Aunt Arabella’s Letter Once More Aunt Arabella’s Letter Once More“YES, Mademoiselle,” said Monsieur Emmanuel, in a voice, almost choked by horror and dismay, “you can speak freely now; you can tell me all. I am your friend. You must recount to me how, and when, you first came to suspect the old man and his wife.”
“How? When?” said Zosine, and tried to search her memory. “Oh, it is a long time ago, an eternity! No one can know or understand what we have been suffering here, alone in the whole world, among people who wanted to murder us too!”
“Aye, I know, I understand,” the young man answered in the same hoarse, stifled voice. “But you must take heart, Mademoiselle. It is all over tonight. And you must tell me more. What you have been feeling and thinking here is not enough. It is not enough to condemn any human being to death.” He broke off, and dried his face with his silk handkerchief. “Have you not,” he asked in an almost inaudible voice, “have you not a letter, some writing that you can produce, to support you in your terrible, forlorn situation?”
Zosine regarded him intensely. He was still crouching in the chair, even paler than before, and apparently even more shaken and terrified than the girls themselves. And yet his eyes, when they met hers, were changed. They were no longer the eyes of the sentimental youth, but those of the policeman. They were the eyes of the hound which had found the scent, and which now will not let go until the quarry has been run down and finished. There was no mercy in those big eyes. From them, Zosine thought, the criminals must expect no grace.
The zeal of the young man for her own cause seized her deeply and violently. She did not herself realize that she was weeping until she tried to answer him and found that she was unable to speak. Then she gave free vent to her tears. She cried without restraint, and her wild passionate sobbing shook her like a storm.
Lucan was amazed and terrified to see Zosine weep. She herself had often cried here at Sainte-Barbe, but only once before tonight, in England, had she seen her friend in tears. She understood that Zosine’s sobbing did not need, and probably would not accept, any consolation. She was, moreover, herself in a state of agitation for which she could find no real explanation; if she had wanted to, she could not have formulated any soothing phrase. All that she could do was to stand up and remain standing by Zosine’s side.
Monsieur Emmanuel sat perfectly immovable. After a while, quietly as before, and almost mechanically, he repeated his question. “I asked you,” he whispered, “whether you had any paper to which to appeal?”
Zosine at last conquered her emotion. With her handkerchief pressed to her trembling lips, she twice solemnly and affirmingly nodded her head to the young man. A silence followed which lasted so long that Lucan turned toward her friend. The young girl stood as straight as if she had been turned into stone. She looked straight at Monsieur Emmanuel, and asked, “What sound is that?”
Through the rain and the wind they did indeed, from outside the house, hear a low, recurrent sound, a regular, dull stroke.
“Someone is digging in the garden,” Zosine said.
Monsieur Emmanuel rose from his chair. He took a few faltering steps toward the window, stopped and turned, took another step, and stood still. “No,” he said, “nobody is digging. It is someone cutting firewood. I know,” he added, in a higher and clearer voice than at any other moment of their conversation, “that Mr. Pennhallow has before now complained of people of the neighborhood stealing firewood in the garden of Sainte-Barbe. They will have known that he was away tonight; they will have taken it for granted that everybody has gone to rest. And the wind and rain are loud here. It is a good night for stealing firewood.” His voice changed into a peculiar low hiss. “I might go out to investigate if you wanted it. But it is of no importance, compared to what we are here talking about. And who can tell how much time we have left? Let them steal the firewood tonight, Mademoiselle, and let us finish our business.” He turned and faced Zosine. “I understand,” he said, “that you have really got a letter, a document to show against the people whom we accuse. It is, indeed, a piece of good fortune! It will decide everything for all of us!”
Zosine stood as still as before, staring with wide-opened eyes at the young man. She had lowered the hand which held the handkerchief, but seemed to breathe with difficulty. She gasped or moaned a few times with half-opened lips before she spoke. Then she said slowly, “Yes. A letter. A document. I have got it in there, in our own room. Now I shall go and fetch it. Then you can see for yourself.” It was as if she was recoiling before him. She did not take her eyes off his face, as, backwards, she walked the short distance to the door, and left the room.
Lucan followed the sound of Zosine’s steps. She was going farther than their room, out in the corridor and the kitchen. “Where is she going?” Lucan thought. “What is she looking for? We have no letter!”
