Strong as the impression was which Captain Bennydeck had produced on Randal, Mrs. Presty’s first words dismissed it from his mind. She asked him if he had any message for his brother.
Randal instantly looked at the clock. “Has Catherine not sent to the farm, yet?” he asked in astonishment.
Mrs. Presty’s mind seemed to be absorbed in her daughter. “Ah, poor Catherine! Worn out with anxiety and watching at Kitty’s bedside. Night after night without any sleep; night after night tortured by suspense. As usual, she can depend on her old mother for sympathy. I have taken all her household duties on myself, till she is in better health.”
Randal tried again. “Mrs. Presty, am I to understand (after the plain direction Herbert gave) that no messenger has been sent to the farm?”
Mrs. Presty held her venerable head higher than ever, when Randal pronounced his brother’s name. “I see no necessity for being in a hurry,” she answered stiffly, “after the brutal manner in which Herbert has behaved to me. Put yourself in my place — and imagine what you would feel if you were told to hold your tongue.”
Randal wasted no more time on ears that were deaf to remonstrance. Feeling the serious necessity of interfering to some good purpose, he asked where he might find his sister-in-law.
“I have taken Catherine into the garden,” Mrs. Presty announced. “The doctor himself suggested — no, I may say, ordered it. He is afraid that she may fall ill next, poor soul, if she doesn’t get air and exercise.”
In Mrs. Linley’s own interests, Randal resolved on advising her to write to her husband by the messenger; explaining that she was not to blame for the inexcusable delay which had already taken place. Without a word more to Mrs. Presty, he hastened out of the room. That inveterately distrustful woman called him back. She desired to know where he was going, and why he was in a hurry.
“I am going to the garden,” Randal answered.
“To speak to Catherine?”
“Yes.”
“Needless trouble, my dear Randal. She will be back in a quarter of an hour, and she will pass through this room on her way upstairs.”
Another quarter of an hour was a matter of no importance to Mrs. Presty! Randal took his own way — the way into the garden.
His silence and his determination to join his sister-in-law roused Mrs. Presty’s ready suspicions; she concluded that he was bent on making mischief between her daughter and herself. The one thing to do in this case was to follow him instantly. The active old lady trotted out of the room, strongly inclined to think that the Evil Genius of the family might be Randal Linley after all!
They had both taken the shortest way to the garden; that is to say, the way through the library, which communicated at its furthest end with the corridor and the vaulted flight of stairs leading directly out of the house. Of the two doors in the drawing-room, one, on the left, led to the grand staircase and the hall; the other, on the right, opened on the backstairs, and on a side entrance to the house, used by the family when they were pressed for time, as well as by the servants.
The drawing-room had not been empty more than a few minutes when the door on the right was suddenly opened. Herbert Linley, entered with hurried, uncertain steps. He took the chair that was nearest to him, and dropped into it like a man overpowered by agitation or fatigue.
He had ridden from the farm at headlong speed, terrified by the unexplained delay in the arrival of the messenger from home. Unable any longer to suffer the torment of unrelieved suspense, he had returned to make inquiry at the house. As he interpreted the otherwise inexplicable neglect of his instructions, the last chance of saving the child’s life had failed, and his wife had been afraid to tell him the dreadful truth.
After an interval, he rose and went into the library.
It was empty, like the drawing-room. The bell was close by him. He lifted his hand to ring it — and drew back. As brave a man as ever lived, he knew what fear was now. The father’s courage failed him before the prospect of summoning a servant, and hearing, for all he knew to the contrary, that his child was dead.
How long he stood there, alone and irresolute, he never remembered when he thought of it in after-days. All he knew was that there came a time when a sound in the drawing-room attracted his attention. It was nothing more important than the opening of a door.
The sound came from that side of the room which was nearest to the grand staircase — and therefore nearest also to the hall in one direction, and to the bed-chambers in the other.
Some person had entered the room. Whether it was one of the family or one of the servants, he would hear in either case what had happened in his absence. He parted the curtains over the library entrance, and looked through.
The person was a woman. She stood with her back turned toward the library, lifting a cloak off a chair. As she shook the cloak out before putting it on, she changed her position. He saw the face, never to be forgotten by him to the last day of his life. He saw Sydney Westerfield.
Linley had one instant left, in which he might have drawn, back into the library in time to escape Sydney’s notice. He was incapable of the effort of will. Grief and suspense had deprived him of that elastic readiness of mind which springs at once from thought to action. For a moment he hesitated. In that moment she looked up and saw him.
With a faint cry of alarm she let the cloak drop from her hands. As helpless as he was, as silent as he was, she stood rooted to the spot.
He tried to control himself. Hardly knowing what he said, he made commonplace excuses, as if he had been a stranger: “I am sorry to have startled you; I had no idea of finding you in this room.”
Sydney pointed to her cloak on the floor, and to her hat on a chair near it. Understanding the necessity which had brought her into the room, he did his best to reconcile her to the meeting that had followed.
“It’s a relief to me to have seen you,” he said, “before you leave us.”
A relief to him to see her! Why? How? What did that strange word mean, addressed to her? She roused herself, and put the question to him.
“It’s surely better for me,” he answered, “to hear the miserable news from you than from a servant.”
“What miserable news?” she asked, still as perplexed as ever.
He could preserve his self-control no longer; the misery in him forced its way outward at last. The convulsive struggles for breath which burst from a man in tears shook him from head to foot.
“My poor little darling!” he gasped. “My only child!”
All that was embarrassing in her position passed from Sydney’s mind in an instant. She stepped close up to him; she laid her hand gently and fearlessly on his arm. “Oh, Mr. Linley, what dreadful mistake is this?”
His dim eyes rested on her with a piteous expression of doubt. He heard her — and he was afraid to believe her. She was too deeply distressed, too full of the truest pity for him, to wait and think before she spoke. “Yes! yes!” she cried, under the impulse of the moment. “The dear child knew me again, the moment I spoke to her. Kitty’s recovery is only a matter of time.”
He staggered back — with a livid change in his face startling to see. The mischief done by Mrs. Presty’s sense of injury had led already to serious results. If the thought in Linley, at that moment, had shaped itself into words, he would have said, “And Catherine never told me of it!” How bitterly he thought of the woman who had left him in suspense — how gratefully he felt toward the woman who had lightened his heart of the heaviest burden ever laid on it!
Innocent of all suspicion of the feeling that she had aroused, Sydney blamed her own want of discretion as the one cause of the change that she perceived in him. “How thoughtless, how cruel of me,” she said, “not to have been more careful in telling you the good news! Pray forgive me.”
“You thoughtless! you cruel!” At the bare idea of her speaking in that way of herself, his sense of what he owed to her defied all restraint. He seized her hands and covered them with grateful kisses. “Dear Sydney! dear, good Sydney!”
She drew back from him; not abruptly, not as if she felt offended. Her fine perception penetrated the meaning of those harmless kisses — the uncontrollable outburst of a sense of relief beyond the reach of expression in words. But she changed the subject. Mrs. Linley (she told him) had kindly ordered fresh horses to be put to the carriage, so that she might go back to her duties if the doctor sanctioned it.
She turned away to take up her cloak. Linley stopped her. “You can’t leave Kitty,” he said, positively.
A faint smile brightened her face for a moment. “Kitty has fallen asleep — such a sweet, peaceful sleep! I don’t think I should have left her but for that. The maid is watching at the bedside, and Mrs. Linley is only away for a little while.”
“Wait a few minutes,” he pleaded; “it’s so long since we have seen each other.”
The tone in which he spoke warned her to persist in leaving him while her resolution remained firm. “I had arranged with Mrs. MacEdwin,” she began, “if all went well —”
“Speak of yourself,” he interposed. “Tell me if you are happy.”
She let this pass without a reply. “The doctor sees no harm,” she went on, “in my being away for a few hours. Mrs. MacEdwin has offered to send me here in the evening, so that I can sleep in Kitty’s room.”
“You don’t look well, Sydney. You are pale and worn — you are not happy.”
She began to tremble. For the second time, she turned away to take up her cloak. For the second time, he stopped her.
“Not just yet,” he said. “You don’t know how it distresses me to see you so sadly changed. I remember the time when you were the happiest creature living. Do you remember it, too?”
“Don’t ask me!” was all she could say.
He sighed as he looked at her. “It’s dreadful to think of your young life, that ought to be so bright, wasting and withering among strangers.” He said those words with increasing agitation; his eyes rested on her eagerly with a wild look in them. She made a resolute effort to speak to him coldly — she called him “Mr. Linley”— she bade him good-by.
It was useless. He stood between her and the door; he disregarded what she had said as if he had not heard it. “Hardly a day passes,” he owned to her, “that I don’t think of you.”
“You shouldn’t tell me that!”
“How can I see you again — and not tell you?”
She burst out with a last entreaty. “For God’s sake, let us say good-by!”
His manner became undisguisedly tender; his language changed in the one way of all others that was most perilous to her — he appealed to her pity: “Oh, Sydney, it’s so hard to part with you!”
“Spare me!” she cried, passionately. “You don’t know how I suffer.”
“My sweet angel, I do know it — by what I suffer myself! Do you ever feel for me as I feel for you?”
“Oh, Herbert! Herbert!”
“Have you ever thought of me since we parted?”
She had striven against herself, and against him, till her last effort at resistance was exhausted. In reckless despair she let the truth escape her at last.
