I made the customary reply, and explained that I had seen her at the opera. "Are you staying in London?" I asked. "May I have the honor of calling on you?"
Her companion answered for her before she could speak.
"My wife thanks you, sir, for the compliment you pay her. She doesn"t receive visitors. We both wish you good-night."
Saying those words, he took off his hat with a sardonic a.s.sumption of respect; and, holding her arm in his, forced her to walk on abruptly with him. Feeling certainly a.s.sured by this time that the man was no other than Van Brandt, I was on the point of answering him sharply, when Mrs. Van Brandt checked the rash words as they rose to my lips.
"For my sake!" she whispered, over her shoulder, with an imploring look that instantly silenced me. After all, she was free (if she liked) to go back to the man who had so vilely deceived and deserted her. I bowed and left them, feeling with no common bitterness the humiliation of entering into rivalry with Mr. Van Brandt.
I crossed to the other side of the street. Before I had taken three steps away from her, the old infatuation fastened its hold on me again.
I submitted, without a struggle against myself, to the degradation of turning spy and following them home. Keeping well behind, on the opposite side of the way, I tracked them to their own door, and entered in my pocket-book the name of the street and the number of the house.
The hardest critic who reads these lines cannot feel more contemptuously toward me than I felt toward myself. Could I still love a woman after she had deliberately preferred to me a scoundrel who had married her while he was the husband of another wife? Yes! Knowing what I now knew, I felt that I loved her just as dearly as ever. It was incredible, it was shocking; but it was true. For the first time in my life, I tried to take refuge from my sense of my own degradation in drink. I went to my club, and joined a convivial party at a supper table, and poured gla.s.s after gla.s.s of champagne down my throat, without feeling the slightest sense of exhilaration, without losing for an instant the consciousness of my own contemptible conduct. I went to my bed in despair; and through the wakeful night I weakly cursed the fatal evening at the river-side when I had met her for the first time. But revile her as I might, despise myself as I might, I loved her--I loved her still!
Among the letters laid on my table the next morning there were two which must find their place in this narrative.
The first letter was in a handwriting which I had seen once before, at the hotel in Edinburgh. The writer was Mrs. Van Brandt.
"For your own sake" (the letter ran) "make no attempt to see me, and take no notice of an invitation which I fear you will receive with this note. I am living a degraded life. I have sunk beneath your notice. You owe it to yourself, sir, to forget the miserable woman who now writes to you for the last time, and bids you gratefully a last farewell."
Those sad lines were signed in initials only. It is needless to say that they merely strengthened my resolution to see her at all hazards. I kissed the paper on which her hand had rested, and then I turned to the second letter. It contained the "invitation" to which my correspondent had alluded, and it was expressed in these terms:
"Mr. Van Brandt presents his compliments to Mr. Germaine, and begs to apologize for the somewhat abrupt manner in which he received Mr.
Germaine"s polite advances. Mr. Van Brandt suffers habitually from nervous irritability, and he felt particularly ill last night. He trusts Mr. Germaine will receive this candid explanation in the spirit in which it is offered; and he begs to add that Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted to receive Mr. Germaine whenever he may find it convenient to favor her with a visit."
That Mr. Van Brandt had some sordid interest of his own to serve in writing this grotesquely impudent composition, and that the unhappy woman who bore his name was heartily ashamed of the proceeding on which he had ventured, were conclusions easily drawn after reading the two letters. The suspicion of the man and of his motives which I naturally felt produced no hesitation in my mind as to the course which I had determined to pursue. On the contrary, I rejoiced that my way to an interview with Mrs. Van Brandt was smoothed, no matter with what motives, by Mr. Van Brandt himself.
I waited at home until noon, and then I could wait no longer. Leaving a message of excuse for my mother (I had just sense of shame enough left to shrink from facing her), I hastened away to profit by my invitation on the very day when I received it.
CHAPTER XIV. MRS. VAN BRANDT AT HOME.
As I lifted my hand to ring the house bell, the door was opened from within, and no less a person than Mr. Van Brandt himself stood before me. He had his hat on. We had evidently met just as he was going out.
"My dear sir, how good this is of you! You present the best of all replies to my letter in presenting yourself. Mrs. Van Brandt is at home.
Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted. Pray walk in."
He threw open the door of a room on the ground-floor. His politeness was (if possible) even more offensive than his insolence. "Be seated, Mr.
Germaine, I beg of you." He turned to the open door, and called up the stairs, in a loud and confident voice:
"Mary! come down directly."
