"Where shall I tell it?"
"Here!" she said eagerly. "Here, where you found me helpless--here, where you have brought me back to life, and where I have first learned to know you. I can bear the hardest words you say to me if you will only say them in this room. It is impossible I can be away longer than a month; a month will be enough and more than enough. If I come back--"
She stopped confusedly. "I am thinking of myself," she said, "when I ought to be thinking of you. You have your own occupations and your own friends. Will you decide for us? Will you say how it shall be?"
"It shall be as you wish. If you come back in a month, you will find me here."
"Will it cause you no sacrifice of your own comfort and your own plans?"
"It will cause me nothing," he replied, "but a journey back to the City." He rose and took his hat. "I must go there at once," he added, "or I shall not be in time."
"It is a promise between us?" she said, and held out her hand.
"Yes," he answered, a little sadly; "it is a promise."
Slight as it was, the shade of melancholy in his manner pained her.
Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently pressed the hand he gave her. "If _that_ won"t tell him the truth," she thought, "nothing will."
It failed to tell him the truth; but it forced a question on his mind which he had not ventured to ask himself before. "Is it her grat.i.tude, or her love; that is speaking to me?" he wondered. "If I was only a younger man, I might almost hope it was her love." That terrible sum in subtraction which had first presented itself on the day when she told him her age began to trouble him again as he left the house. He took twenty from forty-one, at intervals, all the way back to the ship-owners" office in Cornhill.
Left by herself, Magdalen approached the table to write the line of answer which Miss Garth requested, and gratefully to accept the proposal that had been made to her.
The second letter which she had laid aside and forgotten was the first object that caught her eye on changing her place. She opened it immediately, and, not recognizing the handwriting, looked at the signature. To her unutterable astonishment, her correspondent proved to be no less a person than--old Mr. Clare!
The philosopher"s letter dispensed with all the ordinary forms of address, and entered on the subject without prefatory phrases of any kind, in these uncompromising terms:
"I have more news for you of that contemptible cur, my son. Here it is in the fewest possible words.
"I always told you, if you remember, that Frank was a Sneak. The very first trace recovered of him, after his running away from his employers in China, presents him in that character. Where do you think he turns up next? He turns up, hidden behind a couple of flour barrels, on board an English vessel bound homeward from Hong-Kong to London.
"The name of the ship was the _Deliverance_, and the commander was one Captain Kirke. Instead of acting like a sensible man, and throwing Frank overboard, Captain Kirke was fool enough to listen to his story. He made the most of his misfortunes, you may be sure. He was half starved; he was an Englishman lost in a strange country, without a friend to help him; his only chance of getting home was to sneak into the hold of an English vessel--and he had sneaked in, accordingly, at Hong-Kong, two days since. That was his story. Any other l out in Frank"s situation would have been rope"s ended by any other captain. Deserving no pity from anybody, Frank was, as a matter of course, coddle d and compa.s.sionated on the spot. The captain took him by the hand, the crew pitied him, and the pa.s.sengers patted him on the back. He was fed, clothed, and presented with his pa.s.sage home. Luck enough so far, you will say. Nothing of the sort; nothing like luck enough for my despicable son.
"The ship touched at the Cape of Good Hope. Among his other acts of folly Captain Kirke took a woman pa.s.senger on board at that place--not a young woman by any means--the elderly widow of a rich colonist. Is it necessary to say that she forthwith became deeply interested in Frank and his misfortunes? Is it necessary to tell you what followed? Look back at my son"s career, and you will see that what followed was all of a piece with what went before. He didn"t deserve your poor father"s interest in him--and he got it. He didn"t deserve your attachment--and he got it. He didn"t deserve the best place in one of the best offices in London; he didn"t deserve an equally good chance in one of the best mercantile houses in China; he didn"t deserve food, clothing, pity, and a free pa.s.sage home--and he got them all. Last, not least, he didn"t even deserve to marry a woman old enough to be his grandmother--and he has done it! Not five minutes since I sent his wedding-cards out to the dust-hole, and tossed the letter that came with them into the fire. The last piece of information which that letter contains is that he and his wife are looking out for a house and estate to suit them. Mark my words!
