In her diary, there has been found the confession of a secret course of reading--with supplementary reflections flowing from it, which need only to be described as worthy of their source.
A person capable of repentance and reform would, in her place, have seen that she had disgusted me. Not a suspicion of this occurred to Miss Helena. "I see you are embarrassed," she remarked, "and I am at no loss to account for it. You are too polite to acknowledge that I have not made a friend of you yet. Oh, I mean to do it!"
"No," I said, "I think not."
"We shall see," she replied. "Sooner or later, you will find yourself saying a kind word to my father for Philip and me." She rose, and took a turn in the room--and stopped, eying me attentively. "Are you thinking of Eunice?" she asked.
"Yes."
"She has your sympathy, I suppose?"
"My heart-felt sympathy."
"I needn't ask how I stand in your estimation, after that. Pray express yourself freely. Your looks confess it--you view me with a feeling of aversion."
"I view you with a feeling of horror."
The exasperating influences of her language, her looks, and her tones would, as I venture to think, have got to the end of another man's self-control before this. Anyway, she had at last irritated me into speaking as strongly as I felt. What I said had been so plainly (perhaps so rudely) expressed, that misinterpretation of it seemed to be impossible. She mistook me, nevertheless. The most merciless disclosure of the dreary side of human destiny is surely to be found in the failure of words, spoken or written, so to answer their purpose that we can trust them, in our attempts to communicate with each other. Even when he seems to be connected, by the nearest and dearest relations, with his fellow-mortals, what a solitary creature, tried by the test of sympathy, the human being really is in the teeming world that he inhabits! Affording one more example of the impotence of human language to speak for itself, my misinterpreted words had found their way to the one sensitive place in Helena Gracedieu's impenetrable nature. She betrayed it in the quivering and flushing of her hard face, and in the appeal to the looking-glass which escaped her eyes the next moment. My hasty reply had roused the idea of a covert insult addressed to her handsome face. In other words, I had wounded her vanity. Driven by resentment, out came the secret distrust of me which had been lurking in that cold heart, from the moment when we first met.
"I inspire you with horror, and Eunice inspires you with compassion," she said. "That, Mr. Governor, is not natural."
"May I ask why?"
"You know why."
"No."
"You will have it?"
"I want an explanation, Miss Helena, if that is what you mean."
"Take your explanation, then! You are not the stranger you are said to be to my sister and to me. Your interest in Eunice is a personal interest of some kind. I don't pretend to guess what it is. As for myself, it is plain that somebody else has been setting you against me, before Miss Jillgall got possession of your private ear."
In alluding to Eunice, she had blundered, strangely enough, on something like the truth. But when she spoke of herself, the headlong malignity of her suspicions--making every allowance for the anger that had hurried her into them--seemed to call for some little protest against a false assertion. I told her that she was completely mistaken.
"I am completely right," she answered; "I saw it."
"Saw what?"
"Saw you pretending to be a stranger to me."
"When did I do that?"
"You did it when we met at the station."
The reply was too ridiculous for the preservation of any control over my own sense of humor. It was wrong; but it was inevitable--I laughed. She looked at me with a fury, revealing a concentration of evil passion in her which I had not seen yet. I asked her pardon; I begged her to think a little before she persisted in taking a view of my conduct unworthy of her, and unjust to myself.
"Unjust to You!" she burst out. "Who are You? A man who has driven your trade has spies always at his command--yes! and knows how to use them. You were primed with private information--you had, for all I know, a stolen photograph of me in your pocket-- before ever you came to our town. Do you still deny it? Oh, sir, why degrade yourself by telling a lie?"
No such outrage as this had ever been inflicted on me, at any time in my life. My forbearance must, I suppose, have been more severely tried than I was aware of myself. With or without excuse for me, I was weak enough to let a girl's spiteful tongue sting me, and, worse still, to let her see that I felt it.
"You shall have no second opportunity, Miss Gracedieu, of insulting me." With that foolish reply, I opened the door violently and went out.
She ran after me, triumphing in having roused the temper of a man old enough to have been her grandfather, and caught me by the arm. "Your own conduct has exposed you." (That was literally how she expressed herself.) "I saw it in your eyes when we met at the station. You, the stranger--you who allowed poor ignorant me to introduce myself--you knew me all the time, knew me by sight!"
I shook her hand off with an inconsiderable roughness, humiliating to remember. "It's false!" I cried. "I knew you by your likeness to your mother."
The moment the words had passed my lips, I came to my senses again; I remembered what fatal words they might prove to be, if they reached the Minister's ears.
Heard only by his daughter, my reply seemed to cool the heat of her anger in an instant.
"So you knew my mother?" she said. "My father never told us that, when he spoke of your being such a very old friend of his. Strange, to say the least of it."
I was wise enough--now when wisdom had come too late--not to attempt to explain myself, and not to give her an opportunity of saying more. "We are neither of us in a state of mind," I answered, "to allow this interview to continue. I must try to recover my composure; and I leave you to do the same."
In the solitude of my room, I was able to look my position fairly in the face.
Mr. Gracedieu's wife had come to me, in the long-past time, without her husband's knowledge. Tempted to a cruel resolve by the maternal triumph of having an infant of her own, she had resolved to rid herself of the poor little rival in her husband's fatherly affection, by consigning the adopted child to the keeping of a charitable asylum. She had dared to ask me to help her. I had kept the secret of her shameful visit--I can honestly say, for the Minister's sake. And now, long after time had doomed those events to oblivion, they were revived--and revived by me. Thanks to my folly, Mr. Gracedieu's daughter knew what I had concealed from Mr. Gracedieu himself.
What course did respect for my friend, and respect for myself, counsel me to take?
I could only see before me a choice of two evils. To wait for events--with the too certain prospect of a vindictive betrayal of my indiscretion by Helena Gracedieu.