Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1307 page)

“Constitutional infirmity, sir.”

“May I ask of what nature?”

“You may. Gout.”

Mr. Sarrazin thought he understood her at last. “You know the Lord President,” he said.

Mrs. Presty denied it positively. “No, Mr. Sarrazin, I don’t get at it in that way. I merely consult my experience of another official person of high rank, and apply it to the Lord President. You know that my first husband was a Cabinet Minister?”

“I have heard you say so, Mrs. Presty, on more than one occasion.”

“Very well. You may also have heard that the late Mr. Norman was a remarkably well-bred man. In and out of the House of Commons, courteous almost to a fault. One day I happened to interrupt him when he was absorbed over an Act of Parliament. Before I could apologize — I tell you this in the strictest confidence — he threw the Act of Parliament at my head. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have thrown it back again. Knowing his constitution, I decided on waiting a day or two. On the second day, my anticipations were realized. Mr. Norman’s great toe was as big as my fist and as red as a lobster; he apologized for the Act of Parliament with tears in his eyes. Suppressed gout in Mr. Norman’s temper; suppressed gout in the Lord President’s temper.
He
will have a toe; and, if I can prevail upon my daughter to call upon him, I have not the least doubt he will apologize to her with tears in
his
eyes.”

This interesting experiment was never destined to be tried. Right or wrong, Mrs. Presty’s theory remained the only explanation of the judge’s severity. Mr. Sarrazin attempted to change the subject. Mrs. Presty had not quite done with it yet. “There is one more thing I want to say,” she proceeded. “Will his lordship’s remarks appear in the newspapers?”

“Not a doubt of it.”

“In that case I will take care (for my daughter’s sake) that no newspapers enter the house to-morrow. As for visitors, we needn’t be afraid of them. Catherine is not likely to be able to leave her room; the worry of this miserable business has quite broken her down.”

The doctor returned at that moment.

Without taking the old lady’s gloomy view of his patient, he admitted that she was in a low nervous condition, and he had reason to suppose, judging by her reply to a question which he had ventured to put, that she had associations with Scotland which made a visit to that country far from agreeable to her. His advice was that she should leave Edinburgh as soon as possible, and go South. If the change of climate led to no improvement, she would at least be in a position to consult the best physicians in London. In a day or two more it would be safe to remove her — provided she was not permitted to exhaust her strength by taking long railway journeys.

Having given his advice, the doctor took leave. Soon after he had gone, Kitty made her appearance, charged with a message from Mrs. Linley’s room.

“Hasn’t the physic sent your mother to sleep yet?” Mrs. Presty inquired.

Kitty shook her head. “Mamma wants to go away tomorrow, and no physic will make her sleep till she has seen you, and settled about it. That’s what she told me to say. If
I
behaved in that way about my physic, I should catch it.”

Mrs. Presty left the room; watched by her granddaughter with an appearance of anxiety which it was not easy to understand.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Sarrazin asked. “You look very serious to-day.”

Kitty held up a warning hand. “Grandmamma sometimes listens at doors,” she whispered; “I don’t want her to hear me.” She waited a little longer, and then approached Mr. Sarrazin, frowning mysteriously. “Take me up on your knee,” she said. “There’s something wrong going on in this house.”

Mr. Sarrazin took her on his knee, and rashly asked what had gone wrong. Kitty’s reply puzzled him.

“I go to mamma’s room every morning when I wake,” the child began. “I get into her bed, and I give her a kiss, and I say ‘Good-morning’ — and sometimes, if she isn’t in a hurry to get up, I stop in her bed, and go to sleep again. Mamma thought I was asleep this morning. I wasn’t asleep — I was only quiet. I don’t know why I was quiet.”

Mr. Sarrazin’s kindness still encouraged her. “Well,” he said, “and what happened after that?”

“Grandmamma came in. She told mamma to keep up her spirits. She says, ‘It will all be over in a few hours more.’ She says, ‘What a burden it will be off your mind!’ She says, ‘Is that child asleep?’ And mamma says, ‘Yes.’ And grandmamma took one of mamma’s towels. And I thought she was going to wash herself. What would
you
have thought?”

Mr. Sarrazin began to doubt whether he would do well to discuss Mrs. Presty’s object in taking the towel. He only said, “Go on.”

“Grandmamma dipped it into the water-jug,” Kitty continued, with a grave face; “but she didn’t wash herself. She went to one of mamma’s boxes. Though she’s so old, she’s awfully strong, I can tell you. She rubbed off the luggage-label in no time. Mamma says, ‘What are you doing that for?’ And grandmamma says — this is the dreadful thing that I want you to explain; oh, I can remember it all; it’s like learning lessons, only much nicer — grandmamma says, ‘Before the day’s over, the name on your boxes will be your name no longer.’“

Mr. Sarrazin now became aware of the labyrinth into which his young friend had innocently led him. The Divorce, and the wife’s inevitable return (when the husband was no longer the husband) to her maiden name — these were the subjects on which Kitty’s desire for enlightenment applied to the wisest person within her reach, her mother’s legal adviser.

Mr. Sarrazin tried to put her off his knee. She held him round the neck. He thought of the railway as a promising excuse, and told her he must go back to London. She held him a little tighter. “I really can’t wait, my dear;” he got up as he said it. Kitty hung on to him with her legs as well as her arms, and finding the position uncomfortable, lost her temper. “Mamma’s going to have a new name,” she shouted, as if the lawyer had suddenly become deaf. “Grandmamma says she must be Mrs. Norman. And I must be Miss Norman. I won’t! Where’s papa? I want to write to him; I know he won’t allow it. Do you hear? Where’s papa?”

