Earlier than usual on the morning of Thursday, the twenty-third of
July, Mr. Clare appeared at the door of his cottage, and stepped out
into the little strip of garden attached to his residence.
After he had taken a few turns backward and forward, alone, he was
joined by a spare, quiet, gray-haired man, whose personal appearance
was totally devoid of marked character of any kind; whose inexpressive
face and conventionally-quiet manner presented nothing that attracted
approval and nothing that inspired dislike. This was Mr. Pendril—this
was the man on whose lips hung the future of the orphans at
Combe-Raven.
“The time is getting on,” he said, looking toward the shrubbery, as he
joined Mr. Clare.
“My appointment with Miss Garth is for eleven o’clock: it only wants
ten minutes of the hour.”
“Are you to see her alone?” asked Mr. Clare.
“I left Miss Garth to decide—after warning her, first of all, that the
circumstances I am compelled to disclose are of a very serious nature.”
“And _has_ she decided?”
“She writes me word that she mentioned my appointment, and repeated the
warning I had given her to both the daughters. The elder of the two
shrinks—and who can wonder at it?—from any discussion connected with
the future which requires her presence so soon as the day after the
funeral. The younger one appears to have expressed no opinion on the
subject. As I understand it, she suffers herself to be passively guided
by her sister’s example. My interview, therefore, will take place with
Miss Garth alone—and it is a very great relief to me to know it.”
He spoke the last words with more emphasis and energy than seemed
habitual to him. Mr. Clare stopped, and looked at his guest
attentively.
“You are almost as old as I am, sir,” he said. “Has all your long
experience as a lawyer not hardened you yet?”
“I never knew how little it had hardened me,” replied Mr. Pendril,
quietly, “until I returned from London yesterday to attend the funeral.
I was not warned that the daughters had resolved on following their
parents to the grave. I think their presence made the closing scene of
this dreadful calamity doubly painful, and doubly touching. You saw how
the great concourse of people were moved by it—and _they_ were in
ignorance of the truth; _they_ knew nothing of the cruel necessity
which takes me to the house this morning. The sense of that
necessity—and the sight of those poor girls at the time when I felt my
hard duty toward them most painfully—shook me, as a man of my years and
my way of life is not often shaken by any distress in the present or
any suspense in the future. I have not recovered it this morning: I
hardly feel sure of myself yet.”
“A man’s composure—when he is a man like you—comes with the necessity
for it,” said Mr. Clare. “You must have had duties to perform as trying
in their way as the duty that lies before you this morning.”
Mr. Pendril shook his head. “Many duties as serious; many stories more
romantic. No duty so trying, no story so hopeless, as this.”
With those words they parted. Mr. Pendril left the garden for the
shrubbery path which led to Combe-Raven. Mr. Clare returned to the
cottage.
On reaching the passage, he looked through the open door of his little
parlor and saw Frank sitting there in idle wretchedness, with his head
resting wearily on his hand.
“I have had an answer from your employers in London,” said Mr. Clare.
“In consideration of what has happened, they will allow the offer they
made you to stand over for another month.”
Frank changed color, and rose nervously from his chair.
“Are my prospects altered?” he asked. “Are Mr. Vanstone’s plans for me
not to be carried out? He told Magdalen his will had provided for her.
She repeated his words to me; she said I ought to know all that his
goodness and generosity had done for both of us. How can his death make
a change? Has anything happened?”
“Wait till Mr. Pendril comes back from Combe-Raven,” said his father.
“Question him—don’t question me.”
The ready tears rose in Frank’s eyes.
“You won’t be hard on me?” he pleaded, faintly. “You won’t expect me to
go back to London without seeing Magdalen first?”
Mr. Clare looked thoughtfully at his son, and considered a little
before he replied.
“You may dry your eyes,” he said. “You shall see Magdalen before you go
back.”
He left the room, after making that reply, and withdrew to his study.
