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

He recovered himself a little, but he was still incapable of speech. He held fast by the fence, and stared at her.

“Try to possess your mind, sir, of what I say,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount. “I have come here not as your enemy, but as your friend. I have been tried by sickness, I have been tried by distress. Nothing remains of me but my heart. My heart forgives you; my heart, in your sore need⁠—need which you have yet to feel⁠—places me at your service. Take my arm, Mr. Noel. A little turn in the sun will help you to recover yourself.”

She put his hand through her arm and marched him slowly up the garden walk. Before she had been five minutes in his company, she had resumed full possession of him in her own right.

“Now down again, Mr. Noel,” she said. “Gently down again, in this fine sunlight. I have much to say to you, sir, which you never expected to hear from me. Let me ask a little domestic question first. They told me at the house door Mrs. Noel Vanstone was gone away on a journey. Has she gone for long?”

Her master’s hand trembled on her arm as she put that question. Instead of answering it, he tried faintly to plead for himself. The first words that escaped him were prompted by his first returning sense⁠—the sense that his housekeeper had taken him into custody. He tried to make his peace with Mrs. Lecount.

“I always meant to do something for you,” he said, coaxingly. “You would have heard from me before long. Upon my word and honor, Lecount, you would have heard from me before long!”

“I don’t doubt it, sir,” replied Mrs. Lecount. “But for the present, never mind about me. You and your interests first.”

“How did you come here?” he asked, looking at her in astonishment. “How came you to find me out?”

“It is a long story, sir; I will tell it you some other time. Let it be enough to say now that I have found you. Will Mrs. Noel be back again at the house today? A little louder, sir; I can hardly hear you. So! so! Not back again for a week! And where has she gone? To London, did you say? And what for?⁠—I am not inquisitive, Mr. Noel; I am asking serious questions, under serious necessity. Why has your wife left you here, and gone to London by herself?”

They were down at the fence again as she made that last inquiry, and they waited, leaning against it, while Noel Vanstone answered. Her reiterated assurances that she bore him no malice were producing their effect; he was beginning to recover himself. The old helpless habit of addressing all his complaints to his housekeeper was returning already with the reappearance of Mrs. Lecount⁠—returning insidiously, in company with that besetting anxiety to talk about his grievances, which had got the better of him at the breakfast-table, and which had shown the wound inflicted on his vanity to his wife’s maid.

“I can’t answer for Mrs. Noel Vanstone,” he said, spitefully. “Mrs. Noel Vanstone has not treated me with the consideration which is my due. She has taken my permission for granted, and she has only thought proper to tell me that the object of her journey is to see her friends in London. She went away this morning without bidding me goodbye. She takes her own way as if I was nobody; she treats me like a child. You may not believe it, Lecount, but I don’t even know who her friends are. I am left quite in the dark; I am left to guess for myself that her friends in London are her uncle and aunt.”

Mrs. Lecount privately considered the question by the help of her own knowledge obtained in London. She soon reached the obvious conclusion. After writing to her sister in the first instance, Magdalen had now, in all probability, followed the letter in person. There was little doubt that the friends she had gone to visit in London were her sister and Miss Garth.

“Not her uncle and aunt, sir,” resumed Mrs. Lecount, composedly. “A secret for your private ear! She has no uncle and aunt. Another little turn before I explain myself⁠—another little turn to compose your spirits.”

She took him into custody once more, and marched him back toward the house.

“Mr. Noel!” she said, suddenly stopping in the middle of the walk. “Do you know what was the worst mischief you ever did yourself in your life? I will tell you. That worst mischief was sending me to Zurich.”

His hand began to tremble on her arm once more.

“I didn’t do it!” he cried piteously. “It was all Mr. Bygrave.”

“You acknowledge, sir, that Mr. Bygrave deceived me?” proceeded Mrs. Lecount. “I am glad to hear that. You will be all the readier to make the next discovery which is waiting for you⁠—the discovery that Mr. Bygrave has deceived you. He is not here to slip through my fingers now, and I am not the helpless woman in this place that I was at Aldborough. Thank God!”

She uttered that devout exclamation through her set teeth. All her hatred of Captain Wragge hissed out of her lips in those two words.

“Oblige me, sir, by holding one side of my traveling-bag,” she resumed, “while I open it and take something out.”

The interior of the bag disclosed a series of neatly-folded papers, all laid together in order, and numbered outside. Mrs. Lecount took out one of the papers, and shut up the bag again with a loud snap of the spring that closed it.

“At Aldborough, Mr. Noel, I had only my own opinion to support me,” she remarked. “My own opinion was nothing against Miss Bygrave’s youth and beauty, and Mr. Bygrave’s ready wit. I could only hope to attack your infatuation with proofs, and at that time I had not got them. I have got them now! I am armed at all points with proofs; I bristle from head to foot with proofs; I break my forced silence, and speak with the emphasis of