The child?”_--There was no mention of
its sex. “I should like to know if it was a boy or a girl,” thought Mat.
Though he was now close to the end of the letter, he roused himself
with difficulty to attend to the last few sentences which remained to be
read. They began thus:--
“Before I say anything in conclusion, of the sale of our business, of
my brother’s death, and of the life which I have been leading since that
time, I should wish to refer, once for all, and very briefly, to the
few things which my niece left behind her, when she abandoned her home.
Circumstances may, one day, render this necessary. I desire then to
state, that everything belonging to her is preserved in one of her boxes
(now in my possession), just as she left it. When the letters signed
‘A. C.’ were discovered, as I have mentioned, on the occasion of repairs
being made in the house, I threw them into the box with my own hand.
They will all be found, more or less, to prove the justice of
those first suspicions of mine, which my late brother so unhappily
disregarded. In reference to money or valuables, I have only to mention
that my niece took all her savings with her in her flight. I knew in
what box she kept them, and I saw that box open and empty on her
table, when I first discovered that she was gone. As for the only three
articles of jewelry that she had, her brooch I myself saw her give to
Ellen Gough--her earrings she always wore--and I can only presume (never
having found it anywhere) that she took with her, in her flight, her
Hair Bracelet.”
“There it is again!” cried Mat, dropping the letter in astonishment, the
instant those two significant words, “Hair Bracelet,” caught his eye.
He had hardly uttered the exclamation, before he heard the door of the
house flung open, then shut to again with a bang. Zack had just let
himself in with his latch-key.
“I’m glad he’s come,” muttered Mat, snatching up the letter from the
floor, and crumpling it into his pocket. “There’s another thing or two
I want to find out, before I go any further--and Zack’s the lad to help
me.”