Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (570 page)

As she hurried homeward, the leaves parted behind her, and Miss Gwilt stepped softly into the open space. She stood there in triumph, tall, beautiful, and resolute. Her lovely colour brightened while she watched Neelie’s retreating figure hastening lightly away from her over the grass.

“Cry, you little fool!” she said, with her quiet, clear tones, and her steady smile of contempt. “Cry as you have never cried yet! You have seen the last of your sweetheart.”

XII. A SCANDAL AT THE STATION.

An hour later, the landlady at Miss Gwilt’s lodgings was lost in astonishment, and the clamorous tongues of the children were in a state of ungovernable revolt. “Unforeseen circumstances” had suddenly obliged the tenant of the first floor to terminate the occupation of her apartments, and to go to London that day by the eleven o’clock train.

“Please to have a fly at the door at half-past ten,” said Miss Gwilt, as the amazed landlady followed her upstairs. “And excuse me, you good creature, if I beg and pray not to be disturbed till the fly comes.” Once inside the room, she locked the door, and then opened her writing-desk. “Now for my letter to the major!” she said. “How shall I word it?”

A moment’s consideration apparently decided her. Searching through her collection of pens, she carefully selected the worst that could be found, and began the letter by writing the date of the day on a soiled sheet of note-paper, in crooked, clumsy characters, which ended in a blot made purposely with the feather of the pen. Pausing, sometimes to think a little, sometimes to make another blot, she completed the letter in these words:

“HON’D SIR — It is on my conscience to tell you something, which I think you ought to know. You ought to know of the goings-on of Miss, your daughter, with young Mister Armadale. I wish you to make sure, and, what is more, I advise you to be quick about it, if she is going the way you want her to go, when she takes her morning walk before breakfast. I scorn to make mischief, where there is true love on both sides. But I don’t think the young man means truly by Miss. What I mean is, I think Miss only has his fancy. Another person, who shall be nameless betwixt us, has his true heart. Please to pardon my not putting my name; I am only a humble person, and it might get me into trouble. This is all at present, dear sir, from yours,

“A WELL-WISHER.”

“There!” said Miss Gwilt, as she folded the letter up. “If I had been a professed novelist, I could hardly have written more naturally in the character of a servant than that!” She wrote the necessary address to Major Milroy; looked admiringly for the last time at the coarse and clumsy writing which her own delicate hand had produced; and rose to post the letter herself, before she entered next on the serious business of packing up. “Curious!” she thought, when the letter had been posted, and she was back again making her traveling preparations in her own room; “here I am, running headlong into a frightful risk — and I never was in better spirits in my life!”

The boxes were ready when the fly was at the door, and Miss Gwilt was equipped (as becomingly as usual) in her neat traveling costume. The thick veil, which she was accustomed to wear in London, appeared on her country straw bonnet for the first time. “One meets such rude men occasionally in the railway,” she said to the landlady. “And though I dress quietly, my hair is so very remarkable.” She was a little paler than usual; but she had never been so sweet-tempered and engaging, so gracefully cordial and friendly, as now, when the moment of departure had come. The simple people of the house were quite moved at taking leave of her. She insisted on shaking hands with the landlord — on speaking to him in her prettiest way, and sunning him in her brightest smiles. “Come!” she said to the landlady, “you have been so kind, you have been so like a mother to me, you must give me a kiss at parting.” She embraced the children all together in a lump, with a mixture of humour and tenderness delightful to see, and left a shilling among them to buy a cake. “If I was only rich enough to make it a sovereign,” she whispered to the mother, “how glad I should be!” The awkward lad who ran on errands stood waiting at the fly door. He was clumsy, he was frowsy, he had a gaping mouth and a turn-up nose; but the ineradicable female delight in being charming accepted him, for all that, in the character of a last chance. “You dear, dingy John!” she said, kindly, at the carriage door. “I am so poor I have only sixpence to give you — with my very best wishes. Take my advice, John — grow to be a fine man, and find yourself a nice sweetheart! Thank you a thousand times!” She gave him a friendly little pat on the cheek with two of her gloved fingers, and smiled, and nodded, and got into the fly.

“Armadale next!” she said to herself as the carriage drove off.

Allan’s anxiety not to miss the train had brought him to the station in better time than usual. After taking his ticket and putting his portmanteau under the porter’s charge, he was pacing the platform and thinking of Neelie, when he heard the rustling of a lady’s dress behind him, and, turning round to look, found himself face to face with Miss Gwilt.

There was no escaping her this time. The station wall was on his right hand, and the line was on his left; a tunnel was behind him, and Miss Gwilt was in front, inquiring in her sweetest tones whether Mr. Armadale was going to London.

Allan coloured scarlet with vexation and surprise. There he was obviously waiting for the train; and there was his portmanteau close by, with his name on it, already labeled for London! What answer but the true one could he make after that? Could he let the train go without him, and lose the precious hours so vitally important to Neelie and himself? Impossible! Allan helplessly confirmed the printed statement on his portmanteau, and heartily wished himself at the other end of the world as he said the words.

“How very fortunate!” rejoined Miss Gwilt. “I am going to London too. Might I ask you Mr. Armadale (as you seem to be quite alone), to be my escort on the journey?”

Allan looked at the little assembly of travelers, and travelers’ friends, collected on the platform, near the booking-office door. They were all Thorpe Ambrose people. He was probably known by sight, and Miss Gwilt was probably known by sight, to every one of them. In sheer desperation, hesitating more awkwardly than ever, he produced his cigar case. “I should be delighted,” he said, with an embarrassment which was almost an insult under the circumstances. “But I — I’m what the people who get sick over a cigar call a slave to smoking.”

