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

here more comfortable? You will stay at this place, won’t you? Geoffrey wishes it.”

She shuddered, and looked away. “Yes! yes!” she answered, hurriedly.

“You will hear from Geoffrey,” Arnold went on, “to-morrow or next day. I know he means to write.”

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t speak of him any more!” she cried out. “How do you think I can look you in the face—” Her cheeks flushed deep, and her eyes rested on him with a momentary firmness. “Mind this! I am his wife, if promises can make me his wife! He has pledged his word to me by all that is sacred!” She checked herself impatiently. “What am I saying? What interest can you have in this miserable state of things? Don’t let us talk of it! I have something else to say to you. Let us go back to my troubles here. Did you see the landlady when you came in?”

“No. I only saw the waiter.”

“The landlady has made some absurd difficulty about letting me have these rooms because I came here alone.”

“She won’t make any difficulty now,” said Arnold. “I have settled that.”

“You!”

Arnold smiled. After what had passed, it was an indescribable relief to him to see the humorous side of his own position at the inn.

“Certainly,” he answered. “When I asked for the lady who had arrived here alone this afternoon—”

“Yes.”

“I was told, in your interests, to ask for her as my wife.”

Anne looked at him—in alarm as well as in surprise.

“You asked for me as your wife?” she repeated.

“Yes. I haven’t done wrong—have I? As I understood it, there was no alternative. Geoffrey told me you had settled with him to present yourself here as a married lady, whose husband was coming to join her.”

“I thought of him when I said that. I never thought of you.”

“Natural enough. Still, it comes to the same thing (doesn’t it?) with the people of this house.”

“I don’t understand you. ”

“I will try and explain myself a little better. Geoffrey said your position here depended on my asking for you at the door (as he would have asked for you if he had come) in the character of your husband.”

“He had no right to say that.”

“No right? After what you have told me of the landlady, just think what might have happened if he had not said it! I haven’t had much experience myself of these things. But—allow me to ask—wouldn’t it have been a little awkward (at my age) if I had come here and inquired for you as a friend? Don’t you think, in that case, the landlady might have made some additional difficulty about letting you have the rooms?”

It was beyond dispute that the landlady would have refused to let the rooms at all. It was equally plain that the deception which Arnold had practiced on the people of the inn was a deception which Anne had herself rendered necessary, in her own interests. She was not to blame; it was clearly impossible for her to have foreseen such an event as Geoffrey’s departure for London. Still, she felt an uneasy sense of responsibility—a vague dread of what might happen next. She sat nervously twisting her handkerchief in her lap, and made no answer.

“Don’t suppose I object to this little stratagem,” Arnold went on. “I am serving my old friend, and I am helping the lady who is soon to be his wife.”

Anne rose abruptly to her feet, and amazed him by a very unexpected question.

“Mr. Brinkworth,” she said, “forgive me the rudeness of something I am about to say to you. When are you going away?”

Arnold burst out laughing.

“When I am quite sure I can do nothing more to assist you,” he answered.

“Pray don’t think of me any longer.”

“In your situation! who else am I to think of?”

Anne laid her hand earnestly on his arm, and answered:

“Blanche!”

“Blanche?” repeated Arnold, utterly at a loss to understand her.

“Yes—Blanche. She found time to tell me what had passed between you this morning before I left Windygates. I know you have made her an offer: I know you are engaged to be married to her.”

Arnold was delighted to hear it. He had been merely unwilling to leave her thus far. He was absolutely determined to stay with her now.

“Don’t expect me to go after that!” he said. “Come and sit down again, and let’s talk about Blanche.”

Anne declined impatiently, by a gesture. Arnold was too deeply interested in the new topic to take any notice of it.

“You know all about her habits and her tastes,” he went on, “and what she likes, and what she dislikes. It’s most important that I should talk to you about her. When we are husband and wife, Blanche is to have all her own way in every thing. That’s my idea of the Whole Duty of Man—when Man is married. You are still standing? Let me give you a chair.”

It was cruel—under other circumstances it would have been impossible—to disappoint him. But the vague fear of consequences which had taken possession of Anne was not to be trifled with. She had no clear conception of the risk (and it is to be added, in justice to Geoffrey, that he had no clear conception of the risk) on which Arnold had unconsciously ventured, in undertaking his errand to the inn. Neither of them had any adequate idea (few people have) of the infamous absence of all needful warning, of all decent precaution and restraint, which makes the marriage law of Scotland a trap to catch unmarried men and women, to this day. But, while Geoffrey’s mind was incapable of looking beyond the present emergency, Anne’s finer intelligence told her that a country which offered such facilities for private marriage as the facilities of which she had proposed to take advantage in her own case, was not a country in which a man could act as Arnold had acted, without danger of some serious embarrassment following as the possible result. With this motive to animate her, she resolutely declined to take the offered chair, or to enter into the proposed conversation.

