The Queen of Hearts

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[Etext by James Rusk (jrusk@cyberramp.net)
Italics are indicated with underscore]

The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

LETTER OF DEDICATION.

---------
TO

EMILE FORGUES.
-----

AT a time when French readers were altogether unaware of the
existence of any books of my writing, a critical examination of
my novels appeared under your signature in the _Revue des Deux
Moudes_. I read that article, at the time of its appearance, with
sincere pleasure and sincere gratitude to the writer, and I have
honestly done my best to profit by it ever since.

At a later period, when arrangements were made for the
publication of my novels in Paris, you kindly undertook, at some
sacrifice of your own convenience, to give the first of the
series--"The Dead Secret"--the great advantage of being rendered
into French by your pen. Your excellent translation of "The
Lighthouse" had already taught me how to appreciate the value of
your assistance; and when "The Dead Secret" appeared in its
French form, although I was sensibly gratified, I was by no means
surprised to find my fortunate work of fiction, not translated,
in the mechanical sense of the word, but transformed from a novel
that I had written in my language to a novel that you might have
written in yours.

I am now about to ask you to confer one more literary obligation
on me by accepting the dedication of this book, as the earliest
acknowledgment which it has been in my power to make of the debt
I owe to my critic, to my translator, and to my friend.

The stories which form the principal contents of the following
pages are all, more or less, exercises in that art which I have
now studied anxiously for some years, and which I still hope to
cultivate, to better and better purpose, for many more. Allow me,
by inscribing the collection to you, to secure one reader for it
at the outset of its progress through the world of letters whose
capacity for seeing all a writer's defects may be matched by many
other critics, but whose rarer faculty of seeing all a writer's
merits is equaled by very few.

WILKIE COLLINS.

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.

CHAPTER I.

OURSELVES.

WE were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively,
handsome young woman, and we were at our wits' end what to do
with her.

A word about ourselves, first of all--a necessary word, to
explain the singular situation of our fair young guest.

We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old
house called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a
hilly, lonesome district of South Wales. No such thing as a line
of railway runs anywhere near us. No gentleman's seat is within
an easy drive of us. We are at an unspeakably inconvenient
distance from a town, and the village to which we send for our
letters is three miles off.

My eldest brother, Owen, was brought up to the Church. All the
prime of his life was passed in a populous London parish. For
more years than I now like to reckon up, he worked unremittingly,
in defiance of failing health and adverse fortune, amid the
multitudinous misery of the London poor; and he would, in all
probability, have sacrificed his life to his duty long before the
present time if The Glen Tower had not come into his possession
through two unexpected deaths in the elder and richer branch of
our family. This opening to him of a place of rest and refuge
saved his life. No man ever drew breath who better deserved the
gifts of fortune; for no man, I sincerely believe, more tender of
others, more diffident of himself, more gentle, more generous,
and more simple-hearted than Owen, ever walked this earth.

My second brother, Morgan, started in life as a doctor, and
learned all that his profession could teach him at home and
abroad. He realized a moderate independence by his practice,
beginning in one of our large northern towns and ending as a
physician in London; but, although he was well known and
appreciated among his brethren, he failed to gain that sort of
reputation with the public which elevates a man into the position
of a great doctor. The ladies never liked him. In the first
place, he was ugly (Morgan will excuse me for mentioning this);
in the second place, he was an inveterate smoker, and he smelled
of tobacco when he felt languid pulses in elegant bedrooms; in
the third place, he was the most formidably outspoken teller of
the truth as regarded himself, his profession, and his patients,
that ever imperiled the social standing of the science of
medicine. For these reasons, and for others which it is not
necessary to mention, he never pushed his way, as a doctor, into
the front ranks, and he never cared to do so. About a year after
Owen came into possession of The Glen Tower, Morgan discovered
that he had saved as much money for his old age as a sensible man
could want; that he was tired of the active pursuit--or, as he
termed it, of the dignified quackery of his profession; and that
it was only common charity to give his invalid brother a
companion who could physic him for nothing, and so prevent him
from getting rid of his money in the worst of all possible ways,
by wasting it on doctors' bills. In a week after Morgan had
arrived at these conclusions, he was settled at The Glen Tower;
and from that time, opposite as their characters were, my two
elder brothers lived together in their lonely retreat, thoroughly
understanding, and, in their very different ways, heartily loving
one another.

