George Gissing
In the Year of Jubilee
He stood leaning upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge, his eyes scanning the dark facade of the Houses of Parliament.
How would the strong, unscrupulous, really ambitious man act in such a case? What was to prevent him from ignoring the fact that he was married, and directing his course precisely as he would have done if poverty had come upon him before his act of supreme foolishness? Journalism must have been his refuge then, as now; but Society would have held out to him the hope of every adventurer—a marriage with some woman whose wealth and connections would clear an upward path in whatever line he chose to follow. Why not abandon to Nancy the inheritance it would degrade him to share, and so purchase back his freedom? The bargain might be made; a strong man would carry it through, and ultimately triumph by daring all risks.
Having wrought himself to this point of insensate revolt, he quitted his musing-station on the bridge, and walked away.
Nancy did not write again. There passed four or five days, and Tarrant, working hard as well as enjoying the pleasures of Society, made up his mind not to see her. He would leave events to take their course. A heaviness of heart often troubled him, but he resisted it, and told himself that he was becoming stronger.
After a long day of writing, he addressed a packet to a certain periodical, and went out to post it. No sooner had he left the house than a woman, who had been about to pass him on the pavement, abruptly turned round and hurriedly walked away. But for this action, he would not have noticed her; as it was, he recognised the figure, and an impulse which allowed of no reflection brought him in a moment to her side. In the ill-lighted street a face could with difficulty be observed, but Nancy’s features were unmistakable to the eye that now fell upon them.
‘Stop, and let me speak to you,’ he exclaimed.
She walked only the more quickly, and he was obliged to take her by the arm.
‘What do you want?’
She spoke as if to an insolent stranger, and shook off his grasp.
‘If you have nothing to say to me, why are you here?’
‘Here? I suppose the streets are free to me?’
‘Nothing would bring you to Great College Street if you didn’t know that I was living here. Now that we have met, we must talk.’
‘I have nothing at all to say to you.’
‘Well, then I will talk.—Come this way; there’s a quiet place where no one will notice us.’
Nancy kept her eyes resolutely averted from him; he, the while, searched her face with eagerness, as well as the faint rays of the nearest lamp allowed it.
‘If you have anything to say, you must say it here.’
‘It’s no use, then. Go your way, and I’ll go mine.’
He turned, and walked slowly in the direction of Dean’s Yard. There was the sound of a step behind him, and when he had come into the dark, quiet square, Nancy was there too.
‘Better to be reasonable,’ said Tarrant, approaching her again. ‘I want to ask you why you answered a well-meant letter with vulgar insult?’
‘The insult came from you,’ she answered, in a shaking voice.
‘What did I say that gave you offence?’
‘How can you ask such a question? To write in that way after never answering my letter for months, leaving me without a word at such a time, making me think either that you were dead or that you would never let me hear of you again—’
‘I told you it was a mere note, just to let you know I was back. I said you should hear more when we met.’
‘Very well, we have met. What have you to say for yourself?’
‘First of all, this. That you are mistaken in supposing I should ever consent to share your money. The thought was natural to you, no doubt; but I see things from a different point of view.’
His cold anger completely disguised the emotion stirred in him by Nancy’s presence. Had he not spoken thus, he must have given way to joy and tenderness. For Nancy seemed more beautiful than the memory he had retained of her, and even at such a juncture she was far from exhibiting the gross characteristics attributed to her by his rebellious imagination.
‘Then I don’t understand,’ were her next words, ‘why you wrote to me again at all.’
‘There are many things in me that you don’t understand, and can’t understand.’
‘Yes, I think so. That’s why I see no use in our talking.’
Tarrant was ashamed of what he had said—a meaningless retort, which covered his inability to speak as his heart prompted.
‘At all events I wanted to see you, and it’s fortunate you passed just as I was coming out.’
Nancy would not accept the conciliatory phrase.
