by Grant Allen
Then he went on to explain to her, in a very rapid flow of language that quite took Linda’s breath away, how he had always loved her, and would always love her, though he had sometimes pretended for both their sakes to keep his love in abeyance. ‘And you loved me too, devotedly, in those days, Linda.’
‘Yes, Mr. Maclaine,’ Linda said, looking up, and trying to get in a word edgeways, ‘in those days I certainly loved you devotedly. But then — —’
He cut her short at once, with a man’s gesture of impatience. ‘You loved me devotedly,’ he repeated. ‘I know it. I know it. I loved you, too. But Linda, foolish ideas, which I’m ashamed at my present age ever to have entertained, made me fight against my own heart, though I loved you even then, and tried to hide it from myself — as I fear, unsuccessfully. You found out my love, however, in spite of all my pains. Then doubts and difficulties arose.’ He went on with glib words to gloss over his behaviour to Cecil when he called on him in the drawing-rooms before leaving England, for of the scene in the back bedroom he was still, of course, entirely ignorant. In his facile fashion he explained away everything. He made all clear as mud; he showed her how, in fact, he had never been false to her. For her own sake, as well as his, he hadn’t wished to tie her down to a starvation income. How could a man at the Board of Trade have married on the screw he then possessed? — though, to be sure, he was much better off now, since his poor dear governor’s death and his last rise in the office; but as things then stood it would have been simply suicidal. He couldn’t bear to think he was spoiling Linda’s future and wasting Linda’s life for her, so he tried to break it off — perhaps too clumsily. It had cost him some pangs, he didn’t deny; but as soon as he saw she was really losing her heart to him hopelessly, duty impelled him to break it off at once, at whatever cost of personal unhappiness. He had worded things to Cecil, perhaps, rather more strongly and brusquely than he really wished, but why was that? Only because he was so impressed by the necessity for letting Cecil feel how inevitable he considered it that they should both be free for a time — and both outlive it. He had never for a moment imagined in his wildest mood she would so take him at his word, and fly off to America.
Linda listened to this strange statement at first in blank bewilderment. She hardly remembered the episode of Cecil’s visit to the drawing-rooms at Clandon Street at all: to her, of course, the real shock had come some hours earlier. But when Basil, finished at last, paused for breath and an answer, she rose and looked at him with proud disdain.
‘I hardly know what you mean by all that, Mr. Maclaine,’ she said haughtily, in spite of trembling. ‘You refer to some interview I had almost forgotten. But if you think it was the result of that interview that drove me to New York, I can only say you’re very much mistaken.... You have told glib falsehoods.... Now hear the plain truth.... I was in the back bedroom that morning, and the folding doors stood ajar, half open. You didn’t know it, and I didn’t wish to listen. But none the less I heard you say these words to Douglas Harrison — I’m Duchess of Powysland now, but the shame and unworthiness of them so burned into my very blood and love that I can never forget them: “She’s a very nice young woman to flutter about and flirt with,” you said, “when one has nothing better on hand to do. But, marry her! nonsense! She can’t be quite such a fool as all that comes to. She can never have imagined for half a moment a man in my position meant anything serious when he amused himself a bit by playing and toying with her!” Those were the words I heard you say that day, Mr. Basil Maclaine, behind the folding doors of your room in Clandon Street; and those were the words, the shameful, hateful words, that drove me away at once across the sea from England.’
Basil Maclaine drew back, nonplussed at this sudden turn of affairs. To think she should have overheard that unlucky conversation, which he himself had altogether forgotten till that precise moment, but which, nevertheless, came back to him now with such unexpected and crushing force to checkmate him! Yet, even so, he could hardly believe himself checkmated. Delusions die hard. Basil Maclaine had counted so long and so confidently upon the shadow of the Duchess’s title and the substance of the Duchess’s dollars, not to speak of that handsome and eminently desirable person the Duchess herself (thrown in gratis), that he couldn’t believe now, at one angry flash of those proud, dark eyes, his dream had vanished.
‘You don’t mean to tell me, Linda,’ he cried passionately, almost flinging himself upon her, ‘that for a single hasty and ill-considered sentence, spoken in pure chaff, as between man and man, to another fellow when you weren’t supposed to be by, you’ll throw me over for ever, who have loved you so long and thought of you so constantly! Have you no tender recollection of those dear old days? Don’t you ever wish yourself back in Clandon Street? Do you really mean it? Do you really mean to fling away your life for one man’s fault and another man’s folly? Will you never forget? Will you never marry?’
