Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (780 page)

He pointed to the entrance.

“Go in,” he said.

“On what terms?” she asked, without stirring a step.

Geoffrey dismissed the cab; and sent the lad in, to wait for further orders. These things done, he answered her loudly and brutally the moment they were alone:

“On any terms I please.”

“Nothing will induce me,” she said, firmly, “to live with you as your wife. You may kill me — but you will never bend me to that.”

He advanced a step — opened his lips — and suddenly checked himself. He waited a while, turning something over in his mind. When he spoke again, it was with marked deliberation and constraint — with the air of a man who was repeating words put into his lips, or words prepared beforehand.

“I have something to tell you in the presence of witnesses,” he said. “I don’t ask you, or wish you, to see me in the cottage alone.”

She started at the change in him. His sudden composure, and his sudden nicety in the choice of words, tried her courage far more severely than it had been tried by his violence of the moment before.

He waited her decision, still pointing through the gate. She trembled a little — steadied herself again — and went in. The lad, waiting in the front garden, followed her.

He threw open the drawing-room door, on the left-hand side of the passage. She entered the room. The servant-girl appeared. He said to her, “Fetch Mrs. Dethridge; and come back with her yourself.” Then he went into the room; the lad, by his own directions, following him in; and the door being left wide open.

Hester Dethridge came out from the kitchen with the girl behind her. At the sight of Anne, a faint and momentary change passed over the stony stillness of her face. A dull light glimmered in her eyes. She slowly nodded her head. A dumb sound, vaguely expressive of something like exultation or relief, escaped her lips.

Geoffrey spoke — once more, with marked deliberation and constraint; once more, with the air of repeating something which had been prepared beforehand. He pointed to Anne.

“This woman is my wife,” he said. “In the presence of you three, as witnesses, I tell her that I don’t forgive her. I have brought her here — having no other place in which I can trust her to be — to wait the issue of proceedings, undertaken in defense of my own honour and good name. While she stays here, she will live separate from me, in a room of her own. If it is necessary for me to communicate with her, I shall only see her in the presence of a third person. Do you all understand me?”

Hester Dethridge bowed her head. The other two answered, “Yes” — and turned to go out.

Anne rose. At a sign from Geoffrey, the servant and the lad waited in the room to hear what she had to say.

“I know nothing in my conduct,” she said, addressing herself to Geoffrey, “which justifies you in telling these people that you don’t forgive me. Those words applied by you to me are an insult. I am equally ignorant of what you mean when you speak of defending your good name. All I understand is, that we are separate persons in this house, and that I am to have a room of my own. I am grateful, whatever your motives may be, for the arrangement that you have proposed. Direct one of these two women to show me my room.”

Geoffrey turned to Hester Dethridge.

“Take her up stairs,” he said; “and let her pick which room she pleases. Give her what she wants to eat or drink. Bring down the address of the place where her luggage is. The lad here will go back by railway, and fetch it. That’s all. Be off.”

Hester went out. Anne followed her up the stairs. In the passage on the upper floor she stopped. The dull light flickered again for a moment in her eyes. She wrote on her slate, and held it up to Anne, with these words on it: “I knew you would come back. It’s not over yet between you and him.” Anne made no reply. She went on writing, with something faintly like a smile on her thin, colourless lips. “I know something of bad husbands. Yours is as bad a one as ever stood in shoes. He’ll try you.” Anne made an effort to stop her. “Don’t you see how tired I am?” she said, gently. Hester Dethridge dropped the slate — looked with a steady and uncompassionate attention in Anne’s face — nodded her head, as much as to say, “I see it now” — and led the way into one of the empty rooms.

It was the front bedroom, over the drawing-room. The first glance round showed it to be scrupulously clean, and solidly and tastelessly furnished. The hideous paper on the walls, the hideous carpet on the floor, were both of the best quality. The great heavy mahogany bedstead, with its curtains hanging from a hook in the ceiling, and with its clumsily carved head and foot on the same level, offered to the view the anomalous spectacle of French design overwhelmed by English execution. The most noticeable thing in the room was the extraordinary attention which had been given to the defense of the door. Besides the usual lock and key, it possessed two solid bolts, fastening inside at the top and the bottom. It had been one among the many eccentric sides of Reuben Limbrick’s character to live in perpetual dread of thieves breaking into his cottage at night. All the outer doors and all the window shutters were solidly sheathed with iron, and had alarm-bells attached to them on a new principle. Every one of the bedrooms possessed its two bolts on the inner side of the door. And, to crown all, on the roof of the cottage was a little belfry, containing a bell large enough to make itself heard at the Fulham police station. In Reuben Limbrick’s time the rope had communicated with his bedroom. It hung now against the wall, in the passage outside.

Looking from one to the other of the objects around her, Anne’s eyes rested on the partition wall which divided the room from the room next to it. The wall was not broken by a door of communication, it had nothing placed against it but a wash-hand-stand and two chairs.

“Who sleeps in the next room?” said Anne.

Hester Dethridge pointed down to the drawing-room in which they had left Geoffrey, Geoffrey slept in the room.

Anne led the way out again into the passage.

“Show me the second room,” she said.

