However exasperating to herself the conclusion might be, Mrs Lecount could not fail to see that she had been thus far met and baffled successfully at every point. What was she to do next? If she sent for Mr Pendril, when he came to Aldborough (with only a few hours spared from his business at her disposal) – what definite course would there be for him to follow? If she showed Noel Vanstone the original letter from which her note had been copied, he would apply instantly to the writer for an explanation; would expose the fabricated story by which Mrs Lecount had succeeded in imposing on Miss Garth; and would, in any event, still declare, on the evidence of his own eyes, that the test by the marks on the neck had utterly failed. Miss Vanstone the elder, whose unexpected presence at Aldborough might have done wonders – whose voice in the hall at North Shingles, even if she had been admitted no farther, might have reached her sister’s ears, and led to instant results – Miss Vanstone the elder, was out of the country, and was not likely to return for a month at least. Look as anxiously as Mrs Lecount might along the course which she had hitherto followed, she failed to see her way through the accumulated obstacles which now barred her advance.
Other women, in this position, might have waited until circumstances altered, and helped them. Mrs Lecount boldly retraced her steps, and determined to find her way to her end in a new direction. Resigning, for the present, all further attempt to prove that the false Miss Bygrave was the true Magdalen Vanstone, she resolved to narrow the range of her next efforts; to leave the actual question of Magdalen’s identity untouched; and to rest satisfied with convincing her master of this simple fact – that the young lady who was charming him at North Shingles, and the disguised woman who had terrified him in Vauxhall Walk, were one and the same person.
The means of effecting this new object were, to all appearance, far less easy of attainment than the means of effecting the object which Mrs Lecount had just resigned. Here, no help was to be expected from others – no ostensibly benevolent motives could be put forward as a blind – no appeal could be made to Mr Pendril or to Miss Garth. Here, the housekeeper’s only chance of success depended in the first place on her being able to effect a stolen entrance into Mr Bygrave’s house; and, in the second place, on her ability to discover whether that memorable alpaca dress from which she had secretly cut the fragment of stuff, happened to form part of Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.
Taking the difficulties now before her in their order as they occurred, Mrs Lecount first resolved to devote the next few days to watching the habits of the inmates of North Shingles, from early in the morning to late at night; and to testing the capacity of the one servant in the house to resist the temptation of a bribe. Assuming that results proved successful, and that, either by money or by stratagem, she gained admission to North Shingles (without the knowledge of Mr Bygrave or his niece), she turned next to the second difficulty of the two – the difficulty of obtaining access to Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.
If the servant proved corruptible, all obstacles in this direction might be considered as removed beforehand. But, if the servant proved honest, the new problem was no easy one to solve.
Long and careful consideration of the question led the housekeeper, at last, to the bold resolution of obtaining an interview – if the servant failed her – with Mrs Bygrave herself. What was the true cause of this lady’s mysterious seclusion? Was she a person of the strictest and the most inconvenient integrity? or a person who could not be depended on to preserve a secret? or a person who was as artful as Mr Bygrave himself, and who was kept in reserve to forward the object of some new deception which was yet to come? In the first two cases, Mrs Lecount could trust in her own powers of dissimulation, and in the results which they might achieve. In the last case (if no other end was gained), it might be of vital importance to her to discover an enemy hidden in the dark. In any event, she determined to run the risk. Of the three chances in her favour, on which she had reckoned at the outset of the struggle – the chance of entrapping Magdalen by word of mouth, the chance of entrapping her by the help of her friends, and the chance of entrapping her by means of Mrs Bygrave – two had been tried, and two had failed. The third remained to be tested yet; and the third might succeed.
So, the captain’s enemy plotted against him in the privacy of her own chamber, while the captain watched the light in her window from the beach outside.
Before breakfast the next morning, Captain Wragge posted the forged letter to Zürich with his own hand. He went back to North Shingles with his mind not quite decided on the course to take with Mrs Lecount, during the all-important interval of the next ten days.
Greatly to his surprise, his doubts on this point were abruptly decided by Magdalen herself.
