They went into the house. Magdalen was perfectly satisfied with all the captain"s arrangements; she accepted the room which he had set apart for her; approved of the woman servant whom he had engaged; presented herself at tea-time the moment she was summoned but still showed no interest whatever in the new scene around her. Soon after the table was cleared, although the daylight had not yet faded out, Mrs. Wragge"s customary drowsiness after fatigue of any kind overcame her, and she received her husband s orders to leave the room (taking care that she left it "up at heel"), and to betake herself (strictly in the character of Mrs. Bygrave) to bed. As soon as they were left alone, the captain looked hard at Magdalen, and waited to be spoken to. She said nothing.
He ventured next on opening the conversation by a polite inquiry after the state of her health. "You look fatigued," he remarked, in his most insinuating manner. "I am afraid the journey has been too much for you."
"No," she said, looking out listlessly through the window; "I am not more tired than usual. I am always weary now; weary at going to bed, weary at getting up. If you would like to hear what I have to say to you to-night, I am willing and ready to say it. Can"t we go out? It is very hot here; and the droning of those men"s voices is beyond all endurance." She pointed through the window to a group of boatmen idling, as only nautical men can idle, against the garden wall. "Is there no quiet walk in this wretched place?" she asked, impatiently. "Can"t we breathe a little fresh air, and escape being annoyed by strangers?"
"There is perfect solitude within half an hour"s walk of the house,"
replied the ready captain.
"Very well. Come out, then."
With a weary sigh she took up her straw bonnet and her light muslin scarf from the side-table upon which she had thrown them on coming in, and carelessly led the way to the door. Captain Wragge followed her to the garden gate, then stopped, struck by a new idea.
"Excuse me," he whispered, confidentially. "In my wife"s existing state of ignorance as to who she is, we had better not trust her alone in the house with a new servant. I"ll privately turn the key on her, in case she wakes before we come back. Safe bind, safe find--you know the proverb!--I will be with you again in a moment."
He hastened back to the house, and Magdalen seated herself on the garden wall to await his return.
She had hardly settled herself in that position when two gentlemen walking together, whose approach along the public path she had not previously noticed, pa.s.sed close by her.
The dress of one of the two strangers showed him to be a clergyman.
His companion"s station in life was less easily discernible to ordinary observation. Practiced eyes would probably have seen enough in his look, his manner, and his walk to show that he was a sailor. He was a man in the prime of life; tall, spare, and muscular; his face sun-burned to a deep brown; his black hair just turning gray; his eyes dark, deep and firm--the eyes of a man with an iron resolution and a habit of command.
He was the nearest of the two to Magdalen, as he and his friend pa.s.sed the place where she was sitting; and he looked at her with a sudden surprise at her beauty, with an open, hearty, undisguised admiration, which was too evidently sincere, too evidently beyond his own control, to be justly resented as insolent; and yet, in her humor at that moment, Magdalen did resent it. She felt the man"s resolute black eyes strike through her with an electric suddenness; and frowning at him impatiently, she turned away her head and looked back at the house.
The next moment she glanced round again to see if he had gone on. He had advanced a few yards--had then evidently stopped--and was now in the very act of turning to look at her once more. His companion, the clergyman, noticing that Magdalen appeared to be annoyed, took him familiarly by the arm, and, half in jest, half in earnest, forced him to walk on. The two disappeared round the corner of the next house. As they turned it, the sun-burned sailor twice stopped his companion again, and twice looked back.
"A friend of yours?" inquired Captain Wragge, joining Magdalen at that moment.
"Certainly not," she replied; "a perfect stranger. He stared at me in the most impertinent manner. Does he belong to this place?"
"I"ll find out in a moment," said the compliant captain, joining the group of boatmen, and putting his questions right and left, with the easy familiarity which distinguished him. He returned in a few minutes with a complete budget of information. The clergyman was well known as the rector of a place situated some few miles inland. The dark man with him was his wife"s brother, commander of a ship in the merchant-service.
He was supposed to be staying with his relatives, as their guest for a short time only, preparatory to sailing on another voyage. The clergyman"s name was Strickland, and the merchant-captain"s name was Kirke; and that was all the boatmen knew about either of them.
"It is of no consequence who they are," said Magdalen, carelessly. "The man"s rudeness merely annoyed me for the moment. Let us have done with him. I have something else to think of, and so have you. Where is the solitary walk you mentioned just now? Which way do we go?"
The captain pointed southward toward Slaughden, and offered his arm.
Magdalen hesitated before she took it. Her eyes wandered away inquiringly to Noel Vanstone"s house. He was out in the garden, pacing backward and forward over the little lawn, with his head high in the air, and with Mrs. Lecount demurely in attendance on him, carrying her master"s green fan. Seeing this, Magdalen at once took Captain Wragge"s right arm, so as to place herself nearest to the garden when they pa.s.sed it on their walk.
