by Michael Sims
“On the contrary, she’s better than she has been for a long time—I’ll guarantee that,” I said. “She has found out that she can have confidence in me, and that has done her good.” Miss Marden had dropped into her chair again. I was standing before her, and she looked up at me without a smile—with a dim distress in her beautiful eyes; not exactly as if I were hurting her, but as if she were no longer disposed to treat as a joke what had passed (whatever it was, it was at the same time difficult to be serious about it), between her mother and myself. But I could answer her inquiry in all kindness and candour, for I was really conscious that the poor lady had put off a part of her burden on me and was proportionately relieved and eased. “I’m sure she has slept all the afternoon as she hasn’t slept for years,” I went on. “You have only to ask her.”
Charlotte got up again. “You make yourself out very useful.”
“You’ve a good quarter of an hour,” I said. “Haven’t I a right to talk to you a little this way, alone, when your mother has given me your hand?”
“And is it your mother who has given me yours? I’m much obliged to her, but I don’t want it. I think our hands are not our mothers’—they happen to be our own!” laughed the girl.
“Sit down, sit down and let me tell you!” I pleaded.
I still stood before her, urgently, to see if she wouldn’t oblige me. She hesitated a moment, looking vaguely this way and that, as if under a compulsion that was slightly painful. The empty hall was quiet—we heard the loud ticking of the great clock. Then she slowly sank down and I drew a chair close to her. This made me face round to the fire again, and with the movement I perceived, disconcertedly, that we were not alone. The next instant, more strangely than I can say, my discomposure, instead of increasing, dropped, for the person before the fire was Sir Edmund Orme. He stood there as I had seen him in the Indian room, looking at me with the expressionless attention which borrowed its sternness from his sombre distinction. I knew so much more about him now that I had to check a movement of recognition, an acknowledgment of his presence. When once I was aware of it, and that it lasted, the sense that we had company, Charlotte and I, quitted me; it was impressed on me on the contrary that I was more intensely alone with Miss Marden. She evidently saw nothing to look at, and I made a tremendous and very nearly successful effort to conceal from her that my own situation was different. I say “very nearly,” because she watched me an instant—while my words were arrested—in a way that made me fear she was going to say again, as she had said in the Indian room: “What on earth is the matter with you?”
What the matter with me was I quickly told her, for the full knowledge of it rolled over me with the touching spectacle of her unconsciousness. It was touching that she became, in the presence of this extraordinary portent. What was portended, danger or sorrow, bliss or bane, was a minor question; all I saw, as she sat there, was that, innocent and charming, she was close to a horror, as she might have thought it, that happened to be veiled from her but that might at any moment be disclosed. I didn’t mind it now, as I found, but nothing was more possible than she should, and if it wasn’t curious and interesting it might easily be very dreadful. If I didn’t mind it for myself, as I afterwards saw, this was largely because I was so taken up with the idea of protecting her. My heart beat high with this idea, on the spot; I determined to do everything I could to keep her sense sealed. What I could do might have been very obscure to me if I had not, in all this, become more aware than of anything else that I loved her. The way to save her was to love her, and the way to love her was to tell her, now and here, that I did so. Sir Edmund Orme didn’t prevent me, especially as after a moment he turned his back to us and stood looking discreetly at the fire. At the end of another moment he leaned his head on his arm, against the chimneypiece, with an air of gradual dejection, like a spirit still more weary than discreet. Charlotte Marden was startled by what I said to her, and she jumped up to escape it; but she took no offence—my tenderness was too real. She only moved about the room with a deprecating murmur, and I was so busy following up any little advantage that I might have obtained that I didn’t notice in what manner Sir Edmund Orme disappeared. I only observed presently that he had gone. This made no difference—he had been so small a hindrance; I only remember being struck, suddenly, with something inexorable in the slow, sweet, sad headshake that Miss Marden gave me.
