in full detail. I am now going to put all the confidence in your honor
and your discretion which I really feel. For your sake, and for
Norah’s, I am going to let you know what the scruple really is which
has misled her into the pride and folly of refusing you. I am old
enough to speak out; and I can tell you, if she had only been wise
enough to let her own wishes guide her, she would have said Yes—and
gladly, too.
“The original cause of all the mischief is no less a person than your
worthy uncle—Admiral Bartram.
“It seems that the admiral took it into his head (I suppose during your
absence) to go to London by himself and to satisfy some curiosity of
his own about Norah by calling in Portland Place, under pretense of
renewing his old friendship with the Tyrrels. He came at luncheon-time,
and saw Norah; and, from all I can hear, was apparently better pleased
with her than he expected or wished to be when he came into the house.
“So far, this is mere guess-work; but it is unluckily certain that he
and Mrs. Tyrrel had some talk together alone when luncheon was over.
Your name was not mentioned; but when their conversation fell on Norah,
you were in both their minds, of course. The admiral (doing her full
justice personally) declared himself smitten with pity for her hard lot
in life. The scandalous conduct of her sister must always stand (he
feared) in the way of her future advantage. Who could marry her,
without first making it a condition that she and her sister were to be
absolute strangers to each other? And even then, the objection would
remain—the serious objection to the husband’s family—of being connected
by marriage with such a woman as Mrs. Noel Vanstone. It was very sad;
it was not the poor girl’s fault, but it was none the less true that
her sister was her rock ahead in life. So he ran on, with no real
ill-feeling toward Norah, but with an obstinate belief in his own
prejudices which bore the aspect of ill-feeling, and which people with
more temper than judgment would be but too readily disposed to resent
accordingly.
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Tyrrel is one of those people. She is an
excellent, warm-hearted woman, with a quick temper and very little
judgment; strongly attached to Norah, and heartily interested in
Norah’s welfare. From all I can learn, she first resented the
expression of the admiral’s opinion, in his presence, as worldly and
selfish in the last degree; and then interpreted it, behind his back,
as a hint to discourage his nephew’s visits, which was a downright
insult offered to a lady in her own house. This was foolish enough so
far; but worse folly was to come.
“As soon as your uncle was gone, Mrs. Tyrrel, most unwisely and
improperly, sent for Norah, and, repeating the conversation that had
taken place, warned her of the reception she might expect from the man
who stood toward you in the position of a father, if she accepted an
offer of marriage on your part. When I tell you that Norah’s faithful
attachment to her sister still remains unshaken, and that there lies
hidden under her noble submission to the unhappy circumstances of her
life a proud susceptibility to slights of all kinds, which is deeply
seated in her nature—you will understand the true motive of the refusal
which has so naturally and so justly disappointed you. They are all
three equally to blame in this matter. Your uncle was wrong to state
his objections so roundly and inconsiderately as he did. Mrs. Tyrrel
was wrong to let her temper get the better of her, and to suppose
herself insulted where no insult was intended. And Norah was wrong to
place a scruple of pride, and a hopeless belief in her sister which no
strangers can be expected to share, above the higher claims of an
attachment which might have secured the happiness and the prosperity of
her future life.
“But the mischief has been done. The next question is, can the harm be
remedied?
“I hope and believe it can. My advice is this: Don’t take No for an
answer. Give her time enough to reflect on what she has done, and to
regret it (as I believe she will regret it) in secret; trust to my
influence over her to plead your cause for you at every opportunity I
can find; wait patiently for the right moment, and ask her again. Men,
being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too
apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of
the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are
heartily sorry for it afterward.
“In the meanwhile, you must help your own interests by inducing your
uncle to alter his opinion, or at least to make the concession of
keeping his opinion to himself. Mrs. Tyrrel has rushed to the
conclusion that the harm he has done he did intentionally—which is as
much as to say, in so many words, that he had a prophetic conviction,
when he came into the house, of what she would do when he left it. My
explanation of the matter is a much simpler one. I believe that the
knowledge of your attachment naturally aroused his curiosity to see the
object of it, and that Mrs. Tyrrel’s injudicious praises of Norah
irritated his objections into openly declaring themselves. Anyway, your
course lies equally plain before you. Use your influence over your
uncle to persuade him into setting matters right again; trust my
settled resolution to see Norah your wife before six months more are
over our heads; and believe me, your friend and well-wisher,
“HARRIET GARTH.”
IV.
From Mrs. Drake to George Bartram.
“St. Crux, April 17th.
“SIR,
“I direct these lines to the hotel you usually stay at in London,
hoping that you may return soon enough from foreign parts to receive my
letter without delay.
“I am sorry to say that some unpleasant events have taken place at St.
Crux since you left it, and that my honored master, the admiral, is far
from enjoying his usual good health. On both these accounts, I venture
to write to you on my own responsibility, for I think your presence is
needed in the house.
“Early in the month a most regrettable circumstance took place. Our new
parlor-maid was discovered by Mr. Mazey, at a late hour of the night
(with her master’s basket of keys in her possession), prying into the
private documents kept in the east library. The girl removed herself
from the house the next morning before we were any of us astir, and she
has not been heard of since. This event has annoyed and alarmed my
master very seriously; and to make matters worse, on the day when the
girl’s treacherous conduct was discovered, the admiral was seized with
the first symptoms of a severe inflammatory cold. He was not himself
aware, nor was any one else, how he had caught the chill. The doctor
was sent for, and kept the inflammation down until the day before
yesterday, when it broke out again, under circumstances which I am sure
you will be sorry to hear, as I am truly sorry to write of them.
“On the date I have just mentioned—I mean the fifteenth of the month—my
master himself informed me that he had been dreadfully disappointed by
a letter received from you, which had come in the morning from foreign
parts, and had brought him bad news. He did not tell me what the news
was—but I have never, in all the years I have passed in the admiral’s
service, seen him so distressingly upset, and so unlike himself, as he
was on that day. At night his uneasiness seemed to increase. He was in
such a state of irritation that he could not bear the sound of Mr.
Mazey’s hard breathing outside his door, and he laid his positive
orders on the old man to go into one of the bedrooms for that night.
Mr. Mazey, to his own great regret, was of course obliged to obey.
“Our only means of preventing the admiral from leaving his room in his
sleep, if the fit unfortunately took him, being now removed, Mr. Mazey
and I agreed to keep watch by turns through the night, sitting, with
the door ajar, in one of the empty rooms near our master’s bed-chamber.
We could think of nothing better to do than this, knowing he would not
allow us to lock him in, and not having the door key in our possession,
even if we could have ventured to secure him in his room without his
permission. I kept watch for the first two hours, and then Mr. Mazey
took my place. After having been some little time in my own room, it
occurred to me that the old man was hard of hearing, and that if his
eyes grew at all heavy in the night, his ears were not to be trusted to
warn him if anything happened. I slipped on my clothes again, and went
back to Mr. Mazey. He was neither asleep nor awake—he was between the
two. My mind misgave me, and I went on to the admiral’s room. The door
was open, and the bed was empty.
“Mr. Mazey and I went downstairs instantly. We looked in all the north
rooms, one after another, and found no traces of him. I thought of the
drawing-room next, and, being the more active of the two, went first to
examine it. The moment I turned the sharp corner of the passage, I saw
my master coming toward me through the open drawing-room door, asleep
and dreaming, with his keys in his hands. The sliding door behind him
was open also; and the fear came to me then, and has remained with me
ever since, that his dream had led him through the Banqueting-Hall into
the east rooms. We abstained from waking him, and followed his steps
until he returned of his own accord to his bed-chamber. The next
morning, I grieve to say, all the bad symptoms came back; and none of
the remedies employed have succeeded in getting the better of them yet.
By the doctor’s advice, we refrained from telling the admiral what had
happened. He is still under the impression that he passed the night as
usual in his own room.
“I have been careful to enter into all the particulars of this
unfortunate accident, because neither Mr. Mazey nor myself desire to
screen ourselves from blame, if blame we have deserved. We both acted
for the best, and we both beg and pray you will consider our
responsible situation, and come as soon as possible to St. Crux. Our
honored master is very hard to manage; and the doctor thinks, as we do,
that your presence is wanted in the house.
“I remain, sir, with Mr. Mazey’s respects and my own, your humble
servant,
“SOPHIA DRAKE.”
V.
From George Bartram to Miss Garth.
“St. Crux, April 22d.
“DEAR MISS GARTH,
“Pray excuse my not thanking you sooner for your kind and consoling
letter. We are in sad trouble at St. Crux. Any little irritation I
might have felt at my poor uncle’s unlucky interference in Portland
Place is all forgotten in the misfortune of his serious illness. He is
suffering from internal inflammation, produced by cold; and symptoms
have shown themselves which are dangerous at his age. A physician from
London is now in the house. You shall hear more in a few days.
Meantime, believe me, with sincere gratitude,
“Yours most truly,
“GEORGE BARTRAM.”
VI.
From Mr. Loscombe to Mrs. Noel Vanstone.
“Lincoln’s Inn Fields, May 6th.
“DEAR MADAM,
“I have unexpectedly received some information which is of the most
vital importance to your interests. The news of Admiral Bartram’s death
has reached me this morning. He expired at his own house, on the fourth
of the present month.
“This event at once disposes of the considerations which I had
previously endeavored to impress on you, in relation to your discovery
at St. Crux. The wisest course we can now follow is to open
communications at once with the executors of the deceased gentleman;
addressing them through the medium of the admiral’s legal adviser, in
the first instance.
“I have dispatched a letter this day to the solicitor in question. It
simply warns him that we have lately become aware of the existence of a
private Document, controlling the deceased gentleman in his use of the
legacy devised to him by Mr. Noel Vanstone’s will. My letter assumes
that the document will be easily found among the admiral’s papers; and
it mentions that I am the solicitor appointed by Mrs. Noel Vanstone to
receive communications on her behalf. My object in taking this step is
to cause a search to be instituted for the Trust—in the very probable
event of the executors not having met with it yet—before the usual
measures are adopted for the administration of the admiral’s estate. We
will threaten legal proceedings, if we find that the object does not
succeed. But I anticipate no such necessity. Admiral Bartram’s
executors must be men of high standing and position; and they will do
justice to you and to themselves in this matter by looking for the
Trust.
“Under these circumstances, you will naturally ask, ‘What are our
prospects when the document is found?’ Our prospects have a bright side
and a dark side. Let us take the bright side to begin with.
“What do we actually know?
“We know, first, that the Trust does really exist. Secondly, that there
is a provision in it relating to the marriage of Mr. George Bartram in
a given time. Thirdly, that the time (six months from the date of your
husband’s death) expired on the third of this month. Fourthly, that Mr.
George Bartram (as I have found out by inquiry, in the absence of any
positive information on the subject possessed by yourself) is, at the
present moment, a single man. The conclusion naturally follows, that
the object contemplated by the Trust, in this case, is an object that
has failed.
“If no other provisions have been inserted in the document—or if, being
inserted, those other provisions should be discovered to have failed
also—I believe it to be impossible (especially if evidence can be found
that the admiral himself considered the Trust binding on him) for the
executors to deal with your husband’s fortune as legally forming part
of Admiral Bartram’s estate. The legacy is expressly declared to have
been left to him, on the understanding that he applies it to certain
stated objects—and those objects have failed. What is to be done with
the money? It was not left to the admiral himself, on the testator’s
own showing; and the purposes for which it _was_ left have not been,
and cannot be, carried out. I believe (if the case here supposed really
happens) that the money must revert to the testator’s estate. In that
event the Law, dealing with it as a matter of necessity, divides it
into two equal portions. One half goes to Mr. Noel Vanstone’s childless
widow, and the other half is divided among Mr. Noel Vanstone’s next of
kin.
“You will no doubt discover the obvious objection to the case in our
favor, as I have here put it. You will see that it depends for its
practical realization not on one contingency, but on a series of
contingencies, which must all happen exactly as we wish them to happen.
