Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (438 page)

“I suppose I may have the happiness of seeing Miss Bygrave to-morrow?” said Noel Vanstone, turning round at the door.

“We must be careful,” replied Captain Wragge. “I don’t forbid to-morrow, but I make no promise beyond that. Permit me to remind you that we have got Mrs. Lecount to manage for the next ten days.”

“I wish Lecount was at the bottom of the German Ocean!” exclaimed Noel Vanstone, fervently. “It’s all very well for you to manage her — you don’t live in the house. What am I to do?”

“I’ll tell you to-morrow,” said the captain. “Go out for your walk alone, and drop in here, as you dropped in to-day, at two o’clock. In the meantime, don’t forget those things I want you to send me. Seal them up together in a large envelope. When you have done that, ask Mrs. Lecount to walk out with you as usual; and while she is upstairs putting her bonnet on, send the servant across to me. You understand? Good-morning.”

An hour afterward, the sealed envelope, with its inclosures, reached Captain Wragge in perfect safety. The double task of exactly imitating a strange handwriting, and accurately copying words written in a language with which he was but slightly acquainted, presented more difficulties to be overcome than the captain had anticipated. It was eleven o’clock before the employment which he had undertaken was successfully completed, and the letter to Zurich ready for the post.

Before going to bed, he walked out on the deserted Parade to breathe the cool night air. All the lights were extinguished in Sea-view Cottage, when he looked that way, except the light in the housekeeper’s window. Captain Wragge shook his head suspiciously. He had gained experience enough by this time to distrust the wakefulness of Mrs. Lecount.

CHAPTER IX.

IF Captain Wragge could have looked into Mrs. Lecount’s room while he stood on the Parade watching the light in her window, he would have seen the housekeeper sitting absorbed in meditation over a worthless little morsel of brown stuff which lay on her toilet-table.

However exasperating to herself the conclusion might be, Mrs. Lecount could not fail to see that she had been thus far met and baffled successfully at every point. What was she to do next? If she sent for Mr. Pendril when he came to Aldborough (with only a few hours spared from his business at her disposal), what definite course would there be for him to follow? If she showed Noel Vanstone the original letter from which her note had been copied, he would apply instantly to the writer for an explanation: would expose the fabricated story by which Mrs. Lecount had succeeded in imposing on Miss Garth; and would, in any event, still declare, on the evidence of his own eyes, that the test by the marks on the neck had utterly failed. Miss Vanstone, the elder, whose unexpected presence at Aldborough might have done wonders — whose voice in the hall at North Shingles, even if she had been admitted no further, might have reached her sister’s ears and led to instant results — Miss Vanstone, the elder, was out of the country, and was not likely to return for a month at least. Look as anxiously as Mrs. Lecount might along the course which she had hitherto followed, she failed to see her way through the accumulated obstacles which now barred her advance.

Other women in this position might have waited until circumstances altered, and helped them. Mrs. Lecount boldly retraced her steps, and determined to find her way to her end in a new direction. Resigning for the present all further attempt to prove that the false Miss Bygrave was the true Magdalen Vanstone, she resolved to narrow the range of her next efforts; to leave the actual question of Magdalen’s identity untouched; and to rest satisfied with convincing her master of this simple fact — that the young lady who was charming him at North Shingles, and the disguised woman who had terrified him in Vauxhall Walk, were one and the same person.

The means of effecting this new object were, to all appearance, far less easy of attainment than the means of effecting the object which Mrs. Lecount had just resigned. Here no help was to be expected from others, no ostensibly benevolent motives could be put forward as a blind — no appeal could be made to Mr. Pendril or to Miss Garth. Here the housekeeper’s only chance of success depended, in the first place, on her being able to effect a stolen entrance into Mr. Bygrave’s house, and, in the second place, on her ability to discover whether that memorable alpaca dress from which she had secretly cut the fragment of stuff happened to form part of Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.

Taking the difficulties now before her in their order as they occurred, Mrs. Lecount first resolved to devote the next few days to watching the habits of the inmates of North Shingles, from early in the morning to late at night, and to testing the capacity of the one servant in the house to resist the temptation of a bribe. Assuming that results proved successful, and that, either by money or by stratagem, she gained admission to North Shingles (without the knowledge of Mr. Bygrave or his niece), she turned next to the second difficulty of the two — the difficulty of obtaining access to Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.

If the servant proved corruptible, all obstacles in this direction might be considered as removed beforehand. But if the servant proved honest, the new problem was no easy one to solve.

Long and careful consideration of the question led the housekeeper at last to the bold resolution of obtaining an interview — if the servant failed her — with Mrs. Bygrave herself. What was the true cause of this lady’s mysterious seclusion? Was she a person of the strictest and the most inconvenient integrity? or a person who could not be depended on to preserve a secret? or a person who was as artful as Mr. Bygrave himself, and who was kept in reserve to forward the object of some new deception which was yet to come? In the first two cases, Mrs. Lecount could trust in her own powers of dissimulation, and in the results which they might achieve. In the last case (if no other end was gained), it might be of vital importance to her to discover an enemy hidden in the dark. In any event, she determined to run the risk. Of the three chances in her favor on which she had reckoned at the outset of the struggle — the chance of entrapping Magdalen by word of mouth, the chance of entrapping her by the help of her friends, and the chance of entrapping her by means of Mrs. Bygrave — two had been tried, and two had failed. The third remained to be tested yet; and the third might succeed.

