Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (456 page)

“Does it fit, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount.

The dress dropped from his hands, and the deadly bluish pallor — which every doctor who attended him had warned his housekeeper to dread — overspread his face slowly. Mrs. Lecount had not reckoned on such an answer to her question as she now saw in his cheeks. She hurried round to him, with the smelling-bottle in her hand. He dropped to his knees and caught at her dress with the grasp of a drowning man. “Save me!” he gasped, in a hoarse, breathless whisper. “Oh, Lecount, save me!”

“I promise to save you,” said Mrs. Lecount; “I am here with the means and the resolution to save you. Come away from this place — come nearer to the air.” She raised him as she spoke, and led him across the room to the window. “Do you feel the chill pain again on your left side?” she asked, with the first signs of alarm that she had shown yet. “Has your wife got any eau-de-cologne, any sal-volatile in her room? Don’t exhaust yourself by speaking — point to the place!”

He pointed to a little triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood fixed high in a corner of the room. Mrs. Lecount tried the door: it was locked.

As she made that discovery, she saw his head sink back gradually on the easy-chair in which she had placed him. The warning of the doctors in past years — ”If you ever let him faint, you let him die” — recurred to her memory as if it had been spoken the day before. She looked at the cupboard again. In a recess under it lay some ends of cord, placed there apparently for purposes of packing. Without an instant’s hesitation, she snatched up a morsel of cord, tied one end fast round the knob of the cupboard door, and seizing the other end in both hands, pulled it suddenly with the exertion of her whole strength. The rotten wood gave way, the cupboard doors flew open, and a heap of little trifles poured out noisily on the floor. Without stopping to notice the broken china and glass at her feet, she looked into the dark recesses of the cupboard and saw the gleam of two glass bottles. One was put away at the extreme back of the shelf, the other was a little in advance, almost hiding it. She snatched them both out at once, and took them, one in each hand, to the window, where she could read their labels in the clearer light.

The bottle in her right hand was the first bottle she looked at. It was marked —
Sal-volatile
.

She instantly laid the other bottle aside on the table without looking at it. The other bottle lay there, waiting its turn. It held a dark liquid, and it was labeled — POISON.

CHAPTER II.

MRS. LECOUNT mixed the sal-volatile with water, and administered it immediately. The stimulant had its effect. In a few minutes Noel Vanstone was able to raise himself in the chair without assistance; his colour changed again for the better, and his breath came and went more freely.

“How do you feel now, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount. “Are you warm again on your left side?”

He paid no attention to that inquiry; his eyes, wandering about the room, turned by chance toward the table. To Mrs. Lecount’s surprise, instead of answering her, he bent forward in his chair, and looked with staring eyes and pointing hand at the second bottle which she had taken from the cupboard, and which she had hastily laid aside without paying attention to it. Seeing that some new alarm possessed him, she advanced to the table, and looked where he looked. The labeled side of the bottle was full in view; and there, in the plain handwriting of the chemist at Aldborough, was the one startling word confronting them both — ”Poison.”

Even Mrs. Lecount’s self-possession was shaken by that discovery. She was not prepared to see her own darkest forebodings — the unacknowledged offspring of her hatred for Magdalen — realized as she saw them realized now. The suicide-despair in which the poison had been procured; the suicide-purpose for which, in distrust of the future, the poison had been kept, had brought with them their own retribution. There the bottle lay, in Magdalen’s absence, a false witness of treason which had never entered her mind — treason against her husband’s life!

With his hand still mechanically pointing at the table Noel Vanstone raised his head and looked up at Mrs. Lecount.

“I took it from the cupboard,” she said, answering the look. “I took both bottles out together, not knowing which might be the bottle I wanted. I am as much shocked, as much frightened, as you are.”

“Poison!” he said to himself, slowly. “Poison locked up by my wife in the cupboard in her own room.” He stopped, and looked at Mrs. Lecount once more. “For
me?
” he asked, in a vacant, inquiring tone.

“We will not talk of it, sir, until your mind is more at ease,” said Mrs. Lecount. “In the meantime, the danger that lies waiting in this bottle shall be instantly destroyed in your presence.” She took out the cork, and threw the laudanum out of window, and the empty bottle after it. “Let us try to forget this dreadful discovery for the present,” she resumed; “let us go downstairs at once. All that I have now to say to you can be said in another room.”

She helped him to rise from the chair, and took his arm in her own. “It is well for him; it is well for me,” she thought, as they went downstairs together, “that I came when I did.”

On crossing the passage, she stepped to the front door, where the carriage was waiting which had brought her from Dumfries, and instructed the coachman to put up his horses at the nearest inn, and to call again for her in two hours’ time. This done, she accompanied Noel Vanstone into the sitting-room, stirred up the fire, and placed him before it comfortably in an easy-chair. He sat for a few minutes, warming his hands feebly like an old man, and staring straight into the flame. Then he spoke.