She fastened her little hands on Mr. Sarrazin’s coat collar and tried to shake him, in a fury of resolution to know what it all meant. At that critical moment Mrs. Presty opened the door, and stood petrified on the threshold.

“Hanging on to Mr. Sarrazin with her arms
and
her legs!” exclaimed the old lady. “You little wretch, which are you, a monkey or a child?”

The lawyer gently deposited Kitty on the floor.

“Mind this, Samuel,” she whispered, as he set her down on her feet, “I won’t be Miss Norman.”

Mrs. Presty pointed sternly at the open door. “You were screaming just now, when quiet in the house is of the utmost importance to your mother. If I hear you again, bread and water and no doll for the rest of the week.”

Kitty retired in disgrace, and Mrs. Presty sharpened her tongue on Mr. Sarrazin next. “I’m astonished, sir, at your allowing that impudent grandchild of mine to take such liberties with you. Who would suppose that you were a married man, with children of your own?”

“That’s just the reason, my dear madam,” Mr. Sarrazin smartly replied. “I romp with my own children — why not with Kitty? Can I do anything for you in London?” he went on, getting a little nearer to the door; “I leave Edinburgh by the next train. And I promise you,” he added, with the spirit of mischief twinkling in his eyes, “this shall be my last confidential interview with your grandchild. When she wants to ask any more questions, I transfer her to you.”

Mrs. Presty looked after the retreating lawyer thoroughly mystified. What “confidential interview”? What “questions”? After some consideration, her experience of her granddaughter suggested that a little exercise of mercy might be attended with the right result. She looked at a cake on the sideboard. “I have only to forgive Kitty,” she decided, “and the child will talk about it of her own accord.”

Chapter XXXI. Mr. Herbert Linley.

Of the friends and neighbours who had associated with Herbert Linley, in bygone days, not more than two or three kept up their intimacy with him at the later time of his disgrace. Those few, it is needless to say, were men.

One of the faithful companions, who had not shrunk from him yet, had just left the London hotel at which Linley had taken rooms for Sydney Westerfield and himself — in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert. This old friend had been shocked by the change for the worse which he had perceived in the fugitive master of Mount Morven. Linley’s stout figure of former times had fallen away, as if he had suffered under long illness; his healthy colour had faded; he made an effort to assume the hearty manner that had once been natural to him which was simply pitiable to see. “After sacrificing all that makes life truly decent and truly enjoyable for a woman, he has got nothing, not even false happiness, in return!” With that dreary conclusion the retiring visitor descended the hotel steps, and went his way along the street.

Linley returned to the newspaper which he had been reading when his friend was shown into the room.

Line by line he followed the progress of the law report, which informed its thousands of readers that his wife had divorced him, and had taken lawful possession of his child. Word by word, he dwelt with morbid attention on the terms of crushing severity in which the Lord President had spoken of Sydney Westerfield and of himself. Sentence by sentence he read the reproof inflicted on the unhappy woman whom he had vowed to love and cherish. And then — even then — urged by his own self-tormenting suspicion, he looked for more. On the opposite page there was a leading article, presenting comments on the trial, written in the tone of lofty and virtuous regret; taking the wife’s side against the judge, but declaring, at the same time, that no condemnation of the conduct of the husband and the governess could be too merciless, and no misery that might overtake them in the future more than they had deserved.

He threw the newspaper on the table at his side, and thought over what he had read.

If he had done nothing else, he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs. When he looked back, he saw nothing but the life that he had wasted. When his thoughts turned to the future, they confronted a prospect empty of all promise to a man still in the prime of life. Wife and child were as completely lost to him as if they had been dead — and it was the wife’s doing. Had he any right to complain? Not the shadow of a right. As the newspapers said, he had deserved it.

The clock roused him, striking the hour.

He rose hurriedly, and advanced toward the window. As he crossed the room, he passed by a mirror. His own sullen despair looked at him in the reflection of his face. “She will be back directly,” he remembered; “she mustn’t see me like this!” He went on to the window to divert his mind (and so to clear his face) by watching the stream of life flowing by in the busy street. Artificial cheerfulness, assumed love in Sydney’s presence — that was what his life had come to already.

If he had known that she had gone out, seeking a temporary separation, with
his
fear of self-betrayal — if he had suspected that she, too, had thoughts which must be concealed: sad forebodings of losing her hold on his heart, terrifying suspicions that he was already comparing her, to her own disadvantage, with the wife whom he had deserted — if he had made these discoveries, what would the end have been? But she had, thus far, escaped the danger of exciting his distrust. That she loved him, he knew. That she had begun to doubt his attachment to her he would not have believed, if his oldest friend had declared it on the best evidence. She had said to him, that morning, at breakfast: “There was a good woman who used to let lodgings here in London, and who was very kind to me when I was a child;” and she had asked leave to go to the house, and inquire if that friendly landlady was still living — with nothing visibly constrained in her smile, and with no faltering tone in her voice. It was not until she was out in the street that the tell-tale tears came into her eyes, and the bitter sigh broke from her, and mingled its little unheard misery with the grand rise and fall of the tumult of London life. While he was still at the window, he saw her crossing the street on her way back to him. She came into the room with her complexion heightened by exercise; she kissed him, and said with her pretty smile: “Have you been lonely without me?” Who would have supposed that the torment of distrust, and the dread of desertion, were busy at this woman’s heart?