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The Legacy of Cain

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #1975 · 667,151 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Legacy of Cain

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: November 1, 1999 [eBook #1975]
                Most recently updated: September 13, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1975

Credits: Produced by James Rusk, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEGACY OF CAIN ***




Produced by James Rusk





THE LEGACY OF CAIN

By Wilkie Collins


To

MRS. HENRY POWELL BARTLEY:

Permit me to add your name to my name, in publishing this novel. The
pen which has written my books cannot be more agreeably employed than in
acknowledging what I owe to the pen which has skillfully and patiently
helped me, by copying my manuscripts for the printer.

WILKIE COLLINS.

Wimpole Street, 6th December, 1888.





THE LEGACY OF CAIN.




First Period: 1858-1859. EVENTS IN THE PRISON, RELATED BY THE GOVERNOR.



CHAPTER I. THE GOVERNOR EXPLAINS.

At the request of a person who has claims on me that I must not disown,
I consent to look back through a long interval of years and to describe
events which took place within the walls of an English prison during the
earlier period of my appointment as Governor.

Viewing my task by the light which later experience casts on it, I think
I shall act wisely by exercising some control over the freedom of my
pen.

I propose to pass over in silence the name of the town in which is
situated the prison once confided to my care. I shall observe a similar
discretion in alluding to individuals--some dead, some living, at the
present time.

Being obliged to write of a woman who deservedly suffered the extreme
penalty of the law, I think she will be sufficiently identified if I
call her The Prisoner. Of the four persons present on the evening before
her execution three may be distinguished one from the other by allusion
to their vocations in life. I here introduce them as The Chaplain, The
Minister, and The Doctor. The fourth was a young woman. She has no claim
on my consideration; and, when she is mentioned, her name may appear.
If these reserves excite suspicion, I declare beforehand that they
influence in no way the sense of responsibility which commands an honest
man to speak the truth.



CHAPTER II. THE MURDERESS ASKS QUESTIONS.

The first of the events which I must now relate was the conviction of
The Prisoner for the murder of her husband.

They had lived together in matrimony for little more than two years. The
husband, a gentleman by birth and education, had mortally offended his
relations in marrying a woman of an inferior rank of life. He was
fast declining into a state of poverty, through his own reckless
extravagance, at the time when he met with his death at his wife’s hand.

Without attempting to excuse him, he deserved, to my mind, some tribute
of regret. It is not to be denied that he was profligate in his
habits and violent in his temper. But it is equally true that he was
affectionate in the domestic circle, and, when moved by wisely applied
remonstrance, sincerely penitent for sins committed under temptation
that overpowered him. If his wife had killed him in a fit of jealous
rage--under provocation, be it remembered, which the witnesses
proved--she might have been convicted of manslaughter, and might have
received a light sentence. But the evidence so undeniably revealed
deliberate and merciless premeditation, that the only defense attempted
by her counsel was madness, and the only alternative left to a righteous
jury was a verdict which condemned the woman to death. Those mischievous
members of the community, whose topsy-turvy sympathies feel for the
living criminal and forget the dead victim, attempted to save her by
means of high-flown petitions and contemptible correspondence in the
newspapers. But the Judge held firm; and the Home Secretary held firm.
They were entirely right; and the public were scandalously wrong.

Our Chaplain endeavored to offer the consolations of religion to the
condemned wretch. She refused to accept his ministrations in language
which filled him with grief and horror.

On the evening before the execution, the reverend gentleman laid on my
table his own written report of a conversation which had passed between
the Prisoner and himself.

“I see some hope, sir,” he said, “of inclining the heart of this woman
to religious belief, before it is too late. Will you read my report, and
say if you agree with me?”

I read it, of course. It was called “A Memorandum,” and was thus
written:

“At his last interview with the Prisoner, the Chaplain asked her if she
had ever entered a place of public worship. She replied that she had
occasionally attended the services at a Congregational Church in this
town; attracted by the reputation of the Minister as a preacher. ‘He
entirely failed to make a Christian of me,’ she said; ‘but I was struck
by his eloquence. Besides, he interested me personally--he was a fine
man.’

“In the dreadful situation in which the woman was placed, such language
as this shocked the Chaplain; he appealed in vain to the Prisoner’s
sense of propriety. ‘You don’t understand women,’ she answered. ‘The
greatest saint of my sex that ever lived likes to look at a preacher as
well as to hear him. If he is an agreeable man, he has all the greater
effect on her. This preacher’s voice told me he was kind-hearted; and
I had only to look at his beautiful eyes to see that he was trustworthy
and true.’

“It was useless to repeat a protest which had already failed. Recklessly
and flippantly as she had described it, an impression had been produced
on her. It occurred to the Chaplain that he might at least make the
attempt to turn this result to her own religious advantage. He asked
whether she would receive the Minister, if the reverend gentleman came
to the prison. ‘That will depend,’ she said, ‘on whether you answer some
questions which I want to put to you first.’ The Chaplain consented;
provided always that he could reply with propriety to what she asked of
him. Her first question only related to himself.

“She said: ‘The women who watch me tell me that you are a widower, and
have a family of children. Is that true?’

“The Chaplain answered that it was quite true.

“She alluded next to a report, current in the town, that the Minister
had resigned the pastorate. Being personally acquainted with him, the
Chaplain was able to inform her that his resignation had not yet been
accepted. On hearing this, she seemed to gather confidence. Her next
inquiries succeeded each other rapidly, as follows:

“‘Is my handsome preacher married?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Has he got any children?’

“‘He has never had any children.’

“‘How long has he been married?’

“‘As well as I know, about seven or eight years.

“‘What sort of woman is his wife?’

“‘A lady universally respected.’

“‘I don’t care whether she is respected or not. Is she kind?’

“‘Certainly!’

“‘Is her husband well off?’

“‘He has a sufficient income.’

“After that reply, the Prisoner’s curiosity appeared to be satisfied.
She said, ‘Bring your friend the preacher to me, if you like’--and there
it ended.

“What her object could have been in putting these questions, it seems to
be impossible to guess. Having accurately reported all that took place,
the Chaplain declares, with heartfelt regret, that he can exert no
religious influence over this obdurate woman. He leaves it to the
Governor to decide whether the Minister of the Congregational Church may
not succeed, where the Chaplain of the Jail has failed. Herein is the
one last hope of saving the soul of the Prisoner, now under sentence of
death!”

In those serious words the Memorandum ended. Although not personally
acquainted with the Minister I had heard of him, on all sides, as an
excellent man. In the emergency that confronted us he had, as it seemed
to me, his own sacred right to enter the prison; assuming that he
was willing to accept, what I myself felt to be, a very serious
responsibility. The first necessity was to discover whether we might
hope to obtain his services. With my full approval the Chaplain left me,
to state the circumstances to his reverend colleague.



CHAPTER III. THE CHILD APPEARS.

During my friend’s absence, my attention was claimed by a sad
incident--not unforeseen.

It is, I suppose, generally known that near relatives are admitted to
take their leave of criminals condemned to death. In the case of the
Prisoner now waiting for execution, no person applied to the authorities
for permission to see her. I myself inquired if she had any relations
living, and if she would like to see them. She answered: “None that
I care to see, or that care to see me--except the nearest relation of
all.”

In those last words the miserable creature alluded to her only child, a
little girl (an infant, I should say), who had passed her first year’s
birthday by a few months. The farewell interview was to take place on
the mother’s last evening on earth; and the child was now brought into
my rooms, in charge of her nurse.

I had seldom seen a brighter or prettier little girl. She was just able
to walk alone, and to enjoy the first delight of moving from one place
to another. Quite of her own accord she came to me, attracted I daresay
by the glitter of my watch-chain. Helping her to climb on my knee, I
showed the wonders of the watch, and held it to her ear. At that past
time, death had taken my good wife from me; my two boys were away at
Harrow School; my domestic life was the life of a lonely man. Whether
I was reminded of the bygone days when my sons were infants on my knee,
listening to the ticking of my watch--or whether the friendless position
of the poor little creature, who had lost one parent and was soon to
lose the other by a violent death, moved me in depths of pity not easily
reached in my later experience--I am not able to say. This only I know:
my heart ached for the child while she was laughing and listening; and
something fell from me on the watch which I don’t deny might have been
a tear. A few of the toys, mostly broken now, which my two children
used to play with are still in my possession; kept, like my poor wife’s
favorite jewels, for old remembrance’ sake. These I took from their
repository when the attraction of my watch showed signs of failing. The
child pounced on them with her chubby hands, and screamed with pleasure.
And the hangman was waiting for her mother--and, more horrid still, the
mother deserved it!

My duty required me to let the Prisoner know that her little daughter
had arrived. Did that heart of iron melt at last? It might have been so,
or it might not; the message sent back kept her secret. All that it said
to me was: “Let the child wait till I send for her.”

The Minister had consented to help us. On his arrival at the prison, I
received him privately in my study.

I had only to look at his face--pitiably pale and agitated--to see
that he was a sensitive man, not always able to control his nerves on
occasions which tried his moral courage. A kind, I might almost say a
noble face, and a voice unaffectedly persuasive, at once prepossessed
me in his favor. The few words of welcome that I spoke were intended
to compose him. They failed to produce the impression on which I had
counted.

“My experience,” he said, “has included many melancholy duties, and has
tried my composure in terrible scenes; but I have never yet found myself
in the presence of an unrepentant criminal, sentenced to death--and
that criminal a woman and a mother. I own, sir, that I am shaken by the
prospect before me.”

I suggested that he should wait a while, in the hope that time and quiet
might help him. He thanked me, and refused.

“If I have any knowledge of myself,” he said, “terrors of anticipation
lose their hold when I am face to face with a serious call on me. The
longer I remain here, the less worthy I shall appear of the trust that
has been placed in me--the trust which, please God, I mean to deserve.”

My own observation of human nature told me that this was wisely said. I
led the way at once to the cell.

CHAPTER IV. THE MINISTER SAYS YES.

The Prisoner was seated on her bed, quietly talking with the woman
appointed to watch her. When she rose to receive us, I saw the Minister
start. The face that confronted him would, in my opinion, have taken any
man by surprise, if he had first happened to see it within the walls of
a prison.

Visitors to the picture-galleries of Italy, growing weary of Holy
Families in endless succession, observe that the idea of the Madonna,
among the rank and file of Italian Painters, is limited to one
changeless and familiar type. I can hardly hope to be believed when I
say that the personal appearance of the murderess recalled that type.
She presented the delicate light hair, the quiet eyes, the finely-shaped
lower features and the correctly oval form of face, repeated in hundreds
on hundreds of the conventional works of Art to which I have ventured to
allude. To those who doubt me, I can only declare that what I have
here written is undisguised and absolute truth. Let me add that daily
observation of all classes of criminals, extending over many years, has
considerably diminished my faith in physiognomy as a safe guide to the
discovery of character. Nervous trepidation looks like guilt. Guilt,
firmly sustained by insensibility, looks like innocence. One of the
vilest wretches ever placed under my charge won the sympathies (while he
was waiting for his trial) of every person who saw him, including even
the persons employed in the prison. Only the other day, ladies and
gentlemen coming to visit me passed a body of men at work on the road.
Judges of physiognomy among them were horrified at the criminal atrocity
betrayed in every face that they noticed. They condoled with me on the
near neighborhood of so many convicts to my official place of residence.
I looked out of the window and saw a group of honest laborers (whose
only crime was poverty) employed by the parish!

Having instructed the female warder to leave the room--but to take care
that she waited within call--I looked again at the Minister.

Confronted by the serious responsibility that he had undertaken, he
justified what he had said to me. Still pale, still distressed, he was
now nevertheless master of himself. I turned to the door to leave him
alone with the Prisoner. She called me back.

“Before this gentleman tries to convert me,” she said, “I want you to
wait here and be a witness.”

Finding that we were both willing to comply with this request, she
addressed herself directly to the Minister. “Suppose I promise to listen
to your exhortations,” she began, “what do you promise to do for me in
return?”

The voice in which she spoke to him was steady and clear; a marked
contrast to the tremulous earnestness with which he answered her.

“I promise to urge you to repentance and the confession of your crime. I
promise to implore the divine blessing on me in the effort to save your
poor guilty soul.”

She looked at him, and listened to him, as if he was speaking to her in
an unknown tongue, and went on with what she had to say as quietly as
ever.

“When I am hanged to-morrow, suppose I die without confessing, without
repenting--are you one of those who believe I shall be doomed to eternal
punishment in another life?”

“I believe in the mercy of God.”

“Answer my question, if you please. Is an impenitent sinner eternally
punished? Do you believe that?”

“My Bible leaves me no other alternative.”

She paused for a while, evidently considering with special attention
what she was about to say next.

“As a religious man,” she resumed, “would you be willing to make some
sacrifice, rather than let a fellow-creature go--after a disgraceful
death--to everlasting torment?”

“I know of no sacrifice in my power,” he said, fervently, “to which I
would not rather submit than let you die in the present dreadful state
of your mind.”

The Prisoner turned to me. “Is the person who watches me waiting
outside?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be so kind as to call her in? I have a message for her.”

It was plain that she had been leading the way to the delivery of
that message, whatever it might be, in all that she had said up to the
present time. So far my poor powers of penetration helped me, and no
further.

The warder appeared, and received her message. “Tell the woman who has
come here with my little girl that I want to see the child.”

Taken completely by surprise, I signed to the attendant to wait for
further instructions.

In a moment more I had sufficiently recovered myself to see the
impropriety of permitting any obstacle to interpose between the Minister
and his errand of mercy. I gently reminded the Prisoner that she would
have a later opportunity of seeing her child. “Your first duty,” I told
her, “is to hear and to take to heart what the clergyman has to say to
you.”

For the second time I attempted to leave the cell. For the second time
this impenetrable woman called me back.

“Take the parson away with you,” she said. “I refuse to listen to him.”

The patient Minister yielded, and appealed to me to follow his example.
I reluctantly sanctioned the delivery of the message.

After a brief interval the child was brought to us, tired and sleepy.
For a while the nurse roused her by setting her on her feet. She
happened to notice the Minister first. Her bright eyes rested on him,
gravely wondering. He kissed her, and, after a momentary hesitation,
gave her to her mother. The horror of the situation overpowered him:
he turned his face away from us. I understood what he felt; he almost
overthrew my own self-command.

The Prisoner spoke to the nurse in no friendly tone: “You can go.”

The nurse turned to me, ostentatiously ignoring the words that had been
addressed to her. “Am I to go, sir, or to stay?” I suggested that she
should return to the waiting-room. She returned at once in silence. The
Prisoner looked after her as she went out, with such an expression of
hatred in her eyes that the Minister noticed it.

“What has that person done to offend you?” he asked.

“She is the last person in the whole world whom I should have chosen
to take care of my child, if the power of choosing had been mine. But
I have been in prison, without a living creature to represent me or to
take my part. No more of that; my troubles will be over in a few hours
more. I want you to look at my little girl, whose troubles are all to
come. Do you call her pretty? Do you feel interested in her?”

The sorrow and pity in his face answered for him.

Quietly sleeping, the poor baby rested on her mother’s bosom. Was the
heart of the murderess softened by the divine influence of maternal
love? The hands that held the child trembled a little. For the first
time it seemed to cost her an effort to compose herself, before she
could speak to the Minister again.

“When I die to-morrow,” she said, “I leave my child helpless and
friendless--disgraced by her mother’s shameful death. The workhouse
may take her--or a charitable asylum may take her.” She paused; a first
tinge of color rose on her pale face; she broke into an outburst of
rage. “Think of _my_ daughter being brought up by charity! She may
suffer poverty, she may be treated with contempt, she may be employed by
brutal people in menial work. I can’t endure it; it maddens me. If she
is not saved from that wretched fate, I shall die despairing, I shall
die cursing--”

The Minister sternly stopped her before she could say the next word.
To my astonishment she appeared to be humbled, to be even ashamed: she
asked his pardon: “Forgive me; I won’t forget myself again. They tell
me you have no children of your own. Is that a sorrow to you and your
wife?”

Her altered tone touched him. He answered sadly and kindly: “It is the
one sorrow of our lives.”

The purpose which she had been keeping in view from the moment when
the Minister entered her cell was no mystery now. Ought I to have
interfered? Let me confess a weakness, unworthy perhaps of my office. I
was so sorry for the child--I hesitated.

My silence encouraged the mother. She advanced to the Minister with the
sleeping infant in her arms.

“I daresay you have sometimes thought of adopting a child?” she said.
“Perhaps you can guess now what I had in my mind, when I asked if you
would consent to a sacrifice? Will you take this wretched innocent
little creature home with you?” She lost her self-possession once more.
“A motherless creature to-morrow,” she burst out. “Think of that.”

God knows how I still shrunk from it! But there was no alternative now;
I was bound to remember my duty to the excellent man, whose critical
position at that moment was, in some degree at least, due to my
hesitation in asserting my authority. Could I allow the Prisoner to
presume on his compassionate nature, and to hurry him into a decision
which, in his calmer moments, he might find reason to regret? I spoke
to _him_. Does the man live who--having to say what I had to say--could
have spoken to the doomed mother?

“I am sorry to have allowed this to go on,” I said. “In justice to
yourself, sir, don’t answer!”

She turned on me with a look of fury.

“He shall answer,” she cried.

I saw, or thought I saw, signs of yielding in his face. “Take time,” I
persisted--“take time to consider before you decide.”

She stepped up to me.

“Take time?” she repeated. “Are you inhuman enough to talk of time, in
my presence?”

She laid the sleeping child on her bed, and fell on her knees before the
Minister: “I promise to hear your exhortations--I promise to do all
a woman can to believe and repent. Oh, I know myself! My heart, once
hardened, is a heart that no human creature can touch. The one way to
my better nature--if I have a better nature--is through that poor babe.
Save her from the workhouse! Don’t let them make a pauper of her!” She
sank prostrate at his feet, and beat her hands in frenzy on the floor.
“You want to save my guilty soul,” she reminded him furiously. “There’s
but one way of doing it. Save my child!”

He raised her. Her fierce tearless eyes questioned his face in a mute
expectation dreadful to see. Suddenly, a foretaste of death--the death
that was so near now!--struck her with a shivering fit: her head dropped
on the Minister’s shoulder. Other men might have shrunk from the contact
of it. That true Christian let it rest.

Under the maddening sting of suspense, her sinking energies rallied for
an instant. In a whisper, she was just able to put the supreme question
to him.

“Yes? or No?”

He answered: “Yes.”

A faint breath of relief, just audible in the silence, told me that she
had heard him. It was her last effort. He laid her, insensible, on the
bed, by the side of her sleeping child. “Look at them,” was all he said
to me; “how could I refuse?”



CHAPTER V. MISS CHANCE ASSERTS HERSELF.

The services of our medical officer were required, in order to hasten
the recovery of the Prisoner’s senses.

When the Doctor and I left the cell together, she was composed, and
ready (in the performance of her promise) to listen to the exhortations
of the Minister. The sleeping child was left undisturbed, by the
mother’s desire. If the Minister felt tempted to regret what he had
done, there was the artless influence which would check him! As we
stepped into the corridor, I gave the female warder her instructions to
remain on the watch, and to return to her post when she saw the Minister
come out.

In the meantime, my companion had walked on a little way.

Possessed of ability and experience within the limits of his profession,
he was in other respects a man with a crotchety mind; bold to the verge
of recklessness in the expression of his opinion; and possessed of a
command of language that carried everything before it. Let me add that
he was just and merciful in his intercourse with others, and I shall
have summed him up fairly enough. When I joined him he seemed to be
absorbed in reflection.

“Thinking of the Prisoner?” I said.

“Thinking of what is going on, at this moment, in the condemned cell,”
 he answered, “and wondering if any good will come of it.”

I was not without hope of a good result, and I said so.

The Doctor disagreed with me. “I don’t believe in that woman’s
penitence,” he remarked; “and I look upon the parson as a poor weak
creature. What is to become of the child?”

There was no reason for concealing from one of my colleagues the
benevolent decision, on the part of the good Minister, of which I had
been a witness. The Doctor listened to me with the first appearance of
downright astonishment that I had ever observed in his face. When I had
done, he made an extraordinary reply:

“Governor, I retract what I said of the parson just now. He is one of
the boldest men that ever stepped into a pulpit.”

Was the doctor in earnest? Strongly in earnest; there could be no doubt
of it. Before I could ask him what he meant, he was called away to a
patient on the other side of the prison. When we parted at the door of
my room, I made it a request that my medical friend would return to me
and explain what he had just said.

“Considering that you are the governor of a prison,” he replied, “you
are a singularly rash man. If I come back, how do you know I shall not
bore you?”

“My rashness runs the risk of that,” I rejoined.

“Tell me something, before I allow you to run your risk,” he said.
“Are you one of those people who think that the tempers of children are
formed by the accidental influences which happen to be about them? Or do
you agree with me that the tempers of children are inherited from their
parents?”

