Hide and Seek

by Wilkie Collins

  Zack's laughter came to an abrupt termination. Mat had raised his head suddenly, and was now staring him full in the face again, with a bright, searching look—an expression in which suspicious amazement and doubting curiosity were very strangely mingled together.

  "You're not angry with me for cracking a few respectable old jokes?" said Zack. "Have I said anything?—Stop! yes, I have, though I didn't mean it. You looked up at me in that savage manner, when I warned you not to give her a Hair Bracelet. Surely you don't think me brute enough to make fun of your not having any hair on your own head to give anybody? Surely you have a better opinion of me than that? I give you my word of honor, I never thought of you, or your head, or that infernal scalping business, when I said what I did. It was true—it happened to me."

  "How did it happen?" said. Mat, with eager, angry curiosity.

  "Only in this way. I wanted to give her a Hair Bracelet myself—my hair and Blyth's, and so on. And an addle-headed old woman who seems to know Madonna (that's a name we give her) as well as Blyth himself, and keeps what she knows just as close, got me into a corner, and talked nonsense about the whole thing, as old women will."

  "What did she say?" asked Mat, more eager, more angry, and more curious than ever.

  "She talked nonsense, I tell you. She said a Hair Bracelet would be unlucky to Madonna; and then told me Madonna had one already; and then wouldn't let me ask Blyth whether it was true, because I should get her into dreadful trouble if I said anything to him about it; besides a good deal more which you wouldn't care to be bothered with. But I have told you enough—haven't I?—to show I was not thinking of you, when I said that just now by way of a joke. Come, shake hands, old fellow. You're not offended with me, now I have explained everything?"

  Mat gave his hand, but he put it out like a man groping in the dark. His mind was full of that memorable letter about a Hair Bracelet, which he had found in the box given to him by Joanna Grice.

  "A Hair Bracelet?" he said, vacantly.

  "Don't be sulky!" cried Zack, clapping him on the shoulder.

  "A Hair Bracelet is unlucky to the young woman—and she's got one already" (he was weighing attentively the lightest word that Zack had spoken to him). "What's it like?" he asked aloud, turning suddenly to young Thorpe.

  "What's what like?"

  "A Hair Bracelet."

  "Still harping on that, after all my explanations! Like? Why it's hair plaited up, and made to fasten round the wrist, with gold at each end to clasp it by. What are you stopping for again? I'll tell you what, Mat, I can make every allowance for a man in your love-struck situation; but if I didn't know how you had been spending the morning, I should say you were drunk."

  They had been walking along quickly, while Mat asked what a Hair Bracelet was like. But no sooner had Zack told him than he came to a dead pause—started and changed color—opened his lips to speak—then checked himself, and remained silent. The information which he had just received had recalled to him a certain object that he had seen in the drawer of Mr. Blyth's bureau; and the resemblance between the two had at once flashed upon him. The importance which this discovery assumed in his eyes, in connection with what he had already heard, may be easily estimated, when it is remembered that his barbarian life had kept him totally ignorant that a Hair Bracelet is in England one of the commonest ornaments of woman's wear.

  "Are we going to stop here all day?" asked Zack. "If you're turning from sulky to sentimental again, I shall go back to Blyth's, and pave the way for you with Madonna, old boy!" He turned gaily in the direction of Valentine's house, as he said those words.

  Mat did not offer to detain him; did not say a word at parting. He passed his hand wearily over his eyes as Zack left him. "I'm sober," he said vacantly to himself; "I'm not dreaming; I'm not light-headed, though I feel a'most like it. I saw that young woman as plain as I see them houses in front of me now; and by God, if she had been Mary's ghost, she couldn't have been more like her!"

  He stopped. His hand fell to his side; then fastened mechanically on the railings of a house near him. His rough, misshapen fingers trembled round the iron. Recollections that had slumbered for years and years past, were awakening again awfully to life within him. Through the obscurity and oblivion of long absence, through the changeless darkness of the tomb, there was shining out now, vivid and solemn on his memory, the image—as she had been in her youth-time—of the dead woman whose name was "Mary." And it was only the sight of that young girl, of that poor, shy, gentle, deaf and dumb creature, that had wrought the miracle!

