[CHAPTER XI.]
CONFIDENTIAL.
Letter from Miss Collumpton, in London, to Miss Browne, in the country.
"My Dearest Mora,--Your telegram of yesterday, followed by your letter, which came to hand this morning, was a great relief to our anxiety. Pray give our joint love (Aunt Percival's and mine) to your dear mother, and say how happy it has made us to hear of such a decided change for the better.
"Had you not in your letter made a special point of asking me to furnish you with all particulars anent a certain affair, I should not have thought of troubling you at a time like the present. As, however, you want 'to know, you know,' I shall be glad to do my best to satisfy your curiosity.
"If you remember, dear, you seemed terribly shocked at the idea of Mr. Fildew having asked me to meet him. And yet, what else could the poor man do? Pray bear in mind that in his eyes I am only an indigent young lady, who earns her living by filling the post of companion to a rich young lady. He could not come to Cadogan Place and ask for me. He knows nothing of my friends and connections. Having very foolishly fallen in love with me, how else was he to plead his cause, how else say all that he wanted to say? I have no expectation of making a convert of you, simply because this is one of those questions that you and I look at from totally different points of view. In the first place, you would never fall in love with an artist--at least, not with one who, like Mr. Fildew, had still his way to fight; in the second place, you would never give any man who had not an assured income the slightest encouragement to fall in love with you. Still, without hoping that anything I can say will induce you to modify your views, I must, in justice to myself, put down some of the reasons by which I have been influenced in doing as I have done. All through the affair I have argued with myself in this wise: Supposing I were really a poor girl who was earning her living in a shop or a warehouse, or it matters not how, and Clement had fallen in love with me, what form would our courtship have taken? how and where should we have seen each other? and so on. Thousands of such courtships are going on around us every day. It was only to imagine that Cis Collumpton had lost the whole of her fortune, or had never had any to lose. In short, I wanted to be loved for myself alone; I wanted to be courted as if I were a girl without a 'tocher.'
"Well, I met him by appointment at seven o'clock one evening, in a quiet crescent not far from Sloane Street. He lifted his hat, shook hands, and said how pleased he was to see me. Then he put my hand under his arm, and so took possession of me. 'We can talk better thus,' he said; 'I have something particular to say to you; besides, I want to have you as close to me as possible.'
"Would you believe it, Mora, I seemed to have altogether lost my tongue,' as we used to say when I was a little girl. For aught I had to say for myself, I might have been brought up in the farthest Hebrides. However, he did not seem to mind whether I answered him or not; he had taken me into custody, as it were, and I had no power to resist--nor any inclination either, for the matter of that.
"He began by apologizing for the liberty he had taken in asking me to meet him; 'but as you are here,' he added, 'I may, perhaps, hope that I have not transgressed beyond forgiveness; although, indeed,' he went on, 'I knew of no other mode of obtaining an opportunity of saying all that I want to say.' Still I was tongue-tied, still the words refused to come. The next ten minutes were the most memorable of my life. How my heart beat! how his words thrilled me from head to foot! What he said you can perhaps faintly imagine; if you cannot, I cannot tell you.
"He pressed me for an answer. Then my tongue was loosened. It would not be worth while to put down here what I said, even if I could do so, which I very much doubt. The result was that I promised to meet him again the following Friday evening at the same time and place, and give him an answer of some kind.