Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1672 page)

“She supposed me,” objected Wilding, shaking his head, “to have a natural claim upon her, which I had not.”

“I must admit that,” replied his partner, “to be true.  But if she had made the discovery that you have made, six months before she died, do you think it would have cancelled the years you were together, and the tenderness that each of you had conceived for the other, each on increasing knowledge of the other?”

“What I think,” said Wilding, simply but stoutly holding to the bare fact, “can no more change the truth than it can bring down the sky.  The truth is that I stand possessed of what was meant for another man.”

“He may be dead,” said Vendale.

“He may be alive,” said Wilding.  “And if he is alive, have I not — innocently, I grant you innocently — robbed him of enough?  Have I not robbed him of all the happy time that I enjoyed in his stead?  Have I not robbed him of the exquisite delight that filled my soul when that dear lady,” stretching his hand towards the picture, “told me she was my mother?  Have I not robbed him of all the care she lavished on me?  Have I not even robbed him of all the devotion and duty that I so proudly gave to her?  Therefore it is that I ask myself, George Vendale, and I ask you, where is he?  What has become of him?”

“Who can tell!”

“I must try to find out who can tell.  I must institute inquiries.  I must never desist from prosecuting inquiries.  I will live upon the interest of my share — I ought to say his share — in this business, and will lay up the rest for him.  When I find him, I may perhaps throw myself upon his generosity; but I will yield up all to him.  I will, I swear.  As I loved and honoured her,” said Wilding, reverently kissing his hand towards the picture, and then covering his eyes with it.  “As I loved and honoured her, and have a world of reasons to be grateful to her!”  And so broke down again.

His partner rose from the chair he had occupied, and stood beside him with a hand softly laid upon his shoulder.  “Walter, I knew you before to-day to be an upright man, with a pure conscience and a fine heart.  It is very fortunate for me that I have the privilege to travel on in life so near to so trustworthy a man.  I am thankful for it.  Use me as your right hand, and rely upon me to the death.  Don’t think the worse of me if I protest to you that my uppermost feeling at present is a confused, you may call it an unreasonable, one.  I feel far more pity for the lady and for you, because you did not stand in your supposed relations, than I can feel for the unknown man (if he ever became a man), because he was unconsciously displaced.  You have done well in sending for Mr. Bintrey.  What I think will be a part of his advice, I know is the whole of mine.  Do not move a step in this serious matter precipitately.  The secret must be kept among us with great strictness, for to part with it lightly would be to invite fraudulent claims, to encourage a host of knaves, to let loose a flood of perjury and plotting.  I have no more to say now, Walter, than to remind you that you sold me a share in your business, expressly to save yourself from more work than your present health is fit for, and that I bought it expressly to do work, and mean to do it.”

With these words, and a parting grip of his partner’s shoulder that gave them the best emphasis they could have had, George Vendale betook himself presently to the counting-house, and presently afterwards to the address of M. Jules Obenreizer.

As he turned into Soho Square, and directed his steps towards its north side, a deepened colour shot across his sun-browned face, which Wilding, if he had been a better observer, or had been less occupied with his own trouble, might have noticed when his partner read aloud a certain passage in their Swiss correspondent’s letter, which he had not read so distinctly as the rest.

A curious colony of mountaineers has long been enclosed within that small flat London district of Soho.  Swiss watchmakers, Swiss silver-chasers, Swiss jewellers, Swiss importers of Swiss musical boxes and Swiss toys of various kinds, draw close together there.  Swiss professors of music, painting, and languages; Swiss artificers in steady work; Swiss couriers, and other Swiss servants chronically out of place; industrious Swiss laundresses and clear-starchers; mysteriously existing Swiss of both sexes; Swiss creditable and Swiss discreditable; Swiss to be trusted by all means, and Swiss to be trusted by no means; these diverse Swiss particles are attracted to a centre in the district of Soho.  Shabby Swiss eating-houses, coffee-houses, and lodging-houses, Swiss drinks and dishes, Swiss service for Sundays, and Swiss schools for week-days, are all to be found there.  Even the native-born English taverns drive a sort of broken-English trade; announcing in their windows Swiss whets and drams, and sheltering in their bars Swiss skirmishes of love and animosity on most nights in the year.