"The eyes of our neighbors are on us; and the least your niece can do is to take your arm," she said, with a bitter laugh. "Come! let us go on."
"They are looking this way," whispered the captain. "Shall I introduce you to Mrs. Lecount?"
"Not to-night," she answered. "Wait, and hear what I have to say to you first."
They pa.s.sed the garden wall. Captain Wragge took off his hat with a smart flourish, and received a gracious bow from Mrs. Lecount in return.
Magdalen saw the housekeeper survey her face, her figure, and her dress, with that reluctant interest, that distrustful curiosity, which women feel in observing each other. As she walked on beyond the house, the sharp voice of Noel Vanstone reached her through the evening stillness.
"A fine girl, Lecount," she heard him say. "You know I am a judge of that sort of thing--a fine girl!"
As those words were spoken, Captain Wragge looked round at his companion in sudden surprise. Her hand was trembling violently on his arm, and her lips were fast closed with an expression of speechless pain.
Slowly and in silence the two walked on until they reached the southern limit of the houses, and entered on a little wilderness of shingle and withered gra.s.s--the desolate end of Aldborough, the lonely beginning of Slaughden.
It was a dull, airless evening. Eastward, was the gray majesty of the sea, hushed in breathless calm; the horizon line invisibly melting into the monotonous, misty sky; the idle ships shadowy and still on the idle water. Southward, the high ridge of the sea dike, and the grim, ma.s.sive circle of a martello tower reared high on its mound of gra.s.s, closed the view darkly on all that lay beyond. Westward, a lurid streak of sunset glowed red in the dreary heaven, blackened the fringing trees on the far borders of the great inland marsh, and turned its little gleaming water-pools to pools of blood. Nearer to the eye, the sullen flow of the tidal river Alde ebbed noiselessly from the muddy banks; and nearer still, lonely and unprosperous by the bleak water-side, lay the lost little port of Slaughden, with its forlorn wharfs and warehouses of decaying wood, and its few scattered coasting-vessels deserted on the oozy river-sh.o.r.e. No fall of waves was heard on the beach, no trickling of waters bubbled audibly from the idle stream. Now and then the cry of a sea-bird rose from the region of the marsh; and at intervals, from farmhouses far in the inland waste, the faint winding of horns to call the cattle home traveled mournfully through the evening calm.
Magdalen drew her hand from the captain"s arm, and led the way to the mound of the martello tower. "I am weary of walking," she said. "Let us stop and rest here."
She seated herself on the slope, and resting on her elbow, mechanically pulled up and scattered from her into the air the tufts of gra.s.s growing under her hand. After silently occupying herself in this way for some minutes, she turned suddenly on Captain Wragge. "Do I surprise you?" she asked, with a startling abruptness. "Do you find me changed?"
The captain"s ready tact warned him that the time had come to be plain with her, and to reserve his flowers of speech for a more appropriate occasion.
"If you ask the question, I must answer it," he replied. "Yes, I do find you changed."
She pulled up another tuft of gra.s.s. "I suppose you can guess the reason?" she said.
The captain was wisely silent. He only answered by a bow.
"I have lost all care for myself," she went on, tearing faster and faster at the tufts of gra.s.s. "Saying that is not saying much, perhaps, but it may help you to understand me. There are things I would have died sooner than do at one time--things it would have turned me cold to think of. I don"t care now whether I do them or not. I am nothing to myself; I am no more interested in myself than I am in these handfuls o f gra.s.s.
I suppose I have lost something. What is it? Heart? Conscience? I don"t know. Do you? W hat nonsense I am talking! Who cares what I have lost?
It has gone; and there"s an end of it. I suppose my outside is the best side of me--and that"s left, at any rate. I have not lost my good looks, have I? There! there! never mind answering; don"t trouble yourself to pay me compliments. I have been admired enough to-day. First the sailor, and then Mr. Noel Vanstone--enough for any woman"s vanity, surely! Have I any right to call myself a woman? Perhaps not: I am only a girl in my teens. Oh, me, I feel as if I was forty!" She scattered the last fragments of gra.s.s to the winds; and turning her back on the captain, let her head droop till her cheek touched the turf bank. "It feels soft and friendly," she said, nestling to it with a hopeless tenderness horrible to see. "It doesn"t cast me off. Mother Earth! The only mother I have left!"
Captain Wragge looked at her in silent surprise. Such experience of humanity as he possessed was powerless to sound to its depths the terrible self-abandonment which had burst its way to the surface in her reckless words--which was now fast hurrying her to actions more reckless still. "Devilish odd!" he thought to himself, uneasily. "Has the loss of her lover turned her brain?" He considered for a minute longer and then spoke to her. "Leave it till to-morrow," suggested the captain confidentially. "You are a little tired to-night. No hurry, my dear girl--no hurry."
