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

stopped her. “I can’t unwind the strings. I can’t lift up the paper. Do it.”

She sternly made the sign of refusal: she resolutely opened the door to leave him. “Do you want your Confession back?” he asked. She closed the door, stolidly submissive in an instant; and crossed to the partition wall.

She lifted the loose strips of paper on either side of the wall⁠—pointed through the hollowed place⁠—and drew back again to the other end of the room.

He rose and walked unsteadily from the chair to the foot of his bed. Holding by the woodwork of the bed; he waited a little. While he waited, he became conscious of a change in the strange sensations that possessed him. A feeling as of a breath of cold air passed over the right side of his head. He became steady again: he could calculate his distances: he could put his hands through the hollowed place, and draw aside the light curtains, hanging from the hook in the ceiling over the head of her bed. He could look at his sleeping wife.

She was dimly visible, by the light of the candle placed at the other end of her room. The worn and weary look had disappeared from her face. All that had been purest and sweetest in it, in the bygone time, seemed to be renewed by the deep sleep that held her gently. She was young again in the dim light: she was beautiful in her calm repose. Her head lay back on the pillow. Her upturned face was in a position which placed her completely at the mercy of the man under whose eyes she was sleeping⁠—the man who was looking at her, with the merciless resolution in him to take her life.

After waiting a while, he drew back. “She’s more like a child than a woman tonight,” he muttered to himself under his breath. He glanced across the room at Hester Dethridge. The lighted candle which she had brought upstairs with her was burning near the place where she stood. “Blow it out,” he whispered. She never moved. He repeated the direction. There she stood, deaf to him.

What was she doing? She was looking fixedly into one of the corners of the room.

He turned his head again toward the hollowed place in the wall. He looked at the peaceful face on the pillow once more. He deliberately revived his own vindictive sense of the debt that he owed her. “But for you,” he whispered to himself, “I should have won the race: but for you, I should have been friends with my father: but for you, I might marry Mrs. Glenarm.” He turned back again into the room while the sense of it was at its fiercest in him. He looked round and round him. He took up a towel; considered for a moment; and threw it down again.

A new idea struck him. In two steps he was at the side of his bed. He seized on one of the pillows, and looked suddenly at Hester. “It’s not a drunken brute, this time,” he said to her. “It’s a woman who will fight for her life. The pillow’s the safest of the two.” She never answered him, and never looked toward him. He made once more for the place in the wall; and stopped midway between it and his bed⁠—stopped, and cast a backward glance over his shoulder.

Hester Dethridge was stirring at last.

With no third person in the room, she was looking, and moving, nevertheless, as if she was following a third person along the wall, from the corner. Her lips were parted in horror; her eyes, opening wider and wider, stared rigid and glittering at the empty wall. Step by step she stole nearer and nearer to Geoffrey, still following some visionary Thing, which was stealing nearer and nearer, too. He asked himself what it meant. Was the terror of the deed that he was about to do more than the woman’s brain could bear? Would she burst out screaming, and wake his wife?

He hurried to the place in the wall⁠—to seize the chance, while the chance was his.

He steadied his strong hold on the pillow.

He stooped to pass it through the opening.

He poised it over Anne’s sleeping face.

At the same moment he felt Hester Dethridge’s hand laid on him from behind. The touch ran through him, from head to foot, like a touch of ice. He drew back with a start, and faced her. Her eyes were staring straight over his shoulder at something behind him⁠—looking as they had looked in the garden at Windygates.

Before he could speak he felt the flash of her eyes in his eyes. For the third time, she had seen the Apparition behind him. The homicidal frenzy possessed her. She flew at his throat like a wild beast. The feeble old woman attacked the athlete!

He dropped the pillow, and lifted his terrible right arm to brush her from him, as he might have brushed an insect from him.

Even as he raised the arm a frightful distortion seized on his face. As if with an invisible hand, it dragged down the brow and the eyelid on the right; it dragged down the mouth on the same side. His arm fell helpless; his whole body, on the side under the arm, gave way. He dropped on the floor, like a man shot dead.

Hester Dethridge pounced on his prostrate body⁠—knelt on his broad breast⁠—and fastened her ten fingers on his throat.

The shock of the fall woke Anne on the instant. She started up⁠—looked round⁠—and saw a gap in the wall at the head of her bed, and the candlelight glimmering in the next room. Panic-stricken; doubting, for the moment, if she were in her right mind, she drew back, waiting⁠—listening⁠—looking. She saw nothing but the glimmering light in the room; she heard nothing but a hoarse gasping, as of some person laboring for breath. The sound ceased. There was an interval of silence. Then the head of