“I don’t ask for an answer now,” I said; “I only want you to be sure—to know how much depends on it.”
“Oh, I don’t want to give it to you, now or ever!” she replied. “I hate the subject, please—I wish one could be let alone.” And then, as if I might have found something harsh in this irrepressible, artless cry of beauty beset, she added quickly, vaguely, kindly, as she left the room: “Thank you, thank you—thank you so much!”
At dinner I could be generous enough to be glad, for her, that I was placed on the same side of the table with her, where she couldn’t see me. Her mother was nearly opposite to me, and just after we had sat down Mrs. Marden gave me one long, deep look, in which all our strange communion was expressed. It meant of course “She has told me,” but it meant other things beside. At any rate I know what my answering look to her conveyed: “I’ve seen him again—I’ve seen him again!” This didn’t prevent Mrs. Marden from treating her neighbours with her usual scrupulous blandness. After dinner, when, in the drawing-room, the men joined the ladies and I went straight up to her to tell her how I wished we could have some private conversation, she said immediately, in a low tone, looking down at her fan while she opened and shut it:
“He’s here—he’s here.”
“Here?” I looked round the room, but I was disappointed.
“Look where she is,” said Mrs. Marden, with just the faintest asperity. Charlotte was in fact not in the main saloon, but in an apartment into which it opened and which was known as the morning-room. I took a few steps and saw her, through a doorway, upright in the middle of the room, talking with three gentlemen whose backs were practically turned to me. For a moment my quest seemed vain; then I recognised that one of the gentlemen—the middle one—was Sir Edmund Orme. This time it was surprising that the others didn’t see him. Charlotte seemed to be looking straight at him, addressing her conversation to him. She saw me after an instant, however, and immediately turned her eyes away. I went back to her mother with an annoyed sense that the girl would think I was watching her, which would be unjust. Mrs. Marden had found a small sofa—a little apart—and I sat down beside her. There were some questions I had so wanted to go into that I wished we were once more in the Indian room. I presently gathered, however, that our privacy was all-sufficient. We communicated so closely and completely now, and with such silent reciprocities, that it would in every circumstance be adequate.
“Oh, yes, he’s there,” I said; “and at about a quarter-past seven he was in the hall.”
“I knew it at the time, and I was so glad!”
“So glad?”
“That it was your affair, this time, and not mine. It’s a rest for me.”
“Did you sleep all the afternoon?” I asked.
“As I haven’t done for months. But how did you know that?”
“As you knew, I take it, that Sir Edmund was in the hall. We shall evidently each of us know things now—where the other is concerned.”
“Where he is concerned,” Mrs. Marden amended. “It’s a blessing, the way you take it,” she added, with a long, mild sigh.
“I take it as a man who’s in love with your daughter.”
“Of course—of course.” Intense as I now felt my desire for the girl to be, I couldn’t help laughing a little at the tone of these words; and it led my companion immediately to say: “Otherwise you wouldn’t have seen him.”
“But every one doesn’t see him who’s in love with her, or there would be dozens.”
“They’re not in love with her as you are.”
“I can, of course, only speak for m
yself; and I found a moment, before dinner, to do so.”
“She told me immediately.”
“And have I any hope—any chance?”
“That’s what I long for, what I pray for.”
“Ah, how can I thank you enough?” I murmured.
“I believe it will all pass—if she loves you,” Mrs. Marden continued.
“It will all pass?”
“We shall never see him again.”
“Oh, if she loves me I don’t care how often I see him!”
“Ah, you take it better than I could,” said my companion. “You have the happiness not to know—not to understand.”
“I don’t indeed. What on earth does he want?”
“He wants to make me suffer.” She turned her wan face upon me with this, and I saw now for the first time, fully, how perfectly, if this had been Sir Edmund Orme’s purpose, he had succeeded. “For what I did to him,” Mrs. Marden explained.
“And what did you do to him?”
