Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (183 page)

“I’m a deal better to-night, Mat,” said Zack, answering his first inquiries. “That good fellow, Blyth, has come back: he’s been sitting here with me a couple of hours or more. Where have you been to all day, you restless old Rough and Tough?” he continued, with something of his natural lighthearted manner returning already. “There’s a letter come for you, by-the-by. The landlady said she would put it on the table in the front room.”

Matthew found and opened the letter, which proved to contain two enclosures. One was addressed to Mr. Blyth; the other had no direction. The handwriting in the letter being strange to him, Mat looked first for the name at the end, and found that it was
Thorpe.
“Wait a bit,” he said, as Zack spoke again just then, “I want to read my letter. We’ll talk after.”

This is what he read: —

“Some hours have passed since you left my house. I have had time to collect a little strength and composure, and have received such assistance and advice as have enabled me to profit by that time. Now I know that I can write calmly, I send you this letter.

“My object is not to ask how you became possessed of the guilty secret which I had kept from every one — even from my wife — but to offer you such explanation and confession as you have a right to demand from me. I do not cavil about that right — I admit that you possess it, without desiring further proof than your actions, your merciless words, and the Bracelet in your possession, have afforded me.

“It is fit you should first be told that the assumed name by which I was known at Dibbledean, merely originated in a foolish jest — in a wager that certain companions of my own age, who were accustomed to ridicule my fondness for botanical pursuits, and often to follow and disturb me when I went in search of botanical specimens, would not be able to trace and discover me in my country retreat. I went to Dibbledean, because the neighbourhood was famous for specimens of rare Ferns, which I desired to possess; and I took my assumed name before I went, to help in keeping me from being traced and disturbed by my companions. My father alone was in the secret, and came to see me once or twice in my retirement. I have no excuse to offer for continuing to preserve my false name, at a time when I was bound to be candid about myself and my station in life. My conduct was as unpardonably criminal in this, as it was in greater things.

“My stay at the cottage I had taken, lasted much longer than my father would have remitted, if I had not deceived him, and if he had not been much harassed at that time by unforeseen difficulties in his business as a foreign merchant. These difficulties arrived at last at a climax, and his health broke down under them. His presence, or the presence of a properly qualified person to represent him, was absolutely required in Germany, where one of his business houses, conducted by an agent, was established. I was his only son; he had taken me as a partner into his London house; and had allowed me, on the plea of delicate health, to absent myself from my duties for months and months together, and to follow my favorite botanical pursuits just as I pleased. When, therefore, he wrote me word that great part of his property, and great part, consequently, of my sisters’ fortunes, depended on my going to Germany (his own health not permitting him to take the journey), I had no choice but to place myself at his disposal immediately.

“I went away, being assured beforehand that my absence would not last more than three or four months at the most.

“While I was abroad, I wrote to your sister constantly. I had treated her dishonourably and wickedly, but no thought of abandoning her had ever entered my heart: my dearest hope, at that time, was the hope of seeing her again. Not one of my letters was answered. I was detained in Germany beyond the time during which I had consented to remain there; and in the excess of my anxiety, I even ventured to write twice to your father. Those letters also remained unanswered. When I at last got back to England, I immediately sent a person on whom I could rely to Dibbledean, to make the inquiries which I dreaded to make myself. My messenger was turned from your doors, with the fearful news of your sister’s flight from home and of her death.

“It was then I first suspected that my letters had been tampered with. It was then, too, when the violence of my grief and despair had a little abated, that the news of your sister’s flight inspired me, for the first time, with a suspicion of the consequence which had followed the commission of my sin. You may think it strange that this suspicion should not have occurred to me before. It would seem so no longer, perhaps, if I detailed to you the peculiar system of home education, by which my father, strictly and conscientiously, endeavored to preserve me — as other young men are not usually preserved — from the moral contaminations of the world. But it would be useless to dwell on this now. No explanations can alter the events of the guilty and miserable past.

“Anxiously — though privately, and in fear and trembling — I caused such inquiries to be made as I hoped might decide the question whether the child existed or not. They were long persevered in, but they were useless — useless, perhaps, as I now think with bitter sorrow, because I trusted them to others, and had not the courage to make them openly myself.

“Two years after that time I married, under circumstances not of an ordinary kind — what circumstances you have no claim to know.
That
part of my life is my secret and my wife’s, and belongs to us alone.

“I have now dwelt long enough for your information on my own guilty share in the events of the Past. As to the Present and the Future, I have still a word or two left to say.

“You have declared that I shall expiate, by the exposure of my shameful secret before all my friends, the wrong your sister suffered at my hands. My life has been one long expiation for that wrong. My broken health, my altered character, my weary secret sorrows, unpartaken and unconsoled, have punished me for many years past more heavily than you think. Do you desire to see me visited by more poignant sufferings than these? If it be so, you may enjoy the vindictive triumph of having already inflicted them. Your threats will force me, in a few hours, from the friends I have lived with, at the very time when the affection shown to me, and the honour conferred on me by those friends, have made their society most precious to my heart. You force me from this, and from more — for you force me from my home, at the moment when my son has affectionately entreated me to take him back to my fireside.

