Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins [best ebook reader android .TXT] 📗

found that he had only fainted under the fatigue. Was it something more than a common fainting fit?”

“It is useless to conceal it now,” replied Mr. Speedwell. “He has had a narrow escape from a paralytic stroke.”

“Was that what you dreaded when you spoke to him at Windygates?”

“That was what I saw in his face when I gave him the warning. I was right, so far. I was wrong in my estimate of the reserve of vital power left in him. When he dropped on the racecourse, I firmly believed we should find him a dead man.”

“Is it hereditary paralysis? His father’s last illness was of that sort.”

Mr. Speedwell smiled. “Hereditary paralysis?” he repeated. “Why the man is (naturally) a phenomenon of health and strength⁠—in the prime of his life. Hereditary paralysis might have found him out thirty years hence. His rowing and his running, for the last four years, are alone answerable for what has happened today.”

Sir Patrick ventured on a suggestion.

“Surely,” he said, “with your name to compel attention to it, you ought to make this public⁠—as a warning to others?”

“It would be quite useless. Delamayn is far from being the first man who has dropped at foot-racing, under the cruel stress laid on the vital organs. The public have a happy knack of forgetting these accidents. They would be quite satisfied when they found the other man (who happens to have got through it) produced as a sufficient answer to me.”

Anne Silvester’s future was still dwelling on Sir Patrick’s mind. His next inquiry related to the serious subject of Geoffrey’s prospect of recovery in the time to come.

“He will never recover,” said Mr. Speedwell. “Paralysis is hanging over him. How long he may live it is impossible for me to say. Much depends on himself. In his condition, any new imprudence, any violent emotion, may kill him at a moment’s notice.”

“If no accident happens,” said Sir Patrick, “will he be sufficiently himself again to leave his bed and go out?”

“Certainly.”

“He has an appointment that I know of for Saturday next. Is it likely that he will be able to keep it?”

“Quite likely.”

Sir Patrick said no more. Anne’s face was before him again at the memorable moment when he had told her that she was Geoffrey’s wife.

Fourteenth Scene Portland Place XLVI A Scotch Marriage

It was Saturday, the third of October⁠—the day on which the assertion of Arnold’s marriage to Anne Silvester was to be put to the proof.

Toward two o’clock in the afternoon Blanche and her stepmother entered the drawing-room of Lady Lundie’s town house in Portland Place.

Since the previous evening the weather had altered for the worse. The rain, which had set in from an early hour that morning, still fell. Viewed from the drawing-room windows, the desolation of Portland Place in the dead season wore its aspect of deepest gloom. The dreary opposite houses were all shut up; the black mud was inches deep in the roadway; the soot, floating in tiny black particles, mixed with the falling rain, and heightened the dirty obscurity of the rising mist. Foot-passengers and vehicles, succeeding each other at rare intervals, left great gaps of silence absolutely uninterrupted by sound. Even the grinders of organs were mute; and the wandering dogs of the street were too wet to bark. Looking back from the view out of Lady Lundie’s state windows to the view in Lady Lundie’s state room, the melancholy that reigned without was more than matched by the melancholy that reigned within. The house had been shut up for the season: it had not been considered necessary, during its mistress’s brief visit, to disturb the existing state of things. Coverings of dim brown hue shrouded the furniture. The chandeliers hung invisible in enormous bags. The silent clocks hibernated under extinguishers dropped over them two months since. The tables, drawn up in corners⁠—loaded with ornaments at other times⁠—had nothing but pen, ink, and paper (suggestive of the coming proceedings) placed on them now. The smell of the house was musty; the voice of the house was still. One melancholy maid haunted the bedrooms upstairs, like a ghost. One melancholy man, appointed to admit the visitors, sat solitary in the lower regions⁠—the last of the flunkies, mouldering in an extinct servants’ hall. Not a word passed, in the drawing-room, between Lady Lundie and Blanche. Each waited the appearance of the persons concerned in the coming inquiry, absorbed in her own thoughts. Their situation at the moment was a solemn burlesque of the situation of two ladies who are giving an evening party, and who are waiting to receive their guests. Did neither of them see this? Or, seeing it, did they shrink from acknowledging it? In similar positions, who does not shrink? The occasions are many on which we have excellent reason to laugh when the tears are in our eyes; but only children are bold enough to follow the impulse. So strangely, in human existence, does the mockery of what is serious mingle with the serious reality itself, that nothing but our own self-respect preserves our gravity at some of the most important emergencies in our lives. The two ladies waited the coming ordeal together gravely, as became the occasion. The silent maid flitted noiseless upstairs. The silent man waited motionless in the lower regions. Outside, the street was a desert. Inside, the house was a tomb.

The church clock struck the hour. Two.

At the same moment the first of the persons concerned in the investigation arrived.

Lady Lundie waited composedly for the opening of the drawing-room door. Blanche started, and trembled. Was it Arnold? Was it Anne?

The door opened⁠—and Blanche drew a breath of relief. The first arrival was only Lady Lundie’s solicitor⁠—invited to attend the proceedings on her ladyship’s behalf. He was one of that large class of purely mechanical and perfectly mediocre persons connected with the practice of the law who will probably, in a more advanced state of science, be superseded by machinery. He