Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (181 page)

For a moment he did not seem to comprehend what her action meant; then the resemblance between the hair in her hand and the hair in his own, struck him suddenly.

The whole expression of his face changed in an instant — changed so darkly that she recoiled from him in terror, and put back the hair into the newspaper. He pounced on it directly; and, crunching it up in his hand, turned his grim threatening face and fiercely-questioning eyes on the landlady. While she was answering his inquiry, Madonna saw him look towards Zack’s bed; and, as he looked, another change passed over his face — the darkness faded from it, and the red scars on his cheek deepened in colour. He moved back slowly to the further corner of the room from the folding-doors; his restless eyes fixed in a vacant stare, one of his hands clutched round the old newspaper, the other motioning clumsily and impatiently to the astonished and alarmed women to leave him.

Madonna had felt Patty’s hand pulling at her arm more than once during the last minute or two. She was now quite as anxious as her companion to quit the house. They went out quickly, not venturing to look at Mat again; and the landlady followed them. She and Patty had a long talk together at the street door — evidently, judging by the expression of their faces, about the conduct of the rough lodger up-stairs. But Madonna felt no desire to be informed particularly of what they were saying to each other. Much as Matthew’s strange behavior had surprised and startled her, he was not the uppermost subject in her mind just then. It was the discovery of her secret, the failure of her little plan for helping Zack with her own money, that she was now thinking of with equal confusion and dismay. She had not been in the front room at Kirk Street much more than five minutes altogether — yet what a succession of untoward events had passed in that short space of time!

For a long while after the women had left him, Mat stood motionless in the furthest corner of the room from the folding-doors, looking vacantly towards Zack’s bedchamber. His first surprise on finding a stranger talking in the passage, when he let himself in from the street; his first vexation on hearing of Zack’s accident from the landlady; his momentary impulse to discover himself to Mary’s child, when he saw Madonna standing in his room, and again when he knew that she had come there with her little offering, for the one kind purpose of helping the sick lad in his distress — all these sensations were now gone from his memory as well as from his heart; absorbed in the one predominant emotion with which the discovery of the resemblance between Zack’s hair and the hair from Jane Holdworth’s letter now filled him. No ordinary shocks could strike Mat’s mind hard enough to make it lose its balance —
this
shock prostrated it in an instant.

In proportion as he gradually recovered his self-possession so did the desire strengthen in him to ascertain the resemblance between the two kinds of hair once more — but in such a manner as it had not been ascertained yet. He stole gently to the folding-doors and looked into young Thorpe’s room. Zack was still asleep.

After pausing for a moment, and shaking his head sorrowfully, as he noticed how pale and wasted the lad’s face looked, he approached the pillow, and laid the lock of Arthur Carr’s hair upon it, close to the uninjured side of Zack’s head. It was then late in the afternoon, but not dusk yet. No blind hung over the bedroom window, and all the light in the sky streamed full on to the pillow as Mat’s eyes fastened on it.

The similarity between the sleeper’s hair and the hair of Arthur Carr was perfect! Both were of the same light brown colour, and both had running through that colour the same delicate golden tinge, brightly visible in the light, hardly to be detected at all in the shade.

Why had this extraordinary resemblance never struck him before? Perhaps because he had never examined Arthur Carr’s hair with attention until he had possessed himself of Mary’s bracelet, and had gone away to the country. Perhaps also because he had never yet taken notice enough of Zack’s hair to care to look close at it. And now the resemblance was traced, to what conclusion did it point? Plainly, from Zack’s youth, to none in connection with
him.
But what elder relatives had he? and which of them was he most like?

Did he take after his father?

Mat was looking down at the sleeper, just then; something in the lad’s face troubled him, and kept his mind from pursuing that last thought. He took the lock of hair from the pillow, and went into the front room. There was anxiety and almost dread in his face, as he thought of the fatally decisive question in relation to the momentous discovery he had just made, which must be addressed to Zack when he awoke. He had never really known how fond he was of his fellow lodger until now, when he was conscious of a dull, numbing sensation of dismay at the prospect of addressing that question to the friend who had lived as a brother with him, since the day when they first met.

As the evening closed in, Zack woke. It was a relief to Mat, as he went to the bedside, to know that his face could not now be clearly seen. The burden of that terrible question pressed heavily on his heart, while he held his comrade’s feeble hand; while he answered as considerately, yet as briefly as he could, the many inquiries addressed to him; and while he listened patiently and silently to the sufferer’s long, wandering, faintly-uttered narrative of the accident that had befallen him. Towards the close of that narrative, Zack himself unconsciously led the way to the fatal question which Mat longed, yet dreaded to ask him.

“Well, old fellow,” he said, turning feebly on his pillow, so as to face Matthew, “something like what you call the ‘horrors’ has been taking hold of me. And this morning, in particular, I was so wretched and lonely, that I asked the landlady to write for me to my father, begging his pardon, and all that. I haven’t behaved as well as I ought; and, somehow, when a fellow’s ill and lonely he gets homesick — ”

His voice began to grow faint, and he left the sentence unfinished.

“Zack,” said Mat, turning his face away from the bed while he spoke, though it was now quite dark. “Zack, what sort of a man is your father?”

“What sort of a man! How do you mean?”

“To look at. Are you like him in the face?”

“Lord help you, Mat! as little like as possible. My father’s face is all wrinkled and marked.”

“Aye, aye, like other old men’s faces. His hair’s grey, I suppose?”

