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MR YORKE went out in the quickly fading spring afternoon with an air of seriousness and resolution, which, indeed, had been upon his countenance all day; but which was not much like the expression of a holiday visitor. He had a long drive out to the northern outskirts of London, across those miles on miles of insignificant streets which are almost more imposing in their shabby dreariness than the more important portions of the greatest of cities. But though they wearied him with endless lines of shabbiness and monotony, the mind of the stranger was not sufficiently at liberty to make any reflection upon them. It was twilight before he reached, mounting upwards slowly for the last mile or so, the suburban heights to which he was bound. He dismissed his cab at the entrance to a leafy lane, lined on each side with detached houses, which were scarcely perceptible among the bare trees and thick hedges. To the servant who admitted him he gave a name which was certainly not that which he had borne an hour before in his hotel. The house which he entered just at the moment of twilight, before the lamps were lighted, was very warmly carpeted and curtained, and almost too warm in the air of its balmy soft interior. He waited for a moment in the hall, with an extraordinary gravity—the seriousness of painful restrained excitement on his face. Then a door opened suddenly, and a lady came out carrying a candle in her hand. The light shone pleasantly upon a fresh face and pretty eyes, undimmed by some fifty years of life; but those eyes were puckered up with a curious, anxious, alarmed gaze, looking into the darkness. She advanced hurriedly for two or three steps, then stopped short in front of the stranger, examining him not without some distress in her look. “Leonard Crosthwaite?” she said, “it is very many years since we have heard that name. Is it some distant cousin we know nothing about? or is it—— is it——”
“It is I, Mary. We have not seen each other for thirty years—but I should have known you anywhere, I think. Certainly, here, in the old house.”
She held up her candle and gazed at him, then shook her head slowly. “It is so sudden,” she said. “It is such a long time——”
“And you did not expect to see me, while I expected—hoped—to see you.” Then he put out his hand. “Mary—you are not still Mary—not a Crosthwaite still, as in the old time? No—I can see that. You have married, and had children—like me.”
This drew a faint little smile from her in spite of herself. “Yes, I have married. I have a son as tall as you. I am a widow. I—— Oh, but I don’t know if I ought to enter into family particulars. How am I to know that you are—Leonard? You are—a little like him.”
“Is there any reason why you should hesitate to own me?” he said, half sternly, yet with a smile.
This brought an overpowering flush of colour over her comely, matronly face; but the next moment she cried out with agitation, “Oh, no, no! How could you think so of me?—not for the world, not for the world! If every penny we had depended on it”—and here she stopped short, confused, and looked at him again.
“I will not meddle with your pennies, Mary, whatever you may mean by that. I have plenty. You need not fear for me. Ah!—Uncle Abraham, I suppose, is dead?—he must be dead long ago: and there is something—— The old people are all dead, I suppose?”
“It is not that,” she said, faltering, which was no answer to his question; but he understood it well enough. He looked at her with increased seriousness, and she shrank before his eye.
“Yes: they are all dead——”
“Uncle Abraham and all——” He looked at her more and more keenly, with a slight smile on his face. “But he did not take his money with him, I suppose, as he used to threaten to do?”
To this the lady made no reply; and there was a pause, he standing somewhat sternly, with his eyes fixed upon her; she with her head drooping a little, drawn back a few steps, not looking at him. The door behind her was open, and after a minute, a voice called from it, “Mary, to whom are you talking?”
The stranger started visibly. He said, with a sudden catch in his voice, “Anna! Is she here?”
“Oh yes, Leonard, yes,” said the lady. “She is here—so changed! so changed! I think it is because she has been unhappy.”
“Unhappy!” he said softly. His tone had changed and softened; only to hear it the listener might be certain that there were tears in his eyes. “Unhappy! after thirty years.”
The man was touched and flattered and compunctious all in one. There was no difficulty in interpreting the inflections in his voice. It was full of tenderness, of a mournful pleasure, and surprise as well—“while I have been making myself so comfortable,” he added in an undertone.
“Oh, not in that way,” the lady said, but in a whisper. “No, no,” shaking her head, “not in that way.”
His mood of tender complaisance was perhaps a little subdued by this, but only a little. “If you think she would let me see her,” he said—
At this moment she was called again—“Mary! there is a perfect gale blowing in at the door. Who have you there?”
The lady who was called Mary advanced to him confidentially. “She heard your name just as well as I did,” she said, “but she pretends to take no notice; wait here till I go and speak to her. Oh, she is so changed!”