The Doctor (as I concluded) was still strongly impressed by the
Minister’s resolution to adopt a child whose wicked mother had committed
the most atrocious of all crimes. Was some serious foreboding in secret
possession of his mind? My curiosity to hear him was now increased
tenfold. I replied without hesitation:

“I agree with you.”

He looked at me with his sense of humor twinkling in his eyes. “Do you
know I rather expected that answer?” he said, slyly. “All right. I’ll
come back.”

Left by myself, I took up the day’s newspaper.

My attention wandered; my thoughts were in the cell with the Minister
and the Prisoner. How would it end? Sometimes, I was inclined to doubt
with the Doctor. Sometimes, I took refuge in my own more hopeful view.
These idle reflections were agreeably interrupted by the appearance of
my friend, the Chaplain.

“You are always welcome,” I said; “and doubly welcome just now. I am
feeling a little worried and anxious.”

“And you are naturally,” the Chaplain added, “not at all disposed to
receive a stranger?”

“Is the stranger a friend of yours?” I asked.

“Oh, no! Having occasion, just now, to go into the waiting-room, I found
a young woman there, who asked me if she could see you. She thinks you
have forgotten her, and she is tired of waiting. I merely undertook, of
course, to mention what she had said to me.”

The nurse having been in this way recalled to my memory, I felt some
little interest in seeing her, after what had passed in the cell. In
plainer words, I was desirous of judging for myself whether she deserved
the hostile feeling which the Prisoner had shown toward her. I thanked
the Chaplain before he left me, and gave the servant the necessary
instructions. When she entered the room, I looked at the woman
attentively for the first time.

Youth and a fine complexion, a well-made figure and a natural grace of
movement--these were her personal attractions, so far as I could
see. Her defects were, to my mind, equally noticeable. Under a heavy
forehead, her piercing eyes looked out at persons and things with an
expression which was not to my taste. Her large mouth--another defect,
in my opinion--would have been recommended to mercy, in the estimation
of many men, by her magnificent teeth; white, well-shaped, cruelly
regular. Believers in physiognomy might perhaps have seen the betrayal
of an obstinate nature in the lengthy firmness of her chin. While I am
trying to describe her, let me not forget her dress. A woman’s dress
is the mirror in which we may see the reflection of a woman’s nature.
Bearing in mind the melancholy and impressive circumstances under which
she had brought the child to the prison, the gayety of color in her gown
and her bonnet implied either a total want of feeling, or a total want
of tact. As to her position in life, let me confess that I felt, after
a closer examination, at a loss to determine it. She was certainly not
a lady. The Prisoner had spoken of her as if she was a domestic servant
who had forfeited her right to consideration and respect. And she had
entered the prison, as a nurse might have entered it, in charge of a
child. I did what we all do when we are not clever enough to find the
answer to a riddle--I gave it up.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“Perhaps you can tell me,” she answered, “how much longer I am to be
kept waiting in this prison.”

“The decision,” I reminded her, “doesn’t depend on me.”

“Then who does it depend on?”

The Minister had undoubtedly acquired the sole right of deciding. It
was for him to say whether this woman should, or should not, remain
in attendance on the child whom he had adopted. In the meanwhile, the
feeling of distrust which was gaining on my mind warned me to remember
the value of reserve in holding intercourse with a stranger.

She seemed to be irritated by my silence. “If the decision doesn’t rest
with you,” she asked, “why did you tell me to stay in the waiting-room?”

“You brought the little girl into the prison,” I said; “was it not
natural to suppose that your mistress might want you--”

“Stop, sir!”

I had evidently given offense; I stopped directly.

“No person on the face of the earth,” she declared, loftily, “has ever
had the right to call herself my mistress. Of my own free will, sir, I
took charge of the child.”

“Because you are fond of her?” I suggested.

“I hate her.”

It was unwise on my part--I protested. “Hate a baby little more than a
year old!” I said.

“_Her_ baby!”

She said it with the air of a woman who had produced an unanswerable
reason. “I am accountable to nobody,” she went on. “If I consented
to trouble myself with the child, it was in remembrance of my
friendship--notice, if you please, that I say friendship--with the
unhappy father.”

Putting together what I had just heard, and what I had seen in the cell,
I drew the right conclusion at last. The woman, whose position in life
had been thus far an impenetrable mystery to me, now stood revealed
as one, among other objects of the Prisoner’s jealousy, during her
disastrous married life. A serious doubt occurred to me as to the
authority under which the husband’s mistress might be acting, after the
husband’s death. I instantly put it to the test.

“Do I understand you to assert any claim to the child?” I asked.

“Claim?” she repeated. “I know no more of the child than you do. I
heard for the first time that such a creature was in existence, when
her murdered father sent for me in his dying moments. At his entreaty I
promised to take care of her, while her vile mother was out of the house
and in the hands of the law. My promise has been performed. If I am
expected (having brought her to the prison) to take her away again,
understand this: I am under no obligation (even if I could afford it)
to burden myself with that child; I shall hand her over to the workhouse
authorities.”

I forgot myself once more--I lost my temper.

“Leave the room,” I said. “Your unworthy hands will not touch the poor
baby again. She is provided for.”

“I don’t believe you!” the wretch burst out. “Who has taken the child?”

A quiet voice answered: “_I_ have taken her.”

We both looked round and saw the Minister standing in the open doorway,
with the child in his arms. The ordeal that he had gone through in the
condemned cell was visible in his face; he looked miserably haggard and
broken. I was eager to know if his merciful interest in the Prisoner had
purified her guilty soul--but at the same time I was afraid, after what
he had but too plainly suffered, to ask him to enter into details.

“Only one word,” I said. “Are your anxieties at rest?”

“God’s mercy has helped me,” he answered. “I have not spoken in vain.
She believes; she repents; she has confessed the crime.”

After handing the written and signed confession to me, he approached
the venomous creature, still lingering in the room to hear what passed
between us. Before I could stop him, he spoke to her, under a natural
impression that he was addressing the Prisoner’s servant.

“I am afraid you will be disappointed,” he said, “when I tell you that
your services will no longer be required. I have reasons for placing the
child under the care of a nurse of my own choosing.”

She listened with an evil smile.

“I know who furnished you with your reasons,” she answered. “Apologies
are quite needless, so far as I am concerned. If you had proposed to me
to look after the new member of your family there, I should have felt it
my duty to myself to have refused. I am not a nurse--I am an independent
single lady. I see by your dress that you are a clergyman. Allow me to
present myself as a mark of respect to your cloth. I am Miss Elizabeth
Chance. May I ask the favor of your name?”

Too weary and too preoccupied to notice the insolence of her manner, the
Minister mentioned his name. “I am anxious,” he said, “to know if the
child has been baptized. Perhaps you can enlighten me?”

Still insolent, Miss Elizabeth Chance shook her head carelessly. “I
never heard--and, to tell you the truth, I never cared to hear--whether
she was christened or not. Call her by what name you like, I can tell
you this--you will find your adopted daughter a heavy handful.”

The Minister turned to me. “What does she mean?”

“I will try to tell you,” Miss Chance interposed. “Being a clergyman,
you know who Deborah was? Very well. I am Deborah now; and _I_
prophesy.” She pointed to the child. “Remember what I say, reverend sir!
You will find the tigress-cub take after its mother.”

With those parting words, she favored us with a low curtsey, and left
the room.



CHAPTER VI. THE DOCTOR DOUBTS.

The Minister looked at me in an absent manner; his attention seemed to
have been wandering. “What was it Miss Chance said?” he asked.

Before I could speak, a friend’s voice at the door interrupted us. The
Doctor, returning to me as he had promised, answered the Minister’s
question in these words:

“I must have passed the person you mean, sir, as I was coming in here;
and I heard her say: ‘You will find the tigress-cub take after its
mother.’ If she had known how to put her meaning into good English, Miss
Chance--that is the name you mentioned, I think--might have told you
that the vices of the parents are inherited by the children. And the
one particular parent she had in her mind,” the Doctor continued, gently
patting the child’s cheek, “was no doubt the mother of this unfortunate
little creature--who may, or may not, live to show you that she comes of
a bad stock and inherits a wicked nature.”

I was on the point of protesting against my friend’s interpretation,
when the Minister stopped me.

“Let me thank you, sir, for your explanation,” he said to the Doctor.
“As soon as my mind is free, I will reflect on what you have said.
Forgive me, Mr. Governor,” he went on, “if I leave you, now that I have
placed the Prisoner’s confession in your hands. It has been an effort to
me to say the little I have said, since I first entered this room. I can
think of nothing but that unhappy criminal, and the death that she must
die to-morrow.”

“Does she wish you to be present?” I asked.

“She positively forbids it. ‘After what you have done for me,’ she
said, ‘the least I can do in return is to prevent your being needlessly
distressed.’ She took leave of me; she kissed the little girl for the
last time--oh, don’t ask me to tell you about it! I shall break down
if I try. Come, my darling!” He kissed the child tenderly, and took her
away with him.

“That man is a strange compound of strength and weakness,” the Doctor
remarked. “Did you notice his face, just now? Nine men out of ten,
suffering as he suffered, would have failed to control themselves. Such
resolution as his _may_ conquer the difficulties that are in store for
him yet.”

It was a trial of my temper to hear my clever colleague justifying, in
this way, the ignorant prediction of an insolent woman.

“There are exceptions to all rules,” I insisted. “And why are the
virtues of the parents not just as likely to descend to the children as
the vices? There was a fund of good, I can tell you, in that poor baby’s
father--though I don’t deny that he was a profligate man. And even the
horrible mother--as you heard just now--has virtue enough left in her
to feel grateful to the man who has taken care of her child. These are
facts; you can’t dispute them.”

The Doctor took out his pipe. “Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.
“Tobacco helps me to arrange my ideas.”

I gave him the means of arranging his ideas; that is to say, I gave
him the match-box. He blew some preliminary clouds of smoke and then he
answered me:

“For twenty years past, my friend, I have been studying the question
of hereditary transmission of qualities; and I have found vices and
diseases descending more frequently to children than virtue and health.
I don’t stop to ask why: there is no end to that sort of curiosity. What
I have observed is what I tell you; no more and no less. You will say
this is a horribly discouraging result of experience, for it tends to
show that children come into the world at a disadvantage on the day of
their birth. Of course they do. Children are born deformed; children are
born deaf, dumb, or blind; children are born with the seeds in them of
deadly diseases. Who can account for the cruelties of creation? Why are
we endowed with life--only to end in death? And does it ever strike you,
when you are cutting your mutton at dinner, and your cat is catching its
mouse, and your spider is suffocating its fly, that we are all, big
and little together, born to one certain inheritance--the privilege of
eating each other?”

“Very sad,” I admitted. “But it will all be set right in another world.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” the Doctor asked.

“Quite sure, thank God! And it would be better for you if you felt about
it as I do.”

“We won’t dispute, my dear Governor. I don’t scoff at comforting hopes;
I don’t deny the existence of occasional compensations. But I do see,
nevertheless, that Evil has got the upper hand among us, on this curious
little planet. Judging by my observation and experience, that ill-fated
baby’s chance of inheriting the virtues of her parents is not to be
compared with her chances of inheriting their vices; especially if she
happens to take after her mother. _There_ the virtue is not conspicuous,
and the vice is one enormous fact. When I think of the growth of that
poisonous hereditary taint, which may come with time--when I think of
passions let loose and temptations lying in ambush--I see the smooth
surface of the Minister’s domestic life with dangers lurking under it
which make me shake in my shoes. God! what a life I should lead, if I
happened to be in his place, some years hence. Suppose I said or did
something (in the just exercise of my parental authority) which offended
my adopted daughter. What figure would rise from the dead in my memory,
when the girl bounced out of the room in a rage? The image of her mother
would be the image I should see. I should remember what her mother did
when _she_ was provoked; I should lock my bedroom door, in my own house,
at night. I should come down to breakfast with suspicions in my cup of
tea, if I discovered that my adopted daughter had poured it out. Oh,
yes; it’s quite true that I might be doing the girl a cruel injustice
all the time; but how am I to be sure of that? I am only sure that her
mother was hanged for one of the most merciless murders committed in our
time. Pass the match-box. My pipe’s out, and my confession of faith has
come to an end.”

It was useless to dispute with a man who possessed his command of
language. At the same time, there was a bright side to the poor
Minister’s prospects which the Doctor had failed to see. It was barely
possible that I might succeed in putting my positive friend in the
wrong. I tried the experiment, at any rate.

“You seem to have forgotten,” I reminded him, “that the child will have
every advantage that education can offer to her, and will be accustomed
from her earliest years to restraining and purifying influences, in a
clergyman’s household.”

Now that he was enjoying the fumes of tobacco, the Doctor was as placid
and sweet-tempered as a man could be.

“Quite true,” he said.

“Do you doubt the influence of religion?” I asked sternly.

He answered, sweetly: “Not at all”

“Or the influence of kindness?”

“Oh, dear, no!”

“Or the force of example?”

“I wouldn’t deny it for the world.”

I had not expected this extraordinary docility. The Doctor had got the
upper hand of me again--a state of things that I might have found it
hard to endure, but for a call of duty which put an end to our sitting.
One of the female warders appeared with a message from the condemned
cell. The Prisoner wished to see the Governor and the Medical Officer.

“Is she ill?” the Doctor inquired.

“No, sir.”

“Hysterical? or agitated, perhaps?”

“As easy and composed, sir, as a person can be.”

We set forth together for the condemned cell.

CHAPTER VII. THE MURDERESS CONSULTS THE AUTHORITIES.

There was a considerate side to my friend’s character, which showed
itself when the warder had left us.

He was especially anxious to be careful of what he said to a woman in
the Prisoner’s terrible situation; especially in the event of her having
been really subjected to the influence of religious belief. On the
Minister’s own authority, I declared that there was every reason to
adopt this conclusion; and in support of what I had said I showed him
the confession. It only contained a few lines, acknowledging that she
had committed the murder and that she deserved her sentence. “From the
planning of the crime to the commission of the crime, I was in my
right senses throughout. I knew what I was doing.” With that remarkable
disavowal of the defense set up by her advocate, the confession ended.

My colleague read the paper, and handed it back to me without making any
remark. I asked if he suspected the Prisoner of feigning conversion to
please the Minister.

“She shall not discover it,” he answered, gravely, “if I do.”

It would not be true to say that the Doctor’s obstinacy had shaken
my belief in the good result of the Minister’s interference. I may,
however, acknowledge that I felt some misgivings, which were not
dispelled when I found myself in the presence of the Prisoner.

I had expected to see her employed in reading the Bible. The good book
was closed and was not even placed within her reach. The occupation to
which she was devoting herself astonished and repelled me.

Some carelessness on the part of the attendant had left on the table the
writing materials that had been needed for her confession. She was using
them now--when death on the scaffold was literally within a few hours
of her--to sketch a portrait of the female warder, who was on the watch!
The Doctor and I looked at each other; and now the sincerity of her
repentance was something that I began to question, too.

She laid down the pen, and proceeded quietly to explain herself.

“Even the little time that is left to me proves to be a weary time
to get through,” she said. “I am making a last use of the talent for
drawing and catching a likeness, which has been one of my gifts since I
was a girl. You look as if you didn’t approve of such employment as this
for a woman who is going to be hanged. Well, sir, I have no doubt you
are right.” She paused, and tore up the portrait. “If I have misbehaved
myself,” she resumed, “I make amends. To find you in an indulgent frame
of mind is of importance to me just now. I have a favor to ask of you.
May the warder leave the cell for a few minutes?”

Giving the woman permission to withdraw for a while, I waited with some
anxiety to hear what the Prisoner wanted of me.

“I have something to say to you,” she proceeded, “on the subject of
executions. The face of a person who is going to be hanged is hidden, as
I have been told, by a white cap drawn over it. Is that true?”

How another man might have felt, in my place, I cannot, of course,
say. To my mind, such a question--on _her_ lips--was too shocking to be
answered in words. I bowed.

“And the body is buried,” she went on, “in the prison?”

I could remain silent no longer. “Is there no human feeling left in
you?” I burst out. “What do these horrid questions mean?”

“Don’t be angry with me, sir; you shall hear directly. I want to know
first if I am to be buried in the prison?”

I replied as before, by a bow.

“Now,” she said, “I may tell you what I mean. In the autumn of last
year I was taken to see some waxworks. Portraits of criminals were
among them. There was one portrait--” She hesitated; her infernal
self-possession failed her at last. The color left her face; she was no
longer able to look at me firmly. “There was one portrait,” she resumed,
“that had been taken after the execution. The face was so hideous; it
was swollen to such a size in its frightful deformity--oh, sir, don’t
let me be seen in that state, even by the strangers who bury me! Use
your influence--forbid them to take the cap off my face when I am
dead--order them to bury me in it, and I swear to you I’ll meet death
tomorrow as coolly as the boldest man that ever mounted the scaffold!”
 Before I could stop her, she seized me by the hand, and wrung it with
a furious power that left the mark of her grasp on me, in a bruise, for
days afterward. “Will you do it?” she cried. “You’re an honorable man;
you will keep your word. Give me your promise!”

I gave her my promise.

The relief to her tortured spirit expressed itself horribly in a burst
of frantic laughter. “I can’t help it,” she gasped; “I’m so happy.”

My enemies said of me, when I got my appointment, that I was too
excitable a man to be governor of a prison. Perhaps they were not
altogether wrong. Anyhow, the quick-witted Doctor saw some change in me,
which I was not aware of myself. He took my arm and led me out of the
cell. “Leave her to me,” he whispered. “The fine edge of my nerves was
worn off long ago in the hospital.”

When we met again, I asked what had passed between the Prisoner and
himself.

“I gave her time to recover,” he told me; “and, except that she looked a
little paler than usual, there was no trace left of the frenzy that you
remember. ‘I ought to apologize for troubling you,’ she said; ‘but it is
perhaps natural that I should think, now and then, of what is to happen
to me to-morrow morning. As a medical man, you will be able to enlighten
me. Is death by hanging a painful death?’ She had put it so politely
that I felt bound to answer her. ‘If the neck happens to be broken,’ I
said, ‘hanging is a sudden death; fright and pain (if there is any pain)
are both over in an instant. As to the other form of death which is also
possible (I mean death by suffocation), I must own as an honest man that
I know no more about it than you do.’ After considering a little, she
made a sensible remark, and followed it by an embarrassing request. ‘A
great deal,’ she said, ‘must depend on the executioner. I am not afraid
of death, Doctor. Why should I be? My anxiety about my little girl is
set at rest; I have nothing left to live for. But I don’t like pain.
Would you mind telling the executioner to be careful? Or would it be
better if I spoke to him myself?’ I said I thought it would come with
a better grace from herself. She understood me directly; and we dropped
the subject. Are you surprised at her coolness, after your experience of
her?”

I confessed that I was surprised.

“Think a little,” the Doctor said. “The one sensitive place in that
woman’s nature is the place occupied by her self-esteem.”

I objected to this that she had shown fondness for her child.

My friend disposed of the objection with his customary readiness.

“The maternal instinct,” he said. “A cat is fond of her kittens; a cow
is fond of her calf. No, sir, the one cause of that outbreak of passion
which so shocked you--a genuine outbreak, beyond all doubt--is to be
found in the vanity of a fine feminine creature, overpowered by a horror
of looking hideous, even after her death. Do you know I rather like that
woman?”

“Is it possible that you are in earnest?” I asked.

“I know as well as you do,” he answered, “that this is neither a time
nor a place for jesting. The fact is, the Prisoner carries out an idea
of mine. It is my positive conviction that the worst murders--I mean
murders deliberately planned--are committed by persons absolutely
deficient in that part of the moral organization which _feels_. The
night before they are hanged they sleep. On their last morning they
eat a breakfast. Incapable of realizing the horror of murder, they are
incapable of realizing the horror of death. Do you remember the last
murderer who was hanged here--a gentleman’s coachman who killed his
wife? He had but two anxieties while he was waiting for execution. One
was to get his allowance of beer doubled, and the other was to be hanged
in his coachman’s livery. No! no! these wretches are all alike; they are
human creatures born with the temperaments of tigers. Take my word for
it, we need feel no anxiety about to-morrow. The Prisoner will face the
crowd round the scaffold with composure; and the people will say, ‘She
died game.’”



CHAPTER VIII. THE MINISTER SAYS GOOD-BY.

The Capital Punishment of the Prisoner is in no respect connected with
my purpose in writing the present narrative. Neither do I desire
to darken these pages by describing in detail an act of righteous
retribution which must present, by the nature of it, a scene of horror.
For these reasons I ask to be excused, if I limit what I must needs say
of the execution within the compass of a few words--and pass on.

The one self-possessed person among us was the miserable woman who
suffered the penalty of death.

