Уилки Коллинз - I Say No

Some girls, addressed with this reckless intermingling of jest and earnest, would have felt confused, and some would have felt flattered. With a good-tempered resolution, which never passed the limits of modesty and refinement, Emily met Alban Morris on his own ground.

“You have said you respect me,” she began; “I am going to prove that I believe you. The least I can do is not to misinterpret you, on my side. Am I to understand, Mr. Morris—you won’t think the worse of me, I hope, if I speak plainly—am I to understand that you are in love with me?”

“Yes, Miss Emily—if you please.”

He had answered with the quaint gravity which was peculiar to him; but he was already conscious of a sense of discouragement. Her composure was a bad sign—from his point of view.

“My time will come, I daresay,” she proceeded. “At present I know nothing of love, by experience; I only know what some of my schoolfellows talk about in secret. Judging by what they tell me, a girl blushes when her lover pleads with her to favor his addresses. Am I blushing?”

“Must I speak plainly, too?” Alban asked.

“If you have no objection,” she answered, as composedly as if she had been addressing her grandfather.

“Then, Miss Emily, I must say—you are not blushing.”

She went on. “Another token of love—as I am informed—is to tremble. Am I trembling?”

“No.”

“Am I too confused to look at you?”

“No.”

“Do I walk away with dignity—and then stop, and steal a timid glance at my lover, over my shoulder?”

“I wish you did!”

“A plain answer, Mr. Morris! Yes or No.”

“No—of course.”

“In one last word, do I give you any sort of encouragement to try again?”

“In one last word, I have made a fool of myself—and you have taken the kindest possible way of telling me so.”

This time, she made no attempt to reply in his own tone. The good-humored gayety of her manner disappeared. She was in earnest—truly, sadly in earnest—when she said her next words.

“Is it not best, in your own interests, that we should bid each other good-by?” she asked. “In the time to come—when you only remember how kind you once were to me—we may look forward to meeting again. After all that you have suffered, so bitterly and so undeservedly, don’t, pray don’t, make me feel that another woman has behaved cruelly to you, and that I—so grieved to distress you—am that heartless creature!”

Never in her life had she been so irresistibly charming as she was at that moment. Her sweet nature showed all its innocent pity for him in her face.

He saw it—he felt it—he was not unworthy of it. In silence, he lifted her hand to his lips. He turned pale as he kissed it.

“Say that you agree with me?” she pleaded.

“I obey you.”

As he answered, he pointed to the lawn at their feet. “Look,” he said, “at that dead leaf which the air is wafting over the grass. Is it possible that such sympathy as you feel for Me, such love as I feel for You, can waste, wither, and fall to the ground like that leaf? I leave you, Emily—with the firm conviction that there is a time of fulfillment to come in our two lives. Happen what may in the interval—I trust the future.”

The words had barely passed his lips when the voice of one of the servants reached them from the house. “Miss Emily, are you in the garden?”

Emily stepped out into the sunshine. The servant hurried to meet her, and placed a telegram in her hand. She looked at it with a sudden misgiving. In her small experience, a telegram was associated with the communication of bad news. She conquered her hesitation—opened it—read it. The color left her face: she shuddered. The telegram dropped on the grass.

“Read it,” she said, faintly, as Alban picked it up.

He read these words: “Come to London directly. Miss Letitia is dangerously ill.”

“Your aunt?” he asked.

“Yes—my aunt.”

The metropolis of Great Britain is, in certain respects, like no other metropolis on the face of the earth. In the population that throngs the streets, the extremes of Wealth and the extremes of Poverty meet, as they meet nowhere else. In the streets themselves, the glory and the shame of architecture—the mansion and the hovel—are neighbors in situation, as they are neighbors nowhere else. London, in its social aspect, is the city of contrasts.

Toward the close of evening Emily left the railway terminus for the place of residence in which loss of fortune had compelled her aunt to take refuge. As she approached her destination, the cab passed—by merely crossing a road—from a spacious and beautiful Park, with its surrounding houses topped by statues and cupolas, to a row of cottages, hard by a stinking ditch miscalled a canal. The city of contrasts: north and south, east and west, the city of social contrasts.

Emily stopped the cab before the garden gate of a cottage, at the further end of the row. The bell was answered by the one servant now in her aunt’s employ—Miss Letitia’s maid.

Personally, this good creature was one of the ill-fated women whose appearance suggests that Nature intended to make men of them and altered her mind at the last moment. Miss Letitia’s maid was tall and gaunt and awkward. The first impression produced by her face was an impression of bones. They rose high on her forehead; they projected on her cheeks; and they reached their boldest development in her jaws. In the cavernous eyes of this unfortunate person rigid obstinacy and rigid goodness looked out together, with equal severity, on all her fellow-creatures alike. Her mistress (whom she had served for a quarter of a century and more) called her “Bony.” She accepted this cruelly appropriate nick-name as a mark of affectionate familiarity which honored a servant. No other person was allowed to take liberties with her: to every one but her mistress she was known as Mrs. Ellmother.

“How is my aunt?” Emily asked.

“Bad.”

“Why have I not heard of her illness before?”

“Because she’s too fond of you to let you be distressed about her. ‘Don’t tell Emily’; those were her orders, as long as she kept her senses.”

“Kept her senses? Good heavens! what do you mean?”

“Fever—that’s what I mean.”

“I must see her directly; I am not afraid of infection.”

“There’s no infection to be afraid of. But you mustn’t see her, for all that.”

“I insist on seeing her.”

“Miss Emily, I am disappointing you for your own good. Don’t you know me well enough to trust me by this time?”

“I do trust you.”

“Then leave my mistress to me—and go and make yourself comfortable in your own room.”

Emily’s answer was a positive refusal. Mrs. Ellmother, driven to her last resources, raised a new obstacle.

“It’s not to be done, I tell you! How can you see Miss Letitia when she can’t bear the light in her room? Do you know what color her eyes are? Red, poor soul—red as a boiled lobster.”

With every word the woman uttered, Emily’s perplexity and distress increased.

“You told me my aunt’s illness was fever,” she said—“and now you speak of some complaint in her eyes. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let me go to her.”

Mrs. Ellmother, still keeping her place, looked through the open door.

“Here’s the doctor,” she announced. “It seems I can’t satisfy you; ask him what’s the matter. Come in, doctor.” She threw open the door of the parlor, and introduced Emily. “This is the mistress’s niece, sir. Please try if you can keep her quiet. I can’t.” She placed chairs with the hospitable politeness of the old school—and returned to her post at Miss Letitia’s bedside.