Chapter XVI: A Strange Encounter

As I turned to go in by the gate, a figure, coming hastily up the road from Market Grazing, made a gesture as if to detain me. I paused in surprise; and in another minute the woman, for a woman it was, had hurried to where I stood, and stopped. She was panting heavily, and she put a hand on her breast as if forcibly to control its spasms. She was very thin, and dowdy in appearance, and had on a thick grey veil, pulled down over her face. But, for all the close secrecy of that screen, I knew her at once. It was Mrs Dalston.

I suppose I ought to have felt some discomposure in her presence, seeing the nature of my thoughts about her husband. I was conscious of nothing, however, but an increased sense of the aversion with which she had at the first inspired me. There was something antipathetic to my nature in this barren reticence, in this material and intellectual threadbareness, one might call it, especially as contrasted with the showy qualities of her partner. I could not dissociate in the two the essential squalor, whether of soul or person, which goes with crime. It was part of the eternal tragedy of her colourlessness, it was a heart-rending consequence of her malleability, that she was thus moulded to repel where she most sought for sympathy. But how could I know that?

Now, to be conscious of these feelings in myself, and of the certainty that her hidden eyes, holding me at a disadvantage, were probing and interpreting them, filled me with a sort of helpless anger. I might even have been sharp, plain with her under the irritation, had she not suddenly taken the initiative. With a swift movement, she put a hand upon my arm, looking the while, quick and nervous, about her; and then she entreated me in a hoarse, small voice:

“Leave him alone; don’t watch him; what are you thinking of? He’ll not let his plans miscarry for such as you. I warn you. You’d better take my warning.”

I was so shocked, so dumfoundered, that for a moment I could answer her not a word. Here, it seemed, was the moral of all my self-pluming astuteness. But the lesson gripped me on the instant.

“You speak of Mr Dalston?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered. “He’s gone to London, or I shouldn’t have dared to venture this.” Even so, it seemed, the terrific spectre of him stalked her fancy, for the motion of her head never ceased to suggest a fearful watchfulness. “He knows that you are observing him--plotting against him, perhaps. There is never anything hidden from him long. You’ll be a fool if you don’t desist.”

“Why should he fear observation?” I muttered some commonplace about conscience.

“Why?” she said. “How can I tell? I know he’s here to carry out some scheme of force or fraud. I know he’s got some claim on Lady Skene. It’s all nothing to me. Where he goes, I go; and what he wills, that thing comes to happen. Do you wish to die yet--horribly, secretly, and no one guess how or where?”

“I neither wish nor intend to.”

“Intend? That sounds brave. You’ll need some bravery.”

“Is he capable of it--going to those lengths? Why do you tell me all this?”

“For yourself--not for him.”

“How have I earned your consideration?”

She seemed to look at me intently. Her hands sought my arms; but I backed instinctively from their touch. She stopped at once, and I was sorry. But not even this new aspect of her could conquer my repugnance.

“I have borne children,” she broke out strangely, “and they died--one after another they died, because I willed they should. I could be stronger than him in some things. And he begged and prayed me; but I would not; I willed them dead, and they died--each as it came. They were the atonement for that life. It’s spirit seems to rise and beckon to me from the past. O, my God! and you ask me how you’ve earned my favour. Who was your mother, who were your parents?”

Her voice rose wildly. She held out her arms to me with a passionate gesture. And now I understood. The poor driven creature was insane--struck mad, perhaps, in some sudden consciousness of the true nature of her bondage to a devil. I must humour, not abuse her.

“You say you tell me all this for myself,” I said, standing quiet and unresponsive. “What, if for myself, I neither fear nor apprehend; can boast a will as strong, perhaps, as his; am resolved to go forward and expose him for the thing he is? I take the privilege of your confidence. I do not flatter.”

She appeared to listen again intently. When she answered, there seemed a note as of some under-triumph thrilling through her voice:

“You will go on? You will not be dissuaded?”

“I will not--no.”

She caught her hands together; her breath came quick; she took an eager step towards me, and spoke in broken sentences:

“I thought--I hoped, even, it might be so. Listen, then, I’ll help you to your end. So like, my God! it seems a Providence. Dead! Yes, but how? he was going to tell me when Mark came in.”

“Hush, madam! hush! Who was dead?”

“My baby--my darling. He might have been like you now--your age--his father’s son. It was twenty years ago. I had a nurse--Ellen Trimmer was her name--she was killed in a street accident; but before she died she made a confession to the man she had been going to marry, and he came on with it to me. I had heard just so much, and then Mark spoke. He had been hidden behind the curtains of my bed all the time; and he spoke quite softly to the man, and the man declared that he had asserted nothing, and believed nothing, and had only been a fool for attaching any value to the ravings of a delirious girl. And he promised for all his life was worth to say and think no more about it, and Mark saw to it that he would keep his promise. What had he been going to say--what? I never had the heart or will to ask. But you--you can still find out if you like, and if he is still living.”

Was she, herself, raving? Sometimes, as I listened to that disjointed outpouring, I was convinced of it; sometimes I seemed to gather from its incoherence the shadow of a truth, a purpose, the cry of a long-fettered despair struggling for articulation.

“Hush!” she said suddenly. “He may be back at any time--here, now, watching us and laughing in his sleeve. He is so terrible--so swift and secret. The souls he desires for his own must go to him. Look--here is the man’s address. I have never parted with it. Find him, if you can, and prove the stronger will. If I could repay him after all these years--remember, and repay him!”

She thrust a paper into my hand, and was gone. I stood stupidly, staring at her retreating figure. Repay him? repay whom and for what? Surely, if there _were_ a purpose in her ravings, it must turn on something ghastly and incredible. It was her husband, I could not doubt, whom she thus held her awful debtor. But for what deed, what crime, that could so move her at this last to take a stranger for her factor? There was something very fearful in the vision of this apostate from the faith of matrimony. Was it possible that there were others in the world, who, through twenty years of seeming apathy, could so be nursing horrible things in their bosoms--vipers--fattening for an opportunity?

I glanced down at the paper. It contained a name, and an address somewhere in Kennington--nothing more. The rest was for me to do. A baby! and dead!--Dalston, and Mother Carey, and a dead baby! There was a coincidence here, at least. What an unconsecrated plot in a graveyard was my mind become! And how the deadly branches twined and shut it in!

Well, I would go and see this man, if he existed. Somewhere and somehow light must be let into the tangle.