Маргарет Олифант
The Two Marys
“Visitors of my son’s? That means, I suppose,” said Mrs Underwood, with a little gasp, yet a heroic effort, “Visitors to me?”
“I am glad you think so, Mary. It is no concern of mine,” said Miss Anna, turning pointedly away.
And then politeness compelled Mrs Underwood to offer civilities she had very little mind to. “Won’t you sit down?” she said. “Geoff, you will perhaps introduce me to your friends.”
She sighed; there was something half-ludicrous in the pathos of her tone.
“I hope we may be friends hereafter,” said Geoffrey; “but at present there is something to be settled which is more than friendship. Mother, you remember your cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite, and his sudden visit here a fortnight ago?”
“Leonard Crosthwaite?” she said the name trembling, and turned involuntarily with a frightened look to where her sister sat.
“He means,” said Miss Anna, without turning her head, “the impostor, or madman, who assumed the name of – our relation who died twenty years ago.”
“Mother, listen,” said Geoffrey. “It is a terrible story, so far as I can make it out. He went from you, to die: and these are his daughters.”
Mrs Underwood turned from one to another as her son spoke, now reading his face, now Miss Anna’s, now throwing an anxious glance at the sisters who stood together in the centre of the room, not knowing what new turn their affairs might be about to take.
At this an exclamation burst from all three at once. The girls said, “No, no!” while Mrs Underwood cried out, “Leonard’s daughters!” “No, no, no, no!” the others said.
“So far as I can see,” repeated the young man, “he is dead, and cannot tell us how it stands. These are the young ladies whom I found at the hotel to which I went in search of him – his hotel, the address he gave you. And their father came out on a wintry afternoon a fortnight ago, a Tuesday, to visit friends – old friends of whom he told them nothing. He went home drenched – you remember how it rained, mother? – and took to his bed. Now that he is dead, they found our address among his papers. This is the story, and what can you want more? It seems to me that it is clear enough!”
“But,” said Grace, “there is one great mistake you make. Our name, it is not Crosthwaite – oh, nothing like it; we never heard that name before. Papa was not a man to go by a false name. Oh, no, no; he was true in everything. There must still be some mistake.”
Miss Anna, who had turned her chair away, turned round again at this. “I told you,” she said; “this young fellow wants to prove you to be the daughters of an impostor or a madman. Of course, your father was not a man to go by a false name. Nobody would do that who was, as you say, a respectable person, a man thought well of in his own place. You know better than to think so. Of course: that is exactly what I said.”
But this support sent Grace instantly into opposition. She paused to consider, when she found herself suddenly embarrassed by this unexpected backing up. Miss Anna’s eyes fixed upon her seemed to have a baneful influence, and oppressed her soul.
“Does it make any difference to you,” she said, with the trenchant simplicity of ignorance, “what was my father’s name?”
The question was so entirely unexpected that each of the three showed its effect in a different, yet characteristic way. Miss Anna, listening with the complacency and satisfaction with which Grace’s denial of the name had filled her, received this stray shot full in her breast, and without any preparation. She wavered, drew back, contracted her features involuntarily in the effort to preserve her perfect calm. Mrs Underwood gasped as if some one had seized her by the throat. As for Geoffrey, he was the only one who replied.
“If,” he said, “you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughters, as I believe, it will make a great deal of difference to us all.”
“The question was addressed to me,” said Miss Anna, with a slight trembling that ran over all her person; “and it is for me to answer it. Young lady, whoever you are, if you are Leonard Crosthwaite’s daughter, which I don’t believe for a moment – I have no doubt your father was a much more respectable man: but if you are, and can prove it, you will be able to give rise to a great lawsuit, which will be fought out on both sides for years; which will cost you every penny you have, if you have anything, and ruin everybody belonging to you: besides bringing out a great many things about the family you claim to belong to, which we would all much rather keep to ourselves; and in all likelihood it would be a failure at the end. That is the true state of the case, whatever that boy may tell you – or anyone else,” she added after a moment, with a glance at her sister, “or any one else. This world is full of fools.”
