Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “Jack,” I said slowly, giving way at last, and letting him hold me down with his small strong hands and slender iron wrist, “tell me, if you will, how I came to do it. I’ll sit here quite still, if only you’ll tell me. Am I really a murderess?”

  Jack recoiled like one shot.

  “YOU a murderess, my spotless Una!” he exclaimed, all aghast. “If anyone else on earth but you had just asked such a thing in my presence, I’d have leapt at the fellow’s throat, and held him down till I choked him!”

  “But I did it!” I cried wildly. “I remember now, I did it. It all comes back to me at last. I fired at him, just so. I aimed the loaded pistol point-blank at his heart, I can hear the din in my ears. I can see the flash at the muzzle. And then I flung down the pistol — like this — at my feet: and darkness came on; and I forgot everything. Why, Dr. Marten knew that much! I remember now, he told me he’d formed a very strong impression, from the nature of the wound and the position of the various objects on the floor of the room, who it was that did it! He must have seen it was I who flung down the pistol.”

  Jack gazed at me in suspense.

  “He’s a very good friend of yours, then,” he murmured, “that Dr. Marten. For he never said a word of all that at the inquest.”

  “But I must give myself up!” I cried, in a fever of penitence for what that other woman who once was ME had done. “Oh, Jack, do let me! It’s hateful to know I’m a murderess and to go unpunished. It’s hateful to draw back from the fate I’d have imposed on another. I’d like to be hanged for it. I want to be hanged. It’s the only possible way to appease one’s conscience.”

  And yet, though I said it, I felt all the time it wasn’t really I, but that other strange girl who once lived at The Grange and looked exactly like me. I remember it, to be sure; but it was in my Other State: and, so far as my moral responsibility was concerned, my Other State and I were two different people.

  For I knew in my heart I couldn’t commit a murder.

  Jack rose without a word, and fetched me in some brandy.

  “Drink this,” he said calmly, in his authoritative medical tone; “drink this before you say another sentence.”

  And, obedient to his order, I took it up and drank it.

  Then he sat down beside me, and took my hand in his, and with very gentle words began to reason and argue with me.

  He was glad I’d struggled, he said, because that broke the first force of the terrible shock for me. Action was always good for one in any great crisis. It gave an outlet for the pent-up emotions, too suddenly let loose with explosive force, and kept them from turning inward and doing serious harm, as mine had done on that horrible night of the accident. He called it always the accident, I noticed, and never the murder. That gave me fresh hope. Could I really after all have fired unintentionally? But no; when I came to look inward, — to look backward on my past state, — I was conscious all the time of some strong and fierce resentment smouldering deep in my heart at the exact moment of firing. However it might have happened, I was angry with the man with the long white beard: I fired at him hastily, it is true, but with malice prepense and deliberate intent to wound and hurt him.

  Jack went on, however, undeterred, in a low and quiet voice, soothing my hand with his as he spoke, and very kind and gentle. My spirit rebelled at the thought that I could ever for one moment have imagined him a murderer. I said so in one wild burst. Jack held my hand, and still reasoned with me. I like a man’s reasoning; it’s so calm and impartial. It seems to overcome one by its mere display of strength. If I’d changed my mind once, Jack said, I might change it again, when further evidence on the point was again forthcoming. I mustn’t give myself up to the police till I understood much more. If I did, I would commit a very grave mistake. There were reasons that had led to the firing of the shot. Very grave reasons too. Couldn’t I restore and reconstruct them, now I knew the last stage of the terrible history? If possible, he’d rather I should arrive at them by myself than that he should tell me.

  I cast my mind back all in vain.

  “No, Jack,” I said trustfully. “I can’t remember anything one bit like that. I can remember forward, sometimes, but never backwards. I can remember now how I flung down the pistol, and how the servants burst in. But not a word, not an item, of what went before. That’s all a pure blank to me.”

  And then I went on to tell him in very brief outline how the first thing I could recollect in all my life was the Australian scene with the big blue-gum-trees; and how that had been recalled to me by the picture at Jane’s; and how one scene in that way had gradually suggested another; and how I could often think ahead from a given fact but never go back behind it and discover what led up to it.

  Jack drew his hand over his chin and reflected silently.

  “That’s odd,” he said, after a pause. “Yet very comprehensible. I might almost have thought of that before: might have arrived at it on general principles. Psychologically and physiologically it’s exactly what one would have expected from the nature of memory. And yet it never occurred to me. Set up the train of thought in the order in which it originally presented itself, and the links may readily restore themselves in successive series. Try to trace it backward in the inverse order, and the process is very much more difficult and involved. — Well, we’ll try things just so with you, Una. We’ll begin by reconstructing your first life as far as we can from the very outset, with the aid of these stray hints of yours; and then we’ll see whether we can get you to remember all your past up to the day of the accident more easily.”

