Уилки Коллинз - The Fallen Leaves

“So you call him ‘Amelius’, do you?” he said. “I note that, Miss, as an unfavourable sign to begin with. How long, if you please, has Amelius turned schoolmarm, for your young ladyship’s benefit? Don’t you understand? Well, you’re not the only inhabitant of Great Britain who don’t understand the English language. I’ll put it plainer. When I last saw Amelius, you were learning your lessons at the Home. What ill wind, Miss, blew you in here? Did Amelius fetch you, or did you come of your own accord, without waiting to be whistled for?” He spoke coarsely but not ill-humouredly. Sally’s pretty downcast face was pleading with him for mercy, and (as he felt, with supreme contempt for himself) was not altogether pleading in vain. “If I guessed that you ran away from the home,” he resumed, “should I guess right?”

She answered with a sudden accession of confidence. “Don’t blame Amelius,” she said; “I did run away. I couldn’t live without him.”

“You don’t know how you can live, young one, till you’ve tried the experiment. Well, and what did they do at the Home? Did they send after you, to fetch you back?”

“They wouldn’t take me back—they sent my clothes here after me.”

“Ah, those were the rules, I reckon. I begin to see my way to the end of it now. Amelius gave you house-room?”

She looked at him proudly. “He gave me a room of my own,” she said.

His next question was the exact repetition of the question which he had put to Regina in Paris. The only variety was in the answer that he received.

“Are you fond of Amelius?”

“I would die for him!”

Rufus had hitherto spoken, standing. He now took a chair.

“If Amelius had not been brought up at Tadmor,” he said, “I should take my hat, and wish you good morning. As things are, a word more may be a word in season. Your lessons here seem to have agreed with you, Miss. You’re a different sort of girl to what you were when I last saw you.”

She surprised him by receiving that remark in silence. The colour left her face. She sighed bitterly. The sigh puzzled Rufus: he held his opinion of her in suspense, until he had heard more.

“You said just now you would die for Amelius,” he went on, eyeing her attentively. “I take that to be a woman’s hysterical way of mentioning that she feels interest in Amelius. Are you fond enough of him to leave him, if you could only be persuaded that leaving him was for his good?”

She abruptly left the table, and went to the window. When her back was turned to Rufus, she spoke. “Am I a disgrace to him?” she asked, in tones so faint that he could barely hear them. “I have had my fears of it, before now.”

If he had been less fond of Amelius, his natural kindness of heart might have kept him silent. Even as it was, he made no direct reply. “You remember how you were living when Amelius first met with you?” was all he said.

The sad blue eyes looked at him in patient sorrow; the low sweet voice answered—“Yes.” Only a look and a word—only the influence of an instant—and, in that instant, Rufus’s last doubts of her vanished!

“Don’t think I say it reproachfully, my child! I know it was not your fault; I know you are to be pitied, and not blamed.”

She turned her face towards him—pale, quiet, and resigned. “Pitied, and not blamed,” she repeated. “Am I to be forgiven?”

He shrank from answering her. There was silence.

“You said just now,” she went on, “that I looked like a different girl, since you last saw me. I am a different girl. I think of things that I never thought of before—some change, I don’t know what, has come over me. Oh, my heart does hunger so to be good! I do so long to deserve what Amelius has done for me! You have got my book there—Amelius gave it to me; we read in it every day. If Christ had been on earth now, is it wrong to think that Christ would have forgiven me?”

“No, my dear; it’s right to think so.”

“And, while I live, if I do my best to lead a good life, and if my last prayer to God is to take me to heaven, shall I be heard?”

“You will be heard, my child, I don’t doubt it. But, you see, you have got the world about you to reckon with—and the world has invented a religion of its own. There’s no use looking for it in this book of yours. It’s a religion with the pride of property at the bottom of it, and a veneer of benevolent sentiment at the top. It will be very sorry for you, and very charitable towards you: in short, it will do everything for you except taking you back again.”

She had her answer to that. “Amelius has taken me back again,” she said.

“Amelius has taken you back again,” Rufus agreed. “But there’s one thing he’s forgotten to do; he has forgotten to count the cost. It seems to be left to me to do that. Look here, my girl! I own I doubted you when I first came into this room; and I’m sorry for it, and I beg your pardon. I do believe you’re a good girl—I couldn’t say why if I was asked, but I do believe it for all that. I wish there was no more to be said—but there is more; and neither you nor I must shirk it. Public opinion won’t deal as tenderly with you as I do; public opinion will make the worst of you, and the worst of Amelius. While you’re living here with him—there’s no disguising it—you’re innocently in the way of the boy’s prospects in life. I don’t know whether you understand me?”

She had turned away from him; she was looking out of the window once more.

“I understand you,” she answered. “On the night when Amelius met with me, he did wrong to take me away with him. He ought to have left me where I was.”

“Wait a bit! that’s as far from my meaning as far can be. There’s a look-out for everybody; and, if you’ll trust me, I’ll find a look-out for you.”

She paid no heed to what he said: her next words showed that she was pursuing her own train of thought.

“I am in the way of his prospects in life,” she resumed. “You mean that he might be married some day, but for me?”

Rufus admitted it cautiously. “The thing might happen,” was all he said.

“And his friends might come and see him,” she went on; her face still turned away, and her voice sinking into dull subdued tones. “Nobody comes here now. You see I understand you. When shall I go away? I had better not say good-bye, I suppose?—it would only distress him. I could slip out of the house, couldn’t I?”

Rufus began to feel uneasy. He was prepared for tears—but not for such resignation as this. After a little hesitation, he joined her at the window. She never turned towards him; she still looked out straight before her; her bright young face had turned pitiably rigid and pale. He spoke to her very gently; advising her to think of what he had said, and to do nothing in a hurry. She knew the hotel at which he stayed when he was in London; and she could write to him there. If she decided to begin a new life in another country, he was wholly and truly at her service. He would provide a passage for her in the same ship that took him back to America. At his age, and known as he was in his own neighbourhood, there would be no scandal to fear. He could get her reputably and profitably employed, in work which a young girl might undertake. “I’ll be as good as a father to you, my poor child,” he said, “don’t think you’re going to be friendless, if you leave Amelius. I’ll see to that! You shall have honest people about you—and innocent pleasure in your new life.”

She thanked him, still with the same dull tearless resignation. “What will the honest people say,” she asked, “when they know who I am?”

“They have no business to know who you are—and they shan’t know it.”