‘I hadn’t the least intention of seeing you,’ she replied. ‘It was a curiosity to know where you lived, nothing else. I shall never forgive you for the way in which you have behaved to me, so you needn’t try to explain yourself.’
‘Here and now, I should certainly not try. The only thing I will say about myself is, that I very much regret not having made known that you were married to me when plain honesty required it. Now, I look upon it as something over and done with, as far as I am concerned. I shall never benefit by the deception—’
She interrupted him.
‘How do you know that I shall benefit by it? How can you tell what has been happening since you last heard from me in America?’
‘I have taken it for granted that things are the same.’
‘Then you didn’t even take measures to have news of me from any one else?’
‘What need? I should always have received any letter you sent.’
‘You thought it likely that I should appeal to you if I were in difficulties.’
He stood silent, glad of the obscurity which made it needless for him to command his features. At length:
‘What is the simple fact? Has your secret been discovered, or not?’
‘How does it concern you?’
‘Only in this way: that if you are to be dependent upon any one, it must be upon me.’
Nancy gave a scornful laugh.
‘That’s very generous, considering your position. But happily you can’t force me to accept your generosity, any more than I can compel you to take a share of my money.’
‘Without the jibe at my poverty,’ Tarrant said, ‘that is a sufficient answer. As we can’t even pretend to be friendly with each other, I am very glad there need be no talk of our future relations. You are provided for, and no doubt will take care not to lose the provision. If ever you prefer to forget that we are legally bound, I shall be no obstacle.’
‘I have thought of that,’ replied Nancy, after a pause, her voice expressing satisfaction. ‘Perhaps we should do better to make the understanding at once. You are quite free; I should never acknowledge you as my husband.’
‘You seriously mean it?’
‘Do I seem to be joking?’
‘Very well. I won’t say that I should never acknowledge you as my wife; so far from that, I hold myself responsible whenever you choose to make any kind of claim upon me. But I shall not dream of interfering with your liberty. If ever you wish to write to me, you may safely address to the house at Champion Hill.—And remember always,’ he added sternly, ‘that it was not I who made such a parting necessary.’
Nancy returned his look through the gloom, and said in like tone:
‘I shall do my best never to think of it at all. Fortunately, my time and my thoughts are occupied.’
‘How?’ Tarrant could not help asking, as she turned away; for her tone implied some special significance in the words.
‘You have no right to ask anything whatever about me,’ came from Nancy, who was already moving away.
He allowed her to go.
‘So it is to be as I wished,’ he said to himself, with mock courage. ‘So much the better.’
And he went home to a night of misery.
CHAPTER 6
Not long after the disappearance of Fanny French, Mrs. Damerel called one day upon Luckworth Crewe at his office in Farringdon Street. Crewe seldom had business with ladies, and few things could have surprised him more than a visit from this lady in particular, whom he knew so well by name, and regarded with such special interest. She introduced herself as a person wishing to find a good investment for a small capital; but the half-hour’s conversation which followed became in the end almost a confidential chat. Mrs. Damerel spoke of her nephew Horace Lord, with whom, she understood, Mr. Crewe was on terms of intimacy; she professed a grave solicitude on his account, related frankly the unhappy circumstances which had estranged the young man from her, and ultimately asked whether Crewe could not make it worth his own while to save Horace from the shoals of idleness, and pilot him into some safe commercial haven. This meeting was the first of many between the fashionable lady and the keen man of affairs. Without a suspicion of how it had come about, Horace Lord presently found himself an informal partner in Crewe’s business; he invested only a nominal sum, which might be looked upon as a premium of apprenticeship; but there was an understanding that at the close of the term of tutelage imposed by his father’s will, he should have the offer of a genuine partnership on very inviting terms.
Horace was not sorry to enter again upon regular occupation. He had considerably damaged his health in the effort to live up to his ideal of thwarted passion, and could no longer entertain a hope that Fanny’s escapade was consistent with innocence. Having learnt how money slips through the fingers of a gentleman with fastidious tastes, he welcomed a prospect of increased resources, and applied himself with some energy to learning his new business. But with Mrs. Damerel he utterly refused to be reconciled, and of his sister he saw very little. Nancy, however, approved the step he had taken, and said she would be content to know that all was well with him.
Upon a Sunday morning, when the church bells had ceased to clang, Luckworth Crewe, not altogether at his ease in garb of flagrant respectability, sat by the fireside of a pleasant little room conversing with Mrs. Damerel. Their subject, as usual at the beginning of talk, was Horace Lord.
‘He won’t speak of you at all,’ said Crewe, in a voice singularly subdued, sympathetic, respectful. ‘I have done all I could, short of telling him that I know you. He’s very touchy still on that old affair.’
‘How would he like it,’ asked the lady, ‘if you told him that we are acquaintances?’
‘Impossible to say. Perhaps it would make no difference one way or another.’
Mrs. Damerel was strikingly, yet becomingly, arrayed. The past year had dealt no less gently with her than its predecessors; if anything, her complexion had gained in brilliancy, perhaps a consequence of the hygienic precautions due to her fear of becoming stout. A stranger, even a specialist in the matter, might have doubted whether the fourth decade lay more than a month or two behind her. So far from seeking to impress her visitor with a pose of social superiority, she behaved to him as though his presence honoured as much as it delighted her; look, tone, bearing, each was a flattery which no obtuseness could fail to apprehend, and Crewe’s countenance proved him anything but inappreciative. Hitherto she had spoken and listened with her head drooping in gentle melancholy; now, with a sudden change intended to signify the native buoyancy of her disposition, she uttered a rippling laugh, which showed her excellent teeth, and said prettily:
‘Poor boy! I must suffer the penalty of having tried to save him from one of my own sex.—Not,’ she added, ‘that I foresaw how that poor silly girl would justify my worst fears of her. Perhaps,’ her head drooping again, ‘I ought to reproach myself with what happened.’
‘I don’t see that at all,’ replied Crewe, whose eyes lost nothing of the exhibition addressed to them. ‘Even if you had been the cause of it, which of course you weren’t, I should have said you had done the right thing. Every one knew what Fanny French must come to.’
‘Isn’t it sad? A pretty girl—but so ill brought up, I fear. Can you give me any news of her sister, the one who came here and frightened me so?’
‘Oh, she’s going on as usual.’
Crewe checked himself, and showed hesitation.
‘She almost threatened me,’ Mrs. Damerel pursued, with timid sweetness. ‘Do you think she is the kind of person to plot any harm against one?’
‘She had better not try it on,’ said Crewe, in his natural voice. Then, as if recollecting himself, he pursued more softly: ‘But I was going to speak of her. You haven’t heard that Miss. Lord has taken a position in the new branch of that Dress Supply Association?’
Mrs. Damerel kept an astonished silence.
‘There can’t be any doubt of it; I have been told on the best authority. She is in what they call the “club-room,” a superintendent. It’s a queer thing; what can have led her to it?’
‘I must make inquiries,’ said Mrs. Damerel, with an air of concern. ‘How sad it is, Mr. Crewe, that these young relatives of mine,—almost the only relatives I have,—should refuse me their confidence and their affection. Pray, does Horace know of what his sister is doing?’
‘I thought I wouldn’t speak to him about it until I had seen you.’
‘How very kind! How grateful I am to you for your constant thoughtfulness!’
Why Crewe should have practised such reticence, why it signified kindness and thoughtfulness to Mrs. Damerel, neither he nor she could easily have explained. But their eyes met, with diffident admiration on the one side, and touching amiability on the other. Then they discussed Nancy’s inexplicable behaviour from every point of view; or rather, Mrs. Damerel discussed it, and her companion made a pretence of doing so. Crewe’s manner had become patently artificial; he either expressed himself in trivial phrases, which merely avoided silence, or betrayed an embarrassment, an abstraction, which caused the lady to observe him with all the acuteness at her command.
You haven’t seen her lately?’ she asked, when Crewe had been staring at the window for a minute or two.
‘Seen her?—No; not for a long time.’
‘I think you told me you haven’t called there since Mr. Lord’s death?’
‘I never was there at all,’ he answered abruptly.
‘Oh, I remember your saying so. Of course there is no reason why she shouldn’t go into business, if time is heavy on her hands, as I dare say it may be. So many ladies prefer to have an occupation of that kind now-a-days. It’s a sign of progress; we are getting more sensible; Society used to have such silly prejudices. Even within my recollection—how quickly things change!—no lady would have dreamt of permitting her daughter to take an engagement in a shop or any such place. Now we have women of title starting as milliners and modistes, and soon it will be quite a common thing to see one’s friends behind the counter.’
She gave a gay little laugh, in which Crewe joined unmelodiously,—for he durst not be merry in the note natural to him,—then raised her eyes in playful appeal.
‘If ever I should fall into misfortune, Mr. Crewe, would you put me in the way of earning my living.’
‘You couldn’t. You’re above all that kind of thing. It’s for the rough and ready sort of women, and I can’t say I have much opinion of them.’
‘That’s a very nice little compliment; but at the same time, it’s rather severe on the women who are practical.—Tell me frankly: Is my—my niece one of the people you haven’t much opinion of?’
Crewe shuffled his feet.
‘I wasn’t thinking of Miss. Lord.’
‘But what is really your opinion of her?’ Mrs. Damerel urged softly.
Crewe looked up and down, smiled in a vacant way, and appeared very uncomfortable.
‘May I guess the truth?’ said his playful companion.
‘No, I’ll tell you. I wanted to marry her, and did my best to get her to promise.’
‘I thought so!’ She paused on the note of arch satisfaction, and mused. ‘How nice of you to confess!—And that’s all past and forgotten, is it?’
Never man more unlike himself than the bold advertising-agent in this colloquy. He was subdued and shy; his usual racy and virile talk had given place to an insipid mildness. He seemed bent on showing that the graces of polite society were not so strange to him as one might suppose. But under Mrs. Damerel’s interrogation a restiveness began to appear in him, and at length he answered in his natural blunt voice:
‘Yes, it’s all over—and for a good reason.’
The lady’s curiosity was still more provoked.
‘No,’ she exclaimed laughingly, ‘I am not going to ask the reason. That would be presuming too far on friendship.’
Crewe fixed his eyes on a corner of the room, and seemed to look there for a solution of some difficulty. When the silence had lasted more than a minute, he began to speak slowly and awkwardly.
‘I’ve half a mind to—in fact, I’ve been thinking that you ought to know.’
‘The good reason?’
‘Yes. You’re the only one that could stand in the place of a mother to her. And I don’t think she ought to be living alone, like she is, with no one to advise and help her.’
‘I have felt that very strongly,’ said Mrs. Damerel. ‘The old servant who is with her can’t be at all a suitable companion—that is, to be treated on equal terms. A very strange arrangement, indeed. But you don’t mean that you thought less well of her because she is living in that way?’
‘Of course not. It’s something a good deal more serious than that.’
Mrs. Damerel became suddenly grave.
‘Then I certainly ought to know.’
‘You ought. I think it very likely she would have been glad enough to make a friend of you, if it hadn’t been for this—this affair, which stood in the way. There can’t be any harm in telling you, as you couldn’t wish anything but her good.’
‘That surely you may take for granted.’
‘Well then, I have an idea that she’s trying to earn money because some one is getting all he can out of her—leaving her very little for herself; and if so, it’s time you interfered.’
The listener was so startled that she changed colour.
‘You mean that some man has her in his power?’
‘If I’m not mistaken, it comes to that. But for her father’s will, she would have been married long ago, and—she ought to be.’
