Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (702 page)

She sank on the nearest chair, and closed her eyes in a flutter of delicious confusion.

The footsteps ascending to the summer-house came nearer. Blanche opened her eyes, and saw Anne Silvester, standing alone, looking at her. She sprang to her feet, and threw her arms impulsively round Anne’s neck.

“You don’t know what has happened,” she whispered. “Wish me joy, darling. He has said the words. He is mine for life!”

All the sisterly love and sisterly confidence of many years was expressed in that embrace, and in the tone in which the words were spoken. The hearts of the mothers, in the past time, could hardly have been closer to each other — as it seemed — than the hearts of the daughters were now. And yet, if Blanche had looked up in Anne’s face at that moment, she must have seen that Anne’s mind was far away from her little love-story.

“You know who it is?” she went on, after waiting for a reply.

“Mr. Brinkworth?”

“Of course! Who else should it be?”

“And you are really happy, my love?”

“Happy?” repeated Blanche “Mind! this is strictly between ourselves. I am ready to jump out of my skin for joy. I love him! I love him! I love him!” she cried, with a childish pleasure in repeating the words. They were echoed by a heavy sigh. Blanche instantly looked up into Anne’s face. “What’s the matter?” she asked, with a sudden change of voice and manner.

“Nothing.”

Blanche’s observation saw too plainly to be blinded in that way.

“There
is
something the matter,” she said. “Is it money?” she added, after a moment’s consideration. “Bills to pay? I have got plenty of money, Anne. I’ll lend you what you like.”

“No, no, my dear!”

Blanche drew back, a little hurt. Anne was keeping her at a distance for the first time in Blanche’s experience of her.

“I tell you all my secrets,” she said. “Why are
you
keeping a secret from
me?
Do you know that you have been looking anxious and out of spirits for some time past? Perhaps you don’t like Mr. Brinkworth? No? you
do
like him? Is it my marrying, then? I believe it is! You fancy we shall be parted, you goose? As if I could do without you! Of course, when I am married to Arnold, you will come and live with us. That’s quite understood between us — isn’t it?”

Anne drew herself suddenly, almost roughly, away from Blanche, and pointed out to the steps.

“There is somebody coming,” she said. “Look!”

The person coming was Arnold. It was Blanche’s turn to play, and he had volunteered to fetch her.

Blanche’s attention — easily enough distracted on other occasions — remained steadily fixed on Anne.

“You are not yourself,” she said, “and I must know the reason of it. I will wait till to-night; and then you will tell me, when you come into my room. Don’t look like that! You
shall
tell me. And there’s a kiss for you in the mean time!”

She joined Arnold, and recovered her gayety the moment she looked at him.

“Well? Have you got through the hoops?”

“Never mind the hoops. I have broken the ice with Sir Patrick.”

“What! before all the company!”

“Of course not! I have made an appointment to speak to him here.”

They went laughing down the steps, and joined the game.

Left alone, Anne Silvester walked slowly to the inner and darker part of the summer-house. A glass, in a carved wooden frame, was fixed against one of the side walls. She stopped and looked into it — looked, shuddering, at the reflection of herself.

“Is the time coming,” she said, “when even Blanche will see what I am in my face?”

She turned aside from the glass. With a sudden cry of despair she flung up her arms and laid them heavily against the wall, and rested her head on them with her back to the light. At the same moment a man’s figure appeared — standing dark in the flood of sunshine at the entrance to the summer-house. The man was Geoffrey Delamayn.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH.

THE TWO.

He advanced a few steps, and stopped. Absorbed in herself, Anne failed to hear him. She never moved.

“I have come, as you made a point of it,” he said, sullenly. “But, mind you, it isn’t safe.”

At the sound of his voice, Anne turned toward him. A change of expression appeared in her face, as she slowly advanced from the back of the summer-house, which revealed a likeness to her moth er, not perceivable at other times. As the mother had looked, in by-gone days, at the man who had disowned her, so the daughter looked at Geoffrey Delamayn — with the same terrible composure, and the same terrible contempt.

“Well?” he asked. “What have you got to say to me?”

“Mr. Delamayn,” she answered, “you are one of the fortunate people of this world. You are a nobleman’s son. You are a handsome man. You are popular at your college. You are free of the best houses in England. Are you something besides all this? Are you a coward and a scoundrel as well?”

He started — opened his lips to speak — checked himself — and made an uneasy attempt to laugh it off. “Come!” he said, “keep your temper.”

The suppressed passion in her began to force its way to the surface.

“Keep my temper?” she repeated. “Do
you
of all men expect me to control myself? What a memory yours must be! Have you forgotten the time when I was fool enough to think you were fond of me? and mad enough to believe you could keep a promise?”

He persisted in trying to laugh it off. “Mad is a strongish word to use, Miss Silvester!”

“Mad is the right word! I look back at my own infatuation — and I can’t account for it; I can’t understand myself. What was there in
you
,” she asked, with an outbreak of contemptuous surprise, “to attract such a woman as I am?”

His inexhaustible good-nature was proof even against this. He put his hands in his pockets, and said, “I’m sure I don’t know.”