“When do I ever think of anything else! I am a wretch unworthy of all the kindness that has been shown to me. I don’t deserve your interest; I don’t even deserve your pity. Send me away — be hard on me — be brutal to me. Have some mercy on a miserable creature whose life is one long hopeless effort to forget you!” Her voice, her look, maddened him. He drew her to his bosom; he held her in his arms; she struggled vainly to get away from him. “Oh,” she murmured, “how cruel you are! Remember, my dear one, remember how young I am, how weak I am. Oh, Herbert, I’m dying — dying — dying!” Her voice grew fainter and fainter; her head sank on his breast. He lifted her face to him with whispered words of love. He kissed her again and again.
The curtains over the library entrance moved noiselessly when they were parted. The footsteps of Catherine Linley were inaudible as she passed through, and entered the room.
She stood still for a moment in silent horror.
Not a sound warned them when she advanced. After hesitating for a moment, she raised her hand toward her husband, as if to tell him of her presence by a touch; drew it back, suddenly recoiling from her own first intention; and touched Sydney instead.
Then, and then only, they knew what had happened.
Face to face, those three persons — with every tie that had once united them snapped asunder in an instant — looked at each other. The man owed a duty to the lost creature whose weakness had appealed to his mercy in vain. The man broke the silence.
“Catherine —”
With immeasurable contempt looking brightly out of her steady eyes, his wife stopped him.
“Not a word!”
He refused to be silent. “It is I,” he said; “I only who am to blame.”
“Spare yourself the trouble of making excuses,” she answered; “they are needless. Herbert Linley, the woman who was once your wife despises you.”
Her eyes turned from him and rested on Sydney Westerfield.
“I have a last word to say to you. Look at me, if you can.”
Sydney lifted her head. She looked vacantly at the outraged woman before her, as if she saw a woman in a dream.
With the same terrible self-possession which she had preserved from the first — standing between her husband and her governess — Mrs. Linley spoke.
“Miss Westerfield, you have saved my child’s life.” She paused — her eyes still resting on the girl’s face. Deadly pale, she pointed to her husband, and said to Sydney: “Take him!”
She passed out of the room — and left them together.
The autumn holiday-time had come to an end; and the tourists had left Scotland to the Scots.
In the dull season, a solitary traveler from the North arrived at the nearest post-town to Mount Morven. A sketchbook and a color-box formed part of his luggage, and declared him to be an artist. Falling into talk over his dinner with the waiter at the hotel, he made inquiries about a picturesque house in the neighborhood, which showed that Mount Morven was well known to him by reputation. When he proposed paying a visit to the old border fortress the next day, the waiter said: “You can’t see the house.” When the traveler asked Why, this man of few words merely added: “Shut up.”
The landlord made his appearance with a bottle of wine and proved to be a more communicative person in his relations with strangers. Presented in an abridged form, and in the English language, these (as he related them) were the circumstances under which Mount Morven had been closed to the public.
A complete dispersion of the family had taken place not long since. For miles round everybody was sorry for it. Rich and poor alike felt the same sympathy with the good lady of the house. She had been most shamefully treated by her husband, and by a good-for-nothing girl employed as governess. To put it plainly, the two had run away together; one report said they had gone abroad, and another declared that they were living in London. Mr. Linley’s conduct was perfectly incomprehensible. He had always borne the highest character — a good landlord, a kind father, a devoted husband. And yet, after more than eight years of exemplary married life, he had disgraced himself. The minister of the parish, preaching on the subject, had attributed this extraordinary outbreak of vice on the part of an otherwise virtuous man, to a possession of the devil. Assuming “the devil,” in this case, to be only a discreet and clerical way of alluding from the pulpit to a woman, the landlord was inclined to agree with the minister. After what had happened, it was, of course, impossible that Mrs. Linley could remain in her husband’s house. She and her little girl, and her mother, were supposed to be living in retirement. They kept the place of their retreat a secret from everybody but Mrs. Linley’s legal adviser, who was instructed to forward letters. But one other member of the family remained to be accounted for. This was Mr. Linley’s younger brother, known at present to be traveling on the Continent. Two trustworthy old servants had been left in charge at Mount Morven — and there was the whole story; and that was why the house was shut up.
In a cottage on the banks of one of the Cumberland Lakes, two ladies were seated at the breakfast-table. The windows of the room opened on a garden which extended to the water’s edge, and on a boat-house and wooden pier beyond. On the pier a little girl was fishing, under the care of her maid. After a prevalence of rainy weather, the sun was warm this morning for the time of year; and the broad sheet of water alternately darkened and brightened as the moving masses of cloud now gathered and now parted over the blue beauty of the sky.
The ladies had finished their breakfast; the elder of the two — that is to say, Mrs. Presty — took up her knitting and eyed her silent daughter with an expression of impatient surprise.
“Another bad night, Catherine?”
The personal attractions that distinguished Mrs. Linley were not derived from the short-lived beauty which depends on youth and health. Pale as she was, her face preserved its fine outline; her features had not lost their grace and symmetry of form. Presenting the appearance of a woman who had suffered acutely, she would have been more than ever (in the eyes of some men) a woman to be admired and loved.
“I seldom sleep well now,” she answered, patiently.
“You don’t give yourself a chance,” Mrs. Presty remonstrated. “Here’s a fine morning — come out for a sail on the lake. To-morrow there’s a concert in the town — let’s take tickets. There’s a want of what I call elastic power in your mind, Catherine — the very quality for which your father was so remarkable; the very quality which Mr. Presty used to say made him envy Mr. Norman. Look at your dress! Where’s the common-sense, at your age, of wearing nothing but black? Nobody’s dead who belongs to us, and yet you do your best to look as if you were in mourning.”
“I have no heart, mamma, to wear colors.”
Mrs. Presty considered this reply to be unworthy of notice. She went on with her knitting, and only laid it down when the servant brought in the letters which had arrived by the morning’s post. They were but two in number — and both were for Mrs. Linley. In the absence of any correspondence of her own, Mrs. Presty took possession of her daughter’s letters.
“One addressed in the lawyer’s handwriting,” she announced; “and one from Randal. Which shall I open for you first?”
“Randal’s letter, if you please.”
Mrs. Presty handed it across the table. “Any news is a relief from the dullness of this place,” she said. “If there are no secrets, Catherine, read it out.”
There were no secrets on the first page.
Randal announced his arrival in London from the Continent, and his intention of staying there for a while. He had met with a friend (formerly an officer holding high rank in the Navy) whom he was glad to see again — a rich man who used his wealth admirably in the interest of his poor and helpless fellow-creatures. A “Home,” established on a new plan, was just now engaging all his attention: he was devoting himself so unremittingly to the founding of this institution that his doctor predicted injury to his health at no distant date. If it was possible to persuade him to take a holiday, Randal might return to the Continent as the traveling-companion of his friend.
“This must be the man whom he first met at the club,” Mrs. Presty remarked. “Well, Catherine, I suppose there is some more of it. What’s the matter? Bad news?”
“Something that I wish Randal had not written. Read it yourself — and don’t talk of it afterward.”
Mrs. Presty read:
“I know nothing whatever of my unfortunate brother. If you think this is a too-indulgent way of alluding to a man who has so shamefully wronged you, let my conviction that he is already beginning to suffer the penalty of his crime plead my excuse. Herbert’s nature is, in some respects, better known to me than it is to you. I am persuaded that your hold on his respect and his devotion is shaken — not lost. He has been misled by one of those passing fancies, disastrous and even criminal in their results, to which men are liable when they are led by no better influence than the influence of their senses. It is not, and never will be, in the nature of women to understand this. I fear I may offend you in what I am now writing; but I must speak what I believe to be the truth, at any sacrifice. Bitter repentance (if he is not already feeling it) is in store for Herbert, when he finds himself tied to a person who cannot bear comparison with you. I say this, pitying the poor girl most sincerely, when I think of her youth and her wretched past life. How it will end I cannot presume to say. I can only acknowledge that I do not look to the future with the absolute despair which you naturally felt when I last saw you.”
Mrs. Presty laid the letter down, privately resolving to write to Randal, and tell him to keep his convictions for the future to himself. A glance at her daughter’s face warned her, if she said anything, to choose a new subject.
The second letter still remained unnoticed. “Shall we see what the lawyer says?” she suggested — and opened the envelope. The lawyer had nothing to say. He simply inclosed a letter received at his office.
Mrs. Presty had long passed the age at which emotion expresses itself outwardly by a change of color. She turned pale, nevertheless, when she looked at the second letter.
The address was in Herbert Linley’s handwriting.
When she was not eating her meals or asleep in her bed, absolute silence on Mrs. Presty’s part was a circumstance without precedent in the experience of her daughter. Mrs. Presty was absolutely silent now. Mrs. Linley looked up.
She at once perceived the change in her mother’s face and asked what it meant. “Mamma, you look as if something had frightened you. Is it anything in that letter?” She bent over the table, and looked a little closer at the letter. Mrs. Presty had turned it so that the address was underneath; and the closed envelope was visible still intact. “Why don’t you open it?” Mrs. Linley asked.
Mrs. Presty made a strange reply. “I am thinking of throwing it into the fire.”
“My letter?”
“Yes; your letter.”
“Let me look at it first.”
“You had better not look at it, Catherine.”
Naturally enough, Mrs. Linley remonstrated. “Surely I ought to read a letter forwarded by my lawyer. Why are you hiding the address from me? Is it from some person whose handwriting we both know?” She looked again at her silent mother — reflected — and guessed the truth. “Give it to me directly,” she said; “my husband has written to me.”
