Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (389 page)

“The meeting of that night decided their future. When other meetings had followed, when the confession of her love had escaped her, he took the one course of all others (took it innocently and unconsciously), which was most dangerous to them both. His frankness and his sense of honour forbade him to deceive her: he opened his heart and told her the truth. She was a generous, impulsive girl; she had no home ties strong enough to plead with her; she was passionately fond of him — and he had made that appeal to her pity which, to the eternal honour of women, is the hardest of all appeals for them to resist. She saw, and saw truly, that she alone stood between him and his ruin. The last chance of his rescue hung on her decision. She decided; and saved him.

“Let me not be misunderstood; let me not be accused of trifling with the serious social question on which my narrative forces me to touch. I will defend her memory by no false reasoning — I will only speak the truth. It is the truth that she snatched him from mad excesses which must have ended in his early death. It is the truth that she restored him to that happy home existence which you remember so tenderly — which
he
remembered so gratefully that, on the day when he was free, he made her his wife. Let strict morality claim its right, and condemn her early fault. I have read my New Testament to little purpose, indeed, if Christian mercy may not soften the hard sentence against her — if Christian charity may not find a plea for her memory in the love and fidelity, the suffering and the sacrifice, of her whole life.

“A few words more will bring us to a later time, and to events which have happened within your own experience.

“I need not remind you that the position in which Mr. Vanstone was now placed could lead in the end to but one result — to a disclosure, more or less inevitable, of the truth. Attempts were made to keep the hopeless misfortune of his life a secret from Miss Blake’s family; and, as a matter of course, those attempts failed before the relentless scrutiny of her father and her friends. What might have happened if her relatives had been what is termed ‘respectable’ I cannot pretend to say. As it was, they were people who could (in the common phrase) be conveniently treated with. The only survivor of the family at the present time is a scoundrel calling himself Captain Wragge. When I tell you that he privately extorted the price of his silence from Mrs. Vanstone to the last; and when I add that his conduct presents no extraordinary exception to the conduct, in their lifetime, of the other relatives — you will understand what sort of people I had to deal with in my client’s interests, and how their assumed indignation was appeased.

“Having, in the first instance, left England for Ireland, Mr. Vanstone and Miss Blake remained there afterward for some years. Girl as she was, she faced her position and its necessities without flinching. Having once resolved to sacrifice her life to the man she loved; having quieted her conscience by persuading herself that his marriage was a legal mockery, and that she was ‘his wife in the sight of Heaven,’ she set herself from the first to accomplish the one foremost purpose of so living with him, in the world’s eye, as never to raise the suspicion that she was not his lawful wife. The women are few, indeed, who cannot resolve firmly, scheme patiently, and act promptly where the dearest interests of their lives are concerned. Mrs. Vanstone — she has a right now, remember, to that name — Mrs. Vanstone had more than the average share of a woman’s tenacity and a woman’s tact; and she took all the needful precautions, in those early days, which her husband’s less ready capacity had not the art to devise — precautions to which they were largely indebted for the preservation of their secret in later times.

“Thanks to these safeguards, not a shadow of suspicion followed them when they returned to England. They first settled in Devonshire, merely because they were far removed there from that northern county in which Mr. Vanstone’s family and connections had been known. On the part of his surviving relatives, they had no curious investigations to dread. He was totally estranged from his mother and his elder brother. His married sister had been forbidden by her husband (who was a clergyman) to hold any communication with him, from the period when he had fallen into the deplorable way of life which I have described as following his return from Canada. Other relations he had none. When he and Miss Blake left Devonshire, their next change of residence was to this house. Neither courting nor avoiding notice; simply happy in themselves, in their children, and in their quiet rural life; unsuspected by the few neighbours who formed their modest circle of acquaintance to be other than what they seemed — the truth in their case, as in the cases of many others, remained undiscovered until accident forced it into the light of day.

“If, in your close intimacy with them, it seems strange that they should never have betrayed themselves, let me ask you to consider the circumstances and you will understand the apparent anomaly. Remember that they had been living as husband and wife, to all intents and purposes (except that the marriage-service had not been read over them), for fifteen years before you came into the house; and bear in mind, at the same time, that no event occurred to disturb Mr. Vanstone’s happiness in the present, to remind him of the past, or to warn him of the future, until the announcement of his wife’s death reached him, in that letter from America which you saw placed in his hand. From that day forth — when a past which
he
abhorred was forced back to his memory; when a future which
she
had never dared to anticipate was placed within her reach — you will soon perceive, if you have not perceived already, that they both betrayed themselves, time after time; and that your innocence of all suspicion, and their children’s innocence of all suspicion, alone prevented you from discovering the truth.

“The sad story of the past is now as well known to you as to me. I have had hard words to speak. God knows I have spoken them with true sympathy for the living, with true tenderness for the memory of the dead.”

He paused, turned his face a little away, and rested his head on his hand, in the quiet, undemonstrative manner which was natural to him. Thus far, Miss Garth had only interrupted his narrative by an occasional word or by a mute token of her attention. She made no effort to conceal her tears; they fell fast and silently over her wasted cheeks, as she looked up and spoke to him. “I have done you some injury, sir, in my thoughts,” she said, with a noble simplicity. “I know you better now. Let me ask your forgiveness; let me take your hand.”

Those words, and the action which accompanied them, touched him deeply. He took her hand in silence. She was the first to speak, the first to set the example of self-control. It is one of the noble instincts of women that nothing more powerfully rouses them to struggle with their own sorrow than the sight of a man’s distress. She quietly dried her tears; she quietly drew her chair round the table, so as to sit nearer to him when she spoke again.

