Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (404 page)

She paused in the middle of the room. “What can he do at his worst?” she said to herself. “Cheat me. Well! if my money governs him for me, what then? Let him have my money!” She returned mechanically to her place by the window. A moment more decided her. A moment more, and she took the first fatal step downward-she determined to face the risk, and try Captain Wragge.

At nine o’clock the landlady knocked at Magdalen’s door, and informed her (with the captain’s kind compliments) that breakfast was ready.

She found Mrs. Wragge alone, attired in a voluminous brown holland wrapper, with a limp cape and a trimming of dingy pink ribbon. The ex-waitress at Darch’s Dining-rooms was absorbed in the contemplation of a large dish, containing a leathery-looking substance of a mottled yellow colour, profusely sprinkled with little black spots.

“There it is!” said Mrs. Wragge. “Omelette with herbs. The landlady helped me. And that’s what we’ve made of it. Don’t you ask the captain for any when he comes in — don’t, there’s a good soul. It isn’t nice. We had some accidents with it. It’s been under the grate. It’s been spilled on the stairs. It’s scalded the landlady’s youngest boy — he went and sat on it. Bless you, it isn’t half as nice as it looks! Don’t you ask for any. Perhaps he won’t notice if you say nothing about it. What do you think of my wrapper? I should so like to have a white one. Have you got a white one? How is it trimmed? Do tell me!”

The formidable entrance of the captain suspended the next question on her lips. Fortunately for Mrs. Wragge, her husband was far too anxious for the promised expression of Magdalen’s decision to pay his customary attention to questions of cookery. When breakfast was over, he dismissed Mrs. Wragge, and merely referred to the omelette by telling her that she had his full permission to “give it to the dogs.”

“How does my little proposal look by daylight?” he asked, placing chairs for Magdalen and himself. “Which is it to be: ‘Captain Wragge, take charge of me?’ or, ‘Captain Wragge, good-morning?’”

“You shall hear directly,” replied Magdalen. “I have something to say first. I told you, last night, that I had another object in view besides the object of earning my living on the stage — ”

“I beg your pardon,” interposed Captain Wragge. “Did you say, earning your living?”

“Certainly. Both my sister and myself must depend on our own exertions to gain our daily bread.”

“What!!!” cried the captain, starting to his feet. “The daughters of my wealthy and lamented relative by marriage reduced to earn their own living? Impossible — wildly, extravagantly impossible!” He sat down again, and looked at Magdalen as if she had inflicted a personal injury on him.

“You are not acquainted with the full extent of our misfortune,” she said, quietly. “I will tell you what has happened before I go any further.” She told him at once, in the plainest terms she could find, and with as few details as possible.

Captain Wragge’s profound bewilderment left him conscious of but one distinct result produced by the narrative on his own mind. The lawyer’s offer of Fifty Pounds Reward for the missing young lady ascended instantly to a place in his estimation which it had never occupied until that moment.

“Do I understand,” he inquired, “that you are entirely deprived of present resources?”

“I have sold my jewelry and my dresses,” said Magdalen, impatient of his mean harping on the pecuniary string. “If my want of experience keeps me back in a theater, I can afford to wait till the stage can afford to pay me.”

Captain Wragge mentally appraised the rings, bracelets, and necklaces, the silks, satins, and laces of the daughter of a gentleman of fortune, at — say, a third of their real value. In a moment more, the Fifty Pounds Reward suddenly sank again to the lowest depths in the deep estimation of this judicious man.

“Just so,” he said, in his most business-like manner. “There is not the least fear, my dear girl, of your being kept back in a theater, if you possess present resources, and if you profit by my assistance.”

“I must accept more assistance than you have already offered — or none,” said Magdalen. “I have more serious difficulties before me than the difficulty of leaving York, and the difficulty of finding my way to the stage.”

“You don’t say so! I am all attention; pray explain yourself!”

She considered her next words carefully before they passed her lips.

“There are certain inquiries,” she said, “which I am interested in making. If I undertook them myself, I should excite the suspicion of the person inquired after, and should learn little or nothing of what I wish to know. If the inquiries could be made by a stranger, without my being seen in the matter, a service would be rendered me of much greater importance than the service you offered last night.”

Captain Wragge’s vagabond face became gravely and deeply attentive.

“May I ask,” he said, “what the nature of the inquiries is likely to be?”

Magdalen hesitated. She had necessarily mentioned Michael Vanstone’s name in informing the captain of the loss of her inheritance. She must inevitably mention it to him again if she employed his services. He would doubtless discover it for himself, by a plain process of inference, before she said many words more, frame them as carefully as she might. Under these circumstances, was there any intelligible reason for shrinking from direct reference to Michael Vanstone? No intelligible reason — and yet she shrank.

“For instance,” pursued Captain Wragge, “are they inquiries about a man or a woman; inquiries about an enemy or a friend — ?”

“An enemy,” she answered, quickly.

Her reply might still have kept the captain in the dark — but her eyes enlightened him. “Michael Vanstone!” thought the wary Wragge. “She looks dangerous; I’ll feel my way a little further.”

“With regard, now, to the person who is the object of these inquiries,” he resumed. “Are you thoroughly clear in your own mind about what you want to know?”

“Perfectly clear,” replied Magdalen. “I want to know where he lives, to begin with.”

“Yes. And after that?”

