Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (521 page)

He bustled away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighbourhood. “Whatever else they may say of me, they shan’t say I was afraid to face them.” Heated red-hot with that idea, he seized his hat and gloves, and hurrying out of the room, met Midwinter in the corridor with the lawyer’s letter in his hand.

“Keep up your spirits!” cried Allan, seeing the anxiety in his friend’s face, and misinterpreting the motive of it immediately. “If Darch can’t be counted on to send us a helping hand into the steward’s office, Pedgift can.”

“My dear Allan, I was not thinking of that; I was thinking of Mr. Darch’s letter. I don’t defend this sour-tempered man; but I am afraid we must admit he has some cause for complaint. Pray don’t give him another chance of putting you in the wrong. Where is your answer to his letter?”

“Gone!” replied Allan. “I always strike while the iron’s hot — a word and a blow, and the blow first, that’s my way. Don’t, there’s a good fellow, don’t fidget about the steward’s books and the rent-day. Here! here’s a bunch of keys they gave me last night: one of them opens the room where the steward’s books are; go in and read them till I come back. I give you my sacred word of honour I’ll settle it all with Pedgift before you see me again.”

“One moment,” interposed Midwinter, stopping him resolutely on his way out to the carriage. “I say nothing against Mr. Pedgift’s fitness to possess your confidence, for I know nothing to justify me in distrusting him. But he has not introduced himself to your notice in a very delicate way; and he has not acknowledged (what is quite clear to my mind) that he knew of Mr. Darch’s unfriendly feeling toward you when he wrote. Wait a little before you go to this stranger; wait till we can talk it over together to-night.”

“Wait!” replied Allan. “Haven’t I told you that I always strike while the iron’s hot? Trust my eye for character, old boy, I’ll look Pedgift through and through, and act accordingly. Don’t keep me any longer, for Heaven’s sake. I’m in a fine humour for tackling the resident gentry; and if I don’t go at once, I’m afraid it may wear off.”

With that excellent reason for being in a hurry, Allan boisterously broke away. Before it was possible to stop him again, he had jumped into the carriage and had left the house.

IV. THE MARCH OF EVENTS.

Midwinter’s face darkened when the last trace of the carriage had disappeared from view. “I have done my best,” he said, as he turned back gloomily into the house “If Mr. Brock himself were here, Mr. Brock could do no more!”

He looked at the bunch of keys which Allan had thrust into his hand, and a sudden longing to put himself to the test over the steward’s books took possession of his sensitive self-tormenting nature. Inquiring his way to the room in which the various movables of the steward’s office had been provisionally placed after the letting of the cottage, he sat down at the desk, and tried how his own unaided capacity would guide him through the business records of the Thorpe Ambrose estate. The result exposed his own ignorance unanswerably before his own eyes. The ledgers bewildered him; the leases, the plans, and even the correspondence itself, might have been written, for all he could understand of them, in an unknown tongue. His memory reverted bitterly as he left the room again to his two years’ solitary self-instruction in the Shrewsbury book-seller’s shop. “If I could only have worked at a business!” he thought. “If I could only have known that the company of poets and philosophers was company too high for a vagabond like me!”

He sat down alone in the great hall; the silence of it fell heavier and heavier on his sinking spirits; the beauty of it exasperated him, like an insult from a purse-proud man. “Curse the place!” he said, snatching up his hat and stick. “I like the bleakest hillside I ever slept on better than I like this house!”

He impatiently descended the door-steps, and stopped on the drive, considering, by which direction he should leave the park for the country beyond. If he followed the road taken by the carriage, he might risk unsettling Allan by accidentally meeting him in the town. If he went out by the back gate, he knew his own nature well enough to doubt his ability to pass the room of the dream without entering it again. But one other way remained: the way which he had taken, and then abandoned again, in the morning. There was no fear of disturbing Allan and the major’s daughter now. Without further hesitation, Midwinter set forth through the gardens to explore the open country on that side of the estate.

Thrown off its balance by the events of the day, his mind was full of that sourly savage resistance to the inevitable self-assertion of wealth, so amiably deplored by the prosperous and the rich; so bitterly familiar to the unfortunate and the poor. “The heather-bell costs nothing!” he thought, looking contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that surrounded him; “and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as the best of you!” He followed the artfully contrived ovals and squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design. “How many pounds a foot did
you
cost?” he said, looking back with scornful eyes at the last path as he left it. “Wind away over high and low like the sheep-walk on the mountain side, if you can!”

He entered the shrubbery which Allan had entered before him; crossed the paddock and the rustic bridge beyond; and reached the major’s cottage. His ready mind seized the right conclusion at the first sight of it; and he stopped before the garden gate, to look at the trim little residence which would never have been empty, and would never have been let, but for Allan’s ill-advised resolution to force the steward’s situation on his friend.

The summer afternoon was warm; the summer air was faint and still. On the upper and the lower floor of the cottage the windows were all open. From one of them, on the upper story, the sound of voices was startlingly audible in the quiet of the park as Midwinter paused on the outer side of the garden inclosure. The voice of a woman, harsh, high, and angrily complaining — a voice with all the freshness and the melody gone, and with nothing but the hard power of it left — was the discordantly predominant sound. With it, from moment to moment, there mingled the deeper and quieter tones, soothing and compassionate, of the voice of a man. Although the distance was too great to allow Midwinter to distinguish the words that were spoken, he felt the impropriety of remaining within hearing of the voices, and at once stepped forward to continue his walk.

