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The Two Marys
CHAPTER VIII
I WILL not enter into all the particulars of our discussion after this, for time would fail me. The last part of Mary’s letter, which she said was not to be shown to me, made me angry. I thought it was vanity on her part to be afraid of interfering with me again. “In what way?” I could not but ask, and that sharply; how could the last chapter of our lives be repeated? Mrs Tufnell only smoothed my hair and soothed me, and called me “dear” and “darling,” but would give no explanation. “What does she mean?” I asked. “Oh, she means, my love – probably she means nothing. It is just a way of talking that people fall into,” said my old lady. I knew this was said simply to quiet me, but on the whole perhaps I preferred it to anything more definite; and, after a time, I allowed myself to be persuaded to pay my stepmother a visit. What a strange journey into the past it seemed! and yet actually we went far away from the scene of the past, into a place so new and unknown to me, that it could awaken no associations. We drove in the comfortable old fly, with the old sleek horse and the old fat man, which was as good as Mrs Tufnell’s private carriage. She did not keep a carriage of her own, but I am sure this fly, in which she drove every day of her life except when she was ill, cost her more than a carriage would have done. She was very apologetic about it always. “I could not undertake the responsibility of a carriage,” she would say; “horses are always getting ill, and your coachman drinks, or he gets into trouble with the maids, or something. Old Groombridge and his fly suit me quite well. No, he is not an old rogue. I have to pay him, of course, for all his trouble, and for the loss of customers, and so forth. You know, Mary, he always suits himself to my convenience at whatever sacrifice – ”
This was her idea, and nothing would convince her otherwise. So we drove in Groombridge’s old fly – which was one of the most expensive vehicles in town – out Hampstead way, but past all the houses, past everything, till we came to new houses again, and skeleton roads and villas growing up like mushrooms, in one of those long straggling arms that London puts out into the country. I had got excited so often thinking that we must be quite close upon the place, that at last I ceased to be excited, and felt as if we had set out upon a hopeless circle, and were going to wind in and out and round and round, till we worked back to the point from which we started. How dreary they look, those new places – roads newly laid out, breaking in upon the fields, which somehow look so superior, so desecrated, and vulgarised by those new muddy lines with the unnecessary kerbstones; and then all the half-built houses, each one uglier than the other, with their bow-windows, all made by the gross (I suppose), and their thin little walls that the wind whistles through, and even their monotonous attempt at irregularity. A steady, solid row which is very ugly and nothing more, is endurable. I was saying this, when suddenly the fly made a sharp turn, and immediately the villas and the kerbstones became invisible. We had got within a mossy wall, through a large old-fashioned gate. There was an avenue, not very long nor very grand, but still an avenue, with odd old trees all gnarled and mossed over, and I suppose in a very bad condition, but still old, and trees – trees which our grandfathers might have walked under. The house was an old red-brick house, very dark red, and covered with little brown and yellow lichens. It was neat, but yet one could see it was in want of repair, and looked like a poor lady in a faded gown and mended lace by the side of the fine shop-people in silk and satin. It was a winter day – a very still and bright one. The shadows of all the leafless trees made a network upon the brown gravel path. The old house seemed to be basking, warming itself in the sun. There were a great many twinkling windows, but not a creature to be seen except one little child on the white step of the deep doorway. There was a porch, and probably his nurse was there, but the little fellow was standing out in the sun, cracking a little whip he had, with his hair shining in the bright light, and his little face like an apple-blossom. He was shouting out some baby nonsense at the top of his voice. He did not care for us, nor for anyone. He was the monarch of all – quite alone in his kingdom, independent of everybody.
“Who do you think that is, Mary?” said Mrs Tufnell, taking my hand suddenly, as I looked out laughing and amused by him. Good heavens! I had never once thought. I fell back into my corner and began to cry, I cannot tell why. Of course I knew at once whom it must be.
And then she came, not in the least altered, kissing me just as if we had parted yesterday. But she was agitated, though she tried not to show it. She took the little boy and brought him to me, and thrust him into my arms without a word, and her lip quivered, and for some minutes she could not say anything. The meeting was hard altogether. When the thing that sundered you is too far off to be talked about, and when everybody counsels you to avoid explanations and go on again as if nothing had happened, it is very hard; you may succeed in uniting the old strands and twisting them together once more, but it is perhaps more likely that you will fail. We went into Mary’s new home, and saw the lady who was the head of the school. It was holiday time – the Christmas holidays – and they were alone. This lady was middle-aged, older than Mary, but not so old as Mrs Tufnell. She was an unmarried woman, and I could at once understand what Mary had said, that her very name and her widow’s cap told for something in the place. But what was most evident of all was that little Jack was the sovereign of Grove House. Whatever anybody might do or say, he was supreme. Miss Robinson was fond of his mother, and “appreciated” her, as she told us; but little Jack was the monarch, and did what he pleased.
