Лучшие романы Уилки Коллинза / The Best of Wilkie Collins
When her cup of tea went up to her the next morning, I followed it in. I sat by her bedside and said a few earnest words. She listened with languid civility. I noticed my serious friend’s precious publications huddled together on a table in a corner. Had she chanced to look into them? – I asked. Yes – and they had not interested her. Would she allow me to read a few passages of the deepest interest, which had probably escaped her eye? No, not now – she had other things to think of. She gave these answers, with her attention apparently absorbed in folding and refolding the frilling on her nightgown. It was plainly necessary to rouse her by some reference to those worldly interests which she still had at heart.
“Do you know, love,” I said, “I had an odd fancy, yesterday, about Mr. Bruff? I thought, when I saw you after your walk with him, that he had been telling you some bad news.”
Her fingers dropped from the frilling of her nightgown, and her fierce black eyes flashed at me.
“Quite the contrary!” she said. “It was news I was interested in hearing – and I am deeply indebted to Mr. Bruff for telling me of it.”
“Yes?” I said, in a tone of gentle interest.
Her fingers went back to the frilling, and she turned her head sullenly away from me. I had been met in this manner, in the course of plying the good work, hundreds of times. She merely stimulated me to try again. In my dauntless zeal for her welfare, I ran the great risk, and openly alluded to her marriage engagement.
“News you were interested in hearing?” I repeated. “I suppose, my dear Rachel, that must be news of Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite?”
She started up in the bed, and turned deadly pale. It was evidently on the tip of her tongue to retort on me with the unbridled insolence of former times. She checked herself – laid her head back on the pillow – considered a minute – and then answered in these remarkable words:
“I SHALL NEVER MARRY MR. GODFREY ABLEWHITE.”
It was my turn to start at that.
“What can you possibly mean?” I exclaimed. “The marriage is considered by the whole family as a settled thing!”
“Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite is expected here to-day,” she said doggedly. “Wait till he comes – and you will see.”
“But my dear Rachel —”
She rang the bell at the head of her bed. The person with the cap-ribbons appeared.
“Penelope! my bath.”
Let me give her her due. In the state of my feelings at that moment, I do sincerely believe that she had hit on the only possible way of forcing me to leave the room.
By the mere worldly mind my position towards Rachel might have been viewed as presenting difficulties of no ordinary kind. I had reckoned on leading her to higher things by means of a little earnest exhortation on the subject of her marriage. And now, if she was to be believed, no such event as her marriage was to take place at all. But ah, my friends! a working Christian of my experience (with an evangelising prospect before her) takes broader views than these. Supposing Rachel really broke off the marriage, on which the Ablewhites, father and son, counted as a settled thing, what would be the result? It could only end, if she held firm, in an exchanging of hard words and bitter accusations on both sides. And what would be the effect on Rachel when the stormy interview was over? A salutary moral depression would be the effect. Her pride would be exhausted, her stubbornness would be exhausted, by the resolute resistance which it was in her character to make under the circumstances. She would turn for sympathy to the nearest person who had sympathy to offer. And I was that nearest person – brimful of comfort, charged to overflowing with seasonable and reviving words. Never had the evangelising[82] prospect looked brighter, to my eyes, than it looked now.
She came down to breakfast, but she ate nothing, and hardly uttered a word.
After breakfast she wandered listlessly from room to room – then suddenly roused herself, and opened the piano. The music she selected to play was of the most scandalously profane sort, associated with performances on the stage which it curdles one’s blood to think of. It would have been premature to interfere with her at such a time as this. I privately ascertained the hour at which Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite was expected, and then I escaped the music by leaving the house.
Being out alone, I took the opportunity of calling upon my two resident friends. It was an indescribable luxury to find myself indulging in earnest conversation with serious persons. Infinitely encouraged and refreshed, I turned my steps back again to the house, in excellent time to await the arrival of our expected visitor. I entered the dining-room, always empty at that hour of the day, and found myself face to face with Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite!
He made no attempt to fly the place. Quite the contrary. He advanced to meet me with the utmost eagerness.
“Dear Miss Clack, I have been only waiting to see you! Chance set me free of my London engagements to-day sooner than I had expected, and I have got here, in consequence, earlier than my appointed time.”
Not the slightest embarrassment encumbered his explanation, though this was his first meeting with me after the scene in Montagu Square. He was not aware, it is true, of my having been a witness of that scene. But he knew, on the other hand, that my attendances at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, and my relations with friends attached to other charities, must have informed me of his shameless neglect of his Ladies and of his Poor. And yet there he was before me, in full possession of his charming voice and his irresistible smile!