  He tried to shake himself clear of the influences which were now at work on him. He moved forward a step or two, and looked up. Zack?—where was Zack?

  Away, at the other end of the solitary suburban street, just visible sauntering along and swinging his stick in his hand.

  Without knowing why he did so, Mat turned instantly and walked after him, calling to him to come back. The third summons reached him: he stopped, hesitated, made comic gesticulations with his stick in the air—then began to retrace his steps.

  The effort of walking and calling after him, had turned Mat's thoughts in another direction. They now occupied themselves again with the hints that Zack had dropped of some incomprehensible connection between a Hair Bracelet, and the young girl who was called by the strange name of "Madonna." With the remembrance of this, there came back also the recollection of the letter about a bracelet, and its enclosure of hair, which he had examined in the lonely cattle-shed at Dibbledean, and which still lay in the little box bearing on it the name of "Mary Grice."

  "Well!" cried Zack, speaking as he came on. "Well, Cupid! what do you want with me now?"

  Mat did not immediately answer. His thoughts were still traveling back cautiously over the ground which they had already explored. Once more, he was pondering on that little circle of plaited hair, having gold at each end, and looking just big enough to go round a woman's wrist, which he had seen in the drawer of Mr. Blyth's bureau. And once again, the identity between this object and the ornament which young Thorpe had described as being the thing called a Hair Bracelet, began surely and more surely to establish itself in his mind.

  "Now then, don't keep me waiting," continued Zack, laughing again as he came nearer; "clap your hand on your heart, and give me your tender message for the future Mrs. Marksman."

  It was on the tip of Mat's tongue to emulate the communicativeness of young Thorpe, and to speak unreservedly of what he had seen in the drawer of the bureau—but he suddenly restrained the words just as they were dropping from his lips. At the same moment his eyes began to lose their vacant perturbed look, and to brighten again with something of craft and cunning, added to their customary watchful expression.

  "What's the young woman's real name?" he asked carelessly, just as Zack was beginning to banter him for the third time.

  "Is that all you called me back for? Her real name's Mary."

  Mat had made his inquiry with the air of a man whose thoughts were far away from his words, and who only spoke because he felt obliged to say something. Zack's reply to his question startled him into instant and anxious attention.

  "Mary!" he repeated in a tone of surprise. "What else, besides Mary?"

  "How should I know? Didn't I try and beat it into your muddled old head, half-an-hour ago, that Blyth won't tell his friends anything about her?" There was another pause. The secrecy in which Mr. Blyth chose to conceal Madonna's history, and the sequestered place in the innermost drawer of his bureau where he kept the Hair Bracelet, began vaguely to connect themselves together in Mat's mind. A curious smile hovered about his lips, and the cunning look brightened in his eyes. "The Painter-Man won't tell anything about her, won't he? Perhaps that thing in his drawer will." He muttered the words to himself, putting his hands in his pockets, and mechanically kicking away a stone which happened to lie at his feet on the pavement.

  "What are you grumbling about now?" asked Zack. "Do you think I'm going to stop here al
l day for the pleasure of hearing you talk to yourself?" As he spoke, he vivaciously rapped his friend on the shoulder with his stick. "Trust me to pave the way for you with Madonna!" he called out mischievously, as he turned back in the direction of Mr. Blyth's house.

  "Trust me to have another look at your friend's Hair Bracelet," said Mat quietly to himself. "I'll handle it this time, before I'm many days older."

  He nodded over his shoulder at Zack, and walked away quickly in the direction of Kirk Street.

  CHAPTER VII. THE BOX OF LETTERS.

  The first thing Mat did when he got to his lodgings, was to fill and light his pipe. He then sat down on his bear-skins, and dragged the box close to him which he had brought from Dibbledean.

