Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (444 page)

The postmaster was compelled to acknowledge that there could be no objection, provided nothing but a necessary line was added to the address, provided nobody touched the letter but himself, and provided the precious time of the post-office was not suffered to run to waste. As there happened to be nothing particular to do at that moment, he would readily oblige the lady at Mr. Bygrave’s request.

Captain Wragge watched the postmaster’s hands, as they sorted the letters in the box, with breathless eagerness. Was the letter there? Would the hands of the zealous public servant suddenly stop? Yes! They stopped, and picked out a letter from the rest.

“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,’ did you say?” asked the postmaster, keeping the letter in his own hand.

“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,’” replied the captain, “‘Admiral Bartram’s, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.’”

“Ossory, Essex,” chimed in the postmaster, throwing the letter back into the box. “The lady has made no mistake, sir. The address is quite right.”

Nothing but a timely consideration of the heavy debt he owed to appearances prevented Captain Wragge from throwing his tall white hat up in the air as soon as he found the street once more. All further doubt was now at an end. Mrs. Lecount had written to her master — therefore Mrs. Lecount was on her way to Zurich!

With his head higher than ever, with the tails of his respectable frock-coat floating behind him in the breeze, with his bosom’s native impudence sitting lightly on its throne, the captain strutted to the inn and called for the railway time-table. After making certain calculations (in black and white, as a matter of course), he ordered his chaise to be ready in an hour — so as to reach the railway in time for the second train running to London — with which there happened to be no communication from Aldborough by coach.

His next proceeding was of a far more serious kind; his next proceeding implied a terrible certainty of success. The day of the week was Thursday. From the inn he went to the church, saw the clerk, and gave the necessary notice for a marriage by license on the following Monday.

Bold as he was, his nerves were a little shaken by this last achievement; his hand trembled as it lifted the latch of the garden gate. He doctored his nerves with brandy and water before he sent for Magdalen to inform her of the proceedings of the morning. Another outbreak might reasonably be expected when she heard that the last irrevocable step had been taken, and that notice had been given of the wedding-day.

The captain’s watch warned him to lose no time in emptying his glass. In a few minutes he sent the necessary message upstairs. While waiting for Magdalen’s appearance, he provided himself with certain materials which were now necessary to carry the enterprise to its crowning point. In the first place, he wrote his assumed name (by no means in so fine a hand as usual) on a blank visiting-card, and added underneath these words: “Not a moment is to be lost. I am waiting for you at the door — come down to me directly.” His next proceeding was to take some half-dozen envelopes out of the case, and to direct them all alike to the following address: “Thomas Bygrave, Esq., Mussared’s Hotel, Salisbury Street, Strand, London.” After carefully placing the envelopes and the card in his breast-pocket, he shut up the desk. As he rose from the writing-table, Magdalen came into the room.

The captain took a moment to decide on the best method of opening the interview, and determined, in his own phrase, to dash at it. In two words he told Magdalen what had happened, and informed her that Monday was to be her wedding-day.

He was prepared to quiet her, if she burst into a frenzy of passion; to reason with her, if she begged for time; to sympathize with her, if she melted into tears. To his inexpressible surprise, results falsified all his calculations. She heard him without uttering a word, without shedding a tear. When he had done, she dropped into a chair. Her large gray eyes stared at him vacantly. In one mysterious instant all her beauty left her; her face stiffened awfully, like the face of a corpse. For the first time in the captain’s experience of her, fear — all-mastering fear — had taken possession of her, body and soul.

“You are not flinching,” he said, trying to rouse her. “Surely you are not flinching at the last moment?”

No light of intelligence came into her eyes, no change passed over her face. But she heard him — for she moved a little in the chair, and slowly shook her head.

“You planned this marriage of your own freewill,” pursued the captain, with the furtive look and the faltering voice of a man ill at ease. “It was your own idea — not mine. I won’t have the responsibility laid on my shoulders — no! not for twice two hundred pounds. If your resolution fails you; if you think better of it — ?”

He stopped. Her face was changing; her lips were moving at last. She slowly raised her left hand, with the fingers outspread; she looked at it as if it was a hand that was strange to her; she counted the days on it, the days before the marriage.

“Friday, one,” she whispered to herself; “Saturday, two; Sunday, three; Monday — ” Her hands dropped into her lap, her face stiffened again; the deadly fear fastened its paralyzing hold on her once more, and the next words died away on her lips.

