"Well, little girl," she said, "you are late in paying me your visit this morning?"
"It was very wrong of you, mother, not to send for me when you were so ill last night," I answered.
"Oh, that time," said mother, "it seems ages off already, and I am quite as well as usual. I have got a kind nurse to look after me now.
Nurse Marion, come here."
I could not help giving a visible start. Were things so bad with mother that she required the services of a trained nurse? A comely, sweet-faced, young woman of about thirty years of age, now approached from her seat behind the curtain.
"The doctor sent me in, Miss Wickham; he thought your mother would be the better for constant care for two or three days."
"I am very glad you have come," I answered.
"Oh, it is so nice," said mother; "Nurse Marion has made me delightfully comfortable; and is not the room sweet with that delicious old-fashioned lavender she uses, and with all those spring flowers?"
"I have opened the window, too," said the nurse, "the more air the dear lady gets the better for her; but now, Miss Wickham, I cannot allow your mother to talk. Will you come back again; or, if you stay, will you be very quiet?"
"As you are here to look after mother I will come back again," I said.
I bent down, kissed the lily white hand which lay on the counterpane, and rushed from the room. Stabs of agony were going through my heart, and yet I must not give way!
I ran upstairs, and knocked at Mrs. Fanning's door. As Albert Fanning was out, I was determined to see her. There was no reply to my summons, and after a moment I opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. I went to my own room, sat down for a moment, and tried to consider how things were tending with me, and what the end would be.
Rather than mother should suffer another pang, I would marry Albert Fanning. But must it come to this!
I put on my outdoor things, and ran downstairs. The closeness and oppression of the day before had changed into a most balmy and delicious spring morning; a sort of foretaste day of early summer. I was reckless, my purse was very light, but what did that matter. I stopped a hansom, got into it, and gave the man Albert Fanning's address in Paternoster Row. Was I mad to go to him--to beard the lion in his den? I did not know; I only knew that sane or mad, I must do what I had made up my mind to do.
The hansom bowled smoothly along, and I sat back in the farthest corner, and tried to hope that no one saw me. A pale, very slender, very miserable girl was all that they would have seen; the grace gone from her, the beauty all departed; a sort of wreck of a girl, who had made a great failure of her life, and of the happiness of those belonging to her. Oh, if only the past six or eight months could be lived over again, how differently would I have spent them! The cottage in the country seemed now to be a sort of paradise. If only I could take mother to it, I would be content to be buried away from the eyes of the world for evermore. But mother was dying; there would be no need soon for any of us to trouble about her future, for God Himself was taking it into His own hands, and had prepared for her a mansion, and an unfading habitation.
I scarcely dared think of this. Be the end long, or be the end short, during the remaining days or weeks of her existence, she must not be worried, she must go happily, securely, confidently, down to the Valley. That was the thought, the only thought which stayed with me, as I drove as fast as I could in the direction of Mr. Fanning's place of business.
The cab was not allowed to go up the Row, so I paid my fare at the entrance, and then walked to my destination. I knew the number well, for Albert had mentioned it two or three times in my hearing, having indeed often urged me to go and see him. I stopped therefore at the right place, looked up, saw the name of Albert Fanning in huge letters across the window, opened the door and entered. I found myself in a big, book saloon, and going up to a man asked if Mr. Fanning were in.
The man was one of those smart sort of clerks, who generally know everybody's business but their own. He looked me all over in a somewhat quizzical way, and then said--
"Have you an appointment, miss?"
"I have not," I replied.
"Our chief, Mr. Fanning, never sees ladies without appointments."
"I think he will see me," I answered, "he happens to know me. Please say that Miss Westenra Wickham has called to see him."
The clerk stared at me for a moment.
"Miss West! what Wickham Miss? Perhaps you wouldn't mind writing it down."
I did not want to write down my name, but I did so; I gave it to the clerk, who withdrew, smiling to a brother clerk as he did so. He came back in a minute or two, looking rather red about the face, and went back to his seat without approaching me, and at the same time I heard heavy, ungainly steps rushing downstairs, and Mr. Fanning, in his office coat, which was decidedly shabby, and almost as greasy as the one which belonged to the "Man in Possession" on the previous evening, entered the saloon. His hair stood wildly up on his head, and his blue eyes were full of excitement. He came straight up to me.
"I say, this is a pleasure," he exclaimed, "and quite unlooked for.
Pray, come upstairs at once, Miss Wickham. I am delighted to see you--delighted. Understand, Parkins," he said, addressing the clerk who had brought my message, "that I am engaged for the present, absolutely engaged, and can see _no one_. Now, Miss Wickham, now."