Frank will get one of the best estates in England; a seat in the House of Commons will follow as a matter of course; and one of the legislators of this a.s.s-ridden country will be--MY LOUT!
"If you are the sensible girl I have always taken you for, you have long since learned to rate Frank at his true value, and the news I send you will only confirm your contempt for him. I wish your poor father could but have lived to see this day! Often as I have missed my old gossip, I don"t know that I ever felt the loss of him so keenly as I felt it when Frank"s wedding-cards and Frank"s letter came to this house. Your friend, if you ever want one,
"FRANCIS CLARE, Sen."
With one momentary disturbance of her composure, produced by the appearance of Kirke"s name in Mr. Clare"s singular narrative, Magdalen read the letter steadily through from beginning to end. The time when it could have distressed her was gone by; the scales had long since fallen from her eyes. Mr. Clare himself would have been satisfied if he had seen the quiet contempt on her face as she laid aside his letter.
The only serious thought it cost her was a thought in which Kirke was concerned. The careless manner in which he had referred in her presence to the pa.s.sengers on board his ship, without mentioning any of them by their names, showed her that Frank must have kept silence on the subject of the engagement once existing between them. The confession of that vanished delusion was left for her to make, as part of the story of the past which she had pledged herself unreservedly to reveal.
She wrote to Miss Garth, and sent the letter to the post immediately.
The next morning brought a line of rejoinder. Miss Garth had written to secure the cottage at Shanklin, and Mr. Merrick had consented to Magdalen"s removal on the following day. Norah would be the first to arrive at the house; and Miss Garth would follow, with a comfortable carriage to take the invalid to the railway. Every needful arrangement had been made for her; the effort of moving was the one effort she would have to make.
Magdalen read the letter thankfully, but her thoughts wandered from it, and followed Kirke on his return to the City. What was the business which had once already taken him there in the morning? And why had the promise exchanged between them obliged him to go to the City again, for the second time in one day?
Was it by any chance business relating to the sea? Were his employers tempting him to go back to his ship?
CHAPTER IV.
THE first agitation of the meeting between the sisters was over; the first vivid impressions, half pleasurable, half painful, had softened a little, and Norah and Magdalen sat together hand in hand, each rapt in the silent fullness of her own joy. Magdalen was the first to speak.
"You have something to tell me, Norah?"
"I have a thousand things to tell you, my love; and you have ten thousand things to tell me.--Do you mean that second surprise which I told you of in my letter?"
"Yes. I suppose it must concern me very nearly, or you would hardly have thought of mentioning it in your first letter?"
"It does concern you very nearly. You have heard of George"s house in Ess.e.x? You must be familiar, at least, with the name of St. Crux?--What is there to start at, my dear? I am afraid you are hardly strong enough for any more surprises just yet?"
"Quite strong enough, Norah. I have something to say to you about St.
Crux--I have a surprise, on my side, for _you._"
"Will you tell it me now?"
"Not now. You shall know it when we are at the seaside; you shall know it before I accept the kindness which has invited me to your husband"s house."
"What _can_ it be? Why not tell me at once?"
"You used often to set me the example of patience, Norah, in old times; will you set me the example now?"
"With all my heart. Shall I return to my own story as well? Yes? Then we will go back to it at once. I was telling you that St. Crux is George"s house, in Ess.e.x, the house he inherited from his uncle. Knowing that Miss Garth had a curiosity to see the place, he left word (when he went abroad after the admiral"s death) that she and any friends who came with her were to be admitted, if she happened to find herself in the neighborhood during his absence. Miss Garth and I, and a large party of Mr. Tyrrel"s friends, found ourselves in the neighborhood not long after George"s departure. We had all been invited to see the launch of Mr.
