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

Scotland, the chances are nine to one (though he may not believe it, and though she may not believe it) that he has really married her, after all.’ My uncle’s own words again! Quite needless to say that, half an hour after they were out of his lips, I had sent them to Craig Fernie in a letter to Anne!”

(Geoffrey’s stolidly-staring eyes suddenly brightened. A light of the devil’s own striking illuminated him. An idea of the devil’s own bringing entered his mind. He looked stealthily round at the man whose life he had saved⁠—at the man who had devotedly served him in return. A hideous cunning leered at his mouth and peeped out of his eyes. “Arnold Brinkworth pretended to be married to her at the inn. By the lord Harry! that’s a way out of it that never struck me before!” With that thought in his heart he turned back again to his half-finished letter to Julius. For once in his life he was strongly, fiercely agitated. For once in his life he was daunted⁠—and that by his own thought! He had written to Julius under a strong sense of the necessity of gaining time to delude Anne into leaving Scotland before he ventured on paying his addresses to Mrs. Glenarm. His letter contained a string of clumsy excuses, intended to delay his return to his brother’s house. “No,” he said to himself, as he read it again. “Whatever else may do⁠—this won’t!” He looked round once more at Arnold, and slowly tore the letter into fragments as he looked.)

In the meantime Blanche had not done yet. “No,” she said, when Arnold proposed an adjournment to the garden; “I have something more to say, and you are interested in it, this time.” Arnold resigned himself to listen, and worse still to answer, if there was no help for it, in the character of an innocent stranger who had never been near the Craig Fernie inn.

“Well,” Blanche resumed, “and what do you think has come of my letter to Anne?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Nothing has come of it!”

“Indeed?”

“Absolutely nothing! I know she received the letter yesterday morning. I ought to have had the answer today at breakfast.”

“Perhaps she thought it didn’t require an answer.”

“She couldn’t have thought that, for reasons that I know of. Besides, in my letter yesterday I implored her to tell me (if it was one line only) whether, in guessing at what her trouble was, Sir Patrick and I had not guessed right. And here is the day getting on, and no answer! What am I to conclude?”

“I really can’t say!”

“Is it possible, Arnold, that we have not guessed right, after all? Is the wickedness of that man who blew the candles out wickedness beyond our discovering? The doubt is so dreadful that I have made up my mind not to bear it after today. I count on your sympathy and assistance when tomorrow comes!”

Arnold’s heart sank. Some new complication was evidently gathering round him. He waited in silence to hear the worst. Blanche bent forward, and whispered to him.

“This is a secret,” she said. “If that creature at the writing-table has ears for anything but rowing and racing, he mustn’t hear this! Anne may come to me privately today while you are all at luncheon. If she doesn’t come and if I don’t hear from her, then the mystery of her silence must be cleared up; and you must do it!”

“I!”

“Don’t make difficulties! If you can’t find your way to Craig Fernie, I can help you. As for Anne, you know what a charming person she is, and you know she will receive you perfectly, for my sake. I must and will have some news of her. I can’t break the laws of the household a second time. Sir Patrick sympathizes, but he won’t stir. Lady Lundie is a bitter enemy. The servants are threatened with the loss of their places if any one of them goes near Anne. There is nobody but you. And to Anne you go tomorrow, if I don’t see her or hear from her today!”

This to the man who had passed as Anne’s husband at the inn, and who had been forced into the most intimate knowledge of Anne’s miserable secret! Arnold rose to put Milton away, with the composure of sheer despair. Any other secret he might, in the last resort, have confided to the discretion of a third person. But a woman’s secret⁠—with a woman’s reputation depending on his keeping it⁠—was not to be confided to anybody, under any stress of circumstances whatever. “If Geoffrey doesn’t get me out of this,” he thought, “I shall have no choice but to leave Windygates tomorrow.”

As he replaced the book on the shelf, Lady Lundie entered the library from the garden.

“What are you doing here?” she said to her stepdaughter.

“Improving my mind,” replied Blanche. “Mr. Brinkworth and I have been reading Milton.”

“Can you condescend so far, after reading Milton all the morning, as to help me with the invitations for the dinner next week?”

“If you can condescend, Lady Lundie, after feeding the poultry all the morning, I must be humility itself after only reading Milton!”

With that little interchange of the acid amenities of feminine intercourse, stepmother and stepdaughter withdrew to a writing-table, to put the virtue of hospitality in practice together.

Arnold joined his friend at the other end of the library.

Geoffrey was sitting with his elbows on the desk, and his clenched fists dug into his cheeks. Great drops of perspiration stood on his forehead, and the fragments of a torn letter lay scattered all round him. He exhibited symptoms of nervous sensibility for the first time in his life⁠—he started when Arnold spoke to him.

“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?”

“A letter to answer. And I don’t know how.”

“From Miss Silvester?” asked Arnold, dropping his voice so as to prevent the ladies at the other end of the room from hearing him.

“No,” answered Geoffrey, in a lower voice still.

“Have you heard what Blanche has