“You look very pale this morning, my child.”
Mercy sighed wearily. “I am not well,” she answered. “The slightest
noises startle me. I feel tired if I only walk across the room.”
Lady Janet patted her kindly on the shoulder. “We must try what a change
will do for you. Which shall it be? the Continent or the sea-side?”
“Your ladyship is too kind to me.”
“It is impossible to be too kind to you.”
Mercy started. The color flowed charmingly over her pale face. “Oh!” she
exclaimed, impulsively. “Say that again!”
“Say it again?” repeated Lady Janet, with a look of surprise.
“Yes! Don’t think me presuming; only think me vain. I can’t hear you say
too often that you have learned to like me. Is it really a pleasure to
you to have me in the house? Have I always behaved well since I have
been with you?”
(The one excuse for the act of personation--if excuse there could
be--lay in the affirmative answer to those questions. It would be
something, surely, to say of the false Grace that the true Grace could
not have been worthier of her welcome, if the true Grace had been
received at Mablethorpe House!)
Lady Janet was partly touched, partly amused, by the extraordinary
earnestness of the appeal that had been made to her.
“Have you behaved well?” she repeated. “My dear, you talk as if you were
a child!” She laid her hand caressingly on Mercy’s arm, and continued,
in a graver tone: “It is hardly too much to say, Grace, that I bless the
day when you first came to me. I do believe I could be hardly fonder of
you if you were my own daughter.”
Mercy suddenly turned her head aside, so as to hide her face. Lady
Janet, still touching her arm, felt it tremble. “What is the matter with
you?” she asked, in her abrupt, downright manner.
“I am only very grateful to your ladyship--that is all.” The words were
spoken faintly, in broken tones. The face was still averted from Lady
Janet’s view. “What have I said to provoke this?” wondered the old lady.
“Is she in the melting mood to-day? If she is, now is the time to say
a word for Horace!” Keeping that excellent object in view, Lady Janet
approached the delicate topic with all needful caution at starting.
“We have got on so well together,” she resumed, “that it will not be
easy for either of us to feel reconciled to a change in our lives. At
my age, it will fall hardest on me. What shall I do, Grace, when the day
comes for parting with my adopted daughter?”
Mercy started, and showed her face again. The traces of tears were in
her eyes. “Why should I leave you?” she asked, in a tone of alarm.
“Surely you know!” exclaimed Lady Janet.
“Indeed I don’t. Tell me why.”
“Ask Horace to tell you.”
The last allusion was too plain to be misunderstood. Mercy’s head
drooped. She began to tremble again. Lady Janet looked at her in blank
amazement.
“Is there anything wrong between Horace and you?” she asked.
“No.”
“You know your own heart, my dear child? You have surely not encouraged
Horace without loving him?”
“Oh no!”
“And yet--”
For the first time in their experience of each other Mercy ventured to
interrupt her benefactress. “Dear Lady Janet,” she interposed, gently,
“I am in no hurry to be married. There will be plenty of time in the
future to talk of that. You had something you wished to say to me. What
is it?”
It was no easy matter to disconcert Lady Janet Roy. But that last
question fairly reduced her to silence. After all that had passed,
there sat her young companion, innocent of the faintest suspicion of the
subject that was to be discussed between them! “What are the young women
of the present time made of?” thought the old lady, utterly at a loss to
know what to say next. Mercy waited, on her side, with an impenetrable
patience which only aggravated the difficulties of the position. The
silence was fast threatening to bring the interview to a sudden and
untimely end, when the door from the library opened, and a man-servant,
bearing a little silver salver, entered the room.
Lady Janet’s rising sense of annoyance instantly seized on the servant
as a victim. “What do you want?” she asked, sharply. “I never rang for
you.”
“A letter, my lady. The messenger waits for an answer.”
The man presented his salver with the letter on it, and withdrew.
