‘No!’ she said, as the last morsel of the torn paper dropped from her hand. ‘On the way I go, there is no turning back.’
She rose composedly, and left the room. While descending the stairs she met Mrs Wragge coming up. ‘Going out again, my dear?’ asked Mrs Wragge. ‘May I go with you?’
Magdalen’s attention wandered. Instead of answering the question, she absently answered her own thoughts.
‘Thousands of women marry for money,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
The helpless perplexity of Mrs Wragge’s face, as she spoke those words, roused her to a sense of present things.
‘My poor dear!’ she said; ‘I puzzle you, don’t I? Never mind what I say, – all girls talk nonsense; and I’m no better than the rest of them. Come! I’ll give you a treat. You shall enjoy yourself while the captain is away. We will have a long drive by ourselves. Put on your smart bonnet, and come with me to the hotel. I’ll tell the landlady to put a nice cold dinner into a basket. You shall have all the things you like – and I’ll wait on you. When you are an old, old woman, you will remember me kindly, won’t you? You will say, “She wasn’t a bad girl; hundreds worse then she was live and prosper, and nobody blames them.” There! there! go and put your bonnet on. Oh, my God, what is my heart made of! How it lives and lives, when other girls’ hearts would have died in them long ago!’
In half an hour more, she and Mrs Wragge were seated together in the carriage. One of the horses was restive at starting. ‘Flog him,’ she cried angrily to the driver. ‘What are you frightened about? Flog him! Suppose the carriage was upset,’ she said, turning suddenly to her companion; ‘and suppose I was thrown out, and killed on the spot? Nonsense! don’t look at me in that way. I’m like your husband; I have a dash of humour, and I’m only joking.’
They were out the whole day. When they reached home again, it was after dark. The long succession of hours passed in the fresh air, left them both with the same sense of fatigue. Again that night, Magdalen slept the deep dreamless sleep of the night before. And so the Friday closed.
Her last thought at night, had been the thought which had sustained her throughout the day. She had laid her head on the pillow, with the same reckless resolution to submit to the coming trial, which had already expressed itself in words, when she and Mrs Wragge met by accident on the stairs. When she woke on the morning of Saturday, the resolution was gone. The Friday’s thoughts – the Friday’s events even -were blotted out of her mind. Once again, creeping chill through the flow of her young blood, she felt the slow and deadly prompting of despair, which had come to her in the waning moonlight, which had whispered to her in the awful calm.
‘I saw the end, as the end must be,’ she said to herself, ‘on Thursday night. I have been wrong ever since.’
When she and her companion met that morning, she reiterated her complaint of suffering from the toothache; she repeated her refusal to allow Mrs Wragge to procure a remedy; she left the house after breakfast, in the direction of the chemist’s shop, exactly as she had left it on the morning before.
This time she entered the shop without an instant’s hesitation.
‘I have got an attack of toothache,’ she said abruptly to an elderly man who stood behind the counter.
‘May I look at the tooth, Miss?’
‘There is no necessity to look. It is a hollow tooth. I think I have caught cold in it.’
The chemist recommended various remedies, which were in vogue fifteen years since. She declined purchasing any of them.
‘I have always found laudanum relieves the pain better than anything else,’ she said, trifling with the bottles on the counter, and looking at them while she spoke, instead of looking at the chemist. ‘Let me have some laudanum.’
‘Certainly, Miss. Excuse my asking the question – it is only a matter of form. You are staying at Aldborough, I think?’
‘Yes. I am Miss Bygrave, of North Shingles.’
The chemist bowed; and, turning to his shelves, filled an ordinary half-ounce bottle with laudanum, immediately. In ascertaining his customer’s name and address beforehand, the owner of the shop had taken a precaution which was natural to a careful man – but which was by no means universal, under similar circumstances, in the state of the law at that time.
‘Shall I put you up a little cotton wool with the laudanum?’ he asked, after he had placed a label on the bottle, and had written a word on it in large letters.
‘If you please. What have you just written on the bottle?’ She put the question sharply, with something of distrust as well as curiosity in her manner.
The chemist answered the question by turning the label towards her. She saw written on it, in large letters – POISON.
‘I like to be on the safe side, Miss,’ said the old man, smiling. ‘Very worthy people in other respects, are often sadly careless, where poisons are concerned.’
She began trifling again with the bottles on the counter; and put another question, with an ill-concealed anxiety to hear the answer.
‘Is there danger,’ she asked, ‘in such a little drop of laudanum as that?’
‘There is Death in it, Miss,’ replied the chemist quietly.
‘Death to a child, or to a person in delicate health?’
‘Death to the strongest man in England, let him be who he may.’
With that answer, the chemist sealed up the bottle in its wrapping of white paper, and handed the laudanum to Magdalen across the counter. She laughed as she took it from him, and paid for it.
‘There will be no fear of accidents at North Shingles,’ she said. ‘I shall keep the bottle locked up in my dressing-case. If it doesn’t relieve the pain, I must come to you again, and try some other remedy. Good morning.’
