William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was the son of an English
portrait painter. As a young man he engaged in commerce, but
later studied law and was admitted to the bar. His own
tastes, however, inclined him to literature; and even while
in business life he wrote a historical romance, "Antonina."
Becoming acquainted with Dickens, he was encouraged by the
latter to give up his profession and devote himself entirely
to novel writing. Dickens at that time was editor of the
magazine called _Household Words_; and in its pages there
were published the short stories by Collins, afterward
collected into a volume entitled "After Dark," from which
the accompanying selection is taken.
In another magazine, also edited by Dickens--_All the Year
Round_--Collins scored his first great success with the
serial story "The Woman in White," which was read with the
keenest interest by tens of thousands. In it Collins showed
himself to be a great master of construction. The plot was
so intricate as to hold the reader in suspense until the
end; while the mystery and horror of certain parts of it
were masterly in their execution. Collins, in fact, ranks in
English with Gaboriau in French for the ingenuity with which
he elaborates a plot; and this special gift is seen also in
"Armadale," "The Moonstone," and "No Name."
For a long while his stories were almost as widely read as
those of Dickens himself; and in 1873, like Dickens, he
visited the United States, where he gave readings of his own
short stories. The narrative printed here is an excellent
example of the skill with which Collins piques and sustains
one's interest even within the space of a few short pages.
I served my time--never mind in whose office--and I started in business
for myself in one of our English country towns, I decline stating which. I
hadn't a farthing of capital, and my friends in the neighborhood were poor
and useless enough, with one exception. That exception was Mr. Frank
Gatliffe, son of Mr. Gatliffe, member for the county, the richest man and
the proudest for many a mile round about our parts.
Stop a bit, Mr. Artist, you needn't perk up and look knowing. You won't
trace any particulars by the name of Gatliffe. I am not bound to commit
myself or anybody else by mentioning names. I have given you the first
that came into my head.
Well, Mr. Frank was a stanch friend of mine, and ready to recommend me
whenever he got the chance. I had contrived to get him a little timely
help--for a consideration, of course--in borrowing money at a fair rate of
interest; in fact, I had saved him from the Jews.
The money was borrowed while Mr. Frank was at college. He came back from
college, and stopped at home a little while, and then there got spread
about all our neighborhood a report that he had fallen in love, as the
saying is, with his young sister's governess, and that his mind was made
up to marry her.
What! you're at it again, Mr. Artist! You want to know her name, don't
you? What do you think of Smith?
Speaking as a lawyer, I consider report, in a general way, to be a fool
and a liar. But in this case report turned out to be something very
different. Mr. Frank told me he was really in love, and said upon his
honor (an absurd expression which young chaps of his age are always
using) he was determined to marry Smith, the governess--the sweet, darling
girl, as _he_ called her; but I'm not sentimental, and _I_ call her Smith,
the governess.
Well, Mr. Frank's father, being as proud as Lucifer, said "No," as to
marrying the governess, when Mr. Frank wanted him to say "Yes." He was a
man of business, was old Gatliffe, and he took the proper business course.
He sent the governess away with a first-rate character and a spanking
present, and then he looked about him to get something for Mr. Frank to
do.
While he was looking about Mr. Frank bolted to London after the governess,
who had nobody alive belonging to her to go to but an aunt--her father's
sister. The aunt refuses to let Mr. Frank in without the squire's
permission. Mr. Frank writes to his father, and says he will marry the
girl as soon as he is of age, or shoot himself.
Up to town come the squire and his wife and his daughter, and a lot of
sentimentality, not in the slightest degree material to the present
statement, takes place among them; and the upshot of it is that old
Gatliffe is forced into withdrawing the word No and substituting the word
Yes.
I don't believe he would ever have done it, though, but for one lucky
peculiarity in the case. The governess's father was a man of good
family--pretty nigh as good as Gatliffe's own. He had been in the army;
had sold out; set up as a wine merchant--failed--died; ditto his wife, as
to the dying part of it. No relation, in fact, left for the squire to make
inquiries about but the father's sister--who had behaved, as old Gatliffe
said, like a thoroughbred gentlewoman in shutting the door against Mr.
Frank in the first instance.
So, to cut the matter short, things were at last made up pleasant enough.
