Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (784 page)

“Where is Mr. Delamayn?”

“Out in the garden, ma’am.”

Anne went down stairs, and found Julius alone in the drawing-room.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” he said. “I am afraid Geoffrey is ill. The landlady has gone to bed, I am told — and I don’t know where to apply for medical assistance. Do you know of any doctor in the neighbourhood?”

Anne, like Julius, was a perfect stranger to the neighbourhood. She suggested making inquiry of the servant. On speaking to the girl, it turned out that she knew of a medical man, living within ten minutes’ walk of the cottage. She could give plain directions enabling any person to find the place — but she was afraid, at that hour of the night and in that lonely neighbourhood, to go out by herself.

“Is he seriously ill?” Anne asked.

“He is in such a state of nervous irritability,” said Julius, “that he can’t remain still for two moments together in the same place. It began with incessant restlessness while he was reading here. I persuaded him to go to bed. He couldn’t lie still for an instant — he came down again, burning with fever, and more restless than ever. He is out in the garden in spite of every thing I could do to prevent him; trying, as he says, to ‘run it off.’ It appears to be serious to
me.
. Come and judge for yourself.”

He led Anne into the next room; and, opening the shutter, pointed to the garden.

The clouds had cleared off; the night was fine. The clear starlight showed Geoffrey, stripped to his shirt and drawers, running round and round the garden. He apparently believed himself to be contending at the Fulham foot-race. At times, as the white figure circled round and round in the star-light, they heard him cheering for “the South.” The slackening thump of his feet on the ground, the heavier and heavier gasps in which he drew his breath, as he passed the window, gave warning that his strength was failing him. Exhaustion, if it led to no worse consequences, would force him to return to the house. In the state of his brain at that moment who could say what the result might be, if medical help was not called in?

“I will go for the doctor,” said Julius, “if you don’t mind my leaving you.”

It was impossible for Anne to set any apprehensions of her own against the plain necessity for summoning assistance. They found the key of the gate in the pocket of Geoffrey’s coat up stairs. Anne went with Julius to let him out. “How can I thank you!” she said, gratefully. “What should I have done without
you!
”

“I won’t be a moment longer than I can help,” he answered, and left her.

She secured the gate again, and went back to the cottage. The servant met her at the door, and proposed calling up Hester Dethridge.

“We don’t know what the master may do while his brother’s away,” said the girl. “And one more of us isn’t one too many, when we are only women in the house.”

“You are quite right,” said Anne. “Wake your mistress.”

After ascending the stairs, they looked out into the garden, through the window at the end of the passage on the upper floor. He was still going round and round, but very slowly: his pace was fast slackening to a walk.

Anne went back to her room, and waited near the open door — ready to close and fasten it instantly if any thing occurred to alarm her. “How changed I am!” she thought to herself. “Every thing frightens me, now.”

The inference was the natural one — but not the true one. The change was not in herself, but in the situation in which she was placed. Her position during the investigation at Lady Lundie’s house had tried her moral courage only. It had exacted from her one of those noble efforts of self-sacrifice which the hidden forces in a woman’s nature are essentially capable of making. Her position at the cottage tried her physical courage: it called on her to rise superior to the sense of actual bodily danger — while that danger was lurking in the dark. There, the woman’s nature sank under the stress laid on it — there, her courage could strike no root in the strength of her love — there, the animal instincts were the instincts appealed to; and the firmness wanted was the firmness of a man.

Hester Dethridge’s door opened. She walked straight into Anne’s room.

The yellow clay-cold colour of her face showed a faint flush of warmth; its deathlike stillness was stirred by a touch of life. The stony eyes, fixed as ever in their gaze, shone strangely with a dim inner lustre. Her gray hair, so neatly arranged at other times, was in disorder under her cap. All her movements were quicker than usual. Something had roused the stagnant vitality in the woman — it was working in her mind; it was forcing itself outward into her face. The servants at Windygates, in past times, had seen these signs, and had known them for a warning to leave Hester Dethridge to herself.

Anne asked her if she had heard what had happened.

She bowed her head.

“I hope you don’t mind being disturbed?”

