You understand what I have just told you? Very good. We may get on from
to-day to to-morrow. Go out to-morrow with Mrs. Lecount at your usual
time. I will meet you on the Parade, and bow to you. Instead of
returning my bow, look the other way. In plain English, cut me! That is
easy enough to do, isn’t it?”
“She won’t believe me, Mr. Bygrave—she won’t believe me!”
“Wait a little again, Mr. Vanstone. There are more instructions to
come. You have got your directions for to-day, and you have got your
directions for to-morrow. Now for the day after. The day after is the
seventh day since we sent the letter to Zurich. On the seventh day
decline to go out walking as before, from dread of the annoyance of
meeting me again. Grumble about the smallness of the place; complain of
your health; wish you had never come to Aldborough, and never made
acquaintances with the Bygraves; and when you have well worried Mrs.
Lecount with your discontent, ask her on a sudden if she can’t suggest
a change for the better. If you put that question to her naturally, do
you think she can be depended on to answer it?”
“She won’t want to be questioned at all,” replied Noel Vanstone,
irritably. “I have only got to say I am tired of Aldborough; and, if
she believes me—which she won’t; I’m quite positive, Mr. Bygrave, she
won’t!—she will have her suggestion ready before I can ask for it.”
“Ay! ay!” said the captain eagerly. “There is some place, then, that
Mrs. Lecount wants to go to this autumn?”
“She wants to go there (hang her!) every autumn.”
“To go where?”
“To Admiral Bartram’s—you don’t know him, do you?—at St.
Crux-in-the-Marsh.”
“Don’t lose your patience, Mr. Vanstone! What you are now telling me is
of the most vital importance to the object we have in view. Who is
Admiral Bartram?”
“An old friend of my father’s. My father laid him under obligations—my
father lent him money when they were both young men. I am like one of
the family at St. Crux; my room is always kept ready for me. Not that
there’s any family at the admiral’s except his nephew, George Bartram.
George is my cousin; I’m as intimate with George as my father was with
the admiral; and I’ve been sharper than my father, for I haven’t lent
my friend any money. Lecount always makes a show of liking George—I
believe to annoy me. She likes the admiral, too; he flatters her
vanity. He always invites her to come with me to St. Crux. He lets her
have one of the best bedrooms, and treats her as if she was a lady. She
is as proud as Lucifer—she likes being treated like a lady—and she
pesters me every autumn to go to St. Crux. What’s the matter? What are
you taking out your pocketbook for?”
“I want the admiral’s address, Mr. Vanstone, for a purpose which I will
explain immediately.”
With those words, Captain Wragge opened his pocketbook and wrote down
the address from Noel Vanstone’s dictation, as follows: “Admiral
Bartram, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh, near Ossory, Essex.”
“Good!” cried the captain, closing his pocketbook again. “The only
difficulty that stood in our way is now cleared out of it. Patience,
Mr. Vanstone—patience! Let us take up my instructions again at the
point where we dropped them. Give me five minutes’ more attention, and
you will see your way to your marriage as plainly as I see it. On the
day after to-morrow you declare you are tired of Aldborough, and Mrs.
Lecount suggests St. Crux. You don’t say yes or no on the spot; you
take the next day to consider it, and you make up your mind the last
thing at night to go to St. Crux the first thing in the morning. Are
you in the habit of superintending your own packing up, or do you
usually shift all the trouble of it on Mrs. Lecount’s shoulders?”
“Lecount has all the trouble, of course; Lecount is paid for it! But I
don’t really go, do I?”
“You go as fast as horses can take you to the railway without having
held any previous communication with this house, either personally or
by letter. You leave Mrs. Lecount behind to pack up your curiosities,
to settle with the tradespeople, and to follow you to St. Crux the next
morning. The next morning is the tenth morning. On the tenth morning
she receives the letter from Zurich; and if you only carry out my
instructions, Mr. Vanstone, as sure as you sit there, to Zurich she
goes.”
Noel Vanstone’s color began to rise again, as the captain’s stratagem
dawned on him at last in its true light.
“And what am I to do at St. Crux?” he inquired.
“Wait there till I call for you,” replied the captain. “As soon as Mrs.
Lecount’s back is turned, I will go to the church here and give the
necessary notice of the marriage. The same day or the next, I will
travel to the address written down in my pocketbook, pick you up at the
admiral’s, and take you on to London with me to get the license. With
that document in our possession, we shall be on our way back to
Aldborough while Mrs. Lecount is on her way out to Zurich; and before
she starts on her return journey, you and my niece will be man and
wife! There are your future prospects for you. What do you think of
them?”
“What a head you have got!” cried Noel Vanstone, in a sudden outburst
of enthusiasm. “You’re the most extraordinary man I ever met with. One
would think you had done nothing all your life but take people in.”
Captain Wragge received that unconscious tribute to his native genius
with the complacency of a man who felt that he thoroughly deserved it.
“I have told you already, my dear sir,” he said, modestly, “that I
never do things by halves. Pardon me for reminding you that we have no
time for exchanging mutual civilities. Are you quite sure about your
instructions? I dare not write them down for fear of accidents. Try the
system of artificial memory; count your instructions off after me, on
your thumb and your four fingers. To-day you tell Mrs. Lecount I have
tried to take you in with my relative’s works of Art. To-morrow you cut
me on the Parade. The day after you refuse to go out, you get tired of
Aldborough, and you allow Mrs. Lecount to make her suggestion. The next
day you accept the suggestion. And the next day to that you go to St.
Crux. Once more, my dear sir! Thumb—works of Art. Forefinger—cut me on
the Parade. Middle finger—tired of Aldborough. Third finger—take
Lecount’s advice. Little finger—off to St. Crux. Nothing can be
clearer—nothing can be easier to do. Is there anything you don’t
understand? Anything that I can explain over again before you go?”
“Only one thing,” said Noel Vanstone. “Is it settled that I am not to
come here again before I go to St. Crux?”
“Most decidedly!” answered the captain. “The whole success of the
enterprise depends on your keeping away. Mrs. Lecount will try the
credibility of everything you say to her by one test—the test of your
communicating, or not, with this house. She will watch you night and
day! Don’t call here, don’t send messages, don’t write letters; don’t
even go out by yourself. Let her see you start for St. Crux on her
suggestion, with the absolute certainty in her own mind that you have
followed her advice without communicating it in any form whatever to me
or to my niece. Do that, and she _must_ believe you, on the best of all
evidence for our interests, and the worst for hers—the evidence of her
own senses.”
With those last words of caution, he shook the little man warmly by the
hand and sent him home on the spot.
CHAPTER X.
On returning to Sea View, Noel Vanstone executed the instructions which
prescribed his line of conduct for the first of the five days with
unimpeachable accuracy. A faint smile of contempt hovered about Mrs.
Lecount’s lips while the story of Mr. Bygrave’s attempt to pass off his
spurious pictures as originals was in progress, but she did not trouble
herself to utter a single word of remark when it had come to an end.
“Just what I said!” thought Noel Vanstone, cunningly watching her face;
“she doesn’t believe a word of it!”
The next day the meeting occurred on the Parade. Mr. Bygrave took off
his hat, and Noel Vanstone looked the other way. The captain’s start of
surprise and scowl of indignation were executed to perfection, but they
plainly failed to impose on Mrs. Lecount. “I am afraid, sir, you have
offended Mr. Bygrave to-day,” she ironically remarked. “Happily for
you, he is an excellent Christian! and I venture to predict that he
will forgive you to-morrow.”
Noel Vanstone wisely refrained from committing himself to an answer.
Once more he privately applauded his own penetration; once more he
triumphed over his ingenious friend.
Thus far the captain’s instructions had been too clear and simple to be
mistaken by any one. But they advanced in complication with the advance
of time, and on the third day Noel Vanstone fell confusedly into the
commission of a slight error. After expressing the necessary weariness
of Aldborough, and the consequent anxiety for change of scene, he was
met (as he had anticipated) by an immediate suggestion from the
housekeeper, recommending a visit to St. Crux. In giving his answer to
the advice thus tendered, he made his first mistake. Instead of
deferring his decision until the next day, he accepted Mrs. Lecount’s
suggestion on the day when it was offered to him.
The consequences of this error were of no great importance. The
housekeeper merely set herself to watch her master one day earlier than
had been calculated on—a result which had been already provided for by
the wise precautionary measure of forbidding Noel Vanstone all
communication with North Shingles. Doubting, as Captain Wragge had
foreseen, the sincerity of her master’s desire to break off his
connection with the Bygraves by going to St. Crux, Mrs. Lecount tested
the truth or falsehood of the impression produced on her own mind by
vigilantly watching for signs of secret communication on one side or on
the other. The close attention with which she had hitherto observed the
out-goings and in-comings at North Shingles was now entirely
transferred to her master. For the rest of that third day she never let
him out of her sight; she never allowed any third person who came to
the house, on any pretense whatever, a minute’s chance of private
communication with him. At intervals through the night she stole to the
door of his room, to listen and assure herself that he was in bed; and
before sunrise the next morning, the coast-guardsman going his rounds
was surprised to see a lady who had risen as early as himself engaged
over her work at one of the upper windows of Sea View.
On the fourth morning Noel Vanstone came down to breakfast conscious of
the mistake that he had committed on the previous day. The obvious
course to take, for the purpose of gaining time, was to declare that
his mind was still undecided. He made the assertion boldly when the
housekeeper asked him if he meant to move that day. Again Mrs. Lecount
offered no remark, and again the signs and tokens of incredulity showed
themselves in her face. Vacillation of purpose was not at all unusual
in her experience of her master. But on this occasion she believed that
his caprice of conduct was assumed for the purpose of gaining time to
communicate with North Shingles, and she accordingly set her watch on
him once more with doubled and trebled vigilance.
No letters came that morning. Toward noon the weather changed for the
worse, and all idea of walking out as usual was abandoned. Hour after
hour, while her master sat in one of the parlors, Mrs. Lecount kept
watch in the other, with the door into the passage open, and with a
full view of North Shingles through the convenient side-window at which
she had established herself. Not a sign that was suspicious appeared,
not a sound that was suspicious caught her ear. As the evening closed
in, her master’s hesitation came to an end. He was disgusted with the
weather; he hated the place; he foresaw the annoyance of more meetings
with Mr. Bygrave, and he was determined to go to St. Crux the first
thing the next morning. Lecount could stay behind to pack up the
curiosities and settle with the trades-people, and could follow him to
the admiral’s on the next day. The housekeeper was a little staggered
by the tone and manner in which he gave these orders. He had, to her
own certain knowledge, effected no communication of any sort with North
Shingles, and yet he seemed determined to leave Aldborough at the
earliest possible opportunity. For the first time she hesitated in her
adherence to her own conclusions. She remembered that her master had
complained of the Bygraves before they returned to Aldborough; and she
was conscious that her own incredulity had once already misled her when
the appearance of the traveling-carriage at the door had proved even
Mr. Bygrave himself to be as good as his word.
Still Mrs. Lecount determined to act with unrelenting caution to the
last. That night, when the doors were closed, she privately removed the
keys from the door in front and the door at the back. She then softly
opened her bedroom window and sat down by it, with her bonnet and cloak
on, to prevent her taking cold. Noel Vanstone’s window was on the same
side of the house as her own. If any one came in the dark to speak to
him from the garden beneath, they would speak to his housekeeper as
well. Prepared at all points to intercept every form of clandestine
communication which stratagem could invent, Mrs. Lecount watched
through the quiet night. When morning came, she stole downstairs before
the servant was up, restored the keys to their places, and re-occupied
her position in the parlor until Noel Vanstone made his appearance at
the breakfast-table. Had he altered his mind? No. He declined posting
to the railway on account of the expense, but he was as firm as ever in
his resolution to go to St. Crux. He desired that an inside place might
be secured for him in the early coach. Suspicious to the last, Mrs.
Lecount sent the baker’s man to take the place. He was a public
servant, and Mr. Bygrave would not suspect him of performing a private
errand.
The coach called at Sea View. Mrs. Lecount saw her master established
in his place, and ascertained that the other three inside seats were
already occupied by strangers. She inquired of the coachman if the
outside places (all of which were not yet filled up) had their full
complement of passengers also. The man replied in the affirmative. He
had two gentlemen to call for in the town, and the others would take
their places at the inn. Mrs. Lecount forthwith turned her steps toward
the inn, and took up her position on the Parade opposite from a point
of view which would enable her to see the last of the coach on its
departure. In ten minutes more it rattled away, full outside and in;
and the housekeeper’s own eyes assured her that neither Mr. Bygrave
himself, nor any one belonging to North Shingles, was among the
passengers.
