Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1022 page)

“Excuse me for noticing it,” he said. “Your manners are perfectly gentlemanlike, and you speak English without any accent. And yet you have been brought up in America. What does it mean?”

I grew worse and worse — I got downright sulky now.

“I suppose it means,” I answered, “that some of us, in America, cultivate ourselves as well as our land. We have our books and music, though you seem to think we only have our axes and spades. Englishmen don’t claim a monopoly of good manners at Tadmor. We see no difference between an American gentleman and an English gentleman. And as for speaking English with an accent, the Americans accuse
us
of doing that.”

He smiled again. “How very absurd!” he said, with a superb compassion for the benighted Americans. By this time, I suspect he began to feel that he had had enough of me. He got rid of me with an invitation.

“I shall be glad to receive you at my private residence, and introduce you to my wife and her niece — our adopted daughter. There is the address. We have a few friends to dinner on Saturday next, at seven. Will you give us the pleasure of your company?”

We are all aware that there is a distinction between civility and cordiality; but I myself never knew how wide that distinction might be, until Mr. Farnaby invited me to dinner. If I had not been curious (after what Mr. Hethcote had told me) to see Mrs. Farnaby and her niece, I should certainly have slipped out of the engagement. As it was, I promised to dine with Oily-Whiskers.

He put his hand into mine at parting. It felt as moistly cold as a dead fish. After getting out again into the street, I turned into the first tavern I passed, and ordered a drink. Shall I tell you what else I did? I went into the lavatory, and washed Mr. Farnaby off my hand. (N.B. — If I had behaved in this way at Tadmor, I should have been punished with the lighter penalty — taking my meals by myself, and being forbidden to enter the Common Room for eight and forty hours.) I feel I am getting wickeder and wickeder in London — I have half a mind to join you in Ireland. What does Tom Moore say of his countrymen — he ought to know, I suppose? “For though they love women and golden store: Sir Knight, they love honour and virtue more!” They must have been all Socialists in Tom Moore’s time. Just the place for me.

I have been obliged to wait a little. A dense fog has descended on us by way of variety. With a stinking coal fire, with the gas lit and the curtains drawn at half-past eleven in the forenoon, I feel that I am in my own country again at last. Patience, my friend — patience! I am coming to the ladies.

Entering Mr. Farnaby’s private residence on the appointed day, I became acquainted with one more of the innumerable insincerities of modern English life. When a man asks you to dine with him at seven o’clock, in other countries, he means what he says. In England, he means half-past seven, and sometimes a quarter to eight. At seven o’clock I was the only person in Mr. Farnaby’s drawing-room. At ten minutes past seven, Mr. Farnaby made his appearance. I had a good mind to take his place in the middle of the hearth-rug, and say, “Farnaby, I am glad to see you.” But I looked at his whiskers; and
they
said to me, as plainly as words could speak, “Better not!”

In five minutes more, Mrs. Farnaby joined us.

I wish I was a practised author — or, no, I would rather, for the moment, be a competent portrait-painter, and send you Mrs. Farnaby’s likeness enclosed. How I am to describe her in words, I really don’t know. My dear fellow, she almost frightened me. I never before saw such a woman; I never expect to see such a woman again. There was nothing in her figure, or in her way of moving, that produced this impression on me — she is little and fat, and walks with a firm, heavy step, like the step of a man. Her face is what I want to make you see as plainly as I saw it myself: it was her face that startled me.

So far as I can pretend to judge, she must have been pretty, in a healthy way, when she was young. I declare I hardly know whether she is not pretty now. She certainly has no marks or wrinkles; her hair either has no gray in it, or is too light to show the gray. She has preserved her fair complexion; perhaps with art to assist it — I can’t say. As for her lips — I am not speaking disrespectfully, I am only describing them truly, when I say that they invite kisses in spite of her. In two words, though she has been married (as I know from what one of the guests told me after dinner) for sixteen years, she would be still an irresistible little woman, but for the one startling drawback of her eyes. Don’t mistake me. In themselves, they are large, well-opened blue eyes, and may at one time have been the chief attraction in her face. But now there is an expression of suffering in them — long, unsolaced suffering, as I believe — so despairing and so dreadful, that she really made my heart ache when I looked at her. I will swear to it, that woman lives in some secret hell of her own making, and longs for the release of death; and is so inveterately full of bodily life and strength, that she may carry her burden with her to the utmost verge of life. I am digging the pen into the paper, I feel this so strongly, and I am so wretchedly incompetent to express my feeling. Can you imagine a diseased mind, imprisoned in a healthy body? I don’t care what doctors or books may say — it is that, and nothing else. Nothing else will solve the mystery of the smooth face, the fleshy figure, the firm step, the muscular grip of her hand when she gives it to you — and the soul in torment that looks at you all the while out of her eyes. It is useless to tell me that such a contradiction as this cannot exist. I have seen the woman; and she does exist.

Oh yes! I can fancy you grinning over my letter — I can hear you saying to yourself, “Where did he pick up his experience, I wonder?” I have no experience — I only have something that serves me instead of it, and I don’t know what. The Elder Brother, at Tadmor, used to say it was sympathy. But
he
is a sentimentalist.

Well, Mr. Farnaby presented me to his wife — and then walked away as if he was sick of us both, and looked out of the window.

For some reason or other, Mrs. Farnaby seemed to be surprised, for the moment, by my personal appearance. Her husband had, very likely, not told her how young I was. She got over her momentary astonishment, and, signing to me to sit by her on the sofa, said the necessary words of welcome — evidently thinking something else all the time. The strange miserable eyes looked over my shoulder, instead of looking at me.

