THE first agitation of the meeting between the sisters was over; the
first vivid impressions, half pleasurable, half painful, had softened a
little, and Norah and Magdalen sat together hand in hand, each rapt in
the silent fullness of her own joy. Magdalen was the first to speak.
"You have something to tell me, Norah?"
"I have a thousand things to tell you, my love; and you have ten
thousand things to tell me.--Do you mean that second surprise which I
told you of in my letter?"
"Yes. I suppose it must concern me very nearly, or you would hardly have
thought of mentioning it in your first letter?"
"It does concern you very nearly. You have heard of George's house in
Essex? You must be familiar, at least, with the name of St. Crux?--What
is there to start at, my dear? I am afraid you are hardly strong enough
for any more surprises just yet?"
"Quite strong enough, Norah. I have something to say to you about St.
Crux--I have a surprise, on my side, for _you._"
"Will you tell it me now?"
"Not now. You shall know it when we are at the seaside; you shall know
it before I accept the kindness which has invited me to your husband's
house."
"What _can_ it be? Why not tell me at once?"
"You used often to set me the example of patience, Norah, in old times;
will you set me the example now?"
"With all my heart. Shall I return to my own story as well? Yes? Then we
will go back to it at once. I was telling you that St. Crux is George's
house, in Essex, the house he inherited from his uncle. Knowing that
Miss Garth had a curiosity to see the place, he left word (when he went
abroad after the admiral's death) that she and any friends who came
with her were to be admitted, if she happened to find herself in the
neighborhood during his absence. Miss Garth and I, and a large party of
Mr. Tyrrel's friends, found ourselves in the neighborhood not long after
George's departure. We had all been invited to see the launch of Mr.
Tyrrel's new yacht from the builder's yard at Wivenhoe, in Essex. When
the launch was over, the rest of the company returned to Colchester to
dine. Miss Garth and I contrived to get into the same carriage together,
with nobody but my two little pupils for our companions. We gave the
coachman his orders, and drove round by St. Crux. The moment Miss Garth
mentioned her name we were let in, and shown all over the house. I don't
know how to describe it to you. It is the most bewildering place I ever
saw in my life--"
"Don't attempt to describe it, Norah. Go on with your story instead."
"Very well. My story takes me straight into one of the rooms at St.
Crux--a room about as long as your street here--so dreary, so dirty, and
so dreadfully cold that I shiver at the bare recollection of it. Miss
Garth was for getting out of it again as speedily as possible, and so
was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking
at a singular piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture in the
comfortless place. She called it a tripod, I think. (There is nothing
to be alarmed at, Magdalen; I assure you there is nothing to be alarmed
at!) At any rate, it was a strange, three-legged thing, which supported
a great panful of charcoal ashes at the top. It was considered by all
good judges (the housekeeper told us) a wonderful piece of chasing in
metal; and she especially pointed out the beauty of some scroll-work
running round the inside of the pan, with Latin mottoes on it,
signifying--I forget what. I felt not the slightest interest in the
thing myself, but I looked close at the scroll-work to satisfy the
housekeeper. To confess the truth, she was rather tiresome with her
mechanically learned lecture on fine metal work; and, while she was
talking, I found myself idly stirring the soft feathery white ashes
backward and forward with my hand, pretending to listen, with my mind a
hundred miles away from her. I don't know how long or how short a time I
had been playing with the ashes, when my fingers suddenly encountered
a piece of crumpled paper hidden deep among them. When I brought it to
the surface, it proved to be a letter--a long letter full of cramped,
close writing.--You have anticipated my story, Magdalen, before I can
end it! You know as well as I do that the letter which my idle fingers
found was the Secret Trust. Hold out your hand, my dear. I have got
George's permission to show it to you, and there it is!"
She put the Trust into her sister's hand. Magdalen took it from
her mechanically. "You!" she said, looking at her sister with the
remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had
vainly suffered, at St. Crux--"_you_ have found it!"
