Read Complete Works of Wilkie Collins Online
Authors: Wilkie Collins
“Do you wish to speak to me?” he asked.
“I want something of you,” Lady Janet answered, “before you go.”
“What is it?”
“Your card.”
“My card?”
“You have just told me not to be uneasy,” said the old lady. “I
am
uneasy, for all that. I don’t feel as sure as you do that this woman really is in the grounds. She may be lurking somewhere in the house, and she may appear when your back in turned. Remember what you told me.”
Julian understood the allusion. He made no reply.
“The people at the police station close by,” pursued Lady Janet, “have instructions to send an experienced man, in plain clothes, to any address indicated on your card the moment they receive it. That is what you told me. For Grace’s protection, I want your card before you leave us.”
It was impossible for Julian to mention the reasons which now forbade him to make use of his own precautions — in the very face of the emergency which they had been especially intended to meet. How could he declare the true Grace Roseberry to be mad? How could he give the true Grace Roseberry into custody? On the other hand, he had personally pledged himself (when the circumstances appeared to require it) to place the means of legal protection from insult and annoyance at his aunt’s disposal. And now, there stood Lady Janet, unaccustomed to have her wishes disregarded by anybody, with her band extended, waiting for the card!
What was to be done? The one way out of the difficulty appeared to be to submit for the moment. If he succeeded in discovering the missing woman, he could easily take care that she should be subjected to no needless indignity. If she contrived to slip into the house in his absence, he could provide against that contingency by sending a second card privately to the police station, forbidding the officer to stir in the affair until he had received further orders. Julian made one stipulation only before he handed his card to his aunt.
“You will not use this, I am sure, without positive and pressing necessity,” he said. “But I must make one condition. Promise me to keep my plan for communicating with the police a strict secret — ”
“A strict secret from Grace?” interposed Lady Janet. (Julian bowed.) “Do you suppose I want to frighten her? Do you think I have not had anxiety enough about her already? Of course I shall keep it a secret from Grace!”
Re-assured on this point, Julian hastened out into the grounds. As soon as his back was turned Lady Janet lifted the gold pencil-case which hung at her watch-chain, and wrote on her nephew’s card (for the information of the officer in plain clothes), “
You are wanted at Mablethorpe House
.” This done, she put the card into the old-fashioned pocket of her dress, and returned to the dining-room.
Grace was waiting, in obedience to the instructions which she had received.
For the first moment or two not a word was spoken on either side. Now that she was alone with her adopted daughter, a certain coldness and hardness began to show itself in Lady Janet’s manner. The discovery that she had made on opening the drawing-room door still hung on her mind. Julian had certainly convinced her that she had misinterpreted what she had seen; but he had convinced her against her will. She had found Mercy deeply agitated; suspiciously silent. Julian might be innocent, she admitted — there was no accounting for the vagaries of men. But the case of Mercy was altogether different. Women did not find themselves in the arms of men without knowing what they were about. Acquitting Julian, Lady Janet declined to acquit Mercy. “There is some secret understanding between them,” thought the old lady, “and she’s to blame; the women always are!”
Mercy still waited to be spoken to; pale and quiet, silent and submissive. Lady Janet — in a highly uncertain state of temper — was obliged to begin.
“My dear!” she called out, sharply.
“Yes, Lady Janet.”
“How much longer are you going to sit there with your mouth shut up and your eyes on the carpet? Have you no opinion to offer on this alarming state of things? You heard what the man said to Julian — I saw you listening. Are you horribly frightened?”
“No, Lady Janet.”
“Not even nervous?”
“No, Lady Janet.”
“Ha! I should hardly have given you credit for so much courage after my experience of you a week ago. I congratulate you on your recovery.”
“Thank you, Lady Janet.”
“I am not so composed as you are. We were an excitable set in
my
youth — and I haven’t got the better of it yet. I feel nervous. Do you hear? I feel nervous.”
“I am sorry, Lady Janet.”
“You are very good. Do you know what I am going to do?”
“No, Lady Janet.”
“I am going to summon the household. When I say the household, I mean the men; the women are no use. I am afraid I fail to attract your attention?”
“You have my best attention, Lady Janet.”
“You are very good again. I said the women were of no use.”
“Yes, Lady Janet.”
“I mean to place a man-servant on guard at every entrance to the house. I am going to do it at once. Will you come with me?”
“Can I be of any use if I go with your ladyship?”
“You can’t be of the slightest use. I give the orders in this house — not you. I had quite another motive in asking you to come with me. I am more considerate of you than you seem to think — I don’t like leaving you here by yourself. Do you understand?
“I am much obliged to your ladyship. I don’t mind being left here by myself.”
“You don’t mind? I never heard of such heroism in my life — out of a novel! Suppose that crazy wretch should find her way in here?”
“She would not frighten me this time as she frightened me before.”
“Not too fast, my young lady! Suppose — Good heavens! now I think of it, there is the conservatory. Suppose she should be hidden in there? Julian is searching the grounds. Who is to search the conservatory?”
