Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1309 page)

“You will be almost as sorry as I was to hear this; and you will be quite as surprised as I was, when I tell you that Sandyseal Place has become a Priory of English Nuns, of the order of St. Benedict.

“I think I see you look up from my letter, with your big black eyes staring straight before you, and say and swear that this must be one of my mystifications. Unfortunately (for I am fond of the old house in which I was born) it is only too true. The instructions in my father’s will, under which Sandyseal has been sold, are peremptory. They are the result of a promise made, many years since, to his wife.

“You and I were both very young when my poor mother died; but I think you must remember that she, like the rest of her family, was a Roman Catholic.

“Having reminded you of this, I may next tell you that Sandyseal Place was my mother’s property. It formed part of her marriage portion, and it was settled on my father if she died before him, and if she left no female child to survive her. I am her only child. My father was therefore dealing with his own property when he ordered the house to be sold. His will leaves the purchase money to me. I would rather have kept the house.

“But why did my mother make him promise to sell the place at his death?

“A letter, attached to my father’s will, answers this question, and tells a very sad story. In deference to my mother’s wishes it was kept strictly a secret from me while my father lived.

“There was a younger sister of my mother’s who was the beauty of the family; loved and admired by everybody who was acquainted with her. It is needless to make this long letter longer by dwelling on the girl’s miserable story. You have heard it of other girls, over and over again. She loved and trusted; she was deceived and deserted. Alone and friendless in a foreign country; her fair fame blemished; her hope in the future utterly destroyed, she attempted to drown herself. This took place in France. The best of good women — a Sister of Charity — happened to be near enough to the river to rescue her. She was sheltered; she was pitied; she was encouraged to return to her family. The poor deserted creature absolutely refused; she could never forget that she had disgraced them. The good Sister of Charity won her confidence. A retreat which would hide her from the world, and devote her to religion for the rest of her days, was the one end to her wasted life that she longed for. That end was attained in a Priory of Benedictine Nuns, established in France. There she found protection and peace — there she passed the remaining years of her life among devoted Sister-friends — and there she died a quiet and even a happy death.

“You will now understand how my mother’s grateful remembrance associated her with the interests of more than one community of Nuns; and you will not need to be told what she had in mind when she obtained my father’s promise at the time of her last illness.

“He at once proposed to bequeath the house as a free gift to the Benedictines. My mother thanked him and refused. She was thinking of me. ‘If our son fails to inherit the house from his father,’ she said, ‘it is only right that he should have the value of the house in money. Let it be sold.’

“So here I am — rich already — with this additional sum of money in my banker’s care.

“My idea is to invest it in the Funds, and to let it thrive at interest, until I grow older, and retire perhaps from service in the Navy. The later years of my life may well be devoted to the founding of a charitable institution, which I myself can establish and direct. If I die first — oh, there is a chance of it! We may have a naval war, perhaps, or I may turn out one of those incorrigible madmen who risk their lives in Arctic exploration. In case of the worst, therefore, I shall leave the interests of my contemplated Home in your honest and capable hands. For the present good-by, and a prosperous voyage outward bound.”

So the letter ended.

Sydney dwelt with reluctant attention on the latter half of it. The story of the unhappy favorite of the family had its own melancholy and sinister interest for her. She felt the foreboding that it might, in some of its circumstances, be her story too — without the peaceful end. Into what community of merciful women could
she
be received, in her sorest need? What religious consolations would encourage her penitence? What prayers, what hopes, would reconcile her, on her death-bed, to the common doom?

She sighed as she folded up Captain Bennydeck’s letter and put it in her bosom, to be read again. “If my lot had fallen among good people,” she thought, “perhaps I might have belonged to the Church which took care of that poor girl.”

Her mind was still pursuing its own sad course of inquiry; she was wondering in what part of England Sandyseal might be; she was asking herself if the Nuns at the old moated house ever opened their doors to women, whose one claim on their common Christianity was the claim to be pitied — when she heard Linley’s footsteps approaching the door.

His tone was kind; his manner was gentle; his tender interest in her seemed to have revived. Her long absence had alarmed him; he feared she might be ill. “I was only thinking,” she said. He smiled, and sat down by her, and asked if she had been thinking of the place that they should go to when they left London.

Chapter XXXIII. Mrs. Romsey.

The one hotel in Sandyseal was full, from the topmost story to the ground floor; and by far the larger half of the landlord’s guests were invalids sent to him by the doctors.

To persons of excitable temperament, in search of amusement, the place offered no attractions. Situated at the innermost end of a dull little bay, Sandyseal — so far as any view of the shipping in the Channel was concerned — might have been built on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Vessels of any importance kept well out of the way of treacherous shoals and currents lurking at the entrance of the bay. The anchorage ground was good; but the depth of water was suited to small vessels only — to shabby old fishing-smacks which seldom paid their expenses, and to dirty little coasters carrying coals and potatoes. At the back of the hotel, two slovenly rows of cottages took their crooked course inland. Sailing masters of yachts, off duty, sat and yawned at the windows; lazy fishermen looked wearily at the weather over their garden gates; and superfluous coastguards gathered together in a wooden observatory, and leveled useless telescopes at an empty sea. The flat open country, with its few dwarf trees and its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-coloured road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little wooden pier, sadly in want of repair. On the other side, a walled inclosure accommodated yachts of light tonnage, stripped of their rigging, and sitting solitary on a bank of mud until their owners wanted them. In this neighbourhood there was a small outlying colony of shops: one that sold fruit and fish; one that dealt in groceries and tobacco; one shut up, with a bill in the window inviting a tenant; and one, behind the Methodist Chapel, answering the double purpose of a post-office and a storehouse for ropes and coals. Beyond these objects there was nothing (and this was the great charm of the place) to distract the attention of invalids, following the doctor’s directions, and from morning to night taking care of their health.

