The Black Robe · Chapter 37On the Road to Rome. (2)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
“Whatever you may think of his conduct,” she continued, “I beg that you will not speak of it to me. May I ask your opinion (now you have read his letter) on another matter, in which my own conduct is concerned? In former days—”
She paused, poor soul, in evident confusion and distress.
“Why speak of those days?” I ventured to say.
“I must speak of them. In former days, I think you were told that my father’s will provided for my mother and for me. You know that we have enough to live on?”
I had heard of it, at the time of our betrothal—when the marriage settlement was in preparation. The mother and daughter had each a little income of a few hundreds a year. The exact amount had escaped my memory.
After answering her to this effect, I waited to hear more.
She suddenly became silent; the most painful embarrassment showed itself in her face and manner. “Never mind the rest,” she said, mastering her confusion after an interval. “I have had some hard trials to bear; I forget things—” she made an effort to finish the sentence, and gave it up, and called to the dog to come to her. The tears were in her eyes, and that was the way she took to hide them from me.
In general, I am not quick at reading the minds of others—but I thought I understood Stella. Now that we were face to face, the impulse to trust me had, for the moment, got the better of her caution and her pride; she was half ashamed of it, half inclined to follow it. I hesitated no longer. The time for which I had waited—the time to prove, without any indelicacy on my side, that I had never been unworthy of her—had surely come at last.
“Do you remember my reply to your letter about Father Benwell?” I asked.
“Yes—every word of it.”
“I promised, if you ever had need of me, to prove that I had never been unworthy of your confidence. In your present situation, I can honorably keep my promise. Shall I wait till you are calmer? or shall I go on at once?”
“At once!”
“When your mother and your friends took you from me,” I resumed, “if you had shown any hesitation—”
She shuddered. The image of my unhappy wife, vindictively confronting us on the church steps, seemed to be recalled to her memory. “Don’t go back to it!” she cried. “Spare me, I entreat you.”
I opened the writing-case in which I keep the papers sent to me by the Rector of Belhaven, and placed them on the table by which she was sitting. The more plainly and briefly I spoke now, the better I thought it might be for both of us.
“Since we parted at Brussels,” I said, “my wife has died. Here is a copy of the medical certificate of her death.”
Stella refused to look at it. “I don’t understand such things,” she answered faintly. “What is this?”
She took up my wife’s death-bed confession.
“Read it,” I said.
She looked frightened. “What will it tell me?” she asked.
“It will tell you, Stella, that false appearances once led you into wronging an innocent man.”
Having said this, I walked away to a window behind her, at the further end of the room, so that she might not see me while she read.
After a time—how much longer it seemed to be than it really was!—I heard her move. As I turned from the window, she ran to me, and fell on her knees at my feet. I tried to raise her; I entreated her to believe that she was forgiven. She seized my hands, and held them over her face—they were wet with her tears. “I am ashamed to look at you,” she said. “Oh, Bernard, what a wretch I have been!”
I never was so distressed in my life. I don’t know what I should have said, what I should have done, if my dear old dog had not helped me out of it. He, too, ran up to me, with the loving jealousy of his race, and tried to lick my hands, still fast in Stella’s hold. His paws were on her shoulder; he attempted to push himself between us. I think I successfully assumed a tranquillity which I was far from really feeling. “Come, come!” I said, “you mustn’t make Traveler jealous.” She let me raise her. Ah, if she could have kissed me—but that was not to be done; she kissed the dog’s head, and then she spoke to me. I shall not set down what she said in these pages. While I live, there is no fear of my forgetting those words.
I led her back to her chair. The letter addressed to me by the Rector of Belhaven still lay on the table, unread. It was of some importance to Stella’s complete enlightenment, as containing evidence that the confession was genuine. But I hesitated, for her sake, to speak of it just yet.
“Now you know that you have a friend to help and advise you—” I began.
“No,” she interposed; “more than a friend; say a brother.”
I said it. “You had something to ask of me,” I resumed, “and you never put the question.”
She understood me.
“I meant to tell you,” she said, “that I had written a letter of refusal to Mr. Romayne’s lawyers. I have left Ten Acres, never to return; and I refuse to accept a farthing of Mr. Romayne’s money. My mother—though she knows that we have enough to live on—tells me I have acted with inexcusable pride and folly. I wanted to ask if you blame me, Bernard, as she does?”
I daresay I was inexcusably proud and foolish too. It was the second time she had called me by my Christian name since the happy bygone time, never to come again. Under whatever influence I acted, I respected and admired her for that refusal, and I owned it in so many words. This little encouragement seemed to relieve her. She was so much calmer that I ventured to speak of the Rector’s letter.
