CHAPTER IV
To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye’s letter.
It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds. She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over. ‘It is mine?’ she said.
‘Why, yes, can’t you see it is?’ said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.
‘O yes, of course!’ replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly tittering, and blushing still more.
Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman’s departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with tears.
A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her bed-chamber. Anna’s mistress looked at her, and said: ‘How dismal you seem this morning, Anna. What’s the matter?’
‘I’m not dismal, I’m glad; only I – ’ She stopped to stifle a sob.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve got a letter – and what good is it to me, if I can’t read a word in it!’
‘Why, I’ll read it, child, if necessary.’
‘But this is from somebody – I don’t want anybody to read it but myself!’ Anna murmured.
‘I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?’
‘I think so.’ Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: ‘Then will you read it to me, ma’am?’
This was the secret of Anna’s embarrassment and flutterings. She could neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain where, even in days of national education, there had been no school within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there had been nobody to investigate Anna’s circumstances, nobody to care about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress’s phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the letter.
Edith Harnham’s large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a tender answer.
‘Now – you’ll do it for me, won’t you, dear mistress?’ said Anna eagerly. ‘And you’ll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn’t bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the earth with shame if he knew that!’
From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions, and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern filled Edith’s heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her happiness to the issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However, what was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna’s only protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna’s eager request that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this young London man’s letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.
A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham’s hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in. Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna’s humble note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life, the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham’s.
‘Won’t you at least put your name yourself?’ she said. ‘You can manage to write that by this time?’
‘No, no,’ said Anna, shrinking back. ‘I should do it so bad. He’d be ashamed of me, and never see me again!’
The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.
Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs. Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day. For the first time since Raye’s visit Anna had gone to stay over a night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for her maid’s collaboration. The luxury of writing to him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had indulged herself therein.
Why was it a luxury?
Edith Harnham led a lonely life. Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a pis aller, at the age of seven-and-twenty – some three years before this date – to find afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.
She was now clearly realizing that she had become possessed to the bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.
They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas – lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep up the disguise – that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna’s delight, who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from Anna’s own lips made apparently no impression upon him.
The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.
There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs. Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking down at Edith’s knees, she made confession that the result of her relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.
Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking such steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.
Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.
But a week later the girl came to her mistress’s room with another note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find time for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham’s counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was imperative: to keep the young man’s romantic interest in her alive. Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her protégée, request him on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities. She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it again from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to discuss what had better be done.
It may well be supposed that Anna’s own feelings had not been quite in accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress’s judgment had ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. ‘All I want is that niceness you can so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can’t for the life o’ me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same thing and feel it exactly when you’ve written it down!’
When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone, she bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept.
‘I wish it was mine – I wish it was!’ she murmured. ‘Yet how can I say such a wicked thing!’
CHAPTER V
The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The intelligence itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of treating him in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach, the devotion to his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every line, all made up a nobility of character that he had never dreamt of finding in womankind.
‘God forgive me!’ he said tremulously. ‘I have been a wicked wretch. I did not know she was such a treasure as this!’
He reassured her instantly; declaring that he would not of course desert her, that he would provide a home for her somewhere. Meanwhile she was to stay where she was as long as her mistress would allow her.
But a misfortune supervened in this direction. Whether an inkling of Anna’s circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs. Harnham’s husband or not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith’s entreaties, to leave the house. By her own choice she decided to go back for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a consultation as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in the girl’s inability to continue personally what had been begun in her name, and in the difficulty of their acting in concert as heretofore, she requested Mrs. Harnham – the only well-to-do friend she had in the world – to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them on afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might at least get some neighbour to read them to her, if a trustworthy one could be met with. Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.
Thus it befel that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position of having to correspond, under no supervision by the real woman, with a man not her husband, in terms which were virtually those of a wife, concerning a condition that was not Edith’s at all; the man being one for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part, she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly, but strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it as if intended for herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart and no other.
Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl’s absence, the high-strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded. For conscience’ sake Edith at first sent on each of his letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies; but later on these so-called copies were much abridged, and many letters on both sides were not sent on at all.
Though selfish, and, superficially at least, infested with the self-indulgent vices of artificial society, there was a substratum of honesty and fairness in Raye’s character. He had really a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her some of the letters.
‘She seems fairly educated,’ Miss Raye observed. ‘And bright in ideas. She expresses herself with a taste that must be innate.’
‘Yes. She writes very prettily, doesn’t she, thanks to these elementary schools?’
‘One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one’s self, poor thing.’
The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming difficulty by marrying her.
This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs. Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna jumped for joy like a little child. And poor, crude directions for answering appropriately were given to Edith Harnham, who on her return to the city carried them out with warm intensification.
‘O!’ she groaned, as she threw down the pen. ‘Anna – poor good little fool – hasn’t intelligence enough to appreciate him! How should she? While I – don’t bear his child!’
It was now February. The correspondence had continued altogether for four months; and the next letter from Raye contained incidentally a statement of his position and prospects. He said that in offering to wed her he had, at first, contemplated the step of retiring from a profession which hitherto had brought him very slight emolument, and which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice after his union with her. But the unexpected mines of brightness and warmth that her letters had disclosed to be lurking in her sweet nature had led him to abandon that somewhat sad prospect. He felt sure that, with her powers of development, after a little private training in the social forms of London under his supervision, and a little help from a governess if necessary, she would make as good a professional man’s wife as could be desired, even if he should rise to the woolsack. Many a Lord Chancellor’s wife had been less intuitively a lady than she had shown herself to be in her lines to him.
‘O – poor fellow, poor fellow!’ mourned Edith Harnham.
