The Two Marys

Meantime the father went on responding a little, but only a little, to the constant claim made upon his attention. He said “Yes” and “No,” or even “Very pretty,” “Very nice,” “Very interesting” on occasion. For his part he did not care very much about the monuments. Sometimes his eye would wander away among the aisles, or through the lovely tracery and carved work of the roofs, to where the faint red sun caught a painted window, and threw a rosy oblique ladder of many colours across the grey. He understood the Abbey better than the girls did; but what he saw in the Abbey was, scenes of the past – the past, not of Shakespeare or the old Kings, but his own. He had been there in his youth, and he had been in other places which were recalled and suggested by this, and he remembered and mused in his heart. His companions were not surprised, because he was always a man of few words; though afterwards it gave them many thoughts, and the question, what he had been thinking of, what fancies might have been rising unconsciously in his mind, was often discussed by them; but at the present moment, as was natural, they did not realise that there was anything out of the way in his silence. They went back to their hotel late for their luncheon; they were tired in body, but not in their minds, which flowed over with wonder and pleasure. “Are you the least little bit disappointed?” said Milly to Grace. “No, not the least. Disappointed!” cried Grace with enthusiasm, though the next moment she was conscious of that little chill in her soul about St James’s, and even felt that she had missed something in Westminster. This being the case with Grace, Milly cleared up in a moment from the slightest little cloud that had fallen upon her, and felt that neither was she disappointed, oh, not the least in the world! It was like walking with Shakespeare, they both said. And Mr Yorke gave a little nod across the table, and lifted his eyebrows at them. It was almost as much as he ever did when they were in full tide of enthusiasm. Papa was always quiet; though perhaps, indeed, he was more preoccupied than usual to-day. The winterly spring afternoon was beginning to close in a little before their meal was over. They were preparing, however, to go out again when their father called them to the window where he was sitting, looking more grave even than he was accustomed to look.

“I am going out,” he said. “Can you manage for yourselves till dinner? I have something to do – out.”

“Can’t we go with you, papa?” they both said in a breath.

There was a kind of embarrassment on his face. “Not to-day, I think. After – perhaps: I have a call to make.”

“Oh, it is about business!” said Milly, wondering, yet apologetic, looking at Grace.

“If it is not about business,” said Grace promptly, “you ought to take us with you, papa. It is the right thing in England. In England girls don’t go about by themselves; and then we want some friends, we want to know the people as well as the place.”

A half smile went over his face. “You shall get the benefit of all the introductions,” he said. “Don’t be afraid; but you must not expect to be taken much notice of in London, just on the edge of the season, you know. People are very busy here; and then there are so many to be looked after – people of more pretensions than you. You must not expect too much; but I am not going to deliver any of the letters. I am going – to see an – old friend.”

“Oh, then, bring him here – will you please bring him here? Do, papa, do! If it is an old friend, so much the more reason that we should know him. Is it a friend you had before you went to Canada? Why has he never come to see us? We have always wondered that you never had any old friends come to see you, papa.”

Yorke did not make any direct reply. He said only, “What will you do with yourselves while I am away?”

The two girls looked at each other somewhat blankly.

“We can’t stay in here,” cried Milly, while Grace drew herself up with youthful dignity.

“As for staying in every time you have any business to do or any calls to make,” she said, with serious emphasis, “you must see that is impossible, papa. English girls may stop in-doors if they please, but we cannot. We are Canadian girls; we are used to take care of ourselves. Milly and I can surely take care of each other wherever we go. It would be too humbling,” she cried, “in the country of Shakespeare, to think two girls couldn’t go out without – what was it, Milly? – unpleasantness. I don’t believe a word of it. Mrs Bidwell is only a vulgar Englishwoman. Unpleasantness! I don’t believe it; and even if I did believe it I shouldn’t allow it to be true.”

“Come,” said her father, “you must not talk so of vulgar Englishwomen – you who are such enthusiasts for England. No, I don’t see any harm in it. Come with me so far, I’ll take you to where the shops are. Of course you would like to look into the shops.”

