‘What can it be? Why not tell me at once?’
‘You used often to set me the example of patience, Norah, in old times – will you set me the example now?’
‘With all my heart. Shall I return to my own story as well? Yes? Then we will go back to it at once. I was telling you that St Crux is George’s house, in Essex; the house he inherited from his uncle. Knowing that Miss Garth had a curiosity to see the place, he left word (when he went abroad after the admiral’s death) that she and any friends who came with her, were to be admitted, if she happened to find herself in the neighbourhood during his absence. Miss Garth and I, and a large party of Mr Tyrrel’s friends, found ourselves in the neighbourhood, not long after George’s departure. We had all been invited to see the launch of Mr Tyrrel’s new yacht, from the builder’s yard at Wivenhoe in Essex. When the launch was over, the rest of the company returned to Colchester to dine. Miss Garth and I contrived to get into the same carriage together, with nobody but my two little pupils for our companions. We gave the coachman his orders, and drove round by St Crux. The moment Miss Garth mentioned her name, we were let in, and shown all over the house. I don’t know how to describe it to you: it is the most bewildering place I ever saw in my life –’
‘Don’t attempt to describe it, Norah. Go on with your story instead.’
‘Very well. My story takes me straight into one of the rooms at St Crux – a room about as long as your street here; so dreary, so dirty, and so dreadfully cold, that I shiver at the bare recollection of it. Miss Garth was for getting out of it again, as speedily as possible, and so was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking at a singular piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture in the comfortless place. She called it a tripod, I think. (There is nothing to be alarmed at, Magdalen; I assure you there is nothing to be alarmed at!) At any rate, it was a strange three– legged thing, which supported a great pan full of charcoal ashes at the top. It was considered, by all good judges (the housekeeper told us), a wonderful piece of chasing in metal; and she especially pointed out the beauty of some scroll– work running round the inside of the pan, with Latin mottoes on it, signifying – I forget what. I felt not the slightest interest in the thing myself, but I looked close at the scroll– work to satisfy the housekeeper. To confess the truth, she was rather tiresome with her mechanically-learnt lecture on fine metal– work – and, while she was talking, I found myself idly stirring the soft feathery white ashes backwards and forwards with my hand, pretending to listen, with my mind a hundred miles away from her. I don’t know how long or how short a time I had been playing with the ashes, when my fingers suddenly encountered a piece of crumpled paper, hidden deep among them. When I brought it to the surface, it proved to be a letter – a long letter full of cramped, close writing. – You have anticipated my story, Magdalen, before I can end it! You know as well as I do, that the letter which my idle fingers found, was the Secret Trust. Hold out your hand, my dear. I have got George’s permission to show it to you, – and there it is!’
She put the Trust into her sister’s hand. Magdalen took it from her mechanically. ‘You!’ she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St Crux. ‘You have found it!’
‘Yes,’ said Norah, gaily; ‘the Trust has proved no exception to the general perversity of all lost things. Look for them, and they remain invisible. Leave them alone, and they reveal themselves! You and your lawyer, Magdalen, were both justified in supposing that your interest in this discovery was an interest of no common kind. I spare you all our consultations after I had produced the crumpled paper from the ashes. It ended in George’s lawyer being written to, and in George himself being recalled from the Continent. Miss Garth and I both saw him, immediately on his return; he did, what neither of us could do – he solved the mystery of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes. Admiral Bartram, you must know, was all his life subject to fits of sommambulism. He had been found walking in his sleep, not long before his death – just at the time, too when he was sadly troubled in his mind on the subject of that very letter in your hand. George’s idea is that he must have fancied he was doing, in his sleep, what he would have died rather than do in his waking moments – destroying the Trust. The fire had been lit in the pan not long before, and he no doubt saw it still burning in his dream. This was George’s explanation of the strange position of the letter when I discovered it. The question of what was to be done with the letter itself, came next, and was no easy question for a woman to understand. But I determined to master it, and I did master it, because it related to you.’
‘Let me try to master it, in my turn,’ said Magdalen. ‘I have a particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter, as you know yourself. What has it done for others? and what is it to do for me?’
‘My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk of it! Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a fortune.’
‘Is my only claim to the fortune, the claim which this letter gives me?’
‘Yes – the letter is your only claim. Shall I try if I can explain it, in two words? Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer’s opinion, have been made a matter for dispute – though I am sure George would have sanctioned no proceeding of that sort. Taken, however, with the postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines, if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally binding, as well as morally binding, on the Admiral’s representatives. I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my own language, instead of in the lawyer’s. The end of the thing was simply this. All the money went back to Mr Noel Vanstone’s estate (another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain reason – that it had not been employed as Mr Noel Vanstone directed. If Mrs Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months earlier, results would have been just the other way. As it is, half the money has been already divided between Mr Noel Vanstone’s next of kin; which means, translated into plain English, my husband, and his poor bedridden sister – who took the money formally, one day, to satisfy the lawyer, and who gave it back again generously, the next, to satisfy herself. So much for one half of this legacy. The other half, my dear, is all yours. How strangely events happen, Magdalen! It is only two years since you and I were left disinherited orphans – and we are sharing our poor father’s fortune between us, after all!’