The second room was also in front of the house. More ugliness (of first-rate quality) in the paper and the carpet. Another heavy mahogany bedstead; but, this time, a bedstead with a canopy attached to the head of it — supporting its own curtains. Anticipating Anne’s inquiry, on this occasion, Hester looked toward the next room, at the back of the cottage, and pointed to herself. Anne at once decided on choosing the second room; it was the farthest from Geoffrey. Hester waited while she wrote the address at which her luggage would be found (at the house of the musical agent), and then, having applied for, and received her directions as to the evening meal which she should send up stairs, quitted the room.

Left alone, Anne secured the door, and threw herself on the bed. Still too weary to exert her mind, still physically incapable of realising the helplessness and the peril of her position, she opened a locket that hung from her neck, kissed the portrait of her mother and the portrait of Blanche placed opposite to each other inside it, and sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Meanwhile Geoffrey repeated his final orders to the lad, at the cottage gate.

“When you have got the luggage, you are to go to the lawyer. If he can come here to-night, you will show him the way. If he can’t come, you will bring me a letter from him. Make any mistake in this, and it will be the worst day’s work you ever did in your life. Away with you, and don’t lose the train.”

The lad ran off. Geoffrey waited, looking after him, and turning over in his mind what had been done up to that time.

“All right, so far,” he said to himself. “I didn’t ride in the cab with her. I told her before witnesses I didn’t forgive her, and why I had her in the house. I’ve put her in a room by herself. And if I
must
see her, I see her with Hester Dethridge for a witness. My part’s done — let the lawyer do his.”

He strolled round into the back garden, and lit his pipe. After a while, as the twilight faded, he saw a light in Hester’s sitting-room on the ground-floor. He went to the window. Hester and the servant-girl were both there at work. “Well?” he asked. “How about the woman up stairs?” Hester’s slate, aided by the girl’s tongue, told him all about “the woman” that was to be told. They had taken up to her room tea and an omelet; and they had been obliged to wake her from a sleep. She had eaten a little of the omelet, and had drunk eagerly of the tea. They had gone up again to take the tray down. She had returned to the bed. She was not asleep — only dull and heavy. Made no remark. Looked clean worn out. We left her a light; and we let her be. Such was the report. After listening to it, without making any remark, Geoffrey filled a second pipe, and resumed his walk. The time wore on. It began to feel chilly in the garden. The rising wind swept audibly over the open lands round the cottage; the stars twinkled their last; nothing was to be seen overhead but the black void of night. More rain coming. Geoffrey went indoors.

An evening newspaper was on the dining-room table. The candles were lit. He sat down, and tried to read. No! There was nothing in the newspaper that he cared about. The time for hearing from the lawyer was drawing nearer and nearer. Reading was of no use. Sitting still was of no use. He got up, and went out in the front of the cottage — strolled to the gate — opened it — and looked idly up and down the road.

But one living creature was visible by the light of the gas-lamp over the gate. The creature came nearer, and proved to be the postman going his last round, with the last delivery for the night. He came up to the gate with a letter in his hand.

“The Honourable Geoffrey Delamayn?”

“All right.”

He took the letter from the postman, and went back into the dining-room. Looking at the address by the light of the candles, he recognised the handwriting of Mrs. Glenarm. “To congratulate me on my marriage!” he said to himself, bitterly, and opened the letter.

Mrs. Glenarm’s congratulations were expressed in these terms:

“MY ADORED GEOFFREY, — I have heard all. My beloved one! my own! you are sacrificed to the vilest wretch that walks the earth, and I have lost you! How is it that I live after hearing it? How is it that I can think, and write, with my brain on fire, and my heart broken! Oh, my angel, there is a purpose that supports me — pure, beautiful, worthy of us both. I live, Geoffrey — I live to dedicate myself to the adored idea of You. My hero! my first, last, love! I will marry no other man. I will live and die — I vow it solemnly on my bended knees — I will live and die true to You. I am your Spiritual Wife. My beloved Geoffrey!
she
can’t come between us, there —
she
can never rob you of my heart’s unalterable fidelity, of my soul’s unearthly devotion. I am your Spiritual Wife! Oh, the blameless luxury of writing those words! Write back to me, beloved one, and say you feel it too. Vow it, idol of my heart, as I have vowed it. Unalterable fidelity! unearthly devotion! Never, never will I be the wife of any other man! Never, never will I forgive the woman who has come between us! Yours ever and only; yours with the stainless passion that burns on the altar of the heart; yours, yours, yours — E. G.”

This outbreak of hysterical nonsense — in itself simply ridiculous — assumed a serious importance in its effect on Geoffrey. It associated the direct attainment of his own interests with the gratification of his vengeance on Anne. Ten thousand a year self-dedicated to him — and nothing to prevent his putting out his hand and taking it but the woman who had caught him in her trap, the woman up stairs who had fastened herself on him for life!

He put the letter into his pocket. “Wait till I hear from the lawyer,” he said to himself. “The easiest way out of it is
that
way. And it’s the law.”

He looked impatiently at his watch. As he put it back again in his pocket there was a ring at the bell. Was it the lad bringing the luggage? Yes. And, with it, the lawyer’s report? No. Better than that — the lawyer himself.

“Come in!” cried Geoffrey, meeting his visitor at the door.

The lawyer entered the dining-room. The candle-light revealed to view a corpulent, full-lipped, bright-eyed man — with a strain of negro blood in his yellow face, and with unmistakable traces in his look and manner of walking habitually in the dirtiest professional by-ways of the law.

“I’ve got a little place of my own in your neighbourhood,” he said. “And I thought I would look in myself, Mr. Delamayn, on my way home.”