Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (414 page)

Noel Vanstone changed colour once more, and began to fidget again in his chair. “Serious trouble,” he repeated, with a blank look. “If you mean writing letters, ma’am, she has given trouble enough already. She has written once to me, and twice to my father. One of the letters to my father was a threatening letter — wasn’t it, Lecount?”

“She expressed her feelings, poor child,” said Mrs. Lecount. “I thought it hard to send her back her letter, but your dear father knew best. What I said at the time was, Why not let her express her feelings? What are a few threatening words, after all? In her position, poor creature, they are words, and nothing more.”

“I advise you not to be too sure of that,” said Magdalen. “I know her better than you do.”

She paused at those words — paused in a momentary terror. The sting of Mrs. Lecount’s pity had nearly irritated her into forgetting her assumed character, and speaking in her own voice.

“You have referred to the letters written by my pupil,” she resumed, addressing Noel Vanstone as soon as she felt sure of herself again. “We will say nothing about what she has written to your father; we will only speak of what she has written to you. Is there anything unbecoming in her letter, anything said in it that is false? Is it not true that these two sisters have been cruelly deprived of the provision which their father made for them? His will to this day speaks for him and for them; and it only speaks to no purpose, because he was not aware that his marriage obliged him to make it again, and because he died before he could remedy the error. Can you deny that?”

Noel Vanstone smiled, and helped himself to a strawberry. “I don’t attempt to deny it,” he said. “Go on, Miss Garth.”

“Is it not true,” persisted Magdalen, “that the law which has taken the money from these sisters, whose father made no second will, has now given that very money to you, whose father made no will at all? Surely, explain it how you may, this is hard on those orphan girls?”

“Very hard,” replied Noel Vanstone. “It strikes you in that light, too — doesn’t it, Lecount?”

Mrs. Lecount shook her head, and closed her handsome black eyes. “Harrowing,” she said; “I can characterize it, Miss Garth, by no other word — harrowing. How the young person — no! how Miss Vanstone, the younger — discovered that my late respected master made no will I am at a loss to understand. Perhaps it was put in the papers? But I am interrupting you, Miss Garth. Do have something more to say about your pupil’s letter?” She noiselessly drew her chair forward, as she said these words, a few inches beyond the line of the visitor’s chair. The attempt was neatly made, but it proved useless. Magdalen only kept her head more to the left, and the packing-case on the floor prevented Mrs. Lecount from advancing any further.

“I have only one more question to put,” said Magdalen. “My pupil’s letter addressed a proposal to Mr. Noel Vanstone. I beg him to inform me why he has refused to consider it.”

“My good lady!” cried Noel Vanstone, arching his white eyebrows in satirical astonishment. “Are you really in earnest? Do you know what the proposal is? Have you seen the letter?”

“I am quite in earnest,” said Magdalen, “and I have seen the letter. It entreats you to remember how Mr. Andrew Vanstone’s fortune has come into your hands; it informs you that one-half of that fortune, divided between his daughters, was what his will intended them to have; and it asks of your sense of justice to do for his children what he would have done for them himself if he had lived. In plainer words still, it asks you to give one-half of the money to the daughters, and it leaves you free to keep the other half yourself. That is the proposal. Why have you refused to consider it?”

“For the simplest possible reason, Miss Garth,” said Noel Vanstone, in high good-humor. “Allow me to remind you of a well-known proverb: A fool and his money are soon parted. Whatever else I may be, ma’am, I’m not a fool.”

“Don’t put it in that way, sir!” remonstrated Mrs. Lecount. “Be serious — pray be serious!”