She wrote on her slate: “I’m glad to be disturbed. I have been dreaming bad dreams. It’s good for me to be wakened, when sleep takes me backward in my life. What’s wrong with you? Frightened?”

“Yes.”

She wrote again, and pointed toward the garden with one hand, while she held the slate up with the other: “Frightened of
him?
”

“Terribly frightened.”

She wrote for the third time, and offered the slate to Anne with a ghastly smile: “I have been through it all. I know. You’re only at the beginning now. He’ll put the wrinkles in your face, and the gray in your hair. There will come a time when you’ll wish yourself dead and buried. You will live through it, for all that. Look at Me.”

As she read the last three words, Anne heard the garden door below opened and banged to again. She caught Hester Dethridge by the arm, and listened. The tramp of Geoffrey’s feet, staggering heavily in the passage, gave token of his approach to the stairs. He was talking to himself, still possessed by the delusion that he was at the foot-race. “Five to four on Delamayn. Delamayn’s won. Three cheers for the South, and one cheer more. Devilish long race. Night already! Perry! where’s Perry?”

He advanced, staggering from side to side of the passage. The stairs below creaked as he set his foot on them. Hester Dethridge dragged herself free from Anne, advanced, with her candle in her hand, and threw open Geoffrey’s bedroom door; returned to the head of the stairs; and stood there, firm as a rock, waiting for him. He looked up, as he set his foot on the next stair, and met the view of Hester’s face, brightly illuminated by the candle, looking down at him. On the instant he stopped, rooted to the place on which he stood. “Ghost! witch! devil!” he cried out, “take your eyes off me!” He shook his fist at her furiously, with an oath — sprang back into the hall — and shut himself into the dining-room from the sight of her. The panic which had seized him once already in the kitchen-garden at Windygates, under the eyes of the dumb cook, had fastened its hold on him once more. Frightened — absolutely frightened — of Hester Dethridge!

The gate bell rang. Julius had returned with the doctor.

Anne gave the key to the girl to let them in. Hester wrote on her slate, as composedly as if nothing had happened: “They’ll find me in the kitchen, if they want me. I sha’n’t go back to my bedroom. My bedroom’s full of bad dreams.” She descended the stairs. Anne waited in the upper passage, looking over into the hall below. “Your brother is in the drawing-room,” she called down to Julius. “The landlady is in the kitchen, if you want her.” She returned to her room, and waited for what might happen next.

After a brief interval she heard the drawing-room door open, and the voices of the men out side. There seemed to be some difficulty in persuading Geoffrey to ascend the stairs; he persisted in declaring that Hester Dethridge was waiting for him at the top of them. After a little they persuaded him that the way was free. Anne heard them ascend the stairs and close his bedroom door.

Another and a longer interval passed before the door opened again. The doctor was going away. He said his parting words to Julius in the passage. “Look in at him from time to time through the night, and give him another dose of the sedative mixture if he wakes. There is nothing to b e alarmed about in the restlessness and the fever. They are only the outward manifestations of some serious mischief hidden under them. Send for the medical man who has last attended him. Knowledge of the patient’s constitution is very important knowledge in this case.”

As Julius returned from letting the doctor out, Anne met him in the hall. She was at once struck by the worn look in his face, and by the fatigue which expressed itself in all his movements.

“You want rest,” she said. “Pray go to your room. I have heard what the doctor said to you. Leave it to the landlady and to me to sit up.”

Julius owned that he had been traveling from Scotland during the previous night. But he was unwilling to abandon the responsibility of watching his brother. “You are not strong enough, I am sure, to take my place,” he said, kindly. “And Geoffrey has some unreasoning horror of the landlady which makes it very undesirable that he should see her again, in his present state. I will go up to my room, and rest on the bed. If you hear any thing you have only to come and call me.”

An hour more passed.

Anne went to Geoffrey’s door and listened. He was stirring in his bed, and muttering to himself. She went on to the door of the next room, which Julius had left partly open. Fatigue had overpowered him; she heard, within, the quiet breathing of a man in a sound sleep. Anne turned back again resolved not to disturb him.

