The gardener's wife (charged with looking after the accommodation of the ladies) met me in the first-floor corridor. This excellent woman treats me with an excessive civility which is plainly the offspring of down-right terror. She stares, trembles, and curtseys, whenever I speak to her. On my asking for Miss Verinder, she stared, trembled, and would no doubt have curtseyed next, if Miss Verinder herself had not cut that ceremony short, by suddenly opening her sitting-room door.
'Is that Mr. Jennings?' she asked.
Before I could answer, she came out eagerly to speak to me in the corridor. We met under the light of a lamp on a bracket. At the first sight of me, Miss Verinder stopped, and hesitated. She recovered herself instantly, coloured for a moment—and then, with a charming frankness, offered me her hand.
'I can't treat you like a stranger, Mr. Jennings,' she said. 'Oh, if you only knew how happy your letters have made me!'
She looked at my ugly wrinkled face, with a bright gratitude so new to me in my experience of my fellow-creatures, that I was at a loss how to answer her. Nothing had prepared me for her kindness and her beauty. The misery of many years has not hardened my heart, thank God. I was as awkward and as shy with her, as if I had been a lad in my teens.
'Where is he now?' she asked, giving free expression to her one dominant interest—the interest in Mr. Blake. 'What is he doing? Has he spoken of me? Is he in good spirits? How does he bear the sight of the house, after what happened in it last year? When are you going to give him the laudanum? May I see you pour it out? I am so interested; I am so excited—I have ten thousand things to say to you, and they all crowd together so that I don't know what to say first. Do you wonder at the interest I take in this?'
'No,' I said. 'I venture to think that I thoroughly understand it.'
She was far above the paltry affectation of being confused. She answered me as she might have answered a brother or a father.
'You have relieved me of indescribable wretchedness; you have given me a new life. How can I be ungrateful enough to have any concealment from you? I love him,' she said simply, 'I have loved him from first to last—even when I was wronging him in my own thoughts; even when I was saying the hardest and the cruellest words to him. Is there any excuse for me, in that? I hope there is—I am afraid it is the only excuse I have. When to-morrow comes, and he knows that I am in the house, do you think——'
She stopped again, and looked at me very earnestly.
'When to-morrow comes,' I said, 'I think you have only to tell him what you have just told me.'
Her face brightened; she came a step nearer to me. Her fingers trifled nervously with a flower which I had picked in the garden, and which I had put into the button-hole of my coat.
'You have seen a great deal of him lately,' she said. 'Have you, really and truly, seen THAT?'
'Really and truly,' I answered. 'I am quite certain of what will happen to-morrow. I wish I could feel as certain of what will happen to-night.'
At that point in the conversation, we were interrupted by the appearance of Betteredge with the tea-tray. He gave me another significant look as he passed on into the sitting-room. 'Aye! aye! make your hay while the sun shines. The Tartar's upstairs, Mr. Jennings—the Tartar's upstairs!'
We followed him into the room. A little old lady, in a corner, very nicely dressed, and very deeply absorbed over a smart piece of embroidery, dropped her work in her lap, and uttered a faint little scream at the first sight of my gipsy complexion and my piebald hair.
'Mrs. Merridew,' said Miss Verinder, 'this is Mr. Jennings.'
'I beg Mr. Jennings's pardon,' said the old lady, looking at Miss Verinder, and speaking at me. 'Railway travelling always makes me nervous. I am endeavouring to quiet my mind by occupying myself as usual. I don't know whether my embroidery is out of place, on this extraordinary occasion. If it interferes with Mr. Jennings's medical views, I shall be happy to put it away of course.'
I hastened to sanction the presence of the embroidery, exactly as I had sanctioned the absence of the burst buzzard and the Cupid's wing. Mrs. Merridew made an effort—a grateful effort—to look at my hair. No! it was not to be done. Mrs. Merridew looked back again at Miss Verinder.
'If Mr. Jennings will permit me,' pursued the old lady, 'I should like to ask a favour. Mr. Jennings is about to try a scientific experiment to-night. I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in