Captain Wragge took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“Damn the two hundred pounds!” he said. “Two thousand wouldn’t pay me for this!”

He put the handkerchief back, took the envelopes which he had addressed to himself out of his pocket, and, approaching her closely for the first time, laid his hand on her arm.

“Rouse yourself,” he said, “I have a last word to say to you. Can you listen?”

She struggled, and roused herself — a faint tinge of colour stole over her white cheeks — she bowed her head.

“Look at these,” pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the envelopes. “If I turn these to the use for which they have been written, Mrs. Lecount’s master will never receive Mrs. Lecount’s letter. If I tear them up, he will know by to-morrow’s post that you are the woman who visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word! Shall I tear the envelopes up, or shall I put them back in my pocket?”

There was a pause of dead silence. The murmur of the summer waves on the shingle of the beach and the voices of the summer idlers on the Parade floated through the open window, and filled the empty stillness of the room.

She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to the envelopes.

“Put them back,” she said.

“Do you mean it?” he asked.

“I mean it.”

As she gave that answer, there was a sound of wheels on the road outside.

“You hear those wheels?” said Captain Wragge.

“I hear them.”

“You see the chaise?” said the captain, pointing through the window as the chaise which had been ordered from the inn made its appearance at the garden gate.

“I see it.”

“And, of your own free-will, you tell me to go?”

“Yes. Go!”

Without another word he left her. The servant was waiting at the door with his traveling bag. “Miss Bygrave is not well,” he said. “Tell your mistress to go to her in the parlor.”

He stepped into the chaise, and started on the first stage of the journey to St. Crux.

CHAPTER XII.

TOWARD three o’clock in the afternoon Captain Wragge stopped at the nearest station to Ossory which the railway passed in its course through Essex. Inquiries made on the spot informed him that he might drive to St. Crux, remain there for a quarter of an hour, and return to the station in time for an evening train to London. In ten minutes more the captain was on the road again, driving rapidly in the direction of the coast.

After proceeding some miles on the highway, the carriage turned off, and the coachman involved himself in an intricate network of cross-roads.

“Are we far from St. Crux?” asked the captain, growing impatient, after mile on mile had been passed without a sign of reaching the journey’s end.

“You’ll see the house, sir, at the next turn in the road,” said the man.

The next turn in the road brought them within view of the open country again. Ahead of the carriage, Captain Wragge saw a long dark line against the sky — the line of the sea-wall which protects the low coast of Essex from inundation. The flat intermediate country was intersected by a labyrinth of tidal streams, winding up from the invisible sea in strange fantastic curves — rivers at high water, and channels of mud at low. On his right hand was a quaint little village, mostly composed of wooden houses, straggling down to the brink of one of the tidal streams. On his left hand, further away, rose the gloomy ruins of an abbey, with a desolate pile of buildings, which covered two sides of a square attached to it. One of the streams from the sea (called, in Essex, “backwaters”) curled almost entirely round the house. Another, from an opposite quarter, appeared to run straight through the grounds, and to separate one side of the shapeless mass of buildings, which was in moderate repair, from another, which was little better than a ruin. Bridges of wood and bridges of brick crossed the stream, and gave access to the house from all points of the compass. No human creature appeared in the neighbourhood, and no sound was heard but the hoarse barking of a house-dog from an invisible courtyard.

“Which door shall I drive to, sir?” asked the coachman. “The front or the back?”

“The back,” said Captain Wragge, feeling that the less notice he attracted in his present position, the safer that position might be.

The carriage twice crossed the stream before the coachman made his way through the grounds into a dreary inclosure of stone. At an open door on the inhabited side of the place sat a weather-beaten old man, busily at work on a half-finished model of a ship. He rose and came to the carriage door, lifting up his spectacles on his forehead, and looking disconcerted at the appearance of a stranger.

“Is Mr. Noel Vanstone staying here?” asked Captain Wragge.

“Yes, sir,” replied the old man. “Mr. Noel came yesterday.”

“Take that card to Mr. Vanstone, if you please,” said the captain, “and say I am waiting here to see him.”

In a few minutes Noel Vanstone made his appearance, breathless and eager — absorbed in anxiety for news from Aldborough. Captain Wragge opened the carriage door, seized his outstretched hand, and pulled him in without ceremony.