“Mr. Farnaby tells me you have been living in America.”

The tone in which she spoke was curiously quiet and monotonous. I have heard such tones, in the Far West, from lonely settlers without a neighbouring soul to speak to. Has Mrs. Farnaby no neighbouring soul to speak to, except at dinner parties?

“You are an Englishman, are you not?” she went on.

I said Yes, and cast about in my mind for something to say to her. She saved me the trouble by making me the victim of a complete series of questions. This, as I afterwards discovered, was
her
way of finding conversation for strangers. Have you ever met with absent-minded people to whom it is a relief to ask questions mechanically, without feeling the slightest interest in the answers?

She began. “Where did you live in America?”

“At Tadmor, in the State of Illinois.”

“What sort of place is Tadmor?”

I described the place as well as I could, under the circumstances.

“What made you go to Tadmor?”

It was impossible to reply to this, without speaking of the Community. Feeling that the subject was not in the least likely to interest her, I spoke as briefly as I could. To my astonishment, I evidently began to interest her from that moment. The series of questions went on — but now she not only listened, she was eager for the answers.

“Are there any women among you?”

“Nearly as many women as men.”

Another change! Over the weary misery of her eyes there flashed a bright look of interest which completely transformed them. Her articulation even quickened when she put her next question.

“Are any of the women friendless creatures, who came to you from England?”

“Yes, some of them.”

I thought of Mellicent as I spoke. Was this new interest that I had so innocently aroused, an interest in Mellicent? Her next question only added to my perplexity. Her next question proved that my guess had completely failed to hit the mark.

“Are there any
young
women among them?”

Mr. Farnaby, standing with his back to us thus far, suddenly turned and looked at her, when she inquired if there were “young” women among us.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Mere girls.”

She pressed so near to me that her knees touched mine. “How old?” she asked eagerly.

Mr. Farnaby left the window, walked close up to the sofa, and deliberately interrupted us.

“Nasty muggy weather, isn’t it?” he said. “I suppose the climate of America — ”

Mrs. Farnaby deliberately interrupted her husband. “How old?” she repeated, in a louder tone.

I was bound, of course, to answer the lady of the house. “Some girls from eighteen to twenty. And some younger.”

“How much younger?”

“Oh, from sixteen to seventeen.”

She grew more and more excited; she positively laid her hand on my arm in her eagerness to secure my attention all to herself. “American girls or English?” she resumed, her fat, firm fingers closing on me with a tremulous grasp.

“Shall you be in town in November?” said Mr. Farnaby, purposely interrupting us again. “If you would like to see the Lord Mayor’s Show — ”

Mrs. Farnaby impatiently shook me by the arm. “American girls or English?” she reiterated, more obstinately than ever.

Mr. Farnaby gave her one look. If he could have put her on the blazing fire and have burnt her up in an instant by an effort of will, I believe he would have made the effort. He saw that I was observing him, and turned quickly from his wife to me. His ruddy face was pale with suppressed rage. My early arrival had given Mrs. Farnaby an opportunity of speaking to me, which he had not anticipated in inviting me to dinner. “Come and see my pictures,” he said.

His wife still held me fast. Whether he liked it or not, I had again no choice but to answer her. “Some American girls, and some English,” I said.

Her eyes opened wider and wider in unutterable expectation. She suddenly advanced her face so close to mine, that I felt her hot breath on my cheeks as the next words burst their way through her lips.

“Born in England?”

“No. Born at Tadmor.”

She dropped my arm. The light died out of her eyes in an instant. In some inconceivable way, I had utterly destroyed some secret expectation that she had fixed on me. She actually left me on the sofa, and took a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. Mr. Farnaby, turning paler and paler, stepped up to her as she changed her place. I rose to look at the pictures on the wall nearest to me. You remarked the extraordinary keenness of my sense of hearing, while we were fellow passengers on the steamship. When he stooped over her, and whispered in her ear, I heard him — though nearly the whole breadth of the room was between us. “You hell-cat!” — that was what Mr. Farnaby said to his wife.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour after seven. In quick succession, the guests at the dinner now entered the room.

I was so staggered by the extraordinary scene of married life which I had just witnessed, that the guests produced only a very faint impression upon me. My mind was absorbed in trying to find the true meaning of what I had seen and heard. Was Mrs. Farnaby a little mad? I dismissed that idea as soon as it occurred to me; nothing that I had observed in her justified it. The truer conclusion appeared to be, that she was deeply interested in some absent (and possibly lost) young creature; whose age, judging by actions and tones which had sufficiently revealed that part of the secret to me, could not be more than sixteen or seventeen years. How long had she cherished the hope of seeing the girl, or hearing of her? It must have been, anyhow, a hope very deeply rooted, for she had been perfectly incapable of controlling herself when I had accidentally roused it. As for her husband, there could be no doubt that the subject was not merely distasteful to him, but so absolutely infuriating that he could not even keep his temper, in the presence of a third person invited to his house. Had he injured the girl in any way? Was he responsible for her disappearance? Did his wife know it, or only suspect it? Who
was
the girl? What was the secret of Mrs. Farnaby’s extraordinary interest in her — Mrs. Farnaby, whose marriage was childless; whose interest one would have thought should be naturally concentrated on her adopted daughter, her sister’s orphan child? In conjectures such as these, I completely lost myself. Let me hear what your ingenuity can make of the puzzle; and let me return to Mr. Farnaby’s dinner, waiting on Mr. Farnaby’s table.