Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (900 page)

Julian looked at Mercy. “Do you understand this?” he asked.

She silently shook her head.

“If any person has gone away in the carriage,” Julian went on, “that person can hardly have been a man, or we must have heard him in the hall.”

The conclusion which her companion had just drawn from the noiseless departure of the supposed visitor raised a sudden doubt in Mercy’s mind.

“Go and inquire!” she said, eagerly.

Julian left the room, and returned again, after a brief absence, with signs of grave anxiety in his face and manner.

“I told you I dreaded the most trifling events that were passing about us,” he said. “An event, which is far from being trifling, has just happened. The carriage which we heard approaching along the drive turns out to have been a cab sent for from the house. The person who has gone away in it — ”

“Is a woman, as you supposed?”

“Yes.”

Mercy rose excitedly from her chair.

“It can’t be Grace Roseberry?” she exclaimed.

“It
is
Grace Roseberry.”

“Has she gone away alone?”

“Alone — after an interview with Lady Janet.”

“Did she go willingly?”

“She herself sent the servant for the cab.”

“What does it mean?”

“It is useless to inquire. We shall soon know.”

They resumed their seats, waiting, as they had waited already, with their eyes on the library door.

CHAPTER XXIII. LADY JANET AT BAY.

THE narrative leaves Julian and Mercy for a while, and, ascending to the upper regions of the house, follows the march of events in Lady Janet’s room.

The maid had delivered her mistress’s note to Mercy, and had gone away again on her second errand to Grace Roseberry in her boudoir. Lady Janet was seated at her writing-table, waiting for the appearance of the woman whom she had summoned to her presence. A single lamp diffused its mild light over the books, pictures, and busts round her, leaving the further end of the room, in which the bed was placed, almost lost in obscurity. The works of art were all portraits; the books were all presentation copies from the authors. It was Lady Janet’s fancy to associate her bedroom with memorials of the various persons whom she had known in the long course of her life — all of them more or less distinguished, most of them, by this time, gathered with the dead.

She sat near her writing-table, lying back in her easy-chair — the living realisation of the picture which Julian’s description had drawn. Her eyes were fixed on a photographic likeness of Mercy, which was so raised upon a little gilt easel as to enable her to contemplate it under the full light of the lamp. The bright, mobile old face was strangely and sadly changed. The brow was fixed; the mouth was rigid; the whole face would have been like a mask, molded in the hardest forms of passive resistance and suppressed rage, but for the light and life still thrown over it by the eyes. There was something unutterably touching in the keen hungering tenderness of the look which they fixed on the portrait, intensified by an underlying expression of fond and patient reproach. The danger which Julian so wisely dreaded was in the rest of the face; the love which he had so truly described was in the eyes alone.
They
still spoke of the cruelly profaned affection which had been the one immeasurable joy, the one inexhaustible hope of Lady Janet’s closing life. The brow expressed nothing but her obstinate determination to stand by the wreck of that joy, to rekindle the dead ashes of that hope. The lips were only eloquent of her unflinching resolution to ignore the hateful present and to save the sacred past. “My idol may be shattered, but none of you shall know it. I stop the march of discovery; I extinguish the light of truth. I am deaf to your words; am blind to your proofs. At seventy years old, my idol is my life. It shall be my idol still.”

The silence in the bedroom was broken by a murmuring of women’s voices outside the door.

Lady Janet instantly raised herself in the chair and snatched the photograph off the easel. She laid the portrait face downward, among some papers on the table, then abruptly changed her mind, and hid it among the thick folds of lace which clothed her neck and bosom. There was a world of love in the action itself, and in the sudden softening of the eyes which accompanied it. The next moment Lady Janet’s mask was on. Any superficial observer who had seen her now would have said, “This is a hard woman!”

The door was opened by the maid. Grace Roseberry entered the room.

She advanced rapidly, with a defiant assurance in her manner, and a lofty carriage of her head. She sat down in the chair, to which Lady Janet silently pointed, with a thump; she returned Lady Janet’s grave bow with a nod and a smile. Every movement and every look of the little, worn, white-faced, shabbily dressed woman expressed insolent triumph, and said, as if in words, “My turn has come!”

“I am glad to wait on your ladyship,” she began, without giving Lady Janet an opportunity of speaking first. “Indeed, I should have felt it my duty to request an interview, if you had not sent your maid to invite me up here.”

“You would have felt it your duty to request an interview?” Lady Janet repeated, very quietly. “Why?”

The tone in which that one last word was spoken embarrassed Grace at the outset. It established as great a distance between Lady Janet and herself as if she had been lifted in her chair and conveyed bodily to the other end of the room.

“I am surprised that your ladyship should not understand me,” she said, struggling to conceal her confusion. “Especially after your kind offer of your own boudoir.”

Lady Janet remained perfectly unmoved. “I do
not
understand you,” she answered, just as quietly as ever.

Grace’s temper came to her assistance. She recovered the assurance which had marked her first appearance on the scene.

