Уилки Коллинз - Hide and Seek

Many a pipe did he empty and fill again, many a dark change passed over his heavy features, as he now pondered long and laboriously over every word of the dialogue that had just been held between himself and Zack. But not so much as five minutes out of all the time he thus consumed, was, in any true sense of the word, time wasted. He had sat down to his first pipe, resolved that, if any human means could compass it, he would find out how the young girl whom he had seen in Mr. Blyth’s studio, had first come there, and who she really was. When he rose up at last, and put the pipe away to cool, he had thought the matter fairly out from beginning to end, had arrived at his conclusions, and had definitely settled his future plans.

Reflection had strengthened him in the resolution to follow his first impulse when he parted from Zack in the street, and begin the attempt to penetrate the suspicious secret that hid from him and from every one the origin of Valentine’s adopted child, by getting possession of the Hair Bracelet which he had seen laid away in the inner drawer of the bureau. As for any assignable reason for justifying him in associating this Hair Bracelet with Madonna, he found it, to his own satisfaction, in young Thorpe’s account of the strange words spoken by Mrs. Peckover in Mr. Blyth’s hall—the suspicions resulting from these hints being also immensely strengthened, by his recollections of the letter signed “Jane Holdsworth,” and containing an enclosure of hair, which he had examined in the cattle-shed at Dibbledean.

According to that letter, a Hair Bracelet (easily recognizable if still in existence, by comparing it with the hair enclosed in Jane Holdsworth’s note) had once been the property of Mary Grice. According to what Zack had said, there was apparently some incomprehensible confusion and mystery in connection with a Hair Bracelet and the young woman whose extraordinary likeness to what Mary Grice had been in her girlhood, had first suggested to him the purpose he was now pursuing. Lastly, according to what he himself now knew, there was actually a hair Bracelet lying in the innermost drawer of Mr. Blyth’s bureau—this latter fragment of evidence assuming in his mind, as has been already remarked, an undue significance in relation to the fragments preceding it, from his not knowing that hair bracelets are found in most houses where there are women in a position to wear any jewelry ornament at all.

Vague as they might be, these coincidences were sufficient to startle him at first—then to fill him with an eager, devouring curiosity—and then to suggest to him the uncertain and desperate course which he was now firmly resolved to follow. How he was to gain possession of the Hair Bracelet without Mr. Blyth’s knowledge, and without exciting the slightest suspicion in the painter’s family, he had not yet determined. But he was resolved to have it, he was perfectly unscrupulous as to means, and he felt certain beforehand of attaining his object. Whither, or to what excesses, that object might lead him, he never stopped and never cared to consider. The awful face of the dead woman (now fixed for ever in his memory by the living copy of it that his own eyes had beheld) seemed to be driving him on swiftly into unknown darkness, to bring him out into unexpected light at the end. The influence which was thus sternly at work in him was not to be questioned—it was to be obeyed.

His resolution in reference to the Hair Bracelet was not more firmly settled than his resolution to keep his real sensations on seeing Madonna, and the purpose which had grown out of them, a profound secret from young Thorpe, who was too warmly Mr. Blyth’s friend to be trusted. Every word that Zack had let slip, had been of vital importance, hitherto; every word that might yet escape him, might be of the most precious use for future guidance. “If it’s his fun and fancy,” mused Mat, “to go on thinking I’m sweet on the girl, let him think it. The more he thinks, the more he’ll talk. All I’ve got to do is to hold in; and then he’s sure to let out.”

While schooling himself thus as to his future conduct towards Zack, he did not forget another person who was less close at hand certainly, but who might also be turned to good account. Before he fairly decided on his plan of action, he debated with himself the propriety of returning to Dibbledean, and forcing from the old woman, Joanna Grice, more information than she had been willing to give him at their first interview. But, on reflection, he considered that it was better to leave this as a resource to be tried, in case of the failure of his first experiment with the Hair Bracelet. One look at that—one close comparison of the hair it was made of, with the surplus hair which had not been used by the jeweler, in Mary Grice’s bracelet, and which had been returned to her in her friend’s letter—was all he wanted in the first place; for this would be enough to clear up every present uncertainty and suspicion connected with the ornament in the drawer of Mr. Blyth’s bureau.

These were mainly the resolutions to which his long meditation had now crookedly and clumsily conducted him. His next immediate business was to examine those letters in the box, which he had hitherto not opened; and also to possess himself of the enclosure of hair, in the letter to “Mary Grice,” that he might have it always about him ready for any emergency.

Before he opened the box, however, he took a quick, impatient turn or two up and down his miserable little room. Not once, since he had set forth to return to his own country, and to the civilization from which, for more than twenty years, he had been an outcast, had he felt (to use his favorite expression) that he was “his own man again,” until now. A thrill of the old, breathless, fierce suspense of his days of deadly peril ran through him, as he thought on the forbidden secret into which he was about to pry, and for the discovery of which he was ready to dare any hazard and use any means. “It goes through and through me, a’most like dodging for life again among the bloody Indians,” muttered Mat to himself, as he trod restlessly to and fro in his cage of a room, rubbing all the while at the scars on his face, as his way was when any new excitement got the better of him.

At the very moment when this thought was rising ominously in his mind, Valentine was expounding anew the whole scope and object of “Columbus” to a fresh circle of admiring spectators—while his wife was interpreting to Madonna above stairs Zack’s wildest jokes about his friend’s love-stricken condition; and all three were laughing gaily at a caricature, which he was maliciously drawing for them, of “poor old Mat” in the character of a scalped Cupid. Even the little minor globe of each man’s social sphere has its antipodes-points; and when it is all bright sunshine in one part of the miniature world, it is all pitch darkness, at the very same moment, in another.

Mat’s face had grown suddenly swarthier than ever, while he walked across his room, and said those words to himself which have just been recorded. It altered again, though, in a minute or two, and turned once more to the cold clay-color which had overspread it in the hosier’s shop at Dibbledean, as he returned to his bear-skins and opened the box that had belonged to “Mary Grice.”

He took out first the letter with the enclosure of hair, and placed it carefully in the breast pocket of his coat. He next searched a moment or two for the letter superscribed and signed by Joanna Grice; and, having found it, placed it on one side of him, on the floor. After this he paused a moment, looking into the box with a curious, scowling sadness on his face; while his hand vacantly stirred hither and thither the different objects that lay about among the papers—the gaily-bound album, the lace-collar, the dried flower-leaves, and the other little womanly possessions which had once belonged to Mary Grice.