“Have you seen Rachel yet?” I asked.
He sighed gently, and took me by the hand. I should certainly have snatched my hand away, if the manner in which he gave his answer had not paralysed me with astonishment.
“I have seen Rachel,” he said with perfect tranquillity. “You are aware, dear friend, that she was engaged to me? Well, she has taken a sudden resolution to break the engagement. Reflection has convinced her that she will best consult her welfare and mine by retracting a rash promise, and leaving me free to make some happier choice elsewhere. That is the only reason she will give, and the only answer she will make to every question that I can ask of her.”
“What have you done on your side?” I inquired. “Have you submitted.”
“Yes,” he said with the most unruffled composure, “I have submitted.”
His conduct, under the circumstances, was so utterly inconceivable, that I stood bewildered with my hand in his. It is a piece of rudeness to stare at anybody, and it is an act of indelicacy to stare at a gentleman. I committed both those improprieties. And I said, as if in a dream, “What does it mean?”
“Permit me to tell you,” he replied. “And suppose we sit down?”
He led me to a chair. I have an indistinct remembrance that he was very affectionate. I don’t think he put his arm round my waist to support me – but I am not sure. I was quite helpless, and his ways with ladies were very endearing. At any rate, we sat down. I can answer for that, if I can answer for nothing more.
Chapter VIII
“I have lost a beautiful girl, an excellent social position, and a handsome income,” Mr. Godfrey began; “and I have submitted to it without a struggle. What can be the motive for such extraordinary conduct as that? My precious friend, there is no motive.”
“No motive?” I repeated.
“Let me appeal, my dear Miss Clack, to your experience of children,” he went on. “A child pursues a certain course of conduct. You are greatly struck by it, and you attempt to get at the motive. The dear little thing is incapable of telling you its motive. You might as well ask the grass why it grows, or the birds why they sing. Well! in this matter, I am like the dear little thing – like the grass – like the birds. I don’t know why I made a proposal of marriage to Miss Verinder. I don’t know why I have shamefully neglected my dear Ladies. I don’t know why I have apostatised from the Mothers’ Small-Clothes. You say to the child, Why have you been naughty? And the little angel puts its finger into its mouth, and doesn’t know. My case exactly, Miss Clack! I couldn’t confess it to anybody else. I feel impelled to confess it to YOU!”
I began to recover myself. A mental problem was involved here. I am deeply interested in mental problems – and I am not, it is thought, without some skill in solving them.
“Best of friends, exert your intellect, and help me,” he proceeded. “Tell me – why does a time come when these matrimonial proceedings of mine begin to look like something done in a dream? Why does it suddenly occur to me that my true happiness is in helping my dear Ladies, in going my modest round of useful work, in saying my few earnest words when called on by my Chairman? What do I want with a position? I have got a position! What do I want with an income? I can pay for my bread and cheese, and my nice little lodging, and my two coats a year. What do I want with Miss Verinder? She has told me with her own lips (this, dear lady, is between ourselves) that she loves another man, and that her only idea in marrying me is to try and put that other man out of her head. What a horrid union is this! Oh, dear me, what a horrid union is this! Such are my reflections, Miss Clack, on my way to Brighton. I approach Rachel with the feeling of a criminal who is going to receive his sentence. When I find that she has changed her mind too – when I hear her propose to break the engagement – I experience (there is no sort of doubt about it) a most overpowering sense of relief. A month ago I was pressing her rapturously to my bosom. An hour ago, the happiness of knowing that I shall never press her again, intoxicates me like strong liquor. The thing seems impossible – the thing can’t be. And yet there are the facts, as I had the honour of stating them when we first sat down together in these two chairs. I have lost a beautiful girl, an excellent social position, and a handsome income; and I have submitted to it without a struggle. Can you account for it, dear friend? It’s quite beyond ME.”
His magnificent head sank on his breast, and he gave up his own mental problem in despair.
I was deeply touched. The case (if I may speak as a spiritual physician) was now quite plain to me. It is no uncommon event, in the experience of us all, to see the possessors of exalted ability occasionally humbled to the level of the most poorly-gifted people about them. The object, no doubt, in the wise economy of Providence, is to remind greatness that it is mortal and that the power which has conferred it can also take it away. It was now – to my mind – easy to discern one of these salutary humiliations in the deplorable proceedings on dear Mr. Godfrey’s part, of which I had been the unseen witness. And it was equally easy to recognise the welcome reappearance of his own finer nature in the horror with which he recoiled from the idea of a marriage with Rachel, and in the charming eagerness which he showed to return to his Ladies and his Poor.