When the new partner in Wilding and Co. rang the bell of a door bearing the blunt inscription OBENREIZER on a brass plate — the inner door of a substantial house, whose ground story was devoted to the sale of Swiss clocks — he passed at once into domestic Switzerland.  A white-tiled stove for winter-time filled the fireplace of the room into which he was shown, the room’s bare floor was laid together in a neat pattern of several ordinary woods, the room had a prevalent air of surface bareness and much scrubbing; and the little square of flowery carpet by the sofa, and the velvet chimney-board with its capacious clock and vases of artificial flowers, contended with that tone, as if, in bringing out the whole effect, a Parisian had adapted a dairy to domestic purposes.

Mimic water was dropping off a mill-wheel under the clock.  The visitor had not stood before it, following it with his eyes, a minute, when M. Obenreizer, at his elbow, startled him by saying, in very good English, very slightly clipped: “How do you do?  So glad!”

“I beg your pardon.  I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Not at all!  Sit, please.”

Releasing his visitor’s two arms, which he had lightly pinioned at the elbows by way of embrace, M. Obenreizer also sat, remarking, with a smile: “You are well?  So glad!” and touching his elbows again.

“I don’t know,” said Vendale, after exchange of salutations, “whether you may yet have heard of me from your House at Neuchâtel?”

“Ah, yes!”

“In connection with Wilding and Co.?”

“Ah, surely!”

“Is it not odd that I should come to you, in London here, as one of the Firm of Wilding and Co., to pay the Firm’s respects?”

“Not at all!  What did I always observe when we were on the mountains?  We call them vast; but the world is so little.  So little is the world, that one cannot keep away from persons.  There are so few persons in the world, that they continually cross and re-cross.  So very little is the world, that one cannot get rid of a person.  Not,” touching his elbows again, with an ingratiatory smile, “that one would desire to get rid of you.”

“I hope not, M. Obenreizer.”

“Please call me, in your country, Mr.  I call myself so, for I love your country.  If I
could
be English!  But I am born.  And you?  Though descended from so fine a family, you have had the condescension to come into trade?  Stop though.  Wines?  Is it trade in England or profession?  Not fine art?”

“Mr. Obenreizer,” returned Vendale, somewhat out of countenance, “I was but a silly young fellow, just of age, when I first had the pleasure of travelling with you, and when you and I and Mademoiselle your niece — who is well?”

“Thank you.  Who is well.”

“ — Shared some slight glacier dangers together.  If, with a boy’s vanity, I rather vaunted my family, I hope I did so as a kind of introduction of myself.  It was very weak, and in very bad taste; but perhaps you know our English proverb, ‘Live and Learn.’”

“You make too much of it,” returned the Swiss.  “And what the devil!  After all, yours
was
a fine family.”

George Vendale’s laugh betrayed a little vexation as he rejoined: “Well!  I was strongly attached to my parents, and when we first travelled together, Mr. Obenreizer, I was in the first flush of coming into what my father and mother left me.  So I hope it may have been, after all, more youthful openness of speech and heart than boastfulness.”

“All openness of speech and heart!  No boastfulness!” cried Obenreizer.  “You tax yourself too heavily.  You tax yourself, my faith! as if you was your Government taxing you!  Besides, it commenced with me.  I remember, that evening in the boat upon the lake, floating among the reflections of the mountains and valleys, the crags and pine woods, which were my earliest remembrance, I drew a word-picture of my sordid childhood.  Of our poor hut, by the waterfall which my mother showed to travellers; of the cow-shed where I slept with the cow; of my idiot half-brother always sitting at the door, or limping down the Pass to beg; of my half-sister always spinning, and resting her enormous goître on a great stone; of my being a famished naked little wretch of two or three years, when they were men and women with hard hands to beat me, I, the only child of my father’s second marriage — if it even was a marriage.  What more natural than for you to compare notes with me, and say, ‘We are as one by age; at that same time I sat upon my mother’s lap in my father’s carriage, rolling through the rich English streets, all luxury surrounding me, all squalid poverty kept far from me.  Such is
my
earliest remembrance as opposed to yours!’”