Mrs. Presty’s heavy eyebrows gathered into a frown. “Is it possible,” she asked sternly, “that you are still fond enough of that man to care about what he writes to you?” Mrs. Linley held out her hand for the letter. Her wise mother found it desirable to try persuasion next. “If you really won’t give way, my dear, humor me for once. Will you let me read it to you?”
“Yes — if you promise to read every word of it.”
Mrs. Presty promised (with a mental reservation), and opened the letter.
At the two first words, she stopped and began to clean her spectacles. Had her own eyes deceived her? Or had Herbert Linley actually addressed her daughter — after having been guilty of the cruelest wrong that a husband can inflict on a wife — as “Dear Catherine”? Yes: there were the words, when she put her spectacles on again. Was he in his right senses? or had he written in a state of intoxication?
Mrs. Linley waited, with a preoccupied mind: she showed no signs of impatience or surprise. As it presently appeared, she was not thinking of the letter addressed to her by Herbert, but of the letter written by Randal. “I want to look at it again.” With that brief explanation she turned at once to the closing lines which had offended her when she first read them.
Mrs. Presty hazarded a guess at what was going on in her daughter’s mind. “Now your husband has written to you,” she said, “are you beginning to think Randal’s opinion may be worth considering again?” With her eyes still on Randal’s letter, Mrs. Linley merely answered: “Why don’t you begin?” Mrs. Presty began as follows, leaving out the familiarity of her son-in-law’s address to his wife.
“I hope and trust you will forgive me for venturing to write to you, in consideration of the subject of my letter. I have something to say concerning our child. Although I have deserved the worst you can think of me, I believe you will not deny that even your love for our little Kitty (while we were living together) was not a truer love than mine. Bad as I am, my heart has that tender place left in it still. I cannot endure separation from my child.”
Mrs. Linley rose to her feet. The first vague anticipations of future atonement and reconciliation, suggested by her brother-in-law, no longer existed in her mind: she foresaw but too plainly what was to come. “Read faster,” she said, “or let me read it for myself.”
Mrs. Presty went on: “There is no wish, on my part, to pain you by any needless allusion to my claims as a father. My one desire is to enter into an arrangement which shall be as just toward you, as it is toward me. I propose that Kitty shall live with her father one half of the year, and shall return to her mother’s care for the other half If there is any valid objection to this, I confess I fail to see it.”
Mrs. Linley could remain silent no longer.
“Does he see no difference,” she broke out, “between his position and mine? What consolation — in God’s name, what consolation is left to me for the rest of my life but my child? And he threatens to separate us for six months in every year! And he takes credit to himself for an act of exalted justice on his part! Is there no such thing as shame in the hearts of men?”
Under ordinary circumstances, her mother would have tried to calm her. But Mrs. Presty had turned to the next page of the letter, at the moment when her daughter spoke.
What she found written, on that other side, produced a startling effect on her. She crumpled the letter up in her hand, and threw it into the fireplace. It fell under the grate instead of into the grate. With amazing activity for a woman of her age, she ran across the room to burn it. Younger and quicker, Mrs. Linley got to the fireplace first, and seized the letter. “There is something more!” she exclaimed. “And you are afraid of my knowing what it is.”
“Don’t read it!” Mrs. Presty called out.
There was but one sentence left to read: “If your maternal anxiety suggests any misgiving, let me add that a woman’s loving care will watch over our little girl while she is under my roof. You will remember how fond Miss Westerfield was of Kitty, and you will believe me when I tell you that she is as truly devoted to the child as ever.”
“I tried to prevent you from reading it,” said Mrs. Presty.
Mrs. Linley looked at her mother with a strange unnatural smile.
“I wouldn’t have missed this for anything!” she said. “The cruelest of all separations is proposed to me — and I am expected to submit to it, because my husband’s mistress is fond of my child!” She threw the letter from her with a frantic gesture of contempt and burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.
The old mother’s instinct — not the old mother’s reason — told her what to do. She drew her daughter to the open window, and called to Kitty to come in. The child (still amusing herself by fishing in the lake) laid down her rod. Mrs. Linley saw her running lightly along the little pier, on her way to the house. That influence effected what no other influence could have achieved. The outraged wife controlled herself, for the sake of her child. Mrs. Presty led her out to meet Kitty in the garden; waited until she saw them together; and returned to the breakfast-room.
Herbert Linley’s letter lay on the floor; his discreet mother-in-law picked it up. It could do no more harm now, and there might be reasons for keeping the husband’s proposal. “Unless I am very much mistaken,” Mrs. Presty concluded, “we shall hear more from the lawyer before long.” She locked up the letter, and wondered what her daughter would do next.
In half an hour Mrs. Linley returned — pale, silent, self-contained.
She seated herself at her desk; wrote literally one line; signed it without an instant’s hesitation, and folded the paper. Before it was secured in the envelope, Mrs. Presty interfered with a characteristic request. “You are writing to Mr. Linley, of course,” she said. “May I see it?”
Mrs. Linley handed the letter to her. The one line of writing contained these words: “I refuse positively to part with my child.— Catherine Linley.”
“Have you considered what is likely to happen, when he gets this?” Mrs. Presty inquired.
“No, mamma.”
“Will you consult Randal?”
“I would rather not consult him.”
“Will you let me consult him for you?”
“Thank you — no.”
“Why not?”
“After what Randal has written to me, I don’t attach any value to his opinion.” With that reply she sent her letter to the post, and went back again to Kitty.
After this, Mrs. Presty resolved to wait the arrival of Herbert Linley’s answer, and to let events take their course. The view from the window (as she passed it, walking up and down the room) offered her little help in forecasting the future. Kitty had returned to her fishing; and Kitty’s mother was walking slowly up and down the pier, deep in thought. Was she thinking of what might happen, and summoning the resolution which so seldom showed itself on ordinary occasions?
No second letter arrived. But a telegram was received from the lawyer toward the end of the week.
“Expect me to-morrow on business which requires personal consultation.”
That was the message. In taking the long journey to Cumberland, Mrs. Linley’s legal adviser sacrificed two days of his precious time in London. Something serious must assuredly have happened.
In the meantime, who was the lawyer?
He was Mr. Sarrazin, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Was he an Englishman or a Frenchman?
He was a curious mixture of both. His ancestors had been among the persecuted French people who found a refuge in England, when the priest-ridden tyrant, Louis the Fourteenth, revoked the Edict of Nantes. A British subject by birth, and a thoroughly competent and trustworthy man, Mr. Sarrazin labored under one inveterate delusion; he firmly believed that his original French nature had been completely eradicated, under the influence of our insular climate and our insular customs. No matter how often the strain of the lively French blood might assert itself, at inconvenient times and under regrettable circumstances, he never recognized this foreign side of his character. His excellent spirits, his quick sympathies, his bright mutability of mind — all those qualities, in short, which were most mischievously ready to raise distrust in the mind of English clients, before their sentiment changed for the better under the light of later experience — were attributed by Mr. Sarrazin to the exhilarating influence of his happy domestic circumstances and his successful professional career. His essentially English wife; his essentially English children; his whiskers, his politics, his umbrella, his pew at church, his plum pudding, his Times newspaper, all answered for him (he was accustomed to say) as an inbred member of the glorious nation that rejoices in hunting the fox, and believes in innumerable pills.
This excellent man arrived at the cottage, desperately fatigued after his long journey, but in perfect possession of his incomparable temper, nevertheless.
He afforded a proof of this happy state of mind, on sitting down to his supper. An epicure, if ever there was one yet, he found the solid part of the refreshments offered to him to consist of a chop. The old French blood curdled at the sight of it — but the true-born Englishman heroically devoted himself to the national meal. At the same time the French vivacity discovered a kindred soul in Kitty; Mr. Sarrazin became her intimate friend in five minutes. He listened to her and talked to her, as if the child had been his client, and fishing from the pier the business which had brought him from London. To Mrs. Presty’s disgust, he turned up a corner of the table-cloth, when he had finished his chop, and began to conjure so deftly with the spoons and forks that poor little Kitty (often dull, now, under the changed domestic circumstances of her life) clapped her hands with pleasure, and became the joyous child of the happy old times once more. Mrs. Linley, flattered in her maternal love and her maternal pride, never thought of recalling this extraordinary lawyer to the business that was waiting to be discussed. But Mrs. Presty looked at the clock, and discovered that her grandchild ought to have been in bed half-an-hour ago.
“Time to say good-night,” the grandmother suggested.
The grandchild failed to see the subject of bed in the same light. “Oh, not yet,” she pleaded; “I want to speak to Mr.—” Having only heard the visitor’s name once, and not finding her memory in good working order after the conjuring, Kitty hesitated. “Isn’t your name something like Saracen?” she asked.
“Very like!” cried the genial lawyer. “Try my other name, my dear. I’m Samuel as well as Sarrazin.”
“Ah, that’ll do,” said Kitty. “Grandmamma, before I go to bed, I’ve something to ask Samuel.”
Grandmamma persisted in deferring the question until the next morning. Samuel administered consolation before he said good-night. “I’ll get up early,” he whispered, “and we’ll go on the pier before breakfast and fish.”
Kitty expressed her gratitude in her own outspoken way. “Oh, dear, how nice it would be, Samuel, if you lived with us!” Mrs. Linley laughed for the first time, poor soul, since the catastrophe which had broken up her home. Mrs. Presty set a proper example. She moved her chair so that she faced the lawyer, and said: “Now, Mr. Sarrazin!”