Not very discreetly, as I think, the Chaplain asked her if she had truly
repented. She answered: “I have confessed the crime, sir. What more do
you want?” To my mind--still hesitating between the view that believes
with the Minister, and the view that doubts with the Doctor--this reply
leaves a way open to hope of her salvation. Her last words to me, as she
mounted the steps of the scaffold, were: “Remember your promise.” It was
easy for me to be true to my word. At that bygone time, no difficulties
were placed in my way by such precautions as are now observed in the
conduct of executions within the walls of the prison. From the time of
her death to the time of her burial, no living creature saw her face.
She rests, veiled in her prison grave.

Let me now turn to living interests, and to scenes removed from the
thunder-clouds of crime.

.......

On the next day I received a visit from the Minister.

His first words entreated me not to allude to the terrible event of
the previous day. “I cannot escape thinking of it,” he said, “but I may
avoid speaking of it.” This seemed to me to be the misplaced confidence
of a weak man in the refuge of silence. By way of changing the subject,
I spoke of the child. There would be serious difficulties to contend
with (as I ventured to suggest), if he remained in the town, and allowed
his new responsibilities to become the subject of public talk.

His reply to this agreeably surprised me. There were no difficulties to
be feared.

The state of his wife’s health had obliged him (acting under medical
advice) to try the influence of her native air. An interval of
some months might elapse before the good effect of the change had
sufficiently declared itself; and a return to the peculiar climate
of the town might bring on a relapse. There had consequently been no
alternative to but resign his charge. Only on that day the resignation
had been accepted--with expressions of regret sincerely reciprocated
by himself. He proposed to leave the town immediately; and one of the
objects of his visit was to bid me good-by.

“The next place I live in,” he said, “will be more than a hundred miles
away. At that distance I may hope to keep events concealed which must
be known only to ourselves. So far as I can see, there are no risks of
discovery lurking in this place. My servants (only two in number) have
both been born here, and have both told my wife that they have no wish
to go away. As to the person who introduced herself to me by the name of
Miss Chance, she was traced to the railway station yesterday afternoon,
and took her ticket for London.”

I congratulated the Minister on the good fortune which had befriended
him, so far.

“You will understand how carefully I have provided against being
deceived,” he continued, “when I tell you what my plans are. The persons
among whom my future lot is cast--and the child herself, of course--must
never suspect that the new member of my family is other than my own
daughter. This is deceit, I admit; but it is deceit that injures no one.
I hope you see the necessity for it, as I do.”

There could be no doubt of the necessity.

If the child was described as adopted, there would be curiosity about
the circumstances, and inquiries relating to the parents. Prevaricating
replies lead to suspicion, and suspicion to discovery. But for the wise
course which the Minister had decided on taking, the poor child’s life
might have been darkened by the horror of the mother’s crime, and the
infamy of the mother’s death.

Having quieted my friend’s needless scruples by this perfectly sincere
expression of opinion, I ventured to approach the central figure in his
domestic circle, by means of a question relating to his wife. How had
that lady received the unfortunate little creature, for whose appearance
on the home-scene she must have been entirely unprepared?

The Minister’s manner showed some embarrassment; he prefaced what he had
to tell me with praises of his wife, equally creditable no doubt to both
of them. The beauty of the child, the pretty ways of the child, he said,
fascinated the admirable woman at first sight. It was not to be denied
that she had felt, and had expressed, misgivings, on being informed
of the circumstances under which the Minister’s act of mercy had been
performed. But her mind was too well balanced to incline to this
state of feeling, when her husband had addressed her in defense of
his conduct. She then understood that the true merit of a good action
consisted in patiently facing the sacrifices involved. Her interest in
the new daughter being, in this way, ennobled by a sense of Christian
duty, there had been no further difference of opinion between the
married pair.

I listened to this plausible explanation with interest, but, at the
same time, with doubts of the lasting nature of the lady’s submission to
circumstances; suggested, perhaps, by the constraint in the Minister’s
manner. It was well for both of us when we changed the subject. He
reminded me of the discouraging view which the Doctor had taken of the
prospect before him.

“I will not attempt to decide whether your friend is right or wrong,”
 he said. “Trusting, as I do, in the mercy of God, I look hopefully to
a future time when all that is brightest and best in the nature of
my adopted child will be developed under my fostering care. If evil
tendencies show themselves, my reliance will be confidently placed on
pious example, on religious instruction, and, above all, on intercession
by prayer. Repeat to your friend,” he concluded, “what you have just
heard me say. Let him ask himself if he could confront the uncertain
future with my cheerful submission and my steadfast hope.”

He intrusted me with that message, and gave me his hand. So we parted.

I agreed with him, I admired him; but my faith seemed to want sustaining
power, as compared with his faith. On his own showing (as it appeared
to me), there would be two forces in a state of conflict in the child’s
nature as she grew up--inherited evil against inculcated good. Try as I
might, I failed to feel the Minister’s comforting conviction as to which
of the two would win.



CHAPTER IX. THE GOVERNOR RECEIVES A VISIT.

A few days after the good man had left us, I met with a serious
accident, caused by a false step on the stone stairs of the prison.

The long illness which followed this misfortune, and my removal
afterward (in the interests of my recovery) to a milder climate than the
climate of England, obliged me to confide the duties of governor of the
prison to a representative. I was absent from my post for rather more
than a year. During this interval no news reached me from my reverend
friend.

Having returned to the duties of my office, I thought of writing to the
Minister. While the proposed letter was still in contemplation, I was
informed that a lady wished to see me. She sent in her card. My visitor
proved to be the Minister’s wife.

I observed her with no ordinary attention when she entered the room.

Her dress was simple; her scanty light hair, so far as I could see it
under her bonnet, was dressed with taste. The paleness of her lips, and
the faded color in her face, suggested that she was certainly not in
good health. Two peculiarities struck me in her personal appearance.
I never remembered having seen any other person with such a singularly
narrow and slanting forehead as this lady presented; and I was
impressed, not at all agreeably, by the flashing shifting expression in
her eyes. On the other hand, let me own that I was powerfully attracted
and interested by the beauty of her voice. Its fine variety of compass,
and its musical resonance of tone, fell with such enchantment on the
ear, that I should have liked to put a book of poetry into her hand, and
to have heard her read it in summer-time, accompanied by the music of a
rocky stream.

The object of her visit--so far as she explained it at the
outset--appeared to be to offer her congratulations on my recovery,
and to tell me that her husband had assumed the charge of a church in a
large town not far from her birthplace.

Even those commonplace words were made interesting by her delicious
voice. But however sensitive to sweet sounds a man may be, there are
limits to his capacity for deceiving himself--especially when he happens
to be enlightened by experience of humanity within the walls of a
prison. I had, it may be remembered, already doubted the lady’s good
temper, judging from her husband’s over-wrought description of her
virtues. Her eyes looked at me furtively; and her manner, gracefully
self-possessed as it was, suggested that she had something of a
delicate, or disagreeable, nature to say to me, and that she was at a
loss how to approach the subject so as to produce the right impression
on my mind at the outset. There was a momentary silence between us. For
the sake of saying something, I asked how she and the Minister liked
their new place of residence.

“Our new place of residence,” she answered, “has been made interesting
by a very unexpected event--an event (how shall I describe it?) which
has increased our happiness and enlarged our family circle.”

There she stopped: expecting me, as I fancied, to guess what she
meant. A woman, and that woman a mother, might have fulfilled her
anticipations. A man, and that man not listening attentively, was simply
puzzled.

“Pray excuse my stupidity,” I said; “I don’t quite understand you.”

The lady’s temper looked at me out of the lady’s shifting eyes, and
hid itself again in a moment. She set herself right in my estimation
by taking the whole blame of our little misunderstanding on her own
innocent shoulders.

“I ought to have spoken more plainly,” she said. “Let me try what I can
do now. After many years of disappointment in my married life, it has
pleased Providence to bestow on me the happiness--the inexpressible
happiness--of being a mother. My baby is a sweet little girl; and my one
regret is that I cannot nurse her myself.”

My languid interest in the Minister’s wife was not stimulated by the
announcement of this domestic event.

I felt no wish to see the “sweet little girl”; I was not even reminded
of another example of long-deferred maternity, which had occurred
within the limits of my own family circle. All my sympathies attached
themselves to the sad little figure of the adopted child. I remembered
the poor baby on my knee, enchanted by the ticking of my watch--I
thought of her, peacefully and prettily asleep under the horrid shelter
of the condemned cell--and it is hardly too much to say that my heart
was heavy, when I compared her prospects with the prospects of her
baby-rival. Kind as he was, conscientious as he was, could the Minister
be expected to admit to an equal share in his love the child endeared
to him as a father, and the child who merely reminded him of an act of
mercy? As for his wife, it seemed the merest waste of time to put
her state of feeling (placed between the two children) to the test of
inquiry. I tried the useless experiment, nevertheless.

“It is pleasant to think,” I began, “that your other daughter--”

She interrupted me, with the utmost gentleness: “Do you mean the child
that my husband was foolish enough to adopt?”

“Say rather fortunate enough to adopt,” I persisted. “As your own
little girl grows up, she will want a playfellow. And she will find a
playfellow in that other child, whom the good Minister has taken for his
own.”

“No, my dear sir--not if I can prevent it.”

The contrast between the cruelty of her intention, and the musical
beauty of the voice which politely expressed it in those words, really
startled me. I was at a loss how to answer her, at the very time when I
ought to have been most ready to speak.

“You must surely understand,” she went on, “that we don’t want another
person’s child, now we have a little darling of our own?”

“Does your husband agree with you in that view?” I asked.

“Oh dear, no! He said what you said just now, and (oddly enough) almost
in the same words. But I don’t at all despair of persuading him to
change his mind--and you can help me.”

She made that audacious assertion with such an appearance of feeling
perfectly sure of me, that my politeness gave way under the strain laid
on it. “What do you mean?” I asked sharply.

Not in the least impressed by my change of manner, she took from the
pocket of her dress a printed paper. “You will find what I mean there,”
 she replied--and put the paper into my hand.

It was an appeal to the charitable public, occasioned by the enlargement
of an orphan-asylum, with which I had been connected for many years.
What she meant was plain enough now. I said nothing: I only looked at
her.

Pleased to find that I was clever enough to guess what she meant, on
this occasion, the Minister’s wife informed me that the circumstances
were all in our favor. She still persisted in taking me into
partnership--the circumstances were in _our_ favor.

“In two years more,” she explained, “the child of that detestable
creature who was hanged--do you know, I cannot even look at the little
wretch without thinking of the gallows?--will be old enough (with your
interest to help us) to be received into the asylum. What a relief
it will be to get rid of that child! And how hard I shall work at
canvassing for subscribers’ votes! Your name will be a tower of
strength when I use it as a reference. Pardon me--you are not looking so
pleasantly as usual. Do you see some obstacles in our way?”

“I see two obstacles.”

“What can they possibly be?”

For the second time, my politeness gave way under the strain laid on it.
“You know perfectly well,” I said, “what one of the obstacles is.”

“Am I to understand that you contemplate any serious resistance on the
part of my husband?”

“Certainly!”

She was unaffectedly amused by my simplicity.

“Are you a single man?” she asked.

“I am a widower.”

“Then your experience ought to tell you that I know every weak point in
the Minister’s character. I can tell him, on your authority, that the
hateful child will be placed in competent and kindly hands--and I have
my own sweet baby to plead for me. With these advantages in my favor, do
you actually suppose I can fail to make _my_ way of thinking _his_ way
of thinking? You must have forgotten your own married life! Suppose
we go on to the second of your two obstacles. I hope it will be better
worth considering than the first.”

“The second obstacle will not disappoint you,” I answered; “I am the
obstacle, this time.”

“You refuse to help me?”

“Positively.”

“Perhaps reflection may alter your resolution?”

“Reflection will do nothing of the kind.”

“You are rude, sir!”

“In speaking to you, madam, I have no alternative but to speak plainly.”

She rose. Her shifting eyes, for once, looked at me steadily.

“What sort of enemy have I made of you?” she asked. “A passive enemy who
is content with refusing to help me? Or an active enemy who will write
to my husband?”

“It depends entirely,” I told her, “on what your husband does. If he
questions me about you, I shall tell him the truth.”

“And if not?”

“In that case, I shall hope to forget that you ever favored me with a
visit.”

In making this reply I was guiltless of any malicious intention. What
evil interpretation she placed on my words it is impossible for me to
say; I can only declare that some intolerable sense of injury hurried
her into an outbreak of rage. Her voice, strained for the first time,
lost its tuneful beauty of tone.

“Come and see us in two years’ time,” she burst out--“and discover the
orphan of the gallows in our house if you can! If your Asylum won’t
take her, some other Charity will. Ha, Mr. Governor, I deserve my
disappointment! I ought to have remembered that you are only a jailer
after all. And what is a jailer? Proverbially a brute. Do you hear that?
A brute!”

Her strength suddenly failed her. She dropped back into the chair from
which she had risen, with a faint cry of pain. A ghastly pallor stole
over her face. There was wine on the sideboard; I filled a glass.
She refused to take it. At that time in the day, the Doctor’s duties
required his attendance in the prison. I instantly sent for him. After
a moment’s look at her, he took the wine out of my hand, and held the
glass to her lips.

“Drink it,” he said. She still refused. “Drink it,” he reiterated, “or
you will die.”

That frightened her; she drank the wine. The Doctor waited for a while
with his fingers on her pulse. “She will do now,” he said.

“Can I go?” she asked.

“Go wherever you please, madam--so long as you don’t go upstairs in a
hurry.”

She smiled: “I understand you, sir--and thank you for your advice.”

I asked the Doctor, when we were alone, what made him tell her not to go
upstairs in a hurry.

“What I felt,” he answered, “when I had my fingers on her pulse. You
heard her say that she understood me.”

“Yes; but I don’t know what she meant.”

“She meant, probably, that her own doctor had warned her as I did.”

“Something seriously wrong with her health?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Heart.”



CHAPTER X. MISS CHANCE REAPPEARS.

A week had passed, since the Minister’s wife had left me, when I
received a letter from the Minister himself.

After surprising me, as he innocently supposed, by announcing the birth
of his child, he mentioned some circumstances connected with that event,
which I now heard for the first time.

“Within an easy journey of the populous scene of my present labors,” he
wrote, “there is a secluded country village called Low Lanes. The rector
of the place is my wife’s brother. Before the birth of our infant, he
had asked his sister to stay for a while at his house; and the doctor
thought she might safely be allowed to accept the invitation. Through
some error in the customary calculations, as I suppose, the child
was born unexpectedly at the rectory; and the ceremony of baptism was
performed at the church, under circumstances which I am not able to
relate within the limits of a letter: Let me only say that I allude to
this incident without any sectarian bitterness of feeling--for I am
no enemy to the Church of England. You have no idea what treasures of
virtue and treasures of beauty maternity has revealed in my wife’s sweet
nature. Other mothers, in her proud position, might find their love
cooling toward the poor child whom we have adopted. But my household is
irradiated by the presence of an angel, who gives an equal share in her
affections to the two little ones alike.”

In this semi-hysterical style of writing, the poor man unconsciously
told me how cunningly and how cruelly his wife was deceiving him.

I longed to exhibit that wicked woman in her true character--but what
could I do? She must have been so favored by circumstances as to be able
to account for her absence from home, without exciting the slightest
suspicion of the journey which she had really taken, if I declared in my
reply to the Minister’s letter that I had received her in my rooms,
and if I repeated the conversation that had taken place, what would
the result be? She would find an easy refuge in positive denial of
the truth--and, in that case, which of us would her infatuated husband
believe?

The one part of the letter which I read with some satisfaction was the
end of it.

I was here informed that the Minister’s plans for concealing the
parentage of his adopted daughter had proved to be entirely successful.
The members of the new domestic household believed the two children to
be infant-sisters. Neither was there any danger of the adopted child
being identified (as the oldest child of the two) by consultation of the
registers.

Before he left our town, the Minister had seen for himself that no
baptismal name had been added, after the birth of the daughter of the
murderess had been registered, and that no entry of baptism existed in
the registers kept in places of worship. He drew the inference--in
all probability a true inference, considering the characters of the
parents--that the child had never been baptized; and he performed the
ceremony privately, abstaining, for obvious reasons, from adding her
Christian name to the imperfect register of her birth. “I am not aware,”
 he wrote, “whether I have, or have not, committed an offense against the
Law. In any case, I may hope to have made atonement by obedience to the
Gospel.”

Six weeks passed, and I heard from my reverend friend once more.

His second letter presented a marked contrast to the first. It was
written in sorrow and anxiety, to inform me of an alarming change
for the worse in his wife’s health. I showed the letter to my medical
colleague. After reading it he predicted the event that might be
expected, in two words:--Sudden death.

On the next occasion when I heard from the Minister, the Doctor’s grim
reply proved to be a prophecy fulfilled.

When we address expressions of condolence to bereaved friends, the
principles of popular hypocrisy sanction indiscriminate lying as a
duty which we owe to the dead--no matter what their lives may have
been--because they are dead. Within my own little sphere, I have always
been silent, when I could not offer to afflicted persons expressions of
sympathy which I honestly felt. To have condoled with the Minister on
the loss that he had sustained by the death of a woman, self-betrayed to
me as shamelessly deceitful, and pitilessly determined to reach her own
cruel ends, would have been to degrade myself by telling a deliberate
lie. I expressed in my answer all that an honest man naturally feels,
when he is writing to a friend in distress; carefully abstaining from
any allusion to the memory of his wife, or to the place which her
death had left vacant in his household. My letter, I am sorry to say,
disappointed and offended him. He wrote to me no more, until years had
passed, and time had exerted its influence in producing a more indulgent
frame of mind. These letters of a later date have been preserved, and
will probably be used, at the right time, for purposes of explanation
with which I may be connected in the future.

.......

The correspondent whom I had now lost was succeeded by a gentleman
entirely unknown to me.

Those reasons which induced me to conceal the names of persons, while I
was relating events in the prison, do not apply to correspondence with a
stranger writing from another place. I may, therefore, mention that Mr.
Dunboyne, of Fairmount, on the west coast of Ireland, was the writer of
the letter now addressed to me. He proved, to my surprise, to be one of
the relations whom the Prisoner under sentence of death had not cared to
see, when I offered her the opportunity of saying farewell. Mr. Dunboyne
was a brother-in-law of the murderess. He had married her sister.

His wife, he informed me, had died in childbirth, leaving him but one
consolation--a boy, who already recalled all that was brightest and best
in his lost mother. The father was naturally anxious that the son should
never become acquainted with the disgrace that had befallen the family.

The letter then proceeded in these terms:

“I heard yesterday, for the first time, by means of an old
newspaper-cutting sent to me by a friend, that the miserable woman who
suffered the ignominy of public execution has left an infant child. Can
you tell me what has become of the orphan? If this little girl is, as I
fear, not well provided for, I only do what my wife would have done if
she had lived, by offering to make the child’s welfare my especial care.
I am willing to place her in an establishment well known to me, in which
she will be kindly treated, well educated, and fitted to earn her own
living honorably in later life.

“If you feel some surprise at finding that my good intentions toward
this ill-fated niece of mine do not go to the length of receiving her as
a member of my own family, I beg to submit some considerations which may
perhaps weigh with you as they have weighed with me.

“In the first place, there is at least a possibility--however carefully
I might try to conceal it--that the child’s parentage would sooner
or later be discovered. In the second place (and assuming that the
parentage had been successfully concealed), if this girl and my boy
grew up together, there is another possibility to be reckoned with:
they might become attached to each other. Does the father live who would
allow his son ignorantly to marry the daughter of a convicted murderess?
I should have no alternative but to part them cruelly by revealing the
truth.” The letter ended with some complimentary expressions addressed
to myself. And the question was: how ought I to answer it?

My correspondent had strongly impressed me in his favor; I could not
doubt that he was an honorable man. But the interest of the Minister
in keeping his own benevolent action secure from the risk of
discovery--increased as that interest was by the filial relations of the
two children toward him, now publicly established--had, as I could not
doubt, the paramount claim on me. The absolutely safe course to take
was to admit no one, friend or stranger, to our confidence. I replied,
expressing sincere admiration of Mr. Dunboyne’s motives, and merely
informing him that the child was already provided for.

After that, I heard no more of the Irish gentleman.

It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that I kept the Minister in
ignorance of my correspondence with Mr. Dunboyne. I was too well
acquainted with my friend’s sensitive and self-tormenting nature to let
him know that a relative of the murderess was living, and was aware that
she had left a child.

A last event remains to be related, before I close these pages.

During the year of which I am now writing, our Chaplain added one more
to the many examples that I have seen of his generous readiness to serve
his friends. He had arranged to devote his annual leave of absence to a
tour among the English Lakes, when he received a letter from a clergyman
resident in London, whom he had known from the time when they had
been school-fellows. This old friend wrote under circumstances of the
severest domestic distress, which made it absolutely necessary that he
should leave London for a while. Having failed to find a representative
who could relieve him of his clerical duties, he applied to the Chaplain
to recommend a clergyman who might be in a position to help him. My
excellent colleague gave up his holiday-plans without hesitation, and
went to London himself.