“I delight in smoking!” said Miss Gwilt, with undiminished vivacity and good humor. “It’s one of the privileges of the men which I have always envied. I’m afraid, Mr. Armadale, you must think I am forcing myself on you. It certainly looks like it. The real truth is, I want particularly to say a word to you in private about Mr. Midwinter.”

The train came up at the same moment. Setting Midwinter out of the question, the common decencies of politeness left Allan no alternative but to submit. After having been the cause of her leaving her situation at Major Milroy’s, after having pointedly avoided her only a few days since on the high-road, to have declined going to London in the same carriage with Miss Gwilt would have been an act of downright brutality which it was simply impossible to commit. “Damn her!” said Allan, internally, as he handed his traveling companion into an empty carriage, officiously placed at his disposal, before all the people at the station, by the guard. “You shan’t be disturbed, sir,” the man whispered, confidentially, with a smile and a touch of his hat. Allan could have knocked him down with the utmost pleasure. “Stop!” he said, from the window. “I don’t want the carriage — ” It was useless; the guard was out of hearing; the whistle blew, and the train started for London.

The select assembly of travelers’ friends, left behind on the platform, congregated in a circle on the spot, with the station-master in the centre.

The station-master — otherwise Mr. Mack — was a popular character in the neighbourhood. He possessed two social qualifications which invariably impress the average English mind — he was an old soldier, and he was a man of few words. The conclave on the platform insisted on taking his opinion, before it committed itself positively to an opinion of its own. A brisk fire of remarks exploded, as a matter of course, on all sides; but everybody’s view of the subject ended interrogatively, in a question aimed pointblank at the station-master’s ears.

“She’s got him, hasn’t she?” “She’ll come back ‘Mrs. Armadale,’ won’t she?” “He’d better have stuck to Miss Milroy, hadn’t he?” “Miss Milroy stuck to
him
. She paid him a visit at the great house, didn’t she?” “Nothing of the sort; it’s a shame to take the girl’s character away. She was caught in a thunder-storm close by; he was obliged to give her shelter; and she’s never been near the place since. Miss Gwilt’s been there, if you like, with no thunderstorm to force
her
in; and Miss Gwilt’s off with him to London in a carriage all to themselves, eh, Mr. Mack?” “Ah, he’s a soft one, that Armadale! with all his money, to take up with a red-haired woman, a good eight or nine years older than he is! She’s thirty if she’s a day. That’s what I say, Mr. Mack. What do you say?” “Older or younger, she’ll rule the roast at Thorpe Ambrose; and I say, for the sake of the place, and for the sake of trade, let’s make the best of it; and Mr. Mack, as a man of the world, sees it in the same light as I do, don’t you, sir?”

“Gentlemen,” said the station-master, with his abrupt military accent, and his impenetrable military manner, “she’s a devilish fine woman. And when I was Mr. Armadale’s age, it’s my opinion, if her fancy had laid that way, she might have married Me.”

With that expression of opinion the station-master wheeled to the right, and intrenched himself impregnably in the stronghold of his own office.

The citizens of Thorpe Ambrose looked at the closed door, and gravely shook their heads. Mr. Mack had disappointed them. No opinion which openly recognises the frailty of human nature is ever a popular opinion with mankind. “It’s as good as saying that any of
us
might have married her if
we
had been Mr. Armadale’s age!” Such was the general impression on the minds of the conclave, when the meeting had been adjourned, and the members were leaving the station.

The last of the party to go was a slow old gentleman, with a habit of deliberately looking about him. Pausing at the door, this observant person stared up the platform and down the platform, and discovered in the latter direction, standing behind an angle of the wall, an elderly man in black, who had escaped the notice of everybody up to that time. “Why, bless my soul!” said the old gentleman, advancing inquisitively by a step at a time, “it can’t be Mr. Bashwood!”

It
was
Mr. Bashwood — Mr. Bashwood, whose constitutional curiosity had taken him privately to the station, bent on solving the mystery of Allan’s sudden journey to London — Mr. Bashwood, who had seen and heard, behind his angle in the wall, what everybody else had seen and heard, and who appeared to have been impressed by it in no ordinary way. He stood stiffly against the wall, like a man petrified, with one hand pressed on his bare head, and the other holding his hat — he stood, with a dull flush on his face, and a dull stare in his eyes, looking straight into the black depths of the tunnel outside the station, as if the train to London had disappeared in it but the moment before.

“Is your head bad?” asked the old gentleman. “Take my advice. Go home and lie down.”

Mr. Bashwood listened mechanically, with his usual attention, and answered mechanically, with his usual politeness.

“Yes, sir,” he said, in a low, lost tone, like a man between dreaming and waking; “I’ll go home and lie down.”

“That’s right,” rejoined the old gentleman, making for the door. “And take a pill, Mr. Bashwood — take a pill.”

Five minutes later, the porter charged with the business of locking up the station found Mr. Bashwood, still standing bare-headed against the wall, and still looking straight into the black depths of the tunnel, as if the train to London had disappeared in it but a moment since.

“Come, sir!” said the porter; “I must lock up. Are you out of sorts? Anything wrong with your inside? Try a drop of gin-and-bitters.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bashwood, answering the porter, exactly as he had answered the old gentleman; “I’ll try a drop of gin-and-bitters.”

The porter took him by the arm, and led him out. “You’ll get it there,” said the man, pointing confidentially to a public-house; “and you’ll get it good.”

“I shall get it there,” echoed Mr. Bashwood, still mechanically repeating what was said to him; “and I shall get it good.”

His will seemed to be paralyzed; his actions depended absolutely on what other people told him to do. He took a few steps in the direction of the public-house, hesitated, staggered, and caught at the pillar of one of the station lamps near him.