The time was fixed for the wedding, and an announcement about it--Marriage
in High Life and all that--put into the county paper. There was a regular
biography, besides, of the governess's father, so as to stop people from
talking--a great flourish about his pedigree, and a long account of his
services in the army; but not a word, mind ye, of his having turned wine
merchant afterward. Oh, no--not a word about that!
I knew it, though, for Mr. Frank told me. He hadn't a bit of pride about
him. He introduced me to his future wife one day when I met him out
walking, and asked me if I did not think he was a lucky fellow. I don't
mind admitting that I did, and that I told him so.
Ah! but she was one of my sort, was that governess. Stood, to the best of
my recollection, five feet four. Good lissom figure, that looked as if it
had never been boxed up in a pair of stays. Eyes that made me feel as if I
was under a pretty stiff cross-examination the moment she looked at me.
Fine red, kiss-and-come-again sort of lips. Cheeks and complexion----
No, Mr. Artist, you wouldn't identify her by her cheeks and complexion, if
I drew you a picture of them this very moment. She has had a family of
children since the time I'm talking of; and her cheeks are a trifle
fatter, and her complexion is a shade or two redder now than when I first
met her out walking with Mr. Frank.
The marriage was to take place on a Wednesday. I decline mentioning the
year or the month. I had started as an attorney on my own account--say six
weeks, more or less, and was sitting alone in my office on the Monday
morning before the wedding-day, trying to see my way clear before me and
not succeeding particularly well, when Mr. Frank suddenly bursts in, as
white as any ghost that ever was painted, and says he's got the most
dreadful case for me to advise on, and not an hour to lose in acting on my
advice.
"Is this in the way of business, Mr. Frank?" says I, stopping him just as
he was beginning to get sentimental. "Yes or no, Mr. Frank?" rapping my
new office paper-knife on the table, to pull him up short all the sooner.
"My dear fellow"--he was always familiar with me--"it's in the way of
business, certainly; but friendship----"
I was obliged to pull him up short again, and regularly examine him as if
he had been in the witness-box, or he would have kept me talking to no
purpose half the day.
"Now, Mr. Frank," says I, "I can't have any sentimentality mixed up with
business matters. You please to stop talking, and let me ask questions.
Answer in the fewest words you can use. Nod when nodding will do instead
of words."
I fixed him with my eye for about three seconds, as he sat groaning and
wriggling in his chair. When I'd done fixing him I gave another rap with
my paper-knife on the table to startle him up a bit. Then I went on.
"From what you have been stating up to the present time," says I, "I
gather that you are in a scrape which is likely to interfere seriously
with your marriage on Wednesday?"
He nodded, and I cut in again before he could say a word:
"The scrape affects your young lady, and goes back to the period of a
transaction in which her late father was engaged, doesn't it?"
He nods, and I cut in once more:
"There is a party, who turned up after seeing the announcement of your
marriage in the paper, who is cognizant of what he oughtn't to know, and
who is prepared to use his knowledge of the same to the prejudice of the
young lady and of your marriage, unless he receives a sum of money to
quiet him? Very well. Now, first of all, Mr. Frank, state what you have
been told by the young lady herself about the transaction of her late
father. How did you first come to have any knowledge of it?"
"She was talking to me about her father one day so tenderly and prettily,
that she quite excited my interest about him," begins Mr. Frank; "and I
asked her, among other things, what had occasioned his death. She said she
believed it was distress of mind in the first instance; and added that
this distress was connected with a shocking secret, which she and her
mother had kept from everybody, but which she could not keep from me,
because she was determined to begin her married life by having no secrets
from her husband."
Here Mr. Frank began to get sentimental again, and I pulled him up short
once more with the paper-knife.
"She told me," Mr. Frank went on, "that the great mistake of her father's
life was his selling out of the army and taking to the wine-trade. He had
no talent for business; things went wrong with him from the first. His
clerk, it was strongly suspected, cheated him----"
"Stop a bit," says I. "What was that suspected clerk's name?"
"Davager," says he.
"Davager," says I, making a note of it. "Go on, Mr. Frank."
"His affairs got more and more entangled," says Mr. Frank; "he was pressed
for money in all directions; bankruptcy, and consequent dishonor (as he
considered it), stared him in the face. His mind was so affected by his
troubles that both his wife and daughter, toward the last, considered him
to be hardly responsible for his own acts. In this state of desperation
and misery, he----" Here Mr. Frank began to hesitate.