“Oh, Grace, come – come away!” cried Milly in her sister’s ear.
But Grace was less easily moved. She was bewildered, and confused, and alarmed. It seemed to her that the rights of her family were in her hand, and her mind leaped to great things – far greater than this simple house and its riches. Perhaps Lenny – yes, certainly, she remembered now, though it had not occurred to her before, her father had Leonard in his name, and her boy-brother was also Leonard – might be the heir of some great property, and only she to defend his rights. Grace stood and looked at them all with a swelling of her breast, yet a dazzled dimness in her eyes, as if she were about to faint. She never had done such a thing in her life; but then she never had been in such an extraordinary strait, and with nobody to advise her. No wonder the light which she wanted so much within to clear up the way before her, should seem to fail without.
“I can’t see my way,” she said faintly. “I cannot tell what to do. Yes, Milly, we will go away; but for all that, it is not finished,” she said, turning to Miss Anna with a gleam of dim defiance in her eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
THE girls were now as eager to go away as they had been to come; they would scarcely wait for the cab which was sent for, and they paid very little attention to the anxious civilities of Mrs Underwood and Geoffrey, who conducted them to the door and put them into the carriage, making every kind of wistful endeavour to obliterate the impression made upon their minds by the other member of the family. Grace and Milly were in too great haste to consult each other, to compare notes, and to realise this strange new complication in their lives, to have their ears open to Mrs Underwood’s apologies.
“You must not mind Anna,” she said in an undertone, as she led them into the hall, with its dark oaken furniture and scanty light, out of the warm and softened brightness of Miss Anna’s room. “She has always been used to having her own way; she cannot bear to be contradicted. When she takes anything into her head it is so difficult to convince her; oh, she is a great deal cleverer than I am, that is true; but she will not be convinced when she has taken a thing into her head.”
This little explanatory stream of talk seemed to flow round them as they went to the door, but they paid very little attention to it. They scarcely heard Mrs Underwood’s promise to go and see them at their hotel next day; and they submitted with a little surprise rather than accepted with any pleasure her offer of kindness, when she took each in succession by the hand and kissed her, with a mixture of nervous timidity and affection. “If it is so, we are relations,” she said almost under her breath; “and if it is not so, my poor dears, my poor children, my heart bleeds for you all the same.” The water trembling in her eyes and the quaver of her voice showed the good woman’s sincerity; but the girls were scarcely moved by it, so full were their minds of this discovery, which they did not understand. As for Geoffrey, he said nothing at all; he shut the door of the cab and lingered for a moment looking at them wistfully, but that was all. There was in his face a pained consciousness of the difference between his own position and theirs. He, with his home behind him, and all the long-established household gods which had protected him all his life; while the other two, so much younger, feebler, and less able to shift for themselves, had nothing but the cold foreign shelter of a hotel to go back upon. He stood bareheaded in the rain, which, to complete the resemblance with their father’s visit to this place, began to drizzle down continuously out of the dim persistent skies; and his face was the last thing they saw, gazing compassionately after them as they disappeared into the darkness. They were too much preoccupied even to notice this – at least Grace was too much preoccupied. Milly for her part saw him very well, but said nothing. Her mind too was full of other thoughts – yet not so full but that she could remark this quietly to herself.
