Book: THE TWO DESTINIES

W >> Wilkie Collins >> THE TWO DESTINIES




We walked on until we reached that part of the Canongate street
in which she lodged. We stopped at the door.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.

I LOOKED at the house. It was an inn, of no great size, but of
respectable appearance. If I was to be of any use to her that
night, the time had come to speak of other subjects than the
subject of dreams.

"After all that you have told me," I said, "I will not ask you to
admit me any further into your confidence until we meet again.
Only let me hear how I can relieve your most pressing anxieties.
What are your plans? Can I do anything to help them before you go
to rest to-night?"

She thanked me warmly, and hesitated, looking up the street and
down the street in evident embarrassment what to say next.

"Do you propose staying in Edinburgh?" I asked.

"Oh no! I don't wish to remain in Scotland. I want to go much
further away. I think I should do better in London; at some
respectable milliner's, if I could be properly recommended. I am
quick at my needle, and I understand cutting out. Or I could keep
accounts, if--if anybody would trust me."

She stopped, and looked at me doubtingly, as if she felt far from
sure, poor soul, of winning my confidence to begin with. I acted
on that hint, with the headlong impetuosity of a man who was in
love.

"I can give you exactly the recommendation you want," I said,
"whenever you like. Now, if you would prefer it."

Her charming features brightened with pleasure. "Oh, you are
indeed a friend to me!" she said, impulsively. Her face clouded
again--she saw my proposal in a new light. "Have I any right,"
she asked, sadly, "to accept what you offer me?"

"Let me give you the letter," I answered, "and you can decide for
yourself whether you will use it or not."

I put her arm again in mine, and entered the inn.

She shrunk back in alarm. What would the landlady think if she
saw her lodger enter the house at night in company with a
stranger, and that stranger a gentleman? The landlady appeared as
she made the objection. Reckless what I said or what I did, I
introduced myself as her relative, and asked to be shown into a
quiet room in which I could write a letter. After one sharp
glance at me, the landlady appeared to be satisfied that she was
dealing with a gentleman. She led the way into a sort of parlor
behind the "bar," placed writing materials on the table, looked
at my companion as only one woman can look at another under
certain circumstances, and left us by ourselves.

It was the first time I had ever been in a room with her alone.
The embarrassing sense of her position had heightened her color
and brightened her eyes. She stood, leaning one hand on the
table, confused and irresolute, her firm and supple figure
falling into an attitude of unsought grace which it was literally
a luxury to look at. I said nothing; my eyes confessed my
admiration; the writing materials lay untouched before me on the
table. How long the silence might have lasted I cannot say. She
abruptly broke it. Her instinct warned her that silence might
have its dangers, in our position. She turned to me with an
effort; she said, uneasily, "I don't think you ought to write
your letter to-night, sir."

"Why not?"

"You know nothing of me. Surely you ought not to recommend a
person who is a stranger to you? And I am worse than a stranger.
I am a miserable wretch who has tried to commit a great sin--I
have tried to destroy myself. Perhaps the misery I was in might
be some excuse for me, if you knew it. You ought to know it. But
it's so late to-night, and I am so sadly tired--and there are
some things, sir, which it is not easy for a woman to speak of in
the presence of a man."

Her head sunk on her bosom; her delicate lips trembled a little;
she said no more. The way to reassure and console her lay plainly
enough before me, if I chose to take it. Without stopping to
think, I took it.

Reminding her that she had herself proposed writing to me when we
met that evening, I suggested that she should wait to tell the
sad story of her troubles until it was convenient to her to send
me the narrative in the form of a letter. "In the mean time," I
added, "I have the most perfect confidence in you; and I beg as a
favor that you will let me put it to the proof. I can introduce
you to a dressmaker in London who is at the head of a large
establishment, and I will do it before I leave you to-night."

I dipped my pen in the ink as I said the words. Let me confess
frankly the lengths to which my infatuation led me. The
dressmaker to whom I had alluded had been my mother's maid in f
ormer years, and had been established in business with money lent
by my late step-father, Mr. Germaine. I used both their names
without scruple; and I wrote my recommendation in terms which the
best of living women and the ablest of existing dressmakers could
never have hoped to merit. Will anybody find excuses for me?
Those rare persons who have been in love, and who have not
completely forgotten it yet, may perhaps find excuses for me. It
matters little; I don't deserve them.