She wouldn’t hear of it. “Oh, Bernard, have I not learned to trust you yet? Put away those papers. There is only one thing I want to know. Who gave them to you? The Rector?”
“No.”
“How did they reach you, then?”
“Through Father Benwell.”
She started at that name like a woman electrified.
“I knew it!” she cried. “It is the priest who has wrecked my married life—and he got his information from those letters, before he put them into your hands.” She waited a while, and recovered herself. “That was the first of the questions I wanted to put to you,” she said. “I am answered. I ask no more.”
She was surely wrong about Father Benwell? I tried to show her why.
I told her that my reverend friend had put the letters into my hand, with the seal which protected them unbroken. She laughed disdainfully. Did I know him so little as to doubt for a moment that he could break a seal and replace it again? This view was entirely new to me; I was startled, but not convinced. I never desert my friends—even when they are friends of no very long standing—and I still tried to defend Father Benwell. The only result was to make her alter her intention of asking me no more questions. I innocently roused in her a new curiosity. She was eager to know how I had first become acquainted with the priest, and how he had contrived to possess himself of papers which were intended for my reading only.
There was but one way of answering her.
It was far from easy to a man like myself, unaccustomed to state circumstances in their proper order—but I had no other choice than to reply, by telling the long story of the theft and discovery of the Rector’s papers. So far as Father Benwell was concerned, the narrative only confirmed her suspicions. For the rest, the circumstances which most interested her were the circumstances associated with the French boy.
“Anything connected with that poor creature,” she said, “has a dreadful interest for me now.”
“Did you know him?” I asked, with some surprise.
“I knew him and his mother—you shall hear how, at another time. I suppose I felt a presentiment that the boy would have some evil influence over me. At any rate, when I accidentally touched him, I trembled as if I had touched a serpent. You will think me superstitious—but, after what you have said, it is certainly true that he has been the indirect cause of the misfortune that has fallen on me. How came he to steal the papers? Did you ask the Rector, when you went to Belhaven?”
“I asked the Rector nothing. But he thought it his duty to tell me all that he knew of the theft.”
She drew her chair nearer to me. “Let me hear every word of it!” she pleaded eagerly.
I felt some reluctance to comply with the request.
“Is it not fit for me to hear?” she asked.
This forced me to be plain with her. “If I repeat what the Rector told me,” I said, “I must speak of my wife.”
She took my hand. “You have pitied and forgiven her,” she answered. “Speak of her, Bernard—and don’t, for God’s sake, think that my heart is harder than yours.”
I kissed the hand that she had given to me—even her “brother” might do that!
“It began,” I said, “in the grateful attachment which the boy felt for my wife. He refused to leave her bedside on the day when she dictated her confession to the Rector. As he was entirely ignorant of the English language, there seemed to be no objection to letting him have his own way. He became inquisitive as the writing went on. His questions annoyed the Rector—and as the easiest way of satisfying his curiosity, my wife told him that she was making her will. He knew just enough, from what he had heard at various times, to associate making a will with gifts of money—and the pretended explanation silenced and satisfied him.”
“Did the Rector understand it?” Stella asked.
“Yes. Like many other Englishmen in his position, although he was not ready at speaking French, he could read the language, and could fairly well understand it, when it was spoken. After my wife’s death, he kindly placed the boy, for a few days, under the care of his housekeeper. Her early life had been passed in the island of Martinique, and she was able to communicate with the friendless foreigner in his own language. When he disappeared, she was the only person who could throw any light on his motive for stealing the papers. On the day when he entered the house, she caught him peeping through the keyhole of the study door. He must have seen where the confession was placed, and the color of the old-fashioned blue paper, on which it was written, would help him to identify it. The next morning, during the Rector’s absence, he brought the manuscript to the housekeeper, and asked her to translate it into French, so that he might know how much money was left to him in ‘the will.’ She severely reproved him, made him replace the paper in the desk from which he had taken it, and threatened to tell the Rector if his misconduct was repeated. He promised amendment, and the good-natured woman believed him. On that evening the papers were sealed, and locked up. In the morning the lock was found broken, and the papers and the boy were both missing together.”
“Do you think he showed the confession to any other person?” Stella asked. “I happen to know that he concealed it from his mother.”
“After the housekeeper’s reproof,” I replied, “he would be cunning enough, in my opinion, not to run the risk of showing it to strangers. It is far more likely that he thought he might learn English enough to read it himself.”
There the subject dropped. We were silent for a while. She was thinking, and I was looking at her. On a sudden, she raised her head. Her eyes rested on me gravely.
