The Last of the Mortimers

“Only that she is an orphan,” said I, “like Harry and me.”

“Ah, dear child! there’s two of you; it does not matter to you,” cried Aunt Milly; then she continued, rather anxiously, “I’d like to know, however, what she can tell about this, Milly. Ellis told me a confused story about a foreign man coming with a letter, and that he insisted on seeing the lady—the lady! and couldn’t talk no more sense, Ellis says. I understood by the description, it must be that man. There couldn’t be two fat foreign serving-men in a quiet county like this; and Carson, ‘as happened to be in the hall at the moment,’ Ellis tells me, spoke to him, ‘and they arguifyed for long in a queer language,’ and then he went away. I don’t know any more of it, my dear. This Lizzie of yours, if she can understand that man, and he told her of it, I wonder does she know any more?”

Then I told her of the further particulars which had come under Lizzie’s observation, the letter returned and destroyed. Aunt Milly once more grew a good deal excited. She walked about the room with a troubled face, and many exclamations; but on the whole it gave her comfort. “My dear, she can’t be afraid of him now,” said Aunt Milly; and with this piece of consolation she went away strengthened to her many businesses, for everything evidently is in her hands. That eldest sister of hers, whom I cannot call by any name of love, takes no share in anything. When she does talk, she talks as if she were the sole mistress and ruler of the house; but Aunt Milly, though I understand they are quite equal in their rights, has all the trouble. It is very strange, but I could not feel so comfortable about her sending back that letter as Aunt Milly did. To tell the plain truth, a very distinct suspicion had entered into my mind about her. It flashed upon me when Mr. Luigi was speaking of her, and it grew stronger and stronger every hour I spent in the same room, though how it could be, was more than by any amount of thinking I could divine. I will not say what my fancy was; I was always too imaginative. I don’t want to commit myself till I see whether anything will occur to bear me out.

The next day was wet, and I had abundant means of seeing Miss Mortimer. I think my foolish faint that first day had quite settled me in her opinion. She saw I was a nobody from that moment. Accordingly all that rainy afternoon I sat by her in the strangest unsocial way. The fire was still kept up, though the weather was warm; and Aunt Milly had stationed me in her own easy chair, opposite her sister, and commanding the entire length of the room so that I could see who entered at the door, though Miss Mortimer could neither see or be seen by any one coming in. The five great windows were all very naked and bare, the curtains drawn back, and the blinds drawn up, according to Miss Mortimer’s fancy; she had always an amount of twilight at her command by movement of her screen. These five long lines of cold broad light, the cloudy sky looking full down upon us, and the blasts of rain driving against the cold transparent fence of glass which separated us from that outdoor world, where the early flowers hung their heads in the rain, and the shrubs cowered and drew together in the fitful gusts of wind, gave an extraordinary atmosphere to the picture. Then that long great mirror at the end of the room repeated the five windows in strange perspective, and reflected all the maze of space and crowd of furniture in bars of light and shadow; while here, in the centre, played the uncertain glow of the fire, much too warm, and making the air feel unnatural; and close before me sat Miss Mortimer with the screen carefully drawn round her chair. She had on her usual dress—her muslin scarf or shawl, I forget which, lined with pale blue silk, and ribbons of the same colour in her cap, and black lace mits upon her thin hands, which, when she happened to stop for a moment, she rubbed slowly before the fire. She did not talk to me. I understand it was very rarely she talked to any one. Silently, as if it were some weird work she was about, she knitted on; but sometimes, as I was conscious, lifted her eyes from her knitting, and continuing her work all the time, surveyed me as I sat helpless before her. Every time the door of the room happened to open she repeated this. I felt her stare at me, as she might have stared at a mirror, to see who had entered the room; and it is impossible to describe how I felt under that look. I durst not answer it by turning my eyes upon her; but looking past her at the door, as one naturally does when the door of the room opens—and knowing her gaze to be fixed on me, I faltered, I trembled, my face burned in spite of myself. This went on till, in desperation, I fairly answered her look; then my feelings changed. Those blue eyes, which must have paled and chilled with age, were gazing with a watchful dread in my face. It was not me she was looking at. Her hands went on, in their dreadful inhuman occupation, while she found in my face a reflection of who it was that went in, or out, by that door behind her. It might be a habit she had got into; but I could read in her eyes that she sat there in full expectation of somebody or something arriving suddenly, which might startle and distress everybody else, but which she knew. Again, I saw the same contrast which I had seen between Aunt Milly and Mr. Luigi. This woman, like the Italian, was in no perplexity. She was not confused with a mystery she could not comprehend, as Aunt Milly was. She knew something was coming, and what was coming, and was prepared to defend herself, and hide her shame to the death.