There was only one more precaution to take, and Mrs. Lecount did not
neglect it. Mr. Bygrave had doubtless seen the coach call at Sea View.
He might hire a carriage and follow it to the railway on pure
speculation. Mrs. Lecount remained within view of the inn (the only
place at which a carriage could be obtained) for nearly an hour longer,
waiting for events. Nothing happened; no carriage made its appearance;
no pursuit of Noel Vanstone was now within the range of human
possibility. The long strain on Mrs. Lecount’s mind relaxed at last.
She left her seat on the Parade, and returned in higher spirits than
usual, to perform the closing household ceremonies at Sea View.
She sat down alone in the parlor and drew a long breath of relief.
Captain Wragge’s calculations had not deceived him. The evidence of her
own senses had at last conquered the housekeeper’s incredulity, and had
literally forced her into the opposite extreme of belief.
Estimating the events of the last three days from her own experience of
them; knowing (as she certainly knew) that the first idea of going to
St. Crux had been started by herself, and that her master had found no
opportunity and shown no inclination to inform the family at North
Shingles that he had accepted her proposal, Mrs. Lecount was fairly
compelled to acknowledge that not a fragment of foundation remained to
justify the continued suspicion of treachery in her own mind. Looking
at the succession of circumstances under the new light thrown on them
by results, she could see nothing unaccountable, nothing contradictory
anywhere. The attempt to pass off the forged pictures as originals was
in perfect harmony with the character of such a man as Mr. Bygrave. Her
master’s indignation at the attempt to impose on him; his
plainly-expressed suspicion that Miss Bygrave was privy to it; his
disappointment in the niece; his contemptuous treatment of the uncle on
the Parade; his weariness of the place which had been the scene of his
rash intimacy with strangers, and his readiness to quit it that
morning, all commended themselves as genuine realities to the
housekeeper’s mind, for one sufficient reason. Her own eyes had seen
Noel Vanstone take his departure from Aldborough without leaving, or
attempting to leave, a single trace behind him for the Bygraves to
follow.
Thus far the housekeeper’s conclusions led her, but no further. She was
too shrewd a woman to trust the future to chance and fortune. Her
master’s variable temper might relent. Accident might at any time give
Mr. Bygrave an opportunity of repairing the error that he had
committed, and of artfully regaining his lost place in Noel Vanstone’s
estimation. Admitting that circumstances had at last declared
themselves unmistakably in her favor, Mrs. Lecount was not the less
convinced that nothing would permanently assure her master’s security
for the future but the plain exposure of the conspiracy which she had
striven to accomplish from the first—which she was resolved to
accomplish still.
“I always enjoy myself at St. Crux,” thought Mrs. Lecount, opening her
account-books, and sorting the tradesmen’s bills. “The admiral is a
gentleman, the house is noble, the table is excellent. No matter! Here
at Sea View I stay by myself till I have seen the inside of Miss
Bygrave’s wardrobe.”
She packed her master’s collection of curiosities in their various
cases, settled the claims of the trades-people, and superintended the
covering of the furniture in the course of the day. Toward nightfall
she went out, bent on investigation, and ventured into the garden at
North Shingles under cover of the darkness. She saw the light in the
parlor window, and the lights in the windows of the rooms upstairs, as
usual. After an instant’s hesitation she stole to the house door, and
noiselessly tried the handle from the outside. It turned the lock as
she had expected, from her experience of houses at Aldborough and at
other watering-places, but the door resisted her; the door was
distrustfully bolted on the inside. After making that discovery, she
went round to the back of the house, and ascertained that the door on
that side was secured in the same manner. “Bolt your doors, Mr.
Bygrave, as fast as you like,” said the housekeeper, stealing back
again to the Parade. “You can’t bolt the entrance to your servant’s
pocket. The best lock you have may be opened by a golden key.”
She went back to bed. The ceaseless watching, the unrelaxing excitement
of the last two days, had worn her out.
The next morning she rose at seven o’clock. In half an hour more she
saw the punctual Mr. Bygrave—as she had seen him on many previous
mornings at the same time—issue from the gate of North Shingles, with
his towels under his arm, and make his way to a boat that was waiting
for him on the beach. Swimming was one among the many personal
accomplishments of which the captain was master. He was rowed out to
sea every morning, and took his bath luxuriously in the deep blue
water. Mrs. Lecount had already computed the time consumed in this
recreation by her watch, and had discovered that a full hour usually
elapsed from the moment when he embarked on the beach to the moment
when he returned.
During that period she had never seen any other inhabitant of North
Shingles leave the house. The servant was no doubt at her work in the
kitchen; Mrs. Bygrave was probably still in her bed; and Miss Bygrave
(if she was up at that early hour) had perhaps received directions not
to venture out in her uncle’s absence. The difficulty of meeting the
obstacle of Magdalen’s presence in the house had been, for some days
past, the one difficulty which all Mrs. Lecount’s ingenuity had thus
far proved unable to overcome.
She sat at the window for a quarter of an hour after the captain’s boat
had left the beach with her mind hard at work, and her eyes fixed
mechanically on North Shingles—she sat considering what written excuse
she could send to her master for delaying her departure from Aldborough
for some days to come—when the door of the house she was watching
suddenly opened, and Magdalen herself appeared in the garden. There was
no mistaking her figure and her dress. She took a few steps hastily
toward the gate, stopped and pulled down the veil of her garden hat as
if she felt the clear morning light too much for her, then hurried out
on the Parade and walked away northward, in such haste, or in such
pre-occupation of mind, that she went through the garden gate without
closing it after her.
Mrs. Lecount started up from her chair with a moment’s doubt of the
evidence of her own eyes. Had the opportunity which she had been vainly
plotting to produce actually offered itself to her of its own accord?
Had the chances declared themselves at last in her favor, after
steadily acting against her for so long? There was no doubt of it: in
the popular phrase, “her luck had turned.” She snatched up her bonnet
and mantilla, and made for North Shingles without an instant’s
hesitation. Mr. Bygrave out at sea; Miss Bygrave away for a walk; Mrs.
Bygrave and the servant both at home, and both easily dealt with—the
opportunity was not to be lost; the risk was well worth running!
This time the house door was easily opened: no one had bolted it again
after Magdalen’s departure. Mrs. Lecount closed the door softly,
listened for a moment in the passage, and heard the servant noisily
occupied in the kitchen with her pots and pans. “If my lucky star leads
me straight into Miss Bygrave’s room,” thought the housekeeper,
stealing noiselessly up the stairs, “I may find my way to her wardrobe
without disturbing anybody.”
She tried the door nearest to the front of the house on the right-hand
side of the landing. Capricious chance had deserted her already. The
lock was turned. She tried the door opposite, on her left hand. The
boots ranged symmetrically in a row, and the razors on the
dressing-table, told her at once that she had not found the right room
yet. She returned to the right-hand side of the landing, walked down a
little passage leading to the back of the house, and tried a third
door. The door opened, and the two opposite extremes of female
humanity, Mrs. Wragge and Mrs. Lecount, stood face to face in an
instant!
“I beg ten thousand pardons!” said Mrs. Lecount, with the most
consummate self-possession.
“Lord bless us and save us!” cried Mrs. Wragge, with the most helpless
amazement.
The two exclamations were uttered in a moment, and in that moment Mrs.
Lecount took the measure of her victim. Nothing of the least importance
escaped her. She noticed the Oriental Cashmere Robe lying half made,
and half unpicked again, on the table; she noticed the imbecile foot of
Mrs. Wragge searching blindly in the neighborhood of her chair for a
lost shoe; she noticed that there was a second door in the room besides
the door by which she had entered, and a second chair within easy
reach, on which she might do well to seat herself in a friendly and
confidential way. “Pray don’t resent my intrusion,” pleaded Mrs.
Lecount, taking the chair. “Pray allow me to explain myself!”
Speaking in her softest voice, surveying Mrs. Wragge with a sweet smile
on her insinuating lips, and a melting interest in her handsome black
eyes, the housekeeper told her little introductory series of falsehoods
with an artless truthfulness of manner which the Father of Lies himself
might have envied. She had heard from Mr. Bygrave that Mrs. Bygrave was
a great invalid; she had constantly reproached herself, in her idle
half-hours at Sea View (where she filled the situation of Mr. Noel
Vanstone’s housekeeper), for not having offered her friendly services
to Mrs. Bygrave; she had been directed by her master (doubtless well
known to Mrs. Bygrave, as one of her husband’s friends, and, naturally,
one of her charming niece’s admirers), to join him that day at the
residence to which he had removed from Aldborough; she was obliged to
leave early, but she could not reconcile it to her conscience to go
without calling to apologize for her apparent want of neighborly
consideration; she had found nobody in the house; she had not been able
to make the servant hear; she had presumed (not discovering that
apartment downstairs) that Mrs. Bygrave’s boudoir might be on the upper
story; she had thoughtlessly committed an intrusion of which she was
sincerely ashamed, and she could now only trust to Mrs. Bygrave’s
indulgence to excuse and forgive her.
A less elaborate apology might have served Mrs. Lecount’s purpose. As
soon as Mrs. Wragge’s struggling perceptions had grasped the fact that
her unexpected visitor was a neighbor well known to her by repute, her
whole being became absorbed in admiration of Mrs. Lecount’s lady-like
manners, and Mrs. Lecount’s perfectly-fitting gown! “What a noble way
she has of talking!” thought poor Mrs. Wragge, as the housekeeper
reached her closing sentence. “And, oh my heart alive, how nicely she’s
dressed!”
“I see I disturb you,” pursued Mrs. Lecount, artfully availing herself
of the Oriental Cashmere Robe as a means ready at hand of reaching the
end she had in view—“I see I disturb you, ma’am, over an occupation
which, I know by experience, requires the closest attention. Dear, dear
me, you are unpicking the dress again, I see, after it has been made!
This is my own experience again, Mrs. Bygrave. Some dresses are so
obstinate! Some dresses seem to say to one, in so many words, ‘No! you
may do what you like with me; I won’t fit!’”
Mrs. Wragge was greatly struck by this happy remark. She burst out
laughing, and clapped her great hands in hearty approval.
“That’s what this gown has been saying to me ever since I first put the
scissors into it,” she exclaimed, cheerfully. “I know I’ve got an awful
big back, but that’s no reason. Why should a gown be weeks on hand, and
then not meet behind you after all? It hangs over my Boasom like a
sack—it does. Look here, ma’am, at the skirt. It won’t come right. It
draggles in front, and cocks up behind. It shows my heels—and, Lord
knows, I get into scrapes enough about my heels, without showing them
into the bargain!”
“May I ask a favor?” inquired Mrs. Lecount, confidentially. “May I try,
Mrs. Bygrave, if I can make my experience of any use to you? I think
our bosoms, ma’am, are our great difficulty. Now, this bosom of
yours?—Shall I say in plain words what I think? This bosom of yours is
an Enormous Mistake!”
“Don’t say that!” cried Mrs. Wragge, imploringly. “Don’t please,
there’s a good soul! It’s an awful big one, I know; but it’s modeled,
for all that, from one of Magdalen’s own.”
She was far too deeply interested on the subject of the dress to notice
that she had forgotten herself already, and that she had referred to
Magdalen by her own name. Mrs. Lecount’s sharp ears detected the
mistake the instant it was committed. “So! so!” she thought. “One
discovery already. If I had ever doubted my own suspicions, here is an
estimable lady who would now have set me right.—I beg your pardon,” she
proceeded, aloud, “did you say this was modeled from one of your
niece’s dresses?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Wragge. “It’s as like as two peas.”
“Then,” replied Mrs. Lecount, adroitly, “there must be some serious
mistake in the making of your niece’s dress. Can you show it to me?”
“Bless your heart—yes!” cried Mrs. Wragge. “Step this way, ma’am; and
bring the gown along with you, please. It keeps sliding off, out of
pure aggravation, if you lay it out on the table. There’s lots of room
on the bed in here.”
She opened the door of communication and led the way eagerly into
Magdalen’s room. As Mrs. Lecount followed, she stole a look at her
watch. Never before had time flown as it flew that morning! In twenty
minutes more Mr. Bygrave would be back from his bath.
