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

effort was useless; her attention wandered again. She threw the paper away, and went out into the garden. The night was dark; the stars were few and faint. She could just see the gravel-walk⁠—she could just pace backward and forward between the house door and the gate.

The confession in the newspaper had taken a fearful hold on her mind. As she paced the walk, the black night opened over the sea, and showed her the murderer in the field hurling the spud of the plow into the air. She ran, shuddering, back to the house. The murderer followed her into the parlor. She seized the candle and went up into her room. The vision of her own distempered fancy followed her to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and vanished there.

It was midnight, and there was no sign yet of the captain’s return.

She took from the writing-case the long letter which she had written to Norah, and slowly read it through. The letter quieted her. When she reached the blank space left at the end, she hurriedly turned back and began it over again.

One o’clock struck from the church clock, and still the captain never appeared.

She read the letter for the second time; she turned back obstinately, despairingly, and began it for the third time. As she once more reached the last page, she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. She had just put the watch back in the belt of her dress, when there came to her⁠—far off in the stillness of the morning⁠—a sound of wheels.

She dropped the letter and clasped her cold hands in her lap and listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer⁠—the trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to hers. It passed the side of the house; it traveled a little further on; it stopped. She heard a loud knocking⁠—then the opening of a window⁠—then voices⁠—then a long silence⁠—than the wheels again coming back⁠—then the opening of the door below, and the sound of the captain’s voice in the passage.

She could endure it no longer. She opened her door a little way and called to him.

He ran upstairs instantly, astonished that she was not in bed. She spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door, keeping herself hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her face.

“Has anything gone wrong?” she asked.

“Make your mind easy,” he answered. “Nothing has gone wrong.”

“Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?”

“None whatever. The marriage is a certainty.”

“A certainty?”

“Yes.”

“Good night.”

She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand of her own accord.

“You have sat up too long,” he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold fingers. “I am afraid you will have a bad night⁠—I’m afraid you will not sleep.”

She softly closed the door.

“I shall sleep,” she said, “sounder than you think for.”

It was past two o’clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and turned to the end where the blank space was left. The last lines written above the space ran thus: “… I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die. It is wickedness, madness, what you will⁠—but it is so. There are now two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him⁠—the journey to the church. If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear⁠—the journey to the grave!”

Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines:

“My choice is made. If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my father and mother in the churchyard at home. Farewell, my love! Be always innocent; be always happy. If Frank ever asks about me, say I died forgiving him. Don’t grieve long for me, Norah⁠—I am not worth it.”

She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister. The tears gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table. She waited until her sight was clear again, and then took the banknotes once more from the little bag in her bosom. After wrapping them in a sheet of note paper, she wrote Captain Wragge’s name on the inclosure, and added these words below it: “Lock the door of my room, and leave me till my sister comes. The money I promised you is in this. You are not to blame; it is my fault, and mine only. If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be kind to your wife for my sake.”

After placing the inclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and looked round the room. Some few little things in it were not in their places. She set them in order, and drew the curtains on either side at the head of her bed. Her own dress was the next object of her scrutiny. It was all as neat, as pure, as prettily arranged as ever. Nothing about her was disordered but her hair. Some tresses had fallen loose on one side of her head; she carefully put them back in their places with the help of her glass. “How pale I look!” she thought, with a faint smile. “Shall I be paler still when they find me in the morning?”

She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and took it out. The bottle was so small that it lay easily in the palm of her hand. She let it remain there for a little while, and stood looking at it.

“Death!” she said. “In this drop of brown drink⁠—Death!”

As the words passed her lips,