"She is very young," said Miss Gwilt, appealing with a smile to Midwinter"s forbearance; "and, as you must see for yourself, sir, she is a spoiled child." She paused--showed, for an instant only, her surprise at Midwinter"s strange silence and strange persistency in keeping his eyes still fixed on her--then set herself, with a charming grace and readiness, to help him out of the false position in which he stood. "As you have extended your walk thus far," she resumed, "perhaps you will kindly favor me, on your return, by taking a message to your friend?
Mr. Armadale has been so good as to invite me to see the Thorpe Ambrose gardens this morning. Will you say that Major Milroy permits me to accept the invitation (in company with Miss Milroy) between ten and eleven o"clock?" For a moment her eyes rested, with a renewed look of interest, on Midwinter"s face. She waited, still in vain, for an answering word from him--smiled, as if his extraordinary silence amused rather than angered her--and followed her pupil back to the cottage.
It was only when the last trace of her had disappeared that Midwinter roused himself, and attempted to realize the position in which he stood. The revelation of her beauty was in no respect answerable for the breathless astonishment which had held him spell-bound up to this moment. The one clear impression she had produced on him thus far began and ended with his discovery of the astounding contradiction that her face offered, in one feature after another, to the description in Mr.
Brock"s letter. All beyond this was vague and misty--a dim consciousness of a tall, elegant woman, and of kind words, modestly and gracefully spoken to him, and nothing more.
He advanced a few steps into the garden without knowing why--stopped, glancing hither and thither like a man lost--recognized the summer-house by an effort, as if years had elapsed since he had seen it--and made his way out again, at last, into the park. Even here, he wandered first in one direction, then in another. His mind was still reeling under the shock that had fallen on it; his perceptions were all confused.
Something kept him mechanically in action, walking eagerly without a motive, walking he knew not where.
A far less sensitively organized man might have been overwhelmed, as he was overwhelmed now, by the immense, the instantaneous revulsion of feeling which the event of the last few minutes had wrought in his mind.
At the memorable instant when he had opened the door of the summer-house, no confusing influence troubled his faculties. In all that related to his position toward his friend, he had reached an absolutely definite conclusion by an absolutely definite process of thought. The whole strength of the motive which had driven him into the resolution to part from Allan rooted itself in the belief that he had seen at Hurle Mere the fatal fulfillment of the first Vision of the Dream. And this belief, in its turn, rested, necessarily, on the conviction that the woman who was the one survivor of the tragedy in Madeira must be also inevitably the woman whom he had seen standing in the Shadow"s place at the pool. Firm in that persuasion, he had himself compared the object of his distrust and of the rector"s distrust with the description written by the rector himself--a description, carefully minute, by a man entirely trustworthy--and his own eyes had informed him that the woman whom he had seen at the Mere, and the woman whom Mr. Brock had identified in London, were not one, but Two. In the place of the Dream Shadow, there had stood, on the evidence of the rector"s letter, not the instrument of the Fatality--but a stranger!
No such doubts as might have troubled a less superst.i.tious man, were started in _his_ mind by the discovery that had now opened on him.
It never occurred to him to ask himself whether a stranger might not be the appointed instrument of the Fatality, now when the letter had persuaded him that a stranger had been revealed as the figure in the dream landscape. No such idea entered or could enter his mind. The one woman whom _his_ superst.i.tion dreaded was the woman who had entwined herself with the lives of the two Armadales in the first generation, and with the fortunes of the two Armadales in the second--who was at once the marked object of his father"s death-bed warning, and the first cause of the family calamities which had opened Allan"s way to the Thorpe Ambrose estate--the woman, in a word, whom he would have known instinctively, but for Mr. Brock"s letter, to be the woman whom he had now actually seen.
Looking at events as they had just happened, under the influence of the misapprehension into which the rector had innocently misled him, his mind saw and seized its new conclusion instantaneously, acting precisely as it had acted in the past time of his interview with Mr. Brock at the Isle of Man.