He found her waiting for him, in the room where the breakfast was laid. She was walking restlessly to and fro, with her head drooping on her bosom, and her hair hanging disordered over her shoulders. The moment she looked up on his entrance, the captain felt the fear which Mrs Wragge had felt before him – the fear that her mind would be struck prostrate again, as it had been struck once already, when Frank’s letter reached her in Vauxhall Walk.
‘Is he coming again to day?’ she asked, pushing away from her the chair which Captain Wragge offered, with such violence that she threw it on the floor.
‘Yes,’ said the captain, wisely answering her in the fewest words. ‘He is coming at two o’clock.’
‘Take me away!’ she exclaimed, tossing her hair back wildly from her face. ‘Take me away before he comes. I can’t get over the horror of marrying him, while I am in this hateful place – take me somewhere where I can forget it, or I shall go mad! Give me two days’ rest – two days out of sight of that horrible sea – two days out of prison in this horrible house – two days anywhere in the wide world, away from Aldborough. I’ll come back with you! I’ll go through with it to the end! Only give me two days’ escape from that man and everything belonging to him! Do you hear, you villain?’ she cried, seizing his arm and shaking it in a frenzy of passion – ‘I have been tortured enough – I can bear it no longer!’
There was but one way of quieting her, and the captain instantly took it.
‘If you will try to control yourself,’ he said, ‘you shall leave Aldborough in an hour’s time.’
She dropped his arm, and leaned back heavily against the wall behind her.
‘I’ll try,’ she answered, struggling for breath, but looking at him less wildly. ‘You sha’n’t complain of me, if I can help it.’ She attempted confusedly to take her handkerchief from her apron pocket, and failed to find it. The captain took it out for her. Her eyes softened, and she drew her breath more freely, as she received the handkerchief from him. ‘You are a kinder man than I thought you were,’ she said; ‘I am sorry I spoke so passionately to you just now – I am very, very sorry.’ The tears stole into her eyes, and she offered him her hand with the native grace and gentleness of happier days. ‘Be friends with me again,’ she said, pleadingly. ‘I’m only a girl, Captain Wragge – I’m only a girl!’
He took her hand in silence – patted it for a moment – and then opened the door for her to go back to her own room again. There was genuine regret in his face, as he showed her that trifling attention. He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life – but he was human; and she had found her way to the lost sympathies in him which not even the self-profanation of a swindler’s existence could wholly destroy. ‘Damn the breakfast!’ he said, when the servant came in for her orders. ‘Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at the door in an hour’s time.’ He went out into the passage, still chafing under a sense of mental disturbance which was new to him; and shouted to his wife more fiercely than ever. ‘Pack up what we want for a week’s absence – and be ready in half an hour!’ Having issued those directions, he returned to the breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table with an impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own meal. ‘She has rubb
ed off the edge of my appetite,’ he said to himself, with a forced laugh. ‘I’ll try a cigar, and a turn in the fresh air.’
If he had been twenty years younger, those remedies might have failed him. But where is the man to be found, whose internal policy succumbs to revolution, when that man is on the wrong side of fifty? Exercise and change of place gave the captain back into the possession of himself. He recovered the lost sense of the flavour of his cigar; and recalled his wandering attention to the question of his approaching absence from Aldborough. A few minutes’ consideration satisfied his mind that Magdalen’s outbreak had forced him to take the course of all others, which, on a fair review of existing emergencies, it was now most desirable to adopt.
Captain Wragge’s inquiries, on the evening when he and Magdalen had drunk tea at Sea-View, had certainly informed him that the housekeeper’s brother possessed a modest competence; that his sister was his nearest living relative; and that there were some unscrupulous cousins on the spot, who were anxious to usurp the place in his will which properly belonged to Mrs Lecount. Here were strong motives to take the housekeeper to Zürich, when the false report of her brother’s relapse reached England. But, if any idea of Noel Vanstone’s true position dawned on her, in the mean time – who could say whether she might not, at the eleventh hour, prefer asserting her large pecuniary interest in her master, to defending her small pecuniary interest at her brother’s bedside? While that question remained undecided, the plain necessity of checking the growth of Noel Vanstone’s intimacy with the family at North Shingles, did not admit of a doubt; and of all means of effecting that object, none could be less open to suspicion than the temporary removal of the household from their residence at Aldborough. Thoroughly satisfied with the soundness of this conclusion, Captain Wragge made straight for Sea-View Cottage, to apologize and explain before the carriage came and the departure took place.