On his return, I asked if he had seen anything of some acquaintances
of his and of mine, who were then visitors to the metropolis. He smiled
significantly when he answered me.

“I have a card to deliver from an acquaintance whom you have not
mentioned,” he said; “and I rather think it will astonish you.”

It simply puzzled me. When he gave me the card, this is what I found
printed on it:

“MRS. TENBRUGGEN (OF SOUTH BEVELAND).”

“Well?” said the Chaplain.

“Well,” I answered; “I never even heard of Mrs. Tenbruggen, of South
Beveland. Who is she?”

“I married the lady to a foreign gentleman, only last week, at my
friend’s church,” the Chaplain replied. “Perhaps you may remember her
maiden name?”

He mentioned the name of the dangerous creature who had first presented
herself to me, in charge of the Prisoner’s child--otherwise Miss
Elizabeth Chance. The reappearance of this woman on the scene--although
she was only represented by her card--caused me a feeling of vague
uneasiness, so contemptibly superstitious in its nature that I now
remember it with shame. I asked a stupid question:

“How did it happen?”

“In the ordinary course of such things,” my friend said. “They were
married by license, in their parish church. The bridegroom was a
fine tall man, with a bold eye and a dashing manner. The bride and
I recognized each other directly. When Miss Chance had become Mrs.
Tenbruggen, she took me aside, and gave me her card. ‘Ask the Governor
to accept it,’ she said, ‘in remembrance of the time when he took me for
a nursemaid. Tell him I am married to a Dutch gentleman of high
family. If he ever comes to Holland, we shall be glad to see him in our
residence at South Beveland.’ There is her message to you, repeated word
for word.”

“I am glad she is going to live out of England.”

“Why? Surely you have no reason to fear her?”

“None whatever.”

“You are thinking, perhaps, of somebody else?”

I was thinking of the Minister; but it seemed to be safest not to say
so. ----

My pen is laid aside, and my many pages of writing have been sent
to their destination. What I undertook to do, is now done. To take a
metaphor from the stage--the curtain falls here on the Governor and the
Prison.




Second Period: 1875. THE GIRLS AND THE JOURNALS.



CHAPTER XI. HELENA’S DIARY.

We both said good-night, and went up to our room with a new object in
view. By our father’s advice we had resolved on keeping diaries, for the
first time in our lives, and had pledged ourselves to begin before we
went to bed.

Slowly and silently and lazily, my sister sauntered to her end of the
room and seated herself at her writing-table. On the desk lay a nicely
bound book, full of blank pages. The word “Journal” was printed on it in
gold letters, and there was fitted to the covers a bright brass lock and
key. A second journal, exactly similar in every respect to the first,
was placed on the writing-table at my end of the room. I opened my book.
The sight of the blank leaves irritated me; they were so smooth, so
spotless, so entirely ready to do _their_ duty. I took too deep a dip
of ink, and began the first entry in my diary by making a blot. This was
discouraging. I got up, and looked out of window.

“Helena!”

My sister’s voice could hardly have addressed me in a more weary tone,
if her pen had been at work all night, relating domestic events. “Well!”
 I said. “What is it?”

“Have you done already?” she asked.

I showed her the blot. My sister Eunice (the strangest as well as the
dearest of girls) always blurts out what she has in her mind at the
time. She fixed her eyes gravely on my spoiled page, and said: “That
comforts me.” I crossed the room, and looked at her book. She had not
even summoned energy enough to make a blot. “What will papa think of
us,” she said, “if we don’t begin to-night?”

“Why not begin,” I suggested, “by writing down what he said, when he
gave us our journals? Those wise words of advice will be in their proper
place on the first page of the new books.”

Not at all a demonstrative girl naturally; not ready with her tears, not
liberal with her caresses, not fluent in her talk, Eunice was affected
by my proposal in a manner wonderful to see. She suddenly developed into
an excitable person--I declare she kissed me. “Oh,” she burst out, “how
clever you are! The very thing to write about; I’ll do it directly.”

She really did it directly; without once stopping to consider, without
once waiting to ask my advice. Line after line, I heard her noisy pen
hurrying to the bottom of a first page, and getting three-parts of the
way toward the end of a second page, before she closed her diary. I
reminded her that she had not turned the key, in the lock which was
intended to keep her writing private.

“It’s not worth while,” she answered. “Anybody who cares to do it may
read what I write. Good-night.”

The singular change which I had noticed in her began to disappear, when
she set about her preparations for bed. I noticed the old easy indolent
movements again, and that regular and deliberate method of brushing
her hair, which I can never contemplate without feeling a stupefying
influence that has helped me to many a delicious night’s sleep. She said
her prayers in her favorite corner of the room, and laid her head on
the pillow with the luxurious little sigh which announces that she
is falling asleep. This reappearance of her usual habits was really a
relief to me. Eunice in a state of excitement is Eunice exhibiting an
unnatural spectacle.

The next thing I did was to take the liberty which she had already
sanctioned--I mean the liberty of reading what she had written. Here it
is, copied exactly:

“I am not half so fond of anybody as I am of papa. He is always kind, he
is always right. I love him, I love him, I love him.

“But this is not how I meant to begin. I must tell how he talked to us;
I wish he was here to tell it himself.

“He said to me: ‘You are getting lazier than ever, Eunice.’ He said to
Helena: ‘You are feeling the influence of Eunice’s example.’ He said to
both of us: ‘You are too ready, my dear children, to sit with your hands
on your laps, looking at nothing and thinking of nothing; I want to try
a new way of employing your leisure time.’

“He opened a parcel on the table. He made each of us a present of a
beautiful book, called ‘Journal.’ He said: ‘When you have nothing to do,
my dears, in the evening, employ yourselves in keeping a diary of the
events of the day. It will be a useful record in many ways, and a good
moral discipline for young girls.’ Helena said: ‘Oh, thank you!’ I said
the same, but not so cheerfully.

“The truth is, I feel out of spirits now if I think of papa; I am not
easy in my mind about him. When he is very much interested, there is a
quivering in his face which I don’t remember in past times. He seems to
have got older and thinner, all on a sudden. He shouts (which he never
used to do) when he threatens sinners at sermon-time. Being in dreadful
earnest about our souls, he is of course obliged to speak of the devil;
but he never used to hit the harmless pulpit cushion with his fist as he
does now. Nobody seems to have seen these things but me; and now I have
noticed them what ought I to do? I don’t know; I am certain of nothing,
except what I have put in at the top of page one: I love him, I love
him, I love him.”

.......

There this very curious entry ended. It was easy enough to discover the
influence which had made my slow-minded sister so ready with her memory
and her pen--so ready, in short, to do anything and everything, provided
her heart was in it, and her father was in it.

But Eunice is wrong, let me tell her, in what she says of myself.

I, too, have seen the sad change in my father; but I happen to know
that he dislikes having it spoken of at home, and I have kept my painful
discoveries to myself. Unhappily, the best medical advice is beyond our
reach. The one really competent doctor in this place is known to be an
infidel. But for that shocking obstacle I might have persuaded my father
to see him. As for the other two doctors whom he has consulted, at
different times, one talked about suppressed gout, and the other told
him to take a year’s holiday and enjoy himself on the Continent.

The clock has just struck twelve. I have been writing and copying till
my eyes are heavy, and I want to follow Eunice’s example and sleep
as soundly as she does. We have made a strange beginning of this
journalizing experiment. I wonder how long it will go on, and what will
come of it.


SECOND DAY.

I begin to be afraid that I am as stupid--no; that is not a nice word to
use--let me say as simple as dear Eunice. A diary means a record of the
events of the day; and not one of the events of yesterday appears in my
sister’s journal or in mine. Well, it is easy to set that mistake right.
Our lives are so dull (but I would not say so in my father’s hearing
for the world) that the record of one day will be much the same as
the record of another. After family prayers and breakfast I suffer my
customary persecution at the hands of the cook. That is to say, I am
obliged, being the housekeeper, to order what we have to eat. Oh, how I
hate inventing dinners! and how I admire the enviable slowness of
mind and laziness of body which have saved Eunice from undertaking the
worries of housekeeping in her turn! She can go and work in her garden,
while I am racking my invention to discover variety in dishes without
overstepping the limits of economy. I suppose I may confess it privately
to myself--how sorry I am not to have been born a man!

My next employment leads me to my father’s study, to write under his
dictation. I don’t complain of this; it flatters my pride to feel that I
am helping so great a man. At the same time, I do notice that here again
Eunice’s little defects have relieved her of another responsibility.
She can neither keep dictated words in her memory, nor has she ever been
able to learn how to put in her stops.

After the dictation, I have an hour’s time left for practicing music.
My sister comes in from the garden, with her pencil and paint-box, and
practices drawing. Then we go out for a walk--a delightful walk, if my
father goes too. He has something always new to tell us, suggested by
what we pass on the way. Then, dinner-time comes--not always a pleasant
part of the day to me. Sometimes I hear paternal complaints (always
gentle complaints) of my housekeeping; sometimes my sister (I won’t say
the greedy sister) tells me I have not given her enough to eat. Poor
father! Dear Eunice!

Dinner having reached its end, we stroll in the garden when the weather
is fine. When it rains, we make flannel petticoats for poor old women.
What a horrid thing old age is to look at! To be ugly, to be helpless,
to be miserably unfit for all the pleasures of life--I hope I shall not
live to be an old woman. What would my father say if he saw this? For
his sake, to say nothing of my own feelings, I shall do well if I make
it a custom to use the lock of my journal. Our next occupation is to
join the Scripture class for girls, and to help the teacher. This is a
good discipline for Eunice’s temper, and--oh, I don’t deny it!--for my
temper, too. I may long to box the ears of the whole class, but it is
my duty to keep a smiling face and to be a model of patience. From the
Scripture class we sometimes go to my father’s lecture. At other times,
we may amuse ourselves as well as we can till the tea is ready. After
tea, we read books which instruct us, poetry and novels being forbidden.
When we are tired of the books we talk. When supper is over, we have
prayers again, and we go to bed. There is our day. Oh, dear me! there is
our day.

.......

And how has Eunice succeeded in her second attempt at keeping a diary?
Here is what she has written. It has one merit that nobody can deny--it
is soon read:

“I hope papa will excuse me; I have nothing to write about to-day.”

Over and over again I have tried to point out to my sister the absurdity
of calling her father by the infantile nickname of papa. I have reminded
her that she is (in years, at least) no longer a child. “Why don’t you
call him father, as I do?” I asked only the other day.

She made an absurd reply: “I used to call him papa when I was a little
girl.”

“That,” I reminded her, “doesn’t justify you in calling him papa now.”

And she actually answered: “Yes it does.” What a strange state of mind!
And what a charming girl, in spite of her mind!


THIRD DAY.

The morning post has brought with it a promise of some little variety in
our lives--or, to speak more correctly, in the life of my sister.

Our new and nice friends, the Staveleys, have written to invite Eunice
to pay them a visit at their house in London. I don’t complain at being
left at home. It would be unfilial, indeed, if we both of us forsook our
father; and last year it was my turn to receive the first invitation,
and to enjoy the change of scene. The Staveleys are excellent
people--strictly pious members of the Methodist Connection--and
exceedingly kind to my sister and me. But it was just as well for my
moral welfare that I ended my visit to our friends when I did. With my
fondness for music, I felt the temptation of the Evil One trying me,
when I saw placards in the street announcing that the Italian Opera was
open. I had no wish to be a witness of the shameful and sinful dancing
which goes on (I am told) at the opera; but I did feel my principles
shaken when I thought of the wonderful singers and the entrancing music.
And this, when I knew what an atmosphere of wickedness people breathe
who enter a theater! I reflect with horror on what _might_ have happened
if I had remained a little longer in London.

Helping Eunice to pack up, I put her journal into the box. “You
will find something to write about now,” I told her. “While I record
everything that happens at home, you will keep your diary of all that
you do in London, and when you come back we will show each other what we
have written.” My sister is a dear creature. “I don’t feel sure of being
able to do it,” she answered; “but I promise to try.” Good Eunice!



CHAPTER XII. EUNICE’S DIARY.

The air of London feels very heavy. There is a nasty smell of smoke
in London. There are too many people in London. They seem to be mostly
people in a hurry. The head of a country girl, when she goes into the
streets, turns giddy--I suppose through not being used to the noise.

I do hope that it is London that has put me out of temper. Otherwise, it
must be I myself who am ill-tempered. I have not yet been one whole day
in the Staveleys’ house, and they have offended me already. I don’t
want Helena to hear of this from other people, and then to ask me why I
concealed it from her. We are to read each other’s journals when we are
both at home again. Let her see what I have to say for myself here.

There are seven Staveleys in all: Mr. and Mrs. (two); three young
Masters (five); two young Misses (seven). An eldest miss and the second
young Master are the only ones at home at the present time.

Mr., Mrs., and Miss kissed me when I arrived. Young Master only shook
hands. He looked as if he would have liked to kiss me too. Why shouldn’t
he? It wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t myself like kissing. What is the
use of it? Where is the pleasure of it?

Mrs. was so glad to see me; she took hold of me by both hands. She said:
“My dear child, you are improving. You were wretchedly thin when I saw
you last. Now you are almost as well-developed as your sister. I think
you are prettier than your sister.” Mr. didn’t agree to that. He and
his wife began to dispute about me before my face. I do call that an
aggravating thing to endure.

Mr. said: “She hasn’t got her sister’s pretty gray eyes.”

Mrs. said; “She has got pretty brown eyes, which are just as good.”

Mr. said: “You can’t compare her complexion with Helena’s.”

Mrs. said: “I like Eunice’s pale complexion. So delicate.”

Young Miss struck in: “I admire Helena’s hair--light brown.”

Young Master took his turn: “I prefer Eunice’s hair--dark brown.”

Mr. opened his great big mouth, and asked a question: “Which of you two
sisters is the oldest? I forget.”

Mrs. answered for me: “Helena is the oldest; she told us so when she was
here last.”

I really could _not_ stand that. “You must be mistaken,” I burst out.

“Certainly not, my dear.”

“Then Helena was mistaken.” I was unwilling to say of my sister that she
had been deceiving them, though it did seem only too likely.

Mr. and Mrs. looked at each other. Mrs. said: “You seem to be very
positive, Eunice. Surely, Helena ought to know.”

I said: “Helena knows a good deal; but she doesn’t know which of us is
the oldest of the two.”

Mr. put in another question: “Do _you_ know?”

“No more than Helena does.”

Mrs. said: “Don’t you keep birthdays?”

I said: “Yes; we keep both our birthdays on the same day.”

“On what day?”

“The first day of the New Year.”

Mr. tried again: “You can’t possibly be twins?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps Helena knows?”

“Not she!”

Mrs. took the next question out of her husband’s mouth: “Come, come, my
dear! you must know how old you are.”

“Yes; I do know that. I’m eighteen.”

“And how old is Helena?”

“Helena’s eighteen.”

Mrs. turned round to Mr.: “Do you hear that?”

Mr. said: “I shall write to her father, and ask what it means.”

I said: “Papa will only tell you what he told us--years ago.”

“What did your father say?”

“He said he had added our two ages together, and he meant to divide
the product between us. It’s so long since, I don’t remember what the
product was then. But I’ll tell you what the product is now. Our two
ages come to thirty-six. Half thirty-six is eighteen. I get one half,
and Helena gets the other. When we ask what it means, and when friends
ask what it means, papa has got the same answer for everybody, ‘I have
my reasons.’ That’s all he says--and that’s all I say.”

I had no intention of making Mr. angry, but he did get angry. He left
off speaking to me by my Christian name; he called me by my surname. He
said: “Let me tell you, Miss Gracedieu, it is not becoming in a young
lady to mystify her elders.”

I had heard that it was respectful in a young lady to call an old
gentleman, Sir, and to say, If you please. I took care to be respectful
now. “If you please, sir, write to papa. You will find that I have
spoken the truth.”

A woman opened the door, and said to Mrs. Staveley: “Dinner, ma’am.”
 That stopped this nasty exhibition of our tempers. We had a very good
dinner.

.......

The next day I wrote to Helena, asking her what she had really said to
the Staveleys about her age and mine, and telling her what I had said.
I found it too great a trial of my patience to wait till she could see
what I had written about the dispute in my journal. The days, since
then, have passed, and I have been too lazy and stupid to keep my diary.

To-day it is different. My head is like a dark room with the light let
into it. I remember things; I think I can go on again.

We have religious exercises in this house, morning and evening, just as
we do at home. (Not to be compared with papa’s religious exercises.) Two
days ago his answer came to Mr. Staveley’s letter. He did just what I
had expected--said I had spoken truly, and disappointed the family by
asking to be excused if he refrained from entering into explanations.
Mr. said: “Very odd;” and Mrs. agreed with him. Young Miss is not quite
as friendly now as she was at first. And young Master was impudent
enough to ask me if “I had got religion.” To conclude the list of
my worries, I received an angry answer from Helena. “Nobody but a
simpleton,” she wrote, “would have contradicted me as you did. Who but
you could have failed to see that papa’s strange objection to let it be
known which of us is the elder makes us ridiculous before other people?
My presence of mind prevented that. You ought to have been grateful, and
held your tongue.” Perhaps Helena is right--but I don’t feel it so.

On Sunday we went to chapel twice. We also had a sermon read at home,
and a cold dinner. In the evening, a hot dispute on religion between Mr.
Staveley and his son. I don’t blame them. After being pious all day long
on Sunday, I have myself felt my piety give way toward evening.

There is something pleasant in prospect for to-morrow. All London is
going just now to the exhibition of pictures. We are going with all
London.

.......

I don’t know what is the matter with me tonight. I have positively been
to bed, without going to sleep! After tossing and twisting and trying
all sorts of positions, I am so angry with myself that I have got up
again. Rather than do nothing, I have opened my ink-bottle, and I mean
to go on with my journal. Now I think of it, it seems likely that the
exhibition of works of art may have upset me.

I found a dreadfully large number of pictures, matched by a dreadfully
large number of people to look at them. It is not possible for me to
write about what I saw: there was too much of it. Besides, the show
disappointed me. I would rather write about a disagreement (oh, dear,
another dispute!) I had with Mrs. Staveley. The cause of it was a famous
artist; not himself, but his works. He exhibited four pictures--what
they call figure subjects. Mrs. Staveley had a pencil. At every one of
the great man’s four pictures, she made a big mark of admiration on her
catalogue. At the fourth one, she spoke to me: “Perfectly beautiful,
Eunice, isn’t it?”

I said I didn’t know. She said: “You strange girl, what do you mean by
that?”

It would have been rude not to have given the best answer I could find.
I said: “I never saw the flesh of any person’s face like the flesh in
the faces which that man paints. He reminds me of wax-work. Why does he
paint the same waxy flesh in all four of his pictures? I don’t see the
same colored flesh in all the faces about us.” Mrs. Staveley held up her
hand, by way of stopping me. She said: “Don’t speak so loud, Eunice; you
are only exposing your own ignorance.”

A voice behind us joined in. The voice said: “Excuse me, Mrs. Staveley,
if I expose _my_ ignorance. I entirely agree with the young lady.”

I felt grateful to the person who took my part, just when I was at a
loss what to say for myself, and I looked round. The person was a young
gentleman.

He wore a beautiful blue frock-coat, buttoned up. I like a frock-coat
to be buttoned up. He had light-colored trousers and gray gloves and a
pretty cane. I like light-colored trousers and gray gloves and a pretty
cane. What color his eyes were is more than I can say; I only know they
made me hot when they looked at me. Not that I mind being made hot; it
is surely better than being made cold. He and Mrs. Staveley shook hands.

They seemed to be old friends. I wished I had been an old friend--not
for any bad reason, I hope. I only wanted to shake hands, too. What Mrs.
Staveley said to him escaped me, somehow. I think the picture escaped
me also; I don’t remember noticing anything except the young gentleman,
especially when he took off his hat to me. He looked at me twice before
he went away. I got hot again. I said to Mrs. Staveley: “Who is he?”

She laughed at me. I said again: “Who is he?” She said: “He is young Mr.
Dunboyne.” I said: “Does he live in London?” She laughed again. I said
again: “Does he live in London?” She said: “He is here for a holiday; he
lives with his father at Fairmount, in Ireland.”

Young Mr. Dunboyne--here for a holiday--lives with his father at
Fairmount, in Ireland. I have said that to myself fifty times over. And
here it is, saying itself for the fifty-first time in my Journal. I must
indeed be a simpleton, as Helena says. I had better go to bed again.



CHAPTER XIII. EUNICE’S DIARY.

