Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins (easy novels to read txt) 📕

Blanche pressed Anne’s hand significantly. The proposal was evidently made for a purpose. They turned the corner of the cottage and gained the large garden at the back—the two ladies walking together, arm in arm; Sir Patrick and Geoffrey following them. Little by little, Blanche quickened her pace. “I have got my instructions,” she whispered to Anne. “Let’s get out of his hearing.”

It was more easily said than done. Geoffrey kept close behind them.

“Consider my lameness, Mr. Delamayn,” said Sir Patrick. “Not quite so fast.”

It was well intended. But Geoffrey’s cunning had taken the alarm. Instead of dropping behind with Sir Patrick, he called to his wife.

“Consider Sir Patrick’s lameness,” he repeated. “Not quite so fast.”

Sir Patrick met that check with characteristic readiness. When Anne slackened her pace, he addressed himself to Geoffrey, stopping deliberately in the middle of the path. “Let me give you my message from Holchester House,” he said. The two ladies were still slowly walking on. Geoffrey was placed between the alternatives of staying with Sir Patrick and leaving them by themselves—or of following them and leaving Sir Patrick. Deliberately, on his side, he followed the ladies.

Sir Patrick called him back. “I told you I wished to speak to you,” he said, sharply.

Driven to bay, Geoffrey openly revealed his resolution to give Blanche no opportunity of speaking in private to Anne. He called to Anne to stop.

“I have no secrets from my wife,” he said. “And I expect my wife to have no secrets from me. Give me the message in her hearing.”

Sir Patrick’s eyes brightened with indignation. He controlled himself, and looked for an instant significantly at his niece before he spoke to Geoffrey.

“As you please ,” he said. “Your brother requests me to tell you that the duties of the new position in which he is placed occupy the whole of his time, and will prevent him from returning to Fulham, as he had proposed, for some days to come. Lady Holchester, hearing that I was likely to see you, has charged me with another message, from herself. She is not well enough to leave home; and she wishes to see you at Holchester House to-morrow—accompanied (as she specially desires) by Mrs. Delamayn.”

In giving the two messages, he gradually raised his voice to a louder tone than usual. While he was speaking, Blanche (warned to follow her instructions by the glance her uncle had cast at her) lowered her voice, and said to Anne:

“He won’t consent to the separation as long as he has got you here. He is trying for higher terms. Leave him, and he must submit. Put a candle in your window, if you can get into the garden to-night. If not, any other night. Make for the back gate in the wall. Sir Patrick and Arnold will manage the rest.”

She slipped those words into Anne’s ears—swinging her parasol to and fro, and looking as if the merest gossip was dropping from her lips—with the dexterity which rarely fails a woman when she is called on to assist a deception in which her own interests are concerned. Cleverly as it had been done, however, Geoffrey’s inveterate distrust was stirred into action by it. Blanche had got to her last sentence before he was able to turn his attention from what Sir Patrick was saying to what his niece was saying. A quicker man would have heard more. Geoffrey had only distinctly heard the first half of the last sentence.

“What’s that,” he asked, “about Sir Patrick and Arnold?”

“Nothing very interesting to you,” Blanche answered, readily. “I will repeat it if you like. I was telling Anne about my step-mother, Lady Lundie. After what happened that day in Portland Place, she has requested Sir Patrick and Arnold to consider themselves, for the future, as total strangers to her. That’s all.”

“Oh!” said Geoffrey, eying her narrowly.

“Ask my uncle,” returned Blanche, “if you don’t believe that I have reported her correctly. She gave us all our dismissal, in her most magnificent manner, and in those very words. Didn’t she, Sir Patrick?”

It was perfectly true. Blanche’s readiness of resource had met the emergency of the moment by describing something, in connection with Sir Patrick and Arnold, which had really happened. Silenced on one side, in spite of himself, Geoffrey was at the same moment pressed on the other for an answer to his mother’s message.

“I must take your reply to Lady Holchester, ” said Sir Patrick. “What is it to be?”

Geoffrey looked hard at him, without making any reply.

Sir Patrick repeated the message—with a special emphasis on that part of it which related to Anne. The emphasis roused Geoffrey’s temper.

“You and my mother have made that message up between you, to try me!” he burst out. “Damn all underhand work is what I say!”

“I am waiting for your answer,” persisted Sir Patrick, steadily ignoring the words which had just been addressed to him.

Geoffrey glanced at Anne, and suddenly recovered himself.

“My love to my mother,” he said. “I’ll go to her to-morrow—and take my wife with me, with the greatest pleasure. Do you hear that? With the greatest pleasure.” He stopped to observe the effect of his reply. Sir Patrick waited impenetrably to hear more—if he had more to say. “I’m sorry I lost my temper just now,” he resumed “I am badly treated—I’m distrusted without a cause. I ask you to bear witness,” he added, his voice getting louder again, while his eyes moved uneasily backward and forward between Sir Patrick and Anne, “that I treat my wife as becomes a lady. Her friend calls on her—and she’s free to receive her friend. My mother wants to see her—and I promise to take her to my mother’s. At two o’clock to-morrow. Where am I to blame? You stand there looking at me, and saying nothing. Where am I to blame?”