The books lay ready to his hand as usual. He opened one of them and set
himself to read in the customary manner. But his attention wandered;
and his eyes strayed away, from time to time, to the empty chair
opposite—the chair in which his old friend and gossip had sat and
wrangled with him good-humoredly for many and many a year past. After a
struggle with himself he closed the book. “D—n the chair!” he said: “it
_will_ talk of him; and I must listen.” He reached down his pipe from
the wall and mechanically filled it with tobacco. His hand shook, his
eyes wandered back to the old place; and a heavy sigh came from him
unwillingly. That empty chair was the only earthly argument for which
he had no answer: his heart owned its defeat and moistened his eyes in
spite of him. “He has got the better of me at last,” said the rugged
old man. “There is one weak place left in me still—and _he_ has found
it.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Pendril entered the shrubbery, and followed the path
which led to the lonely garden and the desolate house. He was met at
the door by the man-servant, who was apparently waiting in expectation
of his arrival.
“I have an appointment with Miss Garth. Is she ready to see me?”
“Quite ready, sir.”
“Is she alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In the room which was Mr. Vanstone’s study?”
“In that room, sir.”
The servant opened the door and Mr. Pendril went in.
The governess stood alone at the study window. The morning was
oppressively hot, and she threw up the lower sash to admit more air
into the room, as Mr. Pendril entered it.
They bowed to each other with a formal politeness, which betrayed on
either side an uneasy sense of restraint. Mr. Pendril was one of the
many men who appear superficially to the worst advantage, under the
influence of strong mental agitation which it is necessary for them to
control. Miss Garth, on her side, had not forgotten the ungraciously
guarded terms in which the lawyer had replied to her letter; and the
natural anxiety which she had felt on the subject of the interview was
not relieved by any favorable opinion of the man who sought it. As they
confronted each other in the silence of the summer’s morning—both
dressed in black; Miss Garth’s hard features, gaunt and haggard with
grief; the lawyer’s cold, colorless face, void of all marked
expression, suggestive of a business embarrassment and of nothing
more—it would have been hard to find two persons less attractive
externally to any ordinary sympathies than the two who had now met
together, the one to tell, the other to hear, the secrets of the dead.
“I am sincerely sorry, Miss Garth, to intrude on you at such a time as
this. But circumstances, as I have already explained, leave me no other
choice.”
“Will you take a seat, Mr. Pendril? You wished to see me in this room,
I believe?”
“Only in this room, because Mr. Vanstone’s papers are kept here, and I
may find it necessary to refer to some of them.”
After that formal interchange of question and answer, they sat down on
either side of a table placed close under the window. One waited to
speak, the other waited to hear. There was a momentary silence. Mr.
Pendril broke it by referring to the young ladies, with the customary
expressions of sympathy. Miss Garth answered him with the same
ceremony, in the same conventional tone. There was a second pause of
silence. The humming of flies among the evergreen shrubs under the
window penetrated drowsily into the room; and the tramp of a
heavy-footed cart-horse, plodding along the high-road beyond the
garden, was as plainly audible in the stillness as if it had been
night.
The lawyer roused his flagging resolution, and spoke to the purpose
when he spoke next.
“You have some reason, Miss Garth,” he began, “to feel not quite
satisfied with my past conduct toward you, in one particular. During
Mrs. Vanstone’s fatal illness, you addressed a letter to me, making
certain inquiries; which, while she lived, it was impossible for me to
answer. Her deplorable death releases me from the restraint which I had
imposed on myself, and permits—or, more properly, obliges me to speak.
You shall know what serious reasons I had for waiting day and night in
the hope of obtaining that interview which unhappily never took place;
and in justice to Mr. Vanstone’s memory, your own eyes shall inform you
that he made his will.”
He rose; unlocked a little iron safe in the corner of the room; and
returned to the table with some folded sheets of paper, which he spread
open under Miss Garth’s eyes. When she had read the first words, “In
the name of God, Amen,” he turned the sheet, and pointed to the end of
the next page. She saw the well-known signature: “Andrew Vanstone.” She
saw the customary attestations of the two witnesses; and the date of
the document, reverting to a period of more than five years since.
