No Name by Wilkie Collins (good books for 7th graders TXT) 📕

“Compose yourself, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount. “Pray compose yourself, and leave me to speak to Miss Garth. I regret to hear, ma’am, that you have forgotten what I said to you in the next room. You have agitated Mr. Noel; you have compromised the interests you came here to plead; and you have only repeated what we knew before. The language you have allowed yourself to use in my absence is the same language which your pupil was foolish enough to employ when she wrote for the second time to my late master. How can a lady of your years and experience seriously repeat such nonsense? This girl boasts and threatens. She will do this; she will do that. You have her confidence, ma’am. Tell me, if you please, in plain words, what can she do?”

Sharply as the taunt was pointed, it glanced off harmless. Mrs. Lecount had planted her sting once too often. Magdalen rose in complete possession of her assumed character and composedly terminated the interview. Ignorant as she was of what had happened behind her chair, she saw a change in Mrs. Lecount’s look and manner which warned her to run no more risks, and to trust herself no longer in the house.

“I am not in my pupil’s confidence,” she said. “Her own acts will answer your question when the time comes. I can only tell you, from my own knowledge of her, that she is no boaster. What she wrote to Mr. Michael Vanstone was what she was prepared to do⁠—what, I have reason to think, she was actually on the point of doing, when her plans were overthrown by his death. Mr. Michael Vanstone’s son has only to persist in following his father’s course to find, before long, that I am not mistaken in my pupil, and that I have not come here to intimidate him by empty threats. My errand is done. I leave Mr. Noel Vanstone with two alternatives to choose from. I leave him to share Mr. Andrew Vanstone’s fortune with Mr. Andrew Vanstone’s daughters⁠—or to persist in his present refusal and face the consequences.” She bowed, and walked to the door.

Noel Vanstone started to his feet, with anger and alarm struggling which should express itself first in his blank white face. Before he could open his lips, Mrs. Lecount’s plump hands descended on his shoulders, put him softly back in his chair, and restored the plate of strawberries to its former position on his lap.

“Refresh yourself, Mr. Noel, with a few more strawberries,” she said, “and leave Miss Garth to me.”

She followed Magdalen into the passage, and closed the door of the room after her.

“Are you residing in London, ma’am?” asked Mrs. Lecount.

“No,” replied Magdalen. “I reside in the country.”

“If I want to write to you, where can I address my letter?”

“To the post-office, Birmingham,” said Magdalen, mentioning the place which she had last left, and at which all letters were still addressed to her.

Mrs. Lecount repeated the direction to fix it in her memory, advanced two steps in the passage, and quietly laid her right hand on Magdalen’s arm.

“A word of advice, ma’am,” she said; “one word at parting. You are a bold woman and a clever woman. Don’t be too bold; don’t be too clever. You are risking more than you think for.” She suddenly raised herself on tiptoe and whispered the next words in Magdalen’s ear. “I hold you in the hollow of my hand!” said Mrs. Lecount, with a fierce hissing emphasis on every syllable. Her left hand clinched itself stealthily as she spoke. It was the hand in which she had concealed the fragment of stuff from Magdalen’s gown⁠—the hand which held it fast at that moment.

“What do you mean?” asked Magdalen, pushing her back.

Mrs. Lecount glided away politely to open the house door.

“I mean nothing now,” she said; “wait a little, and time may show. One last question, ma’am, before I bid you goodbye. When your pupil was a little innocent child, did she ever amuse herself by building a house of cards?”

Magdalen impatiently answered by a gesture in the affirmative.

“Did you ever see her build up the house higher and higher,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount, “till it was quite a pagoda of cards? Did you ever see her open her little child’s eyes wide and look at it, and feel so proud of what she had done already that she wanted to do more? Did you ever see her steady her pretty little hand, and hold her innocent breath, and put one other card on the top, and lay the whole house, the instant afterward, a heap of ruins on the table? Ah, you have seen that. Give her, if you please, a friendly message from me. I venture to say she has built the house high enough already; and I recommend her to be careful before she puts on that other card.”

“She shall have your message,” said Magdalen, with Miss Garth’s bluntness, and Miss Garth’s emphatic nod of the head. “But I doubt her minding it. Her hand is rather steadier than you suppose, and I think she will put on the other card.”

“And bring the house down,” said Mrs. Lecount.

“And build it up again,” rejoined Magdalen. “I wish you good morning.”

“Good morning,” said Mrs. Lecount, opening the door. “One last word, Miss Garth. Do think of what I said in the back room! Do try the Golden Ointment for that sad affliction in your eyes!”

As Magdalen crossed the threshold of the door she was met by the postman ascending the house steps with a letter picked out from the bundle in his hand. “Noel Vanstone, Esquire?” she heard the man say, interrogatively, as she made her way down the front garden to the street.

She passed through the garden gates little thinking from what new difficulty and new danger her timely departure had saved her. The letter which the postman had just delivered into the housekeeper’s hands was no other than the anonymous letter addressed to Noel Vanstone by Captain Wragge.

Mrs. Lecount returned to the