I handed her the open letter to read.

She blushed delightfully; she cast one tenderly grateful look at
me, which I remembered but too well for many and many an
after-day. The next moment, to my astonishment, this changeable
creature changed again. Some forgotten consideration seemed to
have occurred to her. She turned pale; the soft lines of pleasure
in her face hardened, little by little; she regarded me with the
saddest look of confusion and distress. Putting the letter down
before me on the table, she said, timidly:

"Would you mind adding a postscript, sir?"

I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and
took up the pen again.

"Would you please say," she went on, "that I am only to be taken
on trial, at first? I am not to be engaged for more"--her voice
sunk lower and lower, so that I could barely hear the next
words--"for more than three months, certain."

It was not in human nature--perhaps I ought to say it was not in
the nature of a man who was in my situation--to refrain from
showing some curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of
recommendation by such a postscript as this.

"Have you some other employment in prospect?" I asked.

"None," she answered, with her head down, and her eyes avoiding
mine.

An unworthy doubt of her--the mean offspring of jealousy--found
its way into my mind.

"Have you some absent friend," I went on, "who is likely to prove
a better friend than I am, if you only give him time?"

She lifted her noble head. Her grand, guileless gray eyes rested
on me with a look of patient reproach.

"I have not got a friend in the world," she said. "For God's
sake, ask me no more questions to-night!"

I rose and gave her the letter once more--with the postscript
added, in her own words.

We stood together by the table; we looked at each other in a
momentary silence.

"How can I thank you?" she murmured, softly. "Oh, sir, I will
indeed be worthy of the confidence that you have shown in me!"
Her eyes moistened; her variable color came and went; her dress
heaved softly over the lovely outline of her bosom. I don't
believe the man lives who could have resisted her at that moment.
I lost all power of restraint; I caught her in my arms; I
whispered, "I love you!" I kissed her passionately. For a moment
she lay helpless and trembling on my breast; for a moment her
fragrant lips softly returned the kiss. In an instant more it was
over. She tore herself away with a shudder that shook her from
head to foot, and threw the letter that I had given to her
indignantly at my feet.

"How dare you take advantage of me! How dare you touch me!" she
said. "Take your letter back, sir; I refuse to receive it; I will
never speak to you again. You don't know what you have done. You
don't know how deeply you have wounded me. Oh!" she cried,
throwing herself in despair on a sofa that stood near her, "shall
I ever recover my self-respect? shall I ever forgive myself for
what I have done to-night?"

I implored her pardon; I assured her of my repentance and regret
in words which did really come from my heart. The violence of her
agitation more than distressed me--I was really alarmed by it.

She composed herself after a while. She rose to her feet with
modest dignity, and silently held out her hand in token that my
repentance was accepted.

"You will give me time for atonement?" I pleaded. "You will not
lose all confidence in me? Let me see you again, if it is only to
show that I am not quite unworthy of your pardon--at your own
time; in the presence of another person, if you like."

"I will write to you," she said.

"To-morrow?"

"To-morrow."

I took up the letter of recommendation from the floor.

"Make your goodness to me complete," I said. "Don't mortify me by
refusing to take my letter."

"I will take your letter," she answered, quietly. "Thank you for
writing it. Leave me now, please. Good-night."

I left her, pale and sad, with my letter in her hand. I left her,
with my mind in a tumult of contending emotions, which gradually
resolved themselves into two master-feelings as I walked on:
Love, that adored her more fervently than ever; and Hope, that
set the prospect before me of seeing her again on the next day.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DISASTERS OF MRS. VAN BRANDT.

A MAN who passes his evening as I had passed mine, may go to bed
afterward if he has nothing better to do. But he must not rank
among the number of his reasonable anticipations the expectation
of getting a night's rest. The morning was well advanced, and the
hotel was astir, before I at last closed my eyes in slumber. When
I awoke, my watch informed me that it was close on noon.

I rang the bell. My servant appeared with a letter in his hand.
It had been left for me, three hours since, by a lady who had
driven to the hotel door in a carriage, and had then driven away
again. The man had found me sleeping when he entered my
bed-chamber, and, having received no orders to wake me overnight,
had left the letter on the sitting-room table until he heard my
bell.