But though they thus left Grove Road in great excitement they were not disappointed. If they had found themselves simply mistaken, and that nothing was known there of their father or his visit, they would have fallen from an eminence of hope, which in present circumstances they had by no means lost. Had they been received with kind indulgence as strangers, rousing no hostile or any other kind of feeling, but simply a little surprise, they would have been cruelly disappointed; but the excitement of seeing themselves regarded with alarm as dangerous intruders, so important as to be perilous to family peace, flattered them in the most subtle way. As they went slowly down the hill, jolting over the stones, their hearts were fluttered by a sense of dignity which they had never felt before. They laid their girlish heads together as they had been longing to do since ever they set foot in that strange enchanted place. What could it be? what solemn inheritance, what great fortune, to justify the panic which they had seen by movements beneath all the glitter and bravado of Miss Anna’s words? Between that exciting and wonderful idea and the associations with their father of which the darkling road seemed full, their minds were transported altogether out of their own trouble and raised into an atmosphere of high interest and responsibility. It would depend, they thought, upon how they now behaved whether their whole position might be changed. They were well off enough; there was no want in their house, nor had they any reason to suppose that their father’s death would leave them destitute. But there was a great difference between that state of ordinary and commonplace comfort, and this dazzling probability. It might have been a vacant principality, almost a throne, from the way in which Grace and Milly contemplated it. They felt as if their former life had been stopped, and that something new, altogether unrealised and unrealisable, awaited them in the future. “If we only knew what to do; if we could only decide on what is best,” Grace said. That was the difficulty now. This morning there had seemed nothing before them but a patient, melancholy waiting for their mother’s sad letter, and the news of her arrangements for their return to her; now they thought no longer of the voyage home or of anything connected with it, but of what to do and say as representatives of their father, and heads, so to speak, of the family, working on their behalf. “It will change everything,” Grace said again thoughtfully. “Instead of all of us being alike, Lenny – Lenny will be the heir. That is one thing that gives a likelihood to it,” she added, sinking her voice as if the cab-driver might perhaps hear and report the matter. “His name, Milly! I never thought of it till a few minutes ago. Lenny; of course he is Leonard; and when you think of it, papa had Leonard in his name too.”
“I thought of it directly,” said Milly, with a little satisfaction.
Grace, in her excitement, threw her arms round her sister. “It is you who ought to be the first of us two,” said Grace admiringly. “It is true that I am the eldest – but so many things occur to you that never come into my head.”
“It is because I have the time to think while you are talking,” Milly said with modesty; but she was not displeased with this testimony to her superior insight. She added, with a little awe: “Gracie, I wonder if that– is our real name?”
This was a question that took away the breath of both. They looked at each other almost with an inclination to laugh, then stopped short and mutually contemplated the impulse with horror. “It is dreadful,” said Milly, “isn’t it, to have a false name?”
“I don’t know,” said Grace, who had been so indignant an hour ago at the suggestion; “it cannot be so very dreadful if papa did it. He must have had his reasons for taking another name. There are reasons that account for everything.” Her momentary humility had disappeared by this time, and she felt equal to explaining all mysteries to her sister in her usual way. “He must have been wronged somehow when he left home. I suspect that Miss Anna, Milly; I am sure she is at the bottom of everything. She must have told lies of him, or invented stories; and then perhaps he was disinherited, and the money given to her. It would not be money; it would be lands or an estate – perhaps a fine old house.” Then they paused and looked at each other for a moment. “If that was how it was, and we got it back, mamma would certainly have to come home then.”
“But it could not be for all of us; it would only be for Lenny,” said Milly doubtfully.
“Lenny is only fifteen; he would not be of age for ever so long. And then it is always stipulated,” said Grace, “that when people have estates, what is called a great stake in the country, they should be educated in the country and made to understand it.” Insensibly she drew herself up, holding her head higher at the thought – “Mamma would not like it; but she would do what was best for Lenny – ”
“Then I suppose – ” Milly said, and now in spite of herself the smallest little laugh, instantly repented of, burst from her. She looked at her sister in great alarm, with a portentously serious countenance. “I suppose,” she repeated, as if, instead of something ridiculous, this had been the most solemn suggestion in the world, “that Lenny – will be the one of us that will be important now.”
So full was Grace of the seriousness of this thought, that she replied, without taking any notice of that guilty laugh, only by an inclination of her head: “We will have to learn all about the English laws, and how things are managed, for Lenny’s sake,” she said seriously. “He will be a magistrate, you know, and most likely in Parliament; and he will be rather behind by losing so much time in Canada. We will have to coach him up.”
“Oh but, Gracie, I don’t know things myself; I never was able to do that.”
“I must begin directly,” said Grace with a little sigh – the sigh of the self-devoted. “It was such a business – don’t you remember, Milly? – to coach him for school; and England – England is a great deal more difficult. I think I must begin Greek directly, and law – or he will never know his lessons. I hope mamma will see that it is her duty, Milly, to come at once,” she added still more seriously. Milly for one second was inclined to laugh again at the portentous and preposterous importance of her young brother, but then she recollected herself, and the tears filled her eyes.
