Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (173 page)

“It happened afore ever you was born.”

He gave this answer, which amazed Zack, in a curiously smothered, abstracted tone, as if he were talking to himself; laying aside the rifle suddenly as he spoke, sitting down by the table again, and resting his head on his hand, Young Thorpe took a chair near him, but wisely refrained from saying anything just at that moment. Silence seemed to favor the change that was taking place for the better in Mat’s temper. He looked up, after awhile, and regarded Zack with a rough wistfulness and anxiety working in his swarthy face.

“I like you, Zack,” he said, laying one hand on the lad’s arm and mechanically stroking down the cloth of his sleeve. “I like you. Don’t let us two part company. Let’s always pull together as brotherly and pleasant as we can.” He paused. His hand tightened round young Thorpe’s arm; and the hot, dry, tearless look in his eyes began to soften as he added, “I take it kind in you, Zack, saying you were sorry for her just now. She died afore ever you was born.” His hand relaxed its grasp: and when he had repeated those last words, he turned a little away, and said no more.

Astonishment and curiosity impelled young Thorpe to hazard another question.

“Was she a sweetheart of yours?” he asked, unconsciously sinking his voice to a whisper, “or a relation, or — ”

“Kin to me. Kin to me,” said Mat quickly, yet not impatiently; reaching out his hand again to Zack’s arm, but without looking up.

“Was she your mother?”

“No.”

“Sister?”

“Yes.”

For a minute or two Zack was silent after this answer. As soon as he began to speak again, his companion shook his arm — a little impatiently, this time — and stopped him.

“Drop it,” said Mat peremptorily. “Don’t let’s talk no more, my head — ”

“Anything wrong with your head?” asked Zack.

Mat rose to his feet again. A change began to appear in his face. The flash that had tinged it from the first, deepened palpably, and spread up to the very rim of his black skull-cap. A confusion and dimness seemed to be stealing over his eyes, a thickness and heaviness to be impeding his articulation when he spoke again.

“I’ve overdone it with the brandy,” he said, “my head’s getting hot under the place where they scalped me. Give me holt of my hat, and show me a light, Zack. I can’t stop indoors no longer. Don’t talk! Let me out of the house at once.”

Young Thorpe took up the candle directly; and leading the way down-stairs, let him out into the street by the private door, not venturing to irritate him by saying anything, but waiting on the door-step, and watching him with great curiosity as he started for his walk. He was just getting out of sight, when Zack heard him stop, and strike his stick on the pavement. In less than a minute he had turned, and was back again at the door of the tobacconist’s shop.

“Zack,” he whispered, “you ask about among your friends if any of ‘em ever knowed a man with that name I told you of.”

“Do you mean the
‘Arthur Carr’
you were talking about just now?” inquired young Thorpe.

“Yes;
Arthur Carr,”
said Mat, very earnestly. Then, turning away before Zack could ask him any more questions, he disappeared rapidly this time in the darkness of the street.

CHAPTER XIII. THE SEARCH FOR ARTHUR CARR.

Mr. Blyth was astir betimes on the morning after Mat and young Thorpe had visited him in the studio. Manfully determined not to give way an inch to his own continued reluctance to leave home, he packed up his brushes and colours, and started on his portrait-painting tour by the early train which he had originally settled to travel by.

Although he had every chance of spending his time, during his absence, agreeably as well as profitably, his inexplicable sense of uneasiness at being away from home, remained with him even on the railway; defying all the exhilarating influences of rapid motion and change of scene, and oppressing him as inveterately as it had oppressed him the night before. Bad, however, as his spirits now were, they would have been much worse, if he had known of two remarkable domestic events, which it had been the policy of his household to keep strictly concealed from him on the day of his departure.

When Mr. Blyth’s cook descended the first thing in the morning to air the studio in the usual way, by opening the garden door, she was not a little amazed and alarmed to find that, although it was closed, it was neither bolted nor locked. She communicated this circumstance (reproachfully, of course) to the housemaid, who answered (indignantly, as was only natural) by reiterating her assertion of the past night, that she had secured the door properly at six o’clock in the evening. Polly, appealing to contradictory visible fact, rejoined that the thing was impossible. Patty, holding fast to affirmatory personal knowledge, retorted that the thing had been done. Upon this, the two had a violent quarrel — followed by a sulky silence — succeeded by an affectionate reconciliation — terminated by a politic resolution to say nothing more about the matter, and especially to abstain from breathing a word in connection with it to the ruling authorities above stairs. Thus it happened that neither Valentine nor his wife knew anything of the suspicious appearance presented that morning by the garden door.

But, though Mrs. Blyth was ignorant on this point, she was well enough informed on another of equal, if not greater, domestic importance. While her husband was down-stairs taking his early breakfast, Madonna came into her room; and communicated confidentially all the particulars of the terrible fright that she had suffered, while looking for her bodkin-case in the studio, on the night before. How her candle could possibly have gone out, as it did in an instant, she could not say. She was quite sure that nobody was in the room when she entered it; and quite sure that she felt no draught of wind in any direction — in short, she knew nothing of her own experience, but that her candle suddenly went out; that she remained for a little time, half dead with fright, in the darkness; and that she then managed to grope her way back to her bedroom, in which a night-light was always burning.