Hide her shame! oh, how do I dare say it; how could I venture to say that she had disgraced herself, or even to think so? There she sat, clothed in a double respect, even by reason of all that made her so unlovely and distasteful to me, the real great lady of the house, served by everybody, imagining herself quite supreme; the head of the house, though she transferred all the trouble of it to other shoulders; Miss Mortimer, of the Park, a spotless maiden lady, who might have been, as the common story went, had she chosen to marry, almost of any rank she pleased. All that I knew; but as I gazed at her, the wild sudden fancy that had seized me before, grew stronger and stronger. A kind of loathing took possession of me. Shame may be dreadful, must be dreadful; but to deserve it, and yet to escape it—to know one’s self guilty, and fight all one’s life against the penalty—to shut one’s self up, heart and voice, like that in a corner, waiting for the discovery and exposure which has become inevitable—and resolute by every lie and expedient of falsehood to resist and baffle it—the sight was hideous to me. I turned away from her with a feeling of sickness—then in the impulse of the moment I spoke.

“Should not you like to take this seat, Miss Mortimer, if you wish to see who comes in at the door?”

“How do you know,” she cried, in her strangled voice, “that I wish to see who comes in at the door?”

“I can see it in your eyes,” said I. I could not help a little shudder as I spoke. Her only answer was to draw a little further back into the twilight of her screen. I don’t think she looked at me again; but she did something else when Ellis came in the next time, which was quite as characteristic. She listened visibly, with an extraordinary intentness; her knitting stopped, though her eyes were bent on it. I could fancy she must have heard the very vibration of the man’s foot upon the floor, and satisfied herself by its sound what it was.

“Miss Milly’s compliments, ma’am, and will you please step into the library a moment,” said Ellis to me.

“Who’s in the library, eh?” interrupted Miss Mortimer, before I could speak.

Ellis faced round upon her slowly, with evident surprise: “I don’t know as it’s nobody, ma’am,” said the man; “Miss Milly has something to show the young lady.”

“Who’s in the house? why don’t you answer me? You are making up a story,” cried Miss Mortimer, almost with a shriek.

“Nobody, as I know on, but the Captain, as is in the stables, ma’am, looking at the colt,” said Ellis, doggedly, “and Miss Milly, as is waiting in the library for the young lady, with some pictures to show to her, as it looked to me; nor likely to come neither on such a day.”

Instead of resenting this speech as I supposed, Miss Mortimer smiled to herself with a nod. She gave a glance out from her screen at the blank of cloudy sky and the falling rain. It seemed to soothe her somehow. She relapsed back again, and resumed her knitting, without looking at or speaking to me. Did it relieve her to be told that nobody was likely to come on such a day? Could she imagine a spring shower was motive enough to keep the avenging truth away? I cannot tell. Who could tell? I might be wronging her cruelly to think of any avenger on his way. But I left the room, leaving her there with the blank clouds and rain, with the solitary gleam of the decaying fire, in the heavy silence and broad light of the vast room. She was standing at bay, grim and desperate; but she could actually imagine that the fate which pursued her would be kept away by the April shower! I cannot express all the wonder, pity, and horror that come over my heart—such strange, strange, inconsequent blendings of the dreadful and the foolish were not in any philosophy of mine.

Chapter VII

I FOUND Aunt Milly in the library with some miniatures spread out before her. She wanted to show them to me. I can’t tell very well what had suggested this to her. She was kept indoors by the rain, and with this standing uneasiness in her mind, Aunt Milly naturally sought for some means of returning to a discussion of the subject that engaged all her thoughts. She made me sit down by her, and silently put one after another before me. I could see clearly enough what she meant. A certain family resemblance ran through them all, a resemblance which Aunt Milly herself had escaped, and of which I believe there was not a trace in my features. But one after another these portraits recalled to me the young Italian’s face.

