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

and stained her face with the customary stage materials, so as to change the transparent fairness of her complexion to the dull, faintly opaque color of a woman in ill health. The lines and markings of age followed next; and here the first obstacles presented themselves. The art which succeeded by gaslight failed by day: the difficulty of hiding the plainly artificial nature of the marks was almost insuperable. She turned to her trunk; took from it two veils; and putting on her old-fashioned bonnet, tried the effect of them in succession. One of the veils (of black lace) was too thick to be worn over the face at that summer season without exciting remark. The other, of plain net, allowed her features to be seen through it, just indistinctly enough to permit the safe introduction of certain lines (many fewer than she was accustomed to use in performing the character) on the forehead and at the sides of the mouth. But the obstacle thus set aside only opened the way to a new difficulty⁠—the difficulty of keeping her veil down while she was speaking to other persons, without any obvious reason for doing so. An instant’s consideration, and a chance look at her little china palette of stage colors, suggested to her ready invention the production of a visible excuse for wearing her veil. She deliberately disfigured herself by artificially reddening the insides of her eyelids so as to produce an appearance of inflammation which no human creature but a doctor⁠—and that doctor at close quarters⁠—could have detected as false. She sprang to her feet and looked triumphantly at the hideous transformation of herself reflected in the glass. Who could think it strange now if she wore her veil down, and if she begged Mrs. Lecount’s permission to sit with her back to the light?

Her last proceeding was to put on the quiet gray cloak which she had brought from Birmingham, and which had been padded inside by Captain Wragge’s own experienced hands, so as to hide the youthful grace and beauty of her back and shoulders. Her costume being now complete, she practiced the walk which had been originally taught her as appropriate to the character⁠—a walk with a slight limp⁠—and, returning to the glass after a minute’s trial, exercised herself next in the disguise of her voice and manner. This was the only part of the character in which it had been possible, with her physical peculiarities, to produce an imitation of Miss Garth; and here the resemblance was perfect. The harsh voice, the blunt manner, the habit of accompanying certain phrases by an emphatic nod of the head, the Northumbrian burr expressing itself in every word which contained the letter r⁠—all these personal peculiarities of the old North-country governess were reproduced to the life. The personal transformation thus completed was literally what Captain Wragge had described it to be⁠—a triumph in the art of self-disguise. Excepting the one case of seeing her face close, with a strong light on it, nobody who now looked at Magdalen could have suspected for an instant that she was other than an ailing, ill-made, unattractive woman of fifty years old at least.

Before unlocking the door, she looked about her carefully, to make sure that none of her stage materials were exposed to view in case the landlady entered the room in her absence. The only forgotten object belonging to her that she discovered was a little packet of Norah’s letters which she had been reading overnight, and which had been accidentally pushed under the looking-glass while she was engaged in dressing herself. As she took up the letters to put them away, the thought struck her for the first time, “Would Norah know me now if we met each other in the street?” She looked in the glass, and smiled sadly. “No,” she said, “not even Norah.”

She unlocked the door, after first looking at her watch. It was close on twelve o’clock. There was barely an hour left to try her desperate experiment, and to return to the lodging before the landlady’s children came back from school.

An instant’s listening on the landing assured her that all was quiet in the passage below. She noiselessly descended the stairs and gained the street without having met any living creature on her way out of the house. In another minute she had crossed the road, and had knocked at Noel Vanstone’s door.

The door was opened by the same woman-servant whom she had followed on the previous evening to the stationer’s shop. With a momentary tremor, which recalled the memorable first night of her appearance in public, Magdalen inquired (in Miss Garth’s voice, and with Miss Garth’s manner) for Mrs. Lecount.

“Mrs. Lecount has gone out, ma’am,” said the servant.

“Is Mr. Vanstone at home?” asked Magdalen, her resolution asserting itself at once against the first obstacle that opposed it.

“My master is not up yet, ma’am.”

Another check! A weaker nature would have accepted the warning. Magdalen’s nature rose in revolt against it.

“What time will Mrs. Lecount be back?” she asked.

“About one o’clock, ma’am.”

“Say, if you please, that I will call again as soon after one o’clock as possible. I particularly wish to see Mrs. Lecount. My name is Miss Garth.”

She turned and left the house. Going back to her own room was out of the question. The servant (as Magdalen knew by not hearing the door close) was looking after her; and, moreover, she would expose herself, if she went indoors, to the risk of going out again exactly at the time when the landlady’s children were sure to be about the house. She turned mechanically to the right, walked on until she recalled Vauxhall Bridge, and waited there, looking out over the river.

The interval of unemployed time now before her was nearly an hour. How should she occupy it?

As she asked herself the question, the thought which had struck her when she put away the packet of Norah’s letters rose in her mind once more. A sudden impulse to test