Her look of embarra.s.sment did not leave her with the postman"s departure.
She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with tears.
A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her bed-chamber. Anna"s mistress looked at her, and said: "How dismal you seem this morning, Anna. What"s the matter?"
"I"m not dismal, I"m glad; only I--" She stopped to stifle a sob.
"Well?"
"I"ve got a letter--and what good is it to me, if I can"t read a word in it!"
"Why, I"ll read it, child, if necessary."
"But this is from somebody--I don"t want anybody to read it but myself!"
Anna murmured.
"I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?"
"I think so." Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: "Then will you read it to me, ma"am?"
This was the secret of Anna"s embarra.s.sment and flutterings. She could neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wess.e.x Plain where, even in days of national education, there had been no school within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there had been n.o.body to investigate Anna"s circ.u.mstances, n.o.body to care about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress"s phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the letter.
Edith Harnham"s large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical pa.s.siveness. She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a tender answer.
"Now--you"ll do it for me, won"t you, dear mistress?" said Anna eagerly.
"And you"ll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn"t bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the earth with shame if he knew that!"
From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions, and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern filled Edith"s heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her happiness to the issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However, what was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna"s only protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna"s eager request that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this young London man"s letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circ.u.mstances she might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.
A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham"s hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in.
Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna"s humble note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life, the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham"s.
"Won"t you at least put your name yourself?" she said. "You can manage to write that by this time?"
"No, no," said Anna, shrinking back. "I should do it so bad. He"d be ashamed of me, and never see me again!"
The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.
Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs.
Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day. For the first time since Raye"s visit Anna had gone to stay over a night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for her maid"s collaboration. The luxury of writing to him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had indulged herself therein.
Why was it a luxury?
Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a _pis aller_, at the age of seven-and- twenty--some three years before this date--to find afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.
She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.
They were her own impa.s.sioned and pent-up ideas--lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep up the disguise--that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna"s delight, who, una.s.sisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from Anna"s own lips made apparently no impression upon him.
The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.
There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs.
Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking down at Edith"s knees, she made confession that the result of her relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.
Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking such steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.
Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.
But a week later the girl came to her mistress"s room with another note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find time for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham"s counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was imperative: to keep the young man"s romantic interest in her alive.
Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her _protegee_, request him on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities. She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it again from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to discuss what had better be done.
It may well be supposed that Anna"s own feelings had not been quite in accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress"s judgment had ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. "All I want is that _niceness_ you can so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can"t for the life o" me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same thing and feel it exactly when you"ve written it down!"
When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone, she bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept.
"I wish it was mine--I wish it was!" she murmured. "Yet how can I say such a wicked thing!"
CHAPTER V
The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The intelligence itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of treating him in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach, the devotion to his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every line, all made up a n.o.bility of character that he had never dreamt of finding in womankind.
"G.o.d forgive me!" he said tremulously. "I have been a wicked wretch. I did not know she was such a treasure as this!"
He rea.s.sured her instantly; declaring that he would not of course desert her, that he would provide a home for her somewhere. Meanwhile she was to stay where she was as long as her mistress would allow her.
But a misfortune supervened in this direction. Whether an inkling of Anna"s circ.u.mstances reached the knowledge of Mrs. Harnham"s husband or not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith"s entreaties, to leave the house. By her own choice she decided to go back for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a consultation as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in the girl"s inability to continue personally what had been begun in her name, and in the difficulty of their acting in concert as heretofore, she requested Mrs. Harnham--the only well-to-do friend she had in the world--to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them on afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might at least get some neighbour to read them to her, if a trustworthy one could be met with.
Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.
Thus it befel that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position of having to correspond, under no supervision by the real woman, with a man not her husband, in terms which were virtually those of a wife, concerning a condition that was not Edith"s at all; the man being one for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part, she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly, but strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it as if intended for herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart and no other.
Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl"s absence, the high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious intimacy engendered such a flow of pa.s.sionateness as was never exceeded.
For conscience" sake Edith at first sent on each of his letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies; but later on these so-called copies were much abridged, and many letters on both sides were not sent on at all.
Though selfish, and, superficially at least, infested with the self-indulgent vices of artificial society, there was a substratum of honesty and fairness in Raye"s character. He had really a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her some of the letters.
"She seems fairly educated," Miss Raye observed. "And bright in ideas.
She expresses herself with a taste that must be innate."
"Yes. She writes very prettily, doesn"t she, thanks to these elementary schools?"
"One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one"s self, poor thing."
The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming difficulty by marrying her.
This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs.
Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna jumped for joy like a little child. And poor, crude directions for answering appropriately were given to Edith Harnham, who on her return to the city carried them out with warm intensification.