Noel Vanstone was easily accessible to visitors: he was walking in the garden before breakfast. His disappointment and vexation were freely expressed when he heard the news which his friend had to communicate. The captain’s fluent tongue, however, soon impressed on him the necessity of resignation to present circumstances. The bare hint that the ‘pious fraud’ might fail after all, if anything happened in the ten days’ interval to enlighten. Mrs Lecount, had an instant effect in making Noel Vanstone as patient and as submissive as could be wished.
I won’t tell you where we are going, for two good reasons,’ said Captain Wragge, when his preliminary explanations were completed. ‘In the first place, I haven’t made up my mind yet; and, in the second place, if you don’t know what our destination is, Mrs Lecount can’t worm it out of you. I have not the least doubt she is watching us, at this moment, from behind her window-curtain. When she asks what I wanted with you this morning, tell her I came to say good-bye for a few days – finding my niece not so well again, and wishing to take her on a short visit to some friends, to try change of air. If you could produce an impression on Mrs Lecount’s mind (without overdoing it) that you are a little disappointed in me, and that you are rather inclined to doubt my heartiness in cultivating your acquaintance, you will greatly help our present object. You may depend on our return to North Shingles in four or five days at farthest. If anything strikes me in the mean while, the post is always at our service, and I won’t fail to write to you.’
‘Won’t Miss Bygrave write to me?’ inquired Noel Vanstone piteously. ‘Did she know you were coming here? Did she send me no message?’
‘Unpardonable on my part to have forgotten it!’ cried the captain. ‘She sent you her love.’
Noel Vanstone closed his eyes in silent ecstasy.
When he opened them again, Captain Wragge had passed through the garden-gate and was on his way back to North Shingles. As soon as his own door had closed on him, Mrs Lecount descended from the post of observation which the captain had rightly suspected her of occupying; and addressed the inquiry to her master which the captain had rightly foreseen would follow his departure. The reply she received produced but one impression on her mind. She at once set it down as a falsehood, and returned to her own window, to keep watch over North Shingles more vigilantly than ever.
To her utter astonishment, after a lapse of less than half an hour, she saw an empty carriage draw up at Mr Bygrave’s door. Luggage was brought out and packed on the vehicle. Miss Bygrave appeared, and took her seat in it. She was followed into the carriage by a lady of great size and stature, whom the housekeeper conjectured to be Mrs Bygrave. The servant came next, and stood waiting on the path. The last person to appear was Mr Bygrave. He locked the house-door, and took the key away with him to a cottage near at hand, which was the residence of the landlord of North Shingles. On his return, he nodded to the servant – who walked away by herself towards the humbler quarter of the little town – and joined the ladies in the carriage. The coachman mounted the box, and the vehicle disappeared.
Mrs Lecount laid down the opera-glass, through which she had been closely investigating these proceedings, with a feeling of helpless perplexity which she was almost ashamed to acknowledge to herself. The secret of Mr Bygrave’s object in suddenly emptying his house at Aldborough of every living creature in it, was an impenetrable mystery to her.
Submitting herself to circumstances with a ready resignation which Captain Wragge had not shown, on his side, in a similar situation, Mrs Lecount wasted neither time nor temper in unprofitable guess-work. She left the mystery to thicken or to clear, as the future might decide; and looked exclusively at the uses to which she might put the morning’s event in her own interests. Whatever might have become of the family at North Shingles, the servant was left behind – and the servant was exactly the person whose assistance might now be of vital importance to the housekeeper’s projects. Mrs Lecount put on her bonnet, inspected the collection of loose silver in her purse, and set forth on the spot to make the servant’s acquaintance.