He acknowledged that he understood what this meant, by a very unprofessional choice of words. “We are in a mess,” he began, “and the sooner we are out of it the better.”
“Only let me keep Kitty,” Mrs. Linley declared, “and I’ll do whatever you think right.”
“Stick to that, dear madam, when you have heard what I have to tell you — and I shall not have taken my journey in vain. In the first place, may I look at the letter which I had the honor of forwarding some days since?”
Mrs. Presty gave him Herbert Linley’s letter. He read it with the closest attention, and tapped the breast-pocket of his coat when he had done.
“If I didn’t know what I have got here,” he remarked, “I should have said: Another person dictated this letter, and the name of the person is Miss Westerfield.”
“Just my idea!” Mrs. Presty exclaimed. “There can’t be a doubt of it.”
“Oh, but there is a very great doubt of it, ma’am; and you will say so too when you know what your severe son-in-law threatens to do.” He turned to Mrs. Linley. “After having seen that pretty little friend of mine who has just gone to bed (how much nicer it would be for all of us if we could go to bed too!), I think I know how you answered your husband’s letter. But I ought perhaps to see how you have expressed yourself. Have you got a copy?”
“It was too short, Mr. Sarrazin, to make a copy necessary.”
“Do you mean you can remember it?”
“I can repeat it word for word. This was my reply: I refuse, positively, to part with my child.”
“No more like that?”
“No more.”
Mr. Sarrazin looked at his client with undisguised admiration. “The only time in all my long experience,” he said, “in which I have found a lady’s letter capable of expressing itself strongly in a few words. What a lawyer you will make, Mrs. Linley, when the rights of women invade my profession!”
He put his hand into his pocket and produced a letter addressed to himself.
Watching him anxiously, the ladies saw his bright face become overclouded with anxiety. “I am the wretched bearer of bad news,” he resumed, “and if I fidget in my chair, that is the reason for it. Let us get to the point — and let us get off it again as soon as possible. Here is a letter, written to me by Mr. Linley’s lawyer. If you will take my advice you will let me say what the substance of it is, and then put it back in my pocket. I doubt if a woman has influenced these cruel instructions, Mrs. Presty; and, therefore, I doubt if a woman influenced the letter which led the way to them. Did I not say just now that I was coming to the point? and here I am wandering further and further away from it. A lawyer is human; there is the only excuse. Now, Mrs. Linley, in two words; your husband is determined to have little Miss Kitty; and the law, when he applies to it, is his obedient humble servant.”
“Do you mean that the law takes my child away from me?”
“I am ashamed, madam, to think that I live by the law; but that, I must own, is exactly what it is capable of doing in the present case. Compose yourself, I beg and pray. A time will come when women will remind men that the mother bears the child and feeds the child, and will insist that the mother’s right is the best right of the two. In the meanwhile —”
“In the meanwhile, Mr. Sarrazin, I won’t submit to the law.”
“Quite right, Catherine!” cried Mrs. Presty. “Exactly what I should do, in your place.”
Mr. Sarrazin listened patiently. “I am all attention, good ladies,” he said, with the gentlest resignation. “Let me hear how you mean to do it.”
The good ladies looked at each other. They discovered that it is one thing to set an abuse at defiance in words, and another thing to apply the remedy in deeds. The kind-hearted lawyer helped them with a suggestion. “Perhaps you think of making your escape with the child, and taking refuge abroad?”
Mrs. Linley eagerly accepted the hint. “The first train to-morrow morning starts at half-past seven,” she said. “We might catch some foreign steamer that sails from the east coast of Scotland.”
Mrs. Presty, keeping a wary eye on Mr. Sarrazin, was not quite so ready as her daughter in rushing at conclusions. “I am afraid,” she acknowledged, “our worthy friend sees some objection. What is it?”
“I don’t presume to offer a positive opinion, ma’am; but I think Mr. Linley and his lawyer have their suspicions. Plainly speaking, I am afraid spies are set to watch us already.”
“Impossible!”
“You shall hear. I travel second-class; one saves money and one finds people to talk to — and at what sacrifice? Only a hard cushion to sit on! In the same carriage with me there was a very conversable person — a smart young man with flaming red hair. When we took the omnibus at your station here, all the passengers got out in the town except two. I was one exception, and the smart young man was the other. When I stopped at your gate, the omnibus went on a few yards, and set down my fellow-traveler at the village inn. My profession makes me sly. I waited a little before I rang your bell; and, when I could do it without being seen, I crossed the road, and had a look at the inn. There is a moon to-night; I was very careful. The young man didn’t see me. But I saw a head of flaming hair, and a pair of amiable blue eyes, over the blind of a window; and it happened to be the one window of the inn which commands a full view of your gate. Mere suspicion, you will say! I can’t deny it, and yet I have my reasons for suspecting. Before I left London, one of my clerks followed me in a great hurry to the terminus, and caught me as I was opening the carriage door. ‘We have just made a discovery,’ he said; ‘you and Mrs. Linley are to be reckoned up.’ Reckoned up is, if you please, detective English for being watched. My clerk might have repeated a false report, of course. And my fellow-traveler might have come all the way from London to look out of the window of an inn, in a Cumberland village. What do you think yourselves?”
It seemed to be easier to dispute the law than to dispute Mr. Sarrazin’s conclusions.
“Suppose I choose to travel abroad, and to take my child with me,” Mrs. Linley persisted, “who has any right to prevent me?”
Mr. Sarrazin reluctantly reminded her that the father had a right. “No person — not even the mother — can take the child out of the father’s custody,” he said, “except with the father’s consent. His authority is the supreme authority — unless it happens that the law has deprived him of his privilege, and has expressly confided the child to the mother’s care. Ha!” cried Mr. Sarrazin, twisting round in his chair and fixing his keen eyes on Mrs. Presty, “look at your good mother; she sees what I am coming to.”
“I see something more than you think,” Mrs. Presty answered. “If I know anything of my daughter’s nature, you will find yourself, before long, on delicate ground.”
“What do you mean, mamma?”
Mrs. Presty had lived in the past age when persons occasionally used metaphor as an aid to the expression of their ideas. Being called upon to explain herself, she did it in metaphor, to her own entire satisfaction.
“Our learned friend here reminds me, my dear Catherine, of a traveler exploring a strange town. He takes a turning, in the confident expectation that it will reward him by leading him to some satisfactory result — and he finds himself in a blind alley, or, as the French put it (I speak French fluently), in a cool de sack. Do I make my meaning clear, Mr. Sarrazin?”
“Not the least in the world, ma’am.”
“How very extraordinary! Perhaps I have been misled by my own vivid imagination. Let me endeavor to express myself plainly — let me say that my fancy looks prophetically at what you are going to do, and sincerely wishes you well out of it. Pray go on.”
“And pray speak more plainly than my mother has spoken,” Mrs. Linley added. “As I understood what you said just now, there is a law, after all, that will protect me in the possession of my little girl. I don’t care what it costs; I want that law.”
“May I ask first,” Mr. Sarrazin stipulated, “whether you are positively resolved not to give way to your husband in this matter of Kitty?”
“Positively.”
“One more question, if you please, on a matter of fact. I have heard that you were married in Scotland. Is that true?”
“Quite true.”
Mr. Sarrazin exhibited himself once more in a highly unprofessional aspect. He clapped his hands, and cried, “Bravo!” as if he had been in a theater.
Mrs. Linley caught the infection of the lawyer’s excitement. “How dull I am!” she exclaimed. “There is a thing they call ‘incompatibility of temper’— and married people sign a paper at the lawyer’s and promise never to trouble each other again as long as they both live. And they’re readier to do it in Scotland than they are in England. That’s what you mean — isn’t it?”
Mr. Sarrazin found it necessary to reassume his professional character.
“No, indeed, madam,” he said, “I should be unworthy of your confidence if I proposed nothing better than that. You can only secure the sole possession of little Kitty by getting the help of a judge —”
“Get it at once,” Mrs. Linley interposed.
“And you can only prevail on the judge to listen to you,” Mr. Sarrazin proceeded, “in one way. Summon your courage, madam. Apply for a divorce.”
There was a sudden silence. Mrs. Linley rose trembling, as if she saw — not good Mr. Sarrazin — but the devil himself tempting her. “Do you hear that?” she said to her mother.
Mrs. Presty only bowed.
“Think of the dreadful exposure!”
Mrs. Presty bowed again.
The lawyer had his opportunity now.
“Well, Mrs. Linley,” he asked, “what do you say?”
“No — never!” She made that positive reply; and disposed beforehand of everything that might have been urged, in the way of remonstrance and persuasion, by leaving the room. The two persons who remained, sitting opposite to each other, took opposite views.
“Mr. Sarrazin, she won’t do it.”
“Mrs. Presty, she will.”
Punctual to his fishing appointment with Kitty, Mr. Sarrazin was out in the early morning, waiting on the pier.
Not a breath of wind was stirring; the lazy mist lay asleep on the further shore of the lake. Here and there only the dim tops of the hills rose like shadows cast by the earth on the faint gray of the sky. Nearer at hand, the waters of the lake showed a gloomy surface; no birds flew over the colorless calm; no passing insects tempted the fish to rise. From time to time a last-left leaf on the wooded shore dropped noiselessly and died. No vehicles passed as yet on the lonely road; no voices were audible from the village; slow and straight wreaths of smoke stole their way out of the chimneys, and lost their vapor in the misty sky. The one sound that disturbed the sullen repose of the morning was the tramp of the lawyer’s footsteps, as he paced up and down the pier. He thought of London and its ceaseless traffic, its roaring high tide of life in action — and he said to himself, with the strong conviction of a town-bred man: How miserable this is!
