THE next morning brought no letters except from Susan. Fordham, if so true as Lady Western called him, was not, Vincent thought with bitterness, acting as an honourable man should in this emergency. But perhaps he might come to Carlingford in the course of the day, to see Susan’s brother. The aspect of the young minister was changed when he made his appearance at the breakfast table. Mrs. Vincent made the most alarmed inquiries about his health, but—stopped abruptly in making them by his short and ungracious answer—came to a dead pause; and with a pang of fright and mortification, acknowledged to herself that her son was no longer her boy, whose entire heart she knew, but a man with a life and concerns of his own, possibly not patent to his mother. That breakfast was not a cheerful meal. There had been a long silence, broken only by those anxious attentions to each other’s personal comfort, with which people endeavour to smooth down the embarrassment of an intercourse apparently confidential, into which some sudden unexplainable shadow has fallen. At last Vincent got up from the table, with a little outbreak of impatience.
“I can’t eat this morning; don’t ask me. Mother, get your bonnet on,” said the young man; “we must go to see Mrs. Hilyard to-day.”
“Yes, Arthur,” said Mrs. Vincent, meekly; she had determined not to see Mrs. Hilyard, of whom her gentle respectability was suspicious; but, startled by her son’s looks, and by the evident arrival of that period, instinctively perceived by most women, at which a man snatches the reins out of his adviser’s hand, and has his way, the alarmed and anxious mother let her arms fall, and gave in without a struggle.
“The fact is, I heard of Mr. Fordham last night,” said Vincent, walking about the room, lifting up and setting down again abstractedly the things on the table. “Lady Western knows him, it appears; perhaps Mrs. Hilyard does too.”
“Lady Western knows him? Oh, Arthur, tell me—what did she say?” cried his mother, clasping her hands.
“She said he could be trusted—with life—to death,” said Vincent, very low, with an inaudible groan in his heart. He was prepared for the joy and the tears, and the thanksgiving with which his words were received; but he could not have believed, how sharply his mother’s exclamation, “God bless my Susan! now I am happy about her, Arthur. I could be content to die,” would go to his heart. Susan, yes;—it was right to be happy about her; and as for himself, who cared? He shut up his heart in that bitterness; but it filled him with an irritation and restlessness which he could not subdue.
“We must go to Mrs. Hilyard; probably she can tell us more,” he said, abruptly; “and there is her child to speak of. I blame myself,” he added, with impatience, “for not telling her before. Let us go now directly—never mind ringing the bell; all that can be done when we are out. Dinner? oh, for heaven’s sake, let them manage that! Where is your bonnet, mother? the air will do me good after a bad night.”
“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Vincent, moved by this last argument. It must be his headache, no doubt, she tried to persuade herself. Stimulated by the sound of his footstep in the next room, she lost very little time over her toilette. Perhaps the chill January air, sharp with frost, air full of natural exhilaration and refreshment, did bring a certain relief to the young Nonconformist’s aching temples and exasperated temper. It was with difficulty his mother kept time with his long strides, as he hurried her along the street, not leaving her time to look at Salem, which was naturally the most interesting point in Carlingford to the minister’s mother. Before she had half prepared herself for this interview, he had hurried her up the narrow bare staircase which led to Mrs. Hilyard’s lodgings. On the landing, with the door half open, stood Lady Western’s big footman, fully occupying the narrow standing-ground, and shedding a radiance of plush over the whole shabby house. The result upon Mrs. Vincent was an immediate increase of comfort, for surely the woman must be respectable to whom people sent messages by so grand a functionary. The sight of the man struck Vincent like another pang. She had sent to take counsel, no doubt, on the evidently unlooked-for information which had startled her so last night.
“Come in,” said the inhabitant of the room. She was folding a note for which the footman waited. Things were just as usual in that shabby place. The coarse stuff at which she had been working lay on the table beside her. Seeing a woman with Vincent, she got up quickly, and turned her keen eyes upon the new-comer. The timid doubtful mother, the young man, somewhat arbitrary and self-willed, who had brought his companion there against her will, the very look, half fright, half suspicion, which Mrs. Vincent threw round the room, explained matters to this quick observer. She was mistress of the position at once.
“Take this to Lady Western, John,” said Mrs. Hilyard. “She may come when she pleases—I shall be at home all day; but tell her to send a maid next time, for you are much too magnificent for Back Grove Street. This is Mrs. Vincent, I know. Your son has brought you to see me, and I hope you have not come to say that I was too rash in asking a Christian kindness from this young man’s mother. If he had not behaved like a paladin, I should not have ventured upon it; but when a young man conducts himself so, I think his mother is a good woman. You have taken in my child?”
