Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (555 page)

She sauntered on a few steps toward the figure advancing along the road. The spy followed her close. “Try it,” he said, brutally. “You’re a fine woman; you’re welcome to put your arms round me if you like.” As the words escaped him, he too saw the stranger for the first time. He drew back a step and waited. Miss Gwilt, on her side, advanced a step and waited, too.

The stranger came on, with the lithe, light step of a practiced walker, swinging a stick in his hand and carrying a knapsack on his shoulders. A few paces nearer, and his face became visible. He was a dark man, his black hair was powdered with dust, and his black eyes were looking steadfastly forward along the road before him.

Miss Gwilt advanced with the first signs of agitation she had shown yet. “Is it possible?” she said, softly. “Can it really be you?”

It was Midwinter, on his way back to Thorpe Ambrose, after his fortnight among the Yorkshire moors.

He stopped and looked at her, in breathless surprise. The image of the woman had been in his thoughts, at the moment when the woman herself spoke to him. “Miss Gwilt!” he exclaimed, and mechanically held out his hand.

She took it, and pressed it gently. “I should have been glad to see you at any time,” she said. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you now. May I trouble you to speak to that man? He has been following me, and annoying me all the way from the town.”

Midwinter stepped past her without uttering a word. Faint as the light was, the spy saw what was coming in his face, and, turning instantly, leaped the ditch by the road-side. Before Midwinter could follow, Miss Gwilt’s hand was on his shoulder.

“No,” she said, “you don’t know who his employer is.”

Midwinter stopped and looked at her.

“Strange things have happened since you left us,” she went on. “I have been forced to give up my situation, and I am followed and watched by a paid spy. Don’t ask who forced me out of my situation, and who pays the spy — at least not just yet. I can’t make up my mind to tell you till I am a little more composed. Let the wretch go. Do you mind seeing me safe back to my lodging? It’s in your way home. May I — may I ask for the support of your arm? My little stock of courage is quite exhausted.” She took his arm and clung close to it. The woman who had tyrannized over Mr. Bashwood was gone, and the woman who had tossed the spy’s hat into the pool was gone. A timid, shrinking, interesting creature filled the fair skin and trembled on the symmetrical limbs of Miss Gwilt. She put her handkerchief to her eyes. “They say necessity has no law,” she murmured, faintly. “I am treating you like an old friend. God knows I want one!”

They went on toward the town. She recovered herself with a touching fortitude; she put her handkerchief back in her pocket, and persisted in turning the conversation on Midwinter’s walking tour. “It is bad enough to be a burden on you,” she said, gently pressing on his arm as she spoke; “I mustn’t distress you as well. Tell me where you have been, and what you have seen. Interest me in your journey; help me to escape from myself.”

They reached the modest little lodging in the miserable little suburb. Miss Gwilt sighed, and removed her glove before she took Midwinter’s hand. “I have taken refuge here,” she said, simply. “It is clean and quiet; I am too poor to want or expect more. We must say good-by, I suppose, unless” — she hesitated modestly, and satisfied herself by a quick look round that they were unobserved — ”unless you would like to come in and rest a little? I feel so gratefully toward you, Mr. Midwinter! Is there any harm, do you think, in my offering you a cup of tea?”

The magnetic influence of her touch was thrilling through him while she spoke. Change and absence, to which he had trusted to weaken her hold on him, had treacherously strengthened it instead. A man exceptionally sensitive, a man exceptionally pure in his past life, he stood hand in hand, in the tempting secrecy of the night, with the first woman who had exercised over him the all-absorbing influence of her sex. At his age, and in his position, who could have left her? The man (with a man’s temperament) doesn’t live who could have left her. Midwinter went in.

A stupid, sleepy lad opened the house door. Even he, being a male creature, brightened under the influence of Miss Gwilt. “The urn, John,” she said, kindly, “and another cup and saucer. I’ll borrow your candle to light my candles upstairs, and then I won’t trouble you any more to-night.” John was wakeful and active in an instant. “No trouble, miss,” he said, with awkward civility. Miss Gwilt took his candle with a smile. “How good people are to me!” she whispered, innocently, to Midwinter, as she led the way upstairs to the little drawing-room on the first floor.