She looked at me a moment. “I killed him.” As I had seen him fifty yards away only five minutes before the words gave me a start. “Yes, I make you jump; be careful. He’s there still, but he killed himself. I broke his heart—he thought me awfully bad. We were to have been married, but I broke it off—just at the last. I saw some one I liked better; I had no reason but that. It wasn’t for interest, or money, or position, or anything of that sort. All those things were his. It was simply that I fell in love with Captain Marden. When I saw him I felt that I couldn’t marry any one else. I wasn’t in love with Edmund Orme—my mother, my elder sister had brought it about. But he did love me. I told him I didn’t care—that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t. I threw him over, and he took something, some abominable drug or draught that proved fatal. It was dreadful, it was horrible, he was found that way—he died in agony. I married Captain Marden, but not for five years. I was happy, perfectly happy; time obliterates. But when my husband died I began to see him.”
I had listened intently, but I wondered. “To see your husband?”
“Never, never that way, thank God! To see him, with Chartie—always with Chartie. The first time it nearly killed me—about seven years ago, when she first came out. Never when I’m by myself—only with her. Sometimes not for months, then every day for a week. I’ve tried everything to break the spell—doctors and regimes and climates; I’ve prayed to God on my knees. That day at Brighton, on the Parade with you, when you thought I was ill, that was the first for an age. And then, in the evening, when I knocked my tea over you, and the day you were at the door with Charlotte and I saw you from the window—each time he was there.”
“I see, I see.” I was more thrilled than I could say. “It’s an apparition like another.”
“Like another? Have you ever seen another?”
“No, I mean the sort of thing one has heard of. It’s tremendously interesting to encounter a case.”
“Do you call me a ‘case’?” Mrs. Marden asked, with exquisite resentment.
“I mean myself.”
“Oh, you’re the right one!” she exclaimed. “I was right when I trusted you.”
“I’m devoutly grateful you did; but what made you do it?”
“I had thought the whole thing out—I had had time to in those dreadful years, while he was punishing me in my daughter.”
“Hardly that,” I objected, “if she never knew.”
“That has been my terror, that she will, from one occasion to another. I’ve an unspeakable dread of the effect on her.”
“She sha’n’t, she sha’n’t!” I declared, so loud that several people looked round.
Mrs. Marden made me get up, and I had no more talk with her that evening. The next day I told her I must take my departure from Tranton—it was neither comfortable nor considerate to remain as a rejected suitor. She was disconcerted, but she accepted my reasons, only saying to me out of her mournful eyes: “You’ll leave me alone then with my burden?” It was of course understood between us that for many weeks to come there would be no discretion in “worrying poor Charlotte”: such were the terms in which, with odd feminine and maternal inconsistency, she alluded to an attitude on my part that she favoured. I was prepared to be heroically considerate, but it seemed to me that even this delicacy permitted me to say a word to Miss Marden before I went. I begged her, after breakfast, to take a turn with me on the terrace, and as she hesitated, looking at me distantly, I informed her that it was only to ask her a question and to say good-bye—I was leaving Tranton for her.