Not long before I left home, I heard one of our two servants telling the
other about a person who had been “bewitched.” Are you bewitched when
you don’t understand your own self? That has been my curious case,
since I returned from the picture show. This morning I took my drawing
materials out of my box, and tried to make a portrait of young Mr.
Dunboyne from recollection. I succeeded pretty well with his frock-coat
and cane; but, try as I might, his face was beyond me. I have never
drawn anything so badly since I was a little girl; I almost felt ready
to cry. What a fool I am!

This morning I received a letter from papa--it was in reply to a letter
that I had written to him--so kind, so beautifully expressed, so like
himself, that I felt inclined to send him a confession of the strange
state of feeling that has come over me, and to ask him to comfort and
advise me. On second thoughts, I was afraid to do it. Afraid of papa! I
am further away from understanding myself than ever.

Mr. Dunboyne paid us a visit in the afternoon. Fortunately, before we
went out.

I thought I would have a good look at him; so as to know his face better
than I had known it yet. Another disappointment was in store for me.
Without intending it, I am sure, he did what no other young man has ever
done--he made me feel confused. Instead of looking at him, I sat with
my head down, and listened to his talk. His voice--this is high
praise--reminded me of papa’s voice. It seemed to persuade me as papa
persuades his congregation. I felt quite at ease again. When he went
away, we shook hands. He gave my hand a little squeeze. I gave him back
the squeeze--without knowing why. When he was gone, I wished I had not
done it--without knowing why, either.

I heard his Christian name for the first time to-day. Mrs. Staveley
said to me: “We are going to have a dinner-party. Shall I ask Philip
Dunboyne?” I said to Mrs. Staveley: “Oh, do!”

She is an old woman; her eyes are dim. At times, she can look
mischievous. She looked at me mischievously now. I wished I had not been
so eager to have Mr. Dunboyne asked to dinner.

A fear has come to me that I may have degraded myself. My spirits are
depressed. This, as papa tells us in his sermons, is a miserable world.
I am sorry I accepted the Staveleys’ invitation. I am sorry I went to
see the pictures. When that young man comes to dinner, I shall say I
have got a headache, and shall stop upstairs by myself. I don’t think I
like his Christian name. I hate London. I hate everybody.

What I wrote up above, yesterday, is nonsense. I think his Christian
name is perfect. I like London. I love everybody.

He came to dinner to-day. I sat next to him. How beautiful a dress-coat
is, and a white cravat! We talked. He wanted to know what my Christian
name was. I was so pleased when I found he was one of the few people who
like it. His hair curls naturally. In color, it is something between my
hair and Helena’s. He wears his beard. How manly! It curls naturally,
like his hair; it smells deliciously of some perfume which is new to me.
He has white hands; his nails look as if he polished them; I should like
to polish my nails if I knew how. Whatever I said, he agreed with me; I
felt satisfied with my own conversation, for the first time in my life.
Helena won’t find me a simpleton when I go home. What exquisite things
dinner-parties are!


My sister told me (when we said good-by) to be particular in writing
down my true opinion of the Staveleys. Helena wishes to compare what she
thinks of them with what I think of them.

My opinion of Mr. Staveley is--I don’t like him. My opinion of Miss
Staveley is--I can’t endure her. As for Master Staveley, my clever
sister will understand that _he_ is beneath notice. But, oh, what a
wonderful woman Mrs. Staveley is! We went out together, after luncheon
today, for a walk in Kensington Gardens. Never have I heard any
conversation to compare with Mrs. Staveley’s. Helena shall enjoy it
here, at second hand. I am quite changed in two things. First: I think
more of myself than I ever did before. Second: writing is no longer a
difficulty to me. I could fill a hundred journals, without once stopping
to think.

Mrs. Staveley began nicely; “I suppose, Eunice, you have often been told
that you have a good figure, and that you walk well?”

I said: “Helena thinks my figure is better than my face. But do I really
walk well? Nobody ever told me that.”

She answered: “Philip Dunboyne thinks so. He said to me, ‘I resist the
temptation because I might be wanting in respect if I gave way to
it. But I should like to follow her when she goes out--merely for the
pleasure of seeing her walk.’”

I stood stockstill. I said nothing. When you are as proud as a peacock
(which never happened to me before), I find you can’t move and can’t
talk. You can only enjoy yourself.

Kind Mrs. Staveley had more things to tell me. She said: “I am
interested in Philip. I lived near Fairmount in the time before I
was married; and in those days he was a child. I want him to marry a
charming girl, and be happy.”

What made me think directly of Miss Staveley? What made me mad to know
if she was the charming girl? I was bold enough to ask the question.
Mrs. Staveley turned to me with that mischievous look which I have
noticed already. I felt as if I had been running at the top of my speed,
and had not got my breath again, yet.

But this good motherly friend set me at my ease. She explained herself:
“Philip is not much liked, poor fellow, in our house. My husband
considers him to be weak and vain and fickle. And my daughter agrees
with her father. There are times when she is barely civil to Philip. He
is too good-natured to complain, but _I_ see it. Tell me, my dear, do
you like Philip?”

“Of course I do!” Out it came in those words, before I could stop it.
Was there something unbecoming to a young lady in saying what I had just
said? Mrs. Staveley seemed to be more amused than angry with me. She
took my arm kindly, and led me along with her. “My dear, you are as
clear as crystal, and as true as steel. You are a favorite of mine
already.”

What a delightful woman! as I said just now. I asked if she really liked
me as well as she liked my sister.

She said: “Better.”

I didn’t expect that, and didn’t want it. Helena is my superior. She is
prettier than I am, cleverer than I am, better worth liking than I am.
Mrs. Staveley shifted the talk back to Philip. I ought to have said Mr.
Philip. No, I won’t; I shall call him Philip. If I had a heart of stone,
I should feel interested in him, after what Mrs. Staveley has told me.

Such a sad story, in some respects. Mother dead; no brothers or sisters.
Only the father left; he lives a dismal life on a lonely stormy coast.
Not a severe old gentleman, for all that. His reasons for taking to
retirement are reasons (so Mrs. Staveley says) which nobody knows. He
buries himself among his books, in an immense library; and he appears
to like it. His son has not been brought up like other young men,
at school and college. He is a great scholar, educated at home by his
father. To hear this account of his learning depressed me. It seemed to
put such a distance between us. I asked Mrs. Staveley if he thought me
ignorant. As long as I live I shall remember the reply: “He thinks you
charming.”

Any other girl would have been satisfied with this. I am the miserable
creature who is always making mistakes. My stupid curiosity spoiled
the charm of Mrs. Staveley’s conversation. And yet it seemed to be a
harmless question; I only said I should like to know what profession
Philip belonged to.

Mrs. Staveley answered: “No profession.”

I foolishly put a wrong meaning on this. I said: “Is he idle?”

Mrs. Staveley laughed. “My dear, he is an only son--and his father is a
rich man.”

That stopped me--at last.

We have enough to live on in comfort at home--no more. Papa has told us
himself that he is not (and can never hope to be) a rich man. This is
not the worst of it. Last year, he refused to marry a young couple, both
belonging to our congregation. This was very unlike his usual kind self.
Helena and I asked him for his reasons. They were reasons that did not
take long to give. The young gentleman’s father was a rich man. He had
forbidden his son to marry a sweet girl--because she had no fortune.

I have no fortune. And Philip’s father is a rich man.

The best thing I can do is to wipe my pen, and shut up my Journal, and
go home by the next train.

.......

I have a great mind to burn my Journal. It tells me that I had better
not think of Philip any more.

On second thoughts, I won’t destroy my Journal; I will only put it away.
If I live to be an old woman, it may amuse me to open my book again, and
see how foolish the poor wretch was when she was young.

What is this aching pain in my heart?

I don’t remember it at any other time in my life. Is it trouble? How can
I tell?--I have had so little trouble. It must be many years since I was
wretched enough to cry. I don’t even understand why I am crying now. My
last sorrow, so far as I can remember, was the toothache. Other
girls’ mothers comfort them when they are wretched. If my mother had
lived--it’s useless to think about that. We lost her, while I and my
sister were too young to understand our misfortune.

I wish I had never seen Philip.

This seems an ungrateful wish. Seeing him at the picture-show was a new
enjoyment. Sitting next to him at dinner was a happiness that I don’t
recollect feeling, even when Papa has been most sweet and kind to me.
I ought to be ashamed of myself to confess this. Shall I write to my
sister? But how should she know what is the matter with me, when I don’t
know it myself? Besides, Helena is angry; she wrote unkindly to me when
she answered my last letter.

There is a dreadful loneliness in this great house at night. I had
better say my prayers, and try to sleep. If it doesn’t make me feel
happier, it will prevent me spoiling my Journal by dropping tears on it.

.......

What an evening of evenings this has been! Last night it was crying that
kept me awake. To-night I can’t sleep for joy.

Philip called on us again to-day. He brought with him tickets for the
performance of an Oratorio. Sacred music is not forbidden music among
our people. Mrs. Staveley and Miss Staveley went to the concert with us.
Philip and I sat next to each other.

My sister is a musician--I am nothing. That sounds bitter; but I don’t
mean it so. All I mean is, that I like simple little songs, which I
can sing to myself by remembering the tune. There, my musical enjoyment
ends. When voices and instruments burst out together by hundreds, I feel
bewildered. I also get attacked by fidgets. This last misfortune is sure
to overtake me when choruses are being performed. The unfortunate people
employed are made to keep singing the same words, over and over and over
again, till I find it a perfect misery to listen to them. The choruses
were unendurable in the performance to-night. This is one of them: “Here
we are all alone in the wilderness--alone in the wilderness--in the
wilderness alone, alone, alone--here we are in the wilderness--alone in
the wilderness--all all alone in the wilderness,” and soon, till I felt
inclined to call for the learned person who writes Oratorios, and beg
him to give the poor music a more generous allowance of words.

Whenever I looked at Philip, I found him looking at me. Perhaps he saw
from the first that the music was wearying music to my ignorant ears.
With his usual delicacy he said nothing for some time. But when he
caught me yawning (though I did my best to hide it, for it looked like
being ungrateful for the tickets), then he could restrain himself no
longer. He whispered in my ear:

“You are getting tired of this. And so am I.”

“I am trying to like it,” I whispered back.

“Don’t try,” he answered. “Let’s talk.”

He meant, of course, talk in whispers. We were a good deal
annoyed--especially when the characters were all alone in the
wilderness--by bursts of singing and playing which interrupted us at the
most interesting moments. Philip persevered with a manly firmness. What
could I do but follow his example--at a distance?

He said: “Is it really true that your visit to Mrs. Staveley is coming
to an end?”

I answered: “It comes to an end the day after to-morrow.”

“Are you sorry to be leaving your friends in London?”

What I might have said if he had made that inquiry a day earlier, when I
was the most miserable creature living, I would rather not try to guess.
Being quite happy as things were, I could honestly tell him I was sorry.

“You can’t possibly be as sorry as I am, Eunice. May I call you by your
pretty name?”

“Yes, if you please.”

“Eunice!”

“Yes.”

“You will leave a blank in my life when you go away--”

There another chorus stopped him, just as I was eager for more. It was
such a delightfully new sensation to hear a young gentleman telling me
that I had left a blank in his life. The next change in the Oratorio
brought up a young lady, singing alone. Some people behind us grumbled
at the smallness of her voice. We thought her voice perfect. It seemed
to lend itself so nicely to our whispers.

He said: “Will you help me to think of you while you are away? I want
to imagine what your life is at home. Do you live in a town or in the
country?”

I told him the name of our town. When we give a person information, I
have always heard that we ought to make it complete. So I mentioned our
address in the town. But I was troubled by a doubt. Perhaps he preferred
the country. Being anxious about this, I said: “Would you rather have
heard that I live in the country?”

“Live where you may, Eunice, the place will be a favorite place of mine.
Besides, your town is famous. It has a public attraction which brings
visitors to it.”

I made another of those mistakes which no sensible girl, in my position,
would have committed. I asked if he alluded to our new market-place.

He set me right in the sweetest manner: “I alluded to a building
hundreds of years older than your market-place--your beautiful
cathedral.”

Fancy my not having thought of the cathedral! This is what comes of
being a Congregationalist. If I had belonged to the Church of England,
I should have forgotten the market-place, and remembered the cathedral.
Not that I want to belong to the Church of England. Papa’s chapel is
good enough for me.

The song sung by the lady with the small voice was so pretty that the
audience encored it. Didn’t Philip and I help them! With the sweetest
smiles the lady sang it all over again. The people behind us left the
concert.

He said: “Do you know, I take the greatest interest in cathedrals. I
propose to enjoy the privilege and pleasure of seeing _your_ cathedral
early next week.”

I had only to look at him to see that I was the cathedral. It was no
surprise to hear next that he thought of “paying his respects to Mr.
Gracedieu.” He begged me to tell him what sort of reception he might
hope to meet with when he called at our house. I got so excited in doing
justice to papa that I quite forgot to whisper when the next question
came. Philip wanted to know if Mr. Gracedieu disliked strangers. When
I answered, “Oh dear, no!” I said it out loud, so that the people heard
me. Cruel, cruel people! They all turned round and stared. One hideous
old woman actually said, “Silence!” Miss Staveley looked disgusted. Even
kind Mrs. Staveley lifted her eyebrows in astonishment.

Philip, dear Philip, protected and composed me.

He held my hand devotedly till the end of the performance. When he put
us into the carriage, I was last. He whispered in my ear: “Expect me
next week.” Miss Staveley might be as ill-natured as she pleased, on the
way home. It didn’t matter what she said. The Eunice of yesterday might
have been mortified and offended. The Eunice of to-day was indifferent
to the sharpest things that could be said to her.

.......

All through yesterday’s delightful evening, I never once thought of
Philip’s father. When I woke this morning, I remembered that old Mr.
Dunboyne was a rich man. I could eat no breakfast for thinking of the
poor girl who was not allowed to marry her young gentleman, because she
had no money.

Mrs. Staveley waited to speak to me till the rest of them had left us
together. I had expected her to notice that I looked dull and dismal.
No! her cleverness got at my secret in quite another way.

She said: “How do you feel after the concert? You must be hard to please
indeed if you were not satisfied with the accompaniments last night.”

“The accompaniments of the Oratorio?”

“No, my dear. The accompaniments of Philip.”

I suppose I ought to have laughed. In my miserable state of mind, it was
not to be done. I said: “I hope Mr. Dunboyne’s father will not hear how
kind he was to me.”

Mrs. Staveley asked why.

My bitterness overflowed at my tongue. I said: “Because papa is a poor
man.”

“And Philip’s papa is a rich man,” says Mrs. Staveley, putting my
own thought into words for me. “Where do you get these ideas, Eunice?
Surely, you are not allowed to read novels?”

“Oh no!”

“And you have certainly never seen a play?”

“Never.”

“Clear your head, child, of the nonsense that has got into it--I can’t
think how. Rich Mr. Dunboyne has taught his heir to despise the base act
of marrying for money. He knows that Philip will meet young ladies at my
house; and he has written to me on the subject of his son’s choice of a
wife. ‘Let Philip find good principles, good temper, and good looks; and
I promise beforehand to find the money.’ There is what he says. Are you
satisfied with Philip’s father, now?”

I jumped up in a state of ecstasy. Just as I had thrown my arms round
Mrs. Staveley’s neck, the servant came in with a letter, and handed it
to me.

Helena had written again, on this last day of my visit. Her letter was
full of instructions for buying things that she wants, before I leave
London. I read on quietly enough until I came to the postscript. The
effect of it on me may be told in two words: I screamed. Mrs. Staveley
was naturally alarmed. “Bad news?” she asked. Being quite unable to
offer an opinion, I read the postscript out loud, and left her to judge
for herself.

This was Helena’s news from home:

“I must prepare you for a surprise, before your return. You will find a
strange lady established at home. Don’t suppose there is any prospect
of her bidding us good-by, if we only wait long enough. She is already
(with father’s full approval) as much a member of the family as we
are. You shall form your own unbiased opinion of her, Eunice. For the
present, I say no more.”

I asked Mrs. Staveley what she thought of my news from home. She said:
“Your father approves of the lady, my dear. I suppose it’s good news.”

But Mrs. Staveley did not look as if she believed in the good news, for
all that.



CHAPTER XIV. HELENA’S DIARY.

To-day I went as usual to the Scripture-class for girls. It was harder
work than ever, teaching without Eunice to help me. Indeed, I felt
lonely all day without my sister. When I got home, I rather hoped that
some friend might have come to see us, and have been asked to stay to
tea. The housemaid opened the door to me. I asked Maria if anybody had
called.

“Yes, miss; a lady, to see the master.”

“A stranger?”

“Never saw her before, miss, in all my life.” I put no more questions.
Many ladies visit my father. They call it consulting the Minister.
He advises them in their troubles, and guides them in their religious
difficulties, and so on. They come and go in a sort of secrecy. So far
as I know, they are mostly old maids, and they waste the Minister’s
time.

When my father came in to tea, I began to feel some curiosity about the
lady who had called on him. Visitors of that sort, in general, never
appear to dwell on his mind after they have gone away; he sees too many
of them, and is too well accustomed to what they have to say. On
this particular evening, however, I perceived appearances that set me
thinking; he looked worried and anxious.

“Has anything happened, father, to vex you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Is the lady concerned in it?”

“What lady, my dear?”

“The lady who called on you while I was out.”

“Who told you she had called on me?”

“I asked Maria--”

“That will do, Helena, for the present.”

He drank his tea and went back to his study, instead of staying a while,
and talking pleasantly as usual. My respect submitted to his want of
confidence in me; but my curiosity was in a state of revolt. I sent for
Maria, and proceeded to make my own discoveries, with this result:

No other person had called at the house. Nothing had happened, except
the visit of the mysterious lady. “She looked between young and old.
And, oh dear me, she was certainly not pretty. Not dressed nicely, to my
mind; but they do say dress is a matter of taste.”

Try as I might, I could get no more than that out of our stupid young
housemaid.

Later in the evening, the cook had occasion to consult me about supper.
This was a person possessing the advantages of age and experience. I
asked if she had seen the lady. The cook’s reply promised something new:
“I can’t say I saw the lady; but I heard her.”

“Do you mean that you heard her speaking?”

“No, miss--crying.”

“Where was she crying?”

“In the master’s study.”

“How did you come to hear her?”

“Am I to understand, miss, that you suspect me of listening?”

Is a lie told by a look as bad as a lie told by words? I looked shocked
at the bare idea of suspecting a respectable person of listening. The
cook’s sense of honor was satisfied; she readily explained herself: “I
was passing the door, miss, on my way upstairs.”

Here my discoveries came to an end. It was certainly possible that an
afflicted member of my father’s congregation might have called on him
to be comforted. But he sees plenty of afflicted ladies, without looking
worried and anxious after they leave him. Still suspecting something
out of the ordinary course of events, I waited hopefully for our next
meeting at supper-time. Nothing came of it. My father left me by myself
again, when the meal was over. He is always courteous to his daughters;
and he made an apology: “Excuse me, Helena, I want to think.”

.......

I went to bed in a vile humor, and slept badly; wondering, in the long
wakeful hours, what new rebuff I should meet with on the next day.

At breakfast this morning I was agreeably surprised. No signs of anxiety
showed themselves in my father’s face. Instead of retiring to his study
when we rose from the table, he proposed taking a turn in the garden:
“You are looking pale, Helena, and you will be the better for a little
fresh air. Besides, I have something to say to you.”

Excitement, I am sure, is good for young women. I saw in his face, I
heard in his last words, that the mystery of the lady was at last to be
revealed. The sensation of languor and fatigue which follows a disturbed
night left me directly.

My father gave me his arm, and we walked slowly up and down the lawn.

“When that lady called on me yesterday,” he began, “you wanted to know
who she was, and you were surprised and disappointed when I refused to
gratify your curiosity. My silence was not a selfish silence, Helena. I
was thinking of you and your sister; and I was at a loss how to act for
the best. You shall hear why my children were in my mind, presently.
I must tell you first that I have arrived at a decision; I hope and
believe on reasonable grounds. Ask me any questions you please; my
silence will be no longer an obstacle in your way.”

This was so very encouraging that I said at once: “I should like to know
who the lady is.”

“The lady is related to me,” he answered. “We are cousins.”

Here was a disclosure that I had not anticipated. In the little that I
have seen of the world, I have observed that cousins--when they happen
to be brought together under interesting circumstances--can remember
their relationship, and forget their relationship, just as it suits
them. “Is your cousin a married lady?” I ventured to inquire.

“No.”

Short as it was, that reply might perhaps mean more than appeared on
the surface. The cook had heard the lady crying. What sort of tender
agitation was answerable for those tears? Was it possible, barely
possible, that Eunice and I might go to bed, one night, a widower’s
daughters, and wake up the next day to discover a stepmother?

“Have I or my sister ever seen the lady?” I asked.

“Never. She has been living abroad; and I have not seen her myself since
we were both young people.”

