Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1381 page)

One of them was an old copy of the
Times
, dating back as far as the 13th December, 1858. It was carefully folded, longwise, with the title-page uppermost. On the first column, at the left-hand side of the sheet, appeared the customary announcements of Births. A mark with a blue pencil, against one of the advertisements, attracted my attention. I read these lines:

“On the 10th inst., the wife of the Rev. Abel Gracedieu, of a daughter.”

The second newspaper bore a later date, and contained nothing that interested me. I naturally assumed that the advertisement in the
Times
had been inserted at the desire of Mrs. Gracedieu; and, after all that I had heard, there was little difficulty in attributing the curious omission of the place in which the child had been born to the caution of her husband. If Mrs. Tenbruggen (then Miss Chance) had happened to see the advertisement in the great London newspaper, Mr. Gracedieu might yet have good reason to congratulate himself on his prudent method of providing against mischievous curiosity.

I turned toward the bed and looked at him. His eyes were closed. Was he sleeping? Or was he trying to remember what he had desired to say to me, when the demands which I made on his memory had obliged him to wait for a later opportunity?

Either way, there was something that quickened my sympathies, in the spectacle of his helpless repose. It suggested to me personal reasons for his anxieties, which he had not mentioned, and which I had not thought of, up to this time. If the discovery that he dreaded took place, his household would be broken up, and his position as pastor would suffer in the estimation of the flock. His own daughter would refuse to live under the same roof with the daughter of an infamous woman. Popular opinion, among his congregation, judging a man who had passed off the child of other parents as his own, would find that man guilty of an act of deliberate deceit.

Still oppressed by reflections which pointed to the future in this discouraging way, I was startled by a voice outside the door — a sweet, sad voice — saying, “May I come in?”

The Minister’s eyes opened instantly: he raised himself in his bed.

“Eunice, at last!” he cried. “Let her in.”

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE ADOPTED CHILD

I opened the door.

Eunice passed me with the suddenness almost of a flash of light. When I turned toward the bed, her arms were round her father’s neck. “Oh, poor papa, how ill you look!” Commonplace expressions of fondness, and no more; but the tone gave them a charm that subdued me. Never had I felt so indulgent toward Mr. Gracedieu’s unreasonable fears as when I saw him in the embrace of his adopted daughter. She had already reminded me of the bygone day when a bright little child had sat on my knee and listened to the ticking of my watch.

The Minister gently lifted her head from his breast. “My darling,” he said, “you don’t see my old friend. Love him, and look up to him, Eunice. He will be your friend, too, when I am gone.”

She came to me and offered her cheek to be kissed. It was sadly pale, poor soul — and I could guess why. But her heart was now full of her father. “Do you think he is seriously ill?” she whispered. What I ought to have said I don’t know. Her eyes, the sweetest, truest, loveliest eyes I ever saw in a human face, were pleading with me. Let my enemies make the worst of it, if they like — I did certainly lie. And if I deserved my punishment, I got it; the poor child believed me! “Now I am happier,” she said, gratefully. “Only to hear your voice seems to encourage me. On our way here, Selina did nothing but talk of you. She told me I shouldn’t have time to feel afraid of the great man; he would make me fond of him directly. I said, ‘Are you fond of him?’ She said, ‘Madly in love with him, my dear.’ My little friend really thinks you like her, and is very proud of it. There are some people who call her ugly. I hope you don’t agree with them?”

I believe I should have lied again, if Mr. Gracedieu had not called me to the bedside.

“How does she strike you?” he whispered, eagerly. “Is it too soon to ask if she shows her age in her face?”

“Neither in her face nor her figure,” I answered: “it astonishes me that you can ever have doubted it. No stranger, judging by personal appearance, could fail to make the mistake of thinking Helena the oldest of the two.”

He looked fondly at Eunice. “Her figure seems to bear out what you say,” he went on. “Almost childish, isn’t it?”

I could not agree to that. Slim, supple, simply graceful in every movement, Eunice’s figure, in the charm of first youth, only waited its perfect development. Most men, looking at her as she stood at the other end of the room with her back toward us, would have guessed her age to be sixteen.

Finding that I failed to agree with him, Mr. Gracedieu’s misgivings returned. “You speak very confidently,” he said, “considering that you have not seen the girls together. Think what a dreadful blow it would be to me if you made a mistake.”

I declared, with perfect sincerity, that there was no fear of a mistake. The bare idea of making the proposed comparison was hateful to me. If Helena and I had happened to meet at that moment, I should have turned away from her by instinct — she would have disturbed my impressions of Eunice.

The Minister signed to me to move a little nearer to him. “I must say it,” he whispered, “and I am afraid of her hearing me. Is there anything in her face that reminds you of her miserable mother?”

I had hardly patience to answer the question: it was simply preposterous. Her hair was by many shades darker than her mother’s hair; her eyes were of a different colour. There was an exquisite tenderness and sincerity in their expression — made additionally beautiful, to my mind, by a gentle, uncomplaining sadness. It was impossible even to think of the eyes of the murderess when I looked at her child. Eunice’s lower features, again, had none of her mother’s regularity of proportion. Her smile, simple and sweet, and soon passing away, was certainly not an inherited smile on the maternal side. Whether she resembled her father, I was unable to conjecture — having never seen him. The one thing certain was, that not the faintest trace, in feature or expression, of Eunice’s mother was to be seen in Eunice herself. Of the two girls, Helena — judging by something in the colour of her hair, and by something in the shade of her complexion — might possibly have suggested, in those particulars only, a purely accidental resemblance to my terrible prisoner of past times.

