The Solitary House (203 page)

“I am very sorry you are going,” she said, her voice
almost sinking to a whisper; her eyes looking more and more intently at the music; her fingers flying over the keys of the piano with a strange feverish energy which I had never noticed in her before.

“I shall remember those kind words, Miss Fairlie, long after to-morrow has come and gone.”

The paleness grew whiter on her face, and she turned farther away from me.

“Don’t speak of to-morrow,” she said. “Let the music speak to us of to-night, in a happier language than ours.”

Her lips trembled—a faint sigh fluttered from them, which she tried vainly to suppress. Her fingers wavered on the piano; she struck a false note; confused herself in trying to set it right; and dropped her hands angrily on her lap. Miss Halcombe and Mr. Gilmore looked up in astonishment from the card-table at which they were playing. Even Mrs. Vesey, dozing in her chair, woke at the sudden cessation of the music, and inquired what had happened.

“You play at whist, Mr. Hartright?” asked Miss Halcombe, with her eyes directed significantly at the place I occupied.

I knew what she meant; I knew she was right; and I rose at once to go to the card-table. As I left the piano, Miss Fairlie turned a page of the music, and touched the keys again with a surer hand.

“I
will
play it,” she said, striking the notes almost passionately. “I
will
play it on the last night.”

“Come, Mrs. Vesey,” said Miss Halcombe; “Mr. Gilmore and I are tired of écarté—come and be Mr. Hartright’s partner at whist.”

The old lawyer smiled satirically. His had been the winning hand; and he had just turned up a king. He evidently attributed Miss Halcombe’s abrupt change in the
card-table arrangements to a lady’s inability to play the losing game.

The rest of the evening passed without a word or a look from her. She kept her place at the piano; and I kept mine at the card-table. She played unintermittingly—played as if the music was her only refuge from herself. Sometimes, her fingers touched the notes with a lingering fondness, a soft, plaintive, dying tenderness, unutterably beautiful and mournful to hear—sometimes, they faltered and failed her, or hurried over the instrument mechanically, as if their task was a burden to them. But still, change and waver as they might in the expression they imparted to the music, their resolution to play never faltered. She only rose from the piano when we all rose to say good night.

Mrs. Vesey was the nearest to the door, and the first to shake hands with me.

“I shall not see you again, Mr. Hartright,” said the old lady. “I am truly sorry you are going away. You have been very kind and attentive; and an old woman, like me, feels kindness and attention. I wish you happy, sir—I wish you a kind good-by.”

Mr. Gilmore came next.

“I hope we shall have a future opportunity of bettering our acquaintance, Mr. Hartright. You quite understand about that little matter of business being safe in my hands? Yes, yes, of course. Bless me, how cold it is! Don’t let me keep you at the door. Bon voyage, my dear sir—bon voyage, as the French say.”

Miss Halcombe followed.

“Half-past seven to-morrow morning,” she said; then added, in a whisper, “I have heard and seen more than you think. Your conduct to-night has made me your friend for life.”

Miss Fairlie came last. I could not trust myself to look
at her, when I took her hand, and when I thought of the next morning.

“My departure must be a very early one,” I said. “I shall be gone, Miss Fairlie, before you——”

“No, no,” she interposed, hastily; “not before I am out of my room. I shall be down to breakfast with Marian. I am not so ungrateful, not so forgetful of the past three months——”

Her voice failed her; her hand closed gently round mine—then dropped it suddenly. Before I could say, “Good night,” she was gone.

The end comes fast to meet me—comes inevitably, as the light of the last morning came at Limmeridge House.

It was barely half-past seven when I went downstairs—but I found them both at the breakfast-table waiting for me. In the chill air, in the dim light, in the gloomy morning silence of the house, we three sat down together, and tried to eat, tried to talk. The struggle to preserve appearances was hopeless and useless; and I rose to end it.

As I held out my hand, as Miss Halcombe, who was nearest to me, took it, Miss Fairlie turned away suddenly, and hurried from the room.

“Better so,” said Miss Halcombe, when the door had closed—“better so, for you and for her.”