They would have liked a great deal better to go with him upon this mysterious call, but he would not permit it, and accordingly they were taken to Regent Street, where he left them with a beautiful confidence. It might not be the best place in the world to leave young girls alone on a spring afternoon, no doubt; but what did they know of that? They were innocent, proud, modest girls, to whom no one had ever said a disrespectful word, and who were afraid of nobody. Nor did they get any new light upon the subject from that walk. The innocent do not even suspect the dangers which the knowing see all about them. Nobody molested Grace and Milly: they walked along in their armour of honest maidenhood, knowing no evil; and were as safe as in their own rooms. It was true, however, that their rapture waned a little, and a touch of local patriotism came over them.

“I don’t think so very much of the shops,” said Milly doubtfully.

Milly was often the first to start an opinion, but she never was quite sure whether she held it or not till she had the support of Grace’s authority, which this time, as so often, was unhesitatingly given.

“I don’t think anything of the shops,” said Grace. “Of course one doesn’t come to England to look at shops. Paris for that, I suppose; but it is England all the same.”

“Oh yes,” said Milly, “certainly it is England all the same. I wish the houses were a little bigger and cleaner-looking, and the streets broader. I wish there were some trees – ”

“Trees! in the heart of London,” said Grace with high contempt. “Trees are the things that show how new a place is. Where you have nothing else you have trees. But think how many people must have walked about here. If we only could see them all strolling up and down this pavement – people you would give your head to see.”

“But Shakespeare – and people like that – could not have walked about Regent Street: it is not old enough.”

“No; not Shakespeare, perhaps. I don’t know – he might have walked about here, though it was not Regent Street then.”

“I wonder,” said Milly suddenly, “where papa can have gone. I never heard him talk of any old friends before; nor relations. By the way, isn’t it very funny that we have no relations in England, Grace?”

“It is strange,” said Grace thoughtfully.

It was not a subject which had occurred to them till now. Their father they were aware had been thirty years in Canada without ever going “home;” and he had no family correspondence, nobody belonging to him that they knew of except themselves. Their mother was a Canadian born, and she had relations in plenty; and cousins on their father’s side had not seemed a necessity before. But as they thought of it, a little additional chill came into the air. England – so dear and delightful as it was, the home of all their traditions – they had begun to make acquaintance with. But to think that they had not a relation in England, nothing to justify their fond identification of themselves with this old country! The idea was somewhat alarming as it burst upon them. It increased the little shade of disappointment which had crept over them against their will, and sent them to their hotel, which was all that answered for home at this moment, with a little heaviness at their hearts.

CHAPTER II

MR YORKE went out in the quickly fading spring afternoon with an air of seriousness and resolution, which, indeed, had been upon his countenance all day; but which was not much like the expression of a holiday visitor. He had a long drive out to the northern outskirts of London, across those miles on miles of insignificant streets which are almost more imposing in their shabby dreariness than the more important portions of the greatest of cities. But though they wearied him with endless lines of shabbiness and monotony, the mind of the stranger was not sufficiently at liberty to make any reflection upon them. It was twilight before he reached, mounting upwards slowly for the last mile or so, the suburban heights to which he was bound. He dismissed his cab at the entrance to a leafy lane, lined on each side with detached houses, which were scarcely perceptible among the bare trees and thick hedges. To the servant who admitted him he gave a name which was certainly not that which he had borne an hour before in his hotel. The house which he entered just at the moment of twilight, before the lamps were lighted, was very warmly carpeted and curtained, and almost too warm in the air of its balmy soft interior. He waited for a moment in the hall, with an extraordinary gravity – the seriousness of painful restrained excitement on his face. Then a door opened suddenly, and a lady came out carrying a candle in her hand. The light shone pleasantly upon a fresh face and pretty eyes, undimmed by some fifty years of life; but those eyes were puckered up with a curious, anxious, alarmed gaze, looking into the darkness. She advanced hurriedly for two or three steps, then stopped short in front of the stranger, examining him not without some distress in her look. “Leonard Crosthwaite?” she said, “it is very many years since we have heard that name. Is it some distant cousin we know nothing about? or is it – is it – ”

“It is I, Mary. We have not seen each other for thirty years – but I should have known you anywhere, I think. Certainly, here, in the old house.”

