Believe me: I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.'
He has lifted his hand to his head, and now puts back his hair from his brow; and his pallor, and the dark about his eye, seem suddenly to age him. His collar is soft, and creased from the grip of his neck-tie. His beard has a single strand of grey. His throat bulges queerly, as men's throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.
I say, 'This is madness. I think you are mad— to come here, to confess yourself a villain, to suppose me willing to receive you.'
'And yet you have received me. You receive me still. You have not called for your maid.'
'You intrigue me. You have seen for yourself, the evenness of my days here.'
'You seek a distraction from those? Why not give them up, for ever? So you shall— like that, in a moment! gone!— when you marry me.'
I shake my head. 'I think you cannot be serious.'
'I am, however.'
'You know my age. You know my uncle would never permit you to take me.'
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He shrugs, speaks lightly. 'We shall resort, of course, to devious methods.'
'You wish to make a villain of me, too?'
He nods. 'I do. But then, I think you are half a villain already.— Don't look like that.
Don't suppose I am joking. You don't know all.' He has grown serious. 'I am offering you something very great and strange. Not the commonplace subjection of a wife to a husband— that servitude, to lawful ravishment and theft, that the world terms wedlock. I shan't ask you for that, that is not what I mean. I am speaking, rather, of liberty. A liberty of a kind not often granted to the members of your sex.'
'Yet to be achieved'— I almost laugh— 'by a marriage?'
'To be achieved by a ceremony of marriage, performed under certain unusual conditions.' Again he smooths his hair, and swallows; and I see at last that he is nervous— more nervous than I. He leans closer. He says, 'I suppose you're not squeamish, or soft about the heart, as another girl might be? I suppose your maid is really sleeping, and not listening at the door?'
I think of Agnes, of Agnes's bruises; but say nothing, only watch him. He passes his hand across his mouth.
'God help me, Miss Lilly, if I have misjudged you!' he says. 'Now, listen.'
This is his plan. He means to bring a girl to Briar, from London, and install her as my maid. He means to use her, then cheat her. He says he has a girl in mind, a girl of my years and colouring. A sort of thief— not over-scrupulous, not too clever in her ways, he says; he thinks he will secure her with the promise of some slight share in the fortune— 'Say, two or three thousand. I don't believe she'll have the ambition to ask for more. Her set are a small set, as crooks go; though, like crooks everywhere, think themselves grander.' He shrugs. The sum means nothing, after all: for he will agree to whatever she asks for; and she will not see a shilling of it. She will suppose me an innocent, and believe herself assisting in my seduction. She will persuade me, first, into marriage with him, then into a— he hesitates, before admitting the word— a madhouse. But, there she will take my place. She will protest— he hopes she will!— for the more she does, the more the madhouse keepers will read it as a form of lunacy; and so keep her the closer.
'And with her, Miss Lilly,' he says finally, 'they keep close your name, your history as your mother's daughter, your uncle's niece— in short, all that marks you as yourself.
Think of it! They will pluck from your shoulders the weight of your life, as a servant would lift free your cloak; and you shall make your naked, invisible way to any part of the world you choose— to any new life— and there re-clothe yourself to suit your fancy.'
This is the liberty— the rare and sinister liberty— he has come to Briar to offer. For payment he wants my trust, my promise, my future silence; and one half of my fortune.
When he has finished I sit not speaking, my face turned from his, for almost a minute.
What I say at last is:
'We should never achieve it.'
He answers at once: 'I think we will.'
'The girl would suspect us.'
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'She will be distracted by the plot into which I shall draw her. She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there.
She will look at you, here, knowing nothing of your uncle— who wouldn't, in her place, believe you innocent?'
'And her people, the thieves: shan't they look for her?'
'They shall look— as a thousand thieves look every day for the friends who have cheated and robbed them; and, finding nothing, they'll suppose her flown, and curse her for a while, and then forget her.'
'Forget her? Are you sure? Has she no— no mother?'