I admit the force of the objection; but I can tell you, at the same
time, that these said contingencies are by no means so improbable as
they may look on the face of them.
“We have every reason to believe that the Trust, like the Will, was
_not_ drawn by a lawyer. That is one circumstance in our favor that is
enough of itself to cast a doubt on the soundness of all, or any, of
the remaining provisions which we may not be acquainted with. Another
chance which we may count on is to be found, as I think, in that
strange handwriting, placed under the signature on the third page of
the Letter, which you saw, but which you, unhappily, omitted to read.
All the probabilities point to those lines as written by Admiral
Bartram: and the position which they occupy is certainly consistent
with the theory that they touch the important subject of his own sense
of obligation under the Trust.
“I wish to raise no false hopes in your mind. I only desire to satisfy
you that we have a case worth trying.
“As for the dark side of the prospect, I need not enlarge on it. After
what I have already written, you will understand that the existence of
a sound provision, unknown to us, in the Trust, which has been properly
carried out by the admiral—or which can be properly carried out by his
representatives—would be necessarily fatal to our hopes. The legacy
would be, in this case, devoted to the purpose or purposes contemplated
by your husband—and, from that moment, you would have no claim.
“I have only to add, that as soon as I hear from the late admiral’s man
of business, you shall know the result.
“Believe me, dear madam,
“Faithfully yours,
“JOHN LOSCOMBE.”
VII.
From George Bartram to Miss Garth.
“St. Crux, May 15th.
“DEAR MISS GARTH,
“I trouble you with another letter: partly to thank you for your kind
expression of sympathy with me, under the loss that I have sustained;
and partly to tell you of an extraordinary application made to my
uncle’s executors, in which you and Miss Vanstone may both feel
interested, as Mrs. Noel Vanstone is directly concerned in it.
“Knowing my own ignorance of legal technicalities, I inclose a copy of
the application, instead of trying to describe it. You will notice as
suspicious, that no explanation is given of the manner in which the
alleged discovery of one of my uncle’s secrets was made, by persons who
are total strangers to him.
“On being made acquainted with the circumstances, the executors at once
applied to me. I could give them no positive information—for my uncle
never consulted me on matters of business. But I felt in honor bound to
tell them, that during the last six months of his life, the admiral had
occasionally let fall expressions of impatience in my hearing, which
led to the conclusion that he was annoyed by a private responsibility
of some kind. I also mentioned that he had imposed a very strange
condition on me—a condition which, in spite of his own assurances to
the contrary, I was persuaded could not have emanated from himself—of
marrying within a given time (which time has now expired), or of not
receiving from him a certain sum of money, which I believed to be the
same in amount as the sum bequeathed to him in my cousin’s will. The
executors agreed with me that these circumstances gave a color of
probability to an otherwise incredible story; and they decided that a
search should be instituted for the Secret Trust, nothing in the
slightest degree resembling this same Trust having been discovered, up
to that time, among the admiral’s papers.
“The search (no trifle in such a house as this) has now been in full
progress for a week. It is superintended by both the executors, and by
my uncle’s lawyer, who is personally, as well as professionally, known
to Mr. Loscombe (Mrs. Noel Vanstone’s solicitor), and who has been
included in the proceedings at the express request of Mr. Loscombe
himself. Up to this time, nothing whatever has been found. Thousands
and thousands of letters have been examined, and not one of them bears
the remotest resemblance to the letter we are looking for.
“Another week will bring the search to an end. It is only at my express
request that it will be persevered with so long. But as the admiral’s
generosity has made me sole heir to everything he possessed, I feel
bound to do the fullest justice to the interests of others, however
hostile to myself those interests may be.
“With this view, I have not hesitated to reveal to the lawyer a
constitutional peculiarity of my poor uncle’s, which was always kept a
secret among us at his own request—I mean his tendency to somnambulism.
I mentioned that he had been discovered (by the housekeeper and his old
servant) walking in his sleep, about three weeks before his death, and
that the part of the house in which he had been seen, and the basket of
keys which he was carrying in his hand, suggested the inference that he
had come from one of the rooms in the east wing, and that he might have
opened some of the pieces of furniture in one of them. I surprised the
lawyer (who seemed to be quite ignorant of the extraordinary actions
constantly performed by somnambulists), by informing him that my uncle
could find his way about the house, lock and unlock doors, and remove
objects of all kinds from one place to another, as easily in his sleep
as in his waking hours. And I declared that, while I felt the faintest
doubt in my own mind whether he might not have been dreaming of the
Trust on the night in question, and putting the dream in action in his
sleep, I should not feel satisfied unless the rooms in the east wing
were searched again.
“It is only right to add that there is not the least foundation in fact
for this idea of mine. During the latter part of his fatal illness, my
poor uncle was quite incapable of speaking on any subject whatever.
From the time of my arrival at St. Crux, in the middle of last month,
to the time of his death, not a word dropped from him which referred in
the remotest way to the Secret Trust.
“Here then, for the present, the matter rests. If you think it right to
communicate the contents of this letter to Miss Vanstone, pray tell her
that it will not be my fault if her sister’s assertion (however
preposterous it may seem to my uncle’s executors) is not fairly put to
the proof.
“Believe me, dear Miss Garth,
“Always truly yours,
“GEORGE BARTRAM.
“P. S.—As soon as all business matters are settled, I am going abroad
for some months, to try the relief of change of scene. The house will
be shut up, and left under the charge of Mrs. Drake. I have not
forgotten your once telling me that you should like to see St. Crux, if
you ever found yourself in this neighborhood. If you are at all likely
to be in Essex during the time when I am abroad, I have provided
against the chance of your being disappointed, by leaving instructions
with Mrs. Drake to give you, and any friends of yours, the freest
admission to the house and grounds.”
VIII.
From Mr. Loscombe to Mrs. Noel Vanstone.
“Lincoln’s Inn Fields, May 24th.
“DEAR MADAM,
“After a whole fortnight’s search—conducted, I am bound to admit, with
the most conscientious and unrelaxing care—no such document as the
Secret Trust has been found among the papers left at St. Crux by the
late Admiral Bartram.
“Under these circumstances, the executors have decided on acting under
the only recognizable authority which they have to guide them—the
admiral’s own will. This document (executed some years since) bequeaths
the whole of his estate, both real and personal (that is to say, all
the lands he possesses, and all the money he possesses, at the time of
his death), to his nephew. The will is plain, and the result is
inevitable. Your husband’s fortune is lost to you from this moment. Mr.
George Bartram legally inherits it, as he legally inherits the house
and estate of St. Crux.
“I make no comment upon this extraordinary close to the proceedings.
The Trust may have been destroyed, or the Trust may be hidden in some
place of concealment inaccessible to discovery. Either way, it is, in
my opinion, impossible to found any valid legal declaration on a
knowledge of the document so fragmentary and so incomplete as the
knowledge which you possess. If other lawyers differ from me on this
point, by all means consult them. I have devoted money enough and time
enough to the unfortunate attempt to assert your interests; and my
connection with the matter must, from this moment, be considered at an
end.
“Your obedient servant,
“JOHN LOSCOMBE.”
IX.
From Mrs. Ruddock (Lodging-house Keeper) to Mr. Loscombe.
“Park Terrace, St. John’s Wood,
“June 2d.
“SIR,
“Having, by Mrs. Noel Vanstone’s directions, taken letters for her to
the post, addressed to you—and knowing no one else to apply to—I beg to
inquire whether you are acquainted with any of her friends; for I think
it right that they should be stirred up to take some steps about her.
“Mrs. Vanstone first came to me in November last, when she and her maid
occupied my apartments. On that occasion, and again on this, she has
given me no cause to complain of her. She has behaved like a lady, and
paid me my due. I am writing, as a mother of a family, under a sense of
responsibility—I am not writing with an interested motive.
“After proper warning given, Mrs. Vanstone (who is now quite alone)
leaves me to-morrow. She has not concealed from me that her
circumstances are fallen very low, and that she cannot afford to remain
in my house. This is all she has told me—I know nothing of where she is
going, or what she means to do next. But I have every reason to believe
she desires to destroy all traces by which she might be found, after
leaving this place—for I discovered her in tears yesterday, burning
letters which were doubtless letters from her friends. In looks and
conduct she has altered most shockingly in the last week. I believe
there is some dreadful trouble on her mind; and I am afraid, from what
I see of her, that she is on the eve of a serious illness. It is very
sad to see such a young woman so utterly deserted and friendless as she
is now.
“Excuse my troubling you with this letter; it is on my conscience to
write it. If you know any of her relations, please warn them that time
is not to be wasted. If they lose to-morrow, they may lose the last
chance of finding her.
“Your humble servant,
“CATHERINE RUDDOCK.”
X.
From Mr. Loscombe to Mrs. Ruddock.
“Lincoln’s Inn Fields, June 2d.
“MADAM,
“My only connection with Mrs. Noel Vanstone was a professional one, and
that connection is now at an end. I am not acquainted with any of her
friends; and I cannot undertake to interfere personally, either with
her present or future proceedings.
“Regretting my inability to afford you any assistance, I remain, your
obedient servant,
“JOHN LOSCOMBE.”
THE LAST SCENE.
AARON’S BUILDINGS
CHAPTER I.
On the seventh of June, the owners of the merchantman _Deliverance_
received news that the ship had touched at Plymouth to land passengers,
and had then continued her homeward voyage to the Port of London. Five
days later, the vessel was in the river, and was towed into the East
India Docks.
Having transacted the business on shore for which he was personally
responsible, Captain Kirke made the necessary arrangements, by letter,
for visiting his brother-in-law’s parsonage in Suffolk, on the
seventeenth of the month. As usual in such cases, he received a list of
commissions to execute for his sister on the day before he left London.
One of these commissions took him into the neighborhood of Camden Town.
He drove to his destination from the Docks; and then, dismissing the
vehicle, set forth to walk back southward, toward the New Road.
He was not well acquainted with the district; and his attention
wandered further and further away from the scene around him as he went
on. His thoughts, roused by the prospect of seeing his sister again,
had led his memory back to the night when he had parted from her,
leaving the house on foot. The spell so strangely laid on him, in that
past time, had kept its hold through all after-events. The face that
had haunted him on the lonely road had haunted him again on the lonely
sea. The woman who had followed him, as in a dream, to his sister’s
door, had followed him—thought of his thought, and spirit of his
spirit—to the deck of his ship. Through storm and calm on the voyage
out, through storm and calm on the voyage home, she had been with him.
In the ceaseless turmoil of the London streets, she was with him now.
He knew what the first question on his lips would be, when he had seen
his sister and her boys. “I shall try to talk of something else,” he
thought; “but when Lizzie and I am alone, it will come out in spite of
me.”
The necessity of waiting to let a string of carts pass at a turning
before he crossed awakened him to present things. He looked about in a
momentary confusion. The street was strange to him; he had lost his
way.
The first foot passenger of whom he inquired appeared to have no time
to waste in giving information. Hurriedly directing him to cross to the
other side of the road, to turn down the first street he came to on his
right hand, and then to ask again, the stranger unceremoniously
hastened on without waiting to be thanked.
Kirke followed his directions and took the turning on his right. The
street was short and narrow, and the houses on either side were of the
poorer order. He looked up as he passed the corner to see what the name
of the place might be. It was called “Aaron’s Buildings.”
Low down on the side of the “Buildings” along which he was walking, a
little crowd of idlers was assembled round two cabs, both drawn up
before the door of the same house. Kirke advanced to the crowd, to ask
his way of any civil stranger among them who might _not_ be in a hurry
this time. On approaching the cabs, he found a woman disputing with the
drivers; and heard enough to inform him that two vehicles had been sent
for by mistake, where only one was wanted.
The house door was open; and when he turned that way next, he looked
easily into the passage, over the heads of the people in front of him.