“I want to know about his habits; about who the people are whom he associates with; about what he does with his money — ” She considered a little. “And one thing more,” she said; “I want to know whether there is any woman about his house — a relation, or a housekeeper — who has an influence over him.”

“Harmless enough, so far,” said the captain. “What next?”

“Nothing. The rest is my secret.”

The clouds on Captain Wragge’s countenance began to clear away again. He reverted, with his customary precision, to his customary choice of alternatives. “These inquiries of hers,” he thought, “mean one of two things — Mischief, or Money! If it’s Mischief, I’ll slip through her fingers. If it’s Money, I’ll make myself useful, with a view to the future.”

Magdalen’s vigilant eyes watched the progress of his reflections suspiciously. “Captain Wragge,” she said, “if you want time to consider, say so plainly.”

“I don’t want a moment,” replied the captain. “Place your departure from York, your dramatic career, and your private inquiries under my care. Here I am, unreservedly at your disposal. Say the word — do you take me?”

Her heart beat fast; her lips turned dry — but she said the word.

“I do.”

There was a pause. Magdalen sat silent, struggling with the vague dread of the future which had been roused in her mind by her own reply. Captain Wragge, on his side, was apparently absorbed in the consideration of a new set of alternatives. His hands descended into his empty pockets, and prophetically tested their capacity as receptacles for gold and silver. The brightness of the precious metals was in his face, the smoothness of the precious metals was in his voice, as he provided himself with a new supply of words, and resumed the conversation.

“The next question,” he said, “is the question of time. Do these confidential investigations of ours require immediate attention — or can they wait?”

“For the present, they can wait,” replied Magdalen. “I wish to secure my freedom from all interference on the part of my friends before the inquiries are made.”

“Very good. The first step toward accomplishing that object is to beat our retreat — excuse a professional metaphor from a military man — to beat our retreat from York to-morrow. I see my way plainly so far; but I am all abroad, as we used to say in the militia, about my marching orders afterward. The next direction we take ought to be chosen with an eye to advancing your dramatic views. I am all ready, when I know what your views are. How came you to think of the theater at all? I see the sacred fire burning in you; tell me, who lit it?”

Magdalen could only answer him in one way. She could only look back at the days that were gone forever, and tell him the story of her first step toward the stage at Evergreen Lodge. Captain Wragge listened with his usual politeness; but he evidently derived no satisfactory impression from what he heard. Audiences of friends were audiences whom he privately declined to trust; and the opinion of the stage-manager was the opinion of a man who spoke with his fee in his pocket and his eye on a future engagement.

“Interesting, deeply interesting,” he said, when Magdalen had done. “But not conclusive to a practical man. A specimen of your abilities is necessary to enlighten me. I have been on the stage myself; the comedy of the Rivals is familiar to me from beginning to end. A sample is all I want, if you have not forgotten the words — a sample of ‘Lucy,’ and a sample of ‘Julia.’”

“I have not forgotten the words,” said Magdalen, sorrowfully; “and I have the little books with me in which my dialogue was written out. I have never parted with them; they remind me of a time — ” Her lip trembled, and a pang of the heart-ache silenced her.

“Nervous,” remarked the captain, indulgently. “Not at all a bad sign. The greatest actresses on the stage are nervous. Follow their example, and get over it. Where are the parts? Oh, here they are! Very nicely written, and remarkably clean. I’ll give you the cues — it will all be over (as the dentists say) in no time. Take the back drawing-room for the stage, and take me for the audience. Tingle goes the bell; up runs the curtain; order in the gallery, silence in the pit — enter Lucy!”

She tried hard to control herself; she forced back the sorrow — the innocent, natural, human sorrow for the absent and the dead — pleading hard with her for the tears that she refused. Resolutely, with cold, clinched hands, she tried to begin. As the first familiar words passed her lips, Frank came back to her from the sea, and the face of her dead father looked at her with the smile of happy old times. The voices of her mother and her sister talked gently in the fragrant country stillness, and the garden-walks at Combe-Raven opened once more on her view. With a faint, wailing cry, she dropped into a chair; her head fell forward on the table, and she burst passionately into tears.

Captain Wragge was on his feet in a moment. She shuddered as he came near her, and waved him back vehemently with her hand. “Leave me!” she said; “leave me a minute by myself!” The compliant Wragge retired to the front room; looked out of the window; and whistled under his breath. “The family spirit again!” he said. “Complicated by hysterics.”

After waiting a minute or two he returned to make inquiries.

“Is there anything I can offer you?” he asked. “Cold water? burned feathers? smelling salts? medical assistance? Shall I summon Mrs. Wragge? Shall we put it off till to-morrow?”

She started up, wild and flushed, with a desperate self-command in her face, with an angry resolution in her manner.

“No!” she said. “I must harden myself — and I will! Sit down again and see me act.”

“Bravo!” cried the captain. “Dash at it, my beauty — and it’s done!”

She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself — with a raised voice, and a glow like fever in her cheeks. All the artless, girlish charm of the performance in happier and better days was gone. The native dramatic capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped of every softening allurement which had once adorned it. She would have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling. She absolutely electrified Captain Wragge. He forgot his politeness, he forgot his long words. The essential spirit of the man’s whole vagabond life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation. “Who the devil would have thought it? She
can
act, after all!” The instant the words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his ordinary colloquial channels. Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his first compliment. “No,” she said; “I have forced the truth out of you for once. I want no more.”