She was alone in the dining-room with the young man. She put her hand on the chair where Zosine had been sitting, to steady herself. In the deep silence she again heard the low, short, measured blows from the garden. Once only she lifted her eyes and looked at her guest, and his own glance met hers.
She heard Zosine come back, and giddily turned toward her. Zosine brought no letter with her, but in her right hand she held the heavy kitchen axe with which Baptistine was wont to cut sticks for the fire. Without a word Lucan took a step toward her. Monsieur Emmanuel at the same moment, and likewise without a word, took a step back.
“I cannot find the letter I was looking for,” said Zosine. Her own glance automatically followed the direction of that of the young man and of Lucan, toward the axe in her hand, and she seemed surprised at their consternation. “It is the kitchen axe,” she said, as if explaining or apologizing. “I wanted to find out if the thieves in the garden had taken that as well. But they had not taken it.” She stood for a while, brooding.
“I cannot find the letter I was looking for,” she repeated. “But I know it by heart. Let us sit down, as we were sitting before. Then I shall repeat it to you from beginning to end.”
She sat down before the fire, erect, and still with the axe in her hand. Her eyes shone with a strange and strong brilliance, like steel. The two others also sat down in their former places.
“Listen to me now,” Zosine said, “so that you will remember it. Lucan knows the letter; she too has seen it. You ask me if we have had no letter to maintain us in our forlorn situation. Yes, we have had that, even if I cannot find it now.
“I have an old aunt in England,” she said, “Miss Arabella Dib-din. She is my godmother. Aunt Arabella loves me. She will do everything in the world for me. But some time before I was looking for this situation in London, we two had quarreled for the first time in our life. She had scolded me because I was spoiled and frivolous. She would have been pleased to receive me into her house, yes, it would probably, as Lucan did then tell me, have been the happiest thing which could have befallen her, had she been able to open it to me. But I was unreasonable and headstrong. I would not listen to her. I told her that I would earn my own bread and be independent of everybody in the world. Then Aunt Arabella wrote to me, before I went away from England, and I have still got her letter. It is somewhere among my things. I have only hidden it too well.”
Zosine had not looked at the others while she spoke, and she did not do so now either, when she had finished. But Lucan and Monsieur Emmanuel both stared at her face.
“Aunt Arabella wrote,” she said in a high, clear and steady voice, “ ‘It is good and useful to get to know life. You will now have to carry heavy burdens. It is inevitable to most human beings. But preserve that dignity which consists in obeying one’s destiny.’ But she also wrote, ‘Every one of my possessions will every day recall your picture to me.’ And Aunt Arabella means what she says, Monsieur Tinchebrai, she always keeps her word!
“Then she wrote further,” Zosine went on slowly. “ ‘For your father’s sake, I will always stick to you more than to any other human being in the world, and never fail you. Even if now you are going away in spite, you cannot tear asunder the tie between us. I shall follow you, with my eyes and my heart, and always keep informed of all your doings. That you are going to a strange country will make no difference to me. People like me have got connections everywhere.’
“I was proud at the time, Monsieur Tinchebrai. I did not answer her. But I know that she will have done as she said, even if I cannot tell you exactly by what means she has managed to do so. I have had proofs of it. I am still proud. I have never done anything which I could not tell Aunt Arabella. If she could see me at this moment, she would understand me, and not be ashamed of me! She wrote, ‘I did not know till now that there were such possibilities for suffering in life.’ I did not know it either at that time. I did not know how much Aunt Arabella had gone through with spoiled and frivolous people. When we meet again, I shall tell her!”
In the long silence that followed upon Zosine’s words, Lucan remembered, as clearly as if she had seen it before her, her friend’s little morning-room at Tortuga, where she had found her standing by the window with Aunt Arabella’s letter in her hand. She also recalled their talk then. At first Zosine had declared that she would never, not even to save her life, mention this letter. A little later she had laughed at Lucan’s grave and frightened face, had fallen on her neck, and said to her, “In return for all your goodness toward me, I promise you that, in order to save my life, I shall mention Aunt Arabella and her letter. But only then!”
Monsieur Emmanuel sat without a word. A couple of times he tried to speak, and again gave it up. After a long time he spoke at last, “But then, Mademoiselle,” he said, “in spite of all, you have had friends who were aware of your place of residence and who were keeping their eyes on you?”
“Yes, that is so,” said Zosine.