The sight that met his eyes should have been shielded in pity from the
observation of the street. He saw a slatternly girl, with a frightened
face, standing by an old chair placed in the middle of the passage, and
holding a woman on the chair, too weak and helpless to support
herself—a woman apparently in the last stage of illness, who was about
to be removed, when the dispute outside was ended, in one of the cabs.
Her head was drooping when he first saw her, and an old shawl which
covered it had fallen forward so as to hide the upper part of her face.
Before he could look away again, the girl in charge of her raised her
head and restored the shawl to its place. The action disclosed her face
to view, for an instant only, before her head drooped once more on her
bosom. In that instant he saw the woman whose beauty was the haunting
remembrance of his life—whose image had been vivid in his mind not five
minutes since.
The shock of the double recognition—the recognition, at the same
moment, of the face, and of the dreadful change in it—struck him
speechless and helpless. The steady presence of mind in all emergencies
which had become a habit of his life, failed him for the first time.
The poverty-stricken street, the squalid mob round the door, swam
before his eyes. He staggered back and caught at the iron railings of
the house behind him.
“Where are they taking her to?” he heard a woman ask, close at his
side.
“To the hospital, if they will have her,” was the reply. “And to the
work-house, if they won’t.”
That horrible answer roused him. He pushed his way through the crowd
and entered the house.
The misunderstanding on the pavement had been set right, and one of the
cabs had driven off.
As he crossed the threshold of the door he confronted the people of the
house at the moment when they were moving her. The cabman who had
remained was on one side of the chair, and the woman who had been
disputing with the two drivers was on the other. They were just lifting
her, when Kirke’s tall figure darkened the door.
“What are you doing with that lady?” he asked.
The cabman looked up with the insolence of his reply visible in his
eyes, before his lips could utter it. But the woman, quicker than he,
saw the suppressed agitation in Kirke’s face, and dropped her hold of
the chair in an instant.
“Do you know her, sir?” asked the woman, eagerly. “Are you one of her
friends?”
“Yes,” said Kirke, without hesitation.
“It’s not my fault, sir,” pleaded the woman, shirking under the look he
fixed on her. “I would have waited patiently till her friends found
her—I would, indeed!”
Kirke made no reply. He turned, and spoke to the cabman.
“Go out,” he said, “and close the door after you. I’ll send you down
your money directly. What room in the house did you take her from, when
you brought her here?” he resumed, addressing himself to the woman
again.
“The first floor back, sir.”
“Show me the way to it.”
He stooped, and lifted Magdalen in his arms. Her head rested gently on
the sailor’s breast; her eyes looked up wonderingly into the sailor’s
face. She smiled, and whispered to him vacantly. Her mind had wandered
back to old days at home; and her few broken words showed that she
fancied herself a child again in her father’s arms. “Poor papa!” she
said, softly. “Why do you look so sorry? Poor papa!”
The woman led the way into the back room on the first floor. It was
very small; it was miserably furnished. But the little bed was clean,
and the few things in the room were neatly kept. Kirke laid her
tenderly on the bed. She caught one of his hands in her burning
fingers. “Don’t distress mamma about me,” she said. “Send for Norah.”
Kirke tried gently to release his hand; but she only clasped it the
more eagerly. He sat down by the bedside to wait until it pleased her
to release him. The woman stood looking at them and crying, in a corner
of the room. Kirke observed her attentively. “Speak,” he said, after an
interval, in low, quiet tones. “Speak in _her_ presence; and tell me
the truth.”
With many words, with many tears, the woman spoke.
She had let her first floor to the lady a fortnight since. The lady had
paid a week’s rent, and had given the name of Gray. She had been out
from morning till night, for the first three days, and had come home
again, on every occasion, with a wretchedly weary, disappointed look.
The woman of the house had suspected that she was in hiding from her
friends, under a false name; and that she had been vainly trying to
raise money, or to get some employment, on the three days when she was
out for so long, and when she looked so disappointed on coming home.
However that might be, on the fourth day she had fallen ill, with
shivering fits and hot fits, turn and turn about. On the fifth day she
was worse; and on the sixth, she was too sleepy at one time, and too
light-headed at another, to be spoken to. The chemist (who did the
doctoring in those parts) had come and looked at her, and had said he
thought it was a bad fever. He had left a “saline draught,” which the
woman of the house had paid for out of her own pocket, and had
administered without effect. She had ventured on searching the only box
which the lady had brought with her; and had found nothing in it but a
few necessary articles of linen—no dresses, no ornaments, not so much
as the fragment of a letter which might help in discovering her
friends. Between the risk of keeping her under these circumstances, and
the barbarity of turning a sick woman into the street, the landlady
herself had not hesitated. She would willingly have kept her tenant, on
the chance of the lady’s recovery, and on the chance of her friends
turning up. But not half an hour since, her husband—who never came near
the house, except to take her money—had come to rob her of her little
earnings, as usual. She had been obliged to tell him that no rent was
in hand for the first floor, and that none was likely to be in hand
until the lady recovered, or her friends found her. On hearing this, he
had mercilessly insisted—well or ill—that the lady should go. There was
the hospital to take her to; and if the hospital shut its doors, there
was the workhouse to try next. If she was not out of the place in an
hour’s time, he threatened to come back and take her out himself. His
wife knew but too well that he was brute enough to be as good as his
word; and no other choice had been left her but to do as she had done,
for the sake of the lady herself.
The woman told her shocking story, with every appearance of being
honestly ashamed of it. Toward the end, Kirke felt the clasp of the
burning fingers slackening round his hand. He looked back at the bed
again. Her weary eyes were closing; and, with her face still turned
toward the sailor, she was sinking into sleep.
“Is there any one in the front room?” said Kirke, in a whisper. “Come
in there; I have something to say to you.”
The woman followed him through the door of communication between the
rooms.
“How much does she owe you?” he asked.
The landlady mentioned the sum. Kirke put it down before her on the
table.
“Where is your husband?” was his next question.
“Waiting at the public-house, sir, till the hour is up.”
“You can take him the money or not, as you think right,” said Kirke,
quietly. “I have only one thing to tell you, as far as your husband is
concerned. If you want to see every bone in his skin broken, let him
come to the house while I am in it. Stop! I have something more to say.
Do you know of any doctor in the neighborhood who can be depended on?”
“Not in our neighborhood, sir. But I know of one within half an hour’s
walk of us.”
“Take the cab at the door; and, if you find him at home, bring him back
in it. Say I am waiting here for his opinion on a very serious case. He
shall be well paid, and you shall be well paid. Make haste!”
The woman left the room.
Kirke sat down alone, to wait for her return. He hid his face in his
hands, and tried to realize the strange and touching situation in which
the accident of a moment had placed him.
Hidden in the squalid by-ways of London under a false name; cast,
friendless and helpless, on the mercy of strangers, by illness which
had struck her prostrate, mind and body alike—so he met her again, the
woman who had opened a new world of beauty to his mind; the woman who
had called Love to life in him by a look! What horrible misfortune had
struck her so cruelly, and struck her so low? What mysterious destiny
had guided him to the last refuge of her poverty and despair, in the
hour of her sorest need? “If it is ordered that I am to see her again,
I _shall_ see her.” Those words came back to him now—the memorable
words that he had spoken to his sister at parting. With that thought in
his heart, he had gone where his duty called him. Months and months had
passed; thousands and thousands of miles, protracting their desolate
length on the unresting waters had rolled between them. And through the
lapse of time, and over the waste of oceans—day after day, and night
after night, as the winds of heaven blew, and the good ship toiled on
before them—he had advanced nearer and nearer to the end that was
waiting for him; he had journeyed blindfold to the meeting on the
threshold of that miserable door. “What has brought me here?” he said
to himself in a whisper. “The mercy of chance? No. The mercy of God.”
He waited, unregardful of the place, unconscious of the time, until the
sound of footsteps on the stairs came suddenly between him and his
thoughts. The door opened, and the doctor was shown into the room.
“Dr. Merrick,” said the landlady, placing a chair for him.
“_Mr._ Merrick,” said the visitor, smiling quietly as he took the
chair. “I am not a physician—I am a surgeon in general practice.”
Physician or surgeon, there was something in his face and manner which
told Kirke at a glance that he was a man to be relied on.
After a few preliminary words on either side, Mr. Merrick sent the
landlady into the bedroom to see if his patient was awake or asleep.
The woman returned, and said she was “betwixt the two, light in the
head again, and burning hot.” The doctor went at once into the bedroom,
telling the landlady to follow him, and to close the door behind her.
A weary time passed before he came back into the front room. When he
re-appeared, his face spoke for him, before any question could be
asked.
“Is it a serious illness?” said Kirke his voice sinking low, his eyes
anxiously fixed on the doctor’s face.
“It is a _dangerous_ illness,” said Mr. Merrick, with an emphasis on
the word.
He drew his chair nearer to Kirke and looked at him attentively.
“May I ask you some questions which are not strictly medical?” he
inquired.
Kirke bowed.
“Can you tell me what her life has been before she came into this
house, and before she fell ill?”
“I have no means of knowing. I have just returned to England after a
long absence.”
“Did you know of her coming here?”
“I only discovered it by accident.”
“Has she no female relations? No mother? no sister? no one to take care
of her but yourself?”
“No one—unless I can succeed in tracing her relations. No one but
myself.”
Mr. Merrick was silent. He looked at Kirke more attentively than ever.
“Strange!” thought the doctor. “He is here, in sole charge of her—and
is this all he knows?”
Kirke saw the doubt in his face; and addressed himself straight to that
doubt, before another word passed between them,
“I see my position here surprises you,” he said, simply. “Will you
consider it the position of a relation—the position of her brother or
her father—until her friends can be found?” His voice faltered, and he
laid his hand earnestly on the doctor’s arm. “I have taken this trust
on myself,” he said; “and as God shall judge me, I will not be unworthy
of it!”
The poor weary head lay on his breast again, the poor fevered fingers
clasped his hand once more, as he spoke those words.
“I believe you,” said the doctor, warmly. “I believe you are an honest
man.—Pardon me if I have seemed to intrude myself on your confidence. I
respect your reserve—from this moment it is sacred to me. In justice to
both of us, let me say that the questions I have asked were not
prompted by mere curiosity. No common cause will account for the
illness which has laid my patient on that bed. She has suffered some
long-continued mental trial, some wearing and terrible suspense—and she
has broken down under it. It might have helped me if I could have known
what the nature of the trial was, and how long or how short a time
elapsed before she sank under it. In that hope I spoke.”
“When you told me she was dangerously ill,” said Kirke, “did you mean
danger to her reason or to her life?”
“To both,” replied Mr. Merrick. “Her whole nervous system has given
way; all the ordinary functions of her brain are in a state of
collapse. I can give you no plainer explanation than that of the nature
of the malady. The fever which frightens the people of the house is
merely the effect. The cause is what I have told you. She may lie on
that bed for weeks to come; passing alternately, without a gleam of
consciousness, from a state of delirium to a state of repose. You must
not be alarmed if you find her sleep lasting far beyond the natural
time. That sleep is a better remedy than any I can give, and nothing
must disturb it. All our art can accomplish is to watch her, to help
her with stimulants from time to time, and to wait for what Nature will
do.”
“Must she remain here? Is there no hope of our being able to remove her
to a better place?”
“No hope whatever, for the present. She has already been disturbed, as
I understand, and she is seriously the worse for it. Even if she gets
better, even if she comes to herself again, it would still be a
dangerous experiment to move her too soon—the least excitement or alarm
would be fatal to her. You must make the best of this place as it is.
The landlady has my directions; and I will send a good nurse to help
her. There is nothing more to be done. So far as her life can be said
to be in any human hands, it is as much in your hands now as in mine.
Everything depends on the care that is taken of her, under your
direction, in this house.” With those farewell words he rose and
quitted the room.
Left by himself, Kirke walked to the door of communication, and,
knocking at it softly, told the landlady he wished to speak with her.
