Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (894 page)

“You were hiding there, by your own confession,” she said. “You know your way out by that door. Will you leave the room?”

“I won’t stir a step!”

Mercy walked to a side-table, and struck the bell placed on it.

At the same moment the billiard-room door opened. Julian Gray appeared — returning from his unsuccessful search in the grounds.

He had barely crossed the threshold before the library door was thrown open next by the servant posted in the room. The man drew back respectfully, and gave admission to Lady Janet Roy. She was followed by Horace Holmcroft with his mother’s wedding present to Mercy in his hand.

CHAPTER XX. THE POLICEMAN IN PLAIN CLOTHES.

JULIAN looked round the room, and stopped at the door which he had just opened.

His eyes rested first on Mercy, next on Grace.

The disturbed faces of both the women told him but too plainly that the disaster which he had dreaded had actually happened. They had met without any third person to interfere between them. To what extremities the hostile interview might have led it was impossible for him to guess. In his aunt’s presence he could only wait his opportunity of speaking to Mercy, and be ready to interpose if anything was ignorantly done which might give just cause of offense to Grace.

Lady Janet’s course of action on entering the dining-room was in perfect harmony with Lady Janet’s character.

Instantly discovering the intruder, she looked sharply at Mercy. “What did I tell you?” she asked. “Are you frightened? No! not in the least frightened! Wonderful!” She turned to the servant. “Wait in the library; I may want you again.” She looked at Julian. “Leave it all to me; I can manage it.” She made a sign to Horace. “Stay where you are, and hold your tongue.” Having now said all that was necessary to every one else, she advanced to the part of the room in which Grace was standing, with lowering brows and firmly shut lips, defiant of everybody.

“I have no desire to offend you, or to act harshly toward you,” her ladyship began, very quietly. “I only suggest that your visits to my house cannot possibly lead to any satisfactory result. I hope you will not oblige me to say any harder words than these — I hope you will understand that I wish you to withdraw.”

The order of dismissal could hardly have been issued with more humane consideration for the supposed mental infirmity of the person to whom it was addressed. Grace instantly resisted it in the plainest possible terms.

“In justice to my father’s memory and in justice to myself,” she answered, “I insist on a hearing. I refuse to withdraw.” She deliberately took a chair and seated herself in the presence of the mistress of the house.

Lady Janet waited a moment — steadily controlling her temper. In the interval of silence Julian seized the opportunity of remonstrating with Grace.

“Is this what you promised me?” he asked, gently. “You gave me your word that you would not return to Mablethorpe House.”

Before he could say more Lady Janet had got her temper under command. She began her answer to Grace by pointing with a peremptory forefinger to the library door.

“If you have not made up your mind to take my advice by the time I have walked back to that door,” she said, “I will put it out of your power to set me at defiance. I am used to be obeyed, and I will be obeyed. You force me to use hard words. I warn you before it is too late. Go!”

She returned slowly toward the library. Julian attempted to interfere with another word of remonstrance. His aunt stopped him by a gesture which said, plainly, “I insist on acting for myself.” He looked next at Mercy. Would she remain passive? Yes. She never lifted her head; she never moved from the place in which she was standing apart from the rest. Horace himself tried to attract her attention, and tried in vain.

Arrived at the library door, Lady Janet looked over her shoulder at the little immovable black figure in the chair.

“Will you go?” she asked, for the last time.

Grace started up angrily from her seat, and fixed her viperish eyes on Mercy.

“I won’t be turned out of your ladyship’s house in the presence of that impostor,” she said. “I may yield to force, but I will yield to nothing else. I insist on my right to the place that she has stolen from me. It’s no use scolding me,” she added, turning doggedly to Julian. “As long as that woman is here under my name I can’t and won’t keep away from the house. I warn her, in your presence, that I have written to my friends in Canada! I dare her before you all to deny that she is the outcast and adventuress, Mercy Merrick!”

The challenge forced Mercy to take part in the proceedings in her own defense. She had pledged herself to meet and defy Grace Roseberry on her own ground. She attempted to speak — Horace stopped her.

“You degrade yourself if you answer her,” he said. “Take my arm, and let us leave the room.”

“Yes! Take her out!” cried Grace. “She may well be ashamed to face an honest woman. It’s her place to leave the room — not mine!”

Mercy drew her hand out of Horace’s arm. “I decline to leave the room,” she said, quietly.

Horace still tried to persuade her to withdraw. “I can’t bear to hear you insulted,” he rejoined. “The woman offends me, though I know she is not responsible for what she says.”

“Nobody’s endurance will be tried much longer,” said Lady Janet. She glanced at Julian, and taking from her pocket the card which he had given to her, opened the library door.

“Go to the police station,” she said to the servant in an undertone, “and give that card to the inspector on duty. Tell him there is not a moment to lose.”

“Stop!” said Julian, before his aunt could close the door again.

“Stop?” repeated Lady Janet, sharply. “I have given the man his orders. What do you mean?”