At the head of the stairs she hesitated — not knowing what to do. Her horror of entering Geoffrey’s room, by herself, was insurmountable. But who else was to do it? The girl had gone to bed. The reason which Julius had given for not employing the assistance of Hester Dethridge was unanswerable. She listened again at Geoffrey’s door. No sound was now audible in the room to a person in the passage outside. Would it be well to look in, and make sure that he had only fallen asleep again? She hesitated once more — she was still hesitating, when Hester Dethridge appeared from the kitchen.

She joined Anne at the top of the stairs — looked at her — and wrote a line on her slate: “Frightened to go in? Leave it to Me.”

The silence in the room justified the inference that he was asleep. If Hester looked in, Hester could do no harm now. Anne accepted the proposal.

“If you find any thing wrong,” she said, “don’t disturb his brother. Come to me first.”

With that caution she withdrew. It was then nearly two in the morning. She, like Julius, was sinking from fatigue. After waiting a little, and hearing nothing, she threw herself on the sofa in her room. If any thing happened, a knock at the door would rouse her instantly.

In the mean while Hester Dethridge opened Geoffrey’s bedroom door and went in.

The movements and the mutterings which Anne had heard, had been movements and mutterings in his sleep. The doctor’s composing draught, partially disturbed in its operation for the moment only, had recovered its sedative influence on his brain. Geoffrey was in a deep and quiet sleep.

Hester stood near the door, looking at him. She moved to go out again — stopped — and fixed her eyes suddenly on one of the inner corners of the room.

The same sinister change which had passed over her once already in Geoffrey’s presence, when they met in the kitchen-garden at Windygates, now passed over her again. Her closed lips dropped apart. Her eyes slowly dilated — moved, inch by inch from the corner, following something along the empty wall, in the direction of the bed — stopped at the head of the bed, exactly above Geoffrey’s sleeping face — stared, rigid and glittering, as if they saw a sight of horror close over it. He sighed faintly in his sleep. The sound, slight as it was, broke the spell that held her. She slowly lifted her withered hands, and wrung them above her head; fled back across the passage; and, rushing into her room, sank on her knees at the bedside.

Now, in the dead of night, a strange thing happened. Now, in the silence and the darkness, a hideous secret was revealed.

In the sanctuary of her own room — with all the other inmates of the house sleeping round her — the dumb woman threw off the mysterious and terrible disguise under which she deliberately isolated herself among her fellow-creatures in the hours of the day. Hester Dethridge spoke. In low, thick, smothered accents — in a wild litany of her own — she prayed. She called upon the mercy of God for deliverance from herself; for deliverance from the possession of the Devil; for blindness to fall on her, for death to strike her, so that she might never see that unnamed Horror more! Sobs shook the whole frame of the stony woman whom nothing human moved at other times. Tears poured over those clay-cold cheeks. One by one, the frantic words of her prayer died away on her lips. Fierce shuddering fits shook her from head to foot. She started up from her knees in the darkness. Light! light! light! The unnamed Horror was behind her in his room. The unnamed Horror was looking at her through his open door. She found the match-box, and lit the candle on her table — lit the two other candles set for ornament only on the mantle piece — and looked all round the brightly lighted little room. “Aha!” she said to herself, wiping the cold sweat of her agony from her face. “Candles to other people. God’s light to
me.
Nothing to be seen! nothing to be seen!” Taking one of the candles in her hand, she crossed the passage, with her head down, turned her back on Geoffrey’s open door, closed it quickly and softly, stretching out her hand behind her, and retreated again to her own room. She fastened the door, and took an ink-bottle and a pen from the mantle-piece. After considering for a moment, she hung a handkerchief over the keyhole, and laid an old shawl longwise at the bottom of the door, so as to hide the light in her room from the observation of any one in the house who might wake and come that way. This done, she opened the upper part of her dress, and, slipping her fingers into a secret pocket hidden in the inner side of her stays, produced from it some neatly folded leaves of thin paper. Spread out on the table, the leaves revealed themselves — all but the last — as closely covered with writing, in her own hand.