Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1826 page)

My bedroom candle was on the side-table; I had just lighted it. I was just leaving the room, when the door suddenly opened, and Naomi herself stood before me!

Recovering the first shook of her sudden appearance, I saw instantly in her eager eyes, in her deadly-pale cheeks, that something serious had happened. A large cloak was thrown over her; a white handkerchief was tied over her head. Her hair was in disorder; she had evidently just risen in fear and in haste from her bed.

“What is it?” I asked, advancing to meet her.

She clung, trembling with agitation, to my arm.

“John Jago!” she whispered.

You will think my obstinacy invincible. I could hardly believe it, even then!

“Where?” I asked.

“In the back-yard,” she replied, “under my bedroom window!”

The emergency was far too serious to allow of any consideration for the small proprieties of every-day life.

“Let me see him!” I said.

“I am here to fetch you,” she answered, in her frank and fearless way. “Come upstairs with me.”

Her room was on the first floor of the house, and was the only bedroom which looked out on the back-yard. On our way up the stairs she told me what had happened.

“I was in bed,” she said, “but not asleep, when I heard a pebble strike against the window-pane. I waited, wondering what it meant. Another pebble was thrown against the glass. So far, I was surprised, but not frightened. I got up, and ran to the window to look out. There was John Jago looking up at me in the moonlight!”

“Did he see you?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Come down and speak to me! I have something serious to say to you!’“

“Did you answer him?”

“As soon as I could catch my breath, I said, ‘Wait a little,’ and ran downstairs to you. What shall I do?”

“Let
me
see him, and I will tell you.”

We entered her room. Keeping cautiously behind the window-curtain, I looked out.

There he was! His beard and mustache were shaved off; his hair was close cut. But there was no disguising his wild, brown eyes, or the peculiar movement of his spare, wiry figure, as he walked slowly to and fro in the moonlight waiting for Naomi. For the moment, my own agitation almost overpowered me; I had so firmly disbelieved that John Jago was a living man!

“What shall I do?” Naomi repeated.

“Is the door of the dairy open?” I asked.

“No; but the door of the tool-house, round the corner, is not locked.”

“Very good. Show yourself at the window, and say to him, ‘I am coming directly.’“

The brave girl obeyed me without a moment’s hesitation.

There had been no doubt about his eyes and his gait; there was no doubt now about his voice, as he answered softly from below — ”All right!”

“Keep him talking to you where he is now,” I said to Naomi, “until I have time to get round by the other way to the tool-house. Then pretend to be fearful of discovery at the dairy, and bring him round the corner, so that I can hear him behind the door.”

We left the house together, and separated silently. Naomi followed my instructions with a woman’s quick intelligence where stratagems are concerned. I had hardly been a minute in the tool-house before I heard him speaking to Naomi on the other side of the door.

The first words which I caught distinctly related to his motive for secretly leaving the farm. Mortified pride — doubly mortified by Naomi’s contemptuous refusal and by the personal indignity offered to him by Ambrose — was at the bottom of his conduct in absenting himself from Morwick. He owned that he had seen the advertisement, and that it had actually encouraged him to keep in hiding!

“After being laughed at and insulted and denied, I was glad,” said the miserable wretch, “to see that some of you had serious reason to wish me back again. It rests with you, Miss Naomi, to keep me here, and to persuade me to save Ambrose by showing myself and owning to my name.”

“What do you mean?” I heard Naomi ask, sternly.

He lowered his voice; but I could still hear him.

“Promise you will marry me,” he said, “and I will go before the magistrate to-morrow, and show him that I am a living man.”

“Suppose I refuse?”

“In that case you will lose me again, and none of you will find me till Ambrose is hanged.”

“Are you villain enough, John Jago, to mean what you say?” asked the girl, raising her voice.

“If you attempt to give the alarm,” he answered, “as true as God’s above us, you will feel my hand on your throat! It’s my turn now, miss; and I am not to be trifled with. Will you have me for your husband — yes or no?”

“No!” she answered, loudly and firmly.

