DARLING MARTIN--There has been an explosion here.The aunts have told me to give you up.I could not promise them that I would not see you and so I am a prisoner here until I leave them altogether.Iwon't leave them until after the New Year, partly because I gave a promise and partly because it would make more trouble for you if Iwere turned out just now.I can't leave the house at all unless I am with one of them, so I am going to try and send the letters by the kitchen-maid here who goes home every day, and she will fetch yours when she posts mine.I'll give her a note to tell the post people that she is to have them.Martin, dear, try and write every day, even if it's only the shortest line, because it is dreadful to be shut up all day, and I think of you all the time and wonder how you are.Don't be unhappy, Martin--that's the one thing I couldn't bear.
If you're not, I'm not.There's no reason to be unhappy about me.
I'm very cheerful indeed if I know that you are all right.You are all right, aren't you? I do want to know what happened when you got home.I quite understand that the one thing you must do now is to keep your father well and not let anything trouble him.If the thought of me troubles him, then tell him that you are thinking of nothing but him now and how to make him happy.But don't let them change your feeling for me.You know me better than any of them do and I am just as you know me, every bit.The aunts are very angry because they say I deceived them, but they haven't any right to tell me who I shall love, have they? No one has.I am myself and nobody's ever cared for me except you--and Uncle Mathew, so I don't see why Ishould think of anybody.The aunts never cared for me really--only to make me religious.
But, Martin, never forget I love you so much I can never change.I'm not one who changes, and although I'm young now I shall be just the same when I'm old.I have the ring and I look at it all the time.Ilike to think you have the locket.Please write, dear Martin, or I'll find it very difficult to stay quiet here, and I know I ought to stay quiet for your sake.
Your loving, MAGGIE.
She put it in an envelope, wrote the address as he had told her, and then set out to find Jane.It was four o'clock in the afternoon now and the house, on this winter's day, was dark and dim.
The gas was always badly lit in the passages, spitting and muttering like an imprisoned animal.The house was so quiet when Maggie came out on to the stairs that there seemed to be no one in it.She found her way down into the hall and saw Thomas the cat there, moving like a black ghost along the floor.He came up to her and rubbed himself in his sinister, mysterious way against her dress.When she turned towards the green baize door that led towards the kitchen regions he stood back from her, stole on to the lower steps of the staircase and watched her with steady, unblinking eyes.She pushed the door and went through into the cold passage that smelt of cheese and bacon and damp earth.There seemed to be no one about, and then suddenly the pantry door opened and Jane came out.She stopped when she saw Maggie.
"Where's Martha?" asked Maggie in a low voice.
The whisper seemed to tell Jane at once that this was to be a confidential matter.She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of the kitchen.
"In there.Cooking the dinner," she whispered back.She was untidy, there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already something in common.Maggie saw that she had no time to lose.She came close to her.
"Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble.It's only you who can help me.
Here's a letter that I want posted--just in the ordinary way.Can you do that for me?"Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head.
"And there's something else," Maggie went on."To-morrow morning, before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office--you know the one opposite the station--and ask for a letter addressed to me.I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any letters of mine.Give it to me somehow when no one's looking.Do you understand?"Jane nodded her head.Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown, but Jane pushed back the money.
"I don't want no money," she said in a hoarse whisper."You're the only one here decent to me."At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared.When she saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What about the potatoes?"She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion.
"I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room.Will you give me one, please?"Jane had vanished.
Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy state.There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient rebellion that he knew so well--a mood that really was like a possession, so that, struggle as he--might, he seemed always in the grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.
It was possession in a sense that to many normal, happy people in this world is so utterly unknown that they can only scornfully name it weakness and so pass on their way.But those human beings who have suffered from it do in very truth feel as though they had been caught up into another world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist.Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force.Let no man who has not known such hours and the terror of such a dominion utter judgment upon his neighbour.