“Quite white. By-the-by — talking of that — there
is
one point I’m like him in — at least, like what he
was,
when he was a young man.”

“What’s that?”

“What we’ve been speaking of — his hair. I’ve heard my mother say, when she first married him — just shake up my pillow a bit, will you, Mat?”

“Yes, yes. And what did you hear your mother say?”

“Oh, nothing particular. Only that when he was a young man, his hair was exactly like what mine is now.”

As those momentous words were spoken, the landlady knocked at the door, and announced that she was waiting outside with candles, and a nice cup of tea for the invalid. Mat let her into the bedchamber — then immediately walked out of it into the front room, and closed the folding-doors behind him. Brave as he was, he was afraid, at that moment, to let Zack see his face.

He walked to the fireplace, and rested his head and arm on the chimney-piece — reflected for a little while — then stood upright again — and searching in his pocket, drew from it once more that fatal lock of hair, which he had examined so anxiously and so often during his past fortnight in the country.

“Your
work’s done,” he said, looking at it for a moment, as it lay in his hand — then throwing it into the dull red fire which was now burning low in the grate.
“Your
work’s done; and mine won’t be long a-doing.” He rested his head and arm again wearily on the chimney-piece, and added:

“I’m brothers with Zack — there’s the hard part of it! — I’m brothers with Zack.”

CHAPTER XVI. THE DAY OF RECKONING.

On the forenoon of the day that followed Mat’s return to Kirk Street, the ordinarily dull aspect of Baregrove Square was enlivened by a procession of three handsome private carriages which stopped at Mr. Thorpe’s door.

From each carriage there descended gentlemen of highly respectable appearance, clothed in shining black garments, and wearing, for the most part, white cravats. One of these gentlemen carried in his hands a handsome silver inkstand, and another gentleman who followed him, bore a roll of glossy paper, tied round with a broad ribbon of sober purple hue. The roll contained an Address to Mr. Thorpe, eulogizing his character in very affectionate terms; the inkstand was a Testimonial to be presented after the Address; and the gentlemen who occupied the three private carriages were all eminent members of the religious society which Mr. Thorpe had served in the capacity of Secretary, and from which he was now obliged to secede in consequence of the precarious state of his health.

A small and orderly assembly of idle people had collected on the pavement to see the gentlemen alight, to watch them go into the house, to stare at the inkstand, to wonder at the Address, to observe that Mr. Thorpe’s page wore his best livery, and that Mr. Thorpe’s housemaid had on new cap-ribbons and her Sunday gown. After the street door had been closed, and these various objects for popular admiration had disappeared, there still remained an attraction outside in the square, which addressed itself to the general ear. One of the footmen in attendance on the carriages, had collected many interesting particulars about the Deputation and the Testimonial, and while he related them in regular order to another footman anxious for information, the small and orderly public of idlers stood round about, and eagerly caught up any stray words explanatory of the ceremonies then in progress inside the house, which fell in their way.

One of the most attentive of these listeners was a swarthy-complexioned man with bristling whiskers and a scarred face, who had made one of the assembly on the pavement from the moment of its first congregating. He had been almost as much stared at by the people about him as the Deputation itself; and had been set down among them generally as a foreigner of the most outlandish kind: but, in plain truth, he was English to the back-bone, being no other than Matthew Grice.

Mat’s look, as he stood listening among his neighbours, was now just as quietly vigilant, his manner just as gruffly self-possessed, as usual. But it had cost him a hard struggle that morning, in the solitude of one of his longest and loneliest walks, to compose himself — or, in his favorite phrase, to “get to be his own man again.”

From the moment when he had thrown the lock of hair into the fire, to the moment when he was now loitering at Mr. Thorpe’s door,
he
had never doubted, whatever others might have done, that the man who had been the ruin of his sister, and the man who was the nearest blood relation of the comrade who shared his roof, and lay sick at that moment in his bed, were one and the same. Though he stood now, amid the casual street spectators, apparently as indolently curious as the most careless among them — looking at what they looked at, listening to what they listened to, and leaving the square when they left it — he was resolved all the time to watch his first opportunity of entering Mr. Thorpe’s house that very day; resolved to investigate through all its ramifications the secret which he had first discovered when the fragments of Zack’s hair were playfully held up for him to look at in the deaf and dumb girl’s hand.

The dispersion of the idlers on the pavement was accelerated, and the footman’s imaginary description of the proceedings then in progress at Mr. Thorpe’s was cut short, by the falling of a heavy shower. The frost, after breaking up, had been succeeded that year by prematurely mild spring weather — April seemed to have come a month before its time.

Regardless of the rain, Mat walked slowly up and down the streets round Baregrove Square, peering every now and then, from afar off, through the misty shower, to see if the carriages were still drawn up at Mr. Thorpe’s door. The ceremony of presenting the Testimonial was evidently a protracted one; for the vehicles were long kept waiting for their owners. The rain had passed away — the sun had reappeared — fresh clouds had gathered, and it was threatening a second shower, before the Deputation from the great Religious Society re-entered their vehicles and drove out of the square.

When they had quitted it, Mat advanced and knocked at Mr. Thorpe’s door. The clouds rolled up darkly over the sun, and the first warning drops of the new shower began to fall, as the door opened.

The servant hesitated about admitting him. He had anticipated that this sort of obstacle would be thrown in his way at the outset, and had provided against it in his own mind beforehand. “Tell your master,” he said, “that his son is ill, and I’ve come to speak to him about it.”