Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (795 page)

They stole out, and looked over the stairs into the passage below. After calling uselessly for the second time, Anne appeared, crossed over to the kitchen; and, returning again with the kettle in her hand, closed the drawing-room door.

Hester Dethridge waited impenetrably to receive her next directions. There were no further directions to give. The hideous dramatic representation of the woman’s crime for which Geoffrey had asked was in no respect necessary: the means were all prepared, and the manner of using them was self-evident. Nothing but the opportunity, and the resolution to profit by it, were wanting to lead the way to the end. Geoffrey signed to Hester to go down stairs.

“Get back into the kitchen,” he said, “before she comes out again. I shall keep in the garden. When she goes up into her room for the night, show yourself at the back-door — and I shall know.”

Hester set her foot on the first stair — stopped — turned round — and looked slowly along the two walls of the passage, from end to end — shuddered — shook her head — and went slowly on down the stairs.

“What were you looking for?” he whispered after her.

She neither answered, nor looked back — she went her way into the kitchen.

He waited a minute, and then followed her.

On his way out to the garden, he went into the dining-room. The moon had risen; and the window-shutters were not closed. It was easy to find the brandy and the jug of water on the table. He mixed the two, and emptied the tumbler at a draught. “My head’s queer,” he whispered to himself. He passed his handkerchief over his face. “How infernally hot it is to-night!” He made for the door. It was open, and plainly visible — and yet, he failed to find his way to it. Twice, he found himself trying to walk through the wall, on either side. The third time, he got out, and reached the garden. A strange sensation possessed him, as he walked round and round. He had not drunk enough, or nearly enough, to intoxicate him. His mind, in a dull way, felt the same as usual; but his body was like the body of a drunken man.

The night advanced; the clock of Putney Church struck ten.

Anne appeared again from the drawing room, with her bedroom candle in her hand.

“Put out the lights,” she said to Hester, at the kitchen door; “I am going up stairs.”

She entered her room. The insupportable sense of weariness, after the sleepless night that she had passed, weighed more heavily on her than ever. She locked her door, but forbore, on this occasion, to fasten the bolts. The dread of danger was no longer present to her mind; and there was this positive objection to losing the bolts, that the unfastening of them would increase the difficulty of leaving the room noiselessly later in the night. She loosened her dress, and lifted her hair from her temples — and paced to and fro in the room wearily, thinking. Geoffrey’s habits were irregular; Hester seldom went to bed early.

Two hours at least — more probably three — must pass, before it would be safe to communicate with Sir Patrick by means of the signal in the window. Her strength was fast failing her. If she persisted, for the next three hours, in denying herself the repose which she sorely needed, the chances were that her nerves might fail her, through sheer exhaustion, when the time came for facing the risk and making the effort to escape. Sleep was falling on her even now — and sleep she must have. She had no fear of failing to wake at the needful time. Falling asleep, with a special necessity for rising at a given hour present to her mind, Anne (like most other sensitively organized people) could trust herself to wake at that given hour, instinctively. She put her lighted candle in a safe position, and laid down on the bed. In less than five minutes, she was in a deep sleep.

The church clock struck the quarter to eleven. Hester Dethridge showed herself at the back garden door. Geoffrey crossed the lawn, and joined her. The light of the lamp in the passage fell on his face. She started back from the sight of it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head; and pointed through the dining-room door to the brandy-bottle on the table.

“I’m as sober as you are, you fool!” he said. “Whatever else it is, it’s not that.”

Hester looked at him again. He was right. However unsteady his gait might be, his speech was not the speech, his eyes were not the eyes, of a drunken man.

“Is she in her room for the night?”

Hester made the affirmative sign.

Geoffrey ascended the st airs, swaying from side to side. He stopped at the top, and beckoned to Hester to join him. He went on into his room; and, signing to her to follow him, closed the door.

He looked at the partition wall — without approaching it. Hester waited, behind him.

“Is she asleep?” he asked.

Hester went to the wall; listened at it; and made the affirmative reply.

He sat down. “My head’s queer,” he said. “Give me a drink of water.” He drank part of the water, and poured the rest over his head. Hester turned toward the door to leave him. He instantly stopped her. “
I
can’t unwind the strings.
I
can’t lift up the paper. Do it.”

She sternly made the sign of refusal: she resolutely opened the door to leave him. “Do you want your Confession back?” he asked. She closed the door, stolidly submissive in an instant; and crossed to the partition wall.

She lifted the loose strips of paper on either side of the wall — pointed through the hollowed place — and drew back again to the other end of the room.

He rose and walked unsteadily from the chair to the foot of his bed. Holding by the wood-work of the bed; he waited a little. While he waited, he became conscious of a change in the strange sensations that possessed him. A feeling as of a breath of cold air passed over the right side of his head. He became steady again: he could calculate his distances: he could put his hands through the hollowed place, and draw aside the light curtains, hanging from the hook in the ceiling over the head of her bed. He could look at his sleeping wife.