Lady Janet recognized the handwriting on the address with a look
of surprise. “Excuse me, my dear,” she said, pausing, with her
old-fashioned courtesy, before she opened the envelope. Mercy made the
necessary acknowledgment, and moved away to the other end of the room,
little thinking that the arrival of the letter marked a crisis in her
life. Lady Janet put on her spectacles. “Odd that he should have come
back already!” she said to herself, as she threw the empty envelope on
the table.
The letter contained these lines, the writer of them being no other than
the man who had preached in the chapel of the Refuge:
“DEAR AUNT--I am back again in London before my time. My friend the
rector has shortened his holiday, and has resumed his duties in the
country. I am afraid you will blame me when you hear of the reasons
which have hastened his return. The sooner I make my confession, the
easier I shall feel. Besides, I have a special object in wishing to see
you as soon as possible. May I follow my letter to Mablethorpe House?
And may I present a lady to you--a perfect stranger--in whom I am
interested? Pray say Yes, by the bearer, and oblige your affectionate
nephew,
“JULIAN GRAY.”
Lady Janet referred again suspiciously to the sentence in the letter
which alluded to the “lady.”
Julian Gray was her only surviving nephew, the son of a favorite sister
whom she had lost. He would have held no very exalted position in the
estimation of his aunt--who regarded his views in politics and religion
with the strongest aversion--but for his marked resemblance to his
mother. This pleaded for him with the old lady, aided as it was by the
pride that she secretly felt in the early celebrity which the young
clergyman had achieved as a writer and a preacher. Thanks to these
mitigating circumstances, and to Julian’s inexhaustible good-humor, the
aunt and the nephew generally met on friendly terms. Apart from what
she called “his detestable opinions,” Lady Janet was sufficiently
interested in Julian to feel some curiosity about the mysterious “lady”
mentioned in the letter. Had he determined to settle in life? Was his
choice already made? And if so, would it prove to be a choice acceptable
to the family? Lady Janet’s bright face showed signs of doubt as she
asked herself that last question. Julian’s liberal views were capable of
leading him to dangerous extremes. His aunt shook her head ominously as
she rose from the sofa and advanced to the library door.
“Grace,” she said, pausing and turning round, “I have a note to write to
my nephew. I shall be back directly.”
Mercy approached her, from the opposite extremity of the room, with an
exclamation of surprise.
“Your nephew?” she repeated. “Your ladyship never told me you had a
nephew.”
Lady Janet laughed. “I must have had it on the tip of my tongue to tell
you, over and over again,” she said. “But we have had so many things to
talk about--and, to own the truth, my nephew is not one of my favorite
subjects of conversation. I don’t mean that I dislike him; I detest
his principles, my dear, that’s all. However, you shall form your own
opinion of him; he is coming to see me to-day. Wait here till I return;
I have something more to say about Horace.”
Mercy opened the library door for her, closed it again, and walked
slowly to and fro alone in the room, thinking.
Was her mind running on Lady Janet’s nephew? No. Lady Janet’s brief
allusion to her relative had not led her into alluding to him by his
name. Mercy was still as ignorant as ever that the preacher at the
Refuge and the nephew of her benefactress were one and the same man. Her
memory was busy now with the tribute which Lady Janet had paid to her at
the outset of the interview between them: “It is hardly too much to say,
Grace, that I bless the day when you first came to me.” For the moment
there was balm for her wounded spirit in the remembrance of those words.
Grace Roseberry herself could surely have earned no sweeter praise than
the praise that she had won. The next instant she was seized with a
sudden horror of her own successful fraud. The sense of her degradation
had never been so bitterly present to her as at that moment. If she
could only confess the truth--if she could innocently enjoy her harmless
life at Mablethorpe House--what a grateful, happy woman she might be!