“There!” said Mrs. Wragge, throwing open the wardrobe, and taking a
dress down from one of the pegs. “Look there! There’s plaits on her
Boasom, and plaits on mine. Six of one and half a dozen of the other;
and mine are the biggest—that’s all!”
Mrs. Lecount shook her head gravely, and entered forthwith into
subtleties of disquisition on the art of dressmaking which had the
desired effect of utterly bewildering the proprietor of the Oriental
Cashmere Robe in less than three minutes.
“Don’t!” cried Mrs. Wragge, imploringly. “Don’t go on like that! I’m
miles behind you; and my head’s Buzzing already. Tell us, like a good
soul, what’s to be done. You said something about the pattern just now.
Perhaps I’m too big for the pattern? I can’t help it if I am. Many’s
the good cry I had, when I was a growing girl, over my own size!
There’s half too much of me, ma’am—measure me along or measure me
across, I don’t deny it—there’s half too much of me, anyway.”
“My dear madam,” protested Mrs. Lecount, “you do yourself a wrong!
Permit me to assure you that you possess a commanding figure—a figure
of Minerva. A majestic simplicity in the form of a woman imperatively
demands a majestic simplicity in the form of that woman’s dress. The
laws of costume are classical; the laws of costume must not be trifled
with! Plaits for Venus, puffs for Juno, folds for Minerva. I venture to
suggest a total change of pattern. Your niece has other dresses in her
collection. Why may we not find a Minerva pattern among them?”
As she said those words, she led the way back to the wardrobe.
Mrs. Wragge followed, and took the dresses out one by one, shaking her
head despondently. Silk dresses appeared, muslin dresses appeared. The
one dress which remained invisible was the dress of which Mrs. Lecount
was in search.
“There’s the lot of ’em,” said Mrs. Wragge. “They may do for Venus and
the two other Ones (I’ve seen ’em in picters without a morsel of decent
linen among the three), but they won’t do for Me.”
“Surely there is another dress left?” said Mrs. Lecount, pointing to
the wardrobe, but touching nothing in it. “Surely I see something
hanging in the corner behind that dark shawl?”
Mrs. Wragge removed the shawl; Mrs. Lecount opened the door of the
wardrobe a little wider. There—hitched carelessly on the innermost
peg—there, with its white spots, and its double flounce, was the brown
Alpaca dress!
The suddenness and completeness of the discovery threw the housekeeper,
practiced dissembler as she was, completely off her guard. She started
at the sight of the dress. The instant afterward her eyes turned
uneasily toward Mrs. Wragge. Had the start been observed? It had passed
entirely unnoticed. Mrs. Wragge’s whole attention was fixed on the
Alpaca dress: she was staring at it incomprehensibly, with an
expression of the utmost dismay.
“You seem alarmed, ma’am,” said Mrs. Lecount. “What is there in the
wardrobe to frighten you?”
“I’d have given a crown piece out of my pocket,” said Mrs. Wragge, “not
to have set my eyes on that gown. It had gone clean out of my head, and
now it’s come back again. Cover it up!” cried Mrs. Wragge, throwing the
shawl over the dress in a sudden fit of desperation. “If I look at it
much longer, I shall think I’m back again in Vauxhall Walk!”
Vauxhall Walk! Those two words told Mrs. Lecount she was on the brink
of another discovery. She stole a second look at her watch. There was
barely ten minutes to spare before the time when Mr. Bygrave might
return; there was not one of those ten minutes which might not bring
his niece back to the house. Caution counseled Mrs. Lecount to go,
without running any more risks. Curiosity rooted her to the spot, and
gave the courage to stay at all hazards until the time was up. Her
amiable smile began to harden a little as she probed her way tenderly
into Mrs. Wragge’s feeble mind.
“You have some unpleasant remembrances of Vauxhall Walk?” she said,
with the gentlest possible tone of inquiry in her voice. “Or perhaps I
should say, unpleasant remembrances of that dress belonging to your
niece?”
“The last time I saw her with that gown on,” said Mrs. Wragge, dropping
into a chair and beginning to tremble, “was the time when I came back
from shopping and saw the Ghost.”
“The Ghost?” repeated Mrs. Lecount, clasping her hands in graceful
astonishment. “Dear madam, pardon me! Is there such a thing in the
world? Where did you see it? In Vauxhall Walk? Tell me—you are the
first lady I ever met with who has seen a ghost—pray tell me!”
Flattered by the position of importance which she had suddenly assumed
in the housekeeper’s eyes, Mrs. Wragge entered at full length into the
narrative of her supernatural adventure. The breathless eagerness with
which Mrs. Lecount listened to her description of the specter’s
costume, the specter’s hurry on the stairs, and the specter’s
disappearance in the bedroom; the extraordinary interest which Mrs.
Lecount displayed on hearing that the dress in the wardrobe was the
very dress in which Magdalen happened to be attired at the awful moment
when the ghost vanished, encouraged Mrs. Wragge to wade deeper and
deeper into details, and to involve herself in a confusion of
collateral circumstances out of which there seemed to be no prospect of
her emerging for hours to come. Faster and faster the inexorable
minutes flew by; nearer and nearer came the fatal moment of Mr.
Bygrave’s return. Mrs. Lecount looked at her watch for the third time,
without an attempt on this occasion to conceal the action from her
companion’s notice. There were literally two minutes left for her to
get clear of North Shingles. Two minutes would be enough, if no
accident happened. She had discovered the Alpaca dress; she had heard
the whole story of the adventure in Vauxhall Walk; and, more than that,
she had even informed herself of the number of the house—which Mrs.
Wragge happened to remember, because it answered to the number of years
in her own age. All that was necessary to her master’s complete
enlightenment she had now accomplished. Even if there had been time to
stay longer, there was nothing worth staying for. “I’ll strike this
worthy idiot dumb with a _coup d’etat_,” thought the housekeeper, “and
vanish before she recovers herself.”
“Horrible!” cried Mrs. Lecount, interrupting the ghostly narrative by a
shrill little scream and making for the door, to Mrs. Wragge’s
unutterable astonishment, without the least ceremony. “You freeze the
very marrow of my bones. Good-morning!” She coolly tossed the Oriental
Cashmere Robe into Mrs. Wragge’s expansive lap and left the room in an
instant.
As she swiftly descended the stairs, she heard the door of the bedroom
open.
“Where are your manners?” cried a voice from above, hailing her feebly
over the banisters. “What do you mean by pitching my gown at me in that
way? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” pursued Mrs. Wragge, turning
from a lamb to a lioness, as she gradually realized the indignity
offered to the Cashmere Robe. “You nasty foreigner, you ought to be
ashamed of yourself!”
Pursued by this valedictory address, Mrs. Lecount reached the house
door, and opened it without interruption. She glided rapidly along the
garden path, passed through the gate, and finding herself safe on the
Parade, stopped, and looked toward the sea.
The first object which her eyes encountered was the figure of Mr.
Bygrave standing motionless on the beach—a petrified bather, with his
towels in his hand! One glance at him was enough to show that he had
seen the housekeeper passing out through his garden gate.
Rightly conjecturing that Mr. Bygrave’s first impulse would lead him to
make instant inquiries in his own house, Mrs. Lecount pursued her way
back to Sea View as composedly as if nothing had happened. When she
entered the parlor where her solitary breakfast was waiting for her,
she was surprised to see a letter lying on the table. She approached to
take it up with an expression of impatience, thinking it might be some
tradesman’s bill which she had forgotten.
It was the forged letter from Zurich.
CHAPTER XI.
The postmark and the handwriting on the address (admirably imitated
from the original) warned Mrs. Lecount of the contents of the letter
before she opened it.
After waiting a moment to compose herself, she read the announcement of
her brother’s relapse.
There was nothing in the handwriting, there was no expression in any
part of the letter which could suggest to her mind the faintest
suspicion of foul play. Not the shadow of a doubt occurred to her that
the summons to her brother’s bedside was genuine. The hand that held
the letter dropped heavily into her lap; she became pale, and old, and
haggard in a moment. Thoughts, far removed from her present aims and
interests; remembrances that carried her back to other lands than
England, to other times than the time of her life in service, prolonged
their inner shadows to the surface, and showed the traces of their
mysterious passage darkly on her face. The minutes followed each other,
and still the servant below stairs waited vainly for the parlor bell.
The minutes followed each other, and still she sat, tearless and quiet,
dead to the present and the future, living in the past.
The entrance of the servant, uncalled, roused her. With a heavy sigh,
the cold and secret woman folded the letter up again and addressed
herself to the interests and the duties of the passing time.
She decided the question of going or not going to Zurich, after a very
brief consideration of it. Before she had drawn her chair to the
breakfast-table she had resolved to go.
Admirably as Captain Wragge’s stratagem had worked, it might have
failed—unassisted by the occurrence of the morning—to achieve this
result. The very accident against which it had been the captain’s chief
anxiety to guard—the accident which had just taken place in spite of
him—was, of all the events that could have happened, the one event
which falsified every previous calculation, by directly forwarding the
main purpose of the conspiracy! If Mrs. Lecount had not obtained the
information of which she was in search before the receipt of the letter
from Zurich, the letter might have addressed her in vain. She would
have hesitated before deciding to leave England, and that hesitation
might have proved fatal to the captain’s scheme.
As it was, with the plain proofs in her possession, with the gown
discovered in Magdalen’s wardrobe, with the piece cut out of it in her
own pocketbook, and with the knowledge, obtained from Mrs. Wragge, of
the very house in which the disguise had been put on, Mrs. Lecount had
now at her command the means of warning Noel Vanstone as she had never
been able to warn him yet, or, in other words, the means of guarding
against any dangerous tendencies toward reconciliation with the
Bygraves which might otherwise have entered his mind during her absence
at Zurich. The only difficulty which now perplexed her was the
difficulty of deciding whether she should communicate with her master
personally or by writing, before her departure from England.
She looked again at the doctor’s letter. The word “instantly,” in the
sentence which summoned her to her dying brother, was twice underlined.
Admiral Bartram’s house was at some distance from the railway; the time
consumed in driving to St. Crux, and driving back again, might be time
fatally lost on the journey to Zurich. Although she would infinitely
have preferred a personal interview with Noel Vanstone, there was no
choice on a matter of life and death but to save the precious hours by
writing to him.
After sending to secure a place at once in the early coach, she sat
down to write to her master.
Her first thought was to tell him all that had happened at North
Shingles that morning. On reflection, however, she rejected the idea.
Once already (in copying the personal description from Miss Garth’s
letter) she had trusted her weapons in her master’s hands, and Mr.
Bygrave had contrived to turn them against her. She resolved this time
to keep them strictly in her own possession. The secret of the missing
fragment of the Alpaca dress was known to no living creature but
herself; and, until her return to England, she determined to keep it to
herself. The necessary impression might be produced on Noel Vanstone’s
mind without venturing into details. She knew by experience the form of
letter which might be trusted to produce an effect on him, and she now
wrote it in these words:
“DEAR MR. NOEL—Sad news has reached me from Switzerland. My beloved
brother is dying and his medical attendant summons me instantly to
Zurich. The serious necessity of availing myself of the earliest means
of conveyance to the Continent leaves me but one alternative. I must
profit by the permission to leave England, if necessary, which you
kindly granted to me at the beginning of my brother’s illness, and I
must avoid all delay by going straight to London, instead of turning
aside, as I should have liked, to see you first at St. Crux.
“Painfully as I am affected by the family calamity which has fallen on
me, I cannot let this opportunity pass without adverting to another
subject which seriously concerns your welfare, and in which (on that
account) your old housekeeper feels the deepest interest.
“I am going to surprise and shock you, Mr. Noel. Pray don’t be
agitated! pray compose yourself!
“The impudent attempt to cheat you, which has happily opened your eyes
to the true character of our neighbors at North Shingles, was not the
only object which Mr. Bygrave had in forcing himself on your
acquaintance. The infamous conspiracy with which you were threatened in
London has been in full progress against you under Mr. Bygrave’s
direction, at Aldborough. Accident—I will tell you what accident when
we meet—has put me in possession of information precious to your future
security. I have discovered, to an absolute certainty, that the person
calling herself Miss Bygrave is no other than the woman who visited us
in disguise at Vauxhall Walk.
“I suspected this from the first, but I had no evidence to support my
suspicions; I had no means of combating the false impression produced
on you. My hands, I thank Heaven, are tied no longer. I possess
absolute proof of the assertion that I have just made—proof that your
own eyes can see—proof that would satisfy you, if you were judge in a
Court of Justice.
