Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (422 page)

“You shall have no reserve to complain of now,” pursued Magdalen. “I tell you plainly, if events had not happened as they did, you
would
have assisted me. If Michael Vanstone had not died, I should have gone to Brighton, and have found my way safely to his acquaintance under an assumed name. I had money enough with me to live on respectably for many months together. I would have employed that time — I would have waited a whole year, if necessary, to destroy Mrs. Lecount’s influence over him — and I would have ended by getting that influence, on my own terms, into my own hands. I had the advantage of years, the advantage of novelty, the advantage of downright desperation, all on my side, and I should have succeeded. Before the year was out — before half the year was out — you should have seen Mrs. Lecount dismissed by her master, and you should have seen me taken into the house in her place, as Michael Vanstone’s adopted daughter — as the faithful friend — who had saved him from an adventuress in his old age. Girls no older than I am have tried deceptions as hopeless in appearance as mine, and have carried them through to the end. I had my story ready; I had my plans all considered; I had the weak point in that old man to attack in my way, which Mrs. Lecount had found out before me to attack in hers, and I tell you again I should have succeeded.”

“I think you would,” said the captain. “And what next?”

“Mr. Michael Vanstone would have changed his man of business next. You would have succeeded to the place; and those clever speculations on which he was so fond of venturing would have cost him the fortunes of which he had robbed my sister and myself. To the last farthing, Captain Wragge, as certainly as you sit there, to the last farthing! A bold conspiracy, a shocking deception — wasn’t it? I don’t care! Any conspiracy, any deception, is justified to my conscience by the vile law which has left us helpless. You talked of my reserve just now. Have I dropped it at last? Have I spoken out at the eleventh hour?”

The captain laid his hand solemnly on his heart, and launched himself once more on his broadest flow of language.

“You fill me with unavailing regret,” he said. “If that old man had lived, what a crop I might have reaped from him! What enormous transactions in moral agriculture it might have been my privilege to carry on!
Ars longa,
” said Captain Wragge, pathetically drifting into Latin — ”
vita brevis!
Let us drop a tear on the lost opportunities of the past, and try what the present can do to console us. One conclusion is clear to my mind — the experiment you proposed to try with Mr. Michael Vanstone is totally hopeless, my dear girl, in the case of his son. His son is impervious to all common forms of pecuniary temptation. You may trust my solemn assurance,” continued the captain, speaking with an indignant recollection of the answer to his advertisement in the Times, “when I inform you that Mr. Noel Vanstone is emphatically the meanest of mankind.”

“I can trust my own experience as well,” said Magdalen. “I have seen him, and spoken to him — I know him better than you do. Another disclosure, Captain Wragge, for your private ear! I sent you back certain articles of costume when they had served the purpose for which I took them to London. That purpose was to find my way to Noel Vanstone in disguise, and to judge for myself of Mrs. Lecount and her master. I gained my object; and I tell you again, I know the two people in that house yonder whom we have now to deal with better than you do.”

Captain Wragge expressed the profound astonishment, and asked the innocent questions appropriate to the mental condition of a person taken completely by surprise.

“Well,” he resumed, when Magdalen had briefly answered him, “and what is the result on your own mind? There must be a result, or we should not be here. You see your way? Of course, my dear girl, you see your way?”

“Yes,” she said, quickly. “I see my way.”

The captain drew a little nearer to her, with eager curiosity expressed in every line of his vagabond face.

“Go on,” he said, in an anxious whisper; “pray go on.”

She looked out thoughtfully into the gathering darkness, without answering, without appearing to have heard him. Her lips closed, and her clasped hands tightened mechanically round her knees.

“There is no disguising the fact,” said Captain Wragge, warily rousing her into speaking to him. “The son is harder to deal with than the father — ”

“Not in my way,” she interposed, suddenly.

“Indeed!” said the captain. “Well! they say there is a short cut to everything, if we only look long enough to find it. You have looked long enough, I suppose, and the natural result has followed — you have found it.”

“I have not troubled myself to look; I have found it without looking.”

“The deuce you have!” cried Captain Wragge, in great perplexity. “My dear girl, is my view of your present position leading me altogether astray? As I understand it, here is Mr. Noel Vanstone in possession of your fortune and your sister’s, as his father was, and determined to keep it, as his father was?”

“Yes.”

“And here are you — quite helpless to get it by persuasion — quite helpless to get it by law — just as resolute in his ease as you were in his father’s, to take it by stratagem in spite of him?”

“Just as resolute. Not for the sake of the fortune — mind that! For the sake of the right.”

“Just so. And the means of coming at that right which were hard with the father — who was not a miser — are easy with the son, who is?”

“Perfectly easy.”

“Write me down an Ass for the first time in my life!” cried the captain, at the end of his patience. “Hang me if I know what you mean!”

