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

“Are you sure of winning it, Sir Patrick?”

Instead of replying, he pressed the letter on her. “Destroy it,” he whispered. “And rely on my silence.”

She took the letter from him.

“Destroy it,” he repeated. “They may open the doors. They may come in at any moment, and see it in your hand.”

“I have something to ask you, Sir Patrick, before I destroy it. Blanche refuses to go back to her husband, unless she returns with the certain assurance of being really his wife. If I produce this letter, she may go back to him to-day. If I declare myself Geoffrey Delamayn’s wife, I clear Arnold Brinkworth, at once and forever of all suspicion of being married to me. Can you as certainly and effectually clear him in any other way? Answer me that, as a man of honor speaking to a woman who implicitly trusts him!”

She looked him full in the face. His eyes dropped before hers—he made no reply.

“I am answered,” she said.

With those words, she passed him, and laid her hand on the door.

He checked her. The tears rose in his eyes as he drew her gently back into the room.

“Why should we wait?” she asked.

“Wait,” he answered, “as a favor to me.”

She seated herself calmly in the nearest chair, and rested her head on her hand, thinking.

He bent over her, and roused her, impatiently, almost angrily. The steady resolution in her face was terrible to him, when he thought of the man in the next room.

“Take time to consider,” he pleaded. “Don’t be led away by your own impulse. Don’t act under a false excitement. Nothing binds you to this dreadful sacrifice of yourself.”

“Excitement! Sacrifice!” She smiled sadly as she repeated the words. “Do you know, Sir Patrick, what I was thinking of a moment since? Only of old times, when I was a little girl. I saw the sad side of life sooner than most children see it. My mother was cruelly deserted. The hard marriage laws of this country were harder on her than on me. She died broken-hearted. But one friend comforted her at the last moment, and promised to be a mother to her child. I can’t remember one unhappy day in all the after-time when I lived with that faithful woman and her little daughter—till the day that parted us. She went away with her husband; and I and the little daughter were left behind. She said her last words to me. Her heart was sinking under the dread of coming death. ‘I promised your mother that you should be like my own child to me, and it quieted her mind. Quiet my mind, Anne, before I go. Whatever happens in years to come—promise me to be always what you are now, a sister to Blanche.’ Where is the false excitement, Sir Patrick, in old remembrances like these? And how can there be a sacrifice in any thing that I do for Blanche?”

She rose, and offered him her hand. Sir Patrick lifted it to his lips in silence.

“Come!” she said. “For both our sakes, let us not prolong this.”

He turned aside his head. It was no moment to let her see that she had completely unmanned him. She waited for him, with her hand on the lock. He rallied his courage—he forced himself to face the horror of the situation calmly. She opened the door, and led the way back into the other room.

Not a word was spoken by any of the persons present, as the two returned to their places. The noise of a carriage passing in the street was painfully audible. The chance banging of a door in the lower regions of the house made every one start.

Anne’s sweet voice broke the dreary silence.

“Must I speak for myself, Sir Patrick? Or will you (I ask it as a last and greatest favor) speak for me?”

“You insist on appealing to the letter in your hand?”

“I am resolved to appeal to it.”

“Will nothing induce you to defer the close of this inquiry—so far as you are concerned—for four-and-twenty hours?”

“Either you or I, Sir Patrick, must say what is to be said, and do what is to be done, before we leave this room.”

“Give me the letter.”

She gave it to him. Mr. Moy whispered to his client, “Do you know what that is?” Geoffrey shook his head. “Do you really remember nothing about it?” Geoffrey answered in one surly word, “Nothing!”

Sir Patrick addressed himself to the assembled company.

“I have to ask your pardon,” he said, “for abruptly leaving the room, and for obliging Miss Silvester to leave it with me. Every body present, except that man” (he pointed to Geoffrey), “will, I believe, understand and forgive me, now that I am forced to make my conduct the subject of the plainest and the fullest explanation. I shall address that explanation, for reasons which will presently appear, to my niece.”

Blanche started. “To me!” she exclaimed.

“To you,” Sir Patrick answered.

Blanche turned toward Arnold, daunted by a vague sense of something serious to come. The letter that she had received from her husband on her departure from Ham Farm had necessarily alluded to relations between Geoffrey and Anne, of which Blanche had been previously ignorant. Was any reference coming to those relations? Was there something yet to be disclosed which Arnold’s letter had not prepared her to hear?

Sir Patrick resumed.

“A short time since,” he said to Blanche, “I proposed to you to return to your husband’s protection—and to leave the termination of this matter in my hands. You have refused to go back to him until you are first certainly assured that you are his wife. Thanks to a sacrifice to your interests and your happiness, on Miss Silvester’s part—which I tell you frankly I have done my utmost to prevent—I am in a position to prove positively that Arnold Brinkworth was a single man when he married you from my house in Kent.”

