Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (877 page)

“It would be well, Grace, if you followed the example set you by my mother and my sisters,” he said. “
They
are not in the habit of speaking cruelly to those who love them.”

To all appearance the rebuke failed to produce the slightest effect. She seemed to be as indifferent to it as if it had not reached her ears. There was a spirit in her — a miserable spirit, born of her own bitter experience — which rose in revolt against Horace’s habitual glorification of the ladies of his family. “It sickens me,” she thought to herself, “to hear of the virtues of women who have never been tempted! Where is the merit of living reputably, when your life is one course of prosperity and enjoyment? Has his mother known starvation? Have his sisters been left forsaken in the street?” It hardened her heart — it almost reconciled her to deceiving him — when he set his relatives up as patterns for her. Would he never understand that women detested having other women exhibited as examples to them? She looked round at him with a sense of impatient wonder. He was sitting at the luncheon-table, with his back turned on her, and his head resting on his hand. If he had attempted to rejoin her, she would have repelled him; if he had spoken, she would have met him with a sharp reply. He sat apart from her, without uttering a word. In a man’s hands silence is the most terrible of all protests to the woman who loves him. Violence she can endure. Words she is always ready to meet by words on her side. Silence conquers her. After a moment’s hesitation, Mercy left the sofa and advanced submissively toward the table. She had offended him — and she alone was in fault. How should he know it, poor fellow, when he innocently mortified her? Step by step she drew closer and closer. He never looked round; he never moved. She laid her hand timidly on his shoulder. “Forgive me, Horace,” she whispered in his ear. “I am suffering this morning; I am not myself. I didn’t mean what I said. Pray forgive me.” There was no resisting the caressing tenderness of voice and manner which accompanied those words. He looked up; he took her hand. She bent over him, and touched his forehead with her lips. “Am I forgiven?” she asked.

“Oh, my darling,” he said, “if you only knew how I loved you!”

“I do know it,” she answered, gently, twining his hair round her finger, and arranging it over his forehead where his hand had ruffled it.

They were completely absorbed in each other, or they must, at that moment, have heard the library door open at the other end of the room.

Lady Janet had written the necessary reply to her nephew, and had returned, faithful to her engagement, to plead the cause of Horace. The first object that met her view was her client pleading, with conspicuous success, for himself! “I am not wanted, evidently,” thought the old lady. She noiselessly closed the door again and left the lovers by themselves.

Horace returned, with unwise persistency, to the question of the deferred marriage. At the first words that he spoke she drew back directly — sadly, not angrily.

“Don’t press me to-day,” she said; “I am not well to-day.”

He rose and looked at her anxiously. “May I speak about it to-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow.” She returned to the sofa, and changed the subject. “What a time Lady Janet is away!” she said. “What can be keeping her so long?”

Horace did his best to appear interested in the question of Lady Janet’s prolonged absence. “What made her leave you?” he asked, standing at the back of the sofa and leaning over her.

“She went into the library to write a note to her nephew. By-the-by, who is her nephew?”

“Is it possible you don’t know?”

“Indeed, I don’t.”

“You have heard of him, no doubt,” said Horace. “Lady Janet’s nephew is a celebrated man.” He paused, and stooping nearer to her, lifted a love-lock that lay over her shoulder and pressed it to his lips. “Lady Janet’s nephew,” he resumed, “is Julian Gray.”

She started off her seat, and looked round at him in blank, bewildered terror, as if she doubted the evidence of her own senses.

Horace was completely taken by surprise. “My dear Grace!” he exclaimed; “what have I said or done to startle you this time?”

She held up her hand for silence. “Lady Janet’s nephew is Julian Gray,” she repeated; “and I only know it now!”

Horace’s perplexity increased. “My darling, now you do know it, what is there to alarm you?” he asked.

(There was enough to alarm the boldest woman living — in such a position, and with such a temperament as hers. To her mind the personation of Grace Roseberry had suddenly assumed a new aspect: the aspect of a fatality. It had led her blindfold to the house in which she and the preacher at the Refuge were to meet. He was coming — the man who had reached her inmost heart, who had influenced her whole life! Was the day of reckoning coming with him?)

“Don’t notice me,” she said, faintly. “I have been ill all the morning. You saw it yourself when you came in here; even the sound of your voice alarmed me. I shall be better directly. I am afraid I startled you?”

“My dear Grace, it almost looked as if you were terrified at the sound of Julian’s name! He is a public celebrity, I know; and I have seen ladies start and stare at him when he entered a room. But
you
looked perfectly panic-stricken.”

She rallied her courage by a desperate effort; she laughed — a harsh, uneasy laugh — and stopped him by putting her hand over his mouth. “Absurd!” she said, lightly. “As if Mr. Julian Gray had anything to do with my looks! I am better already. See for yourself!” She looked round at him again with a ghastly gayety; and returned, with a desperate assumption of indifference, to the subject of Lady Janet’s nephew. “Of course I have heard of him,” she said. “Do you know that he is expected here to-day? Don’t stand there behind me — it’s so hard to talk to you. Come and sit down.”

He obeyed — but she had not quite satisfied him yet. His face had not lost its expression of anxiety and surprise. She persisted in playing her part, determined to set at rest in him any possible suspicion that she had reasons of her own for being afraid of Julian Gray. “Tell me about this famous man of yours,” she said, putting her arm familiarly through his arm. “What is he like?”

