Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (888 page)

“No. I only know it is waiting for you. Shall I go and get it to-day?”

She neither accepted nor refused the proposal — she went on with her work more industriously than ever.

“There is plenty of time,” Horace persisted. “I can go before dinner.”

Still she took no notice: still she never looked up. “Your mother is very kind to me,” she said, abruptly. “I was afraid, at one time, that she would think me hardly good enough to be your wife.”

Horace laughed indulgently: his self-esteem was more gently flattered than ever.

“Absurd!” he exclaimed. “My darling, you are connected with Lady Janet Roy. Your family is almost as good as ours.”

“Almost?” she repeated. “Only almost?”

The momentary levity of expression vanished from Horace’s face. The family question was far too serious a question to be lightly treated A becoming shadow of solemnity stole over his manner. He looked as if it was Sunday, and he was just stepping into church.

“In OUR family,” he said, “we trace back — by my father, to the Saxons; by my mother, to the Normans. Lady Janet’s family is an old family — on her side only.”

Mercy dropped her embroidery, and looked Horace full in the face. She, too, attached no common importance to what she had next to say.

“If I had not been connected with Lady Janet,” she began, “would you ever have thought of marrying me?”

“My love! what is the use of asking? You
are
connected with Lady Janet.”

She refused to let him escape answering her in that way.

“Suppose I had not been connected with Lady Janet?” she persisted. “Suppose I had only been a good girl, with nothing but my own merits to speak for me. What would your mother have said then?”

Horace still parried the question — only to find the point of it pressed home on him once more.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“I ask to be answered,” she rejoined. “Would your mother have liked you to marry a poor girl, of no family — with nothing but her own virtues to speak for her?”

Horace was fairly pressed back to the wall.

“If you must know,” he replied, “my mother would have refused to sanction such a marriage as that.”

“No matter how good the girl might have been?”

There was something defiant — almost threatening — in her tone. Horace was annoyed — and he showed it when he spoke.

“My mother would have respected the girl, without ceasing to respect herself,” he said. “My mother would have remembered what was due to the family name.”

“And she would have said, No?”

“She would have said, No.”

“Ah!”

There was an undertone of angry contempt in the exclamation which made Horace start. “What is the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she answered, and took up her embroidery again. There he sat at her side, anxiously looking at her — his hope in the future centreed in his marriage! In a week more, if she chose, she might enter that ancient family of which he had spoken so proudly, as his wife. “Oh!” she thought, “if I didn’t love him! if I had only his merciless mother to think of!”

Uneasily conscious of some estrangement between them, Horace spoke again. “Surely I have not offended you?” he said.

She turned toward him once more. The work dropped unheeded on her lap. Her grand eyes softened into tenderness. A smile trembled sadly on her delicate lips. She laid one hand caressingly on his shoulder. All the beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to him. The woman’s heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could only come from his lips.

“
You
would have loved me, Horace — without stopping to think of the family name?”

The family name again! How strangely she persisted in coming back to that! Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom what was passing in her mind.

She took his hand, and wrung it hard — as if she would wring the answer out of him in that way.

“
You
would have loved me?” she repeated.

The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him. He answered, warmly, “Under any circumstances! under any name!”

She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his. “Is that true?” she asked.

“True as t he heaven above us!”

She drank in those few commonplace words with a greedy delight. She forced him to repeat them in a new form.

“No matter who I might have been? For myself alone?”

“For yourself alone.”

She threw both arms round him, and laid her head passionately on his breast. “I love you! I love you!! I love you!!!” Her voice rose with hysterical vehemence at each repetition of the words — then suddenly sank to a low hoarse cry of rage and despair. The sense of her true position toward him revealed itself in all its horror as the confession of her love escaped her lips. Her arms dropped from him; she flung herself back on the sofa-cushions, hiding her face in her hands. “Oh, leave me!” she moaned, faintly. “Go! go!”

Horace tried to wind his arm round her, and raise her. She started to her feet, and waved him back from her with a wild action of her hands, as if she was frightened of him. “The wedding present!” she cried, seizing the first pretext that occurred to her. “You offered to bring me your mother’s present. I am dying to see what it is. Go and get it!”

Horace tried to compose her. He might as well have tried to compose the winds and the sea.

“Go!” she repeated, pressing one clinched hand on her bosom. “I am not well. Talking excites me — I am hysterical; I shall be better alone. Get me the present. Go!”

“Shall I send Lady Janet? Shall I ring for your maid?”

“Send for nobody! ring for nobody! If you love me — leave me here by myself! leave me instantly!”

“I shall see you when I come back?”

“Yes! yes!”

There was no alternative but to obey her. Unwillingly and forebodingly, Horace left the room.