Easily guessing who my correspondent was, I opened the letter. An
inclosure fell out of it--to which, for the moment, I paid no
attention. I turned eagerly to the first lines. They announced
that the writer had escaped me for the second time: early that
morning she had left Edinburgh. The paper inclosed proved to be
my letter of introduction to the dressmaker returned to me.

I was more than angry with her--I felt her second flight from me
as a downright outrage. In five minutes I had hurried on my
clothes and was on my way to the inn in the Canongate as fast as
a horse could draw me.

The servants could give me no information. Her escape had been
effected without their knowledge.

The landlady, to whom I next addressed myself, deliberately
declined to assist me in any way whatever.

"I have given the lady my promise," said this obstinate person,
"to answer not one word to any question that you may ask me about
her. In my belief, she is acting as becomes an honest woman in
removing herself from any further communication with you. I saw
you through the keyhole last night, sir. I wish you
good-morning."

Returning to my hotel, I left no attempt to discover her untried.
I traced the coachman who had driven her. He had set her down at
a shop, and had then been dismissed. I questioned the
shop-keeper. He remembered that he had sold some articles of
linen to a lady with her veil down and a traveling-bag in her
hand, and he remembered no more. I circulated a description of
her in the different coach offices. Three "elegant young ladies,
with their veils down, and with traveling-bags in their hands,"
answered to the description; and which of the three was the
fugitive of whom I was in search, it was impossible to discover.
In the days of railways and electric telegraphs I might have
succeeded in tracing her. In the days of which I am now writing,
she set investigation at defiance.

I read and reread her letter, on the chance that some slip of the
pen might furnish the clew which I had failed to find in any
other way. Here is the narrative that she addressed to me, copied
from the original, word for word:


"DEAR SIR--Forgive me for leaving you again as I left you in
Perthshire. After what took place last night, I have no other
choice (knowing my own weakness, and the influence that you seem
to have over me) than to thank you gratefully for your kindness,
and to bid you farewell. My sad position must be my excuse for
separating myself from you in this rude manner, and for venturing
to send you back your letter of introduction. If I use the
letter, I only offer you a means of communicating with me. For
your sake, as well as for mine, this mu st not be. I must never
give you a second opportunity of saying that you love me; I must
go away, leaving no trace behind by which you can possibly
discover me.

"But I cannot forget that I owe my poor life to your compassion
and your courage. You, who saved me, have a right to know what
the provocation was that drove me to drowning myself, and what my
situation is, now that I am (thanks to you) still a living woman.
You shall hear my sad story, sir; and I will try to tell it as
briefly as possible.

"I was married, not very long since, to a Dutch gentleman, whose
name is Van Brandt. Please excuse my entering into family
particulars. I have endeavored to write and tell you about my
dear lost father and my old home. But the tears come into my eyes
when I think of my happy past life. I really cannot see the lines
as I try to write them.

"Let me, then, only say that Mr. Van Brandt was well recommended
to my good father before I married. I have only now discovered
that he obtained these recommendations from his friends under a
false pretense, which it is needless to trouble you by mentioning
in detail. Ignorant of what he had done, I lived with him
happily. I cannot truly declare that he was the object of my
first love, but he was the one person in the world whom I had to
look up to after my father's death. I esteemed him and respected
him, and, if I may say so without vanity, I did indeed make him a
good wife.

"So the time went on, sir, prosperously enough, until the evening
came when you and I met on the bridge.

"I was out alone in our garden, trimming the shrubs, when the
maid-servant came and told me there was a foreign lady in a
carriage at the door who desired to say a word to Mrs. Van
Brandt. I sent the maid on before to show her into the
sitting-room, and I followed to receive my visitor as soon as I
had made myself tidy. She was a dreadful woman, with a flushed,
fiery face and impudent, bright eyes. 'Are you Mrs. Van Brandt?'
she said. I answered, 'Yes.' 'Are you really married to him?' she
asked me. That question (naturally enough, I think) upset my
temper. I said, 'How dare you doubt it?' She laughed in my face.
'Send for Van Brandt,' she said. I went out into the passage and
called him down from the room upstairs in which he was writing.
'Ernest,' I said, 'here is a person who has insulted me. Come
down directly.' He left his room the moment he heard me. The
woman followed me out into the passage to meet him. She made him
a low courtesy. He turned deadly pale the moment he set eyes on
her. That frightened me. I said to him, 'For God's sake, what
does this mean?' He took me by the arm, and he answered: 'You
shall know soon. Go back to your gardening, and don't return to
the house till I send for you.' His looks were so shocking, he
was so unlike himself, that I declare he daunted me. I let him
take me as far as the garden door. He squeezed my hand. 'For my
sake, darling,' he whispered, 'do what I ask of you.' I went into
the garden and sat me down on the nearest bench, and waited
impatiently for what was to come.

