The Victorian Mystery Megapack (120 page)

Let me dry my eyes, and return to my narrative.

I went downstairs to luncheon, naturally anxious to see how Rachel was affected by her release from her marriage engagement.

It appeared to me—but I own I am a poor authority in such matters—that the recovery of her freedom had set her thinking again of that other man whom she loved, and that she was furious with herself for not being able to control a revulsion of feeling of which she was secretly ashamed. Who was the man? I had my suspicions—but it was needless to waste time in idle speculation. When I had converted her, she would, as a matter of course, have no concealments from Me. I should hear all about the man; I should hear all about the Moonstone. If I had had no higher object in stirring her up to a sense of spiritual things, the motive of relieving her mind of its guilty secrets would have been enough of itself to encourage me to go on.

Aunt Ablewhite took her exercise in the afternoon in an invalid chair. Rachel accompanied her. “I wish I could drag the chair,” she broke out, recklessly. “I wish I could fatigue myself till I was ready to drop.”

She was in the same humour in the evening. I discovered in one of my friend’s precious publications—the Life, Letters, and Labours of Miss Jane Ann Stamper, forty-fourth edition—passages which bore with a marvellous appropriateness on Rachel’s present position. Upon my proposing to read them, she went to the piano. Conceive how little she must have known of serious people, if she supposed that my patience was to be exhausted in that way! I kept Miss Jane Ann Stamper by me, and waited for events with the most unfaltering trust in the future.

Old Mr. Ablewhite never made his appearance that night. But I knew the importance which his worldly greed attached to his son’s marriage with Miss Verinder—and I felt a positive conviction (do what Mr. Godfrey might to prevent it) that we should see him the next day. With his interference in the matter, the storm on which I had counted would certainly come, and the salutary exhaustion of Rachel’s resisting powers would as certainly follow. I am not ignorant that old Mr. Ablewhite has the reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer.

The next day, exactly as I had foreseen, Aunt Ablewhite was as near to being astonished as her nature would permit, by the sudden appearance of her husband. He had barely been a minute in the house, before he was followed, to
my
astonishment this time, by an unexpected complication in the shape of Mr. Bruff.

I never remember feeling the presence of the lawyer to be more unwelcome than I felt it at that moment. He looked ready for anything in the way of an obstructive proceeding—capable even of keeping the peace with Rachel for one of the combatants!

“This is a pleasant surprise, sir,” said Mr. Ablewhite, addressing himself with his deceptive cordiality to Mr. Bruff. “When I left your office yesterday, I didn’t expect to have the honour of seeing you at Brighton today.”

“I turned over our conversation in my mind, after you had gone,” replied Mr. Bruff. “And it occurred to me that I might perhaps be of some use on this occasion. I was just in time to catch the train, and I had no opportunity of discovering the carriage in which you were travelling.”

Having given that explanation, he seated himself by Rachel. I retired modestly to a corner—with Miss Jane Ann Stamper on my lap, in case of emergency. My aunt sat at the window; placidly fanning herself as usual. Mr. Ablewhite stood up in the middle of the room, with his bald head much pinker than I had ever seen it yet, and addressed himself in the most affectionate manner to his niece.

“Rachel, my dear,” he said, “I have heard some very extraordinary news from Godfrey. And I am here to inquire about it. You have a sitting-room of your own in this house. Will you honour me by showing me the way to it?”

Rachel never moved. Whether she was determined to bring matters to a crisis, or whether she was prompted by some private sign from Mr. Bruff, is more than I can tell. She declined doing old Mr. Ablewhite the honour of conducting him into her sitting-room.

“Whatever you wish to say to me,” she answered, “can be said here—in the presence of my relatives, and in the presence” (she looked at Mr. Bruff) “of my mother’s trusted old friend.”