Was it possible (if she made the confession) to trust to her own good
conduct to plead her excuse? No! Her calmer sense warned her that it
was hopeless. The place she had won--honestly won--in Lady Janet’s
estimation had been obtained by a trick. Nothing could alter, nothing
could excuse, _that_. She took out her handkerchief and dashed away
the useless tears that had gathered in her eyes, and tried to turn her
thoughts some other way. What was it Lady Janet had said on going into
the library? She had said she was coming back to speak about Horace.
Mercy guessed what the object was; she knew but too well what Horace
wanted of her. How was she to meet the emergency? In the name of Heaven,
what was to be done? Could she let the man who loved her--the man whom
she loved--drift blindfold into marriage with such a woman as she had
been? No! it was her duty to warn him. How? Could she break his heart,
could she lay his life waste by speaking the cruel words which might
part them forever? “I can’t tell him! I won’t tell him!” she burst
out, passionately. “The disgrace of it would kill me!” Her varying mood
changed as the words escaped her. A reckless defiance of her own better
nature--that saddest of all the forms in which a woman’s misery can
express itself--filled her heart with its poisoning bitterness. She sat
down again on the sofa with eyes that glittered and cheeks suffused with
an angry red. “I am no worse than another woman!” she thought. “Another
woman might have married him for his money.” The next moment the
miserable insufficiency of her own excuse for deceiving him showed its
hollowness, self-exposed. She covered her face with her hands, and
found refuge--where she had often found refuge before--in the helpless
resignation of despair. “Oh, that I had died before I entered this
house! Oh, that I could die and have done with it at this moment!” So
the struggle had ended with her hundreds of times already. So it ended
now.
The door leading into the billiard-room opened softly. Horace Holmcroft
had waited to hear the result of Lady Janet’s interference in his favor
until he could wait no longer.
He looked in cautiously, ready to withdraw again unnoticed if the two
were still talking together. The absence of Lady Janet suggested that
the interview had come to an end. Was his betrothed wife waiting alone
to speak to him on his return to the room? He advanced a few steps.
She never moved; she sat heedless, absorbed in her thoughts. Were they
thoughts of _him?_ He advanced a little nearer, and called to her.
“Grace!”
She sprang to her feet, with a faint cry. “I wish you wouldn’t startle
me,” she said, irritably, sinking back on the sofa. “Any sudden alarm
sets my heart beating as if it would choke me.”
Horace pleaded for pardon with a lover’s humility. In her present state
of nervous irritation she was not to be appeased. She looked away from
him in silence. Entirely ignorant of the paroxysm of mental suffering
through which she had just passed, he seated himself by her side, and
asked her gently if she had seen Lady Janet. She made an affirmative
answer with an unreasonable impatience of tone and manner which would
have warned an older and more experienced man to give her time before
he spoke again. Horace was young, and weary of the suspense that he
had endured in the other room. He unwisely pressed her with another
question.
“Has Lady Janet said anything to you--”
She turned on him angrily before he could finish the sentence. “You have
tried to make her hurry me into marrying you,” she burst out. “I see it
in your face!”
Plain as the warning was this time, Horace still failed to interpret it
in the right way. “Don’t be angry!” he said, good-humoredly. “Is it so
very inexcusable to ask Lady Janet to intercede for me? I have tried to
persuade you in vain. My mother and my sisters have pleaded for me, and
you turn a deaf ear--”
She could endure it no longer. She stamped her foot on the door with
hysterical vehemence. “I am weary of hearing of your mother and your
sisters!” she broke in violently. “You talk of nothing else.”
It was just possible to make one more mistake in dealing with her--and
Horace made it. He took offense, on his side, and rose from the sofa.
His mother and sisters were high authorities in his estimation; they
variously represented his ideal of perfection in women. He withdrew
to the opposite extremity of the room, and administered the severest
reproof that he could think of on the spur of the moment.
“It would be well, Grace, if you followed the example set you by
my mother and my sisters,” he said. “_They_ are not in the habit of
speaking cruelly to those who love them.”
To all appearance the rebuke failed to produce the slightest effect.
She seemed to be as indifferent to it as if it had not reached her ears.