She went first to the cottage, at which Mr Bygrave had left the key of North Shingles, to discover the servant’s present address from the landlord. So far as this object was concerned, her errand proved successful. The landlord knew that the girl had been allowed to go home for a few days to her friends, and knew in what part of Aldborough her friends lived. But here his sources of information suddenly dried up. He knew nothing of the destination to which Mr Bygrave and his family had betaken themselves; and he was perfectly ignorant of the number of days over which their absence might be expected to extend. All he could say was, that he had not received a notice to quit from his tenant, and that he had been requested to keep the key of the house in his possession until Mr Bygrave returned to claim it in his own person.
Baffled, but not discouraged, Mrs Lecount turned her steps next towards the back street of Aldborough, and astonished the servant’s relatives by conferring on them the honour of a morning call.
Easily imposed on, at starting, by Mrs Lecount’s pretence of calling to engage her, under the impression that she had left Mr Bygrave’s service – the servant did her best to answer the questions put to her. But she knew as little as the landlord of her master’s plans. All she could say about them was, that she had not been dismissed, and that she was to await the receipt of a note recalling her when necessary to her situation at North Shingles. Not having expected to find her better informed on this part of the subject, Mrs Lecount smoothly shifted her ground, and led the woman into talking generally of the advantages and defects of her situation in Mr Bygrave’s family.
Profiting by the knowledge gained, in this indirect manner, of the little secrets of the household, Mrs Lecount made two discoveries. She found out, in the first place, that the servant (having enough to do in attending to the coarser part of the domestic work) was in no position to disclose the secrets of Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe, which were known only to the young lady herself and to her aunt. In the second place, the housekeeper ascertained that the true reason of Mrs Bygrave’s rigid seclusion, wa
s to be found in the simple fact that she was little better than an idiot, and that her husband was probably ashamed of allowing her to be seen in public. These apparently trivial discoveries enlightened Mrs Lecount on a very important point which had been previously involved in doubt. She was now satisfied that the likeliest way to obtaining a private investigation of Magdalen’s wardrobe, lay through deluding the imbecile lady and not through bribing the ignorant servant.
Having reached that conclusion – pregnant with coming assaults on the weakly-fortified discretion of poor Mrs Wragge – the housekeeper cautiously abstained from exhibiting herself any longer under an inquisitive aspect. She changed the conversation to local topics; waited until she was sure of leaving an excellent impression behind her; and then took her leave.
Three days passed; and Mrs Lecount and her master each with their widely-different ends in view – watched with equal anxiety for the first signs of returning life in the direction of North Shingles. In that interval, no letter either from the uncle or the niece arrived for Noel Vanstone. His sincere feeling of irritation under this neglectful treatment, greatly assisted the effect of those feigned doubts on the subject of his absent friends, which the captain had recommended him to express in the housekeeper’s presence. He confessed his apprehensions of having been mistaken, not in Mr Bygrave only, but even in his niece as well, with such a genuine air of annoyance, that he actually contributed a new element of confusion to the existing perplexities of Mrs Lecount.
On the morning of the fourth day, Noel Vanstone met the postman in the garden; and, to his great relief, discovered among the letters delivered to him, a note from Mr Bygrave.
The date1 of the note was ‘Woodbridge’, and it contained a few lines only. Mr Bygrave mentioned that his niece was better, and that she sent her love as before. He proposed returning to Aldborough on the next day – when he would have some new considerations, of a strictly private nature, to present to Mr Noel Vanstone’s mind. In the mean time he would beg Mr Vanstone not to call at North Shingles, until he received a special invitation to do so – which invitation should certainly be given on the day when the family returned. The motive of this apparently strange request should be explained to Mr Vanstone’s perfect satisfaction, when he was once more united to his friends. Until that period arrived, the strictest caution was enjoined on him in all his communications with Mrs Lecount – and the instant destruction of Mr Bygrave’s letter, after due perusal of it was (if the classical phrase might be pardoned) a sine qua non.
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