‘Wait a little, Norah. Our shares come to us in very different ways.’
‘Do they? Mine comes to me, by my husband. Yours comes to you –’ she stopped confusedly, and changed colour. ‘Forgive me, my own love!’ she said, putting Magdalen’s hand to her lips. ‘I have forgotten what I ought to have remembered. I have thoughtlessly distressed you!’
‘No!’ said Magdalen. ‘You have encouraged me.’
‘Encouraged you?’
‘You shall see.’
With those words, she rose quietly from the sofa, and walked to the open window. Before Norah could follow her, she had torn the Trust to pieces, and had cast the fragments into the street.
She came back to the sofa, and laid her head, with a deep sigh of relief, on Norah’s bosom. ‘I will owe nothing to my past life,’ she said. ’I have parted with it, as I have parted with those torn morsels of paper. All the thoughts, and all the hopes belonging to it, are put away from me for ever!’
‘Magdalen! my husband will never allow you; I will never allow you, myself–’
‘Hush! hush! What your husband thinks right, Norah, you and I will think right, too. I will take from you, what I would never have taken, if that letter had given it to me. The end I dreamed of has come. Nothing is changed, but the position I once thought we might hold towards each other. Better as it is, my love – far, far better as it is!’
So, she made the last sacrifice of the old perversity and the old pride. So, she entered on t
he new and nobler life.
A month had passed. The autumn sunshine was bright even in the murky streets; and the clocks in the neighbourhood were just striking two, as Magdalen returned alone to the house in Aaron’s Buildings.
‘Is he waiting for me?’ she asked anxiously, when the landlady let her in.
He was waiting in the front room. Magdalen stole up the stairs, and knocked at the door. He called to her carelessly and absently to come in – plainly thinking that it was only the servant who applied for permission to enter the room.
‘You hardly expected me so soon?’ she said, speaking on the threshold, and pausing there to enjoy his surprise as he started to his feet and looked at her.
The only traces of illness still visible in her face, left a delicacy in its outline which added refinement to her beauty. She was simply dressed in muslin. Her plain straw bonnet had no other ornament than the white ribbon with which it was sparingly trimmed. She had never looked lovelier in her best days, than she looked now – as she advanced to the table at which he had been sitting, with a little basket of flowers that she had brought with her from the country, and offered him her hand.
He looked anxious and careworn, when she saw him closer. She interrupted his first inquiries and congratulations to ask if he had remained in London, since they had parted – if he had not even gone away for a few days only, to see his friends in Suffolk? No; he had been in London ever since. He never told her that the pretty parsonage-house in Suffolk wanted all those associations with herself, in which the poor four walls at Aaron’s Buildings were so rich. He only said, he had been in London ever since.
‘I wonder,’ she asked, looking him attentively in the face, ‘if you are as happy to see me again, as I am to see you?’
‘Perhaps, I am even happier, in my different way,’ he answered, with a smile.
She took off her bonnet and scarf, and seated herself once more in her own arm– chair. ’I suppose this street is very ugly,’ she said; ‘and I am sure nobody can deny that the house is very small. And yet – and yet, it feels like coming home again. Sit there, where you used to sit; tell me about yourself. I want to know all that you have done, all that you have thought even, while I have been away.’ She tried to resume the endless succession of questions by means of which she was accustomed to lure him into speaking of himself. But she put them far less spontaneously, far less adroitly than usual. Her one all– absorbing anxiety in entering that room, was not an anxiety to be trifled with. After a quarter of an hour wasted in constrained inquiries on one side, in reluctant replies on the other, she ventured near the dangerous subject at last.
‘Have you received the letters I wrote to you from the sea– side?’ she asked, suddenly looking away from him for the first time.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘all.’
‘Have you read them?’
‘Every one of them; many times over.’
Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had kept her promise bravely. The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck at Combe– Raven, to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in her sister’s presence, had been all laid before him. Nothing that she had done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from his knowledge. As he would have kept a pledged engagement with her, so she had kept her pledged engagement with him. She had not faltered in the resolution to do this – and now she faltered over the one decisive question which she had come there to ask. Strong as the desire in her was to know if she had lost or won him, the fear of knowing was at that moment stronger still. She waited and trembled: she waited, and said no more.
‘May I speak to you about your letters?’ he asked. ‘May I tell you –?’
If she had looked at him, as he said those few words, she would have seen what he thought of her, in his face. She would have seen, innocent as he was in this world’s knowledge, that he knew the priceless value, the all-ennobling virtue, of a woman who speaks the truth. But she had no courage to look at him – no courage to raise her eyes from her lap.
‘Not just yet,’ she said, faintly. ‘Not quite so soon after we have met again.’
She rose hurriedly from her chair, and walked to the window – turned back again into the room – and approached the table, close to where he was sitting. The writing materials scattered near him, offered her a pretext for changing the subject; and she seized on it directly. ‘Were you writing a letter,’ she asked, ‘when I came in?’
‘I was thinking about it,’ he replied. ‘It was not a letter to be written, without thinking first.’ He rose, as he answered her, to gather the writing materials together, and put them away.