A voice from the garden cheered him, just as he reached the end of the pier for the fiftieth time, and looked with fifty-fold intensity of dislike at the dreary lake.
There stood Kitty behind the garden-gate, with a fishing-rod in each hand. A tin box was strapped on one side of her little body and a basket on the other. Burdened with these impediments, she required assistance. Susan had let her out of the house; and Samuel must now open the gate for her. She was pleased to observe that the raw morning had reddened her friend’s nose; and she presented her own nose to notice as exhibiting perfect sympathy in this respect. Feeling a misplaced confidence in Mr. Sarrazin’s knowledge and experience as an angler, she handed the fishing-rods to him. “My fingers are cold,” she said; “you bait the hooks.” He looked at his young friend in silent perplexity; she pointed to the tin box. “Plenty of bait there, Samuel; we find maggots do best.” Mr. Sarrazin eyed the box with undisguised disgust; and Kitty made an unexpected discovery. “You seem to know nothing about it,” she said. And Samuel answered, cordially, “Nothing!” In five minutes more he found himself by the side of his young friend — with his hook baited, his line in the water, and strict injunctions to keep an eye on the float.
They began to fish.
Kitty looked at her companion, and looked away again in silence. By way of encouraging her to talk, the good-natured lawyer alluded to what she had said when they parted overnight. “You wanted to ask me something,” he reminded her. “What is it?”
Without one preliminary word of warning to prepare him for the shock, Kitty answered: “I want you to tell me what has become of papa, and why Syd has gone away and left me. You know who Syd is, don’t you?”
The only alternative left to Mr. Sarrazin was to plead ignorance. While Kitty was instructing him on the subject of her governess, he had time to consider what he should say to her next. The result added one more to the lost opportunities of Mr. Sarrazin’s life.
“You see,” the child gravely continued, “you are a clever man; and you have come here to help mamma. I have got that much out of grandmamma, if I have got nothing else. Don’t look at me; look at your float. My papa has gone away and Syd has left me without even saying good-by, and we have given up our nice old house in Scotland and come to live here. I tell you I don’t understand it. If you see your float begin to tremble, and then give a little dip down as if it was going to sink, pull your line out of the water; you will most likely find a fish at the end of it. When I ask mamma what all this means, she says there is a reason, and I am not old enough to understand it, and she looks unhappy, and she gives me a kiss, and it ends in that way. You’ve got a bite; no you haven’t; it’s only a nibble; fish are so sly. And grandmamma is worse still. Sometimes she tells me I’m a spoiled child; and sometimes she says well-behaved little girls don’t ask questions. That’s nonsense — and I think it’s hard on me. You look uncomfortable. Is it my fault? I don’t want to bother you; I only want to know why Syd has gone away. When I was younger I might have thought the fairies had taken her. Oh, no! that won’t do any longer; I’m too old. Now tell me.”
Mr. Sarrazin weakly attempted to gain time: he looked at his watch. Kitty looked over his shoulder: “Oh, we needn’t be in a hurry; breakfast won’t be ready for half an hour yet. Plenty of time to talk of Syd; go on.”
Most unwisely (seeing that he had to deal with a clever child, and that child a girl), Mr. Sarrazin tried flat denial as a way out of the difficulty. He said: “I don’t know why she has gone away.” The next question followed instantly: “Well, then, what do you think about it?” In sheer despair, the persecuted friend said the first thing that came into his head.
“I think she has gone to be married.”
Kitty was indignant.
“Gone to be married, and not tell me!” she exclaimed. “What do you mean by that?”
Mr. Sarrazin’s professional experience of women and marriages failed to supply him with an answer. In this difficulty he exerted his imagination, and invented something that no woman ever did yet. “She’s waiting,” he said, “to see how her marriage succeeds, before she tells anybody about it.”
This sounded probable to the mind of a child.
“I hope she hasn’t married a beast,” Kitty said, with a serious face and an ominous shake of the head. “When shall I hear from Syd?”
Mr. Sarrazin tried another prevarication — with better results this time. “You will be the first person she writes to, of course.” As that excusable lie passed his lips, his float began to tremble. Here was a chance of changing the subject —“I’ve got a fish!” he cried.
Kitty was immediately interested. She threw down her own rod, and assisted her ignorant companion. A wretched little fish appeared in the air, wriggling. “It’s a roach,” Kitty pronounced. “It’s in pain,” the merciful lawyer added; “give it to me.” Kitty took it off the hook, and obeyed. Mr. Sarrazin with humane gentleness of handling put it back into the water. “Go, and God bless you,” said this excellent man, as the roach disappeared joyously with a flick of its tail. Kitty was scandalized. “That’s not sport!” she said. “Oh, yes, it is,” he answered —“sport to the fish.”
They went on with their angling. What embarrassing question would Kitty ask next? Would she want to be told why her father had left her? No: the last image in the child’s mind had been the image of Sydney Westerfield. She was still thinking of it when she spoke again.
“I wonder whether you’re right about Syd?” she began. “You might be mistaken, mightn’t you? I sometimes fancy mamma and Sydney may have had a quarrel. Would you mind asking mamma if that’s true?” the affectionate little creature said, anxiously. “You see, I can’t help talking of Syd, I’m so fond of her; and I do miss her so dreadfully every now and then; and I’m afraid — oh, dear, dear, I’m afraid I shall never see her again!” She let her rod drop on the pier, and put her little hands over her face and burst out crying.
Shocked and distressed, good Mr. Sarrazin kissed her, and consoled her, and told another excusable lie.
“Try to be comforted, Kitty; I’m sure you will see her again.”
His conscience reproached him as he held out that false hope. It could never be! The one unpardonable sin, in the judgment of fallible human creatures like herself, was the sin that Sydney Westerfield had committed. Is there something wrong in human nature? or something wrong in human laws? All that is best and noblest in us feels the influence of love — and the rules of society declare that an accident of position shall decide whether love is a virtue or a crime.
These thoughts were in the lawyer’s mind. They troubled him and disheartened him: it was a relief rather than an interruption when he felt Kitty’s hand on his arm. She had dried her tears, with a child’s happy facility in passing from one emotion to another, and was now astonished and interested by a marked change in the weather.
“Look for the lake!” she cried. “You can’t see it.”
A dense white fog was closing round them. Its stealthy advance over the water had already begun to hide the boathouse at the end of the pier from view. The raw cold of the atmosphere made the child shiver. As Mr. Sarrazin took her hand to lead her indoors, he turned and looked back at the faint outline of the boathouse, disappearing in the fog. Kitty wondered. “Do you see anything?” she asked.
He answered that there was nothing to see, in the absent tone of a man busy with his own thoughts. They took the garden path which led to the cottage. As they reached the door he roused himself, and looked round again in the direction of the invisible lake.
“Was the boat-house of any use now,” he inquired —“was there a boat in it, for instance?” “There was a capital boat, fit to go anywhere.” “And a man to manage it?” “To be sure! the gardener was the man; he had been a sailor once; and he knew the lake as well as —” Kitty stopped, at a loss for a comparison. “As well as you know your multiplication table?” said Mr. Sarrazin, dropping his serious questions on a sudden. Kitty shook her head. “Much better,” she honestly acknowledged.
Opening the breakfast-room door they saw Mrs. Presty making coffee. Kitty at once retired. When she had been fishing, her grandmamma inculcated habits of order by directing her to take the rods to pieces, and to put them away in their cases in the lumber-room. While she was absent, Mr. Sarrazin profited by the opportunity, and asked if Mrs. Linley had thought it over in the night, and had decided on applying for a Divorce.
“I know nothing about my daughter,” Mrs. Presty answered, “except that she had a bad night. Thinking, no doubt, over your advice,” the old lady added with a mischievous smile.
“Will you kindly inquire if Mrs. Linley has made up her mind yet?” the lawyer ventured to say.
“Isn’t that your business?” Mrs. Presty asked slyly. “Suppose you write a little note, and I will send it up to her room.” The worldly-wisdom which prompted this suggestion contemplated a possible necessity for calling a domestic council, assembled to consider the course of action which Mrs. Linley would do well to adopt. If the influence of her mother was among the forms of persuasion which might be tried, that wary relative maneuvered to make the lawyer speak first, and so to reserve to herself the advantage of having the last word.
Patient Mr. Sarrazin wrote the note.
He modestly asked for instructions; and he was content to receive them in one word — Yes or No. In the event of the answer being Yes, he would ask for a few minutes’ conversation with Mrs. Linley, at her earliest convenience. That was all.
The reply was returned in a form which left Yes to be inferred: “I will receive you as soon as you have finished your breakfast.”
Having read Mrs. Linley’s answer, Mr. Sarrazin looked out of the breakfast-room window, and saw that the fog had reached the cottage. Before Mrs. Presty could make any remark on the change in the weather, he surprised her by an extraordinary question.
“Is there an upper room here, ma’am, which has a view of the road before your front gate?”
“Certainly!”
“And can I go into it without disturbing anybody?”
Mrs. Presty said, “Of course!” with an uplifting of her eye brows which expressed astonishment not unmixed with suspicion. “Do you want to go up now?” she added, “or will you wait till you have had your breakfast?”
“I want to go up, if you please, before the fog thickens. Oh, Mrs. Presty, I am ashamed to trouble you! Let the servant show me the room.”
