No Name Wilkie Collins (e book reader android TXT) 📖

Look as anxiously as Mrs. Lecount might along the course which she had hitherto followed, she failed to see her way through the accumulated obstacles which now barred her advance.

Other women in this position might have waited until circumstances altered, and helped them. Mrs. Lecount boldly retraced her steps, and determined to find her way to her end in a new direction. Resigning for the present all further attempt to prove that the false Miss Bygrave was the true Magdalen Vanstone, she resolved to narrow the range of her next efforts; to leave the actual question of Magdalen’s identity untouched; and to rest satisfied with convincing her master of this simple fact⁠—that the young lady who was charming him at North Shingles, and the disguised woman who had terrified him in Vauxhall Walk, were one and the same person.

The means of effecting this new object were, to all appearance, far less easy of attainment than the means of effecting the object which Mrs. Lecount had just resigned. Here no help was to be expected from others, no ostensibly benevolent motives could be put forward as a blind⁠—no appeal could be made to Mr. Pendril or to Miss Garth. Here the housekeeper’s only chance of success depended, in the first place, on her being able to effect a stolen entrance into Mr. Bygrave’s house, and, in the second place, on her ability to discover whether that memorable alpaca dress from which she had secretly cut the fragment of stuff happened to form part of Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.

Taking the difficulties now before her in their order as they occurred, Mrs. Lecount first resolved to devote the next few days to watching the habits of the inmates of North Shingles, from early in the morning to late at night, and to testing the capacity of the one servant in the house to resist the temptation of a bribe. Assuming that results proved successful, and that, either by money or by stratagem, she gained admission to North Shingles (without the knowledge of Mr. Bygrave or his niece), she turned next to the second difficulty of the two⁠—the difficulty of obtaining access to Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.

If the servant proved corruptible, all obstacles in this direction might be considered as removed beforehand. But if the servant proved honest, the new problem was no easy one to solve.

Long and careful consideration of the question led the housekeeper at last to the bold resolution of obtaining an interview⁠—if the servant failed her⁠—with Mrs. Bygrave herself. What was the true cause of this lady’s mysterious seclusion? Was she a person of the strictest and the most inconvenient integrity? or a person who could not be depended on to preserve a secret? or a person who was as artful as Mr. Bygrave himself, and who was kept in reserve to forward the object of some new deception which was yet to come? In the first two cases, Mrs. Lecount could trust in her own powers of dissimulation, and in the results which they might achieve. In the last case (if no other end was gained), it might be of vital importance to her to discover an enemy hidden in the dark. In any event, she determined to run the risk. Of the three chances in her favor on which she had reckoned at the outset of the struggle⁠—the chance of entrapping Magdalen by word of mouth, the chance of entrapping her by the help of her friends, and the chance of entrapping her by means of Mrs. Bygrave⁠—two had been tried, and two had failed. The third remained to be tested yet; and the third might succeed.

So, the captain’s enemy plotted against him in the privacy of her own chamber, while the captain watched the light in her window from the beach outside.

Before breakfast the next morning, Captain Wragge posted the forged letter to Zurich with his own hand. He went back to North Shingles with his mind not quite decided on the course to take with Mrs. Lecount during the all-important interval of the next ten days.

Greatly to his surprise, his doubts on this point were abruptly decided by Magdalen herself.

He found her waiting for him in the room where the breakfast was laid. She was walking restlessly to and fro, with her head drooping on her bosom and her hair hanging disordered over her shoulders. The moment she looked up on his entrance, the captain felt the fear which Mrs. Wragge had felt before him⁠—the fear that her mind would be struck prostrate again, as it had been struck once already, when Frank’s letter reached her in Vauxhall Walk.

“Is he coming again today?” she asked, pushing away from her the chair which Captain Wragge offered, with such violence that she threw it on the floor.

“Yes,” said the captain, wisely answering her in the fewest words. “He is coming at two o’clock.”

“Take me away!” she exclaimed, tossing her hair back wildly from her face. “Take me away before he comes. I can’t get over the horror of marrying him while I am in this hateful place; take me somewhere where I can forget it, or I shall go mad! Give me two days’ rest⁠—two days out of sight of that horrible sea⁠—two days out of prison in this horrible house⁠—two days anywhere in the wide world away from Aldborough. I’ll come back with you! I’ll go through with it to the end! Only give me two days’ escape from that man and everything belonging to him! Do you hear, you villain?” she cried, seizing his arm and shaking it in a frenzy of passion; “I have been tortured enough⁠—I can bear it no longer!”

There was but one way of quieting her, and the captain instantly took it.

“If you will try to control yourself,” he said, “you shall leave Aldborough in an hour’s time.”

She dropped his arm, and leaned back heavily against the wall behind her.

“I’ll try,” she answered, struggling for breath, but looking at him less wildly. “You shan’t complain of me, if I can help it.” She attempted confusedly to take