“Just as you please, my dear,” said the amiable Mr. Ablewhite. He took a chair. The rest of them looked at his face—as if they expected it, after seventy years of worldly training, to speak the truth. I looked at the top of his bald head; having noticed on other occasions that the temper which was really in him had a habit of registering itself
there
.

“Some weeks ago,” pursued the old gentleman, “my son informed me that Miss Verinder had done him the honour to engage herself to marry him. Is it possible, Rachel, that he can have misinterpreted—or presumed upon—what you really said to him?”

“Certainly not,” she replied. “I did engage myself to marry him.”

“Very frankly answered!” said Mr. Ablewhite. “And most satisfactory, my dear, so far. In respect to what happened some weeks since, Godfrey has made no mistake. The error is evidently in what he told me yesterday. I begin to see it now. You and he have had a lovers’ quarrel—and my foolish son has interpreted it seriously. Ah! I should have known better than that at his age.”

The fallen nature in Rachel—the mother Eve, so to speak—began to chafe at this.

“Pray let us understand each other, Mr. Ablewhite,” she said. “Nothing in the least like a quarrel took place yesterday between your son and me. If he told you that I proposed breaking off our marriage engagement, and that he agreed on his side—he told you the truth.”

The self-registering thermometer at the top of Mr. Ablewhite’s bald head began to indicate a rise of temper. His face was more amiable than ever—but
there
was the pink at the top of his face, a shade deeper already!

“Come, come, my dear!” he said, in his most soothing manner, “now don’t be angry, and don’t be hard on poor Godfrey! He has evidently said some unfortunate thing. He was always clumsy from a child—but he means well, Rachel, he means well!”

“Mr. Ablewhite, I have either expressed myself very badly, or you are purposely mistaking me. Once for all, it is a settled thing between your son and myself that we remain, for the rest of our lives, cousins and nothing more. Is that plain enough?”

The tone in which she said those words made it impossible, even for old Mr. Ablewhite, to mistake her any longer. His thermometer went up another degree, and his voice when he next spoke, ceased to be the voice which is appropriate to a notoriously good-natured man.

“I am to understand, then,” he said, “that your marriage engagement is broken off?”

“You are to understand that, Mr. Ablewhite, if you please.”

“I am also to take it as a matter of fact that the proposal to withdraw from the engagement came, in the first instance, from
you
?”

“It came, in the first instance, from me. And it met, as I have told you, with your son’s consent and approval.”

The thermometer went up to the top of the register. I mean, the pink changed suddenly to scarlet.

“My son is a mean-spirited hound!” cried this furious old worldling. “In justice to myself as his father—not in justice to
him
—I beg to ask you, Miss Verinder, what complaint you have to make of Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite?”

Here Mr. Bruff interfered for the first time.

“You are not bound to answer that question,” he said to Rachel.

Old Mr. Ablewhite fastened on him instantly.

“Don’t forget, sir,” he said, “that you are a self-invited guest here. Your interference would have come with a better grace if you had waited until it was asked for.”

Mr. Bruff took no notice. The smooth varnish on
his
wicked old face never cracked. Rachel thanked him for the advice he had given to her, and then turned to old Mr. Ablewhite—preserving her composure in a manner which (having regard to her age and her sex) was simply awful to see.

“Your son put the same question to me which you have just asked,” she said. “I had only one answer for him, and I have only one answer for you. I proposed that we should release each other, because reflection had convinced me that I should best consult his welfare and mine by retracting a rash promise, and leaving him free to make his choice elsewhere.”

“What has my son done?” persisted Mr. Ablewhite. “I have a right to know that. What has my son done?”

She persisted just as obstinately on her side.

“You have had the only explanation which I think it necessary to give to you, or to him,” she answered.

“In plain English, it’s your sovereign will and pleasure, Miss Verinder, to jilt my son?”

Rachel was silent for a moment. Sitting close behind her, I heard her sigh. Mr. Bruff took her hand, and gave it a little squeeze. She recovered herself, and answered Mr. Ablewhite as boldly as ever.

