Before he opened the box, however, he took a quick, impatient turn or two up and down his miserable little room. Not once, since he had set forth to return to his own country, and to the civilization from which, for more than twenty years, he had been an outcast, had he felt (to use his favorite expression) that he was "his own man again," until now.
A thrill of the old, breathless, fierce suspense of his days of deadly peril ran through him, as he thought on the forbidden secret into which he was about to pry, and for the discovery of which he was ready to dare any hazard and use any means. "It goes through and through me, a"most like dodging for life again among the b.l.o.o.d.y Indians," muttered Mat to himself, as he trod restlessly to and fro in his cage of a room, rubbing all the while at the scars on his face, as his way was when any new excitement got the better of him.
At the very moment when this thought was rising ominously in his mind, Valentine was expounding anew the whole scope and object of "Columbus"
to a fresh circle of admiring spectators--while his wife was interpreting to Madonna above stairs Zack"s wildest jokes about his friend"s love-stricken condition; and all three were laughing gaily at a caricature, which he was maliciously drawing for them, of "poor old Mat"
in the character of a scalped Cupid. Even the little minor globe of each man"s social sphere has its antipodes-points; and when it is all bright suns.h.i.+ne in one part of the miniature world, it is all pitch darkness, at the very same moment, in another.
Mat"s face had grown suddenly swarthier than ever, while he walked across his room, and said those words to himself which have just been recorded. It altered again, though, in a minute or two, and turned once more to the cold clay-color which had overspread it in the hosier"s shop at Dibbledean, as he returned to his bear-skins and opened the box that had belonged to "Mary Grice."
He took out first the letter with the enclosure of hair, and placed it carefully in the breast pocket of his coat. He next searched a moment or two for the letter superscribed and signed by Joanna Grice; and, having found it, placed it on one side of him, on the floor. After this he paused a moment, looking into the box with a curious, scowling sadness on his face; while his hand vacantly stirred hither and thither the different objects that lay about among the papers--the gaily-bound alb.u.m, the lace-collar, the dried flower-leaves, and the other little womanly possessions which had once belonged to Mary Grice.
Then he began to collect together all the letters in the box. Having got them into his hands--some tied up in a packet, some loose--he spread them out before him on his lap, first drawing up an end of one of the bear-skins over his legs for them to lie on conveniently. He began by examining the addresses. They were all directed to "Mary Grice," in the same clear, careful, sharply-shaped handwriting. Though they were letters in form, they proved to be only notes in substance, when he opened them: the writing, in some, not extending to more than four or five lines. At least fifteen or twenty were expressed, with unimportant variations, in this form:
"MY DEAREST MARY--Pray try all you can to meet me to-morrow evening at the usual place. I have been waiting and longing for you in vain to-day.
Only think of _me,_ love, as I am now, and always, thinking of _you;_ and I know you will come. Ever and only yours,
"A. C."
All these notes were signed in the same way, merely with initial letters. They contained nothing in the shape of a date, except the day of the week on which they had been written; and they had evidently been delivered by some private means, for there did not appear to be a post-mark on any of them. One after another Mat opened and glanced at them--then tossed them aside into a heap. He pursued this employment quietly and methodically; but as he went on with it, a strange look flashed into his eyes from time to time, giving to them a certain sinister brightness which altered very remarkably the whole natural expression of his face.
Other letters, somewhat longer than the note already quoted, fared no better at his hands. Dry leaves dropped out of some, as he threw them aside; and little water-color drawings of rare flowers fluttered out of others. Hard botanical names which he could not spell through, and descriptions of plants which he could not understand, occurred here and there in postscripts and detached pa.s.sages of the longer letters. But still, whether long or short, they bore no signature but the initials "A. C.;" still the dates afforded no information of the year, month, or place in which they had been written; and still Mat quietly and quickly tossed them aside one after the other, without so much as a word or a sigh escaping him, but with that sinister brightness flas.h.i.+ng into his eyes from time to time. Out of the whole number of the letters, there were only two that he read more than once through, and then pondered over anxiously, before he threw them from him like the rest.