“Whatever we have to say about Blanche, Mr. Brinkworth, must be said at some fitter time. I beg you will leave me.”

“Leave you!”

“Yes. Leave me to the solitude that is best for me, and to the sorrow that I have deserved. Thank you—and good-by.”

Arnold made no attempt to disguise his disappointment and surprise.

“If I must go, I must,” he said, “But why are you in such a hurry?”

“I don’t want you to call me your wife again before the people of this inn.”

“Is that all? What on earth are you afraid of?”

She was unable fully to realize her own apprehensions. She was doubly unable to express them in words. In her anxiety to produce some reason which might prevail on him to go, she drifted back into that very conversation about Blanche into which she had declined to enter but the moment before.

“I have reasons for being afraid,” she said. “One that I can’t give; and one that I can. Suppose Blanche heard of what you have done? The longer you stay here—the more people you see—the more chance there is that she might hear of it.”

“And what if she did?” asked Arnold, in his own straightforward way. “Do you think she would be angry with me for making myself useful to you?”

“Yes,” rejoined Anne, sharply, “if she was jealous of me.”

Arnold’s unlimited belief in Blanche expressed itself, without the slightest compromise, in two words:

“That’s impossible!”

Anxious as she was, miserable as she was, a faint smile flitted over Anne’s face.

“Sir Patrick would tell you, Mr. Brinkworth, that nothing is impossible where women are concerned.” She dropped her momentary lightness of tone, and went on as earnestly as ever. “You can’t put yourself in Blanche’s place—I can. Once more, I beg you to go. I don’t like your coming here, in this way! I don’t like it at all!”

She held out her hand to take leave. At the same moment there was a loud knock at the door of the room.

Anne sank into the chair at her side, and uttered a faint cry of alarm. Arnold, perfectly impenetrable to all sense of his position, asked what there was to frighten her—and answered the knock in the two customary words:

“Come in!”

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

MR. BISHOPRIGGS.

THE knock at the door was repeated—a louder knock than before.

“Are you deaf?” shouted Arnold.

The door opened, little by little, an inch at a time. Mr. Bishopriggs appeared mysteriously, with the cloth for dinner over his arm, and with his second in c ommand behind him, bearing “the furnishing of the table” (as it was called at Craig Fernie) on a tray.

“What the deuce were you waiting for?” asked Arnold. “I told you to come in.”

“And I tauld you,” answered Mr. Bishopriggs, “that I wadna come in without knocking first. Eh, man!” he went on, dismissing his second in command, and laying the cloth with his own venerable hands, “d’ye think I’ve lived in this hottle in blinded eegnorance of hoo young married couples pass the time when they’re left to themselves? Twa knocks at the door—and an unco trouble in opening it, after that—is joost the least ye can do for them! Whar’ do ye think, noo, I’ll set the places for you and your leddy there?”

Anne walked away to the window, in undisguised disgust. Arnold found Mr. Bishopriggs to be quite irresistible. He answered, humoring the joke,

“One at the top and one at the bottom of the table, I suppose ?”

“One at tap and one at bottom?” repeated Mr. Bishopriggs, in high disdain. “De’il a bit of it! Baith yer chairs as close together as chairs can be. Hech! hech!—haven’t I caught ‘em, after goodness knows hoo many preleeminary knocks at the door, dining on their husbands’ knees, and steemulating a man’s appetite by feeding him at the fork’s end like a child? Eh!” sighed the sage of Craig Fernie, “it’s a short life wi’ that nuptial business, and a merry one! A mouth for yer billin’ and cooin’; and a’ the rest o’ yer days for wondering ye were ever such a fule, and wishing it was a’ to be done ower again.—Ye’ll be for a bottle o’ sherry wine, nae doot? and a drap toddy afterwards, to do yer digestin’ on?”

Arnold nodded—and then, in obedience to a signal from Anne, joined her at the window. Mr. Bishopriggs looked after them attentively—observed that they were talking in whispers—and approved of that proceeding, as representing another of the established customs of young married couples at inns, in the presence of third persons appointed to wait on them.

“Ay! ay!” he said, looking over his shoulder at Arnold, “gae to your deerie! gae to your deerie! and leave a’ the solid business o’ life to Me. Ye’ve Screepture warrant for it. A man maun leave fether and mother (I’m yer fether), and cleave to his wife. My certie! ‘cleave’ is a strong word—there’s nae sort o’ doot aboot it, when it comes to ‘cleaving!’ ” He wagged his head thoughtfully, and walked to the side-table in a corner, to cut the bread.

As he took up the knife, his one wary eye detected a morsel of crumpled paper, lying lost between the table and