Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1319 page)

“And perhaps I have shown a little too plainly how dependent I am on you — how dreadful it would be to me if I lost you too as a friend?”

She blushed as she said it. When the words had escaped her, she felt that they might bear another meaning than the simple meaning which she had attached to them. He took her hand; his doubts of himself, his needless fear of offending her, restrained him no longer.

“You can never lose me,” he said, “if you will only let me be the nearest friend that a woman can have. Bear with me, dearest! I ask for so much; I have so little to offer in return. I dream of a life with you which is perhaps too perfectly happy to be enjoyed on earth. And yet, I cannot resign my delusion. Must my poor heart always long for happiness which is beyond my reach? If an overruling Providence guides our course through this world, may we not sometimes hope for happier ends than our mortal eyes can see?”

He waited a moment — and sighed — and dropped her hand. She hid her face; she knew what it would tell him: she was ashamed to let him see it.

“I didn’t mean to distress you,” he said sadly.

She let him see her face. For a moment only, she looked at him — and then let silence tell him the rest.

His arms closed round her. Slowly, the glory of the sun faded from the heavens, and the soft summer twilight fell over the earth. “I can’t speak,” he whispered; “my happiness is too much for me.”

“Are you sure of your happiness?” she asked.

“Could I think as I am thinking now, if I were not sure of it?”

“Are you thinking of
me?
”

“Of you — and of all that you will be to me in the future. Oh, my angel, if God grants us many years to come, what a perfect life I see!”

“Tell me — what do you see?”

“I see a husband and wife who are all in all to each other. If friends come to us, we are glad to bid them welcome; but we are always happiest by ourselves.”

“Do we live in retirement?”

“We live where you like best to live. Shall it be in the country?”

“Yes! yes! You have spoken of the sea as you might have spoken of your best friend — we will be near the sea. But I must not keep you selfishly all to myself. I must remember how good you have been to poor creatures who don’t feel our happiness, and who need your kindness. Perhaps I might help you? Do you doubt it?”

“I only doubt whether I ought to let you see what I have seen; I am only afraid of the risk of making you unhappy. You tempt me to run the risk. The help of a woman — and of such a woman as you are — is the one thing I have wanted. Your influence would succeed where my influence has often failed. How good, how thoughtful you would be!”

“I only want to be worthy of you,” she said, humbly. “When may I see your Home?”

He drew her closer to him: tenderly and timidly he kissed her for the first time. “It rests with you,” he answered. “When will you be my wife?”

She hesitated; he felt her trembling. “Is there any obstacle?” he asked.

Before she could reply, Kitty’s voice was heard calling to her mother — Kitty ran up to them.

Catherine turned cold as the child caught her by the hand, eagerly claiming her attention. All that she should have remembered, all that she had forgotten in a few bright moments of illusion, rose in judgment against her, and struck her mind prostrate in an instant, when she felt Kitty’s touch.

Bennydeck saw the change. Was it possible that the child’s sudden appearance had startled her? Kitty had something to say, and said it before he could speak.

“Mamma, I want to go where the other children are going. Susan’s gone to her supper. You take me.”

Her mother was not even listening. Kitty turned impatiently to Bennydeck. “Why won’t mamma speak to me?” she asked. He quieted her by a word. “You shall go with me.” His anxiety about Catherine was more than he could endure. “Pray let me take you back to the house,” he said. “I am afraid you are not well.”

“I shall be better directly. Do me a kindness — take the child!”

She spoke faintly and vacantly. Bennydeck hesitated. She lifted her trembling hands in entreaty. “I beg you will leave me!” Her voice, her manner, made it impossible to disobey. He turned resignedly to Kitty and asked which way she wanted to go. The child pointed down the path to one of the towers of the Crystal Palace, visible in the distance. “The governess has taken the others to see the company go away,” she said; “I want to go too.”

Bennydeck looked back before he lost sight of Catherine.

She remained seated, in the attitude in which he had left her. At the further end of the path which led to the hotel, he thought he saw a figure in the twilight, approaching from the house. There would be help near, if Catherine wanted it.

His uneasy mind was in some degree relieved, as he and Kitty left the garden together.

Chapter XLV. Love Your Enemies.

She tried to think of Bennydeck.

Her eyes followed him as long as he was in sight, but her thoughts wandered. To look at him now was to look at the little companion walking by his side. Still, the child reminded her of the living father; still, the child innocently tortured her with the consciousness of deceit. The faithless man from whom the law had released her, possessed himself of her thoughts, in spite of the law. He, and he only, was the visionary companion of her solitude when she was left by herself.

Did he remind her of the sin that he had committed? — of the insult that he had inflicted on the woman whom he had vowed to love and cherish? No! he recalled to her the years of love that she had passed by his side; he upbraided her with the happiness which she had owed to him, in the prime and glory of her life. Woman! set
that
against the wrong which I have done to you. You have the right to condemn me, and Society has the right to condemn me — but I am your child’s father still. Forget me if you can!