I put this view before him in a few simple and sisterly words. His joy was beautiful to see. He compared himself, as I went on, to a lost man emerging from the darkness into the light. When I answered for a loving reception of him at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, the grateful heart of our Christian Hero overflowed. He pressed my hands alternately to his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph of having got him back among us, I let him do what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder. In a moment more I should certainly have swooned away in his arms, but for an interruption from the outer world, which brought me to myself again. A horrid rattling of knives and forks sounded outside the door, and the footman came in to lay the table for luncheon.
Mr. Godfrey started up, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.
“How time flies with YOU!” he exclaimed. “I shall barely catch the train.”
I ventured on asking why he was in such a hurry to get back to town. His answer reminded me of family difficulties that were still to be reconciled, and of family disagreements that were yet to come.
“I have heard from my father,” he said. “Business obliges him to leave Frizinghall for London to-day, and he proposes coming on here, either this evening or to-morrow. I must tell him what has happened between Rachel and me. His heart is set on our marriage – there will be great difficulty, I fear, in reconciling him to the breaking-off of the engagement. I must stop him, for all our sakes, from coming here till he IS reconciled. Best and dearest of friends, we shall meet again!”
With those words he hurried out. In equal haste on my side, I ran upstairs to compose myself in my own room before meeting Aunt Ablewhite and Rachel at the luncheon-table.
I am well aware – to dwell for a moment yet on the subject of Mr. Godfrey – that the all-profaning opinion of the world has charged him with having his own private reasons for releasing Rachel from her engagement, at the first opportunity she gave him. It has also reached my ears, that his anxiety to recover his place in my estimation has been attributed in certain quarters, to a mercenary eagerness to make his peace (through me) with a venerable committee-woman at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, abundantly blessed with the goods of this world, and a beloved and intimate friend of my own. I only notice these odious slanders for the sake of declaring that they never had a moment’s influence on my mind. In obedience to my instructions, I have exhibited the fluctuations in my opinion of our Christian Hero, exactly as I find them recorded in my diary. In justice to myself, let me here add that, once reinstated in his place in my estimation, my gifted friend never lost that place again. I write with the tears in my eyes, burning to say more. But no – I am cruelly limited to my actual experience of persons and things. In less than a month from the time of which I am now writing, events in the money-market (which diminished even my miserable little income) forced me into foreign exile, and left me with nothing but a loving remembrance of Mr. Godfrey which the slander of the world has assailed, and assailed in vain.
Let me dry my eyes, and return to my narrative.
I went downstairs to luncheon, naturally anxious to see how Rachel was affected by her release from her marriage engagement.
It appeared to me – but I own I am a poor authority in such matters – that the recovery of her freedom had set her thinking again of that other man whom she loved, and that she was furious with herself for not being able to control a revulsion of feeling of which she was secretly ashamed. Who was the man? I had my suspicions – but it was needless to waste time in idle speculation. When I had converted her, she would, as a matter of course, have no concealments from Me. I should hear all about the man; I should hear all about the Moonstone. If I had had no higher object in stirring her up to a sense of spiritual things, the motive of relieving her mind of its guilty secrets would have been enough of itself to encourage me to go on.
Aunt Ablewhite took her exercise in the afternoon in an invalid chair. Rachel accompanied her. “I wish I could drag the chair,” she broke out, recklessly. “I wish I could fatigue myself till I was ready to drop.”
She was in the same humour in the evening. I discovered in one of my friend’s precious publications – the Life, Letters, and Labours of Miss Jane Ann Stamper, forty-fourth edition – passages which bore with a marvellous appropriateness on Rachel’s present position. Upon my proposing to read them, she went to the piano. Conceive how little she must have known of serious people, if she supposed that my patience was to be exhausted in that way! I kept Miss Jane Ann Stamper by me, and waited for events with the most unfaltering trust in the future.
Old Mr. Ablewhite never made his appearance that night. But I knew the importance which his worldly greed attached to his son’s marriage with Miss Verinder – and I felt a positive conviction (do what Mr. Godfrey might to prevent it) that we should see him the next day. With his interference in the matter, the storm on which I had counted would certainly come, and the salutary exhaustion of Rachel’s resisting powers would as certainly follow. I am not ignorant that old Mr. Ablewhite has the reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer.
The next day, exactly as I had foreseen, Aunt Ablewhite was as near to being astonished as her nature would permit, by the sudden appearance of her husband. He had barely been a minute in the house, before he was followed, to MY astonishment this time, by an unexpected complication in the shape of Mr. Bruff.
