At length, by our joint efforts, the basket was extricated and placed upon its—what shall I say?—on its right end, in the landing. The pretty maid smoothed her hair and adjusted her collar, somewhat creased by her exertions. I made an effort to recover the usual dignity of my demeanour, conscious that I was, to a certain extent, in a false position, yet resolved to make the best of it.
“Thank you,” said I, somewhat bashfully, as well as breathlessly.
“Thank you, sir,” said Justine; laughing, I thought, rather roguishly.
“Dear! how you’ve rumpled your collar,” I observed, with perfect innocence. Justine glanced reproachfully in my face, as she smoothed the collar down with a remarkably pretty hand, and, tilting the offending basket on the bannisters, paused for a space, as if to “get her wind” before proceeding any further. In a few minutes the process would be accomplished, and Justine would take wing and fly away. I should never have such an opportunity again—at least not for a considerable period. The basket, in all probability, contained articles of wearing apparel, either going to or coming from the wash. Without being a family man, I was aware such an occurrence did not usually take place more than once a week. I should have another seven days to wait before so favourable an opportunity would arise again. Stimulated by this reflection I accosted Justine with considerable energy. I am not sure that I did not take her by the hand.
“Can I speak a word with you, mademoiselle?” said I, in trembling tones. I do not know why I called her Mademoiselle, except that I was flurried and eager, and inclined to be supremely polite.
“Not now, sir,” replied Justine, sinking her voice, to my great alarm, incontinently to a whisper. “Some other time, Mr. Softly” (she had got my name already): “not now, sir, pray. I hear somebody coming!”
“It’s only a question or two I want to ask,” I urged, as soothingly and reassuringly as I could; for, in truth, had there been fifty “somebodies coming,” there was nothing to be alarmed at. “Something you can tell me about—about your mistress.” I bounced it out, thinking it better we should understand each other at once.
“Oh!” replied Justine, this time in a perfectly audible voice. “And what may you please to want to know, Mr. Softly, about my lady?”
“I want to know everything about her,” said I; slipping, at the same time, a little profile of her Majesty, raised in gold, into Justine’s hand, which delicate compliment was acknowledged by the least perceptible squeeze. “When did she arrive? When is she going away again? Where did she come from? Where does she live when she is at home? Is she young or middle-aged? Of course she’s very beautiful, or she couldn’t afford to take about with her such a pretty maid as you!”
The latter clause of my sentence I considered, not without reason, a master-stroke of diplomacy, and I strove to enhance its effect by again possessing myself of Justine’s hand; a man?uvre she neutralised by placing both her own in her apron-pockets, leaving the basket to take care of itself.
“Why, ain’t you a hunting gentleman?” asked she, in her turn, somewhat inconsequently, as I thought. “I made sure you was a hunting gentleman, by your broken bones; and I thought every hunting gentleman knew my lady. She’s just come from the Castle—my lady. She’ll stay here exactly as long as suits her fancy, and not a moment longer. Bless you, Mr. Softly, we might never stir a foot from here this side of Easter; and we might be off, bag and baggage, first thing to-morrow morning. She’s a quiet lady, mine: a quieter lady than Miss Merlin I never wish to dress and do for; but when she says a thing, she means it, Mr. Softly, and horses couldn’t draw her the way she hasn’t a mind to go.”
“And is she so very beautiful?” I inquired, determined to know the worst of this Amazon at once. Justine looked up from under her long eyelashes (she was a very pretty girl—this Justine), and shook her head, and smiled.
“That depends upon taste, Mr. Softly,” replied she, shooting such a glance at me the while, as I have no doubt had often done irreparable injury amongst her adorers.
“Some gentlemen doesn’t admire such a pale grave lady with dark eyes and hair. She’s a slight figure, too, has Miss Merlin; and, for as tall as she is, her waist is as small as mine. For goodness’ sake, Mr. Softly, here’s the waiter coming along the passage!” and without giving me any more information as to the size of Miss Merlin’s waist, or further opportunity of measuring her own, Justine darted up the staircase, and was soon lost in the sacred retreat of her mistress’s apartment.