No. For the first time in her life Mrs. Presty insisted on doing servant’s duty. If she had been crippled in both legs her curiosity would have helped her to get up the stairs on her hands. “There!” she said, opening the door of the upper room, and placing herself exactly in the middle of it, so that she could see all round her: “Will that do for you?”
Mr. Sarrazin went to the window; hid himself behind the curtain; and cautiously peeped out. In half a minute he turned his back on the misty view of the road, and said to himself: “Just what I expected.”
Other women might have asked what this mysterious proceeding meant. Mrs. Presty’s sense of her own dignity adopted a system of independent discovery. To Mr. Sarrazin’s amusement, she imitated him to his face. Advancing to the window, she, too, hid herself behind the curtain, and she, too, peeped out. Still following her model, she next turned her back on the view — and then she became herself again. “Now we have both looked out of window,” she said to the lawyer, in her own inimitably impudent way, “suppose we compare our impressions.”
This was easily done. They had both seen the same two men walking backward and forward, opposite the front gate of the cottage. Before the advancing fog made it impossible to identify him, Mr. Sarrazin had recognized in one of the men his agreeable fellow-traveler on the journey from London. The other man — a stranger — was in all probability an assistant spy obtained in the neighborhood. This discovery suggested serious embarrassment in the future. Mrs. Presty asked what was to be done next. Mr. Sarrazin answered: “Let us have our breakfast.”
In another quarter of an hour they were both in Mrs. Linley’s room.
Her agitated manner, her reddened eyes, showed that she was still suffering under the emotions of the past night. The moment the lawyer approached her, she crossed the room with hurried steps, and took both his hands in her trembling grasp. “You are a good man, you are a kind man,” she said to him wildly; “you have my truest respect and regard. Tell me, are you — really — really — really sure that the one way in which I can keep my child with me is the way you mentioned last night?”
Mr. Sarrazin led her gently back to her chair.
The sad change in her startled and distressed him. Sincerely, solemnly even, he declared that the one alternative before her was the alternative that he had mentioned. He entreated her to control herself. It was useless, she still held him as if she was holding to her last hope.
“Listen to me!” she cried. “There’s something more; there’s another chance for me. I must, and will, know what you think of it.”
“Wait a little. Pray wait a little!”
“No! not a moment. Is there any hope in appealing to the lawyer whom Mr. Linley has employed? Let me go back with you to London. I will persuade him to exert his influence — I will go down on my knees to him — I will never leave him till I have won him over to my side — I will take Kitty with me; he shall see us both, and pity us, and help us!”
“Hopeless. Quite hopeless, Mrs. Linley.”
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“My dear lady, my poor dear lady, I must say it. The man you are talking of is the last man in the world to be influenced as you suppose. He is notoriously a lawyer, and nothing but a lawyer. If you tried to move him to pity you, he would say, ‘Madam, I am doing my duty to my client’; and he would ring his bell and have you shown out. Yes! even if he saw you crushed and crying at his feet.”
Mrs. Presty interfered for the first time.
“In your place, Catherine,” she said, “I would put my foot down on that man and crush him. Consent to the Divorce, and you may do it.”
Mrs. Linley lay prostrate in her chair. The excitement which had sustained her thus far seemed to have sunk with the sinking of her last hope. Pale, exhausted, yielding to hard necessity, she looked up when her mother said, “Consent to the Divorce,” and answered, “I have consented.”
“And trust me,” Mr. Sarrazin said fervently, “to see that Justice is done, and to protect you in the meanwhile.”
Mrs. Presty added her tribute of consolation.
“After all,” she asked, “what is there to terrify you in the prospect of a Divorce? You won’t hear what people say about it — for we see no society now. And, as for the newspapers, keep them out of the house.”
Mrs. Linley answered with a momentary revival of energy:
“It is not the fear of exposure that has tortured me,” she said. “When I was left in the solitude of the night, my heart turned to Kitty; I felt that any sacrifice of myself might be endured for her sake. It’s the remembrance of my marriage, Mr. Sarrazin, that is the terrible trial to me. Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Is there nothing to terrify me in setting that solemn command at defiance? I do it — oh, I do it — in consenting to the Divorce! I renounce the vows which I bound myself to respect in the presence of God; I profane the remembrance of eight happy years, hallowed by true love. Ah, you needn’t remind me of what my husband has done. I don’t forget how cruelly he has wronged me; I don’t forget that his own act has cast me from him. But whose act destroys our marriage? Mine, mine! Forgive me, mamma; forgive me, my kind friend — the horror that I have of myself forces its way to my lips. No more of it! My child is my one treasure left. What must I do next? What must I sign? What must I sacrifice? Tell me — and it shall be done. I submit! I submit!”
Delicately and mercifully Mr. Sarrazin answered that sad appeal.
All that his knowledge, experience and resolution could suggest he addressed to Mrs. Presty. Mrs. Linley could listen or not listen, as her own wishes inclined. In the one case or in the other, her interests would be equally well served. The good lawyer kissed her hand. “Rest, and recover,” he whispered. And then he turned to her mother — and became a man of business once more.
“The first thing I shall do, ma’am, is to telegraph to my agent in Edinburgh. He will arrange for the speediest possible hearing of our case in the Court of Session. Make your mind easy so far.”
Mrs. Presty’s mind was by this time equally inaccessible to information and advice. “I want to know what is to be done with those two men who are watching the gate,” was all she said in the way of reply.
Mrs. Linley raised her head in alarm.
“Two!” she exclaimed — and looked at Mr. Sarrazin. “You only spoke of one last night.”
“And I add another this morning. Rest your poor head, Mrs. Linley, I know how it aches; I know how it burns.” He still persisted in speaking to Mrs. Presty. “One of those two men will follow me to the station, and see me off on my way to London. The other will look after you, or your daughter, or the maid, or any other person who may try to get away into hiding with Kitty. And they are both keeping close to the gate, in the fear of losing sight of us in the fog.”
“I wish we lived in the Middle Ages!” said Mrs. Presty.
“What would be the use of that, ma’am?”
“Good heavens, Mr. Sarrazin, don’t you see? In those grand old days you would have taken a dagger, and the gardener would have taken a dagger, and you would have stolen out, and stabbed those two villains as a matter of course. And this is the age of progress! The vilest rogue in existence is a sacred person whose life we are bound to respect. Ah, what good that national hero would have done who put his barrels of gunpowder in the right place on the Fifth of November! I have always said it, and I stick to it, Guy Fawkes was a great statesman.”
In the meanwhile Mrs. Linley was not resting, and not listening to the expression of her mother’s political sentiments. She was intently watching Mr. Sarrazin’s face.
“There is danger threatening us,” she said. “Do you see a way out of it?”
To persist in trying to spare her was plainly useless; Mr. Sarrazin answered her directly.
“The danger of legal proceedings to obtain possession of the child,” he said, “is more near and more serious than I thought it right to acknowledge, while you were in doubt which way to decide. I was careful — too careful, perhaps — not to unduly influence you in a matter of the utmost importance to your future life. But you have made up your mind. I don’t scruple now to remind you that an interval of time must pass before the decree for your Divorce can be pronounced, and the care of the child be legally secured to the mother. The only doubt and the only danger are there. If you are not frightened by the prospect of a desperate venture which some women would shrink from, I believe I see a way of baffling the spies.”
Mrs. Linley started to her feet. “Say what I am to do,” she cried, “and judge for yourself if I am as easily frightened as some women.”
The lawyer pointed with a persuasive smile to her empty chair. “If you allow yourself to be excited,” he said, “you will frighten me. Please — oh, please sit down again!”
Mrs. Linley felt the strong will, asserting itself in terms of courteous entreaty. She obeyed. Mrs. Presty had never admired the lawyer as she admired him now. “Is that how you manage your wife?” she asked.
Mr. Sarrazin was equal to the occasion, whatever it might be. “In your time, ma’am,” he said, “did you reveal the mysteries of conjugal life?” He turned to Mrs. Linley. “I have something to ask first,” he resumed, “and then you shall hear what I propose. How many people serve you in this cottage?”
“Three. Our landlady, who is housekeeper and cook. Our own maid. And the landlady’s daughter, who does the housework.”
“Any out-of-door servants?”
“Only the gardener.”
“Can you trust these people?”
“In what way, Mr. Sarrazin?”
“Can you trust them with a secret which only concerns yourself?”
“Certainly! The maid has been with us for years; no truer woman ever lived. The good old landlady often drinks tea with us. Her daughter is going to be married; and I have given the wedding-dress. As for the gardener, let Kitty settle the matter with him, and I answer for the rest. Why are you pointing to the window?”
“Look out, and tell me what you see.”
“I see the fog.”
“And I, Mrs. Linley, have seen the boathouse. While the spies are watching your gate, what do you say to crossing the lake, under cover of the fog?”
Winter had come and gone; spring was nearing its end, and London still suffered under the rigid regularity of easterly winds. Although in less than a week summer would begin with the first of June, Mr. Sarrazin was glad to find his office warmed by a fire, when he arrived to open the letters of the day.
The correspondence in general related exclusively to proceedings connected with the law. Two letters only presented an exception to the general rule. The first was addressed in Mrs. Linley’s handwriting, and bore the postmark of Hanover. Kitty’s mother had not only succeeded in getting to the safe side of the lake — she and her child had crossed the German Ocean as well. In one respect her letter was a remarkable composition. Although it was written by a lady, it was short enough to be read in less than a minute:
“MY DEAR MR. SARRAZIN— I have just time to write by this evening’s post. Our excellent courier has satisfied himself that the danger of discovery has passed away. The wretches have been so completely deceived that they are already on their way back to England, to lie in wait for us at Folkestone and Dover. To-morrow morning we leave this charming place — oh, how unwillingly!— for Bremen, to catch the steamer to Hull. You shall hear from me again on our arrival. Gratefully yours,
“CATHERINE LINLEY.”