“Perhaps even yet, Mr. Noel, you will refuse to believe me? Be it so.
Believe me or not, I have one last favor to ask, which your English
sense of fair play will not deny me.
“This melancholy journey of mine will keep me away from England for a
fortnight, or, at most, for three weeks. You will oblige me—and you
will certainly not sacrifice your own convenience and pleasure—by
staying through that interval with your friends at St. Crux. If, before
my return, some unexpected circumstance throws you once more into the
company of the Bygraves, and if your natural kindness of heart inclines
you to receive the excuses which they will, in that case, certainly
address to you, place one trifling restraint on yourself, for your own
sake, if not for mine. Suspend your flirtation with the young lady (I
beg pardon of all other young ladies for calling her so!) until my
return. If, when I come back, I fail to prove to you that Miss Bygrave
is the woman who wore that disguise, and used those threatening words,
in Vauxhall Wall, I will engage to leave your service at a day’s
notice; and I will atone for the sin of bearing false witness against
my neighbor by resigning every claim I have to your grateful
remembrance, on your father’s account as well as on your own. I make
this engagement without reserves of any kind; and I promise to abide by
it—if my proofs fail—on the faith of a good Catholic, and the word of
an honest woman. Your faithful servant,
“VIRGINIE LECOUNT.”
The closing sentences of this letter—as the housekeeper well knew when
she wrote them—embodied the one appeal to Noel Vanstone which could be
certainly trusted to produce a deep and lasting effect. She might have
staked her oath, her life, or her reputation, on proving the assertion
which she had made, and have failed to leave a permanent impression on
his mind. But when she staked not only her position in his service, but
her pecuniary claims on him as well, she at once absorbed the ruling
passion of his life in expectation of the result. There was not a doubt
of it, in the strongest of all his interests—the interest of saving his
money—he would wait.
“Checkmate for Mr. Bygrave!” thought Mrs. Lecount, as she sealed and
directed the letter. “The battle is over—the game is played out.”
While Mrs. Lecount was providing for her master’s future security at
Sea View, events were in full progress at North Shingles.
As soon as Captain Wragge recovered his astonishment at the
housekeeper’s appearance on his own premises, he hurried into the
house, and, guided by his own forebodings of the disaster that had
happened, made straight for his wife’s room.
Never, in all her former experience, had poor Mrs. Wragge felt the full
weight of the captain’s indignation as she felt it now. All the little
intelligence she naturally possessed vanished at once in the whirlwind
of her husband’s rage. The only plain facts which he could extract from
her were two in number. In the first place, Magdalen’s rash desertion
of her post proved to have no better reason to excuse it than
Magdalen’s incorrigible impatience: she had passed a sleepless night;
she had risen feverish and wretched; and she had gone out, reckless of
all consequences, to cool her burning head in the fresh air. In the
second place, Mrs. Wragge had, on her own confession, seen Mrs.
Lecount, had talked with Mrs. Lecount, and had ended by telling Mrs.
Lecount the story of the ghost. Having made these discoveries, Captain
Wragge wasted no time in contending with his wife’s terror and
confusion. He withdrew at once to a window which commanded an
uninterrupted prospect of Noel Vanstone’s house, and there established
himself on the watch for events at Sea View, precisely as Mrs. Lecount
had established herself on the watch for events at North Shingles.
Not a word of comment on the disaster of the morning escaped him when
Magdalen returned and found him at his post. His flow of language
seemed at last to have run dry. “I told you what Mrs. Wragge would do,”
he said, “and Mrs. Wragge has done it.” He sat unflinchingly at the
window with a patience which Mrs. Lecount herself could not have
surpassed. The one active proceeding in which he seemed to think it
necessary to engage was performed by deputy. He sent the servant to the
inn to hire a chaise and a fast horse, and to say that he would call
himself before noon that day and tell the hostler when the vehicle
would be wanted. Not a sign of impatience escaped him until the time
drew near for the departure of the early coach. Then the captain’s
curly lips began to twitch with anxiety, and the captain’s restless
fingers beat the devil’s tattoo unremittingly on the window-pane.
The coach appeared at last, and drew up at Sea View. In a minute more,
Captain Wragge’s own observation informed him that one among the
passengers who left Aldborough that morning was—Mrs. Lecount.
The main uncertainty disposed of, a serious question—suggested by the
events of the morning—still remained to be solved. Which was the
destined end of Mrs. Lecount’s journey—Zurich or St. Crux? That she
would certainly inform her master of Mrs. Wragge’s ghost story, and of
every other disclosure in relation to names and places which might have
escaped Mrs. Wragge’s lips, was beyond all doubt. But of the two ways
at her disposal of doing the mischief—either personally or by letter—it
was vitally important to the captain to know which she had chosen. If
she had gone to the admiral’s, no choice would be left him but to
follow the coach, to catch the train by which she traveled, and to
outstrip her afterward on the drive from the station in Essex to St.
Crux. If, on the contrary, she had been contented with writing to her
master, it would only be necessary to devise measures for intercepting
the letter. The captain decided on going to the post-office, in the
first place. Assuming that the housekeeper had written, she would not
have left the letter at the mercy of the servant—she would have seen it
safely in the letter-box before leaving Aldborough.
“Good-morning,” said the captain, cheerfully addressing the postmaster.
“I am Mr. Bygrave of North Shingles. I think you have a letter in the
box, addressed to Mr.—?”
The postmaster was a short man, and consequently a man with a proper
idea of his own importance. He solemnly checked Captain Wragge in full
career.
“When a letter is once posted, sir,” he said, “nobody out of the office
has any business with it until it reaches its address.”
The captain was not a man to be daunted, even by a postmaster. A bright
idea struck him. He took out his pocketbook, in which Admiral Bartram’s
address was written, and returned to the charge.
“Suppose a letter has been wrongly directed by mistake?” he began. “And
suppose the writer wants to correct the error after the letter is put
into the box?”
“When a letter is once posted, sir,” reiterated the impenetrable local
authority, “nobody out of the office touches it on any pretense
whatever.”
“Granted, with all my heart,” persisted the captain. “I don’t want to
touch it—I only want to explain myself. A lady has posted a letter
here, addressed to ‘Noel Vanstone, Esq., Admiral Bartram’s, St.
Crux-in-the-Marsh, Essex.’ She wrote in a great hurry, and she is not
quite certain whether she added the name of the post-town, ‘Ossory.’ It
is of the last importance that the delivery of the letter should not be
delayed. What is to hinder your facilitating the post-office work, and
obliging a lady, by adding the name of the post-town (if it happens to
be left out), with your own hand? I put it to you as a zealous officer,
what possible objection can there be to granting my request?”
The postmaster was compelled to acknowledge that there could be no
objection, provided nothing but a necessary line was added to the
address, provided nobody touched the letter but himself, and provided
the precious time of the post-office was not suffered to run to waste.
As there happened to be nothing particular to do at that moment, he
would readily oblige the lady at Mr. Bygrave’s request.
Captain Wragge watched the postmaster’s hands, as they sorted the
letters in the box, with breathless eagerness. Was the letter there?
Would the hands of the zealous public servant suddenly stop? Yes! They
stopped, and picked out a letter from the rest.
“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,’ did you say?” asked the postmaster, keeping
the letter in his own hand.
“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,’” replied the captain, “‘Admiral Bartram’s,
St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.’”
“Ossory, Essex,” chimed in the postmaster, throwing the letter back
into the box. “The lady has made no mistake, sir. The address is quite
right.”
Nothing but a timely consideration of the heavy debt he owed to
appearances prevented Captain Wragge from throwing his tall white hat
up in the air as soon as he found the street once more. All further
doubt was now at an end. Mrs. Lecount had written to her
master—therefore Mrs. Lecount was on her way to Zurich!
With his head higher than ever, with the tails of his respectable
frock-coat floating behind him in the breeze, with his bosom’s native
impudence sitting lightly on its throne, the captain strutted to the
inn and called for the railway time-table. After making certain
calculations (in black and white, as a matter of course), he ordered
his chaise to be ready in an hour—so as to reach the railway in time
for the second train running to London—with which there happened to be
no communication from Aldborough by coach.
His next proceeding was of a far more serious kind; his next proceeding
implied a terrible certainty of success. The day of the week was
Thursday. From the inn he went to the church, saw the clerk, and gave
the necessary notice for a marriage by license on the following Monday.
Bold as he was, his nerves were a little shaken by this last
achievement; his hand trembled as it lifted the latch of the garden
gate. He doctored his nerves with brandy and water before he sent for
Magdalen to inform her of the proceedings of the morning. Another
outbreak might reasonably be expected when she heard that the last
irrevocable step had been taken, and that notice had been given of the
wedding-day.
The captain’s watch warned him to lose no time in emptying his glass.
In a few minutes he sent the necessary message upstairs. While waiting
for Magdalen’s appearance, he provided himself with certain materials
which were now necessary to carry the enterprise to its crowning point.
In the first place, he wrote his assumed name (by no means in so fine a
hand as usual) on a blank visiting-card, and added underneath these
words: “Not a moment is to be lost. I am waiting for you at the
door—come down to me directly.” His next proceeding was to take some
half-dozen envelopes out of the case, and to direct them all alike to
the following address: “Thomas Bygrave, Esq., Mussared’s Hotel,
Salisbury Street, Strand, London.” After carefully placing the
envelopes and the card in his breast-pocket, he shut up the desk. As he
rose from the writing-table, Magdalen came into the room.
The captain took a moment to decide on the best method of opening the
interview, and determined, in his own phrase, to dash at it. In two
words he told Magdalen what had happened, and informed her that Monday
was to be her wedding-day.
He was prepared to quiet her, if she burst into a frenzy of passion; to
reason with her, if she begged for time; to sympathize with her, if she
melted into tears. To his inexpressible surprise, results falsified all
his calculations. She heard him without uttering a word, without
shedding a tear. When he had done, she dropped into a chair. Her large
gray eyes stared at him vacantly. In one mysterious instant all her
beauty left her; her face stiffened awfully, like the face of a corpse.
For the first time in the captain’s experience of her,
fear—all-mastering fear—had taken possession of her, body and soul.
“You are not flinching,” he said, trying to rouse her. “Surely you are
not flinching at the last moment?”
No light of intelligence came into her eyes, no change passed over her
face. But she heard him—for she moved a little in the chair, and slowly
shook her head.
“You planned this marriage of your own freewill,” pursued the captain,
with the furtive look and the faltering voice of a man ill at ease. “It
was your own idea—not mine. I won’t have the responsibility laid on my
shoulders—no! not for twice two hundred pounds. If your resolution
fails you; if you think better of it—?”
He stopped. Her face was changing; her lips were moving at last. She
slowly raised her left hand, with the fingers outspread; she looked at
it as if it was a hand that was strange to her; she counted the days on
it, the days before the marriage.
“Friday, one,” she whispered to herself; “Saturday, two; Sunday, three;
Monday—” Her hands dropped into her lap, her face stiffened again; the
deadly fear fastened its paralyzing hold on her once more, and the next
words died away on her lips.
Captain Wragge took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
“Damn the two hundred pounds!” he said. “Two thousand wouldn’t pay me
for this!”
He put the handkerchief back, took the envelopes which he had addressed
to himself out of his pocket, and, approaching her closely for the
first time, laid his hand on her arm.
“Rouse yourself,” he said, “I have a last word to say to you. Can you
listen?”
She struggled, and roused herself—a faint tinge of color stole over her
white cheeks—she bowed her head.
“Look at these,” pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the envelopes. “If
I turn these to the use for which they have been written, Mrs.
Lecount’s master will never receive Mrs. Lecount’s letter. If I tear
them up, he will know by to-morrow’s post that you are the woman who
visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word! Shall I tear the envelopes
up, or shall I put them back in my pocket?”
There was a pause of dead silence. The murmur of the summer waves on
the shingle of the beach and the voices of the summer idlers on the
Parade floated through the open window, and filled the empty stillness
of the room.
She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to the
envelopes.
“Put them back,” she said.
“Do you mean it?” he asked.
“I mean it.”
As she gave that answer, there was a sound of wheels on the road
outside.
“You hear those wheels?” said Captain Wragge.
“I hear them.”
“You see the chaise?” said the captain, pointing through the window as
the chaise which had been ordered from the inn made its appearance at
the garden gate.