“I ought to tell you,” said Aunt Milly in a tremulous tone, “what has occurred to my own mind. I have thought of it for some time, but it’s so very unlikely that I never could allow myself to think it. I do believe he must be my father’s son. Yes, you may well be surprised. I can’t think anything else but that my father must have married and had a son, and Sarah somehow had bullied him into leaving the child behind, and we’ve been deceivers all this time, and the Park has never been ours.”

“But, dear Aunt Milly,” cried I, “with all these terrible thoughts, why don’t you satisfy yourself. If you tell Miss Mortimer how much you have found out, she certainly cannot help clearing up the rest.”

“Ah! but she can help it—she is not carried away by her feelings; she knows better than to be surprised or anything like that. I have asked her and been none the better for it,” cried Aunt Milly, “and the young man will not tell me either. Milly, hush! there is certainly some one at the door.”

The door bell at the Park was a peculiar one—it had a solemn cathedral sort of sound that rolled through the whole house, and it was only used by strangers or visitors on ceremony. Both of us started violently when we heard it; it came upon our consultations like a sudden alarm of battle.

“It rains as bad as ever; on such a day who can ring the great bell at our door?” cried Aunt Milly. “God help us! if my father walked in at that door, I should not feel it was anything out of the way. Nothing would surprise me now.”

I could not make her any answer. We both sat perfectly silent, waiting for what was to come. As if to heighten the excitement of the moment, the rain, which had been falling steadily all day, suddenly became violent, and dashed against the windows in torrents. Through all this we could hear the great door opened and the sound of voices. My thoughts travelled into the great vacant drawing-room where these sounds could not fail to reach Miss Mortimer within her screen. What was she doing? Could she be sitting there still, dumb and desperate, listening but not looking, with a pride and resistance more dreadful in its self-control than the wildest passions! I trembled with suspense and wondering anxiety in spite of myself. As for Aunt Milly, the miniatures she was looking at fell out of her hands. She covered her eyes for an instant, and then lifted her scared and pallid face to the door, as if she could hear the approaching sounds better, for having her eyes fixed that way. There was a pause that I suppose did not endure a minute, but which looked like an hour. Then a soft tap at the door; then Ellis entered, looking half as pale and anxious as we did—vaguely frightened he could not tell how.

“Miss Milly,” he said, in a hasty troubled voice, “the gentleman is here as wants Miss Mortimer; what am I to do?”

The old mistress and the old servant looked at each other. The man did not know anything, but he knew the involuntary suspicion and dread that had somehow gathered about the house.

“What are we to do? God help us, Ellis, I know no more than the baby!” cried Aunt Milly under her breath.

She was carried by her excitement beyond her usual discretion. I interposed as I best could.

“Let it come to the crisis!” cried I, not being well aware what I said; “it must be best to know clearly Aunt Milly—hush!—recollect, you know nothing—let him go in.”

She made a convulsive pause and restrained herself; and then the usual keeping up of appearances recurred to her mind. “My sister’s voice! you know, Milly,” she said, turning to me as if with a kind of apology,—“who—who is it, Ellis?”

“It’s—it’s the foreign gentleman, ma’am,” said Ellis, with a sympathetic faltering of his voice.

“Then show him in to Miss Mortimer?” cried Aunt Milly with a gasp over the words. “You shouldn’t have spoken so, my dear,” she said as soon as he was gone, “servants have nothing to do with our private affairs. Dear, dear, it’s surely very cold. It’s the storm come on so suddenly—a hail-storm, I declare. Don’t you feel, Milly, how cold the air has grown?”