"Yes," said Norah, gayly; "the Trust has proved no exception to the
general perversity of all lost things. Look for them, and they remain
invisible. Leave them alone, and they reveal themselves! You and your
lawyer, Magdalen, were both justified in supposing that your interest
in this discovery was an interest of no common kind. I spare you all our
consultations after I had produced the crumpled paper from the ashes. It
ended in George's lawyer being written to, and in George himself being
recalled from the Continent. Miss Garth and I both saw him immediately
on his return. He did what neither of us could do--he solved the mystery
of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes. Admiral Bartram, you
must know, was all his life subject to fits of somnambulism. He had been
found walking in his sleep not long before his death--just at the time,
too, when he was sadly troubled in his mind on the subject of that very
letter in your hand. George's idea is that he must have fancied he was
doing in his sleep what he would have died rather than do in his waking
moments--destroying the Trust. The fire had been lighted in the pan not
long before, and he no doubt saw it still burning in his dream. This
was George's explanation of the strange position of the letter when
I discovered it. The question of what was to be done with the letter
itself came next, and was no easy question for a woman to understand.
But I determined to master it, and I did master it, because it related
to you."
"Let me try to master it, in my turn," said Magdalen. "I have a
particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter as you
know yourself. What has it done for others, and what is it to do for
me?"
"My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk
of it! Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a
fortune."
"Is my only claim to the fortune the claim which this letter gives me?"
"Yes; the letter is your only claim. Shall I try if I can explain it in
two words? Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer's opinion,
have been made a matter for dispute, though I am sure George would
have sanctioned no proceeding of that sort. Taken, however, with the
postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines
if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally
binding, as well as morally binding, on the admiral's representatives.
I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my
own language instead of in the lawyer's. The end of the thing was simply
this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone's estate (another
legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain
reason--that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed.
If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months
earlier, results would have been just the other way. As it is, half the
money has been already divided between Mr. Noel Vanstone's next of kin;
which means, translated into plain English, my husband, and his poor
bedridden sister--who took the money formally, one day, to satisfy the
lawyer, and who gave it back again generously, the next, to satisfy
herself. So much for one half of this legacy. The other half, my dear,
is all yours. How strangely events happen, Magdalen! It is only two
years since you and I were left disinherited orphans--and we are sharing
our poor father's fortune between us, after all!"
"Wait a little, Norah. Our shares come to us in very different ways."
"Do they? Mine comes to me by my husband. Yours comes to you--" She
stopped confusedly, and changed color. "Forgive me, my own love!" she
said, putting Magdalen's hand to her lips. "I have forgotten what I
ought to have remembered. I have thoughtlessly distressed you!"
"No!" said Magdalen; "you have encouraged me."
"Encouraged you?"
"You shall see."
With those words, she rose quietly from the sofa, and walked to the open
window. Before Norah could follow her, she had torn the Trust to pieces,
and had cast the fragments into the street.
She came back to the sofa and laid her head, with a deep sigh of relief,
on Norah's bosom. "I will owe nothing to my past life," she said. "I
have parted with it as I have parted with those torn morsels of paper.
All the thoughts and all the hopes belonging to it are put away from me
forever!"
"Magdalen, my husband will never allow you! I will never allow you
myself--"
"Hush! hush! What your husband thinks right, Norah, you and I will think
right too. I will take from _you_ what I would never have taken if that
letter had given it to me. The end I dreamed of has come. Nothing is
changed but the position I once thought we might hold toward each other.
Better as it is, my love--far, far better as it is!"
So she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride.
So she entered on the new and nobler life.
* * * * * *
A month had passed. The autumn sunshine was bright even in the murky
streets, and the clocks in the neighborhood were just striking two, as
Magdalen returned alone to the house in Aaron's Buildings.
"Is he waiting for me?" she asked, anxiously, when the landlady let her
in.
He was waiting in the front room. Magdalen stole up the stairs and
knocked at the door. He called to her carelessly and absently to come
in, plainly thinking that it was only the servant who applied for
permission to enter the room.
"You hardly expected me so soon?" she said speaking on the threshold,
and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and
looked at her.
The only traces of illness still visible in her face left a delicacy in
its outline which added refinement to her beauty. She was simply dressed
in muslin. Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than the
white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed. She had never looked
lovelier in her best days than she looked now, as she advanced to the
table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of flowers that
she had brought with her from the country, and offered him her hand.
He looked anxious and careworn when she saw him closer. She interrupted
his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in
London since they had parted--if he had not even gone away, for a few
days only, to see his friends in Suffolk? No; he had been in London
ever since. He never told her that the pretty parsonage house in Suffolk
wanted all those associations with herself in which the poor four walls
at Aaron's Buildings were so rich. He only said he had been in London
ever since.