Linda turned to him calmly, and seized his last question with a certain proud unreserve.
‘Yes, Mr. Maclaine,’ she said; ‘I will marry. I remember those old days at Clandon Street with unalloyed delight. I remember, too, the man who loved me there so truly and devotedly. And, what is more, I mean to marry him. In spite of everything, I mean still to marry him.’ Basil drew a step nearer, enraptured, but she waved him off imperiously with her warning left hand held open upward. ‘I care nothing for the title I took from a husband who never loved me at all,’ she continued. ‘I’ve learnt to value a true man at his true worth, unblinded by a false love or a brilliant position. And so I’ve come back to England at last — to marry Douglas Harrison.’
‘Douglas Harrison!’ the frequenter of Good Society cried, drawing back in surprise, and gazing at her all unnerved. ‘Douglas Harrison! How mean, how unworthy, how unkind of him! Why, he knew I was coming here to ask you to-day — to offer you my love — and he never told me!’
‘Because he never knew,’ Linda answered quietly. ‘But, if you care to be my messenger, you can go back and tell him now that Linda Amberley, whom he has loved so long and served so faithfully, loves him as truly as he deserves, and has come home at last on purpose to marry him.’
‘I never felt so astonished in all my life, Linda,’ that eminent counsel often says to his wife, ‘as when poor Maclaine, like a whipped spaniel, with his tail between his legs, came honestly back and gave me your message. It was most manly and generous of him. But really and truly, you dear good girl! I do seriously think you were too awfully cruel to make Maclaine the bearer of his own defeat to me.’
THE END
Recalled to Life
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER I.
UNA CALLINGHAM’S FIRST RECOLLECTION
It may sound odd to say so, but the very earliest fact that impressed itself on my memory was a scene that took place — so I was told — when I was eighteen years old, in my father’s house, The Grange, at Woodbury.
My babyhood, my childhood, my girlhood, my school-days were all utterly blotted out by that one strange shock of horror. My past life became exactly as though it had never been. I forgot my own name. I forgot my mother-tongue. I forgot everything I had ever done or known or thought about. Except for the power to walk and stand and perform simple actions of every-day use, I became a baby in arms again, with a nurs
e to take care of me. The doctors told me, later, I had fallen into what they were pleased to call “a Second State.” I was examined and reported upon as a Psychological Curiosity. But at the time, I knew nothing of all this. A thunderbolt, as it were, destroyed at one blow every relic, every trace of my previous existence; and I began life all over again, with that terrible scene of blood as my first birthday and practical starting point.
I remember it all even now with horrible distinctness. Each item in it photographed itself vividly on my mind’s eye. I saw it as in a picture — just as clearly, just as visually. And the effect, now I look back upon it with a maturer judgment, was precisely like a photograph in another way too. It was wholly unrelated in time and space: it stood alone by itself, lighted up by a single spark, without rational connection before or after it. What led up to it all, I hadn’t the very faintest idea. I only knew the Event itself took place; and I, like a statue, stood rooted in the midst of it.
And this was the Picture as, for many long months, it presented itself incessantly to my startled brain, by day and by night, awake or asleep, in colours more distinct than words can possibly paint them.
I saw myself standing in a large, square room — a very handsome old room, filled with bookshelves like a library. On one side stood a table, and on the table a box. A flash of light rendered the whole scene visible. But it wasn’t light that came in through the window. It was rather like lightning, so quick it was, and clear, and short-lived, and terrible. Half-way to the door, I stood and looked in horror at the sight revealed before my eyes by that sudden flash. A man lay dead in a little pool of blood that gurgled by short jets from a wound on his left breast. I didn’t even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship wasn’t part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a man — a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been shot with lay on the ground not far from him.
But that wasn’t all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as the victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and the pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window. It was the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or thirty: he had just raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to leap; for the room, as I afterwards learned, though on the ground floor, stood raised on a basement above the garden behind. I couldn’t see the man’s face, or any part of him, indeed, except his stooping back, and his feet, and his neck, and his elbows. But what little I saw was printed indelibly on the very fibre of my nature. I could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw him in the same attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of justice on the strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.
