Chapter Twelve.
After all these Years
Miss Norreys found the sheltered corner she was in search of, and then she read her letter. It was a very long one, full of interest to her for reasons besides those affecting Winifred. And more than an hour had passed before, at last recalling herself to the present, she rose from her seat to return to the house.
“How perfectly beautiful it is!” she thought. “This place is almost too sunshiny, so far as I have seen it. I should like to know it in winter, or in cloudy weather; I wonder if the ‘White cat’s palace’ feeling could still remain, or if it would seem more commonplace and homely.”
“Homely,” in the sweetest sense of the word, it always was, however. As Hertha went slowly in, crossing the white-panelled entrance hall, and down one or two of the long passages, on a rather roundabout route to her quarters – for she now knew the house well, and felt a fascination in strolling about it – she passed one or two open doors, revealing glimpses of “interiors” which carried her in fancy back by a century or two. There was the still-room as it might have been in the days of the great-great-grandmothers of the present inhabitants; the white-shelved “napery” room with its snowy piles, which one knew by instinct must be lavender-scented; even the girls’ own sitting-room, which she passed on one of the first-floor landings, in spite of the very nineteenth-century piano and easel and wealth of books and book-cases, might, at the first rapid glance, have been the legendary tabby-lady’s own boudoir, with its lattice-paned windows and polished floor.
“It is like no other place in the world,” said Hertha to herself for the twentieth time. “I only wish I could give to poor Winifred some of the quite indescribable charm it has for me. I suppose it is just that she has grown up in it; but yet Celia, and even Louise, feel it almost as I do. Well, Winifred may awake in many ways yet. She will probably love her home better when there is no stifled consciousness of self-reproach mixed up with it. How glad I am she gave in before she – or I – knew the contents of Mr Montague’s letter. I must answer it at once, by the bye.”
She was standing in the corridor out of which her own room opened, leaning idly against the balusters here surrounding a sort of gallery overlooking the inner hall below, admiring the charming effects of the morning sunshine creeping in at the capriciously placed windows of this part of the house, lighting up the brasses of the great “dog fireplace,” and flecking the well-worn crimson carpet of the shallow-stepped staircase – a perfect picture of somewhat slumbrous peacefulness. All at once, through the morning quiet and stillness, re-echoing up and down from no direction that she could at once define, came a piercing scream – a scream so utterly at variance with everything around, that the startling terror of it was doubled in intensity.
Hertha looked about her, horror-stricken. Then realising that the sound had entirely died away, she began to collect herself a little, to hope that it was some trick or folly among the servants, and she was hurrying to the stairs, when again broke out the cry; this time, however, accompanied by wild confused words and the sound of hurrying footsteps. They were hurrying towards her, and in another moment Miss Norreys recognised the voice as Celia’s.
“Oh, come, come quickly,” she was calling. “She is dead! I am sure she is dead!”
“Celia,” said Hertha, as the girl came flying along wildly, “what is the matter?”
For all answer Celia caught her by the arm and dragged her backwards again – across the hall, for by this time Hertha had got to the foot of the staircase – down a side passage to a door leading out to the grounds. And there, just below the few steps leading from the terrace, for even here there were terraces to descend from as in the front, lay the cause of Celia’s agonised screams.
It was Winifred, white and unconscious, very, very white, with the half-closed, unseeing eyes, that make the dearest and best known face look strange and dreadful.
“Is she dead?” gasped Celia, who was almost as white as her sister.
Hertha had stooped down beside poor Winifred, bending very closely over her.
“Dead!” she repeated, looking up, “of course not. My dear Celia, you must have more self-control.”
The rather cold, seemingly unsympathising words brought the young girl more quickly to herself than anything else could have done, which was Hertha’s intention, though, in truth, at the first moment she had been nearly as terrified as Celia.
“Of course not. She has only fainted. Run and fetch Mrs Grimthorp – and water – and then, perhaps, Louise. Yes, Louise, tell her quietly so as not to startle her too.”
Somewhat hurt, but inexpressibly relieved, Celia rushed off. And in a few minutes the crowd of anxious faces and ready hands was only too great. Miss Norreys dismissed them all, while she and the housekeeper set to work to bring Winifred round again. After a while they succeeded: she shivered and opened her eyes, smiled faintly at Hertha, mentioning something about her head, then seemed to relapse into semi-consciousness again.