I waited a moment before I could speak—it was hard to lose her, without a parting word, or a parting look. I controlled myself; I tried to take leave of Miss Halcombe in fitting terms; but all the farewell words I would fain have spoken, dwindled to one sentence.

“Have I deserved that you should write to me?” was all I could say.

“You have nobly deserved everything that I can do for you, as long as we both live. Whatever the end is, you shall know it.”

“And if I can ever be of help again, at any future time, long after the memory of my presumption and my folly is forgotten——”

I could add no more. My voice faltered, my eyes moistened, in spite of me.

She caught me by both hands—she pressed them with the strong, steady grasp of a man—her dark eyes glittered—her brown complexion flushed deep—the force and energy of her face glowed and grew beautiful with the pure inner light of her generosity and her pity.

“I will trust you—if ever the time comes, I will trust you as
my
friend and
her
friend; as
my
brother and
her
brother.” She stopped; drew me nearer to her—the fearless, noble creature—touched my forehead, sisterlike, with her lips; and called me by my Christian name. “God bless you, Walter,” she said. “Wait here alone, and compose yourself—I had better not stay for both our sakes; I had better see you go, from the balcony upstairs.”

She left the room. I turned away towards the window, where nothing faced me but the lonely autumn landscape—I turned away to master myself, before I, too, left the room in my turn, and left it for ever.

A minute passed—it could hardly have been more—when I heard the door open again softly; and the rustling of a woman’s dress on the carpet, moved towards me. My heart beat violently as I turned round. Miss Fairlie was approaching me from the farther end of the room.

She stopped and hesitated, when our eyes met, and when she saw that we were alone. Then, with that courage which women lose so often in the small emergency, and so seldom in the great, she came on nearer to me, strangely
pale and strangely quiet, drawing one hand after her along the table by which she walked, and holding something at her side, in the other, which was hidden by the folds of her dress.

“I only went into the drawing-room,” she said, “to look for this. It may remind you of your visit here, and of the friends you leave behind you. You told me I had improved very much when I did it—and I thought you might like——”

She turned her head away, and offered me a little sketch drawn throughout by her own pencil, of the summer-house in which we had first met. The paper trembled in her hand as she held it out to me—trembled in mine, as I took it from her.

I was afraid to say what I felt—I only answered: “It shall never leave me; all my life long it shall be the treasure that I prize most. I am very grateful for it—very grateful to
you
, for not letting me go away without bidding you good-by.”

“Oh!” she said, innocently, “how could I let you go, after we have passed so many happy days together!”

“Those days may never return again. Miss Fairlie—my way of life and yours are very far apart. But if a time should come, when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength will give you a moment’s happiness or spare you a moment’s sorrow, will you try to remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you? Miss Halcombe has promised to trust me—will you promise, too?”

The farewell sadness in the kind blue eyes shone dimly through her gathering tears.

“I promise it,” she said, in broken tones. “Oh, don’t look at me like that! I promise it with all my heart.”

I ventured a little nearer to her, and held out my hand.

“You have many friends who love you, Miss Fairlie. Your happy future is the dear object of many hopes. May I say, at parting, that it is the dear object of
my
hopes too?”

The tears flowed fast down her cheeks. She rested one trembling hand on the table to steady herself, while she gave me the other. I took it in mine—I held it fast. My head drooped over it, my tears fell on it, my lips pressed it—not in love; oh, not in love, at that last moment, but in the agony and the self-abandonment of despair.

“For God’s sake, leave me!” she said, faintly.

The confession of her heart’s secret burst from her in those pleading words. I had no right to hear them, no right to answer them: they were the words that banished me, in the name of her sacred weakness, from the room. It was all over. I dropped her hand; I said no more. The blinding tears shut her out from my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for the last time. One look, as she sank into a chair, as her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped on them wearily. One farewell look; and the door had closed on her—the great gulf of separation had opened between us—the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE NARRATIVE OF VINCENT GILMORE, SOLICITOR, OF CHANCERY-LANE, LONDON

I

I
write these lines at the request of my friend, Mr. Walter Hartright. They are intended to convey a description of certain events which seriously affected Miss Fairlie’s interests, and which took place after the period of Mr. Hartright’s departure from Limmeridge House.