“It is very strange!” she said
“What is strange?”
“I have been thinking of the Lorings. They encouraged me to doubt you. They advised me to be silent about what happened at Brussels. And they too are concerned in my husband’s desertion of me. He first met Father Benwell at their house.” Her head drooped again; her next words were murmured to herself. “I am still a young woman,” she said. “Oh, God, what is my future to be?”
This morbid way of thinking distressed me. I reminded her that she had dear and devoted friends.
“Not one,” she answered, “but you.”
“Have you not seen Lady Loring?” I asked.
“She and her husband have written most kindly, inviting me to make their house my home. I have no right to blame them—they meant well. But after what has happened, I can’t go back to them.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” I said.
“Are you thinking of the Lorings?” she asked.
“I don’t even know the Lorings. I can think of nobody but you.”
I was still looking at her—and I am afraid my eyes said more than my words. If she had doubted it before, she must have now known that I was as fond of her as ever. She looked distressed rather than confused. I made an awkward attempt to set myself right.
“Surely your brother may speak plainly,” I pleaded.
She agreed to this. But nevertheless she rose to go—with a friendly word, intended (as I hoped) to show me that I had got my pardon for that time. “Will you come and see us to-morrow?” she said. “Can you forgive my mother as generously as you have forgiven me? I will take care, Bernard, that she does you justice at last.”
She held out her hand to take leave. How could I reply? If I had been a resolute man, I might have remembered that it would be best for me not to see too much of her. But I am a poor weak creature—I accepted her invitation for the next day.
January 30.—I have just returned from my visit.
My thoughts are in a state of indescribable conflict and confusion—and her mother is the cause of it. I wish I had not gone to the house. Am I a bad man, I wonder? and have I only found it out now?
Mrs. Eyrecourt was alone in the drawing-room when I went in. Judging by the easy manner in which she got up to receive me, the misfortune that has befallen her daughter seemed to have produced no sobering change in this frivolous woman.
“My dear Winterfield,” she began, “I have behaved infamously. I won’t say that appearances were against you at Brussels—I will only say I ought not to have trusted to appearances. You are the injured person; please forgive me. Shall we go on with the subject? or shall we shake hands, and say no more about it?”
I shook hands, of course. Mrs. Eyrecourt perceived that I was looking for Stella.
“Sit down,” she said; “and be good enough to put up with no more attractive society than mine. Unless I set things straight, my good friend, you and my daughter—oh, with the best intentions!—will drift into a false position. You won’t see Stella to-day. Quite impossible—and I will tell you why. I am the worldly old mother; I don’t mind what I say. My innocent daughter would die before she would confess what I am going to tell you. Can I offer you anything? Have you had lunch?”
I begged her to continue. She perplexed—I am not sure that she did not even alarm me.
“Very well,” she proceeded. “You may be surprised to hear it—but I don’t mean to allow things to go on in this way. My contemptible son-in-law shall return to his wife.”
This startled me, and I suppose I showed it.
“Wait a little,” said Mrs. Eyrecourt. “There is nothing to be alarmed about. Romayne is a weak fool; and Father Benwell’s greedy hands are (of course) in both his pockets. But he has, unless I am entirely mistaken, some small sense of shame, and some little human feeling still left. After the manner in which he has behaved, these are the merest possibilities, you will say. Very likely. I have boldly appealed to those possibilities nevertheless. He has already gone away to Rome; and I need hardly add—Father Benwell would take good care of that—he has left us no address. It doesn’t in the least matter. One of the advantages of being so much in society as I am is that I have nice acquaintances everywhere, always ready to oblige me, provided I don’t borrow money of them. I have written to Romayne, under cover to one of my friends living in Rome. Wherever he may be, there my letter will find him.”
So far, I listened quietly enough, naturally supposing that Mrs. Eyrecourt trusted to her own arguments and persuasions. I confess it even to myself, with shame. It was a relief to me to feel that the chances (with such a fanatic as Romayne) were a hundred to one against her.
This unworthy way of thinking was instantly checked by Mrs. Eyrecourt’s next words.
“Don’t suppose that I am foolish enough to attempt to reason with him,” she went on. “My letter begins and ends on the first page. His wife has a claim on him, which no newly-married man can resist. Let me do him justice. He knew nothing of it before he went away. My letter—my daughter has no suspicion that I have written it—tells him plainly what the claim is.”
She paused. Her eyes softened, her voice sank low—she became quite unlike the Mrs. Eyrecourt whom I knew.
