Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (573 page)

This time, Mr. Bashwood felt the sting. Without another word of expostulation or entreaty, without even saying “Good-morning” on his side, he walked to the door, opened it, softly, and left the room.

The parting look in his face, and the sudden silence that had fallen on him, were not lost on Pedgift Senior. “Bashwood will end badly,” said the lawyer, shuffling his papers, and returning impenetrably to his interrupted work.

The change in Mr. Bashwood’s face and manner to something dogged and self-contained was so startlingly uncharacteristic of him, that it even forced itself on the notice of Pedgift Junior and the clerks as he passed through the outer office. Accustomed to make the old man their butt, they took a boisterously comic view of the marked alteration in him. Deaf to the merciless raillery with which he was assailed on all sides, he stopped opposite young Pedgift, and, looking him attentively in the face, said, in a quiet, absent manner, like a man thinking aloud, “I wonder whether
you
would help me?”

“Open an account instantly,” said Pedgift Junior to the clerks, “in the name of Mr. Bashwood. Place a chair for Mr. Bashwood, with a footstool close by, in case he wants it. Supply me with a quire of extra double-wove satin paper, and a gross of picked quills, to take notes of Mr. Bashwood’s case; and inform my father instantly that I am going to leave him and set up in business for myself, on the strength of Mr. Bashwood’s patronage. Take a seat, sir, pray take a seat, and express your feelings freely.”

Still impenetrably deaf to the raillery of which he was the object, Mr. Bashwood waited until Pedgift Junior had exhausted himself, and then turned quietly away.

“I ought to have known better,” he said, in the same absent manner as before. “He is his father’s son all over — he would make game of me on my death-bed.” He paused a moment at the door, mechanically brushing his hat with his hand, and went out into the street.

The bright sunshine dazzled his eyes, the passing vehicles and foot-passengers startled and bewildered him. He shrank into a by-street, and put his hand over his eyes. “I’d better go home,” he thought, “and shut myself up, and think about it in my own room.”

His lodging was in a small house, in the poor quarter of the town. He let himself in with his key, and stole softly upstairs. The one little room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it where he might, with silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the chimney-piece were the flowers she had given him at various times, all withered long since, and all preserved on a little china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the wall hung a wretched coloured print of a woman, which he had caused to be nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that reminded him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk were the few letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written to him at the time when he was watching and listening meanly at Thorpe Ambrose to please
her
. And when, turning his back on these, he sat down wearily on his sofa-bedstead — there, hanging over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat of blue satin, which he had bought because she had told him she liked bright colours, and which he had never yet had the courage to wear, though he had taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to put it on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in his language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing that could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with an oath.

The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand between Miss Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was as far as ever from discovering the means which might lead him to his end. The more he thought and thought of it, the darker and the darker his course in the future looked to him.

He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his cupboard. “I’m feverish and thirsty,” he said; “a cup of tea may help me.” He opened his canister, and measured out his small allowance of tea, less carefully than usual. “Even my own hands won’t serve me to-day!” he thought, as he scraped together the few grains of tea that he had spilled, and put them carefully back in the canister.

In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the kitchen fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his teapot in his hand.

Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice was of the lighter sort — the vice of curiosity; and among the many counterbalancing virtues she possessed was the virtue of greatly respecting Mr. Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from one year’s end to another.

“What did you please to want, sir?” asked the landlady. “Boiling water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr. Bashwood, when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that? I’ll put a stick or two in, if you’ll wait a little, and give me the chance. Dear, dear me, you’ll excuse my mentioning it, sir, but how poorly you do look to-day!”

The strain on Mr. Bashwood’s mind was beginning to tell. Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on the kitchen table and sat down.

“I’m in trouble, ma’am,” he said, quietly; “and I find trouble gets harder to bear than it used to be.”

“Ah, you may well say that!” groaned the landlady. “
I’m
ready for the undertaker, Mr. Bashwood, when
my
time comes, whatever you may be. You’re too lonely, sir. When you’re in trouble, it’s some help — though not much — to shift a share of it off on another person’s shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now, sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn’t you?”

A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr. Bashwood’s face. The landlady had ignorantly recalled him to the misfortunes of his married life. He had been long since forced to quiet her curiosity about his family affairs by telling her that he was a widower, and that his domestic circumstances had not been happy ones; but he had taken her no further into his confidence than this. The sad story which he had related to Midwinter, of his drunken wife who had ended her miserable life in a lunatic asylum, was a story which he had shrunk from confiding to the talkative woman, who would have confided it in her turn to every one else in the house.

“What I always say to my husband when he’s low, sir,” pursued the landlady, intent on the kettle, “is, ‘What would you do
now
, Sam, without me?’ When his temper don’t get the better of him (it will boil directly, Mr. Bashwood), he says, ‘Elizabeth, I could do nothing.’ When his temper does get the better of him, he says, ‘I should try the public-house, missus; and I’ll try it now.’ Ah, I’ve got
my
troubles! A man with grown-up sons and daughters tippling in a public-house! I don’t call to mind, Mr. Bashwood, whether
you
ever had any sons and daughters? And yet, now I think of it, I seem to fancy you said yes, you had. Daughters, sir, weren’t they? and, ah, dear! dear! to be sure! all dead.”