He ushered me as if I were a queen through the saloon, past the wondering and almost tittering clerks, and up some winding stairs to his own sanctum on the first floor.
"Cosy, eh?" he said, as he opened the door, and showed me a big apartment crowded with books of every shape and size, and heavily, and at the same time, handsomely furnished. "Not bad for a city man's office, eh?" he continued, "all the books are amusing; you might like to dip into 'em by-and-by, nothing deep or dull, or stodgy here, all light, frothy, and merry. Nothing improving, all entertaining. That is how my father made his fortune; and that is how I, Albert the second, as the mater calls me, intend to go on adding to my fortune. It is on light, frothy, palatable morsels that I and my wife will live in the future, eh, eh? You're pleased with the look of the place, ain't you.
Now then, sit right down here facing the light, so that I can have a good view of you. You're so young; you have not a wrinkle on you. It's the first sign of age coming on when a girl wishes to sit with her back to the light, but you are young, and you can stand the full glare. Here, you take the office chair. Isn't it comfortable? That's where I have sat for hours and hours, and days and days; and where my father sat before me. How well you'd look interviewing authors and artists when they come here with their manuscripts. But there! I expect you'd be a great deal too kind to them. A lot of rubbish you would buy for the firm of Fanning & Co., wouldn't you now, eh? Ah, it's you that has got a tender little heart, and Albert Fanning has been one of the first to find it out."
I could not interrupt this rapid flow of words, and sat in the chair indicated, feeling almost stunned. At last he stopped, and gazing at me, said--
"Well, and how _is_ Miss Westenra Wickham, and what has brought her to visit her humble servant? Out with it now, the truth, please."
Still I could find no words. At last, however, I said almost shyly--
"You have been kind, more than kind, but I came here to tell you, you must not do it."
"Now that's a pretty sort of thing to bring you here," said Mr.
Fanning. "Upon my soul, that's a queer errand. I have been kind, forsooth! and I am not to be kind in the future. And pray why should I turn into an evil, cruel sort of man at your suggestion, Miss Wickham?
Why should I, eh? Am I to spoil my fine character because you, a little slip of a girl, wish it so?"
"You must listen to me," I said; "you do not take me seriously, but you must. This is no laughing matter."
"Oh, I am to talk sense, am I? What a little chit it is! but it is a dear little thing in its way, although saucy. It's trying to come round me and to teach me. Well, well, I don't mind owning that you can turn me with a twist of your little finger wherever you please. You have the most bewitching way with you I ever saw with any girl. It has bowled Albert Fanning over, that it has. Now, then, what have you really come for?"
"You paid the bill of Pattens the butcher either this morning or last night, why did you do it?"
Mr. Fanning had the grace to turn red when I said this. He gave me even for a moment an uncomfortable glance, then said loudly--
"But you didn't surely want that fellow Robert to stay on?"
"That is quite true," I replied, "but I still less want you, Mr.
Fanning, to pay our debts. You did very wrong to take such a liberty without my permission, very, very wrong."
"To tell you the honest truth, I never wished you to know about it,"
said Mr. Fanning. "Who blurted it out?"
"Jane Mullins, of course, told me."
"Ah, I mentioned to the mater that it would be very silly to confide in that woman, and now the little mater has done no end of mischief.
She has set your back up and--but there, you were bound to know of it sooner or later. Of course the butcher's is not the only bill I must pay, and you were bound to know, of course. I don't really mind that you do know. It's a great relief to you, ain't it now?"
"It is not a great relief, and what is more I cannot allow it."
"You cannot allow it?"
"No."
Mr. Fanning now pulled his chair up so close to mine that his knees nearly touched me. I drew back.
"You needn't be afraid that I'll come closer," he said almost sulkily, "you know quite well what I feel about you, Miss Wickham, for I have said it already. I may have a few more words to deliver on that point by-and-by, but now what I want to say is this, that I won't force any one to come to me except with a free heart. Nobody, not even you--not even _you_--although, God knows, you are like no one else on earth, shall come to me except willingly. I never met any one like you before, so dainty, so fair so pretty--oh, so very pretty, and such a sweet girl and, upon my word, you can make just anything of me. But there, the time for love-making has not yet come, and you have something ugly to say in the back of your head, I see the thought shining out of your eyes. Oh, however hard you may feel, and however much pain you mean to give me, you cannot make those eyes of yours look ugly and forbidding. Now I am prepared to listen."
He folded his arms across his chest and looked full at me. He was in such great and desperate earnest that he was not quite so repellant as usual. I could not but respect him, and I found it no longer difficult to speak freely to him.