She was dimly visible, by the light of the candle placed at the other end of her room. The worn and weary look had disappeared from her face. All that had been purest and sweetest in it, in the by-gone time, seemed to be renewed by the deep sleep that held her gently. She was young again in the dim light: she was beautiful in her calm repose. Her head lay back on the pillow. Her upturned face was in a position which placed her completely at the mercy of the man under whose eyes she was sleeping — the man who was looking at her, with the merciless resolution in him to take her life.

After waiting a while, he drew back. “She’s more like a child than a woman to-night,” he muttered to himself under his breath. He glanced across the room at Hester Dethridge. The lighted candle which she had brought up stairs with her was burning near the place where she stood. “Blow it out,” he whispered. She never moved. He repeated the direction. There she stood, deaf to him.

What was she doing? She was looking fixedly into one of the corners of the room.

He turned his head again toward the hollowed place in the wall. He looked at the peaceful face on the pillow once more. He deliberately revived his own vindictive sense of the debt that he owed her. “But for you,” he whispered to himself, “I should have won the race: but for you, I should have been friends with my father: but for you, I might marry Mrs. Glenarm.” He turned back again into the room while the sense of it was at its fiercest in him. He looked round and round him. He took up a towel; considered for a moment; and threw it down again.

A new idea struck him. In two steps he was at the side of his bed. He seized on one of the pillows, and looked suddenly at Hester. “It’s not a drunken brute, this time,” he said to her. “It’s a woman who will fight for her life. The pillow’s the safest of the two.” She never answered him, and never looked toward him. He made once more for the place in the wall; and stopped midway between it and his bed — stopped, and cast a backward glance over his shoulder.

Hester Dethridge was stirring at last.

With no third person in the room, she was looking, and moving, nevertheless, as if she was following a third person along the wall, from the corner. Her lips were parted in horror; her eyes, opening wider and wider, stared rigid and glittering at the empty wall. Step by step she stole nearer and nearer to Geoffrey, still following some visionary Thing, which was stealing nearer and nearer, too. He asked himself what it meant. Was the terror of the deed that he was about to do more than the woman’s brain could bear? Would she burst out screaming, and wake his wife?

He hurried to the place in the wall — to seize the chance, while the chance was his.

He steadied his strong hold on the pillow.

He stooped to pass it through the opening.

He poised it over Anne’s sleeping face.

At the same moment he felt Hester Dethridge’s hand laid on him from behind. The touch ran through him, from head to foot, like a touch of ice. He drew back with a start, and faced her. Her eyes were staring straight over his shoulder at something behind him — looking as they had looked in the garden at Windygates.

Before he could speak he felt the flash of her eyes in
his
eyes. For the third time, she had seen the Apparition behind him. The homicidal frenzy possessed her. She flew at his throat like a wild beast. The feeble old woman attacked the athlete!

He dropped the pillow, and lifted his terrible right arm to brush her from him, as he might have brushed an insect from him.

Even as he raised the arm a frightful distortion seized on his face. As if with an invisible hand, it dragged down the brow and the eyelid on the right; it dragged down the mouth on the same side. His arm fell helpless; his whole body, on the side under the arm, gave way. He dropped on the floor, like a man shot dead.

Hester Dethridge pounced on his prostrate body — knelt on his broad breast — and fastened her ten fingers on his throat.

The shock of the fall woke Anne on the instant. She started up — looked round — and saw a gap in the wall at the head of her bed, and the candle-light glimmering in the next room. Panic-stricken; doubting, for the moment, if she were in her right mind, she drew back, waiting — listening — looking. She saw nothing but the glimmering light in the room; she heard nothing but a hoarse gasping, as of some person labouring for breath. The sound ceased. There was an interval of silence. Then the head of Hester Dethridge rose slowly into sight through the gap in the wall — rose with the glittering light of madness in the eyes, and looked at her.

She flew to the open window, and screamed for help.

Sir Patrick’s voice answered her, from the road in front of the cottage.

“Wait for me, for God’s sake!” she cried.

She fled from the room, and rushed down the stairs. In another moment, she had opened the door, and was out in the front garden.

As she ran to the gate, she heard the voice of a strange man on the other side of it. Sir Patrick called to her encouragingly. “The police man is with us,” he said. “He patrols the garden at night — he has a key.” As he spoke the gate was opened from the outside. She saw Sir Patrick, Arnold, and the policeman. She staggered toward them as they came in — she was just able to say, “Up stairs!” before her senses failed her. Sir Patrick saved her from falling. He placed her on the bench in the garden, and waited by her, while Arnold and the policeman hurried into the cottage.

“Where first?” asked Arnold.

“The room the lady called from,” said the policeman

They mounted the stairs, and entered Anne’s room. The gap in the wall was instantly observed by both of them. They looked through it.

Geoffrey Delamayn’s dead body lay on the floor. Hester Dethridge was kneeling at his head, praying.

EPILOGUE.

A MORNING CALL.

I.

THE newspapers have announced the return of Lord and Lady Holchester to their residence in London, after an absence on the continent of more than six months.