My excellent innocent father! Not the faintest idea of what I had been
thinking of was in his mind. Little did he suspect how welcome was the
relief that he had afforded to his daughter’s wicked doubts of him. But
he had not said a word yet about his cousin’s personal appearance. There
might be remains of good looks which the housemaid was too stupid to
discover.

“After the long interval that has passed since you met,” I said, “I
suppose she has become an old woman?”

“No, my dear. Let us say, a middle-aged woman.”

“Perhaps she is still an attractive person?”

He smiled. “I am afraid, Helena, that would never have been a very
accurate description of her.”

I now knew all that I wanted to know about this alarming person,
excepting one last morsel of information which my father had strangely
forgotten.

“We have been talking about the lady for some time,” I said; “and you
have not yet told me her name.”

Father looked a little embarrassed “It’s not a very pretty name,” he
answered. “My cousin, my unfortunate cousin, is--Miss Jillgall.”

I burst out with such a loud “Oh!” that he laughed. I caught the
infection, and laughed louder still. Bless Miss Jillgall! The interview
promised to become an easy one for both of us, thanks to her name. I was
in good spirits, and I made no attempt to restrain them. “The next time
Miss Jillgall honors you with a visit,” I said, “you must give me an
opportunity of being presented to her.”

He made a strange reply: “You may find your opportunity, Helena, sooner
than you anticipate.”

Did this mean that she was going to call again in a day or two? I am
afraid I spoke flippantly. I said: “Oh, father, another lady fascinated
by the popular preacher?”

The garden chairs were near us. He signed to me gravely to be seated by
his side, and said to himself: “This is my fault.”

“What is your fault?” I asked.

“I have left you in ignorance, my dear, of my cousin’s sad story. It
is soon told; and, if it checks your merriment, it will make amends by
deserving your sympathy. I was indebted to her father, when I was a boy,
for acts of kindness which I can never forget. He was twice married. The
death of his first wife left him with one child--once my playfellow; now
the lady whose visit has excited your curiosity. His second wife was a
Belgian. She persuaded him to sell his business in London, and to invest
the money in a partnership with a brother of hers, established as a
sugar-refiner at Antwerp. The little daughter accompanied her father to
Belgium. Are you attending to me, Helena?”

I was waiting for the interesting part of the story, and was wondering
when he would get to it.

“As time went on,” he resumed, “the new partner found that the value
of the business at Antwerp had been greatly overrated. After a long
struggle with adverse circumstances, he decided on withdrawing from
the partnership before the whole of his capital was lost in a failing
commercial speculation. The end of it was that he retired, with his
daughter, to a small town in East Flanders; the wreck of his property
having left him with an income of no more than two hundred pounds a
year.”

I showed my father that I was attending to him now, by inquiring what
had become of the Belgian wife. Those nervous quiverings, which Eunice
has mentioned in her diary, began to appear in his face.

“It is too shameful a story,” he said, “to be told to a young girl. The
marriage was dissolved by law; and the wife was the person to blame. I
am sure, Helena, you don’t wish to hear any more of _this_ part of the
story.”

I did wish. But I saw that he expected me to say No--so I said it.

“The father and daughter,” he went on, “never so much as thought of
returning to their own country. They were too poor to live comfortably
in England. In Belgium their income was sufficient for their wants. On
the father’s death, the daughter remained in the town. She had friends
there, and friends nowhere else; and she might have lived abroad to the
end of her days, but for a calamity to which we are all liable. A
long and serious illness completely prostrated her. Skilled medical
attendance, costing large sums of money for the doctors’ traveling
expenses, was imperatively required. Experienced nurses, summoned from a
distant hospital, were in attendance night and day. Luxuries, far beyond
the reach of her little income, were absolutely required to support her
wasted strength at the time of her tedious recovery. In one word, her
resources were sadly diminished, when the poor creature had paid her
debts, and had regained her hold on life. At that time, she unhappily
met with the man who has ruined her.”

It was getting interesting at last. “Ruined her?” I repeated. “Do you
mean that he robbed her?”

“That, Helena, is exactly what I mean--and many and many a helpless
woman has been robbed in the same way. The man of whom I am now speaking
was a lawyer in large practice. He bore an excellent character, and
was highly respected for his exemplary life. My cousin (not at all a
discreet person, I am bound to admit) was induced to consult him on her
pecuniary affairs. He expressed the most generous sympathy--offered to
employ her little capital in his business--and pledged himself to pay
her double the interest for her money, which she had been in the habit
of receiving from the sound investment chosen by her father.”

“And of course he got the money, and never paid the interest?” Eager to
hear the end, I interrupted the story in those inconsiderate words. My
father’s answer quietly reproved me.

“He paid the interest regularly as long as he lived.”

“And what happened when he died?”

“He died a bankrupt; the secret profligacy of his life was at last
exposed. Nothing, actually nothing, was left for his creditors. The
unfortunate creature, whose ugly name has amused you, must get help
somewhere, or must go to the workhouse.”

If I had been in a state of mind to attend to trifles, this would have
explained the reason why the cook had heard Miss Jillgall crying. But
the prospect before me--the unendurable prospect of having a strange
woman in the house--had showed itself too plainly to be mistaken.
I could think of nothing else. With infinite difficulty I assumed a
momentary appearance of composure, and suggested that Miss Jillgall’s
foreign friends might have done something to help her.

My father defended her foreign friends. “My dear, they were poor people,
and did all they could afford to do. But for their kindness, my cousin
might not have been able to return to England.”

“And to cast herself on your mercy,” I added, “in the character of a
helpless woman.”

“No, Helena! Not to cast herself on my mercy--but to find my house open
to her, as her father’s house was open to me in the bygone time. I
am her only surviving relative; and, while I live, she shall not be a
helpless woman.”

I began to wish that I had not spoken out so plainly. My father’s sweet
temper--I do so sincerely wish I had inherited it!--made the kindest
allowances for me.

“I understand the momentary bitterness of feeling that has escaped you,”
 he said; “I may almost say that I expected it. My only hesitation in
this matter has been caused by my sense of what I owe to my children. It
was putting your endurance, and your sister’s endurance, to a trial to
expect you to receive a stranger (and that stranger not a young girl
like yourselves) as one of the household, living with you in the closest
intimacy of family life. The consideration which has decided me does
justice, I hope, to you and Eunice, as well as to myself. I think that
some allowance is due from my daughters to the father who has always
made loving allowance for _them_. Am I wrong in believing that my good
children have not forgotten this, and have only waited for the occasion
to feel the pleasure of rewarding me?”

It was beautifully put. There was but one thing to be done--I kissed
him. And there was but one thing to be said. I asked at what time we
might expect to receive Miss Jillgall. “She is staying, Helena, at a
small hotel in the town. I have already sent to say that we are waiting
to see her. Perhaps you will look at the spare bedroom?”

“It shall be got ready, father, directly.”

I ran into the house; I rushed upstairs into the room that is Eunice’s
and mine; I locked the door, and then I gave way to my rage, before it
stifled me. I stamped on the floor, I clinched my fists, I cast myself
on the bed, I reviled that hateful woman by every hard word that I could
throw at her. Oh, the luxury of it! the luxury of it!

Cold water and my hairbrush soon made me fit to be seen again.

As for the spare room, it looked a great deal too comfortable for an
incubus from foreign parts. The one improvement that I could have
made, if a friend of mine had been expected, was suggested by the
window-curtains. I was looking at a torn place in one of them, and
determined to leave it unrepaired, when I felt an arm slipped round
my waist from behind. A voice, so close that it tickled my neck, said:
“Dear girl, what friends we shall be!” I turned round, and confronted
Miss Jillgall.

CHAPTER XV. HELENA’S DIARY.

If I am not a good girl, where is a good girl to be found? This is in
Eunice’s style. It sometimes amuses me to mimic my simple sister.

I have just torn three pages out of my diary, in deference to the
expression of my father’s wishes. He took the first opportunity which
his cousin permitted him to enjoy of speaking to me privately; and his
object was to caution me against hastily relying on first impressions of
anybody--especially of Miss Jillgall. “Wait for a day or two,” he said;
“and then form your estimate of the new member of our household.”

The stormy state of my temper had passed away, and had left my
atmosphere calm again. I could feel that I had received good advice; but
unluckily it reached me too late.

I had formed my estimate of Miss Jillgall, and had put it in writing for
my own satisfaction, at least an hour before my father found himself
at liberty to speak to me. I don’t agree with him in distrusting first
impressions; and I had proposed to put my opinion to the test, by
referring to what I had written about his cousin at a later time.
However, after what he had said to me, I felt bound in filial duty
to take the pages out of my book, and to let two days pass before I
presumed to enjoy the luxury of hating Miss Jillgall. On one thing I
am determined: Eunice shall not form a hasty opinion, either. She shall
undergo the same severe discipline of self-restraint to which her sister
is obliged to submit. Let us be just, as somebody says, before we are
generous. No more for to-day.

.......

I open my diary again--after the prescribed interval has elapsed. The
first impression produced on me by the new member of our household
remains entirely unchanged.

Have I already made the remark that, when one removes a page from
a book, it does not necessarily follow that one destroys the page
afterward? or did I leave this to be inferred? In either case, my course
of proceeding was the same. I ordered some paste to be made. Then I
unlocked a drawer, and found my poor ill-used leaves, and put them back
in my Journal. An act of justice is surely not the less praiseworthy
because it is an act of justice done to one’s self.

My father has often told me that he revises his writings on religious
subjects. I may harmlessly imitate that good example, by revising my
restored entry. It is now a sufficiently remarkable performance to be
distinguished by a title. Let me call it:

Impressions of Miss Jillgall. My first impression was a strong one--it
was produced by the state of this lady’s breath. In other words, I was
obliged to let her kiss me. It is a duty to be considerate toward human
infirmity. I will only say that I thought I should have fainted.

My second impression draws a portrait, and produces a striking likeness.

Figure, little and lean--hair of a dirty drab color which we see in
string--small light gray eyes, sly and restless, and deeply sunk in
the head--prominent cheekbones, and a florid complexion--an
inquisitive nose, turning up at the end--a large mouth and a servile
smile--raw-looking hands, decorated with black mittens--a misfitting
white jacket and a limp skirt--manners familiar--temper cleverly
hidden--voice too irritating to be mentioned. Whose portrait is this? It
is the portrait of Miss Jillgall, taken in words.

Her true character is not easy to discover; I suspect that it will
only show itself little by little. That she is a born meddler in other
people’s affairs, I think I can see already. I also found out that she
trusted to flattery as the easiest means of making herself agreeable.
She tried her first experiment on myself.

“You charming girl,” she began, “your bright face encourages me to ask
a favor. Pray make me useful! The one aspiration of my life is to be
useful. Unless you employ me in that way, I have no right to intrude
myself into your family circle. Yes, yes, I know that your father
has opened his house and his heart to me. But I dare not found any
claim--your name is Helena, isn’t it? Dear Helena, I dare not found any
claim on what I owe to your father’s kindness.”

“Why not?” I inquired.

“Because your father is not a man--”

I was rude enough to interrupt her: “What is he, then?”

“An angel,” Miss Jillgall answered, solemnly. “A destitute earthly
creature like me must not look up as high as your father. I might be
dazzled.”

This was rather more than I could endure patiently. “Let us try,” I
suggested, “if we can’t understand each other, at starting.”

Miss Jillgall’s little eyes twinkled in their bony caverns. “The very
thing I was going to propose!” she burst out.

“Very well,” I went on; “then, let me tell you plainly that flattery is
not relished in this house.”

“Flattery?” She put her hand to her head as she repeated the word, and
looked quite bewildered. “Dear Helena, I have lived all my life in East
Flanders, and my own language is occasionally strange to me. Can you
tell me what flattery is in Flemish?”

“I don’t understand Flemish.”

“How very provoking! You don’t understand Flemish, and I don’t
understand Flattery. I should so like to know what it means. Ah, I see
books in this lovely room. Is there a dictionary among them?” She darted
to the bookcase, and discovered a dictionary. “Now I shall understand
Flattery,” she remarked--“and then we shall understand each other.
Oh, let me find it for myself!” She ran her raw red finger along the
alphabetical headings at the top of each page. “‘FAD.’ That won’t do.
‘FIE.’ Further on still. ‘FLE.’ Too far the other way. ‘FLA.’ Here we
are! ‘Flattery: False praise. Commendation bestowed for the purpose of
gaining favor and influence.’ Oh, Helena, how cruel of you!” She dropped
the book, and sank into a chair--the picture, if such a thing can be, of
a broken-hearted old maid.

I should most assuredly have taken the opportunity of leaving her to her
own devices, if I had been free to act as I pleased. But my interests
as a daughter forbade me to make an enemy of my father’s cousin, on the
first day when she had entered the house. I made an apology, very neatly
expressed.

She jumped up--let me do her justice; Miss Jillgall is as nimble as a
monkey--and (Faugh!) she kissed me for the second time. If I had been a
man, I am afraid I should have called for that deadly poison (we are all
temperance people in this house) known by the name of Brandy.

“If you will make me love you,” Miss Jillgall explained, “you must
expect to be kissed. Dear girl, let us go back to my poor little
petition. Oh, do make me useful! There are so many things I can do: you
will find me a treasure in the house. I write a good hand; I understand
polishing furniture; I can dress hair (look at my own hair); I play and
sing a little when people want to be amused; I can mix a salad and knit
stockings--who is this?” The cook came in, at the moment, to consult
me; I introduced her. “And, oh,” cried Miss Jillgall, in ecstasy, “I can
cook! Do, please, let me see the kitchen.”

The cook’s face turned red. She had come to me to make a confession;
and she had not (as she afterward said) bargained for the presence of
a stranger. For the first time in her life she took the liberty
of whispering to me: “I must ask you, miss, to let me send up the
cauliflower plain boiled; I don’t understand the directions in the book
for doing it in the foreign way.”

Miss Jillgall’s ears--perhaps because they are so large--possess a
quickness of hearing quite unparalleled in my experience. Not one word
of the cook’s whispered confession had escaped her.

“Here,” she declared, “is an opportunity of making myself useful! What
is the cook’s name? Hannah? Take me downstairs, Hannah, and I’ll show
you how to do the cauliflower in the foreign way. She seems to hesitate.
Is it possible that she doesn’t believe me? Listen, Hannah, and judge
for yourself if I am deceiving you. Have you boiled the cauliflower?
Very well; this is what you must do next. Take four ounces of grated
cheese, two ounces of best butter, the yolks of four eggs, a little bit
of glaze, lemon-juice, nutmeg--dear, dear, how black she looks. What
have I said to offend her?”

The cook passed over the lady who had presumed to instruct her, as if no
such person had been present, and addressed herself to me: “If I am
to be interfered with in my own kitchen, miss, I will ask you to suit
yourself at a month’s notice.”

Miss Jillgall wrung her hands in despair.

“I meant so kindly,” she said; “and I seem to have made mischief.
With the best intentions, Helena, I have set you and your servant at
variance. I really didn’t know you had such a temper, Hannah,” she
declared, following the cook to the door. “I’m sure there’s nothing I
am not ready to do to make it up with you. Perhaps you have not got the
cheese downstairs? I’m ready to go out and buy it for you. I could
show you how to keep eggs sweet and fresh for weeks together. Your gown
doesn’t fit very well; I shall be glad to improve it, if you will leave
it out for me after you have gone to bed. There!” cried Miss Jillgall,
as the cook majestically left the room, without even looking at her,
“I have done my best to make it up, and you see how my advances are
received. What more could I have done? I really ask you, dear, as a
friend, what more _could_ I have done?”

I had it on the tip of my tongue to say: “The cook doesn’t ask you to
buy cheese for her, or to teach her how to keep eggs, or to improve the
fit of her gown; all she wants is to have her kitchen to herself.” But
here again it was necessary to remember that this odious person was my
father’s guest.

“Pray don’t distress yourself,” I began; “I am sure you are not to
blame, Miss Jillgall--”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Don’t--what?”

“Don’t call me Miss Jillgall. I call you Helena. Call me Selina.”

I had really not supposed it possible that she could be more unendurable
than ever. When she mentioned her Christian name, she succeeded
nevertheless in producing that result. In the whole list of women’s
names, is there any one to be found so absolutely sickening as “Selina”?
I forced myself to pronounce it; I made another neatly-expressed
apology; I said English servants were so very peculiar. Selina was more
than satisfied; she was quite delighted.

“Is that it, indeed? An explanation was all I wanted. How good of you!
And now tell me--is there no chance, in the house or out of the house,
of my making myself useful? Oh, what’s that? Do I see a chance? I do! I
do!”

Miss Jillgall’s eyes are more than mortal. At one time, they are
microscopes. At another time, they are telescopes. She discovered (right
across the room) the torn place in the window-curtain. In an instant,
she snatched a dirty little leather case out of her pocket, threaded her
needle and began darning the curtain. She sang over her work. “My heart
is light, my will is free--” I can repeat no more of it. When I heard
her singing voice, I became reckless of consequences, and ran out of the
room with my hands over my ears.



CHAPTER XVI. HELENA’S DIARY.

When I reached the foot of the stairs, my father called me into his
study.

I found him at his writing-table, with such a heap of torn-up paper in
his waste-basket that it overflowed on to the floor. He explained to me
that he had been destroying a large accumulation of old letters, and
had ended (when his employment began to grow wearisome) in examining his
correspondence rather carelessly. The result was that he had torn up a
letter, and a copy of the reply, which ought to have been set aside as
worthy of preservation. After collecting the fragments, he had heaped
them on the table. If I could contrive to put them together again on
fair sheets of paper, and fasten them in their right places with gum, I
should be doing him a service, at a time when he was too busy to set his
mistake right for himself.

Here was the best excuse that I could desire for keeping out of Miss
Jillgall’s way. I cheerfully set to work on the restoration of the
letters, while my father went on with his writing.

Having put the fragments together--excepting a few gaps caused by
morsels that had been lost--I was unwilling to fasten them down with
gum, until I could feel sure of not having made any mistakes; especially
in regard to some of the lost words which I had been obliged to restore
by guess-work. So I copied the letters, and submitted them, in the first
place, to my father’s approval. He praised me in the prettiest
manner for the care that I had taken. But, when he began, after some
hesitation, to read my copy, I noticed a change. The smile left his
face, and the nervous quiverings showed themselves again.

“Quite right, my child,” he said, in low sad tones.

On returning to my side of the table, I expected to see him resume his
writing. He crossed the room to the window and stood (with his back to
me) looking out.

When I had first discovered the sense of the letters, they failed
to interest me. A tiresome woman, presuming on the kindness of a
good-natured man to beg a favor which she had no right to ask, and
receiving a refusal which she had richly deserved, was no remarkable
event in my experience as my father’s secretary and copyist. But the
change in his face, while he read the correspondence, altered my opinion
of the letters. There was more in them evidently than I had discovered.
I kept my manuscript copy--here it is:


From Miss Elizabeth Chance to the Rev. Abel Gracedieu.

(Date of year, 1859. Date of month, missing.)


“DEAR SIR--You have, I hope, not quite forgotten the interesting
conversation that we had last year in the Governor’s rooms. I am afraid
I spoke a little flippantly at the time; but I am sure you will believe
me when I say that this was out of no want of respect to yourself. My
pecuniary position being far from prosperous, I am endeavoring to
obtain the vacant situation of housekeeper in a public institution the
prospectus of which I inclose. You will see it is a rule of the place
that a candidate must be a single woman (which I am), and must be
recommended by a clergyman. You are the only reverend gentleman whom it
is my good fortune to know, and the thing is of course a mere formality.
Pray excuse this application, and oblige me by acting as my reference.

“Sincerely yours,

“ELIZABETH CHANCE.”


“P. S.--Please address: Miss E. Chance, Poste Restante, St.
Martin’s-le-Grand, London.”


“From the Rev. Abel Gracedieu to Miss Chance.

(Copy.)


“MADAM--The brief conversation to which your letter alludes, took place
at an accidental meeting between us. I then saw you for the first time,
and I have not seen you since. It is impossible for me to assert the
claim of a perfect stranger, like yourself, to fill a situation of
trust. I must beg to decline acting as your reference.

“Your obedient servant,

“ABEL GRACEDIEU.”

.......

My father was still at the window.

In that idle position he could hardly complain of me for interrupting
him, if I ventured to talk about the letters which I had put together.
If my curiosity displeased him, he had only to say so, and there would
be an end to any allusions of mine to the subject. My first idea was to
join him at the window. On reflection, and still perceiving that he kept
his back turned on me, I thought it might be more prudent to remain at
the table.

“This Miss Chance seems to be an impudent person?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Was she a young woman, when you met with her?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of a woman to look at? Ugly?”

“No.”

Here were three answers which Eunice herself would have been quick
enough to interpret as three warnings to say no more. I felt a little
hurt by his keeping his back turned on me. At the same time, and
naturally, I think, I found my interest in Miss Chance (I don’t say my
friendly interest) considerably increased by my father’s unusually rude
behavior. I was also animated by an irresistible desire to make him turn
round and look at me.

