The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Third Person/Chapter 3
III
The curate that evening did duty alone; but on the morrow the vicar called and, as soon as he got into the room, let them again have it. 'He was hanged for smuggling!'
They stood there before him almost cold in their surprise and diffusing an air in which, somehow, this misdemeanour sounded out as the coarsest of all. 'Smuggling?' Miss Susan disappointedly echoed—as if it presented itself to the first chill of their apprehension that he had, then, only been vulgar.
'Ah, but they hanged for it freely, you know, and I was an idiot for not having taken it, in his case, for granted. If a man swung, hereabouts, it was mostly for that. Don't you know it's on that we stand here to-day, such as we are—on the fact of what our bold, bad forefathers were not afraid of? It's in the floors we walk on and under the roofs that cover us. They smuggled so hard that they never had time to do anything else; and if they broke a head not their own it was only in the awkwardness of landing their brandy-kegs. I mean, dear ladies,' good Mr. Patten wound up, 'no disrespect to your forefathers when I tell you that—as I've rather been supposing that, like all the rest of us, you were aware—they conveniently lived by it.'
Miss Susan wondered—visibly almost doubted. 'Gentlefolks?'
'It was the gentlefolks who were the worst.'
'They must have been the bravest!' Miss Amy interjected. She had listened to their visitor's free explanation with a rapid return of colour. 'And since if they lived by it they also died for it———'
'There's nothing at all to be said against them? I quite agree with you,' the vicar laughed, 'for all my cloth; and I even go so far as to say, shocking as you may think me, that we owe them, in our shabby little shrunken present, the sense of a bustling background, a sort of undertone of romance. They give us'—he humorously kept it up, verging perilously near, for his cloth, upon positive paradox—'our little handful of legend and our small possibility of ghosts.' He paused an instant, with his lighter pulpit manner, but the ladies exchanged no look. They were, in fact, already, with an immense revulsion, carried quite as far away. 'Every penny in the place, really, that hasn't been earned by subtler—not nobler—arts in our own virtuous time, and though it's a pity there are not more of em: every penny in the place was picked up, somehow, by a clever trick, and at the risk of your neck, when the backs of the king's officers were turned. It's shocking, you know, what I'm saying to you, and I wouldn't say it to every one, but I think of some of the shabby old things about us, that represent such pickings, with a sort of sneaking kindness—as of relics of our heroic age. What are we now? We were at any rate devils of fellows then!'
Susan Frush considered it all solemnly, struggling with the spell of this evocation. 'But must we forget that they were wicked?'
'Never!' Mr. Patten laughed. 'Thank you, dear friend, for reminding me. Only I'm worse than they!'
'But would you do it?'
'Murder a coastguard———?' The vicar scratched his head.
'I hope,' said Miss Amy rather surprisingly, 'you'd defend yourself.' And she gave Miss Susan a superior glance. 'I would!' she distinctly added.
Her companion anxiously took it up. 'Would you defraud the revenue?'
Miss Amy hesitated but a moment; then with a strange laugh, which she covered, however, by turning instantly away, 'Yes!' she remarkably declared.
Their visitor, at this, amused and amusing, eagerly seized her arm. 'Then may I count on you on the stroke of midnight to help me———?'
'To help you———?'
'To land the last new Tauchnitz.'
She met the proposal as one whose fancy had kindled, while her cousin watched them as if they had suddenly improvised a drawing-room charade. 'A service of danger?'
'Under the cliff—when you see the lugger stand in!'
'Armed to the teeth?'
'Yes—but invisibly. Your old waterproof———!'
'Mine is new. I'll take Susan's!'
This good lady, however, had her reserves. 'Mayn't one of them, all the same—here and there—have been sorry?'
Mr. Patten wondered. 'For the jobs he muffed?'
'For the wrong—as it was wrong—he did.'
'"One" of them?' She had gone too far, for the vicar suddenly looked as if he divined in the question a reference.
They became, however, as promptly unanimous in meeting this danger, as to which Miss Susan in particular showed an inspired presence of mind. 'Two of them!' she sweetly smiled. 'May not Amy and I———?'
'Vicariously repent?' said Mr. Patten. 'That depends—for the true honour of Marr—on how you show it.'
'Oh, we shan't show it!' Miss Amy cried.
'Ah, then,' Mr. Patten returned, 'though atonements, to be efficient, are supposed to be public, you may do penance in secret as much as you please!'