She had taken Mrs. Vincent by both hands, and placed her in a chair, and sat down beside her. The widow had not a word to say. What with the praise of her son, which was music to her ears—what with the confusion of her own position, she was painfully embarrassed and at a loss, and anxiously full of explanations. “Susan has, I have no doubt; but I am sorry I left home on Wednesday morning, and we did not know then they were expected; but we have a spare room, and Susan, I don’t doubt——”
“The fact is, my mother had left home before they could have reached Lonsdale,” interposed Vincent; “but my sister would take care of them equally well. They are all safe. A note came this morning announcing their arrival. My mother,” said the young man, hastily, “returns almost immediately. It will make no difference to the strangers.”
“I am sure Susan will make them comfortable, and the beds would be well aired,” said Mrs. Vincent; “but I had sudden occasion to leave home, and did not even know of it till the night before. My dear,” she said, with hesitation, “did you think Mrs. Hilyard would know? I brought Susan’s note to show you,” she added, laying down that simple performance in which Susan announced the receipt of Arthur’s letter, and the subsequent arrival of “a governess-lady, and the most beautiful girl that ever was seen.” The latter part of Susan’s hurried note, in which she declared this beautiful girl to be “very odd—a sort of grown-up baby,” was carefully abstracted by the prudent mother.
The strange woman before them took up the note in both her hands and drank it in, with an almost trembling eagerness. She seemed to read over the words to herself again and again with moving lips. Then she drew a long breath of relief.
“Miss Smith is the model of a governess-lady,” she said, turning with a composure wonderfully unlike that eagerness of anxiety to Mrs. Vincent again—“she never writes but on her day, whatever may happen; and yesterday did not happen to be her day. Thank you; it is Christian charity. You must not be any loser meantime, and we must arrange these matters before you go away. This is not a very imposing habitation,” she said, glancing round with a movement of her thin mouth, and comic gleam in her eye—“but that makes no difference, so far as they are concerned. Mr. Vincent knows more about me than he has any right to know,” continued the strange woman, turning her head towards him for the moment with an amused glance—“a man takes one on trust sometimes, but a woman must always explain herself to a woman: perhaps, Mr. Vincent, you will leave us together while I explain my circumstances to your mother?”
“Oh, I am sure it—it is not necessary,” said Mrs. Vincent, half alarmed; “but, Arthur, you were to ask——”
“What were you to ask?” said Mrs. Hilyard, laying her hand with an involuntary movement upon a tiny note lying open on the table, to which Vincent’s eyes had already wandered.
“The fact is,” he said, following her hand with his eyes, “that my mother came up to inquire about some one called Fordham, in whom she is interested. Lady Western knows him,” said Vincent, abruptly, looking in Mrs. Hilyard’s face.
“Lady Western knows him. You perceive that she has written to ask me about him this morning. Yes,” said Mrs. Hilyard, looking at the young man, not without a shade of compassion. “You are quite right in your conclusions; poor Alice and he were in love with each other before she married Sir Joseph. He has not been heard of for a long time. What do you want to know, and how is it he has showed himself now?”
“It is for Susan’s sake,” cried Mrs. Vincent, interposing; “oh, Mrs. Hilyard, you will feel for me better than any one—my only daughter! I got an anonymous letter the night before I left. I am so flurried, I almost forget what night it was—Tuesday night—which arrived when my dear child was out. I never kept anything from her in all her life, and to conceal it was dreadful—and how we got through that night——”
“Mother, the details are surely not necessary now,” said her impatient son. “We want to know what are this man’s antecedents and his character—that is all,” he added, with irrestrainable bitterness.
Mrs. Hilyard took up her work, and pinned the long coarse seam to her knee. “Mrs. Vincent will tell me herself,” she said, looking straight at him with her amused look. Of all her strange peculiarities, the faculty of amusement was the strangest. Intense restrained passion, anxiety of the most desperate kind, a wild will which would pause at nothing, all blended with and left room for this unfailing perception of any ludicrous possibility. Vincent got up hastily, and, going to the window, looked out upon the dismal prospect of Salem, throwing its shabby shadow upon those dreary graves. Instinctively he looked for the spot where that conversation must have been held which he had overheard from the vestry window; it came most strongly to his mind at that moment. As his mother went through her story, how Mr. Fordham had come accidentally to the house—how gradually they had admitted him to their friendship—how, at last, Susan and he had become engaged to each other—her son stood at the window, following in his mind all the events of that evening, which looked so long ago, yet was only two or three evenings back. He recalled to himself his rush to the telegraph office; and again, with a sharp stir of opposition and enmity, recalled, clear as a picture, the railway-carriage just starting, the flash of light inside, the face so clearly evident against the vacant cushions. What had he to do with that face, with its eagle outline and scanty long locks? Somehow, in the meshes of fate he felt himself so involved that it was impossible to forget this man. He came and took his seat again with his mind full of that recollection. The story had come to a pause, and Mrs. Hilyard sat silent, taking in with her keen eyes every particular of the gentle widow’s character, evidently, as Vincent could see, following her conduct back to those springs of gentle but imprudent generosity and confidence in what people said to her, from which her present difficulties sprang.