She lit the candles, and, turning quickly on her guest, stopped him at the first attempt he made to remove the knapsack from his shoulders. “No,” she said, gently; “in the good old times there were occasions when the ladies unarmed their knights. I claim the privilege of unarming
my
knight.” Her dexterous fingers intercepted his at the straps and buckles, and she had the dusty knapsack off, before he could protest against her touching it.

They sat down at the one little table in the room. It was very poorly furnished; but there was something of the dainty neatness of the woman who inhabited it in the arrangement of the few poor ornaments on the chimney-piece, in the one or two prettily bound volumes on the chiffonier, in the flowers on the table, and the modest little work-basket in the window. “Women are not all coquettes,” she said, as she took off her bonnet and mantilla, and laid them carefully on a chair. “I won’t go into my room, and look in my glass, and make myself smart; you shall take me just as I am.” Her hands moved about among the tea-things with a smooth, noiseless activity.

Her magnificent hair flashed crimson in the candle-light, as she turned her head hither and thither, searching with an easy grace for the things she wanted in the tray. Exercise had heightened the brilliancy of her complexion, and had quickened the rapid alternations of expression in her eyes — the delicious languor that stole over them when she was listening or thinking, the bright intelligence that flashed from them softly when she spoke. In the lightest word she said, in the least thing she did, there was something that gently solicited the heart of the man who sat with her. Perfectly modest in her manner, possessed to perfection of the graceful restraints and refinements of a lady, she had all the allurements that feast the eye, all the siren invitations that seduce the sense — a subtle suggestiveness in her silence, and a sexual sorcery in her smile.

“Should I be wrong,” she asked, suddenly suspending the conversation which she had thus far persistently restricted to the subject of Midwinter’s walking tour, “if I guessed that you have something on your mind — something which neither my tea nor my talk can charm away? Are men as curious as women? Is the something — Me?”

Midwinter struggled against the fascination of looking at her and listening to her. “I am very anxious to hear what has happened since I have been away,” he said. “But I am still more anxious, Miss Gwilt, not to distress you by speaking of a painful subject.”

She looked at him gratefully. “It is for your sake that I have avoided the painful subject,” she said, toying with her spoon among the dregs in her empty cup. “But you will hear about it from others, if you don’t hear about it from me; and you ought to know why you found me in that strange situation, and why you see me here. Pray remember one thing, to begin with. I don’t blame your friend, Mr. Armadale. I blame the people whose instrument he is.”

Midwinter started. “Is it possible,” he began, “that Allan can be in any way answerable — ?” He stopped, and looked at Miss Gwilt in silent astonishment.

She gently laid her hand on his. “Don’t be angry with me for only telling the truth,” she said. “Your friend is answerable for everything that has happened to me — innocently answerable, Mr. Midwinter, I firmly believe. We are both victims.
He
is the victim of his position as the richest single man in the neighbourhood; and I am the victim of Miss Milroy’s determination to marry him.”

“Miss Milroy?” repeated Midwinter, more and more astonished. “Why, Allan himself told me — ” He stopped again.

“He told you that I was the object of his admiration? Poor fellow, he admires everybody; his head is almost as empty as this,” said Miss Gwilt, smiling indicatively into the hollow of her cup. She dropped the spoon, sighed, and became serious again. “I am guilty of the vanity of having let him admire me,” she went on, penitently, “without the excuse of being able, on my side, to reciprocate even the passing interest that he felt in me. I don’t undervalue his many admirable qualities, or the excellent position he can offer to his wife. But a woman’s heart is not to be commanded — no, Mr. Midwinter, not even by the fortunate master of Thorpe Ambrose, who commands everything else.”

She looked him full in the face as she uttered that magnanimous sentiment. His eyes dropped before hers, and his dark colour deepened. He had felt his heart leap in him at the declaration of her indifference to Allan. For the first time since they had known each other, his interests now stood self-revealed before him as openly adverse to the interests of his friend.