The first of the two was expressed thus:--
"I shall bring the dried ferns and the pa.s.sion flower for your alb.u.m with me this evening. You cannot imagine, dearest, how happy and how vain I feel at having made you as enthusiastic a botanist as I am myself. Since you have taken an interest in my favorite pursuit, it has been more exquisitely delightful to me than any words can express. I believe that I never really knew how to touch tender leaves tenderly until now, when I gather them with the knowledge that they are all to be shown to _you,_ and all to be placed in your dear hand.
"Do you know, my own love, I thought I detected an alteration in you yesterday evening? I never saw you so serious. And then your attention often wandered; and, besides, you looked at me once or twice quite strangely, Mary.--I mean strangely, because your color seemed to be coming and going constantly without any imaginable reason. I really fancied, as I walked home--and I fancy still--that you had something to say, and were afraid to say it. Surely, love, you can have no secrets from me!--But we shall meet to-night, and then you will tell me everything (will you not?) without reserve. Farewell, dearest, till seven o"clock."
Mat slowly read the second paragraph of this letter twice over, abstractedly twisting about his great bristly whiskers between his finger and thumb. There was evidently something in the few lines which he was thus poring over, that half saddened, half perplexed him.
Whatever the difficulty was, he gave it up, and went on doggedly to the next letter, which was an exception to the rest of the collection, for it had a postmark on it. He had failed to notice this, on looking at the outside; but he detected directly on glancing at the inside that it was dated differently from those which had gone before it. Under the day of the week was written the word "London"--noting which, he began to read the letter with some appearance of anxiety. It ran thus:
"I write, my dearest love, in the greatest possible agitation and despair. All the hopes I felt, and expressed to you, that any absence would not last more than a few days, and that I should not be obliged to journey farther from Dibbledean than London, have been entirely frustrated. I am absolutely compelled to go to Germany, and may be away as long as three or four months. You see, I tell you the worst at once, Mary, because I know your courage and high spirit, and feel sure that you will bear up bravely against this unforeseen parting, for both our sakes. How glad I am that I gave you my hair for your Bracelet, when I did; and that I got yours in return! It will be such a consolation to both of us to have our keepsakes to look at now.
"If it only rested with _me_ to go or not, no earthly consideration should induce me to take this journey. But the rights and interests of others are concerned in my setting forth; and I must, therefore, depart at the expense of my own wishes, and my own happiness. I go this very day, and can only steal a few minutes to write to you. My pen hurries over the paper without stopping an instant--I am so agitated that I hardly know what I am saying to you.
"If anything, dearest Mary, could add to my sense of the misfortune of being obliged to leave you, it would be the apprehension which I now feel, that I may have ignorantly offended you, or that something has happened which you don"t like to tell me. Ever since I noticed, ten days ago, that little alteration in your manner, I have been afraid you had something on your mind that you were unwilling to confide to me. The very last time we saw each other I thought you had been crying; and I am sure you looked away uneasily, whenever our eyes met. What is it? Do relieve my anxiety by telling me what it is in your first letter! The moment I get to the other side of the Channel, I will send you word, where to direct to. I will write constantly--mind you write constantly too. Love me, and remember me always, till I return, never, I hope, to leave you again.--A. C."
Over this letter, Mat meditated long before he quietly cast it away among the rest. When he had at last thrown it from him there remained only three more to examine. They proved to be notes of no consequence, and had been evidently written at an earlier period than the letters he had just read. After hastily looking them over, he searched carefully all through the box, but no papers, of any sort remained in it. That hurried letter, with its abrupt announcement of the writer"s departure from England, was the latest in date--the last of the series!
After he had made this discovery, he sat for a little while vacantly gazing out of the window. His sense of the useless result to which the search he had been prosecuting had led him, thus far, seemed to have robbed him of half his energy already. He looked once or twice at the letter superscribed by Joanna Grice, mechanically reading along the line on the cover:--"Justification of my conduct towards my niece,"--but not attempting to examine what was written inside. It was only after a long interval of hesitation and delay that he at last roused himself. "I must sweep these things out of the way, and read all what I"ve got to read before Zack comes in," he said to himself, gathering up the letters heaped at his feet, and thrusting them all back again together, with an oath, into the box.