He caught her by the hand and detained her. “Nothing has happened? She must be old like all of us, I know——”
“She is as handsome as ever she was,” said the other hastily. “I am coming, I am coming, Anna! It is a visitor—an old friend”—and she turned round with the quickness of a girl, leaving the stranger standing where she had found him, the candle on the hall table watching him like a little wakeful sentinel. A glow of warmth and light came from the door of the open room. He had not noticed it before; now it appeared to him like a glimpse into some sanctuary. He could see a beautiful Persian carpet, a softly-tinted wall hung with pictures; not that he noticed what these details were, but took them in vaguely as producing an effect of delicate brightness and luxury. Memory stole softly over the far-travelled visitor. His present life had departed from him altogether—he was living in the past, in his youth, thinking of the pretty caprices of the girl whom he had thought the most beautiful, the most delightful creature that God had made, in all her whims and fancies. She had always been like that; and through all those thirty years it had been constantly suggested to him, in the inmost recesses of his mind, when he saw anything that was graceful or pretty, “It is just like Anna—Anna would have liked that.” He had felt inclined to say it to his wife a thousand times—his good wife, who never had heard of Anna, and would not have heard of her with any pleasure. And now, here was Anna close to him, enshrined in the warmth and surrounded by all the prettinesses she had loved. It made his heart beat to think that he was so near her, that he would see her presently—and even that she had been unhappy. At fifty-five men are not often sentimental, but the hardest would be softened by the thought of a beautiful woman who had been unhappy about him for thirty years. He stood quite patiently, and waited for admittance. The hesitation of the other, her evident unwillingness to consent to his identity, which he could see was mingled all the time with a conviction that he was the person he claimed to be, had irritated and filled him with suspicions; but all this flew away upon the breath of old, old, unchangeable feeling. Anna! he had never ceased to think that the very name was music all these years.
The sound of the voices within the room was low at first, but afterwards grew louder. Then it was mingled with impatient tappings as of a stick on the floor, and Mary’s voice—he could trace both voices, they were so different, even in the murmur of talk at the beginning—took an expostulatory tone.
“I assure you, Anna—”
“Assure me nothing. Let him come in, let him come in: and I will let him know what I think of him.”
It was certainly her voice; but in all his recollection he had never heard this tone in it. He waited listening, half amused, half sad, beginning to wonder more and more. At last he yielded to a sudden impulse, and went straight forward to the half-opened door.
There he stood for a moment arrested, struck dumb. And they, too, struck by the sound of the man’s foot, so different from their own velvet steps, turned round and looked at him. Was that Anna? His heart, which had been beating so high, stopped short, and seemed to drop, drop into some unknown depths. “Oh yes, I see,” he said to himself. “I see, I see. She is as handsome as ever——” But was that Anna? He stood on the threshold of this room, which was sacred to her, holding his breath.
Then the strange old woman, who was Anna, beckoned to him imperiously with her hand.
“Come in, come in,” she said, “whoever you are, who are using a name—— Come in. I do not know if you are aware that Mr Leonard Crosthwaite, whose name you are assuming——” Here she stopped and fixed two great, brilliant, dark eyes upon him, opened to their full width, glowing like angry stars. She made a pause of about a minute long, which seemed to the two others like an hour. Then she dropped her voice with a careless inflection, as if after that gaze she disdained the risk she was running—“died,” she added indifferently, but pausing on the word—“at least twenty years ago.”
“He did not die, Anna, since I am here,” said the stranger.
It was impossible to speak to her, even now, without some tenderness getting into his voice.
“Do not venture to speak to me, sir, by my Christian name. Do you know there is a punishment for impostors? Oh, you think perhaps you know just how far you can go without infringing the law. Perhaps you think, too, that we are alone here, and you can frighten us. But that is a mistake. There is a butler, a strong man, whom I can summon in a moment with this bell, and there is my nephew. Any attempt at bullying or extortion will be useless here.”
“Oh, Anna!” her sister cried; then she clasped her hands, turning to the visitor—“I told you she was changed.”
A series of different emotions passed over the Canadian’s face—he smiled, then laughed angrily, growing red and hot; but over these variations stole such a softening of regret as combined all in one sorrowful sense of change. He nodded his head gently in reply to what the other sister said.
“You are right,” he said in a low tone; “as handsome as ever, but how different! Anna, Anna, though we have been separated so long—though you cast me off, and I thought had forgotten me—though I am married and a happy man—yet you have never been put out of your place in my heart all these years.”
She looked at him with those keen eyes; though she kept up wonderfully her air of lofty scorn and indifference, it was possible to perceive a gleam of something else, a mixture of satisfaction and anger in her face. “It is part of the rôle, of course,” she said, “to call me by my Christian name. But Leonard Crosthwaite, whatever he might be else, was a gentleman. So you will keep to your part better by acting like a gentleman in this point. That is one way of making an impostor look like him.”