“Quite impossible, Lecount,” rejoined her master. “I can’t be serious. My poor father, Miss Garth, took a high moral point of view in this matter. Lecount, there, takes a high moral point of view — don’t you, Lecount? I do nothing of the sort. I have lived too long in the Continental atmosphere to trouble myself about moral points of view. My course in this business is as plain as two and two make four. I have got the money, and I should be a born idiot if I parted with it. There is my point of view! Simple enough, isn’t it? I don’t stand on my dignity; I don’t meet you with the law, which is all on my side; I don’t blame your coming here, as a total stranger, to try and alter my resolution; I don’t blame the two girls for wanting to dip their fingers into my purse. All I say is, I am not fool enough to open it.
Pas si bete
, as we used to say in the English circle at Zurich. You understand French, Miss Garth?
Pas si bete!
” He set aside his plate of strawberries once more, and daintily dried his fingers on his fine white napkin.

Magdalen kept her temper. If she could have struck him dead by lifting her hand at that moment, it is probable she would have lifted it. But she kept her temper.

“Am I to understand,” she asked, “that the last words you have to say in this matter are the words said for you in Mrs. Lecount’s letter!”

“Precisely so,” replied Noel Vanstone.

“You have inherited your own father’s fortune, as well as the fortune of Mr. Andrew Vanstone, and yet you feel no obligation to act from motives of justice or generosity toward these two sisters? All you think it necessary to say to them is, you have got the money, and you refuse to part with a single farthing of it?”

“Most accurately stated! Miss Garth, you are a woman of business. Lecount, Miss Garth is a woman of business.”

“Don’t appeal to me, sir,” cried Mrs. Lecount, gracefully wringing her plump white hands. “I can’t bear it! I must interfere! Let me suggest — oh, what do you call it in English? — a compromise. Dear Mr. Noel, you are perversely refusing to do yourself justice; you have better reasons than the reason you have given to Miss Garth. You follow your honoured father’s example; you feel it due to his memory to act in this matter as he acted before you. That is his reason, Miss Garth —
 
— I implore you on my knees to take that as his reason. He will do what his dear father did; no more, no less. His dear father made a proposal, and he himself will now make that proposal over again. Yes, Mr. Noel, you will remember what this poor girl says in her letter to you. Her sister has been obliged to go out as a governess; and she herself, in losing her fortune, has lost the hope of her marriage for years and years to come. You will remember this — and you will give the hundred pounds to one, and the hundred pounds to the other, which your admirable father offered in the past time? If he does this, Miss Garth, will he do enough? If he gives a hundred pounds each to these unfortunate sisters — ?”

“He will repent the insult to the last hour of his life,” said Magdalen.

The instant that answer passed her lips she would have given worlds to recall it. Mrs. Lecount had planted her sting in the right place at last. Those rash words of Magdalen’s had burst from her passionately, in her own voice.

Nothing but the habit of public performance saved her from making the serious error that she had committed more palpable still, by attempting to set it right. Here her past practice in the Entertainment came to her rescue, and urged her to go on instantly in Miss Garth’s voice as if nothing had happened.

“You mean well, Mrs. Lecount,” she continued, “but you are doing harm instead of good. My pupils will accept no such compromise as you propose. I am sorry to have spoken violently just now; I beg you will excuse me.” She looked hard for information in the housekeeper’s face while she spoke those conciliatory words. Mrs. Lecount baffled the look by putting her handkerchief to her eyes. Had she, or had she not, noticed the momentary change in Magdalen’s voice from the tones that were assumed to the tones that were natural? Impossible to say.

“What more can I do!” murmured Mrs. Lecount behind her handkerchief. “Give me time to think — give me time to recover myself. May I retire, sir, for a moment? My nerves are shaken by this sad scene. I must have a glass of water, or I think I shall faint. Don’t go yet, Miss Garth. I beg you will give us time to set this sad matter right, if we can — I beg you will remain until I come back.”

There were two doors of entrance to the room. One, the door into the front parlor, close at Magdalen’s left hand. The other, the door into the back parlor, situated behind her. Mrs. Lecount politely retired — through the open folding-doors — by this latter means of exit, so as not to disturb the visitor by passing in front of her. Magdalen waited until she heard the door open and close again behind her, and then resolved to make the most of the opportunity which left her alone with Noel Vanstone. The utter hopelessness of rousing a generous impulse in that base nature had now been proved by her own experience. The last chance left was to treat him like the craven creature he was, and to influence him through his fears.