She looked round at him for the first time — looked him straight and steadily in the face.

“I will tell you what I mean,” she said. “I mean to marry him.”

Captain Wragge started up on his knees, and stopped on them, petrified by astonishment.

“Remember what I told you,” said Magdalen, looking away from him again. “I have lost all care for myself. I have only one end in life now, and the sooner I reach it — and die — the better. If — ” She stopped, altered her position a little, and pointed with one hand to the fast-ebbing stream beneath her, gleaming dim in the darkening twilight — ”if I had been what I once was, I would have thrown myself into that river sooner than do what I am going to do now. As it is, I trouble myself no longer; I weary my mind with no more schemes. The short way and the vile way lies before me. I take it, Captain Wragge, and marry him.”

“Keeping him in total ignorance of who you are?” said the captain, slowly rising to his feet, and slowly moving round, so as to see her face. “Marrying him as my niece, Miss Bygrave?”

“As your niece, Miss Bygrave.”

“And after the marriage — ?” His voice faltered, as he began the question, and he left it unfinished.

“After the marriage,” she said, “I shall stand in no further need of your assistance.”

The captain stooped as she gave him that answer, looked close at her, and suddenly drew back, without uttering a word. He walked away some paces, and sat down again doggedly on the grass. If Magdalen could have seen his face in the dying light, his face would have startled her. For the first time, probably, since his boyhood, Captain Wragge had changed colour. He was deadly pale.

“Have you nothing to say to me?” she asked. “Perhaps you are waiting to hear what terms I have to offer? These are my terms; I pay all our expenses here; and when we part, on the day of the marriage, you take a farewell gift away with you of two hundred pounds. Do you promise me your assistance on those conditions?”

“What am I expected to do?” he asked, with a furtive glance at her, and a sudden distrust in his voice.

“You are expected to preserve my assumed character and your own,” she answered, “and you are to prevent any inquiries of Mrs. Lecount’s from discovering who I really am. I ask no more. The rest is my responsibility — not yours.”

“I have nothing to do with what happens — at any time, or in any place — after the marriage?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“I may leave you at the church door if I please?”

“At the church door, with your fee in your pocket.”

“Paid from the money in your own possession?”

“Certainly! How else should I pay it?”

Captain Wragge took off his hat, and passed his handkerchief over his face with an air of relief.

“Give me a minute to consider it,” he said.

“As many minutes as you like,” she rejoined, reclining on the bank in her former position, and returning to her former occupation of tearing up the tufts of grass and flinging them out into the air.

The captain’s reflections were not complicated by any unnecessary divergences from the contemplation of his own position to the contemplation of Magdalen’s. Utterly incapable of appreciating the injury done her by Frank’s infamous treachery to his engagement — an injury which had severed her, at one cruel blow, from the aspiration which, delusion though it was, had been the saving aspiration of her life — Captain Wragge accepted the simple fact of her despair just as he found it, and then looked straight to the consequences of the proposal which she had made to him.

In the prospect
before
the marriage he saw nothing more serious involved than the practice of a deception, in no important degree different — except in the end to be attained by it — from the deceptions which his vagabond life had long since accustomed him to contemplate and to carry out. In the prospect
after
the marriage he dimly discerned, through the ominous darkness of the future, the lurking phantoms of Terror and Crime, and the black gulfs behind them of Ruin and Death. A man of boundless audacity and resource, within his own mean limits; beyond those limits, the captain was as deferentially submissive to the majesty of the law as the most harmless man in existence; as cautious in looking after his own personal safety as the veriest coward that ever walked the earth. But one serious question now filled his mind. Could he, on the terms proposed to him, join the conspiracy against Noel Vanstone up to the point of the marriage, and then withdraw from it, without risk of involving himself in the consequences which his experience told him must certainly ensue?

Strange as it may seem, his decision in this emergency was mainly influenced by no less a person than Noel Vanstone himself. The captain might have resisted the money-offer which Magdalen had made to him — for the profits of the Entertainment had filled his pockets with more than three times two hundred pounds. But the prospect of dealing a blow in the dark at the man who had estimated his information and himself at the value of a five pound note proved too much for his caution and his self-control. On the small neutral ground of self-importance, the best men and the worst meet on the same terms. Captain Wragge’s indignation, when he saw the answer to his advertisement, stooped to no retrospective estimate of his own conduct; he was as deeply offended, as sincerely angry as if he had made a perfectly honourable proposal, and had been rewarded for it by a personal insult. He had been too full of his own grievance to keep it out of his first letter to Magdalen. He had more or less forgotten himself on every subsequent occasion when Noel Vanstone’s name was mentioned. And in now finally deciding the course he should take, it is not too much to say that the motive of money receded, for the first time in his life, into the second place, and the motive of malice carried the day.