Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (876 page)

“Your ladyship is too kind to me.”

“It is impossible to be too kind to you.”

Mercy started. The colour flowed charmingly over her pale face. “Oh!” she exclaimed, impulsively. “Say that again!”

“Say it again?” repeated Lady Janet, with a look of surprise.

“Yes! Don’t think me presuming; only think me vain. I can’t hear you say too often that you have learned to like me. Is it really a pleasure to you to have me in the house? Have I always behaved well since I have been with you?”

(The one excuse for the act of personation — if excuse there could be — lay in the affirmative answer to those questions. It would be something, surely, to say of the false Grace that the true Grace could not have been worthier of her welcome, if the true Grace had been received at Mablethorpe House!)

Lady Janet was partly touched, partly amused, by the extraordinary earnestness of the appeal that had been made to her.

“Have you behaved well?” she repeated. “My dear, you talk as if you were a child!” She laid her hand caressingly on Mercy’s arm, and continued, in a graver tone: “It is hardly too much to say, Grace, that I bless the day when you first came to me. I do believe I could be hardly fonder of you if you were my own daughter.”

Mercy suddenly turned her head aside, so as to hide her face. Lady Janet, still touching her arm, felt it tremble. “What is the matter with you?” she asked, in her abrupt, downright manner.

“I am only very grateful to your ladyship — that is all.” The words were spoken faintly, in broken tones. The face was still averted from Lady Janet’s view. “What have I said to provoke this?” wondered the old lady. “Is she in the melting mood to-day? If she is, now is the time to say a word for Horace!” Keeping that excellent object in view, Lady Janet approached the delicate topic with all needful caution at starting.

“We have got on so well together,” she resumed, “that it will not be easy for either of us to feel reconciled to a change in our lives. At my age, it will fall hardest on me. What shall I do, Grace, when the day comes for parting with my adopted daughter?”

Mercy started, and showed her face again. The traces of tears were in her eyes. “Why should I leave you?” she asked, in a tone of alarm.

“Surely you know!” exclaimed Lady Janet.

“Indeed I don’t. Tell me why.”

“Ask Horace to tell you.”

The last allusion was too plain to be misunderstood. Mercy’s head drooped. She began to tremble again. Lady Janet looked at her in blank amazement.

“Is there anything wrong between Horace and you?” she asked.

“No.”

“You know your own heart, my dear child? You have surely not encouraged Horace without loving him?”

“Oh no!”

“And yet — ”

For the first time in their experience of each other Mercy ventured to interrupt her benefactress. “Dear Lady Janet,” she interposed, gently, “I am in no hurry to be married. There will be plenty of time in the future to talk of that. You had something you wished to say to me. What is it?”

It was no easy matter to disconcert Lady Janet Roy. But that last question fairly reduced her to silence. After all that had passed, there sat her young companion, innocent of the faintest suspicion of the subject that was to be discussed between them! “What are the young women of the present time made of?” thought the old lady, utterly at a loss to know what to say next. Mercy waited, on her side, with an impenetrable patience which only aggravated the difficulties of the position. The silence was fast threatening to bring the interview to a sudden and untimely end, when the door from the library opened, and a man-servant, bearing a little silver salver, entered the room.

Lady Janet’s rising sense of annoyance instantly seized on the servant as a victim. “What do you want?” she asked, sharply. “I never rang for you.”

“A letter, my lady. The messenger waits for an answer.”

The man presented his salver with the letter on it, and withdrew.

Lady Janet recognised the handwriting on the address with a look of surprise. “Excuse me, my dear,” she said, pausing, with her old-fashioned courtesy, before she opened the envelope. Mercy made the necessary acknowledgment, and moved away to the other end of the room, little thinking that the arrival of the letter marked a crisis in her life. Lady Janet put on her spectacles. “Odd that he should have come back already!” she said to herself, as she threw the empty envelope on the table.

The letter contained these lines, the writer of them being no other than the man who had preached in the chapel of the Refuge:

“DEAR AUNT — I am back again in London before my time. My friend the rector has shortened his holiday, and has resumed his duties in the country. I am afraid you will blame me when you hear of the reasons which have hastened his return. The sooner I make my confession, the easier I shall feel. Besides, I have a special object in wishing to see you as soon as possible. May I follow my letter to Mablethorpe House? And may I present a lady to you — a perfect stranger — in whom I am interested? Pray say Yes, by the bearer, and oblige your affectionate nephew,

“JULIAN GRAY.”

Lady Janet referred again suspiciously to the sentence in the letter which alluded to the “lady.”

Julian Gray was her only surviving nephew, the son of a favorite sister whom she had lost. He would have held no very exalted position in the estimation of his aunt — who regarded his views in politics and religion with the strongest aversion — but for his marked resemblance to his mother. This pleaded for him with the old lady, aided as it was by the pride that she secretly felt in the early celebrity which the young clergyman had achieved as a writer and a preacher. Thanks to these mitigating circumstances, and to Julian’s inexhaustible good-humor, the aunt and the nephew generally met on friendly terms. Apart from what she called “his detestable opinions,” Lady Janet was sufficiently interested in Julian to feel some curiosity about the mysterious “lady” mentioned in the letter. Had he determined to settle in life? Was his choice already made? And if so, would it prove to be a choice acceptable to the family? Lady Janet’s bright face showed signs of doubt as she asked herself that last question. Julian’s liberal views were capable of leading him to dangerous extremes. His aunt shook her head ominously as she rose from the sofa and advanced to the library door.