“Miss Chance’s letter was written many years ago,” I resumed. “I wonder
what has become of her since she wrote to you.”

“I know nothing about her.”

“Not even whether she is alive or dead?”

“Not even that. What do these questions mean, Helena?”

“Nothing, father.”

I declare he looked as if he suspected me!

“Why don’t you speak out?” he said. “Have I ever taught you to conceal
your thoughts? Have I ever been a hard father, who discouraged you when
you wished to confide in him? What are you thinking about? Do _you_ know
anything of this woman?”

“Oh, father, what a question! I never even heard of her till I put the
torn letters together. I begin to wish you had not asked me to do it.”

“So do I. It never struck me that you would feel such extraordinary--I
had almost said, such vulgar--curiosity about a worthless letter.”

This roused my temper. When a young lady is told that she is vulgar,
if she has any self-conceit--I mean self-respect--she feels insulted. I
said something sharp in my turn. It was in the way of argument. I do
not know how it may be with other young persons, I never reason so well
myself as when I am angry.

“You call it a worthless letter,” I said, “and yet you think it worth
preserving.”

“Have you nothing more to say to me than that?” he asked.

“Nothing more,” I answered.

He changed again. After having looked unaccountably angry, he now looked
unaccountably relieved.

“I will soon satisfy you,” he said, “that I have a good reason for
preserving a worthless letter. Miss Chance, my dear, is not a woman to
be trusted. If she saw her advantage in making a bad use of my reply,
I am afraid she would not hesitate to do it. Even if she is no longer
living, I don’t know into what vile hands my letter may not have fallen,
or how it might be falsified for some wicked purpose. Do you see now how
a correspondence may become accidentally important, though it is of no
value in itself?”

I could say “Yes” to this with a safe conscience.

But there were some perplexities still left in my mind. It seemed
strange that Miss Chance should (apparently) have submitted to the
severity of my father’s reply. “I should have thought,” I said to him,
“that she would have sent you another impudent letter--or perhaps have
insisted on seeing you, and using her tongue instead of her pen.”

“She could do neither the one nor the other, Helena. Miss Chance will
never find out my address again; I have taken good care of that.”

He spoke in a loud voice, with a flushed face--as if it was quite a
triumph to have prevented this woman from discovering his address. What
reason could he have for being so anxious to keep her away from him?
Could I venture to conclude that there was a mystery in the life of a
man so blameless, so truly pious? It shocked one even to think of it.

There was a silence between us, to which the housemaid offered a welcome
interruption. Dinner was ready.

He kissed me before we left the room. “One word more, Helena,” he said,
“and I have done. Let there be no more talk between us about Elizabeth
Chance.”



CHAPTER XVII. HELENA’S DIARY.

Miss Jillgall joined us at the dinner-table, in a state of excitement,
carrying a book in her hand.

I am inclined, on reflection, to suspect that she is quite clever enough
to have discovered that I hate her--and that many of the aggravating
things she says and does are assumed, out of retaliation, for the
purpose of making me angry. That ugly face is a double face, or I am
much mistaken.

To return to the dinner-table, Miss Jillgall addressed herself, with an
air of playful penitence, to my father.

“Dear cousin, I hope I have not done wrong. Helena left me all by
myself. When I had finished darning the curtain, I really didn’t know
what to do. So I opened all the bedroom doors upstairs and looked into
the rooms. In the big room with two beds--oh, I am so ashamed--I found
this book. Please look at the first page.”

My father looked at the title-page: “Doctor Watts’s Hymns. Well, Selina,
what is there to be ashamed of in this?”

“Oh, no! no! It’s the wrong page. Do look at the other page--the one
that comes first before that one.”

My patient father turned to the blank page.

“Ah,” he said quietly, “my other daughter’s name is written in it--the
daughter whom you have not seen. Well?”

Miss Jillgall clasped her hands distractedly. “It’s my ignorance I’m so
ashamed of. Dear cousin, forgive me, enlighten me. I don’t know how to
pronounce your other daughter’s name. Do you call her Euneece?”

The dinner was getting cold. I was provoked into saying: “No, we don’t.”

She had evidently not forgiven me for leaving her by herself. “Pardon
me, Helena, when I want information I don’t apply to you: I sit, as it
were, at the feet of your learned father. Dear cousin, is it--”

Even my father declined to wait for his dinner any longer. “Pronounce it
as you like, Selina. Here we say Euni’ce--with the accent on the ‘i’ and
with the final ‘e’ sounded: Eu-ni’-see. Let me give you some soup.”

Miss Jillgall groaned. “Oh, how difficult it seems to be! Quite beyond
my poor brains! I shall ask the dear girl’s leave to call her Euneece.
What very strong soup! Isn’t it rather a waste of meat? Give me a little
more, please.”

I discovered another of Miss Jillgall’s peculiarities. Her appetite
was enormous, and her ways were greedy. You heard her eat her soup. She
devoured the food on her plate with her eyes before she put it into
her mouth; and she criticised our English cookery in the most impudent
manner, under pretense of asking humbly how it was done. There was,
however, some temporary compensation for this. We had less of her talk
while she was eating her dinner.

With the removal of the cloth, she recovered the use of her tongue; and
she hit on the one subject of all others which proves to be the sorest
trial to my father’s patience.

“And now, dear cousin, let us talk of your other daughter, our absent
Euneece. I do so long to see her. When is she coming back?”

“In a few days more.”

“How glad I am! And do tell me--which is she? Your oldest girl or your
youngest?”

“Neither the one nor the other, Selina.”

“Oh, my head! my head! This is even worse than the accent on the ‘i’ and
the final ‘e.’ Stop! I am cleverer than I thought I was. You mean that
the girls are twins. Are they both so exactly like each other that I
shan’t know which is which? What fun!”

When the subject of our ages was unluckily started at Mrs. Staveley’s,
I had slipped out of the difficulty easily by assuming the character of
the eldest sister--an example of ready tact which my dear stupid Eunice
doesn’t understand. In my father’s presence, it is needless to say that
I kept silence, and left it to him. I was sorry to be obliged to
do this. Owing to his sad state of health, he is easily
irritated--especially by inquisitive strangers.

“I must leave you,” he answered, without taking the slightest notice of
what Miss Jillgall had said to him. “My work is waiting for me.”

She stopped him on his way to the door. “Oh, tell me--can’t I help you?”

“Thank you; no.”

“Well--but tell me one thing. Am I right about the twins?”

“You are wrong.”

Miss Jillgall’s demonstrative hands flew up into the air again, and
expressed the climax of astonishment by quivering over her head. “This
is positively maddening,” she declared. “What does it mean?”

“Take my advice, cousin. Don’t attempt to find out what it means.”

He left the room. Miss Jillgall appealed to me. I imitated my father’s
wise brevity of expression: “Sorry to disappoint you, Selina; I know no
more about it than you do. Come upstairs.”

Every step of the way up to the drawing-room was marked by a protest or
an inquiry. Did I expect her to believe that I couldn’t say which of
us was the elder of the two? that I didn’t really know what my father’s
motive was for this extraordinary mystification? that my sister and I
had submitted to be robbed, as it were, of our own ages, and had not
insisted on discovering which of us had come into the world first? that
our friends had not put an end to this sort of thing by comparing us
personally, and discovering which was the elder sister by investigation
of our faces? To all this I replied: First, that I did certainly expect
her to believe whatever I might say: Secondly, that what she was pleased
to call the “mystification” had begun when we were both children; that
habit had made it familiar to us in the course of years; and above all,
that we were too fond of our good father to ask for explanations which
we knew by experience would distress him: Thirdly, that friends did try
to discover, by personal examination, which was the elder sister, and
differed perpetually in their conclusions; also that we had amused
ourselves by trying the same experiment before our looking-glasses, and
that Eunice thought Helena was the oldest, and Helena thought Eunice was
the oldest: Fourthly (and finally), that the Reverend Mr. Gracedieu’s
cousin had better drop the subject, unless she was bent on making her
presence in the house unendurable to the Reverend Mr. Gracedieu himself.

I write it with a sense of humiliation; Miss Jillgall listened
attentively to all I had to say--and then took me completely by
surprise. This inquisitive, meddlesome, restless, impudent woman
suddenly transformed herself into a perfect model of amiability and
decorum. She actually said she agreed with me, and was much obliged for
my good advice!

A stupid young woman, in my place, would have discovered that this was
not natural, and that Miss Jillgall was presenting herself to me in
disguise, to reach some secret end of her own. I am not a stupid young
woman; I ought to have had at my service penetration enough to
see through and through Cousin Selina. Well! Cousin Selina was an
impenetrable mystery to me.

The one thing to be done was to watch her. I was at least sly enough to
take up a book, and pretend to be reading it. How contemptible!

She looked round the room, and discovered our pretty writing-table;
a present to my father from his congregation. After a little
consideration, she sat down to write a letter.

“When does the post go out?” she asked.

I mentioned the hour; and she began her letter. Before she could have
written more than the first two or three lines, she turned round on her
seat, and began talking to me.

“Do you like writing letters, my dear?”

“Yes--but then I have not many letters to write.”

“Only a few friends, Helena, but those few worthy to be loved? My own
case exactly. Has your father told you of my troubles? Ah, I am glad of
that. It spares me the sad necessity of confessing what I have suffered.
Oh, how good my friends, my new friends, were to me in that dull little
Belgian town! One of them was generosity personified--ah, she had
suffered, too! A vile husband who had deceived and deserted her. Oh,
the men! When she heard of the loss of my little fortune, that noble
creature got up a subscription for me, and went round herself to
collect. Think of what I owe to her! Ought I to let another day pass
without writing to my benefactress? Am I not bound in gratitude to make
her happy in the knowledge of _my_ happiness--I mean the refuge opened
to me in this hospitable house?”

She twisted herself back again to the writing-table, and went on with
her letter.

I have not attempted to conceal my stupidity. Let me now record a
partial recovery of my intelligence.

It was not to be denied that Miss Jillgall had discovered a good reason
for writing to her friend; but I was at a loss to understand why
she should have been so anxious to mention the reason. Was it
possible--after the talk which had passed between us--that she had
something mischievous to say in her letter, relating to my father or
to me? Was she afraid I might suspect this? And had she been so
communicative for the purpose of leading my suspicions astray? These
were vague guesses; but, try as I might, I could arrive at no clearer
view of what was passing in Miss Jillgall’s mind. What would I not have
given to be able to look over her shoulder, without discovery!

She finished her letter, and put the address, and closed the envelope.
Then she turned round toward me again.

“Have you got a foreign postage stamp, dear?”

If I could look at nothing else, I was resolved to look at her envelope.
It was only necessary to go to the study, and to apply to my father. I
returned with the foreign stamp, and I stuck it on the envelope with my
own hand.

There was nothing to interest _me_ in the address, as I ought to have
foreseen, if I had not been too much excited for the exercise of
a little common sense. Miss Jillgall’s wonderful friend was only
remarkable by her ugly foreign name--MRS. TENBRUGGEN.



CHAPTER XVIII. EUNICE’S DIARY.

Here I am, writing my history of myself, once more, by my own bedside.
Some unexpected events have happened while I have been away. One of them
is the absence of my sister.

Helena has left home on a visit to a northern town by the seaside. She
is staying in the house of a minister (one of papa’s friends), and is
occupying a position of dignity in which I should certainly lose my
head. The minister and his wife and daughters propose to set up a Girls’
Scripture Class, on the plan devised by papa; and they are at a loss,
poor helpless people, to know how to begin. Helena has volunteered to
set the thing going. And there she is now, advising everybody, governing
everybody, encouraging everybody--issuing directions, finding fault,
rewarding merit--oh, dear, let me put it all in one word, and say:
thoroughly enjoying herself.

Another event has happened, relating to papa. It so distressed me that I
even forgot to think of Philip--for a little while.

Traveling by railway (I suppose because I am not used to it) gives me
the headache. When I got to our station here, I thought it would do
me more good to walk home than to ride in the noisy omnibus. Half-way
between the railway and the town, I met one of the doctors. He is a
member of our congregation; and he it was who recommended papa, some
time since, to give up his work as a minister and take a long holiday in
foreign parts.

“I am glad to have met with you,” the doctor said. “Your sister, I
find, is away on a visit; and I want to speak to one of you about your
father.”

It seemed that he had been observing papa, in chapel, from what he
called his own medical point of view. He did not conceal from me that he
had drawn conclusions which made him feel uneasy. “It may be anxiety,”
 he said, “or it may be overwork. In either case, your father is in
a state of nervous derangement, which is likely to lead to serious
results--unless he takes the advice that I gave him when he last
consulted me. There must be no more hesitation about it. Be careful not
to irritate him--but remember that he must rest. You and your sister
have some influence over him; he won’t listen to me.”

Poor dear papa! I did see a change in him for the worse--though I had
only been away for so short a time.

When I put my arms round his neck, and kissed him, he turned pale, and
then flushed up suddenly: the tears came into his eyes. Oh, it was hard
to follow the doctor’s advice, and not to cry, too; but I succeeded in
controlling myself. I sat on his knee, and made him tell me all that I
have written here about Helena. This led to our talking next of the new
lady, who is to live with us as a member of the family. I began to feel
less uneasy at the prospect of being introduced to this stranger, when
I heard that she was papa’s cousin. And when he mentioned her name, and
saw how it amused me, his poor worn face brightened into a smile. “Go
and find her,” he said, “and introduce yourself. I want to hear, Eunice,
if you and my cousin are likely to get on well together.”

The servants told me that Miss Jillgall was in the garden.

I searched here, there, and everywhere, and failed to find her. The
place was so quiet, it looked so deliciously pure and bright, after
smoky dreary London, that I sat down at the further end of the garden
and let my mind take me back to Philip. What was he doing at that
moment, while I was thinking of him? Perhaps he was in the company of
other young ladies, who drew all his thoughts away to themselves? Or
perhaps he was writing to his father in Ireland, and saying something
kindly and prettily about me? Or perhaps he was looking forward, as
anxiously as I do, to our meeting next week.

I have had my plans, and I have changed my plans.

On the railway journey, I thought I would tell papa at once of the new
happiness which seems to have put a new life into me. It would have been
delightful to make my confession to that first and best and dearest of
friends; but my meeting with the doctor spoiled it all. After what he
had said to me, I discovered a risk. If I ventured to tell papa that my
heart was set on a young gentleman who was a stranger to him, could I be
sure that he would receive my confession favorably? There was a chance
that it might irritate him--and the fault would then be mine of doing
what I had been warned to avoid. It might be safer in every way to wait
till Philip paid his visit, and he and papa had been introduced to each
other and charmed with each other. Could Helena herself have arrived at
a wiser conclusion? I declare I felt proud of my own discretion.

In this enjoyable frame of mind I was disturbed by a woman’s voice. The
tone was a tone of distress, and the words reached my ears from the end
of the garden: “Please, miss, let me in.”

A shrubbery marks the limit of our little bit of pleasure-ground. On the
other side of it there is a cottage standing on the edge of the
common. The most good-natured woman in the world lives here. She is our
laundress--married to a stupid young fellow named Molly, and blessed
with a plump baby as sweet-tempered at herself. Thinking it likely that
the piteous voice which had disturbed me might be the voice of Mrs.
Molly, I was astonished to hear her appealing to anybody (perhaps to
me?) to “let her in.” So I passed through the shrubbery, wondering
whether the gate had been locked during my absence in London. No; it was
as easy to open as ever.

The cottage door was not closed.

I saw our amiable laundress in the passage, on her knees, trying to open
an inner door which seemed to be locked. She had her eye at the keyhole;
and, once again, she called out: “Please, miss, let me in.” I waited to
see if the door would be opened--nothing happened. I waited again, to
hear if some person inside would answer--nobody spoke. But somebody,
or something, made a sound of splashing water on the other side of the
door.

I showed myself, and asked what was the matter.

Mrs. Molly looked at me helplessly. She said: “Miss Eunice, it’s the
baby.”

“What has the baby done?” I inquired.

Mrs. Molly got on her feet, and whispered in my ear: “You know he’s a
fine child?”

“Yes.”

“Well, miss, he’s bewitched a lady.”

“What lady?”

“Miss Jillgall.”

The very person I had been trying to find! I asked where she was.

The laundress pointed dolefully to the locked door: “In there.”

“And where is your baby?”

The poor woman still pointed to the door: “I’m beginning to doubt, miss,
whether it is my baby.”

“Nonsense, Mrs. Molly. If it isn’t yours, whose baby can it be?”

“Miss Jillgall’s.”

Her puzzled face made this singular reply more funny still. The
splashing of water on the other side of the door began again. “What is
Miss Jillgall doing now?” I said.

“Washing the baby, miss. A week ago, she came in here, one morning;
very pleasant and kind, I must own. She found me putting on the baby’s
things. She says: ‘What a cherub!’ which I took as a compliment. She
says: ‘I shall call again to-morrow.’ She called again so early that
she found the baby in his crib. ‘You be a good soul,’ she says, ‘and
go about your work, and leave the child to me.’ I says: ‘Yes, miss, but
please to wait till I’ve made him fit to be seen.’ She says: ‘That’s
just what I mean to do myself.’ I stared; and I think any other person
would have done the same in my place. ‘If there’s one thing more than
another I enjoy,’ she says, ‘it’s making myself useful. Mrs. Molly, I’ve
taken a fancy to your boy-baby,’ she says, ‘and I mean to make myself
useful to _him_.’ If you will believe me, Miss Jillgall has only let
me have one opportunity of putting my own child tidy. She was late
this morning, and I got my chance, and had the boy on my lap, drying
him--when in she burst like a blast of wind, and snatched the baby away
from me. ‘This is your nasty temper,’ she says; ‘I declare I’m ashamed
of you!’ And there she is, with the door locked against me, washing the
child all over again herself. Twice I’ve knocked, and asked her to let
me in, and can’t even get an answer. They do say there’s luck in odd
numbers; suppose I try again?” Mrs. Molly knocked, and the proverb
proved to be true; she got an answer from Miss Jillgall at last: “If you
don’t be quiet and go away, you shan’t have the baby back at all.” Who
could help it?--I burst out laughing. Miss Jillgall (as I supposed from
the tone of her voice) took severe notice of this act of impropriety.
“Who’s that laughing?” she called out; “give yourself a name.” I gave
my name. The door was instantly thrown open with a bang. Papa’s cousin
appeared, in a disheveled state, with splashes of soap and water all
over her. She held the child in one arm, and she threw the other arm
round my neck. “Dearest Euneece, I have been longing to see you. How do
you like Our baby?”

To the curious story of my introduction to Miss Jillgall, I ought
perhaps to add that I have got to be friends with her already. I am the
friend of anybody who amuses me. What will Helena say when she reads
this?



CHAPTER XIX. EUNICE’S DIARY.

When people are interested in some event that is coming, do they find
the dull days, passed in waiting for it, days which they are not able to
remember when they look back? This is my unfortunate case. Night after
night, I have gone to bed without so much as opening my Journal. There
was nothing worth writing about, nothing that I could recollect, until
the postman came to-day. I ran downstairs, when I heard his ring at the
bell, and stopped Maria on her way to the study. There, among papa’s
usual handful of letters, was a letter for me.

“DEAR MISS EUNICE:

.......

“Yours ever truly.”

I quote the passages in Philip’s letter which most deeply interested
me--I am his dear miss; and he is mine ever truly. The other part of the
letter told me that he had been detained in London, and he lamented it.
At the end was a delightful announcement that he was coming to me by the
afternoon train. I ran upstairs to see how I looked in the glass.

My first feeling was regret. For the thousandth time, I was obliged to
acknowledge that I was not as pretty as Helena. But this passed off. A
cheering reflection occurred to me. Philip would not have found, in my
sister’s face, what seems to have interested him in my face. Besides,
there is my figure.

The pity of it is that I am so ignorant about some things. If I had been
allowed to read novels, I might (judging by what papa said against them
in one of his sermons) have felt sure of my own attractions; I might
even have understood what Philip really thought of me. However, my mind
was quite unexpectedly set at ease on the subject of my figure. The
manner in which it happened was so amusing--at least, so amusing to
me--that I cannot resist mentioning it.

My sister and I are forbidden to read newspapers, as well as novels. But
the teachers at the Girls’ Scripture Class are too old to be treated in
this way. When the morning lessons were over, one of them was reading
the newspaper to the other, in the empty schoolroom; I being in the
passage outside, putting on my cloak.