"How long a time passed I don't know. My anxiety got to such a
pitch at last that I could bear it no longer. I ventured back to
the house.

"I listened in the passage, and heard nothing. I went close to
the parlor door, and still there was silence. I took courage, and
opened the door.

"The room was empty. There was a letter on the table. It was in
my husband's handwriting, and it was addressed to me. I opened it
and read it. The letter told me that I was deserted, disgraced,
ruined. The woman with the fiery face and the impudent eyes was
Van Brandt's lawful wife. She had given him his choice of going
away with her at once or of being prosecuted for bigamy. He had
gone away with her--gone, and left me.

"Remember, sir, that I had lost both father and mother. I had no
friends. I was alone in the world, without a creature near to
comfort or advise me. And please to bear in mind that I have a
temper which feels even the smallest slights and injuries very
keenly. Do you wonder at what I had it in my thoughts to do that
evening on the bridge?

"Mind this: I believe I should never have attempted to destroy
myself if I could only have burst out crying. No tears came to
me. A dull, stunned feeling took hold like a vise on my head and
on my heart. I walked straight to the river. I said to myself,
quite calmly, as I went along, '_There_ is the end of it, and the
sooner the better.'

"What happened after that, you know as well as I do. I may get on
to the next morning--the morning when I so ungratefully left you
at the inn by the river-side.

"I had but one reason, sir, for going away by the first
conveyance that I could find to take me, and this was the fear
that Van Brandt might discover me if I remained in Perthshire.
The letter that he had left on the table was full of expressions
of love and remorse, to say nothing of excuses for his infamous
behavior to me. He declared that he had been entrapped into a
private marriage with a profligate woman when he was little more
than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent. When
he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was
dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she
had discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out.
Knowing her furious temper, he had gone away with her, as the one
means of preventing an application to the justices and a scandal
in the neighborhood. In a day or two he would purchase his
release from her by an addition to the allowance which she had
already received from him: he would return to me and take me
abroad, out of the way of further annoyance. I was his wife in
the sight of Heaven; I was the only woman he had ever loved; and
so on, and so on.

"Do you now see, sir, the risk that I ran of his discovering me
if I remained in your neighborhood? The bare thought of it made
my flesh creep. I was determined never again to see the man who
had so cruelly deceived me. I am in the same mind still--with
this difference, that I might consent to see him, if I could be
positively assured first of the death of his wife. That is not
likely to happen. Let me get on with my letter, and tell you what
I did on my arrival in Edinburgh.

"The coachman recommended me to the house in the Canongate where
you found me lodging. I wrote the same day to relatives of my
father, living in Glasgow, to tell them where I was, and in what
a forlorn position I found myself.

"I was answered by return of post. The head of the family and his
wife requested me to refrain from visiting them in Glasgow. They
had business then in hand which would take them to Edinburgh, and
I might expect to see them both with the least possible delay.

"They arrived, as they had promised, and they expressed
themselves civilly enough. Moreover, they did certainly lend me a
small sum of money when they found how poorly my purse was
furnished. But I don't think either husband or wife felt much for
me. They recommended me, at parting, to apply to my father's
other relatives, living in England. I may be doing them an
injustice, but I fancy they were eager to get me (as the common
phrase is) off their hands.

"The day when the departure of my relatives left me friendless
was also the day, sir, when I had that dream or vision of you
which I have already related. I lingered on at the house in the
Canongate, partly because the landlady was kind to me, partly
because I was so depressed by my position that I really did not
know what to do next.