“I have been sadly broken, Mr. Pendril, by what has happened in this house,” she said, “or I should have borne what you have told me better than I have borne it to-day. Will you let me ask one question before you go on? My heart aches for the children of my love — more than ever my children now. Is there no hope for their future? Are they left with no prospect but poverty before them?”

The lawyer hesitated before he answered the question.

“They are left dependent,” he said, at last, “on the justice and the mercy of a stranger.”

“Through the misfortune of their birth?”

“Through the misfortunes which have followed the marriage of their parents.”

With that startling answer he rose, took up the will from the floor, and restored it to its former position on the table between them.

“I can only place the truth before you,” he resumed, “in one plain form of words. The marriage has destroyed this will, and has left Mr. Vanstone’s daughters dependent on their uncle.”

As he spoke, the breeze stirred again among the shrubs under the window.

“On their uncle?” repeated Miss Garth. She considered for a moment, and laid her hand suddenly on Mr. Pendril’s arm. “Not on Michael Vanstone!”

“Yes: on Michael Vanstone.”

Miss Garth’s hand still mechanically grasped the lawyer’s arm. Her whole mind was absorbed in the effort to realize the discovery which had now burst on her.

“Dependent on Michael Vanstone!” she said to herself. “Dependent on their father’s bitterest enemy? How can it be?”

“Give me your attention for a few minutes more,” said Mr. Pendril, “and you shall hear. The sooner we can bring this painful interview to a close, the sooner I can open communications with Mr. Michael Vanstone, and the sooner you will know what he decides on doing for his brother’s orphan daughters. I repeat to you that they are absolutely dependent on him. You will most readily understand how and why, if we take up the chain of events where we last left it — at the period of Mr. and Mrs. Vanstone’s marriage.”

“One moment, sir,” said Miss Garth. “Were you in the secret of that marriage at the time when it took place?”

“Unhappily, I was not. I was away from London — away from England at the time. If Mr. Vanstone had been able to communicate with me when the letter from America announced the death of his wife, the fortunes of his daughters would not have been now at stake.”

He paused, and, before proceeding further, looked once more at the letters which he had consulted at an earlier period of the interview. He took one letter from the rest, and put it on the table by his side.

“At the beginning of the present year,” he resumed, “a very serious business necessity, in connection with some West Indian property possessed by an old client and friend of mine, required the presence either of myself, or of one of my two partners, in Jamaica. One of the two could not be spared; the other was not in health to undertake the voyage. There was no choice left but for me to go. I wrote to Mr. Vanstone, telling him that I should leave England at the end of February, and that the nature of the business which took me away afforded little hope of my getting back from the West Indies before June. My letter was not written with any special motive. I merely thought it right — seeing that my partners were not admitted to my knowledge of Mr. Vanstone’s private affairs — to warn him of my absence, as a measure of formal precaution which it was right to take. At the end of February I left England, without having heard from him. I was on the sea when the news of his wife’s death reached him, on the fourth of March: and I did not return until the middle of last June.”

“You warned him of your departure,” interposed Miss Garth. “Did you not warn him of your return?”

“Not personally. My head-clerk sent him one of the circulars which were dispatched from my office, in various directions, to announce my return. It was the first substitute I thought of for the personal letter which the pressure of innumerable occupations, all crowding on me together after my long absence, did not allow me leisure to write. Barely a month later, the first information of his marriage reached me in a letter from himself, written on the day of the fatal accident. The circumstances which induced him to write arose out of an event in which you must have taken some interest — I mean the attachment between Mr. Clare’s son and Mr. Vanstone’s youngest daughter.”

“I cannot say that I was favorably disposed toward that attachment at the time,” replied Miss Garth. “I was ignorant then of the family secret: I know better now.”

“Exactly. The motive which you can now appreciate is the motive that leads us to the point. The young lady herself (as I have heard from the elder Mr. Clare, to whom I am indebted for my knowledge of the circumstances in detail) confessed her attachment to her father, and innocently touched him to the quick by a chance reference to his own early life. He had a long conversation with Mrs. Vanstone, at which they both agreed that Mr. Clare must be privately informed of the truth, before the attachment between the two young people was allowed to proceed further. It was painful in the last degree, both to husband and wife, to be reduced to this alternative. But they were resolute, honourably resolute, in making the sacrifice of their own feelings; and Mr. Vanstone betook himself on the spot to Mr. Clare’s cottage. — You no doubt observed a remarkable change in Mr. Vanstone’s manner on that day; and you can now account for it?”

Miss Garth bowed her head, and Mr. Pendril went on.

“You are sufficiently acquainted with Mr. Clare’s contempt for all social prejudices,” he continued, “to anticipate his reception of the confession which his neighbour addressed to him. Five minutes after the interview had begun, the two old friends were as easy and unrestrained together as usual. In the course of conversation, Mr. Vanstone mentioned the pecuniary arrangement which he had made for the benefit of his daughter and of her future husband — and, in doing so, he naturally referred to his will here, on the table between us. Mr. Clare, remembering that his friend had been married in the March of that year, at once asked when the will had been executed: receiving the reply that it had been made five years since; and, thereupon, astounded Mr. Vanstone by telling him bluntly that the document was waste paper in the eye of the law. Up to that moment he, like many other persons, had been absolutely ignorant that a man’s marriage is, legally as well as socially, considered to be the most important event in his life; that it destroys the validity of any will which he may have made as a single man; and that it renders absolutely necessary the entire re-assertion of his testamentary intentions in the character of a husband. The statement of this plain fact appeared to overwhelm Mr. Vanstone. Declaring that his friend had laid him under an obligation which he should remember to his dying day, he at once left the cottage, at once returned home, and wrote me this letter.”