He was far more composed, far more like his own resolute self, after
his interview with the doctor, than he had been before it. A man living
in the artificial social atmosphere which _this_ man had never breathed
would have felt painfully the worldly side of the situation—its novelty
and strangeness; the serious present difficulty in which it placed him;
the numberless misinterpretations in the future to which it might lead.
Kirke never gave the situation a thought. He saw nothing but the duty
it claimed from him—a duty which the doctor’s farewell words had put
plainly before his mind. Everything depended on the care taken of her,
under his direction, in that house. There was his responsibility, and
he unconsciously acted under it, exactly as he would have acted in a
case of emergency with women and children on board his own ship. He
questioned the landlady in short, sharp sentences; the only change in
him was in the lowered tone of his voice, and in the anxious looks
which he cast, from time to time, at the room where she lay.
“Do you understand what the doctor has told you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The house must be kept quiet. Who lives in the house?”
“Only me and my daughter, sir; we live in the parlors. Times have gone
badly with us since Lady Day. Both the rooms above this are to let.”
“I will take them both, and the two rooms down here as well. Do you
know of any active trustworthy man who can run on errands for me?”
“Yes, sir. Shall I go—?”
“No; let your daughter go. You must not leave the house until the nurse
comes. Don’t send the messenger up here. Men of that sort tread
heavily. I’ll go down, and speak to him at the door.”
He went down when the messenger came, and sent him first to purchase
pen, ink, and paper. The man’s next errand dispatched him to make
inquiries for a person who could provide for deadening the sound of
passing wheels in the street by laying down tan before the house in the
usual way. This object accomplished, the messenger received two letters
to post. The first was addressed to Kirke’s brother-in-law. It told
him, in few and plain words, what had happened; and left him to break
the news to his wife as he thought best. The second letter was directed
to the landlord of the Aldborough Hotel. Magdalen’s assumed name at
North Shingles was the only name by which Kirke knew her; and the one
chance of tracing her relatives that he could discern was the chance of
discovering her reputed uncle and aunt by means of inquiries starting
from Aldborough.
Toward the close of the afternoon a decent middle-aged woman came to
the house, with a letter from Mr. Merrick. She was well known to the
doctor as a trustworthy and careful person, who had nursed his own
wife; and she would be assisted, from time to time, by a lady who was a
member of a religious Sisterhood in the district, and whose
compassionate interest had been warmly aroused in the case. Toward
eight o’clock that evening the doctor himself would call and see that
his patient wanted for nothing.
The arrival of the nurse, and the relief of knowing that she was to be
trusted, left Kirke free to think of himself. His luggage was ready
packed for his contemplated journey to Suffolk the next day. It was
merely necessary to transport it from the hotel to the house in Aaron’s
Buildings.
He stopped once only on his way to the hotel to look at a toyshop in
one of the great thoroughfares. The miniature ships in the window
reminded him of his nephew. “My little name-sake will be sadly
disappointed at not seeing me to-morrow,” he thought. “I must make it
up to the boy by sending him something from his uncle.” He went into
the shop and bought one of the ships. It was secured in a box, and
packed and directed in his presence. He put a card on the deck of the
miniature vessel before the cover of the box was nailed on, bearing
this inscription: “A ship for the little sailor, with the big sailor’s
love.”—“Children like to be written to, ma’am,” he said,
apologetically, to the woman behind the counter. “Send the box as soon
as you can—I am anxious the boy should get it to-morrow.”
Toward the dusk of the evening he returned with his luggage to Aaron’s
Buildings. He took off his boots in the passage and carried his trunk
upstairs himself; stopping, as he passed the first floor, to make his
inquiries. Mr. Merrick was present to answer them.
“She was awake and wandering,” said the doctor, “a few minutes since.
But we have succeeded in composing her, and she is sleeping now.”
“Have no words escaped her, sir, which might help us to find her
friends?”
Mr. Merrick shook his head.
“Weeks and weeks may pass yet,” he said, “and that poor girl’s story
may still be a sealed secret to all of us. We can only wait.”
So the day ended—the first of many days that were to come.
CHAPTER II.
The warm sunlight of July shining softly through a green blind; an open
window with fresh flowers set on the sill; a strange bed, in a strange
room; a giant figure of the female sex (like a dream of Mrs. Wragge)
towering aloft on one side of the bed, and trying to clap its hands;
another woman (quickly) stopping the hands before they could make any
noise; a mild expostulating voice (like a dream of Mrs. Wragge again)
breaking the silence in these words, “She knows me, ma’am, she knows
me; if I mustn’t be happy, it will be the death of me!”—such were the
first sights, such were the first sounds, to which, after six weeks of
oblivion, Magdalen suddenly and strangely awoke.
After a little, the sights grew dim again, and the sounds sank into
silence. Sleep, the merciful, took her once more, and hushed her back
to repose.
Another day—and the sights were clearer, the sounds were louder.
Another—and she heard a man’s voice, through the door, asking for news
from the sick-room. The voice was strange to her; it was always
cautiously lowered to the same quiet tone. It inquired after her, in
the morning, when she woke—at noon, when she took her refreshment—in
the evening, before she dropped asleep again. “Who is so anxious about
me?” That was the first thought her mind was strong enough to form—“Who
is so anxious about me?”
More days—and she could speak to the nurse at her bedside; she could
answer the questions of an elderly man, who knew far more about her
than she knew about herself, and who told her he was Mr. Merrick, the
doctor; she could sit up in bed, supported by pillows, wondering what
had happened to her, and where she was; she could feel a growing
curiosity about that quiet voice, which still asked after her, morning,
noon, and night, on the other side of the door.
Another day’s delay—and Mr. Merrick asked her if she was strong enough
to see an old friend. A meek voice, behind him, articulating high in
the air, said, “It’s only me.” The voice was followed by the prodigious
bodily apparition of Mrs. Wragge, with her cap all awry, and one of her
shoes in the next room. “Oh, look at her! look at her!” cried Mrs.
Wragge, in an ecstasy, dropping on her knees at Magdalen’s bedside,
with a thump that shook the house. “Bless her heart, she’s well enough
to laugh at me already. ‘Cheer, boys, cheer—!’ I beg your pardon,
doctor, my conduct isn’t ladylike, I know. It’s my head, sir; it isn’t
_me._ I must give vent somehow, or my head will burst!” No coherent
sentence, in answer to any sort of question put to her, could be
extracted that morning from Mrs. Wragge. She rose from one climax of
verbal confusion to another—and finished her visit under the bed,
groping inscrutably for the second shoe.
The morrow came—and Mr. Merrick promised that she should see another
old friend on the next day. In the evening, when the inquiring voice
asked after her, as usual, and when the door was opened a few inches to
give the reply, she answered faintly for herself: “I am better, thank
you.” There was a moment of silence—and then, just as the door was shut
again, the voice sank to a whisper, and said, fervently, “Thank God!”
Who was he? She had asked them all, and no one would tell her. Who was
he?
The next day came; and she heard her door opened softly. Brisk
footsteps tripped into the room; a lithe little figure advanced to the
bed-side. Was it a dream again? No! There he was in his own evergreen
reality, with the copious flow of language pouring smoothly from his
lips; with the lambent dash of humor twinkling in his party-colored
eyes—there he was, more audacious, more persuasive, more respectable
than ever, in a suit of glossy black, with a speckless white cravat,
and a rampant shirt frill—the unblushing, the invincible, unchangeable
Wragge!
“Not a word, my dear girl!” said the captain, seating himself
comfortably at the bedside, in his old confidential way. “I am to do
all the talking; and, I think you will own, a more competent man for
the purpose could not possibly have been found. I am really
delighted—honestly delighted, if I may use such an apparently
inappropriate word—to see you again, and to see you getting well. I
have often thought of you; I have often missed you; I have often said
to myself—never mind what! Clear the stage, and drop the curtain on the
past. _Dum vivimus, vivamus!_ Pardon the pedantry of a Latin quotation,
my dear, and tell me how I look. Am I, or am I not, the picture of a
prosperous man?”
Magdalen attempted to answer him. The captain’s deluge of words flowed
over her again in a moment.
“Don’t exert yourself,” he said. “I’ll put all your questions for you.
What have I been about? Why do I look so remarkably well off? And how
in the world did I find my way to this house? My dear girl, I have been
occupied, since we last saw each other, in slightly modifying my old
professional habits. I have shifted from Moral Agriculture to Medical
Agriculture. Formerly I preyed on the public sympathy, now I prey on
the public stomach. Stomach and sympathy, sympathy and stomach—look
them both fairly in the face when you reach the wrong side of fifty,
and you will agree with me that they come to much the same thing.
However that may be, here I am—incredible as it may appear—a man with
an income, at last. The founders of my fortune are three in number.
Their names are Aloes, Scammony, and Gamboge. In plainer words, I am
now living—on a Pill. I made a little money (if you remember) by my
friendly connection with you. I made a little more by the happy decease
(_Requiescat in Pace!_) of that female relative of Mrs. Wragge’s from
whom, as I told you, my wife had expectations. Very good. What do you
think I did? I invested the whole of my capital, at one fell swoop, in
advertisements, and purchased my drugs and my pill-boxes on credit. The
result is now before you. Here I am, a Grand Financial Fact. Here I am,
with my clothes positively paid for; with a balance at my banker’s;
with my servant in livery, and my gig at the door; solvent,
flourishing, popular—and all on a Pill.”
Magdalen smiled. The captain’s face assumed an expression of mock
gravity; he looked as if there was a serious side to the question, and
as if he meant to put it next.
“It’s no laughing matter to the public, my dear,” he said. “They can’t
get rid of me and my Pill; they must take us. There is not a single
form of appeal in the whole range of human advertisement which I am not
making to the unfortunate public at this moment. Hire the last new
novel, there I am, inside the boards of the book. Send for the last new
Song—the instant you open the leaves, I drop out of it. Take a cab—I
fly in at the window in red. Buy a box of tooth-powder at the
chemist’s—I wrap it up for you in blue. Show yourself at the theater—I
flutter down on you in yellow. The mere titles of my advertisements are
quite irresistible. Let me quote a few from last week’s issue.
Proverbial Title: ‘A Pill in time saves Nine.’ Familiar Title: ‘Excuse
me, how is your Stomach?’ Patriotic Title: ‘What are the three
characteristics of a true-born Englishman? His Hearth, his Home, and
his Pill.’ Title in the form of a nursery dialogue: ‘Mamma, I am not
well.’ ‘What is the matter, my pet?’ ‘I want a little Pill.’ Title in
the form of a Historical Anecdote: ‘New Discovery in the Mine of
English History. When the Princes were smothered in the Tower, their
faithful attendant collected all their little possessions left behind
them. Among the touching trifles dear to the poor boys, he found a tiny
Box. It contained the Pill of the Period. Is it necessary to say how
inferior that Pill was to its Successor, which prince and peasant alike
may now obtain?’—Et cetera, et cetera. The place in which my Pill is
made is an advertisement in itself. I have got one of the largest shops
in London. Behind one counter (visible to the public through the lucid
medium of plate-glass) are four-and-twenty young men, in white aprons,
making the Pill. Behind another counter are four-and-twenty young men,
in white cravats, making the boxes. At the bottom of the shop are three
elderly accountants, posting the vast financial transactions accruing
from the Pill in three enormous ledgers. Over the door are my name,
portrait, and autograph, expanded to colossal proportions, and
surrounded in flowing letters, by the motto of the establishment, ‘Down
with the Doctors!’ Even Mrs. Wragge contributes her quota to this
prodigious enterprise. She is the celebrated woman whom I have cured of
indescribable agonies from every complaint under the sun. Her portrait
is engraved on all the wrappers, with the following inscription beneath
it: ‘Before she took the Pill you might have blown this patient away
with a feather. Look at her now!!!’ Last, not least, my dear girl, the
Pill is the cause of my finding my way to this house. My department in
the prodigious Enterprise already mentioned is to scour the United
Kingdom in a gig, establishing Agencies everywhere. While founding one
of those Agencies, I heard of a certain friend of mine, who had lately
landed in England, after a long sea-voyage. I got his address in
London—he was a lodger in this house. I called on him forthwith, and
was stunned by the news of your illness. Such, in brief, is the history
of my existing connection with British Medicine; and so it happens that
you see me at the present moment sitting in the present chair, now as
ever, yours truly, Horatio Wragge.” In these terms the captain brought
his personal statement to a close. He looked more and more attentively
at Magdalen, the nearer he got to the conclusion. Was there some latent
importance attaching to his last words which did not appear on the face
of them? There was. His visit to the sick-room had a serious object,
and that object he had now approached.