'Well, I shall do it,' said Susan Frush.
Again, by something in her tone, the vicar's attention appeared to be caught. 'Have you then in view a particular form———?'
'Of atonement?' She coloured now, glaring rather helplessly, in spite of herself, at her companion. 'Oh, if you're sincere you'll always find one.'
Amy came to her assistance. 'The way she often treats me has made her—though there's after all no harm in her—familiar with remorse. Mayn't we, at any rate,' the younger lady continued, 'now have our letters back?' And the vicar left them with the assurance that they should receive the bundle on the morrow.
They were indeed so at one as to shrouding their mystery that no explicit agreement, no exchange of vows, needed to pass between them; they only settled down, from this moment, to an unshared possession of their secret, an economy in the use and, as may even be said, the enjoyment of it, that was part of their general instinct and habit of thrift. It had been the disposition, the practice, the necessity of each to keep, fairly indeed to clutch, everything that, as they often phrased it, came their way; and this was not the first time such an influence had determined for them an affirmation of property in objects to which ridicule, suspicion, or some other inconvenience might attach. It was their simple philosophy that one never knew of what service an odd object might not be; and there were days now on which they felt themselves to have made a better bargain with their aunt's executors than was witnessed in those law-papers which they had at first timorously regarded as the record of advantages taken of them in matters of detail. They had got, in short, more than was vulgarly, more than was even shrewdly supposed—such an indescribable unearned increment as might scarce more be divulged as a dread than as a delight. They drew together, old-maidishly, in a suspicious, invidious grasp of the idea that a dread of their very own—and blissfully not, of course, that of a failure of any essential supply—might, on nearer acquaintance, positively turn to a delight.
Upon some such attempted consideration of it, at all events, they found themselves embarking after their last interview with Mr. Patten, an understanding conveyed between them in no redundancy of discussion, no flippant repetitions nor profane recurrences, yet resting on a sense of added margin, of appropriated history, of liberties taken with time and space, that would leave them prepared both for the worst and for the best. The best would be that something that would turn out to their advantage might prove to be hidden about the place; the worst would be that they might find themselves growing to depend only too much on excitement. They found themselves amazingly reconciled, on Mr. Patten's information, to the particular character thus fixed on their visitor; they knew by tradition and fiction that even the highwaymen of the same picturesque age were often gallant gentlemen; therefore a smuggler, by such a measure, fairly belonged to the aristocracy of crime. When their packet of documents came back from the vicarage Miss Amy, to whom her associate continued to leave them, took them once more in hand; but with an effect, afresh, of discouragement and languor—a headachy sense of faded ink, of strange spelling and crabbed characters, of allusions she couldn't follow and parts she couldn't match. She placed the tattered papers piously together, wrapping them tenderly in a piece of old figured silken stuff; then, as solemnly as if they had been archives or statutes or title-deeds, laid them away in one of the several small cupboards lodged in the thickness of the wainscoted walls. What really most sustained our friends in all ways was their consciousness of having, after all and so contrariwise to what appeared—a man in the house. It removed them from that category of the manless into which no lady really lapses till every issue is closed. Their visitor was an issue—at least to the imagination, and they arrived finally, under provocation, at intensities of flutter in which they felt themselves so compromised by his hoverings that they could only consider with relief the fact of nobody's knowing.
The real complication indeed at first was that for some weeks after their talks with Mr. Patten the hoverings quite ceased; a circumstance that brought home to them in some degree a sense of indiscretion and indelicacy. They hadn't mentioned him, no; but they had come perilously near it, and they had doubtless, at any rate, too recklessly let in the light on old buried and sheltered things, old sorrows and shames. They roamed about the house themselves at times, fitfully and singly, when each supposed the other out or engaged; they paused and lingered, like soundless apparitions, in corners, doorways, passages, and sometimes suddenly met, in these experiments, with a suppressed start and a mute confession. They talked of him practically never; but each knew how the other thought—all the more that it was (oh yes, unmistakably!) in a manner different from her own. They were together, none the less, in feeling, while, week after week, he failed again to show, as if they had been guilty of blowing, with an effect of sacrilege, on old-gathered silvery ashes. It frankly came out for them that, possessed as they so strangely, yet so ridiculously were, they should be able to settle to nothing till their consciousness was yet again confirmed. Whatever the subject of it might have for them of fear or favour, profit or loss, he had taken the taste from everything else. He had converted them into wandering ghosts. At last, one day, with nothing they could afterwards perceive to have determined it, the change came—came, as the previous splash in their stillness had come, by the pale testimony of Miss Susan.