“I see it.”
“And, of your own free-will, you tell me to go?”
“Yes. Go!”
Without another word he left her. The servant was waiting at the door
with his traveling bag. “Miss Bygrave is not well,” he said. “Tell your
mistress to go to her in the parlor.”
He stepped into the chaise, and started on the first stage of the
journey to St. Crux.
CHAPTER XII.
Toward three o’clock in the afternoon Captain Wragge stopped at the
nearest station to Ossory which the railway passed in its course
through Essex. Inquiries made on the spot informed him that he might
drive to St. Crux, remain there for a quarter of an hour, and return to
the station in time for an evening train to London. In ten minutes more
the captain was on the road again, driving rapidly in the direction of
the coast.
After proceeding some miles on the highway, the carriage turned off,
and the coachman involved himself in an intricate network of
cross-roads.
“Are we far from St. Crux?” asked the captain, growing impatient, after
mile on mile had been passed without a sign of reaching the journey’s
end.
“You’ll see the house, sir, at the next turn in the road,” said the
man.
The next turn in the road brought them within view of the open country
again. Ahead of the carriage, Captain Wragge saw a long dark line
against the sky—the line of the sea-wall which protects the low coast
of Essex from inundation. The flat intermediate country was intersected
by a labyrinth of tidal streams, winding up from the invisible sea in
strange fantastic curves—rivers at high water, and channels of mud at
low. On his right hand was a quaint little village, mostly composed of
wooden houses, straggling down to the brink of one of the tidal
streams. On his left hand, further away, rose the gloomy ruins of an
abbey, with a desolate pile of buildings, which covered two sides of a
square attached to it. One of the streams from the sea (called, in
Essex, “backwaters”) curled almost entirely round the house. Another,
from an opposite quarter, appeared to run straight through the grounds,
and to separate one side of the shapeless mass of buildings, which was
in moderate repair, from another, which was little better than a ruin.
Bridges of wood and bridges of brick crossed the stream, and gave
access to the house from all points of the compass. No human creature
appeared in the neighborhood, and no sound was heard but the hoarse
barking of a house-dog from an invisible courtyard.
“Which door shall I drive to, sir?” asked the coachman. “The front or
the back?”
“The back,” said Captain Wragge, feeling that the less notice he
attracted in his present position, the safer that position might be.
The carriage twice crossed the stream before the coachman made his way
through the grounds into a dreary inclosure of stone. At an open door
on the inhabited side of the place sat a weather-beaten old man, busily
at work on a half-finished model of a ship. He rose and came to the
carriage door, lifting up his spectacles on his forehead, and looking
disconcerted at the appearance of a stranger.
“Is Mr. Noel Vanstone staying here?” asked Captain Wragge.
“Yes, sir,” replied the old man. “Mr. Noel came yesterday.”
“Take that card to Mr. Vanstone, if you please,” said the captain, “and
say I am waiting here to see him.”
In a few minutes Noel Vanstone made his appearance, breathless and
eager—absorbed in anxiety for news from Aldborough. Captain Wragge
opened the carriage door, seized his outstretched hand, and pulled him
in without ceremony.
“Your housekeeper has gone,” whispered the captain, “and you are to be
married on Monday. Don’t agitate yourself, and don’t express your
feelings—there isn’t time for it. Get the first active servant you can
find in the house to pack your bag in ten minutes, take leave of the
admiral, and come back at once with me to the London train.”
Noel Vanstone faintly attempted to ask a question. The captain declined
to hear it.
“As much talk as you like on the road,” he said. “Time is too precious
for talking here. How do we know Lecount may not think better of it?
How do we know she may not turn back before she gets to Zurich?”
That startling consideration terrified Noel Vanstone into instant
submission.
“What shall I say to the admiral?” he asked, helplessly.
“Tell him you are going to be married, to be sure! What does it matter,
now Lecount’s back is turned? If he wonders you didn’t tell him before,
say it’s a runaway match, and the bride is waiting for you. Stop! Any
letters addressed to you in your absence will be sent to this place, of
course? Give the admiral these envelopes, and tell him to forward your
letters under cover to me. I am an old customer at the hotel we are
going to; and if we find the place full, the landlord may be depended
on to take care of any letters with my name on them. A safe address in
London for your correspondence may be of the greatest importance. How
do we know Lecount may not write to you on her way to Zurich?”
“What a head you have got!” cried Noel Vanstone, eagerly taking the
envelopes. “You think of everything.”
He left the carriage in high excitement, and ran back into the house.
In ten minutes more Captain Wragge had him in safe custody, and the
horses started on their return journey.
The travelers reached London in good time that evening, and found
accommodation at the hotel.
Knowing the restless, inquisitive nature of the man he had to deal
with, Captain Wragge had anticipated some little difficulty and
embarrassment in meeting the questions which Noel Vanstone might put to
him on the way to London. To his great relief, a startling domestic
discovery absorbed his traveling companion’s whole attention at the
outset of the journey. By some extraordinary oversight, Miss Bygrave
had been left, on the eve of her marriage, unprovided with a maid. Noel
Vanstone declared that he would take the whole responsibility of
correcting this deficiency in the arrangements, on his own shoulders;
he would not trouble Mr. Bygrave to give him any assistance; he would
confer, when they got to their journey’s end, with the landlady of the
hotel, and would examine the candidates for the vacant office himself.
All the way to London, he returned again and again to the same subject;
all the evening, at the hotel, he was in and out of the landlady’s
sitting-room, until he fairly obliged her to lock the door. In every
other proceeding which related to his marriage, he had been kept in the
background; he had been compelled to follow in the footsteps of his
ingenious friend. In the matter of the lady’s maid he claimed his
fitting position at last—he followed nobody; he took the lead!
The forenoon of the next day was devoted to obtaining the license—the
personal distinction of making the declaration on oath being eagerly
accepted by Noel Vanstone, who swore, in perfect good faith (on
information previously obtained from the captain) that the lady was of
age. The document procured, the bridegroom returned to examine the
characters and qualifications of the women-servants out of the place
whom the landlady had engaged to summon to the hotel, while Captain
Wragge turned his steps, “on business personal to himself,” toward the
residence of a friend in a distant quarter of London.
The captain’s friend was connected with the law, and the captain’s
business was of a twofold nature. His first object was to inform
himself of the legal bearings of the approaching marriage on the future
of the husband and the wife. His second object was to provide
beforehand for destroying all traces of the destination to which he
might betake himself when he left Aldborough on the wedding-day. Having
reached his end successfully in both these cases, he returned to the
hotel, and found Noel Vanstone nursing his offended dignity in the
landlady’s sitting-room. Three ladies’ maids had appeared to pass their
examination, and had all, on coming to the question of wages,
impudently declined accepting the place. A fourth candidate was
expected to present herself on the next day; and, until she made her
appearance, Noel Vanstone positively declined removing from the
metropolis. Captain Wragge showed his annoyance openly at the
unnecessary delay thus occasioned in the return to Aldborough, but
without producing any effect. Noel Vanstone shook his obstinate little
head, and solemnly refused to trifle with his responsibilities.
The first event which occurred on Saturday morning was the arrival of
Mrs. Lecount’s letter to her master, inclosed in one of the envelopes
which the captain had addressed to himself. He received it (by previous
arrangement with the waiter) in his bedroom—read it with the closest
attention—and put it away carefully in his pocketbook. The letter was
ominous of serious events to come when the housekeeper returned to
England; and it was due to Magdalen—who was the person threatened—to
place the warning of danger in her own possession.
Later in the day the fourth candidate appeared for the maid’s
situation—a young woman of small expectations and subdued manners, who
looked (as the landlady remarked) like a person overtaken by
misfortune. She passed the ordeal of examination successfully, and
accepted the wages offered without a murmur. The engagement having been
ratified on both sides, fresh delays ensued, of which Noel Vanstone was
once more the cause. He had not yet made up his mind whether he would,
or would not, give more than a guinea for the wedding-ring; and he
wasted the rest of the day to such disastrous purpose in one jeweler’s
shop after another, that he and the captain, and the new lady’s maid
(who traveled with them), were barely in time to catch the last train
from London that evening. It was late at night when they left the
railway at the nearest station to Aldborough. Captain Wragge had been
strangely silent all through the journey. His mind was ill at ease. He
had left Magdalen, under very critical circumstances, with no fit
person to control her, and he was wholly ignorant of the progress of
events in his absence at North Shingles.
CHAPTER XIII.
What had happened at Aldborough in Captain Wragge’s absence? Events had
occurred which the captain’s utmost dexterity might have found it hard
to remedy.
As soon as the chaise had left North Shingles, Mrs. Wragge received the
message which her husband had charged the servant to deliver. She
hastened into the parlor, bewildered by her stormy interview with the
captain, and penitently conscious that she had done wrong, without
knowing what the wrong was. If Magdalen’s mind had been unoccupied by
the one idea of the marriage which now filled it—if she had possessed
composure enough to listen to Mrs. Wragge’s rambling narrative of what
had happened during her interview with the housekeeper—Mrs. Lecount’s
visit to the wardrobe must, sooner or later, have formed part of the
disclosure; and Magdalen, although she might never have guessed the
truth, must at least have been warned that there was some element of
danger lurking treacherously in the Alpaca dress. As it was, no such
consequence as this followed Mrs. Wragge’s appearance in the parlor;
for no such consequence was now possible.
Events which had happened earlier in the morning, events which had
happened for days and weeks past, had vanished as completely from
Magdalen’s mind as if they had never taken place. The horror of the
coming Monday—the merciless certainty implied in the appointment of the
day and hour—petrified all feeling in her, and annihilated all thought.
Mrs. Wragge made three separate attempts to enter on the subject of the
housekeeper’s visit. The first time she might as well have addressed
herself to the wind, or to the sea. The second attempt seemed likely to
be more successful. Magdalen sighed, listened for a moment
indifferently, and then dismissed the subject. “It doesn’t matter,” she
said. “The end has come all the same. I’m not angry with you. Say no
more.” Later in the day, from not knowing what else to talk about, Mrs.
Wragge tried again. This time Magdalen turned on her impatiently. “For
God’s sake, don’t worry me about trifles! I can’t bear it.” Mrs. Wragge
closed her lips on the spot, and returned to the subject no more.
Magdalen, who had been kind to her at all other times, had angrily
forbidden it. The captain—utterly ignorant of Mrs. Lecount’s interest
in the secrets of the wardrobe—had never so much as approached it. All
the information that he had extracted from his wife’s mental confusion,
he had extracted by putting direct questions, derived purely from the
resources of his own knowledge. He had insisted on plain answers,
without excuses of any kind; he had carried his point as usual; and his
departure the same morning had left him no chance of re-opening the
question, even if his irritation against his wife had permitted him to
do so. There the Alpaca dress hung, neglected in the dark—the
unnoticed, unsuspected center of dangers that were still to come.
Toward the afternoon Mrs. Wragge took courage to start a suggestion of
her own—she pleaded for a little turn in the fresh air.
Magdalen passively put on her hat; passively accompanied her companion
along the public walk, until they reached its northward extremity. Here
the beach was left solitary, and here they sat down, side by side, on
the shingle. It was a bright, exhilarating day; pleasure-boats were
sailing on the calm blue water; Aldborough was idling happily afloat
and ashore. Mrs. Wragge recovered her spirits in the gayety of the
prospect—she amused herself like a child, by tossing pebbles into the
sea. From time to time she stole a questioning glance at Magdalen, and
saw no encouragement in her manner, no change to cordiality in her
face. She sat silent on the slope of the shingle, with her elbow on her
knee, and her head resting on her hand, looking out over the
sea—looking with rapt attention, and yet with eyes that seemed to
notice nothing. Mrs. Wragge wearied of the pebbles, and lost her
interest in looking at the pleasure-boats. Her great head began to nod
heavily, and she dozed in the warm, drowsy air. When she woke, the
pleasure-boats were far off; their sails were white specks in the
distance. The idlers on the beach were thinned in number; the sun was
low in the heaven; the blue sea was darker, and rippled by a breeze.
Changes on sky and earth and ocean told of the waning day; change was
everywhere—except close at her side. There Magdalen sat, in the same
position, with weary eyes that still looked over the sea, and still saw
nothing.
“Oh, do speak to me!” said Mrs. Wragge.
Magdalen started, and looked about her vacantly.
