Not the slightest cause appeared for any apprehension in that quarter. Mrs Wragge was seated at the table, absorbed in the arrangement of a series of smart circulars and tempting price-lists, issued by advertising tradespeople, and flung in at the cab-windows as they left the London terminus. ‘I’ve often heard tell of light reading,’ said Mrs Wragge, restlessly shifting the positions of the circulars, as a child restlessly shifts the position of a new set of toys. ‘Here’s light reading, printed in pretty colours. Here’s all the Things I’m going to buy when I’m out shopping to-morrow. Lend us a pencil, please – you won’t be angry, will you? – I do so want to mark ‘em off.’ She looked up at Magdalen, chuckled joyfully over her own altered circumstances, and beat her great hands on the table in irrepressible delight. ‘No cookery-book!’ cried Mrs Wragge. ‘No Buzzing in my head! no captain to shave to-morrow! I’m all down at heel; my cap’s on one side; and nobody bawls at me. My heart alive, here is a holiday and no mistake!’ Her hands began to drum on the table louder than ever, until Magdalen quieted them by presenting her with a pencil. Mrs Wragge instantly recovered her dignity, squared her elbows on the table, and plunged into imaginary shopping for the rest of the evening.
Magdalen returned to the window. She took a chair, seated herself behind the curtain, and steadily fixed her eyes once more on the house opposite.
The blinds were down over the windows of the first floor and the second. The window of the room on the ground floor was uncovered and partly open, but no living creature came near it. Doors opened and people came and went, in the houses on either side; children by the dozen poured out on the pavement to play, and invaded the little strips of garden-ground to recover lost balls and shuttlecocks; streams of people passed backwards and forwards perpetually; heavy waggons piled high with goods, lumbered along the road on their way to, or their way from, the railway station near; all the daily life of the district stirred with its ceaseless activity in every direction but one. The hours passed – and there was the house opposite, still shut up, still void of any signs of human existence, inside or out. The one object which had decided Magdalen on personally venturing herself in Vauxhall Walk -the object of studying the looks, manners and habits of Mrs Lecount and her master from a post of observation known only to herself – was, thus far, utterly defeated. After three hours’ watching at the window, she had not even discovered enough to show her that the house was inhabited at all.
Shortly after six o’clock, the landlady disturbed Mrs Wragge’s studies by spreading the cloth for dinner. Magdalen placed herself at the table in a position which still enabled her to command the view from the window. Nothing happened. The dinner came to an end; Mrs Wragge (lulled by the narcotic influences of annotating circulars and eating and drinking with an appetite sharpened by the captain’s absence) withdrew to an arm-chair, and fell asleep in an attitude which would have caused her husband the acutest mental suffering; seven o’clock struck; the shadows of the summer evening lengthened stealthily on the grey pavement and the brown house-walls – and still the closed door opposite remained shut; still the one window open, showed nothing but the black blank of the room inside, lifeless and changeless as if that room had been a tomb.
Mrs Wragge’s meek snoring deepened in tone; the evening wore on drearily; it was close on eight o’clock – when an event happened at last. The street-door opposite opened for the first time, and a woman appeared on the threshold.
Was the woman Mrs Lecount? No. As she came nearer, her dress showed her to be a servant. She had a large door-key in her hand, and was evidently going out to perform an errand. Roused, partly by curiosity – partly by the impulse of the moment, which urged her impetuous nature into action, after the passive endurance of many hours past – Magdalen snatched up her bonnet, and determined to follow the servant to her destination, wherever it might be.
The woman led her to the great thoroughfare of shops close at hand, called Lambeth Walk. After proceeding some little distance, and looking about her with the hesitation of a person not well acquainted with the neighbourhood, the servant crossed the road, and entered a stationer’s shop. Magdalen crossed the road after her, and followed her in.
The inevitable delay in entering the shop under these circumstances, made Magdalen too late to hear what the woman asked for. The first words spoken, however, by the man behind the counter, reached her ears, and informed her that the servant’s object was to buy a railway guide.