The caressing action and the easy tone had their effect on Horace. His face began to clear; he answered her lightly on his side.

“Prepare yourself to meet the most unclerical of clergymen,” he said. “Julian is a lost sheep among the parsons, and a thorn in the side of his bishop. Preaches, if they ask him, in Dissenters’ chapels. Declines to set up any pretensions to priestly authority and priestly power. Goes about doing good on a plan of his own. Is quite resigned never to rise to the high places in his profession. Says it’s rising high enough for
him
to be the Archdeacon of the afflicted, the Dean of the hungry, and the Bishop of the poor. With all his oddities, as good a fellow as ever lived. Immensely popular with the women. They all go to him for advice. I wish you would go, too.”

Mercy changed colour. “What do you mean?” she asked, sharply.

“Julian is famous for his powers of persuasion,” said Horace, smiling. “If
he
spoke to you, Grace, he would prevail on you to fix the day. Suppose I ask Julian to plead for me?”

He made the proposal in jest. Mercy’s unquiet mind accepted it as addressed to her in earnest. “He will do it,” she thought, with a sense of indescribable terror, “if I don’t stop him!” There is but one chance for her. The only certain way to prevent Horace from appealing to his friend was to grant what Horace wished for before his friend entered the house. She laid her hand on his shoulder; she hid the terrible anxieties that were devouring her under an assumption of coquetry painful and pitiable to see.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” she said, gayly. “What were we saying just now — before we began to speak of Mr. Julian Gray?”

“We were wondering what had become of Lady Janet,” Horace replied.

She tapped him impatiently on the shoulder. “No! no! It was something you said before that.”

Her eyes completed what her words had left unsaid. Horace’s arm stole round her waist.

“I was saying that I loved you,” he answered, in a whisper.

“Only that?”

“Are you tired of hearing it?”

She smiled charmingly. “Are you so very much in earnest about — about — ” She stopped, and looked away from him.

“About our marriage?”

“Yes.”

“It is the one dearest wish of my life.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

There was a pause. Mercy’s fingers toyed nervously with the trinkets at her watch-chain. “When would you like it to be?” she said, very softly, with her whole attention fixed on the watch-chain.

She had never spoken, she had never looked, as she spoke and looked now. Horace was afraid to believe in his own good fortune. “Oh, Grace!” he exclaimed, “you are not trifling with me?”

“What makes you think I am trifling with you?”

Horace was innocent enough to answer her seriously. “You would not even let me speak of our marriage just now,” he said.

“Never mind what I did just now,” she retorted, petulantly. “They say women are changeable. It is one of the defects of the sex.”

“Heaven be praised for the defects of the sex!” cried Horace, with devout sincerity. “Do you really leave me to decide?”

“If you insist on it.”

Horace considered for a moment — the subject being the law of marriage. “We may be married by license in a fortnight,” he said. “I fix this day fortnight.”

She held up her hands in protest.

“Why not? My lawyer is ready. There are no preparations to make. You said when you accepted me that it was to be a private marriage.”

Mercy was obliged to own that she had certainly said that.

“We might be married at once — if the law would only let us. This day fortnight! Say — Yes!” He drew her closer to him. There was a pause. The mask of coquetry — badly worn from the first — dropped from her. Her sad gray eyes rested compassionately on his eager face. “Don’t look so serious!” he said. “Only one little word, Grace! Only Yes.”

She sighed, and said it. He kissed her passionately. It was only by a resolute effort that she released herself.

“Leave me!” she said, faintly. “Pray leave me by myself!”

She was in earnest — strangely in earnest. She was trembling from head to foot. Horace rose to leave her. “I will find Lady Janet,” he said; “I long to show the dear old lady that I have recovered my spirits, and to tell her why.” He turned round at the library door. “You won’t go away? You will let me see you again when you are more composed?”

“I will wait here,” said Mercy.

Satisfied with that reply, he left the room.

Her hands dropped on her lap; her head sank back wearily on the cushions at the head of the sofa. There was a dazed sensation in her: her mind felt stunned. She wondered vacantly whether she was awake or dreaming. Had she really said the word which pledged her to marry Horace Holmcroft in a fortnight? A fortnight! Something might happen in that time to prevent it: she might find her way in a fortnight out of the terrible position in which she stood. Anyway, come what might of it, she had chosen the preferable alternative to a private interview with Julian Gray. She raised herself from her recumbent position with a start, as the idea of the interview — dismissed for the last few minutes — possessed itself again of her mind. Her excited imagination figured Julian Gray as present in the room at that moment, speaking to her as Horace had proposed. She saw him seated close at her side — this man who had shaken her to the soul when he was in the pulpit, and when she was listening to him (unseen) at the other end of the chapel — she saw him close by her, looking her searchingly in the face; seeing her shameful secret in her eyes; hearing it in her voice; feeling it in her trembling hands; forcing it out of her word by word, till she fell prostrate at his feet with the confession of the fraud. Her head dropped again on the cushions; she hid her face in horror of the scene which her excited fancy had conjured up. Even now, when she had made that dreaded interview needless, could she feel sure (meeting him only on the most distant terms) of not betraying herself? She could
not
feel sure. Something in her shuddered and shrank at the bare idea of finding herself in the same room with him. She felt it, she knew it: her guilty conscience owned and feared its master in Julian Gray!