He shrugs. 'A sort of mother. A guardian, an aunt. She loses children all the time. I don't think she will trouble very hard over one child more. Especially if she supposes— as I mean that she
will— that the child has turned out swindler. Do you see? Her own reputation will help to bury her. Crooked girls can't expect to be cared for, like honest ones.' He pauses.
'They will watch her more closely, however, in the place we'll put her.'
I gaze away from him. 'A madhouse . . .'
'I am sorry for that,' he says quickly. 'But your own reputation— your own mother's reputation— will work for us there, just as our crooked girl's will. You must see how it will. You have been held in thrall to it, all these years. Here is your chance to profit by it, once; then be free of it, for ever.'
I still look away. Again, I am afraid he will see how deeply his words have stirred me.
I am almost afraid of how deeply they stir me, myself. I say, 'You speak as though my freedom were something to you. It's the money you care for.'
'I've admitted as much, have I not? But then, your freedom and my money are the same. That will be your safeguard, your insurance, until our fortune is secure. You may trust yourself, till then, not to my honour— for I have none— but, say, to my cupidity; which is anyway a greater thing than honour, in the world outside these walls. You will find that out. I might teach you how to profit from it. We can take some house, in London, as man and wife.— Live separately, of course,' he adds, with a smile, 'when the door of the house is closed .. . Once our money is got, however, your future will be your own; you must only be silent, then, as to the manner in which you got it. You understand me? Being once committed to this thing, we must be true to each other, or founder. I don't speak lightly. I don't wish to mislead you as to the nature of the business I'm proposing. Perhaps your uncle's care has kept you from a knowledge of the law ..."
'My uncle's care,' I say, 'has made me ready to consider any strategy that will relieve me of the burden of it. But— '
He waits and, when I add nothing, says, 'Well, I don't expect to hear you give me your decision now. I t ' s m y a i m t h a t y o u r u n c l e w i l l k e e p m e h e r e , t o w o r k o n h i s pictures— I am to view them tomorrow. If he does not, then we shall anyway be obliged to reconsider. But there are ways about that, as about everything.'
He passes his hand again before his eyes, and again looks older.
The clock has struck the twelve, the fire has died an hour before, and the room is terribly chill. I feel it, all at once. He sees me shiver. I think he reads it as fear, or 145
doubt. He leans, and at last takes my hand in his. He says, 'Miss Lilly, you say your freedom is nothing to me; but how could I see the life that is yours— how could any honest man see you kept down, made a slave to lewdness, leered at and insulted by fellows like Huss— and not wish to free you of it? Think of what I have proposed.
Then think of your choices. You may wait for another suitor: shall you find one, among the gentlemen your uncle's work brings here? And, if you do, shall he be as scrupulous as I, in the handling of your fortune?— of your person? Or, say you wait for your uncle to die, and find a liberty that way; meantime, his eyes have faded, his limbs have a tremor, he has worked you the harder as he has felt his powers fail. By then you are— what age? Say thirty- five, or forty. You have given your youth to the curating of books, of a kind that Hawtrey sells, for a shilling, to drapers' boys and clerks. Your fortune sits untouched in the vault of a bank. Your consolation is to be mistress of Briar— where the clock strikes off the hollow half- hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.'
As he speaks, I look not at his face; but at my own foot in its slipper. I think again of the vision I have sometimes had— of myself, as a limb bound tight to a form it longs to outgrow. With the drops in me the vision is fiercer, I see the limb made crooked, the flesh sour and grow dense. I sit quite still, then raise my eyes to his. He is watching me, waiting to know if he has won me. He has. Not by what he has told me, about my future at Briar— for he has said nothing that I have not, long ago, already concluded for myself; but by the fact that he is here, telling it at all— that he has plotted, and travelled, forty miles— that he has stolen his way to the heart of the sleeping house, to my dark room, to me.
Of the girl in London— who, in less than a month, he will persuade to her doom by a similar method; and to whom, a little later, with tears on my cheek, I will repeat his own arguments— I think nothing, nothing at all.