  I gazed up at him with gratitude.

  “Oh, Jack,” I said, trembling, “in spite of this shock, I believe I can do it now. I believe I can remember. The scales are falling from my eyes. I’m becoming myself again. What you’ve said and what you’ve shown me seems to have broken down a veil. I feel as if I could reconstruct all now, when once the key’s suggested to me.”

  He smiled at me encouragingly. Oh, how could I ever have doubted him?

  “That’s right, darling,” he answered. “I should have expected as much, indeed. For now for the very first time since the accident you’ve got really at the other side of the great blank in your memory.”

  I felt so happy, though I knew I was a murderess. I didn’t mind now whether I was hanged or not. To love Jack and be loved by him was quite enough for me. When he called me “darling,” I was in the seventh heavens. It sounded so familiar. I knew he must have called me so, often and often before, in the dim dead past that was just beginning to recur to me.

  CHAPTER XX.

  THE STRANGER FROM THE SEA

  I held his hand tight. It was so pleasant to know I could love him now with a clear conscience, even if I had to give myself up to the police to-morrow. And indeed, being a woman, I didn’t really much care whether they took me or not, if only I could love Jack, and know Jack loved me.

  “You must tell me everything — this minute — Jack,” I said, clinging to him like a child. “I can’t bear this suspense. Begin telling me at once. You’ll do me more harm than good if you keep me waiting any longer.”

  Jack took instinctively a medical view of the situation.

  “So I think, my child,” he said, looking lovingly at me. “Your nerves are on the rack, and will be the better for unstringing. Oh, Una, it’s such a comfort that you know at last who I am! It’s such a comfort that I’m able to talk to you to-day just as we two used to talk four years ago in Devonshire!”

  “Did I love you then, Jack?” I whispered, nestling still closer to him, in spite of my horror. Or rather, my very horror made me feel more acutely than ever the need for protection. I was no longer alone in the world. I had a man to support me.

  “You told me so, darling,” he answered, smoothing my hair with his hand. “Have you forgotten all about it? Doesn’t even that come back? Can’t you remember it now, when I’ve told you who I am and how it all happened?”

  I shook my head.


  “All cloudy still,” I replied, vaguely. “Some dim sense of familiarity, perhaps, — as when people say they have a feeling of having lived all this over somewhere else before, — but nothing more certain, nothing more definite.”

  “Then I must begin at the beginning,” Jack answered, bracing himself for his hard task, “and reconstruct your whole life for you, as far as I know it, from your very childhood. I’m particularly anxious you should not merely be TOLD what took place, but should remember the past. There are gaps in my own knowledge I want you to eke out. There are places I want you to help me myself over. And besides, it’ll be more satisfactory to yourself to remember than to be told it.”

  I leaned back, almost exhausted. Incredible as it may seem to you, in spite of that awful photograph, I couldn’t really believe even so I had killed my father. And yet I knew very well now that Jack, at least, hadn’t done it. That was almost enough. But not quite. My head swam round in terror. I waited and longed for Jack to explain the whole thing to me.

  “You remember,” he said, watching me close, “that when you lived as a very little girl in Australia you had a papa who seems different to you still from the papa in your later childish memories?”

  “I remember it very well,” I replied. “It came back to me on the Sarmatian. I think of him always now as the papa in the loose white linen coat. The more I dwell on him, the more does he come out to me as a different man from the other one — the father…I shot at The Grange, at Woodbury. The father that lives with me in that ineffaceable Picture.”

  “He WAS a different man,” Jack answered, with a sudden burst, as if he knew all my story. “Una, I may as well relieve your mind all at once on that formidable point. You shot that man” — he pointed to the white-bearded person in the photograph,— “but it was not parricide: it was not even murder. It was under grave provocation…in more than self-defence…and he was NOT your father.”

  “Not my father!” I cried, clasping my hands and leaning forward in my profound suspense. “But I killed him all the same! Oh, Jack, how terrible!”

  “You must quiet yourself, my child,” he said, still soothing me automatically. “I want your aid in this matter. You must listen to me calmly, and bring your mind to bear on all I say to you.”

  Then he began with a regular history of my early life, which came back to me as fast as he spoke, scene by scene and year by year, in long and familiar succession. I remembered everything, sometimes only when he suggested it; but sometimes also, before he said the words, my memory outran his tongue, and I put in a recollection or two with my own tongue as they recurred to me under the stimulus of this new birth of my dead nature. I recalled my early days in the far bush in Australia; my journey home to England on the big steamer with mamma; the way we travelled about for years from place to place on the Continent. I remembered how I had been strictly enjoined, too, never to speak of baby; and how my father used to watch my mother just as closely as he watched me, always afraid, as it appeared to me, she should make some verbal slip or let out some great secret in an unguarded moment. He seemed relieved, I recollected now, when my poor mother died: he grew less strict with me then, but as far as I could judge, though he was careful of my health, he never really loved me.