"I wonder," she asked, looking him attentively in the face, "if you are
as happy to see me again as I am to see you?"
"Perhaps I am even happier, in my different way," he answered, with a
smile.
She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her
own arm-chair. "I suppose this street is very ugly," she said; "and I am
sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet--and yet it
feels like coming home again. Sit there where you used to sit; tell me
about yourself. I want to know all that you have done, all that you have
thought even, while I have been away." She tried to resume the endless
succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to lure him
into speaking of himself. But she put them far less spontaneously, far
less adroitly, than usual. Her one all-absorbing anxiety in entering
that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with. After a quarter of an
hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side, in reluctant replies
on the other, she ventured near the dangerous subject at last.
"Have you received the letters I wrote to you from the seaside?" she
asked, suddenly looking away from him for the first time.
"Yes," he said; "all."
"Have you read them?"
"Every one of them--many times over."
Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had kept her promise
bravely. The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck at
Combe-Raven to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in her
sister's presence, had been all laid before him. Nothing that she had
done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from his
knowledge. As he would have kept a pledged engagement with her, so she
had kept her pledged engagement with him. She had not faltered in
the resolution to do this; and now she faltered over the one decisive
question which she had come there to ask. Strong as the desire in her
was to know if she had lost or won him, the fear of knowing was at that
moment stronger still. She waited and trembled; she waited, and said no
more.
"May I speak to you about your letters?" he asked. "May I tell you--?"
If she had looked at him as he said those few words, she would have seen
what he thought of her in his face. She would have seen, innocent as
he was in this world's knowledge, that he knew the priceless value, the
all-ennobling virtue, of a woman who speaks the truth. But she had no
courage to look at him--no courage to raise her eyes from her lap.
"Not just yet," she said, faintly. "Not quite so soon after we have met
again."
She rose hurriedly from her chair, and walked to the window, turned back
again into the room, and approached the table, close to where he was
sitting. The writing materials scattered near him offered her a pretext
for changing the subject, and she seized on it directly. "Were you
writing a letter," she asked, "when I came in?"
"I was thinking about it," he replied. "It was not a letter to be
written without thinking first." He rose as he answered her to gather
the writing materials together and put them away.
"Why should I interrupt you?" she said. "Why not let me try whether I
can't help you instead? Is it a secret?"
"No, not a secret."
He hesitated as he answered her. She instantly guessed the truth.
"Is it about your ship?"
He little knew how she had been thinking in her absence from him of the
business which he believed that he had concealed from her. He little
knew that she had learned already to be jealous of his ship. "Do they
want you to return to your old life?" she went on. "Do they want you to
go back to the sea? Must you say Yes or No at once?"
"At once."
"If I had not come in when I did would you have said Yes?"
She unconsciously laid her hand on his arm, forgetting all inferior
considerations in her breathless anxiety to hear his next words. The
confession of his love was within a hair-breadth of escaping him; but
he checked the utterance of it even yet. "I don't care for myself," he
thought; "but how can I be certain of not distressing _her?_"
"Would you have said Yes?" she repeated.
"I was doubting," he answered--"I was doubting between Yes and No."
Her hand tightened on his arm; a sudden trembling seized her in every
limb, she could bear it no longer. All her heart went out to him in her
next words:
"Were you doubting _for my sake?"_
"Yes," he said. "Take my confession in return for yours--I was doubting
for your sake."
She said no more; she only looked at him. In that look the truth reached
him at last. The next instant she was folded in his arms, and was
shedding delicious tears of joy, with her face hidden on his bosom.
"Do I deserve my happiness?" she murmured, asking the one question at
last. "Oh, I know how the poor narrow people who have never felt and
never suffered would answer me if I asked them what I ask you. If _they_
knew my story, they would forget all the provocation, and only remember
the offense; they would fasten on my sin, and pass all my suffering
by. But you are not one of them! Tell me if you have any shadow of a
misgiving! Tell me if you doubt that the one dear object of all my life
to come is to live worthy of you! I asked you to wait and see me; I
asked you, if there was any hard truth to be told, to tell it me here
with your own lips. Tell it, my love, my husband!--tell it me now!"
She looked up, still clinging to him as she clung to the hope of her
better life to come.
"Tell me the truth!" she repeated.
"With my own lips?"
"Yes!" she answered, eagerly. "Say what you think of me with your own
lips."
He stooped and kissed her.
THE END