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

She turned upon him with an angry brightness in her large gray eyes. “Is this thing shown publicly?” she asked, stamping her foot on it. “Is the mark on my neck described all over York?”

“Pray compose yourself,” pleaded the persuasive Wragge. “At present I have every reason to believe that you have just perused the only copy in circulation. Allow me to pick it up.”

Before he could touch the bill she snatched it from the pavement, tore it into fragments, and threw them over the wall.

“Bravo!” cried the captain. “You remind me of your poor dear mother. The family spirit, Miss Vanstone. We all inherit our hot blood from my maternal grandfather.”

“How did you come by it?” she asked, suddenly.

“My dear creature, I have just told you,” remonstrated the captain. “We all come by it from my maternal grandfather.”

“How did you come by that handbill?” she repeated, passionately.

“I beg ten thousand pardons! My head was running on the family spirit.⁠—How did I come by it? Briefly thus.” Here Captain Wragge entered on his personal statement; taking his customary vocal exercise through the longest words of the English language, with the highest elocutionary relish. Having, on this rare occasion, nothing to gain by concealment, he departed from his ordinary habits, and, with the utmost amazement at the novelty of his own situation, permitted himself to tell the unmitigated truth.

The effect of the narrative on Magdalen by no means fulfilled Captain Wragge’s anticipations in relating it. She was not startled; she was not irritated; she showed no disposition to cast herself on his mercy, and to seek his advice. She looked him steadily in the face; and all she said, when he had neatly rounded his last sentence, was⁠—“Go on.”

“Go on?” repeated the captain. “Shocked to disappoint you, I am sure; but the fact is, I have done.”

“No, you have not,” she rejoined; “you have left out the end of your story. The end of it is, you came here to look for me; and you mean to earn the fifty pounds reward.”

Those plain words so completely staggered Captain Wragge that for the moment he stood speechless. But he had faced awkward truths of all sorts far too often to be permanently disconcerted by them. Before Magdalen could pursue her advantage, the vagabond had recovered his balance: Wragge was himself again.

“Smart,” said the captain, laughing indulgently, and drumming with his umbrella on the pavement. “Some men might take it seriously. I’m not easily offended. Try again.”

Magdalen looked at him through the gathering darkness in mute perplexity. All her little experience of society had been experience among people who possessed a common sense of honor, and a common responsibility of social position. She had hitherto seen nothing but the successful human product from the great manufactory of civilization. Here was one of the failures, and, with all her quickness, she was puzzled how to deal with it.

“Pardon me for returning to the subject,” pursued the captain. “It has just occurred to my mind that you might actually have spoken in earnest. My poor child! how can I earn the fifty pounds before the reward is offered to me? Those handbills may not be publicly posted for a week to come. Precious as you are to all your relatives (myself included), take my word for it, the lawyers who are managing this case will not pay fifty pounds for you if they can possibly help it. Are you still persuaded that my needy pockets are gaping for the money? Very good. Button them up in spite of me with your own fair fingers. There is a train to London at nine forty-five tonight. Submit yourself to your friend’s wishes and go back by it.”

“Never!” said Magdalen, firing at the bare suggestion, exactly as the captain had intended she should. “If my mind had not been made up before, that vile handbill would have decided me. I forgive Norah,” she added, turning away and speaking to herself, “but not Mr. Pendril, and not Miss Garth.”

“Quite right!” said Captain Wragge. “The family spirit. I should have done the same myself at your age. It runs in the blood. Hark! there goes the clock again⁠—half-past seven. Miss Vanstone, pardon this seasonable abruptness! If you are to carry out your resolution⁠—if you are to be your own mistress much longer, you must take a course of some kind before eight o’clock. You are young, you are inexperienced, you are in imminent danger. Here is a position of emergency on one side⁠—and here am I, on the other, with an uncle’s interest in you, full of advice. Tap me.”

“Suppose I choose to depend on nobody, and to act for myself?” said Magdalen. “What then?”

“Then,” replied the captain, “you will walk straight into one of the four traps which are set to catch you in the ancient and interesting city of York. Trap the first, at Mr. Huxtable’s house; trap the second, at all the hotels; trap the third, at the railway station; trap the fourth, at the theater. That man with the handbills has had an hour at his disposal. If he has not set those four traps (with the assistance of the local solicitor) by this time, he is not the competent lawyer’s clerk I take him for. Come, come, my dear girl! if there is somebody else in the background, whose advice you prefer to mine⁠—”

“You see that I am alone,” she interposed, proudly. “If you knew me better, you would know that I depend on nobody but myself.”

Those words decided the only doubt which now remained in the captain’s mind⁠—the doubt whether the course was clear before him. The motive of her flight from home was evidently what the handbills assumed it to be⁠—a reckless fancy for going on the stage. “One of two things,” thought Wragge to himself, in his logical way. “She’s worth more than fifty pounds to me in her present situation, or she isn’t. If she is, her friends may whistle for