A House in Bloomsbury

“I am sure of this, that he ought to, if he is not a fool. Every man ought to who has a spark of sense in him. I have not done it, and you see what happens. Roland may be a great idiot, but not so great an idiot as I.”

“Oh, father, what is the use of talking like this? Let us try and think how we are to do it,” Dora cried.

His renewed outcry that he could not do it, that it was not a thing to be thought of for a moment, was stopped by a knock at the door, at which, when Dora, after vainly bidding the unknown applicant come in, opened it, there appeared an old gentleman, utterly unknown to both, and whose appearance was extremely disturbing to the invalid newly issued from his sick room, and the girl who still felt herself his nurse and protector.

“I hope I do not come at a bad moment,” the stranger said. “I took the opportunity of an open door to come straight up without having myself announced. I trust I may be pardoned for the liberty. Mr. Mannering, you do not recollect me, but I have seen you before. I am Mr. Templar, of Gray’s Inn. I have something of importance to say to you, which will, I trust, excuse my intrusion.”

“Oh,” cried Dora. “I am sure you cannot know that my father has been very ill. He is out of his room for the first time to-day.”

The old gentleman said that he was very sorry, and then that he was very glad. “That means in a fair way of recovery,” he said. “I don’t know,” he added, addressing Mannering, who was pondering over him with a somewhat sombre countenance, “whether I may speak to you about my business, Mr. Mannering, at such an early date: but I am almost forced to do so by my orders: and whether you would rather hear my commission in presence of this young lady or not.”

“Where is it we have met?” Mannering said, with a more and more gloomy look.

“I will tell you afterwards, if you will hear me in the first place. I come to announce to you, Mr. Mannering, the death of a client of mine, who has left a very considerable fortune to your daughter, Dora Mannering—this young lady, I presume: and with it a prayer that the young lady, to whom she leaves everything, may be permitted to—may, with your consent–”

“Oh,” cried Dora, “I know! It is the poor lady from South America!” And then she became silent and grew red. “Father, I have hid something from you,” she said, faltering. “I have seen a lady, forgive me, who was your enemy. She said you would never forgive her. Oh, how one’s sins find one out! It was not my fault that I went, and I thought you would never know. She was mamma’s sister, father.”

“She was—who?” Mr. Mannering rose from his chair. He had been pale before, he became now livid, yellow, his thin cheek-bones standing out, his hollow eyes with a glow in them, his mouth drawn in. He towered over the two people beside him—Dora frightened and protesting, the visitor very calm and observant—looking twice his height in his extreme leanness and gauntness. “Who—who was it? Who?” His whole face asked the question. He stood a moment tottering, then dropped back in complete exhaustion into his chair.

“Father,” cried Dora, “I did not know who she was. She was very ill and wanted me. It was she who used to send me those things. Miss Bethune took me, it was only once, and I—I was there when she died.” The recollection choked her voice, and made her tremble. “Father, she said you would not forgive her, that you were never to be told; but I could not believe,” cried Dora, “that there was any one, ill or sorry, and very, very weak, and in trouble, whom you would not forgive.”

Mr. Mannering sat gazing at his child, with his eyes burning in their sockets. At these words he covered his face with his hands. And there was silence, save for a sob of excitement from Dora, excitement so long repressed that it burst forth now with all the greater force. The visitor, for some time, did not say a word. Then suddenly he put forth his hand and touched the elbow which rested like a sharp point on the table. He said softly: “It was the lady you imagine. She is dead. She has led a life of suffering and trouble. She has neither been well nor happy. Her one wish was to see her child before she died. When she was left free, as happened by death some time ago, she came to England for that purpose. I can’t tell you how much or how little the friends knew, who helped her. They thought it, I believe, a family quarrel.”

Mr. Mannering uncovered his ghastly countenance. “It is better they should continue to think so.”

“That is as you please. For my own part, I think the child at least should know. The request, the prayer that was made on her deathbed in all humility, was that Dora should follow her remains to the grave.”

“To what good?” he cried, “to what good?”

“To no good. Have you forgotten her, that you ask that? I told her, if she had asked to see you, to get your forgiveness–”

“Silence!” cried Mr. Mannering, lifting his thin hand as if with a threat.

“But she had not courage. She wanted only, she said, her own flesh and blood to stand by her grave.”

Mannering made again a gesture with his hand, but no reply.

“She has left everything of which she died possessed—a considerable, I may say a large fortune—to her only child.”

“I refuse her fortune!” cried Mannering, bringing down his clenched hand on the table with a feverish force that made the room ring.