He was tall and thin, but he stooped like a hunchback.
There were other points worth notice in that strange mental photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer. Whatever might have been the man’s object in shooting my father, I was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the time, I’m confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his actions in any way. I merely took in the scene, as it were, passively, in a great access of horror, which rendered me incapable of sense or thought or speech or motion. I saw the table, the box, the apparatus by its side, the murdered man on the floor, the pistol lying pointed with its muzzle towards his body, the pool of blood that soaked deep into the Turkey carpet beneath, the ledge of the window, the young man’s rounded back as he paused and hesitated. And I also saw, like an instantaneous flash, one hand pushed behind him, waving me off, I almost thought, with the gesture of one warning.
Why didn’t I remember the murderer’s face? That puzzled me long after. I must have seen him before: I must surely have been there when the crime was committed. I must have known at the moment everything about it. But the blank that came over my memory, came over it with the fatal shot. All that went before, was to me as though it were not. I recollect vaguely, as the first point in my life, that my eyes were shut hard, and darkness came over me. While they were so shut, I heard an explosion. Next moment, I believe, I opened them, and saw this Picture. No sensitive-plate could have photographed it more instantaneously, as by an electric spark, than did my retina that evening, as for months after I saw it all. In another moment, I shut my lids again, and all was over. There was darkness once more, and I was alone with my Horror.
In years then to come, I puzzled my head much as to the meaning of the Picture. Gradually, step by step, I worked some of it out, with the aid of my friends, and of the evidence tendered at the coroner’s inquest. But for the moment I knew nothing of all that. I was a newborn baby again. Only with this important difference. They say our minds at birth are like a sheet of white paper, ready to take whatever impressions may fall upon them. Mine was like a sheet all covered and obscured by one hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy, before I knew or was conscious of anything else but that. The Picture and a great Horror divided my life between them.
Recollect, I didn’t even remember the murdered man was my father. I didn’t recognise the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I didn’t know anything at all except what I tell you here. I saw the corpse, the blood, the box on the table, the wires by the side, the bottles and baths and plates of an amateur photographer’s kit, without knowing what they all meant. I saw even the books not as books but as visible points of colour. It had something the effect on me that it might have upon anyone else to be dropped suddenly on the stage of a theatre at the very moment when a hideous crime was being committed, and to believe it real, or rather, to know it by some vague sense as hateful and actual.
Here my history began. I date from that Picture. My second babyhood was passed in the shadow of the abiding Horror.
CHAPTER II.
BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN
Wha happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with the vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had to learn to remember things just like other children.
I will try to tell the whole tale over again exactly as it then struck me.
After the Picture, I told you, I shut my eyes in alarm for a second. When I opened them once more there was a noise, a very great noise, and my recollection is that people had burst wildly into the room, and were lifting the dead body, and bending over it in astonishment, and speaking loud to me, and staring at me. I believe they broke the door open, though that’s rather inference than memory; I learnt it afterwards. Soon some of them rushed to the open window and looked out into the garden. Then, suddenly, a man gave a shout, and leaping on to the sill, jumped down in pursuit, as I thought, of the murderer. As time went on, more people flocked in; and some of them looked at the body and the pool of blood; and some of them turned round and spoke to me. But what they said or what they meant I hadn’t the slightest idea. The noise of the pistol-shot still rang loud in my ears: the ineffable Horror still drowned all my senses.
After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, and felt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn’t even remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for a while, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and close-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after which he turned round and examined the body. He looked hard at the revolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw no more, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed; and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to end entirely.
At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and a clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone, my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her, — it’s so hard not to drop into the language of everyday life when one has to describe things to other people, — my nurse got me up, with much ado and solemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and ugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and took me downstairs, with the aid of a man who wore a suit of blue clothes and a queer kind of helmet. The man was of the sort I now call a policeman. These pictures are far less definite in my mind than the one that begins my second life; but still, in a vague kind of way, I pretty well remember them.
On the ground floor, nurse made me walk; and I walked out to the door, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses. People were looking on, on either side, between the door and the cab — great crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two more men in blue suits were holding them off by main force from surging against me and incommoding me. I don’t think they wanted to hurt me: it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces. But I was afraid, and shrank back. They were eager to see me, however, and pressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits had hard work to prevent them.