Before she could speak, Noel Vanstone himself broke the silence. Cunningly as he strove to hide it, he was half angry, half alarmed at his housekeeper’s desertion of him. He looked doubtingly at his visitor; he showed a nervous anxiety to conciliate her until Mrs. Lecount’s return.

“Pray remember, ma’am, I never denied that this case was a hard one,” he began. “You said just now you had no wish to offend me — and I’m sure I don’t want to offend you. May I offer you some strawberries? Would you like to look at my father’s bargains? I assure you, ma’am, I am naturally a gallant man; and I feel for both these sisters — especially the younger one. Touch me on the subject of the tender passion, and you touch me on a weak place. Nothing would please me more than to hear that Miss Vanstone’s lover (I’m sure I always call her Miss Vanstone, and so does Lecount) — I say, ma’am, nothing would please me more than to hear that Miss Vanstone’s lover had come back and married her. If a loan of money would be likely to bring him back, and if the security offered was good, and if my lawyer thought me justified — ”

“Stop, Mr. Vanstone,” said Magdalen. “You are entirely mistaken in your estimate of the person you have to deal with. You are seriously wrong in supposing that the marriage of the younger sister — if she could be married in a week’s time — would make any difference in the convictions which induced her to write to your father and to you. I don’t deny that she may act from a mixture of motives. I don’t deny that she clings to the hope of hastening her marriage, and to the hope of rescuing her sister from a life of dependence. But if both those objects were accomplished by other means, nothing would induce her to leave you in possession of the inheritance which her father meant his children to have. I know her, Mr. Vanstone! She is a nameless, homeless, friendless wretch. The law which takes care of you, the law which takes care of all legitimate children, casts her like carrion to the winds. It is your law — not hers. She only knows it as the instrument of a vile oppression, an insufferable wrong. The sense of that wrong haunts her like a possession of the devil. The resolution to right that wrong burns in her like fire. If that miserable girl was married and rich, with millions tomorrow, do you think she would move an inch from her purpose? I tell you she would resist, to the last breath in her body, the vile injustice which has struck at the helpless children, through the calamity of their father’s death! I tell you she would shrink from no means which a desperate woman can employ to force that closed hand of yours open, or die in the attempt!”

She stopped abruptly. Once more her own indomitable earnestness had betrayed her. Once more the inborn nobility of that perverted nature had risen superior to the deception which it had stooped to practice. The scheme of the moment vanished from her mind’s view; and the resolution of her life burst its way outward in her own words, in her own tones, pouring hotly and more hotly from her heart. She saw the abject manikin before her cowering, silent, in his chair. Had his fears left him sense enough to perceive the change in her voice? No:
his
face spoke the truth — his fears had bewildered him. This time the chance of the moment had befriended her. The door behind her chair had not opened again yet. “No ears but his have heard me,” she thought, with a sense of unutterable relief. “I have escaped Mrs. Lecount.”

She had done nothing of the kind. Mrs. Lecount had never left the room.

After opening the door and closing it again, without going out, the housekeeper had noiselessly knelt down behind Magdalen’s chair. Steadying herself against the post of the folding-door, she took a pair of scissors from her pocket, waited until Noel Vanstone (from whose view she was entirely hidden) had attracted Magdalen’s attention by speaking to her, and then bent forward, with the scissors ready in her hand. The skirt of the false Miss Garth’s gown — the brown alpaca dress, with the white spots on it — touched the floor, within the housekeeper’s reach. Mrs. Lecount lifted the outer of the two flounces which ran round the bottom of the dress one over the other, softly cut away a little irregular fragment of stuff from the inner flounce, and neatly smoothed the outer one over it again, so as to hide the gap. By the time she had put the scissors back in her pocket, and had risen to her feet (sheltering herself behind the post of the folding-door), Magdalen had spoken her last words. Mrs. Lecount quietly repeated the ceremony of opening and shutting the back parlor door; and returned to her place.