Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (973 page)

“Questions of the Second Group: relating to the Wife’s Confession. First Question: What prevented Dexter from destroying the letter, when he first discovered it under the dead woman’s pillow?

“Answer: The same motives which led him to resist the seizure of the Diary, and to give his evidence in the prisoner’s favor at the Trial, induced him to preserve the letter until the verdict was known. Looking back once more at his last words (as taken down by Mr. Benjamin), we may infer that if the verdict had been Guilty, he would not have hesitated to save the innocent husband by producing the wife’s confession. There are degrees in all wickedness. Dexter was wicked enough to suppress the letter, which wounded his vanity by revealing him as an object for loathing and contempt — but he was not wicked enough deliberately to let an innocent man perish on the scaffold. He was capable of exposing the rival whom he hated to the infamy and torture of a public accusation of murder; but, in the event of an adverse verdict, he shrank before the direr cruelty of letting him be hanged. Reflect, in this connection, on what he must have suffered, villain as he was, when he first read the wife’s confession. He had calculated on undermining her affection for her husband — and whither had his calculations led him? He had driven the woman whom he loved to the last dreadful refuge of death by suicide! Give these considerations their due weight; and you will understand that some little redeeming virtue might show itself, as the result even of
this
man’s remorse.

“Second Question: What motive influenced Miserrimus Dexter’s conduct, when Mrs. (Valeria) Macallan informed him that she proposed reopening the inquiry into the poisoning at Gleninch?

“Answer: In all probability, Dexter’s guilty fears suggested to him that he might have been watched on the morning when he secretly entered the chamber in which the first Mrs. Eustace lay dead. Feeling no scruples himself to restrain him from listening at doors and looking through keyholes, he would be all the more ready to suspect other people of the same practices. With this dread in him, it would naturally occur to his mind that Mrs. Valeria might meet with the person who had watched him, and might hear all that the person had discovered — unless he led her astray at the outset of her investigations. Her own jealous suspicions of Mrs. Beauly offered him the chance of easily doing this. And he was all the readier to profit by the chance, being himself animated by the most hostile feeling toward that lady. He knew her as the enemy who destroyed the domestic peace of the mistress of the house; he loved the mistress of the house — and he hated her enemy accordingly. The preservation of his guilty secret, and the persecution of Mrs. Beauly: there you have the greater and the lesser motive of his conduct in his relations with Mrs. Eustace the second!”*

* Note by the writer of the Narrative:

Look back for a further illustration of this point of view to the scene at Benjamin’s house (Chapter XXXV.), where Dexter, in a moment of ungovernable agitation, betrays his own secret to Valeria.

Benjamin laid down his notes, and took off his spectacles.

“We have not thought it necessary to go further than this,” he said. “Is there any point you can think of that is still left unexplained?”

I reflected. There was no point of any importance left unexplained that I could remember. But there was one little matter (suggested by the recent allusions to Mrs. Beauly) which I wished (if possible) to have thoroughly cleared up.

“Have you and Mr. Playmore ever spoken together on the subject of my husband’s former attachment to Mrs. Beauly?” I asked. “Has Mr. Playmore ever told you why Eustace did not marry her, after the Trial?”

“I put that question to Mr. Playmore myself,” said Benjamin. “He answered it easily enough. Being your husband’s confidential friend and adviser, he was consulted when Mr. Eustace wrote to Mrs. Beauly, after the Trial; and he repeated the substance of the letter, at my request. Would you like to hear what I remember of it, in my turn?”

I owned that I should like to hear it. What Benjamin thereupon told me, exactly coincided with what Miserrimus Dexter had told me — as related in the thirtieth chapter of my narrative. Mrs. Beauly had been a witness of the public degradation of my husband. That was enough in itself to prevent him from marrying her: He broke off with
her
for the same reason which had led him to separate himself from
me.
Existence with a woman who knew that he had been tried for his life as a murderer was an existence which he had not resolution enough to face. The two accounts agreed in every particular. At last my jealous curiosity was pacified; and Benjamin was free to dismiss the past from further consideration, and to approach the more critical and more interesting topic of the future.

His first inquiries related to Eustace. He asked if my husband had any suspicion of the proceedings which had taken place at Gleninch.

I told him what had happened, and how I had contrived to put off the inevitable disclosure for a time.

My old friend’s face cleared up as he listened to me.

“This will be good news for Mr. Playmore,” he said. “Our excellent friend, the lawyer, is sorely afraid that our discoveries may compromise your position with your husband. On the one hand, he is naturally anxious to spare Mr. Eustace the distress which he must certainly feel, if he read his first wife’s confession. On the other hand, it is impossible, in justice (as Mr. Playmore puts it) to the unborn children of your marriage, to suppress a document which vindicates the memory of their father from the aspersion that the Scotch Verdict might otherwise cast on it.”

I listened attentively. Benjamin had touched on a trouble which was still secretly preying on my mind.

“How does Mr. Playmore propose to meet the difficulty?” I asked.

“He can only meet it in one way,” Benjamin replied. “He proposes to seal up the original manuscript of the letter, and to add to it a plain statement of the circumstances under which it was discovered, supported by your signed attestation and mine, as witnesses to the fact. This done, he must leave it to you to take your husband into your confidence, at your own time. It will then be for Mr. Eustace to decide whether he will open the inclosure — or whether he will leave it, with the seal unbroken, as an heirloom to his children, to be made public or not, at their discretion, when they are of an age to think for themselves. Do you consent to this, my dear? Or would you prefer that Mr. Playmore should see your husband, and act for you in the matter?”