I am no busy-body, I humbly trust and believe. It is not my way ever to inquire into the affairs of other people; and when any obliging friend wishes to make me the depository of some secret which is growing too heavy for his own shoulders, I invariably beg that he will keep it to himself. There is no such false position, as to be told an awful mystery under oath of inviolable silence, which you feel sure has been administered with the same injunctions to some half-dozen others besides yourself. One of these lets it out; perhaps all six of them make it their everyday conversation; and you, the only trustworthy person of the lot, sustain all the blame of having divulged a circumstance which you have kept silent as the grave, or even forgotten altogether. I need not, therefore, say that it is not my custom to waylay waiting-maids, nor to set every engine in my power in motion to discover the antecedents of such ladies as may happen to occupy the same hostelry with myself. But there was something about this new arrival that interested and excited me in spite of my better judgment. It was like being in the same house with a ghost. A man may not like ghosts, or he may disbelieve in them, or, worse still, he may have an invincible terror of these apparitions; and although he laughs and jeers at such matters by a crowded fireside on a Christmas eve, he may quail and shudder in his cold sheets at the dead of night, when he lies awake, thinking of all the horrors he has ever heard and read; fancying, as people will fancy in the dark, that he hears sighs at the door, footsteps in the passage, and something moving softly and stealthily about the room. But whether he be a courageous infidel, or a superstitious believer in the possibility of apparitions, only tell him there is a phantom belonging to the establishment, and the man becomes restless and uncomfortable forthwith. You will find him poking about the attics and offices by day and night. When you are snoring healthily in your first sleep, he will be shivering in his dressing-gown, to discover the spirit or the impostor; and it is probable that in his character of detective he will alarm more of the inhabitants of the mansion in a week than the old established and considerate ghost itself has done in a century.
Well, Miss Merlin was rapidly becoming my ghost. I felt a morbid desire to find out all about her. I could not rest in ignorance of the appearance, the character, and the antecedents of a lady who in her own person involved such interesting contradictions as this mysterious dame—tall, pale, and slight; with a waist as small as Justine’s, and that was certainly an extremely taper one; with a will of iron (not that there was anything unusual in THAT), and four such horses as I never saw together in one stable before. Then she was a devoted student; for had not Miss Lushington taxed her with read, read, reading all day long? Probably she was blue; possibly she might be an authoress, and I adore intellectual women! I can never see why ignorance is supposed by some men to be such an attraction in the other sex. The Tree of Knowledge is not necessarily the Tree of Evil; and, for my part, I think the more they know the better. What can be more graceful than a woman’s way of imparting her information?—the deprecating air with which she produces it, as it were, under protest, and the charming humility with which she accepts her victory when she has beaten you in argument, and swamped you with rhetoric? Oh! if Miss Merlin should turn out literary, it would be all over with me! In the meantime, how was I to find out something definite about her, before I committed myself in a personal interview?
As I revolved this question in my mind, I bethought me of a club acquaintance of mine—indeed I think I may almost call him a friend—whose speciality it is to know all about everybody who floats on the surface of society, not only in London, where he resides, but also in the different counties of England, and most of the fashionable watering-places abroad. Where and how he acquires his information is to me a matter of the darkest mystery, inasmuch as I never entered “The Hat and Umbrella” in my life, without finding him making use of that commodious club; and I have been informed by other members, that with the exception of Christmas-Day—a festival which, in his dislike of congratulations, I am giving to understand he always spends in bed—he may be seen seven times a week in his accustomed arm-chair during the afternoon, and at his accustomed table when the dining-hour arrives. However, he is a man of universal information, a walking edition of “Who’s Who?” in any year of the century. And to Quizby accordingly I resolved to write, begging him at his earliest convenience to give me all the particulars he could about Miss Merlin, stating also that we were occupying the same hotel, but wording by communication with the delicacy imperatively demanded by such topics. I hope none of my friends may ever have cause to say, but that “Softly is a confoundedly guarded fellow about women, you know!”