Having thus convinced her of the formality of the will, the lawyer
interposed before she could question him, and addressed her in these
words:
“I must not deceive you,” he said. “I have my own reasons for producing
this document.”
“What reasons, sir?”
“You shall hear them. When you are in possession of the truth, these
pages may help to preserve your respect for Mr. Vanstone’s memory—”
Miss Garth started back in her chair.
“What do you mean?” she asked, with a stern straightforwardness.
He took no heed of the question; he went on as if she had not
interrupted him.
“I have a second reason,” he continued, “for showing you the will. If I
can prevail on you to read certain clauses in it, under my
superintendence, you will make your own discovery of the circumstances
which I am here to disclose—circumstances so painful that I hardly know
how to communicate them to you with my own lips.”
Miss Garth looked him steadfastly in the face.
“Circumstances, sir, which affect the dead parents, or the living
children?”
“Which affect the dead and the living both,” answered the lawyer.
“Circumstances, I grieve to say, which involve the future of Mr.
Vanstone’s unhappy daughters.”
“Wait,” said Miss Garth, “wait a little.” She pushed her gray hair back
from her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the
dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or
a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief,
searched the lawyer’s unfathomable face. “His unhappy daughters?” she
repeated to herself, vacantly. “He talks as if there was some worse
calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans.” She paused
once more; and rallied her sinking courage. “I will not make your hard
duty, sir, more painful to you than I can help,” she resumed. “Show me
the place in the will. Let me read it, and know the worst.”
Mr. Pendril turned back to the first page, and pointed to a certain
place in the cramped lines of writing. “Begin here,” he said.
She tried to begin; she tried to follow his finger, as she had followed
it already to the signatures and the dates. But her senses seemed to
share the confusion of her mind—the words mingled together, and the
lines swam before her eyes.
“I can’t follow you,” she said. “You must tell it, or read it to me.”
She pushed her chair back from the table, and tried to collect herself.
“Stop!” she exclaimed, as the lawyer, with visible hesitation and
reluctance, took the papers in his own hand. “One question, first. Does
his will provide for his children?”
“His will provided for them, when he made it.”
“When he made it!” (Something of her natural bluntness broke out in her
manner as she repeated the answer.) “Does it provide for them now?”
“It does not.”
She snatched the will from his hand, and threw it into a corner of the
room. “You mean well,” she said; “you wish to spare me—but you are
wasting your time, and my strength. If the will is useless, there let
it lie. Tell me the truth, Mr. Pendril—tell it plainly, tell it
instantly, in your own words!”
He felt that it would be useless cruelty to resist that appeal. There
was no merciful alternative but to answer it on the spot.
“I must refer you to the spring of the present year, Miss Garth. Do you
remember the fourth of March?”
Her attention wandered again; a thought seemed to have struck her at
the moment when he spoke. Instead of answering his inquiry, she put a
question of her own.
“Let me break the news to myself,” she said—“let me anticipate you, if
I can. His useless will, the terms in which you speak of his daughters,
the doubt you seem to feel of my continued respect for his memory, have
opened a new view to me. Mr. Vanstone has died a ruined man—is that
what you had to tell me?”
“Far from it. Mr. Vanstone has died, leaving a fortune of more than
eighty thousand pounds—a fortune invested in excellent securities. He
lived up to his income, but never beyond it; and all his debts added
together would not reach two hundred pounds. If he had died a ruined
man, I should have felt deeply for his children: but I should not have
hesitated to tell you the truth, as I am hesitating now. Let me repeat
a question which escaped you, I think, when I first put it. Carry your
mind back to the spring of this year. Do you remember the fourth of
March?”
Miss Garth shook her head. “My memory for dates is bad at the best of
times,” she said. “I am too confused to exert it at a moment’s notice.
Can you put your question in no other form?”
He put it in this form:
“Do you remember any domestic event in the spring of the present year
which appeared to affect Mr. Vanstone more seriously than usual?”
Miss Garth leaned forward in her chair, and looked eagerly at Mr.
Pendril across the table. “The journey to London!” she exclaimed. “I
distrusted the journey to London from the first! Yes! I remember Mr.
