Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (920 page)

Thus far my pride had held me up. It sustained me no longer. I dropped back again into my chair, in undisguised dread of what was coming next.

“I gave you a look when I left you on the beach,” pursued the landlady, growing louder and louder and redder and redder as she went on. “A grateful woman would have understood that look. Never mind! I won’t do it again I overtook your mother-in-law at the gap in the cliff. I followed her — oh, how I feel the disgrace of it
now!
— I followed her to the station at Broadstairs. She went back by train to Ramsgate.
I
went back by train to Ramsgate. She walked to her lodgings.
I
walked to her lodgings. Behind her. Like a dog. Oh, the disgrace of it! Providentially, as I then thought — I don’t know what to think of it now — the landlord of the house happened to be a friend of mine, and happened to be at home. We have no secrets from each other where lodgers are concerned. I am in a position to tell you, madam, what your mother-in-law’s name really is. She knows nothing about any such person as Mrs. Woodville, for an excellent reason. Her name is
not
Woodville. Her name (and consequently her son’s name) is Macallan — Mrs. Macallan, widow of the late General Macallan. Yes! your husband is
not
your husband. You are neither maid, wife, nor widow. You are worse than nothing, madam, and you leave my house!”

I stopped her as she opened the door to go out. She had roused
my
temper by this time. The doubt that she had cast on my marriage was more than mortal resignation could endure.

“Give me Mrs. Macallan’s address,” I said.

The landlady’s anger receded into the background, and the landlady’s astonishment appeared in its place.

“You don’t mean to tell me you are going to the old lady herself?” she said.

“Nobody but the old lady can tell me what I want to know,” I answered. “Your discovery (as you call it) may be enough for
you
; it is not enough for
me
. How do we know that Mrs. Macallan may not have been twice married? and that her first husband’s name may not have been Woodville?”

The landlady’s astonishment subsided in its turn, and the landlady’s curiosity succeeded as the ruling influence of the moment. Substantially, as I have already said of her, she was a good-natured woman. Her fits of temper (as is usual with good-natured people) were of the hot and the short-lived sort, easily roused and easily appeased.

“I never thought of that,” she said. “Look here! if I give you the address, will you promise to tell me all about it when you come back?”

I gave the required promise, and received the address in return.

“No malice,” said the landlady, suddenly resuming all her old familiarity with me.

“No malice,” I answered, with all possible cordiality on my side.

In ten minutes more I was at my mother-in-law’s lodgings.

CHAPTER VI. MY OWN DISCOVERY.

FORTUNATELY for me, the landlord did not open the door when I rang. A stupid maid-of-all-work, who never thought of asking me for my name, let me in. Mrs. Macallan was at home, and had no visitors with her. Giving me this information, the maid led the way upstairs, and showed me into the drawing-room without a word of announcement.

My mother-in-law was sitting alone, near a work-table, knitting. The moment I appeared in the doorway she laid aside her work, and, rising, signed to me with a commanding gesture of her hand to let her speak first.

“I know what you have come here for,” she said. “You have come here to ask questions. Spare yourself, and spare me. I warn you beforehand that I will not answer any questions relating to my son.”

It was firmly, but not harshly said. I spoke firmly in my turn.

“I have not come here, madam, to ask questions about your son,” I answered. “I have come, if you will excuse me, to ask you a question about yourself.”

She started, and looked at me keenly over her spectacles. I had evidently taken her by surprise.

“What is the question?” she inquired.

“I now know for the first time, madam, that your name is Macallan,” I said. “Your son has married me under the name of Woodville. The only honourable explanation of this circumstance, so far as I know, is that my husband is your son by a first marriage. The happiness of my life is at stake. Will you kindly consider my position? Will you let me ask you if you have been twice married, and if the name of your first husband was Woodville?”

She considered a little before she replied.

“The question is a perfectly natural one in your position,” she said. “But I think I had better not answer it.”

“May I ask why?”

“Certainly. If I answered you, I should only lead to other questions, and I should be obliged to decline replying to them. I am sorry to disappoint you. I repeat what I said on the beach — I have no other feeling than a feeling of sympathy toward
you.
If you had consulted me before your marriage, I should willingly have admitted you to my fullest confidence. It is now too late. You are married. I recommend you to make the best of your position, and to rest satisfied with things as they are.”

“Pardon me, madam,” I remonstrated. “As things are, I don’t know that I
am
married. All I know, unless you enlighten me, is that your son has married me under a name that is not his own. How can I be sure whether I am or am not his lawful wife?”

“I believe there can be no doubt that you are lawfully my son’s wife,” Mrs. Macallan answered. “At any rate it is easy to take a legal opinion on the subject. If the opinion is that you are
not
lawfully married, my son (whatever his faults and failings may be) is a gentleman. He is incapable of willfully deceiving a woman who loves and trusts him. He will do you justice. On my side, I will do you justice, too. If the legal opinion is adverse to your rightful claims, I will promise to answer any questions which you may choose to put to me. As it is, I believe you to be lawfully my son’s wife; and I say again, make the best of your position. Be satisfied with your husband’s affectionate devotion to you. If you value your peace of mind and the happiness of your life to come, abstain from attempting to know more than you know now.”