“It is more than a common faint,” said Hertha, regretfully. “I fear it may have been something of a sunstroke. Poor child, I hope I was not too hard upon her,” she added to herself.
Winifred had to be carried into the house, to a bedroom, for there were several such at White Turrets, on the ground floor; the doctor sent for, and worst of all, her father and mother told of the catastrophe, a shock which Hertha and Louise would gladly have spared them had it been possible. And for a few hours there was some serious anxiety. But it gradually dispersed. Hertha’s idea had been correct: it was a mild case of sunstroke, aggravated, no doubt, by the unusual agitation and emotion that Winifred had gone through that same morning.
By the third day she was much better, though not yet well enough to leave her room. And this was the day on which she was to have returned to London with her friend.
“It is rather too bad – don’t you think so?” she said to Hertha, “that when I had given in I should be tied by the leg like this, literally,” – for in her fall one ankle had been sprained. “It seems to take away all the – the credit of it, as it were,” she went on, with a rueful smile.
“No, dear, it does not. They all know – your parents and your sisters, and,” with a glance round to make sure that no one could hear, “your cousin. They all know what you had resolved, and as soon as you are well enough to talk more you will see what they feel about it,” Hertha replied.
A gleam of bright pleasure crossed Winifred’s pale face.
“Still,” she said, “does it not a little destroy your faith in our guardian ghost, as you choose to consider her? If I had been standing out about it, determined not to give in, she might have tried something of the kind, but as I had given in – ”
Her tone puzzled Miss Norreys.
“You don’t mean to say that the White Weeper had anything to do with your fainting-fit – your fall?” she said.
“N-no,” replied Winifred. “But if she is really so concerned about us all, about me in particular, she might have prevented it somehow, don’t you think?”
Her tone of matter-of-fact discussion of the subject was almost amusing. Winifred would always be Winifred!
“As things have turned out, I scarcely see that the catastrophe affects you or the whole question very much one way or the other,” said Miss Norreys, “except that – Winifred, it must show you how mistaken you have been in thinking you are not deeply cared for and loved.”
“Yes,” said Winifred, flushing a little, “it may have been to show me that.” Then, after a little pause: “Practically, it only affects me in this way, that I had made up my mind to go back to London with you to do my work for a week or two – for nothing, of course,” and here she grew still more flushed, “till they replace me. And I wanted to collect my things and to say good-bye to two or three people – the people where I lodged, amongst them. I have been so interested in them – in the two poor daughters; the father and mother are dreadful people, very often intoxicated,” she added calmly.
“My dear Winifred! And the society recommended such a place for a young girl to live at?” exclaimed Hertha, aghast.
“Oh dear no, I found it out for myself. And I am not a young girl. I was able to be of great use to them. But for me there would have been an execution in the house ever so long ago.”
And then some allusion in Mr Montague’s letter – which, in her newborn anxiety to spare Winifred further mortification, Hertha had determined she should never see, recurred to Miss Norreys’s mind. “It appears she has even set the society’s rules at defiance with regard to her lodgings.” She understood the sentence now.
“I can do any commissions that need to be done for you. I have arranged now to stay till the day after to-morrow, and you will be able to tell me all by then,” she said quietly, thinking in her own mind that it was probably very well that Winifred was not to return to her self-chosen quarters at all. “The White Weeper must have been very wise not to have prevented the accident, even supposing she could have done so,” she thought to herself, while half laughing at her own fancifulness. But the idea suggested a question.
“What did make you fall, I wonder?” she said. “Do you think you fainted first, or that the shock of the fall made you faint?”
“I don’t know,” said Winifred. “It was very strange. I was dizzy – that was the sunstroke, I suppose. But I might have had a slight sunstroke without either falling or fainting. I have never fainted before, so I don’t know anything about it. But it was very strange. I felt dizzy, as I said, and I was going up the terrace steps – it was the terrace, you know, that runs on to the aspens – when all at once I became icy cold, not cold in myself, but as if something outside me, something coming to me, had made me cold. It was so startling, so extraordinary, that the shock seemed to paralyse me – I felt myself going, and then I must have fallen. The next thing I remember is your face looking at me.”
“It is strange,” said Hertha, “but I do not know much about fainting either.”