Mr. Moy’s experience forewarned him of what was coming. He pointed to the letter in Sir Patrick’s hand.

“Do you claim on a promise of marriage?” he asked.

Sir Patrick rejoined by putting a question on his side.

“Do you remember the famous decision at Doctors’ Commons, which established the marriage of Captain Dalrymple and Miss Gordon?”

Mr. Moy was answered. “I understand you, Sir Patrick,” he said. After a moment’s pause, he addressed his next words to Anne. “And from the bottom of my heart, madam, I respect you.”

It was said with a fervent sincerity of tone which wrought the interest of the other persons, who were still waiting for enlightenment, to the highest pitch. Lady Lundie and Captain Newenden whispered to each other anxiously. Arnold turned pale. Blanche burst into tears.

Sir Patrick turned once more to his niece.

“Some little time since,” he said, “I had occasion to speak to you of the scandalous uncertainty of the marriage laws of Scotland. But for that uncertainty (entirely without parallel in any other civilized country in Europe), Arnold Brinkworth would never have occupied the position in which he stands here to-day—and these proceedings would never have taken place. Bear that fact in mind. It is not only answerable for the mischief that has been already done, but for the far more serious evil which is still to come.”

Mr. Moy took a note. Sir Patrick went on.

“Loose and reckless as the Scotch law is, there happens, however, to be one case in which the action of it has been confirmed and settled by the English Courts. A written promise of marriage exchanged between a man and woman, in Scotland, marries that man and woman by Scotch law. An English Court of Justice (sitting in judgment on the ease I have just mentioned to Mr. Moy) has pronounced that law to be good—and the decision has since been confirmed by the supreme authority of the Hous e of Lords. Where the persons therefore—living in Scotland at the time—have promised each other marriage in writing, there is now no longer any doubt they are certainly, and lawfully, Man and Wife.” He turned from his niece, and appealed to Mr. Moy.” Am I right?”

“Quite right, Sir Patrick, as to the facts. I own, however, that your commentary on them surprises me. I have the highest opinion of our Scottish marriage law. A man who has betrayed a woman under a promise of marriage is forced by that law (in the interests of public morality) to acknowledge her as his wife.”

“The persons here present, Mr. Moy, are now about to see the moral merit of the Scotch law of marriage (as approved by England) practically in operation before their own eyes. They will judge for themselves of the morality (Scotch or English) which first forces a deserted woman back on the villain who has betrayed her, and then virtuously leaves her to bear the consequences.”

With that answer, he turned to Anne, and showed her the letter, open in his hand.

“For the last time,” he said, “do you insist on my appealing to this?”

She rose, and bowed her head gravely.

“It is my distressing duty,” said Sir Patrick, “to declare, in this lady’s name, and on the faith of written promises of marriage exchanged between the parties, then residing in Scotland, that she claims to be now—and to have been on the afternoon of the fourteenth of August last—Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn’s wedded wife.”

A cry of horror from Blanche, a low murmur of dismay from the rest, followed the utterance of those words.

There was a pause of an instant.

Then Geoffrey rose slowly to his feet, and fixed his eyes on the wife who had claimed him.

The spectators of the terrible scene turned with one accord toward the sacrificed woman. The look which Geoffrey had cast on her—the words which Geoffrey had spoken to her—were present to all their minds. She stood, waiting by Sir Patrick’s side—her soft gray eyes resting sadly and tenderly on Blanche’s face. To see that matchless courage and resignation was to doubt the reality of what had happened. They were forced to look back at the man to possess their minds with the truth.

The triumph of law and morality over him was complete. He never uttered a word. His furious temper was perfectly and fearfully calm. With the promise of merciless vengeance written in the Devil s writing on his Devil-possessed face, he kept his eyes fixed on the hated woman whom he had ruined—on the hated woman who was fastened to him as his wife.

His lawyer went over to the table at which Sir Patrick sat. Sir Patrick handed him the sheet of note-paper.

He read the two letters contained in it with absorbed and deliberate attention. The moments that passed before he lifted his head from his reading seemed like hours. “Can you prove the handwritings?” he asked. “And prove the residence?”

Sir Patrick took up a second morsel of paper lying ready under his hand.

“There are the names of persons who can prove the writing, and prove the residence,” he replied. “One of your two witnesses below stairs (otherwise useless) can speak to the hour at which Mr. Brinkworth arrived at the inn, and so can prove that the lady for whom he asked was, at that moment, Mrs. Geoffrey Delamayn. The indorsement on the back of the note-paper, also referring to the question of time, is in the handwriting of the same witness—to whom I refer you, when it suits your convenience