She sat down again with the air of a woman who had said her last word.

Further remonstrance would be useless; I could see it in her face; I could hear it in her voice. I turned round to open the drawing-room door.

“You are hard on me, madam,” I said at parting. “I am at your mercy, and I must submit.”

She suddenly looked up, and answered me with a flush on her kind and handsome old face.

“As God is my witness, child, I pity you from the bottom of my heart!”

After that extraordinary outburst of feeling, she took up her work with one hand, and signed to me with the other to leave her.

I bowed to her in silence, and went out.

I had entered the house far from feeling sure of the course I ought to take in the future. I left the house positively resolved, come what might of it, to discover the secret which the mother and son were hiding from me. As to the question of the name, I saw it now in the light in which I ought to have seen it from the first. If Mrs. Macallan
had
been twice married (as I had rashly chosen to suppose), she would certainly have shown some signs of recognition when she heard me addressed by her first husband’s name. Where all else was mystery, there was no mystery here. Whatever his reasons might be, Eustace had assuredly married me under an assumed name.

Approaching the door of our lodgings, I saw my husband walking backward and forward before it, evidently waiting for my return. If he asked me the question, I decided to tell him frankly where I had been, and what had passed between his mother and myself.

He hurried to meet me with signs of disturbance in his face and manner.

“I have a favor to ask of you, Valeria,” he said. “Do you mind returning with me to London by the next train?”

I looked at him. In the popular phrase, I could hardly believe my own ears.

“It’s a matter of business,” he went on, “of no interest to any one but myself, and it requires my presence in London. You don’t wish to sail just yet, as I understand? I can’t leave you here by yourself. Have you any objection to going to London for a day or two?”

I made no objection. I too was eager to go back.

In London I could obtain the legal opinion which would tell me whether I were lawfully married to Eustace or not. In London I should be within reach of the help and advice of my father’s faithful old clerk. I could confide in Benjamin as I could confide in no one else. Dearly as I loved my uncle Starkweather, I shrank from communicating with him in my present need. His wife had told me that I made a bad beginning when I signed the wrong name in the marriage register. Shall I own it? My pride shrank from acknowledging, before the honeymoon was over, that his wife was right.

In two hours more we were on the railway again. Ah, what a contrast that second journey presented to the first! On our way to Ramsgate everybody could see that we were a newly wedded couple. On our way to London nobody noticed us; nobody would have doubted that we had been married for years.

We went to a private hotel in the neighbourhood of Portland Place.

After breakfast the next morning Eustace announced that he must leave me to attend to his business. I had previously mentioned to him that I had some purchases to make in London. He was quite willing to let me go out alone, on the condition that I should take a carriage provided by the hotel.

My heart was heavy that morning: I felt the unacknowledged estrangement that had grown up between us very keenly. My husband opened the door to go out, and came back to kiss me before he left me by myself. That little after-thought of tenderness touched me. Acting on the impulse of the moment, I put my arm round his neck, and held him to me gently.

“My darling,” I said, “give me all your confidence. I know that you love me. Show that you can trust me too.”

He sighed bitterly, and drew back from me — in sorrow, not in anger.

“I thought we had agreed, Valeria, not to return to that subject again,” he said. “You only distress yourself and distress me.”

He left the room abruptly, as if he dare not trust himself to say more. It is better not to dwell on what I felt after this last repulse. I ordered the carriage at once. I was eager to find a refuge from my own thoughts in movement and change.

I drove to the shops first, and made the purchases which I had mentioned to Eustace by way of giving a reason for going out. Then I devoted myself to the object which I really had at heart. I went to old Benjamin’s little villa, in the by-ways of St. John’s Wood.

As soon as he had got over the first surprise of seeing me, he noticed that I looked pale and care-worn. I confessed at once that I was in trouble. We sat down together by the bright fireside in his little library (Benjamin, as far as his means would allow, was a great collector of books), and there I told my old friend, frankly and truly, all that I have told here.

He was too distressed to say much. He fervently pressed my hand; he fervently thanked God that my father had not lived to hear what he had heard. Then, after a pause, he repeated my mother-in-law’s name to himself in a doubting, questioning tone. “Macallan?” he said. “Macallan? Where have I heard that name? Why does it sound as if it wasn’t strange to me?”

He gave up pursuing the lost recollection, and asked, very earnestly, what he could do for me. I answered that he could help me, in the first place, to put an end to the doubt — an unendurable doubt to
me
— whether I were lawfully married or not. His energy of the old days when he had conducted my father’s business showed itself again the moment I said those words.

“Your carriage is at the door, my dear,” he answered. “Come with me to my own lawyer, without wasting another moment.”

We drove to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.