It was nearly an hour past noon when Mr. Pendril left the house. Miss
Garth sat down again at the table alone, and tried to face the
necessity which the event of the morning now forced on her.
Her mind was not equal to the effort. She tried to lessen the strain on
it—to lose the sense of her own position—to escape from her thoughts
for a few minutes only. After a little, she opened Mr. Vanstone’s
letter, and mechanically set herself to read it through once more.
One by one, the last words of the dead man fastened themselves more and
more firmly on her attention. The unrelieved solitude, the unbroken
silence, helped their influence on her mind and opened it to those very
impressions of past and present which she was most anxious to shun. As
she reached the melancholy lines which closed the letter, she found
herself—insensibly, almost unconsciously, at first—tracing the fatal
chain of events, link by link backward, until she reached its beginning
in the contemplated marriage between Magdalen and Francis Clare.
That marriage had taken Mr. Vanstone to his old friend, with the
confession on his lips which would otherwise never have escaped them.
Thence came the discovery which had sent him home to summon the lawyer
to the house. That summons, again, had produced the inevitable
acceleration of the Saturday’s journey to Friday; the Friday of the
fatal accident, the Friday when he went to his death. From his death
followed the second bereavement which had made the house desolate; the
helpless position of the daughters whose prosperous future had been his
dearest care; the revelation of the secret which had overwhelmed her
that morning; the disclosure, more terrible still, which she now stood
committed to make to the orphan sisters. For the first time she saw the
whole sequence of events—saw it as plainly as the cloudless blue of the
sky and the green glow of the trees in the sunlight outside.
How—when could she tell them? Who could approach them with the
disclosure of their own illegitimacy before their father and mother had
been dead a week? Who could speak the dreadful words, while the first
tears were wet on their cheeks, while the first pang of separation was
at its keenest in their hearts, while the memory of the funeral was not
a day old yet? Not their last friend left; not the faithful woman whose
heart bled for them. No! silence for the present time, at all
risks—merciful silence, for many days to come!
She left the room, with the will and the letter in her hand—with the
natural, human pity at her heart which sealed her lips and shut her
eyes resolutely to the future. In the hall she stopped and listened.
Not a sound was audible. She softly ascended the stairs, on her way to
her own room, and passed the door of Norah’s bed-chamber. Voices
inside, the voices of the two sisters, caught her ear. After a moment’s
consideration, she checked herself, turned back, and quickly descended
the stairs again. Both Norah and Magdalen knew of the interview between
Mr. Pendril and herself; she had felt it her duty to show them his
letter making the appointment. Could she excite their suspicion by
locking herself up from them in her room as soon as the lawyer had left
the house? Her hand trembled on the banister; she felt that her face
might betray her. The self-forgetful fortitude, which had never failed
her until that day, had been tried once too often—had been tasked
beyond its powers at last.
At the hall door she reflected for a moment again, and went into the
garden; directing her steps to a rustic bench and table placed out of
sight of the house among the trees. In past times she had often sat
there, with Mrs. Vanstone on one side, with Norah on the other, with
Magdalen and the dogs romping on the grass. Alone she sat there now—the
will and the letter which she dared not trust out of her own
possession, laid on the table—her head bowed over them; her face hidden
in her hands. Alone she sat there and tried to rouse her sinking
courage.
Doubts thronged on her of the dark days to come; dread beset her of the
hidden danger which her own silence toward Norah and Magdalen might
store up in the near future. The accident of a moment might suddenly
reveal the truth. Mr. Pendril might write, might personally address
himself to the sisters, in the natural conviction that she had
enlightened them. Complications might gather round them at a moment’s
notice; unforeseen necessities might arise for immediately leaving the
house. She saw all these perils—and still the cruel courage to face the
worst, and speak, was as far from her as ever. Ere long the thickening
conflict of her thoughts forced its way outward for relief, in words
and actions. She raised her head and beat her hand helplessly on the
table.
“God help me, what am I to do?” she broke out. “How am I to tell them?”
“There is no need to tell them,” said a voice behind her. “They know it
already.”
She started to her feet and looked round. It was Magdalen who stood
before her—Magdalen who had spoken those words.
Yes, there was the graceful figure, in its mourning garments, standing
out tall and black and motionless against the leafy background. There
was Magdalen herself, with a changeless stillness on her white face;
with an icy resignation in her steady gray eyes.
“We know it already,” she repeated, in clear, measured tones. “Mr.
Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children; and the law leaves them
helpless at their uncle’s mercy.”
