Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (918 page)

We had been out, I should think, more than half an hour, when we overtook a lady walking before us on the beach.

Just as we were about to pass the stranger she took her handkerchief from her pocket, and accidentally drew out with it a letter, which fell unnoticed by her, on the sand. I was nearest to the letter, and I picked it up and offered it to the lady.

The instant she turned to thank me, I stood rooted to the spot. There was the original of the photographic portrait in the dressing-case! there was my husband’s mother, standing face to face with me! I recognised the quaint little gray curls, the gentle, genial expression, the mole at the corner of the mouth. No mistake was possible. His mother herself!

The old lady, naturally enough, mistook my confusion for shyness. With perfect tact and kindness she entered into conversation with me. In another minute I was walking side by side with the woman who had sternly repudiated me as a member of her family; feeling, I own, terribly discomposed, and not knowing in the least whether I ought or ought not to assume the responsibility, in my husband’s absence, of telling her who I was.

In another minute my familiar landlady, walking on the other side of my mother-in-law, decided the question for me. I happened to say that I supposed we must by that time be near the end of our walk — the little watering-place called Broadstairs. “Oh no, Mrs. Woodville!” cried the irrepressible woman, calling me by my name, as usual; “nothing like so near as you think!”

I looked with a beating heart at the old lady.

To my unutterable amazement, not the faintest gleam of recognition appeared in her face. Old Mrs. Woodville went on talking to young Mrs. Woodville just as composedly as if she had never heard her own name before in her life!

My face and manner must have betrayed something of the agitation that I was suffering. Happening to look at me at the end of her next sentence, the old lady started, and said, in her kindly way,

“I am afraid you have overexerted yourself. You are very pale — you are looking quite exhausted. Come and sit down here; let me lend you my smelling-bottle.”

I followed her, quite helplessly, to the base of the cliff. Some fallen fragments of chalk offered us a seat. I vaguely heard the voluble landlady’s expressions of sympathy and regret; I mechanically took the smelling-bottle which my husband’s mother offered to me, after hearing my name, as an act of kindness to a stranger.

If I had only had myself to think of, I believe I should have provoked an explanation on the spot. But I had Eustace to think of. I was entirely ignorant of the relations, hostile or friendly, which existed between his mother and himself. What could I do?

In the meantime the old lady was still speaking to me with the most considerate sympathy. She too was fatigued, she said. She had passed a weary night at the bedside of a near relative staying at Ramsgate. Only the day before she had received a telegram announcing that one of her sisters was seriously ill. She was herself thank God, still active and strong, and she had thought it her duty to start at once for Ramsgate. Toward the morning the state of the patient had improved. “The doctor assures me ma’am, that there is no immediate danger; and I thought it might revive me, after my long night at the bedside, if I took a little walk on the beach.”

I heard the words — I understood what they meant — but I was still too bewildered and too intimidated by my extraordinary position to be able to continue the conversation. The landlady had a sensible suggestion to make — the landlady was the next person who spoke.

“Here is a gentleman coming,” she said to me, pointing in the direction of Ramsgate. “You can never walk back. Shall we ask him to send a chaise from Broadstairs to the gap in the cliff?”

The gentleman advanced a little nearer.

The landlady and I recognised him at the same moment. It was Eustace coming to meet us, as we had arranged. The irrepressible landlady gave the freest expression to her feelings. “Oh, Mrs. Woodville, ain’t it lucky? here is Mr. Woodville himself.”

Once more I looked at my mother-in-law. Once more the name failed to produce the slightest effect on her. Her sight was not so keen as ours; she had not recognised her son yet. He had young eyes like us, and he recognised his mother. For a moment he stopped like a man thunderstruck. Then he came on — his ruddy face white with suppressed emotion, his eyes fixed on his mother.

“You here!” he said to her.

“How do you do, Eustace?” she quietly rejoined. “Have
you
heard of your aunt’s illness too? Did you know she was staying at Ramsgate?”

He made no answer. The landlady, drawing the inevitable inference from the words that she had just heard, looked from me to my mother-in-law in a state of amazement, which paralyzed even her tongue. I waited with my eyes on my husband, to see what he would do. If he had delayed acknowledging me another moment, the whole future course of my life might have been altered — I should have despised him.

He did
not
delay. He came to my side and took my hand.

“Do you know who this is?” he said to his mother.

She answered, looking at me with a courteous bend of her head:

“A lady I met on the beach, Eustace, who kindly restored to me a letter that I dropped. I think I heard the name” (she turned to the landlady): “Mrs. Woodville, was it not?”

My husband’s fingers unconsciously closed on my hand with a grasp that hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one cowardly moment of hesitation.

“Mother,” he said to her, very quietly, “this lady is my wife.”

She had hitherto kept her seat. She now rose slowly and faced her son in silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt that I ever saw in a woman’s eyes.