“I have exposed myself to worse misconstruction than that,” she said. “And I have borne it patiently. The time has gone by, when you could mortify me by calling me a jilt.”

She spoke with a bitterness of tone which satisfied me that the scandal of the Moonstone had been in some way recalled to her mind. “I have no more to say,” she added, wearily, not addressing the words to anyone in particular, and looking away from us all, out of the window that was nearest to her.

Mr. Ablewhite got upon his feet, and pushed away his chair so violently that it toppled over and fell on the floor.

“I have something more to say on my side,” he announced, bringing down the flat of his hand on the table with a bang. “I have to say that if my son doesn’t feel this insult, I do!”

Rachel started, and looked at him in sudden surprise.

“Insult?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”

“Insult!” reiterated Mr. Ablewhite. “I know your motive, Miss Verinder, for breaking your promise to my son! I know it as certainly as if you had confessed it in so many words. Your cursed family pride is insulting Godfrey, as it insulted
me
when I married your aunt. Her family—her beggarly family—turned their backs on her for marrying an honest man, who had made his own place and won his own fortune. I had no ancestors. I wasn’t descended from a set of cut-throat scoundrels who lived by robbery and murder. I couldn’t point to the time when the Ablewhites hadn’t a shirt to their backs, and couldn’t sign their own names. Ha! ha! I wasn’t good enough for the Herncastles, when I married. And now, it comes to the pinch, my son isn’t good enough for
you
. I suspected it, all along. You have got the Herncastle blood in you, my young lady! I suspected it all along.”

“A very unworthy suspicion,” remarked Mr. Bruff. “I am astonished that you have the courage to acknowledge it.”

Before Mr. Ablewhite could find words to answer in, Rachel spoke in a tone of the most exasperating contempt.

“Surely,” she said to the lawyer, “this is beneath notice. If he can think in
that
way, let us leave him to think as he pleases.”

From scarlet, Mr. Ablewhite was now becoming purple. He gasped for breath; he looked backwards and forwards from Rachel to Mr. Bruff in such a frenzy of rage with both of them that he didn’t know which to attack first. His wife, who had sat impenetrably fanning herself up to this time, began to be alarmed, and attempted, quite uselessly, to quiet him. I had, throughout this distressing interview, felt more than one inward call to interfere with a few earnest words, and had controlled myself under a dread of the possible results, very unworthy of a Christian Englishwoman who looks, not to what is meanly prudent, but to what is morally right. At the point at which matters had now arrived, I rose superior to all considerations of mere expediency. If I had contemplated interposing any remonstrance of my own humble devising, I might possibly have still hesitated. But the distressing domestic emergency which now confronted me, was most marvellously and beautifully provided for in the Correspondence of Miss Jane Ann Stamper—Letter one thousand and one, on “Peace in Families.” I rose in my modest corner, and I opened my precious book.

“Dear Mr. Ablewhite,” I said, “one word!”

When I first attracted the attention of the company by rising, I could see that he was on the point of saying something rude to me. My sisterly form of address checked him. He stared at me in heathen astonishment.

“As an affectionate well-wisher and friend,” I proceeded, “and as one long accustomed to arouse, convince, prepare, enlighten, and fortify others, permit me to take the most pardonable of all liberties—the liberty of composing your mind.”

He began to recover himself; he was on the point of breaking out—he
would
have broken out, with anybody else. But my voice (habitually gentle) possesses a high note or so, in emergencies. In this emergency, I felt imperatively called upon to have the highest voice of the two.

I held up my precious book before him; I rapped the open page impressively with my forefinger. “Not my words!” I exclaimed, in a burst of fervent interruption. “Oh, don’t suppose that I claim attention for My humble words! Manna in the wilderness, Mr. Ablewhite! Dew on the parched earth! Words of comfort, words of wisdom, words of love—the blessed, blessed, blessed words of Miss Jane Ann Stamper!”