Tyrrel"s new yacht from the builder"s yard at Wivenhoe, in Ess.e.x. When the launch was over, the rest of the company returned to Colchester to dine. Miss Garth and I contrived to get into the same carriage together, with n.o.body but my two little pupils for our companions. We gave the coachman his orders, and drove round by St. Crux. The moment Miss Garth mentioned her name we were let in, and shown all over the house. I don"t know how to describe it to you. It is the most bewildering place I ever saw in my life--"
"Don"t attempt to describe it, Norah. Go on with your story instead."
"Very well. My story takes me straight into one of the rooms at St.
Crux--a room about as long as your street here--so dreary, so dirty, and so dreadfully cold that I shiver at the bare recollection of it. Miss Garth was for getting out of it again as speedily as possible, and so was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking at a singular piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture in the comfortless place. She called it a tripod, I think. (There is nothing to be alarmed at, Magdalen; I a.s.sure you there is nothing to be alarmed at!) At any rate, it was a strange, three-legged thing, which supported a great panful of charcoal ashes at the top. It was considered by all good judges (the housekeeper told us) a wonderful piece of chasing in metal; and she especially pointed out the beauty of some scroll-work running round the inside of the pan, with Latin mottoes on it, signifying--I forget what. I felt not the slightest interest in the thing myself, but I looked close at the scroll-work to satisfy the housekeeper. To confess the truth, she was rather tiresome with her mechanically learned lecture on fine metal work; and, while she was talking, I found myself idly stirring the soft feathery white ashes backward and forward with my hand, pretending to listen, with my mind a hundred miles away from her. I don"t know how long or how short a time I had been playing with the ashes, when my fingers suddenly encountered a piece of crumpled paper hidden deep among them. When I brought it to the surface, it proved to be a letter--a long letter full of cramped, close writing.--You have antic.i.p.ated my story, Magdalen, before I can end it! You know as well as I do that the letter which my idle fingers found was the Secret Trust. Hold out your hand, my dear. I have got George"s permission to show it to you, and there it is!"
She put the Trust into her sister"s hand. Magdalen took it from her mechanically. "You!" she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St. Crux--"_you_ have found it!"
"Yes," said Norah, gayly; "the Trust has proved no exception to the general perversity of all lost things. Look for them, and they remain invisible. Leave them alone, and they reveal themselves! You and your lawyer, Magdalen, were both justified in supposing that your interest in this discovery was an interest of no common kind. I spare you all our consultations after I had produced the crumpled paper from the ashes. It ended in George"s lawyer being written to, and in George himself being recalled from the Continent. Miss Garth and I both saw him immediately on his return. He did what neither of us could do--he solved the mystery of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes. Admiral Bartram, you must know, was all his life subject to fits of somnambulism. He had been found walking in his sleep not long before his death--just at the time, too, when he was sadly troubled in his mind on the subject of that very letter in your hand. George"s idea is that he must have fancied he was doing in his sleep what he would have died rather than do in his waking moments--destroying the Trust. The fire had been lighted in the pan not long before, and he no doubt saw it still burning in his dream. This was George"s explanation of the strange position of the letter when I discovered it. The question of what was to be done with the letter itself came next, and was no easy question for a woman to understand.
But I determined to master it, and I did master it, because it related to you."
"Let me try to master it, in my turn," said Magdalen. "I have a particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter as you know yourself. What has it done for others, and what is it to do for me?"
"My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk of it! Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a fortune."
"Is my only claim to the fortune the claim which this letter gives me?"
"Yes; the letter is your only claim. Shall I try if I can explain it in two words? Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer"s opinion, have been made a matter for dispute, though I am sure George would have sanctioned no proceeding of that sort. Taken, however, with the postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally binding, as well as morally binding, on the admiral"s representatives.
I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my own language instead of in the lawyer"s. The end of the thing was simply this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone"s estate (another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain reason--that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed.