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The Two Marys

“Do you know,” he said, after a long time, “I have never seen your stepmother, Mary? I have been three months in the house, and I have never seen her. I must go and see her now.”

“Oh, wait a little,” I said; “wait a day. Let us have a secret all to ourselves one day.” How foolish I was! – but how was I to know?

He consented after a while; and then he made me promise to bring her out at a certain hour in the afternoon, that he might meet us at the door and see her. I made all the arrangements for this with a light heart. Though it was very difficult to hide from her what had happened, I did so with a great effort. I persuaded her to come out earlier than usual. She did not resist me. She was kinder, more tender, than I had ever known. She began to say something of a story she had to tell me as we went out. I went first and opened the door, and stood aside on the white steps to let her go out. Her crape veil was thrown back. Though she was still pale, there was a tint of life upon her cheeks. She was more like herself in her refined, delicate beauty, more like a lily, my favourite image of her, than she had been for ever so long.

I had begun to smile to myself at the success of our trick, when suddenly I got frightened, I could scarcely tell how. Looking up, I saw him standing on the pavement gazing at her, confounded. I can use no other word. He looked bewildered, confused, half wild with amazement. As for Mary, she had stopped short on the step. She was taken strangely by surprise too; for the first moment she only gazed as he did. Then she dropped her veil, and stepped back into the house. “I have forgotten something,” she said; and turned round and went upstairs to her room. He came in, too, and went upstairs after her, passing without looking at me. His under lip seemed to have dropped; his cheerful face had lost all its animation; his eyes had a wild, bewildered stare in them. What did it mean? oh! what did it mean?

I did not know what to do. I wondered if he had followed her to speak to her, or what was the meaning of those strange looks. I lingered in the hall holding the handle of the door, feeling miserable, but not knowing why. In two or three minutes she came downstairs. “I had forgotten my handkerchief,” she said; and we went out together as if nothing had happened. But something had happened, that was certain. She did not talk very much that day. When we were coming home she said to me, quite suddenly, “Was it your doing; Mary, that I met Mr Durham at the door?”

“He said it was so strange he had never seen you,” I said.

“Yes; but you should have known I would not do that for nothing. You should not have been the one to betray me, Mary. I knew Mr Durham once. He is associated with one of the most painful portions of my life.”

“Oh, Mary dear! I did not know – ”

“You did not know, and I did not want you to find out; but never mind, it is done. It need not, I hope, do any harm to you.”

That was a very strange day: the excitement of the morning, and then the other excitement; and to feel that I had a secret from her, and that he was seated upstairs giving no sign, taking no notice of our existence all day long. I was so agitated and disturbed that I did not know what to do. At last I settled myself in the schoolroom to do some translations. When one has been looking for a long time for a holiday, and something happens to spoil the holiday when it comes, it is worse even than if that something had happened on an ordinary day. I think Mary was glad to be left to herself, for instead of our ordinary companionship, she sat in the parlour at work all the long afternoon, and I in the schoolroom. One of the doors was half opened between us. She could hear my pen scratching on the paper, and the rustling of the leaves of my dictionary – and I could hear her moving softly over her work. It was autumn by this time, and the days were growing short, and neither of us cared to ring for tea; and I think Ellen was cooking dinner for Mr Durham and forgot us at the usual hour. We still sat as we had been all the afternoon when the twilight came on. I laid down my pen, having no light to write by, when I heard some one knock softly at the parlour door.

Mary made no reply. She sat quite still, never stirring. The knock came again; then I, too, put my paper away from me and listened. The door opened, and some one came into the parlour. How well I knew who it was! I listened now so intently that nothing escaped me. How could it be wrong? He must have come to talk to her of me.

“Mary!” he said. I rose up softly in my excitement, thinking it was me he was calling; but before I could move further a strange consciousness came over me that it was not me he meant. The old feeling with which I had heard my father call Mary came into my very soul – but worse, a hundred times worse. Oh, had he too another Mary besides me?

“Mary!” he said, breathless, and then paused. “How has all this come about? Why do I find you here? What does it mean? There are many explanations which I have a right to ask. You disappear from me – sent away – I know not how; and then – not to count the years that have passed – after these three months, in which you must have known me, I find you by chance – ”

She knew that I was within hearing, and that whatever she said to him must be to me too. If that was a restraint upon her, I cannot tell. I felt sorry for her vaguely in my mind; but yet I did not move.

“I did not wish you to find me at all,” she said, very low. “Mr Durham, there is and can be nothing between you and me.”

“Nothing!” he said; “what do you mean, Mary? Why, there is all the past between us – a hundred things that cannot be undone by anything in the future. You know how many things there are connected with you which are a mystery to me – things not affecting you alone, but others. How you went away, for instance; and what became of you, and how much my mother had to do with it? You must have known the moment I found you that all these questions remained to be asked.”

“All these questions,” she said, “are made quite unimportant by two things. First, that I am the wife, though now the widow, of a man I loved dearly – and that you have begun to love, begun to think of, some one very different from me.”

“Ah!” he said, with a strange brief utterance of distress. Whether he was grieved to think of the wrong he was doing me, or whether the strange position he stood in troubled him, I cannot tell; but there was pain in the cry he gave – “ah!” with a little shiver. “You have abundance of power to pain me,” he said, very low, “but it seems strange you should upbraid me. Yes, I have begun to think of some one else; but that does not prevent me from being deeply startled, deeply moved, by the sight of you.”

There was a little silence then, and I came to myself slowly. I woke as it were out of a trance. She knew I was there, but he did not. I had no right to hear his secrets without warning him. I tried to get up, but could not at first. I felt stiff and weary, as if I had been travelling for days together. I could scarcely drag myself up from my chair. The sound I made in rising might have warned him, but I do not think he heard. Before I could drag myself to the door and show I was there, he had begun again.

“Mary,” he said, lingering upon the name as if he loved it, “this is not a time for recrimination. Tell me how you left Chester Street, and what my mother had to do with it? and then, if you choose, I will never see you again.”

“Is it for your mother, or for me?”

I did not hear the answer. I could not stay longer. I got to the door somehow, and threw it open. I was too much bewildered to know what I was doing, or to think. I came out with a little rush as feeble creatures do. “I want to get away. I want to go out. I cannot stay there all day and hear you talking,” I said. I was not addressing either her or him. The sound of my voice must have been very piteous, for I remember it even now.

“Mary!” he cried.

Oh, what a difference in the sound! This time his voice was startled, pained, almost harsh, with a kind of reproof in it: not as he said Mary to her. Oh, papa, papa! it was you first who taught me the difference. I gave a hoarse little cry. I could not speak. Millions of words seemed to rush to my lips, but I could not say any of them. “I have been here long enough,” I managed to stammer out. “Let me go – let me go!” Next moment I was in the dark, in the silence, in my own little room, kneeling down by the bedside, crying and moaning to myself. I did not know why. I had heard nothing wrong; but it seemed to me that all my life was over, and that it did not matter what came next.

And, indeed, I cannot tell what came next. She came up to me, and told me the whole story, and in a vague sort of way I understood it. She was not to blame. He had been fond of her (everybody was fond of her) when she was the governess in his mother’s house; and it had been found out, and his mother was harsh, and she had gone suddenly away. There was nothing in this which need have made me unhappy, perhaps – so people have said to me since – but then I was very young; and I had been happy – and now I was miserable. I listened to her, and made no answer, but only moaned. The night passed, I cannot tell how. I did not sleep till late in the morning; and then I fell asleep and did not wake till noon. Then what was the use of going downstairs? I stayed in my room, feeling so weary, so worn out. It was Saturday, a half-holiday, and there was nothing to do. She came to me and spoke to me again and again; but I gave her very little answer. And he took no notice – he sent no message, no letter – not a word of explanation. He never asked my pardon. In my misery I thought I heard voices all the day as if they were talking, talking – and he never sent a message or note or anything to me. And then, after a long talk, as I fancied, with him, she would come to me. “Mary, this must not be. You must get up. You must be like yourself. Neither Mr Durham nor I have done you any wrong, Mary.”

“Oh, don’t call me Mary!” I said; “call me some other name. If you knew how different it sounds when it is said to you, not to me.”

And then she would look at me with her eyes full of tears, and sit down by me, and say no more. And so passed this bitter day.

CHAPTER V

NEXT day was Sunday. When I woke up, early, I recollected all that had happened with a flush of overwhelming shame. How childishly, how foolishly I had behaved. I was very, very wretched; but I was ashamed, and pride got the upper hand. I dressed myself carefully, and went downstairs, resolved not to show my misery at least, to be proud and forget it. “If he does not care for me,” I said to myself, “I will not care for him.” I passed his room very softly that I might not wake him. There was early morning service in St Mark’s now, for the curate who had succeeded poor papa was very High Church. I stole out and went to this early service, and tried to be good, and to give myself up to God’s will. Yes, it must have been God’s will – though how it could ever be God’s will that anybody should be false, or unkind, or cruel, I could not tell. I know it is right, however, whatever happens that vexes you, to accept it as if it must be the will of God. I tried to do that, and I was not quite so miserable when I went home. Ellen opened the door to me, looking frightened. “I thought you was lost, too, Miss,” she said. “I have been to church,” I answered, scarcely noticing her words. Breakfast was laid in the little parlour. It was very, very tidy, dreadfully tidy – everything was cleared away – the basket with the work and all the little things, and every stray thread and remnant. All of a sudden it occurred to me how little I had been doing to help of late. Instead of working I had been spending the evenings with Mrs Stephens. I did not even know how far the “things” were advanced, and it seemed strange they should all be gone. Of course it was because of Sunday. After a while Ellen brought in the coffee. She had still the same frightened look. “Missis wasn’t with you at the early service, Miss Mary?” “Oh, no,” I said, surprised at the question; “perhaps she is not up.”

“She’s never lain down all night,” said Ellen; “she was worrited and worn off her legs going up and down to you yesterday, Miss – you that was quite well, and had no call to your bed. She was a deal more like it, the dear. She’s never lain in her bed this blessed night, and I can’t find her, high or low.”

I scarcely waited to hear this out, but rushed up to her room. The bed had not been touched since yesterday. A little prayer-book lay on it, as if she had been praying. The room was in perfect good order – no litter about it. The little “things” were not to be seen. One of her dresses hanging against the wall made me think for a moment she was there, but it was only an old dress, and everything else was gone. Oh the terror and the pain and the wonder of that discovery! I could not believe it. I rushed through all the house, every room, calling her. Mr Durham heard me, and came out to the door of his room and spoke to me as I passed, and tried to take my hand, but I snatched it away from him. I did not even think of him. I can just remember the look he had, half-ashamed, appealing with his eyes, a little abashed and strange. I scarcely saw him at the time – but I remember him now, and with good reason, for I have never seen him again.

And I have never seen Mary again from that day. Mrs Stephens came in to me, startled by the news her servants had carried her; and she told me she had heard a carriage drive off late on the previous night, but did not think it was from our door. She knew nothing. She cried, but I could not cry; and it was Sunday, and nothing could be done – nothing! even if I had known what to do. I rushed to Spicer’s, and then I was sorry I had gone, for such people as they are never understand, and they thought, and think to this day, that there was something disgraceful in it. I rushed to Mrs Tufnell, not expecting to find her, for now it was time for church. The bells had done ringing, and I had already met, as I walked wildly along, almost all the people I knew. One woman stopped me and asked if Mrs Peveril was taken ill, and if she should go to her. “Poor thing, poor thing!” this good woman said. Oh, she might well pity us – both of us! But to my surprise Mrs Tufnell was at home. She almost looked as if she expected me. She looked agitated and excited, as if she knew. Did she know? I have asked her on my knees a hundred times, but she has always shaken her head. “How should I know?” she has said, and cried. I have thought it over and over for days and for years, till my brain has whirled. But I think she does know – I think some time or other she will tell me. It is a long time ago, and my feelings have got a little dulled; but I think some time or other I must find it out.

This wonderful event made a great change in my life. I began at once, that very day, to live with Mrs Tufnell in the Square. She would not let me go home. She kissed me, and said I was to stay with her now. Mr Durham came twice and asked to see me; but I could not bear to see him. Then Mrs Stephens came with a letter. He said in it that I must dispose of him; that he, was in my hands, and would do whatever I pleased; that he had been startled more than he could say by the sudden sight of one whom he had loved before he knew me; but that if I could forgive him any foolish words he might have said, then he hoped we might be happy. In short, he was very honourable, ready to keep his word; and I felt as if I hated him for his virtue – for treating me “honourably!” Was that what all his love and all my happiness had come to? I sent him a very short little note back, and it was all over. He went abroad soon after, and I have never heard of him any more.

And thus my story ended at seventeen. I wonder if there are many lives with one exciting chapter in them, ending at seventeen, and then years upon years of monotonous life. I am twenty-three now. I live with Mrs Tufnell. I am daily governess to one little girl, and I have my forty pounds a-year, the interest of poor papa’s insurance money. I am very well off indeed, and some people think I need not care to take a pupil at all – better off, a great deal, than I was in Southampton Street; but how different! I heard very soon after that Mary had a little boy. It was in the papers, but without any address; and I had one letter from her, saying that we had made a mistake in trying to live together, and that she was sorry. She hoped I would forgive her if she had been mistaken, and she would always think of me and love me. Love me? Is it like love to go away and leave me alone? Two people have said they loved me in my life, and that is what both have done.

However, after that letter I could not do anything more. If she thought it was a mistake for us to live together, of course it was a mistake. And I had my pride too. “I always felt it was a doubtful experiment,” Mrs Tufnell said when people wondered, “and it did not answer – that was all.” And this is how it was settled and ended – ended, I suppose, for ever. Mrs Tufnell is very good to me, and as long as she lives I am sure of a home. Perhaps I may tell you her story one of these days; for she has a story, like most people. She tells me I am still very young, and may yet have a life of my own; but in the meantime the most I can do is to take an interest in other people’s lives.

CHAPTER VI

I HAD not intended to carry on any further a history which is chiefly about myself; but events are always occurring which change one’s mind from day to day, and alter one’s most fixed resolutions. I do not pretend to understand people who make unchangeable decisions, and certainly I am not one of them. Besides, common fairness requires that I should allow Mrs Peveril to have the same privilege as myself, and tell things her own way. I could not have imagined, had I not seen it, the difference there was between the aspect of things to her and to me. I suppose it is true after all that everybody has his or her own point of view, which is different from all others. Of course we realise this fact quite clearly in a great poem like “The Ring and the Book;” but to recognise it in one’s own small affairs has somehow a much stranger, more surprising effect. What an odd difference it would make in the world if we could all see ourselves now and then with other people’s eyes! I confess that the girl in her story, who was Mr Peveril’s daughter, is very much unlike the girl in mine – and yet the same somehow, as may be traced out with a little trouble. This is humbling, but it is for one’s good, I suppose. When you look at yourself in a mirror, you have so much interest in yourself that your defects don’t strike you – you can’t help being the first figure – the most important; but to feel that all along you are not important at all – anything but the first figure, a mere shadow, scarcely noticed! it has a very odd effect – sometimes laughable, sometimes rather the reverse; but this was what now happened to me.