“It’s late,” she said, shivering under the first sensation that reached
her of the rising breeze. “Come home; you want your tea.” They walked
home in silence.
“Don’t be angry with me for asking,” said Mrs. Wragge, as they sat
together at the tea-table. “Are you troubled, my dear, in your mind?”
“Yes,” replied Magdalen. “Don’t notice me. My trouble will soon be
over.”
She waited patiently until Mrs. Wragge had made an end of the meal, and
then went upstairs to her own room.
“Monday!” she said, as she sat down at her toilet-table. “Something may
happen before Monday comes!”
Her fingers wandered mechanically among the brushes and combs, the tiny
bottles and cases placed on the table. She set them in order, now in
one way, and now in another—then on a sudden pushed them away from her
in a heap. For a minute or two her hands remained idle. That interval
passed, they grew restless again, and pulled the two little drawers
backward and forward in their grooves. Among the objects laid in one of
them was a Prayer-book which had belonged to her at Combe-Raven, and
which she had saved with her other relics of the past, when she and her
sister had taken their farewell of home. She opened the Prayer-book,
after a long hesitation, at the Marriage Service, shut it again before
she had read a line, and put it back hurriedly in one of the drawers.
After turning the key in the locks, she rose and walked to the window.
“The horrible sea!” she said, turning from it with a shudder of
disgust—“the lonely, dreary, horrible sea!”
She went back to the drawer, and took the Prayer-book out for the
second time, half opened it again at the Marriage Service, and
impatiently threw it back into the drawer. This time, after turning the
lock, she took the key away, walked with it in her hand to the open
window, and threw it violently from her into the garden. It fell on a
bed thickly planted with flowers. It was invisible; it was lost. The
sense of its loss seemed to relieve her.
“Something may happen on Friday; something may happen on Saturday;
something may happen on Sunday. Three days still!”
She closed the green shutters outside the window and drew the curtains
to darken the room still more. Her head felt heavy; her eyes were
burning hot. She threw herself on her bed, with a sullen impulse to
sleep away the time. The quiet of the house helped her; the darkness of
the room helped her; the stupor of mind into which she had fallen had
its effect on her senses; she dropped into a broken sleep. Her restless
hands moved incessantly, her head tossed from side to side of the
pillow, but still she slept. Ere long words fell by ones and twos from
her lips; words whispered in her sleep, growing more and more
continuous, more and more articulate, the longer the sleep lasted—words
which seemed to calm her restlessness and to hush her into deeper
repose. She smiled; she was in the happy land of dreams; Frank’s name
escaped her. “Do you love me, Frank?” she whispered. “Oh, my darling,
say it again! say it again!”
The time passed, the room grew darker; and still she slumbered and
dreamed. Toward sunset—without any noise inside the house or out to
account for it—she started up on the bed, awake again in an instant.
The drowsy obscurity of the room struck her with terror. She ran to the
window, pushed open the shutters, and leaned far out into the evening
air and the evening light. Her eyes devoured the trivial sights on the
beach; her ears drank in the welcome murmur of the sea. Anything to
deliver her from the waking impression which her dreams had left! No
more darkness, no more repose. Sleep that came mercifully to others
came treacherously to her. Sleep had only closed her eyes on the
future, to open them on the past.
She went down again into the parlor, eager to talk—no matter how idly,
no matter on what trifles. The room was empty. Perhaps Mrs. Wragge had
gone to her work—perhaps she was too tired to talk. Magdalen took her
hat from the table and went out. The sea that she had shrunk from, a
few hours since, looked friendly now. How lovely it was in its cool
evening blue! What a god-like joy in the happy multitude of waves
leaping up to the light of heaven!
She stayed out until the night fell and the stars appeared. The night
steadied her.
By slow degrees her mind recovered its balance and she looked her
position unflinchingly in the face. The vain hope that accident might
defeat the very end for which, of her own free-will, she had
ceaselessly plotted and toiled, vanished and left her; self-dissipated
in its own weakness. She knew the true alternative, and faced it. On
one side was the revolting ordeal of the marriage; on the other, the
abandonment of her purpose. Was it too late to choose between the
sacrifice of the purpose and the sacrifice of herself? Yes! too late.
The backward path had closed behind her. Time that no wish could
change, Time that no prayers could recall, had made her purpose a part
of herself: once she had governed it; now it governed her. The more she
shrank, the harder she struggled, the more mercilessly it drove her on.
No other feeling in her was strong enough to master it—not even the
horror that was maddening her—the horror of her marriage.
Toward nine o’clock she went back to the house.
“Walking again!” said Mrs. Wragge, meeting her at the door. “Come in
and sit down, my dear. How tired you must be!”
Magdalen smiled, and patted Mrs. Wragge kindly on the shoulder.
“You forget how strong I am,” she said. “Nothing hurts me.”
She lit her candle and went upstairs again into her room. As she
returned to the old place by her toilet-table, the vain hope in the
three days of delay, the vain hope of deliverance by accident, came
back to her—this time in a form more tangible than the form which it
had hitherto worn.
“Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something may happen to him; something may
happen to me. Something serious; something fatal. One of us may die.”
A sudden change came over her face. She shivered, though there was no
cold in the air. She started, though there was no noise to alarm her.
“One of us may die. I may be the one.”
She fell into deep thought, roused herself after a while, and, opening
the door, called to Mrs. Wragge to come and speak to her.
“You were right in thinking I should fatigue myself,” she said. “My
walk has been a little too much for me. I feel tired, and I am going to
bed. Good-night.” She kissed Mrs. Wragge and softly closed the door
again.
After a few turns backward and forward in the room, she abruptly opened
her writing-case and began a letter to her sister. The letter grew and
grew under her hands; she filled sheet after sheet of note-paper. Her
heart was full of her subject: it was her own story addressed to Norah.
She shed no tears; she was composed to a quiet sadness. Her pen ran
smoothly on. After writing for more than two hours, she left off while
the letter was still unfinished. There was no signature attached to
it—there was a blank space reserved, to be filled up at some other
time. After putting away the case, with the sheets of writing secured
inside it, she walked to the window for air, and stood there looking
out.
The moon was waning over the sea. The breeze of the earlier hours had
died out. On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded in a deep
and awful calm.
Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before her
eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death, the Tempter,
was busy at her heart. Death, the Tempter, pointed homeward, to the
grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven churchyard.
“Nineteen last birthday,” she thought. “Only nineteen!” She moved away
from the window, hesitated, and then looked out again at the view. “The
beautiful night!” she said, gratefully. “Oh, the beautiful night!”
She left the window and lay down on her bed. Sleep, that had come
treacherously before, came mercifully now; came deep and dreamless, the
image of her last waking thought—the image of Death.
Early the next morning Mrs. Wragge went into Magdalen’s room, and found
that she had risen betimes. She was sitting before the glass, drawing
the comb slowly through and through her hair—thoughtful and quiet.
“How do you feel this morning, my dear?” asked Mrs. Wragge. “Quite well
again?”
“Yes.”
After replying in the affirmative, she stopped, considered for a
moment, and suddenly contradicted herself.
“No,” she said, “not quite well. I am suffering a little from
toothache.”
As she altered her first answer in those words she gave a twist to her
hair with the comb, so that it fell forward and hid her face.
At breakfast she was very silent, and she took nothing but a cup of
tea.
“Let me go to the chemist’s and get something,” said Mrs. Wragge.
“No, thank you.”
“Do let me!”
“No!”
She refused for the second time, sharply and angrily. As usual, Mrs.
Wragge submitted, and let her have her own way. When breakfast was
over, she rose, without a word of explanation, and went out. Mrs.
Wragge watched her from the window and saw that she took the direction
of the chemist’s shop.
On reaching the chemist’s door she stopped—paused before entering the
shop, and looked in at the window—hesitated, and walked away a
little—hesitated again, and took the first turning which led back to
the beach.
Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose, she
seated herself on the shingle. The only persons who were near to her,
in the position she now occupied, were a nursemaid and two little boys.
The youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in his hand. After looking
at Magdalen for a little while with the quaintest gravity and
attention, the boy suddenly approached her, and opened the way to an
acquaintance by putting his toy composedly on her lap.
“Look at my ship,” said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen’s
knee.
She was not usually patient with children. In happier days she would
not have met the boy’s advance toward her as she met it now. The hard
despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted and
trembled. She put the ship back into the child’s hands and lifted him
on her lap.
“Will you give me a kiss?” she said, faintly. The boy looked at his
ship as if he would rather have kissed the ship.
She repeated the question—repeated it almost humbly. The child put his
hand up to her neck and kissed her.
“If I was your sister, would you love me?” All the misery of her
friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured
from her in those words.
“Would you love me?” she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the
child’s frock.
“Yes,” said the boy. “Look at my ship.”
She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.
“What do you call it?” she asked, trying hard to find her way even to
the interest of a child.
“I call it Uncle Kirke’s ship,” said the boy. “Uncle Kirke has gone
away.”
The name recalled nothing to her memory. No remembrances but old
remembrances lived in her now. “Gone?” she repeated absently, thinking
what she should say to her little friend next.
“Yes,” said the boy. “Gone to China.”
Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart. She
put Kirke’s little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.
As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night renewed
itself in her mind. But the sense of relief which the child had brought
to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her
knee, influenced her still. She was conscious of a dawning hope,
opening freshly on her thoughts, as the boy’s innocent eyes had opened
on her face when he came to her on the beach. Was it too late to turn
back? Once more she asked herself that question, and now, for the first
time, she asked it in doubt.
She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self
which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting to remove
her shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case and
addressed these lines to Captain Wragge as fast as her pen could trace
them:
“You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this. My resolution
has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than I can face. I
have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget me. Let us never
meet again.”
With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her
little white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes to
inclose them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had
lost its discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole contents of the
bag in one handful of papers, and drew them out violently, tearing some
and disarranging the folds of others. As she threw them down before her
on the table, the first object that met her eye was her own
handwriting, faded already with time. She looked closer, and saw the
words she had copied from her dead father’s letter—saw the lawyer’s
brief and terrible commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of
the page:
_Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves
them helpless at their uncle’s mercy._
Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet. All
the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming reproach. She took up
the lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and
looked at the ink, still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.
The color that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more. The
hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless
eyes. She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them back in her bag.
She pressed the copy of her father’s letter to her lips, and returned
it to its place with the banknotes. When the bag was in her bosom
again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands, then
deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge. Before the
ink was dry, the letter lay in fragments on the floor.
“No!” she said, as the last morsel of the torn paper dropped from her
hand. “On the way I go there is no turning back.”
She rose composedly and left the room. While descending the stairs, she
met Mrs. Wragge coming up. “Going out again, my dear?” asked Mrs.
Wragge. “May I go with you?”
Magdalen’s attention wandered. Instead of answering the question, she
absently answered her own thoughts.
“Thousands of women marry for money,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”
The helpless perplexity of Mrs. Wragge’s face as she spoke those words
roused her to a sense of present things. “My poor dear!” she said; “I
puzzle you, don’t I? Never mind what I say—all girls talk nonsense, and
I’m no better than the rest of them. Come! I’ll give you a treat. You
shall enjoy yourself while the captain is away. We will have a long
drive by ourselves. Put on your smart bonnet, and come with me to the
hotel. I’ll tell the landlady to put a nice cold dinner into a basket.
You shall have all the things you like, and I’ll wait on you. When you
are an old, old woman, you will remember me kindly, won’t you? You will
say: ‘She wasn’t a bad girl; hundreds worse than she was live and
prosper, and nobody blames them.’ There! there! go and put your bonnet
on. Oh, my God, what is my heart made of! How it lives and lives, when
other girls’ hearts would have died in them long ago!”
In half an hour more she and Mrs. Wragge were seated together in the
carriage. One of the horses was restive at starting. “Flog him,” she
cried angrily to the driver. “What are you frightened about? Flog him!
Suppose the carriage was upset,” she said, turning suddenly to her
companion; “and suppose I was thrown out and killed on the spot?
Nonsense! don’t look at me in that way. I’m like your husband; I have a
dash of humor, and I’m only joking.”
They were out the whole day. When they reached home again, it was after
dark. The long succession of hours passed in the fresh air left them
both with the same sense of fatigue. Again that night Magdalen slept
the deep dreamless sleep of the night before. And so the Friday closed.