He restrained himself with an effort. “What am I to call you then?” he said, looking at her sister. “Has she never married? How wonderful that is! Miss Crosthwaite then: since you wish it, I will call you so.”
A momentary shadow of humiliation went over the proud face. She had chosen not to marry. She had always been beautiful, and she was not without fortune; but nobody whom she thought good enough had ever asked Anna Crosthwaite to marry him. And she did not like to remember this in presence of her old lover, whom she had loved once in her silly youth, though she forsook him: it was not, however, because of that love, or anything connected with it, that she received him thus now.
“I am Miss Crosthwaite,” she said, “though you affect to be surprised. It is not all a woman thinks of to marry any fool that turns up, and to become the mother of fools. Go away to your son, Mary. That was your ambition: as it is your folly now, to believe in every deception, and allow yourself to be led by the nose. I think your protégé had better withdraw too, now that I have seen him. He has not a feature of poor Leonard Crosthwaite,” she added, eyeing him steadfastly. “No one, I suppose, can doubt my capacity to judge. His complexion is different, his features are different. Go away, sir, and be thankful we don’t turn you over at once to the police.”
“Is this,” he said, half-stifled with astonishment and indignation, “is this all you have to say to me—”
“It is all I have to say to you,” she said; “and this is my room, where I am supposed to have some right to choose my visitors. Go! You can do anything you please; I, for one, am not afraid of you. You may go.”
He burst out laughing at the extraordinary perversity of the scene. If he had not laughed he must have been furious—it was his only deliverance; and yet it may be supposed there was not much laughing in his heart.
“This is the most extraordinary reception to meet with,” he said, “after coming so far, after staying away so long. If it is a jest, it is a bad jest, Anna. Suppose that it is hard upon us after all this long interval, to look upon each other with such changed eyes—still there is such a thing as justice. You know me as well as I know you. It is by instinct—it is because we cannot help it. For, heaven knows, you are as unlike the Anna I left as night is to day.”
She did not reply. A hasty gleam of passion came out of her keen eyes. Then she put out her hand to the bell. “Simmons,” she said, “will see this person to the door, Mary. I don’t want to be hard upon any acquaintance of yours; you know a very strange set of people, I must say; but I will not be insulted. Simmons must see this person out of the house.”
The other sister looked at him with a look of agonised entreaty, clasping her hands. He was touched by it, though his only answer to Anna was another outburst of harsh laughter. “I would not like to be in your Simmons’ shoes,” he said, “if he tries to see me anywhere that I do not choose to go. But I do not care to thrust myself on anybody. Good-bye, Anna; we shall meet ere long in different circumstances, never fear.”
With that he went out hastily into the hall, where the sentinel candle was still burning. There he was met by a young man who looked at him surprised. There was so much resemblance in this new-comer to the lady called Mary that there could be no doubt who he was. The Canadian did not pause to inquire. He put his hand on the young man’s arm—“Come out with me, or take me somewhere where I can talk to you. There is a mystery that wants clearing up, and you can help me. I am your mother’s cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite. What! you have heard the name before?”
“Indeed, I have heard the name; but you were supposed to be dead long ago,” the young man said.
“I am not dead—your mother will tell you—I am newly returned from Canada. Tell me what reason there is to wish me dead,” he said peremptorily. “It will be no worse for you——”
“No reason at all, sir,” said the young man promptly. “I do not know who you are, but there is nothing to conceal. You are welcome to hear it all from me.”
Then he led the visitor into a small room at the other side of the hall, into which after a while the young man’s mother stole softly, crying and greatly agitated. She was startled beyond measure to find the visitor with her son, to whom she was going for consolation. But they were not long in convincing her that it was better that all there was to tell should be told.
When Mr Yorke left the house it was very dark and cold, and the rain beginning to drizzle. Young Geoffrey Underwood would have gone with him, or, failing that, pressed all manner of wraps upon him, as his mother had pressed refreshments: but the Canadian smiled at the cold, and the dismal, continuous, but not violent rain. “I am used to worse cold than this,” he said. He went out into the night, more grave than when he had entered, but with a fire in his eye and in his heart of which there had then been no sign. He walked slowly along making calculations, arranging his course of procedure as he went down the hill. The rain came down faster and faster, till it swept like a great sheet of water from the inky sky. It swept all the suburban streets both of passengers and vehicles; nothing was to be seen but the wavering dismal lamps, making distorted reflections on the wet pavement—not a cab, not a place of shelter. Mr Yorke was drenched to the bones and chilled to the very heart.