A Whisper Away
After Miss Wilhelmina Murray left Allan Quatermain and England, she moved quietly to Scotland and then to France and bought a small house in the Rue Plumet, where she lived for several years.
This seemed simple enough, but in her head it was not at all simple. At first she missed Allan. It was not a deep, longing ache that ate her up. It was just a soft, gentle sadness sometimes that she was alone.
And she liked her house, but she didn't love it. She had imagined being satisfied living on her own, but she didn't know anyone in Paris to be even a casual acquaintance and she was, although she hated to admit it, lonely. The house was empty. Somehow, she didn't have the incentive to go out and buy pictures or hangings for the walls, or special furniture for the small hall and the open rooms. She kept what was there already.
It meant that there were no men to come through her house, putting in the furniture or hanging the paintings. It also meant that nothing was really hers.
Miss Wilhelmina Murray's house was practical, efficient, uncluttered, and, in general, quite suitable, but she couldn't be happy in it.
So she took to walking in the Luxembourg. It was a place that didn't seem as though it would ever change past the natural cycle of the leaves falling from the trees, growing back, becoming downstaged by the blossoms, and then grasping the attention again by changing to the colour of flames before falling off once more as winter crept 'round. She took pleasure in sitting quietly on a bench and watching it.
After a little while, she took up sketching. She thought about the League occasionally--perhaps she even thought about it involuntarily. She thought about herself and Allan; about Nemo, raging against the world; about sorry Jekyll, unable to be brave, and Hyde, who couldn't terrify her because she'd known worse things. She thought about Griffin sometimes, and the pages in her sketchbook turned.
In September, when the leaves were already beginning slowly to change colour, she noticed an old man sitting on a bench near hers. He sat every day, quite as quiet as she was, with an old-fashioned silk hat on his white hair and his face half-hidden by a pale blue scarf.
She touched her hand to her throat without thinking. Scarves caused her to do that.
The old man was always watching. His brown eyes would flicker about, from the young men and women walking together to the changing trees to the students strolling about to her and her sketchbook to the sky. Mina couldn't help but watch him back.
She had moved to France very partly to be near to Auguste Dupin. She had liked the man and his bad-temperedness and his--his grace, as he kissed her hand and told her that he read a lot.
She would have liked living by him and perhaps visiting.
But Auguste Dupin died shortly after she moved, and she attended the funeral as unobtrusively as she could, hiding in the background behind her umbrella.
The old man reminded her a little of Dupin, with his intense, alert eyes. Oh, intense eyes! They had both had intense eyes. He looked away politely when he saw her looking back, but then he smiled courteously and rose to make a bow.
"Good afternoon, Mademoiselle," he said in English.
"Good afternoon, Monsieur."
"The leaves are beautiful, non? They were more beautiful last year, but nature performs so well for all the world that it wouldn't seem fair to condemn her over a slight discrepancy."
"No," said Mina, a little surprised. His English was excellent.
"My name is Marius Pontmercy," he added, smiling again.
"Miss Wilhelmina Murray."
"I am charmed. You come here often, Mademoiselle Murray."
"Yes, I--I sketch." She frowned at herself inside her head for stating the obvious, but M. Pontmercy reacted as though as though it were a wonderful surprise.
"Really? What do you sketch?" he asked her.
"The trees, and sometimes the people."
"My wife used to sketch. She took it up soon after we were married. She drew her garden."
"Really, Monsieur? Was it a large garden?" Mina pursed her lips. Of all the silly questions. Being so long without speaking to people was evidently having an effect.
"It was wild, but nothing like the one she had before. She lived at 55 Rue Plumet, and the garden there was a small jungle. A beautiful one. We used to sit in it..."
Upon hearing the address 55 Rue Plumet, Mina started a little. She lived in that house, but there was no garden at all in the back; only a small copse of trees tangled in vines.
After that, however, she began to speak with M. Pontmercy when she came to the Luxembourg. He was talkative in a dreamy sort of way, and she learned that his wife had died two years before of a weakness of the heart. They had had four children who survived and grew up, living far away now with their own families. He was alone in their old house with a manservant and a maid, and the house was too big. Nevertheless, he wouldn't consider selling it--he could walk into any room and remember something about his family, and he valued that, as his memory was going.
Mina felt sorry for him. He was a sentimentalist, which ought to have annoyed her, but he was sentimental in an endearing way. He talked at the same time like both a schoolboy and an educated, dignified gentleman, and Mina believed he still loved his wife, as opposed to becoming indifferent or used to her as they lived together for so long.
Besides, he was lonely, and so was she.
She admitted it now. She had wanted a companion and one was here offered to her: a sweet Frenchman who watched leaves and imagined himself back sixty years in a garden with his darling.
He was good at imagining. He claimed it was from having so many children to tell stories to.
By November, by the time it was growing frosty and the leaves were falling, she knew all about him. He'd been a lawyer. His grandfather had raised him. He was actually a Baron, but no one thought of him as such any longer.
Still there was something she thought she didn't know, but he was entitled to his secrets. She kept hers. All Marius knew about her was that she had become disfigured in a fire and underwent a divorce from her husband some time later. She had moved to France because she'd visited there once and thought it beautiful.
In December, he invited her for Christmas. After supper they went into his library and spent the evening reading aloud from their own separate stacks of favoured books. There was no exchange of gifts. It was not at all how Mina had envisioned spending her Christmas, but she enjoyed it. She admitted that, too.
She began to think that if it had been her and Allan, they would've done something very different--but cut herself off. There was no point in reminiscencing or dreaming about what she might have done. She had enjoyed it. That was all there was to the situation.
She had enjoyed it.
She was happy.
In May, just as the trees in the Luxembourg were beginning to burst into bloom, Marius Pontmercy died. This was a natural thing to happen. He was old. He was alone and he missed his wife.
His children came with their families to arrange for his funeral and pay their respects. They loved their father, and they regretted, quietly, that they had not seen him more often. This, too, was a natural thing to happen, but they were good, ordinary children and they gave him a beautiful funeral.
Miss Wilhelmina Murray did not look any older than she had three years ago, but she felt it. Perhaps it was that her blood had thinned significantly from the incident where she had received her scars. Perhaps it was the cold, wet weather that had plagued Paris lately and the fact that her house was empty and damp.
However, she attended the funeral of Baron Marius Pontmercy, albeit as unobtrusively as she could, hiding in the background behind her umbrella.
When she returned to her house in Rue Plumet, she considered several things in a very impulsive manner. She thought she might plant a garden and look after it. She thought she might begin buying books so that she could read on Christmas when it was cold outside. She wondered if she should purchase paintings for her walls and ornamental tables for her rooms. But these were the irrational thoughts of a moment.
Instead, she took her sketchbook and went to Luxembourg to look at the trees.
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