Many years passed before I, the youngest of the three--christened
by the unmelodious name of Griffith--found my way, in my turn, to
the dreary old house, and the sheltering quiet of the Welsh
hills. My career in life had led me away from my brothers; and
even now, when we are all united, I have still ties and interests
to connect me with the outer world which neither Owen nor Morgan
possess.

I was brought up to the Bar. After my first year's study of the
law, I wearied of it, and strayed aside idly into the brighter
and more attractive paths of literature. My occasional occupation
with my pen was varied by long traveling excursions in all parts
of the Continent; year by year my circle of gay friends and
acquaintances increased, and I bade fair to sink into the
condition of a wandering desultory man, without a fixed purpose
in life of any sort, when I was saved by what has saved many
another in my situation--an attachment to a good and a sensible
woman. By the time I had reached the age of thirty-five, I had
done what neither of my brothers had done before me--I had
married.

As a single man, my own small independence, aided by what little
additions to it I could pick up with my pen, had been sufficient
for my wants; but with marriage and its responsibilities came the
necessity for serious exertion. I returned to my neglected
studies, and grappled resolutely, this time, with the intricate
difficulties of the law. I was called to the Bar. My wife's
father aided me with his interest, and I started into practice
without difficulty and without delay.

For the next twenty years my married life was a scene of
happiness and prosperity, on which I now look back with a
grateful tenderness that no words of mine can express. The memory
of my wife is busy at my heart while I think of those past times.
The forgotten tears rise in my eyes again, and trouble the course
of my pen while it traces these simple lines.

Let me pass rapidly over the one unspeakable misery of my life;
let me try to remember now, as I tried to remember then, that she
lived to see our only child--our son, who was so good to her, who
is still so good to me--grow up to manhood; that her head lay on
my bosom when she died; and that the last frail movement of her
hand in this world was the movement that brought it closer to her
boy's lips.

I bore the blow--with God's help I bore it, and bear it still.
But it struck me away forever from my hold on social life; from
the purposes and pursuits, the companions and the pleasures of
twenty years, which her presence had sanctioned and made dear to
me. If my son George had desired to follow my profession, I
should still have struggled against myself, and have kept my
place in the world until I had seen h im prosperous and settled.
But his choice led him to the army; and before his mother's death
he had obtained his commission, and had entered on his path in
life. No other responsibility remained to claim from me the
sacrifice of myself; my brothers had made my place ready for me
by their fireside; my heart yearned, in its desolation, for the
friends and companions of the old boyish days; my good, brave son
promised that no year should pass, as long as he was in England,
without his coming to cheer me; and so it happened that I, in my
turn, withdrew from the world, which had once been a bright and a
happy world to me, and retired to end my days, peacefully,
contentedly, and gratefully, as my brothers are ending theirs, in
the solitude of The Glen Tower.

How many years have passed since we have all three been united it
is not necessary to relate. It will be more to the purpose if I
briefly record that we have never been separated since the day
which first saw us assembled together in our hillside retreat;
that we have never yet wearied of the time, of the place, or of
ourselves; and that the influence of solitude on our hearts and
minds has not altered them for the worse, for it has not
embittered us toward our fellow-creatures, and it has not dried
up in us the sources from which harmless occupations and innocent
pleasures may flow refreshingly to the last over the waste places
of human life. Thus much for our own story, and for the
circumstances which have withdrawn us from the world for the rest
of our days.

And now imagine us three lonely old men, tall and lean, and
white-headed; dressed, more from past habit than from present
association, in customary suits of solemn black: Brother Owen,
yielding, gentle, and affectionate in look, voice, and manner;
brother Morgan, with a quaint, surface-sourness of address, and a
tone of dry sarcasm in his talk, which single him out, on all
occasions, as a character in our little circle; brother Griffith
forming the link between his two elder companions, capable, at
one time, of sympathizing with the quiet, thoughtful tone of
Owen's conversation, and ready, at another, to exchange brisk
severities on life and manners with Morgan--in short, a pliable,
double-sided old lawyer, who stands between the clergyman-brother
and the physician-brother with an ear ready for each, and with a
heart open to both, share and share together.