There was a spirit in her--a miserable spirit, born of her own bitter
experience--which rose in revolt against Horace’s habitual glorification
of the ladies of his family. “It sickens me,” she thought to herself,
“to hear of the virtues of women who have never been tempted! Where
is the merit of living reputably, when your life is one course of
prosperity and enjoyment? Has his mother known starvation? Have his
sisters been left forsaken in the street?” It hardened her heart--it
almost reconciled her to deceiving him--when he set his relatives up as
patterns for her. Would he never understand that women detested having
other women exhibited as examples to them? She looked round at him with
a sense of impatient wonder. He was sitting at the luncheon-table, with
his back turned on her, and his head resting on his hand. If he had
attempted to rejoin her, she would have repelled him; if he had spoken,
she would have met him with a sharp reply. He sat apart from her,
without uttering a word. In a man’s hands silence is the most terrible
of all protests to the woman who loves him. Violence she can endure.
Words she is always ready to meet by words on her side. Silence conquers
her. After a moment’s hesitation, Mercy left the sofa and advanced
submissively toward the table. She had offended him--and she alone
was in fault. How should he know it, poor fellow, when he innocently
mortified her? Step by step she drew closer and closer. He never looked
round; he never moved. She laid her hand timidly on his shoulder.
“Forgive me, Horace,” she whispered in his ear. “I am suffering this
morning; I am not myself. I didn’t mean what I said. Pray forgive me.”
There was no resisting the caressing tenderness of voice and manner
which accompanied those words. He looked up; he took her hand. She bent
over him, and touched his forehead with her lips. “Am I forgiven?” she
asked.
“Oh, my darling,” he said, “if you only knew how I loved you!”
“I do know it,” she answered, gently, twining his hair round her finger,
and arranging it over his forehead where his hand had ruffled it.
They were completely absorbed in each other, or they must, at that
moment, have heard the library door open at the other end of the room.
Lady Janet had written the necessary reply to her nephew, and had
returned, faithful to her engagement, to plead the cause of Horace. The
first object that met her view was her client pleading, with conspicuous
success, for himself! “I am not wanted, evidently,” thought the old
lady. She noiselessly closed the door again and left the lovers by
themselves.
Horace returned, with unwise persistency, to the question of the
deferred marriage. At the first words that he spoke she drew back
directly--sadly, not angrily.
“Don’t press me to-day,” she said; “I am not well to-day.”
He rose and looked at her anxiously. “May I speak about it to-morrow?”
“Yes, to-morrow.” She returned to the sofa, and changed the subject.
“What a time Lady Janet is away!” she said. “What can be keeping her so
long?”
Horace did his best to appear interested in the question of Lady Janet’s
prolonged absence. “What made her leave you?” he asked, standing at the
back of the sofa and leaning over her.
“She went into the library to write a note to her nephew. By-the-by, who
is her nephew?”
“Is it possible you don’t know?”
“Indeed, I don’t.”
“You have heard of him, no doubt,” said Horace. “Lady Janet’s nephew
is a celebrated man.” He paused, and stooping nearer to her, lifted a
love-lock that lay over her shoulder and pressed it to his lips. “Lady
Janet’s nephew,” he resumed, “is Julian Gray.”
She started off her seat, and looked round at him in blank, bewildered
terror, as if she doubted the evidence of her own senses.
Horace was completely taken by surprise. “My dear Grace!” he exclaimed;
“what have I said or done to startle you this time?”
She held up her hand for silence. “Lady Janet’s nephew is Julian Gray,”
she repeated; “and I only know it now!”
Horace’s perplexity increased. “My darling, now you do know it, what is
there to alarm you?” he asked.
(There was enough to alarm the boldest woman living--in such a position,
and with such a temperament as hers. To her mind the personation of
Grace Roseberry had suddenly assumed a new aspect: the aspect of a
fatality. It had led her blindfold to the house in which she and the
preacher at the Refuge were to meet. He was coming--the man who had
reached her inmost heart, who had influenced her whole life! Was the day
of reckoning coming with him?)