“You see,” said Winifred, naïvely, “I don’t think in all my life before I had ever cried so violently, or – or felt so – so unlike myself.”
“No,” agreed Hertha. And in her own mind she said that there are certainly “more things” close about us than we dream of. Who could say if the awakening of Winifred’s finer and more perceptive nature might not have begun?
Two days later, Miss Norreys found herself in the train on her return journey to London. She was alone this time – she could scarcely believe that barely ten days had passed since the exquisite spring morning when she and Winifred travelled down together to the home Hertha had pictured to herself as so modest, if not humble, an abode. And even now she could not repress a smile at the thought of her own astonishment at the first sight of White Turrets, and her indignation against Winifred.
How much seemed to have happened in those few days! It had been to Hertha like the reading of a very interesting book, in which, for the time, her own life and thoughts had been merged.
“And not even the ghost story wanting, which is to be found in every orthodox novel nowadays,” she thought. “But I am not at the end of my story of real life yet. I have to prepare for pretty Celia coming to me next month, and to settle up Winifred’s small affairs. I am sorry for her accident, poor child, but very glad she is not coming up to London just now. It would have been almost impossible to conceal from her the real state of the case.”
For Mr Montague’s letter – the letter which Hertha had refrained from reading before her talk with Winifred – had contained matter which would have been sorely mortifying to the heiress of White Turrets. The society among whose workers she had for a short time been enrolled had decided on dismissing her, feeling naturally indignant at the deception which its heads considered had been put upon them. Mr Montague was, of course, exonerated from all intentional collusion, but his position in the matter was unpleasant, and but for his firm and steady regard for Hertha, he might have visited on her some of his annoyance.
“Nor could I have resented it if he had done so,” thought Miss Norreys.
But Mr Montague had behaved well and unselfishly. All he could do he had done, and that had been to obtain a promise that if Miss Maryon at once sent in her resignation it would be accepted in lieu of a dismissal.
“They are by no means sorry to be free of her,” he wrote, “for though a clever girl in several ways, her self-will and defiance of authority were impossible to stand, coupled as they were with complete inexperience and reluctance to ask or take advice.” And then followed the remark already quoted about Winifred’s change of quarters.
Hertha sighed.
“I do feel terribly sorry to have involved Mr Montague so uncomfortably,” she said. “Even now I feel as if I could shake Winifred with pleasure.”
She took the letter out of her bag to read it again. She did not own to herself that in the postscript – for there was a postscript – lay its greatest interest. Yet her eyes dwelt on the two or three lines as if they would read in them more, far more, than was there.
“I think I must tell you,” wrote her old friend, “that at last, after all these years, I have heard from Austin. He writes cheerfully, and hopes to be able to return home for good next autumn. He is not married.”
But Hertha folded the page and replaced the letter resolutely in the envelope.
“No,” she said to herself, “I must not think of him at all. After all these years, as Mr Montague says, it would be worse than folly, utter madness, to risk reopening the old wounds.”
And Hertha knew how to use a mental lock and key.
Still, all through the weeks and months that followed – through the fatigue and not infrequent trials and annoyances of her own almost overwhelmingly busy life – through her newly awakened, interest in, and friendship for, the family at White Turrets – through everything, there ran, like the rippling of an all but inaudible brook in the summer time, a little acknowledged refrain of gladness, of hope. And the words, which were set to this fairy music were always the same. “Austin is coming home for good next autumn. He is not married.”
Celia, pretty Celia, as Hertha called her to herself, joined Miss Norreys before long, as arranged. Long afterwards —always afterwards, perhaps I should say – Hertha came to see what a happy thing for her at this juncture had been the advent into her own daily life of this fresh, enthusiastic, yet thoughtful young nature. They suited each other admirably. Celia was so entirely in earnest, so forgetful of self in her work, so grateful for the advantages she owed in considerable measure to her friend, that she seemed never in the way. She had, of course, many difficulties to contend with, for even genius cannot walk along a royal road for many steps together; then come the rough bits, the flat, dull, monotonous stretches, when one seems to be making no way, and worst, yet best of all, perhaps, the ever-increasing consciousness of falling short of one’s ever ascending ideal.
But by degrees the great fact came to be incontestable – the genius was there.