“Grace,” she said, pausing and turning round, “I have a note to write to my nephew. I shall be back directly.”

Mercy approached her, from the opposite extremity of the room, with an exclamation of surprise.

“Your nephew?” she repeated. “Your ladyship never told me you had a nephew.”

Lady Janet laughed. “I must have had it on the tip of my tongue to tell you, over and over again,” she said. “But we have had so many things to talk about — and, to own the truth, my nephew is not one of my favorite subjects of conversation. I don’t mean that I dislike him; I detest his principles, my dear, that’s all. However, you shall form your own opinion of him; he is coming to see me to-day. Wait here till I return; I have something more to say about Horace.”

Mercy opened the library door for her, closed it again, and walked slowly to and fro alone in the room, thinking.

Was her mind running on Lady Janet’s nephew? No. Lady Janet’s brief allusion to her relative had not led her into alluding to him by his name. Mercy was still as ignorant as ever that the preacher at the Refuge and the nephew of her benefactress were one and the same man. Her memory was busy now with the tribute which Lady Janet had paid to her at the outset of the interview between them: “It is hardly too much to say, Grace, that I bless the day when you first came to me.” For the moment there was balm for her wounded spirit in the remembrance of those words. Grace Roseberry herself could surely have earned no sweeter praise than the praise that she had won. The next instant she was seized with a sudden horror of her own successful fraud. The sense of her degradation had never been so bitterly present to her as at that moment. If she could only confess the truth — if she could innocently enjoy her harmless life at Mablethorpe House — what a grateful, happy woman she might be! Was it possible (if she made the confession) to trust to her own good conduct to plead her excuse? No! Her calmer sense warned her that it was hopeless. The place she had won — honestly won — in Lady Janet’s estimation had been obtained by a trick. Nothing could alter, nothing could excuse,
that
. She took out her handkerchief and dashed away the useless tears that had gathered in her eyes, and tried to turn her thoughts some other way. What was it Lady Janet had said on going into the library? She had said she was coming back to speak about Horace. Mercy guessed what the object was; she knew but too well what Horace wanted of her. How was she to meet the emergency? In the name of Heaven, what was to be done? Could she let the man who loved her — the man whom she loved — drift blindfold into marriage with such a woman as she had been? No! it was her duty to warn him. How? Could she break his heart, could she lay his life waste by speaking the cruel words which might part them forever? “I can’t tell him! I won’t tell him!” she burst out, passionately. “The disgrace of it would kill me!” Her varying mood changed as the words escaped her. A reckless defiance of her own better nature — that saddest of all the forms in which a woman’s misery can express itself — filled her heart with its poisoning bitterness. She sat down again on the sofa with eyes that glittered and cheeks suffused with an angry red. “I am no worse than another woman!” she thought. “Another woman might have married him for his money.” The next moment the miserable insufficiency of her own excuse for deceiving him showed its hollowness, self-exposed. She covered her face with her hands, and found refuge — where she had often found refuge before — in the helpless resignation of despair. “Oh, that I had died before I entered this house! Oh, that I could die and have done with it at this moment!” So the struggle had ended with her hundreds of times already. So it ended now.

The door leading into the billiard-room opened softly. Horace Holmcroft had waited to hear the result of Lady Janet’s interference in his favor until he could wait no longer.

He looked in cautiously, ready to withdraw again unnoticed if the two were still talking together. The absence of Lady Janet suggested that the interview had come to an end. Was his betrothed wife waiting alone to speak to him on his return to the room? He advanced a few steps. She never moved; she sat heedless, absorbed in her thoughts. Were they thoughts of
him?
He advanced a little nearer, and called to her.

“Grace!”

She sprang to her feet, with a faint cry. “I wish you wouldn’t startle me,” she said, irritably, sinking back on the sofa. “Any sudden alarm sets my heart beating as if it would choke me.”

Horace pleaded for pardon with a lover’s humility. In her present state of nervous irritation she was not to be appeased. She looked away from him in silence. Entirely ignorant of the paroxysm of mental suffering through which she had just passed, he seated himself by her side, and asked her gently if she had seen Lady Janet. She made an affirmative answer with an unreasonable impatience of tone and manner which would have warned an older and more experienced man to give her time before he spoke again. Horace was young, and weary of the suspense that he had endured in the other room. He unwisely pressed her with another question.

“Has Lady Janet said anything to you — ”

She turned on him angrily before he could finish the sentence. “You have tried to make her hurry me into marrying you,” she burst out. “I see it in your face!”

Plain as the warning was this time, Horace still failed to interpret it in the right way. “Don’t be angry!” he said, good-humoredly. “Is it so very inexcusable to ask Lady Janet to intercede for me? I have tried to persuade you in vain. My mother and my sisters have pleaded for me, and you turn a deaf ear — ”

She could endure it no longer. She stamped her foot on the door with hysterical vehemence. “I am weary of hearing of your mother and your sisters!” she broke in violently. “You talk of nothing else.”

It was just possible to make one more mistake in dealing with her — and Horace made it. He took offense, on his side, and rose from the sofa. His mother and sisters were high authorities in his estimation; they variously represented his ideal of perfection in women. He withdrew to the opposite extremity of the room, and administered the severest reproof that he could think of on the spur of the moment.