The next and last subject was the stealing of a child from the lap of its slumbering nurse by a gipsy woman. These sadly suggestive subjects were the only ornaments on the walls, No traces of books or music were visible; no needlework of any sort was to be seen; no elegant trifles; no china or flowers or delicate lacework or sparkling jewelry--nothing, absolutely nothing, suggestive of a woman's presence appeared in any part of Mrs. Farnaby's room.
"I have got several things to say to you," she began; "but one thing must be settled first. Give me your sacred word of honour that you will not repeat to any mortal creature what I am going to tell you now." She reclined in her chair, and drew in a mouthful of smoke and puffed it out again, and waited for his reply.
Young and unsuspicious as he was, this unscrupulous method of taking his confidence by storm startled Amelius. His natural tact and good sense told him plainly that Mrs. Farnaby was asking too much.
"Don't be angry with me, ma'am," he said; "I must remind you that you are going to tell me your secrets, without any wish to intrude on them on my part--"
She interrupted him there. "What does that matter?" she asked coolly.
Amelius was obstinate; he went on with what he had to say. "I should like to know," he proceeded, "that I am doing no wrong to anybody, before I give you my promise?"
"You will be doing a kindness to a miserable creature," she answered, as quietly as ever; "and you will be doing no wrong to yourself or to anybody else, if you promise. That is all I can say. Your cigar is out. Take a light."
Amelius took a light, with the dog-like docility of a man in a state of blank amazement. She waited, watching him composedly until his cigar was in working order again.
"Well?" she asked. "Will you promise now?"
Amelius gave her his promise.
"On your sacred word of honour?" she persisted.
Amelius repeated the formula. She reclined in her chair once more. "I want to speak to you as if I was speaking to an old friend," she explained. "I suppose I may call you Amelius?"
"Certainly."
"Well, Amelius, I must tell you first that I committed a sin, many long years ago. I have suffered the punishment; I am suffering it still. Ever since I was a young woman, I have had a heavy burden of misery on my heart. I am not reconciled to it, I cannot submit to it, yet. I never shall be reconciled to it, I never shall submit to it, if I live to be a hundred. Do you wish me to enter into particulars? or will you have mercy on me, and be satisfied with what I have told you so far?"
It was not said entreatingly, or tenderly, or humbly: she spoke with a savage self-contained resignation in her manner and in her voice. Amelius forgot his cigar again--and again she reminded him of it. He answered her as his own generous impulsive temperament urged him; he said, "Tell me nothing that causes you a moment's pain; tell me only how I can help you." She handed him the box of matches; she said, "Your cigar is out again."
He laid down his cigar. In his brief span of life he had seen no human misery that expressed itself in this way. "Excuse me," he answered; "I won't smoke just now."
She laid her cigar aside like Amelius, and crossed her arms over her bosom, and looked at him, with the first softening gleam of tenderness that he had seen in her face. "My friend," she said, "yours will be a sad life--I pity you. The world will wound that sensitive heart of yours; the world will trample on that generous nature. One of these days, perhaps, you will be a wretch like me. No more of that. Get up; I have something to show you."
Rising herself, she led the way to the large oaken press, and took her bunch of keys out of her pocket again.
"About this old sorrow of mine," she resumed. "Do me justice, Amelius, at the outset. I haven't treated it as some women treat their sorrows--I haven't nursed it and petted it and made the most of it to myself and to others. No! I have tried every means of relief, every possible pursuit that could occupy my mind. One example of what I say will do as well as a hundred. See it for yourself."
She put the key in the lock. It resisted her first efforts to open it. With a contemptuous burst of impatience and a sudden exertion of her rare strength, she tore open the two doors of the press. Behind the door on the left appeared a row of open shelves. The opposite compartment, behind the door on the right, was filled by drawers with brass handles. She shut the left door; angrily banging it to, as if the opening of it had disclosed something which she did not wish to be seen. By the merest chance, Amelius had looked that way first. In the one instant in which it was possible to see anything, he had noticed, carefully laid out on one of the shelves, a baby's long linen frock and cap, turned yellow by the lapse of time.
The half-told story of the past was more than half told now. The treasured relics of the infant threw their little glimmer of light on the motive which had chosen the subjects of the prints on the wall. A child deserted and lost! A child who, by bare possibility, might be living still!
She turned towards Amelius suddenly, "There is nothing to interest you on that side," she said. "Look at the drawers here; open them for yourself." She drew back as she spoke, and pointed to the uppermost of the row of drawers. A narrow slip of paper was pasted on it, bearing this inscription:--"Dead Consolations."
Amelius opened the drawer; it was full of books. "Look at them," she said. Amelius, obeying her, discovered dictionaries, grammars, exercises, poems, novels, and histories--all in the German language.
"A foreign language tried as a relief," said Mrs. Farnaby, speaking quietly behind him. "Month after month of hard study--all forgotten now. The old sorrow came back in spite of it. A dead consolation! Open the next drawer."
The next drawer revealed water-colours and drawing materials huddled together in a corner, and a heap of poor little conventional landscapes filling up the rest of the space. As works of art, they were wretched in the last degree; monuments of industry and application miserably and completely thrown away.
"I had no talent for that pursuit, as you see," said Mrs. Farnaby. "But I persevered with it, week after week, month after month. I thought to myself, 'I hate it so, it costs me such dreadful trouble, it so worries and persecutes and humiliates me, that this surely must keep my mind occupied and my thoughts away from myself!' No; the old sorrow stared me in the face again on the paper that I was spoiling, through the colours that I couldn't learn to use. Another dead consolation! Shut it up."
She herself opened a third and a fourth drawer. In one there appeared a copy of Euclid, and a slate with the problems still traced on it; the other contained a microscope, and the treatises relating to its use. "Always the same effort," she said, shutting the door of the press as she spoke; "and always the same result. You have had enough of it, and so have I." She turned, and pointed to the lathe in the corner, and to the clubs and dumb-bells over the mantelpiece.