He listened carefully once or twice after he had shut down the lid, and while he was tying the cords over it, to ascertain whether his wild young friend was opening the street door yet, or not. How short a time he had pa.s.sed in Zack"s company, yet how thoroughly well he knew him, not as to his failings only, but as to his merits besides! How wisely he foreboded that his boisterous fellow-lodger would infallibly turn against him as an enemy, and expose him without an instant"s hesitation, if young Thorpe got any hint of his first experimental scheme for discovering poor Mr. Blyth"s anxiously-treasured secret by underhand and treacherous means! Mat"s cunning had proved an invaluable resource to him on many a critical occasion already; but he had never been more admirably served by it than now, when it taught him to be cautious of betraying himself to Zack.
For the present there seemed to be no danger of interruption. He corded up the box at his leisure, concealed it in its accustomed place, took his brandy-bottle from the cupboard, opened Joanna Grice"s letter--and still there was no sound of any one entering, in the pa.s.sage downstairs.
Before he began to read, he drank some of the spirit from the neck of the bottle. Was there some inexplicable dread stealing over him at the mere prospect of examining the contents of this one solitary letter?
It seemed as if there was. His finger trembled so, when he tried to guide himself by it along each successive line of the cramped writing which he was now attempting to decipher, that he had to take a second dram to steady it. And when he at length fairly began the letter, he did not pursue his occupation either as quietly or as quickly as he had followed it before. Sometimes he read a line or two aloud, sometimes he overlooked several sentences, and went on to another part of the long narrative--now growling out angry comments on what he was reading; and now das.h.i.+ng down the paper impatiently on his knees, with fierce outbursts of oaths, which he had picked up in the terrible swearing-school of the Californian gold mines.
He began, however, with perfect regularity at the proper part of the letter; sitting as near to the window as he could, and slanting the closely written page before him, so as to give himself the full benefit of all the afternoon light which still flowed into the room.
CHAPTER VIII. JOANNA GRICE"S NARRATIVE.
"I intend this letter to be read after my death, and I purpose calling it plainly a Justification of my conduct towards my Niece. Not because I think my conduct wants any excuse--but because others, ignorant of my true motives, may think that my actions want justifying, and may wickedly condemn me unless I make some such statement in my own defense as the present. There may still be living one member of my late brother"s family, whose voice would, I feel sure, be raised against me for what I have done. The relation to whom I refer has been--"
(Here Mat, who had read carefully thus far, grew impatient, and growling out some angry words, guided himself hastily down the letter with his finger till he arrived at the second paragraph.)
"--It was in the April month of 1827 that the villain who was the ruin of my niece, and the dishonor of the once respectable family to which she belonged, first came to Dibbledean. He took the little four room cottage called Jay"s Cottage, which was then to be let furnished, and which stands out of the town about a quarter of a mile down Church-lane.
He called himself Mr. Carr, and the few letters that came to him were directed to "Arthur Carr, Esq."
"He was quite a young man,--I should say not more than four or five and twenty--very quiet mannered and delicate--or rather effeminate looking, as I thought--for he wore his hair quite long over his shoulders, in the foreign way, and had a clear, soft complexion, almost like a woman"s.
Though he appeared to be a gentleman, he always kept out of the way of making acquaintances among the respectable families about Dibbledean. He had no friends of his own to come and see him that I heard of, except an old gentleman who might have been his father, and who came once or twice. His own account of himself was, that he came to Jay"s Cottage for quiet, and retirement, and study; but he was very reserved, and would let n.o.body make up to him until the miserable day when he and my brother Joshua, and then my niece Mary, all got acquainted together.
"Before I go on to anything else, I must say first, that Mr. Carr was what they call a botanist. Whenever it was fine, he was always out of doors, gathering bits of leaves, which it seems he carried home in a tin case, and dried, and kept by him. He hired a gardener for the bit of ground round about Jay"s Cottage; and the man told me once, that his master knew more about flowers and how to grow them than anybody he ever met with. Mr. Carr used to make little pictures, too, of flowers and leaves set together in patterns. These things were thought very odd amus.e.m.e.nts for a young man to take up with; but he was as fond of them as others of his age might be hunting or shooting. He brought down many books with him, and read a great deal; but from all that I heard, he spent more time over his flowers and his botany than anything else.
