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

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 down 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 upstairs, 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 upstairs. 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 them, he drenched the bed and the sofa. It was all over in little more than a minute. The cottage was saved. But the bed-furniture was destroyed; and the room, as a matter of course, was rendered uninhabitable, for that night at least, and probably for more nights to come.

Geoffrey set down the empty pail; and, turning to Anne, pointed across the passage.

“You won’t be much inconvenienced by this,” he said. “You have only to shift your quarters to the spare room.”

With the assistance of the lad, he moved Anne’s boxes, and the chest of drawers, which had escaped damage, into the opposite room. This done, he cautioned her to be careful with her candles for the future⁠—and went downstairs, without waiting to hear what she said in reply. The lad followed him, and was dismissed for the night.

Even in the confusion which attended the extinguishing of the fire, the conduct of Hester Dethridge had been remarkable enough to force itself on the attention of Anne.

She had come out from her bedroom, when the alarm was given; had looked at the flaming curtains; and had drawn back, stolidly submissive, into a corner to wait the event. There she had stood⁠—to all appearance, utterly indifferent to the possible destruction of her own cottage. The fire extinguished, she still waited impenetrably in her corner, while the chest of drawers and the boxes were being moved⁠—then locked the door, without even a passing glance at the scorched ceiling and the burned bed-furniture⁠—put the key into her pocket⁠—and went back to her room.

Anne had hitherto not shared the conviction felt by most other persons who were brought into contact with Hester Dethridge, that the woman’s mind was deranged. After what she had just seen, however, the general impression became her impression too. She had thought of putting certain questions to Hester, when they were left together, as to the origin of the fire. Reflection decided her on saying nothing, for that night at least. She crossed the passage, and entered the spare room⁠—the room which she had declined to occupy on her arrival at the cottage, and which she was obliged to sleep in now.

She was instantly struck by a change in the disposition of the furniture of the room.

The bed had been moved. The head⁠—set, when she had last seen it, against the side wall of the cottage⁠—was placed now against the partition wall which separated the room from Geoffrey’s room. This new arrangement had evidently been effected with a settled purpose of some sort. The hook in the ceiling which supported the curtains (the bed, unlike the bed in the other room, having no canopy attached to it) had been moved so as to adapt itself to the change that had been made. The chairs and the washhand-stand, formerly placed against the partition wall, were now, as a matter of necessity, shifted over to the vacant space against the side wall of the cottage. For the rest, no other alteration was visible in any part of the room.

In Anne’s situation, any event not immediately intelligible on the face of it, was an event to be distrusted. Was there a motive for the change in the position of the bed? And was it, by any chance, a motive in which she was concerned?

The doubt had barely occurred to her, before a startling suspicion succeeded it. Was there some secret purpose to be answered by making her sleep in the spare room? Did the question which the servant