“You will not be so pitiless,” said the visitor; “you will not pursue an unfortunate woman, who never in her unhappy life meant any harm.”

“In her unhappy life!—in her pursuit of a happy life at any cost, that is what you mean.”

“I will not argue. She is dead. Say she was thoughtless, fickle. I can’t tell. She did only what she was justified in doing. She meant no harm.”

“I will allow no one,” cried Mr. Mannering, “to discuss the question with me. Your client, I understand, is dead,—it was proper, perhaps, that I should know,—and has left a fortune to my daughter. Well, I refuse it. There is no occasion for further parley. I refuse it. Dora, show this gentleman downstairs.”

“There is only one thing to be said,” said the visitor, rising, “you have not the power to refuse it. It is vested in trustees, of whom I am one. The young lady herself may take any foolish step—if you will allow me to say so—when she comes of age. But you have not the power to do this. The allowance to be made to her during her minority and all other particulars will be settled as soon as the arrangements are sufficiently advanced.”

“I tell you that I refuse it,” repeated Mr. Mannering.

“And I repeat that you have no power to do so. I leave her the directions in respect to the other event, in which you have full power. I implore you to use it mercifully,” the visitor said.

He went away without any further farewell—Mannering, not moving, sitting at the table with his eyes fixed on the empty air. Dora, who had followed the conversation with astonished uncomprehension, but with an acute sense of the incivility with which the stranger had been treated, hurried to open the door for him, to offer him her hand, to make what apologies were possible.

“Father has been very ill,” she said. “He nearly died. This is the first time he has been out of his room. I don’t understand what it all means, but please do not think he is uncivil. He is excited, and still ill and weak. I never in my life saw him rude to any one before.”

“Never mind,” said the old gentleman, pausing outside the door; “I can make allowances. You and I may have a great deal to do with each other, Miss Dora. I hope you will have confidence in me?”

“I don’t know what it all means,” Dora said.

“No, but some day you will; and in the meantime remember that some one, who has the best right to do so, has left you a great deal of money, and that whenever you want anything, or even wish for anything, you must come to me.”

“A great deal of money?” Dora said. She had heard him speak of a fortune—a considerable fortune, but the words had not struck her as these did. A great deal of money? And money was all that was wanted to make everything smooth, and open out vistas of peace and pleasure, where all had been trouble and care. The sudden lighting up of her countenance was as if the sun had come out all at once from among the clouds. The old gentleman, who, like so many old gentlemen, entertained cynical views, chuckled to see that even at this youthful age, and in Mannering’s daughter, who had refused it so fiercely, the name of a great deal of money should light up a girl’s face. “They are all alike,” he said to himself as he went downstairs.

When Dora returned to the room, she found her father as she had left him, staring straight before him, seeing nothing, his head supported on his hands, his hollow eyes fixed. He did not notice her return, as he had not noticed her absence. What was she to do? One of those crises had arrived which are so petty, yet so important, when the wisest of women are reduced to semi-imbecility by an emergency not contemplated in any moral code. It was time for him to take his beef tea. The doctor had commanded that under no circumstances was this duty to be omitted or postponed; but who could have foreseen such circumstances as these, in which evidently matters of life and death were going through his mind? After such an agitating interview he wanted it more and more, the nourishment upon which his recovery depended. But how suggest it to a man whose mind was gone away into troubled roamings through the past, or still more troubled questions about the future? It could have been no small matters that had been brought back to Mr. Mannering’s mind by that strange visit. Dora, who was not weak-minded, trembled to approach him with any prosaic, petty suggestion. And yet how did she dare to pass it by? Dora went about the room very quietly, longing to rouse yet unwilling to disturb him. How was she to speak of such a small matter as his beef tea? And yet it was not a small matter. She heard Gilchrist go into the other room, bringing it all ready on the little tray, and hurried thither to inquire what that experienced woman would advise. “He has had some one to see him about business. He has been very much put out, dreadfully disturbed. I don’t know how to tell you how much. His mind is full of some dreadful thing I don’t understand. How can I ask him to take his beef tea? And yet he must want it. He is looking so ill. He is so worn out. Oh, Gilchrist, what am I to do?”

“It is just a very hard question, Miss Dora. He should not have seen any person on business. He’s no’ in a fit state to see anybody the first day he is out of his bedroom: though, for my part, I think he might have been out of his bedroom three or four days ago,” Gilchrist said.

“As if that was the question now! The question is about the beef tea. Can I go and say, ‘Father, never mind whatever has happened, there is nothing so important as your beef tea’? Can I tell him that everything else may come and go, but that beef tea runs on for ever? Oh, Gilchrist, you are no good at all! Tell me what to do.”