I never remember feeling the presence of the lawyer to be more unwelcome than I felt it at that moment. He looked ready for anything in the way of an obstructive proceeding – capable even of keeping the peace with Rachel for one of the combatants!
“This is a pleasant surprise, sir,” said Mr. Ablewhite, addressing himself with his deceptive cordiality to Mr. Bruff. “When I left your office yesterday, I didn’t expect to have the honour of seeing you at Brighton to-day.”
“I turned over our conversation in my mind, after you had gone,” replied Mr. Bruff. “And it occurred to me that I might perhaps be of some use on this occasion. I was just in time to catch the train, and I had no opportunity of discovering the carriage in which you were travelling.”
Having given that explanation, he seated himself by Rachel. I retired modestly to a corner – with Miss Jane Ann Stamper on my lap, in case of emergency. My aunt sat at the window; placidly fanning herself as usual. Mr. Ablewhite stood up in the middle of the room, with his bald head much pinker than I had ever seen it yet, and addressed himself in the most affectionate manner to his niece.
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Примечания
1
Seringapatam – a town in southern India; the town got its name for the 12th century temple to the Hindu god Vishnu. In the 15th century it became the capital of the rajahs and sultans
2
Mohammedan – Muslim
3
Mahmud of Ghizni (998–1030) – sultan of Ghazna, the king-dom comprising the territory of present-day Afghanistan, most of Iran and northern India
4
Somnauth – Somnath, an ancient city in west-central India, now ruined; it is known for its temple of Shiva (Lord of the Moon)
5
Brahmins – members of the caste of Hindu priests
6
Benares – Varanasi, a sacred city of the Hindus in northern India on the left bank of the Ganges River
7
Vishnu – one of the main Hindu gods; Vishnu is associated with the Sun
8
Aurungzebe – Aurangzeb (1618–1707), emperor of India in 1658–1707, the last of the Mogul emperors
9
the Moguls – a Muslim dynasty that ruled India in the 16th–18th centuries
10
Brahma(h) – one of the major gods in Hinduism who created the earth and everything on it
11
Tippoo – Tippu (1750–1799), sultan of Mysore; he died in 1799 when his capital, Seringapatam, was stormed by the Brit-ish forces.
12
Yorkshire – a large historic county in the north-central part of England
13
the Garden of Eden – in the Old Testament, paradise where the first man and woman lived
14
Adam – in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the first man cre-ated by God on the sixth day of creation
15
claret – Bordeaux wine; the city of Bordeaux was known for its wine even in the Roman times
16
jugglers – persons who perform tricks to amuse people
17
Reformatory – an institution for reforming young crimi-nals
18
quicksand – liquid sand combined with pools of water at the mouth of large rivers or along the beach
19
cambric – cotton (originally linen) cloth first made in France, used for bands, cuffs, ruffs
20
Hampstead – originally a village, now an inner borough (in-corporated town or district) of London north of Westminster and the City of London
21
plaguy – dangerous, annoying
22
freaks – a freak is somebody or something unusual or ab-normal
23
Christendom – the Christian world; cultural and religious community of Christian countries.
24
boudoir – a woman’s dressing room or a private sitting room
25
Satan – in Christianity and Judaism, the prince of evil forces, the enemy of God
26
misalliance – unequal or unsuitable marriage
27
a good Samaritan – in the Bible, the man who, with love and patience, helped every suffering person
28
philanthropist – a person who helps those in need or in trou-ble
29
ditto = the same thing (the word is used to avoid repetition)
30
griffins – mythological creatures with bodies of lions and heads of eagles
31
cupids – Cupid is a Roman god of love portrayed as a winged child with arrows and a bow
32
cravat – folded linen or lace worn as a necktie
33
salaams – low bows
34
cheroot – a thin cigar with both ends open
35
gig – a light two-wheeled carriage with one horse
36
magistrate – an official, acting as judge in lower courts
37
embargo – a decision that forbids trade, import, export, com-merce, etc.; also means a ban on smth.
38
sal-volatile – solution of smelling salts used as a medicine when a person is unconscious
39
pony-chaise – a low carriage with two or four wheels pulled by a pony
40
holus-bolus – with one hit; at one gulp; at once; in a body, in bulk
41
sovereign – a British gold coin with face value of one pound; the coin is out of use now.
42
Solomon – the greatest king of Israel (10th century BC), son of David; Solomon was famous for his wisdom, military expan-sion and the construction of the temple in Jerusalem.
43
memorandum – a written plan for future
44
hieroglyphics – an ancient system of writing, in which pic-tures and symbols are used for words and sounds
45
gibberish – unintelligible, meaningless sounds
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