“If a man’s own conscience justifies him, Mr. Delamayn,” said Sir Patrick, “the opinions of others are of very little importance. My errand here is performed.”

As he turned to bid Anne farewell, the uneasiness that he felt at leaving her forced its way to view. The color faded out of his face. His hand trembled as it closed tenderly and firmly on hers. “I shall see you to-morrow, at Holchester House,” he said; giving his arm while he spoke to Blanche. He took leave of Geoffrey, without looking at him again, and without seeing his offered hand. In another minute they were gone.

Anne waited on the lower floor of the cottage while Geoffrey closed and locked the gate. She had no wish to appear to avoid him, after the answer that he had sent to his mother’s message. He returned slowly half-way across the front garden, looked toward the passage in which she was standing, passed before the door, and disappeared round the corner of the cottage on his way to the back garden. The inference was not to be mistaken. It was Geoffrey who was avoiding her. Had he lied to Sir Patrick? When the next day came would he find reasons of his own for refusing to take her to Holchester House?

She went up stairs. At the same moment Hester Dethridge opened her bedroom door to come out. Observing Anne, she closed it again and remained invisible in her room. Once more the inference was not to be mistaken. Hester Dethridge, also, had her reasons for avoiding Anne.

What did it mean? What object could there be in common between Hester and Geoffrey?

There was no fathoming the meaning of it. Anne’s thoughts reverted to the communication which had been secretly made to her by Blanche. It was not in womanhood to be insensible to such devotion as Sir Patrick’s conduct implied. Terrible as her position had become in its ever-growing uncertainty, in its never-ending suspense, the oppression of it yielded for the moment to the glow of pride and gratitude which warmed her heart, as she thought of the sacrifices that had been made, of the perils that were still to be encountered, solely for her sake. To shorten the period of suspense seemed to be a duty which she owed to Sir Patrick, as well as to herself. Why, in her situation, wait for what the next day might bring forth? If the opportunity offered, she determined to put the signal in the window that night.

Toward evening she heard once more the noises which appeared to indicate that repairs of some sort were going on in the house. This time the sounds were fainter; and they came, as she fancied, not from the spare room, as before, but from Geoffrey’s room, next to it.

The dinner was later than usual that day. Hester Dethridge did not appear with the tray till dusk. Anne spoke to her, and received a mute sign in answer. Determined to see the woman’s face plainly, she put a question which required a written answer on the slate; and, telling Hester to wait, went to the mantle-piece to light her candle. When she turned round with the lighted candle in her hand, Hester was gone.

Night came. She rang her bell to have the tray taken away. The fall of a strange footstep startled her outside her door. She called out, “Who’s there?” The voice of the lad whom Geoffrey employed to go on errands for him answered her.

“What do you want here?” she asked, through the door.

“Mr. Delamayn sent me up, ma’am. He wishes to speak to you directly.”

Anne found Geoffrey in the dining-room. His object in wishing to speak to her was, on the surface of it, trivial enough. He wanted to know how she would prefer going to Holchester House on the next day—by the railway, or in a carriage. “If you prefer driving,” he said, “the boy has come here for orders, and he can tell them to send a carriage from the livery-stables, as he goes home.”

“The railway will do perfectly well for me,” Anne replied.

Instead of accepting the answer, and dropping the subject, he asked her to reconsider her decision. There was an absent, uneasy expression in his eye as he begged her not to consult economy at the expense of her own comfort. He appeared to have some reason of his own for preventing her from leaving the room. “Sit d own a minute, and think before you decide,” he said. Having forced her to take a chair, he put his head outside the door and directed the lad to go up stairs, and see if he had left his pipe in his bedroom. “I want you to go in comfort, as a lady should,” he repeated, with the uneasy look more marked than ever. Before Anne could reply, the lad’s voice reached them from the bedroom floor, raised in shrill alarm, and screaming “Fire!”

Geoffrey ran up stairs. Anne followed him. The lad met them at the top of the stairs. He pointed to the open door of Anne’s room. She was absolutely certain of having left her lighted candle, when she went down to Geoffrey, at a safe distance from the bed-curtains. The bed-curtains, nevertheless, were in a blaze of fire.

There was a supply of water to the cottage, on the upper floor. The bedroom jugs and cans usually in their places at an earlier hour, were standing that night at the cistern. An empty pail was left near them. Directing the lad to bring him water from these resources, Geoffrey tore down the curtains in a flaming heap, partly on the bed and partly on the sofa near it. Using the can and the pail alternately, as the boy brought