“I had one daughter, ma’am,” said Mr. Bashwood, patiently — ”only one, who died before she was a year old.”

“Only one!” repeated the sympathising landlady. “It’s as near boiling as it ever will be, sir; give me the tea-pot. Only one! Ah, it comes heavier (don’t it?) when it’s an only child? You said it was an only child, I think, didn’t you, sir?”

For a moment, Mr. Bashwood looked at the woman with vacant eyes, and without attempting to answer her. After ignorantly recalling the memory of the wife who had disgraced him, she was now, as ignorantly, forcing him back on the miserable remembrance of the son who had ruined and deserted him. For the first time, since he had told his story to Midwinter, at their introductory interview in the great house, his mind reverted once more to the bitter disappointment and disaster of the past. Again he thought of the bygone days, when he had become security for his son, and when that son’s dishonesty had forced him to sell everything he possessed to pay the forfeit that was exacted when the forfeit was due. “I have a son, ma’am,” he said, becoming conscious that the landlady was looking at him in mute and melancholy surprise. “I did my best to help him forward in the world, and he has behaved very badly to me.”

“Did he, now?” rejoined the landlady, with an appearance of the greatest interest. “Behaved badly to you — almost broke your heart, didn’t he? Ah, it will come home to him, sooner or later. Don’t you fear! ‘Honour your father and mother,’ wasn’t put on Moses’s tables of stone for nothing, Mr. Bashwood. Where may he be, and what is he doing now, sir?”

The question was in effect almost the same as the question which Midwinter had put when the circumstances had been described to him. As Mr. Bashwood had answered it on the former occasion, so (in nearly the same words) he answered it now.

“My son is in London, ma’am, for all I know to the contrary. He was employed, when I last heard of him, in no very creditable way, at the Private Inquiry Office — ”

At those words he suddenly checked himself. His face flushed, his eyes brightened; he pushed away the cup which had just been filled for him, and rose from his seat. The landlady started back a step. There was something in her lodger’s face that she had never seen in it before.

“I hope I’ve not offended you, sir,” said the woman, recovering her self-possession, and looking a little too ready to take offense on her side, at a moment’s notice.

“Far from it, ma’am, far from it!” he rejoined, in a strangely eager, hurried way. “I have just remembered something — something very important. I must go upstairs — it’s a letter, a letter, a letter. I’ll come back to my tea, ma’am. I beg your pardon, I’m much obliged to you, you’ve been very kind — I’ll say good-by, if you’ll allow me, for the present.” To the landlady’s amazement, he cordially shook hands with her, and made for the door, leaving tea and tea-pot to take care of themselves.

The moment he reached his own room, he locked himself in. For a little while he stood holding by the chimney-piece, waiting to recover his breath. The moment he could move again, he opened his writing-desk on the table. “That for you, Mr. Pedgift and Son!” he said, with a snap of his fingers as he sat down. “I’ve got a son too!”

There was a knock at the door — a knock, soft, considerate, and confidential. The anxious landlady wished to know whether Mr. Bashwood was ill, and begged to intimate for the second time that she earnestly trusted she had given him no offense.

“No! no!” he called through the door. “I’m quite well — I’m writing, ma’am, I’m writing — please to excuse me. She’s a good woman; she’s an excellent woman,” he thought, when the landlady had retired. “I’ll make her a little present. My mind’s so unsettled, I might never have thought of it but for her. Oh, if my boy is at the office still! Oh, if I can only write a letter that will make him pity me!”

He took up his pen, and sat thinking anxiously, thinking long, before he touched the paper. Slowly, with many patient pauses to think and think again, and with more than ordinary care to make his writing legible, he traced these lines:

“MY DEAR JAMES — You will be surprised, I am afraid, to see my handwriting. Pray don’t suppose I am going to ask you for money, or to reproach you for having sold me out of house and home when you forfeited your security, and I had to pay. I am willing and anxious to let by-gones be by-gones, and to forget the past.

“It is in your power (if you are still at the Private Inquiry Office) to do me a great service. I am in sore anxiety and trouble on the subject of a person in whom I am interested. The person is a lady. Please don’t make game of me for confessing this, if you can help it. If you knew what I am now suffering, I think you would be more inclined to pity than to make game of me.

“I would enter into particulars, only I know your quick temper, and I fear exhausting your patience. Perhaps it may be enough to say that I have reason to believe the lady’s past life has not been a very creditable one, and that I am interested — more interested than words can tell — in finding out what her life has really been, and in making the discovery within a fortnight from the present time.

“Though I know very little about the ways of business in an office like yours, I can understand that, without first having the lady’s present address, nothing can be done to help me. Unfortunately, I am not yet acquainted with her present address. I only know that she went to town to-day, accompanied by a gentleman, in whose employment I now am, and who (as I believe) will be likely to write to me for money before many days more are over his head.