Our visit was, as people say, quite successful. It went off perfectly well – we kissed when we met and when we parted – we had a great deal to say to each other of what had passed since we met – and there was little Jack to make acquaintance with, and a great many of his wonderful adventures to be told of. Mrs Tufnell came away with the thought that it had been a great success, and that henceforward nothing more was wanted – that Mary and I would be one again.
But Mary and I felt differently. I did, at least, and I am sure so did she. You cannot mend a rent so easily. Such a rent – a rent that had lasted more than five years – how can it be drawn together again by any hasty needle and thread like a thing done yesterday? We parted friends, with promises to meet again; but with hearts, oh! so much more apart from each other than they had been an hour before! An hour before we met I had all sorts of vague hopes in my mind – vague feelings that she would understand me, that I should understand her – vague yearnings towards the old union which was almost perfect. Did you ever see the great glass screen they have in some houses to shield you from the heat of the fire? You can see the cheerful blaze through it, but you feel nothing. Something of the kind was between Mary and me. We saw through it as well as ever, and seemed, to enjoy the pleasant warmth; but no other sensation followed, only the chill of a disappointment. I felt that she was now nothing, nothing to me; and I – I cannot tell how I seemed to her. We had the old habit suddenly brought to life and put on again, but none of the old meaning. We were like mummers trying to make ourselves out to be heroines of the past, but knowing we were not and never could be what we appeared. I was very silent during our drive home I did not know what to say to my dear old lady. She looked very fragile with her pretty rose-cheeks, lying back in the corner of the fly; she was fatigued, and in the daylight I suddenly woke up to see that she did look very fragile. I had not believed in it before. And how could I vex her by telling her of my disappointment? I could not do it; she was pleased and happy; she held my hand, and nodded to me and said: “Now you see you are not so much alone as you thought you were. Now you see you have friends who belong to you.” How could I have had the heart to say otherwise – to say I had found out that we were separated for ever, Mary and I?
That evening, however, after tea, she began to talk to me very seriously. We were sitting over the fire – she on her favourite sofa, I on a low chair near her. The firelight kept dancing about, lighting up the room fitfully. It was a large room. We had some candles on the mantel-piece, which shone, reflected in the great mirror, as if from some dim, deep chamber opening off this one; but it was really the firelight that lighted the room. I had been singing to her, and I half thought she had been asleep, when suddenly she roused up all at once, and sat upright in her little prim way.
“I want to speak to you, Mary,” she said; and then, after a pause – “You think I meant nothing but love and kindness when I took you to see Mrs Peveril to-day; but I am a scheming, wicked old woman, Mary. I had more than that in my mind.”
I was a little, but only a little, startled by this: I knew her way. I looked up at her, smiling. “You are so designing,” I said; “I might have known there was something underneath. You are going to ask them to spend the rest of their holidays here?”
“That if you like,” she said brightly, encouraged, I could see, by my tone; “but more than that, Mary; more than that.”
I was not curious. I looked with an indolent amusement at the shining of the firelight and the reflection in the mirror of the flame of the candles, which shone out of its surface without seeming to move the dark ruddy gloom beyond. A glass is always an inscrutable, wonderful thing, like an opening into the unseen: it was especially so that night.
“Mary,” Mrs Tufnell resumed, with a voice that faltered, I could not tell why; “do you remember when I first spoke to you of Mrs Peveril – when I was ill? – and what I said?”
“Yes,” I answered, with sudden alarm, looking up at her. “You don’t feel ill now?”
“No, but I have got a shake,” she said. “When a woman at my time of life is ill, though it may seem to pass quite away, it always leaves a something. I shall never be as strong as I have been, my dear child. I feel I have got a shake. My life has come to be like the late leaves on the top of a tree. They may last through many gales, but the first gust may blow them off. I cannot feel sure for a day.”
I went close up to her in my fright, and knelt down by the sofa, and put my arms round her. “Do not speak so,” I said; “you could not leave me? What could I do without you? I am not an orphan as long as I have you. You cannot have the heart – ”
“Oh, Mary! hush; don’t overwhelm me. It was of that I wanted to speak. I shall live as long as I can, for your sake. But, dear, old people cannot stay always, however much they may be wanted. I have been thinking of it a great deal, and there is a proposal I have to make to you – with Mrs Peveril’s consent, Mary. You must listen to all I have to say.”