So, without a tear on her cheeks, without a faltering tone in her
voice, she repeated the lawyer’s own words, exactly as he had spoken
them. Miss Garth staggered back a step and caught at the bench to
support herself. Her head swam; she closed her eyes in a momentary
faintness. When they opened again, Magdalen’s arm was supporting her,
Magdalen’s breath fanned her cheek, Magdalen’s cold lips kissed her.
She drew back from the kiss; the touch of the girl’s lips thrilled her
with terror.
As soon as she could speak she put the inevitable question. “You heard
us,” she said. “Where?”
“Under the open window.”
“All the time?”
“From beginning to end.”
She had listened—this girl of eighteen, in the first week of her
orphanage, had listened to the whole terrible revelation, word by word,
as it fell from the lawyer’s lips; and had never once betrayed herself!
From first to last, the only movements which had escaped her had been
movements guarded enough and slight enough to be mistaken for the
passage of the summer breeze through the leaves!
“Don’t try to speak yet,” she said, in softer and gentler tones. “Don’t
look at me with those doubting eyes. What wrong have I done? When Mr.
Pendril wished to speak to you about Norah and me, his letter gave us
our choice to be present at the interview, or to keep away. If my elder
sister decided to keep away, how could I come? How could I hear my own
story except as I did? My listening has done no harm. It has done
good—it has saved you the distress of speaking to us. You have suffered
enough for us already; it is time we learned to suffer for ourselves. I
have learned. And Norah is learning.”
“Norah!”
“Yes. I have done all I could to spare you. I have told Norah.”
She had told Norah! Was this girl, whose courage had faced the terrible
necessity from which a woman old enough to be her mother had recoiled,
the girl Miss Garth had brought up? the girl whose nature she had
believed to be as well known to her as her own?
“Magdalen!” she cried out, passionately, “you frighten me!”
Magdalen only sighed, and turned wearily away.
“Try not to think worse of me than I deserve,” she said. “I can’t cry.
My heart is numbed.”
She moved away slowly over the grass. Miss Garth watched the tall black
figure gliding away alone until it was lost among the trees. While it
was in sight she could think of nothing else. The moment it was gone,
she thought of Norah. For the first time in her experience of the
sisters her heart led her instinctively to the elder of the two.
Norah was still in her own room. She was sitting on the couch by the
window, with her mother’s old music-book—the keepsake which Mrs.
Vanstone had found in her husband’s study on the day of her husband’s
death—spread open on her lap. She looked up from it with such quiet
sorrow, and pointed with such ready kindness to the vacant place at her
side, that Miss Garth doubted for the moment whether Magdalen had
spoken the truth. “See,” said Norah, simply, turning to the first leaf
in the music-book—“my mother’s name written in it, and some verses to
my father on the next page. We may keep this for ourselves, if we keep
nothing else.” She put her arm round Miss Garth’s neck, and a faint
tinge of color stole over her cheeks. “I see anxious thoughts in your
face,” she whispered. “Are you anxious about me? Are you doubting
whether I have heard it? I have heard the whole truth. I might have
felt it bitterly, later; it is too soon to feel it now. You have seen
Magdalen? She went out to find you—where did you leave her?”
“In the garden. I couldn’t speak to her; I couldn’t look at her.
Magdalen has frightened me.”
Norah rose hurriedly; rose, startled and distressed by Miss Garth’s
reply.
“Don’t think ill of Magdalen,” she said. “Magdalen suffers in secret
more than I do. Try not to grieve over what you have heard about us
this morning. Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose? What
loss is there for us after the loss of our father and mother? Oh, Miss
Garth, _there_ is the only bitterness! What did we remember of them
when we laid them in the grave yesterday? Nothing but the love they
gave us—the love we must never hope for again. What else can we
remember to-day? What change can the world, and the world’s cruel laws
make in _our_ memory of the kindest father, the kindest mother, that
children ever had!” She stopped: struggled with her rising grief; and
quietly, resolutely, kept it down. “Will you wait here,” she said,
“while I go and bring Magdalen back? Magdalen was always your favorite:
I want her to be your favorite still.” She laid the music-book gently
on Miss Garth’s lap—and left the room.
“Magdalen was always your favorite.”
Tenderly as they had been spoken, those words fell reproachfully on
Miss Garth’s ear. For the first time in the long companionship of her
pupils and herself a doubt whether she, and all those about her, had
not been fatally mistaken in their relative estimate of the sisters,
now forced itself on her mind.
She had studied the natures of her two pupils in the daily intimacy of
twelve years. Those natures, which she believed herself to have sounded
through all their depths, had been suddenly tried in the sharp ordeal
of affliction. How had they come out from the test? As her previous
experience had prepared her to see them? No: in flat contradiction to
it.
What did such a result as this imply?
Thoughts came to her, as she asked herself that question, which have
startled and saddened us all.