Vanstone receiving a letter—I remember his reading it, and looking so
altered from himself that he startled us all.”
“Did you notice any apparent understanding between Mr. and Mrs.
Vanstone on the subject of that letter?”
“Yes: I did. One of the girls—it was Magdalen—mentioned the post-mark;
some place in America. It all comes back to me, Mr. Pendril. Mrs.
Vanstone looked excited and anxious, the moment she heard the place
named. They went to London together the next day; they explained
nothing to their daughters, nothing to me. Mrs. Vanstone said the
journey was for family affairs. I suspected something wrong; I couldn’t
tell what. Mrs. Vanstone wrote to me from London, saying that her
object was to consult a physician on the state of her health, and not
to alarm her daughters by telling them. Something in the letter rather
hurt me at the time. I thought there might be some other motive that
she was keeping from me. Did I do her wrong?”
“You did her no wrong. There was a motive which she was keeping from
you. In revealing that motive, I reveal the painful secret which brings
me to this house. All that I could do to prepare you, I have done. Let
me now tell the truth in the plainest and fewest words. When Mr. and
Mrs. Vanstone left Combe-Raven, in the March of the present year—”
Before he could complete the sentence, a sudden movement of Miss
Garth’s interrupted him. She started violently, and looked round toward
the window. “Only the wind among the leaves,” she said, faintly. “My
nerves are so shaken, the least thing startles me. Speak out, for God’s
sake! When Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone left this house, tell me in plain
words, why did they go to London?”
In plain words, Mr. Pendril told her:
“They went to London to be married.”
With that answer he placed a slip of paper on the table. It was the
marriage certificate of the dead parents, and the date it bore was
March the twentieth, eighteen hundred and forty-six.
Miss Garth neither moved nor spoke. The certificate lay beneath her
unnoticed. She sat with her eyes rooted on the lawyer’s face; her mind
stunned, her senses helpless. He saw that all his efforts to break the
shock of the discovery had been efforts made in vain; he felt the vital
importance of rousing her, and firmly and distinctly repeated the fatal
words.
“They went to London to be married,” he said. “Try to rouse yourself:
try to realize the plain fact first: the explanation shall come
afterward. Miss Garth, I speak the miserable truth! In the spring of
this year they left home; they lived in London for a fortnight, in the
strictest retirement; they were married by license at the end of that
time. There is a copy of the certificate, which I myself obtained on
Monday last. Read the date of the marriage for yourself. It is Friday,
the twentieth of March—the March of this present year.”
As he pointed to the certificate, that faint breath of air among the
shrubs beneath the window, which had startled Miss Garth, stirred the
leaves once more. He heard it himself this time, and turned his face,
so as to let the breeze play upon it. No breeze came; no breath of air
that was strong enough for him to feel, floated into the room.
Miss Garth roused herself mechanically, and read the certificate. It
seemed to produce no distinct impression on her: she laid it on one
side in a lost, bewildered manner. “Twelve years,” she said, in low,
hopeless tones—“twelve quiet, happy years I lived with this family.
Mrs. Vanstone was my friend; my dear, valued friend—my sister, I might
almost say. I can’t believe it. Bear with me a little, sir, I can’t
believe it yet.”
“I shall help you to believe it when I tell you more,” said Mr.
Pendril—“you will understand me better when I take you back to the time
of Mr. Vanstone’s early life. I won’t ask for your attention just yet.
Let us wait a little, until you recover yourself.”
They waited a few minutes. The lawyer took some letters from his
pocket, referred to them attentively, and put them back again. “Can you
listen to me, now?” he asked, kindly. She bowed her head in answer. Mr.
Pendril considered with himself for a moment, “I must caution you on
one point,” he said. “If the aspect of Mr. Vanstone’s character which I
am now about to present to you seems in some respects at variance with
your later experience, bear in mind that, when you first knew him
twelve years since, he was a man of forty; and that, when I first knew
him, he was a lad of nineteen.”
His next words raised the veil, and showed the irrevocable Past.