“Oh, you have consulted Mrs Peveril!” said I; and I got up, feeling my heart grow chill and sore, and went back to my seat to hear what was to be said to me. In the depths of my heart I must have been jealous of her still. It came all back upon me like a flood. My dear old lady gave me a grieved look, but she did not stop to explain. She went quickly on with what she had to say: —
“Grove House is a nice old-fashioned house, and cheap, and they have a good list of scholars; and Miss Robinson would be glad to retire, and would not ask very much for the furniture and things; and Mrs Peveril is so much liked by everybody. I have always set apart as much as I thought was right of my little property, intending it for you, Mary – ”
“Don’t!” I cried, in a voice so shrill and sharp that it startled even myself who spoke.
“It is not very much,” she went on, “but it is all I can give away, and my whole heart has been set upon doing something for you with this money that would make you independent. My dear Mary, I am half afraid you don’t like the thought, you are so silent. I had thought of buying Grove House for Mrs Peveril and you.”
“For Mrs Peveril and me!”
“Yes – don’t you like the idea, Mary? – don’t you like the idea? I thought it was something that would please you so much. You have always said you liked teaching, and it would be a living for you, dear, and a home when I am gone. I have so wished to make these arrangements for you, Mary – ”
“Is it all settled?” I said.
“Nothing could be settled without your consent. All that I want is your good. I could not leave you, could I, at your age, without anyone to stand by you, without a home to go to, without a friend – ”
Thus she apologised to me for those kind, tender plans of hers; and I sat like a clod, feeling that I could not reply. I was dull and heavy and miserable; not grateful, yet feeling how grateful I ought to be; understanding her, yet not owning even to myself that I understood her. It was not a very great destiny that was thus allotted to me, but that was not what I was thinking. My mind did not revolt against the idea of being the mistress of a school; which was a natural lot enough. To tell the truth, I cannot quite say what it was that gave me so miserable a feeling. Here was my life marked out for me; there was never to be any change in it; no alteration for the brighter or better occurred to this dear old woman who loved me. She wanted to make sure I should have daily bread and a roof to shelter me, and some sort of companionship. How right she was! How good and how kind! and yet, oh, how dreary, how unutterably blank and hopeless seemed the prospect! I felt this with a dull fighting and struggle of the two things in me – wanting to please her by looking pleased, feeling how good she was, and how kind, how just, how suitable was the arrangement. I felt all this in a kind of way, and then I felt the struggle not to be wildly angry, not to burst out and ask her how she could think of condemning me so – for my life?
She was grieved and disappointed at the way I received her proposal, but she was so good that she took no notice, but kissed me, and said nothing should be done or thought of against my consent. For my part my heart was so heavy and dull that I could not even thank her for her kindness; but I hung about her when she went to bed, and held her fast in a speechless way that she understood, I think, though I said nothing. She cried; she looked at me with her kind old eyes full of tears. “Oh, Mary,” she said, “don’t break my heart! If I could live for ever and go on always taking care of you, don’t you think I would do it, for your sake and your father’s too? But I cannot. One must die when one’s time comes, however much one may be wanted: and I must provide for that.”
“Oh, why can’t I provide for it?” I cried. “Why can’t I die too? That would be the best way.”
And then she was angry – half angry – as much as it was in her nature to be. And presently I found myself alone, and had to sit down and think it over, and make up my mind to it, as one has so often to do in this life. I had to teach myself to see how good it was. And I did. I made up my mind to it. What was there else in heaven or earth – as I could not die with my only friend, or compel her to live, what was there else that I could do?
CHAPTER IX
NEXT morning when I woke, the impression on my mind was, that Mrs Tufnell must have died in the night. I cannot tell why I thought so, but I woke with such a horror in my mind, that I threw a shawl over my shoulders and rushed to her door to ask how she was, before I could take breath. She was not up; but smiled at me from her bed, where she lay with all the pictures and the portraits of her friends about her, the centre of a silent company. “I am quite well – better than usual,” she said; but I think she knew the meaning of my terror, and felt that after all that had been said it was natural I should be afraid. This perhaps threw just a little cloud upon her serenity too, during the morning, for however calmly one may think of dying, I suppose it must startle one to see that others are thinking of it. I suppose so – it seems natural. She was very grave, thoughtful, and somewhat silent during the forenoon; and when I went and sat down by her, and asked her to forgive me, and said I was ready to do whatever she thought best, she took me into her arms and cried and kissed me. “Oh, that it should be necessary to change!” she said. “I do not feel as if I could face the change – but, Mary, for your good – ”
It was about noon as we thus sat talking it over. It comforted me to see that she liked it as little as I did; that she would rather have kept me with her to the last moment of her life. But then what should I have done? – this was what she thought of. We were talking it all over very seriously, with more pain than either of us would show. It was a chilly winter morning. The room was bright, to be sure, with a good fire burning, and all the comforts that so many poor people are without; but there was a chill that went to one’s heart – the chill of the grave for her, which she thought near; and the chill of the outside world, from which she had sheltered me so long, for me. I remember the look of that morning – there was a black frost outside which bound all the dry street, and seemed to hold the naked trees in the square so fast that they dared not rustle, though an icy wind was blowing through them. There were traces still on the windows, notwithstanding the fire, of the frosty network of the night. The sun had begun to shine as it approached noon, but even the sun was white and cold, and seemed rather to point out how chilly the world was, than to warm it. After we had got through all our explanations and said all that was to be said, and arranged that Mary was to be invited to the Square with her child to spend a week of the holidays and arrange everything, we still kept sitting together holding each other’s hands, not saying much. I could not pretend that I liked it even to please her, and she did not like it, though she thought it right; but all the same it was settled, and there was nothing more to say.
