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

“Don’t talk nonsense, Roberts! The woman is obstinate and idle and insolent. She is now in the house, as you know, under a month’s notice to leave. If she doesn’t choose to do her duty for that month I shall refuse to give her a character. Who is to cook the dinner to-day if I give Hester Dethridge leave to go out?”

“Any way, my lady, I am afraid the kitchen-maid will have to do her best to-day. Hester is very obstinate, when the fit takes her—as your ladyship says.”

“If Hester Dethridge leaves the kitchen-maid to cook the dinner, Roberts, Hester Dethridge leaves my service to-day. I want no more words about it. If she persists in setting my orders at defiance, let her bring her account-book into the library, while we are at lunch, and lay it out my desk. I shall be back in the library after luncheon—and if I see the account-book I shall know what it means. In that case, you will receive my directions to settle with her and send her away. Ring the luncheon-bell.”

The luncheon-bell rang. The guests all took the direction of the dining -room; Sir Patrick following, from the far end of the library, with Blanche on his arm. Arrived at the dining-room door, Blanche stopped, and asked her uncle to excuse her if she left him to go in by himself.

“I will be back directly,” she said. “I have forgotten something up stairs.”

Sir Patrick went in. The dining-room door closed; and Blanche returned alone to the library. Now on one pretense, and now on another, she had, for three days past, faithfully fulfilled the engagement she had made at Craig Fernie to wait ten minutes after luncheon-time in the library, on the chance of seeing Anne. On this, the fourth occasion, the faithful girl sat down alone in the great room, and waited with her eyes fixed on the lawn outside.

Five minutes passed, and nothing living appeared but the birds hopping about the grass.

In less than a minute more Blanche’s quick ear caught the faint sound of a woman’s dress brushing over the lawn. She ran to the nearest window, looked out, and clapped her hands with a cry of delight. There was the well-known figure, rapidly approaching her! Anne was true to their friendship—Anne had kept her engagement at last!

Blanche hurried out, and drew her into the library in triumph. “This makes amends, love for every thing! You answer my letter in the best of all ways—you bring me your own dear self.”

She placed Anne in a chair, and, lifting her veil, saw her plainly in the brilliant mid-day light.

The change in the whole woman was nothing less than dreadful to the loving eyes that rested on her. She looked years older than her real age. There was a dull calm in her face, a stagnant, stupefied submission to any thing, pitiable to see. Three days and nights of solitude and grief, three days and nights of unresting and unpartaken suspense, had crushed that sensitive nature, had frozen that warm heart. The animating spirit was gone—the mere shell of the woman lived and moved, a mockery of her former self.

“Oh, Anne! Anne! What can have happened to you? Are you frightened? There’s not the least fear of any body disturbing us. They are all at luncheon, and the servants are at dinner. We have the room entirely to ourselves. My darling! you look so faint and strange! Let me get you something.”

Anne drew Blanche’s head down and kissed her. It was done in a dull, slow way—without a word, without a tear, without a sigh.

“You’re tired—I’m sure you’re tired. Have you walked here? You sha’n’t go back on foot; I’ll take care of that!”

Anne roused herself at those words. She spoke for the first time. The tone was lower than was natural to her; sadder than was natural to her—but the charm of her voice, the native gentleness and beauty of it, seemed to have survived the wreck of all besides.

“I don’t go back, Blanche. I have left the inn.”

“Left the inn? With your husband?”

She answered the first question—not the second.

“I can’t go back,” she said. “The inn is no place for me. A curse seems to follow me, Blanche, wherever I go. I am the cause of quarreling and wretchedness, without meaning it, God knows. The old man who is head-waiter at the inn has been kind to me, my dear, in his way, and he and the landlady had hard words together about it. A quarrel, a shocking, violent quarrel. He has lost his place in consequence. The woman, his mistress, lays all the blame of it to my door. She is a hard woman; and she has been harder than ever since Bishopriggs went away. I have missed a letter at the inn—I must have thrown it aside, I suppose, and forgotten it. I only know that I remembered about it, and couldn’t find it last night. I told the landlady, and she fastened a quarrel on me almost before the words were out of my mouth. Asked me if I charged her with stealing my letter. Said things to me—I can’t repeat them. I am not very well, and not able to deal with people of that sort. I thought it best to leave Craig Fernie this morning. I hope and pray I shall never see Craig Fernie again.”

She told her little story with a total absence of emotion of any sort, and laid her head back wearily on the chair when it was done.

Blanche’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of her.

“I won’t tease you with questions, Anne,” she said, gently. “Come up stairs and rest in my room. You’re not fit to travel, love. I’ll take care that nobody comes near us.”