“Don’t notice me,” she said, faintly. “I have been ill all the morning.
You saw it yourself when you came in here; even the sound of your voice
alarmed me. I shall be better directly. I am afraid I startled you?”
“My dear Grace, it almost looked as if you were terrified at the sound
of Julian’s name! He is a public celebrity, I know; and I have seen
ladies start and stare at him when he entered a room. But _you_ looked
perfectly panic-stricken.”
She rallied her courage by a desperate effort; she laughed--a harsh,
uneasy laugh--and stopped him by putting her hand over his mouth.
“Absurd!” she said, lightly. “As if Mr. Julian Gray had anything to do
with my looks! I am better already. See for yourself!” She looked round
at him again with a ghastly gayety; and returned, with a desperate
assumption of indifference, to the subject of Lady Janet’s nephew. “Of
course I have heard of him,” she said. “Do you know that he is expected
here to-day? Don’t stand there behind me--it’s so hard to talk to you.
Come and sit down.”
He obeyed--but she had not quite satisfied him yet. His face had not
lost its expression of anxiety and surprise. She persisted in playing
her part, determined to set at rest in him any possible suspicion that
she had reasons of her own for being afraid of Julian Gray. “Tell me
about this famous man of yours,” she said, putting her arm familiarly
through his arm. “What is he like?”
The caressing action and the easy tone had their effect on Horace. His
face began to clear; he answered her lightly on his side.
“Prepare yourself to meet the most unclerical of clergymen,” he said.
“Julian is a lost sheep among the parsons, and a thorn in the side of
his bishop. Preaches, if they ask him, in Dissenters’ chapels. Declines
to set up any pretensions to priestly authority and priestly power. Goes
about doing good on a plan of his own. Is quite resigned never to rise
to the high places in his profession. Says it’s rising high enough for
_him_ to be the Archdeacon of the afflicted, the Dean of the hungry, and
the Bishop of the poor. With all his oddities, as good a fellow as ever
lived. Immensely popular with the women. They all go to him for advice.
I wish you would go, too.”
Mercy changed color. “What do you mean?” she asked, sharply.
“Julian is famous for his powers of persuasion,” said Horace, smiling.
“If _he_ spoke to you, Grace, he would prevail on you to fix the day.
Suppose I ask Julian to plead for me?”
He made the proposal in jest. Mercy’s unquiet mind accepted it as
addressed to her in earnest. “He will do it,” she thought, with a sense
of indescribable terror, “if I don’t stop him!” There is but one chance
for her. The only certain way to prevent Horace from appealing to his
friend was to grant what Horace wished for before his friend entered the
house. She laid her hand on his shoulder; she hid the terrible anxieties
that were devouring her under an assumption of coquetry painful and
pitiable to see.
“Don’t talk nonsense!” she said, gayly. “What were we saying just
now--before we began to speak of Mr. Julian Gray?”
“We were wondering what had become of Lady Janet,” Horace replied.
She tapped him impatiently on the shoulder. “No! no! It was something
you said before that.”
Her eyes completed what her words had left unsaid. Horace’s arm stole
round her waist.
“I was saying that I loved you,” he answered, in a whisper.
“Only that?”
“Are you tired of hearing it?”
She smiled charmingly. “Are you so very much in earnest about--about--”
She stopped, and looked away from him.
“About our marriage?”
“Yes.”
“It is the one dearest wish of my life.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
There was a pause. Mercy’s fingers toyed nervously with the trinkets at
her watch-chain. “When would you like it to be?” she said, very softly,
with her whole attention fixed on the watch-chain.
She had never spoken, she had never looked, as she spoke and looked now.
Horace was afraid to believe in his own good fortune. “Oh, Grace!” he
exclaimed, “you are not trifling with me?”