Mr. Sarrazin put this letter into a private drawer and smiled as he turned the key. “Has she made up her mind at last?” he asked himself. “But for the courier, I shouldn’t feel sure of her even now.”
The second letter agreeably surprised him. It was announced that the writer had just returned from the United States; it invited him to dinner that evening; and it was signed “Randal Linley.” In Mr. Sarrazin’s estimation, Randal had always occupied a higher place than his brother. The lawyer had known Mrs. Linley before her marriage, and had been inclined to think that she would have done wisely if she had given her hand to the younger brother instead of the elder. His acquaintance with Randal ripened rapidly into friendship. But his relations with Herbert made no advance toward intimacy: there was a gentlemanlike cordiality between them, and nothing more.
At seven o’clock the two friends sat at a snug little table, in the private room of a hotel, with an infinite number of questions to ask of each other, and with nothing to interrupt them but a dinner of such extraordinary merit that it insisted on being noticed, from the first course to the last.
Randal began. “Before we talk of anything else,” he said, “tell me about Catherine and the child. Where are they?”
“On their way to England, after a residence in Germany.”
“And the old lady?”
“Mrs. Presty has been staying with friends in London.”
“What! have they parted company? Has there been a quarrel?”
“Nothing of the sort; a friendly separation, in the strictest sense of the word. Oh, Randal, what are you about? Don’t put pepper into this perfect soup. It’s as good as the gras double at the Cafe Anglais in Paris.”
“So it is; I wasn’t paying proper attention to it. But I am anxious about Catherine. Why did she go abroad?”
“Haven’t you heard from her?”
“Not for six months or more. I innocently vexed her by writing a little too hopefully about Herbert. Mrs. Presty answered my letter, and recommended me not to write again. It isn’t like Catherine to bear malice.”
“Don’t even think such a thing possible!” the lawyer answered, earnestly. “Attribute her silence to the right cause. Terrible anxieties have been weighing on her mind since you went to America.”
“Anxieties caused by my brother? Oh, I hope not!”
“Caused entirely by your brother — if I must tell the truth. Can’t you guess how?”
“Is it the child? You don’t mean to tell me that Herbert has taken Kitty away from her mother!”
“While I am her mother’s lawyer, my friend, your brother won’t do that. Welcome back to England in the first glass of sherry; good wine, but a little too dry for my taste. No, we won’t talk of domestic troubles just yet. You shall hear all about it after dinner. What made you go to America? You haven’t been delivering lectures, have you?”
“I have been enjoying myself among the most hospitable people in the world.”
Mr. Sarrazin shook his head; he had a case of copyright in hand just then. “A people to be pitied,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because their Government forgets what is due to the honor of the nation.”
“How?”
“In this way. The honor of a nation which confers right of property in works of art, produced by its own citizens, is surely concerned in protecting from theft works of art produced by other citizens.”
“That’s not the fault of the people.”
“Certainly not. I have already said it’s the fault of the Government. Let’s attend to the fish now.”
Randal took his friend’s advice. “Good sauce, isn’t it?” he said.
The epicure entered a protest. “Good?” he repeated. “My dear fellow, it’s absolute perfection. I don’t like to cast a slur on English cookery. But think of melted butter, and tell me if anybody but a foreigner (I don’t like foreigners, but I give them their due) could have produced this white wine sauce? So you really had no particular motive in going to America?”
“On the contrary, I had a very particular motive. Just remember what my life used to be when I was in Scotland — and look at my life now! No Mount Morven; no model farm to look after; no pleasant Highland neighbors; I can’t go to my brother while he is leading his present life; I have hurt Catherine’s feelings; I have lost dear little Kitty; I am not obliged to earn my living (more’s the pity); I don’t care about politics; I have a pleasure in eating harmless creatures, but no pleasure in shooting them. What is there left for me to do, but to try change of scene, and go roaming around the world, a restless creature without an object in life? Have I done something wrong again? It isn’t the pepper this time — and yet you’re looking at me as if I was trying your temper.”
The French side of Mr. Sarrazin’s nature had got the better of him once more. He pointed indignantly to a supreme preparation of fowl on his friend’s plate. “Do I actually see you picking out your truffles, and putting them on one side?” he asked.
“Well,” Randal acknowledged, “I don’t care about truffles.”
Mr. Sarrazin rose, with his plate in his hand and his fork ready for action. He walked round the table to his friend’s side, and reverently transferred the neglected truffles to his own plate. “Randal, you will live to repent this,” he said solemnly. “In the meantime, I am the gainer.” Until he had finished the truffles, no word fell from his lips. “I think I should have enjoyed them more,” he remarked, “if I had concentrated my attention by closing my eyes; but you would have thought I was going to sleep.” He recovered his English nationality, after this, until the dessert had been placed on the table, and the waiter was ready to leave the room. At that auspicious moment, he underwent another relapse. He insisted on sending his compliments and thanks to the cook.
“At last,” said Randal, “we are by ourselves — and now I want to know why Catherine went to Germany.”
As a lawyer, Randal’s guest understood that a narrative of events can only produce the right effect, on one condition: it must begin at the beginning. Having related all that had been said and done during his visit to the cottage, including his first efforts in the character of an angler under Kitty’s supervision, he stopped to fill his glass again — and then astonished Randal by describing the plan that he had devised for escaping from the spies by crossing the lake in the fog.
“What did the ladies say to it?” Randal inquired. “Who spoke first?”
“Mrs. Presty, of course! She objected to risk her life on the water, in a fog. Mrs. Linley showed a resolution for which I was not prepared. She thought of Kitty, saw the value of my suggestion, and went away at once to consult with the landlady. In the meantime I sent for the gardener, and told him what I was thinking of. He was one of those stolid Englishmen, who possess resources which don’t express themselves outwardly. Judging by his face, you would have said he was subsiding into a slumber under the infliction of a sermon, instead of listening to a lawyer proposing a stratagem. When I had done, the man showed the metal he was made of. In plain English, he put three questions which gave me the highest opinion of his intelligence. ‘How much luggage, sir?’ ‘As little as they can conveniently take with them,’ I said. ‘How many persons?’ ‘The two ladies, the child, and myself.’ ‘Can you row, sir?’ ‘In any water you like, Mr. Gardener, fresh or salt’. Think of asking Me, an athletic Englishman, if I could row! In an hour more we were ready to embark, and the blessed fog was thicker than ever. Mrs. Presty yielded under protest; Kitty was wild with delight; her mother was quiet and resigned. But one circumstance occurred that I didn’t quite understand — the presence of a stranger on the pier with a gun in his hand.”
“You don’t mean one of the spies?”
“Nothing of the sort; I mean an idea of the gardener’s. He had been a sailor in his time — and that’s a trade which teaches a man (if he’s good for anything) to think, and act on his thought, at one and the same moment. He had taken a peep at the blackguards in front of the house, and had recognized the shortest of the two as a native of the place, perfectly well aware that one of the features attached to the cottage was a boathouse. ‘That chap is not such a fool as he looks,’ says the gardener. ‘If he mentions the boat-house, the other fellow from London may have his suspicions. I thought I would post my son on the pier — that quiet young man there with the gun — to keep a lookout. If he sees another boat (there are half a dozen on this side of the lake) putting off after us, he has orders to fire, on the chance of our hearing him. A little notion of mine, sir, to prevent our being surprised in the fog. Do you see any objection to it?’ Objection! In the days when diplomacy was something more than a solemn pretense, what a member of Congress that gardener would have made! Well, we shipped our oars, and away we went. Not quite haphazard — for we had a compass with us. Our course was as straight as we could go, to a village on the opposite side of the lake, called Brightfold. Nothing happened for the first quarter of an hour — and then, by the living Jingo (excuse my vulgarity), we heard the gun!”
“What did you do?”
“Went on rowing, and held a council. This time I came out as the clever one of the party. The men were following us in the dark; they would have to guess at the direction we had taken, and they would most likely assume (in such weather as we had) that we should choose the shortest way across the lake. At my suggestion we changed our course, and made for a large town, higher up on the shore, called Tawley. We landed, and waited for events, and made no discovery of another boat behind us. The fools had justified my confidence in them — they had gone to Brightfold. There was half-an-hour to spare before the next train came to Tawley; and the fog was beginning to lift on that side of the lake. We looked at the shops; and I made a purchase in the town.”
“Stop a minute,” said Randal. “Is Brightfold on the railway?”
“No.”
“Is there an electric telegraph at the place?”
“Yes.”
“That was awkward, wasn’t it? The first thing those men would do would be to telegraph to Tawley.”
“Not a doubt of it. How would they describe us, do you think?”
Randal answered. “A middle-aged gentleman — two ladies, one of them elderly — and a little girl. Quite enough to identify you at Tawley, if the station-master understood the message.”
“Shall I tell you what the station-master discovered, with the message in his hand? No elderly lady, no middle-aged gentleman; nothing more remarkable than one lady — and a little boy.”
Randal’s face brightened. “You parted company, of course,” he said; “and you disguised Kitty! How did you manage it?”