We have two ways in the law of drawing evidence off nice and clear from an
unwilling client or witness. We give him a fright, or we treat him to a
joke. I treated Mr. Frank to a joke.
"Ah!" says I, "I know what he did. He had a signature to write; and, by
the most natural mistake in the world, he wrote another gentleman's name
instead of his own--eh?"
"It was to a bill," says Mr. Frank, looking very crestfallen, instead of
taking the joke. "His principal creditor wouldn't wait till he could raise
the money, or the greater part of it. But he was resolved, if he sold off
everything, to get the amount and repay----"
"Of course," says I; "drop that. The forgery was discovered. When?"
"Before even the first attempt was made to negotiate the bill. He had done
the whole thing in the most absurdly and innocently wrong way. The person
whose name he had used was a stanch friend of his and a relation of his
wife's--a good man as well as a rich one. He had influence with the chief
creditor, and he used it nobly. He had a real affection for the
unfortunate man's wife, and he proved it generously."
"Come to the point," says I. "What did he do? In a business way, what did
he do?"
"He put the false bill into the fire, drew a bill of his own to replace
it, and then--only then--told my dear girl and her mother all that had
happened. Can you imagine anything nobler?" asks Mr. Frank.
"Speaking in my professional capacity, I can't imagine anything greener,"
says I. "Where was the father? Off, I suppose?"
"Ill in bed," says Mr. Frank, coloring. "But he mustered strength enough
to write a contrite and grateful letter the same day, promising to prove
himself worthy of the noble moderation and forgiveness extended to him, by
selling off everything he possessed to repay his money debt. He did sell
off everything, down to some old family pictures that were heirlooms; down
to the little plate he had; down to the very tables and chairs that
furnished his drawing-room. Every farthing of the debt was paid; and he
was left to begin the world again, with the kindest promises of help from
the generous man who had forgiven him. It was too late. His crime of one
rash moment--atoned for though it had been--preyed upon his mind. He
became possessed with the idea that he had lowered himself forever in the
estimation of his wife and daughter, and----"
"He died," I cut in. "Yes, yes, we know that. Let's go back for a minute
to the contrite and grateful letter that he wrote. My experience in the
law, Mr. Frank, has convinced me that if everybody burned everybody else's
letters, half the courts of justice in this country might shut up shop. Do
you happen to know whether the letter we are now speaking of contained
anything like an avowal or confession of the forgery?"
"Of course it did," says he. "Could the writer express his contrition
without making some such confession?"
"Quite easy, if he had been a lawyer," says I. "But never mind that; I'm
going to make a guess--a desperate guess, mind. Should I be altogether in
error if I thought that this letter had been stolen; and that the fingers
of Mr. Davager, of suspicious commercial celebrity, might possibly be the
fingers which took it?"
"That is exactly what I wanted to make you understand," cried Mr. Frank.
"How did he communicate the interesting fact of the theft to you?"
"He has not ventured into my presence. The scoundrel actually had the
audacity----"
"Aha!" says I. "The young lady herself! Sharp practitioner, Mr. Davager."
"Early this morning, when she was walking alone in the shrubbery," Mr.
Frank goes on, "he had the assurance to approach her, and to say that he
had been watching his opportunity of getting a private interview for days
past. He then showed her--actually showed her--her unfortunate father's
letter; put into her hands another letter directed to me; bowed, and
walked off, leaving her half dead with astonishment and terror. If I had
only happened to be there at the time!" says Mr. Frank, shaking his fist
murderously in the air, by way of a finish.
"It's the greatest luck in the world that you were not," says I. "Have you
got that other letter?"
He handed it to me. It was so remarkably humorous and short, that I
remember every word of it at this distance of time. It began in this way:
To FRANCIS GATLIFFE, ESQ., JUN.
SIR--I have an extremely curious autograph letter to sell.
The price is a five-hundred-pound note. The young lady to
whom you are to be married on Wednesday will inform you of
the nature of the letter, and the genuineness of the
autograph. If you refuse to deal, I shall send a copy to the
local paper, and shall wait on your highly respected father
with the original curiosity, on the afternoon of Tuesday
next. Having come down here on family business, I have put
up at the family hotel--being to be heard of at the Gatliffe
Arms. Your very obedient servant,