Her last thought at night had been the thought which had sustained her
throughout the day. She had laid her head on the pillow with the same
reckless resolution to submit to the coming trial which had already
expressed itself in words when she and Mrs. Wragge met by accident on
the stairs. When she woke on the morning of Saturday, the resolution
was gone. The Friday’s thoughts—the Friday’s events even—were blotted
out of her mind. Once again, creeping chill through the flow of her
young blood, she felt the slow and deadly prompting of despair which
had come to her in the waning moonlight, which had whispered to her in
the awful calm.
“I saw the end as the end must be,” she said to herself, “on Thursday
night. I have been wrong ever since.”
When she and her companion met that morning, she reiterated her
complaint of suffering from the toothache; she repeated her refusal to
allow Mrs. Wragge to procure a remedy; she left the house after
breakfast, in the direction of the chemist’s shop, exactly as she had
left it on the morning before.
This time she entered the shop without an instant’s hesitation.
“I have got an attack of toothache,” she said, abruptly, to an elderly
man who stood behind the counter.
“May I look at the tooth, miss?”
“There is no necessity to look. It is a hollow tooth. I think I have
caught cold in it.”
The chemist recommended various remedies which were in vogue fifteen
years since. She declined purchasing any of them.
“I have always found Laudanum relieve the pain better than anything
else,” she said, trifling with the bottles on the counter, and looking
at them while she spoke, instead of looking at the chemist. “Let me
have some Laudanum.”
“Certainly, miss. Excuse my asking the question—it is only a matter of
form. You are staying at Aldborough, I think?”
“Yes. I am Miss Bygrave, of North Shingles.”
The chemist bowed; and, turning to his shelves, filled an ordinary
half-ounce bottle with laudanum immediately. In ascertaining his
customer’s name and address beforehand, the owner of the shop had taken
a precaution which was natural to a careful man, but which was by no
means universal, under similar circumstances, in the state of the law
at that time.
“Shall I put you up a little cotton wool with the laudanum?” he asked,
after he had placed a label on the bottle, and had written a word on it
in large letters.
“If you please. What have you just written on the bottle?” She put the
question sharply, with something of distrust as well as curiosity in
her manner.
The chemist answered the question by turning the label toward her. She
saw written on it, in large letters—POISON.
“I like to be on the safe side, miss,” said the old man, smiling. “Very
worthy people in other respects are often sadly careless where poisons
are concerned.”
She began trifling again with the bottles on the counter, and put
another question, with an ill-concealed anxiety to hear the answer.
“Is there danger,” she asked, “in such a little drop of Laudanum as
that?”
“There is Death in it, miss,” replied the chemist, quietly.
“Death to a child, or to a person in delicate health?”
“Death to the strongest man in England, let him be who he may.”
With that answer, the chemist sealed up the bottle in its wrapping of
white paper and handed the laudanum to Magdalen across the counter. She
laughed as she took it from him, and paid for it.
“There will be no fear of accidents at North Shingles,” she said. “I
shall keep the bottle locked up in my dressing-case. If it doesn’t
relieve the pain, I must come to you again, and try some other remedy.
Good-morning.”
“Good-morning, miss.”
She went straight back to the house without once looking up, without
noticing any one who passed her. She brushed by Mrs. Wragge in the
passage as she might have brushed by a piece of furniture. She ascended
the stairs, and caught her foot twice in her dress, from sheer
inattention to the common precaution of holding it up. The trivial
daily interests of life had lost their hold on her already.
In the privacy of her own room, she took the bottle from its wrapping,
and threw the paper and the cotton wool into the fire-place. At the
moment when she did this there was a knock at the door. She hid the
little bottle, and looked up impatiently. Mrs. Wragge came into the
room.
“Have you got something for your toothache, my dear?”
“Yes.”
“Can I do anything to help you?”
“No.”
Mrs. Wragge still lingered uneasily near the door. Her manner showed
plainly that she had something more to say.
“What is it?” asked Magdalen, sharply.
“Don’t be angry,” said Mrs. Wragge. “I’m not settled in my mind about
the captain. He’s a great writer, and he hasn’t written. He’s as quick
as lightning, and he hasn’t come back. Here’s Saturday, and no signs of
him. Has he run away, do you think? Has anything happened to him?”
“I should think not. Go downstairs; I’ll come and speak to you about it
directly.”
As soon as she was alone again, Magdalen rose from her chair, advanced
toward a cupboard in the room which locked, and paused for a moment,
with her hand on the key, in doubt. Mrs. Wragge’s appearance had
disturbed the whole current of her thoughts. Mrs. Wragge’s last
question, trifling as it was, had checked her on the verge of the
precipice—had roused the old vain hope in her once more of release by
accident.
“Why not?” she said. “Why may something not have happened to one of
them?”
She placed the laudanum in the cupboard, locked it, and put the key in
her pocket. “Time enough still,” she thought, “before Monday. I’ll wait
till the captain comes back.”
After some consultation downstairs, it was agreed that the servant
should sit up that night, in expectation of her master’s return. The
day passed quietly, without events of any kind. Magdalen dreamed away
the hours over a book. A weary patience of expectation was all she felt
now—the poignant torment of thought was dulled and blunted at last. She
passed the day and the evening in the parlor, vaguely conscious of a
strange feeling of aversion to going back to her own room. As the night
advanced, as the noises ceased indoors and out, her restlessness began
to return. She endeavored to quiet herself by reading. Books failed to
fix her attention. The newspaper was lying in a corner of the room: she
tried the newspaper next.
She looked mechanically at the headings of the articles; she listlessly
turned over page after page, until her wandering attention was arrested
by the narrative of an Execution in a distant part of England. There
was nothing to strike her in the story of the crime, and yet she read
it. It was a common, horribly common, act of bloodshed—the murder of a
woman in farm-service by a man in the same employment who was jealous
of her. He had been convicted on no extraordinary evidence, he had been
hanged under no unusual circumstances. He had made his confession, when
he knew there was no hope for him, like other criminals of his class,
and the newspaper had printed it at the end of the article, in these
terms:
“I kept company with the deceased for a year or thereabouts. I said I
would marry her when I had money enough. She said I had money enough
now. We had a quarrel. She refused to walk out with me any more; she
wouldn’t draw me my beer; she took up with my fellow-servant, David
Crouch. I went to her on the Saturday, and said I would marry her as
soon as we could be asked in church if she would give up Crouch. She
laughed at me. She turned me out of the wash-house, and the rest of
them saw her turn me out. I was not easy in my mind. I went and sat on
the gate—the gate in the meadow they call Pettit’s Piece. I thought I
would shoot her. I went and fetched my gun and loaded it. I went out
into Pettit’s Piece again. I was hard put to it to make up my mind. I
thought I would try my luck—I mean try whether to kill her or not—-by
throwing up the Spud of the plow into the air. I said to myself, if it
falls flat, I’ll spare her; if it falls point in the earth, I’ll kill
her. I took a good swing with it, and shied it up. It fell point in the
earth. I went and shot her. It was a bad job, but I did it. I did it,
as they said I did it at the trial. I hope the Lord will have mercy on
me. I wish my mother to have my old clothes. I have no more to say.”
In the happier days of her life, Magdalen would have passed over the
narrative of the execution, and the printed confession which
accompanied it unread; the subject would have failed to attract her.
She read the horrible story now—read it with an interest unintelligible
to herself. Her attention, which had wandered over higher and better
things, followed every sentence of the murderer’s hideously direct
confession from beginning to end. If the man or the woman had been
known to her, if the place had been familiar to her memory, she could
hardly have followed the narrative more closely, or have felt a more
distinct impression of it left on her mind. She laid down the paper,
wondering at herself; she took it up once more, and tried to read some
other portion of the contents. The effort was useless; her attention
wandered again. She threw the paper away, and went out into the garden.
The night was dark; the stars were few and faint. She could just see
the gravel-walk—she could just pace backward and forward between the
house door and the gate.
The confession in the newspaper had taken a fearful hold on her mind.
As she paced the walk, the black night opened over the sea, and showed
her the murderer in the field hurling the Spud of the plow into the
air. She ran, shuddering, back to the house. The murderer followed her
into the parlor. She seized the candle and went up into her room. The
vision of her own distempered fancy followed her to the place where the
laudanum was hidden, and vanished there.
It was midnight, and there was no sign yet of the captain’s return.
She took from the writing-case the long letter which she had written to
Norah, and slowly read it through. The letter quieted her. When she
reached the blank space left at the end, she hurriedly turned back and
began it over again.
One o’clock struck from the church clock, and still the captain never
appeared.
She read the letter for the second time; she turned back obstinately,
despairingly, and began it for the third time. As she once more reached
the last page, she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. She
had just put the watch back in the belt of her dress, when there came
to her—far off in the stillness of the morning—a sound of wheels.
She dropped the letter and clasped her cold hands in her lap and
listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer—the
trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to hers. It passed
the side of the house; it traveled a little further on; it stopped. She
heard a loud knocking—then the opening of a window—then voices—then a
long silence—than the wheels again coming back—then the opening of the
door below, and the sound of the captain’s voice in the passage.
She could endure it no longer. She opened her door a little way and
called to him.
He ran upstairs instantly, astonished that she was not in bed. She
spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door, keeping herself
hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her face.
“Has anything gone wrong?” she asked.
“Make your mind easy,” he answered. “Nothing has gone wrong.”
“Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?”
“None whatever. The marriage is a certainty.”
“A certainty?”
“Yes.”
“Good-night.”
She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little
surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand
of her own accord.
“You have sat up too long,” he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold
fingers. “I am afraid you will have a bad night—I’m afraid you will not
sleep.”
She softly closed the door.
“I shall sleep,” she said, “sounder than you think for.”
It was past two o’clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her
chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down
for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and
turned to the end where the blank space was left. The last lines
written above the space ran thus: “... I have laid my whole heart bare
to you; I have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have
toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must
reach or die. It is wickedness, madness, what you will—but it is so.
There are now two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry
him—the journey to the church. If the profanation of myself is more
than I can bear—the journey to the grave!”
Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines:
“My choice is made. If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my
father and mother in the churchyard at home. Farewell, my love! Be
always innocent; be always happy. If Frank ever asks about me, say I
died forgiving him. Don’t grieve long for me, Norah—I am not worth it.”
She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister. The tears
gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table. She waited until her
sight was clear again, and then took the banknotes once more from the
little bag in her bosom. After wrapping them in a sheet of note paper,
she wrote Captain Wragge’s name on the inclosure, and added these words
below it: “Lock the door of my room, and leave me till my sister comes.
The money I promised you is in this. You are not to blame; it is my
fault, and mine only. If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be
kind to your wife for my sake.”
After placing the inclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and looked
round the room. Some few little things in it were not in their places.
She set them in order, and drew the curtains on either side at the head
of her bed. Her own dress was the next object of her scrutiny. It was
all as neat, as pure, as prettily arranged as ever. Nothing about her
was disordered but her hair. Some tresses had fallen loose on one side
of her head; she carefully put them back in their places with the help
of her glass. “How pale I look!” she thought, with a faint smile.
“Shall I be paler still when they find me in the morning?”
She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and took
it out. The bottle was so small that it lay easily in the palm of her
hand. She let it remain there for a little while, and stood looking at
it.
“DEATH!” she said. “In this drop of brown drink—DEATH!”
As the words passed her lips, an agony of unutterable horror seized on
her in an instant. She crossed the room unsteadily, with a maddening
confusion in her head, with a suffocating anguish at her heart. She
caught at the table to support herself. The faint clink of the bottle,
as it fell harmlessly from her loosened grasp and rolled against some
porcelain object on the table, struck through her brain like the stroke
of a knife. The sound of her own voice, sunk to a whisper—her voice
only uttering that one word, Death—rushed in her ears like the rushing
of a wind. She dragged herself to the bedside, and rested her head
against it, sitting on the floor. “Oh, my life! my life!” she thought;
“what is my life worth, that I cling to it like this?”
An interval passed, and she felt her strength returning. She raised
herself on her knees and hid her face on the bed. She tried to pray—to
pray to be forgiven for seeking the refuge of death. Frantic words
burst from her lips—words which would have risen to cries, if she had
not stifled them in the bed-clothes. She started to her feet; despair
strengthened her with a headlong fury against herself. In one moment
she was back at the table; in another, the poison was once more in her
hand.
She removed the cork and lifted the bottle to her mouth.
