Chapter Thirteen
What had happened at Aldborough, in Captain Wragge’s absence?
Events had occurred which the captain’s utmost dexterity might have found it hard to remedy.
As soon as the chaise had left North Shingles, Mrs Wragge received the message which her husband had charged the servant to deliver. She hastened into the parlour, bewildered by her stormy interview with the captain, and penitently conscious that she had done wrong, without knowing what the wrong was. If Magdalen’s mind had been unoccupied by the one idea of the marriage which now filled it – if she had possessed composure enough to listen to Mrs Wragge’s rambling narrative of what had happened during her interview with the housekeeper -Mrs Lecount’s visit to the wardrobe must, sooner or later, have formed part of the disclosure; and Magdalen, although she might never have guessed the truth, must at least have been warned that there was some element of danger lurking treacherously in the alpaca dress. As it was, no such consequence as this followed Mrs Wragge’s appearance in the parlour; for no such consequence was now possible.
Events which had happened earlier in the morning, events which had happened for days and weeks past, had vanished as completely from Magdalen’s mind, as if they had never taken place. The horror of the coming Monday – the merciless certainty implied in the appointment of the day and hour – petrified all feeling in her, and annihilated all thought. Mrs Wragge made three separate attempts to enter on the subject of the housekeeper’s visit. The first time she might as well have addressed herself to the wind, or to the sea. The second attempt seemed likely to be more successful. Magdalen sighed, listened for a moment indifferently, and then dismissed the subject. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The end has come all the same. I’m not angry with you. Say no more.’ Later in the day, from not knowing what else to talk about, Mrs Wragge tried again. This time, Magdalen turned on her impatiently. ‘For God’s sake, don’t worry me about trifles! I can’t bear it.’ Mrs Wragge closed her lips on the spot, and returned to the subject no more. Magdalen, who had been kind to her at all other times, had angrily forbidden it. The captain – utterly ignorant of Mrs Lecount’s interest in the secrets of the wardrobe – had never so much as approached it. All the information that he had extracted from his wife’s mental confusion, he had extracted by putting direct questions, derived purely from the resources of his own knowledge. He had insisted on plain answers, without excuses of any kind; he had carried his point as usual; and his departure the same morning had left him no chance of re-opening the question, even if his irritation against his wife had permitted him to do so. There the alpaca dress hung, neglected in the dark; the unnoticed, unsuspected centre of dangers that were still to come.
Towards the afternoon, Mrs Wragge took courage to start a suggestion of her own – she pleaded for a little turn in the fresh air.
Magdalen passively put on her hat; passively accompanied her companion along the public-walk, until they reached its northward extremity. Here the beach was left solitary, and here they sat down, side by side, on the shingle. It was a bright exhilarating day; pleasure-boats were sailing on the calm blue water; Aldborough was idling happily afloat and ashore. Mrs Wragge recovered her spirits in the gaiety of the prospect – she amused herself, like a child, by tossing pebbles into the sea. From time to time she stole a questioning glance at Magdalen, and saw no encouragement in her manner, no change to cordiality in her face. She sat silent on the slope of the shingle, with her elbow on her knee, and her head resting on her hand, looking out over the sea -looking with rapt attention, and yet with eyes that seemed to notice nothing. Mrs Wragge wearied of the pebbles, and lost her interest in looking at the pleasure-boats. Her great head began to nod heavily, and she dozed in the warm drowsy air. When she woke, the pleasure-boats were far off; their sails were white specks in the distance. The idlers on the beach were thinned in number; the sun was low in the heaven; the blue sea was darker, and rippled by a breeze. Changes on sky and earth and ocean told of the waning day; change was everywhere – except close at her side. There Magdalen sat, in the same position, with weary eyes that still looked over the sea, and still saw nothing.
‘Oh, do speak to me!’ said Mrs Wragge.
Magdalen started, and looked about her vacantly.
‘It’s late,’ she said, shivering under the first sensation that reached her of the rising breeze. ‘Come home; you want your tea.’
They walked home in silence.
‘Don’t be angry with me for asking,’ said Mrs Wragge, as they sat together at the tea-table. ‘Are you troubled, my dear, in your mind?’
‘Yes,’ replied Magdalen. ‘Don’t notice me. My trouble will soon be over.’
She waited patiently until Mrs Wragge had made an end of the meal, and then went upstairs to her own room.
‘Monday!’ she said, as she sat down at her toilet-table. ‘Something may happen before Monday comes!’
Her fingers wandered mechanically among the brushes and combs, the tiny bottles and cases placed on the table. She set them in order, now in one way, and now in another – then on a sudden pushed them away from her in a heap. For a minute or two her hands remained idle. That interval passed, they grew restless again, and pulled the two little drawers backwards and forwards in their grooves. Among the objects laid in one of them was a Prayer-Book, which had belonged to her at Combe-Raven, and which she had saved with her other relics of the past, when she and her sister had taken their farewell of home. She opened the Prayer-Book after a long hesitation, at the Marriage Service – shut it again, before she had read a line – and put it back hurriedly in one of the drawers. After turning the key in the lock, she rose and walked to the window.
