The Fallen Leaves Part 12

The question was not an easy one to answer. Amelius hesitated. Mrs.

Farnaby insisted on a reply.

"Did you see anything?" she reiterated

Amelius owned that he had seen something.

She turned away from him, and looked into the fire. Her firm full tones sank so low, when she spoke next, that he could barely hear them.

"Was it something belonging to a child?"

"Yes."

"Was it a baby's frock and cap? Answer me. We have gone too far to go back. I don't want apologies or explanations--I want, Yes or No."

"Yes."

There was an interval of silence. She never moved; she still looked into fire--looked, as if all her past life was pictured there in the burning coals.

"Do you despise me?" she asked at last, very quietly.

"As G.o.d hears me, I am only sorry for you!" Amelius answered.

Another woman would have melted into tears. This woman still looked into the fire--and that was all. "What a good fellow!" she said to herself, "what a good fellow he is!"

There was another pause. She turned towards him again as abruptly as she had turned away.

"I had hoped to spare you, and to spare myself," she said. "If the miserable truth has come out, it is through no curiosity of yours, and (G.o.d knows!) against every wish of mine. I don't know if you really felt like a friend towards me before--you must be my friend now. Don't speak!

I know I can trust you. One last word, Amelius, about my lost child. You doubt whether I should recognize her, if she stood before me now. That might be quite true, if I had only my own poor hopes and anxieties to guide me. But I have something else to guide me--and, after what has pa.s.sed between us, you may as well know what it is: it might even, by accident, guide you. Don't alarm yourself; it's nothing distressing this time. How can I explain it?" she went on; pausing, and speaking in some perplexity to herself. "It would be easier to show it--and why not?" She addressed herself to Amelius once more. "I'm a strange creature,"

she resumed. "First, I worry you about my own affairs--then I puzzle you--then I make you sorry for me--and now (would you think it?) I am going to amuse you! Amelius, are you an admirer of pretty feet?"

Amelius had heard of men (in books) who had found reason to doubt whether their own ears were not deceiving them. For the first time, he began to understand those men, and to sympathize with them. He admitted, in a certain bewildered way, that he was an admirer of pretty feet--and waited for what was to come next.

"When a woman has a pretty hand," Mrs. Farnaby proceeded; "she is ready enough to show it. When she goes out to a ball, she favours you with a view of her bosom, and a part of her back. Now tell me! If there is no impropriety in a naked bosom--where is the impropriety in a naked foot?"

Amelius agreed, like a man in a dream.

"Where, indeed!" he remarked--and waited again for what was to come next.

"Look out of the window," said Mrs. Farnaby.

Amelius obeyed. The window had been opened for a few inches at the top, no doubt to ventilate the room. The dull view of the courtyard was varied by the stables at the farther end, and by the kitchen skylight rising in the middle of the open s.p.a.ce. As Amelius looked out, he observed that some person at that moment in the kitchen required apparently a large supply of fresh air. The swinging window, on the side of the skylight which was nearest to him, was invisibly and noiselessly pulled open from below; the similar window, on the other side, being already wide open also. Judging by appearance, the inhabitants of the kitchen possessed a merit which is exceedingly rare among domestic servants--they understood the laws of ventilation, and appreciated the blessing of fresh air.

"That will do," said Mrs. Farnaby. "You can turn round now."

Amelius turned. Mrs. Farnaby's boots and stockings were on the hearthrug, and one of Mrs. Farnaby's feet was placed, ready for inspection, on the chair which he had just left. "Look at my right foot first," she said, speaking gravely and composedly in her ordinary tone.

It was well worth looking at--a foot equally beautiful in form and in colour: the instep arched and high, the ankle at once delicate and strong, the toes tinged with rose-colour at the tips. In brief, it was a foot to be photographed, to be cast in plaster, to be fondled and kissed. Amelius attempted to express his admiration, but was not allowed to get beyond the first two or three words. "No," Mrs. Farnaby explained, "this is not vanity--simply information. You have seen my right foot; and you have noticed that there is nothing the matter with it. Very well. Now look at my left foot."

She put her left foot up on the chair. "Look between the third toe and the fourth," she said.

Following his instructions, Amelius discovered that the beauty of the foot was spoilt, in this case, by a singular defect. The two toes were bound together by a flexible web, or membrane, which held them to each other as high as the insertion of the nail on either side.

"Do you wonder," Mrs. Farnaby asked, "why I show you the fault in my foot? Amelius! my poor darling was born with my deformity--and I want you to know exactly what it is, because neither you nor I can say what reason for remembering it there may not be in the future." She stopped, as if to give him an opportunity of speaking. A man shallow and flippant by nature might have seen the disclosure in a grotesque aspect. Amelius was sad and silent. "I like you better and better," she went on. "You are not like the common run of men. Nine out of ten of them would have turned what I have just told you into a joke--nine out of ten would have said, 'Am I to ask every girl I meet to show me her left foot?' You are above that; you understand me. Have I no means of recognizing my own child, now?"

