Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1670 page)

“Only once.  I have lived with the same widow lady for twelve years.  Ever since I lost my husband.  She was an invalid, and is lately dead: which is the occasion of my now wearing black.”

“I do not doubt that she has left you the best credentials?” said Mr. Wilding.

“I hope I may say, the very best.  I thought it would save trouble, sir, if I wrote down the name and address of her representatives, and brought it with me.”  Laying a card on the table.

“You singularly remind me, Mrs. Goldstraw,” said Wilding, taking the card beside him, “of a manner and tone of voice that I was once acquainted with.  Not of an individual — I feel sure of that, though I cannot recall what it is I have in my mind — but of a general bearing.  I ought to add, it was a kind and pleasant one.”

She smiled, as she rejoined: “At least, I am very glad of that, sir.”

“Yes,” said the wine-merchant, thoughtfully repeating his last phrase, with a momentary glance at his future housekeeper, “it was a kind and pleasant one.  But that is the most I can make of it.  Memory is sometimes like a half-forgotten dream.  I don’t know how it may appear to you, Mrs. Goldstraw, but so it appears to me.”

Probably it appeared to Mrs. Goldstraw in a similar light, for she quietly assented to the proposition.  Mr. Wilding then offered to put himself at once in communication with the gentlemen named upon the card: a firm of proctors in Doctors’ Commons.  To this, Mrs. Goldstraw thankfully assented.  Doctors’ Commons not being far off, Mr. Wilding suggested the feasibility of Mrs. Goldstraw’s looking in again, say in three hours’ time.  Mrs. Goldstraw readily undertook to do so.  In fine, the result of Mr. Wilding’s inquiries being eminently satisfactory, Mrs. Goldstraw was that afternoon engaged (on her own perfectly fair terms) to come to-morrow and set up her rest as housekeeper in Cripple Corner.

THE HOUSEKEEPER SPEAKS

On the next day Mrs. Goldstraw arrived, to enter on her domestic duties.

Having settled herself in her own room, without troubling the servants, and without wasting time, the new housekeeper announced herself as waiting to be favoured with any instructions which her master might wish to give her.  The wine-merchant received Mrs. Goldstraw in the dining-room, in which he had seen her on the previous day; and, the usual preliminary civilities having passed on either side, the two sat down to take counsel together on the affairs of the house.

“About the meals, sir?” said Mrs. Goldstraw.  “Have I a large, or a small, number to provide for?”

“If I can carry out a certain old-fashioned plan of mine,” replied Mr. Wilding, “you will have a large number to provide for.  I am a lonely single man, Mrs. Goldstraw; and I hope to live with all the persons in my employment as if they were members of my family.  Until that time comes, you will only have me, and the new partner whom I expect immediately, to provide for.  What my partner’s habits may be, I cannot yet say.  But I may describe myself as a man of regular hours, with an invariable appetite that you may depend upon to an ounce.”

“About breakfast, sir?” asked Mrs. Goldstraw.  “Is there anything particular — ?”

She hesitated, and left the sentence unfinished.  Her eyes turned slowly away from her master, and looked towards the chimney-piece.  If she had been a less excellent and experienced housekeeper, Mr. Wilding might have fancied that her attention was beginning to wander at the very outset of the interview.

“Eight o’clock is my breakfast-hour,” he resumed.  “It is one of my virtues to be never tired of broiled bacon, and it is one of my vices to be habitually suspicious of the freshness of eggs.”  Mrs. Goldstraw looked back at him, still a little divided between her master’s chimney-piece and her master.  “I take tea,” Mr. Wilding went on; “and I am perhaps rather nervous and fidgety about drinking it, within a certain time after it is made.  If my tea stands too long — ”

He hesitated, on his side, and left the sentence unfinished.  If he had not been engaged in discussing a subject of such paramount interest to himself as his breakfast, Mrs. Goldstraw might have fancied that his attention was beginning to wander at the very outset of the interview.

“If your tea stands too long, sir — ?” said the housekeeper, politely taking up her master’s lost thread.

“If my tea stands too long,” repeated the wine-merchant mechanically, his mind getting farther and farther away from his breakfast, and his eyes fixing themselves more and more inquiringly on his housekeeper’s face.  “If my tea — Dear, dear me, Mrs. Goldstraw! what
is
the manner and tone of voice that you remind me of?  It strikes me even more strongly to-day, than it did when I saw you yesterday.  What can it be?”

“What can it be?” repeated Mrs. Goldstraw.

She said the words, evidently thinking while she spoke them of something else.  The wine-merchant, still looking at her inquiringly, observed that her eyes wandered towards the chimney-piece once more.  They fixed on the portrait of his mother, which hung there, and looked at it with that slight contraction of the brow which accompanies a scarcely conscious effort of memory.  Mr. Wilding remarked.

“My late dear mother, when she was five-and-twenty.”

Mrs. Goldstraw thanked him with a movement of the head for being at the pains to explain the picture, and said, with a cleared brow, that it was the portrait of a very beautiful lady.

Mr. Wilding, falling back into his former perplexity, tried once more to recover that lost recollection, associated so closely, and yet so undiscoverably, with his new housekeeper’s voice and manner.

“Excuse my asking you a question which has nothing to do with me or my breakfast,” he said.  “May I inquire if you have ever occupied any other situation than the situation of housekeeper?”

“O yes, sir.  I began life as one of the nurses at the Foundling.”

“Why, that’s it!” cried the wine-merchant, pushing back his chair.  “By heaven!  Their manner is the manner you remind me of!”

In an astonished look at him, Mrs. Goldstraw changed colour, checked herself, turned her eyes upon the ground, and sat still and silent.