The time was evening; the scene was one of the private sitting-rooms in the hotel; and the purpose in view was a little tea-party.

Rich Mrs. Romsey, connected with commerce as wife of the chief partner in the firm of Romsey & Renshaw, was staying at the hotel in the interests of her three children. They were of delicate constitution; their complete recovery, after severe illness which had passed from one to the other, was less speedy than had been anticipated; and the doctor had declared that the nervous system was, in each case, more or less in need of repair. To arrive at this conclusion, and to recommend a visit to Sandyseal, were events which followed each other (medically speaking) as a matter of course.

The health of the children had greatly improved; the famous air had agreed with them, and the discovery of new playfellows had agreed with them. They had made acquaintance with Lady Myrie’s well-bred boys, and with Mrs. Norman’s charming little Kitty. The most cordial good-feeling had established itself among the mothers. Owing a return for hospitalities received from Lady Myrie and Mrs. Norman, Mrs. Romsey had invited the two ladies to drink tea with her in honour of an interesting domestic event. Her husband, absent on the Continent for some time past, on business connected with his firm, had returned to England, and had that evening joined his wife and children at Sandyseal.

Lady Myrie had arrived, and Mr. Romsey had been presented to her. Mrs. Norman, expected to follow, was represented by a courteous note of apology. She was not well that evening, and she begged to be excused.

“This is a great disappointment,” Mrs. Romsey said to her husband. “You would have been charmed with Mrs. Norman — highly-bred, accomplished, a perfect lady. And she leaves us to-morrow. The departure will not be an early one; and I shall find an opportunity, my dear, of introducing you to my friend and her sweet little Kitty.”

Mr. Romsey looked interested for a moment, when he first heard Mrs. Norman’s name. After that, he slowly stirred his tea, and seemed to be thinking, instead of listening to his wife.

“Have you made the lady’s acquaintance here?” he inquired.

“Yes — and I hope I have made a friend for life,” Mrs. Romsey said with enthusiasm.

“And so do I,” Lady Myrie added.

Mr. Romsey went on with his inquiries.

“Is she a handsome woman?”

Both the ladies answered the question together. Lady Myrie described Mrs. Norman, in one dreadful word, as “Classical.” By comparison with this, Mrs. Romsey’s reply was intelligible. “Not even illness can spoil her beauty!”

“Including the headache she has got to-night?” Mr. Romsey suggested.

“Don’t be ill-natured, dear! Mrs. Norman is here by the advice of one of the first physicians in London; she has suffered under serious troubles, poor thing.”

Mr. Romsey persisted in being ill-natured. “Connected with her husband?” he asked.

Lady Myrie entered a protest. She was a widow; and it was notorious among her friends that the death of her husband had been the happiest event in her married life. But she understood her duty to herself as a respectable woman.

“I think, Mr. Romsey, you might have spared that cruel allusion,” she said with dignity.

Mr. Romsey apologized. He had his reasons for wishing to know something more about Mrs. Norman; he proposed to withdraw his last remark, and to put his inquiries under another form. Might he ask his wife if anybody had seen
Mr.
Norman?

“No.”

“Or heard of him?”

Mrs. Romsey answered in the negative once more, and added a question on her own account. What did all this mean?

“It means,” Lady Myrie interposed, “what we poor women are all exposed to — scandal.” She had not yet forgiven Mr. Romsey’s allusion, and she looked at him pointedly as she spoke. There are some impenetrable men on whom looks produce no impression. Mr. Romsey was one of them. He turned to his wife, and said, quietly: “What I mean is, that I know more of Mrs. Norman than you do. I have heard of her — never mind how or where. She is a lady who has been celebrated in the newspapers. Don’t be alarmed. She is no less a person than the divorced Mrs. Linley.”

The two ladies looked at each other in blank dismay. Restrained by a sense of conjugal duty, Mrs. Romsey only indulged in an exclamation. Lady Myrie, independent of restraint, expressed her opinion, and said: “Quite impossible!”

“The Mrs. Norman whom I mean,” Mr. Romsey went on, “has, as I have been told, a mother living. The old lady has been twice married. Her name is Mrs. Presty.”

This settled the question. Mrs. Presty was established, in her own proper person, with her daughter and grandchild at the hotel. Lady Myrie yielded to the force of evidence; she lifted her hands in horror: “This is too dreadful!”

Mrs. Romsey took a more compassionate view of the disclosure. “Surely the poor lady is to be pitied?” she gently suggested.