‘The horrible sea!’ she said, turning from it with a shudder of disgust. ‘The lonely, dreary, horrible sea!’
She went back to the drawer, and took the Prayer-Book out for the second time; half opened it again at the Marriage Service; and impatiently threw it back into the drawer. This time, after turning the lock, she took the key away – walked with it in her hand to the open window - and threw it violently from her into the garden. It fell on a bed thickly planted with flowers. It was invisible; it was lost. The sense of its loss seemed to relieve her.
‘Something may happen on Friday; something may happen on Saturday; something may happen on Sunday. Three days still!’
She closed the green shutters outside the window, and drew the curtains, to darken the room still more. Her head felt heavy; her eyes were burning hot. She threw herself on her bed, with a sullen impulse to sleep away the time.
The quiet of the house helped her, the darkness of the room helped her; the stupor of mind into which she had fallen had its effect on her senses: she dropped into a broken sleep. Her restless hands moved incessantly; her head tossed from side to side of the pillow – but still she slept. Erelong, words fell by ones and twos from her lips; words whispered in her sleep, growing more and more continuous, more and more articulate, the longer the sleep lasted; words which seemed to calm her restlessness, and to hush her into deeper repose. She smiled; she was in the happy land of dreams – Frank’s name escaped her. ‘Do you love me, Frank?’ she whispered. ‘Oh, my darling, say it again! say it again!’
The time passed, the room grew darker; and still she slumbered and dreamed. Towards sunset – without any noise inside the house or out to account for it – she started up on the bed, awake again in an instant. The drowsy obscurity of the room struck her with terror. She ran to the window, pushed open the shutters, and leaned far out into the evening air and the evening light. Her eyes devoured the trivial sights on the beach; her ears drank in the welcome murmur of the sea. Anything to deliver her from the waking impression which her dreams had left! No more darkness; no more repose. Sleep that came mercifully to others, came treacherously to her. Sleep had only closed her eyes on the future, to open them on the past.
She went down again into the parlour, eager to talk – no matter how idl
y, no matter on what trifles. The room was empty. Perhaps Mrs Wragge had gone to her work – perhaps, she was too tired to talk. Magdalen took her hat from the table, and went out. The sea that she had shrunk from, a few hours since, looked friendly now. How lovely it was in its cool evening blue! What a godlike joy in the happy multitude of waves, leaping up to the light of Heaven!
She stayed out, until the night fell and the stars appeared. The night steadied her.
By slow degrees, her mind recovered its balance, and she looked her position unflinchingly in the face. The vain hope that accident might defeat the very end for which, of her own free will, she had ceaselessly plotted and toiled, vanished and left her; self-dissipated in its own weakness. She knew the true alternative, and faced it. On one side, was the revolting ordeal of the marriage – on the other, the abandonment of her purpose. Was it too late to choose between the sacrifice of the purpose, and the sacrifice of herself? Yes! too late. The backward path had closed behind her. Time that no wish could change, Time that no prayers could recall, had made her purpose a part of herself: once she had governed it; now it governed her. The more she shrank, the harder she struggled, the more mercilessly it drove her on. No other feeling in her was strong enough to master it – not even the horror that was maddening her; the horror of her marriage.
Towards nine o’clock, she went back to the house.
‘Walking again!’1 said Mrs Wragge, meeting her at the door. ‘Come in and sit down, my dear. How tired you must be!’
Magdalen smiled, and patted Mrs Wragge kindly on the shoulder.
‘You forget how strong I am,’ she said. ‘Nothing hurts me.’
She lit her candle, and went upstairs again into her room. As she returned to the old place by her toilet-table, the vain hope in the three days of delay, the vain hope of deliverance by accident, came back to her – this time, in a form more tangible than the form which it had hitherto worn.
‘Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something may happen to him; something may happen to me. Something serious; something fatal. One of us may the.’
A sudden change came over her face. She shivered, though there was no cold in the air. She started, though there was no noise to alarm her.
‘One of us may the. I may be the one.’
She fell into deep thought – roused herself, after a while – and, opening the door, called to Mrs Wragge to come and speak to her.
‘You were right in thinking I should fatigue myself,’ she said. ‘My walk has been a little too much for me. I feel tired; and I am going to bed. Good night.’ She kissed Mrs Wragge, and softly closed the door again.