‘Why should I interrupt you?’ she said. ‘Why not let me try whether I can’t help you, instead? Is it a secret?’
‘No – not a secret.’
He hesitated as he answered her. She instantly guessed the truth.
‘Is it about your ship?’
He little knew how she had been thinking in her absence from him, of the business which he believed that he had concealed from her. He little knew that she had learnt already to be jealous of his ship.
‘Do they want you to return to your old life?’ she went on. ‘Do they want you to go back to the sea? Must you say Yes or No at once?’
‘At once.’
‘If I had not come in when I did, would you have said Yes?’
She unconsciously laid her hand on his arm; forgetting all inferior considerations in her breathless anxiety to hear his next words. The confession of his love, was within a hair’s breadth of escaping him – but he checked the utterance of it even yet. ‘I don’t care for myself,’ he thought. ‘But how can I be certain of not distressing her? ’
‘Would you have said Yes?’ she repeated.
‘I was doubting,’ he answered – ‘I was doubting between Yes and No.’
Her hand tightened on his arm; a sudden trembling seized her in every limb – she could bear it no longer. All her heart went out to him, in her next words.
‘Were you doubting for my sake? ’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Take my confession in return for yours – I was doubting for your sake.’
She said no more – she only looked at him. In that look, the truth reached him at last. The next instant, she was folded in his arms, and was shedding delicious tears of joy, with her face hidden on his bosom.
‘Do I deserve my happiness?’ she murmured, asking the one question at last. ‘Oh, I know how the poor narrow people who have never felt and never suffered, would answer me, if I asked them what I ask you. If they knew my story, they would forget all the provocation, and only remember the offence – they would fasten on my sin, and pass all my suffering by. But you are not one of them? Tell me if you have any shadow of a misgiving! Tell me if you doubt that the one dear object of all my life to come, is to live worthy of you! I asked you to wait and see me; I asked you, if there was any hard truth to be told, to tell it me here, with your own lips. Tell it, my love, my husband! – tell it me now!’
She looked up, still clinging to him as she clung to the hope of her better life to come.
‘Tell me the truth!’ she repeated.
‘With my own lips?’
‘Yes!’ she answered eagerly. ‘Say what you think of me, with your own lips.’
He stooped, and kissed her.
THE END
NOTES
DEDICATION
1. (p. xix). Francis Can Beard. Beard became Collins’s doctor during the composition of No Name. He treated Collins for ‘rheumatic gout’, mainly with laudanum. It is generally thought that Collins’s addiction to opium dates from this period.
THE FIRST SCENE
Combe Raven, Somersetshire
Chapter One
1. (p. 3). eighteen hundred and forty-six. Like Collins’s other major novels of the 1860s, No Name is set in the 1840s. Collins was especially meticulous about chronology in the planning of No Name. A perceptive reviewer had pointed out a
n error in the timing of events in The Woman in White (which Collins was able to correct in the second edition), and he was anxious not to slip up again. During the writing of No Name he repeatedly requested information about dates, postage times and shipping times from his banker friend, Charles Ward. See Catherine Peters’s The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London, 1991) pp. 242–3 for further details.
2. (p. 9). mournful ideas of penitence and seclusion. See Luke, 7:38 and following.
3. (p. 10). Men… at heart a rake. Alexander Pope, Epistle to a Lady (1735), lines 215–16.
Chapter Two
1. (p. 16). the mixed train. Train carrying different classes of passengers.
Chapter Four
1. (p. 26). Horace… Rochefoucault. Horace (68–5 BC), Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Voltaire (1694–1778), Diogenes (4th century BC), the Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613–80) are all admired by Mr Clare for their satirical views on society.
2. (p. 27). a well-reputed grammar-school. A grammar school subsidized by private endowments.
3. (p. 33). The Rivals by the famous whafs-his-name. Richard Sheridan (1751–1816). The Rivals was first performed in 1775.
Chapter Five
1. (p. 41). Argus. Creature from Greek myth with numerous eyes, famed for his watchfulness.
Chapter Eight
1. (p. 60). parliamentary train. A slow, cheap train. All railway companies were obliged to run one such service each day by an Act of Parliament.
Chapter Thirteen
1. (p. 99). Major Kirke. In the serial version the superior officer who helped Andrew Vanstone is anonymous.
BETWEEN THE SCENES
1. (p. 143) she and her sister had No Name. Collins had enormous difficulty deciding on the book’s title. On the first page of the manuscript he labels it simply ‘Wilkie Collins’s Story’, and a note in the top left-hand corner runs: ‘The title was not determined on when the first page was written.’ So matters stayed right up until weeks before serialization was due to begin on 15 March. On 24 January Dickens wrote in answer to a plea for suggestions with twenty-seven possible titles, most of a staggering banality. On 4 February Collins sent his mother a short-list of eight possibilities, on which No Name does not appear. Collins added this reference, and another in Magdalen’s following letter, after finally hitting on the book’s title some time in February. They do not appear in the manuscript. For further details, see Virginia Blain’s ‘The Naming of No Name’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal, 4 (1984), PP. 25–29.
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