Having blurted out these words, Crewe felt much more at ease. As Mrs. Damerel’s eyes fell, the sense of sexual predominance awoke in him, and he was no longer so prostrate before the lady’s natural and artificial graces.
‘How do you know this?’ she asked, in an undertone.
‘From some one who had it from Miss. Lord herself.’
‘Are you quite sure that it isn’t a malicious falsehood?’
‘As sure as I am that I sit here. I know the man’s name, and where he lives, and all about him. And I know where the child is at nurse.
‘The child?—Oh—surely—never!’
A genuine agitation possessed her; she had a frightened, pain-stricken look, and moved as if she must act without delay.
‘It’s nearly six months old,’ Crewe continued. ‘Of course that’s why she was away so long.’
‘But why haven’t you told me this before? It was your duty to tell me—your plain duty. How long have you known?’
‘I heard of it first of all about three months ago, but it was only the other day that I was told the man’s name, and other things about him.’
‘Is it known to many people? Is the poor girl talked about?’
‘No, no,’ Crewe replied, with confidence. ‘The person who told me is the only one who has found it out; you may depend upon that.’
‘It must be a woman,’ said Mrs. Damerel sharply.
‘Yes, it’s a woman. Some one I know very well. She told me just because she thought I was still hoping to marry Miss. Lord, and—well, the truth is, though we’re good friends, she has a little spite against me, and I suppose it amused her to tell me something disagreeable.’
‘I have no doubt,’ said Mrs. Damerel, ‘that the secret has been betrayed to a dozen people.’
‘I’ll go bail it hasn’t!’ returned Crewe, falling into his vernacular.
‘I can hardly believe it at all. I should never have dreamt that such a thing was possible. What is the man’s name? what is his position?’
‘Tarrant is his name, and he’s related somehow to a Mr. Vawdrey, well known in the City, who has a big house over at Champion Hill. I have no notion how they came together, or how long it was going on. But this Mr. Tarrant has been in America for a year, I understand; has only just come back; and now he’s living In poorish lodgings,—Great College Street, Westminster. I’ve made a few inquiries about him, but I can’t get at very much. A man who knows Vawdrey tells me that Tarrant has no means, and that he’s a loafing, affected sort of chap. If that’s true,—and it seems likely from the way he’s living,—of course he will be ready enough to marry Miss. Lord when the proper time has come; I’m only afraid that’s all he had in view from the first. And I can’t help suspecting, as I said, that she’s supporting him now. If not, why should she go and work in a shop? At all events, a decent man wouldn’t allow her to do it.’
‘A decent man,’ said the listener, ‘would never have allowed her to fall into disgrace.’
‘Certainly not,’ Crewe assented with energy. ‘And as for my keeping quiet about it, Mrs. Damerel, you’ve only to think what an awkward affair it was to mention. I’m quite sure you’ll have a little feeling against me, because I knew of it—’
‘I beg you not to think that!’ She returned to her manner of suave friendliness. ‘I shall owe you gratitude for telling me, and nothing but gratitude. You have behaved with very great delicacy; I cannot say how highly I appreciate your feeling on the poor girl’s behalf.’
‘If I can be of any use, I am always at your service.’
‘Thank you, dear Mr. Crewe, thank you! In you I have found a real friend,—and how rarely they are met with! Of course I shall make inquiries at once. My niece must be protected. A helpless girl in that dreadful position may commit unheard-of follies. I fear you are right. He is making her his victim. With such a secret, she is absolutely at his mercy. And it explains why she has shunned me. Oh, do you think her brother knows it?’
‘I’m quite sure he doesn’t; hasn’t the least suspicion.’
‘Of course not. But it’s wonderful how she has escaped. Your informant—how did she find it out? You say she had the story from the girl’s own lips. But why? She must have shown that she knew something.’
Crewe imparted such details as had come to his knowledge; they were meagre, and left many obscurities, but Mrs. Damerel rewarded him with effusive gratitude, and strengthened the spell which she had cast upon this knight of Farringdon Street.
