Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (387 page)

“Is she alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the room which was Mr. Vanstone’s study?”

“In that room, sir.”

The servant opened the door and Mr. Pendril went in.

The governess stood alone at the study window. The morning was oppressively hot, and she threw up the lower sash to admit more air into the room, as Mr. Pendril entered it.

They bowed to each other with a formal politeness, which betrayed on either side an uneasy sense of restraint. Mr. Pendril was one of the many men who appear superficially to the worst advantage, under the influence of strong mental agitation which it is necessary for them to control. Miss Garth, on her side, had not forgotten the ungraciously guarded terms in which the lawyer had replied to her letter; and the natural anxiety which she had felt on the subject of the interview was not relieved by any favorable opinion of the man who sought it. As they confronted each other in the silence of the summer’s morning — both dressed in black; Miss Garth’s hard features, gaunt and haggard with grief; the lawyer’s cold, colourless face, void of all marked expression, suggestive of a business embarrassment and of nothing more — it would have been hard to find two persons less attractive externally to any ordinary sympathies than the two who had now met together, the one to tell, the other to hear, the secrets of the dead.

“I am sincerely sorry, Miss Garth, to intrude on you at such a time as this. But circumstances, as I have already explained, leave me no other choice.”

“Will you take a seat, Mr. Pendril? You wished to see me in this room, I believe?”

“Only in this room, because Mr. Vanstone’s papers are kept here, and I may find it necessary to refer to some of them.”

After that formal interchange of question and answer, they sat down on either side of a table placed close under the window. One waited to speak, the other waited to bear. There was a momentary silence. Mr. Pendril broke it by referring to the young ladies, with the customary expressions of sympathy. Miss Garth answered him with the same ceremony, in the same conventional tone. There was a second pause of silence. The humming of flies among the evergreen shrubs under the window penetrated drowsily into the room; and the tramp of a heavy-footed cart-horse, plodding along the high-road beyond the garden, was as plainly audible in the stillness as if it had been night.

The lawyer roused his flagging resolution, and spoke to the purpose when he spoke next.

“You have some reason, Miss Garth,” he began, “to feel not quite satisfied with my past conduct toward you, in one particular. During Mrs. Vanstone’s fatal illness, you addressed a letter to me, making certain inquiries; which, while she lived, it was impossible for me to answer. Her deplorable death releases me from the restraint which I had imposed on myself, and permits — or, more properly, obliges me to speak. You shall know what serious reasons I had for waiting day and night in the hope of obtaining that interview which unhappily never took place; and in justice to Mr. Vanstone’s memory, your own eyes shall inform you that he made his will.”

He rose; unlocked a little iron safe in the corner of the room; and returned to the table with some folded sheets of paper, which he spread open under Miss Garth’s eyes. When she had read the first words, “In the name of God, Amen,” he turned the sheet, and pointed to the end of the next page. She saw the well-known signature: “Andrew Vanstone.” She saw the customary attestations of the two witnesses; and the date of the document, reverting to a period of more than five years since. Having thus convinced her of the formality of the will, the lawyer interposed before she could question him, and addressed her in these words:

“I must not deceive you,” he said. “I have my own reasons for producing this document.”

“What reasons, sir?”

“You shall hear them. When you are in possession of the truth, these pages may help to preserve your respect for Mr. Vanstone’s memory — ”

Miss Garth started back in her chair.

“What do you mean?” she asked, with a stern straightforwardness.

He took no heed of the question; he went on as if she had not interrupted him.

“I have a second reason,” he continued, “for showing you the will. If I can prevail on you to read certain clauses in it, under my superintendence, you will make your own discovery of the circumstances which I am here to disclose — circumstances so painful that I hardly know how to communicate them to you with my own lips.”

Miss Garth looked him steadfastly in the face.

“Circumstances, sir, which affect the dead parents, or the living children?”

“Which affect the dead and the living both,” answered the lawyer. “Circumstances, I grieve to say, which involve the future of Mr. Vanstone’s unhappy daughters.”

“Wait,” said Miss Garth, “wait a little.” She pushed her gray hair back from her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer’s unfathomable face. “His unhappy daughters?” she repeated to herself, vacantly. “He talks as if there was some worse calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans.” She paused once more; and rallied her sinking courage. “I will not make your hard duty, sir, more painful to you than I can help,” she resumed. “Show me the place in the will. Let me read it, and know the worst.”