She held up her candle and gazed at him, then shook her head slowly. “It is so sudden,” she said. “It is such a long time – ”

“And you did not expect to see me, while I expected – hoped – to see you.” Then he put out his hand. “Mary – you are not still Mary – not a Crosthwaite still, as in the old time? No – I can see that. You have married, and had children – like me.”

This drew a faint little smile from her in spite of herself. “Yes, I have married. I have a son as tall as you. I am a widow. I – Oh, but I don’t know if I ought to enter into family particulars. How am I to know that you are – Leonard? You are – a little like him.”

“Is there any reason why you should hesitate to own me?” he said, half sternly, yet with a smile.

This brought an overpowering flush of colour over her comely, matronly face; but the next moment she cried out with agitation, “Oh, no, no! How could you think so of me? – not for the world, not for the world! If every penny we had depended on it” – and here she stopped short, confused, and looked at him again.

“I will not meddle with your pennies, Mary, whatever you may mean by that. I have plenty. You need not fear for me. Ah! – Uncle Abraham, I suppose, is dead? – he must be dead long ago: and there is something – The old people are all dead, I suppose?”

“It is not that,” she said, faltering, which was no answer to his question; but he understood it well enough. He looked at her with increased seriousness, and she shrank before his eye.

“Yes: they are all dead – ”

“Uncle Abraham and all – ” He looked at her more and more keenly, with a slight smile on his face. “But he did not take his money with him, I suppose, as he used to threaten to do?”

To this the lady made no reply; and there was a pause, he standing somewhat sternly, with his eyes fixed upon her; she with her head drooping a little, drawn back a few steps, not looking at him. The door behind her was open, and after a minute, a voice called from it, “Mary, to whom are you talking?”

The stranger started visibly. He said, with a sudden catch in his voice, “Anna! Is she here?”

“Oh yes, Leonard, yes,” said the lady. “She is here – so changed! so changed! I think it is because she has been unhappy.”

“Unhappy!” he said softly. His tone had changed and softened; only to hear it the listener might be certain that there were tears in his eyes. “Unhappy! after thirty years.”

The man was touched and flattered and compunctious all in one. There was no difficulty in interpreting the inflections in his voice. It was full of tenderness, of a mournful pleasure, and surprise as well – “while I have been making myself so comfortable,” he added in an undertone.

“Oh, not in that way,” the lady said, but in a whisper. “No, no,” shaking her head, “not in that way.”

His mood of tender complaisance was perhaps a little subdued by this, but only a little. “If you think she would let me see her,” he said —

At this moment she was called again – “Mary! there is a perfect gale blowing in at the door. Who have you there?”

The lady who was called Mary advanced to him confidentially. “She heard your name just as well as I did,” she said, “but she pretends to take no notice; wait here till I go and speak to her. Oh, she is so changed!”

He caught her by the hand and detained her. “Nothing has happened? She must be old like all of us, I know – ”

“She is as handsome as ever she was,” said the other hastily. “I am coming, I am coming, Anna! It is a visitor – an old friend” – and she turned round with the quickness of a girl, leaving the stranger standing where she had found him, the candle on the hall table watching him like a little wakeful sentinel. A glow of warmth and light came from the door of the open room. He had not noticed it before; now it appeared to him like a glimpse into some sanctuary. He could see a beautiful Persian carpet, a softly-tinted wall hung with pictures; not that he noticed what these details were, but took them in vaguely as producing an effect of delicate brightness and luxury. Memory stole softly over the far-travelled visitor. His present life had departed from him altogether – he was living in the past, in his youth, thinking of the pretty caprices of the girl whom he had thought the most beautiful, the most delightful creature that God had made, in all her whims and fancies. She had always been like that; and through all those thirty years it had been constantly suggested to him, in the inmost recesses of his mind, when he saw anything that was graceful or pretty, “It is just like Anna – Anna would have liked that.” He had felt inclined to say it to his wife a thousand times – his good wife, who never had heard of Anna, and would not have heard of her with any pleasure. And now, here was Anna close to him, enshrined in the warmth and surrounded by all the prettinesses she had loved. It made his heart beat to think that he was so near her, that he would see her presently – and even that she had been unhappy. At fifty-five men are not often sentimental, but the hardest would be softened by the thought of a beautiful woman who had been unhappy about him for thirty years. He stood quite patiently, and waited for admittance. The hesitation of the other, her evident unwillingness to consent to his identity, which he could see was mingled all the time with a conviction that he was the person he claimed to be, had irritated and filled him with suspicions; but all this flew away upon the breath of old, old, unchangeable feeling. Anna! he had never ceased to think that the very name was music all these years.