In describing the circumstances under which he had become acquainted
with Magdalen’s present position, Captain Wragge had skirted, with his
customary dexterity, round the remote boundaries of truth. Emboldened
by the absence of any public scandal in connection with Noel Vanstone’s
marriage, or with the event of his death as announced in the newspaper
obituary, the captain, roaming the eastern circuit, had ventured back
to Aldborough a fortnight since, to establish an agency there for the
sale of his wonderful Pill. No one had recognized him but the landlady
of the hotel, who at once insisted on his entering the house and
reading Kirke’s letter to her husband. The same night Captain Wragge
was in London, and was closeted with the sailor in the second-floor
room at Aaron’s Buildings.
The serious nature of the situation, the indisputable certainty that
Kirke must fail in tracing Magdalen’s friends unless he first knew who
she really was, had decided the captain on disclosing part, at least,
of the truth. Declining to enter into any particulars—for family
reasons, which Magdalen might explain on her recovery, if she
pleased—he astounded Kirke by telling him that the friendless woman
whom he had rescued, and whom he had only known up to that moment as
Miss Bygrave—was no other than the youngest daughter of Andrew
Vanstone. The disclosure, on Kirke’s side, of his father’s connection
with the young officer in Canada, had followed naturally on the
revelation of Magdalen’s real name. Captain Wragge had expressed his
surprise, but had made no further remark at the time. A fortnight
later, however, when the patient’s recovery forced the serious
difficulty on the doctor of meeting the questions which Magdalen was
sure to ask, the captain’s ingenuity had come, as usual, to the rescue.
“You can’t tell her the truth,” he said, “without awakening painful
recollections of her stay at Aldborough, into which I am not at liberty
to enter. Don’t acknowledge just yet that Mr. Kirke only knew her as
Miss Bygrave of North Shingles when he found her in this house. Tell
her boldly that he knew who she was, and that he felt (what she must
feel) that he had a hereditary right to help and protect her as his
father’s son. I am, as I have already told you,” continued the captain,
sticking fast to his old assertion, “a distant relative of the
Combe-Raven family; and, if there is nobody else at hand to help you
through this difficulty, my services are freely at your disposal.”
No one else was at hand, and the emergency was a serious one. Strangers
undertaking the responsibility might ignorantly jar on past
recollections, which it would, perhaps, be the death of her to revive
too soon. Near relatives might, by their premature appearance at the
bedside, produce the same deplorable result. The alternative lay
between irritating and alarming her by leaving her inquiries
unanswered, or trusting Captain Wragge. In the doctor’s opinion, the
second risk was the least serious risk of the two—and the captain was
now seated at Magdalen’s bedside in discharge of the trust confided to
him.
Would she ask the question which it had been the private object of all
Captain Wragge’s preliminary talk lightly and pleasantly to provoke?
Yes; as soon as his silence gave her the opportunity, she asked it:
“Who was that friend of his living in the house?”
“You ought by rights to know him as well as I do,” said the captain.
“He is the son of one of your father’s old military friends, when your
father was quartered with his regiment in Canada. Your cheeks mustn’t
flush up! If they do, I shall go away.”
She was astonished, but not agitated. Captain Wragge had begun by
interesting her in the remote past, which she only knew by hearsay,
before he ventured on the delicate ground of her own experience.
In a moment more she advanced to her next question: “What was his
name?”
“Kirke,” proceeded the captain. “Did you never hear of his father,
Major Kirke, commanding officer of the regiment in Canada? Did you
never hear that the major helped your father through a great
difficulty, like the best of good fellows and good friends?”
Yes; she faintly fancied she had heard something about her father and
an officer who had once been very good to him when he was a young man.
But she could not look back so long. “Was Mr. Kirke poor?” Even Captain
Wragge’s penetration was puzzled by that question. He gave the true
answer at hazard. “No,” he said, “not poor.”
Her next inquiry showed what she had been thinking of. “If Mr. Kirke
was not poor, why did he come to live in that house?”
“She has caught me!” thought the captain. “There is only one way out of
it—I must administer another dose of truth. Mr. Kirke discovered you
here by chance,” he proceeded, aloud, “very ill, and not nicely
attended to. Somebody was wanted to take care of you while you were not
able to take care of yourself. Why not Mr. Kirke? He was the son of
your father’s old friend—which is the next thing to being _your_ old
friend. Who had a better claim to send for the right doctor, and get
the right nurse, when I was not here to cure you with my wonderful
Pill? Gently! gently! you mustn’t take hold of my superfine black
coat-sleeve in that unceremonious manner.”
He put her hand back on the bed, but she was not to be checked in that
way. She persisted in asking another question.—How came Mr. Kirke to
know her? She had never seen him; she had never heard of him in her
life.
“Very likely,” said Captain Wragge. “But your never having seen _him_
is no reason why he should not have seen _you_.”
“When did he see me?”
The captain corked up his doses of truth on the spot without a moment’s
hesitation. “Some time ago, my dear. I can’t exactly say when.”
“Only once?”
Captain Wragge suddenly saw his way to the administration of another
dose. “Yes,” he said, “only once.”
She reflected a little. The next question involved the simultaneous
expression of two ideas, and the next question cost her an effort.
“He only saw me once,” she said, “and he only saw me some time ago. How
came he to remember me when he found me here?”
“Aha!” said the captain. “Now you have hit the right nail on the head
at last. You can’t possibly be more surprised at his remembering you
than I am. A word of advice, my dear. When you are well enough to get
up and see Mr. Kirke, try how that sharp question of yours sounds in
_his_ ears, and insist on his answering it himself.” Slipping out of
the dilemma in that characteristically adroit manner, Captain Wragge
got briskly on his legs again and took up his hat.
“Wait!” she pleaded. “I want to ask you—”
“Not another word,” said the captain. “I have given you quite enough to
think of for one day. My time is up, and my gig is waiting for me. I am
off, to scour the country as usual. I am off, to cultivate the field of
public indigestion with the triple plowshare of aloes, scammony and
gamboge.” He stopped and turned round at the door. “By-the-by, a
message from my unfortunate wife. If you will allow her to come and see
you again, Mrs. Wragge solemnly promises _not_ to lose her shoe next
time. _I_ don’t believe her. What do you say? May she come?”
“Yes; whenever she likes,” said Magdalen. “If I ever get well again,
may poor Mrs. Wragge come and stay with me?”
“Certainly, my dear. If you have no objection, I will provide her
beforehand with a few thousand impressions in red, blue, and yellow of
her own portrait (‘You might have blown this patient away with a
feather before she took the Pill. Look at her now!’). She is sure to
drop herself about perpetually wherever she goes, and the most
gratifying results, in an advertising point of view, must inevitably
follow. Don’t think me mercenary—I merely understand the age I live
in.” He stopped on his way out, for the second time, and turned round
once more at the door. “You have been a remarkably good girl,” he said,
“and you deserve to be rewarded for it. I’ll give you a last piece of
information before I go. Have you heard anybody inquiring after you,
for the last day or two, outside your door? Ah! I see you have. A word
in your ear, my dear. That’s Mr. Kirke.” He tripped away from the
bedside as briskly as ever. Magdalen heard him advertising himself to
the nurse before he closed the door. “If you are ever asked about it,”
he said, in a confidential whisper, “the name is Wragge, and the Pill
is to be had in neat boxes, price thirteen pence half-penny, government
stamp included. Take a few copies of the portrait of a female patient,
whom you might have blown away with a feather before she took the Pill,
and whom you are simply requested to contemplate now. Many thanks.
_Good_-morning.”
The door closed and Magdalen was alone again. She felt no sense of
solitude; Captain Wragge had left her with something new to think of.
Hour after hour her mind dwelt wonderingly on Mr. Kirke, until the
evening came, and she heard his voice again through the half-opened
door.
“I am very grateful,” she said to him, before the nurse could answer
his inquiries—“very, very grateful for all your goodness to me.”
“Try to get well,” he replied, kindly. “You will more than reward me,
if you try to get well.”
The next morning Mr. Merrick found her impatient to leave her bed, and
be moved to the sofa in the front room. The doctor said he supposed she
wanted a change. “Yes,” she replied; “I want to see Mr. Kirke.” The
doctor consented to move her on the next day, but he positively forbade
the additional excitement of seeing anybody until the day after. She
attempted a remonstrance—Mr. Merrick was impenetrable. She tried, when
he was gone, to win the nurse by persuasion—the nurse was impenetrable,
too.
On the next day they wrapped her in shawls, and carried her in to the
sofa, and made her a little bed on it. On the table near at hand were
some flowers and a number of an illustrated paper. She immediately
asked who had put them there. The nurse (failing to notice a warning
look from the doctor) said Mr. Kirke had thought that she might like
the flowers, and that the pictures in the paper might amuse her. After
that reply, her anxiety to see Mr. Kirke became too ungovernable to be
trifled with. The doctor left the room at once to fetch him.
She looked eagerly at the opening door. Her first glance at him as he
came in raised a doubt in her mind whether she now saw that tall figure
and that open sun-burned face for the first time. But she was too weak
and too agitated to follow her recollections as far back as Aldborough.
She resigned the attempt, and only looked at him. He stopped at the
foot of the sofa and said a few cheering words. She beckoned to him to
come nearer, and offered him her wasted hand. He tenderly took it in
his, and sat down by her. They were both silent. His face told her of
the sorrow and the sympathy which his silence would fain have
concealed. She still held his hand—consciously now—as persistently as
she had held it on the day when he found her. Her eyes closed, after a
vain effort to speak to him, and the tears rolled slowly over her wan
white cheeks.
The doctor signed to Kirke to wait and give her time. She recovered a
little and looked at him. “How kind you have been to me!” she murmured.
“And how little I have deserved it!”
“Hush! hush!” he said. “You don’t know what a happiness it was to me to
help you.”
The sound of his voice seemed to strengthen her, and to give her
courage. She lay looking at him with an eager interest, with a
gratitude which artlessly ignored all the conventional restraints that
interpose between a woman and a man. “Where did you see me,” she said,
suddenly, “before you found me here?”
Kirke hesitated. Mr. Merrick came to his assistance.
“I forbid you to say a word about the past to Mr. Kirke,” interposed
the doctor; “and I forbid Mr. Kirke to say a word about it to _you._
You are beginning a new life to-day, and the only recollections I
sanction are recollections five minutes old.”
She looked at the doctor and smiled. “I must ask him one question,” she
said, and turned back again to Kirke. “Is it true that you had only
seen me once before you came to this house?”
“Quite true!” He made the reply with a sudden change of color which she
instantly detected. Her brightening eyes looked at him more earnestly
than ever, as she put her next question.
“How came you to remember me after only seeing me once?”
His hand unconsciously closed on hers, and pressed it for the first
time. He attempted to answer, and hesitated at the first word. “I have
a good memory,” he said at last; and suddenly looked away from her with
a confusion so strangely unlike his customary self-possession of manner
that the doctor and the nurse both noticed it.
Every nerve in her body felt that momentary pressure of his hand, with
the exquisite susceptibility which accompanies the first faltering
advance on the way to health. She looked at his changing color, she
listened to his hesitating words, with every sensitive perception of
her sex and age quickened to seize intuitively on the truth. In the
moment when he looked away from her, she gently took her hand from him,
and turned her head aside on the pillow. “_Can_ it be?” she thought,
with a flutter of delicious fear at her heart, with a glow of delicious
confusion burning on her cheeks. “_Can_ it be?”