She smiled, and took her foot off the chair--then, after a moment's thought, she pointed to it again.

"Keep this as strictly secret as you keep everything else," she said.

"In the past days, when I used to employ people privately to help me to find her, it was my only defence against being imposed upon. Rogues and vagabonds thought of other marks and signs--but not one of them could guess at such a mark as that. Have you got your pocket-book, Amelius? In case we are separated at some later time, I want to write the name and address in it of a person whom we can trust. I persist, you see, in providing for the future. There's the one chance in a hundred that my dream may come true--and you have so many years before you, and so many girls to meet with in that time!"

She handed back the pocket-book, which Amelius had given to her, after having inscribed a man's name and address on one of the blank leaves.

"He was my father's lawyer," she explained; "and he and his son are both men to be trusted. Suppose I am ill, for instance--no, that's absurd; I never had a day's illness in my life. Suppose I am dead (killed perhaps by some accident, or perhaps by my own hand), the lawyers have my written instructions, in the case of my child being found. Then again--I am such an unaccountable woman--I may go away somewhere, all by myself.

Never mind! The lawyers shall have my address, and my positive orders (though they keep it a secret from all the world besides) to tell it to you. I don't ask your pardon, Amelius, for troubling you. The chances are so terribly against me; it is all but impossible that I shall ever see you--as I saw you in my dream--coming into the room, leading my girl by the hand. Odd, isn't it? This is how I veer about between hope and despair. Well, it may amuse you to remember it, one of these days. Years hence, when I am at rest in mother earth, and when you are a middle aged married man, you may tell your wife how strangely you once became the forlorn hope of the most wretched woman that ever lived--and you may say to each other, as you sit by your snug fireside, 'Perhaps that poor lost daughter is still living somewhere, and wondering who her mother was.'

No! I won't let you see the tears in my eyes again--I'll let you go at last."

She led the way to the door--a creature to be pitied, if ever there was a pitiable creature yet: a woman whose whole nature was maternal, who was nothing if not a mother; and who had lived through sixteen years of barren life, in the hopeless antic.i.p.ation of recovering her lost child!

"Goodbye, and thank you," she said. "I want to be left by myself, my dear, with that little frock and cap which you found out in spite of me.

Go, and tell my niece it's all right--and don't be stupid enough to fall in love with a girl who has no love to give you in return." She pushed Amelius into the hall. "Here he is, Regina!" she called out; "I have done with him."

Before Amelius could speak, she had shut herself into her room. He advanced along the hall, and met Regina at the door of the dining-room.

CHAPTER 3

The young lady spoke first.

"Mr. Goldenheart," she said, with the coldest possible politeness, "perhaps you will be good enough to explain what this means?"

She turned back into the dining-room. Amelius followed her in silence.

"Here I am, in another sc.r.a.pe with a woman!" he thought to himself. "Are men in general as unlucky as I am, I wonder?"

"You needn't close the door," said Regina maliciously. "Everybody in the house is welcome to hear what _I_ have to say to you."

Amelius made a mistake at the outset--he tried what a little humility would do to help him. There is probably no instance on record in which humility on the part of a man has ever really found its way to the indulgence of an irritated woman. The best and the worst of them alike have at least one virtue in common--they secretly despise a man who is not bold enough to defend himself when they are angry with him.

"I hope I have not offended you?" Amelius ventured to say.

She tossed her head contemptuously. "Oh dear, no! I am not offended.

Only a little surprised at your being so very ready to oblige my aunt."

In the short experience of her which had fallen to the lot of Amelius, she had never looked so charmingly as she looked now. The nervous irritability under which she was suffering brightened her face with the animation which was wanting in it at ordinary times. Her soft brown eyes sparkled; her smooth dusky cheeks glowed with a warm red flush; her tall supple figure a.s.serted its full dignity, robed in a superb dress of silken purple and black lace, which set off her personal attractions to the utmost advantage. She not only roused the admiration of Amelius--she unconsciously gave him back the self-possession which he had, for the moment, completely lost. He was man enough to feel the humiliation of being despised by the one woman in the world whose love he longed to win; and he answered with a sudden firmness of tone and look that startled her.

"You had better speak more plainly still, Miss Regina," he said. "You may as well blame me at once for the misfortune of being a man."

She drew back a step. "I don't understand you," she answered.

"Do I owe no forbearance to a woman who asks a favour of me?" Amelius went on. "If a man had asked me to steal into the house on tiptoe, I should have said--well! I should have said something I had better not repeat. If a man had stood between me and the door when you came back, I should have taken him by the collar and pulled him out of my way. Could I do that, if you please, with Mrs. Farnaby?"