Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (403 page)

“I will wait a little,” Magdalen rejoined, “before I answer that question. When I came down to tea, you told me you had been employing your mind for my benefit. May I ask how?”

“By all means,” said Captain Wragge. “You shall have the net result of the whole mental process. Said process ranges over the present and future proceedings of your disconsolate friends, and of the lawyers who are helping them to find you. Their present proceedings are, in all probability, assuming the following form: the lawyer’s clerk has given you up at Mr. Huxtable’s, and has also, by this time, given you up, after careful inquiry, at all the hotels. His last chance is that you may send for your box to the cloak-room — you don’t send for it — and there the clerk is to-night (thanks to Captain Wragge and Rosemary Lane) at the end of his resources. He will forthwith communicate that fact to his employers in London; and those employers (don’t be alarmed!) will apply for help to the detective police. Allowing for inevitable delays, a professional spy, with all his wits about him, and with those handbills to help him privately in identifying you, will be here certainly not later than the day after tomorrow — possibly earlier. If you remain in York, if you attempt to communicate with Mr. Huxtable, that spy will find you out. If, on the other hand, you leave the city before he comes (taking your departure by other means than the railway, of course) you put him in the same predicament as the clerk — you defy him to find a fresh trace of you. There is my brief abstract of your present position. What do you think of it?”

“I think it has one defect,” said Magdalen. “It ends in nothing.”

“Pardon me,” retorted the captain. “It ends in an arrangement for your safe departure, and in a plan for the entire gratification of your wishes in the direction of the stage. Both drawn from the resources of my own experience, and both waiting a word from you, to be poured forth immediately in the fullest detail.”

“I think I know what that word is,” replied Magdalen, looking at him attentively.

“Charmed to hear it, I am sure. You have only to say, ‘Captain Wragge, take charge of me’ — and my plans are yours from that moment.”

“I will take to-night to consider your proposal,” she said, after an instant’s reflection. “You shall have my answer to-morrow morning.”

Captain Wragge looked a little disappointed. He had not expected the reservation on his side to be met so composedly by a reservation on hers.

“Why not decide at once?” he remonstrated, in his most persuasive tones. “You have only to consider — ”

“I have more to consider than you think for,” she answered. “I have another object in view besides the object you know of.”

“May I ask — ?”

“Excuse me, Captain Wragge — you may
not
ask. Allow me to thank you for your hospitality, and to wish you good-night. I am worn out. I want rest.”

Once more the captain wisely adapted himself to her humour with the ready self-control of an experienced man.

“Worn out, of course!” he said, sympathetically. “Unpardonable on my part not to have thought of it before. We will resume our conversation to-morrow. Permit me to give you a candle. Mrs. Wragge!”

Prostrated by mental exertion, Mrs. Wragge was pursuing the course of the omelette in dreams. Her head was twisted one way, and her body the other. She snored meekly. At intervals one of her hands raised itself in the air, shook an imaginary frying-pan, and dropped again with a faint thump on the cookery-book in her lap. At the sound of her husband’s voice, she started to her feet, and confronted him with her mind fast asleep, and her eyes wide open.

“Assist Miss Vanstone,” said the captain. “And the next time you forget yourself in your chair, fall asleep straight — don’t annoy me by falling asleep crooked.”

Mrs. Wragge opened her eyes a little wider, and looked at Magdalen in helpless amazement.

“Is the captain breakfasting by candle-light?” she inquired, meekly. “And haven’t I done the omelette?”

Before her husband’s corrective voice could apply a fresh stimulant, Magdalen took her compassionately by the arm and led her out of the room.

“Another object besides the object I know of?” repeated Captain Wragge, when he was left by himself. “
Is
there a gentleman in the background, after all? Is there mischief brewing in the dark that I don’t bargain for?”

CHAPTER III.

TOWARD six o’clock the next morning, the light pouring in on her face awoke Magdalen in the bedroom in Rosemary Lane.

She started from her deep, dreamless repose of the past night with that painful sense of bewilderment, on first waking, which is familiar to all sleepers in strange beds. “Norah!” she called out mechanically, when she opened her eyes. The next instant her mind roused itself, and her senses told her the truth. She looked round the miserable room with a loathing recognition of it. The sordid contrast which the place presented to all that she had been accustomed to see in her own bed-chamber — the practical abandonment, implied in its scanty furniture, of those elegant purities of personal habit to which she had been accustomed from her childhood — shocked that sense of bodily self-respect in Magdalen which is a refined woman’s second nature. Contemptible as the influence seemed, when compared with her situation at that moment, the bare sight of the jug and basin in a corner of the room decided her first resolution when she woke. She determined, then and there, to leave Rosemary Lane.

How was she to leave it? With Captain Wragge, or without him?