Mr. Obenreizer was a black-haired young man of a dark complexion, through whose swarthy skin no red glow ever shone.  When colour would have come into another cheek, a hardly discernible beat would come into his, as if the machinery for bringing up the ardent blood were there, but the machinery were dry.  He was robustly made, well proportioned, and had handsome features.  Many would have perceived that some surface change in him would have set them more at their ease with him, without being able to define what change.  If his lips could have been made much thicker, and his neck much thinner, they would have found their want supplied.

But the great Obenreizer peculiarity was, that a certain nameless film would come over his eyes — apparently by the action of his own will — which would impenetrably veil, not only from those tellers of tales, but from his face at large, every expression save one of attention.  It by no means followed that his attention should be wholly given to the person with whom he spoke, or even wholly bestowed on present sounds and objects.  Rather, it was a comprehensive watchfulness of everything he had in his own mind, and everything that he knew to be, or suspected to be, in the minds of other men.

At this stage of the conversation, Mr. Obenreizer’s film came over him.

“The object of my present visit,” said Vendale, “is, I need hardly say, to assure you of the friendliness of Wilding and Co., and of the goodness of your credit with us, and of our desire to be of service to you.  We hope shortly to offer you our hospitality.  Things are not quite in train with us yet, for my partner, Mr. Wilding, is reorganising the domestic part of our establishment, and is interrupted by some private affairs.  You don’t know Mr. Wilding, I believe?”

Mr. Obenreizer did not.

“You must come together soon.  He will be glad to have made your acquaintance, and I think I may predict that you will be glad to have made his.  You have not been long established in London, I suppose, Mr. Obenreizer?”

“It is only now that I have undertaken this agency.”

“Mademoiselle your niece — is — not married?”

“Not married.”

George Vendale glanced about him, as if for any tokens of her.

“She has been in London?”

“She
is
in London.”

“When, and where, might I have the honour of recalling myself to her remembrance?”

Mr. Obenreizer, discarding his film and touching his visitor’s elbows as before, said lightly: “Come up-stairs.”

Fluttered enough by the suddenness with which the interview he had sought was coming upon him after all, George Vendale followed up-stairs.  In a room over the chamber he had just quitted — a room also Swiss-appointed — a young lady sat near one of three windows, working at an embroidery-frame; and an older lady sat with her face turned close to another white-tiled stove (though it was summer, and the stove was not lighted), cleaning gloves.  The young lady wore an unusual quantity of fair bright hair, very prettily braided about a rather rounder white forehead than the average English type, and so her face might have been a shade — or say a light — rounder than the average English face, and her figure slightly rounder than the figure of the average English girl at nineteen.  A remarkable indication of freedom and grace of limb, in her quiet attitude, and a wonderful purity and freshness of colour in her dimpled face and bright gray eyes, seemed fraught with mountain air.  Switzerland too, though the general fashion of her dress was English, peeped out of the fanciful bodice she wore, and lurked in the curious clocked red stocking, and in its little silver-buckled shoe.  As to the elder lady, sitting with her feet apart upon the lower brass ledge of the stove, supporting a lap-f of gloves while she cleaned one stretched on her left hand, she was a true Swiss impersonation of another kind; from the breadth of her cushion-like back, and the ponderosity of her respectable legs (if the word be admissible), to the black velvet band tied tightly round her throat for the repression of a rising tendency to goître; or, higher still, to her great copper-coloured gold ear-rings; or, higher still, to her head-dress of black gauze stretched on wire.