The doctor made another sign to Kirke. He understood it, and rose
immediately. The momentary discomposure in his face and manner had both
disappeared. He was satisfied in his own mind that he had successfully
kept his secret, and in the relief of feeling that conviction he had
become himself again.
“Good-by till to-morrow,” he said, as he left the room.
“Good-by,” she answered, softly, without looking at him.
Mr. Merrick took the chair which Kirke had resigned, and laid his hand
on her pulse. “Just what I feared,” remarked the doctor; “too quick by
half.”
She petulantly snatched away her wrist. “Don’t!” she said, shrinking
from him. “Pray don’t touch me!”
Mr. Merrick good-humoredly gave up his place to the nurse. “I’ll return
in half an hour,” he whispered, “and carry her back to bed. Don’t let
her talk. Show her the pictures in the newspaper, and keep her quiet in
that way.”
When the doctor returned, the nurse reported that the newspaper had not
been wanted. The patient’s conduct had been exemplary. She had not been
at all restless, and she had never spoken a word.
The days passed, and the time grew longer and longer which the doctor
allowed her to spend in the front room. She was soon able to dispense
with the bed on the sofa—she could be dressed, and could sit up,
supported by pillows, in an arm-chair. Her hours of emancipation from
the bedroom represented the great daily event of her life. They were
the hours she passed in Kirke’s society.
She had a double interest in him now—her interest in the man whose
protecting care had saved her reason and her life; her interest in the
man whose heart’s deepest secret she had surprised. Little by little
they grew as easy and familiar with each other as old friends; little
by little she presumed on all her privileges, and wound her way
unsuspected into the most intimate knowledge of his nature.
Her questions were endless. Everything that he could tell her of
himself and his life she drew from him delicately and insensibly: he,
the least self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous
hands. She found out his pride in his ship, and practiced on it without
remorse. She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel,
of the great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never
in his life talked yet to any living creature on shore. She found him
out in private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring
exultations which he had kept a secret from his own mate. She watched
his kindling face with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to
the fire; she trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time
and place, and striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little
lodging-house table, in the fervor of his talk, as if his hand had
descended on the solid bulwark of his ship. His confusion at the
discovery of his own forgetfulness secretly delighted her; she could
have cried with pleasure when he penitently wondered what he could
possibly have been thinking of.
At other times she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life,
and led him into talking of its perils—the perils of that jealous
mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which
had kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore.
Twice he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him
had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the
narrowness of a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to
speak of this dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by
adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for him in his talk,
that she lured him into telling her of the terrors of the great deep.
She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him
with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories—made doubly vivid by
the simple language in which he told them—fell, one by one, from his
lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism—the artless modesty
with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted
courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts
of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed—raised
him to a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she
became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again
which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most
rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so
precious to women in their intercourse with men. “This hand,” she
thought, with an exquisite delight in secretly following the idea while
he was close to her—“this hand that has rescued the drowning from death
is shifting my pillows so tenderly that I hardly know when they are
moved. This hand that has seized men mad with mutiny, and driven them
back to their duty by main force, is mixing my lemonade and peeling my
fruit more delicately and more neatly than I could do it for myself.
Oh, if I could be a man, how I should like to be such a man as this!”
She never allowed her thoughts, while she was in his presence, to lead
her beyond that point. It was only when the night had separated them
that she ventured to let her mind dwell on the self-sacrificing
devotion which had so mercifully rescued her. Kirke little knew how she
thought of him, in the secrecy of her own chamber, during the quiet
hours that elapsed before she sank to sleep. No suspicion crossed his
mind of the influence which he was exerting over her—of the new spirit
which he was breathing into that new life, so sensitively open to
impression in the first freshness of its recovered sense. “She has
nobody else to amuse her, poor thing,” he used to think, sadly, sitting
alone in his small second-floor room. “If a rough fellow like me can
beguile the weary hours till her friends come here, she is heartily
welcome to all that I can tell her.”
He was out of spirits and restless now whenever he was by himself.
Little by little he fell into a habit of taking long, lonely walks at
night, when Magdalen thought he was sleeping upstairs. Once he went
away abruptly in the day-time—on business, as he said. Something had
passed between Magdalen and himself the evening before which had led
her into telling him her age. “Twenty last birthday,” he thought. “Take
twenty from forty-one. An easy sum in subtraction—as easy a sum as my
little nephew could wish for.” He walked to the Docks, and looked
bitterly at the shipping. “I mustn’t forget how a ship is made,” he
said. “It won’t be long before I am back at the old work again.” On
leaving the Docks he paid a visit to a brother sailor—a married man. In
the course of conversation he asked how much older his friend might be
than his friend’s wife. There was six years’ difference between them.
“I suppose that’s difference enough?” said Kirke. “Yes,” said his
friend; “quite enough. Are you looking out for a wife at last? Try a
seasoned woman of thirty-five—that’s your mark, Kirke, as near as I can
calculate.”
The time passed smoothly and quickly—the present time, in which _she_
was recovering so happily—the present time, which _he_ was beginning to
distrust already.
Early one morning Mr. Merrick surprised Kirke by a visit in his little
room on the second floor.
“I came to the conclusion yesterday,” said the doctor, entering
abruptly on his business, “that our patient was strong enough to
justify us at last in running all risks, and communicating with her
friends; and I have accordingly followed the clue which that queer
fellow, Captain Wragge, put into our hands. You remember he advised us
to apply to Mr. Pendril, the lawyer? I saw Mr. Pendril two days ago,
and was referred by him—not overwillingly, as I thought—to a lady named
Miss Garth. I heard enough from her to satisfy me that we have
exercised a wise caution in acting as we have done. It is a very, very
sad story; and I am bound to say that I, for one, make great allowances
for the poor girl downstairs. Her only relation in the world is her
elder sister. I have suggested that the sister shall write to her in
the first instance, and then, if the letter does her no harm, follow it
personally in a day or two. I have not given the address, by way of
preventing any visits from being paid here without my permission. All I
have done is to undertake to forward the letter, and I shall probably
find it at my house when I get back. Can you stop at home until I send
my man with it? There is not the least hope of my being able to bring
it myself. All you need do is to watch for an opportunity when she is
not in the front room, and to put the letter where she can see it when
she comes in. The handwriting on the address will break the news before
she opens the letter. Say nothing to her about it—take care that the
landlady is within call—and leave her to herself. I know I can trust
_you_ to follow my directions, and that is why I ask you to do us this
service. You look out of spirits this morning. Natural enough. You’re
used to plenty of fresh air, captain, and you’re beginning to pine in
this close place.”
“May I ask a question, doctor? Is _she_ pining in this close place,
too? When her sister comes, will her sister take her away?”
“Decidedly, if my advice is followed. She will be well enough to be
moved in a week or less. Good-day. You are certainly out of spirits,
and your hand feels feverish. Pining for the blue water, captain—pining
for the blue water!” With that expression of opinion, the doctor
cheerfully went out.
In an hour the letter arrived. Kirke took it from the landlady
reluctantly, and almost roughly, without looking at it. Having
ascertained that Magdalen was still engaged at her toilet, and having
explained to the landlady the necessity of remaining within call, he
went downstairs immediately, and put the letter on the table in the
front room. Magdalen heard the sound of the familiar step on the floor.
“I shall soon be ready,” she called to him, through the door.
He made no reply; he took his hat and went out. After a momentary
hesitation, he turned his face eastward, and called on the ship-owners
who employed him, at their office in Cornhill.
CHAPTER III.
Magdalen’s first glance round the empty room showed her the letter on
the table. The address, as the doctor had predicted, broke the news the
moment she looked at it.
Not a word escaped her. She sat down by the table, pale and silent,
with the letter in her lap. Twice she attempted to open it, and twice
she put it back again. The bygone time was not alone in her mind as she
looked at her sister’s handwriting: the fear of Kirke was there with
it. “My past life!” she thought. “What will he think of me when he
knows my past life?”
She made another effort, and broke the seal. A second letter dropped
out of the inclosure, addressed to her in a handwriting with which she
was not familiar. She put the second letter aside and read the lines
which Norah had written:
“Ventnor, Isle of Wight, August 24th.
“MY DEAREST MAGDALEN,
“When you read this letter, try to think we have only been parted since
yesterday; and dismiss from your mind (as I have dismissed from mine)
the past and all that belongs to it.
“I am strictly forbidden to agitate you, or to weary you by writing a
long letter. Is it wrong to tell you that I am the happiest woman
living? I hope not, for I can’t keep the secret to myself.
“My darling, prepare yourself for the greatest surprise I have ever
caused you. I am married. It is only a week to-day since I parted with
my old name—it is only a week since I have been the happy wife of
George Bartram, of St. Crux.
“There were difficulties at first in the way of our marriage, some of
them, I am afraid, of my making. Happily for me, my husband knew from
the beginning that I really loved him: he gave me a second chance of
telling him so, after I had lost the first, and, as you see, I was wise
enough to take it. You ought to be especially interested, my love, in
this marriage, for you are the cause of it. If I had not gone to
Aldborough to search for the lost trace of you—if George had not been
brought there at the same time by circumstances in which you were
concerned, my husband and I might never have met. When we look back to
our first impressions of each other, we look back to _you_.
“I must keep my promise not to weary you; I must bring this letter
(sorely against my will) to an end. Patience! patience! I shall see you
soon. George and I are both coming to London to take you back with us
to Ventnor. This is my husband’s invitation, mind, as well as mine.
Don’t suppose I married him, Magdalen, until I had taught him to think
of you as I think—to wish with my wishes, and to hope with my hopes. I
could say so much more about this, so much more about George, if I
might only give my thoughts and my pen their own way; but I must leave
Miss Garth (at her own special request) a blank space to fill up on the
last page of this letter; and I must only add one word more before I
say good-by—a word to warn you that I have another surprise in store,
which I am keeping in reserve until we meet. Don’t attempt to guess
what it is. You might guess for ages, and be no nearer than you are now
to the discovery of the truth.
“Your affectionate sister,
“NORAH BARTRAM.”
(Added by Miss Garth.)
“MY DEAR CHILD,
“If I had ever lost my old loving recollection of you, I should feel it
in my heart again now, when I know that it has pleased God to restore
you to us from the brink of the grave. I add these lines to your
sister’s letter because I am not sure that you are quite so fit yet, as
she thinks you, to accept her proposal. She has not said a word of her
husband or herself which is not true. But Mr. Bartram is a stranger to
you; and if you think you can recover more easily and more pleasantly
to yourself under the wing of your old governess than under the
protection of your new brother-in-law, come to me first, and trust to
my reconciling Norah to the change of plans. I have secured the refusal
of a little cottage at Shanklin, near enough to your sister to allow of
your seeing each other whenever you like, and far enough away, at the
same time, to secure you the privilege, when you wish it, of being
alone. Send me one line before we meet to say Yes or No, and I will
write to Shanklin by the next post.
“Always yours affectionately,
“HARRIET GARTH”
The letter dropped from Magdalen’s hand. Thoughts which had never risen
in her mind yet rose in it now.
Norah, whose courage under undeserved calamity had been the courage of
resignation—Norah, who had patiently accepted her hard lot; who from
first to last had meditated no vengeance and stooped to no deceit—Norah
had reached the end which all her sister’s ingenuity, all her sister’s
resolution, and all her sister’s daring had failed to achieve. Openly
and honorably, with love on one side and love on the other, Norah had
married the man who possessed the Combe-Raven money—and Magdalen’s own
scheme to recover it had opened the way to the event which had brought
husband and wife together.