“In that case,” she resumed, “I must enter into particulars, in justice to myself. I can place but one interpretation on the extraordinary change in your ladyship’s behavior to me downstairs. The conduct of that abominable woman has at last opened your eyes to the deception that has been practiced on you. For some reason of your own, however, you have not yet chosen to recognise me openly. In this painful position something is due to my own self-respect. I cannot, and will not, permit Mercy Merrick to claim the merit of restoring me to my proper place in this house. After what I have suffered it is quite impossible for me to endure that. I should have requested an interview (if you had not sent for me) for the express purpose of claiming this person’s immediate expulsion from the house. I claim it now as a proper concession to Me. Whatever you or Mr. Julian Gray may do,
I
will not tamely permit her to exhibit herself as an interesting penitent. It is really a little too much to hear this brazen adventuress appoint her own time for explaining herself. It is too deliberately insulting to see her sail out of the room — with a clergyman of the Church of England opening the door for her — as if she was laying me under an obligation! I can forgive much, Lady Janet — including the terms in which you thought it decent to order me out of your house. I am quite willing to accept the offer of your boudoir, as the expression on your part of a better frame of mind. But even Christian Charity has its limits. The continued presence of that wretch under your roof is, you will permit me to remark, not only a monument of your own weakness, but a perfectly insufferable insult to Me.”

There she stopped abruptly — not for want of words, but for want of a listener.

Lady Janet was not even pretending to attend to her. Lady Janet, with a deliberate rudeness entirely foreign to her usual habits, was composedly busying herself in arranging the various papers scattered about the table. Some she tied together with little morsels of string; some she placed under paper-weights; some she deposited in the fantastic pigeon-holes of a little Japanese cabinet — working with a placid enjoyment of her own orderly occupation, and perfectly unaware, to all outward appearance, that any second person was in the room. She looked up, with her papers in both hands, when Grace stopped, and said, quietly,

“Have you done?”

“Is your ladyship’s purpose in sending for me to treat me with studied rudeness?” Grace retorted, angrily.

“My purpose in sending for you is to say something as soon as you will allow me the opportunity.”

The impenetrable composure of that reply took Grace completely by surprise. She had no retort ready. In sheer astonishment she waited silently with her eyes riveted on the mistress of the house.

Lady Janet put down her papers, and settled herself comfortably in the easy-chair, preparatory to opening the interview on her side.

“The little that I have to say to you,” she began, “may be said in a question. Am I right in supposing that you have no present employment, and that a little advance in money (delicately offered) would be very acceptable to you?”

“Do you mean to insult me, Lady Janet?”

“Certainly not. I mean to ask you a question.”

“Your question is an insult.”

“My question is a kindness, if you will only understand it as it is intended. I don’t complain of your not understanding it. I don’t even hold you responsible for any one of the many breaches of good manners which you have committed since you have been in this room. I was honestly anxious to be of some service to you, and you have repelled my advances. I am sorry. Let us drop the subject.”

Expressing herself in the most perfect temper in those terms, Lady Janet resumed the arrangement of her papers, and became unconscious once more of the presence of any second person in the room.

Grace opened her lips to reply with the utmost intemperance of an angry woman, and thinking better of it, controlled herself. It was plainly useless to take the violent way with Lady Janet Roy. Her age and her social position were enough of themselves to repel any violence. She evidently knew that, and trusted to it. Grace resolved to meet the enemy on the neutral ground of politeness, as the most promising ground that she could occupy under present circumstances.

“If I have said anything hasty, I beg to apologize to your ladyship,” she began. “May I ask if your only object in sending for me was to inquire into my pecuniary affairs, with a view to assisting me?”

“That,” said Lady Janet, “was my only object.”

“You had nothing to say to me on the subject of Mercy Merrick?”

“Nothing whatever. I am weary of hearing of Mercy Merrick. Have you any more questions to ask me?”

“I have one more.”

“Yes?”

“I wish to ask your ladyship whether you propose to recognise me in the presence of your household as the late Colonel Roseberry’s daughter?”

“I have already recognised you as a lady in embarrassed circumstances, who has peculiar claims on my consideration and forbearance. If you wish me to repeat those words in the presence of the servants (absurd as it is), I am ready to comply with your request.”

Grace’s temper began to get the better of her prudent resolutions.

“Lady Janet!” she said; “this won’t do. I must request you to express yourself plainly. You talk of my peculiar claims on your forbearance. What claims do you mean?”

“It will be painful to both of us if we enter into details,” replied Lady Janet. “Pray don’t let us enter into details.”

“I insist on it, madam.”

“Pray don’t insist on it.”

Grace was deaf to remonstrance.

“I ask you in plain words,” she went on, “do you acknowledge that you have been deceived by an adventuress who has personated me? Do you mean to restore me to my proper place in this house?”

Lady Janet returned to the arrangement of her papers.

“Does your ladyship refuse to listen to me?”