Exactly as he had once declared it to be an all-sufficient refutation of the idea of the Fatality, that he had never met with the timber-ship in any of his voyages at sea, so he now seized on the similarly derived conclusion, that the whole claim of the Dream to a supernatural origin stood self-refuted by the disclosure of a stranger in the Shadow"s place. Once started from this point--once encouraged to let his love for Allan influence him undividedly again, his mind hurried along the whole resulting chain of thought at lightning speed. If the Dream was proved to be no longer a warning from the other world, it followed inevitably that accident and not fate had led the way to the night on the Wreck, and that all the events which had happened since Allan and he had parted from Mr. Brock were events in themselves harmless, which his superst.i.tion had distorted from their proper shape. In less than a moment his mobile imagination had taken him back to the morning at Castletown when he had revealed to the rector the secret of his name; when he had declared to the rector, with his father"s letter before his eyes, the better faith that was in him. Now once more he felt his heart holding firmly by the bond of brotherhood between Allan and himself; now once more he could say with the eager sincerity of the old time, "If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!" As that n.o.bler conviction possessed itself again of his mind--quieting the tumult, clearing the confusion within him--the house at Thorpe Ambrose, with Allan on the steps, waiting, looking for him, opened on his eyes through the trees. A sense of illimitable relief lifted his eager spirit high above the cares, and doubts, and fears that had oppressed it so long, and showed him once more the better and brighter future of his early dreams. His eyes filled with tears, and he pressed the rector"s letter, in his wild, pa.s.sionate way, to his lips, as he looked at Allan through the vista of the trees. "But for this morsel of paper," he thought, "my life might have been one long sorrow to me, and my father"s crime might have parted us forever!"
Such was the result of the stratagem which had shown the housemaid"s face to Mr. Brock as the face of Miss Gwilt. And so--by shaking Midwinter"s trust in his own superst.i.tion, in the one case in which that superst.i.tion pointed to the truth--did Mother Oldershaw"s cunning triumph over difficulties and dangers which had never been contemplated by Mother Oldershaw herself.
XI. MISS GWILT AMONG THE QUICKSANDS.
1. _From the Rev. Decimus Brock to Ozias Midwinter_.
"Thursday.
"MY DEAR MIDWINTER--No words can tell what a relief it was to me to get your letter this morning, and what a happiness I honestly feel in having been thus far proved to be in the wrong. The precautions you have taken in case the woman should still confirm my apprehensions by venturing herself at Thorpe Ambrose seem to me to be all that can be desired. You are no doubt sure to hear of her from one or other of the people in the lawyer"s office, whom you have asked to inform you of the appearance of a stranger in the town.
"I am the more pleased at finding how entirely I can trust you in this matter; for I am likely to be obliged to leave Allan"s interests longer than I supposed solely in your hands. My visit to Thorpe Ambrose must, I regret to say, be deferred for two months. The only one of my brother-clergymen in London who is able to take my duty for me cannot make it convenient to remove with his family to Somersetshire before that time. I have no alternative but to finish my business here, and be back at my rectory on Sat.u.r.day next. If anything happens, you will, of course, instantly communicate with me; and, in that case, be the inconvenience what it may, I must leave home for Thorpe Ambrose. If, on the other hand, all goes more smoothly than my own obstinate apprehensions will allow me to suppose, then Allan (to whom I have written) must not expect to see me till this day two months.
"No result has, up to this time, rewarded our exertions to recover the trace lost at the railway. I will keep my letter open, however, until post time, in case the next few hours bring any news.
"Always truly yours,
"DECIMUS BROCK.
"P. S.--I have just heard from the lawyers. They have found out the name the woman pa.s.sed by in London. If this discovery (not a very important one, I am afraid) suggests any new course of proceeding to you, pray act on it at once. The name is--Miss Gwilt."
2. _From Miss Gwilt to Mrs. Oldershaw_.