She waited till after breakfast to speak of it—or Miss Amy, rather, waited to hear her; for she showed during the meal the face of controlled commotion that her comrade already knew and that must, with the game loyally played, serve as preface to a disclosure. The younger of the friends really watched the elder, over their tea and toast, as if seeing her for the first time as possibly tortuous, suspecting in her some intention of keeping back what had happened. What had happened was that the image of the hanged man had reappeared in the night; yet only after they had moved together to the drawing-room did Miss Amy learn the facts.
'I was beside the bed—in that low chair; about'—since Miss Amy must know—'to take off my right shoe. I had noticed nothing before, and had had time partly to undress—had got into my wrapper. So, suddenly—as I happened to look—there he was. And there,' said Susan Frush, 'he stayed.'
'But where do you mean?'
'In the high-backed chair, the old flowered chintz "earchair" beside the chimney.'
'All night?—and you in your wrapper?' Then as if this image almost challenged her credulity, 'Why didn't you go to bed?' Miss Amy inquired.
'With a—a person in the room?' her friend wonderfully asked; adding after an instant as with positive pride: 'I never broke the spell!'
'And didn't freeze to death?'
'Yes, almost. To say nothing of not having slept, I can assure you, one wink. I shut my eyes for long stretches, but whenever I opened them he was still there, and I never for a moment lost consciousness.'
Miss Amy gave a groan of conscientious sympathy. 'So that you're feeling now, of course, half dead.'
Her companion turned to the chimney-glass a wan, glazed eye. 'I dare say I am looking impossible.'
Miss Amy, after an instant, found herself still conscientious. 'You are.' Her own eyes strayed to the glass, lingering there while she lost herself in thought. 'Really,' she reflected with a certain dryness, 'if that's the kind of thing it's to be———!' there would seem, in a word, to be no withstanding it for either. Why, she afterwards asked herself in secret, should the restless spirit of a dead adventurer have addressed itself, in its trouble, to such a person as her queer, quaint, inefficient housemate? It was in her, she dumbly and somewhat sorely argued, that an unappeased soul of the old race should show a confidence. To this conviction she was the more directed by the sense that Susan had, in relation to the preference shown, vain and foolish complacencies. She had her idea of what, in their prodigious predicament, should be, as she called it, 'done,' and that was a question that Amy from this time began to nurse the small aggression of not so much as discussing with her. She had certainly, poor Miss Frush, a new, an obscure reticence, and since she wouldn't speak first she should have silence to her fill. Miss Amy, however, peopled the silence with conjectural visions of her kinswoman's secret communion. Miss Susan, it was true, showed nothing, on any particular occasion, more than usual; but this was just a part of the very felicity that had begun to harden and uplift her. Days and nights hereupon elapsed without bringing felicity of any order to Amy Frush. If she had no emotions it was, she suspected, because Susan had them all; and—it would have been preposterous had it not been pathetic—she proceeded rapidly to hug the opinion that Susan was selfish and even something of a sneak. Politeness, between them, still reigned, but confidence had flown, and its place was taken by open ceremonies and confessed precautions. Miss Susan looked blank but resigned; which maintained again, unfortunately, her superior air and the presumption of her duplicity. Her manner was of not knowing where her friend's shoe pinched; but it might have been taken by a jaundiced eye for surprise at the challenge of her monopoly. The unexpected resistance of her nerves was indeed a wonder: was that, then, the result, even for a shaky old woman, of shocks sufficiently repeated? Miss Amy brooded on the rich inference that, if the first of them didn't prostrate and the rest didn't undermine, one might keep them up as easily as—well, say an unavowed acquaintance or a private commerce of letters. She was startled at the comparison into which she fell—but what was this but an intrigue like another? And fancy Susan carrying one on! That history of the long night hours of the pair in the two chairs kept before her—for it was always present—the extraordinary measure. Was the situation it involved only grotesque—or was it quite grimly grand? It struck her as both; but that was the case with all their situations. Would it be in herself, at any rate, to show such a front? She put herself such questions till she was tired of them. A few good moments of her own would have cleared the air. Luckily they were to come.