As the light of that overwhelming discovery broke on her mind, the old
strife was renewed; and Good and Evil struggled once more which should
win her—but with added forces this time; with the new spirit that had
been breathed into her new life; with the nobler sense that had grown
with the growth of her gratitude to the man who had saved her, fighting
on the better side. All the higher impulses of her nature, which had
never, from first to last, let her err with impunity—which had tortured
her, before her marriage and after it, with the remorse that no woman
inherently heartless and inherently wicked can feel—all the nobler
elements in her character, gathered their forces for the crowning
struggle and strengthened her to meet, with no unworthy shrinking, the
revelation that had opened on her view. Clearer and clearer, in the
light of its own immortal life, the truth rose before her from the
ashes of her dead passions, from the grave of her buried hopes. When
she looked at the letter again—when she read the words once more which
told her that the recovery of the lost fortune was her sister’s
triumph, not hers, she had victoriously trampled down all little
jealousies and all mean regrets; she could say in her hearts of hearts,
“Norah has deserved it!”
The day wore on. She sat absorbed in her own thoughts, and heedless of
the second letter which she had not opened yet, until Kirke’s return.
He stopped on the landing outside, and, opening the door a little way
only, asked, without entering the room, if she wanted anything that he
could send her. She begged him to come in. His face was worn and weary;
he looked older than she had seen him look yet. “Did you put my letter
on the table for me?” she asked.
“Yes. I put it there at the doctor’s request.”
“I suppose the doctor told you it was from my sister? She is coming to
see me, and Miss Garth is coming to see me. They will thank you for all
your goodness to me better than I can.”
“I have no claim on their thanks,” he answered, sternly. “What I have
done was not done for them, but for you.” He waited a little, and
looked at her. His face would have betrayed him in that look, his voice
would have betrayed him in the next words he spoke, if she had not
guessed the truth already. “When your friends come here,” he resumed,
“they will take you away, I suppose, to some better place than this.”
“They can take me to no place,” she said, gently, “which I shall think
of as I think of the place where you found me. They can take me to no
dearer friend than the friend who saved my life.”
There was a moment’s silence between them.
“We have been very happy here,” he went on, in lower and lower tones.
“You won’t forget me when we have said good-by?”
She turned pale as the words passed his lips, and, leaving her chair,
knelt down at the table, so as to look up into his face, and to force
him to look into hers.
“Why do you talk of it?” she asked. “We are not going to say good-by,
at least not yet.”
“I thought—” he began.
“Yes?”
“I thought your friends were coming here—”
She eagerly interrupted him. “Do you think I would go away with
anybody,” she said, “even with the dearest relation I have in the
world, and leave you here, not knowing and not caring whether I ever
saw you again? Oh, you don’t think that of me!” she exclaimed, with the
passionate tears springing into her eyes—“I’m sure you don’t think that
of me!”
“No,” he said; “I never have thought, I never can think, unjustly or
unworthily of you.”
Before he could add another word she left the table as suddenly as she
had approached it, and returned to her chair. He had unconsciously
replied in terms that reminded her of the hard necessity which still
remained unfulfilled—the necessity of telling him the story of the
past. Not an idea of concealing that story from his knowledge crossed
her mind. “Will he love me, when he knows the truth, as he loves me
now?” That was her only thought as she tried to approach the subject in
his presence without shrinking from it.
“Let us put my own feelings out of the question,” she said. “There is a
reason for my not going away, unless I first have the assurance of
seeing you again. You have a claim—the strongest claim of any one—to
know how I came here, unknown to my friends, and how it was that you
found me fallen so low.”
“I make no claim,” he said, hastily. “I wish to know nothing which
distresses you to tell me.”
“You have always done your duty,” she rejoined, with a faint smile.
“Let me take example from you, if I can, and try to do mine.”
“I am old enough to be your father,” he said, bitterly. “Duty is more
easily done at my age than it is at yours.”
His age was so constantly in his mind now that he fancied it must be in
her mind too. She had never given it a thought. The reference he had
just made to it did not divert her for a moment from the subject on
which she was speaking to him.
“You don’t know how I value your good opinion of me,” she said,
struggling resolutely to sustain her sinking courage. “How can I
deserve your kindness, how can I feel that I am worthy of your regard,
until I have opened my heart to you? Oh, don’t encourage me in my own
miserable weakness! Help me to tell the truth—_force_ me to tell it,
for my own sake if not for yours!”
He was deeply moved by the fervent sincerity of that appeal.
“You _shall_ tell it,” he said. “You are right—and I was wrong.” He
waited a little, and considered. “Would it be easier to you,” he asked,
with delicate consideration for her, “to write it than to tell it?”
She caught gratefully at the suggestion. “Far easier,” she replied. “I
can be sure of myself—I can be sure of hiding nothing from you, if I
write it. Don’t write to me on your side!” she added, suddenly, seeing
with a woman’s instinctive quickness of penetration the danger of
totally renouncing her personal influence over him. “Wait till we meet,
and tell me with your own lips what you think.”
“Where shall I tell it?”
“Here!” she said eagerly. “Here, where you found me helpless—here,
where you have brought me back to life, and where I have first learned
to know you. I can bear the hardest words you say to me if you will
only say them in this room. It is impossible I can be away longer than
a month; a month will be enough and more than enough. If I come back—”
She stopped confusedly. “I am thinking of myself,” she said, “when I
ought to be thinking of you. You have your own occupations and your own
friends. Will you decide for us? Will you say how it shall be?”
“It shall be as you wish. If you come back in a month, you will find me
here.”
“Will it cause you no sacrifice of your own comfort and your own
plans?”
“It will cause me nothing,” he replied, “but a journey back to the
City.” He rose and took his hat. “I must go there at once,” he added,
“or I shall not be in time.”
“It is a promise between us?” she said, and held out her hand.
“Yes,” he answered, a little sadly; “it is a promise.”
Slight as it was, the shade of melancholy in his manner pained her.
Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently
pressed the hand he gave her. “If _that_ won’t tell him the truth,” she
thought, “nothing will.”
It failed to tell him the truth; but it forced a question on his mind
which he had not ventured to ask himself before. “Is it her gratitude,
or her love; that is speaking to me?” he wondered. “If I was only a
younger man, I might almost hope it was her love.” That terrible sum in
subtraction which had first presented itself on the day when she told
him her age began to trouble him again as he left the house. He took
twenty from forty-one, at intervals, all the way back to the
ship-owners’ office in Cornhill.
Left by herself, Magdalen approached the table to write the line of
answer which Miss Garth requested, and gratefully to accept the
proposal that had been made to her.
The second letter which she had laid aside and forgotten was the first
object that caught her eye on changing her place. She opened it
immediately, and, not recognizing the handwriting, looked at the
signature. To her unutterable astonishment, her correspondent proved to
be no less a person than—old Mr. Clare!
The philosopher’s letter dispensed with all the ordinary forms of
address, and entered on the subject without prefatory phrases of any
kind, in these uncompromising terms:
“I have more news for you of that contemptible cur, my son. Here it is
in the fewest possible words.
“I always told you, if you remember, that Frank was a Sneak. The very
first trace recovered of him, after his running away from his employers
in China, presents him in that character. Where do you think he turns
up next? He turns up, hidden behind a couple of flour barrels, on board
an English vessel bound homeward from Hong-Kong to London.
“The name of the ship was the _Deliverance_, and the commander was one
Captain Kirke. Instead of acting like a sensible man, and throwing
Frank overboard, Captain Kirke was fool enough to listen to his story.
He made the most of his misfortunes, you may be sure. He was half
starved; he was an Englishman lost in a strange country, without a
friend to help him; his only chance of getting home was to sneak into
the hold of an English vessel—and he had sneaked in, accordingly, at
Hong-Kong, two days since. That was his story. Any other lout in
Frank’s situation would have been rope’s ended by any other captain.
Deserving no pity from anybody, Frank was, as a matter of course,
coddled and compassionated on the spot. The captain took him by the
hand, the crew pitied him, and the passengers patted him on the back.
He was fed, clothed, and presented with his passage home. Luck enough
so far, you will say. Nothing of the sort; nothing like luck enough for
my despicable son.
“The ship touched at the Cape of Good Hope. Among his other acts of
folly Captain Kirke took a woman passenger on board at that place—not a
young woman by any means—the elderly widow of a rich colonist. Is it
necessary to say that she forthwith became deeply interested in Frank
and his misfortunes? Is it necessary to tell you what followed? Look
back at my son’s career, and you will see that what followed was all of
a piece with what went before. He didn’t deserve your poor father’s
interest in him—and he got it. He didn’t deserve your attachment—and he
got it. He didn’t deserve the best place in one of the best offices in
London; he didn’t deserve an equally good chance in one of the best
mercantile houses in China; he didn’t deserve food, clothing, pity, and
a free passage home—and he got them all. Last, not least, he didn’t
even deserve to marry a woman old enough to be his grandmother—and he
has done it! Not five minutes since I sent his wedding-cards out to the
dust-hole, and tossed the letter that came with them into the fire. The
last piece of information which that letter contains is that he and his
wife are looking out for a house and estate to suit them. Mark my
words! Frank will get one of the best estates in England; a seat in the
House of Commons will follow as a matter of course; and one of the
legislators of this Ass-ridden country will be—MY LOUT!
“If you are the sensible girl I have always taken you for, you have
long since learned to rate Frank at his true value, and the news I send
you will only confirm your contempt for him. I wish your poor father
could but have lived to see this day! Often as I have missed my old
gossip, I don’t know that I ever felt the loss of him so keenly as I
felt it when Frank’s wedding-cards and Frank’s letter came to this
house.
“Your friend, if you ever want one,
“FRANCIS CLARE, Sen.”
With one momentary disturbance of her composure, produced by the
appearance of Kirke’s name in Mr. Clare’s singular narrative, Magdalen
read the letter steadily through from beginning to end. The time when
it could have distressed her was gone by; the scales had long since
fallen from her eyes. Mr. Clare himself would have been satisfied if he
had seen the quiet contempt on her face as she laid aside his letter.
The only serious thought it cost her was a thought in which Kirke was
concerned. The careless manner in which he had referred in her presence
to the passengers on board his ship, without mentioning any of them by
their names, showed her that Frank must have kept silence on the
subject of the engagement once existing between them. The confession of
that vanished delusion was left for her to make, as part of the story
of the past which she had pledged herself unreservedly to reveal.
She wrote to Miss Garth, and sent the letter to the post immediately.
The next morning brought a line of rejoinder. Miss Garth had written to
secure the cottage at Shanklin, and Mr. Merrick had consented to
Magdalen’s removal on the following day. Norah would be the first to
arrive at the house; and Miss Garth would follow, with a comfortable
carriage to take the invalid to the railway. Every needful arrangement
had been made for her; the effort of moving was the one effort she
would have to make.
Magdalen read the letter thankfully, but her thoughts wandered from it,
and followed Kirke on his return to the City. What was the business
which had once already taken him there in the morning? And why had the
promise exchanged between them obliged him to go to the City again, for
the second time in one day?
Was it by any chance business relating to the sea? Were his employers
tempting him to go back to his ship?
CHAPTER IV.
The first agitation of the meeting between the sisters was over; the
first vivid impressions, half pleasurable, half painful, had softened a
little, and Norah and Magdalen sat together hand in hand, each rapt in
the silent fullness of her own joy. Magdalen was the first to speak.
“You have something to tell me, Norah?”
“I have a thousand things to tell you, my love; and you have ten
thousand things to tell me.—Do you mean that second surprise which I
told you of in my letter?”
“Yes. I suppose it must concern me very nearly, or you would hardly
have thought of mentioning it in your first letter?”
“It does concern you very nearly. You have heard of George’s house in
Essex? You must be familiar, at least, with the name of St. Crux?—What
is there to start at, my dear? I am afraid you are hardly strong enough
for any more surprises just yet?”
“Quite strong enough, Norah. I have something to say to you about St.
Crux—I have a surprise, on my side, for _you._”
“Will you tell it me now?”
“Not now. You shall know it when we are at the seaside; you shall know
it before I accept the kindness which has invited me to your husband’s
house.”
“What _can_ it be? Why not tell me at once?”
