“You dare propose to me to—”
“Darling, I dare propose to you. Stop
there. If it be bad to idolise you, I am the worst of men; if it be good, I am
the best. My love for you is above all other love, and my truth to you is above
all other truth. Let me have hope and favour, and I am a forsworn man for your
sake.”
Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and,
pushing back her hair, looks wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were
trying to piece together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in
fragments.
“Reckon up nothing at this moment,
angel, but the sacrifices that I lay at those dear feet, which I could fall
down among the vilest ashes and kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage
might. There is my fidelity to my dear boy after death. Tread upon it!”
With an action of his hands, as though
he cast down something precious.
“There is the inexpiable offence against
my adoration of you. Spurn it!”
With a similar action.
“There are my labours in the cause of a
just vengeance for six toiling months. Crush them!”
With another repetition of the action.
“There is my past and my present wasted
life. There is the desolation of my heart and my soul. There is my peace; there
is my despair. Stamp them into the dust; so that you take me, were it even
mortally hating me!”
The frightful vehemence of the man, now
reaching its full height, so additionally terrifies her as to break the spell
that has held her to the spot. She swiftly moves towards the porch; but in an
instant he is at her side, and speaking in her ear.
“Rosa, I am self-repressed again. I am
walking calmly beside you to the house. I shall wait for some encouragement and
hope. I shall not strike too soon. Give me a sign that you attend to me.”
She slightly and constrainedly moves her
hand.
“Not a word of this to any one, or it will
bring down the blow, as certainly as night follows day. Another sign that you
attend to me.”
She moves her hand once more.
“I love you, love you, love you! If you
were to cast me off now—but you will not—you would never be rid of me. No one
should come between us. I would pursue you to the death.”
The handmaid coming out to open the gate
for him, he quietly pulls off his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with
no greater show of agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea's
father opposite. Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to
her room and laid down on her bed. A thunderstorm is coming on, the maids say,
and the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear: no wonder; they have
felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.
CHAPTER XX—A FLIGHT
ROSA no sooner came to herself than the
whole of the late interview was before her. It even seemed as if it had pursued
her into her insensibility, and she had not had a moment's unconsciousness of
it. What to do, she was at a frightened loss to know: the only one clear
thought in her mind was, that she must fly from this terrible man.
But where could she take refuge, and how
could she go? She had never breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena. If
she went to Helena, and told her what had passed, that very act might bring
down the irreparable mischief that he threatened he had the power, and that she
knew he had the will, to do. The more fearful he appeared to her excited memory
and imagination, the more alarming her responsibility appeared; seeing that a
slight mistake on her part, either in action or delay, might let his malevolence
loose on Helena's brother.
Rosa's mind throughout the last six
months had been stormily confused. A half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion
tossed in it, now heaving itself up, and now sinking into the deep; now gaining
palpability, and now losing it. Jasper's self-absorption in his nephew when he
was alive, and his unceasing pursuit of the inquiry how he came by his death,
if he were dead, were themes so rife in the place, that no one appeared able to
suspect the possibility of foul play at his hands. She had asked herself the
question, “Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to conceive a wickedness that
others cannot imagine?” Then she had considered, Did the suspicion come of her
previous recoiling from him before the fact? And if so, was not that a proof of
its baselessness? Then she had reflected, “What motive could he have, according
to my accusation?” She was ashamed to answer in her mind, “The motive of
gaining ME!” And covered her face, as if the lightest shadow of the idea of
founding murder on such an idle vanity were a crime almost as great.
She ran over in her mind again, all that
he had said by the sundial in the garden. He had persisted in treating the
disappearance as murder, consistently with his whole public course since the
finding of the watch and shirt-pin. If he were afraid of the crime being traced
out, would he not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance? He
had even declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been less
strong, he might have swept “even him” away from her side. Was that like his
having really done so? He had spoken of laying his six months” labours in the
cause of a just vengeance at her feet. Would he have done that, with that
violence of passion, if they were a pretence? Would he have ranged them with
his desolate heart and soul, his wasted life, his peace and his despair? The
very first sacrifice that he represented himself as making for her, was his
fidelity to his dear boy after death. Surely these facts were strong against a
fancy that scarcely dared to hint itself. And yet he was so terrible a man! In
short, the poor girl (for what could she know of the criminal intellect, which
its own professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying
to reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of
identifying it as a horrible wonder apart) could get by no road to any other
conclusion than that he WAS a terrible man, and must be fled from.
She had been Helena's stay and comfort
during the whole time. She had constantly assured her of her full belief in her
brother's innocence, and of her sympathy with him in his misery. But she had
never seen him since the disappearance, nor had Helena ever spoken one word of
his avowal to Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, though as a part of the
interest of the case it was well known far and wide. He was Helena's
unfortunate brother, to her, and nothing more. The assurance she had given her
odious suitor was strictly true, though it would have been better (she
considered now) if she could have restrained herself from so giving it. Afraid
of him as the bright and delicate little creature was, her spirit swelled at
the thought of his knowing it from her own lips.