I made no answer, and she did not expect any. She went up close to the library door, and stood there as if listening, shivering now and then with the nervous chill of her own emotion. We heard the drawing-room door open and shut,—then silence, silence, something positive, not merely an absence of sound. I stood by the table trembling, fancying I saw the stranger pass, as if through a picture, up that empty-seeming room, with the cold chill daylight spying in, and the motionless, conscious creature who feared and yet defied him lurking behind that screen. Would she speak to him? If she did it would not be with that stifled whispering voice. What communication would pass between them? Would the old walls groan with some dark secret fatal to their honour? The very air tingled round us in the dead calm of the house. Surely it never was so noiseless before. As for Aunt Milly, she stood before me shivering at the door, sometimes putting her hand upon the lock, then drawing back in irresolute terror. This lasted for some time, though most likely for not half so long as I imagined it did; then she turned to me, wringing her hands and bursting out into tears and cries.

“I cannot leave her alone any longer, Milly,” she said in broken words. “I cannot desert her in time of need;” and made as though she would leave the room, and then returned and sank into a chair and hid her face in her hands.

She was entirely overwhelmed and broken down. All I could do for her, was to get a shawl which hung over the sofa, and wrap it round her. All this had been too much for her strength.

In the midst of our suspense, Harry came suddenly in upon us. The sound of his honest frank step ringing into the library, startled me back to life again, and even Aunt Milly lifted up her blanched face expecting him to bring some news. Harry looked startled and curious, and did not grow less so as he looked at our agitated faces.

“What is the matter, Milly?” he cried. “I passed the drawing-room windows just now, and looked in thinking to see you. Miss Mortimer was standing at a table looking over some papers, and by her side was Luigi, talking very earnestly. By Jove! to see them standing there you would have said they were mother and son.”

At these words Aunt Milly lifted up her head, listening,—but Harry’s expression did not seem to strike her; she held up her finger and cried “Hark!”

The silence was broken. A bell evidently rung—a door hastily opened—startled us all three standing together. “Shall Harry go after him?” cried I, seeing how it was and pointing Harry to the door; but Aunt Milly would not, or perhaps could not, suppose that the visitor was merely going away. She sprang up, crying, “She must be ill!” and rushed out of the library. I followed her, alarmed, but not for Miss Mortimer. I saw Luigi standing at the open door, just about to go out into the cold rainy world out of doors, but Aunt Milly did not see him. She rushed forward blindly into the room where she supposed her sister to be ill.

When I rushed in after her I found the usual positions of the two ladies much reversed. Miss Mortimer was standing between the fire and the window, looking at her sister with a certain fierce scorn. Aunt Milly had sunk down in utter exhaustion and bewilderment upon a large ottoman. The two were looking at each other, Aunt Milly all trembling, pallid, and anxious. Miss Mortimer, with her head more erect than usual, her muslin mantle hanging back from her shoulders, her attitude very rigid and exact, and no symptom of excitement about her, save in the slight hurried incessant movement of her head and hands. A mere spectator would have said she was the judge and the other the culprit. It was an extraordinary scene.

“What did he say? Who is he? What does he want? Sarah, tell me for the love of heaven,” cried Aunt Milly in her agony of distress and terror.

“Who is he? I am not a girl to distinguish any one person by that name,” said Miss Mortimer.

Then she went back steadily to her chair, and sat down in it and took up her knitting.

“Any one who thinks to surprise me into speaking of my private affairs, is mistaken,” she said after a while. “Gossips like you may talk as they please; but what belongs to me is mine, and nobody in the world has a right to ask what I either do or say.”

That was all. She never opened her lips again that day. She sat there rigid, pretending to work; she did not work however. I noticed that to keep her hands and her head from excessive trembling was almost more than she was able for; but the day passed without any disclosure. I believe now she would die sooner than make any sign.