At the first cold touch of the glass on her lips, her strong young life
leaped up in her leaping blood, and fought with the whole frenzy of its
loathing against the close terror of Death. Every active power in the
exuberant vital force that was in her rose in revolt against the
destruction which her own will would fain have wreaked on her own life.
She paused: for the second time, she paused in spite of herself. There,
in the glorious perfection of her youth and health—there, trembling on
the verge of human existence, she stood; with the kiss of the Destroyer
close at her lips, and Nature, faithful to its sacred trust, fighting
for the salvation of her to the last.
No word passed her lips. Her cheeks flushed deep; her breath came thick
and fast. With the poison still in her hand, with the sense that she
might faint in another moment, she made for the window, and threw back
the curtain that covered it.
The new day had risen. The broad gray dawn flowed in on her, over the
quiet eastern sea.
She saw the waters heaving, large and silent, in the misty calm; she
felt the fresh breath of the morning flutter cool on her face. Her
strength returned; her mind cleared a little. At the sight of the sea,
her memory recalled the walk in the garden overnight, and the picture
which her distempered fancy had painted on the black void. In thought,
she saw the picture again—the murderer hurling the Spud of the plow
into the air, and setting the life or death of the woman who had
deserted him on the hazard of the falling point. The infection of that
terrible superstition seized on her mind as suddenly as the new day had
burst on her view. The promise of release which she saw in it from the
horror of her own hesitation roused the last energies of her despair.
She resolved to end the struggle by setting her life or death on the
hazard of a chance.
On what chance?
The sea showed it to her. Dimly distinguishable through the mist, she
saw a little fleet of coasting-vessels slowly drifting toward the
house, all following the same direction with the favoring set of the
tide. In half an hour—perhaps in less—the fleet would have passed her
window. The hands of her watch pointed to four o’clock. She seated
herself close at the side of the window, with her back toward the
quarter from which the vessels were drifting down on her—with the
poison placed on the window-sill and the watch on her lap. For one
half-hour to come she determined to wait there and count the vessels as
they went by. If in that time an even number passed her, the sign given
should be a sign to live. If the uneven number prevailed, the end
should be Death.
With that final resolution, she rested her head against the window and
waited for the ships to pass.
The first came, high, dark and near in the mist, gliding silently over
the silent sea. An interval—and the second followed, with the third
close after it. Another interval, longer and longer drawn out—and
nothing passed. She looked at her watch. Twelve minutes, and three
ships. Three.
The fourth came, slower than the rest, larger than the rest, further
off in the mist than the rest. The interval followed; a long interval
once more. Then the next vessel passed, darkest and nearest of all.
Five. The next uneven number—
Five.
She looked at her watch again. Nineteen minutes, and five ships. Twenty
minutes. Twenty-one, two, three—and no sixth vessel. Twenty-four, and
the sixth came by. Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight,
and the next uneven number—the fatal Seven—glided into view. Two
minutes to the end of the half-hour. And seven ships.
Twenty-nine, and nothing followed in the wake of the seventh ship. The
minute-hand of the watch moved on half-way to thirty, and still the
white heaving sea was a misty blank. Without moving her head from the
window, she took the poison in one hand, and raised the watch in the
other. As the quick seconds counted each other out, her eyes, as quick
as they, looked from the watch to the sea, from the sea to the
watch—looked for the last time at the sea—and saw the EIGHTH ship.
She never moved, she never spoke. The death of thought, the death of
feeling, seemed to have come to her already. She put back the poison
mechanically on the ledge of the window and watched, as in a dream, the
ship gliding smoothly on its silent way—gliding till it melted dimly
into shadow—gliding till it was lost in the mist.
The strain on her mind relaxed when the Messenger of Life had passed
from her sight.
“Providence?” she whispered faintly to herself. “Or chance?”
Her eyes closed, and her head fell back. When the sense of life
returned to her, the morning sun was warm on her face—the blue heaven
looked down on her—and the sea was a sea of gold.
She fell on her knees at the window and burst into tears.
Towards noon that day, the captain, waiting below stairs, and hearing
no movement in Magdalen’s room, felt uneasy at the long silence. He
desired the new maid to follow him upstairs, and, pointing to the door,
told her to go in softly and see whether her mistress was awake.
The maid entered the room, remained there a moment, and came out again,
closing the door gently.
“She looks beautiful, sir,” said the girl; “and she’s sleeping as
quietly as a new-born child.”
CHAPTER XIV.
The morning of her husband’s return to North Shingles was a morning
memorable forever in the domestic calendar of Mrs. Wragge. She dated
from that occasion the first announcement which reached her of
Magdalen’s marriage.
It had been Mrs. Wragge’s earthly lot to pass her life in a state of
perpetual surprise. Never yet, however, had she wandered in such a maze
of astonishment as the maze in which she lost herself when the captain
coolly told her the truth. She had been sharp enough to suspect Mr.
Noel Vanstone of coming to the house in the character of a sweetheart
on approval; and she had dimly interpreted certain expressions of
impatience which had fallen from Magdalen’s lips as boding ill for the
success of his suit, but her utmost penetration had never reached as
far as a suspicion of the impending marriage. She rose from one climax
of amazement to another, as her husband proceeded with his disclosure.
A wedding in the family at a day’s notice! and that wedding Magdalen’s!
and not a single new dress ordered for anybody, the bride included! and
the Oriental Cashmere Robe totally unavailable on the occasion when she
might have worn it to the greatest advantage! Mrs. Wragge dropped
crookedly into a chair, and beat her disorderly hands on her
unsymmetrical knees, in utter forgetfulness of the captain’s presence
and the captain’s terrible eye. It would not have surprised her to hear
that the world had come to an end, and that the only mortal whom
Destiny had overlooked, in winding up the affairs of this earthly
planet, was herself!
Leaving his wife to recover her composure by her own unaided efforts,
Captain Wragge withdrew to wait for Magdalen’s appearance in the lower
regions of the house. It was close on one o’clock before the sound of
footsteps in the room above warned him that she was awake and stirring.
He called at once for the maid (whose name he had ascertained to be
Louisa), and sent her upstairs to her mistress for the second time.
Magdalen was standing by her dressing-table when a faint tap at the
door suddenly roused her. The tap was followed by the sound of a meek
voice, which announced itself as the voice of “her maid,” and inquired
if Miss Bygrave needed any assistance that morning.
“Not at present,” said Magdalen, as soon as she had recovered the
surprise of finding herself unexpectedly provided with an attendant. “I
will ring when I want you.”
After dismissing the woman with that answer, she accidentally looked
from the door to the window. Any speculations on the subject of the new
servant in which she might otherwise have engaged were instantly
suspended by the sight of the bottle of laudanum, still standing on the
ledge of the window, where she had left it at sunrise. She took it once
more in her hand, with a strange confusion of feeling—with a vague
doubt even yet, whether the sight of it reminded her of a terrible
reality or a terrible dream. Her first impulse was to rid herself of it
on the spot. She raised the bottle to throw the contents out of the
window, and paused, in sudden distrust of the impulse that had come to
her. “I have accepted my new life,” she thought. “How do I know what
that life may have in store for me?” She turned from the window and
went back to the table. “I may be forced to drink it yet,” she said,
and put the laudanum into her dressing-case.
Her mind was not at ease when she had done this: there seemed to be
some indefinable ingratitude in the act. Still she made no attempt to
remove the bottle from its hiding-place. She hurried on her toilet; she
hastened the time when she could ring for the maid, and forget herself
and her waking thoughts in a new subject. After touching the bell, she
took from the table her letter to Norah and her letter to the captain,
put them both into her dressing-case with the laudanum, and locked it
securely with the key which she kept attached to her watch-chain.
Magdalen’s first impression of her attendant was not an agreeable one.
She could not investigate the girl with the experienced eye of the
landlady at the London hotel, who had characterized the stranger as a
young person overtaken by misfortune, and who had showed plainly, by
her look and manner, of what nature she suspected that misfortune to
be. But with this drawback, Magdalen was perfectly competent to detect
the tokens of sickness and sorrow lurking under the surface of the new
maid’s activity and politeness. She suspected the girl was
ill-tempered; she disliked her name; and she was indisposed to welcome
any servant who had been engaged by Noel Vanstone. But after the first
few minutes, “Louisa” grew on her liking. She answered all the
questions put to her with perfect directness; she appeared to
understand her duties thoroughly; and she never spoke until she was
spoken to first. After making all the inquiries that occurred to her at
the time, and after determining to give the maid a fair trial, Magdalen
rose to leave the room. The very air in it was still heavy to her with
the oppression of the past night.
“Have you anything more to say to me?” she asked, turning to the
servant, with her hand on the door.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Louisa, very respectfully and very
quietly. “I think my master told me that the marriage was to be
to-morrow?”
Magdalen repressed the shudder that stole over her at that reference to
the marriage on the lips of a stranger, and answered in the
affirmative.
“It’s a very short time, miss, to prepare in. If you would be so kind
as to give me my orders about the packing before you go downstairs—?”
“There are no such preparations to make as you suppose,” said Magdalen,
hastily. “The few things I have here can be all packed at once, if you
like. I shall wear the same dress to-morrow which I have on to-day.
Leave out the straw bonnet and the light shawl, and put everything else
into my boxes. I have no new dresses to pack; I have nothing ordered
for the occasion of any sort.” She tried to add some commonplace
phrases of explanation, accounting as probably as might be for the
absence of the usual wedding outfit and wedding-dress. But no further
reference to the marriage would pass her lips, and without another word
she abruptly left the room.
The meek and melancholy Louisa stood lost in astonishment. “Something
wrong here,” she thought. “I’m half afraid of my new place already.”
She sighed resignedly, shook her head, and went to the wardrobe. She
first examined the drawers underneath, took out the various articles of
linen laid inside, and placed them on chairs. Opening the upper part of
the wardrobe next, she ranged the dresses in it side by side on the
bed. Her last proceeding was to push the empty boxes into the middle of
the room, and to compare the space at her disposal with the articles of
dress which she had to pack. She completed her preliminary calculations
with the ready self-reliance of a woman who thoroughly understood her
business, and began the packing forthwith. Just as she had placed the
first article of linen in the smaller box, the door of the room opened,
and the house-servant, eager for gossip, came in.
“What do you want?” asked Louisa, quietly.
“Did you ever hear of anything like this!” said the house-servant,
entering on her subject immediately.
“Like what?”
“Like this marriage, to be sure. You’re London bred, they tell me. Did
you ever hear of a young lady being married without a single new thing
to her back? No wedding veil, and no wedding breakfast, and no wedding
favors for the servants. It’s flying in the face of Providence—that’s
what I say. I’m only a poor servant, I know. But it’s wicked, downright
wicked—and I don’t care who hears me!”
Louisa went on with the packing.
“Look at her dresses!” persisted the house-servant, waving her hand
indignantly at the bed. “I’m only a poor girl, but I wouldn’t marry the
best man alive without a new gown to my back. Look here! look at this
dowdy brown thing here. Alpaca! You’re not going to pack this Alpaca
thing, are you? Why, it’s hardly fit for a servant! I don’t know that
I’d take a gift of it if it was offered me. It would do for me if I
took it up in the skirt, and let it out in the waist—and it wouldn’t
look so bad with a bit of bright trimming, would it?”
“Let that dress alone, if you please,” said Louisa, as quietly as ever.
“What did you say?” inquired the other, doubting whether her ears had
not deceived her.
“I said, let that dress alone. It belongs to my mistress, and I have my
mistress’s orders to pack up everything in the room. You are not
helping me by coming here—you are very much in my way.”
“Well!” said the house-servant, “you may be London bred, as they say.
But if these are your London manners, give me Suffolk!” She opened the
door with an angry snatch at the handle, shut it violently, opened it
again, and looked in. “Give me Suffolk!” said the house-servant, with a
parting nod of her head to point the edge of her sarcasm.
Louisa proceeded impenetrably with her packing up.
Having neatly disposed of the linen in the smaller box, she turned her
attention to the dresses next. After passing them carefully in review,
to ascertain which was the least valuable of the collection, and to
place that one at the bottom of the trunk for the rest to lie on, she
made her choice with very little difficulty. The first gown which she
put into the box was—the brown Alpaca dress.
Meanwhile, Magdalen had joined the captain downstairs. Although he
could not fail to notice the languor in her face and the listlessness
of all her movements, he was relieved to find that she met him with
perfect composure. She was even self-possessed enough to ask him for
news of his journey, with no other signs of agitation than a passing
change of color and a little trembling of the lips.