Mr. Pendril turned back to the first page, and pointed to a certain place in the cramped lines of writing. “Begin here,” he said.

She tried to begin; she tried to follow his finger, as she had followed it already to the signatures and the dates. But her senses seemed to share the confusion of her mind — the words mingled together, and the lines swam before her eyes.

“I can’t follow you,” she said. “You must tell it, or read it to me.” She pushed her chair back from the table, and tried to collect herself. “Stop!” she exclaimed, as the lawyer, with visible hesitation and reluctance, took the papers in his own hand. “One question, first. Does his will provide for his children?”

“His will provided for them, when he made it.”

“When he made it!” (Something of her natural bluntness broke out in her manner as she repeated the answer.) “Does it provide for them now?”

“It does not.”

She snatched the will from his hand, and threw it into a corner of the room. “You mean well,” she said; “you wish to spare me — but you are wasting your time, and my strength. If the will is useless, there let it lie. Tell me the truth, Mr. Pendril — tell it plainly, tell it instantly, in your own words!”

He felt that it would be useless cruelty to resist that appeal. There was no merciful alternative but to answer it on the spot.

“I must refer you to the spring of the present year, Miss Garth. Do you remember the fourth of March?”

Her attention wandered again; a thought seemed to have struck her at the moment when he spoke. Instead of answering his inquiry, she put a question of her own.

“Let me break the news to myself,” she said — ”let me anticipate you, if I can. His useless will, the terms in which you speak of his daughters, the doubt you seem to feel of my continued respect for his memory, have opened a new view to me. Mr. Vanstone has died a ruined man — is that what you had to tell me?”

“Far from it. Mr. Vanstone has died, leaving a fortune of more than eighty thousand pounds — a fortune invested in excellent securities. He lived up to his income, but never beyond it; and all his debts added together would not reach two hundred pounds. If he had died a ruined man, I should have felt deeply for his children: but I should not have hesitated to tell you the truth, as I am hesitating now. Let me repeat a question which escaped you, I think, when I first put it. Carry your mind back to the spring of this year. Do you remember the fourth of March?”

Miss Garth shook her head. “My memory for dates is bad at the best of times,” she said. “I am too confused to exert it at a moment’s notice. Can you put your question in no other form?”

He put it in this form:

“Do you remember any domestic event in the spring of the present year which appeared to affect Mr. Vanstone more seriously than usual?”

Miss Garth leaned forward in her chair, and looked eagerly at Mr. Pendril across the table. “The journey to London!” she exclaimed. “I distrusted the journey to London from the first! Yes! I remember Mr. Vanstone receiving a letter — I remember his reading it, and looking so altered from himself that he startled us all.”

“Did you notice any apparent understanding between Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone on the subject of that letter?”

“Yes: I did. One of the girls — it was Magdalen — mentioned the post-mark; some place in America. It all comes back to me, Mr. Pendril. Mrs. Vanstone looked excited and anxious, the moment she heard the place named. They went to London together the next day; they explained nothing to their daughters, nothing to me. Mrs. Vanstone said the journey was for family affairs. I suspected something wrong; I couldn’t tell what. Mrs. Vanstone wrote to me from London, saying that her object was to consult a physician on the state of her health, and not to alarm her daughters by telling them. Something in the letter rather hurt me at the time. I thought there might be some other motive that she was keeping from me. Did I do her wrong?”

“You did her no wrong. There was a motive which she was keeping from you. In revealing that motive, I reveal the painful secret which brings me to this house. All that I could do to prepare you, I have done. Let me now tell the truth in the plainest and fewest words. When Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone left Combe-Raven, in the March of the present year — ”

Before he could complete the sentence, a sudden movement of Miss Garth’s interrupted him. She started violently, and looked round toward the window. “Only the wind among the leaves,” she said, faintly. “My nerves are so shaken, the least thing startles me. Speak out, for God’s sake! When Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone left this house, tell me in plain words, why did they go to London?”

In plain words, Mr. Pendril told her:

“They went to London to be married.”

With that answer he placed a slip of paper on the table. It was the marriage certificate of the dead parents, and the date it bore was March the twentieth, eighteen hundred and forty-six.

Miss Garth neither moved nor spoke. The certificate lay beneath her unnoticed. She sat with her eyes rooted on the lawyer’s face; her mind stunned, her senses helpless. He saw that all his efforts to break the shock of the discovery had been efforts made in vain; he felt the vital importance of rousing her, and firmly and distinctly repeated the fatal words.