Mrs. Blyth followed the progress of this strange story on Madonna’s fingers with great interest to the end; and then — after suggesting that the candle might have gone out through some defect in the make of it, or might really have been extinguished by a puff of air which the girl was too much occupied in looking for her bodkin-case to attend to — earnestly charged her not to say a word on the subject of her adventure to Valentine, when she went to help him in packing up his painting materials. “He is nervous and uncomfortable enough already, poor fellow, at the idea of leaving home,” thought Mrs. Blyth; “and if he heard the story about the candle going out, it would only make him more uneasy still.” To explain this consideration to Madonna was to ensure her discretion. She accordingly kept her adventure in the studio so profound a secret from Mr. Blyth, that he no more suspected what had happened to her, than he suspected what had happened to the Hair Bracelet, when he hastily assured himself that he was leaving his bureau properly locked, by trying the lid of it the last thing before going away.

Such were the circumstances under which Valentine left home. He was not, however, the only traveler of the reader’s acquaintance, whose departure from London took place on the morning after the mysterious extinguishing of Madonna’s light in the painting-room. By a whimsical coincidence, it so happened that, at the very same hour when Mr. Blyth was journeying in one direction, to paint portraits, Mr. Matthew Marksman (now, perhaps, also recognisable as Mr. Matthew Grice) was journeying in another, to pay a second visit to Dibbledean.

Not a visit of pleasure by any means, but a visit of business — business, which, in every particular, Mat had especially intended to keep secret from Zack; but some inkling of which he had nevertheless allowed to escape him, during his past night’s conversation with the lad in Kirk Street.

When young Thorpe and he met on the morning after that conversation, he was sufficiently aware of the fact that his overdose of brandy had set him talking in a very unguarded manner; and desired Zack, as bluntly as usual, to repeat to him all that he had let out while the liquor was in his head. After this request had been complied with, he volunteered no additional confidences. He simply said that what had slipped from his tongue was no more than the truth; but that he could add nothing to it, and explain nothing about it, until he had first discovered whether “Arthur Carr” were alive or dead. On being asked how, and when, he intended to discover this, he answered that he was going into the country to make the attempt that very morning; and that, if he succeeded, he would, on his return, tell his fellow-lodger unreservedly all that the latter might wish to know. Favored with this additional promise, Zack was left alone in Kirk Street, to quiet his curiosity as well as he could, with the reflection that he might hear something more about his friend’s secrets, when Mat returned from his trip to the country.

In order to collect a little more information on the subject of these secrets than was at present possessed by Zack, it will be necessary to return for a moment to the lodgings in Kirk Street, at that particular period of the night when Mr. Marksman was sitting alone in the front room, and was holding the Hair Bracelet crumpled up tight in one of his hands.

His first glance at the letters engraved on the clasp not only showed him to whom the Bracelet had once belonged, but set at rest in his mind all further doubt as to the identity of the young woman, whose face had so startled and impressed him in Mr. Blyth’s studio. He was neither logical enough nor legal enough in his mode of reasoning, to see, that, although he had found his sister’s bracelet in Valentine’s bureau, it did not actually follow as a matter of proof — though it might as a matter of suspicion — that he had also found his sister’s child in Valentine’s house. No such objection as this occurred to him. He was now perfectly satisfied that Madonna was what he had suspected her to be from the first — Mary’s child.

But to the next questions that he asked himself, concerning the girl’s unknown father, the answers were not so easy to be found: — Who was Arthur Carr? Where was he? Was he still alive?

His first hasty suspicion that Valentine might have assumed the name of Arthur Carr, and might therefore be the man himself, was set at rest immediately by another look at the Bracelet. He knew that the lightest in colour, of the two kinds of hair of which it was made, was Carr’s hair, because it exactly resembled the surplus lock sent back by the jeweler, and enclosed in Jane Holdsworth’s letter. He made the comparison and discovered the resemblance at a glance. The evidence of his own eyesight, which was enough for this, was also enough to satisfy him immediately that Arthur Carr’s hair was, in colour, as nearly as possible the exact opposite of Mr. Blyth’s hair.

Still, though the painter was assuredly not the father, might he not know who the father was, or had been? How could he otherwise have got possession of Mary Grice’s bracelet and Mary Grice’s child?

These two questions suggested a third in Mat’s mind. Should he discover himself at once to Mr. Blyth; and compel him, by fair means or foul, to solve all doubts, and disclose what he knew?

No: not at once. That would be playing, at the outset, a desperate and dangerous move in the game, which had best be reserved to the last. Besides, it was useless to think of questioning Mr. Blyth just now — except by the uncertain and indiscreet process of following him into the country — for he had settled to take his departure from London, early the next morning.

But it was now impossible to rest, after what had been already discovered, without beginning, in one direction or another, the attempt to find out Arthur Carr. Mat’s purpose of doing this sprang from the strongest of all resolutions — a vindictive resolution. That dangerous part of the man’s nature which his life among the savages and his wanderings in the wild places of the earth had been stealthily nurturing for many a long year past, was beginning to assert itself, now that he had succeeded in penetrating the mystery of Madonna’s parentage by the mother’s side. Placed in his position, the tender thought of their sister’s child would, at this particular crisis, have been uppermost in many men’s hearts. The one deadly thought of the villain who had been Mary’s ruin was uppermost in Mat’s.

He pondered but a little while on the course that he should pursue, before the idea of returning to Dibbledean, and compelling Joanna Grice to tell more than she had told at their last interview, occurred to him. He disbelieved the passage in her narrative which stated that she had seen and heard nothing of Arthur Carr in all the years that had elapsed since the flight and death of her niece: he had his own conviction, or rather his own presentiment (which he had mentioned to Zack), that the man was still alive somewhere; and he felt confident that he had it in his power, as a last resource, to awe the old woman into confessing everything that she knew. To Dibbledean, therefore, in the first instance, he resolved to go.