NEXT morning he went first to his old lawyer, in whom he had confidence, and having copied the certificate, carefully changing the names, submitted it to him. Mr. Parchemin declared that he knew nothing of Scotch law, but shook his head, and hoped there was nothing very unpleasant in the circumstances, declaring vehemently that it was a shame and disgrace that such snares should be spread for the unwary on the other side of the border. Was it a disgrace that Arthur Arden should not have been protected in Scotland, as in England, from the quick-wittedness of the girl whom he had already cheated and meant to betray? Edgar felt that there might be something to be said on both sides of the question, as he left his copy in Mr. Parchemin’s hands, who undertook to consult a Scotch legal authority on the question; then he went upon his other business. I need not follow him through his manifold and perplexing inquiries, or inform the reader how he was sent from office to office, and from secretary to secretary, or with what loss of time and patience his quest was accompanied. After several days’ work, however, he ascertained that the chapel in Hart Street had indeed been licensed, but only used once or twice for marriages, and that no record of any such marriage as that which he was in search of could be found anywhere. A stray record of a class-meeting which Emma Lockwood had been admonished for levity of demeanour, was the sole mention of her to be found; and though the officials admitted a certain carelessness in the preservation of books belonging to an extinct chapel, they declared it to be impossible that such a fact could have been absolutely ignored. There was, indeed, a rumour in the denomination that a local preacher had been found to have taken upon himself to perform a marriage, for which he had been severely reprimanded; but as he had been possessed of no authority to make such a proceeding legal, no register had been made of the fact, and only the reprimanded was inscribed on the books of the community. This was the only opening for even a conjecture as to the truth of Miss Lockwood’s first story. If the second could only have been dissipated as easily!
Edgar’s inquiries among the Wesleyan authorities lasted, as I have said, several days, and caused him more fatigue of limb and of mind than it is easy to express. He went to Tottenham’s—where, indeed, he showed himself every day, getting more and more irritated with the Entertainment, and all its preparations—as soon as he had ascertained beyond doubt that the marriage at Hart Street Chapel was fictitious. Miss Lockwood, he was informed, was an invalid, but would see him in the young ladies’ dining-room, where, accordingly, he found her, looking sharper, and whiter, and more worn than ever. He told her his news quietly, with a natural pity for the woman deceived; a gleam of sudden light shone in her eyes.
“I told you so,” she said, triumphantly; “now didn’t I tell you so? He wanted to take me in—I felt it from the very first; but he hadn’t got to do with a fool, as he thought. I was even with him for that.”
“I have written to find out if your Scotch witnesses are alive,” said Edgar.
“Alive!—why shouldn’t they be alive, like I am, and like he is?” she cried, with feverish irritability. “Folks of our ages don’t die!—what are you thinking of? And if they were dead, what would it matter?—there’s their names as good as themselves. Ah! I didn’t botch my business any more than he botched his. You’ll find it’s all right.”
“I hope you are better,” Edgar said, with a compassion that was all the more profound because the object of it neither deserved, nor would have accepted it.
“Better—oh! thank you, I am quite well,” she said lightly—“only a bit of a cold. Perhaps on the whole it’s as well I’m not going to sing to-night; a cold is so bad for one’s voice. Good-bye, Mr. Earnshaw. We’ll meet at the old gentleman’s turnout to-night.”
And she waved her hand, dismissing poor Edgar, who left her with a warmer sense of disgust, and dislike than had ever moved his friendly bosom before. And yet it was in this creature’s interests he was working, and against Clare! Mr. Tottenham caught him on his way out, to hand him a number of letters which had arrived for him, and to call for his advice in the final preparations. The public had been shut out of the hall in which the Entertainment was to be, on pretence of alterations.
“Three more resignations,” Mr. Tottenham said, who was feverish and harassed, and looked like a man at the end of his patience. “Heaven be praised, it will be over to-night? Come early, Earnshaw, if you can spare the time, and stand by me. If any of the performers get cross, and refuse to perform, what shall I do?”
“Let them!” cried Edgar; “ungrateful fools, after all your kindness.”
Edgar was too much harassed and annoyed himself to be perfectly rational in his judgments.
“Don’t let us be uncharitable,” said Mr. Tottenham; “have they perhaps, after all, much reason for gratitude? Is it not my own crotchet I am carrying out, in spite of all obstacles? But it will be a lesson—I think it will be a lesson,” he added. “And, Earnshaw, don’t fail me to-night.”
Edgar went straight from the shop to Mr. Parchemin’s, to receive the opinion of the eminent Scotch law authority in respect to the marriage certificate. He had written to Robert Campbell, at Loch Arroch Head, suggesting that inquiries might be made about the persons who signed it, and had heard from him that morning that the landlady of the inn was certainly to be found, and that she perfectly remembered having put her name to the paper. The waiter was no longer there, but could be easily laid hands upon. There was accordingly no hope except in the Scotch lawyer, who might still make waste paper of the certificate. Edgar found Mr. Parchemin hot and red, after a controversy with this functionary.