She turned away from him. The frank brutality of the answer had not offended her. It forced her, cruelly forced her, to remember that she had nobody but herself to blame for the position in which she stood at that moment. She was unwilling to let him see how the remembrance hurt her — that was all. A sad, sad story; but it must be told. In her mother’s time she had been the sweetest, the most lovable of children. In later days, under the care of her mother’s friend, her girlhood had passed so harmlessly and so happily — it seemed as if the sleeping passions might sleep forever! She had lived on to the prime of her womanhood — and then, when the treasure of her life was at its richest, in one fatal moment she had flung it away on the man in whose presence she now stood.

Was she without excuse? No: not utterly without excuse.

She had seen him under other aspects than the aspect which he presented now. She had seen him, the hero of the river-race, the first and foremost man in a trial of strength and skill which had roused the enthusiasm of all England. She had seen him, the central object of the interest of a nation; the idol of the popular worship and the popular applause.
His
were the arms whose muscle was celebrated in the newspapers.
He
was first among the heroes hailed by ten thousand roaring throats as the pride and flower of England. A woman, in an atmosphere of red-hot enthusiasm, witnesses the apotheosis of Physical Strength. Is it reasonable — is it just — to expect her to ask herself, in cold blood, What (morally and intellectually) is all this worth? — and that, when the man who is the object of the apotheosis, notices her, is presented to her, finds her to his taste, and singles her out from the rest? No. While humanity is humanity, the woman is not utterly without excuse.

Has she escaped, without suffering for it?

Look at her as she stands there, tortured by the knowledge of her own secret — the hideous secret which she is hiding from the innocent girl, whom she loves with a sister’s love. Look at her, bowed down under a humiliation which is unutterable in words. She has seen him below the surface — now, when it is too late. She rates him at his true value — now, when her reputation is at his mercy. Ask her the question: What was there to love in a man who can speak to you as that man has spoken, who can treat you as that man is treating you now? you so clever, so cultivated, so refined — what, in Heaven’s name, could
you
see in him? Ask her that, and she will have no answer to give. She will not even remind you that he was once your model of manly beauty, too — that you waved your handkerchief till you could wave it no longer, when he took his seat, with the others, in the boat — that your heart was like to jump out of your bosom, on that later occasion when he leaped the last hurdle at the foot-race, and won it by a head. In the bitterness of her remorse, she will not even seek for
that
excuse for herself. Is there no atoning suffering to be seen here? Do your sympathies shrink from such a character as this? Follow her, good friends of virtue, on the pilgrimage that leads, by steep and thorny ways, to the purer atmosphere and the nobler life. Your fellow-creature, who has sinned and has repented — you have the authority of the Divine Teacher for it — is your fellow-creature, purified and ennobled. A joy among the angels of heaven — oh, my brothers and sisters of the earth, have I not laid my hand on a fit companion for You?

There was a moment of silence in the summer-house. The cheerful tumult of the lawn-party was pleasantly audible from the distance. Outside, the hum of voices, the laughter of girls, the thump of the croquet-mallet against the ball. Inside, nothing but a woman forcing back the bitter tears of sorrow and shame — and a man who was tired of her.

She roused herself. She was her mother’s daughter; and she had a spark of her mother’s spirit. Her life depended on the issue of that interview. It was useless — without father or brother to take her part — to lose the last chance of appealing to him. She dashed away the tears — time enough to cry, is time easily found in a woman’s existence — she dashed away the tears, and spoke to him again, more gently than she had spoken yet.

“You have been three weeks, Geoffrey, at your brother Julius’s place, not ten miles from here; and you have never once ridden over to see me. You would not have come to-day, if I had not written to you to insist on it. Is that the treatment I have deserved?”

She paused. There was no answer.

“Do you hear me?” she asked, advancing and speaking in louder tones.

He was still silent. It was not in human endurance to bear his contempt. The warning of a coming outbreak began to show itself in her face. He met it, beforehand, with an impenetrable front. Feeling nervous about the interview, while he was waiting in the rose-garden — now that he stood committed to it, he was in full possession of himself. He was composed enough to remember that he had not put his pipe in its case — composed enough to set that little matter right before other matters went any farther. He took the case out of one pocket, and the pipe out of another.

“Go on,” he said, quietly. “I hear you.”

She struck the pipe out of his hand at a blow. If she had had the strength she would have struck him down with it on the floor of the summer-house.

“How dare you use me in this way?” she burst out, vehemently. “Your conduct is infamous. Defend it if you can!”

He made no attempt to defend it. He looked, with an expression of genuine anxiety, at the fallen pipe. It was beautifully coloured — it had cost him ten shillings. “I’ll pick up my pipe first,” he said. His face brightened pleasantly — he looked handsomer than ever — as he examined the precious object, and put it back in the case. “All right,” he said to himself. “She hasn’t broken it.” His attitude as he looked at her again, was the perfection of easy grace — the grace that attends on cultivated strength in a state of repose. “I put it to your own common-sense,” he said, in the most reasonable manner, “what’s the good of bullying me? You don’t want them to hear you, out on the lawn there — do you? You women are all alike. There’s no beating a little prudence into your heads, try how one may.”