But where was she to go? Anywhere beyond
his reach, was no reply to the question. Somewhere must be thought of. She
determined to go to her guardian, and to go immediately. The feeling she had
imparted to Helena on the night of their first confidence, was so strong upon
her—the feeling of not being safe from him, and of the solid walls of the old
convent being powerless to keep out his ghostly following of her—that no
reasoning of her own could calm her terrors. The fascination of repulsion had
been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that she felt as if he had
power to bind her by a spell. Glancing out at window, even now, as she rose to
dress, the sight of the sun-dial on which he had leaned when he declared
himself, turned her cold, and made her shrink from it, as though he had
invested it with some awful quality from his own nature.
She wrote a hurried note to Miss
Twinkleton, saying that she had sudden reason for wishing to see her guardian
promptly, and had gone to him; also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy,
for all was well with her. She hurried a few quite useless articles into a very
little bag, left the note in a conspicuous place, and went out, softly closing
the gate after her.
It was the first time she had ever been
even in Cloisterham High Street alone. But knowing all its ways and windings
very well, she hurried straight to the corner from which the omnibus departed.
It was, at that very moment, going off.
“Stop and take me, if you please, Joe. I
am obliged to go to London.”
In less than another minute she was on
her road to the railway, under Joe's protection. Joe waited on her when she got
there, put her safely into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little
bag after her, as though it were some enormous trunk, hundredweights heavy,
which she must on no account endeavour to lift.
“Can you go round when you get back, and
tell Miss Twinkleton that you saw me safely off, Joe
“It shall be done, Miss.”
“With my love, please, Joe.”
“Yes, Miss—and I wouldn't mind having it
myself!” But Joe did not articulate the last clause; only thought it.
Now that she was whirling away for
London in real earnest, Rosa was at leisure to resume the thoughts which her
personal hurry had checked. The indignant thought that his declaration of love
soiled her; that she could only be cleansed from the stain of its impurity by
appealing to the honest and true; supported her for a time against her fears,
and confirmed her in her hasty resolution. But as the evening grew darker and
darker, and the great city impended nearer and nearer, the doubts usual in such
cases began to arise. Whether this was not a wild proceeding, after all; how
Mr. Grewgious might regard it; whether she should find him at the journey's
end; how she would act if he were absent; what might become of her, alone, in a
place so strange and crowded; how if she had but waited and taken counsel
first; whether, if she could now go back, she would not do it thankfully; a
multitude of such uneasy speculations disturbed her, more and more as they
accumulated. At length the train came into London over the housetops; and down
below lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps a-glow, on a hot,
light, summer night.
“Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn,
London.” This was all Rosa knew of her destination; but it was enough to send
her rattling away again in a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many
people crowded at the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many
other people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on
hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their surroundings were so
gritty and so shabby!
There was music playing here and there,
but it did not enliven the case. No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big
drum beat dull care away. Like the chapel bells that were also going here and
there, they only seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from
everything. As to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have cracked their
hearts and souls in pining for the country.
Her jingling conveyance stopped at last
at a fast-closed gateway, which appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to
bed very early, and was much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her
conveyance, timidly knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag
and all, by a watchman.
“Does Mr. Grewgious live here?”
“Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,” said
the watchman, pointing further in.
So Rosa went further in, and, when the
clocks were striking ten, stood on P. J. T. “s doorsteps, wondering what P. J.
T. had done with his street-door.
Guided by the painted name of Mr.
Grewgious, she went up-stairs and softly tapped and tapped several times. But
no one answering, and Mr. Grewgious's door-handle yielding to her touch, she
went in, and saw her guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with
a shaded lamp placed far from him on a table in a corner.
Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight
of the room. He saw her, and he said, in an undertone: “Good Heaven!”
Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and
then he said, returning her embrace:
“My child, my child! I thought you were
your mother!—But what, what, what,” he added, soothingly, “has happened? My
dear, what has brought you here? Who has brought you here?”
“No one. I came alone.”
“Lord bless me!” ejaculated Mr.
Grewgious. “Came alone! Why didn't you write to me to come and fetch you?”
“I had no time. I took a sudden
resolution. Poor, poor Eddy!”
“Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!”
“His uncle has made love to me. I cannot
bear it,” said Rosa, at once with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little
foot; “I shudder with horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and
all of us from him, if you will?”
“I will,” cried Mr. Grewgious, with a
sudden rush of amazing energy. “Damn him!
“Confound his politics! Frustrate his
knavish tricks! On Thee his hopes to fix? Damn him again!"”
After this most extraordinary outburst,
Mr. Grewgious, quite beside himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance
undecided whether he was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative
denunciation.
He stopped and said, wiping his face: “I
beg your pardon, my dear, but you will be glad to know I feel better. Tell me
no more just now, or I might do it again. You must be refreshed and cheered.
What did you take last? Was it breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper? And
what will you take next? Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?”