“In a few months more, Winterfield,” she said, “my poor Stella will be a mother. My letter calls Romayne back to his wife—and his child.”
Mrs. Eyrecourt paused, evidently expecting me to offer an opinion of some sort. For the moment I was really unable to speak. Stella’s mother never had a very high opinion of my abilities. She now appeared to consider me the stupidest person in the circle of her acquaintance.
“Are you a little deaf, Winterfield?” she asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you understand me?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then why can’t you say something? I want a man’s opinion of our prospects. Good gracious, how you fidget! Put yourself in Romayne’s place, and tell me this. If you had left Stella—”
“I should never have left her, Mrs. Eyrecourt.”
“Be quiet. You don’t know what you would have done. I insist on your supposing yourself to be a weak, superstitious, conceited, fanatical fool. You understand? Now, tell me, then. Could you keep away from your wife, when you were called back to her in the name of your firstborn child? Could you resist that?”
“Most assuredly not!”
I contrived to reply with an appearance of tranquillity. It was not very easy to speak with composure. Envious, selfish, contemptible—no language is too strong to describe the turn my thoughts now took. I never hated any human being as I hated Romayne at that moment. “Damn him, he will come back!” There was my inmost feeling expressed in words.
In the meantime, Mrs. Eyrecourt was satisfied. She dashed at the next subject as fluent and as confident as ever.
“Now, Winterfield, it is surely plain to your mind that you must not see Stella again—except when I am present to tie the tongue of scandal. My daughter’s conduct must not allow her husband—if you only knew how I detest that man!—must not, I say, allow her husband the slightest excuse for keeping away from her. If we give that odious old Jesuit the chance, he will make a priest of Romayne before we know where we are. The audacity of these Papists is really beyond belief. You remember how they made Bishops and Archbishops here, in flat defiance of our laws? Father Benwell follows that example, and sets our other laws at defiance—I mean our marriage laws. I am so indignant I can’t express myself as clearly as usual. Did Stella tell you that he actually shook Romayne’s belief in his own marriage? Ah, I understand—she kept that to herself, poor dear, and with good reason, too.”
I thought of the turned-down page in the letter. Mrs. Eyrecourt readily revealed what her daughter’s delicacy had forbidden me to read—including the monstrous assumption which connected my marriage before the registrar with her son-in-law’s scruples.
“Yes,” she proceeded, “these Catholics are all alike. My daughter—I don’t mean my sweet Stella; I mean the unnatural creature in the nunnery—sets herself above her own mother. Did I ever tell you she was impudent enough to say she would pray for me? Father Benwell and the Papal Aggression over again! Now tell me, Winterfield, don’t you think, taking the circumstances into consideration—that you will act like a thoroughly sensible man if you go back to Devonshire while we are in our present situation? What with foot-warmers in the carriage, and newspapers and magazines to amuse you, it isn’t such a very long journey. And then Beaupark—dear Beaupark—is such a remarkably comfortable house in the winter; and you, you enviable creature, are such a popular man in the neighborhood. Oh, go back! go back!”
I got up and took my hat. She patted me on the shoulder. I could have throttled her at that moment. And yet she was right.
“You will make my excuses to Stella?” I said.
“You dear, good fellow, I will do more than make your excuses; I will sing your praises—as the poet says.” In her ungovernable exultation at having got rid of me, she burst into extravagant language. “I feel like a mother to you,” she went on, as we shook hands at parting. “I declare I could almost let you kiss me.”
There was not a single kissable place about Mrs. Eyrecourt, unpainted, undyed, or unpowdered. I resisted temptation and opened the door. There was still one last request that I could not help making.
“Will you let me know,” I said, “when you hear from Rome?”
“With the greatest pleasure,” Mrs. Eyrecourt answered, briskly. “Good-by, you best of friends—good-by.”
I write these lines while the servant is packing my portmanteau. Traveler knows what that means. My dog is glad, at any rate, to get away from London. I think I shall hire a yacht, and try what a voyage round the world will do for me. I wish to God I had never seen Stella!
Second Extract.
Beaupark, February 10.—News at last from Mrs. Eyrecourt.
Romayne has not even read the letter that she addressed to him—it has actually been returned to her by Father Benwell. Mrs. Eyrecourt writes, naturally enough, in a state of fury. Her one consolation, under this insulting treatment, is that her daughter knows nothing of the circumstances. She warns me (quite needlessly) to keep the secret—and sends me a copy of Father Benwell’s letter:
“Dear Madam—Mr. Romayne can read nothing that diverts his attention from his preparation for the priesthood, or that recalls past associations with errors which he has renounced forever. When a letter reaches him, it is his wise custom to look at the signature first. He has handed your letter to me, unread—with a request that I will return it to you. In his presence, I instantly sealed it up. Neither he nor I know, or wish to know, on what subject you have addressed him. We respectfully advise you not to write again.”
