Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (415 page)

“What has happened, sir, in my absence?” she inquired, addressing her master with a look of alarm. “You are pale; you are agitated! Oh, Miss Garth, have you forgotten the caution I gave you in the other room?”

“Miss Garth has forgotten everything,” cried Noel Vanstone, recovering his lost composure on the re-appearance of Mrs. Lecount. “Miss Garth has threatened me in the most outrageous manner. I forbid you to pity either of those two girls any more, Lecount — especially the younger one. She is the most desperate wretch I ever heard of! If she can’t get my money by fair means, she threatens to have it by foul. Miss Garth has told me that to my face. To my face!” he repeated, folding his arms, and looking mortally insulted.

“Compose yourself, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount. “Pray compose yourself, and leave me to speak to Miss Garth. I regret to hear, ma’am, that you have forgotten what I said to you in the next room. You have agitated Mr. Noel; you have compromised the interests you came here to plead; and you have only repeated what we knew before. The language you have allowed yourself to use in my absence is the same language which your pupil was foolish enough to employ when she wrote for the second time to my late master. How can a lady of your years and experience seriously repeat such nonsense? This girl boasts and threatens. She will do this; she will do that. You have her confidence, ma’am. Tell me, if you please, in plain words, what can she do?”

Sharply as the taunt was pointed, it glanced off harmless. Mrs. Lecount had planted her sting once too often. Magdalen rose in complete possession of her assumed character and composedly terminated the interview. Ignorant as she was of what had happened behind her chair, she saw a change in Mrs. Lecount’s look and manner which warned her to run no more risks, and to trust herself no longer in the house.

“I am not in my pupil’s confidence,” she said. “Her own acts will answer your question when the time comes. I can only tell you, from my own knowledge of her, that she is no boaster. What she wrote to Mr. Michael Vanstone was what she was prepared to do — -what, I have reason to think, she was actually on the point of doing, when her plans were overthrown by his death. Mr. Michael Vanstone’s son has only to persist in following his father’s course to find, before long, that I am not mistaken in my pupil, and that I have not come here to intimidate him by empty threats. My errand is done. I leave Mr. Noel Vanstone with two alternatives to choose from. I leave him to share Mr. Andrew Vanstone’s fortune with Mr. Andrew Vanstone’s daughters — or to persist in his present refusal and face the consequences.” She bowed, and walked to the door.

Noel Vanstone started to his feet, with anger and alarm struggling which should express itself first in his blank white face. Before he could open his lips, Mrs. Lecount’s plump hands descended on his shoulders, put him softly back in his chair, and restored the plate of strawberries to its former position on his lap.

“Refresh yourself, Mr. Noel, with a few more strawberries,” she said, “and leave Miss Garth to me.”

She followed Magdalen into the passage, and closed the door of the room after her.

“Are you residing in London, ma’am?” asked Mrs. Lecount.

“No,” replied Magdalen. “I reside in the country.”

“If I want to write to you, where can I address my letter?”

“To the post-office, Birmingham,” said Magdalen, mentioning the place which she had last left, and at which all letters were still addressed to her.

Mrs. Lecount repeated the direction to fix it in her memory, advanced two steps in the passage, and quietly laid her right hand on Magdalen’s arm.

“A word of advice, ma’am,” she said; “one word at parting. You are a bold woman and a clever woman. Don’t be too bold; don’t be too clever. You are risking more than you think for.” She suddenly raised herself on tiptoe and whispered the next words in Magdalen’s ear. “
I hold you in the hollow of my hand!
” said Mrs. Lecount, with a fierce hissing emphasis on every syllable. Her left hand clinched itself stealthily as she spoke. It was the hand in which she had concealed the fragment of stuff from Magdalen’s gown — the hand which held it fast at that moment.

“What do you mean?” asked Magdalen, pushing her back.

Mrs. Lecount glided away politely to open the house door.

“I mean nothing now,” she said; “wait a little, and time may show. One last question, ma’am, before I bid you good-by. When your pupil was a little innocent child, did she ever amuse herself by building a house of cards?”

Magdalen impatiently answered by a gesture in the affirmative.

“Did you ever see her build up the house higher and higher,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount, “till it was quite a pagoda of cards? Did you ever see her open her little child’s eyes wide and look at it, and feel so proud of what she had done already that she wanted to do more? Did you ever see her steady her pretty little hand, and hold her innocent breath, and put one other card on the top, and lay the whole house, the instant afterward, a heap of ruins on the table? Ah, you have seen that. Give her, if you please, a friendly message from me. I venture to say she has built the house high enough already; and I recommend her to be careful before she puts on that other card.”

“She shall have your message,” said Magdalen, with Miss Garth’s bluntness, and Miss Garth’s emphatic nod of the head. “But I doubt her minding it. Her hand is rather steadier than you suppose, and I think she will put on the other card.”

“And bring the house down,” said Mrs. Lecount.

“And build it up again,” rejoined Magdalen. “I wish you good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” said Mrs. Lecount, opening the door. “One last word, Miss Garth. Do think of what I said in the back room! Do try the Golden Ointment for that sad affliction in your eyes!”