‘Do you mean a Guide for this month? or a Guide for July?’ asked the shopman, addressing his customer.
‘Master didn’t tell me which,’ answered the woman. ‘All I know is, he’s going into the country the day after to-morrow.’
‘The day after to-morrow is the first of July,’ said the shopman. ‘The Guide your master wants, is the Guide for the new month. It won’t be published till to-morrow.’
Engaging to call again on the next day, the servant left the shop, and took the way that led back to Vauxhall Walk.
Magdalen purchased the first trifle she saw on the counter, and hastily returned in the same direction. The discovery she had just made was of very serious importance to her; and she felt the necessity of acting on it with as little delay as possible.
On entering the front room at the lodgings, she found Mrs Wragge just awake, lost in drowsy bewilderment, with her cap fallen off on her shoulders, and with one of her shoes missing altogether. Magdalen endeavoured to persuade her that she was tired after her journey, and that her wisest proceeding would be to go to bed. Mrs Wragge was perfectly willing to profit by this suggestion, provided she could find her shoe first. In looking for the shoe, she unfortunately discovered the circulars, put by on a side table; and forthwith recovered her recollection of the earlier proceedings of the evening.
‘Give us the pencil,’ said Mrs Wragge, shuffling the circulars in a violent hurry. ‘I can’t go to bed yet – I haven’t half done marking down the things I want. Let’s see; where did I leave off? Try Finch’s feeding-bottle for Infants. No! there’s a cross against that: the cross means I don’t want it. Comfort in the Field. Buckler’s Indestructible Hunting Breeches. Oh, dear, dear! I’ve lost the place. No, I haven’t. Here it is; here’s my mark against it. Elegant Cashmere Robes; strictly oriental, very grand; reduced to one pound, nineteen, and sixpence. Be in time. Only three left. Only three! Oh, do lend us the money and let’s go and get one!’
‘Not to-night,’ said Magdalen. ‘Suppose you go to bed now, and finish the circulars to-morrow? I will put them by the bedside for you, and you can go on with them as soon as you wake, the first thing in the morning.’
This suggestion met with Mrs Wragge’s immediate approval. Magdalen took her into the next room and put her to bed like a child -with her toys by her side. The room was so narrow, and the bed was so small; and Mrs Wragge, arrayed in the white apparel proper for the occasion, with her moon-face framed round by a spacious halo of nightcap – looked so hugely and disproportionately large, that Magdalen, anxious as she was, could not repress a smile on taking leave of her travelling companion for the night.
‘Aha!’ cried Mrs Wragge, cheerfully; ‘we’ll have that Cashmere Robe to-morrow. Come here! I want to whisper something to you. Just you look at me – I’m going to sleep crooked, and the captain’s not here to bawl at me!’
The front room at the lodgings contained a sofa-bedstead, which the landlady arranged betimes for the night. This done, and the candles brought in, Magdalen was left alone to shape her future course, as her own thoughts counselled her.
The questions and answers which had passed in her presence that evening, at the stationer’s shop, led plainly to the conclusion that one day more would bring Noel Vanstone’s present term of residence in Vauxhall Walk to an end. Her first cautious resolution to pass many days together in unsuspected observation of the house opposite, before she ventured herself inside, was entirely frustrated by the turn events had taken. She was placed in the dilemma of running all risks hea
dlong on the next day – or of pausing for a future opportunity, which might never occur. There was no middle course open to her. Until she had seen Noel Vanstone with her own eyes, and had discovered the worst there was to fear from Mrs Lecount – until she had achieved this double object, with the needful precaution of keeping her own identity carefully in the dark – not a step could she advance towards the accomplishment of the purpose which had brought her to London.