  Although the machinery of Mat's mind was constructed of very clumsy and barbaric materials; although book-learning had never oiled it, and wise men's talk had never quickened it; nevertheless, it always contrived to work on—much as it was working now—until it reached, sooner or later, a practical result. Solitude and Peril are stern schoolmasters, but they do their duty for good or evil, thoroughly with some men; and they had done it thoroughly, amid the rocks and wildernesses of the great American continent, with Mat.

  Many a pipe did he empty and fill again, many a dark change passed over his heavy features, as he now pondered long and laboriously over every word of the dialogue that had just been held between himself and Zack. But not so much as five minutes out of all the time he thus consumed, was, in any true sense of the word, time wasted. He had sat down to his first pipe, resolved that, if any human means could compass it, he would find out how the young girl whom he had seen in Mr. Blyth's studio, had first come there, and who she really was. When he rose up at last, and put the pipe away to cool, he had thought the matter fairly out from beginning to end, had arrived at his conclusions, and had definitely settled his future plans.

  Reflection had strengthened him in the resolution to follow his first impulse when he parted from Zack in the street, and begin the attempt to penetrate the suspicious secret that hid from him and from every one the origin of Valentine's adopted child, by getting possession of the Hair Bracelet which he had seen laid away in the inner drawer of the bureau. As for any assignable reason for justifying him in associating this Hair Bracelet with Madonna, he found it, to his own satisfaction, in young Thorpe's account of the strange words spoken by Mrs. Peckover in Mr. Blyth's hall—the suspicions resulting from these hints being also immensely strengthened, by his recollections of the letter signed "Jane Holdsworth," and containing an enclosure of hair, which he had examined in the cattle-shed at Dibbledean.

  According to that letter, a Hair Bracelet (easily recognizable if still in existence, by comparing it with the hair enclosed in Jane Holdsworth's note) had once been the property of Mary Grice. According to what Zack had said, there was apparently some incomprehensible confusion and mystery in connection with a Hair Bracelet and the young woman whose extraordinary likeness to what Mary Grice had been in her girlhood, had first suggested to him the purpose he was now pursuing. Lastly, according to what he himself now knew, there was actually a hair Bracelet lying in the innermost drawer of Mr. Blyth's bureau—this latter fragment of evidence assuming in his mind, as has been already remarked, an undue significance in relation to the fragments preceding it, from his not knowing that hair bracelets are found in most houses where there are women in a position to wear any jewelry ornament at all.

  Vague as they might be, these coincidences were sufficient to startle him at first—then to fill him with an eager, devouring curiosity—and then to suggest to him the uncertain and desperate course which he was now firmly resolved to follow. How he was to gain possession of the Hair Bracelet without Mr. Blyth's knowledge, and without exciting the slightest suspicion in the painter's family, he had not yet determined. But he was resolved to have it, he was perfectly unscrupulous as to means, and he felt certain beforehand of attaining his object. Whither, or to what excesses, that object might lead him, he never stopped and never cared to consider. The awful face of the dead woman (now fixed for ever in his memory by the living copy of it that his own eyes had beheld) seemed to be driving him on swiftly into unknown darkness, to bring him out into unexpected light at the end. The influence which was thus sternly at work in him was not to be questioned—it was to be obeyed.

  His resolution in reference to the Hair Bracelet was not more firmly settled than his resolution to keep his real sensations on seeing Madonna, and the purpose which had grown out of them, a profound secret from young Thorpe, who was too warmly Mr. Blyth's friend to be trusted. Every word that Zack had let slip, had been of vital importance, hitherto; every word that might yet escape him, might be of the most precious use for future guidance. "If it's his fun and fancy," mused Mat, "to go on thinking I'm sweet on the girl, let him think it. The more he thinks, the more he'll talk. All I've got to do is to hold in; and then he's sure to let out."

