Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (427 page)

Mrs. Lecount’s smooth cheeks coloured with pleasure. The one assailable place in that cold and secret nature was the place occupied by the memory of the Professor. Her pride in his scientific achievements, and her mortification at finding them but little known out of his own country, were genuine feelings. Never had Captain Wragge burned his adulterated incense on the flimsy altar of human vanity to better purpose than he was burning it now.

“You are very good, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount. “In honouring my husband’s memory, you honour me. But though you kindly treat me on a footing of equality, I must not forget that I fill a domestic situation. I shall feel it a privilege to show you my relics, if you will allow me to ask my master’s permission first.”

She turned to Noel Vanstone; her perfectly sincere intention of making the proposed request, mingling — in that strange complexity of motives which is found so much oftener in a woman’s mind than in a man’s — with her jealous distrust of the impression which Magdalen had produced on her master.

“May I make a request, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount, after waiting a moment to catch any fragments of tenderly-personal talk that might reach her, and after being again neatly baffled by Magdalen — thanks to the camp-stool. “Mr. Bygrave is one of the few persons in England who appreciate my husband’s scientific labours. He honours me by wishing to see my little world of reptiles. May I show it to him?”

“By all means, Lecount,” said Noel Vanstone, graciously. “You are an excellent creature, and I like to oblige you. Lecount’s Tank, Mr. Bygrave, is the only Tank in England — Lecount’s Toad is the oldest Toad in the world. Will you come and drink tea at seven o’clock to-night? And will you prevail on Miss Bygrave to accompany you? I want her to see my house. I don’t think she has any idea what a strong house it is. Come and survey my premises, Miss Bygrave. You shall have a stick and rap on the walls; you shall go upstairs and stamp on the floors, and then you shall hear what it all cost.” His eyes wrinkled up cunningly at the corners, and he slipped another tender speech into Magdalen’s ear, under cover of the all-predominating voice in which Captain Wragge thanked him for the invitation. “Come punctually at seven,” he whispered, “and pray wear that charming hat!”

Mrs. Lecount’s lips closed ominously. She set down the captain’s niece as a very serious drawback to the intellectual luxury of the captain’s society.

“You are fatiguing yourself, sir,” she said to her master. “This is one of your bad days. Let me recommend you to be careful; let me beg you to walk back.”

Having carried his point by inviting the new acquaintances to tea, Noel Vanstone proved to be unexpectedly docile. He acknowledged that he was a little fatigued, and turned back at once in obedience to the housekeeper’s advice.

“Take my arm, sir — take my arm on the other side,” said Captain Wragge, as they turned to retrace their steps. His party-coloured eyes looked significantly at Magdalen while he spoke, and warned her not to stretch Mrs. Lecount’s endurance too far at starting. She instantly understood him; and, in spite of Noel Vanstone’s reiterated assertions that he stood in no need of the captain’s arm, placed herself at once by the housekeeper’s side. Mrs. Lecount recovered her good-humor, and opened another conversation with Magdalen by making the one inquiry of all others which, under existing circumstances, was the hardest to answer.

“I presume Mrs. Bygrave is too tired, after her journey, to come out to-day?” said Mrs. Lecount. “Shall we have the pleasure of seeing her tomorrow?”

“Probably not,” replied Magdalen. “My aunt is in delicate health.”

“A complicated case, my dear madam,” added the captain; conscious that Mrs. Wragge’s personal appearance (if she happened to be seen by accident) would offer the flattest of all possible contradictions to what Magdalen had just said of her. “There is some remote nervous mischief which doesn’t express itself externally. You would think my wife the picture of health if you looked at her, and yet, so delusive are appearances, I am obliged to forbid her all excitement. She sees no society — our medical attendant, I regret to say, absolutely prohibits it.”

“Very sad,” said Mrs. Lecount. “The poor lady must often feel lonely, sir, when you and your niece are away from her?”

“No,” replied the captain. “Mrs. Bygrave is a naturally domestic woman. When she is able to employ herself, she finds unlimited resources in her needle and thread.” Having reached this stage of the explanation, and having purposely skirted, as it were, round the confines of truth, in the event of the housekeeper’s curiosity leading her to make any private inquiries on the subject of Mrs. Wragge, the captain wisely checked his fluent tongue from carrying him into any further details. “I have great hope from the air of this place,” he remarked, in conclusion. “The Iodine, as I have already observed, does wonders.”

Mrs. Lecount acknowledged the virtues of Iodine, in the briefest possible form of words, and withdrew into the innermost sanctuary of her own thoughts. “Some mystery here,” said the housekeeper to herself. “A lady who looks the picture of health; a lady who suffers from a complicated nervous malady; and a lady whose hand is steady enough to use her needle and thread — is a living mass of contradictions I don’t quite understand. Do you make a long stay at Aldborough, sir?” she added aloud, her eyes resting for a moment, in steady scrutiny, on the captain’s face.

“It all depends, my dear madam, on Mrs. Bygrave. I trust we shall stay through the autumn. You are settled at Sea-view Cottage, I presume, for the season?”

“You must ask my master, sir. It is for him to decide, not for me.”

The answer was an unfortunate one. Noel Vanstone had been secretly annoyed by the change in the walking arrangements, which had separated him from Magdalen. He attributed that change to the meddling influence of Mrs. Lecount, and he now took the earliest opportunity of resenting it on the spot.