Does there exist in every human being, beneath that outward and visible
character which is shaped into form by the social influences
surrounding us, an inward, invisible disposition, which is part of
ourselves, which education may indirectly modify, but can never hope to
change? Is the philosophy which denies this and asserts that we are
born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper a philosophy which
has failed to remark that we are not born with blank faces—a philosophy
which has never compared together two infants of a few days old, and
has never observed that those infants are not born with blank tempers
for mothers and nurses to fill up at will? Are there, infinitely
varying with each individual, inbred forces of Good and Evil in all of
us, deep down below the reach of mortal encouragement and mortal
repression—hidden Good and hidden Evil, both alike at the mercy of the
liberating opportunity and the sufficient temptation? Within these
earthly limits, is earthly Circumstance ever the key; and can no human
vigilance warn us beforehand of the forces imprisoned in ourselves
which that key _may_ unlock?
For the first time, thoughts such as these rose darkly—as shadowy and
terrible possibilities—in Miss Garth’s mind. For the first time, she
associated those possibilities with the past conduct and characters,
with the future lives and fortunes of the orphan sisters.
Searching, as in a glass darkly, into the two natures, she felt her
way, doubt by doubt, from one possible truth to another. It might be
that the upper surface of their characters was all that she had, thus
far, plainly seen in Norah and Magdalen. It might be that the
unalluring secrecy and reserve of one sister, the all-attractive
openness and high spirits of the other, were more or less referable, in
each case, to those physical causes which work toward the production of
moral results. It might be, that under the surface so formed—a surface
which there had been nothing, hitherto, in the happy, prosperous,
uneventful lives of the sisters to disturb—forces of inborn and inbred
disposition had remained concealed, which the shock of the first
serious calamity in their lives had now thrown up into view. Was this
so? Was the promise of the future shining with prophetic light through
the surface-shadow of Norah’s reserve, and darkening with prophetic
gloom, under the surface-glitter of Magdalen’s bright spirits? If the
life of the elder sister was destined henceforth to be the ripening
ground of the undeveloped Good that was in her—was the life of the
younger doomed to be the battle-field of mortal conflict with the
roused forces of Evil in herself?
On the brink of that terrible conclusion, Miss Garth shrank back in
dismay. Her heart was the heart of a true woman. It accepted the
conviction which raised Norah higher in her love: it rejected the doubt
which threatened to place Magdalen lower. She rose and paced the room
impatiently; she recoiled with an angry suddenness from the whole train
of thought in which her mind had been engaged but the moment before.
What if there were dangerous elements in the strength of Magdalen’s
character—was it not her duty to help the girl against herself? How had
she performed that duty? She had let herself be governed by first fears
and first impressions; she had never waited to consider whether
Magdalen’s openly acknowledged action of that morning might not imply a
self-sacrificing fortitude, which promised, in after-life, the noblest
and the most enduring results. She had let Norah go and speak those
words of tender remonstrance, which she should first have spoken
herself. “Oh!” she thought, bitterly, “how long I have lived in the
world, and how little I have known of my own weakness and wickedness
until to-day!”
The door of the room opened. Norah came in, as she had gone out, alone.
“Do you remember leaving anything on the little table by the
garden-seat?” she asked, quietly.
Before Miss Garth could answer the question, she held out her father’s
will and her father’s letter.
“Magdalen came back after you went away,” she said, “and found these
last relics. She heard Mr. Pendril say they were her legacy and mine.
When I went into the garden she was reading the letter. There was no
need for me to speak to her; our father had spoken to her from his
grave. See how she has listened to him!”
She pointed to the letter. The traces of heavy tear-drops lay thick
over the last lines of the dead man’s writing.
“_Her_ tears,” said Norah, softly.
Miss Garth’s head drooped low over the mute revelation of Magdalen’s
return to her better self.
“Oh, never doubt her again!” pleaded Norah. “We are alone now—we have
our hard way through the world to walk on as patiently as we can. If
Magdalen ever falters and turns back, help her for the love of old
times; help her against herself.”
“With all my heart and strength—as God shall judge me, with the
devotion of my whole life!” In those fervent words Miss Garth answered.
She took the hand which Norah held out to her, and put it, in sorrow
and humility, to her lips. “Oh, my love, forgive me! I have been
miserably blind—I have never valued you as I ought!”
Norah gently checked her before she could say more; gently whispered,
“Come with me into the garden—come, and help Magdalen to look patiently
to the future.”
The future! Who could see the faintest glimmer of it? Who could see
anything but the ill-omened figure of Michael Vanstone, posted darkly
on the verge of the present time—and closing all the prospect that lay
beyond him?