Imagine the strange old building in which we live to be really
what its name implies--a tower standing in a glen; in past times
the fortress of a fighting Welsh chieftain; in present times a
dreary land-lighthouse, built up in many stories of two rooms
each, with a little modern lean-to of cottage form tacked on
quaintly to one of its sides; the great hill, on whose lowest
slope it stands, rising precipitously behind it; a dark,
swift-flowing stream in the valley below; hills on hills all
round, and no way of approach but by one of the loneliest and
wildest crossroads in all South Wales.

Imagine such a place of abode as this, and such inhabitants of it
as ourselves, and them picture the descent among us--as of a
goddess dropping from the clouds--of a lively, handsome,
fashionable young lady--a bright, gay, butterfly creature, used
to flutter away its existence in the broad sunshine of perpetual
gayety--a child of the new generation, with all the modern ideas
whirling together in her pretty head, and all the modern
accomplishments at the tips of her delicate fingers. Imagine such
a light-hearted daughter of Eve as this, the spoiled darling of
society, the charming spendthrift of Nature's choicest treasures
of beauty and youth, suddenly flashing into the dim life of three
weary old men--suddenly dropped into the place, of all others,
which is least fit for her--suddenly shut out from the world in
the lonely quiet of the loneliest home in England. Realize, if it
be possible, all that is most whimsical and most anomalous in
such a situation as this, and the startling confession contained
in the opening sentence of these pages will no longer excite the
faintest emotion of surprise. Who can wonder now, when our bright
young goddess really descended on us, that I and my brothers were
all three at our wits' end what to do with her!

CHAPTER II.

OUR DILEMMA.

WHO is the young lady? And how did she find her way into The Glen
Tower?

Her name (in relation to which I shall have something more to say
a little further on) is Jessie Yelverton. She is an orphan and an
only child. Her mother died while she was an infant; her father
was my dear and valued friend, Major Yelverton. He lived long
enough to celebrate his darling's seventh birthday. When he died
he intrusted his authority over her and his responsibility toward
her to his brother and to me.

When I was summoned to the reading of the major's will, I knew
perfectly well that I should hear myself appointed guardian and
executor with his brother; and I had been also made acquainted
with my lost friend's wishes as to his daughter's education, and
with his intentions as to the disposal of all his property in her
favor. My own idea, therefore, was, that the reading of the will
would inform me of nothing which I had not known in the
testator's lifetime. When the day came for hearing it, however, I
found that I had been over hasty in arriving at this conclusion.
Toward the end of the document there was a clause inserted which
took me entirely by surprise.

After providing for the education of Miss Yelverton under the
direction of her guardians, and for her residence, under ordinary
circumstances, with the major's sister, Lady Westwick, the clause
concluded by saddling the child's future inheritance with this
curious condition:

From the period of her leaving school to the period of her
reaching the age of twenty-one years, Miss Yelverton was to pass
not less than six consecutive weeks out of every year under the
roof of one of her two guardians. During the lives of both of
them, it was left to her own choice to say which of the two she
would prefer to live with. In all other respects the condition
was imperative. If she forfeited it, excepting, of course, the
case of the deaths of both her guardians, she was only to have a
life-interest in the property; if she obeyed it, the money itself
was to become her own possession on the day when she completed
her twenty-first year.

This clause in the will, as I have said, took me at first by
surprise. I remembered how devotedly Lady Westwick had soothed
her sister-in-law's death-bed sufferings, and how tenderly she
had afterward watched over the welfare of the little motherless
child--I remembered the innumerable claims she had established in
this way on her brother's confidence in her affection for his
orphan daughter, and I was, therefore, naturally amazed at the
appearance of a condition in his will which seemed to show a
positive distrust of Lady Westwick's undivided influence over the
character and conduct of her niece.

