Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📖

was what he had said down in the parlor. Up in his bedroom I kept on repeating it in my own mind—with my eyes all the while on the key, which he had moved to the inner side of the door to lock himself in—till the knowledge of what it meant burst on me like a flash of light. I looked at the wall, at the bedhead, at my own two hands—and I shivered as if it was winter time.

“Hours must have passed like minutes while I was up stairs that night. I lost all count of time. When my husband came up from his drinking, he found me in his room.

10.

“I leave the rest untold, and pass on purposely to the next morning.

“No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shal l only say this. I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s hands—at the very time when I first saw, set plainly before me, the way to take his life. He went out toward noon next day, to go his rounds among the public houses; my mind being then strung up to deliver myself from him, for good and all, when he came back at night.

“The things we had used on the previous day were left in the parlor. I was all by myself in the house, free to put in practice the lesson he had taught me. I proved myself an apt scholar. Before the lamps were lit in the street I had my own way prepared (in my bedroom and in his) for laying my own hands on him—after he had locked himself up for the night.

“I don’t remember feeling either fear or doubt through all those hours. I sat down to my bit of supper with no better and no worse an appetite than usual. The only change in me that I can call to mind was that I felt a singular longing to have somebody with me to keep me company. Having no friend to ask in, I went to the street door and stood looking at the people passing this way and that.

“A stray dog, sniffing about, came up to me. Generally I dislike dogs and beasts of all kinds. I called this one in and gave him his supper. He had been taught (I suppose) to sit up on his hind-legs and beg for food; at any rate, that was his way of asking me for more. I laughed—it seems impossible when I look back at it now, but for all that it’s true—I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, at the little beast on his haunches, with his ears pricked up and his head on one side and his mouth watering for the victuals. I wonder whether I was in my right senses? I don’t know.

“When the dog had got all he could get he whined to be let out to roam the streets again.

“As I opened the door to let the creature go his ways, I saw my husband crossing the road to come in. ‘Keep out’ (I says to him); ‘to-night, of all nights, keep out.’ He was too drunk to heed me; he passed by, and blundered his way up stairs. I followed and listened. I heard him open his door, and bang it to, and lock it. I waited a bit, and went up another stair or two. I heard him drop down on to his bed. In a minute more he was fast asleep and snoring.

“It had all happened as it was wanted to happen. In two minutes—without doing one single thing to bring suspicion on myself—I could have smothered him. I went into my own room. I took up the towel that I had laid ready. I was within an inch of it—when there came a rush of something up into my head. I can’t say what it was. I can only say the horrors laid hold of me and hunted me then and there out of the house.

“I put on my bonnet, and slipped the key of the street door into my pocket. It was only half past nine—or maybe a quarter to ten. If I had any one clear notion in my head, it was the notion of running away, and never allowing myself to set eyes on the house or the husband more.

“I went up the street—and came back. I went down the street—and came back. I tried it a third time, and went round and round and round—and came back. It was not to be done The house held me chained to it like a dog to his kennel. I couldn’t keep away from it. For the life of me, I couldn’t keep away from it.

“A company of gay young men and women passed me, just as I was going to let myself in again. They were in a great hurry. ‘Step out,’ says one of the men; ‘the theatre’s close by, and we shall be just in time for the farce.’ I turned about and followed them. Having been piously brought up, I had never been inside a theatre in my life. It struck me that I might get taken, as it were, out of myself, if I saw something that was quite strange to me, and heard something which would put new thoughts into my mind.

“They went in to the pit; and I went in after them.

“The thing they called the farce had begun. Men and women came on to the stage, turn and turn about, and talked, and went off again. Before long all the people about me in the pit were laughing and clapping their hands. The noise they made angered me. I don’t know how to describe the state I was in. My eyes wouldn’t serve me, and my ears wouldn’t serve me, to see and to hear what the rest of them were seeing and hearing. There must have been something, I fancy, in my mind that got itself between me and what was going on upon the stage. The play looked fair enough on the surface; but there was danger and death at the bottom of it. The players were talking and laughing to deceive the people—with murder in their minds all the time. And nobody knew it but me—and my tongue was tied when I tried to tell the others. I got up, and ran out. The moment I was in the street my steps turned back of themselves on the way to the house. I called a cab, and told the man to drive (as far as a shilling would take me) the opposite way. He put me down—I don’t know where. Across the street I saw an inscription in letters of flame over an open door. The man said it was a dancing-place. Dancing was as new to me as play-going. I had one more shilling left; and I paid to go in, and see what a sight of the dancing would do for me. The light from the ceiling poured down in this place as if it was all on fire. The crashing of the music was dreadful. The whirling round and round of men and women in each other’s arms was quite maddening to see. I don’t know what happened to me here. The great blaze of light from the ceiling turned blood-red on a sudden. The man standing in front of the musicians waving a stick took the likeness of Satan, as seen in the picture in our family Bible at home. The whirling men and women went round and round, with white faces like the faces of the dead, and bodies robed in winding-sheets. I screamed out with the terror of it; and some person took me by the arm and put me outside the door. The darkness did me good: it was comforting and delicious—like a cool hand laid on a hot head. I went walking on through it, without knowing where; composing my mind with the belief that I had lost my way, and that I should find myself miles distant from home when morning dawned. After some time I got too weary to go on; and I sat me down to rest on a door-step. I dozed a bit, and woke up. When I got on my feet to go on again, I happened to turn my head toward the door of the house. The number on it was the same number an as ours. I looked again. And behold, it was our steps I had been resting on. The door was our door.

“All my doubts and all my struggles dropped out of my mind when I made that discovery. There was no mistaking what this perpetual coming back to the house meant. Resist it as I might, it was to be.

“I opened the street door and went up stairs, and heard him sleeping his heavy sleep, exactly as I had heard him when I went out. I sat down on my bed and took off my bonnet, quite quiet in myself, because I knew it was to be. I damped the towel, and put it ready, and took a turn in the room.

“It was just the dawn of day. The sparrows were chirping among the trees in the square hard by.

“I drew up my blind; the faint light spoke to me as if in words, ‘Do it now, before I get brighter, and show too much.’

“I listened. The friendly silence had a word for me too: ‘Do it now, and trust the secret to Me.’

“I waited till the church clock chimed before striking the hour. At the first stroke—without touching the lock of his door, without setting foot in his room—I had the towel over his face. Before the last stroke he had ceased struggling. When the hum of the bell through the morning silence was still and dead, he was still and dead with it.

11.

“The rest of this history is counted in my mind by four days—Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. After that it all fades off like, and the new years come with a strange look, being the years of a new life.

“What about the old life first? What did I feel, in the horrid quiet of the morning, when I had done it?

“I don’t know what I felt. I can’t remember it, or I can’t tell it, I don’t know which. I can write the history of the four days, and that’s all.

“Wednesday.—I gave the alarm toward noon. Hours before, I had put things straight and fit to be seen. I had only to call for help, and to leave the people to do as they pleased. The neighbors came in, and then the police. They knocked, uselessly, at his door. Then they broke it open, and found him dead in his bed.

“Not the ghost of a suspicion of me entered the mind of any one. There was no fear of human justice finding me out: my one unutterable dread was dread of an Avenging Providence.

I had a short sleep that night, and a dream, in which I did the deed over again. For a time my mind was busy with thoughts of confessing to the police, and of giving myself up. If I had not belonged to a respectable family, I should have done it. From generation to generation there had been no stain on our good name. It would be death to my father, and disgrace to all my family, if I owned what I had done, and suffered for it on the public scaffold. I prayed to be guided; and I had a revelation, toward morning, of what to do.

“I was commanded, in a vision, to