“What is the matter?” asked Mr. Wilding.

“Do I understand that you were in the Foundling, sir?”

“Certainly.  I am not ashamed to own it.”

“Under the name you now bear?”

“Under the name of Walter Wilding.”

“And the lady — ?” Mrs. Goldstraw stopped short with a look at the portrait which was now unmistakably a look of alarm.

“You mean my mother,” interrupted Mr. Wilding.

“Your — mother,” repeated the housekeeper, a little constrainedly, “removed you from the Foundling?  At what age, sir?”

“At between eleven and twelve years old.  It’s quite a romantic adventure, Mrs. Goldstraw.”

He told the story of the lady having spoken to him, while he sat at dinner with the other boys in the Foundling, and of all that had followed in his innocently communicative way.  “My poor mother could never have discovered me,” he added, “if she had not met with one of the matrons who pitied her.  The matron consented to touch the boy whose name was ‘Walter Wilding’ as she went round the dinner-tables — and so my mother discovered me again, after having parted from me as an infant at the Foundling doors.”

At those words Mrs. Goldstraw’s hand, resting on the table, dropped helplessly into her lap.  She sat, looking at her new master, with a face that had turned deadly pale, and with eyes that expressed an unutterable dismay.

“What does this mean?” asked the wine-merchant.  “Stop!” he cried.  “Is there something else in the past time which I ought to associate with you?  I remember my mother telling me of another person at the Foundling, to whose kindness she owed a debt of gratitude.  When she first parted with me, as an infant, one of the nurses informed her of the name that had been given to me in the institution.  You were that nurse?”

“God forgive me, sir — I was that nurse!”

“God forgive you?”

“We had better get back, sir (if I may make so bold as to say so), to my duties in the house,” said Mrs. Goldstraw.  “Your breakfast-hour is eight.  Do you lunch, or dine, in the middle of the day?”

The excessive pinkness which Mr. Bintrey had noticed in his client’s face began to appear there once more.  Mr. Wilding put his hand to his head, and mastered some momentary confusion in that quarter, before he spoke again.

“Mrs. Goldstraw,” he said, “you are concealing something from me!”

The housekeeper obstinately repeated, “Please to favour me, sir, by saying whether you lunch, or dine, in the middle of the day?”

“I don’t know what I do in the middle of the day.  I can’t enter into my household affairs, Mrs. Goldstraw, till I know why you regret an act of kindness to my mother, which she always spoke of gratefully to the end of her life.  You are not doing me a service by your silence.  You are agitating me, you are alarming me, you are bringing on the singing in my head.”

His hand went up to his head again, and the pink in his face deepened by a shade or two.

“It’s hard, sir, on just entering your service,” said the housekeeper, “to say what may cost me the loss of your good will.  Please to remember, end how it may, that I only speak because you have insisted on my speaking, and because I see that I am alarming you by my silence.  When I told the poor lady, whose portrait you have got there, the name by which her infant was christened in the Foundling, I allowed myself to forget my duty, and dreadful consequences, I am afraid, have followed from it.  I’ll tell you the truth, as plainly as I can.  A few months from the time when I had informed the lady of her baby’s name, there came to our institution in the country another lady (a stranger), whose object was to adopt one of our children.  She brought the needful permission with her, and after looking at a great many of the children, without being able to make up her mind, she took a sudden fancy to one of the babies — a boy — under my care.  Try, pray try, to compose yourself, sir!  It’s no use disguising it any longer.  The child the stranger took away was the child of that lady whose portrait hangs there!”

Mr. Wilding started to his feet.  “Impossible!” he cried out, vehemently.  “What are you talking about?  What absurd story are you telling me now?  There’s her portrait!  Haven’t I told you so already?  The portrait of my mother!”

“When that unhappy lady removed you from the Foundling, in after years,” said Mrs. Goldstraw, gently, “she was the victim, and you were the victim, sir, of a dreadful mistake.”

He dropped back into his chair.  “The room goes round with me,” he said.  “My head! my head!”  The housekeeper rose in alarm, and opened the windows.  Before she could get to the door to call for help, a sudden burst of tears relieved the oppression which had at first almost appeared to threaten his life.  He signed entreatingly to Mrs. Goldstraw not to leave him.  She waited until the paroxysm of weeping had worn itself out.  He raised his head as he recovered himself, and looked at her with the angry unreasoning suspicion of a weak man.

“Mistake?” he said, wildly repeating her last word.  “How do I know you are not mistaken yourself?”

“There is no hope that I am mistaken, sir.  I will tell you why, when you are better fit to hear it.”

“Now! now!”

The tone in which he spoke warned Mrs. Goldstraw that it would be cruel kindness to let him comfort himself a moment longer with the vain hope that she might be wrong.  A few words more would end it, and those few words she determined to speak.

“I have told you,” she said, “that the child of the lady whose portrait hangs there, was adopted in its infancy, and taken away by a stranger.  I am as certain of what I say as that I am now sitting here, obliged to distress you, sir, sorely against my will.  Please to carry your mind on, now, to about three months after that time.  I was then at the Foundling, in London, waiting to take some children to our institution in the country.  There was a question that day about naming an infant — a boy — who had just been received.  We generally named them out of the Directory.  On this occasion, one of the gentlemen who managed the Hospital happened to be looking over the Register.  He noticed that the name of the baby who had been adopted (‘Walter Wilding’) was scratched out — for the reason, of course, that the child had been removed for good from our care.  ‘Here’s a name to let,’ he said.  ‘Give it to the new foundling who has been received to-day.’  The name was given, and the child was christened.  You, sir, were that child.”