All thought will bear the test of solitude, excepting only the thought that finds its origin in hopeless self-reproach. The soft mystery of twilight, the solemn silence of the slowly-coming night, daunted Catherine in that lonely place. She rose to return to light and human beings. As she set her face toward the house, a discovery confronted her. She was not alone.

A woman was standing on the path, apparently looking at her.

In the dim light, and at the distance between them, recognition of the woman was impossible. She neither moved nor spoke. Strained to their utmost point of tension, Catherine’s nerves quivered at the sight of that shadowy solitary figure. She dropped back on the seat. In tones that trembled she said: “Who are you? What do you want?”

The voice that answered was, like her own voice, faint with fear. It said: “I want a word with you.”

Moving slowly forward — stopping — moving onward again — hesitating again — the woman at last approached. There was light enough left to reveal her face, now that she was near. It was the face of Sydney Westerfield.

The survival of childhood, in the mature human being, betrays itself most readily in the sex that bears children. The chances and changes of life show the child’s mobility of emotion constantly associating itself with the passions of the woman. At the moment of recognition the troubled mind of Catherine was instantly steadied, under the influence of that coarsest sense which levels us with the animals — the sense of anger.

“I am amazed at your audacity,” she said.

There was no resentment — there was only patient submission in Sydney’s reply.

“Twice I have approached the house in which you are living; and twice my courage has failed me. I have gone away again — I have walked, I don’t know where, I don’t know how far. Shame and fear seemed to be insensible to fatigue. This is my third attempt. If I was a little nearer to you, I think you would see what the effort has cost me. I have not much to say. May I ask you to hear me?”

“You have taken me by surprise, Miss Westerfield. You have no right to do that; I refuse to hear you.”

“Try, madam, to bear in mind that no unhappy creature, in my place, would expose herself to your anger and contempt without a serious reason. Will you think again?”

“No!”

Sydney turned to go away — and suddenly stopped.

Another person was advancing from the hotel; an interruption, a trivial domestic interruption, presented itself. The nursemaid had missed the child, and had come into the garden to see if she was with her mother.

“Where is Miss Kitty, ma’am?” the girl asked.

Her mistress told her what had happened, and sent her to the Palace to relieve Captain Bennydeck of the charge that he had undertaken. Susan listened, looking at Sydney and recognising the familiar face. As the girl moved away, Sydney spoke to her.

“I hope little Kitty is well and happy?”

The mother does not live who could have resisted the tone in which that question was put. The broken heart, the love for the child that still lived in it, spoke in accents that even touched the servant. She came back; remembering the happy days when the governess had won their hearts at Mount Morven, and, for a moment at least, remembering nothing else.

“Quite well and happy, miss, thank you,” Susan said.

As she hurried away on her errand, she saw her mistress beckon to Sydney to return, and place a chair for her. The nursemaid was not near enough to hear what followed.

“Miss Westerfield, will you forget what I said just now?” With those words, Catherine pointed to the chair. “I am ready to hear you,” she resumed — ”but I have something to ask first. Does what you wish to say to me relate only to yourself?”

“It relates to another person, as well as to myself.”

That reply, and the inference to which it led, tried Catherine’s resolution to preserve her self-control, as nothing had tried it yet.

“If that other person,” she began, “means Mr. Herbert Linley — ”

Sydney interrupted her, in words which she was entirely unprepared to hear.

“I shall never see Mr. Herbert Linley again.”

“Has he deserted you?”

“No. It is
I
who have left
him.
”

“You!”

The emphasis laid on that one word forced Sydney to assert herself for the first time.

“If I had not left him of my own free will,” she said, “what else would excuse me for venturing to come here?”

Catherine’s sense of justice felt the force of that reply. At the same time her sense of injury set its own construction on Sydney’s motive. “Has his cruelty driven you away from him?” she asked.

“If he has been cruel to me,” Sydney answered, “do you think I should have come here to complain of it to You? Do me the justice to believe that I am not capable of such self-degradation as that. I have nothing to complain of.”

“And yet you have left him?”

“He has been all that is kind and considerate: he has done everything that a man in his unhappy position could do to set my mind at ease. And yet I have left him. Oh, I claim no merit for my repentance, bitterly as I feel it! I might not have had the courage to leave him — if he had loved me as he once loved you.”

“Miss Westerfield, you are the last person living who ought to allude to my married life.”

“You may perhaps pardon the allusion, madam, when you have heard what I have still to say. I owe it to Mr. Herbert Linley, if not to you, to confess that his life with me has
not
been a life of happiness. He has tried, compassionately tried, to keep his secret sorrow from discovery, and he has failed. I had long suspected the truth; but I only saw it in his face when he found the book you left behind you at the hotel. Your image has, from first to last, been the one living image in his guilty heart. I am the miserable victim of a man’s passing fancy. You have been, you are still, the one object of a husband’s love. Ask your own heart if the woman lives who can say to you what I have said — unless she knew it to be true.”