I decided, without hesitation, to take the responsibility on myself. Where the question of guiding Eustace’s decision was concerned, I considered my influence to be decidedly superior to the influence of Mr. Playmore. My choice met with Benjamin’s full approval. He arranged to write to Edinburgh, and relieve the lawyer’s anxieties by that day’s post.

The one last thing now left to be settled related to our plans for returning to England. The doctors were the authorities on this subject. I promised to consult them about it at their next visit to Eustace.

“Have you anything more to say to me?” Benjamin inquired, as he opened his writing-case.

I thought of Miserrimus Dexter and Ariel; and I inquired if he had heard any news of them lately. My old friend sighed, and warned me that I had touched on a painful subject.

“The best thing that can happen to that unhappy man is likely to happen,” he said. “The one change in him is a change that threatens paralysis. You may hear of his death before you get back to England.”

“And Ariel?” I asked.

“Quite unaltered,” Benjamin answered. “Perfectly happy so long as she is with ‘the Master.’ From all I can hear of her, poor soul, she doesn’t reckon Dexter among moral beings. She laughs at the idea of his dying; and she waits patiently, in the firm persuasion that he will recognise her again.”

Benjamin’s news saddened and silenced me. I left him to his letter.

CHAPTER L.

THE LAST OF THE STORY.

In ten days more we returned to England, accompanied by Benjamin.

Mrs. Macallan’s house in London offered us ample accommodation. We gladly availed ourselves of her proposal, when she invited us to stay with her until our child was born, and our plans for the future were arranged.

The sad news from the asylum (for which Benjamin had prepared my mind at Paris) reached me soon after our return to England. Miserrimus Dexter’s release from the burden of life had come to him by slow degrees. A few hours before he breathed his last he rallied for a while, and recognised Ariel at his bedside. He feebly pronounced her name, and looked at her, and asked for me. They thought of sending for me, but it was too late. Before the messenger could be dispatched, he said, with a touch of his old self-importance, “Silence, all of you! my brains are weary; I am going to sleep.” He closed his eyes in slumber, and never awoke again. So for this man too the end came mercifully, without grief or pain! So that strange and many-sided life — with its guilt and its misery, its fitful flashes of poetry and humor, its fantastic gayety, cruelty, and vanity — ran its destined course, and faded out like a dream!

Alas for Ariel! She had lived for the Master — what more could she do, now the Master was gone? She could die for him.

They had mercifully allowed her to attend the funeral of Miserrimus Dexter — in the hope that the ceremony might avail to convince her of his death. The anticipation was not realized; she still persisted in denying that “the Master” had left her. They were obliged to restrain the poor creature by force when the coffin was lowered into the grave; and they could only remove her from the cemetery by the same means when the burial-service was over. From that time her life alternated, for a few weeks, between fits of raving delirium and intervals of lethargic repose. At the annual ball given in the asylum, when the strict superintendence of the patients was in some degree relaxed, the alarm was raised, a little before midnight, that Ariel was missing. The nurse in charge had left her asleep, and had yielded to the temptation of going downstairs to look at the dancing. When the woman returned to her post, Ariel was gone. The presence of strangers, and the confusion incidental to the festival, offered her facilities for escaping which would not have presented themselves at any other time. That night the search for her proved to be useless. The next morning brought with it the last touching and terrible tidings of her. She had strayed back to the burial-ground; and she had been found toward sunrise, dead of cold and exposure, on Miserrimus Dexter’s grave. Faithful to the last, Ariel had followed the Master! Faithful to the last, Ariel had died on the Master’s grave!

Having written these sad words, I turn willingly to a less painful theme.

Events had separated me from Major Fitz-David, after the date of the dinner-party which had witnessed my memorable meeting with Lady Clarinda. From that time I heard little or nothing of the Major; and I am ashamed to say I had almost entirely forgotten him — when I was reminded of the modern Don Juan by the amazing appearance of wedding-cards, addressed to me at my mother-in-law’s house! The Major had settled in life at last. And, more wonderful still, the Major had chosen as the lawful ruler of his household and himself — ”the future Queen of Song,” the round-eyed, overdressed young lady with the strident soprano voice!

We paid our visit of congratulation in due form; and we really did feel for Major Fitz-David.

The ordeal of marriage had so changed my gay and gallant admirer of former times that I hardly knew him again. He had lost all his pretensions to youth: he had become, hopelessly and undisguisedly, an old man. Standing behind the chair on which his imperious young wife sat enthroned, he looked at her submissively between every two words that he addressed to me, as if he waited for her permission to open his lips and speak. Whenever she interrupted him — and she did it, over and over again, without ceremony — he submitted with a senile docility and admiration, at once absurd and shocking to see.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” he said to me (in his wife’s hearing!). “What a figure, and what a voice! You remember her voice? It’s a loss, my dear lady, an irretrievable loss, to the operatic stage! Do you know, when I think what that grand creature might have done, I sometimes ask myself if I really had any right to marry her. I feel, upon my honour I feel, as if I had committed a fraud on the public!”

As for the favored object of this quaint mixture of admiration and regret, she was pleased to receive me graciously, as an old friend. While Eustace was talking to the Major, the bride drew me aside out of their hearing, and explained her motives for marrying, with a candor which was positively shameless.