“Oh, poor mamma!” she cried, “poor mamma! to come now!”
This turned once more the current of their thoughts. But when they got back to their hotel the argument was resumed: for it soon became an argument maintained with great heat on one side, with an unimaginable gentle obstinacy on the other. Milly, who never went against her sister’s will, was for once in opposition, and though she was not strong enough to subdue Grace, she did not yield to her.
They had begun languidly and mournfully to arrange their father’s papers in the morning. Now Grace betook herself to this pursuit with passion. She found nothing: some fragments of torn letters, torn up into very small pieces, on one of which the name of “Anna” occurred, lay in the bottom of his dressing bag; but Grace was not sufficiently skilled in the art of detection to join them together as a more experienced investigator might have done. And it revolted her to pry into what the dead man had thus wished to conceal. In all his other stores there was not a word which even suggested any information. He had scrawled, “3 Grove Road,” on a page of his blotting-paper, and twice over in other places, as if afraid of forgetting it. When she came to a little diary he had kept she paused with a sensation of awe. She had seen it a hundred times – had seen it lying open, and knew that no special sanctity was attributed to it. It was nothing but a little record of events and engagements; but when the hand is still that has scribbled these careless memoranda, how strangely their character changes! She took it to where Milly sat, and placed herself on the sofa beside her. “I cannot read this by myself,” she said.
“Oh, why should we read it at all, Grace? If papa had wanted us to know he would have told us.”
“Hush! even papa shall not make me suffer injustice!” cried the excited girl. But when the little book was opened it gave but the scantiest information. There was one entry since the landing in England, and no more; and this was all it contained: —
“Same name in directory, at old address; to go first thing and inquire.”
Grace gave a little cry when she read this; it seemed to her to tell all she wanted – and yet it told nothing. “It is quite clear,” she cried in her mistaken little triumph. Milly looked at it too with all the feeling that it was an important revelation. Then they cried a little over the foolish little events of the voyage, all set down there, with that strange unconsciousness of what was coming, which makes death so doubly terrible to the survivors. If he had but known, surely he would have put something in that little record to console, to elevate, to calm the survivors, to whom his every word was so soon to be sacred! But he did not know, and put down nothing except “Wind so-and-so; a little fog in the morning. Captain’s birthday; champagne at dinner,” and such other trifles. They folded it carefully away in paper and sealed it, with an ache at their hearts. Oh, if he had but known! and so told them something, left them some information, if it had only been a task to do! “But there is something to do!” Grace cried; “this that he began; and I will never, never give it up till Lenny has his rights! He is papa’s heir.”
CHAPTER IX
THESE vague gropings after an unknown fact were very different from the discussions which took place in Grove Road when the girls were gone. Mrs Underwood and her son lingered together for a moment in the hall. She took hold of Geoffrey’s arm with both her hands, and leaned for a moment upon his shoulder and shed a few tears of agitation and distress.
“You must not be frightened, mother. We can get on together, whatever happens,” he said in her ear.
“Oh, Geoff, how can I help being frightened? I would not wrong anybody – not by the value of a straw.”
“I am sure you would not, mother. I know you would not.”
“But what a difference it will make – oh, what a difference!” cried poor Mrs Underwood.
She cried for a moment on her son’s shoulder. Was it to be expected that she could give up the greater part of her living without a sigh?
“And then Anna,” she said, “Anna!” in a tone of mingled fright and pain.
It would seem almost as if her sister had divined, for she could not hear, this reference to herself; for she called sharply in a keen voice which penetrated through the closed door. Mrs Underwood started immediately, dropping her son’s arm.
“Must you always fly the moment she calls, as if you were her maid?” said Geoff indignantly.
His mother put up her hand to his mouth.
“I have always done it: and could I stop it now when perhaps she is going to lose everything? Oh, hush! hush! I am coming, I am coming, Anna,” she cried.