“I have nothing to do with our stay at Aldborough,” he broke out, peevishly. “You know as well as I do, Lecount, it all depends on
you
. Mrs. Lecount has a brother in Switzerland,” he went on, addressing himself to the captain — ”a brother who is seriously ill. If he gets worse, she will have to go the re to see him. I can’t accompany her, and I can’t be left in the house by myself. I shall have to break up my establishment at Aldborough, and stay with some friends. It all depends on you, Lecount — or on your brother, which comes to the same thing. If it depended on
me
,” continued Mr. Noel Vanstone, looking pointedly at Magdalen across the housekeeper, “I should stay at Aldborough all through the autumn with the greatest pleasure. With the greatest pleasure,” he reiterated, repeating the words with a tender look for Magdalen, and a spiteful accent for Mrs. Lecount.

Thus far Captain Wragge had remained silent; carefully noting in his mind the promising possibilities of a separation between Mrs. Lecount and her master which Noel Vanstone’s little fretful outbreak had just disclosed to him. An ominous trembling in the housekeeper’s thin lips, as her master openly exposed her family affairs before strangers, and openly set her jealously at defiance, now warned him to interfere. If the misunderstanding were permitted to proceed to extremities, there was a chance that the invitation for that evening to Sea-view Cottage might be put off. Now, as ever, equal to the occasion, Captain Wragge called his useful information once more to the rescue. Under the learned auspices of Joyce, he plunged, for the third time, into the ocean of science, and brought up another pearl. He was still haranguing (on Pneumatics this time), still improving Mrs. Lecount’s mind with his politest perseverance and his smoothest flow of language — when the walking party stopped at Noel Vanstone’s door.

“Bless my soul, here we are at your house, sir!” said the captain, interrupting himself in the middle of one of his graphic sentences. “I won’t keep you standing a moment. Not a word of apology, Mrs. Lecount, I beg and pray! I will put that curious point in Pneumatics more clearly before you on a future occasion. In the meantime I need only repeat that you can perform the experiment I have just mentioned to your own entire satisfaction with a bladder, an exhausted receiver, and a square box. At seven o’clock this evening, sir — at seven o’clock, Mrs. Lecount. We have had a remarkably pleasant walk, and a most instructive interchange of ideas. Now, my dear girl, your aunt is waiting for us.”

While Mrs. Lecount stepped aside to open the garden gate, Noel Vanstone seized his opportunity and shot a last tender glance at Magdalen, under shelter of the umbrella, which he had taken into his own hands for that express purpose. “Don’t forget,” he said, with the sweetest smile; “don’t forget, when you come this evening, to wear that charming hat!” Before he could add any last words, Mrs. Lecount glided back to her place, and the sheltering umbrella changed hands again immediately.

“An excellent morning’s work!” said Captain Wragge, as he and Magdalen walked on together to North Shingles. “You and I and Joyce have all three done wonders. We have secured a friendly invitation at the first day’s fishing for it.”

He paused for an answer; and, receiving none, observed Magdalen more attentively than he had observed her yet. Her face had turned deadly pale again; her eyes looked out mechanically straight before her in heedless, reckless despair.

“What is the matter?” he asked, with the greatest surprise. “Are you ill?”

She made no reply; she hardly seemed to hear him.

“Are you getting alarmed about Mrs. Lecount?” he inquired next. “There is not the least reason for alarm. She may fancy she has heard something like your voice before, but your face evidently bewilders her. Keep your temper, and you keep her in the dark. Keep her in the dark, and you will put that two hundred pounds into my hands before the autumn is over.”

He waited again for an answer, and again she remained silent. The captain tried for the third time in another direction.

“Did you get any letters this morning?” he went on. “Is there bad news again from home? Any fresh difficulties with your sister?”

“Say nothing about my sister!” she broke out passionately. “Neither you nor I are fit to speak of her.”

She said those words at the garden-gate, and hurried into the house by herself. He followed her, and heard the door of her own room violently shut to, violently locked and double-locked. Solacing his indignation by an oath, Captain Wragge sullenly went into one of the parlors on the ground-floor to look after his wife. The room communicated with a smaller and darker room at the back of the house by means of a quaint little door with a window in the upper half of it. Softly approaching this door, the captain lifted the white muslin curtain which hung over the window, and looked into the inner room.

There was Mrs. Wragge, with her cap on one side, and her shoes down at heel; with a row of pins between her teeth; with the Oriental Cashmere Robe slowly slipping off the table; with her scissors suspended uncertain in one hand, and her written directions for dressmaking held doubtfully in the other — so absorbed over the invincible difficulties of her employment as to be perfectly unconscious that she was at that moment the object of her husband’s superintending eye. Under other circumstances she would have been soon brought to a sense of her situation by the sound of his voice. But Captain Wragge was too anxious about Magdalen to waste any time on his wife, after satisfying himself that she was safe in her seclusion, and that she might be trusted to remain there.

He left the parlor, and, after a little hesitation in the passage, stole upstairs and listened anxiously outside Magdalen’s door. A dull sound of sobbing — a sound stifled in her handkerchief, or stifled in the bed-clothes — was all that caught his ear. He returned at once to the ground-floor, with some faint suspicion of the truth dawning on his mind at last.

“The devil take that sweetheart of hers!” thought the captain. “Mr. Noel Vanstone has raised the ghost of him at starting.”

CHAPTER V.

WHEN Magdalen appeared in the parlor shortly before seven o’clock, not a trace of discomposure was visible in her manner. She looked and spoke as quietly and unconcernedly as usual.

The lowering distrust on Captain Wragge’s face cleared away at the sight of her. There had been moments during the afternoon when he had seriously doubted whether the pleasure of satisfying the grudge he owed to Noel Vanstone, and the prospect of earning the sum of two hundred pounds, would not be dearly purchased by running the risk of discovery to which Magdalen’s uncertain temper might expose him at any hour of the day. The plain proof now before him of her powers of self-control relieved his mind of a serious anxiety. It mattered little to the captain what she suffered in the privacy of her own chamber, as long as she came out of it with a face that would bear inspection, and a voice that betrayed nothing.