“And you admitted him first?” said Mrs. Hilyard, interrogatively, “because——?” She paused. Mrs. Vincent became embarrassed and nervous.
“It was very foolish, very foolish,” said the widow, wringing her hands; “but he came to make inquiries, you know. I answered him civilly the first time, and he came again and again. It looked so natural. He had come down to see a young relation at school in the neighbourhood.”
Mrs. Hilyard uttered a sudden exclamation—very slight, low, scarcely audible; but it attracted Vincent’s attention. He could see that her thin lips were closed, her figure slightly erected, a sudden keen gleam of interest in her face. “Did he find his relation?” she asked, in a voice so ringing and distinct that the young minister started, and sat upright, bracing himself for something about to happen. It did not flash upon him yet what that meaning might be; but his pulses leapt with a prescient thrill of some tempest or earthquake about to fall.
“No; he never could find her—it did not turn out to be our Lonsdale, I think—what is the matter?” cried Mrs. Vincent; “you both know something I don’t know—what has happened? Arthur, have I said anything dreadful?—oh, what does it mean?”
“Describe him if you can,” said Mrs. Hilyard, in a tone which, sharp and calm, tingled through the room with a passionate clearness which nothing but extreme excitement could give. She had taken Mrs. Vincent’s hand, and held it tightly with a certain compassionate compulsion, forcing her to speak. As for Vincent, the horrible suspicion which stole upon him unmanned him utterly. He had sprung to his feet, and stood with his eyes fixed on his mother’s face with an indescribable horror and suspense. It was not her he saw. With hot eyes that blazed in their sockets, he was fixing the gaze of desperation upon a picture in his mind, which he felt but too certain would correspond with the faltering words which fell from her lips. Mrs. Vincent, for her part, would have thrown herself wildly upon him, and lost her head altogether in a frightened attempt to find out what this sudden commotion meant, had she not been fixed and supported by that strong yet gentle grasp upon her hand. “Describe him—take time,” said her strange companion again—not looking at her, but waiting in an indescribable calm of passion for the words which she could frame in her mind before they were said.
“Tall,” said the widow’s faltering alarmed voice, falling with a strange uncertainty through the intense stillness, in single words, with gasps between; “not—a very young man—aquiline—with a sort of eagle-look—light hair—long and thin, and as fine as silk—very light in his beard, so that it scarcely showed. Oh, God help us! what is it? what is it?—You both know whom I mean.”
Neither of them spoke; but the eyes of the two met in a single look, from which both withdrew, as if the communication were a crime. With a shudder Vincent approached his mother; and, speechless though he was, took hold of her, and drew her to him abruptly. Was it murder he read in those eyes, with their desperate concentration of will and power? The sight of them, and recollection of their dreadful splendour, drove even Susan out of his mind. Susan, poor gentle soul!—what if she broke her tender heart, in which no devils lurked? “Mother, come—come,” he said, hoarsely, raising her up in his arm, and releasing the hand which the extraordinary woman beside her still clasped fast. The movement roused Mrs. Hilyard as well as Mrs. Vincent. She rose up promptly from the side of the visitor who had brought her such news.
“I need not suggest to you that this must be acted on at once,” she said to Vincent, who, in his agitation, saw how the hand, with which she leant on the table, clenched hard till it grew white with the pressure. “The man we have to deal with spares nothing.” She stopped, and then, with an effort, went up to the half-fainting mother, who hung upon Vincent’s arm, and took her hands and pressed them close. “We have both thrust our children into the lion’s mouth,” she cried, with a momentary softening. “Go, poor woman, and save your child if you can, and so will I—we are companions in misfortune. And you are a priest, why cannot you curse him?” she exclaimed, with a bitter cry. The next moment she had taken down a travelling-bag from a shelf, and, kneeling down by a trunk, began to transfer some things to it. Vincent left his mother, and went up to her with a sudden impulse, “I am a priest, let me bless you,” said the young man, touching with a compassionate hand the dark head bending before him. Then he took his mother away. He could not speak as he supported her down-stairs; she, clinging to him with double weakness, could scarcely support herself at all in her agitation and wonder when they got into the street. She kept looking in his face with a pitiful appeal that went to his heart.
“Tell me, Arthur, tell me!” She sobbed it out unawares, and over and over before he knew what she was saying. And what could he tell her? “We must go to Susan—poor Susan!” was all the young man could say.