“When the woman came and threatened me in Vauxhall Walk,” he began, still staring into the fire, “you came back to the parlor after she was gone, and you told me — ?” He stopped, shivered a little, and lost the thread of his recollections at that point.

“I told you, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount, “that the woman was, in my opinion, Miss Vanstone herself. Don’t start, Mr. Noel! Your wife is away, and I am here to take care of you. Say to yourself, if you feel frightened, ‘Lecount is here; Lecount will take care of me.’ The truth must be told, sir, however hard to bear the truth may be. Miss Magdalen Vanstone was the woman who came to you in disguise; and the woman who came to you in disguise is the woman you have married. The conspiracy which she threatened you with in London is the conspiracy which has made her your wife. That is the plain truth. You have seen the dress upstairs. If that dress had been no longer in existence, I should still have had my proofs to convince you. Thanks to my interview with Mrs. Bygrave I have discovered the house your wife lodged at in London; it was opposite our house in Vauxhall Walk. I have laid my hand on one of the landlady’s daughters, who watched your wife from an inner room, and saw her put on the disguise; who can speak to her identity, and to the identity of her companion, Mrs. Bygrave; and who has furnished me, at my own request, with a written statement of facts, which she is ready to affirm on oath if any person ventures to contradict her. You shall read the statement, Mr. Noel, if you like, when you are fitter to understand it. You shall also read a letter in the handwriting of Miss Garth — who will repeat to you personally every word she has written to me — a letter formally denying that she was ever in Vauxhall Walk, and formally asserting that those moles on your wife’s neck are marks peculiar to Miss Magdalen Vanstone, whom she has known from childhood. I say it with a just pride — you will find no weak place anywhere in the evidence which I bring you. If Mr. Bygrave had not stolen my letter, you would have had your warning before I was cruelly deceived into going to Zurich; and the proofs which I now bring you, after your marriage, I should then have offered to you before it. Don’t hold me responsible, sir, for what has happened since I left England. Blame your uncle’s bastard daughter, and blame that villain with the brown eye and the green!”

She spoke her last venomous words as slowly and distinctly as she had spoken all the rest. Noel Vanstone made no answer — he still sat cowering over the fire. She looked round into his face. He was crying silently. “I was so fond of her!” said the miserable little creature; “and I thought she was so fond of Me!”

Mrs. Lecount turned her back on him in disdainful silence. “Fond of her!” As she repeated those words to herself, her haggard face became almost handsome again in the magnificent intensity of its contempt.

She walked to a book-case at the lower end of the room, and began examining the volumes in it. Before she had been long engaged in this way, she was startled by the sound of his voice, affrightedly calling her back. The tears were gone from his face; it was blank again with terror when he now turned it toward her.

“Lecount!” he said, holding to her with both hands. “Can an egg be poisoned? I had an egg for breakfast this morning, and a little toast.”

“Make your mind easy, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount. “The poison of your wife’s deceit is the only poison you have taken yet. If she had resolved already on making you pay the price of your folly with your life, she would not be absent from the house while you were left living in it. Dismiss the thought from your mind. It is the middle of the day; you want refreshment. I have more to say to you in the interests of your own safety — I have something for you to do, which must be done at once. Recruit your strength, and you will do it. I will set you the example of eating, if you still distrust the food in this house. Are you composed enough to give the servant her orders, if I ring the bell? It is necessary to the object I have in view for you, that nobody should think you ill in body or troubled in mind. Try first with me before the servant comes in. Let us see how you look and speak when you say, ‘Bring up the lunch.’”

After two rehearsals, Mrs. Lecount considered him fit to give the order, without betraying himself.

The bell was answered by Louisa — Louisa looked hard at Mrs. Lecount. The luncheon was brought up by the house-maid — the house-maid looked hard at Mrs. Lecount. When luncheon was over, the table was cleared by the cook — the cook looked hard at Mrs. Lecount. The three servants were plainly suspicious that something extraordinary was going on in the house. It was hardly possible to doubt that they had arranged to share among themselves the three opportunities which the service of the table afforded them of entering the room.

The curiosity of which she was the object did not escape the penetration of Mrs. Lecount. “I did well,” she thought, “to arm myself in good time with the means of reaching my end. If I let the grass grow under my feet, one or the other of those women might get in my way.” Roused by this consideration, she produced her traveling-bag from a corner, as soon as the last of the servants had entered the room; and seating herself at the end of the table opposite Noel Vanstone, looked at him for a moment, with a steady, investigating attention. She had carefully regulated the quantity of wine which he had taken at luncheon — she had let him drink exactly enough to fortify, without confusing him; and she now examined his face critically, like an artist examining his picture at the end of the day’s work. The result appeared to satisfy her, and she opened the serious business of the interview on the spot.