As Magdalen crossed the threshold of the door she was met by the postman ascending the house steps with a letter picked out from the bundle in his hand. “Noel Vanstone, Esquire?” she heard the man say, interrogatively, as she made her way down the front garden to the street.

She passed through the garden gates little thinking from what new difficulty and new danger her timely departure had saved her. The letter which the postman had just delivered into the housekeeper’s hands was no other than the anonymous letter addressed to Noel Vanstone by Captain Wragge.

CHAPTER IV.

MRS. LECOUNT returned to the parlor, with the fragment of Magdalen’s dress in one hand, and with Captain Wragge’s letter in the other.

“Have you got rid of her?” asked Noel Vanstone. “Have you shut the door at last on Miss Garth?”

“Don’t call her Miss Garth, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount, smiling contemptuously. “She is as much Miss Garth as you are. We have been favored by the performance of a clever masquerade; and if we had taken the disguise off our visitor, I think we should have found under it Miss Vanstone herself. — Here is a letter for you, sir, which the postman has just left.”

She put the letter on the table within her master’s reach. Noel Vanstone’s amazement at the discovery just communicated to him kept his whole attention concentrated on the housekeeper’s face. He never so much as looked at the letter when she placed it before him.

“Take my word for it, sir,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount, composedly taking a chair. “When our visitor gets home she will put her gray hair away in a box, and will cure that sad affliction in her eyes with warm water and a sponge. If she had painted the marks on her face, as well as she painted the inflammation in her eyes, the light would have shown me nothing, and I should certainly have been deceived. But I saw the marks; I saw a young woman’s skin under that dirty complexion of hers; I heard in this room a true voice in a passion, as well as a false voice talking with an accent, and I don’t believe in one morsel of that lady’s personal appearance from top to toe. The girl herself, in my opinion, Mr. Noel — and a bold girl too.”

“Why didn’t you lock the door and send for the police?” asked Mr. Noel. “My father would have sent for the police. You know, as well as I do, Lecount, my father would have sent for the police.”

“Pardon me, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount, “I think your father would have waited until he had got something more for the police to do than we have got for them yet. We shall see this lady again, sir. Perhaps she will come here next time with her own face and her own voice. I am curious to see what her own face is like. I am curious to know whether what I have heard of her voice in a passion is enough to make me recognise her voice when she is calm. I possess a little memorial of her visit of which she is not aware, and she will not escape me so easily as she thinks. If it turns out a useful memorial, you shall know what it is. If not, I will abstain from troubling you on so trifling a subject. — Allow me to remind you, sir, of the letter under your hand. You have not looked at it yet.”

Noel Vanstone opened the letter. He started as his eye fell on the first lines — hesitated — and then hurriedly read it through. The paper dropped from his hand, and he sank back in his chair. Mrs. Lecount sprang to her feet with the alacrity of a young woman and picked up the letter.

“What has happened, sir?” she asked. Her face altered as she put the question, and her large black eyes hardened fiercely, in genuine astonishment and alarm.

“Send for the police,” exclaimed her master. “Lecount, I insist on being protected. Send for the police!”

“May I read the letter, sir?”

He feebly waved his hand. Mrs. Lecount read the letter attentively, and put it aside on the table, without a word, when she had done.

“Have you nothing to say to me?” asked Noel Vanstone, staring at his housekeeper in blank dismay. “Lecount, I’m to be robbed! The scoundrel who wrote that letter knows all about it, and won’t tell me anything unless I pay him. I’m to be robbed! Here’s property on this table worth thousands of pounds — property that can never be replaced — property that all the crowned heads in Europe could not produce if they tried. Lock me in, Lecount, and send for the police!”

Instead of sending for the police, Mrs. Lecount took a large green paper fan from the chimney-piece, and seated herself opposite her master.

“You are agitated, Mr. Noel,” she said, “you are heated. Let me cool you.”

With her face as hard as ever — with less tenderness of look and manner than most women would have shown if they had been rescuing a half-drowned fly from a milk-jug — she silently and patiently fanned him for five minutes or more. No practiced eye observing the peculiar bluish pallor of his complexion, and the marked difficulty with which he drew his breath, could have failed to perceive that the great organ of life was in this man, what the housekeeper had stated it to be, too weak for the function which it was called on to perform. The heart laboured over its work as if it had been the heart of a worn-out old man.

“Are you relieved, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount. “Can you think a little? Can you exercise your better judgment?”

She rose and put her hand over his heart with as much mechanical attention and as little genuine interest as if she had been feeling the plates at dinner to ascertain if they had been properly warmed. “Yes,” she went on, seating herself again, and resuming the exercise of the fan; “you are getting better already, Mr. Noel. — Don’t ask me about this anonymous letter until you have thought for yourself, and have given your own opinion first.” She went on with the fanning, and looked him hard in the face all the time. “Think,” she said; “think, sir, without troubling yourself to express your thoughts. Trust to my intimate sympathy with you to read them. Yes, Mr. Noel, this letter is a paltry attempt to frighten you. What does it say? It says you are the object of a conspiracy directed by Miss Vanstone. We know that already — the lady of the inflamed eyes has told us. We snap our fingers at the conspiracy. What does the letter say next? It says the writer has valuable information to give you if you will pay for it. What did you call this person yourself just now, sir?”