“She will never lose you, mother,” he said, detaining her. “I can see already what will happen. You will make yourself her slave, and give up every comfort in your life.”
“What can I do? What can I do? I have you, but she has nobody. I am coming, Anna, I am coming,” she said.
Miss Anna still sat in her easy chair, with the tea-table before her. Her forehead was slightly contracted, her lips parted with a quickened breath; but these faint indications were all that showed any agitation in her. She addressed her sister when she appeared in a sharper tone than usual. “You two have been having a little consultation,” she said. “Oh, quite right; quite right. Two heads are better than one. It might be considered a little ungenerous, perhaps, to the other who has no one to consult with – but I am used to it. I know what a single woman has to expect in life.”
“Oh, Anna!” her sister said, with a faint remonstrance, “when you know that you are always our first thought.”
“Your first thought! I did not know I was of so much importance,” said Miss Anna with a laugh. “One would scarcely think it to see how little attention you pay to me – either you or Geoff. But I must not complain: for it is your money as well as mine that he is so anxious to make a present of to the new claimants. And I can see very well what his motive is – very well. Oh, I know men and their motives, though I have never married. I can see through them well enough.”
“My motive! what motive can I have but justice?” the young man said.
“Oh, Geoffrey! hush, my dear. When you know it is your aunt’s way. Why should there be any quarrelling, to make everything worse?”
“Yes, it is his aunt’s way. I am not the sort of fool that accepts everything,” said Miss Anna. “I can read him like a book. He has had to have his living doled out to him through you and me, and now he sees a way of getting the better of us – of turning the tables upon us. Oh, it is clear enough. Two girls – two silly creatures that will believe every word he says; but take my advice, Geoffrey, and choose the little one. She is the one that you can turn round your little finger; the other has a will of her own. Though it is against my own interest, you see, I can still give you good advice.”
Geoffrey made no reply to this speech. His mother fluttered between him and Miss Anna with her hands spread out like the wings of a protecting bird, ready to burst in and forestall him had he attempted to reply; but he did not speak for some minutes. Then he said coldly, “We must not quarrel, as my mother says. We are all threatened with a great danger. For anything we can tell, the girls you are talking of so lightly can take the greater part of our living from us. The question not only is, have they a real claim? but can they establish it? and how far are we ready to go in the way of resistance? Rather, how far are you ready to go? Will moral certainty be enough for you, or do you demand legal proof?”
“Moral fiddlestick!” said Miss Anna. “Morals have nothing to do with it. We were always as near in blood as Leonard was; we had as good a right as he had; indeed, we had a better right, being girls, to be provided for. Uncle Abraham thought of the name when he chose his nephew instead of his nieces. And that showed his folly – for the nephew seems to have thrown off the name the moment he left the country: and of all the claimants there is only one Crosthwaite, and that is me. I do not care a brass farthing for your moral certainty. All it means is, that you have made up your mind to stand by your opinion through thick and thin. It is your opinion that the man who came here the other night was Leonard. Well! you think so, and he said so – but that is no proof.”
“Oh, Anna!” cried her sister, “speak of him kindly. Poor Leonard! when you have just heard that he is dead – ”
“What is his dying to me?” she cried, with a glance of fury. “That’s the man that was held up to us all as the image of faithfulness. Not one of you but has told me if I had not treated him so badly, this and that would not have happened; and the hound had changed his name, and married, and been happy all the time!” Then she stopped and looked at Geoffrey with a contemptuous laugh. “Mind you, I don’t acknowledge that he was Leonard Crosthwaite. It suits my purpose a great deal better to believe that he was the pink of fidelity, and died of a broken heart.”
“Very few people, they say,” said Mrs Underwood, in a reluctant voice, “die of broken hearts.”