Pending my friend’s reply, it may easily be believed that I waited with no small anxiety and impatience, none the less that the fact of my being under the same roof with Miss Merlin gave me no more access to her society, no more information regarding her movements, than if we had been on different continents. The very first morning after her arrival she was off to hunt before I was out of bed, and returned so quietly as to frustrate my insidious intentions of waylaying her in the passage. Justine too, either taken to task by her mistress, or on some definite calculations of her own, avoided my presence altogether, and never gave me an opportunity of exchanging a syllable with her. Miss Lushington, whom I boldly confronted in her own dominions, was obviously on her high horse, and ill at ease. There could be no question but that, notwithstanding her simple and retiring habits, in accordance with the strict seclusion in which she lived, Miss Merlin’s arrival had completely altered the tone and destroyed the cordiality of the whole establishment.
True to his post, my letter must have found Quizby at the “Hat and Umbrella,” for within eight-and-forty hours of its dispatch, I received his answer; written of course on Club paper, and sealed with our handsome Club seal—a beautiful device formed of the domestic insignia from which we take our name. I opened it eagerly, and after a few commonplace lines of inquiry and gossip, I arrived, so to speak, at the marrow of its contents.
“You could not have applied, my dear Softly,” said my correspondent, “to any man in London better qualified to give you the information you require. Not only have I known Miss Merlin almost from childhood, but it was my lot in early life, when the heart is fresh and the feelings susceptible, to be by no means insensible to her charms. You ask me whether she is good-looking; and this, did I not know your extreme diffidence and scrupulous delicacy of feeling, would seem a strange question from one who is under the same roof with its object. Beauty is a matter of opinion. I need scarcely say that many years ago I thought her ‘beautiful exceedingly.’ She was then a tall pale girl, with the most thorough-bred head and neck you ever saw, with the grace and elasticity of a nymph, combined with the dignity of an empress. So haughty a young woman it has never been my fate to come across. She had full dark eyes, and very silky dark hair; regular features of the severe classical type, and the sad mournful expression, that had a great effect on me at that period. I need not be ashamed to confess it, whilst I remained an eleven-stone man I was romantic; but, like many others, increasing weight has brought with it, I trust, increasing wisdom, and I have not the slightest doubt myself that adipose matter conduces vastly to a proper equilibrium of the mind. I thought otherwise once, and Miss Merlin’s dark eyes would have led me to follow her to the end of the world—nay, even over those ghastly fences, which then, as now, it seemed to be her greatest delight to ‘negotiate,’ as I think you hunting men call it in your extraordinary vernacular. She had a wonderfully graceful figure too, as a young thing, and the narrowest, most flexible hands and feet you ever beheld. I have waltzed with her many a time—moi qui vous parle; and to think of the delicious swing with which she went down a room to the strains of Jullien and K?nig, the musical wonders of our day, almost makes me feel as if I could waltz again. When she bridled her taper neck, and put one little foot forward from beneath her draperies, she looked like a filly just going to start for the Oaks.
“I have been thus particular in describing her, because they tell me she is very much aged and altered now; so that, whenever you do see her, you can judge for yourself of the difference between the Miss Merlin of to-day, and the damsel of a good many years ago, who made such an example of your old friend.
“But I never had a chance with her—never! She was a singular girl, not the least like most of her own age and sex. Her mother was dead; and she lived and kept house for her father, an old clergyman of eccentric habits and extraordinary learning. Being an only child, she was accustomed to have her own way from the first; and as her father never interfered in the household arrangements, and indeed seldom came out of his study upon any provocation, she had the whole management of the establishment, and conducted it with the de............