  While schooling himself thus as to his future conduct towards Zack, he did not forget another person who was less close at hand certainly, but who might also be turned to good account. Before he fairly decided on his plan of action, he debated with himself the propriety of returning to Dibbledean, and forcing from the old woman, Joanna Grice, more information than she had been willing to give him at their first interview. But, on reflection, he considered that it was better to leave this as a resource to be tried, in case of the failure of his first experiment with the Hair Bracelet. One look at that—one close comparison of the hair it was made of, with the surplus hair which had not been used by the jeweler, in Mary Grice's bracelet, and which had been returned to her in her friend's letter—was all he wanted in the first place; for this would be enough to clear up every present uncertainty and suspicion connected with the ornament in the drawer of Mr. Blyth's bureau.

  These were mainly the resolutions to which his long meditation had now crookedly and clumsily conducted him. His next immediate business was to examine those letters in the box, which he had hitherto not opened; and also to possess himself of the enclosure of hair, in the letter to "Mary Grice," that he might have it always about him ready for any emergency.

  Before he opened the box, however, he took a quick, impatient turn or two up and down his miserable little room. Not once, since he had set forth to return to his own country, and to the civilization from which, for more than twenty years, he had been an outcast, had he felt (to use his favorite expression) that he was "his own man again," until now. A thrill of the old, breathless, fierce suspense of his days of deadly peril ran through him, as he thought on the forbidden secret into which he was about to pry, and for the discovery of which he was ready to dare any hazard and use any means. "It goes through and through me, a'most like dodging for life again among the bloody Indians," muttered Mat to himself, as he trod restlessly to and fro in his cage of a room, rubbing all the while at the scars on his face, as his way was when any new excitement got the better of him.

  At the very moment when this thought was rising ominously in his mind, Valentine was expounding anew the whole scope and object of "Columbus" to a fresh circle of admiring spectators—while his wife was interpreting to Madonna above stairs Zack's wildest jokes about his friend's love-stricken condition; and all three were laughing gaily at a caricature, which he was maliciously drawing for them, of "poor old Mat" in the character of a scalped Cupid. Even the little minor globe of each man's social sphere has its antipodes-points; and when it is all bright sunshine in one part of the miniature world, it is all pitch darkness, at the very same moment, in another.

  Mat's face had grown suddenly swarthier than ever, while he walked across his room, and said those words to himself which have just been recorded. It altered again, though, in a minute or two, and turned once more to the cold clay-color which had overspread it in the hosier's shop at Dibbledean, as he returned to his bear-skins and opened the box that had belonged to "Mary Grice."

  He took out first the letter with the
enclosure of hair, and placed it carefully in the breast pocket of his coat. He next searched a moment or two for the letter superscribed and signed by Joanna Grice; and, having found it, placed it on one side of him, on the floor. After this he paused a moment, looking into the box with a curious, scowling sadness on his face; while his hand vacantly stirred hither and thither the different objects that lay about among the papers—the gaily-bound album, the lace-collar, the dried flower-leaves, and the other little womanly possessions which had once belonged to Mary Grice.

  Then he began to collect together all the letters in the box. Having got them into his hands—some tied up in a packet, some loose—he spread them out before him on his lap, first drawing up an end of one of the bear-skins over his legs for them to lie on conveniently. He began by examining the addresses. They were all directed to "Mary Grice," in the same clear, careful, sharply-shaped handwriting. Though they were letters in form, they proved to be only notes in substance, when he opened them: the writing, in some, not extending to more than four or five lines. At least fifteen or twenty were expressed, with unimportant variations, in this form:

  "MY DEAREST MARY—Pray try all you can to meet me to-morrow evening at the usual place. I have been waiting and longing for you in vain to-day. Only think of me, love, as I am now, and always, thinking of you; and I know you will come. Ever and only yours,

  "A. C."

  All these notes were signed in the same way, merely with initial letters. They contained nothing in the shape of a date, except the day of the week on which they had been written; and they had evidently been delivered by some private means, for there did not appear to be a post-mark on any of them. One after another Mat opened and glanced at them—then tossed them aside into a heap. He pursued this employment quietly and methodically; but as he went on with it, a strange look flashed into his eyes from time to time, giving to them a certain sinister brightness which altered very remarkably the whole natural expression of his face.