The revival of Mr. Gracedieu’s spirits indicated a temporary change only, and was already beginning to pass away. The eyes which had looked lovingly at Eunice began to look languidly now: his head sank on the pillow with a sigh of weak content. “My pleasure has been almost too much for me,” he said. “Leave me for a while to rest, and get used to it.”

Eunice kissed his forehead — and we left the room.

CHAPTER XL. THE BRUISED HEART.

When we stepped out on the landing, I observed that my companion paused. She looked at the two flights of stairs below us before she descended them. It occurred to me that there must be somebody in the house whom she was anxious to avoid.

Arrived at the lower hall, she paused again, and proposed in a whisper that we should go into the garden. As we advanced along the backward division of the hall, I saw her eyes turn distrustfully toward the door of the room in which Helena had received me. At last, my slow perceptions felt with her and understood her. Eunice’s sensitive nature recoiled from a chance meeting with the wretch who had laid waste all that had once been happy and hopeful in that harmless young life.

“Will you come with me to the part of the garden that I am fondest of?” she asked.

I offered her my arm. She led me in silence to a rustic seat, placed under the shade of a mulberry tree. I saw a change in her face as we sat down — a tender and beautiful change. At that moment the girl’s heart was far away from me. There was some association with this corner of the garden, on which I felt that I must not intrude.

“I was once very happy here,” she said. “When the time of the heartache came soon after, I was afraid to look at the old tree and the bench under it. But that is all over now. I like to remember the hours that were once dear to me, and to see the place that recalls them. Do you know who I am thinking of? Don’t be afraid of distressing me. I never cry now.”

“My dear child, I have heard your sad story — but I can’t trust myself to speak of it.”

“Because you are so sorry for me?”

“No words can say how sorry I am!”

“But you are not angry with Philip?”

“Not angry! My poor dear, I am afraid to tell you how angry I am with him.”

“Oh, no! You mustn’t say that. If you wish to be kind to me — and I am sure you do wish it — don’t think bitterly of Philip.”

When I remember that the first feeling she roused in me was nothing worthier of a professing Christian than astonishment, I drop in my own estimation to the level of a savage. “Do you really mean,” I was base enough to ask, “that you have forgiven him?”

She said, gently: “How could I help forgiving him?”

The man who could have been blessed with such love as this, and who could have cast it away from him, can have been nothing but an idiot. On that ground — though I dared not confess it to Eunice — I forgave him, too.

“Do I surprise you?” she asked simply. “Perhaps love will bear any humiliation. Or perhaps I am only a poor weak creature. You don’t know what a comfort it was to me to keep the few letters that I received from Philip. When I heard that he had gone away, I gave his letters the kiss that bade him good-by. That was the time, I think, when my poor bruised heart got used to the pain; I began to feel that there was one consolation still left for me — I might end in forgiving him. Why do I tell you all this? I think you must have bewitched me. Is this really the first time I have seen you?”

She put her little trembling hand into mine; I lifted it to my lips, and kissed it. Sorely was I tempted to own that I had pitied and loved her in her infancy. It was almost on my lips to say: “I remember you an easily-pleased little creature, amusing yourself with the broken toys which were once the playthings of my own children.” I believe I should have said it, if I could have trusted myself to speak composedly to her. This was not to be done. Old as I was, versed as I was in the hard knowledge of how to keep the mask on in the hour of need, this was not to be done.

Still trying to understand that I was little better than a stranger to her, and still bent on finding the secret of the sympathy that united us, Eunice put a strange question to me.

“When you were young yourself,” she said, “did you know what it was to love, and to be loved — and then to lose it all?”

It is not given to many men to marry the woman who has been the object of their first love. My early life had been darkened by a sad story; never confided to any living creature; banished resolutely from my own thoughts. For forty years past, that part of my buried self had lain quiet in its grave — and the chance touch of an innocent hand had raised the dead, and set us face to face again! Did I know what it was to love, and to be loved, and then to lose it all? “Too well, my child; too well!”

That was all I could say to her. In the last days of my life, I shrank from speaking of it. When I had first felt that calamity, and had felt it most keenly, I might have given an answer worthier of me, and worthier of her.

She dropped my hand, and sat by me in silence, thinking. Had I — without meaning it, God knows! — had I disappointed her?

“Did you expect me to tell my own sad story,” I said, “as frankly and as trustfully as you have told yours?”

“Oh, don’t think that! I know what an effort it was to you to answer me at all. Yes, indeed! I wonder whether I may ask something. The sorrow you have just told me of is not the only one — is it? You have had other troubles?”

“Many of them.”

“There are times,” she went on, “when one can’t help thinking of one’s own miserable self. I try to be cheerful, but those times come now and then.”

She stopped, and looked at me with a pale fear confessing itself in her face.