Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (446 page)

The time passed, the room grew darker; and still she slumbered and dreamed. Toward sunset — without any noise inside the house or out to account for it — she started up on the bed, awake again in an instant. The drowsy obscurity of the room struck her with terror. She ran to the window, pushed open the shutters, and leaned far out into the evening air and the evening light. Her eyes devoured the trivial sights on the beach; her ears drank in the welcome murmur of the sea. Anything to deliver her from the waking impression which her dreams had left! No more darkness, no more repose. Sleep that came mercifully to others came treacherously to her. Sleep had only closed her eyes on the future, to open them on the past.

She went down again into the parlor, eager to talk — no matter how idly, no matter on what trifles. The room was empty. Perhaps Mrs. Wragge had gone to her work — perhaps she was too tired to talk. Magdalen took her hat from the table and went out. The sea that she had shrunk from, a few hours since, looked friendly now. How lovely it was in its cool evening blue! What a god-like joy in the happy multitude of waves leaping up to the light of heaven!

She stayed out until the night fell and the stars appeared. The night steadied her.

By slow degrees her mind recovered its balance and she looked her position unflinchingly in the face. The vain hope that accident might defeat the very end for which, of her own free-will, she had ceaselessly plotted and toiled, vanished and left her; self-dissipated in its own weakness. She knew the true alternative, and faced it. On one side was the revolting ordeal of the marriage; on the other, the abandonment of her purpose. Was it too late to choose between the sacrifice of the purpose and the sacrifice of herself? Yes! too late. The backward path had closed behind her. Time that no wish could change, Time that no prayers could recall, had made her purpose a part of herself: once she had governed it; now it governed her. The more she shrank, the harder she struggled, the more mercilessly it drove her on. No other feeling in her was strong enough to master it — not even the horror that was maddening her — the horror of her marriage.

Toward nine o’clock she went back to the house.

“Walking again!” said Mrs. Wragge, meeting her at the door. “Come in and sit down, my dear. How tired you must be!”

Magdalen smiled, and patted Mrs. Wragge kindly on the shoulder.

“You forget how strong I am,” she said. “Nothing hurts me.”

She lit her candle and went upstairs again into her room. As she returned to the old place by her toilet-table, the vain hope in the three days of delay, the vain hope of deliverance by accident, came back to her — this time in a form more tangible than the form which it had hitherto worn.

“Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something may happen to him; something may happen to me. Something serious; something fatal. One of us may die.”

A sudden change came over her face. She shivered, though there was no cold in the air. She started, though there was no noise to alarm her.

“One of us may die. I may be the one.”

She fell into deep thought, roused herself after a while, and, opening the door, called to Mrs. Wragge to come and speak to her.

“You were right in thinking I should fatigue myself,” she said. “My walk has been a little too much for me. I feel tired, and I am going to bed. Good-night.” She kissed Mrs. Wragge and softly closed the door again.

After a few turns backward and forward in the room, she abruptly opened her writing-case and began a letter to her sister. The letter grew and grew under her hands; she filled sheet after sheet of note-paper. Her heart was full of her subject: it was her own story addressed to Norah. She shed no tears; she was composed to a quiet sadness. Her pen ran smoothly on. After writing for more than two hours, she left off while the letter was still unfinished. There was no signature attached to it — there was a blank space reserved, to be filled up at some other time. After putting away the case, with the sheets of writing secured inside it, she walked to the window for air, and stood there looking out.

The moon was waning over the sea. The breeze of the earlier hours had died out. On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded in a deep and awful calm.

Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before her eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death, the Tempter, was busy at her heart. Death, the Tempter, pointed homeward, to the grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven churchyard.

“Nineteen last birthday,” she thought. “Only nineteen!” She moved away from the window, hesitated, and then looked out again at the view. “The beautiful night!” she said, gratefully. “Oh, the beautiful night!”

She left the window and lay down on her bed. Sleep, that had come treacherously before, came mercifully now; came deep and dreamless, the image of her last waking thought — the image of Death.

Early the next morning Mrs. Wragge went into Magdalen’s room, and found that she had risen betimes. She was sitting before the glass, drawing the comb slowly through and through her hair — thoughtful and quiet.

“How do you feel this morning, my dear?” asked Mrs. Wragge. “Quite well again?”

“Yes.”

After replying in the affirmative, she stopped, considered for a moment, and suddenly contradicted herself.

“No,” she said, “not quite well. I am suffering a little from toothache.”