I must add, however, that a long time passed over before I could even think that Mrs Peveril might have something to say on her side. It was not because of the rupture between Mr Durham and myself, and the sudden conclusion of that dream and all that it seemed likely to bring with it. No doubt these things embittered all my feelings about her; but yet I was reasonable enough to come to see that it was not her fault – that she had kept out of the way with all her might – and that after all she could not foresee that another complication might arise between him and me. She could not of course foresee this; and even if she had foreseen it, what could she have done? I think it shows I was not unfair in my judgment, for a girl of seventeen, to say that I soon came to see that. But though I did not blame her, of course I was embittered against her, and took refuge in being very angry with her on other grounds. That she should have said our living together was a mistake was the chief of these. Why was it a mistake? Did she mean to say it was my fault? If it was simply her fault, as I felt sure it was, why did she call it a mistake? Why not say plainly out, “I was wrong, and so we got into trouble?” How easy it seems to be for people to acknowledge themselves in the wrong! but not so easy for one’s self, somehow. I never met anybody who liked doing it, though I have met with so many who ought to have done it, and to whom it would have been so simple – so easy, I thought; but that never seemed to be their opinion. Mrs Tufnell, who is in some things a very odd old lady, says it never is anybody’s fault. “There was never any quarrel yet,” she will say, “but there were two in it – there was never any misunderstanding but two were in it. There is no such thing as absolute blame on the one side and innocence on the other. Even in your affairs, Mary, my dear – ” But this I never can see nor allow. How could I be to blame? Only seventeen, and knowing so little of the world, and expecting everybody to be good and true, and say just what they thought. When a man said he was fond of me, how was I to put up with his having been fond of somebody else? And when a woman professed to be thinking of me, was it natural that I could be pleased to know she had been thinking of herself? I could not help behaving just as I did. It was the only natural, the only possible way; but for them, they ought to have known better, they ought to have thought of me. On the whole that is the thing that hurts one – that goes to one’s heart. People think of themselves first – when they ought to be thinking of you, they think of themselves first. I suppose it is the same all over the world.

The way in which I first heard Mary’s story was simple enough. After years of a dull sort of quiet life at Mrs Tufnell’s – who was very good to me, and very kind, but who, of course, could give to me, a girl, only what she, an old woman, had to give – the quietest life, without excitement or change of any kind – she had a bad illness. It was not an illness of the violent kind, but of what, I suppose, is more dangerous to an old woman, a languishing, slow sickness, which looked like decay more than disease. The doctors said “breaking up of the constitution,” or at least the servants said so, who are less particular than the doctors, and shook their heads and looked very serious. I was less easily alarmed than anyone else, for it seemed to me a natural thing that an old lady should be gently ill like that, one day a little better and the next a little worse, without any suffering to speak of. It was not until after she was better that I knew there had been real danger, but she must have felt it herself. The way in which her sense of her precarious condition showed itself was anxiety for me. I remember one evening sitting in her room by the fire with a book; she was in bed, and I had been reading to her, and now she was dozing, or at least I thought so. Things appear (it is evident) very differently to different people. I was extremely comfortable in that nice low easy-chair by the fire. It was a pretty room, full of pictures and portraits of her friends, so full that there was scarcely an inch of the wall uncovered. The atmosphere was warm and soft, and the tranquil repose and ease of the old lady in the bed somehow seemed to increase the warmth and softness and kindly feeling. She was an additional luxury to me sitting there by the fire with my novel. If any fairy had proposed to place her by my side as young and as strong as myself, I should have rejected the proposal with scorn. I liked her a great deal best so – old, a little sick, kind, comfortable, dozing in her bed. Her very illness – which I thought quite slight, rather an excuse for staying in this cosy room and being nursed than anything else – heightened my sense of comfort. She was not dozing, as it happened, but lying very still, thinking of dying – wondering how it would feel, and planning for those she should leave behind her. I knew nothing of these thoughts, no more than if I had been a thousand miles away: and fortunately neither did she of mine. I was roused from my comfortable condition by the sound of her voice calling me. I rose up half reluctantly from the bright fire, and the little table with the lamp and my book, and went and sat by her in the shade where I could not see the fire; but still the sentiment of comfort was predominant in me. I gave my old lady her mixture, which it was time for her to take, and advised her to go to sleep.

“You must not doze this time,” I said; “you must go right off to sleep, and never wake till morning. Everything is put right for the night, and I shall not go till you are asleep.”

“I was not dozing,” she said, with that natural resentment which everybody feels to be so accused; and then, after a moment, “Mary, I was thinking of you. If I were to die, what would you do?”

I was very much shocked, and rather frightened; but when I looked at her, and saw by the dim light that she did not look any worse, I felt rather angry. “How unkind of you!” I said, “to speak so! You frightened me at first. What would it matter what became of me?”