It was all settled by twelve o’clock, fixed and decided with that double certainty which is given by pain. If we had liked it we should not have felt half so sure. At half-past twelve the mid-day post came in, and I was still sitting by my dear old lady, holding her hand, feeling my heart sink lower and lower every moment, thinking how I should have to leave her when she wanted me most – when Mrs Tufnell’s maid came in with the letters. She gave some to her mistress, and she gave one to me. I do not think I recognised the writing at first. But I got few letters, and it gave me a little thrill of agitation, I could not quite tell why. It was a foreign letter, with a number of unintelligible postmarks. I got up and went to the window, partly because my heart began to beat very loud, and partly to leave Mrs Tufnell at liberty to read her letters. I recollect looking out unconsciously and seeing the dried-up, dusty, frosty look of everything, the ice-wind sweeping the dust round the corners, the bare shivering trees – with a momentary thrill of sensation that my life was like that, dried-up, frost-bound, for ever and ever. And then, with my fingers trembling and my heart beating, and a consciousness of something coming, I could not tell what, I opened the envelope and found – This was what I found; without any preface or introduction – without anything to soften the difference between what was before my eyes and what was going to be.
There was no beginning to the letter; there were a good many blots in it, as if it had been written with a hand which was not very steady. There was not even a date until the end. He who had written it had been as much agitated as she who read it; and she who read it did so as in a dream, not knowing where she was standing, feeling the world and the white curtains and the frosty square to be going round and round with her, making a buzzing in her ears and a thumping against her breast.
What a plunge into a new world – into an old world – into a world not realised, not possible, and yet so strange in its fascination, so bewildering! Was it a dream – or could it be true?
“I have long wanted, and often tried, to write to you again. I do not know now whether I may or whether I ought. If this letter should come to another man’s wife, if it should fall into your hands in such changed circumstances that you will scarcely remember the writer’s name – and I cannot hide from myself that all this may be the case – then forgive me, Mary, and put it in the fire without further thought. It will not be for you, in your new life, but for someone else whom you will have forgotten, though I can never forget her. But if you are still little Mary Peveril as you used to be, oh, read it! and try to throw your thoughts back to the time when you knew me – when we used to meet. You were not much more than a child. How much I have thought of that time; how often and often I have gone over it in my thoughts I need not tell you. You were badly used, dear Mary. I was wrong – I will say it humbly on my knees if you like: having got your promise and your heart – for I did have that, if only for a little while – nothing could have justified me in appearing for one moment to place you otherwise than first in all I did or said. I will not excuse myself by saying how much startled I was by the sight of Miss Martindale, nor how anxious I was to know whether my mother had any share, or what share she had, in her disappearance from our house. I will say nothing about all that, but only that I was wrong, wrong without any excuse. Had I thought of what I was risking by my curiosity, I would have bitten my tongue out sooner than have asked a single question. Do you think, could you think, that I would have sacrificed you to the old foolish business which was over years before? I was an utter fool, I allow, but not such a fool as that. Therefore, Mary dear, dearest, whom I have always thought of, listen to me again; take me back again! I will beg your pardon a hundred and a thousand times. I will humbly do whatever penance you may appoint me; but listen to me now. You would not listen to me at first – and perhaps I was not so ready at first to acknowledge how wrong I was. I have had five long years to think of it, and I see it all. You were rightly angry, dear, and I was wrong; and if ever man repented, I have repented. Mary, Mary! take me back!