‘Good morning, Miss.’
She went straight back to the house, without once looking up, without noticing any one who passed her. She brushed by Mrs Wragge in the passage, as she might have brushed by a piece of furniture. She ascended the stairs, and caught her foot twice in her dress, from sheer inattention to the common precaution of holding it up. The trivial daily interests of life had lost their hold on her already.
In the privacy of her own room, she took the bottle from its wrapping, and threw the paper and the cotton wool into the fireplace. At the moment when she did this there was a knock at the door. She hid the little bottle, and looked up impatiently. Mrs Wragge came into the room.
‘Have you got something for your toothache, my dear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I do anything to help you?’
‘No.’
Mrs Wragge still lingered uneasily near the door. Her manner showed plainly that she had something more to say.
‘What is it?’ asked Magdalen, sharply.
‘Don’t be angry,’ said Mrs Wragge. ‘I’m not settled in my mind about the captain. He’s a great writer – and he hasn’t written. He’s as quick as lightning – and he hasn’t come back. Here’s Saturday, and no signs of him. Has he run away, do you think? Has anything happened to him?’
‘I should think not. Go downstairs; I’ll come and speak to you about it directly.’
As soon as she was alone again, Magdalen rose from her chair, advanced towards a cupboard in the room which locked, and paused for a moment, with her hand on the key, in doubt. Mrs Wragge’s appearance had disturbed the whole current of her thoughts. Mrs Wragge’s last question, trifling as it was, had checked her on the verge of the precipice – had roused the old vain hope in her once more of release by accident.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Why may something not have happened to one of them?’
She placed the laudanum in the cupboard, locked it, and put the key in her pocket. ‘Time enough still,’ she thought, ‘before Monday. I’ll wait till the captain comes back.’
After some consultation downstairs, it was agreed that the servant should sit up that night, in expectation of her master’s return. The day passed quietly, without events of
any kind. Magdalen dreamed away the hours over a book. A weary patience of expectation was all she felt now – the poignant torment of thought was dulled and blunted at last. She passed the day and the evening in the parlour, vaguely conscious of a strange feeling of aversion to going back to her own room. As the night advanced, as the noises ceased indoors and out, her restlessness began to return. She endeavoured to quiet herself by reading. Books failed to fix her attention. The newspaper was lying in a corner of the room: she tried the newspaper next.
She looked mechanically at the headings of the articles; she listlessly turned over page after page, until her wandering attention was arrested by the narrative of an Execution in a distant part of England. There was nothing to strike her in the story of the crime; and yet she read it. It was a common, horribly common, act of bloodshed – the murder of a woman in farm-service, by a man in the same employment who was jealous of her. He had been convicted on no extraordinary evidence; he had been hanged under no unusual circumstances. He had made his confession, when he knew there was no hope for him, like other criminals of his class; and the newspaper had printed it at the end of the article, in these terms:
‘I kept company with the deceased for a year or thereabouts. I said I would marry her when I had money enough. She said I had money enough now. We had a quarrel. She refused to walk out with me any more; she wouldn’t draw me my beer; she took up with my fellow-servant, David Crouch. I went to her on the Saturday, and said I would marry her as soon as we could be asked in church, if she would give up Crouch. She laughed at me. She turned me out of the washhouse, and the rest of them saw her turn me out. I was not easy in my mind. I went and sat on the gate – the gate in the meadow they call Pettit’s Piece. I thought I would shoot her. I went and fetched my gun and loaded it. I went out into Pettit’s Piece again. I was hard put to it, to make up my mind. I thought I would try my luck – I mean try whether to kill her. I took a throwing up the Spud1 of the plough into the air. I said to myself, if it falls flat, I’ll spare her; if it falls point in the earth, I’ll kill her. I took a good swing with it, and shied it up. It fell point in the earth. I went and shot her. It was a bad job, but I did it. I did it, as they said I did it at the trial. I hope the Lord will have mercy on me. I wish my mother to have my old clothes. I have no more to say.’
In the happier days of her life, Magdalen would have passed over the narrative of the execution, and the printed confession which accompanied it, unread – the subject would have failed to attract her. She read the horrible story now – read it, with an interest unintelligible to herself. Her attention, which had wandered over higher and better things, followed every sentence of the murderer’s hideously direct confession, from beginning to end. If the man, or the woman, had been known to her – if the place had been familiar to her memory – she could hardly have followed the narrative more closely, or have felt a more distinct impression of it left on her mind. She laid down the paper, wondering at herself; she took it up once more, and tried to read some other portion of the contents. The effort was useless; her attention wandered again. She threw the paper away; and went out into the garden. The night was dark; the stars were few and faint. She could just see the gravel walk – she could just pace backwards and forwards between the house-door and the gate.
