Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1611 page)

“Is the young man educated? Can he produce testimonials to his character? Oblige me by writing his name and address down on the back of that card.”

When I had obeyed, in a handwriting which I am afraid did me no credit, he took out another card and gave it to me.

“I shall leave England to-morrow,” he said. “There is nothing now to keep me in my own country. If you are ever in any difficulty or distress (which I pray God you may never be), apply to my London agent, whose address you have there.”

He stopped, and looked at me attentively, then took my hand again.

“Where is she buried?” he said, suddenly, in a quick whisper, turning his head away.

I told him, and added that we had made the grave as beautiful as we could with grass and flowers. I saw his lips whiten and tremble.

“God bless and reward you!” he said, and drew me toward him quickly and kissed my forehead. I was quite overcome, and sank down and hid my face on the table. When I looked up again he was gone.

* * * * * * *

June 25th, 1841. I write these lines on my wedding morning, when little more than a year has passed since Robert returned to England.

His salary was increased yesterday to one hundred and fifty pounds a year. If I only knew where Mr. Mallinson was, I would write and tell him of our present happiness. But for the situation which his kindness procured for Robert, we might still have been waiting vainly for the day that has now come.

I am to work at home for the future, and Sally is to help us in our new abode. If Mary could have lived to see this day! I am not ungrateful for my blessings; but oh, how I miss that sweet face on this morning of all others!

I got up to-day early enough to go alone to the grave, and to gather the nosegay that now lies before me from the flowers that grow round it. I shall put it in my bosom when Robert comes to fetch me to the church. Mary would have been my bridesmaid if she had lived; and I can’t forget Mary, even on my wedding-day....

THE NIGHT.

THE last words of the last story fell low and trembling from Owen’s lips. He waited for a moment while Jessie dried the tears which Anne Rodway’s simple diary had drawn from her warm young heart, then closed the manuscript, and taking her hand patted it in his gentle, fatherly way.

“You will be glad to hear, my love,” he said, “that I can speak from personal experience of Anne Rodway’s happiness. She came to live in my parish soon after the trial at which she appeared as chief witness, and I was the clergyman who married her. Months before that I knew her story, and had read those portions of her diary which you have just heard. When I made her my little present on her wedding day, and when she gratefully entreated me to tell her what she could do for me in return, I asked for a copy of her diary to keep among the papers that I treasured most. ‘The reading of it now and then,’ I said, ‘will encourage that faith in the brighter and better part of human nature which I hope, by God’s help, to preserve pure to my dying day.’ In that way I became possessed of the manuscript: it was Anne’s husband who made the copy for me. You have noticed a few withered leaves scattered here and there between the pages. They were put there, years since, by the bride’s own hand: they are all that now remain of the flowers that Anne Rodway gathered on her marriage morning from Mary Mallinson’s grave.”

Jessie tried to answer, but the words failed on her lips. Between the effect of the story, and the anticipation of the parting now so near at hand, the good, impulsive, affectionate creature was fairly overcome. She laid her head on Owen’s shoulder, and kept tight hold of his hand, and let her heart speak simply for itself, without attempting to help it by a single word.

The silence that followed was broken harshly by the tower clock. The heavy hammer slowly rang out ten strokes through the gloomy night-time and the dying storm.

I waited till the last humming echo of the clock fainted into dead stillness. I listened once more attentively, and again listened in vain. Then I rose, and proposed to my brothers that we should leave our guest to compose herself for the night.

When Owen and Morgan were ready to quit the room, I took her by the hand, and drew her a little aside.

“You leave us early, my dear,” I said; “but, before you go to-morrow morning — ”

I stopped to listen for the last time, before the words were spoken which committed me to the desperate experiment of pleading George’s cause in defiance of his own request. Nothing caught my ear but the sweep of the weary weakened wind and the melancholy surging of the shaken trees.

“But, before you go to-morrow morning,” I resumed, “I want to speak to you in private. We shall breakfast at eight o’clock. Is it asking too much to beg you to come and see me alone in my study at half past seven?”

Just as her lips opened to answer me I saw a change pass over her face. I had kept her hand in mine while I was speaking, and I must have pressed it unconsciously so hard as almost to hurt her. She may even have uttered a few words of remonstrance; but they never reached me: my whole hearing sense was seized, absorbed, petrified. At the very instant when I had ceased speaking, I, and I alone, heard a faint sound — a sound that was new to me — fly past the Glen Tower on the wings of the wind.

“Open the window, for God’s sake!” I cried.

My hand mechanically held hers tighter and tighter. She struggled to free it, looking hard at me with pale cheeks and frightened eyes. Owen hastened up and released her, and put his arms round me.

“Griffith, Griffith!” he whispered, “control yourself, for George’s sake.”

Morgan hurried to the window and threw it wide open.

The wind and rain rushed in fiercely. Welcome, welcome wind! They all heard it now. “Oh, Father in heaven, so merciful to fathers on earth — my son, my son!”