The Cottage, Thorpe Ambrose, Sat.u.r.day, June 28.
"If you will promise not to be alarmed, Mamma Oldershaw, I will begin this letter in a very odd way, by copying a page of a letter written by somebody else. You have an excellent memory, and you may not have forgotten that I received a note from Major Milroy"s mother (after she had engaged me as governess) on Monday last. It was dated and signed; and here it is, as far as the first page: "June 23d, 1851. Dear Madam--Pray excuse my troubling you, before you go to Thorpe Ambrose, with a word more about the habits observed in my son"s household. When I had the pleasure of seeing you at two o"clock to-day, in Kingsdown Crescent, I had another appointment in a distant part of London at three; and, in the hurry of the moment, one or two little matters escaped me which I think I ought to impress on your attention." The rest of the letter is not of the slightest importance, but the lines that I have just copied are well worthy of all the attention you can bestow on them. They have saved me from discovery, my dear, before I have been a week in Major Milroy"s service!
"It happened no later than yesterday evening, and it began and ended in this manner:
"There is a gentleman here, (of whom I shall have more to say presently) who is an intimate friend of young Armadale"s, and who bears the strange name of Midwinter. He contrived yesterday to speak to me alone in the park. Almost as soon as he opened his lips, I found that my name had been discovered in London (no doubt by the Somersetshire clergyman); and that Mr. Midwinter had been chosen (evidently by the same person) to identify the Miss Gwilt who had vanished from Brompton with the Miss Gwilt who had appeared at Thorpe Ambrose. You foresaw this danger, I remember; but you could scarcely have imagined that the exposure would threaten me so soon.
"I spare you the details of our conversation to come to the end.
Mr. Midwinter put the matter very delicately, declaring, to my great surprise, that he felt quite certain himself that I was not the Miss Gwilt of whom his friend was in search; and that he only acted as he did out of regard to the anxiety of a person whose wishes he was bound to respect. Would I a.s.sist him in setting that anxiety completely at rest, as far as I was concerned, by kindly answering one plain question--which he had no other right to ask me than the right my indulgence might give him? The lost "Miss Gwilt" had been missed on Monday last, at two o"clock, in the crowd on the platform of the North-western Railway, in Euston Square. Would I authorize him to say that on that day, and at that hour, the Miss Gwilt who was Major Milroy"s governess had never been near the place?
"I need hardly tell you that I seized the fine opportunity he had given me of disarming all future suspicion. I took a high tone on the spot, and met him with the old lady"s letter. He politely refused to look at it. I insisted on his looking at it. "I don"t choose to be mistaken,"
I said, "for a woman who may be a bad character, because she happens to bear, or to have a.s.sumed, the same name as mine. I insist on your reading the first part of this letter for my satisfaction, if not for your own." He was obliged to comply; and there was the proof, in the old lady"s handwriting, that, at two o"clock on Monday last, she and I were together in Kingsdown Crescent, which any directory would tell him is a "crescent" in Bayswater! I leave you to imagine his apologies, and the perfect sweetness with which I received them.
"I might, of course, if I had not preserved the letter, have referred him to you, or to the major"s mother, with similar results. As it is, the object has been gained without trouble or delay. _I have been proved not to be myself_; and one of the many dangers that threatened me at Thorpe Ambrose is a danger blown over from this moment. Your house-maid"s face may not be a very handsome one; but there is no denying that it has done us excellent service.
"So much for the past; now for the future. You shall hear how I get on with the people about me; and you shall judge for yourself what the chances are for and against my becoming mistress of Thorpe Ambrose.