The stable-clock at Windygates struck the quarter to two. Anne raised herself in the chair with a start.

“What time was that?” she asked.

Blanche told her.

“I can’t stay,” she said. “I have come here to find something out if I can. You won’t ask me questions? Don’t, Blanche, don’t! for the sake of old times.”

Blanche turned aside, heart-sick. “I will do nothing, dear, to annoy you,” she said, and took Anne’s hand, and hid the tears that were beginning to fall over her cheeks.

“I want to know something, Blanche. Will you tell me?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Who are the gentlemen staying in the house?”

Blanche looked round at her again, in sudden astonishment and alarm. A vague fear seized her that Anne’s mind had given way under the heavy weight of trouble laid on it. Anne persisted in pressing her strange request.

“Run over their names, Blanche. I have a reason for wishing to know who the gentlemen are who are staying in the house.”

Blanche repeated the names of Lady Lundie’s guests, leaving to the last the guests who had arrived last.

“Two more came back this morning,” she went on. “Arnold Brinkworth and that hateful friend of his, Mr. Delamayn.”

Anne’s head sank back once more on the chair. She had found her way without exciting suspicion of the truth, to the one discovery which she had come to Windygates to make. He was in Scotland again, and he had only arrived from London that morning. There was barely time for him to have communicated with Craig Fernie before she left the inn—he, too, who hated letter-writing! The circumstances were all in his favor: there was no reason, there was really and truly no reason, so far, to believe that he had deserted her. The heart of the unhappy woman bounded in her bosom, under the first ray of hope that had warmed it for four days past. Under that sudden revulsion of feeling, her weakened frame shook from head to foot. Her face flushed deep for a moment—then turned deadly pale again. Blanche, anxiously watching her, saw the serious necessity for giving some restorative to her instantly.

“I am going to get you some wine—you will faint, Anne, if you don’t take something. I shall be back in a moment; and I can manage it without any body being the wiser.”

She pushed Anne’s chair close to the nearest open window—a window at the upper end of the library—and ran out.

Blanche had barely left the room, by the door that led into the, hall, when Geoffrey entered it by one of the lower windows opening from the lawn.

With his mind absorbed in the letter that he was about to write, he slowly advanced up the room toward the nearest table. Anne, hearing the sound of footsteps, started, and looked round. Her failing strength rallied in an instant, under the sudden relief of seeing him again. She rose and advanced eagerly, with a faint tinge of color in her cheeks. He looked up. The two stood face to face together—alone.

“Geoffrey!”

He looked at her without answering—without advancing a step, on his side. There was an evil light in his eyes; his silence was the brute silence that threatens dumbly. He had made up his mind never to see her again, and she had entrapped him into an interview. He had made up his mind to write, and there she stood forcing him to speak. The sum of her offenses against him was now complete. If there had ever been the faintest hope of her raising even a passing pity in his heart, that hope would have been annihilated now.

She failed to understand the full meaning of his silence. She made her excuses, poor soul, for venturing back to Windygates—her excuses to the man whose purpose at that moment was to throw her helpless on the world.

“Pray forgive me for coming here,” she said. “I have done nothing to compromise you, Geoffrey. Nobody but Blanche knows I am at Windygates. And I have contrived to make my inquiri es about you without allowing her to suspect our secret.” She stopped, and began to tremble. She saw something more in his face than she had read in it at first. “I got your letter,” she went on, rallying her sinking courage. “I don’t complain of its being so short: you don’t like letter-writing, I know. But you promised I should hear from you again. And I have never heard. And oh, Geoffrey, it was so lonely at the inn!”

She stopped again, and supported herself by resting her hand on the table. The faintness was stealing back on her. She tried to go on again. It was useless—she could only look at him now.

“What do you want?” he asked, in the tone of a man who was putting an unimportant question to a total stranger.

A last gleam of her old energy flickered up in her face, like a dying flame.

“I am broken by what I have gone through,” she said. “Don’t insult me by making me remind you of your promise.”

“What promise?”’

“For shame, Geoffrey! for shame! Your promise to marry me.”

“You claim my promise after what you have done at the inn?”

She steadied herself against the table with one hand, and put the other hand to her head. Her brain was giddy. The effort to think was too much for her. She said to herself, vacantly, “The inn? What did I do at the inn?”

“I have had a lawyer’s advice, mind! I know what I am talking about.”

She appeared not to have heard him. She repeated the words, “What did I do at the inn?” and gave it up in despair. Holding by the table, she came close to him and