“Didn’t I say just now that we looked at the shops, and that I made a purchase in the town? A boy’s ready-made suit — not at all a bad fit for Kitty! Mrs. Linley put on the suit, and tucked up the child’s hair under a straw hat, in an empty yard — no idlers about in that bad weather. We said good-by, and parted, with grievous misgivings on my side, which proved (thank God!) to have been quite needless. Kitty and her mother went to the station, and Mrs. Presty and I hired a carriage, and drove away to the head of the lake, to catch the train to London. Do you know, Randal, I have altered my opinion of Mrs. Presty?”
Randal smiled. “You too have found something in that old woman,” he said, “which doesn’t appear on the surface.”
“The occasion seems to bring that something out,” the lawyer remarked. “When I proposed the separation, and mentioned my reasons, I expected to find some difficulty in persuading Mrs. Presty to give up the adventurous journey with her daughter and her grandchild. I reminded her that she had friends in London who would receive her, and got snubbed for taking the liberty. ‘I know that as well as you do. Come along — I’m ready to go with you.’ It isn’t agreeable to my self-esteem to own it, but I expected to hear her say that she would consent to any sacrifice for the sake of her dear daughter. No such clap-trap as that passed her lips. She owned the true motive with a superiority to cant which won my sincerest respect. ‘I’ll do anything,’ she said, ‘to baffle Herbert Linley and the spies he has set to watch us.’ I can’t tell you how glad I was that she had her reward on the same day. We were too late at the station, and we had to wait for the next train. And what do you think happened? The two scoundrels followed us instead of following Mrs. Linley! They had inquired no doubt at the livery stables where we hired the carriage — had recognized the description of us — and had taken the long journey to London for nothing. Mrs. Presty and I shook hands at the terminus the best friends that ever traveled together with the best of motives. After that, I think I deserve another glass of wine.”
“Go on with your story, and you shall have another bottle!” cried Randal. “What did Catherine and the child do after they left you?”
“They did the safest thing — they left England. Mrs. Linley distinguished herself on this occasion. It was her excellent idea to avoid popular ports of departure, like Folkestone and Dover, which were sure to be watched, and to get away (if the thing could be done) from some place on the east coast. We consulted our guide and found that a line of steamers sailed from Hull to Bremen once a week. A tedious journey from our part of Cumberland, with some troublesome changing of trains, but they got there in time to embark. My first news of them reached me in a telegram from Bremen. There they waited for further instructions. I sent the instructions by a thoroughly capable and trustworthy man — an Italian courier, known to me by an experience of twenty years. Shall I confess it? I thought I had done rather a clever thing in providing Mrs. Linley with a friend in need while I was away from her.”
“I think so, too,” said Randal.
“Wrong, completely wrong. I had made a mistake — I had been too clever, and I got my reward accordingly. You know how I advised Mrs. Linley?”
“Yes. You persuaded her, with the greatest difficulty, to apply for a Divorce.”
“Very well. I had made all the necessary arrangements for the trial, when I received a letter from Germany. My charming client had changed her mind, and declined to apply for the Divorce. There was my reward for having been too clever!”
“I don’t understand you.”
“My dear fellow, you are dull to-night. I had been so successful in protecting Mrs. Linley and the child, and my excellent courier had found such a charming place of retreat for them in one of the suburbs of Hanover, that ‘she saw no reason now for taking the shocking course that I had recommended to her — so repugnant to all her most cherished convictions; so sinful and so shameful in its doing of evil that good might come. Experience had convinced her that (thanks to me) there was no fear of Kitty being discovered and taken from her. She therefore begged me to write to my agent in Edinburgh, and tell him that her application to the court was withdrawn.’ Ah, you understand my position at last. The headstrong woman was running a risk which renewed all my anxieties. By every day’s post I expected to hear that she had paid the penalty of her folly, and that your brother had succeeded in getting possession of the child. Wait a little before you laugh at me. But for the courier, the thing would have really happened a week since.”
Randal looked astonished. “Months must have passed,” he objected. “Surely, after that lapse of time, Mrs. Linley must have been safe from discovery.”
“Take your own positive view of it! I only know that the thing happened. And why not? The luck had begun by being on one side — why shouldn’t the other side have had its turn next?”
“Do you really believe in luck?”
“Devoutly. A lawyer must believe in something. He knows the law too well to put any faith in that: and his clients present to him (if he is a man of any feeling) a hideous view of human nature. The poor devil believes in luck — rather than believe in nothing. I think it quite likely that accident helped the person employed by the husband to discover the wife and child. Anyhow, Mrs. Linley and Kitty were seen in the streets of Hanover; seen, recognized, and followed. The courier happened to be with them — luck again! For thirty years and more, he had been traveling in every part of Europe; there was not a landlord of the smallest pretensions anywhere who didn’t know him and like him. ‘I pretended not to see that anybody was following us,’ he said (writing from Hanover to relieve my anxiety); ‘and I took the ladies to a hotel. The hotel possessed two merits from our point of view — it had a way out at the back, through the stables, and it was kept by a landlord who was an excellent good friend of mine. I arranged with him what he was to say when inquiries were made; and I kept my poor ladies prisoners in their lodgings for three days. The end of it is that Mr. Linley’s policeman has gone away to watch the Channel steam-service, while we return quietly by way of Bremen and Hull.’ There is the courier’s account of it. I have only to add that poor Mrs. Linley has been fairly frightened into submission. She changes her mind again, and pledges herself once more to apply for the Divorce. If we are only lucky enough to get our case heard without any very serious delay, I am not afraid of my client slipping through my fingers for the second time. When will the courts of session be open to us? You have lived in Scotland, Randal —”
“But I haven’t lived in the courts of law. I wish I could give you the information you want.”
Mr. Sarrazin looked at his watch. “For all I know to the contrary,” he said, “we may be wasting precious time while we are talking here. Will you excuse me if I go away to my club?”
“Are you going in search of information?”
“Yes. We have some inveterate old whist-players who are always to be found in the card-room. One of them formerly practiced, I believe, in the Scotch courts. It has just occurred to me that the chance is worth trying.”
“Will you let me know if you succeed?” Randal asked.
The lawyer took his hand at parting. “You seem to be almost as anxious about it as I am,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, I am a little alarmed when I think of Catherine. If there is another long delay, how do we know what may happen before the law has confirmed the mother’s claim to the child? Let me send one of the servants here to wait at your club. Will you give him a line telling me when the trial is likely to take place?”
“With the greatest pleasure. Good-night.”
Left alone, Randal sat by the fireside for a while, thinking of the future. The prospect, as he saw it, disheartened him. As a means of employing his mind on a more agreeable subject for reflection, he opened his traveling desk and took out two or three letters. They had been addressed to him, while he was in America, by Captain Bennydeck.
The captain had committed an error of which most of us have been guilty in our time. He had been too exclusively devoted to work that interested him to remember what was due to the care of his health. The doctor’s warnings had been neglected; his over-strained nerves had given way; and the man whose strong constitution had resisted cold and starvation in the Arctic wastes, had broken down under stress of brain-work in London.
This was the news which the first of the letters contained.
The second, written under dictation, alluded briefly to the remedies suggested. In the captain’s case, the fresh air recommended was the air of the sea. At the same time he was forbidden to receive either letters or telegrams, during his absence from town, until the doctor had seen him again. These instructions pointed, in Captain Bennydeck’s estimation, to sailing for pleasure’s sake, and therefore to hiring a yacht.
The third and last letter announced that the yacht had been found, and described the captain’s plans when the vessel was ready for sea.
He proposed to sail here and there about the Channel, wherever it might please the wind to take him. Friends would accompany him, but not in any number. The yacht was not large enough to accommodate comfortably more than one or two guests at a time. Every now and then, the vessel would come to an anchor in the bay of the little coast town of Sandyseal, to accommodate friends going and coming and (in spite of medical advice) to receive letters. “You may have heard of Sandyseal,” the Captain wrote, “as one of the places which have lately been found out by the doctors. They are recommending the air to patients suffering from nervous disorders all over England. The one hotel in the place, and the few cottages which let lodgings, are crammed, as I hear, and the speculative builder is beginning his operations at such a rate that Sandyseal will be no longer recognizable in a few months more. Before the crescents and terraces and grand hotels turn the town into a fashionable watering-place, I want to take a last look at scenes familiar to me under their old aspect. If you are inclined to wonder at my feeling such a wish as this, I can easily explain myself. Two miles inland from Sandyseal, there is a lonely old moated house. In that house I was born. When you return from America, write to me at the post-office, or at the hotel (I am equally well known in both places), and let us arrange for a speedy meeting. I wish I could ask you to come and see me in my birth-place. It was sold, years since, under instructions in my father’s will, and was purchased for the use of a community of nuns. We may look at the outside, and we can do no more. In the meantime, don’t despair of my recovery; the sea is my old friend, and my trust is in God’s mercy.”
These last lines were added in a postscript:
“Have you heard any more of that poor girl, the daughter of my old friend Roderick Westerfield — whose sad story would never have been known to me but for you? I feel sure that you have good reasons for not telling me the name of the man who has misled her, or the address at which she may be found. But you may one day be at liberty to break your silence. In that case, don’t hesitate to do so because there may happen to be obstacles in my way. No difficulties discourage me, when my end in view is the saving of a soul in peril.”
Randal returned to his desk to write to the Captain. He had only got as far as the first sentences, when the servant returned with the lawyer’s promised message. Mr. Sarrazin’s news was communicated in these cheering terms:
“I am a firmer believer in luck than ever. If we only make haste — and won’t I make haste!— we may get the Divorce, as I calculate, in three weeks’ time.”