“It would matter a great deal,” she said. “It would make everything so much worse. I don’t want to die, Mary, though I daresay I should be a great deal better off, and get rid of all my troubles – ”

“Oh, it is wicked to talk so!”

“Why should it be wicked? I can’t help thinking of it,” she said, lying in her warm cosy bed. It made me shiver to hear her. I began to cry, rather with a chill, wretched sense of discomfort in the midst of all the warmth than anything else; upon which she put her hand on my shoulder and gave me a little shake, and laughed at me softly. “Silly child!” she said – but she was not angry. There was a very grave look on her face behind the smile. Dying was strange to her as well as to me, though she was very old.

“But, Mary,” she went on, “I want to read you something. I want you to think again about some one you once were very fond of. I have some news of Mrs Peveril – ”

“Oh!” I said; and then I went on stiffly, “I hope she is well.”

“She is quite well – and – your little brother. I wish you would see them. All that happened was so long ago; I think you might see them, Mary.”

“I never made any objection to seeing them,” I said, more and more stiffly, though my heart began to leap and thump against my breast. “You forget I had nothing to do with it. It was she who went away. She said it was a mistake.”

“You are an unforgiving child. You did not try to enter into her feelings, Mary.”

“How could I?” I said. “Did she wish me to enter into her feelings? Did she ever give me a chance? She said it was a mistake. What was there left for me to say?”

“Well, well,” said the old lady, “I don’t defend her. I always said she was wrong; but still I have been hearing from her lately, Mary. I have three or four letters which I should like you to read – ”

“You have been hearing from her without ever telling me!”

“Bless the child! must I not even get a letter without consulting her? But, Mary, I am a free agent still, and I can’t be kept in such order,” she said, half laughing. “Give me that blotting-book, and my keys, and my spectacles, and bring the lamp a little closer.”

Indignant as I was, I was comforted by all these preparations. And when she had put on her spectacles and opened the blotting-book, sitting up in bed, my mind was so much relieved that my indignation floated away. “It is a pretty thing for you to talk of dying, and frighten people,” I said, giving her a kiss, “with your cheeks like two nice old roses.” She shook her head, but she smiled too: she felt better, and got better gradually from that hour.

But in the meantime I had to listen to these letters. Perhaps if it had not been that my old lady was ill, I should have been offended to find that she had deceived me, and had known about Mary all along. It was a deception, though she did not mean any harm. “She had thought it best,” she said, “to let time soften all our feelings, before she told me anything about it.” However, I must not enter into all the discussions we had on this subject. It is only fair that Mary should have her turn, and tell her story as I have told mine. It is not a connected story like mine, but you will see from it what kind of a life hers had been, and what sort of a woman she was. She is different from the Mary I thought – and yet not different either – just as I am different from the girl I thought I was, and yet very like too, if you look into it. I cannot tell what my feelings were as I read first one bit and then another, and a great deal more which I do not think it necessary to quote here. One moment I was furious with her – the next I could have kissed her feet. These people who send you from one extreme of feeling to another, who do wrong things and right things all in a jumble, take a greater hold upon you, somehow, than better people do, who are placid and always on the same level – at least I think so. I started by calling her Mrs Peveril – and here I am already saying Mary, as of old, without knowing! And Mrs Tufnell wishes me to go and see her. She has even made me promise as a kind of reward to herself for getting better. Since she takes it in this way, I shall have to go – and sometimes I fear it, and sometimes I wish for it. Will it make any difference to me? Will the old love come back, or the still older feeling that was not love? Shall I think of that “Mary” that sounded always so much sweeter to her than to me? Or shall I remember only the time when she was everything to me – when she charmed me out of my grief and loneliness, and told me her secret, and made me her companion, and was all mine? I do not know. I begin to tremble, and my heart beats when I think of this meeting; but in the meantime Mary has a right to her turn, and to tell the story her own way. It is all in little bits taken from Mrs Tufnell’s letters, and sometimes may appear a little fragmentary; but I can only give it as it came to me.