There is no need for me to say whether my own opinion does or does not sanction the disclosure of the remarkable family story, of which my narrative forms an important component part. Mr. Hartright has taken that responsibility on himself; and circumstances yet to be related will show that he has amply earned the right to do so, if he chooses to exercise it. The plan he has adopted for presenting the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence. My appearance here, as narrator, is the necessary consequence of this arrangement. I was present during the sojourn of Sir Percival Glyde in Cumberland, and was personally concerned in one important result of his short residence under Mr. Fairlie’s roof. It is my duty, therefore, to
add these new links to the chain of events, and to take up the chain itself at the point where, for the present only, Mr. Hartright has dropped it.

I arrived at Limmeridge House, on Friday the second of November.

My object was to remain at Mr. Fairlie’s until the arrival of Sir Percival Glyde. If that event led to the appointment of any given day for Sir Percival’s union with Miss Fairlie, I was to take the necessary instructions back with me to London, and to occupy myself in drawing the lady’s marriage-settlement.

On the Friday, I was not favoured by Mr. Fairlie with an interview. He had been, or had fancied himself to be, an invalid for years past; and he was not well enough to receive me. Miss Halcombe was the first member of the family whom I saw. She met me at the house door; and introduced me to Mr. Hartright, who had been staying at Limmeridge for some time past.

I did not see Miss Fairlie until later in the day, at dinner time. She was not looking well, and I was sorry to observe it. She is a sweet, lovable girl, as amiable and attentive to everyone about her as her excellent mother used to be—though, personally speaking, she takes after her father. Mrs. Fairlie had dark eyes and hair; and her elder daughter, Miss Halcombe, strongly reminds me of her. Miss Fairlie played to us in the evening—not so well as usual, I thought. We had a rubber at whist; a mere profanation, so far as play was concerned, of that noble game. I had been favourably impressed by Mr. Hartright, on our first introduction to one another; but I soon discovered that he was not free from the social failings incidental to his age. There are three things that none of the young men of the
present generation can do. They can’t sit over their wine; they can’t play at whist; and they can’t pay a lady a compliment. Mr. Hartright was no exception to the general rule. Otherwise, even in those early days and on that short acquaintance, he struck me as being a modest and gentlemanlike young man.

So the Friday passed. I say nothing about the more serious matters which engaged my attention on that day—the anonymous letter to Miss Fairlie; the measures I thought it right to adopt when the matter was mentioned to me; and the conviction I entertained that every possible explanation of the circumstances would be readily afforded by Sir Percival Glyde, having all been fully noticed, as I understand, in the narrative which precedes this.

On the Saturday, Mr. Hartright had left before I got down to breakfast. Miss Fairlie kept her room all day; and Miss Halcombe appeared to me to be out of spirits. The house was not what it used to be in the time of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Fairlie. I took a walk by myself in the forenoon: and looked about at some of the places which I first saw when I was staying at Limmeridge to transact family business, more than thirty years since. They were not what they used to be, either.

At two o’clock Mr. Fairlie sent to say he was well enough to see me.
He
had not altered, at any rate, since I first knew him. His talk was to the same purpose as usual—all about himself and his ailments, his wonderful coins, and his matchless Rembrandt etchings. The moment I tried to speak of the business that had brought me to his house, he shut his eyes and said I “upset” him. I persisted in upsetting him by returning again and again to the subject. All I could ascertain was that he looked on his niece’s marriage as a settled thing, that her father had sanctioned it, that he sanctioned it himself, that it was a desirable marriage, and that
he should be personally rejoiced when the worry of it was over. As to the settlement, if I would consult his niece, and afterwards dive as deeply as I pleased into my own knowledge of the family affairs, and get everything ready, and limit his share in the business, as guardian, to saying, Yes, at the right moment—why of course he would meet my views, and everybody else’s views, with infinite pleasure. In the mean time, there I saw him, a helpless sufferer, confined to his room. Did I think he looked as if he wanted teasing? No. Then why tease him?