A few words from my fellow-guardian, Mr. Richard Yelverton, and a
little after-consideration of some of my deceased friend's
peculiarities of disposition and feeling, to which I had not
hitherto attached sufficient importance, were enough to make me
understand the motives by which he had been influenced in
providing for the future of his child.

Major Yelverton had raised himself to a position of affluence and
eminence from a very humble origin. He was the son of a small
farmer, and it was his pride never to forget this circumstance,
never to be ashamed of it, and never to allow the prejudices of
society to influence his own settled opinions on social questions
in general.

Acting, in all that related to his intercourse with the world, on
such principles as these, the major, it is hardly necessary to
say, held some strangely heterodox opinions on the modern
education of girls, and on the evil influence of society over the
characters of women in general. Out of the strength of those
opinions, and out of the certainty of his conviction that his
sister did not share them, had grown that condition in his will
which removed his daughter from the influence of her aunt for six
consec utive weeks in every year. Lady Westwick was the most
light-hearted, the most generous, the most impulsive of women;
capable, when any serious occasion called it forth, of all that
was devoted and self-sacrificing, but, at other and ordinary
times, constitutionally restless, frivolous, and eager for
perpetual gayety. Distrusting the sort of life which he knew his
daughter would lead under her aunt's roof, and at the same time
gratefully remembering his sister's affectionate devotion toward
his dying wife and her helpless infant, Major Yelverton had
attempted to make a compromise, which, while it allowed Lady
Westwick the close domestic intercourse with her niece that she
had earned by innumerable kind offices, should, at the same time,
place the young girl for a fixed period of every year of her
minority under the corrective care of two such quiet
old-fashioned guardians as his brother and myself. Such is the
history of the clause in the will. My friend little thought, when
he dictated it, of the extraordinary result to which it was one
day to lead.

For some years, however, events ran on smoothly enough. Little
Jessie was sent to an excellent school, with strict instructions
to the mistress to make a good girl of her, and not a fashionable
young lady. Although she was reported to be anything but a
pattern pupil in respect of attention to her lessons, she became
from the first the chosen favorite of every one about her. The
very offenses which she committed against the discipline of the
school were of the sort which provoke a smile even on the stern
countenance of authority itself. One of these quaint freaks of
mischief may not inappropriately be mentioned here, inasmuch as
it gained her the pretty nickname under which she will be found
to appear occasionally in these pages.

On a certain autumn night shortly after the Midsummer vacation,
the mistress of the school fancied she saw a light under the door
of the bedroom occupied by Jessie and three other girls. It was
then close on midnight; and, fearing that some case of sudden
illness might have happened, she hastened into the room. On
opening the door, she discovered, to her horror and amazement,
that all four girls were out of bed--were dressed in
brilliantly-fantastic costumes, representing the four grotesque
"Queens" of Hearts, Diamonds, Spades, and Clubs, familiar to us
all on the pack of cards--and were dancing a quadrille, in which
Jessie sustained the character of The Queen of Hearts. The next
morning's investigation disclosed that Miss Yelverton had
smuggled the dresses into the school, and had amused herself by
giving an impromptu fancy ball to her companions, in imitation of
an entertainment of the same kind at which she had figured in a
"court-card" quadrille at her aunt's country house.

The dresses were instantly confiscated and the necessary
punishment promptly administered; but the remembrance of Jessie's
extraordinary outrage on bedroom discipline lasted long enough to
become one of the traditions of the school, and she and her
sister-culprits were thenceforth hailed as the "queens" of the
four "suites" by their class-companions whenever the mistress's
back was turned, Whatever might have become of the nicknames thus
employed in relation to the other three girls, such a mock title
as The Queen of Hearts was too appropriately descriptive of the
natural charm of Jessie's character, as well as of the adventure
in which she had taken the lead, not to rise naturally to the
lips of every one who knew her. It followed her to her aunt's
house--it came to be as habitually and familiarly connected with
her, among her friends of all ages, as if it had been formally
inscribed on her baptismal register; and it has stolen its way
into these pages because it falls from my pen naturally and
inevitably, exactly as it often falls from my lips in real life.