Dora could not help being light-hearted, though it was in the present circumstances so inappropriate, when she thought of that “great deal of money"—money that would sweep all bills away, that would make almost everything possible. That consciousness lightened more and more upon her, as she saw the little bundle of bills carefully labelled and tied up, which she had intended to remove surreptitiously from her father’s room while he was out of it. With what comfort and satisfaction could she remove them now!

“Just put it down on the table by his side, Miss Dora,” said Gilchrist. “Say no word, just put it there within reach of his hand. Maybe he will fly out at you, and ask if you think there’s nothing in the world so important as your confounded– But no, he will not say that; he’s no’ a man that gets relief in that way. But, on the other hand, he will maybe just be conscious that there’s a good smell, and he will feel he’s wanting something, and he will drink it off without more ado. But do not, Miss Dora, whatever you do, let more folk on business bother your poor papaw, for I could not answer for what might come of it. You had better let me sit here on the watch, and see that nobody comes near the door.”

“I will do what you say, and you can do what you like,” said Dora. She could almost have danced along the passage. Poor lady from America, who was dead! Dora had been very sorry. She had been much troubled by the interview about her which she did not understand: but even if father were pitiless, which was so incredible, it could do that poor woman no harm now: and the money—money which would be deliverance, which would pay all the bills, and leave the quarter’s money free to go to the country with, to go abroad with! Dora had to tone her countenance down, not to look too guiltily glad when she went in to where her father was sitting in the same abstraction and gloom. But this time he observed her entrance, looking up as if he had been waiting for her. She had barely time to follow Gilchrist’s directions when he stretched out his hand and took hers, drawing her near to him. He was very grave and pale, but no longer so terrible as before.

“Dora,” he said, “how often have you seen this lady of whom I have heard to-day?”

“Twice, father; once in Miss Bethune’s room, where she had come. I don’t know how.”

“In this house?” he said with a strong quiver, which Dora felt, as if it had been communicated to herself.

“And the night before last, when Miss Bethune took me to where she was living, a long way off, by Hyde Park. I knelt at the bed a long time, and then they put me in a chair. She said many things I did not understand—but chiefly,” Dora said, her eyes filling with tears—the scene seemed to come before her more touchingly in recollection than when, to her wonder and dismay, it took place, “chiefly that she loved me, that she had wanted me all my life, and that she wished for me above everything before she died.”

“And then?” he said, with a catch in his breath.

“I don’t know, father; I was so confused and dizzy with being there so long. All of a sudden they took me away, and the others all came round the bed. And then there was nothing more. Miss Bethune brought me home. I understood that the lady—that my poor—my poor aunt—if that is what she was—was dead. Oh, father, whatever she did, forgive her now!”

Dora for the moment had forgotten everything but the pity and the wonder, which she only now began to realise for the first time, of that strange scene. She saw, as if for the first time, the dark room, the twinkling lights, the ineffable smile upon the dying face: and her big tears fell fast upon her father’s hand, which held hers in a trembling grasp. The quiver that was in him ran through and through her, so that she trembled too.

“Dora,” he said, “perhaps you ought to know, as that man said. The lady was not your aunt: she was your mother—my"—there seemed a convulsion in his throat, as though he could not pronounce the word—“my wife. And yet she was not to blame, as the world judges. I went on a long expedition after you were born, leaving her very young still, and poor. I did not mean her to be poor. I did not mean to be long away. But I went to Africa, which is terrible enough now, but was far more terrible in those days. I fell ill again and again. I was left behind for dead. I was lost in those dreadful wilds. It was more than three years before I came to the light of day at all, and it seemed a hundred. I had been given up by everybody. The money had failed her, her people were poor, the Museum gave her a small allowance as to the widow of a man killed in its service. And there was another man who loved her. They meant no harm, it is true. She did nothing that was wrong. She married him, thinking I was dead.”

“Father!” Dora cried, clasping his arm with both her hands: his other arm supported his head.

“It was a pity that I was not dead—that was the pity. If I had known, I should never have come back to put everything wrong. But I never heard a word till I came back. And she would not face me—never. She fled as if she had been guilty. She was not guilty, you know. She had only married again, which the best of women do. She fled by herself at first, leaving you to me. She said it was all she could do, but that she never, never could look me in the face again. It has not been that I could not forgive her, Dora. No, but we could not look each other in the face again.”

“Is it she,” said Dora, struggling to speak, “whose picture is in your cabinet, on its face? May I take it, father? I should like to have it.”

He put his other arm round her and pressed her close. “And after this,” he said, “my little girl, we will never say a word on this subject again.”