“He laughs at my indignation,” said the old lawyer. “Well, I suppose if one did not heat one’s self in argument, what he says might have some justice in it. He says innocent men that let women alone, and innocent women that behave as they ought to do, will never get any harm from the Scotch marriage law; and that it’s always a safeguard for a poor girl that may have been led astray without meaning it. He says—well, I see you’re impatient—though how such an anomaly can ever be suffered so near to civilization! Well, he says it’s as good a marriage as if it had been done in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That’s all the comfort I’ve got to give you. I hope it hasn’t got anything directly to say to you.”
“Thanks,” said Edgar, faintly; “it has to do with some—very dear friends of mine. I could scarcely feel it more deeply if it concerned myself.”
“It is a disgrace to civilization!” cried the lawyer—“it is a subversion of every honest principle. You young men ought to take warning—”
“—To do a villainy of this kind, when we mean to do it, out of Scotland?” said Edgar, “or we may find ourselves the victims instead of the victors? Heaven forbid that I should do anything to save a scoundrel from his just deserts!”
“But I thought you were interested—deeply interested——”
“Not for him, the cowardly blackguard!” cried Edgar, excited beyond self-control.
He turned away from the place, holding the lawyer’s opinion, for which he had spent a large part of his little remaining stock of money, clutched in his hand. A feverish, momentary sense, almost of gratification, that Arden should have been thus punished, possessed him—only for a moment. He hastened to the club, where he could sit quiet and think it over. He had not been able even to consider his own business, but had thrust his letters into his pocket without looking at them.
When he found himself alone, or almost alone, in a corner of the library, he covered his face with his hands, and yielded to the crushing influence of this last certainty. Clare was no longer an honoured matron, the possessor of a well-recognized position, the mother of children of whom she was proud, the wife of a man whom at least she had once loved, and who, presumably, had done nothing to make her hate and scorn him. God help her! What was she now? What was her position to be? She had no relations to fall back upon, or to stand by her in her trouble, except himself, who was no relation—only poor Edgar, her loving brother, bound to her by everything but blood; but, alas! he knew that in such emergencies blood is everything, and other ties count for so little. The thought made his heart sick; and he could not be silent, could not hide it from her, dared not shut up this secret in his own mind, as he might have done almost anything else that affected her painfully. There was but one way, but one step before him now.
His letters tumbled out of his pocket as he drew out Miss Lockwood’s original paper, and he tried to look at them, by way of giving his overworn mind a pause, and that he might be the better able to choose the best way of carrying out the duty now before him. These letters were—some of them, at least—answers to those which he had written in the excitement and happy tumult of his mind, after Lady Mary’s unintentional revelation. He read them as through a mist; their very meaning came dimly upon him, and he could with difficulty realize the state of his feelings when, all glowing with the prospect of personal happiness, and the profound and tender exultation with which he found himself to be still beloved, he had written these confident appeals to the kindness of his friends. Most likely, had he read the replies with a disengaged mind, they would have disappointed him bitterly, with a dreariness of downfall proportioned to his warmth of hope. But in his present state of mind every sound around him was muffled, every blow softened. One nail strikes out another, say the astute Italians. The mind is not capable of two profound and passionate preoccupations at once. He read them with subdued consciousness, with a veil before his eyes. They were all friendly, and some were warmly cordial. “What can we do for you?” they all said. “If you could take a mastership, I have interest at more than one public school; but, alas! I suppose you did not even take your degree in England,” one wrote to him. “If you knew anything about land, or had been trained to the law,” said another, “I might have got you a land agency in Ireland, a capital thing for a man of energy and courage; but then I fear you are no lawyer, and not much of an agriculturist.” “What can you do, my dear fellow?” said a third, more cautiously. “Think what you are most fit for—you must know best yourself—and let me know, and I will try all I can do.”
Edgar laughed as he bundled them all back into his pocket. What was he most fit for? To be an amateur detective, and find out secrets that broke his heart. A dull ache for his own disappointment (though his mind was not lively enough to feel disappointed) seemed to add to the general despondency, the lowered life and oppressed heart of which he had been conscious without this. But then what had he to do with personal comfort or happiness? In the first place there lay this tremendous passage before him—this revelation to be made to Clare.