Her distress now raged as high as her infatuation. It was she who had wrought him to this pitch – to a marriage which meant his ruin; yet she could not, in mercy to her maid, do anything to hinder his plan. Anna was coming to Melchester that week, but she could hardly show the girl this last reply from the young man; it told too much of the second individuality that had usurped the place of the first.
Anna came, and her mistress took her into her own room for privacy. Anna began by saying with some anxiety that she was glad the wedding was so near.
‘O Anna!’ replied Mrs. Harnham. ‘I think we must tell him all – that I have been doing your writing for you? – lest he should not know it till after you become his wife, and it might lead to dissension and recriminations – ’
‘O mis’ess, dear mis’ess – please don’t tell him now!’ cried Anna in distress. ‘If you were to do it, perhaps he would not marry me; and what should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to me! And I am getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the copybook you were so good as to give me, and I practise every day, and though it is so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe, if I keep on trying.’
Edith looked at the copybook. The copies had been set by herself, and such progress as the girl had made was in the way of grotesque facsimile of her mistress’s hand. But even if Edith’s flowing caligraphy were reproduced the inspiration would be another thing.
‘You do it so beautifully,’ continued Anna, ‘and say all that I want to say so much better than I could say it, that I do hope you won’t leave me in the lurch just now!’
‘Very well,’ replied the other. ‘But I – but I thought I ought not to go on!’
‘Why?’
Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:
‘Because of its effect upon me.’
‘But it can’t have any!’
‘Why, child?’
‘Because you are married already!’ said Anna with lucid simplicity.
‘Of course it can’t,’ said her mistress hastily; yet glad, despite her conscience, that two or three outpourings still remained to her. ‘But you must concentrate your attention on writing your name as I write it here.’
CHAPTER VI
Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester; Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs. Harnham threw herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna’s departure. In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up with Anna and be with her through the ceremony – ‘to see the end of her,’ as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made an irremediable social blunder.
It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel cab at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London, and carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs. Harnham. Anna looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the wooden horse at Melchester Fair.
Mrs. Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young man – a friend of Raye’s – having met them at the door, all four entered the registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had never known the wine-merchant’s wife, except at that first casual encounter, and in the flutter of the performance before them he had little opportunity for more than a brief acquaintance. The contract of marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret gravitation between himself and Anna’s friend.
The formalities of the wedding – or rather ratification of a previous union – being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye’s lodgings, newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye had bought at a pastrycook’s on his way home from Lincoln’s Inn the night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye’s friend was obliged to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only ones virtually present were Edith and Raye who exchanged ideas with much animation. The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as a domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with her inadequacy.
At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, ‘Mrs. Harnham, my darling is so flurried that she doesn’t know what she is doing or saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be necessary before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she used to treat me to in her letters.’
They had planned to start early that afternoon for Knollsea, to spend the few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the writing-desk in the next room and scribble a little note to his sister, who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that the ceremony was over, thanking her for her little present, and hoping to know her well now that she was the writer’s sister as well as Charles’s.
‘Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt,’ he added, ‘for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be dear friends.’
Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly rose and went to her.
He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her good-will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had progressed but a few lines, in the characters and spelling of a child of eight, and with the ideas of a goose.
‘Anna,’ he said, staring; ‘what’s this?’
‘It only means – that I can’t do it any better!’ she answered, through her tears.
‘Eh? Nonsense!’
‘I can’t!’ she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. ‘I – I – didn’t write those letters, Charles! I only told her what to write! And not always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And you’ll forgive me, won’t you, for not telling you before?’ She slid to her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.
He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each other.
‘Do I guess rightly?’ he asked, with wan quietude. ‘You were her scribe through all this?’
‘It was necessary,’ said Edith.
‘Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?’
‘Not every word.’
‘In fact, very little?’
‘Very little.’
‘You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own conceptions, though in her name!’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without communication with her?’
‘I did.’
He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.
‘You have deceived me – ruined me!’ he murmured.
‘O, don’t say it!’ she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘I can’t bear that!’
‘Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it —why did you!’
‘I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it for pleasure to myself.’
Raye looked up. ‘Why did it give you pleasure?’ he asked.
‘I must not tell,’ said she.
He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return train: could a cab be called immediately?
But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. ‘Well, to think of such a thing as this!’ he said. ‘Why, you and I are friends – lovers – devoted lovers – by correspondence!’
‘Yes; I suppose.’
‘More.’
‘More?’
‘Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married her – God help us both! – in soul and spirit I have married you, and no other woman in the world!’
‘Hush!’
‘But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth, when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me that the bond is – not between me and her! Now I’ll say no more. But, O my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!’
She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her. ‘If it was all pure invention in those letters,’ he said emphatically, ‘give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips. It is for the first and last time, remember!’
She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. ‘You forgive me?’ she said crying.
‘Yes.’
‘But you are ruined!’
‘What matter!’ he said shrugging his shoulders. ‘It serves me right!’
She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the letter. Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.
He went back to his wife. ‘Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,’ he said gently. ‘Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.’
The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married, showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side.
Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the very stupor of grief; her lips still tingling from the desperate pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see each other, and she went out of the station alone.
She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched down upon the floor.
‘I have ruined him!’ she kept repeating. ‘I have ruined him; because I would not deal treacherously towards her!’
In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.
‘Ah – who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.
‘Your husband – who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.
‘Ah – my husband! – I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself.
‘I missed you at the station,’ he continued. ‘Did you see Anna safely tied up? I hope so, for ’twas time.’
‘Yes – Anna is married.’
Simultaneously with Edith’s journey home Anna and her husband were sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in silence, and sighed.
‘What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said timidly from the other window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.
‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed “Anna,”’ he replied with dreary resignation.
Autumn 1891.