The sound of the voices within the room was low at first, but afterwards grew louder. Then it was mingled with impatient tappings as of a stick on the floor, and Mary’s voice – he could trace both voices, they were so different, even in the murmur of talk at the beginning – took an expostulatory tone.

“I assure you, Anna – ”

“Assure me nothing. Let him come in, let him come in: and I will let him know what I think of him.”

It was certainly her voice; but in all his recollection he had never heard this tone in it. He waited listening, half amused, half sad, beginning to wonder more and more. At last he yielded to a sudden impulse, and went straight forward to the half-opened door.

There he stood for a moment arrested, struck dumb. And they, too, struck by the sound of the man’s foot, so different from their own velvet steps, turned round and looked at him. Was that Anna? His heart, which had been beating so high, stopped short, and seemed to drop, drop into some unknown depths. “Oh yes, I see,” he said to himself. “I see, I see. She is as handsome as ever – ” But was that Anna? He stood on the threshold of this room, which was sacred to her, holding his breath.

Then the strange old woman, who was Anna, beckoned to him imperiously with her hand.

“Come in, come in,” she said, “whoever you are, who are using a name – Come in. I do not know if you are aware that Mr Leonard Crosthwaite, whose name you are assuming – ” Here she stopped and fixed two great, brilliant, dark eyes upon him, opened to their full width, glowing like angry stars. She made a pause of about a minute long, which seemed to the two others like an hour. Then she dropped her voice with a careless inflection, as if after that gaze she disdained the risk she was running – “died,” she added indifferently, but pausing on the word – “at least twenty years ago.”

“He did not die, Anna, since I am here,” said the stranger.

It was impossible to speak to her, even now, without some tenderness getting into his voice.

“Do not venture to speak to me, sir, by my Christian name. Do you know there is a punishment for impostors? Oh, you think perhaps you know just how far you can go without infringing the law. Perhaps you think, too, that we are alone here, and you can frighten us. But that is a mistake. There is a butler, a strong man, whom I can summon in a moment with this bell, and there is my nephew. Any attempt at bullying or extortion will be useless here.”

“Oh, Anna!” her sister cried; then she clasped her hands, turning to the visitor – “I told you she was changed.”

A series of different emotions passed over the Canadian’s face – he smiled, then laughed angrily, growing red and hot; but over these variations stole such a softening of regret as combined all in one sorrowful sense of change. He nodded his head gently in reply to what the other sister said.

“You are right,” he said in a low tone; “as handsome as ever, but how different! Anna, Anna, though we have been separated so long – though you cast me off, and I thought had forgotten me – though I am married and a happy man – yet you have never been put out of your place in my heart all these years.”

She looked at him with those keen eyes; though she kept up wonderfully her air of lofty scorn and indifference, it was possible to perceive a gleam of something else, a mixture of satisfaction and anger in her face. “It is part of the rôle, of course,” she said, “to call me by my Christian name. But Leonard Crosthwaite, whatever he might be else, was a gentleman. So you will keep to your part better by acting like a gentleman in this point. That is one way of making an impostor look like him.”

He restrained himself with an effort. “What am I to call you then?” he said, looking at her sister. “Has she never married? How wonderful that is! Miss Crosthwaite then: since you wish it, I will call you so.”

A momentary shadow of humiliation went over the proud face. She had chosen not to marry. She had always been beautiful, and she was not without fortune; but nobody whom she thought good enough had ever asked Anna Crosthwaite to marry him. And she did not like to remember this in presence of her old lover, whom she had loved once in her silly youth, though she forsook him: it was not, however, because of that love, or anything connected with it, that she received him thus now.