Chapter VIII

THAT was a very miserable day. I cannot fancy a more uncomfortable position for a stranger than that of being thrust into some distressing family secret, almost immediately after his or her introduction to the family in which it exists. This was just what had happened to me. I was kept one way or the other between those two sisters all the day. Aunt Milly kept continually appealing to me with her eyes, for conversation would not keep up its fluctuating and feeble existence in presence of that figure within the shelter of the screen; and my unlucky position of confidante must have been so apparent that I should not have wondered at any degree of dislike or displeasure which Miss Mortimer could have shown me. She did not show any, however; I could discern no signs of aversion to me. What am I saying? I could discern no signs of any human feeling whatever in her appearance and behaviour that day. My impression was that the sole thing with which her mind was occupied, was the effort to keep her head steady, and overcome the nervous, tremulous motion which agitated her frame. It was a relic, it might be an evidence, of some unseen tempest. But I am firmly convinced that this was the subject of all her thoughts. I watched, I must confess, with intense curiosity, though as quietly as possible, that she might not see I was watching her, every movement she made. But she did not notice me; she scarcely noticed anybody; she was careless of what other people were thinking; what she laboured after, all that miserable, lingering, rainy night was to get the command of herself. She never ventured to unbend her attitude in the slightest degree. She set her teeth together sometimes, and made her face look ghastly; but she could not keep down that external symptom of the trouble or tempest within. Her head kept moving with an incessant tremble; her hands were too much agitated to pursue their work. She kept the knitting-pins in her fingers, and held them rigidly together, as if she were knitting, and sometimes made a few convulsive stitches, and dropt them again, and bent in a tragical dismal confusion over that trifling occupation of hers, which had grown so weird an adjunct of herself to me. I watched her with a certain horror and pity which I cannot describe. It was not her paltry wealth and lands she was defending; it was her honour and her life. There she sat a solitary desperate creature driven to bay, with dear Aunt Milly’s vague terrors and anxieties revolving about her; but conscious in herself of a misery and danger far transcending anything in her innocent sister’s thoughts. Life and honour! but I believed there was no way in this world to defend them but by unnatural falsehood, cruelty, and wrong, and that she did not shrink from these means of upholding herself. Perhaps even a virtuous struggle would have exercised less fascination, than the sight of that desperate guilty secret resistance. I could not keep my eyes from Miss Mortimer. There was something terrible to me in her convulsive efforts after stillness, and in the nervous motion which continually betrayed her, and which no exertions on her part could overcome.

But she sat out all the lengthy lingering hours of that evening, after dinner, for they departed from their usual customs at that time, and dined late out of compliment to Harry. We did try to talk a little, but Aunt Milly’s thoughts were all astray upon one subject, and she was continually breaking off in abrupt conclusions which irresistibly suggested the engrossing matter which she dared not enter upon. Miss Mortimer, meanwhile, attempted to read her Times; but whether it was that the rustle of the paper betrayed the trembling of her hands, or that her mind was unfit for reading anything, she soon laid the paper by, and resumed her pretence of working. You may suppose that Harry and I were not very much at our ease in this strange position of affairs. Almost everything that was said among us suggested a something which could not be said, yet which occupied everybody’s thoughts. Aunt Milly sat flushed and troubled opposite to her sister; her distressed perplexed look, the look of one totally at a loss and unable to offer any explanation even to herself; her glances, sometimes directing me to look at Miss Mortimer, sometimes appealing to me in vain for some suggestion which could throw light upon the subject, were enough of themselves to betray to any stranger the existence of some secret unhappiness in the house. Harry, who was not so much in Aunt Milly’s confidence as I was, kept appealing to me on the other side. What was it all about? I never wished so fervently for the conclusion of a day as I did for that; and yet there must be some extraordinary fascination in watching one’s fellow-creatures. I should not like to get fairly into that dreadful inhuman occupation which people called studying character. But I was so curious about Miss Mortimer that I could almost have liked to follow her to her own room, and watch, when she was no longer on her guard against other people, how she would look and what she would do. Would she faint, or cry out, or dash herself against the floor? or was she so accustomed to that dreadful secresy that she would not betray herself even to herself? She must have lived that dreadful hidden life, and locked up all she knew in her own breast for a lifetime; for a longer lifetime than mine.

“I wonder,” said Henry, when we were alone that evening, “what sort of a person this Miss Mortimer is. Something’s wrong clearly. I suspect there must be something in the old lady’s life which will not bear the light of day.”

“What makes you think so?” said I.

“The t’other old lady and you play into each other’s hands,” cried Harry; “you know more about it than you choose to tell. But of course you are right enough if it is somebody else’s secret; only recollect, Milly, I am very glad you should be an heiress; I am extremely glad you will have a house to receive you while I am away, and that come what may, that little beggar is provided for; but look here, if there’s another relation nearer than you, legitimate or illegitimate, I won’t stand by and see him wronged.”