CHAPTER XVIII.—THE SEALED LETTER.
Philip drew his breath more freely. He experienced that delightful sense of relief which rewards one who has been long overstrained, when the strain is relaxed before the stage of exhaustion is reached. But such is the perversity of human nature, that his gladness was tinged with something resembling a degree of disappointment. Certainly the tinge was so delicate that he was not thoroughly aware of its real character. To Madge the shade was revealed in this way.
‘I wish the accident had been a little more serious,’ he said.
She opened her eyes in astonishment. ‘What a wicked wish,’ was her reproachful comment.
‘We have made such a fuss about my going,’ he went on, turning things over in his mind, ‘that we shall look ridiculous to everybody when it becomes known that a stupid tumble off a horse has stopped me.’
‘I think we should only be ridiculous if we minded the foolish people who thought us so,’ she answered very wisely.
‘Ah, you never heard the story of the curate who in a moment of enthusiasm declared his intention of making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.’
‘What about him?’
‘“What about him?” The poor beggar was so worried by everybody he met afterwards asking in surprise how he had managed to get back from Jerusalem so soon—then why he hadn’t gone—when he was going—and looking as if he had perpetrated a fraud—that he was forced to make the pilgrimage in order to escape being called a humbug.’
‘But you are not a curate, and—I don’t think you are a humbug, Philip,’ she said with a twinkle of fun in her eyes.
‘I hope not,’ he rejoined, laughing. ‘But what can have induced Uncle Shield to change all his plans so suddenly?’
That question was a source of much marvel to them both. During the afternoon, an idea occurred to Madge, which seemed so extravagant, that at first she only smiled at it, as one smiles at the revelation of some pretty but absurd dream.
This was the idea: that in some way this sudden change of plans by Mr Shield was associated with her and the memory of her mother. She was nearer the truth than she imagined, although the more she thought over it, the more she was impressed by the possibility of the surmise finding some foundation in the motives which actuated Mr Shield’s present conduct.
She did not, however, think the surmise of sufficient importance to speak about yet; but she asked Aunt Hessy to tell Philip on the first opportune occasion about her mother and his uncle. Philip ought to know about it, whether or not there was anything in her fanciful idea.
Aunt Hessy, with a little smile of approval, gave the promise, and, passing her hand affectionately over the girl’s head, added: ‘Thou’lt be a happy woman, dearie; and bring peace to sore troubled breasts. There never was ill but good lay behind it, if we would only seek and find it. That’s an old saying; but there’s a deal of comfort in most old sayings. Seems to me as if they were the cries of folk that had proved them through suffering.’
‘What did Mr Shield say in his letter to you, aunt?’
The dame shook her head, and although still smiling, looked as she felt, awkward.
‘I am not to tell thee—anyway, not now. By-and-by, when I come to understand it myself, I will tell thee; but do not thou ask again until I speak. It will be best.’
And Madge knew that whatever Aunt Hessy chose to do—whether to speak or be silent—would be best. So she said simply: ‘Very well, aunt.’
‘I am going into the oak room to wrestle with the spirit, as my father used to say when he wanted to be left quite by himself. I want to be quite by myself till I get the right end of this riddle. I have been trying it two or three times since you went out, but the answer has not come yet. I am to try again. Be not you afraid, though I do not come out till tea-time.’
She spoke as if amused at herself; but when she had closed the door of the oak room and seated herself in a big armchair beside one of the gaunt windows, the smile faded from her kindly face, and her expression became one of mingled sadness and perplexity.
But everything Dame Crawshay had to do was done sedately—with that perfect composure which can be obtained only by a mind at rest with itself and innocent of all evil intention. She put on her spectacles, and quietly took from her pocket the two letters she had received from Mr Shield. One was open, and she had studied it many times that day, for it presented the riddle she had not yet been able to solve: the other, which had been inclosed in the first, was still unopened.
She settled herself down to make one more effort to find the right thing to do.
‘Dear Friend,’ said the open letter, ‘in telling me that I have still a kindly place in your memory, you have given me a pleasure which I am glad to have lived long enough to experience. Thank you. And I ask you to take this “Thank you” in its full sense of respect and gratitude.
‘I knew that’—here there was a word scored out, but the dame deciphered it to be ‘Lucy’—‘she had left a daughter under your care. I have thought of her—very often thought of her; and wished that it might be in my power to serve her as I would have served her mother, had I known of her misfortunes in time. But whenever I thought of writing to you about her, my pen was stopped by the same strange stupor—paralysis or whatever it may be that affects my brains whenever certain memories are stirred—the same which rendered me dumb and incapable of listening to you, when you might have given me explanations that would no doubt have made my suffering less. I do not ask for explanations now; perhaps it would be best to give me none. I am sure it would be best; and yet I have a longing to know anything you may have to tell me about Lucy. Time has taken the sting from memory: there is no bitterness in my thought of her—I do not think there ever was any bitterness in my thoughts about her. Looking back, I only see the bright days when we were so happy together, dreaming of our future. Then there is the black day when you told me she was married. Somebody died that day—my better self, I always think. Since then, I seem to have been toiling through a long tunnel, so numbed with cold and sunk in darkness that I have felt nothing and seen nothing.