“Before you send the card I wish to say a word in private to this lady,” replied Julian, indicating Grace. “When that is done,” he continued, approaching Mercy, and pointedly addressing himself to her, “I shall have a request to make — I shall ask you to give me an opportunity of speaking to you without interruption.”

His tone pointed the allusion. Mercy shrank from looking at him. The signs of painful agitation began to show themselves in her shifting colour and her uneasy silence. Roused by Julian’s significantly distant reference to what had passed between them, her better impulses were struggling already to recover their influence over her. She might, at that critical moment, have yielded to the promptings of her own nobler nature — she might have risen superior to the galling remembrance of the insults that had been heaped upon her — if Grace’s malice had not seen in her hesitation a means of referring offensively once again to her interview with Julian Gray.

“Pray don’t think twice about trusting him alone with me,” she said, with a sardonic affectation of politeness. “
I
am not interested in making a conquest of Mr. Julian Gray.”

The jealous distrust in Horace (already awakened by Julian’s request) now attempted to assert itself openly. Before he could speak, Mercy’s indignation had dictated Mercy’s answer.

“I am much obliged to you, Mr. Gray,” she said, addressing Julian (but still not raising her eyes to his). “I have nothing more to say. There is no need for me to trouble you again.”

In those rash words she recalled the confession to which she stood pledged. In those rash words she committed herself to keeping the position that she had usurped, in the face of the woman whom she had deprived of it!

Horace was silenced, but not satisfied. He saw Julian’s eyes fixed in sad and searching attention on Mercy’s face while she was speaking. He heard Julian sigh to himself when she had done. He observed Julian — after a moment’s serious consideration, and a moment’s glance backward at the stranger in the poor black clothes — lift his head with the air of a man who had taken a sudden resolution.

“Bring me that card directly,” he said to the servant. His tone announced that he was not to be trifled with. The man obeyed.

Without answering Lady Janet — who still peremptorily insisted on her right to act for herself — Julian took the pencil from his pocketbook and added his signature to the writing already inscribed on the card. When he had handed it back to the servant he made his apologies to his aunt.

“Pardon me for venturing to interfere,” he said “There is a serious reason for what I have done, which I will explain to you at a fitter time. In the meanwhile I offer no further obstruction to the course which you propose taking. On the contrary, I have just assisted you in gaining the end that you have in view.”

As he said that he held up the pencil with which he had signed his name.

Lady Janet, naturally perplexed, and (with some reason, perhaps) offended as well, made no answer. She waved her hand to the servant, and sent him away with the card.

There was silence in the room. The eyes of all the persons present turned more or less anxiously on Julian. Mercy was vaguely surprised and alarmed. Horace, like Lady Janet, felt offended, without clearly knowing why. Even Grace Roseberry herself was subdued by her own presentiment of some coming interference for which she was completely unprepared. Julian’s words and actions, from the moment when he had written on the card, were involved in a mystery to which not one of the persons round him held the clew.

The motive which had animated his conduct may, nevertheless, be described in two words: Julian still held to his faith in the inbred nobility of Mercy’s nature.

He had inferred, with little difficulty, from the language which Grace had used toward Mercy in his presence, that the injured woman must have taken pitiless advantage of her position at the interview which he had interrupted. Instead of appealing to Mercy’s sympathies and Mercy’s sense of right — instead of accepting the expression of her sincere contrition, and encouraging her to make the completest and the speediest atonement — Grace had evidently outraged and insulted her. As a necessary result, her endurance had given way — under her own sense of intolerable severity and intolerable wrong.

The remedy for the mischief thus done was, as Julian had first seen it, to speak privately with Grace, to soothe her by owning that his opinion of the justice of her claims had undergone a change in her favor, and then to persuade her, in her own interests, to let him carry to Mercy such expressions of apology and regret as might lead to a friendly understanding between them.

With those motives, he had made his request to be permitted to speak separately to the one and the other. The scene that had followed, the new insult offered by Grace, and the answer which it had wrung from Mercy, had convinced him that no such interference as he had contemplated would have the slightest prospect of success.

The only remedy now left to try was the desperate remedy of letting things take their course, and trusting implicitly to Mercy’s better nature for the result.

Let her see the police officer in plain clothes enter the room. Let her understand clearly what the result of his interference would be. Let her confront the alternative of consigning Grace Roseberry to a mad-house or of confessing the truth — and what would happen? If Julian’s confidence in her was a confidence soundly placed, she would nobly pardon the outrages that had been heaped upon her, and she would do justice to the woman whom she had wronged.

If, on the other hand, his belief in her was nothing better than the blind belief of an infatuated man — if she faced the alternative and persisted in asserting her assumed identity — what then?

Julian’s faith in Mercy refused to let that darker side of the question find a place in his thoughts. It rested entirely with him to bring the officer into the house. He had prevented Lady Janet from making any mischievous use of his card by sending to the police station and warning them to attend to no message which they might receive unless the card produced bore his signature. Knowing the responsibility that he was taking on himself — knowing that Mercy had made no confession to him to which it was possible to appeal — he had signed his name without an instant’s hesitation: and there he stood now, looking at the woman whose better nature he was determined to vindicate, the only calm person in the room.