"Mary"! I knew her Christian name at last, and knew it through Van Brandt. No words can tell how the name jarred on me, spoken by his lips.
For the first time for years past my mind went back to Mary Dermody and Greenwater Broad. The next moment I heard the rustling of Mrs. Van Brandt"s dress on the stairs. As the sound caught my ear, the old times and the old faces vanished again from my thoughts as completely as if they had never existed. What had _she_ in common with the frail, shy little child, her namesake, of other days? What similarity was perceivable in the sooty London lodging-house to remind me of the bailiff"s flower-scented cottage by the sh.o.r.es of the lake?
Van Brandt took off his hat, and bowed to me with sickening servility.
"I have a business appointment," he said, "which it is impossible to put off. Pray excuse me. Mrs. Van Brandt will do the honors. Good morning."
The house door opened and closed again. The rustling of the dress came slowly nearer and nearer. She stood before me.
"Mr. Germaine!" she exclaimed, starting back, as if the bare sight of me repelled her. "Is this honorable? Is this worthy of you? You allow me to be entrapped into receiving you, and you accept as your accomplice Mr.
Van Brandt! Oh, sir, I have accustomed myself to look up to you as a high-minded man. How bitterly you have disappointed me!"
Her reproaches pa.s.sed by me unheeded. They only heightened her color; they only added a new rapture to the luxury of looking at her.
"If you loved me as faithfully as I love you," I said, "you would understand why I am here. No sacrifice is too great if it brings me into your presence again after two years of absence."
She suddenly approached me, and fixed her eyes in eager scrutiny on my face.
"There must be some mistake," she said. "You cannot possibly have received my letter, or you have not read it?"
"I have received it, and I have read it."
"And Van Brandt"s letter--you have read that too?"
"Yes."
She sat down by the table, and, leaning her arms on it, covered her face with her hands. My answers seemed not only to have distressed, but to have perplexed her. "Are men all alike?" I heard her say. "I thought I might trust in _his_ sense of what was due to himself and of what was compa.s.sionate toward me."
I closed the door and seated myself by her side. She removed her hands from her face when she felt me near her. She looked at me with a cold and steady surprise.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I am going to try if I can recover my place in your estimation," I said. "I am going to ask your pity for a man whose whole heart is yours, whose whole life is bound up in you."
She started to her feet, and looked round her incredulously, as if doubting whether she had rightly heard and rightly interpreted my last words. Before I could speak again, she suddenly faced me, and struck her open hand on the table with a pa.s.sionate resolution which I now saw in her for the first time.
"Stop!" she cried. "There must be an end to this. And an end there shall be. Do you know who that man is who has just left the house? Answer me, Mr. Germaine! I am speaking in earnest."
There was no choice but to answer her. She was indeed in earnest--vehemently in earnest.
"His letter tells me," I said, "that he is Mr. Van Brandt."
She sat down again, and turned her face away from me.
"Do you know how he came to write to you?" she asked. "Do you know what made him invite you to this house?"
I thought of the suspicion that had crossed my mind when I read Van Brandt"s letter. I made no reply.
"You force me to tell you the truth," she went on. "He asked me who you were, last night on our way home. I knew that you were rich, and that _he_ wanted money. I told him I knew nothing of your position in the world. He was too cunning to believe me; he went out to the public-house and looked at a directory. He came back and said, "Mr. Germaine has a house in Berkeley Square and a country-seat in the Highlands. He is not a man for a poor devil like me to offend; I mean to make a friend of him, and I expect you to make a friend of him too." He sat down and wrote to you. I am living under that man"s protection, Mr. Germaine. His wife is not dead, as you may suppose; she is living, and I know her to be living. I wrote to you that I was beneath your notice, and you have obliged me to tell you why. Am I sufficiently degraded to bring you to your senses?"
I drew closer to her. She tried to get up and leave me. I knew my power over her, and used it (as any man in my place would have used it) without scruple. I took her hand.
"I don"t believe you have voluntarily degraded yourself," I said. "You have been forced into your present position: there are circ.u.mstances which excuse you, and which you are purposely keeping back from me.
Nothing will convince me that you are a base woman. Should I love you as I love you, if you were really unworthy of me?"
She struggled to free her hand; I still held it. She tried to change the subject. "There is one thing you haven"t told me yet," she said, with a faint, forced smile. "Have you seen the apparition of me again since I left you?"
"No. Have _you_ ever seen _me_ again, as you saw me in your dream at the inn in Edinburgh?"