She came out with me, and we passed slowly round the house three or four times. Nothing is finer than this great airy platform, from which every look is a sweep of the country, with the sea on the furthest edge. It might have been that as we passed the windows we were conspicuous to our friends in the house, who would divine, sarcastically, why I was so significantly bolting. But I didn’t care; I only wondered whether they wouldn’t really this time make out Sir Edmund Orme, who joined us on one of our turns and strolled slowly on the other side of my companion. Of what transcendent essence he was composed I knew not; I have no theory about him (leaving that to others), any more than I have one about such or such another of my fellow-mortals whom I have elbowed in life. He was as positive, as individual, as ultimate a fact as any of these. Above all he was as respectable, as sensitive a fact; so that I should no more have thought of taking a liberty, of practising an experiment with him, of touching him, for instance, or speaking to him, since he set the example of silence, than I should have thought of committing any other social grossness. He had always, as I saw more fully later, the perfect propriety of his position—had always the appearance of being dressed and, in attitude and aspect, of comporting himself, as the occasion demanded. He looked strange, incontestably, but somehow he always looked right. I very soon came to attach an idea of beauty to his unmentionable presence, the beauty of an old story of love and pain. What I ended by feeling was that he was on my side, that he was watching over my interest, that he was looking to it that my heart shouldn’t be broken. Oh, he had taken it seriously, his own catastrophe—he had certainly proved that in his day. If poor Mrs. Marden, as she told me, had thought it out, I also subjected the case to the finest analysis of which my intellect was capable. It was a case of retributive justice. The mother was to pay, in suffering, for the suffering she had inflicted, and as the disposition to jilt a lover might have been transmitted to the daughter, the daughter was to be watched, so that she might be made to suffer should she do an equal wrong. She might reproduce her mother in character as vividly as she did in face. On the day she should transgress, in other words, her eyes would be opened suddenly and unpitiedly to the “perfect presence,” which she would have to work as she could into her conception of a young lady’s universe. I had no great fear for her, because I didn’t believe she was, in any cruel degree, a coquette. We should have a good deal of ground to get over before I, at least, should be in a position to be sacrificed by her. She couldn’t throw me over before she had made a little more of me.
The question I asked her on the terrace that morning was whether I might continue, during the winter, to come to Mrs. Marden’s house. I promised not to come too often and not to speak to her for three months of the question I had raised the day before. She replied that I might do as I liked, and on this we parted.
I carried out the vow I had made her; I held my tongue for my three months. Unexpectedly to myself there were moments of this time when she struck me as capable of playing with a man. I wanted so to make her like me that I became subtle and ingenious, wonderfully alert, patiently diplomatic. Sometimes I thought I had earned my reward, brought her to the point of saying: “Well, well, you’re the best of them all—you may speak to me now.” Then there was a greater blankness than ever in her beauty, and on certain days a mocking light in her eyes, of which the meaning seemed to be: “If you don’t take care, I will accept you, to have done with you the more effectually.” Mrs. Ma
rden was a great help to me simply by believing in me, and I valued her faith all the more that it continued even though there was a sudden intermission of the miracle that had been wrought for me. After our visit to Tranton Sir Edmund Orme gave us a holiday, and I confess it was at first a disappointment to me. I felt less designated, less connected with Charlotte. “Oh, don’t cry till you’re out of the wood,” her mother said; “he has let me off sometimes for six months. He’ll break out again when you least expect it—he knows what he’s about.” For her these weeks were happy, and she was wise enough not to talk about me to the girl. She was so good as to assure me that I was taking the right way, that I looked as if I felt secure and that in the long run women give way to that. She had known them do it even when the man was a fool for looking so—or was a fool on any terms. For herself she felt it to be a good time, a sort of St. Martin’s summer of the soul. She was better than she had been for years, and she had me to thank for it. The sense of visitation was light upon her—she wasn’t in anguish every time she looked round. Charlotte contradicted me very often, but she contradicted herself still more. That winter was a wonder of mildness, and we often sat out in the sun. I walked up and down with Charlotte, and Mrs. Marden, sometimes on a bench, sometimes in a bath-chair, waited for us and smiled at us as we passed. I always looked out for a sign in her face—“He’s with you, he’s with you” (she would see him before I should), but nothing came; the season had brought us also a sort of spiritual softness. Toward the end of April the air was so like June that, meeting my two friends one night at some Brighton sociability—an evening party with amateur music—I drew Miss Marden unresistingly out upon a balcony to which a window in one of the rooms stood open. The night was close and thick, the stars were dim, and below us, under the cliff, we heard the regular rumble of the sea. We listened to it a little and we heard mixed with it, from within the house, the sound of a violin accompanied by a piano—a performance which had been our pretext for passing out.