I burst open the door, and seized him as he lifted his hand on her. He had not suffered from the nervous derangement which had weakened me, and he was the stronger man of the two. Naomi saved my life. She struck up his pistol as he pulled it out of his pocket with his free hand and presented it at my head. The bullet was fired into the air. I tripped up his heels at the same moment The report of the pistol had alarmed the house. We two together kept him on the ground until help arrived.

CHAPTER XII. THE END OF IT.

JOHN JAGO was brought before the magistrate, and John Jago was identified the next day.

The lives of Ambrose and Silas were, of course, no longer in peril, so far as human justice was concerned. But there were legal delays to be encountered, and legal formalities to be observed, before the brothers could be released from prison in the characters of innocent men.

During the interval which thus elapsed, certain events happened which may be briefly mentioned here before I close my narrative.

Mr. Meadowcroft the elder, broken by the suffering which he had gone through, died suddenly of a rheumatic affection of the heart. A codicil attached to his will abundantly justified what Naomi had told me of Miss Meadowcroft’s influence over her father, and of the end she had in view in exercising it. A life income only was left to Mr. Meadowcroft’s sons. The freehold of the farm was bequeathed to his daughter, with the testator’s recommendation added, that she should marry his “best and dearest friend, Mr. John Jago.”

Armed with the power of the will, the heiress of Morwick sent an insolent message to Naomi, requesting her no longer to consider herself one of the inmates at the farm. Miss Meadowcroft, it should be here added, positively refused to believe that John Jago had ever asked Naomi to be his wife, or had ever threatened her, as I had heard him threaten her, if she refused. She accused me, as she accused Naomi, of trying meanly to injure John Jago in her estimation, out of hatred toward “that much-injured man;” and she sent to me, as she had sent to Naomi, a formal notice to leave the house.

We two banished ones met the same day in the hall, with our traveling-bags in our hands.

“We are turned out together, friend Lefrank,” said Naomi, with her quaintly-comical smile. “You will go back to England, I guess; and I must make my own living in my own country. Women can get employment in the States if they have a friend to speak for them. Where shall I find somebody who can give me a place?”

I saw my way to saying the right word at the right moment.

“I have got a place to offer you,” I replied.

She suspected nothing, so far.

“That’s lucky, sir,” was all she said. “Is it in a telegraph-office or in a dry-goods store?”

I astonished my little American friend by taking her then and there in my arms, and giving her my first kiss.

“The office is by my fireside,” I said; “the salary is anything in reason you like to ask me for; and the place, Naomi, if you have no objection to it, is the place of my wife.”

I have no more to say, except that years have passed since I spoke those words and that I am as fond of Naomi as ever.

Some months after our marriage, Mrs. Lefrank wrote to a friend at Narrabee for news of what was going on at the farm. The answer informed us that Ambrose and Silas had emigrated to New Zealand, and that Miss Meadowcroft was alone at Morwick Farm. John Jago had refused to marry her. John Jago had disappeared again, nobody knew where.

NOTE IN CONCLUSION. — The first idea of this little story was suggested to the author by a printed account of a trial which actually took place, early in the present century, in the United States. The published narrative of this strange case is entitled “The Trial, Confessions, and Conviction of Jesse and Stephen Boorn for the Murder of Russell Colvin, and the Return of the Man supposed to have been murdered. By Hon. Leonard Sargeant, Ex-Lieutenant Governor of Vermont. (Manchester, Vermont,
Journal
Book and Job Office, 1873.)” It may not be amiss to add, for the benefit of incredulous readers, that all the “improbable events” in the story are matters of fact, taken from the printed narrative. Anything which “looks like truth” is, in nine cases out of ten, the invention of the author. — W. C.

This ghost story was set in 1860 and published in book form with ‘My Lady’s Money’.
 
It was dedicated to Collins’ friends Mr and Mrs Sebastian Schlesinger.
 
Apart from supernatural elements, the story contains detective procedures, an insurance fraud plotline and is atypically horrific for Collins.

THE HAUNTED HOTEL

A Mystery of Modern Venice

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THE FIRST PART