When Jessie left school the first difficulty presented itself--in
other words, the necessity arose of fulfilling the conditions of
the will. At that time I was already settled at The Glen Tower,
and her living six weeks in our dismal solitude and our humdrum
society was, as she herself frankly wrote me word, quite out of
the question. Fortunately, she had always got on well with her
uncle and his family; so she exerted her liberty of choice, and,
much to her own relief and to mine also, passed her regular six
weeks of probation, year after year, under Mr. Richard
Yelverton's roof.

During this period I heard of her regularly, sometimes from my
fellow-guardian, sometimes from my son George, who, whenever his
military duties allowed him the opportunity, contrived to see
her, now at her aunt's house, and now at Mr. Yelverton's. The
particulars of her character and conduct, which I gleaned in this
way, more than sufficed to convince me that the poor major's plan
for the careful training of his daughter's disposition, though
plausible enough in theory, was little better than a total
failure in practice. Miss Jessie, to use the expressive common
phrase, took after her aunt. She was as generous, as impulsive,
as light-hearted, as fond of change, and gayety, and fine
clothes--in short, as complete and genuine a woman as Lady
Westwick herself. It was impossible to reform the "Queen of
Hearts," and equally impossible not to love her. Such, in few
words, was my fellow-guardian's report of his experience of our
handsome young ward.

So the time passed till the year came of which I am now
writing--the ever-memorable year, to England, of the Russian war.
It happened that I had heard less than usual at this period, and
indeed for many months before it, of Jessie and her proceedings.
My son had been ordered out with his regiment to the Crimea in
1854, and had other work in hand now than recording the sayings
and doings of a young lady. Mr. Richard Yelverton, who had been
hitherto used to write to me with tolerable regularity, seemed
now, for some reason that I could not conjecture, to have
forgotten my existence. Ultimately I was reminded of my ward by
one of George's own letters, in which he asked for news of her;
and I wrote at once to Mr. Yelverton. The answer that reached me
was written by his wife: he was dangerously ill. The next letter
that came informed me of his death. This happened early in the
spring of the year 1855.

I am ashamed to confess it, but the change in my own position was
the first idea that crossed my mind when I read the news of Mr.
Yelverton's death. I was now left sole guardian, and Jessie
Yelverton wanted a year still of coming of age.

By the next day's post I wrote to her about the altered state of
the relations between us. She was then on the Continent with her
aunt, having gone abroad at the very beginning of the year.
Consequently, so far as eighteen hundred and fifty-five was
concerned, the condition exacted by the will yet remained to be
performed. She had still six weeks to pass--her last six weeks,
seeing that she was now twenty years old--under the roof of one
of her guardians, and I was now the only guardian left.

In due course of time I received my answer, written on
rose-colored paper, and expressed throughout in a tone of light,
easy, feminine banter, which amused me in spite of myself. Miss
Jessie, according to her own account, was hesitating, on receipt
of my letter, between two alternatives--the one, of allowing
herself to be buried six weeks in The Glen Tower; the other, of
breaking the condition, giving up the money, and remaining
magnanimously contented with nothing but a life-interest in her
father's property. At present she inclined decidedly toward
giving up the money and escaping the clutches of "the three
horrid old men;" but she would let me know again if she happened
to change her mind. And so, with best love, she would beg to
remain always affectionately mine, as long as she was well out of
my reach.

The summer passed, the autumn came, and I never heard from her
again. Under ordinary circumstances, this long silence might have
made me feel a little uneasy. But news reached me about this time
from the Crimea that my son was wounded--not dangerously, thank
God, but still severely enough to be la id up--and all my
anxieties were now centered in that direction. By the beginning
of September, however, I got better accounts of him, and my mind
was made easy enough to let me think of Jessie again. Just as I
was considering the necessity of writing once more to my
refractory ward, a second letter arrived from her. She had
returned at last from abroad, had suddenly changed her mind,
suddenly grown sick of society, suddenly become enamored of the
pleasures of retirement, and suddenly found out that the three
horrid old men were three dear old men, and that six weeks'
solitude at The Glen Tower was the luxury, of all others, that
she languished for most. As a necessary result of this altered
state of things, she would therefore now propose to spend her
allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly expect
her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the
greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the
lowest possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ashes
along with her.

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