“These trials, heavy as they are, I am ready to endure, if, by accepting them humbly, I may be deemed to have made some atonement for my sin. But more I have not the fortitude to meet. I cannot face the exposure with which you are resolved to overwhelm me. The anxiety — perhaps, I ought to say, the weakness — of my life, has been to win and keep the respect of others. You are about, by disclosing the crime which dishonoured my youth, to deprive me of my good fame. I can let it go without a struggle, as part of the punishment that I have deserved; but I have not the courage to wait and see you take it from me. My own sensations tell me that I have not long to live; my own convictions assure me that I cannot fitly prepare myself for death, until I am far removed from worldly interests and worldly terrors — in a word, from the horror of an exposure, which I have deserved, but which, at the end of my weary life, is more than I can endure. We have seen the last of each other in this world. To-night I shall be beyond the reach of your retaliation; for to-night I shall be journeying to the retreat in which the short remainder of my life will be hidden from you and from all men.

“It now only remains for me to advert to the two enclosures contained in this letter.

“The first is addressed to Mr. Blyth. I leave it to reach his hands through you; because I am ashamed to communicate with him directly, as from myself. If what you said about my child be the truth — and I cannot dispute it — then, in my ignorance of her identity, in my estrangement from the house of her protector since she first entered it, I have unconsciously committed such an offense against Mr. Blyth as no contrition can ever adequately atone for. Now indeed I feel how presumptuously merciless my bitter conviction of the turpitude of my own sin, has made me towards what I deemed like sins in others. Now also I know, that, unless you have spoken falsely, I have been guilty of casting the shame of my own deserted child in the teeth of the very man who had nobly and tenderly given her an asylum in his own home. The unutterable anguish which only the bare suspicion of this has inflicted on me might well have been my death. I marvel even now at my own recovery from it.

“You are free to look at the letter to Mr. Blyth which I now entrust to you. Besides the expression of my shame, my sorrow, and my sincere repentance, it contains some questions, to which Mr. Blyth, in his Christian kindness, will, I doubt not, readily write answers. The questions only refer to the matter of the child’s identity; and the address I have written down at the end, is that of the house of business of my lawyer and agent in London. He will forward the document to me, and will then arrange with Mr. Blyth the manner in which a fit provision from my property may be best secured to his adopted child. He has deserved her love, and to him I gratefully and humbly leave her. For myself, I am not worthy even to look upon her face.

“The second enclosure is meant for my son; and is to be delivered in the event of your having already disclosed to him the secret of his father’s guilt. But, if you have not done this — if any mercy towards me has entered into your heart, and pleads with it for pardon and for silence — then destroy the letter, and tell him that he will find a communication waiting for him at the house of my agent. He wrote to ask my pardon — he has it freely. Freely, in my turn, I hope to have his forgiveness for severities exercised towards him, which were honestly meant to preserve him betimes from ever falling as his father fell, but which I now fear were persevered in too hardly and too long. I have suffered for this error, as for others, heavily — more heavily, when he abandoned his home, than I should ever wish him to know. You said he lived with you and that you were fond of him. Be gentle with him, now that he is ill, for his mother’s sake.

“My hand grows weaker and weaker: I can write no more. Let me close this letter by entreating your pardon. If you ever grant it me, then I also ask your prayers.”

With this the letter ended.

Matthew sat holding it open in his hand for a little while. He looked round once or twice at the enclosed letter from Mr. Thorpe to his son, which lay close by on the table — but did not destroy it; did not so much as touch it even.

Zack spoke to him before long from the inner room.

“I’m sure you must have done reading your letter by this time, Mat. I’ve been thinking, old fellow, of the talk we used to have, about going back to America together, and trying a little buffalo hunting and roaming about in the wilds. If my father takes me into favor again, and can be got to say Yes, I should so like to go with you, Mat. Not for too long, you know, because of my mother, and my friends over here. But a sea voyage, and a little scouring about in what you call the lonesome places, would do me such good! I don’t feel as if I should ever settle properly to anything, till I’ve had my fling. I wonder whether my father would let me go?”

“I know he would, Zack.”

“You! How?”

“I’ll tell you how another time. You shall have your run, Zack, — you shall have your heart’s content along with me.” As he said this, he looked again at Mr. Thorpe’s letter to his son, and took it up in his hand this time.

“Oh! how I wish I was strong enough to start! Come in here, Mat, and let’s talk about it.”

“Wait a bit, and I will.” Pronouncing those words, he rose from his chair. “For your sake, Zack,” he said, and dropped the letter into the fire.

“What can you be about all this time?” asked young Thorpe.

“Do you call to mind,” said Mat, going into the bedroom, and sitting down by the lad’s pillow — ”Do you call to mind me saying, that I’d be brothers with you, when first us two come together? Well, Zack, I’ve only been trying to be as good as my word.”

“Trying? What do you mean? I don’t understand, old fellow.”

“Never mind: you’ll make it out better some day. Let’s talk about getting aboard ship, and going a buffalo-hunting now.”

They discussed the projected expedition, until Zack grew sleepy. As he fell off into a pleasant doze, Mat went back into the front-room; and, taking from the table Mr. Thorpe’s letter to Mr. Blyth, left Kirk Street immediately for the painter’s house.

It had occurred to Valentine to unlock his bureau twice since his return from the country, but on neither occasion had he found it necessary to open that long narrow drawer at the back, in which he had secreted the Hair Bracelet years ago. He was consequently still totally ignorant that it had been taken away from him, when Matthew Grice entered the painting-room, and quietly put it into his hand.