The confession in the newspaper had taken a fearful hold on her mind. As she paced the walk, the black night opened over the sea, and showed her the murderer in the field, hurling the Spud of the plough into the air. She ran, shuddering, back to the house. The murderer followed her into the parlour. She seized the candle, and went up into her room. The vision of her own distempered fancy followed her to the place where the laudanum was hidden – and vanished there.
It was midnight; and there was no sign yet of the captain’s return.
She took from the writing-case the long letter which she had written to Norah, and slowly read it through. The letter quieted her. When she reached the blank space left at the end, she hurriedly turned back, and began it over again.
One o’clock struck from the church clock; and still the captain never appeared.
She read the letter for the second time; she turned back obstinately, despairingly; and began it for the third time. As she once more reached the last page, she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. She had just put the watch back in the belt of her dress, when there came to her – far off in the stillness of the morning – a sound of wheels.
She dropped the letter, and clasped her cold hands in her lap, and listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer – the trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to hers. It passed the side of the house; it travelled a little further on; it stopped. She heard a loud knocking – then the opening of a window – then voices – then a long silence – then the wheels again, coming back – then the opening of the door below, and the sound of the captain’s voice in the passage.
She could endure it no longer. She opened her door a little way, and called to him.
He ran up stairs instantly, astonished that she was not in bed. She spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door; keeping herself hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her face.
‘Has anything gone wrong?’ she asked.
‘Make your mind easy,’ he answered. ‘Nothing has gone wrong.’
‘Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?’
‘None whatever. The marriage is a certainty.’
‘A certainty?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good night.’
She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand of her own accord.
‘You have sat up too long,’ he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold fingers. ‘I am afraid you will have a bad night – I’m afraid you will not sleep.’
She softly closed the door.
‘I shall sleep,’ she said, ‘sounder than you think for.’
It was past two o’clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully – then opened her letter to Nor ah, and turned to the end, where the blank space was left. The last lines written above the space ran thus:… ‘I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or the. It is wickedness, madness, what you will – but it is so. There are now two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him – the journey to the church. If the profanation of myself is more than I can bear – the journey to the grave!’
Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines:
‘My choice is made. If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my father and mother, in the churchyard at home. Farewell, my love! Be always innocent; be always happy. If Frank ever asks about me, say I died forgiving him. Don’t grieve long for me, Norah – I am not worth it.’
She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister. The tears gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table. She waited until her sight was clear again, and then took the bank-notes once more from the little bag in her bosom. After wrapping them in a sheet of note-paper, she wrote Captain Wragge’s name on the enclosure, and added these words below it: ‘Lock the door of my room, and leave me till my sister comes. The money I promised you is in this. You are not to blame; it is my fault, and mine only. If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be kind to your wife for my sake.’
After placing the enclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and looked round the room. Some few little things in it were not in their places. She set them in order, and drew the curtains on either side, at the head of her bed. Her own dress was the next object of her scrutiny. It was all as neat, as pure, as prettily arranged as ever. Nothing about her was disordered, but her hair. Some tresses had fallen loose on one side of her head; she carefully put th
em back in their places, with help of her glass. ‘How pale I look!’ she thought, with a faint smile. ‘Shall I be paler still, when they find me in the morning?’
She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and took it out. The bottle was so small, that it lay easily in the palm of her hand. She let it remain there for a little while, and stood looking at it.
‘DEATH!’she said. ‘In this drop of brown drink – DEATH!’
As the words passed her lips, an agony of unutterable horror seized on her in an instant. She crossed the room unsteadily with a maddening confusion in her head, with a suffocating anguish at her heart. She caught at the table to support herself. The faint clink of the bottle, as it fell harmlessly from her loosened grasp, and rolled against some porcelain object on the table, struck through her brain like the stroke of a knife. The sound of her own voice, sunk to a whisper – her voice only uttering that one word, Death – rushed in her ears like the rushing of a wind. She dragged herself to the bedside, and rested her head against it, sitting on the floor. ‘O, my life! my life!’ she thought; ‘what is my life worth, that I cling to it like this?’
An interval passed, and she felt her strength returning. She raised herself on her knees, and hid her face on the bed. She tried to pray – to pray to be forgiven for seeking the refuge of death. Frantic words burst from her lips – words which would have risen to cries, if she had not stifled them in the bed-clothes. She started to her feet; despair strengthened her with a headlong fury against herself. In one moment, she was back at the table; in another, the poison was once more in her hand.
She removed the cork, and lifted the bottle to her mouth.
At the first cold touch of the glass on her lips, her strong young life leapt up in her leaping blood, and fought with the whole frenzy of its loathing against the close terror of Death. Every active power in the exuberant vital force that was in her, rose in revolt against the destruction which her own will would fain have wreaked on her own life. She paused: for the second time, she paused in spite of herself. There, in the glorious perfection of her youth and health – there, trembling on the verge of human existence, she stood; with the kiss of the Destroyer close at her lips, and Nature, faithful to its sacred trust, fighting for the salvation of her to the last.