She raised her head instantly, and looked round at him with the same angry resolution, with the same desperate defiance of herself, which he had seen in her face on the memorable day at York when she had acted before him for the first time. "I came here to tell you what is in my mind," she said; "and I _will_ tell it!" She seated herself upright on the slope; and clasping her hands round her knees, looked out steadily, straight before her, at the slowly darkening view. In that strange position, she waited until she had composed herself, and then addressed the captain, without turning her head to look round at him, in these words:
"When you and I first met," she began, abruptly, "I tried hard to keep my thoughts to myself. I know enough by this time to know that I failed.
When I first told you at York that Michael Vanstone had ruined us, I believe you guessed for yourself that I, for one, was determined not to submit to it. Whether you guessed or not, it is so. I left my friends with that determination in my mind; and I feel it in me now stronger, ten times stronger, than ever."
"Ten times stronger than ever," echoed the captain. "Exactly so--the natural result of firmness of character."
"No--the natural result of having nothing else to think of. I had something else to think of before you found me ill in Vauxhall Walk. I have nothing else to think of now. Remember that, if you find me for the future always harping on the same string. One question first. Did you guess what I meant to do on that morning when you showed me the newspaper, and when I read the account of Michael Vanstone"s death?"
"Generally," replied Captain Wragge--"I guessed, generally, that you proposed dipping your hand into his purse and taking from it (most properly) what was your own. I felt deeply hurt at the time by your not permitting me to a.s.sist you. Why is she so reserved with me? (I remarked to myself)--why is she so unreasonably reserved?"
"You shall have no reserve to complain of now," pursued Magdalen. "I tell you plainly, if events had not happened as they did, you _would_ have a.s.sisted me. If Michael Vanstone had not died, I should have gone to Brighton, and have found my way safely to his acquaintance under an a.s.sumed name. I had money enough with me to live on respectably for many months together. I would have employed that time--I would have waited a whole year, if necessary, to destroy Mrs. Lecount"s influence over him--and I would have ended by getting that influence, on my own terms, into my own hands. I had the advantage of years, the advantage of novelty, the advantage of downright desperation, all on my side, and I should have succeeded. Before the year was out--before half the year was out--you should have seen Mrs. Lecount dismissed by her master, and you should have seen me taken into the house in her place, as Michael Vanstone"s adopted daughter--as the faithful friend--who had saved him from an adventuress in his old age. Girls no older than I am have tried deceptions as hopeless in appearance as mine, and have carried them through to the end. I had my story ready; I had my plans all considered; I had the weak point in that old man to attack in my way, which Mrs.
Lecount had found out before me to attack in hers, and I tell you again I should have succeeded."
"I think you would," said the captain. "And what next?"
"Mr. Michael Vanstone would have changed his man of business next. You would have succeeded to the place; and those clever speculations on which he was so fond of venturing would have cost him the fortunes of which he had robbed my sister and myself. To the last farthing, Captain Wragge, as certainly as you sit there, to the last farthing! A bold conspiracy, a shocking deception--wasn"t it? I don"t care! Any conspiracy, any deception, is justified to my conscience by the vile law which has left us helpless. You talked of my reserve just now. Have I dropped it at last? Have I spoken out at the eleventh hour?"
The captain laid his hand solemnly on his heart, and launched himself once more on his broadest flow of language.
"You fill me with unavailing regret," he said. "If that old man had lived, what a crop I might have reaped from him! What enormous transactions in moral agriculture it might have been my privilege to carry on! _Ars longa,_" said Captain Wragge, pathetically drifting into Latin--"_vita brevis!_ Let us drop a tear on the lost opportunities of the past, and try what the present can do to console us. One conclusion is clear to my mind--the experiment you proposed to try with Mr.
Michael Vanstone is totally hopeless, my dear girl, in the case of his son. His son is impervious to all common forms of pecuniary temptation.
You may trust my solemn a.s.surance," continued the captain, speaking with an indignant recollection of the answer to his advertis.e.m.e.nt in the Times, "when I inform you that Mr. Noel Vanstone is emphatically the meanest of mankind."
"I can trust my own experience as well," said Magdalen. "I have seen him, and spoken to him--I know him better than you do. Another disclosure, Captain Wragge, for your private ear! I sent you back certain articles of costume when they had served the purpose for which I took them to London. That purpose was to find my way to Noel Vanstone in disguise, and to judge for myself of Mrs. Lecount and her master. I gained my object; and I tell you again, I know the two people in that house yonder whom we have now to deal with better than you do."
Captain Wragge expressed the profound astonishment, and asked the innocent questions appropriate to the mental condition of a person taken completely by surprise.