After a few turns backwards and forwards in the room, she abruptly opened her writing-case and began a letter to her sister. The letter grew and grew under her hands; she filled sheet after sheet of note-paper. Her heart was full of her subject: it was her own story addressed to Norah. She shed no tears; she was composed to a quiet sadness. Her pen ran smoothly on. After writing for more than two hours, she left off while the letter was still unfinished. There was no signature attached to it -there was a blank space reserved, to be filled up at some other time. After putting away the case, with the sheets of writing secured inside it, she walked to the window for air, and stood there looking out.
The moon was waning over the sea. The breeze of the earlier hours had died out. On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded in a deep and awful calm.
Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before her eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death the Tempter, was busy at her heart. Death the Tempter, pointed homeward, to the grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven churchyard.
‘Nineteen last birthday,’ she thought. ‘Only nineteen!’ She moved away from the window – hesitated – and then looked out again at the view. ‘The beautiful night!’ she said gratefully. ‘Oh, the beautiful night!’
She left the window, and lay down on her bed. Sleep that had come treacherously before, came mercifully now; came deep and dreamless, the image of her last waking thought – the image of Death.
Early the next morning, Mrs Wragge went into Magdalen’s room, and found that she had risen betimes. She was sitting before the glass, drawing the comb slowly through and through her hair – thoughtful and quiet.
‘How do you feel this morning, my dear?’ asked Mrs Wragge. ‘Quite well again?’
‘Yes.’
After replying in the affirmative, she stopped, considered for a moment, and suddenly contradicted herself. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not quite well. I am suffering a little from toothache.’ As she altered her first answer in those words, she gave a twist to her hair with the comb, so that it fell forward and hid her face.
At breakfast she was very silent; and she took nothing but a cup of tea.
‘Let me go to the chemist’s and get something,’ said Mrs Wragge.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Do let me!’
‘No!’
She refused for the second time sharply and angrily. As usual, Mrs Wragge submitted, and let her have her own way. When breakfast was over she rose, without a word of explanation, and went out. Mrs Wragge watched her from the window, and saw that she took the direction of the chemist’s shop.
On reaching the chemist’s door, she stopped – paused, before entering the shop, and looked in at the window – hesitated, and walked away a little – hesitated again – and took the first turning which led back to the beach.
Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose, she seated herself on the shingle. The only persons who were near to her, in the position she now occupied, were a nurse-maid and two little boys. The youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in his hand. After looking at Magdalen for a little while, with the quaintest gravity and attention, the boy suddenly approached her; and opened the way to an acquaintance by putting his toy composedly on her lap.
‘Look at my ship,’ said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen’s knee.
She was not usually patient with children. In happier days, she would not have met the boy’s advance towards her, as she met it now. The hard despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted, and trembled. She put the ship back into the child’s hands, and lifted him on her lap.
‘Will you give me a kiss?’ she said, faintly.
The boy looked at his ship, as if he would rather have kissed the ship.
She repeated the question – repeated it, almost humbly. The child put his hand up to her neck, and kissed her.
‘If I was your sister, would you love me?’
All the misery of her friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart, poured from her in those words.
‘Would you love me?’ she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom of the child’s frock.
‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘Look at my ship.’
She looked at the ship through her gathering tears.
‘What do you call it?’ she asked, trying hard to find her way even to the interest of a child.
‘I call it Uncle Kirke’s ship,’ said the boy. ‘Uncle Kirke has gone away.’
The name recalled nothing to her memory. No remembrances but old remembrances lived in her now. ‘Gone?’ she repeated absently, thinking what she should say to her little friend next.
‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘Gone to China.’
Even from the lips of a child, that word struck her to the heart. She put Kirke’s little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the beach.
As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night renewed itself in her mind. But the sense of relief which the child had brought to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her knee, influenced her still. She was conscious of a dawning hope, opening freshly on her thoughts, as the boy’s innocent eyes had opened on her face when he came to her on the beach. Was it too late to turn back? Once more, she asked herself that question – and now, for the first time, she asked it in do
ubt.
She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self, which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting to remove her shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case, and addressed these lines to Captain Wragge, as fast as her pen could trace them.
‘You will find the money I promised you, enclosed in this. My resolution has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than I can face. I have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget me. Let us never meet again.’
With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her little white silk bag from her bosom, and took out the bank-notes to enclose them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had lost its discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole contents of the bag in one handful of papers; and drew them out violently, tearing some and disarranging the folds of others. As she threw them down before her on the table, the first object that met her eye was her own handwriting, faded already with time. She looked closer, and saw the words she had copied from her dead father’s letter – saw the lawyer’s brief and terrible commentary on them, confronting her at the bottom of the page:
Mr Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.
Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet. All the Past rose before her in mute overwhelming reproach. She took up the lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and looked at the ink still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.
The colour that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more. The hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless eyes. She folded the bank-notes carefully, and put them back in her bag. She pressed the copy of her father’s letter to her lips, and returned it to its place, with the bank-notes. When the bag was in her bosom again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands – then deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge. Before the ink was dry, the letter lay in fragments on the floor.