At the same moment, the face of a young girl (easily recognisable as the face of Miss Milroy, from Allan’s description of her) appeared at the open window of the room. In spite of himself, Midwinter paused to look at her. The expression of the bright young face, which had smiled so prettily on Allan, was weary and disheartened. After looking out absently over the park, she suddenly turned her head back into the room, her attention having been apparently struck by something that had just been said in it. “Oh, mamma, mamma,” she exclaimed, indignantly, “how
can
you say such things!” The words were spoken close to the window; they reached Midwinter’s ears, and hurried him away before he heard more. But the self-disclosure of Major Milroy’s domestic position had not reached its end yet. As Midwinter turned the corner of the garden fence, a tradesman’s boy was handing a parcel in at the wicket gate to the woman servant. “Well,” said the boy, with the irrepressible impudence of his class, “how is the missus?” The woman lifted her hand to box his ears. “How is the missus?” she repeated, with an angry toss of her head, as the boy ran off. “If it would only please God to take the missus, it would be a blessing to everybody in the house.”

No such ill-omened shadow as this had passed over the bright domestic picture of the inhabitants of the cottage, which Allan’s enthusiasm had painted for the contemplation of his friend. It was plain that the secret of the tenants had been kept from the landlord so far. Five minutes more of walking brought Midwinter to the park gates. “Am I fated to see nothing and hear nothing to-day, which can give me heart and hope for the future?” he thought, as he angrily swung back the lodge gate. “Even the people Allan has let the cottage to are people whose lives are imbittered by a household misery which it is
my
misfortune to have found out!”

He took the first road that lay before him, and walked on, noticing little, immersed in his own thoughts.

More than an hour passed before the necessity of turning back entered his mind. As soon as the idea occurred to him, he consulted his watch, and determined to retrace his steps, so as to be at the house in good time to meet Allan on his return. Ten minutes of walking brought him back to a point at which three roads met, and one moment’s observation of the place satisfied him that he had entirely failed to notice at the time by which of the three roads he had advanced. No sign-post was to be seen; the country on either side was lonely and flat, intersected by broad drains and ditches. Cattle were grazing here and there, and a windmill rose in the distance above the pollard willows that fringed the low horizon. But not a house was to be seen, and not a human creature appeared on the visible perspective of any one of the three roads. Midwinter glanced back in the only direction left to look at — the direction of the road along which he had just been walking. There, to his relief, was the figure of a man, rapidly advancing toward him, of whom he could ask his way.

The figure came on, clad from head to foot in dreary black — a moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road. He was a lean, elderly, miserably respectable man. He wore a poor old black dress-coat, and a cheap brown wig, which made no pretense of being his own natural hair. Short black trousers clung like attached old servants round his wizen legs; and rusty black gaiters hid all they could of his knobbed, ungainly feet. Black crape added its mite to the decayed and dingy wretchedness of his old beaver hat; black mohair in the obsolete form of a stock drearily encircled his neck and rose as high as his haggard jaws. The one morsel of colour he carried about him was a lawyer’s bag of blue serge, as lean and limp as himself. The one attractive feature in his clean-shaven, weary old face was a neat set of teeth — teeth (as honest as his wig) which said plainly to all inquiring eyes, “We pass our nights on his looking-glass, and our days in his mouth.”

All the little blood in the man’s body faintly reddened his fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the way to Thorpe Ambrose. His weak, watery eyes looked hither and thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed to him had been words expressing a threat instead of a question, he could hardly have looked more confused and alarmed than he looked now. For the first time in his life, Midwinter saw his own shy uneasiness in the presence of strangers reflected, with tenfold intensity of nervous suffering, in the face of another man — and that man old enough to be his father.

“Which do you please to mean, sir — the town or the house? I beg your pardon for asking, but they both go by the same name in these parts.”

He spoke with a timid gentleness of tone, an ingratiatory smile, and an anxious courtesy of manner, all distressingly suggestive of his being accustomed to receive rough answers in exchange for his own politeness from the persons whom he habitually addressed.

“I was not aware that both the house and the town went by the same name,” said Midwinter; “I meant the house.” He instinctively conquered his own shyness as he answered in those words, speaking with a cordiality of manner which was very rare with him in his intercourse with strangers.

The man of miserable respectability seemed to feel the warm return of his own politeness gratefully; he brightened and took a little courage. His lean forefinger pointed eagerly to the right road. “That way, sir,” he said, “and when you come to two roads next, please take the left one of the two. I am sorry I have business the other way, I mean in the town. I should have been happy to go with you and show you. Fine summer weather, sir, for walking? You can’t miss your way if you keep to the left. Oh, don’t mention it! I’m afraid I have detained you, sir. I wish you a pleasant walk back, and — good-morning.”

By the time he had made an end of speaking (under an impression apparently that the more he talked the more polite he would be) he had lost his courage again. He darted away down his own road, as if Midwinter’s attempt to thank him involved a series of trials too terrible to confront. In two minutes more, his black retreating figure had lessened in the distance till it looked again, what it had once looked already, a moving blot on the brilliant white surface of the sun-brightened road.

The man ran strangely in Midwinter’s thoughts while he took his way back to the house. He was at a loss to account for it. It never occurred to him that he might have been insensibly reminded of himself, when he saw the plain traces of past misfortune and present nervous suffering in the poor wretch’s face. He blindly resented his own perverse interest in this chance foot passenger on the high-road, as he had resented all else that had happened to him since the beginning of the day. “Have I made another unlucky discovery?” he asked himself, impatiently. “Shall I see this man again, I wonder? Who can he be?”