Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (996 page)

To that result her inquiries had inscrutably conducted her! If she had only pressed them a little further — if she had not unconsciously led me astray again by the very next question that fell from her lips — she
must
have communicated to
my
mind the idea obscurely germinating in hers — the idea of a possible identity between the Mary of my first love and Mrs. Van Brandt!

“Tell me,” she went on. “If you met with your little Mary now, what would she be like? What sort of woman would you expect to see?”

I could hardly help laughing. “How can I tell,” I rejoined, “at this distance of time?”

“Try!” she said.

Reasoning my way from the known personality to the unknown, I searched my memory for the image of the frail and delicate child of my remembrance: and I drew the picture of a frail and delicate woman — the most absolute contrast imaginable to Mrs. Van Brandt!

The half-realized idea of identity in the mind of Miss Dunross dropped out of it instantly, expelled by the substantial conclusion which the contrast implied. Alike ignorant of the aftergrowth of health, strength, and beauty which time and circumstances had developed in the Mary of my youthful days, we had alike completely and unconsciously misled one another. Once more, I had missed the discovery of the truth, and missed it by a hair-breadth!

“I infinitely prefer your portrait of Mary,” said Miss Dunross, “to your portrait of Mrs. Van Brandt. Mary realizes my idea of what a really attractive woman ought to be. How you can have felt any sorrow for the loss of that other person (I detest buxom women!) passes my understanding. I can’t tell you how interested I am in Mary! I want to know more about her. Where is that pretty present of needle-work which the poor little thing embroidered for you so industriously? Do let me see the green flag!”

She evidently supposed that I carried the green flag about me! I felt a little confused as I answered her.

“I am sorry to disappoint you. The green flag is somewhere in my house in Perthshire.”

“You have not got it with you?” she exclaimed. “You leave her keepsake lying about anywhere? Oh, Mr. Germaine, you have indeed forgotten Mary! A woman, in your place, would have parted with her life rather than part with the one memorial left of the time when she first loved!”

She spoke with such extraordinary earnestness — with such agitation, I might almost say — that she quite startled me.

“Dear Miss Dunross,” I remonstrated, “the flag is not lost.”

“I should hope not!” she interposed, quickly. “If you lose the green flag, you lose the last relic of Mary — and more than that, if
my
belief is right.”

“What do you believe?”

“You will laugh at me if I tell you. I am afraid my first reading of your face was wrong — I am afraid you are a hard man.”

“Indeed you do me an injustice. I entreat you to answer me as frankly as usual. What do I lose in losing the last relic of Mary?”

“You lose the one hope I have for you,” she answered, gravely — ”the hope of your meeting and your marriage with Mary in the time to come. I was sleepless last night, and I was thinking of your pretty love story by the banks of the bright English lake. The longer I thought, the more firmly I felt the conviction that the poor child’s green flag is destined to have its innocent influence in forming your future life. Your happiness is waiting for you in that artless little keepsake! I can’t explain or justify this belief of mine. It is one of my eccentricities, I suppose — like training my cats to perform to the music of my harp. But, if I were your old friend, instead of being only your friend of a few days, I would leave you no peace — I would beg and entreat and persist, as only a woman
can
persist — until I had made Mary’s gift as close a companion of yours, as your mother’s portrait in the locket there at your watch-chain. While the flag is with you, Mary’s influence is with you; Mary’s love is still binding you by the dear old tie; and Mary and you, after years of separation, will meet again!”

The fancy was in itself pretty and poetical; the earnestness which had given expression to it would have had its influence over a man of a far harder nature than mine. I confess she had made me ashamed, if she had done nothing more, of my neglect of the green flag.

“I will look for it the moment I am at home again,” I said; “and I will take care that it is carefully preserved for the future.”

“I want more than that,” she rejoined. “If you can’t wear the flag about you, I want it always to be
with
you — to go wherever you go. When they brought your luggage here from the vessel at Lerwick, you were particularly anxious about the safety of your traveling writing-desk — the desk there on the table. Is there anything very valuable in it?”

“It contains my money, and other things that I prize far more highly — my mother’s letters, and some family relics which I should be very sorry to lose. Besides, the desk itself has its own familiar interest as my constant traveling companion of many years past.”

Miss Dunross rose, and came close to the chair in which I was sitting.

“Let Mary’s flag be your constant traveling companion,” she said. “You have spoken far too gratefully of my services here as your nurse. Reward me beyond my deserts. Make allowances, Mr. Germaine, for the superstitious fancies of a lonely, dreamy woman. Promise me that the green flag shall take its place among the other little treasures in your desk!”

It is needless to say that I made the allowances and gave the promise — gave it, resolving seriously to abide by it. For the first time since I had known her, she put her poor, wasted hand in mine, and pressed it for a moment. Acting heedlessly under my first grateful impulse, I lifted her hand to my lips before I released it. She started — trembled — and suddenly and silently passed out of the room.

CHAPTER XXI. SHE COMES BETWEEN US.

WHAT emotion had I thoughtlessly aroused in Miss Dunross? Had I offended or distressed her? Or had I, without meaning it, forced on her inner knowledge some deeply seated feeling which she had thus far resolutely ignored?

I looked back through the days of my sojourn in the house; I questioned my own feelings and impressions, on the chance that they might serve me as a means of solving the mystery of her sudden flight from the room.