"Let me begin with young Armadale--because it is beginning with good news. I have produced the right impression on him already, and Heaven knows _that_ is nothing to boast of! Any moderately good-looking woman who chose to take the trouble could make him fall in love with her. He is a rattle-pated young fool--one of those noisy, rosy, light-haired, good-tempered men whom I particularly detest. I had a whole hour alone with him in a boat, the first day I came here, and I have made good use of my time, I can tell you, from that day to this. The only difficulty with him is the difficulty of concealing my own feelings, especially when he turns my dislike of him into downright hatred by sometimes reminding me of his mother. I really never saw a man whom I could use so ill, if I had the opportunity. He will give me the opportunity, I believe, if no accident happens, sooner than we calculated on. I have just returned from a party at the great house, in celebration of the rent-day dinner, and the squire"s attentions to me, and my modest reluctance to receive them, have already excited general remark.
"My pupil, Miss Milroy, comes next. She, too, is rosy and foolish; and, what is more, awkward and squat and freckled, and ill-tempered and ill-dressed. No fear of _her_, though she hates me like poison, which is a great comfort, for I get rid of her out of lesson time and walking time. It is perfectly easy to see that she has made the most of her opportunities with young Armadale (opportunities, by-the-by, which we never calculated on), and that she has been stupid enough to let him slip through her fingers. When I tell you that she is obliged, for the sake of appearances, to go with her father and me to the little entertainments at Thorpe Ambrose, and to see how young Armadale admires me, you will understand the kind of place I hold in her affections. She would try me past all endurance if I didn"t see that I aggravate her by keeping my temper, so, of course, I keep it. If I do break out, it will be over our lessons--not over our French, our grammar, history, and globes--but over our music. No words can say how I feel for her poor piano. Half the musical girls in England ought to have their fingers chopped off in the interests of society, and, if I had my way, Miss Milroy"s fingers should be executed first.
"As for the major, I can hardly stand higher in his estimation than I stand already. I am always ready to make his breakfast, and his daughter is not. I can always find things for him when he loses them, and his daughter can"t. I never yawn when he proses, and his daughter does. I like the poor dear harmless old gentleman, so I won"t say a word more about him.
"Well, here is a fair prospect for the future surely? My good Oldershaw, there never was a prospect yet without an ugly place in it. _My_ prospect has two ugly places in it. The name of one of them is Mrs.
Milroy, and the name of the other is Mr. Midwinter.
"Mrs. Milroy first. Before I had been five minutes in the cottage, on the day of my arrival, what do you think she did? She sent downstairs and asked to see me. The message startled me a little, after hearing from the old lady, in London, that her daughter-in-law was too great a sufferer to see anybody; but, of course, when I got her message, I had no choice but to go up stairs to the sick-room. I found her bedridden with an incurable spinal complaint, and a really horrible object to look at, but with all her wits about her; and, if I am not greatly mistaken, as deceitful a woman, with as vile a temper, as you could find anywhere in all your long experience. Her excessive politeness, and her keeping her own face in the shade of the bed-curtains while she contrived to keep mine in the light, put me on my guard the moment I entered the room. We were more than half an hour together, without my stepping into any one of the many clever little traps she laid for me. The only mystery in her behavior, which I failed to see through at the time, was her perpetually asking me to bring her things (things she evidently did not want) from different parts of the room.
"Since then events have enlightened me. My first suspicions were raised by overhearing some of the servants" gossip; and I have been confirmed in my opinion by the conduct of Mrs. Milroy"s nurse.
"On the few occasions when I have happened to be alone with the major, the nurse has also happened to want something of her master, and has invariably forgotten to announce her appearance by knocking, at the door. Do you understand now why Mrs. Milroy sent for me the moment I got into the house, and what she wanted when she kept me going backward and forward, first for one thing and then for another? There is hardly an attractive light in which my face and figure can be seen, in which that woman"s jealous eyes have not studied them already. I am no longer puzzled to know why the father and daughter started, and looked at each other, when I was first presented to them; or why the servants still stare at me with a mischievous expectation in their eyes when I ring the bell and ask them to do anything. It is useless to disguise the truth, Mother Oldershaw, between you and me. When I went upstairs into that sickroom, I marched blindfold into the clutches of a jealous woman. If Mrs. Milroy _can_ turn me out of the house, Mrs. Milroy _will_; and, morning and night, she has nothing else to do in that bed prison of hers but to find out the way.