“With your ladyship’s permission,
I
will search the conservatory.”
“You!!!”
“With your ladyship’s permission.”
“I can hardly believe my own ears! Well, ‘Live and learn’ is an old proverb. I thought I knew your character. This
is
a change!”
“You forget, Lady Janet (if I may venture to say so), that the circumstances are changed. She took me by surprise on the last occasion; I am prepared for her now.”
“Do you really feel as coolly as you speak?”
“Yes, Lady Janet.”
“Have your own way, then. I shall do one thing, however, in case of your having overestimated your own courage. I shall place one of the men in the library. You will only have to ring for him if anything happens. He will give the alarm — and I shall act accordingly. I have my plan,” said her Ladyship, comfortably conscious of the card in her pocket. “Don’t look as if you wanted to know what it is. I have no intention of saying anything about it — except that it will do. Once more, and for the last time — do you stay here? or do you go with me?”
“I stay here.”
She respectfully opened the library door for Lady Janet’s departure as she made that reply. Throughout the interview she had been carefully and coldly deferential; she had not once lifted her eyes to Lady Janet’s face. The conviction in her that a few hours more would, in all probability, see her dismissed from the house, had of necessity fettered every word that she spoke — had morally separated her already from the injured mistress whose love she had won in disguise. Utterly incapable of attributing the change in her young companion to the true motive, Lady Janet left the room to summon her domestic garrison, thoroughly puzzled and (as a necessary consequence of that condition) thoroughly displeased.
Still holding the library door in her hand, Mercy stood watching with a heavy heart the progress of her benefactress down the length of the room on the way to the front hall beyond. She had honestly loved and respected the warm-hearted, quick-tempered old lady. A sharp pang of pain wrung her as she thought of the time when even the chance utterance of her name would become an unpardonable offense in Lady Janet’s house.
But there was no shrinking in her now from the ordeal of the confession. She was not only anxious — she was impatient for Julian’s return. Before she slept that night Julian’s confidence in her should be a confidence that she had deserved.
“Let her own the truth, without the base fear of discovery to drive her to it. Let her do justice to the woman whom she has wronged, while that woman is still powerless to expose her. Let her sacrifice everything that she has gained by the fraud to the sacred duty of atonement. If she can do that, then her repentance has nobly revealed the noble nature that is in her; then she is a woman to be trusted, respected, beloved.” Those words were as vividly present to her as if she still heard them falling from his lips. Those other words which had followed them rang as grandly as ever in her ears: “Rise, poor wounded heart! Beautiful, purified soul, God’s angels rejoice over you! Take your place among the noblest of God’s creatures!” Did the woman live who could hear Julian Gray say that, and who could hesitate, at any sacrifice, at any loss, to justify his belief in her? “Oh!” she thought, longingly while her eyes followed Lady Janet to the end of the library, “if your worst fears could only be realized! If I could only see Grace Roseberry in this room, how fearlessly I could meet her now!”
She closed the library door, while Lady Janet opened the other door which led into the hall.
As she turned and looked back into the dining-room a cry of astonishment escaped her.
There — as if in answer to the aspiration which was still in her mind; there, established in triumph on the chair that she had just left — sat Grace Roseberry, in sinister silence, waiting for her.
RECOVERING from the first overpowering sensation of surprise, Mercy rapidly advanced, eager to say her first penitent words. Grace stopped her by a warning gesture of the hand. “No nearer to me,” she said, with a look of contemptuous command. “Stay where you are.”
Mercy paused. Grace’s reception had startled her. She instinctively took the chair nearest to her to support herself. Grace raised a warning hand for the second time, and issued another command: “I forbid you to be seated in my presence. You have no right to be in this house at all. Remember, if you please, who you are, and who I am.”
The tone in which those words were spoken was an insult in itself. Mercy suddenly lifted her head; the angry answer was on her lips. She checked it, and submitted in silence. “I will be worthy of Julian Gray’s confidence in me,” she thought, as she stood patiently by the chair. “I will bear anything from the woman whom I have wronged.”
In silence the two faced each other; alone together, for the first time since they had met in the French cottage. The contrast between them was strange to see. Grace Roseberry, seated in her chair, little and lean, with her dull white complexion, with her hard, threatening face, with her shrunken figure clad in its plain and poor black garments, looked like a being of a lower sphere, compared with Mercy Merrick, standing erect in her rich silken dress; her tall, shapely figure towering over the little creature before her; her grand head bent in graceful submission; gentle, patient, beautiful; a woman whom it was a privilege to look at and a distinction to admire. If a stranger had been told that those two had played their parts in a romance of real life — that one of them was really connected by the ties of relationship with Lady Janet Roy, and that the other had successfully attempted to personate her — he would inevitably, if it had been left to him to guess which was which, have picked out Grace as the counterfeit and Mercy as the true woman.
Grace broke the silence. She had waited to open her lips until she had eyed her conquered victim all over, with disdainfully minute attention, from head to foot.