“I am Miss Crosthwaite,” she said, “though you affect to be surprised. It is not all a woman thinks of to marry any fool that turns up, and to become the mother of fools. Go away to your son, Mary. That was your ambition: as it is your folly now, to believe in every deception, and allow yourself to be led by the nose. I think your protégé had better withdraw too, now that I have seen him. He has not a feature of poor Leonard Crosthwaite,” she added, eyeing him steadfastly. “No one, I suppose, can doubt my capacity to judge. His complexion is different, his features are different. Go away, sir, and be thankful we don’t turn you over at once to the police.”

“Is this,” he said, half-stifled with astonishment and indignation, “is this all you have to say to me – ”

“It is all I have to say to you,” she said; “and this is my room, where I am supposed to have some right to choose my visitors. Go! You can do anything you please; I, for one, am not afraid of you. You may go.”

He burst out laughing at the extraordinary perversity of the scene. If he had not laughed he must have been furious – it was his only deliverance; and yet it may be supposed there was not much laughing in his heart.

“This is the most extraordinary reception to meet with,” he said, “after coming so far, after staying away so long. If it is a jest, it is a bad jest, Anna. Suppose that it is hard upon us after all this long interval, to look upon each other with such changed eyes – still there is such a thing as justice. You know me as well as I know you. It is by instinct – it is because we cannot help it. For, heaven knows, you are as unlike the Anna I left as night is to day.”

She did not reply. A hasty gleam of passion came out of her keen eyes. Then she put out her hand to the bell. “Simmons,” she said, “will see this person to the door, Mary. I don’t want to be hard upon any acquaintance of yours; you know a very strange set of people, I must say; but I will not be insulted. Simmons must see this person out of the house.”

The other sister looked at him with a look of agonised entreaty, clasping her hands. He was touched by it, though his only answer to Anna was another outburst of harsh laughter. “I would not like to be in your Simmons’ shoes,” he said, “if he tries to see me anywhere that I do not choose to go. But I do not care to thrust myself on anybody. Good-bye, Anna; we shall meet ere long in different circumstances, never fear.”

With that he went out hastily into the hall, where the sentinel candle was still burning. There he was met by a young man who looked at him surprised. There was so much resemblance in this new-comer to the lady called Mary that there could be no doubt who he was. The Canadian did not pause to inquire. He put his hand on the young man’s arm – “Come out with me, or take me somewhere where I can talk to you. There is a mystery that wants clearing up, and you can help me. I am your mother’s cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite. What! you have heard the name before?”

“Indeed, I have heard the name; but you were supposed to be dead long ago,” the young man said.

“I am not dead – your mother will tell you – I am newly returned from Canada. Tell me what reason there is to wish me dead,” he said peremptorily. “It will be no worse for you – ”

“No reason at all, sir,” said the young man promptly. “I do not know who you are, but there is nothing to conceal. You are welcome to hear it all from me.”

Then he led the visitor into a small room at the other side of the hall, into which after a while the young man’s mother stole softly, crying and greatly agitated. She was startled beyond measure to find the visitor with her son, to whom she was going for consolation. But they were not long in convincing her that it was better that all there was to tell should be told.

When Mr Yorke left the house it was very dark and cold, and the rain beginning to drizzle. Young Geoffrey Underwood would have gone with him, or, failing that, pressed all manner of wraps upon him, as his mother had pressed refreshments: but the Canadian smiled at the cold, and the dismal, continuous, but not violent rain. “I am used to worse cold than this,” he said. He went out into the night, more grave than when he had entered, but with a fire in his eye and in his heart of which there had then been no sign. He walked slowly along making calculations, arranging his course of procedure as he went down the hill. The rain came down faster and faster, till it swept like a great sheet of water from the inky sky. It swept all the suburban streets both of passengers and vehicles; nothing was to be seen but the wavering dismal lamps, making distorted reflections on the wet pavement – not a cab, not a place of shelter. Mr Yorke was drenched to the bones and chilled to the very heart.