So, the captain’s enemy plotted against him in the privacy of her own chamber, while the captain watched the light in her window from the beach outside.

Before breakfast the next morning, Captain Wragge posted the forged letter to Zurich with his own hand. He went back to North Shingles with his mind not quite decided on the course to take with Mrs. Lecount during the all-important interval of the next ten days.

Greatly to his surprise, his doubts on this point were abruptly decided by Magdalen herself.

He found her waiting for him in the room where the breakfast was laid. She was walking restlessly to and fro, with her head drooping on her bosom and her hair hanging disordered over her shoulders. The moment she looked up on his entrance, the captain felt the fear which Mrs. Wragge had felt before him — the fear that her mind would be struck prostrate again, as it had been struck once already, when Frank’s letter reached her in Vauxhall Walk.

“Is he coming again to-day?” she asked, pushing away from her the chair which Captain Wragge offered, with such violence that she threw it on the floor.

“Yes,” said the captain, wisely answering her in the fewest words. “He is coming at two o’clock.”

“Take me away!” she exclaimed, tossing her hair back wildly from her face. “Take me away before he comes. I can’t get over the horror of marrying him while I am in this hateful place; take me somewhere where I can forget it, or I shall go mad! Give me two days’ rest — two days out of sight of that horrible sea — two days out of prison in this horrible house — two days anywhere in the wide world away from Aldborough. I’ll come back with you! I’ll go through with it to the end! Only give me two days’ escape from that man and everything belonging to him! Do you hear, you villain?” she cried, seizing his arm and shaking it in a frenzy of passion; “I have been tortured enough — I can bear it no longer!”

There was but one way of quieting her, and the captain instantly took it.

“If you will try to control yourself,” he said, “you shall leave Aldborough in an hour’s time.”

She dropped his arm, and leaned back heavily against the wall behind her.

“I’ll try,” she answered, struggling for breath, but looking at him less wildly. “You shan’t complain of me, if I can help it.” She attempted confusedly to take her handkerchief from her apron pocket, and failed to find it. The captain took it out for her. Her eyes softened, and she drew her breath more freely as she received the handkerchief from him. “You are a kinder man than I thought you were,” she said; “I am sorry I spoke so passionately to you just now — I am very, very sorry.” The tears stole into her eyes, and she offered him her hand with the native grace and gentleness of happier days. “Be friends with me again,” she said, pleadingly. “I’m only a girl, Captain Wragge — I’m only a girl!”

He took her hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then opened the door for her to go back to her own room again. There was genuine regret in his face as he showed her that trifling attention. He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life, but he was human; and she had found her way to the lost sympathies in him which not even the self-profanation of a swindler’s existence could wholly destroy. “Damn the breakfast!” he said, when the servant came in for her orders. “Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at the door in an hour’s time.” He went out into the passage, still chafing under a sense of mental disturbance which was new to him, and shouted to his wife more fiercely than ever — ”Pack up what we want for a week’s absence, and be ready in half an hour!” Having issued those directions, he returned to the breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table with an impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own meal. “She has rubbed off the edge of my appetite,” he said to himself, with a forced laugh. “I’ll try a cigar, and a turn in the fresh air.”

If he had been twenty years younger, those remedies might have failed him. But where is the man to be found whose internal policy succumbs to revolution when that man is on the wrong side of fifty? Exercise and change of place gave the captain back into the possession of himself. He recovered the lost sense of the flavour of his cigar, and recalled his wandering attention to the question of his approaching absence from Aldborough. A few minutes’ consideration satisfied his mind that Magdalen’s outbreak had forced him to take the course of all others which, on a fair review of existing emergencies, it was now most desirable to adopt.

Captain Wragge’s inquiries on the evening when he and Magdalen had drunk tea at Sea View had certainly informed him that the housekeeper’s brother possessed a modest competence; that his sister was his nearest living relative; and that there were some unscrupulous cousins on the spot who were anxious to usurp the place in his will which properly belonged to Mrs. Lecount. Here were strong motives to take the housekeeper to Zurich when the false report of her brother’s relapse reached England. But if any idea of Noel Vanstone’s true position dawned on her in the meantime, who could say whether she might not, at the eleventh hour, prefer asserting her large pecuniary interest in her master, to defending her small pecuniary interest at her brother’s bedside? While that question remained undecided, the plain necessity of checking the growth of Noel Vanstone’s intimacy with the family at North Shingles did not admit of a doubt; and of all means of effecting that object, none could be less open to suspicion than the temporary removal of the household from their residence at Aldborough. Thoroughly satisfied with the soundness of this conclusion, Captain Wragge made straight for Sea-view Cottage, to apologize and explain before the carriage came and the departure took place.