Read Complete Works of Wilkie Collins Online
Authors: Wilkie Collins
Emily’s face reddened with indignation. “She suffered for it? Oh, Mr. Morris, surely she suffered for it?”
“Not at all. She had money enough to reward the groom for marrying her; and she let herself down easily to her husband’s level. It was a suitable marriage in every respect. When I last heard of them, they were regularly in the habit of getting drunk together. I am afraid I have disgusted you? We will drop the subject, and resume my precious autobiography at a later date. One showery day in the autumn of last year, you young ladies went out with Miss Ladd for a walk. When you were all trotting back again, under your umbrellas, did you (in particular) notice an ill-tempered fellow standing in the road, and getting a good look at you, on the high footpath above him?”
Emily smiled, in spite of herself. “I don’t remember it,” she said.
“You wore a brown jacket which fitted you as if you had been born in it — and you had the smartest little straw hat I ever saw on a woman’s head. It was the first time I ever noticed such things. I think I could paint a portrait of the boots you wore (mud included), from memory alone. That was the impression you produced on me. After believing, honestly believing, that love was one of the lost illusions of my life — after feeling, honestly feeling, that I would as soon look at the devil as look at a woman — there was the state of mind to which retribution had reduced me; using for his instrument Miss Emily Brown. Oh, don’t be afraid of what I may say next! In your presence, and out of your presence, I am man enough to be ashamed of my own folly. I am resisting your influence over me at this moment, with the strongest of all resolutions — the resolution of despair. Let’s look at the humorous side of the story again. What do you think I did when the regiment of young ladies had passed by me?”
Emily declined to guess.
“I followed you back to the school; and, on pretense of having a daughter to educate, I got one of Miss Ladd’s prospectuses from the porter at the lodge gate. I was in your neighbourhood, you must know, on a sketching tour. I went back to my inn, and seriously considered what had happened to me. The result of my cogitations was that I went abroad. Only for a change — not at all because I was trying to weaken the impression you had produced on me! After a while I returned to England. Only because I was tired of traveling — not at all because your influence drew me back! Another interval passed; and luck turned my way, for a wonder. The drawing-master’s place became vacant here. Miss Ladd advertised; I produced my testimonials; and took the situation. Only because the salary was a welcome certainty to a poor man — not at all because the new position brought me into personal association with Miss Emily Brown! Do you begin to see why I have troubled you with all this talk about myself? Apply the contemptible system of self-delusion which my confession has revealed, to that holiday arrangement for a tour in the north which has astonished and annoyed you. I am going to travel this afternoon by your train. Only because I feel an intelligent longing to see the northernmost county of England — not at all because I won’t let you trust yourself alone with Mrs. Rook! Not at all because I won’t leave you to enter Sir Jervis Redwood’s service without a friend within reach in case you want him! Mad? Oh, yes — perfectly mad. But, tell me this: What do all sensible people do when they find themselves in the company of a lunatic? They humour him. Let me take your ticket and see your luggage labeled: I only ask leave to be your traveling servant. If you are proud — I shall like you all the better, if you are — pay me wages, and keep me in my proper place in that way.”
Some girls, addressed with this reckless intermingling of jest and earnest, would have felt confused, and some would have felt flattered. With a good-tempered resolution, which never passed the limits of modesty and refinement, Emily met Alban Morris on his own ground.
“You have said you respect me,” she began; “I am going to prove that I believe you. The least I can do is not to misinterpret you, on my side. Am I to understand, Mr. Morris — you won’t think the worse of me, I hope, if I speak plainly — am I to understand that you are in love with me?”
“Yes, Miss Emily — if you please.”
He had answered with the quaint gravity which was peculiar to him; but he was already conscious of a sense of discouragement. Her composure was a bad sign — from his point of view.
“My time will come, I daresay,” she proceeded. “At present I know nothing of love, by experience; I only know what some of my schoolfellows talk about in secret. Judging by what they tell me, a girl blushes when her lover pleads with her to favor his addresses. Am I blushing?”
“Must I speak plainly, too?” Alban asked.
“If you have no objection,” she answered, as composedly as if she had been addressing her grandfather.
“Then, Miss Emily, I must say — you are not blushing.”
She went on. “Another token of love — as I am informed — is to tremble. Am I trembling?”
“No.”
“Am I too confused to look at you?”
“No.”
“Do I walk away with dignity — and then stop, and steal a timid glance at my lover, over my shoulder?”
“I wish you did!”
“A plain answer, Mr. Morris! Yes or No.”
“No — of course.”
“In one last word, do I give you any sort of encouragement to try again?”
“In one last word, I have made a fool of myself — and you have taken the kindest possible way of telling me so.”
This time, she made no attempt to reply in his own tone. The good-humored gayety of her manner disappeared. She was in earnest — truly, sadly in earnest — when she said her next words.
“Is it not best, in your own interests, that we should bid each other good-by?” she asked. “In the time to come — when you only remember how kind you once were to me — we may look forward to meeting again. After all that you have suffered, so bitterly and so undeservedly, don’t, pray don’t, make me feel that another woman has behaved cruelly to you, and that I — so grieved to distress you — am that heartless creature!”