What effect had she produced on me?

In plain truth, she had simply taken her place in my mind, to the exclusion of every other person and every other subject. In ten days she had taken a hold on my sympathies of which other women would have failed to possess themselves in so many years. I remembered, to my shame, that my mother had but seldom occupied my thoughts. Even the image of Mrs. Van Brandt — except when the conversation had turned on her — had become a faint image in my mind! As to my friends at Lerwick, from Sir James downward, they had all kindly come to see me — and I had secretly and ungratefully rejoiced when their departure left the scene free for the return of my nurse. In two days more the Government vessel was to sail on the return voyage. My wrist was still painful when I tried to use it; but the far more serious injury presented by the re-opened wound was no longer a subject of anxiety to myself or to any one about me. I was sufficiently restored to be capable of making the journey to Lerwick, if I rested for one night at a farm half-way between the town and Mr. Dunross’s house. Knowing this, I had nevertheless left the question of rejoining the vessel undecided to the very latest moment. The motive which I pleaded to my friends was — uncertainty as to the sufficient recovery of my strength. The motive which I now confessed to myself was reluctance to leave Miss Dunross.

What was the secret of her power over me? What emotion, what passion, had she awakened in me? Was it love?

No: not love. The place which Mary had once held in my heart, the place which Mrs. Van Brandt had taken in the after-time, was not the place occupied by Miss Dunross. How could I (in the ordinary sense of the word) be in love with a woman whose face I had never seen? whose beauty had faded, never to bloom again? whose wasted life hung by a thread which the accident of a moment might snap? The senses have their share in all love between the sexes which is worthy of the name. They had no share in the feeling with which I regarded Miss Dunross. What
was
the feeling, then? I can only answer the question in one way. The feeling lay too deep in me for my sounding.

What impression had I produced on her? What sensitive chord had I ignorantly touched, when my lips touched her hand?

I confess I recoiled from pursuing the inquiry which I had deliberately set myself to make. I thought of her shattered health; of her melancholy existence in shadow and solitude; of the rich treasures of such a heart and such a mind as hers, wasted with her wasting life; and I said to myself, Let her secret be sacred! let me never again, by word or deed, bring the trouble which tells of it to the surface! let her heart be veiled from me in the darkness which veils her face!

In this frame of mind toward her, I waited her return.

I had no doubt of seeing her again, sooner or later, on that day. The post to the south went out on the next day; and the early hour of the morning at which the messenger called for our letters made it a matter of ordinary convenience to write overnight. In the disabled state of my hand, Miss Dunross had been accustomed to write home for me, under my dictation: she knew that I owed a letter to my mother, and that I relied as usual on her help. Her return to me, under these circumstances, was simply a question of time: any duty which she had once undertaken was an imperative duty in her estimation, no matter how trifling it might be.

The hours wore on; the day drew to its end — and still she never appeared.

I left my room to enjoy the last sunny gleam of the daylight in the garden attached to the house; first telling Peter where I might be found, if Miss Dunross wanted me. The garden was a wild place, to my southern notions; but it extended for some distance along the shore of the island, and it offered some pleasant views of the lake and the moorland country beyond. Slowly pursuing my walk, I proposed to myself to occupy my mind to some useful purpose by arranging beforehand the composition of the letter which Miss Dunross was to write.

To my great surprise, I found it simply impossible to fix my mind on the subject. Try as I might, my thoughts persisted in wandering from the letter to my mother, and concentrated themselves instead — on Miss Dunross? No. On the question of my returning, or not returning, to Perthshire by the Government vessel? No. By some capricious revulsion of feeling which it seemed impossible to account for, my whole mind was now absorbed on the one subject which had been hitherto so strangely absent from it — the subject of Mrs. Van Brandt!

My memory went back, in defiance of all exercise of my own will, to my last interview with her. I saw her again; I heard her again. I tasted once more the momentary rapture of our last kiss; I felt once more the pang of sorrow that wrung me when I had parted with her and found myself alone in the street. Tears — of which I was ashamed, though nobody was near to see them — filled my eyes when I thought of the months that had passed since we had last looked on one another, and of all that she might have suffered, must have suffered, in that time. Hundreds on hundreds of miles were between us — and yet she was now as near me as if she were walking in the garden by my side!

This strange condition of my mind was matched by an equally strange condition of my body. A mysterious trembling shuddered over me faintly from head to foot. I walked without feeling the ground as I trod on it; I looked about me with no distinct consciousness of what the objects were on which my eyes rested. My hands were cold — and yet I hardly felt it. My head throbbed hotly — and yet I was not sensible of any pain. It seemed as if I were surrounded and enwrapped in some electric atmosphere which altered all the ordinary conditions of sensation. I looked up at the clear, calm sky, and wondered if a thunderstorm was coming. I stopped, and buttoned my coat round me, and questioned myself if I had caught a cold, or if I was going to have a fever. The sun sank below the moorland horizon; the gray twilight trembled over the dark waters of the lake. I went back to the house; and the vivid memory of Mrs. Van Brandt, still in close companionship, went back with me.

The fire in my room had burned low in my absence. One of the closed curtains had been drawn back a few inches, so as to admit through the window a ray of the dying light. On the boundary limit where the light was crossed by the obscurity which filled the rest of the room, I saw Miss Dunross seated, with her veil drawn and her writing-case on her knee, waiting my return.