“I have been guilty of the vanity of letting Mr. Armadale admire me, and I have suffered for it,” resumed Miss Gwilt. “If there had been any confidence between my pupil and me, I might have easily satisfied her that she might become Mrs. Armadale — if she could — without having any rivalry to fear on my part. But Miss Milroy disliked and distrusted me from the first. She took her own jealous view, no doubt, of Mr. Armadale’s thoughtless attentions to me. It was her interest to destroy the position, such as it was, that I held in his estimation; and it is quite likely her mother assisted her. Mrs. Milroy had her motive also (which I am really ashamed to mention) for wishing to drive me out of the house. Anyhow, the conspiracy has succeeded. I have been forced (with Mr. Armadale’s help) to leave the major’s service. Don’t be angry, Mr. Midwinter! Don’t form a hasty opinion! I dare say Miss Milroy has some good qualities, though I have not found them out; and I assure you again and again that I don’t blame Mr. Armadale. I only blame the people whose instrument he is.”

“How is he their instrument? How can he be the instrument of any enemy of yours?” asked Midwinter. “Pray excuse my anxiety, Miss Gwilt: Allan’s good name is as dear to me as my own!”

Miss Gwilt’s eyes turned full on him again, and Miss Gwilt’s heart abandoned itself innocently to an outburst of enthusiasm. “How I admire your earnestness!” she said. “How I like your anxiety for your friend! Oh, if women could only form such friendships! Oh you happy, happy men!” Her voice faltered, and her convenient tea-cup absorbed her for the third time. “I would give all the little beauty I possess,” she said, “if I could only find such a friend as Mr. Armadale has found in
you
. I never shall, Mr. Midwinter — I never shall. Let us go back to what we were talking about. I can only tell you how your friend is concerned in my misfortune by telling you something first about myself. I am like many other governesses; I am the victim of sad domestic circumstances. It may be weak of me, but I have a horror of alluding to them among strangers. My silence about my family and my friends exposes me to misinterpretation in my dependent position. Does it do me any harm, Mr. Midwinter, in your estimation?”

“God forbid!” said Midwinter, fervently. “There is no man living,” he went on, thinking of his own family story, “who has better reason to understand and respect your silence than I have.”

Miss Gwilt seized his hand impulsively. “Oh,” she said, “I knew it, the first moment I saw you! I knew that you, too, had suffered; that you, too, had sorrows which you kept sacred! Strange, strange sympathy! I believe in mesmerism — do you?” She suddenly recollected herself, and shuddered. “Oh, what have I done? What must you think of me?” she exclaimed, as he yielded to the magnetic fascination of her touch, and, forgetting everything but the hand that lay warm in his own, bent over it and kissed it. “Spare me!” she said, faintly, as she felt the burning touch of his lips. “I am so friendless — I am so completely at your mercy!”

He turned away from her, and hid his face in his hands; he was trembling, and she saw it. She looked at him while his face was hidden from her; she looked at him with a furtive interest and surprise. “How that man loves me!” she thought. “I wonder whether there was a time when I might have loved
him
?”

The silence between them remained unbroken for some minutes. He had felt her appeal to his consideration as she had never expected or intended him to feel it — he shrank from looking at her or from speaking to her again.

“Shall I go on with my story?” she asked. “Shall we forget and forgive on both sides?” A woman’s inveterate indulgence for every expression of a man’s admiration which keeps within the limits of personal respect curved her lips gently into a charming smile. She looked down meditatively at her dress, and brushed a crumb off her lap with a little flattering sigh. “I was telling you,” she went on, “of my reluctance to speak to strangers of my sad family story. It was in that way, as I afterward found out, that I laid myself open to Miss Milroy’s malice and Miss Milroy’s suspicion. Private inquiries about me were addressed to the lady who was my reference — at Miss Milroy’s suggestion, in the first instance, I have no doubt. I am sorry to say, this is not the worst of it. By some underhand means, of which I am quite ignorant, Mr. Armadale’s simplicity was imposed on; and, when application was made secretly to my reference in London, it was made, Mr. Midwinter, through your friend.”