She drew a deep breath of relief, and dropped into the nearest chair. If Horace had stayed a moment longer — she felt it, she knew it — her head would have given way; she would have burst out before him with the terrible truth. “Oh!” she thought, pressing her cold hands on her burning eyes, “if I could only cry, now there is nobody to see me!”

The room was empty: she had every reason for concluding that she was alone. And yet at that very moment there were ears that listened — there were eyes waiting to see her.

Little by little the door behind her which faced the library and led into the billiard-room was opened noiselessly from without, by an inch at a time. As the opening was enlarged a hand in a black glove, an arm in a black sleeve, appeared, guiding the movement of the door. An interval of a moment passed, and the worn white face of Grace Roseberry showed itself stealthily, looking into the dining-room.

Her eyes brightened with vindictive pleasure as they discovered Mercy sitting alone at the further end of the room. Inch by inch she opened the door more widely, took one step forward, and checked herself. A sound, just audible at the far end of the conservatory, had caught her ear.

She listened — satisfied herself that she was not mistaken — and drawing back with a frown of displeasure, softly closed the door again, so as to hide herself from view. The sound that had disturbed her was the distant murmur of men’s voices (apparently two in number) talking together in lowered tones, at the garden entrance to the conservatory.

Who were the men? and what would they do next? They might do one of two things: they might enter the drawing-room, or they might withdraw again by way of the garden. Kneeling behind the door, with her ear at the key-hole, Grace Roseberry waited the event.

CHAPTER XVI. THEY MEET AGAIN.

ABSORBED in herself, Mercy failed to notice the opening door or to hear the murmur of voices in the conservatory.

The one terrible necessity which had been present to her mind at intervals for a week past was confronting her at that moment. She owed to Grace Roseberry the tardy justice of owning the truth. The longer her confession was delayed, the more cruelly she was injuring the woman whom she had robbed of her identity — the friendless woman who had neither witnesses nor papers to produce, who was powerless to right her own wrong. Keenly as she felt this, Mercy failed, nevertheless, to conquer the horror that shook her when she thought of the impending avowal. Day followed day, and still she shrank from the unendurable ordeal of confession — as she was shrinking from it now!

Was it fear for herself that closed her lips?

She trembled — as any human being in her place must have trembled — at the bare idea of finding herself thrown back again on the world, which had no place in it and no hope in it for
her
. But she could have overcome that terror — she could have resigned herself to that doom.

No! it was not the fear of the confession itself, or the fear of the consequences which must follow it, that still held her silent. The horror that daunted her was the horror of owning to Horace and to Lady Janet that she had cheated them out of their love.

Every day Lady Janet was kinder and kinder. Every day Horace was fonder and fonder of her. How could she confess to Lady Janet? how could she own to Horace that she had imposed upon him? “I can’t do it. They are so good to me — I can’t do it!” In that hopeless way it had ended during the seven days that had gone by. In that hopeless way it ended again now.

The murmur of the two voices at the further end of the conservatory ceased. The billiard-room door opened again slowly, by an inch at a time.

Mercy still kept her place, unconscious of the events that were passing round her. Sinking under the hard stress laid on it, her mind had drifted little by little into a new train of thought. For the first time she found the courage to question the future in a new way. Supposing her confession to have been made, or supposing the woman whom she had personated to have discovered the means of exposing the fraud, what advantage, she now asked herself, would Miss Roseberry derive from Mercy Merrick’s disgrace?

Could Lady Janet transfer to the woman who was really her relative by marriage the affection which she had given to the woman who had pretended to be her relative? No! All the right in the world would not put the true Grace into the false Grace’s vacant place. The qualities by which Mercy had won Lady Janet’s love were the qualities which were Mercy’s won. Lady Janet could do rigid justice — but hers was not the heart to give itself to a stranger (and to give itself unreservedly) a second time. Grace Roseberry would be formally acknowledged — and there it would end.

Was there hope in this new view?

Yes! There was the false hope of making the inevitable atonement by some other means than by the confession of the fraud.

What had Grace Roseberry actually lost by the wrong done to her? She had lost the salary of Lady Janet’s “companion and reader.” Say that she wanted money, Mercy had her savings from the generous allowance made to her by Lady Janet; Mercy could offer money. Or say that she wanted employment, Mercy’s interest with Lady Janet could offer employment, could offer anything Grace might ask for, if she would only come to terms.

Invigorated by the new hope, Mercy rose excitedly, weary of inaction in the empty room. She, who but a few minutes since had shuddered at the thought of their meeting again, was now eager to devise a means of finding her way privately to an interview with Grace. It should be done without loss of time — on that very day, if possible; by the next day at latest. She looked round her mechanically, pondering how to reach the end in view. Her eyes rested by chance on the door of the billiard-room.