It was late in the afternoon before he could nerve himself to write the indispensable letter, from which he felt it was cowardly to shrink. It was not a model of composition, though it gave him a great deal of trouble. This is what he said:—
“SIR,
“It is deeply against my will that I address you, so long after all communication has ended between us; and it is possible that you may not remember even the new name with which I sign this. By a singular and unhappy chance, facts in your past life, affecting the honour and credit of the family, have been brought to my knowledge, of all people in the world. If I could have avoided the confidence, I should have done so; but it was out of my power. When I say that these facts concern a person called Lockwood (or so called, at least, before her pretended marriage), you will, I have no doubt, understand what I mean. Will you meet me, at any place you may choose to appoint, for the purpose of discussing this most momentous and fatal business? I have examined it minutely, with the help of the best legal authority, from whom the real names of the parties have been concealed, and I cannot hold out to you any hope that it will be easily arranged. In order, however, to save it from being thrown at once into professional hands, and exposed to the public, will you communicate with me, or appoint a time and place to meet me? I entreat you to do this, for the sake of your children and family. I cannot trust myself to appeal to any other sacred claim upon you. For God’s sake, let me see you, and tell me if you have any plea to raise!
“EDGAR EARNSHAW.”
He felt that the outburst at the end was injudicious, but could not restrain the ebullition of feeling. If he could but be allowed to manage it quietly, to have her misery broken to Clare without any interposition of the world’s scorn or pity. She was the one utterly guiltless, but it was she who would be most exposed to animadversion; he felt this, with his heart bleeding for his sister. If he had but had the privilege of a brother—if he could have gone to her, and drawn her gently away, and provided home and sympathy for her, before the blow had fallen! But neither he nor anyone could do this, for Clare was not the kind of being to make close friends. She reserved her love for the few who belonged to her, and had little or none to expend on strangers. Did she still think of him as one belonging to her, or was his recollection altogether eclipsed, blotted out from her mind? He began half a dozen letters to Clare herself, asking if she still thought of him, if she would allow him to remember that he was once her brother, with a humility which he could not have shown had she been as happy and prosperous as all the world believed her to be. But after he had written these letters, one after another, retouching a phrase here, and an epithet there, which was too weak or too strong for his excited fancy, and lingering over her name with tears in his eyes, he destroyed them all. Until he heard from her husband, he did not feel that he could venture to write to his sister. His sister!—his poor, forlorn, ruined, solitary sister, rich as she was, and surrounded by all things advantageous! a wife, and yet no wife; the mother of children whose birth would be their shame! Edgar rose up from where he was writing in the intolerable pang of this thought—he could not keep still while it flashed through his mind. Clara, the proudest, the purest, the most fastidious of women—how could she bear it? He said to himself that it was impossible—impossible—that she must die of it! There was no way of escape for her. It would kill her, and his was the hand which had to give the blow.
In this condition, with such thoughts running over in his vexed brain, to go back to the shop, and find poor Mr. Tottenham wrestling among the difficulties which, poor man, were overwhelming him, with dark lines of care under his eyes, and his face haggard with anxiety—imagine, dear reader, what it was! He could have laughed at the petty trouble; yet no one could laugh at the pained face, the kind heart wounded, the manifest and quite overwhelming trouble of the philanthropist.
“I don’t even know yet whether they will keep to their engagements; and we are all at sixes and sevens, and the company will begin to arrive in an hour or two!” cried poor Mr. Tottenham. Edgar’s anxieties were so much more engrossing and terrible that to have a share in these small ones did him good; and he was so indifferent that he calmed everybody, brought the unruly performers back to their senses, and thrust all the arrangements on by the sheer carelessness he felt as to whether they were ready or not. “Who cares about your play?” he said to Watson, who came to pour out his grievances. “Do you think the Duchess of Middlemarch is so anxious to hear you? They will enjoy themselves a great deal better chatting to each other.”
This brought Mr. Watson and his troupe to their senses, as all Mr. Tottenham’s agitated remonstrances had not brought them. Edgar did not care to be in the way of the fine people when they arrived. He got a kind word from Lady Mary, who whispered to him, “How ill you are looking! You must tell us what it is, and let us help you;” for this kind woman found it hard to realise that there were things in which the support of herself and her husband would be but little efficacious; and he had approached Lady Augusta, as has been recorded, with some wistful, hopeless intention of recommending Clare to her, in case of anything that might happen. But Lady Augusta had grown so pale at the sight of him, and had thrown so many uneasy glances round her, that Edgar withdrew, with his heart somewhat heavy, feeling his burden rather more than he could conveniently bear. He had gone and hid himself in the library, trying to read, and hearing far off the din of applause—the distant sound of voices. The noise of the visitors’ feet approaching had driven him from that refuge, when Mr. Tottenham, in high triumph, led his guests through his huge establishment. Edgar, dislodged, and not caring to put himself in the way of further discouragement, chose this moment to give his message to Phil, and strayed away from sound and light into the retired passages, when that happened to him in his time of extremity which it is now my business to record.