It came in, louder and louder with every gust of wind — the joyous, rapid gathering roll of wheels. My eyes fastened on her as if they could see to her heart, while she stood there with her sweet face turned on me all pale and startled. I tried to speak to her; I tried to break away from Owen’s arms, to throw my own arms round her, to keep her on my bosom, till
he
came to take her from me. But all my strength had gone in the long waiting and the long suspense. My head sank on Owen’s breast — but I still heard the wheels. Morgan loosened my cravat, and sprinkled water over my face — I still heard the wheels. The poor terrified girl ran into her room, and came back with her smelling-salts — I heard the carriage stop at the house. The room whirled round and round with me; but I heard the eager hurry of footsteps in the hall, and the opening of the door. In another moment my son’s voice rose clear and cheerful from below, greeting the old servants who loved him. The dear, familiar tones just poured into my ear, and then, the moment they filled it, hushed me suddenly to rest.

When I came to myself again my eyes opened upon George. I was lying on the sofa, still in the same room; the lights we had read by in the evening were burning on the table; my son was kneeling at my pillow, and we two were alone.

THE MORNING.

THE wind is fainter, but there is still no calm. The rain is ceasing, but there is still no sunshine. The view from my window shows me the mist heavy on the earth, and a dim gray veil drawn darkly over the sky. Less than twelve hours since, such a prospect would have saddened me for the day. I look out at it this morning, through the bright medium of my own happiness, and not the shadow of a shade falls across the steady inner sunshine that is poring over my heart.

The pen lingers fondly in my hand, and yet it is little, very little, that I have left to say. The Purple Volume lies open by my side, with the stories ranged together in it in the order in which they were read. My son has learned to prize them already as the faithful friends who served him at his utmost need. I have only to wind off the little thread of narrative on which they are all strung together before the volume is closed and our anxious literary experiment fairly ended.

My son and I had a quiet hour together on that happy night before we retired to rest. The little love-plot invented in George’s interests now required one last stroke of diplomacy to complete it before we all threw off our masks and assumed our true characters for the future. When my son and I parted for the night, we had planned the necessary stratagem for taking our lovely guest by surprise as soon as she was out of her bed in the morning.

Shortly after seven o’clock I sent a message to Jessie by her maid, informing her that a good night’s rest had done wonders for me, and that I expected to see her in my study at half past seven, as we had arranged the evening before. As soon as her answer, promising to be punctual to the appointment, had reached me, I took George into my study — left him in my place to plead his own cause — and stole away, five minutes before the half hour, to join my brothers in the breakfast-room.

Although the sense of my own happiness disposed me to take the brightest view of my son’s chances, I must nevertheless acknowledge that some nervous anxieties still fluttered about my heart while the slow minutes of suspense were counting themselves out in the breakfast-room. I had as little attention to spare for Owen’s quiet prognostications of success as for Morgan’s pitiless sarcasms on love, courtship, and matrimony. A quarter of an hour elapsed — then twenty minutes. The hand moved on, and the clock pointed to five minutes to eight, before I heard the study door open, and before the sound of rapidly-advancing footsteps warned me that George was coming into the room.

His beaming face told the good news before a word could be spoken on either side. The excess of his happiness literally and truly deprived him of speech. He stood eagerly looking at us all three, with outstretched hands and glistening eyes.

“Have I folded up my surplice forever,” asked Owen, “or am I to wear it once again, George, in your service?”

“Answer this question first,” interposed Morgan, with a look of grim anxiety. “Have you actually taken your young woman off my hands, or have you not?”

No direct answer followed either question. George’s feelings had been too deeply stirred to allow him to return jest for jest at a moment’s notice.

“Oh, father, how can I thank you!” he said. “And you! and you!” he added, looking at Owen and Morgan gratefully.

“You must thank Chance as well as thank us,” I replied, speaking as lightly as my heart would let me, to encourage him. “The advantage of numbers in our little love-plot was all on our side. Remember, George, we were three to one.”

While I was speaking the breakfast-room door opened noiselessly, and showed us Jessie standing on the threshold, uncertain whether to join us or to run back to her own room. Her bright complexion heightened to a deep glow; the tears just rising in her eyes, and not yet falling from them; her delicate lips trembling a little, as if they were still shyly conscious of other lips that had pressed them but a few minutes since; her attitude irresolutely graceful; her hair just disturbed enough over her forehead and her cheeks to add to the charm of them — she stood before us, the loveliest living picture of youth, and tenderness, and virgin love that eyes ever looked on. George and I both advanced together to meet her at the door. But the good, grateful girl had heard from my son the true story of all that I had done, and hoped, and suffered for the last ten days, and showed charmingly how she felt it by turning at once to
me
.

“May I stop at the Glen Tower a little longer?” she asked, simply.

“If you think you can get through your evenings, my love,” I answered. “‘But surely you forget that the Purple Volume is closed, and that the stories have all come to an end?”

She clasped her arms round my neck, and laid her cheek fondly against mine.

“How you must have suffered yesterday!” she whispered, softly.

“And how happy I am to-day!”

The tears gathered in her eyes and dropped over her cheeks as she raised her head to look at me affectionately when I said those words. I gently unclasped her arms and led her to George.

“So you really did love him, then, after all,” I whispered, “though you were too sly to let me discover it?”

A smile broke out among the tears as her eyes wandered away from mine and stole a look at my son. The clock struck the hour, and the servant came in with breakfast. A little domestic interruption of this kind was all that was wanted to put us at our ease. We drew round the table cheerfully, and set the Queen of Hearts at the head of it, in the character of mistress of the house already.