This is really too bad; but it has one advantage, so far as I am concerned. It sets my own unworthy doubts and jealousies before me in a baser light than ever. How honestly I defended Father Benwell! and how completely he has deceived me! I wonder whether I shall live long enough to see the Jesuit caught in one of his own traps?
11th.—I was disappointed at not hearing from Stella, yesterday. This morning has made amends; it has brought me a letter from her.
She is not well; and her mother’s conduct sadly perplexes her. At one time, Mrs. Eyrecourt’s sense of injury urges her to indulge in violent measures—she is eager to place her deserted daughter under the protection of the law; to insist on a restitution of conjugal rights or on a judicial separation. At another time she sinks into a state of abject depression; declares that it is impossible for her, in Stella’s deplorable situation, to face society; and recommends immediate retirement to some place on the Continent in which they can live cheaply. This latter suggestion Stella is not only ready, but eager, to adopt. She proves it by asking for my advice, in a postscript; no doubt remembering the happy days when I courted her in Paris, and the many foreign friends of mine who called at our hotel.
The postscript gave me the excuse that I wanted. I knew perfectly well that it would be better for me not to see her—and I went to London, for the sole purpose of seeing her, by the first train.
London, February 12.—I found mother and daughter together in the drawing-room. It was one of Mrs. Eyrecourt’s days of depression. Her little twinkling eyes tried to cast on me a look of tragic reproach; she shook her dyed head and said, “Oh. Winterfield, I didn’t think you would have done this!—Stella, fetch me my smelling bottle.”
But Stella refused to take the hint. She almost brought the tears into my eyes, she received me so kindly. If her mother had not been in the room—but her mother was in the room; I had no other choice than to enter on my business, as if I had been the family lawyer.
Mrs. Eyrecourt began by reproving Stella for asking my advice, and then assured me that she had no intention of leaving London. “How am I to get rid of my house?” she asked, irritably enough. I knew that “her house” (as she called it) was the furnished upper part of a house belonging to another person, and that she could leave it at a short notice. But I said nothing. I addressed myself to Stella.
“I have been thinking of two or three places which you might like,” I went on. “The nearest place belongs to an old French gentleman and his wife. They have no children, and they don’t let lodgings; but I believe they would be glad to receive friends of mine, if their spare rooms are not already occupied. They live at St. Germain—close to Paris.”
I looked at Mrs. Eyrecourt as I said those last words—I was as sly as Father Benwell himself. Paris justified my confidence: the temptation was too much for her. She not only gave way, but actually mentioned the amount of rent which she could afford to pay. Stella whispered her thanks to me as I went out. “My name is not mentioned, but my misfortune is alluded to in the newspapers,” she said. “Well-meaning friends are calling and condoling with me already. I shall die, if you don’t help me to get away among strangers!”
I start for Paris by the mail train, to-night.
Paris, February 13.—It is evening. I have just returned from St. Germain. Everything is settled—with more slyness on my part. I begin to think I am a born Jesuit; there must have been some detestable sympathy between Father Benwell and me.
My good friends, Monsieur and Madame Villeray, will be only too glad to receive English ladies, known to me for many years. The spacious and handsome first floor of their house (inherited from once wealthy ancestors by Madame Villeray) can be got ready to receive Mrs. Eyrecourt and her daughter in a week’s time. Our one difficulty related to the question of money. Monsieur Villeray, living on a Government pension, was modestly unwilling to ask terms; and I was too absolutely ignorant of the subject to be of the slightest assistance to him. It ended in our appealing to a house-agent at St. Germain. His estimate appeared to me to be quite reasonable. But it exceeded the pecuniary limit mentioned by Mrs. Eyrecourt. I had known the Villerays long enough to be in no danger of offending them by proposing a secret arrangement which permitted me to pay the difference. So that difficulty was got over in due course of time.
We went into the large garden at the back of the house, and there I committed another act of duplicity.
In a nice sheltered corner I discovered one of those essentially French buildings called a “pavilion,” a delightful little toy house of three rooms. Another private arrangement made me the tenant of this place. Madame Villeray smiled. “I bet you,” she said to me in her very best English, “one of these ladies is in her fascinating first youth.” The good lady little knows what a hopeless love affair mine is. I must see Stella sometimes—I ask, and hope for, no more. Never have I felt how lonely my life is, as I feel it now.