Never in her life had she been so irresistibly charming as she was at that moment. Her sweet nature showed all its innocent pity for him in her face.
He saw it — he felt it — he was not unworthy of it. In silence, he lifted her hand to his lips. He turned pale as he kissed it.
“Say that you agree with me?” she pleaded.
“I obey you.”
As he answered, he pointed to the lawn at their feet. “Look,” he said, “at that dead leaf which the air is wafting over the grass. Is it possible that such sympathy as you feel for Me, such love as I feel for You, can waste, wither, and fall to the ground like that leaf? I leave you, Emily — with the firm conviction that there is a time of fulfillment to come in our two lives. Happen what may in the interval — I trust the future.”
The words had barely passed his lips when the voice of one of the servants reached them from the house. “Miss Emily, are you in the garden?”
Emily stepped out into the sunshine. The servant hurried to meet her, and placed a telegram in her hand. She looked at it with a sudden misgiving. In her small experience, a telegram was associated with the communication of bad news. She conquered her hesitation — opened it — read it. The colour left her face: she shuddered. The telegram dropped on the grass.
“Read it,” she said, faintly, as Alban picked it up.
He read these words: “Come to London directly. Miss Letitia is dangerously ill.”
“Your aunt?” he asked.
“Yes — my aunt.”
The metropolis of Great Britain is, in certain respects, like no other metropolis on the face of the earth. In the population that throngs the streets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the shame of architecture — the mansion and the hovel — are neighbours in situation, as they are neighbours nowhere else. London, in its social aspect, is the city of contrasts.
Toward the close of evening Emily left the railway terminus for the place of residence in which loss of fortune had compelled her aunt to take refuge. As she approached her destination, the cab passed — by merely crossing a road — from a spacious and beautiful Park, with its surrounding houses topped by statues and cupolas, to a row of cottages, hard by a stinking ditch miscalled a canal. The city of contrasts: north and south, east and west, the city of social contrasts.
Emily stopped the cab before the garden gate of a cottage, at the further end of the row. The bell was answered by the one servant now in her aunt’s employ — Miss Letitia’s maid.
Personally, this good creature was one of the ill-fated women whose appearance suggests that Nature intended to make men of them and altered her mind at the last moment. Miss Letitia’s maid was tall and gaunt and awkward. The first impression produced by her face was an impression of bones. They rose high on her forehead; they projected on her cheeks; and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous eyes of this unfortunate person rigid obstinacy and rigid goodness looked out together, with equal severity, on all her fellow-creatures alike. Her mistress (whom she had served for a quarter of a century and more) called her “Bony.” She accepted this cruelly appropriate nick-name as a mark of affectionate familiarity which honoured a servant. No other person was allowed to take liberties with her: to every one but her mistress she was known as Mrs. Ellmother.
“How is my aunt?” Emily asked.
“Bad.”
“Why have I not heard of her illness before?”
“Because she’s too fond of you to let you be distressed about her. ‘Don’t tell Emily’; those were her orders, as long as she kept her senses.”
“Kept her senses? Good heavens! what do you mean?”
“Fever — that’s what I mean.”
“I must see her directly; I am not afraid of infection.”
“There’s no infection to be afraid of. But you mustn’t see her, for all that.”
“I insist on seeing her.”
“Miss Emily, I am disappointing you for your own good. Don’t you know me well enough to trust me by this time?”
“I do trust you.”
“Then leave my mistress to me — and go and make yourself comfortable in your own room.”
Emily’s answer was a positive refusal. Mrs. Ellmother, driven to her last resources, raised a new obstacle.
“It’s not to be done, I tell you! How can you see Miss Letitia when she can’t bear the light in her room? Do you know what colour her eyes are? Red, poor soul — red as a boiled lobster.”
With every word the woman uttered, Emily’s perplexity and distress increased.
“You told me my aunt’s illness was fever,” she said — ”and now you speak of some complaint in her eyes. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let me go to her.”
Mrs. Ellmother, still keeping her place, looked through the open door.
“Here’s the doctor,” she announced. “It seems I can’t satisfy you; ask him what’s the matter. Come in, doctor.” She threw open the door of the parlor, and introduced Emily. “This is the mistress’s niece, sir. Please try if
you
can keep her quiet. I can’t.” She placed chairs with the hospitable politeness of the old school — and returned to her post at Miss Letitia’s bedside.
Doctor Allday was an elderly man, with a cool manner and a ruddy complexion — thoroughly acclimatized to the atmosphere of pain and grief in which it was his destiny to live. He spoke to Emily (without any undue familiarity) as if he had been accustomed to see her for the greater part of her life.
“That’s a curious woman,” he said, when Mrs. Ellmother closed the door; “the most headstrong person, I think, I ever met with. But devoted to her mistress, and, making allowance for her awkwardness, not a bad nurse. I am afraid I can’t give you an encouraging report of your aunt. The rheumatic fever (aggravated by the situation of this house — built on clay, you know, and close to stagnant water) has been latterly complicated by delirium.”