"In this wretched condition you discovered me on that favorite
walk of mine from Holyrood to Saint Anthony's Well. Believe me,
your kind interest in my fortunes has not been thrown away on an
ungrateful woman. I could ask Providence for no greater blessing
than to find a brother and a friend in you. You have yourself
destroyed that hope by what you said and did when we were
together in the parlor. I don't blame you: I am afraid my manner
(without my knowing it) might have seemed to give you some
encouragement. I am only sorry--very, very sorry--to have no
honorable choice left but never to see you again.

"After much thin king, I have made up my mind to speak to those
other relatives of my father to whom I have not yet applied. The
chance that they may help me to earn an honest living is the one
chance that I have left. God bless you, Mr. Germaine! I wish you
prosperity and happiness from the bottom of my heart; and remain,
your grateful servant,

"M. VAN BRANDT.

"P.S.--I sign my own name (or the name which I once thought was
mine) as a proof that I have honestly written the truth about
myself, from first to last. For the future I must, for safety's
sake, live under some other name. I should like to go back to my
name when I was a happy girl at home. But Van Brandt knows it;
and, besides, I have (no matter how innocently) disgraced it.
Good-by again, sir; and thank you again."


So the letter concluded.

I read it in the temper of a thoroughly disappointed and
thoroughly unreasonable man. Whatever poor Mrs. Van Brandt had
done, she had done wrong. It was wrong of her, in the first
place, to have married at all. It was wrong of her to contemplate
receiving Mr. Van Brandt again, even if his lawful wife had died
in the interval. It was wrong of her to return my letter of
introduction, after I had given myself the trouble of altering it
to suit her capricious fancy. It was wrong of her to take an
absurdly prudish view of a stolen kiss and a tender declaration,
and to fly from me as if I were as great a scoundrel as Mr. Van
Brandt himself. And last, and more than all, it was wrong of her
to sign her Christian name in initial only. Here I was,
passionately in love with a woman, and not knowing by what fond
name to identify her in my thoughts! "M. Van Brandt!" I might
call her Maria, Margaret, Martha, Mabel, Magdalen, Mary--no, not
Mary. The old boyish love was dead and gone, but I owed some
respect to the memory of it. If the "Mary" of my early days were
still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as
this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to
think even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of
her at all? Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of
tracing her in her letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace
a woman who had gone I knew not whither, and who herself informed
me that she meant to pass under an assumed name. Had I lost all
pride, all self-respect? In the flower of my age, with a handsome
fortune, with the world before me, full of interesting female
faces and charming female figures, what course did it become me
to take? To go back to my country-house, and mope over the loss
of a woman who had deliberately deserted me? or to send for a
courier and a traveling carriage, and forget her gayly among
foreign people and foreign scenes? In the state of my temper at
that moment, the idea of a pleasure tour in Europe fired my
imagination. I first astonished the people at the hotel by
ordering all further inquiries after the missing Mrs. Van Brandt
to be stopped; and then I opened my writing desk and wrote to
tell my mother frankly and fully of my new plans.

The answer arrived by return of post.

To my surprise and delight, my good mother was not satisfied with
only formally approving of my new resolution. With an energy
which I had not ventured to expect from her, she had made all her
arrangements for leaving home, and had started for Edinburgh to
join me as my traveling companion. "You shall not go away alone,
George," she wrote, "while I have strength and spirits to keep
you company."

In three days from the time when I read those words our
preparations were completed, and we were on our way to the
Continent.

CHAPTER XIII.

NOT CURED YET.

WE visited France, Germany, and Italy; and we were absent from
England nearly two years.

Had time and change justified my confidence in them? Was the
image of Mrs. Van Brandt an image long since dismissed from my
mind?

No! Do what I might, I was still (in the prophetic language of
Dame Dermody) taking the way to reunion with my kindred spirit in
the time to come. For the first two or three months of our
travels I was haunted by dreams of the woman who had so
resolutely left me. Seeing her in my sleep, always graceful,
always charming, always modestly tender toward me, I waited in
the ardent hope of again beholding the apparition of her in my
waking hours--of again being summoned to meet her at a given
place and time. My anticipations were not fulfilled; no
apparition showed itself. The dreams themselves grew less
frequent and less vivid and then ceased altogether. Was this a
sign that the days of her adversity were at an end? Having no
further need of help, had she no further remembrance of the man
who had tried to help her? Were we never to meet again?

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.