She dressed herself, with a dainty shrinking from everything in the room which her hands or her clothes touched in the process, and then opened the window. The autumn air felt keen and sweet; and the little patch of sky that she could see was warmly bright already with the new sunlight. Distant voices of bargemen on the river, and the chirping of birds among the weeds which topped the old city wall, were the only sounds that broke the morning silence. She sat down by the window; and searched her mind for the thoughts which she had lost, when weariness overcame her on the night before.

The first subject to which she returned was the vagabond subject of Captain Wragge.

The “moral agriculturist” had failed to remove her personal distrust of him, cunningly as he had tried to plead against it by openly confessing the impostures that he had practiced on others. He had raised her opinion of his abilities; he had amused her by his humor; he had astonished her by his assurance; but he had left her original conviction that he was a Rogue exactly where it was when he first met with her. If the one design then in her mind had been the design of going on the stage, she would, at all hazards, have rejected the more than doubtful assistance of Captain Wragge on the spot.

But the perilous journey on which she had now adventured herself had another end in view — an end, dark and distant — an end, with pitfalls hidden on the way to it, far other than the shallow pitfalls on the way to the stage. In the mysterious stillness of the morning, her mind looked on to its second and its deeper design, and the despicable figure of the swindler rose before her in a new view.

She tried to shut him out — to feel above him and beyond him again, as she had felt up to this time.

After a little trifling with her dress, she took from her bosom the white silk bag which her own hands had made on the farewell night at Combe-Raven. It drew together at the mouth with delicate silken strings. The first thing she took out, on opening it, was a lock of Frank’s hair, tied with a morsel of silver thread; the next was a sheet of paper containing the extracts which she had copied from her father’s will and her father’s letter; the last was a closely-folded packet of bank-notes, to the value of nearly two hundred pounds — the produce (as Miss Garth had rightly conjectured) of the sale of her jewelry and her dresses, in which the servant at the boarding-school had privately assisted her. She put back the notes at once, without a second glance at them, and then sat looking thoughtfully at the lock of hair as it lay on her lap. “You are better than nothing,” she said, speaking to it with a girl’s fanciful tenderness. “I can sit and look at you sometimes, till I almost think I am looking at Frank. Oh, my darling! my darling!” Her voice faltered softly, and she put the lock of hair, with a languid gentleness, to her lips. It fell from her fingers into her bosom. A lovely tinge of colour rose on her cheeks, and spread downward to her neck, as if it followed the falling hair. She closed her eyes, and let her fair head droop softly. The world passed from her; and, for one enchanted moment, Love opened the gates of Paradise to the daughter of Eve.

The trivial noises in the neighbouring street, gathering in number as the morning advanced, forced her back to the hard realities of the passing time. She raised her head with a heavy sigh, and opened her eyes once more on the mean and miserable little room.

The extracts from the will and the letter — those last memorials of her father, now so closely associated with the purpose which had possession of her mind — still lay before her. The transient colour faded from her face, as she spread the little manuscript open on her lap. The extracts from the will stood highest on the page; they were limited to those few touching words in which the dead father begged his children’s forgiveness for the stain on their birth, and implored them to remember the untiring love and care by which he had striven to atone for it. The extract from the letter to Mr. Pendril came next. She read the last melancholy sentences aloud to herself: “For God’s sake come on the day when you receive this — come and relieve me from the dreadful thought that my two darling girls are at this moment unprovided for. If anything happened to me, and if my desire to do their mother justice ended (through my miserable ignorance of the law) in leaving Norah and Magdalen disinherited, I should not rest in my grave!” Under these lines again, and close at the bottom of the page, was written the terrible commentary on that letter which had fallen from Mr. Pendril’s lips: “Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.”

Helpless when those words were spoken — helpless still, after all that she had resolved, after all that she had sacrificed. The assertion of her natural rights and her sister’s, sanctioned by the direct expression of her father’s last wishes; the recall of Frank from China; the justification of her desertion of Norah — all hung on her desperate purpose of recovering the lost inheritance, at any risk, from the man who had beggared and insulted his brother’s children. And that man was still a shadow to her! So little did she know of him that she was even ignorant at that moment of his place of abode.

She rose and paced the room with the noiseless, negligent grace of a wild creature of the forest in its cage. “How can I reach him in the dark?” she said to herself. “How can I find out — ?” She stopped suddenly. Before the question had shaped itself to an end in her thoughts, Captain Wragge was back in her mind again.

A man well used to working in the dark; a man with endless resources of audacity and cunning; a man who would hesitate at no mean employment that could be offered to him, if it was employment that filled his pockets — was this the instrument for which, in its present need, her hand was waiting? Two of the necessities to be met, before she could take a single step in advance, were plainly present to her — the necessity of knowing more of her father’s brother than she knew now; and the necessity of throwing him off his guard by concealing herself personally during the process of inquiry. Resolutely self-dependent as she was, the inevitable spy’s work at the outset must be work delegated to another. In her position, was there any ready human creature within reach but the vagabond downstairs? Not one. She thought of it anxiously, she thought of it long. Not one! There the choice was, steadily confronting her: the choice of taking the Rogue, or of turning her back on the Purpose.