As she altered her first answer in those words she gave a twist to her hair with the comb, so that it fell forward and hid her face.

At breakfast she was very silent, and she took nothing but a cup of tea.

“Let me go to the chemist’s and get something,” said Mrs. Wragge.

“No, thank you.”

“Do let me!”

“No!”

She refused for the second time, sharply and angrily. As usual, Mrs. Wragge submitted, and let her have her own way. When breakfast was over, she rose, without a word of explanation, and went out. Mrs. Wragge watched her from the window and saw that she took the direction of the chemist’s shop.

On reaching the chemist’s door she stopped — paused before entering the shop, and looked in at the window — hesitated, and walked away a little — hesitated again, and took the first turning which led back to the beach.

Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose, she seated herself on the shingle. The only persons who were near to her, in the position she now occupied, were a nursemaid and two little boys. The youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in his hand. After looking at Magdalen for a little while with the quaintest gravity and attention, the boy suddenly approached her, and opened the way to an acquaintance by putting his toy composedly on her lap.

“Look at my ship,” said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen’s knee.

She was not usually patient with children. In happier days she would not have met the boy’s advance toward her as she met it now. The hard despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted and trembled. She put the ship back into the child’s hands and lifted him on her lap.

“Will you give me a kiss?” she said, faintly. The boy looked at his ship as if he would rather have kissed the ship.

She repeated the question — repeated it almost humbly. The child put his hand up to her neck and kissed her.

“If I was your sister, would you love me?” All the misery of her friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured from her in those words.

“Would you love me?” she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the child’s frock.

“Yes,” said the boy. “Look at my ship.”

She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.

“What do you call it?” she asked, trying ha rd to find her way even to the interest of a child.

“I call it Uncle Kirke’s ship,” said the boy. “Uncle Kirke has gone away.”

The name recalled nothing to her memory. No remembrances but old remembrances lived in her now. “Gone?” she repeated absently, thinking what she should say to her little friend next.

“Yes,” said the boy. “Gone to China.”

Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart. She put Kirke’s little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.

As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night renewed itself in her mind. But the sense of relief which the child had brought to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her knee, influenced her still. She was conscious of a dawning hope, opening freshly on her thoughts, as the boy’s innocent eyes had opened on her face when he came to her on the beach. Was it too late to turn back? Once more she asked herself that question, and now, for the first time, she asked it in doubt.

She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting to remove her shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case and addressed these lines to Captain Wragge as fast as her pen could trace them:

“You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this. My resolution has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than I can face. I have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget me. Let us never meet again.”

With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her little white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes to inclose them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had lost its discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole contents of the bag in one handful of papers, and drew them out violently, tearing some and disarranging the folds of others. As she threw them down before her on the table, the first object that met her eye was her own handwriting, faded already with time. She looked closer, and saw the words she had copied from her dead father’s letter — saw the lawyer’s brief and terrible commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of the page:

Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.

Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet. All the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming reproach. She took up the lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and looked at the ink, still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.

The colour that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more. The hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless eyes. She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them back in her bag. She pressed the copy of her father’s letter to her lips, and returned it to its place with the banknotes. When the bag was in her bosom again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands, then deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge. Before the ink was dry, the letter lay in fragments on the floor.

“No!” she said, as the last morsel of the torn paper dropped from her hand. “On the way I go there is no turning back.”

She rose composedly and left the room. While descending the stairs, she met Mrs. Wragge coming up. “Going out again, my dear?” asked Mrs. Wragge. “May I go with you?”

Magdalen’s attention wandered. Instead of answering the question, she absently answered her own thoughts.

“Thousands of women marry for money,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I?”

The helpless perplexity of Mrs. Wragge’s face as she spoke those words roused her to a sense of present things. “My poor dear!” she said; “I puzzle you, don’t I? Never mind what I say — all girls talk nonsense, and I’m no better than the rest of them. Come! I’ll give you a treat. You shall enjoy yourself while the captain is away. We will have a long drive by ourselves. Put on your smart bonnet, and come with me to the hotel. I’ll tell the landlady to put a nice cold dinner into a basket. You shall have all the things you like, and I’ll wait on you. When you are an old, old woman, you will remember me kindly, won’t you? You will say: ‘She wasn’t a bad girl; hundreds worse than she was live and prosper, and nobody blames them.’ There! there! go and put your bonnet on. Oh, my God, what is my heart made of! How it lives and lives, when other girls’ hearts would have died in them long ago!”