‘But the information contained in your note about the intended marriage of Lucy’s child to Philip Hadleigh has brought me back into the daylight. The change was so sudden, that for a little while my eyes were dazzled and my mind confused. I see clearly now. Here is my opportunity to serve Lucy. There can be nothing you can tell me which can affect my craving to serve her; and I can only do it by guarding her daughter. I proceed to England by the next steamer which leaves the nearest port.
‘I am aware that you will find it difficult to understand me from what I have written here. I have tried to make my purpose plain to you in the packet which is inclosed with this; but what is put down there is for the present intended only for you. Before you break the seal, I ask you, in Lucy’s name, to keep my confidence from your niece, and even from your husband, until we meet. Should this be asking too much, I beseech you to put the packet into the fire without opening it. Let me assure you at once that in withholding my purpose for a time from others, you will in nowise harm—or even run the risk of harming the living or the dead, whilst you may be able to assist me greatly in the service I wish to do for your sister’s child.
‘Decide as you will: I trust you shall be satisfied that the grounds for your decision are as sufficient as mine are for the course I have adopted.’
Here was the question she found it so difficult to answer: could she accept this trust? It was contrary to all her notions of right that she should have any thought which she might not communicate to her husband. She had never had a secret; her life had run so smoothly that there had been no occasion for one. She was grateful for having been spared the temptations to falsehood, which a secret, however trifling in itself, entails. But she took no special credit to herself on this account. Indeed, the good woman found it hard to understand why there should be any mysteries in the conduct of people at all. The straightforward course appeared to her so much easier to travel than the crooked ways which some choose or fall into unawares, that she wondered why, on purely selfish grounds, they should continue in them, when the way out was so simple.
At this moment her theory was put to a severe test. She was asked to keep a secret, but it was not her own or of her seeking. Then she should refuse to accept the trust. On the other hand, she was assured by one in whose honesty she had every reason to place implicit faith, that the secret meant no harm to any one—that she was only required to keep it for a time, and that by so doing she would aid him in carrying into effect his design for the welfare of Madge.
She took a practical view of the mode in which he proposed to benefit the child of the woman he had loved long ago. He was rich, he was childless: of course his purpose must be to make her his heiress. Then why should he make such a mystery of such a generous act? She had heard of people who took the drollest possible way of bequeathing their fortunes. Maybe it amused them: maybe they were a little wrong in the head, and were therefore to be pitied. Why, then, should she not humour him, by letting him have his own way so long as it was harmless, as she would do with any person whose eccentricity could not be agreeably dealt with otherwise? This was coming nearer to a settlement of her doubts.
Now she could either burn the sealed letter, or send it to him at his lawyer’s, whose address he gave her for further communications. But the argument was in favour of opening it; and what lingering hesitation she might have on the subject was decided by that strain of curiosity which the best of women have inherited.
She deliberately cut the envelope with her scissors and unfolded the paper on her lap. The contents were somewhat of the nature she expected; but the way in which he purposed benefiting Madge was different from anything she could have guessed.
‘Although events which in the first hours of their occurrence appeared to be too hard for me to live through have become in time only sad memories, flitting at intervals across my mind without causing pain or interfering with my ordinary ways, your letter has brought me so close to the old times, that I seem to be living in them again. The old interests—the old passions are as strong upon me at this moment as they were when I still possessed the greatest of all fortunes—Youth and Hope.
‘Even when I knew that she was lost to me, there remained the prospect that some day she might need my help, and I should find consolation in giving it. Her death took that comfort from me, and I settled down to the dull business of living without a purpose. Luck, not labour, brought me money—that is why I am indifferent to it. This was how it came.
‘You remember the old hawthorn tree in your father’s garden, where so many glad hours were spent with Lucy? Well, on a green patch of this land which I was lazily farming here was an old hawthorn tree, and associating it with the one which had such deep root in my memory, it became my favourite resting-place. I made a seat beneath it as like the old one as possible, and there I used to sit reading or thinking of the dead man who was my former self. Under this tree I found a diamond: it was the first of many. But you have read about the diamond fields—and now you know the source of my wealth.
‘My intention has been from the first that Lucy’s daughter should benefit by my luck. I could not feel, and you could not expect me to feel, much active interest in her childhood, knowing that she was under your protection, and therefore well cared for. Your information that she is engaged to marry Philip Hadleigh has roused me from a long sleep. I have formed a good opinion of the young man from his letters. I purposed having him here with me for a year or so, in order to judge of his character before deciding in what manner I should best fulfil the promise given to my sister, to do what I could for him in the future. The fact that you and your husband regard him with so much favour as to give your niece to him, would be in the case of another a sufficient guarantee that he is worthy of all trust.
‘But he is Lloyd Hadleigh’s son.
‘What that means to me, I do not care to explain, and it is unnecessary to do so. It is sufficient to tell you that it compels me to make him prove that he is worthy of trust—above all, that he is worthy of Madge Heathcote.
‘I intended to judge of him by observing his ways during his stay with me. Now I intend to put him to the severest test of human nature—the test of what is called Good Fortune.
‘You love your niece. You cannot trust the man if you object to let him prove his worth.
Austin Shield.’