“What makes you think I am trifling with you?”
Horace was innocent enough to answer her seriously. “You would not even
let me speak of our marriage just now,” he said.
“Never mind what I did just now,” she retorted, petulantly. “They say
women are changeable. It is one of the defects of the sex.”
“Heaven be praised for the defects of the sex!” cried Horace, with
devout sincerity. “Do you really leave me to decide?”
“If you insist on it.”
Horace considered for a moment--the subject being the law of marriage.
“We may be married by license in a fortnight,” he said. “I fix this day
fortnight.”
She held up her hands in protest.
“Why not? My lawyer is ready. There are no preparations to make. You
said when you accepted me that it was to be a private marriage.”
Mercy was obliged to own that she had certainly said that.
“We might be married at once--if the law would only let us. This day
fortnight! Say--Yes!” He drew her closer to him. There was a pause. The
mask of coquetry--badly worn from the first--dropped from her. Her
sad gray eyes rested compassionately on his eager face. “Don’t look so
serious!” he said. “Only one little word, Grace! Only Yes.”
She sighed, and said it. He kissed her passionately. It was only by a
resolute effort that she released herself.
“Leave me!” she said, faintly. “Pray leave me by myself!”
She was in earnest--strangely in earnest. She was trembling from head
to foot. Horace rose to leave her. “I will find Lady Janet,” he said; “I
long to show the dear old lady that I have recovered my spirits, and to
tell her why.” He turned round at the library door. “You won’t go away?
You will let me see you again when you are more composed?”
“I will wait here,” said Mercy.
Satisfied with that reply, he left the room.
Her hands dropped on her lap; her head sank back wearily on the cushions
at the head of the sofa. There was a dazed sensation in her: her mind
felt stunned. She wondered vacantly whether she was awake or dreaming.
Had she really said the word which pledged her to marry Horace Holmcroft
in a fortnight? A fortnight! Something might happen in that time to
prevent it: she might find her way in a fortnight out of the terrible
position in which she stood. Anyway, come what might of it, she had
chosen the preferable alternative to a private interview with Julian
Gray. She raised herself from her recumbent position with a start, as
the idea of the interview--dismissed for the last few minutes--possessed
itself again of her mind. Her excited imagination figured Julian Gray
as present in the room at that moment, speaking to her as Horace had
proposed. She saw him seated close at her side--this man who had shaken
her to the soul when he was in the pulpit, and when she was listening to
him (unseen) at the other end of the chapel--she saw him close by her,
looking her searchingly in the face; seeing her shameful secret in
her eyes; hearing it in her voice; feeling it in her trembling hands;
forcing it out of her word by word, till she fell prostrate at his
feet with the confession of the fraud. Her head dropped again on the
cushions; she hid her face in horror of the scene which her excited
fancy had conjured up. Even now, when she had made that dreaded
interview needless, could she feel sure (meeting him only on the most
distant terms) of not betraying herself? She could _not_ feel sure.
Something in her shuddered and shrank at the bare idea of finding
herself in the same room with him. She felt it, she knew it: her guilty
conscience owned and feared its master in Julian Gray!
The minutes passed. The violence of her agitation began to tell
physically on her weakened frame.
She found herself crying silently without knowing why. A weight was
on her head, a weariness was in all her limbs. She sank lower on the
cushions--her eyes closed--the monotonous ticking of the clock on the
mantelpiece grew drowsily fainter and fainter on her ear. Little by
little she dropped into slumber--slumber so light that she started when
a morsel of coal fell into the grate, or when the birds chirped and
twittered in their aviary in the winter-garden.
Lady Janet and Horace came in. She was faintly conscious of persons in
the room. After an interval she opened her eyes, and half rose to speak
to them. The room was empty again. They had stolen out softly and left
her to repose. Her eyes closed once more. She dropped back into slumber,
and from slumber, in the favoring warmth and quiet of the place, into
deep and dreamless sleep.