“I have been wandering about the world all this time, working and doing well enough. I can offer you something better now than the little cottage we once spoke of, though that would have been Paradise. I am leaving along with this letter, and hope to arrive in England almost as soon. I do not ask you to write – unless indeed you would, of your own sweet kindness – one word – to Chester Street? But even if you don’t do that, I will go to Russell Square in the hope of finding you. Mary! don’t break my heart. You liked me once. If I knew what to say that would move you, I would make this letter miles long; but I don’t know what more to say, except that I love you better than ever, and no one but you; and that I am coming back to England for you, for you only – half hopeless, only determined to try once more. Perhaps by the time you have read this I may be at your door.
“Ever and ever yours,“George Durham.”
“Mary!” cried some one calling me; “Mary, what is the matter? Have you bad news, my dear? Mary! Good gracious, the child will faint! Mary, don’t you hear me?”
“Oh, hush, hush!” I cried, not knowing what I said. “Hark! listen! is that him at the door?”
It was not him just then; and after a little while the curtains stopped going round, and the floor and the Square and everything about grew solid and steady, and I came to myself. To myself, yes – but not to the same self as had been sitting so sadly holding my old lady’s hand. What a change all in a moment! If I had not been so happy, I should have been ashamed to think that a man’s letter could all in a moment make such a change in a woman’s life. It is demoralising to the last degree – it comes in the way of all the proper efforts of education and independent thought, and everything that is most necessary and elevating. If in a moment, without any virtue of yours, without any exertion of yours, you are to have your existence all altered for you – the greyness turned into brightness, the labour into ease, the poverty into wealth – how is it to be supposed that you can be trained aright? It is demoralising: but it is very pleasant. Oh, the change in one half-hour!
But I should find it very difficult to explain to anyone how it was that I behaved like a rational creature at this moment, and did not take a bad turn and torture him and myself with objections. It was not wisdom on my part; I think it was the absolute suddenness of the whole transaction. Had he left me more time to think, or prepared me for his reception, my pride and my delicacy would have come in, and probably I should have thrown away both his happiness and my own. But fortunately he arrived that very afternoon, before the first excitement was over, and hearing that Miss Peveril was at home, and that the servants had not been forbidden to admit him, walked upstairs when I was not thinking, and took possession of me as if there had been no doubt on the subject. Mrs Tufnell was begging me to write to him at the very moment. I had shown her my letter, and she was full of excitement about it. “Be an honest girl, Mary,” she was saying: “a girl should not worry a man like that: you ought to be frank and open, and send him a word to meet him when he comes home. Say you are as fond of him as he is of you – ”
“No, I could not – I could not,” I was beginning to say; when suddenly something overshadowed us, and a big, ringing voice said behind me, “How could she? Let us be reasonable.” Reasonable! After that there was no more to say.
But if it had not all passed like a dream; if he had not been so sudden; if he had taken more time and more, care – the chances are, I know, that I should have behaved like a fool, and hesitated and questioned, and been proud and been foolish. As it was, I had to be honest and happy – there was no time for anything else.
This was of course the ending of the whole matter. I have often wondered whether, had my dear old lady been burdened with the anxiety of her charge of me, she would have died. As it is, she has not died. She lives with us often now, and we with her. On my wedding day she talked of departing in peace; but so far from departing in peace, she has been stronger ever since, and has a complexion any girl of twenty might envy. When I look back to Southampton Street and to Russell Square, where I was so unhappy, they all grow delightful and beautiful to me. It was very bad, no doubt (I suppose), while it lasted, but how I smile now at all my dolours! The delightful fact that they are over makes them pleasant. “That is how it will be, Mary,” my dearest old lady says, “with all our sorrows, when we die and get safely out of them. We shall smile – I know it – and wonder how we could have made such a fuss over those momentary woes.” This is a serious way of ending a story, which after all has turned out merely a love-story, a thing I never contemplated when I began to confide my early miseries to you. How miserable I was! and how it all makes me smile now!
As for Mary – the other Mary – we carried out that arrangement for her which had been proposed for me. We bought Grove House for her. I do not know what we could have done better. I never see that she is dull or weary of her life. What languors she may have she keeps from common view. Little Jack has grown a great boy, and she is very happy in him. But she does not give herself up to him, like so many mothers. “I must keep my own life,” she said to me once, when I wanted her to give up, to live quietly at home and devote herself to my little brother alone. “He will go out into the world after a while,” she went on; “he must, he has to make his way – and I, what should I do then? follow him or stay at home all alone? – No! I must keep my own life.” And so she does. Happiness? I cannot tell if she has happiness: so many people get on without that – though some of us, I thank God humbly on my knees, have it without deserving it – without having done anything for it. Mary, I believe, never takes time to ask herself how about that. She said so once; she is not unhappy, and never will be; she has her life.