Miss Anna’s bright eyes seemed to give out gleams of malice and scorn and indignant ridicule. “But I believe in them,” she said. “I am romantic, not prosaic like you. When you know it’s for your sake, then, naturally, you believe in it.” She stopped to laugh, her bosom panting with a mixture of contempt and fury. “If Leonard did not die for me as he promised he would, he was a poor creature. Heirs! what had he to do with heirs? If he did not die he was a traitor and a liar. Geoff, there is no poetry in you; you are a commonplace being; that is why you are capable of believing that Leonard Crosthwaite lived, and throve, and married, and had heirs. I do not believe a word of it,” she said. And again she laughed. After all, there was something behind the self-interest that determined her resistance – something which the more honourable people who gazed at her with so much wonder and alarm did not understand. Her laugh was not of merriment but of that last scorn of humanity which is despair. It made her furious, it transported her beyond all limits of nature. She had believed in this one man as true and faithful beyond all question; and he had been the greatest deceiver of all. This put such fierce scorn into her breast that she could not contain herself. The more selfish a nature is the more is it lacerated by desertion. This was a woman who had put herself above others all her life, and had been punished by the gradual failure of all whose worship she had once believed in. It was the final blow to her self-esteem, and she resented it with wild wrath and frantic ridicule of the traitor. But nobody knew the tragic element in it, or that her belief in the possibility of honour and truth went with this discovery. She appeared to the others like an unscrupulous woman, firmly determined to hold by her inheritance against all claimants – which she was: but also something more.
“All that is beyond the question,” said Geoffrey; “it is very possible that legal proof may be hard to get. We might fight it out at law for years; we might ruin them and ourselves too in the effort to make it quite clear. The question is for you, mother, as well as Aunt Anna. If you are sure these are the heirs, though they cannot prove it in law, what will you do?”
Poor Mrs Underwood was taken entirely without preparation. She turned to her son with a gasp, clasping her hands together in dismay. She was a woman who had always been told what to do by somebody – her husband, her sister, her son, had managed her mind for her. When she knew what was expected of her she did it faithfully, holding by her consigne whatever happened. She had kept steadily to her orders under the most trying circumstances already: struggling against the glimmerings of right judgment in her own breast, even while silenced by Anna’s casuistry. Since Geoffrey grew up her course had been easier, though even with his support her sister’s older influence was sometimes too much for her. But now to be asked instead of being told – to have a decision demanded from her instead of made for her, took away her breath.
“Oh, Geoff,” she said, “my dear! how can you expect me to understand anything about the law? I should like to be kind to the girls, poor things. Of course I should like to be kind to them. I would not ruin them, poor fatherless children, for all the world. How could you think such a thing of me?”
“That is not what I am asking you, mother. If you are sure they ought to have the money, though they cannot prove it legally, what will you do?”
Mrs Underwood turned a frightened look towards her sister, who laughed; then her eyes returned to the face of her son, which was very serious, and gave her no guidance. “Do?” she murmured faintly, “I will do – whatever is thought right, Geoff.”
“But what do you think right, mother?”
Geoffrey felt that if he had not put a powerful control upon himself, he might have turned round upon the laughing spectator behind him and taken her by the throat.
“Poor Geoff!” said Miss Anna; “between his mother, who cannot understand, and I who understand better than a woman ought, he is in a hard case. You had better have it out with me. What shall we do in case there is no legal proof? You know very well there is but one thing to do. Keep ourselves on our guard and refuse any concession. What else? Fancy is one thing, but property is another. You can’t go chucking that about like a ball. It must stay in the hands it is in, until others have proved a right to it. You who were brought up for the bar, and you need me to tell you that?”
“This is how the case stands, mother,” said Geoffrey. “The money which is the greater part of our living was left to your cousin, Leonard Crosthwaite, and only to you failing him and his heirs. You thought he was dead, without heirs, and you have enjoyed it all this time with an easy mind. But a fortnight ago Leonard Crosthwaite appeared. You did not know him at first, but before he went away you were convinced it was he. Is not this all true?”
“She fancied it was he, being a silly woman who believes everybody’s story, and never knew a lie from the truth all her days.”
“And you, Aunt Anna,” said Geoffrey, turning upon her with quick impatience, “did you always know the truth from a lie?”
“I have had no practice to speak of,” she answered; “lies have been told me ever since I can remember. The other is a great deal more uncommon. Don’t puzzle your mother with sophistries. Tell her what you want, that is the shortest way.”