"In this awkward position, my own cautious conduct is admirably seconded by the dear old major"s perfect insensibility. His wife"s jealousy of him is as monstrous a delusion as any that could be found in a mad-house; it is the growth of her own vile temper, under the aggravation of an incurable illness. The poor man hasn"t a thought beyond his mechanical pursuits; and I don"t believe he knows at this moment whether I am a handsome woman or not. With this chance to help me, I may hope to set the nurse"s intrusions and the mistress"s contrivances at defiance--for a time, at any rate. But you know what a jealous woman is, and I think I know what Mrs. Milroy is; and I own I shall breathe more freely on the day when young Armadale opens his foolish lips to some purpose, and sets the major advertising for a new governess.
"Armadale"s name reminds me of Armadale"s friend. There is more danger threatening in that quarter; and, what is worse, I don"t feel half as well armed beforehand against Mr. Midwinter as I do against Mrs. Milroy.
"Everything about this man is more or less mysterious, which I don"t like, to begin with. How does he come to be in the confidence of the Somersetshire clergyman? How much has that clergyman told him? How is it that he was so firmly persuaded, when he spoke to me in the park, that I was not the Miss Gwilt of whom his friend was in search? I haven"t the ghost of an answer to give to any of those three questions. I can"t even discover who he is, or how he and young Armadale first became acquainted. I hate him. No, I don"t; I only want to find out about him.
He is very young, little and lean, and active and dark, with bright black eyes which say to me plainly, "We belong to a man with brains in his head and a will of his own; a man who hasn"t always been hanging about a country house, in attendance on a fool." Yes; I am positively certain Mr. Midwinter has done something or suffered something in his past life, young as he is; and I would give I don"t know what to get at it. Don"t resent my taking up so much s.p.a.ce in my writing about him. He has influence enough over young Armadale to be a very awkward obstacle in my way, unless I can secure his good opinion at starting.
"Well, you may ask, and what is to prevent your securing his good opinion? I am sadly afraid, Mother Oldershaw, I have got it on terms I never bargained for I am sadly afraid the man is in love with me already.
"Don"t toss your head and say, "Just like her vanity!" After the horrors I have gone through, I have no vanity left; and a man who admires me is a man who makes me shudder. There was a time, I own--Pooh! what am I writing? Sentiment, I declare! Sentiment to _you_! Laugh away, my dear.
As for me, I neither laugh nor cry; I mend my pen, and get on with my--what do the men call it?--my report.
"The only thing worth inquiring is, whether I am right or wrong in my idea of the impression I have made on him.
"Let me see; I have been four times in his company. The first time was in the major"s garden, where we met unexpectedly, face to face. He stood looking at me, like a man petrified, without speaking a word. The effect of my horrid red hair, perhaps? Quite likely; let us lay it on my hair.
The second time was in going over the Thorpe Ambrose grounds, with young Armadale on one side of me, and my pupil (in the sulks) on the other.
Out comes Mr. Midwinter to join us, though he had work to do in the steward"s office, which he had never been known to neglect on any other occasion. Laziness, possibly? or an attachment to Miss Milroy? I can"t say; we will lay it on Miss Milroy, if you like; I only know he did nothing but look at _me_. The third time was at the private interview in the park, which I have told you of already. I never saw a man so agitated at putting a delicate question to a woman in my life. But _that_ might have been only awkwardness; and his perpetually looking back after me when we had parted might have been only looking back at the view. Lay it on the view; by all means, lay it on the view! The fourth time was this very evening, at the little party. They made me play; and, as the piano was a good one, I did my best. All the company crowded round me, and paid me their compliments (my charming pupil paid hers, with a face like a cat"s just before she spits), except Mr.