One after another, the minutes of the night passed away; one after another, the thronging thoughts followed each other over her mind -and still she reached no conclusion; still she faltered and doubted, with a hesitation new to her in her experience of herself. At last she crossed the room impatiently to seek the trivial relief of unlocking her trunk, and taking from it the few things that she wanted for the night. Captain Wragge’s suspicions had not misled him. There, hidden between two dresses, were the articles of costume which he had missed from her box at Birmingham. She turned them over one by one, to satisfy herself that nothing she wanted had been forgotten, and returned once more to her post of observation by the window.
The house opposite was dark down to the parlour. There, the blind, previously raised, was now drawn over the window: the light burning behind it, showed her for the first time that the room was inhabited. Her eyes brightened, and her colour rose as she looked at it.
‘There he is!’ she .said to herself, in a low angry whisper. ‘There he lives on our money, in the house that his father’s warning has closed against me!’ She dropped the blind which she had raised to look out; returned to her trunk; and took from it the grey wig which was part of her dramatic costume, in the character of the north-country lady. The wig had been crumpled in packing; she put it on, and went to the toilet-table to comb it out. ‘His father has warned him against Magdalen Vanstone,’ she said, repeating the passage in Mrs Lecount’s letter, and laughing bitterly, as she looked at herself in the glass. ‘I wonder whether his father has warned him against Miss Garth? Tomorrow is sooner than I bargained for. No matter; tomorrow shall show.’
Chapter Two
The early morning, when Magdalen rose and looked out, was cloudy and overcast. But as time advanced to the breakfast hour, the threatening of rain passed away; and she was free to provide, without hindrance from the weather, for the first necessity of the day – the necessity of securing the absence of her travelling companion from the house.
Mrs Wragge was dressed, armed at all points with her collection of circulars, and eager to be away by ten o’clock. At an earlier hour Magdalen had provided for her being properly taken care of by the landlady’s eldest daughter, – a quiet, well-conducted girl, whose interest in the shopping expedition was readily secured by a little present of money for the purchase, on her own account, of a parasol and a muslin dress. Shortly after ten o’clock, Magdalen dismissed Mrs Wragge and her attendant in a cab. She then joined the landlady – who was occupied in setting the rooms in order upstairs – with the object of ascertaining by a little well-timed gossip, what the daily habits might be of the inmates of the house.
She discovered that there were no other lodgers but Mrs Wragge and herself. The landlady’s husband was away all day, employed at a railway station. Her second daughter was charged with the care of the kitchen, in the elder sister’s absence. The younger children were at school, and would be back at one o’clock to dinner. The landlady herself ‘got up fine linen for ladies’, and expected to be occupied over her work all that morning, in a little room built out at the back of the premises. Thus, there was every facility for Magdalen’s leaving the house in disguise, and leaving it unobserved; provided she went out before the children came back to dinner at one o’clock.
By eleven o’clock the apartments were set in order, and the landlady had retired to pursue her own employments. Magdalen softly locked the door of her room; drew the blind over the window, and entered at once on her preparations for the perilous experiment of the day.
The same quick perception of dangers to be avoided, and difficulties to be overcome, which had warned her to leave the extravagant part of her character costume in the box at Birmingham, now kept her mind fully alive to the vast difference between a disguise worn by gaslight, for the amusement of an audience, and a disguise assumed by daylight to deceive the searching eyes of two strangers. The first article of dress which she put on was an old gown of her own (made of the material called ‘alpaca’), of a dark-brown colour, with a neat pattern of little star-shaped spots in white. A double flounce running round the bottom of this dress was the only milliner’s ornament which it presented – an ornament not at all out of character with the costume appropriate to an elderly lady. The disguise of her head and face was the next object of her attention. She fitted and arranged the grey wig with the dexterity which constant practice had given her; fixed the false eyebrows (made rather large, and of hair darker than the wig) carefully in their position, with the gum she had with her for the purpose, and stained her face, with the customary stage materials, so as to change the transparent fairness of her complexion to the dull, faintly opaque colour 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 colours, 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 grey 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 practised 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.’