  Then Jack reminded me further of other scenes that came much later in my forgotten life. He reminded me of my trip to Torquay, where I first met him: and all at once the whole history of my old visits to the Moores came back like a flood to me. The memory seemed to inundate and overwhelm my brain. They were the happiest time of all life, those delightful visits, when I met Jack and fell in love with him, and half confided my love to my Cousin Minnie. Strange to say, though at Torquay itself I’d forgotten it all, in that little Canadian house, with Jack by my side to recall it, it rushed back like a wave upon me. I’d fallen in love with Jack without my father’s knowledge or consent; and I knew very well my father would never allow me to marry him. He had ideas of his own, my father, about the sort of person I ought to marry: and I half suspected in my heart of hearts he meant if possible always to keep me at home single to take care of him and look after him. I didn’t know, as yet, he had sufficient reasons of his own for desiring me to remain for ever unmarried.

  I remembered, too, that I never really loved my father. His nature was hard, cold, reserved, unsympathetic. I only feared and obeyed him. At times, my own strong character came out, I remembered, and I defied him to his face, defied him openly. Then there were scenes in the house, dreadful scenes, too hateful to dwell upon: and the servants came up to my room at the end and comforted me.

  So, step by step, Jack reminded me of everything in my own past life, up to the very night of the murder, from which my Second State dated. I’d come back from Torquay a week or two before, very full indeed of Jack, and determined at all costs, sooner or later, to marry him. But though I had kept all quiet, papa had suspected my liking on the day of the Berry Pomeroy athletics, and had forbidden me to see Jack, or to write to him, or to have anything further to say to him. He was determined, he told me, whoever I married, I shouldn’t at least marry a beggarly doctor. All that I remembered; and also how, in spite of the prohibition, I wrote letters to Jack, but could receive none in return — lest my father should see them.

  And still, the central mystery of the murder was no nearer solution. I held my breath in terror. Had I really any sort of justification in killing him?

  Dimly and instinctively, as Jack went on, a faint sense of resentment and righteous indignation against the man with the white beard rose up vaguely in my mind by slow degrees. I knew I had been angry with him, I knew I had defied him, but how or why as yet I knew not.

  Then Jack suddenly paused, and began in a different voice a new part of his tale. It was nothing I remembered or could possibly remember, he said; but it was necessary to the comprehension of what came after, and would help me to recall it. About a week after I left Torquay, it seemed, Jack was in his consulting-room at Babbicombe one day, having just returned from a very long bicycle ride — for he was a first-rate cyclist, — when the servant announced a new patient; and a very worn-out old man came in to visit him.

  The man had a ragged grey beard and scanty white hair; he was clad in poor clothes, and had tramped on foot all the way from London to Babbicombe, where Jack used to practice. But Jack saw at once under this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose from the workhouse.

  I held my breath as Jack showed me the poor old man’s photograph. It was a portrait taken after death — for Jack attended him to the end through a fatal illness; — and it showed a face thin and worn, and much lined by unspeakable hardships. But I burst out crying at once the very moment I looked at it. For a second or two, I couldn’t say why: I suppose it was instinct. Blood is thicker than water, they tell us; and I have the intuition of kindred very strong in me, I believe. But at any rate, I cried silently, with big hot tears, while I looked at that dead face of silent suffering, as I never had cried over the photograph of the respectable-looking man who lay dead on the floor of the library, and whom I was always taught to consider my father. Then it came back to me, why… I gazed at it and grew faint. I clutched Jack’s arm for support. I knew what it meant now. The poor worn old man who lay dead on the bed with that look of mute agony on his features — was my first papa: the papa in the loose white linen coat: the one I remembered with childlike love and trustfulness in my earliest babyish Australian recollections!

  I couldn’t mistake the face. It was burnt into my brain now. This was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by age and weather. It was my very first papa. My own papa. I cried silently still. I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then the real truth broke upon me once more. This, and this alone, was in very deed my one real father!

  I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.
<
br />   “Oh, I know him!” I cried wildly. “It’s my father! My father!”

  Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.

  At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the table before me.

  “Tell me all about him,” I murmured, sobbing. “For, Jack, I remember now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him — I loved him.”

  Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me. The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a man of education, position, reputation, fortune.

  Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock, away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man had lived by himself a solitary life.

  I started at the sound.

  “For twenty years!” I exclaimed. “Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?”

  Jack looked at me and shook his head.

  “You’ve much to learn yet, Una,” he answered. “The story’s a long one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You’ve been deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended. You’re twenty-six now, not twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you’ll hear all about it.”