Now that I was no longer obliged to listen to polite strangers, my thoughts reverted to Cristel, and to the suspicions that she had roused in me.
Recovering its influence, in the interval that had passed, my better nature sharply reproached me. I had presumed to blame Cristel, with nothing to justify me but my own perverted view of her motives. How did Iknow that she had not opened that door, and gone to that side of the cottage, with a perfectly harmless object in view? I was really anxious, if I could find the right way to do it, to make amends for an act of injustice of which I felt ashamed. If I am asked why I was as eager to set myself right with a miller's daughter, as if she had been a young lady in the higher ranks of life, I can only reply that no such view of our relative positions as this ever occurred to me. A strange state of mind, no doubt. What was the right explanation of it?
The right explanation presented itself at a later time, when troubles had quickened my intellect, and when I could estimate the powerful influence of circumstances at its true value.
I had returned to England, to fill a prominent place in my own little world, without relations whom I loved, without friends whose society Icould enjoy. Hopeful, ardent, eager for the enjoyment of life, I had brought with me to my own country the social habits and the free range of thought of a foreign University; and, as a matter of course, I failed to feel any sympathy with the society--new to me--in which my lot had been cast. Beset by these disadvantages, I had met with a girl, possessed of remarkable personal attractions, and associated with my earliest remembrances of my own happy life and of my mother's kindness--a girl, at once simple and spirited; unspoilt by the world and the world's ways, and placed in a position of peril due to the power of her own beauty, which added to the interest that she naturally inspired. Estimating these circumstances at their true value, did a state of mind which rendered me insensible to the distinctions that separate the classes in England, stand in any need of explanation? As I thought--and think still--it explained itself.
My stepmother and I parted on the garden terrace, which ran along the pleasant southern side of the house.
The habits that I had contracted, among my student friends in Germany, made tobacco and beer necessary accompaniments to the process of thinking. I had nearly exhausted my cigar, my jug, and my thoughts, when I saw two men approaching me from the end of the terrace.
As they came nearer, I recognized in one of the men my fat domestic in black. He stopped the person who was accompanying him and came on to me by himself.
"Will you see that man, sir, waiting behind me?""Who is he?"
"I don't know, sir. He says he has got a letter to give you, and he must put it in your own hands. I think myself he's a beggar. He's excessively insolent--he insists on seeing you. Shall I tell him to go?"The servant evidently expected me to say Yes. He was disappointed; my curiosity was roused; I said I would see the insolent stranger.
As he approached me, the man certainly did not look like a beggar. Poor he might be, judging by his dress. The upper part of him was clothed in an old shooting jacket of velveteen; his legs presented a pair of trousers, once black, now turning brown with age. Both garments were too long for him, and both were kept scrupulously clean. He was a short man, thickly and strongly made. Impenetrable composure appeared on his ugly face. His eyes were sunk deep in his head; his nose had evidently been broken and not successfully mended; his grey hair, when he took off his hat on addressing me, was cut short, and showed his low forehead and his bull neck. An Englishman of the last generation would, as I have since been informed, have set him down as a retired prize-fighter. Thanks to my ignorance of the pugilistic glories of my native country, I was totally at a loss what to make of him.
"Have I the honor of speaking to Mr. Roylake?" he asked. His quiet steady manner prepossessed me in his favour; it showed no servile reverence for the accident of birth, on the one hand, and no insolent assertion of independence, on the other. When I had told him that my name was Roylake, he searched one of the large pockets of his shooting jacket, produced a letter, and silently offered it to me.
Before I took the letter--seeing that he was a stranger, and that he mentioned no name known to me--I thought it desirable to make some inquiry.
"Is it a letter of your own writing?" I asked.
"No, sir."
"Who sends you with it?"
He was apparently a man of few words. "My master," was the guarded answer that this odd servant returned.
I became as inquisitive as old Toller himself.
"Who is your master?" I went on.
The reply staggered me. Speaking as quietly and respectfully as ever, he said: "I can't tell you, sir.""Do you mean that you are forbidden to tell me?""No, sir."
"Then what do you mean?"
"I mean that I don't know my master's name."
I instantly took the letter from him, and looked at the address. For once in a way, I had jumped at a conclusion and I had proved to be right. The handwriting on the letter, and the handwriting of the confession which Ihad read overnight, were one and the same.
"Are you to wait for an answer?" I asked, as I opened the envelope.
"I am to wait, sir, if you tell me to do so."The letter was a long one. After running my eye over the first sentences, I surprised myself by acting discreetly. "You needn't wait," I said; "Iwill send a reply." The man of few words raised his shabby hat, turned about in silence, and left me.