"We had, at that time, the two best shops in Dibbledean. Joshua sold hosiery, and I carried on a good dress-making and general millinery business. Both our shops were under the same roof, with a part.i.tion wall between. One day Mr. Carr came in Joshua"s shop, and wanted something which my brother had not got as ready to hand as the common things that the townspeople generally bought. Joshua begged him to sit down for a few minutes; but Mr. Carr (the parlor door at the bottom of the shop being left open) happened to look into the garden, which he could see very well through the window, and said that he would like to wait there, and look at the flowers. Joshua was only too glad to have his garden taken such notice of, by a gentleman who was a botanist; so he showed his customer in there, and then went up into the warehouse to look for what was wanted.
"My niece, Mary, worked in my part of the house, along with the other young women. The room they used to be in looked into the garden; and from the window my niece must have seen Mr. Carr, and must have slipped down stairs (I not being in the way just then) to peep at the strange gentleman--or, more likely, to make believe she was accidentally walking in the garden, and so get noticed by him. All I know is, that when I came up into the workroom and found she was not there, and looked out of the window, I saw her, and Joshua, and Mr. Carr all standing together on the gra.s.s plot, the strange gentleman talking to her quite intimate, with a flower in his hand.
"I called out to her to come back to her work directly. She looked up at me, smiling in her bold impudent way, and said:--"Father has told me I may stop and learn what this gentleman is so kind as to teach me about my geraniums." After that, I could say nothing more before the stranger: and when he was gone, and she came back triumphing, and laughing, and singing about the room, more like a mad play-actress than a decent young woman, I kept quiet and bore with her provocation. But I went down to my brother Joshua the same day, and talked to him seriously, and warned him that she ought to be kept stricter, and never let to have her own way, and offered to keep a strict hand over her myself, if he would only support me properly. But he put me off with careless, jesting words, which he learned to repent of bitterly afterwards.
"Joshua was as pious and respectable a man as ever lived: but it was his misfortune to be too easy-tempered, and too proud of his daughter.
Having lost his wife, and his eldest boy and girl, he seemed so fond of Mary, that he could deny her nothing. There was, to be sure, another one left of his family of children, who--"
(Here, again, Mat lost patience. He had been muttering to himself angrily for the last minute or two, while he read--and now once more he pa.s.sed over several lines of the letter, and went on at once to a new paragraph.)
"I have said she was vain of her good looks, and bold, and flighty; and I must now add, that she was also hasty and pa.s.sionate, and reckless.
But she had wheedling ways with her, which n.o.body was sharp enough to see through but me. When I made complaints against her to her father, and proved that I was right in making them, she always managed to get him to forgive her. She behaved, from the outset, (though I stood in the place of a mother to her,) as perversely towards me as usual, in respect to Mr. Carr. It had flattered her pride to be noticed and bowed to just as if she was a born lady, by a gentleman, and a customer at the shop.
And the very same evening, at tea time, she undid before my face the whole effect of the good advice I had been giving her father. What with jumping on his knee, kissing him, tying and untying his cravat, sticking flowers in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and going on altogether more like a child than a grown-up young woman, she wheedled him into promising that he would take her next Sunday to see Mr. Carr"s garden; for it seems the gentleman had invited them to look at his flowers. I had tried my best, when I heard it, to persuade my brother not to accept the invitation and let her sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with a stranger under her father"s own nose; but all that I could say was useless now. She had got the better of me, and when I put in my word, she had her bold laugh and her light answer ready to insult me with directly. Her father said he wondered I was not amused at her high spirits. I shook my head, but said nothing in return.
Poor man! he lived to see where her "high spirits" led her to.
"On the Sunday, after church, they went to Mr. Carr"s. Though my advice was set at defiance in this way, I determined to persevere in keeping a stricter watch over my niece than ever. I felt that the maintaining the credit and reputation of the family rested with me, and I determined that I would try my best to uphold our good name. It is some little comfort to me, after all that has happened, to remember that I did my utmost to carry out this resolution. The blame of our dishonor lies not at my door. I disliked and distrusted Mr. Carr from the very first; and I tried hard to make others as suspicious of him as I was. But all I could say, and all I could do, availed nothing against the wicked cunning of my niece. Watch and restrain her as I might, she was sure--"
(Once more Mat broke off abruptly in the middle of a sentence. This time, however, it was to strike a light. The brief day of winter was fast fading out--the coming darkness was deepening over the pages of Joanna Grice"s narrative. When he had lit his candle, and had sat down to read again, he lost his place, and, not having patience to look for it carefully, went on at once with the first lines that happened to strike his eye.)