It was a report of “an application made to the magistrates by the lady
of his worship the Mayor.” Hearing this, I stopped to listen. The
lady of his worship (what a funny way of describing a man’s wife!) is
reported to be a little too fond of notoriety, and to like hearing the
sound of her own voice on public occasions. But this is only my writing;
I had better get back to the report. “In her address to the magistrates,
the Mayoress stated that she had seen a disgusting photograph in the
shop window of a stationer, lately established in the town. She desired
to bring this person within reach of the law, and to have all his
copies of the shameless photograph destroyed. The usher of the court
was thereupon sent to purchase the photograph.”--On second thoughts,
I prefer going back to my own writing again; it is so uninteresting to
copy other people’s writing. Two of the magistrates were doing justice.
They looked at the photograph--and what did it represent? The famous
statue called the Venus de’ Medici! One of the magistrates took this
discovery indignantly. He was shocked at the gross ignorance which could
call the classic ideal of beauty and grace a disgusting work. The other
one made polite allowances. He thought the lady was much to be pitied;
she was evidently the innocent victim of a neglected education. Mrs.
Mayor left the court in a rage, telling the justices she knew where to
get law. “I shall expose Venus,” she said, “to the Lord Chancellor.”

When the Scripture Class had broken up for the day, duty ought to
have taken me home. Curiosity led me astray--I mean, led me to the
stationer’s window.

There I found our two teachers, absorbed in the photograph; having got
to the shop first by a short cut. They seemed to think I had taken a
liberty whom I joined them. “We are here,” they were careful to explain,
“to get a lesson in the ideal of beauty and grace.” There was quite
a little crowd of townsfolk collected before the window. Some of them
giggled; and some of them wondered whether it was taken from the life.
For my own part, gratitude to Venus obliges me to own that she effected
a great improvement in the state of my mind. She encouraged me. If
that stumpy little creature--with no waist, and oh, such uncertain
legs!--represented the ideal of beauty and grace, I had reason indeed to
be satisfied with my own figure, and to think it quite possible that my
sweetheart’s favorable opinion of me was not ill-bestowed.

I was at the bedroom window when the time approached for Philip’s
arrival. Quite at the far end of the road, I discovered him. He was on
foot; he walked like a king. Not that I ever saw a king, but I have my
ideal. Ah, what a smile he gave me, when I made him look up by waving
my handkerchief out of the window! “Ask for papa,” I whispered as he
ascended the house-steps.

The next thing to do was to wait, as patiently as I could, to be sent
for downstairs. Maria came to me in a state of excitement. “Oh, miss,
what a handsome young gentleman, and how beautifully dressed! Is he--?”
 Instead of finishing what she had to say, she looked at me with a sly
smile. I looked at her with a sly smile. We were certainly a couple of
fools. But, dear me, how happy sometimes a fool can be!

My enjoyment of that delightful time was checked when I went into the
drawing-room.

I had expected to see papa’s face made beautiful by his winning smile.
He was not only serious; he actually seemed to be ill at ease when he
looked at me. At the same time, I saw nothing to make me conclude that
Philip had produced an unfavorable impression. The truth is, we were all
three on our best behavior, and we showed it. Philip had brought with
him a letter from Mrs. Staveley, introducing him to papa. We spoke of
the Staveleys, of the weather, of the Cathedral--and then there seemed
to be nothing more left to talk about.

In the silence that followed--what a dreadful thing silence is!--papa
was sent for to see somebody who had called on business. He made his
excuses in the sweetest manner, but still seriously. When he and Philip
had shaken hands, would he leave us together? No; he waited. Poor Philip
had no choice but to take leave of me. Papa then went out by the door
that led into his study, and I was left alone.

Can any words say how wretched I felt?

I had hoped so much from that first meeting--and where were my hopes
now? A profane wish that I had never been born was finding its way into
my mind, when the door of the room was opened softly, from the side of
the passage. Maria, dear Maria, the best friend I have, peeped in. She
whispered: “Go into the garden, miss, and you will find somebody there
who is dying to see you. Mind you let him out by the shrubbery gate.”
 I squeezed her hand; I asked if she had tried the shrubbery gate with a
sweetheart of her own. “Hundreds of times, miss.”

Was it wrong for me to go to Philip, in the garden? Oh, there is no end
to objections! Perhaps I did it _because_ it was wrong. Perhaps I had
been kept on my best behavior too long for human endurance.

How sadly disappointed he looked! And how rashly he had placed himself
just where he could be seen from the back windows! I took his arm and
led him to the end of the garden. There we were out of the reach of
inquisitive eyes; and there we sat down together, under the big mulberry
tree.

“Oh, Eunice, your father doesn’t like me!”

Those were his first words. In justice to papa (and a little for my
own sake too) I told him he was quite wrong. I said: “Trust my father’s
goodness, trust his kindness, as I do.”

He made no reply. His silence was sufficiently expressive; he looked at
me fondly.

I may be wrong, but fond looks surely require an acknowledgment of some
kind? Is a young woman guilty of boldness who only follows her impulses?
I slipped my hand into his hand. Philip seemed to like it. We returned
to our conversation.

He began: “Tell me, dear, is Mr. Gracedieu always as serious as he is
to-day?”

“Oh no!”

“When he takes exercise, does he ride? or does he walk?”

“Papa always walks.”

“By himself?”

“Sometimes by himself. Sometimes with me. Do you want to meet him when
he goes out?”

“Yes.”

“When he is out with me?”

“No. When he is out by himself.”

Was it possible to tell me more plainly that I was not wanted? I did my
best to express indignation by snatching my hand away from him. He was
completely taken by surprise.

“Eunice! don’t you understand me?”

I was as stupid and as disagreeable as I could possibly be: “No; I
don’t!”

“Then let me help you,” he said, with a patience which I had not
deserved.

Up to that moment I had been leaning against the back of a garden
chair. Something else now got between me and my chair. It stole round
my waist--it held me gently--it strengthened its hold--it improved my
temper--it made me fit to understand him. All done by what? Only an arm!

Philip went on:

“I want to ask your father to do me the greatest of all favors--and
there is no time to lose. Every day, I expect to get a letter which may
recall me to Ireland.”

My heart sank at this horrid prospect; and in some mysterious way my
head must have felt it too. I mean that I found my head resting on his
shoulder. He went on:

“How am I to get my opportunity of speaking to Mr. Gracedieu? I mustn’t
call on him again as soon as to-morrow or next day. But I might meet
him, out walking alone, if you will tell me how to do it. A note to my
hotel is all I want. Don’t tremble, my sweet. If you are not present at
the time, do you see any objection to my owning to your father that I
love you?”

I felt his delicate consideration for me--I did indeed feel it
gratefully. If he only spoke first, how well I should get on with papa
afterward! The prospect before me was exquisitely encouraging. I agreed
with Philip in everything; and I waited (how eagerly was only known to
myself) to hear what he would say to me next. He prophesied next:

“When I have told your father that I love you, he will expect me to tell
him something else. Can you guess what it is?”

If I had not been confused, perhaps I might have found the answer to
this. As it was, I left him to reply to himself. He did it, in words
which I shall remember as long as I live.

“Dearest Eunice, when your father has heard my confession, he will
suspect that there is another confession to follow it--he will want to
know if you love me. My angel, will my hopes be your hopes too, when I
answer him?”

What there was in this to make my heart beat so violently that I felt as
if I was being stifled, is more than I can tell. He leaned so close to
me, so tenderly, so delightfully close, that our faces nearly touched.
He whispered: “Say you love me, in a kiss!”

His lips touched my lips, pressed them, dwelt on them--oh, how can I
tell of it! Some new enchantment of feeling ran deliciously through
and through me. I forgot my own self; I only knew of one person in the
world. He was master of my lips; he was master of my heart. When he
whispered, “kiss me,” I kissed. What a moment it was! A faintness stole
over me; I felt as if I was going to die some exquisite death; I laid
myself back away from him--I was not able to speak. There was no need
for it; my thoughts and his thoughts were one--he knew that I was
quite overcome; he saw that he must leave me to recover myself alone. I
pointed to the shrubbery gate. We took one long last look at each other
for that day; the trees hid him; I was left by myself.



CHAPTER XX. EUNICE’S DIARY.

How long a time passed before my composure came back to me, I cannot
remember now. It seemed as if I was waiting through some interval of my
life that was a mystery to myself. I was content to wait, and feel the
light evening air in the garden wafting happiness over me. And all this
had come from a kiss! I can call the time to mind when I used to wonder
why people made such a fuss about kissing.

I had been indebted to Maria for my first taste of Paradise. I was
recalled by Maria to the world that I had been accustomed to live in;
the world that was beginning to fade away in my memory already. She had
been sent to the garden in search of me; and she had a word of advice
to offer, after noticing my face when I stepped out of the shadow of the
tree: “Try to look more like yourself, miss, before you let them see you
at the tea-table.”


Papa and Miss Jillgall were sitting together talking, when I opened the
door. They left off when they saw me; and I supposed, quite correctly
as it turned out, that I had been one of the subjects in their course
of conversation. My poor father seemed to be sadly anxious and out of
sorts. Miss Jillgall, if I had been in the humor to enjoy it, would have
been more amusing than ever. One of her funny little eyes persisted in
winking at me; and her heavy foot had something to say to my foot, under
the table, which meant a great deal perhaps, but which only succeeded in
hurting me.

My father left us; and Miss Jillgall explained herself.

“I know, dearest Euneece, that we have only been acquainted for a day or
two and that I ought not perhaps to have expected you to confide in
me so soon. Can I trust you not to betray me if I set an example of
confidence? Ah, I see I can trust you! And, my dear, I do so enjoy
telling secrets to a friend. Hush! Your father, your excellent father,
has been talking to me about young Mr. Dunboyne.”

She provokingly stopped there. I entreated her to go on. She invited
me to sit on her knee. “I want to whisper,” she said. It was too
ridiculous--but I did it. Miss Jillgall’s whisper told me serious news.

“The minister has some reason, Euneece, for disapproving of Mr.
Dunboyne; but, mind this, I don’t think he has a bad opinion of the
young man himself. He is going to return Mr. Dunboyne’s call. Oh, I do
so hate formality; I really can’t go on talking of _Mr._ Dunboyne. Tell
me his Christian name. Ah, what a noble name! How I long to be useful
to him! Tomorrow, my dear, after the one o’clock dinner, your papa will
call on Philip, at his hotel. I hope he won’t be out, just at the wrong
time.”

I resolved to prevent that unlucky accident by writing to Philip. If
Miss Jillgall would have allowed it, I should have begun my letter at
once. But she had more to say; and she was stronger than I was, and
still kept me on her knee.

“It all looks bright enough so far, doesn’t it, dear sister? Will you
let me be your second sister? I do so love you, Euneece. Thank you!
thank you! But the gloomy side of the picture is to come next! The
minister--no! now I am your sister I must call him papa; it makes me
feel so young again! Well, then, papa has asked me to be your companion
whenever you go out. ‘Euneece is too young and too attractive to be
walking about this great town (in Helena’s absence) by herself.’ That
was how he put it. Slyly enough, if one may say so of so good a man. And
he used your sister (didn’t he?) as a kind of excuse. I wish your sister
was as nice as you are. However, the point is, why am I to be your
companion? Because, dear child, you and your young gentleman are not to
make appointments and to meet each other alone. Oh, yes--that’s it!
Your father is quite willing to return Philip’s call; he proposes (as a
matter of civility to Mrs. Staveley) to ask Philip to dinner; but, mark
my words, he doesn’t mean to let Philip have you for his wife.”

I jumped off her lap; it was horrible to hear her. “Oh,” I said, “_can_
you be right about it?” Miss Jillgall jumped up too. She has foreign
ways of shrugging her shoulders and making signs with her hands. On this
occasion she laid both hands on the upper part of her dress, just below
her throat, and mysteriously shook her head.

“When my views are directed by my affections,” she assured me, “I never
see wrong. My bosom is my strong point.”

She has no bosom, poor soul--but I understood what she meant. It failed
to have any soothing effect on my feelings. I felt grieved and angry and
puzzled, all in one. Miss Jillgall stood looking at me, with her hands
still on the place where her bosom was supposed to be. She made my
temper hotter than ever.

“I mean to marry Philip,” I said.

“Certainly, my dear Euneece. But please don’t be so fierce about it.”

“If my father does really object to my marriage,” I went on, “it must be
because he dislikes Philip. There can be no other reason.”

“Oh, yes, dear--there can.”

“What is the reason, then?”

“That, my sweet girl, is one of the things that we have got to find
out.”

.......

The post of this morning brought a letter from my sister. We were to
expect her return by the next day’s train. This was good news. Philip
and I might stand in need of clever Helena’s help, and we might be sure
of getting it now.

In writing to Philip, I had asked him to let me hear how papa and he had
got on at the hotel. I won’t say how often I consulted my watch, or how
often I looked out of the window for a man with a letter in his hand. It
will be better to get on at once to the discouraging end of it, when the
report of the interview reached me at last. Twice Philip had attempted
to ask for my hand in marriage--and twice my father had “deliberately,
obstinately” (Philip’s own words) changed the subject. Even this was not
all. As if he was determined to show that Miss Jillgall was perfectly
right, and I perfectly wrong, papa (civil to Philip as long as he did
not talk of Me) had asked him to dine with us, and Philip had accepted
the invitation!

What were we to think of it? What were we to do?

I wrote back to my dear love (so cruelly used) to tell him that Helena
was expected to return on the next day, and that her opinion would be of
the greatest value to both of us. In a postscript I mentioned the hour
at which we were going to the station to meet my sister. When I say
“we,” I mean Miss Jillgall as well as myself.

.......

We found him waiting for us at the railway. I am afraid he resented
papa’s incomprehensible resolution not to give him a hearing. He was
silent and sullen. I could not conceal that to see this state of feeling
distressed me. He showed how truly he deserved to be loved--he begged
my pardon, and he became his own sweet self again directly. I am more
determined to marry him than ever.

When the train entered the station, all the carriages were full. I went
one way, thinking I had seen Helena. Miss Jillgall went the other way,
under the same impression. Philip was a little way behind me.

Not seeing my sister, I had just turned back, when a young man jumped
out of a carriage, opposite Philip, and recognized and shook hands with
him. I was just near enough to hear the stranger say, “Look at the girl
in our carriage.” Philip looked. “What a charming creature!” he said,
and then checked himself for fear the young lady should hear him. She
had just handed her traveling bag and wraps to a porter, and was getting
out. Philip politely offered his hand to help her. She looked my way.
The charming creature of my sweetheart’s admiration was, to my infinite
amusement, Helena herself.



CHAPTER XXI. HELENA’S DIARY.

The day of my return marks an occasion which I am not likely to forget.
Hours have passed since I came home--and my agitation still forbids the
thought of repose.

As I sit at my desk I see Eunice in bed, sleeping peacefully, except
when she is murmuring enjoyment in some happy dream. To what end has my
sister been advancing blindfold, and (who knows?) dragging me with her,
since that disastrous visit to our friends in London? Strange that there
should be a leaven of superstition in _my_ nature! Strange that I should
feel fear of something--I hardly know what!

I have met somewhere (perhaps in my historical reading) with the
expression: “A chain of events.” Was I at the beginning of that chain,
when I entered the railway carriage on my journey home?

Among the other passengers there was a young gentleman, accompanied by
a lady who proved to be his sister. They were both well-bred people.
The brother evidently admired me, and did his best to make himself
agreeable. Time passed quickly in pleasant talk, and my vanity was
flattered--and that was all. My fellow-travelers were going on to
London. When the train reached our station the young lady sent
her brother to buy some fruit, which she saw in the window of the
refreshment-room. The first man whom he encountered on the platform was
one of his friends; to whom he said something which I failed to hear.
When I handed my traveling bag and my wraps to the porter, and showed
myself at the carriage door, I heard the friend say: “What a charming
creature!” Having nothing to conceal in a journal which I protect by a
lock, I may own that the stranger’s personal appearance struck me,
and that what I felt this time was not flattered vanity, but
gratified pride. He was young, he was remarkably handsome, he was a
distinguished-looking man.

All this happened in one moment. In the moment that followed, I found
myself in Eunice’s arms. That odious person, Miss Jillgall, insisted on
embracing me next. And then I was conscious of an indescribable feeling
of surprise. Eunice presented the distinguished-looking gentleman to me
as a friend of hers--Mr. Philip Dunboyne.

“I had the honor of meeting your sister,” he said, “in London, at Mr.
Staveley’s house.” He went on to speak easily and gracefully of the
journey I had taken, and of his friend who had been my fellow-traveler;
and he attended us to the railway omnibus before he took his leave. I
observed that Eunice had something to say to him confidentially, before
they parted. This was another example of my sister’s childish character;
she is instantly familiar with new acquaintances, if she happens to like
them. I anticipated some amusement from hearing how she had contrived to
establish confidential relations with a highly-cultivated man like Mr.
Dunboyne. But, while Miss Jillgall was with us, it was just as well to
keep within the limits of commonplace conversation.

Before we got out of the omnibus I had, however, observed one
undesirable result of my absence from home. Eunice and Miss
Jillgall--the latter having, no doubt, finely flattered the
former--appeared to have taken a strong liking to each other.

Two curious circumstances also caught my attention. I saw a change to,
what I call self-assertion, in my sister’s manner; something seemed to
have raised her in her own estimation. Then, again, Miss Jillgall was
not like her customary self. She had delightful moments of silence; and
when Eunice asked how I liked Mr. Dunboyne, she listened to my reply
with an appearance of interest in her ugly face which was quite a new
revelation in my experience of my father’s cousin.

These little discoveries (after what I had already observed at the
railway-station) ought perhaps to have prepared me for what was to come,
when my sister and I were alone in our room. But Eunice, whether she
meant to do it or not, baffled my customary penetration. She looked as
if she had plenty of news to tell me--with some obstacle in the way of
doing it, which appeared to amuse instead of annoying her. If there is
one thing more than another that I hate, it is being puzzled. I asked
at once if anything remarkable had happened during Eunice’s visit to
London.

She smiled mischievously. “I have got a delicious surprise for you, my
dear; and I do so enjoy prolonging it. Tell me, Helena, what did you
propose we should both do when we found ourselves at home again?”

My memory was at fault. Eunice’s good spirits became absolutely
boisterous. She called out: “Catch!” and tossed her journal into my
hands, across the whole length of the room. “We were to read each
other’s diaries,” she said. “There is mine to begin with.”

Innocent of any suspicion of the true state of affairs, I began the
reading of Eunice’s journal. If I had not seen the familiar handwriting,
nothing would have induced me to believe that a girl brought up in
a pious household, the well-beloved daughter of a distinguished
Congregational Minister, could have written that shameless record of
passions unknown to young ladies in respectable English life. What to
say, what to do, when I had closed the book, was more than I felt myself
equal to decide. My wretched sister spared me the anxiety which I might
otherwise have felt. It was she who first opened her lips, after the
silence that had fallen on us while I was reading. These were literally
the words that she said:

“My darling, why don’t you congratulate me?”

No argument could have persuaded me, as this persuaded me, that all
sisterly remonstrance on my part would be completely thrown away.

“My dear Eunice,” I said, “let me beg you to excuse me. I am waiting--”

There she interrupted me--and, oh, in what an impudent manner! She took
my chin between her finger and thumb, and lifted my downcast face, and
looked at me with an appearance of eager expectation which I was quite
at a loss to understand.

“You have been away from home, too,” she said. “Do I see in this serious
face some astonishing news waiting to overpower me? Have _you_ found a
sweetheart? Are _you_ engaged to be married?”

I only put her hand away from me, and advised her to return to her
chair. This perfectly harmless proceeding seemed absolutely to frighten
her.

“Oh, my dear,” she burst out, “surely you are not jealous of me?”

There was but one possible reply to this: I laughed at it. Is Eunice’s
head turned? She kissed me!

“Now you laugh,” she said, “I begin to understand you again; I ought to
have known that you are superior to jealousy. But, do tell me, would it
be so very wonderful if other girls found something to envy in my good
luck? Just think of it! Such a handsome man, such an agreeable man,
such a clever man, such a rich man--and, not the least of his merits,
by-the-by, a man who admires You. Come! if you won’t congratulate me,
congratulate yourself on having such a brother-in-law in prospect!”

Her head _was_ turned. I drew the poor soul’s attention compassionately
to what I had said a moment since.

“Pardon me, dear, for reminding you that I have not yet refused to offer
my congratulations. I only told you I was waiting.”

“For what?”

“Waiting, of course, to hear what my father thinks of your wonderful
good luck.”

This explanation, offered with the kindest intentions, produced another
change in my very variable sister. I had extinguished her good spirits
as I might have extinguished a light. She sat down by me, and sighed in
the saddest manner. The heart must be hard indeed which can resist the
distress of a person who is dear to us. I put my arm round her; she was
becoming once more the Eunice whom I so dearly loved.

“My poor child,” I said, “don’t distress yourself by speaking of it; I
understand. Your father objects to your marrying Mr. Dunboyne.”

She shook her head. “I can’t exactly say, Helena, that papa does that.
He only behaves very strangely.”

“Am I indiscreet, dear, if I ask in what way father’s behavior has
surprised you?”

She was quite willing to enlighten me. It was a simple little story
which, to my mind, sufficiently explained 

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