Уилки Коллинз - Man and Wife

“Well,” Blanche resumed, “and what do you think has come of my letter to Anne?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Nothing has come of it!”

“Indeed?”

“Absolutely nothing! I know she received the letter yesterday morning. I ought to have had the answer to-day at breakfast.”

“Perhaps she thought it didn’t require an answer.”

“She couldn’t have thought that, for reasons that I know of. Besides, in my letter yesterday I implored her to tell me (if it was one line only) whether, in guessing at what her trouble was, Sir Patrick and I had not guessed right. And here is the day getting on, and no answer! What am I to conclude?”

“I really can’t say!”

“Is it possible, Arnold, that we have not guessed right, after all? Is the wickedness of that man who blew the candles out wickedness beyond our discovering? The doubt is so dreadful that I have made up my mind not to bear it after to-day. I count on your sympathy and assistance when to-morrow comes!”

Arnold’s heart sank. Some new complication was evidently gathering round him. He waited in silence to hear the worst. Blanche bent forward, and whispered to him.

“This is a secret,” she said. “If that creature at the writing-table has ears for any thing but rowing and racing, he mustn’t hear this! Anne may come to me privately to-day while you are all at luncheon. If she doesn’t come and if I don’t hear from her, then the mystery of her silence must be cleared up; and You must do it!”

“I!”

“Don’t make difficulties! If you can’t find your way to Craig Fernie, I can help you. As for Anne, you know what a charming person she is, and you know she will receive you perfectly, for my sake. I must and will have some news of her. I can’t break the laws of the household a second time. Sir Patrick sympathizes, but he won’t stir. Lady Lundie is a bitter enemy. The servants are threatened with the loss of their places if any one of them goes near Anne. There is nobody but you. And to Anne you go to-morrow, if I don’t see her or hear from her to-day!”

This to the man who had passed as Anne’s husband at the inn, and who had been forced into the most intimate knowledge of Anne’s miserable secret! Arnold rose to put Milton away, with the composure of sheer despair. Any other secret he might, in the last resort, have confided to the discretion of a third person. But a woman’s secret—with a woman’s reputation depending on his keeping it—was not to be confided to any body, under any stress of circumstances whatever. “If Geoffrey doesn’t get me out of this, ,” he thought, “I shall have no choice but to leave Windygates to-morrow.”

As he replaced the book on the shelf, Lady Lundie entered the library from the garden.

“What are you doing here?” she said to her step-daughter.

“Improving my mind,” replied Blanche. “Mr. Brinkworth and I have been reading Milton.”

“Can you condescend so far, after reading Milton all the morning, as to help me with the invitations for the dinner next week?”

“If you can condescend, Lady Lundie, after feeding the poultry all the morning, I must be humility itself after only reading Milton!”

With that little interchange of the acid amenities of feminine intercourse, step-mother and step-daughter withdrew to a writing-table, to put the virtue of hospitality in practice together.

Arnold joined his friend at the other end of the library.

Geoffrey was sitting with his elbows on the desk, and his clenched fists dug into his cheeks. Great drops of perspiration stood on his forehead, and the fragments of a torn letter lay scattered all round him. He exhibited symptoms of nervous sensibility for the first time in his life—he started when Arnold spoke to him.

“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?”

“A letter to answer. And I don’t know how.”

“From Miss Silvester?” asked Arnold, dropping his voice so as to prevent the ladies at the other end of the room from hearing him.

“No,” answered Geoffrey, in a lower voice still.

“Have you heard what Blanche has been saying to me about Miss Silvester?”

“Some of it.”

“Did you hear Blanche say that she meant to send me to Craig Fernie to-morrow, if she failed to get news from Miss Silvester to-day?”

“No.”

“Then you know it now. That is what Blanche has just said to me.”

“Well?”

“Well—there’s a limit to what a man can expect even from his best friend. I hope you won’t ask me to be Blanche’s messenger to-morrow. I can’t, and won’t, go back to the inn as things are now.”

“You have had enough of it—eh?”

“I have had enough of distressing Miss Silvester, and more than enough of deceiving Blanche.”

“What do you mean by ‘distressing Miss Silvester?’”

“She doesn’t take the same easy view that you and I do, Geoffrey, of my passing her off on the people of the inn as my wife.”

Geoffrey absently took up a paper-knife. Still with his head down, he began shaving off the topmost layer of paper from the blotting-pad under his hand. Still with his head down, he abruptly broke the silence in a whisper.

“I say!”

“Yes?”

“How did you manage to pass her off as your wife?”

“I told you how, as we were driving from the station here.”

“I was thinking of something else. Tell me again.”

Arnold told him once more what had happened at the inn. Geoffrey listened, without making any remark. He balanced the paper-knife vacantly on one of his fingers. He was strangely sluggish and strangely silent.

“All that is done and ended,” said Arnold shaking him by the shoulder. “It rests with you now to get me out of the difficulty I’m placed in with Blanche. Things must be settled with Miss Silvester to-day.”

“Things shall be settled.”

“Shall be? What are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting to do what you told me.”

“What I told you?”

“Didn’t you tell me to consult Sir Patrick before I married her?”

“To be sure! so I did.”

“Well—I am waiting for a chance with Sir Patrick.”

“And then?”

“And then—” He looked at Arnold for the first time. “Then,” he said, “you may consider it settled.”

“The marriage?”

He suddenly looked down again at the blotting-pad. “Yes—the marriage.”

Arnold offered his hand in congratulation. Geoffrey never noticed it. His eyes were off the blotting-pad again. He was looking out of the window near him.

“Don’t I hear voices outside?” he asked.

“I believe our friends are in the garden,” said Arnold. “Sir Patrick may be among them. I’ll go and see.”

The instant his back was turned Geoffrey snatched up a sheet of note-paper. “Before I forget it!” he said to himself. He wrote the word “Memorandum” at the top of the page, and added these lines beneath it:

“He asked for her by the name of his wife at the door. He said, at dinner, before the landlady and the waiter, ‘I take these rooms for my wife.’ He made her say he was her husband at the same time. After that he stopped all night. What do the lawyers call this in Scotland?—(Query: a marriage?)”

After folding up the paper he hesitated for a moment. “No!” he thought, “It won’t do to trust to what Miss Lundie said about it. I can’t be certain till I have consulted Sir Patrick himself.”

He put the paper away in his pocket, and wiped the heavy perspiration from his forehead. He was pale—for him, strikingly pale—when Arnold came back.

“Any thing wrong, Geoffrey?—you’re as white as ashes.”

“It’s the heat. Where’s Sir Patrick?”