“I pity your wife,” she said.

With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.

CHAPTER IV. ON THE WAY HOME.

LEFT by ourselves, there was a moment of silence among us. Eustace spoke first.

“Are you able to walk back?” he said to me. “Or shall we go on to Broadstairs, and return to Ramsgate by the railway?”

He put those questions as composedly, so far as his manner was concerned, as if nothing remarkable had happened. But his eyes and his lips betrayed him. They told me that he was suffering keenly in secret. The extraordinary scene that had just passed, far from depriving me of the last remains of my courage, had strung up my nerves and restored my self-possession. I must have been more or less than woman if my self-respect had not been wounded, if my curiosity had not been wrought to the highest pitch, by the extraordinary conduct of my husband’s mother when Eustace presented me to her. What was the secret of her despising him, and pitying me? Where was the explanation of her incomprehensible apathy when my name was twice pronounced in her hearing? Why had she left us, as if the bare idea of remaining in our company was abhorrent to her? The foremost interest of my life was now the interest of penetrating these mysteries. Walk? I was in such a fever of expectation that I felt as if I could have walked to the world’s end, if I could only keep my husband by my side, and question him on the way.

“I am quite recovered,” I said. “Let us go back, as we came, on foot.”

Eustace glanced at the landlady. The landlady understood him.

“I won’t intrude my company on you, sir,” she said, sharply. “I have some business to do at Broadstairs, and, now I am so near, I may as well go on. Good-morning, Mrs. Woodville.”

She laid a marked emphasis on my name, and she added one significant look at parting, which (in the preoccupied state of my mind at that moment) I entirely failed to comprehend. There was neither time nor opportunity to ask her what she meant. With a stiff little bow, addressed to Eustace, she left us as his mother had left us taking the way to Broadstairs, and walking rapidly.

At last we were alone.

I lost no time in beginning my inquiries; I wasted no words in prefatory phrases. In the plainest terms I put the question to him:

“What does your mother’s conduct mean?”

Instead of answering, he burst into a fit of laughter — loud, coarse, hard laughter, so utterly unlike any sound I had ever yet heard issue from his lips, so strangely and shockingly foreign to his character as
I
understood it, that I stood still on the sands and openly remonstrated with him.

“Eustace! you are not like yourself,” I said. “You almost frighten me.”

He took no notice. He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train of thought just started in his mind.

“So like my mother!” he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own. “Tell me all about it, Valeria!”

“Tell
you
!” I repeated. “After what has happened, surely it is your duty to enlighten
me
.”

“You don’t see the joke,” he said.

“I not only fail to see the joke,” I rejoined, “I see something in your mother’s language and your mother’s behavior which justifies me in asking you for a serious explanation.”

“My dear Valeria, if you understood my mother as well as I do, a serious explanation of her conduct would be the last thing in the world that you would expect from me. The idea of taking my mother seriously!” He burst out laughing again. “My darling, you don’t know how you amuse me.”

It was all forced: it was all unnatural. He, the most delicate, the most refined of men — a gentleman in the highest sense of the word — was coarse and loud and vulgar! My heart sank under a sudden sense of misgiving which, with all my love for him, it was impossible to resist. In unutterable distress and alarm I asked myself, “Is my husband beginning to deceive me? is he acting a part, and acting it badly, before we have been married a week?” I set myself to win his confidence in a new way. He was evidently determined to force his own point of view on me. I determined, on my side, to accept his point of view.

“You tell me I don’t understand your mother,” I said, gently. “Will you help me to understand her?”

“It is not easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn’t understand herself,” he answered. “But I will try. The key to my poor dear mother’s character is, in one word — Eccentricity.”

If he had picked out the most inappropriate word in the whole dictionary to describe the lady whom I had met on the beach, “Eccentricity” would have been that word. A child who had seen what I saw, who had heard what I heard would have discovered that he was trifling — grossly, recklessly trifling — with the truth.

“Bear in mind what I have said,” he proceeded; “and if you want to understand my mother, do what I asked you to do a minute since — tell me all about it. How came you to speak to her, to begin with?”

“Your mother told you, Eustace. I was walking just behind her, when she dropped a letter by accident — ”

“No accident,” he interposed. “The letter was dropped on purpose.”

“Impossible!” I exclaimed. “Why should your mother drop the letter on purpose?”

“Use the key to her character, my dear. Eccentricity! My mother’s odd way of making acquaintance with you.”

“Making acquaintance with me? I have just told you that I was walking behind her. She could not have known of the existence of such a person as myself until I spoke to her first.”

“So you suppose, Valeria.”

“I am certain of it.”

“Pardon me — you don’t know my mother as I do.”

I began to lose all patience with him.

“Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that your mother was out on the sands to-day for the express purpose of making acquaintance with Me?”