And Winifred, for her part, kept her promise man – or womanfully. She had not boasted in saying she was not one to do things by halves. She set her shoulder to the wheel of the duties she had never before taken any real interest in. There came up to Celia now and then lists of appallingly clever books on eminently practical subjects, all directly or indirectly connected with the management, on the best possible lines, of a large estate.
And when Celia returned to London again, after a happy Christmastide at White Turrets the following winter, her report was most encouraging.
“I cannot tell you how well Winifred is getting on,” she said, “and how excellently she does everything. And with her as his more than right hand, papa seems a different being. She really is very clever.”
“I am sure of it,” Miss Norreys replied warmly.
“And the queer thing is, that though she has never been so useful in her life, she is so much less self-confident,” said Celia. “She is, oh, so much softer and more sympathising!”
“I think that is natural. She is no longer at war with herself, and unconsciously on the defensive,” replied the elder woman.
“But is it not delightful to you to think that it is really all your doing, dear Hertha?” asked Celia.
Hertha smiled.
“I do not feel that it was,” she said. “At least, my hands were strengthened very strangely. I – Celia,” she broke off abruptly, “I want to ask you something. Has the White Weeper been heard of or seen of late?”
“No, I believe not once,” said Celia in surprise.
Hertha bent her head in sign of satisfaction.
“I thought so,” she said. “Celia,” she went on, “I think I will tell you now what I have never told any one but Winifred.”
And she related the story of her strange experience that moonlight night at White Turrets.
Celia listened breathlessly, her face growing a shade paler.
“How extraordinary, how strange!” she exclaimed. “And you think Winifred was really influenced by it?”
“At least she did not mock at it – not in the very slightest,” said Hertha. “And – there was something more, that day she fainted, you remember?”
“Yes,” said Celia.
“Did she never tell you what she had felt?” And Hertha repeated what Winifred had told her.
Celia shook her head.
“No, she never told me. She knows I have always been so frightened about it. But – I scarcely see why she came, or tried to come, to Winifred herself, when the point was gained and she had given in?”
“Ah – I must tell you the rest, and this I think impressed your sister most of all. A day or two after I returned to London, after that Easter time – I went, at her request, to collect her things and pay some money she thought due to the people she had lodged with. What do you think I found? A deserted house – in the possession of the police. There had been a fire the night but one before, caused, no doubt, by the people themselves, for they were a very undesirable lot. They had all escaped, however, as they lived below; but the upper rooms, the very rooms Winifred had had, were literally gutted – in a state of black, charred desolation. We cannot say, of course, but when I explained my errand, the policeman said the lady should be thankful that she had been prevented returning. ‘Ten to one if she could have been got out alive,’ he said.”
“Oh, Hertha!” exclaimed Celia, horror-struck. “And you told Winifred?”
“Yes, though not immediately. She was still ill when it happened. But I think it impressed her exceedingly. Still, as she has not told you about it, it may be as well never to mention it.”
“I will never do so,” said Celia. “But I think I shall never feel afraid of the White Weeper again.”
Then she went on to tell her friend about Louise and Lennox in their own house, their marriage having taken place the preceding autumn.
“They are as happy as the good people in a fairy tale,” she said.
When Celia went home the next time – a little more than a year after she had joined Miss Norreys, she took with her an astonishing piece of news. Hertha, Winifred’s typical, self-dependent woman, Hertha, was going to be married!
“It is an old story,” said Celia, calmly. “An old story, ending very beautifully, I think. I cannot tell you much, for I do not know the whole. But they were separated for years, through nobody’s fault exactly, and neither has ever cared for any one else,” she added simply.
“All the same,” said Winifred, “I am just a little disappointed in her.”
Celia’s own plans were not materially affected by this unexpected event, as, having by this time gathered experience, she was able to go on with her studies without actually sharing her friend’s home. Before long, those studies led her further afield for a time. But this sketch, or rough outline, rather – not worthy of the name of a story – of some girls’ experiences, must come to an end without chronicling the successes of the young painter, of whom great things are prophesied.
There are those, too, who predict that Celia Maryon is about to try the experiment of reconciling the claims and duties of married life with those of a special vocation. And if it be possible to succeed in so doing, assuredly no woman could have a wiser, less exacting, and more sympathising husband than the one whom rumour has selected for her – Eric Balderson.