“You used often to set me the example of patience, Norah, in old times;
will you set me the example now?”
“With all my heart. Shall I return to my own story as well? Yes? Then
we will go back to it at once. I was telling you that St. Crux is
George’s house, in Essex, the house he inherited from his uncle.
Knowing that Miss Garth had a curiosity to see the place, he left word
(when he went abroad after the admiral’s death) that she and any
friends who came with her were to be admitted, if she happened to find
herself in the neighborhood during his absence. Miss Garth and I, and a
large party of Mr. Tyrrel’s friends, found ourselves in the
neighborhood not long after George’s departure. We had all been invited
to see the launch of Mr. Tyrrel’s new yacht from the builder’s yard at
Wivenhoe, in Essex. When the launch was over, the rest of the company
returned to Colchester to dine. Miss Garth and I contrived to get into
the same carriage together, with nobody but my two little pupils for
our companions. We gave the coachman his orders, and drove round by St.
Crux. The moment Miss Garth mentioned her name we were let in, and
shown all over the house. I don’t know how to describe it to you. It is
the most bewildering place I ever saw in my life—”
“Don’t attempt to describe it, Norah. Go on with your story instead.”
“Very well. My story takes me straight into one of the rooms at St.
Crux—a room about as long as your street here—so dreary, so dirty, and
so dreadfully cold that I shiver at the bare recollection of it. Miss
Garth was for getting out of it again as speedily as possible, and so
was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking
at a singular piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture in the
comfortless place. She called it a tripod, I think. (There is nothing
to be alarmed at, Magdalen; I assure you there is nothing to be alarmed
at!) At any rate, it was a strange, three-legged thing, which supported
a great panful of charcoal ashes at the top. It was considered by all
good judges (the housekeeper told us) a wonderful piece of chasing in
metal; and she especially pointed out the beauty of some scroll-work
running round the inside of the pan, with Latin mottoes on it,
signifying—I forget what. I felt not the slightest interest in the
thing myself, but I looked close at the scroll-work to satisfy the
housekeeper. To confess the truth, she was rather tiresome with her
mechanically learned lecture on fine metal work; and, while she was
talking, I found myself idly stirring the soft feathery white ashes
backward and forward with my hand, pretending to listen, with my mind a
hundred miles away from her. I don’t know how long or how short a time
I had been playing with the ashes, when my fingers suddenly encountered
a piece of crumpled paper hidden deep among them. When I brought it to
the surface, it proved to be a letter—a long letter full of cramped,
close writing.—You have anticipated my story, Magdalen, before I can
end it! You know as well as I do that the letter which my idle fingers
found was the Secret Trust. Hold out your hand, my dear. I have got
George’s permission to show it to you, and there it is!”
She put the Trust into her sister’s hand. Magdalen took it from her
mechanically. “You!” she said, looking at her sister with the
remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had
vainly suffered, at St. Crux—“_you_ have found it!”
“Yes,” said Norah, gayly; “the Trust has proved no exception to the
general perversity of all lost things. Look for them, and they remain
invisible. Leave them alone, and they reveal themselves! You and your
lawyer, Magdalen, were both justified in supposing that your interest
in this discovery was an interest of no common kind. I spare you all
our consultations after I had produced the crumpled paper from the
ashes. It ended in George’s lawyer being written to, and in George
himself being recalled from the Continent. Miss Garth and I both saw
him immediately on his return. He did what neither of us could do—he
solved the mystery of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes.
Admiral Bartram, you must know, was all his life subject to fits of
somnambulism. He had been found walking in his sleep not long before
his death—just at the time, too, when he was sadly troubled in his mind
on the subject of that very letter in your hand. George’s idea is that
he must have fancied he was doing in his sleep what he would have died
rather than do in his waking moments—destroying the Trust. The fire had
been lighted in the pan not long before, and he no doubt saw it still
burning in his dream. This was George’s explanation of the strange
position of the letter when I discovered it. The question of what was
to be done with the letter itself came next, and was no easy question
for a woman to understand. But I determined to master it, and I did
master it, because it related to you.”
“Let me try to master it, in my turn,” said Magdalen. “I have a
particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter as you
know yourself. What has it done for others, and what is it to do for
me?”
“My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk
of it! Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a
fortune.”
“Is my only claim to the fortune the claim which this letter gives me?”
“Yes; the letter is your only claim. Shall I try if I can explain it in
two words? Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer’s opinion,
have been made a matter for dispute, though I am sure George would have
sanctioned no proceeding of that sort. Taken, however, with the
postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines
if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally
binding, as well as morally binding, on the admiral’s representatives.
I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my
own language instead of in the lawyer’s. The end of the thing was
simply this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone’s estate
(another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one
plain reason—that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone
directed. If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a
few months earlier, results would have been just the other way. As it
is, half the money has been already divided between Mr. Noel Vanstone’s
next of kin; which means, translated into plain English, my husband,
and his poor bedridden sister—who took the money formally, one day, to
satisfy the lawyer, and who gave it back again generously, the next, to
satisfy herself. So much for one half of this legacy. The other half,
my dear, is all yours. How strangely events happen, Magdalen! It is
only two years since you and I were left disinherited orphans—and we
are sharing our poor father’s fortune between us, after all!”
“Wait a little, Norah. Our shares come to us in very different ways.”
“Do they? Mine comes to me by my husband. Yours comes to you—” She
stopped confusedly, and changed color. “Forgive me, my own love!” she
said, putting Magdalen’s hand to her lips. “I have forgotten what I
ought to have remembered. I have thoughtlessly distressed you!”
“No!” said Magdalen; “you have encouraged me.”
“Encouraged you?”
“You shall see.”
With those words, she rose quietly from the sofa, and walked to the
open window. Before Norah could follow her, she had torn the Trust to
pieces, and had cast the fragments into the street.
She came back to the sofa and laid her head, with a deep sigh of
relief, on Norah’s bosom. “I will owe nothing to my past life,” she
said. “I have parted with it as I have parted with those torn morsels
of paper. All the thoughts and all the hopes belonging to it are put
away from me forever!”
“Magdalen, my husband will never allow you! I will never allow you
myself—”
“Hush! hush! What your husband thinks right, Norah, you and I will
think right too. I will take from _you_ what I would never have taken
if that letter had given it to me. The end I dreamed of has come.
Nothing is changed but the position I once thought we might hold toward
each other. Better as it is, my love—far, far better as it is!”
So she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride.
So she entered on the new and nobler life.
A month had passed. The autumn sunshine was bright even in the murky
streets, and the clocks in the neighborhood were just striking two, as
Magdalen returned alone to the house in Aaron’s Buildings.
“Is he waiting for me?” she asked, anxiously, when the landlady let her
in.
He was waiting in the front room. Magdalen stole up the stairs and
knocked at the door. He called to her carelessly and absently to come
in, plainly thinking that it was only the servant who applied for
permission to enter the room.
“You hardly expected me so soon?” she said speaking on the threshold,
and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and
looked at her.
The only traces of illness still visible in her face left a delicacy in
its outline which added refinement to her beauty. She was simply
dressed in muslin. Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than
the white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed. She had never
looked lovelier in her best days than she looked now, as she advanced
to the table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of
flowers that she had brought with her from the country, and offered him
her hand.
He looked anxious and careworn when she saw him closer. She interrupted
his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in
London since they had parted—if he had not even gone away, for a few
days only, to see his friends in Suffolk? No; he had been in London
ever since. He never told her that the pretty parsonage house in
Suffolk wanted all those associations with herself in which the poor
four walls at Aaron’s Buildings were so rich. He only said he had been
in London ever since.
“I wonder,” she asked, looking him attentively in the face, “if you are
as happy to see me again as I am to see you?”
“Perhaps I am even happier, in my different way,” he answered, with a
smile.
She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her
own arm-chair. “I suppose this street is very ugly,” she said; “and I
am sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet—and yet
it feels like coming home again. Sit there where you used to sit; tell
me about yourself. I want to know all that you have done, all that you
have thought even, while I have been away.” She tried to resume the
endless succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to
lure him into speaking of himself. But she put them far less
spontaneously, far less adroitly, than usual. Her one all-absorbing
anxiety in entering that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with.
After a quarter of an hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side,
in reluctant replies on the other, she ventured near the dangerous
subject at last.
“Have you received the letters I wrote to you from the seaside?” she
asked, suddenly looking away from him for the first time.
“Yes,” he said; “all.”
“Have you read them?”
“Every one of them—many times over.”
Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had kept her promise
bravely. The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck
at Combe-Raven to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in
her sister’s presence, had been all laid before him. Nothing that she
had done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from
his knowledge. As he would have kept a pledged engagement with her, so
she had kept her pledged engagement with him. She had not faltered in
the resolution to do this; and now she faltered over the one decisive
question which she had come there to ask. Strong as the desire in her
was to know if she had lost or won him, the fear of knowing was at that
moment stronger still. She waited and trembled; she waited, and said no
more.
“May I speak to you about your letters?” he asked. “May I tell you—?”
If she had looked at him as he said those few words, she would have
seen what he thought of her in his face. She would have seen, innocent
as he was in this world’s knowledge, that he knew the priceless value,
the all-ennobling virtue, of a woman who speaks the truth. But she had
no courage to look at him—no courage to raise her eyes from her lap.
“Not just yet,” she said, faintly. “Not quite so soon after we have met
again.”
She rose hurriedly from her chair, and walked to the window, turned
back again into the room, and approached the table, close to where he
was sitting. The writing materials scattered near him offered her a
pretext for changing the subject, and she seized on it directly. “Were
you writing a letter,” she asked, “when I came in?”
“I was thinking about it,” he replied. “It was not a letter to be
written without thinking first.” He rose as he answered her to gather
the writing materials together and put them away.
“Why should I interrupt you?” she said. “Why not let me try whether I
can’t help you instead? Is it a secret?”
“No, not a secret.”
He hesitated as he answered her. She instantly guessed the truth.
“Is it about your ship?”
He little knew how she had been thinking in her absence from him of the
business which he believed that he had concealed from her. He little
knew that she had learned already to be jealous of his ship. “Do they
want you to return to your old life?” she went on. “Do they want you to
go back to the sea? Must you say Yes or No at once?”
“At once.”
“If I had not come in when I did would you have said Yes?”
She unconsciously laid her hand on his arm, forgetting all inferior
considerations in her breathless anxiety to hear his next words. The
confession of his love was within a hair-breadth of escaping him; but
he checked the utterance of it even yet. “I don’t care for myself,” he
thought; “but how can I be certain of not distressing _her?_”
“Would you have said Yes?” she repeated.
“I was doubting,” he answered—“I was doubting between Yes and No.”
Her hand tightened on his arm; a sudden trembling seized her in every
limb, she could bear it no longer. All her heart went out to him in her
next words:
“Were you doubting _for my sake?”_
“Yes,” he said. “Take my confession in return for yours—I was doubting
for your sake.”
She said no more; she only looked at him. In that look the truth
reached him at last. The next instant she was folded in his arms, and
was shedding delicious tears of joy, with her face hidden on his bosom.
“Do I deserve my happiness?” she murmured, asking the one question at
last. “Oh, I know how the poor narrow people who have never felt and
never suffered would answer me if I asked them what I ask you. If
_they_ knew my story, they would forget all the provocation, and only
remember the offense; they would fasten on my sin, and pass all my
suffering by. But you are not one of them! Tell me if you have any
shadow of a misgiving! Tell me if you doubt that the one dear object of
all my life to come is to live worthy of you! I asked you to wait and
see me; I asked you, if there was any hard truth to be told, to tell it
me here with your own lips. Tell it, my love, my husband!—tell it me
now!”
She looked up, still clinging to him as she clung to the hope of her
better life to come.
“Tell me the truth!” she repeated.
“With my own lips?”
“Yes!” she answered, eagerly. “Say what you think of me with your own
lips.”
He stooped and kissed her.